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  • Loony Tunes – 6jul2019 (updated 8jul19)

    George Rebane

    To our categorical ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man’, we must add a section in which, from time to time, some real doozies can be collected and commented.  We all witness and shake our heads at them as they appear in serious publications and outlets.  This morning we start with a couple from our own Union and the ultra-serious coronet of capitalism, The Wall Street Journal.  The record would be incomplete should we omit such observations and interpretations as a seminal characteristic of our times.

    Nevada City resident Ron Lowe, writing (here) in the 6jul19 Union, is astounded to discover “that liberty must be kept by force”, and that the country is now so polarized that “crazy Republican white religious extremists” are actually ready to defend their liberties with the use of force.  This worthy has never heard of the American Revolution and the conditions that gave rise to it.  His fervent hope today is that our government has “contingent plans to call out the US military to quell these Republican radicals if they start their revolution against America.” (emphasis mine) In his letter he makes it clear that citizens’ right to bear arms sufficient to resist an autocratic government is anathema to the social order of his liking.  I wonder what free nations he knows of that did not gain their freedoms through the use of force, and then remain prepared to use force to maintain those freedoms.  In embracing such beliefs Mr Lowe has plenty of company.  (My own opinion on such use of force by the citizenry was covered here and here.)

    Then we have author, war correspondent, and journalist Gordon Dillow who writes a sober ‘The Asteroid Peril isn’t Science Fiction’ in the 7jul19 WSJ.  He goes to great length to describe the peril and inform us that we have no answer for “what to do about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth”  So what’s loony about such an alarming dissertation?  Well, in outlining ways in which mankind could counter such cataclysmic catastrophes, most of which will not work, he considers an approach that has the best chance of working – using a nuclear bomb to divert/destroy the asteroid – and then tells us that this is not a viable alternative.  Why?  (Seatbelts please) Because “the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space … makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.”  There you have it.  Millions would die, or even civilization could end, and it’s all worth it if we can keep lots of people from not getting nervous about “nuclear weapons in space”, especially if this may “violate international treaties …”.  In publishing this piece, I don’t know whether the WSJ editorial staff decided to pull our collective legs, or they just overlooked Dillow’s ‘reasoned’ basis that opts for wholesale human annihilation.  Now imagine such an argument being brought up in the White House war room while our senior leaders consider how to counter a killer asteroid heading for Earth.  Should they then just shoot the sumbich on the spot, or take the time and effort to seek psychiatric aid?

    [8jul19 update] One of the looniest tunes from the Left playing out today is their legions of public school teachers continuing to declare their heartfelt concern for the education and welfare of the children they are paid to educate.  As we have documented for years in these pages, nothing could be further from the laughable truth.  The Democratic party and their union minions/handlers (take your pick) have taken America’s public education to new lows with every passing decade over the last half century during which they have been in charge.  The 8jul19 WSJ published ‘An Education Horror Show – a case study in public school failure and lack of accountability’.

    The latest posterchild of this ongoing tragedy of America’s culture is the Providence, RI public school system, an horrific example that was pointedly not even mentioned at the past weekend’s NEA convention that saw prominent visits by a phalanx of Dem presidential candidates.  I urge you to read the details such as the testing which demonstrates the Providence’s pedagogic plague in which children get dumber the longer they attend the city’s schools.  There is much more involved here.  And all of it in a district that “spent nearly $18,000 per pupil in 2017—about 50% more than the national average.”  Finally, to put a bow on it that applies across the land, the incompetent, cynical, and shameless “Democrats as ever blame a lack of funding”.

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  • Happy Fourth, if you can (updated)

    George Rebane

    Independence4jul2108

    This patriotic graphic was posted on last year’s 4th of July.  Continuing our national trend, this year’s celebration has gotten a bit more tense.  We now have invented and baked in the country’s psyche the national notion that everything ante-bellum that was part of American history is fair game to be attacked, withdrawn, denied, silenced, or destroyed.  The latest is the very familiar Betsy Ross flag, the first Stars and Stripes to grace our newborn country with its familiar ring of thirteen stars for the original thirteen colonies.  No more.

    (more…)

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  • Picking a Politically Proficient Heritage

    George Rebane

    Kamala Harris’ insistence that she is African-American, in spite of the Jamaican detour of her father’s lineage, raises an interesting and, perhaps, important point on how we claim our racial roots in this age of political correctness. (more here)  Not imposing any reasonable limits on climbing up our ancestral tree would, of course, allow each of us to call ourselves African-American.  That would effectively kill that label’s semantic in American politics.

    (A language derives its power from the accuracy and precision of its words or lexicon which allows its users to readily discriminate between shades of meaning.  Therefore, the more words – precisely defined, meticulously preserved, and correctly used – within its lexicon, the more effective are the communications that a language supports in the sense of enabling complete, clear, and compact messaging.  Semantically prostituted words with multiple meanings are inefficient and ambiguous, and require additional discriminative words to correctly communicate ideas and assertions.  Today’s English is a mess created by our educational system.)

    So, how far back should we go in claiming and projecting our ethno-racial heritage?  In my case, I could call myself a Mongo-American since my racial derivation is from the Finno-Ugric segment of Europe’s Nordic clans.  The Ugric tribes originally migrated westward from Mongolia, leaving some in the Ural Mountains of Russia before spreading out into eastern Europe.  Estonians and Finns are genetically identical, and both speak what modern linguists call a Finno-Ugric language.  Or perhaps I should proclaim myself to be an Ugric-American.  I don’t know, but Estonian-American sounds as bland as Jamaican-American.  Neither effectively communicates its aggrieved past as required in today's proper public use of identity politics.  So what kind of hyphenated American are you?

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  • Anything to undermine America (updated 7jul19)

    George Rebane

    The Democrats and their lamestream media are now in high gear doing anything and everything they can to undermine this administration and weaken the US in the eyes of its adversaries.  The first and most important victims of the Left’s lies are their constituents relegated to the low end of the bell curve on smarts.  As evidence, they are so bamboozled by the sleazebags that only 17% of them believe that Trump’s tax cuts benefit them, when IRS data shows that almost everyone benefited from the tax cuts.

    And to put a ribbon on it, only 47% of Americans believe that Trump’s policies pulled the economy out of its Obama doldrums of under 2% growth, making no never mind of the fact that when Trump took over the GDP growth rate jumped over 60% and has remained there.  The lamestream has made certain than none of these light thinkers ever hear of Obama’s famous prognostication, “To get the GDP to grow at 3% again will require a magic wand.”  Well, our current president most certainly has that magic wand, which today’s market underlined by finishing the highest June gain in over 80 years.  (For the non-investors, the summer months beginning with June are historically the doldrum months on the stock markets.)  In spite of all this, the Dems have convinced 53% of Americans that Trump is mishandling the economy.

    On the foreign policy front, Trump has exposed longstanding and dramatic shortcomings in our agreements for trade, mutual defense with allies, nuclear proliferation by rogues, and border security.  For decades America’s position in each of these areas was being taken advantage of by nations who saw us as weak and without direction.  Trump has changed all that, and in every area he has gotten people off the dime and things moving.  Now the feckless Democrats are criticizing him and telling their know-nothings that Trump is not doing any good because he hasn’t solved all the decades-old problems in his first two years in office.  And none of them, not a single one, has anything better to offer than to stick our head back in the sand and let friend and foe steal us blind.

    In the meantime, the Democrats have totally abandoned their former positions and goals, as they have wrapped themselves in socialism to tout Marx’s message to the masses of the western hemisphere, ‘Workers of the world unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains!’  And where do you think that all of this uniting of the workers will take place as our formerly porous borders disappear completely?

    [2jul19 update] This painting by Jon McNaughton titled ‘National Emergency’ says it all.  (H/T to reader)

    NationalEmergency

    [3jul19 update] A regular reader suggests that to better understand what the Democrats in Congress and our own leftwing socialist commenters share as worldviews and objectives to strive for can be found in the Jacobin Magazine.  Take a look at the real meaning of free speech as we celebrate an independence they are working to take away.

    [7jul19 update]  Here’s another big lie pushed by one of our favorite communists, Umair Haque, who writes ‘The origins of America’s unique and spectacular cruelty’.  America is the one nation in the world that has THE preeminent culture of altruistic giving to those afflicted and less fortunate.  Yet this propagandist exercises his 1A right to constantly reel off lie after lie about America, Americans, and our role in the world’s community of nations.  The importance of his thought is that it is shared by almost all the Democrat presidential candidates who daily echo his words.

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  • Ruminations – 1jul19 (updated 2jul19)

    George Rebane

    George Boardman writes ‘Trump wants to turn the 4th of July into a political rally’ in the 1jul19 Union.  Students of American history know that patriotic holidays, especially the 4th of July, have been used by politicians – incumbents and wannabes – to meld their message within a patriotic mantle.  It is the recently educated who have no knowledge of our country’s past, and today are using everything to excoriate Trump.  I could have sworn Mr Boardman to be old enough to know better.

    Kamala Harris owes her career to being a privileged mulatto – Jamaican father, Indian mother – which in today’s racial labeling allows her to call herself a black – “I am black and I am proud of it.”  She has played the black card for advancement all her life, and now she is beating her fellow Democrat presidential candidates over the head with it.  And it might even get her the nomination, unless one of her opponents has the courage to tell voters that her claims of having risen through racial discrimination is just politically motivated bull crap.

    Bullet buying background checks start today in California.  This new law will have no impact on criminals and their use of firearms to commit crimes.  But it will further constructively restrict the Second Amendment rights of the state’s law-abiding citizens.  And after all, the constructive confiscation of guns is the objective of all socialists, especially those still in denial.  The objective has always been to restrict guns to government and criminals, and out of the hands of citizens who might one day choose to revolt as autocracy evolves into tyranny.

    [2jul19 update] Under Obama, porous borders admit a dull roar of illegals who are incarcerated with children in separate quarters.  Millions are subsequently deported under our immigration laws, Republicans promote border security infrastructure, but do not criticize the stark detention quarters.  Under Trump, Democrats issue international invitations to disgruntled foreigners to enter the US illegally with promises of amnesty and citizenship.  Millions respond, creating a security and humanitarian crisis at the border.  The Democrats refuse to fund either border barriers to slow the flow or increased detention facilities to house the illegals as required by law.  Instead, they attack the president and Republicans for “separating families” as our law requires, and having created the crisis by not allowing free access through our border, sufficient welcoming succor at our border, and the unvetted and unconditional release into America’s interior.

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  • Sandbox – 28jun19

    [Facebook Inc. last week unveiled plans to launch Libra, a payment system it describes as a new “global currency.” It’s based on blockchain, the same technology that powers bitcoin, and is backed by real assets and pegged to stable government securities. Over two dozen corporate partners are on board, including financial companies MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc.,PayPal Holdings Inc. and Coinbase. Partners contribute a membership fee of $10 million each. Facebook’s goal is to line up a total of 100 corporate partners and $1 billion in assets. – 28jun19 WSJ]

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  • The 2020 campaign – capitalism vs socialism (updated 3jul19)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 June 2019.]

    Today’s dramatic tack to the left by the Democratic Party and its legion of presidential candidates has brought capitalism vs socialism to center-stage in the public forum.  The Democrat candidates share a common vision for their fundamentally transformed America, but each of them has fashioned their own particular path to their promised land.  By this I mean that each has outlined a particular sequence of wealth transfer and confiscation policies designed to solidify support from their leftwing core and attract the maximum of mid-road and undeclared voters to the collectivist cause.

    Their message is simple and effective – ‘we’ll give you a lot more free stuff, and tax the bejeezus out of the evil and greedy rich to pay for it all’.  After half century of controlling public education in America, we now have at least two generations of voters who know absolutely nothing about capitalism, and little or nothing about socialism.  What the Millennials and the lightly read have been taught is that socialism works – look at how we describe Europe.  Today capitalism for these Americans is akin to a dirty word that refers to a broken social order which allows the rapacious rich to rape the middle-class and the poor who have no opportunities to advance.  America’s history has been taught as a three century long dystopian trail of tears that has spread its misery worldwide.

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 24jun19 (updated 27jun19)

    George Rebane

    The Left wants nothing measured the public reporting of which it cannot control, or that goes against their established narrative.

    Our intrepid progressive pundit and Union columnist George Boardman is all exercised in his ‘Double dipping at the public trough, in the spotlight, and just the facts’ published in the newspaper’s 24jun19 edition.  There he leaps off the rails to rail those double dipping Dahles, while totally missing the definition of double dipping as it pertains to government payees.  Megan Dahle plans to run for her husband Brian Dahle’s recently vacated California Assembly seat since winning his seat in the state’s Senate.  If Mrs Dahle wins, she will become the elected representative from her district, doing the work of an assemblyman, and on her own merits and efforts earning that position’s pay.  That having a second member of the family also performing an independent job in government is in no way double dipping, save it serve a distinctly progressive political narrative.  Apparently Mr Boardman misses that significant nuance that spouses of elected politicians are also individuals with a duplicate set of rights to independently seek employment and recompense as they see fit.  Ah, the bespoke blinders of the Left.  (On the same op-ed page see also Manny Montes’ commentary that helps explain Mr Boardman’s values.)

    In the 24jun19 update to my ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ commentary, I posited the following observation about cultures.

    Peace and prosperity were generally maintained as long as such a governed society’s culture was allowed to evolve without obvious interdictions by government.  It is easy to see why this approach to organizing societies worked as long as the dominant culture was sufficiently cohesive.  A little reflection reveals that culture is able to inculcate and control the most complex sets of human behaviors, and allow their natural expressions in new environments/situations without having to write down a single law or regulation.  Behaviors (acceptable and unacceptable) are learned in the family and in the village square, and ‘enforced’ by the culture’s collective – i.e. everyone.

    In searching for exceptions to the above, the Talmud of the Jewish diaspora occurred to me.  The Talmud is an extensive collection (or collections if you consider separately its Babylonian and Jerusalem parts) of Jewish civil and ceremonial law along with its ethnic legends.  It comprises quite a collection of volumes that painstakingly detail a comprehensive body of behaviors and processes permitted and proscribed to practicing Jews everywhere.  And ‘everywhere’ here is the key idea.  After the Romans destroyed their Jerusalem temple in 70AD, the Jews were driven from their traditional homelands, and found themselves spread all over Europe and northern Africa.

    While always seeking to stick together wherever they found themselves, they were necessarily separated and for centuries mostly out of touch with other Jewish communities.  So how to retain, practice, and promulgate the culture that defined them and their very Jewishness when so dispersed?  The answer was through the formalization of their culture in written form, which, as I have often argued, requires many volumes to record, study, and teach.  The Talmud is thus the exception that highlights and supports my dissertations on the function and efficiency of cultures in prescribing normative behaviors within coherent populations.

    [25jun19 update]  The lamestream outlets are exorcising President Trump for his new sanctions against individuals in the Iranian leadership.  Specifically, vindictive opprobrium is dished out at Trump’s sanctioning Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and leading negotiator who has been our main point of contact in the sub-rosa diplomatic efforts between the two countries.  Their common wisdom is that now we have lost someone with whom we have been able to communicate.  What these pinheads and pundits miss is that the president has to include Zarif in the sanctions if he is to remain as our point of future contact.  Omitting Zarif’s obviously needed inclusion would have made him suspect among the raghead mullahs, and cost him his job or worse.

    [26jun19 update] "Remarkably, a recent study cited in The Atlantic (gasp!) found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives. … Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors."  Whoulda thought?  (H/T to reader)

    [27jun19 update] Photo journalism at its worst as far as providing information to impact public policy – that is conveyed by the photo of the drowned father and his toddler daughter floating face down at the water’s edge (here).  This emotional picture drives all reason and logic from viewers’ uncritical minds; whatever narrative you want to connect with that image will now be taken as God’s truth about illegal border crossings, immigration, President Trump’s border security policies, … .  No one will consider factors such as the abnormally low death rate that is connected with illegal border crossings per se – illegal aliens die before getting to the border, and a few die after successfully entering the US, but given the circumstances, the death rate is mercifully low.  How do we know?  Had there been any previous border crossing deaths, crack photo journalists would have had such pictures posted and published in every imaginable outlet all over the globe.  Fortunately, that is not the case.  I do note that the father did a very foolish and deadly thing by stuffing his daughter into his t-shirt, thus guaranteeing the toddler’s death should he not be able to stay afloat with that ungainly load in the roiling waters.  In any event, now we are guaranteed another spate of public policies based on emotion and the absence of reason.

    Democrats continue to dramatically disrespect and discount the intellect of their base and those voters they desire to attract.  A particularly specious attractant their presidential candidates are using is their promise to forgive student debt.  They are betting that their supporters will be like the now-infamous video clip of an Obama voter who believed that all the promised goodies she received would be paid for out “the President’s stash”.  OPM continues to be the salve Democrat elites will use to fix everything that ails us if you just give them your vote.  Michael Solon in the 27jun19 WSJ adds to the obvious when he writes – Debt forgiveness punishes those who did the right thing, made sacrifices, and acted wisely and frugally, as well as those who simply didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Isn’t this the sort of private gain at public expense that people on the left claim to abhor? … Such forgiveness would also eliminate a quality-control device that drives students to ensure their investment can be monetized to cover their costs. A student who borrows must make sure his future earnings will be enough to pay off the loans. If that incentive disappears, with free debt or free college, the graduate and the nation would suffer economically.  (Also see my ‘Student Loan Scam Solution’)

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  • Dropout Derby Updated 23 June 2019

    George Rebane

    I don’t know how much of this piling on of Democratic presidential candidates will go on, but that 23-member gaggle just got two more wannabes to join the race.  Talk about a snow ball’s chance in hell IMHO.  Nevertheless, I am adding #24 Mike Gravel and #25 Joe Sestak, with indicated ID numbers to the list of 23 candidates shown in my original 5jun19 Dropout Derby post (here).  I’m not sure that either of them will do much as candidates at this late date – the debates start on 26 June – but I’ll continue to accept new and updated lists until the first dropout bites the dust.  Please submit them in the vertical list format as you did before.  Thanks.

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  • Trump, Turing, and the RAF

    George Rebane

    Regarding the content and direction of his message to voters, President Trump can learn a thing or two from Alan Turing, who is considered by many to be a sanctified founder of computer science and machine intelligence.  Turing was also credited for being the technical head of the British team at Bletchley Park that broke the back of Hitler’s Enigma crypto-communications system. But few people know that Turing also did the RAF a strategic service when in 1941 he was asked to recommend the placement of armor on the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes which were suffering unacceptable losses at the hands of the Luftwaffe and while flying through German flak.

    Turing asked to see the data on the damage to the returning RAF aircraft, and also the existing plans to place armor on the fighters.  The prevailing RAF wisdom called for armoring the parts of the airplane that suffered more hits.  After some thought and a bit of analysis Turing recommended placing additional armor under the skin where seldom was found a penetration on the returning fighters.  Astonished, the RAF mavens demanded an explanation for such an outlandish recommendation.  Turing’s answer was simple.  The hits on the aircraft would be pretty much evenly distributed from their air combats and AA barrages.  On the returning fighters there was a consistency in the areas seldom hit.  So Turing reasoned, correctly, that those planes which suffered damage in the seldom hit areas were the most likely to go down; ergo put the extra armor there.  The RAF’s resulting epiphany had them do exactly that, and the survival rate of the Spitfires and Hurricanes improved markedly and immediately.

    What’s the connection to Trump?  Well, in his public and campaign pronouncement the president continues armor plating his monologues where he least needs them.  His core supporters are not fragile and brittle, threatening to abandon him at the first hint of his reducing their daily allotment of red meat.  They are exactly the opposite; his core is extremely resilient and strong; they have no Plan B save Trump, they have nowhere else to go.  So Trump doesn’t need to spend all his valuable air time bolstering his core, at this point they are bullet-proof.

    What is required of him is to armor plate the sides of his ideological corpus with appeals to the cohorts of voters he still needs to attract.  And they require a totally different kind of message that does not recount the history of progressive atrocities so pleasing to his core.  He needs to tell those he seeks to attract of his plan forward.

    The armor plate there will be made up of a description of Trump 2.0 with plans for the next stage of tax reforms, of a new list of judges and justices, of new term limits initiatives, of block grants to states for food stamps, Medicaid, housing, etc, of new initiatives to continue draining the swamp, of bipartisan justice reform to eliminate “over criminalization” and asset forfeiture, of new infrastructure projects, of school choice for parents, of solving the ideological train wreck in higher education, of outlining his existing plans to expand STEM education and vocational training programs.  This list goes on.  There’s so much that he can say to attract the undecideds from all sides, and put on the needed armor to deflect the barrage of slings and arrows against these initiatives from his enemies who have nothing more to offer than their frenetic ‘Never Trump!’ exhortations. 

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47 comments on Loony Tunes – 6jul2019 (updated 8jul19)