Rebane's Ruminations

About

November 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)

    George Rebane

    [This commentary appeared here in the 5jun21 op-ed pages of The Union.  The response in the newspaper’s online edition comment stream was as predicted (by publisher Don Rogers among others), and I expand on this in the addendum below.]

    In my last two Other Voices columns – ‘Farewell Unity’ (2apr21), ‘Where exactly are we going?’ (19apr21) – I apparently miscommunicated the outlined steps to reunify our politically polarized land.  Liberal readers misunderstood that I was inviting our neighbors of the Left to abandon their desiderata for a fundamentally transformed America, and simply adopt those that we of the Right embrace.  Nowhere did I make such a proposal.

    My main point was and still is that we should not start on the road to reunification with the much ballyhooed, premature, and therefore misguided search for ‘common ground’.  As it continues to be demonstrated by calls from both sides, that approach has been a futile undertaking over the last few years.  I offered a three-step sequence toward reunification that must start with an heroic effort to meld elements of our distinct ideas for a future America into a compromised list of shared attributes for governance and social policies.

    If we can successfully come up with such a collection of ideas, then that list of mutually acceptable and shared attributes will naturally give us the basis for a common ground from which to attempt the concluding step.  The recommended sequence is concluded by both sides joining in the effort to forge a unified format for America’s future, concurrently with the process by which such an envisioned America shall come to pass.  By this I mean that the outlined structure and the process to achieve it, must necessarily be put in place through, say, a productive give-and-take convention of the parties, so that both sides see the same end and also the means to achieve it as a feasible political enterprise to take place in the out years.

    ReunificationProcess2021

    The nearby diagram attempts to convey this graphically.  In its examination, it’s important not to get hung up on the descriptions of each side’s currently desired America.  They are included here only to illustrate that it is these disputed objectives, as perceived by the other, that are the underlying causes for our polarization.  If such a reunification process is actually attempted by our Democrats and Republicans, then each will bring to the table their own descriptions of their desired America which will serve as a starting point.  Finally, even this approach does not guarantee success.  Nevertheless, if we cannot agree to work for a common America, then a Great Divide, achieved peacefully or through violence, is in our future.

    [Addendum]  A quick perusal of The Union’s comment stream to this commentary reveals that the most recent tranche of liberal readers replicate the cognitive deficits exhibited by the readers of my two preceding columns that introduced a more productive process toward possible reunification than the one that starts with finding common ground which has been fruitlessly bandied around by politicians and in the national press.

    Again, our liberals show they have no understanding of the direction Biden’s policies and the congressional Democrats are taking the country.  They vehemently deny that it is toward socialism, and some in turn accuse Republicans of promoting fascism as our future.  None of these worthies give a hint that they understand the definitions of either ideology.

    I need to point out that predictably Steven Frisch, the local Left’s leading intellectual light, also made his appearance.  And a very disappointing effort it was.  He had no idea what to make of my column, instead he took the opportunity for what he thought would be another personal detraction that would confirm his followers’ rejection of my recommended approach.  His words –

    Thought I would leave this little post by George from over at his blog here for people to consider as they think about his system for finding a “Unified Format for America’s Future”….”Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event. After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders. Does anyone think that this kind “racial catharsis” has left us more united? ” –yep, George Rebane.

    He was quoting from my intro to ‘Sandbox – 2jun21’ in which I took Biden and the country’s lamestream media to task for their obvious use of the Tulsa Massacre to further divide America.  And Frisch, again displaying his extremely limited knowledge of national dialogues, thinks that I am somehow again a misguided lonely and deranged voice in the wilderness.  He has no idea of the number of columnists and conservative academics who measured Biden to a similar standard.  My own opinion was closely matched by black academic Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute from whose linked column I used his “racial catharsis” to characterize the reporting on the Tulsa centenary.

    So yes, given this level of ignorance amplified vitriol, there is no indication that any rational approach to reunification will be accepted by the Left.

    [13jun21 update]  The comment stream to this piece in the online Union has grown considerably, it now numbers above 150.  What I need to point out here is that no leftwing Union reader has yet to understand and critique the 3-step process to unification that I detail.  Almost all the comments are regurgitations of baseless ad hominems against me and RR.  The sad reflection on the hopelessness of starting a productive national dialogue on ANY issue is that the vituperations don’t even provide any specifics to substantiate their naked assessments and name-calling.  The apologetics to support contentions on this website are voluminous and rich with citations.  The Left’s demonstrated intellectual capacity appears not able to undertake a reasoned debate on any of it.  As a group, they are innocent of even the most basic definitions required to understand and engage.  This is USA in 2021.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    23 comments on Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)

  • The Blessings of Inequality

    George Rebane

    We are in the age of trading equality for equity.  Why?  Because equality at the start of any road quickly leads to inequality among the travelers – given equal opportunities, some get further ahead than others.  That’s how it has been, is now, and always will be the human condition.  To the socialist such results are anathema.  To them an enlightened governance will use force as needed to assure that society advances in a tight equitable cohort in which no one is left too far behind, and no one gets ahead too far.  And the governing elites will decide and manage what is ‘too far’.

    As history has shown elsewhere and also in our land, policies that impose such equities produce stagnating economies in which the lot of the citizenry is uniform misery that takes many forms as individual freedoms are pruned over time.

    Over the last 250 years, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the west, we have witnessed an enormous blossoming in the quality of life (QoL) for all classes.  These range from fewer and less menial jobs with shorter hours, better living conditions with more stuff, an explosion of arts and entertainments, and longer lives during which to enjoy all these blessings.  Moreover, these betterments have inevitably spread across the world, raising billions of people out of droll and desperate lives that their ancestors suffered for centuries.

    A closer look at how this all came about immediately reveals the role of inequality that sprung up in the new middle classes which were enabled by ever more liberal governments that inherited western culture.  In the 19th century trade and industry allowed those who could and would to quickly leap ahead of their more sanguine and status quo satisfied neighbors in growing their assets.  The last two centuries contain countless stories of single-generation leaps from abject poverty to undreamed of wealth by entrepreneurs who took risks investing their time, health, money, and comfort to bring something new and useful to market.

    And all of them knew that what they introduced would initially garner resistance and criticism in the marketplace.  Their driving hope was always that there would be a cohort of potential customers with the means and curiosity to give the new product or service a try, for these also would be taking a risk to buy something that might not work.  But it was always those having sufficient money set aside who could take that risk to enjoy and/or incorporate the new thing into their lives or businesses.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    6 comments on The Blessings of Inequality

  • Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

    Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

    George Rebane

    Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here’s the solution sent by a reader.

    StudentLoans

    Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

    [8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    28 comments on Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

  • Sandbox – 2jun21

    [Over the last week or so, the evil party has done everything it could to divide us further and pander to their ultra-left faction and black constituents by hammering the centenary of the Tulsa massacre over every possible channel and at every possible event.  After dredging up the terrible details of that riot of the whites, these were repeated ad nauseum over the days as it awakened and drew predictable expressions of rage from the Left and black leaders.  Does anyone think that this kind "racial catharsis" has left us more united?  (more here) gjr]

    Posted at

    in

  • The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

    George Rebane

    You can fool some people most of the time; you can fool most people some of the time; and today you can also fool most of the people most of the time.

    As ensconced in communist Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the new Democratic Party has thoroughly embraced its dictum ‘Accuse others of what you are guilty.’  Nowhere has this been more profoundly demonstrated than over the last decade as the Democrats have started their short march to socialism.  The notion of socialism was anathema in post-war American politics as demonstrated by almost daily reports of ruinous suppression of all human rights and freedoms that our Cold War enemies were imposing on their citizens.  Now, going on three generations of the Left’s dominance in public classrooms, the nature of socialism has been obfuscated in the American mind so that at least half of our citizens view it as another viable form of governance that we should perhaps try.

    All this has been built on a complex façade of lies designed to install a political monopoly based on constantly customized collective ideologies du jour from the Democrat Party that cascade through the various channels of the now propagandized lamestream media.  A partial list of these very large, significant, and nationally consequential lies includes –

    1. Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election;
    2. Democrats are not taking America into socialism cum Marxism;
    3. C19 from a Wuhan virology lab has been a baseless rightwing conspiracy;
    4. HCQ and IVT are not useful for fighting C19;
    5. Today China is not America’s mortal enemy;
    6. Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon;
    7. Our Mexican border is closed and secure;
    8. There is no human crisis at our southern border;
    9. Raising taxes and regulations does not impact economic behavior;
    10. The 6jan21 Capitol invasion was a planned insurrection to topple government;
    11. BLM is a protest movement and not a Marxist political organization;
    12. America continues plagued by systemic racism; no progress made since 1964;
    13. America’s Left and its corporatist allies have not rolled back 1A rights and practiced cancel culture;
    14. The systematic destruction of black families and perpetuation of urban ghettos is the Republicans’ fault;
    15. Rolling back 2A rights from law abiding citizens will eliminate ‘gun violence’ such as ghetto murders and mass shootings;
    16. Police have been purposefully murdering blacks;
    17. America’s colleges don’t have racist admissions policies and welcome free speech;
    18. The biggest existential threat to America is climate change;
    19. There is a scientific consensus that preventable manmade global warming is occurring;
    20. The great American experiment was founded on the racist principle, promotion, and practice of slavery; today Critical Race Theory correctly teaches that America is still a racist country, and its teaching is not anti-American propaganda.

    And finally, perhaps the biggest, most damaging, and enduring lie is that the solution to the all of humanity’s problems requires our embrace of collectivist governance at its most comprehensive scale possible.  There, the admitted goal is achieving a Marxist-Leninist society populated by the “communist Man”, at which time government will naturally dissolve as the then altruistic humanity marches joyously into a future of eternal peace and plenty.  (A similar list is always invited from our left-leaning readers.)

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    44 comments on The Evil Party Marches On (updated 4jun21)

  • Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

    George Rebane

    MemorialDay2011

    Most but not all died to save America from a calamitous tyranny; many have also died for America to remain as the world’s white hat hegemon.  On this day we gratefully remember and honor them all.

    Posted at

    in

    , ,
    3 comments on Memorial Day – 31 May 2021

  • ‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

    George Rebane

    Scholar and commentator Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a biography of economist Thomas Sowell, one of the country’s most celebrated conservative academics and intellectuals.  Progressives accuse Sowell’s perspectives on race in America as “going against the grain of fellow African-Americans.”  That on its face is wrong, as Riley points out in Sowell’s own words during a Charlie Rose interview – “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.” (more here)

    A main thesis of Sowellian thought on race is that successful racial/ethnic groups in America have assumed their places in our pluralistic society by relying on their own resources and means, and not waiting for the dominant culture to provide them special dispensations to smooth the ‘E pluribus unum’ road to assimilated equality.  “If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes of self-reliance”.

    Sowell has also maintained that “government has a role to play in social mobility, albeit a limited one, and incentives matter”, but he remains worried about “handouts that ask little or nothing of the recipient, and thus risk creating dependency”.  Thanks to the Democrats’ imbued plantation mentality on the nation’s blacks, that kind of dependency has now been created and etched in stone as the foundational principle of modern black politics – white supremacists have taken the blacks’ share of the common weal, and through the practice of ‘systemic racism’ deny blacks the ability to garner their fair share of the nation’s riches.  Hence, America must be fundamentally transformed so that a more comprehensive and encompassing government can then use its gun to force an equitable redistribution.  The Left teaches that is the only way to achieve social justice in the land.

    As a concluding thought, Rebane Doctrine holds that to the extent that systemic racism can be shown to exist in America, it is practiced and maintained by the country’s elitist Left (both black and white) with the unwitting support of their purposely under-educated legions of urban African-Americans.  Our main street whites have long been indifferent to the racial make-up of their neighbors, team mates, fellow workers, and even spouses.  Nowhere has this been more demonstrated than in our post-war military.  A litmus test for the end of such racism will be a time when we no longer require organizations, institutions, and agencies to have race-specific names, race-based memberships, and that provide race-based dispensations.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    8 comments on ‘The Soul of Black Conservatism’

  • Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

    If "being shot is a risk police officers take with the job", then isn't being shot a risk criminals take when breaking the law?

    George Rebane

    Tomorrow our Left will celebrate the life of George Floyd on the anniversary of his death last year in the custody of the Minneapolis police.  The ‘celebration’ itself is a specious undertaking of political propaganda at its most blunt delivery while cloaked in the highest level of obfuscation for the nation’s hoi polloi.  Mr Floyd was a career petty criminal and drug addict, in and out of jails, who devoted his life to victimizing fellow blacks.  His unfortunate death at the hands of white police officers set in motion a perfect storm that has been used by Democrats, cum socialists and communists, to convince the country’s lightly read that America remains a deeply racist country with persecuted minorities, especially our African-Americans, whose lot has not improved since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Huckster Al Sharpton will feature prominently in the coming kabuki, as will President Biden’s White House meeting with the Floyd family to assure all the country’s blacks it is America’s racist Right that has deprived them of their ‘fair share’, and has kept them suffering on the plantation all these decades.

    Victor Davis Hanson (here) and Bret Weinstein (here) whose essays have both hit it “outta da park” according to a longtime commenter, who again joins with RR’s cohort of other astute commenters who regularly bring to our readers’ attention significant commentaries that reveal and characterize these historic times, during which our country is rent and the world order is changing.  These pages have featured both writers over the years, and again their recent contributions do not disappoint.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    81 comments on Scattershots – 24may21 (updated 31may21)

  • Sandbox – 22may21

    [My ongoing reunification commentaries saga with The Union augments what we’ve discovered in these pages – that grassroots leftwingers have no clue about the kind of America that their elite leadership has chosen for us, and are now implementing through a bevy of misguided policies not experienced in decades.  They’re ignorant of it because their more recent schooling did not reveal collectivist objectives, or because they only consume lamestream outlets which dutifully deny that the Democrats seek to instill the trappings of collectivism in the America they intend to uniformly pauper (equity) with their socialist nostrums.  These assume the classic historical format of the Left, applied devastatingly over the last century, that includes summarily politicizing science, education, and economics to fit their overarching narrative.  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

  • Systemic Racism in America

    George Rebane

    Systemic racism is alive and well in America, and it has been in a fine fettle for most of the last fifty years.  We have our progressive and Marxist neighbors to thank for bringing it to our attention, only not in the way that they have massaged the national message.  All of our divers ethnic groups are aware of what the euphemistically labeled ‘Section 8’ promotions, admissions, awards, distributions, recognitions, … have been all about.  (I believe the origin of this label generalized from ‘Section 8 set asides’ in a HUD regulation that would assure minorities and low income applicants would get their share in certain kinds of contracting and allocations.)  Black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and the late Walter Williams deplored Section 8 advancements, not only for their racism, but for the explicit message that our African-Americans are somehow intellectually inferior and need special favorable dispensations to enable them to approach par with the other racial groups that participate in our public forums.

    In our land over the years Section 8 advancements have been brought to bear to a fare-thee-well.  We all have seen it, and now witness its application in steroids.  (Un/fortunately, my professional experiences also abound in this realm.  And these have obviously shaped my socio-political beliefs.) Today even the simplest of statistical tests will confirm that the public face of our society is racially composed and biased.  The histrionics of the current ‘woke culture’ daily exposes a bevy of new insane interpretations of our language, America’s traditional culture, along with lunatic efforts to amplify systemic racism to bring about ‘equity’, the new scourge of progressive social engineering.

    The resulting intellectual rot our Left is rapidly inducing into all of our institutions has, of course, already swept through academe, wreaked havoc in transforming capitalism into corporatism, seeped into the very fiber of our military, and today is finally broaching the formerly secure intellectual ramparts of our technical disciplines.  As we now see, equity is Section 8’s bastard issue.

    A specific example that clearly illustrates the above is found in today’s academe – specifically, in math education.  Powerline presents the evidence in ‘Math is hard – hardest of all for the Left’.  From there we learn “that certain Virginia public school districts (and others elsewhere in the country) will discontinue advanced math classes, because (of) ‘equity’, and the University of California will permanently discontinue using the SAT for admission purposes.”  The graphic below explains the Left’s concern.  (Click on image for a larger presentation.)

    SATscores

    The article by Steven Hayward goes on to explain, “If there’s one thing the left can’t abide at the moment, it is unequal racial results in achievement tests—tests that, let us recall, were largely invented by the liberal establishment decades ago as a means of making meritocracy count for more than family connections, private school pedigree, and so forth. It is not surprising that the left is turning on meritocracy right now.”

    To further emphasize the extent of African-American and Hispanic academic deficits, which must be hidden/ignored, take a look at the graphic below that contains a SAT performance data matrix from the DoJ’s recent investigation of Yale’s admission practices.  Note the obvious bias in the admission of blacks and Latinos.  Only 20.18% of whites in the 10th decile (the top 10% of students’ SAT scores) were admitted, whereas 60% of similarly scoring blacks were admitted.  The admission rate for blacks did not sink to the level of the top admission rate for whites until the black students’ scores were in the 5th decile (in the lower half of test scores) where their admission rate was still 20.85%, higher than that of the highest scoring whites.

    YaleAdmissions

    Here then we see one of the actual faces of existential systemic racism that has been resurrected in America.  This is the decades-long fruit of Democrat public policies, especially those promoted by their virulent Marxist anti-American wing under the new cynical rubric of ‘equity’.  To continue in power and our country on the road to autocratic socialist mediocrity, the Democrats cannot afford to have America’s blacks and Hispanics understand what has been done to them since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  With the Left’s control of our educational institutions and the media, there is little chance for them to enjoy any ethnic and/or racial epiphanies anytime soon.  Thus, America’s systemic racism is not only sustained, but also assured growth.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , ,
    8 comments on Systemic Racism in America

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

23 comments on Toward Reunification, One More Time (updated 13jun21)