Rebane's Ruminations

‘Illiberal American Century’

George Rebane

[This is a quick response to an essay by a noted leftwing academic that I received from a longtime correspondent and friend who sometimes tacks a bit to my port side.  I post it because the author presents a good summary of what continues to abet our Left’s ongoing expressions of TDS as their never-ending source of all ills that currently blanket this fair land.]

America is becoming a “rogue superpower” according to Michael Beckley, leftwing academic at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and a professor at Tufts.  His essay ‘Rogue Superpower – Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century’ in the Nov/Dec2020 Foreign Affairs argued that President Trump’s policies focusing on America’s interests was making our country a pariah hegemon in the community of nations.  Events since then have made many important aspects of his arguments moot or just plain wrong, but his arguments are worth reviewing since they still form the core of what Democrats and their radical left purvey daily through our lamestream media.

To begin, Beckley has a somewhat skewed if not jaundiced view of history with blithe observations that after WW2 “hundreds of millions accepted communism”, a proposition that flies in the face of the actual methods communists used to subvert national governments and turn nations into wholesale gulags under the heels of tyrants who slaughtered millions of their own citizens.

Beckley sees Trump’s policy of having NATO countries pay at their agreed levels (2% of GDP) for their and the continent’s security as a mortal sin of international diplomacy.  Beckley’s solution is for us to continue bearing the overwhelming share of NATO’s defense budget, and subsume our national interest in the process.  He does not recognize nor make mention of China’s rapid advances in technology (mostly purloined), military build-up, and territorial expansions.  This blind spot makes him a critic of America’s response to Trump’s defense budgets.

Somehow the entire decades-long successful strategy of containing communist, and now fundamentalist Islamic tyrannies, is completely overlooked.  It’s as if Beckley is ignorant of what George Kennan laid out in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ to President Truman.  There Kennan made clear the global aims of the Left headed by the USSR and supported by numerous Marxist-Leninist regimes that supplanted many formerly western colonial governments after WW2.

Kennan’s counsel was assiduously followed during the Cold War, and specifically supported by Trump in his announced policy of fielding expeditionary units as needed vs maintaining expensive and politically sensitive permanent bases as the correct solution to an affordable and effective white hat global hegemony.  Beckley missed this one completely and recommends global deterrence by setting up US missile bases on foreign soils.  He is apparently ignorant of how allies like Germany responded when we suggested basing intermediate range nuclear missiles in their lands.  At least then we had our troops in those countries to defend such installations.  Beckley is silent on the force levels required to defend the foreign-based missiles in his plan.  And curiously, he argues against Trump’s stated policy of using Taiwan and the Baltics as well-armed buffers against China’s and Russia’s demonstrated expansionist aims.

And some things Beckley just gets wrong for reasons that are out of scope for this short piece.  An example is his assertion that Trump “gutted” DepState and “handed more responsibility to the Pentagon”.  Save for increasing defense spending, Trump did exactly the opposite with his announced policies of diminishing our military’s overseas roles and bases, and in Mike Pompeo, installing one of the most knowledgeable and widely respected SecStates in recent history.  I invite comparison to Biden’s low grade ore Antony Blinken now underperforming in that slot.  (In addition to him I invite your attention to our newly politicized Pentagon with worthies like SecDef Austin and JCS Chair Gen Milley.  What they are doing to our military deserves expanded inquiries by the DOJ and a bipartisan congressional committee.  Cutting to the chase, Biden has populated his cabinet with an historical legion of losers.)

So, along with many other Americans, I am puzzled as to what is rogue about a country acting in its own best interests to maintain world order - e.g. see Kissinger’s World Order (2014)  ALL other countries have demonstrably done the same for centuries, and do so to this day.  Beckley wants the US to continue its sacrifice-and-pay policy while suborning America’s interests to that of its allies and even countries that are openly hostile to us – has he forgotten Golden Rule #2? - ‘them that’s got the gold makes the rules’, or its gentler version, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune.’  America First has never meant that the rest of the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

Sandbox - 23aug21

['I am NOT a victim'  Worth watching before YouTube censors it, especially by our portside progressives.  gjr]

Scattershots – 19aug21 (updated 23aug21)

George Rebane

“Since the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, China has what economists call a socialist market economy – one in which a dominant state-owned enterprises sector exists in parallel with market capitalism and private ownership.”  This is the version of capitalism of which many on our Left are so enamored, with claims of how such restructuring of the economy will promote - wait for it - equity.  The truth is actually the opposite.  The further the socialist slide toward communism has progressed, the more unequal becomes a country’s economy and wealth distribution as measured by the UN in its Gini Index (or Coefficient) ratings of member countries.  The index ranges between zero (complete equality) and one (complete inequality) – a review here.  Today China’s GI = 70.4 compared to America’s GI = 47.7 (more here)  That’s quite a difference in wealth distribution, and completely expected for authoritarian cum totalitarian regimes.  Team Biden and the new radically socialist wing of the Democratic Party are busy fundamentally transforming our economy to more resemble the People’s Republic of China.

[20aug21 update]  Islam – our eternal foe?  So suggests Robert Nicholson, president of the Philos Project, as he dances around the notion of religious plurality in the Middle East.  In his ‘The Unconquerable Islamic World’ (20aug21 WSJ) he writes – “The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the ‘Jews and Crusaders’ who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.” (emphasis mine)  Combine such ‘normative beliefs’ with Islam’s taqiya, and you get a much better idea of the Muslim mentality that the world faces.  [23aug21 update is the nearby picture.  H/T to correspondent.]

[21aug21 update]  ‘The biggest crime committed during the vaccine heist is the censorship of Ivermectin’  (H/T to reader)  In these pages over the past 18 months we have covered the imbecility and criminality of our governments’ Covid responses, blindly abetted by millions of our leftwing lackies.  Most recently RR focused on the criminality of withholding effective and established prophylactic and treatment drugs from the American public while hundreds of thousands needlessly died waiting for Warp Speed to bear fruit (here).  Now more physicians and scientists have begun to speak out about this enormous crime.  The above cited pieces summarizes –

• While the list of crimes committed by authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic is a long one, perhaps the biggest crime of all is the purposeful suppression of safe and effective treatments, including ivermectin. This appears to have been done to protect the COVID “vaccine” program
• The COVID shots were brought to market under emergency use authorization (EUA), which can only be obtained if there are no other safe and effective alternatives available
• Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies looked at ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection. A rapid review performed on behalf of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) in the U.S., January 3, 2021, found the drug “probably reduces deaths by an average 83% compared to no ivermectin treatment”
• According to a more recent review and meta-analysis, ivermectin, when used preventatively, reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86%
• Another recent scientific review concluded ivermectin produces large statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance

Do you have your prescribed Ivermectin courses of treatment ready to go in your medicine cabinet?

Speaking of getting vaccinated, one should take every opportunity -

[more 23aug21 update]  And now, if you can lower your eyes a mite, for your edification we delve into a bit of timely poetry.

Afghanistan Reflections (updated 21aug21)

George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

Illustrations of Futility (updated 19aug21)

George Rebane

In the latest effort to find common ground in our fractured country, a new civics curriculum has been devised by a few hundred scholars under the aegis of Educating for American Democracy Initiative.  Bipartisan support comes from Sens Coons and Cornyn who have authored the Civics Secures Democracy Act to pump $1B of federal money into teaching a federal curriculum on history and civics at TBD K-12 levels. (more here)

The initiative is funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Dept of Education.  The intent is for “states to evolve from the traditional approach to curriculum—listing a series of events and concepts for students to learn—and embrace an “inquiry focus” that encourages students to explore open-ended questions from multiple perspectives. Topics would include how the system of American constitutional democracy came to be and what it means to participate in it, the place of the U.S. in the world, and the debates that characterize contemporary American civic life. Instead of focusing on facts about the Constitutional Convention or Shay’s Rebellion, for example, lessons would pose questions, such as ‘How did the institution of enslavement and practices of indigenous removal and even extermination affect national unity in the U.S.?’ Or, ‘Why does a society need shared rules and what do rules do?’”  (Note the ideological drift here.)

Such questions, of course, are less than meaningless to young minds empty of any historical context, context which will somehow be absorbed through the ether since there are no plans to extend the 24-hour day.  Given this approach, and the ideological tint of the curriculum’s progenitors, it is highly probable "that (many) have criticized the initiative as a pretext for teaching left-wing ideas” as is the reasonable concern of some conservative groups.

With some grounding in American history, the group could have suggested some more meaningful pro-American questions for students to discuss, such as, ‘How did the US become the world’s beacon of freedom and enterprise as the ‘shining city on the hill’ of liberty, when it had to work through its difficult decades of slavery, civil war, and years of subsequent racial segregation?’

The way this federal program is to be foisted on local school districts gives pause to even some of it proponents who are concerned “that continued political polarization will likely make it hard for schools to adopt the initiative’s recommendations.”  There are also some other material concerns with the ability of current curricula to educate students so that they will be “civics ready” by 2030.  The most important of these concerns is that the Right and Left see diametrically opposite futures for America's governance and therefore the kind of civics required to produce a citizenry that is supportive and compliant with each of these futures – no such civics exists nor is conceivable.

We refuse to even adopt a conversation that would allow us to try to cobble together a mutually acceptable American future.  Note that I offered a plan and tried to start a conversation with that aim in these pages (here).  That went over like a fart in church with our RR readership, no one is interested in any rapprochement.  North Carolina State University professor Paula McAvoy thinks that this program will run into strong headwinds.  She concludes with –

We’re in a moment in which there’s incredible disagreement about whether democracy is a good idea in the first place, what a good democracy looks like, what civility looks like and what truth looks like, and because we have all this churning in the public about what a good society is, I think this initiative bumps up against the very thing it’s trying to fix.

This is another example of seminal futility that our country’s leadership can’t wrap their heads around.

[19aug21 update]  The country’s Left has been successful in implementing Lenin’s dictum about educating young minds in order to transform a country’s governance and social order.  Its success in America, as in other places, comes from inattention and lack of concern for what is taught in our schools.  With all the other problems in the land, people just aren’t interested in what is poured into the heads of little Jacks and Jills by their unionized leftwing teachers, who by and far are marginally competent to teach them ‘regular subjects’.  This lack of interest arises from a wide spectrum of political beliefs, and isn’t isolated on the Right or the Left.

These pages contribute their own evidence of this particular form of ennui.  This commentary highlights a very recent and damning initiative contributing to the ongoing demise of our public education system, and it has drawn exactly zero comments in its first five days of posting.  I can understand the readers’ disinterest in my more technical topics – after all, our country does not ‘do numbers’ – but what is being taught to our kids should IMHO raise an eyebrow or two here and there.  Our last great century indeed.

Sandbox – 14aug21

[Mark Levin’s American Marxism has been #1 nationwide since it was published some five weeks ago.  It is an exhaustive compendium of America’s body politic and can serve as a handbook for anyone researching items of national concern.  It is also a page-turner that contains an enormous number of substantial quotes drawn political writings that precede Marx, include him and buddy Engels, and go on to the socialist literature that has swept us through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, terminating with the outpourings of today’s Left and their more strident neo-Marxist organizations.  Unless you know the stuff in the book, you are at best lobbing small caliber rounds, and more likely shooting blanks.  Levin is a good wordsmith with whom those on the Left and Right should spend time, first, to learn more completely their own ideologies, and then to discover what really drives the other side beyond the daily ad hominems and diversionary dollops of fake news.  gjr]

Climate Hysteria 3.0 (maybe 4.0)

George Rebane

‘Settled’ is not an adjective to be used with real science.

The recently released AR6 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has injected new life into climate hysteria that seems to have been flagging over the last few years.  The usual hysterics are again up in arms with another round of outlandish warnings and proposals to tank the economies of the developed countries, led, of course, by the US.  More sober and knowledgeable scientists are saying ‘not so fast’.

Physicist Steven Koonin has been introduced in these pages as one of the leading sober and knowledgeable scientists who has for some years now been counseling a more measured view of climate change.  His recent best seller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), summarizes the unsubstantiated fears and foibles that continue to be foisted on the lay public worldwide.  The 11aug21 WSJ, from which the nearby figure was filched, contains his critique of AR6, and is definitely worth a read.  I’ll give some highlights.

To begin for those late to this pity party, what all the fuss is about that we are ignoring a global catastrophe in process – namely, preventable manmade global warming (PMGW).  Every word in that label is important, and it’s the ‘preventable’ part that promises to be most devastating to the fortunes of developed countries.  You have to be convinced that we humans did it all by ourselves, and that therefore we can and must roll back global warming all by ourselves.

In ‘Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole’ Dr Koonin begins with -

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.

The entire history of climate reporting has been a mire of politicized fraud.  RR readers learned years ago that all the prognostications about PMGW are based on a collection of incoherent, incomplete, and essentially broken general circulation models (e.g. we don't understand earth's CO2 cycle).  The have been twisted beyond recognition by true believers and fraudsters to yield the gee-whiz graphs and endlessly repeated, hysterical talking points.

It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface. … The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.

The other big bamboozle involves pointing to unusual weather as confirmation of climate change.  These assessments and dire pronouncements are made daily by innumerates who have no idea what science is or how it can substantiate something.

Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events. … The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.

The IPCC report reveals very little that is new.  It is mostly the repackaging of past reports by a legion of contributing authors, each working within their narrow field.  The almost 4,000 page tome has been read by very few, and understood by even fewer.  Nevertheless, AR6 will feature prominently in the upcoming November UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  So it’s important to understand both the nature of its contents and misrepresentations about PMGW that are always prominent in the executive summary and conclusion sections of what the IPCC publishes.  Here is the AR6 Headline Statements from the Summary for Policy Makers.

Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact. … Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

In the days of yore we had a national institution called the Fourth Estate – professional journalism.  It was staffed by reporters taught by their editors to be ‘curious, hard-bitten skeptics’, always seeking alternative sides to what they were being told.  In a recent piece (here) by national columnist Gerard Baker, “The good reporter doubted whatever he was told, even what time it was. He’d weigh competing accounts and explanations and actively seek out alternative versions. Read the bios of great reporters from the past and they’ll be scattered with adjectives like ornery and insubordinate.”

More than ever, today the country is faced with major crises, manufactured and managed in the media – Covid pandemic, open borders, unbounded debt, preventable man-made climate change, catastrophic crime rates, race relations, CRT school curricula, accelerating dumbth of the electorate, rogue ‘deep state’ departments destroying businesses and lives, retreat of US hegemony, and on and on.  In any sense of the word, facts about these are no longer reported.  “‘Reported’ is a misnomer. They aren’t facts; (instead) they are sacred revealed truths, unchallengeable arguments invested with epistemic certainty and moral clarity.”

“Journalism is no longer about trying to tell us what happened; it’s about telling us what we must believe, on pain of moral peril. On every major topic, … every story blares out at us with censorious didacticism, the journalist’s smug disdain for the unbelievers pouring through (their) prose.”  (Full disclosure - as declared here years ago, I am NOT a journalist.)

With journalism in the bag, it didn’t take long for other national institutions to corrupt everything that they were supposed to inform us about.  Everything coming out of our law enforcement agencies, public health institutes, justice departments, the judiciary, legislatures, environmental bureaus, commerce, elected politicians, …, everything they declared, stated, published, etc had a short half-life as truth.  Many of the lies today are so blatant that they scarcely last through the news making interview.

Leaders in this downfall are what we here label as the lamestream media.  These are broadcast, internet, and hardcopy outlets that overwhelmingly toe the Left’s progressive narrative, and serve as the reliable trumpet of the Democratic National Committee and leadership elites.  They package and embellish only the part of the news that serves to cement leftwing talking points du jour.  This is easy to tell from both these pages and simply comparing news items (no matter how reported) from both rightwing and leftwing outlets.  As the liberals here daily confirm, the lamestream covers only a subset of items that are found on rightwing outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, and associated websites.

(The latest tactic to assure that the future generations of voters are compliant double dummies, anti-education Democrats, led by Oregon governor Kate Brown, who has now surreptitiously signed a law that makes reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates.  One can never have enough uncritical, true-believing constituents.  I expect this initiative to be replicated in other Democrat led states – more here.)

Rightwing outlets, led by Fox, claim to be “fair, balanced, and unafraid” of the censorious Left and their rampant cancel culture.  But unfortunately that also is not true.  There is plenty of evidence that rightwing outlets have a healthy fear of political incorrectness and retribution.  A timely example should suffice to spread the blame.  MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is a longtime staunch Trump supporter, and a leader in the rightwing movement claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.  Lindell is sponsoring a limited attendance 3-day Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls that started today (more here).  Almost every leftwing outlet of any stature has been dunning and denigrating the conference as another rightwing attempt to once more convince the country of the fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.  Lindell has been a big advertiser on Fox News and also wanted to advertise his symposium on the network.

FN said no, and not only no, but it didn’t even include mention of this otherwise covered conference in its news broadcasts.  For a change, you had to watch CNN and MSNBC to learn of Lindell’s latest effort to keep the election fraud pot boiling.  Not only did FN’s news programs shun Lindell’s gathering, but so also did that king of conservative commentary on Fox, Tucker Carlson, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”  Carlson has taken on the Left on some pretty controversial and damning issues.  He advertises himself as being Mr Balls-to-the-floor himself when it comes to reporting what others hide.  But Tucker has been too scared to even mention Lindell or simply report the massive vituperation thrown at him on the lamestream.  This reflects poorly on Carlson and doubly so on his colleague Bret Baier, FN’s lead news anchor on their flagship news program.  I am saddened by all this duck-and-cover fear in a network I used to hold in high esteem.  (We’ll see what Tucker says tonight.)

Gerard Baker concludes his piece with – “The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite, happily swaddled in all their shared nostrums. He’s most content when he’s wagging a finger at the selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism, express skepticism about vaccines, or deny their innate white sinfulness. … His virtue thus signaled, he luxuriates in the knowledge that he’s on the side of the chosen ones. It’s just a pity it’s no longer journalism.”

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

[Later]  Neither Bret Baier nor Tucker Carlson on Fox News made mention of Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium which continues for two more days.

Ruminations – 6aug21 (updated 11aug21)

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.

George Rebane

Socialist economists don’t understand why millions of workers’ real wages have not increased in the last, say, thirty years.  The answer is simple.  Labor is a cost, why increase that component of cost when it has contributed nothing to the increase in productivity.  That wages are tied to delivered productivity is an economic concept totally lost on socialists, and even more distant for their local double dummies who believe that somehow you should be paid more the longer you can hang on and keep fogging the mirror.

The Bumblebrain Bunch doesn’t think that Republican governors who cut off government checks to the unemployed had anything to do with the big increase in July’s employment number.  This is another illustration of inter-ear density by the Left that can’t connect consumer money flows to their economic behavior.  For them it has been an eternal mystery since the days of Marx.

Texas governor Greg Abbott is being dunned by the Democrats for the state’s spike in C19 cases.  None of these worthies are aware of the ongoing border crisis and the hundreds of thousands of illegals, thousands of whom are infected, being gratuitously released into the country.  The more important aspect of this is that their millions of terminally ignorant constituents have no idea that this has been going on and is only getting more critical with every passing day.  All part of their anti-American program to destroy the US as a sovereign nation-state.

[7aug21 update]  ‘College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened’.  “Black college graduates in their 30s have lost ground over three decades, the result of student debt and sluggish income growth.”  Nowhere in such articles is pointed out the kind of degrees obtained by blacks vs whites/Asians.  For example, the ratio of black-to-whites who graduate from college is pitiful, and of those black graduates, how many get degrees that provide employable skillsets.  Not all college degrees are created equal, and that goes double in today’s academe awash with ‘soft majors’.  To that we add intellectual demographic distributions, the impact of which is most devastating. And finally, today it’s not possible to examine this problem to discover its real contours and where public policies can do most good.  (more here)  The Left will stand for none of it; they depend on the status quo of victimhood.

[8aug21 update]  African-Americans in TV commercials.  Ever notice that the overwhelming majority of TV commercials, say 80%, feature blacks and often other people of color.  Blacks make up about one of eight Americans, yet they are extremely prominent, way beyond their ‘equity’, in our public face.  That I and other non-blacks don’t mind this nor demand equity in such displays should be accepted as more strong evidence that America is not a racist country.  I just wish that people would take more notice and joy from such evidence.

[9aug21 update]  More on C19 vaccines, vaccinations, and face masks.  To demonstrate how unsettled science is about this dreaded pandemic, here is a video of some expert testimony from a physician and virologist. (H/T to correspondent)

[10aug21 update]  The march of the double dummies gathers momentum.  Oregon governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that made reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates – ‘Oregon governor signs bill suspending math, reading proficiency requirements for HS graduates’.  Our Democrat proto-Marxists are firming the foundations of the United Socialist States of America by ramping up the level of ignorance and control of the next generation of their compliant constituencies.  And they know that people with even vestiges of critical thinking skills would object to this blatant demolition of our public education, so it all happened hush-hush.  Let’s see how fast the other states start picking up such advances in equity.

[11aug21 update] The CBO on Trump’s tax cuts as reported on Fox Business.  Just out from the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s corporate tax cuts paid for themselves in 18 months, and his personal income tax cuts almost paid for themselves by the eve of the pandemic (and would have easily provided more government revenues had the pandemic not happened).  This should silence our liberal readers who have long maintained that tax cuts, especially Trump’s, never pay for themselves, therefore more taxes are always necessary to pay for more vote buying (aka government “investments”).  And the takeaway is still, ‘corporations don’t pay taxes, people do’. (more here)

Speaking Algoristically

George Rebane

[Reading some recent papers on the current problems in the advance of deep learning, and causal inference as the next quantum leap in machine intelligence, I ran across a lot of discussion about what are still called algorithms.  It recalled the summary of a more facile syntax that I and several others have been promoting.  More to be said later about the contention between the ‘data fitting’ of neural nets, and ‘data interpretation’ capability of causal nets.]

al·go·rithm n. A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established process for solving a problem or accomplishing a task in a finite number of steps. (more here)

When we relieve ‘algorithm’ of its codal baggage, we are left with the simple, compact, communicable, and elegant ‘algo’.  In this form the entire enterprise and field of algorithmics (better ‘algoristics’) can be efficiently communicated, bypassing current attempts to twist its ‘rithm’ tail into tortured forms like “algorithmatized” or use many other words to describe what can be expressed directly.  Consider the following little dissertation on the subject.

Any process is algorizable and can be algorized by an experienced algorist.  Algorized processes benefit from being readily teachable and passed on to others.  Developing algos is also an art because there is usually more than one algo that can algoristically capture the essence of a process.  Algoristically speaking, most algorized processes can always benefit from additional algorizing.  The history of algoristics is full of such algoristical efforts of developing ever more efficient algos.  In the affairs of Man never disparage algorization, for it simply is the heart of the matter. No light bursts forth in your mind save in an algorizable form, for without the ability to algorize we proceed as the blind. It always pays to be an algophile instead of an algophobe, for expressing and retaining knowledge, it all comes down to algoristics.

One of history’s greatest algorists was Henry Ford.  He took the notion of interchangeable parts (first developed for the manufacture of military arms) and algorized the manufacturing of cars into the assembly line.  Realizing the algorizability of automobile manufacturing, his algorized assembly line was algoristically so structured that parts didn’t come to the assembled car, the car went to the parts.  That was the breakthrough algo that changed a country and then the world.

• Algo
• Algorist
• Algoristics,
• Algoristical
• Algoristically
• Algorize
• Algorized
• Algorizable
• Algorizing
• Algorization
• Algorizability
• Algophile
• Algophobe

River Fire Reflections

George Rebane

Kudos to Yubanet.com for being the most heads up and informative website for wildfire information.  At the same time, government falls short of its function as is apparent to anyone visiting mynevadacounty.com.  Starting yesterday (4aug21) afternoon, all of us in western Nevada County have been on tenterhooks watching the River Fire started by someone at the Bear River Campground near Colfax.

For Jo Ann and me this kind of annual firewatch and evacuation preparedness has been a way of life ever since we moved to Simi Valley in 1968, and then into the Santa Monica Mountains in 1978, and here to Nevada County in 2002.  Every year it’s the same ol’ same ol’ – are we going to lose our home this year?  And frankly, after over fifty years of this and at our age, we’re starting to get a little tired of being puckered up every summer and fall.

Sandbox - 4aug21

['If Biden is Serious About Covid, He'll Protect the Border' writes Manhattan Institute scholar Jason L. Riley.  gjr]

Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. - Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

George Rebane

According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence - is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

[4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with -

Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.

Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

"... the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

George Rebane

CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind - high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

Sandbox - 26jul21

[Yet one more indicator that we are no longer smart enough to govern ourselves as a free nation was the most recent WaPo/ABC poll in which 51% of respondents were satisfied with Bumblebrain’s handling of the economy – ignoring literally every related factor that is promoting the economy coming off of its C19 hiatus (thanks to Trump) while blind to the administrations plans to pass tax and regulation legislation to stifle the economy, launch rampant inflation, and push national debt to historical records not even seen during wartimes.  gjr]

The Criminality of Covid Care (updated 31jul21)

George Rebane

The prominent article on front page of the 26jul21 WSJ declares ‘Covid Treatment Options Remain Elusive, Despite Months of Effort and Rising Delta Cases’.  And the most elusive treatment options remain Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) which are nowhere even mentioned in an otherwise comprehensive piece on the various medicines having been tested and used in treating C19.

The effectiveness of HCQ, and especially IVM, as both a preventative and therapeutic for the virus has been well known for over a year.  Physicians all over the world, including the US, have used it and prescribe it regularly.  Numerous studies have been conducted on their efficacies at various stages of the disease.  Curiously, the overseas studies show remarkably positive results, and the US studies show them to be little more effective, if that, than a placebo (none have shown it to do harm to the patient).

A very comprehensive study – ‘Ivermectin for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 60 studies’ - was already released last fall.  (H/T to reader)  It concludes –

Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19. The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 60 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 193 billion (p = 0.0000000000052). As expected for an effective treatment, early treatment is more successful, with an estimated reduction of 74% in the effect measured using random effects meta-analysis (RR 0.26 [0.16-0.43]). 64% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.36 [0.15-0.85] and 0.04 [0.00-0.59]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of heterogeneous studies is remarkable, with 92% of the 60 studies reporting positive effects (26 statistically significant in isolation).

Even the simplest back-of-envelope calculations will show that the widespread use of IVM would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past year and a half.  Given the reported results, its suppression by our governmental public health institutions has been nothing short of rank criminality.  Neither the commonly available and generic HCQ nor IVM will benefit the big pharmas selling medicines on which their patents still hold sway.

Omitting any mention of, say, IVM and the cited study reeks to high heaven, and goes a long way to maintain the loss of credibility that our society’s major institutions have suffered.  I repeat the WSJ citation above – not a hint of even the existence of HCQ or IVM.  Even repeating the CDC’s official stance on these medicines would have served to allay some suspicions, but total silence screams collusion and conspiracy at the highest levels.

Your physician will more than likely already have his/her own supply and be happy to prescribe IVM if you request it.  Given the readily available research, the Rebanes have stocked their medicine cabinet appropriately.

[29jul21 update]  So ‘Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?’  Ivermectin is a promising Covid treatment and prophylaxis, but why is the FDA still denigrating it?  People continue to suffer and die at numbers that could be greatly reduced were this safe, inexpensive, and effective drug promoted and made available to all of us who should have it in our medicine cabinets.  More specifically, “Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.  Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.”

CDC’s newest mask mandate continues to be based on no science, just imperiously incompetent control.  Governors and mayors are beginning to give the agency pushback, asking for the substantiating science or at least some supporting data.  The best that CDC could do to date is to mumble something about an unpublished report (the one that failed peer review?).  When asked, they could not advise when the report would be made public.  The bottom line of all this is that we are 18 months into this pandemic, and the government is becoming more dysfunctional by the day in the response policies it struggles to put out.  This is the outfit that the neo-Marxists are trying to enlarge and control more of our everyday lives??!

But the biggest ongoing tragedy is the response of the American sheeple.  The overwhelming majority of our citizens respond with a muffled compliance, very similar to that of cattle being prodded down the chute on their final walk to slaughter.  Consider Covid as a training aid used by government elites to prepare us to accept more serious measures to come from on high.

[31jul21 update]  The evidence for Ivermectin continues to pour in.  Given the number of people that Covid has killed, IVM is truly a demonstrated wonder drug.  Its timely application would have save hundreds of thousands of lives, and it still can be the medicine that will allow us to live with C19 as its variants make it endemic for the indefinite future.  ‘How to Kill a Cure: The War on Ivermectin’ is a must read to appreciate the level of criminality that IVM's suppression has entailed, and continues today as a perfidious blight in our society.  (H/T to reader)

‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

[Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

Ruminations -21jul21 (updated 25jul21)

‘You comply because you want it to end.  But because you comply, it will never end.’  The realworld of dealing with autocracies.

George Rebane

“There’s nothing partisan about seeking the truth.”  Thus spake Nancy Pelosi, one of the all-time duplicitous lying politicians of our times, as she rejected the nomination of GOP Reps Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Dems’ 6jan21 House investigation committee.  That statement is just the most recent pernicious play on the intellects of leftwing voters across the land.

Minority Leader McCarthy responds to Pelosi by promising to pull all Republicans out of her committee, and launch a parallel GOP investigation of 6 January.  This will show the country how the ‘honorables’ of Congress play the game, kabuki performances all around.  These two will produce diametrically opposite non-partisan truths, and let the people pick which they like the best.  Something for everyone, what’s not to like?

[22jul21 update]  The 25^th Amendment was clearly adopted for the sad condition of President Biden’s mental state as witnessed by his recent townhall performance on CNN. (here) It unbelievable how little he can do in public without his pre-printed notecards.  The fact that there is no discernible effort to remove him means that he is totally in control of his handlers and, therefore, continues to serve a useful purpose, and/or not even Democrats want their idiot VP to ascend to the position.  But then again, in that case Nancy would be a heartbeat away from 1600.

[23jul21 update]  Leftwing educator Mollie Mowat takes Union columnist Terry McLaughlin to task (here) for her recent abundantly researched column on CRT (here).  The woman understands nothing of McLaughlin’s column as she adequately displays generous helpings of her own ignorance and bias.  She illustrates the level of knowledge and scholarship so common in the ranks of unionized public school teachers.  And as expected from a progressive autocrat, she ends her screed with a wistful wish that opposing voices like McLaughlin’s be silenced in our media – “As a former teacher and lifelong educator, I am saddened that she is allowed to continue a frankly ignorant and racist rhetoric.”

[24jul21 update]  Bumblebrain’s exit.  Given his visible daily decline, even some Dems are now beginning to realize that he might not last.  I’m starting a contest for readers to predict the date when our next president gets sworn in.  Submit your entries as a 4-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date, Most likely date, Confidence (0 to 1) that the date will be near Most likely date] or just a 2-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date].  Some of you may recall that these four parameters also define a MAB distribution (here).  The entrant whose MAB has the highest likelihood value at the actual swear in date wins.  As a prize I will send a $1,000 check to the winner’s favorite 501c3 charity.  Entries must be submitted before 1 September 2021, earliest received entry resolves ties.

[25jul21 update]  Big pharmas are now racing for a C19 therapeutic pill (here and here) while the reporting media completely ignore widespread uses of cheap, established, and widely available hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin anti-virals as both a preventative and a therapeutic.  Informing readers on the global experience with HCQ and IVT would be useful since in the west the use of these drugs has been rejected and vilified.  One wonders how these developments stand on the shoulders of (repackaged?) HCQ/IVT.

Fraudulent C19 stats have been promoted with the year-long use of PCR tests to ascribe C19 cases.  The CDC is now pulling the use of these tests since we’ve known from the start that they can’t differentiate between SARS-CoV-2 (the C19 virus) and influenza (here).  The resulting damage from the use of such confused data is yet to be determined.  The politicization of everything to do with the C19 pandemic continues to destroy the credibility of our formerly sacrosanct institutions.  The medical community adds itself to our already TDS-tainted intelligence services, crime fighting agencies, judicial system, and, of course, the terminally tainted lamestream news media. (H/T to reader)

Sandbox - 19jul21

[If the US was being damaged even a tenth as much as claimed by foreign state-sponsored rogue hackers demanding money, and we did nothing, then we are over as a sovereign nation-state.  Rebane Doctrine calls for 10:1 retribution on the infrastructures of such sponsoring states; none of this crap about ‘balanced’, 'measured', or ‘proportional’ responses that we might take some day when we really get pissed off.  We’re playing with thugs who worship and understand only force – it’s time to up the ante and convince Russia and China that the price of cyberwarfare just went up.  Gjr]

In Appreciation – 14jul21

Sell your stuff at the price of courtesy, for that imposes the heaviest obligation; …courtesy not only pays, but it pledges, and it is gallant manner that imposes the greatest obligation; nothing costs a man of conscience more than something given him, for it is sold him twice, and at a double price, that of its own value, and that of politeness.  Nevertheless it remains true, that to men of mean spirit such noble talk is mere gibberish, for they do not understand the idioms of good style.  Gracian #272

George Rebane

Recently I’ve been doing some review and archiving of the last 14 years of RR’s contents.  And in the perusal of the voluminous comment streams in these pages, I am overcome with gratitude for the content of the almost 200,000 comments from readers of all socio-political persuasions.  Most humbling to me are the long, thoughtful, and citation-supported comments that append to and expand on my commentaries.  Most of these, over the years, have come from a small and faithful cadre of regular commenters.  It is a rare blog where comment contents abet and also vie with the topical posts – RR is so blessed.

I am also grateful for the cadre of readers who trade their ideas with me through emails, giving rise to long and fruitful exchanges, some of which I have been able to post.  And lastly, I have to also thank our readers of the Left.  Some of them take me and RR’s more rightwing readers to task on other blogs, whereon they can swim in more comfortable waters without having to match wits with those whom they criticize or seek to silence.

But the greatest thanks go to those liberals, progressives, et al of today’s woke cadres who now and then have the fortitude to take up their lance and do battle in our comment streams.  It is their welcome attendance that gives spice to the debates and that illustrate most clearly how differently our polarized sides see the same world, and the diametrically opposite directions each side wants to guide our republic.  After all, for a more complete telling, we need from all sides the observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.

Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

George Rebane

Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

[13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

[14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

[18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

Sandbox – 10jul21

[With daddy’s help Hunter Biden has figured out how to collect on all of his international graft accounts – the sumbich has suddenly become a world renown artiste, ‘selling’ his paintings for up to $500K apiece.  Daddy and his DoJ are making sure that the art connoisseurs don’t get fingered as their money gets laundered.  It will be interesting to see if/how these ‘Paid in Full’ receipts are displayed.  So, no matter how they are run, elections do have consequences.  Or as Josif Vissarionovich observed, ‘It matters not for whom the votes are cast, only who counts them.’  gjr]

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

Equity Denies Reality (Addended)

George Rebane

[This piece was rejected by The Union as unfit for their readers.  I must admit that I was surprised at that response, and the reasons given by publisher Don Rogers.  I will have more to say later about my new understanding of the newspaper’s ideological coloring and journalistic demeanor.  The following is an addended version of what was submitted.]

Our public policies, including those now seeking equity, have denied reality for decades, so argues nationally prominent, quantitative sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray in Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021).  In his latest scholarly researched and richly referenced book, Dr Murray brings to light data that government collected and our media muffled on the intellectual metrics that characterize race in America.  As with his past dissertations (e.g. Bell Curve, Coming Apart), his politically and profusely incorrect Facing Reality is destined for the same opprobrium from progressives that graced his previous volumes.  However, his presentation of information and socially impactive conclusions are supported by databases assembled over the decades by our Dept of Education, FBI, and various accredited testing services.

What motivated Murray to produce this illuminating work is today’s broadly held contention that America’s fundamental creed is in peril.  The creed is from our Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”  And the danger to our way of life comes from a total misapprehension of how our multi-racial culture is viewed through the perspectives of cognitive capability and criminality, and how this gives rise to today’s misguided, and even insane public policies through which government misinforms, mis-enables, and misdirects Americans as we seek our places in the sun.

The long-taught but erroneous common wisdom is that cognitive capabilities are equally distributed across races.  Using census data Murray presents his analysis of our four main racial groups and percentages making up our 330M population.  Murray labels these European (60%), Latin (17.9%), African (12.8%), Asian (5.7%), Other (3.6%).  Volumes of data over the years demonstrate that in the aggregate these groups have measurably different distributions of closely correlating scores in IQ, SAT, ACT, and other skill-based tests which have been meticulously controlled to eliminate the usual sources of non-racial bias.  To illustrate this broad-based reality, Murray presents the proxy IQ distributions which are annotated in the nearby figure.

The racial distributions are the familiar ‘bell curves’, the size (area under the curve) of each being proportional to its population.  As usual, the data has been adjusted (normed) so that the country’s overall average IQ = 100, with a 15-point standard deviation.  The average IQs for each racial group are indicated in the figure.  At this point we remind ourselves that such basic measures of cognitive ability are embedded characteristics of people and not subject to rapid change through education and/or training.  The importance of such measures are that they reliably predict aggregate abilities to acquire and apply different levels of skill sets.