Rebane's Ruminations

‘The Marginal Revolutionaries’

George Rebane

George Melloan, former deputy editor of WSJ’s editorial page and now syndicated columnist, has written an excellent review (here) in the 5oct19 WSJ of The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019) by historian Janek Wasserman.  This is an extensively researched “group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party.”  From Melloan’s review, replete with lavish quotes from the book, it is clear that Wasserman’s work corroborates Der Führer (1944), Konrad Heiden’s first-hand history of the rise of Hitler, and the international and national brands of socialism during the first half of the 20^th century.

(I insert the following thoughts into the record because, as the astute reader has gleaned over the years, I am a student of the Austrian School which most closely represents my desiderata for economic order that is beneficial to a society.  This major segment of my belief system (credo) forms the foundation of my profound differences with and opposition to collectivism and its current resurgent socialist/communist forms in America and the EU.  Some of my previous commentaries on the above can be found here and here, expanded in their comment streams)

The Austrian School was founded by economists Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek who met regularly in a little Vienna coffee house early in the 20^th century.  Their nascent revolution was marginal in the sense that during that same epoch that included the Great War (WW1) more formidable revolutionaries were also plotting and scheming in other Vienna coffee houses.  Communist regulars plotting the Marxist revolution were Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.  Excluded from international socialists to form national socialism were Hitler who met with a variously attended group of the disaffected jobless, and after the war with a rapidly growing cohort of disaffected jobless veterans.  The Nazis and communists fought pitched battles and murdered each other in the night until Hitler’s side won, and the communists went underground in the west while Lenin et al were building the USSR in Russia.  Both forms of socialism would come to kill millions of their own citizens for various reasons that ranged from race to redundancy.

Ruminations – 3oct19 (updated 6oct19)

George Rebane

Former Union publisher Jeff Ackerman writes (here) that Californians today pay and average of $4.02/gal for gasoline while the rest of the country averages at $2.64/gal.  And the escapee to Oregon goes on to point out that all of this is self-inflicted pain that the state’s voters are way past having enough between the ears to change course as Sacramento does its best to accelerate dumb laws/regulations and spread our epidemic across the country.

Gun confiscation was again disguised at the Giffords/March for Our Lives “gun safety forum” in Las Vegas. The Dems are having problems coming together on which or whether to back such confiscation schemes as mandatory buybacks.  Even Moms Demand Action have stopped short of buybacks, which leaves Beto (of AR15/AK47 fame) and the klatch of radical socialists more isolated than ever.  Many of us hope Beto will double down on his ‘Damn right, we’ll take your guns!’

No more masks for Hong Kong protesters.  An old British colonial law is to be invoked to threaten protesters with eventual arrest when they reveal their faces to government operated face recognition software that is being installed all over China today.  Here we are considering doing the same, starting with neighborhood watch cameras for recording night time crime (and anyone else who is on the street after dark).  Soon after, we’ll be fighting daytime crime and questioning people who are recorded being out of their own neighborhoods.  Isn’t technology wonderful?

[4oct19 update]  Volker’s House testimony and release of tweets are the first real disclosures that may seriously put Trump’s tit in a wringer in the ongoing impeachment saga.  Trump is by no means the first president to seek and get foreign aid against political opponents for some horse trading.  But back then it was no big deal and a known prerogative of office.  IMHO, if the sought aid concerns a material revelation about the character of a political opponent, then I don’t oppose such information gathering.  However, I do oppose purchasing fabricated ‘evidence’ of an opponent’s bad character from foreign sources.

[6oct19 update]  Harvard on capitalism (here) - whouda thought?

Agenda21 to SDGs to Agenda 2030

George Rebane

RR has covered the Agenda21 story extensively over the years primarily in its role as a template for leftwing objectives that their politicians’ public policies seek to fulfill.  (see 'Agenda 21' category) This non-binding UN initiative was formalized in 1992 and signed by over 100 nations.  The US (under Bush1) became a signatory.  A21’s objectives and means of achieving them on the level of local jurisdictions was and continues to be taught to government officials and properly politically oriented NGO staffs through a global network of ICLEIs.

ICLEI or the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives was launched under the aegis of A21.  The ICLEIs almost immediately began distancing themselves from the A21 relationship as the latter’s objectives started to be highlighted by various rightwing media outlets, politicians, and conservative blogs as harbingers of global autocracy.  The goals taken in toto were an antithesis for the retention of sovereign nation-states as the fundamental structure of world order.  A21 called for an authoritarian global government whose operational goals were actually to markedly lower human population, reduce its consumption of earth’s resources, and restrict people’s access to most of earth’s land area and natural resources.

This obviously made A21 and all references to it anathema to most Americans, and made connecting A21 to the Left’s globalist narrative a no-brainer.  Hence, the Left immediately launched a nationwide denial campaign, claiming that A21 was really some hare-brained Big Brother conspiracy cooked up by the Right.  Their proof of that was showing that none of their public policies which existentially abetted A21 objectives, actually called out A21 or mentioned A21 objectives in the laws and regulations they passed and their publicized desiderata for future legislation.  In short, A21 had to be banished from the public mind.  And so it was.

Today the objectives of A21 are all alive and well, but they have had to be repackaged by the UN under the new rubric of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and wrapped into its newly introduced Agenda 2030.  The clear hope is that within such new adornments, the public will be bamboozled a bit longer as the global Left continues to fashion and form ever more restrictive boundaries through SDG-supportive public policies, all of which need an ever larger state to administer and enforce them.  And, of course, all that will cost much more than we are used to paying now, hence the new levels of mandated tribute to Leviathan will be justified as fulfilling part of humanity’s overall moral imperative in its march into the globalist 21^st century as prescribed by Agenda 2030.  The beat goes on.  (more here, here, and elsewhere – google ‘Agenda 2030’)

The happier place, America or Europe? (updated 25sep19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 September 2019.  An edited version was printed (here) in the 21sep19 edition of The Union.]

Our national Left has loudly included in their narrative to fundamentally transform America, that the Europeans are a much happier lot than we poor polarized and poverty-stricken wretches on this side of the Pond.  The citizens of the EU are described as a people happy with their subsidies and socialism, cared for from cradle to grave with extended vacations, shorter work weeks, job security, and lavish no-cost healthcare.  What’s not to like?

Actually, the Europeans have a lot of worries, and when you talk to them on a personal level, they are ready and willing to go through the long list.  We just returned from two weeks in Europe where we had a reunion with our German families, and then went on to visit and talk with people in Switzerland, France, more Germany, and Holland.  Here’s part of the laundry list that keeps Europeans up at night.

All EU countries are struggling with low to no economic growth, due mainly to over regulation and high taxes.  The future of indigenous Europe is hampered by devastating demographics which are characterized by a growing cohort of the ever more feeble and ailing elderly.  No country is close to delivering the 2.1 births per fertile woman required for mere stability of a population.  Germany is today at 1.2 which is equivalent to Russia’s alarming shrink rate.  The richer countries’ declining workforces are made up of an ever greater fraction of mid-easterners, Africans, and southeastern Europeans from poor countries such as Rumania and Bulgaria, who do jobs that northern Europeans refuse to do.

Demise of Capitalism?

George Rebane

The world’s population is stabilizing, if not starting to ‘stagnate’, and will soon start declining.  This argument and its impacts on humanity are presented in two newly published books – The Human Tide: How Populaton Shaped the Modern World (2019) by Paul Morland, and Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.  As a result, capitalism as we know it will disappear explains Zachart Karabell who reviews the books in the Sep/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs – ‘The Population Bust – Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It’.

The crux of that striking conclusion rests on the theory that capitalism remains viable only in an environment of eternal growth; once growth stops or reverses, then capitalism, as we know it, will collapse.  “If global population stops expanding and then contracts, capitalism - a system implicitly predicated on ever-burgeoning numbers of people - will likely not be able to thrive in its current form.”  But I have no idea where this ominous ‘predicate’ comes from.

Capitalism is fundamentally based on human nature organizing economies in an environment of open markets in which prices effectively communicate the supply and demand for goods and services.  Therefore, if demand slows down and then contracts, so long as open markets are allowed to operate, capitalists will adjust their enterprises accordingly.  The only aspect of such a contraction of available services and things for sale is its impact on the value of money. 

The value of any given supply of money depends on the amount of available goods and services it can command in transactions.  Its value, as reflected in open market discount (i.e. interest) rates will track the size of the economies in which it is used as the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.  For example, the value of a lot of fiat dollars will decline if there is less to buy or build with them.  But again, such values will adjust accordingly as central banks ply their wily ways of taking money out of and injecting it into economies.  Granted, if human perceptions about markets change rapidly, then there will be financial shocks as the value of monies held by governments and the public also changes rapidly – after all, we must always remember that fiat money by its very nature is strongly faith-based.

So here we are in the pre-Singularity years as birth rates all over the world are dropping and populations are aging (older folks don’t consume as much as younger ones).  Advances in healthcare and productivity promoted through capitalism are making poorer countries richer, and encourage the richer countries to maintain growth through immigration. The current world population of approximately 7.6B will probably not exceed 10B by mid-century before it starts pulling back.  And given the impact of accelerating technology on systemic unemployment and income inequality, global population pullback is not something to be feared, but to be managed through judicious wealth distribution so as to maintain civil societies that continue to provide an increasing quality of life.  And once the Singularity does occur, all bets are off, as most then alive scramble to become trans-humans (q.v.).  For an entertaining and stimulating treatment of such a plausible future, I recommend Childhood’s End (1953) by A.C Clarke.

Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

George Rebane

The true costs of ‘renewable energy’ are both unaffordable and hidden. Those of us who can do arithmetic have known the unreported high costs of renewable wind and solar power for years, and how the climate calamity acolytes and the lamestream have suppressed reporting the costs of making the world work with renewable energy.  Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute writes a short, fact-filled piece on the matter in the 6aug19 WSJ (here).  He cites the work of the International Renewable Energy Institute based on the demand forecasts of the International Energy Agency.  The bottom line is that if you take into account the ‘cradle to grave’ costs and environmental impacts of spreading solar and wind power production worldwide, then humanity will have an existential disaster on its hands.  The amount of mining, transport, construction, and waste elimination required swamps all conceivable benefits from such ‘clean power’ which will turn out to be the dirtiest and most expensive that we can attempt to buy.  As an example, “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.  And these materials will have to be mined, manufactured, and assembled in not so very nice places according to the Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future.  None of this is known to our garden-variety progressives (some in these pages) who continue to mindlessly tout subsidized ‘clean energy’ and claim its unrealizable economic benefits.

‘1984’ has arrived on campuses.  “Bias response teams” are now an established institution on most college campuses, and the disease is spreading rapidly.  Christian Schneider reports (here) on “a chilling look inside colleges’ systems for reporting and policing offensive speech.”  The growing archive of such petty incidences of one student snitching on another, often unsuspecting, student is testimony to another of the progressive-promoted illiberal insanities in our society.  Reading the record of cited incidences is simply mind-boggling to most of us.  The accused offenders are then required to present themselves to the schools’ administrative “diversity” panels for examination of their violations.  As with sexual abuse allegations, there is no appeals process, and such allegations go on the students’ records which may later be used to impact careers and other life-opportunities in these looney tunes times.  For all this, go thank your local leftists who have enthusiastically made all this possible, and continue to do so with every ballot they mark.

[update]  Tonight on FN we saw an ugly leftwing mob assembled across the street from Majority Leader McConnell’s house with signs and flood lights screaming unspeakable epithets at the senator and people to “Stab him through the heart!” and “Cut his fucking throat!”.  How many lamestream outlets showed this?  How many rightwingers have gathered to put on a scene like that in front of Democrat politician’s house?  Biden and Booker both stated that they want to “beat up” President Trump; how many Republican politicians have ever come even close to such violent language against a Democrat President.  And none of these are isolated incidents carried out by some backwater communists, these are carried out regularly by mainstream leftists all across the country.  In progressive circles and in their lapdog lamestream media President Trump is regularly referred to as a “white supremacist”.  Where is the evidence for that?  I join with Victor Davis Hanson and most other conservative commentators in declaring that I have never met a rightwing white supremacist, nor do I know of anyone who has ever met such a person.  Yet the lunatic Left continues to accuse all of us daily of being white supremacists.  (check RR comment streams)  It is these insanely cynical asymmetries that confirm our having passed the tipping point and promoting the Great Divide.

[8aug19 update]  To further confirm the tsunami of censoring conservatives that is sweeping the country’s media, Twitter concluded that the video I reference above was too damaging to the progressive narrative about who actually are purveyors of hate and violence.  CNBC reports that “Twitter locked Mitch McConnell's campaign Twitter account, Team Mitch, for posting a video of a profanity-laden protest outside of McConnell's home in Louisville, Kentucky.”  (more here)  You literally cannot make this stuff up – politically motivated censorship is now a daily happening, most of it not visible.

[10aug19 update]  ‘Shaming’, even FN doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, and plays patsy to the Dem candidates’ attempt at that in their desperate attempts to intimidate President Trump.  These political sleazebags, now joined by Uncle Joe, are all claiming a direct causal relationship between Trump’s public speech and the El Paso and Dayton killings.  This is supposed to shame the president.  People who still care about the language know that a person accepts shame only when 1) he acknowledges the veracity of the allegations against him, AND 2) the society around him also embraces the same allegations.  Neither of those conditions exist for Trump re the massacres, nor the 100M+ Americans who are paying attention.  The desperate scumbags who seek to make such ludicrous claims stick don’t have a clue about this, and are mainly relying on the segment of their constituents who are innocent of current events and most other things that quality education delivers.

[11aug19 update]  Leftwing dumb is definitely a terminal mindset. Any kind of discussion with them is nigh impossible because they fail the basics of an IQ test that asks questions about whether this is like that, and if not, what is the difference.  Years of examples of such deficit thinking are archived in RR comment streams, and today we see it in the comments under Jo Ann’s recent Union piece (here) about the treatment LaMalfa received at the hands of the leftists when he visited here.  The Union leftwing commenters equate the crowd’s cries of ‘Lock her up!’ at Trump rallies with their own thuggish behavior of shouting down a congressman of the opposite party.  They haven’t a clue that one set of voices is in support of the speaker, and the other set of voices is meant to disrupt a speaker trying to respond to his audience.  To those pinheads these two situations are identical, and they consider their loutish behavior as Democrats to be a proper response to the Republican audience’s behavior at a Republican rally.  Is there someone with even garden variety smarts on the other side who can see a profound difference here?  Exit question: how often do you see Republicans do that when a Democrat comes to speak?  (I don't usually comment on Jo Ann's columns, but this time the number of butt-stupid responses was overwhelming.  H/T to GregG and ToddJ for their valiant attempts to explain the matter in that comment stream.)

Tariffs – who really pays

George Rebane

President Trump’s current tariff wars are definitely having a mixed impact on economies in the US and around the world.  His claim that ‘China is now paying us billions in tariffs’ is patently false.  But most people still think that tariffs on Chinese imports now consist of the imported goods plus a check for the tariff amount written by someone in China.  And that a 25% tariff on Chinese imports will increase their price for such goods by 25%.  Not so.

Tariffs on imported goods are paid for by the US registered importers to our Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency within 10 days of the goods landing in the US, which monies go into the Treasury's general fund of tax collections.  That, of course, increases the cost of doing business since the importer must now increase his, usually financed, operating capital by the amount of the tariff, thereby increasing both the direct cost of what he buys, and also adding the cost of financing the tariff amount. (more here)

To see how the tariff impacts us on the receiving end, consider the rule-of-thumb breakdown of end-user price.  For most things the ‘one-thirds rule’ applies – 1/3 to the manufacturer, 1/3 to distribution, 1/3 to the retailer (end-seller).  That means that the distributor (distribution channel) charges the end-seller twice its cost(s) for the item, and the end-seller then adds 50% of his cost to arrive at the price the end-user must pay.

So, let’s look at a pair of athletic shoes for which the consumer pays a pre-tariff $100.  The Chinese manufacturer sells these out the door for, say, $32.  The importer (distributor) must pay, say, a 25% tariff on the goods, or $8 to the CBP for a total cost of $40 for the shoes at the port of entry.  Now how much of that additional $8 cost he passes on to the retailer depends on what kind of a hit he’s willing to take on his profit margin.  Say, he’s willing to swallow half the increased cost, so he sells the shoes to the retailer for 2*($32 + 0.5*$8) = $72.  If the retailer now followed the one-third rule, then the price for the end-user consumer would be 1.5*$72 = $108, or an 8% price increase.  Being sensitive to the price-demand curve (you sell less of what costs more), the retailer may decide to swallow, say, 25% of his increased cost, or 0.25*($72 - $64) = $2.  This brings the consumer price of the athletic shoes to $106 or a 6% increase to the American end-user that was caused by imposition of a 25% tariff on such imports.

You can, of course, play this game with different numbers, for example starting with the Chinese manufacturer also discounting his out-the-door price of $32 to keep his shoe sales volume up.  Anyway, this should give us all an idea how and where tariff charges impact everyone in the process of getting imported stuff into the hands of end-users.  (Those wanting to play with these numbers can now see the effect on end prices by also considering the slightly more complex intermediate ‘end pricing’ of imported components ordered by US manufacturers making goods for US and foreign markets.)  And when all is said and done, everyone in the described chain will hold their breath to see how much the end-user will balk at paying the increased price and thereby lower the sales volume for the shoes, which effect will ripple up the chain impacting all kinds of decisions about what to pay, what to charge, and from where to buy.

In sum, the penalty that China (or any tariff assessed country) pays is that 1) they will sell less of the stuff to end users who have to pay a higher price, and/or 2) manufacturers and distributors on the receiving end will inevitably try to obtain the same stuff from countries that are not tariffed so as to regain their profit margins while lowering end user prices.  When, like China, you have entire industrial sectors geared to make goods for the single largest market in the world, tariffs on the receiving end do impose many forms monetary and financial penalties at the source end.  But make no mistake, the pain of tariffs is felt by all sides, and Trump needs to make that clear instead of spewing only the ‘China pays’ bullshit to the American electorate.  (Don’t mistake this screed as an assessment of the strategic wisdom cum effectiveness of today’s tariff trade wars; that is another discussion altogether.)

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

Soaking the Middle Class

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 June 2019.]

By this time we have all heard the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential candidates promise Americans so many free things we’ll get that most of us have lost track of all the goodies coming our way when one of the newly declared socialists replaces President Trump.  Let me just recount a partial list to get us all on the same page, because I’m going to talk about paying for all the free stuff.  We are promised Medicare for All, free college, forgiven student loans, national job guarantee, paid family medical leave, guaranteed national income, and, of course, all the things in the Green New Deal.  There is more to the list, but I think that these are enough to give the flavor of what we all are encouraged to expect after 2020.

What no one wants to talk about is how the coming workers’ paradise will be paid for.  The few candidates who dare to venture there give short answers that can be paraphrased as, ‘well, we’re gonna tax the bejeezus out of the corporations and the rich, and make them finally pay their fair share’.  And this usually brings out a sigh of relief from the light thinkers in the middle and lower income classes – ‘we’re gonna get all this free stuff and other people will be paying for it, where do I sign?’

Those requiring more meaty answers are assured that we will follow the European model, and everyone knows that they’ve cracked the code on how bigger governments are really the source of the people’s succor and largess.  However, that’s not the case when we look at their data from the EU and OECD countries.  There we quickly find that 1) they get a lot less than our Democratic candidates promise, and 2) the money to pay for it comes from the middle and lower classes, for the simple reason that the rich don’t have enough loot to foot the bill.  And there’s even a more sinister method by how the taxes eventually get raised on everyone.  The entire story with lots of numbers, charts, and graphs unfolds in the recent Heritage Foundation paper, ‘A Progressive Road Map for Soaking the Middle Class’ by Adam Michel.

Michel summarizes his research with – “Taxes on the rich cannot raise the necessary revenue to fund large European-style welfare states. If left on the current trajectory, U.S. government expenditures will require large tax increases on middle-class Americans. The current progressive agenda to further increase spending on health care, education, environmental policy, and income supports will require even higher taxes on a larger share of taxpayers. If America’s spending continues to look more and more like that of Europe, U.S. tax policy will also need to shift. In European countries, lower-income and middle-class taxpayers pay an average marginal wage tax rate of 49 percent on income above $37,000 a year, and an average value-added tax (VAT) of 20 percent. Those same U.S. taxpayers face a marginal wage tax of 32 percent and an average sales tax of 6 percent. The only sustainable way to avoid a high-tax American future is to reduce the growth rate of federal spending.”

For those still in terminal phases of denial, consider that our federal spending has been growing faster than the economy, tax revenues, inflation, Americans’ wages, and savings.  There is no alternative other than taxes have to be raised to European levels to pay for European size governments and spending.  And as Michel shows from EU and OECD data, that means tax bills will have to be raised to a minimum of three times for everyone – no one, rich, middle, or low earners will be spared.  Everyone will pay because at that level of proposed spending we will have run out of other people’s money.

The Democrats’ proposals will cost a conservative $50T over the next 10 years, more than doubling the current $4.4T annual federal budget which is already one-third funded by debt.  The tax implications are so horrendous that no one on the Left wants to talk about it as we witnessed in this week’s Democrat controlled House Committee on the Budget, which pointedly refused to consider any discussion of where the money would come from for all the things promised in just the Green New Deal.  My recommendation is that you get some answers to these questions before you vote in 2020.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  To put some meat on the above arguments.  Here are a couple of graphics illustrating the data from Adam Michel’s paper.  The first shows how much of each nation’s GDP is made up from the total tax burden its government imposes on its citizens.  The reason for America’s high ranking in most economic metrics that bear on people’s QoL should be clear.  There’s a reason why people from all over the world continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States, a reason that is totally, and I do mean TOTALLY, lost on our Left.  (Perhaps promoting policies to make us into a second rate country is the Democrats’ new stealth immigration policy that will then dramatically decrease the pressure on our borders.)

And here’s a compendium of more detailed albeit complex graphs placing the US relative to the EU and OECD countries.  It shows how tax revenues are spread over the spectrum of the countries' wage earners through the marginal rate burdens put on earnings.  It should dispel notions that all the socialist goodies currently in the EU, and promised in the US, are paid for by everyone, and not restricted to monies collected from the socially unjust rich and corporations.

The point to focus on in the above graphs is that the Democrat candidates want to put America right into the middle to upper end of the groups of blue dots representing the EU-OECD countries.  Check out the new tax rates that would apply to ALL our wage earners, and the resulting growth of government to absorb and redistribute the larger share of our nation's GDP (from the first figure, we are now only at the 27% of GDP level).  Does anyone really think that such a massive hit will not put brakes on our economy with the resulting impact on all our lives and motivation to take investment and entrepreneurial risks?  Look to Europe for the answers.

America’s politicians of all stripes know that Americans are overwhelmingly innumerate – they ‘don’t do numbers’.   Data such as presented above make no never mind to the overwhelming share of our citizens who, today more than ever, are focused on polarizing one-liners for their understanding of public policy proposals.  That is why the Democrats have no problem promising unattainable ‘free’ government benefits after they are elected to office.  The tools to make discriminating decisions on such matters were removed long ago from our public educational curricula.

‘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?