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  • Returning to Race-based College Admissions

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my resumed regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 3 June 2020.]

    Former University of California regent Ward Connerly founded the American Civil Rights Institute in response to the corrupt racism that affirmative action introduced into state government contracting, public jobs hiring, and deciding who would be admitted to state schools.  Almost 25 years ago he launched Prop 209 which was the successful ballot initiative that made it illegal for California to consider race in performing any of those functions.

    Being able to award contracts, jobs, and admissions on the basis of race was a big progressive vote getter for the state’s Democratic Party, and leftwing politicians have been chafing for all these years trying to figure out how to make racial patrimony legal again.

    In the meantime, race-based admissions into the nation’s universities and colleges has become a much-publicized issue, especially after it was discovered that elite universities were leading the pack with racial quota systems in their admissions programs applied in the most corrupt and merit-free manner.  For these elitist administrations academic merit became a racist criterion when considering applicants for their freshman classes.  Since African-American and Hispanic students ranked way below the Asians and whites in academic achievement, it was clear that something had to be done to ‘level the playing field’ and bring social justice to bear.

    The result was that race quotas were pushed to the top, and academic merit was demoted in the ranking of factors that would recommend admission.  The proponents of academics started pushing back when these admissions policies came to light.  However, nobody really cared how the white applicants were discriminated against.  What really hit a nerve on the race-based policies was the dirty deal dealt to Asian-American applicants.  This cohort of minority students always blew the tops off their high school grades, achievement tests, and any other criteria like extra-curricular activities and breadth of interests.  If the new progressive race-based admissions standards were fairly applied to all minorities, the Asian-American kids would have flooded the enrollment rolls.  What to do now?

    Well, the answer to the progressive administrations was obvious, lay on another layer of corruption and eliminate any semblance of balance between minority and academic requirements.  If you were black or Latino, you went to the head of the line until the quota was filled, and that was that.  However, when the Asian-American community got wind of such obviously biased and unfair practices, they got active and involved.  The result was that these tilted playing field practices made national headlines with our polarized country predictably lined up on both sides of the issue.

    Today, California’s Democrats see an opportunity to eliminate the last barriers to race-based admissions policies.  This week the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote to pass ACA5, the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Prop209, and again legitimize race-based admissions.  The 81-year-old Ward Connerly has returned to work with a handful of very devoted Asian-American civic groups to stop ACA5, which most likely will be railroaded through the Senate during this pandemic season without a single public hearing.  It will then appear on the November ballot to let Californians again decide how they want to diminish and demote the state’s higher education systems.  The reinstatement of this corrupt practice will be sold to our electorate under the guise of affirmative action.  In opposition, Asian-Americans against ACA5 know that “If it passes, Asian-American students will be further scapegoated and penalized in college admissions.”  Those Californians who believe in a colorblind society when it comes to government preferences and perks should join to oppose ACA5 on the November ballot.

    Should it pass, lawsuits are already being prepared to fight this discriminatory amendment.  And there’s a good chance the case will end up before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hope that the court would then rule as clearly and categorically as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (more here)

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

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  • Scattershots – 3jun20 (updated 4jun20)

    George Rebane

    Worldwide lockdowns were triggered by panicky politicians who listened to the ‘eminent epidemiologist’ Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.  He came out with a slew of mortality predictions almost every country of note by monkeying with his models.  Trouble is that none of them came anywhere near true, but politicians were reluctant to let go of the new dimensions of power they had appropriated.  So most of the world shut down economies and also caused untold more deaths and morbidity (as many of us then predicted).  Now Ferguson, with stiff upper lip firmly in place, admits to having observed these “interesting” realworld results, perhaps starting with the admission, “Without instituting full lockdown, Sweden is essentially getting the same effect.”  (whouda thought?  H/T to reader and more here)  And here is a confirming update on the C19 stats from Sweden (H/T to reader).  Consider this report in the context of my 16may20 commentary that also appears in today’s 3jun20 Union (here).

    My ‘Unsettling ‘Settled Science’’ was published in today’s (3jun20) Union.  As expected, it drew a lot of ire from our local leftwingers.  Almost all of it was hard to connect with the points I made in the commentary.  Some even rejected my propositions on the basis of their similarity of what they may have heard from Limbaugh, or that it “was written by a staunch trump supporter”.  But a comment from George Boardman, one of our liberal thought leaders and intellects, piqued my interest.  He asked why Jo Ann and I “have been sheltering in place for 70 plus days”, since my “oft-expressed skepticism of the conventional scientific wisdom”.   To start with, Mr Boardman apparently is not a very careful (or comprehending?) reader of RR.  From the body count alone, no one should doubt that the elderly are in the most vulnerable group.  So there was no point in our going out just to solicit the infection – after all I am a Bayesian.  But the main reason is that all of our outside activities were canceled and many brought online, not by us, but by the government – in short, there was no place for us to go, save to run the usual store errands which we did.  However, undeterred we continued seeing our family and Nevada County friends on a regular basis – e.g. we had an ‘essential’ dinner party at our house last night – during this months-long interval of insane and conflicting dicta issuing from various government offices (see the latest from Neil Ferguson above).  Boardman, flying hot, true, and normal with his fellow progressive pundits, evinces no capability of nuancing anything he sees.  I have found people like that to operate in what we control engineers call ‘bang-bang mode’, their needle gets pegged at either end with no readings from the middle.  But perhaps I too am missing something here.  I’d like to lunch with George Boardman and have each of us really get the cut of the other’s jib.

    This is what we see on the streets, and what the Democrats and the lamestream refuse to denounce.

    AnarchistManifesto_2020

    [update]  Yellow journalism on Bret Baier’s FN program.  For the program’s panel tonight, Baier had assembled Ari Fleischer (Bush2 press secretary), Mara Liaisson (NPR political correspondent), and Mo Elleithee (Georgetown Institute of Politics) – a laudible 2-to-1 in favor of leftists.  Subject: Trump’s threat to use military against rioters if states can’t control them.  In his comments Elleithee said, “(Trump) authorizes militarized law enforcement to use excessive force against peaceful protesters.”  We all expect that kind of crap out of leftwing ideologues like Elleithee and Liasson, but since Trump said no such thing (it was just one more in the Left’s daily avalanche of uncounted lies), the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ Baier’s next question should have been, ‘Mo, what evidence do you have that the President said any such thing?  Please share it with us.’  Instead the network’s flagship anchor again showed his lily liver, and let the whole statement slide as if it were a commonly known truth.  Back in older days FN journalists would not have allowed that kind of crap to just float out there unchallenged.  Today their lead correspondent has taken the knee on truth, and has yet to update his closing line to ‘Feebly balanced and scared shitless.’  FN is rapidly becoming a CNN-in-training outlet.

    [4jun20 update]  Apropos to ‘settled science’ (here) and making decisions on the basis of ‘science not politics’, we now read the WHO has flipped on their hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) admonitions cum screed. The widely cited study ‘disproving’ the effectiveness of HCQ turns out to have been badly flawed, as attested to by 120+ scientists who examined the record. (more here)  So now they’re going back to square one and resuming the trial that they prematurely aborted.  And, of course, we’re all familiar with the field day the Democrats and their lamestream lackies had when during the early days of the pandemic President Trump suggested that HCQ might be something we should also examine.  Don’t expect any of those sumbiches to show any remorse at their TDS-powered hipshot remonstrations.

    Common Core curriculum fans rejoice.  One of your aims was for the new educational initiative to “narrow the performance gap” between the high-end students and those at/near the bottom.  According to both the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the gap is being closed, not by boosting the academic performance of the low achievers, but by dumbing down the high achievers.  We have reported on this many times, and now Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes in the 3jun20 edition of the newspaper, “After decades of slow and steady improvement, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have seen historic declines in the six years since most states implemented national Common Core English and math curriculum standards”. (more here)  Bill Gates’ sponsorship of Common Core did immeasurable damage and played right into the progressives’ agenda to dumb down succeeding generations of American voters.  As a humorous footnote, RR’s spam folder correctly trapped a well-known leftwing local who sought to comment on ‘Returning to Race-based College Admissions’ by declaring his ignorance of the legislature’s initiative to repeal Prop209 that prohibits race-based state contracting, hiring, and admissions.

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  • Sandbox – 2jun20

    [It's now established that we have a full-service House Speaker in Nancy Pelosi.  She has donned the additional mantle of Congressional Spiritual Adviser.  And as her first task in that new responsibility, she has taken the President under her wing with pointed counsel directing his scriptural pursuits.  We already know of her as a woman of manifold talents and a multitude of concerns – her capacity to care knows no bounds.  However, pursuant to this new expansion of duties, were I the current House Chaplain, Fr. Patrick J. Conroy, S.J., I would be very worried.  The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.  gjr]

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  • Riot Reflections – 1jun20 (updated)

    ‪"Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians."‬ Thomas Sowell (and an oft-cited tenet of Rebane Doctrine)

    George Rebane

    Well, given what we see in the streets, we can safely conclude that the pandemic lockdowns are over, and all business are open except those that have been boarded up or burned down.

    Starting with local police departments, all fielded LE units/agencies are now conducting defensive operations to preserve themselves.  They are no longer out there to protect persons or property.  The compelling explanation for this kind of CYA behavior is that they don’t see support from their political leaders, the law-abiding public, and most certainly not from the protesters and rioters.  Law enforcement today stands politically abandoned.  They are indicted by a long history of law enforcement ‘mistakes’ that recently have culminated in the outrageous public murder (execution?) of George Floyd, a black petty criminal, by the Minneapolis police, and the killing of Breonna Taylor, an innocent black woman gunned down in her own home by Louisville Metro Police mistakenly raiding her house in the middle of the night.  Both should be seen as preventable crimes by institutions that have lost sight of their reason for being.

    No one has really determined the make-up of the legitimate protesters in the streets, nor if they are the same ones who turn into destructive rioters after the peaceful phase of their demonstrations are concluded.  Does the non-violent cohort then go home to be replaced by the violent ones who mostly conduct themselves as Antifa members?  (To my knowledge, Antifa is still a distributed national protest movement that shares literature, values, dress, street tactics, …, but having no common leadership, managed funding, or central control.)  From the reports from the media and police on the scene, the non-violent protesters appear to morph into violent rioters at some point, mostly after the sun goes down.  Today the violent are all masked (perhaps because of the pandemic) and therefore act with impunity because their anonymity is secure.  In the meantime, the cities’ progressive political leaders are desperately looking for the illusive out-of-town white supremacists who are really the instigators of looting and burning.

    Today’s street conflicts are also culturally confused and confusing.  There is no common social contract in evidence among the street borne polyglot.  Everyone is doing their own thing, milling from here to there or just idly standing by and watching the show.  Some have come with prepared signs with the usual slogans demanding justice and change.  But when interviewed, no one has a clue as to what exactly needs to be done to bring about the change and the new age of justice.  Moreover, no one even thinks that there need be some deeper thought behind the demands on the displayed placards – their histrionics are sufficient unto themselves.

    If really pressed for specifics, black leadership in the media can drill down no deeper than spout the Democratic Party talking points – ‘Shut down white supremacy and white privilege.’  This is the closest that any leftwinger can come to specifying what needs to be done to bring about the “change” that the protesters are demanding.  What white supremacy should be shut down how?  Which white privileges should be legislated into criminality?  And their political party and political leadership are equally clueless as to what specific and feasible programs should be implemented across the land to prevent future Floyds and Taylors being killed at the hands of various law enforcement agencies.

    In the meantime, there is political hay to be made in this election year that has already given our Left so much ammo against President Trump and the Republicans.  For a party without a single viable idea of how to better respond to the virus, let alone how to revive the economy, all they have to offer is solution-free partisan vituperation to convince their constituents and light-thinking lackies that a new glorious age will spontaneously start if we can only get Trump out of the White House, Republicans out of Congress, and pack SCOTUS with an enlarged bench of progressive justices.  The rest will miraculously take care of itself under a distended government that will redistribute the country’s wealth, hire more of the unemployable incompetents, pay everyone regardless, and become the major player in our economy – i.e. socialism on steroids.

    When the dust settles, what will the gutless politicians do with police departments that are becoming more insular and frustrated as they are charged with keeping the peace in public environments ever more conflicted in values, mores, attitudes, perceived pasts, fearful futures, …, all existing under a shroud of confusing, contradictory, unknown, and variously interpreted and randomly enforced laws, regulations, and codes that become more impenetrable by the day?  The cop on the beat can no longer reliably predict anyone’s behavior, and must therefore become a programmed automaton who survives his shift by avoiding conflicts and strife whenever possible, and when not, then apply one-size-fits-all rules in the most self-defensive and often ruthless manner possible.

    [update]  We just finished watching the evening news that covered the ongoing demonstrations from several big cities across the country.  The President made a ‘law and order’ speech in which he separated those lawful protesters from the thugs, looters, arsonists, and now killers on our streets.  We hear people of all ranks, starting with the Floyd family, calling for the violence to stop, that such behavior is not serving the memory of their murdered son George, nor anything good that hopefully would come out of this after the dust settles.  The politicians calling for calm and calling out the rioters are all from the Right.  The only political leader voices from the Left are using this ongoing national tragedy to attack the administration, and to further divide us and convince all that there is no hope of unity in the future.  They realize more than any of us that those on the streets are their imperturbable constituents, loyal voters, and their very political lifeblood – they can do no wrong.

    If a progressive wanted to counter any of this shameful behavior by their political leaders, one need only ask, ‘Where are the Pelosis, Schumers, Obamas, Bidens, Jacksons, Sharptons… with their messages of peace and calm, calling for the protesters to abide by the law and rioters to stand down?’  The only words from their and their lamestream lackies’ mouths do nothing but throw fuel on a raging partisan fire, and give their imprimaturs to the lawlessness on the streets by pledging their solidarities from which are absent any condemnation of the riotous mobs.  Even the word ‘riot’ is not in their vocabulary when they occasionally stray from lauding the “just protests” on our cities’ streets.  In Democrats’ eyes, it is all one homogeneous nationwide protest against Republican racism and social injustice.  For them this indeed is one helluva crisis not to let go waste.

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  • Riot Reflections – 30may20 (updated)

    George Rebane

    The videod murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police gave rise to justified public protests that quickly turned into destructive and violent riots which have little to do with the death of Mr Floyd, and instead have again revealed that we Americans are no longer ‘one people’ who can be called to ‘come together’.

    Law enforcement agencies of all stripes provide daily demonstrations that they are an institution unto themselves, there to overwhelmingly look after their own interests and provide little or no security for those who pay them to preserve society and civilization.  As clearly admitted by the Minneapolis police chief who publicly stated the reason his officers are standing back, standing down, and hightailing it from rioters is that he does not want to put them in harm’s way in situations that could turn dangerous.  Think about that.  What if firemen would only fight unrisky fires?  What if the FBI adopted a similar policy, no field operations in which their agents were put at risk?  What if the Secret Service would protect the President only to the extent that it would not be dangerous to them?  What if our military didn’t want to commit troops into situations in which casualties would result?

    So the police et al, those who do attend the riots now taking place in cities across the land, simply gather in solid self-defensive phalanxes to watch the rioting mob loot and burn.  Over the lamestream media we are informed in an ongoing stream of commentary that these are not riots (a word absent in lamestream reports) led by criminal thugs, but simply justified “protests” attended by “protesters”.  The rest of us are told by our politicians that any criminality that is evident is justified, and that we must simply let it play out.  Actually, its more than that as FN’s Tucker Carlson explained in a landmark monologue last night – ‘Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault’.

    Local business owners who witness their life’s work and savings go up in flames are seen pleading with the mob to no avail.  Some are again taking up arms to defend their lives and livelihoods, and most cynically, the police are arresting those who dare shoot (at) rioters inside their premises in acts of arson and looting.

    No doubt one can draw a connection between the lengthy pandemic lockdowns and the number of urban dwellers eager to get out of their houses and small apartments to protest undeniable injustices at the hands of law enforcement and our entire ‘justice system’.  But in doing so, they do underline that we are not one people as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile asserts in her ‘We are one people’.  The rioters are not people who built this country, as they claim, and are therefore entitled to ‘burn it down’.  These are people who have their very own and distinct social contract with the institutions of our government – contrary to their protestations, they have rights and privileges, demonstrated daily, that people like me and mine wouldn’t dream of having in a civilized society.

    Here’s an interesting question – what would the police do if law abiding folks of all colors showed up armed in downtowns to protect and defend the properties and property owners against the rioting mobs?

    And here’s an even more interesting question – what would local governments and law enforcement agencies do if the streets were filled with peaceful protesters of all colors who looked like you and me?

    And finally – what if all those law-abiding peaceful protesters against LE injustice showed up also demonstrating why Americans are unique with their constitutional 2A rights?

    [update] A reader sent me a link to a Powerline article on the Twin Cities riots.  It appears that both Democrat Mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter are doing their best to dodge any and all responsibility for what's going down in their mismanaged metropolises, even to the anticipated desperate accusation that the riots are being instigated by out-of-state "white supremacists".  How do self-respecting Democrats elect such misfits to office?  (more here and here)

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  • Ruminations – 29may20 (updated 3jun20)

    George Rebane

    How soon they forget – “The accusation that Trump got rid of a pandemic office is among the left’s politicized attacks on the White House since the coronavirus outbreak began. The administration assembled a coronavirus task force run by Vice President Mike Pence to address security and medical issues.”  This was echoed in chorus by all of our local leftwing lackies who took their cue from the lamestream.  (H/T to reader and more here)

    Fauci the Fickle – 3jun20 edition.  “Fauci changes tune, now says second COVID-19 wave may never happen — and mask-wearing is symbolic.”  (more here and here) How’s that tune go? ‘First you say you do, and then you don’t, …’  Never mind Dr Fauci, Dr Rebane says that unless we miraculously get everyone vaccinated in time, the second wave is inevitable with the high likelihood that it will be a small fraction of the first wave.

    Bejing pissing on the Hong Kong parade. (here)  Now there’s a puzzle, or maybe not.  HK is the acknowledged “cash cow” for the mainland, handling much of the foreign investments into the Chinese economy, and Chinese IPOs placed on foreign exchanges.  Screwing with the contracted freedoms of this principality will cripple the cow or even kill it.  Is the CCP now so brittle that it is scared of HK’s freedom virus spreading to the mainland when that possibility is added to the lack of progress Beijing has made with reintegrating Taiwan?  From my perch, the answer is Yes.

    [update] “Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis,” said the liberal Mayor Jacob Frey in an early news conference this morning.  Don’t know what all we need to know about the city after watching understandably justified peaceful protests turn into mobs looting and burning.  Am reminded of a Rodney King joke that quoted tongue-in-cheek a white resident of Simi Valley (home of one officer on trial who was involved in the King beating), ‘If they find those police officers guilty, you bet we’re gonna burn down our town!’

    Speaking of President Trump and Minneapolis – I think he stuck his foot in it again.  Have no idea which of his constituencies he was trying to impress with the tweets that were definitely untimely and off-the-mark.  Don’t get me wrong, naming the looting and burning thugs in Minneapolis as “thugs” was not wrong, but it was a sophomoric political error compounded by his threat to send in Minnesota’s National Guard, which under our system of federalism, the state’s governor already has done.  All this grandstanding does is give the TDS crowd more fuel to ignite nationwide fires.

    All published pandemic data and information is now both wrong and the remainder highly suspect.  Here and across the world we continue to receive a torrent of reports about the virus’s death counts, case numbers, recoveries, etc, a couple of days later which turn out to be the stuff that you shovel out of a stall, all disguised as the sober and considered prescriptions and proscriptions from our elected ‘honorables’ and degreed ‘experts’ citing science and medicine.  And since most of it comes to us through the media filter of double-dummy and/or agenda-driven reporters (aka ‘journalists’), we have very little idea of what’s really happening, and how we should respond.  Your governments in peace and war.  [more update]  Just received this little tidbit from a reader to underline the above.  It now appears that all the bad juju about HCQ that was recently blasted out by the TDS crowd was a bit premature.  No less than the NYT had to publish a 'Hold on there' report citing unsettled science.

    [31may20 update]  Here’s one for the ‘Say whaaat??!’ department.  James ‘Forked Tongue’ Clapper has just been appointed to the Executive Board of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania.  This announcement bounced off my eyeballs as I opened the most recent copy of Aviation Week & Space Technology.  Don’t ask how they came to pick up that major faux pas on the part of CERL (see for yourself here).

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  • ‘Seize the Moment’

    George Rebane

    So exhorts The Economist (here), Britain’s famous weekly ‘newspaper’ since 1843 that has metamorphosed over the years into a leftwing trumpet with an international audience.  The lead editorial in its 23may20 issue counsels countries, especially the US, to use the coronavirus pandemic to include in their government aid machinations additional laws, regulations, codes, restrictions, taxes, fees, fines, … to advance the global socialist agenda while their citizens are focused on maintaining health and hearth.

    The number one supernumerary policy having nothing to do with the pandemic relief involves climate change legislation and subsidies.  They are more open than Team Pelosi about not wasting this crisis – “The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change – and creates a unique chance to do so.”  Specific recommendations focus on first instigating new “carbon pricing”, their code for passing massive new carbon taxes which “schemes” they claim will “use the power of the market to incentivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible.”

    Anyone with even a smidgen of capitalism in their veins knows that such government dictates have nothing to do with “the power of the market”.  In enforcing the use of uneconomical alternative energy sources with the government gun simply mangles the markets beyond recognition, and in its wake leaves an economy mired in ‘mother-may-I’ mandates that will impede economic recovery wherever it seeks purchase to climb out of its current hole.

    Socialists use their gross misunderstanding (or cynical ignoring) of the ‘Broken Windows Fallacy’ (here) first illuminated by Frederic Bastiat a little after The Economist was launched.  In his ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen’ Bastiat introduces us to the important economic concepts of “crowding out” which denies the existence of “idle resources”, and the little recognized distinction between wealth and employment.  The parable has a hooligan break a baker’s window which act is ameliorated, actually even celebrated, by onlookers as being beneficial to the economy in that it now will create extra business for the glazier when the baker spends to replace his broken window (that which is seen).  However, this creates no new wealth or work since the baker had other uses for the money he lost, uses that would have expanded his business creating more wealth and other income for his suppliers (that which is not seen).

    Socialist economists like Paul Krugman agree with the crowd in the fable, and in their ideologically-blindered, profound ignorance don’t recognize that “if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labor, is affected, whether windows are broken or not.”  And so it will go with the funding and created jobs of climate change to replace existing, cheap energy sources, with manmade make-work before the market is ready to accept them.  We will never know what other unseen advances and social benefits we will deny ourselves by implementing such still uncompetitive ‘sustainable energy sources’ through the seen artifices like punitive carbon taxing.

    Which now brings us to the more fundamental crisis that pre-dates the pandemic – why our country is terminally polarized and “why we hate each other”.  The real answer to those questions is more often than not papered over by various kinds of feel-good pabulum.  An example is the op-ed ‘Why We Hate Each Other’ by Scottie Hart in the 28may20 Union.  She cites “solid research” by sociologists that point the finger at our loneliness being caused by modern technology-induced isolation.  Put simply, our online virtual relationships are not cutting it.  “A wide array of prominent health organizations now recognize deep, pervasive loneliness as a major public health issue, eroding our lives and often prematurely ending them. … Even before COVID-19, long-term trends have changed, and will continue to change our lives. As we negotiate the enormous shift from an industrial, manufacturing world to a near-virtual, technological world, it is no wonder we feel disoriented and vulnerable.”

    Ms Hart is a self-avowed, good-hearted liberal who totally misses the deeper schism between us.  The country now is home to two cohorts of citizens with profoundly different beliefs about what constitutes a beneficial and preferred socio-economic structure for maximizing our quality of life.  Those of the various flavors of the collectivist Left see an ever-encompassing growing government that will ultimately provide succor, sufficiency, equality, and social justice to all its citizens through central planning and control, a social structure in which citizens will gladly trade their liberties and freedom for promised risk-free living where the meritocratic competition between the competent and incompetent will be banished forever.  This course has been successfully pursued now for over fifty years, and there is no indication that it will do anything but accelerate.

    Capitalism

    The various flavors of the conservetarian Right see the Left’s pursuits as leading to an enforced egalitarian amalgam ruled over by a corrupt elite that wields all power.  Given all the diverse human frailties, the Right recognizes that life does contain more than a modicum of risk for any individual in their pursuit of happiness.  But that risk is worth taking within a society that recognizes and promotes individual initiative and enterprise, with all the necessary freedoms and liberties, under a social contract based on laws under which we are all treated equally.  And yes, the outcomes there will be unequal where those who can and do will naturally want to provide for those who can’t or won’t in order to maintain the social order.

    Such views are intrinsically incompatible within one sovereign nation-state, and that is why we are polarized and, as the Ms Harts among us observe, that we ‘hate each other’.  Today we are two incompatible countries trying to live within a single border under an increasingly dysfunctional state.

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  • Factors Fighting the Pandemic

    George Rebane

    PandemicFactors

    This is a simple and straightforward influence factors diagram that relates the relevant aspects in the policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The salient influences are indicated by the arrows with plus/minus signs at the destination arrow heads.  A plus ‘+’ indicates that the influencing factor and influenced factor go up and down together.  A minus ‘-‘ indicates that the influencing factor causes the opposite effect in the influenced factor.  Capice?  (more here)

    It should not be too difficult to identify the virtuous and vicious cycles in the diagram, and relate them to what’s happening as America’s federal and state governments respond to the pandemic.

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  • Scattershots – 26may20

    George Rebane

    What is the death rate of those infected with SARS-Cov-2 (here C19)?  Well, the more we try to find out, the more it gets curiouser and curiouser.  The latest attempt to explain the whole matter to us is put forth by Reason magazine in their ‘Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?’  Their quest for the answer was launched with the premise “The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably varies from one place to another.”  Well, no sh!+ Red Ryder, you’d think?  Then after a head-spinning discussion, about all the reader can walk away with is that IFR varies anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.013.  And IFR is strongly correlated with old age, especially those with preexisting comorbidities.  But then a little later, someone concludes that, no matter your age, it’s actually mainly your preexisting comorbidity that determines your probability of dying, and old age is just a prominent proxy for that since almost all old people have one kind of preexisting malady or other.  But what brought a smile to my face was their attempt to buttress the piece by injecting numbers.  All kinds of talk about test 'specifities' and disease 'prevalence', and the resulting 'positive predictive values' were bandied about which the reader is supposedly able to follow with their numbers.  But it turns out that none of it could be followed because nowhere do they bring up, let alone cite, the related test sensitivities without which their discussion is a meaningless jumble.  The point they try and fail to make is that which I presented in ‘Image of ignorance and/or incompetence’ along with its preceding tutorials on testing.  The bottom line here is that to understand how C19 relates to the mostly insane current response policies is almost impossible.  Since everything, like IFR, depends on so many different factors, to get even a glimmer, one has to have more than a smidgen of numeracy under their belt.  And if you’re going to publish something about it, you’d better be at least numerate.  Today none of that is a prerequisite before spouting volumes about the pandemic.

    This PAN-DEM-IC looks like a DEM-PANIC when we consider how the Dems are doing everything they can to blame the whole shebang on President Trump – everything from the economy to the number of deaths attributed to the corona virus.  A reader sent an article from American Thinker (here) that details the whole thing, including why cooking the books on the body count has become a cynical political football.  November is coming and the Democrats are desperate to making something stick on Trump before they have to let Bumblebrain out of the basement.  No matter who the DNC picks for Biden’s VP, I bet they will demand that the presidential debate(s) will be presented in a tag-team format so that Bumblebrain will have someone with him on stage who can talk – otherwise it will be a bloodbath.

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  • Sandbox -26may20

    [What remains the point of debates which are empty of citations that are commonly accepted by the debating parties?  As I have pontificated here for some years, and am now joined by my betters like Victor Davis Hanson among others, we are so polarized that we no longer share any cognitive common ground.  In other words, we arrive at venues like RR, not only with our own opinions, but also with our own unique ‘facts’ (thereby giving lie to Sen Moynihan’s dictum).  The ensuing melee is then composed of nothing but ejecta of hot air flung at the other which make no lasting impact, let alone changing anyone’s beliefs.  And yet, … and yet we continue to regularly assemble on both sides of this arena to dance our ferocious dances, making threatening sounds while shaking our spears and shields at the other side, like the natives of primitive tribes or beasts of the jungle that learned to wage faux ‘wars’ without really harming each other.  Realizing this, perhaps we can all join in the attempt to discover the point of it all.  gjr]

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