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  • Scattershots – 18jul22 (updated 23jul22)

    George Rebane

    The Khashoggi murder continues to aspirate the pundits on both sides after Biden’s fistbump with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  To me the whole affair is politically ridiculous and a diplomatic farce.  Khashoggi was not a US citizen, but a foreign national with a permit to live and work in America (among other countries).  While within US borders, our governments’ responsibility toward Khashoggi’s security is the same as it is for any US citizen and legal resident.  But our federal government has no responsibility for the security of ANY alien permitted to live and work in our country when they travel outside our boundaries, especially when they frequent one of their own legations in a third country.  To think otherwise would be a ludicrous contemplation.  So why then are we putting our important foreign relations on the line when this foreign national gets butchered by his own countrymen in a foreign land?  If some soft-headed pundit or politician thinks otherwise, why are we then so sanguine with the governments of Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, … who regularly murder their own citizens?  Why are all of them not also ‘pariah states’ denied handshakes when making diplomatic contacts?  And why is this consideration not brought up by all those sharp-witted journalists, pundits, and politicos?

    Nevada County’s currently registered voters were made available to me by my bride who concerns herself with such things.  The CA SecState collects and publishes this data for all the state’s counties as of 23 May 2022 shown below. (more here).

    NCregistered_23may22

    What interested me was the prominent inclusion of the American Independent Party in the political party headings.  I’m ashamed to admit that I know next to nothing about the AIP, and had to do a quick read-up on the organization (here).  What I found was both surprising and refreshing.  With my longtime and growing frustration with the Republican Party, I discovered that the AIP’s tenets and platform were totally acceptable to me save, perhaps, their stance on marriage.  I share it with readers in hopes of soliciting a broader critique of that party’s statement of purpose and principles.  My only regret is that they seem to have gone dormant after the 2016 election as witnessed by their website.  But then, how do they maintain a self-declared, currently registered membership of 3,335 in the county?  My bride’s answer is that most of these people are really political independents who, when registering, were confused by that word appearing in the party’s name.

    [21jul22 update]  Corrupt corporatism is ubiquitous in the land, and runs rampant in our automotive industry.  Reader Efox (@ 858am below) beat me to the report about Ford getting ready to cut thousands of white-collar jobs currently at work in its combustion engine division (here).  The reason?  Ford along with the other car makers are investing over $500B before 2026 to develop new e-vehicles.  Now why would all these capitalists go out on a limb and spend so much of their retained earnings to get ready for volume production of products for which there is no evidence of open-market demand?  Simple answer, they’re not going out on any limb.  Instead, they are colluding with federal central planner/controllers who have informed them of future federal mandates for us to purchase all the e-vehicles they can roll off the assembly lines.  You and I will soon be told to either buy an e-car, or walk.  Unabashed corporatist corruption on parade.

    (more…)

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  • The Perennially Confused Grassroots Left

    George Rebane

    Imagine a country that does not recognize the right of their citizens to revolt.

    These thoughts were resurfaced by a comment from local leftwing cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb responding to ‘A Case for the Right of Revolution’.  In it he accuses those of the Right of “blowing up what’s left of the constitution(sic)”, and seeking to install a tyrannical “new regime” that will imprison or execute “those of us who won’t swear fealty to the new regime.”

    Bob shares these beliefs and worldview with most of the Democrat mainstream which has been inculcated in the country’s unionized leftwing public schools, with its tenets of received wisdom being reinforced daily by the country’s lamestream media.  These millions of fellow Americans are no longer capable of questioning, let alone critiquing what they are fed in a never-ending stream of propagandized media reportage and ‘entertainment’.

    They demand no evidence for the allegations they willingly consume as factual indictments of the Right.  They can point to no part of the Constitution that has been ‘blown up’ by rightwing legislators, judges, or justices in the land.  They demand nothing of their thought leaders save the gratuitously naked lies that the unrevealed evidence exists somewhere, always to be presented at the proper time – e.g. yearslong ‘evidence’ of Trump’s Russia collusion.  Like the highland natives of Papua-New Guinea (here), the video corroborated evidence of a purposely open border is invisible to them as millions of illegal aliens continue to pour in daily.  They have totally ignored the Left’s destruction of the black families launched with the onset of the Great Society policies.  For them the loss of black lives by the thousands really doesn’t matter, which are noted only in their singletons or handfuls when it serves to support their overall anti-American narrative.

    The Left’s grassroots have no clue of how their leaders and elites have trashed our Constitution, and constantly make the case for its irrelevance, lack of currency, and need for a total overhaul or rewrite.  All this to foster and enable the country’s progress toward a centrally planned and controlled state under the governance of an implausibly expensive and behemoth bureaucracy.  The Right’s appeal and initiative for a minimally taxing and regulating small government never impacts any inter-ear organ they may purport to have.

    They continue their composed mantra that the Right is working to install a fascist state, without any understanding that fascism is a strong form of socialism that requires a very large government to monitor and master its masses.  All the historical and day-to-day evidence of implemented and proposed rightwing policies to the contrary – e.g. reducing taxes and regulations, federalizing national imperatives – they just go on parroting the Democrat party line that the Right is the party of limiting freedoms no matter the impact of leftwing policies in force from Main Street to the nation’s capitals – they are incapable of simply considering how our freedoms have been ratcheted down by the growth of the US Code, regulatory burdens by the thousands, and bureaucracies of leftwing minions numbering in the millions.

    And the piece de resistance of their imperturbably smug belief system is their view of those on the Right as a uniform mass of fundamentalist Christian, bible-thumping end-timers who are itching to “empty the nuclear arsenal on the heathens” while “convinced you are going to your great reward in heaven, (thereby) burning the planet shouldn’t cause you any pangs of guilt.”

    So there you have it, the latest communication from the Left’s grassroots, that continues to bear witness to the utter void where we might find common ground between our polarized population, each side seeking to go in a direction that is a complete anathema to the other.  There is no longer an opportunity to start a civil, let alone productive conversation.  How do you answer someone like Bob Crabb who believes in the sanctified state against which no hand shall ever be raised?

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  • A Case for the Right of Revolution

    George Rebane

    [This piece appears as my column in the 16jul22 Union (here).  It is a response to the latest in the newspaper’s thread of Second Amendment debates that started with my response to ‘Read it yourself – A well-regulated militia’ by a local leftwing gun controller.  To this I responded with ‘The Many Ways to Regulate Militias’ published in the 14jun22 Union (and here)  This was responded to by another leftwinger’s 21jun22 column, ‘The role of a well-regulated militia’.  Just to pile on, yet another anti-gunner’s column ‘This July Fourth, enough with misguided patriotism’ taking me to task, was published in the 30jun22 Union.  The piece below seeks to put paid to my 2A critics, but unfortunately only those who have some claim to critical thinking.  I invite RR readers to examine the comments of those who lack such a skill in my column’s comment stream.  It is witness to the dominant sign of our times.]

    In his 21jun22 column Mr Dick Sciaroni limits the 2nd Amendment, arguing that in our nation’s founding and the establishment of its republican government, “it defies reason that (the Founders’) focus would include condoning a revolt against that very government.”  Were Mr Sciaroni to expand his historical studies, he would quickly discover that it was exactly that focus which inspired, nay demanded, the inclusion of the “right and duty of the people to alter or abolish a government that acts against their common interest and/or threatens the safety of the people without cause.”

    The Founders were learned men and students of Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson, et al who taught the ‘Right of Revolution’ against governments gone rogue.  Our nation’s birth came about through the exercise of that right against its then government gone rogue.  History is replete with numerous justified revolutions against governments turning against their people.  Our Founders were very aware of that and enshrined their sentiments in our Declaration of Independence – “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (the citizenry) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

    Our Constitution contemplates and provides for two distinct ways to change our government – an orderly process through amendments and constitutional conventions; failing that, then through armed revolt with the means provided the citizenry through the 2nd Amendment.  The Founders were neither hubristic nor naïfs when they gave us “a republic if (we) can keep it.”  They were sufficiently wise and humble to know that they had not created the perfect government incapable of going rogue, so they provided us, under law, with the ultimate means of redress.

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  • The Bitanic Presidency

    George Rebane

    The number of political icebergs that have gashed this presidency has gotten hard to track.  The only thing that is now obvious to all, especially to Democrats, is the irreparable amount of damage this president and his administration have brought on themselves.  But before we’re too hard on this incompetent Bumblebrain, we should also acknowledge that the “responsibility for the public failure of this government lies with the Democratic Party.”

    The case for this is made clear, concise, and complete by nationally prominent WSJ deputy editor Daniel Henninger in his 14jul22 column ‘Joe Biden’s Sinking Presidency’.  The main factor corroborating the Oval Office disaster is that the lamestream media – e.g NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, … – are daily clutching their worry pearls in the public fora for what they now label Biden’s “lame duck presidency”.  Led by his own party, no one wants him to run in 2024, and more every day want him to resign early for ‘mental health reasons’ – the ‘mental’ part going unsaid yet understood by all.

    As if to fully accept that assessment, the man continues to deny being responsible for any of the massive mess in which he and his have mired the country – he lives in la-la land and that is finally being recognized by progressives.  “RootsAction, a group aligned with Bernie Sanders, is planning a #DontRunJoe campaign.”

    That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the Dems’ Plan B is Kamala Harris, a kackling black woman having served her purpose and since then shown demonstrably unqualified for any conceivable task required in public office, let alone producing the work products of the West Wing.  Her early ascendancy will cause major heartburn to Govs Newsom (CA) and Pritzker (IL) who are already circling the White House after having put paid to two of the most prominent shithole states in the Union.  They each are ready to do the same to our beloved Republic.

    So, with 2 of 3 Dems wanting someone besides Biden for 2024, over 9 of 10 under 30-something explicitly saying they don’t want Bumblebrain to run, and 7 of 10 Americans telling everyone that the country is headed in the wrong direction, it’s hard to see how the Democratic leadership will allow ol’ Joe to even finish his present hitch let alone sign up for one more.  The Left has always had more than one way of ridding themselves of dogs that don’t hunt.

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  • Sandbox – 11jul22

    [Apologies for letting the last sandbox get a little odoriferous.  I wonder how many of our Ruminators are planning on setting up bond ladders for the continuing rough ride in the securities markets.  gjr]

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  • Ruminations – 6jul22 (updated 12jul22)

    “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” David Horowitz re harassment of Justice Kavanaugh at DC restaurant.

    George Rebane

    Illinois Gov Pritzker typified the profound ignorance that most (all?) leftwing politicians have about guns, ‘gun violence’, and the effect of existing gun regulations.  In signing a law banning the sale and possession ‘ghost guns’ (AR-15 style untraceable componentized semi-automatic rifles) he made this audacious claim that was not rebutted by any of the media; to wit, “… even our revolutionaries did not use assault rifles, they used muskets.”  The idiot governor has no idea that muskets were the assault guns of the 18th century.

    [7jul22 update]  Over 550 colleges have hired for-profit education vendors for delivering their online programs under the schools’ names.  The students seldom know that their courses are delivered by employees of companies like 2U instead of the universities’ academics.  It’s an attractive fire-and-forget source of revenues for the schools that get 20% of online ‘bootcamp’ tuitions and 40% of semester course tuitions from the vendors.  Bootcamps go for upwards of $10K, and semester courses for more than $60K.  Modern school daze. (more here)

    The Victims of Communism Museum in Washington opened last month.  It “unsparingly illuminates the most murderous ideology of modern times.”  The museum was funded by donors and the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia.  Communist regimes have killed well over 100 million of their own citizens, and today 1.5 billion people still live under communism.  Unfortunately, more countries, including our own, today seek to increase their governments’ role in “abolishing private property and controlling the means of production and distribution of goods and services.”  “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes rely on force, use brutality, and repress speech, religion, assembly, and all rights and freedoms.”  (more here)

    [8jul22 update]  The Democrats are desperately trying to divert the country’s attention from the ongoing foreign policy mess, the open border crisis, exploding crime rates, soaring inflation, shelves empty of critical goods, historically high gasoline prices, ongoing Covid muddle, fetid cities filled with vagrant encampments, dysfunctional public schools, pending recession, and announced policies guaranteed make each of these social catastrophes worse.  The only diversions they have left now is to blanket the country with lies about J6, SCOTUS, and “the best economy in our history”.

    Abortion is a latent right, even though it isn’t in the Constitution, so argue all pro-abortionists and progressives.  A favorite supportive citation is Madison’s inclusion of the 9th Amendment in which he wanted to make sure that unenumerated rights would henceforth not be excluded.  The big problem this argument launched is who decides what the next unenumerated right is, and how many of these are there waiting to be ‘discovered’ and codified by the politicians who happen to then have control the government gun.  We now have a culture in which new rights are immaculately conceived daily out of thin air, rights that inevitably reduce freedoms for the rest of us.

    [9jul22 update]  The dollar will be destroyed to pay off or at least allow the Treasury to keep borrowing to service the $23T+ national debt held by the public ($30T+ total).  This has been covered many times over the years in these pages (e.g. here and here).  Now the Mises Institute is also putting out papers that warn us of this (here).  Destruction will occur through sky-high inflation which allows the debt to be serviced in ever cheaper nominal dollars.  As I see it, the real news here is that we Americans are simply too stupid to be concerned, let alone do anything about it at the ballot box.  Witness the comment stream below.

    Poetry more relevant today than ever to illuminate the upcoming mid-term election.

    ProgressivePropaganda_2021

    [11jul22 update]  Repeal the 2nd Amendment is the latest brainchild of communist filmmaker Michael Moore (here), who proposes adoption of a 28th Amendment that would explicitly do that, and make civilian ownership and use of firearms a joke that would please only those Americans born with serfdom in their veins, aka Democrat voters.

    [12jul22 update]  So how to interpret the Trump/Biden polls for 2024.  Depending on the poll and its qnaire, it’s hard to really tell what the legitimate backing is for either man’s 2024 candidacy. (more here)  I estimate that half of the right and leftwingers are contras – the rightwingers wanting Biden to run, and the leftwingers wanting Trump to run on the theory that either man would be the loser in any feasible match-up.  Me?  I definitely want Biden to run again, and Trump to leave the field and lose his ‘the 2020 election was stolen’, no matter the merits of the argument.  So now you know how people like me would respond to pollsters, but that doesn’t help knowing that the, say, pro-Trump respondents would also include a hefty share of the man’s political devotees.

    ‘Bumblebrain bows out before 2022 election’ predicts Athena Thorne of PJ Media while crowing that she is the first to make this prediction (here).  Sorry to burst the bubble of this Jenny-come-lately, but RR readers had already had this discussion more than a year ago and even entered into a monied bet in July 2021 on exactly when we would get a new president (here)

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  • Happy Independence Day 2022!

    George Rebane

    Independence4jul2108

    Think of all the things that have happened in and to our beloved Republic during the last twelve months since we last celebrated our country’s birthday.  In this interval the country has again grown more apart than it has been since our 19th century’s ante-bellum days.  The two sides seek markedly different futures for America – one side decrying the nation’s past and publicly denying their desired destination, while the other side spells it out and celebrates the historic road that, with some miles unpaved, we have traveled.  But even with our life-threatening wounds, we all should celebrate that we still live in a land which allows both sides access to sufficient public podia from which to make their case for America’s best future.  (A couple of years ago this was our 4th of July outlook.)

     

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  • SCOTUS to Congress: Legislate!

    Know how to let the blame slip upon another … .  Gracian #149

    George Rebane

    The overwhelming share of congress critters don’t like to make laws that spell out what we citizens can/should do in conducting our lives and businesses.  They know that if they put down what they really mean, then a good fraction of us would get pissed off at them and let it be known at the next ballot box.  So members of both parties have figured out how to avoid this pesky aspect of law-making.  They know the ideological and bureaucratic tenor of the various departments and agencies that will implement the laws, and they write the laws in a namby-pamby language that leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation by the unelected and anonymous bureaucrats who also regularly get sub-rosa offline directions from the camouflaged politicians.  Sleazy politics and corrupt governance.

    Given that our federal and state bureaucracies are staffed overwhelmingly by incompetent leftwingers, it is the Democrats who are the architects of the most cynical, ambiguous, and amorphous legislation, while the Republicans stand by grumbling with their thumbs up their … well, you know.  In the 1jul22 WSJ Kim Strassel writes (here) –

    Conservative Republican legislators report that this cynicism has now reached new heights. They note that their Democratic counterparts routinely write legislation that is deliberately vague, so as to give the administrative state maximum flexibility to impose programs Congress won’t take responsibility for passing. This also ensures that the federal bureaucracy—which largely shares the left’s political ideology—can continue its work even under Republican presidencies and Congresses.

    America’s informed readers have known this for years, but they (we) too have yet to raise hew and cry about the matter that impacts the behavior of the bums they (we) send to state houses and Washington.  Perhaps this oversight is due to our having become too comfortable and ignoring our duties required to maintain the republic.  But the evidence of electoral ignorance and neglect are visible all over the land.  So finally, we get a SCOTUS with a majority that recognizes the problem and has the backbone to correct it.

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 1jul22 (updated 5jul22)

    George Rebane

    Legal lying that powers today’s lamestream.  The lamestream has been exposed for its lies, misinformation, fake news, and defamations in general.  As a result, its shrinking audiences are made up of the most dedicated and/or ignorant leftists in the land, augmented by some residual uninformed mid-roaders.  Their legal underpinnings to carry on with this atrocious so-called journalism is provided by today’s defamation, libel, and slander laws which have been purposely degraded by leftwing lawyers and politicians in order to continue delivering their substance-free narrative to the hoi polloi.  This may be coming to an end if Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have their way, and get SCOTUS to rule on a case that would finally mandate Congress to pass a strict and clear law which demarks ‘public figures’ and ‘private individuals’ as targets of purposed and publicized sleaze.  (more here)

    Biden’s open border policy makes him guilty of killing thousands of illegal aliens as they attempt to gain entry and disappear into our hinterlands.  Open border invites hundreds of thousands of economic migrants to start their long journeys from all over the world to our southern border.  It is an easy argument to make that many more of these people die from divers causes and are killed en route than the alien deaths counted only on our side of the southern border.  Mexican President Obrador blames the US for the deaths because we don’t control our border.  Of course, he omits the fact that Mexico has facilitated the transit of these millions of migrants over the decades.  As a terminally corrupt and criminal country, Mexico’s economy does not generate the jobs needed to sustain employment at levels required by its formerly high birth rate.  (Things have gotten so bad that the country’s birth rate has plunged in recent years.)  So first and foremost, the hordes of illegal aliens entering the US still consist mostly of Mexicans.  Their government abets this exodus for obvious reasons – relieves population pressures on the economy and increases the inflow of foreign capital.  And our anti-American Bumblebrain has elevated this game of import vote buying to a whole new level with his and his shills' daily declarations that our border is "secure" and "closed" while millions pour in. (more here)

    [4jul22  update]  ‘71% of Voters Don’t Want Biden in 2024’ according to the just out Harvard CAPS – Harris Poll.  Them that follow these things should get another view from all those reports of Biden doing well and Trump doing badly.  It seems the reasons Americans don’t like Bumblebrain are all over the map; nobody has anything good to say about him, including the Democratic leadership.  My own assessment is that history will judge him to be hands-down the worst president since the Gilded Age, and the best thing that has happened to Jimmy Carter’s legacy.  Trump isn’t even in the running in this competition – if they had a ‘Shoot from the Lip’ category, the Orange Man would be right in there.  (more here)

    [5jul22 update]  Putin’s view of Russia’s geo-strategic position, its goals of resurgence, and the forces arrayed against it are revealed in a blockbuster Russian TV series that launched in 2014 and has run now for 3 seasons containing a total of 40 episodes (more here)  The documentary soap opera has won numerous awards in the Russian Federation, and was released to Amazon Prime in 2017.  Widely read columnist and academic Walter Russel Meade writes a revealing column (here) (here) in the 5jul22 WSJ making the case that the series provides an important insight into the mind of Putin and his enlarged aspiration for Russia.  Since its enormous popularity with the Russian TV viewership, Mead argues that it also explains away Putin’s continued popularity with the Russians and their stoic acceptance of the historical hardships Russians have had to suffer under many rulers who sought to ‘make Russia great again’.  ‘Ekaterina: The Rise of Catherine the Great’ is definitely on the Rebane family viewing list.  And Mead’s message sums to, “To grasp the Russian president’s worldview, just binge-watch ‘Catherine the Great.’”

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  • Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

    George Rebane

    I was shocked to read in the 75th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

    Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

    To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

    The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

    In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

    One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

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