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.

Mr Boardman also laments our not allowing illegal aliens into our country as somehow doing ourselves harm.  Why?  Well, look at all the good stuff immigrants have contributed to America and its workforce over the years.  And today, with the economy booming and unemployment at record lows (call your office Dr Vodicka), denying entry to these illegal Hispanics will “shut off the source of most of our economic growth and access to brain power we need to fuel our high-tech economy.”  Just when did we discover that Latin America provided us such critically fueling brain power?  But what we do know is that our progressives have made the schools they control such that academically America’s Hispanics vie for the bottom of the barrel along with our African-American students.  Else how can they continue to count on such reliably voting constituencies.

Skipping right along from topic to topic, Mr Boardman then takes to task those dastardly capitalists and privately-owned corporations.  These folks have the temerity to use the monies they earn and save for purposes totally out of line from those prescribed by the progressive central planning elites who wait in the wings to fundamentally transform our economy.  The corporations have actually been (gasp) returning too much of their profits to the companies’ owners of the enterprise and those who risked their investment to keep it growing.  For our intrepid columnist, these corporations are doing everything wrong – everything from paying proper worker salaries, compensating management, investing in R&D, paying performance bonuses, …, the list seems to be endless of how these capitalists are screwing up.

And what’s even worse is that President Trump is successfully fooling enough people so that they don’t understand all those inequities occurring right in front of their noses.  He has messed with the media so much that the message can’t get through to Americans who otherwise would be assembling in town squares with torches and pitchforks to demand social justice.

Apropos to all this, I note that not one leftwing outlet can parse the nuance of Trump’s labeling ‘fake news’ as an “enemy of the people”, and not so the entire Fourth Estate.   It serves the Left better to continue fooling all the people all the time with repeated reports that our President is trying to censor or shut down media outlets that are unfavorable to him.  This would be a clear violation of the First Amendment, which the Left doesn’t like all that much either, but here its claimed violation serves a purpose.  To be fair, not even Chris Wallace (FN’s left-leaning star journalist) was able to make that distinction in his interview with President Trump that aired yesterday (18nov18).  It appears that none of these worthies can tell the difference between a pipe, and the stuff that flows through it.

Now wasn’t that a fun time with our Monday morning newspaper?