Rebane's Ruminations

Swedish Rhapsody

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 January 2019.]

George Rebane

Today our socialist politicians feel that they have the wind at their back to fundamentally transform our country into the Socialist States of America.  And that may well be the case as poll after poll shows that for most Americans capitalism has fallen out of favor, or at best they are indifferent to its existence and role in supporting their quality of life.  The Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, are now the major voting block, having taken their positions in government and the private sector workforce.  Their attitudes reflect the education they received in our unionized public schools, and most are definitely in favor of socialism as the better way to organize society and our economy – over half prefer socialism to capitalism.

For most Americans, tilting leftward or already there, Scandinavia is their siren song of socialism.  And among those nations, Sweden is the posterchild and most frequent answer to, ‘Why can’t we be more like …?’  Sweden is held up to us by both progressive politicians and their handmaiden media as the paragon of how to correctly do government.

The mangling of managed minds

George Rebane

People who are informed primarily through media soundbites have been shown to have very volatile opinions.  When a new and contrary tranche of soundbites comes along, such people more often than not change their minds and follow the new direction of the most recent compelling soundbite.  This is because soundbite driven opinions are reactionary and not reasoned.  That is simply because the individual takes no time or effort to develop any depth of understanding in what he currently believes.  Finicky and fleeting feelings drive decisions for such people.  Bryan Caplan, in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, was one of the first to publish the research confirming how voters make decisions about issues and candidates.

The bottom line acceptance of Caplan’s findings is corroborated by how politicians and our news media (specifically the lamestream) construct their messages for soundbite thinkers.  This morning’s analyses of President Trump’s Oval Office speech last night is chuck full of such messaging.

One frequently used ruse is to dismiss stated levels by surreptitiously sliding the argument over to rates, and also dismiss inconvenient rates by citing the more fortuitous change in the offending rate.  [For the technically versed, this well-known process is known as ‘climbing the derivative ladder’ until you find the one that serves your narrative.]  An example here is the President’s citing the high number of illegals currently coming over the border.  This the lamestream journalist brushes off by telling listeners that the rate of illegals entering was higher in the past.  For innumerates and soundbite thinkers, this is an effective way to dismiss concern over the continuing rate of illegal entrants.  Presented in this context, it never occurs to them that what’s happening now is still a huge and preventable problem that overwhelms our border security personnel.

Pelosi’s “Immoral Wall” (updated 6jan19)

George Rebane

In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan documented a significant body of research which showed that in the US voters in the aggregate are what may be termed formally insane.  The general understanding of this phenomenon applies to populations all over the world, and its general characteristics were even known to the ancients.  Of course, our well-read Founders knew this, and that is why, in order to avoid the mistakes of the past, they wisely did not leave us a democracy.

The democratic republic they did construct and detailed in our Constitution is supposed to keep the hoi polloi’s mitts off the machinery of our federal and state governments.  They inserted a hopefully wiser and more circumspect layer of elected representatives between the mass of citizens and the levers of power.  The idea was that such electeds would be better read and would take a broader view of things that insured the country’s prudent progress.  Unspoken, save in their oaths of office, was the notion that all of these worthies would be pro-American – i.e. legislate so as to assure the republic’s prosperous and permanent future.

Our Founders had no idea of the world order in which America would find itself 250 years after declaring our independence.  Today two major ideologies, founded by Marx and Muhammad, are working to bring all the peoples of the world under one monolithic governing leviathan.  Each, in the interval, willing to work off the gains of the other in the firm belief that they will be the victor when the dust settles.  In the meantime, there will be a need for lots of dust, or ‘cracked eggs’, or whatever to bring the outdated global gaggle of sovereign nation-states to an end.

Marx’s collectivists today march to that brave new world mostly under the socialist banner, although swapping for the colors of communism (already/still solidly ensconced in the community of nations) is always possible were stronger medicine necessary to mind the masses.  Muhammad’s disciples, no matter their current schisms, see the global caliphate under sharia law as the culmination of Allah’s plan for his earthly creation.  Both can accept convenient amalgamations of the two on the road to their glorious destinations.

Dems Embrace Shutdown (updated)

George Rebane (updated)

Now in its second week, the partial (25%) shutdown of the federal government continues with the Democrats refusing to negotiate with President Trump.  The natural deal to be made is for the Dems to accept the $5B for border security (including all means and methods) and the Repubs to accept legalizing the residence of DACA aliens.

The Dems’ position is clear and repeated often – they will refuse Trump any legislative victories and will use their House majority in the attempt to bring down this administration through the launch of a thousand investigations into anything remotely connected with Donald Trump, either now or back then.  The logic behind it is clear.

Let the DACA aliens swing in the wind while the border remains porous and countless thousands continue streaming in.  Sooner or later the illegal alien share of America’s population will be so high (now above 30M by some estimates) that the only non-violent political solution will be granting amnesty to the lot, with border security still unresolved (see also A21).  All of these new residents with a paved path to citizenship will be Democrat voters whose numbers overwhelm the paltry hundreds of thousands in the current DACA cohort.  All that is required is a prudently pernicious patience on the part of the Left.

And during the interval, our lightly-read neighbors will constantly be fed the repeated lies that legal immigration is the same as illegal entry, and that ‘walls don’t work’.  NY’s Gov Cuomo is repeating that lie today on Ellis Island, and history shows that walls are and always have been very effective in preventing both ingress and egress where they have been erected and maintained.  The Dems are placing a smart bet that after three generations their educational systems have produced enough double dummies to swallow whatever is fed to them.

[update]  In ‘Our Exhausted American Mediocracy’ noted historian Victor Davis Hanson takes us through the notable sea change that accompanied and/or was revealed by Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.  It is a marvelous summary of a perspective attempted by many writers over the last two years.  VDH nails it, and includes illuminating sections addressing ‘Earned Hypocrisies?’ and ‘A Case Against Trump?’.  I bring this essay mainly to the attention of our liberal neighbors who seem to get these ideas only through RR – consider it a public service of purview broadening.  (H/T to reader)

More to the point of the contempt with which Democrat politicians hold their constituents, another oft told lie is told in response to every new atrocity committed by an illegal alien – most recently by Gustavo Arriaga murdering police officer Ronil Singh.  The Left glibly counters the violence committed by illegals by the bland claim that ‘immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born’, which their voters have no capacity to parse as to what that claim means.  In ‘The Immorality of Illegal Immigration’ VDH points out that ‘statisticians argue that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born, but never quite calibrate illegal immigrants into the equation (in part because no one has any idea who, where, or how many they are, as estimates range from 11 to 20 million) or note that second-generation native-born children of immigrants have much higher violent-crime rates than do their immigrant parents, and in circular fashion add to the general pool of violent Americans who then are used to contrast immigrants as less violent.’, and then makes the case that “we should redefine the entire morality of multifaceted illegal immigration.”

Scattershots – 16dec18 (updated 20dec18)

"Distrust of experts is the cornerstone of science."  Richard Feynman

George Rebane

CA’s revenue model is a disaster as we bid adieu to Gov Moonbeam (he got the name in the 70s when he proposed the state start its own NASA).  70% of state revenues come from personal income taxes, and half of these (i.e. 35%) are paid by the top 1% of earners.  These monies come from feast-or-famine earnings, making state financial planning virtually impossible.  Dems believe in corporations bearing a heavy tax burden, and that CA has been awash with big corporations.  What’s wrong with this picture as the state’s know-nothing electorate keeps sending ever more functional idiots to Sacramento?  And what does the exiting Moonbeam say? - "CA's next governor is going to be on the edge of a cliff."

NPR told us in detail this morning that it is America’s responsibility to reduce wait-times for hordes of asylum seekers encamped on the other side of our southern border.  It doesn’t matter at what rates these thousands of hopeful migrants arrive there, the lamestream tells Americans that it is their government’s job to expand immigration handling facilities and staff so as to minimize inconvenience and discomfort to aliens who demand entry into our land.  The whole narrative is sold to our nebbishes as the need to stop the US from violating some kind of human rights if foreigners are not processed lickety-split at our border crossing points.  The not so hidden message being that if they have to wait, then it is their right to enter illegally, at which point we either let them disappear into our population, or register them and start taking care of them indefinitely.

[18dec18 update]  Single Payer fake news is revealed once more.  The socialists promoting socialized medicine all over the world have to convert the US to that government-run system, else it continues to give lie to all their efforts to run such programs in other countries.  Dr Scott Atlas, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes ‘Single Payer’s Misleading Statistics’ in which he takes apart the fake news which the lamestream and its (also local) acolytes tout about how poorly the US is doing viz the other more enlightened countries with nationalized healthcare.  Well, for openers Dr Atlas shows that “mediocre US rankings in infant mortality and life expectancy have little to do with health care quality.”  He goes on to reveal the many kinds of apples-to-oranges comparisons that fake news purveyors have relied on for years to convince many Americans that since government has screwed up so many other things it has commandeered, our healthcare industry should also be put under its care and management.

Caltrans is the latest expert on climate change.  The 18dec18 Union reports (here),  “Caltrans has released two Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments as part of an effort to understand how and where climate change may impact the State Highway System, a news release states.  The assessments evaluate risks, including extreme temperatures, increased precipitation, storm surge, wildfire risk and sea level rise. … Extreme weather and its associated costs are expected to become more pronounced and more frequent in the future as a result of climate change. … Caltrans has developed an interactive mapping application for public use, which shows impacted locations and the climate model results. … The reports and the interactive mapping application can be accessed (here).”  Note physicist Richard Feynman's caution above.

‘DeBlasio Sees Too Many Asians’ – Yes indeed, NYC’s DeBlasio is another hard-left politician who supports socially destructive diversity through blatantly racist policies - once more proving that sacrificing racism on the altar of diversity is no sin.  The mayor argues that the merit-based admission process to the city’s eight elite high schools is unjust because Asians make up more than 70% of their student bodies, whites about 20%, and Latinos and African-Americans coming in around 5%.  Hizzoner displays his critical thinking and numeracy skills by pointing out that “only 10% of Black or Latino students get offers from the specialized high schools even though they account for nearly 70% of the city’s high school population.”  Well, no kidding.  As part of its contribution to national dumbth, NYC’s 3-8^th graders overall are less than 50% proficient in English and math, while for black students only one in three and one in four are proficient respectively in English and math.  And once more, the Left continues to do what it can in every sphere of public policy to promote America-last policies on the world stage.

[20dec18 update]  Pulling out of Syria.  This is a big step in the implementation of our Mideast policy.  I usually weigh in on such happenings, and here’s my two cents of Rebane Doctrine.  Unless we want to completely abandon the Mideast to let them settle their affairs with only Russian and Chinese meddling, I think Trump is making a mistake in pulling out the remaining 2K US troops from Syria.  This move will give ISIS a second wind to retrench as Turkey et al will attack our Kurdish allies in Syria – ISIS will stand aside and watch its enemies beat crap out of each other.  I am a longstanding proponent of Kurdistan, and see a strong Kurdish state made from contiguous pieces of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as contributing mightily to Mideast stability, and acting as the bulwark against Iran’s establishing its strategic ‘arc to the Mediterranean’.  The new Kurdistan would stand smack dab in the way of that, and having their own nation would bring an end to the Turks’ decades long fight in their south-east with Kurdish militants.

The US staying in Syria to maintain the current power balance is a hell of a lot better politically and logistically than pulling out and then having to go back in for a number of reasons, all bad for US interests.  But if we decide to leave the Mideast altogether, then the Turks and Iran will probably wind up going to war over who will be the new regional hegemon.  We will lose the trust of the regional semi-allies – Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt – we still have left, all of whom will seek other accommodations with Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China.  And then we’ll have to go back in later to protect Israel, which will be totally on its own in the region.  Are we then going to abandon Israel to use its nuclear capability to defend itself, or will we have to go back in at multiples of the political, dollar, and human costs to keep our promise to the Jewish state?  President Trump hasn’t told us what his druthers are about our staying in the region, or pulling up stakes and letting radical Islam have a real go at dominating the entire Mideast.  All things considered, a bit by piece pullout is not the answer to any problem.

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

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

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

Plastics and more from CO2

George Rebane

The latest chapter in the global climate change hysteria was published last week.  The ‘4^th National Climate Assessment, Vol2’ (NCA4V2) purported to summarize for light readers the dreadful fate that will surely befall all of us were we not to immediately put in place policies that would pauper ALL developed countries.   This is the only reason the others are not willing to commit economic suicide, and instead relegating their earth preserving wrath into versions of public outrage against the US for not willing to fly solo into that mountain of politicized climate science.

NCA4V1 was published last year, and contained the then ignored ‘science’ behind the current version of the hysteria.  Now that NCA4V2, the political summary of the 1,500+ page NCA4, has issued, scores of scientists and analysts, not on the climate change payroll, have again reviewed the purported science, and again concluded that both volumes represent a big nothing-burger at best and fake news at worst.  Specifically, the rebuttals echo the years of identical arguments presented on RR, and can be stated compactly as –

1. The NCA4V1 results are calculated from over two dozen general circulation models (GCMs), none of which agree, and some of them clearly implausible;
2. None of the GCMs “used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.”

We are alerted by Russ Steele (here) to one of the more comprehensive analyses of NCA4 by Andy May (here).  In there May points out that even in the NCA4’s summary, the economic effects of the predicted climate change are minuscule, and most certainly contain no verifiable demonstration that human activity is the controlling cause of the GCMs’ predicted temperature change(s), not that reducing such activities would have any significant effect on the perpetual dynamics of earth’s climate.

OK, so what’s the latest that real technology and science have to say about that dastardly GHG, yes, CO2.  Well, as reported by New Atlas (here) it turns out that a team of scientists at Rutgers University have achieved an artificial photosynthesis breakthrough that promises to allow the manufacture of plastics, resins, and pharmaceuticals “on the cheap”.  The overview of the process is shown in the figure, and the complete story is published in Energy & Environmental Science (Issue 9, 2018 here).

The point to be made here is that the realworld is rapidly giving lie to the climate change hysteria mongers rushing to put us on a one-way road to global governance and its inevitable autocracy cum tyranny.  The real climate change is not what’s being sold to the world’s masses, and accelerating technology continues to produce environment sustaining solutions without government diktats, driven by (gasp), yes, capitalism.  “With patents in hand, the (Rutgers) team will now work toward commercializing the technology.”

Monday with The Union

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  Isaac Asimov

George Rebane

The combined body count of the Camp and Woolsey Canyon fires has topped 100 with an additional 1,000 missing.  Perusing the lamestream media without second thought, one comes away with the understanding that, at best, the fires are one of the regular unpreventable disasters that regularly visit California’s wild lands due to natural causes out of our control.  At worst, we learn that the fires are really due to global warming which now has created the conditions for these inevitable holocausts.  Moreover, they could be prevented were we only to implement the prescribed surefire policies to stop, or even roll back, global warming.

As a lifelong (60+ years) California resident and a student of its land, weather, and horticulture, I join with those who have a radically different view of the state’s regular wildfires and public policies that can greatly reduce their frequency, magnitude, and cost to life and property.

The state’s weather record shows two centuries of periodic droughts which have dried the forests, given rise to infestations by various critters, and to wildfires mostly caused by lightning strikes.  The fall ‘Santa Ana’ winds have always done their best to spread the fires, but with limited success until modern times.  Why?  Over the ages our forests evolved not only to survive fires, but actually require their regular occurrence to continue their life cycles.  The major characteristics of the age-old forests was the irregular density of trees (into copses) that prevented long distance/perimeter burns and which densities were maintained by the burns that did occur.  A little technical reflection quickly explains why such configurations became the survivable ‘steady state’ configuration of the forests.  (A more detailed look at the changes in the Sierra forests is documented by George E. Gruell in the rather pricey Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.)

Then arrived the hubristic Regulatus Californicus who knew better than the established natural order.  Starting in the 1960s and building on Smokey the Bear (born in 1944), this rapidly evolving breed of humanity quickly latched on to ‘saving the ecology’ as their raison d’etre for launching an unheard level of regulatory controls over peoples lives and property, enforced by an ever-enlarging Leviathan in Sacramento.  In the 1970s they discovered catastrophic climate change to add to their causus belli on the rest of us Californians.  They initially took the wrong tack and argued ‘global cooling’ with the advent of a new ice age, caused by CO2 and other atmospheric gases linked to humans that were supposed to be reflecting too much sunlight.

But even with the state’s growing dumbth, it was hard to harness cooling as an adequate basis for enlarging the regulatory state.  So it was time to reverse the role of these gases from reflecting sunlight to retaining earth’s build-up of heat, and the great greenhouse gas gambit was born with CO2 now starring in its new role.  Some scientists quickly pointed out that we knew very little about earth’s carbon cycle and even less about long-term climate modeling, and most certainly not enough to reliably calculate (aka blame) any temperature changes on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  These scientists were quickly shouted down, and their grant monies to study the carbon cycle dried up.  And that has been their fate as the UN’s IPCC gathered the willing technocrats under its well-funded umbrella and became the voice of preventable man-made global warming.

The ‘true believers’ aka fanatical ecological nutcases, or simply econuts, now had a real arrow in their quiver – consensus science interpreted through selective faith-based lenses.  And they have been off to the races ever since 1995 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report – an evolving set of documents that now have had to be redacted, rewritten, revised, and re-issued many times over the years so as to keep the desired narrative in line with the vagaries of uncooperative weather patterns.

In the interval, the nation’s politically imperious progressive wave continued to grow as reflected in the staffs of federal regulatory agencies and, more importantly, in all elements of California governments ranging from Sacramento down to local leftwing NGOs funded to propagandize, monitor, and report on the state’s progress toward becoming 'green'.  And that, of course, included prohibiting any intervention, save heroic fire prevention and suppression efforts, in fostering the growth of high-density forests complete with huge ground level accumulations of duff and slash (“organic waste”).  All this has been done in the name of preserving the econuts’ vision of the natural order of fauna and flora on government lands, while in reality doing exactly the opposite as they created a wholesale unnatural order of wildland preservation never before seen on this earth.

And the bittersweet comedy continues unabated, as our progressive elites, in California and elsewhere, continue to blame the current spate of wildfires on climate change, even as they begin to evince micro-epiphanies, albeit sub-rosa, about the reality that decades of unnatural forest fuels build-ups is actually the dominant contributive cause of the devastations we have witnessed in recent years.  However, these leftwing central planners have yet to develop a public-ready narrative to effectively deflect the raw truth so that Californians – econuts and their voting legions of double dummy compliant constituents – can discover the cause of these holocausts by simply looking into a mirror.

(The Rebanes' up-close and personal experience with California wildfires was reported here, here, and here.)

The Election & RIP Prop6

George Rebane

Instead of my regular KVMR commentary, News Director Paul Emery suggested we do a little one-on-one for tonight’s news program.  So we sat down for a little gabfest about the election.   Paul asked me for any surprises on the outcome, and chowder-head me responded that things went pretty much as I had expected, while completely overlooking my total disappointment and frustration with the failure of Prop6 – you know, the repeal of the most recent California gas tax bamboozle from Sacramento.

Prop6 went down to solid defeat in California in the hands of a partisan majority of voters that over the years has vacillated between insanity and terminal stupidity.  CA already has the highest gas taxes in the land, much of them from previous initiatives promised by the lying sacks of s#!t in Sacramento that the taxes would go to fix CA’s roads and bridges.  Well, what has happened is that these tax receipts go directly into the state’s general fund to finance an endless number of programs and purposes – e.g. bullet trains, smelt salvation, succoring illegal aliens, funding govt workers pension liabilities, attracting evermore of the nation’s welfare recipients, … - that continue to leave us in an ever bigger mess.  And with already the highest gas taxes in the land, we continue to pay these fraudulent takings without even a peep.

So now our roads are really a mess, and that looks like a perfect opportunity for some capitol scumbags to go to the voters – over half of whom pay no taxes, and a third of whom get regular government checks - and ask them to dance another round of the SOSO samba.  Only this time the bill will be even more smelly because it has a built-in ratchet that keeps upping it ad nauseum over the years.  Those Californians who pay attention did put out the word on Prop6, pointing out that these new taxes will do nothing except increase the cost of transportation (especially for the poor), while once more destined for the state’s general fund to finance the ever greater insanities and inanities from Sacramento.

Defeating such an obviously fraudulent proposition should have been a no-brainer, hence it was designed precisely for those not so encumbered.  But like Lucy with the football, our Charlie Brown electorate again fell for the ‘can’t you see all them chuckholes and cracks and … all of which need fixin’?’  And, of course, today all them cracks etc are way bigger and more numerous and easier to see than last time, so the state’s not so nimble numbnuts dutifully checked the proper box to keep the most recent and onerous gas tax in place as the scumbags are already planning the next tax to fix the roads and bridges – hell, why stop a perfectly good bamboozle designed exactly for the kind of voters we worked so hard to attract, ‘educate’, and put in place.  No one out there in VoterLand asks what is the word for doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

Oh well, on the national scene things went a little better.  The Dems won the House, but the best they can do there is start more dead-end investigations of President Trump and the Executive branch, with a possible impeachment swipe at Justice Kavanaugh.  Republicans actually will welcome that kind of blatant congressional obstruction which will demonstrate to the country that just putting the new and more aggressive socialist Left in power is going to do nothing to get Congress legislating for the people’s needs.

President Trump’s first-half accomplishments re the tax cut, regulation rollback, foreign policy, and immigration will stay in place.  The border will not be secured, and healthcare costs will continue increasing with the bastardized system now metastasizing like a cancer.  It will be easy to focus the spotlight on the source of stagnation, and Trump will have something very solid and visible to run on in 2020.  The lamestream will have a hell of time ramping up their Fake News Machine enough to hide the source of grit and gravel grinding in the gears of government.

Meanwhile, the Dems will also have to work out their Gerontology Optics Problem with a leadership headed by Nancy the Penultimate Facelift, and backed up by a crowd of cretins like Mad Max Waters, Elijah Cummings, Comrade Bernie, Vacuum Head Ocasio-Cortez, the ‘Capitalist Bones’ of Fauxahontas, True Colors DiFi, SlyEye Chuckie Schumer, all straight out of Central Casting.  Every one of these will be on daily display filling countless screens across the land.  In the meantime, Trump will have a solid Senate majority to confirm and emplace as many constitutional judges and justices as are on his lengthening short-list.  All in all, not a bad night.

Election night and I am really pi&&ed (again)!

George Rebane

We’re watching the various channels report the returns.  And the directors and producers of their election night shows insist on putting on talking heads and politicians from all over the country who not only have no clue which way things are trending, but also no firm ideas on which way things will turn out given the up-to-the-minute data feeds.  Why put these know-nothings on the air to tell us their long-winded ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ information-free interviews.  We don’t need to hear such ignorance (technical use of term) and/or ambivalence from invited talking heads; the program anchors can handle such 50-50 outcome monologues all by themselves, and they can do it more efficiently with backup data than the people on their panels or the senator from some state who will amble on in ambiguity.

So here’s the drill.  Ask the prospective person to be put on the air whether they have any firm convictions about which way this or that race will turn out given the data up to now.  If the sumbich says he hasn’t got a clue, then don’t put him on the air to waste the viewers’ time.  In short, if you have some firm position on an outcome that you can defend, then welcome and speak your piece – else we’ll get back to you when you’ve got something to tell us other than your long-winded ‘I don’t know’.  How come none of those stellar journalistic professionals putting these ‘election headquarters’ on the air know how to do this???

Ruminations – 4nov18 (update 5nov18)

“If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.” Karl Popper

George Rebane

A regression function does not a theory make.

Climate change: A regular reader and avid follower of climate science Russ Steele sent me a couple of links that I’d like to share with our True Believers (the rest are “deniers”).  The first is a comprehensive yet compact analysis and refutation of the Left’s climate science hysteria (here).  The second is an analysis of ‘CO2 driven warming’ that again puts a lie to the whole thing (here).  Both pieces have solid assertions that can be refuted (i.e. they are falsifiable) with countering science and argument.  I invite our leftwing readers to respond with something more than another performance of their sophomoric Consensus Cantata.  In the meantime, meditate on the above two shibboleths now out of fashion with our progressives.

The definition of ‘nationalism’ is on the slippery slope, being shoved into politically correct meaningless verbiage that is appended with everything the Left dislikes.  I ask readers to give us an English word that means “a political, social, and economic system characterized by devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state. The belief that nations will benefit more from acting independently rather than collectively, and the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty over the homeland”, and nothing more or less.  What should be the label for such a sentiment shared by billions across the globe?

Midterm Election MABs.  Only three of us cared to offer their MAB distributions for the outcome of the House elections.  I have computed the MABs shown in the upper left of the above figure, along with the plots of the discrete MAB probabilities for each outcome for the number of House Democrats who will be seated January 2019.  Recall, of the 435 seats a majority requires at least 218.  The figure shows the definite and confident party biases of Messrs Steele and Frisch, with Moi the Chickens#!t timidly sneaking in there with a 0.5 confidence for my most likely (ML) of 220 seats for the Dems.  It is clear that RussS will win with the best prediction if the Dems get less that 219 seats, and StevenF will win if the Dems get more than 219.  And 219 happens to be the ONLY number of Dems that will make me the winner - very sad.  However, if we consider the 'wisdom of crowds' as the shown group average, then I am the closest to the common mind in this little prediction derby.  Alas, this is a position of which I have never been a proud resident.  Oh well, we'll see next Wednesday morning how it all shakes out.

Hate speech??  Hate speech is used a lot by progressives to describe stuff they don't want to read or hear.  Can anyone give an operational definition of 'hate speech' that can be used to categorize it?  Or is it a gift leftwingers are blessed with - something like 'I really can't define it, but I sure can tell when someone uses it.'?

[5nov18 update] Sen Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has issued a massive report documenting interviews with dozens of witnesses and accusers of Justice Kavanaugh, and his alleged sexual misconduct.  They have found “found that no witnesses could provide evidence to substantiate their claims”.  Instead, many of those who came out of the woodwork have now recanted their accusations – example, “the evidence appears to support the position that Julie Swetnick and Mr. Avenatti criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the Committee and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.”  For some odd reason the Dem sleazebags on the committee – those led by Sen Feinstein who conspired to torpedo Kavanaugh’s nomination through last minute political theatrics, are silent on the matter – no report contending the committee’s findings is forthcoming.  Should the Dems take the House tomorrow, the same troupe of sleazebags will resurface to up the ante on the crap they will manufacture in the attempt to impeach SCOTUS’s newest justice.  In the meanwhile, crickets.  (more here)

Bloomberg drops $5M in last minute appeal to bipartisanship by urging a Democratic vote tomorrow.  The former mayor of New York is confident that his audience is sufficiently dimwitted to believe his claim that he is not being political, but instead calling for us to come together under the magnificent plan forward for the nation as promised by the Left.  Let your search for common ground begin here.

Honduran and Guatemalan flags are in very obvious display in the columns of migrants headed for the US.  You would think that they would be carrying the flags of the country into which they wish entry, into whose society they intend to assimilate.  What are we missing here?

And speaking of everyone coming together to become one happy American family - here's the latest from our Muslim immigrants.  Get any of this from the lamestream?

‘A Short History of American Medical Insurance’ (Addended)

George Rebane

If there is a problem in the land, consider government guilty of its cause until proven innocent.

And that RR tagline applies doubly to the current cost of healthcare in America.  A short history of how we achieved healthcare costs that rank highest as a percentage of GDP is provided (here) by John Steele Gordon, nationally prominent author and economic historian.  Our healthcare costs have soared from 3.5% of GDP in 1930 to about 15% in 2015, indicating that “per capita medical costs in the United States have risen by a factor of 30 in 90 years.”

Speaking to a Hillsdale College audience, he opens with the reminder - “Whenever one segment of an economy exhibits, year after year, inflation above the general rate, and when there is no constraint on supply, then either a cartel is in operation or there is a lack of price transparency—or both, as is the case with American medical care.”

The history of real diagnostic and curative medicine actually began around 1930; prior to that physicians provided little benefit in those functions, and relied on the body’s own immune and restorative abilities to heal the patient.  But at the beginning of the Great Depression medical science had advanced enough to start providing remedies, albeit costly, that really did save patients from some dreaded diseases and injuries.  The expense of these new treatments launched the field of “hospital insurance” – dominated by Blue Cross and Blue Shield (for doctors’ fees) which broadened to what today we call medical or simply health insurance.

Hospital insurance paid only for services rendered while the patient was in the hospital.  It paid the complete hospital bill no matter its amount or treatment, thereby causing patients and doctors to make expensive hospital stays longer rather than shorter.  Government succumbed to doctor and hospital lobbies to keep service levels and prices up.  This gave rise to a special category of highly regulated (as non-profits) insurance companies.  And off we went onto the regimen of cost-plus payments to hospitals and doctors.  Given this scheme, there was no impetus to contain costs since these were actually withheld from the customers (patients) who had no information nor motive to shop for better prices for received services.

Then came wartime wage and price controls which forced companies to compete for workers from an already scarce pool, not through wages, which were fixed, but through fringe benefits which launched ‘free’ health insurance.  There’s a lot more important detail about how the various government departments, greedy politicians, and well-heeled lobbyists worked together to permanently keep America’s healthcare from responding to the normal markets which tremendously increased our quality of life in all other sectors of the economy over the decades.

The solution from here is not a ‘single payer’ comprehensively nationalized healthcare.  Gordon points out that “our federal government already runs three single-payer systems—Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service—each of which is in a shambles, noted for fraud, waste, and corruption. Why would we want to turn over all of American medicine to those who have proved themselves incompetent to run large parts of it?”  Instead he outlines a number of “far better and cheaper alternatives”.  I won’t steal any more of his thunder here but invite you to read his eye-opening essay on the topic.  Gordon concludes his piece with –

Finally, we need to get the practitioners of modern medicine to recognize an age-old reality: there is no cure for old age itself. Maybe someday we’ll be able to 3-D print a new body and have the data in our brain downloaded to it. But for the time being, when the body begins to break down systemically, we should let nature take its course. … There are enormous forces arrayed against these economically sensible reforms. Defenders of the status quo are the most potent lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals. This is not to mention the leftist proponents of single payer, who favor whatever will increase the power and scope of government. So it won’t be an easy fight. But at least we have one thing on our side—Stein’s law, named after the famous economist Herbert Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

[Addendum]  I was in a rush to get this posted before another scheduled chore would interrupt.  What I failed to mention is that the Dems are playing ACA and healthcare as their only card in this mid-term election, and blaming Republicans for the baked in shortcomings of Obamacare, such as the rapid rise in healthcare costs.  The question many conservatives have had lately is whether President Trump is overplaying his ‘immigration, immigration, immigration’ hand.  I would advise our president to also point out that the defections from the multiple ‘migrant caravans’ are occurring only because he is making real his intent to use every legal means available – including active military – to stop the planned illegal bums rush across our borders.  These people aren’t going home or staying in Mexico because their road is a long one.  But what our president should really emphasize is what he has accomplished for our economy – that should make the greatest impact on those voters who have the capacity to understand the basics.

In any event, I am among the few who believe that knowing how our healthcare became so expensive and remains so is important.  Unfortunately not that many people give a big rat’s ass about that as they demonstrate their concern by limiting their healthcare knowledge to five or six publicized slogans.

Scattershots – 29oct18 (updated 31oct18)

George Rebane

Growing numbers of liberals now embrace the notion that voting for a living can be more lucrative than working for a living.

Hallelujah!  Our distinguished liberal columnist and RR reader George Boardman comes out strong for the educated voter.  In today’s (29oct18) Union he writes, “If you haven't yet taken the time to familiarize yourself with the issues and candidates, if your vote is based on emotion, or prejudice, or party affiliation, what your neighbor says, or that you had a fight with one of the candidates in the third grade, do your country a favor and throw out that mail-in ballot. An uninformed vote is much more dangerous than not voting at all.” (emphasis mine)  That, of course, has been a major conservetarian tenet of these pages for years (most recently here), and I welcome him as a fellow promoter of the educated vote.  However, now Mr Boardman should prepare himself to be pilloried by the local panel of progressive pinheads who believe and preach that encouraging voter education is akin to proposing the return to the Jim Crow voter policies of the post-bellum South.

The Pittsburg massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue is the latest installment of the ongoing tragedy of our times that should remind us of the nature of these kind of deranged and lunatic killers.  They should not be confused with the several flavors of organized terror such as sponsored by the various Islamist groups.  These desperate lone wolves seek to put meaning into their pitifully empty lives, and are terminally ignorant to boot.  They have no idea that their killings promote exactly the opposite effect than that which their fevered little minds conceived.  Today the killer’s “All Jews must die!” has redoubled the pride that Jews have in their faith and the strength they draw from it.  And it has also brought the rest of us closer to the Jewish community, and more determined than ever to fight the age-old scourge of antisemitism as the poster child of faith-targeted persecution.

[Later]  While the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys are busy tying the massacre to our president, even the rabbi of The Tree of Life and the Israeli ambassador join in praising President Trump in his strong condemnation of the massacre and its antisemitic character.  Neither of them blame the the president for contributing to this tragedy.  Any bets on how this exculpatory news is covered in the lamestream which has already fulminated about the 'Trump connection'? (more here and here)

A reliable sign of a corrupt and/or out of control government is when it increases taxes for 1) no other reason (benefit to the public) than that it can, and/or 2) because it must do so in order to pay for under-budgeted existing but politically critical promised programs that no longer are sustainable (if they ever were from the start).  Of the first, the latest is Britain’s planned ‘digital tax’ – an additional tax on technology companies that deliver online services (e.g. social media, ecommerce, …) and yet another on the consumers using such services.  These are taxes that do nothing to improve or make such services more facile – it is just the next taking, because it can take.  (more here)  For an example of the second type we have Lawrence W. Reed, professor of economics and president of the Foundation for Economic Education, who draws a startling parallel in ‘Are We Rome?’ of today's America with the downfall of Rome, a nation which first declined from a republic to an autocracy that then bought its degenerating survival through public welfare programs which first destroyed its economy and then its means to defend itself.   

[31oct18 update]  I took to task Susan Rogers, liberal editorial board member of The Union, in my 18oct18 post.  In there I highlighted one of her more regrettable ‘Hits’ in which she opined that “any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.” (emphasis mine).  Today, after an apparent mini-epiphany, the lady shows us one of her (probably many) redeeming sides by a penning a course-reversal column – ‘Vote Smart or Vote Stupid’ - that advocates for the educated voter.  While she has yet to draw the proper conclusion about what an uneducated voter should do – as long proposed by your commentator and now joined by Union’s George Boardman (see above) – Ms Rogers does provide the reader with ample specific citations where the responsible and concerned voter may get needed information before marking hiser (my own contribution to gender-free pronouns) ballot.

Common Core = Obamacare of Education

George Rebane

More test scores keep rolling in telling those paying attention what our educational systems have done to the newest generation of America's students – and it isn’t pretty.  The only ones still genuflecting to our union dominated public schools are the nation’s progressives (including our local lefties) who dare not let light shine on the truth for fear (completely substantiated) that it blows up their social narrative.

In the meantime PJ Media reports ‘Common Core: ACT Scores for Class of 2018 Worst in Decades’.  Bottom line – our students’ scores in all subjects declined, but we took the worst hits in math.  There the “the average score on the ACT math test dropped to its lowest level in 20 years — 20.5 on a scale of 1 to 36. American students scored 21.1 in 2012 and 20.7 last year.”  We weren’t that hot to begin with, and now we’re just sinking lower than ever on the world stage of competing countries where STEM acumen counts most. (more here)

The latest big problem in our education, of course, is Common Core.  The propaganda on CC was that it would just establish some standards, but not dictate curriculum – wrong! 

Congressman Andy Thompson of Ohio has been, from the start, attempting to minimize the damage done by CC.  He says, "I think testimony we took during our attempts to eradicate Common Core showed the dumbing down of curriculum, the social justice indoctrination, the emphasis on social-emotional learning, reduced quantity and quality of reading, emphasizing screen time rather than classroom instruction."  Thompson went on to explain that the "destruction of proper math" has also been a contributing factor. … (CC proponents) place a higher priority on indoctrination than education."

None of the Common Core contamination of curricula makes any sense on the national scale, save for how it neatly dovetails into the objectives laid out in Agenda21.  (H/T to reader)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Socially Just STEM – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

While the Dems have the nation tied in Kavanaugh knots and Russia collusions, they are also making quiet progress on other fronts.  In their constant efforts to weaken and then destroy the United States as a sovereign nation-state, our progressives accelerated shift to socialism today adds a new program to stifle and dilute STEM education in the nation’s high schools.  This innovative federal pilot program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and “will promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) high school curriculums that are steeped in the context of social justice.” (more here)

NHS has granted $1,009,762 of taxpayer money to train the initial cohort of 24 teachers from Drexel University to mangle the math curriculum in the Philadelphia school system.  The stated goal for the new and improved STEM curricula is to “promote social justice teaching”.  Internationally, US students’ STEM performance already ranks in the dire straits region, but nowhere in this new initiative is the improvement in STEM performance included as a stated objective.

In the new socialist order, "the long-term and far-reaching benefits to society of this project are the potential to document and share sustainable approaches, steeped in the context of social-justice, for recruiting and preparing STEM majors to provide success in learning mathematics and science for all middle-grades students in a high-need school district."  So, our learned left-lurched educators at the federal level have concluded that the solution to our poor performance has been due to the lack of social justice emphasis in teaching STEM.  This will all be improved when “the (new) foundation of the math and science courses will be based on ‘understanding students' cultural communities as a foundation for classroom culture.’”  (H/T to reader for the heads up.)

Scattershots – 10sep18 (updated 11sep18)

George Rebane

What’s wrong with this picture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Choose capitalism’

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

The Vassals of Corporatism

George Rebane

The good part of capitalism is that it games the system; the bad part of capitalism is that it games the system.

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 September 2018.]

I was going to do this week’s commentary on the ongoing Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  But after what I saw happen today and during yesterday’s opening round, I thought better of it - since, after all, this is a family radio station, and there are still some limits on what words can be used on the air.  Let’s just say that I was more than put out by things I have never witnessed from a Senate chamber conducting one of its most serious constitutional assignments for our republic.  And the outrage on display was perpetrated equally by protesters in the audience and senators on the panel.

Instead, tonight I want to talk about something pretty bad that happens when government and capitalism collude, or more accurately, when they conspire.  Such conspiratorial collusion is called corporatism.  Corporatism occurs when a usually large corporation and government conspire to mangle the market in which the corporation is then shielded from new competitors – usually start-ups and small companies.  This paid protection plan includes cleverly minted regulations, required licenses, fees, and taxes that create a barrier to entry which the small guys cannot afford to overcome.  In turn, the protected corporatist donates ample sums to the politicians who enshrined into law what the corporation’s lobbyists and lawyers had drafted.

Local socialist labors on the Economy

George Rebane

On this Labor Day our Union columnist George Boardman takes a particularly dim view of the state our economy and its workforce (here).  He recounts economic news only to continue the socialist narrative of envy and promote some dismal legislation, while decrying the evil and uncaring capitalist system under which Americans are forced to suffer.  Mr Boardman is not breaking any new ground here with his reportage of the dire straits of the American worker – that kind of news has come from the Left like clockwork since at least the roaring 20s, and reached an apex when the federal government put and kept the county mired in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Along with the Pelosi, Schumer, et al school of economics and social justice, Boardman discounts the sea change in economic growth and unemployment under President Trump.  What he chooses to trumpet is how the Left sees our workers fairing, abetted by the false flag stats that horribly misrepresent the quoted official US poverty rate of above 14% (with some more rabid leftwing outfits claiming a 28% to 50% rates) that compares poorly with other OECD countries (here).

Fairness and Leftwing Talk Radio (updated 26jul18)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democratic Socialists = proto-communists

Some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once.

George Rebane

The left-leaning Associated Press reports ‘Democratic socialism surging in the age of Trump’.  The article is a well-written, comprehensive review of what the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are and their recent growth spurt as the Democratic Party lurches hard Left.  (We note that know-nothing local lefties are still in denial about that.)  What they are - according to the AP, other observers, and now even some dues-paying members - is socialists, plain and simple.  But even that doesn’t go far enough.

DSA’s paid up membership has surged from about 6K to 45K in the last year or so, and now includes in its ranks more than a handful of Democrat politicians running for office.  DSA used to be “on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank.”  Today they are a “significant force in Democratic politics” that overwhelmingly dominates the public direction the party has taken and openly advertises as its future.   On the DSA’s website we find, and AP corroborates, that there is “little distinction” between ‘democratic socialism’ and just plain good old-fashioned ‘socialism’.  But wait, there’s more to this telling.

When you read the DSA constitution, you learn that “its members as socialists reject an economic order based on private profit and share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”  In short, they are really a new and improved modern day movement of communists who are temporarily hiding under the more acceptable socialist label.  When the time is ripe, they will dispense with this half-way house and co-opt the political pimple that today still calls itself the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

The real question is how far will the Democratic Party play along with this headlong rebirth of communism via the waystation of socialism.  Many Democrats, and we all know who they are, have already thrown in their lot with the DSA, and many more Dems are standing by, nervously fingering their hats as they prepare to toss them into the DSA ring.  The times, they surely are a-changin.

The only speed-bump on the road to complete government control of everything seems to be the label ‘socialist’ that some Dems running for office fear that “people do associate (socialism) with bad things in history”.  Now if we can only hurry up and convince these inconvenient history troglodytes that socialism was really not all that bad, and that we’ll do it right this time around, then we’ll have it made in the shade.  Why?  Because our government educational system has already taught the younger generation that capitalism is bad and socialism is good, and the lamestream media is reinforcing that daily.  It's those damn older folks who can still remember yesterday who are the problem.

You can bet the farm that the Deep State “patriots” are already all socialists since their livelihood depends on it.  The only kerfuffle slowing things down is the current lack of a definitive Democrat leadership behind which the young and stupid can join ranks.  Current Dems jockeying for position, like Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, Biden, and Waters come across as marginal work products from some second-rate embalming school.  It’s the new cohort of the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, Kaniela Ing, Kamala Harris, etc who are the emerged and unabashed socialist face of the Democratic Party.  And the platform to which they all have signed up sees the abrogation of the Constitution and its defined voter franchise as Job One.

National dumbth on parade, again (updated 1jul18)

George Rebane

Today the nation will witness ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Americans demonstrating against what is represented as “Trump’s immigration policy”.  The demonstrations are sponsored by the usual leftwing anti-American and socialist organizations, and will focus on the ‘separation of children’ aspect of US Code (including our extant immigration law) that requires the separation of children from people (American citizens and illegal aliens) taken into custody – we have never thrown kids into jail with criminal adults.

This aspect of US law is totally denied and suppressed by today’s leftwingers who will shout themselves hoarse.  The reporting on this is so one-sided and misrepresented on the lamestream media that, in addition to riling up the leftwing base and those lightly read on social justice, that some more moderate and even conservative media dare not put these emotional claims into some kind of realworld perspective.  We have reported on this and discussed it extensively in these pages (here, here, and here).  Locally, as well as nation-wide, the Left does not want to even recognize their information-free and illogical position on this, because the real agenda here remains the maintenance of incivility against our duly elected president – all this answers the call to now put their “bodies on the line” to oppose anything and everything this administration does.

In today’s (30jun18) Union, Nancy Garcia takes up our incivility and asks (here), “Why is it OK to not serve someone because of their political affiliation but not OK to discriminate against race or creed of customers?  Why is it OK for a past president to put children, who crossed the border illegally, in caged detention cells, but not OK for a sitting president to house them in a safe, secure and caring environment?  The immigration laws were created by Congress, not the president. It will take Congress to change them.”

That the hordes attending today’s demonstration have been carefully taught to ignore such questions is another confirmation of national dumbth solidly in place and on the rise.

[1jul18 update]  Well, as part of our national dumbth in its upper reaches, we have a major op-ed piece in the NYT decrying ‘How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment’.  The fools in their editorial department are so ignorant of constitutional principles that they don’t even realize that the First was meant by our Founders to be used as a weapon against any insipient tyranny arising in the land.  And nowhere is that more obvious today than what the progressives have done and are doing to our national dialogue in academe, our public schools, business, and the media.

Formerly fierce promoters of free speech, the Left today has its mammaries in a pinch with a bitter harvest of what it has sown.  The notions now being discussed by progressive elitists include the total revision, if not abrogation, of the First Amendment and free speech, because (wait for it) it turns out that the Constitution hinders free speech.  Apparently the rich and powerful are now using it to make arguments for which the progressive pinheads have no reasonable counter, and they and theirs are made to look like the fools they are in even their own lamestream media.  The solution for them is always the government gun in the attempt to put a stop to the whole thing.  I can already see proposals for a federal Free Speech Commission through which public speech must first be cleared before being posted, published, or broadcast.

And while this is going on, the Left, exemplified by our local loonies, continues to call for inclusion and diversity as they howl for opposing voices to be silenced, or at least denied forums in which their ideas can be disseminated.  As they accuse us of being divisive, we witness calls by our own alt-Left to silence Union columnist George Boardman, cartoonist Bob Crabb, and of course, yours truly.  And I am sure such calls are echoed across the land as we now prepare to witness the most vicious political fight of our lifetime as our national socialist will fight tooth-and-nail to stop anyone and everyone that President Trump nominates to replace Justice Kennedy on SCOTUS.