Rebane's Ruminations

About

November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • Sandbox – 30aug15

    [Wow! I take a little trip into Preconnectivity Land and the sandbox overflows – isn't Hillary's email scandal grand?  But boys and girls, let's not forget that the woman has soooo many other scandals to answer for, so concentrating all our energies unraveling her email fu@% ups will work to her benefit if the Dems and the lamestream (with a cooperating FBI and DoJ) can bundle it up and make the whole thing go away.  Trying to jump onto another scandal (take your pick) will then seem like so much witch hunting – 'well we didn't get you with the emails, now let's try Benghazi.'  My take is that we need to keep her whole ball of putrid wax in focus; compromising national security through her email shenanigans is just one reason she's not qualified for the WH.  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

    225 comments on Sandbox – 30aug15

  • Scattershots – 29aug15 (updated 31aug15)

    George Rebane

    I’ve been away on the NorCal coast where connectivity and even cell phone service ranges between unavailable and being a sometime thing.  With some friends we caravanned up to an RV park near Manchester, and took some day trips up and down the coast to see how folks there were making do.  One thing always strikes me in those parts is how our Agenda21 types have made sure that public lands (and beaches) number as few as possible, and those that do allow non-government human visits are made inconvenient to one and all.

    Most ‘coastal access’ sites do not allow dogs for reasons that are completely beyond my ken, but it serves well to project the ascendant power of our econazis.  And all coastal access sites have their parking lots quite a distance from the surf again for reasons I’ll let you figure out.  One access site that did not restrict dogs required you to walk almost a mile on a path of loose sand through row after row of dunes stretching for miles in both directions.  It took about 20 minutes for a one way trip.  None but the hale and hearty, and desperate to have their puppy run on the sand need apply.  The biggest employer there is – you guessed it – the government.  Lots of uniformed people from various agencies are up there to make sure the taxpayer does not stray from his permitted path.  Why not hire fewer bureaucrats and extend the little one lane roads to within 100 yards of the surf?  Let the people who own it have their taxes pay for access so they can enjoy the public beaches.

    I noticed the comment stream on the last sandbox has conversations and debates that exceed 250 entries.  One leftwing regular doesn’t understand the use of coal in today’s world; he thinks that this fossil fuel has seen its last days and is on the way out.  Meanwhile others are telling him that the patron saint of socialism George Soros dropped a bundle into coal investments.  Of course our lefty didn’t have clue about that – why would MSNBC report something like that? – and when pressed, made some lame remark about buying low during the recent market dip and then selling high.  Someone else had to remind him that Soros bought way before the markets hiccupped.  But those conversations go nowhere since such corrections and related questions are simply ignored and papered over by yet another question from leftwing news.

    The microcosm of such exchanges mirror exactly what is going on nationally with Hillary’s campaign.  She just keeps repeating the same irrelevancies about not handling any emails on her private server that were "marked classified".  And her constituents, starting with Obama’s Josh Earnest, just lap it up and repeat same for the greater unwashed.  Nevertheless, that scandal itself has taken on a life of its own, and it will take Hillary to places she knows not.  Meanwhile fellow Democrats are already sharpening their knives for when the time comes – ‘Et tu, Bidenius?’

    [31aug15 update]  Constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt writes on Stratfor a piece revealing a specious practice of debating that is quite common in the national debates, and even on these pages.  In ‘Fallacies of Argument’ Professor Bobbitt highlights the ‘guise of accountability’ with

    President Barack Obama's observation in his American University address last week that "many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran deal." There are two points being made here, and both are insidious.

    One is that it is necessary to hold our leaders "accountable" for their alleged mistakes by ignoring their arguments in a current debate in favor of reminding them, and us, of the errors they have made in the past. This is not an argument about the merits — the "arcana" — of a proposed treaty or statute but rather an effort to dispense with such hard work in favor of embarrassing the people with whom one disagrees. Its claim of retribution or payback — "accountability" — for past actions is in fact merely a forensic weapon in a present debate.

    You can read the entire article yourself to glean Bobbitt’s second point.  But I just wanted to highlight here that our comment streams are full of “effort(s) to dispense with such hard work in favor of embarrassing the people with whom one disagrees.”  One does not have to look far.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    52 comments on Scattershots – 29aug15 (updated 31aug15)

  • Sandbox – 23aug15

    [OK, can someone besides crickets explain why farmers are experiencing a shortage of field labor with one out four black youth unemployed, along with an unknown high unemployment rate among our illegal aliens?  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

    304 comments on Sandbox – 23aug15

  • Scattershots – 22aug15

    Liberalism is what ‘smart’ looks like to stupid people. – from a talk radio call in

    George Rebane

    Apropos to the above bagatelle, we have a letter to the 22aug15 Union from a Ms Kuczora.  The good lady intends to enlighten the “many ignorant Americans” about socialism, which in her dim lights reveals itself as “an economic system – not a political system” that is “intended to reduce economic injustice and poverty.  Political and economic systems can be mixed and matched.”  In the realworld that Ms Kuczora should some day visit, political systems define the ownership of the means to produce wealth and the methods of its subsequent re/distribution.  All political systems and their supportive economic systems are joined at the hip – e.g. communist governance does not support an economy based on the Bastiat Triangle (q.v.).

    In the same issue of the Union, president of the Nevada County Democratic Central Committee, Mr Jim Firth gets it almost right when discussing the populist popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  He understands that “given the number and complexity of ‘Communities of Interest’ in the United States, it makes sense to have many more political parties.”  But his answer of forming a “third or fourth major political party” misses the mark.  The correct answer is the concurrent formation of at least two more major political parties.  As all RR readers understand, forming only a third party guarantees that the established major party, ideologically more distal from the new third party, will win.

    FedPredictsThe federal government is incompetent in almost every area of human enterprise, especially in its understanding of the economy and economics.  In the latter area its top mavens are concentrated in the Executive Branch and the Federal Reserve.  To these worthies the many decades of Keynsian failures are invisible, and they continue to “rely on Keynsian models” to mismanage our common weal.  One need not look further than the recent twenty years of the Fed’s zigging while the economy zagged.  The nearby table of results gives some measure of their understanding of what’s going on (more here).

    The student debt debacle under the feds has now gotten totally out of hand – very few of the borrowers are repaying any of it.  6.9M of them made no payment at all in the last year as Obama’s over-taxed, over-borrowed, over-regulated, and jobless economy is making a mockery of its ‘recovery’, daily touted ever more loudly by his resident lackies in the Democratic Party and the lamestream.  As reported here before, Hillary plans to make hay with this economic disaster to buy Millenials’ votes through her new College Compact entitlement that will be a massive pocket picking of the shrinking fraction of Americans who actually pay taxes – “first you encourage student debt, then you write it off on taxpayers”.

    NYC socialist governance at work.  Everyone is familiar with what the city’s new idiot mayor Bill de Blasio has done to destroy the crime suppression work of the last twenty years.  And the beat goes on as the city reverts to its dismal past all in the name of ‘social justice’ which is also disappearing rapidly under this new troop of collectivists.  For more, google ‘NYC crime, de Blasio’.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    23 comments on Scattershots – 22aug15

  • A Common History Was Our Common Ground (Addended)

    Goerge Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 August 2015.]

    US History is again being revised in our high schools.  The new 2014 Advanced Placement US History ‘framework’ is now replacing the old 2010 AP framework, and its adoption will take students one giant step to the Left.  Last month at Hillsdale College noted historian Wilfred McClay, now Blankenship Professor in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, gave a compendious speech on the state of history in America and its readily observed impact on our collective society and thought.  The much published historian did not paint a hopeful future for our nation.

    McClay states that the new 2014 version of our history “represents a lurch in the direction of more centralized control, as well as an expression of a distinct agenda—an agenda that downplays comprehensive content knowledge in favor of interpretive finesse, and that seeks to deemphasize American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective. The new framework is organized around such opaque and abstract concepts as “identity,” “peopling,” and “human geography.” It gives only the most cursory attention to traditional subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s fundamental political institutions, notably the Constitution, and the narrative accounting of political events, such as elections, wars, and diplomacy.”

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    11 comments on A Common History Was Our Common Ground (Addended)

  • Sandbox – 19aug15

    [Hillary's emails and Obama's Iran giveaway, both are going to overheat.  Yet some think that Obama may be rehabilitated enough by next spring to become an invited campaigner for Democrat candidates.  If true, then "… you can fool enough of them all the time." will be confirmed again.  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

    213 comments on Sandbox – 19aug15

  • California Breaks More Windows (updated 19aug15)

    George Rebane

    You may fool all of the people only some of the time, but you can fool enough of them all the time.

    Associated Press published an exclusive report – ‘Lawmakers call for oversight hearings on green jobs measure’ – on the three year aftermath of Prop 39.  California voters were bamboozled by our socialist central planners (funded by Tom Steyer of ‘When you’re rich they really think you know’ fame), to vote for a measure to increase taxes on the state’s businesses in order to “create more green-energy jobs.”  As evident from AP’s investigative report, Prop 39 has been another travesty that drove more businesses from California, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and delivered nothing of any use to the state’s citizens, especially the less than brilliant ones who fell for the econuts’ crapola and then voted for it.  Prop 39 follows AB32 (q.v.) and a list of anti-growth, anti-business sludge that continues to pour out of Sacramento.

    You need to read the AP piece yourself to see the magnitude of this socialist boondoggle.  But for the high hard ones consider that they have already taken an additional almost billion dollars from the state’s businesses for the ostensible purpose of helping schools upgrade their infrastructures.  Even this amount is much less than the projected take – whoudda thought that businesses wouldn’t leave, change, or otherwise try to avoid this new tribute.  Out of the collected monies less than a third has been dispensed, and of that $150M has been spent on consultants who continue to generate plans on how to ‘get the most bang for the buck’ from the remaining loot.

    The job stats are even worse.  This scheme was supposed to create about 11,000 green jobs a year.  But to date it has created fewer than 1,700 jobs in three years, about 5% of the number advertised.  And now the same numbnuts in Sacramento who came up with this brainchild are going to try and find out what went wrong, why this is another feel-good bonanza that didn’t deliver and now has to be papered over with propaganda as have been its predecessors.  Do not think that there is any learning going on in the state’s capitol; their only aim is to figure out how best to cover up yet another fiscal fizzle.

    What these socialists miss was made clear to their earlier forebears in 19th century post-napoleonic France, home of the first nationwide applications of socialist governance.  Frederic Bastiat explained the matter in his brilliant essay ‘That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen’ with the vignette on ‘The Broken Window’.  California’s and the nation’s entire phalanx of environmental regulatory programs are a sad poster child of the malady ailing the country.

    In the story an accidentally broken shop window is initially lamented by onlookers until one worthy points out that the unintended mishap will actually provide a benefice to the community and the greater economy.  Why?  Because now the shopkeeper will have to engage the glazier to come and repair the window thereby creating new work and releasing the cost of the repair into other hands which is then spent fulfilling their needs and so on as the money spreads into the economy.  From this insight everyone on the sidewalk comes to understand the apparent good that will derive from this broken window, and all go home feeling good about the shopkeeper’s loss now that its real impact has been explained to them.

    But for the clear thinkers Bastiat reveals the real situation.  The shopkeeper had a good window before spending $100 (modern amount) to get his broken window restored.  What we don’t see is that he wanted to spend the same money at the cobbler’s for a new pair of shoes.  At the end of this transaction the same $100 would have still been released into the economy through the cobbler’s spending, but in that future the shopkeeper would have wound up with an intact window and a new pair of shoes – in short, his quality of life would have increased for having spent the same amount to do something else that he needed or had planned for his own benefit; to accomplish something more than spend that money to just maintain his status quo, and with fewer dollars in his pocket.

    The socialists of 1850 France did not understand any better than do the socialists of 2015 USA, that ‘creating’ jobs by going down the street and breaking more intact windows does not prosper a nation.  Today the government ‘breaks windows’ by syphoning money out of our pockets for so many propagandized purposes and projects that benefit absolutely no one save the elites with guns, along with their local lackeys spread across the land who sing paeans to Leviathan for the pittances dropped into their cups.  This is the politically correct trickle down economics that those who can’t generate wealth understand so well.  The rest of us know that when it comes to economic planning, governments are the historically demonstrated dunces with their ham fisted approach of centralized control.

    And the real tragedy is that today, as it was in Bastiat’s time, our gruberized voters never see any of this, for enough of them can be fooled all of the time.

    [19aug15 update]  Lo and behold, the country is taking note of AP’s findings and adding those to its considerable knowledge of how California leads the nation (the world?) on the Index of Inane and Insane Governments.  This morning’s (19aug15) WSJ features a prominent editorial on Steyer’s bamboozle, noting that not only has Prop 39 not met any of its goals by far, but it’s also not known whether it has had any impact on the promised energy reductions.  Less known is the  proviso that half of the business punishing tax take goes into the state’s general fund for Sacramento’s Society of Sleazebags to spend as they please – did you know that?  The WSJ piece concludes that “results rarely matter for the supporters of green subsidies. Their good intentions in spending other peoples’ money is enough.”  Given how many topics have appeared first in these pages, over the years I’ve begun to wonder if the WSJ gets some of its good editorial ideas from RR, hmmm … ;-)   

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    15 comments on California Breaks More Windows (updated 19aug15)

  • Liberally Liberal Abortions Revisited (updated 16aug15)

    George Rebane

    In response to my 7aug15 commentary – ‘Planned (alternative to) Parenthood’ – in The Union, the newspaper’s 15aug15 edition contains two related pieces illuminating the liberal mind from the logically lame to the deliberately deceitful.  The first is a letter to the editor from “Dr Larry and Cheryl Cook” (paywalled here), and the second is an Other Voices commentary (paywalled here) by Ms Kimberly D’Urso, the gratefully aborted president of Nevada County Citizens for Choice.  Regular readers may recall our previous consideration of Ms Cheryl Cook in these pages (here and here).

    The Cooks’ critique of my commentary is more than mind boggling.  They take me to task for my “blatantly exclusionary focus on women undergoing abortions”.  Apparently I was remiss in not including a comprehensive treatment of all the mass homicides caused by gun toting lunatics in my 750-word piece on Planned Parenthood that according to their lights attempted to treat “the sanctity of all human life, really?”  Well not quite.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    119 comments on Liberally Liberal Abortions Revisited (updated 16aug15)

  • Ruminations – 12aug15 (updated 13aug15)

    George Rebane

    Helped Jo Ann and friends work the Republican booth at the fairgrounds today.  We were located between the Vietnam Veterans and the State of Jefferson’s booth with the NC Tea Party beyond them.  It was kinda like old home week on Redneck Row the way we all were lined up with everyone flying several Old Glories to let the passersby get the drift of what we were all about.  Had some interesting conversations with a couple of Dems who dropped in to tell us about our presidential candidates.  They were nice people, but definitely related to the folks at LaMalfa’s do yesterday afternoon (see 11aug15 update here).

    The Dems’ booth was tucked away a bit down and across the asphalt from us, real hidden like.  If you looked hard inside you could see a couple of cutouts of Hillary and Bernie.  But except for their sign, it was hard to tell they were an American political party – not one Old Glory in sight.  When I asked about this from one of our Dem visitors, he got a bit red-faced and said he’d go over and ask that same question of the folks in charge.  I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t really surprised since the Dems (now the unabashed Socialists of America) have long ago given up such blatant displays of patriotism because it might offend one of their many dependable ‘God damn America!’ groups of constituents.  The times they are a’changin’.

    Speaking of the Dems toppling leftward, I recommend a good read in Jason Riley’s ‘The Democrats’ Socialist Surge’ today.  Riley points out that “Bernie Sanders drew a crowd of 27,500 in Los Angeles on Monday. In the age of Obama, a liberal with a statist agenda fits right in.”  The rebranding of the Democratic Party is not without some heartburn as socialism takes a firm hold. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the Democratic National Committee, was “visibly rattled” when asked recently to explain “the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist.”  Her crickets rose to the occasion with, “The more important question is, ‘What is the difference between being a Democrat and being a Republican?’ ”  Tough sledding ahead.  

    MSNBC is tired of being at the bottom of the ratings bucket with their constant drizzle of collectivist crap that no one watches.  Its management is tired of selling advertising for pennies on the dollar because MSNBC draws about 50,000 pairs of eyeballs nationwide (not a typo) during times of the day when Fox has forty times as many glued to their cable channel.  So they’re going to can over half of the regular lamestreamers – Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews will be saved – and convert to a “hard news” channel.  And they’ve even hired ol’ Brian Williams, that intrepid war reporter, to spearchuck their rehabilitation.  I guess they figure while they try to dust off their own reputation, they might as well do two for the price of one.  We shall see how the new and improved MSNBC fares in the big boys club with CNN, Fox Business, and Fox News.  (Hopefully this change will also help out our information compressed liberal readers.)

    China devalues yuan in prep for its debut into the basket of the world’s trade currencies.  The world’s markets go into semi-hysterics as they attempt to figure out how that is going to influence Team Yellen to go forward with the promised (wink-wink) interest rate hike in October.  If the good lady ups the interest, then the dollar will be at an even greater disadvantage to the yuan, and we all know what that is going to do to the country’s current account, which isn’t all that healthy as it is.  I guess it will be time to strap on the knee pads again and ask supreme leader Xi to buy more Treasurys – what’s $18T and change when $20T is such a nice round national debt number and within easy reach?  Meanwhile America’s businesses are dusting off and hanging up their ‘Rig for Ram!’ signs.

    RR readers have been in an understandable dust-up with the EPA spawned toxic waste water gusher that started in Colorado, and now promises to become an equal opportunity disaster across several western states (see comment stream here).  Predictably some liberal commenters instantly weighed in with the diagnosis that this was all the fault of greedy capitalism, and the owners of the messed with mine should be held accountable.  Well, there are almost 20,000 abandoned mines in the west, most with heavy metals water in them.  The heavy metals are indigenous to the mineral strata of the mines, as is the water that fills the abandoned tunnels – in short, the ‘pollution’ in the abandoned mines is quite natural, and its repositories also quite stable unless you mess with it when you don’t know what you’re doing.  And when it comes to messing, the EPA has demonstrated its arrogance and ignorance now for almost two generations.  (Left-leaning local readers would be surprised at the kind of waters stored in the tunnels of Nevada County’s abandoned mines.)  But all that don’t make no never mind to those used to lecturing ex cathedra about matters environmental.  In any case, we’ll soon get to see whether Garrett Hardin’s tongue-in-cheek ‘The solution to pollution is dilution’ really works.

    [13aug15 update]  Given the latest emails revelations, Hillary is most certainly a criminal of a particularly high level.  Men and women have gone to jail for a lot less when illegally handling classified materials and lying to federal investigators.  We are told that she has now compromised TOP SECRET/NOFORN (with a bunch of letters thrown in) materials which are essentially the most secret and sensitive documents that our country can produce.  Martha Stewart became a felon did time for lying to federal investigators and obstructing an investigation regarding securities trading.  Over the past months and years Hillary has done much, much more from a position of national trust that now has compromised the entire country.  An RR reader posted this link to the Daily Beast which really belongs here.  Let's see what kind of an autocracy this administration has become that will keep her from being indicted and remanded for trial, instead of continuing to campaign for president.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    52 comments on Ruminations – 12aug15 (updated 13aug15)

  • How the gulf between us widens (updated 12aug15)

    To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. – Charles Krauthammer

    George Rebane

    Students of American history agree that President Lincoln was the prime instigator of federalism’s decline and the growth of Washington’s power over our land and lives.  That the times called for such a reorientation of our body politic is still being debated, but the assumption of the path to collectivism is today denied only by those most ardently at work who promote progress on that same path.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    157 comments on How the gulf between us widens (updated 12aug15)

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

225 comments on Sandbox – 30aug15