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  • Underwriting China’s Bad Behavior

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 20 November 2019.]

    While our country is embroiled in the fight to oust a duly elected president on yet to be established evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors before voters have a chance to weigh in on the matter next November, a much more realistic threat to our fortunes and future continues to grow without any effective defense in sight.  Few Americans know of communist China’s strategic designs that include the relegation of America into a second-rate power in developing and employing the technologies that provide for our national defense and overall quality of life.  However, the few people who do follow national affairs are aware of China’s doings regarding the proprietary intellectual property they have stolen from our defense and private sectors, and how they continue on that same course today more effectively than ever before.

    The Senate permanent sub-committee on investigations just released an extensive bi-partisan assessment report in excess of 100 pages titled ‘Threats to the US Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans’.  It details how the US has for years failed to counter China’s enterprises to recruit scientists, acquire research, and maintain an ongoing program that compromises the fruits of our taxpayer funded research and development programs conducted in our universities and by our private enterprises.  The investigation’s findings criticize numerous federal science-funding agencies including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Energy Department, and many more than can be listed in this short commentary.

    The basic MO of the Chinese government is to operate euphemistically named “talent recruitment programs”, more than 200 of these hire both visiting Chinese nationals and American citizens, numbering over 7,000 that include Nobel laureates.  These scientists and engineers are contracted and paid to transmit the fruits of their US-based research to Chinese agencies that then disseminate the information to the Chinese military and industries which compete with US companies in international commerce.  These surreptitious technology transfers amount to plain old thievery for hire, and according to the Senate report, our failure to stop them “continues to undermine the integrity of the American research enterprise and endanger our national security.” (more here)

    The main Chinese extortion of technology program is called the ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ under which researchers in America are bought and paid for the benefit of communist China, which has openly stated that it intends to be the world hegemon well before 2050, and along the way to become the global leader in science, technology, commerce, and military power.  The Thousand Talents Plan, almost all of it effectively funded by US taxpayers through its $150B annual support of federal STEM R&D appropriations, is well on its way of meeting China’s global strategic objective.

    What should be even more galling to Americans is highlighted by Roger Robinson Jr, a think tank CEO and former senior director on President Reagan’s National Security Council.  In his recent article ‘Why and How the US Should Stop Financing China’s Bad Actors’, he details how the global capital markets, dominated by the United States, provide China with the direct financial support through trade and security markets that fuels their current rapid progress toward global primacy, as they violate almost every principle and value of western civilization.

    Robinson states that “it is an empirical fact: the majority of American investors are unwittingly funding Chinese concentration camps, weapons systems for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and more. This is because the U.S. has no security-minded screening mechanism for our capital markets, which have roughly $35 trillion under management.”  And in the main, these investors include America’s pension funds for teachers and government employees, along with the billions of dollars from university endowments.  Investors whose talk preaches climate change and green investments, as their walk pours untold billions into the treasury of the world’s biggest tyranny and polluter.  And there’s much more to learn here than time allows, but I hope that some of this news will invite listeners to do their own research and act accordingly.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the 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.

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  • Democrats’ Big Lies #4685, 4686

    George Rebane

    California’s Cris de Coeur continue.  The state’s Democrats deny that the state has been steadily diving for the bottom, and has already reached it in the many sectors of fiscal and social performance.  This Big Lie is dutifully picked up by all the local leftwing lackeys who must echo the narrative out of Sacramento.  This morning we read a plaintive lament (here) in the 20nov19 Union by Alyssa Mayo, a native Californian who states, “I am as middle class American as they come.  But because I live in California, I am surviving … far from thriving.”  She goes on to list the nationally known grievances about our state, also highlighting that “every day, I watch people that I respect and love leave California.”  (In the last decade the Rebanes have bid good-bye to 11 families of friends and relatives who have struck out from California for greener pastures.)  Ms Mayo’s big concern as a “silently struggling” sufferer is shared by most, not progressively blind, that “California will get worse. I don’t know what the next downhill slide will be.  But I’m sure that it will result in losing more hard-working Americans in this state.  For those of us who remain, feebly bucketing out the ever-growing rising water, we will continue to hope for a miracle.  A miracle to save our home.  A miracle that may never come.”  My suggestion to the ‘silent suffers’ is to abandon hoping for that miracle, and instead do something radically different next time in the voting booth.  We don’t have to continue placing our futures into the hands of incompetent scumbags.  Continuing to do the same thing and hoping for a different result has never worked.

    In ‘The Big Lie About Charter Schools’ David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute (an established Democrat policy think tank) debunks the bamboozle that Democrat candidates have been foisting on their constituents for at least a couple of decades.  This year the standard refrain that charter schools ‘siphon off the funds of public schools’ has reached crescendo from the throats of Dem presidential wannabes.  First, charter schools are public schools, but of the type that don’t have fatten the wallets of teachers’ union leaders and staff.  Charter schools set their own teachers benefit packages and curricula to create schools where parents want to send their children.  We all should remember that the Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association whose income is diminished by every kid who leaves a broken unionized public school.  The actual financial impact is negligible and/or minimized by various convoluted ‘make whole’ programs at the state level, but it all sorts in Osborne’s article.  The bottom line that’s a shot in the shorts for the unions is their mismanaged and mostly unfunded teachers’ pension programs.  These rely on more younger teachers paying into the expanding ponzi scheme from which the retiring teachers’ pensions will be drawn.  And that’s where the under-performing unionized schools don’t have anywhere else to turn.  So put the claims of Warren, Sanders, and even ol’ Uncle Joe about charter schools into perspective when they tell you (perhaps at tonight’s debate) that charters take money away from public schools.

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  • Sandbox – 15nov19

    [From the comment stream under 'America Askew' it's interesting to note that no one cares much about how California's electorate is composed.  California is not the only state that both invites and enables voting by the disenfranchised among us.  Please post your belated concerns under the referenced commentary, and your 'here's why I don't give a crap' hereunder.  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 15nov19

    George Rebane

    ‘Schiff’s Obstruction Theory’ is a particularly revealing analysis of constitutional law and its SCOTUS interpretations by David Rivkin and Lee Casey, two well-respected lawyers with White House experience who practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington DC.  A key point in their analysis is Schiff’s reluctance to formally adjudicate his claimed evidence of presidential obstruction of justice.  “If (Schiff) were confident in his legal position, he’d want to put the case to a judge.  Yet he seems desperate not to.”  Schiff’s main and legally intractable argument circles the contention that it is an impeachable offense for a president to resist impeachment.  The detailed expansion of this important constitutional interpretation about the role of separation of powers in an impeachment process is worth knowing, especially if you’re going to debate the matter in a reasonable manner.

    Teachers union leader Glenn Sacks has come up with “the cure for what ails America’s schools”.  And as we would expect, the man has not a clue about the real ailments of our public schools, for the simple reason that he has not looked in a mirror.  In his 15nov19 lecture (here) he details all of the extra “clerical work and other chores (that) sap educators’ limited time”, and provides the simplistic and proven ineffective solution – “hire more support staff” (aka new union members).  Nowhere does he even hint at how the unions have increased the teachers’ list of clerical tasks and “other chores”, and nowhere does he mention that his solution will require more funding for schools already misspending their large allocations of taxpayer funds.  And to put a ribbon on it, nowhere does he recognize that the new progressive parenting prescriptions have led to the breakdown of the students’ social contract with how they respond to teachers and how they behave toward each other and the school’s infrastructure while on campus.

    ‘170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data Show No Evidence of Significant Warming’ by T.K. Bjorklund of the Dept of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Houston presents a somewhat technical but still accessible discussion of evidence that our current climate hysteria is way overblown.  This is one of a legion of papers by learned skeptics of the politicized global warming alarums promoted to substantiate more restrictive and expensive collectivist public policies from ever larger and more intrusive governments.  I look forward to our leftwing readers’ comments that address the substance of Dr Bjorklund’s presentation.  (H/T to reader.)

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  • America Askew – 14nov19

    George Rebane

    The 14nov19 Union reports (here) that an unlicensed illegal alien, Joaquin Lopez Pinto, a Honduran national, killed his passenger on Hwy 49 when he ran off the road and hit a tree.  For that he was charged with a misdemeanor vehicular homicide and driving without a license, and given a suspended sentence with two years’ probation.  We are also assured by DA Chris Walsh that “this conviction won’t affect his immigration status” since the “low-level offense would not trigger the interest of federal immigration officials.”

    To at least half of Americans such cases illustrate the corruption of our judicial systems at all jurisdictional levels.  We are aghast that the sumbich was not taken into custody and deported back to Honduras.  But the other half will see nothing wrong with such a response to multiple criminal behaviors by people who don't belong here.  And that is also the half which denies that such illegal aliens regularly give rise to undetected voter fraud.  Why?  Because they point out that such voter fraud no longer is investigated or prosecuted in our land – therefore it doesn’t exist.

    To register and vote in California, all you need for ID is a street address and a driver’s license, SS number, or state ID, none of the acquisition of which require proof of citizenship that is accepted on the basis of just a personal attestation.  The entire schema has been and continues as a blatant invitation to augment Democrat vote counts during elections.  And that is why it is only the leftwingers – progressives, liberals, Democrats, … – who vehemently oppose any effective procedures to vet a person’s bona fides as a legitimate franchised voter.  And the icing on this putrid public policy is that implementing any such verification procedures will somehow inhibit the participation of minorities in our elections.

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  • The Silence of Socialists

    George Rebane

    This morning’s cartoon in the 12nov19 Union (filched below) was a heartening surprise.  Our leftwing political cartoonist Bob Crabb is possibly the first from his political pole to recognize the Great California Exodus frequently covered here and recognized nationally.  The state’s socialists, echoed by our local progressives, are in terminal denial that California is losing its wealth creators and attracting the country’s transfer payment dependents and illegals to keep the population growing.

    RLCrabb191112

    This reminded me of the many other issues about which our Left does not want their voices heard – for the simple reason that they have nothing reasonable to say and their usual apologetics to their cognitively challenged core constituents sound utterly foolish in the public forum.

    This country-wide sound of silence starts at the national level where congressional Democrats have totally given up legislating and are focused solely on removing a president they know they cannot defeat at the polls; most certainly not with anyone still riding in their clown car of current candidates.  Even their own brain trust has let it be known that they are seriously looking for a Plan B, someone who will have at least a snowball’s chance in hell come next November should their almost four-year effort to impeach fail.

    California is already a lost cause.  Its decades of one-party rule has left one third of its population without a voice as its socialists continue to tax, price, and regulate out the last vestiges of individual effort, initiative, and enterprise.  The message from the Sacramento socialists continues to be ‘my way or the highway’.  And millions of productive Californians respond by choosing the highway as each additional and more insane than the last diktat issues from the statehouse.  Our lefties have nothing to say about that in the public debate, save that the more looney ones deny that it is happening.

    On the national scene the Democrats present us with a list of freebies designed for those legions who can’t or won’t.  No one with a functioning intellect knows how to contend with or pay for the proposed Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Free College, Open Borders, Wealth Taxes, Welfare for Illegal Aliens, … .  These pages witness the response of the national Left – none want to address these issues, and instead focus only on what they consider ‘evidence’ for impeachment and President Trump’s standings in the most recent polls.

    For years I have pointed out in my commentaries policy questions and principles to which our leftwing readers will not respond, and instead either ignore or side-step the relevant issue.  A textbook example of this can be found in the response from the Left to my recent commentary on income inequality. (here)

    Debating relevant and substantive issues for the country has never been a strong suit of our progressive Left.  They cannot understand, let alone offer, a cogent structure of the relationships of influences and causes which impact the outcomes of a public policy.  Not being able to go deeper, they simply respond by repetition of a strong opening assertion and expect that to carry the day.  This is akin to their concept of social justice and justice in general, where widely and frequently trumpeted allegations are taken as proxies in good standing for evidence.  When we compare the national experience of our socialists’ sound of silence with what history records that has been experienced in other lands under collectivist assault, then we find that it was ever thus.

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  • Ruminations – 8nov19 (updated 13nov19)

    George Rebane

    Progressives moving to suburbs and small towns after they have soiled their coastal urban areas.  Almost half of San Francisco residents now want to leave the shithole city.  These people – overwhelmingly ignorant and anti-capitalist – are like locusts and will also devastate their new homes wherever they land.  The process will not take place overnight, but it will be inexorable, especially if their states continue to adopt the disastrous policies of California.  Nevada County turning ‘blue’ is a poster child for this migration of socialists blind to socialism.   (more here, here, and here)

    James Dean lives again through the magic of CGI (computer generated imagery) in an upcoming movie. (here)  In my field we foresaw the resurrection of dead, iconic movie stars almost 40 years ago when then nascent CGI technologies made their way into smaller companies that started servicing the movie and TV industries. (My own company and Hughes Aircraft were the first two west coast companies to establish the then advanced computer graphics labs for defense work.)  The current owners of these movie stars’ estates will have a chance to cash in again.  The impact of such a CGI resurrection on opportunities for today’s myriads of living actors is TBD.

    University of California prepares to abandon academic meritocracy.  The Left’s constant push to compromise America’s future is making additional inroads in a field they pretty much have dominated and devastated our educational systems with their ‘social justice’ organizations now threatening to sue UC if it continues to use standardized testing (think SAT and ACT) as a basis for admittance.  As always, these anti-American warriors use the bogus argument that meritocracy discriminates against minorities.  Has anyone taken a walk on a UC campus lately?  Does anyone think that developing any realworld system – inventing an algorithm, writing a program, or building a bridge – will benefit from fewer or incompetent STEM graduates?

    ‘California’s Disastrous State Illustrates Limits of Progressivism’ writes Victor Davis Hanson in his lates review of how our state has been turned into a third-world wannabe in the hands of the resurrected Socialist Party of America who still use their old name of Democrats.  Unfortunately, the limits of progressivism will be achieved when California becomes a social wasteland toward which it is now accelerating.  And the local idiots still think it's only some obscure foothill codgers who hallucinate about the state's long downfall.

    [10nov19 update]  My skepticism about the reality of preventable man-made global warming is nicely summarized in this article written by climate scientist Dr Jay Lehr.  It incorporates most of the factors that I have addressed over the years about the global warming issues as part of Rebane Doctrine.  (H/T to reader)

    [13nov19 update]  Apropos to the above update, another Democrat has outed a previously hushed truth about the public positions and policies of progressives.  Sen Mazie Hirono (D-HI) publicly admonished Americans “to fundamentally change the way they think about climate change” – more specifically, she urged that people “believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.” (more here)  This, of course, has been a major Rebane Doctrine tenet about preventable manmade global warming in these pages for years.

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  • Sandbox – 8nov19

    [So what's Bloomberg's entry into the Dems' presidential race going to do to the Dropout Derby?  Will there be a rush to the exits by those who can't get traction?  How will the current 'Final Four' go after the new white billionaire vying for office?  gjr]

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  • Income Inequality Revealed (addended)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 6 November 2019.]

    Income inequality in America has become a hot button issue.  People in the street are being convinced daily that the inequality is somehow morally reprehensible since they are made to believe that the inequality comes from the rich stealing from the poor.  And to nail this notion into people’s heads, we are told that the top fifth or quintile of households’ average earnings are 17 times more than the average of the bottom quintile.  The problem with this number is that it is a blatantly false statistic. 

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 3nov19 (updated 6nov19)

    George Rebane

    Our increasingly dysfunctional school system makes itself felt every time any of us uses a text editor such as MS Word, or one embedded in some app such as the TypePad comment box.  The programmers who write the code that edits what you type are really drawn from a class of dimwits who are not very familiar with the English lexicon, contemporary American usage, spelling, and most certainly grammar.  And yet they blithely generate code that, for example, will take an obvious usage of a plural and make it into an erroneous singular possessive.  What’s really astounding about the de minimis qualifications of these turkeys (most certainly all of them wet behind the ears) is that they live in the 21st century where our technology driven language continually morphs into novel word forms, yet their software continues to reject anything new that the writer seeks to use or compose, and instead imposes a garden variety proximity algo which converts the desired string into something out of a 20-year-old Webster’s dictionary.

    The recent lackluster GDP growth numbers are now trumpeted by Democrats as something, anything to use against the stellar performance of the economy since Trump took office.  Their attempt to convince their constituents (who don’t even know the three branches of government) and fellow hangers on that such GDP growth is the important and impactive number that tells the real tale.  What they completely miss is that Main Street’s conception of the economy is formed of much more pragmatic data that people can experience where they live, shop, and work.  And there they see the real picture composed of record low unemployment, especially for minorities.  They see more open jobs wanting workers, they experience steadily rising wages, continuing low inflation and interest rates for their mortgages and debt, and enjoy store shelves filled with goods that they can afford.  They understand why consumer confidence numbers are so high because they are living daily in that sector of commerce.  And then they have to put that together with an editorializing ‘news’ reporter on some lamestream outlet telling them that Trump ‘lied’ when he promised them 3% GDP growth.  What all these TDS pundits don’t understand is that to the man-in-the-street GDP is at best just a confusing proxy for an economy, one that never trumps direct experience.

    The Great Divide is both dunned and promoted by the Democrat brain trust.  They cannot abide the thought of separating themselves from the cash they drain from the country’s middle class, small businesses, retirees, and the wealthy who would abandon them in a heartbeat were life possible under an alternative form of governance than the fundamentally transformed America now promised by our Left’s proto-communists.  And yet the double-dummies continue to pursue a transparently partisan inquisition to overturn the 2016 election.  Even the November issue of the leftwing The Atlantic prominently laments that ‘Americans Hate One Another. Impeachment Isn’t Helping’, wherein they report – “According to a growing body of political-science research, Americans largely no longer feel a shared sense of national identity. Democrats and Republicans see their political opponents as enemies with totally incomprehensible beliefs and lifestyles. On impeachment, members of the two parties see things radically differently, not just because they have dissimilar political opinions, but because they have entirely divergent views on how to approach life. The vicious impeachment fight ahead may further exacerbate polarization in America, leaving Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between feeling even more suspicious of one another.” (emphases mine)  And the local leftwing loonies continue to believe that serious consideration of a Great Divide was invented in these foothills and remains a mental masturbation for some solitary and senile seniors.  (and more here)

    [4nov19 update] Big tech companies in the Bay Area subsidizing housing is breathlessly reported by some liberals as vindication of capitalism transforming into altruistic collectivism – a long-held dream by all socialists.  I addressed one of our local breathless types in the last Sandbox with this – What some light (non?) thinkers miss is that CA’s state govts have put big tech’s tit in a wringer with its no growth and anti-housing policies so that the employees they need no longer have affordable housing available to them within commuting distance. So their PlanB is to pay such employees astronomical wages, or attempt the alternative of subsidizing their housing costs. None of this is altruistic or intended to alleviate the state’s mid-class housing shortage or provide homes for the homeless. Lefties, desperate to find any salutary evidence for socialist governance, will grasp at any straws, no matter how fantastic, to sustain their perpetually absurd narrative.

    More homeowners are staying put longer.  This is the big finding from looking at the country’s real estate inventory numbers (here and google ‘homeowners stay put’).  Given the general shortage of housing in many states – on steroids in CA – this creates a problem for new home buyers, especially the middle-class folks trying to locate near their jobs.  Even though mortgage rates are low, the appreciation of house prices in a demand driven market makes the tax bite huge for sellers seeking to upsize for growing families or downsize for empty-nesters.  So people are staying closer to 20 years in their homes, where ten years ago their average stay in a house was about 10 years – hence, slower sales and a depressed housing market.  And all this is created by your state and local governments with their anti-development laws and regs as the economy is booming with jobs, wage growth, and consumer confidence at their highs.

    ‘Government is the problem’ has been a constant message in these pages since the launch of RR in 2007.  The examples provided by me and our right-leaning commenters over the years are legion and a matter of record – and, as seen above and below, they continue pouring in.  A more precise form of this truth is that ‘Upon closer examination, almost every one of society’s problems can be traced back to poor public policies adopted, implemented, and enforced by large self-serving, disconnected governments and their incompetent bureaucracies.’  In view of this history, today I am advancing ‘Government is the problem’ to axiomatic status in the Rebane Doctrine.  Recall that in reasoned apologetics an axiom is a statement of self-evident truth that requires no further proof in the logical development of an argument.

    Sen Warren and her multifarious ‘plans’ illustrate a problem with ‘self-evident truths’, and nowhere more visibly than in her plan to nationalize America’s healthcare industry.  It is clear to me and mine that we share dismally few self-evident truths in common with her and hers.  Over the last days more and more people are taking a closer look at what her ‘Medicare for All’ proposal entails.  And an alarming number of people from both parties today conclude that the woman is either delusional or extremely ignorant about the ways and means of government operations.  Besides providing little to no realistic basis for paying for the $5T+ annual cost of this monstrosity that would double the federal budget, her ‘free healthcare is a human right’ fantasy would markedly increase the country’s cost of healthcare from what it is today.  And it would immediately bring to bear the EU’s practice of rationing (actually, every government-run health system in the world rations care”), and firmly ensconce ‘death panels’ at all levels in the attempt to contain runaway costs. (more here)

    [6nov19 update]  The Big Lie has ALWAYS been the fundamental plank in the platform of collectivists – aka, socialists, communists, and the Democratic Party.  Their eternal goal is to form a comprehensively pervasive leviathan government that directs all human behavior into an amalgam of a compliant society based on Huxley’s Brave New World model.  Realizing that such organization for society is only preferred by those who neither ‘know’ nor ‘can’, they have perfected the Big Lie over the last century since Bolshevism first revealed that it was based on the Big Lie.  Today Democrats are the inheritors of American socialism that maintains socialism’s goal and the Big Lie in its well-oiled public relations and political toolset.  A commenter offers just one more piece of evidence of this in an admonishment by ABC’s Joy Behar for Dems to hide their true political intentions until after they are elected (here).  WSJ’s liberal columnist William Galston in his ‘Elizabeth Warren’s Health-Care Hara-Kiri’ takes Sen Warren to task for prematurely revealing her ‘Medicare for All’ catastrophe.  Note the response to all this from our progressive commenters.

    A brief note on the formerly unbelievable level of national dumbth – the evidence just keeps rolling in.  According to current polls, fewer than 20% of Americans state that they do trust the federal government, yet over 50% of them prefer policies that would immensely enlarge it so as to control and provide for more of their lives.  We have known for some decades that our population in the aggregate (>95%) is innumerate.  After two generations of unionized public schooling, we now have daily demonstrations that we are a nation with few if any remaining critical thinking skills.  And this not because our genetically influenced intelligence levels have suddenly dropped, but simply because our government-managed knowledge base about reality continues to shrink.  At this point it’s always proper to cue Thomas Jefferson’s ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Bottom line – the Democrats have a winning strategy.

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