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  • Scattershots – 31oct20 (updated 2nov20)

    George Rebane

    A progressive argues that America’s income inequality has actually increased under Obama, instead of having decreased per their national narrative.  This is shown in RL Crabb’s comment stream (here) where I contended with a typically snarky liberal about the Gini Index worldwide rankings.  I used a 2007 CIA table that gave GI = 0.45 for the US, and the liberal used the more recent Wikipedia value of 0.47.  GI ranges between 0 (total equality) and 1 (total inequality).  In reality, GI changes slowly because it reflects the slowly changing income distribution over an entire economy.  The liberal then argued that America’s income distribution became more unequal under Obama.  BTW, my point on Bob’s blog was to illustrate that the GI is not a reliable indicator of autocratic vs liberal governance, showing that both kinds of countries had GIs both greater and less than that of the US.  This point was totally lost on the liberal genius.

    Lest we forget –

    WizofId_voting

    The Left claims that the Hunter Biden scandal is a manufactured ‘October Surprise’.  Seamus Bruner is the associate director of research at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) counters, “A lot of people think this is, you know, (an) October surprise or just for the election to tarnish Joe Biden’s name … These stories were released in 2018 in a book called ‘Secret Empires’. … Joe Biden wasn’t a candidate, we didn’t ever think Joe Biden would run for president, we kind of just followed the money.”

    I love capitalism.  We just got back from the weekly shopping at Safeway.  I bitched to the manager last time that they were always out of tonic water; they should change their inventory policy on that SKU.  He thanked me and promised he’d solve the problem.  And sure enough, today there was tonic water galore.  Also, their first edition of plastic grocery bags were on the fringe of fragile.  They saw the problem and had their supplier up the heft, and now we have plastic bags so sturdy that they are reusable.  In more regulated economies – those I’ve experienced in Europe – if you lodged such a complaint to a clerk, you’d get the gimlet for being a disaffected nonconformist.  And in places like the USSR/Russia, your complaint would be noted on your state dossier for future reference as a noncompliant misfit.  In North Korea the Ugly Fat Kid would have you and your family being re-educated in a labor camp.  Guess which of our politically polarized poles likes the UFK’s solution.   

    [2nov20 update] CDC-attributed corona deaths are a Big Lie according to their own accounting. (more here) It’s the money and lamestream promotion of the Democrats that give rise to maintaining one of this year’s biggest lies in order to influence the election in favor of Bumblebrain.  (H/T to reader)

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  • Sandbox – 31oct20

    [Halloween will be extended by several weeks this year as the scary election returns and adjudicated ruling start coming in.  In the meantime, I invite those prognosticators of the presidential race to use the spreadsheet with assignable probabilities to express their views.  Using that model, instead of the limited information point estimate maps provided online, allows us to also calculate the chances that either candidate can win, and let’s us see how the probabilities shift as the state’s shift their electors.  The innumerates keep fooling themselves that our universe is constructed with predestined point quantities, instead of an unending sea of probability distributions that define all apprehended knowledge, and from which reality is sampled with the passage of time. Gjr

    https://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2020/07/election2020-electoral-college-predictor.html ]

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  • Biden Family Scandal Debunked

    George Rebane

    News media’s search for balance is an errand for hubristic fools.

    DonRogersHere I am, writing this mea culpa with a red face.  Over the past week or so, I was among the millions of rightwingers who took in the news – hook, line, and sinker – about the business dealings of Hunter, Jim, and Joe (“the big guy”) Biden.  This morning my eyes were opened by an incisive and revealing op-ed piece – ‘Never mind COVID, how about Hunter?’ – in the 30oct20 Union by its publisher Don Rogers.  There he details a vast bamboozle, now in full swing, managed by Team Trump in the attempt to again illegitimately influence the election.  Reading the tightly worded expose, one immediately sees how these shenanigans all fit together to produce a conspiracy of size, depth, and scope never attempted in the history of our Republic.

    The first thing I learned from Mr Rogers’ piece was that the country cannot continue executing its C19 response while also attending to the Biden scandal news.  I must admit, I never thought of that important detail.  We live and learn, when our betters shine the light.

    The whole conspiracy apparently started by a rightwing Mac repair shop owner producing a laptop he claimed belonged to Hunter.  We should have known that this was a plant because it’s very unlikely that any “Trump follower” and “patriot” would ever operate a computer repair shop – a dead giveaway.

    And then more evidence of a bamboozle when Trump’s lawyer Giuliani was given a copy of the alleged emails supposedly on Hunter’s laptop.  Everyone knows that Giuliani is in the bag and easy to involve in any of Trump’s shenanigans.  And everyone knows that Giuliani in his travels to Ukraine and points east has already been compromised by the Russians, and is now one of Putin’s Pals.

    Where it gets really interesting is the report that the FBI was given the computer, and has had it for a better part of a year.  But that dog won’t hunt either.  We know how the FBI has been complicit in a lot of underhanded doings; it wouldn’t take any silver-tongued devil, say, like Bill Barr (no doubt in on it from the start), to talk the FBI’s leadership to join the conspiracy.  Again, I was blinded by FBI Dir Wray et al announcing that Hunter has been under criminal investigation since last year.  A clever ruse that has convinced too many of us unsuspecting naïfs.

    What really should also have alerted all of us to the magnitude of the conspiracy was how Trump paraded DNI Ratcliffe in front of the nation to announce that the entire intelligence community had analyzed all the doings, and had not been able to find any Russian connection.  That that was clearly a lie came to light when we heard of the letter from 50 retired intelligence sector managers.  These distinguished gentlemen assured the country that the laptop and emails affair had all the earmarks of a Russian operation.  In fact, so much so, that any reasonable person would agree that no further evidence was needed to prove that point.  Again, plain as day, the allegation of so many retired intelligence professionals should have, then and there, made clear to all what was really going down.  But I and people like me just went ahead believing.  (Readers know that I was also bamboozled by all the findings discrediting the Steele dossier – too soon old, too late smart.)

    What really took us in were the obviously placed reports of other colleagues of Hunter who had received some of the alleged emails.  To include such unknowns in the game was a no-brainer.  The real clever and well-thought-out ruse was the whole affair involving retired Navy officer Tony Bobulinsky.  Bobulinsky, supposedly CEO of a Hunter set-up company, was put up in a LA hotel room in front of Tucker Carlson (already another dead giveaway) to sing like a bird.  Some may argue that since Bobulinsky, from a long and honorable military family, was already wealthy, therefore he would not be on the take for a few more mere millions.  But we all know that rich guys are greedy and forever on the take; it really didn’t take much to get him to play along.  Anyway, the entire Bobulinsky thing is a sideshow and charade, especially his claim of discussing the whole alleged scam with Joe Biden himself, and now adding on that the FBI has listed him as a “material witness” in its criminal investigation of the Bidens.  The whole country knows what a straight-up guy VP Joe has been, a man who would never be involved in crass undertakings such as family-wide influence peddling.  Again, another missed dead giveaway.

    And now we hear reports that the NY Post, the rightwing rag that broke the story, contracted a well-known cybersecurity expert to authenticate Hunter’s Burisma emails (more here).  That desperate ploy itself should have put the kibosh on the whole conspiracy.  But no, all this time we have had more rightwing media outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal acting out their roles like a bought-and-paid-for chorus giving credence to the fabricated dirty linens manufactured in Russia, and coordinated here from the White House.

    Involving those major discredited rightwing news sources should have put paid on the whole sordid affair.  This was made doubly clear by the entire cadre of progressive networks, cable news, and newspapers bravely and professionally refusing to cover any of this insidious conspiracy, lest it poison the minds of the more malleable folks so close to the election.  I see this now as a public service of the first rank, and have to admit that it shades all of my misdirected diatribes over the years against the journalistic profession and our Fourth Estate – one of our sacred and celebrated public institutions.  And were it not for courageous and diligent journalists like The Union’s Don Rogers, so many of us would never have been the wiser.  For me, it’s better late than never.

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  • Misguided Public Safety Power Shutoffs

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 October 2020.]

    Dear Gov Newsom – This is an open letter to you from an old and very disgruntled citizen who has spent the last 63 years of his life in this beautiful state.  During these decades I went to school, earned my living, raised my family here, and watched the steady decline of a once golden state.  And I can attest that it truly was the Golden State because I was there.

    Today, after decades of a virtual political monopoly in Sacramento, our state has landed on the bottom of the barrel with several other equally discredited states.  We purposely raised our taxes to the highest levels, became the leader in regulatory burdens heaped on our businesses and homeowners, and are now the hands down mecca of the nation’s welfare recipients – one out of three live here.  We lead the nation in the number of homeless, and invite their filthy tent favelas that now stretch from the coastal cities to the Sierra foothills.  Our food and fuel prices have sky rocketed to the highest in the nation.  Our roads, bridges, and other infrastructures are in third-world disrepair, public employee pensions are unfunded to the tune of unpayable billions, and businesses and middle-class taxpayers are departing in droves to greener pastures.

    Add to this California’s highest electricity costs and disastrous power outages that now resemble the availability of electricity in second and third world countries, and you almost have the complete picture of where we are today and the direction we’re headed tomorrow.  (more here) And that, because the state’s legislative and regulatory pipeline is chuck full of a lot more of what already pains us.  But governor, this is just a short summary of California’s deficits and decline, about which long and detailed books have been written.  On top of all this, the state’s political leaders and bureaucrats have created a problem that’s even more up close and personal, one that affects all Californians, especially those of us who live in the rural counties.

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 25oct20 (updated 28oct20)

    George Rebane

    Exciting times, youngest granddaughter Fi just gave birth to Maybelle at Sierra Memorial to our fifth great-grandchild.  Daddy Shawn was there to catch it on the first bounce or sooner.  They’re not allowing visitors during these trying times, so our family's welcoming committee will have to form when the new mama and baby get discharged.  Oh well.

    Dodgers v Rays at 2-2.  From the record, the chances that the winner of the 2-2 game goes on to win the series is 65% or about two out of three.  I dug up this stat to see how close it matched the chances for two equally capable teams each having a 50-50 chance of winning a subsequent game.  Going into the 3-2 game, the ‘3’ team has a 75% chance of taking the series, and the ‘2’ team’s chance is 25%.  So the record book’s 65% stat of actual 3-2 winners is a mite low, but still commanding.  Were we to do a little bit of probability math and compute what the actual probability of the series champ winning the subsequent games that yield the recorded 65% stat, we would get 41%, or about two out of five, as the probability of winning each subsequent game.  This says that during the history of baseball, winners of the 2-2 games, those who went on to win the series 65% of the time, were actually the poorer of the two teams who just managed to make it to the 2-2 game score in the series.  That explains that if they were better to at least be 50-50 equal with the other team, they would have won the series 3 out of 4 times instead of 2 out 3 times.  Throw a brainbone around that.

    [26oct20 update]  The DJA is down 2.50% (707 points) as I write; supposedly on fears that there will be no stimulus bill, Nancy won’t allow it, and the "uptick" of C19 cases.  A week before the election, and things are looking dim for President Trump and the Republicans.  It reminds me again of the difference between our polarized politics.  One side has a tougher row to hoe since it bases its message on building and growing the fortunes of Americans.  And that’s hard, especially when the other side does all it can to diminish, dampen, and destroy the opportunities for all, save their elites – especially their black constituents whom they have had in the bag since the Great Society days.  It’s much harder to build than to tear down.  With all this news the Democrats are dancing in the streets. 

    The WH correctly maintains that we will “defeat” C19, but we “cannot control it”.  Unfortunately, to most people this will seem like a conundrum – how can we defeat something we can’t control?  Of course, the Dems and their lamestream media will make the most out of this statement, claiming it’s proof of Trump’s failed C19 response policy.  Those more used to critical thought realize that we have managed to defeat (with vaccines and therapeutics) many diseases in the sense that we can go on with our lives in a normal manner without the ability to control when and where any such disease will again turn up.  The list of such defeated but uncontrolled bugs and viruses is long.  This statement from the WH is meant to promote getting back to normal sooner than later, but that’s not how it will be spun to the all-believing hoi polloi.  Sad, but it is what it is.

    A new study proclaims that “2.5 Million Person-Years of Life Have Been Lost Due to COVID-19 in the United States”.  We read (here) that Harvard Medical School geneticist Stephen Elledge, says he did the analysis to correct "the false impression that the impact on society of these deaths is minimal" because they are concentrated among the elderly.  Actually, Dr Elledge misses the point completely with his mathematical manipulation of C19 mortality statistics.  His study does not consider who actually suffers the loss of so many million life-years lost.  By any known metric our society (and world) is not lacking for the billions of life-years lost through whatever causes.  However, one can instead make the case that our society and world (i.e. the aggregate cohort of survivors) do suffer today from too many life-years lived. (more here)

    [27oct20 update] Rebane Doctrine re status of country correctly summarized in ‘The American Experiment is on Life Support’ by Andrew Michta, dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.  And then there’s our eternally confused progressive Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer, in whose ‘Why does ‘socialism is bad’ myth continue?’ he demonstrates again that he understands neither socialism, capitalism, America’s governance, nor human nature.  The ways he achieves this state of ignorance are too many to count.

    Thanksgiving 2020 is cancelled for all intents and purposes.  Gov Newsom has done it again.  In our progressives' search for ever more ignorant, harmful, and useless public policies, this 9oct20 ‘Guidance for Private Gatherings’ from the California Health and Human Services Agency takes the cake.  But not to worry.  Give it a couple of days, and an even more stupid one will soon be coming down from the heights of Mt Sacramento.  (H/T to reader)

    Thousand plus looters rampage through Philadelphia stores “for hours” as a smattering of assembled police stand by and do nothing (more here).  Jim Kenney, Philadelphia’s Democratic mayor, saw fit to order no enhanced police presence as leftwing rioters ransacked store after store.  The message to fellow Democrat mayors is clear – no need to enforce the law and take a political hit from the Left, since the Democratic leadership and the lamestream media will do its job of calling the whole thing a ‘peaceful protest’ and sweep the rest under its self-censoring teppich.

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  • Journalism’s unstoppable ‘Leftward Ho!’

    George Rebane

    [Apologies for the late posting of this commentary.  My writing workflow always has several pieces in concurrent development, and sometimes one of them with time-dependent content gets overlooked for too long, but one that I still want to have archived as part of RR’s record.]

    California’s passing of a racial diversity law that prescribes the composition of boards of corporations headquartered in the state.  This new legislation, now signed into law, is one the most blatant racist mandates by government that the morals-bleating Left have imposed on residents.  (more here)  This law joins the gender-biased legislation that requires female representation on boards and takes another step away from merit-based make-ups of publicly traded corporate boards.

    There is no question that such laws continue to hobble the engines of wealth creation in California, but wealth creation has never been the objective of socialist governments.  The state has assumed the mantle of leadership in the Union for destructive collectivist initiatives designed to fundamentally transform America from a capitalist economy and society to one of comprehensive government planning and control.

    Along this road to autocracy, we encounter questions raised for years on RR.  Now others are beginning understand the societal benefits of more culturally coherent societies, as we witness the daily destruction of every aspect of America’s traditions, cultural values, and institutions (more here).  Our Fourth Estate has long abandoned their traditional role in bringing reliable and timely news to their audiences.  They all are invested in one or the other side of a terminally polarized citizenry, and there is less and less of the ‘other side’ remaining in the cadre of media outlets.  No conservative broadcast outlets remain.  There is only Fox News which used to be a solidly “fair and balanced” outlet that also gave conservative voices a podium.  That stance is now fading as FN succumbs to the fear of being left behind in the virtue signaling competition, as it includes ever more liberal talking heads and left-tainted news copy.  When Rupert made his liberal son Lachlan CEO of Fox Corporation that owns FN, he started revamping both the Fox News and Fox Business cable outlets.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox -25oct20

    [That our news media have no desire to follow-up the Hunter Biden email revelations of Biden family corruption is a bigger untold story than anything else so far connected with this sordid affair.  And that includes the (non)response of the FBI and the 50 former intelligence officials' successful attempt to disseminate fake news about the provenance of the emails on Hunter's laptop (here).  As far as our lamestream media are concerned, the US is now officially a banana republic in how its citizens are fed 'information' that they are to believe.  And no one, not the Republicans nor Fox News, is making much beyond clucking their tongues at what appears to be a super-scandal stillborn.  gjr]

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  • A Purposely Politicized “Pseudo-pandemic”

    ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson

    George Rebane

    Today reporting on the corona or Covid-19 virus (C19) resembles a chaotic cacophony.  I wanted to pull together some salient factors that help me sort things out in this blizzard of mostly junk journalism, agenda driven by election year politics.  So, with apologies where needed, I offer the following potpourri.

    We have analyzed the science and response policies invoked by the C19 outbreak twenty ways from Sunday, and the evidence continues to mount that this year the globe has been subjected to a “pseudo-pandemic” driven by politics and political/ideological agendas.  The science behind C19 is complex and has been mostly banished to be brought up when a political statement needs some additional support.  Then the science is almost always misrepresented or abbreviated beyond recognition (more below).  And there’s the real problem, the science is beyond the attention spans and comprehension of 99.99% of the people who just listen to the loudest and oft repeated voices.

    (more…)

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  • RR commenters are a blessing

    Live with those from whom you can learn; let friendly intercourse be a school for knowledge, and social contact a school for culture; to make teachers of your friends is to join the need of learning to the joy of converse.  Gracian #11

    George Rebane

    In blog years RR is now considered to be somewhere between long-of-tooth and ancient, along with its host in human years.  Rummaging around the very accessible archive of this online publishing effort, I always find it remarkable to rediscover the breadth of topics we have covered to various levels of depth.  And I’m not only talking about the almost 3,400 posted commentaries, but the extensive comment streams appended to most of the commentaries -  comment streams in which readers expand and amplify the topic, and provide other readers not only with their own insights, but also with informative links that substantiate their assertions.

    Many of the over 175,000 (to date) appended comments are themselves lengthy essays, sometimes longer than the topical post itself, that highlight the quality of thought by their authors.  And I mean to include in this cohort of thoughtful scribblers a few of our liberal commenters, those who have taken the time to deliver extended arguments for their positions that go beyond countering snarks and ad hominems.

    In its 14th year this blog continues to be a welcoming arena for ideas, opinions, and apologetics from all quarters.  To be sure, ours is an arena in which every contributor should be prepared for dharma battle (q.v.).  And no one should take umbrage that their ideas are assaulted, instead such umbrage should be reserved for ideas ignored.

    That said, I thank all RR readers and commenters for their precious hours that they have spent over the years in these pages.

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  • Scattershots – 20oct20 (updated 22oct20)

    George Rebane

    This afternoon the FBI and DoJ stated their concurrence with DNI Ratcliffe’s revelation (here) that the Hunter Biden laptop email scandal had nothing to do with or was any part of Russia’s disinformation campaign to undermine confidence in our November election.  The laptop emails are real.  Claiming otherwise over the last week has been a prime example of the Democrats’ Big Lie campaign, which here will be corroborated by our leftwing readers practicing their SNEP (Socialist Narrative Exclusion Principle) responses.

    [21oct20 update]  Continuing proof that most (not all) liberals are functional idiots.  To this day, these mental midgets do not understand that fascists are collectivists of the autocratic cum tyrannical variety, who work for a leviathan government that directly controls most of its industry, imposes stacks of regulations, is anti-religion, collects enormous taxes, suppresses individual liberties, and maintains a large internal police apparatus to enforce the whole thing.  This is exactly the opposite of the kind of governance that rightwing conservatives desire.  In today’s 21oct20 Union we have an example of one of these midgets, a Mr Robert Lobell, who labors mightily to present ‘building evidence’ that President Trump is a fascist (here), and instead presents evidence that he doesn’t have a clue about what is going on in Washington, among other places.  But he does describe precisely the major tenets of the now likely Harris/Biden disaster.

    The Hunter Biden email scandal is mounting with the FBI’s “nothing to add to Ratcliffe’s statement”, more email recipients confirming veracity of the collection, confirmation of the laptop’s chain of custody, Secret Service matching travel logs, documented ‘pay for play’ shares, … .  With all this coming out, Bumblebrain has now stated that there is “no basis” for the claim that his son profited from trading influence with foreign governments.  And to keep things as quiet as possible, the overwhelming share of America’s news industry, affectionately known as the lamestream media, does not even make a peep about what is clearly the greatest corruption high-level corruption scandal in modern US history.  SNEP on steroids.  (more  here, here, here, and here)

    They really don’t know squat.  We just got back from a political luncheon meeting where part of the conversation revolved around the dissemination of the Hunter Biden emails.  And a common experience of some of the assembled was that their liberal friends literally knew nothing of what’s going on with Hunter’s laptop and the emails on it.  One couple has a son who works on the staff of a Democrat state office holder.  They asked his thoughts on the matter, and he drew a complete blank.  We are now effectively subjected to a Deep State controlled news and entertainment media enterprise comprised of what can best be described as the vast Progeny of Pravda.  When political workers of one side are so insular in their knowledge of national happenings, then control of the electorate for all intents and purposes is complete.  The rest of us are really just pissing into the wind.

    [22oct20 update] The real Russian colluders have turned out to be the Democrats; we’ve been aware of this for at least two years.  Hillary’s misdeeds are known and await indictment.  The newest pals of all things Russian and Chinese are members of the Biden cosa nostra, and it turns out there are plenty of them.  More evidence of how that group of grifters operated for years is now turning up daily.  Given the upcoming election, the stimulus bill negotiations, and other divers things to attend to, the Dems are having a hard time fitting in all the denials and accusations of a vast Republican “smear campaign”.  Typical of the daily fare now is this piece just out – ‘New Documents Shed Light On Hunter Biden’s Links To Russian Billionaire Oligarch’.  The difference between the Democrats’ “evidence” and evidence of the misdeeds of the Clinton Clan and the Biden Bunch is that the latter is specific and verifiable.  All that’s now required is the growth of some political balls to get it all in front of a grand jury.

     

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