Rebane's Ruminations

Border Security, Barriers, and Porosity (updated)

George Rebane

No nation-state can long maintain its culture and sovereignty without the ability and will to control its borders.

“Sounds like a lack of technology rather than the porosity of a wall”, replied a commenter who had just finished celebrating the capture of illegals who had tunneled under an old, shallow, and unmanned remote section of our southern border.  He and others like him gleefully pointed that out as evidence supporting the Left’s new narrative that border barriers (walls, fences, …) are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  And then he posted the above statement which confused (i.e. “rather than”) barrier system design with a metric of its performance.  Such mistakes from the Left abound today in the media and these pages.  We can leave the question of how much these erroneous statements are forged through simple ignorance vs promoting the ‘hate Trump’ agenda.  There is little we can do to heal their TDS, however there is an outside chance that their ignorance can be alleviated (given that there is no stupidity – i.e. processing deficit – at play).

Motivated by the above general principle, border control is defined as the ability to determine the ingress and egress of people and goods across geographical boundaries which delineate the jurisdictional limits of a sovereign nation-state.  Border controls are implemented by many means, depending on the border geography, implemented border security systems, and the cost burden the nation is willing to bear to implement its border security policies which should include one or more publicly known border control performance metrics that are part of the nation’s overall border control (multi-attribute) utility function.  The most meaningful attribute is the border’s overall porosity metric.

Border porosity is a bidirectional measure of the rate of illegal crossings in either the egress or ingress directions across the national boundary.  Today we are overwhelmingly concerned with only the ingress of illegal aliens.  In practice, porosity will vary over a range of values along a long, complex border having varying physical and political attributes that come into play.  Here we have to be careful in how we apply the above definition of porosity.  Specifically, the ingress porosity metric does NOT include the accretion of illegal aliens through non-border means such as overstaying their visa permissions.  Aliens who entered legally under various immigration, tourist, and guest-worker policies, and then ‘went illegal’ are a concern for our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

So when we want to have a meaningful discussion of border security, we must start with at least the statement of an acceptable ‘mean porosity’ level that, if exceeded, alerts us to discover and fix the cause of having violated the policy threshold.  As RR readers may be aware, my own considered border porosity threshold is a quite generous annual entry of 15,000 illegal aliens who are not intercepted/captured at the border, and successfully meld into our population.  These illegals then become fugitives from our laws, and are to be brought back into our legal system by our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

Now regarding physical border barriers (in military jargon known as ‘fixed field fortifications’) – I will not waste readers’ time countering the ignorant and inane critics who suddenly maintain that such barriers are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  (And to address the question of their ‘morality’ is for me beyond accessible levels of idiocy.)  The main purpose of such physical barriers has always been to reduce the boundary or border manning requirements wherever they are constructed.  As we are taught in the military, all unmanned fixed field fortifications can be penetrated by a determined enemy, and that goes for desperate migrants breaching unguarded segments of our southern border.  The question on what to build where depends strictly on how we must share the ‘hardware’ (walls, fences, surveillance/tracking/penetration detection systems, etc) costs with the costs of staffing our boots-on-the-ground Border Patrol, ICE, and other border interdiction units in order to maintain the acceptable porosity levels along the border.

The Left’s current narrative about whether we need walls, or slats, or fences, or whatever, and that Trump lied if he doesn’t really intend to build some ridiculously high concrete wall from the Pacific to the Gulf, is just unmitigated bullshit that diverts the national attention from border security.  This narrative panders to the nation’s Latinos, and seeks to increase the inflow of future Democrat voters who will join the ranks of those who already are working to bring America to its knees as one more compliant complement that genuflects to the brave new world of one global government.

(Now let’s see what President Trump has to say about this in his imminent speech at noon (PST) from the Oval Office.)

[update] President Trump’s short speech was full of compromises that traded multiple tranches of benefits to resident illegal aliens, including extending the DACA stays to three years, in return for the next $5.7B for border security which includes barrier systems.  He also invited the Dems to an accelerated bipartisan program to hammer out a new comprehensive immigration policy and implementing laws. (more here)  The Republican majority Senate will now draft and pass a bill that incorporates the President’s compromise proposal to terminated the partial shutdown and proceed on the road to immigration reform putatively desired by both sides.  It will be up to the Pelosi House to pass and work out with the Senate a compromise bill that the President will sign.  If Team Pelosi continues to tell the President to stuff it where the sun don’t shine, then that should remove the last shreds of doubt as to who has been stonewalling the shutdown from the gitgo.

Ruminations - 18jan19 (updated 20jan19)

Federal workers demonstrate because they don't have the money to buy food or pay the rent. Why haven't some of the nation's major lenders stepped forward to lend them money at low/no interest rates until they start getting a check again?  The money so lent would be at minimal risk since the borrowers have their government jobs and their back-pay checks as collateral of equal quality to US Treasury bonds.  Where are all these rightwing bankers who could lend Trump and the Republicans a political hand while reaping beaucoup PR rewards? ...  OK, then where are the leftwing lenders since the overwhelming share of government workers are Democrat voters?

[update]  RR contributor and blogger Russ Steele wrote and excellent Other Voices in the 18jan19 Union making the case for “upskilling” your workplace talents in the age of galloping AI.  In his ‘STEM for all’ he also pointed out what SESF has been doing in promoting and supporting STEM education in Nevada County.

Former Trump attorney Cohen’s most recent allegations about candidate Trump’s real estate dealings with Russia are making big headlines that have every Dem and all their cousins calling for more investigations, and definitely for the president’s impeachment.  But no one is lifting an eyebrow about what was just released about Bruce Ohr’s testimony last August that revealed a string of lies the FBI told Congress and on its FISA application to investigate Trump’s campaign.  And also that two of the liars have been key members of Mueller’s team continuing to investigate the president.  The magnitude of such misdirection of national attention is beyond astounding and does not portend well for our beloved republic.  (more here)

‘If Weed Is Medicine, So Is Budweiser’, so goes a convincing argument by Dr Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  He points out that MJ “is a toxin, not a medicine” per se as its adherents claim for ailments ranging from hepatitis to Parkinson’s.  Citing studies, Bach tells us that “if weed is a pain reliever, so is Budweiser.”  His message of “Legalize marijuana, but don’t pretend it’s therapeutic” come with the bottom line that MJ “belongs in the same category as alcohol an tobacco – harmful products that adults can choose to enjoy”, and they need to be regulated as such.

"Trump's Shutdown" - Here's a quiz, how is this government shutdown significantly different from Obama's shutdown, and previous ones?  And here is the answer.

[20jan19 update]  Fiber in Nevada City.  Russ Steele sent me this which might be of interest to our locals concerned about the county's economic development.  "I am reading Susan Crawford's book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School.  There are ten references to Nevada City and John Paul's Fiber Network in her book recounting the struggle to bring fiber to Nevada City/Grass Valley.   More details on my blog:"  https://ruraleconomytechnology.com

Swedish Rhapsody

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 January 2019.]

George Rebane

Today our socialist politicians feel that they have the wind at their back to fundamentally transform our country into the Socialist States of America.  And that may well be the case as poll after poll shows that for most Americans capitalism has fallen out of favor, or at best they are indifferent to its existence and role in supporting their quality of life.  The Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, are now the major voting block, having taken their positions in government and the private sector workforce.  Their attitudes reflect the education they received in our unionized public schools, and most are definitely in favor of socialism as the better way to organize society and our economy – over half prefer socialism to capitalism.

For most Americans, tilting leftward or already there, Scandinavia is their siren song of socialism.  And among those nations, Sweden is the posterchild and most frequent answer to, ‘Why can’t we be more like …?’  Sweden is held up to us by both progressive politicians and their handmaiden media as the paragon of how to correctly do government.

Scattershots – 11jan19 (updated 17jan19)

George Rebane

None of the rabid opposition to border security makes sense, and even less so with the passing months. We supposedly look at and experience the same world, yet obviously live in different universes. Physics may have an answer for that, but everyday logic in the conduct of human affairs does not, especially if we assume that both sides are working for a strong, independent, free, and prosperous America. Logic clicks back into place when we remove that assumption.

Israel’s wall costs $2M/mile. (more here)  That is a good stake in the ground to estimate the cost of our border security infrastructure which would not be a 2,000-mile concrete wall, but would instead consist of other barrier approaches and supportive detection and localization systems.  Posit $3M/mile for our southern border, and the cost would come to $6B.  And that includes all of the overhead.  Claiming that our border property owners will fight the increased border security is a red herring that does not jibe with what actual property owners are saying.  It is they who have suffered at the hands of illegal entrants whose criminal activities transiting their property has made living on the border dangerous.

Was sorry to see today’s (11jan19) Union column by publisher Don Rogers. His arguments against border security ignored all the marginal impacts on crime, culture, and costs of a porous border outlined in ‘The mangling of managed minds’.  It seems that being blind to that line of reasoning is a widespread malady among our Left, for it always appears to form the basis of their resulting fractured logic for opposing Trump’s border security policies, aka the same ones that the congressional Left supported not so long ago.

Bright fiber in Nevada County is a reported go, but details about the scope of the project are less than skimpy.  All that’s reported in The Union (here and here) is that 2,000 homes along Hwy 174 will be getting enhanced broadband in about a year.  But there is more than enough detail on the bureaucratics and the funding to roll your eyes.  However, people who don’t happen to live along 174 haven’t a clue as to how this project will advance the rest of the county toward 21^st century connectivity.  In short, after reading the reportage I again had to strap on my ‘Pardon me but you have me confused with someone who cares’ button.  Maybe more informed readers will provide the much needed information.

Ex-Muslims of North America is an organization of former American and Canadian Muslims united to spread word about ‘the religion of peace’ and support those who have left and are contemplating leaving Islam.  Their position on their former faith parallels that of RR.  Islam is still in its ‘Accept Allah or die!’ phase of maturing.  But unfortunately this is happening in a much more connected world laced with an abundance of very deadly technologies.  Just to be clear, all major religions have and/or are still going through such a violent and uncompromising phase.  Christianity most certainly had its ‘Accept Jesus or die!’ epoch in the centuries after Rome, starting coincidentally about when Islam was born on the Arabian peninsula. 

[12jan19 update]  Fact checking Trump.  Leftwing readers here have been taking President Trump to task for his ‘lies’, the overwhelming share of such are easily identified as political bluster of the kind that can be tallied for any politician on either side of the aisle.  There are however certain statements from a politician that are intended to elicit and/or support public support for government policy.  Such weighty claims are usually easy to fact-check either at the time of delivery or subsequently.  President Trump’s recent border security speech from the Oval Office contained a number of such statements.  Here is a fact-check summary of five of the most important ones from that speech.

Venice, CA now importing SF values. Beautiful seaside community of Venice in SoCal is rapidly becoming the next ‘sierra hotel’ city in the state, joining Anaheim and the long-enduring People's Republic of Santa Monica as newly risen exemplars of socialist governance.  The Hollywood Reporter has the details in its ‘LA's Battle for Venice Beach: Homeless Surge Puts Hollywood's Progressive Ideals to the Test’.  There “with swelling transient encampments abutting seven-figure homes, the beachside enclave has emerged as a flashpoint for the inequality shaping Los Angeles — and a real-world test case for the liberal ideology of the area’s showbiz residents.” (H/T to correspondent)

[13jan19 update]  Conjecture: NYC mayor Bill deBlasio is a communist, having passed to the left of all remaining progressive milestones. (more here)

[14jan19 update] Whether you like or regret (like me) many of our President's tweets and hipshot repartees, this is what many Americans believe is really the case.

[17jan19 update]  Border barriers (walls, fences, ...) "don't work and are ineffective" maintains the Democrat leadership and their nationwide constituents.  Border security officers with long years of experience maintain exactly the opposite.  I have not found any journalist with the wit or temerity to ask people like Pelosi, 'What evidence do you have about border barrier systems that overrides the testimony of our border security professionals and which supports you continued assertions that such border security infrastructure "doesn't work"?  (We'll address the "immorality" question another time.)  Asking the Democrats to produce such evidence would put this debate on the fast track to resolution, not only with regard to border security funding, but also the government shutdown.  RR readers know the disdain I have for the journalistic profession, I have found almost all journalists to be alarmingly ignorant hacks with little or no spine to seek out and report truth that is counter to their publishers' and/or editors' agendas.

The mangling of managed minds

George Rebane

People who are informed primarily through media soundbites have been shown to have very volatile opinions.  When a new and contrary tranche of soundbites comes along, such people more often than not change their minds and follow the new direction of the most recent compelling soundbite.  This is because soundbite driven opinions are reactionary and not reasoned.  That is simply because the individual takes no time or effort to develop any depth of understanding in what he currently believes.  Finicky and fleeting feelings drive decisions for such people.  Bryan Caplan, in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, was one of the first to publish the research confirming how voters make decisions about issues and candidates.

The bottom line acceptance of Caplan’s findings is corroborated by how politicians and our news media (specifically the lamestream) construct their messages for soundbite thinkers.  This morning’s analyses of President Trump’s Oval Office speech last night is chuck full of such messaging.

One frequently used ruse is to dismiss stated levels by surreptitiously sliding the argument over to rates, and also dismiss inconvenient rates by citing the more fortuitous change in the offending rate.  [For the technically versed, this well-known process is known as ‘climbing the derivative ladder’ until you find the one that serves your narrative.]  An example here is the President’s citing the high number of illegals currently coming over the border.  This the lamestream journalist brushes off by telling listeners that the rate of illegals entering was higher in the past.  For innumerates and soundbite thinkers, this is an effective way to dismiss concern over the continuing rate of illegal entrants.  Presented in this context, it never occurs to them that what’s happening now is still a huge and preventable problem that overwhelms our border security personnel.

Mending Wall (updated 12jan19)

Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

 

[12jan19 gjr update] From some of the comments below it appears that a word of clarification is required, not only about Frost’s poem but also walls, fences, and other things that demark and control access.  Such constructs are nothing more than the existential and visible attributes of contracts that define property rights within a society.  These transmit the unambiguous message that this side belongs to me, and the other side belongs to someone else; and I don’t want someone from the other side coming unbeknownst to me onto my property from where I have constructed my wall/fence or any other kind of barrier.  For access to my property at certain locations I have provided gates, the states of which I can control, and therefore control access to my property.

People who don’t share the value of such rights, and perhaps feel that these delineated things should be owned in common, or at least be shared unhindered, will oppose physical barriers that unambiguously define ownership and provide for non-owner access only at the pleasure of the owner.

Today such values are very much the topic of hot debate between ideologically estranged peoples and nations.  Conservatives and libertarians are very much proponents of property rights and such expression of these rights.  They believe that property (and any asset of value) that is owned by everyone is owned by no one, and treated as such.  (cf. Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons')  Everywhere that property is ‘owned by the people’, it is actually owned by their government which visibly deports itself as owner.  The definition of ownership is straightforward – you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will.  The thinking person immediately understands that ownership is not a simple ‘you own it, or you don’t’.  Instead, they know that ownership is very much nuanced, and that anything owned can also be taken insidiously and stage wise from the weaker by the stronger.  In the US we have seen such erosion of ownership occur with many things, including real property and firearms.  In an autocracy (which we are fast becoming) such subtle transfers of ownership are replaced by more direct and unambiguous methods.

(In understanding ownership, be careful not to confuse that notion with the responsibility for and/or accountability for the disposition of said property by its de juris owner or any third party.)

Mr Boardman’s Bamboozle or Boo-boo?

George Rebane

Intrepid leftwing columnist at The Union, George Boardman, is either trying to bamboozle the lightly-read reader, or was just a bit fast and loose on the keyboard in his 7jan19 submittal to the newspaper.  In his commentary ‘Don’t Expect Reality to Intrude on Trump’s Argument for a Border Wall’, Mr Boardman launches into a sonorous if not somnambulant recounting of the debate about how to secure our southern border.  He repeats the new shibboleths about whether it should really be a solid concrete wall or some other form of possible physical barrier “to cut-off the hordes of illegal immigrants poring(sic) across the border to take good-paying American jobs, commit numerous crimes, and turn our fair country into an outpost of lawlessness.”  Well, he almost got that list right – nobody is worried about our country becoming “an outpost of lawlessness”, just illegals committing the reported numerous crimes and costing a bundle to hunt and house them in our prisons.

But his main argument for ignoring the tens of thousands pouring across our southern border is that they don’t number as many as those who enter the US legally with visas and then overstay.  Boardman quotes the legal entrant overstays for 2016 at 628,799, while the illegal entrants in 2016 number only 170,000.  Countering this, the US Customs and Border Protection arm of the Dept of Homeland Security post the more realistic 553,378 who were apprehended in 2016 (more here).  The number escaping apprehension is unknown, but reasonable estimates place it in the same range as the apprehensions.  And with the advent of the recent mass migrations, this number has increased significantly based on 102,857 apprehensions last year (2018) reported during October and November – the annualized number for this comes to over 600,000.  Again, we don’t know all of those illegals who got through our overwhelmed border security personnel.  The illegals who overstayed their visas in 2017 number 702,000 according to the DHS.  And yes, about half of the illegal aliens in the country today entered legally and overstayed their visas.

From his version of such statistics Mr Boardman concludes with the simple red herring that “If you really want to stop illegal immigration, a wall is not the solution.”  Nobody has maintained that any southern border barrier will stop all illegal aliens from settling in America.  But can his readers see through this little bit of legerdemain?  Nor does our columnist tell us that those entering legally with visas and those crawling through border barriers comprise two distinct cohorts of illegals.  Our immigration and border security people were able to vet those to whom we issued visas.  We know that they weren’t the obvious drug runners, human traffickers, unaccompanied minors, wanted criminals, terrorists, … .  Those coming in across the southern border (sometimes multiple times) do not submit to such examination, and there are enough of them to be of concern to reasonable law-abiding Americans who are not racists, xenophobes, or even nationalists. (more here)

After having convinced his readers that our porous southern border is not a concern, he does a subtle shift to put a cherry on that argument by citing all the benefits to the American economy and workforce contributed by immigrants who make up more than one sixth of our workforce and almost three fourths of our tech workers, many of whom are entrepreneurs starting new companies that grow our economy and maintain our leadership in the world of innovation and commerce.  (I also belong to that cohort.)  Well yes, but all of these people came in legally and are not the under-educated poor illegal entrants from, well, you know, what our fearless leader correctly called "shithole countries".  That subtle semantical pirouette of naming all foreign-born in America as ‘immigrants’, regardless of their mode of entry and legal status, continues to support the bamboozle our Left is successfully dispensing in today’s media.  Everyone is an immigrant, and since we are a nation of immigrants, therefore we must let all immigrants enter and succor their needs.  To do otherwise is heartless and un-American, capice?  (more here and here)

But in the final analysis Mr Boardman is a loyal liberal just soldiering on, polishing the progressive narrative to make it more palatable to the residents of these hinterlands. (Just to be clear, I too am guilty of doing my part to purvey the conservetarian worldview, hopefully with better numbers and reasoning.)

PS. Just to pile on, in this scurrilous piece of journalism, Mr Boardman also throws in some red meat for the alt-Left: Because in its op-ed the WSJ deigned to propose a solution to the government shutdown negotiations, our columnist asks, "Who said the fake news media doesn't have any clout in this country?" (emphasis mine)

Pelosi’s “Immoral Wall” (updated 6jan19)

George Rebane

In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan documented a significant body of research which showed that in the US voters in the aggregate are what may be termed formally insane.  The general understanding of this phenomenon applies to populations all over the world, and its general characteristics were even known to the ancients.  Of course, our well-read Founders knew this, and that is why, in order to avoid the mistakes of the past, they wisely did not leave us a democracy.

The democratic republic they did construct and detailed in our Constitution is supposed to keep the hoi polloi’s mitts off the machinery of our federal and state governments.  They inserted a hopefully wiser and more circumspect layer of elected representatives between the mass of citizens and the levers of power.  The idea was that such electeds would be better read and would take a broader view of things that insured the country’s prudent progress.  Unspoken, save in their oaths of office, was the notion that all of these worthies would be pro-American – i.e. legislate so as to assure the republic’s prosperous and permanent future.

Our Founders had no idea of the world order in which America would find itself 250 years after declaring our independence.  Today two major ideologies, founded by Marx and Muhammad, are working to bring all the peoples of the world under one monolithic governing leviathan.  Each, in the interval, willing to work off the gains of the other in the firm belief that they will be the victor when the dust settles.  In the meantime, there will be a need for lots of dust, or ‘cracked eggs’, or whatever to bring the outdated global gaggle of sovereign nation-states to an end.

Marx’s collectivists today march to that brave new world mostly under the socialist banner, although swapping for the colors of communism (already/still solidly ensconced in the community of nations) is always possible were stronger medicine necessary to mind the masses.  Muhammad’s disciples, no matter their current schisms, see the global caliphate under sharia law as the culmination of Allah’s plan for his earthly creation.  Both can accept convenient amalgamations of the two on the road to their glorious destinations.

Dems Embrace Shutdown (updated)

George Rebane (updated)

Now in its second week, the partial (25%) shutdown of the federal government continues with the Democrats refusing to negotiate with President Trump.  The natural deal to be made is for the Dems to accept the $5B for border security (including all means and methods) and the Repubs to accept legalizing the residence of DACA aliens.

The Dems’ position is clear and repeated often – they will refuse Trump any legislative victories and will use their House majority in the attempt to bring down this administration through the launch of a thousand investigations into anything remotely connected with Donald Trump, either now or back then.  The logic behind it is clear.

Let the DACA aliens swing in the wind while the border remains porous and countless thousands continue streaming in.  Sooner or later the illegal alien share of America’s population will be so high (now above 30M by some estimates) that the only non-violent political solution will be granting amnesty to the lot, with border security still unresolved (see also A21).  All of these new residents with a paved path to citizenship will be Democrat voters whose numbers overwhelm the paltry hundreds of thousands in the current DACA cohort.  All that is required is a prudently pernicious patience on the part of the Left.

And during the interval, our lightly-read neighbors will constantly be fed the repeated lies that legal immigration is the same as illegal entry, and that ‘walls don’t work’.  NY’s Gov Cuomo is repeating that lie today on Ellis Island, and history shows that walls are and always have been very effective in preventing both ingress and egress where they have been erected and maintained.  The Dems are placing a smart bet that after three generations their educational systems have produced enough double dummies to swallow whatever is fed to them.

[update]  In ‘Our Exhausted American Mediocracy’ noted historian Victor Davis Hanson takes us through the notable sea change that accompanied and/or was revealed by Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.  It is a marvelous summary of a perspective attempted by many writers over the last two years.  VDH nails it, and includes illuminating sections addressing ‘Earned Hypocrisies?’ and ‘A Case Against Trump?’.  I bring this essay mainly to the attention of our liberal neighbors who seem to get these ideas only through RR – consider it a public service of purview broadening.  (H/T to reader)

More to the point of the contempt with which Democrat politicians hold their constituents, another oft told lie is told in response to every new atrocity committed by an illegal alien – most recently by Gustavo Arriaga murdering police officer Ronil Singh.  The Left glibly counters the violence committed by illegals by the bland claim that ‘immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born’, which their voters have no capacity to parse as to what that claim means.  In ‘The Immorality of Illegal Immigration’ VDH points out that ‘statisticians argue that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born, but never quite calibrate illegal immigrants into the equation (in part because no one has any idea who, where, or how many they are, as estimates range from 11 to 20 million) or note that second-generation native-born children of immigrants have much higher violent-crime rates than do their immigrant parents, and in circular fashion add to the general pool of violent Americans who then are used to contrast immigrants as less violent.’, and then makes the case that “we should redefine the entire morality of multifaceted illegal immigration.”

Ruminations – 1jan19 (updated 5jan19)

George Rebane

First and foremost, Jo Ann and I wish all of our family, friends, and RR readers a healthy and productive 2019 – hopefully, ‘happy’ can also be fit in there somewhere 😉

As things stand now, US economic growth will continue at a brisk rate in 2019 with low unemployment, especially for the historically unemployed minorities.  This is major consternation for the anti-American Left as it prepares for the 2020 elections.  Look for progressive policies aggressively promoted to stop this growth.

In the growing assault on the Trump presidency, if the calls from leftwing media outlets like truthout.org and vox.com to take to the streets is answered by the tens of thousands of alt-Left, then there is a good chance for some serious violence.  As most recently being demonstrated by the Democrat leadership, the search for middle-ground is long past.  Now it’s simply a destruction derby going on at the federal level.  The Left has already won several of such derbies at the states level.

Several pollsters tell us that more than half of millennials believe that capitalism is bad and socialism should be given a chance.  Very few of them know the definition of either means of organizing the economy and society.

This may be the year where businesses big and small realize the constructive and disruptive power of AI-based business systems.  No longer do we see all the hopeful arguments that AI will create more jobs.  Instead we (techies) notice a lot of quasi-tutorial pieces (e.g. 'What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence?') in the world’s leading news media.  Most of them are written by journalists who haven’t quite cracked the code themselves on the topic.  Therefore, some are quite humorous.

Both sides of the climate change war (yes, it’s now a war) claim that 2018 was not a bad year for their respective perspectives.  For the global warmists, the latest IPCC report was their capstone for the unassailable edifice of ‘scientific proof’ that ‘preventable man-made global warming’ is happening and can be stopped without bad economic impacts.  The skeptics saw the report as a final admission that there is still no supporting science behind the whole matter.

California will be the state to watch in 2019 as all the brakes to slow down the long-promised Leftward Leap toward socialism have now been removed.  Keep your eye on the stats for one-way rentals of U-Haul trailers heading east.

RR will be meticulously read and denigrated by our local lefties, both in the blogosphere and in the more established media - we apparently live in their heads.  My wish for 2019 is that our commenters should continue to minimize their ad hominems, and put a churchillian polish on those that must be posted.  Remember, the internet is forever, even if you are a sackhead.

[2jan19 update]  This is actually an addendum to my 650am in the 28dec18 sandbox.  American autocracy, if it comes, will arrive through the ballot box.  This was also anticipated by Jefferson in his ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Numerous examples of the Left counting on such ignorance arrive daily – today’s is from Gov Cuomo of NY speaking on Ellis Island.  There he vilifies President Trump and his secure borders initiatives by reminding Americans that both Cuomo’s and Trump’s grandfathers were immigrants who came through Ellis Island.  And then with his loony leftwing logic argues that legal immigration by foreign supplicants to these shores is equivalent to aliens violating our laws by illegally crossing our border and demanding their ‘right’ to residency.  Cuomo and Democrat leaders really believe we Americans are stupid enough to swallow that argument.  If they are right, then Jefferson’s dictum will surely come to pass.

[5jan19 update]  The country’s progressives are giving high fives to the 70% marginal tax policy suggested by the newest proto-communist in Congress.  Congresswoman AOC is lauded as being spot on with her new tax policy on earned income.  Some leftwing worthies point out that in bygone days such high tax rates made the rich keep their money in investments and, therefore, that helped the economy and will do so again.  Their blindspot seems to be in what people do with all their excess disposable income.  The socialists seem to think that such people take that income in cash, and then stow it away under their mattresses – i.e. the money leaves the economy.  That, of course, is not the case at all.  The well-to-do spend that money in maintaining and expanding their expensive lifestyles, which means that it winds up in the revenues of merchants, manufacturers, and purveyors of recreational products/services.  The commerce and jobs that result from such spending constitute a tremendous boost to our entrepreneurial and innovative small and mid-size companies who are the nation’s leading employers.  None of this thinking is accessible to our collectivists and corporatists.

Scattershots – 27dec18 (updated 30dec18)

George Rebane

LIBERAL BILLIONAIRE APOLOGIZES FOR FUNDING RUSSIAN BOT ‘FALSE FLAG’  Those fun-loving Democrats just can’t leave well enough alone when the go to work getting out the vote.  In the 2016 national election Crooked Hillary and her DNC had to do some numbers ginning up dirt on the opposition, and even putting down the hammer on one of their own kind who didn’t get the hint that it wasn’t his turn (ever).  But most recently it was “billionaire Reid Hoffman (who) apologized Wednesday for funding an effort to dupe Alabama voters into believing Russian bots were fueling Republican Roy Moore’s failed senatorial bid.”  Yep, you really don’t want to get yourself into the cross-hairs of that bunch.

Truthout.org, the ultra-left (well, actually communist) opinion shaper and progressives’ moral voice, is now calling for acts of sabotage to bring down the Trump administration.  This week the summons went out to Democrat constituencies across the country (‘We Can’t Wait on a Savior to Remove Trump. We Must Resist En Masse’), followed by a specific call directed at government employees for “federal disobedience” and “noncooperation” (‘Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation’).  It is literally impossible to make this up.  Today’s Left is no different from the Bosheviks of old; when the established (constitutional) order cannot be brought down by their ideas in the public forum, then it must be attacked by all other trans-rational means available.

Most longtime RR readers know that people of the Left get a very one-sided view of the world that is dispensed by their favorite ideological wordsmiths and talking heads.  They stick to their own kind when it comes to forming their picture of the world.  And because of this, our local leftwing contingent continually creates comic relief in these comment streams when they unknowingly show up with their blinders on and claim that RR has a solo hold on ideas that counter their carefully cultivated credos.  When other readers provide links and point out contrary references in my commentaries, that information is simply ignored by our lefties as if it didn’t exist – they just continue their critiques cased in the comfort that not only do these ideas have local provenance, but that they also have limited purview.  Hence, if they can be stamped out here in their cradle, the outside world will not be infected.  BTW, here’s a laundry list of fake news that our progressives swallowed hook, line, and sinker during the past year from their faithful fountains of facts.

That old-time religion in America is on the skids.  We have been pointing out for years how the media and our educational systems have been composing recessionals to Christianity as part of their assault on western culture and civilization.  Every time new stats are collected and composed, the story becomes bleaker for our Judeo-Christian heritage.  The evidence for that is most visible during the year-end holiday season when secular humanity makes its strongest assault on the faith of our fathers.  I was directed to a current compendium on this cultural transformation by Joel Kotkin (‘As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void’) by a reader and correspondent.  After giving us the dreary numbers of how our traditional religions are being forsaken by the young moderns, despite heroic efforts by churches and temples to inject socio-political ideology into their liturgies, Kotkin documents the parallel social phenomenon of the Left desperately cobbling together new faiths to serve new gods, so that they will not miss out on that ineffable something that they see gracing the lives of the remaining Christian and Jewish holdouts.  (Here is Truthout's report this.) The real interesting news here is about the outliers of secular humanists’ fabricated faiths.  These involve the new trans-humanist faith(s?), and those churches of god without god.  Kotkin concludes his essay with –

The loss here would not only be for the faithful but the entire society. Religious institutions rooted in the past also serve as ideal transmitters of traditional culture and identity; the new ones see themselves largely as warriors of the future, based on perceived social and scientific truths. Trans-humanists, for their part, seek to reduce reality to data, rejecting much of what makes us different not only from other animals, but machines. … Ultimately, the new religions, seeking to fill the void left behind by traditional faiths, offer little to families in search of moral instruction or guidance for how different kinds of people can get along. They have no answers for addressing the reality that almost all of us alive today, despite the scheming of the trans-humanists, eventually will die. A world without the old faiths may still be spiritually engaged, even hysterically so, but we may lose the lessons of community, sacrifice, discipline and faith that the old religions taught to bind our societies together.

[28dec18 update]  “Climate change has always been the cover story, not the real issue which (is) Agenda 21 Sustainability.” writes a reader and correspondent in this morning’s email.  This year’s IPCC special report SR-15 details the real agenda that was pursued at this year’s international climate change conference in Katowice, Poland. (more here)  The global warming bamboozle continues in full force, but the real objectives for arguably the greatest wholesale fraud ever attempted on the entire world’s population are now leaking out, and there to see for everyone who cares to pay attention.  Unfortunately, humans in the aggregate are not that bright.

‘China Reins In Its Tech Giants’ reports the 28dec18 WSJ.  “The closer scrutiny of tech companies comes as Mr. Xi seeks to restore the Communist Party's pre-eminence as a force in people’s lives and to establish that the Party—and not the private sector—is charting the course for China’s future.”  Communism, like our progressive sector, has always claimed to be society’s most reliable moral compass.  Therefore, kowtowing to the Party, China’s industries like ride-sharing Didi are now hiring thousands of “Communist Party members as role models for customer service.”  For our global competitive position, this is the best news coming out of the Middle Kingdom in years.  (Here our Dems will do their best to emulate China starting 3 January 2019.)

Nokidhungry.org maintains that childhood hunger is prevalent in over ten million American households.  And this goes on under governments that have uncountable programs for helping and feeding even mildly or totally unneedy families and individuals.  Congress just passed an $867B (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’, of which 85% or $737B goes for food stamps for the poor.  For the hungry households, this computes to over $73K for each household’s annual food budget.  Cut that in half and half again, and you’d still come up with over $18K per year for groceries.  What do each of these messages convey about the extent of children going hungry – ‘In America 1 in 6 kids is starving’, ‘- does not have enough to eat’, ‘- faces hunger’.?  (nokidhungry uses the last one in its ads).  But the real question is, what’s wrong with this picture?  (Extra credit:  What’s the political persuasion of the overwhelming share of bureaucrats who have been running the food stamps program for years?)

[30dec18 update]  I was graced by Union columnist George Boardman to appear in his tomorrow's (31dec18) offering.  He quoted from the addendum to my 3jan18 KVMR commentary - "I believe the present state of affairs in the world order are the result of the spontaneously coordinated efforts of fundamental Islam and western socialism’s striving to meet Agenda21 objectives."  I invite readers to reread the complete addendum.

‘Do We Need Our Country Anymore?’

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 December 2018.]

Dr Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, asks that question in the latest (Dec 2018) issue of the Imprimis.  The answer that our public schools have been teaching for the last half century is NO.  As Arnn points out, “World leaders are now accustomed to call for the subordination of the nation for the good of the globe.”  All in preparation for “the peoples of the world (to) enter a new age of global peace, prosperity, and cooperation.”

The latest to call for the abandonment of sovereign nation-states was French president Macron on the 100^th anniversary of the WW1 armistice.  The embrace of nationalism, he argued, is the cause of wars.  And the solution is to rid ourselves of nationalism, which he defines as a people’s desire to put the interests of their nation first and foremost to a degree that ignores all transnational cooperation with other nations.  On a roll, the French leader went on to claim that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.”  In other words, if you’re a patriot, you will work to subsume your country into a larger world order, or in essence, to make it disappear.

Macron called for world leaders to “take the UN’s oath to place peace higher than anything.”  To which Dr Arnn then asks, “Higher than freedom?  Higher than justice?  Higher than the lives of our children?”

Churchill maintained that, since time immemorial, “the central principle of civilization is the subordination of the ruling authority to the settled customs of the people, and to their will as expressed through (a) constitution.”  That says civilization is constituted by populations of people with shared customs under a constitutional umbrella that explicitly spells out the communal processes and procedures they agree practice in order to form a mutually sustained society.

And for any population this can only take place under a government that has “received the broad assent of large majorities” of its citizens.  Such broad assent can only occur among a population with broadly shared values, mores, and customs.  Then other people, whose values etc differ, will also want to join with their like-minded brethren; and when they do, another political unit is born, identifying itself as a kingdom or nation distinct from all the others.

A civilized people united under a foundational document or constitution enjoys a government that settles affairs by talking things out.  The alternative is a government by force, one which rules over a fragmented and fearful population not permitted or able to talk things out.  A government that uses force to keep the peace in such a population is known as a tyranny.

There is zero chance that all the world’s peoples under a global government will be of a sufficiently like-mind on any given social issue.  Under such a behemoth government, one that preserves itself through the most sophisticated and efficacious technologies, where then can smaller groups of the like-minded go, save to the re-education camps or worse that Leviathan has prepared for such anti-social miscreants?

The clear alternative to such a future is the maintenance of a world order of sovereign nation-states comprised of peoples capable of giving broad assent for common solutions to shared problems.  With this understanding, today’s real question becomes, ‘Is America any longer such a country?’

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the 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.  And in this holiday season Jo Ann and I wish you and our entire KVMR family a healthy and productive new year.  Thank you for listening. 

Scattershots – 16dec18 (updated 20dec18)

"Distrust of experts is the cornerstone of science."  Richard Feynman

George Rebane

CA’s revenue model is a disaster as we bid adieu to Gov Moonbeam (he got the name in the 70s when he proposed the state start its own NASA).  70% of state revenues come from personal income taxes, and half of these (i.e. 35%) are paid by the top 1% of earners.  These monies come from feast-or-famine earnings, making state financial planning virtually impossible.  Dems believe in corporations bearing a heavy tax burden, and that CA has been awash with big corporations.  What’s wrong with this picture as the state’s know-nothing electorate keeps sending ever more functional idiots to Sacramento?  And what does the exiting Moonbeam say? - "CA's next governor is going to be on the edge of a cliff."

NPR told us in detail this morning that it is America’s responsibility to reduce wait-times for hordes of asylum seekers encamped on the other side of our southern border.  It doesn’t matter at what rates these thousands of hopeful migrants arrive there, the lamestream tells Americans that it is their government’s job to expand immigration handling facilities and staff so as to minimize inconvenience and discomfort to aliens who demand entry into our land.  The whole narrative is sold to our nebbishes as the need to stop the US from violating some kind of human rights if foreigners are not processed lickety-split at our border crossing points.  The not so hidden message being that if they have to wait, then it is their right to enter illegally, at which point we either let them disappear into our population, or register them and start taking care of them indefinitely.

[18dec18 update]  Single Payer fake news is revealed once more.  The socialists promoting socialized medicine all over the world have to convert the US to that government-run system, else it continues to give lie to all their efforts to run such programs in other countries.  Dr Scott Atlas, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes ‘Single Payer’s Misleading Statistics’ in which he takes apart the fake news which the lamestream and its (also local) acolytes tout about how poorly the US is doing viz the other more enlightened countries with nationalized healthcare.  Well, for openers Dr Atlas shows that “mediocre US rankings in infant mortality and life expectancy have little to do with health care quality.”  He goes on to reveal the many kinds of apples-to-oranges comparisons that fake news purveyors have relied on for years to convince many Americans that since government has screwed up so many other things it has commandeered, our healthcare industry should also be put under its care and management.

Caltrans is the latest expert on climate change.  The 18dec18 Union reports (here),  “Caltrans has released two Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments as part of an effort to understand how and where climate change may impact the State Highway System, a news release states.  The assessments evaluate risks, including extreme temperatures, increased precipitation, storm surge, wildfire risk and sea level rise. … Extreme weather and its associated costs are expected to become more pronounced and more frequent in the future as a result of climate change. … Caltrans has developed an interactive mapping application for public use, which shows impacted locations and the climate model results. … The reports and the interactive mapping application can be accessed (here).”  Note physicist Richard Feynman's caution above.

‘DeBlasio Sees Too Many Asians’ – Yes indeed, NYC’s DeBlasio is another hard-left politician who supports socially destructive diversity through blatantly racist policies - once more proving that sacrificing racism on the altar of diversity is no sin.  The mayor argues that the merit-based admission process to the city’s eight elite high schools is unjust because Asians make up more than 70% of their student bodies, whites about 20%, and Latinos and African-Americans coming in around 5%.  Hizzoner displays his critical thinking and numeracy skills by pointing out that “only 10% of Black or Latino students get offers from the specialized high schools even though they account for nearly 70% of the city’s high school population.”  Well, no kidding.  As part of its contribution to national dumbth, NYC’s 3-8^th graders overall are less than 50% proficient in English and math, while for black students only one in three and one in four are proficient respectively in English and math.  And once more, the Left continues to do what it can in every sphere of public policy to promote America-last policies on the world stage.

[20dec18 update]  Pulling out of Syria.  This is a big step in the implementation of our Mideast policy.  I usually weigh in on such happenings, and here’s my two cents of Rebane Doctrine.  Unless we want to completely abandon the Mideast to let them settle their affairs with only Russian and Chinese meddling, I think Trump is making a mistake in pulling out the remaining 2K US troops from Syria.  This move will give ISIS a second wind to retrench as Turkey et al will attack our Kurdish allies in Syria – ISIS will stand aside and watch its enemies beat crap out of each other.  I am a longstanding proponent of Kurdistan, and see a strong Kurdish state made from contiguous pieces of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as contributing mightily to Mideast stability, and acting as the bulwark against Iran’s establishing its strategic ‘arc to the Mediterranean’.  The new Kurdistan would stand smack dab in the way of that, and having their own nation would bring an end to the Turks’ decades long fight in their south-east with Kurdish militants.

The US staying in Syria to maintain the current power balance is a hell of a lot better politically and logistically than pulling out and then having to go back in for a number of reasons, all bad for US interests.  But if we decide to leave the Mideast altogether, then the Turks and Iran will probably wind up going to war over who will be the new regional hegemon.  We will lose the trust of the regional semi-allies – Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt – we still have left, all of whom will seek other accommodations with Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China.  And then we’ll have to go back in later to protect Israel, which will be totally on its own in the region.  Are we then going to abandon Israel to use its nuclear capability to defend itself, or will we have to go back in at multiples of the political, dollar, and human costs to keep our promise to the Jewish state?  President Trump hasn’t told us what his druthers are about our staying in the region, or pulling up stakes and letting radical Islam have a real go at dominating the entire Mideast.  All things considered, a bit by piece pullout is not the answer to any problem.

CA Exodus Denied

George Rebane

The exodus of the producers and the productive from California has been a recurring theme on RR ever since the Democrats assumed total control, turned the state into the nation’s home for welfare recipients, started raising taxes and fees as if there were no tomorrow, and opened its gates to illegal aliens.  Essentially, the Democratic super-majority has turned the state into a sanctuary from sanity.  Among the reams of data presented to buttress the exodus argument, a reader sent me the graphic below that highlights just one aspect of nationwide migrations – and these are NET migrations – from/to our country’s prominent metropolitan areas (more here).

This shows that from LA alone we have a net outflow of 46,720 people per year.  And do you think these are the gimmes who think they’ll get more sanctuary protections and better government bennies from some other state?

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]

Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds?  Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue?  Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.

Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk.  The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round.  When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.

While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit.  And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps.  Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.

Scattershots – 10dec18 (updated 13dec18)

George Rebane

Laffer lives, tax rates do affect people’s behavior.  French president Macron and his government have discovered that over the last couple of weeks, and are now retreating from the attempt to wean their country from fossil fuels by boosting the price of such fuels for French consumers and workers.  The monetary losses already suffered in the country’s economy, and therefore tax revenues (France already has one of the world’s highest aggregate tax rates) have yet to be totaled, but the sum could easily be in the billions of dollars.  The bottom line is that no one any longer believes that their government’s tax increases will have any positive impact on global warming.  None of this is a lesson to or understood by America’s Left.

Schumer was for border security before he became a champion of open borders.  It’s hard to believe that Senator Chuck had such sentiments about illegal aliens, and told us all that “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.”  Today only a shrinking share of courageous Republicans can say the words which so forcefully came from the mouth of one of Democrats’ leading forked tongues in 2009.  You can see the senator’s Georgetown Law School two-minute summary of the topic here.  How come every voter in the US has not seen this little video?

Our local lefties are happy dancing in the streets celebrating Nevada County’s role in California’s recent Blue Wave, and ascribing all kinds of community bennies to the advent of coastal progressives moving into these foothills.  What’s astounding about that celebration is the celebrants’ claim that our county is therefore taking part in all the good things cultural and economic in which California is supposed to already lead the country.  None of these people are aware of the real stats on California’s decline culturally, commercially, and into criminality.  The exodus of middle-class workers, retirees, and businesses continues unabated, and unreported by the lamestream.  Kinda reminds one of the progress reports that always adorned the pages of Pravda in the old days of the USSR, and to a great extent still do under Putin.

George Boardman again lambasts LaMalfa (here).  Our favorite Union columnist and stalwart apologist for the Left on these pages singles out our congressman for his rice farm subsidies that the recent (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’ promises to continue.  The cleverly crafted conclusion that Mr Boardman bestows on his readers is that Doug LaMalfa somehow stands out as the leading leech of farm subsidies which are distributed far and wide across the land.  Moreover, our columnist again implies that it would be a simple matter for LaMalfa to decline his subsidies were he only made of stiffer stuff.  (I leave it to the reader to decide how much of this is fake news viz opinionated commentary, as also found on these pages.  For the record, RR has been and remains opposed to farm subsidies and corporatism.)  But nowhere does Boardman profit his audience by telling them that 85% of the farm bill is the carefully camouflaged food stamp welfare bill – that would mangle the carefully crafted message.  In fact, there are over 40M Americans on food stamps, more than the 37M population of Canada.

‘History Ended in 1945’, so argues James Dobbins, former assistant SecState who now holds the Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy at the RAND Corporation.  He maintains that “undoing the postwar order could produce global depressions and frequent wars.”  This has been a general theme of Rebane Doctrine, and has been debated here for years.  I found the following excerpt as a particularly strong endorsement for continuing capitalism, the Westphalian world order, and America as a global hegemon.

Yet in a larger sense, the “end of history” came in 1945. Since then there have been no wars between major powers and few between smaller states. The business cycle has been moderated if not eliminated. The subsequent seven decades saw almost continuous economic growth, lifting nearly half the world’s population into the middle class.

These accomplishments are based on two basic, widely accepted norms of international behavior: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s territory, and thou shall open thy markets to all equally. The norms were buttressed by numerous postwar institutions—the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization. Equally important, the norms were backed by U.S. military and economic power and the attractiveness of the American political and economic model.

Trump’s NDA payoffs.  Quite often Non-Disclosure Agreements are part of quid pro quo contracts.  Why is Trump singled out for such a contract that involved alleged events before he became a candidate, and the effect of which on the election is debatable and yet to be demonstrated?  Didn’t Hillary also pay staff (possibly with government or campaign funds) to scrub servers of contents which definitely would have had an impact on her electability including potential criminality?  No one has made a peep about that.

[13dec18 update]  Apple to build $1B, 15K job facility in TX - “ choosing Austin as its marquee job-creation locale” - among other locations across the country.  Progressives (especially the looney local lefties) need to strap on yet another set of blinders in order to continue denying the Great California Exodus that is moving producers and the productive out of state. (more here)

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense.  I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD.  But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed.  I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.

The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’  He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.”  What??!!

Plastics and more from CO2

George Rebane

The latest chapter in the global climate change hysteria was published last week.  The ‘4^th National Climate Assessment, Vol2’ (NCA4V2) purported to summarize for light readers the dreadful fate that will surely befall all of us were we not to immediately put in place policies that would pauper ALL developed countries.   This is the only reason the others are not willing to commit economic suicide, and instead relegating their earth preserving wrath into versions of public outrage against the US for not willing to fly solo into that mountain of politicized climate science.

NCA4V1 was published last year, and contained the then ignored ‘science’ behind the current version of the hysteria.  Now that NCA4V2, the political summary of the 1,500+ page NCA4, has issued, scores of scientists and analysts, not on the climate change payroll, have again reviewed the purported science, and again concluded that both volumes represent a big nothing-burger at best and fake news at worst.  Specifically, the rebuttals echo the years of identical arguments presented on RR, and can be stated compactly as –

1. The NCA4V1 results are calculated from over two dozen general circulation models (GCMs), none of which agree, and some of them clearly implausible;
2. None of the GCMs “used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.”

We are alerted by Russ Steele (here) to one of the more comprehensive analyses of NCA4 by Andy May (here).  In there May points out that even in the NCA4’s summary, the economic effects of the predicted climate change are minuscule, and most certainly contain no verifiable demonstration that human activity is the controlling cause of the GCMs’ predicted temperature change(s), not that reducing such activities would have any significant effect on the perpetual dynamics of earth’s climate.

OK, so what’s the latest that real technology and science have to say about that dastardly GHG, yes, CO2.  Well, as reported by New Atlas (here) it turns out that a team of scientists at Rutgers University have achieved an artificial photosynthesis breakthrough that promises to allow the manufacture of plastics, resins, and pharmaceuticals “on the cheap”.  The overview of the process is shown in the figure, and the complete story is published in Energy & Environmental Science (Issue 9, 2018 here).

The point to be made here is that the realworld is rapidly giving lie to the climate change hysteria mongers rushing to put us on a one-way road to global governance and its inevitable autocracy cum tyranny.  The real climate change is not what’s being sold to the world’s masses, and accelerating technology continues to produce environment sustaining solutions without government diktats, driven by (gasp), yes, capitalism.  “With patents in hand, the (Rutgers) team will now work toward commercializing the technology.”

Scattershots – 27nov18 (updated 28nov18)

George Rebane

Climate Hysteria Continues.  Along with many other analysts, Steve Koonin in the 26nov18 WSJ reports (here) that “Headlines warned of economic doom after the U.S. government released its fourth National Climate Assessment last week. Yet a close reading of the report shows that the overall economic impact of human-caused climate change is expected to be quite small.”  The report has more holes in it than swiss cheese, but it is the latest blast to continue political pressure on the ignorant and poorly read to start ‘doing something’ to materially hobble the US economy in order to ‘prevent a climate catastrophe’.  None of it holds water, and as Koonin points out, a closer reading debunks its main alarums.  Here assemble government agencies that in their best days cannot reliably predict next week’s weather or next quarter’s GDP, all pretending to tell us what the world will be like 75 years from now.  The report’s survival in the public forum does not reflect well on our collective intelligence.

Presumption of innocence is one of the seminal starting points of any adjudication of guilt in enlightened western societies, and has been so for a couple of centuries now.  Not so according to a Mr Pete Williams as he pits his logic against the recent Kavanaugh hearings.  His letter in the 26nov18 Union (here) argues “the presumption of innocence applies in criminal cases, not civil law suits or administrative matters such as applications for security clearances, job interviews, or hearings to gather information on prospective appointees, like Kavanaugh. The theory behind the presumption of innocence applying only to criminal cases is that it is better that a guilty person escape conviction than for an innocent prison(sic) to be sent to prison. The Supreme Court hearings are not a criminal proceeding — and thus the presumption of innocence was not applicable to the Kavanaugh hearings.”  This terminally progressive gentleman reveals what will be the demeanor of their star chamber courts when the socialists cum communists finally achieve their primacy in the halls of our government (e.g. Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s).  What the gentleman totally misses is the significant nuance that the receipt of a security clearance or similar benefice (e.g. corporate job) is not a constitutional right, it is a privilege to be properly granted by the government charged with the nation’s security.  Its refusal does not destroy the applicant.  However, in cases – administrative, civil, congressional, etc – where a nominee’s reputation, ability to continue his career, and to care for his family is put on the line, all western civilized cultures have tacitly accepted the premise that the burden to prove condemning accusations rests on the accuser, and not their defense on the gratuitously accused.  This distinction is totally lost on our Left, hence RR and other voices consider these lopsided sentiments to be a danger to the very foundations of our way of life – but apparently not of theirs.

[28nov18 update] As the last echoes of the election die down, we should always be reminded of the words of Josif Vissarionovich Stalin - "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Ruminations – 23nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Don Rogers, ex-hotshot firefighter and now publisher of The Union, writes a good piece (here) in today’s newspaper in which he instructs readers about believing hasty predictions about 'new normals' of cold, hot, wet, and dry in California’s weather patterns.  He confirms what we have been preaching for years on these pages about wildfires (recently here).  Mr Rogers’ piece concludes with, “In any case, the path forward includes no small amount of smoke. The fires will burn, but we do have some choice about when. Our best firefighting, perhaps paradoxically, includes setting the forest alight. Basically burn now, when the weather's right, before we burn up later.” (also see 24nov18 update below)

For us history buffs, preeminent living war historian Max Hastings has produced another masterpiece – Vietnam, an epic tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) - which may become the definitive history of that decades-long conflict.  I strongly recommend his entire oeuvre, and highlight two must reads – Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (2005) and Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (2007) – that document the last years of WW2 in Europe and in the Pacific.  (Longtime readers know that I claim intimate knowledge of the contents of the former.)

‘A $15 Minimum Wage Goes National’ - Nancy Pelosi wants to boost the wage floor far higher than the historical average.  So writes Michael Saltsman in the 23nov18 WSJ.  What progressives and their communist brethren never seem to understand is that such wage controls – especially large ones like this $15/hr would be – always harm the workers and consumers, i.e. the economy.  If the central planners really want to shove more money into workers’ shorts, then why not raise the minimum wage to $100/hr or even $500/hr – then everyone would be happy dancing in the street (for about five minutes).  None of these leftists learn from history of how such merit-removing policies mangle markets – the prices of everything would increase accordingly – without providing any longer term benefits to anyone save the politicians who count on the votes of the ignorant.

[24nov18 update]  This RL Crabb graphic was filched from today’s copy of The Union where Bob is their duty political cartoonist.  I particularly enjoyed this edition of Bob’s work where he sticks his creative big toe into more artistic waters.  My hope is that perhaps he can ease off a bit from his (not so) ‘middle of the road’ observations of our politics, and offer us a richer sampling of his more philosophical and contemplative renditions.

The tragic Camp and Woolsey Canyon wildfires have made news and also a lot of fake news in the last couple of weeks.  A more measured view (here) of these disasters is available from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, which in part reads -

An enormous debate has developed over the cause of both fires.  Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown has loudly proclaimed that climate change deniers are “definitely contributing” to the onslaught of new fires. But the best evidence says otherwise. Global temperature increase has been nil over the last 20 or so years, notwithstanding the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Similarly, the repeated claims that we have had more unstable global climate patterns within that period is likewise false. According to Professor David B. South of Auburn University, “data suggest that extremely large megafires were four-times more common before 1940” than today, even though CO2 levels were lower.

[26nov18 update]  Migrants now rushing our southern border.  Remember just a week or so ago these thousands of people were walking toward us over a thousand miles away.  It was supposed to take them weeks to walk to the border.  Then suddenly all kinds of transportation and logistical support appeared for the marchers.  Hard to keep arguing that all this was a spontaneous exodus from their home countries.  Now who provided the money for all this, and who is providing the political welcome into America?  This question is actually a freebie, since Ocasio-Cortez, the Dems' new ignoramus in Congress, is today publicly comparing this mass attempt to illegally enter the US to the Jewish Holocaust survivors' illegal entry into Palestine after WW2.

GM exits sedans, and plans to lay off about 18K workers in the US.  Decades ago the Rebanes could not figure out why any family would want to buy a sedan as opposed to a van or SUV or the station wagon of yore.  Sedans were such inefficiently designed vehicles, especially for a growing family.  Finally the entire country is getting the message as sedan sales are "sliding" industry wide in favor of pickups and SUVs.  For years now our stable has housed a van, SUV, and a pickup.  Hopefully, government mandated electric vehicle production will not prevent the return of those jobs as the car companies start producing more of the vehicles which the market actually demands.

Scattershots – 22nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Forcible female mutilation is again legal in America.  “A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. law banning female genital mutilation was unconstitutional and dismissed charges against several doctors in Michigan who carried out the procedure on underage girls as part Muslim sect’s religious practice. … U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that Congress had no authority to enact a law that criminalizes female genital mutilation (FGM). “As despicable as [FGM] may be… [Congress] overstepped its bounds” by banning the procedure, the judge said.” (more here)

Two things – imagine, if let stand, the precedence this ruling sets for all kinds of primitive practices if they are claimed in the name of this or that religious practice (and focus on the ‘forcible’ part); also, did anyone notice that it was FN that broke this news, while it was totally eschewed by the likes of lamestream’s MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, … .  Begrudgingly, 24 hrs late, leftwing outlets such the NYT started reporting on it.  But the news doesn’t fit the Left’s pro-Muslim narrative even though they should all be enraged at the anti-woman implications of this barbarous practice.  It’s tough making such choices when you have a dysfunctional ideology that you must then promote with an incoherent narrative.

Women in world class chess are not very prominent.  Today the unequal and asymmetric roles of women are much in the news and an entire politically correct protocol has emerged about how we should think about women viz men, and how we should speak about such things.  The ongoing world chess championship match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana (here) is renewing interest in the questions of ‘where are the women, and why aren’t they represented in such matches?’  Well, there are all kinds of answers.  An interesting one is presented by Alisha Mathewson-Grand who argues (here) that women’s chess needs more coverage than current interest warrants, and that they are not as good as men because an insufficient number of them play the game to create enough right-tail outliers in the game’s skill distribution (admittedly tech talk).  My view is that instead of creating some artificial demand for women chess players, women should just play the men in normal tournaments and beat them to generate broader female interest in the game.  Overall, I think this gender stuff in chess is a non-issue, a nothing-burger if you will.  (I wonder how a transgender woman champion will be viewed by the politically correct population.)

Man vs Machine.  My real interest in human championship chess actually resides in a new class of interests for me.  How should we humans think of continuing to compete in activities in which our abilities are clearly outclassed by machines.  Ever since Kasparov was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, the best chess players on this planet are no longer humans.  Continuing matches like the current Carlsen/Carauna contest are strictly Junior Varsity.  No human chess master today would take the time and make the effort to be publicly humiliated by a better chess-playing machine.  The same dethronement happened recently in the even more complex game of Go.  It all reminds us again of the lore of John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man (here and here), that introduced America to the notion early in the industrial age that bit by piece man would be bettered by machines as time went on.  Is our (waning?) interest in human world chess championships a harbinger of how pre-Singularity humans will continue to compliment themselves in various endeavors in which they have been bettered?  And will they persist in these self-adulatory activities as the daily advance of technology outdoes them in skill after skill that require advanced cognition, sensing, dexterity, speed, and strength?  Can we also start augmenting our own bodies in these pre-Singularity years (jumping the gun in becoming trans-humans) with advanced embedded processing, memory, connectivity, prosthetics for sensing, mobility, and manipulanda, …?

Border security and judicial bias political?  That's what the media claims that President Trump brought up politics in his Thanksgiving calls to our troops.  First, I don't think so.  Border security is a non-partisan issue that the anti-American Left has made political in its opposition.  Judicial bias in the US is blatant and unabashed, and it has been so deemed by all sides in their turn.  Chief Justice Roberts spoke out of the wrong end when he created the latest batch of fake news by bloviating that America's judges, once empaneled, are hardworking, unbiased jurists.  Nothing could be further from the truth, else neither side would so readily sacrifice honesty and honor in opposing the other side's picks.  The president was on the mark and correct in pointing these out during his calls; and BTW, he's their CIC and gets to do that all day long if he wants to.  The last thing he should be guided by is the hate-Trump sentiments of his political enemies.

[26nov18 update]  Why Nevada County indeed?  Russ Steele, NC native and RR contributor, writes a letter to The Union in today’s edition that nails the particulars behind that question.  Here it is in its entirety –

Erika Kosina wrote in Digital disruption: Tech, entrepreneurial ecosystem paves way for growth, "All we need to do is connect the dots."

Yes, let's connect the dots, all the dots.

Dot #1: Lack of affordable housing for young families fleeing urban blight. According to Joel Kotkin, millennials with family are looking for single family homes with a safe yard for their children.

Dot #2: Young families with children are looking for communities with quality schools. Nevada County has the Ghidotti Early College High School with a small number of students, but the recent Common Core testing indicates many Nevada County Schools would not make the competitive cut.

Dot #3: The work-at-home population needs to have high-speed internet access, and broadband in Nevada County has some severe limitations.

Dot #4: The target populations are prolific smartphone users and expect robust cell phone coverage, which can be a challenge in Nevada County.

Given the lack of affordable single-family homes with a yard, a high-speed broadband connection, with robust cell phone service, all near top-rated schools, why would a young family choose to move to Nevada County, when there are more competitive options in other states?

Khashoggi affair resolved

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 November 2018.]

President Trump announced yesterday that the US would not pursue the Khashoggi murder by Saudi government agents.  The president’s reasoning was clear and eminently rational.  As anticipated, our leftwing received it with howls of disapproval that accused the president of all manner of sins violating international norms founded on morals and ethics and law and human rights and God knows what else they could pile on, when the decision actually violated nothing of the sort.  BTW, full disclosure, even some Republican politicians got their noses out of joint.

Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a dissident Saudi journalist whose commentary and news coverage were critical of the kingdom’s ruling Saud family.  In mid-east countries like Saudi Arabia you don’t get to mess with the rulers without some consequences coming your way.  Let’s face it, that is their culture, these are not nations of laws with guaranteed rights and constitutional strictures which prescribe what their governments can and cannot do.  Most nations in the second and third worlds are ruled by ruthless men who are corrupt autocrats at best, and cruel tyrants at worst.

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  Isaac Asimov

George Rebane

The combined body count of the Camp and Woolsey Canyon fires has topped 100 with an additional 1,000 missing.  Perusing the lamestream media without second thought, one comes away with the understanding that, at best, the fires are one of the regular unpreventable disasters that regularly visit California’s wild lands due to natural causes out of our control.  At worst, we learn that the fires are really due to global warming which now has created the conditions for these inevitable holocausts.  Moreover, they could be prevented were we only to implement the prescribed surefire policies to stop, or even roll back, global warming.

As a lifelong (60+ years) California resident and a student of its land, weather, and horticulture, I join with those who have a radically different view of the state’s regular wildfires and public policies that can greatly reduce their frequency, magnitude, and cost to life and property.

The state’s weather record shows two centuries of periodic droughts which have dried the forests, given rise to infestations by various critters, and to wildfires mostly caused by lightning strikes.  The fall ‘Santa Ana’ winds have always done their best to spread the fires, but with limited success until modern times.  Why?  Over the ages our forests evolved not only to survive fires, but actually require their regular occurrence to continue their life cycles.  The major characteristics of the age-old forests was the irregular density of trees (into copses) that prevented long distance/perimeter burns and which densities were maintained by the burns that did occur.  A little technical reflection quickly explains why such configurations became the survivable ‘steady state’ configuration of the forests.  (A more detailed look at the changes in the Sierra forests is documented by George E. Gruell in the rather pricey Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.)

Then arrived the hubristic Regulatus Californicus who knew better than the established natural order.  Starting in the 1960s and building on Smokey the Bear (born in 1944), this rapidly evolving breed of humanity quickly latched on to ‘saving the ecology’ as their raison d’etre for launching an unheard level of regulatory controls over peoples lives and property, enforced by an ever-enlarging Leviathan in Sacramento.  In the 1970s they discovered catastrophic climate change to add to their causus belli on the rest of us Californians.  They initially took the wrong tack and argued ‘global cooling’ with the advent of a new ice age, caused by CO2 and other atmospheric gases linked to humans that were supposed to be reflecting too much sunlight.

But even with the state’s growing dumbth, it was hard to harness cooling as an adequate basis for enlarging the regulatory state.  So it was time to reverse the role of these gases from reflecting sunlight to retaining earth’s build-up of heat, and the great greenhouse gas gambit was born with CO2 now starring in its new role.  Some scientists quickly pointed out that we knew very little about earth’s carbon cycle and even less about long-term climate modeling, and most certainly not enough to reliably calculate (aka blame) any temperature changes on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  These scientists were quickly shouted down, and their grant monies to study the carbon cycle dried up.  And that has been their fate as the UN’s IPCC gathered the willing technocrats under its well-funded umbrella and became the voice of preventable man-made global warming.

The ‘true believers’ aka fanatical ecological nutcases, or simply econuts, now had a real arrow in their quiver – consensus science interpreted through selective faith-based lenses.  And they have been off to the races ever since 1995 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report – an evolving set of documents that now have had to be redacted, rewritten, revised, and re-issued many times over the years so as to keep the desired narrative in line with the vagaries of uncooperative weather patterns.

In the interval, the nation’s politically imperious progressive wave continued to grow as reflected in the staffs of federal regulatory agencies and, more importantly, in all elements of California governments ranging from Sacramento down to local leftwing NGOs funded to propagandize, monitor, and report on the state’s progress toward becoming 'green'.  And that, of course, included prohibiting any intervention, save heroic fire prevention and suppression efforts, in fostering the growth of high-density forests complete with huge ground level accumulations of duff and slash (“organic waste”).  All this has been done in the name of preserving the econuts’ vision of the natural order of fauna and flora on government lands, while in reality doing exactly the opposite as they created a wholesale unnatural order of wildland preservation never before seen on this earth.

And the bittersweet comedy continues unabated, as our progressive elites, in California and elsewhere, continue to blame the current spate of wildfires on climate change, even as they begin to evince micro-epiphanies, albeit sub-rosa, about the reality that decades of unnatural forest fuels build-ups is actually the dominant contributive cause of the devastations we have witnessed in recent years.  However, these leftwing central planners have yet to develop a public-ready narrative to effectively deflect the raw truth so that Californians – econuts and their voting legions of double dummy compliant constituents – can discover the cause of these holocausts by simply looking into a mirror.

(The Rebanes' up-close and personal experience with California wildfires was reported here, here, and here.)

Nationalism cum Patriotism

'Nationalism unites; tribalism divides.'

George Rebane

The concept and notion of nationalism is now thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued across western countries.  The gist of the conversation or debate over nationalism is that it has been incorporated into the Left’s trans-national narrative as something that today portends giving rise to the more sinister angels of our collective nature.  To be more precise, leftwing politicians here and in Europe have unleashed the message that nationalism implies ‘white nationalism’ which implies ‘ethnic exclusion’ which represents the strong form of ‘racism’.  The lamestream media's daily outpouring makes all this very explicit, and it is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the leftwing grassroots.  An example of this reveals itself in recent comment streams found in these pages.

French president Macron did no one a favor by lecturing Trump that “nationalism is counter to patriotism” while defining his understanding of neither term (more here).  Such simple and unexamined semantic conquests continue to be the modus operandi of how language is co-opted into politically correct newspeak.  In more measured moments each of us can look up the pre-progressive definition of nationalism to find it means –

"Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland." (Wikipedia)

Nationalism is “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nationalism, “the strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.” (dictionary.com)

From these, and other such definitions, we see a common thread in an operational sense.  Nationalism is simply the ideological tenet that describes a nationalist as one who puts the interests of his own nation first when contending, comparing, or competing with other nations.  As such, there is nothing pejorative about any of these semantic variants.  And anyone of any color, religion, ethnicity, etc can join with others similarly distinguishable as a fellow nationalist to promote the sovereignty of a given nation-state.  (Sen Marco Rubio also expands on this here.)

Patriotism is nothing more or less that the expression of national pride within “the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.” (Wikipedia)  In other words patriotism is the display, exercise, and/or implementation of nationalism - i.e. patriotism is the practice and maintenance of nationalism.

Things get dicier when we start adding modifiers to create ‘white nationalism’ and ‘black nationalism’.  A white nationalist is not simply a nationalist of the Caucasian variety.  No, no, no.  The progressive definition of white nationalist has overt racial overtones such as white supremacy AND white separatism (two semantically orthogonal notions).  Today being called a white nationalist clearly assigns you to the deplorably racist neo-Nazi camp without any chance of redemption or opportunity to explain yourself using more precise language.

A black nationalist is not so encumbered, and enjoys a very asymmetrical definition.  “Black nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism in the United States which seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black national identity for people of black ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Nation of Islam and Black Power are functional expressions of such black nationalism.  Any such reciprocal notions of promoting, developing, or maintaining a white national identity for people of white ancestry is strictly forbidden.  Moreover, evincing any efforts in those directions will get you placed on several lists of suspect and bad people that are maintained by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  And should such leanings be known in your workplace, you likely will soon be unemployed.

For the record, there is no evidence that nationalist Republicans, Libertarians, conservetarians, conservatives, or Tea Party members embrace additional attributes of nationalism than those included in the above definitions.  However, this conclusion does not fit the narrative of the Left, ranging from so-called moderate Democrats to their most fringe socialist cum communist cadres.  The America of the non-Left is, has always been, and will remain an evil nation-state.  And of this, our children must continue to be carefully taught in union dominated public schools and academe.