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  • From Lakoff to McConnell to Biden

    George Rebane

    Berkeley professor, cognitive linguist, and progressive philosopher extraordinaire George Lakoff is the celebrated author of Don’t think of an Elephant (2014), which in its first (2004) edition became the best selling definitive bible of neo-Marxist thought, policy, and communication.  He is the intellectual darling of the Left who has spelled out the belief systems of today’s progressives and conservatives, and how to communicate these to the masses.  One of his strong theses is that the difference between the Ps and Cs is organic and can be traced to the basic way each cohorts’ brains are wired.  Readers may recall my introduction of this notion by citing a University College London clinical study (here).  And he confirms the existence of totally different worldviews of both sides, including understanding of logic and perception of truth.  In short, as these pages have asserted over the years, we see and understand very little in common even when we are looking at the same thing.

    Lakoff educates his readers on both the mores and values of Ps and Cs.  He, as I, don’t give much credence to the claimed existence of the middle-road ideologues, their belief system is a muddle of tenets cobbled together from both sides that result in a mutually incoherent amalgam which really doesn’t work.  Both sides do their best to convert these ‘independents’ and attract them into their respective camps.  But in the larger context of Lakoff’s message to his congregants, he really has no idea what conservatives believe and practice.  Nevertheless, his strong construction of current progressive beliefs – mores and values – is an illuminating compendium of neo-Marxist tenets that we conservetarians and others of the Right hold foreign to human nature.

    An example of Lakoff’s broad-brush of P and C distinguishing characteristics is that P families are “nurturing” environments in which to bring up children, and C families hew to the “strict father model” wherein children are taught “absolute” rights and wrongs.  The bottom line of such up-bringing environments is that Ps produce good people, and Cs produce bad people with all kinds of social deficits.  Today from what we observe being reported in the media and taught in our public schools, it is clear that Lakoff’s strict differentiation between Ps and Cs is taken as ground truth by our national leftwing.  Again, I recommend Lakoff’s Elephants … as an illuminating read to all my right-leaning and mid-road compatriots.

    Moving on to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, we see that he has succumbed to the Left’s framing of the 6jan21 Capitol riot as a “violent insurrection”.  We have covered the use of such language 20 ways from Sunday in these pages, and witness his use of such language with great disappointment, and also surprise.  There definitely is a growing faction of Republican leadership that is not clear on the concept of what the Democrats want to achieve in molding the pre-election public mind.  I don’t know whether Mitch is losing it or he really has a rationale for starting to adopt the Left’s lexicon.  It all started with seemingly innocent sounding malaprops such as ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘climate change’.  What makes it all the more destructive is that our ability to communicate in the public forum is diminished daily by such degradations of our language.  In any event, Sen McConnell appears as the able leader of the politically silent majority Republicans who have so much to tell our electorate, but only make a peep now and then.

    Finally, I have to give a pseudo-kudo to ol’ Bumblebrain, our president.  He is finally acting a bit like the leader of the world’s white hat hegemon with his agonizingly belated aid to Ukraine, sending them armaments and moving more American military into trip-wire positions in Russia’s near-abroad NATO neighbors. (more here)  Rebane Doctrine has backed and promoted America’s role as the powerful hegemon sheriff of the post-WW2 world order.  Ever since George Kennan laid out our cold war strategy of containment in his 1946 Long Telegram, the US has been doing mankind an enormous good by selectively holding back the spread of totalitarianism in its many forms.  As Kennan warned us, this job is neither cheap nor easy, but it beats hell out of having a nuclear WW3 or a global autocracy a la Orwell or Red China.  And America has been the only player on the world stage qualified in means and mindset for the job – long may it wave.

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  • Sandbox – 10feb22

    [Now that we are an inflation nation, anyone care to predict how much of the dollar will be destroyed this year?  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 6feb22 (updated 11feb22)

    George Rebane

    Numbers never speak for themselves.  Instead, they always deliver the substance of adroitly framed messages by astute spokespeople.

    ‘Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy’ is the title of a comprehensive survey article in the 6feb22 WSJ, that echoes and confirms most of the points made in these pages about general circulation models (GCMs) that have been used to predict Earth’s temperatures in the long-term.  Over the past decades the number of competing (and some complementing) GCMs have grown to several hundred.  Almost all of them tell their own stories about the future.  And all of them gain ‘credibility’ in the eyes of science-free politicians and activists by being meticulously tuned through adjusting their myriads of ‘knobs’ (constants) so that they can take past data and generate today’s climate as their outputs.  As those trained in data analysis and estimation will tell you, perfecting past performance to predict the present is no guarantee that predictions of the future will then be on the mark.  (Kinda sounds like the copy delivered by your financial advisor.) The current big bugaboo is the impact of clouds, which no one really knows how to model their impact on radiation reflection and/or heat retention.  One thing that GCMs have in common is the prediction of higher temps in the out-years.  These numbers continue to be embraced by all true believers in the coming climate catastrophe, and will be used to justify even more draconian policies to combat what they devoutly embrace as preventable man-made global warming.

    [7feb22 update] Picking up on the reparations thread in the last Sandbox, I’d like to throw my native Estonia’s hat into the ring for its due in the ‘past-due payments to make up for historical bad behaviors’ gambit.  The Ests (large Viking tribe of oak tree worshippers) lost their independence in the 1200s when German Teutonic Knights conquered the entire Baltic region extending north to Estonia.  Since then, Estonia has been a ‘bailiwick’ ruled in turn over the centuries by Germans, Russians, and Swedes.  The culturally insular and obdurate Estonians were always kept as serfs cum slaves to work the land for their foreign masters.  They never acclimated to their forced last-class social status and rebelled every couple of generations (here), only to be put down ruthlessly by the established ruling order du jour.  This ended with the revolution of 1918 in which Estonia finally freed itself from the most recent centuries of rule by Russia.  Independence lasted until the start of WW2 in 1939 when the Soviets overran the country and once more made it a Slavic satrapy, this time under the communists.  Estonia again became free in 1991 with the fall of the USSR.  So, for all those centuries of languishing under the brutal heels of the Germans, Swedes, and Russians, doesn’t Estonia belong somewhere at the head of the reparations equity line that many think should now start extracting social justice checks from all kinds of historical bad actors?  But then again, do we really want to open that Pandora’s Box?

    [8feb22 update]  DHS’s domestic terrorist watch is now in full swing as described in the 7feb22 DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin.  We are again on a WW2 keep-an-eye-on-your-neighbor footing – remember ‘If you see something, say something’.  Report suspicious stuff to your local FBI field office or Fusion Center.  And this includes anyone who still has doubts about the 2020 election, or thinks the government hasn’t been straight with us about fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.  Personally, I’m waiting for the posting of cash rewards, at which time I plan to turn all of you in.  Guilty as alleged and/or until proven innocent.  H/T to reader for the heads up on this.

    Masks for Covid are butt stupid is the blunt conclusion of a compendium of studies, citing verifiable sources, from Swiss Policy Research – ‘Are Face Masks Effective?  The Evidence’ – that one of our astute readers posted in a RR comment stream.  Rather than let it languish there, I’m giving it more prominence here.  This is another important document that blows the cover off the political corruption that continues to pander this pandemic, and that is made worse by the cohort of compliant ignorance that pervades the land.

    [11feb22 update]  The Left is rapidly discovering that there is no ‘settled science’ on which they can hang their political hat.  All Covid response policies and the formerly immutable truths of ‘followed science’ they were based on are rapidly changing as the November mid-term election approaches.  What you will never see out of a leftwinger or their lamestream lackies is recognition that they have been wrong and their mistakes have led to thousands of avoidable deaths, irretrievable educational losses to our youth, and tens of thousands of businesses and livelihoods destroyed.  Hopefully now these functional idiots will realize that we have an endemic virus, like so many others that we have learned to live with.  But no premature rejoicing, these same worthies have plenty of opportunities to harm us and the country with their ongoing work on border security, climate change, the economy, K-12 education, … .

    For all you racists out there who want to hide your racism from black folks, here is a little how-to piece that will serve you well.  It is written by a black lady who has given the problem a lot of thought.  She has a list of attributes that racist white folks cannot help but exhibit sooner or later.  Of course, them racist white people can use the same list to practice hiding their inevitable racism, or, if so motivated, attempt to purify themselves from that societal stain.

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  • Walk or Run in the Rain?

    George Rebane

    Time for little respite from matters political and geo-strategic.  Years ago I came up with a TechTest problem that asked if there were an optimal speed that minimized the amount of rain coming through the area of a car’s missing windshield.  A few days ago I ran into another form of this problem in one of my techie subscriptions.  The question this time was whether you would get more wet or less wet if you ran or walked some distance to get to shelter.  These are essentially the same problem, and I learned that the problem has a long history and debated solutions among techies versed in quantitative STEM.

    Well, if you frame the problem correctly, the solution readily reveals itself along with an interesting twist.  So, I decided to re-solve it using the missing windshield version because that makes all the variables and resulting math unambiguous and intuitively clear.  We start with an area A, at angle φ to the vertical, moving horizontally at speed vA through a steady rainfall in which the drops fall at speed vR at an angle θ off vertical as shown in the figure below.  When you add these two velocities (speeds with angles), you get vRA at angle α, the windshield-relative velocity of rain coming down.  We need one more parameter to characterize the problem, and that is the water density ρ that characterizes the intensity of the falling rain.  Important to note here is that no matter the resulting vRA speed and direction, the water density (e.g. gals/ft^3) in the volume that A, the hole of the missing windshield, sweeps out remains unchanged.

    The problem then becomes twofold – as a function of the vehicle speed vA, what is the rate that water comes in through the hole, and if you had a distance D to travel to shelter, how much water will have come through the hole.

    Solving this problem requires a bit of trigonometry and some straightforward squiggly pushing that I include in the box below.  Out of this comes the formula for the rate rR (through the area that is perpendicular to vRA), and the formula for VR(D, vA), the volume of water through the hole until distance D is covered at speed vA.

    RainThruWindshield

    To illustrate the answer to the stated problem, I’ve put together a little scenario with actual numerical values as indicated in the figure, and programmed it up in MS Excel™.  The quick answers are shown in the graphs.  The blue line shows how rR (gals/sec) increases linearly with vehicle speed vA as expected.  The faster you go, the more water comes pouring through the whole.  As vA goes to infinity, so does rR as long as the hole’s orientation φ presents some frontal area to vRA which approaches vA as the vehicle’s speed gets very large.  Note that if we make the hole face parallel to vRA (i.e. – φ = α) then rR goes to zero, again as expected.

    But if you only have a certain distance D to go to reach shelter, the orange curve shows that the faster you go (i.e. the higher the vA) the less water VR you take through the hole.  The limiting value is just the volume of rain at density ρ swept out when your speed reaches infinity.  In the illustrated scenario this volume of rain VR (D,∞) = 3,733.5 gallons.  So the answer for ‘should you run to get out of the rain?’ is a definite YES; however, if you want to minimize the rate of water coming through the hole, then don’t move (i.e. vA = 0).  As the rR equation shows, setting vA = 0 reduces the gals/sec to just the volume to the area perpendicular to and increasing at the rate of vR.  And its easy to also see that VR will go to infinity since you will be standing still and making no progress to the shelter at distance D.  (Isn’t math wonderful?)  Bottom line – run, don’t walk to get out of the rain.

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  • Lockdown Lunacy vs Fringe Ideas

    George Rebane

    Litmus test for autocracy – ALL autocracies actively proscribe ideas that are fringe to what the state prescribes as mainstream thinking.  Rebane Doctrine

    The recent study from Johns Hopkins University unequivocally shows that lockdowns don’t work in reducing Covid-19 death rates. (here, here, and here) The mortality rate data for this also comes from around the world.  In the developed world state-imposed lockdowns have devastated economies, families, and individuals of all ages.  This pandemic will be studied for generations by historians, political scientists, and autocrats.

    The impact of lockdowns has so many dimensions in the realms of their implementation and causal effects.  Most independent (i.e. not on the government tit) epidemiologists, economists, and other science-savvy analysts decried the lockdown policies from the start.  Only the central planning/control elites and ignorantly compliant local jurisdictions promoted the months of insane mandates handed down from on high that began in the spring of 2020.

    FringeIdeas

    Half the country is populated by those reliably labeled sheeple.  To the ruling elite these are the recipients of received wisdom known as ‘mainstream thought’, which is comprised of an ever-changing roll of diktats a la Orwell.  These people have been taught since grade school to unquestioningly accept and put to practice whatever and whenever Big Brother mandates.  No critical thought needed nor tolerated – such thought, being constituted of ‘fringe ideas’, is to be rejected as anti-social and dangerous, polluting the purity of state mandated groupthink.  To witness them, one need only go to the local shopping mall or read The Union.

    The trained progressive has had excised from his education any notion that all benefits to mankind over the millennia have always been introduced as fringe ideas.  Mainstream thought has always been the home of thought-free compliant stasis and stagnation.  At no time in the last hundred years have we witnessed in the developed world a more complete practice of such mainstream thought than over the last two years – and the beat goes on.

    So now we have the latest from Johns Hopkins that once more confirms what the greatly denigrated Barrington Declaration already told us back in the fall of 2020 (here).  That piece of work was endorsed by thousands of accredited scientists and medicos, and ruthlessly put down by our federal government and their lamestream lackies.  Hundreds of thousands more died needlessly and/or went bankrupt.

    No recognition of, let alone apologies for the Big Lies were forthcoming, and no one today is holding their breath.  The dead and financially destitute are a price the leftwing elites were willing to pay for their great experiment in the fundamental transformation of America into a satrapy under a global government.  And you can bet that there’s more to come from the same team, still fully in control and totally insulated from any legal or public repercussions by a corrupt DoJ and judiciary.  According to those propagandists and their local true believers, Joe Biden has had a banner year since he was inaugurated.  And the Democrat devotees across the land still revere and believe in the gospel according to Saint Anthony of Fauci, the Beatified – “The fact that we shut down when we did, and the rest of the world did, has saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives.”  (17 June 2020)

    The tactic of ‘accuse them of what you do’ is a tried-and-true formula for shutting down any real opposition from the recumbent Republicans.  (Does anyone know on what are they spending their political capital?)  No better example of that can be had than the established fact that Russian appeasement has been a leftwing monopoly as once again illustrated by Victor Davis Hanson (here).  To this day lamestream outlets trumpet that Trump was the Great Colluder.

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  • Racist SCOTUS Nomination

    [More than three-quarters (76%) of Americans want President Joe Biden to consider all potential nominees to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, according to a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll. (more here)]

    George Rebane

    Bumblebrain joins the short list of known presidents who have chosen their SCOTUS nominees based on race and gender, and, of course, their proper ideological orientation.  We all know that, along with the other government branches, SCOTUS is a political organization.  It attempts to distinguish itself by claiming otherwise.  Reagan limited one of his choices to (white?) women only, and Bush1 limited his choice to black men only.

    Black Americans make up about 13.4% of our population of 332M, and of those 50.8% or 22.6M are women.  Given a chance, candidate Bumblebrain promised to put a black woman on the bench, to bring the court’s black contingent up to three or 33% of its justices.  (Actually, the racist Dems don’t recognize Justice Thomas as a black because he votes mostly conservative, and therefore the lamestream lackies ignore him and his work.)

    So after bragging to his base that now he’ll seat a black woman, he got massive pushback some of which even included his own propaganda organs who correctly feared that such naked criteria, left to themselves, would really be politically damaging.  That got the WH team with room temp IQs busy trying to get that horse back into the barn.  Bumblebrain himself got in front of mic to assure everyone that he really was interested in the candidate’s lawyering credentials, but then slipped and admitted that the interest was limited to qualified black females.

    I’m not sure how the Dems are going to handle Bumblebrain going forward.  The man definitely did not help himself by voting against Clarence Thomas, and today his woke supporters are not even sure what defines a person as a ‘woman’.  So here is the way I see it shaping up.

    Bottom line, the Bumblebrain is a hypocritical, politics-first, racist when the Left argues that he just continued in the established tradition of Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush .  A little thought reveals this.  Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as part of the nation’s awakening to the long-suppressed role of women.  His appointment of the first female justice was lauded by all, and rightfully so.  Bush1 appointed Clarence Thomas in order to maintain the multiracial composition of the court with the retirement of its first black justice Thurgood Marshall.

    Bumblebrain will appoint a black woman because he wants to retain as much of the black and progressive vote as possible during the next two national elections – it’s a matter of retaining Democrat power in our national and state governments.  Before his nominating a black woman, SCOTUS already has two blacks, 22.2% of the court and more than the black share (13.4%) of our population.  Biden wants to pump the court’s black share up to 33%.  And the court already has three women justices, so he’s not breaking any new ground by increasing that to four or 45% of its sitting members.  The argument would be different if he simply wanted to bring female membership up to par.

    His apparent real criteria in order of importance are 1) woman, 2) black, 3) demonstrated leftwing ideology, 4) has some demonstrated knowledge of law.  The population of such politically qualifying and credible candidates is relatively small.  If being a member of some accredited bar is a requirement, then there are only 107,000 (8% of all lawyers) black women, out of over 497,000 practicing female lawyers, who make it past that hurdle.  Women make up 37.4% of the total number of 1,330,000 lawyers in the US.  Given that identical proportions hold for lawyers of all races and genders, and since legal qualifications are not a high requirement for the new justice, Biden is then peremptorily excluding 92% of equally and/or better qualified lawyers from being considered for the job.  Our society’s high price for bespoke progressive ‘equity’.

    Correction – As pointed out in a comment below by reader Steven Frisch, Justice Sotomayor is not black.  Mea culpa.

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  • Sandbox – 31jan22

    [I draw your kind attention to the brouhaha that my 'Democrats' Newspeak' invited when it was published in the 29jan22 Union.  gjr]

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  • The Webb at a million miles, really?

    George Rebane

    The recently launched Webb space telescope will be able to peer further back in time and see more of what was then there.  As an amateur cosmologist, I’ve been interested in this new instrument for some years now.  It brings these new capabilities to bear because of its very large mirror and that its imaging plane is designed to be sensitive to infra-red light.  From high school we recall that IR has a long wavelength, and therefore can penetrate through all kinds of dust, water vapor, and other tiny stuff in space.  It’ll be able to make out far-off galaxies through dust clouds that formed around 13.5B years ago, only 300M years after the Big Bang.  (more here)

    L2figure

    In the media we have been told that the Webb will orbit Earth’s L2 point shown in the above figure which also indicates the location of the other four Lagrange points.  The L2 point is on the straight line connecting Earth and the Sun, and reported to be about a million miles beyond Earth’s orbit.  Since this point in space stays on such a straight line, the angular rotation of L2 therefore equals that of Earth; along with our planet, it completes one rotation of the Sun in 365.25 days.

    The Lagrange points are unique locations in a three-body configuration where the gravitational attraction of the two larger bodies provide ‘stable’ orbital points for much lighter third bodies.  Of the three kinds of stability – conditional (marble on large ball), unconditional (marble in a bowl), neutral (marble on a flat plane) – only L4 and L5 are unconditionally stable in that if a lighter body there is perturbed, it will remain in the L4 or L5 region (cf. The Travelers of Jupiter).  The other three points are conditionally stable, a perturbation from, say, the solar wind or the gravitational effects of the other planets, will push the lighter body away on a trajectory never to return.  Hence, to keep the Webb telescope near L2 requires little accurately directed squirts of thrust now and then.

    (more…)

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  • Tangles in the Underwear (updated 3feb22)

    “Nothing good ever comes out of communism.”  Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

    George Rebane

    From the Biden presidential library’s White House telephone record archives –

    Operator: Justice Breyer, will you please hold for the President?

    Breyer: Oh sure.

    Biden: Hey Stevo, we’re gonna announce your retirement today, and I didn’t want you to see it on CNN before giving you a heads up, capice?

    Breyer: … Oh … OK.

    Biden: Yeah, Ron will schedule a little dick shake here in the White House, so you can make your retirement speech – try to keep it short and sweet.  He’ll call you later and let you know.  Chou.

    Matson_220128

    Now no one has claimed that Matson’s elevator makes it to the top floor.  But lately during Bumblebrain’s administration, there’s reason to think that his elevator cable has snapped, or he joined the leftwing media lackies who believe, with some evidence, that their audiences compete at a disadvantage with doorknobs.  Pilfered from the op-ed pages of the 28jan22 Union, his cartoon attempts to convince people that the Dems have two killer issues for the 2022 election while the Repubs have but one.  Anyone who’s been awake in recent weeks knows that middle and lower class wages have lost buying power during the last year, and the jobs situation is bleak with workers on generous government doles unwilling to even attempt going back to work.  On the other hand, the Dems’ Biden/Pelosi/Schumer hat trick has provided the Repubs with more issues than even Matson could fit into his sorry attempt to bamboozle voters.

    [3feb22 update]  The Havana Syndrome mystery.  It’s a puzzle to me why this hasn’t been solved by our intelligence community (maybe it has?).  Our diplomats at various embassies around the world, starting in Havana, continue to complain about all kinds of symptoms, mostly related to their heads.  These arose after being stationed in our embassies, which we are told are most likely to have been illuminated by directed RF energy transmitters.  But no one is sure.  It’s an easy solution to stick a triangular antenna array on the roof of the embassy and capture the frequencies, intensities, and source directions of any such radio frequency radiation that is used to bathe the embassy buildings.  And any physics/electronics undergraduate can design such a system.  My take is that this has been done, and the real mystery is why we haven’t been told about it.

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  • Scattershots – 25jan22 (updated 2feb22)

    George Rebane

    SAT tests are biased and inequitable.  That is the claim by leftwing academics over the past few years.  The evidence shown for this assertion is that black and Hispanic students don’t get the same pro rata scores with the white students.  Today the SAT people say that they’ll fix that by having different tests for different students which should cut down cheating and drive the test scores into some par region for the races. (here and here)  If white student scores are the anchor range to which other must hew, then that means the black/Hispanic tests will be dumbed down to raise their scores, and tests given to Asian-descent students will be made tougher to lower their scores.  As with all such collectivist social engineering undertakings, the causes – home culture, quality of education, heritance – for the diverse results are either denied or ignored; the overarching motive is political correctness, no matter how much the students and the country are harmed by such ideological machinations.  I covered the race-based reason for such differences in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

    Testing to slow the spread of Covid is futile and also nonsensical, as these pages have revealed over the last two years.  Professor Daniel Halperin makes this point clear in ‘Omicron Is Spreading, Resistance Is Futile’ in the 25jan22 WSJ.  A highlight in the article is its revelation of the difference between the ‘gold standard’ PCR and the more available antigen tests, the former taking days to get results and the latter being the ‘rapid test’.  Both suffer from weaknesses I have described and quantified in previous posts that involve the tests’ sensitivities – P(TP|V) – and specificities – P(-TP|-V).  Sensitivity is the probability of a ‘test positive’ given that you have the virus, and specificity is the probability that you get a correct negative result given you don’t have the virus.  It turns out that the PCR tests have a high false alarm rate, i.e. low specificity; and the antigen tests miss detecting the virus too frequently, i.e. low sensitivity, especially in the critical early days of the infection.  The bottom line is that both tests give jaundiced results in addition to the entire overarching argument that testing doesn’t contribute anything to slowing the spread of Covid.

    Other dubious Covid stats we are inundated with is “Covid hospitalizations” and Omicron deaths.  The former bamboozled number counts “patients admitted for other reasons who incidentally test positive” that analysis shows these amount to about half of the hospitalizations.  And fear-mongering Omicron deaths is done without telling people that these number no more than the normal death rates encountered during normal flu seasons.  Dr Halperin concludes with – “It’s past time to shift focus from trying to stamp out all new infections to protecting the most vulnerable from severe disease directly through vaccination and other evidence-based measures and alleviating hospital staffing shortages. Ending mask mandates, de-emphasizing isolation and encouraging vaccination ought to be a compromise most of us can live with.”  Finally, as we have known all along, masks are a farce – more below.

    Local bureaucrats are still attempting to mandate masks in their allocated public spaces.  Today the 25jan22 Union features their lead story (here) telling of an encounter between a citizen group wanting to enter the Nevada County Clerk Recorder’s office to check on the proper filing of their BoS recall papers, the directions for which were confused by the Clerk Recorder staff.  They were denied entry because they did not wear masks.  Such a denial was totally illegal since there is no state or county mask mandate in force.  Tinpot bureaucrats cannot just make up their own rules for how the public must deport themselves when entering their fiefdom.  But that is the way of our country now – the Left fear-mongers Covid for establishing a new precedence for public control, and the Right refuses to play along while pointing to constitutional norms that prevent such gratuitous imposition of arbitrary rules.

    [27jan22 update]  “Fair and honest elections, with votes cast by knowledgeable and informed citizens, are an integral part of our democratic republic”, asserts Terry McLaughlin in her excellent 27jan22 Union column on voting rights (here).  On the other hand, I’m in receipt of an email from a liberal friend that contains a desperate Democrat plea for funds for their ‘Ron Begone’ with which to defeat Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida, the man they perhaps fear the most on the 2024 Republican ticket.  DeSantis is launching a voter integrity program, manned by “far-right election police” that the Dems claim will “intimidate and discourage Democratic voters”; yep, only the Dems will be kept away by this new program designed to “erase the voting rights” of, wait for it, only Dems.  It’s unbelievable how dumb their elites consider their grassroots true believers to be.  Their ‘Ron Begone’ brochure concludes with, “MAGA Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is the worst Governor in America and an utter nightmare for Floridians. He is relentless in his praise for Donald Trump, he completely botched Florida’s pandemic response and put lives at risk, and he gave scarce COVID vaccines to his major campaign donors instead of the most vulnerable Floridians. He MUST be defeated in the next election. We know for sure that Donald Trump is going to go ALL OUT to help DeSantis win, so we need to start fighting back today by building a massive coalition of good Democratic supporters.”  Exit problem:  Count the number of lies in this plea for money.

    [2feb22 update]  Re the restraining order against my daughter and two other individuals active in promoting the recall of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors as reported in 2feb22 Union. (here)  The accounts of what happened in the brief encounter at the Clerk Recorder’s office differ widely.  What is clear is that the staff of the Clerk Recorder decided unilaterally to establish and physically enforce a mask mandate.  Such a mandate was not in force in Nevada County or at the Rood Center.  The restraining order appears to be a political instrument launched by Rood Center insiders opposing the recall, and using for its substantive basis a staffer becoming somewhat hysterical about her safety after being asked to give her name to one of the recall promoters who entered the office.  Here the fundamental question is, does a subordinate public bureau of the county government have the right to unilaterally establish and enforce mandates on the public to restrict legitimate business with the bureau, mandates that have not been established by the county nor enforced by its law enforcement arm (i.e Sheriff)?  For the record, neither Jo Ann nor I are in favor of the recall.  Our adult daughter follows her own counsel and ideology which does have considerable overlap with ours, while neither being the subset of the other.

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