Rebane's Ruminations

Returning to Race-based College Admissions

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my resumed regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 3 June 2020.]

Former University of California regent Ward Connerly founded the American Civil Rights Institute in response to the corrupt racism that affirmative action introduced into state government contracting, public jobs hiring, and deciding who would be admitted to state schools.  Almost 25 years ago he launched Prop 209 which was the successful ballot initiative that made it illegal for California to consider race in performing any of those functions.

Being able to award contracts, jobs, and admissions on the basis of race was a big progressive vote getter for the state’s Democratic Party, and leftwing politicians have been chafing for all these years trying to figure out how to make racial patrimony legal again.

In the meantime, race-based admissions into the nation’s universities and colleges has become a much-publicized issue, especially after it was discovered that elite universities were leading the pack with racial quota systems in their admissions programs applied in the most corrupt and merit-free manner.  For these elitist administrations academic merit became a racist criterion when considering applicants for their freshman classes.  Since African-American and Hispanic students ranked way below the Asians and whites in academic achievement, it was clear that something had to be done to ‘level the playing field’ and bring social justice to bear.

The result was that race quotas were pushed to the top, and academic merit was demoted in the ranking of factors that would recommend admission.  The proponents of academics started pushing back when these admissions policies came to light.  However, nobody really cared how the white applicants were discriminated against.  What really hit a nerve on the race-based policies was the dirty deal dealt to Asian-American applicants.  This cohort of minority students always blew the tops off their high school grades, achievement tests, and any other criteria like extra-curricular activities and breadth of interests.  If the new progressive race-based admissions standards were fairly applied to all minorities, the Asian-American kids would have flooded the enrollment rolls.  What to do now?

Well, the answer to the progressive administrations was obvious, lay on another layer of corruption and eliminate any semblance of balance between minority and academic requirements.  If you were black or Latino, you went to the head of the line until the quota was filled, and that was that.  However, when the Asian-American community got wind of such obviously biased and unfair practices, they got active and involved.  The result was that these tilted playing field practices made national headlines with our polarized country predictably lined up on both sides of the issue.

Today, California’s Democrats see an opportunity to eliminate the last barriers to race-based admissions policies.  This week the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote to pass ACA5, the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Prop209, and again legitimize race-based admissions.  The 81-year-old Ward Connerly has returned to work with a handful of very devoted Asian-American civic groups to stop ACA5, which most likely will be railroaded through the Senate during this pandemic season without a single public hearing.  It will then appear on the November ballot to let Californians again decide how they want to diminish and demote the state’s higher education systems.  The reinstatement of this corrupt practice will be sold to our electorate under the guise of affirmative action.  In opposition, Asian-Americans against ACA5 know that “If it passes, Asian-American students will be further scapegoated and penalized in college admissions.”  Those Californians who believe in a colorblind society when it comes to government preferences and perks should join to oppose ACA5 on the November ballot.

Should it pass, lawsuits are already being prepared to fight this discriminatory amendment.  And there’s a good chance the case will end up before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hope that the court would then rule as clearly and categorically as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (more here)

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

Scattershots – 26may20

George Rebane

What is the death rate of those infected with SARS-Cov-2 (here C19)?  Well, the more we try to find out, the more it gets curiouser and curiouser.  The latest attempt to explain the whole matter to us is put forth by Reason magazine in their ‘Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?’  Their quest for the answer was launched with the premise “The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably varies from one place to another.”  Well, no sh!+ Red Ryder, you’d think?  Then after a head-spinning discussion, about all the reader can walk away with is that IFR varies anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.013.  And IFR is strongly correlated with old age, especially those with preexisting comorbidities.  But then a little later, someone concludes that, no matter your age, it’s actually mainly your preexisting comorbidity that determines your probability of dying, and old age is just a prominent proxy for that since almost all old people have one kind of preexisting malady or other.  But what brought a smile to my face was their attempt to buttress the piece by injecting numbers.  All kinds of talk about test 'specifities' and disease 'prevalence', and the resulting 'positive predictive values' were bandied about which the reader is supposedly able to follow with their numbers.  But it turns out that none of it could be followed because nowhere do they bring up, let alone cite, the related test sensitivities without which their discussion is a meaningless jumble.  The point they try and fail to make is that which I presented in ‘Image of ignorance and/or incompetence’ along with its preceding tutorials on testing.  The bottom line here is that to understand how C19 relates to the mostly insane current response policies is almost impossible.  Since everything, like IFR, depends on so many different factors, to get even a glimmer, one has to have more than a smidgen of numeracy under their belt.  And if you’re going to publish something about it, you’d better be at least numerate.  Today none of that is a prerequisite before spouting volumes about the pandemic.

This PAN-DEM-IC looks like a DEM-PANIC when we consider how the Dems are doing everything they can to blame the whole shebang on President Trump – everything from the economy to the number of deaths attributed to the corona virus.  A reader sent an article from American Thinker (here) that details the whole thing, including why cooking the books on the body count has become a cynical political football.  November is coming and the Democrats are desperate to making something stick on Trump before they have to let Bumblebrain out of the basement.  No matter who the DNC picks for Biden’s VP, I bet they will demand that the presidential debate(s) will be presented in a tag-team format so that Bumblebrain will have someone with him on stage who can talk – otherwise it will be a bloodbath.

Some flavors of mindlessness (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unsettling ‘Settled Science’

[This commentary was also published here in the 3jun20 edition of The Union.]

George Rebane

None are so certain about science as those outside looking in.

Today, the SARS-CoV-2 (or Covid-19 or simply C19) pandemic ‘science’ in the public square rapidly became a mish-mash of unreliable reports, contending medical views, and ideologically tailored fake news.  One thing you can always take to the bank – people claiming ‘settled science’ is the litmus test for identifying the charlatans, the ignorant, and the ignorant charlatans.  Historically all important scientific advances were met with an overwhelming chorus of opposition from the entrenched establishment.  Their consistent theme was citing how the new was not in accord with the old, or worse, that the new directly contradicted the long and dearly held beliefs.  In our highly polarized and politicized society, it is safe to say that all reports purporting a solid scientific foundation are at a minimum suspect.

The C19 virus has been uniformly mischaracterized in the popular press and politics.  As more and more evidence climbs out from under widespread media (broadcast and internet) censorship, it becomes clear that the national lockdown was and continues to be a horrible mistake of yet to be tallied cost in lives and livelihoods.  And that lockdown was imposed by governments citing ‘science’ when no such science existed to support the mandates to shutdown commerce and impose stay-at-home.  It now turns out that C19 is only a bit more virulent than our seasonal flus, and the cited data claiming otherwise is dreadfully flawed and misreported.

Many reasoned, reasonable, and experienced voices have sought to counsel holding back on the draconian measures our politicians have imposed on the country.  An example of one of the more recent ones is epidemiologist Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (here).  He points out that, far from being settled, the science around C19 is “bitterly contested”, as confirmed by anyone doing an internet search on the topic.  The bottom line that the expanding data on the pandemic now shows is that C19 is NOT significantly more dangerous than our usual infectious diseases (which don’t require forsaking freedoms and destroying economies), unless you have an age-related comorbidity.  And then you are in line to die anyway, either of an unfortunate C19 infection or something else.

Sadly, Americans don’t ‘do numbers’.  We are an overwhelmingly innumerate nation educated in dumbed-down public schools that have a decades-long record of abysmal and declining performance now imposed on the third generation of young people as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.  And when it comes to STEM-based knowledge, you can forget it.  As a population, we are at the mercy of the loudest demogauges that rise above the media cacophony, with no way to even reasonably assess alternative viewpoints and opinions.  We have found that the safe and sane way to handle the daily conflicts and conundrums is to adopt a simple set of beliefs, view everything through its lens, and comingle within a cohort of common, confirming, and comfortable minds.

Those who have spent their lives in and with science have an easier time and a natural inclination to say ‘it ain’t necessarily so’, and then use their skills to examine and evaluate alternative explanations.  But not everyone so blessed will voice such doubts if their job, livelihood, and/or reputation depends on swimming with the established school of thought that succors the correctly like-minded with grants, stipends, tenure, endowed chairs, published peer-approved papers, … .  And unfortunately, science is such a multi-variegated field that there is a lot of latitude in the words that can be chosen to support or remain circumspect about any scientific position.

Politicians like Governors Cuomo (NY) and Newsom (CA), and Mayors de Blasio (NYC) and Garcetti (LA) have been quick to tell their flocks that their lockdown and loosening mandates are based on science not politics.  And those carefully taught in their compliant constituencies have no available alternative than believe in the cited ‘science’ dispensed from on high.

At this point your columnist will usually offer a solution to get us out of today’s judiciously fabricated dilemma – ‘profits before people’ or ‘people before profits’.  Unfortunately, those of us having spent our lives in and with science can offer no science-based acceptable solution, because here it is all politics.  Today America’s answer to Keynes’ immortal question, ‘When I get new information, I change my mind.  What do you do?’, is a confidently calcified ‘Nothing.’

[Addendum]  People are now being told of herd immunity thresholds (HITs).  These are percentages of populations immune, at the crossing of which herd immunity kicks in and does the good things variously reputed to it – primarily starts tilting the number of currently infected curve downward.  M. Gomes et al have done a recent study of how individual variation in susceptibility and likelihood of exposure (actually exposure rate) to C19 would lower the herd immunity threshold (here).  It’s a technical paper with squigglies, but also fairly readable graphs, and therefore worth reading by the non-techie by just skipping over the obtuse parts and concentrating on what’s known, and what’s known to be unknown.

The takeaway is that at best today’s C19 HITs lie somewhere between 10% and 70% of target populations.  The authors also go into some detail on what is required to nail down a HIT, and doing it doesn’t look promising for any time soon.  The good news from the analysis is another corroboration that lockdowns do little to reduce morbidity or mortality.  Sooner or later the susceptibles have to come out, become the exposed, and get infected.  Depending on how many were hunkered down and now out-and-about, the next wave will be big or small.

So we come full circle on the argument presented here and elsewhere – do away with the lockdowns, and let people prudently go about their business knowing that there’s a bug out there that is likely to kill the elderly with comorbidities, against which there still is no vaccine, but for which the likelihood of your getting a debilitating infection starts out low and diminishes with every passing day as herd immunity increases.

Liberty’s Twilight - 13may20

George Rebane

Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville, KY home when the police erroneously broke through her front door in the middle of the night seeking a narcotics suspect who was already in police custody.  Not knowing the invaders during the break-in, Ms Taylor’s boyfriend sought to defend themselves by shooting one of the assailants in the leg.  In the following melee the other police officers returned fire, pumping eight rounds into Ms Taylor and killing her.  Her boyfriend was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of a police officer.  The family is now suing the police department (more here).

Over the years we have lost count of this kind of mistaken killings of innocents by incompetent law enforcement agencies.  But that is not the real point here.  What’s germane is that our homes are no longer our castles.  We have no right to defend ourselves within the confines of our own four walls when LE executes one of its surprise assaults into our living quarters, our most inner sanctums.  These unnecessary attacks mimic criminal home invasions which now, according to the ever-growing leviathan, put the onus on the home owner to ascertain the identity of those breaking through his front door BEFORE he is allowed to start defending himself.  The assailant now has the de jure right to take the first shots at the victim.  And only after the assailant’s identity has been confirmed by the victim, can his defense begin.  Moreover, in some states it’s not even legal to ‘stand your ground’ in your own house if it is later determined that you could have retreated out of the back door or an open window.  The law has been stood on its head, and we sheeple must comply.

In a practical sense, there is never a need for LE to ambush someone with deadly force in a known residence.  The state always has the resources to surround the habitat and then make their presence known.  LE officers breaking and entering in the middle of the night is now an established tactic of state thuggery.  According to our Constitution and Rebane Doctrine, an American has every right to initiate the use of deadly force against any unidentified assailant who forcefully enters his home.  And an innocent man being accused of attempted murder of a police officer after such an incident is the beyond-cynical elimination of the last vestiges of justice that should be brought to bear after such a tragic incident.  Our quiet acceptance of these proceedings, just because it happened in distant Louisville, is testimony to how inured we all have become to the growth of our autocratic governments in these United States.

Where is the Covid Deaths Bump?

George Rebane

For the past week I’ve been poring over various data from different sources on Covid-19 deaths and death rates.  It’s been a frustrating enterprise due to definitions ranging from vague to insane, and numbers that just don’t tie.  The quest is important though, because we have been deluged for the past couple of months with what can now be called the metrics of mass madness.  The ongoing efforts to afflict major damage to our economy are all based on the allegation that a national lockdown will greatly reduce the number of people dying from the virus, and therefore the calls for opening up are nothing less than the voices of greed putting profits before people.

However, when we take a closer look at C19 deaths, the lockdown arguments and reasoning don’t add up.  What every histrionics laden report ignores and/or hides is the entire question of how many would have died anyway from their ‘underlying conditions’, or from the legion of other causes that kill almost 2.9 million Americans year in and year out.  In other words, at any given age, if you don’t die of this, then you’ll die of that anyway, C19 or no C19.

So, from all the blizzard of mostly irrelevant and bad data available to us, the objective to sustain lockdown arguments is to see if there is an abnormal bump in the current number of deaths due to the corona virus.  We must also keep in mind the hanky-panky that is going on with how C19 deaths have been and are being counted – in many health care systems/institutions patients dying of anything during this epidemic have been put down as succumbing to C19.  The National Center for Health Statistics assures us that the most reliable data are the “provisional death counts (that) deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19. These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.”  (more here)

So here’s the drill.  The CDC tallies total C19 deaths from 1 Feb 2020 to 1 May 2020 at 37,308 out of a total of 719,438 US deaths for that three-month period (here).  The current ‘normal’ (pre-C19) annual death rate in 2019 for the US is 8.8 per thousand (here).  This says that out of a population of 328,000,000 we have a total of about 2,886,400 Americans die annually, or 722,000 during a three-month period (or 55,500 every week).  To emphasize again, this is the pre-C19 death rate for last year.  Not to put too sharp a point on it, this year’s total deaths, with C19 raging in that three-month period, don’t even come up to our norm for a three-month period.

The reasonable explanation is that the corona virus’s marginal contribution to America’s annual deaths count is literally so low as to be swallowed by the country’s natural mortality rate.  Highlighting (hyping?) C19 deaths due to the worldwide pandemic has made us all accept draconian personal lockdowns and the arguably insane shutdown of America’s commerce.  And it has been done without the presentation of any substantive information (i.e. data formatted to support decision making), only the daily death counts and emotional appeals to ‘save human lives’ from the ravages of a disease that is doing little or nothing extraordinary, save focus our fearful attention on it so that we will compliantly accept new layers of controls from federal and state governments pursuing more fundamental agendas while desperately seeking to convince us that they are ‘doing something’.  So today we have a population that does not understand the role, power, and development of herd immunity in stopping pandemics.  And most certainly, no one has asked to see the extraordinary bump in total deaths caused by C19 (aka SARS-CoV-2).  Is this how sheeple behave?

Ruminations – 3may20 (updated 5may20)

George Rebane

You can indeed have your own opinions AND your own facts – America proves it daily.

Know the denominator!!  The innumerates of the land are constantly bombarded with naked numerators about this stat and that stat.  And none of them make a peep that they know about what they are being told.  That the US has suffered more than 60K C19 deaths means nothing unless you know either the total number of infections or America’s population.  Naked numerators are NOT news unless you know what the denominator is and how that compares with others in the same class (e.g. international C19 death rates) in which the numerator belongs.  Dumbth rules.

Dr Fauci is quoted saying, “Opening too soon COULD cause a (C19) rebound.”  Well, no shit Red Ryder.  Reported by everyone from FN on down, this is a tautology of cosmic proportions; a real nothing-burger seen as ‘news’ only by the nation’s light thinkers.  Fauci had to say that because it's also his job to disperse palliative pabulum, true statements masquerading as epiphanies of expert opinion.  But it’s up to us Americans out here in television land to understand that we learned nothing new.  And woe be to them (and really to us all) if enough of our fellow citizens really thought they were enlightened by something actionable.

Asymptomatic C19 carriers are not contagious, shows a new German study, thereby debunking the Chinese claim to the contrary, and making moot more of the claims by the nation’s CCP-celebrating lockdown loonies.  (more here)  H/T to correspondent since the lamestream has a tendency to suppress such news.

Censorship rising.  The Left, supported by corporatist America, now determines which facts and opinions may be publicly expressed in the various media.  Even FN can no longer claim to “fair, balanced, and unafraid.”

‘I vas just following orders.’  Does anyone else notice how many of our police are becoming automatons, mindlessly carrying out their lockdown orders, no matter how insane?  This behavior is a harbinger of the police state the progressives intend to implement sooner than later when they tip the balance of power.  And as has happened in so many other countries, historically and especially during the last century, the government people with the guns will always act to first and foremost protect their own jobs and families’ security at the expense of yours.  The Left has a full pipeline of laws and regulations awaiting implementation to control every aspect of our lives and livelihoods.  But there are still LE voices in the wilderness that recognize and oppose the national insanity; here is one from the Sacramento Deputy Sheriffs Association. (H/T to reader)

Nevada County – ‘still a day late and a dollar short’.  As of 2may20, NC with 100K residents has a total of 41 C19 cases that include one death, two still active, and 38 recovered.  Our hospital is empty of C19 patients, and western county has had no new cases since 17 April.  Also, as of 2may20 Yuba and Sutter counties with a combined 175K residents have 50 recorded cases that include 36 recoveries and 3 deaths with the remaining 11 being active.  Yuba and Sutter have opened up their businesses with the advisory that commercial enterprises “use all appropriate health measures” in the public square.  As a remote rural county that doesn’t understand the nature of the current coronavirus epidemic and how it compares to a regular flu season which has never impacted the conduct of commerce, NC remains closed, fearful, and continues to shutter and threaten its businesses.  Talk about rank ignorance and political CYA.

[4may20 update]  Prof Alan Blinder, the very liberal Princeton economist, was interviewed in the 4may20 WSJ, a newspaper in which he regularly appears.  Asked about the Fed’s response to the C19 pandemic, he gave it high marks for immediately providing lavish liquidity to commerce (part of its monetary policy), but reminded us that the Fed cannot create jobs because that is the role of government’s fiscal policy (taxes, tariffs, fees, regs).  Of interest to me was that he never deigned to elaborate on the fiscal policy required to create jobs, avoiding this important detail for good reason.  To the leftist economists proper fiscal policy here means government creating winners and losers in the commercial sector by selectively issuing taxes, tariffs, fees, and regs.  That has never worked, and it’s always been the opposite of the government getting out of the way that has given rise to rapid economic growth (witness the most recent snail’s pace of growth stifled by Obama.)  But the Blinders of the world cannot make their case to a knowledgeable audience without inviting more public blowback on their cherished collectivist economics.  So the good professor left it to the reader to interpret which kind of fiscal policy would be needed today to rescue our economy.

Seventy-one years ago the refugee Rebanes from Europe arrived in the Port of New York aboard the troopship USS General Harry Taylor packed with a regiment-load of WW2 survivors.  We had spent the last ten days on the storm-tossed North Atlantic housed in huge sleeping bays like sardines in canvas sleeping bunks stacked 5 and 6 high. (more here)  And finally, on the morning of 4 May 1949 we landed in the world’s greatest country that promised all of us lucky ones life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness as each of us saw fit and were capable, … and did we ever!

[5may20 update]  Aerosols, droplets, speaking, singing, ..., and Covid-19.  Here is a very illuminating summary of how the virus can be transmitted and the effectiveness of masks.

Hunker Down Diary – 27apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD51 for the Rebanes.  As most people, we have been doing extensive Facetime with family and friends, and Zooming in for meetings.  We also meet surreptitiously for dinners with equally hunkered family and friends. The rest of the time is taken up with household chores and deskwork.  RR readers know what I’ve been noodling about.  Jo Ann has been busy with her Republican Women Federated, NC Republican Central Committee,  and Union editorial board work.  My labors on the boards of MIM and SESF have been minimal since the C19 lockdown.  And now that the weather guessers are predicting warm weather going forward as far as the eye can see, it’s time to get the farm going and the horseshoe court spiffed up for competition.

We are also participating in weekly online cocktail sessions with other couples.  These have turned out to be more fun than we anticipated, and all of us look forward to the next week’s happy hours.  So all in all, social life continues along newly created paths.  We always have a fire going during the evenings which are divided into TV nights and reading nights.  The TV fare is all prerecorded stuff of various series, new/commentary programs, movies, and documentaries.  (Years ago, we pretty much weaned ourselves off of live broadcasts, everything gets put on the DVR – we pace the presentations, they don’t pace us.  I suppose everyone now does that so it’s hard to see why advertisers still pay to advertise, unless some people still watch live TV.)

Today we had to make a trip into town for bags of soil and sand – soil for Jo Ann’s farm and sand for refurbishing my world-class horseshoe court.  She gets the best manmade soil you can buy which contains all the nummies that her veggies want, including 15% chickenshit.  Long ago we decided not to run the numbers on the actual cost of our vegetables – we’re not in competition with Safeway, but they are with us.  It has turned out to be a labor of love and the pure joy of eating loads of home-grown veggies.  We even enjoy the late night hunts for tomato worms with our UV flashlight.

But my big report of the day is that regardless of what our out-of-step governor dictates, the people of Nevada County are not staying at home.  Traffic on the roads and Brunswick Basin was somewhere between normal and heavy.  The nursery parking lot was so full with people coming and going that they had two clerks out there directing traffic.  Picking up sand at B&C was no different.  The entire shopping center’s parking lot was full of cars, and the store full of  people.  More than half the people were not wearing masks.  It is clear that it is the people who have ended the lockdown – rural Californians are not waiting for the word from Sacramento.  The only thing we are still waiting for is the county to get their jackboot off our necks and let the restaurants, bars, churches, and theaters open up for sit-down food, worship, and entertainment.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life.  From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.  And now the data is coming in from multiple sources overseas and within our borders that national lockdowns are wrongheaded and more dangerous, most certainly in the long run, than hunkering down.  (more here)

A Nation Risk Averse - Scared, Cowering, and Compliant

George Rebane

In the middle of the 20^th century we lived in a world filled with ‘unconquered’ infectious diseases that were both life threatening and life limiting.  Everything from measles to polio lurked in places unknown.  And, of course, we had the rates of mortality and morbidity to show for it.  Nevertheless, life went on in full recognition of the hidden dangers laying in wait.  None of us thought of shutting down the country and cowering in our homes until someone somewhere in authority would make the dangers go away.

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed 50M worldwide and somewhere well above half million Americans died of the disease.  But life not only went on, it thrived in the years after WW1 with the country’s economy growing while people were still coming down with the virus and other maladies.  Little to no mention of the disease made the news nor required special government dispensations affecting the entire population.  The flu was there, it would stay for a while, and then it would go away – meanwhile try not to get sick.

The same happened later in the century when we weathered the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957 – over 110,000 deaths in the US and 1M worldwide.  And then there came the ‘Hong Kong flu’, another Asian flu in 1968 – 100,000 deaths in the US and 1.1M worldwide.  From the NIH we learn that “within the past one hundred years, four pandemics have resulted from the emergence of a novel influenza strain for which humans possessed little or no immunity: the H1N1 Spanish flu (1918), the H2N2 Asian flu (1957), the H3N2 Hong Kong flu (1968), and the H1N1 swine flu (2009).”  They summarize these pandemics in the following table.

And then there were others like the avian or ‘bird flu’ which killed 70,000 Americans; and even more - it’s all very confusing.  But the bottom line is that people didn’t lose jobs, companies didn’t go out of business, the fed and state governments didn’t go autocratic, no one panicked, life went on.

Local Launch of Left’s New Covid-19 Narrative

George Rebane

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

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

What is the purpose of testing???

George Rebane

This may be the most definitive evidence that dumbth is the established order of the day in America.  Everyone has been screaming about testing, and continues that to this minute.  But no one has told us why test – what kind of metric is testing supposed to provide to public policy makers, and how will it be used to support those policies.  I would think that this would be something that we would be briefed on instead of hearing from one side that there are not enough tests, and the other citing the numbers of tests that have been administered and shipped.

The dumbest thing I hear from the daily briefings is that we have now given over 3 million infection tests – really!!?  BFD!  What the hell are you going to do with the results of 3 million infection tests, results obtained willy-nilly from all over the country over the last 5-6 weeks?  I don’t hear the Drs Fauci or Birx telling us jack about how the test results will be used.  And what should be even more amazing – but is not – is that our crack journalists, double dummies all, have never thought to even consider asking for the purpose of testing.

Some silly shit answer like, ‘well, it’ll tell the healthcare people if the tested person has C19’ – so what?!  If the sumbich already feels poorly with C19 symptoms, it isn’t the test that’s going to get him admitted into a clinic or hospital.  And if he isn’t symptomatic, then it’s pure happenstance that a serendipitous test of unknown reliability tests positive, and he’s then advised to get off the streets, and wait until his symptoms appear before he bothers anyone.

And then some other worthy will explain to the peanut gallery that we need testing to find out the extent of the pandemic and identify new C19 hot spots early.  Does anyone at NIH or CDC have a clue about the kind of testing program required – its extent, frequency, and duration – for that??  We hope that someone there passed a stats class somewhere in their career, but today they sure as hell don’t act like it. 

Infection testing needs to be conducted continuously on random samples drawn from critical target populations – remember, infection tests are snapshots the results of which can and do change overnight.  To be fair, Dr Fauci last night finally acknowledged that neither the US nor any other country has the ability to do the kind of infection testing for early identification of hot spots.  And don’t get me started again on factoring in test reliabilities into any kind of a non-existent organized testing program; no one has even made a peep about that. 

Immunity (antibody/antigen) testing gives time-dependent enduring results that tells us the extent of herd immunity that may already exist in a target population.  However, Dr Birx also finally admitted that today’s immunity test reliabilities are so bad that it’s futile to use them with any confidence to determine the recovered share of target populations.  When and if such tests become reliable, at that point if the recovered share is sufficiently high, then even ‘lives over profits’ policy makers can start staging back-to-work policies.  And if the recovered population grows too slowly, then that advises that the target population is hunkering down too hard, and we again need to loosen things up a mite to start making progress against C19.

But in the meantime, what in hell is going on out there with our political leaders and their teams of so-called ‘experts’??  Given what we can and cannot do in the testing field, the known attributes of C19, and the general dynamics of virulent epidemics, it’s past time to start a programmed loosening up of America’s commerce.

Scattershots – 15apr20 (updated 18apr20)

George Rebane

For a progressive the content value of delivered messages depend only on the correct credentials of the messenger. 

Autocracy rising.  Granted that all the federal and state hunker-down mandates have taken a big bite out of our civil liberties (here and here), we witness and read daily of people being stopped, harrassed, arrested, and even handcuffed for engaging in non-infectious activities like walking in the woods, surfing alone, riding a bike, driving a car, … .  Given their head to control and dictate, government workers are becoming more autocratic, hubristic, and commanding in their relations with regular citizens.  Don’t get me wrong, they were no paragons of helpful knowledge and assistance in the best of times, but now we get regular reports of everyone from law enforcement people to clerks behind counters beginning to act like the caricature authorities of tyrannies like the USSR, East Germany, Red China, Iran, Cuba, … .  In such behaviors these bureaucrats have predictably wrapped themselves in the mantle of inflexible machines executing pre-programmed and unwavering dicta from on high.  I recently ran into that on an call to our Rood Center on an administrative manner.  The response between now and then was markedly different.  And it’s all being helped by the legions of naïfs who continue to repeat the mantra, ‘It can’t happen here, cause we’re Mericans.’

“Bernie’s an American original”, embellished Barack Obama during his announced support for his former VP Joe Biden.  Calling Sanders a “man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes”, Obama kind of goes off the rails because the record of all of Sanders’ proposed policies would have reduced the number of jobs available to working people, grown government, and made those same working people de facto wards of the state.  An ‘American original’ indeed; Obama’s intellect has never embraced history (among other pursuits), so he doesn’t realize that Comrade Bernie is nothing but a clone of old school Moscow.

Junk Journalism on Parade (updated 4apr20)

George Rebane

Ignorant, cynical, agenda-driven (you pick) media scribes and talking heads are doing a real disservice to the American public.  Their latest is the reporting of misconstrued pandemic data in ways designed to make the US look like an incompetent laggard in the fight against the virus.  Playing to an innumerate audience, these ‘journalists’ are citing cherry picked raw numbers of everything from total cases, deaths, ventilators, tests, masks, you name it in a way that is totally meaningless.  No one in the audience has any way of understanding the significance of the reported numbers, and more so when these are compared to similar numbers from other countries.

Here’s an example of what I’m trying to convey.  The yellow journalists report the yellow data, and the required information (i.e. data formatted to support decisions) that allows the audience to make meaningful comparisons is in green.  There would be a lot less for the lamestream and progressives to hyperventilate about if comparable per capita rates were reported for morbidity, mortality, materiel shortages/supplies, etc.  From this morning’s Covid19 count we have -

And here is another major contribution of today’s fake news – ‘The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the US to Covid-19’ -  from the fallen NYT that blames the Trump administration for 1) the failures of long dysfunctional federal bureaucracies, 2) not anticipating a black swan, and 3) for not doing something (comprehensive widespread testing) that was impossible, unwarranted at the time, and would not have provided the called-out information.  Their main message, “Aggressive screening might have helped contain the coronavirus in the United States.  But technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, and lapse in leadership let it spread undetected for weeks.”  Six ‘journalists’ participated in this misleading hit job.  Such crap from progressive politicians with terminal TDS are understandable, like the one from Pelosi (here).  It remains clear why this vaunted 'gray lady' continues to be the darling of progressives.

Here’s how to look at aspects of different countries’ healthcare systems – this one from the OECD on what share of out-of-pocket household income people spend on prescription drugs.  Such a presentation allows a more accurate comparison of consumer costs experienced under different healthcare systems and provides a new perspective on the big ‘greedy’ pharma.

In my book there’s a difference between journalists, reporters, and simply media hacks.  Journalists used to hew to a code of ethics about research and reporting – today that practice ranges between rare and long gone.  Reporters are anybody off the street or from another department told to go out for a look-see and type up what they thought they ran into in time for a publishing deadline – these are the learn-while-you-earn types.  A bunch of those still exist.  But today it is the media hacks who fill the overwhelming number of print and broadcast slots.  These are people with good hair and teeth whose job is to shape the news into specified formats that promote the message of the outlet’s political and ideological masters.

[4apr20 update] H/T to reader.

Hunker Down Diary – 26mar20 (updated 27mar20)

George Rebane

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

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

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

Ruminations – 17mar20 (updated 18mar20)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Electoral College dialogue continued

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

COVID Testing – Unclear on the Concept (updated 15mar20)

George Rebane

Our dispensers of perennial hate have now fastened on to the shortage of Covid test kits in the land, and claim that the President had two months warning and did nothing.  The fact of the matter, as even reported in the NYT (here), is that no one around the world knew of the actual epidemiological parameters of Covid.  And no one did anything about it, starting with China’s Communist Party which initially tried to hide and play down what was happening in Wuhan.

Another fact of the matter is that there are perhaps tens of infectious disease outbreaks around the globe each year, most in inaccessible places that stay and abate there.  But some do get out into the more traveled parts of the world.  While we may know about each of such outbreaks, gearing up the nation's medical machinery to combat a full-blown epidemic on our shores for each of these has never been either a reasonable or feasible response.  Last December Covid-19 started out just like one of these outbreaks.

In any case, the problem we have with starting up any mass production of medicines and medical supplies is - drum roll please – big government.  The litigious regulatory state has grown to such an extent that everyone who could, moved their manufacturing offshore.  We make less that 10% of the medicines we consume – most are made in Chinese pharma factories.  No one gets extra credit for answering, ‘which of America’s political factions promote high cost of labor, draconian and unfathomable regulations, litigation at the drop of the hat, high taxes and fees on businesses, and overwhelming government bureaucracies to oversee and enforce the whole mess?’  And after that, they scream about high prices for the consumer.

But let’s get back to testing.  The anti-Trump lamestream continues to convince the public that Covid testing is somehow a prophylactic against the virus.  And things would have been much better had we been able to test all Americans from the gitgo.  That, it turns out, is unabashed bull crap.  Princeton’s liberal professor of economics and public policy, Alan Blinder, advises President Trump that ‘The Best Stimulus Is Coronavirus Testing Kits’.  Why? Because testing negative will give comfort to the consumer to go out there and keep shopping, since consumer spending makes up 70% of our GDP.

A little thought reveals that 1) a negative Covid test does not prevent subsequent infection, and 2) since a negative test is only a snapshot in time, we can’t make and distribute enough test kits to give continuous comfort to the consumer.  (We don’t even know the sensitivity of the tests; at what level of pre-symptomatic Covid presence will the test register positive.)  Testing negative on Monday does not guarantee that you will not be infected on Tuesday, nor that you will not be infecting others by Friday.  The only benefit a one-time comprehensive testing provides is to identify potential pockets of infection which might be contained by a timely regional quarantine, a quarantine which no one really knows how to enforce (as our Italian friends have discovered).  And to provide such information for making public policy on an ongoing basis requires testing entire populations also on an ongoing basis.  For that we have neither the funds, the manufacturing capacity, the distribution and administration organization, nor the capable personnel to administer tests and interpret the results – in short, it’s not in the cards.

Given all that, the only ‘benefit’ that the spread of Covid in America provides is ammo for the Democrats to continue lambasting President Trump and his administration, while hoping that their absurd accusations get some traction with the country’s lightly read, and therefore divert attention from the obviously diminished-capacity senior citizen who they’re putting up for President this fall.

[12mar20 update]  The Democrats’ program of Big Lies continues with their and their lamestream lackeys’ assertions that the Trump administration continues to mismanage the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  This is now asserted as a given on the leftwing broadcast media.  However, the medical professionals who the President has working on the problem is made up of people like the NIH immunologist Dr Anthony Fauci (who has also advised six Presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues) .  None of their careers are dependent on their current jobs, but all of their professional credentials are.  And to date none have criticized the federal response as being somehow inadequate in the sense that something else or more could be done today which isn’t being done.  In short, all these health pros agree that what the administration did and continues to do with the information and resources available at the time was aggressively proper.  And compared to what other governments have done, America under Trump is way in the lead in executing its pandemic mitigation policies.  According to my lights, the perniciously partisan public propaganda that the Democrats are trumpeting today puts them squarely in the sleazebag evil category.

Apropos to this politicizing, in 2009-10 we had the H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic under Obama, who could do no wrong.  Around 60,000,000 Americans were infected, and about 12,000 died (its death rate was a bit higher than the annual flu's).  But the pandemic was not politicized, and it finally abated as people took normal precautions with social distancing and the usual care for flu cases.

(H/T to reader for the above graphic.)

Another hot flash from the NC school district nurse who informed the attendees at a service club meeting that keeping hydrated is good, and staying hydrated with hot drinks like tea is better.  It also doesn't like Vitamin C.  The virus does not like wet, and hot wet is especially toxic to it.  Also take a look (here) at how long the virus survives in various non-human environments.

[13mar20 update]  Worthy of note is America’s unique process for most medical tests as outlined by Dr Fauci in his congressional testimony.  It turns out that to get tested for Covid-19 you need to go to your physician who then will decide whether to prescribe that you be tested.  Most EU countries apparently allow the patient to get the test kit on his own recognizance, perform the test, and submit the ‘kit’ for interpretation by medical authorities.  They do this to reduce costs of their national healthcare programs which are already unsustainable and forever seeking to eliminate services in a manner that will evade public attention and response.  We should follow their cost saving example and also allow self-testing, at least during this pandemic.  Longer term consideration of this policy is warranted – e.g. case in point, we allow self-testing for pregnancy with OTC test kits.

[15mar20 update]  The commentary and discussion on Covid-19 and testing for it is continued here.

Scattershots – 9mar20 (updated 12mar20)

George Rebane

Those whose policies cannot create wealth must champion policies that redistribute existing wealth.

So you think that if you get some flu-like symptoms, just go in and get tested for COVID-19, and then they’ll do the rest and take care of you.  Hah!  My east coast spy sent me the link (here) to a an unfolding saga of what is probably more prevalent than not across the country.  Remember, if there’s a problem ANYWHERE, your first look-see should be the government, on which you can make book on being at fault or the cause.  So enjoy, and don't touch anyone or anything or …;  I think levitation is the best bet if you can do it.

[10mar20 update]  Trump can’t bluff or bully the epidemic, so correctly argues Walter Russell Mead in the 10mar20 WSJ (here). And the hits Trump will take won’t really depend on how the fed responds to COVID-19.  This is a complex nationwide problem affecting multiple fronts, it's a bona fide black swan.  The feds have never responded to such things without big goof-ups here and there, and this time it will be the same, no matter who is in the White House.  But today the TDS crowd, now fervently praying for death and destruction in this election year, has some well-oiled, built-in ammo with its lamestream to fire against the administration.  As WRM says, “the media multitudes who loathe Mr. Trump will do everything they can to turn the epidemic into a Hurricane Katrina event. That would be easy to do even if the government’s response is near-flawless; epidemics are messy. There will almost certainly be heartbreaking tragedies that can plausibly be blamed on administration policies. There will be shortages of medical supplies. Some hospitals will be stretched past the breaking point. The bureaucracy and its leadership will inevitably fall short in many ways. In an election year when health care is a major political issue, every failure and problem in the coronavirus response will be politicized and publicized, putting the administration on the defensive as the economy falters and the virus spreads.”  The coronavirus will indeed be President Trump’s greatest foe, one against which the best policies, let alone his standard repertoire of responses, will be inadequate in many (most?) eyes.

Democracy or Winner-take-all.  The Dems are playing both sides of the street on this for their presidential candidates.  In the primaries they want proportional allocation of delegates to the their July convention.  However, in the November election for president, they want to do winner takes all the Electoral College votes, which disenfranchises the minorities in each state.  Another case of ‘Do as I say, and not …’.

[12mar20 update]  Bernie Sanders claims to have won the ideological battle because he convinced the young that capitalism is bad and socialism is good.  And the young are the future.  But what he and other collectivists have missed in the past is that the young age, gain realworld experience, and change their minds about socialism.  Perhaps this time it will be different.  But Bernie is headed for his political sunset, and he must hope that Bumblebrain Biden will pick up the gauntlet and carry it past goal line.  Bernie’s departing line continues to be that his “democratic socialism” is not what the USSR had which was “autocratic communism”.  According to Bernie and his guileless followers, the slogan to remember is “Real socialism hasn’t been tried!”  David Harsanyi writes (here), “ leftists like Bernie like to act as if socialist ideology is incompatible with totalitarianism, when the opposite is true. The nationalization of industry and dispensing with property rights — necessary for any genuine socialism to occur — can’t be instituted without coercion and a centralized authoritarian effort. And even if the effort to redistribute property is first supported by the majority, as soon the state comes for your stuff — and it always does — the “democratic” part of the equation starts to dissipate.”

Today’s men beware of the women activists who claim to have been victims of sexual harassment and predation.  It is apparently legal for people, especially employers, to ask whether someone is or has been involved in law suits of various kinds before entering into a relationship.  Therefore it might be prudent for a man contemplating a relationship with a woman to find out whether he might be stepping into a snare.  Given the number of websites that offer access to publicly available personal information databases, wouldn’t it be useful to have accessible a database on women who have publicly accused or sued men for sexual issues?  Online dating services could even include that in their clients’ data sheets.  In light of today’s greatly expanded definitions of sexual misconduct, what man would want to get involved with a woman who has a record publicly accusing men of such misconduct?  Making such information readily available would both reduce future issues (real and imagined), and temper such gratuitous allegations in the future.

Bernie’s Big Lie – Socialist Sweden

George Rebane

Sen Bernie Sanders’ lies are too many to count, but one that he keeps repeating successfully to the nation’s light thinkers involves the myth of Scandinavian socialism.  This is the kind of socialism that Bernie wants to incorporate in the United States, and he continues to use Sweden as the posterchild of how socialism can be made to work successfully.  Either he is butt stupid or evil as he spreads the lies about Swedish socialism.  Let’s be kind and put Bernie with the butt stupid crowd, that includes the Dem candidates clown car and Team AOC, as they were characterized by Will Rogers’ “It ain’t what you know that worries me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.’

Sweden was a model and wealthy capitalist democracy before 1960, having gone through two world wars as a neutral selling their wares to the highest bidders.  Along with the other Nordics, Sweden then tried socialism to redistribute its remarkable wealth and earn votes for its leftwing politicians, and that failed miserably over the next two decades.  As a result, each pulled back toward marked capitalism after enjoying the tender mercies of socialism.  Sweden led the way after having doubled public spending from 31% to 60% in the 1960-80 interval.  And then the real problems started piling on which ended with unemployment surging and budget deficits of 11% of GDP in the late 80s (that’s like almost $3T annually in the US).  The country literally went broke as the wealthy, the producers and entrepreneurs jumped ship.  The pullback to sanity started in 1991 and has been going on ever since.  And that has been the best kept secret of our progressives and their lamestream lackeys (witness its effect on our local liberal commenters).

Swedish historian and author, Johan Norberg (also senior fellow at the Cato Institute) lays out the history of this wise retrenchment to sanity in his ‘Sweden’s Lessons for America’.  Norberg reports that -

Sooner or later, American socialists always return to Sweden and other Nordic countries. There’s a good reason for that. For some reason, the countries that socialists originally tout always end up with bread lines and labor camps. But there’s always Sweden: decent, well‐​functioning, nonthreatening, and with impeccable democratic credentials. … There is just one problem: Sweden is not socialist. … If Sanders and Ocasio‐​Cortez really want to turn America into Sweden, what would that look like? For the United States, it would mean, for example, more free trade and a more deregulated product market, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the abolition of occupational licensing and minimum wage laws. The United States would also have to abolish taxes on property, gifts, and inheritance. And even after the recent tax cut, America would still have to slightly reduce its corporate tax. Americans would need to reform Social Security from defined benefits to defined contributions and introduce private accounts. They would also need to adopt a comprehensive school voucher system where private schools get the same per‐​pupil funding as public ones.

The Socialistic Socialization of Socialism (updated 6mar20)

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

Fair Share Taxing

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice’, what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”  Thomas Sowell.

George Rebane

Our socialist and proto-communist politicians have no policies to grow economies and generate wealth.  Instead, they buy their way into office by promising to take money from both Peter and Paul, and give it to their voters.  Trouble with that policy is that most of their voters turn out to be the Peters and Pauls.

The cry across the land, amplified by the lamestream, is that the ‘rich’ don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes.  Not only that, but included is the not-so-hidden message that the rich got theirs by taking what was rightfully yours.  This message works really well with those who can’t or won’t, and who still believe they are entitled to it all.  The Big Lie accompanying all this outrage is that America has an unfair tax system that favors the rich.  However –

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system in the world, with the top 10% of earners paying 45% of all income taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes, compared with only 28% in France and 27% in Sweden. 

Economists Phil Gramm and John Early present the supportive data in their ‘Wealthy Americans Already Pay Their Share’.  The accompanying graphic shows how much the different earning groups pay as a function of their earned income and received transfer payments.

Add to this data that the top 0.1% of households paid a total of 45.1% in federal, state, and local taxes.  So how do we answer the ‘fair share’ question?  And why do we even ask it?   With our progressive tax system and generous transfer payment programs, our ‘poor’ are the envy of the world.  Why?  Because our battered capitalist economy still produces enough wealth to provide that envious QoL to those of us who can’t or won’t - enough wealth to waste on legions of government bureaucrats and ‘educators’ whose jobs (of last resort) primarily entail throwing sand into the gears of enterprise and commerce, and enough wealth to remain the white-hat hegemon of the world by keeping the bad guys at bay while giving entire continents a free ride on their security.

The socialists tell us that none of that is true or needed.  Government is the solution to all social problems, and more government is better.  And we don’t need no stinking military that is only used to create worldwide problems and support our country’s immoral imperialism.  Besides, everyone knows that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior – the filthy rich will keep working just as hard whether we tax ‘em low or tax ‘em high.  So high taxes will not reduce the wealth produced, but only redirect it through the government to more socially just uses.

With this logic, and the firmly held belief that the Laffer Curve is laughable, there really is no reasonable basis for any given level of taxation.  Who really needs to have more than a billion dollars anyway?  So in the final argument the notion of ‘fair share’ is moot.  In the near-term taxes should be raised to a level just short of armed rebellion.  And as the government succeeds in disarming the populace, there will be no need to stop raising taxes and confiscating wealth even when there is blood in the gutters, because that will not be government blood.

But then again you say, that can’t happen in America.

GDP and Earth’s Temperature (updated 9feb20)

George Rebane

Most well-read people look at Gross Domestic Product as the gold standard of our economy’s performance.  And all know that GDP growth will cure almost all the ills we still see in the economy.  But when we take a deeper look at how the GDP statistic is concocted, we discover that it’s really a rat’s nest of formulas and calculations and selective capture of dubiously reliable data, that then pops out a number which, more often than not, must be rejiggered in a couple of months to give a new and improved version of itself.

Ruminations – 5jan20 (updated 6jan20)

George Rebane

On hubris and nemesis in the Deep State – an interview (here) with Victor Davis Hanson sheds some new light on the goings on in the unelected state within a state.  (H/T to correspondent)

Consulting Congress required?  The Constitution is very specific on the matters of national security that require the President to consult with Congress before acting.  And the Constitution purposefully gives the President sole power to decide what constitutes an imminent threat to our national security.  The War Powers Act (actually a Resolution) of 1973 was enacted only to check the President’s power to unilaterally commit the US to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress (e.g. the Vietnam War).  None of this is material to the opportunistic assassination of another high level terrorist leader in the course of conducting longstanding regional security operations.  The Democrats are demogauging their hopefully ignorant constituents.

Listening to Tucker Carlson quoting polls taken of all Americans on matters of economics, foreign policy, ecology, …, and anything requiring numeracy is a misleading and futile effort, because the population as a whole is not read on such topics.  That is why our Founders feared a pure democracy and instead gave us a republic, ‘if we can keep it’.  Anti-Americans of all stripes always advocate doing away with our republican Constitution and substituting a pure democracy as the shortcut to an overarching tyranny of the elites.  Tucker should know better.

[6jan20 update]  Obama’s blatant treachery (without congressional approval for those so concerned) was secretly releasing and delivering to the mullahs pallets of Iranian cash sequestered by the US since that country declared itself a sworn enemy of America and acted accordingly for decades.  That money went directly to support the rogue country’s killing of Americans across the globe, and funding its world threatening nuclear weapons program.  And we have yet to discover who all in the free world took Iranian bribes to support the horrible nuclear agreement under which the mullahs have continued their nuclearization unopposed and unobserved.

The Union demonstrates once again its open-door editorial policy to let profoundly ignorant local ideologues embellish their op-ed pages.  Today a Nevada City worthy gets to vent in a particularly long diatribe titled ‘The billionaire’s (sic) lament’.  Here we learn that it has been our billionaires who have prevented “working/nonworking class families (to) be able to live sustainable lives.”  It is they who have squirreled all that money, taken from the poor, in their mattresses instead of investing it to build companies, provide needed goods/services, and create jobs for the rest of us.  Happy days lie ahead when the likes of Bernie and Pocahontas put in place their new asset and income taxes to finally launch what “is a ‘class battle for power,’ one between the wealthy old rich males (super rich 1%) with their minions (rich 19%) against all of you, no matter who you are.”

The nation’s progressive pinheads have now fastened on “imminent threat” as a demonstrated prerequisite for killing Soleimani, the murderous mastermind of Islamist ragheads everywhere.  Congressional Democrats and their lamestream lackeys grudgingly admit to Soleimani’s decades of dastardly deeds, but now see ‘imminence’ as a useful distraction to refocus their ongoing TDS.  From the 6jan20 WSJ, “If the threat to Americans from Soleimani was real, it doesn’t matter under international law whether the threat was “imminent.” The traditional law of war couldn’t be clearer on this point. If Soleimani was an enemy combatant waging war on the U.S., then the U.S. has every right to target him. If he was directing attacks on the U.S., as not even Chuck Todd doubts he was, then he can be legally targeted.” (here)

Scattershots – 27dec19 (updated 31dec19)

George Rebane

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

When Compassion Kills

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.