Rebane's Ruminations

‘The scariest poll …’

‘Freedom?  We don’t need no stinkin’ freedom’.  Anonymous leftwinger

George Rebane

The Pew Research Center released the latest edition of a poll on free speech that they have been conducting for years.  It contains the latest tranche of evidence that corroborates one of the longtime tenets of Rebane Doctrine – a major fraction of Americans are no longer smart enough to maintain our democratic republic.  Not only that, but the level of dumbth in the population is increasing at an alarming rate.  (more here, H/T to reader)

Over the last five years Pew has posed this poll three times.  “In 2018, Democrats supported free speech by a 57-40 margin, almost identical to the Republican view. They now oppose it by 70-28, a massive shift over the last five years, while Republican views have not changed.”

As RR has held for years, most Dems are true believers in big government that they entrust with managing their (and our) lives with an unending and ever-growing tsunami of regulations, and with the handling of an ever-greater fraction of your finances.  And in recent years they have been convinced by their lamestream media and neo-Marxist politicians that the whole effort to convince new ideological recruits and maintain existing membership is by convincing everyone that allowing people to hear “misinformation” in the public square is inimical to American democracy.  Moreover, those (Republicans) who continue to maintain and support the First Amendment are evil along every social dimension – white supremacists, racists, homophobes, inequitable, non-inclusive, rejecting diversity, … .

Today our progressives and woke contingents are actively working to break down our country from the inside.  As recently as 20 years ago these lame brains were overwhelmingly to be found in our ‘deep state’ bureaucracies and academe.  Now the infection has spread to and runs rampant in K-12 public education, corporatist business enterprises, and the military. 

The bottom line is that most Americans today would be sanguine living in a society where all permitted public speech must first be vetted by a newly established Ministry of Truth and its local offices spread across the land.

Scattershots – 5feb23 (updated 12feb23)

George Rebane

Chinese spy balloon.  One of the more intriguing and scary test purposes for the balloon could easily have been to see how easy it would be to float EMP nuclear devices over the American mainland.  The published altitude range for effective EMP explosions is about 60K-80Kft.  Such considerations make it even more important to immediately shoot down these incursions as soon as they enter US air space into payload recoverable territory.  I suppose then if an EMP device or test package was found, it could be considered an act of war.  But in such a contingency things would immediately get very complicated with the introduction of a lot of other factors.  The news about today’s underwater recovery results are guaranteed to be lies and propaganda; we should not tell the Chicoms what we found or didn’t.

[7feb23 update]  Microsoft to integrate ChatGPT into Bing in today’s announcement (here).  ChatGPT is the ‘complete natural language’ response system that represents the latest quantum leap in advanced deep learning systems and has already demonstrated how the new generation of smart machines will converse with users on a rapidly expanding base of human knowledge.  My son-in-law who does advanced AI research at Microsoft Research tells me to “stay tuned, this could be history in the making.”

[12feb23 update]  From post-SOTUS media reports, Democrats finally admit that Republicans have a totally opposite direction they want to take the country, and that neither side believes in each other’s facts.  Given such terminal incongruity, what could then be the purpose of pursuing common goals for returning to or going forward to seek an unhappy state of America’s reunification.  Isn’t it past time to start negotiating a peaceful Great Divide?

Enduring Impact of Imported Cultures

George Rebane

As we anticipate the horrendous impact of abandoning Title 42 for managing the current tsunami of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones comes out with The Culture Transplant (2022), a major essay on the enduring impact of cultures brought in by America’s immigrants.  In the book review (here) we read –

… cultural traits can persist for generations after migrants arrive in a new country. Newcomers don’t simply assimilate to their new homes; as the book’s subtitle puts it, they “make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left.” It’s a thesis that is at once highly provocative and a restatement of common sense: Poorly chosen immigrants can undermine a country’s success; cultures don’t disappear when people move from place to place.

A point long made in these pages, the presentation of this research underlines the damage, not only possible, but to be anticipated from the hordes of millions of illegals that have been released with no effective controls into all corners of our land.  More ominously –

… even after four generations in the U.S., immigrants continue to hold attitudes toward trust that are significantly influenced by their home countries. On a host of other matters, such as family, abortion and the role of government, fourth-generation immigrants on average converge only about 60% of the way to the national norm. “Overall,” Mr. Jones contends, “that low level of conformity is a bad sign, unless you think most immigrants come from countries with better political attitudes than Americans currently have.”

The bottom line is that immigrants from bad and backward countries don’t leave their cultures behind.  They continue to embrace and practice them here, especially when they gather in ethnically homogenous enclaves.  The resulting disunity impedes the falsely touted assimilation, and gives lie to the progressives’ chant that ‘Our diversity is our strength.’  In this shibboleth Jones writes “you’re hearing the cultural equivalent of second marriages: a triumph of hope over experience.”  As demonstrated over the centuries, first and foremost, people like to live with their own kind, no matter where they locate.

In this work Prof Jones has introduced a migration-adjusted SAT (state, agriculture, technology) score which usefully predicts the assimilation attributes of our immigrant ethnicities – e.g. predicts more than 60% of modern day income differences between the groups as derived from their countries of origin.  It turns out that the technology component of SAT is the most impactive.  Correlating with their home countries -

Technology also seems to be the best long-run predictor of government quality. So the main story seems to be about technological development persisting over time, and of people bringing their technological capabilities to new places. 

Continuing to allow uncontrolled entry of millions of illegals portends a cultural and existential disaster for America – “These concerns are immediate and tangible, not preoccupied with the effect of immigration generations from now. To address some of the more compelling worries, we might start placing greater emphasis on skills, perhaps implementing a points system, as Australia, Canada and the U.K. do, to grade potential immigrants.”

But first and foremost, to implement any of these factors into an immigration policy that sustains America, we have to secure our borders.  This is also understood by our neo-Marxist and anti-American elites who will fight tooth and nail to maintain our borders in their current dysfunctional state that promotes, nay invites, the uncontrolled invasion by millions of illegals who will implant their own counter-cultures in this fair land.

The Kennan/Byrnes Foreign Policy Conundrum

George Rebane

I recently finished reading a most fascinating and informative account of the international geo-strategic process of decision making by the Allies during WW2.  The work titled Speaking Frankly (1947) by James F. Byrnes (here), diplomat, jurist, and politician extraordinaire, was a command performance and hit the top of the charts when it was published in October 1947.  (In these pages we first met Byrnes in ‘America’s Foreign Policy’)

Byrnes concludes his ‘diplomatic chronology’ of the war with new challenges for making and keeping the peace after hostilities ended in 1945.  The problem was the USSR.  Dealing with them had been difficult during the war since they were ousted from the Axis powers by Hitler’s double-cross in 1941, after which they quickly became the second (some say ‘first’) front of the Allies against the Nazi war machine.

Byrnes concludes his considerable tome with the Book IV chapters ‘Building a People’s Foreign Policy’, ‘Control of Atomic Energy’, ‘What Are the Russians After?’, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’.  It is the last two chapters that concern us.

But before we consider these, let’s turn to George F. Kennan (here), accomplished and enigmatic diplomat with some outrageous social views.   More importantly, he was our Russia expert, fluent in Russian, who during the war in 1944 was made ‘deputy chief of mission’ in Moscow under ambassador Averill Harriman.  During this service Kennan developed a detailed and highly accurate understanding of the USSR, Stalin, and the international communist movement.  He was the vociferous critic of America’s foreign policy who launched his post-war career with the now famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946) which he sent to President Truman through his then SecState boss James Byrnes.

So here comes the conundrum.  Byrnes, who experienced the long, detailed, and frustrating negotiations with the Russians firsthand during and after the war, concluded that Soviet leaders were a bunch of totalitarian lying sonsabitches who could not be trusted to carry out the provisions of any treaty that they finally deigned to sign.  Time and again he watched the Soviets undermine duly elected/established post-war, east European governments, and bring them under communist regimes in preparation for ultimate membership in the USSR’s expanding coterie of soviet republics and compliant client states when the Iron Curtain finally dropped in the spring of 1948.

Yet Byrnes kept trying to wring out of the Soviets the remaining and still missing peace treaties with major governments like Germany and Italy, which were now occupied countries under martial law administered within the framework of the existing armistices that each signed after the guns were silenced.  Truth be told, an overarching reason for Byrnes continuing to treat the USSR honorably was to employ and promote the functions of the then nascent United Nations, the institution in which many in the free world had faith in becoming the successful international peacekeeper.

Right vs Left – what distinguishes us (updated 17jun22)

George Rebane

Of the several correspondences in which I am currently active, one is on the perennial topic of the Great Divide and America’s irredeemable polarization.  In these correspondences with two of my left-leaning intellectual friends, we are attempting to create a mutually acceptable inventory of ideological belief tenets.  These would form a starting point for another attempt at finding any common ground to support dialogue from which some form of rapprochement could result.  This is a work-in-process in which I think some of our readers might be interested, and to which they could contribute their own thoughts toward progress in this enlarged conversation.

I attach the following pdfs for your critical comments and perhaps even reading pleasure.  The first piece - 'Versions of Fundamental Transforms (2020) - serves as background, and the second piece - 'Right/Left Belief Inventory' (v14jun22) - is a WIP currently in discussion with my correspondents.  Notwithstanding general interest, I do want to include these in the RR archive.

Download VersFundTransforms

Download BeliefInventory_220614

[17jun22 update]  A longtime RR reader posted the link to an important or possibly a milestone essay – ‘Heading Toward the Abyss’ - by David Horowitz on the nature of the Left, and particularly the Democratic Party, with which America is contending today for its survival.  The points that Horowitz expands on are familiar to RR readers.  I highlight the essay in this update so that it does not get lost in the comment stream below.  H/T to Mr Tozer.

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

[This post also appears here in the op-ed pages of 14jun22 Union.]

George Rebane

In his 10jun22 ‘Read it yourself – ‘A well-regulated militia’’ Union columnist Taylor Carey seems focused only on the interpretation of the nation’s leftwing anti-gunners.  The Left has always held that the Founders' intention for the Second Amendment was that members of the local militias were to be unarmed until their government decided to assemble them and issue guns from the local armory.  That was and is the only mode of regulation that makes sense to the big government, command/control progressive.

Private possession and ownership of guns is not necessary in a well-regulated and organized collective because the government will fulfill all functions of internal security and external defense, arming trained citizens to augment the standing LE and military only as and when the leadership determines that the need arises.  Being at the mercy of armed criminals or the insane until, or if, LE arrives is just the price people must pay to live in a civilized society.  Your personal safety is the responsibility of the collective, and your home is definitely not YOUR castle.

And perish the thought that either the state or its LE cadres go rogue.  In the socialist ideology there is no provision for such an eventuality, no matter the abundant historical evidence to the contrary.  A centralized state under the leadership and administration of educated elites dedicated to the proposition of their interpretation of common good, that benefits everyone equitably, there is no provision for such roguish contingencies – by definition, the state is always fair and just, and as such, brooks no challenge to its power to organize and administer society.  Revolt and revolution by an armed populace in the embrace of a “rabidly corrosive cult of individuality” is “inimical” to such governments that deliver and sustain “ordered liberty” according to Mr Carey.

Secret Sauce for a New World Order

George Rebane

Rebane Doctrine: Stingers and Javelins are the secret sauce of the new world order.  What’s happening in Ukraine is proof of what we should be doing for Taiwan – shipping them vast quantities of Javelins and Stingers to enable them to thwart a D-day-like invasion by Red China on their shores.  These weapons demonstrate that the old days of using massive slowly moving war machines no longer gives advantage to the aggressor against highly mobile light cavalry units armed with Stingers and Javelins.  A wise administration would have already started supplying Taiwan with large quantities of sub-rosa shipments of these weapons, and then informing Beijing, again sub-rosa, of that accomplishment so that no face needs be lost in the international forum.  Download video here - Download VIDEO-2022-04-23-22-14-35

The same can be said for highly mobile, relatively inexpensive shore-to-ship missiles that will quickly reduce both carrier strike groups and amphibious assault groups to smoldering wrecks.  The whole scenario of how large nations project power will have to be rethought.  And we haven't even started talking about hypersonics yet.  The only foreseeable defense for such missile attacks is with directed-energy weapons which are not yet operational, and for which the sensor and fire control problems have yet to be solved.

And now we are getting back-channel news (reported here by The Blaze) that intelligence sources state Chinese preparations for an imminent Taiwan invasion are underway.

A Nation to Transcend Stupid?

George Rebane

The Atlantic usually contains ideas that are antithetical to the perspectives with which I interpret what happens in the world.  A longtime and dear friend, who leans a bit to my left, forwarded to me an essay with which he concurs “with 90% of the points made in this article (regardless of the source!)”  After reading it, I must admit to a similar concordance.  The piece – ‘WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID’ – by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and NYU Professor of Ethical Leadership (here).

Dr Haidt is described variously as someone who “has attracted both support and criticism for his critique of the current state of universities and his interpretation of progressive values. He has been named one of the ‘top global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the ‘top world thinkers’ by Prospect magazine. He is among the most cited researchers in political and moral psychology, and is considered among the top 25 most influential living psychologists.”

In the cited essay, Haidt uses the Tower of Babel metaphor to interpret what has happened to America in the last two decades as “the fractured country we now inhabit.”  Like many of us, he sees that “something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”  Regular RR readers will recognize these longstanding themes in these pages.

The author goes on to outline “the rise of the modern Tower” in concert with the rise of the smartphone, the internet and its extremely influential social networks which now unite the various thoughts and ideas of several billion people.  For Haidt “the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the Occupy movement. … For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.”  Then things started going downhill as “humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.”

The problem, as dissected by Haidt, began as social media weakened “at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”  He then goes on to detail how the Left has dominated the various institutions, specifically the media and academe.  He abets this argument by citing James Madison in Federalist #10 on “the innate human proclivity toward ‘faction’, by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”  

But since then, thanks much to social media, the Tower has fallen and the factions no longer communicate.  The hows and whys of the fall are of some considerable interest to those of us who claim to pay attention.  He even details how closed groups of “jerks” dominate discussions and debates on the various blogs.  I won’t go on giving you clips of Haidt’s expansion of that very recent and ongoing history.  Suffice it to say that Haidt also agrees that we are at least two distinct countries – with appropriately differentiated cultures, languages, histories, values, … - sharing a common border.

What struck me as a significant shortcoming in Dr Haidt’s contemporary ontology is his apparent ignorance (neglect?) of some significant findings by sociologists that dovetail with teachings from the systems sciences.  He argues that ‘Democracy after Babel’ will require a ‘redesign of democracy’ that includes reforms in three categorical areas – “three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”

When expanding on these areas, it is not clear at all that Haidt’s recommendations do not require the enlargement of our already encompassing government(s).  How else would democratic institutions be “hardened”, social media “reformed”, and the “next generation prepared” for a more compliant and compatible “democratic citizenship”?  What Haidt misses is the underlying truth that for large complex systems to remain viable, they need to be decentralized – they need to be based on a structure of distributed control and knowledge.  In this universe, nature does not support large systems that are centrally comprehended and controlled.  On Earth, the evidence for this abounds when we open our eyes and understand what we see in the natural world.

The alternative approach to successful societies in the post-Babel era, missed by Haidt, is to abandon globalism and work to enlarge the community of sovereign nation-states to have members with much smaller and more culturally cohesive populations.  I have lost track, but somewhere in the archives of such sociological studies are solutions that identify ideal national populations to be in the five to ten million range, and comprise of jurisdictional units that are not larger than 50,000.  This kind of global structure of independent states and free peoples would promote specialization, trade, and the ready transfer of ‘best practices’, as one people sees how another people have a better solution for a common problem.

What is Faith?

So, what is faith?  “Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true. — Tom Robbins, author.  Think about it: If the “something” you believe in is actually provably true, you wouldn’t need faith.”  So writes Tom Durkin in the 14apr22 Union.  From this I can’t really tell if here we have the misguided quoting the more misguided.  Robbins is clearly off the rails.  Belief in a tenet (proposition) is the assessment of its verity which can measurably vary from 0 (certainly FALSE) to 1 (certainly TRUE), where either extreme will reject falsifiability (i.e. new evidence) in the mind of the believer.

Robbins definition is cognitively impossible (i.e. insane).  However, in our daily round we all operate heavily on the basis of faith, since many/most(?) of the things in our knowledge base we hold to be true are really based on the fidelity of the intermediaries who brought that knowledge to us.  By experience or experiment we have confirmed a fairly small share of our knowledge base.  Technology today allows us to reason correctly in such unreliable environments through the use of belief networks, whether applied formally or informally.  Beliefs between 0 and 1 are falsifiable by the incorporation of new evidence.  So, in the correct common usage of ‘faith’, we understand it to consist of beliefs which cannot be falsified.

And as we conclude this reflection, we must always remember that beliefs are subjective, and therefore vary in their measure of verity from person to person (depending on the series of belief networks they have solved in traveling their particular world line).  What to one individual may be compelling evidence to support/reject a tenet, may not be at all acceptable to another.  Thus endeth the epistle for today.

‘Poking the Bear’!?

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialist Economics

George Rebane

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

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

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

What is truth?

George Rebane

Contrary to common wisdom, in addition to your opinions you can also have your own facts, history, science, logic, sense of justice, fairness, equity, evil, beauty, and, of course, truth.  Rebane Doctrine

Two friends of ours tackled the notion of ‘truth’ in recent issues of The Union.  Jan Tannarome (‘Facts vs Beliefs’) and Terry McLaughlin (‘What is truth, exactly?’) in which each argued the existence of propositions that are universally and unambiguously assessed as being true.  Ms Tannarome leans to the left, and Ms McLaughlin is a conservative.

Tannarome harbors the pejorative view of ‘belief’ as being inimical to a kind and just society.  She writes, “And no matter who is using belief as a weapon or as a shield, this is unforgivable. It is unforgivable on a scale of such magnitude that I can’t think of anything worse at this juncture in our human evolution. I will borrow a phrase from a frequent contributor to this newspaper’s pages and say that using belief as a shield or a weapon is the mother dog of all political mischief, all social and cultural malfeasance, all justification for hatred and its many offspring.”

McLaughlin, while never actually defining ‘absolute truth’, believes it to exist and goes through a litany of misguided notions about truth ranging from relativism, through pluralism, to beliefs.  She writes, “Why is it important to embrace the concept of absolute truth? Because life has consequences for being wrong. … Today, many people seem to fear publicly and honestly stating facts and truth. … If we wish to heal the present divides within our country, our neighborhoods, even our families, we must be willing to share in truthful and honest discourse.”

From my perch (see also my credo) I join with those who have a more precise and, perhaps, technical understanding and definition of belief.  The commonly accepted definition of ‘belief’ is a faith-based proposition.  (Here a proposition is a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or assessment.)  As such, a belief requires no reasonable basis.

A more nuanced, and technically correct definition, holds that there are two kinds of beliefs – faith-based and falsifiable.  In that sense a person’s worldview or ontology consists of a set of propositions or beliefs which may all be falsifiable or also include some that are faith-based and beyond the pale of reason.  Over the years RR readers who have followed my sermons on Bayesian inference and non-monotonic reasoning know that I and most people of my ilk and background embrace an ontology that consists wholly of potentially falsifiable beliefs.

For the more technical/philosophical reader, the Bayesian measure of verity of a proposition is its probability of being verifiably true.  This measure ranges between zero (impossible proposition) and one (axiomatically true).  Verity measures between zero and one may be updated (by Bayes theorem) with the introduction of new evidence.  Faith-based verity measures at zero and one are immune to new evidence and the ministrations of Bayes.  (more here, here, and here)

Unfortunately, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is belief in the mind (heart?) of the believer.  The pithy shibboleth at the top summarizes the realworld basis for our nation’s polarization, and its negligible prospects for restoring e pluribus unum.  IMHO too many of us paint our views of the world with faith-based colors.  Such people believe in absolute truths beyond those immediately subject to multi-party verification.

An example of such an absolute truth is the proposition that 2+2=4 which can be immediately verified during an ongoing discourse by everyone present who can count.  Claimed absolute truths that are limited to citations of past third-party verifications are immediately open to contention which cannot be resolved in the moment, and therefore give rise to the above pithy shibboleth.  And it is in the moment, that is ripe for taking decisions, that one must accept or reject available paths forward when multiple contending truths (beliefs) do battle – absolute truths have no place is such arenas.  It was ever thus.

With this understanding one can appreciate why appeals based on Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ fail to unite us.

A better course to resolve disputes would be to admit the pithy shibboleth and focus on discovering common aspects in the differing utilities held by contending factions.  Without such a basis for dispute resolution expect no light, only heat. (more here and here)

The Ukraine War – 19mar22

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody have a workable wishbone Plan B?

From Lakoff to McConnell to Biden

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

Systems Sciences Refute Collectivism

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupidity, against which there is no defense

Fools all who seem it, and half of those who do not.  Gracian #201

George Rebane

Executed anti-Nazi cleric and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer correctly maintained that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”  In America, we overwhelmingly confirm this daily.  Now I admit, sometimes it’s hard to accept this as the better of the two alternatives, but for the most part one can embrace Bonhoeffer’s observation because there are way more stupid people in the country than evil ones.  This has also been a Rebane Doctrine tenet for many years.  (more here)

Democrat politicians and lamestream ‘journalists’ demonstrate this with their audacious and ongoing stream of lies – e.g. the $4T+ BBB cost “will not raise the national debt by one penny.” - they constantly use to convince their cognitively impaired constituents who make up almost half of the country’s voters – without an adequate knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they’ll believe literally anything their favorite information sources spout.

Bonhoeffer went on to say –

Against stupidity we have no defense.  Neither protests nor force can touch it.  Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simple be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can count by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied.  In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive.  For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.

This why so many of today’s conservative and libertarian writers, along with moi, see no common ground across which a trail may be blazed to the unification of our polarized population.  The only solution being a negotiated Great Divide or barricades in the streets.

Extraterrestrials and Religion

George Rebane

Recently the Ignatius Forum held a session on ‘The Future of Space’ at our National Cathedral attended by theologians, government space officials, private sector space entrepreneurs, and academics.  Among the latter was Prof Avi Loeb of Harvard who is also active in SETI and a member of the international SETI group (of which I am a member) administered by the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

While the larger topic was finding ETs, a more focused topic of interest was how we earthlings bring the existence of ETIs into concordance with our notions of God and religion.  Prof Loeb is not a person of faith, but made it clear that “science and religion are not necessarily in conflict, as long as one is careful not to ignore the boundary between physics and meta-physics. … In finding advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, religion might simply reflect advanced science with a twist. Traditional religions described God as the creator of the Universe and life within it. They also suggested that humans were made in the image of God. But these notions are not necessarily in contradiction with science. A sufficiently advanced scientific civilization might be able to create synthetic life in its laboratories; in fact, some of our terrestrial laboratories almost reached that threshold. And with a good understanding of how to unify quantum-mechanics and gravity, an advanced scientific civilization could potentially create a baby universe in its laboratories. Therefore, an advanced scientific civilization might be a good approximation to God.” (more here with links to the forum)

Long time readers will recognize this as a position much discussed over the years in these pages, especially as it relates to my position as a copernican viz science.  In that, Loeb and many other scientists are kindred spirits.  What impressed me is the Harvard astro-physicist’s stance on the perspective humanity should assume when it considers cosmic matters - these being humility, modesty, and calmness.  In the greater scheme of things we are not important enough about which to make a great fuss.  I have dwelled on the quantitative measures of our ordinary insignificance in my SETI paper (here) among other postings.

In the final analysis of integrating religion, science, and an intelligent creator, I find nothing awkward or contrary in my particular understanding of Christianity as a faith compatible with civilizations across the universe.  It is a particularly comforting belief system to embrace as we seek to understand the Upanishad’s ‘Tat tvam asi!’

Postscript – ‘Who am I?’ is a question often heard from people seeking to find a deeper significance to their existence.  It is the wrong question, and we already know its answer, since ‘who’ seeks to identify one as a particular member of a known set.  ‘Tat tvam asi!’ points to the much deeper question of ‘What am I?’, the question which seeks to know the essence of the set itself.

The Great Divide – America’s Cultural Split

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson continues the ongoing study of how America is coming apart.  In ‘Is America Repeating the Cultural Split Between Rome and the Byzantine Empire?’ VDH lays out the parallels and answers the question in the affirmative.

When the Roman Empire split into its western part centered on Rome, and its eastern part centered on Constantinople, the two halves took distinctly different approaches to governing their territories, with catastrophic results for Rome.  Rome’s hedonistic practices and passive acceptance of a “polyglot and often fractious” tribal cultures and religions (including versions of Christianity) soon focused people on the regional me and mine that came to vie with the you and yours.  By 600AD the disintegration that started around 450AD was complete.

This was not the case in the east – “the glue that held the East together against centuries of foreign enemies was the revered idea of an ancient and uncompromising Hellenism—the preservation of a common, holistic Greek language, religion, culture, and history.”  The Byzantine Empire, as it then became known, held together for a thousand years after Rome, finally becoming so over-bureaucratized and corrupt that it was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in 1453AD, and Constantinople became today’s Istanbul.

Today we see the definite analogue of such a split in our red/blue America.  Now “millions of Americans yearly self-select, disengage from their political opposites, and make moves based on diverging ideology, culture, politics, religiosity or lack of it, and differing views of the American past.”  Our conservatives are migrating to the interior, leaving both coastal areas to liberals.

This is producing two distinct Americas.  “While red states welcome change, they believe America never had to be perfect to be good. It will always survive, but only if it sticks to its 234-year-old Constitution, stays united by the English language, and assimilates newcomers into an enduring and exceptional American culture.”  The more conservative traditionalists prefer states “where there is usually smaller government, fewer taxes, more religiosity, and unapologetic traditionalists.”  

America’s Left prefers the blue state “bicoastal salad bowl” as their “model for immigration” where “newcomers can retain and reboot their former cultural identities”, and where “religion is less orthodox; atheism and agnosticism are almost the norm. And most of the recent social movements of American feminism, transgenderism, and critical race theory grew out of coastal urbanity and academia.”  Tribalism par excellence.

VDH concludes with – “Our Byzantine interior and Roman coasts are quite differently interpreting their shared American heritage as they increasingly plot radically divergent courses to survive in scary times.  But as in the past, it is far more likely that one state model will prove unsustainable and collapse than it is that either region would ever start a civil war.”  From his mouth to God’s ear.

So here again is the bottom line.  Today a lot of lip service is paid to ‘finding common ground’ and ‘coming together’ and ‘there’s more that unites us than divides us’, etc.  But for any of these attempts at dialogue to bear fruit, we must first and foremost recognize the gorilla in the room – the “radically divergent courses” that have been plotted and embraced by the tens of millions of polarized Americans which give rise to the Great Divide.  If these radically divergent courses are not resolved first, the rest will only continue the rehash of hot air.

Scattershots – 28sep21 (updated 30sep21)

George Rebane

In the aggregate and hands down, California continues to have the most ignorant cohort of voters in the Union.  Rebane Doctrine

This tenet of Rebane Doctrine has stood the test of time and today continues to express itself at every opportunity.  No one can point to any other state that has been done in so thoroughly by its voting residents (citizens?) over the years as has the once Golden State.  To make any kind of reasonable comparison, you also have to consider the tremendous heights from which our state has fallen.  When I was a young’un California had achieved the pinnacle in about every attribute that civilized humans attach to a desirable place in which to put down roots, raise their families, and build productive communities for their progeny.  And then came the socialist takers, generation after generation they have infected every institution that served as the pillars of this fair land.  Now they virulently infect every nook and cranny to guarantee that any possible road back has already been scorched beyond hope; and these same from here and other similarly afflicted states are looking to infest the remaining regions of the heartland yet to be touched by their destructive and rapacious policies and world views,

The above outpouring was again prompted by a couple of op-ed columns and a letter in today’s 28sep21 Union.  One by a regular contributor claiming technical credentials who nevertheless cannot parse not being against wearing masks, while also being against mandates to require wearing them.  For him, this and a number of other concepts are simply a cognitive bridge too far.  Then we have another contribution by an indefatigable lady liberal who continues to genuflect to science at a distance from which it is unrecognizable to her.  An example will suffice – “Our forests are burning because we are in the throes of a catastrophic warming of the globe caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.”  To such perceptions she adds “extreme weather events” as another unsupportable calamity caused by preventable manmade global warming in which her faith is unwavering.

[29sep21 update]  It’s always a source of bittersweet humor to hear how socialists and proto-socialists wrestle with economic matters.  In fact, it would be 'Comedy Central' if their policies did not muck up the country's economy.  The latest farcical attempts come from PressSec Jen Psaki who assures us that it’s “unfair and absurd” to think that corporations would pass on increased tax expenses to their customers.  This woman has to be among the dumbest on Team Biden, or among the evil in hoping that her audience is equally ignorant to know that all corporate taxes are paid by customers.  And then we have political scientist William Galston of the Brookings Institute who writes a regular WSJ column on economics.  In today’s paper he assures us that “you don’t need a doctorate in economics to understand that when rising demand meets too little supply, the result is inflation.”  Wrong.  To students of economics, the words of Uncle Milton taught us that inflation is strictly a monetary phenomenon, i.e. when there is too much (government printed/borrowed) money chasing too few goods.  A doctorate in economics would have informed our leftwing political scientist that what he described is just the normal dynamism of a capitalistic market explained by the intersection of the demand and supply curves, as most of us learned in Econ 101.

[30sep21 update]  Bread and circuses galore.  Just read about the $300M+ A Round funding for Trading Card Fanatics, Inc, valuing the company at over $10B (see today’s WSJ).  These people are to become the online marketplace and clearing house for all sports trading cards, and a lot of smart money is betting on their success (this is no longer a kids’ activity).  My little fevered brain got all discombobulated about another piece of evidence that our nation’s electorate cum body politic is really more interested in the various ‘bread and circuses’ they are offered to while away time not spent in more productive undertakings.  A friend recently educated me on the growth of sports betting, which is another bird of a feather to such massive diversions now made available to a population that daily understands less about the fundamental transformations going on in Washington and their state houses.  They no longer ‘do politics’, which is a deadly portent for our republic.  And with technology driven systemic unemployment now on the rise, the ratio of takers to makers is already at a dangerous level. 

“Doctors and pharmacies are rapidly signing up patients for Covid-19 booster shots, many with requiring proof of eligibility under standards that federal official set last week.”  These people get spiffed by the big pharmas selling the boosters to the government.  And all this is going on as pharmacists are refusing to fill legitimate prescriptions for other demonstrated but less profitable C19 therapeutics like Ivermectin.  More rampant national insanity, again demonstrating that it is easy to put a dollar value on human lives.

Bumblebrain’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency (i.e. our economy) is a devout and declared communist.  Cornell law professor Dr Saure Omarova has published “radical ideas (that) might make even Bernie Sanders blush.”  A 1989 graduate of Moscow State University, she is truly one of Lenin’s lasses who unabashedly and favorably compares USSR’s economy and economics to that of the US and the West.  Even SecTreas Yellen, under whom Omarova would work, is not happy with the president’s latest nomination.  It is hard to witness day after day how this Oval Office idiot can do nothing right.  (more here and here)

Green energy insanity is rampant across the land.  The lamestream’s reports gush with news of green energy taking over all of electricity generation and even transportation and much of manufacturing by 2040.  The reality is markedly different as calculated by the International Energy Agency and reported (here) by noted environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Convention.  Green electricity is extremely expensive (ask Europeans and Californians) and requires massive back-up generation from fossil fuels.  The attempted road to green electricity guarantees only that 1) our energy bills will skyrocket, 2) third world power blackouts will become the norm, and 3) the whole effort will have no discernible impact whatsoever on climate change which the true believers and central planners propagandize as preventable manmade global warming.

Afghanistan – Tell us the truth instead (updated 4sep21)

George Rebane

’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways.  These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes.  But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality.  Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run?  Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.

But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control.  You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis.  This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations.  America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’  I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again.  But it all starts with telling us the truth.

[4sep21 update]  Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste.  In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity.  So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry.  No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan.  At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.

So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban.  Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits.  And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … .  Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits.  (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)

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.

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.

America the Unnatural

George Rebane

[This essay kicks off Independence Day week at Casa Rebane.  Jo Ann and I installed our annual display of bunting and a large Old Glory on our porch railing, which always brings good words from our neighbors.  Perhaps you too would consider giving more than a nod to a tradition that has bound us over the centuries.

18sep21 update - an edited version of this essay was published in the 18sep21 print edition of The Union, and the submitted version was also posted in the newspaper's online edition (here).]

America is an exceptional country and an historical social experiment in more ways than I can count.  It is also an ongoing test of how humans can live and profit by behaving unnaturally toward each other.  That is by becoming sanguine in the practice of unnatural behaviors which go against the millions of years of evolution through which our progenitors and species survived.

Anthropologists and paleo-sociologists have long known and written about how primitive societies formed, fought, and sometimes flourished.  The pervasive watchword among all critters, including hominids, has been ‘Stick to your own kind’ (as even Maria was advised in ‘West Side Story’).  The fundamental behavior that supported survival and progeny was to be with and trust only those whose behavior you could reliably predict.  To this day, we distance ourselves (including denying their access to us) from people in our midst whose behavior we cannot predict.  This is the very natural ‘hardwired instinct’ with which all critters of some intelligence that includes us are born.  Even infants begin expressing it at a very early age.