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  • Ruminations – 14apr17 (updated 15apr17)

    George Rebane

    Judge Andrew Napolitano was right in his report about Obama’s backdoor use of foreign intelligence intercepts of Team Trump’s communications.  An astute reader (cf fish 857pm comment here) alerted us to the now emerging news also confirmed by CNN that the US does indeed trade intelligence, including communications intercepts, in this case to give Obama administraton plausible deniability that they filtered out the Trump commo transcripts from the ‘incidentally’ monitored traffic.  British intelligence just happened to pass that intel to the White House.  The real question I have is that this now represents culpable activity by Obama to thwart Trump’s candidacy, so why are not the media making a federal case of it in banner headlines.  The lamestream I can understand, but the increasingly spineless Fox News (who reinstated Napolitano) continues to be a puzzle and a disappointment to me.  Why the deafening silence?

    Another progressive tenet – Admitting poor and unskilled immigrants and illegal aliens into the country does no harm to poor and unskilled Americans in their wallets or job prospects.

    Memo to File:  What to do about comment streams that develop widely off-topic threads?  RR is blessed with a readership keenly interested in and aware of the multitude of things happening locally and at the ends of the earth about which they wish to offer their diverse observations, opinions, and to correct other misinformed or wrong-thinking commenters.  The resulting vigorous debates, dismissed and denigrated by the Left and middle roaders, often consume the participants to an extent that it is difficult to follow threads pertinent to the RR post in their comment streams.  My desire here is not to limit the topics of interest, although I am most interested in readers’ opinions about my posts.  But absent that, how to organize these added topics so that subsequent readers and the commenters themselves can find these topic threads and build on previous arguments instead of ‘circling the barn’ – bringing up covered points again and again as if the last commenter keeps hitting the reset button; kinda reminds me of the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ – instead of reaching some point of closure. What to do?

    [15apr17 update]  In today's Union cartoonist Bob Crabb claims that the recently organized leftwing mob reception of Congressman Doug LaMalfa at his townhall in Grass Valley was nothing but a 'what goes around comes around' retribution for a similar reception the community's conservatives gave to the Gang of Four supervisors at a NH2020 townhall in 2002.  We moved here in 2002 and quickly started supporting conservative causes, but don't recall any such rowdy or raucous townhall meeting where speakers were shouted down.  Does someone have a recollection of that or can point to a news article (audio snippet?) about such a meeting?

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  • Oh, were it only that simple (updated 13apr17)

    George Rebane

    Our local graphical commentator RL (Bob) Crabb posted one of his most powerful and well-crafted offerings filched here from the 11apr17 Union.  In it he joins with deep thinkers like (also local commentator) Hilary Hodge and Rodney King to convincingly communicate the ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ message.

    RLCrabb170411

    Unfortunately, such effective propaganda messages leave out what the world has experienced and continues to do so today.  I summarize it below.

    Reality101

    [13apr17 update]  A Lament. I discovered at Bob Crabb’s blog that he sees my post above as another episode of “mocking” him. In his post Mr Crabb expanded his own commentary with a thorough drub of RR, to wit –

    I see that this latest entry is already being mocked over at Rebane’s Ruminations. I’m not surprised. George and his friends have been doing their endless circle jerk for years on end, now emboldened by the regressive policies of the Trump juggernaut. I’ve long since abandoned any hope of dialog with that snarky crew.

    In a futile response I posted this comment –

    I am saddened that you consider my critique of your excellent cartoon on RR as being “mocked”. No matter how our worldviews may differ, you have always had a respectful reception and, where necessary, a civil counter. In short, I have never mocked you, but would consider it a boon if you could point out which of my posts covering RL Crabb you consider as being of a mocking nature. Perhaps we have different definitions for the term.

    Mocking can apparently be done only in writing but not graphically. To confirm this, readers can review all the Crabb cartoons that have adorned these pages over the years, and then decide whether or not they were floated down to us from the mock-free heights which some cartoonists inhabit.

    Admittedly, the ad hominems that some RR commenters insist on inserting between serious analyses and commentaries do detract. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to convince my readers that such inserts reflect poorly on RR and, of course, themselves. (Re ‘snarky’ repartees; the boundary between snark and wit is hazy, save for those with a keen sense of others’ morals. One man’s snark is another’s wit.) However, I have yet to find another blog in these parts that has the breadth and depth of covered topics we do here, while welcoming all comers, and whose comment streams more often than not contain thoughtful, well-formed, and appropriately cited entries that expand on or dispute what I or our byline contributors post here.

    In the final analysis RR is what it is, and that itself is variously seen/judged by its readers. As made clear over the years, I don’t pretend to present ‘fair and balanced’ views simply because I am incapable of such rhetorical feats. And moreover, I believe those who claim to be so blessed are really charlatans or simply ignorant. RR will continue to unabashedly reflect the tinted/tainted views which all of its contributors and commenters bring to this forum. Perhaps someday our betters can forgive us, but we are what we are, and it was ever thus.

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  • To Declare Wars or Not

    George Rebane

    After the end of our last declared war, diplomat extraordinaire and historian George Kennan wrote in 1946 what has come to be known as the ‘Long Telegram’ (q.v.) outlining a policy to contain the post-war global aspirations of the USSR.  That was quickly followed by his now famous ‘X article’ – ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ in Foreign Affairs – which expanded on the recognition that Stalin’s real objective was to dedicate the USSR to foment revolution to “defeat the capitalist forces in the outside world” which required the overthrow of western governments.  In this piece his oft-quoted seminal observation was that –

    “… the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies … Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”  (emphasis as in its subsequent references)

    This policy with variants was adopted and implemented in its essence by all subsequent US presidents until the USSR collapsed in 1991.  Fundamentally, history has judged the containment policy through “adroit and vigilant applications of counterforce” wherever needed to have been successful.  During the entire period from 1945 to 1991 and to the present, neither the US nor any developed country has bothered to apply force or counterforce under an umbrella of a formal declaration of war.  World order, such as it is, has been maintained by the ad hoc application of military force by individual nation-states acting alone or within some loose alliances cobbled together for political reasons.

    But the pragmatism that has underpinned such undeclared hostilities for more than half a century is easy to see.  Three principal reasons to proceed without formal declaration come to mind –

    1. A declared war needs to have an objective of victory over an identified enemy that controls territory, people, and resources. The declaring party needs also then to put its nation on a wartime footing with all the concomitant sacrifices in force.
    2. Foreign policy objectives can be achieved by the use of many kinds of force without the declaration of war which requires the commitment of foreign powers to declare themselves an ally or some other form of a committed partner of the declaring nation.
    3. A formally declared war must continue until some formal instrument of peace or cessation of hostilities is negotiated and signed, else it continues indefinitely. Such terminating negotiations are more often than not difficult, expensive, and take a long time.

    Now regarding Islamists and dawa, I tend to hold with Popper and Kennan as far as a responsive policy is concerned.  To understand what I mean, take Kennan’s paragraph above and substitute Islamist et al for the USSR et al.  It would then read –

    The main element of any United States policy toward Islamism must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of dawa and Islamist expansive tendencies … Islamist pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Islamist policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence. 

    None of this involves a declaration of war against Islamism, since that in its essence is a state-less distributed assault, especially in its promotion of dawa inside the borders of western countries already suffering from unassimilating Islamic colonization.  Were we to seek the stasist solution, promoted by many libertarians and progressives, of waiting for Islamism to condense into an attackable nation-state, it would be too late for the simple reason that this will never happen.  That kind of a world has passed a good many years ago.

    And if people still believe that our current Constitution does not already provide for America to fight for its survival, without the declaration of war, through the timely, adroit, and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, then we should appropriately amend the Constitution to make that possible.

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  • It’s the Dawa, stupid! (updated 10apr17)

    George Rebane

    ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate’ now makes her latest attempt to explain the sum and substance of Islam in a well-summarized interview conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  Longtime RR readers will recognize that this American scholar, born as a Somalian Muslim, corroborates every point made in these pages about the threat that the spread of Islam portends to western civilization and all non-Islamic cultures.

    AyaanHirsiAliIn the above WSJ article, the multipli-fatwaed Ms Hirsi Ali (portrait by Zina Saunders) issues yet another dire warning to the west while our politically correct cadres continue to blindly support the growing communities of the so-called moderate Muslims in our midst.  As a former Muslim and now a celebrated academic and student of Islam, she cannot underline strongly enough that the west is in a civilizational war with the disciples of the Prophet Muhammad.  An early herald detailing the nature of this war in these pages is my ‘Of Ragheads and Racism’.

    Let me attempt a structured summary of Ms Hirsi Ali’s understated yet eloquent cri de Coeur which she expands in her latest and extensively referenced The Challenge of Dawa.  The compact book is published online as a pdf (download here) by the Hoover Institute where she is a research fellow.  She is also a fellow at the Kennedy Government School at Harvard University, and married to Scottish historian and public commentator Dr Niall Ferguson whom we have also met in these pages (here, here, and here).

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 7apr17 (updated 13apr17)

    George Rebane

    Hallelujah!  Judge Neil Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate and will now fill the ‘Scalia seat’ on SCOTUS.  This brilliant constitutional jurist is just what the country needs to slow our headlong rush to socialism, and assure us all that the high court will fulfill its constitutional role without encroaching on Congress or acting in its silence as an extension of the Executive.

    The ‘Nuclear Option’ used to confirm Judge Gorsuch does not spell the end of federal governance as we know it, no matter the gnashing of teeth and rending of garment by the Dems.  After all, it was they who came up with that little piece of weaponry in the legislative arsenal.  We are also reminded that the Senate’s 60-vote cloture rule did not come down from Sinai, nor is it ensconced in the Constitution.  Our senators can pretty much do what they like when they cobble together or mend the rules which guide their proceedings.  But having gone nuclear should now make elections and party control of Congress much more interesting, important, and volatile.

    Tomahawks over Syria, about time.  Without parsing the exact see-saws of Trump’s or even Washington’s wisdom about escalating the conflict in that part of the Middle (actually Near) East, it is good on its own that the US again showed the willingness to use its tooth and claw.  No matter whether/how the bombardment of Assad’s Syria continues, it is important for bad actors from Putin, through Iran’s mullahs, to the fat kid in North Korea to see that there’s a new order and resolve in Washington.  And the constant carping about ‘consistency’ by our Dems be damned.  Under Obama the world came to know us as consistently lame; now a little sampler of inconsistency should make people appropriately apprehensive about how this man will play the hand he was dealt.

    [8apr17 update]  ‘Where Non-Techies Can Get With the Programming’ reports on the growing popularity of computer programming courses across the nation.  These courses range from the introductory/survey type all the way to multi-month programs that pump out certificated coders who are ready to earn a living in industry.  Almost all universities now have programming courses for their non-STEM majors, and for-profit training factories charge in the tens of thousands to make a programmer out of you in three to six months.

    The importance of algorithms and the ability to algorize has finally been recognized by our non-techie business and (gasp!) humanities communities as a pre-requisite for critical or systems thinking.  This gospel has been preached here for years, and now it has bubbled up to the level where even folks at the NYT appreciate how algorizing is actually a fundamental skill that is also the foundational common denominator of creativity (more here).  Everyone who learns to code becomes an algorist, and can eventually learn to think thoughts denied to mere mortals (cf. Sapir-Whorf and all that).  For those heading for STEM careers, computer programming is a natural gateway to the systems sciences the tools of which many of us have come to know open up more than a lucrative livelihood for their practitioners. Here is something I wrote years ago as a short intro to algorithmics at a time when using the word algorithm was beyond the communal ken and thought to be only obscure jargon and propeller-head talk.  The times they are a’changin’.

    [10apr17 update] Regarding this morning’s shootings at a San Bernardino elementary school about which we at this time know very little, but which is again raising all the gun control questions in the minds of our left-leaning neighbors.  A commenter below asks for my “pragmatic approach to the 2nd Amendment” in view of this latest tragedy, and the question deserves a more considered answer.  For the present let me just reiterate that the 2nd Amendment is not about duck hunting, and that the right of a large free peoples – now sheltering under a gossamer social contract while sharing fewer cultural assets than ever – to possess firearms does not come without a palpable price.  And that price should be viewed as calmly and reasonably as possible when from time-to-time it must be paid.  For recent readers and those who may have forgotten, my past scribblings – philosophical, pragmatic, and practical – on the private ownership of guns can be reviewed here, here, here, here, and here.

    [11apr17 update]  In days of yore when a store had to order some out of stock item for you, the typical wait was usually somewhere between 2-4 weeks.  And we were OK with that.  Today, it’s a given that an online order will arrive tomorrow or the next day; and from a brick and mortar outlet the pressure is to replicate that service or the customer will go elsewhere.  Now that Amazon has set the new standard, there have sprung up dozens of new shipping companies to serve the small retailers desperate to compete.  And the new paradigm is that these shipping companies are offering inventory stocking warehouses to which retailers can have their suppliers deliver the designated SKUs for rapid fulfillment. (more here)  Ever wonder if UPS and FedEx missed the march by not expanding their package shipping/distribution centers to also offer inventory stocking services?  Big online retailers like Amazon are not shy in also entering the shipping business.  Changing times.

    [13apr17 update] Softballing the opioid epidemic.  Fox News’ decline as a hard-hitting right-oriented network proceeds apace.  They now want to enlarge their audience from the sea of double dummies.  Covering the opioid epidemic which is reported to kill 91 Americans per day, FN goes into hyper-anecdotal mode reporting on the tragic death of a good looking 20-something young man by sticking a mike into the faces of his bereaved parents.  Opioids have a tremendous salutary effect as a prescribed pain killer that is used properly by millions of Americans.  We can only put the ‘epidemic’ in perspective if given the ratio of opioid abusers (including gateways to heroin) to those consuming it properly to alleviate pain.  But that stat is considered a yawn by the likes of FN.  We already know how to do such tradeoffs for societal benefit.  Traffic accidents also kill about 90 people a day, yet no one is proposing to curb the use of vehicular traffic in the US. Somehow those deaths are worth the price for the benefit we derive from a facile, low cost transportation system.

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  • Sandbox Sayonara

    George Rebane

    When RR introduced the Sandbox forum to its readers back in 2014 (here) I don’t think any of us knew how popular it would quickly become.  The purpose of the Sandbox was to give RR readers a place to comment on topics of their current interest upon which I had not yet posted or even planned to post, or posted topics that had become dated and required re-invigoration.  The result was that each dated Sandbox acquired a comment stream in excess of one or two hundred comments in no time.

    As RR host I felt it my job to monitor Sandbox comments in order to maintain a minimum semblance of decorum, but mainly to be responsive to readers who specifically wanted my opinion/response on an issue.  With the unexpected volume of comments in the rapidly filling Sandboxes over these past years, this monitoring has become quite a time-consuming chore, one that has now crossed into tedium.

    As most readers know, my purpose for RR is to memorialize my observations and interpretations of the events of our times, in what I believe to be “the last great century of man”, and to also record the same from readers who are interested in expanding and/or contending what I present and thereby memorialize their views.  As the record shows, RR has always welcomed reasoned responses to and extensions of my posts.  It is my intention for RR to focus on this MO and continue such topical commentaries.

    However, in the interval the number and intensity of my other projects has increased to the extent that I have to do a better job of prioritizing how I spend my time.  An obvious activity to cut back on was the Sandbox.  But due to its popularity I’ve been putting this off until it occurred to me that the Sandbox can (does?) have a life of its own, and it doesn’t have to only live and die on RR.  Long story short, I’ve found a new home for the Sandbox on the Sierra Dragon’s Breath blog run by Todd Juvinall, also a longtime RR reader and commenter.  Todd is a strong supporter of conservative ideas and very active on the various social media, which I am not, and he has agreed to welcome the Sandbox and make it a new feature on his blog.

    In sum, I thank all RR readers who have ‘used’ the Sandbox over these years and am grateful for their continued interest in RR.  Today I invite you all to continue your lively debates and stinging repartees at Mr Juvinall’s pad where I am sure he will be a more assiduous host than me, and keep the Sandbox refreshed and refreshing with all of your contributions.  Thank you again.

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  • The Wall – Our Porous Sovereignty

    George Rebane

    Control of its borders is the sine qua non of a sovereign nation-state that intends to remain self-determinant.  And here control means the ability to determine who comes and goes across its borders.  No known nation has ever had 100% secure borders, in other words all borders are porous to some extent.  It is then the level or rate of porosity that is the operational measure of border security and control.  In this piece I want to present some thoughts about America’s border porosity and its continued sovereignty.

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  • ‘Fair’ Cost of Goods & Services

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 April 2017.]

    Capitalism in America is on the ropes and about to take two big hits that most likely will put it down for the count.  The first is to tax automation and technology in the workplace intended to reduce wage inequality and protect jobs for the untrained, the mis-skilled, and the uneducated.  The second is gender pay equality.  Implementing these will enable government to determine and enforce what the labor component of goods and services should cost the employer.  We’ll take each of them in turn.

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  • Ruminations – 3apr17 (updated)

    George Rebane

    Well, it turns out that Obama's White House was indeed illegally monitoring Team Trump during both the campaign and pre-inaugural transition.  Outlets Bloomberg and the Washington Times (here) report on Susan Rice’s involvement in ordering the unmasking of Team Trump personnel.  This is likely to turn out as a criminal matter that maybe will stick to one of Obama’s most unabashed shills.  The information was revealed to Chairman Nunes during his recent White House intelligence briefing, and explains away why he “was acting so cagey last week.”  This could well turn out to be the gun that has been doing all the smoking lately.

    ‘Incidental (aka widespread/comprehensive?) monitoring and collection’ of communications data in the US is now confirmed.  The lamestream media along with the more timid Republican MoCs have yet to come to grips with this truth.  The Dems don’t want to touch this aspect of our intelligence industry and the operation of the Deep State, especially now apropos to Susan Rice.  RR recommended this line of questioning for House Intelligence Committee in ‘Questions Unasked and Unanswered’ which was immediately lambasted by the local Left’s intelligentsia who have left their crickets to carry the remaining water on this.

    Union columnist George Boardman today brought up an interesting point (here) about our annual trimmigrant invasion and ‘fair trade pot’.  He explains, “Fair trade, the idea that we should care about how the goods and commodities we consume are produced, particularly when they come from developing countries, has gained enough traction to get the attention of manufacturers and retailers.”  And hopefully concludes, “While generally mellow and law abiding, trimmigrants have been known to sleep in their cars or under bridges, and to patronize free meal programs for the homeless, presumably to stretch the money they make harvesting the local pot crop. If they are paid a fair wage under a fair trade program, a lot of these problems disappear. It's a win-win for everybody.”  Now here’s a chance for our progressive purveyors of pot to walk their politically correct talk.

    [update]  The battlements for Susan Rice are being rapidly erected by the Left.  The main spin is that ‘unmasking’ is not ‘wiretapping’, which, of course, always meant directed surveillance made possible by requesting selected communications of the comprehensive (aka ‘incidental’) surveillance now conducted by our intelligence community.  That Rice found an unbidden stack of Team Trump communication transcripts on her desk is nothing short of a miracle.  But they do happen, so posit it.  Rice then decided to order the unmasking of the contained US citizen IDs, and had them disseminated over the God’s half-acre conveniently authorized by her boss, the Big O.  Some leftwing worthies who don’t believe in miracles are also arguing that she may have just ‘requested’ those transcripts, which (seatbelts please) is not the same as having ordered them pulled from the database.  Bottom line, President Trump was right, he was ‘wiretapped’ and had to let the evidence find its convoluted way out into the sunshine.

    Heard about California’s SB18, the ‘Children’s Bill of Rights’ that leviathan is working on in Sacramento?  The essence of the bill “establishes our state's ULTIMATE control of every aspect of our children's welfare without consideration for the parents' rights or unique knowledge of their child's individual needs. … the draft of the bill contemplates the state’s power to seize or restrict parents' access to children that aren't receiving what they (the state) determines to be the correct ‘research-based essential needs’ and ‘special care’ from their parents and guardians.”  Is this still only advancing toward autocracy, or have we already passed into the suburbs of tyranny?

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  • The Depth of Dumbth (updated 1apr17)

    George Rebane

    Evidence continues to pour in that the most recent generation of Americans – the so-called millennials – have turned out to be the dumbest in our history.  Specifically, their literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills hover above the barely adequate levels to conduct modern life according to diverse sources ranging from America’s employers to our National Center for Educational Statistics (more here)  What makes it worse is the fully functioning, concerted effort to deny any of this that is delivered daily by the nation’s progressive lamestream media piled on by our local leftwing lackeys.  The latter take it upon themselves to confuse the critiques of this state of national ignorance with an ignoble and gratuitous denigration of the ignorant, thereby firmly establishing their own membership in this cohort.  

    The situation has gotten so bad that a currently popular form of easy entertainment are videos of reporters – e.g. Jesse Watters and Mark Dice – encountering people on sidewalks to engage them on topics ranging from current events, through popular history and geography, to common sense.  Watching the respondents either flail in their ignorance or unwittingly exhibit confidence where none is warranted illustrates the more formally published statistics (many reported here over the years).

    DumbestGenerationA recent volume (pictured) by Mark Bauerlein – The Dumbest Generation – is packed with data from the now numerous studies and includes information about the organizations engaged in quantifying the extent of our endemic ‘dumbth’ (q.v.).

    The problem caused by these people who don’t know the difference between a million and a billion, or the structure of our government, or the role of our Constitution, or …, is that way too many of them vote.  And they vote on topics about which they have neither the slightest clue nor even basic knowledge.  From our common past we can still hear Will Rogers’ paraphrasing Mark Twain – ‘It ain’t what you know that troubles me, it’s what you know that ain’t so.’ (more here)

    This generation’s state of knowledge was most vividly illustrated during the ‘women’s marches’ after President Trump’s inauguration.  When asked why they were marching, their answers ranged from the incoherent to the inane.  When ‘diversity’, one of the millennials’ main memes, is brought up, their inability to define or discuss it surpasses high comedy.  The source of their malady is the education that they have been denied since their parents first enrolled them in their neighborhood public school.  From there through the halls of higher academia, their ability to think critically about diverse ideas was carefully expunged, and replaced by a memorized catalog of politically correct progressive notions which in the past were known as politicized slogans (the very embodiment of Orwell’s ‘newthink’).

    Classics professor Anthony Esolen of Providence College has been studying and writing about the whys and wherefores of today’s ‘diversitarians’.  For this revelatory work he has been mercilessly pilloried by the Left.  To get a sense of our educational decline I recommend his latest essay ‘Ut Plures Sint’ (May Be More) in which he focuses on the constricted (mis)understandings about the diversity of cultures – today a topic that so much exercises the progressive mind.

    I offer this little update to further buttress RR’s contention that the damage to our national mind is both deep and done; there is no feasible way to fix it or fill the educational chasm.  This generation will embrace progressive policies wherever they are encountered, and cement them in the voting booth.  At this late stage of their development they have no choice; they are forced to consume information in the only way they have been taught – in small bite-sized, standalone pieces that describe a very simple and simplistic world that simply ain’t so.  The only solution remaining from this side of the long-passed tipping point is to wish us both ‘Vaya con Dios’, and work for a peaceful Great Divide.

    [1apr17 update]  “Shaky numerical literacy can undermine our sense of issues like the federal budget that deal in millions and billions” says Jo Craven McGinty (here) as she adds to the evidence of our national dumbth.  She points out that the overwhelming percentage of Americans have no idea about how to deal with the very large and the very small numbers that are supposed to inform us about everything from government budgets, borrowings, and taxes to temperature and pollution levels impacting (or not) our environment.  Our innumerate citizenry continues making nationally impacting policies in the voting booths without a clue as to what is big, small, or significant.  Therefore demagoguery and pandering politicians abetted by their local echo chambers rule the day.

    On a more hopeful note, the eleventh annual TechTest was administered today by the Nevada Joint Union High School District in the NUHS Science Lecture Hall.  Taking the four-hour merit scholarship exam were some of the county’s best and brightest students.  The exam attracts qualified students who plan to pursue STEM careers after completing their post-high school studies.  The exam is sponsored by the Sierra Economics and Science Foundation which also sponsors TechTestJr (completing its fourth year) to motivate fifth through eighth graders to take STEM qualifying classes in high school.  Scholarship monies and prizes are provided through the generous support of SESF donors and local high-tech businesses who have made possible awards totaling over $150,000.

    As a sad footnote to these programs benefitting our youth, our local (now called) Alt-Left started politicizing and denigrating this scholarship program years ago solely on the basis that the test is written, sponsored, and administered by people some of whom hold conservative political views. (e.g. I write the TTs and give the seminars.)  The tests and related seminars are and have always been ideologically neutral, however that has not made any impact on people who have a history of looking at everything through correctly polished political lenses.  And if your politics don’t pass their muster, then they relentlessly demand that you withdraw from the public forum.  Only those approved should be visible in our community and allowed to contribute.  The portents of this dreadful worldview has long been dealt with in these pages.  

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29 comments on Ruminations – 14apr17 (updated 15apr17)