Rebane's Ruminations

Two blind mice

George Rebane

Celebrating political monopolies.  Leftwing thought leaders, syndicated Thomas Elias and local George Boardman, write with glee how California’s Democrat Party cancer continues to grow.  Having already metastasized the state, it is now starting to pick off the remnant low population rural counties in the northern part, leading with our Nevada County. (Their columns in the 29nov22 Union, not online yet.)

The social and economic devastation is totally invisible to these mavens, as these were to the Stalin celebretorians in Pravda of the 1930s and 1940s.  As with all autocrats, it’s the party über alles, no matter what trail of destruction it leaves behind.  They see nothing wrong with the exodus of the skilled and productive.  The exodus of small businesses for greener pastures.  The ever-increasing taxes and regulations to conduct and corral our lives.  Nothing wrong with the state’s top 1% earners paying nearly 50% of the state’s general fund revenues.  And many of these 150,000 out of 40M are now leaving or have already left, thereby causing huge ($25B) and promising bigger state budget deficits.

But what the Left’s cricket chorus hides is how decades of one-party control has made California the nation’s posterchild of every government folly and foible that places us in the bottom of the federalized barrel of states along almost every metric that is important to the country’s makers.  However, the country’s takers see an entirely different California.  They welcome its teeming cities filled with the homeless, littered with needles and feces, and rife with crime rates that are anything but equitable.

To be fair Thomas Elias does make a couple of good points about the state’s Republicans basically sitting on their collective butts celebrating a micro gain here and there, but none of it amounts to a hill of beans in being a relevant opposition party in the state.  Elias doesn’t have much advice for that achievement save give up on some core Republican planks like opposing abortion.

Bottom line though is that neither columnist gives a hint of lament about the detritus all around us as evidence of what the Democrat Party has accomplished during its tenure in Sacramento.  

Ruminations - 15nov22 (updated 22nov22)

George Rebane

How a communist thinks and talks.  Listen to CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil come up with a new plan (here) how rich guys like Bezos should dispose of their money - give the extra back to the government where it will be spent "democratically".  Well, actually it's not a new plan.  Marx and Lenin thought of it first, and starting with Stalin communist countries have been implementing it ever since.  Their method was even more efficient, the state didn't pay you enough for anything to be left over; they took their democratic share right off the top before you even got the left overs.  You can bet the ranch that is exactly what our woke progressives would ultimately implement here.

[17nov22 update]  California is anticipating a $25B budget deficit, due to revenue shortfalls from a diminishing population of our top wealthiest quintile, who, along with their businesses, have been leaving the state in droves.  All in an environment of complete denial by the Left's monopoly party in Sacramento, and their legions of bought-and-paid-for gimmes that populate California’s hustings.  But not to worry, that market for acquiring dependent votes continues in full swing, including the promise of no service cutbacks for our growing cohort of illegal aliens.

“Political Gridlock is Poised to Return” in Washington.  Hallelujah!  Given the damage done by Congress in recent decades, a good helping of gridlock is just what the country needs now.

[22nov22 update]  Well, it took a while for us to join the billions of infected, but Jo Ann and I tested positive for Covid today.  We returned from visiting our Northern Tribe in the Seattle area on Sunday, and both of us felt a little queasy with a persistent cough when we got home.  And yesterday morning Jo Ann was really symptomatic, with my joining her in the evening.  We started our own federally countermanded curative regimen, and amazingly both of us already feel that we have passed the low point.  Then again, maybe this bug has multiple minima, we shall see.  Anyway -

The time has come, the feds all say,

to talk of many things;

Of salves and pills, and even a potion,

that relief from Covid brings.

But make no motion to include any notion

of some bygone promotion

that to IVT and HCQ still clings.

Ruminations – 29oct22 (update 4nov22)

George Rebane

Left fears the ‘start of political violence’ with the Pelosi assault.  As commenters from the 25oct22 Sandbox observe, why have such fears suddenly come up now, and none such during the summer of city riots and Justice Kavanaugh assaults?  Judging from his lodgings, the nutjob’s political orientation was leftwing.  And given Nancy’s horrible anti-American policies that hurt all of us, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ is politically an equal opportunity query. Is there anyone on the left with balls enough to explain the matter to the rest of us?  Don’t hold your breath.

How come cancer of or inside the pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart, is so rare?  This question keeps recurring to me.  Maybe a reader knows the answer.

“What are election crimes?”  Well, it appears that the FBI has come up with an answer (here), the remaining mystery is how it intends to seek out and capture the ‘criminals’.

[1nov22 update]  Conspiracies exist.  They have always existed, and always will.  How then can we examine, debate, and expose harmful conspiracies in the public forum if our citizenry is brainwashed into believing that theorizing about the existence of any conspiracy or surreptitious activity is on its face an extremist, ignorant, and/or socially harmful endeavor?

[4nov22 update]  Bumblebrain is to meet with China’s Xi in a “summit” during the G20 conference this month. (more here)  What possible motivation would we (i.e. the administration and Democrats) have in allowing that level of incompetence to take part in a one-on-one meeting with perhaps the shrewdest tyrant on earth?  Is Biden going to wear ear buds so his handlers could at least attempt to mediate what comes out of his mouth?

Scattershots – 12oct22 (updated 16oct22)

California is a warning to the nation.  Kevin Kiley

George Rebane

Unhinged leftwinger op-ed in the 12oct22 Union. (here) In this community the ideological sentiments (aka blinders) of Ms Cheryl Cook are well known.  In today’s column she corroborates her reputation as a woke progressive who strives for a world repulsive to anyone to the right of Joe Manchin.  She highlights her ignorance from the gitgo with “At River Valley High School in Yuba City recently, it was three shirtless Black students who suffered humiliation during a videotaped mock slave auction. They were lined up against a wall with objects hanging from their bowed heads while they were yelled at and assigned monetary values by a few Varsity football team members.  That’s humiliation! That’s embarassment!(sic) Yes, sir! Right there in Yuba City, California. With a capital C, that rhymes with C, that stands for Cruel.  Ever wonder how the pain of unresolved history is inherited by our own children?”  Anyone with a minimum room temp IQ knows that this was an historical enactment willingly participated in by the black students wanting to graphically act out the unsavory and tragic aspects of US history.  From there Ms Cook’s screed goes down hill winding up with the assertion that MAGA Americans are Nazis equivalent to those of pre-WW2 fascists who brought Hitler to power.  And, of course, you know who is the MAGA-Hitler.

Democrats continue their reputation as the anti-science party while loudly claiming the Alinsky alternative.  The Steamboat Institute had a hell of time putting together debates on college campuses on the resolution: “Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”  Dr Steve Koonin, MIT theoretical physicist and prominent author (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters), has agreed participate in all three scheduled debates to argue the negative.  When this became known to the leftwing ‘scientists’ proclaiming climate hysteria, they went ballistic.  Ms Jennifer Schubert-Akin, CEO of the Steamboat Institute, informs us (here) that “Some of the responses we received from well-known climate scientists and academics stated that we are “wildly irresponsible” for giving Mr. Koonin a platform, that there is “no room for debate on these issues,” and my favorite, from a well-known climatologist who is on Reuters’s “Hot List” of the world’s top climate scientists: “I don’t debate climate science. It’s a poor way to get at the truth.”  To socialists, the way to truth, goodness, and light is take Marxist maxims as ex cathedra.

Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.  For those truly interested (and concerned?) about climate change, here is a look at it from an apolitical perspective and one that really relies on all that science has to offer on the subject.   “The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, as its name suggests, is an international panel of scientists and scholars who came together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. NIPCC has no formal attachment to or sponsorship from any government or governmental agency. It is wholly independent of political pressures and influences and therefore is not predisposed to produce politically motivated conclusions or policy recommendations.”

[15oct22 update]  ‘How EVs Can Power the Grid’  Well, they can’t really do that today, but governments are keenly interested in using the increasing number of EV batteries as a distributed storage cache for electricity.  These EVs will have bidirectional inverters that let you plug in and charge your EV or, when the utility decides, then to drain your battery for the greater good of the grid users.  Utrecht in Holland is leading the way in studying this possibility with the city’s EV charging stations.  Implementing this V2G capability will give someone else the ultimate control of your EV - whether you can drive it or not, when and how far.  No grousing allowed; it’s for the common good you see.  (more here and here)

[16oct22 update] ‘The Biden Admin Has Been A Chaotic Disaster. But Will It Matter?’ That is my perennial question; are there enough Americans informed and smart enough to make it count in the voting booth?  The affirming evidence is hard to find. Jared Whitley of the Daily Caller writes, “The first two years (God help us, it’s just been two years) of the Biden Administration have been an irrefutable disaster. Biden has wiped out $9 trillion in wealth from the stock market. The rate of inflation is 8.2%, four times what it was under former President  Donald Trump. The cost of energy is up almost 33%, whereas Trump sold oil to the Middle East. … After a 25-year trend of decreasing violent crime across the country, hopelessly blue cities have seen a spike, with murder rates up 44% since 2019! … The president is himself a barely coherent, maladroit zombie. Whereas the corporate media roasted George W. Bush for saying nucular instead of nuclear, today they blissfully ignore the gaffes of a man who was gaffe prone even before he was senile.’ (more here)

Dark Days Diary – 30sep22 (updated 1oct22)

George Rebane

Sen Joe Manchin has turned out to be another double dummy political hack and a major disappointment, succumbing to the predictable and obvious wiles of Sen Schumer.  Ol’ Joe had us all fooled during the past year as being the staunch stalwart, along with Sen Sinema (D-AZ), against the economic ruin the Dems were cooking up with their Inflation Reduction Act bamboozle.  They got Joe’s vote with the promise of including his pipeline and permit facilitation bill, which most on the Right correctly saw as Lucy’s football.  Now that the bill has no chance of passing as is, Manchin’s reputation is in the mud with Republicans, moderate Democrats (vanishing breed), and, of course, his West Virginia constituents who expected more than the meadow muffins he wound up delivering.  Tough to see how he’ll ever recover.  (more here, here, and here) 

Fire tax – Nevada County voters will have a chance to vote down the proposed ½% sales tax increase that’s supposed to fund wildfire prevention and mitigation.  Actually, the collected monies will go into the general fund where the Supes promise they will be carefully watched and audited by a “citizens oversight committee”.  California’s Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association warns us once more (here) how such taxes will be misused as they have been in the past.

J6 show trial postponed closer to election – Moving the century’s biggest-to-date show trial closer to the election again tells you all you need to know about this hyper-partisan kabuki theater.  The Dems have no viable platform or record of achievements to present to the voters, so all they have left is to pump up the J6 hysteria of imminent attacks by Trump led ultra-right MAGA white supremacist terrorists.  The real tragedy is that there are millions of muddle minded Americans who swallow this political swill. (more here)

Dems’ Big Lies – As opposed to counting Trump’s political bombast as lies, the real material lies that continue unabated from the Left need to be reviewed, revived, and reinserted into the public’s attention span.  This, of course, is the job of the Republicans who have not shown much political moxie in keeping these highlighted in the public fora.  Oh, to again have two viable political parties.  Here is the list from a recent post -  

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[1oct22 update]  Competing for the biggest of the Dems’ big lies is their ‘Republicans want to destroy the Constitution, censor free speech, do away with our freedoms, and establish a totalitarian state.’  This message to their cognitively constrained constituents is Alinsky and Lenin on steroids, each part being exactly 180 from their own daily demonstrated policies and activists on the march.  Today’s fragmented conservative pro-life movement is as close as any leftist can get to some Republicans wanting to limit your freedom to kill your unborn child.  Other than that, it is ONLY the Republicans who work for fewer regulations, lower taxes to support a smaller government, and a nation of constitutional laws instead of a corrupt and growing administrative neo-Marxist state.  And to put a bow on it, today’s Republicans leave a lot to be desired in their efforts to keep our republic.

[2oct22 update]  One of our astute readers and commenters posted a link to a recent VDH piece, ‘The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization’.  In communicating the current state of western civilization, the good professor has again hit it out of the park.  Definitely a must read and share.  One wonders how much of such writing is comprehensible to our Left.  Dark days indeed.

Underserved, really?

George Rebane

Underserved groups used to describe populations without adequate access to goods and services, e.g. education, medical care. This included rural, elderly, low-literacy, blue collar, and poor populations. Minorities (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, transphiles, illegal aliens, …) per se were not included, but often belonged to one or more or the included categories.  The current politically correct definition first and foremost characterizes all minorities as being underserved, and therefore needing wealth transfers along with a growing slate of “socially equitable” laws, regulations, rights, and permissions.

Today the underserved minorities are grist for the Democrat voting machine.  But the government’s own wealth transfer data from its myriads of welfare programs tells a markedly different story.  Starting around 1970, when the Great Society laws and programs started kicking in, it turns out that if anything, the minority populations in the big urban areas have been overserved.  (Culture and public education explains away why these monies have not been used more wisely.)  What keeps the underserved Big Lie alive in the lamestream is the way that progressive government bureaus, agencies, and departments keep score on the dispensed cash.

A good illustration of this is the cited statistics on the country’s child poverty rate.  Nationally prominent economists Phil Gramm and John Early debunk (here) the leftwing claim that currently one in six (over 16%) children live in poverty.  When you look more closely, you find for openers that “the Census Bureau’s tallies still don’t include $1.9 trillion in government transfer payments. … If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%.”

A similar Big Lie treatment generates the “myth of American income inequality”.  The authors treat this issue in an excellent online version (here) of their similarly titled book.  The income inequality ‘facts’ are cooked from statistics that garble earned income and the myriad of transfer payments that induce people not to work.  The continually cited poverty stats range in the one in five or six level (16-20%), when the actual rates are really less than one fifth (about 3+%) of that.  This fact is known by all illegal aliens who risked life and limb to get here.

The bottom line of all this is that these lies are used by our Left to perennially bolster their voter rolls with the unread and diseducated of the land.  At the same time this narrative forms the basis for the Democrats’ constant drumbeat of promoting vote-buying payments to these populations which require ever more taxes and national debt increases.  You can bet the farm that none of this has been covered in the Dems’ lamestream media, and therefore at least half the country has no idea of who is underserved, and to what extent these populations are actually being overserved.

Scattershots – 21sep2022 (updated 23sep22)

George Rebane

Do any of them know what they’re talking about?  Here’s a comment from a liberal sackhead –

I sense much desperation on this site from the host's diatribes against women, blacks, and the march toward MAGA extremism. ... The hosts(sic) denigrates educated women, and assumed anyone not a rank MAGA is an idiot when in fact the QAnon prone MAGA are far more dangerously ignorant and mind controlled.  Posted by: Whole Foods | 21 September 2022 at 07:21 AM

As the record shows, RR contains no “diatribes against women, blacks,” nor has it ever given evidence of any “march toward MAGA extremism.”  Does the commenter have a definition for ‘MAGA extremism’, or even know the tenets of MAGA?  My money is on ‘Not even a clue’.  Naked allegations without a shred of substance behind them is the progressives’ de rigueur of accepted indictments.

They also have a very coarse, actually a binary, concept of ‘hate’.  Their lexicon between embracing and hating is a barren desert.  Once you criticize something or someone, especially one of their totems, then you are automatically accused of hate.  Nuanced semantics are relegated to their never-neverland.  An example of the other bookend, once someone embraces any one of the many conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, they are automatically relegated to membership in the internationally fractionated and unstructured organization, along with embracing the entire smorgasbord of socio-political worldviews attributed to QAnon.  There is no middle ground.

On the lighter side.  Here’s a brain teaser reputed to have even caused Einstein a moment of puzzlement.  An old car is to drive a stretch of 2 miles, up and down a hill (one mile up and one mile down). Being so old, it cannot drive the first mile (the ascent) faster than with an average speed of 15 miles per hour.  How fast does it have to drive the second mile (on going down, it can, of course, go faster) in order to have an average speed of 30 miles an hour for the whole journey?

[23sep22 update]  Democrats’ partisan 501c3 charities use tax deductible contributions to register leftwing voters.  Such charities are not supposed engage in partisan activities.  The evil party has done this for decades knowing that the IRS will continue to give them a pass (consider if the Repubs did this).  Kim Strassel provides chapter and verse about this crap in the 23sep22 WSJ, “America’s charitable giving laws have been an enormous force for good, but Democrats are cynically abusing the system for partisan gain. If Congress wants to keep dollars and politicking in the political sphere—and under the remit of the Federal Election Commission—it needs to change tax law to prohibit ‘charities’ outright from taking part in voter-registration or get-out-the-vote drives. The problem isn’t ‘dark money’—it’s the sham ‘philanthropy’ voter-registration racket, taking place in broad daylight.” (more here)  Talk about election fraud; and what has the incompetent GOP leadership done about this?  Nothing, absolutely nothing.

‘The Real Threat to Our Republic’ (updated 12sep22)

George Rebane

Over the years I’ve touched on the impact that the ‘educated’ liberal woman have had on our society and our republic.  My own experience with such people has been uniformly informative and corroborated by many readings on the subject.  I’ve been meaning to write a definitive piece on these females who pervade our big cities and suburban communities, and now Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has beat me to it with his excellent essay, ‘Why ‘Educated’ Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic’.  Along the way he coined ELF as the efficient acronym for future reference.

Through my many years I have had the opportunity to take the measure of ELFs in divers social and professional situations.  They all share a set of common characteristics which start with a collectivist ideology expressed through fewer than 50 tried-and-true leftwing shibboleths and slogans, an ideology which they can neither dissect nor defend, and which is sustained on a solid foundation of unwarranted hubris held together by generous dollops of ignorance and one-sided mis/disinformation.

These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.

Institutionally, they have co-opted formerly non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women.  Additionally, in academe they have been stalwart foot soldiers in both pedagogy and administration to turn our public schools and institutions of higher learning into critical-thinking-free zones operating under the façade of ‘education’.

At the core of the ELFs' (intellectual) vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses.  This should not surprise.  Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents).  Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.

When ELFs vote, they vote as a homogeneous block.  The DNC and Democratic leadership have long been painfully aware of this, and the fact that they only trust and get their news from the lamestream media and social media sites.

In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse.  Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site.  As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America's four-year colleges.  By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man. … Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage.  A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty.  In some fields, there are no Republicans at all. … Lacking a male counterpoint in their lives and often majoring in subjects with a social justice agenda, college women enter the political arena not so much uninformed as misinformed.  Given that communications/journalism faculty members skew 20 to 1 Democrat, the media these young ELFs consume will only reinforce the biases nurtured in college.

Jack Cashill expands on all these points, citing many studies that corroborate the above characterization of ELFs and the institutions under their influence.  We can put a bow on it for now by also recognizing the current thrust of the Democrats’ divisive pre-election rhetoric, especially Biden’s Philadelphia speech that could not have been better staged by Joseph Göbbels himself.

In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse.  This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not.  Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.

Incapable of giving it further thought, the ELFs will confidently vote us into the kind of American autocracy that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has been planning for decades.

[12sep22 update]  Victor Davis Hanson’s recent essay ‘American Delira’ puts the above threat to our country in its greater and proper context.  In recent years such essays have appeared regularly, not only from his pen, but also from other astute observers of the American saga.  Nevertheless, VDH has a unique gift of being able to wordsmith a comprehensive description and analysis of what has brought us here and what we are doing now to undo ourselves.  A hat tip to one of our regular commenters who has also regularly been the first to alert RR readers to the timely contributions of VDH and others.

The Democrats' evil is professionally inbred

[This piece came across my email transom forwarded by a lawyer who apologized for his profession and how it confuses litigation with governance.  gjr]
 
Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate – Biden (no surprise) was at the bottom of his class).  Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.  Barack Obama was a lawyer. Michelle Obama was a lawyer.  Hillary Clinton was a lawyer. Bill Clinton was a lawyer.  John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer.  Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer.  Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.
 
The Republican Party is different.  President Trump is a businessman.  President Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen.  Vice President Cheney was a businessman.  President Eisenhower was a 5 star General.  The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor.  Dick Armey was an economist.  Ex-House Minority Leader John Boehner was a plastics manufacturer.  The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.  Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?  Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976.  The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.  This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.
 
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers.  Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.  The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America .  And, so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow.  Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?  Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. 
 
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.  Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.  Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.
 
When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming.  Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government.  We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit.  We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
 
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives.  America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.  When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.  When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
 
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
 
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers!  Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits.  This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party.  When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.

The ‘Party of Science’ aka Idiot’s Delight (Addended)

George Rebane

Well, the cat is finally clawing its way out of the bag, bit by piece.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is beginning to admit that it has completely mismanaged the major pandemic of the 21^st century.  As numerous observers, analysts, and scientists have repeatedly pointed out over the last four years, the agency has “failed in its core responsibility, which is to track diseases, collect data to inform decision-making, and deploy resources to support local public-health responses.”  Instead, it became the lackey of the evil Democratic Party which has long proclaimed itself as ‘the party of science’ and used the CDC as its willing political pawn.

CDC’s main mama, Dr Rochelle Walensky, can’t quite bring herself to admit the utter catastrophe that she launched with the aid of Dr Anthony Fauci, spiritual advisor who only spoke ex cathedra with words directly from God.  America put up with their gobbledygook for almost four years, and continues in some measure to follow it today.

As data kept pouring in from all over the world that contradicted their various and varying policies dictating masking, social distancing, lockdowns, vaccination, boosters, etc, they remained steadfast in their own ‘science’ which supported the command and control stance of the Democratic Party hard on the heels of hunting Donald Trump.

FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Residence

George Rebane

Tonight the FBI raided former President Trump’s Florida residence unannounced.  This is an historical  and unprecedented action which has horrible portents for our republic.  I’ll have more to say about this, and so will RR readers who need a place to record their sentiments as this story develops over the next days.  If there is no smoking gun produced by the DoJ in this case, then we have definitely transitioned into a political thugocracy.

Scattershots – 27jul22 (updated 31jul22)

George Rebane

Biden, the killer president – When the tally of all the deaths resulting from his announced policy of abolishing our southern border is calculated, the numbers will now reach well over a 100,000 annually during his term in the White House.  The deaths occur on both sides of what used to be our border.  Thousands have died trying to make it from their native countries before reaching the US, thousands die in transport after crossing over, but the overwhelming number of Biden deaths occur all over the land in America from drug overdoses.  The major cause now is Chinese-produced, cartel-delivered fentanyl that daily floods into the US in amounts that can kill our entire population.  Local jurisdictions are overwhelmed with the number of overdosers dying and requiring critical care (example here).  And the primary cohort of victims is made up of our black, Hispanic, and Indian populations.  Reading the NYT this morning, and monitoring other lamestream outlets, there is no mention of this national emergency of deliberate, ongoing, and cataclysmic human tragedy and flaunting of America’s border and immigration laws.  From the Left nothing but silence and ongoing lies about systemic racism, white supremacy, and social injustice.  If ever there was a reason to impeach the entire executive branch as criminal sacks of … .

Woke medical schools have arrived.  Mandatory woke ideology and CRT curriculum has now infected another STEM field – medicine.  “Future doctors will be obliged to learn how health relates to ‘systems of oppression.’” (more here)  Medical students and residents will be expected to master new “diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies” according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.  These additional courses will be required in all accredited medical schools.  And make no mistake, including this added curricular crap is going to displace real medical education required for today’s physicians to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technology that impacts all aspects of healthcare.  Today’s physicians are already woefully behind on diagnostics, treatments, and pharmacology, as can be verified by any patient with some technical training.  From here on out, according to the AAMC, “aspiring doctors will have to become fluent in woke concepts such as ‘intersectionality’ (defined as) overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.’ Med students who managed to avoid learning critical race theory in college will now get an immersive course.”  Medical mistakes already take more than 200,000 lives annually (here).  And when we calculate the new stats on medical morbidity and mortality, all of us will pay for this next helping of death by government.  Socialism on the march.

[31jul22 update]  President Newsom without a single cast vote.  People are now beginning to accept the likelihood of Biden’s early retirement; something that has been often foretold on these pages.  All the Democratic and socialist leadership of our country don’t want Bumblebrain to run in 2024, and everyone knows that the country’s First Kackle is a joke and will remain a joke.  A feasible and likely scenario has Kamala being offered big bucks (by, say, Soros) to resign and accept a position on the board of a global leftwing organization, purportedly working to save the world from one of many capitalist ills.  Kamala understands that it’s the best deal she can get after her embarrassing performance as VP – she accepts and resigns.  Ol’ Joe is then spoon-fed the reason for his early departure, and the need to make a deal with a compliant and drooling Gavin Newsom.  Newsom becomes VP, and soon thereafter Bumblebrain resigns for health reasons.  Newsom becomes president and immediately pardons every available Biden within that terminally corrupt family.  Newsom appoints his VP – someone like Stacey Abrams or one of the other well-known double dummies.  They go into Dems’ 2024 convention as incumbents, and to loud cheers and lamestream adulation, they emerge as the Democratic candidates for the party’s top of the ticket.  The scenario is perfectly legal and already tested by Richard Nixon when his VP Agnew was caught holding a sack of cash that didn’t belong to him.  Gerald Ford became VP, and the rest is history.

Speaking of double dummies, consider those sharp-witted journalists on the various rightwing media outlets starting with FN and FB interviewing the legion of liars that the administration fronts as their economic experts.  For decades, recession has been defined as two successive quarters of GDP contraction.  This definition has been used by the Fed, ensconced in economics textbooks, and touted by every politician over the last fifty some years.  Biden’s mangling of our vibrant economy during 18 months in office now requires rejection of the established definition.  We’re told by Team Biden and their lamestream lackies that the old definition was never correct (even though everyone is on tape having used it).  They tell us that recession is a more complex matter that has a technical definition which is never mentioned by the leftwing economic experts.  But what’s missing from all these interviews is the question that always goes begging – well then, tell us what is the correct definition of a recession.  There has not been a single journalist with the wherewithal between their ears to immediately ask that question when a Democrat again moves the recession goal posts.  Am I the only one who has noticed this dereliction of journalistic professionalism?  Please tell me it ain’t so.

Social Science Sucks

George Rebane

Harvard and Exeter social scientists just published a new study the implications of which go far beyond the answer to, “Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans?”  The correct answer was a clear YES, and for all the reasons that most RR readers would have predicted.

The study was done professionally, involving over 2,000 in the experimental group and over 3,100 in the control group, all properly controlled for the important societal parameters.  The bottom line was that those receiving the no-strings-attached handouts were not encouraged to practice “better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.” (more here)

In fact, the free money recipients did exactly what most sane observers of human nature know – “Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health, and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group.”  Whouda thunk?

This finding (corroboration?) casts a serious shadow on the impact of contemplated guaranteed minimal income policies.  As RR has argued for years, the penultimate motivator of human behavior is to be relevant within and to one’s society.  Reducing relevance or becoming irrelevant is akin to being shunned by your fellows.  And no one really believes that you deserve to have your hand in others’ pockets just because you can fog a mirror.  They know that you contribute nothing and consume the wealth others create – you are a parasite.

If we peel back the social onion one more layer, we come to the real answer – the culture of the recipient group.  It is culture that determines how social groups behave in various environments of material and financial wellbeing.  Nowhere in human history was this demonstrated more explicitly than in the post-war displaced persons camps of West Germany which were home to tens of millions of east European refugees fleeing communism.  Under UN administration almost all the camps were culturally homogeneous and received equal amounts of aid; refugees were not allowed to work on the German economy and were simply wards of the ‘state’ awaiting determination of their fate over a period of approximately five years.  Many studies were done and books written on how the people in the camps organized themselves and what kinds of activities they pursued.  The spectrum ranged all the way from virtual prisons ruled by indigenous criminal mafias to flourishing societies that replicated the refugees’ native lands and allowed them to develop and pursue education, arts, trades, crafts, etc, some of which they were allowed to sell to GIs stationed in numerous military bases.

But returning to the real point I want to make here is that social science is a broken profession practiced by so-called ‘social scientists’, most of whom have not the most basic understanding of what motivates and rewards human behavior.  This sad condition exacerbates the making of public policies, especially those we are subjected to by leftwing politicians and legislatures.  Citing the results of the Harvard/Exeter study found no difference between the free-cash and control groups. 

But remarkable was the collateral finding, one that will be swept under the rug by the lamestream, that “These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policy makers the researchers surveyed. That’s not surprising. Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems. If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.” (emphasis mine)

In sum, we see again that today’s social science is a farcical pursuit populated by the blind leading the blind – these guys are firing blanks and bamboozling both their students and policy makers.  At least half the population of our fair land would have correctly predicted the outcome of this experiment.  But in this light what should concern all of us is the portent of future wealth transfers being able to keep the peace as more and more workers become systemically unemployed, wards of the state, and conspicuously irrelevant.  And nobody cares – yet.

The Perennially Confused Grassroots Left

George Rebane

Imagine a country that does not recognize the right of their citizens to revolt.

These thoughts were resurfaced by a comment from local leftwing cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb responding to ‘A Case for the Right of Revolution’.  In it he accuses those of the Right of “blowing up what’s left of the constitution(sic)”, and seeking to install a tyrannical “new regime” that will imprison or execute “those of us who won’t swear fealty to the new regime.”

Bob shares these beliefs and worldview with most of the Democrat mainstream which has been inculcated in the country’s unionized leftwing public schools, with its tenets of received wisdom being reinforced daily by the country’s lamestream media.  These millions of fellow Americans are no longer capable of questioning, let alone critiquing what they are fed in a never-ending stream of propagandized media reportage and ‘entertainment’.

They demand no evidence for the allegations they willingly consume as factual indictments of the Right.  They can point to no part of the Constitution that has been ‘blown up’ by rightwing legislators, judges, or justices in the land.  They demand nothing of their thought leaders save the gratuitously naked lies that the unrevealed evidence exists somewhere, always to be presented at the proper time – e.g. yearslong ‘evidence’ of Trump’s Russia collusion.  Like the highland natives of Papua-New Guinea (here), the video corroborated evidence of a purposely open border is invisible to them as millions of illegal aliens continue to pour in daily.  They have totally ignored the Left’s destruction of the black families launched with the onset of the Great Society policies.  For them the loss of black lives by the thousands really doesn’t matter, which are noted only in their singletons or handfuls when it serves to support their overall anti-American narrative.

The Left’s grassroots have no clue of how their leaders and elites have trashed our Constitution, and constantly make the case for its irrelevance, lack of currency, and need for a total overhaul or rewrite.  All this to foster and enable the country’s progress toward a centrally planned and controlled state under the governance of an implausibly expensive and behemoth bureaucracy.  The Right’s appeal and initiative for a minimally taxing and regulating small government never impacts any inter-ear organ they may purport to have.

They continue their composed mantra that the Right is working to install a fascist state, without any understanding that fascism is a strong form of socialism that requires a very large government to monitor and master its masses.  All the historical and day-to-day evidence of implemented and proposed rightwing policies to the contrary - e.g. reducing taxes and regulations, federalizing national imperatives - they just go on parroting the Democrat party line that the Right is the party of limiting freedoms no matter the impact of leftwing policies in force from Main Street to the nation’s capitals – they are incapable of simply considering how our freedoms have been ratcheted down by the growth of the US Code, regulatory burdens by the thousands, and bureaucracies of leftwing minions numbering in the millions.

And the piece de resistance of their imperturbably smug belief system is their view of those on the Right as a uniform mass of fundamentalist Christian, bible-thumping end-timers who are itching to “empty the nuclear arsenal on the heathens” while “convinced you are going to your great reward in heaven, (thereby) burning the planet shouldn’t cause you any pangs of guilt.”

So there you have it, the latest communication from the Left’s grassroots, that continues to bear witness to the utter void where we might find common ground between our polarized population, each side seeking to go in a direction that is a complete anathema to the other.  There is no longer an opportunity to start a civil, let alone productive conversation.  How do you answer someone like Bob Crabb who believes in the sanctified state against which no hand shall ever be raised?

A Case for the Right of Revolution

George Rebane

[This piece appears as my column in the 16jul22 Union (here).  It is a response to the latest in the newspaper’s thread of Second Amendment debates that started with my response to ‘Read it yourself – A well-regulated militia’ by a local leftwing gun controller.  To this I responded with ‘The Many Ways to Regulate Militias’ published in the 14jun22 Union (and here)  This was responded to by another leftwinger’s 21jun22 column, ‘The role of a well-regulated militia’.  Just to pile on, yet another anti-gunner’s column ‘This July Fourth, enough with misguided patriotism’ taking me to task, was published in the 30jun22 Union.  The piece below seeks to put paid to my 2A critics, but unfortunately only those who have some claim to critical thinking.  I invite RR readers to examine the comments of those who lack such a skill in my column’s comment stream.  It is witness to the dominant sign of our times.]

In his 21jun22 column Mr Dick Sciaroni limits the 2nd Amendment, arguing that in our nation’s founding and the establishment of its republican government, “it defies reason that (the Founders’) focus would include condoning a revolt against that very government.”  Were Mr Sciaroni to expand his historical studies, he would quickly discover that it was exactly that focus which inspired, nay demanded, the inclusion of the “right and duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that acts against their common interest and/or threatens the safety of the people without cause.”

The Founders were learned men and students of Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson, et al who taught the ‘Right of Revolution’ against governments gone rogue.  Our nation’s birth came about through the exercise of that right against its then government gone rogue.  History is replete with numerous justified revolutions against governments turning against their people.  Our Founders were very aware of that and enshrined their sentiments in our Declaration of Independence – “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the citizenry) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

Our Constitution contemplates and provides for two distinct ways to change our government – an orderly process through amendments and constitutional conventions; failing that, then through armed revolt with the means provided the citizenry through the 2nd Amendment.  The Founders were neither hubristic nor naïfs when they gave us “a republic if (we) can keep it.”  They were sufficiently wise and humble to know that they had not created the perfect government incapable of going rogue, so they provided us, under law, with the ultimate means of redress.

The Bitanic Presidency

George Rebane

The number of political icebergs that have gashed this presidency has gotten hard to track.  The only thing that is now obvious to all, especially to Democrats, is the irreparable amount of damage this president and his administration have brought on themselves.  But before we’re too hard on this incompetent Bumblebrain, we should also acknowledge that the “responsibility for the public failure of this government lies with the Democratic Party.”

The case for this is made clear, concise, and complete by nationally prominent WSJ deputy editor Daniel Henninger in his 14jul22 column ‘Joe Biden’s Sinking Presidency’.  The main factor corroborating the Oval Office disaster is that the lamestream media – e.g NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, … - are daily clutching their worry pearls in the public fora for what they now label Biden’s “lame duck presidency”.  Led by his own party, no one wants him to run in 2024, and more every day want him to resign early for ‘mental health reasons’ – the ‘mental’ part going unsaid yet understood by all.

As if to fully accept that assessment, the man continues to deny being responsible for any of the massive mess in which he and his have mired the country – he lives in la-la land and that is finally being recognized by progressives.  “RootsAction, a group aligned with Bernie Sanders, is planning a #DontRunJoe campaign.”

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the Dems’ Plan B is Kamala Harris, a kackling black woman having served her purpose and since then shown demonstrably unqualified for any conceivable task required in public office, let alone producing the work products of the West Wing.  Her early ascendancy will cause major heartburn to Govs Newsom (CA) and Pritzker (IL) who are already circling the White House after having put paid to two of the most prominent shithole states in the Union.  They each are ready to do the same to our beloved Republic.

So, with 2 of 3 Dems wanting someone besides Biden for 2024, over 9 of 10 under 30-something explicitly saying they don’t want Bumblebrain to run, and 7 of 10 Americans telling everyone that the country is headed in the wrong direction, it’s hard to see how the Democratic leadership will allow ol’ Joe to even finish his present hitch let alone sign up for one more.  The Left has always had more than one way of ridding themselves of dogs that don’t hunt.

Ruminations – 6jul22 (updated 12jul22)

“Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” David Horowitz re harassment of Justice Kavanaugh at DC restaurant.

George Rebane

Illinois Gov Pritzker typified the profound ignorance that most (all?) leftwing politicians have about guns, ‘gun violence’, and the effect of existing gun regulations.  In signing a law banning the sale and possession ‘ghost guns’ (AR-15 style untraceable componentized semi-automatic rifles) he made this audacious claim that was not rebutted by any of the media; to wit, “… even our revolutionaries did not use assault rifles, they used muskets.”  The idiot governor has no idea that muskets were the assault guns of the 18^th century.

[7jul22 update]  Over 550 colleges have hired for-profit education vendors for delivering their online programs under the schools’ names.  The students seldom know that their courses are delivered by employees of companies like 2U instead of the universities’ academics.  It’s an attractive fire-and-forget source of revenues for the schools that get 20% of online ‘bootcamp’ tuitions and 40% of semester course tuitions from the vendors.  Bootcamps go for upwards of $10K, and semester courses for more than $60K.  Modern school daze. (more here)

The Victims of Communism Museum in Washington opened last month.  It “unsparingly illuminates the most murderous ideology of modern times.”  The museum was funded by donors and the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia.  Communist regimes have killed well over 100 million of their own citizens, and today 1.5 billion people still live under communism.  Unfortunately, more countries, including our own, today seek to increase their governments’ role in “abolishing private property and controlling the means of production and distribution of goods and services.”  “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes rely on force, use brutality, and repress speech, religion, assembly, and all rights and freedoms.”  (more here)

[8jul22 update]  The Democrats are desperately trying to divert the country’s attention from the ongoing foreign policy mess, the open border crisis, exploding crime rates, soaring inflation, shelves empty of critical goods, historically high gasoline prices, ongoing Covid muddle, fetid cities filled with vagrant encampments, dysfunctional public schools, pending recession, and announced policies guaranteed make each of these social catastrophes worse.  The only diversions they have left now is to blanket the country with lies about J6, SCOTUS, and “the best economy in our history”.

Abortion is a latent right, even though it isn’t in the Constitution, so argue all pro-abortionists and progressives.  A favorite supportive citation is Madison’s inclusion of the 9^th Amendment in which he wanted to make sure that unenumerated rights would henceforth not be excluded.  The big problem this argument launched is who decides what the next unenumerated right is, and how many of these are there waiting to be ‘discovered’ and codified by the politicians who happen to then have control the government gun.  We now have a culture in which new rights are immaculately conceived daily out of thin air, rights that inevitably reduce freedoms for the rest of us.

[9jul22 update]  The dollar will be destroyed to pay off or at least allow the Treasury to keep borrowing to service the $23T+ national debt held by the public ($30T+ total).  This has been covered many times over the years in these pages (e.g. here and here).  Now the Mises Institute is also putting out papers that warn us of this (here).  Destruction will occur through sky-high inflation which allows the debt to be serviced in ever cheaper nominal dollars.  As I see it, the real news here is that we Americans are simply too stupid to be concerned, let alone do anything about it at the ballot box.  Witness the comment stream below.

Poetry more relevant today than ever to illuminate the upcoming mid-term election.

[11jul22 update]  Repeal the 2^nd Amendment is the latest brainchild of communist filmmaker Michael Moore (here), who proposes adoption of a 28^th Amendment that would explicitly do that, and make civilian ownership and use of firearms a joke that would please only those Americans born with serfdom in their veins, aka Democrat voters.

[12jul22 update]  So how to interpret the Trump/Biden polls for 2024.  Depending on the poll and its qnaire, it’s hard to really tell what the legitimate backing is for either man’s 2024 candidacy. (more here)  I estimate that half of the right and leftwingers are contras – the rightwingers wanting Biden to run, and the leftwingers wanting Trump to run on the theory that either man would be the loser in any feasible match-up.  Me?  I definitely want Biden to run again, and Trump to leave the field and lose his 'the 2020 election was stolen', no matter the merits of the argument.  So now you know how people like me would respond to pollsters, but that doesn’t help knowing that the, say, pro-Trump respondents would also include a hefty share of the man’s political devotees.

‘Bumblebrain bows out before 2022 election’ predicts Athena Thorne of PJ Media while crowing that she is the first to make this prediction (here).  Sorry to burst the bubble of this Jenny-come-lately, but RR readers had already had this discussion more than a year ago and even entered into a monied bet in July 2021 on exactly when we would get a new president (here)

Scattershots – 1jul22 (updated 5jul22)

George Rebane

Legal lying that powers today’s lamestream.  The lamestream has been exposed for its lies, misinformation, fake news, and defamations in general.  As a result, its shrinking audiences are made up of the most dedicated and/or ignorant leftists in the land, augmented by some residual uninformed mid-roaders.  Their legal underpinnings to carry on with this atrocious so-called journalism is provided by today’s defamation, libel, and slander laws which have been purposely degraded by leftwing lawyers and politicians in order to continue delivering their substance-free narrative to the hoi polloi.  This may be coming to an end if Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have their way, and get SCOTUS to rule on a case that would finally mandate Congress to pass a strict and clear law which demarks ‘public figures’ and ‘private individuals’ as targets of purposed and publicized sleaze.  (more here)

Biden’s open border policy makes him guilty of killing thousands of illegal aliens as they attempt to gain entry and disappear into our hinterlands.  Open border invites hundreds of thousands of economic migrants to start their long journeys from all over the world to our southern border.  It is an easy argument to make that many more of these people die from divers causes and are killed en route than the alien deaths counted only on our side of the southern border.  Mexican President Obrador blames the US for the deaths because we don’t control our border.  Of course, he omits the fact that Mexico has facilitated the transit of these millions of migrants over the decades.  As a terminally corrupt and criminal country, Mexico’s economy does not generate the jobs needed to sustain employment at levels required by its formerly high birth rate.  (Things have gotten so bad that the country’s birth rate has plunged in recent years.)  So first and foremost, the hordes of illegal aliens entering the US still consist mostly of Mexicans.  Their government abets this exodus for obvious reasons – relieves population pressures on the economy and increases the inflow of foreign capital.  And our anti-American Bumblebrain has elevated this game of import vote buying to a whole new level with his and his shills' daily declarations that our border is "secure" and "closed" while millions pour in. (more here)

[4jul22  update]  ‘71% of Voters Don’t Want Biden in 2024’ according to the just out Harvard CAPS – Harris Poll.  Them that follow these things should get another view from all those reports of Biden doing well and Trump doing badly.  It seems the reasons Americans don’t like Bumblebrain are all over the map; nobody has anything good to say about him, including the Democratic leadership.  My own assessment is that history will judge him to be hands-down the worst president since the Gilded Age, and the best thing that has happened to Jimmy Carter’s legacy.  Trump isn’t even in the running in this competition – if they had a ‘Shoot from the Lip’ category, the Orange Man would be right in there.  (more here)

[5jul22 update]  Putin’s view of Russia’s geo-strategic position, its goals of resurgence, and the forces arrayed against it are revealed in a blockbuster Russian TV series that launched in 2014 and has run now for 3 seasons containing a total of 40 episodes (more here)  The documentary soap opera has won numerous awards in the Russian Federation, and was released to Amazon Prime in 2017.  Widely read columnist and academic Walter Russel Meade writes a revealing column (here) (here) in the 5jul22 WSJ making the case that the series provides an important insight into the mind of Putin and his enlarged aspiration for Russia.  Since its enormous popularity with the Russian TV viewership, Mead argues that it also explains away Putin’s continued popularity with the Russians and their stoic acceptance of the historical hardships Russians have had to suffer under many rulers who sought to ‘make Russia great again’.  ‘Ekaterina: The Rise of Catherine the Great’ is definitely on the Rebane family viewing list.  And Mead’s message sums to, “To grasp the Russian president’s worldview, just binge-watch ‘Catherine the Great.’”

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Scattershots – 21jun22 (updated 25jun22)

George Rebane

Solar Tax – California, as regular as the sunrise, is again showing the world that it knows how to expand its unchallenged butt-stupid ways to govern possibly the most blessed land mass on God’s green earth.  Sacramento, led by our idiot governor, is contemplating levying a tax on homes that have installed solar panels.  These are housing units that use less electricity from the grid, and also pump back electricity into a grid that is already overloaded, poorly maintained & managed, and expensive to boot.  Instead of encouraging the installation of more environmentally friendly photovoltaics, the state wants to dun those who already have them, and provide more reasons why not to install more of these home power-generating systems.  Call your governor and tell him what you think of the Democrats’ latest brainchild.  (info here)

Scattershots – 11jun22 (updated 12jun22)

George Rebane

The professionally produced prime-time J6 congressional kabuki has the obvious dual objectives to 1) divert the electorate from the incompetence and trumpeted disastrous policies of Bumblebrain’s administration (here), and in the process 2) pillory Trump as the Dems’ perennial punching bag.  The one-sided charade is celebrated by the lamestream’s idiot pundits, and the latter objective is even uncritically abetted by conservative outlets such as FN and the WSJ.  Therein my critique of the WSJ’s editorial policy centers on their dismissal of the 2020 election ‘fraud and irregularities’ allegations is based on nothing but citing a chain of opinions by certain judges, Trump administration officials, and Republican politicians – a chain of he-said, she-said reports.  A more persuasive indictment of Trump’s attributed Big Con of his supporters would be to also cite major attempts to support the ‘stolen election’ claims such as what happened in Wisconsin (here), as shown in the ‘2,000 Mules’ documentary (here and here), and Mollie Hemingway's Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (2021).  Heads up journalism would have presented the existential evidence as to why these were dismissed by those investigating last November’s election.  Instead, they leave knowledgeable readers with obvious questions unanswered.

The collectivists of the Left don’t understand human nature – that has been the evidence cited over the last century by many political observers (including me in these pages).  They simply have no clue about how or what individual motivations contribute to sustainable social orders and organizations.  The only human response the Left has discovered is the elicitation of confessions under torture as demonstrated in the dungeons of Stalin, Mao, Castro, … .  This overall deficit has been uniformly absent in today's political commentaries by the Right, who dun the Left’s policies without giving the underlying reasons why they have never worked, and can never work.  Finally, we have an exception in the WSJ’s 11jun22 piece by Peggy Noonan – ‘The Boiling Over of America’.  Therein she covers a litany of fundamental and unredeemable deficits of the progressive’s mind.  Examples –

• They don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.
• They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.
• The progressive can’t understand why. (E.g. SF’s recalled progressive DA Boudin) tells reporters the voters are “in a bad mood” because of inflation and housing costs.
• A final characteristic of progressive politicians is that they tend to be high-IQ stupid people. They are bright and well-educated but can’t comprehend the implications of policy. They don’t understand that if an 18-year-old is repeatedly arrested for assaulting people on the street and repeatedly let go, his thought may not go in the direction of, “What a gracious and merciful society I live in, I will do more to live up to it.” It is more likely he will think, “I can assault anyone and get away with it. They are afraid of me.”

[Update]  Dead people are voting, no matter how vehemently it is denied in the lamestream and by their grassroots sheeple.  And our corrupt LE authorities and judicial system do nothing to get hundreds of thousands of the dead off the country’s voter rolls.  “The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s database of the country’s voter rolls found nearly 350,000 deceased registrants before the 2020 election. The inevitable question is always, well did any of them vote. Unfortunately, some always do.” (more here)

[12jun22 update] Re the J6 imbroglio and Pence's constitutional power over the proceedings to certify the vote. I am reposting this from a recent comment stream where I answered a liberal commenter about possible outcomes of the 6jan21 congressional certification of the electoral college votes.  “First, we presume that the congressional certification was never meant to be a pro-forma kabuki ritual. Were that not so, then all attendees could have been replaced by their cardboard cutouts, or they could have mailed it in. Second, given that the certification, by those gathered, was to be performed after due consideration of the submitted materials, then the designated process had to have the ability for more than one canned outcome. … Constitutional scholars are still debating what that decision space should look like - e.g. accept as submitted; reject submittal and return to states with instructions for resubmittal; table proceeding to give time for further study of any material contentions, inviting both sides to come and testify before resuming the certification process; and so on. You and yours, of course, were awaiting a kabuki performance; the other half of the country had concerns about the election.” 

Readers should note that this aspect of the J6 proceedings has never been discussed in the media, which presumes without pause that only one outcome is supported by the Constitution.  Is this an intellectual bridge too far, or does the media correctly assess the public’s inability to parse the unexamined requirement of the proceedings to end with certification, arrived at through several possible contingencies ranging from immediate acceptance of the electoral votes to going through various further procedures of vetting the votes before finally certifying them?  To the nation’s hoi polloi it is presented as immediate certification or our democracy comes crashing down.  President Trump was right insisting that VP Pence did not have to immediately certify the votes, but wrong in restricting the only alternative to summary rejection of the November 2020 election results - another nuance beyond the media and the public.

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

Who should vote? – Redux

George Rebane

In these pages we have circled this barn without resolution.  My own sentiments, and those of readers at the time, are available here.  The politically correct among us regularly encourage all should vote who can fog a mirror and are citizens.  Well, not exactly.  In recent years the anti-American woke and progressives have reduced that requirement to just the foggers, or even to those who just recently lost that ability.

Bryan Caplan did a landmark study on the electorate and voting – The Myth of the Rational Voter – in which he showed that in our history informed and rational voters were few and far in between.  But the saving grace during those times was that the ignorant voter cohort pretty much split themselves evenly on candidates and issues.  This left the small percentage of knowledgeable and reasoning voters to essentially determine the outcome by how they divided themselves on the margins.  See the top part of the figure below for an explanatory graphic.

All of this changed, beginning around 1920 with the advent of radio broadcasting – the birth of mass media which spread to phone banks, TV, internet, etc.  Now it was possible for those with monies to spend to get their messages out in proportion to their available funds.  And it turned out that this kind of campaigning worked wonders – the more you could blast out your candidate’s voice, the more assured you were of tilting the scale toward your side among the great unwashed.  The small number of knowledgeable and informed voters were overwhelmed, and thereby lost their ability to influence election outcomes.  See the bottom part of the figure.

This absence of rational voter influence has had an enormous impact on our country, delivering huge coastal urban areas and even entire states into perpetual social disasters and economic destitution.  We now have ignorant cohorts continuing to vote against their own best interests, who guarantee single-party monopolies of entrenched politicians in perpetuity.

Proof of this is provided by a coven of distressed states that includes New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, …, headed by its most prominent member, California.  The once golden state has been the posterchild of voter ignorance for the last fifty years.  Over this period the state’s voters initially ensconced a spate of well-meaning liberal politicians, and then later continued to refill their ranks with know-nothing socialists and charlatans.  Today we have sinecured a bevy of functional idiots and scoundrels whose only reliable political talent is using the public till to invite more double dummies (aka reliable constituents) to partake of our insane welfare programs, thereby insuring that California’s recovery remains evermore beyond the horizon. (more here)

So what should a well-meaning but poorly-read citizen do when an election rolls around.  My own recommendation is that such a citizen should excuse himself from that particular election, unless he has the ability to educate himself on the candidates and/or issues.  And unless you know what is at stake in the election, and how the various outcomes will affect you, your neighbors, the country, stay out of the voting booth but remain interested in the election results and prepare yourself for the next time.  If you are a citizen who loves his country, know that it is the voters who determine the state of the nation and its future.  So just because you have the right to vote, there is no law that requires you to cast an ignorant vote based on what you saw on TV the most, the loudest, or the most recent. (more here)

Today my counsel is considered elitist and even anti-American by those who want everyone to vote regardless of their preparation.  (See the exhortations in our local newspaper.)  They tell you that democracy is intrinsically strengthened by high voter turnouts.  History shows us that nothing could be further from the truth – democracies inevitably ended their lives by suicides through emotional plebiscites, referendums, and other summarily catastrophic ballot box ‘opportunities’.  So, get informed first, then vote.

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

Admittedly not a difficult task.  I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty.  Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here).  Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world.  Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies.  Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.

In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.

In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names.  This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute.  Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.”  If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.

Open Letter to Don Rogers

[This piece was published in the 11may22 Union op-ed pages here.]

Your weekly column – ‘The gritty middle way’ - in the 6may22 Union (here) was a thoughtful, well-written piece that I and many of your readers enjoyed reading.  By now, most of the newspaper’s readers know that, counter to your protestations, you have become markedly left-of-center in your politics.  We have all witnessed the transition over the last few years.

The essay’s great opening – “Humans live in tension between the collective and the individual, neither ant drones nor lonely snow leopards.” – sets the stage for a good discussion of that gritty tension.  As you might expect, your words will sound very different to right and left readers who don’t necessarily inhabit the extremes of their respective polar regions.

The discerning reader is jarred a mite when he runs into “the farther right and farther left have uncannily similar root worldviews in common. Just understand that America’s actual risk of living under the thumb of fascist overlords or critical-theorist Marxist mobs amounts to the same fever dream born of indigestion from bogieman stories repeated mostly on blue screens.”

This observation and a couple of others can qualify as a litmus test for an intellectual leftist – they do not see the asymmetries in the ideological foundations of individualism and collectivism.  For them, “our yearnings in politics would have us believe that the end of the rainbow, the prize, lies at one pole or the other, sweet relief to be found there.”  However, that is not true.  Were we to believe polls and voting patterns, we would know the overwhelming share of liberal voters embrace large government collectivism, seeing no natural limits to taxation, regulation, and centralized control – reaching for the undefined but uniformly applied ‘common good’ dominates all political thought.  This is the foundation of the ‘fair share’ dictum - from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – enforced equity über alles.

On the right the conservative, most certainly the conservetarian, sees no desired end in fascist governance.  For after all, fascism is the other dominant form of collectivism that also requires a very large autocratic government to implement its principles of social order and economics.  This is anathema to the overwhelming share of those on the Right.  Perhaps unrealistically, but the mainstream rightwinger’s desiderata are based on a smaller government minimally regulating open markets, staying out of people’s lives, and subsisting on minimum tax revenues.  The real political bookends for us are quite different than those apprehended and preached by the Left.  An easy proof of this is in the readings of your cited Levin, who describes a leftist society accepted by the Left, and Lakoff, who demonstrates repeatedly that he has no idea what the Right believes and seeks.

What the left-leaner also misses is that his desired social order requires the practice of wholesale altruism to make it work, and populated by perfected Marxists who have always been beyond the pale of human action (see Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’).  Historically, all leftwing nostrums to achieve such a glorified state of affairs require an initial phase of large-scale authoritarian social conditioning, wherein some eggs have to be cracked to make the sought for omelet.  This road, de rigueur to the intellectual Marxist, is kept hidden from the hoi polloi lest they up and embrace the ever-present siren song of the capitalists.

So, in sum Don, your commentary invites the reader to an admittedly difficult, yet reasonable, and reasoned middle path, avoiding both sides bounded by indistinguishable brambles and thorns.  Sadly, as attested by more than two hundred years of history, along with today’s petabytes of data, that is not the real world – it never was.  May the conversation continue.

Always with respect and best wishes,

George Rebane