George Rebane

Shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere) – winter solstice, a time for all kinds of alternative belief systems to hold ceremonies honoring their deities, ancestors, dark spirits, …, and, of course, Gaia.  Here in Nevada County (lat 39.13 degrees) the sun will climb to only 27.37 degrees above the southern horizon because today the earth’s axis is tilted its full 23.5 degrees away from the sun.  (For you artillerymen who remember your hand calibrations, that’s about a stack of three fist widths at your arm’s length.)  The earth’s axis actually wobbles between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over about a 40,000 year cycle.  That also contributes to climate change, the migration of the magnetic poles, and the wandering of Polaris, the pole star approximately at the North Pole’s zenith.

The Seattle train wreck.  How in hell does a train engineer drive his train into a 30mph curve at 80 mph??!  The engineering solutions to prevent or avoid these recurring dumbass disasters are too many to count.  But to answer the question, one need only begin with the most obvious and telling factor – this was a government-run (Amtrak) train.  And when we combine Friar Occam’s dictum for the simplest explanation with Rebane Doctrine’s ‘When something goes wrong, assume the government is the culprit until proven innocent.’, then these explain everything from the qualification of Amtrak’s train operators to the deficits of its various management levels who design and oversee planning and operations.  Bottom line – it’s no way to run a railroad.

Red China uses latest technology to keep tabs on its citizens.  George Orwell had nothing on what the Chinese communists are doing to nip opposition and dissent in the bud.  The newest citizen monitoring and tracking systems are being tested in Xinjiang province populated by the mostly Muslim Uighurs.  Using everything from AI-driven automated facial recognition, retinal scans, directional mike arrays, smartphone monitoring/tracking, combined with uncounted police checkpoints where IDs are required to pass from one part of town or jurisdiction to another, the authoritarian government is quickly perfecting the ‘compleat surveillance state’. (more here and here)  Much of the technology is already installed and in use in other major Chinese urban areas, and you can bet the ranch that our security apparatchiks are not far behind.  Oh, how the security vs freedom see-saw tilts.  But in the end, when the usual bad guys are eliminated, then from whose comprehensive embrace do we need to feel secure?  Not to worry, that can never happen in Amerika.

[22dec17 update] – A refreshing Trumpian Tornado has blown into our foreign policy dealings.  Our president told the world that under his administration the US was also going to start acting in its own best interests, just like the rest of the world’s nations are doing.  And those who aren’t doing that, President Trump advised them to start doing it.  This flies in tight formation with Rebane Doctrine’s foreign policy advisories in these pages.  To wit, ‘On the world stage the United States will unabashedly act in all matters to promote its own best interests.  We have made and continue to make those interests known to all.  We invite other countries to work with us in maximizing our mutually shared interests, and will support those with whom we are successful in doing that.  We will not support countries that oppose our interests, instead, we will actively counter such opposition wherever and whenever it arises.’  (For more on diplomacy, I encourage reading Hillsdale College President Dr Larry Arnn's 'Three Lessons of Statesmanship' wherein he goes over the serious challenges faced by Churchill both at the beginning and ending of WW2.)

UN ambassador Nikki Haley gave strong voice to that policy as she responded to the resolution condemning the US for announcing its embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  Taking no prisoners, the lady told the assembled, “The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation, … We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations.”  Then she got up and walked out of what Prime Minister Netanyahu called “the theater of the absurd.”

More still moving out of Kalifornia, than moving in, according to the AP.  This has been widely known for some time now by just about everyone save the local leftwing intelligentsia, who are merely doing their duty to discombobulate the lightly read and pre-educated.  The state that already houses more than one third of the nation’s welfare recipients within 12% of its population (more here) just added 300K more people last year, overwhelmingly contributed by our more fecund neighbors.  “More people moved out of California than in from other US states, but foreign immigration made up the difference.  Total net migration added 80K people.”  Anyone want to bet whether the state’s share of welfare recipients went up or down?

[23dec17 update]  California wildfires are the latest human-augmented natural calamity that needs to be used for political purposes by the state’s command and control team led by our governor.  As argued in the WSJ (‘California’s Political Fires’), the decision comes down to spending billions on the bullet train, or properly managing the state’s forests, overgrown with underbrush and littered with millions of beetle-killed dead trees.  The state has become expert in the bait-and-switch tax/fee schemes in which it promises to dedicate these impounded funds for fire safety and management, and instead uses the monies to “backfill the budget” and spend on “high-speed rail, public housing and transit and electric-car subsidies.”  Of course, the Left’s constituencies have been well prepared for such arguments and sleights of hand, having neither the critical thinking skills nor knowledge base to conceive of anything beyond what they are told by California’s ensconced Democrats.