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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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  • Systems Sciences Refute Collectivism

    George Rebane

    [This contribution is a periodic review of a major stave of Rebane Doctrine.  It attempts to explain to the intelligent reader why collectivist governance and policies are doomed to failure.  The punchline is that they violate the fundamental laws of nature (i.e. our universe) which, of course, includes certain evolved and long established behaviors that make up human nature.  Collectivists’ rebuttals are sincerely invited.]

    Fundamental Law from Systems Sciences – The more complex is a system’s transfer function (inputs-to-outputs relationship from control theory), the more rapid and comprehensive must be its feedbacks required for stable operation.  Collectivist systems of governance violate this law by enforcing ever more comprehensive centralized control over large/complex socio-economic systems the transfer functions for which are unknown, and in which feedback loops are lacking, faulty, and operate with grossly large delays (i.e. large time-late).

    Corollary of Fundamental Law – You can control only what you can measure in a timely manner.  An added deficit in the human governance of large socio-economic systems is that we still don’t know exactly what needs to be measured or when or how.  As witnessed by the continual miscalculations of economists and other elite experts, the best we can do is obtain time-late data from processes that we know are at best pitiful proxies for what we really want to know when.

    The Disfunction of Organizational Feedback.  Timely and accurate feedback to correct operational errors is lacking in poorly structured and managed organizations.  In such organizations agents at all levels overwhelmingly seek to secure their own position and futures, rather than serve the overarching mission of the organization that employs them.  They do this by focusing their efforts to please their supervisors, rather than to benefit the organization’s customers/clients.  Government bureaus, agencies, and departments exhibit the quintessence of such organizational deficits (e.g. ‘the deep state’).  Non-profit institutions and for-profit corporations are not immune, especially those that have forsaken competitive capitalism for corporatism – partnering with corrupt government to obtain favors that only government can bestow, assure, and deliver.

    Comprehensive centralized control is profoundly unnatural in the sense that it is not found in any aspect of ‘nature’.  Nature stabilizes its required complexities by operating in modes of highly distributed knowledge and control.  Control is always hierarchical in that the higher levels in any given natural system impose ever coarser, infrequent, and generalized control signals on their immediate subsystems, which iteratively then repeat the process to their lower-level subsystems.  The same is affected with feedback which also gets coarser and more abstract as it is passed to the higher levels of the system’s structure – higher levels don’t need to know the details of lower-level operations.

    This is especially true in living systems that range from individual cells to human beings – they ALL function with a hierarchy of distributed control and maximally localized knowledge.  And natural social orders from hives to herds function similarly without need for central controllers and planners.  It is the recently evolved perversion in humankind which has begun using its advanced communication skills in attempts to establish and govern centrally controlled societies.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 20jan22

    [I’m interested in how our liberal readers contort themselves to overlook the disastrous first year of the Biden administration – mostly by regurgitating their ongoing TDS affliction.  Never mind 'this is now', keep your eye on 'that was then'.  The recent AP/NORC poll puts the whole thing into a perspective that should be of interest to our liberal poll watchers.  gjr]

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  • Ruminations – 17jan22 (updated 18jan22)

    George Rebane

    A zealot is one who identifies intimately with his message, and opposes all efforts to reasonably falsify the message because doing so would also falsify him.

    A brief compendium of current observations for the record.

    Conservatives are (fascists, racists, white supremacists, … pick one or more) and work constantly to have government limit individual freedoms, diminish America’s liberties, and promote an autocratic government – so goes the progressive/Democrat/lamestream narrative.  This is witnessed daily and well documented in progressive activist literature like ‘Don’t Think of an Elephant’ by George Lakoff.  The latter is actually a best-selling leftist communication handbook into which is marbled the Marxist/socialist manifesto.  What the leftwing elites count on is the ignorance of their audience who cannot connect the dots between an autocratic state and big government based on central planning and control.  This deficiency prevents them from seeing that all conservative efforts in governance and public policy are directed in exactly the opposite direction – a minimally funded smaller government with fewer laws and regulations based on federalized maximum local control.  Such governments cannot generate and maintain collectivist public policies which need a massive government to enforce and implement.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

    America’s Left and their Democrat Party public face are desperately attempting to pass federal voting legislation (HR1, ‘The Voting Rights Act’) that will foster and facilitate the entrenchment of a political monopoly based on Marxist/socialist ideology.  The selling point, hysterically touted by Team Biden, is that America’s current election laws limit voting rights, especially those of protected classes.  The evidence to oppose this attack on constitutional federalism is abundant and readily available, but totally buried by the lamestream media.  Only conservative outlets inform their audiences of how the states’ voting laws compare, and about public attitudes that favor policies which restrict the voting franchise to American citizens, and minimize opportunities for election irregularities and fraud. (more here)  Our Left tells Americans that such voter integrity policies are racist/fascist/etc designed to limit voting access to minorities, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Nevertheless, this Big Lie continues.

    Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine have fallen victim to Mammon and politics of the most reprehensible, insidious, and deadly kind.  Both medicines have been widely used worldwide as a prophylaxis and treatment for a number of maladies, including Covid – extensively reported in these pages – but proscribed by our federal government and big pharma.  The former to establish precedents and new avenues of government control, the latter to keep effective off-patent medicines out of reach so that high margin patented medicines remain the only alternatives to combatting the pandemic.  The effectiveness of IVT and HCQ have been demonstrated in countless studies and clinical cases.  It’s now so bad that Covid patients on death’s door cannot be administered either medicine by court order (more here).

    The death rate of Covid ‘vaccines’ is another scandalous cover-up by our federal government.  In the program to maximize vaccinations, the data on vaccine-related deaths is withheld by the CDC and the FDA.  No vaccine is entirely safe, and every one has its own mortality rate due to various complex – mostly anaphylaxis – reactions to the prophylactic.  According to government data, the death rate within 14 days of being vaccinated for standard flu is about 120 per 100,000, and for shingles it is about 21 per 100,000.  It turns out that for Covid, the equivalent death rate within 14 days of getting jabbed is 190 per 100,000.  When this rate is applied to the millions of people vaccinated, then the Covid vaccines have killed over 388,000 Americans alone.  And with the incidence of breakthrough infections, the efficacy of the vaccines is yet to be determined.  One thing is certain, no government agency wants to talk about this, and all continue to stonewall legitimate queries submitted to them.  (more here and here)

    The destruction of the FBI by the Left is almost complete – they are now being repurposed as the nation’s new Stasi.  As evidence, consider that today the FBI finally acknowledged that last week’s attack on the Texas synagogue was an act of Islamist terrorism.  They were the last to know what was immediately obvious to the man on the street across America when informed that one Malik Faisal Akram was the attacker who demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, another convicted and jailed Islamist killer.  AG Garland did the best he could to bamboozle the American public as long as he could before national ridicule made him tell his FBI lackeys to announce that the attack was “a terrorist-related matter”.  No kidding Kemosabe.

    A more standard law enforcement fare for today’s FBI is launching domestic terrorism investigations of parents who go on public record to oppose local school boards about the content of the curricula – e.g. the tenets of CRT – taught to their kids.  On such matters the FBI is right on the spot ferreting out those subversive parents who don’t toe the line laid down by leftwing dominated teachers unions.  Gotta get those parents out of the way of our educators who are concerned first about their students right after they have their pension negotiations in the bag.  Actually, there may be an issue or two, like paid days off for Covid safety, that may still consume their attention before they get to the kids.

    [18jan22 update]  Open and free critique of government is a fundamental principle upon which America was founded.  And the continuance of that right has been the mainstay of our republic since its birth in revolution, which itself is the ultimate critique of government by its citizens.  All roads to tyranny start with the state proscribing the critique of government.  We in the United States have a long history of criticizing our government, its policies, and actions both domestic and foreign.  Everyone has exercised that right, built into our founding documents, without second thought of suffering retribution from any institution of government.  This is not to say that it hasn’t happened (e.g. the IRS going after conservative 501c3 organizations).  But when such illegal retributions have been discovered – usually uncovered by an alert media – they have been roundly rejected by all Americans, resulting in public censure, ending of careers, and even legal actions against the perpetrating scoundrels.  Those days are gone.  Today, firmly on the doorstep of autocracy, we have the Democrats in power openly deploying federal intelligence and law enforcement organs to punish critics of its rogue and radical politicians and policies, and even those opposing state and local leftwing authorities illegally mandating laws and regulations about schools, the pandemic, academe, border porosity, elections, and corporatist enterprises that seek government favor. (more here)  What portends even worse for the republic is that a large share of Americans now favor such government reprisals that formerly were the hallmarks only of communist and fascist governments, and tinpot dictators of backward (e.g. shithole) countries.

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  • Democrats’ Newspeak – 13jan22 (updated 31jan22)

    George Rebane

    [A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the 29jan22 op-ed pages of The Union, titled ‘Democrats’ ‘Newspeak' a radical ideological agenda’.  As you can see from the comment stream under article, once again none of the leftwingers understand the message and simply play their strong suit in attacking the messenger – ‘twas ever thus.  All are profoundly ignorant of not only the civil, but also the legal, pre-Newspeak meaning of ‘alien’ which was in common usage across the land to describe the non-citizen class of people in America.]

    George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic.  Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental.  It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949.  Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.

    Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments.  And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21st century version of Newspeak.  A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language.  This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous.  (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)

    A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here).  Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens.  With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.

    Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States.  And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible.  As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.

    As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”

    [31jan22 update]  The comment stream under The Union’s online post of the above article is populated by almost all leftwingers with a totally predictable illustration of polarization beyond futility.  They have focused on my inclusion of ‘illegal alien’ as one of today’s proscribed words that makes very difficult or impossible understanding and discussing immigration policy or our border situation.  And, of course, that is the whole purpose of the Democrats' radical progressive wing to reduce the information carrying capacity of everyday language.  However, most noteworthy in today’s America is that there now is a huge cohort of our electorate that demands to be ignorant of the issues, and unable to communicate anything about them beyond the approved slogans in abbreviated semantics.  In response to that comment stream, I posted the following.

    Illegal Alien: Federal law employs the term alien, which it defines as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States”.  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses the term in its program descriptions.  As a legal term of art, illegal alien has been a part of US Code, our body of laws, for generations.  From BallotPedia, “Those in favor of using the term illegal alien argue that it is a legally accurate term used in federal law and other formal documentation. They also argue that its alternatives, such as undocumented immigrant, are euphamisms used to distract others from considering whether someone has violated U.S. immigration law. … Those opposed to using the term illegal alien argue the use of the word illegal dehumanizes people and does not fully consider the exceptional cases of refugees.”  More specifically, according to H.A. Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, “ 'Undocumented immigrant' is a politically correct, made-up term adopted by pro-illegal alien advocacy groups and liberal media outlets to obscure the fact that such aliens have violated U.S. immigration law and are in the country illegally…If we are going to discuss and debate the issue of immigration and what our public policy should be, we should at least use accurate, precise terms, and talk about, for example, legal aliens vs. illegal aliens.”

    The comments herein do an excellent job of illustrating the point/thesis of my column.  To further underline my thesis, The Washington Post reports, “The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to stop using terms such as ‘alien’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘assimilation’ when referring to immigrants in the United States, a rebuke of terms widely used under the Trump administration.”  Obfuscation über alles.

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  • The Covid testing fiasco grows

    George Rebane

    Now there are not enough tests, and the desired rapid tests are really unreliable, and regardless of test results, it is probably safer to let Omicron spread than mess with it, if you’re not in one of those vulnerable classes, and more to come.  All this on top of the simple fact that making decisions on just ‘test positivity’ has always been a non-starter (as I’ve shown in these pages).

    Today we read in the 11jan22 WSJ (here) that the popular home rapid tests may be even more unreliable in detecting Delta and other non-Omicron variants of the disease.  And timing is very important in when the test is taken – don’t do it too early, let the symptoms cook for a couple or three days (then what do you do?), and don’t be eager to believe negative test results, and … .

    The best sensitivities of ‘properly applied’ tests yield sensitivities of 85-95% – that’s the probability of getting a ‘test positive’ given you have the disease.  This, of course, means that out of every 100 diseased and infectious individuals, the test will come back negative for 5 to 15 of them.  These are then free to party or attend other sardine-packed events or transports.  The specificity of tests are not even mentioned; apparently they are of no concern.  You may recall that a test’s specificity is the probability getting ‘test negative’, given you don’t have the disease.  Test specificities are usually lower than sensitivities.  That means that tests also quarantine a lot more people than actually have the malady.

    Then there’s the whole question of managing the spread of Covid.  In ‘Slow the spread?  Speeding it may be safer’ the authors present data and argue that “the Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.”

    This all has to do with some very sophisticated technical notions of factors affecting dispersion known as ‘antigenic drift’ and ‘antigenic shift’.  Drift is a slow mechanism by which a virus changes, which then allows a host’s immune system to successfully suppress viruses which have only slightly modified themselves from the successfully vaxxed or naturally inhibited variants.  Letting drift occur – i.e. speeding dispersion – has a higher probability of stopping all such variants before they find ways to change even more into versions for which there is no effective vaccine.

    Shift then is the process by which the virus can pile up multiple changes to its genome and then emerge as having gone through a “discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen (or set of antigens) to a very different antigen (or set of antigens). New viral strains—such as those that jump from one species to another—tend to emerge from antigenic shift.”

    This is bad because “vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. Yet social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally ‘drifted’ variants.”

    This reality is complex stuff, and you’ll hear nothing about it from the government’s Faucis and Walenskys.  All that comes down to us are articles of faith about more testing being somehow better than less testing.  But two years into C19, and no one has yet to state a cogent or coherent objective for widespread testing.  Most certainly no reasonable case has been made that testing somehow reduces the virulence, morbidity, or mortality of Covid.  So there you have it.  The testing confusion grows, and the world’s population has abandoned all critical thought and become lemmings led to the altar of testing to worship a rite, the blessings of which no one is aware.  Today we do testing simply for the sake of testing because it makes us feel good.  Sometimes placebos work.

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  • Check your PG&E bill (updated 11jan22)

    George Rebane

    PG&E continues to provide its customers with added dimensions of its incompetence as the power utility of northern California.  We have covered the litany of its poor performance in these pages, and now add another to the list.  The December bill arrived with a blatant and obvious overcharge for electricity not delivered.  During the last series of snowstorms along with thousands of PG&E customers in the foothills, we too lost our power for eleven days.  It went off at 1215 27dec21 and came back on at 1600 6jan22.  Our bill (below) showed that they continued our electric service unabated on 27dec21 through 29dec21.

    PGEbill211230

    We have one of those ‘smart meters’ that are now standard in PG&E’s service area.  It is supposed to automatically report power usage to their accounting and power management systems.  There they have a computer algo that takes this data and massages it into the above graphic along with the billed amount using a complex formula of time-dependent rates.  Obviously, their data gathering system and/or algo is faulty, and this blatant revelation strongly implies that they may have been overcharging their customers for some time now.

    So check your electricity bill, and if yours is also in error, do something more than just bitching to the PG&E billing department.  Write a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission and demand that they get PG&E to account for the performance of their metering and billing system, and prove that they have not been screwing up for who knows how many months/years.  It is implausible that such an error is a onetime affair that was caused by the storm.  (Note that the algo did not revert to some constant default usage level, but actually varied the post-shutdown daily usage.)

    I ascribe the problem to the ongoing cadre of ignorant, incompetent, and slothful dunces that populate PG&E’s management ranks.  Their hardworking field crews are capable, hardworking, and fully acknowledge that they have to be the public face of an organization that has had a rotten head shed for years.  The PUC should hold them to account for this and numerous other sins too many to list.

    [11jan22 update]  Jo Ann called PG&E and went online to our account.  The nice lady at the other end apologized that the bills they send out continue to have bogus indications of power usage, and that they are working very hard to fix it.  She further assured us, and showed us the appropriate page online where the usage numbers for the power outage period had cross hatches below them, indicating that these were not the actual numbers to be used to calculate our bill.  She was very accommodating and informative about their problem and their consumers’ misapprehensions.  In the future we should ignore the bill they send us and log in to our account online to see the actual data that goes into calculating out bill.  What a way to run a railroad.

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  • Sandbox – 9jan22

    [Apologies for such a big interval between fresh sand.  Too many other good topics to address directly.  gjr]

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  • Dark Days Diary – 8jan22 (updated 12jan22)

    George Rebane

    The shameful declines of Scientific American and NPR.  In days of yore, both media outlets were posterchildren of professional and responsible journalism.  And during the last twenty years both have embarked on a shameful decline that shows no signs of stopping.  SA, published continuously since the 1840s, served as the periodic and apolitical compendium of scientific advances served up for the intelligent reader.  No longer.  Today it has subverted to a progressive propaganda organ that sees all aspects of science as being race-based, and promotes a fundamental change to scientific enquiry founded on Marxist class/racist principles (here).  We have already covered the decline of what is now National Propaganda Radio which serves as the publicly funded ($100M annually) voice of the Democratic Party, tilting daily more to its radically woke wing (here).  What pisses me to the gills is the amount of its taxpayer funding that the Republicans have been silent about for years.

    Comparative corruption in global governance.  In an ongoing discussion with a friend and correspondent who is a retired international banker, we have focused on the existence of corruption in almost all governments, and which countries do better than others to actively control corruption.  My friend spent many years stationed in various countries and experienced first hand their inner workings which were very much in evidence through their baking and financial institutions.  Costa Rica is the standout anti-corruption posterchild in the otherwise terminally corrupt gaggle of Latin American nations.  Many thousands of American expatriates have retired to Costa Rica, and now call it their home while maintaining their US citizenship.  The chart below (compiled by the World Bank in its Worldwide Governance Indicators) provides a basis for that emigration over the years.  I am surprised to see that the US rated so high, given its recent decline from the rule of law (and constitutionalism), and the growth of an obviously corrupt ‘deep state’ bureaucracy.

    ComparativeCorruption02

    [9jan22 update]  ‘More Good News on Ivermectin’ and more evidence that the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic cost millions of preventable deaths.  So have the physicians and researchers of “the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) been calling for widespread adoption of Ivermectin, both as a prophylactic and for the treatment of all phases of COVID-19.”  History will record that what has happened in the last two years across the globe has been one of greatest politically motivated mass murders on record.  And those complicit can never admit to their perfidy in promoting the proscription of this effective, readily available, and demonstrably safe medicine, for the adjudication of their criminality would require the empaneling of a Nürnberg-like court, and this will never happen.  Nevertheless, the record of this unrequited tragedy should always remain available.  Dark days indeed.

    [10jan22 update]  Our housecleaner closed down after 30 years in the business.  She and her excellent crew have been part of our extended family for half of those years.  In her letter to us she cited the reasons for quitting as the usual litany of California’s war against entrepreneurship and capitalism – taxes, stifling regulations from all levels, varying Covid mandates, government checks for not working, and so on.  And sadly, she was not able to give us a reference to another local housecleaning business.  The reason?  In Nevada County she was the last holdout against the state’s anti-business winds, all of the other reputable housecleaners preceded her in pulling the plug.  More signs of the times.

    North Carolina Lt Gov Mark Robinson on reparations.  This two minute video (here) of his last year’s speech to the state’s GOP is guaranteed to moisten your eyes and send chills down your spine, unless you are a Democrat doing plantation maintenance in the country’s urban areas.

    [12jan22 update]  Government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.  More information continues to be made public about the large-scale perfidy promoted by various agencies of the federal government and gratuitously integrated into the radical progressive policies in practice and promoted by the Democratic Party through its control of the administration and Congress.  Project Veritas has obtained documents that shed more light on what our government has done in promoting overseas gain-of-function research and suppression of the demonstrated benefits of Hydrochloroquine and Ivermectin in the treatment of Covid in all its phases.  This lends further credence to the allegations that senior government officials like Dr Fauci have purposively misled the American public and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions across the world.  H/T to reader.  (More here and here)

     

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  • The “Insurrection” one year on

    George Rebane

    Calling and pursuing the 6jan21 Capitol riot as an ‘insurrection’ is the new litmus test for identifying those of the Left in America.

    Countless leftwing naïfs across the country – e.g. Tom Durkin (here) in the 6jan22 Union – are decrying the “death of democracy”, which supposedly started with what they call a rightwing insurrection last January.  What happened then was anything but an insurrection planned and executed to destroy American democracy and replace its government.  Look up the definition of ‘insurrection’ and read some history on real insurrections.  In the meantime we may take these 'insurrections' as coming from the semantically challenged and politically agendized.

    For other perspectives on the 6jan21 riot attended by rightwingers and Trump supporters, I call your attention to two WSJ pieces – ‘Democracy Isn’t Dying’ and ‘Stop Calling Jan.6 an Insurrection’.  From such perspectives we can reasonably conclude that 1/6 now conveniently serves the Left's agenda to define our division, and also to divide us further.

    Victor Davis Hanson ties a nice bow on what the Democrats are actually pursuing in Washington and nation wide in his ‘Who are the Real Insurrectionists?’  It is clear to all who pay attention that the Dems have only one tune to play for their 2022 chances with an obviously debilitated and failing administration.

    Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.  As a result, the Left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when they expect to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when they fear losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.  A cynic might suggest that they praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.  (emphasis added)

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