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  • Scattershots – 23jan21 (updated 27jan21)

    When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.” – Barton Swaim

    George Rebane

    California hides C19 data to insulate Newsom’s disastrous pandemic response policies from criticism.  Surprisingly, AP broke this story (more here), and the rest of the lamestream immediately clammed up about it.  As usual with the Left, this practice is well-established in all autocracies wherever they are implemented.  Don’t let the public discover that their government is wrongheaded, stupid, pernicious, or a sordid amalgam of all three.  Newsom is an established idiot with a penchant for control.  For almost the entire past year his stratagems against C19 have been totally ineffective or markedly underperformed those of almost all other states.  You have to be idiots-on-steroids like Cuomo and DeBlasio to outperform Newsom in governance.  (It takes a union-educated progressive not to know that California is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged one-party autocracy.  And California has them by the millions.)

    Speaking of Newsom and the nationalization of California’s failures, here is a compendium of them by CA Assemblyman Kevin Kiley in a 21jan21 letter that he sent to President Biden.  In it he responds to Newsom’s plea to Biden to implement the Golden State’s disasters nationwide.  Have you signed the petition to recall Newsom?

    Higher wages increase profits – well, at least “at times”, according to a 23jan21 piece (here) by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca in which they describe ‘efficiency-wage theory’.  This theory by some prominent leftwing economists proposes that paying workers more will increase retention and productivity.  And the cost benefits from these increases, for certain industries, primarily the 'shag and stack' kind, it may boost the bottom line for a while.  However, the special cases in which this may be true are few and far in between, and most certainly don’t recommend a national minimum wage policy.  Leftists who believe that some arbitrary amount, today $15/hr, will result in workers happy dancing in the streets are the same ones who still believe in perpetual motion, and that the moon is 1/49th the size of earth, even though it is further away.  Henry Ford’s raising assembly workers' wages by almost double and reducing work from 9 to 8hrs/day did indeed increase productivity and retention enough to more than pay for itself.  But that was primarily due to the long lines of applicants outside the factory gates to replace those Ford would fire for not working their butts off for the firm.  This is not today's labor market.  Everything has its market price, and no matter how much governments attempt to mangle those prices, in the end reality will rule.  Biden’s Bunch knows none of this, and will do its damnest to show all how levitation by bootstraps will work.

    [24jan21 update]  On vaccine distribution and administration, under its disastrous Democrats California now ranks dead last in getting the stuff out to the people who need it.  And double-dummy Newsom writes Biden to have the nation start following California's lead on public policies a bit more closely.  I guess he figgers that if the rest of the country gets as crappy as we are, then Californians won't notice the difference, and they won't have anyplace else to go, and maybe we'll even stop the recall petitions now circulating around the state.

    [25jan21 update]  Bumblebrain’s latest Big Lie is one that is attributed to his victory over Trump, and also the ONLY thing the Dems could claim was his mandate from the electorate – to demonstrate how Trump was derelict in responding to C19, and to demonstrate how his administration will finally get the pandemic under control.  Well, as pointed out @914am below, he has no plan of his own that is better than what President Trump achieved with both the historically rapid development of multiple vaccines (Project Warp Speed), and the meticulously planned distribution of the vaccines to the states using military logistics.  What did the states do?  The Dem governed ones loudly declared that they didn’t trust Trump, and sat on their collective asses instead of preparing their states’ distribution plans.  Today most of their vaccines are still sitting on shelves and some are spoiling instead of saving lives.  But the bottom line for Bumblebrain is that his handlers have finally explained the matter to him, which is that he can do no better than Trump.  He admitted his Big Lie with “there's nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months”. So, on what he got elected, he can’t deliver.  Compare that to the share of promised accomplishments by his predecessor. (more here)

    For Sale – White Privilege Card.  I'm selling my white privilege card.  It's over 70 years old and still in mint condition. It has never been used.  Full disclosure – reason for selling is that it hasn't done a damn thing for me! No free college, no free food, no free housing, etc.  Prefer cash but would be willing to do an even trade for a different race card that is much more widely accepted!  Interested?  Contact me on my non-Obama cell phone that I pay for every month…  Serious buyers only!  (H/T to correspondent seeking a similar transaction.)

    [26jan21 update]  Dr Fauci has an intimate connection with the development of the Corona virus, a relationship that calls into question his continuing role in the Biden administration as the head of its task force to develop national response policies.  This was reported Sunday night by FN’s Steve Hilton, and comes as a shock/surprise to most of the country. (more here)  It will most interesting to see how the current administration handles what normally would be a politically hot potato, and, of course, how the lamestream lackies then subsequently report on it.  (H/T to reader.)

    [27jan21 update] ‘The 1776 Report’ by the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission arrived yesterday in the mail. (download report here)  This is a magnificent document that successfully counters the fanatically anti-American 1619 Project’s version of our country’s history and what our nation represents to the world. (more here) ‘1619’ forms the basis for a perverse curriculum that the country’s Left, supported by the Democratic Party, is injecting into our public schools as the main plank of its program to re-formulate our educational system according to the worldview and mandates of ‘critical race theory’ (full text pdf here).  For that reason, one of Biden’s first EOs was to shut down the 1776 Commission, and bury its work.  To those for whom the survival of the United States as a sovereign nation-state is paramount, ‘1619’ and CRT are manifestations of pure political evil.  Their intent is to fill the ranks of American citizens with people ‘educated’ to accept and comply with our collectivist elites, ensconced in the Democratic Party, whose aim is to meld what was America into a global amalgam of centrally-controlled satraps under a one-world government.  These are the times we live in.

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  • The Biden Bamboozle Begins

    George Rebane

    Actually, bamboozle is way too gentle of a descriptive for what was launched yesterday.  This commentary would actually find a better home on the next entry into our Dark Days Diary, nevertheless … .  Our new president spoke of stopping the lies inundating the nation, all the while heaping on new ones while bringing up old ones for another pass over the country’s psyche so that we could all unify in the glow of an inaugural speech that drove so many to tears, albeit for markedly different reasons.

    While Seattle again enjoys Antifa’s tender mercies – this time at the state’s Democratic HQ – the Left’s nationwide destructive and murderous riots of last year are either forgotten or repainted with a fresh new coat of lies, Biden’s lamestream (yes, it’s his now) plays the 6jan21 Capitol assault video over and over again as undisputable proof of where lies the real danger to America and democracy.  In his laughable attempt to focus on unifying the country, our new president is characterizing the country as in ruins and continuing crisis, all due to the mismanagement of his predecessor, who is the nation’s Supremacista Blanca El Primero.

    And all 75+ million of us who voted for him, and at least that many more of our families, all of whom supported his policies and accomplishments, these now also carry the scarlet letters that label us all as white supremacists, racists, nazis (small n), and incipient domestic terrorists.  For the Left we have become the country’s number one enemy to be sought out, identified, watched, isolated, and dealt with accordingly.  Apparently, we have always been there (as RR comment streams attest), but now Donald J Trump has outed us by rising up as our leader so that the politically proper and prudent could finally see those around them who visibly rose up to support and cheer him on.

    NGinDCjan2021

    By continually citing their carefully formulated versions of our pernicious beliefs in an historically false America and our ongoing unabashed public behavior, the new administration will be free to fumble forth with all of its failures pre-attributed to the disastrous legacy of Trump abetted by his minions, still free to roam the countryside perpetuating perfidy and lies to counter socially just progressive programs and initiatives.  This cannot and will not go on unanswered.

    Of course, given the recent tendentious behavior of our Hispanics and blacks, even their own traditional constituencies are not to be completely trusted.  The Left knows that these folks have been successfully bamboozled for years, and the possibility that they may now subscribe to a new pied piper is not to be discounted.

    But the 800lbs gorilla in the room remains the November election which more than half of Americans have beliefs ranging from its having unexplained irregularities to outright ballot stuffing fraud.  And all these feelings have been and continue to be reinforced by the establishment, first refusing to look at and substantively refute the presented evidence, and second then upping the ante to launch a national vilifying campaign against everyone who continues expressing concerns and thinks that the conduct of the 2020 election should get at least a small fraction of the kind of attention the Democrats mandated for the 2016 election in terms of countless congressional investigations, the involvement of DoJ and the FBI and its fraudulent use of FISA, various IGs looking into their spheres of purview, the Mueller special prosecutor investigation, and the still ongoing Durham probe.

    All we hear from the Dems and their nascent Biden administration is that only racists, insurrectionists, and seditious domestic terrorists remain interested in having a transparent examination of the evidence.  And, of course, no correctly thinking American should be beholden to such an irredeemable cohort of deplorables, no matter how many tens of millions they number.  The Democrats demonstrated that they can roll out a couple of divisions of armed National Guard troops at a moment’s notice if there is even a faint (unfounded?) hint of public opposition to their new power structure.  And in the meanwhile, as our liberal commenters remind us today, they will be taking our names and making lists for when the reckoning comes.  That is who they are and have always been, now it’s their time to flex some muscle and really kick ass.  This is their ‘unification’ program which will continue until we all unite to ‘Sieg heil!’ the victory of our new masters.

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  • Sandbox – 20jan21

    [From this day on, Pravda reigns.  gjr]

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  • Dark Days Diary – 18jan21 (updated 20jan21)

    “Leftists in this country claim that their violence is speech and our speech is violence.” – Daniel Horowitz

    George Rebane

    The Democrats and their corporatist allies are prepared to remove the First Amendment, launch a surge of prosecutions for what we have always considered free speech, and then have their lamestream assert that the First Amendment is still in force while jailing those who claim otherwise.  This will be but the first step on the path to abrogate our Constitution in its entirety.  When this comes to pass, anyone and everyone who resists this phase of fundamentally transforming America will be labeled a seditious insurrectionist, and treated accordingly.

    SnitchInvitation

    It appears now that the federal government deems everyone suspect of insurrection who attended the Washington pro-Trump rally.  Those who actually entered the Capitol, the people’s house, stand accused of insurrection.  The vandals who led the mob into the building while destroying and stealing property, and violating private spaces, deserve to be treated like the criminals they are.  However, there is no evidence that those few hundred(?) who also walked through then opened doors had any intention other than telling Congress that they were opposed to the ongoing certification of electoral votes which they firmly believed were tallied from an election abundantly laced with irregularities and fraud, the evidence of which was summarily rejected by the courts without examining the underlying substance.

    Now the nationwide manhunt is on for all those who walked in and milled around the Capitol on 6 January 2021.  True to Orwellian, Stalinist, and Stasi standards, fellow citizens are encouraged to report to the FBI anyone they know or think was there (DC, Mall, Capitol?) on that fateful day.  History shows what kind of countries such massive snitch programs have created.  And there is only one political party that wants to create a government with encompassing tentacles to effectively pursue such programs of persecution. (more here)

    Federal elections integrity is promoted by congressional Republicans with their introduction of their Save Democracy Act that “aims to close loopholes that prevent secure and fair general elections by strengthening voter registration verifications, narrowing rules for when and how mail-in ballots can be accepted, and mandating observers from each party is allowed to be present during polling and vote counting.”  Pew Research reports that only 5% of Trump voters and 64% of Biden voters thought the election was properly administered.  That’s a heap of folks who had less favorable opinions of how everything went down last November, and more than enough reason to do something positive to restore faith in the integrity of our elections.  Now let’s see how far the Democrats permit this and other such measures to proceed.  (more here)

    C19 vaccines continue to sit on shelves as most states have trouble getting the doses distributed to their inoculation sites.  Given the months of advance warning everyone received about when the vaccines would be available, most states sat on their butts instead of putting in place the needed procedures to get their residents vaccinated in a timely manner.  As we continue to note here, if there is any kind of problem in the land, look first to government as the source or cause of it, and you won’t have to look much further.  It turns out again that Texas leads and California lags – the correlation of performance with which party is in charge is striking, wonder why?  “Texas, with a population of some 29 million, has distributed just over 2 million doses and administered just under 1.2 million, as of Jan. 15, the CDC said. California, with 39.5 million people, has distributed over 3.5 million doses and administered just under 1.1 million.” (more here)

    [19jan21 update]  Since it became clear that Trump’s appeals failed to overturn Biden win, the share of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction jumped markedly.  Today, according to the recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll (here), two out of three Americans agree with that assessment.  In December 49% answered ‘wrong track’, which assessment increased to 65% this month, with 84% Republicans and 52% Democrats concurring.  Of course, both sides feel that their right tracks head in the opposite directions.  Yet another measure of the size of the gulf that separates us.

    ‘Will Covid-19 shake up capitalism?’ is a popular question today that is covered by James Macintosh of the London WSJ (here).  He cites the current move leftward toward socialism that is making many people rethink capitalism, especially during the mish-mash of dubious responses that governments have initiated to fight the pandemic.  As examples of crises that have resulted in major changes to political economics, Macintosh points to the Great Depression and FDR’s misguided responses that still echo through the decades.  Then there was WW2’s aftermath which created the British welfare state that almost bankrupted the country.  The runaway inflation of the 1970s led to some beneficial changes with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.  Now there returns the great itch to undo Trump’s gains and once more pauper the country.  The argument by the leftists is that ‘look, under Trump’s capitalism 17 million people lost their jobs, and 10 million are still out of work’.  None of them are smart enough to figure out that it was the governments’ lockdown responses to C19 that caused the hit to the economy, not capitalism (see below).

    ‘It Took a Strong America to Survive 2020’ (here) is Walter Russell Mead’s more sober and accurate look at the political and economic roads we traveled last year.  Contrary to the Left’s histrionics, our political system has NOT been threatened and our economy survived the pandemic remarkably well, and is now recovering at a rapid rate.  However, this is not the narrative that is now being fashioned into the next Big Lie by the lamestream media which will paint Biden as the nation’s savior who arrived just in the nick o’ time.  If you thought the media had reached its low point during the last four years, you ain’t seen nothing yet – seatbelts please.

    [20jan21 update]

    20jan21

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  • Unclear on Partisan Politics

    George Rebane

    RLCrabb210116

    The above cartoon by our tried and true progressive cartoonist Bob Crabb was filched from the pages of The Union’s 16jan21 edition.  It provides an opportune lesson that illustrates our polarization and the sorry condition of jurisdictions that practice monopoly politics.  (I do like the Burma-Shave signs.)

    Collectivists like Bob sincerely want to “find a cure for” partisan politics.  They totally miss that partisanship is the only political order that provides the necessary and critical feedback loops which yield balanced governance.  Without effective and ongoing partisanship we get runaway one-party rule of the type that in recent years has put a heap of hurt on a number of states and urban jurisdictions led, of course, by California.

    While our Democrats, along with other international globalists, work ardently for an overarching, all-powerful world government, almost all other people, who are able to give the problem some thought, oppose such a sure path to a stable and lasting tyranny.  As conservetarian, I would never want a political monopoly of free-market capitalism in my country to dominate so as to eliminate effective feedback from collectivist ideologues.

    Progressives, hewing to the teachings of the immortal Marx, have no concept of the function of such balance in the ongoing back-and-forth of governance, and even less knowledge of how to achieve and maintain that needed tension.  For them, all goodness and light comes from but a single fount of truth enabled by one-party rule.  No broadly beneficial and productive social order has ever been achieved without robust feedbacks that check government excesses which easily arise from human weaknesses.

    Government, by its very nature has always lacked these critical feedback mechanisms, and as a result is the most inefficient way to organize people to get almost anything done right.  (Most recent example, the states’ inability to efficiently distribute and administer C19 vaccines, again led by California.)  Nevertheless, every society needs individuals to contribute some time, treasure, and talent to collective enterprises, such as national security and shared infrastructures, that would be inefficient undertakings for private enterprise.

    But here the modus operandi should always be guided by the minimalist principle of having the smallest possible government, but no smaller.  And to achieve that is where the collectivists and capitalists must meet on a sufficiently par basis of partisan politics to arrive at a workable social order, one that provides hope and equal opportunity for all to pursue their dreams, rewards merit and industry, does not abandon those unable, and all of it no matter how inevitably and unequally we are suited for the pursuit.

    As history illuminates and we demonstrate daily, all other mono-partisan approaches to organize society lead toward tyranny or anarchy.

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  • Scattershots – 15jan21 (16jan21)

    George Rebane

    The Capitol assault reports are getting curiouser and curiouser.  Instead of quickly blaming Trump supporters for the mob action while labeling them ‘seditious insurrectionists’, and then quickly calling the case closed, we keep having reports coming out documenting feds who now admit that they knew in advance that Trump haters were planning to enter the Capitol and visit violence in the midst of Trump supporters who would follow them in.  Here is one such report that has yet to be censored.  Readers should contribute their own pros/cons to such reports.

    Also, the entire timing and preparations for the assault viz Trump’s speech is turning into a mendacious muddle.  Law enforcement agencies report that the assault began significantly before Trump’s alleged call to march to the Capitol.  And also that stores of assault equipments like crowbars, etc had already been stored in convenient locations for the perpetrators of violent entry into the building.  We need to be reminded again of the House article that gave rise to the half-day snap impeachment.  From my perch it sure looks like a historical political hit job has just gone down with pre-orchestrated rallying cries coming from both sides of the aisle.  What the hell is going on?  Is this Deep State on parade, while the rest of us are threatened with re-education camps?

    California’s C19 vaccine distribution system is, predictably, one of the worst in the land.  Last night FN reported on the relative amounts of received vaccines distributed by the states.  California was next to the lowest with only 26% of its vaccines having been administered.  With each passing day our political monopoly in Sacramento finds more ways to screw up and make life worse for every taxpayer within its borders.  All of this is invisible to our local leftwing lackies.

    Big business is making a sharp left turn, as we have noted in these pages.  This is now being picked up (here) by national columnists like WSJ’s Kim Strassel who notes, “Corporate America took a big step this week, moving from captives of wokeness to active accomplices. The legal and political consequences may prove profound.”  One political consequence that will fit the Dem socialists to a tee is that already corporatist big businesses will become protected extensions of the state, taking their operations marching orders from relevant (and possible new) cabinet departments, bureaus, and agencies.  This is the established route from Hitler through Xi Jinping to America’s radical left now going through birthing pains as it spreads its tentacles over the land.  None dare call it capitalism.

    Last night on FN’s Bret Baier program we noticed something very shocking to us.  The program’s balanced panel of commenters has recently ensconced Harold Ford Jr (former congress critter from Tennessee) as its reasonable liberal voice.  The panelists currently join the program online from their homes.  Ford broadcasts from his elegant living room from which the man accidentally and momentarily revealed his deeply held values.  He pulled back his video camera so that it showed the room’s center-piece fireplace, and over the mantle on the wall, centered over the fireplace hung a large (Andy Warhol) portrait painting of a smiling Mao Zedong.  The prominent place in a former congressman’s home afforded this killer of over 100,000,000 of his own people made our jaws go slack.  This camera shot was quickly corrected as it became his turn to speak again.  Nuff said.

    Grand opening coming soon.

    TraderJoes

    And then there’s more suppressed news ‘Media Mostly Silent As BLM Activists Clash With Capitol Police’.

    [16jan21 update]  Today The Union saw fit to publish my censored 6jan21 KVMR commentary.  (more here)

    The Left’s cry of “Insurrection!!” continues as they have filled Washington with about two divisions of National Guard troops to counter the predicted assaults by armed citizens.  There will be no such assaults, any more than the mob in the Capitol was the launch of an insurrection.  As I’ve pointed out, those clowns didn’t anticipate any success in getting into the building which was made possible by the mysterious melting away of the Capitol police.  A planned insurrection has a few attendant requirements to make such a label credible.  The most important would be to have a replacement government-in-waiting ready to assume the critical functions that communicates success to the tuned-in masses.  The people milling in the halls of the Capitol couldn’t even organize a Sunday school picnic if their lives depended on it.

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  • ‘What Just Happened?’

    [Union columnist Terry McLaughlin asks that pointed question (here) on the 14jan21 edition’s op-ed page.  She goes on to provide and excellent background summary that lets the reader answer her question.  It turns out that we Americans have been given an education over the past year to accept a much more expressive way of protesting everything from public policies to individuals and institutions – in short, we have been carefully taught that riot and mayhem is now de rigueur for expressing collective dissatisfaction.  Ms McLaughlin’s piece provides us with the syllabus for that course.  It is posted below with her permission.  gjr]

    Terry McLaughlin

    There is no excuse for the violence that took place on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. What we witnessed is morally reprehensible and I am ashamed and horrified that it occurred.

    Americans deserve to know who was responsible, and those persons who perpetrated vandalism or violence should be brought to justice.

    It cannot be denied that both the political far right and far left are home to their own share of Antifa-like anarchists, and the chaos at the Capitol has refuted any perception that the left owns a monopoly on widespread political violence. While we can never excuse or defend this behavior, we can make an honest effort to identify the environment in which it happened.

    These events resulted from a multitude of causes: concerns and distrust in the integrity of our elections, pent up frustrations of citizens stripped of their livelihoods and freedoms during the pandemic, and yes, the rhetoric of the president of the United States.

    But not the least of these causes is the justification, defense, and even apathy of the media and many of our elected political leaders regarding the violence committed across America throughout 2020, including attacks on federal courthouses, burning of police stations, and the establishment of “autonomous zones” in Portland and Seattle. The message was loud and clear: If you are dissatisfied with a political or social issue, violence is an acceptable answer.

    (more…)

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  • Dark Days Diary – 13jan21 (updated 15jan21)

    George Rebane

    ‘America was born of dissent. It shall perish when dissent is forbidden.’  I used this anonymous aphorism as a tagline for a recent post, and upon reflection, it rings more true with each passing day.  Today loud voices are heard mostly from the Left, but also some from the Right, exhorting us to set our beliefs aside and be compliantly silent.  The underlying principle that is being hoisted like a banner in the public square is ‘politics has no place for violence.’

    That is also the title of a piece by Rep Steve Scalise (R-LA) in the 13jan21 WSJ (here).  Unfortunately, the congressman could not be more wrong, both historically and existentially.  Going back to the days of historian Thucydides of ancient Greece, violence has always been one of the extremes and frequently practiced bookends of politics.  The other extreme of political behavior is silent compliance, the rigidly enforced favorite of tyrants.  To get a deeper understanding of this, I recommend to you Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap (2017).  (Kissinger’s plaudit of the book included, “Thucydides’ Trap identifies the cardinal challenge to world order.”)

    Allison and other historians have long made it clear that almost every military action, including partisan uprisings, were spawned for political reasons.  Nevertheless, most of us believe that a social order succumbing to either of these extremes represents a failure of practicing prudent politics.  An oft-accepted definition of politics is ‘the art of the possible’, which is still valid with its noted bookends withstanding.

    In this light, I maintain that current arguments, exhortations, and platitudes from our national leaders do nothing to calm the angry sea that today defines social order.  None of these politicians can point to a common ground where we may meet to forge a mutually acceptable future.  What each offers in place of such a political meeting is simply another version of ‘my way or the highway’.  And the diagnosis is appropriate to those of us minor ideologues making our voices heard on the grassroots hustings.  For me as a conservetarian, the Left offers little to nothing that would give rise to a world in which I would want my progeny to live.  And collectivists feel equally strong about their ideals.

    Political peace has been achieved in the past mostly by both (all) sides stumbling into a de facto compromise that is to no one’s complete liking, and one that motivates everyone to continue working for their political goals with plausible hope in their hearts.  And that is the important point.  The discovered compromise must be such that neither side loses hope of still being able to push the policy peanuts in their desired direction.  When that hope vanishes or is quashed, then one of the political bookends is all that remains, and the one chosen depends on the people’s means, culture, and their historical narrative.

    Today President Trump was impeached again by the House, this time being accused of “encouraging a mob to storm Congress as part of an effort to overturn Joe Biden’s election win."  For millions of us across the land this most certainly was the most scurrilous political act we have witnessed during our lifetime.  There is no need to rehash all the ethical, constitutional, and simply principled criteria that were violated in performing probably the most vindictive act by Congress in its long history.  There was no opportunity, nor desire by the Democrats, to permit a reasoned defense by the opposition; it was simply a hastily assembled and railroaded political lynching.  What it underlined for all who pay attention is that this abortion on the floor of the House did nothing but cement in place an implacable division between polarized Americans that continues to grow in its scope and girth.

    And we learned more about the stout political underpinnings of the ten so-called Republicans who decided to pile on to this judicial charade.  All the while more Republicans quake in their boots as the Dems and their lamestream continue to broadcast accusations of ‘acts of sedition’ and ‘insurrection’, none of which was intended or took place.  What did take place, as the record shows, is the President’s exhortation for his supporters to go to the Capitol and protest the scheduled proceedings to certify the electoral votes.  There is nothing illegal about a call for such action by citizens who do feel aggrieved that the November election was fraught with irregularities and fraud.  But today our liberties retreated another step as last Wednesday’s speech by the president was deemed both illegal and impeachable.  Besides cementing our breach, this second impeachment has now put a serious rip into the fabric of what once were the normative affairs of governance.

    [15jan21 update] 'Assault on the Capitol Has Let Loose the Electronic Octopus' argues Victor Davis Hanson in a convincing piece apropos to these dark days.  And reader posts a link with a DoJ official declaring there is "no direct evidence" of plot to kill, kidnap lawmakers in Capitol assault (here).

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  • Sandbox – 12jan21

    [There is a lot happening in the world while our federal govt is focused on the attempts to remove President Trump from office before his term is up next Wednesday.  Haven't heard much discussion of how our 'friends' and declared enemies are preparing for the new Harris/Biden administration.  There's some serious stuff going down as they anticipate a new TBD foreign policy from Washington.  Usually the bad guys pull off some kind of test to gauge the measure of America's new Big Kahuna.  gjr]

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  • Control of Corporatist Oligopolies

    “America was born of dissent. It shall perish when dissent is forbidden.”  Anon.

    George Rebane

    Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, … arguably reside somewhere between monopoly and oligopoly in the capitalist spectrum.  It is very hard for a corporation that controls a dominating segment of a major market to become such a beast in a truly competitive environment, and then to maintain its standing without active help from the government gun in suppressing would-be competitors.  Such relationships between putatively private sector companies and the government is called corporatism.  And such participating corporatists are a malevolent disease of capitalism made possible by one of its systemic vulnerabilities.  The creation of corporatism is only possible with the abetting aid of a corrupt government, one that seeks large amounts of private funding to extend its political power over a citizenry having tendencies for non-compliance with the establishment’s diktats.

    According to Rebane Doctrine and the basic tenets of conservetarianism, such corporatist oligopolies invite regulation to prevent them from becoming weaponized by one controlling political faction in a democracy.  (For more on this important happening, see LikeWar:The Weaponization of Social Media)  The threshold criterion here is the corporatist’s domination of a broadly embedded and established public function or service for which there exist no viable alternative providers in the marketplace.  When a corporatist achieves that status (call it a critical public good corporation, CPGC), then it’s time to put in place non-partisan regulations to either defang or dismember it.

    At this point the lightly-read liberal will leap into this discussion with charges of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘double standards’.  As I’ve recounted countless times, this response is borne of either purposive political snark, or more likely from the simplified worldview that most leftwingers are burdened with as they seek to make sense of complex societies – it must be either ‘this’ or ‘that’ with no perception of nuance or a middle-ground.

    In the present case of gratuitous imposition of censorship and/or cutting off public communications completely, the corporatists are outing themselves as 1) the strong partisans they are, and 2) taking advantage of the current political environment to also quash competing companies, and all of it done as virtue signaling to support the public good.  The government’s sponsors of such corporatism and corporatists will, of course, support and sustain such private sector initiatives as the actions of good and caring corporate citizens.

    The solution that would prohibit such preemptive partisan actions is to have in place a law that 1) prescribes criteria to identify such critical oligops or monopolists as CPGCs, and 2) restricts how CPGCs may conduct the critical public services and/or functions they provide.  In short, the profuse and protected profits they derive, when so designated, come at a price of regulatory controls that are supervised by an appropriate department – say, Commerce – of the federal government.  None of this violates the strong conservetarian principle of a minimalist government being among the social desiderata for a democratic republic that creates and distributes wealth within a capitalist context.

    Under such a regulatory order it would be easy for a corporation to sufficiently divest or segment its operations to escape its CPGC designation.  The main objective of such an approach is to prevent what is happening today with private sector providers making political decisions as to who may or not continue using the communication services that the same corporatists have conduced people to accept, integrate, and make critical parts of their daily lives.

    As a parting consideration, think about the disruption to your life were your phone company to gratuitously cut your ability to make and receive telephone calls.  That situation existed for decades when AT&T was the overwhelmingly dominant telephone service provider, and for that reason it was a strongly regulated oligopoly until advancing technology made possible a competitive environment that could best be served by a break up of Ma Bell into Baby Bells, and the entry of new service providers.  We all have benefitted from this paradigm, and now need to expand it into the world of CPGCs on the internet.

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