Rebane's Ruminations

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.

Scattershots – 15mar2021 (updated 19mar21)

George Rebane

The Ides of March.  2065 years ago, if I recall correctly, it was a very bad day for Julius Caesar – ‘Et tu Brute!’ and all that.  Bummer.

Speaking of inhumane acts, Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT) contrasted treatment of illegal aliens under Trump and Biden, and stated unequivocally that “Building a wall is the most inhumane policy.”  When you consider that statement in the context of the now invited hordes surging north, hordes that contain thousands of exploited unaccompanied children, then a statement like that is either evil or comes from the mouth of a blithering idiot.  To confirm this assessment, Murphy went on to declare that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens “will save lives”, for which there is not a shred of evidence.

The Connecticut senator is not alone in dispersing such messages and working feverishly to ensconce them into public policies.  To me that just adds to the evidence that we would not err much if we gingerly treated all Democrats as we would the clinically insane.

Along the same lines, the Dems now consider introducing a federal wealth tax to help pay for their disastrous $1.9T American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (breakdown here).  The so-called stimulus has very little to do with the Covid relief it was supposed to provide.  But paying for it with a wealth tax is beyond stupid.  Wealth taxes have not worked where they have been tried.  Europe had a fling with them and discovered that not only did such taxes not yield the desired revenues, it additionally drove away capital to more friendly shores, reduced jobs, and slowed economic growth.  So again, what would you call people like Sen Warren (D-MA) who reject such decades long and widespread evidence, and continue with plans to install such a disaster in America? (more here)

The $1.9T stimulus is going to shove a one-time $1,400 check into the shorts of millions of our fellow countrymen.  Talking to a local as I was waiting my turn at the Safeway deli counter, I was regaled by the wondrous things that his greatly anticipated check would make possible.  He was clearly a Biden voter who approved of such rewards for his loyalty in the voting booth.  This made me think about the difference between a politician offering money to a prospective voter to pay for his upcoming vote, to the same politician promising to pay cash money to the voter after voting him into office.  Is there really a difference in how those two kinds of votes are bought?  And what is the difference of such cash payments and a politician’s promise to pass legislation that will grow the economy, and thereby enrich all according to how they participate in the economy?

[17mar21 update]  Is Biden performing on green screen or edited CGI?  If so, have we entered a whole new era of bamboozling the public?  The video clearly shows Biden’s hand in front of one of the reporters’ mics, which from the rest of the (apparently composed) image should still be at least a couple of feet in front of him as he approaches. (more here)

The world has passed peak oil usage according to the International Energy Agency forecast. (here)  The post-pandemic usage of fossil fuels is projected to start going down as we convert to alternative ‘sustainable’ sources of energy.  The main factor in this reduction is the switch to electrically powered vehicles (EVs).  The IEA has not told us what the production pathway is to get the needed electricity to power the ever more higher count of EVs used for transportation.  Wind, water, and solar sources are still a long way off from satisfying the world's hunger for energy.

[18mar21 update] Today’s Union op-ed features a stellar local example of progressive thought in ‘What’s wrong with women’s rights?’ by Tom Durkin.  Among other women related issues Mr Durkin addresses abortion with, “Let’s get one thing straight. Anti-abortionists are not pro-life. They are just pro-birth. Once an unwanted child is born, anti-choice advocates lose interest — and responsibility — for the lives they claim to have saved. Way too often, unwanted children grow up in abuse, poverty and neglect. Where are the pro-lifers for these children?”  From this we are to understand that the anti-abortionists are responsible for the squalid conditions which led to women getting pregnant, and then have their un-aborted child grow up in the same squalor to a life of ignorance, crime, drugs, … .  All of this coming to pass on decades-long Democrat-controlled urban plantations that are perpetuated purposely for political power.  Now if this kind of argument does not represent evil or more evidence for leftwing idiocy (not ignorance), it’s hard to conceive what else would qualify.  From a careful examination of his nearby visage we may conclude in Mr Durkin’s favor that the gentleman most likely is not evil.

[19mar21 update]  Bumblebrain’s bungles jes’ keep on a’truckin’.  Never mind his problems climbing the stairs to board AF-1.  The only thing remarkable about that was the stone silence from his lamestream lackies who never noticed anything awry.  But the biggie was Team Biden confronting the Chinese in Alaska.  SecState Blinken confirmed that he is a naïf in the field of international diplomacy.  He and his team actually believed that they could get China to act contrite, kick their instep, and mutter ‘Well, aw schucks’ after Blinken gave them a sophomoric lecture on all their baddies re the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China Sea, … .  China responded by outlining our lamestream’s own anti-Trump talking points to highlight our systemic racism, wanton killing of blacks, persecuting immigrants at our borders, … .  In short, any casual RR contributor could have easily predicted the disastrous reaction to Team Biden and accurately scripted the Chinese response.  But to the new flock of incompetents that Bumblebrain has assembled, it was all a surprise.  The guys from Beijing are getting an early cut on ol’ Joe’s jib – exciting times ahead.  (more here)

Ruminations – 6mar21 (updated 11mar21)

George Rebane

White supremacist hysteria has reached fever pitch among the progressive socialists.  Commenter BillT @ 835am cites (here) the dean of Arizona State University who announced that characteristics of precision, timeliness, quality expression (e.g. good written English), good work ethic, etc are all part and parcel of “white racial habitus” which perpetuates “white language supremacy” which means “it’s inherently white and racist”.  By the dean’s logic, then ‘black racial habitus’ that perpetuates black behavioral characteristics is inherently black and racist. (more here)

Covid science and disinformation is discussed by Dr Scott W Atlas MD, Hoover Institution senior fellow, former professor and head of neuroradiology at Stanford.  He recently gained a furious notoriety in the eyes of all Democrats and their lamestream lackies for serving as a C19 advisor to President Trump.  In the Feb 2021 Imprimus he asks ‘Science, Politics, and COVCID: Will Truth Prevail?’  I cite his short and very informative essay as another cogent summary of my own stance on the nature of the C19 pandemic and the various disastrous government response policies to the disease.  From all of my readings (also see below), the clear answer to Dr Atlas’s question is NO!

Fact-checking the fact checkers.  Today it is easy to make the case that media giants are “employing left-wing vetters to limit scientific debate”.  The work of fact checking by leftwingers primarily focuses on cherry picking a supporting counter-opinion report or two and using it to dun any scientific opinion that does not support the command/control narrative prescribing government diktats opposing federalist responses to the C19 pandemic.  The whole enterprise of fact checking is based on the Mega Lie that science speaks but with one voice.  The ‘one voice’ chosen by the ‘progressive health clerisy’ is then labeled consensus science to which all the hoi polloi must kowtow when thinking properly about such politicized issues as global warming and C19.  For more, see ‘Fact-Checking Facebook’s Fact Checkers’.

[7mar21 update]  Islam's goal in/for America.  Over the years in these pages I have been very clear and explicit about my assessment as to the objective of the Islamic diaspora, especially as it is directed toward America and its western culture.  The fundamental task of all expatriate Muslims is to be missionaries and bring the infidels into the embrace of Allah and his prophet Muhammad, to whatever destination they emigrate.  Practiced as a temporary and necessary ruse, assimilation into their host country’s culture is the last thing on their mind. Here is a video of a talk on Islam’s goal for America given by a very sober Muslim woman - Download Received_938000470288815. (H/T to correspondent)

George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and NOT due to police brutality.  The four policmen involved followed the training book and policy to the letter as attested by a continuous police bodycam video (here).  The 31may20 autopsy report showed that Floyd had almost 3 times a potential lethal dose of the drug in his system, and that he was already dying of fluid filling his lungs when the police encountered him.  The real question is why this information was kept until 25 August after three months of looting, rioting, and murder across the nation.  And given the overwhelming evidence, why are the policemen still being tried for doing nothing wrong?

[11mar21 update]  Nevada County Trembles.  The Board of Supervisors failed to pass an already lame and vanilla resolution (here) that asks Sacramento to behave more responsibly and competently toward Nevada County.  Along with other small rural counties, we have gotten screwed by the policies foisted on the state by Gavin Newsom.  I, along with many other local citizens, have encouraged the supes to step up and make our voices heard – to wit we want more local control of our C19 responses, and we don’t want to get screwed by the state in its distribution of vaccines, federal funds, etc that are supposed help pay for our pandemic related expenses.  It turns out that at last Tuesday’s BoS meeting, the supes were too timid to pass the proposed resolution, and instead they tabled it.  When are we finally going to get the courage to make a simple peep to protest the crap that keeps coming down from Sacramento?

Progressives Big Lie #7519 – Texas Power Debacle

George Rebane

The 24feb21 Union ran this cartoon on its op-ed pages.

From this the newspaper’s uninformed and progressive readers have the clear takeaway that the Texas electric grid is in disarray and dysfunctional, as the recent blizzard demonstrated, because the electricity market is too ‘free’ and unregulated.  The disaster that hit Texans, and from which they still suffer, was caused by too much capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The actual cause of the grid’s failure and its normal high cost to consumers is purely and solely a government manufactured travesty, brought to you by the scumbag politicians in Washington and Austin.  (Remember, if society has a problem, government is almost always the cause.)  To get a handle on this rather complex kerfuffle, we first have to understand that across the country there have come to be two kinds of energy suppliers – more or less deregulated ‘retail generators’ and the usual regulated public utilities.  The corporatist ‘free marketeers’ led by outfits like Enron, successfully lobbied for new fed and state laws that allowed the set up of the two-tier supply structure – the deregulated retail suppliers were supposed to compete and thereby lower consumer prices below those charged by the regulated utilities.

The corporatists anticipated their windfall by promising to set up a green power generating infrastructure that minimized reliance on coal and nuclear.  It was going to be all wind and solar with gas back-up.  The green power part was going to be heavily subsidized by the feds, and natural gas was a just-in-time fuel that could not be efficiently stored by the remaining back-up power stations.  And to transport the gas through pipelines required the operation of electrically powered compressors.  As dollar signs danced in their heads, and since the deregulation didn’t require it, the last thing in the minds of these new corporatist retail utilities was spending money to maintain and harden the electricity distribution infrastructure.   Are you beginning to get the picture? (more here)

Now step back about 30 years when people started analyzing the vulnerability of green electric grids not backed up by reliable coal and nuclear.  They started issuing warnings which were ignored by the politicians in charge of legislation and prudent regulation.  In fact, the eco and corporatist factions caused most of these longer term studies to be shut down lest their pesky findings would get too much publicity. To add insult to injury, many jurisdictions such as in Texas, consumers were not allowed to pipe gas into their homes for heating, and codes were put in place to prohibit the building of such houses – ‘clean electricity’ was going to be the solution to all energy consumption needs.

This insanity continued with governors (e.g. Cuomo) prohibiting the building/expansion of pipelines to bring back-up fossil fuels into their states and appropriately distribute it in the regions where subsidized green power was expanding.  The point here is, that contrary to the Big Lie cartoons like the one above, there has never been anything free about the energy markets when corporatists conspire with econuts and scumbag politicians to force consumers to choose between regulated utilities and ‘unregulated’ retail electricity generators who wind up with a captured clientele that can be charged sky-high market prices when primary (wind and solar) generators inevitably fail and back-up power turns out to be inadequate. (more here) 

So today politicians such as Cuomo and Warren inhibit the building of needed infrastructure ranging from pipelines to gas compressor facilities, and go on to ignore and shut down studies that produce results which don’t support their Agenda21 green narratives.

But more fundamentally, as taught by Rebane Doctrine, unfettered capitalism in any market will become rapacious as it inevitably coagulates into socially egregious, corporatist oligopolies on the road to monopoly.  (e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, …)  Capitalism, as an economic order to generate and distribute wealth, is an 800 lbs gorilla that always needs some minimal regulation by the collective in a stable and liberal society.  Capitalism is God’s paramount gift to mankind’s pursuit of happiness, but it does not come free.  We recall that the good part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system, and the bad part of capitalism is that it always tries to game the system.  And there’s the rub for enlightened governance.

Consummating Corporatist Conspiracies

“Conspiracy - an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.”

George Rebane

Over the last year or two corporatist conspiracies have come into full bloom with the various progressive factions of the government and media as counter-parties.  Today the dominant vehicle for promoting the fruits of such conspiracies is the ‘green new deal’ in all its facets.  What makes the ‘surreptitious’ part of the plan work is that most Americans think that the GND was promoted as a temporary far-left hot flash to attract the socialist cum communist factions of the Democratic Party to support Teams Biden and Pelosi.  Walter Russel Mead goes into some detail in the 23feb21 WSJ (here) to remind us that  -

Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.

To these corporatists we add our technology oligopolies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.  A blatant example of corporatist trade of corporations’ support for suppression of competition is made in Amazon’s full page ad (see nearby photo) propagandizing of the $15/hr federal minimum wage in the 22feb21 WSJ and other lamestream outlets.  In this unashamed appeal for the government gun, Amazon wants its retail competition quashed through mandatory increases in labor costs for those small enterprises that still offer entry level job opportunities as opposed to integrating expensive new technologies or simply folding their tents.  As justification, the copy in its ad reads –

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.  For millions of workers, that’s 12 years without a wage increase – despite significant cost-of-living increases and the economic toll of the Covid-19 crisis.  That’s why we support the Raise the Wage Act that’s currently being proposed in Congress.  This legislation will increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour four years from now, giving 32 million US workers the raise they deserve while helping accelerate the recovery from the pandemic. … At Amazon, we saw the need to do more.  That’s why in 2018 we decided to provide all our US employees a starting wage of at least $15 an hour.  Since then, applications have doubled, our employees have had an easier time providing for their families, and local economies have seen a boost. …  We’re calling on Congress to pass the Raise the Wage Act.  It’s the right thing to do.

This piece of drivel has more holes in it than a sieve.  Nowhere have there been millions of deserving workers increasing their skill sets for over a decade without getting raises and promotions.  There exists no permanent cohort of American workers condemned to only $7.25/hr for years.  And Amazon’s applications have doubled because misguided government lockdowns have destroyed thousands of retailers among other businesses.  During this time Amazon’s online retailing business has boomed from people ordering their necessaries from home, thereby increasing Amazon’s happy requirement to build more distribution warehouses that need thousands more workers off the unemployment rolls.  (Amazon can afford to train and pay the $15 to carefully selected and appropriately capable new employees.)  The longer the lockdowns stay in place, the more money Amazon makes.  And in return Amazon and the oligarchs promote Democrat vote-buying policies with added benefit of virtue signaling to the nation’s light readers.

And fuhgeddabout “local economies have seen a boost”.  The promise of a $15 minimum wage has had nothing to do with any growth of local economies, growth which is only fostered by businesses that are allowed to operate at current labor costs to provide needed goods and services to people hunkered down in their homes.  Were that not so, then even more growth would come about if the minimum wage were to be $20 or $30 or even higher. As Raise the Wage Act becomes law and labor costs start rising, there will be a net fewer jobs available across the country (1.4M fewer according to the CBO), especially for the uneducated and unskilled who are also promised government checks if they vote correctly.

Walter Russel Mead concludes his adroit commentary with –

Business lobbies around the world are experts in regulatory capture and in diverting subsidies and mandates to serve corporate interests. It won’t be the greenest possible grid that wins the political contest; it will be the system that provides the most-entrenched interests with the highest rents that the best PR firms can present as sufficiently green. As lobbyists and green entrepreneurs rush to cash in on one of history’s greatest bonanzas, pigs will be adorned in green lipstick and white elephants dipped in green dye.

Yes indeed, you scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours.

Dark Days Diary – 21 feb21

George Rebane

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

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

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

Right Wing Watchers

George Rebane

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

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

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

$15/hr Dumbth on the March

You always get less of what you tax more.  Eternal Truth #461

George Rebane

For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills.  This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy.  Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.

Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ - by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years.  These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.

Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21^st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’.  Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America.  Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”  This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government.  Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage.  Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage.  That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.

Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme.  For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor.  But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.

But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation.  As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South.  The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.”  They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.”  And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.

Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets.  There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march.  This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.

That Which Must Not Be Known

George Rebane

In free societies merit and its reward will always seek a commensurate level.

As we enter the Biden years, America’s Left has a once in a lifetime opportunity to permanently tip the scales and guide the country into the Marxist future they have been seeking since the Bolshevik Revolution a century ago.  Following Lenin’s dictum in educating our young, our Left, in its co-opting of the Democratic Party, has had unfettered control for the last half-century of the country’s public education.  And by all available observables and measurables (e.g. National Center for Educational Statistics) they have now produced an America that in the large reflects what the late Steve Allen referred to as “national dumbth”.  Today merit has been replaced by mediocrity (more here). The best illustration of this is the political behavior of our least well-read neighbors who have shown themselves to be robotically compliant to the state and its corporatist manufactured reality.

The eternal goal of collectivist autocracies is to evolve humankind into an amalgamated society that will respond reliably to top-down rule.  A major tool for creating such a population has been the successful decoupling of merit and reward in the American mind.  This has been achieved by appeal to the siren songs of ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’, each having malleable and/or implied meanings that are fashioned daily to promote the latest state diktat.

The demonstrable aspect of the merit/reward principle in determining human behavior has some compelling corollaries -

1. Merit always has an open market price.
2. When reward for recognized merit is withheld, the level of delivered merit declines.
3. When reward for recognized merit is lavished, it invites an increased supply of merit.

This universal principle is totally counter to collectivist ideologies in general and today’s progressivist narrative in particular.  The command-and-control elites of autocratic governments understand the merit/reward relationship, and use it cynically in shaping public policies designed to hide its teachings.

Facts, Speech, and Reach

George Rebane

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

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

Dark Days Diary – 1feb21 (updated 3feb21)

George Rebane

The latest 2^nd Amendment attack is in progress.  HR127 has been introduced in the House (here).  The high hard one starts with, “The Attorney General, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, shall establish a system for licensing the possession of firearms or ammunition in the United States, and for the registration with the Bureau of each firearm present in the United States.”  From there it gets worse, in Sec (c)(1)(A) the law would require all Americans possessing firearms to have each one registered, each type of ammunition registered, pass a criminal background check, pass a psychological evaluation, successfully complete a training course, and take out a special firearms insurance policy.  This is called constructive abrogation of the 2^nd Amendment.  From there it is one short step to subsequent prohibition and “surrendering” of select firearms since their owners and locations will be known by the feds.  Violation of any of the bill’s strictures carry long minimum prison sentences and fines that will leave the overwhelming fraction of Americans destitute.  The total disarming of law-abiding American citizens is the goal.  Criminals, illegal aliens, terrorists, … will not be affected.

How the Democrats killed thousands of Americans, and many others elsewhere, is now coming to light.  Starting in the spring of 2020, the Dems and their lamestream lackies strongly opposed Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin for use against C19. (example here)  Why?  Because President Trump spoke hopefully about the effectiveness of HCQ as demonstrated in the EU, Africa, and Asia.  The Democrat Death machine would have nothing get in the way of their narrative that the Trump administration was mismanaging the country’s C19 response – high body counts were the gold standard for their allegations.  If thousands had to die in order to keep their election-year imperative a viable issue (they had no other policies to offer) in the daily news, then so be it – it was all for the greater omelet, and more than a few eggs needed to be cracked.  Well, it turns out that these well-established medicines have proven to be huge lifesavers around the world (more here), and now that Biden is in office, even the FDA is putting HCQ on its approval list (here).  HCQ has proven very effective as a therapeutic in the early stages of C19, and Ivermectin is probably the hands down champion cheap drug for both prevention and treatment of C19.  Since the US is seen as the leader in C19 response policies, the death counts, when totaled with other countries similarly delaying the use of these drugs, may number in the millions.  Collectivist politics über alles – historically, whatever they touch is followed by death and desolation.  (There are other news references to this revisionist policy which I'll dig out later.)

[2feb21 update]  Re the efficacy of politically incorrect medicines like HCQ and Ivermectin for C19 prevention and treatment, we had a routine visit with our physician today and the conversation inevitably turned to the pandemic.  We talked extensively about alternative prophylactics and therapeutics to the anti-viral Remdesivir and the recently developed vaccines.  To make a long story short, our physician and colleagues have for months now been taking a daily dose of HCQ.  He confirmed that almost all we’ve heard about the pandemic and the ‘science’ behind the response policies is utter bullshit.  We will now join him in this regimen and get our first vaccination shot next week.  Our litigious justice system, abetted by the corporatists’ social media and the Democrats’ lamestream, advise against the broad dissemination of this knowledge, but it does not prohibit their practicing ‘Physician, heal thyself!’

[3feb21 update]  More on the Democrat C19 killing machine.  The 3feb21 WSJ reports (here) on corporatist YouTube’s recent censorship of critical lifesaving testimony to the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs – “(Google's YouTube) censors testimony from physicians on early treatment for Covid-19 patients.”  At that hearing two medical experts gave evidence of the efficacy of alternative medicines in the treatment of C19, one of which was Ivermectin. Dr Pierre Kory reported on the most recently published clinical study of that medicine involving 1,200 healthcare workers, 800 of whom received Ivermectin and 400 received a placebo.  Subsequently, none of the 800 contracted C19 while 58% of the 400 did.  The Democrat-led warpath against Trump has kept America’s healthcare institutions on tenterhooks to do nothing that would draw the wrath of leftwing politicos and their lamestream legions.  As a result, America early on rejected regimens using safe and established medicines that could have saved thousands of lives and mitigated the draconian lockdowns that have destroyed so much of our economy – all to support their drumbeat narrative of Trump’s mishandling the country’s response to the pandemic.

India Cracks COVID Code (updated 30jan21)

George Rebane

For many weeks now we’ve been hearing a lot about the astounding C19 stats coming out of India.  Their rate of confirmed C19 cases is shown in the figure below as compiled by Johns Hopkins University.  And how have they achieved such astounding results?

The answer lies in the country’s taking a radically different tack for both C19 prevention and therapeutics that emphasizes the use of off-shelf anti-viral and anti-parasitic drugs which have been dunned by our healthcare industry, both private and governmental.  The more complete story is told in ‘India Develops Effective COVID Treatment for Under $3 Per Person While America Remains in Vaccine Frenzy’.  (H/T to reader) The bottom line is that India’s government distributes anti-C19 packets – labelled Ziverdo – based on Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine (early on touted by President Trump) that cost about $2.65 each.  I have posted on both Ivermectin and HCQ which have yet to receive AMA or FDA approval while big pharma’s expensive vaccines have enjoyed an historical fast track into people’s arms.

Ziverdo kits are available from multiple sources (here) for those wishing to lay in an extra layer of protection against C19.  Ziverdo is reported effective both as a prophylactic and a therapeutic as demonstrated by the available hospitalization and mortality stats.

One reason why the lamestream does not publicize this news is that early on President Trump was in favor of existing bio-chemical medicines to fight C19, an approach that did not comport with the Left’s making the pandemic as bad as possible during the 2020 election year.  Why outlets like FN have not picked up on this is a puzzle to me.  Yet one more item to add to the evidence for the ongoing global fraud. (more here)  Perhaps readers have better insights.

[30jan21 update]  Apparently Congress and the federal government has been fully apprised of India’s major response to C19 with it dispensing of millions of Ziverdo kits to be used as both a prophylactic and a therapeutic.  In our media we have heard nothing of this; how come?  Here is a report of recent testimony to the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, and here another study recommending use of Ivermectin.  Everyone’s lips seemed to be securely sealed.  (H/T to reader)

For more information on the Ziverdo kits and their recommended usage, here is the website of one of its purveyors.

Our mega-fraudulent Covid response

George Rebane

It was well back in the last year during the heights of our Covid panics that it occurred to me to examine more closely the cited death tolls from the pandemic.  The CDC was beginning to prevaricate on some stats that didn’t fly in tight formation with John Hopkins, which had assigned itself to be the national Covid (C19 in the sequel) tally center.  Being locked down, I then amused myself with a lot of analytics that ranged from developing my own epidemic spread model to deriving the reliability relationships of the various C19 tests that were being administered.  What puzzled me was how these pandemic deaths comported with the mortality rates that the country experienced during ‘normal’ years.

It didn’t take much looking to discover that whatever the number of C19 deaths we were suffering, they did not cause a spike in our national mortality count that our daily ration of media hysteria reported.  I posted my thoughts and findings on the matter, and soon found that I was not alone – other investigators had come to the same politically inconvenient conclusion. (more here, here, and here)

“The Covid-19 death count is a fabrication” reports Celia Farber of uncoverdc.com in a piece titled ‘Have 400,000 Americans Died of Covid-19?’ (H/T to reader)  Citing several scientists and investigators and illustrating CDC data with screenshots, she goes on to make an extensive case for that assertion that many have already discovered for themselves.  You will not find any of this information in the nation’s trusted lamestream outlets, and even honest politicians (a hard notion to swallow) will have little courage to properly denigrate the policies that our governments by the gun have imposed on us.  The result has been a devastated economy, thousands lives and businesses ruined, uncountable collateral deaths and morbidities, a skewed election placing corrupt idiots in the White House, and a ratcheting back of our constitutional freedoms the impact of which is shaking the foundations of our republic.

The bottom line of the C19 fraud so far is that the CDC has been mangling the deaths data to a fair-thee-well, and to keep with the Democratic/Biden supporting narrative, they had to precipitously add almost 270,000 to the “all-cause deaths” at the end of the year; “evidently 269,249 people suddenly died during the last week of 2020” to reinvigorate the C19 hoax.  Apparently, even the CDC could not make the needed ‘excess deaths’ from the nation’s 2020 mortality dataset, so they just fabricated the number and added it in with the hope that no one would notice and/or understand what they had done.

All of these numbers in Farber’s article are replicable from published data sources.  And the politically correct crowd can easily debunk what the cited scientists have presented.  But, of course, that will not be their way of countering these conclusions should they ever be made public by any of the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ media.  Until then, wear your masks, socially distance, lock down your businesses, and keep your hopes up for a better world as you turn toward your local state house from whence all wisdom flows – remember, your government follows the science.

The Biden Bamboozle Begins

George Rebane

Actually, bamboozle is way too gentle of a descriptive for what was launched yesterday.  This commentary would actually find a better home on the next entry into our Dark Days Diary, nevertheless … .  Our new president spoke of stopping the lies inundating the nation, all the while heaping on new ones while bringing up old ones for another pass over the country’s psyche so that we could all unify in the glow of an inaugural speech that drove so many to tears, albeit for markedly different reasons.

While Seattle again enjoys Antifa’s tender mercies – this time at the state’s Democratic HQ – the Left’s nationwide destructive and murderous riots of last year are either forgotten or repainted with a fresh new coat of lies, Biden’s lamestream (yes, it’s his now) plays the 6jan21 Capitol assault video over and over again as undisputable proof of where lies the real danger to America and democracy.  In his laughable attempt to focus on unifying the country, our new president is characterizing the country as in ruins and continuing crisis, all due to the mismanagement of his predecessor, who is the nation’s Supremacista Blanca El Primero.

And all 75+ million of us who voted for him, and at least that many more of our families, all of whom supported his policies and accomplishments, these now also carry the scarlet letters that label us all as white supremacists, racists, nazis (small n), and incipient domestic terrorists.  For the Left we have become the country’s number one enemy to be sought out, identified, watched, isolated, and dealt with accordingly.  Apparently, we have always been there (as RR comment streams attest), but now Donald J Trump has outed us by rising up as our leader so that the politically proper and prudent could finally see those around them who visibly rose up to support and cheer him on.

By continually citing their carefully formulated versions of our pernicious beliefs in an historically false America and our ongoing unabashed public behavior, the new administration will be free to fumble forth with all of its failures pre-attributed to the disastrous legacy of Trump abetted by his minions, still free to roam the countryside perpetuating perfidy and lies to counter socially just progressive programs and initiatives.  This cannot and will not go on unanswered.

Of course, given the recent tendentious behavior of our Hispanics and blacks, even their own traditional constituencies are not to be completely trusted.  The Left knows that these folks have been successfully bamboozled for years, and the possibility that they may now subscribe to a new pied piper is not to be discounted.

But the 800lbs gorilla in the room remains the November election which more than half of Americans have beliefs ranging from its having unexplained irregularities to outright ballot stuffing fraud.  And all these feelings have been and continue to be reinforced by the establishment, first refusing to look at and substantively refute the presented evidence, and second then upping the ante to launch a national vilifying campaign against everyone who continues expressing concerns and thinks that the conduct of the 2020 election should get at least a small fraction of the kind of attention the Democrats mandated for the 2016 election in terms of countless congressional investigations, the involvement of DoJ and the FBI and its fraudulent use of FISA, various IGs looking into their spheres of purview, the Mueller special prosecutor investigation, and the still ongoing Durham probe.

All we hear from the Dems and their nascent Biden administration is that only racists, insurrectionists, and seditious domestic terrorists remain interested in having a transparent examination of the evidence.  And, of course, no correctly thinking American should be beholden to such an irredeemable cohort of deplorables, no matter how many tens of millions they number.  The Democrats demonstrated that they can roll out a couple of divisions of armed National Guard troops at a moment’s notice if there is even a faint (unfounded?) hint of public opposition to their new power structure.  And in the meanwhile, as our liberal commenters remind us today, they will be taking our names and making lists for when the reckoning comes.  That is who they are and have always been, now it’s their time to flex some muscle and really kick ass.  This is their 'unification' program which will continue until we all unite to 'Sieg heil!' the victory of our new masters.

‘What Just Happened?’

[Union columnist Terry McLaughlin asks that pointed question (here) on the 14jan21 edition’s op-ed page.  She goes on to provide and excellent background summary that lets the reader answer her question.  It turns out that we Americans have been given an education over the past year to accept a much more expressive way of protesting everything from public policies to individuals and institutions – in short, we have been carefully taught that riot and mayhem is now de rigueur for expressing collective dissatisfaction.  Ms McLaughlin’s piece provides us with the syllabus for that course.  It is posted below with her permission.  gjr]

Terry McLaughlin

There is no excuse for the violence that took place on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. What we witnessed is morally reprehensible and I am ashamed and horrified that it occurred.

Americans deserve to know who was responsible, and those persons who perpetrated vandalism or violence should be brought to justice.

It cannot be denied that both the political far right and far left are home to their own share of Antifa-like anarchists, and the chaos at the Capitol has refuted any perception that the left owns a monopoly on widespread political violence. While we can never excuse or defend this behavior, we can make an honest effort to identify the environment in which it happened.

These events resulted from a multitude of causes: concerns and distrust in the integrity of our elections, pent up frustrations of citizens stripped of their livelihoods and freedoms during the pandemic, and yes, the rhetoric of the president of the United States.

But not the least of these causes is the justification, defense, and even apathy of the media and many of our elected political leaders regarding the violence committed across America throughout 2020, including attacks on federal courthouses, burning of police stations, and the establishment of “autonomous zones” in Portland and Seattle. The message was loud and clear: If you are dissatisfied with a political or social issue, violence is an acceptable answer.

Dark Days Diary – 9jan21 (updated 12jan21)

No days unalert; … alertness when most necessary, is always missing, and not to give the matter a thought is to be slated for destruction.  Gracian #264

George Rebane

Over the years to this day we have seen that our leftwing neighbors don’t have much truck with concepts like nuance or shades of gray.  Their more simple worldview resides comfortably in the corners of the extreme – for them the needle is always pegged: yes/no, black/white, racist/woke, 0/1, socialist/capitalist, … .  (Bang-bang policy in control theory)  This embrace of simplicity goes back to the Bolshevik revolution and continued all throughout the 5-year civil war that followed.

During that terrible strife, communist partisans would stop trains of ‘White Russians’ fleeing the already consolidated Red areas.  They would have the passengers dismount to line up next to the tracks and show their palms.  Those whose hands were found to be soft and/or uncalloused were executed on the spot as bourgeoisie enemies of the people.  There was no middle road to be examined, nor any propensity to do so.  Terror was the name of the game, and to make their omelet, some necessary eggs had to be cracked.

An Appeal to Restore Election Integrity (updated 16jan21)

George Rebane

[This was to be the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary censored on 6 January 2021.]

[Update.  I was informed this afternoon that my “commentary got cut tonight by station management.”  Management is now “establishing criteria for commentaries”, and there were elements in my piece with which the station took issue.  I am saddened that the pall of leftwing censorship across the land has now reached our little corner of the Sierra foothills.  Ratcheting autocracy on parade.  gjr]

[16jan21 update.  I am happy to report that The Union saw fit to publish this commentary in its 16jan21 hardcopy and online editions (here).  Update continued below.  gjr]

Today our country is again unhappy with how our national election was carried out.  Here we are not talking about voters unhappy that their candidate did not win, which happens with about half the voters in every election.  Instead, we concern ourselves with the very large number of voters on both sides of the contest who are dissatisfied with various parts of the voting process, and believe with all the cited and documented irregularities of the November election, that something serious is amiss with how we have come to elect our political leaders in the 21^st century.

Evidence - Why not look at the evidence? (updated 7jan21)

George Rebane

Why not indeed?  The existential evidence abounds of election fraud and irregularities having happened.  It exists just for the looking in forms of

1. witnessed and sworn affidavits of polling place and vote counting wrongdoings;
2. witnessed and video records of after-hours arrivals of thousands of unmailed ballots in unmarked vehicles;
3. mass arrivals of ballots supporting Biden that fail simple statistical tests that attest to their numerical authenticity;
4. demonstrated ease with which voting machine counts could be manipulated;
5. recorded denials of access to vote processing observers;
6. obvious gross numerical discrepancies between registered voters and votes cast;

Uncounted complaints of these infractions and irregularities have been filed across the land, and all have been rejected by our already dubious judicial system, not for lack of evidence, but on procedural grounds.  And these procedural grounds smell to high heaven that include the scurrilous use of ‘lack of standing’ of the plaintiff.  The legal notion of standing has no basis in constitutional law, and was only concocted in the 1920s to reduce an overly burdened case load on the courts as a means of avoiding/reducing adjudications.

What no court has done is to examine the evidence in open court and find any of it lacking in form, substance, and/or credibility.  In fact, the opposite findings have been issued to the effect that the unexamined evidence, even if verified, would not have materially changed the election’s outcome.  That is both false and a lie on the face of the vote counts presented in the reams of existing evidence.  And whether or not the evidence would change the election’s outcome is immaterial as a point of law.  What is important is to examine and conclude on the verity of the irregularities in the November election, and then prepare feasible remedies so that these will not be repeated in future elections.

All of this should be done in order to restore bipartisan confidence in our elections, especially the last one that saw copious amounts of dubious votes arrive in the dark of night to be surreptitiously counted in favor of the Democratic candidate.  So now on 6 January 2021, Congress will meet to go through what has been a pro forma certification of the electoral college votes.  However, this time dozens of Republican congress critters will rise to object to the electoral college counts.

Given the behavior of the courts, many Republican MOCs maintain with Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) that “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections, but Congress has so far failed to act.”  Today’s count is fluid, but upwards of 140 MOCs now say they are willing to join in the rejection of electoral college votes, and demand that the collected evidence of fraud see the light of day.

Meanwhile leftwing propaganda organs like the LA Times maintain that “there is no evidence of voter fraud and the integrity of the election has been repeatedly affirmed at the state level, in the courts and in Washington.”  Joining in accepting the current election results, no matter how marred, are members of the Republican congressional leadership led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But given the highly polarized state of the nation and the countless controversies surrounding this election, the simple question remains, ‘Why not look at the evidence?’

Here and here are two recent, extensively referenced reports by John Lott and Peter Navarro that present in detail the case to be made for the existence, scope, and authenticity of the current body of election fraud evidence.  How would you judge an appeals process that dismisses even considering the examination of evidence only on the basis of the plaintiffs not having said the appropriate ‘Mother may I?’ at some point in bringing it to the attention of the courts?

[7jan21 update] More light on the matter from the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society is presented in 'Set In Stone? - A Historical, Constitutional, and Legal examination of Electoral College Deadlines and their implications for the 2020 Presidential Election'  Download Electoral_College_Deadlines_White_Paper.

Covid Related – 26dec20

George Rebane

The evidence against our lunatic lockdowns continues to pour in.  And as fast as it arrives, it is rejected/ignored by our anti-American, pro-control, anti-science Left.  Assemblyman Kevin Kiley writes, “California, with the nation’s most severe lockdowns, now has the most new cases per capita in addition to all the other harms. It’s hard to imagine a more catastrophic failure of political leadership.”  We are truly the poster-child for failed lockdowns and other evidence-free nostrums for fighting C19.  (more here and here) 

Epidemiologist, professor of medicine, and Greater Barrington author Dr Jay Battacharya, MD, PhD has been telling us for months about the foibles of quarantienes and lockdown in the face of this pandemic.  He and a bevy of notable colleagues in the field of infectious diseases have been promoting the diligent monitoring of seroprevalence (q.v.) instead and using that to implement focused responses that target primarily the vulnerable population segments and leave the rest of the people to go on with their work and lives while taking prudent non-draconian measures so as not to solicit infection.  All of this has fallen on deaf Democratic ears as these politicos revel in their new-found opportunities to once more dial back our liberties and attempt to install a new slate of permanent control regulations into lightly-read, compliant minds.

Covid Related – 11dec20

George Rebane

With major ongoing national issues, I’m starting what would appear to be bespoke issue-dedicated sandboxes.  Let’s see how well/long this works out.

A reader sent me a link that supports arguments I and others here have made as to why the US has its reported Covid case and mortality numbers.  The Left has effectively screamed all summer long and into the fall that these were due to President Trump’s mishandling of the nation’s C19 response program.  Well, they were wrong on multiple accounts, but with the lamestream’s help, this continuously broadcast message convinced enough people to give us the currently reported and contested election results.

The actual reason for the difficulty in reducing our numbers to that of smaller, more culturally cohesive countries is that we are a large polyglot nation, now highly polarized, and of many cultures, ethnicities, and political persuasions.  Belgium, a much smaller nation of 11M, but otherwise similarly afflicted also demonstrates even higher C19 rates (more here and H/T to reader).  And it doesn’t look like this level of America’s ignorance will be surmounted any time soon – especially now that K-12 schools are starting to embrace ‘critical race theory’ big time.