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  • Scattershots – 1aug21 (updated 4aug21)

    The redistribution of wealth does not affect its creation. – Democrat/Marxist shibboleth

    George Rebane

    According to its director Dr Rochelle Wolensky, CDC’s new national mask guidance – even vaccinated people should wear masks in regions of high C19 incidence – is based on data from a spike of cases that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts.  Well, it turns out that the data is a bit more than skewed.  The data was compiled subsequent to Bear Week, an annual gathering of thousands of gay men who congregate for socializing, entertainment, and sex.  The CDC did not point out Bear Week nor that 85% of the new cases recorded were men.  It confirms that the more CDC attempts to inform the public, the more muddled are its messages.  (more here)

    National Propaganda Radio has finally gone public with a policy that allows its ‘journalists’ to also be political activists and report on their supposedly non-partisan efforts opposing racism and white supremacy while promoting social justice, equity, and the usual leftwing list of progressive policies.  Meanwhile, they continue to maintain that they remain a government-funded, non-partisan news and information outlet.

    Gymnast Simone Biles’ withdrawal from competing in certain events at the Tokyo Olympics has the media abuzz.  Most reports and commentaries celebrate her “courage” for choosing not to compete due to mental issues.  This attitude is taken by all in the lamestream media, but also by some conservative talking heads.  Some on the Right are being less accommodating about the young lady’s decision, going so far as to view her decision as a national embarrassment.  It’s hard to tell how much of the division of sentiments is based on Ms Biles gender – would a similarly disposed male athlete garner equal rations of celebratory courage and embarrassment?  I can only imagine the pressures that Biles has been under to perform, and am told how important it is for gymnasts to have their head together in order to safely perform their routines that regularly threaten life and limb. IMHO, her decisions do not call for celebration nor denouncements of embarrassment.  In the age of ‘trophies for all’, no one wants to set a precedent of hailing athletes who refuse to compete as expected, a simple expression of disappointment should put such matters to rest.

    Taking a knee or other ways of showing disrespect for America when representing our country at the Olympics is an altogether different matter.  I have no sympathy for athletes who take their highly partisan and dreadfully misguided political sentiments for exhibition on the world stage.  Such acts and expressions are blatantly anti-American, and do nothing but succor our enemies abroad, dispirit their more patriotic fellow athletes, and expand the partisan chasm that already rends our homeland.  Keep America’s internal politics in America.

    [4aug21 update] Our beloved Union continues flying its true op-ed colors.  I am disappointed, not so much in its ongoing tilt to the left, but in its uneven application of the editorial corrections it inserts at the end of contributed commentaries with which it does not agree, and in which it detects an error about which readers need to be notified.  This morning’s Union has a piece by devoutly blindered leftwinger Richardt Stormsgaard (here).  He ends his piece with –

    Much of the Republican Party has edged perilously close to outright authoritarianism. Hundreds of moderate and conservative national security and military members from current and former administrations have warned against this disturbing tendency under Donald Trump. … A majority of Republican voters still support Trump and his attempted coup even though the leading perpetrators of the “Stop the Steal” myth in court have defended their false claims in court documents stating, “No reasonable people would consider these statements believable.” … Despite these damning admissions, a major portion of Republicans is increasing their assaults on our democracy leading up to the next elections. There are disturbing similarities between the USA today and Germany in the early 1930s, including the attacks on the democratic rule, along with the personality traits of Hitler and Trump and their fanatical supporters.

    Aside from the fact that it is and always has been the Democrats who attempt to drive the country from a constitutional republic to naked collectivist authoritarianism, Republicans are explicitly impeded from taking that tack because their proposals and policies all inhibit the growth of government and/or actively seek to reduce its size.  No authoritarian governance is possible without an ever larger, growing, and intrusive government, exactly the kind that Democrats have always sought to bring about.  The Union’s editorialists are unwilling to point out such glaring errors in the op-ed contributions they print.

    And celebrated Union cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb does his part to underline the newpaper’s editorial policy with his latest cartoon, filched and presented below.

    RLCrabb210804

    This Crabb contribution is an excellent example of soft vitriol against the Right.  Note the number of bases in the progressive narrative he covers with these cleverly constituted panels – a master’s touch.  And it behooves the rest of us to never forget that this is exactly what they think of us, and given the chance, how they will send us knuckledraggers to be re-ejikated in new institutions that will be built for our benefit.  The templates for all this have been operated by the Left all over the world since the turn of the last century.

    Bernie Sanders answers ‘Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package’.  He sidesteps the Democrats’ real answer – the biggest vote buying “package” in the country’s history.  Instead, he talks about oodles and oodles of goodies for everyone from the terminally unemployable to illegal aliens invited to continue their surge across our southern border in order to get free everything and citizenship to boot.  For our mis-educated youth, the law will establish a Civilian Climate Corps in the hopes they could be taken off the streets and stop murdering each other, and marshalled into more institutionalized settings in which they will work on approved progressive priorities and projects.  The last couple of decades have seen Democrats offer different proposals to set up institutions to politicize and propagandize the unemployed and unemployable.  The ultimate function of these nascent legions of brown shirts is not a mystery; we can already see them ferreting out ‘white supremacists’ and other undesirable irredeemables across the country.

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  • Critical Race Theory – a personal assessment

    “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”  Stephen Decatur

    "… the ultimate purpose of  public education is to subsume the individual's will into the general will."  American Marxist (2021)

    George Rebane

    CRT is now blowing across the land, starting with our K-12 public schools and continuing on through our public and private institutions to its unbelievable terminus – our military.  Everything in between from corporations to governments at all levels have been infected by a new belief system that sees and describes America at every turn as a deeply flawed nation – to many of us as the world’s most reprehensible country.

    CRT is being implanted and implemented in many of its variants.  Not one of them need to check every box in the list of its attributes.  And to the lightly-read with no critical thinking skills, this variability in its applications allows them to deny that CRT is rampant in the land.  These light thinkers are all children of the Left whose leaders and media outlets represent CRT as a culmination of correct insight into the nation’s history.

    These insights all center around America as the world’s focused vortex of white supremacy that has kept people of color enslaved in various forms unto this day since it all began for them in 1619.  Our evil and/or ignorant half does not recognize America as the generations-long most desired destination for people of all colors.  They simply ignore the multi-generational mass ingress of immigrants and illegal aliens, and continue, louder than ever, their narrative and pedagogy of a reprobate America.

    In these pages we posted many commentaries and comment streams that examine the impact and realities of CRT as it seeps through the most intimate inroads of our society’s public and private lives. (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) The Left has now successfully submerged even the most balanced criticisms of CRT.  To be caught criticizing, automatically pins the racist label on all who so dare.  This is now so strongly enforced in every level of media and politics that private individuals no longer dare speak their thoughts in normal conversations when they are out and about.  The result is, of course, an ever-widening of the already irredeemable chasm that separates us.

    I focus on the damage that is done to our children when they are indoctrinated in public schools with the variants of CRT.  The most visible damage is to the students’ political values with which they matriculate, and then go on to interpret and accept the worldview fed to them daily by our lamestream media.  Absent in their acquired skillsets is critical thinking – the state of the country and world is summarized for them by a set of 17 (don’t hold me to this number) collectivist cum Marxist shibboleths, endlessly repeated and accredited by their political, entertainment, and sports celebrities.

    The point here is that this growing cohort of citizenry sees very little about America that should be conserved, for them it is all bad and requires a fundamental transformation to make it right.  That is what CRT-based history has done and continues to do to our citizenry.  It removes the love of country and makes toxic its symbols, traditions, established curricula, and even our everyday language.  All of these are to be replaced by new norms of social justice, equity, and anti-western values.  Never mind that these notions remain undefined.  Without critical thought to light the way, the missing definitions never enter the mind – high-sounding labels suffice to inspire action.

    So, call these CRT variants what you will, the bottom line is that people emerge from their indoctrination sessions with a jaundiced eye toward everything traditionally American.  They see little to preserve, and believe that in the transformed brave new world they will be better off in every dimension of human existence.  Most even believe that all this can be achieved with ever less intrusive governments as even neo-Marxist teach the ultimate perfection of Man and the final evaporation of governance.  None are aware of how many eggs had to be cracked in the attempts to make such omelets in the past.

    According to my lights, an accurate history of America can and should be taught to our kids.  But it needs to be taught in such a way that on balance, even when recognizing our barnacles, they emerge seeing our country as being an historically exceptional social order.  One that has achieved for its citizens, and the world at large, an enormously increased quality of life, as it continues to be the destination of choice for not only the downtrodden, but also its industrious builders.

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  • Sandbox – 26jul21

    [Yet one more indicator that we are no longer smart enough to govern ourselves as a free nation was the most recent WaPo/ABC poll in which 51% of respondents were satisfied with Bumblebrain’s handling of the economy – ignoring literally every related factor that is promoting the economy coming off of its C19 hiatus (thanks to Trump) while blind to the administrations plans to pass tax and regulation legislation to stifle the economy, launch rampant inflation, and push national debt to historical records not even seen during wartimes.  gjr]

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  • The Criminality of Covid Care (updated 31jul21)

    George Rebane

    The prominent article on front page of the 26jul21 WSJ declares ‘Covid Treatment Options Remain Elusive, Despite Months of Effort and Rising Delta Cases’.  And the most elusive treatment options remain Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) which are nowhere even mentioned in an otherwise comprehensive piece on the various medicines having been tested and used in treating C19.

    The effectiveness of HCQ, and especially IVM, as both a preventative and therapeutic for the virus has been well known for over a year.  Physicians all over the world, including the US, have used it and prescribe it regularly.  Numerous studies have been conducted on their efficacies at various stages of the disease.  Curiously, the overseas studies show remarkably positive results, and the US studies show them to be little more effective, if that, than a placebo (none have shown it to do harm to the patient).

    A very comprehensive study – ‘Ivermectin for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 60 studies’ – was already released last fall.  (H/T to reader)  It concludes –

    Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19. The probability that an ineffective treatment generated results as positive as the 60 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in 193 billion (p = 0.0000000000052). As expected for an effective treatment, early treatment is more successful, with an estimated reduction of 74% in the effect measured using random effects meta-analysis (RR 0.26 [0.16-0.43]). 64% and 96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis (RR 0.36 [0.15-0.85] and 0.04 [0.00-0.59]). Statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety of heterogeneous studies is remarkable, with 92% of the 60 studies reporting positive effects (26 statistically significant in isolation).

    Even the simplest back-of-envelope calculations will show that the widespread use of IVM would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past year and a half.  Given the reported results, its suppression by our governmental public health institutions has been nothing short of rank criminality.  Neither the commonly available and generic HCQ nor IVM will benefit the big pharmas selling medicines on which their patents still hold sway.

    Omitting any mention of, say, IVM and the cited study reeks to high heaven, and goes a long way to maintain the loss of credibility that our society’s major institutions have suffered.  I repeat the WSJ citation above – not a hint of even the existence of HCQ or IVM.  Even repeating the CDC’s official stance on these medicines would have served to allay some suspicions, but total silence screams collusion and conspiracy at the highest levels.

    Your physician will more than likely already have his/her own supply and be happy to prescribe IVM if you request it.  Given the readily available research, the Rebanes have stocked their medicine cabinet appropriately.

    [29jul21 update]  So ‘Why is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?’  Ivermectin is a promising Covid treatment and prophylaxis, but why is the FDA still denigrating it?  People continue to suffer and die at numbers that could be greatly reduced were this safe, inexpensive, and effective drug promoted and made available to all of us who should have it in our medicine cabinets.  More specifically, “Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.  Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease.”

    CDC’s newest mask mandate continues to be based on no science, just imperiously incompetent control.  Governors and mayors are beginning to give the agency pushback, asking for the substantiating science or at least some supporting data.  The best that CDC could do to date is to mumble something about an unpublished report (the one that failed peer review?).  When asked, they could not advise when the report would be made public.  The bottom line of all this is that we are 18 months into this pandemic, and the government is becoming more dysfunctional by the day in the response policies it struggles to put out.  This is the outfit that the neo-Marxists are trying to enlarge and control more of our everyday lives??!

    But the biggest ongoing tragedy is the response of the American sheeple.  The overwhelming majority of our citizens respond with a muffled compliance, very similar to that of cattle being prodded down the chute on their final walk to slaughter.  Consider Covid as a training aid used by government elites to prepare us to accept more serious measures to come from on high.

    [31jul21 update]  The evidence for Ivermectin continues to pour in.  Given the number of people that Covid has killed, IVM is truly a demonstrated wonder drug.  Its timely application would have save hundreds of thousands of lives, and it still can be the medicine that will allow us to live with C19 as its variants make it endemic for the indefinite future.  ‘How to Kill a Cure: The War on Ivermectin’ is a must read to appreciate the level of criminality that IVM's suppression has entailed, and continues today as a perfidious blight in our society.  (H/T to reader)

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  • ‘CRT’s Attempt to Reframe Our Country’s Founding’

    [Apologies for the belated posting of this third in the series of columns Ms McLaughlin which appeared in the 14jul21 issue of The Union.  The previous two can be found here and here.  gjr]

    Terry McLaughlin

    Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has argued that critical race theory is “another right-wing conspiracy theory” that was “totally made up.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said that critical race theory is being “manufactured” by the right. Yet, over the July 4 weekend, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, announced plans to teach critical race theory in all 50 states and more than 14,000 school districts. The National Education Association believes it is real, and they would be right.

    One of the narratives being incorporated into critical race theory curriculum is the 1619 Project originally published in 2019 by The New York Times as stories, poems, and essays about racism and slavery. Twenty Africans, believed to be the first enslaved Africans in British North America, arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. The 1619 Project suggests that this was the moment of America’s “true founding.”

    Written by journalists and opinion writers, not historians, the project attempts to reframe our country’s founding around the concepts of racism and slavery.

    Within days of its launch in August 2019, a number of notable historians pointed out numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements in a letter to The New York Times. They included professors Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon Wood of Brown University.

    They disputed many of the statements presented as facts in the 1619 Project, not the least of which was an essay promoting the idea that the American Revolution was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.

    Northwestern University History Professor Leslie Harris, an expert on African American life and slavery in the pre-Civil War era, was the first historian to levy criticism who had actually supported the project and participated in it as a fact-checker.

    During the publication process, she was presented with the assertion that “one critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”

    Harris vigorously disputed this claim, explaining that while slavery was an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the colonies went to war. Yet that claim remains in the published account.

    According to Harris, colonists had no need to secede to protect slavery, as slavery faced no immediate threat from Great Britain. The opposite was true, Harris argued, as the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American colonies. It led most of the 13 colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. Thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies, and the ideals gaining force during the Revolutionary era also inspired many Northern states to pass laws gradually ending slavery.

    These laws did not provide immediate emancipation, nor did they promise racial equality or full citizenship, but Professor Harris asserted that black activism during the Revolutionary War and the following era of emancipation led to the end of slavery much earlier than prescribed within those laws. Slaves often negotiated with their owners to purchase their freedom, or simply ran away in the confused aftermath of the war, and most Northern slave owners granted freedom to their slaves in advance of the time mandated by law.

    Despite the many leading scholars who have discredited and criticized the project since its publication as historically inaccurate and ideologically driven, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary architect of the 1619 Project, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay introducing it.

    The editorial staff of the New York Post, which had run multiple articles challenging the 1619 Project’s facts and arguments, wrote: “Too bad the Pulitzer committee now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.” Most recently, Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her alma mater. (She turned it down in favor of a position at Howard University.)

    African-American history and slavery is a critical theme in America’s story, but we can recognize the impact of race without denying the roles of other influences or erasing or denigrating the contributions of early American settlers and our founding fathers, as critical race theory attempts to do.

    A dozen Civil War professors and scholars have stated that they are “troubled that these materials are now … the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of The New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights.”

    Professor Gordon Wood, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history for a book on the American Revolution, wrote, “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution. … I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. … We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.”

    Despite its demonstrable flaws and distortions, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum approved by the California Department of Education this year draws significantly upon the 1619 Project to validate what The Wall Street Journal calls the curriculum’s “radical indoctrination.”

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  • Ruminations -21jul21 (updated 25jul21)

    ‘You comply because you want it to end.  But because you comply, it will never end.’  The realworld of dealing with autocracies.

    George Rebane

    “There’s nothing partisan about seeking the truth.”  Thus spake Nancy Pelosi, one of the all-time duplicitous lying politicians of our times, as she rejected the nomination of GOP Reps Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Dems’ 6jan21 House investigation committee.  That statement is just the most recent pernicious play on the intellects of leftwing voters across the land.

    Minority Leader McCarthy responds to Pelosi by promising to pull all Republicans out of her committee, and launch a parallel GOP investigation of 6 January.  This will show the country how the ‘honorables’ of Congress play the game, kabuki performances all around.  These two will produce diametrically opposite non-partisan truths, and let the people pick which they like the best.  Something for everyone, what’s not to like?

    [22jul21 update]  The 25th Amendment was clearly adopted for the sad condition of President Biden’s mental state as witnessed by his recent townhall performance on CNN. (here) It unbelievable how little he can do in public without his pre-printed notecards.  The fact that there is no discernible effort to remove him means that he is totally in control of his handlers and, therefore, continues to serve a useful purpose, and/or not even Democrats want their idiot VP to ascend to the position.  But then again, in that case Nancy would be a heartbeat away from 1600.

    [23jul21 update]  Leftwing educator Mollie Mowat takes Union columnist Terry McLaughlin to task (here) for her recent abundantly researched column on CRT (here).  The woman understands nothing of McLaughlin’s column as she adequately displays generous helpings of her own ignorance and bias.  She illustrates the level of knowledge and scholarship so common in the ranks of unionized public school teachers.  And as expected from a progressive autocrat, she ends her screed with a wistful wish that opposing voices like McLaughlin’s be silenced in our media – “As a former teacher and lifelong educator, I am saddened that she is allowed to continue a frankly ignorant and racist rhetoric.”

    [24jul21 update]  Bumblebrain’s exit.  Given his visible daily decline, even some Dems are now beginning to realize that he might not last.  I’m starting a contest for readers to predict the date when our next president gets sworn in.  Submit your entries as a 4-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date, Most likely date, Confidence (0 to 1) that the date will be near Most likely date] or just a 2-tuple [Earliest date, Latest date].  Some of you may recall that these four parameters also define a MAB distribution (here).  The entrant whose MAB has the highest likelihood value at the actual swear in date wins.  As a prize I will send a $1,000 check to the winner’s favorite 501c3 charity.  Entries must be submitted before 1 September 2021, earliest received entry resolves ties.

    [25jul21 update]  Big pharmas are now racing for a C19 therapeutic pill (here and here) while the reporting media completely ignore widespread uses of cheap, established, and widely available hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin anti-virals as both a preventative and a therapeutic.  Informing readers on the global experience with HCQ and IVT would be useful since in the west the use of these drugs has been rejected and vilified.  One wonders how these developments stand on the shoulders of (repackaged?) HCQ/IVT.

    Fraudulent C19 stats have been promoted with the year-long use of PCR tests to ascribe C19 cases.  The CDC is now pulling the use of these tests since we’ve known from the start that they can’t differentiate between SARS-CoV-2 (the C19 virus) and influenza (here).  The resulting damage from the use of such confused data is yet to be determined.  The politicization of everything to do with the C19 pandemic continues to destroy the credibility of our formerly sacrosanct institutions.  The medical community adds itself to our already TDS-tainted intelligence services, crime fighting agencies, judicial system, and, of course, the terminally tainted lamestream news media. (H/T to reader)

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  • Sandbox – 19jul21

    [If the US was being damaged even a tenth as much as claimed by foreign state-sponsored rogue hackers demanding money, and we did nothing, then we are over as a sovereign nation-state.  Rebane Doctrine calls for 10:1 retribution on the infrastructures of such sponsoring states; none of this crap about ‘balanced’, 'measured', or ‘proportional’ responses that we might take some day when we really get pissed off.  We’re playing with thugs who worship and understand only force – it’s time to up the ante and convince Russia and China that the price of cyberwarfare just went up.  Gjr]

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  • In Appreciation – 14jul21

    Sell your stuff at the price of courtesy, for that imposes the heaviest obligation; …courtesy not only pays, but it pledges, and it is gallant manner that imposes the greatest obligation; nothing costs a man of conscience more than something given him, for it is sold him twice, and at a double price, that of its own value, and that of politeness.  Nevertheless it remains true, that to men of mean spirit such noble talk is mere gibberish, for they do not understand the idioms of good style.  Gracian #272

    George Rebane

    Recently I’ve been doing some review and archiving of the last 14 years of RR’s contents.  And in the perusal of the voluminous comment streams in these pages, I am overcome with gratitude for the content of the almost 200,000 comments from readers of all socio-political persuasions.  Most humbling to me are the long, thoughtful, and citation-supported comments that append to and expand on my commentaries.  Most of these, over the years, have come from a small and faithful cadre of regular commenters.  It is a rare blog where comment contents abet and also vie with the topical posts – RR is so blessed.

    I am also grateful for the cadre of readers who trade their ideas with me through emails, giving rise to long and fruitful exchanges, some of which I have been able to post.  And lastly, I have to also thank our readers of the Left.  Some of them take me and RR’s more rightwing readers to task on other blogs, whereon they can swim in more comfortable waters without having to match wits with those whom they criticize or seek to silence.

    But the greatest thanks go to those liberals, progressives, et al of today’s woke cadres who now and then have the fortitude to take up their lance and do battle in our comment streams.  It is their welcome attendance that gives spice to the debates and that illustrate most clearly how differently our polarized sides see the same world, and the diametrically opposite directions each side wants to guide our republic.  After all, for a more complete telling, we need from all sides the observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.

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  • Scattershots – 12jul21 (updated 18jul21)

    George Rebane

    Power outage on Hind Tit Road.  Unannounced, PG&E decided to turn off power at 1130pm last night, and then back on at 4am.  The transients did their predictable share of problems starting with no internet (the ATT modem did not reset properly) to our well pump controller deciding to shut off.  One required the usual interminable call through ATT’s phone system maze, and the second required a manual ministration at the well house to get our irrigation system back up.  Other electrical/electronic systems required their own pain-in-the-ass resets.  When PG&E deems us worthy of a heads-up before shutting off power, we can then turn off or unplug all the sensitive stuff to avoid the hassles as we turn on the generator and then back to line power.  Ahh, the benefits of living in God’s country.

    Cubans are rioting in the streets.  Cuba and Venezuela are the proxy goals of the kind of America that Team Biden and his socialists are promoting here.  “Cuba promotes itself as a world-class healthcare powerhouse. But as the scabies epidemic shows, the decrepit hospital and outpatient network cannot even tend to run-of-the-mill illnesses, never mind Covid-19. Things are not much better in the Cuban colony of Venezuela, where the virus is spreading, many medical professionals have fled, and basic needs in hospitals, like reliable running water, are no longer met.”  I recall on these pages our lefties hailing Cuba’s healthcare as model of what nationalization can provide for its people.  Our problem is that no one can connect the dots between all those workers’ paradises and America.  Or worse, most of our electorate doesn’t even know the dots exist.  (more here)

    [13jul21 update]  I have limited internet access after the power outage Sunday night.  Will advise when back to normal.  Now it’s time to scour the streets for an ATT truck and get the tech to come to the house.

    [14jul21 update]  ‘California Fleeing’ is a well-documented essay by Joel Kotkin, Chapman University fellow and much-published analyst of all things California.  In it he presents oodles of data that overwhelms the head-in-sand denials that our state has a years-long and accelerating out migration problem.  “Some longtime Californians view the continued net outmigration from their state as a worrisome sign, but most others in the Golden State’s media, academic, and political establishment dismiss this demographic decline as a “myth.” The Sacramento Bee suggests that it largely represents the “hate” felt toward the state by conservatives eager to undermine California’s progressive model. Local media and think tanks generally concede the migration losses but comfort themselves with the thought that California continues to attract top-tier talent and will remain an irrepressible superpower that boasts innovation, creativity, and massive capital accumulation.  Reality reveals a different picture. …”  This piece was discovered and shared by one of RR’s astute readers and regular commenters – many thanks.  I repost here so it gets a more appropriate prominence in these pages.

    Biden’s insane speech yesterday set a new record of being totally devoid of and detached from any semblance of reality.  The WSJ observed (here) that “the Democratic narrative on voting is becoming unglued.”  Example: The new Texas voter integrity law is the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.  The number of lies and ignorant citations of history in Bumblebrain’s narrative was simply jaw-dropping, and again demonstrated that he is too dumb to be evil, but his handlers are not.  Moreover, what equally astounds is that his handlers and the Democratic leadership are convinced that half the county is so ignorant as to lap up the crap out of Biden’s mouth without a second thought.  And dear reader, the strong possibility of that is the greatest ongoing tragedy in our beloved republic.

    The Dems’ latest censorship initiative. This time their particulars are focused on “misinformation about vaccines” with the DNC exhorting to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages” according to Politico.  (more here and here)  The Democrats' national censorship initiatives have now broadened to social media corporatists who deny the posting of data published by government agencies like the CDC and NIH when that does not fit the Democrat narrative.  Marxism on the march.

    My internet has mysteriously returned through a modem that ATT diagnosed as being faulty.  Wonder of wonders.

    [18jul21 update]  “We’re going to get it done!” shouts Schumer on a video as he escorts Bumblebrain with a vacant stare off camera.  The “it” is passage of a $3.5T vote buying bamboozle advertised by the Dems as the most significant and desperately needed stimulus since FDR’s New Deal.  Out of the other side of their mouths comes praise for a robustly recovering economy that then must be compared to a dysfunctional spending plan during the depth of the Great Depression over 80 years ago, one that also did NOTHING to bring the country’s economy back.  On the eve of WW2, after 8 years of Democrat nostrums, unemployment was still at 25% and the economy was on its ass, waiting for the war to kick industry back into gear.  Now we have a vibrant economy coming back from Covid, peace around the world, tolerable tax rates, …, and Team Biden wants to flush the economy down the toilet just so that the Dems can stay in power, no matter how poorly Americans will fare on Main Street.

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  • Global Tax Bamboozle

    Tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.  Leftwing shibboleth

    George Rebane

    Let’s start with an eternal truth, forever hidden from the lightly read and leftwing ‘economists’ – corporations don’t pay taxes, their customers do.’  Today SecTreas Yellen is Team Biden’s point on the easy job of convincing the G-7 countries to establish a globally applied minimum tax on corporations that do business across national borders.  A 15% minimum on some line in a company’s income statement is being bandied about.  The EU countries are ecstatic about the prospects of taxing American companies for revenues generated withing their borders.  “The deal represents an intersection of Europeans’ longstanding dream to tax American tech companies and the Biden Administration’s attempt to bamboozle lawmakers into passing a competition-killing corporate-tax hike at home.”

    But the whole idea for such a tax is a bad one from start to finish. (more here) Our anti-American Left sees it as a twofer – more revenues to support increased vote buying at home, and subrogating our Congress’ taxing powers to an international bureaucracy will take America another step away from sovereignty and toward a global government.

    The bamboozle is particularly pernicious for the nation’s consumers, particularly those who are  both ignorant and poor.  For them the availability of needed goods and services will go down as their prices go up.  And all this is happening as they cheer on their scumbag politicians for delivering another tranche of social justice in making the corporations pay their fair share of taxes.  It’s actually a double tax on the corporations’ customers who then will have to pay higher prices and correspondingly higher sales taxes.

    The international tax agreement, in whatever form it takes, will have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.  And what winds up getting through will be gamed to a fare-thee-well by the big corporatists.  You can bet the farm that their margins and, therefore, share prices will not be impacted.  What our socialists don’t understand is exactly how the corporations will game whatever new corporate tax policy is imposed here and abroad.  (Readers recall a fundamental Rebane Doctrine tenet – The bad part of capitalism is that they will always game the system, the good part of capitalism is that they will always game the system.  A corollary of this is that the corporatists have already gamed whatever change is planned for the system.)

    Bottom line, don’t let any of this impact decisions on the disposition of equities in your portfolio.

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