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January 2026
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  • Pissing Match Continues

    George Rebane

    Today marked another malignant milestone in the US/Ukraine relationship.  President Trump aborted his much-publicized meeting with President Zelensky, and told him to come back when he’s ready to make peace in the three-year Russo-Ukraine war.  The intended objective of the meeting was for both presidents to sign an agreement that would serve as the framework for a more detailed treaty between US and Ukraine spelling out how we would mine their rare earth minerals and share the profits therefrom.

    The trouble started when Trump said again that he has a good relationship with Putin and believes that the thug would honor any subsequent peace agreement to end the war.  Trump also needlessly pointed out that Zelensky has no hand to play in these negotiations and will observe the proceedings like a potted plant.  In his turn Zelensky had the temerity to once more caution Trump that Putin has violated every agreement he has signed, many with Ukraine.

    The bottom line that should be clear after all these decades in dealing with communists, Marxists, and dictators that none of them have or have ever had a ‘good relationship’ with ANYONE.  They have all ended with their naïve counterparties getting screwed in the end, which usually has arrived sooner than later.  For Trump to trumpet his ‘good relationship’ with Vladimir illustrates our president’s naivete in going into these negotiations with Russia, and gives rise to peals of laughter inside the Kremlin’s walls.  And Zelensky got shown the door today for just bringing up this cautionary piece of history that awkwardly shone a light on Trump’s kindergarten view of his good relations with Putin, Xi, and the ugly fat kid.

    If all this geo-political stumbling turns out to be a brilliant opening round to a resolution that stops the fighting, gets us the minerals, and secures the peace (with the US threatening to use its club on anyone who messes with ongoing American investments and mine operations), then I will have egg on my face and gladly admit to my own naivete about how Trump executes the art of the deal.

    In the interval, Rebane Doctrine calls for us to engineer a regime change in the Kremlin, preferably with Vladimir’s defenestration by one of his oligarchs with whom he has a ‘good relationship’.  Short of that we should light a candle in the National Cathedral for Trump’s hoped for epiphany.

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  • ‘What We Know and Don’t About January 6’

    George Rebane

    The title article is a revealing and long overdue piece of journalism by John Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist (here).  A House Select Committee was formed to investigate the 6jan21 Capitol “insurrection” by the Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  The purpose of the committee as performing an institutional hit job on Donald Trump was clear from the onset.

    Davidson writes – “The official report of the House Select Committee, which runs to more than 800 pages, is too deeply biased to give much help. This was foreordained given the hyper-partisan way the Select Committee was formed. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s two Republican appointments to the committee—Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banks—and instead appointed two virulently anti-Trump Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.”

    As Davidson points out with readily verifiable facts subsequently made available, the report is an intricate fabric laced with lies about what happened on J6.  And these exposed lies continue to be repeated daily by the Left’s lamestream media.  To a large fraction of Americans what spews from MSNBC to the NYT continues to be the official version of how the Right tried to overthrow the federal government on that fateful day.  Davidson’s piece contains an important sampling of the most egregious lies with which the Democrats still populate the press, airwaves, and internet.  The report, published in the January 2025 issue of the Imprimis, is an important summary for those who want to know and cite the real J6 story to their friends and neighbors about the evils of our virulently anti-American and neo-Marxist Democrats.

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  • Sandbox – 25feb25

    ["OpenAI announced a partnership with Estonia to roll out ChatGPT Edu in all secondary schools, starting with 10th and 11th graders by September 2025, as part of the country’s AI Leap 2025 initiative to provide free AI tools and teacher training." (more here)  And now for a bit of levity, enjoy this.  gjr]

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  • Is Trump going off the rails?

    George Rebane

    I am distraught and shaken at the news of what President Trump is planning for ending the war between Ukraine and Russia.  It’s taken a few days for me to gather the gumption to get my thoughts down for the record.  Readers know that as the best of available alternatives I have supported Trump’s candidacies and general policies through three elections.  My support has been interleaved with generous dollops of criticisms, especially when he has shot from the lip and acted like a third-grader throwing a tantrum on the playground.  But now in power, he has really shown a new side of himself in the foreign policy arena – he is acting as if he’s never studied history and knows nothing about how international thugs and dictators (especially of the communist stripe) respond to opposing their atrocities.

    Putin is a low-life, rank-and-file KGB agent who struck it rich in Russia’s chaotic aftermath during the collapse of the USSR.  To view him as anything other than a murderous thug and liar is to embark on the wrong course regarding any dealings with him.  To that we must add his newfound embrace of becoming the self-aggrandized heroic figure who will reconstitute the old Communist empire and return Russia to its never-was glory days.

    It boggles the mind to discover why Trump set up the meetings with Russia and excluded Ukraine’s president Zelensky from the undertakings.  Last time I looked, the war was between Russia and the Ukraine with America and the allies providing war materiel support on an unreliable schedule that so far has favored Putin.  It is Zelensky who has used every legal means (according to Ukraine’s constitution) to administer the state and conduct a decidedly one-sided war to save his country from a criminal invasion and conquest.

    And in response Trump not only excludes Zelensky from the negotiations, but gratuitously attacks him personally for no apparent reason, culminating with the patently absurd lie that Ukraine started the war.  Putin and Lavrov are laughing their collective asses off watching Trump go off the rails.  Any C- student of history knows that Moscow’s thugs are playing for time with all the cards stacked in their favor viz no return of conquered Ukrainian territories and Ukraine permanently banned from NATO.  What in hell is there left for the west to negotiate?

    Having successfully expanded Russia’s boundaries through bullshit negotiations with the west, Putin will just wait for the next opportunity to again invade convenient neighbors, be it the Baltics, or the rest of Ukraine, or … .  And, of course, China is watching Trump’s screw-ups with keen interest as it prepares for its next moves on Taiwan.

    The best source of Trump’s wrong thinking that I can muster is his proudly claimed expertise as a New York real estate negotiator.  Trump, like most western business people, has grown up in the belief that capitalism under liberal governments provides ideal environments for win-win negotiations and deals.  However, the deep-rooted culture of most of the rest of the world, especially Slavic Russia, is that the fundamental nature of negotiations and resulting deals is a zero-sum game – if he’s winning, I must be losing, and vice versa.

    So now Trump is trying to engineer a laudable win-win outcome with Putin and present the results, take it or leave it, to Zelensky.  There is absolutely zero chance of that happening.  Putin’s political AND personal survival depends on his being able to continue reconstituting Mother Russia to at least its czarist days.  If he fails in this endeavor, they may not even hold a state funeral for him.

    Oi Weh!

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  • President Elon Musk?!

    George Rebane

    The Democratic leadership has discovered the evils of political appointees who share a politician’s ideology and worldview.  Since they have no recollection of their own politicians ever having done such a dastardly thing, they consider Trump’s appointment of Musk as his DOGE czar a true “constitutional crisis”.  In response their leaders are gathering ragtags of followers on every street corner on which they can erect a mic and attract a camera with the call for all ignorant Americans to assemble in the streets with torches and pitchforks to … RESIST!

    Their own lamestream media lackeys have dutifully fallen in line with their own loud echoes of ‘constitutional crisis’.  No one seems to have picked up on how ludicrous is this charge.  Even the conservative cable news guys have trouble connecting the dots on the howls of the likes of Mad Maxine and Sychophant Schumer trying to get a rise out of the country against Trump, who now enjoys record  approval ratings.  It seems that only a few late-night conservative comics point out the utter nonsense that the Democrats are purveying.

    The obvious counter to silence the Dems on this charge that somehow Musk is taking over the presidency is to point out that politicians ALWAYS appoint people with whose views they are compatible to key positions on the staffs and in their administrations.  How the hell did Trump pick all those cabinet members?  Was it dumb luck that they all wound up claiming to fly in tight formation with the boss?  No one howled when the unelected Rubio, Hegseth, Bessent, … got Trump’s nod to sit in his cabinet and wield some serious unelected power.  But all of them, at all times, are careful to point out that they are executing the President’s policies and vision.  (In fact, Musk is designated and works as a Special Government Employee – more here.)

    And so it is with his other appointments who don’t require congressional confirmation.  Musk is one of them, and he too is always careful to point out that he and his DOGE team are in the business of identifying government waste, fraud, mismanagement, redundancy, and incompetence – apparently all the things that Democrats promote and benefit from in the operation of our deep administrative state.  Musk tells everyone his job is to identify the problem, its scope, priority, supportive evidence, and possible fix; and then present that to the President.  It is the President who then determines what should be done next, not Musk.

    The Democrats, whose actions are always an amalgam of stupidity and evil, continue to lie to their constituents, telling them that it is actually Musk who’s in charge and making the executable decisions.  And, of course, one of the qualifications for an American to be such a  constituent is to always believe the bilge that issues from their Schumers, Pelosis, Clintons, Bookers, Schiffs, … .

    My disappointment with the media lies with the conservative side, especially Fox News.  They have yet to detail the hypocrisy and lies when reporting on latest progressive outrage from some street corner or talking heads on MSNBC or CNN or … .  They simply leave the argument hanging instead of clarifying the matter for their audience.

    TrumpMusk2025

    I want to end with the photo showing Trump sitting calmly at his Resolute Desk while Musk stands nearby with his 4-year-old son explaining some recent DOGE initiative to the press assembled in the Oval Office.  The Dems claim this to be a picture showing historical presidential weakness, and confirming that it is Musk who is really in charge.  To the rest of us it is a display of comfortable and confident power.  The President sitting at his desk quite sanguine about letting one of his lieutenants have a moment in the sun while his position in the administration’s leadership hierarchy is confirmed by the top gun, known by the world to always be in charge of all that he surveys – he need not flaunt anything in the manner of weaker leaders.

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  • Scattershots – 6feb25

    George Rebane

    As most longtime RR readers know I am a child, student, and defender of western civilization.  And as most literate and reasoning people also know today is that our beloved western civilization is rapidly disintegrating around us.  Its portending doom is abetted from many sources, led most effectively by our educational systems and news media.  An example of the latter is The Economist, a hallmark ‘newspaper’ (really a magazine) founded in 1843 and now enjoying worldwide distribution.

    For some years now I have lamented the fall of The Economist from its perch as an exemplar of excellent reporting of global news and commentary that mattered.  I and others have considered it a canary in the coal mine of journalism.  Sharing this view in a recent edition of Medium (here) is Allan Milne Lees’ essay on the The Economist.  It is definitely worth a read.  And while we’re working on a post-mortem for the magazine, I offer these snippets from Mr Lees who is neither a fan of Trump nor Biden.

    “It may seem silly to mourn the end of a news magazine when our civilization is crumbling all around us and the tyrants are swooping in to feast on the corpse of Western civilization — a civilization that for all its faults brought stability and prosperity to billions of people around the globe — but I do mourn the intellectual death of The Economist.”

    “Sometimes, however, things really were different and in some ways better in the past and as mindless populism (a pleonasm, I know) sweeps the tattered remains of our civilization into the dustbin of history, it is legitimate to realize that today is in a great many ways genuinely far worse than what went before.”

    And here are some other thoughts on Trump’s doings that have focused the rage of Democrats who haven’t a clue about what happened last November, and still cannot cobble together any kind of policy going forward.  Please take these vignettes, not as thought-out solutions, but simply as some reasonable starting points for expanded discussions.

    Panama Canal.  Yes, China should be in no position to influence let alone control the operation of that critical waterway.  I’m not sure we should re-establish the Canal Zone as it existed for almost a century as an American enclave on foreign soil.  The Panamanians oppose it in ways that may become too expensive for us to maintain both politically and monetarily.  Perhaps setting up a new arrangement that would let us re-establish a naval and air base there, and let the Panamanians continue operating the canal under our oversight which would serve both parties.

    Greenland.  I’ve already waxed eloquent on this geo-strategic problem (here) and continue to believe that the solution I’ve offered is a win-win for the Danes, Greenlanders, and America.  It’s most certainly better than the halfway proposals presented so far in the media.

    Canada.  It’s not going to become our 51st state.  But increasing the strength and number of ties between our two culturally almost identical countries should be an ongoing work-in-progress.  We need a treaty that allows our military presence on their Arctic rim.  And we should initiate a freedom of movement arrangement similar to that in place among the EU nations.  We definitely should not use tariffs against each other; trade between us should resemble trade between our states as closely as possible with appropriate caveats to coordinate international trade in to serve the strategic interest of the two countries.

    Gaza.  According to the Arab nations who know them best, Palestinians are intrinsically a nasty people who are not welcome literally anywhere.  My concept for a two-state solution has been to pressure Egypt to relinquish a part of the Sinai to the Palestinians.  That land can be made green (like in verdant) and productive with modern technology and investment.  This can become the new home for people under the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank.  Gaza will remain the home of the Gazans who don’t like the other Palestinians very much.  Under a US protectorate treaty with a sunset clause (like Hong Kong) the US would assume oversight of the Gazans setting up their new government.  Developing an economic plan for the territory, which may include making it into a free port (q.v.), would attract investment from a variety of sources that would include Arab countries.  To insure regional stability, the US would initially maintain a military presence in Gaza.

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  • Thoughts on the air tragedies

    George Rebane

    Two air tragedies happened in our land just a couple of days apart.  Yesterday’s medevac Learjet carrying six people came down within a minute after take-off from a Philadelphia airport.  The fuel-ladened jet plummeted at a 45 degree angle into a neighborhood crowded with residences and commercial outlets.  So far the expert talking heads assign the cause to equipment failure, most likely one or both engines’ reverse thrusters unexpectedly self-deployed as the aircraft was accelerating at full thrust, not yet having sufficient airspeed and altitude for any possible corrective action by the pilot.

    As a complex system, an aircraft operates at the marginal stability boundaries of its performance envelope just after take-off and on final approach before landing.  Almost all aircraft, from the heavies to light private airplanes, adopt a three-degree down angle during the last part of their final approach.  Depending on the geography and other restrictions surrounding the destination airport, this descent path may start as far as ten miles, or even further, from touchdown.  The American Airlines flight into Reagan International was on 'short final' and clearly on such a descent trajectory when it was struck by the Army Blackhawk helicopter.

    The unresolved factor about the impact of the two aircraft was their altitude.  We are told that the helicopter was restricted to stay below 200ft AGL (above ground level) in that area which included the final approach part of Reagan’s traffic pattern into runway 33 for which the airliner was cleared to land, and under supposedly tight air traffic control.  The best available data so far indicates the AA flight was at about 300ft AGL when struck.  Conclusion – the Blackhawk was not maintaining altitude discipline in a congested flight traffic area.

    My take on the whole thing about the collision is completely different.  I strongly believe that when the normal flight path on final to a runway requires the aircraft to descend through at least 1,000ft AGL, then the entire airspace below the aircraft to ground level ‘belongs’ to the landing aircraft, and EVERYONE should be required to stay clear of it including to at least 200 yards on either side of the runway centerline extended.  It is not unusual for aircraft to drift off the three-degree descent trajectory on final and quickly apply corrective control.  (Have experienced this myself to know that it’s not a problem when the air around you is yours.)  Such diversions may be due to momentary pilot inattention, engine/control surface problems, and most dangerously the undetected downdraft.  Over the years several accidents have happened on final due to each of these causes.  Most scary is the undetected downdraft which can slam the landing aircraft into the ground.  This has happened enough times over the years to strongly recommend/require that the above-described rule be adopted nationwide.  And many more landings have come so close to being slammed into the ground that such fortunate aircraft recovered and landed with the proverbial weeds in their undercarriage.

    In congested airspace, as in the pattern region of Reagan International, allowing aircraft to legally fly within a hundred feet vertical separation on final, in my mind is criminal.  The landing aircraft on final and within seconds of touchdown should always know that the air from ground up and to either side belongs to him and is free of all other air traffic.

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  • Sandbox – 1feb25

    [No one knows how to price their AI-enhanced productivity tools like the MS Copilot.  One of the problems is that it’s hard to tell how much benefit a desk worker gets out such a tool for the various prices charged.  I tried it about a week ago to help write a post (here), and it produced what was obviously low-grade ore.  Now China enters with its DeepSeek at markedly lower costs but nobody still knows how to rate the benefits.  Meanwhile we’re concerned about DeepSeek vacuuming up Americans’ information and thereby compromising our national security. gjr]

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  • Elizabeth G. Fernandez, PhD

    George Rebane

    Our granddaughter Elizabeth received her PhD last Friday after seven years of research at the Department of Oncology of UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine.  She is one of the school’s research stars having developed a ground-breaking method for treating glioblastoma patients.  Glioblastoma is the most virulent and deadly form of brain cancer that took the life of Elizabeth’s cousin and our granddaughter Ellen at the age of fourteen after her clinically historic fight for survival.  Elizabeth dedicated her work to Ellen.

    Elizabeth presented a summary of her research and defense of her dissertation to the gathered in one of the medical school’s amphitheaters, attended by her doctoral committee, research colleagues, medical students, and, of course, her family.  The hour-long presentation was followed by a Q&A session and then a reception at the school, with a big dinner later in the evening.  Her accolades delivered by the director of her research lab and the head of the school’s oncology department were impressive.  She now has a choice on whether to stay in academe, preferred by UCLA, or go into the commercial sector as an oncology researcher.

    ElizPhD_2025

    For those interested, I’ll describe a bit of her research.  The forbidding title of her dissertation and published work is ‘Integrating molecular and functional profiling to identify therapeutic vulnerabilities in glioblastoma’.  The easiest way to understand what Elizabeth has developed is a methodology for screening glioblastoma patients as to their receptivity to what promises to be a new standard of care procedure involving a unique cocktail of bio-chemicals (think of chemo) that will either destroy the glioblastoma cells or shrink the tumor into remission.  (The current standard of care for glioblastoma is virtually a death sentence within eighteen months from diagnosis.)

    Elizabeth’s treatment destroys glioblastoma cells either by utilizing the body’s apoptosis process or invading the cell itself and destroying a couple of its components critical for its continuing survival.  Apoptosis is a type of programmed cell death that naturally goes on in our bodies, killing old or diseased cells, to make room for new cells and thereby maintain the body’s state of homeostasis (think balance).  Elizabeth’s research developed a method of intervention that initiates apoptosis against glioblastoma cells with a high likelihood of inducing the immune system to kill them.

    The added and critical attribute of the method is that it is computable.  This means that the cost of its application to patients will be reduced as such therapeutic software becomes part of the dreaded disease’s standard of care.  Those of you with an entrepreneurial bent can foresee the manifest benefits of all this.

    Congratulations to Elizabeth for the years of hard work and pulling it off!

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  • Sandbox – 22jan25

    [I think the Dems will put up a greater and more desperate ‘resistance’ to the Trump2 administration that they did to Trump1 and also the interregnum Trump.  The poor bastards have nothing else to offer thinking Americans – i.e. no policy alternatives that anyone who pays attention would accept.  All they have left is a pathetic program of digging up dirt that doesn’t stick to anything that Trump proposes.  And that effort is patently silly to all except their own hard core socialists/communists and media lackeys.  gjr]

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