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  • ‘Tis the Season for Some Folly

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 December 2015.]

    Jo Ann and I hope that everyone had a meaningful and enjoyable Thanksgiving, and have properly girded themselves for the busiest, most stressful month of the year.  Rather than delve into another globe shaking issue or national catastrophe in the making, I’ll instead try to rattle some cages on a more general collection of our new shibboleths and ingrained verities.   Many of you know that I host a controversial blog that is inevitably on the wrong side of every politically correct thought held dear by 21st century progressives.  This evening I want to cover some details of these thoughts.  And in line with today’s progressive protocols, perhaps this is the place to issue a trigger warning to some of our more sensitive listeners.

    The other day on my blog it was noted that five illegal aliens are suing Oregon for not granting them driver’s licenses.  I then had the temerity to post the following, somewhat edited, question – “Does anyone know where these illegal aliens and their coddling collectivists get the harebrained idea that they are owed anything in this country save a free trip back to the border?  How did all this get started?”

    The point of the question was summarily ignored, and I was taken to task by two prominent liberals of our community about my presumably callous attitude toward these people, seeing as how I too was born in a foreign land and, at the invitation of the US Congress, immigrated here after WW2.  The left-leaning debaters made no difference between legal immigration and a felonious entry into our land.  The implicit conclusion was that as long as you’re both here, you both should have equal rights.  However, the last time I looked, immigration to America was still subject to a two-party agreement between our government and the applicant for immigration.

    I will not bore you with the heated discussion which followed, with many readers weighing in on the issue.  One of the threads that developed, at least in my mind, was the matter of culture.  What may be called America’s mainstream culture has always been in flux since Europeans first set foot on these shores.  But the progress of cultural change was very measured, and in the public square centered on an amalgam of European Christian values and traditions.  This accepted cultural target for assimilation started to unravel in the 1950s, slowly at first as we became Judeo-Christian, but then picking up steam as the Great Society programs kicked into gear, after which an uncounted number of new and old cultures and their traditions were elevated and celebrated, while symbols and observances of the old were diminished or completely removed.

    Today we are in a cultural turmoil where the once dominant American culture is now daily maligned along with those who dare recall it in discussions of who then are we and where are we going.  Have we abandoned the adoption of a new American culture which can again be accepted by all as our common ground?  Don’t get me wrong, we cannot go back, nor am I promoting a return to yesteryear.  But will our future hold a culture that again can be called American, and about whose traditions and tenets our young will be educated?  Or will we continue as a multi-cultural polyglot with no shared center?

    Over the life of our Republic immigrants have come to enjoy our liberties and opportunities for a better life, and in the process they have contributed lavishly to what made America the envy of the world.  These immigrants came and stashed their native cultures behind their private lives as they visibly celebrated American culture and assimilated with astonishing speed.  But today there is little reason to abandon exhibiting the culture into which you were born.  Why?  Because there is nothing of apparent value, form, and function which you can adopt in its stead.  So all over the world immigrants and migrants are facing the same cultural challenge, and given a choice, they would overwhelmingly opt to return to or retain their native culture.  This is especially true in the Mideast where, instead of emigrating, almost all refugees in the camps simply want to return to the life and culture they had.  The important question then becomes, what culture will they cling to as they arrive in a strange country that neither claims nor offers a dominant culture of its own?

    And from our own perch here in the western hemisphere, what kind of country are we evolving toward as we indiscriminately pile every new culture upon our already large stack of recently arrived and recognized cultures?  It’s worth a thought when we consider the function that culture serves in organizing a cohesive and stable society.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended 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.

    [Addendum]  Coincidentally the 2dec15 WSJ contained a piece by News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch from a recent speech he gave at the Hudson Institute.  The essay ‘America the Indispensible’ summarizes much of my conservetarian sentiment that is recorded in these pages, and it is germane to my radio commentary since Murdoch is also an immigrant and naturalized American citizen.  The essay is about world order and America’s role in maintaining it since WW2.  In it the author expresses a sentiment I experienced as a sixteen-year-old ‘Indiana teenager’ when I finally received my citizenship papers after being country for seven years – “Like so many naturalized citizens, I felt that I was an American before I formally became one.”

     

     

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  • Sandbox – 1dec15

    [Well, 'tis the global warming season among other less intensely celebrated religious holidays.  We will observe it with an intense fervor not seen in many a year.  And AGW, I might add, has ascended to become mankind's first global religion.  This week's Economist features its cover story titled 'Clear thinking on climate change' in which the lead commentary accepts the kool-aid with the short statement "that climate change is happening, that it is very largely man-made and that it is exceedingly dangerous, are all now hard to deny".  Then it goes on to discuss the political situation in Paris, and that any real agreement will be hard to achieve.  And then, I kid you not, in its 14-page spread to induce the promised "clear thinking", it goes through a major dissertation on the models and science, admitting that essentially nothing is well known about the dynamics of earth's climate and less about making the models used to predict near term catastrophe intended to launch thousands of laws and regulations to tame earth's temperature.  Now there we have a good and clear example of liberal thought.  gjr]

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  • The Good Kind of Blacklist

    George Rebane

    Well, our little union educated, progressive darlins have once more confirmed the longheld Rebane Doctrine tenet that the Left proscribes free speech wherever it can establish a beachhead of power.  You can feel visible hatred from these mobs of ‘university students’ against those who disagree with them, and more importantly, also those who don’t support their views with sufficient vigor.  They have no idea about the First Amendment simply because it and its place in American society has never been taught to them.

    On college campuses in the 1960s, was it not their grandparents who relied on the First Amendment to support and protect their open protests against the government and university administrations?  It used to be that a university was anything but a safe place for any idea – there ideas were treated to rigorous intellectual enquiry and analysis, and discarded unmercifully when found wanting.

    SavingSafeSpace

    Now the little darlins even banish journalists from covering their rage against a society they deem insensitive to their own needs and demands.  In their public appearances they demonstrate both their ignorance and emotional fragility.  This is the generation that needs ‘trigger warnings’ on all things academic and otherwise that might fracture their brittle countenances.  They now need to set aside ‘safe spaces’ where politically incorrect speech and other communications are barred. 

    They abhor violence to such a degree that they do not hesitate to use it against others in order to diminish it in society.  And, of course, they are against all forms of discrimination, stereotyping, and bias, as long as it all conforms to their own peculiar notions of goodness and light.  They rail against McCarthyism blacklisting communists during early cold war years, but today they have no problem blacklisting distinguished Americans from speaking or even setting foot on their campuses.  These young narcissists already know it all to an extent that they stand ready to remake their schools by vetting their own administrations and professors.

    Our campuses have long been recognized as havens of collectivist thought.  But now we seem to be entering into a new era of what may at best be described as the lunatics running the asylum.  The progressive administrators and professors have a conundrum on their hands.  Their half-baked and mini-minded spawn are actually putting into practice the proletarian putsches they have been carefully taught.  Since they have been abandoned by their elders, the salvation of the American university now lies in the hands of the remaining serious cohort of students who are there for an education from institutions that can again be made to invite, nurture, and honor all ideas that illuminate and advance the human condition.  No more blacklists about who can and cannot speak about what on campus.

    Here is what The Atlantic had to say about ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’.

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  • Happy Thanksgiving

    Thanksgiving

    Jo Ann and I wish all of our readers a happy Thanksgiving Day which we hope you are spending with people you love.  We give thanks that we can still give thanks in the manner of our choosing.

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  • The denial of broad-based Muslim sentiment (updated 29nov15)

    George Rebane

    There is a politically dominant and longstanding narrative by the Left in America (and Europe) that the overwhelming fraction of the world’s Muslims have no intrinsic hatred of the west and America.  In the aggregate these Muslims are supposed to be peaceful and quite sanguine about the west, and they have no sympathy with the ragheads that are massacring everyone within reach while giving Islam a bad name.  Until they kill, they are to be viewed as any other cultural and/or ethnic population that has come to these shores and assimilated into the Americans next door.

    Well, that narrative was proven wrong by the videos and surveys of the Arab street right after 9/11 and doubly so since that time.  (Trump claims we now have a video that shows Muslims on the New Jersey shore celebrating the burning World Trade Center towers before they came crashing down.)  The anti-western behavior of European Muslims in and out of their enclaves is a matter of record.  The polls surveying the sentiment of Muslims living in the west continually show that a majority support 1) violence against the west if it does not accept Islam, and 2) Muslims allowed to rule their enclaves under sharia while demanding concessions from the neighboring western communities on matters they hold disrespectful to Islam.  RR has reported on these survey results before.

    Today the post-Paris news about Muslim sentiment in Europe continues to bear out that the ‘peaceful Muslims’ volubly support attacks by ISIS and other radical Islam organizations against the west.   To make the point Fox News showed chilling videos of young military age Muslims in Brussels sitting at an outdoor café and calmly telling a reporter that they and theirs wholeheartedly supported the Paris massacre declaring that such attacks are justified as long the west opposes the spread of Islam.

    In the meantime over two out of three Americans think that Obama has a flawed foreign policy and is not doing enough to secure the country from radical Islam.  Our president is in terminal denial about the threat to America and the west, and has no intention whatsoever of changing his benign stance on Islam and its ‘religion of peace’.  His solution is to allow tens of thousands of unvetted Muslims into the country as quickly as possible to accelerate the Left's plan to fundamentally transform America.  And as with preventable global warming, the debate about the growing war between the civilizations in his mind is also over.

    The Republicans want to bring this war to the attention of Americans in their election year campaigning.  But it turns out again and again that a catastrophically large body (most?) of our voting age citizens have little or no idea what is going on in the world.  They don’t know the middle east from Middle Earth.  They literally know nothing of American or world history.  Today it is cheap and saddening entertainment to stick a mike into someone’s face on a city sidewalk and ask him the simplest question about our government, history, American traditions, … .  When it comes time evaluate a candidate's statements about ANYTHING to do with public policy save promises to increase their entitlements, they are babes in the woods – totally unarmed between the ears.  Union dominated public schools have taken a toll on our body politic that today is literally beyond comprehension.

    [29nov15 update]  Woke up this morning to an interesting NPR interview with five American Muslims in their twenties.  They all showed concern about how incidents like the recent Paris massacres affect relations with Muslims in this country.  None of them claimed that the jihadists were doing something that is foreign to Islam.  And none claimed that hatred of the west was unique to insignificant minorities in Islam.  On the contrary, they all seemed to agree that Islam is NOT a homogenous belief system or religion; that there are many kinds of Muslims with antipathies and interpretations of the Quran that range from the Wahhabis of the Arabian peninsula to moderates in America who barely practice their faith.  And they definitely agreed that ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Iran are part of Islam and practicing the more violent versions of their faith.  One young college graduate underlined this by saying it is “foolish” not to admit these large militant groups (and the nation of Iran) into the global Islamic community.

    These reasonable sentiments and interpretations from practicing Muslims kinda knocks into a cocked hat the crap that liberals here and elsewhere have been preaching to the rest of us about their vast knowledge of what Islam really is.  But then we already knew of what they were full.

    A more important takeaway from that interview corroborated the asymmetry of Islam vs Christianity.  One young lady attempted to describe the human bond that exists between Muslims and Christians by describing the aftermath of what happened after a devastating fire in their mosque.  Local Christian groups pitched in to help rebuild, and in the interval invited the Muslims to worship in their churches and fellowship halls.  Yes, that is not an unusual Christian response these days.  But what all of them seemed to have missed is that such an outreach is always one-sided.  How many Muslim congregations have invited Christians, whose churches have been burned by Islamic mobs, to worship in their mosques?  How many of those Muslims have offered to help rebuild the destroyed churches?

    And here is some new information from columnist Mark Steyn on the Jersey shore celebrations.  H/T to reader for this heads up.

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  • Sandbox – 22nov15

    [The tragedies of Paris are many, and the immediate loss of life in that city may well be the least of them.  As readers know, through the years while countering great leftwing vilification, RR has heralded the Islam's scripturally commissioned invasion through colonization (Hijra).  The globalists now are using the raghead attacks in Europe to illustrate the reasons why Syrians and other mideasterners and Africans are fleeing their home countries, and that we in the west should welcome these people into our lands to establish beacheads for their kith and kin, and ultimately their horrific cultures.  To better understand the institutional and organizational details of what really is happening, please take time to watch these two short videos (here and here).  gjr]

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  • The Other Paris Tragedy (addended)

    George Rebane

    [This is the linked and addended transcript to my regular KVMR commentary which will be broadcast after the evening news on Monday 23 November 2015.  Appended is a graphic detailing the chain (thick red arrows) of valid propositions forming a sane preamble for making preventable global warming public policies.  There is little hope that sanity will be a prerequisite to the UN’s Agenda21 deliberations in Paris.]

    The echoes of the most recent Islamist massacre of innocents in Paris will not have died down by the time that the latest preventable manmade global warming show opens its doors.  The UN’s conference on climate change, formally called the 21st Conference of the Parties or COP21, is slated to run from 30 November to 11 December in Le Bourget.  However, preconference activities will start on 20 November during which heads of state will meet to lay down the broad outlines of what policies will be agreed to during COP21.

    For the proponents of preventable global warming, this conference culminates years of planning that is intended to finally launch a unified international thrust that is supposed to save the world from the loudly and widely predicted catastrophe that will befall us all sometime in the next 30 to 70 years.  In recent years the importance of the misnamed ‘climate change’ issue has declined in the public mind for a number of reasons, among them being that the ‘science’ cited to substantiate the dire predictions has suffered a number of material setbacks.

    (more…)

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  • The Union leans Left

    George Rebane

    RR has long argued and demonstrated that the local Left is terribly out of touch with important happenings here and elsewhere.  One of their constant complaints is that The Union is so far biased to the Right in its editorial stance that it should be renamed The Tea Party Gazette.  Nothing could be further from the truth as documented by an ongoing audit by the Nevada County Republican Women Federated (NCRWF).

    Members of the NCRWF leadership met on 16 November 2015 with Union publisher Jim Hemig and editor Brian Hamilton to present their most recent tranche of data from their audit of the newspaper’s editorial page contents – editorials, syndicated columns, submitted commentaries, political cartoons, and letters to the editor – which were published in the August-September timeframe.  The audit revealed that of the 329 pieces published, 140 espoused liberal views, 90 were conservative, and 99 were neutral.

    Messrs Hemig and Hamilton have long held that their newspaper seeks to represent a balanced political perspective for our community, and they were reportedly surprised to learn that their actual editorial policy was skewed 61% – 39% in favor of leftwing submissions and ideas.

    I must add my own surprise to that of The Union’s management.  While having long had a hunch that the paper had a liberal bent to it - that has always been corroborated by the public statements/talks by Hemig and Hamilton - I wrote that off as their being part and parcel of the progressives' preponderance in the news media in general.  (None of this, of course, has been noted or admitted by the Left whose position seems to be that if an outlet doesn’t continuously espouse the socialism of Marx, Engels, et al, then it has been co-opted by the corporatist Right.)

    But the nagging question remains as to what specific local pressures exist to tilt the newspaper so markedly toward the left.  Other indicators of the paper’s disposition on this issue are its lax enforcement of its announced policy of a 30-day interval between publishing letters from any one correspondent.  Some frequent writers are definitely favored.  (My own infrequent letters are batting about 500 in this league for getting published.)  And there is a significant problem with the paper’s policy of letting a considerable time lapse between an issue raised in a column and publishing the responding letters.  Again, the Left is favored in this regard.

    An illustration of this asymmetric policy is the 19nov15 letter from a Ms Angelica Niblock, an unabashed leftwinger, demonstrably ignorant, and a True Believer in preventable man-made, catastrophic global warming (PGW).  She takes the newspaper to task for having published the full page ad piece by Mr Frank Pinney making the case that ‘global warming is a hoax’ (more here).  She claims that the ad was disguised as an "authentic part"(sic!) of its editorial content, and that the newspaper should no longer publish pieces that are skeptical of man-made global warming.  Her main point is that exposing such ideas to public view is akin to printing statements that Negroes are inferior to white people. And moreover, that permitting such arguments skeptical of PGW in the public forum indicates that The Union does not “take its role in journalism seriously and make wise decisions when asked to print smut.”

    Ms Niblock is not the only liberal who has recently demanded that The Union adhere to her higher principles of journalism and thereby institute a policy of proscribing conservative thought and ideas.  History records that the push to censor the other side in the media has been a constant and uniquely leftwing goal for decades.  Such proposals, exhortations, and admonitions continue at all levels in our country with such regularity that they can be taken as a litmus test for correctly identifying a person as a collectivist.

    The First Amendment holds that in our republic all ideas should be exposed to public purview so that they may sway the thinking of its educated and informed citizenry who can then decide which ones will carry the day.

    Let me finish by saying again that I appreciate our local newspaper’s role in binding and informing our little foothills community.  As a conservetarian I also acknowledge that The Union is a business and a private enterprise which can hold and promote whatever social and political views it sees fit to print.  I don’t want anyone to censor its work product, nor in response to the Niblocks of the world do I want it to censor itself as a purveyor of ideas.

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  • Sandbox – 16nov15

    [This sandbox is dedicated to the timely urgings of Mr William Tozer, Esq.  gjr]

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  • Unperturbed, Obama stays the course

    George Rebane

    We woke up to President Obama’s news conference from the G20 meeting in Turkey.  Since last Friday’s Paris attacks the calls have intensified for our Community Organizer to face the reality of radical Islam expanding (see also ‘Wake up, Mr President’).  At the news conference even lamestream reporters were asking the president pointed questions about the effectiveness of his entrenched Mideast strategy, especially the one he is executing against the Islamic State (more here).  Obama gave each question an extended answer laced with generous dollops of pabulum that informed little but effectively ran out the clock.

    What we took away from the president’s answers could be easily summarized as –

    1. My strategy against ISIS continues to work and I have no intention of changing it, but now I will “intensify” it.

    2. I’m already doing all that my critics are suggesting, except that I will not commit more ‘boots on the ground’ to make a difference.

    3. If I put 50K troops into Iraq/Syria to defeat ISIS, then I’ll have to do the same if Al Qaeda starts acting up more in places like Yemen.  And that’s not a sustainable policy.

    4. What I’m doing now in the Mideast is in concord with my security team and Pentagon’s military advisers.  There are no better ideas to implement.

    5. And I’ll be damned if I will use the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic’ in any of these remarks, the closest you’ll get out of me is a reference to “ISIL’s caliphate”, so there.

    (more…)

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