Rebane's Ruminations

More Revelatory Bullshit from the Left

George Rebane

Propaganda Broadcasting System (you know, the unbiased one) in its 9jul25 News Hour had an interview with the new DNC chairman Ken Martin.  The entire interview is available here.

Among the usual nauseating Democrat lies, this time about the BBB, that this interview again laid on their viewers (no real new revelations there), the segment concluded with Martin being very carefully asked about NYC mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.  The entire interview was designed, of course, to promote the radical progressive narrative, and Martin followed the script with a glowing praise of Mamdani’s “brilliant campaign”.

However, the only part of his brilliant campaign that PBS brought to light was why has that Muslim communist not disavowed the pro-terrorist phrase “globalize the intifada”.  Kent, of course, sidestepped the question with some prattle about the Democrats being “a big tent party”; never mind that the tent only stretches to the left to openly include their communist candidates.  More and more of them are now striking their false colors and declaring their radical anti-American positions on all issues – they believe that enough of their constituents have now been converted and/or sufficiently bamboozled that it’s safe to start opening up with their real agenda.

But the real interesting part of PBS’s continuing biased reporting is that interviewer Amna Nawaz never went near Mamdani’s avowed plans to collectivize rents, transport, distribution, and production per the Marxist playbook.  That is still a no-no according to the mavens who assess the mangling of the public mind.  So the main issue that is making national news about Mamdani’s communism evokes nothing but the sound of silence when they talk to their Democrat handlers.

What is ‘fair’? – one more time

George Rebane

The use of ‘fair’, as in ‘the rich need to pay their fair share’, is one the most nefarious misuse of language in the public square.  Oxford Languages defines the adjective as “impartial and just, without favoritism or discrimination”.  Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (Nobel 1972, here) proves that in collective decision making among alternatives it is impossible to satisfy any commonly accepted set of fairness criteria (q.v.) for all participating parties.  From a systems perspective the reason for this is even simpler, the decision-making parties each have a distinct, different, and often incoherent measure of utility that they want the group’s decision to satisfy.  Given this reality, they usually don’t communicate their utilities to each other and therefore talk past each other in their deliberations.  The result is almost always regarded as ‘unfair’ by one or more of the participants.

Leftwing politicians who use ‘fair’ as one of their sales tools to convince their ignorant constituents have always been able to lure their well-meaning naifs into supporting socialist policies, e.g. in wealth redistribution.  Today we have a posterchild of this tactic in Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ communist candidate for NYC mayor who advertises himself as a socialist.  In his support several Democrat congress critters have gone on the air to tell us that we really don’t know what socialism means and that it’s not all that bad.

According to Rebane Doctrine any time you hear anyone, especially a politician, claiming to have come up with a policy or process that is fair for all concerned, you know that you are asked to believe bullshit.  Exercise for the student – what is a fair share of taxes that the rich should pay?  And before that – what is a fair definition of ‘the rich’?

California’s $8 gasoline

George Rebane

With most of the state’s refineries already gone, and two more packing up to leave, and with more planned refinery exits in the works, the state is heading for a transportation disaster.  The oil companies are uncertain about the reality of CA’s 2035 ban on internal combustion engines now being litigated.  Other states like Texas have much more friendly business environments than the draconian landscape created here by Sacramento’s idiots led by chief imbecile Newsom.

Columnist Terry McLaughlin spells out more details (here) in the 29may25 Union.  The definitive analysis of the next California tragedy is documented in ‘Ensuring California’s Gasoline Security for the 21^st Century’ by Professor Michael Mische of USC’s Marshall School of Business.  From the report’s introduction we read -

California can ill afford the loss of one refinery, let alone two. The pending shutdown of the Phillips 66 refining complex in Los Angeles will reduce daily refining capacity by 8.9%. The loss, although painful in terms of its impact on consumer prices, is absorbable and the deficit in production and gasoline levels will be compensated by imports of finished fuels from Washington State and perhaps Gulf Coast refineries.

The collective consequence of the pending refinery exits to the Golden State is potentially devastating to California’s economic growth and status as the fourth largest economy, in nominal terms, in the world. With the announced shutdown of Valero’s Benicia refinery complex accompanied by its $1.1 billion charge-off, California is confronting a potential 21% reduction in collective refining capacity from 2023 to April 2026.

In 1982 California had about 45 refineries, with the exit of the next two the refinery count will be eleven.  There is no foreseeable end to the ongoing destruction caused by our voters ensconcing the state's socialist one-party monopoly.

Scattershots – 22may2025 (updated 26may25)

We must now take seriously the possibility that it will be the resurrection of a shared culture, not its abandonment, that will make possible our continued survival and cohesion.  The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025)

George Rebane

The Big Beautiful Bill is now on a rocky road through the Senate after having squeaked through the House on the narrowest of margins.  What concerns me about those Republicans who threaten to torpedo the bill is their narrow-minded concern about the $4-5T increase in the national debt that the bill is supposed to cause over the next ten years.  The problem that no one on the media (e.g. Fox News) is covering is that the ONLY soft landing to our debt burden is the massive growth of our economy which can eliminate or make deficits smaller, and lower the debt service burden as a fraction of our national income.  Do these stalwarts think that stopping this bill today will cause their inevitable Democrat successors to reduce deficits and the increase to our debt??  NFW!  Every conservative economist today understands and supports the above premise, they are all students of the Austrian and Chicago schools.  But none of them are raising the critical question to the bill’s naysayers – what is your Plan B that avoids the tax and spend Democratic deluge sure to follow?

Bumblebrain was not in charge of the executive branch during the last four years, that much is now clear to both the Left and Right.  So the critical questions that must be answered to avoid the repeat of such travesty is 1) who ran the White House, made the devastating policies, and executed them, and 2) who were those in charge of the cover-up of Biden’s mental and physical health?  The evidence for such criminal cum unconstitutional behavior is now overwhelming (e.g. see Original Sin, 2025) as confirmed by the Democrats shouting ‘That’s old news, we have to move forward!’.  It’s not over until some people start doing hard time.

Eliminate the Dept of Education as the embedded lobbying arm of the national teachers unions who have been the Democrats’ cash cows for decades.  The dismally ineffective, nay destructive, government agency was founded under Carter in May 1980.  It has now overseen and promoted the dumbing down of two generations of Americans.  This has served mostly to fatten Democrat constituencies across the land, and Democrats are doing all they can to save their cash cow and continue swelling their voter cohort.  Declining test scores are music to progressive ears.

How Trump is upending the status quo is the topic expanded on by Victor Davis Hanson.  Worth watching the video (here) with a glass of wine.

[26may25 update] The party of thieves and charlatans continues to howl at and misrepresent the ongoing discoveries of government waste, fraud, and abuse.  The latest come to light was by Dr M. Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who reported that through the joint efforts of his department and DOGE they have identified and are putting an end to $14B of fraudulent spending for Medicaid.  They discovered double payments for the same people who moved from one state to another.  Both states continue to collect at the federal trough.  The Dems, of course, continue lying their butts off to anyone who’ll listen that Republicans are cutting legal Medicare and Medicaid benefits from people who deserve them in order to provide tax cuts for the rich. (more here)

Self-administered lipstick on the California’s pigs in Sacramento who continue to tell one and all that the once golden state is still as golden as ever.  Now they’re adding population growth to all their news about the state’s superb economy.  Middle classes and the astute rich have been leaving California in droves over the last years.  Now we hear from Gavin that the state has actually gained 0.6% in population.  A closer look, not available in the lamestream, shows that in 2024 about 240,000 left the state which still grew because 361,000 illegal aliens arrived to take their place.  California’s gross mismanagement by the supermajority Democrats have made living here unaffordable for those not on the government tit.  Our median house price at $900K is twice that of the nation, and our utilities and fuel prices are among the highest, joining other idiot-run states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, … .  As of 2022 over 17% of California’s population were in the country illegally, and that number has easily doubled during 2023-24 given the millions Biden invited in and spread across the country.  Guess where a good fraction of them wound up. (more here)

Scattershots – 15may25

George Rebane

“California’s poverty rate has increased significantly, with disproportionate impacts on Black and Laninx residents” during the Biden years (2021-2024).  The California Budget & Policy Center reports (here) on the continuous disaster foisted on our formerly golden state by the double dummy Democrats who inhabit Sacramento at all levels.  And it is getting worse by the month as we hear from our know-nothing  governor.  With its policies of providing all kinds of social benefits to illegal aliens, thereby inviting more of them to come, the state has run up another deficit of over $12B this year.  This, of course, requires more taxes and fees that will mostly impact the state’s poor, thereby raising the poverty levels even more.  The terminally ignorant liberal constituencies (some comment here) have no idea what’s happening or what’s causing it.  They are focused happily on the lamestream reports that California has the world’s fourth biggest economy (contributed by Silicon Valley companies which employ a minimal workforce of highly paid employees that give rise to the large income gap among Californians generated by the exodus of middle class workers).

Birthright citizenship reporting again reveals the strong progressive tilt of our National Propaganda Radio.  As SCOTUS starts to hear arguments on the matter, the NPR Marxists go through all the tragic tales of not granting such citizenship to the offspring of illegal aliens.  With serious mien they intone the provisions of the 14^th Amendment, citing its “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”  Not once do they mention that the post Civil War amendment was written to unambiguously grant citizenship to the South’s slaves freed by Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.  The 14^th was never intended to be a y’all come invitation to illegals crossing our purposely porous borders to provide legions of future Democrat voters through planned amnesties to the parents of newly born birthright citizens.  Again, the lamestream media makes sure that their audiences never hear any of this.

The Matter of Abrego Garcia

George Rebane

Democrat lies abound in all sizes and shapes; they wash over us daily during our consumption of the news, be it from conservative or progressive outlets.  The lies about the deported gang member and wife beater Abrego Garcia have gotten a lot of mileage, and proivdes a lot of holier-than-thou comments on blogs from leftwing readers.

Unfortunately, the rightwing outlets fall down on explaining to viewers the crux of the Garcia deportation argument – maintained by the Left that he was denied due process.  In reality Garcia was provided all that he had coming under our deportation laws.  The Heritage Foundation makes this clear in ‘Abrego Garcia: The Poster Child for the Left’s Demands of Endless “Due Process”’ –

When an alien becomes deportable—either because they entered the U.S. illegally, overstayed their temporary visa, committed a crime, committed fraud, participated in terrorist activity, or other reasons—ICE charges the alien with ground(s) of deportability, which initiates removal proceedings with the Justice Department’s administrative immigration court system.

These are civil proceedings, not criminal. The administrative immigration judges are Justice Department employees in the executive branch; they are not federal judges under the Article III Judiciary of the U.S. Constitution.

That means deportable aliens in deportation proceedings do not have the same rights as a person in a criminal trial, such as being innocent until proven guilty, the right to a taxpayer funded public defendant, etc. Removing a deportable alien is not a criminal sentence

The unsuspecting news consumer is told that Garcia was wrongfully treated like a criminal and denied the ‘due process’ that US criminals receive after being arrested.  The Left emphasizes this point while the Right remains silent, thereby letting the Left’s lie remain unchallenged.  Hopefully, this little bagatelle will explain the matter to open-minded readers, while true believers of the Left remain unreachable.

Scattershots – 24apr25

George Rebane

Trump is being played by Putin for all to see, and the man has finally stumbled into one of his blind spots, apparently without a clue.  In brokering the Ukraine/Russia peace he is announcing daily progress with Russia, who continues to bomb the crap out of Ukraine’s civilian centers, and dunning Zelensky for being “difficult”.  The difficulty lies in Trump’s wanting to give Russia all of its conquered Ukrainian territories, including Crimea, while not requiring any concessions from Putin that would be politically palatable to make public.  In short, the KGB thug is taking Trump on an embarrassing ride who is belatedly realizes that he’s being viewed as a dolt in the world’s eyes.

Trump’s trade wars are not going well.  He has received offers to negotiate from over 70 countries but none are promising any near-term mutually beneficial results.  Meanwhile, the president has had to stand down on the levels and application dates of his precipitously announced tariffs.  Rebane doctrine follows the teaching of the Austrian school on tariffs as made clear in these pages.  Overall they are bad medicine for world trade, and soon we’ll see if they can even serve as useful stakes in the ground for starting negotiations.  The markets remain conditionally hopeful.

On the political front a hopeful sign.  The Democrats, currently sans leaders and public policies, are getting more convinced daily that they should hand the reins over to a younger generation of socialists cum communists.  The latter conclusion supported by their growing howls to punish the producers and the ‘rich’ by spreading wealth to their loyal voter blocks of light thinkers kept ensconced in urban ghettos ruled by Democrat demagogues.  In the meantime by their silence today's prominent Democrats quietly support their radical cohorts in acts of violence against Republican leaders and conservative business interests.  This will not bode well for the Left in 2026.

An idea to oppose pro-terrorist and antisemitic violence on campuses.  The students who oppose Islam-supported terror and support Israel and world Jewry should do what the Danes did during WW2 when their occupying Nazis mandated that all Jews should wear a yellow Star of David armband when in public.  The Danes’ response was that everyone, Christians and Jews, turned out wearing the required armbands.  Imitating the brave and unflinching Danes would send a strong message to the country that these pro-terrorist campus radicals do not represent the institutions’ student bodies.

Those discriminating selfish countries

George Rebane

The Marschak Colloquium is a 50+ year institution at UCLA that features world class thinkers, artists, and scientists as invited speakers.  Jo Ann and I were in regular attendance when we lived in SoCal.  As with academe in general, Marschak has drifted leftward ideologically.  The next scheduled talk will be given by a hard left academic who has no idea what motivates the generation of wealth.  The announcement of his upcoming presentation is given below.

Why are citizens of some countries so much richer, on average, than citizens of other countries? Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, posits that citizenship itself may be one of the key explanations. At the same time as new methods of extraction and productivity have generated vast wealth over the last two centuries, countries have hoarded this wealth by discriminating against non-citizens, limiting political rights and economic claims and reshaping inequality on a global scale.

RSVP to hear Professor Kurzman explore citizenship discrimination and global inequality on Tuesday, April 29 at 1 p.m. This talk will be held in person in the Charles E. Young Research Library main conference room and over Zoom.

Lurching Leftward (updated 11apr25)

George Rebane

The Democrats daily ventures into leftwing extremes are too many to count, but unfortunately too easy to witness.  Nationally prominent Democrat author and pollster Doug Schoen, a centrist, openly laments that the Democrat Party’s embrace of socialism and collectivist extremes is not only unabated, but picking up steam.  Led by Bernie Sanders and AOC, their newly anointed leaders, and witnessed by their rally attendances and polling, the radicals are gaining ground on and absorbing their mid-road constituents.  Ignorance, firmly implanted in unionized public schools, continues to metastasize through our population.

A potpourri of reflections follows:

• Would it not be of benefit to both sides if, say, CNN and Fox News each started a weekly program documenting the lies told by the other side, and presenting evidence to counter the featured lies? I believe any of the conservative outlets could develop a backbone to deliver such news; but not so with the lamestream.  Were they to attempt such a program, they would doubly expose their hypocrisy – first, to claim their rightwing lie, and second, their attempt to present evidence of their claim.

• The Democrats openly support tens of billions in waste and fraudulent welfare and Medicaid payments to legally unqualified people (mostly illegal aliens) in hopes of ultimately allowing them to legally vote whether they be citizens or not. Their lies, repeated daily, is that Republicans (and DOGE) intend to do away with Medicaid and Social Security.

• The “total destruction of western civilization” is now the publicly stated goal of the white pro-Islamic demonstrators on our streets and college campuses. Previously we could only infer that from the teachings of leftwing professors (aren’t they all?) in academe.  Now the anti-western, anti-US voices of main street Democrats are so blatant that internationally prominent author and social critic Douglas Murray documents this phenomenon in his On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civiization (2025).  It isn’t only the Muslims in the Middle East who call for the destruction of the West and America; Democrats have enthusiastically become fellow travelers.

• ‘83% of Americans endorse voters present proof of US citizenship in order to exercise their right to vote’. Such high shares of our population are confirmed today by poll after poll.  However, the overwhelming share of Democrats today no longer hold that constitutional privilege to be sacrosanct, and many militate for non-citizens and even illegal aliens to be able to cast their ballots.  Given today’s potpourri of people within our borders, I believe that all citizens should be provided with readily presentable proof that their US citizenship has indeed been confirmed by an appropriate government agency, and that this proof be presented whenever citizens apply for any benefits and/or permissions granted by the state.

• [11apr25 update]  From the cornucopia of Democrat lies, we hear the constant drumbeat of their description of the difference between the benighted American workers on Main Street continuously taken advantage of by the American rich on Wall Street.  That lie is repeated to keep their fomented class warfare sizzling.  Not one of their scumbag politicians or lamestream lackeys dare point out that two out of three Americans are invested in our equity markets – yes, Wall Street.  The marriage between Main and Wall Street occurred some years back.

“Eradication of Western Civilization”

George Rebane

That is the seldom spoken yet common goal of socialists, communists, Islamic extremists/terrorists, our Democratic party, and generally of leftwing ideologues worldwide.  When confronted with this reality and its confirming historical record, today’s intellectual Democrat (yes, there are some) will deny it.  The time is not yet right for its public cotillion.

Recent activities by our not-so-far Left in response to the policies by the now resident Republican majority in government leave little doubt as to what the real aim of the Democrat Party has been for some decades.  President Trump’s policies to bring common sense to government have convinced our socialists et al that there is a real chance that their program to disable and debilitate America may suffer a real setback.  Hence they are freaked out and have mustered their more virulent minions to take to the streets to shut down institutions, riot, burn, and attack anyone who opposes or exposes them in the public forum.

Examples of their true motives abound when we review their response to securing our borders, deporting illegals (especially criminals), opposing Islamic terrorists, motivating our allies to upgrade their militaries against our avowed enemies Russia and China, eliminating government waste, corruption, and abuse, reducing taxes, and removing stultifying laws and regulations.  The response of the Democrat elites (politicians, media, entertainment, academe) and their street thugs is simply ‘Resist!’.  Their lightly-read constituent millions have no idea about the bigger picture and what Democrat exhortations portend, they simply parrot the mouthings of their political leaders and entertainment ‘heroes’.  This is made clear by the polling results which are reported daily in the media.  And made even more vivid by the tirades of our illiterate – they don’t know how to read - leftwing neighbors in the local newspaper’s op-ed section.

I’ll conclude with a couple of specific examples.  Last night’s (27mar25) Bret Baier interview (here) on Fox News with Elon Musk and some of his top DOGE lieutenants was historical journalism.  The almost hourlong session once again and emphatically exposed the Democrat Party as our political and professional progenitor of public lying.  It made clear that not one thing the Democrats and their media mouthpieces have said about DOGE is true.  And these lies explain away what their mindless minions parrot to the polls that we see daily.

For an equally expansive view of what’s happening to the United States, I urge you to read Victor Davis Hanson’s 24mar25 commentary in American Greatness.  The piece ‘California and its Collapsing Blue State Democrat Model’ illustrates the nature of the country’s collapse, led by the once Golden State, that is already being aped by other Democrat led states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, … .  California has become the putrid template of uni-party governance in America that today clearly illustrates the arrival Ayn Rand’s dystopia in Atlas Shrugged (1957).

Lamestream Lies for the Lightly-read (updated)

George Rebane

[24apr25 – This piece was submitted to The Union on 23 May 2025 for their Other Voices op-ed contributions.  Not only was it not published, but they did not even deign to answer my follow-on inquiries about its acceptance and status.  Clearly I stepped over their editorial line with this piece.  The same fate befell a subsequent mildly worded letter-to-the-editor on another topic.  I may have made the shit list for this strong voice of the Left in these foothills.]

The chaos currently reigning in the Democratic party highlights a propaganda gambit long practiced by socialists and communists of all hues.  Since the Democrats have no program of governance that even they would consider acceptable to broad American constituencies, all they have left to fill the void of their public messaging is to criticize what the Trump administration is doing to exercise its broad mandate from last November to restructure the federal government, cutting waste, corruption, and abuse.  And how do they accomplish this?

The way they have again selected is the tried-and-true method that has worked with the ignorant and lightly read since collectivism crawled into public discourse.  The method is supremely simple and extremely effective.  To wit, first tell an audacious lie about what your political opponents are doing or plan to do, and then spend the remainder of your tirade describing what terrible things would come to pass when/if these fabricated policies were implemented.

The guileless have neither the intellectual skills, background knowledge, nor accessible resources to refute the initial lie, and therefore it is taken as a given to consume the subsequent harangue that details the public suffering to come.

It is easy for the well-read who pay attention to confirm this with their liberal brethren.  Just recount some current events and happenings that embarrass the Left.  You will then quickly discover that they have little or no knowledge of such goings on for the simple reason that their lamestream news outlets (to the extent that they even partake) don’t cover such topics or simply give them short shrift in their reporting.

As a somewhat hyperbolic example to make the point, consider if our habitually comfortable leftwing voters are assured that the Republican-backed parochial schools and home schooling programs promote racism.  And that is the reason why African-Americans and Hispanics rank low academically in public schools and America remains a racist nation.  Having established that preamble lie, our socialist propagandists are then free to launch into extended dissertations about the historical horrors of racism, many of which continue today, and all promoted by Republicans, or Trump, or DOGE, or whoever happens to be chosen as the menace du jour.

To extend this example, we can now see why the Left wants to keep the Department of Education in business getting more money and doing the same ol’ same ol’ with the teachers’ unions while student academic performance continues to deteriorate as it has under decades of their careful anti-student ministrations.  And the saddest part is that their constituencies have no clue of the (Einstein?) established admonition about ignorance.

Scattershots – 17mar25 (updated 22mar25)

George Rebane

Happy St Pat’s day to all even if you’re not Irish!

Wrong answer to an interview puzzle.  The website Medium regularly publishes math puzzles that it lifts from entrance tests for various university STEM programs and some supposedly given to applicants during their interviews.  Here is a treasure hunt problem that requires some noodling about the given solution that unfortunately is wrong.  Can you figure out why the presented solution will not work, and provide an alternative that has a chance of working or show why no feasible solution exists?

RR reader (scenes 810am in the 8mar25 Sandbox) gives us a timely reminder.  “The US Left appears to be fueled by good-boy points, mobs built on top of upvotes and praise from within the group. I wonder if a Nazi operated that way? Probably. Scrabbling for acceptance is a strange thing. The whole point of shouting with signs is group solidarity, not convincing others.” (emphasis mine)  It is, of course, hopeless to tell anyone on the Left that their “shouting with signs” will convince anyone else save the talking head idiots on CNN, MSNBC, et al.

[18mar25 update]  Naifs Propaganda Radio.  We wake up to NPR’s local CapRadio (KXJZ 90.9FM) news to get the spin from the other side.  NPR is one of the acknowledged leftwing lamestream national news outlets.  They are currently having their spring pledge drive in which they feature sound bite testimonials from listeners about how much they all love CapRadio because it is there that they can get their “unbiased news”.  These little endorsements are broadcast throughout the day and again attest that the Democrats’ constituency is made up of people ignorant or terminally naïve.

[22mar25 update] RR reader and commenter Barry Pruett writes ‘Reliance on government: a reflection of distrust in humanity’ in the 21mar25 Union.  It’s an excellent piece worth your read.  In it Barry compares and contrasts the performance of government vs the private sector in ministering to the needy.  And in the argument establishes how dependence on government to fulfill such social needs gives rise to and maintains “an implicit lack of faith in humanity’s ability to care for itself.”

‘What We Know and Don’t About January 6’

George Rebane

The title article is a revealing and long overdue piece of journalism by John Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist (here).  A House Select Committee was formed to investigate the 6jan21 Capitol “insurrection” by the Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  The purpose of the committee as performing an institutional hit job on Donald Trump was clear from the onset.

Davidson writes – “The official report of the House Select Committee, which runs to more than 800 pages, is too deeply biased to give much help. This was foreordained given the hyper-partisan way the Select Committee was formed. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s two Republican appointments to the committee—Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banks—and instead appointed two virulently anti-Trump Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.”

As Davidson points out with readily verifiable facts subsequently made available, the report is an intricate fabric laced with lies about what happened on J6.  And these exposed lies continue to be repeated daily by the Left’s lamestream media.  To a large fraction of Americans what spews from MSNBC to the NYT continues to be the official version of how the Right tried to overthrow the federal government on that fateful day.  Davidson’s piece contains an important sampling of the most egregious lies with which the Democrats still populate the press, airwaves, and internet.  The report, published in the January 2025 issue of the Imprimis, is an important summary for those who want to know and cite the real J6 story to their friends and neighbors about the evils of our virulently anti-American and neo-Marxist Democrats.

President Elon Musk?!

George Rebane

The Democratic leadership has discovered the evils of political appointees who share a politician’s ideology and worldview.  Since they have no recollection of their own politicians ever having done such a dastardly thing, they consider Trump’s appointment of Musk as his DOGE czar a true “constitutional crisis”.  In response their leaders are gathering ragtags of followers on every street corner on which they can erect a mic and attract a camera with the call for all ignorant Americans to assemble in the streets with torches and pitchforks to … RESIST!

Their own lamestream media lackeys have dutifully fallen in line with their own loud echoes of ‘constitutional crisis’.  No one seems to have picked up on how ludicrous is this charge.  Even the conservative cable news guys have trouble connecting the dots on the howls of the likes of Mad Maxine and Sychophant Schumer trying to get a rise out of the country against Trump, who now enjoys record  approval ratings.  It seems that only a few late-night conservative comics point out the utter nonsense that the Democrats are purveying.

The obvious counter to silence the Dems on this charge that somehow Musk is taking over the presidency is to point out that politicians ALWAYS appoint people with whose views they are compatible to key positions on the staffs and in their administrations.  How the hell did Trump pick all those cabinet members?  Was it dumb luck that they all wound up claiming to fly in tight formation with the boss?  No one howled when the unelected Rubio, Hegseth, Bessent, … got Trump’s nod to sit in his cabinet and wield some serious unelected power.  But all of them, at all times, are careful to point out that they are executing the President’s policies and vision.  (In fact, Musk is designated and works as a Special Government Employee – more here.)

And so it is with his other appointments who don’t require congressional confirmation.  Musk is one of them, and he too is always careful to point out that he and his DOGE team are in the business of identifying government waste, fraud, mismanagement, redundancy, and incompetence – apparently all the things that Democrats promote and benefit from in the operation of our deep administrative state.  Musk tells everyone his job is to identify the problem, its scope, priority, supportive evidence, and possible fix; and then present that to the President.  It is the President who then determines what should be done next, not Musk.

The Democrats, whose actions are always an amalgam of stupidity and evil, continue to lie to their constituents, telling them that it is actually Musk who’s in charge and making the executable decisions.  And, of course, one of the qualifications for an American to be such a  constituent is to always believe the bilge that issues from their Schumers, Pelosis, Clintons, Bookers, Schiffs, … .

My disappointment with the media lies with the conservative side, especially Fox News.  They have yet to detail the hypocrisy and lies when reporting on latest progressive outrage from some street corner or talking heads on MSNBC or CNN or … .  They simply leave the argument hanging instead of clarifying the matter for their audience.

I want to end with the photo showing Trump sitting calmly at his Resolute Desk while Musk stands nearby with his 4-year-old son explaining some recent DOGE initiative to the press assembled in the Oval Office.  The Dems claim this to be a picture showing historical presidential weakness, and confirming that it is Musk who is really in charge.  To the rest of us it is a display of comfortable and confident power.  The President sitting at his desk quite sanguine about letting one of his lieutenants have a moment in the sun while his position in the administration’s leadership hierarchy is confirmed by the top gun, known by the world to always be in charge of all that he surveys – he need not flaunt anything in the manner of weaker leaders.

LA Inferno – Criminal Incompetence on Parade?

George Rebane

The Los Angeles area continues to burn after entire neighborhoods of the city are already heaps of ash and ruin.  What news has been concurrently emerging with videos of burning houses and hills, interviews with residents who lost everything, and endless ‘news conferences’ with obviously incompetent officials who have no useful information and are desperately trying to cover their collective asses.

Jo Ann and I are multi-decade veterans of SoCal wildfires with our valuables and heirlooms packed and ready to go every late summer and fall.  The last 25 years before moving to Nevada County we lived on Saddle Peak Rd in the Santa Monica Mountains on a high ridgeline in a house we built.  The latest information we have right now is that ‘our house’ is gone after dodging dozens of fires and surviving the big Malibu fire of 1993.  I have documented that experience here, here, and especially here.

So what is the takeaway so far from the SoCal fires.  Well, nothing much has changed for the better with the passing of the decades and the incompetently comprehensive governance exercised by the Democratic Party over these years.  But the last two days confirms again that things have gotten much worse as far as the recognition of the nature of the wildfire problem and preparations to prevent and fight such large scale conflagrations.

Some major screwups -

• Reduction of fire and police budgets in favor of succoring illegal aliens, criminals, insane environmentalists in favor of implementing woke DEI policies.
• Dumping about 75% of Sierra Nevada snow melt water into the Pacific Ocean in order to save the smelt – a very much unendangered species no one cares about.
• Eliminating water storage reservoirs by destroying dams and not constructing sufficient water tanks in the mountains to provide gravity fed water for fire fighting.
• Environmentalists opposing building additional reservoirs to collect water during wet years to have for the inevitable 7 to 10 year intervals between statewide droughts.
• Insurance companies abandoning California because they aren’t allowed to raise premiums commensurate with the cost of rebuilding in a state with stifling building regulations (again refer to the insane environmentalists and incompetent politicos).
• Allowing ignorant NIMBYs to oppose/restrict prescribed burns and fuel reduction programs.

Witness the results of elections that have stacked local governments and Sacramento with progressive politicians, and you explain away the above list of devastating deficits. (more here) The general mentality of California’s electorate is corroborated when we consider how the media continues to cover and report on such disasters.  Examples abound.

The most important thing residents, both evacuated and still in place, want to know is where is the fire, and which way is it moving.  Almost all reporters with mic-in-hand in the field do not know where they are and what is happening beyond their visible surroundings.  All they do is repeat the obvious and ask how some devastated resident feels about having lost his home.  Air coverage has provided no more information – one flaming and smoky mountain looks pretty mush like another one.  Although to credit where a little bit of it is due, in Fox’s current coverage they have shown road names superimposed on the large area aerial videos, but only very briefly before switching back to yet another close-up of a burning house.

The last thing they care to look at for hour after hour is close-up videos of flame engulfed houses, and still images of huge flame masses on unknown hillsides.  And the last thing they want to hear are news conferences by phalanxes of politicians, bureaucrats, and officials standing in turn to mouth the same platitudes of how terrible the disaster is, how much they are praying for everyone, how everyone is co-operating with everyone else, and how much the state and federal governments are providing us all that we need while there are way too few firefighters on the line with no water to come out of their hoses.

It is abundantly clear that our political leaders and local responding agencies have been totally incompetent in preparing and/or raising the alarm to current the obvious shortcomings listed above.  Perhaps the inevitable follow-on investigations will even find people who are criminally at fault and make them publicly accountable.

Scattershots – 18dec24

George Rebane

The lopsided lamestream fesses up – not quite.  Those of us not restricted to lamestream media news have always had a more complete picture of what’s going on in the country and the world.  Not so for our leftwing friends.  But now that the election is over and there is nothing to be gained by more lies and omissions that favor the Democrats, the major left-leaning outlets – broadcast, print, online – are starting to fill in their audiences on what has really been going on since 2016.  Led by no less than the NYT, its readers are, for example, finally informed that the millions of illegal aliens who have entered and been loosened in our land has really been due to the border and immigration policies of the Biden/Harris administration.  National columnist Jason Riley fills you in (here) on some more revelations currently being introduced to the dedicated Democrat cadres across the land.  Managed ignorance has always been the forte of socialists worldwide, and in many ways we in America have perfected it.  But don’t hold your breath that this is an enduring epiphany with the lamestream; it’ll be back to business as usual before you know it.

Leftwing universities identified by the Left.  Here’s another awakening going on with our left-leaning thought leaders.  Prominent columnists of the Left like William Galston are writing revelatory essays such as ‘Higher Education Is in Trouble’ in the 18dec24 WSJ, coming right out and saying “schools should curtail DEI and stop taking political sides.”  He admits that “higher education in the U.S. faces a crisis: Its credibility is under attack. The public is increasingly skeptical of university-trained experts and the test-score-based meritocracy that dominates America’s upper middle class.”  But note that he doesn’t specify that only the leftwing upper middle class has been skeptical about testing – the rightwingers of all classes have long been and continue to be supporters of meritocratic metrics.  Galston also has a jaundiced view of the relevant history he claims that led to politicized leftwing universities – the listed faults are all attributable to Republican policy failures.  To his credit, Galston does conclude with three useful prescriptions starting with, “First, they should get their houses in order. They should end mandatory DEI statements for faculty and staff candidates. They should adopt the principle of institutional neutrality … (and) while defending free speech, they should act firmly against activities that impede core academic functions such as teaching, learning and hosting speakers with a range of views.” 

California’s continuing war against privately owned cars advances another notch.  The legislature is pushing through AB413 which will make it illegal to park within 20 feet of a crosswalk.  You’re supposed to believe it’s for “public safety”.  It’s real purpose is to remove thousands of parking spaces from our cities and towns, making an already bad situation worse.  For example, San Francisco will lose 14,000 parking spaces, and about 100,000 statewide.  Californians keep voting for “busybodies (who) want people walking, biking, scooting, or bussing — anything but driving their own cars to their own destinations on their own schedules.”  (more here)

Election Reflections

The sense to let things settle.  Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent.  There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used.  Gracian #138

George Rebane

As we sit in wait for the election of our lifetime, many of us are in a cold sweat as to what may be our country’s fate if the neo-Marxist Left prevails this upcoming Tuesday.  Our Left’s not so hidden agenda is to remove the United States as the main impediment to global governance.  It does this by fostering drastically flawed policies for conducting the country’s economy, education, and foreign policy (to include blatantly porous borders).  The Left’s inventory of governance deficits is large and continues to grow, immune to ongoing appeals of reason and historical evidence of their failures wherever these have been implemented.

Today I will focus my screed on the Left’s successful attempts to put in play a malformed economy that is accepted by an alarmingly large share of the country’s (lightly read) electorate as having fixed the Trump legacy, if we are to believe the polls.  And specifically I want to highlight the entire notion of the Left’s goal to implement wage/price controls (“price gouging”) across the land should they also dominate Congress.  They have convinced a large contingent of us that Kamala’s economic plan (what plan? where?) is backed over Trump’s by scores of economists from sea to shining sea.

Longtime RR readers know my assessment of economics as a field of study and informer of policy.  Most certainly there is nothing scientific about economics when it comes to quantitative models designed to predict the future – i.e. contain equations with time as the independent variable.  Wherever such models have been applied, they have shown themselves to be woefully inadequate for the job for reasons I have detailed many times.  Yet they persist, perhaps serving the economists’ ongoing desire to be accepted into the more respectable community of science. 

In this regard I offer the celebrated British macro-economist Lord John Maynard Keynes as an example of one who did not understand the impact of wage/price controls and gave us his ‘demand side’ model of an economy which continues to infect the thinking of government planners all over the world.  His economics began to fray in the 60s and 70s when governments’ demand infusion policies did nothing to mitigate stagflation.  However, leftwingers like Barack Obama gave Keynesianism another chance after the 2008-09 recession, and demonstrated to the world how such demand based economic policies gave rise to the most impeded and slowest recovery in the history of US recessions.

Getting back to wage/price controls.  It is easy to show that anyone who continues to believe that wage/price controls will increase the quality of life in an economy is way past those who still believe in a flat earth.  At least the flat earthers can stand on a hill and point to the surrounding horizons to demonstrate that the earth is always flat from here to there.  The true believers in w/p controls have never had such a hill to stand on.  Theirs is a pabulum-based body of evidence that crumbles under any serious examination.

The more successful economists have been those who interpret economic behaviors in terms of very apparent and recorded behaviors of individuals when presented with economic choices and decisions.  Successful economists of this stripe have been men like Smith, Bastiat, von Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, and Freedman.

Henry Hazlitt contributed to a widespread understanding of economics with the publication of Economics in One Lesson (1946), a paperback translated into over ten languages with which he intended to attract readers put off by Friedrich Hayek’s more dense and massive classic, Road to Serfdom (1944).  (The highly recommended Hazlitt tome is now in the public domain and available here along with a chapters summary here.)

This September’s issue of the Hillsdale College Imprimis (here) features an updated reprise of the Hazlitt essay ‘The Dangers of Price Controls’ which also appeared in the very first issue of Imprimis in 1972.  (Imprimis is a monthly pamphlet on governance and cultural issues that is subscribed by 6.6M people worldwide.)  The essay opens with –

The first thing to be said about price and wage fixing is that it is harmful at any time and under any conditions. It is a giant step toward a dictated, regimented, and authoritarian economy. It makes impossible arrangements that both sides are willing to agree to. It sets aside contracts that have already been made in good faith. If an employer wishes to give a man a raise in pay, and the man deserves it, he is nonetheless forbidden to do it under the new regulations. This is a grave abridgment of individual liberty. … Price and wage fixing does harm even if there is no inflation. In a free economy prices are constantly changing. They are changing to reflect changes in supply and demand, in costs, and in a hundred other conditions. Some prices are going up, other prices are going down. If an effort is made to freeze prices and wages exactly where they are, it immediately disturbs the relationship of prices and comparative profit margins, which decides what things will be made and what quantities they will be made in. It upsets the process by which the free market decides how thousands of different commodities and services are to be made in the proportions in which people want them.

So now I and those of my persuasion sit here holding our breaths for Tuesday night when we may receive a hint of the kind of future that awaits us all.

Scattershots – 18oct24 (updated 25oct24)

George Rebane

Sacramento City Council idiots are going to pass “ordinances (that) range from requiring gun liability insurance to a yearly $25 gun harm reduction fee” -  that’s $25/gun/year.  The claimed purpose of these insane ordinances is to “combat senseless gun violence”. However, anyone with a working 3-digit IQ will immediately see that these ordinances can and will do NOTHING to reduce gun violence.  Their real purpose is another step in ratcheting the elimination of Second Amendment rights. (more here)

Leftwing Union columnist George Boardman doesn’t recognize the constant stream of Democrat lies.  Throughout history socialists have always been the dominant liars since the governance they are selling has never worked and only delivered the greatest misery to the greatest number who acceded to travel their road.  Predictably his 15oct24 sacrament (here) on free speech only focused on the Right, claiming that “conservatives are disingenuous when they don the mantle of absolute free speech by viewing lies and falsehoods as just part of the exchange of ideas. It is hard to take seriously people who celebrate media personalities who sell falsehoods as a triumph of free speech, a true debasement of the idea.  (piling more on Loomer)  We got a taste of that in a statement issued by our local Republicans eager to hear Loomer’s viewpoints. 'We look forward to hearing about her struggle to defend her First Amendment rights.' This from a party whose leader can’t resist telling one lie after another.”  Boardman is a steadfast loyal water carrier for all those on our political left. 

‘Kamala Harris is an Idiot’ writes Charles Cooke (here) in the 14oct24 National Review in a blisteringly on-the-mark summary of her public career, and he correctly concludes that everything she has attempted has shown her to be “wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth.”  In spite of that, lamestream “reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete.”

Our leftwing neighbors continue stealing Trump yard signs.  This year is no different than all the previous years that we have lived in Nevada County.  Our conservative friends living in different parts of the western county consistently report that their Republican election signs disappear very quickly after being displayed.  A simple tour through our community will demonstrate that somehow Democrat promoting signs proliferate suggesting that there are very few or no Republicans living in these parts who promote their candidates during election seasons.

Well-known hedge fund manager and former Democrat Bill Ackman (CEO Pershing Square Management, Chairman of Howard Hughes Corporation) has gone public with an extensive list of reasons for supporting Trump in the coming election (here).  It’s definitely worth a read since Ackman has now become the new target for the progressive commentariat.  An example of this is Yahoo’s Rick Newman who hasn’t a clue as to what forces are really at work in shaping the future of America and the free world.  He demonstrates this for all to see in his 15oct24 ‘What Bill Ackman and other business titans don’t get about politics’ (here).  His other politically naïve businessmen include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen who have come out with their support for Trump.

[25oct24 update] Sounds of Socialists’ Silence.  Here are a couple more items for progressives and socialists to shun from discussing in public.  Did you know that electricity rates in blue states that mandate green policies to fight catastrophic climate change are significantly higher than those in the red states with sane climate policies?  (more here)  And are you aware that DOJ is pushing DEI, especially the ‘equity’ part, to make sure that our police and fire departments will be filled with people who cannot pass either the qualifying IQ tests, physical ability tests, or both?  Yep, double dummies and weaklings can now bypass these tests and be hired so as to keep the departments’ African-American and female ratios up to snuff.  Anybody from the Left care to offer a cogent comment on these? (more here)

E pluribus unum – Really? Still? (Reprised)

George Rebane

As we enter the home stretch of this election season, with both sides agreeing that this is the election to prevent the other side from taking the nation down the road to terminal evil, we still hear some good-hearted and/or dim-witted public figures hopefully assuring us that ‘there is more that unites us than that which separates us.’

Four years ago during our last presidential election year the same shibboleth was heard across the land, and we all know how the 2020 election united Americans and left us with a four-year bitter taste as one after another of our institutions were shown to have surreptitiously put their politically biased thumbs on the scale of a democratic election.  After a four-year downward spiral we find ourselves having come around and again trying to reach for the golden ring.

During the summer of 2020 I decided to take a more measured look at the things our polarized citizenry holds in common and compare them with the things that irredeemably separate us.  I summarized my findings in the 1aug20 post titled ‘E Pluribus Unum – Really? Still?’ (here).  So let’s reprise the inventory of the salient things in question.

Twisted Logic from Twisted Minds (updated 1oct24)

Just as you don't find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don't find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

The appearance of the enthusiastic MAGA proponent Laura Loomis at tonight’s Republican fund raiser dinner continues to draw fire from our local Left.  I reported on the onset of this firestorm of censorship in the previous Scattershots (here).  More should be said as the howls from our socialist neighbors continue unabated.  In today’s 28sep24 Union we have a double header in the form of a letter from Grass Valley resident Jacob Kolb (here), and a pile on from local leftwing cartoonist Bob Crabb shown nearby.

Mr Kolb goes on to advise our Board of Supervisors to get into the fray by “publicly affirming” that the Board “does not endorse Loomer’s rhetoric, showing that we understand the dangers of misinformation.”  In the process our county government should promote “truth and inclusivity” by opposing “political factions” that “represent a small minority.”  Oh my, does that not put an additional burden on our elected leaders to now become the arbiter and would be censors of what they consider “misinformation and hate speech” by their constituents?

If such declarations become a new standard of proscribing political speech for the BoS, then by extending Kolb’s logic should not ALL Democrat public pronouncements also be greeted with “strong messages” against “harmful ideologies” as assessed by our so-called non-partisan elected leaders?  Every Democrat who opens their mouth on a public podium repeats their egregious lies about ‘secure borders’, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’, Hunter’s laptop hoax, Trump’s inflation legacy, the glories of Bidenomics, criminality of illegal aliens (see recent release of  Dem cover-up here, here, and here), and on and on.

Kolb begins his letter with the Voltaire misattribution, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  From the Left’s outcry of the last few days, it is clear their willingness to die is at best a one-sided commitment. 

[1oct24 update]  The more desperate minions of the local Left took it up another notch on letting everyone know that they are a post-constitutional bunch cum mob demanding the silencing of voices with which they disagree.  The 1oct24 Union features a pictorial under the heading ‘Crowds gather to protest Loomer visit’ (here).  The local Republican Party turned tail and ran, moving the Loomis speaking event to an undisclosed location.  Their ‘duck and cover’ policy missed a perfect opportunity to highlight the planned demonstration by the mini-minded to once more illustrate that the Left opposes the First Amendment, among others.  And to put a ribbon on it, our indefatigable leftwing columnist George Boardman must needs add his shoulder to the wheel on the matter (here).  Perhaps the BoS can settle such future vetting problems by establishing the Nevada County Commissariat on Public Speakers.

Berkheimer bamboozled by borders

George Rebane

This is a big miss to leftwing columnist Darrell Berkheimer for his muddling and misleading report on our illegal alien problem in the 23sep24 Union (here).  His use of “immigrants” to refer to illegal entrants continues to confuse the national dialogue over porous borders, legal immigration, and immigration policy reform.  For generations by law immigration has been a two-party contract between the government and immigrant.  His unsupported diatribe, especially on the net costs of illegals on federal and state budgets, echoes Democratic Party talking points that have long been based on the Big Lie that “our border is secure”.  This claim ignores that somewhere north of the 15M illegals have been released into America under Biden in addition to an unknown few million more ‘got aways’.  Citations on the true net cost of illegal aliens are readily available from investigations by the various Senate and House committees and subcommittees, reports that somehow have evaded Mr Berkheimer’s attention.

Kamala Conquers

George Rebane

Well, that was a nothing burger that Trump delivered last night on ABC’s presidential debate stage.  Kamala Harris came across unbelievably polished, strong, and on message, while Trump treated the whole thing as another stump speech in the late afternoon after a couple of martinis.  Make no mistake that Kamala’s copy was totally BS and full of her now well-practiced big lies, but she delivered it all flawlessly, with clear strong voice and gestures to match, as if she were reading it from a teleprompter.  Whatever they taught her in that hotel room over the weekend worked.

Trump did his best (I think) to maintain a presidential demeanor, but 1) he still couldn’t control his mouth, and 2) he forgot to bring up key points or brought them up in brief fly-bys – e.g. ‘You flip-flopped on all these key issues over the last month, tell the American people how your values allow you to be so two-faced; what are we to believe?’ and ‘And how can you lie that the border was secure while over 15 million illegal aliens were coming across and being released into our country?’

The ABC talking heads running the debate were clearly in the tank for Kamala.  They let her side-step every question on hard issues with no follow-ups.  Trump received the other end of the stick from the interrogators with at least two gotcha questions thrown in.  For him and those of us who support his candidacy it was a bad day at Black Rock.  The road to November will be a rough one, and then … .

Scattershots - 8sep24 (updated 9sep24)

George Rebane

Ongoing pain and legacy of SFB Democrats in Sacramento.

[9sep24 update] 'California's Lights Are Out, and Gavin Newsom Isn't Home'  And the Sacramento sewage just keeps inundating the state.

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

Our socially destructive culture has long done a number on students with the extraordinary capacity to study and make it in STEM careers.  Part of the socialist agenda for the US is to impress in the population a belief that we are fundamentally all equal, with all of us capable of anything as long as the state suppresses the bad angels of discrimination with which we, especially the whites, are burdened.  And to accomplish this we need to make sure that Billy and Jill grow up in an environment of mirror-fogging equity instead of merit-based equal opportunity in which today DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is the chosen form of politically acceptable social environment.

Unfortunately, the realworld is fashioned on quite a different landscape where our capacities have developed differentially.  Today diversity is recognized, but in a highly qualified manner and under precisely and politically prescribed circumstances.  Diversity that leads to differential capacities to perform, especially in the cognitive areas, is not only rejected but also proscribed in some places by laws that may lead to incarceration.  Again, science confirms that in almost all dimensions that describe us we are created unique and develop unequally, and in some dimensions these differences are systemic and cannot be overcome by bending the twig according to the dictates of DEI.  

Nationally recognized scholar and political scientist, Harvard/MIT educated Dr Charles Murray, has written an illuminating essay about the extraordinary and special requirements for success in STEM education and subsequent careers.  His ‘The Roots of STEM Excellence - Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.’ here in the 30aug24 WSJ will now be vilified by all the usual leftwing suspects bent on reducing America into a second-world country.  In this piece he continues reporting on research that established the human diversities we reported on in his previous work Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) which was equally attacked and rejected by the Left. (more here)  (I wrote a Union column on it at the time which could not be printed for reasons its then publisher took great pains to explain to me over one of our lunches.)

The basic thesis Murray presents is that success in STEM requires cognitive abilities that are relatively very uncommon.  The cognitive abilities demanded are present in only the top 0.01% or one in 10,000 people – it’s just the way the cognitive cookie crumbles.  The bottom line is that just being dedicated and working hard will not cut it as it does for almost all other professional pursuits.  It’s the equivalent of not being able to make it in the NBA if you’re short or in the NFL if you’re skinny and slow.  Not everyone has what it takes to make it in any desired career – the playing field is not level, and it was ever thus.  This is diametrically contra to what is told to our K-12 students in progressive public schools.

To nail the point and outline the problem, I will quote some paragraphs from the cited essay by Charles Murray.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.

First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.

The Kamala interview that wasn’t

George Rebane

Last night CNN’s prerecorded 18-minute interview with Kamala Harris, with attendant training wheels Walz, was a giant nothing-burger – a disappointment but not a surprise.  While Kamala was asked some decent questions, she predictably dodged all of them as did her partner in perfidy.  What galled me the most was how she was allowed to bullshit her way out of the question about her manifold and desperate flip-flops on policies she championed in 2019 and her new ones with which she now apes Trump.

Her response to this line of questioning by Dana Bash was that “My values have not changed.”  And I almost gagged when Bash allowed her to skate with that.  Bash’s next question should immediately have been, ‘That may be, but the whole country has witnessed you doing 180s on your previously championed policies, and it will be your policies and not some ephemeral values that will impact the American people.  On what new evidence did you base your policy pirouettes?’ – or something in that vein.  Kamala’s lame answer again confirmed the low opinion that Democrats have of their loyal, yet demonstrably and reliably ignorant, constituencies who regularly swallow such answers with nary a qualm.

This brings me to my general complaint about the dismal state of today’s journalism that primarily includes the conservative media like Fox News.  Starting with lead political anchor Bret Baier, none of them are either smart or quick enough to follow up Democrats’ stated allegations about Republicans, wrong-headed realities, etc with ‘Sir, you’ve just stated an unsubstantiated allegation to my question ‘On what did you base your claim that …?’.  Please tell us again on what evidence do you base this and similar allegations you have made.’  Always ask for evidence when offered allegations.

Such a follow-up question will inevitably expose bullshit, and may even lead to a more productive discussion.  Instead, our stalwarts of the Fourth Estate just calmly soldier on to their next question to receive a similarly dissembled response by the progressive pundit/politician being interviewed.  And in the end, the interview has again turned into a non-interview in which the devious interviewee’s non-responses were not even exposed.  We viewers (well, some of us) expect to receive such performances on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, … .  But having to regularly consume them on outlets that attempt to champion the Right is downright nauseating.