Rebane's Ruminations
January 2026
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  • [Did everyone see yet another shot in the shorts for what was known as American culture?  To propagandize the administration’s C19 response and highlight Trump’s alleged failure, the Bidens and Harrises observed what can only be described as a kabuki ‘moment of silence’ for the C19 500K death-count.  Now what could possibly be confusing about conducting a moment of silence?  All you have to do is STFU and look somber for a bit.  But not in Bumblebrain’s brave new America; there stood the two first couples (with Dr Jill still talking or giving directions to Joe) in front of the WH’s twin staircases festooned with 500 garishly-lit candles, while an off-camera band played an unusually loud and raucous rendition of Amazing Grace – moment of silence??!  Whatever norms we previously observed, henceforth these are to be eliminated wherever they are encountered.  gjr]

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  • George Rebane

    I’m working on a piece that describes in a more formal and specific sense how people can have their own opinions AND facts, given that they all formulate or update them from the same body of newly arrived evidence.  How can that be?  The answer to that question also goes a long way toward an understanding of how the gulf formed between the polarized factions in our land, and sadly, the difficulty in attempting to bring the two (or more) sides together to a new common understanding, or at least to a workable common ground.

    The answer lies in the manner we humans approximate Bayesian inference and reasoning.  Along the way in my studies I stumbled upon a form (there are many) of the Bayes formula that I had to rederive years ago, and surprisingly, since then I have seen used in very few instances.  This formula from Bayes theory is so deliciously intuitive and straightforward to understand, that I thought a quick intro to it in the context of updating everyday beliefs and knowledge would be helpful to the layman, or at least provide some amusement before it disappears into the memory hole.

    BayesSurfaceBefore diving in, let’s all appreciate that every piece of knowledge or tenet of our belief system is represented by a probability distribution, whether or not we realize it.  These distributions quantify everything from ‘certain knowledge’ (probability = 1), to items that are more iffy (probability between 0 and 1), and all the way to the ‘impossible’ (probability = 0).  Most people believe with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, however, most people will know the time of the sunrise only to within a range of values to which they attach an unquantified subjective probability.  The events ‘sun will rise’ vs ‘sun will not rise’ are mutually exclusive with the first having probability of occurrence equaling one (unity, the certain event), and the second having probability zero (the impossible event) – well, there is a very small probability that the sun will not rise tomorrow, but let’s not quibble here.  So these are discrete events described by a simple discrete probability distribution consisting of a one and a zero characterizing our knowledge of these mutually exclusive events.

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    Litmus test for liberal mentality.  There is a very reliable test to identify a person sporting a well-developed liberal persuasion.  It can be administered within the comfortable confines of a casual conversation about almost anything socio-political.  A few questions about the person’s viewpoint or perspective, which can then be mildly challenged, will quickly reveal if that person ever considers that there may exist prima facie reasoned and valid viewpoints other than his.  If such a rejection turns out to be the case, the likelihood is very high that you are talking to a liberal.  If your discussant responds with a reasoned defense of his position, especially one that identifies well-formed weaknesses in the counter-position, then the likelihood is low that you are in the presence of a liberal.  In these pages we have years of such evidence.  As an example, a most prominent liberal commenter continues repeating the same pejorative assessment of Donald Trump with the surety that his viewpoint is the only one brought down the mountain on stone tablets.  The counter-arguments don’t exist, since for him they have been invisible.

    The country’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic continues unabated.  Established medicines that would have greatly or even wholly mitigated the health impact of C19 were abolished by the Left from public access during Trump’s administration in order to enable policies that maximized body counts and the destruction of our economy, and established government controls that may have become ensconced destructors of our liberties.

    The ‘party of science’ did everything unscientific that was possible to spread unfounded fear across the land, and it continues to this day.  As examples, the early banishment of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin along with mandated draconian lockdowns guaranteed the distress we all have witnessed.  Re-evaluating the effectiveness of HCQ and IVM, our FDA, NIH, and CDC have now begrudgingly permitted their qualified use in treating C19.  (e.g. here)

    (more…)

  • George Rebane

    For some time now a hard-left commenter signing himself as ‘Nevada County Right Wing Watch’ has been visiting these pages and leaving a trail of his intelligence, understanding, and thoughts.  He claims to be part of an extensive organization, apparently one of several reported in the news that are doing their best to intimidate and shut down all wrong thought in the country.  It’s hard to tell how authentic all this is.  But it’s very easy to tell from both the news and as corroborated on this blog, that the communication between the polarized sides is extremely asymmetrical.  The Left wants to silence the Right.  The Right wants an open forum debate on ideas, happenings, history, economics, etc.

    A microcosm of this activity has been recorded in RR’s comment streams for the last 14 years, and in recent years the exchange has become more intense.  During this time the leftwingers come here to repeatedly tell us that our views are grossly in error, evil, and that no one cares what we think – and yet they come.  All of them appear to think that the conservetarian ideas promoted by me and others are unique, constrained to a tiny group in these foothills, and only represent fringe far-right thought.  They have no idea of the existence of the tens of millions of every-day Americans with whom we are ideological soulmates.  From the content of their comments, it’s clear they think that if only they could silence RR, then such wrong thinking would be eliminated from the land.

    In the following I present a couple of extracted comment threads from recent posts to give readers a clearer picture of the virulence experienced here and, no doubt, elsewhere.  We start with the contribution of our ever-vigilant Right Wing Watcher in a comment thread under ‘$15/hr Dumbth on the March’.

    (more…)

  • You always get less of what you tax more.  Eternal Truth #461

    George Rebane

    For some years now RR has chronicled and mourned America’s decline in intellectual resources and critical thinking skills.  This national dash to dumbth continues (nay, accelerates) as a purposeful process by progressives who have carefully husbanded public education at ALL levels for the last half century to achieve today’s new lows in pedagogy.  Various writers and academics have observed this process for some decades now – Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) are some earlier works that come to mind.

    Most recently we have a comprehensive essay – ‘The Decline of Intelligence in the West’ – by educational theorist and literary critic David Solway that cites the work of many psychologists and cognitive scientists who have documented our “plummet in cognitive abilities” over the course of these years.  These assessments come from a broad range of socio-political ideologues – e.g. Gruber’s on-target assertions on “the stupidity of the American voter” that would help pass Obamacare as his next step toward socialism.

    Consideration of this descent is not an idle undertaking for those who want to sustain America’s achievements and support its continuing ascent in the 21st century as the world’s ‘shining city on a hill’.  Denying the data, as Solway points out, hastens our decline, and serves the aims of globalists yearning for a post-national America.  Science historian Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture (2000) observes that “a society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”  This truth is embraced by autocratic elites everywhere, and our cynical central planners daily devise and implement stratagems to keep America maximally dysfunctional, knowing how that concentrates power in government.  Our Founders’ realization of this was summarized in Jefferson’s immortal ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

    Today we see an example of such a stratagem about to be run by the American voter one more time – the next rise in federally mandated wage controls in the imposition of the $15/hr minimum wage.  Without going through the catalog of damages this will do to the poorest already in and those seeking to enter our workforce, I want to point out that almost no one in the country knows how and when America came to accept a minimum wage.  That is one of the many parts of our history that has been wiped from our schools’ curricula in their dispensation of dumbth.

    Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recounts (here) the “racially discriminatory roots” of America’s minimum wage laws born in the 1930s, and of today’s Pelosi-led progressive prevarications designed to bamboozle the ignorant and free into supporting the Dems’ $15 vote buying scheme.  For openers, the minimum wage does NOT provide the breadth of economic benefit to the claimed target populations of women and the poor.  But it will kill more jobs (1.4M according to the CBO) and remove another tranche of entry-level rungs of the economic ladder from those who need it the most.

    But the most politically damaging part of the governments’ minimum wages is the history of their introduction and implementation.  As Riley recounts, minimum wages were introduced to the country’s North in the attempt to stem the migration of blacks from the economically bleak agricultural South.  The North’s black-excluding unions lobbied Congress where compliant “lawmakers complained openly about the ‘superabundance’ and ‘large aggregation of Negro labor’, and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.”  They knew that “low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers.”  And Team Pelosi, with Bumblebrain in the wheelhouse now, have not forgotten the benefits of that policy tool.

    Perhaps most damning of today’s progressive narrative would be to recall JFK’s attempt in the Senate to protect New England industry by promoting minimum wages that would price blacks out of the low end of the labor markets.  There in 1957 the young senator and soon our future president lectured a NAACP official, stating, “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete, … and when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

    We conclude with an apropos picture of America’s dumbth on the march.  This is the Democrats’ siren song to their incomprehensively loyal African-American constituencies with carefully cultured deficits in history and economics.

    MinWageMarch

  • George Rebane

    It’s time to start a new feature on RR now that the country’s market-mangling socialists-in-denial are in charge, both in super-majority California, and now in Washington DC.  Add to that the other Democrat-dominated states that look to California to ‘lead the way’ with the march to Marxism, and you’re looking at a perfect coast-to-coast public policy pandemic.  Hard to figure how things could get worse.  I’d like to differentiate what these Chronicles will cover from the postings and comments under our Dark Days Diary, which will draw topics from the rest of the country, and possibly the world (e.g. Biden’s geo-strategic, trade, immigration, and environmental policies).  But here let’s stick to California’s self-inflicted auto da fe.

    For openers, the smart/productive ones are either gone or still going.  Our progressives have been denying this easily verifiable fact for the last few years.  They’ll have a more difficult time hanging on to their myths when the new census numbers reduce California’s House districts by at least one.

    Sacramento demonstrates its incompetency by the hour.  We still can’t get the C19 vaccines distributed in a timely manner to the venues that need them.  Our leftwing bureaucrats (they’re all leftwing) have pissed away a confirmed $30B of federal pandemic relief dollars to criminals, fraudsters, and convicts residing in our jails, and even across the country.  By some estimates, that amount may reach $100B before the monies are accounted. (more here)

    And then there are the majority of Californians who can’t quite put it all together.  When presented with Republican and Democrat public policies, the Republican policies win hands down.  This is subsequently demonstrated when such policies are put to a vote by our electorate instead of quietly run through Sacramento’s sausage mill.  But when the same voters look at politicians on the stump, they have a hard time saying no to the scumbags who promise everything and deliver none of it.

    This phenomenon is expressed in other mainly large urban areas.  It is most likely due to the growth of national dumbth (topic of an upcoming post) as recognized by a growing group of academics, psychologists, and commentators.  Yes Virginia, national dumbth is real, ubiquitous, and not just an isolated tenet of Rebane Doctrine.

    [19feb21 update]  The recall roars onward.  California Assemblyman Kevin Kiley emailed – “The latest signature count is 1,689,000, and "alarmed party leaders" are panicking, making all hands on deck calls to try to head off this extraordinary citizens’ movement.”  The linked Politico article makes for interesting reading about the political dynamics now in a frenzy over the Newsom recall initiative.  The odds of replacing our idiot governor are now a solid smidgen above the chance of a snowball in hell.

  • George Rebane

    Recalling Gov Gavin Nuisance.  The 'Recall Newsom 2020', and similar movements, reported last week that they had exceeded the 1.5M signatures needed to put the recall proposition on the ballot of a special election that would be scheduled for sometime this fall.  Many thinking Californians and millions across the country agree that Gavin has been a disaster for the state – for openers, bungling the C19 response and exacerbating policies that have accelerated our Great Exodus.  Almost everything he touches turns to crap.  These signature counts have been reported by NBC (here), FN (here), and Newsweek (here).  But that news don’t make no never mind to leftwing columnists like our Union’s George Boardman who confidently reports (here) that only 600K signatures have been collected.  Who still says that you can’t have your very own facts to support your own opinions?

    [update]  A correspondent writes me that, “After two months of elected officials across the country saying that there is no need to verify signatures from the 2020 election, one politician is clinging to this very process to salvage his career. Governor Gavin Newsom of California is now seeking to ensure that all of the signatures collected in the effort to oust him be verified thoroughly. What changed? Is the integrity of one public vote more important than another?”

    [17feb21 update]  Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk show host, dead at 70.  RIP.

    Recall Newsom numbers.  From the comments below, George Boardman’s quietly outdated number claims are deemed correct by none other than the indominatable Steven Frisch himself.  Frisch asserts that Boardman’s couching of “…backers have submitted less (sic) than 600,000 of the 1.5 million valid signatures they need…” makes it clear to readers that to date the signature gatherers are woefully short of the number needed by St Patrick’s Day.  What he seems to ignore is that Boardman’s hopeful report was based on cited data collected and validated by 6 January 2021.  At that time the statewide cumulative summary consisted of 723,886 signatures received by the SecState, of those 485,650 signatures were put through a validation process, and of those 410,087 signatures or 84.44% were accepted as valid.  Over a week ago the various ‘Recall Newsom’ organizations reported that over 1.5M signatures had been collected.  If that validation rate holds, then last week’s expected number of valid signatures numbered about 1,266,600.

    All this means that a total of at least 1,776,410 signatures need to be collected to meet the 1.5M valid signatures requirement.  And I'd bet the ranch that today there are at a minimum several hundred false flag leftwing activists out there filling petitions with invalid signatures.

    [18feb21 update]  To put a ribbon on my take of Mr Boardman’s column, IMHO he wrote the usual gleeful leftwinger's report of another insipient and pending failure of California’s GOP.  To get the desired message across, he cited a grossly dated summary of gathered and validated ‘recall Newsom’ signatures – a very dynamic process, especially in its closing months – that appeared to intend a miscommunication.  Believing Boardman’s prognosis, the lightly-read reader of his column would walk away thinking that no way in hell could the Repubs get enough signatures to put the governor’s recall on the ballot.  At a minimum, such commentary cum reporting was not valid in any sense of the word.

    BTW, the most recent report from the 'recall Newsom' organizations cite collected signatures well above 1.5M, with the intention to bring that total to 2M so as to insure that more than the required 1.4M+change signatures are available for validation by CA's SOS.  We shall see.

  • [There was a graveside service for Brother ToddJ this afternoon at Greenwook Memorial Gardens in Grass Valley.  About 50 of us attended the 2pm gathering conducted under a light rainfall.  A pastor officiated and several of Todd's relatives and friends gave their remembrances.  A couple of current public personages were also in attendance.  It was a warm and homey gathering, and a very befitting recognition for one of our formerly prominent local citizens. RIP.  gjr]

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  • A happy finish gilds everything, however unfitting the means may have been.  Which explains why at times it should be the rule to offend the rules, when it is not possible by other methods to attain a happy ending.  Gracian #66

    George Rebane

    ‘My way or the highway!’ were the responses to the 13feb21 column by my favorite conservative Union columnist (here) wondering how Biden’s calls to unify would work as the country’s Left continues to vilify the tens of millions on the Right who voted for Trump.  The strong answer from our locals echo their national response, and confirms that there is no middle ground.

    ‘On second thought, no witnesses needed.’  After they sobered up, that was the Dems’ second cut this morning at wanting to call witnesses.  The Repubs’ first witness would have been Mrs  Pelosi answering questions of what/when she knew about the Capitol riot and a whole lot of other stuff.  Her testimony would have resulted in either Perjury City (and an orange jumpsuit) or blowing the Dems case, not only for this impeachment, but also for every little lie and dirty trick that went down over the last four years.  No, no, no, can’t let that bird sing.

    Our Supes have been pretty spineless during Newsom’s insane lockdown diktats.  There has been no science or logic to back up statewide and local policies to, say, prevent indoor eating at restaurants.  Other neighboring counties – e.g. Yuba and Placer – already have indoor eating as brave restaurateurs allow their customers to decide on their aversion to C19 risk.  In Nevada County our eateries cower compliantly under the leadership of county officials who dare not raise a peep against almighty Sacramento.  Well, today we read Board Chair Dan Miller will put on the next agenda an item “to further discuss state restrictions.”  I guess we’ll now inch forward one vertebrae at a time.

    California mistakenly gave convicts over $30B federal C19 relief dollars.  That according to Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-6th district) who stated today that further evidence has emerged indicating that a lot of that money wound up in the hands of LA and Bay area gangs which they have used to buy guns.  Any past increase in criminal gun violence has always been used to launch the next leftwing assault on the 2nd Amendment to roll back gun rights for law abiding citizens.  That is beyond progressive logic, but simply a continuing scam to eliminate civilian arms.  Great Divide.

    [14feb21 update]  More Covid fraud exposed.  For most of the past year RR has examined the C19 pandemic in detail with analytical models and numerous cited sources.  As reported, my own findings have always indicated that there has been something funny going on in the feds’ C19 reporting and recommended response policies – things didn’t tie, and most certainly did not follow cited science.  The scope of and responses to the whole pandemic seemed to be politically motivated and manipulated.  Early on I also examined the ‘excess deaths’ aspect of C19 and found them to be minimal as did others (here).  Recently more detailed analyses of CDC releases expose how the institution has played fast and loose with its reporting of C19 cases and deaths.  A summary of the findings are here, and a detailed report of how the data was manipulated can be downloaded here. (H/T to reader)

    [15feb21 update]  Equity on parade.  So, the guy who made $8/hr will now get $15.  The guy making $11 gets $15, and the guy who made $15 gets $15.  And as a result, that hard worker is on the bottom again.  (And don’t even start me on the well-known principle that a rising minimum wage floats all prices.)

    Covid deaths as you like them.  A regular reader sent the following graphic that he dug up on the CDC website (here).  He makes a cogent argument that IF these reported numbers of simple body counts are true, then there are indeed ‘excess deaths’ (from the projected norm) that can be plausibly attributed to C19.  At this point of (C19 and other) stats flying this way and that, it is hard to determine what to believe, since both journalism and govt agencies have now succumbed to publishing injections of political propaganda.  But for completeness, you are invited to make up your own mind.

    C19deaths_CDC

    Billionaire Bill “has a master plan for battling climate change” and ending our dependency on carbon and other bad stuff.  He will reveal it all in his How to Avoid Climate Disaster that will be published this month.  Using a lot of “analysis”, Mr Gates has been able to reduce the whole thing to “a simple plan” that most of us should be able to understand.  He has started a couple of green venture funds with other very rich people, and, of course, he has a funded a sophisticated lobbying organization that can buy politicians by the dozens.  The latter to make sure that appropriate laws and regs get passed so that the venture funds make a lot of money investing in green start-ups protected from open markets by the government gun.  (more here)

    The leftwing commenters to Jo Ann’s 13feb21 Union column have a hard time understanding her point about Biden’s call for national unity.  It was Biden who issued the call, not Jo Ann.  All she’s doing is asking how one can respond to such a call if the Left continues to call people like her bad names and accusing her of doing bad stuff in being a Republican who supported Trump.  Understanding that seems to be a bridge too far.

    [17feb21 update]  NAACP sues Trump and Giuliani under guise of violating the 1871 KKK Act as reported in the 17feb21 WSJ.  That is another blatant exercise by the transformed leftwing civil rights group to enlarge the country’s division, keep reminding blacks that they continue as victims, and that they should remain on the plantation cared for by their elitist black political leaders who have learned to play the game.  (more here)

    Texans are freezing their symbolic balls off.  The energy richest state of the Union has its energy generation and distribution grid and its energy market in general so badly mangled by its (Republican) state government kowtowing to federal mandates, that there is not enough functioning power generating capacity available as inclement weather knocks out their fair weather wind turbines.  Playing ball with the global warming Left invariably gets the bat shoved up your butt sideways as California already has demonstrated.  Global cooling – it’s a comin’.

     

  • George Rebane

    Living on a huge manmade island may be the thing of the future for those who can afford it and want to escape from the ever more contested and politically roiling lands that cover about 29% of the Earth’s 197,000,000 sq mi surface.  The first of these islands is being built off the Bahamas by an outfit that calls itself The Blue Estate (here).  Multiples of such islands are planned to reside off Dubai in the Persian Gulf which are advertised to be miniature havens of German, Swiss, Italian, and Swedish culture.  The Blue Estate plan envisions an island measuring 1,500 by 1,000 meters as shown below.

    BlueEstate

    The island’s size, modular construction, and high (130ft) free board, augmented by another 100+ foot extendable windwalls, we are told will assure the structure’s calm survival in the roughest of hurricanes.  The island will also have propulsion and guidance so that it can transit open ocean areas to avoid storms.

    Yet to be explained is to what extent the island will be energy self-sufficient using solar, wind, and wave energy extraction technologies.  Its home area will be in international waters, minutes by air away from Miami and Bahamian towns.  Apparently, food and other consumables will be imported.

    The community will also be economically self-sufficient by being home to clean commercial enterprises and the successfully retired.  The commercial activities will be heavily IT oriented with ample satellite connectivity.  I can envision that it might also be home to small R&D firms engaged in computer science, genomics, and similar areas.  Located in a tropical sea with abundant (300+ days/yr) sunshine, the island can also operate a sizeable nearby sea farm containing various flora supported by an underwater matrix which will give rise to a whole new ecosystem of rich sea life similar to what exist around oil drilling platforms and the Navy’s ‘kelp farm’ (off San Clemente Island) on which I worked years ago.

    One of the potential attractions of such seaborne communities may be their ability to provide social stability through a discriminative selection of residents.  It is clear to me that some such island communities will emphasize cultural cohesion of their residents.  Offering such cohesive environments seems to be the goal of the planned Persian Gulf islands that will focus on providing culture-specific resort living and holidays.

    As an entrepreneur and systems nerd, I am drawn to the dreaming and planning of such habitats, and in the present case could go on for pages contemplating different concepts and their supporting technical, commercial, environmental, educational, cultural, … support systems and institutions.  But to me the problem of having the seas support a considerable population of such islands in different parts of the world will come down to the solution of the inevitable political problems that will arise and need solutions that can be implemented globally.

    Because these island communities will attract (and be limited to) the smart, productive, and ‘financially capable’ people, they will naturally become hotbeds of wealth generation.  And they will therefore become tax and tariff prey for the land-based political grifters who maintain their collectivist regimes by bamboozling their poor and huddled masses yearning to be free.  These people need state supplied succor that their political leaders will not allow them to generate for all the reasons we have discussed in these pages.

    In such political landscapes those who can will escape to available locales with lower taxes, regulations, and abundant liberties.  This we see happening in today’s American migrations, and have witnessed for decades (centuries?) in Europe and Asia where the productive congregate in enclaves such as Singapore, Taiwan, and formerly Hong Kong.  Therefore, new political paradigms need to be discovered if the financially and culturally attractive island communities are to thrive and multiply.  Else the early ones will just be economically harvested to oblivion by the land-based stifling autocracies that see such free and enterprising enclaves as low-hanging fruit.

    Much more to be said about all this.