Rebane's Ruminations

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January 2026
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  • Sandbox – 19oct23

    [Rebane Doctrine – POTUS will tell Iran and the world that if the Hamas hostages are not released forthwith, then the US and Israel will start destroying Iran’s oil production and transport infrastructure including its refineries, pipelines, tank farms, tanker ports, and railheads.  gjr]

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  • Ruminations – 7oct23 (updated 15oct23)

    George Rebane

    ‘Taking a Closer Look at the Vaunted Scandinavian Welfare States’ (here)  Here is a little wisdom for our leftwing readers who embrace ever more socialism based on their shared belief that it works in the Scandinavian countries.  Well not quite as this piece from the Mises Institute makes clear.

    Sacramento’s socialist sleazebags are illegally end-running California’s citizens in their perennial effort to raise more taxes and gut Prop 13.  The sad part is that the state’s population now consists of such a large proportions of double dummies, that they will believe Newsom’s lies and vote us deeper into a financial crisis in November 2024.  The Howard Jarvis organization is fighting back. (more here and here)

    [15oct23 update]  You shouldn’t have to be too bright to understand when someone says an acknowledged enemy is ‘smart’, it's an assessment of their cunningness.  And it doesn’t mean they support or side with the enemy.

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  • Scattershots – 4oct23 (updated 8oct23)

    George Rebane

    Detracking America.  “’Detracking’ is an increasingly popular proposal among socialist educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.” (more here)

    The daily confirmation arrives in truckloads that the Democratic Party is truly the evil anti-American party, aided ably in their quest to destroy our republic by harebrained Republicans who can’t get their act together.

    ‘The Data Prove Government Is Spending Too Much’  Americans for Tax Reform recently launched the Sustainable Budget Project from which we read – “The U.S. national debt recently passed $33 trillion, more than 120% of gross domestic product. Left-wing politicians assert that Americans are undertaxed, but the data show that the government spends too much.”  Americans for Tax Reform has offered a very practical rule by which to construct sustainable budgets – limit the budget increases to “the rate of population growth plus inflation.”  Bottom line – “If government grows faster than this rate, then it is growing faster than what the average taxpayer can afford.”  (more here) 

    Kaja Kallas[8oct23 update] Estonia advises Ukraine.  ““You can’t bribe a computer,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told me. When it’s time to rebuild, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should heed these words. Estonia—a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—is No. 1 in providing government services digitally, according to the United Nations; first in democratic development among 29 postcommunist countries, according to Freedom House; first in international tax competitiveness, according to the Tax Foundation (the U.S. is 22nd); and sixth in the 2023 Index of Economic Freedom, according to the Heritage Foundation (the U.S. is 25th). It has the most startups per capita in Europe, and its 15-year-olds top the Continent in reading, science and mathematics.” (more here)

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  • Redeeming Aspects of American Slavery?

    George Rebane

    One of our politicians, I now forget who, recently let slip the notion that American blacks have benefitted from having ancestors who were slaves – he stated that American slavery had bestowed redeemable aspects on those progenies who today share protected freedoms with our white population.

    Of course, the politician was immediately attacked as a racist for proposing that slavery had any redeemable features at all.  In response he immediately succumbed and offered profuse apologies for his obvious error.  And the matter appears to have been settled as strong reminder that no one should ever again publicly imply that slavery was a “positive good in the United States” as was the regular habit of ante-bellum southern politicians during the 1810-1860 period. (more here)

    Most people today reject the oratorical arguments of men like John C. Calhoun, et al. holding that regulated slavery vs unregulated free labor was indeed a “positive good” for civilized society.  But giving the matter a little more thought does bring up another perspective.  And that is in the comparison of the quality of life enjoyed today by the African-Americans to that of the trials and tribulations available to sub Sahel African blacks.  It is clear to many, most certainly to our African-Americans, that America continues to provide a much higher quality of life and opportunity for our black citizenry.  All one has to do is look at the predominance of which direction migration is taking place between the two continents.

    In short, one can argue that whatever suffering our slaves went through compared to the then concurrent life of their African cousins on a continent of constant combat and corruption, our slaves bequeathed their posterity a much better environment in which to pursue their happiness than did those who remained in Africa.

    If this has been a redeeming feature of American slavery, it most certainly was not planned that way a couple of centuries ago.  But today it is what it is, and therefore may require some more thought when we reconsider the darker side of our history.

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  • Sandbox – 29sep23

    [Sen Dianne Feinstein spent thirty years in Congress.  Her death yesterday launched an avalanche of hosannas by the lamestream for her productive life as a legislator.  However, her accomplishments as such have been few and far between, and almost all misdirected.  RIP Dianne.  gjr]

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  • Basic pricing rules in an insane Democrat economy

    George Rebane

    New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in a 35-page opinion “found that Donald Trump and his family business committed fraud by making false and misleading valuations on much of his real-estate empire and ordered the cancellation of legal certificates that have allowed the Trumps to do business in the state.”  He claims that “the Trumps have repeatedly relied ‘on bogus arguments’ that ignore basic rules about how assets are valued. To the Trumps, rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated ones, and restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted property”. 

    To Engoron “This is a fantasy world, not the real world.”  And to correct these egregious business practices “the judge said it was necessary to go ahead and cancel the Trump business certificates now because the defendants ‘have continued to disseminate false and misleading information while conducting business,’ even as an independent monitor has been overseeing their actions.” (more here)

    This hands a pre-appeal victory to New York Attorney General Letitia James who has been hunting Trump for some years now.  Looking at the nature of the charges they have cobbled together, this puts the AG and the judge into the large cohort of Democrats in which evil and rank ignorance cohabit.  Consider the charge that a property owner cannot price his own properties, especially prices that have been accepted by some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated lenders who have repeatedly dealt with Trump in mutually beneficent deals that have enriched all participants.

    According to these evil idiots – abetted by legions of Democrats and lamestream outlets – the government is the final arbiter of real estate prices (what next?), and can criminally charge citizens with fraud if they price their properties higher than what is acceptable to our overseers.  How does one find common ground with such senseless autocrats, let alone abide with them peacefully within the same borders?

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  • Sandbox – 14sep23

    Sandbox -14sep23

    [California Dems are giving ‘butt stupid’ a expanded definition with their new CCW law that prohibits law-abiding citizens to exercise their concealed carry rights in an expanded array of places that include schools, government buildings, prisons, hospitals, airports, and bars.  The criminally intent and crazies out there welcome such prohibitions which keep them safe as they carry out their plans for murder and mayhem.  It is amazing that we walk the same planet with idiots who believe such laws will reduce ‘gun violence’.  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 2sep23

    George Rebane

    ‘How the AI Revolution Will Reshape the World’ is an essay in the 1sep23 issue of Time that presents an excellent summary of how the advent of generative AI is launching “the greatest redistribution of power in history.”  Not only is this new wave of technology based on large language models sufficient to found the greatest revolution in human civilization all by its lonesome, its redistribution of power will be abetted by accompanying technological breakthroughs in synthetic biology, quantum computing, and “abundant new sources of energy.”  Having understood all this, it is remarkable that today “this is the most underappreciated aspect of the technological revolution now underway.”  What’s more, previous technological leaps were reserved to the capital rich elite or national governments.  That’s no longer the case.  “We are facing a step change in what’s possible for individual people to do, and at a previously unthinkable pace. AI is becoming more powerful and radically cheaper by the month—what was computationally impossible, or would cost tens of millions of dollars a few years ago, is now widespread.”  For the sanguine among us, snooze on at your own peril.  (H/T to reader)

    Blinders on black governance.  It’s with some trepidation that I offer this observation motivated by the recent slum apartment building fire in Johannesburg that killed over seventy poor immigrants to the Union of South Africa. (more here)  Over the last generation (i.e. post-apartheid) that nation’s largest city has turned from a crown jewel of Africa into the country’s, perhaps the continent’s, largest favela.  And here is the observation to which no one dare give voice – are there any black-governed countries in Africa, or anywhere for that matter, that compare favorably with first-world nations like those in Europe, North America, and Asia?  To carry this observation even deeper, the same may be asked of black-run cities in the United States.  Instead, these questions remain unasked and unexamined.  From an academic or demographic perspective such enquiries remain on terra incognita, and their causal factors define one of our culture’s growing number of forbidden territories.  Anyone daring to even explore whether there is any truth to the basis which such questions imply is immediately tagged as a racist or worse.  As evidence, I offer the comment stream below.

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  • Sandbox – 30aug23

    [The chorus of financial mavens warning of the dollar’s destruction is growing.  The cost to just service our exploding national debt is unsustainable.  That means it’s growing so fast that it consumes an ever greater share of the federal budget AND the nation’s GDP.  Those people concerned with this financial collapse are advised to reinvest in gold, silver, and prominent crypto currencies.  Judging from past attempts to elicit discussion of this event, we have a very sanguine group of readers.  Quoting a famous man, “What, me worry?” gjr]

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  • Russia’s Preventive Maintenance Crisis

    George Rebane

    Russians have always had a problem keeping their equipment in top operating shape.  This problem goes back to the days of Peter the Great who brought back the latest ship building technology from his trip to western Europe.  They subsequently built great stuff that inevitably had catastrophic breakdowns.  In modern times such public embarrassments occurred everywhere from the sinkings of their advanced submarines and supersonic transports crashing to big apartment buildings whose HVACs mysteriously blew up.

    Lately such failures have occurred on even more mundane levels.  For instance, multiple reports of upper story windows which have suffered from untightened latches.  These have caused a number of tragic accidents in which prominent Russian industrialists continue to fall to their deaths.  Now we hear of private aircraft whose major components, like wings, are not bolted securely to their fuselages, and result in tragedies of their falling apart at altitude during routine operations which simple maintenance and monitoring procedures would have prevented

    This morning we read reports of just this kind of preventable accident happening to a business jet flying out of Moscow.  At 28,000 feet some 100 kilometers northwest of the city, the jet fell apart.  Bystander videos show the airplane with one wing missing and trailing smoke, spiraling to the ground and exploding on impact with all aboard killed.

    Subsequent reports indicate that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner paramilitary group commander, and some of his senior staff were passengers on the craft which, surprisingly it turned out, also belonged to Prigozhin.  Since the Wagner troops have been Russia’s only effective military forces in Ukraine, this loss, no doubt, has come as a shock to President Putin.

    The whole thing reminds one of “For want of a nail the shoe was lost.  For want of a shoe the horse was lost. …”.  From this latest incident the message to all of Russia’s maintenance people is clear – check you work!

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