Rebane's Ruminations

‘Religious Freedom in Islam’

George Rebane

That’s the title of the new book by political science professor Daniel Philpott of Notre Dame.  It appears to be another anxious attempt at understanding and reconciling global Islam.  The book has an excellent review by Thomas Howard (history professor at Valparaiso University) in the 14may19 WSJ (here). Philpott divides the non-Islamic world into “Islamoskeptics”, holding that Islam is incompatible with religious freedom, and “Islamopluralists”, who accept the “religion of peace” teaching from the Mecca (v the Medina) Quran.

Philpott tries to give us the correct perspective on Muslim-majority countries by dividing them into three categories – “religiously free” (e.g. Lebanon, Kosovo), “secularly repressive” (e.g. Egypt, Turkey), and “religiously repressive” (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia).  Philpott agrees that the third confirms the West’s worst fears about Islam, but argues (as if it mattered) that the second kind is actually an import from the West, with its teaching that “the state must manage, control, and contain religion in order to make way for modern civilization.”

According to the author, the problem is that the secularly repressive countries spawn most of the Islamist terror that afflicts the world.  Somehow, here he overlooks the major (dominant?) contributions of Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia (homeland of almost all the 9/11 terrorists).  And the so-called peaceful and devout Muslims in the religiously free countries “have concluded that secularism (in its various guises) is to be eschewed as a Trojan horse sent by the West.”  In other words, the West as a whole remains the enemy of Islam, and not only Islamism (the terror spawning kind).

Nowhere does Philpott cover the much-feared and scripturally taught practice of taqiya (q.v., dissembling to promote Islam), or the caliphate as Islam’s endgame.  Most Islamoskeptics and all Islamophobes are sensitive to the global practice of terror killings by Islamists, and also their ongoing practice of green-on-green (and blue) killings, primarily in lands actively resisting Islamist factions such as ISIS, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, … .  Non-Muslims, especially westerners, have a hard time reconciling such ubiquitous and longstanding practice of the ‘murder of the innocents’ with any other belief system save those who follow Allah.

Nevertheless, Philpott’s essay concludes that our Constitution, and especially its First Amendment, provides a global template for protecting religious freedom rights (an unexamined goal of Islamic religionists) that will attract our Muslim brethren to exercise their “capacity to embrace a shift in thought.”  Again, here it is proper to insert from what-to-what, which apparently Philpott avoids in order to also avoid sounding, what, paternalistically neo-colonial?

I count myself definitely as an Islamoskeptic with periodic lapses into Islamophobia (fear of attempts to bring about a sharia-dominated caliphate).  My main concern is the absence of wholesale condemnation by the expatriate Islamic communities of individual acts of Islamist terror.  These Muslims, at best, only murmur a quiet, quick, and qualified disapproval, and when polled, turn in some very scary aggregate sentiments.  (e.g. results from Pew Research)  And the behavior of immigrant Muslims, in countries with insular communities abandoned by indigenous law enforcement agencies, speaks for itself, especially when considered in light of politically correct self-censorship by the media in reporting goings on and statistics that describe such cultural enclaves.

In the final analysis, our need to publish such apologetics in the west as Professor Philpott’s Religious Freedom in Islam (2019) speaks volumes about the real collision between the followers of the Prophet and the rest of us.  In many ways this work sounds like another careful walk whistling past the graveyard of the thousands who have been killed in the name of Allah.

Scattershots – 26apr19 (updated 27apr19)

George Rebane

The 17apr19 Scattershots got a bit too long with items that are hard to see below the page break, so let’s start another one.  BTW, I want to thank the thousands of RR readers and its group of stalwart commenters of all ideological hues.  We are now in our thirteenth year, and to date have amassed an archive of 3,006 posts underpinned by 140,681 comments in their comment streams.  Actually, the number of posts would be thousands more, save for my use of aggregating many of them under the dated ‘Ruminations’ and ‘Scattershots’ collections.  RR continues to be a uniquely open forum for the civil (albeit sometimes uncivil) discussion of all ideas that “alter and illuminate our times.”

Rebane’s rumblings are not the only attempts at deep thoughts about the goings on in our country and on our planet.  Significant contributions from our commenters on other issues and ideas decorate and lend weight to these comment streams, especially under the dated Sandboxes.  I call your attention to a recent exchange in the 23apr19 Sandbox between commenters Messrs Tozer (starting 848am) and ‘scenes’ (formerly ‘Scenes from the Coming Apocalypse’) that illustrates how illiberal has become free speech and discussion of new ideas in our progressive-run universities and colleges.

Democratic mayor Pete Buttigieg has entered the party’s race for its 2020 presidential candidate.  And, out of the gate, he’s basing the launch of his campaign on an audacious pack of lies about VP and former Indiana governor Mike Pence, with whom he had a most cordial and cooperative working relationship.  Governor Pence went out of his way to support and work with the unabashedly gay South Bend mayor.  But now “Mayor Pete picks a fight with a caricature of the vice president that he knows from experience is false.” (more here)  I bring this up re the continuing charges from our leftwing about Republicans being the only lying politicians in the land; none of them recognize the whopper-based careers of their own political leaders.  Why is it that the Right has no problem calling out the lies of Republican politicians (witness the numberless articles and features from the WSJ, National Review, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, …), but you never hear about the lying sumbiches and biches on the Left from their lamestream outlets?

How many mosques and Muslims have been attacked by self-declared Christians, or in the name of Christ?  Ask that reciprocal question about Muslims murdering Christians all around the world.  And dig deeper to ask how many of these Islamic terrorists have been recruited, trained, dedicated, and directed by Islamic institutions, organizations, and their clergy.  It is hard to make the case that there is any semblance of reciprocation in this ideo/theological conflict as our progressive brethren like to point out.  The two stacks of evidence simply do not compare.  So why does the Left continue to maintain this façade of lies?  (Full disclosure: this a is an unvarnished rhetorical question to which most Americans already know the answer.)

Western media glibly continue to report that North Korea is a “nuclear armed regime”, when it clearly is not.  I think for diplomatic and propaganda purposes we need to paint NK and its dear leader, the Ugly Fat Kid, as having the capability to wreak worldwide havoc.  This so that we can continue our attempts to keep him from acquiring/developing nuclear arms, and in the process support our agenda with China and now Russia.  It may be a bit technical to follow, but the UFK is nowhere near having nuclear ‘arms’ – i.e. operational weapons capable of delivering and exploding nuclear devices over distant enemy targets.  The simple fact is that the UFK has yet to test and demonstrate a launchable warhead that can be controlled with sufficient accuracy, and that also carries precisely-deployable, onboard penaids (penetration aids consisting of staged decoys used to spoof interceptor radars and IR sensors) that enable it to survive re-entry and reach the desired detonation point before being intercepted.   Before such a weapon enters their arsenal as an operational weapon system, NK will have to conduct multiple re-entry tests using otherwise fully functional, dummy warheads aimed at open-ocean ‘targets’.  Such tests will take time and be visible to all, and will be most carefully monitored by us and other nations concerned about the UFK’s sabre rattling.  (The Soviets and now Russians have monitored the re-entry of our ICBMs at mid-Pacific target atolls for decades.)  However, no such tests have been observed; ergo, NK is not yet a nuclear armed regime.

Avengers: The Endgame was touted by WSJ’s film critic Joe Morgenstern, who gave the movie a glowing review last Wednesday (24apr19), the day before its nationwide opening (here).  And apparently he was not the only one trumpeting hosannas for the flick.  Well, Jo Ann and I don’t go to the movies much, so we thought ‘what the hell, even though comic book heroes are not our favorite past time, the cultural experience sitting with a live audience should be worth it – so we went last night to the GV del Oro theater and wedged ourselves between an interesting menagerie of humanity that included a pair of motor-mouths behind us rattling their popcorn bags and bumping the backs of our seats, and next to a couple of twenty-something females who hauled in a four-year-old young man who had been taught no social skills about how to behave in polite company (perhaps because it didn’t turn out to be all that polite).  Anyway, the theater’s noise level during the movie was something to behold – when will they provide the audio over our own wireless, noise-cancelling headsets?

So now the 3+ hour movie.  It was the most banal attempt to combine some awkwardly composed serious dialogue with action scenes designed for the comprehension of six-year-olds that unsuccessfully attempted to explain the role of quantum-based time travel by the characters before they found themselves battling the vast array of minions in the service of a really bad guy who wanted to destroy the universe – we noticed that we’re now beyond simply destroying the earth, or our solar system, or even the galaxy – and then build a new one more to his liking.  Apparently he had the godlike powers to do it, although the movie was distinctly free of any accompanying spiritual content – you know, separation of church and Hollywood – that might at least have made a cameo appearance.  And so this utter waste of time dragged on for hours that seemed like much more than its claimed three, during which time all (who knows?) the Marvel heroes made their own appearances in addition to more cameos by some notable film worthies like Robert Redford and Benedict Cumberbatch.  And here we thought such people had enough money to avoid another turn at the world’s oldest profession.  Apparently not, since all across the country multiplexes bumped other films to use all their auditoriums for extra showings of Avengers, some going so far as to advertise 24/7 offerings so everyone could come and enjoy this heartwarming epic and culmination of the cinemagraphic arts.  Truth be told, if you paid attention, you could even catch odd snatches of acting, each lasting maybe ten, fifteen seconds.  And this morning we were told that this flick is breaking all box office records.  But overall, as a public service our advice is to save your money, unless you are determined to dip your own dipstick to check the level and character of today’s hoi polloi.

[27apr19 update]  Our indominable cartoonist Bob Crabb has hit another home run.  His latest offering below was filched from the pages of the 27apr19 Union.  Thanks Bob for making the already painful also memorable 😉

NZ Massacre – the Left’s new perfect storm

“Conservatism is corporatism in disguise.  I want no part of it. … The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China. … Conservatism is dead, thank God.”  Australian Brenton Tarrant, NZ shooter

George Rebane

The Christchurch massacre has been covered extensively and also received an initial go-through by RR commenters.  As always happens in the coverage of such massacres, they are characterized as ‘insane’, ‘the acts of a deranged person’, and ‘senseless killings’.  I have always thought that we’re missing something significant about these mass killings when we dismiss them as such.  Years ago, I gave my own take on these killers of the Islamic persuasion in ‘Of Ragheads and Racism’.  However, it should be clear that those sentiments are not restricted to terrorists of only one persuasion; there is a lot happening in this world which requires a wider and more detailed look.

Scattershots – 11mar19 (updated 14mar19)

George Rebane

Looking for national conspiracies?  Now here is one that involves everyone from George Soros through the DoJ/FBI to the DNC/Hillary.  “A dark money group with links to several high-profile liberal activists contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, an organization founded by a former Dianne Feinstein staffer that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.” (more here)  But no one gives a hoot after the FBI’s historical public exoneration of Hillary after confirming that she did indeed break several laws dealing with national security and destroying subpoenaed evidence.

The EU’s socialist-burdened, debt-ladened countries have had a hard time taking advantage of the global upswing in business, and appear to be heading for a slowdown if not recession.  With low growth rates and still high unemployment, the continent added another harbinger as investors are exiting stocks and bidding up government bonds.  The German bund last Friday was paying 0.04% or essentially no interest as a safe haven for cash.  This, of course, sets up a vicious circle in which left-leaning countries regulate and tax their businesses to low profits, which causes their shares to be sold off, which reduces business expansion and hiring, which bids up bonds thereby lowering government debt service costs, which provides governments essentially free money to borrow and dispense into programs that grow bureaucracies and launch more programs of socialist largess, which makes the business climate even worse, which … .  Our Democrats are taking notes on how to replicate such policies on this side of the pond.

[12mar19 update]  Finland’s government collapses over healthcare costs (here).  Other Nordics are not far behind as has been reported here for some time now.  None of these socialist programs nationalizing this or that are sustainable – it’s only a matter of time when other people’s money runs out.  H/T to a Sandbox commenter for finding an early report of it.  You can bet the ranch that the lamestream will hide this as long as it can, and proto-communists like Bernie and AOC will lie through their teeth about the news.  Their solution will, of course, be even higher taxes (aka wealth redistribution).  We all await our progressive pundits’ response for an enlivening conversation; sure hope they don’t send in their cricket corps.

NPR’s Morning Edition today featured a segment on what our 2050 world will look like after we have stopped emitting CO2 and global warming has been stopped in its tracks.  The reporter was almost delirious with joy reporting from the future and looking back on what it took to get to the brave new world where people live in ‘stack & pack’ housing, suburbia was no more, private electric vehicles cost a lot, were taxed a lot, and all roadways charged dynamic fees to keep you using public transportation. That future world was envisioned quite accurately by Orwell’s 1984, and even portrayed more honestly in Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago.  Big suburban houses will repurposed for multi-family living, and standard houses will be home to 4-5 people sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities.  (The Rebanes lived almost five years in such lodgings after WW2.  See ‘My Story’)  What the report conveniently omitted was what draconian measures it would take for government to herd people into such warrens and then keep them from revolting, and what would happen to the economy when taking risks was no longer rewarded, or even allowed by central planners and controllers.

[14mar19 update]  Second Amendment attack by Connecticut's Supreme Court in ruling that manufacturer of the Sandy Hook AR-15 can be sued. (more here) This is more than a gun control nose under the 2nd Amendment tent.  If this ruling is allowed to stand, then where will this kind of rogue litigations stop?  The implication is that the manufacturer of a tool legally made for legal use can be held accountable for its illegal uses.  What then of knife makers, or hatchet makers, or baseball bat makers, or rat poison makers, or rope makers, or even manufacturer of a car used by a terrorist or drunkard to kill people?  What then of the item's distributors and dealers?  You get the idea.  'The Left is evil' gets another confirming check mark.

Scattershots – 28feb19 (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

Trump won big in Hanoi.  By walking away with a smile when the Ugly Fat Kid overreached by offering to give some to get all, our president maintained his creds and caused the UFK to call a midnight news conference to claim a misunderstanding – ‘No, no, no, we didn’t demand that all the sanctions be lifted.’  Bullshit; Trump would never have left had not the UFK overplayed his hand.  Now, with visions of a prosperous Vietnam in his head, the UFK will be ready for some real give and take – I predict that he will seek the next meeting before the end of this year.  In the meantime the friendly parting will maintain the UFK’s good behavior – no testing.  All in all, a brilliant piece of foreign policy with a country that for 60+ years no other president has made any progress.

RR has concluded early and often (here) that our Millennials are America’s dumbest generation – both they and their parents were ‘educated’ in leftwing unionized public schools.  That most of them now view socialism favorably over open market capitalism gives abundant testimony that they will readily vote America into tyranny.  The culmination of dumbth indeed.

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin reminds us (here) in detail of how biased and one-sided are our lamestream media.  After two years of investigating Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia to throw the 2016 election, on 12feb19 NBC reported, “After two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle."  During this time the lamestream devoted more than 36 hours of intense coverage attempting to convince America that the evidence for collusion existed and was about to be released.  Instead of banner headlines for this announcement, all the lamestream outlets together basically ignored the bipartisan announcement from the Senate committee.  “But just take a moment to sit back and compare 2,202 minutes of media coverage of potential collusion with Russia — with supposedly unbiased journalists accusing a sitting American president of misconduct, lack of patriotism, impeachable offenses, or worse — to the less than one minute of coverage within the first 48 hours of an announcement that no evidence has actually been uncovered in a serious two-year bipartisan investigation, and it is abundantly clear why many Americans have lost faith in the honesty and trustworthiness of the media.”

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, our favorite manager of the masses (here), has a new book On Freedom.  There he argues that too much freedom is really not all that good for us – “What if people do not know how to find their way?” - that certain unnamed elites should really be in positions to mercifully limit our choices to only the proper ones, and then “nudge” us to the correct one before we stray too far from the social ideal, this to be prevented by structuring the country’s “choice architecture”.  While Big Brother looms large in the background, Sunstein never quite explains “which of us deserves the exalted position to design and impose nudges on others, and for what ends?” (more here)  But not to worry, after the Green New Deal gets into gear, Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and AOC will know exactly how to set up such ‘exalted positions’; all we have to do is vote correctly in 2020.

Italy will offer Universal Basic Income real soon now.  They’re going to make up the shortfall for all people earning less than their poverty threshold – but wait!  If you subsequently get a job or a better paying job, then the government will cut back you UBI payments to the extent that your earnings exceed that threshold.  Now that brilliant tactic is really going to motivate people to go work and get paid less. (more here)  Finland already had to roll up its experiment with UBI because people got real used to living on unearned handouts and only put forth effort in the black markets to increase their (untaxable) incomes.  To their benefit, even a bunch of Italy’s leftwing politicians are worried about this UBI’s impact on the national fisc which, next to Greece, is Europe’s shakiest.  The UBI was ushered in by the electorate voting for socialist Luigi Di Maio who was able to marshal Italy’s byzantine legislative machinery to launch their UBI.  That’s what enough not-too-bright voters and socialists candidates can do – given our Millennials, along with Bernie, Liz, and Kamala, we should not be too sanguine when next year rolls around.

[2mar19 update]  The crippling counters by our leftwing politicians and courts to stopping illegal entrants and contraband is having the predicted impact – more people than ever are climbing border fences and walls.  Government stats cite “The proportion of foreign nationals attempting to cross the border illegally rather than reporting to legal ports of entry has risen in the past year, according to the data. Those crossing illegally made up 73 percent of all border crossings from October 2017 to January 2018 and then rose to 83 percent for the same period of time ending on Jan. 31, 2019, NBC News reported Friday.” (more here)  Why’s that?  Well, we all know that most entrants claiming asylum don’t have a leg to stand on, and before Trump they were admitted at legal crossing points, told to appear in a US immigration court at some future date, and then turned loose never to be seen again.  Today we tell such asylum seeker to stay in Mexico until their court date comes up.  But the overwhelming share of them know they can’t qualify for asylum, so they go back to Mexico and then attempt illegal crossings somewhere down the line where they think the border is most porous.  Today they’re coming in over such porous spots at just the underside of a million a year because we can't do the right thing and build the needed wall/fence border security infrastructure.  And the anti-American Left continues to trumpet through their lamestream outlets that this does not constitute a national emergency.  (BTW, the size of an army division is about 15,000 troops.  At 80,000 illegal entrants per month, that is like an invasion force of five divisions each and every month.  And we haven’t even started reviewing the growing dollar cost of illegals in the country.)

Scattershots – 25feb19 (updated 26feb19)

George Rebane

In ‘America’s Second Civil War’ by Dennis Prager, he makes the case of the Great Divide stating that, save for slavery, Americans are further apart in how they think about their country and in which direction should be its future, than during the “First Civil War” in the 19th century.  He writes in Townhall.com that “Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative. … The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism. … Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.”  This has been a seminal part of Rebane Doctrine and the RR commentaries that have expanded on these points over the years.  This message will continue here as long as it is allowed to be published.

Gov Gavin Newsom is part of the leftwing clatch that supported CA’s bullet train to nowhere and blew billions in its abortive and aborted construction.  CA having violated literally every part of the agreement with the feds for getting dollars from Washington, Trump now has stopped further funding and wants to claw back what the state has fraudulently received.  Newsom unabashedly lies in stating that the state has complied, and is really not stopping the project, but merely reducing its scope to have it now go from nowhere to nowhere on the remaining funds. (more here)  Ultimately he’ll have to go back to CA voters for more money, and he’ll probably get it from a now-dominant Democrat electorate, most of whom don’t pay very much or any taxes.  To them it will all be OPM from the greedy rich.

Edelman Intelligence conducted a recent poll which revealed that “53% of California residents are considering leaving the Golden State because of the high cost of living.” A higher share (62%) of “respondents said they believed the best days of California were in the past.” (more here and here)  This in the face of a continuing barrage of leftwing lies telling us that the state is in fine fettle with all the right-thinking people happy dancing in the streets.  As also witnessed on these pages, the progressives maintain that only the narrow-minded, ignorant conservatives are disgruntled because the Republican party has become irrelevant in Sacramento and major metropolitan areas.  People voting with their feet tell a different story.

Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid will meet again, this time in Vietnam, to continue talking about North Korea’s 'denuclearization', a concept yet to be defined by the parties.  And you can bet the ranch that their current definitions are not even close.  Here’s my take on Trump’s plan forward.  He knows the UFK cannot give up his nuclear program for the simple reason that he and his family will then be killed by the high level echelon of generals that surrounds him (because they and their families will also live only so long as the regime survives, otherwise they too will be dead meat).  So Trump will be satisfied to continue these talks, claiming progress as long as NK doesn’t resume missile flights and underground testing.  When he leaves office and a more weaker-looking Democrat (a la Obama) takes over, the UFK will immediately resume testing and threatening that will bring the world to the brink again, and also solidify his grip on his regime.  At that point Trump and the Repubs will point out that it was their clever foreign policy that kept the world safe, and now look what’s happening with the naïve Dem leadership in power.  This will be known as Trump’s Grand Ropadope to avoid war on the Korean peninsula for which no one seems to have a stomach.

[26feb19 update]  Henderson’s population surges past Reno’s as Californians arrive in droves to escape taxes, fees, regulations, and prices (especially for living units).  The numbers are truly amazing as again reported in ‘As California Loses People, a Las Vegas Suburb Grows’.  California’s small net population growth is made possible by an equally massive influx of immigrants and illegal aliens, and a high birthrate contributed by resident minorities.  Progressives are the only political segment of California’s population that is totally sanguine if not celebratory about this demographic dynamic.  The rest of us chickens continue wondering how long the state can carry on with an ever smaller cohort of highly taxed wealth generators.

Scattershots – 9feb19 (updated)

George Rebane

‘How a tiny country bordering Russia became one of the most tech-savvy societies in the world’ reports CNBC on Estonia’s eternal love affair with technology.  As the world’s leading country in its integration of the internet into literally every facet of Estonian life, the implementation of such cooperation between public and private sectors underpins the Rebane Doctrine commentaries on collectivization.  The bottom line has always been that the smaller and more culturally coherent a cooperating cohort, the better can collectivization be implemented in such a society.  While Estonia’s experience and those of other Scandinavian countries sing a siren song to our progressives, what they always overlook are the stark differences between a large, inhomogeneous, and culturally diverse America, and the small, culturally homogeneous countries that dot the globe.  The only way we can even attempt to replicate the idylls of small country harmonies is to create a hierarchy of ever smaller and distributed jurisdictions (as envisioned by our Founders) in our land which then can enjoy the benefits that derive from common cultures.  Sadly, our Left has taken us beyond the tipping point toward big government socialism (centrally controlled cohesion by the gun) and the tyrannies that inevitably lie beyond. (H/T to correspondent)

The current spate of cold winter weather has me tending daylong fires in our big front room fireplace.  Many RR readers know my longtime interest in the care and feeding of wood fires (here is a more complete treatment).  Getting the fire going this morning reminded me of an aspect that I have not emphasized enough – the form of the fire that you should attempt to maintain for the longest time possible.  Most people think that a robustly flaming fire provides the most heat to those sitting in front of the fireplace or around a campfire – wrong.  Bright cheery flames primarily heat the air which then convects vertically upward.  It’s the radiant heat that flows out sideways (and all other directions) that provides the desired warmth from such fires, the rest goes up the chimney.  And that radiant heat comes mainly from the red-hot coals.  So, the ideal fire is one that has finally generated enough coals, both on the coal grate and the sides of still burning wood, to provide a large red radiating area toward you and the room you are sitting in.  At this phase of the fire you want to minimize the burning rate, keep the flames sparse and small, and let the developing coals glow and radiate.  When you finally do have to add another piece of wood or two, try to add it so that large horizontal fire pockets (q.v.) remain visible from which radiation can still escape.  (Using a keeper chain is ideal for structuring such vertically 'open front' fires backed by a yule log.)  Here’s picture I took this morning of the fire having achieved its ideal heating phase.

[update]  George Kennan’s 22feb46 ‘Long Telegram’ to SecState George Marshall is one of the most prescient and useful intra-government communications in US history.  In it Kennan lays out the coming world order and the proper role of the US as hegemon to contain the already obvious post-WW2 spread of communism.  Bottom line, in order to avoid fighting WW3, be prepared to be the white hat global sheriff by always deploying small contingents of troops in critical locations all over the world, and to fight small ‘brushfire wars’ as they become necessary.  And prepare to do that indefinitely – with allies if possible, alone if necessary - as the cost of doing business to prevent the world from falling into a new age of global tyranny.  And with that Kennan nailed the foundation of our foreign policy for the last 70+ years.  I had to post this as the topic of our ongoing foreign policy came up at a recent dinner with friends.  (The original archival copy is here, with a more readable version here.)

Globalization, Globalism, Globalists, and Governance

George Rebane

RR commentaries have defined and used globalism and globalization interchangeably to mean the political and commercial progress toward a one-world government as long proposed by the United Nations and its proponents, and especially by those espousing the UN’s Agenda21 program (q.v.) promulgated by its worldwide network of ICLEIs (more here and here, and see also RR’s ‘Agenda 21’ category of commentaries).

In recent RR comment stream exchanges, a couple of our leftwing readers reminded me, correctly, that most of the public understands ‘globalization’ to refer to the trade and commerce aspect of companies rapidly expanding to do business across national borders.  Moreover, that this same cohort, which includes our commenters, doesn't connect ‘globalization’ with today’s concurrent efforts by the international collectivists to abrogate the Westphalian order of nation-states and unite humanity under a one-world government.  Merriam-Webster defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”  Clearly the focus and intent here is in the fields of commerce and not unified governance.

Yet M-W and others define ‘globalism’ as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence”, and “the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations”. Here we definitely overlap into the area of politics and governance.  And people who are ‘globalists’ are those who share such an “attitude”, now on the track to one-world governance.  This has been the sense in which RR commentaries have interchangeably used ‘globalization’ and ‘globalism’, along with ‘globalist’.

So, in the interest of continuing our tradition of precise definitions (which so vexes the Left), I will henceforth use the following definitions in my commentaries and comments –

Globalization - the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by businesses and commercial institutions in sovereign nation-states expanding their products and services across national boundaries in conducting free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.

Globalism – the ideology that treats the whole world as a unified sphere of political influence, and promotes institutions which place the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations, with the ultimate goal of achieving a one-world government.  A globalist is a person embracing such an ideology.

These definitions will be included in the next edition of RR’s Glossary & Semantics.

The Real Issue That Divides Us (updated 27jan19)

George Rebane

Conservetarians believe in global diversity and national cohesion; progressives believe in global conformity and national diversity.  The former resists global autocracy, the latter sustains global autocracy.

Nationally prominent commentator and executive WSJ editor Gerald Seib recently wrote ‘The Wall Marks a Deep Cultural Divide’ (in the 21jan19 WSJ) a piece describing attributes which divide America that focused on “character differences”.  In his piece Seib said, “One question asked whether immigration adds to the character and strength of America by increasing its diversity and bringing in new talent, or detracts from American character by putting burdens on government services and creating language barriers”, and then cited the disparate responses of the Trump and resist-Trump supporters.

While I agreed with Seib’s subsequent analysis, I felt that he did not reach deep enough to a more basic, revelatory, and explanatory level (in the sense of being able to reliably predict derivative attitudes and behaviors).

I emailed Mr Seib a brief explanation of my critique: Mr Seib - Our divide goes much deeper than can be discovered with pabulum questions about “American character”.  If these surveys were structured and administered so as to discover what kind of future world order Americans would like to see the US being a part of (i.e. Westphalian sovereign nation-states vs a peerage of jurisdictional fiefs of a global government), then the answers would be more revealing (and reliably predictive) as to the respondents’ attitudes about border security, immigration policy, cultural diversity, paths to citizenship of illegal aliens, etc, since all these are dependent on how people value culturally cohesive (vs fragmented) nations, and whether/how such a community of nations should continue to organize the world’s peoples.

Swedish Rhapsody

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Fearful Writing

“We write at root to make sense of life. And what do we seek to understand more than anything? Our deepest fears.”  Josh Weil

George Rebane

Union publisher Don Rogers’ Friday essay – ‘Write where you fear the most’ – was an unexpected helping of food for thought this morning.  Mr Rogers takes us through a bit of personal history about his education and membership in the guild of wordsmiths, as he promotes our attendance at the Sierra Writers Conference in January at which “top fiction author” Josh Weil of Nevada City will be the keynote speaker.  Weil’s dictum to the rest of us is “Write what scares you.  If what you are writing doesn’t scare you, you probably shouldn’t write it.”

Now Don Rogers reads a lot of books that don’t make it onto my reading list, simply because time is limited and we come at life from different angles.  But his dissertation, with references to multiple authors (mostly unknown to me) and famous personages, on the meta-motivations for good writing struck a chord which I’ll let vibrate a bit in what follows.  I recommend you read Rogers to see what, if anything, starts vibrating in you.

Weil’s observations and advice struck my motivation, for these years of scribbling on RR, right between the eyes – ‘Observations and Interpretations of Events from the Last Great Century of Man’.  My technical training and work in machine intelligence, combined with the experiences in man’s greatest war and its aftermath, has focused my attention on the Singularity and humanity’s race, during these pre-Singularity years of accelerating technology, between proponents of a global tyranny and a stable Westphalian order in which most people will enjoy liberty and their own pursuits of happiness.  Once the Singularity is ensconced, all bets are off – that’s why it’s called a singularity.  And therein lie the things that scare me.

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 10dec18 (updated 13dec18)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

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

By Russ Steele

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

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

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

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

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

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

Scattershots – 22nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khashoggi affair resolved

George Rebane

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

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

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

11 November 1918 - Ed and Jack’s War

George Rebane

My up close and personal introduction to WW1 came at the knee of my two early mentors Jack Maschmeyer and Ed Egold. Both were WW1 veterans who were sent ‘over there’ and didn’t come home ‘until it was over over there’. Both saw trench warfare at its most horrific and survived going ‘over the top’ several times. In 1953 we moved into an old house (built in 1830s) in rural Marion County, Indiana next to Ed and Mary who were in their early sixties. Today they would be mistaken for being in their eighties; they had lived a long life of hard work and it showed on most folks of that age in those days.

Victims of Communism remembered – 8 November 2018 (updated 9nov18)

[I post today’s ‘Presidential Message on the National Day for the Victims of Communism’ in memory of the 100-200 million people, including members of my family, killed by communists and communism over the past century.  This is the system to which today’s Left is repaving the road of return.  gjr]

On the National Day for the Victims of Communism, we honor the memory of the more than 100 million people who have been killed and persecuted by communist totalitarian regimes.  We also reaffirm our steadfast support for those who strive for peace, prosperity, and freedom around the world.

Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, we have witnessed the effects of the tyrannical communist ideology—anguish, repression, and death.  Communism subordinates inherent human rights to the purported well-being of all, resulting in the extermination of religious freedom, private property, free speech, and, far too often, life.  These horrors have included Ukrainians deliberately starved in the Holodomor, Russians purged in the Great Terror, Cambodians murdered in the killing fields, and Berliners shot as they tried to escape to freedom.  The victims of these and many other atrocities bear silent testimony to the undeniable fact that communism, and the pursuit of it, will forever be destructive to the human spirit and to the prosperity of mankind.

Today, we remember all who have been denied the great blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under oppressive communist regimes.  Together, we mourn the unbearable losses so many have endured under communism, and we renew our pledge to continue advancing the cause of freedom and opportunity for all.

[9nov18 update]  From one of our more prominent leftwing commenters - “almost 30 years ago one wall came down in Berlin and today another one is going up here.” (see comment stream below)

That is the reason our two polarized sides can no longer profitably talk to each other.  From what I and others of the conservetarian bent see, there is nothing that we can say to the now radicalized Left which today 1) has an enormous intellectual deficit regarding shared history, and 2) little or no ability to incorporate elemental reasoning into their conversations.

These pages are witness to repeated assertions by the progressives that securing our border with a wall is exactly the same as how the communist dictators secured their borders with walls.  No matter how many times here, and in other publications and broadcasts, people have patiently sought to explain to the terminally deficient that the two kinds of walls serve diametrically opposite functions – communism’s walls are built to keep their citizens IN, i.e. from escaping tyranny so as to prevent emigration; the border walls of liberal democracies are meant to keep illegal aliens OUT, and are built to minimize illegal entry so as to control immigration.  This enormous distinction has always been too difficult for a liberal mind to comprehend – for them a wall is a wall, and even more so if they can glibly ignore that significant nuance to promote their anti-capitalistic message to those equally dense.

From such simple distinctions, things go down when the conversation turns to more complex subjects such as the forms of governance, their dynamics and provenance.  For example, when now and again such leftwing worthies dip into their rich trove of historical knowledge and attempt to, say, deny the socialist underpinnings of the Nazis.  Here they go one up on the walls question, and claim that the American right, which wants to maximize individual liberties and reduce the size of government, is equivalent to Germany’s Nationalist Socialists who did everything to minimize individual liberties and maximized the size of their government.  Simply mind boggling.  And they want us to think like they do!!

The Migration Mess (updated 28oct18)

George Rebane

[This is the updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 October 2018.]

A recently updated dictionary defines ‘migration’ as the “movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.”  And not by accident, this sounds like something all good-hearted people should encourage and support.  Today we are suddenly presented with the prospect of over 5,000 Central Americans having mysteriously been massed and marshalled to march north illegally through three countries with the objective of overtly overwhelming our southern border controls, and illegally forcing their way into the United States to become wards of the American taxpayer.

Climate Change Revisited

George Rebane

‘Climate change’ is one of the unfortunate labels that a nation dominated by dumbth uses to simplify and therefore profoundly misunderstand a very complex process that is made even more confusing through the injection and overarch of political ideologies.  The hoi polloi are salved and saved from all this confounding by being taught that science is a singular absolute, and that ‘science is settled’ on climate change.  There is nothing that will change such minds outside the opinions of their chosen political betters who insist all credible scientists warn us that earth is headed for a thermal catastrophe unless we quickly adopt a set of draconian public policies, enforced by a bigger government, that must needs change our fundamental lifestyles.  Assessments and evidence that contradict such consensus science are loudly sourced to flat-earthers, creationists, and others categorized as intellectual troglodytes.

When the semantic onion is peeled back, climate change is really the short label for preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), about which you shouldn’t bother your little head as long as you concur with the new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees required to ‘prevent climate change’.  Climate change is also the perfect and only storm that must not be wasted on our road to a global Agenda21 (q.v.).  However, the rest of us know that –

1) earth’s climate change is perennial and ongoing;

2) the greenhouse effect is real and greenhouse gases (especially CO2) in earth’s atmosphere are constantly varying, and have done so over broad ranges for eons;

3) earth’s carbon cycle is poorly understood at best;

4) humans do contribute an unknown proportion to atmospheric CO2;

5) the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and ‘earth’s temperature’ is an unknown dynamic process;

6) the temperature of the earth is a number produced by any of many algorithms, and then politically selected for public consumption;

7) our understanding of the dynamics of weather and climate are poor and a work in process, definitely not ready to support public policy making;

8) general circulation models (GCMs), cobbled together to generate and support weather and climate predictions, are many in a field of ongoing research, and are intensely politically mediated for use in public policy making;

9) today’s GCMs barely work for predicting near-term weather, and are useless for predicting long-term climate changes;

10) earth’s weather and climate are large-scale, complex chaotic processes, the long-term predictions of which today are not possible to any degree of usable reliability, and for several technical reasons having to do with physics and computability, such usable reliability may never be possible;

11) the presented evidence for PMGW has been demonstrated to be fraught with fraudulent manipulations and interpretations of historical and topical measurements along with ad hoc estimates, and there is no evidence that the claimed climate change is preventable;

12) the overwhelming ‘thousands’ of the UN’s IPCC scientists, who have neither the expertise nor understanding of things outside their own narrow disciplines correctly, make no such claims, especially when it comes to the workings of any of the GCMs du jour that incorporate their particular inputs for making predictions in the large;

13) all of the above has also been communicated by a body of competent scientists and engineers who are both beholden and not beholden to politically correct government grants.

For some time now the climate change debate has been politically polluted beyond any reason-based redemption or resolution.  Instead, it meticulously mangled by the media before being resolved in the public square through the vicissitudes of an ephemeral and mostly fluid public comprehension, one that expresses itself variously in the nation’s ballot boxes.  Democracy at work indeed.

For these reasons I remain a skeptic about PMGW, and treat all new information as a Bayesian.  To characterize people like me as 'not believing' in climate change immediately extinguishes further discussion and debate.  Such accusations are invariably either agenda driven or simply ignorant.

(The portents are more compelling for a near-term episode of global cooling.  Perhaps the politicians will respond when we witness, say, a couple of years of a crop-killing June frost on the Great Plains.)

Fascism – what it is and isn’t (addended)

George Rebane

Since the Democratic Party’s great Leftward Lurch, it is now publicly and unabashedly America’s new socialist party, notwithstanding start-up wannabes like the newly formed Progressive Party USA.  The Left’s problem today is how they must carefully wend their way through a potential political minefield in how they describe their brand of collectivism – i.e. socialism - in a way that doesn’t blow up the narrative they have been carefully nurturing since the days of FDR.

As we witness in these pages and from the years-long national dialogue, the Left has always maintained that while they embrace the socialism of a Marxist-Leninist provenance, the extreme Right, in its turn, embraces the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.  And therefore, to all good modern leftwingers, fascism is not now and never has been a form of socialism – fascism is instead the form of totalitarianism that comprises the hidden agenda of the Right and is the other bookend of their simplistic political spectrum.  This is both factually and historically false as we’ll cover in a moment.  But given the difficulties our Left has had in selling socialism to Americans, they have always desperately needed an ideological bogeyman or monster that they could erect and portray to the lightly read, and against which they could favorably compare the nostrums and shibboleths celebrating their brave new world.  Enter ‘fascism’, the avowed enemy and monstrous ideology that we fought and vanquished in WW2, and, according to the Left, the rebirth of which once more threatens the world if the Right comes to power and has its way with us.  (And hence the current rationale for the Left’s sanctioned “incivility” in the streets until they regain power.)

So, for at least the last 75 years, the Left’s narrative has drawn its substance and raison d’etre from characterizing itself as the defender of the common man against what they invent for public consumption as the rapacious Right of the greedy capitalists.  These are the people whose only aim is to exploit and then enslave the masses under an autocratic cum totalitarian governance that forcefully exploits them as the labor engines to create wealth, which is then shunted into the coffers of the … (wait for it), the ‘fascist elites’.  Unfortunately for the Left, history has shown all this occurring only after collectivists have come to power.

America’s Right has continued to characterize itself as promoting the ideology of individual enterprise, free markets, private property, liberty, distributed governance through minimalist governments/jurisdictions, and an originalist (‘textualist’) interpretation of the Constitution (see Addendum).  This interpretation embraces inevitable change through constitutional ways and means prescribed and practiced throughout our history.  In short, an ideology that is a total antithesis of the collectivists’ worship of society organized under and administered through the strata of (altruistic) central planners and controllers within an expansive and ever-expanding government.  Today the Left marches toward globalization under banners emblazoned with ‘democracy’, and the full and selectively suppressed knowledge that, practiced in the large, democracy quickly consumes itself as it morphs into one of the particularly egregious forms of totalitarianism.

Poverty, Transfer Payments, and GNI, oh my!

George Rebane

Abetted by progressive propaganda, the UN has found “shocking” evidence that 40M Americans live in “squalor and deprivation”, which comes to about 12.7% of our population.  The trouble with that piece of fiction is that none of the millions seeking entry into the US by hook or crook believe that bullcrap.  As we have pointed out before, our Census Bureau uses a complicated formula for computing the poverty threshold that uses factors such as income based on family size and composition, and totally ignores the $1.5T of government transfer payments along with the additional $500B of private charity benefits that our ‘poor’ receive annually.  Were only the government payments included in the calculation, our poverty rate would already be less than 3% which reflects realworld total household income data, consumer spending patterns, and the country’s immigration pressures.

But none of this would fit the vote buying and plantation maintenance narratives of our Left, now very busy moving the Democratic Party toward full scale socialism.  These elites need to play a hand that contains not only the poverty card, but also separate cards for inequality, racism, sexism, and more ‘phobics’ that emerge every day.  And the maintenance of this Big Lie is all made possible by their bought and paid for propaganda purveyors of the national media.  Were it not for the constant daily din of dunning news about how badly we are all doing because of President Trump and his 'illegitimate administration', people would forget what is drilled into their heads, go about their business and enjoy a real recovery from the last recession that’s finally worth its name.

Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post’s token conservative columnist, recounted the economic and public policy realities that we have enjoyed since Team Trump took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  In ‘Trump may be outside our norms. But he is succeeding for all of us.’ Hewitt recounts the impressive litany of this administration’s accomplishments including getting more people, especially of the minorities, working than anyone today can remember.  One of the tightly kept secrets by the lamestream media is the recent Rasmussen poll that shows a resurgence of blacks supporting the president more than doubling from one out of five to one out of three – that means people are beginning to notice where it counts, in their wallets.

Economists Phil Gramm and John Early in ‘Government Can’t Rescue the Poor’ provide the reader a snootful of pertinent stats about poverty in America, and conclude that with what our poor already receive in transfer payments and from charities, that there is no amount of money which will today motivate them to added efforts “to allow them to develop and use their capacities.” This was Lyndon Johnson selling his 'War on Poverty' in 1964, one of the historically least effective and most destructive programs ever devised by our government.  As supportive data, consider that in the twenty years since WW2, America’s poverty rate had steadily dropped from 32.1% to 14.7%.  And then in 1965 its descent stopped dead in its tracks by the advent of progressive give-aways, the only real measurable achievement of which was the destruction of African-American families.

Without the obligation of marriage to hold them back, black men impregnated willing black women who knew that each additional fatherless kid meant a bigger check from the feds.  The Census Bureau data confirms “how the War on Poverty produced an unprecedented decline in work effort among those who received benefits”, and over the years it “has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work.”

Today the marriage, bastard children, educational achievement, and employment stats tell the story of how the Great Society has impacted America’s minorities.  But not to worry, as reported by Gramm and Early, the actual poverty rate of 3% is confirmed by the “Department of Energy Residential Consumption Survey, which finds consistently rising spending among poor families on cars, home electronics, cable, household appliances, smartphones and living space. The 3% poverty rate would fall even further if it accounted for transfers within families, some $500 billion of private charitable giving, and the multibillion-dollar informal economy, where income is unreported.”

This effect on the poor has been known for generations.  Even that great social engineer Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned us during the midst of his depression in 1935 that “The lessons of history show conclusively that continued dependency upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

So now we come to Guaranteed National Income, which is suggested by many, including me (here), as the only prophylactic that will keep blood out of the gutters.  The only concern that nags me is a tenet in my credo that acknowledges 'relevance' as being a fundamental human requirement for maintaining stable civil societies.  Without doing work that obviously contributes to the well-being of his family and community, people will become dissatisfied with the general scheme of things that surrounds them.  And they will respond by either attempting to become relevant in their established environment, or disrupt that environment for a new, perhaps simpler (more primitive?) one in which they again see themselves as relevant.

No matter our politics, these are the certainties that will shape our world as technology advances and governments seek to soothe us, first with gratuities then with guns.

Yellowstone Supervolcano about to blow?

George Rebane

[This little interlude will most likely interest very few RR readers, but it has provided me a respite from the political struggles through my continuing love-affair with pushing squigglies.  Truth be told, I do this kind of stuff quite often, and who knows, there's always the off-chance that some reader may show interest.]

As we sat last Saturday morning waiting for the history making Senate confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh, I meandered across yet another article on the supervolcano that rumbles under Yellowstone National Park.  Geologists tell us that the volcano has erupted every 600K – 800K years or so with a devastating effect that we in recent decades have come to call a ‘nuclear winter’.  The last one occurred about 640K years ago.  When that magma dome blows again it will put so much dust, dirt, and ash into the earth’s atmosphere as to change the earth’s climate for several years starting with a two- or three-year winter that will kill much of the planet’s vegetation and critters, make agriculture near impossible, and therefore cause the wholesale death of most of us who live here – at least that’s what NASA and a covey of paleo-geologists tell us.

It turns out that modern technology today can provide a very beneficial prophylactic to prevent such an event, and in the process generate a considerable amount of clean geothermal electricity.  Scientists at NASA tell us that it would be possible to cool the molten magma bubble by drilling laterally into its sides, pumping down cold water, and harvesting super-heated steam for electricity generating powerplants on the surface.

The cost of drilling such 10km deep holes comes to almost $3.5B, add another few billion dollars to the budget to put up a powerplant or two, and you could see doing the whole thing for about $10B while lowering or completely eliminating the risk of a big blow-up.  The cost of the electricity generated in this manner comes to about $0.10/kWh – cheap at twice the price.  So why aren’t utilities rushing in there to do just that? (more here and here)

Well, the best anyone can tell is the high business risk of such an undertaking in a national park that is surrounded by high walls of environmental regulations manned by legions of super-zealous, lawyer-ladened, eco-nazis with a paucity of critical thinking skills.  Now this is where government should step in and play the crucial role of paving the way to implement such a humanity-saving insurance policy with a clean energy solution to boot.  But so far no one on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has made a peep about this.  It can’t be the cost, because the feds lose more than $10B a day with what they drop off their loading docks.  So, for an answer, let’s look at the risk side of this potential earth-shaking catastrophe.

To quantify the downside risk we techies first appeal to what is called probability rate theory that is a well-known tool in areas like search and detection using radars and sonars.  The best estimate of Yellowstone’s catastrophe rate is once every 700K years.  That’s about the average frequency at which the big magma bubble gets close enough to the surface for its outward pressure to blow its top.

The real question we have to answer today is something like ‘what is the probability that Yellowstone blows again in the next 100 years?’  Clearly, if that probability, let’s label it P100, is sufficiently high, we should get busy tout de suite on the drilling and powerplant project described by NASA.  I have no idea what is ‘sufficiently high’ for the congress critters to get something going.  Most certainly if P100 = 0.5, then things in Washington would start happening.  But if P100 = 0.01, then I think we would continue to sleep on it a bit more.  So what is the real value of P100?

Lucky for you dear reader, mom sent me to school to learn how to answer such questions.  So I’ll save you the trouble of reading my brilliant analysis before calculating the answer, and give it to you right off the bat – P100 = 0.000246.  That’s a pretty low number for the next supervolcano eruption to take place sometime in the coming 100 years, and it pretty much explains why people aren’t getting too excited about it in the government or in the energy industry.

Now that doesn’t mean we won’t have one of those smaller eruptions that occur every few 10K years, these will not be civilization enders, but they might screw up our agriculture on the Great Plains for a few years.  Maybe later, if there’s available data, I’ll do some noodling on the chance that a ‘minor’ eruption will happen in the next century.  So the question remains, why are the NASA people getting excited about Yellowstone’s civilization ending volcano?

American Retreat

George Rebane

Robert Kagan is a historian and political scientist with an endowed fellowship at the Brookings Institute.  He perches a bit left of center from where he has been a foreign policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents.  Dinesh D’Souza is a conservative political commentator, author, and filmmaker formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation, who continues as a lightning rod for critiques of rightwing ideology.  Not so surprisingly, these two intellectuals share many insights into America’s post-war role in the world and the state of the world were America to “retreat” from this role.

Of D’Souza’s many books, his America: Imagine a World Without Her (2014) contains assessments that tie closely with Kagan’s sentiments as expanded in a major essay ‘The Cost of American Retreat’ in the 8sep18 WSJ.  (Essay based on Kagan’s latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World, that comes out later this month.)  My commentary on this highlights that the Rebane Doctrine on foreign policy espoused here over the years also ties closely with what these essayists have gleaned from their studies and experience.  I believe that, in these times, the tenets from both bear repeating emphatically and often.  (Graphic by Brian Stauffer)

Kagan points out how the period of liberalism under the hegemonic umbrella of the United States has given rise to a most unusual epoch of human history.  During this epoch “liberal ideals triumphed because, for the first time, they had power behind them.”  And all this, because “a new player arose on the international scene: the United States. It possessed a unique and advantageous geography, a large, productive population, unprecedented economic and military power, a national ideology based on liberal principles, and a willingness, after the war, to use its power to establish and sustain a global order roughly consistent with those principles. … That order - with its mutually reinforcing security, economic and political components - has created a geographical and geopolitical space in which liberalism has taken root, spread and evolved. But it was always artificial and tenuous, challenged from within and without by natural forces - the always potent antiliberal aspects of human nature and the competitive and anarchic tendencies of geopolitics.”