Rebane's Ruminations

LA Inferno – Criminal Incompetence on Parade?

George Rebane

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

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

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

Some major screwups -

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 18dec24

George Rebane

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

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

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

Election Reflections

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattershots – 18oct24 (updated 25oct24)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

E pluribus unum – Really? Still? (Reprised)

George Rebane

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

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

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

Twisted Logic from Twisted Minds (updated 1oct24)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

Berkheimer bamboozled by borders

George Rebane

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

Kamala Conquers

George Rebane

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

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

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

Scattershots - 8sep24 (updated 9sep24)

George Rebane

Ongoing pain and legacy of SFB Democrats in Sacramento.

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

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kamala interview that wasn’t

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Kamala’s Terrifying Speech

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ speech at last night’s Democrat convention was terrifying in its unusually professional delivery and its absolutely vapid content.  That lady has surely learned to read a teleprompter.  But the scariest impact of her acceptance speech were the early returns of enthusiasm with which it was accepted by voters outside the convention center.

“The Vice President spoke with authority and admirable brevity (for) 37 minutes. … Kamala Harris introduced herself to the American public on Thursday, and her presentation was much like this week’s Democratic convention: well delivered, confident and optimistic, and mostly devoid of policy substance. Whether she can keep this up, unexplained and unexposed, for the next 12 weeks will determine whether she becomes America’s 47th President.”  This according to the 23aug24 WSJ (here).

But the real problem will be Trump and the Republican response between now and November.  Thomas Sowell’s warning is worth attending.  In his tempest fugit column (here) he admonishes “Republicans better get on the ball.  They haven’t made the case against Harris, (and) the clock is ticking.”

Instead of responding with “political jargon or snappy quips” wrapped in insults, the rebuttals should be a la Reagan, timely and in plain English.  “There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028. But there is such a thing as a country declining to the point of no return.  Four more years of disastrous Biden-Harris policies, at home and abroad, can take us past that fatal point.”

Bottom line, as they anticipated the 2022 ‘red wave’, the Republicans should never again underestimate the share of our fellow Americans who will swallow hook, line, and sinker the Democrats’ socialist swill.  Donald Trump does not once more need to demonstrate how he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

America’s Downward Spiral – A Revealing Snapshot

George Rebane

Date Everything - Rebane Doctrine

In this election year which promises to be a political milestone (watershed?) two significant neo-Marxist messages from Democratic politicians blanketed the country yesterday.  Presidential candidate and VP Kamala Harris told the nation that her economic program (here) going forward would be based on government price controls in order to control inflation.  And Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA17) wrote an excellent article (here) in the 17aug24 WSJ contrasting his and VP candidate Sen JD Vance’s (R-OH) views on industrial policy.  Both progressive politicians cannot see America’s private sector making the country’s economy work without massive participation by the federal government that involves more regulatory controls, more directed subsidies, higher taxes on industry and ‘the rich’, and a heavily unionized workforce blessed with ‘living wages’ and price controls.

Rep Khanna’s piece is well written and very convincing to an audience mired in ignorance about economics, finance, human behavior, and the history of socialist governance here and abroad.  Unfortunately about two out of three Americans are so burdened as they attempt to make sense of the current daily tsunami of political punditry.  Khanna’s essay is both effective and impactive through the way he erroneously characterizes conservative thought, policies, and its ideological tenets.  He constructs excellent strawmen (i.e. lies) which are then readily demolished by his adroit wordsmithing.

One of the prime fallacies both Harris and Khanna promulgate is that government price controls actually work in managing a national economy to the benefit of its citizens.  Each presents that as an axiomatic notion of truth requiring no evidence to support it.  Central to their message to the benighted is that fixing prices does not affect supply and stifle economic growth.  The common thread from both politicians is that the Democrats have been and are the competent stewards of our economy who build factories and make jobs for main street.

No one of the Left understands any of the basic science of how nature manages complexity.  Their ideas about how complex economies work is based on a small trove of simplistic slogans and shibboleths that are demonstrably wrong.  And principles like ‘you cannot control what you cannot measure’ is also beyond their ken.  They still have no idea how primitive are our methods of collecting relevant, accurate, and timely economic data, and then using it to fashion information that would come close to supporting correct policy decisions made by a cohort of centrally controlling technicians.

As a coda to the above riff, I want to remind present day readers, most not all that interested in the view from my perch, that a prime motivation of this blog is to insert a collection of my observations into the great archive in the cloud – ‘the internet is forever’ – which may someday be dredged up by future data archeologists studying the mentality of the citizenry that allowed their great nation at its apex to go to hell in a handcart.

Scattershots – 16aug24 (updated)

George Rebane

The UK is on the threshold of totalitarianism.  To illustrate the devastating slippery slide that comes with socialism, one of Europe’s oldest democracies has now descended into prosecuting its citizens on the basis of thought control.  Not only is free speech in Great Britain’s past, but their hubristic bureaucrats promise to threaten foreigners outside their borders with extradition is they overstep the new restrictions on newly disallowed publicly expressed opinions. (here, here, and here)

‘Islam and the Future of the West’.  Islamophobia is a clearly warranted reaction to the long-standing writings and recently reinforced statements by leaders of trans-national Islam.  “Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.” (more here) According to our neo-Marxists defending your culture against the promised and ongoing Muslim onslaught is ignorant and despicable racism.

“Inflation is down!” trumpet our lamestream media outlets.  NPR even coordinates its ‘news’ items with featured programming subjects in promoting this jaundiced view of the nation’s economy.  In their coordinated support of the Democrats’ campaign talking points, the Left’s lightly-read legions are spared the difference between ‘inflation level’ and ‘inflation rate’ in the constant cacophony they consume daily.  Contrary to what they experience in their wallets, they are led to believe that prices are actually going down in this Biden/Harris economy.

[16aug24 update] Dems move to red states.  The conspiracy to soil the remaining states not embracing socialism is in full swing.  There is now an organization called MoveIndigo -  MoveIndigo encourages Democratic flight to swing districts with Republican congressmen, often in swing states. Its goal is to “reset the balance in our country” and elect a more “representative” government. That’s doublespeak, but the group has also put it plainly: “It only takes a few Democrats moving to crucial toss-up districts . . . to take control of the House”—even to have “a profound impact on the Presidential race. (more here)  None of the migrating progressives are smart enough to ask what has made their selected red state so desirable compared to the shithole state they are abandoning, and moreover, what makes these leftwing double dummies think that the arrival  of more like them will not turn their new home also into the same kind of socialist quagmire they abandoned.

[update]  Georgia non-citizens registered to vote.  The Heritage Oversight project interviewed residents of a large apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia asking its residents 1) were they registered to vote, and 2) were they citizens.  14% answered that they were non-citizens who were already registered to vote. (more here)  With this kind of evidence of what is most likely happening to some extent all over the land, it was a very reasonable and legitimate request to Georgia SecState Brad Raffensberger by Trump to have their vote counts checked to discover more legal votes that may favor him.  There was never any demand to “overturn” the Georgia election.  Restricting voting to America’s legal voters is trumpeted as ‘voter suppression’ by our leftwing sleazebags, and their lightly read constituents lap up this ongoing lie.

Scattershots – 21jul24 (updated 22jul24)

George Rebane

Given the nature and extent of America’s ideological schism, all effective public policies should be made in the anticipation that this schism will endure.  Existentially we are no longer one nation.  Rebane Doctrine, 2024.

The mentality of collectivists – progressives, liberals, wokes, socialists, communists, neo-Marxists, … - ranges within a space anchored by insanity, cynicism, and evil. The evidence continues to pour in.  Today we hear leftwing commentators on lamestream media attempting to foster doubt that there was an actual assassination attempt on Donald Trump.  Their cynical cum evil proposals to their ill-informed audiences are that the blood letting was staged and/or was caused by some mysterious shards of broken glass exploding out of somewhere.

As expected, Bumblebrain is out and an even worse choice in Kamala Harris is now undemocratically foisted by the Dem elites as their new standard bearer. (more here)  But everyone knows Kamala will just be the next empty pipe to power for those who have been acting as the administration’s Star Chamber.  She will be a compliant conduit between the leftwing power brokers and the public policies they intend to implement, much like Joe Biden has been during his term.  From my perch I see the political landscape between now and November as a minefield for Republicans, especially Donald Trump.  There will be an opportunity to make countless politically destructive gaffs when shooting from the lip as the campaign really heats up.

[22jul24 update]  POTUS is NOT the hardest job in the world as any casual perusal of history will confirm.  In fact, POTUS may be the most fault tolerant job ever.  For how else do people with no executive experience and a woefully limited knowledge base perform more or less adequately – i.e. they didn’t start WW3?  Almost anyone who reads English can assume the position and make it through with on-the-job training that is amply available to a president.  Since FDR, consider the tenures of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Obama, and now Biden.

PJ Media is not a credible source of news and information due to its conservative outlook – so again posits one of our leftwing commenters after I cited it above in reference to the ‘undemocratic’ way that the Dems have hoisted Kamala to be their standard bearer.  What I always ask these liberal critics is for the evidence they have to support their assertion.  They can never provide any such backing for their gratuitous conclusion.  This is in opposition to conservatives dunning liberal outlets like NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS as willing shills of the Democratic Party publishing years of unrecanted lies to their audiences.  As evidence just consider their years of ongoing reporting on the Russian election interference, that the border is secure, onset of inflation, Trump instigating insurrection, FBI doctoring FISA evidence, Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation, Hillary’s paying for generating the infamous Trump memo, and on and on.  And now we know that the whole cadre of the country’s Left has been covering up and lying about the cognitive breakdown of Joe Biden which has been obvious to Americans during his entire term as POTUS.

California does not teach kids to read

'All people are naturally political animals.  Politics is a dominant factor in how we run our daily affairs in both the public and private spheres.  The individual who sniffs that they are above or not concerned with politics is simply delusional or worse.   For humans politics is fundamental.'  Charles Krauthammer paraphrased.

George Rebane

In the 22jun24 WSJ we learn that California public schools are even worse than what we have discovered over the years since Great Society policies were launched in the late 1960s.  Former English teacher Daniel Buck, now at the Fordham Institute, writes ‘California Will Teach Kids Anything Except How to Read’, wherein he describes the latest neo-Marxist turn of the screw on children entrusted to the state for their education.  The bottom line of our grade school reading curricula is that “Gender ideology, social justice and Marxist ideas are all welcome in the classroom. Phonics isn’t.”

Most recently – “In 2021 the state ignited a brawl over its mandated ethnic-studies curriculum. Its content and instructional practices have roots in 1960s activism against American hegemony; the goal is to “liberate” students from the oppressive forces of capitalism, patriarchy and settler colonialism.

In 2023 California implemented a new mathematics framework, the first edition of which included “whiteness” and “social justice” as topics for instruction. The goal was to raise the “sociopolitical consciousness” of students—in math class. A revised framework was notably less political but required teachers to use a quantifiably ineffective approach to teaching called “discovery” learning, where students must be left to “discover” their way into long division or algebraic equations.”

As we have long pointed out in these pages, the evil Democratic Party needs legions of double dummies ‘graduating’ from progressive run academe to assure the re-election of socialist politicians whose ideology and the impact of their policies are not understood by their usual cohort of constituents.  This beat, not only goes on, but becomes stronger by the year.  An example staring us in the face daily is the output of polls showing enormous support for our Bumblebrain president.  One wonders who are these tens of millions of very light thinkers who walk around in a brain fog with no ability to give a reasonable basis for their political beliefs.

Inflation? Most people don’t have a clue.

George Rebane

Evidence rolls in daily that Americans in the large do not have a clue about what is inflation and how it affects their financial wellbeing and quality of life.  This wholesale ignorance is constantly being reinforced by our news media of all political colorations and the Democratic Party.  The egregious journalists mostly congregate on the Right since they have no hidden agenda to hide the meaning and impact of inflation today spawned by Bidenomics.

The confusion arises from the use of the single misleading ‘inflation’ to variously describe three distinct and separate attributes of inflation – inflation level, inflation rate of change, and the change in inflation’s rate of change.  (Mathematically these are known as simply the first three derivatives of inflation’s price curve – respectively the zeroth, first, and second derivatives.)  The figure below illustrates.

Today we hear all kinds of reports citing inflation numbers that totally confound the average American – ‘inflation was xx% under the previous administration’, ‘inflation is now higher/lower, ‘inflation is going up/down’, ‘inflation is slowing’, and so on.  What almost no one understands is that claims that 'inflation is going down' is a bald-faced lie designed to fool the light thinkers.  Whatever the current level of inflation - i.e. Biden's 9% increase in market prices (here) - it is already baked in.  You will continue paying them and they will NOT go down as long as demand increases and supply does not.  So Team Biden's propaganda that they are 'reducing inflation' (#1) is utter BS; even if they reduce the inflation rate (#2), the current level of inflation will remain and prices will still go up.

Nobelist Milton Freedman and his forebears long ago advised us that inflated price increases are always a monetary phenomenon in which the government ‘prints’ and releases more fiat money into an economy to chase the same amount of goods and services, hence prices increase and we call the whole thing inflation.  The overall impact of inflation has always been that prices only ratchet up (increase monotonically) over time, and consequently the dollar in your pocket inevitably buys less stuff tomorrow than it does today.  But that is only the beginning of the story of government misuses of inflation to abuse and steal from its citizens.  Historically, great empires have inevitably laid themselves open to collapse and/or invasion by diluting/cheapening its money to the point that people no longer want to use it as the medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of wealth.  Hence, the economy’s wealth generation grinds to a halt and tax revenues can no longer pay for implementing public policies including maintaining its sovereignty with secure borders and an able military.

The real story of inflation is much more opaque.  Inflation is really a multi-level tax levied by governments that can no longer openly increase tax rates, so instead the steal money from their own citizens.  Notice that over the years the general level of people’s wealth has not increased much, if at all.  To be sure, enormous wealth has been generated in our economy by the commercial/industrial sector due to the invisible hand of market capitalism and ever-present competition.  And along with that, the quality of life for the broad population has increased by the introduction and affordability of all kinds of new products and services generated by corporations and entrepreneurs to whom justifiably the overwhelming majority of the new wealth accrues, since they are the ones who successfully invest their own monies and undertake the risks such ventures demand.  In spite of that, a large share of the population still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and has precious little saved for discretionary spending, investments, or a rainy day.  Increasing their debt and succumbing to more government welfare is their only alternative.

Looking under the hood of our economy and taking note of how our government inserts itself to gather tribute from the unsuspecting masses, it becomes clear that it is Big Brother run by sleazebag politicians and their deep state bureaucracies that effectively and continuously scrape off any ‘excess wealth’ that may accrue to the unsuspecting on main street who are lulled by a constant stream of bread and circuses from our political betters and their elites.  The whole program of mollification begins with a public education system that guarantees our young will be carefully taught to believe in the largess of government and the evils of private enterprise.

Two years ago I presented RR readers with the chapter and verse of how all this perfidy is executed in the public square.  You can and should review ‘Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government’, it will put some scary meat on the bone of the above arguments.  Unfortunately the bottom line here remains immutably unchanged.  We witness no awareness of all this by our friends and neighbors – you have yet to see protesting throngs with pitchforks and torches demonstrating in front of government buildings across the land.  (Also check out this post's comment stream.)  No one is aware of what is being quietly vacuumed from their wallets by the various levels of government ranging from local to federal.  All is well, just reduce your carbon footprint and embrace DEI wherever it may next be introduced – behave yourself.

America's Dystopia has Dawned

Dystopia has dawned – Trump convicted on all counts.  The greatest American travesty has happened in my lifetime.  I have seen my country slide from its heights of glory to the now confirmed beginning of its dark age from which recovery to its former self is unlikely.  With evil and corruption now firmly ensconced in our government, it is doubtful that my children will ever again witness America in its full promise as the shining city on a hill. (more here and here)

Scattershots – 26may24 (updated 29may24)

George Rebane

Gracian (#261) speaks to Bumblebrain – Do not persist in folly.  Some make a duty of failure and having started down the wrong road, think it a badge of character to continue; they accuse themselves of error before the bar of their inner selves but before the bar of the outer world they excuse themselves, to the end that if at the start of their unwisdom they were marked imprudent, in its prosecution they are marked fools; neither rash promise, nor wrong resolve lays obligation upon any man; and yet some will on this account continue in their sulkiness, and carry on in their contrariness, wishing to be known as constant in their idiocies.

Reasonable fear of Islam.  If Islamophobia is the “unreasonable fear” of Islam, then what is the term for a reasonable fear of Islam?  I am among those who identify with such a reasonable fear the evidence for which abounds as proclaimed by both Muslim intellectuals and the Muslim street.  As an example, consider the opening comment to the 7may24 Sandbox (here).

[29may24 update]  The New York judicial system is rotten to the core as demonstrated by the Trump hush money trial judge’s instructions to the jury.  He never told them what was the specific crime that Trump was supposed to have committed when his financial records showed the $130K payment to Cohen as a ‘legal expense’ (which it was).  Instead he invited each juror to come to their own conclusion on whatever crime suited each the best, and the court would still accept that as a ‘unanimous’ judgement.  So now the precedent is set that New York (and other?) juries can be exhorted to convict the defendant on whatever crime each juror would gin up – no agreement or cohesive thought needed.  That’s one way to  avoid hung juries and nail whoever the trial judge does not like.

‘The End is Near’

George Rebane

Were we to discuss really serious topics beyond Trump’s trials and Biden’s lies, I can think of one no more important than that brought up by Victor Davis Hanson in a recent interview (here).  We have extensively covered the various national and geo-strategic factors that portend to end America’s run as the world's leading democratic republic, economy, and white hat world hegemon.  However, most of our neighbors neither care nor are aware of what’s happening.  As witnessed on these pages, if anything, they are more interested in Stormy Daniel’s testimony and various topical policy atrocities launched by our doddering idiot for president and Democrats at all levels of government (especially California).

This is not to say that there is no traction to the warnings issued by our more thoughtful political leaders and commentators (e.g. here) – so far, a sparsely populated bunch.  Today more people are starting to take notice that there is now in the offing a likely “extinction” of the United States we have known.  Letter writers (here) to serious publications like the WSJ acknowledge the current deterioration of America’s defense posture and industrial might, and are showing concern.

Material arguments summarize as follows –

• The US industrial base to make things from ships to medicines to machine tools is essentially gone.
• Our military is tragically under-manned and woke-corrupted with traditional cadres of enlistees no longer willing to join, let alone make military their career. Our country can no longer find enough people willing to fight for it.
• Our unimaginable national debt and reckless social spending programs are destroying the dollar and unseating it as the preferred currency for international commerce.
• Our open borders and illegal alien import policies are destroying the remnants of America’s public cultural cohesion with new levels of unassimilating multi-culturality never before witnessed in a sustainable and geographically compact jurisdiction.
• Our traditional allies in Europe and Asia are aware of America’s weak (non-existent?) leadership and feckless foreign policy, and are seeking alternative geo-strategic relationships that serve their national interests.
• Our electorate is split and largely ignorant of the issues facing the nation; and are in no shape to unify and support reasonably coherent policies to attempt a return to a usefully educated, economically healthy, fiscally sound, geographically secure, and culturally unified sovereign nation-state. Over half of us don’t care and want an autocratic global government run by elites, and the remainder want to return to a liberal constitutional government based on free-market capitalism.
• By passing laws, regulations, and prohibitive tax rates in a transforming neo-Marxist society, we no longer educate a sufficient cadre of high-end (STEM) workers with needed skillsets or provide them the means to produce wealth in an open-market capitalist economy.

So instead –

   

Dumbing Down Denied (updated 28apr24)

George Rebane

For years RR and its more enlightened readers have lamented and documented the degradation of our public schools and also of our higher educational institutions.  Over the last half century this decline has been relentless and extensively reported as anti-American socialists of all shades adopted policies and curricula designed to produce a workforce of diminishing value to our employers and benefit to our society.

Today with the woke movement the state of our education has reached new depths of idiocy.  Based on utter nonsense, school curricula are being removed, downgraded, restructured in order to eliminate what the Left says is our country’s ‘structural racism’ promoted by cadres of ‘white supremacists’.  These are identified primarily as whites of European descent who are now irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, …, the list goes on.

Apropos to this I refer to the latest op-ed, ‘Any learning loss recovery at local high schools?’, by my sweetie-pie Jo Ann.  Her piece in the 22mar24 Union (here) cited chapter and verse of the dismal numbers that document the downfall of our local public education system.  Since its publication the column has drawn a continuous stream of ire from our local leftwing loonies who also demonstrate their lack of prowess with the written word.  The initial criticisms were of Jo Ann’s purported attack on the incompetence of the teachers.  She did not single out teachers, but identifying the public school districts as part of the culprits hit close to home, and brought out the defense of the obviously weak component of our public education.  In that me thinks their ample protests are revealingly welcome.

To date these rebuttals have come in the form of the newspaper’s Other Voices columns, Hits & Misses entries, and Letters to the Editor.  This morning I was reminded of the Left’s desperate denial of this travesty by yet another letter to the editor, this time by one of our more prominent local Marxist worthies (here).  This time the criticism was not of Jo Ann’s quoted performance statistics, or of their perceived unfair umbrage against teachers, but the accusation that only rabid rightwing MAGA Republicans would dare point out such a devastating and divisive national deficiency.  The politically correct response to this ongoing educational tragedy and its long term impact on our workforce should instead be a prudent silence.

[28apr24 update]  I note the almost complete lack of interest in the dumbing down of the nation’s electorate.  It seems as if no one cares or is aware that it all starts with an ignorant horde of voters as our Founders feared and Bryan Caplan -The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (here) - pointed out several years ago and RR has argued forever.  It is such voters who believe the politicians’ bullshit about the economy, how government can spend money better that they can, and how the rich are taking it away from the poor.  And perusing the news confirms that people really like to focus on the knock-on and silly ephemeral impacts of national dumbth.  I suppose the readers of this little blog just reflect the country’s real interests.

Scattershots – 24mar24

George Rebane

Some laments du jour that keep bubbling to the surface.

Progressives believe that there is no truth in or benefits from policy propositions that have not been tried and demonstrated to work.  That is the prime reason why there are few liberal entrepreneurs and why socialists are so risk averse.  Their best repartee for rejecting novel (to them) proposals is, ‘Show me where your proposal for undertaking XX is working.’  They also reject the failures of their own repeated policy mistakes by claiming errors in execution which will be corrected on the next attempt.

The leftists’ innate inability to reason is nowhere better highlighted than in promoting New York’s civil ‘fraud’ case against Trump, the outrageous cash judgement against him, and the intent to financially ruin/cripple him (and his presidential campaign) by granting him a ridiculously short time to raise almost half billion dollars in cash.  It is an act of punitive jurisprudence with no basis in law or fact, and no defrauded victims.  Yet it is justice embraced by all the progressive elites, and their thoughtless and lightly read Democrat constituencies.

No national conservative media really tells it like it is.  Led by Fox News, they are all reticent (afraid?) to point out the real reason why Democrats, led by Frankfurt school socialists, propose and implement anti-American legislation and regulations.  No one points out that their real objective is to eliminate American hegemony (the world’s white hat sheriff) and its opposition toward achieving an autocratic global government.  The apparent opposition of the conservatives only penetrates into arcane intellectual arguments of how unreasonable, unworkable, and/or silly are the machinations of leftwing governance.  In short, they characterize progressives as still good Americans who just have bad luck when they try to think.

‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’

George Rebane

F.A. Hayek was one of the world’s foremost economists and a giant among the original thinkers of the 20^th century.  In this post I want to interest readers in his ideas and works with a short discussion of one of his small and often overlooked monograms – The Intellectuals and Socialism - published in 1949, the year I arrived on these shores.

From the monogram currently published by the Mercatus Center of George Washington University we read,  “Friedrich A. Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1974, is best known for the book the Road to Serfdom (1944), which has been widely translated.  Receiving doctorates in law and economics from the University of Vienna, Hayek served on the faculties of the universities of London, Chicago, Freiburg, and Salzburg.  (His major books may be seen here.)  Hayek has attracted a growing body of scholarship, and in February 2000 a writer in The New Yorker observed that ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.’”

One of the main lessons from the monogram is the reader’s ability to distinguish between the purveyors of ideas variously, and often carelessly, labeled as ‘theorists’, ‘experts’, and ‘intellectuals’.  The first two are people who originate ideas and those who are actually able to implement ideas by applying their skills.  However, it is the countless intellectuals with whom we should concern ourselves.  They are overwhelmingly of the Left and populate our media, academe, institutions, and bureaucracies.  Hayek defines them as follows.

“The term "intellectuals," however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the secondhand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not understood. Even persons who use the word "intellectual" mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it from many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.” (emphasis mine)

The intellectuals are the distributors and champions of ideas formulated by the elites.  They are drawn to the Left and socialism primarily because of its simplistic utopian vision of the future.  This is opposed to the Right’s ideology having always emphasized individual liberty and its manifold benefits.  In short, the Left’s intellectuals distribute simple easy-to-understand, high-level ideas to the masses, while those of the Right attempt to communicate their more complex ideas of, say, liberty, individual effort, and market capitalism on a person-to-person basis.

We are a Republic, NOT a Democracy

George Rebane

The country’s socialists and globalists have found the corruption of language to best serve their purpose of blinding Americans to the critical aspects of our society and culture.  First and foremost is today’s established custom of considering precise semantics to be somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant, and most certainly politically incorrect.

As an example, many of us have come to accept open borders on the basis of promoting ‘immigration’, firm in the knowledge that today’s invasion of illegal aliens from countless countries violating our law is somehow similar to the process that populated our empty lands in days gone by, for are we not a country of immigrants?  No one from the highest levels of government to main street wants to acknowledge that immigration is a two-party process between willing participants – a pact between a discriminating government and the alien seeking residency in a new land.  Using the correct legal term ‘illegal alien’ to describe those wading across the river (formerly also known as wetbacks) has now become proscribed and not for proper use in a public forum.  Instead the naked term ‘immigrant’ is now the norm in lamestream media, and the right-of-center outlets barely use the appended ‘illegal immigrant’, all preferring more obfuscating labels like ‘migrant’ to describe the foreign lawbreakers crossing our borders.

Other similar examples can be offered to illustrate the desecration and demeaning of our language over the last several decades.

Perhaps the most egregious and dangerous of such examples is the new idea promoted by collectivists, especially of the woke variety, that our nation is a democracy that promotes (civil) equality.  Our Founders were keenly aware that democracies, promoted under the banner of indiscriminating equality quickly devolve into autocracies cum tyrannies.  This is the reason that they conceived and formed our nation to hold liberty sacrosanct within a constitutional republic, governed under a document that severely limits the powers of government.  As the thinking reader knows, universal equality and liberty are incompatible.  Our founding principles recognize and promote equality in the sense that we Americans are equal only under our laws and in the eyes of God.  Elsewhere, most certainly in our Constitution, equality is not mentioned and liberty is supreme.

Our socialists know this truth, and have twisted our public education, abetted by the media, to preach their unquestionable glories of equality cum equity in all things.  The damage to our republic that this perversion has caused was already evident almost sixty years ago.  Dan Smoot was one of the nation’s leading conservative commentators back then, and in 1966 he recorded this very clear and succinct 10-minute commentary about the real difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic (here), and the danger of our citizenry remaining confused about the two.  Today that confusion has been replaced by total ignorance.

Scattershots – 6mar24 (updated 8mar24)

George Rebane

The specter of California’s AB5, and raising the state’s minimum wage to $20/hr, are again and predictably wreaking more havoc in our small business community and providing another shot in the shorts for consumers.  A shot close to home arrived yesterday in a letter from our beloved Union.  On 2 April next, the newspaper will cease morning delivery of its pulp edition and start using snail mail instead.  Why?  Because AB5 and $20/hr will “restructure our ability to use carriers to deliver the newspaper.”  Note the compliant and uncomplaining manner in which this latest action of California’s butt-stupid government is described by a compliant and well-behaved leftwing business.

‘The rate of inflation is decreasing’ is today’s celebratory trumpet from the Biden campaign.  The message is perfectly designed to keep the nation’s marginally informed in perpetual ignorance about the impact of Bidenomics.  What these folks totally miss is that Biden’s inflation has already increased the prices that we pay every day, and these are not going down.  Slowly decreasing inflation will not fix another full-fledged feature of Bumblebrain’s economy – that wages have not kept pace with the baked-in inflation, and the buying power of all Americans has gone down under this administration, that in total contrast to what they did under Trump’s stewardship.  This adds to the Democrats’ lies that Trump’s reduction of regulations and taxes only benefitted ‘the rich’.  Exactly opposite of what government data shows happened – businesses prospered, middle and low income taxes were reduced, upper income people continued to pay more, and government revenues increased.  (Can everyone spell ‘Laffer’?)  And then came Biden.

[7mar24 update] 'Why Black Voters are Ditching Democrats'  Had lunch with a liberal friend who unsurprisingly was not aware that not only blacks but also other non-white voters - Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc - are realizing that life has been bad under Democrats, and has gotten worse under Joe Biden.  Basketball great Charles Barkley explains the matter to those who will listen (here).

[8mar24 update]  Re last night’s SOTU – the corrupt sumbich just can’t stop lying every time he opens his mouth.  Check out ‘Fact-Checking Biden’s State of the Union Address’.