Rebane's Ruminations

Hunker Down Diary – 26mar20 (updated 27mar20)

George Rebane

When there’s a problem, government is guilty until proven innocent.

Today is HD19 for the Rebanes.  We started hunkering down on 8 March 2020, and finally risked it all this morning by showing up at our local Safeway at 7am, the advertised ‘old folks shopping time’.  Apparently the younger people had not gotten the word, and the store was full with a lot of couples like Jo Ann and me pushing two carts.  Most of us wore gloves, a few had on masks, and all of us social distanced as much as possible.  But what we saw was dismal; something you’d experience in a socialist second or third world country – ‘miles’ of empty shelves of the stuff that everyone really wanted to buy.  Still, we all filled our baskets with what there was and substituted a lot of PlanB items.

What surprised me was that today the younger generation of managers have no knowledge, let alone experience, of the buying patterns during times of emergency and need.  With all signs of the coming hunker down time apparent more than a month ago, no one, starting with FEMA, advised the supply system to put the pedal to the metal on obvious staples and sanitary items.  There was no anticipative ‘push’ in the pipeline.  Everything appeared to have continued on with the JIT (just in time) scheme that works so well during happy days.  The makers and distributers are making do with the JIT schema in spite of the enormous consumer ‘pull’ of empty shelves.

The Demonic Party reveals itself (updated 25mar20)

George Rebane

The congressional Democrats have plumbed new depths of unabashed and sickening sleaze as they block the passage of the Senate bill to provide liquidity and relief to the nation’s economy on the verge of depression.  The multi-trillion dollar aid package is designed to prevent bankruptcies of countless companies that provide jobs to millions of Americans and are now attempting to rapidly retool to supply the medical needs to flatten the Wuhan virus infection curve, thereby saving untold families grief. (more here) Instead, led by Team Pelosi/Schumer, the Dems have attached a socialist wishlist of provisions to the bill that have NOTHING to do with fighting the virus and saving the economy.

Besides demogauging another one of their material Big Lies that the bill is a “slush fund” and a “bailout” of corporations, as if the corporations were the cause of the pandemic, these socialist sleazebags want to piggyback on this crisis to pass anti-capitalist provisions that they could never accomplish during normal times.  The want to revise laws that will implement many of the Green New Deal provisions on corporate board memberships (unions, activists, and workers), and that henceforth the government will have a major say in how individual businesses are run. (more here)

One of their most onerous provisions is a permanent ban on corporate stock buybacks.  It is clear that such buybacks should not be allowed during the time a company receives liquidity funding from the feds, but the Dems want to remove this important financial strategy forever.  They are either ignorant of or just plain evil in denying such an important market strategy that benefits every participant in such buybacks, including the small investors and holders of retirement accounts.  (more here)

Their aim is to finally start the real fundamental transformation of the country through a government ‘rob-and-ruin’ involvement in company operations.  Since the Dems have no positive or productive policies for generating wealth and jobs, they continue to play the only cards they hold – hate capitalism and hate Trump.  And their constituents don’t have the wherewithal to ask ‘what then?’ after their socialist future comes about.

But all of this is part and parcel of a party that has long been the creator and promoter of the nation’s miseries, highlighted by their support of slavery, then decades of Jim Crow, then the destruction of black families and promotion of urban blight launched by their not-so-Great Society, and now continuing with the dismantling and destruction of America’s educational system. (The complete list is too long to recount here.)  While the Republicans also have warts and have not always been our angels, the policies and politics of today’s Democrats have surely made them into our Demonic Party.

[25mar20 update]  Healthy companies create jobs, jobs pay people, people with money can buy things they need, companies make more such things, and the cycle repeats.  I have yet to find a single leftwinger, let alone socialist, who really understands this cycle.  The role of a thriving private sector economy is so obvious that, when told this, almost all folks of the Left will agree to the need for such a cycle that epitomizes a healthy economy.  And then they blow a tire, because invariably their follow-on remarks turn out to promote economy stifling policies, which gives lie to the claim that they understand.  All this is enormously magnified by the nation's political idiot contingency in Washington and other levels of government across the land.  They simply cannot connect the dots when it comes to wealth creation; they sincerely believe that money (wealth) is created simply by government printing the long green as much as is needed.  There is no comprehension as to what has to stand behind those printed slips of paper (or the equivalently fortuitous bit patterns on some mass memory device somewhere in the cloud).  We see that again in the demonic machinations of Team Pelomer in Congress.  Last October “the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.” (more here)  Their bottom line, don’t destroy the economy when fighting a pandemic, the resulting damage is a lot worse and longer lasting than what the pandemic can do in an economy that continues to function.  Save the economy to save the people.

Ruminations – 17mar20 (updated 18mar20)

George Rebane

Swine flu H1N1 Apr09-Jan10.  57M Americans infected, 257K hospitalized, 11,690 died.  Does anyone remember any full court press on Obama by the media and the Repubs as today we witness dished out hourly by the Dems and their lamestream in their vilification of Trump?  (H/T to reader.)

Russia impacted the 2016 election.  Those lyrics of our leftwing loonies still rings out loud and clear across the land.  And since that chorus started, tens of millions have been spent in the attempt to find any evidence, all to no avail.  Admittedly, our Left is not all that good with the finer points of English as they continue to confuse ‘attempt’ and ‘impact’, or is it really one from their repertoire of Big Lies broadcast daily?  That's called trolling for the dummies.

Coronavirus info link for Nevada County – NC Health and Human Services.  The Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital has announced a new testing program; see 17mar20 update here.

[18mar20 update]  Epidemic model used by policy makers revealed, and also news of a stop-gap medicine to prevent and fight Covid19.  See the 18mar20 update to 'Testing, testing, ...' here.

Correlation of the nation's blue concentrations with the incidence of Covid19 was pointed out in a reader's correspondence.  Apparently no one in the media has yet to make the connection.  (more here)

Lots of people buying guns and ammo.  The Left should recognize that these are not the nation’s gun owners who have already laid in their stash of Second Amendment armaments.  It is the latest tranche of newbies who have had their ‘gun epiphanies’ by the tens (hundreds?) of thousands.  The feds confirm this through the surge in background checks, and the dealers confirm it by reporting that these desperate buyers will take any available gun with any kind of ammo that fits.  Those of us who have owned guns for years would never even consider doing that for more reasons that we simply don’t have to.

All the Dems grousing about Trump’s “failure to handle the pandemic” are simply full of horseshit (aka bull pucky).  No one dares to compare America’s response with the actual numbers of what the other Left-celebrated countries have done.  Grab any metric that you have available.  And the biggest farce is the so-implied massive testing that other countries have done.  The challenge is to discover what marginal benefit to prophylactic or prescriptive policies has their testing provided that shows America is somehow behind the response curve.  Nothing – but ‘testing’ is the only thing that the Dems have, with no better (or any) plans of their own, to try to get some traction against the Trump administration.

Ordering out from restaurants.  Lots of people are buying into this alternative as an easy way to get good food without risking Covid19 infection.  Not so advise the thinking medicos.  You have no guarantee of what kind of food was used to prepare in what manner by personnel in what kind of pre-symptomatic condition within kitchens of unknown sanitary state that are frequented by numerous people whose outside contacts are also totally unknown.  The infectious disease experts tell us to order out is still a crapshoot.

The Socialistic Socialization of Socialism (updated 6mar20)

George Rebane

Some thoughts on Super Tuesday 2020.  Socialism is a form of organizing society and the economy, a form unknown to our younger generations.  They have been taught in our schools all about the mythical glories of socialism, and no history of what actually happens when countries have adopted it.  Today they are saturated by reports of Europe’s socialism as examples of the ‘benefits’ which await America on its adoption here.  These propagandized stories are generated and delivered by our media that are somewhere between incompetent and corruptly partisan.

With today’s stifling political correctness and ongoing deconstruction of our public speech, critical thinking by the young is almost impossible and definitely rare.  It is a field day for corrupt politicians like Senators Sanders and Warren.  This gives the young no choice about their messages, but to simply believe their content, and judge them only by the cosmetics of their delivery.

All of this explains why our millennials and genXrs are so willing and eager to vote away their national inheritance.  The one-world socialist elites know well Thomas Jefferson’s admonition – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

[6mar20 update] Super Tuesday's Latinos for Sanders.  We know that Bernie Sanders is an idiot and a demogauge – he has proved it daily for at least the last five years.  But what about the young Latinos whose parents escaped here from dictatorial banana republics in which Sanders’ socialism was on full display, and whose history and leaders Sanders still celebrates today?  What does that say for their socio-political awareness when they have such revealing and enlightening family histories?  Actually, it says the same thing about them as about the more indigenous Americans who make up Bernie’s Bros.  It’s the same 25-30% of unread bad news bears (more in California) who can’t or won’t, and who support every national movement that promises them a workers’ paradise where everything is free.  They will be with us forever, here and elsewhere.  And every so often they are successful in bringing communism to the fore, and dispense wholesale misery to their people for a couple of generations before the next revolution.  All of them now believe it’s finally America’s chance to dumpster dive for a dictatorship of the proletariat.  (more here)

Scattershots – 22feb20 (updated 25feb20)

George Rebane

Surprise! – school costs are projected to double their budgeted income.  Well, not really.  It’s only a surprise to our progressives who either skipped or failed Econ 101.  The 22feb20 Union cites a report by WestEd that projects the coming “silent recession” in our schools (here) This was known to most of us years ago (2008) when its first ignored signs became apparent.  The schools will “likely be running deficits soon because of factors like the rising rate of pensions, special education costs, and rising staff costs, along with the price of health care.”  With state socialism running wild and teachers’ unions sitting in the catbird seat, whoulda thought?  In Nevada County we are holding emergency meetings at the school district “in an attempt to get ahead of the possible (?!) problems.”  And guess what is the big unfunded gorilla in the room – can you spell ‘CalSTRS’?  As usual, no one is discussing cutting the schools’ ridiculous cost structure, but only how best to raise taxes to pay off the new bonds that must be floated to cover the deficits.

The mood of California’s disgruntled Democrats is correctly captured by our beloved liberal cartoonist Bob Crabb.  You see, they already control the state with an electorate of gimmes having voted in the Sacramento super-majorities, and a double dummy governor who’s competing with Bernie for the Time's cover picture of the ‘Socialist of the Year’.  But there’s a bit of northern California that still remains mostly Republican and conservative, and that must not be tolerated to complete a true-Blue, one-party state – any vestige of remaining representation of the knuckle draggers in Sacramento must be purged.  And Mr Crabb is up to promoting that in his cartoon which I filched from the pages of the 22feb20 Union.

The fair share between pay and profits, that is the consuming question for America’s socialists, who, of course, know the answer.  Jon Sindreu in the 22feb20 WSJ gives the issue a workmanlike airing (here).  There he points out that “there has been a lot of attention paid to how much of national income goes to profits instead of workers’ pay. Labor’s share of gross domestic product remained close to a postcrisis low in 2019 amid record corporate earnings, according to the latest U.S. data.”  And the stability between pay and profits during most of the 20th century started tilting toward profits, which predictably has gotten up the dander of our ‘workers, throw off your chains’ leftwing.  A deeper look reveals no untoward imbalance, save that since 1980 competition has forced industries to consolidate, and technology started replacing labor’s share of productivity contributions.  This, of course, has caused labor’s share of GDP to decrease since the remaining jobs are tending to a dumbbell shaped distribution of pay, with the big hump consisting of lower wage ‘commodity level’ jobs.  If we want to maintain and grow our QoL, then start thinking again of systemic unemployment, universal basic income, and perhaps even non-profit service corporations.

[23feb20 update]  One of the Democrat Big Lies is that Russia is backing Trump in 2020.  This not only a lie, but blatant idiocy for anyone to believe such tripe.  We have pointed out how Trump’s walk is what people should focus on, not his public talk about Russia which is firm yet relatively mild-mannered.  For those snuffies unfamiliar with public/private negotiations, this is what you do to maximize your position in deal making – talk softly while wielding a big stick.  As John Hinderaker explains in ‘You Don’t Need a Spy to Know Which Way the Russian Wind Blows’ - "Donald Trump is anathema to the rulers of Russia. Not only has he armed the Ukrainians, he has re-invigorated NATO by insisting that members take an interest in their own defense; stood up to and badly wounded Russia’s key ally, Iran; overseen an expansion and strengthening of American armed forces; and, most important, encouraged fracking and other development of U.S. oil and gas resources, which has kept down the global price of oil. … It is blindingly obvious that the Russians would prefer any Democrat to President Trump. All of the Democrats have promised to limit U.S. production of oil and gas, which no doubt sounds like pure insanity to Putin but is music to his ears. Equally important, they all vow to shrink America’s armed forces and never to use them under any foreseeable circumstances. And they all would pursue a soft line toward Iran." (more here and H/T to correspondent)

[24feb20 update]  There is a Sanders Silver Lining.  What many of us have been saying for years about the true social and governance objectives of the Democratic Party are now visible to all as the curtain has been pulled aside to reveal their true aims for a fundamentally transformed America.  It is clear that communism is the ultimate goal, and proto-communist policies, should Team Bernie et al prevail, are the first steps.  But first, our guns have got to go as the government’s guns come out to make us heel.

[25feb20 update]  Google full-page ad in the 25feb20 WSJ touting their cloud services has the banner – The Home Depot is solving for empowering doers to get more done.  Huh??!

From the immortal Robert Burns “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us! …"  - Since George W. Bush I have been writing about the fundamentalist hijacked Republican Party. It is 2020 and the GOP Jihad continues on with the new moniker of the Trump Party. … Leaderless and adrift, the far-right hoards of white Republican religious purists are still trying to purge the country of decency, morality and moderation instilling their brand of anti-abortion and anti-immigration and science denial. … I understand the necessity of an opposition, but the Republicans are completely AWOL, in that regard. The Republican Party is becoming a group of fringe right-wingers lacking the moderation of centrists. Get ready for the Trump-Republican 2020 campaign of lies as they play to the wealthy, religious and conservatives. What a god-awful mess. May they self-destruct.  Ron Lowe, Nevada City (from Letters in the 25feb20 Union)

And in the same vein from Thomas Elias’ ‘California carrying the national economy’ , we learn that instead of all the growing problems the state has been having under decades of Democrat rule with workers and companies leaving, highest taxes/fees/regulations, welfare capital of the nation, illegals and gimmes arriving, and crap-infested cities full of indigent homeless and addicts living in the streets, and … .  All of that is wrong, and California is really “the envy of the nation” as we were told the other day by Governor Goofy Gavin.  Since the state has a couple or three counties that are home to major corporations raking gazillions of revenues from manufactories and server centers all over the world, all is well – better than well, it’s just peachy.  When county GDPs are tallied like that, then it’s easy to see how places like India and China can also have several small concentrations of outfits that produce enormous wealth which doesn’t accrue to the surrounding countryside where people are in dire straits.  Don’t know whether the arch leftwing columnist Elias is a bit teched, but he’s sure betting that his readers are.

Ruminations – 16feb20 (updated 20feb20)

George Rebane

Bernie will force employers to pay disabled workers the going minimum wage in his “disability rights” platform – according to socialist lights, it’s only fair.  No matter that repeal of Sec 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act will no longer induce employers to fashion jobs for which the (mostly mentally) disabled can join the labor market, and with other workers provide a rewarding service.  And the rank and file Dems don’t understand any of it.

"Germany's experience is typical for bureaucratic climate policies, and it stands in sharp contrast to the American experience. The U.S., though heavily criticized for not signing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is curbing emissions today much faster than any country that actually did sign the agreement… U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration."  (more here and H/T to correspondent)

Pocahontas has another plan, this one to stamp out foreign and domestic “disinformation” campaigns: punish those who disseminate misleading online posts about elections.  This includes holding responsible online platforms that let their users post such “disinformation”.  What this former Harvard pinhead professor misses is that disinformation campaigns have been a staple of elections for centuries.  Hardly any election has ever been held free of lies, libels, fabrications, mendacities, misrepresentations, fraud, … by opposing sides.  Before the internet there were pamphlets, newspapers, radio, and TV.  Is her sophomoric epiphany one more sign that our electorate has descended another couple of critical thinking rungs?  Thank you unionized public schools.

[17feb20 update]  George Boardman writes a good column (here) in the 17feb20 Union on NC’s economic development.  His review of our recent economic development history makes clear that the county and city governments contribute materially to the county’s slow/no economic growth. His lament, “Where are the jobs that pay a living wage and offer a meaningful career path?” will go on until we attract an educated population which won’t happen until we can offer good schools and desirable commercial amenities.  Our local politicians imposing their opinions on what businesses should be permitted and properly located continues to keep us as a backwater in a state that already has baked in anti-entrepreneurial policies.

[18feb20 update]  Rep Chris Murphy (D-CN) was doing a little foreign policy on the side with Ukraine.  Why he did it is more than a bit convoluted.  But even his own best excuse doesn’t contradict his meddling in America’s foreign policy, which is a clear violation of the old Logan Act that the Dems have been trying to pin on a number of Repubs.  I question the man’s ability to think clearly if he thought pulling a stunt like that would have no consequences.  Who else in his brain trust also advised that the surreptitious visit would be a good idea?

[20feb20 update]  One of the Dems’ big lies was again front and center in last night’s clown car debate – the economy is bad because there has been no wage growth for middle and lower class workers and minorities.  Now as I have mentioned, such lies are consequential because it drives decisions of people who are too lazy or simply are not able to think critically.  Here is what the Fed tells us about wage growth over the years.  The Dems continue to tell consequential lies that totally misrepresent the existential situation in America and around the world.  And their lamestream lackeys ignore, if not reinforce, the entire performance.  Instead, they focus on the make no-never-mind ‘lies’ that Trump spouts in his usual and regrettable braggadocio tweets.

The joys of capitalism.  A small innovative pharmaceutical company has come up with a vaccine for the corona virus in three hours after getting access to its genetic sequence.  The company developed an algorithm that works on such double helixes to find the proper gene to disable that will neutralize the COVID-19 virus.  Inovio Pharmaceuticals is now getting ready to mass produce the vaccine and have it ready for the market possible as soon as this summer.  That’s the kind of innovation free markets invite, and the candidates in the Dems’ clown car want to dismantle.  Remember, their mantra is that ‘you didn’t build that; you didn’t develop that, you didn’t …’ – it was all due to the great collective in the sky.  (more here and H/T to correspondent)

We do have our own facts (updated 7feb20)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." A. Lincoln

George Rebane

[This is the addended and updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 February 2020.]

The nationally prominent public figure and liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us the well-known shibboleth that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Moynihan was a man of many talents, serving as adviser to several presidents of both parties, Harvard college professor, ambassador to India and the UN, and as a four-term senator from New York.  He died in 2003, a bit too early to witness the rejection and even falsification of what at first reading seems like an eminently reasonable and widely applicable statement.

Today in 2020 we have long acknowledged and adopted the existence of at least two sets of facts, held by each side of a deeply polarized country.  That we do not agree on the facts which support our stands on public policies is the prime reason why we can no longer emulate that great Texas politician and 36th US president Lyndon Johnson, when he would put his big arm around an uncompromising opponent’s shoulder and utter the biblical invitation from Isaiah to “Come now, let us reason together.”  But the prerequisite for reasoning together is to have some common ground that usually begins by accepting some common collection of critical facts.

Scattershots – 21jan20 (updated 27jan20)

George Rebane

RL Crabb is prominent in today’s (21jan20) Union lambasting AB5, the latest socialist outrage from Sacramento. (more here)  This piece of dreadful anti-work legislation has finally caught enough of our liberal artsy-fartsy crowd to also get them squawking – less known, AB5 impacts at least as many of California's high-tech STEM consultants and freelancers.  Our cartoonist friend Bob Crabb’s distress (here) puts paid on what most of us have known about his true ideological colors – for shur he ain’t no middle-roader.  Regardless of his ire against the state’s Democrats – it’s akin to my ire against the state’s Republicans, but I don’t pretend to be a mid-roader – he cannot countenance the other side, even in the face of AB5.  “I also do not agree with those who want to steer clear of partisan politics. This bill is 100% Democrat. It was written by an assemblywoman who curses like a sailor and dismisses us as whiners who are too dense to understand how fortunate we are to have her party looking out for our well-being.  It passed on a straight party line vote. It was signed by a governor who just dedicated millions of dollars to enforcing it.  California Democrats believe they have little to fear from the riffraff at the bottom tier of workers. We are, after all, musicians, journalists, community theaters, and cartoonists. What are we going to do? Vote for Republicans? Ha ha ha!”  As you can see, regardless of the years of collectivist crap flowing from our Democrat legislature, Bob would not change his vote to give us bottom tier riffraff a chance to sell our services as we choose – a few eggs have yet to be cracked and sacrifices have to be made.

California leavin’ should be the title of a new musical lament for all those folks heading out of state.  But there’s enough of us disgruntled Golden Staters to take and remake the places where we land and put down new stakes.  An example is Star, Idaho, a small town near where one of our dear departed California expats and RR readers now lives.  Star’s population has more than doubled in the last ten years as couples like JT and Mary Jo Turnipseed (their real name, honest!) left SoCal and moved in to experience small town living at its best.  Well, no more.  “Now Star is grappling with some of the same problems the Turnipseeds left California to escape. The town’s main drag, where ranchers once drove their cattle, is clogged with traffic during rush-hour commutes. Sprawling subdivisions have sprouted up around farmland, as have new chain stores. The median home price has more than doubled to nearly $400,000 since 2010.” (more here)  The most amazing thing to me is still the utter blindness of our states overwhelming population of leftwing loonies who deny that any of this exodus is going on.  It mirrors exactly their grossly distorted perception of the realworld which is their daily drink from the lamestream.  For them, another sip of that Kool-Aid, and all’s right with the world.

The Harvard Reorganization Plan

George Rebane

Harvard has a plan to deconstruct our republic and rebuild it in their own image.  To launch a national dialogue on this initiative, the university’s prestigious law school has published ‘Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation’ which we shall here call the Harvard Reorganization Plan (HRP).  For those unfamiliar, Harvard University is today perhaps the best endowed ($40.9B as of FY2019) premier academe of all things ideologically progressive and the fount of America’s leftwing thought.  For our liberals it is the mother temple of correct forward thinking – as declared in its motto ‘Veritas’, the institution publishes its works on stone tablets.

In the HRP, on their most recently issued tablet, their legal academics make an extensive and well-documented case for yet the most fundamental transformation, if not the complete abrogation, of what has been the United States of America.  This is a bottom up plan that will rip out by the roots our “republic, if you can keep it.”  The HRP proposes a devilishly convoluted route to replace our present form of governance with a pure democracy; using the leaks, holes, and soft-points of our otherwise carefully constructed Constitution to first create a minimum of 96 solidly leftwing new states out of what is now the District of Columbia – since DC is federal territory, this will require only a simple majority in the Senate to achieve.  Then with a newly constituted hard-Left Congress, the Constitution will be pro forma amended beyond recognition so that the result is the birth of a new United Socialist States of America (USSA).

On its first reading, HRP puts forward some very persuasive arguments for the founding of a new USSA.  But it is persuasive in a blindered and blinding manner.  And all of these arguments pivot on the siren song of “equal representation” - ‘one person, one vote’ - to be applied in a reorganized America to as many public policy decisions as possible.  The promise here is replicating the California template wherein cowardly politicians, rather than assume political risk and vote openly in the legislature, will throw the decision to a manipulable electorate so that the desired result can be credited to ‘the peehpul’.   Today the whole nation can see the fruits of that kind of a legislative dodge.

The purpose of this commentary is to invite readers to collect in one place their thoughts on the recommendations in the HRP and other similar plans that call for changing our democratic republic into a democracy.  In the sequel I list some numbered assertions, some of which I offer axiomatically, others as propositions, and perhaps a few as provable theorems.

1. The natural world (universe) has evolved over the billions of years to be an unequal, lumpy, more-here-than-there, highly discriminating, and therefore marvelously complex place that gave rise to equally unequal critters like Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
2. We are each identifiably unique in almost every dimension of being and doing that we can imagine. Therefore, if thrown into the same cauldron, we sort ourselves out very quickly as to those who can and will do what is the best, most, and/or quickest.  And we observe this as an attribute we share with all the more highly developed animals – the smarter the critter, the more differentiable it is from its fellows.
3. The belief in and the enforcement of unexamined and unqualified equality is unnatural, and gives rise to societies that cannot generate the wealth required to maintain a beneficial quality of life for any of its members, including the controlling elites.
4. Humans don’t know how to purposely manage large-scale, complex systems affected by random influences. While we can impact their serendipitous responses, we cannot beneficially control their behavior.  Mankind’s attempt to do so has always resulted in large-scale misery that precedes tragedy.  Central control of such systems requires much more knowledge than we have been able to assemble.  The eternal hubris of the Left is to ignore and/or deny this truth.
5. Nature’s answer to this conundrum is to distribute knowledge and control to the lowest levels (of agency found) in large systems. The leaf knows neither the nature nor purpose of the tree, and needs know neither to do a good job as a leaf, paying attention only to its immediate environment.  Even Rousseau and Marx caught a whiff of such an Elysian state of being in their philosophies.
6. Our Founders were astute students of human nature. They knew the histories of failed democracies, and to a man, sought to shield their new nation from a similar short-sighted fate.  Hence, the immortal words of Ben Franklin when asked what the Constitutional Convention had wrought – ‘A republic if you can keep it’, clearly indicating that future generations’ ability to sustain their bequest was to be western civilization’s Great Experiment of governance.
7. No reasonable person would argue that our Constitution is the perfect foundational document for a republic. Its flaws were already recognized when it was still being hammered on the anvil.  That’s why the Constitution was issued with built-in mechanisms by which it could be amended in a deliberate and orderly manner as new times would give rise to new values and thinking.  There is nothing deliberate or orderly in the manner HRP calls for rewriting the Constitution.
8. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007) captured and quantified the recent experience in sustaining our Republic subjected to the vicissitudes of an electorate composed overwhelmingly of those who won’t or can’t grasp the issues about which they must choose. The results of this monumental study would not have surprised our Founders.
9. I submit that, were the measures outlined in the HRP to be initiated by the next Democrat controlled Congress, there would arise a spontaneous nationwide armed resistance to ‘save the Constitution’ and maintain the status quo. In short, reasoned national dialogue would break down in a similar manner experienced during the years before the War Between the States.

More later, based on our prolific and deep-thinking readers, and as other thoughts will undoubtedly arise in the fullness of time, I will add them to the list with attribution.

The Advent of Government's Mega-overreach

George Rebane

Those who pay attention were made aware that Sacramento is next preparing a bill that would tax companies doing business in California on the basis of the difference between their CEO and median worker pay. (more here)  Portland already passed such a tax regulation last year.  Now you may ask, what business is it of government, or any non-owner of a private company, as to what should be their pay scale.  What’s the reasonable basis for government to reach into a company’s operating policy and impose punitive measures if it doesn’t do what politicians and government bureaucrats dictate?  Actually, there is no reasonable basis for this, nor need there be as long as government threatens the use of their gun.

What should concern all of us right-leaners is what comes next if the court challenges to this new super-stupid law fail.  There is nothing then to stop government from constructively appropriating private corporations – first slowly, then rampantly - by extending their operational dicta to everything from how many products of what kind companies should make, how much of a ‘fair market’ price they should charge for them, what should be the pay for specific jobs, …, the list is endless once this tax regimen is accepted.  Companies would still bear the full measure of risk for such operating policies enforced from on high.  Such a mega-overreach of private businesses is exactly what Hitler did in the 1930s to extend the cold hand of national socialism over Germany.  (Our already left-leaning media didn’t then know how to report that because Stalinist communism had already appropriated all production in the USSR.)

The likelihood of this scenario being the actual death knell of open market capitalism in America is heightened by the lack of involvement and critical thinking skills of our electorate.  And here I’m not talking about those of today’s hard-leftists (like those who frequent RR comment streams); what should concern us all are those millions of mid-roaders and independents now inured to years of lamestream propaganda – those whose socio-political ideology is at best a soft mush that can be re/shaped by the most recent socialist slogan.

AB5 is a related super-stupid California law that has become the legislative analogue of swiss cheese given all the exclusions that it is in the process of incorporating.  We covered its introduction in ‘California’s latest dumb to dumber’.  And to remind readers that stupid governance in California is not restricted to any one sector, we brought SB419 to readers’ attention in ‘SB419 – Stupid becomes stupider’.  Ms Terry McLaughlin in the 16jan20 Union (here) gives a more complete treatment of the effects of AB5 since its passage.  I could go on to also review the impact of SB50 on local control of planning and restrictions on rent increases, but there's enough here to again communicate the ongoing disaster that is Sacramento.

It will be most interesting to read the leftwing's apologetics for all this insanity in California, because we know they are true believers in whatever comes out of Sacramento (fashioned in their image), even if they don’t have the ability to present a rational defense of their beliefs.

SB419 – Stupid becomes stupider

George Rebane

There is no lower bound to progressive stupidity.  This truth is again confirmed and demonstrated to boot by SB419 signed into law by our Gov Nutjob.  Adding to all the other problems with our progressively punished public education in California, the new law installs ‘the willfully defiant classroom’ into our schools.  It legalizes “willful defiance”, which until now has been a reason for teachers and principals to impose disciplinary action and suspension when 6-8^th grade students willfully defy teachers and staffers in our schools.  The law effectively removes the ‘willful defiance’ clause as a violation from our education code EC48900(k).

Actually, it’s even worse than that.  In its broader interpretation, the new law makes it legal for such kids to defy any adult, including their parents who will now be in violation when they attempt to discipline their unruly little darlins, or any kids for that matter.  The real reason for this stupid response from Sacramento is that suspended kids don’t generate cash for the schools which get certain kinds of government funding based on attendance.  A quirk in the law is that the schools may still use EC48910 to send the little idiots somewhere else, but not home.  One possible destination will be the new “intervention room” appropriately staffed by people the kids can ignore and raise hell.  I have no idea how that will work out, and neither do the pinheads in our legislature led by our paramount pinhead Newsom. (more here and here)

And the real pinheads are our neighbors, those who year after year vote for ever more ignorant and ideologically sclerotic legislators.  Recall, the plan was to first make them into double dummies through our public schools.  That has worked, and now they are compliant nebbishes who get their daily marching orders from the lamestream media.

Ruminations – 10jan20 (updated 13jan20)

George Rebane

The Dems’ Chorus of Cacophony is now shrieking at Trump for taking out Soleimani the terrorist as a prophylactic for imminent acts of terror, exactly the same thing they blamed and still blame Bush2 for NOT taking out Bin Laden in order to prevent 9/11.  We recall it was Bill Clinton who declined to take out Bin Laden when he was actually in our cross-hairs.

More liberal worthies are also blaming Trump for Iran’s downing of the Ukrainian airliner, claiming that our president caused the deaths of the innocent passengers.  No doubt all subsequent atrocities committed by the rump ISIS contingents will now be blamed on our president since he also took out ISIS leader al-Baghdadi.  Such accusations are a daily testament to the anti-American propaganda of our progressives who promote the longevity of every leftwing tyrant across the globe.

Our voting teenagers should make US foreign policy a “higher priority” argues a learned 17-year-old in the 10jan20 edition of The Union (here).  The young man appears to have been successfully inculcated in our public schools to embrace TDS as the proper political support for voting decisions (he likes Buttigieg), while ignoring the capacities of his much less knowledgeable and more malleable peers.  His point would be better made were our schools really a forum for open discussion of ideas instead of founts of mind-melding progressive propaganda.

'Tax the robots' is the new cry arising across the land as a way to slow down automation and save the jobs of the un- and less-skilled.  This, along with universal basic income (q.v.), appears to be the half-way solution to the advent of systemic unemployment.  Other deep thinkers are of the mind that smart machines will be like all other past innovations, they’ll create more new jobs as they change and take away old jobs.  No one yet knows how to tax this latest advance in what used to be called automation.  And you can be sure that nothing promising about all this will come out of our polarized legislatures.  The real problem of systemic income was outlined in these pages some years back (here, here, and here).

[12jan20 update] The winds of woke.  Oh it’s hard to be a progressive without getting daily instructions from PC Central.  For years they taught us about the benefits of adopting cross-cultural artifacts, arts, and affectations into our supposedly banal and racist western culture - inclusivity and globalism and all that.  Now suddenly it has become ‘misappropriation’ to do any of that - a definite no-no for all the woke folks.  The latest is that white women should no longer wear hoop earrings which were originally connected with African women’s adornments.  Gotta stay current.

"The ongoing turmoil in U.S. politics is part of a larger political crisis that is shattering old alignments of left and right in North America and Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, embattled establishments are besieged by populist insurgents. The rebellion takes different forms in different countries—the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., Brexit in the U.K., the revolt of the yellow vests in France. But the underlying dynamic is the same: the revolt of alienated, mostly but not exclusively native and white working-class voters against post-national metropolitan elites."  So argues University of Texas Prof Michael Lind in a major 11jan20 WSJ essay (here).  New insights, definitely worth a read for those paying attention.

[13jan20 update]  ‘Stack & Pack’, an important objective of Agenda21 (now Agenda2030), takes a huge step forward in California under SB50 which Gov Newsom will sign into law.  Here’s the headline – “Senate Bill 50 tramples over local control to push densification”.  Our leftwingers will again sing the A21 conspiracy song.  And again I reply that with Sacramento’s one-party system of governance, there is no conspiracy needed to promote collectivist central planning and control.  (H/T to reader)  Oh, and did I mention AB5?

Why Black Lives Don’t Matter to Blacks

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 January 2020.]

Do black lives really matter?  Well that clearly depends on whose talk and whose walk you pay attention to.  The loud talk from our congresscritters and black leaders is that black lives very much matter, and that it’s the police and white racists who are wantonly killing blacks across the land.  But by their walk and the abundant facts on record over the last half-century, these same people demonstrate that they really don’t care much about how African-Americans live and die.  They only demonstrate their concern and ire after a rare and unfortunate incident occurs where a black American is killed by a law enforcement officer.  Then it is time to gather their constituents in the streets and continue the narrative that blacks are dying in great numbers at the hands of cops and whites.

The reality is quite different in that blacks die by the hundreds every month at the hands of other blacks.  This ongoing carnage does not raise a murmur in the national news.  No black leaders or members of Congress, or media outlets express their outrage on Monday mornings after another weekend of murder and mayhem in the Democrat controlled urban ghettos.

From the conservative National Review we learn the big picture that “From 2000 to 2015, the mean African-American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That’s more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4 (despite disadvantages comparable to those of blacks) and over seven times the average white rate, 2.7. Moreover, … from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of the killers of black murder victims were other African Americans. In short, this is about exceptionally high as well as overwhelmingly intraracial black violent crime. White-on-white homicide is equally intraracial, but the rates are not astronomically high. … (And) in the contemporary period, from 1976 to 2014, it is estimated that (over 198,000) African Americans died nationwide at the hands of black killers. That’s (more than 5,200) deaths per year on average, roughly 19 times the annual number of deaths of African Americans in confrontations with police.” (more here)

There have been a few short-lived programs attempted that effectively reduced crime rates in our urban centers.  The most notable of these was carried out under NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a white Jewish liberal politician now running for president.  The ‘Broken Windows’ and ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ programs during his 2002-2013 tenure saved over 21,000 lives of which 90+% or over 19,000 of them would have been black.  So what happened?

The response after Bloomberg left office was immediate and disastrous.  Under leftwing Mayor DeBlasio, stop-and-frisk, which took hundreds of illegal guns off the streets, was discontinued because cops ‘unfairly’ stopped and frisked more blacks than people of other races.  As reported in the WSJ, “the rap on stop-and-frisk was that stops of African-Americans were disproportionate to their percentage of the population. That is true. But as (Mayor Bloomberg) pointed out, they were not disproportionate to the descriptions of the people committing crimes given by witnesses.” (more here)  No matter, progressive views on political correctness and social justice demanded that neighborhood maintenance was no longer required, illegal guns returned to the streets, and, as predicted, the crime rate began increasing.  And blacks again started dying at the hands of other blacks in greater numbers.

So today, the Democrats know that they have no chance against Trump without the black vote.  And for reasons no one dares to study or answer, our urban African-American populations demand policing policies that cater to proportions propagandized by Democrat politicians, instead of caring that black lives matter.  So now we have candidate Bloomberg doing a 180 on the stop-and-frisk apology circuit for having saved thousands of black lives, and promising never to do it again.

The questions no one is asking are, ‘Was it fair to blacks that an effective policing policy was discontinued, thereby again raising black-on-black murder rates?’, and even more importantly, ‘What does all this say about the priorities and/or the understanding of the black voters who year after year return disastrously incompetent and corrupt politicians to office, who then perpetuate their lives on the “plantation”?’  As reported in the Washington Post, Candace Owens has a YouTube video (here) that explains the matter – I recommend it to you.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the 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.

Scattershots – 27dec19 (updated 31dec19)

George Rebane

Well, here are a handful of observations on the progress the progressives are making to fundamentally transform America into a second-world autocracy that will look nothing like what our Founders intended to bequeath us, and nothing like the America many of us older folks have enjoyed and learned about.  And about which the younger generations have been kept in the dark, discontent, and expectant that the nation is in dire straits and will be saved only by fulfilling the objectives specified in Agenda21 (now Agenda2030).

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

Millionaires Surtax on Steroids

George Rebane

Should the Democrats win in 2020, the country will suffer a spate of confiscatory tax increases on virtually every aspect of our economic activities.  One of their recent additions to taking your earnings and belongings is the Millionaires Surtax sponsored by Sen Van Hollen and Rep Beyer of Maryland.  This would levy an additional 10% tax on all earnings above $1M for individuals and $2M for married couples.  The envy-driven of the land would approve with the snort that ‘what does anyone need with so much annual income?’

What the great unwashed miss is that such a tax on income hits a wide swath of middle-class earners when they have a rare or once-in-a-lifetime income event that they have been planning and working hard for over perhaps most of their lives.  Families that have risked, built, and worked a small business or saved and lived long in an appreciated home or investment real estate that they then finally sell to establish their retirement nest egg; it is these folks who will be hit hard when they receive their income spike in any one given year.  It is that nest egg which they have planned to prudently invest to provide for their not-so-spectacular subsequent annual income stream that no longer comes close to qualifying for such a ‘millionaires surtax’.  But during that payoff year, the federal government swoops in and treats them as if that windfall represents their regular income stream.

And that is just a bit of what our socialists on steroids will do. “Democrats these days are also proposing to raise the regular income-tax rate, the corporate-tax rate, the capital-gains-tax rate, the dividend-tax rate, the death-tax and payroll-tax rates, while creating a new wealth tax, a new financial-transactions tax, a new carbon tax and a new pharmaceutical tax, even as they would repeal 100% business expensing and the 20% income exclusion for so-called pass-through firms.”  And this is just the beginning, since we haven’t mentioned new taxes on already taxed assets.  Asset taxes on what you already own are meant to take down your private property to a value level that the government thinks is the most that people should own.  Think about that. (more here)

Van Hollen, Beyer, et al, and the phalanx of Democrat presidential candidates all parrot the eternal etude to envy – “fair share”.  Their message continues that it has been the country’s wealth-producers who have caused the poor to be poor, and through their “greed” – in earning what they earn, and having what they have – are denying them “a fair shot to succeed”.  Here in their own words, “The new revenues would finance investments needed to build a more dynamic economy where everyone has a fair shot to succeed, instead of a dynastic economy based on existing wealth. And it’s supported by patriotic millionaires who agree they should do more to give others a better chance to achieve similar success.”  From Lenin’s mouth to God’s ear.

Ruminations – 21nov19 (updated 22nov19)

George Rebane

Those creative Dems on Team Schiff have again expanded the definition of ‘evidence’.  The initial expansion qualified 'allegations' for inclusion. And from yesterday’s hearings we learned that ‘perceptions’ have now joined the ranks of culpable evidence.  For those paying attention, ‘feelings’ are waiting in the wings, and are next to shoulder and again lighten the burdens of what we formerly knew as evidence.

Last night’s Democratic debate was kabuki komedy taken to a new level.  Moderated by four fierce femmes, crack journalists all, from (gasp!) MSNBC, the carefully staged candidates were repeatedly lobbed fuzzballs like, ‘We all know Trump is a brazen and corrupt scumbag, who has done this (insert allegation), and that (insert allegation), …, and even this (insert allegation); what other things can you add to his sins, and how would you be a better president if elected?’

Someone with a caring and sympathetic heart should really show Uncle Joe to the Senior Statesman Suite at a first class Baltimore assisted living center.  He doesn’t deserve what his ‘friends’ are doing to him in the public forum.

The current desperate push to to embrace preventable man-made global warming (aka climate change) is causing its science-free adherents and echo chambers to cite and regurgitate ever more ridiculous reasoning supposedly from 10,000+ “climate scientists” warning of civilization’s impending doom that can only be saved through ample applications of central planning and socialism.  A more sober assessment of all this (‘Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence’) comes from Dr Walter Williams, economics professor and syndicated columnist.  It’s definitely worth perusing with cup of coffee in hand.  (H/T to correspondent)

[22nov19 update]  The Left’s assault on education and America’s public schools continues full speed ahead.  Yesterday in Howard County, Maryland the school board redistricted school boundaries so as to cover their collective asses and once more denigrate underachieving black kids with a policy that explicitly says ‘black kids can’t learn’ - they will not benefit from better teachers and schools.  To equalize test performance scores between a mostly white district and a mostly black district, the school board redrew district boundaries so that smarter white kids will be bussed longer distances into badly performing black schools, and vice versa.  The school board doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about the kids, black or white, but only covering their political butts from criticisms of “inequality”.  So they gave up on the black kids and will now ‘equalize’ the test scores by bussing more kids longer distances, thereby winding up with lower scores from both districts which, however, will be more equal.  All this is going on while we’re pissing and moaning about the House impeachment circus, which takes up all the news bandwidth.  Try to find a SINGLE Democrat congress critter who will point out this atrocity.

Democrats’ Big Lies #4685, 4686

George Rebane

California’s Cris de Coeur continue.  The state’s Democrats deny that the state has been steadily diving for the bottom, and has already reached it in the many sectors of fiscal and social performance.  This Big Lie is dutifully picked up by all the local leftwing lackeys who must echo the narrative out of Sacramento.  This morning we read a plaintive lament (here) in the 20nov19 Union by Alyssa Mayo, a native Californian who states, “I am as middle class American as they come.  But because I live in California, I am surviving … far from thriving.”  She goes on to list the nationally known grievances about our state, also highlighting that “every day, I watch people that I respect and love leave California.”  (In the last decade the Rebanes have bid good-bye to 11 families of friends and relatives who have struck out from California for greener pastures.)  Ms Mayo’s big concern as a “silently struggling” sufferer is shared by most, not progressively blind, that “California will get worse. I don’t know what the next downhill slide will be.  But I’m sure that it will result in losing more hard-working Americans in this state.  For those of us who remain, feebly bucketing out the ever-growing rising water, we will continue to hope for a miracle.  A miracle to save our home.  A miracle that may never come.”  My suggestion to the ‘silent suffers’ is to abandon hoping for that miracle, and instead do something radically different next time in the voting booth.  We don’t have to continue placing our futures into the hands of incompetent scumbags.  Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for a different result has never worked.

In ‘The Big Lie About Charter Schools’ David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute (an established Democrat policy think tank) debunks the bamboozle that Democrat candidates have been foisting on their constituents for at least a couple of decades.  This year the standard refrain that charter schools ‘siphon off the funds of public schools’ has reached crescendo from the throats of Dem presidential wannabes.  First, charter schools are public schools, but of the type that don’t have fatten the wallets of teachers’ union leaders and staff.  Charter schools set their own teachers benefit packages and curricula to create schools where parents want to send their children.  We all should remember that the Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association whose income is diminished by every kid who leaves a broken unionized public school.  The actual financial impact is negligible and/or minimized by various convoluted ‘make whole’ programs at the state level, but it all sorts in Osborne’s article.  The bottom line that’s a shot in the shorts for the unions is their mismanaged and mostly unfunded teachers’ pension programs.  These rely on more younger teachers paying into the expanding ponzi scheme from which the retiring teachers’ pensions will be drawn.  And that’s where the under-performing unionized schools don’t have anywhere else to turn.  So put the claims of Warren, Sanders, and even ol’ Uncle Joe about charter schools into perspective when they tell you (perhaps at tonight’s debate) that charters take money away from public schools.

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.