Rebane's Ruminations
November 2026
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  • George Rebane

    Headline, ‘Growth in US Leaves World Behind’ while the ECB continues to keep the ‘fragile economies’ of the EU on crutches with low interest rates.  Wonder why our lamestream considers this too insignificant to report?  One might almost think that they're afraid people will credit President Trump with some of this good news.

    Judge’s ruling – Illegal aliens now know how to be turned loose in the US after crawling under the fence – just bring your kid along.  Wonder if this will invite or deter more illegals.

    Macron wants to restore the ancien régime after Brexit, and make French again the official language of the EU.  Meanwhile English, and specifically American English, has become the world’s lingua franca in both commerce and diplomacy.  Maybe Monsieur le Président knows that French is the most rapidly shrinking developed country language worldwide.

    California’s new enforced water restriction law is designed to make real in people's lives the global warming hysteria that the progressives’ politicized consensus science could not do.   It looks like you will be criminalized if ‘in this land of surf and sun, you still flush for Number One’.  Meanwhile we continue to oppose building new reservoirs and dump most of our fresh water into the Pacific. (more here)

    Government cheating government – it turns out that “America’s great progressive political hope, NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio is essentially the nation’s pre-eminent slumlord.”  NYC’s affordable housing projects have been allowed to deteriorate while deBlasio has been “taking active steps to deceive inspectors and cover up its ineptitude and wrongdoing.”  We recall our mantra – in creating social problems, government is always guilty until proven innocent.

    [16jun18 update]  Gary Litke in the 16jun18 Union (here) is among the county’s NIMBY legions who oppose building 28 new houses west of Grass Valley because “the agricultural, open space history of this property should be maintained in ways that would benefit someone other than residential real-estate developers.”  It continues to be lost on the local Litkes that Nevada County needs people who need places to come and raise their families here, do business with our merchants, send their kids to our schools, support our cultural offerings, and do all the things which have made Nevada County the desirable place to live that it has been.  Do all of these people not also benefit from such developments?  Today, we seem to be a draw primarily for people with, let’s say, a spectrum of alternative life styles based on cesspool SF values.  What are we offering to middle-class working families with traditional American values?

    Mizzou’s comeuppance.  The university is in dire straits with student enrollments down 35%, and more graduating than wanting to attend.  It turns out that all that horsecrap in 2015 – when student activists banned free speech, got top administrators to leave, and made academics a politically correct supplementary offering – has convinced students and parents that the University of Missouri is a place to avoid, especially when other neighboring universities and colleges are doing their best to return to academics and offer an open environment for exchanging ideas. (more here and here)

    [17jun18 update]  The naivete of The Economist.  This hoary ‘newspaper’ continues its lurch leftward, donning the trappings that so often today adorn the remarks of progressive naifs.  In its 16jun18 edition’s lead editorial (here) this auto-aggrandized paragon of journalism laments that the Singapore “agreement contains no binding North Korean commitments.”  More sober observers celebrated Trump’s first meeting with NK’s UFK as 1) the decades-awaited breakthrough meeting that defused what the Left itself had been aspirating as imminent nuclear armageddon, and 2) the potential for further talks that could lead to the normalization of that rogue regime and remove it as China’s pawn for irritating the west.

    [19jun18 update]  Now here’s a bit of embarrassment for Mueller and his crack team of progressive yet unbiased lawyers finally investigating the Russia conspiracy angle which was their charge.  A Russian company charged in the conspiracy did not exist at the time of the alleged mischief, and the company is now fighting back – whoulda thought of that? – justifiably demanding Mueller’s evidence on which he based his indictment.  Red-faced and with pants down, Mueller is desperately petitioning the court for delays and gag order for submitting his supposedly unclassified evidence.  Oh my.  (more here)  H/T to reader.

    [20jun18 update] 'My Lazy Summer as a Public Employee' by Jason Riley is another of a gazillion examples we see every day of government workers' gold bricking, hubris, inefficiencies, and incompetence.  All of it counsels letting government do something should be the choice of last resort when all other private sector means have been exhausted, including to consider not doing it at all if government is the only remaining choice.

  • George Rebane

    Cal-3Cal-3 is going to be on the November ballot. WaPo reports that “On Tuesday, the California secretary of state confirmed in a memo that Draper’s Cal-3 campaign attained enough valid signatures to earn a spot on the ballot Nov. 6. After more than 150 years of failed partition proposals, California voters will finally go to the polls to decide whether they want to relinquish their monopoly of the Pacific coast and become three new states.”  Venture capitalist Tim Draper’s old plan to cut California into six more ideologically cohesive pieces has been slimmed down with some apparent success.  No matter its fate at the polls, the proposition confirms again what RR has maintained over the years while vehemently being denied by the state’s Left – especially our lightly read locals.  People do want their voices heard by their government, and people do want to live with others whose values and mores are more than less like theirs.  Such existential diversity is anathema to the one-size-fits-all Left.

    The Left’s campaign to enlarge national dumbth gets a boost from NYC’s mayor deBlasio reports Jason Riley in ‘The Attack on Educational Excellence’.  deBlasio wants schools with entrance test requirements, for which Hispanics and blacks are historically poorly prepared, to revert to the racial quota system, all in the name of “diversity”.  “In the upside-down thinking of affirmative-action advocates, academically rigorous schools should be more focused on achieving racial balance and less focused on maintaining high standards. Asian displays of academic excellence therefore become problematic. Asians are somehow to blame for outperforming others, and they are to be punished for the historical injustices that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.”  Occam’s rationale for deBlasio’s call to eliminate entrance tests is simply that ignorant minorities are easier to keep disgruntled on the plantation where their attitudes and votes can be readily manipulated.

    Trump in Singapore.  Well, it turns out that it was really the media experts who were expecting a single-shot breakthrough at this week’s summit.  Leading up, they blamed Trump for expecting too much from the meeting, while Trump was telling the world not to expect much more than it would be the “potential” beginning of conversations which no other world leader had been able to launch with the North Korean dictators, while allowing them to become an ever bigger danger to world peace.  Now the Monday morning quarterbacks are decrying the President for not walking out with a definitive world-shaking treaty that in one swell foop rid the Ugly Fat Kid of his nuclear capability and made him into a well-behaved leader enjoying a recent epiphany on human rights.  Demonstrating that their Trump Derangement Syndrome knows no bounds, these self-pumped pinhead pundits are now manufacturing hypotheticals about all kinds of imagined bad things yet-to-come, and getting a jump on criticizing the President for those.  (Here is an example from the auto-profound Council on Foreign Relations.  The myriad pronouncements on the lamestream are too silly and stupid to even consider.)  Meanwhile, Trump continues to tell all that the process has just started, and no one has given away anything to anyone – i.e. going forward we will trust AND verify.

    [14jun18 update]  The 500-page DoJ’s IG report on Hillary’s email server investigation has apparently been seen by select eyes only, and is promised to be made public later today.  From early and conflicting reports by sources such as AG Sessions, Rep Trey Gowdy, and the WSJ, it is unclear what kind of political bias IG Horowitz found or did not find.  The congressman concludes what most of us witnessed over the last two years, that the FBI’s treatment of Hillary and Trump have been profoundly asymmetrical.  Yet the WSJ reports, ‘DOJ Watchdog’s Clinton Report Finds Mistakes by Comey, No Political Bias’.  We can hardly wait to discover what kind of hoops the IG had to jump through to come to that conclusion.  An early and perhaps premature assessment is that the Deep State is fully engaged in defending itself.

    [later]  Well, the 568-page hernia pack is now out for all to read, and it’s a doozer (download pdf here).  The report documents in exhaustive detail the prima facie bias expressed throughout the months of the FBI’s investigation of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.  It hauls Comey, Lynch, McCabe, Strzok, and others over the coals, and then, and then, … FBI Director Christopher Wrey goes in front of the cameras this afternoon and does a reprise of Comey’s 5jul16 bullshit performance exonerating Hillary.  Wray goes through the exact same arguments of the damning evidence the IG’s investigation uncovered, and then announces a jaw-dropping conclusion that there was no hint of political bias shown by the investigators or during the course of the investigation – simply unbelievable how the man could keep a straight face delivering that copy.

    Wray’s message essentially acknowledged that the FBI screwed up from start to end, and “we’ll hold people accountable”, but the organization itself remains as untainted as ever and was not harmed by at least 18 months of continued incompetence and blatant documented bias.  Somehow screwing up the biggest investigation the FBI has had in decades should make no never mind in the minds of Americans.

    More revealing were the sober, detailed, and very frank assessments delivered by House chairmen Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va) on Bret Baier’s FN Special Report.  Both men were incredulous of the way that the Deep State was now defending itself.  It’s worth watching this exchange here on YouTube.

  • George Rebane

    Monopsony – the market condition that exists when there is one buyer.

    Nobody has said that capitalism is the perfect way to organize society and commerce; it has just beat the bejeezus out competitors since King Louis XVI lost his head in 1793.  But capitalism does have its inevitable warts.  I was reminded of one last night when reading the online edition of Prof Alan Blinder’s ‘What to Do When the Labor Market Stops Working for Workers’.  Blinder is a proto-socialist economist ensconced at Princeton, and often shares his views on capitalism with us in the pages of the WSJ.

    The good professor is a fan of unions and no fan of the extra-union work-employer arbitration methods used in today’s corporate workplaces.  His point is that arbitration methods currently in use to resolve labor disputes puts the worker at a disadvantage when facing a squad of the company’s astute labor lawyers.  Blinder has a point there, especially when the worker brings nothing more than his easily replaced commodity skills to the workplace and expects more over time simply because he has put in the time.

    The commodity worker is at a special disadvantage, as we would expect, when the employer is the regional monopsonist for the worker’s skills, and there are other workers who would be willing to do the same work for less – i.e. in that market such workers are willing to compete for the job by offering greater value to the employer.

    (more…)

  • [A left-leaning friend, and no friend of Trump, cites the WaPo's latest dire prediction of a coming debt-crash, what with all these companies buying back their stock, returning money to shareholders, and paying additional compensation to their employees.  Anyone else hunkering down?  gjr]

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  • George Rebane

    State Senator Ted Gaines reports in the 9jun18 Union – ‘New bill slaps Californians with tax on services’ – of a piece of surreptitious legislation (SB993) quietly wending through Sacramento that will install yet one more layer of taxes that the people must add to the tribute that they already submit to succor the Sacramento Leviathan.  This new 3% tax on services will affect people directly and indirectly in more ways than we can count.

    “Next time you visit a dry cleaner, hair stylist, manicurist, mechanic or any of the other countless services that we use day after day, week after week, you'll pay a new and additional three-percent tax for the exact same service. That's the last thing financially-stretched Californians need in this already unaffordable state. And history is clear that the three-percent tax will only creep up over time. … The damage wouldn't stop there. Small businesses contract out myriad tasks so they can focus on their core money making activity. They pay for computer services, payroll, janitorial, bookkeeping, legal services and more. Under this bill, they will be paying a premium for those services.”

    The tax will give rise to a whole new bureaucracy charged with its administration that itself will cost over $600M annually, and employ a whole new tranche of government workers (aka parasites) whose benefit and retirement packages will require more millions taken into perpetuity from the shrinking corps of the state’s taxpayers.  In short, this will be another cancer upon the horde of cancers already afflicting the state’s fisc, and it will “further damage California’s faltering economic competitiveness and corrode our long-term financial health.”

    We the people used to pay taxes for acknowledged needed services that were best provided by the collective, i.e. government.  Today new taxes are constantly added and existing ones are redirected for the sole purpose of sustaining and growing government (the employer of last resort).  When governments start exacting tribute from the people with impunity and for such clearly self-serving purposes, it has always signaled the onset of a rapidly evolving autocracy toward eventual tyranny.

    Addendum:  As we have reported, California’s loss of productive middle-class taxpayers continues apace.  And the state is fast on the track to follow other high-tax socialist enclaves like Vermont (home of Bernie the communist) which has now initiated a $10K ‘Vermont relocation grant’ in its desperate attempt to replace its outflow of taxpayers by attracting new workers who can telecommute from the Green Mountain State (here).  Upon a moment’s reflection, it is clear that the $10K reward for moving there will only be taken by the innumerates who cannot calculate the horribly negative internal rate of return that this investment will have on their financial health.  Exit question – do companies really allow such double dummies to work from home?

  • George Rebane

    That Ted Cruz is a strong anti-abortionist was claimed by a liberal friend and RR reader.  Moreover, the Texas Republican believes that “the continuum of human life begins at the moment of fertilization”, which means at conception.  By reasonable extension, this also means that Cruz is against any and all post-coitus contraception, since this might destroy a fertilized egg (although some eggs may be fertilized many hours after coitus).  I was not aware of that about Sen Cruz and asked my friend to provide some proof, which I promised to post.  He did, and you can inspect his submission here.

    Illegal border crossings are down – that is the narrative that the Left (and their lamestream-locked local lackeys) are using to extenuate their criminality with the argument that ‘Dreamers’, illegal alien children (accompanied and unaccompanied), and other labeled groups of “immigrants” (now referenced sans the former ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ modifiers) should be given amnesty to stay here forever, qualify for state offices, and soon obtain the vote (‘they pay taxes too’).  Well, border crossings are actually up since the folks south of the border became convinced that Congress and our courts would override President Trump’s enforcement of illegal alien laws already on the books.  According to the Border Patrol and Homeland Security, the year-to-year number of intercepted and arrested illegal alien families is up 435%, and the number of unaccompanied children is up 329%.  Fox News reported this; haven’t heard/seen it on any lamestream outlets.

    Hillary Hodge’s run for District 3 Supervisor has so far garnered her 1,467 votes (to Dan Miller’s 1,713 votes).  Nevada County’s participation in beta testing the new Voters’ Choice Act will delay completing the tally until this coming Monday.  I presume that Dan Miller’s lead will hold and he will be re-elected.  But what I really find remarkable is that so many people actually voted for her.  Let me say at the outset that Ms Hodge is a nice pleasant lady and an upstanding citizen of our county.  But what I find astounding is that someone without any relevant education, total absence of experience, a demonstrated ignorance of issues, and no known life accomplishments (she admits to still coming to grips with being an adult) has the hubris to come in as an unknown, and do so well against the incumbent opponent whose attributes are diametrically opposite hers.  This speaks poorly for our county and, in extension, to our country’s voters who today are so ideologically rent that they will vote for a 2×4 with a painted face if it runs under their preferred party’s banner.  

    [9jun18 update]  Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer delivered one of his liberal logrollers – ‘What should America do to be great again’ – in the newspaper’s 9jun18 edition.  He has concluded that America is no longer a great nation, and that is the fault of Republicans and President Trump.  He cites with alarm the upcoming report by the UN’s Human Rights Council, an assemblage dominated by the world’s worthless worthies (here), which contains an amplified and doctored list of America’s sores and carbuncles, leading Mr Berkheimer to conclude that we are indeed the worst of the worst among developed nations.  To be great again, Berkheimer prescribes that we reinstate “the freedom and opportunities to live a better life”, along with the “freedom to innovate” – freedoms which the Left has systematically been removing since the country’s post-war march to socialism was resumed by the Great Society in the 1960s.  Telling of Berkheimer’s prescriptions for America’s future are his mythical interpretations of the governmental “we” who used to “provide” for Americans.  And going forward “it's not just what we provide for those living now, but instead what we provide for the future — for our children, and the next generation after that.” (emphasis mine)  Unless I’m forgetting something fundamental about the greatness of America, it was not government, but the people who were free to innovate and provide for themselves that made us the most sought-after nation in the world.  Government’s constitutional role was to maintain a secure geography in which we could do all these things for ourselves.  Today the Berkheimers in America are working hard and with considerable success to reverse these roles.

  • George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 6 June 2018.]

    Steven Hayward of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies has put down some observations about climate change (here) that summarize what millions around the world acknowledge daily – namely that “climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.” 

    Now neither Dr Hayward nor, for that matter, these commentaries have been telling readers and listeners that climate change, formerly sold as global warming, is not happening.  Of course it is, and humans are no doubt contributing to this change, but we have nowhere near the impact on climate that hysteria mongers in politics and special interests have been getting all purple-faced about over the last few decades.  The supporting consensus or pseudo-science of climate change has failed to live up to the terrible predictions wrested from tortured data and dodgy computer models, neither of which can seem to get their stories straight.

    Barraged by all the revelations of data doctoring and missed prognostications, the True Believers have tried all manner of approaches to convince the world’s nations to start economy-crippling decarbonization programs.  On national levels there have been a flood of laws passed to lower carbon emissions in both consumption and energy production.  But on the international level, since 1988 when the climate hysteria was launched with a series of highly publicized congressional hearings, the UN’s big global warming conferences have been an utter bust.  Since then, nations have gathered several times to pay lip service to reducing carbon emissions.  But after leaving the conferences and running the numbers on the impact of their promises, none of them have come close to living up to their carbon reduction commitments.  And many have actually increased their CO2 outputs.

    As Hayward points out, “A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ”  Yes, you heard that right – the politically correct world is definitely pivoting away from the unconvincing consensus science about global warming to something more fuzzy and currently in vogue – social justice and identity politics issues of which there are an uncounted number just waiting to be raised into people’s consciousnesses.  Hayward calls this “the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality.”

    The downward descent of such politicized attempts at central control was explained years ago in 1972 by political scientist Anthony Downs as “a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.”  The first cycle has experts and activists raising the alarm about a problem, which in then is picked up by the media as the next big story of “global peril and salvation”.  This establishes the peril’s priesthood – for global warming it has been Al Gore and Jerry Brown.  Third comes the sudden realization that fixing it is going to cost a lot of money, more than anyone had imagined.  In the fourth cycle people have become accustomed to the volume of the hysteria, have become convinced that no one can fund the solution, and quietly enter the last cycle, shifting their interest to other more recent and immediate things, which then completes the sequence.

    Today no one is really interested in actual global warming solutions as shown by the direction of climate-related philanthropy from the green-leaning foundations.  These overwhelmingly fund only “mobilizing public opinion and opposing the fossil fuel industry.”  Hayward concludes that “treating climate change as a planet-scale problem, that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme, transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.”

    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.

  • [Bolton’s chief of staff Fred Fleitz is drawing fire for co-authoring (with 15 others) a report on Islamic radicalism in the US which claims that “80% of U.S. mosques were incubators for subversion or violence” and that the real war with Islam is “in reality a clash of civilizations.” (Whoulda thought?!)  But no one is drawing fire for spreading the blatant socialism now rampant across the land which is a demonstrated harbinger of totalitarian governance, examples of which have killed tens of millions in the 20th century and continue to do so today.  Go figger.  gjr]

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  • George Rebane

    Politically incorrect and nationally syndicated economist Dr Walter Williams offers his thoughts on ‘Why Capitalism is Morally Superior to Socialism’.  The short essay is worth a read, as are some of its leftwing comments. 

    The US poverty level has been a political football for years.  The Left keeps upping it regularly in order to bolster their agenda for increased taxation and regulation based on the narrative that America is the leader in wealth and income inequality.  For example, today I just heard from a KVMR regular that “40% of Americans are poor”; the statement passed without challenge as if it came down from the mountain on stone tablets.  For a new data-backed analysis of this issue, take a read of Cato’s Policy Analysis #839 ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’.  From its executive summary we read –

    Many U.S. politicians are promoting policies to reduce income inequality and poverty by increasing taxes and transferring more income to lower-income households. These proposals rest in part on claims that income inequality in the United States is greater than that in other Western democracies and is growing, and that poverty persists at high levels. … The usual statistics invoked to support those claims, however, are misleading. Those statistics exclude about $1 trillion in annual transfer payments to lower-income households and do not account for the effects of taxes. When those transfers and tax effects are included, income inequality in the United States is lower than that in many Western democracies and has grown at rates similar to income inequality in other nations. Improved estimates of poverty show that only about 2 percent of today’s population lives in poverty, well below the 11 percent to 15 percent that has been reported during the past five decades.

    [31may18 update] TBS’ Samantha Bee called First Daughter Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt” for posting a picture of herself hugging her toddler son, blaming her for the fallacious reports that “the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 1,500 immigrant children in the last three months of 2017.” (here)  Ms Bee is unscathed, but imagine what would have happened had a conservative media person so labeled an Obama or Clinton daughter.  The progressives do indeed live in a privileged world of their own.

    AI encounters problems in being adopted by the medical industry which kills over 200,000 patients annually through medical mistakes.  For example, deep learning algos are daily discovering new, effective, and super-human diagnostic methods for early detection of diseases.  But their adoption is being stymied by authorities who reject them because their workings cannot be explained to humans – they just work and save lives.  The EU is doing a double dummy in this when it “implemented a regulation requiring all algorithms to be “explainable” by human engineers”, something that is impossible for most deeply learned algorithms from large datasets.  Again, government is guilty until proven innocent. (more here)

    [1jun18 update] Hilary Hodge as a county supervisor??!!  From all available evidence, the woman has nothing in her record to recommend her for the position, especially when it comes to promoting business and economic development.  To my knowledge she has never even held a job that required someone to take money out of his own pocket to pay her – the concept of for-profit enterprise is foreign to her.  And a perusal of her political provenance and promoters predicts that the lady will attempt to ‘help’ the county by enthusiastically amplifying the regulatory, tax, and fee burdens that come down to us from Sacramento.

    [5jun18 update]  Barabara Ross, Nevada Joint Union High School District Scholarship Coordinator, is retiring.  Since the news is now public, I want to express my gratitude for all the work over the years she has done, in addition to her other NJUHSD duties, as the Academic Chair of SESF’s TechTest.  She has administered the annual TechTest, coordinated the pre-test seminars, supervised the grading of the tests, and awarded the scholarship checks at the annual awards ceremonies.  In the 2007-18 running of TechTest, SESF has awarded more than $150,000 in merit scholarships to Nevada County’s brightest STEM-bound graduates.  I have had the pleasure of working with Ms Ross all these years, and we will miss her greatly as she heads out of state for greener pastures with her husband for a well-deserved retirement.  Thank you Barbara!

  • [Today our merrily marching Marxists, comprised of our dimly lit and under educated leftwingers, have no idea that their new ideological epiphanies are nothing but the retrieved (from the dustbin of history) and reheated tenets of 20th century communists who killed untold millions as they ruined the lives and hopes of billions – "you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet".  gjr]

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3 comments on Ruminations – 15jun2018 (updated 20jun18)