George Rebane
The Great Divide debate continues as muddled as ever. We refer to leftwing commenter jon smith’s 134pm re my 1104am in the 26may18 Sandbox. The man(?) is apparently not aware of the years-long Great Divide debate in these pages and in the national dialogue (also referenced here, see RR’s ‘Great Divide’ category). In this debate the Left has always taken the position that the country is to remain unified and continue its progress toward a socialist state. The Right’s position has been to acknowledge the growing and irreversible ideological chasm, and therefore counsels adoption of a new form of republic to keep alive the Founders’ idea that the US would go forward as a multitude of ‘laboratories of democracy’, each governing according to their interpretation of the Constitution, and each implementing ‘best practices’ from other states as needed.
The Right has suggested various solutions for the Great Divide that range from partitioning existing states (e.g. SoJ movement) to forming coalitions of states into a confederacy of like-minded regions. The Left, as also witnessed here, has always been in vehement denial of such peaceful solutions, claiming that these are treasonous, and retorting with the dictum, ‘My way, or the highway’ for those opposing their promotion of Agenda21 collectivism. Well, at least that was so until alt-Left Californians recently started floating the idea of the state’s secession from the Union.
What one can draw from these lopsided opposing attitudes is that the Right would very much like to be relieved of those Americans who embrace the Left’s insane public policies that are leading us to tyranny through an economic morass and growing autocracy. And conversely, we see the Left rejecting any such separation and/or change in direction, seeking instead to keep the wealth producing Americans under their heel while denying the ideological leaning of the these wealth producers. What gives lie to their demogauging is that, if they really believed the Right to be an economic burden that is being shouldered by the Left, they would be more than happy to relieve themselves of such a burden through a Great Divide that provides appropriate economic isolation of the two schools of economics. In short, we would be happy to be rid of them, but they don’t want to be rid of us.
California’s education woes continue. The 29may18 SacBee reports (here) that more primary and secondary school teachers left the state (most to Texas) than we were able to attract and/or graduate from our colleges. Census data shows that in the 2003-16 interval California lost a net of 18,000 teachers in such an out-migration. All of this, of course, makes no nevermind to Sacramento’s collectivist chorus and their local lackeys who just continue singing ‘All is Well, All is Well’ louder than ever. Those of us who point out our educational calamity are simply dismissed as ‘gripers’. (H/T to reader for the heads up on this report.)
[update] On Bob Crabb’s blog I responded to Steve Frisch’s under the ‘History Regrets Itself’ post as follows – “Well, here’s a revelation. I didn’t know that the Left considered Trump and Hitler to be so much alike that it would take “mental gymnastics to differentiate Trump from Hitler.” And the chasm continues to grow.”
Attempting to post my comment, I ran into a new feature of the Security Question that compels the commenter to answer a simple arithmetic problem – in my case it was supplying the answer to 10+8 – before the comment is accepted. Instead of being able to type in the answer as usual, the site now supplies a list of possible answers from which, presumably, the commenter is to select the correct one. In my case the supplied list contained only the numbers 12, 10, 15, 6, and allowed no other direct entry. Since my education in this case was demonstrably deficient, I couldn’t post my comment, and am here reduced to lamenting that I may have run into a sample of Common Core math on a liberal site that would put so many of us at a disadvantage. I assume Mr Crabb’s regular readers have no problem with this new challenge.
When will Mueller’s criminal collusion investigation (aka “witch hunt”) end? The Left’s answer has been the easy one – it will end when Mueller finds something from which he can make a criminal case against President Trump, and not a day before. The rest of us are hoping for a more reasonable termination the time of which we can only guess. But it turns out that we can do better than that if we appeal to a method published way back in 1993 by Professor J. Richard Gott. Gott applied what we in these pages may term ‘Copernican reasoning’ to derive a formula that calculates the probability that a minimally known process will terminate between now and a specified future time. Here the minimal knowledge required is only the age of the process, or how long it has been in operation. I have used Gott’s result and expanded on it in my work over the years – a version of it is summarized in ‘… and this too shall pass’. (and more here)
So, what are the chances (probability) that Mueller’s investigation will stop in the next month, four months from now, before the election in November (in the next 5 months), …? Accepting 20 months as the acknowledged duration of the ongoing investigation, we can use the appropriate Gott-Rebane formula to compute the following graph of the increasing probability of termination over the numbered future months. As we see, the chances are one out of five that Mueller will hang it up before the election. Now you can make book.
