George Rebane
Union columnist and RR reader George Boardman writes ‘High school cutbacks another consequence of our stagnant economy’ in today’s paper. There he gets kudos for echoing the commentaries and comments on Nevada County schools and economic development that have long populated these pages over the years. My preference is that he should have stated his case more strongly – Nevada County’s leftward tack has now baked in its previous on/off promotion of the county’s development in literally all dimensions, save being a welcoming home for progressive causes, non-profits, and ‘San Francisco values’. The county has been and continues to be enthusiastically anti-development; and it subscribes in spades to Einstein’s dictum of insanity. Our political leaderships’ latest foray in this direction is opposing the development of housing for our successfully retireds – major cash importers to our community – who want to move from their acreage homes to appropriately high-end, higher density local options that offer more readily accessible conveniences. It seems that Mr Boardman’s own list to port prevents such a frontal assault on his brethren. Then again, perhaps next time.
‘The Cultural Revolution comes to North America’ writes Anastasia Lin in the 8apr19 WSJ. The Left in both the US and Canada has now been launching ‘call-out mobs’ whose “aim (is) not to persuade or debate, but to humiliate the target and intimidate other.” Their main weapon is to paint their opponents with the broad brush of ad hoc labels whose meanings they either do not know or take to mean whatever they want it to mean as convenient. Popular terms du jour are ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’. One of the established intellectual leaders of the local blue mob is Steven Frisch, who has frequented these pages for years, distributing his opprobrium in RR comment streams when he finds anything that is too persuasive of a counter to his progressive mores, values, or narrative in general. I am his favorite target and recipient of his latest offering a few days ago. I use it as a concrete example of the cultural revolution Ms Lin describes – as they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
I know you think we are in a new crusade and Islam is going to take over the world; that brown people are a scourge on our country; that anything that addresses environmental or climate benefit is a UN and IPCC conspiracy to control the world; that there is growing threat of communism in the US; that young people are stupid and lazy; that we should be able to have communities where people of like culture live together without having to bothered by outsiders; that you were once wrote a column for a newsletter that featured a cover of the Völkischer Beobachter on their front cover, and I could go on…
Pollinating fruit trees in Nevada County is a sometime thing. Depending on the vicissitudes of our spring weather – rains and temperature – the bees either come or not. We have about ten fruit trees of different kinds, and every spring Jo Ann and I anxiously watch them bloom while fervently hoping for the arrival of bees and other bud-crawling bugs. So far this year things have not looked so good, and our harvest promises to be somewhere between little or nothing. So anyway, this set me to thinking of an engineering solution, and since I know next to nothing about bees and blooms, I’m asking more knowledgeable readers to critique this approach to artificial pollination of fruit trees that might promise to do away with the need for bees.
My approach features the use of opposing fans angled upward and blowing air into the fruit tree. The intent is to create a gentle turbulent breeze within the branches that would waft the pollen throughout and get the job done. Trees that require cross-pollination would have the fans set at a higher speed and oriented to blow the pollen up and down the rows. I’m not sure if any of this is new and untried. It seems like an easy experiment to do, and people at schools like UC Davis most likely have already tried this. Thoughts?
[9apr19 update] The last great century of Man has already passed according to Umair Haque, an ultra-Left columnist and author who writes in Medium. His latest offering, ‘(Why) America is the Canary in the Coal Mine of Global Collapse’, is a thinly disguised anti-Trump tirade in which he outlines the ongoing and rampant decline of the US, and how that will cause the domino-like collapse of the world’s countries. His piece can be viewed as the consummate apologetic that lays the foundation for the new Democrat policies touted by Bernie, AOC, Liz, Kamala, … . I’ll just illustrate a bit of this must-read piece by all those who are right-leaning or claim to balance themselves on the center stripe.
So let me ask you again: would you say that America’s a collapsing society? I would. Americans live poorer, unhappier, shorter, bleaker, dumber, meaner and more violent lives than anywhere else in the rich world — and they do so every single year. The rate of decline, moreover, is accelerating. Where will it end? Stop? Probably when America reaches Russian levels — 60 years of life, half of European income, and so on. But Russia is the textbook definition of a collapsed society. So in America’s example we begin to see what “collapse” really means. It isn’t some kind of cartoonish fantasy — it’s a bitter reality that we don’t want to confront, probably because many of us are too busy living it.
… and this is just an intro into the expansion of his fervent pitch to convince you that America, under Trump, is plummeting on a downward spiral into a fascistic autocracy that will leave us all destitute in a serfdom presided over by greedy and powerful corporatist capitalists who are already working us to the bone and milking us dry.
“Wheels Coming Off Climate Change?”, so asks a correspondent and RR reader in an email with a link to a Bloomberg report that states – The Rockefeller Foundation intends to disband its 100 Resilient Cities initiative, the largest privately funded climate-adaptation program in the U.S., according to people familiar with the foundation’s plans. It appears that the data, the general circulation models, and public interest individually or in the aggregate don’t offer much support for preventable man-made global warming. The only ones still wanting to send America into the world’s poorhouse while fighting the ghost of climate change are the nation’s globalist progressives. (more here)
[10apr19 update] How true, how true (as these pages attest).
rebanesruminations.com 
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