George Rebane
Last week Elon Musk released a tranche of Twitter internal communications to conservative blogger Matt Taibbi. Since then, more has been released through Taibbi. These missives between top and middle management at Twitter during the summer and fall of 2020 are damning evidence of how the Democrat Party, government agencies, and corporatist entities worked hand-in-glove to deflect the election toward Biden by censoring and discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop evidence of high-level corruption and government influence peddling.
As RR and its regular Ruminators have long-cited and argued, this case of carefully constructed and directed lies was most certainly the biggest ‘irregularity’ from which the 2020 election suffered, and still gives cause for many of us to consider that President Trump would have been re-elected had the laptop imbroglio received the timely national coverage it deserved. Many legal minds and national commentators opine that the significance of how the Biden laptop was censored and propagandized makes Watergate look like a walk in the park. I strongly agree.
Here we have two distinct issues at work – laptop evidence of Biden family corruption, and corporatist cooperation with political opposition to influence the outcome of a national election. These working together gives a perfect example where 2+2=5, and why the DNC and Democratic leadership pulled all stops to bury the evidence before voters could hear of it. The details of the story, especially as it involves collusion of the FBI (weekly meetings with Twitter) and a cadre of former intelligence officials, make for movie material reading (more here). And, of course, the case is not closed yet if congressional Republicans will grow a pair and open a wide-ranging investigation in January. Stay tuned.
Finally, what this illustrates once more is another example of how Americans live in two distinct and separate worlds. Those light readers who consume mainly lamestream media will not have even heard enough to give this matter a second thought. More observant leftwingers continue to consume the lies that there is no there there; most certainly not of government censorship since Twitter is a private company. Of course, Twitter’s close coordination with the Biden WH and FBI, as the evidence now shows, is never mentioned in the leftwing outlets’ reports. Through corporatism the government has been overwhelmingly involved in First Amendment censorship.
For a coda, put this coverage and the polarization it maintains in the context of finding common ground, of coming together again, or of the oft-repeated notion that there are more things that unite us than separate us. No there aren’t. (More here)
George Rebane
Over the years I’ve touched on the impact that the ‘educated’ liberal woman have had on our society and our republic. My own experience with such people has been uniformly informative and corroborated by many readings on the subject. I’ve been meaning to write a definitive piece on these females who pervade our big cities and suburban communities, and now Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has beat me to it with his excellent essay, ‘Why ‘Educated’ Liberal Women Are the Real Threat to Our Republic’. Along the way he coined ELF as the efficient acronym for future reference.
Through my many years I have had the opportunity to take the measure of ELFs in divers social and professional situations. They all share a set of common characteristics which start with a collectivist ideology expressed through fewer than 50 tried-and-true leftwing shibboleths and slogans, an ideology which they can neither dissect nor defend, and which is sustained on a solid foundation of unwarranted hubris held together by generous dollops of ignorance and one-sided mis/disinformation.
These are the women who will proudly vote Democrat regardless of soaring inflation, rising gas prices, rampant crime in the streets, the unchecked flood of illegal aliens, and oppressive COVID policies that have irreparably damaged all children, the poor most notably.
Institutionally, they have co-opted formerly non-partisan organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women. Additionally, in academe they have been stalwart foot soldiers in both pedagogy and administration to turn our public schools and institutions of higher learning into critical-thinking-free zones operating under the façade of ‘education’.
At the core of the ELFs' (intellectual) vulnerability is their ignorance, if not at the top, certainly among the masses. This should not surprise. Everywhere and always, men have performed better on political knowledge tests than women (just as conservatives routinely outperform liberals and independents). Researchers exploring this particular gender gap long ago gave up on questioning whether this was true and have focused instead on why.
When ELFs vote, they vote as a homogeneous block. The DNC and Democratic leadership have long been painfully aware of this, and the fact that they only trust and get their news from the lamestream media and social media sites.
In the not too distant past, women attended college with the expectation of finding a spouse. Today, they would have much better luck hanging out at a construction site. As late as 1970, there were five men for every four women in America's four-year colleges. By the fall of 2021, there were almost two women for every man. … Once in college, the progressive grooming that began discreetly in high school now publicly and proudly moves to center stage. A study of faculty voter registration at 40 leading U.S. universities showed a more than ten-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans with the numbers skewing higher in liberal arts and among young faculty. In some fields, there are no Republicans at all. … Lacking a male counterpoint in their lives and often majoring in subjects with a social justice agenda, college women enter the political arena not so much uninformed as misinformed. Given that communications/journalism faculty members skew 20 to 1 Democrat, the media these young ELFs consume will only reinforce the biases nurtured in college.
Jack Cashill expands on all these points, citing many studies that corroborate the above characterization of ELFs and the institutions under their influence. We can put a bow on it for now by also recognizing the current thrust of the Democrats’ divisive pre-election rhetoric, especially Biden’s Philadelphia speech that could not have been better staged by Joseph Göbbels himself.
In November, Biden needs the ELFs to vote en masse. This will happen only if they remain ignorant of the things that should worry them — the border, crime, inflation — and scared silly of things that need not. Something tells me that the producers of Biden's Nuremberg-style spectacle knew what they were doing.
Incapable of giving it further thought, the ELFs will confidently vote us into the kind of American autocracy that the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has been planning for decades.
[12sep22 update] Victor Davis Hanson’s recent essay ‘American Delira’ puts the above threat to our country in its greater and proper context. In recent years such essays have appeared regularly, not only from his pen, but also from other astute observers of the American saga. Nevertheless, VDH has a unique gift of being able to wordsmith a comprehensive description and analysis of what has brought us here and what we are doing now to undo ourselves. A hat tip to one of our regular commenters who has also regularly been the first to alert RR readers to the timely contributions of VDH and others.
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Will Durant
George Rebane
The ongoing rape of America by the evil party has more dimensions than just government induced inflation and higher taxes. Victor Davis Hanson gives a short yet comprehensive summary in his ‘The Subordinate Citizen’ of this unbelievable yet ongoing injustice against all Americans, perpetrated by our federal government under the Biden administration and the Pelosi/Schumer Congress.
In these pages we have covered extensively the impact of taxed inflation on investment returns, and made the quantitative case showing how inflation is an added tax that is confounded with the apparent IRS and state-quoted tax rates. The details are found here, here, and here.
In this little review I want to draw your attention again to the four important formulas that let you calculate the impact of taxed inflation on your own finances. These are given in the figure below. The image is from a spreadsheet tool I made that allows you to change the blue numbers denoting R, the nominal return on an investment, the inflation rate I during the investment, and the overall tax rate RT that must be paid when realizing the nominal return.
Here R = 10%, I = 8.5%, RT = 30%. Note that inflation reduces the effective return of the investment to RI = 1.38%. But now comes the hit. The 10% nominal return is taxed at 30% which further reduces the actual return to a negative 1.38%. This is what really happened to the buying power of every dollar you invested. Not only did you not make any money, you lost some. In this situation you would have done better by keeping it under your mattress. Your invested dollar now buys only 98.62 cents of stuff.
In this double whammy inflation/tax environment you need to make at least 12.14% just to maintain the buying power of your invested dollar. And, of course, 12.14% returns don’t come without any risk. Does that turn on any lights in liberal heads as to why the economy suffers under government induced inflation and rapacious tax rates? Since Karl Marx the answer has been a resounding NO. Socialists have no clue as to what causes inflation, and they all know that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.
This preposterous situation arose because, as we see in the figure, the effective total tax rate, RET, in the above scenario turns out to be a whopping 113.82%, taking all you nominally gained and then some. And all of this outright larceny is so well hidden from the average Joe, that it doesn’t even make a visible ripple. Joe just bitches a bit about the high prices and that he’s not making enough money. His government tells him that it’s all the fault of the greedy corporations and the rich who don’t pay their ‘fair share’. Apparently this is totally acceptable, as witnessed by the comment stream below. But I may be wrong, and people really do care.
[10jun22 update] Lest you wage earners with no investment portfolios think that you have been spared – ‘fraid not. The inflation formulas above apply equally to your take-home pay. Suppose you’re fortunate enough to have gotten, say, a 10% raise and your overall pre-raise tax rate is 20%. We’ll let inflation stay at 8.5%. When you bring home that paycheck containing the raise, it’s exactly the same as if you sold your stock portfolio that has increased 10% at the end of the year. But fasten your seat belt, the results don’t look good.
Assume first that your overall tax rate stays at 20%. Then your effective raise considering only inflation turns out to be 1.38%. And taking out taxes reduces your effective raise into a pay cut of 0.46%. You would have required a raise of 10.63% to just maintain your wage’s buying power. When all is said and done, you have paid an effective total tax rate of 104.61%. In short, the government took from you more in taxes and buying power than your employer’s raise, and then some.
But what if your increased wages now put you into a higher tax bracket, say, at 22%? Then the above 1.38% remains unchanged, since it does not involve tax rates. But your former effective pay cut now increases from 0.46% to 0.65%. And now you would have required a 10.90% raise instead of the previous 10.63% raise to maintain buying power. Finally, your total effective tax rate has now increased from 104.61% to 106.45%. Oi weh!
We must always remember that government revenues increase during inflation because inflation pushes nominal wages into higher tax brackets, which for the consumer/investor is the monetary equivalent of a tax increase. And the final kick in the gonads is that the government knows that most average Joes out there don't do numbers, and therefore to them the above discussion is boooring.
There's also a Lucky Strike Extra for you fastidious number crunchers who have survived this far. Fiscally pernicious governments like ours, that purposefully create inflation by flooding the economy with new money not supported by increased productivity, they get a bonus by being the first able to spend the new cash (the Fed prints it and buys govt bonds from the Treasury) which always has the buying power that is subsequently to be reduced by the inflation caused by the new tranche of money into the economy. Inflation does not increase suddenly and in lock-step across a large economy like ours. It takes some time for the new cash to work its way through the various commercial highways and byways, bidding up the prices of what is bought by successive handlers of those new 'crisp dollar bills'. Or is it 'crisp dollar bits'?
George Rebane
In these pages we have circled this barn without resolution. My own sentiments, and those of readers at the time, are available here. The politically correct among us regularly encourage all should vote who can fog a mirror and are citizens. Well, not exactly. In recent years the anti-American woke and progressives have reduced that requirement to just the foggers, or even to those who just recently lost that ability.
Bryan Caplan did a landmark study on the electorate and voting – The Myth of the Rational Voter – in which he showed that in our history informed and rational voters were few and far in between. But the saving grace during those times was that the ignorant voter cohort pretty much split themselves evenly on candidates and issues. This left the small percentage of knowledgeable and reasoning voters to essentially determine the outcome by how they divided themselves on the margins. See the top part of the figure below for an explanatory graphic.
All of this changed, beginning around 1920 with the advent of radio broadcasting – the birth of mass media which spread to phone banks, TV, internet, etc. Now it was possible for those with monies to spend to get their messages out in proportion to their available funds. And it turned out that this kind of campaigning worked wonders – the more you could blast out your candidate’s voice, the more assured you were of tilting the scale toward your side among the great unwashed. The small number of knowledgeable and informed voters were overwhelmed, and thereby lost their ability to influence election outcomes. See the bottom part of the figure.
This absence of rational voter influence has had an enormous impact on our country, delivering huge coastal urban areas and even entire states into perpetual social disasters and economic destitution. We now have ignorant cohorts continuing to vote against their own best interests, who guarantee single-party monopolies of entrenched politicians in perpetuity.
Proof of this is provided by a coven of distressed states that includes New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, …, headed by its most prominent member, California. The once golden state has been the posterchild of voter ignorance for the last fifty years. Over this period the state’s voters initially ensconced a spate of well-meaning liberal politicians, and then later continued to refill their ranks with know-nothing socialists and charlatans. Today we have sinecured a bevy of functional idiots and scoundrels whose only reliable political talent is using the public till to invite more double dummies (aka reliable constituents) to partake of our insane welfare programs, thereby insuring that California’s recovery remains evermore beyond the horizon. (more here)
So what should a well-meaning but poorly-read citizen do when an election rolls around. My own recommendation is that such a citizen should excuse himself from that particular election, unless he has the ability to educate himself on the candidates and/or issues. And unless you know what is at stake in the election, and how the various outcomes will affect you, your neighbors, the country, stay out of the voting booth but remain interested in the election results and prepare yourself for the next time. If you are a citizen who loves his country, know that it is the voters who determine the state of the nation and its future. So just because you have the right to vote, there is no law that requires you to cast an ignorant vote based on what you saw on TV the most, the loudest, or the most recent. (more here)
Today my counsel is considered elitist and even anti-American by those who want everyone to vote regardless of their preparation. (See the exhortations in our local newspaper.) They tell you that democracy is intrinsically strengthened by high voter turnouts. History shows us that nothing could be further from the truth – democracies inevitably ended their lives by suicides through emotional plebiscites, referendums, and other summarily catastrophic ballot box ‘opportunities’. So, get informed first, then vote.
George Rebane
That is the only slim thread of agreement that the Republicans and Democrats have for new legislation pursuant to the mass killing of students and teachers in Uvalde, Texas this week. Yet the Dems’ solution continues to be to enact senseless gun legislation to stop senseless mass shootings. Their entire initiative is based on appealing to the hoped for raw emotional response of their constituents to ‘do something’, or anything that can be used to advance the final objective of removing firearms from the country’s law-abiding civilian population.
The Dems’ entire argument is that since ‘guns kill people’, the “gun lobby” (aka NRA) wants more people killed through the unhindered sale of more guns. For the Left there are no other considerations for the private ownership of guns, least of all the antiquated and misconstrued Second Amendment to defend against rogue government. Every successive gun control measure is understood to be nothing more or less than a ratchet toward socialist autocracy’s final objective of an unarmed, compliant citizenry.
In a country with over 340 million variously un/registered firearms, there is no guarantee that a quietly deranged person with no previous criminal record or recorded history of mental instability will be stopped from a serendipitously inspired and spontaneously launched mass murder. LE officials have told us for decades that no level of gun restrictions will bring an end to what happened in Uvalde.
What journalists and clear-thinking politicians don’t ask, during the inevitable gun control hysteria that follows every mass shooting, is ‘what is the evidence that this legislation would have stopped the previous mass murderers, or will stop them in the future?’ Posing this question will quickly reveal the real purpose for the newly proposed gun control measures.
The real solution – possibly unattainable – is what may be called a ‘cultural reset’. The American culture of, say, fifty years ago prevented such mass murders occurring in a population equally populated with firearms – both semi-auto pistols and long guns. Today, wholesale human life is cheapened and cheap. With widespread and instant salacious news coverage, we continually hear of hundreds of people gunned down weekly without giving it much if any thought. Unless the life belongs to family or close friends, the deaths don’t matter much irrespectively how they are snuffed out.
And our polarized society no longer supports community-wide solutions. Remaining solutions have become very personalized – you pull up stakes and move to a safer place if you can, or you stay put, become insular, and hunker down while the killing continues around you. That will continue in perpetuity as long as the state makes it so that only criminals have guns to use with impunity on an unarmed citizenry. To various extents this has proven to be true both under so-called liberal democracies and police-state tyrannies.
A cultural reset, even if attempted, will take at least a generation to gain traction in our society. In the meantime, IMHO we should recognize the ground truth that active killers with guns are stopped only by defenders with guns. So, if we really have an interest to do something to protect the children, then we must always remember that when seconds count, LE is minutes (or more) away. Actually, an hour away in Uvalde and similarly at previous shooting sites. As far as the killer is concerned, LE has not arrived until he is assaulted with arms. It doesn’t matter how quickly LE arrives on the scene, the clock starts when the killer perceives that his further intentions will now be curtailed. For example, LE getting to the Uvalde school and dicking around for an hour before a Border Patrol agent confronted and shot the killer, means that LE effectively arrived an hour late. So consider -
Policies that don’t work – place one security officer per school. These have proven to be career-limited, marginally trained, timid people who either have no idea that killing is taking place in another part of the school, or who will not confront the killer until summoned LE people (‘back-up’) arrive to take control of the incident.
Policies that have a chance of working – Every teacher and certain staffers are trained and required to be concealed-carry armed when on duty. This policy is then made public. Israel has demonstrated the efficacy of such policy. (more here)
[Addendum] In ongoing discussions about solutions to such wanton and unpredictable massacres, it was brought out that there may be a significant share of teachers who will refuse to be trained and armed. The point makes sense since so many teachers are liberals/progressives whose logic doesn’t always concur with reality – e.g. similar to those leftwingers who believe that declaring a building or facility a ‘gun-free zone’ will hinder instead of attract the manic mass murderer. No matter, for whatever reasons, not all teachers can qualify or be relied upon to be armed and confront their students' would-be killer.
The alternative to concealed-carry teachers in the classroom is a cadre of volunteer CCW holders who would also receive the required additional training. These would come from the students’ parents, grandparents, and (retired) friends or community volunteers. I’d bet the farm that there would be more than enough volunteers to sit in the back of classrooms while instruction is going on. Each school could have a ‘security coordinator’ volunteer to coordinate with the school’s administration, maintain the active roster, and manage the ‘duty calendar’ for the classroom security volunteers. The marginal cost to the school district and community would be nil.
Given today’s mobile devices (laptops, pads, smart phones, …), the security volunteers can easily be productive on their own projects as they carry out their assigned watches. I know from our family’s circle of friends and contacts, that almost everyone would volunteer who could pass the training requirements. As an example, for years I was a member of the Banner Mountain firewatch team and pulled many a 4-6 hour morning and afternoon stints on the tower (until the tower was decommissioned). It was a rewarding experience, as I’m sure it would also be to serve as a classroom security volunteer.
(For the record, America's CCW holders are the most reliable and law-abiding cohort of citizens when it comes to psychological stability, gun safety and proficiency, and criminality/gun violence. Statistically, you are six times more likely to be assaulted by a rogue LE officer than a CCW permit holder.)
[28may22 update] A commenter raised a valid question about the availability of sufficient volunteers to implement the above described classroom security approach. I’ve taken a more detailed look at the numbers, and it appears to be doable. These back-of-envelope calculations are available here - Download Classroom Security Volunteers. Readers thoughts are always welcome, especially as they point out any errors or weaknesses (not already covered in the comment stream below).
[4jun22 update] Certify retired military personnel to serve as armed school security guards – so proposes Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Above I have made case for such a solution that can be implemented more rapidly than any ineffective anti-gun legislation. (more here)
The Left, of course, is dead-set against such a practical solution, and surprisingly they are joined by some folks from the other side who also think it’s the dumbest thing they ever heard of. Nevertheless, that kind of solution, using trained and certified volunteer security guards, is staring us in the face with no reasonable opposition save ‘schools should remain a gun-free zone’, or more simply, ‘it’s a stupid idea that will never work’.
[9jun22 update] Well, things may be looking up with getting more defensive guns into schools and classrooms. Reports are coming in that in certain red states teachers are volunteering to carry guns (here). And we now hear that even in progressive New Jersey militant parents are convincing school districts to hire off-duty and retired LE officers to serve as added security in schools (here). These people will be paid. So that brings us a few steps closer to the volunteer security concept outlined here as the affordable solution to protect our children.
BTW, does everyone notice that the ‘do something’ new gun regs coming out of the House have nothing to do with protecting the children? (They’re just a desperate Dem election issue since everything else they propose is a demonstrable disaster for the country.) And no Republican has the balls to resist the new ‘do something’ hysteria by asking why existing gun regs – from past ‘do something’ hysterias - aren’t being enforced and/or have proven to be totally ineffective in reducing ‘gun violence’.
America’s Ingrained Indelible Ignorance
George Rebane
Union columnist Terry McLaughlin penned an important column in today’s (3nov22) newspaper titled ‘Perceptions and reality’. In there she cited studies from academe and data from government agencies about the large deficits in what our adult population, which includes the electorate, knows about our country and what beliefs they actually use on which to base their decisions. The information derived from academic surveys paints a picture of a population that has almost no knowledge about the important parameters that define the country they live in. McLaughlin does an excellent job in summarizing the skewed view our neighbors have about America.
It's not hard to attribute the reason we have such a grossly misinformed citizenry. Almost all of them have been educated by barrel-bottom teachers in unionized public schools which promote the country’s leftwing narrative, and that recently have started incorporating various neo-Marxist ‘critical’ curricula based on the teachings of the Frankfurt School (more here). All of these educational institutions, even at the university level, are teaching the country to believe that there is a new norm in place that is markedly different from what the older folks were taught and grew up with. And all of this is reinforced daily by the preponderant leftwing (aka lamestream) media. When we look at its emphasized news items, ads and commercials, and entertainment program contents, we see such skewed population shares being foisted on the consuming audiences with brains in neutral.
And to put a bow on this state of our nation, McLaughlin cites "research (that) seems to indicate that shining a light on public misperceptions and providing accurate data may have little or no impact on changing the firmly held positions and opinions of Americans on almost any topic."
The lament of those who are not so encumbered is what will this existential plurality take into the voting booth next Tuesday. Looking at the condition of our country, and especially California, we know how they have mis-marked their ballots in the past. Given the hysterical level of daily lies from the Left – the economy is sound, crime is low, borders are secure, Republicans will destroy democracy, wind and sun will replace fossil fuels, higher taxes and more regulations are good, … - does not promise anything better from the upcoming mid-term election. But then again, I may be wrong. Even a pecking blind chicken will eventually find a seed.
Posted at 01:46 PM in Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Culture Comments, Our Country, We the iSheeple | Permalink | Comments (30)
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