Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 20sep19

George Rebane

The Daily Signal of the Heritage Foundation discovers ‘The Real Reason for Trump Derangement Syndrome’.  RR readers have been discussing and debating the real reasons for the Left’s virulent TDS ever since the 2016 election.  Yes indeed, with foot firmly planted in mouth, our president is still our champion in the “multifront pushback—politically, socially, economically, and culturally—against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world.”

Piers Morgan, liberal commentator and journalist, is concerned about where today's liberals and progressives are going with their political correctness cum incipient Soviet communist society.  This video interview (here) on Real Clear Politics is a bit lengthy (hence complete), but the first 10 minutes makes clear that most of what we have been saying in these commentaries for some time is not only shared by conservatives and libertarians, but also by many of those leaning liberal who are alarmed by the utter insanity that now grips the Left.  Morgan summarizes it very well.

Climate hysteria is scheduled on 27 September 2019 to reach globally coordinated proportions with a “first ever international General Strike for Climate” planned by Earth Strike and its affiliated organizational members. (more here)  Their intention is to literally stop the world doing its business.  They must take to the streets to disrupt for the simple reason that their attempts at presenting their arguments for preventable manmade global warming simply don’t hold water in the public forum.  So now it is time to disrupt society in order to push their narrative before the last of their consensus science withers and dies.  Nothing they have prognosticated and presented has panned out, and their cause looks more ridiculous with each passing month.  Hence, the time has come to rout reason.

The happier place, America or Europe?

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 September 2019.]

Our national Left has loudly included in their narrative to fundamentally transform America, that the Europeans are a much happier lot than we poor polarized and poverty-stricken wretches on this side of the Pond.  The citizens of the EU are described as a people happy with their subsidies and socialism, cared for from cradle to grave with extended vacations, shorter work weeks, job security, and lavish no-cost healthcare.  What’s not to like?

Actually, the Europeans have a lot of worries, and when you talk to them on a personal level, they are ready and willing to go through the long list.  We just returned from two weeks in Europe where we had a reunion with our German families, and then went on to visit and talk with people in Switzerland, France, more Germany, and Holland.  Here’s part of the laundry list that keeps Europeans up at night.

All EU countries are struggling with low to no economic growth, due mainly to over regulation and high taxes.  The future of indigenous Europe is hampered by devastating demographics which are characterized by a growing cohort of the ever more feeble and ailing elderly.  No country is close to delivering the 2.1 births per fertile woman required for mere stability of a population.  Germany is today at 1.2 which is equivalent to Russia’s alarming shrink rate.  The richer countries’ declining workforces are made up of an ever greater fraction of mid-easterners, Africans, and southeastern Europeans from poor countries such as Rumania and Bulgaria, who do jobs that northern Europeans refuse to do.

The specific concerns of such an influx of foreign migrants are themselves legion, starting with the loss of national identity, declining common culture and values, and rising crime rates.  The growing insular communities of Muslims across the northern EU present unique problems which individual governments have yet to figure out how to even recognize and discuss in politically correct ways, let alone making policies to address them effectively.

Being part of a formally united polyglot of nations, administered from Brussels and by the European Central Bank, has emerged as a whole new set of worries for Europeans.  Those countries with effective wealth producing societies are not happy to see their wealth redistributed to southern neighbors that have a history of dysfunctional economic policies and behaviors exercised within markedly different cultures.  And the southerners resent the remedial disciplines that the northerners want to impose.  This replicates on a nation-to-nation scale what we witness here between our economic classes dependent on government provided entitlements.

While environmentally conscious, Europeans have not been able to realize their climate change nostrums, and know that they will have to continue, if not increase, their use of fossil fuels and nuclear generators to contain the growth of their already sky-high energy prices.  The uncertainty of mid-east oil supplies and the economic blackmail threatened by Russia supplying natural gas are today a growing concern with no solution in sight.

Finally, the existential fact is that the EU cannot and/or is not willing to defend itself from neighbors seeking to restore their empires or insidiously invade through emigration.  Since WW2 the continent has relied on America’s military being the shield under which free Europe was able to recover, grow, and even prosper.  Having lived for decades in the succoring shade of America, which President Trump has promised to revamp in his effort to make Europe more self-sufficient and sustainable, the EU is now completely dependent on our alliance.  Europeans today rightly worry that America is coming to the end of its willingness to spend its political capital and treasure to unconditionally defend NATO countries that even refuse to live up to their pledges to spend a minimum of 2% GDP on defense.

Contrary to leftwing propaganda that promotes our adoption of Europe’s socialism, America’s unease is politicized and manufactured at home.  And compared to Europe, this narrative has little existential basis to claim that it’s caused by factors not under our control.  In the final analysis, Americans are much more sanguine and satisfied about our ability to continue securing our quality of life than are the shrinking populations of indigenous Europeans.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Just a couple of quick notes.  An example of the kind of anti-American propaganda about unhappy Americans is provided by our favorite (proto?) communist Umair Haque, who writes a remarkably ignorant and fallacious ‘Why Are Europeans (So Much) Happier Than Americans?’

It also turns out that Europe’s national healthcare systems have tiered death committees.  There’s the big national one that sets overall policy and rules as to who gets treated for what, and who gets left to die.  Then at regional/local levels there are the next level death committees who may impose additional restrictions on treatments that depend on the availability of resources (all national healthcare programs are underfunded and use various stratagems to minimize/eliminate services that entail minimal political cost). This does lead to some gaming as the ill attempt to move into other jurisdictions in order to have a chance at staying alive.  All this is done on the nascent (desperate?) belief that local decision making better allocates locally scarce resources.  What a concept?

Such desperate moves to return to freer markets is also now quietly being reinstituted by Maduro in Caracas to alleviate shortages and provide heretofore unavailable goods in order to assuage a very victimized population that has now lived under a socialist and ruinous command economy for years.

Dropout Derby - 13sep19 update

George Rebane

Last one out to date is Gillibrand.  Mr fish leaps into the lead.

“Never forget” what?

George Rebane

Today marks the 18^th anniversary of 9/11, the day radical Islam claimed the largest number of innocent American lives through terror as part of its global jihad against western civilization.  Since then the anti-American lamestream media has tried its damnest to propagandize an Islam-free narrative to memorialize that day of infamy.  The day is now marked by commemorative blather that describes “some people” flying “airplanes (that) took aim and brought down the World Trade Center” as if the event was a hurricane or earthquake that caused the deaths and destruction.

Ads are run that ask us to “never forget”, but stop short of saying what we are to never forget.  Had 9/11 been a natural disaster, then almost everyone not directly involved would already have forgotten what happened.  Every memorializing message that omits the real intent and cause of those killers who hijacked the airliners is in reality asking us to specifically forget the real intent and cause of that day’s terror-borne tragedy, and the resulting celebrations all across Islam.

Nevada County – economic disaster area

George Rebane

The more that wealth gets redistributed, the less wealth there is to redistribute.

This morning’s (27aug19) lead article in The Union by reporter Cory Fisher (here) informs the reader an awful lot about our community that most of us did not know.  It turns out our county is an economic disaster area with more working people than ever going hungry and having problems making ends meet.

According to local reports, “1 out of 7 Nevada County residents” (14.3%) were “food insecure” (term of art for hungry?).  Across all US counties 13.3% were food insecure, only 11% were in such dire straits in LA County, the country’s individual rate is somewhere around 12.5% (1 of 8), and all this in a land where over one in three of us are mysteriously fat. (more here)

Then we learn that the hunger rate in our county is not only high but screaming upward.  At the Food Bank the increase has been from 800 in May, 1,000 in July, and 1,200 in August – in other words our calorie calamity is reported to be growing at about 150% annually.  We are told this is causing our non-profit food distributors financial hardship for two reasons – increase in the county’s hungry population and a reduction in charitable contributions because of Trump’s new tax law.

Somehow the truth about the tax law and its restrictions on charitable giving is completely opposite.  The standard deduction has more than doubled to $24K for joint filers and it does not limit giving at all.  All it has done is caused more people to take the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions such as their former charitable gifts.  This little feature has induced many people to then just skip the giving, not because they have less money, but because there is no need to give to get the tax benefit. (more here) But that’s not what the article impugns.  Somebody forgot to include that character still counts, even under the new tax law.

And the overall problem of falling income making it hard for our county’s residents to make ends meet – it then appears that our workers did not share in the country’s benefit from the tax cuts that increased lower and middle class household incomes by an average of $2,000.  (More here) When you factor in the doubled tax credits for kids, the average family has even more dollars to spend.  And here is a summary of the real impact of the Trump tax cut.

So, while the rest of the country is enjoying historically low unemployment, rising wages, and paying lower taxes, in Nevada County our poverty rate is estimated to have started increasing again after Trump was elected.  He even caused a bump in climate change that started more wild fires, which then raised county residents’ insurance rates that forced some of them to move.  The takeaway is clear, it’s only California’s enlightened public policies in housing, homelessness, education, fighting capitalists’ greed and global warming that have somehow kept body and soul together.

In the real world "Americans in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners buy more consumer goods and services than the national averages for people living in most of the wealthiest nations of the world, including those in Europe." (more here)  How can this be?  Well, for all of you who have consumed the media-delivered poverty rate for Americans, Cato’s ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’ may shed some new light on reality.  All said and done, the piece did make me wonder why Nevada County is under the reported curse.

Dropout Derby - 23aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Moulton among the dear departed.

Dropout Derby - 21aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Inslee bites the dust.

Scattershots – 20aug19 (updated 23aug19)

“nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort”, William Ewart Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

George Rebane

I’m old enough to remember when TVs were the big new whizbang thing.  We common folks were then told of all the wonders that a live screen with sound would be bringing into our living rooms.  And then came computers, and the news was full of how businesses were doing this and that with those new-fangled number crunchers.  After that it was the internet, and we learned to expect all of its wonders, and now we read the breathless reports of AI starting to do all things good and also its (biased, gasp!) dark side.  All of those technologies quickly faded into commonplace roles in our lives.  The next big thing will be personal AGI (artificial general intelligence) companions whom we will demand and trust more than fellow humans.  And this will scare the crap out of autocratic governments – keep your eye on Sacramento and DC.

Meritocracy is a bad thing in modern society, so points out a recent article in The (leftwing) Atlantic. (H/T to Sandbox commenter)  It causes all kinds of bad psychological problems and promotes inequality – kids from richer homes are smarter than those from poorer homes (Stop the presses!).  Therefore, they wind up working ridiculously hard in school and the workplace, and get stressed out as they dominate the 1% class.  The solution, force universities to admit a certain percentage of the dumber students.  Or maybe in the future the smarter ones must have a noise making chip implanted into their skulls to disrupt longer thinking processes, or maybe the too smart ones will just be culled by the state like shown on a Twilight Zone episode long ago (here).

A Pence/Harris VP debate next year is anticipated with some glee by our liberals.  They can just see Harris taking down VP Pence in a one-on-one encounter.  I would counsel a little trimming of such hopes because Mike Pence is not a Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is definitely not the brightest bulb on an otherwise dimly lit Democrat tree.  Harris commands little to no basis for arguing substantive issues; all she can do is attempt to sway the lightly read with emotional anecdotes.  These the VP can easily dispatch by pointing out the aggregate impacts that such radical leftwing policies have delivered elsewhere, and now portend for the country.

Preventable man-made global warming (PMGW) ascendant. Notice the increased hysterics in the media about all the disastrous effects caused by PMGW.  Time after time the warming data is shown to be politically motivated hokum, but that makes no never mind to the fear mongers (the lamestream does not air that side).  The new level of hysteria is being ramped up by the Dems for 2020 as a back-up argument for their policies that promise to deliver the country's new socialist sunrise.  The message – capitalism causes PMGW that will kill the planet, socialism is the only hope to save mankind.  A good fraction of our electorate has been carefully cultured to uncritically embrace such arguments.

[21aug19 update]  “… the clicking of jack boots and rifle bolts.” As witnessed on RR over the years, this is the form of governance legions of leftists have convinced themselves that conservative America seeks.  They ignore that it is and has been only the goose-stepping collectivists that have constructed leviathans in which citizens are kept in line by such displays and applications of state power.  But true to Lenin and Alinsky, they were taught early to counter political opponents by loudly accusing them of one’s own worst practices.  And as history has shown, you can fool enough of the people all the time to bring down somnambulant republics.

[22aug19 update] ‘Americans Are Richer Than We Think’ write economists Phil Gramm and John Early.  The Democrats and their lamestream lapdogs have done all they can to convince America that we live in a bad economy that doesn’t benefit anyone but the rich, and (go figger) they turn around and tell us that our good economy is about to take a dive.  And all will be well again once we fundamentally transform the country and put it on a firm socialist track. Such reasoning fits well with the liberal mindset.  Gramm and Early present loads of data that debunk the leftwing's advertised misery of the middle class.

Russ Steele has an excellent idea on how to take a census of rural folks who don’t have access to broadband.  Everyone has been trying to get their hands around that problem in order to come up with good public policies that enable government and the private sector to work together in correcting this deficit.  Russ suggests that we use the upcoming census to gather this data.  The details are in his 22aug19 ‘Overwhelmed and Under-counted’ letter to The Union.

US acquiring Greenland. Trump’s recent proposal to Denmark on the reprise of this idea (first proposed under President Truman) has been peremptorily identified as looney by the Left (and a few on the Right), and offered in the lamestream as further evidence that The Donald’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.  Now I don’t particularly agree with the way that our president again introduced this proposal; it should have been done quietly at lower levels of diplomatic contact.  But on the overall concept, I think that there exist several approaches in which that piece of strategically located and resource rich real estate can benefit both us and the Danes if the US got or shared sovereignty over Greenland.  The Left in their mirth appear to have put as much thought into the matter as do hyenas before beginning their bouts of ‘laughter’.  (Here is a more sober discussion of this in Politico, and here is Sen Tom Cotton's overture last year.)

[23aug19 update]  Union publisher Don Rogers writes an enticing, yet in the end disappointing, meditation on the meaning of life in today’s paper.  In his ‘The Meaning of Life?’ he takes us on a short journey of futility while keeping hope alive, and then (trigger warning) summarily drops us off with “Life is what life does”? -86-  OK, but then why bother to lead us “befuddled pilgrims” by the nose to ‘It is what it is.’?  Actually, I’m just exposing my naivete here.  One should always temper one’s expectations when reading our beloved Union. 😉

Dropout Derby - 15aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Hickenlooper has hit the silk.  The results gentlemen.

The Lone Wolf Killers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 August 2019.]

Each spate of mass shootings reveals yet another aspect of current American politics and how easy it is to manipulate the country’s masses.  As a result of the El Paso and Dayton massacres we are drenched in daily calls to ‘do something’, anything to stop rightwing ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’ from continuing their reign of terror wherever innocent people gather.  The ‘do something’ cries have reinvigorated our Second Amendment opponents to take more “common sense” steps on the road to total confiscation of guns.  Currently these steps involve more background checks, red-flag laws, and, of course, the ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’.  (more here)

Non-political experts continue to tell us that neither the current background check laws on the books, nor the newly House-passed Background Checks Act would have stopped any of these killings by first-time lone wolves with clean police records.  Nor would red-flag laws, already on the books in many states, provide any guarantee of prevention, since people naturally hesitate to apply them because of their high false alarm rates and their impact on personal relationships.  This latter point was highlighted by psychiatrist Richard Friedman in a recent NYT op-ed where he stated that “experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. The evidence suggests that while red-flag laws do stop suicides, it isn’t clear they prevent mass shootings.”

And our progressives, including the Democratic candidates, declare that the real problem for such indigenous terror is the presence of a persistent and burgeoning number of ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ Americans.  According to these leftwingers, the problem now is so bad that all of President Trump’s supporters can be classed as ‘white supremacists’.  It is this massive body of misfits that spawns the killers of innocents among us.  For such progressives, America is still a racist country overrun by white supremacists who continue to deny people of color their legal and constitutional rights.  These assertions are ludicrous on their face as argued by among others, historians such as Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute and David Harsanyi of the Federalist.  America is the overwhelming destination of emigrants from all over the world, and over 90% these emigrants are people of color, most of whom clamor for entry from Hispanic America and Africa.  So, what do all these would be immigrants know about white supremacy in the United States that Democrats don’t know?

Democrats’ Big Lie #3671 – America’s economy

George Rebane

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, our Left has marshalled their legion of liars to spread the word to the lightly read that Trump’s revamping of our economy to historical levels has not happened, and that only the top 1% derived any benefit from the tax cuts and regulation rollbacks.  This kind of concerted lying campaign does immeasurable harm to the lower half of the IQ curve, causing these folks to vote against their own self interests.  But that makes no never mind to our progressive Democrats; do whatever keeps and increases your power, and bamboozling the snuffies has always been part of the drill.

It’s instructive to take a look at the magnitude of this particular stream of lies from the Left that started back in Obama’s time when we were assured that a max of 2% annual growth was going to be “the new normal”.  And, of course, Team Obama demonstrated that dictum over his tenure which averaged growth under 2%.  These people pulled every trick in the book to stifle the economy and keep workers’ wage growth essentially flat, all the while lying that they were helping the little guy and middle class.  The little guys took it in the shorts also as the Dems boosted the minimum wage wherever possible so as to make the lower rungs of the economic ladder ever more inaccessible to our unskilled and youngest workers starting their careers.

Conservatives and capitalists have known for generations that a rising tide lifts all boats, in direct contradiction to the Left’s teaching that the only friend of the poor and unskilled is big and bigger government.  Here’s a graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate the difference between Obama and Trump (filched from the 5jul19 WSJ).

By 2012 it was clear to most Americans that Obama was a socialist who had little interest in implementing demonstrated economic principles to recover the economy from its 2009 Great Recession lows.  I waxed eloquently on this in my ‘What Recovery?’ essay.  In that piece I presented a clear and concise systems flow diagram for how the GDP is calculated from its major components.  It even pointed out how and where the government just pisses away generated wealth.

Most of us don’t have a clue when talking about economic recovery and growth.  Recovery is in the eyes of the beholder, and economic growth is not experienced as a one size fits all – different sectors benefit differentially from any given level of quoted aggregate growth, as the following graphic illustrates.

America’s economy has grown in a remarkably constant range of 3.3-3.4% annually from 1880 to 2008 on the eve of the Great Recession.  To explain the different recovery flavors, I indicated such an exponential growth as the green line in the above graph taken from ‘The Recovery Rigamarole’.  The arbitrary GDP amounts shown vary as a function of time, say, in years.  At year 40 a recession/depression occurs that takes the GDP from around 225 down to 135 over a ten year period.  At year 50 the economy begins to recover.  But from there several 'recovery' paths are possible, three of which (R1, R2, R3) are shown.  At this point it’s important to keep in mind that if the economy’s dip (red line) did not occur, then it would have continued growing at its long term (green line) rate – e.g. at year 50 it would have been about 265.

R1 is clearly a true recovery that regains the long-term growth curve.  R2 is a more tendentious recovery that does achieve the pre-recession growth rate, but perennially lags the sans recession GDP growth trend.  And finally, R3 is at best a propagandized faux recovery, achieving neither the pre-recession growth rate nor its long term trend.

The continuing dissemination of this Big Lie about Trump's economy by the lamestream is one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the ongoing progressive propaganda onslaught through the auspices of fake news.

 

The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

George Rebane

Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

George Rebane

The true costs of ‘renewable energy’ are both unaffordable and hidden. Those of us who can do arithmetic have known the unreported high costs of renewable wind and solar power for years, and how the climate calamity acolytes and the lamestream have suppressed reporting the costs of making the world work with renewable energy.  Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute writes a short, fact-filled piece on the matter in the 6aug19 WSJ (here).  He cites the work of the International Renewable Energy Institute based on the demand forecasts of the International Energy Agency.  The bottom line is that if you take into account the ‘cradle to grave’ costs and environmental impacts of spreading solar and wind power production worldwide, then humanity will have an existential disaster on its hands.  The amount of mining, transport, construction, and waste elimination required swamps all conceivable benefits from such ‘clean power’ which will turn out to be the dirtiest and most expensive that we can attempt to buy.  As an example, “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.  And these materials will have to be mined, manufactured, and assembled in not so very nice places according to the Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future.  None of this is known to our garden-variety progressives (some in these pages) who continue to mindlessly tout subsidized ‘clean energy’ and claim its unrealizable economic benefits.

‘1984’ has arrived on campuses.  “Bias response teams” are now an established institution on most college campuses, and the disease is spreading rapidly.  Christian Schneider reports (here) on “a chilling look inside colleges’ systems for reporting and policing offensive speech.”  The growing archive of such petty incidences of one student snitching on another, often unsuspecting, student is testimony to another of the progressive-promoted illiberal insanities in our society.  Reading the record of cited incidences is simply mind-boggling to most of us.  The accused offenders are then required to present themselves to the schools’ administrative “diversity” panels for examination of their violations.  As with sexual abuse allegations, there is no appeals process, and such allegations go on the students’ records which may later be used to impact careers and other life-opportunities in these looney tunes times.  For all this, go thank your local leftists who have enthusiastically made all this possible, and continue to do so with every ballot they mark.

[update]  Tonight on FN we saw an ugly leftwing mob assembled across the street from Majority Leader McConnell’s house with signs and flood lights screaming unspeakable epithets at the senator and people to “Stab him through the heart!” and “Cut his fucking throat!”.  How many lamestream outlets showed this?  How many rightwingers have gathered to put on a scene like that in front of Democrat politician’s house?  Biden and Booker both stated that they want to “beat up” President Trump; how many Republican politicians have ever come even close to such violent language against a Democrat President.  And none of these are isolated incidents carried out by some backwater communists, these are carried out regularly by mainstream leftists all across the country.  In progressive circles and in their lapdog lamestream media President Trump is regularly referred to as a “white supremacist”.  Where is the evidence for that?  I join with Victor Davis Hanson and most other conservative commentators in declaring that I have never met a rightwing white supremacist, nor do I know of anyone who has ever met such a person.  Yet the lunatic Left continues to accuse all of us daily of being white supremacists.  (check RR comment streams)  It is these insanely cynical asymmetries that confirm our having passed the tipping point and promoting the Great Divide.

[8aug19 update]  To further confirm the tsunami of censoring conservatives that is sweeping the country’s media, Twitter concluded that the video I reference above was too damaging to the progressive narrative about who actually are purveyors of hate and violence.  CNBC reports that “Twitter locked Mitch McConnell's campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, for posting a video of a profanity-laden protest outside of McConnell's home in Louisville, Kentucky.”  (more here)  You literally cannot make this stuff up – politically motivated censorship is now a daily happening, most of it not visible.

[10aug19 update]  ‘Shaming’, even FN doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, and plays patsy to the Dem candidates’ attempt at that in their desperate attempts to intimidate President Trump.  These political sleazebags, now joined by Uncle Joe, are all claiming a direct causal relationship between Trump’s public speech and the El Paso and Dayton killings.  This is supposed to shame the president.  People who still care about the language know that a person accepts shame only when 1) he acknowledges the veracity of the allegations against him, AND 2) the society around him also embraces the same allegations.  Neither of those conditions exist for Trump re the massacres, nor the 100M+ Americans who are paying attention.  The desperate scumbags who seek to make such ludicrous claims stick don’t have a clue about this, and are mainly relying on the segment of their constituents who are innocent of current events and most other things that quality education delivers.

[11aug19 update]  Leftwing dumb is definitely a terminal mindset. Any kind of discussion with them is nigh impossible because they fail the basics of an IQ test that asks questions about whether this is like that, and if not, what is the difference.  Years of examples of such deficit thinking are archived in RR comment streams, and today we see it in the comments under Jo Ann’s recent Union piece (here) about the treatment LaMalfa received at the hands of the leftists when he visited here.  The Union leftwing commenters equate the crowd’s cries of ‘Lock her up!’ at Trump rallies with their own thuggish behavior of shouting down a congressman of the opposite party.  They haven’t a clue that one set of voices is in support of the speaker, and the other set of voices is meant to disrupt a speaker trying to respond to his audience.  To those pinheads these two situations are identical, and they consider their loutish behavior as Democrats to be a proper response to the Republican audience’s behavior at a Republican rally.  Is there someone with even garden variety smarts on the other side who can see a profound difference here?  Exit question: how often do you see Republicans do that when a Democrat comes to speak?  (I don't usually comment on Jo Ann's columns, but this time the number of butt-stupid responses was overwhelming.  H/T to GregG and ToddJ for their valiant attempts to explain the matter in that comment stream.)

The Lamestream’s Russia Collusion Illuminated

George Rebane

Holman Jenkins in his ‘What Ails the US Press?’ expands the strong point, much massaged in these pages, that “the media’s lack of interest in the Steele dossier amounts to collusion in a coverup.”  In this 3aug19 WSJ piece he lays it out so well that I decided to let RR readers crawl under the paywall and read the whole thing themselves

Ruminations – 3aug19

George Rebane

Our favorite double-dummy communist, Umair Haque writing in Medium, continues his dive into the abyss of ideological idiocy with his latest essay attempting to explain ‘fascism’ to American readers.  In a piece titled ‘America Is Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism’ he does a great job of confusing the matter even further on his journey into regions of history and semantics in which he is a complete naif.  It’s worth a read though, if only to understand how our lightly-read are swayed.

George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility is the latest book to go on my reading list.  The sometimes conservative commentator has enjoyed a long career purveying his right of center ideology in the media (a regular on NBC, MSNBC, WaPo, and the National Review).  Will is both an anti-Trumper and an anti-Republican who shares my belief that our country’s march to collectivism has passed the tipping point, and that conservatism is in a terminal decline – the “Right’s losing battle against progressivism.”  (more here)

For a little light-hearted, local comical relief, I direct your attention to Terry Lamphier’s ‘Grass Valley’s burning desire for growth’.  There I challenge you to discover Mr Lamphier’s point of the article, save his eternal opposition to the county’s growth.  The man continues his established tradition of writing articles both long-winded and opaque.

Tariffs – who really pays

George Rebane

President Trump’s current tariff wars are definitely having a mixed impact on economies in the US and around the world.  His claim that ‘China is now paying us billions in tariffs’ is patently false.  But most people still think that tariffs on Chinese imports now consist of the imported goods plus a check for the tariff amount written by someone in China.  And that a 25% tariff on Chinese imports will increase their price for such goods by 25%.  Not so.

Tariffs on imported goods are paid for by the US registered importers to our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within 10 days of the goods landing in the US, which monies go into the Treasury's general fund of tax collections.  That, of course, increases the cost of doing business since the importer must now increase his, usually financed, operating capital by the amount of the tariff, thereby increasing both the direct cost of what he buys, and also adding the cost of financing the tariff amount. (more here)

To see how the tariff impacts us on the receiving end, consider the rule-of-thumb breakdown of end-user price.  For most things the ‘one-thirds rule’ applies – 1/3 to the manufacturer, 1/3 to distribution, 1/3 to the retailer (end-seller).  That means that the distributor (distribution channel) charges the end-seller twice its cost(s) for the item, and the end-seller then adds 50% of his cost to arrive at the price the end-user must pay.

So, let’s look at a pair of athletic shoes for which the consumer pays a pre-tariff $100.  The Chinese manufacturer sells these out the door for, say, $32.  The importer (distributor) must pay, say, a 25% tariff on the goods, or $8 to the CBP for a total cost of $40 for the shoes at the port of entry.  Now how much of that additional $8 cost he passes on to the retailer depends on what kind of a hit he’s willing to take on his profit margin.  Say, he’s willing to swallow half the increased cost, so he sells the shoes to the retailer for 2*($32 + 0.5*$8) = $72.  If the retailer now followed the one-third rule, then the price for the end-user consumer would be 1.5*$72 = $108, or an 8% price increase.  Being sensitive to the price-demand curve (you sell less of what costs more), the retailer may decide to swallow, say, 25% of his increased cost, or 0.25*($72 - $64) = $2.  This brings the consumer price of the athletic shoes to $106 or a 6% increase to the American end-user that was caused by imposition of a 25% tariff on such imports.

You can, of course, play this game with different numbers, for example starting with the Chinese manufacturer also discounting his out-the-door price of $32 to keep his shoe sales volume up.  Anyway, this should give us all an idea how and where tariff charges impact everyone in the process of getting imported stuff into the hands of end-users.  (Those wanting to play with these numbers can now see the effect on end prices by also considering the slightly more complex intermediate ‘end pricing’ of imported components ordered by US manufacturers making goods for US and foreign markets.)  And when all is said and done, everyone in the described chain will hold their breath to see how much the end-user will balk at paying the increased price and thereby lower the sales volume for the shoes, which effect will ripple up the chain impacting all kinds of decisions about what to pay, what to charge, and from where to buy.

In sum, the penalty that China (or any tariff assessed country) pays is that 1) they will sell less of the stuff to end users who have to pay a higher price, and/or 2) manufacturers and distributors on the receiving end will inevitably try to obtain the same stuff from countries that are not tariffed so as to regain their profit margins while lowering end user prices.  When, like China, you have entire industrial sectors geared to make goods for the single largest market in the world, tariffs on the receiving end do impose many forms monetary and financial penalties at the source end.  But make no mistake, the pain of tariffs is felt by all sides, and Trump needs to make that clear instead of spewing only the ‘China pays’ bullshit to the American electorate.  (Don’t mistake this screed as an assessment of the strategic wisdom cum effectiveness of today’s tariff trade wars; that is another discussion altogether.)

Subliminal Manipulation of Votes (updated 8aug19)

George Rebane

This is possibly the scariest post to date on RR.  Dr Robert Epstein’s congressional testimony about the vote manipulation antics of Google and Facebook are jaw-dropping.  Epstein is the former editor-in-chief of the prestigious Psychology Today and continues as Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research & Technology.  In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, this self-avowed liberal Democrat and strong Hillary supporter recounts numerous incidents of subliminal and so far unstoppable vote manipulation by the named tech giants.  As an example of an experimentally demonstrable vote manipulation effort Dr Epstein recounts that Google swung an extra 2.6M to over 10M extra votes for Hillary and the Democrats.  And to date there is not a thing anyone can do about this kind of activity which Epstein says will definitely be the deciding factor in the 2020 election.  We are reminded during the testimony that Alphabet – Google’s parent – was the single largest contributor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign. 

You wanna see what vote manipulation really looks like, then watch the goddam 7-minute video before someone takes it offline!  (H/T to correspondent)

[8aug19 update]  For a recent example of how these social media giants manipulate public attitudes, see the report in 'Scattershots - 6aug19' for what Twitter quietly did so as not to damage the progressive narrative about who are nation's haters and promoters of polarization.

Some Journalistic Jollies

George Rebane

Readers know that today’s professional journalists comprise one of my favorite foils.  Perusing the morning papers, I ran across three doozies that brought on a spate of self-satisfying chuckles.  First, let’s start with Don Rogers’ essay in his 26jul19 Union.  The newspaper’s publisher is an irreconcilable ‘never Trumper’, and promises to cut off your nose to spite your face.  He observes the national scene and laments that “no one truly acts for the common good.”  But in the sequel he doesn’t seem to understand that in today’s America we no longer have a ‘common good’, all the polarizing evidence withstanding.  Let me begin by acknowledging that Mr Rogers is a likeable man of good character and an intellectual leader of our community

In today’s essay he claims to like “some actions” of Trump “almost exclusively in economic matters”, and brushes off the historic sea change from Obama years as something “any decent Republican could have accomplished”.  But they didn’t, Trump did.  Society correctly credits the individuals who actually accomplished a notable thing, good or bad, and doesn’t withhold accolades or accusations with the excuse that someone else could just as easily have done it sooner or later.  Einstein discovered relativity, Lucky Lindy was first to solo the Atlantic, and Stalin killed tens of millions of his own citizens.  It wasn’t just anyone doing those things.

Mr Rogers joins his legion of liberal colleagues in calling Donald Trump “Racist? Sure, of course, but we’ve known that for a while.”  And along with them he offers no definition of the ‘racism’ to which he hews; Trump is “of course” racist for the reason that Rogers simply echoes that accusation – for a liberal, that is more than enough to make it so.  Consensus ignorance becomes common wisdom.

Our publisher’s main complaint in his ‘Impeach me, please’ is that Trump is flying solo in wanting the House to impeach him as part of some self-serving “thuggery” in his re-election strategy.  Apparently, Mr Rogers has not been exposed to the last two years of news about how Democrats, high and low, are in an all-out assault to impeach and discredit the president based on no culpable evidence, and ONLY as a blatant tactic to end his presidency in 2020.  The long litany of investigations, hearings, conspiracies, criminality, along with gratuitous and baseless accusations in the Democrat-compliant media, to Rogers somehow fall short of thuggery - actions and behaviors which for the rest of us overfill its most basic definition.

Don Rogers would rather vote for the Democrats’ “wrong-headed” and “ill-advised” legislation and policies and deny us the demonstrated benefits of Trump’s policies, why? because he doesn’t like the wrapper in which they are delivered.  And there we have a sterling example of a journalist promoting the common good. 

With a mild segue we now encounter Aaron Zitner, WSJ editor for digital innovation, who discovers the independent voter as those who actually swing elections one way or t’other.  He breathlessly reports the news of both parties having the dilemma of spending campaign funds to nail down their core voters or spend it trying to convince those yet to make up their minds.  His report (here) in the 26jul19 WSJ has got to be evidence of a slow news day.  Why?  That decision and its cash allocation dilemma is as old as electioneering.  Anyone familiar with how America has voted for the last couple of centuries knows the 40-20-40 rule.  We have reported on it extensively (here, here, and here) starting with The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan, who covered the large body research which demonstrated that the minority ruled, and did so until politicians discovered mass media in the 1920s.  This caused voters to succumb to the guile of political sound bites in their number and recency.  And that, of course, brought the whole thing back to which party and candidates could buy more eyeballs and earballs on the media.  So we’re back to the ‘middle minority’ as the swing votes who always determine elections.  But then, you knew that, and so should have Aaron Zitner.

OK, we’ll end with a real subtle knee-slapper.  How many times have you been told about investors moving into this or that investment?  The image painted by these financial reporters is of a mass of agitated people moving en masse from, say, stocks to bonds or vice versa, or to some other area like commodities or real estate.  ‘Investors give up on gold!’ is a regular headline in this genre.  Today we read Jessica Menton’s breathless report (here) about investors pouring money into bonds at a “record pace”.  Apparently investors are forsaking stocks as being more risky and going into the perceived less risky debt instruments.  Well, no they aren’t.  No investor threw their gold bars or stocks into the gutter; no one left their corporate stocks lie fallow in some drawer or some broker account when they switched their investment focus.  Every investor sold their old investments to whom?  Rumor has it that these buyers have always been (seatbelts please) other investors – imagine that.  Just as much money was coming out of one pile of investments as was going into another pile or two.  These monies don’t move by abandoning what was previously valued; they can’t.  Never are there discarded piles of share certificates found in dumpsters when monies move.  For some reason, this important little aspect of investor monies moving around is never mentioned.  You gotta sell stuff before you can buy other stuff.  And if investors are buying something else at a record pace, other investors must also be buying what was sold at a record pace.  Reporters should point this out now and then. 

Scattershots – 23jul19 (updated 24jul19)

George Rebane

Marxist-Leninist ideology has proven itself as the world’s most toxic way to organize society, primarily because of its appeal to the simple-minded and uneducated (according to Rebane Doctrine).  Today the so-called Justice Democrats have joined with Our Revolution to form the most prominent ‘legitimate’ political organization to promote an M-L future for America.  Our Revolution is the front for the three most influential Marxist organizations in America – Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  This is what you will get when you back Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Squad.

‘Can’t We All Just Get Along?’ Here’s Victor Davis Hanson putting many things from the Obama years in perspective, things that our liberal contingent shows us daily that they have forgotten, if they ever even noticed such happenings in the first place.  As VDH reminds us, the Democrats have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.  (H/T to reader)

Fire Team (a squad is divided into two fire teams) Tlaib and Omar are heading for Israel and the West Bank with the blessings of President Trump and the welcoming Prme Minister Netanyahu.  They will be there to promote their anti-Israeli BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) bill that Pelosi will never allow on the House floor.  That doesn’t matter, the Squad has become the mind and message of the Democratic Party whose more politically astute members are trying to stifle before the election season gets too far along.  Every Republican considers those brainless broads to be the gift that keeps on giving – long may they wave.

Puerto Rico’s hot summer continues as San Juan’s citizens by the tens of thousands demonstrate to get their governor Rossello to resign after some revealing tweets of his were made public.  But the question I ask readers to consider is why Puerto Rico continues to flirt with being a banana republic.  Why has that island remained a corrupt and essentially dysfunctional state after enjoying more than a century of being a succored territory of the United States with special dispensations for its citizens, trade relations, investment sources, economic aid, … ??  I suggest again that it is their culture that keeps them in their perennial dire straits; a culture that they share with much of the western hemisphere south of our border, and the same culture that most on our Left are trying to infuse into our land with its porous borders.

[update]  Seven Dems on the House Judiciary Committee floated fake Russiagate stories. Tomorrow they get to quiz Mueller.  Such is the nature of the carnival that was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.  No more deliberation allowed, just time-worn, disproved allegations and outright lies.  There is the cast of characters ready to expose their character and show their prowess in questioning Special Counsel Mueller in the fervent hope that he will break and tell everyone that Trump was really guilty as sin, his report was a whitewash, and now he is sorry. (more here)

[24jul19 update]  The Mueller testimony to Congress is over. The man came across confused, timid, and uninformed – the Dems ‘movie’ to follow the ‘book’ was a bust.  But au contraire, to hear the Dems on the media outlets tonight, they had a great victory – now the American people know that Trump colluded with the Russians to assure his election victory, and then partook in numerous criminal acts to obstruct subsequent justice.  This is straight out of the Stalinist/Leninist playbook – just counter with bigger lies that contradict truth.  Mueller found no evidence for collusion or obstruction; had he done so, he, who set a new standard for RINO, would have said so.  Instead, his best efforts against Trump was a lame statement, never before heard from a prosecutor, that he “did not exonerate” Trump from the obstruction allegations, having yet to find any evidence of support – a non-news statement first made public in AG Barr’s letter summary of the report over three months ago.  So all the Dems are now busy in the political sweatshop trying to sew silk purses out of sows’ ears.  Only Pelosi is justifiably happy that, no matter the further efforts of Nadler’s nitpickers, the butt stupid effort to impeach the president is dead.  As a footnote, one of my liberal friends assured me today that Mueller’s 17 crack lawyers only included 4 Democrats, when in reality they were 13 Dems, 0 Repubs, 6 Hillary donors, and most having being associated with Team Clinton in one way or another.  But all that only underlined that Mueller’s obvious unfamiliarity with his own investigation and report, strongly indicated that he did little to lead the investigation which was conducted and reported by his ‘never Trump’ troops (e.g. "not familiar with Fusion GPS").

Racism and Racists revisited (updated 24jul19)

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

George Rebane

In a more learned time ‘racism’ was defined by first class dictionaries like the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) 2 ed as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.”  Today, Dictionary.com still posts that same definition verbatim.  Unfortunately, that’s where it ends.

In days of yore, and perhaps still among the more precise speakers and writers, a ‘racist’ was a person who embraced such a belief or doctrine.  No longer.  Today in the public forum ignorance and political cynicism rule the day, and are reinforced by the hour in print, online, in schools, and by politicians of both parties.  Racist can be an indictment of someone's comments that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, simply on the invocation of 'We know what he really meant'. It is of a piece of our declining culture that does not bode well for America.  One of my early commentaries on racism was ‘Who is a Racist?’; there I particularly call your attention to the intense and self-assured responses from our liberal commenters.

Today, racist is a label publicly, cynically, and even gratuitously hung around the neck of –

1. Anyone who disagrees with your speech or opinion;
2. Any white person who disagrees with the speech or opinion of a non-white person;
3. Any white person who describes a non-white person in any but the most salutary terms;
4. Anyone who tells a non-white to ‘go back where you came from’;
5. Anyone who describes radical Islam in their own terms;
6. Anyone who opposes illegal entry into the US;
7. Anyone who opposes taxpayer funded succor and sanctuary to illegal aliens;
8. Anyone who calls a shithole country a shithole country;
9. Anyone who wants illegal aliens deported according to our laws;
10. Anyone who wants to enforce our immigration laws;
11. Anyone who cites the race-based IQ testing results published by the American Psychological Association;
12. Anyone who points out the cultural deficits of a non-white country;
13. Anyone who identifies a mulatto as a mulatto;
14. Any white person who disagrees with an elected politician, official, teacher, … of color;
15. Any white person who criticizes the government sponsored demise of the black family;
16. Anyone who points out that overwhelmingly and obviously people like to live among cultural likes;
17. Anyone who points out the failure of certain non-white groups to assimilate;
18. … .

The list goes on indefinitely as expressions and behaviors are uncritically labeled ‘racist’.  What they all share in common is that each has absolutely nothing to do with the original precise definition of racism.  In spite of this, for the Left 'racist' has long become the preferred pejorative with which to tar their political opponents.  So today ‘racist’ can mean anything, when it actually means nothing.  The danger to our republic is that the Humpty Dumpty approach to semantics has now been baked into our justice system.

[24jul19 update] The national press is taking up the points of my above commentary.  To wit, that the media offer no proof or basis for charging President Trump’s tweets to have been ‘racist’.  They just continue to pile on empty moralizing, repeating the racist charge with no accompanying reasoning or evidence whatsoever.  In the comment stream below, we see the echoes of this from our local liberal light-thinkers who have never been able to go beyond the lamestream’s talking points.  To their benefit we beseech, ‘Lord, forgive them for they know not what they say.’

An example of this appears in ‘Prove the Tweets Were Racist’ by WSJ editorial board member Holman Jenkins.  Excerpts from his piece follow –

• Numerous outlets this week deceived themselves when they referred to Mr. Trump’s “racist tweets” as if their racist nature was an established fact that good reporting had nailed down. They think they are being brave when they are being the opposite. Brave was a dissenter: Keith Woods, National Public Radio’s diversity chief, who argued on NPR’s website that reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to people they quote.

• (The media sought) to incriminate Mr. Trump with words and actions of people who are not Mr. Trump. Media outlet after media outlet confidently asserted that Mr. Trump was speaking in racist code. But if it’s code, its meaning cannot be detected in the plain words, so we must rely on the media’s anointed code breakers to tell us what Mr. Trump really meant. (emphasis mine)

• Trump makes a great deal of trouble for himself because he insists on free-associating in public. He won’t, like other politicians, stick to scripts carefully scrubbed of ambiguity. But the press does not make truth out of ambiguity by putting words in his mouth. (emphasis mine)

• If they acquired a bit of political realism (from Trump’s election), reporters might even notice something about Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” slogan. It gives a large and ineradicable part of the electorate a way to frame their interests and discontents without reciprocating the identity-based claims of those they see (not altogether inaccurately) as assailing them.

• Frankly, some humility is also in order from a press that has displayed a more than usual amount of gullibility, conformism and poor judgment on just about every matter that has come before them in the past few years. If the media’s not-so-secret agenda is to defeat Mr. Trump, they might consider the possibility that they are (again) going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Ruminations – 18jul19 (updated 19jul19)

George Rebane

Gold-backed dollar or not?  Interesting debate now going on over how to set the value of the dollar which is fiat money but still the world’s leading reserve currency.  Gold is pooh-poohed by governments and pundits as just an “alternative asset class” which serves many as a “speculative store of value”.  Interesting to note is that it is the governments who hoard massive amounts of gold and use it to clear inter-nation trade accounts.  Hmm?

Counting Trump’s ‘lies’ has become another favorite pastime for leftwingers.  Books have been written on the subject.  On closer inspection, such counts include all the bravados and projections and predictions and promises that politicians over the ages and of all hues have generously poured into their constituents’ ears.  Today’s under-educated TDS sufferers know nothing of this, and feel proud that they are plowing new ground in such endeavors.

AOC for all seasons and reasons.  Seldom has a politician come along who gives so much pleasure to both sides campaigning in a highly polarized political landscape.  Today both Repubs and Dems hope that AOC and her brood will continue spewing loud and clear their anti-American assessments and prescriptions for a fundamentally transformed US.  Karl Rove calls her “the gift that keeps on giving.”

[19jul19 update] 'Impeachment Phonies' in the 19jul19 WSJ - "So much for high crimes and misdemeanors. Faced with a resolution to impeach President Trump on Wednesday, House Democrats blinked. That was the smart move politically, but what does it say about the courage of their conviction that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to the country and Constitution?"

Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

George Rebane

This patriotic graphic was posted on last year’s 4^th of July.  Continuing our national trend, this year’s celebration has gotten a bit more tense.  We now have invented and baked in the country’s psyche the national notion that everything ante-bellum that was part of American history is fair game to be attacked, withdrawn, denied, silenced, or destroyed.  The latest is the very familiar Betsy Ross flag, the first Stars and Stripes to grace our newborn country with its familiar ring of thirteen stars for the original thirteen colonies.  No more.

Picking a Politically Proficient Heritage

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ insistence that she is African-American, in spite of the Jamaican detour of her father’s lineage, raises an interesting and, perhaps, important point on how we claim our racial roots in this age of political correctness. (more here)  Not imposing any reasonable limits on climbing up our ancestral tree would, of course, allow each of us to call ourselves African-American.  That would effectively kill that label’s semantic in American politics.

(A language derives its power from the accuracy and precision of its words or lexicon which allows its users to readily discriminate between shades of meaning.  Therefore, the more words - precisely defined, meticulously preserved, and correctly used – within its lexicon, the more effective are the communications that a language supports in the sense of enabling complete, clear, and compact messaging.  Semantically prostituted words with multiple meanings are inefficient and ambiguous, and require additional discriminative words to correctly communicate ideas and assertions.  Today’s English is a mess created by our educational system.)

So, how far back should we go in claiming and projecting our ethno-racial heritage?  In my case, I could call myself a Mongo-American since my racial derivation is from the Finno-Ugric segment of Europe’s Nordic clans.  The Ugric tribes originally migrated westward from Mongolia, leaving some in the Ural Mountains of Russia before spreading out into eastern Europe.  Estonians and Finns are genetically identical, and both speak what modern linguists call a Finno-Ugric language.  Or perhaps I should proclaim myself to be an Ugric-American.  I don’t know, but Estonian-American sounds as bland as Jamaican-American.  Neither effectively communicates its aggrieved past as required in today's proper public use of identity politics.  So what kind of hyphenated American are you?

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

The 2020 campaign – capitalism vs socialism (updated 3jul19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 June 2019.]

Today’s dramatic tack to the left by the Democratic Party and its legion of presidential candidates has brought capitalism vs socialism to center-stage in the public forum.  The Democrat candidates share a common vision for their fundamentally transformed America, but each of them has fashioned their own particular path to their promised land.  By this I mean that each has outlined a particular sequence of wealth transfer and confiscation policies designed to solidify support from their leftwing core and attract the maximum of mid-road and undeclared voters to the collectivist cause.

Their message is simple and effective – ‘we’ll give you a lot more free stuff, and tax the bejeezus out of the evil and greedy rich to pay for it all’.  After half century of controlling public education in America, we now have at least two generations of voters who know absolutely nothing about capitalism, and little or nothing about socialism.  What the Millennials and the lightly read have been taught is that socialism works – look at how we describe Europe.  Today capitalism for these Americans is akin to a dirty word that refers to a broken social order which allows the rapacious rich to rape the middle-class and the poor who have no opportunities to advance.  America’s history has been taught as a three century long dystopian trail of tears that has spread its misery worldwide.