Rebane's Ruminations

That Which Must Not Be Known

George Rebane

In free societies merit and its reward will always seek a commensurate level.

As we enter the Biden years, America’s Left has a once in a lifetime opportunity to permanently tip the scales and guide the country into the Marxist future they have been seeking since the Bolshevik Revolution a century ago.  Following Lenin’s dictum in educating our young, our Left, in its co-opting of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control for the last half-century of the country’s public education.  And by all available observables and measurables (e.g. National Center for Educational Statistics) they have now produced an America that in the large reflects what the late Steve Allen referred to as “national dumbth”.  Today merit has been replaced by mediocrity (more here). The best illustration of this is the political behavior of our least well-read neighbors who have shown themselves to be robotically compliant to the state and its corporatist manufactured reality.

The eternal goal of collectivist autocracies is to evolve humankind into an amalgamated society that will respond reliably to top-down rule.  A major tool for creating such a population has been the successful decoupling of merit and reward in the American mind.  This has been achieved by appeal to the siren songs of ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’, each having malleable and/or implied meanings that are fashioned daily to promote the latest state diktat.

The demonstrable aspect of the merit/reward principle in determining human behavior has some compelling corollaries -

1. Merit always has an open market price.
2. When reward for recognized merit is withheld, the level of delivered merit declines.
3. When reward for recognized merit is lavished, it invites an increased supply of merit.

This universal principle is totally counter to collectivist ideologies in general and today’s progressivist narrative in particular.  The command-and-control elites of autocratic governments understand the merit/reward relationship, and use it cynically in shaping public policies designed to hide its teachings.

Facts, Speech, and Reach

George Rebane

We are all isolated from ‘facts’ by at least one layer of biased intermediaries.

In recent editions of our local Union we continue to read its columnists and letter writers who devoutly believe in and repeatedly cite versions of the late Senator Moynihan’s famous dictum – ‘You are free to have your own opinions, but not your own facts.’  In recent years our polarized country has demonstrated countless times that in addition to their own opinions, people now have their own histories, logics, social contracts, ethics, science, sense of justice, equality, equity, lexicons of highly charged terms, and, not least of all, their very own facts – and all of these backed by equally countless online citations.  The NYT acknowledges all this, asking “How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?”  All of these realities are proudly on display in their heartfelt and intense communications that promote their own worldviews.  Who among us is the final arbiter of any of these cultural and ideological notions to pronounce that this is truth and that is not?

Dark Days Diary – 1feb21 (updated 3feb21)

George Rebane

The latest 2^nd Amendment attack is in progress.  HR127 has been introduced in the House (here).  The high hard one starts with, “The Attorney General, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, shall establish a system for licensing the possession of firearms or ammunition in the United States, and for the registration with the Bureau of each firearm present in the United States.”  From there it gets worse, in Sec (c)(1)(A) the law would require all Americans possessing firearms to have each one registered, each type of ammunition registered, pass a criminal background check, pass a psychological evaluation, successfully complete a training course, and take out a special firearms insurance policy.  This is called constructive abrogation of the 2^nd Amendment.  From there it is one short step to subsequent prohibition and “surrendering” of select firearms since their owners and locations will be known by the feds.  Violation of any of the bill’s strictures carry long minimum prison sentences and fines that will leave the overwhelming fraction of Americans destitute.  The total disarming of law-abiding American citizens is the goal.  Criminals, illegal aliens, terrorists, … will not be affected.

How the Democrats killed thousands of Americans, and many others elsewhere, is now coming to light.  Starting in the spring of 2020, the Dems and their lamestream lackies strongly opposed Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin for use against C19. (example here)  Why?  Because President Trump spoke hopefully about the effectiveness of HCQ as demonstrated in the EU, Africa, and Asia.  The Democrat Death machine would have nothing get in the way of their narrative that the Trump administration was mismanaging the country’s C19 response – high body counts were the gold standard for their allegations.  If thousands had to die in order to keep their election-year imperative a viable issue (they had no other policies to offer) in the daily news, then so be it – it was all for the greater omelet, and more than a few eggs needed to be cracked.  Well, it turns out that these well-established medicines have proven to be huge lifesavers around the world (more here), and now that Biden is in office, even the FDA is putting HCQ on its approval list (here).  HCQ has proven very effective as a therapeutic in the early stages of C19, and Ivermectin is probably the hands down champion cheap drug for both prevention and treatment of C19.  Since the US is seen as the leader in C19 response policies, the death counts, when totaled with other countries similarly delaying the use of these drugs, may number in the millions.  Collectivist politics über alles – historically, whatever they touch is followed by death and desolation.  (There are other news references to this revisionist policy which I'll dig out later.)

[2feb21 update]  Re the efficacy of politically incorrect medicines like HCQ and Ivermectin for C19 prevention and treatment, we had a routine visit with our physician today and the conversation inevitably turned to the pandemic.  We talked extensively about alternative prophylactics and therapeutics to the anti-viral Remdesivir and the recently developed vaccines.  To make a long story short, our physician and colleagues have for months now been taking a daily dose of HCQ.  He confirmed that almost all we’ve heard about the pandemic and the ‘science’ behind the response policies is utter bullshit.  We will now join him in this regimen and get our first vaccination shot next week.  Our litigious justice system, abetted by the corporatists’ social media and the Democrats’ lamestream, advise against the broad dissemination of this knowledge, but it does not prohibit their practicing ‘Physician, heal thyself!’

[3feb21 update]  More on the Democrat C19 killing machine.  The 3feb21 WSJ reports (here) on corporatist YouTube’s recent censorship of critical lifesaving testimony to the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – “(Google's YouTube) censors testimony from physicians on early treatment for Covid-19 patients.”  At that hearing two medical experts gave evidence of the efficacy of alternative medicines in the treatment of C19, one of which was Ivermectin. Dr Pierre Kory reported on the most recently published clinical study of that medicine involving 1,200 healthcare workers, 800 of whom received Ivermectin and 400 received a placebo.  Subsequently, none of the 800 contracted C19 while 58% of the 400 did.  The Democrat-led warpath against Trump has kept America’s healthcare institutions on tenterhooks to do nothing that would draw the wrath of leftwing politicos and their lamestream legions.  As a result, America early on rejected regimens using safe and established medicines that could have saved thousands of lives and mitigated the draconian lockdowns that have destroyed so much of our economy – all to support their drumbeat narrative of Trump’s mishandling the country’s response to the pandemic.

‘Speech and Sedition in 2021’

George Rebane

That is the title of the important lead editorial (here) in the 30jan21 WSJ, and very relevant to the ongoing discussions and debates on these pages.  The whole notion of speech-based sedition arose with the Federalists who essentially ran the government of the newly born United States.  The Federalists and their agencies, did not consider themselves as a political party, they simply saw themselves as THE government when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.  Therefore, any speech that opposed them or their ideas opposed the government, and was therefore by definition seditious.  The Democrats of today have overwhelmed themselves into the same government positions and the same mindset.

Today the WaPo again supplies one of the abundant confirmations of this by arguing that the Federalists’ stratagems with such legislation and its enforcements did not go far enough, and was therefore “flawed”.  This is buttressed by Democrats who “increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.”

India Cracks COVID Code (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

For many weeks now we’ve been hearing a lot about the astounding C19 stats coming out of India.  Their rate of confirmed C19 cases is shown in the figure below as compiled by Johns Hopkins University.  And how have they achieved such astounding results?

The answer lies in the country’s taking a radically different tack for both C19 prevention and therapeutics that emphasizes the use of off-shelf anti-viral and anti-parasitic drugs which have been dunned by our healthcare industry, both private and governmental.  The more complete story is told in ‘India Develops Effective COVID Treatment for Under $3 Per Person While America Remains in Vaccine Frenzy’.  (H/T to reader) The bottom line is that India’s government distributes anti-C19 packets – labelled Ziverdo – based on Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine (early on touted by President Trump) that cost about $2.65 each.  I have posted on both Ivermectin and HCQ which have yet to receive AMA or FDA approval while big pharma’s expensive vaccines have enjoyed an historical fast track into people’s arms.

Ziverdo kits are available from multiple sources (here) for those wishing to lay in an extra layer of protection against C19.  Ziverdo is reported effective both as a prophylactic and a therapeutic as demonstrated by the available hospitalization and mortality stats.

One reason why the lamestream does not publicize this news is that early on President Trump was in favor of existing bio-chemical medicines to fight C19, an approach that did not comport with the Left’s making the pandemic as bad as possible during the 2020 election year.  Why outlets like FN have not picked up on this is a puzzle to me.  Yet one more item to add to the evidence for the ongoing global fraud. (more here)  Perhaps readers have better insights.

[30jan21 update]  Apparently Congress and the federal government has been fully apprised of India’s major response to C19 with it dispensing of millions of Ziverdo kits to be used as both a prophylactic and a therapeutic.  In our media we have heard nothing of this; how come?  Here is a report of recent testimony to the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, and here another study recommending use of Ivermectin.  Everyone’s lips seemed to be securely sealed.  (H/T to reader)

For more information on the Ziverdo kits and their recommended usage, here is the website of one of its purveyors.

Dark Days Diary – 28jan21 (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

Quietech in Grass Valley is a very capable local computer service store owned and run by Melissa Hannebrink.  The Rebanes have been satisfied customers since Melissa’s retired father established the business.  This morning Melissa sent her customers an email that begins with, “I am writing you today with a very heavy heart. As I have shared with some of you, here at Quietech we have endured daily abuse over the past 10 months. By enforcing basic COVID guidelines, there are some who feel their rights are being infringed upon. In addition, we have some who walk through our doors and are so disappointed to find that they aren’t next in line, or that they can’t have their device fixed on-the-spot, that they have full-blown tantrums. These unfulfillable expectations, in addition to the pressures of COVID, seem to be creating the perfect storm for abuse, shockingly even from some of our longest-standing clients. This morning, we had an incident that went too far. We decided to temporarily close to regroup, although the last thing we want is to close our doors and stop helping those in our community who need us.”  As the country sinks into its woke-powered autocracy, we will be reminded more frequently than ever that a gossamer thin veil separates civilization from barbarians at the gate.

Welcome to the After-Trump Era.  Victor Davis Hanson explains the matter to us in his latest commentary.  There he points out, “During the Trump Age, the president was supposedly responsible for every death from COVID-19. Now, the media report that career scientists and health administrators in the federal government, especially at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were largely to blame for past slow testing, and were tardy and lax in apprising the nation of the infectious threat. … In the new age, expect the media and government to suddenly resent any pushback against a sitting president. Questions about the Biden family’s past multimillion-dollar influence-peddling overseas or Biden’s cognitive ability can no longer be asked. … None will compare the recurring violence of Antifa or Black Lives Matter to that of Islamic terrorists. None will compare Biden, who dismissed Antifa as a mere “idea,” to Mussolini or the Nazis. Any retired officer who smears the president, we will be reminded, would violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. … The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, top retired military brass, corporate America, universities, and professional sports are all recalibrating the truth for our Year One. … In about a month, they will have it down. And soon, we won’t even be able to tell the old reality from the new.”

[29jan21 update] Danny Pearl’s killer is set free by Pakistani courts (more here and here).  Pearl, WSJ’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002.  Danny’s parents, who have been fighting the Pakistani justice system for almost twenty years, stated “Today’s decision is a complete travesty of justice” that “puts in danger journalists everywhere, we urge the U.S. government to take all necessary actions under the law to correct this injustice.”  RR has covered this Islamist travesty in previous posts here and here.

[30jan21 update]  Ms Hannebrink has surprisingly taken exception to my above Quietech entry.  Her remarks with my reply may be found @1058am in the comment stream.  I find it remarkable that she seems to think that I ascribed a political leaning to her remarks, especially when I explicitly declined to do so.

Our mega-fraudulent Covid response

George Rebane

It was well back in the last year during the heights of our Covid panics that it occurred to me to examine more closely the cited death tolls from the pandemic.  The CDC was beginning to prevaricate on some stats that didn’t fly in tight formation with John Hopkins, which had assigned itself to be the national Covid (C19 in the sequel) tally center.  Being locked down, I then amused myself with a lot of analytics that ranged from developing my own epidemic spread model to deriving the reliability relationships of the various C19 tests that were being administered.  What puzzled me was how these pandemic deaths comported with the mortality rates that the country experienced during ‘normal’ years.

It didn’t take much looking to discover that whatever the number of C19 deaths we were suffering, they did not cause a spike in our national mortality count that our daily ration of media hysteria reported.  I posted my thoughts and findings on the matter, and soon found that I was not alone – other investigators had come to the same politically inconvenient conclusion. (more here, here, and here)

“The Covid-19 death count is a fabrication” reports Celia Farber of uncoverdc.com in a piece titled ‘Have 400,000 Americans Died of Covid-19?’ (H/T to reader)  Citing several scientists and investigators and illustrating CDC data with screenshots, she goes on to make an extensive case for that assertion that many have already discovered for themselves.  You will not find any of this information in the nation’s trusted lamestream outlets, and even honest politicians (a hard notion to swallow) will have little courage to properly denigrate the policies that our governments by the gun have imposed on us.  The result has been a devastated economy, thousands lives and businesses ruined, uncountable collateral deaths and morbidities, a skewed election placing corrupt idiots in the White House, and a ratcheting back of our constitutional freedoms the impact of which is shaking the foundations of our republic.

The bottom line of the C19 fraud so far is that the CDC has been mangling the deaths data to a fair-thee-well, and to keep with the Democratic/Biden supporting narrative, they had to precipitously add almost 270,000 to the “all-cause deaths” at the end of the year; “evidently 269,249 people suddenly died during the last week of 2020” to reinvigorate the C19 hoax.  Apparently, even the CDC could not make the needed ‘excess deaths’ from the nation’s 2020 mortality dataset, so they just fabricated the number and added it in with the hope that no one would notice and/or understand what they had done.

All of these numbers in Farber’s article are replicable from published data sources.  And the politically correct crowd can easily debunk what the cited scientists have presented.  But, of course, that will not be their way of countering these conclusions should they ever be made public by any of the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ media.  Until then, wear your masks, socially distance, lock down your businesses, and keep your hopes up for a better world as you turn toward your local state house from whence all wisdom flows – remember, your government follows the science.

Liberal Logic on Parade

My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.  It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.  Winston Churchill

George Rebane

This is another installment in RR’s educational series to illuminate the workings of a liberal mind.  As such it contributes one more important illustration of how the liberal mind functions, and why it is nigh impossible today to make any measurable progress when engaged with them in the understanding of political processes and the shaping of public policies.

Here one of our prominent liberal readers, burdened for years with a severe case of TDS, takes the former president to task once more for what to him is yet another of Trump’s lies – purposeful spread of deceit to harm Americans.  Before dissecting the errors, we examine the relevant parts of the exchange between the liberal and me as taken from the comment stream of the 23jan21 posting of Scattershots (here).

‘2034’

George Rebane

This is a heads-up on a good read – 2034 – A Novel of the Next World War that will be published in early March.  It is written by two military and national security heavyweights – Elliot Ackerman and Adm James Stavridis, both ranking high in our national security apparatus; Ackerman in the White House and Stavridis former CIC of our Southern Command and then head of NATO military.  The first part of the novel took up the entire Jan 2021 issue of Wired.  I started reading it, and it immediately grabbed me.  I’m a kinda finicky reader, especially fiction, reserving time only for geo-political and edge sci-fi written by people who’ve 'been there and done that' – ‘2034’ definitely qualifies and promises to also be an education on a lot of systems and tactics.  Anyway, I thought that you would find this a good and timely read.  Here’s some promotional copy – “From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic, geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.”

I sent the above notice to a group of friends who may be interested in geo-political thrillers with technical element that is written by knowledgeable authors.  Since then, the book has received some very good reviews from noteworthy people.  (more here and here)

“War with China is the most dangerous scenario facing us and the world. Absent a strategic method to manage our differences, Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s chilling novel presents a realistic series of miscalculations leading to the worst consequences. A sobering, cautionary tale for our time.” — Jim Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (Ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense

“A real page-turner, 2034 is a novel about a conflict we hope never happens. Drawing on their deep operational and diplomatic backgrounds, Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman have conjured a nightmare we desperately need to avoid. The novel is a cautionary tale for our times, and a reminder how quickly events can spin out of control—even before 2034.” — Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011

Scattershots – 23jan21 (updated 27jan21)

When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.” – Barton Swaim

George Rebane

California hides C19 data to insulate Newsom’s disastrous pandemic response policies from criticism.  Surprisingly, AP broke this story (more here), and the rest of the lamestream immediately clammed up about it.  As usual with the Left, this practice is well-established in all autocracies wherever they are implemented.  Don’t let the public discover that their government is wrongheaded, stupid, pernicious, or a sordid amalgam of all three.  Newsom is an established idiot with a penchant for control.  For almost the entire past year his stratagems against C19 have been totally ineffective or markedly underperformed those of almost all other states.  You have to be idiots-on-steroids like Cuomo and DeBlasio to outperform Newsom in governance.  (It takes a union-educated progressive not to know that California is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged one-party autocracy.  And California has them by the millions.)

Speaking of Newsom and the nationalization of California’s failures, here is a compendium of them by CA Assemblyman Kevin Kiley in a 21jan21 letter that he sent to President Biden.  In it he responds to Newsom’s plea to Biden to implement the Golden State’s disasters nationwide.  Have you signed the petition to recall Newsom?

Higher wages increase profits – well, at least “at times”, according to a 23jan21 piece (here) by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca in which they describe ‘efficiency-wage theory’.  This theory by some prominent leftwing economists proposes that paying workers more will increase retention and productivity.  And the cost benefits from these increases, for certain industries, primarily the 'shag and stack' kind, it may boost the bottom line for a while.  However, the special cases in which this may be true are few and far in between, and most certainly don’t recommend a national minimum wage policy.  Leftists who believe that some arbitrary amount, today $15/hr, will result in workers happy dancing in the streets are the same ones who still believe in perpetual motion, and that the moon is 1/49^th the size of earth, even though it is further away.  Henry Ford’s raising assembly workers' wages by almost double and reducing work from 9 to 8hrs/day did indeed increase productivity and retention enough to more than pay for itself.  But that was primarily due to the long lines of applicants outside the factory gates to replace those Ford would fire for not working their butts off for the firm.  This is not today's labor market.  Everything has its market price, and no matter how much governments attempt to mangle those prices, in the end reality will rule.  Biden’s Bunch knows none of this, and will do its damnest to show all how levitation by bootstraps will work.

[24jan21 update]  On vaccine distribution and administration, under its disastrous Democrats California now ranks dead last in getting the stuff out to the people who need it.  And double-dummy Newsom writes Biden to have the nation start following California's lead on public policies a bit more closely.  I guess he figgers that if the rest of the country gets as crappy as we are, then Californians won't notice the difference, and they won't have anyplace else to go, and maybe we'll even stop the recall petitions now circulating around the state.

[25jan21 update]  Bumblebrain’s latest Big Lie is one that is attributed to his victory over Trump, and also the ONLY thing the Dems could claim was his mandate from the electorate – to demonstrate how Trump was derelict in responding to C19, and to demonstrate how his administration will finally get the pandemic under control.  Well, as pointed out @914am below, he has no plan of his own that is better than what President Trump achieved with both the historically rapid development of multiple vaccines (Project Warp Speed), and the meticulously planned distribution of the vaccines to the states using military logistics.  What did the states do?  The Dem governed ones loudly declared that they didn’t trust Trump, and sat on their collective asses instead of preparing their states’ distribution plans.  Today most of their vaccines are still sitting on shelves and some are spoiling instead of saving lives.  But the bottom line for Bumblebrain is that his handlers have finally explained the matter to him, which is that he can do no better than Trump.  He admitted his Big Lie with “there's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months”. So, on what he got elected, he can’t deliver.  Compare that to the share of promised accomplishments by his predecessor. (more here)

For Sale - White Privilege Card.  I'm selling my white privilege card.  It's over 70 years old and still in mint condition. It has never been used.  Full disclosure - reason for selling is that it hasn't done a damn thing for me! No free college, no free food, no free housing, etc.  Prefer cash but would be willing to do an even trade for a different race card that is much more widely accepted!  Interested?  Contact me on my non-Obama cell phone that I pay for every month…  Serious buyers only!  (H/T to correspondent seeking a similar transaction.)

[26jan21 update]  Dr Fauci has an intimate connection with the development of the Corona virus, a relationship that calls into question his continuing role in the Biden administration as the head of its task force to develop national response policies.  This was reported Sunday night by FN’s Steve Hilton, and comes as a shock/surprise to most of the country. (more here)  It will most interesting to see how the current administration handles what normally would be a politically hot potato, and, of course, how the lamestream lackies then subsequently report on it.  (H/T to reader.)

[27jan21 update] ‘The 1776 Report’ by the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission arrived yesterday in the mail. (download report here)  This is a magnificent document that successfully counters the fanatically anti-American 1619 Project’s version of our country’s history and what our nation represents to the world. (more here) ‘1619’ forms the basis for a perverse curriculum that the country’s Left, supported by the Democratic Party, is injecting into our public schools as the main plank of its program to re-formulate our educational system according to the worldview and mandates of ‘critical race theory’ (full text pdf here).  For that reason, one of Biden’s first EOs was to shut down the 1776 Commission, and bury its work.  To those for whom the survival of the United States as a sovereign nation-state is paramount, ‘1619’ and CRT are manifestations of pure political evil.  Their intent is to fill the ranks of American citizens with people ‘educated’ to accept and comply with our collectivist elites, ensconced in the Democratic Party, whose aim is to meld what was America into a global amalgam of centrally-controlled satraps under a one-world government.  These are the times we live in.

The Biden Bamboozle Begins

George Rebane

Actually, bamboozle is way too gentle of a descriptive for what was launched yesterday.  This commentary would actually find a better home on the next entry into our Dark Days Diary, nevertheless … .  Our new president spoke of stopping the lies inundating the nation, all the while heaping on new ones while bringing up old ones for another pass over the country’s psyche so that we could all unify in the glow of an inaugural speech that drove so many to tears, albeit for markedly different reasons.

While Seattle again enjoys Antifa’s tender mercies – this time at the state’s Democratic HQ – the Left’s nationwide destructive and murderous riots of last year are either forgotten or repainted with a fresh new coat of lies, Biden’s lamestream (yes, it’s his now) plays the 6jan21 Capitol assault video over and over again as undisputable proof of where lies the real danger to America and democracy.  In his laughable attempt to focus on unifying the country, our new president is characterizing the country as in ruins and continuing crisis, all due to the mismanagement of his predecessor, who is the nation’s Supremacista Blanca El Primero.

And all 75+ million of us who voted for him, and at least that many more of our families, all of whom supported his policies and accomplishments, these now also carry the scarlet letters that label us all as white supremacists, racists, nazis (small n), and incipient domestic terrorists.  For the Left we have become the country’s number one enemy to be sought out, identified, watched, isolated, and dealt with accordingly.  Apparently, we have always been there (as RR comment streams attest), but now Donald J Trump has outed us by rising up as our leader so that the politically proper and prudent could finally see those around them who visibly rose up to support and cheer him on.

By continually citing their carefully formulated versions of our pernicious beliefs in an historically false America and our ongoing unabashed public behavior, the new administration will be free to fumble forth with all of its failures pre-attributed to the disastrous legacy of Trump abetted by his minions, still free to roam the countryside perpetuating perfidy and lies to counter socially just progressive programs and initiatives.  This cannot and will not go on unanswered.

Of course, given the recent tendentious behavior of our Hispanics and blacks, even their own traditional constituencies are not to be completely trusted.  The Left knows that these folks have been successfully bamboozled for years, and the possibility that they may now subscribe to a new pied piper is not to be discounted.

But the 800lbs gorilla in the room remains the November election which more than half of Americans have beliefs ranging from its having unexplained irregularities to outright ballot stuffing fraud.  And all these feelings have been and continue to be reinforced by the establishment, first refusing to look at and substantively refute the presented evidence, and second then upping the ante to launch a national vilifying campaign against everyone who continues expressing concerns and thinks that the conduct of the 2020 election should get at least a small fraction of the kind of attention the Democrats mandated for the 2016 election in terms of countless congressional investigations, the involvement of DoJ and the FBI and its fraudulent use of FISA, various IGs looking into their spheres of purview, the Mueller special prosecutor investigation, and the still ongoing Durham probe.

All we hear from the Dems and their nascent Biden administration is that only racists, insurrectionists, and seditious domestic terrorists remain interested in having a transparent examination of the evidence.  And, of course, no correctly thinking American should be beholden to such an irredeemable cohort of deplorables, no matter how many tens of millions they number.  The Democrats demonstrated that they can roll out a couple of divisions of armed National Guard troops at a moment’s notice if there is even a faint (unfounded?) hint of public opposition to their new power structure.  And in the meanwhile, as our liberal commenters remind us today, they will be taking our names and making lists for when the reckoning comes.  That is who they are and have always been, now it’s their time to flex some muscle and really kick ass.  This is their 'unification' program which will continue until we all unite to 'Sieg heil!' the victory of our new masters.

Dark Days Diary – 18jan21 (updated 20jan21)

“Leftists in this country claim that their violence is speech and our speech is violence.” – Daniel Horowitz

George Rebane

The Democrats and their corporatist allies are prepared to remove the First Amendment, launch a surge of prosecutions for what we have always considered free speech, and then have their lamestream assert that the First Amendment is still in force while jailing those who claim otherwise.  This will be but the first step on the path to abrogate our Constitution in its entirety.  When this comes to pass, anyone and everyone who resists this phase of fundamentally transforming America will be labeled a seditious insurrectionist, and treated accordingly.

It appears now that the federal government deems everyone suspect of insurrection who attended the Washington pro-Trump rally.  Those who actually entered the Capitol, the people’s house, stand accused of insurrection.  The vandals who led the mob into the building while destroying and stealing property, and violating private spaces, deserve to be treated like the criminals they are.  However, there is no evidence that those few hundred(?) who also walked through then opened doors had any intention other than telling Congress that they were opposed to the ongoing certification of electoral votes which they firmly believed were tallied from an election abundantly laced with irregularities and fraud, the evidence of which was summarily rejected by the courts without examining the underlying substance.

Now the nationwide manhunt is on for all those who walked in and milled around the Capitol on 6 January 2021.  True to Orwellian, Stalinist, and Stasi standards, fellow citizens are encouraged to report to the FBI anyone they know or think was there (DC, Mall, Capitol?) on that fateful day.  History shows what kind of countries such massive snitch programs have created.  And there is only one political party that wants to create a government with encompassing tentacles to effectively pursue such programs of persecution. (more here)

Federal elections integrity is promoted by congressional Republicans with their introduction of their Save Democracy Act that “aims to close loopholes that prevent secure and fair general elections by strengthening voter registration verifications, narrowing rules for when and how mail-in ballots can be accepted, and mandating observers from each party is allowed to be present during polling and vote counting.”  Pew Research reports that only 5% of Trump voters and 64% of Biden voters thought the election was properly administered.  That’s a heap of folks who had less favorable opinions of how everything went down last November, and more than enough reason to do something positive to restore faith in the integrity of our elections.  Now let's see how far the Democrats permit this and other such measures to proceed.  (more here)

C19 vaccines continue to sit on shelves as most states have trouble getting the doses distributed to their inoculation sites.  Given the months of advance warning everyone received about when the vaccines would be available, most states sat on their butts instead of putting in place the needed procedures to get their residents vaccinated in a timely manner.  As we continue to note here, if there is any kind of problem in the land, look first to government as the source or cause of it, and you won’t have to look much further.  It turns out again that Texas leads and California lags – the correlation of performance with which party is in charge is striking, wonder why?  “Texas, with a population of some 29 million, has distributed just over 2 million doses and administered just under 1.2 million, as of Jan. 15, the CDC said. California, with 39.5 million people, has distributed over 3.5 million doses and administered just under 1.1 million.” (more here)

[19jan21 update]  Since it became clear that Trump’s appeals failed to overturn Biden win, the share of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction jumped markedly.  Today, according to the recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll (here), two out of three Americans agree with that assessment.  In December 49% answered ‘wrong track’, which assessment increased to 65% this month, with 84% Republicans and 52% Democrats concurring.  Of course, both sides feel that their right tracks head in the opposite directions.  Yet another measure of the size of the gulf that separates us.

‘Will Covid-19 shake up capitalism?’ is a popular question today that is covered by James Macintosh of the London WSJ (here).  He cites the current move leftward toward socialism that is making many people rethink capitalism, especially during the mish-mash of dubious responses that governments have initiated to fight the pandemic.  As examples of crises that have resulted in major changes to political economics, Macintosh points to the Great Depression and FDR’s misguided responses that still echo through the decades.  Then there was WW2’s aftermath which created the British welfare state that almost bankrupted the country.  The runaway inflation of the 1970s led to some beneficial changes with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.  Now there returns the great itch to undo Trump’s gains and once more pauper the country.  The argument by the leftists is that ‘look, under Trump’s capitalism 17 million people lost their jobs, and 10 million are still out of work’.  None of them are smart enough to figure out that it was the governments’ lockdown responses to C19 that caused the hit to the economy, not capitalism (see below).

‘It Took a Strong America to Survive 2020’ (here) is Walter Russell Mead’s more sober and accurate look at the political and economic roads we traveled last year.  Contrary to the Left’s histrionics, our political system has NOT been threatened and our economy survived the pandemic remarkably well, and is now recovering at a rapid rate.  However, this is not the narrative that is now being fashioned into the next Big Lie by the lamestream media which will paint Biden as the nation’s savior who arrived just in the nick o’ time.  If you thought the media had reached its low point during the last four years, you ain’t seen nothing yet – seatbelts please.

[20jan21 update]

Unclear on Partisan Politics

George Rebane

The above cartoon by our tried and true progressive cartoonist Bob Crabb was filched from the pages of The Union’s 16jan21 edition.  It provides an opportune lesson that illustrates our polarization and the sorry condition of jurisdictions that practice monopoly politics.  (I do like the Burma-Shave signs.)

Collectivists like Bob sincerely want to “find a cure for” partisan politics.  They totally miss that partisanship is the only political order that provides the necessary and critical feedback loops which yield balanced governance.  Without effective and ongoing partisanship we get runaway one-party rule of the type that in recent years has put a heap of hurt on a number of states and urban jurisdictions led, of course, by California.

While our Democrats, along with other international globalists, work ardently for an overarching, all-powerful world government, almost all other people, who are able to give the problem some thought, oppose such a sure path to a stable and lasting tyranny.  As conservetarian, I would never want a political monopoly of free-market capitalism in my country to dominate so as to eliminate effective feedback from collectivist ideologues.

Progressives, hewing to the teachings of the immortal Marx, have no concept of the function of such balance in the ongoing back-and-forth of governance, and even less knowledge of how to achieve and maintain that needed tension.  For them, all goodness and light comes from but a single fount of truth enabled by one-party rule.  No broadly beneficial and productive social order has ever been achieved without robust feedbacks that check government excesses which easily arise from human weaknesses.

Government, by its very nature has always lacked these critical feedback mechanisms, and as a result is the most inefficient way to organize people to get almost anything done right.  (Most recent example, the states’ inability to efficiently distribute and administer C19 vaccines, again led by California.)  Nevertheless, every society needs individuals to contribute some time, treasure, and talent to collective enterprises, such as national security and shared infrastructures, that would be inefficient undertakings for private enterprise.

But here the modus operandi should always be guided by the minimalist principle of having the smallest possible government, but no smaller.  And to achieve that is where the collectivists and capitalists must meet on a sufficiently par basis of partisan politics to arrive at a workable social order, one that provides hope and equal opportunity for all to pursue their dreams, rewards merit and industry, does not abandon those unable, and all of it no matter how inevitably and unequally we are suited for the pursuit.

As history illuminates and we demonstrate daily, all other mono-partisan approaches to organize society lead toward tyranny or anarchy.

Scattershots – 15jan21 (16jan21)

George Rebane

The Capitol assault reports are getting curiouser and curiouser.  Instead of quickly blaming Trump supporters for the mob action while labeling them ‘seditious insurrectionists’, and then quickly calling the case closed, we keep having reports coming out documenting feds who now admit that they knew in advance that Trump haters were planning to enter the Capitol and visit violence in the midst of Trump supporters who would follow them in.  Here is one such report that has yet to be censored.  Readers should contribute their own pros/cons to such reports.

Also, the entire timing and preparations for the assault viz Trump’s speech is turning into a mendacious muddle.  Law enforcement agencies report that the assault began significantly before Trump’s alleged call to march to the Capitol.  And also that stores of assault equipments like crowbars, etc had already been stored in convenient locations for the perpetrators of violent entry into the building.  We need to be reminded again of the House article that gave rise to the half-day snap impeachment.  From my perch it sure looks like a historical political hit job has just gone down with pre-orchestrated rallying cries coming from both sides of the aisle.  What the hell is going on?  Is this Deep State on parade, while the rest of us are threatened with re-education camps?

California’s C19 vaccine distribution system is, predictably, one of the worst in the land.  Last night FN reported on the relative amounts of received vaccines distributed by the states.  California was next to the lowest with only 26% of its vaccines having been administered.  With each passing day our political monopoly in Sacramento finds more ways to screw up and make life worse for every taxpayer within its borders.  All of this is invisible to our local leftwing lackies.

Big business is making a sharp left turn, as we have noted in these pages.  This is now being picked up (here) by national columnists like WSJ’s Kim Strassel who notes, “Corporate America took a big step this week, moving from captives of wokeness to active accomplices. The legal and political consequences may prove profound.”  One political consequence that will fit the Dem socialists to a tee is that already corporatist big businesses will become protected extensions of the state, taking their operations marching orders from relevant (and possible new) cabinet departments, bureaus, and agencies.  This is the established route from Hitler through Xi Jinping to America’s radical left now going through birthing pains as it spreads its tentacles over the land.  None dare call it capitalism.

Last night on FN’s Bret Baier program we noticed something very shocking to us.  The program’s balanced panel of commenters has recently ensconced Harold Ford Jr (former congress critter from Tennessee) as its reasonable liberal voice.  The panelists currently join the program online from their homes.  Ford broadcasts from his elegant living room from which the man accidentally and momentarily revealed his deeply held values.  He pulled back his video camera so that it showed the room’s center-piece fireplace, and over the mantle on the wall, centered over the fireplace hung a large (Andy Warhol) portrait painting of a smiling Mao Zedong.  The prominent place in a former congressman’s home afforded this killer of over 100,000,000 of his own people made our jaws go slack.  This camera shot was quickly corrected as it became his turn to speak again.  Nuff said.

Grand opening coming soon.

And then there's more suppressed news 'Media Mostly Silent As BLM Activists Clash With Capitol Police'.

[16jan21 update]  Today The Union saw fit to publish my censored 6jan21 KVMR commentary.  (more here)

The Left's cry of "Insurrection!!" continues as they have filled Washington with about two divisions of National Guard troops to counter the predicted assaults by armed citizens.  There will be no such assaults, any more than the mob in the Capitol was the launch of an insurrection.  As I've pointed out, those clowns didn't anticipate any success in getting into the building which was made possible by the mysterious melting away of the Capitol police.  A planned insurrection has a few attendant requirements to make such a label credible.  The most important would be to have a replacement government-in-waiting ready to assume the critical functions that communicates success to the tuned-in masses.  The people milling in the halls of the Capitol couldn't even organize a Sunday school picnic if their lives depended on it.

‘What Just Happened?’

[Union columnist Terry McLaughlin asks that pointed question (here) on the 14jan21 edition’s op-ed page.  She goes on to provide and excellent background summary that lets the reader answer her question.  It turns out that we Americans have been given an education over the past year to accept a much more expressive way of protesting everything from public policies to individuals and institutions – in short, we have been carefully taught that riot and mayhem is now de rigueur for expressing collective dissatisfaction.  Ms McLaughlin’s piece provides us with the syllabus for that course.  It is posted below with her permission.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

There is no excuse for the violence that took place on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. What we witnessed is morally reprehensible and I am ashamed and horrified that it occurred.

Americans deserve to know who was responsible, and those persons who perpetrated vandalism or violence should be brought to justice.

It cannot be denied that both the political far right and far left are home to their own share of Antifa-like anarchists, and the chaos at the Capitol has refuted any perception that the left owns a monopoly on widespread political violence. While we can never excuse or defend this behavior, we can make an honest effort to identify the environment in which it happened.

These events resulted from a multitude of causes: concerns and distrust in the integrity of our elections, pent up frustrations of citizens stripped of their livelihoods and freedoms during the pandemic, and yes, the rhetoric of the president of the United States.

But not the least of these causes is the justification, defense, and even apathy of the media and many of our elected political leaders regarding the violence committed across America throughout 2020, including attacks on federal courthouses, burning of police stations, and the establishment of “autonomous zones” in Portland and Seattle. The message was loud and clear: If you are dissatisfied with a political or social issue, violence is an acceptable answer.

Dark Days Diary – 13jan21 (updated 15jan21)

George Rebane

‘America was born of dissent. It shall perish when dissent is forbidden.’  I used this anonymous aphorism as a tagline for a recent post, and upon reflection, it rings more true with each passing day.  Today loud voices are heard mostly from the Left, but also some from the Right, exhorting us to set our beliefs aside and be compliantly silent.  The underlying principle that is being hoisted like a banner in the public square is ‘politics has no place for violence.’

That is also the title of a piece by Rep Steve Scalise (R-LA) in the 13jan21 WSJ (here).  Unfortunately, the congressman could not be more wrong, both historically and existentially.  Going back to the days of historian Thucydides of ancient Greece, violence has always been one of the extremes and frequently practiced bookends of politics.  The other extreme of political behavior is silent compliance, the rigidly enforced favorite of tyrants.  To get a deeper understanding of this, I recommend to you Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap (2017).  (Kissinger’s plaudit of the book included, “Thucydides’ Trap identifies the cardinal challenge to world order.”)

Allison and other historians have long made it clear that almost every military action, including partisan uprisings, were spawned for political reasons.  Nevertheless, most of us believe that a social order succumbing to either of these extremes represents a failure of practicing prudent politics.  An oft-accepted definition of politics is ‘the art of the possible’, which is still valid with its noted bookends withstanding.

In this light, I maintain that current arguments, exhortations, and platitudes from our national leaders do nothing to calm the angry sea that today defines social order.  None of these politicians can point to a common ground where we may meet to forge a mutually acceptable future.  What each offers in place of such a political meeting is simply another version of ‘my way or the highway’.  And the diagnosis is appropriate to those of us minor ideologues making our voices heard on the grassroots hustings.  For me as a conservetarian, the Left offers little to nothing that would give rise to a world in which I would want my progeny to live.  And collectivists feel equally strong about their ideals.

Political peace has been achieved in the past mostly by both (all) sides stumbling into a de facto compromise that is to no one’s complete liking, and one that motivates everyone to continue working for their political goals with plausible hope in their hearts.  And that is the important point.  The discovered compromise must be such that neither side loses hope of still being able to push the policy peanuts in their desired direction.  When that hope vanishes or is quashed, then one of the political bookends is all that remains, and the one chosen depends on the people’s means, culture, and their historical narrative.

Today President Trump was impeached again by the House, this time being accused of “encouraging a mob to storm Congress as part of an effort to overturn Joe Biden’s election win."  For millions of us across the land this most certainly was the most scurrilous political act we have witnessed during our lifetime.  There is no need to rehash all the ethical, constitutional, and simply principled criteria that were violated in performing probably the most vindictive act by Congress in its long history.  There was no opportunity, nor desire by the Democrats, to permit a reasoned defense by the opposition; it was simply a hastily assembled and railroaded political lynching.  What it underlined for all who pay attention is that this abortion on the floor of the House did nothing but cement in place an implacable division between polarized Americans that continues to grow in its scope and girth.

And we learned more about the stout political underpinnings of the ten so-called Republicans who decided to pile on to this judicial charade.  All the while more Republicans quake in their boots as the Dems and their lamestream continue to broadcast accusations of ‘acts of sedition’ and ‘insurrection’, none of which was intended or took place.  What did take place, as the record shows, is the President’s exhortation for his supporters to go to the Capitol and protest the scheduled proceedings to certify the electoral votes.  There is nothing illegal about a call for such action by citizens who do feel aggrieved that the November election was fraught with irregularities and fraud.  But today our liberties retreated another step as last Wednesday’s speech by the president was deemed both illegal and impeachable.  Besides cementing our breach, this second impeachment has now put a serious rip into the fabric of what once were the normative affairs of governance.

[15jan21 update] 'Assault on the Capitol Has Let Loose the Electronic Octopus' argues Victor Davis Hanson in a convincing piece apropos to these dark days.  And reader posts a link with a DoJ official declaring there is "no direct evidence" of plot to kill, kidnap lawmakers in Capitol assault (here).

Control of Corporatist Oligopolies

“America was born of dissent. It shall perish when dissent is forbidden.”  Anon.

George Rebane

Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, … arguably reside somewhere between monopoly and oligopoly in the capitalist spectrum.  It is very hard for a corporation that controls a dominating segment of a major market to become such a beast in a truly competitive environment, and then to maintain its standing without active help from the government gun in suppressing would-be competitors.  Such relationships between putatively private sector companies and the government is called corporatism.  And such participating corporatists are a malevolent disease of capitalism made possible by one of its systemic vulnerabilities.  The creation of corporatism is only possible with the abetting aid of a corrupt government, one that seeks large amounts of private funding to extend its political power over a citizenry having tendencies for non-compliance with the establishment’s diktats.

According to Rebane Doctrine and the basic tenets of conservetarianism, such corporatist oligopolies invite regulation to prevent them from becoming weaponized by one controlling political faction in a democracy.  (For more on this important happening, see LikeWar:The Weaponization of Social Media)  The threshold criterion here is the corporatist’s domination of a broadly embedded and established public function or service for which there exist no viable alternative providers in the marketplace.  When a corporatist achieves that status (call it a critical public good corporation, CPGC), then it’s time to put in place non-partisan regulations to either defang or dismember it.

At this point the lightly-read liberal will leap into this discussion with charges of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘double standards’.  As I’ve recounted countless times, this response is borne of either purposive political snark, or more likely from the simplified worldview that most leftwingers are burdened with as they seek to make sense of complex societies – it must be either ‘this’ or ‘that’ with no perception of nuance or a middle-ground.

In the present case of gratuitous imposition of censorship and/or cutting off public communications completely, the corporatists are outing themselves as 1) the strong partisans they are, and 2) taking advantage of the current political environment to also quash competing companies, and all of it done as virtue signaling to support the public good.  The government’s sponsors of such corporatism and corporatists will, of course, support and sustain such private sector initiatives as the actions of good and caring corporate citizens.

The solution that would prohibit such preemptive partisan actions is to have in place a law that 1) prescribes criteria to identify such critical oligops or monopolists as CPGCs, and 2) restricts how CPGCs may conduct the critical public services and/or functions they provide.  In short, the profuse and protected profits they derive, when so designated, come at a price of regulatory controls that are supervised by an appropriate department – say, Commerce – of the federal government.  None of this violates the strong conservetarian principle of a minimalist government being among the social desiderata for a democratic republic that creates and distributes wealth within a capitalist context.

Under such a regulatory order it would be easy for a corporation to sufficiently divest or segment its operations to escape its CPGC designation.  The main objective of such an approach is to prevent what is happening today with private sector providers making political decisions as to who may or not continue using the communication services that the same corporatists have conduced people to accept, integrate, and make critical parts of their daily lives.

As a parting consideration, think about the disruption to your life were your phone company to gratuitously cut your ability to make and receive telephone calls.  That situation existed for decades when AT&T was the overwhelmingly dominant telephone service provider, and for that reason it was a strongly regulated oligopoly until advancing technology made possible a competitive environment that could best be served by a break up of Ma Bell into Baby Bells, and the entry of new service providers.  We all have benefitted from this paradigm, and now need to expand it into the world of CPGCs on the internet.

Dark Days Diary – 9jan21 (updated 12jan21)

No days unalert; … alertness when most necessary, is always missing, and not to give the matter a thought is to be slated for destruction.  Gracian #264

George Rebane

Over the years to this day we have seen that our leftwing neighbors don’t have much truck with concepts like nuance or shades of gray.  Their more simple worldview resides comfortably in the corners of the extreme – for them the needle is always pegged: yes/no, black/white, racist/woke, 0/1, socialist/capitalist, … .  (Bang-bang policy in control theory)  This embrace of simplicity goes back to the Bolshevik revolution and continued all throughout the 5-year civil war that followed.

During that terrible strife, communist partisans would stop trains of ‘White Russians’ fleeing the already consolidated Red areas.  They would have the passengers dismount to line up next to the tracks and show their palms.  Those whose hands were found to be soft and/or uncalloused were executed on the spot as bourgeoisie enemies of the people.  There was no middle road to be examined, nor any propensity to do so.  Terror was the name of the game, and to make their omelet, some necessary eggs had to be cracked.

From my perch on 6 January 2021

George Rebane

A socialist imposes unequal opportunity, promises equal outcomes, and delivers uniform misery.  A capitalist imposes equal opportunity, enables individual initiative, and delivers unequal outcomes that provide the best possible prosperity to all.

Today President Trump’s talk sunk the walk of the thousands of conservative DC protesters.  This dreadful character defect of his has done incalculable damage to his work while in office, to his legacy after he leaves office, and his political future by how he transfers power to his successor.

The message to Congress and the American electorate on this day should be evidence centric and NOT election outcome centric.  Assembling thousands on the Mall and Capitol grounds to shout and wave signs reading ‘Biden stole the election’ and ‘Trump won by a landslide’ helps get the real message and purpose of the demonstration to no one.  And it amply feeds the waiting propaganda factories of the lamestream.  There was not a single sign I saw that demanded the examination and adjudication of the mountains of evidence that substantiate election irregularities and voter fraud.  That should have been the obvious and clearly displayed reason for the anger and frustration of those assembled, and their demands for redress of grievances.

Instead, on the day Congress was to actually certify the Electoral College vote count, the peaceful protest became a mob that stormed the Capitol to display their most base sentiments as they destroyed property and disgraced legislative chambers and legislators’ offices by posing for the cameras like a bunch of ignorant rock apes which indeed they were.  (I would still like to see the authorities confirm the conservative bona fides of the idiots who rampaged through the Capitol.)

The subsequent videos and tweets by the President did nothing to quiet the emotions of his loyal supporters.  If anything, these communicated a back-handed imprimatur to continue running amok.  IMHO, today’s presidential performance tremendously increased the likelihood that the Republicans will splinter, and that DJT’s hopes for a White House reprise are dashed.  It should not surprise anyone to see VP Mike Pence emerge from this imbroglio as the courageous Horatius at the bridge to lead what is left of the Republicans.  The comparative lassitude of the McCarthys, Cruzes, Cottons, and Jordans gives strong evidence that their best days are behind them.  And it will be interesting to see if the former majority leader McConnell will be allowed his last hurrah to marshal the Senate’s de facto minority in a rear guard action against the socialist onslaught of Pelosi and Schumer.

For those of us who continue to believe that society will best be served by a governance that promotes individual enterprise, open markets, capitalism, equal opportunity, and freedom, it definitely has not been a good day.

An Appeal to Restore Election Integrity (updated 16jan21)

George Rebane

[This was to be the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary censored on 6 January 2021.]

[Update.  I was informed this afternoon that my “commentary got cut tonight by station management.”  Management is now “establishing criteria for commentaries”, and there were elements in my piece with which the station took issue.  I am saddened that the pall of leftwing censorship across the land has now reached our little corner of the Sierra foothills.  Ratcheting autocracy on parade.  gjr]

[16jan21 update.  I am happy to report that The Union saw fit to publish this commentary in its 16jan21 hardcopy and online editions (here).  Update continued below.  gjr]

Today our country is again unhappy with how our national election was carried out.  Here we are not talking about voters unhappy that their candidate did not win, which happens with about half the voters in every election.  Instead, we concern ourselves with the very large number of voters on both sides of the contest who are dissatisfied with various parts of the voting process, and believe with all the cited and documented irregularities of the November election, that something serious is amiss with how we have come to elect our political leaders in the 21^st century.

Evidence - Why not look at the evidence? (updated 7jan21)

George Rebane

Why not indeed?  The existential evidence abounds of election fraud and irregularities having happened.  It exists just for the looking in forms of

1. witnessed and sworn affidavits of polling place and vote counting wrongdoings;
2. witnessed and video records of after-hours arrivals of thousands of unmailed ballots in unmarked vehicles;
3. mass arrivals of ballots supporting Biden that fail simple statistical tests that attest to their numerical authenticity;
4. demonstrated ease with which voting machine counts could be manipulated;
5. recorded denials of access to vote processing observers;
6. obvious gross numerical discrepancies between registered voters and votes cast;

Uncounted complaints of these infractions and irregularities have been filed across the land, and all have been rejected by our already dubious judicial system, not for lack of evidence, but on procedural grounds.  And these procedural grounds smell to high heaven that include the scurrilous use of ‘lack of standing’ of the plaintiff.  The legal notion of standing has no basis in constitutional law, and was only concocted in the 1920s to reduce an overly burdened case load on the courts as a means of avoiding/reducing adjudications.

What no court has done is to examine the evidence in open court and find any of it lacking in form, substance, and/or credibility.  In fact, the opposite findings have been issued to the effect that the unexamined evidence, even if verified, would not have materially changed the election’s outcome.  That is both false and a lie on the face of the vote counts presented in the reams of existing evidence.  And whether or not the evidence would change the election’s outcome is immaterial as a point of law.  What is important is to examine and conclude on the verity of the irregularities in the November election, and then prepare feasible remedies so that these will not be repeated in future elections.

All of this should be done in order to restore bipartisan confidence in our elections, especially the last one that saw copious amounts of dubious votes arrive in the dark of night to be surreptitiously counted in favor of the Democratic candidate.  So now on 6 January 2021, Congress will meet to go through what has been a pro forma certification of the electoral college votes.  However, this time dozens of Republican congress critters will rise to object to the electoral college counts.

Given the behavior of the courts, many Republican MOCs maintain with Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) that “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections, but Congress has so far failed to act.”  Today’s count is fluid, but upwards of 140 MOCs now say they are willing to join in the rejection of electoral college votes, and demand that the collected evidence of fraud see the light of day.

Meanwhile leftwing propaganda organs like the LA Times maintain that “there is no evidence of voter fraud and the integrity of the election has been repeatedly affirmed at the state level, in the courts and in Washington.”  Joining in accepting the current election results, no matter how marred, are members of the Republican congressional leadership led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But given the highly polarized state of the nation and the countless controversies surrounding this election, the simple question remains, ‘Why not look at the evidence?’

Here and here are two recent, extensively referenced reports by John Lott and Peter Navarro that present in detail the case to be made for the existence, scope, and authenticity of the current body of election fraud evidence.  How would you judge an appeals process that dismisses even considering the examination of evidence only on the basis of the plaintiffs not having said the appropriate ‘Mother may I?’ at some point in bringing it to the attention of the courts?

[7jan21 update] More light on the matter from the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society is presented in 'Set In Stone? - A Historical, Constitutional, and Legal examination of Electoral College Deadlines and their implications for the 2020 Presidential Election'  Download Electoral_College_Deadlines_White_Paper.

Scattershots – 27dec20 (updated 30dec20)

Suspension of judgment is always the part of wisdom in a listener, and the remission of faith to authority the part of wisdom in a speaker.  Gracian #154

George Rebane

Identity politics is a totalitarian enterprise, as called out by Paul Gigot, op-ed editor-in-chief of the WSJ.  About Gigot's defense of Joseph Epstein’s commentary on Jill Biden’s doctorate – ‘The Biden Team Strikes Back’ – Roger Kimball of The New Criterion writes,

The governing strategy of identity politics is not to encourage free expression but to shutter it. In essence, it is a totalitarian enterprise, deploying the shibboleths of race, gender, and radical egalitarianism to enforce a stultifying conformity. It is heartening to see Gigot affirming that, at one of our nation’s most important newspapers, “these pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.” If, as we suspect, the preview we just witnessed was a sort of sighting shot, it suggests that Gigot is going to have his hands full dealing with ever more intolerant efforts to “turn the page” and enforce ghastly new modes of “healing” and “unity.”  (and more here)

[29dec20 update] Speaking of ‘doctors in the house’ (here), we are now not surprised to hear that the pandemic is causing most leading universities to ‘pause’ their 2021 admissions to PhD programs.  “More than 140 humanities and social sciences programs at top schools have suspended admitting students for fall 2021.”  And also we’re not surprised to hear that STEM PhD programs are not affected by these cutbacks.  During disasters, society in the large acts pretty much as humans do in the small when it comes to deciding who gets to stay in the lifeboat – utility rules. (more here)

Trust government ‘science’ when spouted by agenda-driven politicians?  The short answer is ‘No’, the long answer is NFW!  One of our astute readers draws our attention to “Joe Biden's decision to hold over Dr. Anthony Fauci in his administration as his chief medical advisor as a symbol of his commitment to ‘trust science’ is coming under new scrutiny following Fauci's recent admission that he altered public scientific estimates based on opinion polls.” (more here)  The most vulnerable double dummies are those who believe science speaks with one infallible voice.  We witness their blather nightly on the lamestream.  And the Democrats (including their local lackies) still claim that theirs is the ‘party of science’.  Please note the above entry on PhDs when recalling their braggadocio about all the Left’s college graduates.

Biden’s education programs promise to be on steroids in their announced path to destroy the last vestiges of the nation’s public education.  From here on all curricula in union-dominated government schools will be focused through the lens of critical race theory.  It is now in the open that progressives have no desire to produce students with market-valued skill sets and the ability to think critically,  The overt K-12 objective from here on is to produce a generation of dumb and woke kids, indoctrinated to believe that meritocracy, personal responsibility, diligence, achievement, industry, intelligence, … are all characteristic traits of white supremacists and racists, and therefore to be eschewed in the coming socially just world of newly-minted, anti-capitalist socialism.

Anyone notice how silent the EU has been about China’s global policy of stealing commercially and militarily critical IP from any and all?  The most plausible answer to that silence has been that EU countries neither develop nor protect much homegrown IP, but license it from IP producers like the US.  Countries like Germany and the Netherlands incorporate licensed IP into their higher-quality manufactured products, and have been more than willing to meet aggressive thieves like China in the marketplace.  In the past they haven’t cared much about China and others stealing IP as long as they can market their stuff to the pilferers.  Now things are changing as China’s ability to manufacture quality products grows along with its domestic consumption for same.  The EU is coming around to America’s assessment of China (thank you President Trump), and they are becoming wary of China’s global commercial and political ambitions being carried out on a very tilted playing field.  (more here)

[30dec20 update]  ‘California may be losing its business mojo’ was the 29dec20 Union’s lead editorial.  In there Dan Walters of CalMatters presents a thoughtful summary of what has happened to our formerly golden state.  The exodus is now at such a fever pitch that only the most dedicated progressives in epiphany-free Sacramento are still blind to it (of course all their local lackeys have no hope of comprehending this ongoing disaster).  Nevertheless, they outnumber all the more saner ones.  In recent weeks tech giants like Tesla, HP, and Oracle have headed for greener pastures (Texas of course).  Why stay in a state encrusting with regulation- and tax-numbing socialism when your post-Covid workers can work from anywhere?  There’s less benefit in Silicon Valley than meets the eye.

71% of America’s military age youth cannot qualify to serve.  That’s the latest from the DoD.  The reasons for this horrible statistic is that since the military became an all-volunteer enterprise, their standards were raised.  The major disqualifiers for our young people are intellect, drugs, and bad health.  Modern warfare uses a lot of high-tech combat systems that require more than a two-digit IQ to operate, with druggies and overweight people not measuring up. 

Christmas - 2020

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

Last year I wrote - Another tumultuous year is ending with celebrations for peace and joy.  The Rebanes count themselves among the diminishing number of American Christians who still wish their family and friends, and RR readers of all persuasions a season of remembrance and reflection on what has been bestowed on this third planet, circling a modest star, making its way with billions of similar stars in a galaxy that populates this universe with uncounted trillions of other such galaxies.  Christmas still reminds many of us that we are among the blessed in our seeming insignificance.

2020 has given new meaning to ‘tumultuous year’ which now ends with a foreboding not seen during my lifetime.  So, more sincerely than ever, Jo Ann and I wish everyone a season of remembrance and reflection of what we once were and how we may regain the blessed parts of our country's past.

‘The Sovietization of California’

George Rebane

We have covered this dreadful progress to autocracy for years from a number of perspectives.  In my lifetime California has descended from its Olympian perch as the planet’s jeweled jurisdiction, to one that today competes with second and third world countries in governance, infrastructure maintenance, husbanding its natural resources, extracting tribute from its citizens, and daily ratcheting down more of their freedoms.

Longtime California resident and national columnist Dennis Prager in Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal gives a summation (here) of how the Left has tattered the once golden state.  Prager describes California as “a state where corruption reigns (one of the leading Democrats of the last half-century told me years ago that politicians in California are window dressing; the real power in California is wielded by unions) and where, for nine months, normal life has been shut down, schools have been closed, and small businesses.”

As a celebrated national leader in everything from technology to ideology, the state has worked hard to fundamentally transform America into its own declining state of collectivism.  As one of its leading bamboozles, California has convinced the nation’s light thinkers that the Left follows the science, when demonstrably “the left’s claim to ‘follow the science’ is a lie. The left does not follow science; it follows scientists it agrees with and dismisses all other scientists as ‘anti-science’.”  And then doubles down with the bigger lie that science speaks unambiguously with a single voice, which for some mystical reason only those of the Left are able to hear and understand.

Given our state’s lead, “there is no question that America is becoming, if it hasn’t already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to free speech.”  And more differences between us are legion.  De facto, the Great Divide is already here, and, as observed in these pages, awaits only its de juris resolution.

Contending and Correcting Elections

"Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord."  Isaiah 1:18

George Rebane

There’s an ‘open letter to the President’ going around the email circuit beseeching him to invoke the Insurrection Act, activate National Guard and the military to seize ballots and vote computers across the nation, publish all the secret evidence of alleged voting fraud, and essentially proceed toward a redo of the national election under newly prescribed and strict supervision.  The letter was written by two lawyers – Stewart Rhodes and Kellye SoRelle.

Regardless of what we think about the legitimacy of the November election, at this stage of the game I don’t think that carrying out the open letter’s prescriptions is a good idea.  If tried, it will not occur peacefully, and will most certainly give rise to massive civil disturbances that could lead to a civil war.  The problem is that the US has a 250-year history of elections – admittedly some more contended than others – that have in the end been accepted by our citizens with relatively minimal turbulence (e.g. ‘Battle of Athens’).  Because of this, our country has not put in place mechanisms to peacefully contend and correct both statewide and national elections.

Now I believe there’s an 80% chance that nationwide incidents of election fraud, ranging from petty to massive, occurred.  And I also believe that there’s a 50% chance that such fraud, as supported by presented and rejected evidence, would overturn significant election results (e.g. the presidency) if allowed its day in court and found to be true.  But today, we are where we are, and there remain only a few low probability opportunities to change the overwhelmingly accepted election outcomes using in-place processes and procedures.  The enduring problem we shoulder going forward is that, given the polls, there is a significant fraction of Americans who no longer have faith in the manner our elections are conducted (I am one of them.)  So, what to do?

My recommendation is that we join in a bipartisan effort to put in place a comprehensive and transparent set of processes and procedures under which future national (and perhaps also statewide) elections may be contended and corrected in an orderly and peaceful manner.  This would be launched and supervised by a congressional commission with a staffed working group of people with appropriate legal and information systems expertise to devise, develop, and test the resulting federal System for Contending and Correcting Elections (SCCE).

The bipartisan SCCE would prescribe the required legal underpinnings for its field operations, and recommend to Congress any additional supporting legislation needed.  Its working group would publish the how/when/who functions that define such things as SCCE election monitoring mechanisms, election scheduling, means of voting, vetting of franchised voters, accepting and processing reported irregularities, ballot chains of custody, isolating voting machines, standards of identifying and adjudicating fraud, procedures for holding re-elections, and so on.

In the latter case when a re-election is warranted, the SCCE's procedures for the uninterrupted continuance of government in the interval would already be laid out, specifying which elected and appointed officials remain with what duties and powers.  It is not yet clear whether all this can be accomplished through legislation, or will the Constitution need to be amended to handle such interregnum matters.

In any case, this approach of commissioning a SCCE during the relative political quietude between elections would serve our country much better than today’s calls for tanks in the intersections and attack helicopters flying overhead.  And in the worst case, the attempt to launch such an initiative would be very revealing of which organs of the Deep State, which private sector institutions, which corporatists, and which political parties rise to oppose such approaches to restore public confidence in the elections which sustain our democratic republic.

These are my preliminary thoughts on the matter, and I'm sure readers have their own ideas to offer on what, if any, preparations need be made to avoid the now existential travails we continue to suffer from the elections of 2016 and 2020.