Rebane's Ruminations

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.

Mine eyes have seen the gory … (updated 21sep18)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Mr Seeman, my sixth-grade teacher at Ben Davis Elementary School in Indianapolis, motivated his class to take an interest in the 1952 election pitting Eisenhower against Stevenson for president.  He did this by promising to vote for the candidate that received the best presentation from his roomful of charges – there were about 33 of us.  It was September and time enough to form up a couple of committees to start researching and preparing the presentation.  The Rebanes weren’t even citizens then, but my mom and dad had always been keen followers of the political scene since Estonia.

So, all of us went home to consult our parents as to which candidate was the best one to vote for and why.  Since Estonia, where my father the electrician ran a small electrical contracting business and both sets of grandparents were farmers (mom’s dad even ran the local flour mill), my forebears had been entrepreneurial, self-reliant, hardworking individualists – in short, they were capitalists.  The upshot was that I got a snootful of pro-Eisenhower propaganda from both parents and was told to start reading the op-ed pages of the Indianapolis News, which was the newspaper I delivered six evenings a week on my paper route.  They pointed out that I too was an entrepreneur businessman, since I bought the newspapers from the News every week, and had to market and sell them in my territory at a profit or not, with no recourse if I couldn’t collect enough from some low-life customers who endlessly delayed payment or simply stiffed the kid.

Progressive Perspectives – 17sep18

George Rebane

George Boardman, our favorite Union columnist, writes in the 17sep18 edition (here) of the newspaper and shares another important worldview held by the country’s progressives.  He starts with an expected dunning of our Republican congressmen Doug LaMalfa and Tom McClintock who refused to attend a candidate’s forum held by the League of Women Voters.  For years now the LWV has morphed itself from an assiduously non-partisan voter information organization into an active arm of the country’s progressive movement under Democratic Party leadership.  Such ‘candidates’ forums’ have turned out to be nothing but leftwing propaganda events showcasing hit jobs on their opposition candidates and issues.  Why attend such an event on purpose?

What Mr Boardman misreports is that Congressman LaMalfa “boycotts” Nevada County.  That simply is not true given his considerable attendance record supporting Republican sponsored events at which all county residents are welcomed to attend, hear his report, and question their representative.

But the real worldview, that comes out in the column, is how progressives view taxation as a zero-sum game.  It’s hard to tell whether or not they are really naïve enough to believe that if one government jurisdiction (say, the county) levies taxes of a given amount/rate, then another government jurisdiction (say, the state) will somehow be inhibited from also getting their pound of flesh from the taxpayer.  He makes that point viz the history of Prop13, claiming that since that proposition limited the local jurisdictions’ ability to arbitrarily continue raising property taxes, it then fell to the state to take up the taxation slack.  Mr Boardman’s point being that had Prop13 not placed such inhibitions on local taxation, then the state would have demurred and diminished its rapacity for continuing to raise taxes.  It would be interesting to discover how many of our left-leaning citizens join Mr Boardman in his embrace of such a charming fable.

Another progressive perspective, contributed by a Mr William Larsen, is the more familiar one advocating open borders and a ‘y’all come, regardless …’ immigration policy.  In his 17sep18 Union column Mr Larsen interprets this century-plus message on the Statue of Liberty as our mandated perennial and correct policy toward all who have let their homelands become what in today’s vernacular would qualify as 'shithole countries'.  Anything else, he informs us, would be considered an utterly racist national response that favors the white skins of Europe over the black and brown skins from the south.  The deeper understanding of this perspective is that America is immune to becoming a shithole country no matter how many people we permit/invite in from countries that have already suffered that fate at their hands and the hands of their fellow citizens and cultural cohorts.

Mr Larsen also shares with us an unfortunate incident he suffered when returning from a local political demonstration with a sign he displayed.  Apparently some aggrieved worthy on the right thought he was an illegal alien, one of those who today unabashedly join such left-sponsored demonstrations, and told him to “Take your sign and go home!”  Understandably Mr Larsen, who is a veteran, was a bit miffed and replied, “I am home.  I am a veteran.”  But then, awash in guilt and self-opprobrium, he goes on a soul-searching pilgrimage, “reflecting on that short interchange, I couldn't help noticing how I had ranked myself as having some special status because I'm a vet. My comment made it seem that being a veteran gives one an enhanced claim to call this country "home," and I was embarrassed at my arrogant assumption of privilege.”  Here Mr Larsen communicates the clear message that America should be home to its veterans, those who have manned the ramparts of their homeland, and equally home to the illegal alien who by hook or by crook has managed get across our border and into some privileged sanctuary status among us.

Scattershots – 10sep18 (updated 11sep18)

George Rebane

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Left likes to make lying a pastime unique to Republican politicians, especially President Trump.  None of them probably noticed that literally all of the Dems’ leading lights on the Judiciary Committee told whoppers when they grilled Judge Kavanaugh in their vain attempts to pry something loose that wasn’t there.  One of them claimed Kavanaugh’s nomination should be thrown out because he was nominated by a president who is an “unindicted co-conspirator”, which Trump is not.  And another one claimed to be the modern-day self-sacrificing Spartacus for releasing committee documents against committee rules, documents that the committee released to him the previous day.  But the lying demagogue just had to have his grandstand for the cameras.  (It turned out that the document in question to show Kavanaugh’s racism was a nothing-burger that indicated exactly the opposite.)  The other Democrats on the panel all did their best to bamboozle their constituents when it came their turn, and given the nature of their constituents, some were undoubtedly successful.

NPR’s daily dump on Trump featured author Bob Woodward talking about his new book.  The interview revealed either how little Woodward knows about executive decision making, and/or the severity of his TDS.  Those familiar with how an executive uses staff for solving problems knows that asking the right questions (formulating the problem) and generating good alternative solutions are the most difficult parts of the process.  Woodward and the mainstream are now citing how a staffer surreptitiously took a supposedly disastrous letter off the president’s desk before he could sign it.  The truth of the matter is that the letter (to South Korea on trade), clearly marked as a draft/WIP,  was one of several alternatives for the president’s review.  Then Woodward takes the president to task for asking ‘why do we have NATO troops in Europe?’ and the same question for South Korea.  Trump is represented here as a double dummy for ‘not knowing the answer’, and SecDef Mattis’s proper answer is characterized as making things clear to an ignoramous.  The real ignoramous is Woodward and Team Lamestream, who have no idea that asking ‘zero base questions’, especially when concerning long unquestioned totems, is a fundamental task of an experienced executive in the process of taking critical decisions.

The Coddling of the American Mind describes the cognitive fragility and brittleness of today’s young.  The just-released book written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - two lifelong Democrat academics - raises yet another alarm about how the progressives have managed to screw up an entire generation plus of Americans with massive deficits in being able to “understand nuances” of arguments, and being totally intolerant and fearful of any idea, concept, or notion that questions or goes counter to their carefully taught intellectual and socio-political underpinnings.  This, of course, is massively denied by the country’s Left as witnessed even in these pages.  Neither author is able to suggest a ready remedy to bring these millions of mind-mangled minions back into the realworld.

California proves itself once more “100% certifiable” as a government of grifters sustained by an electorate of malleable idiots.  Our progressive Democrats now mandate that the state get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2045.  The impact of all this will be utility bills through the roof that will devastate the unsubsidized poor and drive more wage earning taxpayers to other states.  Only the coastal elites will not notice the economic devastation.  Today Californians already pay the highest rates for electricity which have increased more than 25% since 2013.  Given the natural gas-powered back-up plants required, the heavily subsidized wind and solar alternative will not even make a noticeable nick in reducing CO2.  (more here)

[11sep18 update]  Global alarmists claims refuted by another score of credentialed experts in their individual fields.  The details can be accessed on Russ Steele's blog here.  His report concludes with "The well-documented invalidation of the 'three lines of evidence' upon which EPA attributes global warming to human-caused CO2 emissions breaks the causal link between such emissions and global warming."  Worth checking out as we continue doing battle with the politically motivated True Believers in consensus science.

This year's 9/11 memorial will again be held at the gravesite of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Grass Valley this morning.  The Nevada County Republican Women Federated maintain the ambassador's grave, and regularly observe various anniversaries there throughout the calendar year.

‘Choose capitalism’

George Rebane

So argues Manny Montes in an excellent piece in the 6sep18 Union (here).  Mr Montes, who lives in Auburn, is a kindred spirit we have cited before in these pages.  He begins by reminding us how the lamestream media misleads and purposely spreads discontent (‘enemy of the people’?) by continuing to imply that the ‘rich’ don’t get taxed enough and therefore don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Citations of concurring Democrat congress critters abound; even some who militate to taxing 70% of the first million you earn, and make the point “… if you can’t get by on $300,000 in a country where so many …”.  Never mind that of the federal tax burden "the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent, the top 10 percent, 71 percent, and the top 20 percent, 87 percent."

He points out the fundamental reality of how socialism is like a cancer that is “inextricably dependent on the producers for their viability”, and “like a cancer, feeding on healthy cells, the progressive socialist must inescapably feed … off the producers of wealth. … Their animal kingdom counterpart is the leech.”  And in its inevitable end, as we have repeatedly seen, socialism is a “cancer (that) essentially commits suicide, feeding on its host until the host has no more to give.”

Montes also cites one of our favorite leftist pundits of plunder, Saul Alinsky, who in Rules for Radicals instructs his acolytes ‘How to Create a Socialist State’, wherein Rule #2 states “Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.”  This “morally repugnant” dictum has been followed to the letter by Democrats who long ago launched the nation’s greatest multi-decadal social bamboozle called the ‘Great Society’, whose policies and programs went on to destroy minority families and create poverty wholesale in our cities under their decades of seemingly misguided administrations, abetted by Washington, that actually hewed to chapter and verse of Alinsky’s teachings.  (Of course, those read in history know that Alinsky was himself a student of Lenin, and, in turn, the ideological mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The Left continues its lame attempt to pass off Alinsky as just “the father of community organizing”, which he was not, since the Bolsheviks perfected that art of pernicious public persuasion a century ago.)

Mr Montes reminds the reader in his takeaway on capitalism, that as a counter to collectivism, “there is only one economic system which provides the greatest opportunity for all to achieve self-reliance, and that is capitalism. The flip side of the capitalism coin is individual rights. This is the moral basis of capitalism. The right of individuals to live as they see fit with respect for the rights of others to live as they see fit.”  And as we often conclude such sentiments on RR, the reader is again invited to revisit and meditate on Bastiat’s triangle of rights.

Ruminations – 4sep2018 (updated 7sep18)

George Rebane

Rapidly decreasing sperm counts in western males.  The trend is now over 40 old and presumably contributed to by some ‘endocrine disruptor’ chemicals in the plastics we use. (here)  Now that is a real shot in the shorts because low sperm counts are also harbingers of all kinds of other maladies in men as reported at a recent conference in Sweden.  The Singularity cannot arrive too soon. (here)

The Senate hearings to empanel Judge Kavanaugh are once more illustrating the trademark thuggery of the Left when they cannot have their way through established civil procedures.  Police this morning have arrested over 20 people who attempted to disrupt the hearings when Dem members of the Judiciary Committee failed with their own attempted disruption to again demand tens of thousands of irrelevant and supernumerary documents which will not impact their publicly declared opposition to Kavanaugh one whit.  Astute readers will remember how the Left went nationally ballistic in 2016 when candidate Trump hinted that he might protest election irregularities for which some DNC instigated rumors were already coming to light.  Instead, they have demonstrated for the last two years what real political disruption looks like in the wake of a legal and duly conducted election won by someone they don’t like.  More later.

Disingenuous Dems.  Given what the reading public already knows about Judge Kavanaugh, does anyone really think that the Dems on the Judiciary Committee really believe what they are saying about the nominee, especially that his confirmation to SCOTUS will destroy America as we have known it???  If enough Americans believe that tripe, then this may finally be the real litmus test giving fair warning that we should immediately form an active federal commission to start working toward a peaceful Great Divide.  If not, then can we not assume that these Dems are simply evil in what they are trying to purvey to their least read and intellectually innocent constituents?

OK, time for some giggles on this auspicious day.  A guy goes into a bar in New York where all the bartenders are robots.  The guy sits down at the bar and the robot asks, “What will you have?”.  The guy replies “Whiskey.”  The robot brings back his drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  The guy says, “168”.  The robot talks about physics, space exploration, and medical technology.

After the guy leaves, he pauses at the street corner and thinks about what he just encountered.  And the more he thinks about it the more curious he gets, so he decides to back.  Another robot asks, “What’s your drink?”  The guy answers, “Whiskey.”  The robot returns with his drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  This time the man replies, “100.”  The robot talks about NASCAR, Budweiser, LSU football, and All-star wrestling.  The man finishes his drink, leaves, but is so interested in this ‘experiment’ that he decides he’ll try again.

He enters the bar and, as usual, a third robot asks him what he wants to drink.  The man replies, “Whiskey.”  The robot brings the drink and asks, “What’s your IQ?”  This time the man answers, “50.”  The robot leans in real close and slowly asks, “So, are you people still unhappy that Hillary lost?”

[5sep18 update]  Social justice as it is.  (H/T to correspondent)

NYT RIP.  With its publishing an anonymous editorial of extremely scurrilous content today (here), the Gray Lady has hammered the last nail - from the inside - into its coffin as ‘the nation’s newspaper’.  Henceforth we can anticipate its resurrection as The Nation’s Tabloid.

[7sep18 update]  Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave good account of the Dems’ behavior in the Kavanaugh hearings, and it further illustrates how the media are shortchanging an already shortchanged electorate.  Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) is the Judiciary Committee’s poster child of a grandstanding demogauge spewing BS.  Ms Robin Diel does an excellent job summarizing the Senator Cruz’s remarks in the 7sep18 Union (here).

Quo Vadis Democrats? (updated 31aug18)

George Rebane

It turns out that my ongoing assessments of our Great Divide have been in error – the gulf between America’s Left and Right is significantly wider than what I have been reporting.  This latest epiphany came to me as I was perusing ‘Another Day of Conflicting Realities’, Bob Crabb’s latest post and comment stream in which he takes me to task for my posting “left/right polarization will make a quantum leap to a much higher level in the next twelve months, exceeding by far anything we have witnessed to date” (here), and then goes on to verify this assertion.

Ruminations – 25aug18 (updated 31aug18)

George Rebane

That Lady Justice today only wears a patch over one eye is apparent to at least half the country.  Mueller’s ongoing investigation, along with the FBI et al investigations that preceded it, gives clear and compelling evidence to the bloom of corruption that has compromised our justice system over the last decade.  Kim Strassel’s ‘When Justice is Partial’ in the 24aug18 WSJ compiles a short and bitter summary of what has gone down.  And here is the strong letter to follow by Canadian Conrad Black.

Luxury Communism, the Siren Song

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 August 2018.]

Among an alarming fraction of today’s younger generation, capitalism has become a dirty word, and communism has lost all of its historical barnacles.  Along with socialism, today communism is viewed by our millennials as a more socially just system, a version of which should replace capitalism as our society’s organizing principle for wealth generation and commerce.  Millennials, also known as Gen Y, are the generation born between the early 80s and the late 90s.  Today they number about 80M in the US, and academically they have tested and demonstrate themselves as not our brightest generation.  (more here)

When they assemble to support politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, and Alexandra Ortega-Cortez, they frequently become an unruly and violent mob to express their anger through assaulting university speakers they don’t like to smashing shiny store windows representing the capitalistic wealth of our nation. (more here)

Today there is rising the idea of a ‘fully automated luxury communism’ or FALC that paints a future of humanity living lives of leisure in harmony with communally-owned advanced technology that does all the work and produces all the wealth that is equitably shared by the people.  In that world, no longer is anyone stressed striving to labor in order to own property that makes possible the good life.  Today, organizations such a Plan C are expanding young memberships, inviting these to work for a world “centered on the commons” in which people will ‘naturally’ behave unnaturally as altruists.

Spokespersons such as Aaron Bastani of Novara Media teach listeners that “there is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions, … in recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”  Bastani sees FALC achieving something closer to that — “a society with collective control over its own high-tech, work-reducing gadgets. He believes what little work will be necessary in the future, such as optimizing 3D-printers and agricultural robots, will be organized much the way editors currently manage Wikipedia — in a decentralized, non-hierarchical fashion.”  Students of history recognize this as the achievement of the Marxist/Leninist communist ideal in which all humanity lives in unregulated harmony after the then superfluous state has withered away.

But what none of these pied pipers talk about to their eager young audiences is the nature of the path required to get us from here to there.  After listening to the animated exhortations of over-zealous speakers, these audiences, innocent of history, leave such emotional rallies to gather in the streets to proclaim the advent of their new world.  But what none of them realize nor are prepared for is the draconian aftermath that must now come when the exhilaration and excitement of street demonstrations end.  Then must begin the real fight, or as Bastani says, “if you want this, what you need to do is seize the means of production. We need to get automation and make it subordinate to human needs, not the profit motive. It’s about seizing the bakery rather than stealing the bread.”

Then will begin the long civil war required to take what’s not yours and kill those who resist such takings.  The road through the way station of socialism to communism has never been an easy one.  Revolutions such as occurred in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and many other lands, all took long, slogging years of civil war that spread wholesale misery across the land and took lives of millions, and then in the aftermath of devastated economies and terrorized societies, destroyed the lives of uncounted more millions for decades to come.  And in the end, for some reason not taught in our schools, the halcyon days that Marx and Lenin promised never came to pass in lands and among peoples who abandoned the fundamental rights to personal property, individual security, and shared liberty.

This is the real battle for the hearts and minds of Americans in which we are now engaged.

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.

‘Does Diversity Really Unite Us?’

George Rebane

The short answer to that important question is NO.  We have studied the arguments of scholars and thinkers on this for the life of RR and longer, and have found nothing to persuade us to abandon the blatantly obvious and common sense answer in the negative.   Unity is based on fundamental principles of cohesion – first and foremost, all peoples feel the greatest comfort, security, support from, and support for other people who in the aggregate share their beliefs and worldview.  The desire and willingness for such sharing has been the basis for assimilation and of America’s strength as an enduring idea, while other countries have sought to endure through maintaining their core ethnicity, no matter what form of governance they happen to fall under in the passage of time.  This belief is a fundamental tenet of what in these pages is filed under Rebane Doctrine.

I claim no originality here, but freely admit to being a student of my betters in such matters.  Most recently (11apr18) the distinguished political scientist and professor emeritus Edward J. Erler delivered a lecture on the titled subject to a national leadership seminar sponsored by Hillsdale College.  The transcript is also published in the July/August 2018 issue of the college’s widely read Imprimis.  From there I will excerpt some seminal points of Prof Erler’s talk.

… Progressive liberalism no longer views self-preservation as a rational goal of the nation-state. Rather, it insists that self-preservation and national security must be subordinate to openness and diversity. America’s immigration policies, we are told, should demonstrate our commitment to diversity because an important part of the American character is openness, and our commitment to diversity is an affirmation of “who we are as Americans.” If this carries a risk to our security, it is a small price to pay. Indeed, the willing assumption of risk adds authenticity to our commitment.

… Our progressive politicians and opinion leaders proclaim their commitment to diversity almost daily, chanting the same refrain: “Diversity is our strength.” 

… This should not be surprising. Greater diversity means inevitably that we have less in common, and the more we encourage diversity the less we honor the common good. Any honest and clear-sighted observer should be able to see that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation—and we should not be deceived into believing that its proponents do not understand the full impact of their advocacy! (emphasis mine)

… The American people can, of course consent to allow others to join the compact that created the American nation, but they have the sovereign right to specify the terms and conditions for granting entry and qualifications for citizenship.

… Immigration policies should serve the interests of the American people and of the nation—they should not be viewed as acts of charity to the world. Putting America first is a rational goal. It is the essence of sovereignty. And the sovereign nation-state is the only home of citizenship—as it is the only home of constitutional government.

Ruminations – 17aug18 (updated 19aug18)

George Rebane

Obama’s PPD-20 has hamstrung America’s ability to defend and counter cyberattacks against us.  President Trump is recalling that Presidential Policy Directive to “ to push decision-making authority down the chain of command, could empower military officials to launch more frequent and more aggressive cyberattacks against adversaries like Russia and Iran.”  (more here)

2017 saw 72,287 opioid overdose deaths in the US.  That’s like a jumbo jet crashing every weekday, and it beggars stats on all other human-induced deaths like attributed to ‘gun violence’ and motor vehicle accidents.  America’s murder capital Chicago apparently leads the way here also with progressive policies stifling its LE agencies’ abilities to intervene.  Blacks account for more than 50% of opioid deaths, and, of course, gun deaths on Chicago’s streets.  Progressives care not a whit (actually spelled with an 's') for black lives; for them all such deaths are useful when recognized, and not to be wasted in blaming the whole thing on conservatives.

Arrest of ISIS terrorist and multiple re-entrant Omar Ameen in Sacramento confirms again that our immigrant vetting process is totally broken.  The feds admit that vetting a refugee depends on the story they tell, and not on any required 3^rd party documentation, which either does not exist or will not be provided if the refugee thinks it will be pejorative.  Counter to lamestream claims, President Trump has been correct in his assessment of this.

Russian online influence on America’s thinking about issues and candidates has turned out to be less than insignificant according to recent analysis of foreign placed ads and social media accounts, so reports Bruce Levey of the Institute for Justice (here).  He also points out what we've known for years, that we and other nations place such ads in each other’s jurisdictions whenever it suits our interests to attempt to influence other countries’ decisions.  Bottom line, Russia's influence in our 2016 election was bupkus.

Dumbest cartoon in a coon’s age was published in the 17aug18 Union.  Have no idea how this got by the newspaper’s editorial policy.  Nothing against the paper publishing anti-Trump stuff, but this contribution is simply butt stupid, and doesn’t reflect well on how The Union thinks of its readership.

[More]  Our intelligence institutions (including the retirees) are now totally political.  The letter signed by former intelligence heads claiming that Trump limited Brennan’s speech by revoking his clearance is both false and butt stupid or worse, evil since it is designed to bamboozle the tens of millions of light-thinking Americans.  As President Trump observed, Brennan’s voice will now be louder than ever.  Let’s see how long these newly minted politicians will keep up that spiel.

[18aug18 update]  In ‘The Press Abets a Coverup’ (18aug18 WSJ) Holman Jenkins contributes an incisive and revealing recounting of our intel community’s shenanigans designed to oppose Trump, but that plausibly gave him the necessary push over the top in 2016.

[19aug18 update]  Kudos to columnist (19aug18 Union) George Boardman for outing Mike Dent, director of the county's Department of Child Support, Collection and Housing.  Mr Dent is a prime exemplar of the double dummies ensconced in government.  He is seeking bids to build and operate a homeless shelter for the winter, but doesn't have a clue how much it costs to run such a shelter through the cold months - hence, no bids to build one.  It really irks me and many others that our tax monies have to be diluted to pay the salaries and retirement benefits for the likes of the mentally dented Dents out there.

Scattershots – 14aug18 (updated 15aug18)

You can get away with a lot of  illiberal theatrics and demands in a liberal society, and one of the great, eternal challenges for democratic governments is to figure out how much one can tolerate before the forces of illiberalism corrode the liberal order.  Jonah Goldberg (2018)

George Rebane

‘Google gives back’ gushes the 13aug18 Union reporting that the company “invests $100K (gasp!) for Nevada workforce development”.  The affair lasted one day and was a marketing event for the company’s business software under the guise of “helping Nevadans develop digital skills needed for job placement and advancement”, which ‘development’ in one day is a joke.  But it did give Reno’s JOIN, a government sponsored workforce development agency, a little feather in their cap – at least they’re doing something.  Meanwhile, Google got a real PR boost and advertising multiplier by spending less than they accidentally drop off their loading docks on any given day.  The real news to note was the mention of Nevada’s net yearly migration rate of 5.5% - #2 in the nation – ably boosted by emigrants from California driven out by our state’s butt stupid palette of public policies, regulations, and taxes.

Trump’s ‘the press is an enemy of the people’ understood contextually is something that has needed to be said and explained in more detail than possible in a punchline tweet.  The few center right news outlets, compared to the legions of leftwing outlets, survive primarily because of their outsized audiences who frequent them for the markedly more comprehensive coverage of what’s happening than is available in the carefully self-censored lamestream media.  A local confirmation of that over the years have been RR’s leftwing readers whose comments reveal that they first ‘hear’ of events, ideas, and happenings from RR commentaries and its commenters.  They then label and attack the same as products of a few isolated and fevered far-right brains from these foothills, being completely unaware of the related national reportage and debates.  If CNN, MSNBC, HuffPost, NYT, … didn’t cover it, then it never happened.  When such news coverage blankets the country, then Americans who are already overly challenged, under-educated, and busy with their daily affairs are effectively propagandized from one perversely ideological perspective.

Today's contribution from our cartoonist RL Crabb, filched from the pages of the 14aug18 Union, is a view from the purported mid-road vantage that appears to suffer a bit from Bob's ongoing bout with TDS.  I wonder what pinned dolls he would have pictured with Obama had he been so inclined.

Speaking of the lamestream’s promotion of the ‘white supremacist threat’, it turns out again that there is no such threat simply because the number of white supremacists in the country is insignificant.  Their only voice is the one manufactured and given to them by the Left which needs an ideological bogeyman against which to play their socialist siren song.  The weekend’s ‘Unite the Right 2’ march of the 20 gave ample evidence of that, as it also demonstrated the alt-Left’s ability to marshal mobs of counter demonstrators, numbering in the thousands, whose hate-filled prescriptions for the United States and its leadership were duly recorded on numerous videos, of course, not aired on the lamestream.

“Curmudgeon” nobelist VS Naipaul (Literature, 2001) died over the weekend.  Naipaul had the courage to observe that all cultures are not of equal worth or quality, and “unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.”  For this he was vilified by progressives as a racist.  Naipaul identified “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement” as the tenets of a “universal civilization” contributed by the west that stood in stark contrast to the Islamist world’s “philosophical hysteria”.  This hysteria has yet to be recognized and denounced by the Left, whose elitists see it as a manageable and existential force that can be used to weaken and bring down western civilization.

[15aug18 update] Sen Fauxcahontas Warren (D-CT) finally exposed her communist destination for us by introducing legislation in Congress that would launch the biggest government grab of private property in the country’s history.  She describes it in ‘Companies Shouldn’t Be Accountable Only to Shareholders’ in the 15aug18 WSJ.  There she instructs us that “American corporations exist only because the American people grant them charters. Those charters confer valuable privileges—such as limited legal liability for their owners—that enable businesses to turn a profit. What do Americans get in return?”  Well, for openers, the answer to that is EVERYTHING that we see around us.

Her Accountable Capitalism Act would remove corporations generating more than $1B annually from shareholder control and make them assume “fiduciary responsibilities beyond their shareholders”.  The new order would make such businesses into “benefit corporations” under a hodgepodge board and management structure which is guaranteed to completely truss up for-profit enterprises in new deep layers of regulation and litigation.  More specifically, “Benefit Corporations fundamentally change how a company is permitted to act. In addition to creating shareholder value like other for-profit companies, a Benefit Corporation must provide a general public benefit, namely, a material positive impact on society and the environment as a whole. Specific examples include providing low-income individuals or communities with beneficial products or services, preserving the environment, promoting economic opportunity, and improving health in the community.”

If that socialist cum communist has her way, then ‘Venezuela here we come’ will be the new tune on everyone’s lips.

The Democratic Party is now our openly declared socialist party in fact and deed.  It has finally realized the reason the Socialist Party of America closed its doors in 1956 – ‘the Democrats are adopting all of our social goals’ – as its former members migrated to their new political home.  Today, according to a just released Gallup poll, almost three of five Democrats view socialism favorably over capitalism, and confirm that ‘Democrats are Officially the Party of Socialism’.  But you can bet the farm that once they get back in power, they ain’t stopping there (see Fauxcahontas above).

The bigotry of the Left

George Rebane 

This post grew out of comments by one of our prominent leftwing readers who hides his identity under the letter M.  This commenter ascribed a quote by white nationalist leader Jason Kessler about the variation in IQ scores between individuals of various population groups. (more here)  M rejects such results (here) and considers such citations as evidence of “the Conservative Echo Chamber Revealed”.  The man(?) has persistently proven himself to be poorly informed, yet continues to demonstrate that deficit at every opportunity.

Bigot: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance. (Merriam-Webster)

I believe M and his ilk would have demonstrated against limited access roads (aka freeways) had he known that they were invented by/under Hitler.  He has left an ample trail in these pages to confirm him as a bigot according to the M-W definition.  While many RR commenters don’t agree with the full credos of white nationalists and, say, ‘black lives matter’ proponents, there is no evidence of hatred or intolerance here when debating their ideas.  Just because Kessler or Sharpton state something, should not mean that it must be rejected out of hand, and those vilified who happen voice agreement with that particular statement.  But that is not the way of bigots.

For those who share M’s deficits, the ranking of aggregate IQ scores among the various ethnic/racial groups has received the imprimatur of none less than the American Psychological Association, the largest and most prestigious professional organization of psychologists.  I summarized that ranking in ‘How many people do we really need?’  To show the wholesale bigotry of the progressive Left, they believe in uni-step that humans, a species that has measurable differences in all their attributes, cannot have them in certain politically prescribed dimensions, IQ being one of them.  And anyone who cites counter evidence or even proposes additional studies on the matter are labeled as racists and either attacked or summarily dismissed.  (more here)

We must always return to the sad fact that the orthodox Left is and has been the most sclerotic and unscientific ideology embraced on God’s green earth.  Wherever they have managed to seize the reins of government, they have inevitably hewn to policies that have repeatedly taken populations down the road to disaster and despair.  That is why in the best style and teachings of Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals), they loudly accuse their opposition of their own shortcomings.

The Liberal Mind Revealed – Example #439 (updated 11aug2018)

‘The beatings will stop when morale improves.’ – wall sign in forced labor camp

George Rebane

“Trained historian” Paul Moore’s piece in the 9aug18 Union argues that ‘Investigation is not done until you have all the evidence’.  I kid you not, this gentleman really has a mind that works out such logic.  And I can guarantee you that he also takes these cognitive powers into the voting booth.  Moreover, the saddest part is that Mr Moore is not some one-off in our community, nor in our beloved land.  There are millions like him out there with such neurological wiring, all working to fundamentally transform America.

Mr Moore starts out by taking Darrell Berkheimer’s 4aug18 column (here) to task for asking that Mueller conclude his investigation in a timely manner.  Our trained historian then lectures us that such investigations don’t and can’t have a natural or externally prescribed terminus.  Why?  Well, according to More, Mueller was tasked to dig up culpable evidence of Donald Trump’s criminal wrongdoings, so his logic inexorably leads him to to conclude that such evidence exists, and that the investigation’s natural conclusion should be when such evidence to impeach and indict President Trump is finally discovered.  In Mr More’s universe the probability is one (certainty) that Trump is guilty, the evidence of that guilt exists, and is yet to be discovered.

In that same universe there is no concept of investigations which continue to turn up negative results will also lower the likelihood that the sought for evidence actually exists.  Specifically, the Mores of the world don’t understand the notion that the longer an ongoing investigation comes up empty, the lower the chances that it will ultimately come up with the sought for evidence.  The converse of that is that the longer an investigation produces no evidence, the higher the probability that no such evidence exists.  In more reasonable worlds, such demonstrably barren investigations have been regularly terminated as a matter of course.  But today, people of Mr Moore’s ideologically constrained capacity can conclude only that the reason no such evidence has been found is that we haven’t yet looked long enough.  So it appears that Mueller’s people have landed in some very attractive federally paid sinecures, charged with conducting a nationally divisive, perennial investigation that can terminate only after having found “all the evidence” of a criminal or treasonous conspiracy required to indict and convict a sitting president.

[11aug18 update]  In the sense of full disclosure, I need to again remind readers (especially those of the leftward tilt) that I am a child, student, and defender of western civilization.  And when we talk of nationalism, I am a nationalist who conforms to Merriam-Webster’s definition.

Nationalism: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially: 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.

Now the logic of the local lefties immediately extends those declarations to people who are therefore necessarily oppose non-western civilizations, and who actively and without cause suppress the interests of other nations.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As an occidentaphile, I become a defender only when western civilization is suppressed and/or attacked.  Else, as a conservetarian I promote diversity in the Westphalian sense, since such diversity underpins global decentralization of knowledge and control, and provides the world with multifarious ongoing experiments in governance so that all can see what works and what doesn’t.  (Also known historically among our several states as the Great Experiment.)

In the same sense I am an American nationalist when other countries, geo-political institutions, and/or those seeking an extra-constitutional transformation of our country seek to suppress, abbreviate, or attack American interests – the prime being its endurance on the American landmass as the sovereign constitutional republic which was bequeathed to us by our Founders, and which we have defended with our blood and treasure over the centuries.

Now, since I am white, which is an acknowledged ‘race’ by non-whites, am I automatically then a white nationalist?  Not necessarily, when we study its broadly accepted non-partisan definition.

White nationalism is a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism that holds the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white national identity.  Its proponents identify with and are attached to the concept of a white nation.  White nationalists say they seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white states. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost.

As my apologetics over the years attest, I am therefore not a white nationalist, since I don’t consider culture to be race-dependent as is obvious by the worldwide acceptance of the major tenets of western culture by people from all races and backgrounds.  By various kinds of ongoing intercourse, all cultures and races have evolved, homogenized, and will continue doing so as we trade and mate with each other.  All forms of ‘racial purity’ will be erased sooner or later, if that has not already happened.  What people (of all races) like me oppose are the rapid fundamental transformations of their cultures and nations implemented through fraud or force as dictated by ideological cohorts working to overturn the established (traditional?) order that is accepted by a free people.  And all such bets on tolerance are off when we encounter threatening tyrannies who unabashedly abolish the Bastiat Triangle of rights.

Trumporama – 30jul18 (updated 1aug18)

George Rebane

These thoughts are motivated by a letter2editor in today’s Union by Richard Van Steen.  There this gentleman, who has graduated from TDS to TAD, tells us that all Americans who don’t want President Trump immediately impeached are traitors, pure and simple – kinda like the stuff he has between his ears.

Lately I’ve been a bit hard on our president’s foot-in-mouth twitter feeds and his tariffs derby (now beginning show some promise), so as one consigned to the nation’s population of irredeemably deplorable traitors, I should at least weigh in my ‘stubborn ounces’ to list some of the benefits we are enjoying in the new era of Trump.

Fairness and Leftwing Talk Radio (updated 26jul18)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 July 2018.]

In our hyper-polarized country it’s time to revisit the notion of censoring free speech.  And specifically as this relates to talk radio.  Our Left has had a perennial problem with how talk radio works in America, or how it works for the Right, and disastrously fails for the Left.  This leads to cries of censorship, claiming that the resulting programming is not ‘fair and balanced’ in the minds of progressives.  All such talk began back in 1949 with the Fairness Doctrine introduced by the Federal Communications Commission.

Back in those days public communication channels were limited to print media, movies, and radio.  Television was then in its infancy.  Since frequency bandwidth was a limited resource, the FCC parceled it out to radio stations as a limited public good.  And among the many rules imposed on broadcasters, the one on the discussion of controversial issues of public importance required programming from every station to be “honest, equitable, and balanced”.  Well, you can imagine the kind of problems that requirement launched – honest, equitable, and balanced in whose opinion?  Soon all kinds of obvious violations came to pass, and in 1987 the FCC rescinded the rule in favor of letting the markets decide who gets to listen to what.

By the early 1990s radio channels had expanded considerably, television was mature, cable was burgeoning, and the internet was already on the horizon.  In the intervening decades broadcast TV had become the home of leftwing political commentary, most visibly when packaged as entertainment, as in late night comedy shows that became thinly veiled propaganda outlets for leftwing ideology and Democrat causes.  And most of the other media, including government subsidized public radio, had taken a distinct and comfortable leftward tilt that actually started under FDR during the depression of the thirties.

The last bastion of rightwing thought became talk radio on private sector commercial stations where commentators were able to interpret the country’s goings on from the conservative and libertarian viewpoints to audiences that seemed to grow without bound.  The reach and effectiveness of conservative talk radio was not lost on the Left, which immediately launched its own talk shows to dispense socialist and progressive views of the world.  But for some puzzling reason, none of these shows got enough traction or caught on with the public.

The liberal diagnosis was that somehow the capitalist free markets were censoring leftwing talk radio, with stations shutting down one show after another as sponsors abandoned them because the audiences simply weren’t there.  As always, the Left’s proposal has been to bring in government, this time to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine that would put talk shows under newly minted quota regulations.  The thought is that no matter if people listened or not, forcing radio stations to devote equal time to Left and Right talk shows would reduce time available for disseminating conservative viewpoints.  This also satisfies a basic tenet of liberal belief, that whatever the government does not subsidize, prescribe, or enforce with its gun, is automatically prohibited, proscribed, or censored in our society.

So today’s accepted progressive wisdom is that censorship by capitalist free markets has been the reason for the ongoing failure of leftwing talk radio.  And this censorship needs to be removed by reinstating government regulation of thought on the airwaves.  But instead of reinstating the failures of the Fairness Doctrine, I would like to offer some other considerations why leftwing talk radio cannot attract audiences, reasons that others may consider too politically incorrect to explain the absence of listeners.

The simplest and most plausible reasons that audiences reject progressive commentaries are due to a combination of factors.  First and foremost, the credibility of a message that violates critical thinking, common sense, and universally understood norms of human behavior.  Second, the ability of government succored audiences to comprehend the more complex parts of public debate and policy proposals.  Third, the poor command of English by many of today’s Democrat constituencies.  And finally, education limited backgrounds that put out of reach the more detailed arguments based on history, economics, and science.

So, why do you think that liberal radio has had such a disastrous history?

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

[Addendum]  The main point I want the reader to take away from this is to answer why it is the Left that is trying to limit the speech of the Right, and the Right has no interest in reciprocating.  Specifically, no one on the Right seeks to apply the Fairness Doctrine to the highly one-sided programs on the mainstream media and the government subsidized outlets such as under the aegis of CPB and PBS.  (A more local example is the record of local lefties who have called for the silencing of my former Union column, and the ongoing calls to get me off the air at KVMR.  Has anyone ever run across someone on the Right trying to silence the rampant local propagandizing by the Left?)

If there were a real demand for leftwing or progressive radio commentary, then there is no one out there to stop them from grabbing time slots, even on established rightwing outlets, since such programming would significantly increase the stations’ outreach to audiences that advertisers would find attractive, and therefore increase such stations’ revenues.  Instead, the ideological fare that sells on TV is leftwing oriented comedy one-liners that appeal primarily to people for whom thinking is optional.  But, of course, for such audiences this lightweight and almost always fallacious fare is extremely effective, especially since it’s the only political commentary they consume.

Here is the currently operative view from the Left as to why they don’t fare well in the talk radio market, and why the government must step in – landmark 2007 study by the Center of American Progress (here), and some analyses of it (here and here).

[26jul18 update]  ‘The Trashing of George Mason U.’ provides a relevant tangent to this post.  Turns out that there’s a sleazebag outfit called UnKoch My Campus that is attacking George Mason for accepting donations from Koch brothers and others of a conservative libertarian bent for seeking “to advance the understanding, acceptance and practice of those free market processes and principles which promote individual freedom, opportunity and prosperity, including the rule of law, constitutional government, private property and the laws, regulations, organizations, institutions, and social norms upon which they rely.”  This attack on supposedly “dark money” funding colleges is against one of the last islands of free speech and conservative thought of America's academia, and is  carried out by an outfit that itself refuses to reveal who is funding its activities.

Scattershots – 23jul18 (updated 26jul18)

George Rebane

In ‘Our country’s future relies on embracing those escaping brutality’ by Ms Judith McCarrick of the Immigration Action Alliance we find some pearls, among them –

• “That migrant parents have broken immigration laws to (surreptitiously) cross our borders is untrue.” Why? Because the legal immigration process is difficult and takes time, and because AG Sessions denies asylum “claims from seekers of protection of gang violence and abusive spouses.”
• “No law mandates that children and parents be separated at the border.” Our immigration and domestic laws specify exactly that when criminal parents are arrested and taken into custody.

These and more like them in her 23jul18 Union piece put Ms McCarrick in the running for the highly competitive designation as Blithering Idiot, 1^st Class.  Unfortunately, given the extensive competition in our county, her latest contribution does not make her a shoo-in.

Kudos to Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman for his timely, comprehensive, and correct vent on the lack of leadership at all levels in our county to expand broadband in our foothills.  Mr Boardman details the sordid history in ‘Bright Fiber, Verizon show what happens when leadership is lacking’.  In that piece he reinforces the recent cri de coeur of the Union's editorial board, and again corroborates the seminal RR dictum, ‘To find the cause of any problem in society, presume that government is guilty until proven innocent.’  Hard to lose with that approach.

[24jul18 update]  Nevada City has now approved 12 pot stores for health reasons.  That’s the same argument the city’s mamas and papas used to deny bringing the town into the 21^st century with appropriate cell phone coverage (let alone broadband).  Consulting their sidewater science, they continue to conclude that cell towers on selected town building will fry the brains of local citizens.  With ample evidence at hand about whom they seat on their city council, many claim that said brains have already been fried for years. (more here)

Two diametrically opposite interpretations of the just released (and deceitfully redacted) FISA application for a warrant to wiretap Carter Page.  All on the Left see no fraud involved and ample evidence for the warrant in the application.  These people don’t think it was material to reveal that the Steele dossier - the prime argument in the application - was scripted, bought, and paid for by Democrats for Hillary.  All on the Right point to the extensive evidence that confirms the fraudulent nature of the application and subsequent FBI testimonies about it.  Within a larger framework, this again proves that no rapprochement is possible, since the opposing parties cannot even agree on the basic facts germane to any subsequent productive conversation.  (more here)

[26jul18 update]  SF Board of Supervisors again certified itself as first class idiots by passing a resolution to screen out insurance companies that invest in fossil fuel businesses.  This because such investments promote climate change, the fight against which the city considers itself among the world’s foremost champions.  So here is a burg, with a history of demonstrably bad decisions and public policies that is drowning in druggies, bums, and their accumulating offal while driving out tourists by the thousands and causing untold losses to their hospitality industry, now preening its deranged ‘values’ for all to see al they attempt to dictate how their insurers should manage their portfolios in order to keep premiums competitive. (more here)  San Francisco values on parade.

Women Taught to Shun STEM

George Rebane

While great effort is being made by universities and the state to attract more women into STEM careers, their massively progressive humanities departments at literally all of the nation’s colleges are doing their best to convince women to reject STEM.  The message of these liberal academics is, “STEM is only for those who enjoy “rote” work. Engineering is not creative. There’s only one right answer. You’ll live your life in a cubicle. It’s dehumanizing. You’ll never talk to anyone. And, of course, it’s sexist.”

Engineering professor Dr Barbara Oakley gives us the lowdown on these not-so-subtle forces in academia that are working to minimize STEM knowledge in favor of topics, majors, and careers in feel-good fields that require ‘skills’ for which no one or very few are willing to pay with money out of their own pockets. (more here)  The anti-STEM professors have not the slightest clue about the level of creativity required for STEM work, nor the nature of the fulfilling careers that STEM fields provide, and, most importantly, that STEM careers are the prime engines of wealth building vs wealth redistribution in society.

Professor Oakley’s only weak argument is the belief that her light-weight “humanities colleagues unthinkingly malign math and science as the province of uncreative drones.”  I don’t think there is anything “unthinking” going on here.  No matter how ignorant they are of STEM and its careers, the light-weights know they are on thin ice.  Were their female students to be exposed to the truth of the real exhilaration that STEM professions can provide, and the creativity required to succeed in such careers, and the real contribution they would make to society, and the life-changing possibilities that would then be open to them, those smart enough would switch out of their humanities majors in a heartbeat.

But the real truth here is that the Left has never promoted STEM for the masses because it creates too many problems in their implementation of a compliant governance for the new world order.  With a smattering of STEM, their pedagogically cultivated drones may start having independent thoughts in areas best left untrammeled by inquiring young minds.  What is doubly wasteful in today’s progressive bureaucracies and institutions is that on the one hand we establish and promote  programs – from kindergarten through grad-school – to attract females into STEM subjects and careers, and on the other hand operate a quiet yet pervasive propaganda campaign in academia to denigrate STEM-based thinking and opportunities as somehow being socially deficient and limiting.

Kavanaugh’s Threat to Civilization

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 11 July 2018.]

President Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the prestigious DC Circuit Court of Appeals to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Judge Kavanaugh is one of the most distinguished jurists in America with an impeccable resume and over 300 scholarly legal opinions, 11 of which have been adopted by SCOTUS into their rulings.  He is also clearly acceptable to the man he will replace, since he served as a law clerk for Justice Kennedy.

Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is, of course, hailed by the Republicans and all Americans who value his strict constitutionalist credentials.  The man agrees with the Founders that laws should be made by Congress and not in the judicial branch, whose job it is to adjudicate the application of existing law.  Kavanaugh’s confirmation will deny, for at least a generation, the recent use of our courts to make laws that Congress would not pass or be signed by the President.  And overnight that has made him the most despicable enemy of the Left, perhaps, second only to Donald Trump who surprised everyone by being elected President of the United States. 

To many of us this nomination and the upcoming confirmation battle represents a milestone in the ongoing destruction of national comity.  The Left has now redirected its perennial attack on this administration by focusing its energies to deny Judge Kavanaugh, with the battle cry issued by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who yesterday promised, “I’m going to fight the Kavanaugh nomination with everything I’ve got.”  And his ‘everything’ has become the immediate call to all Democrats ranging from moderate, through the alt-Left, to communist bands marching in the streets with hammer & sickle flags.  These are the dedicated worthies whose shout is ‘No Trump, No Wall, No USA at all!’,

This is reinforced by Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, who points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the “future of the Democratic Party”.  Self-avowed socialist Ocasio-Cortez, who recently won the Democrat primary in Queens calls herself a democratic socialist, and purports to be the new face of the Democratic Party.  In that pivot she is joined by other Democrats such as Cynthia Nixon running for New York governor, and, of course, the established socialist stalwarts, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Other Democrats stand ready to board that train or, unannounced, are already on it.

Meanwhile Democratic Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi warn the country that “Civilization as we know it today is at risk in this election.”  And former DNC chair and governor Terry McAuliffe tells us, “The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh will threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come …”  Meanwhile, leftwing organizations such as the National Women’s Law Center have rushed into print obvious lies like Justice Kavanaugh “believes the President is above the law”.

All of this is the latest and perhaps penultimate chapter of the Left’s anti-Trump national narrative.  Most likely half the country does not believe this extremely divisive screed now erupting against Judge Kavanaugh.    But if you’re a Democrat listening to this, why do you think that your party’s national leadership is telling you these things that they know not to be true?  Do they really think that you are ignorant enough to believe America is at a tipping point to tyranny with the Kavanaugh nomination?  However, if enough of you do believe this, then we really are facing a crisis of governance, because then we are definitely no longer one people under the same Constitution “with liberty and justice for all.”

More soberly, we recall that civilization, as we know it, truly was at risk during WW2 and the ensuing Cold War, with powerful totalitarian regimes seeking to fundamentally transform the world.  And now the Democratic leadership and its core are telling us that we are there again.  Their emerging solution is to abolish capitalism so as to make the world safe for socialism – a form of governance that, without the support of other people’s free market capitalism, has never ended well.

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

Scattershots – 6jul18 (updated 8jul18)

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. - Bertrand De Jouvenel

George Rebane

Liberal logic juries.  Reviewing some of the ‘Russian interference’ comment streams to confirm the kind of logic our leftwing readers accept and present as evidence that Russia did indeed throw the 2016 election to assure Trump’s victory, it occurs to me that many, probably most, of our empaneled juries across the country enjoy a majority of liberals.  Their thought processes and ability to think critically are not lost on lawyers.  We already have long years of evidence that our judicial system suffers from significant corruption by legal professionals implementing jurisprudence to solicit erroneous verdicts by playing games with both process and evidence.  Now I wonder how much of the justice system mess is contributed by juries whose ability to reason and understand evidence is similar to what we often witness in these pages.

Left/Right civility side-by-side in the 5jul18 Union op-ed page.  Take a look at the Other Voices ‘Vote Blue in November’ by a Ms Betsy Wobus who simply exudes raw hatred of President Trump as a reason to vote Democrat, and then compare that to the neighboring column ‘A Threat to One Person’s Free Speech is a Threat to All’ by Ms Terry McLaughlin.  One contains only baseless vituperation, and the other a reasoned presentation of government’s ideology-based impact on First Amendment rights.  A more vivid example of the people on either side of our widening political gulf would be hard to find.

For all the fans of Single Payer (Socialized) Medicine, we have the latest report – ‘Reform the NHS before it kills again’ - about the UK’s much-vaunted National Health Service.  Researcher and author Rupert Darwall runs through a toe-curling litany of recent evidence and ongoing investigations of how the NHS has for years conducted a quiet policy of euthanasia on its patients.  As we have pointed out here, and Mr Darwall reinforces – for government-run health services, especially the de facto monopolistic kind like the NHS, patients are a cost to be minimized.  The obverse is true for private (for-profit) health care services for whom patients are the revenue source to be kept alive, cared for, and cured so that more patients will select the services of such enterprises.  (To confirm such a difference here in the US, revisit the evidence about the healthcare that our VA provides veterans.)

Our country’s multiple identity-based cultures are diverging (becoming more “heterogeneous”). Researchers Klaus Desmet and Romain Wacziarg at the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research have completed “a systematic quantitative study of cultural convergence and divergence in the United States over time” to “assess whether cultural values have grown more or less heterogeneous”.  Among a lot of other things, in their jun2018 paper ‘Cultural Divide’ they conclude that the cultures of 11 distinct groups, into which they divided the American population, became more homogeneous from 1972 to the late 1990s, and then reversed and started becoming more heterogeneous thereafter.  In short, our various identity group cultures have now been diverging for the last 20 years or so.  This, of course, does help explain why we are having more difficulty in communicating and accepting each other’s public policy solutions.  Whoulda thought?

Earth during last half of June 2018.  This YouTube video was sent to me by Russ Steele, RR reader and fellow blogger (here) who closely follows and compares the global warming hysteria to what is actually happening but missing in the lamestream media reports.

[7jul18 update]  ‘If America Is Divided, So Is Europe’, so argues Tunku Varadarajan in a revealing WSJ essay.  Their divisions are similar to ours, with their Left also working feverishly to bury western civilization by any and all means in order to create the chaotic change, as necessary, from which a new global collective may arise to the carefully managed, compliant, and approving cries of their great unwashed, amply augmented by hordes of Islamic and sub-Saharan migrants.

[8jul18 update]  Agenda21 alive and well and advancing.  A reader sent me this update on the implementation and progress of A21 that was posted on Anthony Watts’ ubiquitous blog – ‘Whatever happened to Agenda 21 and Climate Change Policy?’  There Dr Tim Ball writes -

It’s alive and well in your backyard. The entire policy of using anthropogenic global warming as a false front to implement global governance and impose how we will all live is working with remarkable success. The plan was set out by Maurice Strong as Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams because the people he arranged to implement it are unaccountable to anyone.

In ‘History’s Bad Ideas are an Inspiration for Progressives’ Victor Davis Hanson describes “the new illiberal ethos” that we witness in our daily round and on these pages.  In there he details the Left’s hubristic asymmetry in public life and our nation’s affairs.  VDH even explains why “supposed liberals keep revisiting discredited illiberal practices from the nation’s past.”

No Abyss for Progressives

George Rebane

‘Progressive movement jumping into abyss’ by Manny Montes appeared in the 23jun18 Union, opening with the hopeful salvo –

An extraordinary thing is happening right before our eyes.  The implosion of the progressive movement, and its complicit ministry of propaganda, our news media, are jumping head first into the abyss, oblivious to the progressive ideological dangers of their descent.  The incipient tyrant in every progressive is now manifest for all to see. The Obama administration blatantly politicized our government's intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus. The tyrant plays by his own rules. Power is the objective. Principles, ethics and constitutional restraints mean not a whit to the tyrant.

The remainder of the piece presented a cogent, clear, and concise summary of the Left’s iniquities, under Obama’s watch and Hillary’s candidacy, revealed over the last six years or so.  All of which have been much discussed in these pages and elsewhere across the land.  The problem with Mr Montes’ assessment appears to come from his limited awareness of the workings of the liberal mind and their lightly read constituencies.

The Left sees none of these extra-constitutional cum criminal acts – they have been and remain totally blind to them as amply evidenced in the RR comment streams, and more prominent progressive trumpets.  For them, the only atrocious aberrations in government remain Trump’s alleged “collusion with Russia” for which there is yet to be discovered one shred of evidence.  And Trump’s immaterial bombasts, exaggerations, misanthropics, and fabrications have become a catalog of impeachable “lies” for them that totally overwhelm the material lies and illegal activities – including documented collusion with Russia and its third-party agents - perpetrated by Team Obama over their eight years in power.

What Mr Montes misses is that for there to open a convenient abyss into which the progressives can either jump or blunder, there has to be a sufficiently knowledgeable political mass in the nation to demand that they be held to account, through either the justice system or in the voting booth.  The American electorate is now hopelessly divided into those too dumb to be informed, and those too smug who think that they need do nothing but wait for Divine Justice to strike through a parting of the clouds to “implode the progressive movement” of dastardly and seditious anti-Americans.  Meanwhile, with apparent impunity, the Left continues to field platoons of political thugs to confront administration staffs, shut down public and private facilities, and block avenues of transportation – all with both tacit and vociferous approval from our already coopted and compliant Fourth Estate.

The logic, totally absent from the Left’s mindset and to which Mr Montes appeals in his arguments, is shared today by a diminishing minority – the masses neither care, let alone dare, to call the progressive perps to account.   The great unwashed are continually reminded that the only evil in the land to be purged is Donald Trump, else (cue the chorus) ‘All is Well, All is Well’.