Rebane's Ruminations

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

Admittedly not a difficult task.  I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty.  Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here).  Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world.  Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies.  Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.

In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.

In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names.  This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute.  Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.”  If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.

Scattershots – 6may22 (updated 14may22)

George Rebane

The 2016 election integrity and voter fraud issue is far from dead.  Besides the many tomes presenting evidence that somehow didn’t reach the courts or were summarily dismissed by dismissive judges, there is a whole trove of (video and smartphone tracking) evidence of hundreds of paid ‘mules’ stuffing multiple ballots into ballot drop boxes in selected voting precincts across the nation (more here).  The whole thing is documented in a new film ‘2,000 Mules’ by documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.  It is now showing at a big screen near you, and you can also watch its online 7may22 premier for pay here on Youtube.  The lamestream has been hyper-silent about this movie, and you can bet the ranch that neither Bumblebrain, Ms Pelosi, nor SFB Schumer will watch it.

[13may22 update]  In ‘Imagine the Unimaginable’ Victor Davis Hanson succinctly lays out the dire straits in which our beloved republic finds itself.  As he makes clear and most RR readers know, all of our maladies are self-inflicted.  VDH ends his warning of the radical Left in America’s fundamental transformation – “When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.”

[14may22 update] ‘Abortion-Rights Marches Planned Across U.S. to Protest Possible Overturning of Roe v. Wade’  Here’s a photo of certifiable young idiots created by the evil party Democrats who continue to broadcast their latest Big Lie that federalizing abortion rights will outlaw abortions and end up “killing women”.  Even Scientific American (here) and the prestigious British medical journal Lancet (here) have decided to expand into American law and politics to proscribe the anticipated “blood on their hands” SCOTUS ruling that would allow the several states to make their own abortion laws.  This is more corroborating evidence that idiocy is independent of intellect.

Democrats speak in ‘poetic truths’ (updated 10may22)

George Rebane

Hoover Institution senior fellow and national commentator Shelby Steele has coined an appropriate tongue-in-cheek label for the gigantic lies that issue daily from our Left.  It turns out that such lies may be viewed as “poetic truths” when broadcast by politicians and political activists.  Poetic truths are "narratives that play down or disregard reality and facts to advance a favored ideological position."  The current claimant of the most audacious poetic truth is Ms Nusrat Choudhury (pictured), whose statement that “the killing of unarmed black men by police happens every day in America” patently qualifies (emphasis mine and Sen Kennedy’s).

She maintained the correctness of this statement to Sen John Kennedy who questioned her during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that revealed her (lack of) qualifications to become a federal judge pursuant to having been nominated by the nation’s First Incompetent, President Bumblebrain himself. (more here)

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[10may22 update]  Poetic truths also come in the complimentary form of the sound of silence.  The evil party again demonstrated its true colors when both the administration and Democratic congressional leaders chose to remain silent on the historical travesty of compromising SCOTUS deliberations by leaking a draft of the forthcoming ruling on the continued federal involvement on abortions.  The leak, if allowed to become a precedent so prevalent in other governmental branches, departments, agencies, … will completely politicize the last vestige of non-political functions of our federal government.  The Democrats quickly doubled down on their ‘ascent by silence’ with a chorus of Big Lies about the impact of the upcoming Roe v Wade ruling that would range all the way from summarily prohibiting abortions in the land, to banning every other social activity that today we are free to perform – e.g. gay marriage.  The poetic truths Democrats perpetrate on the poor and the poorly informed knows no end.

As always, Democrats are invited to counter.

Central Bank Digital Currencies a'comin'?

George Rebane

The powers that be have quietly initiated the process to change all fiat monies into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Plenary sessions among the G7 have demonstrated that most countries are ready to change their money into ‘programmable crypto currencies’.  The US and UK are leaders of this movement as the means to enlarge the power of governments and control the inevitable destruction of their circulating fiat monies.

To understand how CBDCs work, consider that when implemented, we will all have personal accounts with our country’s central bank (e.g. our Fed) which will then enable control of the amounts, dispensing, and programming the use of the new nationalized crypto currency.  This essentially follows what Red China is doing now (‘the Chinese model’).  The totalitarian gorilla in the room is the programmability of CBDCs.

Depending on TBD laws, regulations, and power-motivated propensities, your particular CBDCs can be programmed to enable and/or deny you, on a day-to-day basis, the freedom to use the money as you will.  Say, that the government doesn’t want you to consume a certain product (e.g. fatty foods) because you are overweight.  It can then make your CBDCs unable to pay for such prohibited products and services.  The same can be said for travel restrictions – the government, or even the permitted airline, can make it so that you cannot purchase tickets that take you to a destination proscribed for you personally.

In essence, CBDCs will then no longer be money in the sense that today’s money is fungible as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.  Your particular CBDCs will then become the equivalent of government-controlled vouchers purposed dynamically for what your employer or a state agency grants you privileges.  Are you beginning to get the picture?  (more here, here, here, and here)

PS. The astute reader will realize that programmable CBDCs can totally collapse the ‘property side’ of the Bastiat Triangle, thereby also collapsing the ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ sides. Can everyone imagine work-around black markets and barter economies? 

Socialist Economics

George Rebane

A Brief History of Equality (2022) is the latest issue of socio-economic wisdom from the socialist-celebrated French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.  You might recall that Piketty gave us Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), his magnus opus comprised of “an 800-page book turbid with equations and numbers of all kinds, … is regarded as a game-changing weapon in the war to wrest wealth from the rich.”  Therein he introduced the world to “the central contradiction of capitalism” which elicited worldwide acclaim from collectivists of every stripe – progressives, Marxists, communists, … .  Its dense arguments made the tome’s 2.5 million copies sold as one of the most unread books of all time.  Nevertheless, adulatory columns and commentaries without end graced the pages and programs of the mainstream media.  With all those equations, it appeared that someone had finally put the demise of capitalism on a firm scientific basis.

The piece de resistance of ‘Capital’ was introduction of his signature inequality r > g, stating that the rate of return on capital always exceeds the growth rate of its underlying economy.  In a nutshell, that was his ‘central contradiction’ to which I return in a bit.  But as Tunku Varadarajan of the American Enterprise Institute explains (here), “Thomas Piketty attempts to lure readers unable to scale the mountain of ‘Capital’” with a series of socialist principles that would create equality (think social justice) by “flattening the wealth curve.”

Piketty does admit that there has been an historical movement toward equality along many dimensions – status, gender, race - since the late 1700s, but still not enough “to brag about.”  These gains have not been achieved by the increase in access to material wealth made possible by capitalist, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, but instead by revolutionary politics and class struggle.  “Efficient production, shrewd investment, or the genius and dynamism of innovators are sideshows”, because “all creations of wealth in history have issued from a collective process”.  For Piketty, this process has not only included but also depended on “the international division of labor, the use of global natural resources”, and most importantly “the accumulation of knowledge since the beginnings of humanity”, all blessings of the global collective.  Varadarajan correctly concludes from these claims that Piketty “is pure Bernie Sanders or AOC” and “may even be to their left.”

‘Genes vs. Culture’

George Rebane

This is the title of a landmark essay on the American condition by Lawrence Mead, Professor of Politics at New York University, published in the March/April 2022 edition of Chronicles, flagship publication of the Charlemagne Institute.  Continuing the work of Charles Murray et al, Professor Mead makes the case that “conservatives face a juggernaut determined to transform society in the name of equity. In order to fight it, they must have the courage to state the truth: There are real differences, both genetic and cultural, between races and sexes.”

The essay presents a compendium of information about the racial and cultural differences inherent in the people who today populate the United States.  Almost everything that is cited is currently censored in today’s land of the free and home of the brave.  That we compliantly accept this is ongoing evidence of the country’s continuing decline toward autocracy cum tyranny.

When I wrote ‘Equity Denies Reality’ and also submitted it to The Union, its publisher told me in so many words that the subject was too hot to be handled in our rapidly bluing Nevada County.  It would generate way more heat than light, and besides, our publisher’s own worldview did not countenance the presentation of such government data - not all that the government gathers and archives is suitable for sheeple fodder.

The main thesis this forbidden research and recorded data supports is that we are a variegated citizenry in an historical melting pot that has yet to melt into a homogenous amalgam when it comes to individual propensities and capabilities which are identifiably and unambiguously still distinguished by genes and culture.  Denying this, and making it public policy to lie about it over the past fifty years has done untold harm to our e pluribus unum work in progress.

I strongly recommend both Murray’s Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) - source of graphic - and Mead’s ‘Genes vs. Culture’ in order to understand the quantitative details about the nature of our divisions, and how today's Left seeks to capitalize on these as we march toward the Great Divide or the global Great Reset.

The Great Reset

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984

George Rebane

Given that the world will always have at least one hegemon, it is therefore imperative that America should always remain a hegemon - Rebane Doctrine.

A prime objective of RR over its now considerable lifespan has been the discovery, discussion, and dissemination of the resurgence of global collectivism under its various guises.  This enterprise has been promoted under various names and transnational programs, possibly the earliest organized launch occurred thirty years ago during a UN conference in Brazil.  There we heard about Agenda 21 (A21) and read its manifesto for a brave new world populated by a much smaller and tightly controlled population of humans.  It was a plan for a ‘sustainable world’ under an overarching collectivist government run by elite technocrats.

The road to A21 was admittedly long and had to be carefully planned and implemented so as not to awaken any early ire to the admitted loss of freedoms, wealth, and quality of life in general in order to redistribute resources to a radically reducing population.  The provisions and policies for A21 were to be installed bit by piece at all levels of government, first and foremost at the local level.  The cadres to do this would be the local electeds, bureaucrats, and civil servants trained by a global network of A21 offshoots called International Councils for Local Environmental Initiatives (which is now known as ‘ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability’).  These government cadres would quietly attend and study the ideological and operational principles of bringing what eventually came to be called neo-Marxist thought to shape and control local societies and economics.

Locally in Nevada County, almost all county staff at the managerial level have attended our regional ICLEI.  This is replicated state and nationwide.  California leads America in the number of ICLEIs, and America leads the world.  Managed from over 20 offices around the globe, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.  These many trails and tributaries to socialism are purposely ignored and unreported by leftwing media, and surprisingly also ignored by right-leaning outlets.

Today the US is being reconfigured (“fundamentally transformed”) socio-politically to prepare for its place in the new global order under a central power structure run by a cadre of elites immune from the policies they will mandate for the population at large.

A large literature has come in place to promote, analyze, and oppose what was introduced as the ‘Great Reset’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos.  The Great Reset is now the latest refinement of what began as the UN’s Agenda 21 lately renamed Agenda 2030.  As long documented here, on the surface these ‘agendas’ are lists of “Sustainable Development Goals” re-adopted in 2015 to reduce world population to a more controllable level that can be corralled into high-density population centers connected by a limited number of transportation corridors.

A Promising New Tactic Against the Fearful

George Rebane

Russia’s new tactic is the use of long-range missiles, many of which can be fired from Russia proper, to overcome the demonstrated ineptness of its land units and manned aircraft over Ukrainian air space.  Putin needs to reorganize his conventional forces because they most certainly have not performed as previously advertised to the Kremlin.  So the approach in the interval is to bombard the crap out of Ukrainian cities with missiles that are hard to intercept, and hope that President Zelensky will call for a favorable cease fire in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of the country’s civilian population. (more here)

With modern precision-guided missiles, this tactic is a movable feast for thugs like Putin whose saber-rattling has caused a comprehensive cowering by western leaders in the name of not willing to risk WW3 by striking Russia with any of several available and effective military responses.  He and Xi can use this approach from their own landmass to their heart’s content in future territorial conquests.  As long as western leaders continue to promise that they will not respond in any way that would (heaven forbid) irritate the international gangsters, they can assemble their land forces at the border and then proceed to slaughter the target country’s civilian population from afar.

As we now know, this will do the trick against any fearful opponent who openly declares from the gitgo that they’ll do nothing “reckless” to rile the attacker.  I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why such a tactic will not be used repeatedly until the west says ‘Enough!’ and demonstrates that we too are willing to return to MAD and risk WW3 to protect our interests.  Without the will to use force, non-military sanctions will not work to stay the hand of a tyrant; the planet is already too interconnected commercially and financially so that surgical sanctions have little effect, and the more comprehensive sanctions spill over and also hurt us and our allies.

In desperation, today we have learned to redefine our interests in favor of international criminals like those who run Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, … .  We learned long ago that the ONLY way to defend, let alone expand, liberal governance on this planet is to always be ready to go to the mat with the world’s tyrants, and appear willing to do that sooner than later with the big thugs.  This principle applies at all scales when we look at what our cities have become as we constrained law enforcement and started nurturing criminals.

Liberal Hypocrisy Fuels American Inequality

George Rebane

What do Dems actually do when they have all the power?  The short answer is that they have created the worst states in the Union with regard to housing, education, taxation, homelessness, … .   And first and foremost, they turn on their political and media lying machines to deny what horrible messes in governance they create when voters unwittingly hand them all the levers of power in a state.  This has gotten so bad that even the NYT now runs op-eds decrying the Democrats’ hypocracies, illustrating in chapter and verse the 180 differences between the nation’s progressive talk and walk.

Today Democrats control the legislative and the executive branches, or else have veto-proof majorities in the legislatures of 18 states – Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii.  And these are the worst governed states in which progressives promote and maintain the greatest inequalities between their rich and their poor.  In these states there is no possibility for any Republicans to stand in the way of Democrat public policies – the Left owns these states lock, stock, and barrel.

Noted author and NYT editorial board writer Binya Appelbaum has zeroed in on these states to discover the nature and magnitude of leftwing travesties in operation.  He teams up with video journalist Johnny Harris to report on the details in this NYT Opinion video.  Here they present the data that forms the basis for the fabric of Big Lies on which our Left has based its access to power by buying the votes of the less-read, and keeping them on urban plantations for decades during which millions of American lives have been destroyed and/or stunted.

To me the information presented here is yet another confirmation that the Democrat Party is fundamentally evil, especially in how it has bamboozled the poor, and succored its rich into believing they have the moral high ground on the nation’s conservatives.  The Great Divide cannot happen soon enough.  (H/T to reader and correspondent)

The Adulation of a Murderous Thug

George Rebane

With the horrendous historical preambles of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the world now knows that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a murderous thug.  What our Left misses or means to misinform is the manner in which many of us on the Right assess Putin’s geo-strategic actions, especially when compared in the same arena to the sophomoric efforts of Team Bumblebrain.

To assess Putin’s strategy, concerning his latest effort to expand Russia’s borders and sphere of influence, with attributes such as clever, shrewd, adroit, and even brilliant has no bearing on the man’s character, values, mores, or any other trait laudable by the international community.  A scoundrel can be all these things without ever being mistaken for a person of high principles and moral character.  To the discerning, assessment can be and has always been received and rendered as independent of adulation.

It is in their political desperation that the Democrats have revived their fabricated Russia Collusion hoax to again paint Trump as a Putin toady.  Their dumb-as-doorknobs lamestream trumpets have dutifully picked up the chorus, and when reporting on the matter, even FN has had trouble always making the distinction between assessment and adulation.  But Democrats can count on their lightly-read minions to lap up the ‘new evidence’ that Trump has always been subservient to the Slav with dirty pictures of him.  Lakoff (q.v.) would approve of such posturing as maintenance of the established TDS frame.

Reunification? Fuhgettaboudit!

George Rebane

A dear friend of more than half century who insists he is a middle-roader and considers both sides before coming to conclusions had an extremely revealing but unsurprising email exchange with me minutes ago.  We had just finished watching the news, a great part of which was the coverage of Durham’s announcement and court filing last Friday concerning the Clinton Russiagate scandal.  Now my friend is very well educated and seeks not to be identified as a polarized American.  He is even an active member of No Labels as confirmation of his claim of being politically independent.  (No Labels is patently leftwing.)

For any conservetarian and most right-leaning readers of my many years’ experience who might examine the writings and opinions of my friend, they would immediately identify him as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist cum progressive.  One who is even insular along with run-of-the-mill Democrats who drastically limit themselves only to lamestream sources – all others are considered suspect political propaganda from the Right.  So here is our little email exchange less than an hour ago.

George: What's your take on the latest Durham finding and court filing that came out last Friday? 

Friend: Durham as in NC? I have followed that. Is it on gerrymandering or something else?

More conservative outlets such as the WSJ, FN, Washington Times, Newsmax, … have had wall-to-wall coverage of this latest revelation which in itself is much more devastating and sheds light on the illegal subterfuge in our corrupt government than Watergate ever was.  And from the reports this evening on media coverage, we find that more than half of the country is totally ignorant of Durham’s latest findings and filings.  (more here)

Someone out there with a keener mind than mine, please find us some hope.

As a coda to this bleeding artery, consider conservative pundits like FN’s Brit Hume sonorously informing us that with this latest finding the lamestream cannot help avoiding an ample helping of egg on their face.  Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.  The lamestream doesn’t give a big rat’s ass about what rightwing journalists, pundits, and commentators know or think.  Their focus is on the great unwashed.  As long as they know that they control what that cohort of Americans knows and believes, the rest makes no never mind.  We confirm that at every election

Lockdown Lunacy vs Fringe Ideas

George Rebane

Litmus test for autocracy – ALL autocracies actively proscribe ideas that are fringe to what the state prescribes as mainstream thinking.  Rebane Doctrine

The recent study from Johns Hopkins University unequivocally shows that lockdowns don’t work in reducing Covid-19 death rates. (here, here, and here) The mortality rate data for this also comes from around the world.  In the developed world state-imposed lockdowns have devastated economies, families, and individuals of all ages.  This pandemic will be studied for generations by historians, political scientists, and autocrats.

The impact of lockdowns has so many dimensions in the realms of their implementation and causal effects.  Most independent (i.e. not on the government tit) epidemiologists, economists, and other science-savvy analysts decried the lockdown policies from the start.  Only the central planning/control elites and ignorantly compliant local jurisdictions promoted the months of insane mandates handed down from on high that began in the spring of 2020.

Half the country is populated by those reliably labeled sheeple.  To the ruling elite these are the recipients of received wisdom known as ‘mainstream thought’, which is comprised of an ever-changing roll of diktats a la Orwell.  These people have been taught since grade school to unquestioningly accept and put to practice whatever and whenever Big Brother mandates.  No critical thought needed nor tolerated – such thought, being constituted of ‘fringe ideas’, is to be rejected as anti-social and dangerous, polluting the purity of state mandated groupthink.  To witness them, one need only go to the local shopping mall or read The Union.

The trained progressive has had excised from his education any notion that all benefits to mankind over the millennia have always been introduced as fringe ideas.  Mainstream thought has always been the home of thought-free compliant stasis and stagnation.  At no time in the last hundred years have we witnessed in the developed world a more complete practice of such mainstream thought than over the last two years – and the beat goes on.

So now we have the latest from Johns Hopkins that once more confirms what the greatly denigrated Barrington Declaration already told us back in the fall of 2020 (here).  That piece of work was endorsed by thousands of accredited scientists and medicos, and ruthlessly put down by our federal government and their lamestream lackies.  Hundreds of thousands more died needlessly and/or went bankrupt.

No recognition of, let alone apologies for the Big Lies were forthcoming, and no one today is holding their breath.  The dead and financially destitute are a price the leftwing elites were willing to pay for their great experiment in the fundamental transformation of America into a satrapy under a global government.  And you can bet that there’s more to come from the same team, still fully in control and totally insulated from any legal or public repercussions by a corrupt DoJ and judiciary.  According to those propagandists and their local true believers, Joe Biden has had a banner year since he was inaugurated.  And the Democrat devotees across the land still revere and believe in the gospel according to Saint Anthony of Fauci, the Beatified - “The fact that we shut down when we did, and the rest of the world did, has saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives.”  (17 June 2020)

The tactic of ‘accuse them of what you do’ is a tried-and-true formula for shutting down any real opposition from the recumbent Republicans.  (Does anyone know on what are they spending their political capital?)  No better example of that can be had than the established fact that Russian appeasement has been a leftwing monopoly as once again illustrated by Victor Davis Hanson (here).  To this day lamestream outlets trumpet that Trump was the Great Colluder.

Ruminations – 17jan22 (updated 18jan22)

George Rebane

A zealot is one who identifies intimately with his message, and opposes all efforts to reasonably falsify the message because doing so would also falsify him.

A brief compendium of current observations for the record.

Conservatives are (fascists, racists, white supremacists, … pick one or more) and work constantly to have government limit individual freedoms, diminish America’s liberties, and promote an autocratic government – so goes the progressive/Democrat/lamestream narrative.  This is witnessed daily and well documented in progressive activist literature like ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ by George Lakoff.  The latter is actually a best-selling leftist communication handbook into which is marbled the Marxist/socialist manifesto.  What the leftwing elites count on is the ignorance of their audience who cannot connect the dots between an autocratic state and big government based on central planning and control.  This deficiency prevents them from seeing that all conservative efforts in governance and public policy are directed in exactly the opposite direction – a minimally funded smaller government with fewer laws and regulations based on federalized maximum local control.  Such governments cannot generate and maintain collectivist public policies which need a massive government to enforce and implement.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

America’s Left and their Democrat Party public face are desperately attempting to pass federal voting legislation (HR1, ‘The Voting Rights Act’) that will foster and facilitate the entrenchment of a political monopoly based on Marxist/socialist ideology.  The selling point, hysterically touted by Team Biden, is that America’s current election laws limit voting rights, especially those of protected classes.  The evidence to oppose this attack on constitutional federalism is abundant and readily available, but totally buried by the lamestream media.  Only conservative outlets inform their audiences of how the states’ voting laws compare, and about public attitudes that favor policies which restrict the voting franchise to American citizens, and minimize opportunities for election irregularities and fraud. (more here)  Our Left tells Americans that such voter integrity policies are racist/fascist/etc designed to limit voting access to minorities, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have fallen victim to Mammon and politics of the most reprehensible, insidious, and deadly kind.  Both medicines have been widely used worldwide as a prophylaxis and treatment for a number of maladies, including Covid – extensively reported in these pages – but proscribed by our federal government and big pharma.  The former to establish precedents and new avenues of government control, the latter to keep effective off-patent medicines out of reach so that high margin patented medicines remain the only alternatives to combatting the pandemic.  The effectiveness of IVT and HCQ have been demonstrated in countless studies and clinical cases.  It’s now so bad that Covid patients on death’s door cannot be administered either medicine by court order (more here).

The death rate of Covid ‘vaccines’ is another scandalous cover-up by our federal government.  In the program to maximize vaccinations, the data on vaccine-related deaths is withheld by the CDC and the FDA.  No vaccine is entirely safe, and every one has its own mortality rate due to various complex – mostly anaphylaxis – reactions to the prophylactic.  According to government data, the death rate within 14 days of being vaccinated for standard flu is about 120 per 100,000, and for shingles it is about 21 per 100,000.  It turns out that for Covid, the equivalent death rate within 14 days of getting jabbed is 190 per 100,000.  When this rate is applied to the millions of people vaccinated, then the Covid vaccines have killed over 388,000 Americans alone.  And with the incidence of breakthrough infections, the efficacy of the vaccines is yet to be determined.  One thing is certain, no government agency wants to talk about this, and all continue to stonewall legitimate queries submitted to them.  (more here and here)

The destruction of the FBI by the Left is almost complete – they are now being repurposed as the nation’s new Stasi.  As evidence, consider that today the FBI finally acknowledged that last week’s attack on the Texas synagogue was an act of Islamist terrorism.  They were the last to know what was immediately obvious to the man on the street across America when informed that one Malik Faisal Akram was the attacker who demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, another convicted and jailed Islamist killer.  AG Garland did the best he could to bamboozle the American public as long as he could before national ridicule made him tell his FBI lackeys to announce that the attack was “a terrorist-related matter”.  No kidding Kemosabe.

A more standard law enforcement fare for today’s FBI is launching domestic terrorism investigations of parents who go on public record to oppose local school boards about the content of the curricula – e.g. the tenets of CRT - taught to their kids.  On such matters the FBI is right on the spot ferreting out those subversive parents who don’t toe the line laid down by leftwing dominated teachers unions.  Gotta get those parents out of the way of our educators who are concerned first about their students right after they have their pension negotiations in the bag.  Actually, there may be an issue or two, like paid days off for Covid safety, that may still consume their attention before they get to the kids.

[18jan22 update]  Open and free critique of government is a fundamental principle upon which America was founded.  And the continuance of that right has been the mainstay of our republic since its birth in revolution, which itself is the ultimate critique of government by its citizens.  All roads to tyranny start with the state proscribing the critique of government.  We in the United States have a long history of criticizing our government, its policies, and actions both domestic and foreign.  Everyone has exercised that right, built into our founding documents, without second thought of suffering retribution from any institution of government.  This is not to say that it hasn’t happened (e.g. the IRS going after conservative 501c3 organizations).  But when such illegal retributions have been discovered – usually uncovered by an alert media - they have been roundly rejected by all Americans, resulting in public censure, ending of careers, and even legal actions against the perpetrating scoundrels.  Those days are gone.  Today, firmly on the doorstep of autocracy, we have the Democrats in power openly deploying federal intelligence and law enforcement organs to punish critics of its rogue and radical politicians and policies, and even those opposing state and local leftwing authorities illegally mandating laws and regulations about schools, the pandemic, academe, border porosity, elections, and corporatist enterprises that seek government favor. (more here)  What portends even worse for the republic is that a large share of Americans now favor such government reprisals that formerly were the hallmarks only of communist and fascist governments, and tinpot dictators of backward (e.g. shithole) countries.

Democrats’ Newspeak – 13jan22 (updated 31jan22)

George Rebane

[A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the 29jan22 op-ed pages of The Union, titled ‘Democrats’ ‘Newspeak' a radical ideological agenda’.  As you can see from the comment stream under article, once again none of the leftwingers understand the message and simply play their strong suit in attacking the messenger – ‘twas ever thus.  All are profoundly ignorant of not only the civil, but also the legal, pre-Newspeak meaning of ‘alien’ which was in common usage across the land to describe the non-citizen class of people in America.]

George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic.  Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental.  It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949.  Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.

Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments.  And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21^st century version of Newspeak.  A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language.  This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous.  (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)

A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here).  Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens.  With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.

Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States.  And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible.  As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.

As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”

[31jan22 update]  The comment stream under The Union’s online post of the above article is populated by almost all leftwingers with a totally predictable illustration of polarization beyond futility.  They have focused on my inclusion of ‘illegal alien’ as one of today’s proscribed words that makes very difficult or impossible understanding and discussing immigration policy or our border situation.  And, of course, that is the whole purpose of the Democrats' radical progressive wing to reduce the information carrying capacity of everyday language.  However, most noteworthy in today’s America is that there now is a huge cohort of our electorate that demands to be ignorant of the issues, and unable to communicate anything about them beyond the approved slogans in abbreviated semantics.  In response to that comment stream, I posted the following.

Illegal Alien: Federal law employs the term alien, which it defines as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States”.  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses the term in its program descriptions.  As a legal term of art, illegal alien has been a part of US Code, our body of laws, for generations.  From BallotPedia, “Those in favor of using the term illegal alien argue that it is a legally accurate term used in federal law and other formal documentation. They also argue that its alternatives, such as undocumented immigrant, are euphamisms used to distract others from considering whether someone has violated U.S. immigration law. … Those opposed to using the term illegal alien argue the use of the word illegal dehumanizes people and does not fully consider the exceptional cases of refugees.”  More specifically, according to H.A. Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, “ 'Undocumented immigrant' is a politically correct, made-up term adopted by pro-illegal alien advocacy groups and liberal media outlets to obscure the fact that such aliens have violated U.S. immigration law and are in the country illegally...If we are going to discuss and debate the issue of immigration and what our public policy should be, we should at least use accurate, precise terms, and talk about, for example, legal aliens vs. illegal aliens.”

The comments herein do an excellent job of illustrating the point/thesis of my column.  To further underline my thesis, The Washington Post reports, “The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to stop using terms such as ‘alien’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘assimilation’ when referring to immigrants in the United States, a rebuke of terms widely used under the Trump administration.”  Obfuscation über alles.

The Covid testing fiasco grows

George Rebane

Now there are not enough tests, and the desired rapid tests are really unreliable, and regardless of test results, it is probably safer to let Omicron spread than mess with it, if you’re not in one of those vulnerable classes, and more to come.  All this on top of the simple fact that making decisions on just ‘test positivity’ has always been a non-starter (as I’ve shown in these pages).

Today we read in the 11jan22 WSJ (here) that the popular home rapid tests may be even more unreliable in detecting Delta and other non-Omicron variants of the disease.  And timing is very important in when the test is taken – don’t do it too early, let the symptoms cook for a couple or three days (then what do you do?), and don’t be eager to believe negative test results, and … .

The best sensitivities of ‘properly applied’ tests yield sensitivities of 85-95% - that’s the probability of getting a ‘test positive’ given you have the disease.  This, of course, means that out of every 100 diseased and infectious individuals, the test will come back negative for 5 to 15 of them.  These are then free to party or attend other sardine-packed events or transports.  The specificity of tests are not even mentioned; apparently they are of no concern.  You may recall that a test’s specificity is the probability getting ‘test negative’, given you don’t have the disease.  Test specificities are usually lower than sensitivities.  That means that tests also quarantine a lot more people than actually have the malady.

Then there’s the whole question of managing the spread of Covid.  In ‘Slow the spread?  Speeding it may be safer’ the authors present data and argue that “the Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.”

This all has to do with some very sophisticated technical notions of factors affecting dispersion known as ‘antigenic drift’ and ‘antigenic shift’.  Drift is a slow mechanism by which a virus changes, which then allows a host’s immune system to successfully suppress viruses which have only slightly modified themselves from the successfully vaxxed or naturally inhibited variants.  Letting drift occur – i.e. speeding dispersion – has a higher probability of stopping all such variants before they find ways to change even more into versions for which there is no effective vaccine.

Shift then is the process by which the virus can pile up multiple changes to its genome and then emerge as having gone through a “discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen (or set of antigens) to a very different antigen (or set of antigens). New viral strains—such as those that jump from one species to another—tend to emerge from antigenic shift.”

This is bad because “vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. Yet social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally ‘drifted’ variants.”

This reality is complex stuff, and you’ll hear nothing about it from the government’s Faucis and Walenskys.  All that comes down to us are articles of faith about more testing being somehow better than less testing.  But two years into C19, and no one has yet to state a cogent or coherent objective for widespread testing.  Most certainly no reasonable case has been made that testing somehow reduces the virulence, morbidity, or mortality of Covid.  So there you have it.  The testing confusion grows, and the world’s population has abandoned all critical thought and become lemmings led to the altar of testing to worship a rite, the blessings of which no one is aware.  Today we do testing simply for the sake of testing because it makes us feel good.  Sometimes placebos work.

Check your PG&E bill (updated 11jan22)

George Rebane

PG&E continues to provide its customers with added dimensions of its incompetence as the power utility of northern California.  We have covered the litany of its poor performance in these pages, and now add another to the list.  The December bill arrived with a blatant and obvious overcharge for electricity not delivered.  During the last series of snowstorms along with thousands of PG&E customers in the foothills, we too lost our power for eleven days.  It went off at 1215 27dec21 and came back on at 1600 6jan22.  Our bill (below) showed that they continued our electric service unabated on 27dec21 through 29dec21.

We have one of those ‘smart meters’ that are now standard in PG&E’s service area.  It is supposed to automatically report power usage to their accounting and power management systems.  There they have a computer algo that takes this data and massages it into the above graphic along with the billed amount using a complex formula of time-dependent rates.  Obviously, their data gathering system and/or algo is faulty, and this blatant revelation strongly implies that they may have been overcharging their customers for some time now.

So check your electricity bill, and if yours is also in error, do something more than just bitching to the PG&E billing department.  Write a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission and demand that they get PG&E to account for the performance of their metering and billing system, and prove that they have not been screwing up for who knows how many months/years.  It is implausible that such an error is a onetime affair that was caused by the storm.  (Note that the algo did not revert to some constant default usage level, but actually varied the post-shutdown daily usage.)

I ascribe the problem to the ongoing cadre of ignorant, incompetent, and slothful dunces that populate PG&E’s management ranks.  Their hardworking field crews are capable, hardworking, and fully acknowledge that they have to be the public face of an organization that has had a rotten head shed for years.  The PUC should hold them to account for this and numerous other sins too many to list.

[11jan22 update]  Jo Ann called PG&E and went online to our account.  The nice lady at the other end apologized that the bills they send out continue to have bogus indications of power usage, and that they are working very hard to fix it.  She further assured us, and showed us the appropriate page online where the usage numbers for the power outage period had cross hatches below them, indicating that these were not the actual numbers to be used to calculate our bill.  She was very accommodating and informative about their problem and their consumers’ misapprehensions.  In the future we should ignore the bill they send us and log in to our account online to see the actual data that goes into calculating out bill.  What a way to run a railroad.

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

In the last Dark Days Diary (here) I highlighted a short dissertation on the spread of communism by a former KGB agent.  As we have frequently pointed out, 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 insidious collectivist propaganda – e.g. Critical Race Theory.  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.

Historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the extensive case (here and here) that this 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 a 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 then 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 student, 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 believe in 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 making school choice possible and letting parents decide where their children will be schooled.

Scattershots – 22dec21 (updated 29dec21)

George Rebane

Here’s the FDA approval of an Ivermectin wannabe that is touted by the conservative Daily Signal.  And here from Blaze is a more sobering look at the new pill therapeutics that discusses their problems and shortcomings, among them price.  Meanwhile IVM has all the proven requirements for an early stage pill to minimize subsequent Covid morbidity, and a medicine that is widely available, off-patent cheap, and doesn’t have the feared side effects of the recently rushed remedies from big pharma.

[24dec21 update]  Here is a gun culture that would give our totalitarians (aka Democrats) sanitary problems in their shorts.  And it's all made possible, as always, by the society's civilized culture; something that has been destroyed in America, the land of the formerly free.  (H/T to reader)

[26dec21 update]  Weather guessers (aka meteorologists) have no shame.  This becomes clear to anyone who attempts to use winter weather forecasts for planning purposes.  Their models are totally deficient in their attempts to predict impactive weather events like rain or snow.  Their unabashed predictions over the last five days for the imminent onset of heavy snow have witnessed a steady sequence of rollbacks without once diminishing the “100%” probabilities they continue to attribute the snows’ onsets that are only a few hours in the future.  Bottom line – no can do, but will continue publishing unabated bullshit hour after hour as the days pass.  So, the tribe that can’t hack getting major weather changes only hours away, still insist that their ‘science’ allows them to predict global temperatures 50 years from now to within one degree Celsius.  And then there are the millions of true believers out there eating it all up – don’t get me (re)started.

[27dec21 update] VDH's The Dying Citizen (2021) is a tour de force from a scholar and keen observer of the human condition that is not his first, nor will it be his last.  In Hanson's included essay on the progressivists' plan for global governance, I extract the following - "In sum, globalization rests on a few poorly examined laws: those who draft globalized rules for others have the resources to navigate around them.  Discussions of abstract cosmic challenges - achieving world peace, cooling the planet, lowering the seas, dismantling secure borders - are psychological ways to square the circle of failure to solve concrete problems at home from war to poverty.  Wealthy tech workers in San Francisco hold frequent conferences and symposia about addressing water, sewage, and disease in Africa, but the have demonstrated no ability to address California's own fetid city streets, which are home to over three hundred thousand homeless and rife with medieval diseases, refuse, excrement, and rodents.  In addressing such existential and age-old challenges, we are left where we started in Western civilization: the only means are transparent decentralized local governments, audited by a free and disinterested press and acting under the aegis of a constitutional, consensual republic, serving only at the pleasure of a voting citizenry." (emphasis added)

[29dec21 update]  To become an actuary is hard, so reports the 29dec21 WSJ in ‘Want to be an actuary?  Odds are you’ll fail the test.’  “Insurers need experts to calculate risks.  Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials.” Actuaries do all kinds of quantitative risk assessment work for insurance companies, M&A consultants, corporate investment activities, etc.  The two professional credentialed actuary levels are Associate and Fellow.  Passing multiple tests are required for each, the toughest being on probabilistics.  The tests are usually taken multiple times by successful candidates to get passing scores – even then only 15% of those attempting make it to Associate, 10% make it to Fellow.  Here’s one of the toughies on probabilistics.  “An urn contains 10 balls: 4 red and 6 blue. A second urn contains 16 red balls and an unknown number of blue balls. A single ball is drawn from each urn. The probability that both balls are the same color is 0.4720.  Calculate the number of blue balls in the second urn.”  Give it a try and post your answer in the comments.  I’ll post the correct answer after we see a few attempts (or not).

Stupidity, against which there is no defense

Fools all who seem it, and half of those who do not.  Gracian #201

George Rebane

Executed anti-Nazi cleric and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer correctly maintained that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil.”  In America, we overwhelmingly confirm this daily.  Now I admit, sometimes it’s hard to accept this as the better of the two alternatives, but for the most part one can embrace Bonhoeffer’s observation because there are way more stupid people in the country than evil ones.  This has also been a Rebane Doctrine tenet for many years.  (more here)

Democrat politicians and lamestream ‘journalists’ demonstrate this with their audacious and ongoing stream of lies – e.g. the $4T+ BBB cost “will not raise the national debt by one penny.” - they constantly use to convince their cognitively impaired constituents who make up almost half of the country’s voters – without an adequate knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they’ll believe literally anything their favorite information sources spout.

Bonhoeffer went on to say –

Against stupidity we have no defense.  Neither protests nor force can touch it.  Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simple be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can count by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied.  In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive.  For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.

This why so many of today’s conservative and libertarian writers, along with moi, see no common ground across which a trail may be blazed to the unification of our polarized population.  The only solution being a negotiated Great Divide or barricades in the streets.

Wealth Tax – dodging a bullet

George Rebane

One of the very dumbest things progressive Democrats have recently proposed is a wealth tax on appreciated but unrealized assets.  Everywhere it has been tried by the Left, it has not worked; it has instead reduced government revenues and distorted economies – e.g. Sweden, Germany, and France were posterchildren of such fiscal idiocies. (more here) Today our Democrats, always looking for something to screw up our economy, have attempted to import yet another bad idea as a ‘pay-for’ for their latest lavish vote buying plans.  Hopefully, this tax has been excised from the current version of this double dummy ‘human infrastructure’ bill.

As a student of economics, over the years it has become clear to me that one of the paramount qualifications for becoming a leftwing economist is that you have to be totally ignorant of human nature, especially of their economic behavior.  We won’t even attempt to plumb the depths of intellectual depravity in the Democrats’ assertion that their multi-trillion dollar spending initiatives will be absolutely free – “It will cost zero.”  The real tragedy for the country is that half of Americans accepted this Big Lie, and that the Republicans gave their usual lame response to repudiate it.

My own noodling on the wealth tax involved a niggling thought that the proposed wealth tax rates were not real, that they in effect had to be higher.  So I pushed a few squigglies, and sure enough, the real wealth tax rate is considerably higher than the rates publicized by the Democrats.  It’s a bit amazing that no Republican or even the conservative financial experts have picked up on this additional attribute of the stupid tax.  So here’s the drill as to how this tax will work on, say, an appreciated security you own.

Your nominal wealth tax amount is the wealth tax rate applied to the appreciated amount (since last wealth tax paid).  However, the rub comes when you consider where to get the money to pay the wealth tax.  The correct answer is that investments pay their own taxes, whether capital gains, added assessments, or the wealth tax.  So now you must sell a fraction of your shares, pay the applicable capital gains tax on their appreciation, and then use the remainder to pay your wealth tax.  In short, it’s the value of the fraction of shares you must sell that is your real and effective wealth tax rate.  A little algebra using the appropriate tax and appreciation rates will let us derive that formula and do the calculations.  I share the results of this analysis with you in the spreadsheet figure below (click on it to enlarge).

In the figure the blue numbers are input to create a wealth tax scenario at the indicated values, with the nominal wealth tax rate of 1%.  From the calculations shown in the figure the actual wealth tax rate comes to 1.67%, two thirds higher than the government advertised rate.  And paying this wealth tax annually reduces the investment’s annual appreciation rate from its nominal 7% to 5.33%.  When we examine what the actual wealth tax is over a range of wealth tax rates (from 1% to 3%) and capital gains rates (from 25% to 50%), then we see in the table the increased actual rates that go from 1.33% (a third higher) to 6% (doubled!).  These are plotted in the graph.

It gets worse.  As shown in the upper right of the figure, we have a $1,000 investment currently appreciating at a nominal 7% rate for ten years, then liquidating it with a payment of 40% cap gains rate.  The net spendable amount then comes to $1,580 which yields a total ten-year return of 58.03%.  When we have the same amount with ten years of ‘1%’ wealth tax payments, we wind up with $1,381 or an appreciation of only 38.08% that amounts to a penalty of over 34% on what investors currently enjoy when paying capital gains taxes only on realized gains.  And we haven’t heard any of this from our rightwing media mavens.

The Glasgow Climate Change Kabuki

George Rebane

President Biden heads to Glasgow with an empty quiver this weekend in a futile effort to demonstrate that his administration is still hanging on to some vestiges of global leadership here and there.  Most nations have either written off the United States as a worthy ally, or most certainly as a hegemon to be respected.  And Bumblebrain accomplished all that by himself.

Climate change is no longer on the list of important concerns for Americans, and even less so for people of other lands.  However, our leftwing lamestream media keeps up the drumbeat of global warming hysterics with lies ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous.  A major one that hits close to home is the progress of destructive wildfires, the frequency and size of which are supposed to be growing without bound due to manmade preventable global warming.  In Biden’s new spending framework there is $500B or so allocated for various green bamboozles designed to fool the foolish and enrich Democrats’ favorites.

But as Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, reiterates what these pages have reported for years – the acreage of America’s annual wildfires continues to decline, and has been declining since record keeping was initiated in 1900 (see nearby graphic).  This fact has been quietly reported by the World Wildlife Fund, and vigorously ignored by our lying politicians, environmental activists, and media.

In ‘Climate Activists Blow Smoke on Wildfire Fears’ (28oct21 WSJ) Lomborg cites data and again points out how the hysterical scenarios on climate change consistently fail to incorporate the most salient and significant factor that mitigates and ameliorates the predicted catastrophes – human adaptation.  In such loudly trumpeted forecasts, humans do nothing and quietly accept whatever nature has in store for them.  Over the millennia this never has been the case, and most certainly won’t be in a technologically and resource rich future that we can and are building for ourselves.

What our average citizen has trouble parsing is the difference between the frequencies and size of wildfires, and the property damage done by wildfires.  In a 2016 study Nature reported, “Contrary to common perception, human exposure to wildfires increases in the future mainly owing to projected population growth in areas with frequent wildfires, rather than by a general increase in burned area.”

Lomborg concludes – “Helping future wildfire victims has little to do with strict and expensive climate policies, and everything to do with simpler, cheaper measures like better forest management and building codes. There’s no good reason to terrify children with stories of apocalyptic firestorms.”  All of this will be ignored during the Glasgow kabuki.

Oath Keepers – a closer look

George Rebane

National Propaganda Radio did a hit piece on Oath Keepers yesterday morning, labeling them as a “radical right, anti-government paramilitary organization”.  The highly biased progressive slant presented was in line with today’s lamestream narrative trying to make the case that the 6jan21 Capitol riot(?) was organized by the OK in their attempt to overthrow our federal government.  I am not an OK member, and have only heard the standard reports on the organization and its doings.  Of course, all of these reports have been more than shaded by the outlet/individual who has done the reporting.  Wanting to find out more of what they actually believe, I went to their website to read about their organization, adopted charter/mission, and bylaws.

Nothing I have read or heard from voices I consider reasonable has come close to painting these former members of the military and first responders as belonging to a radical right, anti-government paramilitary organization.  Save for the current efforts by our own rabid Left to nail OK as the organizers and leaders of the 6jan21 affair, there has been no evidence presented that these people have done anything of which they are currently accused by the Democrats and their lamestream.  However, the congressional investigation continues, and every possible filament, no matter how gossamer or tenuous, is made out as a portent of much more damning evidence to come.

From their website and the public record, we learn that –

1. OK are non-partisan, hewing to neither political party;
2. Their guiding principle is to maintain the oath we all swore upon entering the military or becoming first responders – to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
3. Instead of anti-government, OK is a dedicated pro-government organization; (As opposed to the existentially anti-constitutional Democratic Party and Biden administration.)
4. There is nothing paramilitary about the OK, save that their members have acquired military and civil first responder skills, which they continue to preserve and share with other members and associate members.
5. Under a constitutional government their activism as an organization is constrained to lawful demonstrations against what they perceive as unconstitutional actions and intents by our federal and various state governments and their agencies.

As such, the OK is very much against the kind of neo-Marxist “fundamental transformation” of America into a socialist state as promised and demonstrated by the country’s leftwing factions led by the radical progressives of the Democratic Party.  OK members, like many more of us, believe that if the leftwing autocrats continue making ‘progress’, then there will come a time when our Left will commission the state police and security apparatus, and/or the military (given its current woke reorganization) to finally disarm the American citizenry and complete their planned road to our servility.  They know that the OK and other similar organizations would then seek to mobilize and organize the public against such an unconstitutional and rogue government.  After all, such a response is our heritage, and the most fundamental American tenet is to preserve our liberties.

The proof of this pudding is that a liberty maintaining government of, by, and for the people is not afraid of citizens who retain the means to overthrow and reconstitute its government gone rogue.  A constitutional government would welcome the existence of supportive grassroots organizations such as the Oath Keepers and other assemblies of veterans and patriotic groups.  Since the Left historically has never trusted the people under their control, their ultimate success depends on the concurrent subversion of government institutions while they disarm the populace and discredit organizations assembled to defend America and its Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Evidence to the contrary welcomed.

Scattershots – 21oct21

George Rebane

DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) has now penetrated the deepest recesses of STEM academia and corporatist organizations of all hues.  As theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss reports in the 21oct21 WSJ, applicants for teaching positions at major universities and corporatist management positions must now submit an essay on DEI with their applications.  And they will be evaluated first and foremost on the contents of what should read like a heartfelt testament for the verity of critical race theory and its anti-racist therapeutics.  Added to that, the applicant must include how he will incorporate the practice of the DEI monomania into his conduct of the sought position.  As an example, an addition to the usual list of qualifications, the applicant must also supply “a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicant’s efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.” Today these organizations have huge DEI departments staffed with zealous STASIs who not only evaluate applications, but also monitor the practice of DEI by the institution’s staff.  It is now common for applications to be rejected for insufficient DEI even before the applicant’s other qualifications are even considered. (more here)  Verily, we have entered America’s age of perdition.

The coordinated calamity of climate change is heralded by all the western media in preparation of next month’s Glasgow conference that will not be attended by the leaders of China, Russia, and India.  In America the lamestream is reeling of stories of impending catastrophes of famine, flood, and fire.  Bjorn Lomborg analyses these for us (here), and points out how the described “catastrophic scenarios presuppose people will do nothing to adjust to differences in the weather.”  No matter what one thinks about the notion of preventable manmade global warming, doing such passive extrapolations decades into the future is nothing short of politicized scaremongering.  It is carried out regularly by the usual leftwing outlets such as CNN, USA Today, and WaPo.  Lomborg’s message to the sheeple is that yes, the climate changes, but so can we.

Biden’s taxes avoid the top 0.1%.  Why?  Because that cohort knows how to play the legal exemptions game – always has, always will.  The taxes are really designed to start with the remaining top 9.9% and then quickly ripple down to the tens of millions of middle-class earners (aka makers).  And it makes perfect sense, since the lying sacks of shit (aka Biden, Pelosi, Psaki, …), claiming that the trillions to be spent are “free”, know where to get all this free money.  This is clear from what little we know of the Democrats’ proposed $5T+ spending spree. (more here)

The Onslaught of the Politically Dormant

"The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living." Anonymous

George Rebane

We have been told many times that democracy works only so long as the takers can’t use the government gun to derive their livelihood from the makers.  Staged governance in a democratic republic was conceived to prevent (delay?) that from happening.  But leftwing autocrats have also known that for over a century, and have always attempted to convince the masses of the non-existent benefits of a pure democracy applied wholesale across the land – it is the fastest way to secure enduring political control by unprincipled authoritarians.

Today we witness what appears to be the beginning of the end with a ‘fundamental transformation’ of our republic.  The Deep State of autocratic elites and their central planners has become firmly ensconced in our government through 50 years of elections by an increasingly under-educated and politically dormant electorate.  California’s failure to recall Newsom is undoubtedly the nation’s posterchild of such misguided elections when we look at the condition of the state and his horrible ongoing policies.  Consider (here) that in just one region –

• SF retailers (e.g. Walgreens) closing stores because their city lets thieves clear shelves of goods and openly haul them away;
• People are moving away in numbers that leads to an enrollment drop in SF schools;
• Polls show that more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave permanently.

Given Newsom’s overwhelming repulse of the recall, it is clear that the added level of pain to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes is yet to be determined.  And that again brings to question the ability of voters to understand the source and sustenance of their pain.

‘Tax the Rich’ – a momentous Democrat lie

“… until you run out of other people’s money.”  M. Thatcher

George Rebane

The momentous lies retold daily by the Democratic Party are now getting too numerous to count.  Among the most impactive on Americans is their assertion that the $5T+ cost of their new government growth and spending programs “will be zero”.  How’s that?  Well, they’ll just tax the crap out of “the rich” and corporations.  ‘You, Mr/Ms Main Street Snuffie won’t have to pay a penny; what’s not to like?’

For our informed and educated neighbors such claims are truly head-spinning as is made clear again by economists Phil Gramm (also former senator) and Mike Solon in the 15oct21 WSJ (here).  There we are reminded again that “the wealthy already bear far more of the burden in the US than they do in other developed countries.”  The chart below compares the ‘fair shares’ paid by the top 10% earners in the US, France Germany, and Sweden.  Note the enormous imbalance in what our socialists are demanding to what we already are paying to keep the vote buying programs funded.  The tax burden in other developed nations (including the vaunted Sweden) is more equally shared by incorporation of a nominally 15-20% VAT on all purchases.  So it turns out, as Gramm and Solon show, that the US already has the most progressive tax system in the world, thereby giving lie to the claims that somehow the ‘rich’ are getting away with murder at the expense of the remaining 90% of Americans.

Their public copy aside, what the Democrats’ new tax proposals do is continue to favor the top 1% who lower their tax rates by charitable giving and investing in tax-favored securities and sectors promoted by our government.  These provisions actually favor the very rich – i.e. the top 1% of earners, not the 10% - and none of such bennies will be affected by the new ‘tax the rich’ rates designed to hit the less wealthy down the income ladder.  No lamestream outlet is allowed to tell us this.

In the meantime we are having a problem finding enough workers to support robust economic growth.  “Since the War on Poverty started in 1965, the labor-force participation rate of bottom-quintile earners, who now receive more than 90% of their $50,000 average income from government transfer payments, has fallen from almost 70% to 36%. With the Build Back Better Act proposing to explode unearned benefits and shower them on middle-income Americans, how long will it take for the current U.S. labor-force participation rate of 61.6% to fall to 55%, as it is in France, or 50%, as it is in Italy? Who then will pull the wagon and pay the taxes to fund the American welfare state?”  This is what we mean when we talk of the takers and makers.  And who do the takers vote for, and which party wants to maximize the people (citizens and illegals) who draw ever more of their succor from the government?

(And these worthies have no idea what’s in store for them regarding their contribution to labor, once the nation, any nation, falls under the tender mercies of a single party state.  History read is a great teacher; not so much history ignored.)

We are reminded again by Gramm and Solon that “corporations don’t ultimately pay taxes” – their customers and their risk-exposed owners pay the whole kit and kaboodle.  “If there is anything economists agree on—and there isn’t much—it’s that all taxes imposed on corporations fall in part on the consumers of their products and in part on their stockholders and workers. Workers pay between 50% and 70% of the corporate tax that isn’t passed on to consumers in higher prices. The record growth in real wages after the 2017 corporate tax cuts, especially among low-income, minority and disadvantaged workers, bears this out.  So when corporate tax rates are raised, it’s workers and their pensions, retirement accounts and insurance investments, which own 72% of America’s stockholder equity, who pay most of those taxes.”

Again, the indominable man-in-the-street who votes Democrat has no clue of this, or at best considers it to be another rightwing piece of fake news put out by rich capitalists and big corporations.  However, when you run the numbers, you see that “not surprisingly, with much of the 2017 tax cuts made up of corporate rate reductions, child tax credits and a doubling of the standard deduction, the Trump tax cuts made the tax code more, not less, progressive.”  When was the last time you heard that on any of the lamestream outlets?

We can put a ribbon around all this by citing the most recent big three feel-good economic accomplishments out of Bumblebrain’s teleprompter – 1) he has created 5M+ new jobs, 2) unemployment dropped below 5%, and 3) wages have gone up.  Well, not exactly.  Employment gain has been anemic due to government handouts, industry is stifled for lack of workers.  Unemployment dropped only because more people dropped out of the workforce -  i.e. they quit looking for jobs.  And the buying power of wages has declined due to not keeping pace with the big jump in inflation.  Americans’ real wages have declined for the first time since the big Obama dip in 2013.  And all of this is due to self-inflicted harm brought to you by Team Biden and his ballyhooed Build Back Better policies which have a snowball’s chance in hell of kicking in.  But to Bumblebrain, all this is "progress".