George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 September 2014.]

Are we in information overload?  It’s hard to think back to a time when Americans have been in such deep denial about so many things going on in the world – both here and abroad.  When I begin to think about the laundry list of current happenings, it seems never ending.  Let’s just illustrate a few of the major items to which we seem to pay no mind.

The campaign for ever more legislation to stop manmade global warming has always ignored the science involved, and in the last years has ignored and misrepresented hard data about actual things we can see and measure – things like global temperature which has been flat or falling during the last 15 plus years, the extent of polar ice caps which have never been bigger, new low temperature records and early snows, fewer extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes, no catastrophic sea level rises, and the list goes on.  But our government controllers deny all this and are going forward at state and federal levels as if we had a proven climate emergency that needs more draconian legislation and regulation, right now.  We keep hearing ‘the debate is over’; that just is not so.

All over the world the United States has become a paper tiger in the eyes of radical Islam which is now comprised of multiple militia groups spread over vast regions of the Middle East and Africa, and stronger than ever.  One group has even beaten standing armies in two countries, and now rules over 8M people.  They execute our innocents with impunity and vow to raise their flag over our capitals.  And in this war between civilizations we are still playing around with semantics trying to figure out whether to call a war a war.  But it really doesn’t matter.  Because after our leader told us we didn’t have a strategy to deal with the situation, he decided come up with a strategy and make a big deal announcing it, which only confirmed that we really don’t have a strategy, but are instead engaged in a desperate pitch to cobble a coalition of reluctant ‘allies’ who really don’t care how the borders in the Middle East are redrawn.

And all the while we are told that our southern border has never been more secure, while data from Homeland Security and the Border Patrol tell us exactly the opposite, as they report illegal aliens now entering our homeland from over a hundred countries, including many from terrorist groups here to begin a new wave of attacks.  As many of our border regions have now become no-man’s land where even the Border Patrol dare not go, we are told that everything is secure down Mexico way.

Under this administration Washington has yet to put together a working foreign policy while claiming that we have never been more respected by our friends and feared by our enemies.  In spite of that, foreign leaders no longer trust nor attend our president.  Russia’s Putin knows we have a patsy in the White House, and that he must make hay with his ‘near abroad’ neighbors while Obama plays with his reset button.  Russia’s military openly announced that it is reinstating the US and NATO as its prime enemies, and proved it by running a nuclear first strike exercise against our east coast during the recent NATO summit in Wales.  China has emplaced troops on disputed islands, unilaterally expanded its airspace into international waters, and regularly has its fighter jets ‘escort’ and buzz our reconnaissance aircraft over international waters.  All the while it is building its first two carrier task groups to counter our historical presence in the Asian waters.

Meanwhile our government is busier than ever in its domestic war on America’s businesses.  The result is a non-existent recovery that is celebrated every month by the lamestream media while more Americans withdraw from the workforce, companies are punished for hiring fulltime workers, GDP growth is below anemic, national debt balloons unbounded while increased taxes stifle investment, government spending as share of the economy continues to grow, but job creation comes nowhere near the number of people looking for work.

The result of all this is a growing income inequality since government policies hurt the ‘little people’ most because they are the easiest to bamboozle and are neither clever enough nor have the means to escape the impacts of regulatory and tax barriers that the well-to-do have long learned to sidestep or avoid.  But this part of the goings on is trumpeted as the need for a government that is bigger still, one that has to tax more and regulate even more of our lives.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com 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]  Yesterday the Scots decided by a considerable margin to remain part of the United Kingdom.  Given the promised collateral benefits for remaining united, the two-year exercise to debate the matter of independence and negotiate with England was very likely a net gain.  Most certainly it has highlighted the legitimate ambitions and longings of many other cultural minorities embedded in larger countries throughout the world – e.g. the Flemish in Belgium and the Catalans in Spain.

Here in the United States we have had a similar debate about cleaving off parts of existing states and even secession from the Union.  In these pages I have discussed the reasons and ramifications for such under the heading of the Great Divide (which is also an RR category in which these commentaries are collected).  In our country these separationist movements are motivated and defined more by ideological differences than by ethnic differences – although the Reconquista (q.v.) movement by an Hispanic segment in America is a noteworthy exception.

Also noteworthy of these discussions are the responses of denial and ridicule they draw from our more progressive readers.  These denials notwithstanding, the sentiments and sympathies for various kinds of separation are real and range anywhere from California’s nascent State of Jefferson movement to the return of Mexico’s lands lost in 1848.  (Readers may recall that I am a supporter of the SoJ efforts for reasons stated here.)

But if we as a nation are to deal reasonably with such stirrings for more culturally cohesive jurisdictions, we have to first recognize the demographic parameters that surround the issue rather than respond with denial and vituperation whenever such voices are raised.  A regular RR reader and correspondent points us to a recent (Aug/Sep 2014) Reuters/Ipsos poll for some corroborative data reported here by Reuters.  Almost one out of four Americans – more from the west than east – “strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away”.  People still want to do all possible not to fracture our country, but do consider it as a definite choice of last resort.  In the middle are many efforts looking for ways to divide their states into parts that would satisfy population segments which feel unrepresented in their states’ capitals (e.g. the SoJ movement).

One thing, however, is clear.  The more the country swings left with Democrat majority legislatures like California’s, the more such sentiments grow in the ranks of working taxpayers who see Leviathan metastasizing into their lives like a terminal cancer.  Reuters reports about such feelings that –

“It seems to have heated up, especially since the election of President Obama,” said Mordecai Lee, a professor of governmental affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who has studied secessionist movements.

The truth of this observation is evident daily as our government identifies the greatest threat to its security arising internally from its own citizens, against whom it is now girding itself with historically unprecedented militarization of all agencies and expansion of its domestic intelligence gathering apparatus.

I conclude this somewhat dour essay with an example of ‘soft denial’ from our own RL ‘Bob’ Crabb filched from today’s 19sep14 Union.  Bob is the eternal mensch who extracts a smile from our own foibles no matter how sinister they may seem.