Welcome dear Reader to this, my first weblog.  From it I hope to record scribblings on various topics that may contain a new thought or two for your amusement and, perhaps, for The Record.  In this I belatedly join the ranks of thousands (soon millions?) who bare parts of themselves on the web for all the world to see.  Actually, my aim is not so much for you to see me, but to see and, hopefully, understand what I see.  And if you feed back your comments, I may hope to also understand what you see and thereby we both benefit.

Why should you be interested in the world through my eyes?  Enter my hubris.  Maybe because I have had many birthdays, still retain most of my marbles, and have seen and experienced more than many.  My prejudices, perceptions, prognostications, and prescriptions grow out of a life that started in the depths and aftermath of our greatest war, struggled through trials and blessings granted to but a small fraction of us, and that is now arrived on a peak of sorts.  From here I can still clearly see the road traveled by an ever hopeful human horde of which now I am temporarily a part. And as I look forward into a foggy future, there appears a fork pointing alternatively toward Man’s greatest adventure or utter termination.  I hope that in some way you may judge parts of this vision to have value.

Rebane’s Ruminations is also a member of the Bastiat Triangle Alliance, a small group of interlinked blogs – NC Media Watch, Light on Nevada County – written by authors sharing fundamental values about the formation and functioning of human societies.  Frederic Bastiat was a remarkable French social philosopher and economist of the first half of the 19th century whose writings include The Law.  In this short treatise he identifies and defends the essential and socially beneficial relationship between the citizen and government of a sovereign nation-state.  He demonstrates that the minimal and fundamental reinforcing tenets of that relationship are the citizen’s seminal rights of personal security, liberty of actions, and ownership of property.  The weakening of any one of these three necessarily weakens the remaining two, hence the idea of the triangle which, with all members intact, is the basic unit of strength and stability.  Yet weakening or removing any one member will cause the entire structure to weaken or collapse.

We hold that Bastiat and our country’s Founders shared the insight of such a triangle of fundamental human rights which became the basis of our country’s Constitution.  In The Law, Bastiat goes on to expand on the implications of the triangle in the proper functioning of the state and the conduct of its citizens.  For the better part of the 20th century each of these rights has been repeatedly weakened much to the hazard of our Republic.  Recognizing the elaborate circuses that now divert our electorate, we have united our prickly pens, each according to his lights, to mount and maintain a stubborn resistance against this erosion.