Rebane's Ruminations

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

Admittedly not a difficult task.  I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty.  Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here).  Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world.  Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies.  Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.

In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.

In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names.  This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute.  Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.”  If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.

Central Bank Digital Currencies a'comin'?

George Rebane

The powers that be have quietly initiated the process to change all fiat monies into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Plenary sessions among the G7 have demonstrated that most countries are ready to change their money into ‘programmable crypto currencies’.  The US and UK are leaders of this movement as the means to enlarge the power of governments and control the inevitable destruction of their circulating fiat monies.

To understand how CBDCs work, consider that when implemented, we will all have personal accounts with our country’s central bank (e.g. our Fed) which will then enable control of the amounts, dispensing, and programming the use of the new nationalized crypto currency.  This essentially follows what Red China is doing now (‘the Chinese model’).  The totalitarian gorilla in the room is the programmability of CBDCs.

Depending on TBD laws, regulations, and power-motivated propensities, your particular CBDCs can be programmed to enable and/or deny you, on a day-to-day basis, the freedom to use the money as you will.  Say, that the government doesn’t want you to consume a certain product (e.g. fatty foods) because you are overweight.  It can then make your CBDCs unable to pay for such prohibited products and services.  The same can be said for travel restrictions – the government, or even the permitted airline, can make it so that you cannot purchase tickets that take you to a destination proscribed for you personally.

In essence, CBDCs will then no longer be money in the sense that today’s money is fungible as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.  Your particular CBDCs will then become the equivalent of government-controlled vouchers purposed dynamically for what your employer or a state agency grants you privileges.  Are you beginning to get the picture?  (more here, here, here, and here)

PS. The astute reader will realize that programmable CBDCs can totally collapse the ‘property side’ of the Bastiat Triangle, thereby also collapsing the ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ sides. Can everyone imagine work-around black markets and barter economies? 

‘Poking the Bear’!?

George Rebane

It appears that under the leadership of our pusillanimous president the west has quietly buried MAD (mutually assured destruction).  Today we tremble in fear of the Butcher of Moscow every time he even hints that he has nuclear weapons which he might use if we don’t let his genocide in Ukraine continue unhindered.  So, what does he think we keep in all our land-based and seagoing silos, bagels?

For decades MAD, augmented by forceful US military interventions, held back the Soviet bear.  None of the communist dictators waved their nuclear warheads in our faces, because they knew we would just wave back with ours – both knew not to play a lose-lose game.  That didn’t mean that the communists didn’t try to surreptitiously stick nukes under our noses.  But when discovered, they always understood the meaning of MAD and pulled back. 

Both were satisfied to continue advancing their foreign policies by propaganda and the kind of brushfire wars that George Kennan outlined in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’.  And in these, we didn’t just send in weapons and other military aid, we and our allies often put boots on the ground.  When necessary, we demonstrated our ability to kick the bear in the butt and not just poke him.  Under US leadership we did this until the USSR collapsed in spite of its decades long attempts to demonstrate the glories of communism and make it work.  Today no more.

Under the clearest moral imperative since Hitler’s 1939 blitzkrieg invasion of Poland, we balked and prevaricated in full knowledge of Putin’s intent to invade Ukraine (as now admitted by our CIA), and continue to do so in the face of the ongoing slaughter of the innocents.  We have yet to send in the heavy weapons that Ukraine needs to counter the Russian (Red) army’s fielded heavy weapons and their air/missile superiority.  Every time we even intimate that we will do so by calling Putin a war criminal, he rattles his nukes and Team Biden dives under their desks.

I would love to hear our leader strap on a pair of balls and respond to Putin’s threat of ‘uncertain consequences’ with a public guarantee of some uncertain consequences of our own should he continue to irritate the Eagle.  According to Rebane Doctrine, one such uncertain consequence would arise were we to promise to supply Ukraine with tactical nukes if Putin would ever pop one of his on Ukrainian territory.  The bottom line here is that we should exhume MAD, a mutually understood and implemented foreign policy strategy that for decades proved its war-limiting mettle, and as a reminder, bears that behave badly should always be poked.

Without MAD, none on Bumblebrain’s A-team has a clue on how to stop Putin from taking the next hunk of neighboring territory after he’s allowed to negotiate a ‘peace’ that further decimates Ukraine.  Why would he not?  As with all tyrants whose regime beggars its citizens, Putin must always have a foreign aggressor against which to rail, and explain to his people why they are in dire straits.

The Jewish Question

George Rebane

In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

“This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

Socialist Economics

George Rebane

A Brief History of Equality (2022) is the latest issue of socio-economic wisdom from the socialist-celebrated French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.  You might recall that Piketty gave us Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), his magnus opus comprised of “an 800-page book turbid with equations and numbers of all kinds, … is regarded as a game-changing weapon in the war to wrest wealth from the rich.”  Therein he introduced the world to “the central contradiction of capitalism” which elicited worldwide acclaim from collectivists of every stripe – progressives, Marxists, communists, … .  Its dense arguments made the tome’s 2.5 million copies sold as one of the most unread books of all time.  Nevertheless, adulatory columns and commentaries without end graced the pages and programs of the mainstream media.  With all those equations, it appeared that someone had finally put the demise of capitalism on a firm scientific basis.

The piece de resistance of ‘Capital’ was introduction of his signature inequality r > g, stating that the rate of return on capital always exceeds the growth rate of its underlying economy.  In a nutshell, that was his ‘central contradiction’ to which I return in a bit.  But as Tunku Varadarajan of the American Enterprise Institute explains (here), “Thomas Piketty attempts to lure readers unable to scale the mountain of ‘Capital’” with a series of socialist principles that would create equality (think social justice) by “flattening the wealth curve.”

Piketty does admit that there has been an historical movement toward equality along many dimensions – status, gender, race - since the late 1700s, but still not enough “to brag about.”  These gains have not been achieved by the increase in access to material wealth made possible by capitalist, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, but instead by revolutionary politics and class struggle.  “Efficient production, shrewd investment, or the genius and dynamism of innovators are sideshows”, because “all creations of wealth in history have issued from a collective process”.  For Piketty, this process has not only included but also depended on “the international division of labor, the use of global natural resources”, and most importantly “the accumulation of knowledge since the beginnings of humanity”, all blessings of the global collective.  Varadarajan correctly concludes from these claims that Piketty “is pure Bernie Sanders or AOC” and “may even be to their left.”

The Great Reset

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984

George Rebane

Given that the world will always have at least one hegemon, it is therefore imperative that America should always remain a hegemon - Rebane Doctrine.

A prime objective of RR over its now considerable lifespan has been the discovery, discussion, and dissemination of the resurgence of global collectivism under its various guises.  This enterprise has been promoted under various names and transnational programs, possibly the earliest organized launch occurred thirty years ago during a UN conference in Brazil.  There we heard about Agenda 21 (A21) and read its manifesto for a brave new world populated by a much smaller and tightly controlled population of humans.  It was a plan for a ‘sustainable world’ under an overarching collectivist government run by elite technocrats.

The road to A21 was admittedly long and had to be carefully planned and implemented so as not to awaken any early ire to the admitted loss of freedoms, wealth, and quality of life in general in order to redistribute resources to a radically reducing population.  The provisions and policies for A21 were to be installed bit by piece at all levels of government, first and foremost at the local level.  The cadres to do this would be the local electeds, bureaucrats, and civil servants trained by a global network of A21 offshoots called International Councils for Local Environmental Initiatives (which is now known as ‘ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability’).  These government cadres would quietly attend and study the ideological and operational principles of bringing what eventually came to be called neo-Marxist thought to shape and control local societies and economics.

Locally in Nevada County, almost all county staff at the managerial level have attended our regional ICLEI.  This is replicated state and nationwide.  California leads America in the number of ICLEIs, and America leads the world.  Managed from over 20 offices around the globe, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.  These many trails and tributaries to socialism are purposely ignored and unreported by leftwing media, and surprisingly also ignored by right-leaning outlets.

Today the US is being reconfigured (“fundamentally transformed”) socio-politically to prepare for its place in the new global order under a central power structure run by a cadre of elites immune from the policies they will mandate for the population at large.

A large literature has come in place to promote, analyze, and oppose what was introduced as the ‘Great Reset’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos.  The Great Reset is now the latest refinement of what began as the UN’s Agenda 21 lately renamed Agenda 2030.  As long documented here, on the surface these ‘agendas’ are lists of “Sustainable Development Goals” re-adopted in 2015 to reduce world population to a more controllable level that can be corralled into high-density population centers connected by a limited number of transportation corridors.

A Promising New Tactic Against the Fearful

George Rebane

Russia’s new tactic is the use of long-range missiles, many of which can be fired from Russia proper, to overcome the demonstrated ineptness of its land units and manned aircraft over Ukrainian air space.  Putin needs to reorganize his conventional forces because they most certainly have not performed as previously advertised to the Kremlin.  So the approach in the interval is to bombard the crap out of Ukrainian cities with missiles that are hard to intercept, and hope that President Zelensky will call for a favorable cease fire in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of the country’s civilian population. (more here)

With modern precision-guided missiles, this tactic is a movable feast for thugs like Putin whose saber-rattling has caused a comprehensive cowering by western leaders in the name of not willing to risk WW3 by striking Russia with any of several available and effective military responses.  He and Xi can use this approach from their own landmass to their heart’s content in future territorial conquests.  As long as western leaders continue to promise that they will not respond in any way that would (heaven forbid) irritate the international gangsters, they can assemble their land forces at the border and then proceed to slaughter the target country’s civilian population from afar.

As we now know, this will do the trick against any fearful opponent who openly declares from the gitgo that they’ll do nothing “reckless” to rile the attacker.  I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why such a tactic will not be used repeatedly until the west says ‘Enough!’ and demonstrates that we too are willing to return to MAD and risk WW3 to protect our interests.  Without the will to use force, non-military sanctions will not work to stay the hand of a tyrant; the planet is already too interconnected commercially and financially so that surgical sanctions have little effect, and the more comprehensive sanctions spill over and also hurt us and our allies.

In desperation, today we have learned to redefine our interests in favor of international criminals like those who run Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, … .  We learned long ago that the ONLY way to defend, let alone expand, liberal governance on this planet is to always be ready to go to the mat with the world’s tyrants, and appear willing to do that sooner than later with the big thugs.  This principle applies at all scales when we look at what our cities have become as we constrained law enforcement and started nurturing criminals.

The Ukraine War – 19mar22

George Rebane

The ongoing Ukraine war is a complex affair with many dynamic factors that influence events and the state (attitudes/assessments) of the involved parties.  These pages are home to a lively discussion and debate about the goings on in Ukraine and their worldwide impact.  I’ve made an attempt to simplify and explicate my take on how the whole mish-mash comes together from what is known, claimed, and propagandized today.  This assessment is reduced into an influence factors diagram shown below.

To understand the above IFD, I recommend a quick read of one or more tutorial pieces I posted some years ago (here, here, and here).  The main thing to recall in looking at how the factors relate is that the connecting lines show the direction of influence by their arrowheads, and the plus (+) sign means that the influencer and influenced are in sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, so does the other), while the minus (-) sign means that they are out of sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, the other goes down/up).  The factors labeled L{ } are likelihoods of the events in the curly brackets coming to pass.

IFDs usually contain ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ cycles.  A cycle is made by any directed path that returns to its selected point of origin.  A cycle is usually taken as virtuous if the cycled feedback seeks to stabilize (self-correct) the involved factors, and is usually understood as vicious if the feedback causes a runaway state in one or more of involved factors.  An easy way to identify such cycles is by counting the number of minus (-) signs in the cycle.  Virtuous cycles have an odd number of minuses, while vicious cycles tally an even number of minuses.  In the above IFD trace out some cycles starting with ‘US Display of Strength’.

Before you dismiss the IFD as just some idle technical doodling, you might consider that this tool (in its various formats) is used by the big kids as a starting point to discuss and communicate ALL complex processes about which critical decisions must be taken, and most certainly when it is required to formally ‘game the process’ using one of several simulation development environments – pricey software systems used in industry, by the military, and in statecraft.  The IFD lets you see the big picture in its entirety and then drill down to whatever level of detail is required.  It is the epitome graphic for communication in multi-party discussions of complex affairs.  (BTW, people who can generate clear, complete, and concise IFDs for complex issues get paid big bucks.)

Ukrainian no-fly zone (addended and updated 16mar22)

George Rebane

Allowing Russia to exercise asymmetric control of Ukraine’s airspace during its unwarranted, illegal, and rapacious invasion of the country is a big mistake.  At every turn in this war and the lead-up to it, the west, led from behind by Biden, has been visibly and overly concerned about how Putin may respond to this or that initiative designed to dissuade or delay the conquest of Ukraine.  Even politicians ignorant of history have now seen how such behavior does nothing to stay the hand of the tyrant.  Does no one on our side counsel that we too should demonstrate our strength against tyranny by actions that would concern Putin as to how we may react to his next atrocities?  At what point do we say ‘Enough!’?  No dictator with territorial ambitions has ever stopped on his own; they have all had to be stopped by nations allied with a common purpose to restore a humanitarian and peaceful world order.

My own strong opinion is that were we to populate Ukrainian skies with F-22s and F-35s (inviting other NATO nations to join), thousands of lives would be saved and the war would soon be over.  As Joe Lieberman also argues (here), in doing so we would be implementing “responsibility to protect”, the international norm that was unanimously adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005.  As I argued in the 12mar22 Scattershots (here), there is no natural stopping point for Putin before he controls the Eurasian continent.  And the more of his successes we continue to tolerate, the bigger will be the resulting war required to put an end to such conquests both in Europe and Asia.  If we don’t start Putin worrying about his own survival now, then when will there come a better time to re-establish the Westphalian world order?

[Addendum]  A longtime reader (@502pm below) contested the wisdom of NATO allies imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine with the now widely accepted prognostication that such a tactic would immediately cause Putin to escalate his invasion into a cross-borders nuclear war – in short, WW3.  It was offered as the most probable response and ensuing scenario.  In my 547pm I rejected that as the only possible contingency, and offered the much more likely alternative contingency were we to continue Biden’s strategy of a limited defense that in effect is no defense.  This is corroborated hourly by Putin’s rapid expansion of the scope of his invasion, now expanding it into western Ukraine with attacks on multiple targets with scores of cruise missiles.

The west’s current response that lets Russia maintain air superiority to support his overwhelming numbers of mechanized infantry, armor, massed artillery, and amphibious assault will result in the inevitable ‘rubbling’ of Ukraine, no matter how ineptly the Russians execute their land attack.  To date, the west led by Biden, has made it clear that saving Ukraine is not our top priority; minimally irritating Putin is.  Given our feckless support and promise not to do more, President Zelensky will soon come to the decision to either surrender sooner and save Ukrainian lives or surrender later, leave Ukraine in a pile of rubble, and sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to no avail.  As he continues to shame NATO, Zelensky will do the right thing and save lives if the west is not willing to up the game and also start giving Putin worries as to what we will do.

And the latest surrender of Ukraine will cement Putin’s list of conquests – Georgia, Chechnya, Donbas, Crimea – as the proper strategy to continue expanding Russia.  We will inevitably then fight in Poland and the Baltics.  It will also affirm Xi Jinping’s assessment (repeating that of Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo) that America is now a weakened and fearful paper tiger, willing to surrender all in order to assure peace in our times.  Appeasement will most certainly bring about a drastic change to an Orwellian-structured world order.  My counter contingency of today’s ongoing appeasement has a long history of being practiced along with the mass suffering by all concerned.  And this contingency has a demonstrated high probability of coming to pass.  Putin pulling the nuclear trigger and thereby assuring his place in history as humanity’s ultimate pariah, eclipsing Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, is to me a reach and a low probability event.

So that’s the debate.  It’s all a matter of probabilities that the opposing sides assign to their contingencies going forward.  I’ll take my stand with history and Putin’s desire to live to fight another day.

[16mar22 update]  Brookings Institute leftwing maven William Galston is a nationally known regular contributor of progressive perspectives in the WSJ.  In the paper’s 16mar22 edition (here) he concludes “We shouldn’t risk nuclear war, but there’s still a lot more we could do” while arguing that we have a “moral obligation to help Ukraine against Russia”.  In supporting his argument he uses profoundly misguided and inappropriate examples of America’s reticence to intervene in the Rwandan slaughter of Tutsis and the 1964 stabbing of Kitty Genovese while bystanders watched and did nothing.

In these citations Galston misses two major points that characterize the Ukrainian war.  First, the assailants in both cases were weak, and not able to overwhelm the proximal agents able to aid the victims.  And second, neither attacker was prepared or capable of continuing his murderous rampage beyond committing their initial atrocities.  This is not the case with Russia invading Ukraine.  To the world Putin has made it clear that his intentions have been and will continue to be more than simply the return of a compliant Ukraine into the resurging Russian empire.

And echoing Biden’s peremptorily cowering announcement (joined by many Republicans), that the US will do nothing to risk nuclear war with Russia, seals an extremely dangerous future for all, while not reducing the eventual risk of nuclear war one whit.  For the decades during the cold war it was the prospect of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that reined in the USSR and kept us from a nuclear holocaust.  Had the Left’s ‘better Red than dead’ become the geo-strategic policy of the west and NATO to contain communism, we would all be fluent in Russian by now.  MAD worked only because Moscow knew we were willing to risk a nuclear war as we implemented policies (the ‘minor wars’ presaged by George Kennan) to stifle the spread of communism.  Without communicating such risk to the Politburo, MAD would have been toothless.

So, the bottom line for us today should be to counter Putin’s nuclear saber rattling with that of our own – ‘if you pull the nuclear trigger Vlad, we will incinerate you.’ – and bring back MAD. The time to stand up to a thug is early in the game before he and his star chamber become invested in the success of his previous threats – that should be our Plan A. The later we trade in our wish bone for a back bone, the more likely the thug will be willing to initiate a nuclear exchange.  Remember that Stalin blinked in 1948, Khrushchev in 1962, Brezhnev in 1981, Gorbachev in 1989.  Today again there is no endpoint in sight for retreating from such threats and conquests that does not involve eventual wholesale worldwide misery.

Anybody have a workable wishbone Plan B?

Scattershots – 8mar22 (updated 12mar22)

George Rebane

Probability is the measure of possibility.

H&I fires.  The Russians are using an unusually insidious, deadly, and dastardly artillery tactic to kill fleeing civilians on negotiated evacuation routes.  The tactic is called Harassment and Interdiction fires, and are designed to deny the enemy free use of designated areas over extended periods.  H&I fires are conducted randomly with high explosive shells fired from one or two tubes, and set to denote at 50-150 feet above ground level.  This results in an anti-personnel ‘kill circle’ of at least 200-300 feet radius depending on shell size.  Historically artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield, spraying shrapnel (extremely jagged and irregularly shaped pieces of steel ranging from bullet to tennis ball sizes) at extreme velocities around the detonation point.  And whereas small arms military bullets travel at around 3,000 ft/sec, shrapnel comes at you at over 20,000 ft/sec.  Targeting H&I fires on escape routes that are used only once by escapees is like shooting fish in a barrel – they never know whether or when its incoming, and they’re always out in the open.  I wonder what a Russian battery commander feels when ordered to schedule H&I fires that he knows will kill/maim only civilians?  Talk about war crimes.

Minds that never will meet.  We have yet one more example of the Great Divide in progress.  In my recent ‘Pentagon teaches socialism’ post’s comment stream we have one of our longtime leftwing readers deny acceptance of this important piece of anti-American news, why? because he considers the cited Newsmax “hardly a credible news source”.  This reader is an established representative of this kind of progressive mentality – if the messenger is unfavorable, summarily reject the message.  He never even bothered to examine the further referenced links which would have taken him to the DoD website where the conference was announced, described, and additional links provided.  Instead, he and his consider CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, … and other lamestream news media as reliable, no matter that they don’t report news that doesn’t comport with the DNC narrative, and are unrepentant and uncontrite about most items they falsely report and/or spin.  People of the Right have no problem consuming leftwing news and progressive literature – we demand to know it.  However, those of the Left never lift the blinders they had carefully installed during their K-12 years.  Such news consumption practices of the Left and Right are but one of many asymmetries that have made meaningful communication between the sides a rapidly fading episode in our country’s history.

[10mar22 update]  Re the restraining order on my daughter.  Nearly everything that has been admitted as evidence from the plaintiff at the hearing is a lie as corroborated by the available videos and the physics of the possible (e.g. see 1032am comment below).  The judgement was a preordained political act.

[12mar22 update]  Putin’s Rasputin bubble?  Perhaps a little play on words, but a friend and reader sent me a link and asked whether I had ever heard of Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin.  It turns out that Dugin has been the political philosopher and intellectual ideologue of Putin’s inner circle for some time now, dishing out his esoteric views on neo-fascist ‘Eurasianism’. (more here)  Now I have never heard of Dugin or even that Putin has had an ‘inner circle’ of confidants.  From what has been reported it appears that Putin has used the Machiavellian structure of alternating advisor circles whose members are political enemies of adjacent circles, thereby making it hard for a court conspiracy to mature sufficiently to topple the prince.  But according to the referenced article, it appears that Putin’s Rasputin may have successfully implanted his ideas about the historical resurgence of a post-czarist Russia extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  “Gestated in anti-communist right-wing activism during the waning days of the Soviet Union, indebted to a specifically anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment philosophical embrace of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and hyper-nationalism, Dugin dreams of a reborn Orthodox Tsarist state surpassing the borders and spheres of influence as they existed before 1989, of a Novorossiya (New Russia) built not on socialist principles, but fascist ones.” 

The mentality of a Russian soldier has always been a puzzle to westerners since at least the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.  (Recall that my grandfather was a czarist conscript in that war, transported to and from Pacific rim battles on the trans-Siberian railroad in cattle cars which served as troop trains for Russian soldiers.)  The Russian soldier has been distinguished by his overall and abysmal ignorance of his mission, especially as it fits into the geo-strategic situation du jour, and his lack of what the western soldier knows as patriotism.  The Russian soldier always has found himself poorly led and poorly outfitted – his main goal is just to stay alive and go back home.  To achieve this, he will follow any orders and do anything that lets him survive the day.  Questioning authority is an unknown concept as long as it doesn’t put his life in immediate danger.  However, he has been known to sabotage his own equipment, and even his own body, in order to avoid being thrown into the next maelstrom from which retreat often means summary execution.  In this light one can understand Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, be they in their apartments or fleeing on an open road.

Pentagon teaches socialism

George Rebane

Promoting public benefits without including public costs is the hallmark of charlatans and evil politicians.  Accepting public benefits without inquiring about their public costs is the way of the useful idiot and the ignorant.

More evidence pours in that our military under progressive federal governments no longer considers national security as its prime and overarching mission.  The latest comes from the Pentagon which recently sponsored and hosted ‘Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism’. (more here)

The event featured the French socialist economics professor Thomas Piketty whose widely panned ‘masterwork’, Capital in the 21^st Century (2013), is still celebrated by progressives everywhere.  Most real economists and students of economics – certainly of the Austrian and Chicago schools - consider ‘socialist economist’ to be a demonstrated oxymoron.

The Pentagon event was put on by DoD’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and featured Piketty’s ideas about how the west should reorganize its socio-economics for the remainder of the century, and specifically to successfully “meet the challenge of China”.  Piketty also wrote Time for Socialism (2021) in which he argues “that the right answer in addressing China's growth lies in ending Western arrogance and promoting a new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and post-colonial socialism," … "If they stick to their usual lecturing posture and a dated hyper-capitalist model, Western countries may find it extremely difficult to meet the Chinese challenge."

The obvious thrust of what our Pentagon mavens now promote is that to counter communist China and its new approach to state-capitalism, the west must become a socialist society and also develop a form of state-capitalism on its road to a Marxist world. (here)  Most free-market economists and business leaders not yet in the embrace of corporatism see such nostrums as advising us to destroy our economy in order to save it.  (There’s more to be said about that as we consider what is happening under the aegis of the Great Reset.)

In today’s military we take valuable hours from the training day to devote to ideologically indoctrinating our soldiers, sailors, and airmen to correct modes of collectivist groupthink. Since the Obama administration, we have increasingly started doing this instead of increasing and honing our troops’ warfighting skills with the ever newer and more complex technologies that already dominate today’s battlefields, and which demand a more highly trained warrior cohort to meet the enemy with modern weapon systems instead of ideological indoctrination.

The new emphasis from such programs is not the continued maintenance of a secure and powerful America as a sovereign nation-state and world hegemon.

The Oligarchs’ Fire Sale

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to ..."  Sir Walter Scott

George Rebane

As an idle exercise I’ve thought of what most likely is going on with those Russian oligarchs who have had their financial plans upended by all the sanctions and who stand to lose more in the coming weeks/months.  Reports are that they’re selling their expatriate assets – land, estates, townhouses, yachts, airplanes, art, securities, … - that can be seized and/or confiscated.  So what do you do if you’re one of Putin’s pals worth a few billion dollars, with a good part of it spread around the world, and you find your name on the internationally published sanctions shit list (SSL).

Well, I imagine that their objective is to survive in the post-Putin world with enough money to make their life comfortable wherever they may wind up once the dust settles and Russia regains some semblance of normalcy.  Now such a QoL does not require billions, a few tens of millions would do nicely, and even better with a few hundred million.  Time to have a couple of yard sales, one in Russia, and one in divers parts of the globe.  But now comes the tricky part.

Assuming you do have some trusted agents (relatives?) living in different parts of the world, how do you sell your stuff?  Let’s dispense with ill-gotten assets; all your foreign stuff has been legitimately obtained and held in their host countries, with above-board purchase monies paid and transferred through the then world banking systems.  But now you cannot sell any of it without payments going through the post-sanctioned banking systems.  Any sums entering those conduits of finance could and will be confiscated/frozen; in short, you wouldn’t be able to spend such monies even after a legal transfer of title to the buyers.  So what to do?

Well, you would have to sell your $200M yacht to someone for say an above-board $1,000, with your agent having negotiated a sub-rosa payment of $20M consisting of fungible tangibles like precious stones or gold bullion that can be squirreled away out of sight.  We’re assuming here that such buyers with ready access to fungible tangibles can be found in the world’s markets.  So let’s postulate that you can sell enough of your expatriate assets for stashes of valuable commodities that await your emigration from mother Russia.  (I assume that those on the SSL will not be welcome in a post-Putin Russia for all the obvious political reasons.)

After the dust settles, you see yourself ensconced in a luxurious townhouse in Buenos Aires or Santiago.  But will you be living the life of ease that you had planned and carefully endowed through a sufficient cadre of trusted agents?  You must know that now-expatriate former oligarchs on the SSL will be tracked and monitored by everyone from various intelligence services and Interpol on down.  On the more sinister side, you can expect that criminals of various stature will also track and know the whereabouts of SSL graduates.  And they all know that you still have considerable wealth in untrackable but readily transportable forms stashed away here and there.

Since SSL members will forever remain exposable pariahs, no matter where they settle, starting with the local authorities, no one will show any great concern if suddenly your wife or one of your children is kidnapped and quietly held for ransom.  For now you are a marked man for the rest of your born days.  I’ll end this little fantasy by wondering how an oligarch would fare if he decided to sign his in-country assets, or his overseas stashes, to Putin’s Russian state to provide much needed foreign exchange.  Would this generate survivable goodwill into post-Putin years?  We can dissect this another time or in the comment stream.  But we can all depart these musings with the conclusion that today it probably is not much fun being a known Putin toady and an oligarch on the SSL.

Scattershots – 22feb22 (updated 24feb22)

George Rebane

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  As of tonight, our weak and incompetent president has done nothing to deter Putin from re-establishing dominion over Russia’s “near abroad”.  The Biden administration’s much-touted ‘prompt and severe’ sanctions are clearly neither, as they are revealed to be low-grade-ore that even now hang fire.  Contrary to the administration’s abysmally ignorant and hesitant assessment of Putin’s strategy, the Russian president’s image as the post-Stalinist incarnation of Russia’s next strong-man leader continues to grow in the eyes of his adoring people, and also in the calculations of the growing cohort of our geo-strategic enemies led by China and Iran.  We are still looking for that single thing that President Biden has accomplished for the benefit of the United States and its citizens.  Unchallenged, he solidly occupies one of the historical performance bookends of our presidency.

[23feb22 update] Many in the West saw the end of the Cold War as proof that free markets and the rule of law were universal values. When the EU began admitting eastern European and Baltic states, a few of its officials thought this was not a geopolitical ploy aimed at Russia but the product of “inevitable globalization,” said Adam Tooze, a historian at Columbia University.  Eastern Europeans didn’t share that view. Mr. Tooze said  accession to the EU, like NATO, was “a way of securing themselves against Russia, full stop,” while Russia similarly “refused to see NATO and the EU as separate entities.” He said the EU may be a bigger threat because while Russia can compete militarily with NATO, it can’t compete with the social, cultural and economic appeal of Europe. … Economic integration didn’t make Russia or China more liberal; they doubled down on autocracy and state capitalism.  (more here)

[24feb22 update]  It appears that the west’s day-late and dollar-short sanctions, advertised for weeks by Team Biden as a “deterrent” to Russian invasion, have gone over like a warm bucket of spit.  Today even Bumblebrain was forced to admit to the world that his invasion deterrent won’t kick in until about four weeks after the Russian invasion started.  That is an excellent example of this idiot’s ‘foreign policy expertise’, much vaunted by Democrats during the 2020 election campaign.  Every day continues to pour in more evidence that this administration, in its entirety, has no idea what are America’s interests and how to marshal the west to resist Putin, and Xi waiting in the wings.  Our front line offense seems to consist of cancelling the credit cards belonging to the kids of Russian oligarchs, and then threatening to really get tough and cancel their debit cards.  That should get Putin to order his armor out of the Ukraine and send in Russian contractors to fix the Ukrainian buildings that got damaged in the last 48 hours.  Then again, maybe not.

From Lakoff to McConnell to Biden

George Rebane

Berkeley professor, cognitive linguist, and progressive philosopher extraordinaire George Lakoff is the celebrated author of Don’t think of an Elephant (2014), which in its first (2004) edition became the best selling definitive bible of neo-Marxist thought, policy, and communication.  He is the intellectual darling of the Left who has spelled out the belief systems of today’s progressives and conservatives, and how to communicate these to the masses.  One of his strong theses is that the difference between the Ps and Cs is organic and can be traced to the basic way each cohorts’ brains are wired.  Readers may recall my introduction of this notion by citing a University College London clinical study (here).  And he confirms the existence of totally different worldviews of both sides, including understanding of logic and perception of truth.  In short, as these pages have asserted over the years, we see and understand very little in common even when we are looking at the same thing.

Lakoff educates his readers on both the mores and values of Ps and Cs.  He, as I, don’t give much credence to the claimed existence of the middle-road ideologues, their belief system is a muddle of tenets cobbled together from both sides that result in a mutually incoherent amalgam which really doesn’t work.  Both sides do their best to convert these ‘independents’ and attract them into their respective camps.  But in the larger context of Lakoff’s message to his congregants, he really has no idea what conservatives believe and practice.  Nevertheless, his strong construction of current progressive beliefs – mores and values – is an illuminating compendium of neo-Marxist tenets that we conservetarians and others of the Right hold foreign to human nature.

An example of Lakoff’s broad-brush of P and C distinguishing characteristics is that P families are “nurturing” environments in which to bring up children, and C families hew to the “strict father model” wherein children are taught “absolute” rights and wrongs.  The bottom line of such up-bringing environments is that Ps produce good people, and Cs produce bad people with all kinds of social deficits.  Today from what we observe being reported in the media and taught in our public schools, it is clear that Lakoff’s strict differentiation between Ps and Cs is taken as ground truth by our national leftwing.  Again, I recommend Lakoff’s Elephants … as an illuminating read to all my right-leaning and mid-road compatriots.

Moving on to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, we see that he has succumbed to the Left’s framing of the 6jan21 Capitol riot as a “violent insurrection”.  We have covered the use of such language 20 ways from Sunday in these pages, and witness his use of such language with great disappointment, and also surprise.  There definitely is a growing faction of Republican leadership that is not clear on the concept of what the Democrats want to achieve in molding the pre-election public mind.  I don’t know whether Mitch is losing it or he really has a rationale for starting to adopt the Left’s lexicon.  It all started with seemingly innocent sounding malaprops such as ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘climate change’.  What makes it all the more destructive is that our ability to communicate in the public forum is diminished daily by such degradations of our language.  In any event, Sen McConnell appears as the able leader of the politically silent majority Republicans who have so much to tell our electorate, but only make a peep now and then.

Finally, I have to give a pseudo-kudo to ol’ Bumblebrain, our president.  He is finally acting a bit like the leader of the world’s white hat hegemon with his agonizingly belated aid to Ukraine, sending them armaments and moving more American military into trip-wire positions in Russia’s near-abroad NATO neighbors. (more here)  Rebane Doctrine has backed and promoted America’s role as the powerful hegemon sheriff of the post-WW2 world order.  Ever since George Kennan laid out our cold war strategy of containment in his 1946 Long Telegram, the US has been doing mankind an enormous good by selectively holding back the spread of totalitarianism in its many forms.  As Kennan warned us, this job is neither cheap nor easy, but it beats hell out of having a nuclear WW3 or a global autocracy a la Orwell or Red China.  And America has been the only player on the world stage qualified in means and mindset for the job – long may it wave.

Scattershots – 6feb22 (updated 11feb22)

George Rebane

Numbers never speak for themselves.  Instead, they always deliver the substance of adroitly framed messages by astute spokespeople.

‘Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy’ is the title of a comprehensive survey article in the 6feb22 WSJ, that echoes and confirms most of the points made in these pages about general circulation models (GCMs) that have been used to predict Earth’s temperatures in the long-term.  Over the past decades the number of competing (and some complementing) GCMs have grown to several hundred.  Almost all of them tell their own stories about the future.  And all of them gain ‘credibility’ in the eyes of science-free politicians and activists by being meticulously tuned through adjusting their myriads of ‘knobs’ (constants) so that they can take past data and generate today’s climate as their outputs.  As those trained in data analysis and estimation will tell you, perfecting past performance to predict the present is no guarantee that predictions of the future will then be on the mark.  (Kinda sounds like the copy delivered by your financial advisor.) The current big bugaboo is the impact of clouds, which no one really knows how to model their impact on radiation reflection and/or heat retention.  One thing that GCMs have in common is the prediction of higher temps in the out-years.  These numbers continue to be embraced by all true believers in the coming climate catastrophe, and will be used to justify even more draconian policies to combat what they devoutly embrace as preventable man-made global warming.

[7feb22 update] Picking up on the reparations thread in the last Sandbox, I’d like to throw my native Estonia’s hat into the ring for its due in the ‘past-due payments to make up for historical bad behaviors’ gambit.  The Ests (large Viking tribe of oak tree worshippers) lost their independence in the 1200s when German Teutonic Knights conquered the entire Baltic region extending north to Estonia.  Since then, Estonia has been a ‘bailiwick’ ruled in turn over the centuries by Germans, Russians, and Swedes.  The culturally insular and obdurate Estonians were always kept as serfs cum slaves to work the land for their foreign masters.  They never acclimated to their forced last-class social status and rebelled every couple of generations (here), only to be put down ruthlessly by the established ruling order du jour.  This ended with the revolution of 1918 in which Estonia finally freed itself from the most recent centuries of rule by Russia.  Independence lasted until the start of WW2 in 1939 when the Soviets overran the country and once more made it a Slavic satrapy, this time under the communists.  Estonia again became free in 1991 with the fall of the USSR.  So, for all those centuries of languishing under the brutal heels of the Germans, Swedes, and Russians, doesn’t Estonia belong somewhere at the head of the reparations equity line that many think should now start extracting social justice checks from all kinds of historical bad actors?  But then again, do we really want to open that Pandora’s Box?

[8feb22 update]  DHS’s domestic terrorist watch is now in full swing as described in the 7feb22 DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin.  We are again on a WW2 keep-an-eye-on-your-neighbor footing – remember ‘If you see something, say something’.  Report suspicious stuff to your local FBI field office or Fusion Center.  And this includes anyone who still has doubts about the 2020 election, or thinks the government hasn’t been straight with us about fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.  Personally, I’m waiting for the posting of cash rewards, at which time I plan to turn all of you in.  Guilty as alleged and/or until proven innocent.  H/T to reader for the heads up on this.

Masks for Covid are butt stupid is the blunt conclusion of a compendium of studies, citing verifiable sources, from Swiss Policy Research – ‘Are Face Masks Effective?  The Evidence’ - that one of our astute readers posted in a RR comment stream.  Rather than let it languish there, I’m giving it more prominence here.  This is another important document that blows the cover off the political corruption that continues to pander this pandemic, and that is made worse by the cohort of compliant ignorance that pervades the land.

[11feb22 update]  The Left is rapidly discovering that there is no ‘settled science’ on which they can hang their political hat.  All Covid response policies and the formerly immutable truths of ‘followed science’ they were based on are rapidly changing as the November mid-term election approaches.  What you will never see out of a leftwinger or their lamestream lackies is recognition that they have been wrong and their mistakes have led to thousands of avoidable deaths, irretrievable educational losses to our youth, and tens of thousands of businesses and livelihoods destroyed.  Hopefully now these functional idiots will realize that we have an endemic virus, like so many others that we have learned to live with.  But no premature rejoicing, these same worthies have plenty of opportunities to harm us and the country with their ongoing work on border security, climate change, the economy, K-12 education, ... .

For all you racists out there who want to hide your racism from black folks, here is a little how-to piece that will serve you well.  It is written by a black lady who has given the problem a lot of thought.  She has a list of attributes that racist white folks cannot help but exhibit sooner or later.  Of course, them racist white people can use the same list to practice hiding their inevitable racism, or, if so motivated, attempt to purify themselves from that societal stain.

Systems Sciences Refute Collectivism

George Rebane

[This contribution is a periodic review of a major stave of Rebane Doctrine.  It attempts to explain to the intelligent reader why collectivist governance and policies are doomed to failure.  The punchline is that they violate the fundamental laws of nature (i.e. our universe) which, of course, includes certain evolved and long established behaviors that make up human nature.  Collectivists’ rebuttals are sincerely invited.]

Fundamental Law from Systems Sciences – The more complex is a system’s transfer function (inputs-to-outputs relationship from control theory), the more rapid and comprehensive must be its feedbacks required for stable operation.  Collectivist systems of governance violate this law by enforcing ever more comprehensive centralized control over large/complex socio-economic systems the transfer functions for which are unknown, and in which feedback loops are lacking, faulty, and operate with grossly large delays (i.e. large time-late).

Corollary of Fundamental Law – You can control only what you can measure in a timely manner.  An added deficit in the human governance of large socio-economic systems is that we still don’t know exactly what needs to be measured or when or how.  As witnessed by the continual miscalculations of economists and other elite experts, the best we can do is obtain time-late data from processes that we know are at best pitiful proxies for what we really want to know when.

The Disfunction of Organizational Feedback.  Timely and accurate feedback to correct operational errors is lacking in poorly structured and managed organizations.  In such organizations agents at all levels overwhelmingly seek to secure their own position and futures, rather than serve the overarching mission of the organization that employs them.  They do this by focusing their efforts to please their supervisors, rather than to benefit the organization’s customers/clients.  Government bureaus, agencies, and departments exhibit the quintessence of such organizational deficits (e.g. ‘the deep state’).  Non-profit institutions and for-profit corporations are not immune, especially those that have forsaken competitive capitalism for corporatism – partnering with corrupt government to obtain favors that only government can bestow, assure, and deliver.

Comprehensive centralized control is profoundly unnatural in the sense that it is not found in any aspect of ‘nature’.  Nature stabilizes its required complexities by operating in modes of highly distributed knowledge and control.  Control is always hierarchical in that the higher levels in any given natural system impose ever coarser, infrequent, and generalized control signals on their immediate subsystems, which iteratively then repeat the process to their lower-level subsystems.  The same is affected with feedback which also gets coarser and more abstract as it is passed to the higher levels of the system’s structure – higher levels don’t need to know the details of lower-level operations.

This is especially true in living systems that range from individual cells to human beings – they ALL function with a hierarchy of distributed control and maximally localized knowledge.  And natural social orders from hives to herds function similarly without need for central controllers and planners.  It is the recently evolved perversion in humankind which has begun using its advanced communication skills in attempts to establish and govern centrally controlled societies.

The Covid testing fiasco grows

George Rebane

Now there are not enough tests, and the desired rapid tests are really unreliable, and regardless of test results, it is probably safer to let Omicron spread than mess with it, if you’re not in one of those vulnerable classes, and more to come.  All this on top of the simple fact that making decisions on just ‘test positivity’ has always been a non-starter (as I’ve shown in these pages).

Today we read in the 11jan22 WSJ (here) that the popular home rapid tests may be even more unreliable in detecting Delta and other non-Omicron variants of the disease.  And timing is very important in when the test is taken – don’t do it too early, let the symptoms cook for a couple or three days (then what do you do?), and don’t be eager to believe negative test results, and … .

The best sensitivities of ‘properly applied’ tests yield sensitivities of 85-95% - that’s the probability of getting a ‘test positive’ given you have the disease.  This, of course, means that out of every 100 diseased and infectious individuals, the test will come back negative for 5 to 15 of them.  These are then free to party or attend other sardine-packed events or transports.  The specificity of tests are not even mentioned; apparently they are of no concern.  You may recall that a test’s specificity is the probability getting ‘test negative’, given you don’t have the disease.  Test specificities are usually lower than sensitivities.  That means that tests also quarantine a lot more people than actually have the malady.

Then there’s the whole question of managing the spread of Covid.  In ‘Slow the spread?  Speeding it may be safer’ the authors present data and argue that “the Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.”

This all has to do with some very sophisticated technical notions of factors affecting dispersion known as ‘antigenic drift’ and ‘antigenic shift’.  Drift is a slow mechanism by which a virus changes, which then allows a host’s immune system to successfully suppress viruses which have only slightly modified themselves from the successfully vaxxed or naturally inhibited variants.  Letting drift occur – i.e. speeding dispersion – has a higher probability of stopping all such variants before they find ways to change even more into versions for which there is no effective vaccine.

Shift then is the process by which the virus can pile up multiple changes to its genome and then emerge as having gone through a “discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen (or set of antigens) to a very different antigen (or set of antigens). New viral strains—such as those that jump from one species to another—tend to emerge from antigenic shift.”

This is bad because “vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. Yet social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally ‘drifted’ variants.”

This reality is complex stuff, and you’ll hear nothing about it from the government’s Faucis and Walenskys.  All that comes down to us are articles of faith about more testing being somehow better than less testing.  But two years into C19, and no one has yet to state a cogent or coherent objective for widespread testing.  Most certainly no reasonable case has been made that testing somehow reduces the virulence, morbidity, or mortality of Covid.  So there you have it.  The testing confusion grows, and the world’s population has abandoned all critical thought and become lemmings led to the altar of testing to worship a rite, the blessings of which no one is aware.  Today we do testing simply for the sake of testing because it makes us feel good.  Sometimes placebos work.

Dark Days Diary – 8jan22 (updated 12jan22)

George Rebane

The shameful declines of Scientific American and NPR.  In days of yore, both media outlets were posterchildren of professional and responsible journalism.  And during the last twenty years both have embarked on a shameful decline that shows no signs of stopping.  SA, published continuously since the 1840s, served as the periodic and apolitical compendium of scientific advances served up for the intelligent reader.  No longer.  Today it has subverted to a progressive propaganda organ that sees all aspects of science as being race-based, and promotes a fundamental change to scientific enquiry founded on Marxist class/racist principles (here).  We have already covered the decline of what is now National Propaganda Radio which serves as the publicly funded ($100M annually) voice of the Democratic Party, tilting daily more to its radically woke wing (here).  What pisses me to the gills is the amount of its taxpayer funding that the Republicans have been silent about for years.

Comparative corruption in global governance.  In an ongoing discussion with a friend and correspondent who is a retired international banker, we have focused on the existence of corruption in almost all governments, and which countries do better than others to actively control corruption.  My friend spent many years stationed in various countries and experienced first hand their inner workings which were very much in evidence through their baking and financial institutions.  Costa Rica is the standout anti-corruption posterchild in the otherwise terminally corrupt gaggle of Latin American nations.  Many thousands of American expatriates have retired to Costa Rica, and now call it their home while maintaining their US citizenship.  The chart below (compiled by the World Bank in its Worldwide Governance Indicators) provides a basis for that emigration over the years.  I am surprised to see that the US rated so high, given its recent decline from the rule of law (and constitutionalism), and the growth of an obviously corrupt ‘deep state’ bureaucracy.

[9jan22 update]  ‘More Good News on Ivermectin’ and more evidence that the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic cost millions of preventable deaths.  So have the physicians and researchers of “the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) been calling for widespread adoption of Ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.”  History will record that what has happened in the last two years across the globe has been one of greatest politically motivated mass murders on record.  And those complicit can never admit to their perfidy in promoting the proscription of this effective, readily available, and demonstrably safe medicine, for the adjudication of their criminality would require the empaneling of a Nürnberg-like court, and this will never happen.  Nevertheless, the record of this unrequited tragedy should always remain available.  Dark days indeed.

[10jan22 update]  Our housecleaner closed down after 30 years in the business.  She and her excellent crew have been part of our extended family for half of those years.  In her letter to us she cited the reasons for quitting as the usual litany of California’s war against entrepreneurship and capitalism – taxes, stifling regulations from all levels, varying Covid mandates, government checks for not working, and so on.  And sadly, she was not able to give us a reference to another local housecleaning business.  The reason?  In Nevada County she was the last holdout against the state’s anti-business winds, all of the other reputable housecleaners preceded her in pulling the plug.  More signs of the times.

North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson on reparations.  This two minute video (here) of his last year’s speech to the state’s GOP is guaranteed to moisten your eyes and send chills down your spine, unless you are a Democrat doing plantation maintenance in the country’s urban areas.

[12jan22 update]  Government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.  More information continues to be made public about the large-scale perfidy promoted by various agencies of the federal government and gratuitously integrated into the radical progressive policies in practice and promoted by the Democratic Party through its control of the administration and Congress.  Project Veritas has obtained documents that shed more light on what our government has done in promoting overseas gain-of-function research and suppression of the demonstrated benefits of Hydrochloroquine and Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid in all its phases.  This lends further credence to the allegations that senior government officials like Dr Fauci have purposively misled the American public and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions across the world.  H/T to reader.  (More here and here)

 

Predicting 2022 (updated 1jan22)

George Rebane

2022 will be another pivotal year in a growing string of such recent years.  Most predictions, save the premature happy dancing by Republicans, range between dour and cataclysmic.  A reader gives us a taste of that by pointing to James Howard Kunstler’s entry in Clusterfuck Nation with his ‘Forecast 2022 – Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age’.  So here are some of my prognostications with an invite for readers to add their own.  Please try to submit your entries before the first week of 2022 becomes history.

Since we know predicting is hard, especially about the future, and very little is certain, I will attach some quantitative probabilities to my efforts, and invite others to do the same.  We can then even determine who wins the 2022 Nostradamus Award, as I demonstrate in the coda.

1. Bumblebrain will not be president on 1 January 2023 (0.5); will not be president on 21 January 2025 (0.4); will serve out his full term (0.1).
2. Kamala will resign before 2022 election (0.6).
3. Covid will revert from pandemic to declared endemic (like the flu) status before 4 July 2022 (0.7).
4. Republicans will win the House in 2022 (0.8).
5. Republicans will win the Senate in 2022 (0.7).
6. Russia will invade Ukraine in 2022 (0.55).
7. China will invade Taiwan in 2022 (0.25).
8. Fed declared inflation will exceed 10% in 2022 (0.25).
9. Republicans will win at least 14 House seats from California (0.8).
10. The 25^th Amendment will be used to designate a new Vice President before the 2024 election (0.75).

More later, maybe.

Such a list of probability tagged predictions may be scored simply by taking the average of the ‘correct’ probabilities – i.e. probabilities that associate with the cases that come to pass.  For instance, in my list, if everything comes to pass with with Biden serving out a full term, Kamala does not resign, and China does not invade Taiwan, then my Nostradamus score – which ranges between 0 and 1 - would be (0.1+0.4+0.7+0.8+0.7+0.55+0.75+0.25+0.8+0.75)/10 = 0.58.

Jo Ann and I wish all of our readers and correspondents a productive and healthy new year.

[1jan22 update]  I just want to emphasize the reason for my #6 and #7 predictions.  Everyone in the world save America’s Democrat-prone electorate knows that the Team Biden is the weakest, most feckless, incompetent, and ignorant leadership the US has installed in the last 50 years (yes, even beating out the peanut farmer).  For either of Putin or Xi to invade would be a win for them ou two counts.  First, whatever our response, Americans tend to support their president during times of crisis.  That will assure a continuance in power of the weak and feckless Democrats.  Second, they get to achieve the next notch in their geo-strategic goals with the new territory they will then control.  What’s not to like in creating another crisis that Bumblebrain can’t handle?

‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’

George Rebane

RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here).  The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles.  Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M.  Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.

As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs.  They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible.  The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.

But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI).  One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check.  This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans.  These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.

RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment.  A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Scattershots – 10nov21

George Rebane

A lot has been happening in the Rebane clan lately.  This has kept me from posting at my usual rate.  Not only that, but every time I look at the news, I get into a dour mood and get to feeling hopeless again.  One of my current books underway is VDH’s The Dying Citizen (2021) in which he gives an historical overview of citizenry over the ages that shines a light on how our current middle classes have adopted the mantle of serfdom without the slightest inkling of it.  Not only that, but a national dialogue about our society’s state and direction is proscribed today by the Left’s minions in public education, academe, and the media.  The writings of right-leaning pundits like Fred Siegel, Robert Nisbet, Joel Kotkin, and Charles Murray are off limits, and citing their studies, no matter how well documented, is now forbidden in polite leftwing company (as I also recently discovered here).

In the past when I have found myself in such doldrums, the surefire road back has always involved ‘pushing squigglies’ on some new idea or invention.  So I dived into some financial engineering stuff on trading probabilistics of the kind pioneered by Didier Sornette – Why Stock Markets Crash (2003) – and John Casti.  (If you want to see a super-exponential, look at the recent behavior of the Dow, SP500, and Nasdaq.)  Hopefully, this work will lead into some proprietary IP.  But rummaging around with some ideas I discovered a new and handy use of the ‘WoRM formula’ beloved of artillerymen everywhere. (more here and here) It makes possible the extraction of distances and object sizes from photographs, and also allows graphic artists to correctly represent desired distances and sizes in the works they create.  I’ll write up the method so that interested readers can download a pdf of it.

Macdonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinsky stated something pretty obvious to the country’s remaining thinkers about parents having failed their children who were killed in gang warfare and police shootings.  Telling the wrong truth and calling attention to parents of the wrong race can get a well-paid executive fired.  So Kempczinsky did what anybody who puts purse before principle would do, he groveled.  My takeaway is that the poor bastard had not made his ‘go-to-hell’ stash yet, and really needed the job.  (more here and here)

COP26, the ongoing climate conference in Glasgow, has been the kabuki dance that I and most other sober observers predicted.  With leaders of major polluters absent, the rest are left to talk about utter crap like “multi-stakeholder decarbonization initiatives.”  Only people like Team Biden and its halo of flacks pretend to take any of this seriously.  Even Saint Greta of Thunberg dunned the affair as nothing but a “two-week long celebration of business as usual.”

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

WHO: Economic Development Trumps Climate Change

George Rebane

In his regular WSJ column on climate change issues, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford's Hoover Institution shines a light on the little reported aspects of the World Health Organization’s analysis of factors affecting the health of the world’s poor in the coming decades. (here) The bottom line, hidden by the Left and its lamestream media, is that more lives will be saved (by millions) through continuing the current course of global economic development, than will be saved by adopting the stringent climate change policies as prescribed by the Paris climate agreement and at next month’s Glasgow Climate Conference.  All such policies are based on utility functions which overwhelmingly favor policies that are ‘deemed’ to reduce global warming over other factors, primarily the effects of economic development on the QoL and health of the world’s poor.

The lives saved annually in 2050 by implementing existing and anticipated global warming accords is projected at 85,000.  However, over a spread of economic growth scenarios impacted by policies seeking to reduce preventable manmade global warming, the annual deaths range from 300,000 to 2,000,000 from malnutrition among the world’s poor.  If saving lives, especially among the poor, ever becomes important in these politicized and dubiously scientific considerations, then sanity advises avoiding draconian approaches such as contemplated in the Green New Deal and the additional socialist diktats on our lives and livelihoods planned by the Biden administration and amplified by established radicals such as are ensconced in Sacramento and Albany.  Per today’s dominant media and government narratives, these conclusions remain invisible to the general public.

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

 

Ruminations – 14sep21 (update 18sep21)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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