Rebane's Ruminations

Some flavors of mindlessness (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

In the mindless department, we start with a letter from a Skip Pollard in the 22may20 Union that takes to task the 6may20 column by Terry McLaughlin where she substantiates the thesis -  

“No one could have predicted with certainty a viral pandemic arising in 2020, and no human being could have been entirely prepared in the moment to make the perfect decisions that would best preserve life and livelihoods.” – and substantiates it with a timeline of C19 pronouncements and assessments made by various agents worldwide.  That assessment didn’t sit well with the TDS crowd who still proclaim to their followers that Trump’s "mismanagement of the pandemic" has caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.  But here is the example of the “omission” cited by Pollard to make his case that McLaughlin “cherry picked” the C19 timeline –

April 23: President Trump says, “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”

Now what in hell does that perfectly good observation and question asked by the president have to do with the timeline of policy pronouncements on the pandemic’s progress assembled by McLaughlin; logically it can’t even be shoehorned into a timeline of similar events.  But to TDS sufferers like Skip Pollard, this liberal logic makes all the sense in the world.  The mentality of such people is literally unfathomable to the unafflicted, and explains a forte why communication with them is futile.  Perhaps one of our liberal readers can help Mr Pollard by citing a substantive omission from Ms McLaughlin’s column.

Long before I warned you of Dr Fauci, President Eisenhower did.  In the same farewell speech in which he called for vigilance of the doings of the country’s “military-industrial complex”, Ike also warned us that scientists dependent on government contracts and grants might cripple scientific breakthroughs. Specifically, he said “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”  And all this because “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”  Yes, if you follow the money, then scientific consensus becomes the order of the day, and those innumerates innocent of science will not be the wiser, as they continue their habituated genuflections before anything proclaimed as ‘scientific’.  In Ike’s words, “partly because of the huge costs involved (in scientific research), a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”  So, today Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the “scientific-technological elites” that Eisenhower warned against. (more here)

Others have echoed and expanded on this new secular religion of science.  Author Tom Bethell in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Science tells us -

Government funding has… promoted the idea that a theory can be regarded as true if it enjoys enough support. … Consensus discourages dissent, however. It is the enemy of science, just as it is the triumph of politics. A theory accepted by 99 percent of scientists may be wrong. Committees at the National Institutes of Health that decide which projects shall be funded are inevitably run by scientists who are at peace with the dominant theory."

Here we note that 99% of scientists accepted ALL theories that were subsequently toppled by new discoveries during the age when science was still “an open platform”.  A fundamental truth that you can bank today is that “when any single source of funding dominates, science will almost certainly become the handmaiden of politics.”  And we have seen that happen countless times during the last half century, most recently in the politically stifled science that promotes preventable man-made global warming.

As one of today’s ‘scientific-technological elites’, Dr Fauci’s words are to be taken as unquestioned gospel about the recent coronavirus disease and the nation’s response to the pandemic.  We do so at our peril. 

[update]  ‘America is Reopening for Summer and Tensions are High’ in the 22may20 WSJ reports that “Tensions are intensifying between those celebrating the end of shutdowns and those fearful of the virus’s re-emergence, between those driven by economic desperation and those eager to resume a semblance of normalcy. As restrictions eventually fall in large cities including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, those dichotomies are likely to become more acute.”  What I find puzzling is the report of tensions between those wanting the lockdowns to remain and those who don’t.  What’s the big deal?  Anyone is free to quarantine themselves to their hearts content.  And if the rest of your neighbors risk themselves and contribute to economic recovery, then those who remain hunkered down will receive even more and better services from those who don’t.  Everyone gets to exercise their own risk tolerance, and the only ones with noses out of joint are them that demands a ‘one size fits all’ America.

[25may20 update] As we pointed out almost two months ago, the C19 quarantines would soon cause more corollary mortality and morbidity than any reasonable estimate of health benefits (including number of deaths) from the pandemic.  Now we are beginning to see reports coming in telling of people dying at home from chronic and topical (including psychological) maladies that would have been addressed through normal visits and access to the medical industry.  One recent article reports ‘California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns’ (H/T to reader).  Add these to the butt-stupid policies like Gov Cuomo’s sentence of almost certain death to those New Yorkers he condemned to be transferred to 24/7 care facilities, and then round out what our dreadfully incompetent governments have inflicted on us in their power panic to appear to ‘do something’ that looks to most like we’re fighting the virus.  In the final analysis the fault of it all belongs on us mal-educated citizens who shrink from every politically identified risk, and demand that government immediately leaps in to keep us safe, no matter the cost in dollars or liberties.  With the passing years, fewer of us remain who still understand that growth of government power is a one-way ratchet toward revolution.  For the rest, the state is ever the benevolent Big Brother.

Scattershots – 28apr20 (updated 2may20)

George Rebane

501c3 bets to co-locate money and mouth.  RR’s commenters have over the years made assertions and predictions with such deeply held convictions as to draw more than a smile from the rest of us.  So here’s a proposal (again) – offer odds and a material dollar bet that your measurable assertion will come true.  The bet may be taken up to a specified dollar amount by challengers.  The loser must remit his lost amount to the bona fide 501c3 charity chosen by the winner.  Say, one of our lefties and true believers in Bumblebrain’s November victory offers 2:1 odds for a maximum of $500.  Then if I take a $100 of that and lose, I have to mail a check to the 501c3 that he specified.  If I win, then the leftie has to mail a $200 check to my 501c3.  The bettors will confirm and adjudicate their own bets – honorable behavior is paramount. The comment streams will become the indelible archive of such bets, and I will keep an updated post of all such pending bets similar to how I ran the Dropout Derby.  The aim here is to sanitize RR comment streams from the reams of unmitigated bullshit posted by commenters, some who have the courage to use their real names, and the sackheads who don’t have any perceivable courage of their convictions as they continue spouting anonymous crap in these pages.  I have labeled these as ‘501c3 bets’, and a commenter can challenge the veracity of another commenter with such a bet, that if refused will communicate to all the level of conviction.  My own prediction is that most commenters will be happy to continue just passing hot air anonymously.

Socialist scumbags want others to pay off their perfidious vote buying debts.  For the last few decades our progressives have bought the votes of public sector employees – police, first responders, teachers, pencil pushing bureaucrats, … - through thug-like union negotiations for lavish pension plans that are now unfunded to the tune of trillions.  Today the evil Dems in Congress are attempting to attach to C19 relief legislation pension bailouts for the various Dem run states.  In short, they want future, say, Floridians to pay for the retirements of, say, Illinois state employees.  As Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) points out (here), federal bailouts like these are a very bad policy to begin with, but more so because they reward the continuance of blatantly corrupt and cunning incompetence by liberal politicians in such state governments.

‘You can never, ever trust the Communists.’ is a wise exhortation memorialized by William McGurn writing (here) about an elderly Hong Kong lawyer and democracy activist recently arrested by the Chinese communists for his role in illuminating the illegal conversion to totalitarianism of the former British colony.  The takeaway here is that today communism sports a broad halo of similar ideologies embraced by the greater Left who range from kitchen table communists, through practicing progressive academics, to legions of liberal politicians, media personalities, and entertainers, all abetted by a solid phalanx of leftwing government employees embedded in countless agencies and bureaus across the country.  Their common denominator is the Alinsky Almanac of public propaganda which was first institutionalized by V. Lenin who held that “Communists have only contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ idea of objective truth, replacing it with a morality that holds ‘truth’ to be whatever is expedient for the party at that moment. “  We see that replicated daily in our lamestream media.

Nevada County government is turning out to be a toady when it comes to asserting the obvious fact that rural counties are not the same as urban counties, and should therefore not be forced to adhere to the one-size-fits-all lockdown mandates from Sacramento.  Absent our county, six northern California counties have joined in a publicized protest (here) of the governor’s wrong-headed program to fight the C19 virus at great cost to the state’s private and public sectors.  Gavin Newsom, along with other Dem governors, sees this as another opportunity to ratchet up the state’s power over citizens, power once institutionalized that will be hard for citizens to walk back once the crisis is over.  ‘How Louisiana Reopened After Hurricane Katrina’ is only a recent example of how the government takes and keeps.  Closer to home, Nevada County has now issued a formal legal lockdown order that is to stay in force until 15 May 2020 (here).  The document is beyond byzantine government-speak with detailed exceptions that continue for pages and can be gratuitously interpreted 20 ways from Sunday.  Reading such prolific verbiage always makes me wonder again what happens to otherwise normal and reasonable people after they enter politics.  To various degrees they all become tainted personages who confirm their obvious blemishes by posturing themselves as being exalted by their positions of power.

[29apr20 update]  Anti-C19 drugs are on a rollercoaster ride of acceptability.  First we heard good things about re-purposing hydroxychloroquine (HCL) plus additives as being both a C19 prophylactic and a curative, then the lamestream screamed at Trump for suggesting its use and studies were dug up to show that it didn’t work.  The same happened to Gilead’s Remdesivir, first it was good (here), then it was totally ineffective according to the lamestream.  Now it looks like both HCL and Remdesivir are back up on the C19 Pharma Hit Parade.  As of 1030 29apr20 the Dow is up 609 (2.55%) on news of a most comprehensive study showing that Remdesivir works (here and here), and also other studies coming in showing that HCL also works (here).  A kicker for this news is that several pharma companies developing C19 vaccines report progress is being made much faster than the experts anticipated with at least two candidates going into early human trials.

[30apr20 update]  C19 mortality rates.  A correspondent sent me a link to a website (here) that specializes in collecting data and making information out of it.  Of current interest are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  This posting covers the age and health factors on C19 deaths.  Analysis of the data delivers the punchline – “both aging and being unhealthy, separately, contribute to a greater risk of dying from Covid.  The risk from being unhealthy, though, is far greater.”  This important finding is backed up by numerous clearly laid out charts and tables from which I lifted the one below.  (Actually, TypePad is partially up right now, but won't accept graphics for posting.  1may20 - and now it will.)

[1may20 update]  More C19 data to assuage the TDS sufferers who can read.

[2may20 update]  The mentality of the Nevada County BoS.  The Supes shut down our local ‘transfer station’ (aka county dump) for a week before wholesale public uproar made them rescind their dictum.  What haunts me about their action, as the most recent and locally accessible decision by government politicians, is how could they possibly have come to such a conclusion to limit the hours and number of vehicles that the Waste Management dump could, should, and would service in a day.  When some county staffer laid such a proposal before the Board, why was it not unanimously rejected in the first, say, 3 to 5 milliseconds?  Cleaning up junk from your household and land during an imposed lengthy quarantine is an extremely useful, rewarding, timely, and safe activity.  Packing your vehicle or trailer with junk and taking it to the dump exposes no one to unnecessary risk of infection, including to Waste Management’s workers who need their hours in this time of economic distress.  All that became obvious to our Supes only after they were overwhelmed with the public pushback that they had acted with blatant and palpable idiocy to compliantly place yet another such unreasonable restriction upon the citizenry.  The item of enduring interest is what went through their collective minds when they issued that edict.  The record shows that not a single supervisor stood to publicly oppose it.  Understanding this same process, as it is historically practiced by politically powerful assemblies at all levels across the land, is important for us as a free people, so that we can be vigilant and work hard to reduce and/or eliminate its effects on our lives.

 

Local Launch of Left’s New Covid-19 Narrative

George Rebane

The country’s Democrats are in a wholesale, smelly-sweat panic about the upcoming election – in reality a progressives’ pandemic.  They have wound up with an unelectable presidential candidate-in-waiting.  No one knows this better about Bumblebrain Biden than the DNC and its congressional leadership.  What to do?

The obvious answer - now that all the other years-long forays against Trump have not only come up empty, but also left the party’s faithful with maximum egg-on-face as November approaches  - is to loosen their lamestream lackeys along with its local acolytes with a new narrative about the causus belli du jour, and how President Trump mishandled the country’s C19 response, thereby causing thousands of additional deaths.

A long-languished letter

[Way back when, before C19 conquered the media, I was taken to task in its lead 13mar20 column by a Union reader about my views on the electoral college and democracy.  I submitted the following rebuttal which became a coronavirus casualty.  Its posting here is for the record, and an acknowledgement that not all my submissions get published.  So there.  gjr]

An Electoral College dialogue continued

Mr Dick Sciaroni wrote ‘Electoral College reform – it’s up to us’ in the 13mar20 Union, a measured and civil response to my 7mar20 Union column, ‘Democracy Destroys the Electoral College’, wherein he concludes with, “Is it time to reform the Electoral College system? Perhaps. It’s up to all of us, the citizens, to decide. That means dialogue, not diatribe.”  However, a more careful read of what I wrote would reveal that nowhere did I oppose a national dialogue on the continued utility of the Electoral College in the governance of our republic.  What I do oppose is the current approach to its sub-rosa and de facto elimination through the little known National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Mr Sciaroni writes, “The Founders’ decision how they should choose a president should have no overriding claim on 21st century America such that we cannot change it. After all, we are talking about our government. It’s ours. Why can’t we change it?”  In this he implies that I oppose any such change.  I don’t, but I do oppose what’s going on now.  The NPVIC is intended to surreptitiously sidestep a national dialogue, and most certainly subvert a constitutional process, through the leftwing mainstream media’s daily diatribes that call for a precipitous elimination of the Electoral College.  I highly doubt that more than one in a hundred Americans are aware of the NPVIC’s existence, its role in eliminating our EC, and current progress toward that goal – all happening without the national dialogue which Mr Sciaroni and I would welcome. 

In his piece, nowhere did Mr Sciaroni acknowledge that my arguments were directed against imposing governance by direct democracy on large diverse populations, in accord with our Framers.  Instead he did repeat the Left’s talking points that the configuration of the EC by our Framers was a devious stratagem to keep wealthy white men in power, and therefore is now a dated construct of our government that needs major overhaul, and perhaps removal altogether.

And his main point about the pervasive role of money in our elections ignores recent evidence that undermines his arguments.  In 2016 Hillary outspent Trump by far, in the current election Steyer, Bloomberg, and Bernie have all outspent our former VP Biden, and most certainly President Trump.  Yes, modern campaigns demand more funding to get out the message, but the evidence at hand is that it still continues to be the message, not the money that shapes the voters’ preferences.  In sum, such evidence should weigh heavily to counter Mr Sciaroni’s “final analysis” wherein he maintains that “the downside of the Electoral College is that it works hand-in-glove with moneyed interests to give a small number of people – not surprisingly, white males – access to the presidency of a country in which they are the decided minority.”  By all means, let us all talk about this.

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who blogs on Rebane’s Ruminations.

Victor Davis Hanson nails it

George Rebane

Noted historian, American classicist, and syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson writes a comprehensive column ‘Corona Meltdowns’ that details the demonic evils of the Democratic Party in this time of crisis for our nation.  He echoes and substantiates what we here have posted and discussed over the years, more frequently since the election of President Trump, and most recently under ‘The Demonic Party reveals itself’.  This is must reading for all who frequent here, especially those fervent acolytes of the Left.

Fighting C19 (updated 10may20)

George Rebane

Here are some points about our country’s approach to fighting the C19 coronavirus.

The main reason the media reporters and the administration are talking past each other about what C19 response policies to follow or even how to evaluate what’s being done is that no one is astute enough to put their finger on the widely different and competing utilities or figures of merit that the various parties are trying to maximize.  Here are three distinct ones.

U_Trump tries to find a balance between the economy (GDP$) and the mortality of C19 (total number dead) by appropriately trading off weighting constants C1 and C2.  I’m not sure that any of them on Team Trump are either bright enough or courageous enough to tell the President that this is what his gut is telling him to do, and that this can be put on a more rigorous basis for making defensible policy decisions.

When we listen to medicos like Drs Fauci or Brix, they claim to be apolitical, and the policies they recommend attempt to maximize U_Medico by minimizing the number of dead.  None of those guys concern themselves with the economy or the longer term health impacts of an economically destitute country.  They focus on the here and now of saving lives, period.

And then there’s the Democrats whose utility is all about getting back into power and putting the country on a solid road to socialism cum communism.  They could give a big rat’s ass about a recovering economy or minimizing the number of C19 deaths.  Their utility U_Dems is the converse of U_Trump.  The want the economy to take the biggest conceivable hit, and have as many people die as possible, all of which, no matter the numbers, they will blame on Team Trump.  Their Big Lie will be that things would have been much better under a Dem (Hillary?) administration, and we’ll be happy dancing again as soon as we throw Trump out of office.

If those reporters would understand any of this, they could perhaps quit asking profoundly stupid questions and write some cogent reports that sort out the apparent differences between the gaggle of factions in the public forum.

Then there’s the matter of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZ) the policies toward which I have covered elsewhere in these pages.  Trump and I promote the use of these proven malaria fighting and anti-biotic drugs for ameliorating C19 both as a prophylactic and as a therapeutic.  The tests (albeit of limited sample sizes) that have been done with these drugs in treating C19 have already delivered impressive results.  And a big study is underway to measure its effectiveness.  But I (and Trump?) take great hope in promoting their immediate use in that they are already being successfully used in the US in this pandemic, and healthcare workers, led by the physicians, are prescribing them for their own use and hoarding the supplies of HCQ and AZ whenever they can get their hands on it.  They know these drugs are safe, and they have nothing to lose in taking them.

So here’s the Rebane Doctrine for the prescription and use of HCQ and AZ.  The Dems are on record vilifying the President for being a proponent of something they consider to be unproven, ineffective, and possibly dangerous.  Whether they believe their own crap is irrelevant, refer again to the utility function discussion above.  Almost everyone on the Right wants HCQ and AZ as quickly as they can get their hands on it.  And if we believe the numbnuts on the Left, they want nothing to do with it, and would be glad to have the folks on the Right scarf it up.  So as these two drugs become available, let's have the Repubs and the Dems agree on a distribution policy based on party registration.  Those who are registered Repubs are first in line to get the drugs, and those registered as Dems either don’t get them, or are last in line if they have a belated epiphany.  Both sides win; what’s not to like?

[6apr20 update]  And here is some more dismal news on how government bureaucracies are impeding the fight against C19 in their approach to approving and/or promoting the use of HCQ and AZ by hospitals and our personal physicians. These are the same guys to whose care and feeding our Left wants to turn over our nation’s healthcare industry.  And here more evidence from the field comes in.  (H/T to readers)

[10may20 update] HCQ as a SARS prophylaxis was discovered over 15 years ago, and (to my knowledge) first published in the Virology Journal here.  HCQ’s successful clinical uses against C19 have been reported from both Wuhan and Singapore, and most recently its robust use in Costa Rica (here).  Further reports about its successful uses, especially preventing progress of the disease in early onset patients, is becoming available in dribs and drabs from all over, including the US.  Why ‘dribs and drabs’?  That is because here in America the Left has politicized the attempts at its widespread clinical uses for the obvious reasons involving President Trump. (more here)  We recall, that ALL things new in science and technology have had to surmount intense opposition from the then entrenched establishments, both technical and political.  In this litigious land it takes rare courage for physicians to wander too far from the CYA comforts of ‘standard of care’, and the Left and their lamestream lackeys have driven a stake in the ground about HCQ being the one therapeutic that is too far afield – ‘Physician, be forewarned!’

But rejoice, the pushback on the Left has now progressed from ‘HCQ is ineffective, harmful, and dangerous’ to a ‘Large Study Suggests Malaria Drug Hydroxychloroquine Doesn’t Help COVID-19’ in the just published 7may20 New England Journal of Medicine.  Therein the strongest statements against HCQ that the authors can make is that (all italicized emphases mine)

• “Hydroxychloroquine has been widely administered to patients with COVID-19 without robust evidence supporting its use.”
• “The study found no significant link between use of hydroxychloroquine and intubation or death.”
• “Our strong feeling is the drug should not be routinely administered to patients with COVID-19.”

What they all avoid denying is the effectiveness of HCQ in the early onset phases of C19.

As more evidence of the ‘dribs and drabs’ that substantiate HCQ uses, consider two recent French studies – here and here.

The bottom line is that no medicine is 100% effective for all cases of any single disease in all of its phases.  But HCQ is now known to be sufficiently effective in the treatment of C19, enough to scare the bejeezus out of Left’s leadership as they attempt to fashion their anti-Trump campaign, while saddled with their champion Bumblebrain sporting Pelosi’s kerchief in his gauntlet.

Scattershots – 31mar20 (updated 4apr20)

George Rebane

Happiness is being tested positive for C19 antibodies.

The US has five times as many per capita ventilators as does the UK.  This was reported on the news tonight along with other real stats showing the comparative lead the US has over other countries in fighting C19.  Concurrently we have the Democrats doing everything they can to lie, misconstrue, block, extend, dun, … any and every area of progress we have been making in tackling this global disaster, one that the country has not experienced in at least a century or perhaps ever.  Team Pelosi/Schumer are filling the lamestream’s bandwidth with snark, lies, and misrepresentations of data in order to pave the way for Bumblebrain Biden in the fall.  They blame it all on Trump in the most vicious ways possible.  None of them mention that the bat-originated coronaviruses were identified and the warnings published in October 2007 as the Bush2 administration was ending (one of our readers dug it up for us here).  Obama did NOTHING over his eight years to prepare the country.  In states, governors like our Moonbeam dismantled the preparations that Schwarzenegger had put in place.  EU nations with socialized healthcare have responded woefully late and ineffectively to the virus, as we have shown in these pages, while attempting to replicate US policies.  None of this makes no never mind to our socialist Left.  After spending three extremely disruptive years to impeach Trump the first time, Pelosi is already making plans to start impeaching the President once more should he be re-elected.  The Demonic Party cares only for the power over the people that they can garner if they can make Trump look like he delivered too little too late, and then only when the Dems made him do it.  Ignoring Trump’s way with words, he is doing the right thing at every turn with the information and wherewithal the country has.  Just calling out the Dems’s Big Lies grossly understates what those people are really doing to our country.

[1apr20 update]  Multi-attribute utility – that is the set of horns America is attempting to balance on today.  Such a utility does not present a stark choice as in ‘Your money or your life?!’, it’s more nuanced and real like ‘Your health or your economy?’.  In the latter you can see the utility of maximizing measures of the country’s health through policies that minimize the near-term C19 morbidity and mortality, while teetering on the other end is maximizing measures of our economy like continuing employment and GDP.  In decision theory these are competing attributes of a single utility function (Figure of Merit, if you prefer) that computes to a single number which you try to maximize through correct decisions.  Coming up with a broadly accepted utility is ALWAYS an exercise in compromising subjective values, and therefore always hard.  Even if you agree on the attributes to be included, placing weights on them becomes the next contention to overcome – say, you accept U = w1*(GDP) – w2*(total deaths) to be maximized over the next twelve months.  What values should we accept for the weights w1 and w2?  Capice?  That’s the kind of exercise staffers versed in this art are attempting to educate their principals so that more rigorous analytics can then be brought to bear on candidate policies (i.e. the decisions) to evaluate their relative merits.  For a variety of reasons, most politicians hate utility functions and rigorous analytics.

Eschewing President Trump’s daily C19 briefings.  The demonic Dems have a conundrum since all but FN have decided not to broadcast the briefings, labeling them as nothing but ‘Trump campaign rallies’.  The problem is that these cynical dufuses know that these are anything but political rallies.  They consist of factual information and data delivered by domain (here, healthcare) experts in understandable formats that summarize the progress of C19 across the land and explain the technologies and logistics brought to bear in fighting the pandemic.  They include our political leader’s exhortations, apprehensions of policy, and expressions of hope – all proper content in a perilous time such as this.  And then all of them can be questioned by the few attending reporters (most there for 'gotcha' questions).  His political enemies, media mouthpieces, and the country’s inculcated pretend to abhor and ignore these daily sessions, all the while carefully watching FN so that they can have something to say during their hours of vituperation.  The Dems really have a problem – no viable candidate, no policies, nothing but TDS to tell Americans, and now how to pick and promote an alternative (e.g. Cuomo) during our national hunkering down time when the election has taken a back seat, and all attention is focused on the doings of Team Trump.

[2apr20 update]  Daniel Pearl murderer gets reprieve from death sentence (here) .  Omar Saeed Sheikh, along with others, were convicted by a Pakistani court in 2003 of murdering WSJ South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl.  Today we learn that the “court reduces charges against British national Omar Saeed Sheikh to kidnapping, cuts sentence from death to seven years.”  Danny’s kidnapping and beheading in 2002 was the first of many such murders by various Islamic terrorists in the years that followed.  His father Dr Judea Pearl is a Turing laureate (2012) and world-famous computer scientist with ground-breaking work in heuristics, Bayesian inference, and causality.  Judea and Danny’s mother Ruth launched the Daniel Pearl Foundation that brought many Muslim journalists for sabbaticals in American media companies as an effort to foster greater understanding between Islamic and western cultures. (more here)

[3apr20 update] ‘Questions About Accuracy of Coronavirus Tests Sow Worry’ (here and here) reports on the concerns that are now beginning to trouble both healthcare workers and political leaders.  RR readers received a thorough tutorial on the reliability of such tests in ‘The Value of Testing’.  Our innumerate citizenry doesn’t really have a clue on the impact of testing on the spread of C19 virus.  At least now some people are beginning to take note that testing is NOT the denied big salvation that the Dems have been screaming about, and using the test shortage as one more reason to attack the administration and divide the country.  I will do an update on the significance of current test performance numbers (sensitivity = Pr(test positive given you have C19), and specificity = Pr(test negative given you don’t have C19) which are still a mystery to the medicos.  Right now I’m trying get out the first post on my epidemic spreading model Epidyne(V1.0) which should provide some answers to the uncertainty in the predictions that we receive from the daily C19 briefings, and also answer some questions on what levels of infections and deaths we can expect as this epidemic sweeps the country.  As some of you know, the healthcare pros are having quite a consternation on the conflicting reports from their many spreading models (hence the reason I developed Epidyne).

Parents are a danger to their children’s carefully inculcated minds in these times during their enforced home stays.  That is the opinion of an emerging clutch of unionized woke (aka evil) teachers as cited by one of our regular commenters (someone please find the link for me so that I can include it herein, thanks).  These ‘educators’ are afraid that their years of drilling large government socialism into their formative minds will all be washed away when they spend more time with their parents and learn an alternative set of values and mores, and God knows what else with which they may pollute their carefully nurtured brain bones.  The little darlins may even come back to school with an appreciation of capitalism, free markets, and religion (gasp!).

[4apr20 update] Trump’s “off color” joke.  The demonic Dems are showing off their hyper-hypocritical side again by suddenly becoming paramount prudes.  In his yesterday’s C19 briefing the discussion went to the deaths predicted by the models.  After Dr Brix finished her contribution on the various results from the various models, the President interjected, “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die and you know what I want to do? I want to come way under the model,” then adding a tongue-in-cheek, “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model. At least this kind of a model.”  And the liberal media went ballistic.  Now these are the same ‘journalists’ and media mavens whose demand for freedom of speech focuses on being able to inject “shit”, “fuck”, …, and people humping into America’s films and TV fare as frequently as possible.  Then they get the vapors when Trump delivers his little bon mot.  (As a relevant aside, FLOTUS Melania was a professional model and a business woman when she and Donald were married.)  

Hunker Down Diary – 26mar20 (updated 27mar20)

George Rebane

When there’s a problem, government is guilty until proven innocent.

Today is HD19 for the Rebanes.  We started hunkering down on 8 March 2020, and finally risked it all this morning by showing up at our local Safeway at 7am, the advertised ‘old folks shopping time’.  Apparently the younger people had not gotten the word, and the store was full with a lot of couples like Jo Ann and me pushing two carts.  Most of us wore gloves, a few had on masks, and all of us social distanced as much as possible.  But what we saw was dismal; something you’d experience in a socialist second or third world country – ‘miles’ of empty shelves of the stuff that everyone really wanted to buy.  Still, we all filled our baskets with what there was and substituted a lot of PlanB items.

What surprised me was that today the younger generation of managers have no knowledge, let alone experience, of the buying patterns during times of emergency and need.  With all signs of the coming hunker down time apparent more than a month ago, no one, starting with FEMA, advised the supply system to put the pedal to the metal on obvious staples and sanitary items.  There was no anticipative ‘push’ in the pipeline.  Everything appeared to have continued on with the JIT (just in time) scheme that works so well during happy days.  The makers and distributers are making do with the JIT schema in spite of the enormous consumer ‘pull’ of empty shelves.

The Demonic Party reveals itself (updated 25mar20)

George Rebane

The congressional Democrats have plumbed new depths of unabashed and sickening sleaze as they block the passage of the Senate bill to provide liquidity and relief to the nation’s economy on the verge of depression.  The multi-trillion dollar aid package is designed to prevent bankruptcies of countless companies that provide jobs to millions of Americans and are now attempting to rapidly retool to supply the medical needs to flatten the Wuhan virus infection curve, thereby saving untold families grief. (more here) Instead, led by Team Pelosi/Schumer, the Dems have attached a socialist wishlist of provisions to the bill that have NOTHING to do with fighting the virus and saving the economy.

Besides demogauging another one of their material Big Lies that the bill is a “slush fund” and a “bailout” of corporations, as if the corporations were the cause of the pandemic, these socialist sleazebags want to piggyback on this crisis to pass anti-capitalist provisions that they could never accomplish during normal times.  The want to revise laws that will implement many of the Green New Deal provisions on corporate board memberships (unions, activists, and workers), and that henceforth the government will have a major say in how individual businesses are run. (more here)

One of their most onerous provisions is a permanent ban on corporate stock buybacks.  It is clear that such buybacks should not be allowed during the time a company receives liquidity funding from the feds, but the Dems want to remove this important financial strategy forever.  They are either ignorant of or just plain evil in denying such an important market strategy that benefits every participant in such buybacks, including the small investors and holders of retirement accounts.  (more here)

Their aim is to finally start the real fundamental transformation of the country through a government ‘rob-and-ruin’ involvement in company operations.  Since the Dems have no positive or productive policies for generating wealth and jobs, they continue to play the only cards they hold – hate capitalism and hate Trump.  And their constituents don’t have the wherewithal to ask ‘what then?’ after their socialist future comes about.

But all of this is part and parcel of a party that has long been the creator and promoter of the nation’s miseries, highlighted by their support of slavery, then decades of Jim Crow, then the destruction of black families and promotion of urban blight launched by their not-so-Great Society, and now continuing with the dismantling and destruction of America’s educational system. (The complete list is too long to recount here.)  While the Republicans also have warts and have not always been our angels, the policies and politics of today’s Democrats have surely made them into our Demonic Party.

[25mar20 update]  Healthy companies create jobs, jobs pay people, people with money can buy things they need, companies make more such things, and the cycle repeats.  I have yet to find a single leftwinger, let alone socialist, who really understands this cycle.  The role of a thriving private sector economy is so obvious that, when told this, almost all folks of the Left will agree to the need for such a cycle that epitomizes a healthy economy.  And then they blow a tire, because invariably their follow-on remarks turn out to promote economy stifling policies, which gives lie to the claim that they understand.  All this is enormously magnified by the nation's political idiot contingency in Washington and other levels of government across the land.  They simply cannot connect the dots when it comes to wealth creation; they sincerely believe that money (wealth) is created simply by government printing the long green as much as is needed.  There is no comprehension as to what has to stand behind those printed slips of paper (or the equivalently fortuitous bit patterns on some mass memory device somewhere in the cloud).  We see that again in the demonic machinations of Team Pelomer in Congress.  Last October “the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.” (more here)  Their bottom line, don’t destroy the economy when fighting a pandemic, the resulting damage is a lot worse and longer lasting than what the pandemic can do in an economy that continues to function.  Save the economy to save the people.

Ruminations – 17mar20 (updated 18mar20)

George Rebane

Swine flu H1N1 Apr09-Jan10.  57M Americans infected, 257K hospitalized, 11,690 died.  Does anyone remember any full court press on Obama by the media and the Repubs as today we witness dished out hourly by the Dems and their lamestream in their vilification of Trump?  (H/T to reader.)

Russia impacted the 2016 election.  Those lyrics of our leftwing loonies still rings out loud and clear across the land.  And since that chorus started, tens of millions have been spent in the attempt to find any evidence, all to no avail.  Admittedly, our Left is not all that good with the finer points of English as they continue to confuse ‘attempt’ and ‘impact’, or is it really one from their repertoire of Big Lies broadcast daily?  That's called trolling for the dummies.

Coronavirus info link for Nevada County – NC Health and Human Services.  The Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital has announced a new testing program; see 17mar20 update here.

[18mar20 update]  Epidemic model used by policy makers revealed, and also news of a stop-gap medicine to prevent and fight Covid19.  See the 18mar20 update to 'Testing, testing, ...' here.

Correlation of the nation's blue concentrations with the incidence of Covid19 was pointed out in a reader's correspondence.  Apparently no one in the media has yet to make the connection.  (more here)

Lots of people buying guns and ammo.  The Left should recognize that these are not the nation’s gun owners who have already laid in their stash of Second Amendment armaments.  It is the latest tranche of newbies who have had their ‘gun epiphanies’ by the tens (hundreds?) of thousands.  The feds confirm this through the surge in background checks, and the dealers confirm it by reporting that these desperate buyers will take any available gun with any kind of ammo that fits.  Those of us who have owned guns for years would never even consider doing that for more reasons that we simply don’t have to.

All the Dems grousing about Trump’s “failure to handle the pandemic” are simply full of horseshit (aka bull pucky).  No one dares to compare America’s response with the actual numbers of what the other Left-celebrated countries have done.  Grab any metric that you have available.  And the biggest farce is the so-implied massive testing that other countries have done.  The challenge is to discover what marginal benefit to prophylactic or prescriptive policies has their testing provided that shows America is somehow behind the response curve.  Nothing – but ‘testing’ is the only thing that the Dems have, with no better (or any) plans of their own, to try to get some traction against the Trump administration.

Ordering out from restaurants.  Lots of people are buying into this alternative as an easy way to get good food without risking Covid19 infection.  Not so advise the thinking medicos.  You have no guarantee of what kind of food was used to prepare in what manner by personnel in what kind of pre-symptomatic condition within kitchens of unknown sanitary state that are frequented by numerous people whose outside contacts are also totally unknown.  The infectious disease experts tell us to order out is still a crapshoot.

The Socialistic Socialization of Socialism (updated 6mar20)

George Rebane

Some thoughts on Super Tuesday 2020.  Socialism is a form of organizing society and the economy, a form unknown to our younger generations.  They have been taught in our schools all about the mythical glories of socialism, and no history of what actually happens when countries have adopted it.  Today they are saturated by reports of Europe’s socialism as examples of the ‘benefits’ which await America on its adoption here.  These propagandized stories are generated and delivered by our media that are somewhere between incompetent and corruptly partisan.

With today’s stifling political correctness and ongoing deconstruction of our public speech, critical thinking by the young is almost impossible and definitely rare.  It is a field day for corrupt politicians like Senators Sanders and Warren.  This gives the young no choice about their messages, but to simply believe their content, and judge them only by the cosmetics of their delivery.

All of this explains why our millennials and genXrs are so willing and eager to vote away their national inheritance.  The one-world socialist elites know well Thomas Jefferson’s admonition – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

[6mar20 update] Super Tuesday's Latinos for Sanders.  We know that Bernie Sanders is an idiot and a demogauge – he has proved it daily for at least the last five years.  But what about the young Latinos whose parents escaped here from dictatorial banana republics in which Sanders’ socialism was on full display, and whose history and leaders Sanders still celebrates today?  What does that say for their socio-political awareness when they have such revealing and enlightening family histories?  Actually, it says the same thing about them as about the more indigenous Americans who make up Bernie’s Bros.  It’s the same 25-30% of unread bad news bears (more in California) who can’t or won’t, and who support every national movement that promises them a workers’ paradise where everything is free.  They will be with us forever, here and elsewhere.  And every so often they are successful in bringing communism to the fore, and dispense wholesale misery to their people for a couple of generations before the next revolution.  All of them now believe it’s finally America’s chance to dumpster dive for a dictatorship of the proletariat.  (more here)

Scattershots – 22feb20 (updated 25feb20)

George Rebane

Surprise! – school costs are projected to double their budgeted income.  Well, not really.  It’s only a surprise to our progressives who either skipped or failed Econ 101.  The 22feb20 Union cites a report by WestEd that projects the coming “silent recession” in our schools (here) This was known to most of us years ago (2008) when its first ignored signs became apparent.  The schools will “likely be running deficits soon because of factors like the rising rate of pensions, special education costs, and rising staff costs, along with the price of health care.”  With state socialism running wild and teachers’ unions sitting in the catbird seat, whoulda thought?  In Nevada County we are holding emergency meetings at the school district “in an attempt to get ahead of the possible (?!) problems.”  And guess what is the big unfunded gorilla in the room – can you spell ‘CalSTRS’?  As usual, no one is discussing cutting the schools’ ridiculous cost structure, but only how best to raise taxes to pay off the new bonds that must be floated to cover the deficits.

The mood of California’s disgruntled Democrats is correctly captured by our beloved liberal cartoonist Bob Crabb.  You see, they already control the state with an electorate of gimmes having voted in the Sacramento super-majorities, and a double dummy governor who’s competing with Bernie for the Time's cover picture of the ‘Socialist of the Year’.  But there’s a bit of northern California that still remains mostly Republican and conservative, and that must not be tolerated to complete a true-Blue, one-party state – any vestige of remaining representation of the knuckle draggers in Sacramento must be purged.  And Mr Crabb is up to promoting that in his cartoon which I filched from the pages of the 22feb20 Union.

The fair share between pay and profits, that is the consuming question for America’s socialists, who, of course, know the answer.  Jon Sindreu in the 22feb20 WSJ gives the issue a workmanlike airing (here).  There he points out that “there has been a lot of attention paid to how much of national income goes to profits instead of workers’ pay. Labor’s share of gross domestic product remained close to a postcrisis low in 2019 amid record corporate earnings, according to the latest U.S. data.”  And the stability between pay and profits during most of the 20th century started tilting toward profits, which predictably has gotten up the dander of our ‘workers, throw off your chains’ leftwing.  A deeper look reveals no untoward imbalance, save that since 1980 competition has forced industries to consolidate, and technology started replacing labor’s share of productivity contributions.  This, of course, has caused labor’s share of GDP to decrease since the remaining jobs are tending to a dumbbell shaped distribution of pay, with the big hump consisting of lower wage ‘commodity level’ jobs.  If we want to maintain and grow our QoL, then start thinking again of systemic unemployment, universal basic income, and perhaps even non-profit service corporations.

[23feb20 update]  One of the Democrat Big Lies is that Russia is backing Trump in 2020.  This not only a lie, but blatant idiocy for anyone to believe such tripe.  We have pointed out how Trump’s walk is what people should focus on, not his public talk about Russia which is firm yet relatively mild-mannered.  For those snuffies unfamiliar with public/private negotiations, this is what you do to maximize your position in deal making – talk softly while wielding a big stick.  As John Hinderaker explains in ‘You Don’t Need a Spy to Know Which Way the Russian Wind Blows’ - "Donald Trump is anathema to the rulers of Russia. Not only has he armed the Ukrainians, he has re-invigorated NATO by insisting that members take an interest in their own defense; stood up to and badly wounded Russia’s key ally, Iran; overseen an expansion and strengthening of American armed forces; and, most important, encouraged fracking and other development of U.S. oil and gas resources, which has kept down the global price of oil. … It is blindingly obvious that the Russians would prefer any Democrat to President Trump. All of the Democrats have promised to limit U.S. production of oil and gas, which no doubt sounds like pure insanity to Putin but is music to his ears. Equally important, they all vow to shrink America’s armed forces and never to use them under any foreseeable circumstances. And they all would pursue a soft line toward Iran." (more here and H/T to correspondent)

[24feb20 update]  There is a Sanders Silver Lining.  What many of us have been saying for years about the true social and governance objectives of the Democratic Party are now visible to all as the curtain has been pulled aside to reveal their true aims for a fundamentally transformed America.  It is clear that communism is the ultimate goal, and proto-communist policies, should Team Bernie et al prevail, are the first steps.  But first, our guns have got to go as the government’s guns come out to make us heel.

[25feb20 update]  Google full-page ad in the 25feb20 WSJ touting their cloud services has the banner – The Home Depot is solving for empowering doers to get more done.  Huh??!

From the immortal Robert Burns “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us! …"  - Since George W. Bush I have been writing about the fundamentalist hijacked Republican Party. It is 2020 and the GOP Jihad continues on with the new moniker of the Trump Party. … Leaderless and adrift, the far-right hoards of white Republican religious purists are still trying to purge the country of decency, morality and moderation instilling their brand of anti-abortion and anti-immigration and science denial. … I understand the necessity of an opposition, but the Republicans are completely AWOL, in that regard. The Republican Party is becoming a group of fringe right-wingers lacking the moderation of centrists. Get ready for the Trump-Republican 2020 campaign of lies as they play to the wealthy, religious and conservatives. What a god-awful mess. May they self-destruct.  Ron Lowe, Nevada City (from Letters in the 25feb20 Union)

And in the same vein from Thomas Elias’ ‘California carrying the national economy’ , we learn that instead of all the growing problems the state has been having under decades of Democrat rule with workers and companies leaving, highest taxes/fees/regulations, welfare capital of the nation, illegals and gimmes arriving, and crap-infested cities full of indigent homeless and addicts living in the streets, and … .  All of that is wrong, and California is really “the envy of the nation” as we were told the other day by Governor Goofy Gavin.  Since the state has a couple or three counties that are home to major corporations raking gazillions of revenues from manufactories and server centers all over the world, all is well – better than well, it’s just peachy.  When county GDPs are tallied like that, then it’s easy to see how places like India and China can also have several small concentrations of outfits that produce enormous wealth which doesn’t accrue to the surrounding countryside where people are in dire straits.  Don’t know whether the arch leftwing columnist Elias is a bit teched, but he’s sure betting that his readers are.

Ruminations – 16feb20 (updated 20feb20)

George Rebane

Bernie will force employers to pay disabled workers the going minimum wage in his “disability rights” platform – according to socialist lights, it’s only fair.  No matter that repeal of Sec 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act will no longer induce employers to fashion jobs for which the (mostly mentally) disabled can join the labor market, and with other workers provide a rewarding service.  And the rank and file Dems don’t understand any of it.

"Germany's experience is typical for bureaucratic climate policies, and it stands in sharp contrast to the American experience. The U.S., though heavily criticized for not signing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is curbing emissions today much faster than any country that actually did sign the agreement… U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration."  (more here and H/T to correspondent)

Pocahontas has another plan, this one to stamp out foreign and domestic “disinformation” campaigns: punish those who disseminate misleading online posts about elections.  This includes holding responsible online platforms that let their users post such “disinformation”.  What this former Harvard pinhead professor misses is that disinformation campaigns have been a staple of elections for centuries.  Hardly any election has ever been held free of lies, libels, fabrications, mendacities, misrepresentations, fraud, … by opposing sides.  Before the internet there were pamphlets, newspapers, radio, and TV.  Is her sophomoric epiphany one more sign that our electorate has descended another couple of critical thinking rungs?  Thank you unionized public schools.

[17feb20 update]  George Boardman writes a good column (here) in the 17feb20 Union on NC’s economic development.  His review of our recent economic development history makes clear that the county and city governments contribute materially to the county’s slow/no economic growth. His lament, “Where are the jobs that pay a living wage and offer a meaningful career path?” will go on until we attract an educated population which won’t happen until we can offer good schools and desirable commercial amenities.  Our local politicians imposing their opinions on what businesses should be permitted and properly located continues to keep us as a backwater in a state that already has baked in anti-entrepreneurial policies.

[18feb20 update]  Rep Chris Murphy (D-CN) was doing a little foreign policy on the side with Ukraine.  Why he did it is more than a bit convoluted.  But even his own best excuse doesn’t contradict his meddling in America’s foreign policy, which is a clear violation of the old Logan Act that the Dems have been trying to pin on a number of Repubs.  I question the man’s ability to think clearly if he thought pulling a stunt like that would have no consequences.  Who else in his brain trust also advised that the surreptitious visit would be a good idea?

[20feb20 update]  One of the Dems’ big lies was again front and center in last night’s clown car debate – the economy is bad because there has been no wage growth for middle and lower class workers and minorities.  Now as I have mentioned, such lies are consequential because it drives decisions of people who are too lazy or simply are not able to think critically.  Here is what the Fed tells us about wage growth over the years.  The Dems continue to tell consequential lies that totally misrepresent the existential situation in America and around the world.  And their lamestream lackeys ignore, if not reinforce, the entire performance.  Instead, they focus on the make no-never-mind ‘lies’ that Trump spouts in his usual and regrettable braggadocio tweets.

The joys of capitalism.  A small innovative pharmaceutical company has come up with a vaccine for the corona virus in three hours after getting access to its genetic sequence.  The company developed an algorithm that works on such double helixes to find the proper gene to disable that will neutralize the COVID-19 virus.  Inovio Pharmaceuticals is now getting ready to mass produce the vaccine and have it ready for the market possible as soon as this summer.  That’s the kind of innovation free markets invite, and the candidates in the Dems’ clown car want to dismantle.  Remember, their mantra is that ‘you didn’t build that; you didn’t develop that, you didn’t …’ – it was all due to the great collective in the sky.  (more here and H/T to correspondent)

We do have our own facts (updated 7feb20)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." A. Lincoln

George Rebane

[This is the addended and updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 February 2020.]

The nationally prominent public figure and liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us the well-known shibboleth that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Moynihan was a man of many talents, serving as adviser to several presidents of both parties, Harvard college professor, ambassador to India and the UN, and as a four-term senator from New York.  He died in 2003, a bit too early to witness the rejection and even falsification of what at first reading seems like an eminently reasonable and widely applicable statement.

Today in 2020 we have long acknowledged and adopted the existence of at least two sets of facts, held by each side of a deeply polarized country.  That we do not agree on the facts which support our stands on public policies is the prime reason why we can no longer emulate that great Texas politician and 36th US president Lyndon Johnson, when he would put his big arm around an uncompromising opponent’s shoulder and utter the biblical invitation from Isaiah to “Come now, let us reason together.”  But the prerequisite for reasoning together is to have some common ground that usually begins by accepting some common collection of critical facts.

Scattershots – 21jan20 (updated 27jan20)

George Rebane

RL Crabb is prominent in today’s (21jan20) Union lambasting AB5, the latest socialist outrage from Sacramento. (more here)  This piece of dreadful anti-work legislation has finally caught enough of our liberal artsy-fartsy crowd to also get them squawking – less known, AB5 impacts at least as many of California's high-tech STEM consultants and freelancers.  Our cartoonist friend Bob Crabb’s distress (here) puts paid on what most of us have known about his true ideological colors – for shur he ain’t no middle-roader.  Regardless of his ire against the state’s Democrats – it’s akin to my ire against the state’s Republicans, but I don’t pretend to be a mid-roader – he cannot countenance the other side, even in the face of AB5.  “I also do not agree with those who want to steer clear of partisan politics. This bill is 100% Democrat. It was written by an assemblywoman who curses like a sailor and dismisses us as whiners who are too dense to understand how fortunate we are to have her party looking out for our well-being.  It passed on a straight party line vote. It was signed by a governor who just dedicated millions of dollars to enforcing it.  California Democrats believe they have little to fear from the riffraff at the bottom tier of workers. We are, after all, musicians, journalists, community theaters, and cartoonists. What are we going to do? Vote for Republicans? Ha ha ha!”  As you can see, regardless of the years of collectivist crap flowing from our Democrat legislature, Bob would not change his vote to give us bottom tier riffraff a chance to sell our services as we choose – a few eggs have yet to be cracked and sacrifices have to be made.

California leavin’ should be the title of a new musical lament for all those folks heading out of state.  But there’s enough of us disgruntled Golden Staters to take and remake the places where we land and put down new stakes.  An example is Star, Idaho, a small town near where one of our dear departed California expats and RR readers now lives.  Star’s population has more than doubled in the last ten years as couples like JT and Mary Jo Turnipseed (their real name, honest!) left SoCal and moved in to experience small town living at its best.  Well, no more.  “Now Star is grappling with some of the same problems the Turnipseeds left California to escape. The town’s main drag, where ranchers once drove their cattle, is clogged with traffic during rush-hour commutes. Sprawling subdivisions have sprouted up around farmland, as have new chain stores. The median home price has more than doubled to nearly $400,000 since 2010.” (more here)  The most amazing thing to me is still the utter blindness of our states overwhelming population of leftwing loonies who deny that any of this exodus is going on.  It mirrors exactly their grossly distorted perception of the realworld which is their daily drink from the lamestream.  For them, another sip of that Kool-Aid, and all’s right with the world.

The Harvard Reorganization Plan

George Rebane

Harvard has a plan to deconstruct our republic and rebuild it in their own image.  To launch a national dialogue on this initiative, the university’s prestigious law school has published ‘Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation’ which we shall here call the Harvard Reorganization Plan (HRP).  For those unfamiliar, Harvard University is today perhaps the best endowed ($40.9B as of FY2019) premier academe of all things ideologically progressive and the fount of America’s leftwing thought.  For our liberals it is the mother temple of correct forward thinking – as declared in its motto ‘Veritas’, the institution publishes its works on stone tablets.

In the HRP, on their most recently issued tablet, their legal academics make an extensive and well-documented case for yet the most fundamental transformation, if not the complete abrogation, of what has been the United States of America.  This is a bottom up plan that will rip out by the roots our “republic, if you can keep it.”  The HRP proposes a devilishly convoluted route to replace our present form of governance with a pure democracy; using the leaks, holes, and soft-points of our otherwise carefully constructed Constitution to first create a minimum of 96 solidly leftwing new states out of what is now the District of Columbia – since DC is federal territory, this will require only a simple majority in the Senate to achieve.  Then with a newly constituted hard-Left Congress, the Constitution will be pro forma amended beyond recognition so that the result is the birth of a new United Socialist States of America (USSA).

On its first reading, HRP puts forward some very persuasive arguments for the founding of a new USSA.  But it is persuasive in a blindered and blinding manner.  And all of these arguments pivot on the siren song of “equal representation” - ‘one person, one vote’ - to be applied in a reorganized America to as many public policy decisions as possible.  The promise here is replicating the California template wherein cowardly politicians, rather than assume political risk and vote openly in the legislature, will throw the decision to a manipulable electorate so that the desired result can be credited to ‘the peehpul’.   Today the whole nation can see the fruits of that kind of a legislative dodge.

The purpose of this commentary is to invite readers to collect in one place their thoughts on the recommendations in the HRP and other similar plans that call for changing our democratic republic into a democracy.  In the sequel I list some numbered assertions, some of which I offer axiomatically, others as propositions, and perhaps a few as provable theorems.

1. The natural world (universe) has evolved over the billions of years to be an unequal, lumpy, more-here-than-there, highly discriminating, and therefore marvelously complex place that gave rise to equally unequal critters like Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
2. We are each identifiably unique in almost every dimension of being and doing that we can imagine. Therefore, if thrown into the same cauldron, we sort ourselves out very quickly as to those who can and will do what is the best, most, and/or quickest.  And we observe this as an attribute we share with all the more highly developed animals – the smarter the critter, the more differentiable it is from its fellows.
3. The belief in and the enforcement of unexamined and unqualified equality is unnatural, and gives rise to societies that cannot generate the wealth required to maintain a beneficial quality of life for any of its members, including the controlling elites.
4. Humans don’t know how to purposely manage large-scale, complex systems affected by random influences. While we can impact their serendipitous responses, we cannot beneficially control their behavior.  Mankind’s attempt to do so has always resulted in large-scale misery that precedes tragedy.  Central control of such systems requires much more knowledge than we have been able to assemble.  The eternal hubris of the Left is to ignore and/or deny this truth.
5. Nature’s answer to this conundrum is to distribute knowledge and control to the lowest levels (of agency found) in large systems. The leaf knows neither the nature nor purpose of the tree, and needs know neither to do a good job as a leaf, paying attention only to its immediate environment.  Even Rousseau and Marx caught a whiff of such an Elysian state of being in their philosophies.
6. Our Founders were astute students of human nature. They knew the histories of failed democracies, and to a man, sought to shield their new nation from a similar short-sighted fate.  Hence, the immortal words of Ben Franklin when asked what the Constitutional Convention had wrought – ‘A republic if you can keep it’, clearly indicating that future generations’ ability to sustain their bequest was to be western civilization’s Great Experiment of governance.
7. No reasonable person would argue that our Constitution is the perfect foundational document for a republic. Its flaws were already recognized when it was still being hammered on the anvil.  That’s why the Constitution was issued with built-in mechanisms by which it could be amended in a deliberate and orderly manner as new times would give rise to new values and thinking.  There is nothing deliberate or orderly in the manner HRP calls for rewriting the Constitution.
8. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007) captured and quantified the recent experience in sustaining our Republic subjected to the vicissitudes of an electorate composed overwhelmingly of those who won’t or can’t grasp the issues about which they must choose. The results of this monumental study would not have surprised our Founders.
9. I submit that, were the measures outlined in the HRP to be initiated by the next Democrat controlled Congress, there would arise a spontaneous nationwide armed resistance to ‘save the Constitution’ and maintain the status quo. In short, reasoned national dialogue would break down in a similar manner experienced during the years before the War Between the States.

More later, based on our prolific and deep-thinking readers, and as other thoughts will undoubtedly arise in the fullness of time, I will add them to the list with attribution.

The Advent of Government's Mega-overreach

George Rebane

Those who pay attention were made aware that Sacramento is next preparing a bill that would tax companies doing business in California on the basis of the difference between their CEO and median worker pay. (more here)  Portland already passed such a tax regulation last year.  Now you may ask, what business is it of government, or any non-owner of a private company, as to what should be their pay scale.  What’s the reasonable basis for government to reach into a company’s operating policy and impose punitive measures if it doesn’t do what politicians and government bureaucrats dictate?  Actually, there is no reasonable basis for this, nor need there be as long as government threatens the use of their gun.

What should concern all of us right-leaners is what comes next if the court challenges to this new super-stupid law fail.  There is nothing then to stop government from constructively appropriating private corporations – first slowly, then rampantly - by extending their operational dicta to everything from how many products of what kind companies should make, how much of a ‘fair market’ price they should charge for them, what should be the pay for specific jobs, …, the list is endless once this tax regimen is accepted.  Companies would still bear the full measure of risk for such operating policies enforced from on high.  Such a mega-overreach of private businesses is exactly what Hitler did in the 1930s to extend the cold hand of national socialism over Germany.  (Our already left-leaning media didn’t then know how to report that because Stalinist communism had already appropriated all production in the USSR.)

The likelihood of this scenario being the actual death knell of open market capitalism in America is heightened by the lack of involvement and critical thinking skills of our electorate.  And here I’m not talking about those of today’s hard-leftists (like those who frequent RR comment streams); what should concern us all are those millions of mid-roaders and independents now inured to years of lamestream propaganda – those whose socio-political ideology is at best a soft mush that can be re/shaped by the most recent socialist slogan.

AB5 is a related super-stupid California law that has become the legislative analogue of swiss cheese given all the exclusions that it is in the process of incorporating.  We covered its introduction in ‘California’s latest dumb to dumber’.  And to remind readers that stupid governance in California is not restricted to any one sector, we brought SB419 to readers’ attention in ‘SB419 – Stupid becomes stupider’.  Ms Terry McLaughlin in the 16jan20 Union (here) gives a more complete treatment of the effects of AB5 since its passage.  I could go on to also review the impact of SB50 on local control of planning and restrictions on rent increases, but there's enough here to again communicate the ongoing disaster that is Sacramento.

It will be most interesting to read the leftwing's apologetics for all this insanity in California, because we know they are true believers in whatever comes out of Sacramento (fashioned in their image), even if they don’t have the ability to present a rational defense of their beliefs.

SB419 – Stupid becomes stupider

George Rebane

There is no lower bound to progressive stupidity.  This truth is again confirmed and demonstrated to boot by SB419 signed into law by our Gov Nutjob.  Adding to all the other problems with our progressively punished public education in California, the new law installs ‘the willfully defiant classroom’ into our schools.  It legalizes “willful defiance”, which until now has been a reason for teachers and principals to impose disciplinary action and suspension when 6-8^th grade students willfully defy teachers and staffers in our schools.  The law effectively removes the ‘willful defiance’ clause as a violation from our education code EC48900(k).

Actually, it’s even worse than that.  In its broader interpretation, the new law makes it legal for such kids to defy any adult, including their parents who will now be in violation when they attempt to discipline their unruly little darlins, or any kids for that matter.  The real reason for this stupid response from Sacramento is that suspended kids don’t generate cash for the schools which get certain kinds of government funding based on attendance.  A quirk in the law is that the schools may still use EC48910 to send the little idiots somewhere else, but not home.  One possible destination will be the new “intervention room” appropriately staffed by people the kids can ignore and raise hell.  I have no idea how that will work out, and neither do the pinheads in our legislature led by our paramount pinhead Newsom. (more here and here)

And the real pinheads are our neighbors, those who year after year vote for ever more ignorant and ideologically sclerotic legislators.  Recall, the plan was to first make them into double dummies through our public schools.  That has worked, and now they are compliant nebbishes who get their daily marching orders from the lamestream media.

Ruminations – 10jan20 (updated 13jan20)

George Rebane

The Dems’ Chorus of Cacophony is now shrieking at Trump for taking out Soleimani the terrorist as a prophylactic for imminent acts of terror, exactly the same thing they blamed and still blame Bush2 for NOT taking out Bin Laden in order to prevent 9/11.  We recall it was Bill Clinton who declined to take out Bin Laden when he was actually in our cross-hairs.

More liberal worthies are also blaming Trump for Iran’s downing of the Ukrainian airliner, claiming that our president caused the deaths of the innocent passengers.  No doubt all subsequent atrocities committed by the rump ISIS contingents will now be blamed on our president since he also took out ISIS leader al-Baghdadi.  Such accusations are a daily testament to the anti-American propaganda of our progressives who promote the longevity of every leftwing tyrant across the globe.

Our voting teenagers should make US foreign policy a “higher priority” argues a learned 17-year-old in the 10jan20 edition of The Union (here).  The young man appears to have been successfully inculcated in our public schools to embrace TDS as the proper political support for voting decisions (he likes Buttigieg), while ignoring the capacities of his much less knowledgeable and more malleable peers.  His point would be better made were our schools really a forum for open discussion of ideas instead of founts of mind-melding progressive propaganda.

'Tax the robots' is the new cry arising across the land as a way to slow down automation and save the jobs of the un- and less-skilled.  This, along with universal basic income (q.v.), appears to be the half-way solution to the advent of systemic unemployment.  Other deep thinkers are of the mind that smart machines will be like all other past innovations, they’ll create more new jobs as they change and take away old jobs.  No one yet knows how to tax this latest advance in what used to be called automation.  And you can be sure that nothing promising about all this will come out of our polarized legislatures.  The real problem of systemic income was outlined in these pages some years back (here, here, and here).

[12jan20 update] The winds of woke.  Oh it’s hard to be a progressive without getting daily instructions from PC Central.  For years they taught us about the benefits of adopting cross-cultural artifacts, arts, and affectations into our supposedly banal and racist western culture - inclusivity and globalism and all that.  Now suddenly it has become ‘misappropriation’ to do any of that - a definite no-no for all the woke folks.  The latest is that white women should no longer wear hoop earrings which were originally connected with African women’s adornments.  Gotta stay current.

"The ongoing turmoil in U.S. politics is part of a larger political crisis that is shattering old alignments of left and right in North America and Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, embattled establishments are besieged by populist insurgents. The rebellion takes different forms in different countries—the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., Brexit in the U.K., the revolt of the yellow vests in France. But the underlying dynamic is the same: the revolt of alienated, mostly but not exclusively native and white working-class voters against post-national metropolitan elites."  So argues University of Texas Prof Michael Lind in a major 11jan20 WSJ essay (here).  New insights, definitely worth a read for those paying attention.

[13jan20 update]  ‘Stack & Pack’, an important objective of Agenda21 (now Agenda2030), takes a huge step forward in California under SB50 which Gov Newsom will sign into law.  Here’s the headline – “Senate Bill 50 tramples over local control to push densification”.  Our leftwingers will again sing the A21 conspiracy song.  And again I reply that with Sacramento’s one-party system of governance, there is no conspiracy needed to promote collectivist central planning and control.  (H/T to reader)  Oh, and did I mention AB5?

Why Black Lives Don’t Matter to Blacks

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 January 2020.]

Do black lives really matter?  Well that clearly depends on whose talk and whose walk you pay attention to.  The loud talk from our congresscritters and black leaders is that black lives very much matter, and that it’s the police and white racists who are wantonly killing blacks across the land.  But by their walk and the abundant facts on record over the last half-century, these same people demonstrate that they really don’t care much about how African-Americans live and die.  They only demonstrate their concern and ire after a rare and unfortunate incident occurs where a black American is killed by a law enforcement officer.  Then it is time to gather their constituents in the streets and continue the narrative that blacks are dying in great numbers at the hands of cops and whites.

The reality is quite different in that blacks die by the hundreds every month at the hands of other blacks.  This ongoing carnage does not raise a murmur in the national news.  No black leaders or members of Congress, or media outlets express their outrage on Monday mornings after another weekend of murder and mayhem in the Democrat controlled urban ghettos.

From the conservative National Review we learn the big picture that “From 2000 to 2015, the mean African-American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That’s more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4 (despite disadvantages comparable to those of blacks) and over seven times the average white rate, 2.7. Moreover, … from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of the killers of black murder victims were other African Americans. In short, this is about exceptionally high as well as overwhelmingly intraracial black violent crime. White-on-white homicide is equally intraracial, but the rates are not astronomically high. … (And) in the contemporary period, from 1976 to 2014, it is estimated that (over 198,000) African Americans died nationwide at the hands of black killers. That’s (more than 5,200) deaths per year on average, roughly 19 times the annual number of deaths of African Americans in confrontations with police.” (more here)

There have been a few short-lived programs attempted that effectively reduced crime rates in our urban centers.  The most notable of these was carried out under NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a white Jewish liberal politician now running for president.  The ‘Broken Windows’ and ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ programs during his 2002-2013 tenure saved over 21,000 lives of which 90+% or over 19,000 of them would have been black.  So what happened?

The response after Bloomberg left office was immediate and disastrous.  Under leftwing Mayor DeBlasio, stop-and-frisk, which took hundreds of illegal guns off the streets, was discontinued because cops ‘unfairly’ stopped and frisked more blacks than people of other races.  As reported in the WSJ, “the rap on stop-and-frisk was that stops of African-Americans were disproportionate to their percentage of the population. That is true. But as (Mayor Bloomberg) pointed out, they were not disproportionate to the descriptions of the people committing crimes given by witnesses.” (more here)  No matter, progressive views on political correctness and social justice demanded that neighborhood maintenance was no longer required, illegal guns returned to the streets, and, as predicted, the crime rate began increasing.  And blacks again started dying at the hands of other blacks in greater numbers.

So today, the Democrats know that they have no chance against Trump without the black vote.  And for reasons no one dares to study or answer, our urban African-American populations demand policing policies that cater to proportions propagandized by Democrat politicians, instead of caring that black lives matter.  So now we have candidate Bloomberg doing a 180 on the stop-and-frisk apology circuit for having saved thousands of black lives, and promising never to do it again.

The questions no one is asking are, ‘Was it fair to blacks that an effective policing policy was discontinued, thereby again raising black-on-black murder rates?’, and even more importantly, ‘What does all this say about the priorities and/or the understanding of the black voters who year after year return disastrously incompetent and corrupt politicians to office, who then perpetuate their lives on the “plantation”?’  As reported in the Washington Post, Candace Owens has a YouTube video (here) that explains the matter – I recommend it to you.

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 – 27dec19 (updated 31dec19)

George Rebane

Well, here are a handful of observations on the progress the progressives are making to fundamentally transform America into a second-world autocracy that will look nothing like what our Founders intended to bequeath us, and nothing like the America many of us older folks have enjoyed and learned about.  And about which the younger generations have been kept in the dark, discontent, and expectant that the nation is in dire straits and will be saved only by fulfilling the objectives specified in Agenda21 (now Agenda2030).

A Progressive’s ‘Common Ground’

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

George Rebane

Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together."

Millionaires Surtax on Steroids

George Rebane

Should the Democrats win in 2020, the country will suffer a spate of confiscatory tax increases on virtually every aspect of our economic activities.  One of their recent additions to taking your earnings and belongings is the Millionaires Surtax sponsored by Sen Van Hollen and Rep Beyer of Maryland.  This would levy an additional 10% tax on all earnings above $1M for individuals and $2M for married couples.  The envy-driven of the land would approve with the snort that ‘what does anyone need with so much annual income?’

What the great unwashed miss is that such a tax on income hits a wide swath of middle-class earners when they have a rare or once-in-a-lifetime income event that they have been planning and working hard for over perhaps most of their lives.  Families that have risked, built, and worked a small business or saved and lived long in an appreciated home or investment real estate that they then finally sell to establish their retirement nest egg; it is these folks who will be hit hard when they receive their income spike in any one given year.  It is that nest egg which they have planned to prudently invest to provide for their not-so-spectacular subsequent annual income stream that no longer comes close to qualifying for such a ‘millionaires surtax’.  But during that payoff year, the federal government swoops in and treats them as if that windfall represents their regular income stream.

And that is just a bit of what our socialists on steroids will do. “Democrats these days are also proposing to raise the regular income-tax rate, the corporate-tax rate, the capital-gains-tax rate, the dividend-tax rate, the death-tax and payroll-tax rates, while creating a new wealth tax, a new financial-transactions tax, a new carbon tax and a new pharmaceutical tax, even as they would repeal 100% business expensing and the 20% income exclusion for so-called pass-through firms.”  And this is just the beginning, since we haven’t mentioned new taxes on already taxed assets.  Asset taxes on what you already own are meant to take down your private property to a value level that the government thinks is the most that people should own.  Think about that. (more here)

Van Hollen, Beyer, et al, and the phalanx of Democrat presidential candidates all parrot the eternal etude to envy – “fair share”.  Their message continues that it has been the country’s wealth-producers who have caused the poor to be poor, and through their “greed” – in earning what they earn, and having what they have – are denying them “a fair shot to succeed”.  Here in their own words, “The new revenues would finance investments needed to build a more dynamic economy where everyone has a fair shot to succeed, instead of a dynastic economy based on existing wealth. And it’s supported by patriotic millionaires who agree they should do more to give others a better chance to achieve similar success.”  From Lenin’s mouth to God’s ear.

Ruminations – 21nov19 (updated 22nov19)

George Rebane

Those creative Dems on Team Schiff have again expanded the definition of ‘evidence’.  The initial expansion qualified 'allegations' for inclusion. And from yesterday’s hearings we learned that ‘perceptions’ have now joined the ranks of culpable evidence.  For those paying attention, ‘feelings’ are waiting in the wings, and are next to shoulder and again lighten the burdens of what we formerly knew as evidence.

Last night’s Democratic debate was kabuki komedy taken to a new level.  Moderated by four fierce femmes, crack journalists all, from (gasp!) MSNBC, the carefully staged candidates were repeatedly lobbed fuzzballs like, ‘We all know Trump is a brazen and corrupt scumbag, who has done this (insert allegation), and that (insert allegation), …, and even this (insert allegation); what other things can you add to his sins, and how would you be a better president if elected?’

Someone with a caring and sympathetic heart should really show Uncle Joe to the Senior Statesman Suite at a first class Baltimore assisted living center.  He doesn’t deserve what his ‘friends’ are doing to him in the public forum.

The current desperate push to to embrace preventable man-made global warming (aka climate change) is causing its science-free adherents and echo chambers to cite and regurgitate ever more ridiculous reasoning supposedly from 10,000+ “climate scientists” warning of civilization’s impending doom that can only be saved through ample applications of central planning and socialism.  A more sober assessment of all this (‘Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence’) comes from Dr Walter Williams, economics professor and syndicated columnist.  It’s definitely worth perusing with cup of coffee in hand.  (H/T to correspondent)

[22nov19 update]  The Left’s assault on education and America’s public schools continues full speed ahead.  Yesterday in Howard County, Maryland the school board redistricted school boundaries so as to cover their collective asses and once more denigrate underachieving black kids with a policy that explicitly says ‘black kids can’t learn’ - they will not benefit from better teachers and schools.  To equalize test performance scores between a mostly white district and a mostly black district, the school board redrew district boundaries so that smarter white kids will be bussed longer distances into badly performing black schools, and vice versa.  The school board doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about the kids, black or white, but only covering their political butts from criticisms of “inequality”.  So they gave up on the black kids and will now ‘equalize’ the test scores by bussing more kids longer distances, thereby winding up with lower scores from both districts which, however, will be more equal.  All this is going on while we’re pissing and moaning about the House impeachment circus, which takes up all the news bandwidth.  Try to find a SINGLE Democrat congress critter who will point out this atrocity.

Democrats’ Big Lies #4685, 4686

George Rebane

California’s Cris de Coeur continue.  The state’s Democrats deny that the state has been steadily diving for the bottom, and has already reached it in the many sectors of fiscal and social performance.  This Big Lie is dutifully picked up by all the local leftwing lackeys who must echo the narrative out of Sacramento.  This morning we read a plaintive lament (here) in the 20nov19 Union by Alyssa Mayo, a native Californian who states, “I am as middle class American as they come.  But because I live in California, I am surviving … far from thriving.”  She goes on to list the nationally known grievances about our state, also highlighting that “every day, I watch people that I respect and love leave California.”  (In the last decade the Rebanes have bid good-bye to 11 families of friends and relatives who have struck out from California for greener pastures.)  Ms Mayo’s big concern as a “silently struggling” sufferer is shared by most, not progressively blind, that “California will get worse. I don’t know what the next downhill slide will be.  But I’m sure that it will result in losing more hard-working Americans in this state.  For those of us who remain, feebly bucketing out the ever-growing rising water, we will continue to hope for a miracle.  A miracle to save our home.  A miracle that may never come.”  My suggestion to the ‘silent suffers’ is to abandon hoping for that miracle, and instead do something radically different next time in the voting booth.  We don’t have to continue placing our futures into the hands of incompetent scumbags.  Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for a different result has never worked.

In ‘The Big Lie About Charter Schools’ David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute (an established Democrat policy think tank) debunks the bamboozle that Democrat candidates have been foisting on their constituents for at least a couple of decades.  This year the standard refrain that charter schools ‘siphon off the funds of public schools’ has reached crescendo from the throats of Dem presidential wannabes.  First, charter schools are public schools, but of the type that don’t have fatten the wallets of teachers’ union leaders and staff.  Charter schools set their own teachers benefit packages and curricula to create schools where parents want to send their children.  We all should remember that the Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association whose income is diminished by every kid who leaves a broken unionized public school.  The actual financial impact is negligible and/or minimized by various convoluted ‘make whole’ programs at the state level, but it all sorts in Osborne’s article.  The bottom line that’s a shot in the shorts for the unions is their mismanaged and mostly unfunded teachers’ pension programs.  These rely on more younger teachers paying into the expanding ponzi scheme from which the retiring teachers’ pensions will be drawn.  And that’s where the under-performing unionized schools don’t have anywhere else to turn.  So put the claims of Warren, Sanders, and even ol’ Uncle Joe about charter schools into perspective when they tell you (perhaps at tonight’s debate) that charters take money away from public schools.