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  • America’s Foreign Policy Misrepresented

    [This commentary was published in the 10mar26 edition of The Union.]

    George Rebane

    Our worthy warriors of the Left continue to bombard us with various messages assembled under the theme of America, the evil racially-drenched imperialist warmonger that seeks to beggar the world to the benefit of its capitalist overlords.  Today TDS is their most effective weapon in the public arena where ideologies contend.  Most recently many of our prominent local leftists – e.g. Daryl Grigsby, Richard Howell, et al – have issued challenges to continue opposing the Trump administration and to gather us in the streets to show our displeasure.  Given his intellectual bent, Mr Grigsby has composed a distinctly historically one-sided missive – ‘When will we wake up?’ (7mar26) – intended to convince readers of the wrong-headed evil currently perpetrated by our administration in Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, … .

    Grigsby’s argument hews to the Democratic Party line that totally omits the historical foundations of America’s foreign policy and its implementation since WW2.  The better-read student is aware of The Long Telegram, an 8,000-word cable, sent on 22 February 1946 by George F. Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow. It is widely considered one of the most influential documents in American diplomatic history, as it provided the intellectual foundation for the U.S. Cold War policy of containment.

    Kennan’s analysis was divided into five parts, covering international communism’s (a la USSR) worldview, its historical roots, and subsequent recommendations for U.S. policy.

    • Inherent Hostility: Kennan argued that the Soviet leadership viewed the world as divided into “capitalist” and “socialist” camps that could never peacefully coexist.
    • Insecurity and Neurosis: He asserted that Soviet aggression was not based on objective reality but on a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and a need for an external enemy to justify internal autocratic rule.
    • Expansionist Nature: The Soviet regime was “inherently expansionist” and would relentlessly seek to spread its influence wherever it encountered “diseased tissue” or weakness in the West.
    • Logic of Force: Kennan noted that the Soviet Union, unlike Nazi Germany, was “highly sensitive to the logic of force” and would withdraw if it encountered sufficient resistance.
    • Containment Policy: The telegram argued that the U.S. should pursue a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”.

    Kennan’s bottom line was that until communism (now abetted by Islam) changed its raison d’etre, the US, as the only viable opposing hegemon, should be prepared to fight small wars in perpetuity against communism where and whenever it rose to challenge the west.  As is evident, we have pursued that world order with various levels of success.  To wit, our 1950 entry into the Korean War to oppose the communist north’s invasion of the south, and the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s democratically elected Mossadegh who used the communist Tudeh Party as his “foot soldiers”.

    And today the beat goes on with conflicts in Ukraine, Mid-east, Iran, and preparations for the promised invasion of Taiwan.  Within this background our domestic Left successfully refocuses America’s attention on the bombastic and auto-promoting nature of our fearless leader, President Trump.  Despite his many domestic and foreign policy successes, with more to come, Mr Trump is not a naturally lovable character.  Instead, he’s the champion of how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, providing the leftwing media a constant flow of ample material that distracts main street from learning of or understanding his abundant successes.

    In sum, today’s Iran conflict is not a “forever war” as its critics describe it.  It is just the latest effort by the US to push back the most current attack on western culture, and the forms of beneficent governance and economies it has promoted in the world.  There is no mistaking that America intends to maintain its position as the free-world’s hegemon, and to do that with a strong leader like Trump through policies and uses of force that satisfy ‘America first’ interests.  The sad conflict we have internally is that today half of us no longer share these sentiments – according to a recent Gallup poll, two of three Democrats view socialism more favorably than capitalism – and are actively working for the best interests of our declared enemies.

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  • Sandbox – 1mar26

    [Well, it all finally hit the fan yesterday.  The video of Khamenei’s compound being destroyed by multiple missile impacts is quite terrific and impressive.  That was, of course, the first target destroyed, else every raghead at the planning meeting would have high-tailed it out of there.  Now we have to hope that we do put some surreptitious boots on the ground and help the Iranians get organized to take care of regime change.  Rallying around Prince Reza Pahlavi is not a bad starting point for forming a temporary government before elections can be held.  gjr]

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  • America’s Literacy and Numeracy Crisis: The High Cost of Left-Wing Dominance in Public Education

    [This commentary was published in the 25feb26 edition of The Union.  It is posted here as it appeared in the newspaper. gjr]

    Over the years in these pages and on my blog I have been a critic of our nation’s public school system that has produced a workforce and electorate marginally able to maintain our democratic republic.  At every turn I have been attacked by our progressive neighbors for my undeserved criticisms and ignorance on the matter.  Nevertheless, these neighbors and their voting record give ample evidence on how this crisis in education came about and continues unabated.

    Recent international assessments paint a damning picture of American adult skills. The 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), conducted by the OECD, reveals that U.S. adults aged 16–65 rank a mediocre 14th in literacy and a dismal 24th in numeracy among 31 participating countries. Literacy scores fell 12 points from 2017 to 2023, while numeracy dropped 7 points. About one of three adults now score at the lowest literacy levels, and struggle with reasoning and basic numeracy—skills essential for everything from reading basic instructions to managing finances. These declines affect a workforce already lagging behind peers in Finland, Japan, and Sweden, where adults excel in both domains.

    This is not a story of underfunding. The United States spends lavishly on public education—around $15,500 to $20,000 per K-12 student annually, far exceeding the OECD average of about $10,700–$11,900 for primary and secondary levels. Including higher education, per-student expenditure reaches $37,400, double the OECD norm. Yet despite this investment, outcomes remain stubbornly poor. American taxpayers pour in resources, but results point to systemic failure rather than scarcity.

    At the heart of this dysfunction lies the left-wing stranglehold on public education. The nation’s two largest teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—wield enormous influence over policy, curriculum, and reform efforts. These organizations are not neutral; they are partisan powerhouses. Over 90% of their political donations flow to Democratic candidates and causes, with tens of millions funneled to left-wing advocacy groups since 2022 alone. In election cycles, union dues—often mandatory—finance progressive agendas, from opposing school accountability to blocking merit-based pay.

    This ideological dominance has prioritized social engineering over foundational skills. For decades, progressive education theories have reshaped classrooms, emphasizing “child-centered” approaches, equity initiatives, and social justice themes at the expense of rigorous instruction. In reading, methods like “whole language”—long favored by progressive educators—downplay phonics in favor of guessing from context, contributing to stalled progress since the early 2010s. Math instruction has suffered similarly, with “discovery-based” curricula encouraging students to invent their own methods rather than master standard algorithms. Critics point to these shifts as key factors in declining scores, as evidenced by flat or falling NAEP results in reading and math over the past decade.

    Compounding this is a broader cultural shift within public education toward ideological indoctrination. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, critical theories on race and gender, and politicized curricula have proliferated, often diverting time and resources from core academics. Republican voters increasingly perceive public schools as promoting liberal viewpoints, a sentiment backed by surveys showing widespread concern over one-sided teaching. This leftward tilt stifles dissent, resists evidence-based reforms like expanded phonics or traditional math, and protects underperforming systems from competition.

    The result? A second generation now entering adulthood ill-equipped for a knowledge economy that requires workers with skills in logic, reasoning, and critical thinking.  Absent these, we have functional illiteracy and innumeracy which hinder economic mobility, innovation, and even constructive civic participation. Poverty, immigration, and family factors play roles, but they do not excuse a system that spends lavishly yet struggles for mediocrity.

    Reform requires breaking the monopoly. School choice—vouchers, charters, and tax-credit scholarships—offers a path forward by empowering parents and introducing competition to government education. Evidence is mixed, but competitive pressures have driven improvements in some contexts, forcing public schools to innovate or lose students. Without such options, left-wing interests will continue safeguarding failure.

    America cannot afford more decades of ideological stranglehold. To reclaim excellence, we must demand accountability, depoliticize classrooms, and prioritize proven teaching over progressive experimentation. The PIAAC data is a wake-up call: our public education system, dominated by left-wing forces, is failing its fundamental mission. It’s past time for change.

    George Rebane, PhD

    Nevada County

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  • Scattershots – 16feb26

    George Rebane

    Hit to Gov Newsom and the state’s Democrats for finally figuring out the homeless problem.  By spending $24B (supposedly) on California’s homeless, that then increased their numbers by 20% to over 180,000 according to HUD data, the Democrats have shown that taxpayers need only pay about $800,000 to add each additional person to our homeless rolls.  And to reward such clever solutions to increasing our homeless problem (already at 2 out of 3 in the country), in their wisdom by passing Prop 50, California voters will again faithfully re-elect even more Democrats to their established one-party sinecures.  With such a crop of resident geniuses, we count our blessings. https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2025/01/hud-pit-count-2024/

    Feds to pay for AI training of employees.  This new program is supposed to reduce the likelihood of rampant systemic unemployment that is waiting in the wings.  Where it misses the boat is that the only feasible training accessible to most is to learn how to compose an AI prompt.  But the contents of a prompt that elicits a useful response must be based on deep knowledge about the requirements for the desired task that the AI will satisfy.  Not all lower level employees have such deep knowledge.  And that is the reason that they become redundant when, say, their manager with such deep knowledge can write the prompt that will do their work, and thereby increase his own productivity.  Bottom line, AI survivors will have to have higher levels of intellect and knowledge than lower level workers.

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  • The Singularity is here?

    George Rebane

    “The accelerating sophistication of artificial intelligence is driving a wave of warnings (from tech insiders) that AI can create real-world harms, including autonomous cyberattacks, mass unemployment, unrelenting market disruption and the replacement of human relationships.” (WSJ 15feb26)  It is getting very hard to argue that we are not already witnessing the Singularity.  And it has come upon us in a form that was unexpected – an insidious arrival instead of a widely recognized event as would have been with the sudden advent of AGI (artificial generalized intelligence).

    And given the already demonstrated level of dumbth in the nation, along with the rising systemic unemployment worries, most observers see the future with AI as dystopic.  This acknowledges that there is still a cohort of naifs who consider the LLMs arrival as just another technological milestone as those in the past that have created more jobs for people of all intellectual levels than were displaced/lost.

    Regarding Singularity’s advent and expanding on the functions remaining to humanity in a society populated by ubiquitous AGIs, I had the following conversation with SuperGrok (here).

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  • Socialism is intrinsically unsustainable

    George Rebane

    If sustainability of a government program is defined as its ongoing budgets not increasing their share of the country’s GDP for non-diminishing levels of service, then which of our government’s entitlement programs are sustainable? Which of the EU governments’ programs are sustainable?

    I presented the above prompt to SuperGrok AI.  And after its extensive analysis of both American and European government programs representing the implementation of socialism in its various degrees, the answer came back in a comprehensive dissertation concluding that no such sustainable programs can be found on either continent.

    That socialism is an intrinsically unsustainable form of collectivist governance has been a seminal message in these pages for almost twenty years.  The evidence, of course, is overwhelming.  The corollary to the proposition is that socialism is a ratcheting gateway to autocracy cum tyranny, since its maintenance needs ever more comprehensive and invasive government controls to implement.  Students of history also know that tyranny is a very stable form of governance for a country since new tyrannies simply replace old faltering tyrannies.

    It always takes a special form of national ignorance for a sovereign nation-state to give up liberal governance based on individual liberties, personal security, and ownership of property (the Bastiat triangle of rights).  We have witnessed three major occurrences of this during the 20th century that swept several hundred million to their untimely ends.  And today we are living in the death spiral of western culture based on such rights.

    As amply noted here, we in the United States have one political party that has rededicated itself to the destruction of a liberal America.  In its multitude of leftwing public policies it has implemented the re-education of two plus generations of constituents now who have no clue as to what socialism is, yet are more than willing to give it a try for our collective future.  As an example, they are successfully convincing their millions of minions that those who seek to reduce government funding and its regulatory umbrella – i.e. reduce the size of government – are the real fascistic autocrats to be opposed at all costs.  Insane.  Given this state of affairs across the land, where does the boundary between such ignorance and evil blur?

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  • Sandbox – 12feb26

    [Have no idea what President Trump is doing re Iran.  Every day past the ‘red line’ continues to be a day of hundreds more executions of innocent Iranians.  What in hell is there to negotiate with this regime other than give them a choice to vamoose or kill them??  But you start by whumping them.  Tik Tok.  gjr]

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  • What Unification?

    [This commentary was published in the 11feb26 edition of The Union.]

    George Rebane

    That we are a badly divided community gives rise to a steady stream of good-hearted folks hereabouts calling for local residents to come together, to unify.  These attempts at unification go beyond the boilerplate calls with which we are all familiar.  Some groups actually hold events, forums, workshops to which opposing sides are invited to talk about and find solutions to their differences.  A recent example of this is Terry McAteer’s 13jan26 ‘The Community Forum is your local unifying connection’ wherein he reports on “a once-a-month public meeting (that) was birthed to present local issues with a meaningful, one-hour focus on a single topic” held at the Sierra College Nevada County campus.

    Ed Sylvester, a forum founder, notes that “In these days of divisiveness, we intend the Community Forums to be a unifying experience for our community.”  To this Mr McAteer adds, “An informed and involved community has always been a hallmark of Nevada County and Community Forums are one more tool in our community-unifying toolbox.”

    In spite of these sincere efforts to bring us together, the fact of the matter is that with the passing years we have grown more apart, and continue to do so at an ever-increasing pace.  Culturally and politically, we were a fairly cohesive conservative community before the influx of liberals, mostly from our big urban centers soiled by years under progressive administration.  Today this beat goes unabated with conservatives exiting to maintain the county’s population and decrease the state’s.

    So what I would like to see in all this talk of unification is that we should be able to devise and tune our attempts at community unification by finally defining a generally accepted performance metric by which to evaluate our efforts.  This would be a useful task for our county’s amply paid “analysts” at the Rood Center.  (I would even volunteer to help them.)

    From my perch none of these calls for, and organized efforts at unification have worked.  Nor do they have any future chance of working.  Recall the principle that you can control ONLY that which you can measure.  We cannot hope to nudge the two sides toward each other if we don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

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  • The less you know, …

    [A slightly edited version of this commentary was published in the 11apr26 issue of The Union.]

    Mayor Mamdani told New York that his administration would seek to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”.

    George Rebane

    Today our country is divided among those who believe in the rugged individualism envisioned by our Founders of citizens who would support and maintain the constitutional republic they fashioned for us; and those who believe that big government will provide them with the warmth of collectivism that has yet to be found in the historical annals of governance.  The latter comprise the ignorant citizenry like those of 1917 Russia, 1933 Germany, and 1949 China to usher in the worst tyrannies the world has known.  The common denominator of all these tragedies was the belief that unbridled growth of government would provide the greatest good for all.  Let us attempt to count the ways this horrendous intellectual deficit plays out.

    The less you know, …

    • The more you believe that an economy is a zero-sum game among its participants.
    • The more you believe that high and rising taxes do not stifle entrepreneurship and wealth creation.
    • The more you believe that increasing tax rates will always increase government revenues.
    • The more you don’t understand that reducing government income and its regulatory umbrella is antithetical to the rise of autocracy.
    • The greater your deficit is about the historical record of socialism/communism.
    • The more you don’t understand the Democratic Party’s longstanding love affair with collectivism and its gateway socialism.
    • The more you believe that we should give socialism a chance in America.
    • The more you don’t understand federalism and its role in the governance of the United States.
    • The more you believe that our constitution is a dated, calcified, and harmful document that does not provide for its systematic and orderly modification to reflect the times; that it must be abrogated in favor of a new ‘just and equitable’ foundational manifesto.
    • The more you believe that America is and has always been, since its founding, an evil nation harmful to its citizens and responsible for most of the world’s ills.
    • The less you believe that a married heterosexual couple with children is the foundational social unit in a stable society.
    • The more you believe that state-enforced equity (equality of outcomes) yields the most just and stable society.
    • The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party as the historical party of pro-slavery, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, eugenics, segregation, …
    • The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party’s promotion of antisemitism in America.
    • The more you believe that meritocracy is racist and a white supremacist imposition.
    • The more clueless you are about the Democratic Party being the leading proponents of anti-American radical Islam.

    The above is a partial list of beliefs that separate Americans, perhaps terminally since no one on either side of the Great Divide can find any common ground to serve as a starting point from which to come together.  Victor Davis Hanson has a comprehensive summary of today’s progress toward separation in his ‘Slouching Toward Fort Sumter?’.

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  • Scattershots – 1feb26 (updated 3feb26)

    George Rebane

    Gold finally crashed last Friday, dropping to $4,899 from its $5,615 high on Thursday (29jan26).  That’s a 12.75% plunge after starting its most recent run-up last November.  Looking at the price history, it occurred to me that this was no garden variety exponential growth pattern, but something special – super-exponential growth.  Exponentially growing processes reach infinity in infinite time, but super-exponentials reach infinity in a finite (critical) time that can be computed.  So I did a little noodling based on the work of Didier Sornette (2003) who pioneered research on such super-exponential processes that our universe does not support.  Putting in the gold prices since November, I calculated the critical time to be 30jan26, i.e. last Friday.  This prediction showed that Sornette’s theory nailed it.

    The movie ‘Melania’, documenting the days leading up to President Trump’s second inauguration, opened to packed or empty theaters last Friday.  Overall the film was a roaring success with conservatives (99% approving and setting a cash office record for documentaries), and a complete bust for the TDS afflicted crowd (only 11% approving).  The First Lady is still persona non grata on the pages and broadcast outlets of the lamestream media.

    [3feb26 update] “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”  A current shibboleth of the lightly read radical Left.  In the enormous educational gaps of these ardent activists lies the fact that all lands on earth have always changed hands from weaker societies to the stronger ones.  In this sense all lands are ‘stolen’.  A dominant group takes land from someone else and establishes a defendable sovereignty over it for some period of time, until a stronger one comes along.  The Aztecs (and all other American tribes) constantly conquered their neighbors’ lands over the centuries.  In their turn the Spanish and Portuguese of the 16th century conquered most of what today is Latin America from the then indigenous tribes.  The Europeans in their turn did the same in North America.  It was ever thus, and will be until the sun becomes a red giant.

    The movie ‘Melania’, documenting the days leading up to President Trump’s second inauguration, opened to packed or empty theaters last Friday.  Overall the film was a roaring success with conservatives (99% approving and setting a cash office record for documentaries), and a complete bust for the TDS afflicted crowd (only 11% approving).  The First Lady is still persona non grata on the pages and broadcast outlets of the lamestream media..

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25 comments on America’s Foreign Policy Misrepresented