Rebane's Ruminations

America Askew – 14nov19

George Rebane

The 14nov19 Union reports (here) that an unlicensed illegal alien, Joaquin Lopez Pinto, a Honduran national, killed his passenger on Hwy 49 when he ran off the road and hit a tree.  For that he was charged with a misdemeanor vehicular homicide and driving without a license, and given a suspended sentence with two years’ probation.  We are also assured by DA Chris Walsh that “this conviction won’t affect his immigration status” since the “low-level offense would not trigger the interest of federal immigration officials.”

To at least half of Americans such cases illustrate the corruption of our judicial systems at all jurisdictional levels.  We are aghast that the sumbich was not taken into custody and deported back to Honduras.  But the other half will see nothing wrong with such a response to multiple criminal behaviors by people who don't belong here.  And that is also the half which denies that such illegal aliens regularly give rise to undetected voter fraud.  Why?  Because they point out that such voter fraud no longer is investigated or prosecuted in our land – therefore it doesn’t exist.

To register and vote in California, all you need for ID is a street address and a driver’s license, SS number, or state ID, none of the acquisition of which require proof of citizenship that is accepted on the basis of just a personal attestation.  The entire schema has been and continues as a blatant invitation to augment Democrat vote counts during elections.  And that is why it is only the leftwingers – progressives, liberals, Democrats, … - who vehemently oppose any effective procedures to vet a person’s bona fides as a legitimate franchised voter.  And the icing on this putrid public policy is that implementing any such verification procedures will somehow inhibit the participation of minorities in our elections.

The Silence of Socialists

George Rebane

This morning’s cartoon in the 12nov19 Union (filched below) was a heartening surprise.  Our leftwing political cartoonist Bob Crabb is possibly the first from his political pole to recognize the Great California Exodus frequently covered here and recognized nationally.  The state’s socialists, echoed by our local progressives, are in terminal denial that California is losing its wealth creators and attracting the country’s transfer payment dependents and illegals to keep the population growing.

This reminded me of the many other issues about which our Left does not want their voices heard – for the simple reason that they have nothing reasonable to say and their usual apologetics to their cognitively challenged core constituents sound utterly foolish in the public forum.

This country-wide sound of silence starts at the national level where congressional Democrats have totally given up legislating and are focused solely on removing a president they know they cannot defeat at the polls; most certainly not with anyone still riding in their clown car of current candidates.  Even their own brain trust has let it be known that they are seriously looking for a Plan B, someone who will have at least a snowball’s chance in hell come next November should their almost four-year effort to impeach fail.

California is already a lost cause.  Its decades of one-party rule has left one third of its population without a voice as its socialists continue to tax, price, and regulate out the last vestiges of individual effort, initiative, and enterprise.  The message from the Sacramento socialists continues to be ‘my way or the highway’.  And millions of productive Californians respond by choosing the highway as each additional and more insane than the last diktat issues from the statehouse.  Our lefties have nothing to say about that in the public debate, save that the more looney ones deny that it is happening.

On the national scene the Democrats present us with a list of freebies designed for those legions who can’t or won’t.  No one with a functioning intellect knows how to contend with or pay for the proposed Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Free College, Open Borders, Wealth Taxes, Welfare for Illegal Aliens, … .  These pages witness the response of the national Left – none want to address these issues, and instead focus only on what they consider ‘evidence’ for impeachment and President Trump’s standings in the most recent polls.

For years I have pointed out in my commentaries policy questions and principles to which our leftwing readers will not respond, and instead either ignore or side-step the relevant issue.  A textbook example of this can be found in the response from the Left to my recent commentary on income inequality. (here)

Debating relevant and substantive issues for the country has never been a strong suit of our progressive Left.  They cannot understand, let alone offer, a cogent structure of the relationships of influences and causes which impact the outcomes of a public policy.  Not being able to go deeper, they simply respond by repetition of a strong opening assertion and expect that to carry the day.  This is akin to their concept of social justice and justice in general, where widely and frequently trumpeted allegations are taken as proxies in good standing for evidence.  When we compare the national experience of our socialists’ sound of silence with what history records that has been experienced in other lands under collectivist assault, then we find that it was ever thus.

Scattershots – 3nov19 (updated 6nov19)

George Rebane

Our increasingly dysfunctional school system makes itself felt every time any of us uses a text editor such as MS Word, or one embedded in some app such as the TypePad comment box.  The programmers who write the code that edits what you type are really drawn from a class of dimwits who are not very familiar with the English lexicon, contemporary American usage, spelling, and most certainly grammar.  And yet they blithely generate code that, for example, will take an obvious usage of a plural and make it into an erroneous singular possessive.  What’s really astounding about the de minimis qualifications of these turkeys (most certainly all of them wet behind the ears) is that they live in the 21^st century where our technology driven language continually morphs into novel word forms, yet their software continues to reject anything new that the writer seeks to use or compose, and instead imposes a garden variety proximity algo which converts the desired string into something out of a 20-year-old Webster’s dictionary.

The recent lackluster GDP growth numbers are now trumpeted by Democrats as something, anything to use against the stellar performance of the economy since Trump took office.  Their attempt to convince their constituents (who don’t even know the three branches of government) and fellow hangers on that such GDP growth is the important and impactive number that tells the real tale.  What they completely miss is that Main Street’s conception of the economy is formed of much more pragmatic data that people can experience where they live, shop, and work.  And there they see the real picture composed of record low unemployment, especially for minorities.  They see more open jobs wanting workers, they experience steadily rising wages, continuing low inflation and interest rates for their mortgages and debt, and enjoy store shelves filled with goods that they can afford.  They understand why consumer confidence numbers are so high because they are living daily in that sector of commerce.  And then they have to put that together with an editorializing ‘news’ reporter on some lamestream outlet telling them that Trump ‘lied’ when he promised them 3% GDP growth.  What all these TDS pundits don’t understand is that to the man-in-the-street GDP is at best just a confusing proxy for an economy, one that never trumps direct experience.

The Great Divide is both dunned and promoted by the Democrat brain trust.  They cannot abide the thought of separating themselves from the cash they drain from the country’s middle class, small businesses, retirees, and the wealthy who would abandon them in a heartbeat were life possible under an alternative form of governance than the fundamentally transformed America now promised by our Left’s proto-communists.  And yet the double-dummies continue to pursue a transparently partisan inquisition to overturn the 2016 election.  Even the November issue of the leftwing The Atlantic prominently laments that ‘Americans Hate One Another. Impeachment Isn’t Helping’, wherein they report – “According to a growing body of political-science research, Americans largely no longer feel a shared sense of national identity. Democrats and Republicans see their political opponents as enemies with totally incomprehensible beliefs and lifestyles. On impeachment, members of the two parties see things radically differently, not just because they have dissimilar political opinions, but because they have entirely divergent views on how to approach life. The vicious impeachment fight ahead may further exacerbate polarization in America, leaving Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between feeling even more suspicious of one another.” (emphases mine)  And the local leftwing loonies continue to believe that serious consideration of a Great Divide was invented in these foothills and remains a mental masturbation for some solitary and senile seniors.  (and more here)

[4nov19 update] Big tech companies in the Bay Area subsidizing housing is breathlessly reported by some liberals as vindication of capitalism transforming into altruistic collectivism – a long-held dream by all socialists.  I addressed one of our local breathless types in the last Sandbox with this - What some light (non?) thinkers miss is that CA’s state govts have put big tech’s tit in a wringer with its no growth and anti-housing policies so that the employees they need no longer have affordable housing available to them within commuting distance. So their PlanB is to pay such employees astronomical wages, or attempt the alternative of subsidizing their housing costs. None of this is altruistic or intended to alleviate the state’s mid-class housing shortage or provide homes for the homeless. Lefties, desperate to find any salutary evidence for socialist governance, will grasp at any straws, no matter how fantastic, to sustain their perpetually absurd narrative.

More homeowners are staying put longer.  This is the big finding from looking at the country’s real estate inventory numbers (here and google ‘homeowners stay put’).  Given the general shortage of housing in many states – on steroids in CA – this creates a problem for new home buyers, especially the middle-class folks trying to locate near their jobs.  Even though mortgage rates are low, the appreciation of house prices in a demand driven market makes the tax bite huge for sellers seeking to upsize for growing families or downsize for empty-nesters.  So people are staying closer to 20 years in their homes, where ten years ago their average stay in a house was about 10 years – hence, slower sales and a depressed housing market.  And all this is created by your state and local governments with their anti-development laws and regs as the economy is booming with jobs, wage growth, and consumer confidence at their highs.

‘Government is the problem’ has been a constant message in these pages since the launch of RR in 2007.  The examples provided by me and our right-leaning commenters over the years are legion and a matter of record – and, as seen above and below, they continue pouring in.  A more precise form of this truth is that ‘Upon closer examination, almost every one of society’s problems can be traced back to poor public policies adopted, implemented, and enforced by large self-serving, disconnected governments and their incompetent bureaucracies.’  In view of this history, today I am advancing ‘Government is the problem’ to axiomatic status in the Rebane Doctrine.  Recall that in reasoned apologetics an axiom is a statement of self-evident truth that requires no further proof in the logical development of an argument.

Sen Warren and her multifarious ‘plans’ illustrate a problem with ‘self-evident truths’, and nowhere more visibly than in her plan to nationalize America’s healthcare industry.  It is clear to me and mine that we share dismally few self-evident truths in common with her and hers.  Over the last days more and more people are taking a closer look at what her ‘Medicare for All’ proposal entails.  And an alarming number of people from both parties today conclude that the woman is either delusional or extremely ignorant about the ways and means of government operations.  Besides providing little to no realistic basis for paying for the $5T+ annual cost of this monstrosity that would double the federal budget, her ‘free healthcare is a human right’ fantasy would markedly increase the country’s cost of healthcare from what it is today.  And it would immediately bring to bear the EU’s practice of rationing (actually, every government-run health system in the world rations care”), and firmly ensconce ‘death panels’ at all levels in the attempt to contain runaway costs. (more here)

[6nov19 update]  The Big Lie has ALWAYS been the fundamental plank in the platform of collectivists – aka, socialists, communists, and the Democratic Party.  Their eternal goal is to form a comprehensively pervasive leviathan government that directs all human behavior into an amalgam of a compliant society based on Huxley’s Brave New World model.  Realizing that such organization for society is only preferred by those who neither ‘know’ nor ‘can’, they have perfected the Big Lie over the last century since Bolshevism first revealed that it was based on the Big Lie.  Today Democrats are the inheritors of American socialism that maintains socialism’s goal and the Big Lie in its well-oiled public relations and political toolset.  A commenter offers just one more piece of evidence of this in an admonishment by ABC’s Joy Behar for Dems to hide their true political intentions until after they are elected (here).  WSJ’s liberal columnist William Galston in his ‘Elizabeth Warren’s Health-Care Hara-Kiri’ takes Sen Warren to task for prematurely revealing her ‘Medicare for All’ catastrophe.  Note the response to all this from our progressive commenters.

A brief note on the formerly unbelievable level of national dumbth – the evidence just keeps rolling in.  According to current polls, fewer than 20% of Americans state that they do trust the federal government, yet over 50% of them prefer policies that would immensely enlarge it so as to control and provide for more of their lives.  We have known for some decades that our population in the aggregate (>95%) is innumerate.  After two generations of unionized public schooling, we now have daily demonstrations that we are a nation with few if any remaining critical thinking skills.  And this not because our genetically influenced intelligence levels have suddenly dropped, but simply because our government-managed knowledge base about reality continues to shrink.  At this point it’s always proper to cue Thomas Jefferson’s ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Bottom line - the Democrats have a winning strategy.

‘From Racism to Culturism’ (updated 18oct19)

George Rebane

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

For some decades now, ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become a cachet in the Left’s narrative about the sins of the Right when other such appellations fail them.  Few people using such pejoratives can give a coherent definition of these terms, nevertheless they continue to serve a useful purpose to invoke the ire of their lightly read constituents.  Longtime listeners to these commentaries who have visited my blog know that I have a long history of being accused by my leftwing readers as a racist, among other unsavory things.

The nuance that such accusers of those like me miss is that I am a culturist, and not a racist.  Instead, as the years-long archive of my writings show, I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.  Western civilization is united by the formidable intersection of western cultures as practiced in the various countries of what today is known as ‘the west’.  And, absent my making any discriminatory remarks about people based on their DNA or gene set, that makes me and others like me culturists and apologists for culturism.

Yuval Harari, in his chapter ‘From Racism to Culturism’, concurs with and expands on this interpretation in his most recent tome, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2019).  Yuval Noah Harari is a celebrated socio-historian and author of best-selling books on humanity, its history, worldviews, and future portents.  Perhaps some of you have read his Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind (2014) or Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). In the following, the quotes I use come from his ‘21 Lessons …’ published earlier this year.

Totalitarian regimes have always sought to fundamentally transform their nations’ cultures when coming to power.  However, such transformations never succeed.  History shows us this most recently in the recoil of such imposed transformations to their native versions in the liberated Balkans and countries conquered by the former USSR.  The existence of a rich tapestry of cultures around the world has served us well, and their measured and unforced evolution will continue to serve mankind in these tumultuous years of technology paced globalization.

Are some cultures better than others?  Cultural relativists say no, but reality says yes. Harari writes “… few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”  When people judge others of a different culture on the basis of their display of cultural attributes, then that is NOT a racist judgement or racist behavior.  Such assessments are more accurately known as culturist behavior, and the person so disposed is a culturist, not a racist.  A culturist evaluates the relative worth of another culture based on cultural attributes that may be expressed or carried out by anyone of any race, and not on the basis of an individual’s racial make-up.

Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories, in modern times even incorporating DNA and genes as the basis for attributed differences in such things as intelligence and morality.  This has been shown to have little scientific basis.  In Hariri’s words, “Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all of their scientific backing and most of their political respectability—unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

For political reasons, today’s progressives reject this understanding of culturism and continue to accuse culturists of being racists in order to serve their emotive narrative targeting the politically unsophisticated.  Describing another nation as a ‘s-hole country’ is definitely not a racist slur, but instead a slur on the country’s culture.  There is nothing inherent in the people of any country, no matter their racial make-up, that prevents them from practicing a more productive and enlightened culture to benefit their citizens.  In sum, “culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.”

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

[Addendum]  I revisit this distinction between racism and (my) culturism because now we have the left-of-center Yuval Hariri, an internationally respected scholar and author of relevant essays for the intelligent reader, who also concurs with what I have argued in these pages for many years.  Followers of Rebane Doctrine know my penchant for more precise and operational definitions, and may recall how my understanding of racist and racism was presented in ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racism and Racists Revisited’.  The caveat in all this is that with respect to the semantic accuracy of the definitions presented, we are technically all racists if we believe that the racial composition of individuals can now be determined from a detailed examination of their DNA.  To the extent we believe that this technology lets us characterize their aggregated physiological attributes, we are all racists.  But, of course, in the socio-political sense, as Hariri corroborates, that is not true.

Power Outage – from a very scary viewpoint

George Rebane

Mr Cedar Moss declared himself to be one of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in this morning’s (14oct19) Union (here).  There the man actually celebrates the recent power outage and looks forward to a time when these become a regular occurrence in our lives.  For him, “there is something about all this that feels very right”, and he admonishes us to just “get used to it folks.”  Why is this man such an ardent connoisseur of third-world living where regular power outages, among other shortages, are a way of life, and a world from which those who can, will risk life and limb to escape?

Well, it seems that he and his believe that we in the developed countries don’t deserve to live in the “high privileged” first-world, and we should instead, through various self-flagellation practices, retreat from being a developed country, and “get at least a tiny glimpse of what so much of the world deals with everyday.”  As part of our absolution, he wants to “experience some inconvenience” on a regular basis, and advises that we “climb off our high-privileged horses and join the rest of the human race” - that “it is time we got over that one.”  In short, it is a social injustice for any culture to strive to be in the vanguard of showing how human lives can be lifted from the miseries of millennia.  The moss-bound Mosses of the world are totally ignorant of how the development of advanced (mostly western) cultures has aided in lifting all of the more backward cultures from their perpetual penury.

But what actually scares me in reading such calcified counsel from progressives like Cedar Moss, exhorting us to return to yesteryear, is that he is just the visible tip of an iceberg, the much bigger mass of which is there and invisible to the rest of us in our daily round.  Mr Moss represents possibly millions of such ignorant Americans whose lasting influence we only witness and subsequently suffer from on election days, when they elect slates of candidates like we have today in Sacramento.  Or worse, the powerful politicians we may get when we consider our futures under policies promised by the likes of AOC, Warren, and Sanders.  It is the Mosses of our country who may well bring about any of these dreadful dystopias.

‘The Marginal Revolutionaries’

George Rebane

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

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

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

The Varieties of Reason in Another Attempt at Discourse

“Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”  Saul Alinsky in ‘Rules for Radicals’

George Rebane

In the effort to reflect here ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of man’, illuminating the ideas and attitudes of our polarized population is part and parcel of RR posts.  Here we do a little dissection of today’s leftwing vs rightwing thought to illustrate how early 21^st century polarization is progressing.  To wit, we again have on parade in these pages a delicious example of how the liberal mind works – especially in its ability to apply standard garden variety logic to reason.  The comment stream of ‘Ruminations – 26sep19’ is an education in progressive thought and another Exhibit A on the machinations of such minds when they attempt to understand and then address a contended issue.  In this example it all started with commenter J. Barron stating –

It is blatantly obvious that if billionaires can save millions in their taxes from going to the under class, they can invest that money in something else. Jets, hot tubs, young boys . . . it's famously known as trickle up economics. Show us the proof that ain't so. Reagan would not approve.  Posted by: J. Barron | 29 September 2019 at 09:02 PM

To which I made a generic observation on Barron’s attempt to contribute to the resolution of his strong assertion about misspending of tax savings by billionaires.  I observed –

In more tempered and reasonable societies the one making an assertion is required to substantiate it with some supportive evidence. In insane societies it's the asserter who demands that his audience prove his assertion to be false, else it must be taken to be true.  Posted by: George Rebane | 29 September 2019 at 09:53 PM

In such references to ‘insane’ I use the term in its technical sense as in describing approaches and solutions to problems in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and engineering.  This exchange gave rise to an intense discussion thread into which several additional progressives contributed the fruits of their thought.  The careful reader will immediately note that none of them understood my 953pm, or they thought it better for their case to change the subject.  In either case, my critique of Barron’s 902pm was not only not addressed, but it was duly mischaracterized as something completely unsaid – a common liberal tactic displayed in these pages over the years.

Scattershots – 23sep19 (updated 24sep19)

George Rebane

George Boardman again flies his true colors with his Union column ‘Trump’s great economy?  Depends on where you are on the food chain’.  He hits all the Democratic Party talking points, and even elevates the top 20% of Americans into the ‘enemy of the people’ class.  Why?  Because they’re getting the largest dollar benefits from our revived economy.  He ignores the wage gains of the middle class and denigrates the historic benefits to our minorities who now have historically low unemployment rates and are leaving entitlement rolls in record numbers.  The Democrats’ fear is clearly evident in his dour assessment - if the dark-skinned among us are able to leave the Progressive Plantation, then from where will come the votes to elect enough leftwing politicians to control Congress and keep alive the country’s lurch to the left?  For a more sober assessment of the country’s economy, you may peruse articles here, here, and here.

Negro names – Deion, Jamar, Keshawn, Lavaughn, Mashawn, Naeem, Rashon, Salim, Dericia, Kanesha, Lachelle, Moesha, Quisha, Talisha, Temima, … (more here) – are the latest and clearest expression of our African-American population’s desire to differentiate themselves and proudly declare their solidarity with their own kind.  Among other such minority initiatives to separate the races (e.g. segregated clubs, institutions, living quarters, …), such initiatives in race-based discrimination are now celebrated, laudable, and promoted behaviors among all non-white peoples.  Our leftwingers again demonstrate their selective blinders by not being able to connect the dots between such expressions and the general characteristic of humans (and other critters) that have the great propensity to dwell among their ‘own kind’ (shared culture and values) rather than having to be politically incorrect strangers in their own land.  BTW, my use of ‘Negro’ is an intentional button push guaranteed to loosen the latest charges and confirmation by the looney Left of my being a racist.  Here is a more reasoned discussion of the current status on the use of that formerly proper and much-employed label. 

Mark Zuckerberg is busy rebuilding human communities to counter their disintegration due to everything from rampant drug addiction to murderous totalitarian regimes.  At the 22jun17 inaugural Communities Summit he lamented that “for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter.  That’s a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.”  So Mark has been ‘using AI’ to build up new communities that “will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together”, and he’ll “change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.”  What a nice guy to make such a selfless sacrifice with his business.  And while we’re patting him on the back, guess how and where these new communities will be formed?  Hint1 – it won’t involve real estate.  Hint2 – it will be an enormous new bonanza for harvesting data on people’s propensities, inclinations, and fears.  OK, here’s Hint3 – it starts with an ‘F’.

[24sep19 update]  Biden, ‘I never talked to my son about business.’  That bullshit is so far off the rails that it brings up the biggest concern about floating it in our public forum.  The Democrats know that their base and hanger-on constituents are so terminally stupid that they will actually believe that a very political father will not talk to his beloved underachieving son about a business opportunity from which he can make a load of dough for doing nothing save peddle his father’s influence.  That is really a dumb bunch of voters out there who constitute the biggest threat to our republic.  ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson.

On Fox News this afternoon we saw Iran’s President Rouhani eat Chris Wallace’s lunch.  It was an extremely informative interview and it will play very well back in Iran.  Rouhani was calm, erudite, and had more than an answer and a counter to Wallace’s attempts to conduct some sort of an expose on the crap that Iran has been pulling in its 40-year effort to become the mid-east hegemon.  Much to our chagrin, Wallace couldn’t lay a glove on him.  Next time we should send someone on varsity to interview smart and fast-thinking people.

Nancy Pelosi has now given her imprimatur to an “official” impeachment inquiry against President Trump.  The problem is that this only moves the peanut ahead in the above mentioned mini-minds of Democrat constituents.  Such an official inquiry is no different than what has been going on until now.  What she has failed to launch is a ‘formal’ inquiry which constitutionally allows the issuance of subpoenas and the empanelment of the congressional version of a grand jury.  And having over-the-hill John Lewis (D-GA5)) make the announcement in the well of the House lends special flavor to this three-ring circus.

The House Judiciary Committee got all worked up about getting the Ukraine telecon “whistleblower” to testify in the face of the President releasing the transcript of that conversation which was monitored by a dozen people here and in the Ukraine.  The question which no one, especially Nadler, is asking is on what information beyond the transcript did the whistleblower base his “serious and critical” complaint.  If it was nothing beyond his second hand reading of the transcript, then that means serious egg on the collective Democrats’ face.  But no one has said that he had anything beyond what everyone in the intelligence communities already knew.  Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who has consented to the transcript’s release, is going to throw some cold water on this witch hunt during his UN visit and talk with Trump.

Mayor Reinette Senum of Nevada City is a sincere and dedicated worker for the common good.  She wrote a Union column (here) discussing the ways and means of broadband connectivity – especially 5G – for western Nevada County.  Although I’m seldom in sync with Reinette, I consider her a friend and have defended her right to express and promote her initiatives, no matter how far off the rails they seem to me. She wants broadband to come to our community in a “technology-neutral way”.  Now why would anyone want that???  I thought we all want technology to come our way definitely biased to our greater benefit; forego the losers and go with the winner.  She also wants to place our wellbeing in the hands of “independent scientists and well-informed medical professionals” when it comes to local radio frequency transmissions, but not when it comes to global warming, the impact of which is OK to leave in the interpretative hands of bureaucrats and consensus science.  Nevertheless, I credit her with informing us that the California constitution contains the following - “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”  This, of course, is anathema to the A21 (now Agenda 2030) promoting governor and Democrat overwhelmed California legislature daily taking more private property away from Californians.

California’s latest dumb to dumber (updated 14sep19)

George Rebane

The litany of inept, incompetent, ineffective, destructive, and corrupt public policies from Democrat controlled Sacramento just keep cascading over this once golden state.  The latest pair involves the statewide rent control law and the forced reclassification of consultants as employees.

“First California makes homes unaffordable, then it imposes statewide rent control” observes the 12sep19 WSJ.  California’s government imposed housing shortage is now known worldwide.  Over 700,000 wealth producing Californians have left the state since 2010, inevitably to be replaced by welfare recipients (1 in 3 live here) and succored illegals.  Rent control distorts the information which open market prices relay about supply and demand.  Here, as elsewhere, rent control will put a further damper on housing development, induce gratuitous rent increases to the new max (5% plus inflation), and reduce/remove incentives to keep rental properties properly maintained.  Today “the upshot is that an ‘affordable’ housing unit in California costs $332,000 to build and nearly $600,000 in San Francisco, according to state budget figures. Developers can’t turn a profit on low- and middle-income homes despite abundant federal and state subsidies.”

Consultants (I used to be one in my career) form a valuable component of the state’s workforce, especially when it comes to starting and expanding businesses.  Consultants quickly bring valuable expertise at reasonable cost to businesses when the need for their specialized knowledge may be for a short term and/or when the future is too uncertain to commit to a premature hiring decision.  Consultants usually have more than one concurrent client, and that lets them and the hiring company only use as much of the consultant’s hours as is necessary to do their special work.  All these advantages go out the window when the new law (now AB5) imposes draconian conditions on who may or may not be called and hired as a consultant.  The law is one more confirmation of Sacramento’s idiocy regarding business development and operations, and also of its desperation for additional revenues – employees get taxed more - into its general fund (giving lie to all the ballyhoo about the state’s budget reserves and financial wellbeing).  In sum, socialists don’t do business right.

[13sep19 update]  It was time for another comment from one our leftwing regulars (JigW 859pm) that again confirms the assessment that those folks are intellectually handicapped beyond repair.  This comment, while not acknowledging the content of my above commentary, repeated the oft offered ‘if you don’t like California, then leave’, augmented by the observation that ‘it sucks to have a life like yours since you’re not going to convince California to change course’.  The sackhead’s attempt to include the notion of ‘logic’ in his diatribe just confirms his disabilities.  Overall, I have seen little evidence that progressive readers understand anything in my commentaries, or similar commentaries elsewhere.

More attentive longtime readers know I have maintained since the launch of RR that CA is beyond the tipping point ideologically, and that it is headed for a socio-economic train wreck as it drives out wealth producers and attracts the hordes of gimmes and illegals with its maelstrom of misguided public policies.  I’m not aware of anyone here embracing the belief that we will miraculously miss the disaster, let alone hoping that their missives will change progressive minds.  That is a notion that people like Jig aggrandize themselves with as having viewpoints that others consider important enough to seek to alter.  The man himself says it best – “If you see things differently and actually believe you are going to convince California and it's progressives to change the course, then let us in on your little secret. I can tell you right up front your plan is delusional at best. Insane more likely. Logical . . . not.”

But what is important to continue noting is the Left’s confusion of criticism as the necessary precursor to change.  I might remind those confused with RR’s tagline – Observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.  This blog is my own public diary of such observations and interpretations to which I invite participation from those with the ability to think critically and conduct a civil dialogue.  As readers can tell, that invitation has been accepted by a broader audience not all having such qualifications.

I offer this invitation because I am a copernican who has no special access to goodness and truth, and is therefore prone to errors that, upon serious consideration (after all I’m supposed to be a trained scientist), may cause me to change my mind.  And to me such redirections are a (sometimes bittersweet) joy.

Although I have been graciously accused of having a unique perspective here and there, generally I find that my views are shared by a significant cohort of learned people who are also students of the human condition.  However, over the years this fact has been totally invisible to the above cited local leftwingers.  As archived in RR’s comment streams, these poorly informed worthies continue their uninterrupted braying that all my commentaries and critiques are the unique offspring of an old, miserable, and lonely mind in these foothills, the defunct offal of ideas about which no one cares – and yet they come.

[14sep19 update]  For a broader compendium of reasons to oppose AB5, please read today’s lead Union editorial, ‘Assembly Bill 5 an out-of-touch overreach’ (following publisher Don Rogers' 12sep15 column on the same issue).  This well-worded criticism of the unbelievably butt-stupid bill comes from the editorial board of our decidedly center-left newspaper.  And it further demonstrates how virulently radical are the above discussed remarks of one of our more calcified socialist ideologues, an ilk whose debating powers are constrained by ‘agree with me or begone!’

“Never forget” what?

George Rebane

Today marks the 18^th anniversary of 9/11, the day radical Islam claimed the largest number of innocent American lives through terror as part of its global jihad against western civilization.  Since then the anti-American lamestream media has tried its damnest to propagandize an Islam-free narrative to memorialize that day of infamy.  The day is now marked by commemorative blather that describes “some people” flying “airplanes (that) took aim and brought down the World Trade Center” as if the event was a hurricane or earthquake that caused the deaths and destruction.

Ads are run that ask us to “never forget”, but stop short of saying what we are to never forget.  Had 9/11 been a natural disaster, then almost everyone not directly involved would already have forgotten what happened.  Every memorializing message that omits the real intent and cause of those killers who hijacked the airliners is in reality asking us to specifically forget the real intent and cause of that day’s terror-borne tragedy, and the resulting celebrations all across Islam.

An Illustration of Liberal Ethics, Morals, Logic, …

George Rebane

The 22aug19 Union has a prominent column by Ms Susan Rogers, a very liberal member of the newspaper’s editorial board.  There in ‘Plenty of shame to go around’ she equates the thuggish behavior of county Democrats at Representative LaMalfa’s recent town hall, with the congressman’s socio-political ideology as expressed through his legislative work.  There is no doubt that the much-reported misbehavior of our local liberals seeking to disrupt a public meeting was something in which no American should take pride.  However, to diminish the louts at the meeting by impugning that LaMalfa shared an equal if not greater blame for the encounter is a down-home illustration of how far beyond the tipping point has progressed our national polarization.

In her column, Ms Rogers lists a litany of the congressman’s legislative actions and policy positions each of which she peremptorily labels as “shameful”.  We are not here confusing ‘shameful’ with, say, ‘erroneous’ or ‘misguided’ or even ‘ignorant’.  The woman illustrates how the liberals’ worldview puts people with whom they disagree onto a morally lower level of human beings – people who purposely behave in a manner that is shameful in our society.  And the basis on which makes such a comparison of bad public behavior at an event with a politician's longstanding ideology defies logic.

In our culture, shame is lavished on people who have purposely done something dishonorable, improper, illegal, etc.  The so accused is then supposed to respond to such a judgment by exhibiting some form of contrition in the attempt to make amends.  Attacking a politician on moral grounds for expressing his beliefs through his work, beliefs of which voters who put him in office were aware, is beyond the pale of political discourse, save the kind that is meant to further divide us.  And it does confirm our divisions since she means to put the rest of us who support congressman LaMalfa into an equivalent condition of shame.  I, for one, reject both her accusations and her hubris in ascending to heights from which she dispenses such lofty, unexamined, and perfunctory judgments.

Steven Frisch answered, yet again (updated)

George Rebane

Mr Steven Frisch is one of, if not the, leading leftwing intellectuals in the northern Sierra.  He earns his keep as CEO of the Sierra Business Council, a cynically named non-profit, progressive NGO that promotes all manner of leftwing policies and causes in this part of California.  SBC also consults to regional government jurisdictions and agencies in their implementation of ‘sustainable development’ as most easily discerned by the recommendations contained in the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives and the initiatives promoted by its derivative ICLEIs across the land.  RR has covered A21 issues for many years and devotes an entire category to it under which are gathered the relevant commentaries and postings.

Mr Frisch has seen fit to visit these pages with some regularity to debate issues with which he does not agree in my commentaries and in the attendant comment streams.  As a liberal and progressive, his approach to debate is primarily to either misrepresent what has been written, or to attack strawmen that he constructs with the standard liberal shibboleth, ‘We know what he really meant.’  The sequel of this post amply illustrates this mode of attack.

In past screeds Mr Frisch has called me ‘unpatriotic’, ‘un-American’, ‘traitor’, ‘racist’, …, and recommended my departure from everywhere that ranges from Nevada County all the way to shores of the USA.  In my turn, I consider the two of us to have been brought up and now live in different universes.  With some assuredness, lavishly documented here over the years, I can state that Mr Frisch knows next to nothing of the areas in which I claim some expertise.  I’m sure he reciprocates that sentiment.

My response to Mr Frisch here is motivated by an extensive comment that he saw fit to post this morning under ‘Scattershots – 12aug19’.  It is reproduced hereunder in its entirety, along with my responses interleaved in italics.

The Lone Wolf Killers

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 14 August 2019.]

Each spate of mass shootings reveals yet another aspect of current American politics and how easy it is to manipulate the country’s masses.  As a result of the El Paso and Dayton massacres we are drenched in daily calls to ‘do something’, anything to stop rightwing ‘racists’ and ‘white supremacists’ from continuing their reign of terror wherever innocent people gather.  The ‘do something’ cries have reinvigorated our Second Amendment opponents to take more “common sense” steps on the road to total confiscation of guns.  Currently these steps involve more background checks, red-flag laws, and, of course, the ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’.  (more here)

Non-political experts continue to tell us that neither the current background check laws on the books, nor the newly House-passed Background Checks Act would have stopped any of these killings by first-time lone wolves with clean police records.  Nor would red-flag laws, already on the books in many states, provide any guarantee of prevention, since people naturally hesitate to apply them because of their high false alarm rates and their impact on personal relationships.  This latter point was highlighted by psychiatrist Richard Friedman in a recent NYT op-ed where he stated that “experienced psychiatrists fare no better than a roll of the dice at predicting violence. The evidence suggests that while red-flag laws do stop suicides, it isn’t clear they prevent mass shootings.”

And our progressives, including the Democratic candidates, declare that the real problem for such indigenous terror is the presence of a persistent and burgeoning number of ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ Americans.  According to these leftwingers, the problem now is so bad that all of President Trump’s supporters can be classed as ‘white supremacists’.  It is this massive body of misfits that spawns the killers of innocents among us.  For such progressives, America is still a racist country overrun by white supremacists who continue to deny people of color their legal and constitutional rights.  These assertions are ludicrous on their face as argued by among others, historians such as Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute and David Harsanyi of the Federalist.  America is the overwhelming destination of emigrants from all over the world, and over 90% these emigrants are people of color, most of whom clamor for entry from Hispanic America and Africa.  So, what do all these would be immigrants know about white supremacy in the United States that Democrats don’t know?

The tragically populous tails of terror (updated 10aug19)

George Rebane

Last weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings are today’s national conversation, a conversation that does not yet communicate much beyond the emotional demand that something must be done.  The conversation is yet a babble that has little reason, meaning, or direction in either working toward a shared understanding of the problem, and most certainly not toward any shared understanding of possible solutions, were they even to exist.

The little contribution here is only to record my own perceptions and feelings, and not offered as some definitive insight, the application/adoption of which would miraculously relieve our national pain.  The overarching insight is that all these nativist massacres (as opposed to those motivated by foreign ideology/theology) are the inevitable result of a growing cultural deficit.  The population distribution of cultures has become flatter as the former dominant cultures are practiced by ever fewer people – in a statistical sense, the tails of such distribution of multiple cultures are becoming fatter, and therefore more populous.  This means that the number of people who invent, join, practice new and extreme cultures and belief systems is rapidly growing.  The inevitable result of such an amalgam is that more and more individuals are out there on the borderline of doing something to act out their recently acquired and strongly held beliefs about what is wrong with the society in which they find themselves.  And with more on the borderline, more are likely to cross it with the results we see.

Scattershots – 6aug19 (updated 11aug19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations – 18jul19 (updated 19jul19)

George Rebane

Gold-backed dollar or not?  Interesting debate now going on over how to set the value of the dollar which is fiat money but still the world’s leading reserve currency.  Gold is pooh-poohed by governments and pundits as just an “alternative asset class” which serves many as a “speculative store of value”.  Interesting to note is that it is the governments who hoard massive amounts of gold and use it to clear inter-nation trade accounts.  Hmm?

Counting Trump’s ‘lies’ has become another favorite pastime for leftwingers.  Books have been written on the subject.  On closer inspection, such counts include all the bravados and projections and predictions and promises that politicians over the ages and of all hues have generously poured into their constituents’ ears.  Today’s under-educated TDS sufferers know nothing of this, and feel proud that they are plowing new ground in such endeavors.

AOC for all seasons and reasons.  Seldom has a politician come along who gives so much pleasure to both sides campaigning in a highly polarized political landscape.  Today both Repubs and Dems hope that AOC and her brood will continue spewing loud and clear their anti-American assessments and prescriptions for a fundamentally transformed US.  Karl Rove calls her “the gift that keeps on giving.”

[19jul19 update] 'Impeachment Phonies' in the 19jul19 WSJ - "So much for high crimes and misdemeanors. Faced with a resolution to impeach President Trump on Wednesday, House Democrats blinked. That was the smart move politically, but what does it say about the courage of their conviction that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to the country and Constitution?"

Scattershots – 13jul19 (updated 16jul19)

George Rebane

Thistle and Shamrock is a weekly program of Irish music on NPR hosted for years by Fiona Richie who speaks in a rich Irish brogue.  On weekends at our house we hear about the first ten minutes of it before one of us turns it off or to another station.  And that is because neither of us have developed an ear for rhythmic Irish tunes, the kind that are played by small combos at gatherings or in public houses.  To us they all sound pretty much alike.  The deficit is clearly ours, because we like many varieties of music and have always supported this cultural art form.  Every time I hear another Irish tune on the radio, the long-held notion always crosses my mind that I could write and program an Irish tune-composing algo that could readily pass the Turing test – i.e. people alternately listening to such machine and human composed music would in their aggregate judgments not be able to tell which is which.  Maybe some music major could do that in a graduate program.

Our language continues to languish under progressive pedagogy. So many words have lost their unique meanings as they are required  to carry excess semantic baggage that makes their parsimonious use obsolete and obfuscates their meaning, especially in today's political commentary.  My latest addition to this list of overburdened words is ‘hate’, ‘hatred’, ‘hateful’, et al.  (It joins established residents like ‘racist’ and ‘hero’.)  In days gone by, the semantic for using anything from the ‘hate genre’ was reserved for feelings and expressions of “intense dislike, or extreme aversion or hostility.”  Not anymore.  Today our liberal literary lightweights append the hate-word to any and every person, group, behavior, or expression that simply disagrees with any one of the limited number of shibboleths that for most progressives comprise their politics and worldview.  If you happen to disagree with some Democrat or communist’s prescriptions or assessments, and write or talk about it, that is immediately labeled as ‘hateful’ or ‘hate speech’.  And make no mistake, they are the final arbiters of such judgments, from which there is neither appeal nor available eleisons.  The real scary thing is that they all want Big Brother to become the all-seeing and powerful censor of everything that to them is hateful.

Mighty today, missing tomorrow. ‘Remember Visicalc?’ asks Christopher Mims (here) in the 13jul19 WSJ.  Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and killer app, and I remember the relief of switching to it around 1980 after spending a weekend programming a cash planning model on the HP-85 for an electronics manufacturing company I was just hired to turn around.  In those days it cost about $10K and over a week to have your accountancy firm do a cashflow projection for, say, the next 8 quarters, and $5K for every subsequent update of the model.  Once Visicalc arrived, I turned my people on to it and quickly became a spreadsheet ‘expert’ – suddenly the PCs had a real and unique business use.  Soon Lotus 1-2-3 came along and we all jumped on that bandwagon, until Bill Gates brought us Excel, and we’ve stayed with that ‘forever’ (while always keeping an eye out for the next better thing).  Anyway, the succession of spreadsheet makers illustrates the history and ongoing saga of companies making it big, and then failing by missing the newest big wave.  Next into the breech is Google according to Daniel Colin James in his very readable ‘This Is How Google Will Collapse’.  Many are now eagerly awaiting its demise, especially since it so obviously and salaciously abandoned ‘Do no harm.’

[14jul19 update]  Even the vaunted WSJ sometimes comes off the rails, as they did recently in a column written by some worthy claiming economist credentials.  He patiently explained to the reader that markets work and trades occur when buyer and seller value equally what they are willing to give each other in the trade.  You don’t need to be an economic maven to understand that such an arrangement is patently not true.  If both parties value equally what they already have, then there is no reason to go through the risk and bother of a trade.  It is ONLY when both parties view what the other has as being more valuable to him than what he currently holds that then make functioning markets and dealing possible.  When prices are set at value parity or higher, markets stagnate.  (Methinks the writer has strong grounds for demanding a refund on his tuition, since he can now demonstrate that they taught him nothing.)

[15jul19 update]  President Trump screwed up again tweeting the recommended return of the Democrats’ Squad members to their native countries.  With another swipe at the English language, Pelosi called his tweets “xenophobic”.  Representative AOC and her House rabble rouser squad have their origins in Somalia, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Africa.  To be fair, Trump did advise them to go back to fix the obvious problems in their native lands.  However, IMHO he should have called attention to their outrageous policy proposals by pointing out that they are seeking to bring to America the same kind of policies and political methods that have devastated places from which they and/or their ancestors hailed.

NYC’s DeBlasio is now hands down the top Democrat big city incompetent idiot.  Single-handedly he has reversed the city’s years-long declining crime rates by denying the legitimacy of its justice system.  In the process “He propagates the smear that the majority-minority NYPD unjustifiably targets minorities when conducting street investigations. He knows there is nothing racially proportionate about reported violent crimes in the city, which in the busiest precincts affect only minorities. His posturing and gamesmanship provide fuel for the worst kind of conspiracy theories and hate speech against officers. Never has a mayor been more disdained by his police.”  Lest you think this turkey is the current Lone Ranger in these generations long urban disasters of governance, DeBlasio is joined by like-minded incompetents from his party in a long list of cities that begins with San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.  (more here)

[16jul19 update]  "We have a really hard time (“connecting with voters”),” Sen Hirono (D-HI) lamented (here), "and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain."  Unfortunately, that is neither true nor anywhere close, as Will Rogers said, “It’s not what you know that worries me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”  However, she did nail the Dems’ attitude about their constituents; intellectually they are a challenged lot as we have pointed out for years.  And Sen Hirono herself is one great example of a Deficit Diva leading her flock of gimmes.  (H/T to RR commenter for digging this out.)

Loony Tunes – 6jul2019 (updated 8jul19)

George Rebane

To our categorical ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man’, we must add a section in which, from time to time, some real doozies can be collected and commented.  We all witness and shake our heads at them as they appear in serious publications and outlets.  This morning we start with a couple from our own Union and the ultra-serious coronet of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal.  The record would be incomplete should we omit such observations and interpretations as a seminal characteristic of our times.

Nevada City resident Ron Lowe, writing (here) in the 6jul19 Union, is astounded to discover “that liberty must be kept by force”, and that the country is now so polarized that “crazy Republican white religious extremists” are actually ready to defend their liberties with the use of force.  This worthy has never heard of the American Revolution and the conditions that gave rise to it.  His fervent hope today is that our government has “contingent plans to call out the US military to quell these Republican radicals if they start their revolution against America.” (emphasis mine) In his letter he makes it clear that citizens’ right to bear arms sufficient to resist an autocratic government is anathema to the social order of his liking.  I wonder what free nations he knows of that did not gain their freedoms through the use of force, and then remain prepared to use force to maintain those freedoms.  In embracing such beliefs Mr Lowe has plenty of company.  (My own opinion on such use of force by the citizenry was covered here and here.)

Then we have author, war correspondent, and journalist Gordon Dillow who writes a sober ‘The Asteroid Peril isn’t Science Fiction’ in the 7jul19 WSJ.  He goes to great length to describe the peril and inform us that we have no answer for “what to do about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth”  So what’s loony about such an alarming dissertation?  Well, in outlining ways in which mankind could counter such cataclysmic catastrophes, most of which will not work, he considers an approach that has the best chance of working – using a nuclear bomb to divert/destroy the asteroid – and then tells us that this is not a viable alternative.  Why?  (Seatbelts please) Because “the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space … makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.”  There you have it.  Millions would die, or even civilization could end, and it’s all worth it if we can keep lots of people from not getting nervous about “nuclear weapons in space”, especially if this may “violate international treaties …”.  In publishing this piece, I don’t know whether the WSJ editorial staff decided to pull our collective legs, or they just overlooked Dillow’s ‘reasoned’ basis that opts for wholesale human annihilation.  Now imagine such an argument being brought up in the White House war room while our senior leaders consider how to counter a killer asteroid heading for Earth.  Should they then just shoot the sumbich on the spot, or take the time and effort to seek psychiatric aid?

[8jul19 update] One of the looniest tunes from the Left playing out today is their legions of public school teachers continuing to declare their heartfelt concern for the education and welfare of the children they are paid to educate.  As we have documented for years in these pages, nothing could be further from the laughable truth.  The Democratic party and their union minions/handlers (take your pick) have taken America’s public education to new lows with every passing decade over the last half century during which they have been in charge.  The 8jul19 WSJ published ‘An Education Horror Show – a case study in public school failure and lack of accountability’.

The latest posterchild of this ongoing tragedy of America’s culture is the Providence, RI public school system, an horrific example that was pointedly not even mentioned at the past weekend’s NEA convention that saw prominent visits by a phalanx of Dem presidential candidates.  I urge you to read the details such as the testing which demonstrates the Providence’s pedagogic plague in which children get dumber the longer they attend the city’s schools.  There is much more involved here.  And all of it in a district that “spent nearly $18,000 per pupil in 2017—about 50% more than the national average.”  Finally, to put a bow on it that applies across the land, the incompetent, cynical, and shameless “Democrats as ever blame a lack of funding”.

Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

George Rebane

This patriotic graphic was posted on last year’s 4^th of July.  Continuing our national trend, this year’s celebration has gotten a bit more tense.  We now have invented and baked in the country’s psyche the national notion that everything ante-bellum that was part of American history is fair game to be attacked, withdrawn, denied, silenced, or destroyed.  The latest is the very familiar Betsy Ross flag, the first Stars and Stripes to grace our newborn country with its familiar ring of thirteen stars for the original thirteen colonies.  No more.

‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ (updated 24jun19)

George Rebane

Yes, that is the advertised name of the event in public libraries, including our own, during which a man, who dresses and wears make-up to look like a woman, will gather children ages 3-8 around him and read them stories.  Our 21jun19 Union reports (here) on the program and the community’s reaction.  Therein we hear Supervisor Heidi Hall extoll of overwhelming public support for the program, and assert that “naturally open and curious” children in that age bracket will be “better off” when they “see that the world is a big place with a lot of variety.”  And some supporters even feel that such a ‘flaunting display of sexuality’ will be of special benefit to young boys who “could use a little bit of help in growing up and not being jerks.”

Here I want to record my reaction to this most visible evidence of the recent years’ rapid transformation of what was our culture.  It has been a long-enduring intention and objective of our country’s progressives to convince Americans that what we formerly considered as aberrant should now be seen as just another aspect of an accepted and embraced ‘normal’ in our society.  In this case, we should not look askance, let alone discourage, a young boy traipsing around in his mother’s dress and heels.  And even more so when he wishes to expose this different mode of expression on days he goes to school wanting to feel like a girl.

Scattershots – 14jun19 (updated 20jun19)

George Rebane

Proto-socialists on parade.  I noticed in the 14jun19 Union’s lead op-ed another example of a good-hearted, light-thinker wailing about our country’s unequal distribution of wealth, and its pitifully inadequately small government.  A Ms Becky Goodwin laments that no “millionaire” attended her kids’ college graduations to pay off their student loans, and why should such largess be a sometime thing instead of a universal benefit across the land.  She gives no evidence of understanding how such inequalities contribute to the overall wealth and weal of a nation.  As a devoted leftist, she eschews private charities and wants all such benefits to come from a much larger government that gets such monies from taxing the bejeezus out of rich folks who just happened to belong to what was known as the middle class (more here).  The country is chock full of these proto-socialist Beckys who deny the label but would eagerly vote for every Bernie, AOC, and Green New Deal that comes their way.

Growing populism and middle-class anger.  If there’s any hope for liberal governments, then it may well begin with what VDH summarizes in his ‘Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?’  He outlines six “gripes” that are also part of RR’s mantra –

• Illegal immigration and open borders have caused institutional chaos and cultural compromises – e.g. multicultural identity politics.
• Globalization that has enriched Western elites who have “outsourced, offshored, and ignored their own industries and manufacturing.”
• The viral explosion of unelected bureaucrats at all levels of government consisting of sinecured, feedback-proof regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors, and adjustors.
• The global lamestream media reaching and indoctrinating billions rather than practicing what was known as ethical journalism.
• The post-educational academia that now functions as a “shrill agent of cultural transformation … charging more for less learning.”
• “Utopian social planning”, a la Agenda21, that has “increased housing, energy, and transportation costs.”

VDH concludes that “because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.”

Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard?, asks our favorite Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute (see also here).  This paragon of academia, that enjoys a $39,000,000,000 endowment made possible only through the largess of western capitalism, is now teaching its students that, in fact, capitalism contains “systemic inequities”, and the “capitalist ethos” is false because it teaches that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.”  Not at all, maintains Dean Rakesh Khurana, because in reality capitalism is a zero-sum game that rewards its players simply on the roll of Fortuna’s dice – remember “you didn’t build that”.  Khurana most recently disseminated this blather at Harvard’s commencement in a speech which pointedly ignored that his “parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, one of the events leading him to conclude that at least 85% of his current status is due to circumstances beyond his control. His parents presumably came to the U.S. because they saw opportunity, not “systemic inequities.” That opportunity arises from Western civilization’s accomplishments: the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression and inquiry, and the relative absence of corruption—all matters about which Mr. Khurana was silent. This civilizational inheritance allows social mobility and wealth creation unimaginable in most of the non-Western world.”  Read MacDonald’s article for the full story.  (H/T to correspondent)

‘Socialist’ Nordics are moving toward private healthcare – what a revoltin’ development!  As we have reported for years, free healthcare is unsustainable, and its dive into the mud is slowed only by providing fewer and slower services.  The answer to it is - seatbelts please - private healthcare funded through private health insurance.  Daily Signal reports that quiet trend has been going on for years with increases in such insurance purchases by 7% of Norwegians, 4% of Swedes, and leading the way, 22% of Danes who have been able to augment their ‘free’ healthcare.  A good piece, that covers what is offered to whom, when, and for how much in various countries our socialists are trying to emulate, is detailed here.

[17jun19 update] Our broken Constitution and legal system.  SCOTUS upheld the cynical double jeopardy provision that our Constitution specifically prohibits.  The Daily Caller reports,  “The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause prohibits multiple prosecutions for the same offense. An exception to this rule called the separate sovereigns doctrine allows state and federal governments to bring successive prosecutions for the same crime. Monday’s decision leaves the doctrine in place, meaning any person Trump pardons remains exposed to state prosecutions.”  The only reasonable conclusion here is that our Constitution does not apply equally to the federal government and those of the several states.  The ‘separate sovereigns doctrine’ and the entire quagmire of a sub-rosa administrative law legal system give continued evidence that our legal system is both broken and corrupt.

Cap & Trade slush fund.  Years ago when CO2 cap & trade was first proposed, I and my fellow climate change skeptics predicted that such monies would soon be used for all kinds of other progressive vote-buying give-aways by Sacramento.  Well, that day has arrived (more here).  The scumbags in the state legislature, who have claimed CA is flush with cash, can’t hide the truth any longer and have to go after money wherever they can find to fund their follies, or just to keep minimal government services going.  RR readers, of course, know what the response of the local lefties was to such predictions. (H/T to reader)

[20jun19 update]  My new favorite communist is Umair Haque. I have reported on his virulently anti-American essays before.  This prolific, yet amazingly ignorant, ultra-left ideologue is published regularly on Medium.com which is an outlet primarily by and for Millennials, and therefore deserves a regular look-see by those seeking to keep up on their thought and sentiments.  Umair’s (that’s how he signs himself) latest mind bending contributions are ‘(Why) There Was No Jackpot at the End of Capitalism’s Rainbow’, ‘The Pattern of the 21^st Century is Predatory Collapse’,  and ‘The Soviet Union of Capitalism’.  Enjoy your visit.

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

Dr Mark Moffett of Harvard and the National Museum of Natural History writes ‘The Social Secret That Humans Share With Ants’ (and other social critters), an essay derived from his The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall (2018).  Therein his main thesis is “building giant communities of strangers requires ‘markers’ that let members know who does and doesn’t belong.”  The essay goes on to concur and confirm the oft-repeated Rebane Doctrine tenet that people like to live and work among people who share their mores, values, …, in short, their culture to the maximum extent possible.  For such communal environments promote trust and rapid socialization, foster specialization, and in general provide the benefits that derive from being able to reliably predict each other’s communal behaviors.  (photo philched phrom article)

Moffett’s article is carefully wordsmithed for this day and age, wherein he comes as close as possible to calling a spade a spade without offering an obvious invite to the inevitable opprobrium from the Left should he speak too plainly.  The destruction of America’s common culture, that has been so successful in forging ‘E pluribus unum’, is the seminal objective, bar none, of our indigenous Left.  Achieving this, drives derivative objectives like transforming our public educational system into a giant package of progressive propaganda that today has combined product, distribution, and audience into one compact and unassailable institution.

Moffett points out that durable societies began long ago “when our ancestors began to signal who belonged through the use of what I call ‘markers’, signs that for many societies came to include gestures, rituals, styles of dress and dialects. Bound together by markers, even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies of the past achieved populations of a thousand or more.”  With his markers, Moffett then two-steps around the unifying idea of a common culture without connecting them to such a culture in our modern world of politically corrected multi-cultural societies.  Pointing to the utility – past and present – of a mono-cultural society today is strictly verboten.

Nevertheless, his dance steps convey a clear message to the careful reader in which he points out how even slight deviations from culture-specific markers “induced anxiety because the conduct of (such individual) couldn’t be predicted.”  And Dr Moffett’s insightful essay concludes with the non-controversial coda – “Then as now, markers have been a way for humans to maintain order and boundaries even in the midst of rapid social change and growth.”  Whew!

As a recent milestone on the multi-kulti highway, one that illustrates the destruction of a stanchion of our common culture - especially when easily related to western cultures – we have Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel).  He is the latest to get a revisionist history written about him.  It turns out that not only was Geisel a “racist”, misogynist, and xx-phobic of everything you can imagine, but even his published “illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”  This man became a beloved icon of America’s common culture which the socialist cum communist Left must now obliterate in every remaining corner in which it is still allowed to draw a breath.  The whole story is told in Becoming Dr Seuss (2019) by Brian Jay Jones which is reviewed here by Meghan Gurdon.

And we all should know the ‘blessings’ bestowed by multi-cultural societies living cheek-by-jowl under repressive regimes that use corrupt and militant justice systems to enforce stacks of laws and regulations, prescribing mandated common behaviors, under each of which inevitably lies the gun.

[13may19 update]  Author and political theorist Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute gives us an added perspective on tribalism and its antitheses in today’s public forums (here).  He reviews how de Toqueville and Russel Kirk “saw that a nation’s strength lay in our hodgepodge of ‘little platoons’”, and that “we are a nation of people with multiple overlapping identities.  We have our Americanness as one identity, but that is tied up with a diversity that includes our particular geographic identity, our particular vocation, our particular faith, and yes, our particular ethnicity.”  Carney concludes that “real love for posterity is inextricably tied to a loving, familiar embrace of the past, and of a tribe.”

Ruminations - 10may19 (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

Global warming warmongers like to ‘prove’ their calamitous climate change prognostications by citing the increasing dollar costs and casualties caused by natural disasters such as winds, floods, and fires.  They count on their claims being consumed without question by constituents not able to discover that such statistics are due to greater numbers of buildings and people populating danger-prone areas.  The record of parameters that measure the physical intensity and frequency of such disasters don’t support the lamestream publicized histrionics.  ‘Growth Fuels Size of Catastrophes’ in the 10may19 WSJ attempts to educate the educable.

No Democrat with a 3-digit IQ wants to actually impeach Trump for the simple reason that their case for it is laughable, and then they would lose an anti-Trump election issue that still has legs with certain deficit-laden constituencies.  Speaker Pelosi and Rep Nadler are doing their best to keep blowing hot air into their “constitutional crisis” balloon which continues to float beautifully through lamestream outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

‘Let’s Apply the Moore Protocol to Congress’ suggests R.G. Walker of St Petersburg (here).  That protocol was established by a liberal court in Fairfax County, VA through ordering the release of the sealed divorce records of Stephen Moore and his former wife, despite strong objections from both parties.  This kind of “dumpster diving” was fomented by the lamestream with such intensity that the VA court finally succumbed to the extra-legal sleaze in order to publicize ‘evidence’ that finally caused Moore to withdraw his nomination to the Fed’s Board.  Mr Walker suggests that if this kind of ethical detour is warranted for Fed candidates, it should also be uniformly applied to members of Congress who have much more power to do harm, the propensity for which presumably arises out of previously hidden character shortcomings that the American public has the right to know.  He recommends that they all should have their sealed records unsealed with the merciful option, not offered Moore, to retain their “previously established privacy to any who resign their congressional posts immediately, say, by sundown.”

Our designated reader gave me a heads up that our FUE has once more mounted the pulpit and issued another ex-cathedra missive, this time delivering a sage reflection and admonition under the 10may19 Union’s Hits & Misses column in reference to Jo Ann’s contribution (here).  She is a continuing member on the newspaper’s editorial board, who drew the FUE’s ire for not including my MIM board membership in her praise for MIM’s recent grand opera Carmen presentation.  (For the record, and to pre-empt another breathless revelation, I am also the Vice President of MIM, and we are long-time In Concert Sierra donors, attendees, and appreciative promoters.)  But what we always find remarkable is the boundless hubris with which our self-adorned “veteran editor and award-winning journalist” issues his absolutes about our “podunk community” and its podunkier inhabitants whom he has graced with his presence, that is today regrettably so far removed from a more compatible cosmopolitan and civil environment.  The man is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

[13may19 update]  After my 9may19 visit to our local pot shop (here), I now read that bio-engineering companies may start making MJ’s active ingredients, THC and CBD, in processing plants without having to grow those smelly weeds.  In the MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado tells us of the Dutch bio-tech company Amyris that has designs of producing those ingredients in bulk to become readily available ingredients for “large scale use” in all kinds of consumables.  Of course, there still is some “cognitive dissonance” involved in all this since “biotech is supposed to be about helping people, and cannabis, like alcohol, doesn’t always do that. It can be used for pain relief, but there’s also a link to psychosis.” (more here)

Post-citizenship America (updated 28apr19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 24 April 2019.  A slightly edited version also appears in the 27apr19 issue of The Union.]

Perhaps no recent issue of national contention illustrates the differences of how our two polarized sides see the future direction of America than does the debate about whether the 2020 census should include the citizenship question.  The original intent of the census had to do with redistricting and reapportionment.  That intent was carried out with our census from 1820 to 1950 by counting American citizens, which then determined membership in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College for the several states.  In the 20^th century an accurate citizen count provided by the census was also used to determine the allocation of federal dollars back to the states under various programs that Congress legislated.

Scattershots – 17apr2019 (updated 19apr19)

George Rebane

RR readers may recall that the two necessary pillars on which science rests are Occam’s razor and falsifiability.  The former selects the simplest theory that explains observations, and the latter requires every theory to contain propositions that, the subsequent falsification of which, will either negate or restrict the applicability of the theory.  Religions are belief systems that require compliance to neither.  Today progressivism is a secular humanist religion that has many belief tenets (propositions) which cannot be falsified.  Currently two of the more often cited are 1) Justice Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, and 2) candidate Trump conspired with the Kremlin in order to win the presidency.  Daily statements from the lamestream, progressive activists, and the Democratic leadership confirm that there neither is nor can be nothing that will change the verity of these tenets.

Apropos to the above, the asymmetry of the Left and Right in about every dimension of behavior in the public forum is familiar to most Americans.  It is denied by the Left that always seeks to attribute equally reprehensible actions from the Right anytime something obviously atrocious is carried out by the Left.  However, their ability to cite evidence – in either frequency, intensity, or participants – to back their claims is woefully lacking.  Today the rise of alt-Left socialism, as espoused by Democrats like Sanders, AOC, Warren, Harris, …, concerns the more established party leaders.  These leaders seek to discount their more radical brethren by identifying them as just the Left’s version of the Tea Party, the group they and their lamestream identify as being equally rightwing radical.  But again, there is no evidence presented; it is just a religious belief.  My recent invitation for local leftwingers to remedy this deficit (here) continues to be met with silence.

Free speech is dying at hands of corporatist giants on the internet.  Conservative leaning outlets like Daily Caller, Daily Signal, and Breitbart are being censored by social media giants and even banned as references on information sites like Wikipedia, as they, including Fox News, are accused of being hateful and sources of ‘fake news’.  There is no evidence for that; in fact, the evidence is exactly the opposite especially as concerns major stories that have dominated our attention for these last years – e.g. Trump’s Russia collusion, DoJ corruption, the glories of nationalized healthcare, and global warming.  Instead, outlets like CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and WaPo are being glorified (e.g. awarded Pulitzer prizes) for being demonstrable sources of fake news.  For example, it was they who kept spreading the collusion lie for over two years, and even today are doing their best to keep it alive.  They have done untold harm to the administration of Trump the candidate and then as the sitting president.  And by extension they have harmed America in our efforts to effect policies foreign, domestic, national security, and in world trade.  Being a progressive leftwing news outlet means never having to say you are sorry.

[18apr19 update]  ‘Afghanistan is our longest lasting war’ seems to be repeated more and more these days for purposes unknown or hazy at best.  In reality, it turns out to be a propagandized meme without moment.  The ‘war’ started in 2001 with our defeating the Taliban who had then been ravaging the country for some years while supporting Islamic terrorist organizations in the land they governed.  Over these last 18 years America has sacrificed fewer than 2,500 lives in conducting what at best can be called a simmering counter-terrorist operation.  To put this number in perspective, during this period over 9,300 Americans have been violently killed in Chicago alone.  And that number is multiplied several times when we include other bastions of our progressives’ prize-winning policies in cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles.  (It is there where we should concentrate our efforts to save American lives.)  During real wars in the 20^th century, America lost more than all of Afghanistan in one day as we assaulted the beaches of Europe and the Pacific.  The reality is that there will be an ongoing price that our military and their families must needs pay if we are to remain the world’s peace keeper and white hat hegemon.  Our overarching and abiding concern should be that such ongoing sacrifices will be made wisely, and only as the last resort to serve our country’s legitimate national interests.

[19apr19 update]  The climate change hysteria has developed all the trappings of a cult. I gave my Occam razor and falsifiability arguments above, and did not here make their connection to global warming strongly enough (although in previous posts this point has been much emphasized).  The cult connection has been detailed in a piece, ‘Climate Change and the Ten Warning Signs for Cults’, posted on Russ Steele’s blog (here).