Rebane's Ruminations

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)

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense.  I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD.  But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed.  I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.

The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’  He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.”  What??!!

Scattershots – 27nov18 (updated 28nov18)

George Rebane

Climate Hysteria Continues.  Along with many other analysts, Steve Koonin in the 26nov18 WSJ reports (here) that “Headlines warned of economic doom after the U.S. government released its fourth National Climate Assessment last week. Yet a close reading of the report shows that the overall economic impact of human-caused climate change is expected to be quite small.”  The report has more holes in it than swiss cheese, but it is the latest blast to continue political pressure on the ignorant and poorly read to start ‘doing something’ to materially hobble the US economy in order to ‘prevent a climate catastrophe’.  None of it holds water, and as Koonin points out, a closer reading debunks its main alarums.  Here assemble government agencies that in their best days cannot reliably predict next week’s weather or next quarter’s GDP, all pretending to tell us what the world will be like 75 years from now.  The report’s survival in the public forum does not reflect well on our collective intelligence.

Presumption of innocence is one of the seminal starting points of any adjudication of guilt in enlightened western societies, and has been so for a couple of centuries now.  Not so according to a Mr Pete Williams as he pits his logic against the recent Kavanaugh hearings.  His letter in the 26nov18 Union (here) argues “the presumption of innocence applies in criminal cases, not civil law suits or administrative matters such as applications for security clearances, job interviews, or hearings to gather information on prospective appointees, like Kavanaugh. The theory behind the presumption of innocence applying only to criminal cases is that it is better that a guilty person escape conviction than for an innocent prison(sic) to be sent to prison. The Supreme Court hearings are not a criminal proceeding — and thus the presumption of innocence was not applicable to the Kavanaugh hearings.”  This terminally progressive gentleman reveals what will be the demeanor of their star chamber courts when the socialists cum communists finally achieve their primacy in the halls of our government (e.g. Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s).  What the gentleman totally misses is the significant nuance that the receipt of a security clearance or similar benefice (e.g. corporate job) is not a constitutional right, it is a privilege to be properly granted by the government charged with the nation’s security.  Its refusal does not destroy the applicant.  However, in cases – administrative, civil, congressional, etc – where a nominee’s reputation, ability to continue his career, and to care for his family is put on the line, all western civilized cultures have tacitly accepted the premise that the burden to prove condemning accusations rests on the accuser, and not their defense on the gratuitously accused.  This distinction is totally lost on our Left, hence RR and other voices consider these lopsided sentiments to be a danger to the very foundations of our way of life – but apparently not of theirs.

[28nov18 update] As the last echoes of the election die down, we should always be reminded of the words of Josif Vissarionovich Stalin - "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Ruminations – 23nov18 (updated 26nov18)

George Rebane

Don Rogers, ex-hotshot firefighter and now publisher of The Union, writes a good piece (here) in today’s newspaper in which he instructs readers about believing hasty predictions about 'new normals' of cold, hot, wet, and dry in California’s weather patterns.  He confirms what we have been preaching for years on these pages about wildfires (recently here).  Mr Rogers’ piece concludes with, “In any case, the path forward includes no small amount of smoke. The fires will burn, but we do have some choice about when. Our best firefighting, perhaps paradoxically, includes setting the forest alight. Basically burn now, when the weather's right, before we burn up later.” (also see 24nov18 update below)

For us history buffs, preeminent living war historian Max Hastings has produced another masterpiece – Vietnam, an epic tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) - which may become the definitive history of that decades-long conflict.  I strongly recommend his entire oeuvre, and highlight two must reads – Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 (2005) and Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (2007) – that document the last years of WW2 in Europe and in the Pacific.  (Longtime readers know that I claim intimate knowledge of the contents of the former.)

‘A $15 Minimum Wage Goes National’ - Nancy Pelosi wants to boost the wage floor far higher than the historical average.  So writes Michael Saltsman in the 23nov18 WSJ.  What progressives and their communist brethren never seem to understand is that such wage controls – especially large ones like this $15/hr would be – always harm the workers and consumers, i.e. the economy.  If the central planners really want to shove more money into workers’ shorts, then why not raise the minimum wage to $100/hr or even $500/hr – then everyone would be happy dancing in the street (for about five minutes).  None of these leftists learn from history of how such merit-removing policies mangle markets – the prices of everything would increase accordingly – without providing any longer term benefits to anyone save the politicians who count on the votes of the ignorant.

[24nov18 update]  This RL Crabb graphic was filched from today’s copy of The Union where Bob is their duty political cartoonist.  I particularly enjoyed this edition of Bob’s work where he sticks his creative big toe into more artistic waters.  My hope is that perhaps he can ease off a bit from his (not so) ‘middle of the road’ observations of our politics, and offer us a richer sampling of his more philosophical and contemplative renditions.

The tragic Camp and Woolsey Canyon wildfires have made news and also a lot of fake news in the last couple of weeks.  A more measured view (here) of these disasters is available from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, which in part reads -

An enormous debate has developed over the cause of both fires.  Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown has loudly proclaimed that climate change deniers are “definitely contributing” to the onslaught of new fires. But the best evidence says otherwise. Global temperature increase has been nil over the last 20 or so years, notwithstanding the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Similarly, the repeated claims that we have had more unstable global climate patterns within that period is likewise false. According to Professor David B. South of Auburn University, “data suggest that extremely large megafires were four-times more common before 1940” than today, even though CO2 levels were lower.

[26nov18 update]  Migrants now rushing our southern border.  Remember just a week or so ago these thousands of people were walking toward us over a thousand miles away.  It was supposed to take them weeks to walk to the border.  Then suddenly all kinds of transportation and logistical support appeared for the marchers.  Hard to keep arguing that all this was a spontaneous exodus from their home countries.  Now who provided the money for all this, and who is providing the political welcome into America?  This question is actually a freebie, since Ocasio-Cortez, the Dems' new ignoramus in Congress, is today publicly comparing this mass attempt to illegally enter the US to the Jewish Holocaust survivors' illegal entry into Palestine after WW2.

GM exits sedans, and plans to lay off about 18K workers in the US.  Decades ago the Rebanes could not figure out why any family would want to buy a sedan as opposed to a van or SUV or the station wagon of yore.  Sedans were such inefficiently designed vehicles, especially for a growing family.  Finally the entire country is getting the message as sedan sales are "sliding" industry wide in favor of pickups and SUVs.  For years now our stable has housed a van, SUV, and a pickup.  Hopefully, government mandated electric vehicle production will not prevent the return of those jobs as the car companies start producing more of the vehicles which the market actually demands.

Monday with The Union

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I very much enjoy reading The Union – our town’s newspaper.  (This pleasure preceded her joining the paper’s editorial board.)  I am particularly entertained by George Boardman’s columns, and the regularly occasioned other voices from locals with academic credentials like Dr Milan Vodicka.  Dr Vodicka is a longtime Nevada County resident and a naturalized citizen immigrant like me.  We have met him before in these pages - e.g. here, where I noted that “the good Dr Vodicka is an ‘Independent Education Management Professional’ with an academic pedigree from the California Institute of Integral Studies that prides itself with academic departments such as ‘Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion’, ‘Integral and Transpersonal Psychology’, and ‘Drama Therapy’.”

In today’s (19nov18) Union, Dr Vodicka illustrates his academic prowess to readers by misunderstanding the difference between the communist controlled economy of his native Czechoslovakia and the US economy we are now enjoying.  There he likens the centrally planned economy of his youth, that based all progress on the tons of steel produced while totally ignoring the people’s needs for consumer goods, with that of America’s which is based on defining our economic boom in terms of providing the wherewithal for record consumer consumption.  He considers both to be short-sighted ‘single attribute’ measures that fall equally short of other attributes that should be the proper measure of an economy.

His measure of an economy (seatbelts please) must center on how well it concerns itself with ecological and environmental affairs, instead of crass indicators like consumer satisfaction, financial growth, and a nation’s quality of life.  In Vodicka’s perspective – “Measuring the ‘boomness’ of the economic performance just by money is like wandering in the world being blind.”

The focus of this liberal academic’s (may I use that label?) environmental interest is, of course, scientifically indisputable ‘climate change’, aka preventable manmade global warming.  There he lectures us on the characteristics of “scientific fact” – “1. measurability, 2. verifiability, and 3. repeatability” - without noticing that the propositions which support ‘climate change’ can lay claim to none of these. (more here)

A correspondent sent me one of the countless debunkings of public policies put in place to limit human emissions of that dreaded CO2.  This was recently put out by Prof Rutherford Plimer, much published geologist and professor emeritus of earth sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide.  Plimer points out again what the lamestream bends over backwards to hide facts about the natural emissions of CO2 by the ongoing eruptions of earth’s over 200 active volcanoes.  For example, just four days of the recent Icelandic eruptions “negated every single effort” all humans have made over the past five years to reduce CO2 emissions on our planet.  More convincing to discerning minds is the fact that Mt Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption, that lasted for about a year, “spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.”

Dr Vodicka apparently knows nothing of such ongoing natural processes that overwhelm human intents and activities, and he most certainly does not have the academic credentials to understand or dispute such obvious realities, which should at least invite some open-minded skepticism about our current politically faith-based writhings to combat global warming.

Turning now to our favorite local liberal commentator and RR commenter George Boardman, we learn from his column (here) that he has missed the news of the Central American migrants’ arrival at the border in Tijuana.  And it also seems that he’s unaware of the bus and truck transportation that is now available to the thousands whom he characterizes as being “weeks from the border”.  Again, it’s best not to know stuff that will upset the Left’s carefully crafted and continuously fed narrative.

Scattershots – 15nov18 (updated 17nov18)

George Rebane

A leftwing Union columnist most recently summarized the huge ideological chasm between the two polarized camps of Americans (see 15nov18 letters).  Writing in response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, the writer unabashedly blurted out a core progressive tenet that was in full display at the congressional hearings – “It is just as bad to assume innocence as it is to assume guilt.”  This violates the very basis of western jurisprudence, and has long been the norm for dictators as they attempt a forged judicial system under their rule.  Nowhere in recent memory have I seen such a stark reminder of how different we are, and how different will be our society were the Left to gain absolute control.

Defense spending and a strong American military has never been in the Left’s desiderata for all the obvious reasons.  Our military has suffered mightily under leftwing administrations, most recently under President Obama.  Today the Democrats continue their anti-military chorus, while they continue to entice their gimme constituencies with promises of more and mightier entitlements, most recently led by their efforts to implant a comprehensive socialized healthcare (“single payer”) program that has yet to demonstrate its sustainability in any land it has been implemented.  Their intended source of insufficient funds for such welfare projects is from our defense budget.  However, our military today has been so weakened that the non-partisan United States Institute for Peace has issued a landmark report ‘Providing for the Common Defense’ (download it here), which goes chapter and verse into the details of what we have let lapse along with the effects it has and will have on world order.  This state of affairs is an ongoing legacy of the Left, a gift that keeps taking.

[16nov18 update]  And then these little tidbits caught my eye this morning.

Khasshoggi’s killers to get the death penalty – well, not all of them, just the poor snuffies tasked to do the dirty work.  Imagine being a highly trained field agent for your country ordered to do a delicate little assassination of some ‘enemy of the state’ in a foreign land.  You go do the job that’s then discovered through no fault of yours, and you get tried and executed while the big kahuna(s) are untouched.  How will that affect your fellow agents as they contemplate their next mission to do the state’s dirty work?  (Work that into the definition of ‘patriotism’.)  But as ever, rank hath its privileges – some people just rank too high to fail, especially those whose enemy is our enemy, and who buy billions of dollars’ worth of guns and grenades from us.

“Hire sight unseen” is the MO of employers seeking to fill critical jobs in sales and STEM.  In this hot economy, the competition for even tentatively qualified labor is so high that all you need is to submit your creatively wordsmithed resume and pass a 25-minute phone interview (some with a robo-interviewer), and your offer letter appears in your inbox. (more here)  Of course, I assume that if you really bomb on your first day on the job, you’ll be let go equally fast.  I began my career as an aerospace draftsman in exactly the same way.  My phone interview with a job shop lasted less than five minutes during which I was told the address and contact person of my new employer.  Those draftsmen who didn’t make it were out on the street after the morning coffee break.

Woke progressives continue to mangle the language.  The latest casualty to politically correct newspeak is the use of ‘body’.  Humans, people, and persons are now reduced to bodies – e.g. “Bodies that migrate across borders undergo tremendous change.” in the NYT.  The use of ‘body’ joins many other words whose meaning has been folded in with a lot of other meanings, making for ever more murkier communications.  Matthew Hennessey’s piece ‘How to Read ‘Body’ Language’ goes into more detail.  (And in the below comment stream you can see my exchange with a commenter over some silly semantics.)

Migrant caravans made up of almost all military-aged males.  Has anyone else noticed the pictures and videos of the various proto-illegal alien caravans approaching our border through Mexico?  Count the women and children.  And who is paying for all the food, shelter, transportation, and organization to get these thousands of Latinos to their designated destinations?

[17nov18 update]  Ramirez again summarizes it in a manner that is clear, concise, and complete.  (H/T to reader)

Nationalism cum Patriotism

'Nationalism unites; tribalism divides.'

George Rebane

The concept and notion of nationalism is now thoroughly misunderstood and misconstrued across western countries.  The gist of the conversation or debate over nationalism is that it has been incorporated into the Left’s trans-national narrative as something that today portends giving rise to the more sinister angels of our collective nature.  To be more precise, leftwing politicians here and in Europe have unleashed the message that nationalism implies ‘white nationalism’ which implies ‘ethnic exclusion’ which represents the strong form of ‘racism’.  The lamestream media's daily outpouring makes all this very explicit, and it is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the leftwing grassroots.  An example of this reveals itself in recent comment streams found in these pages.

French president Macron did no one a favor by lecturing Trump that “nationalism is counter to patriotism” while defining his understanding of neither term (more here).  Such simple and unexamined semantic conquests continue to be the modus operandi of how language is co-opted into politically correct newspeak.  In more measured moments each of us can look up the pre-progressive definition of nationalism to find it means –

"Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland." (Wikipedia)

Nationalism is “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” (Merriam-Webster)

Nationalism, “the strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.” (dictionary.com)

From these, and other such definitions, we see a common thread in an operational sense.  Nationalism is simply the ideological tenet that describes a nationalist as one who puts the interests of his own nation first when contending, comparing, or competing with other nations.  As such, there is nothing pejorative about any of these semantic variants.  And anyone of any color, religion, ethnicity, etc can join with others similarly distinguishable as a fellow nationalist to promote the sovereignty of a given nation-state.  (Sen Marco Rubio also expands on this here.)

Patriotism is nothing more or less that the expression of national pride within “the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.” (Wikipedia)  In other words patriotism is the display, exercise, and/or implementation of nationalism - i.e. patriotism is the practice and maintenance of nationalism.

Things get dicier when we start adding modifiers to create ‘white nationalism’ and ‘black nationalism’.  A white nationalist is not simply a nationalist of the Caucasian variety.  No, no, no.  The progressive definition of white nationalist has overt racial overtones such as white supremacy AND white separatism (two semantically orthogonal notions).  Today being called a white nationalist clearly assigns you to the deplorably racist neo-Nazi camp without any chance of redemption or opportunity to explain yourself using more precise language.

A black nationalist is not so encumbered, and enjoys a very asymmetrical definition.  “Black nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism in the United States which seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black national identity for people of black ancestry.” (Wikipedia)  Nation of Islam and Black Power are functional expressions of such black nationalism.  Any such reciprocal notions of promoting, developing, or maintaining a white national identity for people of white ancestry is strictly forbidden.  Moreover, evincing any efforts in those directions will get you placed on several lists of suspect and bad people that are maintained by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  And should such leanings be known in your workplace, you likely will soon be unemployed.

For the record, there is no evidence that nationalist Republicans, Libertarians, conservetarians, conservatives, or Tea Party members embrace additional attributes of nationalism than those included in the above definitions.  However, this conclusion does not fit the narrative of the Left, ranging from so-called moderate Democrats to their most fringe socialist cum communist cadres.  The America of the non-Left is, has always been, and will remain an evil nation-state.  And of this, our children must continue to be carefully taught in union dominated public schools and academe.

Scattershots – 18oct18 (updated 20oct18)

George Rebane

All eligible should vote?!  In today’s (18oct18) Union ‘Hits & Misses’ we note the following – “HIT (from Editorial Board member Susan Rogers): To the massive turnout at the Miners Foundry for Indivisible Women of Nevada County's Get Out the Vote event. Even if you personally don't agree with the agenda of the group, any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.”  (emphasis mine)  Actually, many of us are not sanguine with that concept, so far as it involves voters ignorant of the issues on which they are asked to vote.  To do your country and community a favor, please don’t vote on matters you don’t understand.  As many have argued before, and we reinforce here, JUST being able to fog a mirror does not necessarily recommend your vote.  More on this important (nay, critical) notion is available from Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007), whose arguments are more valid today than ever, and are expanded here, here, and here.

Fascism – what it is and isn’t (addended)

George Rebane

Since the Democratic Party’s great Leftward Lurch, it is now publicly and unabashedly America’s new socialist party, notwithstanding start-up wannabes like the newly formed Progressive Party USA.  The Left’s problem today is how they must carefully wend their way through a potential political minefield in how they describe their brand of collectivism – i.e. socialism - in a way that doesn’t blow up the narrative they have been carefully nurturing since the days of FDR.

As we witness in these pages and from the years-long national dialogue, the Left has always maintained that while they embrace the socialism of a Marxist-Leninist provenance, the extreme Right, in its turn, embraces the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.  And therefore, to all good modern leftwingers, fascism is not now and never has been a form of socialism – fascism is instead the form of totalitarianism that comprises the hidden agenda of the Right and is the other bookend of their simplistic political spectrum.  This is both factually and historically false as we’ll cover in a moment.  But given the difficulties our Left has had in selling socialism to Americans, they have always desperately needed an ideological bogeyman or monster that they could erect and portray to the lightly read, and against which they could favorably compare the nostrums and shibboleths celebrating their brave new world.  Enter ‘fascism’, the avowed enemy and monstrous ideology that we fought and vanquished in WW2, and, according to the Left, the rebirth of which once more threatens the world if the Right comes to power and has its way with us.  (And hence the current rationale for the Left’s sanctioned “incivility” in the streets until they regain power.)

So, for at least the last 75 years, the Left’s narrative has drawn its substance and raison d’etre from characterizing itself as the defender of the common man against what they invent for public consumption as the rapacious Right of the greedy capitalists.  These are the people whose only aim is to exploit and then enslave the masses under an autocratic cum totalitarian governance that forcefully exploits them as the labor engines to create wealth, which is then shunted into the coffers of the … (wait for it), the ‘fascist elites’.  Unfortunately for the Left, history has shown all this occurring only after collectivists have come to power.

America’s Right has continued to characterize itself as promoting the ideology of individual enterprise, free markets, private property, liberty, distributed governance through minimalist governments/jurisdictions, and an originalist (‘textualist’) interpretation of the Constitution (see Addendum).  This interpretation embraces inevitable change through constitutional ways and means prescribed and practiced throughout our history.  In short, an ideology that is a total antithesis of the collectivists’ worship of society organized under and administered through the strata of (altruistic) central planners and controllers within an expansive and ever-expanding government.  Today the Left marches toward globalization under banners emblazoned with ‘democracy’, and the full and selectively suppressed knowledge that, practiced in the large, democracy quickly consumes itself as it morphs into one of the particularly egregious forms of totalitarianism.

Subtle Whims of Change – A Socialist Trifecta

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 October 2018.]

Things have become very strange and different since Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump.  Of the many outrages the Left has proclaimed since November 2016, the most recent one comes on the heels of the Kavanaugh confirmation from none other than the current titular head of the Democratic Party.  The nightly videos of leftwing mobs in the streets stopping traffic, assaulting pedestrians, harassing customers in places of business, and screaming epithets at people they think do not share their interpretation of recent events has now become the norm.  Hillary herself calmly explained the situation to an interviewer yesterday, telling us that today it is impossible to be civil with people who oppose her desired direction for America.  Therefore, the incivility we witness on the streets and in the media from the Left is totally justified.  Moreover, according to her, civility can only return when the Democrats retake control of Congress.

To support this objective and control the national conversation, progressive corporatists are now planning ways of censoring speech on the internet – to bring about what they call “good censorship”.  The dilemma that companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube see is a tension between the American tradition of our being “an unmediated marketplace for ideas” which “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility”, and the European tradition wherein government ensures “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility” that “favor dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.”  The corporatists favor our migration toward the European model and claim that “all tech (aka social media) platforms are now moving toward the European tradition.”

In this chilling grand scheme of things for elitist planning and control, Google sees its new role as “the guarantor of civility” describing its new functions as the editor and publisher of allowed content.  All this has come to light in a leaked document from Google that structured a recent conversation between major corporation executives.  In response, Google still claims to be a “neutral platform”, and that the document does not describe new directions and policies, but is merely a product of some “internal research”.  (more here and here)

To complement such content censorship comes California’s latest attempt to control commerce on the internet through a new set of regulations signed by Governor Jerry Brown.  Under the confusing label of ‘net neutrality’, the intent is to make the internet into a utility under government political control to determine who can transmit how much data, for what purposes, and at what price.  The intent is to take market demand out of the equation for data-intensive services provided to the consumer.  To be sure, this progressive initiative violates not only constitutional norms but also all kinds of established interstate commerce laws, which is why the Department of Justice has now brought suit to have California continue to comply with federal law and regulations.  (more here)

Working hand-in-glove with the corporatists is the movement of Millennials – those partially and under-educated 20- and 30- somethings – who are shifting markedly leftward into the Bernie Sanders and hard-socialist wings of the Democratic Party and the new Progressive Party USA that has recently calved from the Democrats.  Many of these Millennials, even those who work on Wall Street, no longer understand the necessary foundations of capitalism and what makes a market economy work.  According to polls, one of their prime concerns is the general notion of economic inequality that such free-wheeling markets produce as they also raise the living standards of our poorest, and cause the opposite, with even more inequality, where such markets are proscribed by governments and corruption. (more here)

These Millennials somehow miss the socialists’ policy prescriptions that have always promised to create a new world, based on government induced altruistic behavior, where risk and reward no longer go hand-in-hand.  A world without inequalities where people will still labor to provide today’s goods and services, with little regard to how much they earn or what profits they will be allowed to keep.  Today more and more of our Millennials are striving to bring about a new socially just America that will be planned and controlled from on high by well-meaning elites.  And in this happy world no one will be heard to complain, because such communications will be automatically censored for the good of us all.

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