Rebane's Ruminations

The Canadian COVID Conspiracy: Dr David E Martin (updated 19sep21)

George Rebane

A longtime reader and friend sent me this mind-bending video on Bitchute of an interview with David Martin (here) who lays out the multi-decadal conspiracy of developing the human infectable/transmissible corona virus and the worldwide pandemic to create a market for its ‘vaccine’, which is really not a vaccine in any medical sense of the word.  I found the 54-minute video riveting as Martin unfolds and exposes the business, marketing, investment, collusion factors that come together as a description of the most massive and well-executed conspiracy to fleece the world with the enthusiastic cooperation of governments and the media.  The financial and political gifts to the co-operating players appear to be unending.

As to the verity of what Martin reports I cannot attest, since at this writing I’m not very familiar with other corroborating sources of this information.  I do invite readers to share such sources should they discover them.  In any event, for those interested in the ongoing COVID saga, the video is definitely worth watching with a glass of your favorite adult beverage, and possibly a pen and paper.  (and here is more)

For more research on David Martin and what he reports, search ‘David E Martin credibility’ on Bing to get some links that cover the pro/con sides of the matter – Google search gives a definitely one-sided collection of hits on that query.

[19sep21 update]  Here is a noteworthy development on C19 vaccines – ‘FDA Allows Whistleblower Testimony that COVID-19 Vaccines Are Killing and Harming People!’  This report has some astounding stats on the aftereffects of certain 'vaccines' that studies are now revealing.  We now know that what people are being inoculated with are not real vaccines in the medical sense, but designed, special-purpose bio-molecules ("medical devices") that are supposed to prompt your immune system to then manufacture the antibodies (provided by normal vaccines) to resist C19.  (H/T to reader)

 

Scattershots – 5sep21 (updated 13sep21)

Geoge Rebane

About a month ago in ‘The Criminality of Covid Care’ we reviewed a catalog of atrocious policies that our governments have imposed since C19 was first loosened on the nation early last year.  Specifically, the focus was on the denigration and proscription of the established anti-viral Ivermectin for both prophylaxis and therapy for the disease.  Evidence of IVM’s benefits continues to be made available, all to the tin ears of CDC and Team Fauci.  Here’s the latest information from a reader – ‘Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19’.  This article is published in the September 2021 issue of New Microbes and New Infections published by Elsevier. (more here)

And here is your Ivermectin Lucky Strike Extra.  'Ivermectin, a potential anticancer drug derived from an antiparasitic drug.'  I think we may have covered this before, but it is definitely worth repeating to illustrate the magnitude of the crime our TDS progressives have committed and continue in the avalanche lies appearing daily about IVM.

[10sep21 update] Bidenese by Bumblebrain - Alright, a little change of pace to examine in more detail what regularly comes out of our president's mouth when in front of a mic.  How many times have you watched him attempt to explain or expand something, and out comes mush.  Well, it's not mush, and here is a video by a stalwart researcher who has captured a sampling of Bidenese to include in your lexicon for the next time you hear the president speak. (H/T to reader)  Download Bidenese

[11sep21 update] Re Recall Newsom - California resident Curt Kruger writes in the 11sep21 WSJ that people who oppose the recall of our misdirected and incompetent governor also support the following initiatives to reduce the state’s standing as the country’s leading repository of the homeless.

• Eliminate laws against living in a tent on public property.
• Remove the social stigma associated with living on the street (terms like hobo, vagrant, etc.)
• Provide free food. During nasty weather, provide free shelter.
• Provide enough cash that people don’t have to hold down a job.
• Make psychiatric-care and drug-dependency programs optional.

Mr Kruger concludes, “It’s ironic that Gov. Newsom’s program to reduce homelessness includes the same policies most people would implement to increase it.”

[13sep21 update]  Corporatist Facebook is one of the country’s premier SOS liars.  A major piece – ‘Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt’ - in the 13sep21 WSJ based on access to company confidential documents reveals, “A program known as XCheck has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse”.

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.  The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

In front of congressional committees holding public hearings Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed multiple times that he is a sleazebag lying sack of (user fill-in, my preference is ‘shit’).  This is the kind of oligopolistic behaviors that make the case for breaking up Facebook or turning companies like this into regulated public utilities.

Climate Hysteria 3.0 (maybe 4.0)

George Rebane

‘Settled’ is not an adjective to be used with real science.

The recently released AR6 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has injected new life into climate hysteria that seems to have been flagging over the last few years.  The usual hysterics are again up in arms with another round of outlandish warnings and proposals to tank the economies of the developed countries, led, of course, by the US.  More sober and knowledgeable scientists are saying ‘not so fast’.

Physicist Steven Koonin has been introduced in these pages as one of the leading sober and knowledgeable scientists who has for some years now been counseling a more measured view of climate change.  His recent best seller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021), summarizes the unsubstantiated fears and foibles that continue to be foisted on the lay public worldwide.  The 11aug21 WSJ, from which the nearby figure was filched, contains his critique of AR6, and is definitely worth a read.  I’ll give some highlights.

To begin for those late to this pity party, what all the fuss is about that we are ignoring a global catastrophe in process – namely, preventable manmade global warming (PMGW).  Every word in that label is important, and it’s the ‘preventable’ part that promises to be most devastating to the fortunes of developed countries.  You have to be convinced that we humans did it all by ourselves, and that therefore we can and must roll back global warming all by ourselves.

In ‘Climate Change Brings a Flood of Hyperbole’ Dr Koonin begins with -

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.

The entire history of climate reporting has been a mire of politicized fraud.  RR readers learned years ago that all the prognostications about PMGW are based on a collection of incoherent, incomplete, and essentially broken general circulation models (e.g. we don't understand earth's CO2 cycle).  The have been twisted beyond recognition by true believers and fraudsters to yield the gee-whiz graphs and endlessly repeated, hysterical talking points.

It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface. … The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.

The other big bamboozle involves pointing to unusual weather as confirmation of climate change.  These assessments and dire pronouncements are made daily by innumerates who have no idea what science is or how it can substantiate something.

Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decadeslong trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events. … The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.

The IPCC report reveals very little that is new.  It is mostly the repackaging of past reports by a legion of contributing authors, each working within their narrow field.  The almost 4,000 page tome has been read by very few, and understood by even fewer.  Nevertheless, AR6 will feature prominently in the upcoming November UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  So it’s important to understand both the nature of its contents and misrepresentations about PMGW that are always prominent in the executive summary and conclusion sections of what the IPCC publishes.  Here is the AR6 Headline Statements from the Summary for Policy Makers.

Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact. … Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.

Belief has been banished

George Rebane

Equity is the enemy of liberty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, who are we supposed to believe today?

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

The Criminality of Covid Care (updated 31jul21)

George Rebane

The prominent article on front page of the 26jul21 WSJ declares ‘Covid Treatment Options Remain Elusive, Despite Months of Effort and Rising Delta Cases’.  And the most elusive treatment options remain Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) which are nowhere even mentioned in an otherwise comprehensive piece on the various medicines having been tested and used in treating C19.

The effectiveness of HCQ, and especially IVM, as both a preventative and therapeutic for the virus has been well known for over a year.  Physicians all over the world, including the US, have used it and prescribe it regularly.  Numerous studies have been conducted on their efficacies at various stages of the disease.  Curiously, the overseas studies show remarkably positive results, and the US studies show them to be little more effective, if that, than a placebo (none have shown it to do harm to the patient).

A very comprehensive study – ‘Ivermectin for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 60 studies’ - was already released last fall.  (H/T to reader)  It concludes –

Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19. The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 60 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 193 billion (p = 0.0000000000052). As expected for an effective treatment, early treatment is more successful, with an estimated reduction of 74% in the effect measured using random effects meta-analysis (RR 0.26 [0.16-0.43]). 64% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.36 [0.15-0.85] and 0.04 [0.00-0.59]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of heterogeneous studies is remarkable, with 92% of the 60 studies reporting positive effects (26 statistically significant in isolation).

Even the simplest back-of-envelope calculations will show that the widespread use of IVM would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past year and a half.  Given the reported results, its suppression by our governmental public health institutions has been nothing short of rank criminality.  Neither the commonly available and generic HCQ nor IVM will benefit the big pharmas selling medicines on which their patents still hold sway.

Omitting any mention of, say, IVM and the cited study reeks to high heaven, and goes a long way to maintain the loss of credibility that our society’s major institutions have suffered.  I repeat the WSJ citation above – not a hint of even the existence of HCQ or IVM.  Even repeating the CDC’s official stance on these medicines would have served to allay some suspicions, but total silence screams collusion and conspiracy at the highest levels.

Your physician will more than likely already have his/her own supply and be happy to prescribe IVM if you request it.  Given the readily available research, the Rebanes have stocked their medicine cabinet appropriately.

[29jul21 update]  So ‘Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?’  Ivermectin is a promising Covid treatment and prophylaxis, but why is the FDA still denigrating it?  People continue to suffer and die at numbers that could be greatly reduced were this safe, inexpensive, and effective drug promoted and made available to all of us who should have it in our medicine cabinets.  More specifically, “Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.  Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.”

CDC’s newest mask mandate continues to be based on no science, just imperiously incompetent control.  Governors and mayors are beginning to give the agency pushback, asking for the substantiating science or at least some supporting data.  The best that CDC could do to date is to mumble something about an unpublished report (the one that failed peer review?).  When asked, they could not advise when the report would be made public.  The bottom line of all this is that we are 18 months into this pandemic, and the government is becoming more dysfunctional by the day in the response policies it struggles to put out.  This is the outfit that the neo-Marxists are trying to enlarge and control more of our everyday lives??!

But the biggest ongoing tragedy is the response of the American sheeple.  The overwhelming majority of our citizens respond with a muffled compliance, very similar to that of cattle being prodded down the chute on their final walk to slaughter.  Consider Covid as a training aid used by government elites to prepare us to accept more serious measures to come from on high.

[31jul21 update]  The evidence for Ivermectin continues to pour in.  Given the number of people that Covid has killed, IVM is truly a demonstrated wonder drug.  Its timely application would have save hundreds of thousands of lives, and it still can be the medicine that will allow us to live with C19 as its variants make it endemic for the indefinite future.  ‘How to Kill a Cure: The War on Ivermectin’ is a must read to appreciate the level of criminality that IVM's suppression has entailed, and continues today as a perfidious blight in our society.  (H/T to reader)

Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

George Rebane

Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

[13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

[14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

[18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

Global Tax Bamboozle

Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

The Joys of Juneteenth (addended)

George Rebane

As most Americans know, today we are a nation fractured into tribes of various victimized and victimizer identity groups.  This new social order started gelling in the national consciousness under Barack Obama, hardened during Trump’s contended presidency, and is on schedule to become a fully petrified structure of America’s society under the pro-Marxist policies of the Biden/Harris/Pelosi presidency.

A contributing policy for realizing that anti-American future will require a constant and heightened flow of reminders in the public news, entertainment, sports, and social media for which our lamestream is now experienced and fully prepared to support.  To that end, and as of today, we have started adding national holidays to remind everyone of our history’s warts, each of which will be designed to maintain the sense of ongoing victimhood for every tribe to which an individual can claim membership and find meaning.

Biden signed into law ‘Juneteenth’, the newest federal holiday that will annually celebrate June 19^th as the real day of freedom from slavery for the nation’s blacks.  It will fly in the face of our historical July 4^th Independence Day which has already been losing its luster in the minds of the various progressive cohorts.

And now we may look forward to other aggrieved groups with heightened consciousness, in the name of equity arising to remind us of their milestones and demand that more days be set aside for their particular observations, celebrations, and remembrance.  I can see our Latino, Asian, women, LGTBQ, …, and European (aka white supremacist) contingencies, all demanding equal recognition and opportunity to remind us of America’s historical blights and blemishes, to provide frequent recounts throughout the year that the only thing exceptional about the United States is its provenance of evil.

So, we start with Juneteenth today to celebrate when the blacks of Galveston, Texas were told that they were no longer slaves on 19 June 1865.

Our Latinos can claim the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848 that made Mexico cede most of today’s American west to the US.  February 2^nd would be a day of remembrance and mourning the beginning of an epoch during which Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics were relegated to second-class citizenship as newly minted Americans.  (It would also serve to keep the fires of Reconquista burning.)

Asian-Americans will demand December 17^th as their special day of recognition and liberation from second-class status, and a time to remind all of ongoing discrimination against Asians.  On 17 December 1943 Congress passed the Magnuson Act which did away with all exclusion acts that primarily focused on denying Asians immigration rights, which began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Women of all shades, shapes, and biological origins will want to have August 18^th be designated a federal holiday.  For it was on 18 August 1920 that women’s suffrage ended with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.  It will be a day of marches and speeches reminding us, not only of the past, but of the here and now when women still have to fight ‘glass ceilings’, unequal pay, and the right to be masters of their own bodies.

And of course, the LGTBQ tribe will want its annual place of pride in the federal sun.  They can militate for September 21^st as a national holiday, for it was on 21 September 1996 that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) was passed by Congress and became effective.  This started a period (1996-2020) during which SCOTUS passed five landmark rulings to the benefit of our LGBTQ group.

We can go on, but let’s just finish with a new national observance of the evils of European culture in America.  Actually, this federal holiday will not be demanded by Americans of European descent.  Instead, it will be established by a woke Congress as a day to recognize and never forget that white supremacy continues as the nation’s foremost threat and abiding enemy.  It is the ever-present possibility of a white supremacist insurrection against which our government must always be prepared to defend with new laws, regulations, processes, procedures, and agencies.  That day of national vigilance will receive an appropriate name like ‘Democracy Preservation Day’ or ‘Insurrection Day’, and will, of course, be celebrated on January 6^th, during which we will be regaled and reminded by demogauges of all stripes of how close we came to ‘losing our democracy’ on 6 January 2021.

[Addendum] A reader sent me the most appropriate Juneteenth graphic shown below.

Critical race theory lurks in schools (addended)

[Terry McLaughlin is a regular columnist for The Union.  This column, posted here by permission, appears in the 17jun21 Union and its online edition (here).  This piece is the first of a three part series.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

Parents are becoming aware of the use of critical race theory in their children’s instruction, particularly as distance learning has given them a window into their classrooms.

Since the California Department of Education in March adopted an ethnic studies curriculum based upon critical race theory, (the fourth version, after more than 100,000 earlier objections), we have seen parents sending open letters to schools and passionately speaking up in protest at school board meetings across California and the nation.

The curriculum presents the view that our legal, economic and social institutions are inherently racist. Critical race theory advocates for, among other things, “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the second version of the curriculum, much to the dismay of critical race advisers, some of whom resigned.

The 100,000 objections resulted in some of the most egregious material being removed from successive versions of the curriculum, such as convicted murderers of police being portrayed as positive role models and a benign narrative presented about Pol Pot, whose regime murdered as many as 30 percent of Cambodians.

Documents from the Santa Clara County Office of Education, obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo, indicate a series of teacher-training sessions were held on deploying ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders encouraged teachers to hide materials from parents. One panelist said, “We have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes {with remote learning}.”

In Missouri, a teacher encouraged other teachers to remove from school websites accessible to parents any classroom materials that promote ideas such as “white privilege.”

Attendees at a training session in Wake County, North Carolina, received a handout that read, “You can’t let parents deter you from the work.”

Media and supporters have given us the impression that critical race theory is a harmless idea which, as described by a CNN columnist, “seeks to understand and address inequality and racism.” But if these ideas are harmless, why are some teachers and school officials attempting to hide the content from parents? What kind of education program suggests materials be hidden from parents?

In California, apparently even mathematics “upholds capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” This statement is from “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” a set of six instruction books for California math teachers.

The workbooks offer “critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms.” Examples given of white supremacy in math include when “students are tracked,” when “the focus is on getting the right answer,” when “students are required to show their work,” or when “control of classrooms is valued over students’ agency over their learning.”

There are some ideas of value within the 82 pages of workbook No.1, such as addressing errors by students not as failure but as an opportunity to expand upon their understanding of the math concept. But these methods would be of value to all students, regardless of race, economic status, or ability.

Yet the workbook’s focus is clearly and repetitively on how “white supremacy culture shows up in the math classroom.”

Are these workbooks being used to train your child’s teacher? Check it out at https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

Disguising her voice for fear of retaliation, a California public school teacher recently called a radio program to lament about how she was required by school administrators to attend a critical race theory seminar, and was told that “facts, data, and the scientific method are white concepts.”

“So,” she said, “if you use facts and data to disprove an argument against an oppressed person, you are proving you are racist because facts and data are the result of whiteness.”

As part of her training, this teacher was given a 20-page handout published by Epoch Education, a training center in Oakland. The first page instructed her to “Express skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy”.

The document included articles about white privilege and how racism will never end. The Epoch Education website displays a video narrated by program specialist Nicole Kukral from the San Juan Unified School District, east of Sacramento, in which she explains how she created an “equity audit rubric” for use by California districts to evaluate social studies curriculum being considered for adoption.

Kukral instructs teachers to evaluate history textbooks in a positive light only if the narrators were “people of color and other diverse communities.” There seems to be no concern regarding whether the history is accurate, only that history told by western white men should be considered suspect.

The fourth version of critical race theory curriculum is riddled with inaccuracies and omits facts that are at variance with its narrative of oppression, imperialism, white supremacy, and exploitation.

Nonetheless, the California Department of Education approved this version, one which The Wall Street Journal calls “radical indoctrination.” Has this curriculum been implemented in your child’s school district?

Gov. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign into law Assembly Bill 331, which would make it a requirement of graduation for every public high school student in California.

Left to their own devices, children are naturally color blind. We are desecrating the legacy of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King with curriculum that teaches our kids to judge themselves and each other based upon the color of their skin — the very definition of racism.

Ms McLaughlin lives in Grass Valley.

[Addendum]  "A question needs to be put to the left in America. If your adversaries in politics are indeed fascists, racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and bigots, as you describe them, why would, or should, such people accept and embrace your rule over them—simply because you managed to rack up a plurality of ballots in an election? Free elections to decide who governs are, it is said, the central sacrament of democracy. But why should people who are described with every synonym for "deplorable" not reject the politics of compromise and instead work constantly to overthrow the rule of people who so detest them?"    Patrick J. Buchanan (more here)

A more comprehensive critique of CRT can be found here.  (H/T to reader)

The Most Atrocious Tax of All (updated 18jun21)

‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

The country’s Democratic radical Left and Team Biden are prepared to expand asset taxes and introduce unrealized capital gains as another taxable form of ‘income’.  If they are successful, this will be the final nail in the coffin of American capitalism, the demonstrated most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth ever devised.

Income – The valuable return or yield from any kind of property, patent, service, etc. received in negotiable instruments, such as nominal dollars, that is spendable in an exchange for goods, services, or labor.  (Passive unrealized appreciation of any asset is NOT income.)

It boggles the sensible mind to hear that government has become so rapacious that it now wants to install a new, game-changing layer of taxes to perennially start taking more of what you have already earned and paid taxes on.  This atrocious taxing scheme comes in two parts.  They will apply one tax rate on the mark-to-market value of assets you already own, and another tax rate on your annual income augmented by the annual unrealized appreciation of those assets.  In other words, they will also perniciously count as income a fictitious amount of money that you never received or spent.

It is this malign definition of income that gave rise to the recent ‘news’ of billionaires paying miniscule tax rates of the order of 1% that came to light after their tax returns were hacked and distributed by the Left.  Where did such small tax rates come from when we know that the top 1% earners pay 40% of the nation’s income taxes?  The answer is easy when you slip in the new Democrat definition of income to include the appreciation of what they already own and have paid taxes on.  Using the accepted definition of income (see above), a wealthy high earner may pay at, say, a 30% rate on such income.  If his income last year was $10M, then his tax bill was $3M.  But if he was a billionaire worth, say, $10B, and his assets appreciated 10%, then Democrats want to call the unrealized $1B gain as ‘income’ and make his tax bill 30% of $1,010,000,000 or $303,000,000.  And if he only paid $3M, then the Left and their lamestream scream that billionaires tax rate is only 0.3% = 3,000,000/1,010,000,000.  And you can hear the envy chorus of the nation’s double dummies holler ‘Yeah, make him pay his fair share like I do!’

Inflation – Up close and personal

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”  Milton Friedman

George Rebane

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And what inflation brings."  (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)  And more specifically we need to be forewarned that inflation is like “the fog, that comes on little cat feet”, and then surreptitiously consumes our plans for the future.

Most people know that the government, through our Federal Reserve, controls the “quantity of money” which pursues available goods and services in our economy.  Fewer know that inflation is really an additional tax on your assets, which for their procurement you already have paid taxes on the inflated income.  Inflation is then another tax, more insidious and mostly invisible that takes buying power out of our pockets and transfers it into the hands of government politicians and their bureaucrats.  And it is they who get the benefits of ‘new money’, because those who get to spend it first, spend it with the value of the ‘old money’ before dilution sets in and the markets react.  By the time you get it, prices have already reflected the additional dollars chasing the same goods and services.

The blame for the return of inflation is ours.  It is we who voted in the conmen who promised us all kinds of goodies that would cost us nothing – it was always the other guy who would foot the bill.  And we have kept doing it year after year.

The other tax that inflation brings is the usual tax that doesn’t even need to be raised, at least for a while until we’re convinced that our government needs to make even more “investments” in our behalf.  The usual tax bill, not only goes up in nominal dollars, but also increases in the so-called ‘bracket creep’ which puts our inflated dollar amounts into the next higher rate categories.

In the final analysis, as we have said here for years, the dollar must be destroyed in order to satisfy all the obligations – now amounting to over $100T – that must be repaid in nominal dollar amounts.  That means that the dollar’s buying power has to be reduced essentially to zero in order to legally satisfy and defraud our creditors, many of whom are actually ourselves.  The ONLY thing that will save the dollar is an economy that grows at a rate which keeps the current debt levels at a low relative amount to our economy.  Elsewhere in these pages I calculated this annual growth rate to be at least 5%, and that means at least 5% GDP growth year after year with no end in sight.  No economy of our size has ever achieved such a steady state of high growth, and there’s no hope of our achieving it with socialists – who are rock apes when it comes to economics – in charge of our national weal.

The Evil Party – more lives lost to the Left (updated 21jun21)

The fact that Joe Biden is even considering opening our southern border to a group of unvetted illegal aliens in a massive caravan – in the middle of a pandemic, while millions of Americans are unemployed – tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ priorities.  - Anonymous

George Rebane

In voices hushed by the evil Democratic Party and their lamestream mouthpieces, evidence continues to pile in that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IMT) are effective preventatives and curatives for Covid-19 (more here and here).  Both are worldwide established pharmaceuticals that have been in constant use for various diseases for decades.  HCQ was initially approved by the FDA for treating C19.  Then approval was withdrawn due to a politicized study that itself was later shown to be faulty.  Since then, additional studies have been performed, cited, and censored showing the benefits of both drugs.

The latest is a study of patients already on ventilators who received HCQ in combination with Azithromycin (AZ).  The results showed patients receiving HCQ/AZ had a survival rate almost three times that of those who were denied the treatment.  Other studies that were not recognized in the US showed that both HCQ and IMT were also effective as treatments for C19 in the pre-ventilator stages of the disease.  There are countless reports of both drugs being used quietly by healthcare workers in unpublished subrosa protocols to save the lives of their patients.

When these performance stats are applied to the millions of C19 patients who have died over the past year plus (600,000 in the US alone), then the extent of this evil is revealed, and begins to compare itself to the order of magnitude of the Holocaust and other politically motivated genocides.  The political motivation in our country was TDS – denying President Trump any credit for his successful policies fighting the C19 pandemic.  In this light, our Democrats and their proto-communist factions are directly culpable for the readily preventable deaths of uncounted tens of thousands of Americans.

To our Left, these political sacrifices are merely the “few eggs that must be cracked to make their (socialist) omelet” - with a nod to Josif Vissarionovich.  And there are many more such cracked eggs to come as they continue their unabated fundamental transformation of America.

[21jun21 update]  “New Study Links Ivermectin to ‘Large Reductions’ in COVID-19 Deaths”  The number of lives that could have been saved by the anti-Trump Left not proscribing Ivermectin easily reaches into the hundreds of thousands.  However Teams Pelosi/Schumer/Biden abetted by Team Fauci were perfectly willing to sacrifice these thousands of lives to maintain their narrative driving toward victory in an election year.  For them there was no doubt that the end would justify any horrendous means available.  And as in any communist and/or third world country, no one will be held accountable – ongoing existential evil in our midst.

Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here's the solution sent by a reader.

Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

[8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

Systemic Racism in America

George Rebane

Systemic racism is alive and well in America, and it has been in a fine fettle for most of the last fifty years.  We have our progressive and Marxist neighbors to thank for bringing it to our attention, only not in the way that they have massaged the national message.  All of our divers ethnic groups are aware of what the euphemistically labeled ‘Section 8’ promotions, admissions, awards, distributions, recognitions, … have been all about.  (I believe the origin of this label generalized from 'Section 8 set asides' in a HUD regulation that would assure minorities and low income applicants would get their share in certain kinds of contracting and allocations.)  Black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams deplored Section 8 advancements, not only for their racism, but for the explicit message that our African-Americans are somehow intellectually inferior and need special favorable dispensations to enable them to approach par with the other racial groups that participate in our public forums.

In our land over the years Section 8 advancements have been brought to bear to a fare-thee-well.  We all have seen it, and now witness its application in steroids.  (Un/fortunately, my professional experiences also abound in this realm.  And these have obviously shaped my socio-political beliefs.) Today even the simplest of statistical tests will confirm that the public face of our society is racially composed and biased.  The histrionics of the current ‘woke culture’ daily exposes a bevy of new insane interpretations of our language, America’s traditional culture, along with lunatic efforts to amplify systemic racism to bring about ‘equity’, the new scourge of progressive social engineering.

The resulting intellectual rot our Left is rapidly inducing into all of our institutions has, of course, already swept through academe, wreaked havoc in transforming capitalism into corporatism, seeped into the very fiber of our military, and today is finally broaching the formerly secure intellectual ramparts of our technical disciplines.  As we now see, equity is Section 8’s bastard issue.

A specific example that clearly illustrates the above is found in today’s academe – specifically, in math education.  Powerline presents the evidence in ‘Math is hard – hardest of all for the Left’.  From there we learn “that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because (of) ‘equity’, and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes.”  The graphic below explains the Left’s concern.  (Click on image for a larger presentation.)

The article by Steven Hayward goes on to explain, “If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it is unequal racial results in achievement tests—tests that, let us recall, were largely invented by the liberal establishment decades ago as a means of making meritocracy count for more than family connections, private school pedigree, and so forth. It is not surprising that the left is turning on meritocracy right now.”

To further emphasize the extent of African-American and Hispanic academic deficits, which must be hidden/ignored, take a look at the graphic below that contains a SAT performance data matrix from the DoJ’s recent investigation of Yale’s admission practices.  Note the obvious bias in the admission of blacks and Latinos.  Only 20.18% of whites in the 10th decile (the top 10% of students’ SAT scores) were admitted, whereas 60% of similarly scoring blacks were admitted.  The admission rate for blacks did not sink to the level of the top admission rate for whites until the black students’ scores were in the 5^th decile (in the lower half of test scores) where their admission rate was still 20.85%, higher than that of the highest scoring whites.

Here then we see one of the actual faces of existential systemic racism that has been resurrected in America.  This is the decades-long fruit of Democrat public policies, especially those promoted by their virulent Marxist anti-American wing under the new cynical rubric of ‘equity’.  To continue in power and our country on the road to autocratic socialist mediocrity, the Democrats cannot afford to have America’s blacks and Hispanics understand what has been done to them since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  With the Left’s control of our educational institutions and the media, there is little chance for them to enjoy any ethnic and/or racial epiphanies anytime soon.  Thus, America’s systemic racism is not only sustained, but also assured growth.

Suppressing Climate Change Debate

“If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” - Michael Crichton in a famous 2003 lecture at Caltech.

George Rebane

The evil Democrats and their corporatist allies continue their massive nationwide campaign to suppress speech and the First Amendment.  Among their latest forays in this area of America’s public discourse is to suppress substantive debate on climate change by loudly and insubstantially denigrating the latest comprehensive treatment of the topic by Caltech physicist Dr Steven Koonin in his Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters (2021).  This book becomes a significant part of the struggling bulwark against the Left’s promotion of mass hysteria about what is claimed to be preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages I and others have presented years of reasoned arguments illustrating the folly of politically erected and sustained consensus science; here we continue this ongoing effort.

In his 26apr21 WJS review of Unsettled, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills writes –

Physicist Steven Koonin kicks the hornet’s nest right out of the gate in “Unsettled.” In the book’s first sentences he asserts that “the Science” about our planet’s climate is anything but “settled.” Mr. Koonin knows well that it is nonetheless a settled subject in the minds of most pundits and politicians and most of the population. … The book is no polemic. It’s a plea for understanding how scientists extract clarity from complexity. And, as Mr. Koonin makes clear, few areas of science are as complex and multidisciplinary as the planet’s climate.

One of my major criticisms of the hyped predictions of climate doom is that they are a based on faulty (general circulation) models.  Dr Koonin wrote the book on modeling large scale ‘physics systems’, and corroborates my own longstanding professional assessment of such models as to their feasibility and reliability.

But what Steven Koonin’s massive and well-referenced tome documents are the factual counters to the large-scale lies with which big government collectivists and their media allies daily fill the news and entertainment channels worldwide.  Examples –

• Frequency and magnitude of severe weather events (e.g. hurricanes) is increasing – NOT TRUE.
• World’s temperature highs are increasing – NOT TRUE.
• Atmospheric CO2 levels are at all-time highs – NOT TRUE.
• Number and severity of droughts are increasing – NOT TRUE.

The real harm is generated by the public’s acceptance of these lies (over 64% of the world’s population believes in a climate “emergency”) is that they compliantly accept the insane, economy stultifying, and liberty constraining public policies their political leaders and government bureaucracies concoct.  All this in the name of nowhere near any “settled science”, as Koonin makes clear.  But then, as they have demonstrated over recent decades, the average voter has had neither the interest nor intellect to examine what science is and what it really says about climate change.  A Swedish teen-ager’s emotional ramblings about a climate calamity are a much more digestible fare to all the folks out there in television land.  Forgive them Father, for they know not … .  (more here and here)

Equality vs Equity

George Rebane

The latest socialist bamboozle is the Democrats' new declaration that America is now more racially divided than it has been for years, and what we now need to fix our society is to pass new laws and regulations to instill equity across the land.  Forget about equality, we’re now told that is a white supremacist cum racist term and concept.  From here on out equity is ‘where it’s at’.  So, what’s the difference?

It turns out the difference is not only big, but requires a very large government, which in turn requires a much greater collection of tribute to bring about nationwide equity.  Part of the big bamboozle is how our leftwing propagandists demonstrate the difference between equality and equity using the graphic below.

All this equity business is being built up to stamp out racism and white privilege.  Pew Research has found that the “public has negative views of the country’s racial progress; more than half say Trump has made race relations worse.”  (more here) What evidence does the average person have/cite that makes him believe that, while the rest of the world’s poor and ‘people of color’ consider that notion to be utterly false (aka bullshit) as attested by their heroic attempts to get into America.  The ‘evidence’ provided the average American has been a steady 24/7 drizzle of racist propaganda from the lamestream as part and parcel of serving up a constant anti-Trump diet for the last five years.  Sadly, the critical thinking skills of our hoi polloi are of bottom-of-barrel quality.

An obvious aspect of the above picture of equity as it concerns wealth redistribution is that their scheme keeps the amount of wealth constant – you just reallocate the existing boxes.  A more complete definition of equity includes the dictum of equal outcomes – equal opportunity is not sufficient because that then requires differential effort to achieve equal outcome.  And a fundamental tenet of socialists everywhere is that enabling the poor and ignorant to compete will tend to make them more independent and accomplished, and less needy of socialist succor.  For the success of socialism, best to keep them on the plantation and be seen as their only reliable source of life’s necessaries.

Scattershots - 12may21 (updated 14may21)

George Rebane

Online cheating at all time high (here).  Getting someone else to do your assignment or take your test is a big business in the current epoch of remote learning.  Students cite the difficulty in learning anything in the remote and virtual presentations of material they are offered.  Others say that the stress level to achieve today is higher than ever.  Both reasons seem to justify cheating by hiring online ‘tutors’ to do their work.  Online cheating is very hard to detect, and everyone believes that what was put in practice during the C19 pandemic will be continued in the new post-pandemic ‘normal’.  Combine this with the already crap for curriculum that unionized public school teachers deliver, and the future for the next generation of ‘educated’ workers looks very dim, … and what does that do for America having to compete in international markets and maintaining leadership in defense technologies?  All this is being brought about in an environment of classroom chaos tolerated more than ever in the name of ‘racial equity’.  (more here)

Everyone is testing Biden on the world stage, and so far he continues to fail every test.  As most of us predicted last year in these pages, Bumblebrain as president would be subjected to a battery of international ‘crises’ as soon as he was sworn in.  And true to form, every bad guy on the geo-strategic stage is now taking advantage of the American president renown for his absolute ignorance of how the world order works as attested to his record of past failures in assessing international events and problems.  Bumblebrain has surrounded himself with a remarkable cadre of limp-wristed policy makers and enforcers who have garnered no respect from our allies and antagonists (e.g. note how Alejandro Mayorkas SecDHS continues to deny the border crisis and push the administration’s Big Lie that “the border is secure”).  The likelihood for a major conflict and/or setback on the world stage increases daily.

Almost all economists cannot make useful predictions of economic behavior and events.  My view of economists, especially those professing quantitative models and more so those of socialist leanings, has been justifiably dour for most of my adult life.  Today these know-nothings are especially in demand by the Dems and the Biden administration to sprinkle some progressive pixie dust on the country’s path to ever more comprehensive socialism.  But as usual, they make huge errors that would be egregious in any public forum attended by an informed and numerate population.  That being far from the case, the current cadre of economists are free to continue their nonsensical blatherings without harming any one but America’s taxpayers.  The most recent example being their prediction of a million new jobs for April that turned out to be less than one fourth that number. (more here)

Anybody know what Trump did that was unconstitutional?  The Dems and their lamestream lackeys repeat that charge daily in their desperate attempts to divert attention from their own anti-constitutional proposals and policies.  Today the list of the most egregious anti-American activities of the Dems is headed by their utter abandonment of border security and their promotion of HR1 in Congress.  The latter’s provisions are based on enormous lies and cynical assessments of our national elections and the country's state of affairs in general.  Their intent is to bring the nation’s elections under federal control, in distinct contravention of our Constitution’s prescriptions.  True to their rampant road to socialism, HR1 would destroy the federalism under which the several states conduct their elections. (more here) Central planning and control über alles.

CDC, NIH, WHO, …, all of them have shown how politicized science can mismanage responses to the Covid pandemic at all levels of government.  The potpourri of pronouncements from such agencies over the last year have been all over the map, and continue to this day.  Their main function has been to let politicians establish and extend illegal, unnecessary, and harmful public policies, the only function of which is to reduce individual liberties and expand the establishment of a powerful centralized government.  The latest such revelation (which is not news to most RR readers) is CDC’s lying about the C19’s outdoor transmission rate which enables politicians to double down on social distancing and mask mandates.  These substantive big lies have been enthusiastically backed by the Dems and trumpeted daily by their lamestream media.  Their impact on the nation’s economic health and forms of transforming governance will be studied for decades by free-thinking historians.  Government historians have already written this history and incorporated it into the nation’s school curricula.  (more here and here)

[14may21 update]  Masks still required for the vaccinated frequenting crowded spaces.  So can someone from the vaunted ‘party of science’ explain how the immunizing and prophylactic properties of the vaccine diminish when the vaccinated walk into one of these crowded space?  The CDC failed to expand on that point.  Even David Leonhardt of the NYT penned a critical commentary of the CDC (here) about its baseless, fluid, and science-free face mask mandates. (H/T to reader, and more here, here and here)

Covid, the third greatest killer in the land?  This little stat is being purveyed perhaps to justify the mostly insane response policies that have been recommended and implemented by government agencies and jurisdictions over the last year.  Our own Don Rogers (Union publisher) writes today – “Some of us also learned folly, depression, grief, though these were not nearly so widespread nor the disease so deadly as at first feared. Still, it is widespread. It is deadly. It is the third-leading cause of death in America, right behind cardiac disease and cancer whether you count by diagnosis or annual deaths above average. It is real.”  Such naked reporting overlooks C19’s role as the stand-in grim reaper for the elderly and/or infirm who were statistically on death’s door with or without the pandemic.  Some malady was going to take these people in any case, and it turned out to be a dreaded disease that had little if any measurable effect on the mortality rates of the young and younger.  C19 was able to rack up its score and place third this time only because of its (not so exceptional) virulence and some wrong-headed and random response policies.  But writing reports which make the lightly-read reader believe that now we have permanently ensconced a new third-place killer is both misleading and wrong.  All that such journalism does is perpetuate continued and docile acceptance of population control policies, no matter how ill-advised.

Critical Race Theory and the March of Marxism

[CRT is the most putrid piece of anti-American pedagogy to infect our institutions in at least the last 100 years.  Thanks to the Democratic Party, it is now rampant as it metastasizes the minds of our lightly read neighbors, products of schools that for years have focused their students on America’s sins.  Today CRT is being rapidly incorporated into California’s public schools, government agencies, and politically compliant corporatist enterprises.  Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo recently gave a speech at Hillsdale College on ‘Critical Race Theory: What it Is and How to Fight It’ which was published in the March 2021 Imprimis.  It is the most cogent, clear, and concise description of CRT and its current spread across our land.  It is reprinted here by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  gjr]

Christopher F. Rufo

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

Scattershots – 7apr21 (updated 10apr21)

George Rebane

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

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

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

The Success of Socialist Schooling

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Days Diary – 2apr21

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell Unity (updated 3apr21)

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Days Diary – 25mar21

The day our elected officials hid the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, it confirmed they would kill us to beat President Trump.  Never forget the evil we are fighting.  Racy Sicilian echoing RR

George Rebane

Dr Scott W Atlas, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, asks ‘Science, Politics, and COVID: Will Truth Prevail?’ in the Feb2021 issue of the Imprimis.  My short answer takeaway is NO.  The C19 public information cesspool has become so soiled and sullied over the last year that it is easy to believe over 90% of Americans have little or no idea of what the true course of the pandemic has been and what ‘science’ has really had to say about the public response policies implemented across the land.  Dr Atlas, an internationally recognized expert in the relevant fields required to make sense of what’s been going on, writes –

First, I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

As these pages record, it’s his second point that has concerned me over the years since the Obama administration.  In the large, we Americans no longer act as inheritors of the greatest legacy of liberty and freedoms bequeathed in human history by our more stout-hearted forebears.  We have become a population of state-succored serfs, compliantly accepting every government instituted ratchet that incrementally proscribes our spirit as a liberty-loving people.

Given the social goals of the Democrat Party and its newly adopted radical leftwing political posture, I fault the Republican Party for letting down America with its ongoing sanguine acceptance of the socialist/communist diktats issued by the Left.  The relinquishing of its position as the active and visible leader of the nation’s political opposition has left a power vacuum that can and will be filled by ad hoc factions of conservative and libertarian Americans with nowhere else to turn.  This is leading us in a potentially dangerous direction as Dr Atlas concludes –

With social media acting as the arbiter of allowable discussion, and with continued censorship and cancellation of those with views challenging the “accepted narrative,” the United States is on the verge of losing its cherished freedoms. It is not at all clear whether our democratic republic will survive—but it is clear it will not survive unless more people begin to step up in defense of freedom of thought and speech.

I urge you to read the entire piece and then contact your local and national political critters.  If you’re a Democrat, ask them to review the history of collectivist regimes and the equal opportunity misery they have instituted over their nations.  And if you’re a Republican, tell your representatives to read the party’s platform, then get off their collective asses and provide some active leadership that will rally Main Street to recognize and resist our headlong rush to autocracy.  In short, since our Left is cutting the Right no slack, tell them to tell it like it is, and cut the ‘go along to get along’ crap.

Working the Unity Myth (updated 25mar21)

George Rebane

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

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