Rebane's Ruminations

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

George Rebane

The combined body count of the Camp and Woolsey Canyon fires has topped 100 with an additional 1,000 missing.  Perusing the lamestream media without second thought, one comes away with the understanding that, at best, the fires are one of the regular unpreventable disasters that regularly visit California’s wild lands due to natural causes out of our control.  At worst, we learn that the fires are really due to global warming which now has created the conditions for these inevitable holocausts.  Moreover, they could be prevented were we only to implement the prescribed surefire policies to stop, or even roll back, global warming.

As a lifelong (60+ years) California resident and a student of its land, weather, and horticulture, I join with those who have a radically different view of the state’s regular wildfires and public policies that can greatly reduce their frequency, magnitude, and cost to life and property.

The state’s weather record shows two centuries of periodic droughts which have dried the forests, given rise to infestations by various critters, and to wildfires mostly caused by lightning strikes.  The fall ‘Santa Ana’ winds have always done their best to spread the fires, but with limited success until modern times.  Why?  Over the ages our forests evolved not only to survive fires, but actually require their regular occurrence to continue their life cycles.  The major characteristics of the age-old forests was the irregular density of trees (into copses) that prevented long distance/perimeter burns and which densities were maintained by the burns that did occur.  A little technical reflection quickly explains why such configurations became the survivable ‘steady state’ configuration of the forests.  (A more detailed look at the changes in the Sierra forests is documented by George E. Gruell in the rather pricey Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.)

Then arrived the hubristic Regulatus Californicus who knew better than the established natural order.  Starting in the 1960s and building on Smokey the Bear (born in 1944), this rapidly evolving breed of humanity quickly latched on to ‘saving the ecology’ as their raison d’etre for launching an unheard level of regulatory controls over peoples lives and property, enforced by an ever-enlarging Leviathan in Sacramento.  In the 1970s they discovered catastrophic climate change to add to their causus belli on the rest of us Californians.  They initially took the wrong tack and argued ‘global cooling’ with the advent of a new ice age, caused by CO2 and other atmospheric gases linked to humans that were supposed to be reflecting too much sunlight.

But even with the state’s growing dumbth, it was hard to harness cooling as an adequate basis for enlarging the regulatory state.  So it was time to reverse the role of these gases from reflecting sunlight to retaining earth’s build-up of heat, and the great greenhouse gas gambit was born with CO2 now starring in its new role.  Some scientists quickly pointed out that we knew very little about earth’s carbon cycle and even less about long-term climate modeling, and most certainly not enough to reliably calculate (aka blame) any temperature changes on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  These scientists were quickly shouted down, and their grant monies to study the carbon cycle dried up.  And that has been their fate as the UN’s IPCC gathered the willing technocrats under its well-funded umbrella and became the voice of preventable man-made global warming.

The ‘true believers’ aka fanatical ecological nutcases, or simply econuts, now had a real arrow in their quiver – consensus science interpreted through selective faith-based lenses.  And they have been off to the races ever since 1995 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first report – an evolving set of documents that now have had to be redacted, rewritten, revised, and re-issued many times over the years so as to the keep desired narrative in line with the vagaries of uncooperative weather patterns.

In the interval, the nation’s politically imperious progressive wave continued to grow as reflected in the staffs of federal regulatory agencies and, more importantly, in all elements of California governments ranging from Sacramento down to local leftwing NGOs funded to propagandize, monitor, and report on the state’s progress toward becoming 'green'.  And that, of course, included prohibiting any intervention, save heroic fire prevention and suppression efforts, in fostering the growth of high-density forests complete with huge ground level accumulations of duff and slash (“organic waste”).  All this has been done in the name of preserving the econuts’ vision of the natural order of fauna and flora on government lands, while in reality doing exactly the opposite as they created a wholesale unnatural order of wildland preservation never before seen on this earth.

And the bittersweet comedy continues unabated, as our progressive elites, in California and elsewhere, continue to blame the current spate of wildfires on climate change, even as they begin to evince micro-epiphanies, albeit sub-rosa, about the reality that decades of unnatural forest fuels build-ups is actually the dominant contributive cause of the devastations we have witnessed in recent years.  However, these leftwing central planners have yet to develop a public-ready narrative to effectively deflect the raw truth that Californians – econuts and their voting legions of double dummy compliant constituents – can discover the cause of these holocausts by simply looking into a mirror.

(The Rebanes' up-close and personal experience with California wildfires was reported here, here, and here.)

The Election & RIP Prop6

George Rebane

Instead of my regular KVMR commentary, News Director Paul Emery suggested we do a little one-on-one for tonight’s news program.  So we sat down for a little gabfest about the election.   Paul asked me for any surprises on the outcome, and chowder-head me responded that things went pretty much as I had expected, while completely overlooking my total disappointment and frustration with the failure of Prop6 – you know, the repeal of the most recent California gas tax bamboozle from Sacramento.

Prop6 went down to solid defeat in California in the hands of a partisan majority of voters that over the years has vacillated between insanity and terminal stupidity.  CA already has the highest gas taxes in the land, much of them from previous initiatives promised by the lying sacks of s#!t in Sacramento that the taxes would go to fix CA’s roads and bridges.  Well, what has happened is that these tax receipts go directly into the state’s general fund to finance an endless number of programs and purposes – e.g. bullet trains, smelt salvation, succoring illegal aliens, funding govt workers pension liabilities, attracting evermore of the nation’s welfare recipients, … - that continue to leave us in an ever bigger mess.  And with already the highest gas taxes in the land, we continue to pay these fraudulent takings without even a peep.

So now our roads are really a mess, and that looks like a perfect opportunity for some capitol scumbags to go to the voters – over half of whom pay no taxes, and a third of whom get regular government checks - and ask them to dance another round of the SOSO samba.  Only this time the bill will be even more smelly because it has a built-in ratchet that keeps upping it ad nauseum over the years.  Those Californians who pay attention did put out the word on Prop6, pointing out that these new taxes will do nothing except increase the cost of transportation (especially for the poor), while once more destined for the state’s general fund to finance the ever greater insanities and inanities from Sacramento.

Defeating such an obviously fraudulent proposition should have been a no-brainer, hence it was designed precisely for those not so encumbered.  But like Lucy with the football, our Charlie Brown electorate again fell for the ‘can’t you see all them chuckholes and cracks and … all of which need fixin’?’  And, of course, today all them cracks etc are way bigger and more numerous and easier to see than last time, so the state’s not so nimble numbnuts dutifully checked the proper box to keep the most recent and onerous gas tax in place as the scumbags are already planning the next tax to fix the roads and bridges – hell, why stop a perfectly good bamboozle designed exactly for the kind of voters we worked so hard to attract, ‘educate’, and put in place.  No one out there in VoterLand asks what is the word for doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome.

Oh well, on the national scene things went a little better.  The Dems won the House, but the best they can do there is start more dead-end investigations of President Trump and the Executive branch, with a possible impeachment swipe at Justice Kavanaugh.  Republicans actually will welcome that kind of blatant congressional obstruction which will demonstrate to the country that just putting the new and more aggressive socialist Left in power is going to do nothing to get Congress legislating for the people’s needs.

President Trump’s first-half accomplishments re the tax cut, regulation rollback, foreign policy, and immigration will stay in place.  The border will not be secured, and healthcare costs will continue increasing with the bastardized system now metastasizing like a cancer.  It will be easy to focus the spotlight on the source of stagnation, and Trump will have something very solid and visible to run on in 2020.  The lamestream will have a hell of time ramping up their Fake News Machine enough to hide the source of grit and gravel grinding in the gears of government.

Meanwhile, the Dems will also have to work out their Gerontology Optics Problem with a leadership headed by Nancy the Penultimate Facelift, and backed up by a crowd of cretins like Mad Max Waters, Elijah Cummings, Comrade Bernie, Vacuum Head Ocasio-Cortez, the ‘Capitalist Bones’ of Fauxahontas, True Colors DiFi, SlyEye Chuckie Schumer, all straight out of Central Casting.  Every one of these will be on daily display filling countless screens across the land.  In the meantime, Trump will have a solid Senate majority to confirm and emplace as many constitutional judges and justices as are on his lengthening short-list.  All in all, not a bad night.

Election night and I am really pi&&ed (again)!

George Rebane

We’re watching the various channels report the returns.  And the directors and producers of their election night shows insist on putting on talking heads and politicians from all over the country who not only have no clue which way things are trending, but also no firm ideas on which way things will turn out given the up-to-the-minute data feeds.  Why put these know-nothings on the air to tell us their long-winded ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ information-free interviews.  We don’t need to hear such ignorance (technical use of term) and/or ambivalence from invited talking heads; the program anchors can handle such 50-50 outcome monologues all by themselves, and they can do it more efficiently with backup data than the people on their panels or the senator from some state who will amble on in ambiguity.

So here’s the drill.  Ask the prospective person to be put on the air whether they have any firm convictions about which way this or that race will turn out given the data up to now.  If the sumbich says he hasn’t got a clue, then don’t put him on the air to waste the viewers’ time.  In short, if you have some firm position on an outcome that you can defend, then welcome and speak your piece – else we’ll get back to you when you’ve got something to tell us other than your long-winded ‘I don’t know’.  How come none of those stellar journalistic professionals putting these ‘election headquarters’ on the air know how to do this???

Ruminations – 4nov18 (update 5nov18)

“If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science.” Karl Popper

George Rebane

A regression function does not a theory make.

Climate change: A regular reader and avid follower of climate science Russ Steele sent me a couple of links that I’d like to share with our True Believers (the rest are “deniers”).  The first is a comprehensive yet compact analysis and refutation of the Left’s climate science hysteria (here).  The second is an analysis of ‘CO2 driven warming’ that again puts a lie to the whole thing (here).  Both pieces have solid assertions that can be refuted (i.e. they are falsifiable) with countering science and argument.  I invite our leftwing readers to respond with something more than another performance of their sophomoric Consensus Cantata.  In the meantime, meditate on the above two shibboleths now out of fashion with our progressives.

The definition of ‘nationalism’ is on the slippery slope, being shoved into politically correct meaningless verbiage that is appended with everything the Left dislikes.  I ask readers to give us an English word that means “a political, social, and economic system characterized by devotion to the interests or culture of a particular nation-state. The belief that nations will benefit more from acting independently rather than collectively, and the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty over the homeland”, and nothing more or less.  What should be the label for such a sentiment shared by billions across the globe?

Midterm Election MABs.  Only three of us cared to offer their MAB distributions for the outcome of the House elections.  I have computed the MABs shown in the upper left of the above figure, along with the plots of the discrete MAB probabilities for each outcome for the number of House Democrats who will be seated January 2019.  Recall, of the 435 seats a majority requires at least 218.  The figure shows the definite and confident party biases of Messrs Steele and Frisch, with Moi the Chickens#!t timidly sneaking in there with a 0.5 confidence for my most likely (ML) of 220 seats for the Dems.  It is clear that RussS will win with the best prediction if the Dems get less that 219 seats, and StevenF will win if the Dems get more than 219.  And 219 happens to be the ONLY number of Dems that will make me the winner - very sad.  However, if we consider the 'wisdom of crowds' as the shown group average, then I am the closest to the common mind in this little prediction derby.  Alas, this is a position of which I have never been a proud resident.  Oh well, we'll see next Wednesday morning how it all shakes out.

Hate speech??  Hate speech is used a lot by progressives to describe stuff they don't want to read or hear.  Can anyone give an operational definition of 'hate speech' that can be used to categorize it?  Or is it a gift leftwingers are blessed with - something like 'I really can't define it, but I sure can tell when someone uses it.'?

[5nov18 update] Sen Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has issued a massive report documenting interviews with dozens of witnesses and accusers of Justice Kavanaugh, and his alleged sexual misconduct.  They have found “found that no witnesses could provide evidence to substantiate their claims”.  Instead, many of those who came out of the woodwork have now recanted their accusations – example, “the evidence appears to support the position that Julie Swetnick and Mr. Avenatti criminally conspired to make materially false statements to the Committee and obstruct the Committee’s investigation.”  For some odd reason the Dem sleazebags on the committee – those led by Sen Feinstein who conspired to torpedo Kavanaugh’s nomination through last minute political theatrics, are silent on the matter – no report contending the committee’s findings is forthcoming.  Should the Dems take the House tomorrow, the same troupe of sleazebags will resurface to up the ante on the crap they will manufacture in the attempt to impeach SCOTUS’s newest justice.  In the meanwhile, crickets.  (more here)

Bloomberg drops $5M in last minute appeal to bipartisanship by urging a Democratic vote tomorrow.  The former mayor of New York is confident that his audience is sufficiently dimwitted to believe his claim that he is not being political, but instead calling for us to come together under the magnificent plan forward for the nation as promised by the Left.  Let your search for common ground begin here.

Honduran and Guatemalan flags are in very obvious display in the columns of migrants headed for the US.  You would think that they would be carrying the flags of the country into which they wish entry, into whose society they intend to assimilate.  What are we missing here?

And speaking of everyone coming together to become one happy American family - here's the latest from our Muslim immigrants.  Get any of this from the lamestream?

‘A Short History of American Medical Insurance’ (Addended)

George Rebane

If there is a problem in the land, consider government guilty of its cause until proven innocent.

And that RR tagline applies doubly to the current cost of healthcare in America.  A short history of how we achieved healthcare costs that rank highest as a percentage of GDP is provided (here) by John Steele Gordon, nationally prominent author and economic historian.  Our healthcare costs have soared from 3.5% of GDP in 1930 to about 15% in 2015, indicating that “per capita medical costs in the United States have risen by a factor of 30 in 90 years.”

Speaking to a Hillsdale College audience, he opens with the reminder - “Whenever one segment of an economy exhibits, year after year, inflation above the general rate, and when there is no constraint on supply, then either a cartel is in operation or there is a lack of price transparency—or both, as is the case with American medical care.”

The history of real diagnostic and curative medicine actually began around 1930; prior to that physicians provided little benefit in those functions, and relied on the body’s own immune and restorative abilities to heal the patient.  But at the beginning of the Great Depression medical science had advanced enough to start providing remedies, albeit costly, that really did save patients from some dreaded diseases and injuries.  The expense of these new treatments launched the field of “hospital insurance” – dominated by Blue Cross and Blue Shield (for doctors’ fees) which broadened to what today we call medical or simply health insurance.

Hospital insurance paid only for services rendered while the patient was in the hospital.  It paid the complete hospital bill no matter its amount or treatment, thereby causing patients and doctors to make expensive hospital stays longer rather than shorter.  Government succumbed to doctor and hospital lobbies to keep service levels and prices up.  This gave rise to a special category of highly regulated (as non-profits) insurance companies.  And off we went onto the regimen of cost-plus payments to hospitals and doctors.  Given this scheme, there was no impetus to contain costs since these were actually withheld from the customers (patients) who had no information nor motive to shop for better prices for received services.

Then came wartime wage and price controls which forced companies to compete for workers from an already scarce pool, not through wages, which were fixed, but through fringe benefits which launched ‘free’ health insurance.  There’s a lot more important detail about how the various government departments, greedy politicians, and well-heeled lobbyists worked together to permanently keep America’s healthcare from responding to the normal markets which tremendously increased our quality of life in all other sectors of the economy over the decades.

The solution from here is not a ‘single payer’ comprehensively nationalized healthcare.  Gordon points out that “our federal government already runs three single-payer systems—Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service—each of which is in a shambles, noted for fraud, waste, and corruption. Why would we want to turn over all of American medicine to those who have proved themselves incompetent to run large parts of it?”  Instead he outlines a number of “far better and cheaper alternatives”.  I won’t steal any more of his thunder here but invite you to read his eye-opening essay on the topic.  Gordon concludes his piece with –

Finally, we need to get the practitioners of modern medicine to recognize an age-old reality: there is no cure for old age itself. Maybe someday we’ll be able to 3-D print a new body and have the data in our brain downloaded to it. But for the time being, when the body begins to break down systemically, we should let nature take its course. … There are enormous forces arrayed against these economically sensible reforms. Defenders of the status quo are the most potent lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals. This is not to mention the leftist proponents of single payer, who favor whatever will increase the power and scope of government. So it won’t be an easy fight. But at least we have one thing on our side—Stein’s law, named after the famous economist Herbert Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

[Addendum]  I was in a rush to get this posted before another scheduled chore would interrupt.  What I failed to mention is that the Dems are playing ACA and healthcare as their only card in this mid-term election, and blaming Republicans for the baked in shortcomings of Obamacare, such as the rapid rise in healthcare costs.  The question many conservatives have had lately is whether President Trump is overplaying his ‘immigration, immigration, immigration’ hand.  I would advise our president to also point out that the defections from the multiple ‘migrant caravans’ are occurring only because he is making real his intent to use every legal means available – including active military – to stop the planned illegal bums rush across our borders.  These people aren’t going home or staying in Mexico because their road is a long one.  But what our president should really emphasize is what he has accomplished for our economy – that should make the greatest impact on those voters who have the capacity to understand the basics.

In any event, I am among the few who believe that knowing how our healthcare became so expensive and remains so is important.  Unfortunately not that many people give a big rat’s ass about that as they demonstrate their concern by limiting their healthcare knowledge to five or six publicized slogans.

Scattershots – 29oct18 (updated 31oct18)

George Rebane

Growing numbers of liberals now embrace the notion that voting for a living can be more lucrative than working for a living.

Hallelujah!  Our distinguished liberal columnist and RR reader George Boardman comes out strong for the educated voter.  In today’s (29oct18) Union he writes, “If you haven't yet taken the time to familiarize yourself with the issues and candidates, if your vote is based on emotion, or prejudice, or party affiliation, what your neighbor says, or that you had a fight with one of the candidates in the third grade, do your country a favor and throw out that mail-in ballot. An uninformed vote is much more dangerous than not voting at all.” (emphasis mine)  That, of course, has been a major conservetarian tenet of these pages for years (most recently here), and I welcome him as a fellow promoter of the educated vote.  However, now Mr Boardman should prepare himself to be pilloried by the local panel of progressive pinheads who believe and preach that encouraging voter education is akin to proposing the return to the Jim Crow voter policies of the post-bellum South.

The Pittsburg massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue is the latest installment of the ongoing tragedy of our times that should remind us of the nature of these kind of deranged and lunatic killers.  They should not be confused with the several flavors of organized terror such as sponsored by the various Islamist groups.  These desperate lone wolves seek to put meaning into their pitifully empty lives, and are terminally ignorant to boot.  They have no idea that their killings promote exactly the opposite effect than that which their fevered little minds conceived.  Today the killer’s “All Jews must die!” has redoubled the pride that Jews have in their faith and the strength they draw from it.  And it has also brought the rest of us closer to the Jewish community, and more determined than ever to fight the age-old scourge of antisemitism as the poster child of faith-targeted persecution.

[Later]  While the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys are busy tying the massacre to our president, even the rabbi of The Tree of Life and the Israeli ambassador join in praising President Trump in his strong condemnation of the massacre and its antisemitic character.  Neither of them blame the the president for contributing to this tragedy.  Any bets on how this exculpatory news is covered in the lamestream which has already fulminated about the 'Trump connection'? (more here and here)

A reliable sign of a corrupt and/or out of control government is when it increases taxes for 1) no other reason (benefit to the public) than that it can, and/or 2) because it must do so in order to pay for under-budgeted existing but politically critical promised programs that no longer are sustainable (if they ever were from the start).  Of the first, the latest is Britain’s planned ‘digital tax’ – an additional tax on technology companies that deliver online services (e.g. social media, ecommerce, …) and yet another on the consumers using such services.  These are taxes that do nothing to improve or make such services more facile – it is just the next taking, because it can take.  (more here)  For an example of the second type we have Lawrence W. Reed, professor of economics and president of the Foundation for Economic Education, who draws a startling parallel in ‘Are We Rome?’ of today's America with the downfall of Rome, a nation which first declined from a republic to an autocracy that then bought its degenerating survival through public welfare programs which first destroyed its economy and then its means to defend itself.   

[31oct18 update]  I took to task Susan Rogers, liberal editorial board member of The Union, in my 18oct18 post.  In there I highlighted one of her more regrettable ‘Hits’ in which she opined that “any patriotic citizen should not have a problem with the concept of urging all eligible voters to vote.” (emphasis mine).  Today, after an apparent mini-epiphany, the lady shows us one of her (probably many) redeeming sides by a penning a course-reversal column – ‘Vote Smart or Vote Stupid’ - that advocates for the educated voter.  While she has yet to draw the proper conclusion about what an uneducated voter should do – as long proposed by your commentator and now joined by Union’s George Boardman (see above) – Ms Rogers does provide the reader with ample specific citations where the responsible and concerned voter may get needed information before marking hiser (my own contribution to gender-free pronouns) ballot.

Common Core = Obamacare of Education

George Rebane

More test scores keep rolling in telling those paying attention what our educational systems have done to the newest generation of America's students – and it isn’t pretty.  The only ones still genuflecting to our union dominated public schools are the nation’s progressives (including our local lefties) who dare not let light shine on the truth for fear (completely substantiated) that it blows up their social narrative.

In the meantime PJ Media reports ‘Common Core: ACT Scores for Class of 2018 Worst in Decades’.  Bottom line – our students’ scores in all subjects declined, but we took the worst hits in math.  There the “the average score on the ACT math test dropped to its lowest level in 20 years — 20.5 on a scale of 1 to 36. American students scored 21.1 in 2012 and 20.7 last year.”  We weren’t that hot to begin with, and now we’re just sinking lower than ever on the world stage of competing countries where STEM acumen counts most. (more here)

The latest big problem in our education, of course, is Common Core.  The propaganda on CC was that it would just establish some standards, but not dictate curriculum – wrong! 

Congressman Andy Thompson of Ohio has been, from the start, attempting to minimize the damage done by CC.  He says, "I think testimony we took during our attempts to eradicate Common Core showed the dumbing down of curriculum, the social justice indoctrination, the emphasis on social-emotional learning, reduced quantity and quality of reading, emphasizing screen time rather than classroom instruction."  Thompson went on to explain that the "destruction of proper math" has also been a contributing factor. … (CC proponents) place a higher priority on indoctrination than education."

None of the Common Core contamination of curricula makes any sense on the national scale, save for how it neatly dovetails into the objectives laid out in Agenda21.  (H/T to reader)

Fascism – what it is and isn’t (addended)

George Rebane

Since the Democratic Party’s great Leftward Lurch, it is now publicly and unabashedly America’s new socialist party, notwithstanding start-up wannabes like the newly formed Progressive Party USA.  The Left’s problem today is how they must carefully wend their way through a potential political minefield in how they describe their brand of collectivism – i.e. socialism - in a way that doesn’t blow up the narrative they have been carefully nurturing since the days of FDR.

As we witness in these pages and from the years-long national dialogue, the Left has always maintained that while they embrace the socialism of a Marxist-Leninist provenance, the extreme Right, in its turn, embraces the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.  And therefore, to all good modern leftwingers, fascism is not now and never has been a form of socialism – fascism is instead the form of totalitarianism that comprises the hidden agenda of the Right and is the other bookend of their simplistic political spectrum.  This is both factually and historically false as we’ll cover in a moment.  But given the difficulties our Left has had in selling socialism to Americans, they have always desperately needed an ideological bogeyman or monster that they could erect and portray to the lightly read, and against which they could favorably compare the nostrums and shibboleths celebrating their brave new world.  Enter ‘fascism’, the avowed enemy and monstrous ideology that we fought and vanquished in WW2, and, according to the Left, the rebirth of which once more threatens the world if the Right comes to power and has its way with us.  (And hence the current rationale for the Left’s sanctioned “incivility” in the streets until they regain power.)

So, for at least the last 75 years, the Left’s narrative has drawn its substance and raison d’etre from characterizing itself as the defender of the common man against what they invent for public consumption as the rapacious Right of the greedy capitalists.  These are the people whose only aim is to exploit and then enslave the masses under an autocratic cum totalitarian governance that forcefully exploits them as the labor engines to create wealth, which is then shunted into the coffers of the … (wait for it), the ‘fascist elites’.  Unfortunately for the Left, history has shown all this occurring only after collectivists have come to power.

America’s Right has continued to characterize itself as promoting the ideology of individual enterprise, free markets, private property, liberty, distributed governance through minimalist governments/jurisdictions, and an originalist (‘textualist’) interpretation of the Constitution (see Addendum).  This interpretation embraces inevitable change through constitutional ways and means prescribed and practiced throughout our history.  In short, an ideology that is a total antithesis of the collectivists’ worship of society organized under and administered through the strata of (altruistic) central planners and controllers within an expansive and ever-expanding government.  Today the Left marches toward globalization under banners emblazoned with ‘democracy’, and the full and selectively suppressed knowledge that, practiced in the large, democracy quickly consumes itself as it morphs into one of the particularly egregious forms of totalitarianism.

Socially Just STEM – it’s a’comin’

George Rebane

While the Dems have the nation tied in Kavanaugh knots and Russia collusions, they are also making quiet progress on other fronts.  In their constant efforts to weaken and then destroy the United States as a sovereign nation-state, our progressives accelerated shift to socialism today adds a new program to stifle and dilute STEM education in the nation’s high schools.  This innovative federal pilot program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and “will promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) high school curriculums that are steeped in the context of social justice.” (more here)

NHS has granted $1,009,762 of taxpayer money to train the initial cohort of 24 teachers from Drexel University to mangle the math curriculum in the Philadelphia school system.  The stated goal for the new and improved STEM curricula is to “promote social justice teaching”.  Internationally, US students’ STEM performance already ranks in the dire straits region, but nowhere in this new initiative is the improvement in STEM performance included as a stated objective.

In the new socialist order, "the long-term and far-reaching benefits to society of this project are the potential to document and share sustainable approaches, steeped in the context of social-justice, for recruiting and preparing STEM majors to provide success in learning mathematics and science for all middle-grades students in a high-need school district."  So, our learned left-lurched educators at the federal level have concluded that the solution to our poor performance has been due to the lack of social justice emphasis in teaching STEM.  This will all be improved when “the (new) foundation of the math and science courses will be based on ‘understanding students' cultural communities as a foundation for classroom culture.’”  (H/T to reader for the heads up.)

Scattershots – 10sep18 (updated 11sep18)

George Rebane

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Left likes to make lying a pastime unique to Republican politicians, especially President Trump.  None of them probably noticed that literally all of the Dems’ leading lights on the Judiciary Committee told whoppers when they grilled Judge Kavanaugh in their vain attempts to pry something loose that wasn’t there.  One of them claimed Kavanaugh’s nomination should be thrown out because he was nominated by a president who is an “unindicted co-conspirator”, which Trump is not.  And another one claimed to be the modern-day self-sacrificing Spartacus for releasing committee documents against committee rules, documents that the committee released to him the previous day.  But the lying demagogue just had to have his grandstand for the cameras.  (It turned out that the document in question to show Kavanaugh’s racism was a nothing-burger that indicated exactly the opposite.)  The other Democrats on the panel all did their best to bamboozle their constituents when it came their turn, and given the nature of their constituents, some were undoubtedly successful.

NPR’s daily dump on Trump featured author Bob Woodward talking about his new book.  The interview revealed either how little Woodward knows about executive decision making, and/or the severity of his TDS.  Those familiar with how an executive uses staff for solving problems knows that asking the right questions (formulating the problem) and generating good alternative solutions are the most difficult parts of the process.  Woodward and the mainstream are now citing how a staffer surreptitiously took a supposedly disastrous letter off the president’s desk before he could sign it.  The truth of the matter is that the letter (to South Korea on trade), clearly marked as a draft/WIP,  was one of several alternatives for the president’s review.  Then Woodward takes the president to task for asking ‘why do we have NATO troops in Europe?’ and the same question for South Korea.  Trump is represented here as a double dummy for ‘not knowing the answer’, and SecDef Mattis’s proper answer is characterized as making things clear to an ignoramous.  The real ignoramous is Woodward and Team Lamestream, who have no idea that asking ‘zero base questions’, especially when concerning long unquestioned totems, is a fundamental task of an experienced executive in the process of taking critical decisions.

The Coddling of the American Mind describes the cognitive fragility and brittleness of today’s young.  The just-released book written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - two lifelong Democrat academics - raises yet another alarm about how the progressives have managed to screw up an entire generation plus of Americans with massive deficits in being able to “understand nuances” of arguments, and being totally intolerant and fearful of any idea, concept, or notion that questions or goes counter to their carefully taught intellectual and socio-political underpinnings.  This, of course, is massively denied by the country’s Left as witnessed even in these pages.  Neither author is able to suggest a ready remedy to bring these millions of mind-mangled minions back into the realworld.

California proves itself once more “100% certifiable” as a government of grifters sustained by an electorate of malleable idiots.  Our progressive Democrats now mandate that the state get 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2045.  The impact of all this will be utility bills through the roof that will devastate the unsubsidized poor and drive more wage earning taxpayers to other states.  Only the coastal elites will not notice the economic devastation.  Today Californians already pay the highest rates for electricity which have increased more than 25% since 2013.  Given the natural gas-powered back-up plants required, the heavily subsidized wind and solar alternative will not even make a noticeable nick in reducing CO2.  (more here)

[11sep18 update]  Global alarmists claims refuted by another score of credentialed experts in their individual fields.  The details can be accessed on Russ Steele's blog here.  His report concludes with "The well-documented invalidation of the 'three lines of evidence' upon which EPA attributes global warming to human-caused CO2 emissions breaks the causal link between such emissions and global warming."  Worth checking out as we continue doing battle with the politically motivated True Believers in consensus science.

This year's 9/11 memorial will again be held at the gravesite of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Grass Valley this morning.  The Nevada County Republican Women Federated maintain the ambassador's grave, and regularly observe various anniversaries there throughout the calendar year.

‘Choose capitalism’

George Rebane

So argues Manny Montes in an excellent piece in the 6sep18 Union (here).  Mr Montes, who lives in Auburn, is a kindred spirit we have cited before in these pages.  He begins by reminding us how the lamestream media misleads and purposely spreads discontent (‘enemy of the people’?) by continuing to imply that the ‘rich’ don’t get taxed enough and therefore don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Citations of concurring Democrat congress critters abound; even some who militate to taxing 70% of the first million you earn, and make the point “… if you can’t get by on $300,000 in a country where so many …”.  Never mind that of the federal tax burden "the top 1 percent shoulders 40 percent, the top 10 percent, 71 percent, and the top 20 percent, 87 percent."

He points out the fundamental reality of how socialism is like a cancer that is “inextricably dependent on the producers for their viability”, and “like a cancer, feeding on healthy cells, the progressive socialist must inescapably feed … off the producers of wealth. … Their animal kingdom counterpart is the leech.”  And in its inevitable end, as we have repeatedly seen, socialism is a “cancer (that) essentially commits suicide, feeding on its host until the host has no more to give.”

Montes also cites one of our favorite leftist pundits of plunder, Saul Alinsky, who in Rules for Radicals instructs his acolytes ‘How to Create a Socialist State’, wherein Rule #2 states “Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.”  This “morally repugnant” dictum has been followed to the letter by Democrats who long ago launched the nation’s greatest multi-decadal social bamboozle called the ‘Great Society’, whose policies and programs went on to destroy minority families and create poverty wholesale in our cities under their decades of seemingly misguided administrations, abetted by Washington, that actually hewed to chapter and verse of Alinsky’s teachings.  (Of course, those read in history know that Alinsky was himself a student of Lenin, and, in turn, the ideological mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The Left continues its lame attempt to pass off Alinsky as just “the father of community organizing”, which he was not, since the Bolsheviks perfected that art of pernicious public persuasion a century ago.)

Mr Montes reminds the reader in his takeaway on capitalism, that as a counter to collectivism, “there is only one economic system which provides the greatest opportunity for all to achieve self-reliance, and that is capitalism. The flip side of the capitalism coin is individual rights. This is the moral basis of capitalism. The right of individuals to live as they see fit with respect for the rights of others to live as they see fit.”  And as we often conclude such sentiments on RR, the reader is again invited to revisit and meditate on Bastiat’s triangle of rights.

The Vassals of Corporatism

George Rebane

The good part of capitalism is that it games the system; the bad part of capitalism is that it games the system.

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 September 2018.]

I was going to do this week’s commentary on the ongoing Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  But after what I saw happen today and during yesterday’s opening round, I thought better of it - since, after all, this is a family radio station, and there are still some limits on what words can be used on the air.  Let’s just say that I was more than put out by things I have never witnessed from a Senate chamber conducting one of its most serious constitutional assignments for our republic.  And the outrage on display was perpetrated equally by protesters in the audience and senators on the panel.

Instead, tonight I want to talk about something pretty bad that happens when government and capitalism collude, or more accurately, when they conspire.  Such conspiratorial collusion is called corporatism.  Corporatism occurs when a usually large corporation and government conspire to mangle the market in which the corporation is then shielded from new competitors – usually start-ups and small companies.  This paid protection plan includes cleverly minted regulations, required licenses, fees, and taxes that create a barrier to entry which the small guys cannot afford to overcome.  In turn, the protected corporatist donates ample sums to the politicians who enshrined into law what the corporation’s lobbyists and lawyers had drafted.

Local socialist labors on the Economy

George Rebane

On this Labor Day our Union columnist George Boardman takes a particularly dim view of the state our economy and its workforce (here).  He recounts economic news only to continue the socialist narrative of envy and promote some dismal legislation, while decrying the evil and uncaring capitalist system under which Americans are forced to suffer.  Mr Boardman is not breaking any new ground here with his reportage of the dire straits of the American worker – that kind of news has come from the Left like clockwork since at least the roaring 20s, and reached an apex when the federal government put and kept the county mired in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Along with the Pelosi, Schumer, et al school of economics and social justice, Boardman discounts the sea change in economic growth and unemployment under President Trump.  What he chooses to trumpet is how the Left sees our workers fairing, abetted by the false flag stats that horribly misrepresent the quoted official US poverty rate of above 14% (with some more rabid leftwing outfits claiming a 28% to 50% rates) that compares poorly with other OECD countries (here).

Fairness and Leftwing Talk Radio (updated 26jul18)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 July 2018.]

In our hyper-polarized country it’s time to revisit the notion of censoring free speech.  And specifically as this relates to talk radio.  Our Left has had a perennial problem with how talk radio works in America, or how it works for the Right, and disastrously fails for the Left.  This leads to cries of censorship, claiming that the resulting programming is not ‘fair and balanced’ in the minds of progressives.  All such talk began back in 1949 with the Fairness Doctrine introduced by the Federal Communications Commission.

Back in those days public communication channels were limited to print media, movies, and radio.  Television was then in its infancy.  Since frequency bandwidth was a limited resource, the FCC parceled it out to radio stations as a limited public good.  And among the many rules imposed on broadcasters, the one on the discussion of controversial issues of public importance required programming from every station to be “honest, equitable, and balanced”.  Well, you can imagine the kind of problems that requirement launched – honest, equitable, and balanced in whose opinion?  Soon all kinds of obvious violations came to pass, and in 1987 the FCC rescinded the rule in favor of letting the markets decide who gets to listen to what.

By the early 1990s radio channels had expanded considerably, television was mature, cable was burgeoning, and the internet was already on the horizon.  In the intervening decades broadcast TV had become the home of leftwing political commentary, most visibly when packaged as entertainment, as in late night comedy shows that became thinly veiled propaganda outlets for leftwing ideology and Democrat causes.  And most of the other media, including government subsidized public radio, had taken a distinct and comfortable leftward tilt that actually started under FDR during the depression of the thirties.

The last bastion of rightwing thought became talk radio on private sector commercial stations where commentators were able to interpret the country’s goings on from the conservative and libertarian viewpoints to audiences that seemed to grow without bound.  The reach and effectiveness of conservative talk radio was not lost on the Left, which immediately launched its own talk shows to dispense socialist and progressive views of the world.  But for some puzzling reason, none of these shows got enough traction or caught on with the public.

The liberal diagnosis was that somehow the capitalist free markets were censoring leftwing talk radio, with stations shutting down one show after another as sponsors abandoned them because the audiences simply weren’t there.  As always, the Left’s proposal has been to bring in government, this time to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine that would put talk shows under newly minted quota regulations.  The thought is that no matter if people listened or not, forcing radio stations to devote equal time to Left and Right talk shows would reduce time available for disseminating conservative viewpoints.  This also satisfies a basic tenet of liberal belief, that whatever the government does not subsidize, prescribe, or enforce with its gun, is automatically prohibited, proscribed, or censored in our society.

So today’s accepted progressive wisdom is that censorship by capitalist free markets has been the reason for the ongoing failure of leftwing talk radio.  And this censorship needs to be removed by reinstating government regulation of thought on the airwaves.  But instead of reinstating the failures of the Fairness Doctrine, I would like to offer some other considerations why leftwing talk radio cannot attract audiences, reasons that others may consider too politically incorrect to explain the absence of listeners.

The simplest and most plausible reasons that audiences reject progressive commentaries are due to a combination of factors.  First and foremost, the credibility of a message that violates critical thinking, common sense, and universally understood norms of human behavior.  Second, the ability of government succored audiences to comprehend the more complex parts of public debate and policy proposals.  Third, the poor command of English by many of today’s Democrat constituencies.  And finally, education limited backgrounds that put out of reach the more detailed arguments based on history, economics, and science.

So, why do you think that liberal radio has had such a disastrous history?

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

[Addendum]  The main point I want the reader to take away from this is to answer why it is the Left that is trying to limit the speech of the Right, and the Right has no interest in reciprocating.  Specifically, no one on the Right seeks to apply the Fairness Doctrine to the highly one-sided programs on the mainstream media and the government subsidized outlets such as under the aegis of CPB and PBS.  (A more local example is the record of local lefties who have called for the silencing of my former Union column, and the ongoing calls to get me off the air at KVMR.  Has anyone ever run across someone on the Right trying to silence the rampant local propagandizing by the Left?)

If there were a real demand for leftwing or progressive radio commentary, then there is no one out there to stop them from grabbing time slots, even on established rightwing outlets, since such programming would significantly increase the stations’ outreach to audiences that advertisers would find attractive, and therefore increase such stations’ revenues.  Instead, the ideological fare that sells on TV is leftwing oriented comedy one-liners that appeal primarily to people for whom thinking is optional.  But, of course, for such audiences this lightweight and almost always fallacious fare is extremely effective, especially since it’s the only political commentary they consume.

Here is the currently operative view from the Left as to why they don’t fare well in the talk radio market, and why the government must step in – landmark 2007 study by the Center of American Progress (here), and some analyses of it (here and here).

[26jul18 update]  ‘The Trashing of George Mason U.’ provides a relevant tangent to this post.  Turns out that there’s a sleazebag outfit called UnKoch My Campus that is attacking George Mason for accepting donations from Koch brothers and others of a conservative libertarian bent for seeking “to advance the understanding, acceptance and practice of those free market processes and principles which promote individual freedom, opportunity and prosperity, including the rule of law, constitutional government, private property and the laws, regulations, organizations, institutions, and social norms upon which they rely.”  This attack on supposedly “dark money” funding colleges is against one of the last islands of free speech and conservative thought of America's academia, and is  carried out by an outfit that itself refuses to reveal who is funding its activities.

Democratic Socialists = proto-communists

Some mistakes are just too much fun to make only once.

George Rebane

The left-leaning Associated Press reports ‘Democratic socialism surging in the age of Trump’.  The article is a well-written, comprehensive review of what the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are and their recent growth spurt as the Democratic Party lurches hard Left.  (We note that know-nothing local lefties are still in denial about that.)  What they are - according to the AP, other observers, and now even some dues-paying members - is socialists, plain and simple.  But even that doesn’t go far enough.

DSA’s paid up membership has surged from about 6K to 45K in the last year or so, and now includes in its ranks more than a handful of Democrat politicians running for office.  DSA used to be “on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank.”  Today they are a “significant force in Democratic politics” that overwhelmingly dominates the public direction the party has taken and openly advertises as its future.   On the DSA’s website we find, and AP corroborates, that there is “little distinction” between ‘democratic socialism’ and just plain good old-fashioned ‘socialism’.  But wait, there’s more to this telling.

When you read the DSA constitution, you learn that “its members as socialists reject an economic order based on private profit and share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”  In short, they are really a new and improved modern day movement of communists who are temporarily hiding under the more acceptable socialist label.  When the time is ripe, they will dispense with this half-way house and co-opt the political pimple that today still calls itself the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

The real question is how far will the Democratic Party play along with this headlong rebirth of communism via the waystation of socialism.  Many Democrats, and we all know who they are, have already thrown in their lot with the DSA, and many more Dems are standing by, nervously fingering their hats as they prepare to toss them into the DSA ring.  The times, they surely are a-changin.

The only speed-bump on the road to complete government control of everything seems to be the label ‘socialist’ that some Dems running for office fear that “people do associate (socialism) with bad things in history”.  Now if we can only hurry up and convince these inconvenient history troglodytes that socialism was really not all that bad, and that we’ll do it right this time around, then we’ll have it made in the shade.  Why?  Because our government educational system has already taught the younger generation that capitalism is bad and socialism is good, and the lamestream media is reinforcing that daily.  It's those damn older folks who can still remember yesterday who are the problem.

You can bet the farm that the Deep State “patriots” are already all socialists since their livelihood depends on it.  The only kerfuffle slowing things down is the current lack of a definitive Democrat leadership behind which the young and stupid can join ranks.  Current Dems jockeying for position, like Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, Biden, and Waters come across as marginal work products from some second-rate embalming school.  It’s the new cohort of the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, Kaniela Ing, Kamala Harris, etc who are the emerged and unabashed socialist face of the Democratic Party.  And the platform to which they all have signed up sees the abrogation of the Constitution and its defined voter franchise as Job One.

National dumbth on parade, again (updated 1jul18)

George Rebane

Today the nation will witness ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Americans demonstrating against what is represented as “Trump’s immigration policy”.  The demonstrations are sponsored by the usual leftwing anti-American and socialist organizations, and will focus on the ‘separation of children’ aspect of US Code (including our extant immigration law) that requires the separation of children from people (American citizens and illegal aliens) taken into custody – we have never thrown kids into jail with criminal adults.

This aspect of US law is totally denied and suppressed by today’s leftwingers who will shout themselves hoarse.  The reporting on this is so one-sided and misrepresented on the lamestream media that, in addition to riling up the leftwing base and those lightly read on social justice, that some more moderate and even conservative media dare not put these emotional claims into some kind of realworld perspective.  We have reported on this and discussed it extensively in these pages (here, here, and here).  Locally, as well as nation-wide, the Left does not want to even recognize their information-free and illogical position on this, because the real agenda here remains the maintenance of incivility against our duly elected president – all this answers the call to now put their “bodies on the line” to oppose anything and everything this administration does.

In today’s (30jun18) Union, Nancy Garcia takes up our incivility and asks (here), “Why is it OK to not serve someone because of their political affiliation but not OK to discriminate against race or creed of customers?  Why is it OK for a past president to put children, who crossed the border illegally, in caged detention cells, but not OK for a sitting president to house them in a safe, secure and caring environment?  The immigration laws were created by Congress, not the president. It will take Congress to change them.”

That the hordes attending today’s demonstration have been carefully taught to ignore such questions is another confirmation of national dumbth solidly in place and on the rise.

[1jul18 update]  Well, as part of our national dumbth in its upper reaches, we have a major op-ed piece in the NYT decrying ‘How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment’.  The fools in their editorial department are so ignorant of constitutional principles that they don’t even realize that the First was meant by our Founders to be used as a weapon against any insipient tyranny arising in the land.  And nowhere is that more obvious today than what the progressives have done and are doing to our national dialogue in academe, our public schools, business, and the media.

Formerly fierce promoters of free speech, the Left today has its mammaries in a pinch with a bitter harvest of what it has sown.  The notions now being discussed by progressive elitists include the total revision, if not abrogation, of the First Amendment and free speech, because (wait for it) it turns out that the Constitution hinders free speech.  Apparently the rich and powerful are now using it to make arguments for which the progressive pinheads have no reasonable counter, and they and theirs are made to look like the fools they are in even their own lamestream media.  The solution for them is always the government gun in the attempt to put a stop to the whole thing.  I can already see proposals for a federal Free Speech Commission through which public speech must first be cleared before being posted, published, or broadcast.

And while this is going on, the Left, exemplified by our local loonies, continues to call for inclusion and diversity as they howl for opposing voices to be silenced, or at least denied forums in which their ideas can be disseminated.  As they accuse us of being divisive, we witness calls by our own alt-Left to silence Union columnist George Boardman, cartoonist Bob Crabb, and of course, yours truly.  And I am sure such calls are echoed across the land as we now prepare to witness the most vicious political fight of our lifetime as our national socialist will fight tooth-and-nail to stop anyone and everyone that President Trump nominates to replace Justice Kennedy on SCOTUS.

No Abyss for Progressives

George Rebane

‘Progressive movement jumping into abyss’ by Manny Montes appeared in the 23jun18 Union, opening with the hopeful salvo –

An extraordinary thing is happening right before our eyes.  The implosion of the progressive movement, and its complicit ministry of propaganda, our news media, are jumping head first into the abyss, oblivious to the progressive ideological dangers of their descent.  The incipient tyrant in every progressive is now manifest for all to see. The Obama administration blatantly politicized our government's intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus. The tyrant plays by his own rules. Power is the objective. Principles, ethics and constitutional restraints mean not a whit to the tyrant.

The remainder of the piece presented a cogent, clear, and concise summary of the Left’s iniquities, under Obama’s watch and Hillary’s candidacy, revealed over the last six years or so.  All of which have been much discussed in these pages and elsewhere across the land.  The problem with Mr Montes’ assessment appears to come from his limited awareness of the workings of the liberal mind and their lightly read constituencies.

The Left sees none of these extra-constitutional cum criminal acts – they have been and remain totally blind to them as amply evidenced in the RR comment streams, and more prominent progressive trumpets.  For them, the only atrocious aberrations in government remain Trump’s alleged “collusion with Russia” for which there is yet to be discovered one shred of evidence.  And Trump’s immaterial bombasts, exaggerations, misanthropics, and fabrications have become a catalog of impeachable “lies” for them that totally overwhelm the material lies and illegal activities – including documented collusion with Russia and its third-party agents - perpetrated by Team Obama over their eight years in power.

What Mr Montes misses is that for there to open a convenient abyss into which the progressives can either jump or blunder, there has to be a sufficiently knowledgeable political mass in the nation to demand that they be held to account, through either the justice system or in the voting booth.  The American electorate is now hopelessly divided into those too dumb to be informed, and those too smug who think that they need do nothing but wait for Divine Justice to strike through a parting of the clouds to “implode the progressive movement” of dastardly and seditious anti-Americans.  Meanwhile, with apparent impunity, the Left continues to field platoons of political thugs to confront administration staffs, shut down public and private facilities, and block avenues of transportation – all with both tacit and vociferous approval from our already coopted and compliant Fourth Estate.

The logic, totally absent from the Left’s mindset and to which Mr Montes appeals in his arguments, is shared today by a diminishing minority – the masses neither care, let alone dare, to call the progressive perps to account.   The great unwashed are continually reminded that the only evil in the land to be purged is Donald Trump, else (cue the chorus) ‘All is Well, All is Well’.

The Diaspora of Dumbth in America

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

George Rebane

Nothing in recent memory highlights the dumbing of the American mind like today’s hysteria about separating kids from adults (parents or coyotes) who criminally enter the United States.  Led by the Left, our news media, both lamestream and conservative, have now started supporting the narrative that such separation from illegal alien adults taken into custody is something new, unique, inhuman, permanently damaging, and not the American way.  In reality nothing could be further from the truth.  America has never jailed kids with adults in whose custody they were at the time of incarceration.  We have always separated the kids and put them into appropriate care institutions until they could be reunited with parents, relatives, or placed with other legal guardians.

Today the insane notion has spread across the land, a diaspora of the belief that somehow illegal aliens who criminally enter our country deserve special treatment that is not now and never has been afforded American citizens.  Our laws, and especially border security laws, have always called for equal separation of alien children brought illegally and surreptitiously into the country by criminal adults who have been arrested and taken into custody.  Here’s a letter in the 25jun18 WSJ from a defense attorney that reinforces what I introduced on these pages in ‘Separating kids from parents’.

Regarding your editorial “The GOP’s Immigration Meltdown” (June 19): I am a criminal defense attorney and can say with confidence that hundreds, if not thousands, of parents and their minor children are separated in this country every day by the criminal justice system. What was happening at our southern border is routine.

It is not uncommon for criminal defendants to bring their minor children to court with them for bail hearings, revocation of bail hearings, revocation of probation hearings and sentencing hearings. Perhaps they think that the presence of their children will influence the judge. It has been my experience that it will not.

If a criminal defendant is denied bail, has his bail revoked (as Paul Manafort recently experienced), has his probation revoked or is sentenced to prison, he will be taken into custody and, by definition, separated from his children (the children don’t accompany the defendant to prison). If a family member or other guardian isn’t present to take the children, the children will be taken by a state agency that is charged with caring for children who have no adult to care for them.

Illegally entering the U.S. is, by definition, a crime. If the parent is taken into custody by law enforcement for the crime of illegally entering the U.S., that parent will be separated from his minor children, just as any other criminal defendant in the examples above.

As an attorney, I don’t understand the current outrage. Parents have been separated, are being separated and will continue to be separated from their minor children by the criminal justice system. Why should there be an exception for noncitizens who have been arrested for the crime of illegally entering the U.S.? As far as I know, there is no exception for any other crime.

Ivars Lacis, Peachtree City, Ga.

The diaspora of this anti-American insanity was further expanded on and put into the context of an ongoing broader leftwing agenda in ‘The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty’.  What I want to emphasize here is that more centrist and conservative media outlets have fallen in line, putting out news items about separating kids that do nothing to dispel the lies that 1) the whole policy was started by Trump, and 2) that such separations are unique to entering illegal aliens, who have been converted simply into “immigrants” no longer adorned with even the mildly clarifying modifiers of ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’.

And the under-educated of the land are lapping it up with manufactured visions of such huddled masses, as in days of yore, gathered at the foot of the Statue of Liberty demanding to be allowed entry simply because they and their neighbors have lost their native countries to criminals and corruptions.  All this time the alt-Left Democrats are also telling Americans what a horrible land the United States is, and no one has the ability to see the disconnect between that argument and the existential confusion at our borders where more than 1,000 illegals daily risk life and limb to enter.

The unexamined bottom line in the public forum, and now the proclaimed policy of the Democratic Party is that America should welcome one and all from across the world who illegally cross our borders with the complaint that they want, nay, demand a better economic future.  Promoting such open borders and automatic amnesty is the surest way for us to lose our national sovereignty and speed up our departure from the America that for the last two centuries has served as the gold standard of governance.

The Existential Abrogation of Sovereignty

George Rebane

Across this land we are debating the wrong thing.  There is no contention about separating kids from parents.  No one want to do that gratuitously.  But as a society, we do it when we must.  And we do it daily with American kids by the thousands when their parents are jailed or otherwise detained through legal proceedings.  We have done that for decades and today we keep hundreds of thousands of American kids in foster care separate from their parents.  But just focusing on the kids is not my point here.

America’s Left has found a new casus belli to attack the foundations of our republic.  Their goal, as stated here many times, is nothing less than the abrogation of America’s sovereignty as a nation-state (cf. Agenda21).  Let me start with some fundamental tenets of governance that I assign to Rebane Doctrine (continuing to collect these under this label and efficiently refer to them drives the local Left nuts; another benefit).

1. A nation-state is first and foremost sovereign only to the extent that it can determine and control the access of goods and people to its territory. Secure and non-porous borders through which ingress, including immigration, and egress are effectively controlled is an existential measure of its sovereignty.
2. Anti-American – a person who opposes American sovereignty 1) as an idea through impugnation, and/or 2) existentially by actively working to reduce/eliminate such sovereignty.
3. Anti-American sedition – activities intended to radically and/or rapidly change the existing character, make-up, and/or established order of America through extra-legal means.

Today the media is full of reports and interviews with progressive politicians unabashedly promoting open borders without (yet) daring to say it in those words.  What they volubly promote instead is a 1) catch, 2) keep the families together, and 3) then release policy for illegal aliens caught after surreptitiously crossing the border.  They are to be released on the basis of 1) having purposely violated US laws, and 2) on the fiction that all illegal aliens have a prima facie legitimate case for seeking asylum.

What gives lie to all this, and is known to our anti-American politicians is that only about 3% of the illegal entrants return for their asylum court hearings which would legitimize their stay in the US.  The other 97% know they have no leg to stand on, and that they would be taken into custody and deported were they to present themselves.  Their only hope for staying here is to remain a fugitive long enough until our anti-American Left (presuming the existence of a pro-American Left) can muster enough public opinion to force the federal government to designate them as the next 'DACAs' or 'Dreamers' or … in sufficient numbers so as to make their en masse deportation no longer feasible.  And voila! We have yet another new tranche of Democrat voters who have no love or understanding of the country into which they have infused.  Their loyalty is only to the globalist progressive cause and its visible political and opinion leaders who are bent on taking us to that new future.

Scattershots – 13jun18 (updated 14jun18)

George Rebane

Cal-3 is going to be on the November ballot. WaPo reports that “On Tuesday, the California secretary of state confirmed in a memo that Draper’s Cal-3 campaign attained enough valid signatures to earn a spot on the ballot Nov. 6. After more than 150 years of failed partition proposals, California voters will finally go to the polls to decide whether they want to relinquish their monopoly of the Pacific coast and become three new states.”  Venture capitalist Tim Draper’s old plan to cut California into six more ideologically cohesive pieces has been slimmed down with some apparent success.  No matter its fate at the polls, the proposition confirms again what RR has maintained over the years while vehemently being denied by the state’s Left – especially our lightly read locals.  People do want their voices heard by their government, and people do want to live with others whose values and mores are more than less like theirs.  Such existential diversity is anathema to the one-size-fits-all Left.

The Left’s campaign to enlarge national dumbth gets a boost from NYC’s mayor deBlasio reports Jason Riley in ‘The Attack on Educational Excellence’.  deBlasio wants schools with entrance test requirements, for which Hispanics and blacks are historically poorly prepared, to revert to the racial quota system, all in the name of “diversity”.  “In the upside-down thinking of affirmative-action advocates, academically rigorous schools should be more focused on achieving racial balance and less focused on maintaining high standards. Asian displays of academic excellence therefore become problematic. Asians are somehow to blame for outperforming others, and they are to be punished for the historical injustices that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.”  Occam’s rationale for deBlasio’s call to eliminate entrance tests is simply that ignorant minorities are easier to keep disgruntled on the plantation where their attitudes and votes can be readily manipulated.

Trump in Singapore.  Well, it turns out that it was really the media experts who were expecting a single-shot breakthrough at this week’s summit.  Leading up, they blamed Trump for expecting too much from the meeting, while Trump was telling the world not to expect much more than it would be the “potential” beginning of conversations which no other world leader had been able to launch with the North Korean dictators, while allowing them to become an ever bigger danger to world peace.  Now the Monday morning quarterbacks are decrying the President for not walking out with a definitive world-shaking treaty that in one swell foop rid the Ugly Fat Kid of his nuclear capability and made him into a well-behaved leader enjoying a recent epiphany on human rights.  Demonstrating that their Trump Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds, these self-pumped pinhead pundits are now manufacturing hypotheticals about all kinds of imagined bad things yet-to-come, and getting a jump on criticizing the President for those.  (Here is an example from the auto-profound Council on Foreign Relations.  The myriad pronouncements on the lamestream are too silly and stupid to even consider.)  Meanwhile, Trump continues to tell all that the process has just started, and no one has given away anything to anyone – i.e. going forward we will trust AND verify.

[14jun18 update]  The 500-page DoJ’s IG report on Hillary’s email server investigation has apparently been seen by select eyes only, and is promised to be made public later today.  From early and conflicting reports by sources such as AG Sessions, Rep Trey Gowdy, and the WSJ, it is unclear what kind of political bias IG Horowitz found or did not find.  The congressman concludes what most of us witnessed over the last two years, that the FBI’s treatment of Hillary and Trump have been profoundly asymmetrical.  Yet the WSJ reports, ‘DOJ Watchdog’s Clinton Report Finds Mistakes by Comey, No Political Bias’.  We can hardly wait to discover what kind of hoops the IG had to jump through to come to that conclusion.  An early and perhaps premature assessment is that the Deep State is fully engaged in defending itself.

[later]  Well, the 568-page hernia pack is now out for all to read, and it’s a doozer (download pdf here).  The report documents in exhaustive detail the prima facie bias expressed throughout the months of the FBI’s investigation of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.  It hauls Comey, Lynch, McCabe, Strzok, and others over the coals, and then, and then, … FBI Director Christopher Wrey goes in front of the cameras this afternoon and does a reprise of Comey’s 5jul16 bullshit performance exonerating Hillary.  Wray goes through the exact same arguments of the damning evidence the IG’s investigation uncovered, and then announces a jaw-dropping conclusion that there was no hint of political bias shown by the investigators or during the course of the investigation – simply unbelievable how the man could keep a straight face delivering that copy.

Wray’s message essentially acknowledged that the FBI screwed up from start to end, and "we’ll hold people accountable", but the organization itself remains as untainted as ever and was not harmed by at least 18 months of continued incompetence and blatant documented bias.  Somehow screwing up the biggest investigation the FBI has had in decades should make no never mind in the minds of Americans.

More revealing were the sober, detailed, and very frank assessments delivered by House chairmen Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va) on Bret Baier’s FN Special Report.  Both men were incredulous of the way that the Deep State was now defending itself.  It’s worth watching this exchange here on YouTube.

Kalifornia’s new service tax

George Rebane

State Senator Ted Gaines reports in the 9jun18 Union – ‘New bill slaps Californians with tax on services’ - of a piece of surreptitious legislation (SB993) quietly wending through Sacramento that will install yet one more layer of taxes that the people must add to the tribute that they already submit to succor the Sacramento Leviathan.  This new 3% tax on services will affect people directly and indirectly in more ways than we can count.

“Next time you visit a dry cleaner, hair stylist, manicurist, mechanic or any of the other countless services that we use day after day, week after week, you'll pay a new and additional three-percent tax for the exact same service. That's the last thing financially-stretched Californians need in this already unaffordable state. And history is clear that the three-percent tax will only creep up over time. … The damage wouldn't stop there. Small businesses contract out myriad tasks so they can focus on their core money making activity. They pay for computer services, payroll, janitorial, bookkeeping, legal services and more. Under this bill, they will be paying a premium for those services.”

The tax will give rise to a whole new bureaucracy charged with its administration that itself will cost over $600M annually, and employ a whole new tranche of government workers (aka parasites) whose benefit and retirement packages will require more millions taken into perpetuity from the shrinking corps of the state’s taxpayers.  In short, this will be another cancer upon the horde of cancers already afflicting the state’s fisc, and it will “further damage California’s faltering economic competitiveness and corrode our long-term financial health.”

We the people used to pay taxes for acknowledged needed services that were best provided by the collective, i.e. government.  Today new taxes are constantly added and existing ones are redirected for the sole purpose of sustaining and growing government (the employer of last resort).  When governments start exacting tribute from the people with impunity and for such clearly self-serving purposes, it has always signaled the onset of a rapidly evolving autocracy toward eventual tyranny.

Addendum:  As we have reported, California’s loss of productive middle-class taxpayers continues apace.  And the state is fast on the track to follow other high-tax socialist enclaves like Vermont (home of Bernie the communist) which has now initiated a $10K ‘Vermont relocation grant’ in its desperate attempt to replace its outflow of taxpayers by attracting new workers who can telecommute from the Green Mountain State (here).  Upon a moment’s reflection, it is clear that the $10K reward for moving there will only be taken by the innumerates who cannot calculate the horribly negative internal rate of return that this investment will have on their financial health.  Exit question – do companies really allow such double dummies to work from home?

Scattershots – 8jun18 (updated 9jun18)

George Rebane

That Ted Cruz is a strong anti-abortionist was claimed by a liberal friend and RR reader.  Moreover, the Texas Republican believes that “the continuum of human life begins at the moment of fertilization”, which means at conception.  By reasonable extension, this also means that Cruz is against any and all post-coitus contraception, since this might destroy a fertilized egg (although some eggs may be fertilized many hours after coitus).  I was not aware of that about Sen Cruz and asked my friend to provide some proof, which I promised to post.  He did, and you can inspect his submission here.

Illegal border crossings are down – that is the narrative that the Left (and their lamestream-locked local lackeys) are using to extenuate their criminality with the argument that ‘Dreamers’, illegal alien children (accompanied and unaccompanied), and other labeled groups of “immigrants” (now referenced sans the former ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ modifiers) should be given amnesty to stay here forever, qualify for state offices, and soon obtain the vote (‘they pay taxes too’).  Well, border crossings are actually up since the folks south of the border became convinced that Congress and our courts would override President Trump’s enforcement of illegal alien laws already on the books.  According to the Border Patrol and Homeland Security, the year-to-year number of intercepted and arrested illegal alien families is up 435%, and the number of unaccompanied children is up 329%.  Fox News reported this; haven’t heard/seen it on any lamestream outlets.

Hillary Hodge’s run for District 3 Supervisor has so far garnered her 1,467 votes (to Dan Miller’s 1,713 votes).  Nevada County’s participation in beta testing the new Voters’ Choice Act will delay completing the tally until this coming Monday.  I presume that Dan Miller’s lead will hold and he will be re-elected.  But what I really find remarkable is that so many people actually voted for her.  Let me say at the outset that Ms Hodge is a nice pleasant lady and an upstanding citizen of our county.  But what I find astounding is that someone without any relevant education, total absence of experience, a demonstrated ignorance of issues, and no known life accomplishments (she admits to still coming to grips with being an adult) has the hubris to come in as an unknown, and do so well against the incumbent opponent whose attributes are diametrically opposite hers.  This speaks poorly for our county and, in extension, to our country’s voters who today are so ideologically rent that they will vote for a 2x4 with a painted face if it runs under their preferred party’s banner.  

[9jun18 update]  Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer delivered one of his liberal logrollers – ‘What should America do to be great again’ - in the newspaper’s 9jun18 edition.  He has concluded that America is no longer a great nation, and that is the fault of Republicans and President Trump.  He cites with alarm the upcoming report by the UN’s Human Rights Council, an assemblage dominated by the world’s worthless worthies (here), which contains an amplified and doctored list of America’s sores and carbuncles, leading Mr Berkheimer to conclude that we are indeed the worst of the worst among developed nations.  To be great again, Berkheimer prescribes that we reinstate “the freedom and opportunities to live a better life”, along with the “freedom to innovate” – freedoms which the Left has systematically been removing since the country’s post-war march to socialism was resumed by the Great Society in the 1960s.  Telling of Berkheimer’s prescriptions for America’s future are his mythical interpretations of the governmental “we” who used to “provide” for Americans.  And going forward “it's not just what we provide for those living now, but instead what we provide for the future — for our children, and the next generation after that.” (emphasis mine)  Unless I’m forgetting something fundamental about the greatness of America, it was not government, but the people who were free to innovate and provide for themselves that made us the most sought-after nation in the world.  Government’s constitutional role was to maintain a secure geography in which we could do all these things for ourselves.  Today the Berkheimers in America are working hard and with considerable success to reverse these roles.

Solar panels - the latest California calamity

George Rebane

California’s collectivist calamites just keep rolling in.  The latest in the works is the Great Solar Panel Sidestep – a new government mandated, contractor supported dance that will push low cost housing, now already out of reach, even further into the land of the bureaucratically impossible.  As observed from outside our state’s borders, “California is often where bad ideas spring to life these days, and they’re worth highlighting lest they catch on in saner precincts. Consider the state Energy Commission’s decision this week to mandate solar panels on all new homes. Meanwhile, Democrats bemoan the lack of affordable housing. Hmmm, maybe there’s a connection?”

But his latest really takes the cake – you can run the numbers yourself, but here’s the back of the envelope version of the California Energy Commission's mandate for all new homes.  Start with the “average cost of a rooftop solar panel system today is $18,840, which amortized at a 5.5% interest rate over 30 years is $107 a month.”  Add to that an average of about $400 annually for government inspections, cleaning and maintaining the system, to get a total monthly cost of $140, or $1,680 annually.  The advertised benefit is $80 monthly off the already outrageous cost of California electricity, making the net negative out-of-pocket $720 annually.  An earlier smokescreen claimed that the initial cost would be recovered by such savings in 30 years.  Now the cat is out of the bag – this bamboozle costs a lot out the gate, and keeps costing forever (even if it last 30 years).  Given the low cost of energy in America, California’s solar energy only benefits leviathan and corporatism.

Meanwhile, California housing costs average between $50K-$75K per unit more than in the rest of the country, and a government specified ‘affordable housing’ unit costs an unaffordable $332K.  Building low cost housing in California is prohibited by more laws and regulations than can be counted.  This is “why hundreds of thousands of middle-class Californians are fleeing. In 2016 Arizona welcomed twice as many Californian refugees as Mexican immigrants. California’s labor force last year expanded by a mere 1% compared with 2.2% in Nevada and Arizona. Sharing a border with California is a gift that keeps on giving.”  (more here)

California’s Common Core Catastrophe

George Rebane

In these pages we have long lamented California’s adoption of the Common Core curriculum standards, especially in the teaching of math in K-12.  H/T to longtime RR reader and discussant Greg Goodknight, who points us to an important just-published essay on Common Core performance in California since the standards were adopted in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014-15.  The piece – ‘California’s Common Core Mistake’ – written by W. Evers and Z. Wurman of the Hoover Institution contains a crisp summary of the educational catastrophe that CC has bestowed on California and the nation in preparing our young people to enter STEM careers so demanded by the AI-driven shift in required workforce skills.

The whole mess started with California having the widely acknowledged highest math teaching standards in the nation throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  The keystone of it all was preparing the maximum number of the state’s public school students to take Algebra1 in the 8^th grade.  Evers and Wurman present copious charts and graphs of the data showing the progress of California students before CC, and then the disaster that befell when the curriculum was dumbed down after CC mandated postponing Algebra1 until the 9^th grade.  And who was hit the hardest by this curricular retreat? – the poor and minorities, of course.

A cynical but totally rational explanation for this Left-promoted, government induced travesty is that the CC curriculum will surreptitiously yet reliably stifle the growth of a more numerate and critically thinking electorate, which then will be more compatible, susceptible, and compliant to the socialist nostrums that now and eternally will gush out of our one-party Sacramento in a steady stream.

Scattershots - 26apr18 (updated 29apr18)

George Rebane

Our American public mind has been taking some hits in recent decades, and is now in a power dive into the mud if we see what is happening in academe and in content of popular entertainments.  After having devastated K-12 education, the Left is now in the process of delivering a coup de grace to academe where critical thought and dialogue have been replaced by diversity’s dumbth.  But there are some vestiges of opposition left in the public universities as reported by Robert Bellafiore, a millennial student at the Univ of Oklahoma who tells us of a very challenging and yet very popular course ‘Fate and the Individual in European Literature’.  Mr Bellafiore writes, “Give students heights to aspire to, and we will reach them—just as surely as we will settle for mediocrity if that is all you ask of us. Too many students are seeking clarity and purpose and finding only cacophony and aimlessness. The Western canon offers the challenge of a lifetime, and it’s one I believe my generation is willing to accept.” (more here)

And on the opposite side of the ledger we now have movie after movie coming out with comic book superheroes battling it out in mind-numbing combats, entertainments that are free of science, art, philosophy, or any takeaway other than ringing in the ears from exposure to 120db multiplex theater sound systems.

Washington’s swamp allegators are having a field day.  (Allegator – a person given to wanton, gratuitous, and evidence-free allegations against prominent public figures, especially when so goaded by third parties or motivated by ideology and/or cash.)  Their latest victim is Radm Dr Ronny Jackson, President Trump’s nominee to head the Veteran’s Affairs Department, who withdrew his name today after a week of pummeling in the lamestream media.  Such attacks are part and parcel of the double (here we have called it ‘assymetrical’) standards applied to Democrats vs Republicans in today’s politics, especially if the Trump administration is involved.  Victor Davis Hanson’s 26apr18 commentary (here) on such double standards highlights some particulars worth noting by those who still consume rather than deflect information.  Dr Hanson reviews the Mueller investigation and makes a case for an impending “investigatory train wreck” as the special prosecutor “searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers.”  And if it touches Trump, the allegators’ cry remains, ‘Guilty, until proven innocent!’

Americans are fleeing leftwing regressive states.  Connecticut is the latest state to become a posterchild of progressives’ putrid public policies.  Federal income data tells the story of the Connecticut exodus of wage earners that is catching up with what is happening in neighboring New York and, of course, Krazy Kalifornia.  Gov Daniel Malloy’s “eight year experiment in public-union governance saw income grow by a meager 1.5% for the year” well below that of neighboring New England states.  And if you take out dividends and government transfer payments, its wage growth was at a stagnant 0.1%.  The 26apr18 WSJ observes “the fact that Connecticut, which is next to America’s financial capital, has grown so poorly amid an expansion that was especially good for financial assets is a damning indictment of its political leadership. It is a particular tragedy for the state’s poorest citizens who may not be able to flee to other states that aren’t run by and for government employees.”

[29apr18 update]  As government has become more pervasive in our lives, it is easier than ever to demonstrate that ALL productive approaches to solving social problems should begin with the proviso that ‘Government is guilty until proven innocent.’  The current gun control fiasco is no different.  Here it would pay to again first determine the role government’s derelictions and incompetence played in the recent Parkland and Waffle House shootings.  Since the Left’s objective is gun confiscation by whatever means available, their lamestream media and activists’ literature turns a blind eye to the dereliction and incompetence aspects of enforcing gun control laws already on the books.  The Left’s perennial solution is to never waste the most recent tragedy to roll back the Second Amendment another notch as part and parcel of their overarching objective to fundamentally transform America.  Two recent analyses of government's dereliction and incompetence in the Waffle House (here)  and Parkland (here) killings illustrate my point, the latter done by Kenneth Preston, a heads-up student in Broward County where the massacre occurred.