Rebane's Ruminations

Open Letter to Don Rogers

[This piece was published in the 11may22 Union op-ed pages here.]

Your weekly column – ‘The gritty middle way’ - in the 6may22 Union (here) was a thoughtful, well-written piece that I and many of your readers enjoyed reading.  By now, most of the newspaper’s readers know that, counter to your protestations, you have become markedly left-of-center in your politics.  We have all witnessed the transition over the last few years.

The essay’s great opening – “Humans live in tension between the collective and the individual, neither ant drones nor lonely snow leopards.” – sets the stage for a good discussion of that gritty tension.  As you might expect, your words will sound very different to right and left readers who don’t necessarily inhabit the extremes of their respective polar regions.

The discerning reader is jarred a mite when he runs into “the farther right and farther left have uncannily similar root worldviews in common. Just understand that America’s actual risk of living under the thumb of fascist overlords or critical-theorist Marxist mobs amounts to the same fever dream born of indigestion from bogieman stories repeated mostly on blue screens.”

This observation and a couple of others can qualify as a litmus test for an intellectual leftist – they do not see the asymmetries in the ideological foundations of individualism and collectivism.  For them, “our yearnings in politics would have us believe that the end of the rainbow, the prize, lies at one pole or the other, sweet relief to be found there.”  However, that is not true.  Were we to believe polls and voting patterns, we would know the overwhelming share of liberal voters embrace large government collectivism, seeing no natural limits to taxation, regulation, and centralized control – reaching for the undefined but uniformly applied ‘common good’ dominates all political thought.  This is the foundation of the ‘fair share’ dictum - from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – enforced equity über alles.

On the right the conservative, most certainly the conservetarian, sees no desired end in fascist governance.  For after all, fascism is the other dominant form of collectivism that also requires a very large autocratic government to implement its principles of social order and economics.  This is anathema to the overwhelming share of those on the Right.  Perhaps unrealistically, but the mainstream rightwinger’s desiderata are based on a smaller government minimally regulating open markets, staying out of people’s lives, and subsisting on minimum tax revenues.  The real political bookends for us are quite different than those apprehended and preached by the Left.  An easy proof of this is in the readings of your cited Levin, who describes a leftist society accepted by the Left, and Lakoff, who demonstrates repeatedly that he has no idea what the Right believes and seeks.

What the left-leaner also misses is that his desired social order requires the practice of wholesale altruism to make it work, and populated by perfected Marxists who have always been beyond the pale of human action (see Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’).  Historically, all leftwing nostrums to achieve such a glorified state of affairs require an initial phase of large-scale authoritarian social conditioning, wherein some eggs have to be cracked to make the sought for omelet.  This road, de rigueur to the intellectual Marxist, is kept hidden from the hoi polloi lest they up and embrace the ever-present siren song of the capitalists.

So, in sum Don, your commentary invites the reader to an admittedly difficult, yet reasonable, and reasoned middle path, avoiding both sides bounded by indistinguishable brambles and thorns.  Sadly, as attested by more than two hundred years of history, along with today’s petabytes of data, that is not the real world – it never was.  May the conversation continue.

Always with respect and best wishes,

George Rebane

Scattershots – 6may22 (updated 14may22)

George Rebane

The 2016 election integrity and voter fraud issue is far from dead.  Besides the many tomes presenting evidence that somehow didn’t reach the courts or were summarily dismissed by dismissive judges, there is a whole trove of (video and smartphone tracking) evidence of hundreds of paid ‘mules’ stuffing multiple ballots into ballot drop boxes in selected voting precincts across the nation (more here).  The whole thing is documented in a new film ‘2,000 Mules’ by documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.  It is now showing at a big screen near you, and you can also watch its online 7may22 premier for pay here on Youtube.  The lamestream has been hyper-silent about this movie, and you can bet the ranch that neither Bumblebrain, Ms Pelosi, nor SFB Schumer will watch it.

[13may22 update]  In ‘Imagine the Unimaginable’ Victor Davis Hanson succinctly lays out the dire straits in which our beloved republic finds itself.  As he makes clear and most RR readers know, all of our maladies are self-inflicted.  VDH ends his warning of the radical Left in America’s fundamental transformation – “When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.”

[14may22 update] ‘Abortion-Rights Marches Planned Across U.S. to Protest Possible Overturning of Roe v. Wade’  Here’s a photo of certifiable young idiots created by the evil party Democrats who continue to broadcast their latest Big Lie that federalizing abortion rights will outlaw abortions and end up “killing women”.  Even Scientific American (here) and the prestigious British medical journal Lancet (here) have decided to expand into American law and politics to proscribe the anticipated “blood on their hands” SCOTUS ruling that would allow the several states to make their own abortion laws.  This is more corroborating evidence that idiocy is independent of intellect.

Democrats speak in ‘poetic truths’ (updated 10may22)

George Rebane

Hoover Institution senior fellow and national commentator Shelby Steele has coined an appropriate tongue-in-cheek label for the gigantic lies that issue daily from our Left.  It turns out that such lies may be viewed as “poetic truths” when broadcast by politicians and political activists.  Poetic truths are "narratives that play down or disregard reality and facts to advance a favored ideological position."  The current claimant of the most audacious poetic truth is Ms Nusrat Choudhury (pictured), whose statement that “the killing of unarmed black men by police happens every day in America” patently qualifies (emphasis mine and Sen Kennedy’s).

She maintained the correctness of this statement to Sen John Kennedy who questioned her during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that revealed her (lack of) qualifications to become a federal judge pursuant to having been nominated by the nation’s First Incompetent, President Bumblebrain himself. (more here)

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[10may22 update]  Poetic truths also come in the complimentary form of the sound of silence.  The evil party again demonstrated its true colors when both the administration and Democratic congressional leaders chose to remain silent on the historical travesty of compromising SCOTUS deliberations by leaking a draft of the forthcoming ruling on the continued federal involvement on abortions.  The leak, if allowed to become a precedent so prevalent in other governmental branches, departments, agencies, … will completely politicize the last vestige of non-political functions of our federal government.  The Democrats quickly doubled down on their ‘ascent by silence’ with a chorus of Big Lies about the impact of the upcoming Roe v Wade ruling that would range all the way from summarily prohibiting abortions in the land, to banning every other social activity that today we are free to perform – e.g. gay marriage.  The poetic truths Democrats perpetrate on the poor and the poorly informed knows no end.

As always, Democrats are invited to counter.

Roe v Wade v Dodd (updated 6may22)

George Rebane

According to a leaked draft, SCOTUS appears prepared to rule on Mississippi’s Dodd v Jackson challenge to the longstanding and contentious 1973 Roe v Wade decision to legalize abortion as a constitutional right in all 50 states. (here and here) By various attempts to overturn RvW since then, many states have additionally ruled that RvW really only grants abortion rights during the first 30 or so weeks of pregnancy.

Now DvJ has reduced this down to the first 15 weeks. (more here) And this started the brouhaha that was appealed all the way up to SCOTUS, which, according to the draft, promises to reconsider the whole question of constitutionality and to reinstate federalism by again allowing the several states each to legislate their own abortion laws. 

The Left, generally against federalism, hates this and anybody and everybody who wants to restrict a ‘woman’s right’ to an abortion, up to and including a post-partum killing.  And for good measure, all progressives want the state to pay for such abortions on demand.

My own take on abortions is included in the 2012 post ‘Abortion and the Two Bodies Problem’.

[4may22 update]  There was a gathering of Nevada County’s ignorant and double dummies to protest the SCOTUS draft on Broad Street. (here)  It is hard to believe that any of these fellow citizens and neighbors, among whom we must live, know the contents of RvW, Mississippi’s DvJ, or the leaked draft.  The depths of their considerable deficits allow them to comfortably demonstrate for democracy while denying the ability of Americans in the several states the ability to vote for the abortion policy that they and their fellow residents support.  The facile way they continue to be manipulated by the nation’s leftwing elites recalls Lenin’s definition of ‘useful idiots’.

[6may22 update]  Another illustration of the intellectually brain-dead Left is their ongoing charge Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh broke their promise to the Senate that they would honor Roe after being confirmed.  There is no evidence whatsoever that they made any such commitments during their hearings, yet the Democrats and their lamestream have now adopted that as their latest Big Lie, adding it to their already historic collection that continues to grow at an increasing pace as the November election approaches.  Another one of their 'poetic truths'?

On the lighter side, the photo below was recaptioned by one of our regular readers.  He didn’t specify whether the new non-scalable fence is supposed to keep the Republicans in or out.

Scattershots – 1may22

George Rebane

‘Workers of the world, arise and celebrate the day that brings us together to again be thankful for the blessings of collectivism that unite us in a revolution to make socialism available to all peoples everywhere.’ - or something similar.  I just thought it would be appropriate to make up that piece of crap on May Day.

Inflation Tax.  Last year many of us already saw the salacious intents of the Biden administration in how they were systematically going about to ruin the nation.  Among the many disasters they were cooking up was inflation.  Well, it’s here now, and the piece I posted then (here) is definitely worth reviewing by those who are impacted by inflation and those who are planning to be so impacted.  I count myself among the latter, so it’s time to review the taxing aspects of inflation (here).  And for those who are spreadsheet challenged, I made a spreadsheet with the formulas from the ‘Inflation – up close and personal’ post. Download InflationInvesting2

Wealth tax:  The Build Back Bullshit agenda is still not dead and buried.  Team Bumblebrain has every intent on passing most of its provisions, especially those increasing our taxes.  The administration's entire team on economics are double dummies who couldn’t pass Econ 101.  They continue to tell the sheeple that we can tax ourselves out of an inflationary spiral.  Even Keynes, the lord of demand-siders, counseled against raising taxes in an inflation infested economy. (more here)

Election corruption right here in River City?  My bride and a commenter picked up on a thinly disguised campaign ad in the 30apr22 Union for Natalie Adona, our Soros'(?) foreign plant Assistant Registrar of Voters, who is running for the county’s Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters in the 7jun22 election.  The ad, pictured below, is made to look like a public service announcement from the Nevada County Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters office.  Notice the formal seal in the lower right corner.  Were it a bona-fide voter info notice from that office, then it would have been published under the aegis of our current holder of that office, Greg Diaz.  It does not speak well for The Union to have allowed this campaign ad to appear without some corrective editorial comment.

A Nation to Transcend Stupid?

George Rebane

The Atlantic usually contains ideas that are antithetical to the perspectives with which I interpret what happens in the world.  A longtime and dear friend, who leans a bit to my left, forwarded to me an essay with which he concurs “with 90% of the points made in this article (regardless of the source!)”  After reading it, I must admit to a similar concordance.  The piece – ‘WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID’ – by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and NYU Professor of Ethical Leadership (here).

Dr Haidt is described variously as someone who “has attracted both support and criticism for his critique of the current state of universities and his interpretation of progressive values. He has been named one of the ‘top global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the ‘top world thinkers’ by Prospect magazine. He is among the most cited researchers in political and moral psychology, and is considered among the top 25 most influential living psychologists.”

In the cited essay, Haidt uses the Tower of Babel metaphor to interpret what has happened to America in the last two decades as “the fractured country we now inhabit.”  Like many of us, he sees that “something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”  Regular RR readers will recognize these longstanding themes in these pages.

The author goes on to outline “the rise of the modern Tower” in concert with the rise of the smartphone, the internet and its extremely influential social networks which now unite the various thoughts and ideas of several billion people.  For Haidt “the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the Occupy movement. … For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.”  Then things started going downhill as “humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.”

The problem, as dissected by Haidt, began as social media weakened “at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”  He then goes on to detail how the Left has dominated the various institutions, specifically the media and academe.  He abets this argument by citing James Madison in Federalist #10 on “the innate human proclivity toward ‘faction’, by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”  

But since then, thanks much to social media, the Tower has fallen and the factions no longer communicate.  The hows and whys of the fall are of some considerable interest to those of us who claim to pay attention.  He even details how closed groups of “jerks” dominate discussions and debates on the various blogs.  I won’t go on giving you clips of Haidt’s expansion of that very recent and ongoing history.  Suffice it to say that Haidt also agrees that we are at least two distinct countries – with appropriately differentiated cultures, languages, histories, values, … - sharing a common border.

What struck me as a significant shortcoming in Dr Haidt’s contemporary ontology is his apparent ignorance (neglect?) of some significant findings by sociologists that dovetail with teachings from the systems sciences.  He argues that ‘Democracy after Babel’ will require a ‘redesign of democracy’ that includes reforms in three categorical areas – “three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”

When expanding on these areas, it is not clear at all that Haidt’s recommendations do not require the enlargement of our already encompassing government(s).  How else would democratic institutions be “hardened”, social media “reformed”, and the “next generation prepared” for a more compliant and compatible “democratic citizenship”?  What Haidt misses is the underlying truth that for large complex systems to remain viable, they need to be decentralized – they need to be based on a structure of distributed control and knowledge.  In this universe, nature does not support large systems that are centrally comprehended and controlled.  On Earth, the evidence for this abounds when we open our eyes and understand what we see in the natural world.

The alternative approach to successful societies in the post-Babel era, missed by Haidt, is to abandon globalism and work to enlarge the community of sovereign nation-states to have members with much smaller and more culturally cohesive populations.  I have lost track, but somewhere in the archives of such sociological studies are solutions that identify ideal national populations to be in the five to ten million range, and comprise of jurisdictional units that are not larger than 50,000.  This kind of global structure of independent states and free peoples would promote specialization, trade, and the ready transfer of ‘best practices’, as one people sees how another people have a better solution for a common problem.

Leftwing Journalism (Addended)

George Rebane

Reading this morning’s (28apr22) Union, I was both startled and disappointed when I came to the paper’s weekly Hits & Misses column (here).  Publisher Don Rogers usually places his contributions at the bottom, and there we saw –

MISS (from Publisher Don Rogers): To the kind of free speech as uttered by bullies, liars, abusers, propagandists, trolls, rumor-mongers, gossips and other asses lurking in social media, including the new owner of Twitter.

Now, it’s been no secret for decades that there is a great asymmetry between the reportage from our neighbors on the Left and Right.  (The published literature on that could fill a library.)  We have covered this phenomenon going on 15 years now.  Recent leftwing journalistic atrocities include the multi-year unabashed and still ongoing reporting of the Great Russian Collusion for which there is not a shred of evidence.  In a similar vein, material events of national importance are thoroughly buried in what is now correctly known as the lamestream media.  An example of that is the Hunter Biden laptop scandal which revealed influence peddling that included payoffs to the “Big Guy” principal, now in the White House, whose influence was peddled.

Such evidence-free, evidence-hiding journalistic behavior is to be expected in the national press, but not so much from local outlets in markets where the writers and readers know each other.  This is why I was surprised to read Don’s pre-emptive swipe at Elon Musk.

Readers may recall that I consider Don Rogers a respected friend, among the many I have on the port side.  However, his published Miss is so out of character of the man I know on two counts.  First, Musk’s stated intentions to open up Twitter to uncensored free speech should be welcomed by all who support our First Amendment, especially those who supposedly deal in ‘Truth’ as journalists claim in their code of ethics.  And second, Musk has yet to do anything at Twitter that would justify anyone to categorize him on Roger’s list of misfit communicators.  So why launch such a pre-emptive editorial attack that looks so much like gratuitous pandering to the county's growing progressive faction?

In expressing all this consternation, I am reminded that The Union is a privately owned enterprise, and has wide latitude in what kind of news and editorial content it is free to publish.  I don’t think that the above Miss crossed any libel lines, but I do think that Don Rogers does step over the bounds of editorial prudence when he joins the ranks of the country’s leftwing lemming chorus, all howling their imagined portents of Elon Musk single-handedly about to bring American democracy to an end by opening up Twitter to free speech.

Addendum:  Leftwing journalism cannot survive as a co-equal in an open market of ideas.  In such an environment, collectivist thought withers away into a dry shell of an echo, infrequently encountered and never taken seriously by those open to the greater wash of ideas that inundate the public square.  This is to be corroborated by the establishment of a very visible crutch that will henceforth support the already limping lamestream.  The Biden administration will seek to ensconce a permanent Ministry of Truth (aka Disinformation Governance Board) to oversee and variously censor ideas, opinions, happenings, and facts that counter the neo-Marxist narrative of socialism that has become the dissonant chorus from the Left. (more here and here)  The leader of these quenchers of free speech will be Nina Jankowicz, a renown incompetent in all but partisan zealotry, which she has demonstrated throughout her career (more here).  This woman is the carefully chosen poster-child for fettered discourse in the land.

Doing Healthcare Right

George Rebane

There’s no doubt about it, we don’t do healthcare right.  As every leftwinger likes to point out, we pay more for healthcare per patient and per capita than any other developed country with liberal governance.  Their solution is to nationalize America’s healthcare industry – aka adopting a ‘single payer’ system.  Given our inability to do bureaucracies right, every proposal to nationalize winds up raising our cost of healthcare and hiding such increases under variously camouflaged wealth transfer, money printing, and federal borrowing programs.

None of the proposed solutions are sustainable in the sense that they are able to keep a constant level of healthcare services within a non-increasing total cost share of GDP.  As documented numerous times in these pages, this is nothing new.  Even the progressives’ poster-child countries for nationalized healthcare have not been able to fashion or operate sustainable healthcare systems – they’re all reducing services and/or eating up bigger shares of their GDP.  None of these systems can last forever, as they continue kicking the cost can down the road.

Our private, semi-subsidized healthcare system is still the best in the world for delivering clinical care, new medicines, technology advancements, and innovative medical procedures.  Where we screw up badly is how we handle all the back-office stuff confirming the levels of delivered care and arranging for their payment through multiple agencies and from multiple sources.  That bureaucracy is enormously costly and screwed up to a fare-thee-well.  And folding these legacy processes and procedures within today’s bureaucratic mindset into a nationalized structure promises to deliver chaos on steroids.

McKinsey & Company, through its Center for Healthcare Reform, has completed a massive study of our healthcare industry, and identified specific improvements through which we could save more than $250,000,000,000 annually.  They have published their findings in a 76-page report titled ‘Administrative Simplification: How to save a quarter-trillion dollars in US healthcare’.  This is probably the most important new finding to come along that can move the healthcare debate off dead center and save enormous amounts annually.  You don’t have to read the entire thing to get the important details of how and where these savings will be realized.  The report begins with a 6-page executive summary with graphics that gets you up to speed.  Read it so that you’ll know what you’re talking about the next time you decide to sound off about healthcare reform.  (H/T to correspondent)

 

Should They Still Honor Your Wishes?

George Rebane

Many people of means make charitable donations and bequests with caveats attached that they are told will be honored after they die.  But not all people think that should be so.  The practice of subverting the will of the dear departed has a long history.  The Ford Foundation, founded in 1936 by Henry (died 1947) and Edsel (died 1943) Ford, is a good example of such radical repurposing that many such bequests have suffered.  In the Ford Foundation case, the transformation started soon after Henry’s death and was directed by its trustees so far afield by 1976 that its then chairman Henry Ford II resigned in disgust.

So, here’s the question – to what extent should the departed donor wishes to charities be honored?  We here consider only cases where the donor conditioned his donation subsequent to receiving bona fide and legal assurances in writing that his monies would be managed and dispensed according to his agreed upon wishes.  In short, the donation/bequest was made as part of a two-party contract.

Historically, there has been a debate in how much and for how long charitable organizations should honor their donors’ wishes.  As early as 1789 Thomas Jefferson weighed in to James Madison his strong opinion on donors setting aside real estate in perpetuum for a designated religious or charitable purpose.  Jefferson said, “The Earth belongs to the living, and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”  It might be a stretch, but one can see that sentiment applied to land, the desired uses of which may change over the passing decades as the country grows.

Leftwing political theorist Emma Saunders-Hastings teaches at Ohio State that philanthropy is a “deeply political activity” which gives the rich an outsized sphere of influence in a democracy, especially “in public life and by putting in place paternalistic relationships between donors and their intended beneficiaries."  In sum, it promotes inequalities that should have no place in democracies.  In her recent Private Virtues, Public Vices (2022) she argues against the notion wherein ‘donors claim to know, better than gift recipients, how their monies should be spent, placing donors’ ideas about what is best ahead of those of the beneficiaries.’

To many of us such a view about perpetuating donor values is a natural and acceptable given.  Donors give to an institution either because they believe in the concordance of their values with those of the institution, or they believe the institution is trustworthy and capable of promoting the donor’s values as prescribed and agreed upon.  Saunders-Hastings also has problems with the lion’s share of large donations coming from the rich whose values are definitely not those of the common folk, and therefore will perpetuate inequalities into the indefinite future, unless … .

Saunders-Hastings appears also being blind to a fundamental tenet of the nature of mortal humans.  Most people who are capable of enduring works see these as an extension of their being for those still living after they die.  Those with charitable instincts often see their wealth as delivering a twofer after they are gone – continuing to provide for a common good, and serving as a living memorial to a life well-lived and wealth well-placed.  To date, America has benefitted greatly from such donors of a wide range of means, who are not necessarily the claimed out-of-touch plutocrats. (more here and here)

But we return to the main question – when the donated money was left in trust, is it ever ethical for society to then later violate that trust; and, if so, under what conditions should that be possible without communicating fraud to potential donors and shutting off the funding of good works?

Central Bank Digital Currencies a'comin'?

George Rebane

The powers that be have quietly initiated the process to change all fiat monies into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Plenary sessions among the G7 have demonstrated that most countries are ready to change their money into ‘programmable crypto currencies’.  The US and UK are leaders of this movement as the means to enlarge the power of governments and control the inevitable destruction of their circulating fiat monies.

To understand how CBDCs work, consider that when implemented, we will all have personal accounts with our country’s central bank (e.g. our Fed) which will then enable control of the amounts, dispensing, and programming the use of the new nationalized crypto currency.  This essentially follows what Red China is doing now (‘the Chinese model’).  The totalitarian gorilla in the room is the programmability of CBDCs.

Depending on TBD laws, regulations, and power-motivated propensities, your particular CBDCs can be programmed to enable and/or deny you, on a day-to-day basis, the freedom to use the money as you will.  Say, that the government doesn’t want you to consume a certain product (e.g. fatty foods) because you are overweight.  It can then make your CBDCs unable to pay for such prohibited products and services.  The same can be said for travel restrictions – the government, or even the permitted airline, can make it so that you cannot purchase tickets that take you to a destination proscribed for you personally.

In essence, CBDCs will then no longer be money in the sense that today’s money is fungible as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.  Your particular CBDCs will then become the equivalent of government-controlled vouchers purposed dynamically for what your employer or a state agency grants you privileges.  Are you beginning to get the picture?  (more here, here, here, and here)

PS. The astute reader will realize that programmable CBDCs can totally collapse the ‘property side’ of the Bastiat Triangle, thereby also collapsing the ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ sides. Can everyone imagine work-around black markets and barter economies? 

‘Poking the Bear’!?

George Rebane

It appears that under the leadership of our pusillanimous president the west has quietly buried MAD (mutually assured destruction).  Today we tremble in fear of the Butcher of Moscow every time he even hints that he has nuclear weapons which he might use if we don’t let his genocide in Ukraine continue unhindered.  So, what does he think we keep in all our land-based and seagoing silos, bagels?

For decades MAD, augmented by forceful US military interventions, held back the Soviet bear.  None of the communist dictators waved their nuclear warheads in our faces, because they knew we would just wave back with ours – both knew not to play a lose-lose game.  That didn’t mean that the communists didn’t try to surreptitiously stick nukes under our noses.  But when discovered, they always understood the meaning of MAD and pulled back. 

Both were satisfied to continue advancing their foreign policies by propaganda and the kind of brushfire wars that George Kennan outlined in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’.  And in these, we didn’t just send in weapons and other military aid, we and our allies often put boots on the ground.  When necessary, we demonstrated our ability to kick the bear in the butt and not just poke him.  Under US leadership we did this until the USSR collapsed in spite of its decades long attempts to demonstrate the glories of communism and make it work.  Today no more.

Under the clearest moral imperative since Hitler’s 1939 blitzkrieg invasion of Poland, we balked and prevaricated in full knowledge of Putin’s intent to invade Ukraine (as now admitted by our CIA), and continue to do so in the face of the ongoing slaughter of the innocents.  We have yet to send in the heavy weapons that Ukraine needs to counter the Russian (Red) army’s fielded heavy weapons and their air/missile superiority.  Every time we even intimate that we will do so by calling Putin a war criminal, he rattles his nukes and Team Biden dives under their desks.

I would love to hear our leader strap on a pair of balls and respond to Putin’s threat of ‘uncertain consequences’ with a public guarantee of some uncertain consequences of our own should he continue to irritate the Eagle.  According to Rebane Doctrine, one such uncertain consequence would arise were we to promise to supply Ukraine with tactical nukes if Putin would ever pop one of his on Ukrainian territory.  The bottom line here is that we should exhume MAD, a mutually understood and implemented foreign policy strategy that for decades proved its war-limiting mettle, and as a reminder, bears that behave badly should always be poked.

Without MAD, none on Bumblebrain’s A-team has a clue on how to stop Putin from taking the next hunk of neighboring territory after he’s allowed to negotiate a ‘peace’ that further decimates Ukraine.  Why would he not?  As with all tyrants whose regime beggars its citizens, Putin must always have a foreign aggressor against which to rail, and explain to his people why they are in dire straits.

‘Separation of church and state’

George Rebane

On this Thursday of Holy Week my bride Jo Ann, who is a member of the Union’s editorial board, had her ‘Hit’ published in the 14apr22 edition of the newspaper’s weekly Hits & Misses column.  It read – “Hit to celebrations this week of Easter and Passover.  These observances in our community help maintain our culture and remind us of our country’s Judeo-Christian roots.”

Well, this did not sit well with Laurent Clark, a local anti-American progressive, who definitely considers Jo Ann’s sentiment one root to far according to today’s secular humanist tradition police.  Ms(?) Clark responded today with her letter titled ‘Separation of church and state’ (here) –

This week Ms. Rebane has used The Union’s “Hits and Misses” section to foist her brand of religion on everyone in the vicinity, doing so with a subtle comment that the Easter and Passover celebrations,“help maintain our culture and remind ‘us’ of our Judeo-Christian roots.” … “Us” may remind her that she overstates her opinion by inferring that all of “us” are encompassed within her religious ilk. She further suggests that “us” as a culture should be thankful for those alleged “roots” — an arguable stretch of an opinion. … She might better refer to her brand of religion as a group, sect, clan, etc. and recognize that the rest of “us” may have our own sect, clan, or group, to worship within, as we please … or not.

One is hard put to discover any ‘foisting’ or even anything about "her brand of religion" in Jo Ann’s hit.  We also note that those who did well in American history are familiar with the role Judeo-Christian tradition played in our country’s birth and beyond.  And the last time I looked, The Union was already a privately owned media outlet and not an inseparable mouthpiece of the state, allowed to still practice what passes for vestiges of free speech in today’s America.  But it is revealing to note that progressive statists today consider all organs of the Fourth Estate as responsible for hewing to the Left's socialist narrative.                    

Ruminations – 15apr22 (updated 16apr22)

George Rebane

Twitter’s poison pill to dissuade Elon Musk from taking the company private and making it truly a universal platform for free speech.  Democrats and other socialists are mortified, with many of their media lackies quickly declaring that only with more “mediation” (aka censorship) of online speech can we sustain democracy.  Not long ago such a statement was palpably unbelievable; today not so.  Here is a link to find out more about the types of most commonly used poison pills.

RR’s characterization of the liberal mind is confirmed multiple times daily.  Here is one from this morning’s letters to the 15apr22 Union by a Ms/Mr/Xcritter Nory Fussell – The year 2021 ended with 745 billionaires, up from 614 in 2020. Many billionaires pay little or no taxes. We suffer the lie of backbreaking “inflation” while corporate profits skyrocket.  Progressives don’t cause this.  Wars continue to break out, the military budget continues to grow, and our chief export is weapons of war. This is not the work of Progressives but of soulless men, put mildly, suffering an acute anti-social personality disorder.  Infrastructure crumbles. You lose power, heat, and essential services. Look what you pay at the pump, while oil executives laugh and rake it in. The economic war against you is raging — it will only get worse.  Progressives, perhaps imperfectly, work toward health care, education, and basic human needs. The oligarch party (you know who they are!) rages flat-out lies about race, class, gender, even about a violent insurrection. They offer no solutions to your needs.  Apparently (unbelievably!), a fairly large percentage of you are moved more by fear, anger, victim-hood and divisiveness. In one generation, how did the USA lose so much?

[16apr22 update]  Our economists and other economic analysts are hyper-ventilating about 3.5M workers they claim will not re-enter the post-Covid job market.  They tell us this deficit – consisting mostly of lowly paid women with no college - will be permanent.  Rebane Doctrine advises them not to worry.  As we have repeatedly noted, systemic unemployment has been slowly growing for years, and will continue to do so as cheaper and more capable technology replaces more expensive and unreliable workers.  And even the short-term deficit will be easily handled by the influx of illegal aliens as they get settled into their new homes and look for work.  From my perch, our continuing problem will be to mollifying the growing horde of the chronically irrelevant and systemically unemployed from revolting to relevance. (cf rising crime rates and more here)

Giving until it hurts?  FN and The Blaze cite IRS records (here) showing that Bumblebrain and FLOTUS gave $17,400 or 2.8% of their 2021 income to charity.  Kamala and SHOTUS upped them a mite, and gave $22,100, but only 1.3% of their 2021 income to charity.  These laughable amounts are not all that laughable as records have shown for years that leftwingers don’t give much to private charities – their charity operates with OPM.  This has been much studied (here).  And as socialists they believe that government should be the sole provider of succor to its citizens.  Nevertheless, Americans continue to give through private charities amounts that are multiples of what the deficit-spending, vote-buying government dispenses.  For the record, as grateful entrepreneurs we, and many of our friends, are blessed to be able to give up to 40% of our earnings to worthy causes.  This tallies to several times the amounts that our progressive elites and leaders let escape from their tightly zipped wallets.

 

The Jewish Question

George Rebane

In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

“This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

Socialist Economics

George Rebane

A Brief History of Equality (2022) is the latest issue of socio-economic wisdom from the socialist-celebrated French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.  You might recall that Piketty gave us Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), his magnus opus comprised of “an 800-page book turbid with equations and numbers of all kinds, … is regarded as a game-changing weapon in the war to wrest wealth from the rich.”  Therein he introduced the world to “the central contradiction of capitalism” which elicited worldwide acclaim from collectivists of every stripe – progressives, Marxists, communists, … .  Its dense arguments made the tome’s 2.5 million copies sold as one of the most unread books of all time.  Nevertheless, adulatory columns and commentaries without end graced the pages and programs of the mainstream media.  With all those equations, it appeared that someone had finally put the demise of capitalism on a firm scientific basis.

The piece de resistance of ‘Capital’ was introduction of his signature inequality r > g, stating that the rate of return on capital always exceeds the growth rate of its underlying economy.  In a nutshell, that was his ‘central contradiction’ to which I return in a bit.  But as Tunku Varadarajan of the American Enterprise Institute explains (here), “Thomas Piketty attempts to lure readers unable to scale the mountain of ‘Capital’” with a series of socialist principles that would create equality (think social justice) by “flattening the wealth curve.”

Piketty does admit that there has been an historical movement toward equality along many dimensions – status, gender, race - since the late 1700s, but still not enough “to brag about.”  These gains have not been achieved by the increase in access to material wealth made possible by capitalist, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, but instead by revolutionary politics and class struggle.  “Efficient production, shrewd investment, or the genius and dynamism of innovators are sideshows”, because “all creations of wealth in history have issued from a collective process”.  For Piketty, this process has not only included but also depended on “the international division of labor, the use of global natural resources”, and most importantly “the accumulation of knowledge since the beginnings of humanity”, all blessings of the global collective.  Varadarajan correctly concludes from these claims that Piketty “is pure Bernie Sanders or AOC” and “may even be to their left.”

Militarizing local LE agencies

George Rebane

Last week’s Union had a couple of items that piqued my ire.  One included the display of a grim array of new militarized riot control gear that our Grass Valley police will now have at the ready to put down any protests they deem will violate public order and safety. (more here) The other item was the newspaper’s editorial board, in their 8apr22 Our View column (here), clutching their communal pearls about the recent Sacramento shootings and lamenting that “we’re nowhere near knowing the steps we need to take to reduce the number of shootings in this country.”

Ruminations – 8apr22

George Rebane

Were I a senator, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have received my vote for her SCOTUS confirmation.  Given the part of her record we are allowed to see, she is by no means the best pick for her legal acumen and rulings.  The lamestream has unabashedly lied about her treatment at her somewhat embarrassing Senate hearings.  But in the final analysis, I would have passed on her because she is a racist pick that peremptorily eliminated over 95% of the field of qualified jurists, most of whom more qualified than she.  (more here)

The Union continues to deny the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in words and pictures (see its 8apr22 op-ed).  Its publisher maintains that there is no there there in which evidence of Biden family corruption abounds, and its overwhelmingly leftwing political cartoons are selected to support the newspaper’s position.  Our local paper makes no never mind that major lamestream players are now tiptoeing back their earlier denials and election year censorship which most definitely had an impact on the nation’s 2020 election. (more here)

WSJ’s Kim Strassel expands on the Biden scandal in her ‘Apologies for Hunter Biden’s Laptop’ where she writes – “Although some Republicans are immediately characterizing all this as “corruption,” the more specific issue (and always the focus of the Johnson-Grassley probe) is national security. Hunter Biden spent years entwining the family in questionable ventures in Ukraine, Russia and China, even as his father’s biggest foreign-policy concerns are Ukraine, Russia and China. This history raises legitimate questions about counterintelligence and extortion, even as it puts a spotlight on how honest President Biden has been in claiming no knowledge of his son’s doings.”

The Evil Party continues self-validation (updated 6apr22)

George Rebane

A reader posted the link to conservative writer David Horowitz’s essay ‘Understanding the Progressive Mind’.  Here he points out that “too many conservatives fail to appreciate the radical evil that lies at the heart of progressivism by, e.g., giving progressives credit for good intentions and assuming that the disasters caused by their policies are inadvertent.”  We have made the case for years that these disasters have been anything but inadvertent.

A more compelling argument as to the evil that imbues the basis of the Democrats’ objectives, means, and methods is on display today with our policy to do everything politically possible, within the context of NATO, to diminish and delay military support to Ukraine.  This perfidy is accomplished with the lamestream propagandizing Biden’s lauded fear/desire not to prompt Putin into pushing the WW3 button.  Few people understand more thoroughly than Garry Kasparov the impact this prevarication has on Russia’s foreign policy and future expansionist aggressions under Putin.  Kasparov’s op-ed, ‘Biden Told the Truth, Putin Has to Go’, in the (paywalled) 4apr22 WSJ is an important analysis of the West’s response to date.  He makes the case that “Ukraine’s sacrifice will be in vain if the West’s moral confusion gives Russia a chance to regroup.”  I’ve decided to make it available to RR readers here - Download Kasparov 4apr22 op-ed

[6apr22 update] Insulin price controls - butt stupid socialist economics on parade.  Don’t know exactly where the needle lands on their stupid-to-evil scale, but the Democrats’ Affordable Insulin Now Act will have exactly the wrong impact on every part of the R&D-to-pharmacist counter cycle.  In the longer term everyone, especially the diabetics, will be hurt as the monies will be mal-distributed between patient, government, big pharma, insurance companies, and, yes, ultimately the taxpayer.  This is yet another Democrat vote buying program directed at the desperate, destitute, deluded, and dumb.  (more here)

‘Genes vs. Culture’

George Rebane

This is the title of a landmark essay on the American condition by Lawrence Mead, Professor of Politics at New York University, published in the March/April 2022 edition of Chronicles, flagship publication of the Charlemagne Institute.  Continuing the work of Charles Murray et al, Professor Mead makes the case that “conservatives face a juggernaut determined to transform society in the name of equity. In order to fight it, they must have the courage to state the truth: There are real differences, both genetic and cultural, between races and sexes.”

The essay presents a compendium of information about the racial and cultural differences inherent in the people who today populate the United States.  Almost everything that is cited is currently censored in today’s land of the free and home of the brave.  That we compliantly accept this is ongoing evidence of the country’s continuing decline toward autocracy cum tyranny.

When I wrote ‘Equity Denies Reality’ and also submitted it to The Union, its publisher told me in so many words that the subject was too hot to be handled in our rapidly bluing Nevada County.  It would generate way more heat than light, and besides, our publisher’s own worldview did not countenance the presentation of such government data - not all that the government gathers and archives is suitable for sheeple fodder.

The main thesis this forbidden research and recorded data supports is that we are a variegated citizenry in an historical melting pot that has yet to melt into a homogenous amalgam when it comes to individual propensities and capabilities which are identifiably and unambiguously still distinguished by genes and culture.  Denying this, and making it public policy to lie about it over the past fifty years has done untold harm to our e pluribus unum work in progress.

I strongly recommend both Murray’s Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) - source of graphic - and Mead’s ‘Genes vs. Culture’ in order to understand the quantitative details about the nature of our divisions, and how today's Left seeks to capitalize on these as we march toward the Great Divide or the global Great Reset.

The Great Reset

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984

George Rebane

Given that the world will always have at least one hegemon, it is therefore imperative that America should always remain a hegemon - Rebane Doctrine.

A prime objective of RR over its now considerable lifespan has been the discovery, discussion, and dissemination of the resurgence of global collectivism under its various guises.  This enterprise has been promoted under various names and transnational programs, possibly the earliest organized launch occurred thirty years ago during a UN conference in Brazil.  There we heard about Agenda 21 (A21) and read its manifesto for a brave new world populated by a much smaller and tightly controlled population of humans.  It was a plan for a ‘sustainable world’ under an overarching collectivist government run by elite technocrats.

The road to A21 was admittedly long and had to be carefully planned and implemented so as not to awaken any early ire to the admitted loss of freedoms, wealth, and quality of life in general in order to redistribute resources to a radically reducing population.  The provisions and policies for A21 were to be installed bit by piece at all levels of government, first and foremost at the local level.  The cadres to do this would be the local electeds, bureaucrats, and civil servants trained by a global network of A21 offshoots called International Councils for Local Environmental Initiatives (which is now known as ‘ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability’).  These government cadres would quietly attend and study the ideological and operational principles of bringing what eventually came to be called neo-Marxist thought to shape and control local societies and economics.

Locally in Nevada County, almost all county staff at the managerial level have attended our regional ICLEI.  This is replicated state and nationwide.  California leads America in the number of ICLEIs, and America leads the world.  Managed from over 20 offices around the globe, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.  These many trails and tributaries to socialism are purposely ignored and unreported by leftwing media, and surprisingly also ignored by right-leaning outlets.

Today the US is being reconfigured (“fundamentally transformed”) socio-politically to prepare for its place in the new global order under a central power structure run by a cadre of elites immune from the policies they will mandate for the population at large.

A large literature has come in place to promote, analyze, and oppose what was introduced as the ‘Great Reset’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos.  The Great Reset is now the latest refinement of what began as the UN’s Agenda 21 lately renamed Agenda 2030.  As long documented here, on the surface these ‘agendas’ are lists of “Sustainable Development Goals” re-adopted in 2015 to reduce world population to a more controllable level that can be corralled into high-density population centers connected by a limited number of transportation corridors.

Scattershots – 27mar22 (updated 1apr22)

George Rebane

Unmitigated media bullshit.  This afternoon watching a news program, I was again reminded that most programming on the air that is advertised as news is nothing but third person rehash.  What fills most of the ‘content time’ on news programs is the anchor or reporters interviewing each other, patronizing politicians, and third party has-beens.  An example called on to give us his reflections on the Ukrainian war was a former CIA station chief from somewhere, who was asked as to his assessment of what was going on in the war.  Now what a former CIA station chief would know that is special is a mystery to me – he neither established such credentials nor did he enlighten the audience with something new we had not heard of or some new insight as to what was happening.  No, the gentleman regurgitated what everyone who tries to keep up has already known for a week or longer.  Unmitigated dated pap was all that came forth.  And when you consider the contribution of other such ‘guests’, they all say essentially the same thing – yesterday’s news or simply sidestepping what would be a telling question.  Literally 80% of content is such a rehash or doing the sidestepping two-step – bottom line, the information rate is dismally low.  And when you consider that the content factor of all news programs is at most about 60%, you get an idea of what a gross waste of time watching a live news program is.  You get a little improvement when you use your DVR, but not much.  A vast wasteland indeed.

Towards scale and controlled networks.  A regular reader/commenter (@ 746am) argues that "it's essentially impossible to avoid economies of scale, which centralizes the beast, plus network effects tend to drive towards gigantism."

Yes, there is always the push toward economies of scale, but that vicious cycle is abetted only by corporatism. A liberal government's role is to maintain minimally regulated markets which allow the entry of more nimble and efficient smaller competitors, thereby creating virtuous (self-correcting) cycles. That is not possible under Democrats and today's limp-wristed Republicans.

Actually, network effects support efficiently operating complex systems (e.g. economies and societies) structured with distributed control and knowledge. For an open network (i.e. a complete graph) to become the handmaiden of autocracy will require massive pruning of links and the elimination of politically incorrect nodes. We witness this today in autocratic countries, and with Dems in charge, will no doubt see the process gain ground in America.

[30mar22 update]  Freedom in the 50 states.  “California is a classic left-wing state on social issues, (and) one of the least free states in the country, largely because of its long-standing poor performance on economic freedom.”  So states the Cato Institute in its latest exhaustively researched annual report (summarized here and pdf download here).  The freedom index is based on the attributes of fiscal, regulatory, and personal freedoms sliced and diced into many different components.  California ranks 48^th overall, miserably surpassed only by Hawaii (49) and New York (50).

[1apr22 update] Another perspective might be helpful.  So, we have this from the comment stream of an FN story about the Smith/Rock slapping imbroglio by someone calling himself ‘fuzzy12’ - "Maybe now would be a good time to give thanks for the great contributions of the Black community to our society. Their peaceful and generous nature make them ideal neighbors, lending testimony to their exceptional family values and parenting skills unrivaled by any other culture. Their commitment to academic excellence enriches our schools and serves as an example to all who hope to achieve prominence as a people. Real estate values are fueled by the mix of African-Americans into an area due to their caring and respectful nature of these communities, an example of all they have achieved through their enthusiasm for self-improvement by hard work and a self-reliant can-do nature. We must not forget their abhorrence for crime and their dedication to observing the law. Without their industrious and creative drive, we would be poorer as a nation." (H/T to correspondent)

SEC gets into the climate change business

George Rebane

There is a serious proposal (here) for Congress to get the SEC into creating additional friction in the conduct of the nation’s businesses, especially in an area where it has no established expertise and needs to set up additional bureaus/departments to monitor and adjudicate newly mandated company reports, all for the putative reason of reducing investor risk, is a bad idea (Ramirez says it all). To begin, there is no consensus science that we are suffering from preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), which is the climate controllers’ fundamental thesis – science does not speak with a single voice.  Most certainly, the series of IPCC reports, including the most recent one, make no such claim.  While most knowledgeable people admit that human activities can contribute to global warming, the quantitative sources and scopes of such activities impacting the earth’s temperature record (itself a very fuzzy concept) is totally unknown.

An important concept not reported on the heavily propagandized interpretations of the IPCC report is that the GCMs (general circulation models) have not gotten more reliable in either describing or predicting temperatures (among their other output parameters).  This science has made little or no progress and the output variance measures of the tens of competing GCMs currently in vogue/use have not declined over the last thirty years.  One reason is that the earth’s complete carbon cycle is not known – there are huge gaps in the cycle that today are still filled with various brown numbers. The transfer function for the earth’s atmosphere is unknown; the GCMs are based on heuristics – cobbled together submodels with constants adjusted to fit dubious temperature etc records from various epochs.  As we know from estimation theory, such fittings to past data give no guarantee of the predictive power of (heuristic) models based on limited science.

A litmus test of a maturing science/technology is that the models which embody and express the underlying theory continue to improve as witnessed by their diminishing output covariance matrices developed from experiment and field data.  The GCMs, on which both climate hysteria and public policies are based, have not satisfied this requirement, and about which the media, politicians, and the grant-consuming academics have been silent.  Perhaps a more dismal outlook for confirming the existence of PMGW is that the factors affecting climate are not sufficiently known, and that they also compose an amalgam of chaotic processes, the predictive modeling of which is something humans don’t know how to do, and which may well be that part of our universe that will not succumb to our level of intelligence and mathematics (there are a number of other such processes known to science where human knowledge appears to have hit an impenetrable boundary).

In the final analysis, even if we postulate that some day soon we’ll overcome all these unknowns about climate dynamics, we will most likely discover that global warming may not be feasibly preventable, even if mankind does contribute to it.  We are capable of putting in place draconian public policies that can pauper the world, but there is not a whit of science that says any of it will impact global temperatures, let alone allow us to control them to desired levels.  And here is where the politics and corporatist enterprises come to bear.  Corporatists, by their definition, partner with government to foster laws and regulations designed to limit competition by raising the cost of doing business to such prohibitive entry levels that smaller companies are stifled and venture capital takes a pass in investing in new enterprises wanting to take on the established Goliaths.  This is why you will see corporatists endorsing this new extension of SEC power to become yet one more arm of government’s expanding control.

(Corporatism is the desirable natural endpoint to a corporate growth cycle vs bankruptcy, acquisition, … .  Corporations that grow beyond an efficient organizational size cannot compete with smaller, more nimble, companies in minimally regulated markets.  They need to team up with the government gun to gain the level of regulatory security required by large inefficient organizations to stay in business.  And membership in the corporatist club is relatively easy, all it requires is money to buy politicians and unionists.)

Coda.  From my perch as a schooled technologist, sophisticated investor of some means, and a successful professional in assessing and quantifying risk, I have no idea how to evaluate the information in the SEC’s contemplated ‘climate-risk’ reports.  I doubt that the SEC will make available their ‘methodology’ that supports the new regulations companies will have to follow.  And retail investors, institutional investment advisors, and corporate CFOs will have no clue about the then reported climate risks.  All of them will learn to operate on the basis of a handful of slogans and shibboleths handed down from on high through an enthusiastically cooperating media.

A Promising New Tactic Against the Fearful

George Rebane

Russia’s new tactic is the use of long-range missiles, many of which can be fired from Russia proper, to overcome the demonstrated ineptness of its land units and manned aircraft over Ukrainian air space.  Putin needs to reorganize his conventional forces because they most certainly have not performed as previously advertised to the Kremlin.  So the approach in the interval is to bombard the crap out of Ukrainian cities with missiles that are hard to intercept, and hope that President Zelensky will call for a favorable cease fire in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of the country’s civilian population. (more here)

With modern precision-guided missiles, this tactic is a movable feast for thugs like Putin whose saber-rattling has caused a comprehensive cowering by western leaders in the name of not willing to risk WW3 by striking Russia with any of several available and effective military responses.  He and Xi can use this approach from their own landmass to their heart’s content in future territorial conquests.  As long as western leaders continue to promise that they will not respond in any way that would (heaven forbid) irritate the international gangsters, they can assemble their land forces at the border and then proceed to slaughter the target country’s civilian population from afar.

As we now know, this will do the trick against any fearful opponent who openly declares from the gitgo that they’ll do nothing “reckless” to rile the attacker.  I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why such a tactic will not be used repeatedly until the west says ‘Enough!’ and demonstrates that we too are willing to return to MAD and risk WW3 to protect our interests.  Without the will to use force, non-military sanctions will not work to stay the hand of a tyrant; the planet is already too interconnected commercially and financially so that surgical sanctions have little effect, and the more comprehensive sanctions spill over and also hurt us and our allies.

In desperation, today we have learned to redefine our interests in favor of international criminals like those who run Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, … .  We learned long ago that the ONLY way to defend, let alone expand, liberal governance on this planet is to always be ready to go to the mat with the world’s tyrants, and appear willing to do that sooner than later with the big thugs.  This principle applies at all scales when we look at what our cities have become as we constrained law enforcement and started nurturing criminals.

The Ukraine War – 19mar22

George Rebane

The ongoing Ukraine war is a complex affair with many dynamic factors that influence events and the state (attitudes/assessments) of the involved parties.  These pages are home to a lively discussion and debate about the goings on in Ukraine and their worldwide impact.  I’ve made an attempt to simplify and explicate my take on how the whole mish-mash comes together from what is known, claimed, and propagandized today.  This assessment is reduced into an influence factors diagram shown below.

To understand the above IFD, I recommend a quick read of one or more tutorial pieces I posted some years ago (here, here, and here).  The main thing to recall in looking at how the factors relate is that the connecting lines show the direction of influence by their arrowheads, and the plus (+) sign means that the influencer and influenced are in sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, so does the other), while the minus (-) sign means that they are out of sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, the other goes down/up).  The factors labeled L{ } are likelihoods of the events in the curly brackets coming to pass.

IFDs usually contain ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ cycles.  A cycle is made by any directed path that returns to its selected point of origin.  A cycle is usually taken as virtuous if the cycled feedback seeks to stabilize (self-correct) the involved factors, and is usually understood as vicious if the feedback causes a runaway state in one or more of involved factors.  An easy way to identify such cycles is by counting the number of minus (-) signs in the cycle.  Virtuous cycles have an odd number of minuses, while vicious cycles tally an even number of minuses.  In the above IFD trace out some cycles starting with ‘US Display of Strength’.

Before you dismiss the IFD as just some idle technical doodling, you might consider that this tool (in its various formats) is used by the big kids as a starting point to discuss and communicate ALL complex processes about which critical decisions must be taken, and most certainly when it is required to formally ‘game the process’ using one of several simulation development environments – pricey software systems used in industry, by the military, and in statecraft.  The IFD lets you see the big picture in its entirety and then drill down to whatever level of detail is required.  It is the epitome graphic for communication in multi-party discussions of complex affairs.  (BTW, people who can generate clear, complete, and concise IFDs for complex issues get paid big bucks.)

Liberal Hypocrisy Fuels American Inequality

George Rebane

What do Dems actually do when they have all the power?  The short answer is that they have created the worst states in the Union with regard to housing, education, taxation, homelessness, … .   And first and foremost, they turn on their political and media lying machines to deny what horrible messes in governance they create when voters unwittingly hand them all the levers of power in a state.  This has gotten so bad that even the NYT now runs op-eds decrying the Democrats’ hypocracies, illustrating in chapter and verse the 180 differences between the nation’s progressive talk and walk.

Today Democrats control the legislative and the executive branches, or else have veto-proof majorities in the legislatures of 18 states – Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii.  And these are the worst governed states in which progressives promote and maintain the greatest inequalities between their rich and their poor.  In these states there is no possibility for any Republicans to stand in the way of Democrat public policies – the Left owns these states lock, stock, and barrel.

Noted author and NYT editorial board writer Binya Appelbaum has zeroed in on these states to discover the nature and magnitude of leftwing travesties in operation.  He teams up with video journalist Johnny Harris to report on the details in this NYT Opinion video.  Here they present the data that forms the basis for the fabric of Big Lies on which our Left has based its access to power by buying the votes of the less-read, and keeping them on urban plantations for decades during which millions of American lives have been destroyed and/or stunted.

To me the information presented here is yet another confirmation that the Democrat Party is fundamentally evil, especially in how it has bamboozled the poor, and succored its rich into believing they have the moral high ground on the nation’s conservatives.  The Great Divide cannot happen soon enough.  (H/T to reader and correspondent)