Rebane's Ruminations

Letters from the Revolution – 8jul20 (updated 9jul20)

George Rebane

Reports of the number of cumulative C19 cases in any given jurisdiction misses the point.  Nobody should care about cumulative cases, only the number of active cases, and maybe the number who have died.  It’s the active cases that communicate some measure of risk for those who are out and about.  The ones who had it and were “released” (died or recovered) are history.  The 7jul20 Union headline piece (129 total cases as of last Friday) misses the point and tells us nothing about how risky it is to go grocery shopping.  This kind of reporting is shared by our crack journalism industry across the country.  (more here)

Our Bob Crabb is again flying hot, true, and normal in the Left lane as is evident in his latest graphic contribution in yesterday’s Union (filched below).

Bob's cartoon falls right in line with the nation’s lamestream outlets advancing the narrative that it’s the people from the Right who are the dangerous gun-toting rioters out there amongst the righteous folks of Left filling the streets with their "peaceful protests against racism".  The falling statues, looted shops, and burning buildings can easily be explained away by natural expressions of social justice and spontaneous combustion – remember, correlation is not causation.  Bob would do a lot to rescue his ‘mid-road’ credentials were he to draw something that illustrated the riotous actions of clearly identifiable Antifa and BLM thugs.  But with high likelihood that could also cause  the locals to pull his Leftwing License, and maybe even get him booted from The Union – worse things have happened for less to those progressives who stray from the straight and narrow.  We are reminded that revolutions first and foremost eat their own.

The causes of “gun violence” in minority neighborhoods continues to be ignored by the nation’s pro-communist commentariat.  Even FN (‘fair, balanced, and scared shitless’) is using that label in reports of the mass murders occurring every weekend on a Democrat-controlled urban plantation near you.  So when the next anti-2A push comes, you won’t have to worry your little head in the effort to discriminate between law-abiding ownership and use of guns, and the ongoing onslaught on black lives that really don’t matter.  Everyone wants to stop gun violence, right?

Speaking of legal guns, entering our Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital yesterday, I was again reminded of the utter insanity of policies that put up signs reading ‘The carrying of firearms in this facility is prohibited.’  This ensures that the facility is a ‘free fire zone’ for any deranged shooter until the police arrive, and then get organized to enter and confront the shooter.  Experience has shown that an in situ CCW-armed individual is the fastest way to stop the murderous mayhem and save countless lives.  For those not familiar with the safety stats of America’s CCW holders, consider that you are six times more likely to be murdered by a criminally rogue LE officer than a CCW civilian.  And here we’re not talking LE shootings caused by mistakes and/or incompetence.  Given the background checks and vetting required for a permit, CCW holders are the nation’s safest cohort of gun-carriers.

[update] The Bumblebrain Administration.  It is now old news that his VP woman of color will exercise historic powers in the Executive Branch; the DNC will have it no other way (and you heard it here first, I think).  But now a cascade of leaks from the Dem leadership also inform us that it’s “inconceivable” that Bumblebrain would run for reelection.  (Recall, for me it’s inconceivable that he’ll complete his first term.)  Additionally, in order to calm their constituencies, the Dem king-makers want our presumptive president to identify the complete spate of nominees for his cabinet, preferably by convention time.  Then everyone will know that capable and politically progressive people will be in charge of the various arms of government, and a vote for Bumblebrain will really be a worry-free vote for a socialist POTUS-optional government – the fundamentally transformed country’s first steps toward a post-constitutional Politburo.

[9jul20 update]  Victor Davis Hanson, one of my many mentors, makes a curious argument in his ‘The Fragility of the Woke’.  He correctly points out their fecklessness, insanities, and virulent ideology, but makes no case for the movement’s fragility.  In fact, he seems to do the opposite and confirm what we all witness in the news and daily round.  The woke movement, along with its militant BLM and Antifa arms, Democrat political support, and Soros et al financial support, appears to be the most robust, dangerous, and long-lasting  anti-American enterprise yet launched by the Left as their latest political road to socialism.  I’m confused as to why anyone keeping up with today’s events would consider this movement to be fragile as more and more institutions fall to its socio-political dicta.

Among the cavalcade of Dem Big Lies is Pelosi’s daily refrain about “the president is not above the law.”  What her constituents apparently are too dense to puzzle out is that President Trump has never been above the law, but has always gone through the bowels of the appropriate legal processes, defending himself as the law allows everyone to defend themselves.  And this is what is happening with the recent SCOTUS ruling concerning his financials and tax returns.  It’s only the lying leftwing loonies who continue to portray the process as the president somehow remaining above the law.  Now you have another litmus test to tell if a person is an idiot – just ask him if what the president is doing is above the law.

Happy Fourth, if you can (redux and up a notch)

George Rebane

On this year’s Fourth our beloved land is in more disarray than in my living memory, and that’s a fer piece in anyone’s book.  Half the country does not know where we have been, what we have done, nor shares a common vision of our future.  These dark clouds were already gathering a year ago during which some prescient words were recorded in these pages (here).

Yet those of us who hold dear what has been and continues to be the America we love will join today in a special celebration of our birthday.  And we do this with the pledge that we with our families and friends will always keep this day a sacrosanct observance, even in the face of sinister forces that now work to erase the greatest country built by people of all races, creeds, and backgrounds joined together.  May God continue to bless the United States of America.

Western academe’s sunset years

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 July 2020.]

The current insanity sweeping the western world that started with the George Floyd killing is now way past that outrage and moved on to much bigger objectives.  The event served as a trigger to launch the ready and waiting socialist and anti-capitalist factions to start their push toward a global collectivist world by first weakening or doing away with sovereign nation-states that have cultures built up over the centuries which today are the glue that unify their populations.  The socialist elites and their fielded militants in the streets have identified several critical weak points in the ties that bind nations.  One of them involves the flawed histories that each developed western nation has, which includes their role in colonizing the third world and fighting religious wars among themselves.

All of these pursuits are ample demonstrations that violate today’s standards of political correctness, social mores and values, treating all peoples and races equally and with appropriate respect for their indigenous cultures.  Western nations did little of that when they conquered and colonized the more backward civilizations of Africa, the Americas, and southern Asia.  All of that history is used by the global Left to indict today’s mostly white and European-derived countries of everything ranging from ‘cultural appropriation’ to genocide.

The west’s public educational systems have long been co-opted by progressive cadres injecting leftist principles at all levels of curriculum.  The generations of the so-educated are now primed as they doubt their own worth to humanity, and are ready to adopt a more virtuous course forward that demands fundamental changes in each nation’s basic and foundational institutions.  The ‘evidence’ for this ongoing stratagem overwhelms us daily every time we tune into mainstream media outlets.

Cultural cohesion, it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

The country is well along its increasingly insane path to the long sought and much promised fundamental transformation.  As our recent commentaries and many excellent reader contributions in the related comment streams attest, the well-funded madness is growing by the day.  The latest expansions involve initiatives to completely erase and remake America’s history, moving from tearing down our national totems to closing museums which house the artifacts and tell the soon to be forbidden stories of our ‘evil past’.  Our public K-12 schools and academe have long prepared for these events, and produced the millions of mindless moilers now making mayhem in our cities and towns.

What I want to point out here is that in their expanding rage they are co-opting a Rebane Doctrine tenet, namely, society is best organized when people exercise their natural right to live among others who share their values, mores, customs, traditions, language, worldview, …, in short, abide with those who share a common culture.  Expressing the desire to do so is not evil per se, as the Left has been telling us all along.

On this road to revolution the Left is visibly reversing itself, and now not only approves of society living within a cohesive culture, but will define such a command culture for all to accept, with no exceptions.  The specifics of such command cultures have been most evident under communist regimes which force their morally imperative diktats onto the masses under the banners of ‘common good’.  In our major governmental and private institutions, including our post-capitalist corporations, these cultural strictures are already solidly ensconced and perfidiously policed to identify, shun and/or oust the non-conformists and historically tainted.

Today a wrong word or an ideological imperfection discovered in your record, no matter its vintage, is more than enough to get you fired, career ruined, or even qualify to be investigated for some bespoke civil or criminal infraction.  In the early days of the revolution, no provision for appealing the verdicts of the righteous mob is made.  Only later, as the revolution matures into the instruments of power will our new masters establish the traditional institutions to isolate and redeem those wearing the indelible mark of the identified deplorables.  We have seen that happen with the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian and Vietnamese re-education camps, and the wholesale forced labor incarcerations of hundreds of millions carried out by the Chinese communists during their cultural revolutions, and who currently house their culturally incorrigible Uighurs in massive prison complexes. (more here)

My point is that finally the Left has also accepted and declared its mandate for a culturally cohesive society that will be conformed for the common good.  America’s Right has always promoted the existence of divers culturally cohesive communities living in harmony – e.g. the Quakers, Amish, Mormons, … .  The methods we have historically used to separate such communities have not always been civil, and some have had definite racist motivations – e.g. against African-Americans and the Irish.  Nevertheless, the criterion has been maintenance of cultural conformity and not the genocide of the expelled culture.  In the last century we also learned that anyone of any genetic make-up can and has been accepted into any given culture.  In sum, ‘race’, however it’s defined, is no longer a relevant factor for cultural membership.

(In my native land, Estonians were for centuries considered genetically inferior and culturally corrupt in turn by their German, Swedish, and Russian conquerors.  We were treated as slaves and then serfs by our masters who even imposed ‘first night’s rights’ on newly married brides in order to ‘improve the breed’.  It was not until the mid-19^th century that Estonian culture came to be recognized, and was then able to work its way into peerage among established European cultures.)

So where are we on the adoption of culturally coherent communities?  Well, both sides have now declared their in-principle preference for them.  The big difference is that the Right wants Americans to have the ability to establish such communities according to their own desires and in places where similarly minded people can move to join together in various locales/regions across this land.  The Left wants to impose its new one-size-fits-all politically correct culture on everybody in America.  It wants to organize our transformed society on the historically failed models of its collectivist forebears, with the claim that this time we’ll do it right, embodying all the inclusiveness, social justice, and equality that were the watchwords used to sell the great unwashed on previous versions of socialism cum communism cum tyranny.  So once again it has started with ‘we’ll take from the greedy and racist rich and give to those who can’t or won’t’, all that’s required is unquestioning conformity.

And it has already started with Job One – the utter destruction of America as we have known it – now going on in a neighborhood near you.

Letters from the Revolution – 27jun20 (updated)

'Can the country confront its current problems with its traditional can-do spirit?  We have barely four months to figure out how.'  A.H.A.

George Rebane

‘America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution’, so argues Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (married to Niall Ferguson, internationally prominent socio-political historian not to be confused with the recently notorious epidemiologist of C19 fame, Neil Ferguson).  We have twice before met this brave and eloquent lady in these pages (here and here).

In her timely essay she brings together many of the ideas promoted in these pages for years, and which also adorn the corpus of my credo and form major tenets of Rebane Doctrine – all of which are anathema to our command/control collectivists now carefully coordinating their socio-political assets as they foment the coming revolution.

An alarming report in her piece is the confirmation of the absolute volatility of public opinion and its being totally unmoored from reason and critical thought. (see also here)  Recounting the rush of politicians and corporatists to join the rioting revolutionaries Ms Ali recounts –

By the middle of June, according to polls, American public opinion had been transformed from skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement to widespread support. Politicians, journalists and other public figures who had denounced protests against the pandemic lockdown suddenly lost their concern about infection. One Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted on June 2: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Please reread the assessment of a thoroughly politicized scientist, who today abound in the public forum.

She goes on to view the changes in what may be termed the aggregate American mind.  We used to be a nation that prided and practiced distributed self-government at the local level, solving our own problems as they arose with our own solutions.  This seminal and differentiating characteristic of Americans was noticed as early as in the 1830s by European visitors.

This country is only 244 years old, but it may be showing signs of age. Time was, Americans were renowned for their can-do, problem-solving attitude. Europeans, as Alexis de Tocqueville complained, were inclined to leave problems to central authorities in Paris or Berlin. Americans traditionally solved problems locally, sitting together in town halls and voluntary associations. Some of that spirit still exists, even if we now have to meet on Zoom. But the old question—“How can we figure this out?”—is threatened with replacement by “Why can’t the government figure this out for us?”

That last appeal is the common denominator that gathers all of our leftists who then also grouse when their problems are not solved by technocrats in some distant capital.  Furthest from their minds, and now from the minds of the mostly mindless masses is the fundamental tenet that government itself is the most likely, if not certain, first cause and/or amplifier of the problem.  Today von Mises’ counsel to government – ‘First, do nothing!’ – is considered a reprehensible expression of lese majeste to big government socialists.

More sinister and on the mark is Ms Ali’s fearless finger when she asserts, “The problem is that there are people among us who don’t want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social problems, because social problems are the basis of their power.”  According to Rebane Doctrine, this forms one of the many accessible litmus tests to identify corrupt and evil politicians and their fielded demogauges.

Right now the biggest danger to our republic lies in the leftward rush of the Democrat Party, and their unquestioned embrace of socialism as the stepping stone to a more perfect world.  In this regard Ali expresses our common hope –

One way or another, the Democratic Party has to find a way of throwing out the socialists who are destroying it. … The Republicans, too, have to change their ways. They have to reconnect with young people. They have to address the concerns of Hispanics. And they have to listen to African-Americans, who most certainly do not want to see the police in their neighborhoods replaced by woke community organizers.

What no one, including Ms Ali, wants to address is how the Republicans can penetrate three generations of anti-American, anti-capitalist indoctrination of our young and younger cohort that is daily reinforced by the lamestream media.  But making headway in that quarter they must, for the fraction of young people currently attracted toward conservetarian ideals is too small to make a significant impact in the voting booth.  Meanwhile, the ranks of today’s young social-luddites swell and sway with every new serving of misguided bombast from the White House.  Nevertheless, the Great Divide, with or without a revolution, it’s a’comin’.

[update]  Appealing to the reasonable middle in America continues to be a fool’s errand still promoted by the intellectual Right (and on which I find myself).  The Left knows better.  That cohort of middle-roaders that so enamors our lightly read, good-hearted neighbors is almost non-existent.  Good estimates seeking out these people are able to calculate that they number at most about 6% of American adults.  The remainder of the permanently polarized, mostly leftwingers and their gimme constituents, significantly outnumber the rightwing true believers.  “In April, the Washington Post published an article titled ‘The Coming Republican Demographic Disaster’ (where it) discusses one of the most notable trends in American politics over the past decade: Republican candidates do consistently worse with people of color, and the proportion of non-white voters in the American electorate is increasing. This could be bad news for the Republican party. If its candidates do not improve their appeal among non-white voters, their chances of winning future elections will decline sharply in the coming decades.”  These non-whites have demonstrated for decades that they are politically beyond any reasonable reach.  I find it sad to see that nationally prominent talking heads, such as those like Dan Henninger at the WSJ, continue to spout hopeful platitudes claiming that if the Republicans can only reach the middle, then they will prevail.  Not even close.  The real question is ‘what does it take to piss off a Democrat voter?’  No one knows.  (more here)

Scattershots – 25jun20 (updated 27jun20)

"Black people are being murdered and brutalized by police with near impunity." ACLU manifesto

George Rebane

Big Lies.  The demonic Democrats are hands down the purveyors of significant and impactive big lies that are issued daily by their political leadership and their lamestream media.  (see above tagline)  When lies in the public forum are considered, the attributes of ‘significance’ and ‘impactive’ should be paramount in assessing their belonging in the Big Lie category.  Significance describes the ability of the lie to grasp the public’s attention, and impactive describes the lie’s ability to affect public behavior and/or attitudes, e.g. voting, demonstrating, rioting, polling responses, … .  Using these criteria for a Big Lie, the ones told by Trump are few and far in between (as opposed to the almost 20K counted by TDS sufferers).  However, those issuing under the various banners of the Left are literally a daily occurrence (e.g. yesterday’s whopper by Pelosi that Republicans are guilty of George Floyd’s death).

‘Time to examine the entire police culture’ proposes David Davidson-Methot in the 25jun20 Union.  He makes a quiet and compelling argument that bad apples in police departments come about in two ways.  First, through faulty screening processes and police union induced departmental omerta, we let innately bad people wear a badge.  But perhaps more importantly, the environment, defined by its leadership and culture, in which people work (the ‘barrel’) is often the wholesale producer of bad apples.  Mr Davidson-Methot cites ‘The Stanford Experiment’ conducted by Dr Philip Zimbardo that launched an entire field of behavioral research yielding results with impressive predictive power of how good apples turn into bad apples in bad barrels – e.g. the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal.  Bottom line here is that to fix real incidences of police brutality, don’t defund or abolish police departments, examine and fix departmental cultures and replace leaderships where necessary.  It’s an approach worthy of public debate as Congress continues in deadlock on the issue.  In the meantime, ‘No, Police Racism Isn’t an Epidemic’ as correctly argues Jason Riley in the 23jun20 WSJ.

No country had an effective and anticipatory pandemic response plan to combat the C19 virus.  So documents Holman Jenkins (here) in the 23jun20 WSJ, that summarizes evidence now gathered from all over the world.  I include this here as more examples of Democrat Big Lies claiming that President Trump uniquely mishandled America’s response and caused the avoidable loss of tens of thousands of lives.  That just ain’t so, no matter how often and intensely Team Pelosi and her lamestream trumpets repeat the lie, and thereby making it a Big Lie due to its clearly significant and impactive effect, as is evident in the polls of respondents many (most?) of whom know nothing of viral infections, epidemic spreading, transmission vectors, herd immunity, … , or simpler put, can’t reliably identify the Atlantic Ocean on a map.  And the demonic Dems count on it.

Republicans suppress votes is another Democrat Big Lie that flies in the face of data unreported in the lamestream.  This Big Lie forms an important barricade to keep the country’s African-Americans on the Democrat plantation.  Karl Rove’s ‘Botch the Vote, Then Cry Suppression’ in the 25jun20 WSJ details the vote tallies and jurisdictional political leaderships of the ‘suppressed areas’ claimed by Democrats and their platoons of black demogauges.  The bottom line is that, contrary to votes being suppressed, blacks voted in record numbers in the cited counties all run by Democrats for years.  What the Big Lie fails to tell people is that voting procedures and processes (many of them botched) are run locally at the county level, and their allegations of suppression occurred in Democrat led counties.  Instead, the Big Lie consumer is supposed to walk away with the belief that Republicans at both federal and local levels have successfully conspired to keep blacks from voting.

[update]  ... and the beat goes on.  " 'Today, it seems there is less of a bias against conservatives and rather a bias for conservatives.'  During the course of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on consumer protection and commerce, Chairwoman Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) actually claimed that Facebook and Twitter favor conservatives, despite mountains of evidence that conservatives are more likely to get banned, flagged, or 'fact checked' by the social media giants." (more here)

[27jun20 update]  Commenter ‘Robert Cross’ in his 236pm comment below (I had to dig it out of Typepad’s spam folder) does a marvelous job illustrating how we talk past each other.  He opens his screed with the claim that I’m “deflecting” the Left’s count of 20K Trump lies, when I directly address it and compare these to the Dems’ Big Lies, which comparison he neither acknowledges nor addresses.  And his piece de resistance is that my pointing out the difference between the types of Trump’s v the Dems’ lies is a prime cause of and my contribution to the country’s polarization.  He thus once again reinforces the Left’s looming march toward censorship and 1A abrogation, in that only one side’s interpretation should be heard in the public forum, and all other opinions are deplorably divisive and therefore should be either withheld or suppressed.

Letters from the Revolution – 23jun20

George Rebane

It is only the reality of force that makes peaceful diplomacy possible.

As our buildings burn, more black lives end that don’t make no nevermind, as China continues to build its muscle to rule its ‘near abroad’, Germany bitches about America not doing more to defend its carefully cloistered butt, and Democrats are busy readying Bumblebrain for prime time, the nation’s cops continue to compete with our politicians for the Cringe Cup while BLM and Antifa thugs rule our city centers.

The revolution has long left behind its George Floyd Memorial Starting Gate.  From the ongoing body counts and mounting casualties in our cities, you have to be a real idiot to keep believing that all this destruction still has anything to do with regaining civil rights denied.  No siree, all eyes are now on a much bigger prize, one that has been waiting in the wings ever since the Wall came down in 1989 - now we are fully advancing onto the ramparts of socialism.  Just ask Bernie, AOC, Warren, Harris, …, ask any of them.  Ask even the members of Team Nancy who are doing their best to hang on to the tiger they know they are riding.

It is all coming about so quickly, just as we have warned readers for years.  And I don’t claim rocket science for that prognostication, only a little more than a casual reading of history and watching what has been going on since WW2.

To date no one is even attempting to talk them down or demonstrate that our traditional culture has the wherewithal to resist the mobs who demand more today than they did yesterday.  The tagline to this missive is something totally beyond the ken of peaceful progressives who passively consume every bit from the wisdom of the demanding signs.  They have no clue of what they condone.  I’d like to conclude that the conservatives do know what lies at the end of the road now traveled, but they (we) have somehow misplaced their (our) gumption.  I have no idea for what the rest of us are waiting – that somehow it will all quiet down and everyone will again play nice.  Well, they haven’t for years, so Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ has never worked (least of all in his life).

It doesn’t matter whether we attempt negotiations with America’s anti-American thugs, or the Chinese, when your opponent realizes that your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is capitulation, then diplomacy fails.  It was ever thus.  The only thing that makes sense attempting to talk down a crisis is that your opponent knows you have a BATNA with balls.  And even that doesn’t guarantee a peaceful stand-down.  For you negotiators out there, that requires a ZOPA (zone of possible agreement) that has something to offer.  (ZOPA is the set of all deals that are at least as good for each party in a negotiation as their respective BATNAs.)

Rig for ram.

Reflections on Racism – no time to decide (updated)

George Rebane

A barren desert is now the middle ground separating Americans from their woke and fundamentally transformed brethren.

Racism has been an enduring theme on RR for years – e.g. back in 2010, through the years, and a more recent commentary in 2019.  With readers we have dissected it 20 ways from Sunday.  Even liberals have joined in.  Unfortunately, their contributions have been limited to calling the rest of us ‘racists’ without being able to even define the word.  From Lewis Carroll we read once again –

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

I recently visited Bob Crabb’s site to pay homage to his excellent cartoon (here) and return the favor of his visits to RR.  What caught my eye was Bob’s brief but meaningful commentary posted below his cartoon –

We are reaching the tipping point, and I don’t mean just tipping old confederate statues. Our competing ideologies have retreated to the far ends of the spectrum where any kind of compromise is seen as treachery. … Can cooler heads prevail? I’d like to think so, but when the extremes are obsessed with winning it all, it seems unlikely. … As I have said here before, it’s too bad that we are bent on destroying such a nice country.

Bob now perceives the tipping point that in my Great Divide screeds I claim we passed long ago.  But what I took to task was his claim that both “extremes are obsessed with winning it all”, which on its face is not true.  I then entered into a dialogue with some liberal worthies that turned out to be predictably unproductive, save that it illustrated the barren desert of our middle ground.  As I’ve mentioned before, and with no apologies to the late Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sides can and do have their own distinct and widely varying opinions, facts, histories, morals, ethics, systems of logic, and desiderata for the future.

Scattershots – 19jun20

“Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property.  Instead, if flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.”  Yuval Noah Hariri

George Rebane

Sweden’s death committees have been working overtime.  Under their nationalized healthcare hordes of seniors diagnosed with C19 have been automatically consigned to “palliative care” – aka pump ‘em full of morphine until they die.  This little revelation comes out in conjunction with a heartfelt success story of a son who fought for his father’s life in the clutches of a calculating state (more here).  In our discussion of the ‘value of human life’ our leftwingers are in terminal denial that it is they and theirs who have always devalued human life, consigning lives to abortion (including post-partum), mental hospitals, eugenics experiments, gas chambers, and boxcars to faraway final solutions.  This is what we have to look forward if/when Democrats sweep the field.

Thomas Sowell writes ‘Charter Schools’ Enemies Block Black Success’ in which he outlines the outright evil wrought by leftwing politicians in denying blacks sure-fire ways to escape the carefully constructed leftwing plantations in America’s urban ghettos.  Charter schools have been enormously successful in closing the black-white academic gaps, and not because they “skim the cream” of the students as another one of the Democrats’ Big Lies that really impact the nation.  Admission to these schools in poor areas is by lottery, so Lady Luck draws a cross section of applicants who come from ALL segments of the black and brown communities.  NYC spends more than $20K (including federal monies paid by you) per student annually to deliver one of the nation’s worst educational products.  And union-funded lickspittle politicians are doing all they can to keep minority children under incompetent, uncaring teachers, crammed into classrooms in schools suffering from years of deferred maintenance under Democrat administrations.  And these idiots still claim the moral highground!

“The U.S. made outrage a form of social currency. Now we’re in the hyperinflationary phase.”. so argues Joseph Sternberg in his ‘A Wheelbarrow Full of Outrage’.  Sternberg correctly equates today’s ever-increasing demands of wokeness for more and more outrage, “outrage (that) has rapidly become so devalued that ordinary members of society can no longer leverage it for that most important good of all: social peace. A conspicuous feature of the recent protests in the U.S. is that no policy reform, no corporate initiative, no individual action is enough. Employers no longer know what form of progressive activism constitutes the “right” level of compensation for their idealistic employees. Commentators and academics no longer know which contributions to important public debates—which expenditures of their professional expertise and social capital—will be deemed acceptable.”  In this piece Sternberg also gives an operational definition of ‘wokeness’ which is a “type of performative progressive outrage used to boost one’s capital in the political marketplace.”

Corporations are not treating their employees fairly, so maintains the US senator from Ohio.  This leftist’s epiphany is that “The pandemic has laid bare how corporations treat employees not as essential to their success but as a cost to be minimized. One grocery store worker in Ohio told me recently, ‘I don’t feel essential. I feel expendable.’”  It’s heartwarming to see Sen Sherrod Brown glean an understanding that corporations have always viewed labor as a cost to be minimized.  Had not the Henry Fords of America realized and put this into practice, not very many people could afford cars, or vacuum cleaners, or toasters, or movies, or supermarkets, or … .  And yes Virginia, when you are working for someone else, you are exchanging the value of your labor for your wages.  And competition in America’s labor markets should always make workers feel expendable (as our product/services markets make their employers feel expendable).  That’s why you work more diligently, learn a more valuable skill, start a business, and in general not become incompetent in what you do, as we see demonstrated daily by public employees. (more here)

Springtime for our Great Divide

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2020.]

Where were you and what did you do in the spring of 2020?  The world has changed much during the last three months.  When we look back, we will remember this spring as the historical milestone when Americans finally realized that they are no longer one reconcilable people.  Where next we go from here is uncertain and up for grabs.  The only certainty we have going forward is the coming Great Divide.

Our country has been subjected to a perfect trifecta of national crises, all layered onto an ongoing campaign to discredit and destroy the duly elected president of our democratic republic.  Along with the rest of the world, we were blindsided by a viral pandemic which no one understood and for which no one had prepared.  America, along with most other developed countries, initiated a lockdown mandating that people not travel, stay home, and not work.  In consumer driven economies like ours, this caused economic collapse.  And while we were sequestered, hearing reports of Covid-19 deaths, and wondering how we would pay our rent and bills, we witnessed three separate killings of black persons by incompetent, inept, and poorly trained police.  And all of this during the most contentious presidential election year in living memory.

Hunker Down Diary – 16jun20

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  A. Lincoln

George Rebane

Yesterday was HD100 for the Rebanes, and Jo Ann announced that we are done hunkering down.  Truth be known, this will not be a sudden change in our collective behviors, we’ve been kinda easing out of our lockdown over the last few weeks.  And what’s more noteworthy is the historical change our country has embarked on since the killing of George Floyd.  We all will have a lot more to say about that as we witness the Antifa/BLM riots continue to be spawned from the many ‘peaceful protests’ that now fill the land.

The above timely graphic by RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, filched from the pages of the 16jun20 Union, is in my humble opinion, the pointedly most significant political cartoon that our own iconic observer of the country’s feats and follies has submitted.  I believe it qualifies for a Pulitzer.

Scattershots – 10jun20 (updated 13jun20)

George Rebane

Beware of people who need outliers to make their point, and then use these to cloud the big picture.

Food prices are soaring even though plants are coming back on line and distribution problems have been solved.  The producers’ argument is that worker safety requires reconfiguration of work spaces and the introduction of new automation.  The real answer is that this opportunity to permanently reduce labor costs can not be wasted.  Stand by for the next surge of systemic unemployment as the C19 pandemic wanes – keep an eye on the workforce participation rate that was already at a low of about 62% before the virus hit; can we return to that level?

‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Cops’ have been pulled by their distributors in fear of knee-bender mobs who have assumed the role of the country’s new thought police.  GWTW’s distributor HBO Max stated, “Gone With the Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”  America is retreating toward the Russia1918 and Germany1934. (more here)

Liberal thought leaders Dr William Galston, Brookings Institute Fellow, and VP-candidate-in-waiting Stacey Abrams base their messages on the beliefs of the ill-informed mass of Americans who hold that George Floyd’s death is a common occurrence at the hands of our police, and that the perennial poverty and crime in black communities are entirely due to Republicans suppressing the black vote over the last half century.  The data record supports none of these assertions.  The glaring bottom line here is that black lives do NOT matter to blacks, nor to their plantation politicians whom they keep in their sinecured offices.  All this mind-boggling mass action is possible with people subjected to utterly failed schools and a perennially propagandizing entertainment and news media. (more here and here)

On violent black deaths, the posterchild statistic is the comparison of the 9 unarmed blacks who died at the hands of police to the 7,400+ blacks who were murdered by fellow blacks. “The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” (here)

[11jun20 update]  Increasingly Great Divide ducks are lining up.  The leading elements of our Left are taking the initiative with more than just lootings, burnings, and killings of the established order, they have now assumed control of a major city’s central section, declaring it to be a new (communist, socialist?) “autonomous zone” while controlling ingress/egress to their new domain.  About all this the timid leftwing governor of Washington claimed no knowledge.  Meanwhile some are beginning the calculus of a portending civil war (here), and others have decided to take up arms in the defense of their communities against imported Antifa thugs.  An example ignored in the lamestream (and the scared shitless Fox News) is Coeur d’Alene where hundreds of the good citizens of Idaho made their presence known in town, which subsequently saw no violent mob activity. (here and here)   Meanwhile, leftwing sites claim that the Antifa threat was all a hoax.  My 30may20 third question (here) is being answered.

The clamped down minds of lamestream journalism are starting to denounce their own.  Today one wrong slip of the lip, and you’re history.  So discovered the NYT’s editorial page editor, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine.  The Left is finally in a position to actively start denying 1A rights in the name of suppressing their obscure but ubiquitous definitions of racism. “The issue here is not about the assertion that racism is endemic in the U.S. The issue is the willingness by many to displace the American system of free argument with a system of enforced, coerced opinion and censorship, which forces comparison to the opinion-control mechanisms that existed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.” (more here)  Samizdat lives. 

[12jun20 update]  Russian collusion is alive and well in the belief and propaganda systems of the Left (witnessed by our leftwinger comments).  To the rest of us it is astounding that the progressives’ hatred of Trump impels them to continue one their most vicious Big Lies, day after day telling the country that Trump did indeed collude with the Russians.  But more importantly, that part and parcel of this collusion enabled the Russians to interfere in the 2016 so successfully that it was the impact of their efforts that sealed the ‘fraudulent election’ in Trump’s favor.  This narrative continues unabated to this day.

Re my C19 response policy.  Readers may be curious as to what my policy would be for public gatherings and general behavior in public forums.  To save my burying it in some comment stream, I’ll put it here for all to see.  I don't support further lockdowns even though we will have succeeding 'waves' of C19 until a reliable vaccine is developed. None has been developed yet for the garden variety flu, and we have succeeding waves of it every fall and winter which cause tens of thousands to die of it. No one has been social distancing, wearing masks, locking down, and turning off the economy for that, at least for a century. Rebane Doctrine calls for the government and healthcare institutions to publish the latest risk data (accounting for demographics, comorbidity, and geography) for C19, flu, ..., and all other contagious diseases, along with what lowers the probability of people getting infected. Then everyone can decide for themselves where to go and which events to attend. Laws should be passed that you get to sue no one if you catch the bug.

[13jun20 update]  Both the Right and Left understand that a robust free press is required to maintain a liberal democracy.  The Left opposes a free press and promotes the censorship of ideas they don’t favor.  What does that say about the Left’s real intentions to maintain a liberal democracy?  The Left promotes the Big Lie that the killing of George Floyd and other black males is a common police activity and not a rare outlier (see above).  Is there anything Trump does that anywhere near approaches that for dividing the country?

Hurricane George Floyd

“In October 1913, the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction. No reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country.” Y.N. Harari, Sapiens (2014).

George Rebane

The on-camera, tragic and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman has unleashed a social storm across America that is unprecedented and potentially ruinous to our constitutional republic.  Anti-American coalitions have united to sanctify a habitual criminal and elevate him to a unique martyrdom for the purpose of disrupting our established, albeit imperfect, yet overwhelmingly beneficial social order that is the envy of the world.  All of these cohorts – ranging from Antifa to the Democrat Party - see today’s nationwide protests and riots as an opportunity to create the chaos from which each has the possibility to bring about their own version of a fundamentally transformed United States.

President Barack Obama started stacking the dominoes with his view of an irretrievably flawed America that needed to be fundamentally transformed into a socialist democracy that would function under a revised, reinterpreted, or totally rewritten constitution.  Today we are witness to the other dominoes all waiting in a row – rotten cities, uncontrolled homelessness, “mismanaged” pandemic, crippled economy, historically high unemployment, politically-biased media, dismally uninformed and innumerate electorate, advance of disruptive technologies, dysfunctional public schools, distrust of businesses and enterprise, rejection of capitalism and markets, looming systemic unemployment, firmly ensconced victimhood of minorities, socially polarized nation, unpopular President with maladroit communication skills, corrupt and timid justice system, Democrat plurality fomenting socialism, lame Republican Party sans backbone, … .

All of these self-inflicted and manufactured flaws today stand in a row ready to be tipped by the riot-prone protests perfidiously promoted by the several political factions sharing various shades of collectivist ideologies in their agendas for a brave new global order.  And the question now is whether that serendipitous video, seen around the world, of the police murdering George Floyd was the flapping of the butterfly wings that has now set in motion a storm the final impact of which no one knows.

From my readings of history, I am reminded of what the previous year’s events gave rise to in the Russia of 1918 and the Germany of 1934.  Today WSJ columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes (here) –

Indiscriminate property damage and looting descended on some 140 cities across the U.S. in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd while in police custody. Business owners, workers and customers in minority neighborhoods were hard hit. And in the years to come they will pay the steepest price for the unchecked violence done by rampaging mobs claiming to represent them.

To be clear, the near universal outrage over the video of Floyd’s death, expressed by an overwhelmingly nonviolent majority of demonstrators, is the lawful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble. This is central to what it means to be an American and to reaching peace and reconciliation.

Violence is another matter entirely. There is evidence that it has been instigated by organized militants trained to leap into action when opportunities present themselves. While they don’t represent the majority of protesters, they use them as shields. What is more, their brutal aggression is politically effective and only mildly condemned. One reason, I would venture, is that they are the mailed fist of a broader movement that has infected academia, the media, popular culture and politics with the notion that Western traditions are oppressive and should be destroyed. … The bad news is that the drip-drip-drip of an intellectual narrative aimed at destroying Western values and publicly shaming anyone who resists the ideological corrosion is here to stay.

I join with those who do not accept the glorification of George Floyd nor the assessments of the street wisdom and fomenting politicians about the irredeemable state of our Union.  From our media we are awash with deceitful propaganda that frames events into formats not supported by any collected data.  In other words, the numbers in the public record (discussed many times in these pages) don’t support the misappropriated emotions of the protesters, politicians, and even police who seek indemnification and redemption for professed sins with every opportunity to ‘take the knee’.  My sentiments about the happenings during the last two weeks are best expressed through the words of Candace Owens in a Facebook video (on Powerline here) now seen by tens of millions.  No one stands taller than this woman against the current tide of insanity.

Antifa Rising (updated 9jun20)

George Rebane

Motivated by the ongoing George Floyd protests cum riots, I renewed my interest in finding out more about Antifa – is it an organization or merely a movement of loosely coupled cells operating all over the country?  The discussions in our comment streams seem to divide along ideological lines – those leaning right see it as a formidable organization that rises to the occasion whenever there’s a political contention in the public forum; those leaning left characterize it as nothing more than a movement of some loosely formed groups of protesters against the country’s capitalist order.  In recent days I’ve received some informative emails from readers containing links to reports and commentaries that cover the waterfront on Antifa.  Here I’ll share a couple of them which I found more salient to my puzzling on the matter.

First some definitions:  A movement is a social cohort sharing an affinity to a set of beliefs and an overarching objective.  They usually express themselves in conjunction with other social gatherings, observances, and/or ad hoc events which may spontaneously/serendipitously arise.  A movement need not be organized around an enduring social structure.  An organization is a social order that has an enduring and labeled identity which is structured to achieve an objective summarized in a published mission statement, the accomplishment of which is through some known intermediate goals.  Organizations have a leadership hierarchy (e.g. board, executive management, operating managers, staff, …), a headquarters, established means of funding operations, membership, and a current agenda.  As they grow and gather steam, movements inevitably become organized in order to continue progress toward their overarching objective. 

The following numbered points summarize my current take on Antifa –

1. The origins of Antifa can be traced to the post-Bolshevik movements to spread the communist revolution into western Europe during the 1920s, specifically to counter the fascist (national socialist) movements that started in Italy with the rise of Mussolini after he was expelled from the Italian Communist Party.
2. Antifa members held a loosely defined and contradictory political ideology that welcomed both anarchists and Marxist/Leninist communists. The anarchists wanted to do away with all government immediately, and the communists wanted big governments to control all aspects of society.  But we recall that the Marx’s stated ultimate objective was a social order in which the perfected communist Man would live in social harmony without further need for government.  So in that sense Antifa could attract both anarchists and communists to work together toward an ultimate common goal, the timing of which they could quibble over after the established ‘fascist social orders’ were overthrown.
3. Antifa divides people into anti-fascists, fascists, and those who are ideologically innocent/naïve. Fascism is never given a precise operational definition, but is simply defined as being anything and everything that opposes the Antifa objectives and methods.
4. The acknowledged and taught MO to achieve Antifa objectives is through violence that is justified because Antifa members consider all opposition to their creed to also be expressions of violence.
5. The Antifa movement never became a stable organization in Europe or in its spread to the US. It arose here and there to oppose fascism in pre-WW2 Europe and was ruthlessly put down by the Nazis.
6. Antifa has made itself known through protest demonstrations of opportunity over the last decades by joining the ranks of non-violent protesters and then turning the protests into violent riots by instigating assaults on police, arson, looting, and generally creating opportunistic mayhem. Their intent is to project the image that the entire protesting cohort in the streets share their objectives and violent means of achieving them.
7. No overarching Antifa organization has been identified in the US. However, there are several Antifa cells that have names and aggressively operate in various cities and regions of our country.  Today they are very active during the ongoing George Floyd protests, successfully having turned most of them into destructive riots.
8. Antifa’s published leaflets and online proclamations declare its fundamental opposition to property, established legal order, capitalism, individual rights and freedom, religion, and constitutional government. The underlying objective of all their activities is the ultimate destruction of the United States of America, their greatest worldwide evil against which all means and methods are justified.
9. “Antifa activists communicate and recruit mostly through social media, using Facebook as their principal forum for organizing protests.” Antifa cells receive money for recruiting and operations through a number of listed leftwing, pro-socialist organizations funded by prominent hard-left personages (e.g. George Soros and various entertainers).
10. The main source of new Antifa members is from the constituents of the Democratic Party. The Dems and their lamestream media provide the political support for Antifa, mischaracterizing them as ‘protesters’, never calling them rioters, and minimizing reports of their violence and destruction.  And when all else fails, Antifa is portrayed as being in the streets to justifiably oppose ‘rightwing anarchists’ and ‘white nationalists’ who are the real fascists and instigators of the riots.
11. The Democratic Party sees Antifa as a cohort of useful idiots that today function to keep alive the more visible and virulent forms of anti-Trump sentiments without having to expose themselves as militantly in the streets seeking to bring about their advertised “fundamental transformation” of America. More importantly, Antifa’s message to the minorities reinforces the Democrats’ decades-long narrative that our Hispanics and African-Americans continue as perpetual victims of corporate America and racist whites.
12. There is a lot written about Antifa. From my readings, the two most informative that I found are ‘Project Veritas: Antifa Operates Like a Business’ and ‘A Communist & Anarchist Movement That Explicitly Endorses Violence’.

[8jun20 update]  The Antifa Manual.  Over the last week I’ve received several emails with what is purported to be the manual for Antifa members that outlines its ideology and the modus operandi of its street operations.  At first I hesitated to post it for several reasons that made me doubt its authenticity, primarily the variations in the writing style and a very naïve composition/structure.  It looks like it was meant to communicate the evils of Antifa to people unfamiliar with the movement.  In any event, whatever its provenance, someone went to some trouble to make the document look like the real deal.  You can download it and make up your own mind.  Download Antifa-Manual

[9jun20 update]  Noted WSJ columnist Bill McGurn joins many nationwide observers of how the peaceful protests have been co-opted by violent thugs, most of whom pledge their allegiance to the many Antifa cells that supply rioters to the various George Floyd demonstration venues.  In his ‘Mayhem is the Message’, McGurn writes – “If justice for George Floyd is the goal, many cannot fathom how it makes any sense to trash already-vulnerable neighborhoods, kill other African-American men in the process, and destroy black-owned stores that, as former President Barack Obama just pointed out, may never come back. But it makes perfect sense if the goal is to indict America as fatally compromised by racism since birth. And if the mayhem provokes authorities such as Mr. Trump into further inflaming the situation, so much the better.”

And then there’s CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the idiot brother of New York’s governor, who pours gasoline on the fire with his, “Please, show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”  The dufus totally misses that ‘polite and peaceful’ is how the lamestream, led by his employer, has been characterizing the riots.  Today’s perversity of the Left includes the observation by Scott Walker of the Capital Research Center that “Radical mobs on campuses call speech they don’t like ‘violence,’ ” while “Radical mobs in the streets call their violence ‘speech.’ Either way, instead of highlighting the difference between peaceful protesters and rioters, they want to erase it.”  The reasonable voices from the black community are always few and hard to hear over those screeching victimhood, but three intellectual giants stand out – Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele.  African-Americans would fare far better following their counsel, instead of divisive demogauges like Sharpton and Jackson.

Riot Reflections – 5jun20 (updated 6jun20)

George Rebane

Taking a knee during our national anthem.  This has now become the woke behavior of all right-thinking people in our land where we are free to protest our government and institutions 24/7 (although not always with impunity since the 1A is ailing and in desperate straits).  Given that, remains there no sacrosanct ceremony or totem for us where showing our unabashed allegiance and gratitude for this unique land is not sullied for yet another opportunity to denigrate and protest?

Sheriffs and police chiefs marching with protesters??!  Can some of the more knowledgeable among us shed light on what these LE department heads were trying to communicate with their attendance in the throng?  Were they protesting their own inability to bring about the protesters’ desired changes in their departments (e.g. defunding), or were they just ropa-doping ‘solidarity’ with the protesters in the attempt to mollify their eventual morphing into a riotous mob?

“rightwing anarchists” is one of progressives’ phrases-of-art du jour.  Not surprisingly, it even appears on Bob Crabb’s blog to apparently identify one of the major causes of today’s nationwide riots, having no mention of the otherwise obvious participants with their desiderata prominently displayed on slogan embellished signs, graffiti, online manifestos, megaphoned gatherings, stashed caches for burnings, lootings, … .  Where can we go to witness these rightwing anarchists who are the root and visible causes of all this mayhem?  What is their number?  Where do they congregate on our streets?  Have any of them been captured or arrested?

Memo to President Trump – ‘Please STFU, give it a rest, and let the news cycle contain something else – e.g. good ecnomic news, waning pandemic – besides the lamestream’s trumpeting about your latest foot-in-mouth tweets.  Thank you.’

[update]  Economists miss May job numbers by more than 420%.  The predicted an 8M jobs loss into the face of 2.5M jobs added.  When they start doing numbers, economists are a real sorry lot, especially when we need them the most, like during this historic recession.  They do a lot of harm when they gather in bunches such as in the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget – they really are gangs that can’t shoot straight.  You’d think that screwing up time after time they’d find other kinds of work – don’t they ever get embarrassed?

Bad poll numbers again for Trump.  So reports one of our more prominent commenters who is now easily past his fourth year of a steady stream of announcements about Trump’s declining poll numbers that are always setting record lows, especially now during the pandemic.  According to him the president never seems to recover.  So how is it that after all these years of drastic losses of public confidence, Trump’s poll numbers haven’t zeroed out, but instead remain pretty much the same.  Sounds like some kind of numerical magic to me.  Perhaps he’ll explain it to us.

[6jun20 update]  D-Day 76 years ago.  In 1944 the Rebanes had recently arrived in the Third Reich from Estonia, and were living in a hastily government-erected clapboard cabin (about 500sqft) in Stettin-am-Oder – an old German cultural and trade center, now named Szczecin in Poland.  As refugees, my electrician father was pressed into a work battalion to reinstall electricity (that or fight on the eastern front) after the nightly bombings by mostly Soviet bombers.  My seamstress mother was put to work sewing rank insignia and epaulets for Wehrmacht uniforms.  In the evenings we heard Goebbels telling the Reich of the latest German victory that somehow always was closer to Berlin than the previously reported victories.  On the night of 6 June 1944 we heard him boast of how the Wehrmacht in France was pushing the long expected allied landings in France back into the English Channel.

Revolution YES, Vigilantes NO.  That is the message from our eternally dysfunctional Democratic functionaries who rule our riotous cities on both coasts, with some more sprinkled in between.  These historically-innocent politicians are celebrating the “protests” conducted by thugs who smash and burn property while killing and maiming anyone who attempts to stop them.  We are assured that such protests are good revolutionary expressions, and America always was a revolutionary country.  In the same breath they tell law-abiding suburbanites and business owners that to defend their stores and homes with guns is illegal vigilantism, and that is not allowed.  Only the rioters are free to assault the social order with arson and mayhem while police watch.  These power-infused dufuses have no idea that the American Revolution and other laudatory labor revolts always started with citizens joining together as vigilantes when needed to oppose or augment the established order.

Scattershots – 3jun20 (updated 4jun20)

George Rebane

Worldwide lockdowns were triggered by panicky politicians who listened to the ‘eminent epidemiologist’ Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.  He came out with a slew of mortality predictions almost every country of note by monkeying with his models.  Trouble is that none of them came anywhere near true, but politicians were reluctant to let go of the new dimensions of power they had appropriated.  So most of the world shut down economies and also caused untold more deaths and morbidity (as many of us then predicted).  Now Ferguson, with stiff upper lip firmly in place, admits to having observed these “interesting” realworld results, perhaps starting with the admission, “Without instituting full lockdown, Sweden is essentially getting the same effect.”  (whouda thought?  H/T to reader and more here)  And here is a confirming update on the C19 stats from Sweden (H/T to reader).  Consider this report in the context of my 16may20 commentary that also appears in today’s 3jun20 Union (here).

My ‘Unsettling ‘Settled Science’’ was published in today’s (3jun20) Union.  As expected, it drew a lot of ire from our local leftwingers.  Almost all of it was hard to connect with the points I made in the commentary.  Some even rejected my propositions on the basis of their similarity of what they may have heard from Limbaugh, or that it “was written by a staunch trump supporter”.  But a comment from George Boardman, one of our liberal thought leaders and intellects, piqued my interest.  He asked why Jo Ann and I “have been sheltering in place for 70 plus days”, since my “oft-expressed skepticism of the conventional scientific wisdom”.   To start with, Mr Boardman apparently is not a very careful (or comprehending?) reader of RR.  From the body count alone, no one should doubt that the elderly are in the most vulnerable group.  So there was no point in our going out just to solicit the infection - after all I am a Bayesian.  But the main reason is that all of our outside activities were canceled and many brought online, not by us, but by the government – in short, there was no place for us to go, save to run the usual store errands which we did.  However, undeterred we continued seeing our family and Nevada County friends on a regular basis – e.g. we had an ‘essential’ dinner party at our house last night – during this months-long interval of insane and conflicting dicta issuing from various government offices (see the latest from Neil Ferguson above).  Boardman, flying hot, true, and normal with his fellow progressive pundits, evinces no capability of nuancing anything he sees.  I have found people like that to operate in what we control engineers call ‘bang-bang mode’, their needle gets pegged at either end with no readings from the middle.  But perhaps I too am missing something here.  I’d like to lunch with George Boardman and have each of us really get the cut of the other’s jib.

This is what we see on the streets, and what the Democrats and the lamestream refuse to denounce.

[update]  Yellow journalism on Bret Baier’s FN program.  For the program’s panel tonight, Baier had assembled Ari Fleischer (Bush2 press secretary), Mara Liaisson (NPR political correspondent), and Mo Elleithee (Georgetown Institute of Politics) – a laudible 2-to-1 in favor of leftists.  Subject: Trump’s threat to use military against rioters if states can’t control them.  In his comments Elleithee said, “(Trump) authorizes militarized law enforcement to use excessive force against peaceful protesters.”  We all expect that kind of crap out of leftwing ideologues like Elleithee and Liasson, but since Trump said no such thing (it was just one more in the Left's daily avalanche of uncounted lies), the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ Baier’s next question should have been, ‘Mo, what evidence do you have that the President said any such thing?  Please share it with us.’  Instead the network’s flagship anchor again showed his lily liver, and let the whole statement slide as if it were a commonly known truth.  Back in older days FN journalists would not have allowed that kind of crap to just float out there unchallenged.  Today their lead correspondent has taken the knee on truth, and has yet to update his closing line to ‘Feebly balanced and scared shitless.’  FN is rapidly becoming a CNN-in-training outlet.

[4jun20 update]  Apropos to ‘settled science’ (here) and making decisions on the basis of ‘science not politics’, we now read the WHO has flipped on their hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) admonitions cum screed. The widely cited study ‘disproving’ the effectiveness of HCQ turns out to have been badly flawed, as attested to by 120+ scientists who examined the record. (more here)  So now they’re going back to square one and resuming the trial that they prematurely aborted.  And, of course, we’re all familiar with the field day the Democrats and their lamestream lackies had when during the early days of the pandemic President Trump suggested that HCQ might be something we should also examine.  Don’t expect any of those sumbiches to show any remorse at their TDS-powered hipshot remonstrations.

Common Core curriculum fans rejoice.  One of your aims was for the new educational initiative to “narrow the performance gap” between the high-end students and those at/near the bottom.  According to both the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the gap is being closed, not by boosting the academic performance of the low achievers, but by dumbing down the high achievers.  We have reported on this many times, and now Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes in the 3jun20 edition of the newspaper, “After decades of slow and steady improvement, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have seen historic declines in the six years since most states implemented national Common Core English and math curriculum standards”. (more here)  Bill Gates’ sponsorship of Common Core did immeasurable damage and played right into the progressives’ agenda to dumb down succeeding generations of American voters.  As a humorous footnote, RR’s spam folder correctly trapped a well-known leftwing local who sought to comment on ‘Returning to Race-based College Admissions’ by declaring his ignorance of the legislature's initiative to repeal Prop209 that prohibits race-based state contracting, hiring, and admissions.

Riot Reflections – 1jun20 (updated)

‪"Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians."‬ Thomas Sowell (and an oft-cited tenet of Rebane Doctrine)

George Rebane

Well, given what we see in the streets, we can safely conclude that the pandemic lockdowns are over, and all business are open except those that have been boarded up or burned down.

Starting with local police departments, all fielded LE units/agencies are now conducting defensive operations to preserve themselves.  They are no longer out there to protect persons or property.  The compelling explanation for this kind of CYA behavior is that they don’t see support from their political leaders, the law-abiding public, and most certainly not from the protesters and rioters.  Law enforcement today stands politically abandoned.  They are indicted by a long history of law enforcement ‘mistakes’ that recently have culminated in the outrageous public murder (execution?) of George Floyd, a black petty criminal, by the Minneapolis police, and the killing of Breonna Taylor, an innocent black woman gunned down in her own home by Louisville Metro Police mistakenly raiding her house in the middle of the night.  Both should be seen as preventable crimes by institutions that have lost sight of their reason for being.

No one has really determined the make-up of the legitimate protesters in the streets, nor if they are the same ones who turn into destructive rioters after the peaceful phase of their demonstrations are concluded.  Does the non-violent cohort then go home to be replaced by the violent ones who mostly conduct themselves as Antifa members?  (To my knowledge, Antifa is still a distributed national protest movement that shares literature, values, dress, street tactics, …, but having no common leadership, managed funding, or central control.)  From the reports from the media and police on the scene, the non-violent protesters appear to morph into violent rioters at some point, mostly after the sun goes down.  Today the violent are all masked (perhaps because of the pandemic) and therefore act with impunity because their anonymity is secure.  In the meantime, the cities’ progressive political leaders are desperately looking for the illusive out-of-town white supremacists who are really the instigators of looting and burning.

Today’s street conflicts are also culturally confused and confusing.  There is no common social contract in evidence among the street borne polyglot.  Everyone is doing their own thing, milling from here to there or just idly standing by and watching the show.  Some have come with prepared signs with the usual slogans demanding justice and change.  But when interviewed, no one has a clue as to what exactly needs to be done to bring about the change and the new age of justice.  Moreover, no one even thinks that there need be some deeper thought behind the demands on the displayed placards – their histrionics are sufficient unto themselves.

If really pressed for specifics, black leadership in the media can drill down no deeper than spout the Democratic Party talking points – ‘Shut down white supremacy and white privilege.’  This is the closest that any leftwinger can come to specifying what needs to be done to bring about the “change” that the protesters are demanding.  What white supremacy should be shut down how?  Which white privileges should be legislated into criminality?  And their political party and political leadership are equally clueless as to what specific and feasible programs should be implemented across the land to prevent future Floyds and Taylors being killed at the hands of various law enforcement agencies.

In the meantime, there is political hay to be made in this election year that has already given our Left so much ammo against President Trump and the Republicans.  For a party without a single viable idea of how to better respond to the virus, let alone how to revive the economy, all they have to offer is solution-free partisan vituperation to convince their constituents and light-thinking lackies that a new glorious age will spontaneously start if we can only get Trump out of the White House, Republicans out of Congress, and pack SCOTUS with an enlarged bench of progressive justices.  The rest will miraculously take care of itself under a distended government that will redistribute the country’s wealth, hire more of the unemployable incompetents, pay everyone regardless, and become the major player in our economy – i.e. socialism on steroids.

When the dust settles, what will the gutless politicians do with police departments that are becoming more insular and frustrated as they are charged with keeping the peace in public environments ever more conflicted in values, mores, attitudes, perceived pasts, fearful futures, …, all existing under a shroud of confusing, contradictory, unknown, and variously interpreted and randomly enforced laws, regulations, and codes that become more impenetrable by the day?  The cop on the beat can no longer reliably predict anyone’s behavior, and must therefore become a programmed automaton who survives his shift by avoiding conflicts and strife whenever possible, and when not, then apply one-size-fits-all rules in the most self-defensive and often ruthless manner possible.

[update]  We just finished watching the evening news that covered the ongoing demonstrations from several big cities across the country.  The President made a ‘law and order’ speech in which he separated those lawful protesters from the thugs, looters, arsonists, and now killers on our streets.  We hear people of all ranks, starting with the Floyd family, calling for the violence to stop, that such behavior is not serving the memory of their murdered son George, nor anything good that hopefully would come out of this after the dust settles.  The politicians calling for calm and calling out the rioters are all from the Right.  The only political leader voices from the Left are using this ongoing national tragedy to attack the administration, and to further divide us and convince all that there is no hope of unity in the future.  They realize more than any of us that those on the streets are their imperturbable constituents, loyal voters, and their very political lifeblood – they can do no wrong.

If a progressive wanted to counter any of this shameful behavior by their political leaders, one need only ask, ‘Where are the Pelosis, Schumers, Obamas, Bidens, Jacksons, Sharptons… with their messages of peace and calm, calling for the protesters to abide by the law and rioters to stand down?’  The only words from their and their lamestream lackies’ mouths do nothing but throw fuel on a raging partisan fire, and give their imprimaturs to the lawlessness on the streets by pledging their solidarities from which are absent any condemnation of the riotous mobs.  Even the word ‘riot’ is not in their vocabulary when they occasionally stray from lauding the “just protests” on our cities’ streets.  In Democrats’ eyes, it is all one homogeneous nationwide protest against Republican racism and social injustice.  For them this indeed is one helluva crisis not to let go waste.

Riot Reflections - 30may20 (updated)

George Rebane

The videod murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police gave rise to justified public protests that quickly turned into destructive and violent riots which have little to do with the death of Mr Floyd, and instead have again revealed that we Americans are no longer ‘one people’ who can be called to ‘come together’.

Law enforcement agencies of all stripes provide daily demonstrations that they are an institution unto themselves, there to overwhelmingly look after their own interests and provide little or no security for those who pay them to preserve society and civilization.  As clearly admitted by the Minneapolis police chief who publicly stated the reason his officers are standing back, standing down, and hightailing it from rioters is that he does not want to put them in harm’s way in situations that could turn dangerous.  Think about that.  What if firemen would only fight unrisky fires?  What if the FBI adopted a similar policy, no field operations in which their agents were put at risk?  What if the Secret Service would protect the President only to the extent that it would not be dangerous to them?  What if our military didn’t want to commit troops into situations in which casualties would result?

So the police et al, those who do attend the riots now taking place in cities across the land, simply gather in solid self-defensive phalanxes to watch the rioting mob loot and burn.  Over the lamestream media we are informed in an ongoing stream of commentary that these are not riots (a word absent in lamestream reports) led by criminal thugs, but simply justified “protests” attended by “protesters”.  The rest of us are told by our politicians that any criminality that is evident is justified, and that we must simply let it play out.  Actually, its more than that as FN’s Tucker Carlson explained in a landmark monologue last night – ‘Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault’.

Local business owners who witness their life’s work and savings go up in flames are seen pleading with the mob to no avail.  Some are again taking up arms to defend their lives and livelihoods, and most cynically, the police are arresting those who dare shoot (at) rioters inside their premises in acts of arson and looting.

No doubt one can draw a connection between the lengthy pandemic lockdowns and the number of urban dwellers eager to get out of their houses and small apartments to protest undeniable injustices at the hands of law enforcement and our entire ‘justice system’.  But in doing so, they do underline that we are not one people as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile asserts in her ‘We are one people’.  The rioters are not people who built this country, as they claim, and are therefore entitled to ‘burn it down’.  These are people who have their very own and distinct social contract with the institutions of our government – contrary to their protestations, they have rights and privileges, demonstrated daily, that people like me and mine wouldn’t dream of having in a civilized society.

Here’s an interesting question – what would the police do if law abiding folks of all colors showed up armed in downtowns to protect and defend the properties and property owners against the rioting mobs?

And here’s an even more interesting question – what would local governments and law enforcement agencies do if the streets were filled with peaceful protesters of all colors who looked like you and me?

And finally – what if all those law-abiding peaceful protesters against LE injustice showed up also demonstrating why Americans are unique with their constitutional 2A rights?

[update] A reader sent me a link to a Powerline article on the Twin Cities riots.  It appears that both Democrat Mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter are doing their best to dodge any and all responsibility for what's going down in their mismanaged metropolises, even to the anticipated desperate accusation that the riots are being instigated by out-of-state "white supremacists".  How do self-respecting Democrats elect such misfits to office?  (more here and here)

Ruminations – 29may20 (updated 3jun20)

George Rebane

How soon they forget - “The accusation that Trump got rid of a pandemic office is among the left’s politicized attacks on the White House since the coronavirus outbreak began. The administration assembled a coronavirus task force run by Vice President Mike Pence to address security and medical issues.”  This was echoed in chorus by all of our local leftwing lackies who took their cue from the lamestream.  (H/T to reader and more here)

Fauci the Fickle – 3jun20 edition.  “Fauci changes tune, now says second COVID-19 wave may never happen — and mask-wearing is symbolic.”  (more here and here) How’s that tune go? ‘First you say you do, and then you don’t, …’  Never mind Dr Fauci, Dr Rebane says that unless we miraculously get everyone vaccinated in time, the second wave is inevitable with the high likelihood that it will be a small fraction of the first wave.

Bejing pissing on the Hong Kong parade. (here)  Now there’s a puzzle, or maybe not.  HK is the acknowledged “cash cow” for the mainland, handling much of the foreign investments into the Chinese economy, and Chinese IPOs placed on foreign exchanges.  Screwing with the contracted freedoms of this principality will cripple the cow or even kill it.  Is the CCP now so brittle that it is scared of HK’s freedom virus spreading to the mainland when that possibility is added to the lack of progress Beijing has made with reintegrating Taiwan?  From my perch, the answer is Yes.

[update] “Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis,” said the liberal Mayor Jacob Frey in an early news conference this morning.  Don’t know what all we need to know about the city after watching understandably justified peaceful protests turn into mobs looting and burning.  Am reminded of a Rodney King joke that quoted tongue-in-cheek a white resident of Simi Valley (home of one officer on trial who was involved in the King beating), ‘If they find those police officers guilty, you bet we’re gonna burn down our town!’

Speaking of President Trump and Minneapolis – I think he stuck his foot in it again.  Have no idea which of his constituencies he was trying to impress with the tweets that were definitely untimely and off-the-mark.  Don’t get me wrong, naming the looting and burning thugs in Minneapolis as “thugs” was not wrong, but it was a sophomoric political error compounded by his threat to send in Minnesota’s National Guard, which under our system of federalism, the state’s governor already has done.  All this grandstanding does is give the TDS crowd more fuel to ignite nationwide fires.

All published pandemic data and information is now both wrong and the remainder highly suspect.  Here and across the world we continue to receive a torrent of reports about the virus’s death counts, case numbers, recoveries, etc, a couple of days later which turn out to be the stuff that you shovel out of a stall, all disguised as the sober and considered prescriptions and proscriptions from our elected ‘honorables’ and degreed ‘experts’ citing science and medicine.  And since most of it comes to us through the media filter of double-dummy and/or agenda-driven reporters (aka ‘journalists’), we have very little idea of what’s really happening, and how we should respond.  Your governments in peace and war.  [more update]  Just received this little tidbit from a reader to underline the above.  It now appears that all the bad juju about HCQ that was recently blasted out by the TDS crowd was a bit premature.  No less than the NYT had to publish a 'Hold on there' report citing unsettled science.

[31may20 update]  Here’s one for the ‘Say whaaat??!’ department.  James ‘Forked Tongue’ Clapper has just been appointed to the Executive Board of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania.  This announcement bounced off my eyeballs as I opened the most recent copy of Aviation Week & Space Technology.  Don’t ask how they came to pick up that major faux pas on the part of CERL (see for yourself here).

‘Seize the Moment’

George Rebane

So exhorts The Economist (here), Britain’s famous weekly ‘newspaper’ since 1843 that has metamorphosed over the years into a leftwing trumpet with an international audience.  The lead editorial in its 23may20 issue counsels countries, especially the US, to use the coronavirus pandemic to include in their government aid machinations additional laws, regulations, codes, restrictions, taxes, fees, fines, … to advance the global socialist agenda while their citizens are focused on maintaining health and hearth.

The number one supernumerary policy having nothing to do with the pandemic relief involves climate change legislation and subsidies.  They are more open than Team Pelosi about not wasting this crisis – “The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change – and creates a unique chance to do so.”  Specific recommendations focus on first instigating new “carbon pricing”, their code for passing massive new carbon taxes which “schemes” they claim will “use the power of the market to incentivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible.”

Anyone with even a smidgen of capitalism in their veins knows that such government dictates have nothing to do with “the power of the market”.  In enforcing the use of uneconomical alternative energy sources with the government gun simply mangles the markets beyond recognition, and in its wake leaves an economy mired in ‘mother-may-I’ mandates that will impede economic recovery wherever it seeks purchase to climb out of its current hole.

Socialists use their gross misunderstanding (or cynical ignoring) of the ‘Broken Windows Fallacy’ (here) first illuminated by Frederic Bastiat a little after The Economist was launched.  In his ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen’ Bastiat introduces us to the important economic concepts of “crowding out” which denies the existence of “idle resources”, and the little recognized distinction between wealth and employment.  The parable has a hooligan break a baker’s window which act is ameliorated, actually even celebrated, by onlookers as being beneficial to the economy in that it now will create extra business for the glazier when the baker spends to replace his broken window (that which is seen).  However, this creates no new wealth or work since the baker had other uses for the money he lost, uses that would have expanded his business creating more wealth and other income for his suppliers (that which is not seen).

Socialist economists like Paul Krugman agree with the crowd in the fable, and in their ideologically-blindered, profound ignorance don’t recognize that “if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labor, is affected, whether windows are broken or not.”  And so it will go with the funding and created jobs of climate change to replace existing, cheap energy sources, with manmade make-work before the market is ready to accept them.  We will never know what other unseen advances and social benefits we will deny ourselves by implementing such still uncompetitive ‘sustainable energy sources’ through the seen artifices like punitive carbon taxing.

Which now brings us to the more fundamental crisis that pre-dates the pandemic – why our country is terminally polarized and “why we hate each other”.  The real answer to those questions is more often than not papered over by various kinds of feel-good pabulum.  An example is the op-ed ‘Why We Hate Each Other’ by Scottie Hart in the 28may20 Union.  She cites “solid research” by sociologists that point the finger at our loneliness being caused by modern technology-induced isolation.  Put simply, our online virtual relationships are not cutting it.  “A wide array of prominent health organizations now recognize deep, pervasive loneliness as a major public health issue, eroding our lives and often prematurely ending them. … Even before COVID-19, long-term trends have changed, and will continue to change our lives. As we negotiate the enormous shift from an industrial, manufacturing world to a near-virtual, technological world, it is no wonder we feel disoriented and vulnerable.”

Ms Hart is a self-avowed, good-hearted liberal who totally misses the deeper schism between us.  The country now is home to two cohorts of citizens with profoundly different beliefs about what constitutes a beneficial and preferred socio-economic structure for maximizing our quality of life.  Those of the various flavors of the collectivist Left see an ever-encompassing growing government that will ultimately provide succor, sufficiency, equality, and social justice to all its citizens through central planning and control, a social structure in which citizens will gladly trade their liberties and freedom for promised risk-free living where the meritocratic competition between the competent and incompetent will be banished forever.  This course has been successfully pursued now for over fifty years, and there is no indication that it will do anything but accelerate.

The various flavors of the conservetarian Right see the Left’s pursuits as leading to an enforced egalitarian amalgam ruled over by a corrupt elite that wields all power.  Given all the diverse human frailties, the Right recognizes that life does contain more than a modicum of risk for any individual in their pursuit of happiness.  But that risk is worth taking within a society that recognizes and promotes individual initiative and enterprise, with all the necessary freedoms and liberties, under a social contract based on laws under which we are all treated equally.  And yes, the outcomes there will be unequal where those who can and do will naturally want to provide for those who can’t or won’t in order to maintain the social order.

Such views are intrinsically incompatible within one sovereign nation-state, and that is why we are polarized and, as the Ms Harts among us observe, that we ‘hate each other’.  Today we are two incompatible countries trying to live within a single border under an increasingly dysfunctional state.

Factors Fighting the Pandemic

George Rebane

This is a simple and straightforward influence factors diagram that relates the relevant aspects in the policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The salient influences are indicated by the arrows with plus/minus signs at the destination arrow heads.  A plus ‘+’ indicates that the influencing factor and influenced factor go up and down together.  A minus ‘-‘ indicates that the influencing factor causes the opposite effect in the influenced factor.  Capice?  (more here)

It should not be too difficult to identify the virtuous and vicious cycles in the diagram, and relate them to what’s happening as America’s federal and state governments respond to the pandemic.

Scattershots – 26may20

George Rebane

What is the death rate of those infected with SARS-Cov-2 (here C19)?  Well, the more we try to find out, the more it gets curiouser and curiouser.  The latest attempt to explain the whole matter to us is put forth by Reason magazine in their ‘Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?’  Their quest for the answer was launched with the premise “The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably varies from one place to another.”  Well, no sh!+ Red Ryder, you’d think?  Then after a head-spinning discussion, about all the reader can walk away with is that IFR varies anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.013.  And IFR is strongly correlated with old age, especially those with preexisting comorbidities.  But then a little later, someone concludes that, no matter your age, it’s actually mainly your preexisting comorbidity that determines your probability of dying, and old age is just a prominent proxy for that since almost all old people have one kind of preexisting malady or other.  But what brought a smile to my face was their attempt to buttress the piece by injecting numbers.  All kinds of talk about test 'specifities' and disease 'prevalence', and the resulting 'positive predictive values' were bandied about which the reader is supposedly able to follow with their numbers.  But it turns out that none of it could be followed because nowhere do they bring up, let alone cite, the related test sensitivities without which their discussion is a meaningless jumble.  The point they try and fail to make is that which I presented in ‘Image of ignorance and/or incompetence’ along with its preceding tutorials on testing.  The bottom line here is that to understand how C19 relates to the mostly insane current response policies is almost impossible.  Since everything, like IFR, depends on so many different factors, to get even a glimmer, one has to have more than a smidgen of numeracy under their belt.  And if you’re going to publish something about it, you’d better be at least numerate.  Today none of that is a prerequisite before spouting volumes about the pandemic.

This PAN-DEM-IC looks like a DEM-PANIC when we consider how the Dems are doing everything they can to blame the whole shebang on President Trump – everything from the economy to the number of deaths attributed to the corona virus.  A reader sent an article from American Thinker (here) that details the whole thing, including why cooking the books on the body count has become a cynical political football.  November is coming and the Democrats are desperate to making something stick on Trump before they have to let Bumblebrain out of the basement.  No matter who the DNC picks for Biden’s VP, I bet they will demand that the presidential debate(s) will be presented in a tag-team format so that Bumblebrain will have someone with him on stage who can talk – otherwise it will be a bloodbath.

Memorial Day – 25 May 2020

George Rebane

On this Memorial Day we reflect on the words of General Jack Keane (Ret) about those who risked all - "None of them wanted to die, certainly. What's different about them is that they were willing to and they were willing to put at risk everything that they care about, you know, having a long life, having friends in your life, being a parent, having love in your life to love and to be loved, … People said, 'Why would they do that?' I've been around these troops forever and I think the answer is, it's pretty simple. ... It's out of a very simple yet profound sense of duty. And it's also because they do it for one another. And I think that's true honor. And we can never, ever take that devotion for granted."  (H/T to RR commenter)

Hunker Down Diary – 23may20

George Rebane

Competition is the only cure for incompetence.

On this Memorial Day weekend today is HD77 for Jo Ann and me.  Even though we have not left the county, we have taken a number of ‘essential’ trips to the grocery, nursery, and hardware store.  We have also had a number of essential dinners with family and local friends, and continue our Facetime cocktail hours.  Jo Ann has her farm planted for this year, and everything appears to be on track for a bountiful summer and fall.  I overdid it on splitting firewood; we now have enough to finish out this season and much of next season.  Both of us keep attending Zoomed meetings of the various organizations in which we are active.

As political animals, we maintain ferocious reading and writing schedules.  For better or worse (currently still worse), we have not touched our portfolio during the recent wild dip and roller coaster recovery.  So far so good.  I am having a great time rummaging around the technical sides of epidemic science and management.  Readers know my thoughts on the amount and kind of ‘science’ that has been brought to bear on this coronavirus pandemic here in America and also in other developed countries.  As more and more people begin to understand and admit, there is little or no science that is evident in the measurement and/or management of this disease (you heard it first here two months ago).  The whole C19 affair is a dreadful self-inflicted farce that continues to play out in the healthcare and economic sectors.

The record of pronouncements by both our national and state healthcare professionals, and political leaders illustrate a growing tsunami of contradictory statements regaling us with predictions, prescriptions, policies, and prohibitions which range between the comical and insane.  Basically, no one knows anything definitive about how/what to measure that can be used to track and support a coherent set of response policies.  Everyone is flying by the seat of their pants under the rubric, repeated with the greatest gravitas, that ‘we will be guided by science and not politics’.  Given the bevy of brown numbers that continue to flow from universities and alphabet-soup agencies, the real national and state responses long ago succumbed to exactly the opposite guidance – what little science there is about dealing with the coronavirus, it doesn’t have a chance.  In the meantime, people are revolting against the lockdowns and betting on herd immunity until a vaccine makes its debut from the wings.  Actually, it’s only half the people who understand the real desolation that economic destitution brings, the other half don’t have a clue and believe in the tooth fairy, endless newly printed money, and the states’ national guards mobilized to work the farms, deliver the goods, and staff the grocery stores, until the all-clear is sounded by Drs Fauci and Brix.  (more here)

And to put a ribbon on it or add insult to injury, we here on Hind Tit Rd (aka Cement Hill Rd) suffered our second power outage in a week.  Don’t know what the boys and girls at PG&E are doing, but they ain’t doing it right.  I again draw your kind attention to my above tagline.

Fair, Balanced, and Scared Sh!+less (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid’ has been the smug, self-preening tagline for Fox News, most prominently used by Bret Baier as the sign-off to his daily flagship Special Report program.  Perhaps that was once true, but during the last couple of years FN has changed by markedly migrating toward the lamestream media.  While still covering news items totally absent or buried on leftwing outlets, the network bends over backward to feature as many progressive guests and commentators as possible on every issue of current interest.  Today it is literally impossible for a middle-road viewer to determine the ideological bent of most of FN’s programming during the 24-hour cycle.  The only exceptions to this are perhaps Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.  These, however, are balanced with other FN stars such as Chris Wallace with a marked and longstanding tilt to port.

The biggest change is that the palpable lies and propaganda narratives of leftwing guests and interviewees are no longer challenged for their verity.  These days the leftwinger can tell an obvious whopper, and the FN host will go on to the next question or subject without so much as lifting an eyebrow.   Led by Baier and Martha McCallum, the remaining daytime FN personalities do everything they can to avoid controversy on the air, and therefore leave its viewers to sort things out as they witness equal time and voice given to leftwing opinions and interpretations that not only go unchallenged, but are presented as having equal weight with any and all opposing opinions and interpretations.  Is it really fair to present obvious falsehoods without so-much as giving the audience some factual context within which to interpret such assertions?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking FN to limit featuring its parade of leftwingers making news and shaping opinions.  But I am asking all so-called journalists to have the guts, then and there, to call out the obvious lies and baseless opinions of their guests, be they from the Right or Left.  (As RR’s polarized commenters have been doing for years.) And here’s the critical question every media interviewer should have the timely wits and courage to ask their guests each time they land a load of crap onto the airwaves –

‘Your viewpoint is fairly controversial, where can our viewers go to see the evidence that made you say that?’

Timidly scurrying on to the next question or topic doesn’t cut it for the claim of being ‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid.’  Time to reinstall that backbone.

[25may20 update] 'The ‘Liberal Leaning’ Media Has Passed Its Tipping Point’, so confirms Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News.  This is the belated point that many on the national scene are finally beginning to recognize.  A phenomenon that became apparent to many of us at the grassroots level years ago (RR stands on its 14-year record).  No one well-read on the socio-politics of America for the last 50 years believes that the country’s Fourth Estate will ever regain its credibility - journalists are all biased ideologues lying to their audiences about being 'fair and balanced'.  All we are now doing is the Great Divide two-step that is becoming more pronounced with every passing month.  Any semblance of a middle ground disappeared years ago.  Look at the 14-year record of RR comment streams, which confirm an unpretentious, simple yet significant reflection of Main Street America’s understanding, beliefs, and sentiments.