Rebane's Ruminations

Like likes Likes - once more (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations - 10may19 (updated 13may19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

Post-citizenship America (updated 28apr19)

George Rebane

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

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

Scattershots – 17apr2019 (updated 19apr19)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

Iconic Incoherence on ‘Immigration’

George Rebane

That is the best that can be said about ‘Trump’s approach on illegal immigration won’t solve the problem’ by columnist and one of our readers, George Boardman, in the 15apr19 Union.  He blithely blames the whole border security problem on President Trump “who created the current crisis” for political reasons.  Mr Boardman is known for his solidly established views from the left shoulder from which he occasionally forays to visit the center stripe.  But in this latest offering he ventures further into the weeds with claims such as –

• Trump has labeled “all illegal immigrants as criminals that threaten the security of the most powerful nation on earth.” (emphasis mine) Everyone knows that the most powerful nations cannot be so threatened.
• Trump is “siding with racist-driven hardliners who want to shut off all immigration, especially from Third World countries.” (emphasis mine, but who are these racist-driven hardliners?)
• After WW2 “the end of colonial rule didn’t deliver the promised benefits to Third World nations when the US became the economic powerhouse of the world.” (Where has this man studied?  All data show exactly the opposite – life in 3^rd world countries that embraced models of western governance made and continue to make enormous strides in all dimensions in quality of life for their citizens.  The culturally deficient suffered.)

Mr Boardman seems to be innocent of the more salient causes of illegal entry across our southern border.  Ted Kennedy’s role in launching chain migration and Third World preference quotas through his Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is a major omission.  And nowhere does he even hint that the Democrats are the major beneficiaries of the increase of America’s Hispanic population – both illegal, and most certainly the ongoing illegal migrations.

In the middle of his piece Mr Boardman shows a welcome awareness that illegal migrant hordes do cost taxpayers somewhere in the $100-300B range annually.  And he correctly offers “that’s a high price to pay to fill agricultural and other low-paying jobs”, especially if we want to “retain the core values of America, and control our own destiny.”

However, knowledge of America’s governance should inform Mr Boardman that there is nothing Mr Trump or any president can do to solve our border crisis, save fulfill his constitutional duties to secure the nation and execute current immigration laws.  Congress, dominated by globalist anti-American Democrats, will not do anything to slow the migration of illegal aliens.  Today the Left is active in Mexico and central America through their NGOs, mega-sponsors, and activists forming up cohorts, numbering in the thousands of women and children, for the perilous journey north.  These migrants are motivated, not by Trump’s efforts to secure the border, but only by Democrat promises that our president will be thwarted from doing exactly that; and, that once across, only American taxpayer-sponsored succor and sanctuary awaits them.

Progressive propagandists like Mr Boardman (presumably) see none of this, else they are part of our Left’s openly pursued policies to create a post-American continent in whose history the United States will be seen as a sordid chapter of humanitarian insult, that will then have been corrected by the socially just march to inevitable socialism.

Scatteshots – 8apr19 (updated 10apr19)

George Rebane

Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman writes ‘High school cutbacks another consequence of our stagnant economy’ in today’s paper.  There he gets kudos for echoing the commentaries and comments on Nevada County schools and economic development that have long populated these pages over the years.  My preference is that he should have stated his case more strongly – Nevada County’s leftward tack has now baked in its previous on/off promotion of the county’s development in literally all dimensions, save being a welcoming home for progressive causes, non-profits, and ‘San Francisco values’.  The county has been and continues to be enthusiastically anti-development; and it subscribes in spades to Einstein’s dictum of insanity.  Our political leaderships’ latest foray in this direction is opposing the development of housing for our successfully retireds – major cash importers to our community - who want to move from their acreage homes to appropriately high-end, higher density local options that offer more readily accessible conveniences.  It seems that Mr Boardman’s own list to port prevents such a frontal assault on his brethren.  Then again, perhaps next time.

‘The Cultural Revolution comes to North America’ writes Anastasia Lin in the 8apr19 WSJ.  The Left in both the US and Canada has now been launching ‘call-out mobs’ whose “aim (is) not to persuade or debate, but to humiliate the target and intimidate other.”  Their main weapon is to paint their opponents with the broad brush of ad hoc labels whose meanings they either do not know or take to mean whatever they want it to mean as convenient.  Popular terms du jour are ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’.  One of the established intellectual leaders of the local blue mob is Steven Frisch, who has frequented these pages for years, distributing his opprobrium in RR comment streams when he finds anything that is too persuasive of a counter to his progressive mores, values, or narrative in general.  I am his favorite target and recipient of his latest offering a few days ago.  I use it as a concrete example of the cultural revolution Ms Lin describes – as they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

I know you think we are in a new crusade and Islam is going to take over the world; that brown people are a scourge on our country; that anything that addresses environmental or climate benefit is a UN and IPCC conspiracy to control the world; that there is growing threat of communism in the US; that young people are stupid and lazy; that we should be able to have communities where people of like culture live together without having to bothered by outsiders; that you were once wrote a column for a newsletter that featured a cover of the Völkischer Beobachter on their front cover, and I could go on...

 

Democrats’ 2020 Platform Previewed

George Rebane

Ever since Trump was elected president and the national Left mobilized their efforts to destroy his administration and unseat him, I’ve been bitching and moaning that the Democrats offered no alternative programs to implement that would “fundamentally transform” America as promised.  Well, the time has come to stop complaining because in recent months after the 2018 election the Democrats have more than filled a cornucopia of initiatives, proposals, programs, and promises to construct several election platforms for any political party dedicated to steering America into a socialist state.

This was made clear to me when I received the notes that a friend used in his talk to an organization the other day.  Its perusal reveals an extensive list of things we may expect were the country to hand over control of the executive and legislative branches to our anti-American Left (anti-American in the sense that they don’t like the America of the past nor the direction it was going before they came along, hence their need for a fundamental transformation).

Without further ado, here is the laundry list of items the Democrats want to afflict on the country starting in 2021.  It is presented as received with minimal editing.

Ruminations – 29mar19 (updated 2apr19)

George Rebane

For our approval poll watchers, Politico counsels a little prudence in that department and not put too much stock into those reports.  “If the election were held today, Mr Trump would likely ride to a second term in a huge landslide.” (emphasis mine)

The Democrats’ agenda?  There ain’t none, as I’ve been pointing out to our leftwing readers.  This was echoed by Rep Cheri Bustos (D-IL), head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, earlier this week in a Democrat caucus where she admonished members that “voters have little idea what the Democratic policy agenda is; the party urgently needs to move beyond 2016.”  My advice is to pay her no attention.

Some ‘obstruction’ crumbs is all that Mueller could leave the Trump haters.  Since he was not able to interview the president (who submitted written answers to questions), Mueller claimed that a robust exoneration could not be granted.  Instead, he left that task up to AG Barr, which, of course, was the right thing to do.

Ruminations – 23mar19 (updated 25mar19)

George Rebane

Thought I’d try something different on this cloudy and wet Saturday morning.  The Mueller report is in AG Barr’s hands, and from the early assessments it is a nothing burger for the TDS Dems.  If so, they are looking at it merely as a speed bump on the road to Trump’s impeachment, which we are assured will follow when the next tranche of “clear evidence” of some, any, wrongdoing will be dug up by the Left’s congressional witch hunts that have yet to get their second wind.  I’m going to hold back my sage assessment of the progress toward nailing the president before the 2020 election.

That China’s going to eat our lunch seems like a much more relevant issue to dwell on.  So argues AI expert and prominent VC Kai-Fu Lee in his AI Super-Powers – China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2019).  Lee, a Chinese national, has impressive credentials – Google’s speech recognition head, then chief of Google China, then major VC funding AI start-ups here and in China.  He goes into great detail outlining our two countries’ different approaches to AI/products development and marketing, and the mentality of the entrepreneurs involved.  The punchline is that China has caught up or soon will in all the major arenas of commercializing and researching AI.

A careful read between the lines, makes me think that Lee really wrote this book for China’s communist leadership, complete with data-supported observations, comparative analysis, and critiques of both countries’ government support of their AI sectors.  He makes a case for state-controlled support of China’s AI, while carefully outlining the weaknesses of lawless competition and a command research environment that’s not all that conducive for creativity.  He ends the essay with a very hopeful vision of how AI-induced systemic unemployment may be alleviated (yes, Lee flies in tight formation with Rebane Doctrine on several important fronts).  The only big hole that I saw that he ignores the fact that half of our workforces have 2-digit IQs, and therefore cannot be ‘upskilled’ to fill future jobs.  Lee sees them providing the human touch and delivering “love” in human2human caregiving work.  No matter, for those interested in the last great century of Man, this is a worthy read.

The Amygdala Struggles (updated 10mar19)

George Rebane

Peggy Noonan (8mar19 WSJ) draws a useful parallel between Mao’s 12-year Cultural Revolution and the present-day antics of the Blue Mobs on campuses and our streets.  Both roilings have involved pre-intellectual young people, mostly students in each country’s academe.  And both sought/seek to banish politically incorrect traditions, customs, learning, behaviors, and thinking.  Mao’s revolution followed a devastating famine, brought on by his extremely ignorant economic policies, which reportedly killed Chinese in the high tens of millions by several post-Mao accountings.  (Liberal media have since sought to reduce that number down to the low millions.)

And today as then, both types of ‘gatherings’ with shouting throngs of young people were directed to identify and publicly shame those politically incorrect who sought to speak, comment, write, or attend in places their betters identified as being out of bounds.  These ‘struggle sessions’ (Chinese term), conducted by the youth who became the Red Guards, would take place in streets, conference halls, legislative chambers, classrooms, administrative offices, and wherever else such targeted people could be found, hounded, transported, or summarily executed.  As then, today the so-accused also have learned to quickly admit their guilt in the attempt to limit added opprobrium.  Leading the currently accused by the hard-Left are self-deprecators from the ranks of Democrat politicians like Kirsten Gillibrand and Joe Biden who have quickly pled ‘guilty as charged’ and recanted.

None dare call it treason

George Rebane

‘Microsoft workers’ letter demands company drop Army HoloLens contract’.  Microsoft “workers” (not employees) are the latest of progressives working at high tech companies to protest doing work for the DoD in defense of America.  Other companies like Google have already turned down defense work in which they could make a significant contribution to national security.  (H/T to reader)

This marks the latest twist in the country’s downward spiral from global exceptionalism and hegemony.  The 75-year Pax Americana is rapidly coming to an end as other bad actors in the world see how our younger generations, especially those with STEM and related skillsets, have been ideologically fashioned in over two generations of leftwing schools and academe.  Lenin’s words, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”, have never sounded truer as they ring across the land.  And we have given him two generations, and are now beginning to reap the fundamentally transforming whirlwind.

Employees who make such demands actually evoke two important notions about our 21^st century social order.  First, that such people mean to withhold strategically valuable skills from contributing to the defense of the order that made possible their education, jobs, and general well-being.  And because such skills are not easily attained by the population at large, these people have a special responsibility to their fellow citizens who work in supportive industries and non-tech fields providing their support for the sustenance of America, and thereby deservedly enjoying their globally-preeminent quality of life.  And finally, these STEM workers contribute materially to creating the wealth that enables us to care for our poor and indigent at levels that are the envy of the world.

The second aspect to notice about such a presumptuous protest letter from a company’s employees is that they actually believe in the collectivist (socialist/communist) principle that workers at a private company have the intrinsic right to specify and “demand” what work the company will and will not do.   In a country founded on the principles of free markets, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and individual liberties, telling someone else what they may or may not do legally with their property is an abhorrent concept and a blatantly deplorable behavior.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to keep our land from coming under such mob rule.

If a private sector employee does not like the work his employer legally undertakes, he has the alternatives to resign, to respectfully request that management changes policy, or suck it up and continue trading his labor for wages in a professional manner.  His employer does not operate a charity, a psychobabble support group, or an enterprise to satisfy someone’s concept of ‘common good’.  An employee’s job is sustained only to the extent that it contributes to the enterprise being able to attract and serve a sufficient customer base in a highly competitive marketplace.

These lessons have been absent from our schools for over a half century.

Unsustainable Socialism

If it hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. - Progressive shibboleth

George Rebane

The conversation hereabouts circles the ‘sustainability of socialism’ barn as regularly as turning the pages of a calendar.   Ever since the French revolution we have always lived with socialists who in past years were harder to spot, at least until Marx and Bastiat published their pro- and con- apologies.  In those years socialists living in capitalist countries did their best to hide their socio-economic credos as they sought to fashion public policy, and letting the word ‘socialism’ be connected with their proposals was the ultimate taboo and an almost certain kiss of death.

Not so any more.  We are now almost 50 years into a public education system the common thread of which has been to turn out socialist-friendly graduates.  Most recently this subterfuge has been replaced with the educators’ blatant promotion of socialism accompanied by a revised history that strongly recommends it to young minds.  And so today we have at least two generations of 'educated' voters who are convinced that everything anti-socialist they hear in the public forum is fomented by the rightwing fascisti and their greedy capitalist running dogs.

Border Security’s True Colors (updated 20feb19)

George Rebane

For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21^st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

[20feb19 update]  Great Divide reflections: >85% conservatives and Republicans believe there is a national emergency at the border; >65% of liberals and Democrats believe there is no border emergency.  The Right is astounded at this disparity and wonders how a nation with such a polarized outlook on such fundamental matters can continue, let alone function.  On the other hand, with no such concerns the Left believes the Right is just ignorant and evil, and needs to be brought to heel by whatever means it takes.

Ruminations - 14feb19 (updated 19feb19)

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity; the main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery - W. Churchill

George Rebane

‘Amazon Cancels HQ2 Plans in NYC’ – Now here’s a good dose of social justice for the residents of NYC delivered by local socialist politicians who couldn’t stomach the tax incentives the city promised Amazon for bringing in thousands of high-paying jobs.  Some call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Mueller’s investigation is wrapping up??? All kinds of rumors are flying around from the imminent termination of the investigation, that most of his lawyers have already been reassigned or left, there will be no final report (at least not one released to the public), to God knows what.  Has any reader found anything that looks like it's definitive and/or reliable out there on the web?

[15feb19 update]  The depth of AOC’s stupidity is yet to be fathomed.  CBS reports that the congresswoman actually believes that NYC has saved $3B, money which it now has and can spend on more teachers, fixing subways, etc, etc, instead of ‘giving away’ to Amazon.  Unbelievable!!  And what can we say about the voters who elected her? – they are at least as stupid as she.  And what can we say about the Dem congressional critters that support her? – they range somewhere between butt stupid and cynical/evil.  And what about all those across the land who are fans of AOC; talk about national dumbth.

[18feb19 update] Taqiya in America appears alive and well.  Our newly-minted Muslim in the House has successfully bamboozled herself out of a little anti-Semitic slip up, and immediately gone on to declare her true colors by agreeing to raise money for an Islamic organization with an iffy relationship to western culture and terrorist organizations.  Daily Caller reports, “Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar is scheduled to raise money in March with the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) only a week after she used an anti-Semitic trope to claim Israel has paid for GOP support.”

'Autopsy of a Dead Coup' by Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent summary of our Left's draconian three-year effort to put an end first to candidate Trump, and then to President Trump.  The VDH piece was brought to us by a regular commenter in the last Sandbox's comment stream.  I did not want the link to it to languish there, so I'm making it more prominent here.  As expected, one of our regular liberal readers had no problem assessing the events of that sordid trail of treachery as nothing more than some solid, concerned citizens "exercising their Constitutional duty in evaluating Trumps mental fitness."  (No really, that's what the Left believes has been happening.)

[19feb19 update]  'Hate crimes' list reported by the liberal lamestream media just during the two years of the Trump administration.  When a progressive hates a duly elected President, then let nothing stand in the way of getting him out of office or delegitimizing his administration.

The Illuminated Great Divide (updated 13feb19)

George Rebane

Every now and then one of our progressive commenters takes the time to offer some thought-out remarks that shine a bright light on the hopeless nature of our country’s Great Divide.  The most recent came from a leftist reader who call himself Robert Cross.  Mr Cross often takes me to task in opposing every facet of my socio-political ideology that he claims to understand.

Under ‘Progressive Pilgrims’ Progress’ we engaged in a thread that he launched with the astute lament that I blamed most of the country’s problems on progressives and their socialistic policies.  I encouraged him to read my extensive apologetics supporting such an assertion and responded in part –

"But your main takeaway should be that the overwhelming share of societal problems are directly attributable to the various expressions of hubristic collectivism - and in the US today that happens to be virulent progressivism."

This motivated Mr Cross to ‘put pen to paper’ and deliver a speech that V. Lenin could easily have made in 1917 from the back of a truck to a crowd of Russians gathered on a blustery snow-covered Moscow street.

 

The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

George Rebane

Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

• US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
• Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
• Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
• Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
• Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

[8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

George Rebane

My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding "minefield" of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ - is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

[5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

[7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal - ready to go to really sink the country.)

Ruminations – 31jan19 (updated 1feb19)

George Rebane

Global warming conspiracy’s agenda is about destroying capitalism, so admits Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.  At a Brussels news conference she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”  This revelation is not news to RR readers who have been repeatedly informed of this for over a decade.  (H/T to reader, more here)

Socialists have an endless list of bad habits, beliefs, and behaviors.  One of the worst on their list is about OPM – they never seem to get enough of it to spend, and they also don’t hold back telling other people how they should spend their own money.  Apropos to that, in the 29jan19 WSJ Jason Riley describes how “progressives are more interested in scapegoating the wealthy than they are in relieving poverty.”

‘Conflating Ideas Weakens Constitutional Principles’ (from RCP).  “The left’s conflation of conservatism with fascism and the right’s conflation of classical liberalism with progressive extremism combine to conceal the concrete political realities that inspired the rise of liberal democracy in the West. These conflations also suppress the multiple traditions that merged in forming the American constitutional order. And they obscure the compelling reasons for conserving this precious inheritance.”  (Trigger warning for some of our readers who have complained about big words, long sentences, and large paragraphs – this piece has them.)

American republicanism, as intended by our Founders, is dead, having succumbed over the years to poll preening politicians.  Moreover, the nation’s pundits and public demand that the pols be ever responsive to the latest polls.   And they are more than happy to comply so as to do ‘the will of the people’, and relieve themselves of having to make potentially contentious decisions about what to support and vote for – after all, getting reelected is job one.  So now we have government by randomly gyrating, soundbite propagandized, uninformed public opinion.  This is exactly the kind of chaotic direct democracy that our Constitution was written to shield us from with a republic of elected representatives.

[1feb19 update]  ‘Ownership as an endangered species’ by Rob Chrisman (1feb19 Union) is a good piece about the vicissitudes of private property in these days of leftward careening progressivism.  Mr Chrisman also writes an occasional blog – notallradishesarered.org – which saw its last of many excellent posts in June 2017.

Ruminations – 25jan19 (updated 29jan19)

George Rebane

Our very own Paul Emery is producing the new Dalrymple MacAlpin musical ‘Make Believe’ that premiers tonight at the Nevada Theater (more here).  Paul is arguably our county’s most prolific producer of both theatrical dramas and musicals, and also musical entertainment events at various venues in our community.  The former hippie cum community icon is also a walking teddy-bear, garnering hugs from ladies on Broad Street every hundred feet or so, and from diverse restaurant patrons when we’re having our regular lunches.  Jo Ann and I will be in the audience tomorrow night to enjoy his latest theatrical enterprise.

The 25jan19 Union ran an Other Voices column by a Mr Joe Keeble who demonstrably has bad luck when he tries to think.  In his contribution to now normative Trump bashing (a good day to do it given the Roger Stone indictment) the gentleman confuses levels with rates (the popular progressive pastime of ‘derivative diving’), and also duns the harvesting of low hanging fruit just because more of it is harder to get.  He applies all this cognitive cogitation to current border security and 'illegal immigration' happenings, real and imagined.  People with fully functioning logics can enjoy his distracted diatribe ‘Proud to be a criminal’ here.

[27jan19 update]  Pelosi ascendant.  President Trump lost big time to the Dems led by Nancy, proving again that elections have consequences.  And I don’t see where this will end since there is nothing in the current state of affairs that would induce the Dems to negotiate in any better faith during the next three weeks than what they have been doing.  They’ve already bagged the political benefit from the Dreamers, and now are focused on keeping the border as porous as possible as more migrant caravans head north.  Can someone explain how this latest decline in American sovereignty will be halted, or are we now finally on the socialist slippery slope?

[28jan19 update]  Our favorite liberal Union columnist and RR reader, George Boardman, recognizes VDH’s recent assessment of California’s decline (here), and then puts up mighty counter arguments that then auto-destruct in his closing paragraphs (here).  Expanding on whether and how California is being taken down is itself worthy of extended debate.

Governor Newsom (apropos the above) is continuing, some say accelerating, CA along the path to an inevitable socialistic abyss.  So argues T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, in his very persuasive ‘Another California Tax Grab’.  Rodgers also points out that no more silicon wafers are manufactured in Silicon Valley – way too expensive, which motivated him along with all the other chip manufacturers to locate out of state.  Comparing his data with Mr Boardman’s arguments is instructive.

America’s cybersecurity war with the world’s bad guys is not going very well.  One of my WashDC spies pointed to some scary reading that made my toes curl the wrong way.  The basic message from a Pentagon assessment report is that our enemies are countering our security measures faster than we can counter their penetrating attacks – and the situation is not getting better.  The big problem is that we don’t have enough tech talent to build and man our cybersecurity barricades.  (more here)

‘UAE Slowly Loosening Constraints on Religious Freedom’ reports the 28jan19 WSJ.  Heartening piece about some commendable progress in Islam – credit where credit is due, but the road ahead to the 21^st century is still long and filled with chuckholes.

[29jan19 update]  Trump ascendant with the Dems' core galloping leftward.  "The energy in the Democratic Party is entirely on the left, and as Hillary Clinton discovered, the nominating process is going to drive the Democratic candidates to get as nutty as necessary to please the new generation of radical bigots."  Newt Gingrich

Border Security, Barriers, and Porosity (updated)

George Rebane

No nation-state can long maintain its culture and sovereignty without the ability and will to control its borders.

“Sounds like a lack of technology rather than the porosity of a wall”, replied a commenter who had just finished celebrating the capture of illegals who had tunneled under an old, shallow, and unmanned remote section of our southern border.  He and others like him gleefully pointed that out as evidence supporting the Left’s new narrative that border barriers (walls, fences, …) are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  And then he posted the above statement which confused (i.e. “rather than”) barrier system design with a metric of its performance.  Such mistakes from the Left abound today in the media and these pages.  We can leave the question of how much these erroneous statements are forged through simple ignorance vs promoting the ‘hate Trump’ agenda.  There is little we can do to heal their TDS, however there is an outside chance that their ignorance can be alleviated (given that there is no stupidity – i.e. processing deficit – at play).

Motivated by the above general principle, border control is defined as the ability to determine the ingress and egress of people and goods across geographical boundaries which delineate the jurisdictional limits of a sovereign nation-state.  Border controls are implemented by many means, depending on the border geography, implemented border security systems, and the cost burden the nation is willing to bear to implement its border security policies which should include one or more publicly known border control performance metrics that are part of the nation’s overall border control (multi-attribute) utility function.  The most meaningful attribute is the border’s overall porosity metric.

Border porosity is a bidirectional measure of the rate of illegal crossings in either the egress or ingress directions across the national boundary.  Today we are overwhelmingly concerned with only the ingress of illegal aliens.  In practice, porosity will vary over a range of values along a long, complex border having varying physical and political attributes that come into play.  Here we have to be careful in how we apply the above definition of porosity.  Specifically, the ingress porosity metric does NOT include the accretion of illegal aliens through non-border means such as overstaying their visa permissions.  Aliens who entered legally under various immigration, tourist, and guest-worker policies, and then ‘went illegal’ are a concern for our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

So when we want to have a meaningful discussion of border security, we must start with at least the statement of an acceptable ‘mean porosity’ level that, if exceeded, alerts us to discover and fix the cause of having violated the policy threshold.  As RR readers may be aware, my own considered border porosity threshold is a quite generous annual entry of 15,000 illegal aliens who are not intercepted/captured at the border, and successfully meld into our population.  These illegals then become fugitives from our laws, and are to be brought back into our legal system by our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

Now regarding physical border barriers (in military jargon known as ‘fixed field fortifications’) – I will not waste readers’ time countering the ignorant and inane critics who suddenly maintain that such barriers are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  (And to address the question of their ‘morality’ is for me beyond accessible levels of idiocy.)  The main purpose of such physical barriers has always been to reduce the boundary or border manning requirements wherever they are constructed.  As we are taught in the military, all unmanned fixed field fortifications can be penetrated by a determined enemy, and that goes for desperate migrants breaching unguarded segments of our southern border.  The question on what to build where depends strictly on how we must share the ‘hardware’ (walls, fences, surveillance/tracking/penetration detection systems, etc) costs with the costs of staffing our boots-on-the-ground Border Patrol, ICE, and other border interdiction units in order to maintain the acceptable porosity levels along the border.

The Left’s current narrative about whether we need walls, or slats, or fences, or whatever, and that Trump lied if he doesn’t really intend to build some ridiculously high concrete wall from the Pacific to the Gulf, is just unmitigated bullshit that diverts the national attention from border security.  This narrative panders to the nation’s Latinos, and seeks to increase the inflow of future Democrat voters who will join the ranks of those who already are working to bring America to its knees as one more compliant complement that genuflects to the brave new world of one global government.

(Now let’s see what President Trump has to say about this in his imminent speech at noon (PST) from the Oval Office.)

[update] President Trump’s short speech was full of compromises that traded multiple tranches of benefits to resident illegal aliens, including extending the DACA stays to three years, in return for the next $5.7B for border security which includes barrier systems.  He also invited the Dems to an accelerated bipartisan program to hammer out a new comprehensive immigration policy and implementing laws. (more here)  The Republican majority Senate will now draft and pass a bill that incorporates the President’s compromise proposal to terminated the partial shutdown and proceed on the road to immigration reform putatively desired by both sides.  It will be up to the Pelosi House to pass and work out with the Senate a compromise bill that the President will sign.  If Team Pelosi continues to tell the President to stuff it where the sun don’t shine, then that should remove the last shreds of doubt as to who has been stonewalling the shutdown from the gitgo.

Swedish Rhapsody

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

George Rebane

Today our socialist politicians feel that they have the wind at their back to fundamentally transform our country into the Socialist States of America.  And that may well be the case as poll after poll shows that for most Americans capitalism has fallen out of favor, or at best they are indifferent to its existence and role in supporting their quality of life.  The Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, are now the major voting block, having taken their positions in government and the private sector workforce.  Their attitudes reflect the education they received in our unionized public schools, and most are definitely in favor of socialism as the better way to organize society and our economy – over half prefer socialism to capitalism.

For most Americans, tilting leftward or already there, Scandinavia is their siren song of socialism.  And among those nations, Sweden is the posterchild and most frequent answer to, ‘Why can’t we be more like …?’  Sweden is held up to us by both progressive politicians and their handmaiden media as the paragon of how to correctly do government.

Scattershots – 27dec18 (updated 30dec18)

George Rebane

LIBERAL BILLIONAIRE APOLOGIZES FOR FUNDING RUSSIAN BOT ‘FALSE FLAG’  Those fun-loving Democrats just can’t leave well enough alone when the go to work getting out the vote.  In the 2016 national election Crooked Hillary and her DNC had to do some numbers ginning up dirt on the opposition, and even putting down the hammer on one of their own kind who didn’t get the hint that it wasn’t his turn (ever).  But most recently it was “billionaire Reid Hoffman (who) apologized Wednesday for funding an effort to dupe Alabama voters into believing Russian bots were fueling Republican Roy Moore’s failed senatorial bid.”  Yep, you really don’t want to get yourself into the cross-hairs of that bunch.

Truthout.org, the ultra-left (well, actually communist) opinion shaper and progressives’ moral voice, is now calling for acts of sabotage to bring down the Trump administration.  This week the summons went out to Democrat constituencies across the country (‘We Can’t Wait on a Savior to Remove Trump. We Must Resist En Masse’), followed by a specific call directed at government employees for “federal disobedience” and “noncooperation” (‘Federal Disobedience: Why We Must Support Federal Worker Noncooperation’).  It is literally impossible to make this up.  Today’s Left is no different from the Bosheviks of old; when the established (constitutional) order cannot be brought down by their ideas in the public forum, then it must be attacked by all other trans-rational means available.

Most longtime RR readers know that people of the Left get a very one-sided view of the world that is dispensed by their favorite ideological wordsmiths and talking heads.  They stick to their own kind when it comes to forming their picture of the world.  And because of this, our local leftwing contingent continually creates comic relief in these comment streams when they unknowingly show up with their blinders on and claim that RR has a solo hold on ideas that counter their carefully cultivated credos.  When other readers provide links and point out contrary references in my commentaries, that information is simply ignored by our lefties as if it didn’t exist – they just continue their critiques cased in the comfort that not only do these ideas have local provenance, but that they also have limited purview.  Hence, if they can be stamped out here in their cradle, the outside world will not be infected.  BTW, here’s a laundry list of fake news that our progressives swallowed hook, line, and sinker during the past year from their faithful fountains of facts.

That old-time religion in America is on the skids.  We have been pointing out for years how the media and our educational systems have been composing recessionals to Christianity as part of their assault on western culture and civilization.  Every time new stats are collected and composed, the story becomes bleaker for our Judeo-Christian heritage.  The evidence for that is most visible during the year-end holiday season when secular humanity makes its strongest assault on the faith of our fathers.  I was directed to a current compendium on this cultural transformation by Joel Kotkin (‘As the Old Faiths Collapse, the Greens, Social Justice Warriors, and Techno-Futurists Aim to Fill the Void’) by a reader and correspondent.  After giving us the dreary numbers of how our traditional religions are being forsaken by the young moderns, despite heroic efforts by churches and temples to inject socio-political ideology into their liturgies, Kotkin documents the parallel social phenomenon of the Left desperately cobbling together new faiths to serve new gods, so that they will not miss out on that ineffable something that they see gracing the lives of the remaining Christian and Jewish holdouts.  (Here is Truthout's report this.) The real interesting news here is about the outliers of secular humanists’ fabricated faiths.  These involve the new trans-humanist faith(s?), and those churches of god without god.  Kotkin concludes his essay with –

The loss here would not only be for the faithful but the entire society. Religious institutions rooted in the past also serve as ideal transmitters of traditional culture and identity; the new ones see themselves largely as warriors of the future, based on perceived social and scientific truths. Trans-humanists, for their part, seek to reduce reality to data, rejecting much of what makes us different not only from other animals, but machines. … Ultimately, the new religions, seeking to fill the void left behind by traditional faiths, offer little to families in search of moral instruction or guidance for how different kinds of people can get along. They have no answers for addressing the reality that almost all of us alive today, despite the scheming of the trans-humanists, eventually will die. A world without the old faiths may still be spiritually engaged, even hysterically so, but we may lose the lessons of community, sacrifice, discipline and faith that the old religions taught to bind our societies together.

[28dec18 update]  “Climate change has always been the cover story, not the real issue which (is) Agenda 21 Sustainability.” writes a reader and correspondent in this morning’s email.  This year’s IPCC special report SR-15 details the real agenda that was pursued at this year’s international climate change conference in Katowice, Poland. (more here)  The global warming bamboozle continues in full force, but the real objectives for arguably the greatest wholesale fraud ever attempted on the entire world’s population are now leaking out, and there to see for everyone who cares to pay attention.  Unfortunately, humans in the aggregate are not that bright.

‘China Reins In Its Tech Giants’ reports the 28dec18 WSJ.  “The closer scrutiny of tech companies comes as Mr. Xi seeks to restore the Communist Party's pre-eminence as a force in people’s lives and to establish that the Party—and not the private sector—is charting the course for China’s future.”  Communism, like our progressive sector, has always claimed to be society’s most reliable moral compass.  Therefore, kowtowing to the Party, China’s industries like ride-sharing Didi are now hiring thousands of “Communist Party members as role models for customer service.”  For our global competitive position, this is the best news coming out of the Middle Kingdom in years.  (Here our Dems will do their best to emulate China starting 3 January 2019.)

Nokidhungry.org maintains that childhood hunger is prevalent in over ten million American households.  And this goes on under governments that have uncountable programs for helping and feeding even mildly or totally unneedy families and individuals.  Congress just passed an $867B (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’, of which 85% or $737B goes for food stamps for the poor.  For the hungry households, this computes to over $73K for each household’s annual food budget.  Cut that in half and half again, and you’d still come up with over $18K per year for groceries.  What do each of these messages convey about the extent of children going hungry – ‘In America 1 in 6 kids is starving’, ‘- does not have enough to eat’, ‘- faces hunger’.?  (nokidhungry uses the last one in its ads).  But the real question is, what’s wrong with this picture?  (Extra credit:  What’s the political persuasion of the overwhelming share of bureaucrats who have been running the food stamps program for years?)

[30dec18 update]  I was graced by Union columnist George Boardman to appear in his tomorrow's (31dec18) offering.  He quoted from the addendum to my 3jan18 KVMR commentary - "I believe the present state of affairs in the world order are the result of the spontaneously coordinated efforts of fundamental Islam and western socialism’s striving to meet Agenda21 objectives."  I invite readers to reread the complete addendum.

CA Exodus Denied

George Rebane

The exodus of the producers and the productive from California has been a recurring theme on RR ever since the Democrats assumed total control, turned the state into the nation’s home for welfare recipients, started raising taxes and fees as if there were no tomorrow, and opened its gates to illegal aliens.  Essentially, the Democratic super-majority has turned the state into a sanctuary from sanity.  Among the reams of data presented to buttress the exodus argument, a reader sent me the graphic below that highlights just one aspect of nationwide migrations – and these are NET migrations – from/to our country’s prominent metropolitan areas (more here).

This shows that from LA alone we have a net outflow of 46,720 people per year.  And do you think these are the gimmes who think they’ll get more sanctuary protections and better government bennies from some other state?

Globalists and Nationalists, oh my!

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 December 2018.]

Have you considered where you stand on the many issues that not only divide us Americans, but also people everywhere, that is everywhere they can freely speak their minds?  Have you really thought it through well enough to sit down and make a list of the issues that concern you, and also your reasoned or even unreasoned, attitude about each such issue?  Most people will have to answer a truthful NO, and admit that they primarily respond to such questions, as they come up, with an unexamined yet readily available emotion.

Today we are becoming more polarized as each day goes by without anyone being able to identify a meaningful patch of common ground on which we can meet and talk.  The old adage of ‘don’t talk politics or religion’, when hoping to remain civil in polite company, has now become a social mandate in the carefully groomed public round.  When at church or at some other club or association meeting, everyone carefully minds their mouths, and holds on patiently until they can leave and get back to more reliably like-minded folks.

While there are many things we all can disagree on – today immigration, climate change, abortion, culture, assimilation, terrorism, … remain high on the list – how we come down on each of them can usually be traced to our overall picture of the kind of world we want our kids and grandkids to inherit.  And for those fortunate enough to be well-read, that almost inevitably brings us to one of two kinds of worlds, which ultimately identify each of us as being in the nationalist or globalist camps.  Moreover, the roads to such diametrically opposite worlds contain all the just-mentioned hurdles about which we, again, are of opposite minds.

Scattershots – 10dec18 (updated 13dec18)

George Rebane

Laffer lives, tax rates do affect people’s behavior.  French president Macron and his government have discovered that over the last couple of weeks, and are now retreating from the attempt to wean their country from fossil fuels by boosting the price of such fuels for French consumers and workers.  The monetary losses already suffered in the country’s economy, and therefore tax revenues (France already has one of the world’s highest aggregate tax rates) have yet to be totaled, but the sum could easily be in the billions of dollars.  The bottom line is that no one any longer believes that their government’s tax increases will have any positive impact on global warming.  None of this is a lesson to or understood by America’s Left.

Schumer was for border security before he became a champion of open borders.  It’s hard to believe that Senator Chuck had such sentiments about illegal aliens, and told us all that “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.”  Today only a shrinking share of courageous Republicans can say the words which so forcefully came from the mouth of one of Democrats’ leading forked tongues in 2009.  You can see the senator’s Georgetown Law School two-minute summary of the topic here.  How come every voter in the US has not seen this little video?

Our local lefties are happy dancing in the streets celebrating Nevada County’s role in California’s recent Blue Wave, and ascribing all kinds of community bennies to the advent of coastal progressives moving into these foothills.  What’s astounding about that celebration is the celebrants’ claim that our county is therefore taking part in all the good things cultural and economic in which California is supposed to already lead the country.  None of these people are aware of the real stats on California’s decline culturally, commercially, and into criminality.  The exodus of middle-class workers, retirees, and businesses continues unabated, and unreported by the lamestream.  Kinda reminds one of the progress reports that always adorned the pages of Pravda in the old days of the USSR, and to a great extent still do under Putin.

George Boardman again lambasts LaMalfa (here).  Our favorite Union columnist and stalwart apologist for the Left on these pages singles out our congressman for his rice farm subsidies that the recent (dreadfully misnamed) ‘farm bill’ promises to continue.  The cleverly crafted conclusion that Mr Boardman bestows on his readers is that Doug LaMalfa somehow stands out as the leading leech of farm subsidies which are distributed far and wide across the land.  Moreover, our columnist again implies that it would be a simple matter for LaMalfa to decline his subsidies were he only made of stiffer stuff.  (I leave it to the reader to decide how much of this is fake news viz opinionated commentary, as also found on these pages.  For the record, RR has been and remains opposed to farm subsidies and corporatism.)  But nowhere does Boardman profit his audience by telling them that 85% of the farm bill is the carefully camouflaged food stamp welfare bill – that would mangle the carefully crafted message.  In fact, there are over 40M Americans on food stamps, more than the 37M population of Canada.

‘History Ended in 1945’, so argues James Dobbins, former assistant SecState who now holds the Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy at the RAND Corporation.  He maintains that “undoing the postwar order could produce global depressions and frequent wars.”  This has been a general theme of Rebane Doctrine, and has been debated here for years.  I found the following excerpt as a particularly strong endorsement for continuing capitalism, the Westphalian world order, and America as a global hegemon.

Yet in a larger sense, the “end of history” came in 1945. Since then there have been no wars between major powers and few between smaller states. The business cycle has been moderated if not eliminated. The subsequent seven decades saw almost continuous economic growth, lifting nearly half the world’s population into the middle class.

These accomplishments are based on two basic, widely accepted norms of international behavior: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s territory, and thou shall open thy markets to all equally. The norms were buttressed by numerous postwar institutions—the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization. Equally important, the norms were backed by U.S. military and economic power and the attractiveness of the American political and economic model.

Trump’s NDA payoffs.  Quite often Non-Disclosure Agreements are part of quid pro quo contracts.  Why is Trump singled out for such a contract that involved alleged events before he became a candidate, and the effect of which on the election is debatable and yet to be demonstrated?  Didn’t Hillary also pay staff (possibly with government or campaign funds) to scrub servers of contents which definitely would have had an impact on her electability including potential criminality?  No one has made a peep about that.

[13dec18 update]  Apple to build $1B, 15K job facility in TX - “ choosing Austin as its marquee job-creation locale” - among other locations across the country.  Progressives (especially the looney local lefties) need to strap on yet another set of blinders in order to continue denying the Great California Exodus that is moving producers and the productive out of state. (more here)