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  • Ruminations – 8dec22 (updated 15dec22)

    George Rebane

    Trump in 2024?  Hard to see how the man can get nominated by the Repubs, no matter how hard he might try.  His latest mis-pronouncements on the Constitution and having his business found criminally guilty of fraud provides a tipping point for the lamestream to finally castigate him cause, and the Republicans to unite in his finally being too tainted to touch.  None of this says that Trump won’t run as a splinter party candidate.  For a prayer that he won’t, we should all light a candle.

    Christmas consideration.  Jo Ann and I put up our porch Christmas lights yesterday.  Today we got this tongue-in-cheek from a fellow bourbon drinking neighbor. “I don’t mean to be a grinch however….to those of you who are placing Christmas lights/decorations in your yards, would you please avoid anything that has Red or Blue flashing lights together? Every time I come around the corner, I think it's the cops and I have a panic attack. I have to brake hard, toss my glass of Jack Daniel's out the window, fasten my seat belt, throw my phone on the floor, turn my radio down, and push the gun under the seat. All while trying to drive. It's just too much drama, even for Christmas. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.”

    [15dec22 update]  Here is a short on-the-mark commentary of VDH on FTX's scumbag Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk, the hero of Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter.

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  • Sandbox – 5dec22

    [Much appreciation for the concern shown by commenters to our pace of Covid recovery.  We have discovered for ourselves that all the stories about how it drains you of energy, and the time it takes to get back to normal are true in spades.  We felt the symptoms and tested positive on 21 November and got over the low point three days later.  But since then it’s been a real drag – every chore that requires moving your butt drains you.  Yesterday morning we did a big grocery shopping which laid us low.  Afternoon nappy-poos are a must.  This morning I tried a turn on the treadmill at half speed; could only last 15 minutes.  But we do sense that day by day we’re getting better; if we could only pick up the pace a little.  gjr]

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  • Twitter blackout

    George Rebane

    Twitter2022Last week Elon Musk released a tranche of Twitter internal communications to conservative blogger Matt Taibbi.  Since then, more has been released through Taibbi.  These missives between top and middle management at Twitter during the summer and fall of 2020 are damning evidence of how the Democrat Party, government agencies, and corporatist entities worked hand-in-glove to deflect the election toward Biden by censoring and discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop evidence of high-level corruption and government influence peddling.

    As RR and its regular Ruminators have long-cited and argued, this case of carefully constructed and directed lies was most certainly the biggest ‘irregularity’ from which the 2020 election suffered, and still gives cause for many of us to consider that President Trump would have been re-elected had the laptop imbroglio received the timely national coverage it deserved.  Many legal minds and national commentators opine that the significance of how the Biden laptop was censored and propagandized makes Watergate look like a walk in the park.  I strongly agree.

    Here we have two distinct issues at work – laptop evidence of Biden family corruption, and corporatist cooperation with political opposition to influence the outcome of a national election.  These working together gives a perfect example where 2+2=5, and why the DNC and Democratic leadership pulled all stops to bury the evidence before voters could hear of it.  The details of the story, especially as it involves collusion of the FBI (weekly meetings with Twitter) and a cadre of former intelligence officials, make for movie material reading (more here).  And, of course, the case is not closed yet if congressional Republicans will grow a pair and open a wide-ranging investigation in January.  Stay tuned.

    Finally, what this illustrates once more is another example of how Americans live in two distinct and separate worlds.  Those light readers who consume mainly lamestream media will not have even heard enough to give this matter a second thought.  More observant leftwingers continue to consume the lies that there is no there there; most certainly not of government censorship since Twitter is a private company.  Of course, Twitter’s close coordination with the Biden WH and FBI, as the evidence now shows, is never mentioned in the leftwing outlets’ reports.  Through corporatism the government has been overwhelmingly involved in First Amendment censorship.

    For a coda, put this coverage and the polarization it maintains in the context of finding common ground, of coming together again, or of the oft-repeated notion that there are more things that unite us than separate us.  No there aren’t.  (More here)

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  • Scattershots – 1dec22

    George Rebane

    China’s nationwide Covid lockdowns.  Does anyone have any reasonable explanation for this supremely stupid policy that will NOT avoid the inevitable nationwide pandemic, destroys the nation’s economy, and gives rise to riots that increase popular opposition to the CCP and its governments?  All pandemics will end through herd immunity – natural or vaccine mediated.  There are no effective Covid vaccines, and none on the horizon.  When the lockdowns are inevitably lifted, the disease will rage just like it has everywhere else.

    More black mayors celebrated.  As Jason Riley points out here in the 30nov22 WSJ, the worst thing that can happen to a city or community is to elect a black mayor.  America’s decades old record of such unfortunate election outcomes clearly demonstrates a strong correlation of economic downturn and soaring crime rates when leftwing black community governance is ensconced.  And yet they keep doing it, while bitching about everything from police brutality, horrible public education, to racist allocation of state and federal largesse to the local weal.  The motto of our black communities has long been ‘vote the same, then expect change’.

    The League of Women Voters is a partisan Democrat shill.  Looking at the political affiliation of its members over the last decades demonstrates its firm position in America’s progressive politics.  Things in the LWV started turning left in the 1970s when Jo Ann was on the board of the Ventura County LWV.  Having early lost credibility as unbiased sponsor of national presidential debates, the organization pulled in its horns to focus on non-partisan bamboozles delivered at the local levels.  And today, Ms Fran Cole, head of the Nevada County LWV, attempts a ludicrous counter argument in the 30nov22 Union – ‘Let’s set the record straight; the League of Women Voters is a political non-partisan organization’.  In it she goes on to twist the record into a pretzel, following the well-established Alinsky model in the Democrats’ communication kit.  For openers she argues that today’s overwhelmingly leftwing LWV members can set aside their political proclivities and provide unbiased reporting on issues and conduct similarly neutral candidate forums.  The latter is contradicted by legions of Republican candidates in recent years who have refused to take part in such one-sided kabukis.  The former is something unknown in the field of psychology, and not accepted as unbiased by any broad-based audience (starting with the leftwingers themselves).

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  • Sandbox – 30nov22

    [All the evidence for impeaching that lying SOS Alejandro Mayorkas applies doubly against Bumblebrain.  It was he who directed his DHS to open the border, let in millions of illegals, including criminals and terrorists of every stripe, fentanyl that has killed hundreds of thousands, and devastated our border cities.  Typically, the Republicans will be blowing it again if they ignore the main event and focus on the low grade ore instead.  Better yet, impeach them both – Mayorkas for following an unconstitutional and illegal order from the President to keep the border open while lying to the American people.  gjr]

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  • Two blind mice

    George Rebane

    Celebrating political monopolies.  Leftwing thought leaders, syndicated Thomas Elias and local George Boardman, write with glee how California’s Democrat Party cancer continues to grow.  Having already metastasized the state, it is now starting to pick off the remnant low population rural counties in the northern part, leading with our Nevada County. (Their columns in the 29nov22 Union, not online yet.)

    The social and economic devastation is totally invisible to these mavens, as these were to the Stalin celebretorians in Pravda of the 1930s and 1940s.  As with all autocrats, it’s the party über alles, no matter what trail of destruction it leaves behind.  They see nothing wrong with the exodus of the skilled and productive.  The exodus of small businesses for greener pastures.  The ever-increasing taxes and regulations to conduct and corral our lives.  Nothing wrong with the state’s top 1% earners paying nearly 50% of the state’s general fund revenues.  And many of these 150,000 out of 40M are now leaving or have already left, thereby causing huge ($25B) and promising bigger state budget deficits.

    But what the Left’s cricket chorus hides is how decades of one-party control has made California the nation’s posterchild of every government folly and foible that places us in the bottom of the federalized barrel of states along almost every metric that is important to the country’s makers.  However, the country’s takers see an entirely different California.  They welcome its teeming cities filled with the homeless, littered with needles and feces, and rife with crime rates that are anything but equitable.

    To be fair Thomas Elias does make a couple of good points about the state’s Republicans basically sitting on their collective butts celebrating a micro gain here and there, but none of it amounts to a hill of beans in being a relevant opposition party in the state.  Elias doesn’t have much advice for that achievement save give up on some core Republican planks like opposing abortion.

    Bottom line though is that neither columnist gives a hint of lament about the detritus all around us as evidence of what the Democrat Party has accomplished during its tenure in Sacramento.  

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  • Thanksgiving 2022

    George Rebane


    Thanksgiving1623

    In spite of it all dear readers and RR regulars, we still have so much to be thankful for.  Jo Ann and I wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving, and may you be blessed to share it with those you love.

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  • Ruminations – 15nov22 (updated 22nov22)

    George Rebane

    How a communist thinks and talks.  Listen to CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil come up with a new plan (here) how rich guys like Bezos should dispose of their money – give the extra back to the government where it will be spent "democratically".  Well, actually it's not a new plan.  Marx and Lenin thought of it first, and starting with Stalin communist countries have been implementing it ever since.  Their method was even more efficient, the state didn't pay you enough for anything to be left over; they took their democratic share right off the top before you even got the left overs.  You can bet the ranch that is exactly what our woke progressives would ultimately implement here.

    [17nov22 update]  California is anticipating a $25B budget deficit, due to revenue shortfalls from a diminishing population of our top wealthiest quintile, who, along with their businesses, have been leaving the state in droves.  All in an environment of complete denial by the Left's monopoly party in Sacramento, and their legions of bought-and-paid-for gimmes that populate California’s hustings.  But not to worry, that market for acquiring dependent votes continues in full swing, including the promise of no service cutbacks for our growing cohort of illegal aliens.

    “Political Gridlock is Poised to Return” in Washington.  Hallelujah!  Given the damage done by Congress in recent decades, a good helping of gridlock is just what the country needs now.

    [22nov22 update]  Well, it took a while for us to join the billions of infected, but Jo Ann and I tested positive for Covid today.  We returned from visiting our Northern Tribe in the Seattle area on Sunday, and both of us felt a little queasy with a persistent cough when we got home.  And yesterday morning Jo Ann was really symptomatic, with my joining her in the evening.  We started our own federally countermanded curative regimen, and amazingly both of us already feel that we have passed the low point.  Then again, maybe this bug has multiple minima, we shall see.  Anyway –

    The time has come, the feds all say,

    to talk of many things;

    Of salves and pills, and even a potion,

    that relief from Covid brings.

    But make no motion to include any notion

    of some bygone promotion

    that to IVT and HCQ still clings.

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  • The Kennan/Byrnes Foreign Policy Conundrum

    George Rebane

    James F ByrnesI recently finished reading a most fascinating and informative account of the international geo-strategic process of decision making by the Allies during WW2.  The work titled Speaking Frankly (1947) by James F. Byrnes (here), diplomat, jurist, and politician extraordinaire, was a command performance and hit the top of the charts when it was published in October 1947.  (In these pages we first met Byrnes in ‘America’s Foreign Policy’)

    Byrnes concludes his ‘diplomatic chronology’ of the war with new challenges for making and keeping the peace after hostilities ended in 1945.  The problem was the USSR.  Dealing with them had been difficult during the war since they were ousted from the Axis powers by Hitler’s double-cross in 1941, after which they quickly became the second (some say ‘first’) front of the Allies against the Nazi war machine.

    Byrnes concludes his considerable tome with the Book IV chapters ‘Building a People’s Foreign Policy’, ‘Control of Atomic Energy’, ‘What Are the Russians After?’, ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’.  It is the last two chapters that concern us.

    But before we consider these, let’s turn to George F. Kennan (here), accomplished and enigmatic diplomat with some outrageous social views.   More importantly, he was our Russia expert, fluent in Russian, who during the war in 1944 was made ‘deputy chief of mission’ in Moscow under ambassador Averill Harriman.  During this service Kennan developed a detailed and highly accurate understanding of the USSR, Stalin, and the international communist movement.  He was the vociferous critic of America’s foreign policy who launched his post-war career with the now famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946) which he sent to President Truman through his then SecState boss James Byrnes.

    George F KennanSo here comes the conundrum.  Byrnes, who experienced the long, detailed, and frustrating negotiations with the Russians firsthand during and after the war, concluded that Soviet leaders were a bunch of totalitarian lying sonsabitches who could not be trusted to carry out the provisions of any treaty that they finally deigned to sign.  Time and again he watched the Soviets undermine duly elected/established post-war, east European governments, and bring them under communist regimes in preparation for ultimate membership in the USSR’s expanding coterie of soviet republics and compliant client states when the Iron Curtain finally dropped in the spring of 1948.

    Yet Byrnes kept trying to wring out of the Soviets the remaining and still missing peace treaties with major governments like Germany and Italy, which were now occupied countries under martial law administered within the framework of the existing armistices that each signed after the guns were silenced.  Truth be told, an overarching reason for Byrnes continuing to treat the USSR honorably was to employ and promote the functions of the then nascent United Nations, the institution in which many in the free world had faith in becoming the successful international peacekeeper.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 10nov22

    [People who debate whether the glass if half empty or half full miss the point.  The glass is refillable.  A verity cherished by the Right and missed by the Left.  gjr]

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70 comments on Ruminations – 8dec22 (updated 15dec22)