Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 20sep21

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be – starting with the lawyers and enactors. Lao-Tzu (as embellished by Rebane)

George Rebane

The wisdom of Lao-Tzu was brought to my attention again by a friend and reader.  Jeff Thomas, a true conservetarian, wrote ‘The First Libertarian?’, an important little essay on governance – its ills and desiderata.  In it he distilled some more useful aphorism from the great sage.

Those in power are meddlesome.

The greater the restrictions and prohibitions, the more people are impoverished.

The more advanced the weapons of the state, the darker the nation … thus the virtuous attend to contracts, while those without virtue collect taxes.

Act before things exist, manage them before there’s disorder

Trickle down taxes is a specialty of the Democratic Party which it sells gift-wrapped in a couple of its perennial Big Lies – raising taxes does not impact economic behavior (the Laffer curve doesn’t work), and corporate taxes lower the tax burden on the working class.  They correctly assess their constituents as being too ignorant to questions such lies, but they know both of them to be false.  For example, Kennedy lowered taxes in xx to stimulate the economy.  And corporations pay no taxes but pass that cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices, which quietly impacts most the poorest in the land.  And a tax not even the Democrats want to talk about is inflation – always government induced (more here and here).  The worker bees’ bigger paychecks don’t give them any more buying power, but do promote them into higher tax brackets (plus higher sales taxes) which surreptitiously increase their overall tax rates.  But our leftwing elites have no worries about pushback from their Democrat voters, people who are totally oblivious to such economic factors, and continue to believe that their political leaders are making corporations and the rich pay their ‘fair share’.

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

In the days of yore we had a national institution called the Fourth Estate – professional journalism.  It was staffed by reporters taught by their editors to be ‘curious, hard-bitten skeptics’, always seeking alternative sides to what they were being told.  In a recent piece (here) by national columnist Gerard Baker, “The good reporter doubted whatever he was told, even what time it was. He’d weigh competing accounts and explanations and actively seek out alternative versions. Read the bios of great reporters from the past and they’ll be scattered with adjectives like ornery and insubordinate.”

More than ever, today the country is faced with major crises, manufactured and managed in the media – Covid pandemic, open borders, unbounded debt, preventable man-made climate change, catastrophic crime rates, race relations, CRT school curricula, accelerating dumbth of the electorate, rogue ‘deep state’ departments destroying businesses and lives, retreat of US hegemony, and on and on.  In any sense of the word, facts about these are no longer reported.  “‘Reported’ is a misnomer. They aren’t facts; (instead) they are sacred revealed truths, unchallengeable arguments invested with epistemic certainty and moral clarity.”

“Journalism is no longer about trying to tell us what happened; it’s about telling us what we must believe, on pain of moral peril. On every major topic, … every story blares out at us with censorious didacticism, the journalist’s smug disdain for the unbelievers pouring through (their) prose.”  (Full disclosure - as declared here years ago, I am NOT a journalist.)

With journalism in the bag, it didn’t take long for other national institutions to corrupt everything that they were supposed to inform us about.  Everything coming out of our law enforcement agencies, public health institutes, justice departments, the judiciary, legislatures, environmental bureaus, commerce, elected politicians, …, everything they declared, stated, published, etc had a short half-life as truth.  Many of the lies today are so blatant that they scarcely last through the news making interview.

Leaders in this downfall are what we here label as the lamestream media.  These are broadcast, internet, and hardcopy outlets that overwhelmingly toe the Left’s progressive narrative, and serve as the reliable trumpet of the Democratic National Committee and leadership elites.  They package and embellish only the part of the news that serves to cement leftwing talking points du jour.  This is easy to tell from both these pages and simply comparing news items (no matter how reported) from both rightwing and leftwing outlets.  As the liberals here daily confirm, the lamestream covers only a subset of items that are found on rightwing outlets like Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, and associated websites.

(The latest tactic to assure that the future generations of voters are compliant double dummies, anti-education Democrats, led by Oregon governor Kate Brown, who has now surreptitiously signed a law that makes reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates.  One can never have enough uncritical, true-believing constituents.  I expect this initiative to be replicated in other Democrat led states – more here.)

Rightwing outlets, led by Fox, claim to be “fair, balanced, and unafraid” of the censorious Left and their rampant cancel culture.  But unfortunately that also is not true.  There is plenty of evidence that rightwing outlets have a healthy fear of political incorrectness and retribution.  A timely example should suffice to spread the blame.  MyPillow’s Mike Lindell is a longtime staunch Trump supporter, and a leader in the rightwing movement claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.  Lindell is sponsoring a limited attendance 3-day Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls that started today (more here).  Almost every leftwing outlet of any stature has been dunning and denigrating the conference as another rightwing attempt to once more convince the country of the fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.  Lindell has been a big advertiser on Fox News and also wanted to advertise his symposium on the network.

FN said no, and not only no, but it didn’t even include mention of this otherwise covered conference in its news broadcasts.  For a change, you had to watch CNN and MSNBC to learn of Lindell’s latest effort to keep the election fraud pot boiling.  Not only did FN’s news programs shun Lindell’s gathering, but so also did that king of conservative commentary on Fox, Tucker Carlson, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.”  Carlson has taken on the Left on some pretty controversial and damning issues.  He advertises himself as being Mr Balls-to-the-floor himself when it comes to reporting what others hide.  But Tucker has been too scared to even mention Lindell or simply report the massive vituperation thrown at him on the lamestream.  This reflects poorly on Carlson and doubly so on his colleague Bret Baier, FN’s lead news anchor on their flagship news program.  I am saddened by all this duck-and-cover fear in a network I used to hold in high esteem.  (We’ll see what Tucker says tonight.)

Gerard Baker concludes his piece with – “The modern journalist is different. His primary ambition is to be part of the expert class, to identify as a member of the cultural elite, happily swaddled in all their shared nostrums. He’s most content when he’s wagging a finger at the selfish fools who continue to doubt climate extremism, express skepticism about vaccines, or deny their innate white sinfulness. … His virtue thus signaled, he luxuriates in the knowledge that he’s on the side of the chosen ones. It’s just a pity it’s no longer journalism.”

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

[Later]  Neither Bret Baier nor Tucker Carlson on Fox News made mention of Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium which continues for two more days.

Ruminations – 6aug21 (updated 11aug21)

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.

George Rebane

Socialist economists don’t understand why millions of workers’ real wages have not increased in the last, say, thirty years.  The answer is simple.  Labor is a cost, why increase that component of cost when it has contributed nothing to the increase in productivity.  That wages are tied to delivered productivity is an economic concept totally lost on socialists, and even more distant for their local double dummies who believe that somehow you should be paid more the longer you can hang on and keep fogging the mirror.

The Bumblebrain Bunch doesn’t think that Republican governors who cut off government checks to the unemployed had anything to do with the big increase in July’s employment number.  This is another illustration of inter-ear density by the Left that can’t connect consumer money flows to their economic behavior.  For them it has been an eternal mystery since the days of Marx.

Texas governor Greg Abbott is being dunned by the Democrats for the state’s spike in C19 cases.  None of these worthies are aware of the ongoing border crisis and the hundreds of thousands of illegals, thousands of whom are infected, being gratuitously released into the country.  The more important aspect of this is that their millions of terminally ignorant constituents have no idea that this has been going on and is only getting more critical with every passing day.  All part of their anti-American program to destroy the US as a sovereign nation-state.

[7aug21 update]  ‘College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened’.  “Black college graduates in their 30s have lost ground over three decades, the result of student debt and sluggish income growth.”  Nowhere in such articles is pointed out the kind of degrees obtained by blacks vs whites/Asians.  For example, the ratio of black-to-whites who graduate from college is pitiful, and of those black graduates, how many get degrees that provide employable skillsets.  Not all college degrees are created equal, and that goes double in today’s academe awash with ‘soft majors’.  To that we add intellectual demographic distributions, the impact of which is most devastating. And finally, today it’s not possible to examine this problem to discover its real contours and where public policies can do most good.  (more here)  The Left will stand for none of it; they depend on the status quo of victimhood.

[8aug21 update]  African-Americans in TV commercials.  Ever notice that the overwhelming majority of TV commercials, say 80%, feature blacks and often other people of color.  Blacks make up about one of eight Americans, yet they are extremely prominent, way beyond their ‘equity’, in our public face.  That I and other non-blacks don’t mind this nor demand equity in such displays should be accepted as more strong evidence that America is not a racist country.  I just wish that people would take more notice and joy from such evidence.

[9aug21 update]  More on C19 vaccines, vaccinations, and face masks.  To demonstrate how unsettled science is about this dreaded pandemic, here is a video of some expert testimony from a physician and virologist. (H/T to correspondent)

[10aug21 update]  The march of the double dummies gathers momentum.  Oregon governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that made reading and math proficiency optional for the state’s high school graduates – ‘Oregon governor signs bill suspending math, reading proficiency requirements for HS graduates’.  Our Democrat proto-Marxists are firming the foundations of the United Socialist States of America by ramping up the level of ignorance and control of the next generation of their compliant constituencies.  And they know that people with even vestiges of critical thinking skills would object to this blatant demolition of our public education, so it all happened hush-hush.  Let’s see how fast the other states start picking up such advances in equity.

[11aug21 update] The CBO on Trump’s tax cuts as reported on Fox Business.  Just out from the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s corporate tax cuts paid for themselves in 18 months, and his personal income tax cuts almost paid for themselves by the eve of the pandemic (and would have easily provided more government revenues had the pandemic not happened).  This should silence our liberal readers who have long maintained that tax cuts, especially Trump’s, never pay for themselves, therefore more taxes are always necessary to pay for more vote buying (aka government “investments”).  And the takeaway is still, ‘corporations don’t pay taxes, people do’. (more here)

Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

"... the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

George Rebane

CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind - high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet - The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

The Great Divide – an updated review (updated 20jul21)

George Rebane

This piece on the Great Divide is a continuation of the thread I started with ‘America the Unnatural’.  The July issue of Chronicles from the Charlemagne Institute features a series of articles under the heading ‘Divided America’.  I bring these to your attention because they contain excellent reports and analyses of the socio-political state of our country.  And also because these three essays appropriately summarize my own views over the years under the rubric of Rebane Doctrine.  I believe them to successfully make the case that Rebane Doctrine has widespread support among a sizeable cohort of rightwing thinkers and writers.

The first is ‘A Tale of Two Americas’ by Bruce Frohnen.  Its main proposition is that “The United States has split into two peoples with two fundamentally different characters”, and as a result “we are a nation and people at war with itself”, or as I have maintained that we are two nations struggling in and enclosed by a common border.  Frohnen goes on to point out that “this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate peoples with two fundamentally different characters. Worse, only one of these characters is capable of self-government in a free, constitutional republic.”

Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)

George Rebane

[This commentary appeared here in the 5jun21 op-ed pages of The Union.  The response in the newspaper’s online edition comment stream was as predicted (by publisher Don Rogers among others), and I expand on this in the addendum below.]

In my last two Other Voices columns – ‘Farewell Unity’ (2apr21), ‘Where exactly are we going?’ (19apr21) - I apparently miscommunicated the outlined steps to reunify our politically polarized land.  Liberal readers misunderstood that I was inviting our neighbors of the Left to abandon their desiderata for a fundamentally transformed America, and simply adopt those that we of the Right embrace.  Nowhere did I make such a proposal.

My main point was and still is that we should not start on the road to reunification with the much ballyhooed, premature, and therefore misguided search for ‘common ground’.  As it continues to be demonstrated by calls from both sides, that approach has been a futile undertaking over the last few years.  I offered a three-step sequence toward reunification that must start with an heroic effort to meld elements of our distinct ideas for a future America into a compromised list of shared attributes for governance and social policies.

If we can successfully come up with such a collection of ideas, then that list of mutually acceptable and shared attributes will naturally give us the basis for a common ground from which to attempt the concluding step.  The recommended sequence is concluded by both sides joining in the effort to forge a unified format for America’s future, concurrently with the process by which such an envisioned America shall come to pass.  By this I mean that the outlined structure and the process to achieve it, must necessarily be put in place through, say, a productive give-and-take convention of the parties, so that both sides see the same end and also the means to achieve it as a feasible political enterprise to take place in the out years.

The nearby diagram attempts to convey this graphically.  In its examination, it’s important not to get hung up on the descriptions of each side’s currently desired America.  They are included here only to illustrate that it is these disputed objectives, as perceived by the other, that are the underlying causes for our polarization.  If such a reunification process is actually attempted by our Democrats and Republicans, then each will bring to the table their own descriptions of their desired America which will serve as a starting point.  Finally, even this approach does not guarantee success.  Nevertheless, if we cannot agree to work for a common America, then a Great Divide, achieved peacefully or through violence, is in our future.

[Addendum]  A quick perusal of The Union's comment stream to this commentary reveals that the most recent tranche of liberal readers replicate the cognitive deficits exhibited by the readers of my two preceding columns that introduced a more productive process toward possible reunification than the one that starts with finding common ground which has been fruitlessly bandied around by politicians and in the national press.

Again, our liberals show they have no understanding of the direction Biden’s policies and the congressional Democrats are taking the country.  They vehemently deny that it is toward socialism, and some in turn accuse Republicans of promoting fascism as our future.  None of these worthies give a hint that they understand the definitions of either ideology.

I need to point out that predictably Steven Frisch, the local Left’s leading intellectual light, also made his appearance.  And a very disappointing effort it was.  He had no idea what to make of my column, instead he took the opportunity for what he thought would be another personal detraction that would confirm his followers’ rejection of my recommended approach.  His words –

Thought I would leave this little post by George from over at his blog here for people to consider as they think about his system for finding a "Unified Format for America's Future"...."Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event. After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders. Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united? " --yep, George Rebane.

He was quoting from my intro to ‘Sandbox – 2jun21’ in which I took Biden and the country’s lamestream media to task for their obvious use of the Tulsa Massacre to further divide America.  And Frisch, again displaying his extremely limited knowledge of national dialogues, thinks that I am somehow again a misguided lonely and deranged voice in the wilderness.  He has no idea of the number of columnists and conservative academics who measured Biden to a similar standard.  My own opinion was closely matched by black academic Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute from whose linked column I used his “racial catharsis” to characterize the reporting on the Tulsa centenary.

So yes, given this level of ignorance amplified vitriol, there is no indication that any rational approach to reunification will be accepted by the Left.

[13jun21 update]  The comment stream to this piece in the online Union has grown considerably, it now numbers above 150.  What I need to point out here is that no leftwing Union reader has yet to understand and critique the 3-step process to unification that I detail.  Almost all the comments are regurgitations of baseless ad hominems against me and RR.  The sad reflection on the hopelessness of starting a productive national dialogue on ANY issue is that the vituperations don’t even provide any specifics to substantiate their naked assessments and name-calling.  The apologetics to support contentions on this website are voluminous and rich with citations.  The Left’s demonstrated intellectual capacity appears not able to undertake a reasoned debate on any of it.  As a group, they are innocent of even the most basic definitions required to understand and engage.  This is USA in 2021.

The Blessings of Inequality

George Rebane

We are in the age of trading equality for equity.  Why?  Because equality at the start of any road quickly leads to inequality among the travelers - given equal opportunities, some get further ahead than others.  That’s how it has been, is now, and always will be the human condition.  To the socialist such results are anathema.  To them an enlightened governance will use force as needed to assure that society advances in a tight equitable cohort in which no one is left too far behind, and no one gets ahead too far.  And the governing elites will decide and manage what is ‘too far’.

As history has shown elsewhere and also in our land, policies that impose such equities produce stagnating economies in which the lot of the citizenry is uniform misery that takes many forms as individual freedoms are pruned over time.

Over the last 250 years, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the west, we have witnessed an enormous blossoming in the quality of life (QoL) for all classes.  These range from fewer and less menial jobs with shorter hours, better living conditions with more stuff, an explosion of arts and entertainments, and longer lives during which to enjoy all these blessings.  Moreover, these betterments have inevitably spread across the world, raising billions of people out of droll and desperate lives that their ancestors suffered for centuries.

A closer look at how this all came about immediately reveals the role of inequality that sprung up in the new middle classes which were enabled by ever more liberal governments that inherited western culture.  In the 19^th century trade and industry allowed those who could and would to quickly leap ahead of their more sanguine and status quo satisfied neighbors in growing their assets.  The last two centuries contain countless stories of single-generation leaps from abject poverty to undreamed of wealth by entrepreneurs who took risks investing their time, health, money, and comfort to bring something new and useful to market.

And all of them knew that what they introduced would initially garner resistance and criticism in the marketplace.  Their driving hope was always that there would be a cohort of potential customers with the means and curiosity to give the new product or service a try, for these also would be taking a risk to buy something that might not work.  But it was always those having sufficient money set aside who could take that risk to enjoy and/or incorporate the new thing into their lives or businesses.

The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

George Rebane

You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.

As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’  Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism.  The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens.  Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.

All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media.  A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –

1. Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
2. Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
3. C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
4. HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
5. Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
6. Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
7. Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
8. There is no human crisis at our southern border;
9. Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
10. The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
11. BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
12. America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
13. America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
14. The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
15. Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
16. Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
17. America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
18. The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
19. There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
20. The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.

And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible.  There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty.  (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)

The Futility of Searching for Common Ground

George Rebane

My original ‘Quo tendimus?’ piece (here) was published in the 20apr21 Union (here) retitled ‘Where exactly are we headed?’, I guess, to make it more accessible to the newspaper’s readership who are classed not capable of googling the original Latin.  The article immediately drew the vitriol, ire, and personal invective from a long list of local liberals, not one of them having understood the thrust of my offer of a new approach for finding common ground which may help us start back on the road to unity.  None showed the ability or propensity to discuss the presented ideas.

They all exhibited what has become the common denominator for the worldview of the nation’s main street Left (aka Democrats).  None of them are aware of the ideological sentiments of the political leadership that today dictate the Democrats’ policies in economics, education, foreign policy, workplace, environment, … .  Citing the names of such thought leaders and identifying example pro-Marxist policies for these light readers is like water off a duck – these cannot serve as substance for them because they know not how such policies have historically ushered in socialist autocracies.

So they accuse me, and anyone else with a similar portfolio, as providing no backing for our characterizing the Left’s desired destination for social order and the government required to implement and maintain it.  The short of it is that a conversation with them cannot be started even at this low level of reason.  One must take these unwilling people back to a grade school that no longer exists and the return to which would be a gargantuan task.  (Here is how one parent of one of today’s exclusive woke grade schools reacted with an eloquence which was totally lost on the school’s leftwing administration.  H/T to reader.)

And yet, the road forward that we can travel together must be selected through a process such as I have outlined.  The argument is simple.  Once again, identify your destination social orders,  attempt to compromise on one that you both would tolerate.  At this point you can begin sorting out the kind of public policies that would bring about and maintain such a social order.  If you are still fortunate to agree on a feasible set of those, only then can you select a road that you can walk together toward your mutually agreed on destination.  And until then you can do nothing other than continue drawing apart as you shout epithets at each other across the widening chasm.

Our liberal and more zealous progressives understand none of this.  While they quack like socialists, walk like socialists, they all still consider being labeled a socialist as some kind of petty political name-calling.  They simply resent being identified as collectivists, which messaging is carefully managed by the Democrat Party and its lamestream media. The bottom line here is that these people still consider themselves to be middle roaders, as they promote and support all the trappings of a collectivist leviathan government.  Hence, the ongoing futility of searching for common ground that must preamble unity.

On a totally separate matter, I continue to note the reaction and participation of local conservatives cum Republicans in such debates.  These people are chronically absent from the public forum’s political frays that are a necessary feature of democratic republics, especially as constituted by peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds and practices.  Our local Republican Party does literally nothing to support those few of us locals who daily engage in the national debate with collectivists, those who want to fundamentally transform America.  The rightwingers are absent from the fray, year after year spending time in cliquish enclaves, echoing their sentiments to each other, while hoping that somehow the great political outdoors will discover their number and cloistered apologetics, and spontaneously morph into good constitutional conservatives.

Quo tendimus? (updated 20apr21)

George Rebane

[My ‘Farewell Unity’ commentary was also published in the 3apr21 Union (here). Its lengthy comment stream made clear again that most liberals had trouble understanding my proposition for finding common ground.  Nevertheless, the piece has since then garnered considerable interest.  This week the newspaper printed on separate days not one, not two, but three op-ed columns by liberals delivering most revealing critiques of the future Americas desired by both sides – ‘Path to unity in America’(13apr21) by Elliot Schneiderman, ‘A point of near unity’(15apr21) by Paul Hauck, and ‘Finding Unity in America’(16apr21) by Nory Fussel.  When “retired scientist” Schneiderman took me to task, I responded with the piece below, prematurely, it turned out, since I was not aware of the subsequent op-eds by Hauck and Fussel.  I address the latter two in the addendum to this post.  Perhaps all this interest provides hope that the conversation toward unity, which I outline below, will start here or elsewhere.  20apr21 update - an edited form of this commentary was published here in the 20apr21 Union.  More here.]

I was halfway heartened to read ‘left-leaning neighbor’ Elliot Schneiderman’s 12apr21 ‘Path to unity in America’ response to my 3ap21 ‘Farewell Unity’ column.  It appears both of us support a future America that is persistently hailed by our Right, and seldom if ever described by our Left.  In fact, Elliot takes exception to the neo-Marxist future that I describe, and the one to which the current administration and the Democrat leadership publicly subscribe.  These disparate visions of America are well documented by the commentariats of both sides.  Elliot writes -

George quite wrongly states that “our neighbors on the left work feverishly for” this Marxist global government world view. I’m on our country’s left and will have none of it, I don’t personally know a single American that would ascribe (sic) to it, and I am convinced that the vast majority of our country’s left do not ascribe (sic) to it.

This remarkable view from the Left is easily explained by the recorded half-century decline of our progressive schools that have assiduously omitted any mention of such historic realities.  And it is easily confirmed through conversations with a sampling of your left-leaning neighbors, especially the ones cited by Elliot.

Socialist Semantics

“When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just when and what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.”  (With apologies to Lewis Carroll.)

George Rebane

We talk past each other because we share no common logic, reasoning, history, facts, …, and yes, no common semantics.  One side demands to know what words mean during a dialogue or debate, the other side wants to avoid such revelations at all costs.  This has been clear since at least the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, because for the Left history is in a constant state of political and ideological revision.  The role of any given word today may have to change markedly tomorrow when responding to unforeseen events or opportunities.

We recognize socialism as one of the prominent limbs of collectivism, a form of that overarching ideology that readily can morph into communism or one of many less-formalized forms of totalitarianism.  The common denominator of all these is that the individual derives value only to the extent that he succumbs to and supports the regime in power, all others are cast into various groups of traitors, seditionists, insurrectionists, and other repressed kinds of ‘counter-revolutionaries’.  Today in America we see and already experience harbingers of such class categorizations by the ascendant Left and their lamestream media.

As examples, none on the Left can or will give the public any stable or even conditionally stable definitions of their workaday pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘fascist’, ‘deplorables’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, … , and terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white nationalism’, ‘equality’, ‘equity’, ‘racial preference’, … , and of course ‘sedition’ and ‘insurrection’.

Such use of slippery semantics by the Left occurs at all levels of our society ranging from the federal government all the way down to our local leftwing worthies who comment on RR.  Examples of these abound.  On one end, we refer you to today’s attempt by Biden to end-run Congress on gun control and the Second Amendment collected under the undefined rubric of ‘gun violence’.  Any reasonable view of his “six initial actions” (here) reveals that nowhere does he define or point to definitions of such key terms as ‘ghost guns’ and ‘assault weapon’, or the scope of his proposed nationalized ‘red flag’ law.  Everyone on both sides knows that the objective here is to enable another major ratchet on restricting the constructive use and ownership of firearms, therefore definitions always need to be malleable.

On the local level a leftwing worthy continues to echo (here) the Left’s Big Lie that the 6jan21 storming of the Capitol, enabled by an incompetently led and permissive cadre of Capitol Police, was an “insurrection”.  I countered with my habitual attempt to uncover the Left’s pernicious use of language by citing the classical definition of insurrection.  (See also the RR ‘Glossary & Semantics’ and ‘A Conservetarian Credo’.)  The only response that our leftwinger could muster was to accuse me of hiding behind semantics, the correct use of the English language – to wit, “… semantics, the weakest of all responses to be used only when you have nothing else to say.”  There was no need for anyone to say anything more in that case than to point out the man’s egregious use of language.  Yet, at a loss for a wider access to vocabulary, he then demanded what I would call the 6jan21 event at the Capitol.

Well, since there was no evidence whatsoever of any preparation or execution of actions to overturn our sitting government and replace it with one waiting in the wings, I would call the penetration of the building a spontaneous civil disobedience, a mob action, or even a directionless and chaotic riot by a frustrated crowd.  To confirm this, the investigations launched in response have not been able to find evidence for anything more sinister and/or organized that occurred on that day. Yet it was an event which daily our Democrats still attempt to inflame and divide Americans by equating it to the 7dec41 and 11sep01 ‘days of infamy’.  Here we see one more subversion of semantics by the Left, as they broadcast propaganda at its best and most effectively against intellectually defenseless people burdened by being educated in progressive public schools.

Scattershots – 7apr21 (updated 10apr21)

George Rebane

Crime rate spikes ignored by Democrats and their local lackies.  Notice that no one on the lamestream commentariat or in the Dem leadership has even breathed of the massive increases in serious crimes that have occurred across the country in response to their butt stupid policies to cut back on police support, both financial and political.  (google 'crime rate spikes')  All of this is part and parcel of the national decay that leftwing anti-Americans of all stripes are vigorously promoting.

Only the Dems’ leadership and the country’s Right know that the Dems’ progressive policies are designed for a socialist future.  The Left’s rank and file remain eternally bamboozled as to where their leaders are taking us.  They literally have no clue as to the nature of our intended destination (e.g. note leftwing commenters here and under my ‘Farewell Unity’ column in The Union).  I keep being told that there is no evidence that any such policies exist and/or are publicly promoted and planned.  These lightly read innocents have been taught to deny all such evidence, be it crime rates, border crisis, climate change regulations/taxes, infrastructure stimulus, or extended Covid lockdowns.  Now they upped the game with their characterization of the new Georgia voting law as being the return to Jim Crow, and then continuing to maintain that chorus of lies even in the face of broadcast side-by-side comparison of Georgia to other states, and the collected participation stats from past elections.  Their leadership knows that their constituencies are too comfortable to remove their heads from their eternally shady orifices (example here), so they and the lamestream keep repeating everything, only just a little bit louder.  Note also the op-ed participation of our local practitioners of fair and balanced journalism.

[10apr21 update]  At Crabb’s Colloquium there’s a lively debate about who in Georgia can offer water etc to people standing in line to vote (here).  There the local lefties all echo the lamestream in claiming that the state’s new voter suppression law contains a blanket prohibition for anyone offering such succor, and is not limited to those wishing to solicit or impact votes.  The legislators who drafted the law and the country’s Right all interpret the law correctly as intended, and claim no such prohibition absent solicitation for votes.  Our local Left instantly claims that anyone (like me) who expresses such erroneous thoughts is either ignorant or lying; for them there are no other alternatives.  For them ‘E pluribus unum’ always means that from the many other available and reasonable possibilities on any issue, there is only the one possibility which corresponds to the Left’s narrative du jour.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the recent 'Dark Days Diary' (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have pointed out here and he confirms, the spread of that evil ideology is made possible by its acolytes initially gaining control of a target nation’s public educational system.  This is from the Marxist-Leninist playbook – ‘let me educate one generation of your youth to assure communism’s triumph.’  In the United States we are now educating the third generation with a curriculum that ranges between pure trash and collectivist propaganda.  And this is done in our public K-12 schools and also academe, which has for the most part eliminated all dissenting voices and thought on their campuses.

The onerous task is being carried out by teachers’ unions and faculty associations which have wholeheartedly embraced the goal of a socialist world order.  Their success can be measured by the fraction of our graduates who are profoundly ignorant of their American heritage and equally lacking skill sets which enable their entry into a productive workforce.  A disturbing share of them find work with government as the employer of last resort.  There they immediately fit in with the correctly thinking and compliant deep state extension of the Democratic Party, doing its work no matter who currently happens to control Congress or reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

For the Left, this fortuitous outcome is to a large extent the fault of our ‘go along to get along’ Republicans.  Over the years they as the conservators of our Constitution have shown little interest to understand and backbone to resist the nation’s ratcheting of anti-American public policies.  The Republicans appear to measure their political progress by how good they feel when grumbling and griping about the Left to their likeminded constituents in cloistered gatherings.  These pity-party nodding sessions motivate only a trickling of attendees, if that, to take an active stance to counter the encroach of socialism in their communities.  The rank and file Republican returns to his homestead to continue living a productive and non-contentious life minding his own business.

The only plausible road back (from beyond the tipping point to the Great Divide) is to regain local control of educating our children.  Rebane Doctrine has long taught that to do this is to change education policy so that in the public funding of education, the money follows the students, and parents determine where the students are schooled.  This calls for a restructuring of our education industry into a more open market, capitalistic format, and away from the rank socialist structure of today.  In the main, K-12 education should be available to parents in the same manner as is the choice of a college education.  This means that schools would become transparent for-profit institutions that make their performance (quality of their product) accessible to their clients.  Overall, given today’s cost of education, such a change would significantly reduce costs, and increase the relevance and quality of the delivered education.

Our leftwing knows that Sapir-Whorf’s theory of language enabling thought (q.v.) is correct as was made public by Orwell and put in practice on a national scale by Mao et al.  Today’s public educated true believers can neither conceive the existence of alternative ways to organize a beneficial society, nor understand where our nation’s present path is taking us (e.g. evidence of that abounds in these pages).

No one knows the truth of all this more than does our Democratic Party which has viewed their support of socialized education as required maintenance of their private manufactory of an ever increasing horde of compliant constituents and unquestioning voters.  The last thing our Left will tolerate is letting parents decide where their children will be schooled. 

Dark Days Diary – 2apr21

George Rebane

Various knowledgeable authors are trying to warn us of how the accelerating Cold War 2.0 with China (and Russia) can quickly spiral out of control into WW3.  The latest alert came last month with the release of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.  This fictional novel spins a very detailed and realistic tale that outlines the road to an international disaster.  This road was laid out under Obama and the Biden administration continues paving it today.  What the two former military authors – Elliot Ackerman (former Obama national security advisor) and retired admiral James Stavridis (former CINC NATO) – don’t explicitly take into account is the rampart politicization of our armed forces into a doctrinaire and woke military.

Decorated marine veteran and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Mackubin Owens spells out our military disaster in the making in ‘War goes woke’.  There he details how the Pentagon’s transformed (under Obama) command structure has been subverted to the task of implementing “diversity over military effectiveness”.  It has also changed stripes by focusing on identity politics, dedicating itself to “eradicating ‘extremism’ and ‘domestic terrorism’ ideologies from the ranks, as well as all ‘racists, bigots, homophobes and bullies’.”  All this falls under the Biden administration’s adoption of the Democratic Party’s far-left anti-American goal of eliminating the US as the world’s white hat hegemon.

Has Bumblebrain Biden yet to do anything to benefit our country?  The daily answer to this standing question continues as a loud NO!  His $2T “infrastructure” travesty is the latest evidence that the man is an amalgam of dumb and evil.  The proposed amount to fix roads and bridges is 5% of the total, and a stretch to 15% if all possible items can be collected under the ‘infrastructure’ rubric.  His daily dose of big lies now doubles down on dunning Georgia’s excellent new election law, and telling America that his massive tax hikes on corporations and the ‘rich’ will not impact anyone earning under $400K.

All of that follows the socialists’ eternal belief, now embedded as Democratic dogma, that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  A more insidious fiction that the Democrats have consistently told main street is that taxing corporations does not impact jobs, salaries, investment, the supply of goods and services, locating facilities, and consumer prices.  The more than obvious fact is that they adversely impact all of these, especially to extent that corporations cannot pass on to their customers the full tax burden in the prices they charge.  The socialists’ eternally skewed understanding of economics totally blinds them to the existential reality that corporations don’t pay taxes, their workers and customers do.  The government’s bamboozle has always been to wave the ‘We’ll tax the rich corporations instead of you’ flag to divert the nation’s double dummies.  Under Biden, this subterfuge is now on steroids.

And then we have Bumblebrain’s border chaos.  The Big Lie that walls don’t work and that it is America’s moral duty to invite all the world’s dissatisfied to illegally enter our country continues to be heralded daily.  This policy has already created untold suffering and death among the throngs of invited aliens migrating through cartel-infested deserts in their desperation to reach the promised land with all the free stuff promised by our anti-American left.  The full cost to America from such illegal migrations is yet to tallied, and when it is again attempted, the numbers will be buried by the lamestream under a hundred false guises, and those who did the accounting vilified.

And all this is just a peek at some of what’s going down during these dark days.

[Later]  KGB defector Yury Bezmenov lays out the entire Rebane Doctrine story on the methodology of communism’s advancement in this 13.5 minute video recorded some years back.  This important piece of education was brought to us by one of this blog’s regular and more erudite readers.  I highlight it here because it clearly reveals what our Left has done to America since the Great Society gained traction after the Vietnam War.  What is important to note is that we can all see happening around us that which Bezmenov outlines from the KGB playbook.  And with the recent outing of socialism and socialist thought during the last decade, anyone who is paying attention can see that we are well beyond the tipping point if we continue as one nation headed for a collectivist autocracy.  There is neither time nor will to educate a new generation that will counter today's incontrovertible true believers.

For me, listening to Bezmenov takes me back to the years of my political awakening around the age of 12.  Before that I was taught and knew that communism was the world’s primary evil, but I took great comfort in the belief that we had successfully escaped it, because it was there and we were here.  Then listening to the political conversations of my parents and (Estonian) elders, it was they along with all east Europeans refugees who already knew and had witnessed what Bezmenov lays out.  The fact of the matter was that communism was not to be constrained in lands remote from America, but that it was an ideological disease which could easily morph, spread, devastate, and kill.  The ample evidence of that as I grew up ended my childhood sanguinity, and made me sensitive to how little our fellow Americans understood about the wiles of metastasizing collectivism.

Farewell Unity (updated 3apr21)

[This commentary appears as an op-ed column in the 3apr21 Union (here).  Unfortunately, a typo survived in the submitted version.  The sentence "Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that each total at least half of Americans."  The word 'each' does not belong.  Here I have also appended an abstract that summarizes the extended prose which some have found to be too challenging. gjr]

George Rebane

The calls for unity over the last years have fallen on deaf ears, most likely because they sound neither sincere nor feasible.  There is no need to recount the history of our country’s polarization, now widened to a chasm.  Those who care and have kept track know it, and the rest of our neighbors don’t appear to concern themselves much about the shared animosity that is firmly entrenched in our public square.  Yet we continue to hear virtuous sounding appeals, almost all from the Left, to adopt the plaintive ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ uttered by the once-famous philosopher Rodney King.

Most of us know that there is more to getting along than having the desire.  People who have a long history of distrust and distaste for the other need first to share some objective or purpose for breaching the chasm before anyone will start looking for workable paths through that common ground.  Today, our country is divided into two distinct ideological camps that total at least half of Americans.  The remainder are those indifferent, ignorant, or claiming to be ‘above politics’.  As the late Charles Krauthammer reminded us, no one in a liberal free society should be above politics, for it is only in that arena that we discover and practice the means to stay together.  In short, all communal life is bonded with the glue of politics, often understood as “the art of the possible”.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, made famous the shibboleth that you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.  After two generations of leftward bound public education, the reality of that wisdom has long passed by the board.  In our divided land people now hold not only their own opinions, but also their own facts, history, logic, causality, sense of justice, fairness, equity, equality, racism, …, all which define their worlds and worldviews.  Moreover, their windows on the world are distinct in the sense that they are chosen to confirm and vindicate their worldviews.

All serious, as opposed to specious, calls for unity should begin with a clear definition of the kind of world we want to achieve in common.  As a conservetarian, the world order I want for my children is made up of liberal and sovereign nation-states living and trading in peace, working together on big projects such as reaching for the stars, while learning best practices of governance from each other.  I also want America to remain the shining city on the hill with an inviting culture that honors our best traditions, rewards meritocracy, promotes the individual, prudently regulated capitalism, and opportunity for all its citizens under a constitutionally minimalist government.  Today the general contours of such a future are shared by at least half of Americans, those who gather on our country’s Right.

However, our neighbors of the Left work feverishly for a diametrically opposite world order, one in which humanity is joined under a strong and over-arching global government run by elites, and which has collected the former nation-states into well-ordered and compliant ‘socialist republics’.  In these, individualism is curbed in favor of cooperative class membership.  Peace among the classes is maintained through tightly regulated principles of equity used to enforce equal outcomes for all classes regardless of their contributions to the common weal.  In such a world, Marxist collectivism is the guiding principle for correct thought and public policy – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

Our Left sees a sovereign capitalist America as the main obstacle to such a world order.  Therefore, the political business at hand for them is to fundamentally transform America into a compliant peerage on the world’s geo-strategic stage.  And that must be achieved in a post-constitutional America through domestic policies designed to demonstrate collectivist leadership by visibly abolishing what the Left has identified as our country’s systemic racism and a culture of white supremacy.  The monitored metrics for this achievement will be class equity and correct thought in all aspects of public life.

Given these radically opposite futures that today divide us, any serious call for reunification as a nation, in my humble opinion, must first and foremost recognize and address the need to define a single America acceptable to the great majority of us.  All else is smoke and subterfuge to distract us on our current road to autocracy.  Without that we bid farewell to unity, and then what?

[Abstract]  To achieve national unity requires a three step process that we don’t recognize today.  To begin, finding ‘common ground’ (Step2) is sought for the purpose of defining and launching a mutually cooperative effort (Step3) to achieve a mutually agreed objective (Step1) – in the present case, the reestablishment of a preferably unified America.  Without the parties’ embrace of such a shared future, seeking common ground, let alone participating in a cooperative effort, is utterly futile.  The above commentary argues that since we literally have no hope of agreeing on a shared future (Step1), then prematurely issuing calls for unification through attempts to find common ground (Step2) is a useless exercise that serves only more cynical agendas such as virtue signaling.  

Working the Unity Myth (updated 25mar21)

George Rebane

Today’s Left seeks to suppress and supplant the legacy, history, and practice of Western culture as an evil instantiation of racism and white supremacy.

One of Jo Ann’s recent Union articles (here) addressed the futile attempts in the Left’s ongoing calls for unity, supposedly addressed to people like her – conservative, Christian women who pay very close attention to national affairs and are active in their communities. (more here)  The piece garnered a record reader response in print, online, and snail-mailed letters.  One heartfelt, well-written and long letter from a liberal woman gave Jo Ann kudos and concluded with a strong appeal for all of us to come together.  It is the ongoing flood of appeals like that, appeals that imply coming together is something as simple as throwing an attitudinal switch, that motivates the present reflection.

A Sad Commentary About Unity

George Rebane

In his inauguration speech President Joe Biden went out of his way to emphasize and promise that his would be the administration to heal the chasm that separates Americans and bring us together again – he would unite us all.  From the policy statements that his WH started to issue immediately put paid to that particular inaugural lie; the new administration’s efforts to unite handily beat the setting sun to the horizon on that auspicious day.

But lying is not the only precursor to the Left’s love affair with disastrous public policies.  We have to credit them also with a genuine desire to benefit society, which, after all, has been the overarching objective of collectivists – socialists, communists, …, Jacobins – since the French Revolution.  Their problem becomes evident when they present the fruits of their deliberations and then attempt apologetics to bolster their freshly minted policies.  It becomes immediately clear to most who pay attention, especially those with some book-learning, that their supportive logic for any given policy simply does not tie.  It isn’t the kind of logic that the rest of us have been taught and successfully practiced in our professions.

This dichotomy between thinking processes by the Right and Left continued unexamined and fruitlessly debated for over two centuries until some psychologists and brain scientists at the University College London decided to do a clinical study and try to answer the question of why the logics used by the two sides are so different.  I reported on that study (here and here), and was a bit astounded to learn it revealed that collectivists use a different part of their brains than do the conservatives to solve policy problems that require use of logic tools.

Dark Days Diary – 21 feb21

George Rebane

Litmus test for liberal mentality.  There is a very reliable test to identify a person sporting a well-developed liberal persuasion.  It can be administered within the comfortable confines of a casual conversation about almost anything socio-political.  A few questions about the person’s viewpoint or perspective, which can then be mildly challenged, will quickly reveal if that person ever considers that there may exist prima facie reasoned and valid viewpoints other than his.  If such a rejection turns out to be the case, the likelihood is very high that you are talking to a liberal.  If your discussant responds with a reasoned defense of his position, especially one that identifies well-formed weaknesses in the counter-position, then the likelihood is low that you are in the presence of a liberal.  In these pages we have years of such evidence.  As an example, a most prominent liberal commenter continues repeating the same pejorative assessment of Donald Trump with the surety that his viewpoint is the only one brought down the mountain on stone tablets.  The counter-arguments don’t exist, since for him they have been invisible.

The country’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic continues unabated.  Established medicines that would have greatly or even wholly mitigated the health impact of C19 were abolished by the Left from public access during Trump’s administration in order to enable policies that maximized body counts and the destruction of our economy, and established government controls that may have become ensconced destructors of our liberties.

The ‘party of science’ did everything unscientific that was possible to spread unfounded fear across the land, and it continues to this day.  As examples, the early banishment of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin along with mandated draconian lockdowns guaranteed the distress we all have witnessed.  Re-evaluating the effectiveness of HCQ and IVM, our FDA, NIH, and CDC have now begrudgingly permitted their qualified use in treating C19.  (e.g. here)

Right Wing Watchers

George Rebane

For some time now a hard-left commenter signing himself as ‘Nevada County Right Wing Watch’ has been visiting these pages and leaving a trail of his intelligence, understanding, and thoughts.  He claims to be part of an extensive organization, apparently one of several reported in the news that are doing their best to intimidate and shut down all wrong thought in the country.  It’s hard to tell how authentic all this is.  But it’s very easy to tell from both the news and as corroborated on this blog, that the communication between the polarized sides is extremely asymmetrical.  The Left wants to silence the Right.  The Right wants an open forum debate on ideas, happenings, history, economics, etc.

A microcosm of this activity has been recorded in RR’s comment streams for the last 14 years, and in recent years the exchange has become more intense.  During this time the leftwingers come here to repeatedly tell us that our views are grossly in error, evil, and that no one cares what we think – and yet they come.  All of them appear to think that the conservetarian ideas promoted by me and others are unique, constrained to a tiny group in these foothills, and only represent fringe far-right thought.  They have no idea of the existence of the tens of millions of every-day Americans with whom we are ideological soulmates.  From the content of their comments, it’s clear they think that if only they could silence RR, then such wrong thinking would be eliminated from the land.

In the following I present a couple of extracted comment threads from recent posts to give readers a clearer picture of the virulence experienced here and, no doubt, elsewhere.  We start with the contribution of our ever-vigilant Right Wing Watcher in a comment thread under ‘$15/hr Dumbth on the March’.

Facts, Speech, and Reach

George Rebane

We are all isolated from ‘facts’ by at least one layer of biased intermediaries.

In recent editions of our local Union we continue to read its columnists and letter writers who devoutly believe in and repeatedly cite versions of the late Senator Moynihan’s famous dictum – ‘You are free to have your own opinions, but not your own facts.’  In recent years our polarized country has demonstrated countless times that in addition to their own opinions, people now have their own histories, logics, social contracts, ethics, science, sense of justice, equality, equity, lexicons of highly charged terms, and, not least of all, their very own facts – and all of these backed by equally countless online citations.  The NYT acknowledges all this, asking “How do you unite a country in which millions of people have chosen to create their own version of reality?”  All of these realities are proudly on display in their heartfelt and intense communications that promote their own worldviews.  Who among us is the final arbiter of any of these cultural and ideological notions to pronounce that this is truth and that is not?

‘Speech and Sedition in 2021’

George Rebane

That is the title of the important lead editorial (here) in the 30jan21 WSJ, and very relevant to the ongoing discussions and debates on these pages.  The whole notion of speech-based sedition arose with the Federalists who essentially ran the government of the newly born United States.  The Federalists and their agencies, did not consider themselves as a political party, they simply saw themselves as THE government when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.  Therefore, any speech that opposed them or their ideas opposed the government, and was therefore by definition seditious.  The Democrats of today have overwhelmed themselves into the same government positions and the same mindset.

Today the WaPo again supplies one of the abundant confirmations of this by arguing that the Federalists’ stratagems with such legislation and its enforcements did not go far enough, and was therefore “flawed”.  This is buttressed by Democrats who “increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.”

Liberal Logic on Parade

My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.  It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.  Winston Churchill

George Rebane

This is another installment in RR’s educational series to illuminate the workings of a liberal mind.  As such it contributes one more important illustration of how the liberal mind functions, and why it is nigh impossible today to make any measurable progress when engaged with them in the understanding of political processes and the shaping of public policies.

Here one of our prominent liberal readers, burdened for years with a severe case of TDS, takes the former president to task once more for what to him is yet another of Trump’s lies – purposeful spread of deceit to harm Americans.  Before dissecting the errors, we examine the relevant parts of the exchange between the liberal and me as taken from the comment stream of the 23jan21 posting of Scattershots (here).

Scattershots – 23jan21 (updated 27jan21)

When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.” – Barton Swaim

George Rebane

California hides C19 data to insulate Newsom’s disastrous pandemic response policies from criticism.  Surprisingly, AP broke this story (more here), and the rest of the lamestream immediately clammed up about it.  As usual with the Left, this practice is well-established in all autocracies wherever they are implemented.  Don’t let the public discover that their government is wrongheaded, stupid, pernicious, or a sordid amalgam of all three.  Newsom is an established idiot with a penchant for control.  For almost the entire past year his stratagems against C19 have been totally ineffective or markedly underperformed those of almost all other states.  You have to be idiots-on-steroids like Cuomo and DeBlasio to outperform Newsom in governance.  (It takes a union-educated progressive not to know that California is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged one-party autocracy.  And California has them by the millions.)

Speaking of Newsom and the nationalization of California’s failures, here is a compendium of them by CA Assemblyman Kevin Kiley in a 21jan21 letter that he sent to President Biden.  In it he responds to Newsom’s plea to Biden to implement the Golden State’s disasters nationwide.  Have you signed the petition to recall Newsom?

Higher wages increase profits – well, at least “at times”, according to a 23jan21 piece (here) by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca in which they describe ‘efficiency-wage theory’.  This theory by some prominent leftwing economists proposes that paying workers more will increase retention and productivity.  And the cost benefits from these increases, for certain industries, primarily the 'shag and stack' kind, it may boost the bottom line for a while.  However, the special cases in which this may be true are few and far in between, and most certainly don’t recommend a national minimum wage policy.  Leftists who believe that some arbitrary amount, today $15/hr, will result in workers happy dancing in the streets are the same ones who still believe in perpetual motion, and that the moon is 1/49^th the size of earth, even though it is further away.  Henry Ford’s raising assembly workers' wages by almost double and reducing work from 9 to 8hrs/day did indeed increase productivity and retention enough to more than pay for itself.  But that was primarily due to the long lines of applicants outside the factory gates to replace those Ford would fire for not working their butts off for the firm.  This is not today's labor market.  Everything has its market price, and no matter how much governments attempt to mangle those prices, in the end reality will rule.  Biden’s Bunch knows none of this, and will do its damnest to show all how levitation by bootstraps will work.

[24jan21 update]  On vaccine distribution and administration, under its disastrous Democrats California now ranks dead last in getting the stuff out to the people who need it.  And double-dummy Newsom writes Biden to have the nation start following California's lead on public policies a bit more closely.  I guess he figgers that if the rest of the country gets as crappy as we are, then Californians won't notice the difference, and they won't have anyplace else to go, and maybe we'll even stop the recall petitions now circulating around the state.

[25jan21 update]  Bumblebrain’s latest Big Lie is one that is attributed to his victory over Trump, and also the ONLY thing the Dems could claim was his mandate from the electorate – to demonstrate how Trump was derelict in responding to C19, and to demonstrate how his administration will finally get the pandemic under control.  Well, as pointed out @914am below, he has no plan of his own that is better than what President Trump achieved with both the historically rapid development of multiple vaccines (Project Warp Speed), and the meticulously planned distribution of the vaccines to the states using military logistics.  What did the states do?  The Dem governed ones loudly declared that they didn’t trust Trump, and sat on their collective asses instead of preparing their states’ distribution plans.  Today most of their vaccines are still sitting on shelves and some are spoiling instead of saving lives.  But the bottom line for Bumblebrain is that his handlers have finally explained the matter to him, which is that he can do no better than Trump.  He admitted his Big Lie with “there's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months”. So, on what he got elected, he can’t deliver.  Compare that to the share of promised accomplishments by his predecessor. (more here)

For Sale - White Privilege Card.  I'm selling my white privilege card.  It's over 70 years old and still in mint condition. It has never been used.  Full disclosure - reason for selling is that it hasn't done a damn thing for me! No free college, no free food, no free housing, etc.  Prefer cash but would be willing to do an even trade for a different race card that is much more widely accepted!  Interested?  Contact me on my non-Obama cell phone that I pay for every month…  Serious buyers only!  (H/T to correspondent seeking a similar transaction.)

[26jan21 update]  Dr Fauci has an intimate connection with the development of the Corona virus, a relationship that calls into question his continuing role in the Biden administration as the head of its task force to develop national response policies.  This was reported Sunday night by FN’s Steve Hilton, and comes as a shock/surprise to most of the country. (more here)  It will most interesting to see how the current administration handles what normally would be a politically hot potato, and, of course, how the lamestream lackies then subsequently report on it.  (H/T to reader.)

[27jan21 update] ‘The 1776 Report’ by the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission arrived yesterday in the mail. (download report here)  This is a magnificent document that successfully counters the fanatically anti-American 1619 Project’s version of our country’s history and what our nation represents to the world. (more here) ‘1619’ forms the basis for a perverse curriculum that the country’s Left, supported by the Democratic Party, is injecting into our public schools as the main plank of its program to re-formulate our educational system according to the worldview and mandates of ‘critical race theory’ (full text pdf here).  For that reason, one of Biden’s first EOs was to shut down the 1776 Commission, and bury its work.  To those for whom the survival of the United States as a sovereign nation-state is paramount, ‘1619’ and CRT are manifestations of pure political evil.  Their intent is to fill the ranks of American citizens with people ‘educated’ to accept and comply with our collectivist elites, ensconced in the Democratic Party, whose aim is to meld what was America into a global amalgam of centrally-controlled satraps under a one-world government.  These are the times we live in.

Dark Days Diary – 18jan21 (updated 20jan21)

“Leftists in this country claim that their violence is speech and our speech is violence.” – Daniel Horowitz

George Rebane

The Democrats and their corporatist allies are prepared to remove the First Amendment, launch a surge of prosecutions for what we have always considered free speech, and then have their lamestream assert that the First Amendment is still in force while jailing those who claim otherwise.  This will be but the first step on the path to abrogate our Constitution in its entirety.  When this comes to pass, anyone and everyone who resists this phase of fundamentally transforming America will be labeled a seditious insurrectionist, and treated accordingly.

It appears now that the federal government deems everyone suspect of insurrection who attended the Washington pro-Trump rally.  Those who actually entered the Capitol, the people’s house, stand accused of insurrection.  The vandals who led the mob into the building while destroying and stealing property, and violating private spaces, deserve to be treated like the criminals they are.  However, there is no evidence that those few hundred(?) who also walked through then opened doors had any intention other than telling Congress that they were opposed to the ongoing certification of electoral votes which they firmly believed were tallied from an election abundantly laced with irregularities and fraud, the evidence of which was summarily rejected by the courts without examining the underlying substance.

Now the nationwide manhunt is on for all those who walked in and milled around the Capitol on 6 January 2021.  True to Orwellian, Stalinist, and Stasi standards, fellow citizens are encouraged to report to the FBI anyone they know or think was there (DC, Mall, Capitol?) on that fateful day.  History shows what kind of countries such massive snitch programs have created.  And there is only one political party that wants to create a government with encompassing tentacles to effectively pursue such programs of persecution. (more here)

Federal elections integrity is promoted by congressional Republicans with their introduction of their Save Democracy Act that “aims to close loopholes that prevent secure and fair general elections by strengthening voter registration verifications, narrowing rules for when and how mail-in ballots can be accepted, and mandating observers from each party is allowed to be present during polling and vote counting.”  Pew Research reports that only 5% of Trump voters and 64% of Biden voters thought the election was properly administered.  That’s a heap of folks who had less favorable opinions of how everything went down last November, and more than enough reason to do something positive to restore faith in the integrity of our elections.  Now let's see how far the Democrats permit this and other such measures to proceed.  (more here)

C19 vaccines continue to sit on shelves as most states have trouble getting the doses distributed to their inoculation sites.  Given the months of advance warning everyone received about when the vaccines would be available, most states sat on their butts instead of putting in place the needed procedures to get their residents vaccinated in a timely manner.  As we continue to note here, if there is any kind of problem in the land, look first to government as the source or cause of it, and you won’t have to look much further.  It turns out again that Texas leads and California lags – the correlation of performance with which party is in charge is striking, wonder why?  “Texas, with a population of some 29 million, has distributed just over 2 million doses and administered just under 1.2 million, as of Jan. 15, the CDC said. California, with 39.5 million people, has distributed over 3.5 million doses and administered just under 1.1 million.” (more here)

[19jan21 update]  Since it became clear that Trump’s appeals failed to overturn Biden win, the share of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction jumped markedly.  Today, according to the recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll (here), two out of three Americans agree with that assessment.  In December 49% answered ‘wrong track’, which assessment increased to 65% this month, with 84% Republicans and 52% Democrats concurring.  Of course, both sides feel that their right tracks head in the opposite directions.  Yet another measure of the size of the gulf that separates us.

‘Will Covid-19 shake up capitalism?’ is a popular question today that is covered by James Macintosh of the London WSJ (here).  He cites the current move leftward toward socialism that is making many people rethink capitalism, especially during the mish-mash of dubious responses that governments have initiated to fight the pandemic.  As examples of crises that have resulted in major changes to political economics, Macintosh points to the Great Depression and FDR’s misguided responses that still echo through the decades.  Then there was WW2’s aftermath which created the British welfare state that almost bankrupted the country.  The runaway inflation of the 1970s led to some beneficial changes with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.  Now there returns the great itch to undo Trump’s gains and once more pauper the country.  The argument by the leftists is that ‘look, under Trump’s capitalism 17 million people lost their jobs, and 10 million are still out of work’.  None of them are smart enough to figure out that it was the governments’ lockdown responses to C19 that caused the hit to the economy, not capitalism (see below).

‘It Took a Strong America to Survive 2020’ (here) is Walter Russell Mead’s more sober and accurate look at the political and economic roads we traveled last year.  Contrary to the Left’s histrionics, our political system has NOT been threatened and our economy survived the pandemic remarkably well, and is now recovering at a rapid rate.  However, this is not the narrative that is now being fashioned into the next Big Lie by the lamestream media which will paint Biden as the nation’s savior who arrived just in the nick o’ time.  If you thought the media had reached its low point during the last four years, you ain’t seen nothing yet – seatbelts please.

[20jan21 update]