George Rebane

Trump’s C19 infection and hospital visit is now providing the Democrats and their lamestream lackeys their latest ration of rage.  Everyone of them with access to a mic or website is lambasting the president on why and how his encounter with the virus came about and was then dealt with.  In their eyes it was all wrong and laden with conspiracies.  Everything from when was the last negative test recorded, to super-spreading WH events, to how sick did the president really get, to the Walter Reed physicians are lying or at least prevaricating about his current condition, to … , and even that he took his mask off too soon when he stood on the WH balcony after returning home.  If we didn’t have so many double dummies registered to vote, the whole exercise by the Left would be patently silly, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Fake drivers licenses from China as reported (here) by FN – “In the first six months of 2020, Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly 20,000 counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses at Chicago’s O’Hare airport alone, according to a report.  The 19,888 licenses and other fake documents were included in 1,513 overseas shipments, mostly from China and Hong Kong, CBP said, according to FOX 5 in New York City. Others were from South Korea and Britain.  Ralph Piccirilli, CBP’s acting area port director in Chicago, called the counterfeits (made mostly for people in their twenties) ‘very realistic.’”  The add-on to this report is that the names on the licenses are phony, and yet all are registered to vote as Democrats.  For some odd reason, this news is not reported on MSNBC or CNN.  [7oct20 – According to a number of news and fact-checking outlets, the names are indeed phony, but there is no substantiating evidence that those phony names are registered to vote.]

'Polling Phollies' was a piece I posted on 4 September 2016 in the throes of the last election season.  It bears reading again in light of the feverish debate we are once more engaged in our Sandboxes.  From this commentary you can download a paper I wrote to clarify the error bounds on poll results.  The overlap of these error bounds are especially relevant when the polls return two-candidate results near the midpoint or 50-50 ratios.  For those who can understand the material, it should really take a lot of steam out of the results constantly reported and debated in the current comment streams.  But I think those comments may satisfy a different purpose than enlightening their readers.

[7oct20 update]  ‘Schools Tackle Racism’  Evanston, IL racist school superintendent Devon Horton is giving a dose of “equity for Black and brown students, for special education students, for our LGBTQ students”, by letting them have first dibs on limited classroom seating.  The rest can attend online.  He’s doing this because “a disproportionate number of Black and Latino students are struggling in school and it is that struggle—not their race—which will get them priority.”  Such an assessment, on its face, is both racist and false.  In Evanston schools these minority students have received the same educational advantages as everyone else.  They are doing poorly only because they are NOT “struggling” as so many minority students struggling to learn have successfully demonstrated across the country.  Horton’s racist claim is that these students need special dispensation because they have a learning deficit apparently due to their skin color or sexual preference (special education kids are a different story).  Upon closer examination, it is again culture that determines kids’ – minority or otherwise – attitude toward education and learning, racist school policies will not. (more here and here)

What is a nation?  Samuel Stone of the Charlemagne Institute takes a good cut at an answer (here) that more than less ties with what I have proposed in Rebane Doctrine.  Stone starts by correctly positing that ‘nation’ is one of the words that today has lost its meaning; not that people can’t point and say ‘that’s a nation’, but because they can’t give it a literal definition.  One of the main determinants that a nation must have is a defined territory with secured borders within which its state (i.e. government) is sovereign.  He then goes on to cite our Founders and their political philosophers about the shared traits of a people which comprise, occupy, and own the nation – traits like a common history, values, beliefs, traditions, language, … .  And under it all is a foundation of justice as “the end of government” (Federalist 51).  However, that view of justice must be held in common by the citizens of a nation; multiple or polarized views of justice in a land cannot hold it together.  In our scripture (Mark 3:25, et al) Jesus said it best, “If a house is divided against itself, it cannot stand.”

[9oct20 update]  Today’s Nevada County’s Covid count is reported by the crack journalists at The Union.  From its front page we learn that there have been 20,735 recorded cases of the infection this year, with 18 cases currently active.  Two of these remain hospitalized, with the C19 body count that now stands at eight.  These numbers are mainly worthless, save the number who have died.  Presumably, the dead were correctly diagnosed and counted.  But given the real nature of the disease, and its wholesale misrepresentation that has led to an historical international panic, the recorded and currently active cases are totally unreliable, therefore meaningless.  The number hospitalized speaks only to the misunderstanding by local health officials about susceptibility to and the virality of this latest form of a corona virus, and their consequential draconian measures against our local businesses.  Bottom line, there is even less there to worry about C19 than meets the eye.  More on this later.