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  • America’s education – mandated and biased (updated 2mar19)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 27 February 2019.]

    Many and perhaps most young people today have a very jaundiced view of America, capitalism, Christianity, and western civilization in general.  Instead, all across the country and especially in the academe, they have come to embrace ideas about the benefits of collectivism – especially socialism – and societies that emphasize group identities and a world order in which group membership, especially if in one of the aggrieved groups, is paramount.  Individualism, personal freedom, and entrepreneurships that promise riches are on the wane.  How did we arrive at such a societal junction from which all roads lead to a fundamentally transformed America, one that will share little with what our Founders bequeathed us, and with the system that made us the envy of the world?

    Political leaders, from constitutional monarchies to communism, answer that such rapid changes in outlook and attitudes can only come from the educational system governments adopt and impose – as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.  And in the last half century there has been a lot of twig bending going on in America’s schools, and the clear evidence indicates that all the bending has been leftward.  Let’s look at three seemingly disparate facets of such evidence.

    (more…)

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  • CA GOP RIP (soon)

    George Rebane

    Last week I attended a candidates’ luncheon put on by the NC Republican Women Federated, undeniably the most active and productive party organization in the county.  Featured were the four candidates running for State Senate from our district – Brian Dahle, Rex Hime, Kevin Kiley, Theodore Dziuba.  Each a fine gentleman, and each gave good account of themselves during their turn at the mic.  When Q&A time came, my card was one of those drawn for the candidates to answer – ‘What plan does the CA Republican Party have for its resurgence in the state?’

    None of the four knew of any such plan, and each spent their time rehashing pabulum for the assembled that we must all work harder for the 2020 election to seat more Republicans – and this was right before the party’s big statewide convention this past weekend.  On a follow-up question I pointed out that statewide and local Dems were organized to a tee, demonstrating every issue at every opportunity, prominent in the media, harvesting voters at the grass roots level, and in general eating our lunch.  The candidates' individual responses could be summed by ‘Well yeah, we could do that also.’  Most attendees were a bit aghast at such a presentation by local party stalwarts.

    The CA Democrats’ super-majorities in all things political has pretty much stunned the Republicans, and the malady seems to have spread statewide.  Edward Ring, co-founder of the California Policy Center, has posted ‘California’s GOP Plays It Safe, When Safe Equals Death’, which may be considered as a pre-post-mortem for the CA GOP.  (H/T to correspondent)

    Longtime RR readers are aware of my litany of criticisms about how the CA Republican Party has been organizing the state’s conservatives and libertarians to stand up and promote their values and vision for America’s future and the revival of our Golden State. 

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  • Sandbox – 26feb19

    [The NCAA now allows transgender females to compete in women's track events, and soon other sports.  The big concern that needs to be addressed is not that the transgenders are setting new records for women, but that this makes no never mind to the officials now fashioning this new sports world, “Focusing on performance advantage is largely irrelevant because this is a rights issue. We shouldn’t be worried about trans people taking over the Olympics. We should be worried about their fairness and human rights instead.” (more here)  gjr] 

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  • Scattershots – 25feb19 (updated 26feb19)

    George Rebane

    In ‘America’s Second Civil War’ by Dennis Prager, he makes the case of the Great Divide stating that, save for slavery, Americans are further apart in how they think about their country and in which direction should be its future, than during the “First Civil War” in the 19th century.  He writes in Townhall.com that “Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative. … The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism. … Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.”  This has been a seminal part of Rebane Doctrine and the RR commentaries that have expanded on these points over the years.  This message will continue here as long as it is allowed to be published.

    Gov Gavin Newsom is part of the leftwing clatch that supported CA’s bullet train to nowhere and blew billions in its abortive and aborted construction.  CA having violated literally every part of the agreement with the feds for getting dollars from Washington, Trump now has stopped further funding and wants to claw back what the state has fraudulently received.  Newsom unabashedly lies in stating that the state has complied, and is really not stopping the project, but merely reducing its scope to have it now go from nowhere to nowhere on the remaining funds. (more here)  Ultimately he’ll have to go back to CA voters for more money, and he’ll probably get it from a now-dominant Democrat electorate, most of whom don’t pay very much or any taxes.  To them it will all be OPM from the greedy rich.

    Edelman Intelligence conducted a recent poll which revealed that “53% of California residents are considering leaving the Golden State because of the high cost of living.” A higher share (62%) of “respondents said they believed the best days of California were in the past.” (more here and here)  This in the face of a continuing barrage of leftwing lies telling us that the state is in fine fettle with all the right-thinking people happy dancing in the streets.  As also witnessed on these pages, the progressives maintain that only the narrow-minded, ignorant conservatives are disgruntled because the Republican party has become irrelevant in Sacramento and major metropolitan areas.  People voting with their feet tell a different story.

    Trump and the Ugly Fat Kid will meet again, this time in Vietnam, to continue talking about North Korea’s 'denuclearization', a concept yet to be defined by the parties.  And you can bet the ranch that their current definitions are not even close.  Here’s my take on Trump’s plan forward.  He knows the UFK cannot give up his nuclear program for the simple reason that he and his family will then be killed by the high level echelon of generals that surrounds him (because they and their families will also live only so long as the regime survives, otherwise they too will be dead meat).  So Trump will be satisfied to continue these talks, claiming progress as long as NK doesn’t resume missile flights and underground testing.  When he leaves office and a more weaker-looking Democrat (a la Obama) takes over, the UFK will immediately resume testing and threatening that will bring the world to the brink again, and also solidify his grip on his regime.  At that point Trump and the Repubs will point out that it was their clever foreign policy that kept the world safe, and now look what’s happening with the naïve Dem leadership in power.  This will be known as Trump’s Grand Ropadope to avoid war on the Korean peninsula for which no one seems to have a stomach.

    [26feb19 update]  Henderson’s population surges past Reno’s as Californians arrive in droves to escape taxes, fees, regulations, and prices (especially for living units).  The numbers are truly amazing as again reported in ‘As California Loses People, a Las Vegas Suburb Grows’.  California’s small net population growth is made possible by an equally massive influx of immigrants and illegal aliens, and a high birthrate contributed by resident minorities.  Progressives are the only political segment of California’s population that is totally sanguine if not celebratory about this demographic dynamic.  The rest of us chickens continue wondering how long the state can carry on with an ever smaller cohort of highly taxed wealth generators.

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  • None dare call it treason

    George Rebane

    ‘Microsoft workers’ letter demands company drop Army HoloLens contract’.  Microsoft “workers” (not employees) are the latest of progressives working at high tech companies to protest doing work for the DoD in defense of America.  Other companies like Google have already turned down defense work in which they could make a significant contribution to national security.  (H/T to reader)

    LeninThis marks the latest twist in the country’s downward spiral from global exceptionalism and hegemony.  The 75-year Pax Americana is rapidly coming to an end as other bad actors in the world see how our younger generations, especially those with STEM and related skillsets, have been ideologically fashioned in over two generations of leftwing schools and academe.  Lenin’s words, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”, have never sounded truer as they ring across the land.  And we have given him two generations, and are now beginning to reap the fundamentally transforming whirlwind.

    Employees who make such demands actually evoke two important notions about our 21st century social order.  First, that such people mean to withhold strategically valuable skills from contributing to the defense of the order that made possible their education, jobs, and general well-being.  And because such skills are not easily attained by the population at large, these people have a special responsibility to their fellow citizens who work in supportive industries and non-tech fields providing their support for the sustenance of America, and thereby deservedly enjoying their globally-preeminent quality of life.  And finally, these STEM workers contribute materially to creating the wealth that enables us to care for our poor and indigent at levels that are the envy of the world.

    The second aspect to notice about such a presumptuous protest letter from a company’s employees is that they actually believe in the collectivist (socialist/communist) principle that workers at a private company have the intrinsic right to specify and “demand” what work the company will and will not do.   In a country founded on the principles of free markets, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and individual liberties, telling someone else what they may or may not do legally with their property is an abhorrent concept and a blatantly deplorable behavior.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to keep our land from coming under such mob rule.

    If a private sector employee does not like the work his employer legally undertakes, he has the alternatives to resign, to respectfully request that management changes policy, or suck it up and continue trading his labor for wages in a professional manner.  His employer does not operate a charity, a psychobabble support group, or an enterprise to satisfy someone’s concept of ‘common good’.  An employee’s job is sustained only to the extent that it contributes to the enterprise being able to attract and serve a sufficient customer base in a highly competitive marketplace.

    These lessons have been absent from our schools for over a half century.

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  • Unsustainable Socialism

    If it hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. – Progressive shibboleth

    George Rebane

    The conversation hereabouts circles the ‘sustainability of socialism’ barn as regularly as turning the pages of a calendar.   Ever since the French revolution we have always lived with socialists who in past years were harder to spot, at least until Marx and Bastiat published their pro- and con- apologies.  In those years socialists living in capitalist countries did their best to hide their socio-economic credos as they sought to fashion public policy, and letting the word ‘socialism’ be connected with their proposals was the ultimate taboo and an almost certain kiss of death.

    Not so any more.  We are now almost 50 years into a public education system the common thread of which has been to turn out socialist-friendly graduates.  Most recently this subterfuge has been replaced with the educators’ blatant promotion of socialism accompanied by a revised history that strongly recommends it to young minds.  And so today we have at least two generations of 'educated' voters who are convinced that everything anti-socialist they hear in the public forum is fomented by the rightwing fascisti and their greedy capitalist running dogs.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 19feb19

    [I think it's profitable to continue the discussion about how the progressive Left is certain about President Trump's unsuitability for office in light of his domestic and foreign policy record, and the record of investigations that to no avail have sought to nail him.  And in light and in spite of this record, how our Left has become more confident that all their evidence-free allegations and more are true beyond the need for any further substantiation. gjr]

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  • Border Security’s True Colors (updated 20feb19)

    George Rebane

    For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

    This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

    Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

    The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

    So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

    Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

    And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

    [20feb19 update]  Great Divide reflections: >85% conservatives and Republicans believe there is a national emergency at the border; >65% of liberals and Democrats believe there is no border emergency.  The Right is astounded at this disparity and wonders how a nation with such a polarized outlook on such fundamental matters can continue, let alone function.  On the other hand, with no such concerns the Left believes the Right is just ignorant and evil, and needs to be brought to heel by whatever means it takes.

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  • Idiots (Evil?) on Parade (updated 18feb19)

    George Rebane

    I claimed that the photo of all the congressional critters who support the Green New Deal will become iconic to both the Left and the Right, of course, for diametrically opposite reasons.  I’m not sure that all of the pictured 40 are demonstrably stupid, such as AOC; no doubt many of them intend to use the GND to fundamentally transform America.  These people I consider somewhere between cynical and just plain evil.  I’ll post better images of GND supporters as they become available – these really deserve to be in RR’s archive.

    GNDsupporters190215

    [18feb19 update] And the GND supporters in Congress just keep coming.  Besides the major Dem presidential candidates, the count is now up to 64 in House and 9 in the Senate.

    GNDsupporters190218

     

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  • Ruminations – 14feb19 (updated 19feb19)

    The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity; the main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery – W. Churchill

    George Rebane

    ‘Amazon Cancels HQ2 Plans in NYC’ – Now here’s a good dose of social justice for the residents of NYC delivered by local socialist politicians who couldn’t stomach the tax incentives the city promised Amazon for bringing in thousands of high-paying jobs.  Some call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.

    Mueller’s investigation is wrapping up??? All kinds of rumors are flying around from the imminent termination of the investigation, that most of his lawyers have already been reassigned or left, there will be no final report (at least not one released to the public), to God knows what.  Has any reader found anything that looks like it's definitive and/or reliable out there on the web?

    [15feb19 update]  The depth of AOC’s stupidity is yet to be fathomed.  CBS reports that the congresswoman actually believes that NYC has saved $3B, money which it now has and can spend on more teachers, fixing subways, etc, etc, instead of ‘giving away’ to Amazon.  Unbelievable!!  And what can we say about the voters who elected her? – they are at least as stupid as she.  And what can we say about the Dem congressional critters that support her? – they range somewhere between butt stupid and cynical/evil.  And what about all those across the land who are fans of AOC; talk about national dumbth.

    [18feb19 update] Taqiya in America appears alive and well.  Our newly-minted Muslim in the House has successfully bamboozled herself out of a little anti-Semitic slip up, and immediately gone on to declare her true colors by agreeing to raise money for an Islamic organization with an iffy relationship to western culture and terrorist organizations.  Daily Caller reports, “Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar is scheduled to raise money in March with the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) only a week after she used an anti-Semitic trope to claim Israel has paid for GOP support.”

    'Autopsy of a Dead Coup' by Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent summary of our Left's draconian three-year effort to put an end first to candidate Trump, and then to President Trump.  The VDH piece was brought to us by a regular commenter in the last Sandbox's comment stream.  I did not want the link to it to languish there, so I'm making it more prominent here.  As expected, one of our regular liberal readers had no problem assessing the events of that sordid trail of treachery as nothing more than some solid, concerned citizens "exercising their Constitutional duty in evaluating Trumps mental fitness."  (No really, that's what the Left believes has been happening.)

    [19feb19 update]  'Hate crimes' list reported by the liberal lamestream media just during the two years of the Trump administration.  When a progressive hates a duly elected President, then let nothing stand in the way of getting him out of office or delegitimizing his administration.

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31 comments on America’s education – mandated and biased (updated 2mar19)