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  • Central Bank Digital Currencies a’comin’?

    George Rebane

    The powers that be have quietly initiated the process to change all fiat monies into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Plenary sessions among the G7 have demonstrated that most countries are ready to change their money into ‘programmable crypto currencies’.  The US and UK are leaders of this movement as the means to enlarge the power of governments and control the inevitable destruction of their circulating fiat monies.

    To understand how CBDCs work, consider that when implemented, we will all have personal accounts with our country’s central bank (e.g. our Fed) which will then enable control of the amounts, dispensing, and programming the use of the new nationalized crypto currency.  This essentially follows what Red China is doing now (‘the Chinese model’).  The totalitarian gorilla in the room is the programmability of CBDCs.

    Depending on TBD laws, regulations, and power-motivated propensities, your particular CBDCs can be programmed to enable and/or deny you, on a day-to-day basis, the freedom to use the money as you will.  Say, that the government doesn’t want you to consume a certain product (e.g. fatty foods) because you are overweight.  It can then make your CBDCs unable to pay for such prohibited products and services.  The same can be said for travel restrictions – the government, or even the permitted airline, can make it so that you cannot purchase tickets that take you to a destination proscribed for you personally.

    In essence, CBDCs will then no longer be money in the sense that today’s money is fungible as a store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.  Your particular CBDCs will then become the equivalent of government-controlled vouchers purposed dynamically for what your employer or a state agency grants you privileges.  Are you beginning to get the picture?  (more here, here, here, and here)

    PS. The astute reader will realize that programmable CBDCs can totally collapse the ‘property side’ of the Bastiat Triangle, thereby also collapsing the ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ sides. Can everyone imagine work-around black markets and barter economies?

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  • ‘Poking the Bear’!?

    George Rebane

    It appears that under the leadership of our pusillanimous president the west has quietly buried MAD (mutually assured destruction).  Today we tremble in fear of the Butcher of Moscow every time he even hints that he has nuclear weapons which he might use if we don’t let his genocide in Ukraine continue unhindered.  So, what does he think we keep in all our land-based and seagoing silos, bagels?

    For decades MAD, augmented by forceful US military interventions, held back the Soviet bear.  None of the communist dictators waved their nuclear warheads in our faces, because they knew we would just wave back with ours – both knew not to play a lose-lose game.  That didn’t mean that the communists didn’t try to surreptitiously stick nukes under our noses.  But when discovered, they always understood the meaning of MAD and pulled back. 

    Both were satisfied to continue advancing their foreign policies by propaganda and the kind of brushfire wars that George Kennan outlined in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’.  And in these, we didn’t just send in weapons and other military aid, we and our allies often put boots on the ground.  When necessary, we demonstrated our ability to kick the bear in the butt and not just poke him.  Under US leadership we did this until the USSR collapsed in spite of its decades long attempts to demonstrate the glories of communism and make it work.  Today no more.

    Under the clearest moral imperative since Hitler’s 1939 blitzkrieg invasion of Poland, we balked and prevaricated in full knowledge of Putin’s intent to invade Ukraine (as now admitted by our CIA), and continue to do so in the face of the ongoing slaughter of the innocents.  We have yet to send in the heavy weapons that Ukraine needs to counter the Russian (Red) army’s fielded heavy weapons and their air/missile superiority.  Every time we even intimate that we will do so by calling Putin a war criminal, he rattles his nukes and Team Biden dives under their desks.

    I would love to hear our leader strap on a pair of balls and respond to Putin’s threat of ‘uncertain consequences’ with a public guarantee of some uncertain consequences of our own should he continue to irritate the Eagle.  According to Rebane Doctrine, one such uncertain consequence would arise were we to promise to supply Ukraine with tactical nukes if Putin would ever pop one of his on Ukrainian territory.  The bottom line here is that we should exhume MAD, a mutually understood and implemented foreign policy strategy that for decades proved its war-limiting mettle, and as a reminder, bears that behave badly should always be poked.

    Without MAD, none on Bumblebrain’s A-team has a clue on how to stop Putin from taking the next hunk of neighboring territory after he’s allowed to negotiate a ‘peace’ that further decimates Ukraine.  Why would he not?  As with all tyrants whose regime beggars its citizens, Putin must always have a foreign aggressor against which to rail, and explain to his people why they are in dire straits.

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  • He is Risen!

    George Rebane

    Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

    HeIsRisen

    For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

    This is RR’s annual message celebrating Easter.

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  • ‘Separation of church and state’

    George Rebane

    On this Thursday of Holy Week my bride Jo Ann, who is a member of the Union’s editorial board, had her ‘Hit’ published in the 14apr22 edition of the newspaper’s weekly Hits & Misses column.  It read – “Hit to celebrations this week of Easter and Passover.  These observances in our community help maintain our culture and remind us of our country’s Judeo-Christian roots.”

    Well, this did not sit well with Laurent Clark, a local anti-American progressive, who definitely considers Jo Ann’s sentiment one root to far according to today’s secular humanist tradition police.  Ms(?) Clark responded today with her letter titled ‘Separation of church and state’ (here) –

    This week Ms. Rebane has used The Union’s “Hits and Misses” section to foist her brand of religion on everyone in the vicinity, doing so with a subtle comment that the Easter and Passover celebrations,“help maintain our culture and remind ‘us’ of our Judeo-Christian roots.” … “Us” may remind her that she overstates her opinion by inferring that all of “us” are encompassed within her religious ilk. She further suggests that “us” as a culture should be thankful for those alleged “roots” — an arguable stretch of an opinion. … She might better refer to her brand of religion as a group, sect, clan, etc. and recognize that the rest of “us” may have our own sect, clan, or group, to worship within, as we please … or not.

    One is hard put to discover any ‘foisting’ or even anything about "her brand of religion" in Jo Ann’s hit.  We also note that those who did well in American history are familiar with the role Judeo-Christian tradition played in our country’s birth and beyond.  And the last time I looked, The Union was already a privately owned media outlet and not an inseparable mouthpiece of the state, allowed to still practice what passes for vestiges of free speech in today’s America.  But it is revealing to note that progressive statists today consider all organs of the Fourth Estate as responsible for hewing to the Left's socialist narrative.                    

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  • Ruminations – 15apr22 (updated 16apr22)

    George Rebane

    Twitter’s poison pill to dissuade Elon Musk from taking the company private and making it truly a universal platform for free speech.  Democrats and other socialists are mortified, with many of their media lackies quickly declaring that only with more “mediation” (aka censorship) of online speech can we sustain democracy.  Not long ago such a statement was palpably unbelievable; today not so.  Here is a link to find out more about the types of most commonly used poison pills.

    RR’s characterization of the liberal mind is confirmed multiple times daily.  Here is one from this morning’s letters to the 15apr22 Union by a Ms/Mr/Xcritter Nory Fussell – The year 2021 ended with 745 billionaires, up from 614 in 2020. Many billionaires pay little or no taxes. We suffer the lie of backbreaking “inflation” while corporate profits skyrocket.  Progressives don’t cause this.  Wars continue to break out, the military budget continues to grow, and our chief export is weapons of war. This is not the work of Progressives but of soulless men, put mildly, suffering an acute anti-social personality disorder.  Infrastructure crumbles. You lose power, heat, and essential services. Look what you pay at the pump, while oil executives laugh and rake it in. The economic war against you is raging — it will only get worse.  Progressives, perhaps imperfectly, work toward health care, education, and basic human needs. The oligarch party (you know who they are!) rages flat-out lies about race, class, gender, even about a violent insurrection. They offer no solutions to your needs.  Apparently (unbelievably!), a fairly large percentage of you are moved more by fear, anger, victim-hood and divisiveness. In one generation, how did the USA lose so much?

    [16apr22 update]  Our economists and other economic analysts are hyper-ventilating about 3.5M workers they claim will not re-enter the post-Covid job market.  They tell us this deficit – consisting mostly of lowly paid women with no college – will be permanent.  Rebane Doctrine advises them not to worry.  As we have repeatedly noted, systemic unemployment has been slowly growing for years, and will continue to do so as cheaper and more capable technology replaces more expensive and unreliable workers.  And even the short-term deficit will be easily handled by the influx of illegal aliens as they get settled into their new homes and look for work.  From my perch, our continuing problem will be to mollifying the growing horde of the chronically irrelevant and systemically unemployed from revolting to relevance. (cf rising crime rates and more here)

    Giving until it hurts?  FN and The Blaze cite IRS records (here) showing that Bumblebrain and FLOTUS gave $17,400 or 2.8% of their 2021 income to charity.  Kamala and SHOTUS upped them a mite, and gave $22,100, but only 1.3% of their 2021 income to charity.  These laughable amounts are not all that laughable as records have shown for years that leftwingers don’t give much to private charities – their charity operates with OPM.  This has been much studied (here).  And as socialists they believe that government should be the sole provider of succor to its citizens.  Nevertheless, Americans continue to give through private charities amounts that are multiples of what the deficit-spending, vote-buying government dispenses.  For the record, as grateful entrepreneurs we, and many of our friends, are blessed to be able to give up to 40% of our earnings to worthy causes.  This tallies to several times the amounts that our progressive elites and leaders let escape from their tightly zipped wallets.

     

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  • The Jewish Question

    George Rebane

    In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

    In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

    “This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

    However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

    (more…)

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  • Socialist Economics

    George Rebane

    A Brief History of Equality (2022) is the latest issue of socio-economic wisdom from the socialist-celebrated French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.  You might recall that Piketty gave us Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), his magnus opus comprised of “an 800-page book turbid with equations and numbers of all kinds, … is regarded as a game-changing weapon in the war to wrest wealth from the rich.”  Therein he introduced the world to “the central contradiction of capitalism” which elicited worldwide acclaim from collectivists of every stripe – progressives, Marxists, communists, … .  Its dense arguments made the tome’s 2.5 million copies sold as one of the most unread books of all time.  Nevertheless, adulatory columns and commentaries without end graced the pages and programs of the mainstream media.  With all those equations, it appeared that someone had finally put the demise of capitalism on a firm scientific basis.

    The piece de resistance of ‘Capital’ was introduction of his signature inequality r > g, stating that the rate of return on capital always exceeds the growth rate of its underlying economy.  In a nutshell, that was his ‘central contradiction’ to which I return in a bit.  But as Tunku Varadarajan of the American Enterprise Institute explains (here), “Thomas Piketty attempts to lure readers unable to scale the mountain of ‘Capital’” with a series of socialist principles that would create equality (think social justice) by “flattening the wealth curve.”

    Piketty does admit that there has been an historical movement toward equality along many dimensions – status, gender, race – since the late 1700s, but still not enough “to brag about.”  These gains have not been achieved by the increase in access to material wealth made possible by capitalist, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, but instead by revolutionary politics and class struggle.  “Efficient production, shrewd investment, or the genius and dynamism of innovators are sideshows”, because “all creations of wealth in history have issued from a collective process”.  For Piketty, this process has not only included but also depended on “the international division of labor, the use of global natural resources”, and most importantly “the accumulation of knowledge since the beginnings of humanity”, all blessings of the global collective.  Varadarajan correctly concludes from these claims that Piketty “is pure Bernie Sanders or AOC” and “may even be to their left.”

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 12apr22

    [Happy days are here again – California plans to introduce the 32-hour work week with 40-hour pay.  Another product of socialist economics and its new monetary theory coming to a job site near you. gjr]

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  • Militarizing local LE agencies

    George Rebane

    Last week’s Union had a couple of items that piqued my ire.  One included the display of a grim array of new militarized riot control gear that our Grass Valley police will now have at the ready to put down any protests they deem will violate public order and safety. (more here) The other item was the newspaper’s editorial board, in their 8apr22 Our View column (here), clutching their communal pearls about the recent Sacramento shootings and lamenting that “we’re nowhere near knowing the steps we need to take to reduce the number of shootings in this country.”

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 8apr22

    George Rebane

    Were I a senator, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have received my vote for her SCOTUS confirmation.  Given the part of her record we are allowed to see, she is by no means the best pick for her legal acumen and rulings.  The lamestream has unabashedly lied about her treatment at her somewhat embarrassing Senate hearings.  But in the final analysis, I would have passed on her because she is a racist pick that peremptorily eliminated over 95% of the field of qualified jurists, most of whom more qualified than she.  (more here)

    The Union continues to deny the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in words and pictures (see its 8apr22 op-ed).  Its publisher maintains that there is no there there in which evidence of Biden family corruption abounds, and its overwhelmingly leftwing political cartoons are selected to support the newspaper’s position.  Our local paper makes no never mind that major lamestream players are now tiptoeing back their earlier denials and election year censorship which most definitely had an impact on the nation’s 2020 election. (more here)

    WSJ’s Kim Strassel expands on the Biden scandal in her ‘Apologies for Hunter Biden’s Laptop’ where she writes – “Although some Republicans are immediately characterizing all this as “corruption,” the more specific issue (and always the focus of the Johnson-Grassley probe) is national security. Hunter Biden spent years entwining the family in questionable ventures in Ukraine, Russia and China, even as his father’s biggest foreign-policy concerns are Ukraine, Russia and China. This history raises legitimate questions about counterintelligence and extortion, even as it puts a spotlight on how honest President Biden has been in claiming no knowledge of his son’s doings.”

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