Rebane's Ruminations

Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

George Rebane

The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

[2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled 'National Emergency' says it all.  (H/T to reader)

[3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

[7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

Scattershots – 14jun19 (updated 20jun19)

George Rebane

Proto-socialists on parade.  I noticed in the 14jun19 Union’s lead op-ed another example of a good-hearted, light-thinker wailing about our country’s unequal distribution of wealth, and its pitifully inadequately small government.  A Ms Becky Goodwin laments that no “millionaire” attended her kids’ college graduations to pay off their student loans, and why should such largess be a sometime thing instead of a universal benefit across the land.  She gives no evidence of understanding how such inequalities contribute to the overall wealth and weal of a nation.  As a devoted leftist, she eschews private charities and wants all such benefits to come from a much larger government that gets such monies from taxing the bejeezus out of rich folks who just happened to belong to what was known as the middle class (more here).  The country is chock full of these proto-socialist Beckys who deny the label but would eagerly vote for every Bernie, AOC, and Green New Deal that comes their way.

Growing populism and middle-class anger.  If there’s any hope for liberal governments, then it may well begin with what VDH summarizes in his ‘Why Are the Western Middle Classes So Angry?’  He outlines six “gripes” that are also part of RR’s mantra –

• Illegal immigration and open borders have caused institutional chaos and cultural compromises – e.g. multicultural identity politics.
• Globalization that has enriched Western elites who have “outsourced, offshored, and ignored their own industries and manufacturing.”
• The viral explosion of unelected bureaucrats at all levels of government consisting of sinecured, feedback-proof regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors, and adjustors.
• The global lamestream media reaching and indoctrinating billions rather than practicing what was known as ethical journalism.
• The post-educational academia that now functions as a “shrill agent of cultural transformation … charging more for less learning.”
• “Utopian social planning”, a la Agenda21, that has “increased housing, energy, and transportation costs.”

VDH concludes that “because elites have no answers to popular furor, the anger directed at them will only increase until they give up—or finally succeed in their grand agenda of a non-democratic, all-powerful Orwellian state.”

Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard?, asks our favorite Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute (see also here).  This paragon of academia, that enjoys a $39,000,000,000 endowment made possible only through the largess of western capitalism, is now teaching its students that, in fact, capitalism contains “systemic inequities”, and the “capitalist ethos” is false because it teaches that “we deserve to win because of our skill, our hard work, and our contributions.”  Not at all, maintains Dean Rakesh Khurana, because in reality capitalism is a zero-sum game that rewards its players simply on the roll of Fortuna’s dice – remember “you didn’t build that”.  Khurana most recently disseminated this blather at Harvard’s commencement in a speech which pointedly ignored that his “parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, one of the events leading him to conclude that at least 85% of his current status is due to circumstances beyond his control. His parents presumably came to the U.S. because they saw opportunity, not “systemic inequities.” That opportunity arises from Western civilization’s accomplishments: the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression and inquiry, and the relative absence of corruption—all matters about which Mr. Khurana was silent. This civilizational inheritance allows social mobility and wealth creation unimaginable in most of the non-Western world.”  Read MacDonald’s article for the full story.  (H/T to correspondent)

‘Socialist’ Nordics are moving toward private healthcare – what a revoltin’ development!  As we have reported for years, free healthcare is unsustainable, and its dive into the mud is slowed only by providing fewer and slower services.  The answer to it is - seatbelts please - private healthcare funded through private health insurance.  Daily Signal reports that quiet trend has been going on for years with increases in such insurance purchases by 7% of Norwegians, 4% of Swedes, and leading the way, 22% of Danes who have been able to augment their ‘free’ healthcare.  A good piece, that covers what is offered to whom, when, and for how much in various countries our socialists are trying to emulate, is detailed here.

[17jun19 update] Our broken Constitution and legal system.  SCOTUS upheld the cynical double jeopardy provision that our Constitution specifically prohibits.  The Daily Caller reports,  “The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy clause prohibits multiple prosecutions for the same offense. An exception to this rule called the separate sovereigns doctrine allows state and federal governments to bring successive prosecutions for the same crime. Monday’s decision leaves the doctrine in place, meaning any person Trump pardons remains exposed to state prosecutions.”  The only reasonable conclusion here is that our Constitution does not apply equally to the federal government and those of the several states.  The ‘separate sovereigns doctrine’ and the entire quagmire of a sub-rosa administrative law legal system give continued evidence that our legal system is both broken and corrupt.

Cap & Trade slush fund.  Years ago when CO2 cap & trade was first proposed, I and my fellow climate change skeptics predicted that such monies would soon be used for all kinds of other progressive vote-buying give-aways by Sacramento.  Well, that day has arrived (more here).  The scumbags in the state legislature, who have claimed CA is flush with cash, can’t hide the truth any longer and have to go after money wherever they can find to fund their follies, or just to keep minimal government services going.  RR readers, of course, know what the response of the local lefties was to such predictions. (H/T to reader)

[20jun19 update]  My new favorite communist is Umair Haque. I have reported on his virulently anti-American essays before.  This prolific, yet amazingly ignorant, ultra-left ideologue is published regularly on Medium.com which is an outlet primarily by and for Millennials, and therefore deserves a regular look-see by those seeking to keep up on their thought and sentiments.  Umair’s (that’s how he signs himself) latest mind bending contributions are ‘(Why) There Was No Jackpot at the End of Capitalism’s Rainbow’, ‘The Pattern of the 21^st Century is Predatory Collapse’,  and ‘The Soviet Union of Capitalism’.  Enjoy your visit.

Soaking the Middle Class

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 12 June 2019.]

By this time we have all heard the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential candidates promise Americans so many free things we’ll get that most of us have lost track of all the goodies coming our way when one of the newly declared socialists replaces President Trump.  Let me just recount a partial list to get us all on the same page, because I’m going to talk about paying for all the free stuff.  We are promised Medicare for All, free college, forgiven student loans, national job guarantee, paid family medical leave, guaranteed national income, and, of course, all the things in the Green New Deal.  There is more to the list, but I think that these are enough to give the flavor of what we all are encouraged to expect after 2020.

What no one wants to talk about is how the coming workers’ paradise will be paid for.  The few candidates who dare to venture there give short answers that can be paraphrased as, ‘well, we’re gonna tax the bejeezus out of the corporations and the rich, and make them finally pay their fair share’.  And this usually brings out a sigh of relief from the light thinkers in the middle and lower income classes – ‘we’re gonna get all this free stuff and other people will be paying for it, where do I sign?’

Those requiring more meaty answers are assured that we will follow the European model, and everyone knows that they’ve cracked the code on how bigger governments are really the source of the people’s succor and largess.  However, that’s not the case when we look at their data from the EU and OECD countries.  There we quickly find that 1) they get a lot less than our Democratic candidates promise, and 2) the money to pay for it comes from the middle and lower classes, for the simple reason that the rich don’t have enough loot to foot the bill.  And there’s even a more sinister method by how the taxes eventually get raised on everyone.  The entire story with lots of numbers, charts, and graphs unfolds in the recent Heritage Foundation paper, ‘A Progressive Road Map for Soaking the Middle Class’ by Adam Michel.

Michel summarizes his research with – “Taxes on the rich cannot raise the necessary revenue to fund large European-style welfare states. If left on the current trajectory, U.S. government expenditures will require large tax increases on middle-class Americans. The current progressive agenda to further increase spending on health care, education, environmental policy, and income supports will require even higher taxes on a larger share of taxpayers. If America’s spending continues to look more and more like that of Europe, U.S. tax policy will also need to shift. In European countries, lower-income and middle-class taxpayers pay an average marginal wage tax rate of 49 percent on income above $37,000 a year, and an average value-added tax (VAT) of 20 percent. Those same U.S. taxpayers face a marginal wage tax of 32 percent and an average sales tax of 6 percent. The only sustainable way to avoid a high-tax American future is to reduce the growth rate of federal spending.”

For those still in terminal phases of denial, consider that our federal spending has been growing faster than the economy, tax revenues, inflation, Americans’ wages, and savings.  There is no alternative other than taxes have to be raised to European levels to pay for European size governments and spending.  And as Michel shows from EU and OECD data, that means tax bills will have to be raised to a minimum of three times for everyone – no one, rich, middle, or low earners will be spared.  Everyone will pay because at that level of proposed spending we will have run out of other people’s money.

The Democrats’ proposals will cost a conservative $50T over the next 10 years, more than doubling the current $4.4T annual federal budget which is already one-third funded by debt.  The tax implications are so horrendous that no one on the Left wants to talk about it as we witnessed in this week’s Democrat controlled House Committee on the Budget, which pointedly refused to consider any discussion of where the money would come from for all the things promised in just the Green New Deal.  My recommendation is that you get some answers to these questions before you vote in 2020.

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]  To put some meat on the above arguments.  Here are a couple of graphics illustrating the data from Adam Michel’s paper.  The first shows how much of each nation’s GDP is made up from the total tax burden its government imposes on its citizens.  The reason for America’s high ranking in most economic metrics that bear on people’s QoL should be clear.  There’s a reason why people from all over the world continue to risk life and limb to get into the United States, a reason that is totally, and I do mean TOTALLY, lost on our Left.  (Perhaps promoting policies to make us into a second rate country is the Democrats’ new stealth immigration policy that will then dramatically decrease the pressure on our borders.)

And here’s a compendium of more detailed albeit complex graphs placing the US relative to the EU and OECD countries.  It shows how tax revenues are spread over the spectrum of the countries' wage earners through the marginal rate burdens put on earnings.  It should dispel notions that all the socialist goodies currently in the EU, and promised in the US, are paid for by everyone, and not restricted to monies collected from the socially unjust rich and corporations.

The point to focus on in the above graphs is that the Democrat candidates want to put America right into the middle to upper end of the groups of blue dots representing the EU-OECD countries.  Check out the new tax rates that would apply to ALL our wage earners, and the resulting growth of government to absorb and redistribute the larger share of our nation's GDP (from the first figure, we are now only at the 27% of GDP level).  Does anyone really think that such a massive hit will not put brakes on our economy with the resulting impact on all our lives and motivation to take investment and entrepreneurial risks?  Look to Europe for the answers.

America’s politicians of all stripes know that Americans are overwhelmingly innumerate – they ‘don’t do numbers’.   Data such as presented above make no never mind to the overwhelming share of our citizens who, today more than ever, are focused on polarizing one-liners for their understanding of public policy proposals.  That is why the Democrats have no problem promising unattainable ‘free’ government benefits after they are elected to office.  The tools to make discriminating decisions on such matters were removed long ago from our public educational curricula.

Trump’s Immigration Policy

George Rebane

Our current immigration policy, such as it is, hails and invites illegal entry from distant lands, favors meritless chain migration without end, and offers entry to only one of eight immigrants who have skillsets that would make them productive members of our workforce.  Additionally, its proponents seek every opportunity to provide amnesty and a fast path to citizenship for the 11M to 20M illegal aliens already in the land.

Trump’s proposal is for more than half of our new immigrants to possess skillsets that are scarce and needed, reduce chain migration to a third of the total, and require all legal immigrants to have some knowledge of English and be able to pass an elemental civics test about the US and its forms of governance. (more here)  It is moot on the resident illegals, knowing that this aspect will be resolved through extensive negotiations with the Democrats who look forward to these millions enlarging its constituent voter base.

But all progressives, led by Pelosi and Schumer, have immediately attacked the Trump plan as obviously being against the strategic interests of the Democrats in their massive lurch to the left.  Their main argument, a la Madame Speaker, is that America has never enforced merit-based immigration, and that the generations of the 19^th and early 20^th century immigrants, who contributed so much to America’s greatness, would never have been allowed in had Trump’s policy been in place then.  This claim is false from a number of perspectives, and again exemplifies the low intellectual esteem that Democrat leaders hold their core supporters, and by extension, the country’s undecides – Team Pelosi considers them all as slogan-swallowing, double dummies.

To make matters worse, the Dems’ arguments are even too difficult for some Republicans (including the vaunted Judge Napolitano) to counter.  The truth of the matter is that when those millions from Europe and Asia arrived in generations past, they ALL possessed skills that allowed them to immediately enter our workforce as its newest productive members.  Taken within the context of predominant workforce skillsets of those times, all the arriving immigrants had the ability to start jobs that they already knew how to do, or for which their skill extensions were easily acquired.  (BTW, Mollie Hemingway, senior editor of The Federalist, was the only one who grokked that historical factor on an FN panel – track her career, she is one astute female.)  In our age of specialization, advanced technology, and automation, such jobs for the under-educated from third world countries are much harder to find, thereby putting those English-absent immigrants at a great disadvantage and make them prey for criminals and other low-lifes ready to take advantage of them and make their advent a net cost to our society.

The other factor of which Team Pelosi is ignorant or willing to dissemble is the merit-based immigration policies we have had in place since WW2.  For example, refugees from war ravaged Europe were let in only on the basis of satisfying three major criteria – having US-needed skills, being sufficiently healthy, and having a political record with no taint of communist or fascist support.  These requirements were relaxed in the post-Vietnam era when immigration policy began to support party-specific voter agendas.  As cited above, workforce merit factors in for only one out of eight legal immigrants, and, of course, zero for those most welcomed above all who are adept at climbing dilapidated fences and fording rivers.

So Trump’s totally pro-American immigration policy proposal has little chance of becoming law under the current federal government's make-up, but contributes yet one more litmus test to distinguish between the pro- and anti-American factions in our land.

Democrats’ 2020 Platform Previewed

George Rebane

Ever since Trump was elected president and the national Left mobilized their efforts to destroy his administration and unseat him, I’ve been bitching and moaning that the Democrats offered no alternative programs to implement that would “fundamentally transform” America as promised.  Well, the time has come to stop complaining because in recent months after the 2018 election the Democrats have more than filled a cornucopia of initiatives, proposals, programs, and promises to construct several election platforms for any political party dedicated to steering America into a socialist state.

This was made clear to me when I received the notes that a friend used in his talk to an organization the other day.  Its perusal reveals an extensive list of things we may expect were the country to hand over control of the executive and legislative branches to our anti-American Left (anti-American in the sense that they don’t like the America of the past nor the direction it was going before they came along, hence their need for a fundamental transformation).

Without further ado, here is the laundry list of items the Democrats want to afflict on the country starting in 2021.  It is presented as received with minimal editing.

Scattershots – 28feb19 (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

Trump won big in Hanoi.  By walking away with a smile when the Ugly Fat Kid overreached by offering to give some to get all, our president maintained his creds and caused the UFK to call a midnight news conference to claim a misunderstanding – ‘No, no, no, we didn’t demand that all the sanctions be lifted.’  Bullshit; Trump would never have left had not the UFK overplayed his hand.  Now, with visions of a prosperous Vietnam in his head, the UFK will be ready for some real give and take – I predict that he will seek the next meeting before the end of this year.  In the meantime the friendly parting will maintain the UFK’s good behavior – no testing.  All in all, a brilliant piece of foreign policy with a country that for 60+ years no other president has made any progress.

RR has concluded early and often (here) that our Millennials are America’s dumbest generation – both they and their parents were ‘educated’ in leftwing unionized public schools.  That most of them now view socialism favorably over open market capitalism gives abundant testimony that they will readily vote America into tyranny.  The culmination of dumbth indeed.

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin reminds us (here) in detail of how biased and one-sided are our lamestream media.  After two years of investigating Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia to throw the 2016 election, on 12feb19 NBC reported, “After two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle."  During this time the lamestream devoted more than 36 hours of intense coverage attempting to convince America that the evidence for collusion existed and was about to be released.  Instead of banner headlines for this announcement, all the lamestream outlets together basically ignored the bipartisan announcement from the Senate committee.  “But just take a moment to sit back and compare 2,202 minutes of media coverage of potential collusion with Russia — with supposedly unbiased journalists accusing a sitting American president of misconduct, lack of patriotism, impeachable offenses, or worse — to the less than one minute of coverage within the first 48 hours of an announcement that no evidence has actually been uncovered in a serious two-year bipartisan investigation, and it is abundantly clear why many Americans have lost faith in the honesty and trustworthiness of the media.”

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, our favorite manager of the masses (here), has a new book On Freedom.  There he argues that too much freedom is really not all that good for us – “What if people do not know how to find their way?” - that certain unnamed elites should really be in positions to mercifully limit our choices to only the proper ones, and then “nudge” us to the correct one before we stray too far from the social ideal, this to be prevented by structuring the country’s “choice architecture”.  While Big Brother looms large in the background, Sunstein never quite explains “which of us deserves the exalted position to design and impose nudges on others, and for what ends?” (more here)  But not to worry, after the Green New Deal gets into gear, Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and AOC will know exactly how to set up such ‘exalted positions’; all we have to do is vote correctly in 2020.

Italy will offer Universal Basic Income real soon now.  They’re going to make up the shortfall for all people earning less than their poverty threshold – but wait!  If you subsequently get a job or a better paying job, then the government will cut back you UBI payments to the extent that your earnings exceed that threshold.  Now that brilliant tactic is really going to motivate people to go work and get paid less. (more here)  Finland already had to roll up its experiment with UBI because people got real used to living on unearned handouts and only put forth effort in the black markets to increase their (untaxable) incomes.  To their benefit, even a bunch of Italy’s leftwing politicians are worried about this UBI’s impact on the national fisc which, next to Greece, is Europe’s shakiest.  The UBI was ushered in by the electorate voting for socialist Luigi Di Maio who was able to marshal Italy’s byzantine legislative machinery to launch their UBI.  That’s what enough not-too-bright voters and socialists candidates can do – given our Millennials, along with Bernie, Liz, and Kamala, we should not be too sanguine when next year rolls around.

[2mar19 update]  The crippling counters by our leftwing politicians and courts to stopping illegal entrants and contraband is having the predicted impact – more people than ever are climbing border fences and walls.  Government stats cite “The proportion of foreign nationals attempting to cross the border illegally rather than reporting to legal ports of entry has risen in the past year, according to the data. Those crossing illegally made up 73 percent of all border crossings from October 2017 to January 2018 and then rose to 83 percent for the same period of time ending on Jan. 31, 2019, NBC News reported Friday.” (more here)  Why’s that?  Well, we all know that most entrants claiming asylum don’t have a leg to stand on, and before Trump they were admitted at legal crossing points, told to appear in a US immigration court at some future date, and then turned loose never to be seen again.  Today we tell such asylum seeker to stay in Mexico until their court date comes up.  But the overwhelming share of them know they can’t qualify for asylum, so they go back to Mexico and then attempt illegal crossings somewhere down the line where they think the border is most porous.  Today they’re coming in over such porous spots at just the underside of a million a year because we can't do the right thing and build the needed wall/fence border security infrastructure.  And the anti-American Left continues to trumpet through their lamestream outlets that this does not constitute a national emergency.  (BTW, the size of an army division is about 15,000 troops.  At 80,000 illegal entrants per month, that is like an invasion force of five divisions each and every month.  And we haven’t even started reviewing the growing dollar cost of illegals in the country.)

America’s education - mandated and biased (updated 2mar19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 February 2019.]

Many and perhaps most young people today have a very jaundiced view of America, capitalism, Christianity, and western civilization in general.  Instead, all across the country and especially in the academe, they have come to embrace ideas about the benefits of collectivism – especially socialism – and societies that emphasize group identities and a world order in which group membership, especially if in one of the aggrieved groups, is paramount.  Individualism, personal freedom, and entrepreneurships that promise riches are on the wane.  How did we arrive at such a societal junction from which all roads lead to a fundamentally transformed America, one that will share little with what our Founders bequeathed us, and with the system that made us the envy of the world?

Political leaders, from constitutional monarchies to communism, answer that such rapid changes in outlook and attitudes can only come from the educational system governments adopt and impose – as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.  And in the last half century there has been a lot of twig bending going on in America’s schools, and the clear evidence indicates that all the bending has been leftward.  Let’s look at three seemingly disparate facets of such evidence.

Scattershots – 25feb19 (updated 26feb19)

George Rebane

In ‘America’s Second Civil War’ by Dennis Prager, he makes the case of the Great Divide stating that, save for slavery, Americans are further apart in how they think about their country and in which direction should be its future, than during the “First Civil War” in the 19th century.  He writes in Townhall.com that “Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative. … The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism. … Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.”  This has been a seminal part of Rebane Doctrine and the RR commentaries that have expanded on these points over the years.  This message will continue here as long as it is allowed to be published.

Gov Gavin Newsom is part of the leftwing clatch that supported CA’s bullet train to nowhere and blew billions in its abortive and aborted construction.  CA having violated literally every part of the agreement with the feds for getting dollars from Washington, Trump now has stopped further funding and wants to claw back what the state has fraudulently received.  Newsom unabashedly lies in stating that the state has complied, and is really not stopping the project, but merely reducing its scope to have it now go from nowhere to nowhere on the remaining funds. (more here)  Ultimately he’ll have to go back to CA voters for more money, and he’ll probably get it from a now-dominant Democrat electorate, most of whom don’t pay very much or any taxes.  To them it will all be OPM from the greedy rich.

Edelman Intelligence conducted a recent poll which revealed that “53% of California residents are considering leaving the Golden State because of the high cost of living.” A higher share (62%) of “respondents said they believed the best days of California were in the past.” (more here and here)  This in the face of a continuing barrage of leftwing lies telling us that the state is in fine fettle with all the right-thinking people happy dancing in the streets.  As also witnessed on these pages, the progressives maintain that only the narrow-minded, ignorant conservatives are disgruntled because the Republican party has become irrelevant in Sacramento and major metropolitan areas.  People voting with their feet tell a different story.

Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid will meet again, this time in Vietnam, to continue talking about North Korea’s 'denuclearization', a concept yet to be defined by the parties.  And you can bet the ranch that their current definitions are not even close.  Here’s my take on Trump’s plan forward.  He knows the UFK cannot give up his nuclear program for the simple reason that he and his family will then be killed by the high level echelon of generals that surrounds him (because they and their families will also live only so long as the regime survives, otherwise they too will be dead meat).  So Trump will be satisfied to continue these talks, claiming progress as long as NK doesn’t resume missile flights and underground testing.  When he leaves office and a more weaker-looking Democrat (a la Obama) takes over, the UFK will immediately resume testing and threatening that will bring the world to the brink again, and also solidify his grip on his regime.  At that point Trump and the Repubs will point out that it was their clever foreign policy that kept the world safe, and now look what’s happening with the naïve Dem leadership in power.  This will be known as Trump’s Grand Ropadope to avoid war on the Korean peninsula for which no one seems to have a stomach.

[26feb19 update]  Henderson’s population surges past Reno’s as Californians arrive in droves to escape taxes, fees, regulations, and prices (especially for living units).  The numbers are truly amazing as again reported in ‘As California Loses People, a Las Vegas Suburb Grows’.  California’s small net population growth is made possible by an equally massive influx of immigrants and illegal aliens, and a high birthrate contributed by resident minorities.  Progressives are the only political segment of California’s population that is totally sanguine if not celebratory about this demographic dynamic.  The rest of us chickens continue wondering how long the state can carry on with an ever smaller cohort of highly taxed wealth generators.

Unsustainable Socialism

If it hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. - Progressive shibboleth

George Rebane

The conversation hereabouts circles the ‘sustainability of socialism’ barn as regularly as turning the pages of a calendar.   Ever since the French revolution we have always lived with socialists who in past years were harder to spot, at least until Marx and Bastiat published their pro- and con- apologies.  In those years socialists living in capitalist countries did their best to hide their socio-economic credos as they sought to fashion public policy, and letting the word ‘socialism’ be connected with their proposals was the ultimate taboo and an almost certain kiss of death.

Not so any more.  We are now almost 50 years into a public education system the common thread of which has been to turn out socialist-friendly graduates.  Most recently this subterfuge has been replaced with the educators’ blatant promotion of socialism accompanied by a revised history that strongly recommends it to young minds.  And so today we have at least two generations of 'educated' voters who are convinced that everything anti-socialist they hear in the public forum is fomented by the rightwing fascisti and their greedy capitalist running dogs.

Border Security’s True Colors (updated 20feb19)

George Rebane

For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21^st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

[20feb19 update]  Great Divide reflections: >85% conservatives and Republicans believe there is a national emergency at the border; >65% of liberals and Democrats believe there is no border emergency.  The Right is astounded at this disparity and wonders how a nation with such a polarized outlook on such fundamental matters can continue, let alone function.  On the other hand, with no such concerns the Left believes the Right is just ignorant and evil, and needs to be brought to heel by whatever means it takes.

The American AI Initiative & herding cats

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 February 2019.]

The entire field of artificial or machine intelligence (AI) seems to be more misunderstood by the day, and not only on Main Street, but also in the highest levels of government.  President Trump recently signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative.  The purpose of this whatever it is, is to “focus federal government resources to develop AI” in order to “increase our prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”

The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

George Rebane

Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

• US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
• Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
• Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
• Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
• Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

[8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

Twilight in California – VDH nails it

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson, California farmer, premier academic, and syndicated columnist, has given a comprehensive analysis of California’s sunset – and I do mean comprehensive.  We have covered the work of VDH many times on these pages (e.g. here), and in ‘Wealth, Poverty, and Flight: The Same Old California’ he takes us through a cold shower look at ourselves from multiple viewpoints, using hard stats on which to base his points.  I was going to include this in the last Scattershots, and forgot.  Then two friends emailed me a kick in the pants, and on second thought, this outstanding essay demands a post of its very own to draw readers’ attention to it.

California truly is the canary in our country’s mineshaft – “Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants, and a fleeing middle class.”  The Left has brought the state to its current condition of decline and decrepitude, and is now busy practicing the fine art of political taxidermy and ideological embalming to continue selling the image of what once was California.  And as VDH points out, our share of the nation’s double dummies is so high today that almost any kind of socialist bullcrap is easily peddled and readily consumed – our own county is an illustrative work-in-progress as the progressive pandemic spreads into the Sierra.

This essay is a must read, if for nothing else than to take the measure of our Left as it denies chapter and verse of what is presented, while the state continues to sink under total one-party rule that is now going into socialist overdrive.  There is no state that is more locked into the attempt to solve its every mounting problem by piling on regulations and increasing taxes.

Scattershots – 22jan19 (updated 24jan19)

George Rebane

The ignorant-to-evil needle has made a big jump toward evil in the last couple of days with the MAGA hat massacre in DC, and the shaming of Second Lady Mrs Pence.  The Catholic boys in the MAGA hats committed two sins for which the Liberal Lies machine went ballistic – they were Christians and obvious Trump supporters.  That was enough to fabricate a hateful story about their racism against American Indians and disseminate a carefully edited video to lamestream outlets who all joined in the howling for the boys’ scalps.  When the story was quickly discredited, the howlers just moved on to their next coverage of fake news.  The same thing happened with Mrs Pence who was pilloried for being provided Secret Service protection for her engagement as an arts teacher at a (gasp!) Christian grade school.  To the legions of progressive idiots that was evidence of violating the separation of church and state.  And the Left still thinks that the coming Great Divide is only a rightwing myth. 

Nevada County’s Love Walk on MLK day was strictly a one-sided affair.  For the attendees to such events, MLK’s civil rights legacy appears to have been a failure.  People attending are of a like mind that the country now is more racist than ever, and that extraordinary means need be brought to bear to restore Dr King’s dream, and this time we’ll get it right.  To boot, everyone not of this mindset is by definition a racist, and proof that today in America racism rules.  In a previous discussion of the ideological tilt of national holidays, it’s easy to see why MLK day is now firmly a leftwing holiday. (Imagine wearing your MAGA cap on the Love Walk.  To date we have not bothered to get our MAGA caps, but given what the socialist brown shirts have launched in the land, the time has come to get one and wear it.)

Wanna see quantitative economic projections on AOC’s 70% tax rate for the country? Take a look at the misery that such a confiscatory policy would heap on the middle class.  Yes, Virginia, the MIDDLE CLASS, because that’s where socialists have to go after they first cripple the economy with their tax on ‘the rich’.  The next inevitable tax, as government revenues sink, will be on the middle class, why?  Because that’s where the money is, and the poor snuffies voting for socialists haven’t a clue about their own doings in the voting booth.  And how will it be sold?  By turning up the volume on the “ravages of capitalism” narrative, of course.  (more here and here)

Racism and racist, terms progressives use constantly are among the terms no progressive wants to define.  Much to the consternation of our liberal readers, here on RR we are prone to pursue semantics, especially of the operational kind (meaning you can usefully apply them in the realworld).  Illustrating this are a couple of forays into this melee ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racialism Rising’, and, of course, see the RR Glossary.

[23jan19 update]  RR readers are aware of my longstanding thoughts on unionized public schools.  The recent LA teachers strike underlined all these concerns, and the main concern that union teachers don’t really give a care for the kids as again pointed out by Jason Riley (here) in the 23jan19 WSJ.  “When the United Auto Workers walk off the job, no one pretends the care about car buyers. … Yet striking public school teachers and their union representatives insist they are action behalf of the children.  We’re expected to believe the priorities of education workers are perfectly aligned with those of students.”  The blatant facts about school spending, students’ performance, and aggressive opposition to the spread of non-union, public charter schools tells a completely different story.  “Teachers unions are unions first, not reformers or student advocates.  Their real agenda – their only agenda – is to protect their members by any means possible.  No matter what those picket signs said, the unions weren’t helping students.  They were using them.”

[24jan19 update] “Senate Rejects Two Rival Spending Bills, Extending Shutdown” Can we now finally give up the notion that just because one party or the other has a majority in Congress (specifically the Senate), that it therefore ‘controls’ what that chamber does?  The Founders intended government’s ability to make laws to be a slow, deliberative, if not awkward process, and the Senate’s super-majority rule of 60 votes helps implement this intent.  So let’s pick up a bit on the simplistic arguments in these comment streams about which party ‘controlled’ Congress in what years so as to imply that they could have passed anything they wanted.  Sophomoric!

SecComm Wilbur Ross today picked up on my suggestion that the fed workers running out of cash should just go get a loan to tide them over.  And he was dunned for making such a practical suggestion.  The needy fed workers would not be borrowing more than their take-home pay since that is what they had planned to spend in the first place, and that amount is guaranteed to them after the shutdown ends.  That is about the best collateral, save US Treasuries, that you can give a lender who can even have you sign a paper agreeing that the govt submit the loan amount directly to the lender.  And the lenders can get extra PR brownie points by advertising that these are short-term no interest loans.  What’s not to like?  Yet it was only ol’ Wilbur who finally came up with that while the rest of Washington is just sitting around with their teeth in their mouth.  It’s almost as if both sides wanted the furloughed to go on a publicized fast.  Nah!

Swedish Rhapsody

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 January 2019.]

George Rebane

Today our socialist politicians feel that they have the wind at their back to fundamentally transform our country into the Socialist States of America.  And that may well be the case as poll after poll shows that for most Americans capitalism has fallen out of favor, or at best they are indifferent to its existence and role in supporting their quality of life.  The Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, are now the major voting block, having taken their positions in government and the private sector workforce.  Their attitudes reflect the education they received in our unionized public schools, and most are definitely in favor of socialism as the better way to organize society and our economy – over half prefer socialism to capitalism.

For most Americans, tilting leftward or already there, Scandinavia is their siren song of socialism.  And among those nations, Sweden is the posterchild and most frequent answer to, ‘Why can’t we be more like …?’  Sweden is held up to us by both progressive politicians and their handmaiden media as the paragon of how to correctly do government.

The mangling of managed minds

George Rebane

People who are informed primarily through media soundbites have been shown to have very volatile opinions.  When a new and contrary tranche of soundbites comes along, such people more often than not change their minds and follow the new direction of the most recent compelling soundbite.  This is because soundbite driven opinions are reactionary and not reasoned.  That is simply because the individual takes no time or effort to develop any depth of understanding in what he currently believes.  Finicky and fleeting feelings drive decisions for such people.  Bryan Caplan, in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, was one of the first to publish the research confirming how voters make decisions about issues and candidates.

The bottom line acceptance of Caplan’s findings is corroborated by how politicians and our news media (specifically the lamestream) construct their messages for soundbite thinkers.  This morning’s analyses of President Trump’s Oval Office speech last night is chuck full of such messaging.

One frequently used ruse is to dismiss stated levels by surreptitiously sliding the argument over to rates, and also dismiss inconvenient rates by citing the more fortuitous change in the offending rate.  [For the technically versed, this well-known process is known as ‘climbing the derivative ladder’ until you find the one that serves your narrative.]  An example here is the President’s citing the high number of illegals currently coming over the border.  This the lamestream journalist brushes off by telling listeners that the rate of illegals entering was higher in the past.  For innumerates and soundbite thinkers, this is an effective way to dismiss concern over the continuing rate of illegal entrants.  Presented in this context, it never occurs to them that what’s happening now is still a huge and preventable problem that overwhelms our border security personnel.

Pelosi’s “Immoral Wall” (updated 6jan19)

George Rebane

In The Myth of the Rational Voter Bryan Caplan documented a significant body of research which showed that in the US voters in the aggregate are what may be termed formally insane.  The general understanding of this phenomenon applies to populations all over the world, and its general characteristics were even known to the ancients.  Of course, our well-read Founders knew this, and that is why, in order to avoid the mistakes of the past, they wisely did not leave us a democracy.

The democratic republic they did construct and detailed in our Constitution is supposed to keep the hoi polloi’s mitts off the machinery of our federal and state governments.  They inserted a hopefully wiser and more circumspect layer of elected representatives between the mass of citizens and the levers of power.  The idea was that such electeds would be better read and would take a broader view of things that insured the country’s prudent progress.  Unspoken, save in their oaths of office, was the notion that all of these worthies would be pro-American – i.e. legislate so as to assure the republic’s prosperous and permanent future.

Our Founders had no idea of the world order in which America would find itself 250 years after declaring our independence.  Today two major ideologies, founded by Marx and Muhammad, are working to bring all the peoples of the world under one monolithic governing leviathan.  Each, in the interval, willing to work off the gains of the other in the firm belief that they will be the victor when the dust settles.  In the meantime, there will be a need for lots of dust, or ‘cracked eggs’, or whatever to bring the outdated global gaggle of sovereign nation-states to an end.

Marx’s collectivists today march to that brave new world mostly under the socialist banner, although swapping for the colors of communism (already/still solidly ensconced in the community of nations) is always possible were stronger medicine necessary to mind the masses.  Muhammad’s disciples, no matter their current schisms, see the global caliphate under sharia law as the culmination of Allah’s plan for his earthly creation.  Both can accept convenient amalgamations of the two on the road to their glorious destinations.

Dems Embrace Shutdown (updated)

George Rebane (updated)

Now in its second week, the partial (25%) shutdown of the federal government continues with the Democrats refusing to negotiate with President Trump.  The natural deal to be made is for the Dems to accept the $5B for border security (including all means and methods) and the Repubs to accept legalizing the residence of DACA aliens.

The Dems’ position is clear and repeated often – they will refuse Trump any legislative victories and will use their House majority in the attempt to bring down this administration through the launch of a thousand investigations into anything remotely connected with Donald Trump, either now or back then.  The logic behind it is clear.

Let the DACA aliens swing in the wind while the border remains porous and countless thousands continue streaming in.  Sooner or later the illegal alien share of America’s population will be so high (now above 30M by some estimates) that the only non-violent political solution will be granting amnesty to the lot, with border security still unresolved (see also A21).  All of these new residents with a paved path to citizenship will be Democrat voters whose numbers overwhelm the paltry hundreds of thousands in the current DACA cohort.  All that is required is a prudently pernicious patience on the part of the Left.

And during the interval, our lightly-read neighbors will constantly be fed the repeated lies that legal immigration is the same as illegal entry, and that ‘walls don’t work’.  NY’s Gov Cuomo is repeating that lie today on Ellis Island, and history shows that walls are and always have been very effective in preventing both ingress and egress where they have been erected and maintained.  The Dems are placing a smart bet that after three generations their educational systems have produced enough double dummies to swallow whatever is fed to them.

[update]  In ‘Our Exhausted American Mediocracy’ noted historian Victor Davis Hanson takes us through the notable sea change that accompanied and/or was revealed by Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.  It is a marvelous summary of a perspective attempted by many writers over the last two years.  VDH nails it, and includes illuminating sections addressing ‘Earned Hypocrisies?’ and ‘A Case Against Trump?’.  I bring this essay mainly to the attention of our liberal neighbors who seem to get these ideas only through RR – consider it a public service of purview broadening.  (H/T to reader)

More to the point of the contempt with which Democrat politicians hold their constituents, another oft told lie is told in response to every new atrocity committed by an illegal alien – most recently by Gustavo Arriaga murdering police officer Ronil Singh.  The Left glibly counters the violence committed by illegals by the bland claim that ‘immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born’, which their voters have no capacity to parse as to what that claim means.  In ‘The Immorality of Illegal Immigration’ VDH points out that ‘statisticians argue that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born, but never quite calibrate illegal immigrants into the equation (in part because no one has any idea who, where, or how many they are, as estimates range from 11 to 20 million) or note that second-generation native-born children of immigrants have much higher violent-crime rates than do their immigrant parents, and in circular fashion add to the general pool of violent Americans who then are used to contrast immigrants as less violent.’, and then makes the case that “we should redefine the entire morality of multifaceted illegal immigration.”

Scattershots – 16dec18 (updated 20dec18)

"Distrust of experts is the cornerstone of science."  Richard Feynman

George Rebane

CA’s revenue model is a disaster as we bid adieu to Gov Moonbeam (he got the name in the 70s when he proposed the state start its own NASA).  70% of state revenues come from personal income taxes, and half of these (i.e. 35%) are paid by the top 1% of earners.  These monies come from feast-or-famine earnings, making state financial planning virtually impossible.  Dems believe in corporations bearing a heavy tax burden, and that CA has been awash with big corporations.  What’s wrong with this picture as the state’s know-nothing electorate keeps sending ever more functional idiots to Sacramento?  And what does the exiting Moonbeam say? - "CA's next governor is going to be on the edge of a cliff."

NPR told us in detail this morning that it is America’s responsibility to reduce wait-times for hordes of asylum seekers encamped on the other side of our southern border.  It doesn’t matter at what rates these thousands of hopeful migrants arrive there, the lamestream tells Americans that it is their government’s job to expand immigration handling facilities and staff so as to minimize inconvenience and discomfort to aliens who demand entry into our land.  The whole narrative is sold to our nebbishes as the need to stop the US from violating some kind of human rights if foreigners are not processed lickety-split at our border crossing points.  The not so hidden message being that if they have to wait, then it is their right to enter illegally, at which point we either let them disappear into our population, or register them and start taking care of them indefinitely.

[18dec18 update]  Single Payer fake news is revealed once more.  The socialists promoting socialized medicine all over the world have to convert the US to that government-run system, else it continues to give lie to all their efforts to run such programs in other countries.  Dr Scott Atlas, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes ‘Single Payer’s Misleading Statistics’ in which he takes apart the fake news which the lamestream and its (also local) acolytes tout about how poorly the US is doing viz the other more enlightened countries with nationalized healthcare.  Well, for openers Dr Atlas shows that “mediocre US rankings in infant mortality and life expectancy have little to do with health care quality.”  He goes on to reveal the many kinds of apples-to-oranges comparisons that fake news purveyors have relied on for years to convince many Americans that since government has screwed up so many other things it has commandeered, our healthcare industry should also be put under its care and management.

Caltrans is the latest expert on climate change.  The 18dec18 Union reports (here),  “Caltrans has released two Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments as part of an effort to understand how and where climate change may impact the State Highway System, a news release states.  The assessments evaluate risks, including extreme temperatures, increased precipitation, storm surge, wildfire risk and sea level rise. … Extreme weather and its associated costs are expected to become more pronounced and more frequent in the future as a result of climate change. … Caltrans has developed an interactive mapping application for public use, which shows impacted locations and the climate model results. … The reports and the interactive mapping application can be accessed (here).”  Note physicist Richard Feynman's caution above.

‘DeBlasio Sees Too Many Asians’ – Yes indeed, NYC’s DeBlasio is another hard-left politician who supports socially destructive diversity through blatantly racist policies - once more proving that sacrificing racism on the altar of diversity is no sin.  The mayor argues that the merit-based admission process to the city’s eight elite high schools is unjust because Asians make up more than 70% of their student bodies, whites about 20%, and Latinos and African-Americans coming in around 5%.  Hizzoner displays his critical thinking and numeracy skills by pointing out that “only 10% of Black or Latino students get offers from the specialized high schools even though they account for nearly 70% of the city’s high school population.”  Well, no kidding.  As part of its contribution to national dumbth, NYC’s 3-8^th graders overall are less than 50% proficient in English and math, while for black students only one in three and one in four are proficient respectively in English and math.  And once more, the Left continues to do what it can in every sphere of public policy to promote America-last policies on the world stage.

[20dec18 update]  Pulling out of Syria.  This is a big step in the implementation of our Mideast policy.  I usually weigh in on such happenings, and here’s my two cents of Rebane Doctrine.  Unless we want to completely abandon the Mideast to let them settle their affairs with only Russian and Chinese meddling, I think Trump is making a mistake in pulling out the remaining 2K US troops from Syria.  This move will give ISIS a second wind to retrench as Turkey et al will attack our Kurdish allies in Syria – ISIS will stand aside and watch its enemies beat crap out of each other.  I am a longstanding proponent of Kurdistan, and see a strong Kurdish state made from contiguous pieces of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as contributing mightily to Mideast stability, and acting as the bulwark against Iran’s establishing its strategic ‘arc to the Mediterranean’.  The new Kurdistan would stand smack dab in the way of that, and having their own nation would bring an end to the Turks’ decades long fight in their south-east with Kurdish militants.

The US staying in Syria to maintain the current power balance is a hell of a lot better politically and logistically than pulling out and then having to go back in for a number of reasons, all bad for US interests.  But if we decide to leave the Mideast altogether, then the Turks and Iran will probably wind up going to war over who will be the new regional hegemon.  We will lose the trust of the regional semi-allies – Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt – we still have left, all of whom will seek other accommodations with Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China.  And then we’ll have to go back in later to protect Israel, which will be totally on its own in the region.  Are we then going to abandon Israel to use its nuclear capability to defend itself, or will we have to go back in at multiples of the political, dollar, and human costs to keep our promise to the Jewish state?  President Trump hasn’t told us what his druthers are about our staying in the region, or pulling up stakes and letting radical Islam have a real go at dominating the entire Mideast.  All things considered, a bit by piece pullout is not the answer to any problem.

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Coming Apart and the Beltway Bubble (updated 4dec18)

George Rebane

SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense.  I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD.  But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed.  I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.

The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’  He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.”  What??!!

Plastics and more from CO2

George Rebane

The latest chapter in the global climate change hysteria was published last week.  The ‘4^th National Climate Assessment, Vol2’ (NCA4V2) purported to summarize for light readers the dreadful fate that will surely befall all of us were we not to immediately put in place policies that would pauper ALL developed countries.   This is the only reason the others are not willing to commit economic suicide, and instead relegating their earth preserving wrath into versions of public outrage against the US for not willing to fly solo into that mountain of politicized climate science.

NCA4V1 was published last year, and contained the then ignored ‘science’ behind the current version of the hysteria.  Now that NCA4V2, the political summary of the 1,500+ page NCA4, has issued, scores of scientists and analysts, not on the climate change payroll, have again reviewed the purported science, and again concluded that both volumes represent a big nothing-burger at best and fake news at worst.  Specifically, the rebuttals echo the years of identical arguments presented on RR, and can be stated compactly as –

1. The NCA4V1 results are calculated from over two dozen general circulation models (GCMs), none of which agree, and some of them clearly implausible;
2. None of the GCMs “used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.”

We are alerted by Russ Steele (here) to one of the more comprehensive analyses of NCA4 by Andy May (here).  In there May points out that even in the NCA4’s summary, the economic effects of the predicted climate change are minuscule, and most certainly contain no verifiable demonstration that human activity is the controlling cause of the GCMs’ predicted temperature change(s), not that reducing such activities would have any significant effect on the perpetual dynamics of earth’s climate.

OK, so what’s the latest that real technology and science have to say about that dastardly GHG, yes, CO2.  Well, as reported by New Atlas (here) it turns out that a team of scientists at Rutgers University have achieved an artificial photosynthesis breakthrough that promises to allow the manufacture of plastics, resins, and pharmaceuticals “on the cheap”.  The overview of the process is shown in the figure, and the complete story is published in Energy & Environmental Science (Issue 9, 2018 here).

The point to be made here is that the realworld is rapidly giving lie to the climate change hysteria mongers rushing to put us on a one-way road to global governance and its inevitable autocracy cum tyranny.  The real climate change is not what’s being sold to the world’s masses, and accelerating technology continues to produce environment sustaining solutions without government diktats, driven by (gasp), yes, capitalism.  “With patents in hand, the (Rutgers) team will now work toward commercializing the technology.”

Monday with The Union

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I very much enjoy reading The Union – our town’s newspaper.  (This pleasure preceded her joining the paper’s editorial board.)  I am particularly entertained by George Boardman’s columns, and the regularly occasioned other voices from locals with academic credentials like Dr Milan Vodicka.  Dr Vodicka is a longtime Nevada County resident and a naturalized citizen immigrant like me.  We have met him before in these pages - e.g. here, where I noted that “the good Dr Vodicka is an ‘Independent Education Management Professional’ with an academic pedigree from the California Institute of Integral Studies that prides itself with academic departments such as ‘Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion’, ‘Integral and Transpersonal Psychology’, and ‘Drama Therapy’.”

In today’s (19nov18) Union, Dr Vodicka illustrates his academic prowess to readers by misunderstanding the difference between the communist controlled economy of his native Czechoslovakia and the US economy we are now enjoying.  There he likens the centrally planned economy of his youth, that based all progress on the tons of steel produced while totally ignoring the people’s needs for consumer goods, with that of America’s which is based on defining our economic boom in terms of providing the wherewithal for record consumer consumption.  He considers both to be short-sighted ‘single attribute’ measures that fall equally short of other attributes that should be the proper measure of an economy.

His measure of an economy (seatbelts please) must center on how well it concerns itself with ecological and environmental affairs, instead of crass indicators like consumer satisfaction, financial growth, and a nation’s quality of life.  In Vodicka’s perspective – “Measuring the ‘boomness’ of the economic performance just by money is like wandering in the world being blind.”

The focus of this liberal academic’s (may I use that label?) environmental interest is, of course, scientifically indisputable ‘climate change’, aka preventable manmade global warming.  There he lectures us on the characteristics of “scientific fact” – “1. measurability, 2. verifiability, and 3. repeatability” - without noticing that the propositions which support ‘climate change’ can lay claim to none of these. (more here)

A correspondent sent me one of the countless debunkings of public policies put in place to limit human emissions of that dreaded CO2.  This was recently put out by Prof Rutherford Plimer, much published geologist and professor emeritus of earth sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide.  Plimer points out again what the lamestream bends over backwards to hide facts about the natural emissions of CO2 by the ongoing eruptions of earth’s over 200 active volcanoes.  For example, just four days of the recent Icelandic eruptions “negated every single effort” all humans have made over the past five years to reduce CO2 emissions on our planet.  More convincing to discerning minds is the fact that Mt Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption, that lasted for about a year, “spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.”

Dr Vodicka apparently knows nothing of such ongoing natural processes that overwhelm human intents and activities, and he most certainly does not have the academic credentials to understand or dispute such obvious realities, which should at least invite some open-minded skepticism about our current politically faith-based writhings to combat global warming.

Turning now to our favorite local liberal commentator and RR commenter George Boardman, we learn from his column (here) that he has missed the news of the Central American migrants’ arrival at the border in Tijuana.  And it also seems that he’s unaware of the bus and truck transportation that is now available to the thousands whom he characterizes as being “weeks from the border”.  Again, it’s best not to know stuff that will upset the Left’s carefully crafted and continuously fed narrative.

California Wildfires – Some Reflections

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.  Isaac Asimov

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 keep the 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 so 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.