Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 20sep21 (updated 22sep21)

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be – starting with the lawyers and enactors. Lao-Tzu (as embellished by Rebane)

George Rebane

The wisdom of Lao-Tzu was brought to my attention again by a friend and reader.  Jeff Thomas, a true conservetarian, wrote ‘The First Libertarian?’, an important little essay on governance – its ills and desiderata.  In it he distilled some more useful aphorism from the great sage.

Those in power are meddlesome.

The greater the restrictions and prohibitions, the more people are impoverished.

The more advanced the weapons of the state, the darker the nation … thus the virtuous attend to contracts, while those without virtue collect taxes.

Act before things exist, manage them before there’s disorder

Trickle down taxes is a specialty of the Democratic Party which it sells gift-wrapped in a couple of its perennial Big Lies – raising taxes does not impact economic behavior (the Laffer curve doesn’t work), and corporate taxes lower the tax burden on the working class.  They correctly assess their constituents as being too ignorant to questions such lies, but they know both of them to be false.  For example, Kennedy lowered taxes in xx to stimulate the economy.  And corporations pay no taxes but pass that cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices, which quietly impacts most the poorest in the land.  And a tax not even the Democrats want to talk about is inflation – always government induced (more here and here).  The worker bees’ bigger paychecks don’t give them any more buying power, but do promote them into higher tax brackets (plus higher sales taxes) which surreptitiously increase their overall tax rates.  But our leftwing elites have no worries about pushback from their Democrat voters, people who are totally oblivious to such economic factors, and continue to believe that their political leaders are making corporations and the rich pay their ‘fair share’.

[21sep21 update]  Sorry ass Biden.  I have been aware of presidential doings since ol' Harry was in office, and want to enter into the RR record that I have never seen such a terminally sorry ass elected President of the United States of America as Bumblebrain Biden.  This idiot has done everything wrong that he could possibly do, as he continues to work on bringing about even bigger disasters for the country.  The list of his failures gets rehashed regularly in these pages, and I’m sure that at some future date I’ll compile another list of them myself.  Right now the bigger problem for our republic is that a huge share of our voting age citizens have shown themselves to be simply too dumb to maintain the blessed land we inherited.  Ben Franklin’s admonition – “… a republic, if you can keep it” – has come true as ever more of our freedoms are stripped away daily.  Nay, not stripped, we have now been reduced to compliant serfs who willingly give away our freedoms – no stripping required.  And many of us even sing hosannas to the munificent wisdom of our socialist overlords so long as the checks keep arriving.  They are buying our freedoms with our own money, and welcoming in millions more aliens, cum tomorrow's Democrats, who will guarantee our descent to tyranny.

[22sep21 update]  Bumblebrain’s poll numbers are tanking and Republicans are happy dancing in the streets about next year’s election.  That election is more than several political eternities in the future, and the not-too-bright electorate has a short memory.  By next Fall things could easily be turned 180, especially if the Dems can pass more social legislation to increase the number and size of checks to the takers, while crowing that their massive tax increases will make the ‘rich’ makers and corporations pay their “fair share”.  (Over 60% of US households pay no capital gains or federal income taxes.)  Their constituents are dim enough to lap up all that kool-aid, especially if Republicans don’t have the balls to call it like it is – loudly and often - singing castrato doesn't cut it.

The Canadian COVID Conspiracy: Dr David E Martin (updated 19sep21)

George Rebane

A longtime reader and friend sent me this mind-bending video on Bitchute of an interview with David Martin (here) who lays out the multi-decadal conspiracy of developing the human infectable/transmissible corona virus and the worldwide pandemic to create a market for its ‘vaccine’, which is really not a vaccine in any medical sense of the word.  I found the 54-minute video riveting as Martin unfolds and exposes the business, marketing, investment, collusion factors that come together as a description of the most massive and well-executed conspiracy to fleece the world with the enthusiastic cooperation of governments and the media.  The financial and political gifts to the co-operating players appear to be unending.

As to the verity of what Martin reports I cannot attest, since at this writing I’m not very familiar with other corroborating sources of this information.  I do invite readers to share such sources should they discover them.  In any event, for those interested in the ongoing COVID saga, the video is definitely worth watching with a glass of your favorite adult beverage, and possibly a pen and paper.  (and here is more)

For more research on David Martin and what he reports, search ‘David E Martin credibility’ on Bing to get some links that cover the pro/con sides of the matter – Google search gives a definitely one-sided collection of hits on that query.

[19sep21 update]  Here is a noteworthy development on C19 vaccines – ‘FDA Allows Whistleblower Testimony that COVID-19 Vaccines Are Killing and Harming People!’  This report has some astounding stats on the aftereffects of certain 'vaccines' that studies are now revealing.  We now know that what people are being inoculated with are not real vaccines in the medical sense, but designed, special-purpose bio-molecules ("medical devices") that are supposed to prompt your immune system to then manufacture the antibodies (provided by normal vaccines) to resist C19.  (H/T to reader)

 

Ruminations – 14sep21 (update 18sep21)

George Rebane

Government bureaucrats allocate capital better than private investors – fundamental tenet of the Left

Newsom's recall is opposed by another progressive dimwit in the 14sep21 Union (here) arguing that all of CA’s problems were there before he was elected.  The ‘gentleman’ does not understand that the recall is about his making all of the problems worse, and then adding on new ones.  And he also quotes a fictitious $70B “surplus”, having no idea that any such monies are long spoken for with the state’s over $1T in unfunded liabilities.

Europe’s electricity prices are going through the roof (here).  Why?  Well, the goddam wind is not blowing very much these days, and their having shut down their nuclear and fossil fuel plants without much consideration that the so-called sustainable sun/wind/water energy sources are sometime things, now they find their mammaries twixt the rollers.  Brings to mind the old Estonian saying about not crapping in the old well before the new one’s dug.  Here in CA, we haven’t learned a thing about that problem.

NIH investigates removal Covid genetic data per Chinese researcher request (here).  The agency removed C19 gene sequence data obtained from Wuhan patients in January/February 2020.  This data would be an important input to determining the source and type (manmade vs nature) of the virus.  The  portents of its compliant and rapid deletion from our database opens up more serious questions about the NIH/Wuhan lab relationship.  Chalk up another one for China.  Dr Fauci call your office.

[15sep21 update]  Newsom’s recall rejected by a landslide.  CA voters once again demonstrate that they know not how to select their political leaders as the state continues its downward plunge along every imaginable way – illegal alien and welfare recipient surge, rampaging homelessness, dilapidated infrastructure, exodus of productive workers, businesses, and retirees, overall population loss, increasing already high taxes, regulatory tsunami, continued growth of eco-fanatics, historic water mismanagement, historic power generation/distribution mismanagement, continued mismanagement of forests, fiscal corruption and incompetency, continued growth of record unfunded liabilities, … .  And perpetuating a never-ending, one party monopoly that only serves the takers and punishes the makers.

Gen Mark Milley’s phone calls to China promising to warn them of any pending US military action against them was one of several acts of treason our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pulled off during the Trump administration.  He is part of the devastation in our flag officer ranks that Obama left behind in his politicization of the military.  Bob Woodward and Robert Costa outline this travesty in their Peril (2021).

SecState Blinken, who is particularly unsuited for his job, now claims to bring the Taliban to heel with his toothless diplomacy.  Echoing Stalin’s famous ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’, after our precipitous and shameful retreat, the Taliban now ask, ‘How many divisions does Blinken have?’  Biden and Blinken have given new meaning to our shooting diplomatic blanks – Blinken Blanks?

C19 response mismanagement last year is laid bare in Uncontrolled Spread (2021) by former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb.  The good doctor documents the numerous and impactive screw-ups perpetrated by the CDC, FDA, and NIH which cry out for deep and penetrating investigations to better prepare us for the next pandemic.  Gottlieb highlights Warp Speed as the only government initiative undertaken correctly and against massive political opposition.

Facebook confirmed a sleazebag outfit, as demonstrated again by its corrupt censorship policy which selectively favors the high and mighty.

C19 ‘cases’ and hospitalization stats are grossly misleading and meant to support more government command and control mandates.  Both cases and hospitalizations have been overwhelmingly (positively tested) asymptomatic and mild when admitted.  Continuing to serve as the DNC trumpet, the lamestream has, of course, omitted mentioning any of this.

[17sep21 update] California voters got what they deserve, 'good and hard' (a la HL Mencken). Syndicated columnist Michael Barone lays out the particulars for us here.  And more and more of today’s college graduates reflect the socialist crap they were taught in universities by voting Democratic.

Democrats’ planned price controls on drugs will kill America’s innovative pharma industry and will be dangerous to your health. (more here and here)  The party of evil is hard at work taking the country down as fast as it can to a uniform level of misery (aka equity) that has been presaged by so many other nations adopting elitist autocratic regimes that have successfully sold central planning and control to their terminally benighted citizens.

[18sep21 update]  My essay 'America the Unnatural', originally posted here on 27 June 2021, finally appeared in today's print and online editions of The Union.  Unfortunately the print version was edited enough to change/omit several critical points in the submitted version.  However, they did kindly post the full submitted version in their online edition (here), for which I am grateful.

We have forgotten 9/11 (updated)

George Rebane

Until we understand and address the role of the swamp, swatting individual mosquitoes will not reduce our suffering.

On 11 September 2001 we as a country vowed that we would never forget what happened on that day which took the lives of almost 3,000 innocent Americans.  Since then, we have built a magnificent Ground Zero monument and museum, and in somber ceremonies called out the names of our murdered country men and women.  But the tragedy more often than not has been observed as an act of God, similar to our remembrance of the devastation of Katrina.

During these observances someone will utter a brief reference to the ‘terrorists’ who flew those passenger airliners into buildings and into a field in Pennsylvania.  At best these faceless terrorists are also glossed over as having no further identity, ideology, and purpose than did Katrina.  We focus all our attention on the killed and their grieving survivors.

But many more than 3,000 Americans die every day, and no national memorials are held for them.  No one asks any longer what made these 9/11 deaths special, and why that date, as another one in our history, will live in infamy.  When we were still a proud country and suffered a great blow on 7 December 1941, we didn’t memorialize our fallen as some inevitable victims of a natural disaster.  We made it clear that everyone down to our kindergarteners knew that it was Imperial Japan, with leaders like Tojo and Yamamoto, that had perpetrated and carried out that dastardly attack.  And even though Japan is no longer a warmongering empire, we still remember who attacked us on that day of infamy, and how we as a country responded to that outrage.

This is not the case with 9/11 that we now briefly identify as having been caused by some band of vanilla terrorists of indifferent provenance.  Today during these hallowed observances we cannot even mention  that it was fundamentalist Islam that motivated, assembled, trained, and set loose the self-sacrificing killers.  And that fundamental Islam has not deviated a whit from its greater goal to subvert the globe to its merciless credo, proving its unflagging zeal by continuing to send an unending stream of Islamist terrorists to maim and murder in the west.

In response, our progressive and woke leadership cringes at even the thought of identifying the terrorists’ creed.  We even take down Old Glory from classroom walls if a Muslim student expresses ‘discomfort’ with that flag for which so many have sacrificed.  We continue mumbling that Islam is still a “religion of peace”, ignoring the wholesale global support by Muslims of anti-western terror as an acceptable tool to bring about their new world order.  And in response, we have turned on ourselves by quietly accepting the leftists in our government who have fabricated the lie that white supremacists make up the greatest terror threat America faces.

There is no doubt that twenty years on, we as a nation have forgotten what really happened on 9/11.

[update]  RL Crabb, our celebrated cartoonist who is also on the editorial board of The Union, is a local leading intellectual light in the cadre of our calcified cohort of collectivists.  His cartoon in today’s 11sep21 issue of the newspaper (below) underlines the point that I am making in the above commentary.  As a collectivist, for him 9/11 was just another tragedy of lives lost to an event perpetrated by some inscrutable terrorists of indifferent origin who no longer deserve recognition, let alone mention.  Most students of geo-politics and Islamic affairs find nothing inscrutable about the 9/11 terrorists and are anything but indifferent as to their origin.  Fundamentalist Islam is the geo-political plague of our times and as such has been endemic for decades.  And so it will continue to be as long as our progressive thought leaders, who are also masters of our media, deem this scourge as just another act of nature to be dealt only with a general trepidation and ill-directed preparations which must neither address nor insult its source.  These leftists wish us to focus only on those whom they designate as “rightwing domestic terrorists”, their paramount threat to our republic.

A fruitful read on the entire matter of global Islamism is ‘The War on Terror Shifts to ‘Brainistan’’ by Tawfik Hamid, an American physician who in his younger years was himself an indoctrinated jihadist ready to martyr himself attacking the west.  He presents the case that “The West needs a better system for identifying radical Islamists and cutting out the religious underpinnings of jihad.”  Ignoring the ideological origins of 9/11 is not part of such a better system.  More such sentiments are presented today in essays such as 'Purposeful Forgetfulness' by Pedro Gonzales, associate editor of Chronicles, who argues that "Americans have been encouraged to forget about 9/11 and to focus on the enemy within."

On Our Road to Serfdom – 10sep21

George Rebane

We Americans have been on the road to serfdom since the launch of President Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960s.  Our progress toward an authoritarian social order was an almost imperceptible creep during the early years starting in the 1970s.  With the passing of the decades, our loss of freedoms has now become a gallop, especially highlighted by the state diktats, we quietly succumbed to during the Covid pandemic.  Specifically, I’m really talking about the battering suffered by the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (q.v.) – Liberty, Security, and Property.  These rights form the seminal legal structure upon which ALL other rights are based and secured; none can be weakened without a concomitant weakening of the other two, and, of course, the weakening of the rights deriving from these.

A beguiling danger on the road to serfdom is that its many disarming byways and slowly enlarging chuck holes are not readily noticed by travelers being drawn by descriptions of the promised land at its terminus.  By the time the journey becomes so difficult that even the lightest thinkers notice, it is too late to turn around and go back.  In America, our socialist elites have successfully brought a compliant and undereducated electorate to such a milestone on the road to serfdom and totalitarianism.

Noted Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, along with Milton Friedman of the ‘Chicago school’, each warned us of the ultimate disaster that would result from an embrace of collectivist governance based on central planning and control by elites.  The disasters of practiced fascism and communism highlight pre-woke and pre-CRT history books.  That both arose from initial adoption of various forms of Marxian socialism is today clouded by the Left’s resurgence and its citation of the Scandinavian experience.  Nowhere is mentioned Scandinavia’s actual unsustainable experience with socialism, along with their ongoing attempts to retreat from their extreme flirtations during the 1960s and 70s.

The US, on the other hand, is rushing toward a neo-Marxian socialist future on a disintegrating chariot pulled by global warming, open borders, and critical theories.  The party in charge of this rush to misery are the Democrats dominated by their left-wing zealots.  A socialist future is now openly presented as the objective of the country’s fundamental transformation.  And the road is already littered with authoritarian mandates that would have gathered our forefathers bearing torches and pitchforks in the public square.  With more of us arriving daily.

This week we heard that CDC has expanded from controlling our rental market to overruling relationships between Americans and their physicians.  As relayed by a reader who went to the local Rite-Aid drugstore to fill an Ivermectin prescription by her doctor, the pharmacist told her that they are rejecting such prescriptions because the CDC has deemed Ivermectin to have suddenly become harmful and not to be used as a C19 therapeutic or prophylactic.  So these unelected, politicized bureaucrats have now injected themselves into our country’s doctor/patient relationship starting with using a demonstrated lamestream hoax to prevent physicians from prescribing lawful medicines to their patients.  And no one has made a peep.  The lamestream has, of course, remained mum, but even the so-called rightwing outlets have yet to pick up on this latest rollback of our freedoms.  We have become so inured to having our rights casually cancelled by any politician or bureaucrat at literally any level of governance.  We are already serfs who comply with our master’s voice.  No second thought is given.  We are even enthusiastic enforcers of such mandates, ready, willing, and able to turn on our neighbor when we see noncompliance.

The Nobelist Hayek was most eloquent and clear in the warnings he issued, beginning with The Road to Serfdom (1944) and continuing throughout his life after he went to the University of Chicago and became part of ‘the Chicago School’ which also included Nobelist Milton Friedman.  A perusal of Serfdom yields some of his more important sentiments about socialism, collectivism, and totalitarianism.

• Western democracies, including the UK and the US, have "progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past".  Society has mistakenly tried to ensure continuing prosperity by centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

• Socialism is a hypocritical system, because its professed humanitarian goals can only be put into practice by brutal methods "of which most socialists disapprove". Such centralized systems also require effective propaganda, so that the people come to believe that the state's goals are theirs. As with communism, Hayek argues that the roots of National Socialism lie in socialism.

• Centralized planning is inherently undemocratic, because it requires "that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people".  The power of these minorities to act by taking money or property in pursuit of centralized goals, destroys the Rule of Law and individual freedoms.  Where there is centralized planning, "the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as ''socialized welfare' or the 'good of the community'".

• Hayek opposed regulations that restrict the freedom to enter a trade, or to buy and sell at any price, or to control quantities. Nevertheless, he acknowledged the utility of regulations that restrict legal methods of production, so long as these are applied equally to everyone and not used as an indirect way of controlling prices or quantities, and without forgetting the cost of such restrictions.

So today we have Biden and his CDC stumbling through one science-free policy after another in their misbegotten efforts to curb Covid.  None of them understand that the disease is now endemic and a permanent part of our health landscape.  We will fight it as we have other infectious diseases, by developing herd immunity through exposure and vaccines, but never by lockdowns and economic destruction.  Ignoring history and science while putting politics first, Team Biden now issues illegal and unconstitutional federal mandates to prescribe everything from masks, to vaccinations, to testing, to social distancing.  And again, we as the serfs we have become do not make a peep in opposition.  Half of us have become so compliant that they rush to denounce their neighbors who don’t toe the (Democratic) party line.

Scattershots – 5sep21 (updated 13sep21)

Geoge Rebane

About a month ago in ‘The Criminality of Covid Care’ we reviewed a catalog of atrocious policies that our governments have imposed since C19 was first loosened on the nation early last year.  Specifically, the focus was on the denigration and proscription of the established anti-viral Ivermectin for both prophylaxis and therapy for the disease.  Evidence of IVM’s benefits continues to be made available, all to the tin ears of CDC and Team Fauci.  Here’s the latest information from a reader – ‘Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19’.  This article is published in the September 2021 issue of New Microbes and New Infections published by Elsevier. (more here)

And here is your Ivermectin Lucky Strike Extra.  'Ivermectin, a potential anticancer drug derived from an antiparasitic drug.'  I think we may have covered this before, but it is definitely worth repeating to illustrate the magnitude of the crime our TDS progressives have committed and continue in the avalanche lies appearing daily about IVM.

[10sep21 update] Bidenese by Bumblebrain - Alright, a little change of pace to examine in more detail what regularly comes out of our president's mouth when in front of a mic.  How many times have you watched him attempt to explain or expand something, and out comes mush.  Well, it's not mush, and here is a video by a stalwart researcher who has captured a sampling of Bidenese to include in your lexicon for the next time you hear the president speak. (H/T to reader)  Download Bidenese

[11sep21 update] Re Recall Newsom - California resident Curt Kruger writes in the 11sep21 WSJ that people who oppose the recall of our misdirected and incompetent governor also support the following initiatives to reduce the state’s standing as the country’s leading repository of the homeless.

• Eliminate laws against living in a tent on public property.
• Remove the social stigma associated with living on the street (terms like hobo, vagrant, etc.)
• Provide free food. During nasty weather, provide free shelter.
• Provide enough cash that people don’t have to hold down a job.
• Make psychiatric-care and drug-dependency programs optional.

Mr Kruger concludes, “It’s ironic that Gov. Newsom’s program to reduce homelessness includes the same policies most people would implement to increase it.”

[13sep21 update]  Corporatist Facebook is one of the country’s premier SOS liars.  A major piece – ‘Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt’ - in the 13sep21 WSJ based on access to company confidential documents reveals, “A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse”.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.  The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

In front of congressional committees holding public hearings Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed multiple times that he is a sleazebag lying sack of (user fill-in, my preference is ‘shit’).  This is the kind of oligopolistic behaviors that make the case for breaking up Facebook or turning companies like this into regulated public utilities.

Afghanistan – Tell us the truth instead (updated 4sep21)

George Rebane

’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways.  These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes.  But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality.  Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run?  Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.

But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control.  You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis.  This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations.  America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’  I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again.  But it all starts with telling us the truth.

[4sep21 update]  Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste.  In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity.  So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry.  No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan.  At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.

So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban.  Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits.  And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … .  Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits.  (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)

We Live in the Golden Age of Stupidity

Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. - Jean Cocteau

George Rebane

So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here).  Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages.  (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge.  Only the former is correctible.)  Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people.  He immediately opens with –

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power.  The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions.  The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic.  The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.

Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels.  Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings.  Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’. 

The Ongoing and Tragic Biden Debacle

George Rebane

Let’s face it from the gitgo, Bumblebrain is so out of it that he and those supporters around him don’t even acknowledge the long list of tragedies that this administration has launched in its first eight months in office – border crisis, national crime wave, confused Covid response, $3.5T Green New Deal, mangled national employment, …, and now Afghanistan.  To them these atrocities either don’t exist or are just normative and expected reactions to their carefully laid out policies.

In Afghanistan we now see what has happened when they executed an exit policy that would have been rejected by a third-year ROTC cadet with a couple courses of military history and tactics under his belt.  The two most obvious and advised-against mistakes were the abandonment of the Bagram air base, and the withdrawing our last combat troops before starting the evacuation of civilians.  Everyone with a 3-digit IQ knew that the Afghan army would collapse as a fighting force immediately after we withdrew our air support, intelligence feeds, and contracted mechanics who kept their aircraft and their more complex combat systems operational.  And all, save the administration, knew that the Taliban would then be in Kabul in a fortnight.

Were there any honor left in the administration and its Pentagon political lackies, there would be a long list of resignations on the president’s desk to herald the much-needed housecleaning to make room for a more competent cadre of staff and military leaders.  And were any semblance of justice and concern for national security left in the Democratic Party, there would be a long list of impeachment filings against officials who were obviously derelict in their sworn duties or even criminal in their errors and omissions.

Since none of that is happening, and flacks like Psaki and Kirby are trotted out to obfuscate and confound what is really happening, we know that the cover-up of the century has been launched in preparation for next year’s midterm election.

Part and parcel of the Democrats’ national redoubt is California’s September recall election.  I am of the school that believes that Team Newsom with the help of national Democrats will do whatever is necessary to make sure Gavin does not get recalled.  The state’s election laws are now tailored to support election fraud and ‘irregularities’, abetted by everything from universal use of mail-ballots to the voting/vote counting period that extends before and after the 14sep21 election day.

California has been mismanaged so visibly and for so long that, post-Newsom, people will immediately ascribe responsibility to the state’s political monopoly.  A Republican governor will have the ability to reverse an untold number of misbegotten policies, codes, initiatives, and regulations that have been put in place by executive fiat.  The immediate impact of such a reversal will be apparent to a sufficient fraction of the state’s voters that it would most likely signal the end of the Democrats’ super-majority legislature, and perhaps even their massive embeds in the state’s various appointed and elected office slots.  The problem for the national Democrats is that such a political epiphany will be seen everywhere, and give lie to the progressive policies that have issued from state capitals and city halls across the land, those dominated by proto-Marxist politicians.

The amount of out-of-state money pouring in to support Newsom’s retainment attests to this assessment.  And we ain’t seen nothing yet when the fireworks erupt as the election draws nigh.  It will be a hot time in the old town for many a night.

Meanwhile, Biden’s tragic Afghanistan rout rolls on. (more here)

‘Illiberal American Century’

George Rebane

[This is a quick response to an essay by a noted leftwing academic that I received from a longtime correspondent and friend who sometimes tacks a bit to my port side.  I post it because the author presents a good summary of what continues to abet our Left’s ongoing expressions of TDS as their never-ending source of all ills that currently blanket this fair land.]

America is becoming a “rogue superpower” according to Michael Beckley, leftwing academic at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and a professor at Tufts.  His essay ‘Rogue Superpower – Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century’ in the Nov/Dec2020 Foreign Affairs argued that President Trump’s policies focusing on America’s interests was making our country a pariah hegemon in the community of nations.  Events since then have made many important aspects of his arguments moot or just plain wrong, but his arguments are worth reviewing since they still form the core of what Democrats and their radical left purvey daily through our lamestream media.

To begin, Beckley has a somewhat skewed if not jaundiced view of history with blithe observations that after WW2 “hundreds of millions accepted communism”, a proposition that flies in the face of the actual methods communists used to subvert national governments and turn nations into wholesale gulags under the heels of tyrants who slaughtered millions of their own citizens.

Beckley sees Trump’s policy of having NATO countries pay at their agreed levels (2% of GDP) for their and the continent’s security as a mortal sin of international diplomacy.  Beckley’s solution is for us to continue bearing the overwhelming share of NATO’s defense budget, and subsume our national interest in the process.  He does not recognize nor make mention of China’s rapid advances in technology (mostly purloined), military build-up, and territorial expansions.  This blind spot makes him a critic of America’s response to Trump’s defense budgets.

Somehow the entire decades-long successful strategy of containing communist, and now fundamentalist Islamic tyrannies, is completely overlooked.  It’s as if Beckley is ignorant of what George Kennan laid out in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ to President Truman.  There Kennan made clear the global aims of the Left headed by the USSR and supported by numerous Marxist-Leninist regimes that supplanted many formerly western colonial governments after WW2.

Kennan’s counsel was assiduously followed during the Cold War, and specifically supported by Trump in his announced policy of fielding expeditionary units as needed vs maintaining expensive and politically sensitive permanent bases as the correct solution to an affordable and effective white hat global hegemony.  Beckley missed this one completely and recommends global deterrence by setting up US missile bases on foreign soils.  He is apparently ignorant of how allies like Germany responded when we suggested basing intermediate range nuclear missiles in their lands.  At least then we had our troops in those countries to defend such installations.  Beckley is silent on the force levels required to defend the foreign-based missiles in his plan.  And curiously, he argues against Trump’s stated policy of using Taiwan and the Baltics as well-armed buffers against China’s and Russia’s demonstrated expansionist aims.

And some things Beckley just gets wrong for reasons that are out of scope for this short piece.  An example is his assertion that Trump “gutted” DepState and “handed more responsibility to the Pentagon”.  Save for increasing defense spending, Trump did exactly the opposite with his announced policies of diminishing our military’s overseas roles and bases, and in Mike Pompeo, installing one of the most knowledgeable and widely respected SecStates in recent history.  I invite comparison to Biden’s low grade ore Antony Blinken now underperforming in that slot.  (In addition to him I invite your attention to our newly politicized Pentagon with worthies like SecDef Austin and JCS Chair Gen Milley.  What they are doing to our military deserves expanded inquiries by the DOJ and a bipartisan congressional committee.  Cutting to the chase, Biden has populated his cabinet with an historical legion of losers.)

So, along with many other Americans, I am puzzled as to what is rogue about a country acting in its own best interests to maintain world order - e.g. see Kissinger’s World Order (2014)  ALL other countries have demonstrably done the same for centuries, and do so to this day.  Beckley wants the US to continue its sacrifice-and-pay policy while suborning America’s interests to that of its allies and even countries that are openly hostile to us – has he forgotten Golden Rule #2? - ‘them that’s got the gold makes the rules’, or its gentler version, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’  America First has never meant that the rest of the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

Scattershots – 19aug21 (updated 23aug21)

George Rebane

“Since the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, China has what economists call a socialist market economy – one in which a dominant state-owned enterprises sector exists in parallel with market capitalism and private ownership.”  This is the version of capitalism of which many on our Left are so enamored, with claims of how such restructuring of the economy will promote - wait for it - equity.  The truth is actually the opposite.  The further the socialist slide toward communism has progressed, the more unequal becomes a country’s economy and wealth distribution as measured by the UN in its Gini Index (or Coefficient) ratings of member countries.  The index ranges between zero (complete equality) and one (complete inequality) – a review here.  Today China’s GI = 70.4 compared to America’s GI = 47.7 (more here)  That’s quite a difference in wealth distribution, and completely expected for authoritarian cum totalitarian regimes.  Team Biden and the new radically socialist wing of the Democratic Party are busy fundamentally transforming our economy to more resemble the People’s Republic of China.

[20aug21 update]  Islam – our eternal foe?  So suggests Robert Nicholson, president of the Philos Project, as he dances around the notion of religious plurality in the Middle East.  In his ‘The Unconquerable Islamic World’ (20aug21 WSJ) he writes – “The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the ‘Jews and Crusaders’ who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.” (emphasis mine)  Combine such ‘normative beliefs’ with Islam’s taqiya, and you get a much better idea of the Muslim mentality that the world faces.  [23aug21 update is the nearby picture.  H/T to correspondent.]

[21aug21 update]  ‘The biggest crime committed during the vaccine heist is the censorship of Ivermectin’  (H/T to reader)  In these pages over the past 18 months we have covered the imbecility and criminality of our governments’ Covid responses, blindly abetted by millions of our leftwing lackies.  Most recently RR focused on the criminality of withholding effective and established prophylactic and treatment drugs from the American public while hundreds of thousands needlessly died waiting for Warp Speed to bear fruit (here).  Now more physicians and scientists have begun to speak out about this enormous crime.  The above cited pieces summarizes –

• While the list of crimes committed by authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic is a long one, perhaps the biggest crime of all is the purposeful suppression of safe and effective treatments, including ivermectin. This appears to have been done to protect the COVID “vaccine” program
• The COVID shots were brought to market under emergency use authorization (EUA), which can only be obtained if there are no other safe and effective alternatives available
• Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies looked at ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection. A rapid review performed on behalf of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the U.S., January 3, 2021, found the drug “probably reduces deaths by an average 83% compared to no ivermectin treatment”
• According to a more recent review and meta-analysis, ivermectin, when used preventatively, reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86%
• Another recent scientific review concluded ivermectin produces large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance

Do you have your prescribed Ivermectin courses of treatment ready to go in your medicine cabinet?

Speaking of getting vaccinated, one should take every opportunity -

[more 23aug21 update]  And now, if you can lower your eyes a mite, for your edification we delve into a bit of timely poetry.

Afghanistan Reflections (updated 21aug21)

George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

Illustrations of Futility (updated 19aug21)

George Rebane

In the latest effort to find common ground in our fractured country, a new civics curriculum has been devised by a few hundred scholars under the aegis of Educating for American Democracy Initiative.  Bipartisan support comes from Sens Coons and Cornyn who have authored the Civics Secures Democracy Act to pump $1B of federal money into teaching a federal curriculum on history and civics at TBD K-12 levels. (more here)

The initiative is funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Dept of Education.  The intent is for “states to evolve from the traditional approach to curriculum—listing a series of events and concepts for students to learn—and embrace an “inquiry focus” that encourages students to explore open-ended questions from multiple perspectives. Topics would include how the system of American constitutional democracy came to be and what it means to participate in it, the place of the U.S. in the world, and the debates that characterize contemporary American civic life. Instead of focusing on facts about the Constitutional Convention or Shay’s Rebellion, for example, lessons would pose questions, such as ‘How did the institution of enslavement and practices of indigenous removal and even extermination affect national unity in the U.S.?’ Or, ‘Why does a society need shared rules and what do rules do?’”  (Note the ideological drift here.)

Such questions, of course, are less than meaningless to young minds empty of any historical context, context which will somehow be absorbed through the ether since there are no plans to extend the 24-hour day.  Given this approach, and the ideological tint of the curriculum’s progenitors, it is highly probable "that (many) have criticized the initiative as a pretext for teaching left-wing ideas” as is the reasonable concern of some conservative groups.

With some grounding in American history, the group could have suggested some more meaningful pro-American questions for students to discuss, such as, ‘How did the US become the world’s beacon of freedom and enterprise as the ‘shining city on the hill’ of liberty, when it had to work through its difficult decades of slavery, civil war, and years of subsequent racial segregation?’

The way this federal program is to be foisted on local school districts gives pause to even some of it proponents who are concerned “that continued political polarization will likely make it hard for schools to adopt the initiative’s recommendations.”  There are also some other material concerns with the ability of current curricula to educate students so that they will be “civics ready” by 2030.  The most important of these concerns is that the Right and Left see diametrically opposite futures for America's governance and therefore the kind of civics required to produce a citizenry that is supportive and compliant with each of these futures – no such civics exists nor is conceivable.

We refuse to even adopt a conversation that would allow us to try to cobble together a mutually acceptable American future.  Note that I offered a plan and tried to start a conversation with that aim in these pages (here).  That went over like a fart in church with our RR readership, no one is interested in any rapprochement.  North Carolina State University professor Paula McAvoy thinks that this program will run into strong headwinds.  She concludes with –

We’re in a moment in which there’s incredible disagreement about whether democracy is a good idea in the first place, what a good democracy looks like, what civility looks like and what truth looks like, and because we have all this churning in the public about what a good society is, I think this initiative bumps up against the very thing it’s trying to fix.

This is another example of seminal futility that our country’s leadership can’t wrap their heads around.

[19aug21 update]  The country’s Left has been successful in implementing Lenin’s dictum about educating young minds in order to transform a country’s governance and social order.  Its success in America, as in other places, comes from inattention and lack of concern for what is taught in our schools.  With all the other problems in the land, people just aren’t interested in what is poured into the heads of little Jacks and Jills by their unionized leftwing teachers, who by and far are marginally competent to teach them ‘regular subjects’.  This lack of interest arises from a wide spectrum of political beliefs, and isn’t isolated on the Right or the Left.

These pages contribute their own evidence of this particular form of ennui.  This commentary highlights a very recent and damning initiative contributing to the ongoing demise of our public education system, and it has drawn exactly zero comments in its first five days of posting.  I can understand the readers’ disinterest in my more technical topics – after all, our country does not ‘do numbers’ – but what is being taught to our kids should IMHO raise an eyebrow or two here and there.  Our last great century indeed.

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

In the days of yore we had a national institution called the Fourth Estate – professional journalism.  It was staffed by reporters taught by their editors to be ‘curious, hard-bitten skeptics’, always seeking alternative sides to what they were being told.  In a recent piece (here) by national columnist Gerard Baker, “The good reporter doubted whatever he was told, even what time it was. He’d weigh competing accounts and explanations and actively seek out alternative versions. Read the bios of great reporters from the past and they’ll be scattered with adjectives like ornery and insubordinate.”

More than ever, today the country is faced with major crises, manufactured and managed in the media – Covid pandemic, open borders, unbounded debt, preventable man-made climate change, catastrophic crime rates, race relations, CRT school curricula, accelerating dumbth of the electorate, rogue ‘deep state’ departments destroying businesses and lives, retreat of US hegemony, and on and on.  In any sense of the word, facts about these are no longer reported.  “‘Reported’ is a misnomer. They aren’t facts; (instead) they are sacred revealed truths, unchallengeable arguments invested with epistemic certainty and moral clarity.”

“Journalism is no longer about trying to tell us what happened; it’s about telling us what we must believe, on pain of moral peril. On every major topic, … every story blares out at us with censorious didacticism, the journalist’s smug disdain for the unbelievers pouring through (their) prose.”  (Full disclosure - as declared here years ago, I am NOT a journalist.)

With journalism in the bag, it didn’t take long for other national institutions to corrupt everything that they were supposed to inform us about.  Everything coming out of our law enforcement agencies, public health institutes, justice departments, the judiciary, legislatures, environmental bureaus, commerce, elected politicians, …, everything they declared, stated, published, etc had a short half-life as truth.  Many of the lies today are so blatant that they scarcely last through the news making interview.

Leaders in this downfall are what we here label as the lamestream media.  These are broadcast, internet, and hardcopy outlets that overwhelmingly toe the Left’s progressive narrative, and serve as the reliable trumpet of the Democratic National Committee and leadership elites.  They package and embellish only the part of the news that serves to cement leftwing talking points du jour.  This is easy to tell from both these pages and simply comparing news items (no matter how reported) from both rightwing and leftwing outlets.  As the liberals here daily confirm, the lamestream covers only a subset of items that are found on rightwing outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, and associated websites.

(The latest tactic to assure that the future generations of voters are compliant double dummies, anti-education Democrats, led by Oregon governor Kate Brown, who has now surreptitiously signed a law that makes reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates.  One can never have enough uncritical, true-believing constituents.  I expect this initiative to be replicated in other Democrat led states – more here.)

Rightwing outlets, led by Fox, claim to be “fair, balanced, and unafraid” of the censorious Left and their rampant cancel culture.  But unfortunately that also is not true.  There is plenty of evidence that rightwing outlets have a healthy fear of political incorrectness and retribution.  A timely example should suffice to spread the blame.  MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is a longtime staunch Trump supporter, and a leader in the rightwing movement claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.  Lindell is sponsoring a limited attendance 3-day Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls that started today (more here).  Almost every leftwing outlet of any stature has been dunning and denigrating the conference as another rightwing attempt to once more convince the country of the fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.  Lindell has been a big advertiser on Fox News and also wanted to advertise his symposium on the network.

FN said no, and not only no, but it didn’t even include mention of this otherwise covered conference in its news broadcasts.  For a change, you had to watch CNN and MSNBC to learn of Lindell’s latest effort to keep the election fraud pot boiling.  Not only did FN’s news programs shun Lindell’s gathering, but so also did that king of conservative commentary on Fox, Tucker Carlson, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”  Carlson has taken on the Left on some pretty controversial and damning issues.  He advertises himself as being Mr Balls-to-the-floor himself when it comes to reporting what others hide.  But Tucker has been too scared to even mention Lindell or simply report the massive vituperation thrown at him on the lamestream.  This reflects poorly on Carlson and doubly so on his colleague Bret Baier, FN’s lead news anchor on their flagship news program.  I am saddened by all this duck-and-cover fear in a network I used to hold in high esteem.  (We’ll see what Tucker says tonight.)

Gerard Baker concludes his piece with – “The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite, happily swaddled in all their shared nostrums. He’s most content when he’s wagging a finger at the selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism, express skepticism about vaccines, or deny their innate white sinfulness. … His virtue thus signaled, he luxuriates in the knowledge that he’s on the side of the chosen ones. It’s just a pity it’s no longer journalism.”

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

[Later]  Neither Bret Baier nor Tucker Carlson on Fox News made mention of Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium which continues for two more days.

Ruminations – 6aug21 (updated 11aug21)

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.

George Rebane

Socialist economists don’t understand why millions of workers’ real wages have not increased in the last, say, thirty years.  The answer is simple.  Labor is a cost, why increase that component of cost when it has contributed nothing to the increase in productivity.  That wages are tied to delivered productivity is an economic concept totally lost on socialists, and even more distant for their local double dummies who believe that somehow you should be paid more the longer you can hang on and keep fogging the mirror.

The Bumblebrain Bunch doesn’t think that Republican governors who cut off government checks to the unemployed had anything to do with the big increase in July’s employment number.  This is another illustration of inter-ear density by the Left that can’t connect consumer money flows to their economic behavior.  For them it has been an eternal mystery since the days of Marx.

Texas governor Greg Abbott is being dunned by the Democrats for the state’s spike in C19 cases.  None of these worthies are aware of the ongoing border crisis and the hundreds of thousands of illegals, thousands of whom are infected, being gratuitously released into the country.  The more important aspect of this is that their millions of terminally ignorant constituents have no idea that this has been going on and is only getting more critical with every passing day.  All part of their anti-American program to destroy the US as a sovereign nation-state.

[7aug21 update]  ‘College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened’.  “Black college graduates in their 30s have lost ground over three decades, the result of student debt and sluggish income growth.”  Nowhere in such articles is pointed out the kind of degrees obtained by blacks vs whites/Asians.  For example, the ratio of black-to-whites who graduate from college is pitiful, and of those black graduates, how many get degrees that provide employable skillsets.  Not all college degrees are created equal, and that goes double in today’s academe awash with ‘soft majors’.  To that we add intellectual demographic distributions, the impact of which is most devastating. And finally, today it’s not possible to examine this problem to discover its real contours and where public policies can do most good.  (more here)  The Left will stand for none of it; they depend on the status quo of victimhood.

[8aug21 update]  African-Americans in TV commercials.  Ever notice that the overwhelming majority of TV commercials, say 80%, feature blacks and often other people of color.  Blacks make up about one of eight Americans, yet they are extremely prominent, way beyond their ‘equity’, in our public face.  That I and other non-blacks don’t mind this nor demand equity in such displays should be accepted as more strong evidence that America is not a racist country.  I just wish that people would take more notice and joy from such evidence.

[9aug21 update]  More on C19 vaccines, vaccinations, and face masks.  To demonstrate how unsettled science is about this dreaded pandemic, here is a video of some expert testimony from a physician and virologist. (H/T to correspondent)

[10aug21 update]  The march of the double dummies gathers momentum.  Oregon governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that made reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates – ‘Oregon governor signs bill suspending math, reading proficiency requirements for HS graduates’.  Our Democrat proto-Marxists are firming the foundations of the United Socialist States of America by ramping up the level of ignorance and control of the next generation of their compliant constituencies.  And they know that people with even vestiges of critical thinking skills would object to this blatant demolition of our public education, so it all happened hush-hush.  Let’s see how fast the other states start picking up such advances in equity.

[11aug21 update] The CBO on Trump’s tax cuts as reported on Fox Business.  Just out from the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s corporate tax cuts paid for themselves in 18 months, and his personal income tax cuts almost paid for themselves by the eve of the pandemic (and would have easily provided more government revenues had the pandemic not happened).  This should silence our liberal readers who have long maintained that tax cuts, especially Trump’s, never pay for themselves, therefore more taxes are always necessary to pay for more vote buying (aka government “investments”).  And the takeaway is still, ‘corporations don’t pay taxes, people do’. (more here)

Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. - Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

George Rebane

According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence - is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

[4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with -

Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.

Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

"... the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

George Rebane

CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind - high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

The Criminality of Covid Care (updated 31jul21)

George Rebane

The prominent article on front page of the 26jul21 WSJ declares ‘Covid Treatment Options Remain Elusive, Despite Months of Effort and Rising Delta Cases’.  And the most elusive treatment options remain Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) which are nowhere even mentioned in an otherwise comprehensive piece on the various medicines having been tested and used in treating C19.

The effectiveness of HCQ, and especially IVM, as both a preventative and therapeutic for the virus has been well known for over a year.  Physicians all over the world, including the US, have used it and prescribe it regularly.  Numerous studies have been conducted on their efficacies at various stages of the disease.  Curiously, the overseas studies show remarkably positive results, and the US studies show them to be little more effective, if that, than a placebo (none have shown it to do harm to the patient).

A very comprehensive study – ‘Ivermectin for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 60 studies’ - was already released last fall.  (H/T to reader)  It concludes –

Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19. The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 60 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 193 billion (p = 0.0000000000052). As expected for an effective treatment, early treatment is more successful, with an estimated reduction of 74% in the effect measured using random effects meta-analysis (RR 0.26 [0.16-0.43]). 64% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.36 [0.15-0.85] and 0.04 [0.00-0.59]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of heterogeneous studies is remarkable, with 92% of the 60 studies reporting positive effects (26 statistically significant in isolation).

Even the simplest back-of-envelope calculations will show that the widespread use of IVM would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past year and a half.  Given the reported results, its suppression by our governmental public health institutions has been nothing short of rank criminality.  Neither the commonly available and generic HCQ nor IVM will benefit the big pharmas selling medicines on which their patents still hold sway.

Omitting any mention of, say, IVM and the cited study reeks to high heaven, and goes a long way to maintain the loss of credibility that our society’s major institutions have suffered.  I repeat the WSJ citation above – not a hint of even the existence of HCQ or IVM.  Even repeating the CDC’s official stance on these medicines would have served to allay some suspicions, but total silence screams collusion and conspiracy at the highest levels.

Your physician will more than likely already have his/her own supply and be happy to prescribe IVM if you request it.  Given the readily available research, the Rebanes have stocked their medicine cabinet appropriately.

[29jul21 update]  So ‘Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?’  Ivermectin is a promising Covid treatment and prophylaxis, but why is the FDA still denigrating it?  People continue to suffer and die at numbers that could be greatly reduced were this safe, inexpensive, and effective drug promoted and made available to all of us who should have it in our medicine cabinets.  More specifically, “Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.  Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.”

CDC’s newest mask mandate continues to be based on no science, just imperiously incompetent control.  Governors and mayors are beginning to give the agency pushback, asking for the substantiating science or at least some supporting data.  The best that CDC could do to date is to mumble something about an unpublished report (the one that failed peer review?).  When asked, they could not advise when the report would be made public.  The bottom line of all this is that we are 18 months into this pandemic, and the government is becoming more dysfunctional by the day in the response policies it struggles to put out.  This is the outfit that the neo-Marxists are trying to enlarge and control more of our everyday lives??!

But the biggest ongoing tragedy is the response of the American sheeple.  The overwhelming majority of our citizens respond with a muffled compliance, very similar to that of cattle being prodded down the chute on their final walk to slaughter.  Consider Covid as a training aid used by government elites to prepare us to accept more serious measures to come from on high.

[31jul21 update]  The evidence for Ivermectin continues to pour in.  Given the number of people that Covid has killed, IVM is truly a demonstrated wonder drug.  Its timely application would have save hundreds of thousands of lives, and it still can be the medicine that will allow us to live with C19 as its variants make it endemic for the indefinite future.  ‘How to Kill a Cure: The War on Ivermectin’ is a must read to appreciate the level of criminality that IVM's suppression has entailed, and continues today as a perfidious blight in our society.  (H/T to reader)

‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

[Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

George Rebane

Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

[13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

[14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

[18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

Equity Denies Reality (Addended)

George Rebane

[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers.  I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers.  I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor.  The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]

Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).  In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America.  As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes.  However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.

What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril.  The creed is from our Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”  And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.

The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races.  Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population.  Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%).  Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias.  To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.

The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population.  As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation.  The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure.  At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training.  The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.

Scattershots – 4jul21 (updated 9jul21)

George Rebane

There are no more paladins living among us.  When some public atrocity is being committed, like someone or two having the crap kicked out of them on a sidewalk, or a Molotov cocktail thrown through a store window, or a brutal execution of someone sitting in a car, then all the gathered onlookers are concerned about is that they get a good video of the goings on, no matter how long the goings on are ongoing.  Concern for the immediate wellbeing of our fellow man, no matter how unjustly he is being treated, is no longer of any concern to anyone.  Where are the CCWs when we need them?  After all, they are issued specifically for use in case of incipient murder or mayhem.  But we can rejoice, the videos ultimately appear on various social media channels.  (Example @208pm on the last Sandbox)

[5jul21 update]  The XL Pipeline people are suing our federal government for $15B damages.  It is a proper suit since the Biden administration, in launching one of its earliest disasters for the country, abrogated its contract with the builder after it had most of the pipeline completed.  Bumblebrain’s compliance to his rabid anti-American Left terminated the country's energy independence, put the world’s oil prices back in the hands of OPEC et al, and resulted in the spiking of gasoline prices across the land as a major contributor to the resurgence of inflation.  The latter being a hit to the wallets of all Americans, hurting most the poor and the middle class.  The Dems only hope for 2022 is that most of our electorate will remain sufficiently numb between the ears so that they cannot ferret out the source of their pain.

The dismantling of Hong Kong by the CCP remains an unreported mystery to the global news machinery.  No one has yet to report that it is in Beijing’s interest to destroy HK as a leading global financial center in the shadow of which Shanghai, mainland’s own financial center, has been forced to compete.  HK has been the port of call for international monies seeking investments in the mainland, Taiwan, and all of south Asia.  This felicitous situation has buttressed Taiwan and highlighted the business efficiencies practiced in an economically free environment with that practiced under strict CCP control.  To Beijing, and its compliant allies in Singapore, HK has been an irritating sore that needed to be excised.  Today things are getting so bad that major US tech companies are threatening to leave the city to save their staffs from trumped-up criminal charges (more here).  But no one is connecting the dots on HK’s ultimate fate as becoming just another seaport to serve China’s southern Guangdong province and its industrial capital Guangzhou.

Our Sacramento stupidos have suddenly realized that the state’s ongoing rape of its power generating infrastructure will leave us short of electricity as we proceed into a hot summer.  The Epoch Times reports (here) the CA Energy Commission and its PUC have asked the CA Independent System Operator to contract for more energy in the coming months.  There is no guarantee that such energy supplies will be available from other states similarly afflicted.  In their letter they lied that the need arises in spite of “California using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,”  In reality, they abandoned the available and reliable tools of safe nuclear and clean natural gas power plants for a poorly conceived, inadequate, and premature green energy strategy that will guarantee power shortfalls in California for years to come.  Our state’s political monopoly has literally shit in the old well before the new one was dug (from an old Estonian proverb).  In sum, the politically incorrect but reliable Plan A has been abandoned, and there is no Plan B.  (H/T to reader)

[8jul21 update] Worthless Degrees.  Here’s a common story from the 8jul21 WSJ.  “Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.  Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.  The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.”  For the arithmetically curious $30K/yr = $15/hr – the intended national minimum wage.  In Nevada County today an apprentice electrician with no experience and without even a high school diploma can get a job for $15-18/hr.

Classroom video monitoring.  The teachers’ unions are dead set against any video recordings of classroom instruction and goings on.  They claim it violates the students’ rights to privacy.  There is no such right to privacy for students in a public school classroom.  For generations parents and other interested parties have always been welcome observers in America’s classrooms.  With today’s technology it would be an easy matter to put streaming/stored classroom videos online so that parents could log in to see what little Johnny/Sally was being taught and assigned as homework.  My wife Jo Ann was a regular fixture in our kids’ grade school classrooms.  But not today, and the reason is clear.  The crap that marginally competent teachers put out under today’s closely guarded cloud of pedagogy would at a minimum disappoint and, most likely, enrage parents.  And this is doubly so as Critical Race Theory has started tainting all manner of K-12 subjects in our unionized public schools.

[9jul21 update]  ‘CDC Recommends Schools Open Fully Immediately, Says Vaccinated Teachers And Students Don’t Need Masks’  This has been true for over six months.  It is the work of the evil party and Team Biden that has prevented our children from resuming their education, and school attendance which never needed to be interrupted last year.  All this has accomplished is to make more reliable Democrat voters, which, of course, was the purpose of the school shutdowns in the first place.

The Ubiquity of Bias

George Rebane

I am a biased ideologue (q.v.).  My biases, along with their reasoned bases, have been spelled out in detail on these pages for well over a decade.  No other blog I’m aware of has so meticulously presented its host’s credo and glossary of vocabulary relevant to the topics covered.

Having again made that statement, I go on to the more universal contention that there are no unbiased presentations of facts or fiction by Man, especially when it comes to matters of human affairs.  We all have a specific world view, a specific way we receive and incorporate new evidence into that world view, a unique set of desiderata for almost all aspects of human striving, and, of course, our own way of communicating and convincing others of the correctness of our particular perspectives.

People who claim to be innocent or cleansed of bias, and therefore present views which they claim are in some sense ‘ex cathedra’, are charlatans, deluded, or both.  This assessment applies especially to those self-proclaimed middle-roaders who profess to clothe their preferences in various forms of authoritative infallibility.  Even in science and every other STEM field we find biased presentations and ongoing debates as to where resides truth, goodness, and light.  The most visible charlatans here are those who seek to buttress their biases with claims of non-existent ‘settled science’.

From this, I and others like me conclude that bias in human affairs is ubiquitous – it was ever thus.

Therefore, the best that disputants in a debate can do is present their case in the context of their respective utilities (definitions of ‘good’), and the reasoned bases which support their propositions.  Wise debaters know beforehand that even with the best intentions and transparent interchanges, all disputes cannot be successfully resolved.  In the art of negotiation, participants are advised to approach all such contentious proceedings with a firm handle on their own BATNAs (best alternative to negotiated agreement).

In our country’s gathering socio-political storm, ongoing debates, accusations, and indictments between the polarized sides are seen at all levels, from the national to the thousands of towns and villages across the land.  As detailed on these pages, the manner in which these contentions are conducted is highly asymmetrical – the Right always willing to spell out the America they want, with the Left keeping secret the details of their vision of a fundamentally transformed country.

From the Left’s published proposals and ensconced public policies, the Right cannot help but conclude that their desire is for a socialist (anti-capitalist) state under a much enlarged and intrusive government that controls almost every aspect of Americans’ lives, livelihoods, thoughts, and speech.  And the Left’s leadership continues to broadcast its vision of those on the Right as being racist, white supremacists who desire to return the country to Jim Crow days with an economy dominated by large oligopolies that pollute the environment and beggar their workers.  They present no evidence beyond repeated allegations to support their case.

[Addendum]  In discussions and debates with my leftwing counterparts in private communications and on this public forum, I often have my supportive citations of verifiable facts rejected on the basis of their having been presented by sources considered hopelessly biased, unreliable, and therefore rejected on their face.  Their opposition is seldom a substantive refutation of the message, it’s always based on the received credentials of the messenger.  The obvious reason for this gambit is that they have no substantive refutation of what has been cited, and therefore must needs be reduced to denigrating the source with claims that all of its output are widely known and acknowledged falsehoods – neither being the case.

A second gambit of the leftists is to require the rejected citation to be additionally buttressed by sources they consider unbiased and reliable.  It never occurs to them to simply go to their own sources and delineate the specific error(s) that were contained in the originally presented citation.  That may also be a too generous conclusion.  The reason they exercise either of these gambits is that they know the original citation to have presented the truth, and all that now remains for them is to deny, delay, and/or deflect the subsequent course of the exchange.  For the Left, countering citations with an equivalent depth of evidence seems to be terra incognita.