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  • End of an Era

    George Rebane

    Puna

    Puna

    6 June 2009 – 30 August 2020

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  • Democrats’ Great Divide or Revolution?

    George Rebane

    According to Democrat luminaries like Hillary Clinton and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, a peaceful transition of power in January 2021 will occur only if Biden wins in a popular and Electoral College landslide.  Every other election outcome will result in blood in the streets, a deep nation shattering constitutional crisis, and even the Pacific seaboard states seceding from the Union.  The lamestream media is locked and loaded to call out the rioters, and President Trump will call out the military. 

    That’s all according to some serious thought put into “wargaming” various election outcome scenarios as reported in the Washington Post (here and here).  We recall the Democrats' predictions about Trump not accepting the results of the 2016 election, that instead turned into a four-year rejection of that election’s results by Democrats, the party that has since mobilized every political, news media, entertainment, and radical leftwing group into a coordinated program to permanently render the country.

    With all the pieces in place for November, Democrats have prepared to reject any outcome save a Biden tsunami.  And they make no bones in threatening the American electorate at every opportunity about what they will do if the people again don’t vote correctly – short version, there will be an historical hell to pay that may easily turn into America’s first civil war.  (The last one was for southern independence.)  November will seal a Marxist future or bring coast-to-coast madness.

    The Democrat/Left ideology is now firmly in place, approved by its radical controlling wing of their organized and funded militant BLM and Antifa factions.  The intellectual basis for their anti-Americanism is all wrapped up and focused on the thesis of critical race theory (CRT).  The Democrats don’t front this ideology, but have allowed it to grow uncontested in the country’s educational and corporatist institutions.  David Harsanyi of the National Review makes the case and expands on it.  (more here)

    If you want to go to a documented source, then familiarize yourself with “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”, which says African Americans aren’t only subjugated through hate and terror, but also kept down through supposedly white cultural mechanisms of individualism, objectivity, neutrality, meritocracy, and color blindness.

    “Critical race theory’s foundational precept is the centrality and permanence in society of racism against blacks, rejecting the idea of significant racial progress.”  This is an important precept which keeps the looting and burning going in our cities.  Nothing of note has happened since the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

    A central Big Lie of their revisionist history, now taught in our unionized K-12 schools is that “In critical race theory, racism is not a local variant of the ancient practices of caste or slavery, but something new in the world that was born with European imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and rationalism.”

    Hence all modes of western civilization must be rejected on their face, since it is all just various forms of white privilege in action to promote racial injustice against the blacks.  And in its most insidious and racially unjust expression we have the principle of meritocracy, which is nothing but a camouflaged practice of subjugating people of color.  Determining the achievement and further promise of merit through testing is proof of systemic racial prejudice in practice.  “It’s a pseudo-science,” Stovall (black law professor, CRT intellectual) said. “Standardized testing is an extension of eugenics.”

    Finally, and this is important in order to grasp what is really the goal of their brave new world.  “The key to understanding critical race theory is grasping the difference between equity, the social justice goal of developing policy to produce equal outcomes, as opposed to equality, the scorned liberal ideal of equal rules and procedures.”  (emphasis mine)

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  • Communicating Uncertainty

    George Rebane

    Years ago when our kids were in grade school, our dinners involved discussions of matters that most people considered too deep for children.  Our kids knew nothing of this and participated wholeheartedly – kinda like the bumblebees who don’t know that they’re not configured for flight but fly anyway.  As a nascent systems techie, practicing aerospace engineer, and perennial grad student, I was very involved with the science of uncertainty, risk, and things barely known.  One of the things that intrigued me and Jo Ann as parents of young children was how we try to communicate our own assessments of uncertainty, and how these assertions are understood by others.

    The thing that really set off an investigation of this was my reading of how the Bay of Pigs disaster was approved.  It turns out that President Kennedy charged the Joint Chiefs to assess the CIA’s plan for the expatriates’ invasion of Cuba.  The general in charge of the study reported to JFK that there was a “fair chance” of success for the invasion.  With this input, the president gave the go ahead, and the rest is history.  Monday morning quarterbacking the disaster, the general was interviewed and opined that he intended ‘fair chance’ to communicate about a 30% chance of success.  JFK hearing of this later said that he never would have approved the invasion had he known that success came with such a low probability.

    In the 1970s Kahneman and Tversky did a lot of research on the matter, publishing their landmark results in ‘Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’ (1974).  Having read this as part of my day job, we decided to run an experiment to see how well we communicated uncertainty within our family circle given the wide range of family member ages involved.  We generated a list of uncertain statements based on how many black marbles there were in a bowl of a hundred other colored marbles from which a marble was drawn randomly.  These statements were more or less similar to the ones reported in Behn and Vaupel (1982) who cited a study by Donald H. Woods published in the Harvard Business Review that involved a large group of student subjects to “test the communicative content of some common probability phrases.”  The results were intriguing.

    To give you an example of some of the phrases to which the students were asked to assign a probability, consider the following –

    • There is a much better than even chance that …
    • There is a possibility that …
    • There is a high likelihood that …
    • There is little chance that …
    • There is a high probability that …
    • They will probably …
    • The possibility is low that …

    The results were reported in a columnar format with headings ‘Lowest’, ‘Lower Quartile’, ‘Median’, ‘Upper Quartile’, ‘Highest’ for each of the presented probability phrases which the students were asked to assess according to their own lights.

    When the Rebane family did our assessments of the number of black marbles out of a 100 that each of the phrases represented for us individually, the results were striking.  All five of us flew in very tight formation, especially given the wide range of ages from about seven to thirty-six.  Jo Ann and I had a hard time believing the results until it occurred to us that we all learned to communicate uncertainties with each other within our tight family circle.  With this in mind, it was not unusual that our linguistic biases had formed a tight and very effective quantitative group; we learned from each other.

    Now that result does not imply that other families’ assessments of the same phrases will match that of the Rebanes.  But it does suggest that each family or closely working cohort will, over time, develop a similar understanding and expression of everyday uncertainties.  And it also strongly suggests that people from different cohorts attempting to communicate uncertainty should augment their probabilistic phrase with a quantitative statement such 20%, or 45-55, or 99 out of a hundred.  At a minimum this would go a long way to preventing the redux of Bay of Pigs disasters.

    OK, so what?  Well, in these pages we discuss and debate a lot of issues and notions which have a bit or more of uncertainty connected with them.  A lot of our debates also generate more heat than light because we don’t successfully communicate our uncertain beliefs.  I’d like to see what kind of a spread we have, or how tightly we agree, given the Harvard probability phrases.  If you want to participate and see how you stack up with RR readers, then download, fill out (your numbers in place of the blue Xs), and email back to me a copy of this spreadsheet – Download ProbPhrases – shown below.  I’ll do the tabulation and post the results which, if a sufficient number of you respond, should be very interesting.  And I don’t need to go into a long dissertation on how such communications (of carefully wordsmithed phrases) in the media impact people’s views about almost everything that is reported.  BTW, you can copy the spreadsheet and do this experiment with your family, friends, and/or colleagues.  I guarantee that the results will be very revealing, and useful for future communications.

    ProbPhrases

    Behn & Vaupel (p77) report that “ambiguous probability phrases also plague legal communications.  For example, there is much confusion over the commonly used statement that, for a conviction, “a reasonable man” must believe that the evidence indicates a person to be guilty ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’  A survey of 347 judges found that some thought this meant that there had to be a 70-percent chance that the defendant was guilty (one judge even thought this meant only a 50-percent chance) and nearly a third of the judges thought it meant 100 percent.  A group of 69 jurors gave similarly divergent responses.”

    And all of us continue using such phrases while believing that we are communicating effectively.

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  • Blackouts Transparency

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 9 September 2020.]

    Two weeks ago in this commentary I discussed California’s blight of 3rd-world country blackouts, and argued that the Power Shortage Blackouts were unnecessary and caused by incompetence at the highest levels of California’s state government.  The other kind of blackouts we are being trained to accept are the so-called Public Safety Power Shutoffs.  These blackouts, we are told, are necessary to prevent wildfires like the one that burned down the town of Paradise.  The real reason for such tragedies is that the power transmission lines which cross our forested mountains have not been properly maintained for decades.

    Power companies like PG&E have prematurely focused on the administrative and political machinations involved with the mandated conversion to green power.  All this hullabaloo has been going as they have let their existing power lines deteriorate and become invaded by dangerously flammable foliage, waiting for a spark from a faulty connection or insulator to trigger the next disaster.  In short, our power utility mavens have ignored their existing infrastructure required for reliable power generation and delivery, in favor of new, more expensive, and insufficient means of providing electricity for California’s homes and businesses.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 8sep20

    [Heard of the new leftwing propaganda wave – there is nothing abnormal or extraordinary or illegitimate about elections the results of which are not known for days or weeks after election day.  That is their newest Big Lie.  For at least the last two centuries America’s election results have been known to the public on the eve of election day or the day after.  There has been one exception to that (2000 – Bush2 v Gore) during all this time, and other developed nations have fared equally with their election results.  Given Trump’s recent traction in the polls, the Democrats have now started to prepare us for Bumblebrain’s possible loss in the ballot count, and their Plan B of a subsequent drawn out litigation process to win in the courts.  gjr]

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  • Labor Day 2020 Laments

    George Rebane

    This Labor Day we again awakened to all lamestream media channels awash in various forms of anti-Trump vituperation and propaganda.  There is no talk or discussion of what the president has accomplished or of his second term plans, only endless repetition of the latest resurrected faux pas he uttered years ago.  Neither are the public apprised of Biden’s plans, for he has none of his own, and his handlers are at the horns of a dilemma – how not to reveal their devastating political desiderata that would surely lose them the election.  So the default is to spew diversions and lies more frequently and louder than ever.  And with Democrats’ total control of the Fourth Estate (even Fox News is timidly easing itself leftward), the Republicans flounder helplessly.

    If our electorate has any understanding of the growing Marxist revolution, they are keeping it to themselves, perhaps to reveal their wisdom in November.  In the meanwhile, the observables don’t look good.

    Here in California we are neck and neck with the other socialist dominated states in the race to the bottom.  One of RR’s astute longtime readers, ‘scenes’ (formerly ‘Scenes from the Apocalypse’ when he arrived on these pages), provided an excellent summation in a recent comment stream which is worth rereading –

    … the Blue State Boogie continues.  "Far-left protesters march to the @PortlandPolice north precinct, start a street fire & begin dancing. They’re playing their new “F— Ted Wheeler” rap song."  At least the power is still on for a bit. I always assumed that California would morph into Latin America given unchecked immigration, but we seem to have managed it on our own. A China virus no one knows what to do with, problematic electricity, overpopulation and poor forest management keeping insufficient fire suppression busy, home insurance slowly but surely going away, Communist Anarchists (a thing I've never wrapped my head around) marching in the streets as part of an election, grumblings from the patriots, drug money running a great deal of the local economy. Welcome to South America.

    Prominent conservative scholar, commentator, and film-maker, Dinesh D’Souza, is among the latest politically-savvy intellectuals who see the rising likelihood of a Great Divide.  He also joins those of us who have seen this future coming for some years now.  In an interview D’Souza tells FN’s Laura Ingraham that “recent riots and political unrest could lead to a rise of citizen militias around the country” while stating that “I’m not advocating this, I’m predicting it.  It is a natural and inevitable response to the militarization of one side.”  He goes on to point out that the rioting street thugs learned their hatred of America from today’s universities, which actually are no longer universities in the sense that they have eliminated the free discussion of ideas which has been the fundamental raison d’etre of universities upon which everything else that they may offer is built. (more here)  D’Souza’s latest documentary film ‘Trump Card’ is set for digital release on 9 October 2020.

    D’Souza agrees with the longstanding Rebane Doctrine assessment, "I think that the Democratic plan is [to swap out] Biden after the election. They don't want Biden to keel over before the election.  The reason they picked him is they think they needed a white male to camouflage the racial radicalness of their party. It's not like some chaotic process produced these horrible candidates. They chose him."

    And regarding the Great Divide, D’Souza maintains that the real reason the Democratic Party relies on force is that, “ultimately, they can only win if they can force us to live their way. Now, I don't think we're going to. We are no more going to submit to them and change our ways than perhaps they are going to submit to us. This raises the deeper question of how do we find a way going forward… We don't want the America they want and they don't want the America we want. The real question is, how do we coexist with each other. That's the real question of the future." (Emphasis mine)

    What today’s rioting BLM and Antifa thugs have no clue about is that, come the real revolution, their undisciplined lifestyles and supporting values will be instantly abolished and replaced with organized, mandated, and disciplined somber marches under approved banners interspersed with enforced cheering.  There will be no more burning and looting; most of their visible leaders will be summarily shot.  An Orwellian peace will descend upon the land in which all public expressions will be pre-authorized, and private expressions duly noted for later adjudication.

    From my perch, were there no Great Divide in our future, the road to tyranny then may well proceed according to the events of 1917 Russia.  History students recall that Russia’s Menshevik (‘minority’) socialists, under Kerensky, overthrew the czar in March to establish what turned out to be a weak and naïve anti-capitalist, pro-labor socialist regime that still played lip-service to a form of democracy.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks (‘majority’) never trusted the people and advocated a strong ‘dictatorship of the masses’ under an unabashed and ruthless central control.  In October the Bolsheviks ousted the Mensheviks and established communism as the state’s secular religion and template for organizing society.  This regime became the USSR and lasted for 80 years, until collapsing internally from massive corruption, inbred thuggery, and widespread incompetence.  For all those years, the people’s modus operandi was ‘They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.’  And this has been replicated under all subsequent communist regimes.  Such a merit-free/optional economic order is today proposed by the Democratic Party and its violent street cadres.

    Happy Labor Day.

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  • Scattershots – 4sep20 (updated 9sep20)

    The most important goal of the leftist project is to use the twin 2020 tragedies to alter the very storyline of America. – Mike Gonzales

    George Rebane

    The Great Divide draws nigh.  One of our astute readers highlighted ‘The Revolution is Upon Us’ by Mike Gonzales in the comment stream of the last Sandbox.  It is in an important essay that correctly highlights much of what is going on in America today as we approach the most contentious and possibly disastrous presidential election in our country’s history.  Read it.

    Bumblebrain’s Big Lies continue with his latest claim in Kenosha that it has been President Trump who has divided the country.  In the meantime, more clear-minded commentators from both the Left and Right recognize that it has been America's Left, dragging the Democrat Party with it, that started the quick march to Marxism.  If anything, this leftward lurch has also attracted some spineless Republicans to lean to port in the attempt to keep their elected jobs.  The Republican Party's platform has remained unchanged over the last years, which cannot be said for Team Pelosi et al.

    Trump on voting twice.  The president’s words and meaning have been mangled beyond recognition by the lamestream and our desperate Democrats.  (more here and here)

    Here are the president’s exact words to Jon Evans of North Carolina’s WECT:  “Well they'll go out and they'll vote, and they're going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way, because if it tabulates, then they won't be able to do that. So, let them send it in and let them go vote, and if the system is as good as they say it is, obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote so that's the way it is. And that's what they should do.”  He repeated a similar message last night in Pennsylvania.

    School shutdowns are butt stupid.  Using persuasive, cogent, and technically correct arguments more suitable for polite company, Drs J. Battacharya and M. Kulldorff of Stanford and Harvard Universities respectively,  inform us in ‘The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy’ that – “There is little purpose in using tests to check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school. When children are infected, most are asymptomatic, and the mortality risk is lower than for the flu. While adult-to-adult and adult-to-child transmission is common, child-to-adult transmission isn’t. Children thus pose minimal risk to their teachers. If a child has a cough, a runny nose or other respiratory symptoms, he should stay home. You don’t need a test for that. … Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for kids 15 and younger throughout the pandemic, with no masks or mass testing. How did it turn out? Zero Covid-19 deaths among 1.8 million children attending day care or school. Teachers didn’t have an excess infection risk compared with the average of other professions.”  I want to emphasize that I’m using ‘butt stupid’ as opposed to ‘ignorant’ to describe public policies keeping kids from attending school – ignorance can be corrected by supplying the ignorant with relevant data and information; stupidity refers to the cognitive inability to process, which is a deficit much more resistant to remediation.  Unfortunately, it is the latter that afflicts government bureaucracies far and wide.

    [6sep20 update]  We are no longer sufficient unto ourselves.  Foreign worker visas have been hampered by C19 strictures and other prohibitions intended to give a helping hand to the non-existent American worker.  Worker shortages have cropped up everywhere, led by the lack of qualified and willing talent in sectors such as technology, hospitality, recreation, and agriculture. (more here and here)  Equally troubling is the prohibition on academic visas for grad school students studying and researching STEM fields.  Since these resident workers earn and spend the bucks here in this consumer dominated economy, it is not clear where the additional consumer spending will come from to make up for the dear departed or never arrived.  More and more of our fellow Americans continue to get college degrees that require skill sets for which no one is willing to spend their own money to hire – of course, government spending OPM is the ever-present employer of last resort for those know-nothings, for which then the country suffers.  This reliance on legal and illegal foreigners cannot end well for us.

    ‘America Hit by Roughly 550 Violent Demonstrations in Three Months’  A bit of news totally alien to consumers of lamestream media.  National Propaganda Radio wakes up the country every morning with reports of “protests” against “racial injustice” in our cities, never mentioning the real openly declared aims of the BLM and Antifa rioters, amply funded, supplied, and transported as required to keep the heat on in the cities with incompetent, compliant, and abetting Democratic administrations.  And then, led by Team Pelosi and their lamestream lackeys, the word goes out again that the whole thing is fomented by our divisive President Trump.  And for millions of light readers across this land, this kind of reportage sustains their ground truth about what’s really going on.

    China is weaponizing water.  China is the source of major Asian rivers that flow into over ten other Asian countries.  On its rivers China has built over 87,000 dams, and continues to build ever more of these critical infrastructures that create huge reservoirs for in-country irrigation, transportation, and exerting strategic influence on its neighbors.  China can and has created droughts and floods that cause major impacts on the lives and economies of downstream countries.  If you don’t play ball according to China’s rules, your lands may be flooded or crackling dry. (more here) Now China also has dam problems, witness the structural cracks developing in its Three Gorges Dam and others (more here).  Also, dams are very vulnerable to attack during wartime, and many experts predict that in this century the major cause of wars will be over access to fresh water.

    [9sep20 update]  Left always wants to silence the Right, but not vice versa.  Why?  This litmus test for a leftwinger is reliable because the Left never ever has any new ideas, but can only offer slogans for old collectivist policies that have never worked here or elsewhere.  So in the battle of ideas their best tactic is to take a pass and call off the contest.  Instead of ideas, they substitute the Big Lie and a stream Alinsky Alternatives.  Locally this tactic was again evident in calls to silence both RR and Jo Ann who sits on The Union's editorial board.  And the Big Lie gambit is constantly available in its various forms in our local left-listing newspaper, today having a particularly vicious cornucopia of anti-Trump copy.

    The Democrats continue to work a brilliant tactic to promote Biden, they keep Trump talking about Trump.  Biden is a singularly unaccomplished, corrupt, and feckless politician with a 50-year record of absolutely no accomplishments that he can be allowed to burnish in public.  And he doesn’t even dare read off the list of policies his Marxist handlers have planned for us.  So to divert and suppress the Republicans’ strong suit of accomplishments and planned policies, the Dems have made the campaign about personalities, and ego-brimming Trump is more than happy to comply.  Our president still doesn’t understand that not many people like him personally, and that his only hope is informing voters of his record of accomplishments and plans for a prosperous and sovereign America.  Were he to make the campaign about what he’s done and plans to do, ol’ Bumblebrain would show up at that gunfight with an empty holster.

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  • Federal budget and “blowing holes” in it

    As I watch this new generation try to rewrite our history, one thing I’m sure of, it will be misspelled and have no punctuation. 

    George Rebane

    We have been deficit spending the federal budget for a few generations now.  And the Simple Simons of the land always lay the deficits at the feet of the current administration.  We just had an example of that (here) from local leftwing columnist George Boardman.  It really seems that these people have no idea how federal budgets are manufactured and structured.  Since all appropriation bills must start in the House, the situation becomes a bit complicated when one party doesn’t control both the House and the White House, and even more complex when Senate approval is thrown in.  (more here)

    Even thought the budget process normally starts with the President’s submittal to Congress of a recommended budget, it is usually DOA in a House controlled by the opposite party.  What really goes on then is that the House drafts a budget that it dickers with the Senate to go along, and then winds up, hopefully, as a ‘concurrent budget resolution’, which is essentially an outline for spending for the coming year enabled by a sequence of subsequent individual appropriations bills.  The concurrent budget resolution does not need the president’s signature to take effect.  If the two houses can’t agree on a concurrent budget resolution, then Congress has to pass a series of continuing resolutions to keep the government operating at current funding levels.

    So with all this going on to have the federal government finally spend through its various departments, bureaus, and agencies – each operating under their own regulatory structures – you really have to be a double dummy to think that the deficit, let alone individual expenditures, are all the president’s doing and fault.  However, in our land of the free, we also enjoy the freedom to be double dummies; there’s no law against it and you can even vote.

    At this point we haven’t even come to the major parts of the budget divided into mandatory spending and discretionary spending.  And then there’s the interest on the national debt – the part we must pay ‘the public’ and not merely government paying itself.  Take a look at the figure below.

    FedBudgetFractions2

    If we break down the components of discretionary spending, that’s where the real dickering starts.  The Dems have an advantage here because they are the champions of social programs that easily buy favorable votes during elections.  Historically, the Dems would like to push as many of their social programs into the un-sunsetted mandatory category as possible, and then continue to demand an equal share of the next year’s remaining discretionary spending (and, of course, to increase it through higher taxes).  The tension here comes with the Repubs always wanting to reduce taxes while also making sure the US doesn’t fall behind the bad guys militarily – i.e. only the Right wants America to maintain its white hat hegemon position in the world.  Both parties succumb to various forms of corporate and agricultural subsidies.  A breakdown of discretionary spending is shown below.

    FedBudgetDiscretionary

    So now we come to the special events category like Mideast Wars, ‘quantitative easing’ during the recovery from the Great Recession, and Covid Relief spending after the states variously and unnecessarily shut down their economies to create historic levels of unemployment in the land.  These boondoggles costing trillions really did lay waste to our budgets and the national debt.  Do we now stack all of these expenditures solely, or even mostly, on the backs of the presidents in office during those fiscal years?  (For example, Trump was responsible for the China virus and its impact on the country’s economy, ergo the subsequent relief spending.)

    We have always had two basic ideologies contending for money, added to the natural habit of politicians to indulge in local pork.  One side wants big government to be the end-all of control and the source of largesse, the other side wants small government and open markets, but knows that it has to play along with the spending game in order not to be swept out office by a population that grows more ignorant and dependent with each passing generation.  Anyone with a smidgen of history under their belt knows that this is the real dynamic that determines the levels and directions of federal spending.

    When all the budget dust settles, we have 535 congress critters, all jostling each other for credit on the passage of spending bills that they think will promote their re-election chances.  So out in television land, what can we make of these self-aggrandizing worthies who failed high school civics (remember when that was still taught), and are now trying to sound like they know how our government works by pointing to this or that president as having “blown a hole in the budget”?

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  • Sandbox – 1sep20

    [So here’s the drill about the riots.  According to the Big Liberal Lie Factory, up until last week there were no riots, only peaceful protests for social justice – ask anybody in the Dem leadership including Bumblebrain.  This week this position became ludicrous even for the country’s liberal contingent.  So a massive pivot was necessary and pulled off on the Sunday lamestream talk shows.  This week the riots are suddenly real, and have been so for some months, all caused by President Trump inciting white nationalists to violence from the White House.  Now that’s a more palatable version of reality for all the land's leftists.  gjr]

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  • Revolution Diary – 29aug20

    George Rebane

    How do you talk math with someone who believes 2+2=5?

    As I scan the morning papers and posts, some inevitable thoughts, idle and maybe not so idle, bubble to the surface.

    The above tag line is apropos to the total breakdown in America’s public discourse, and I do mean total.  This week ‘Thousands Flood National Mall to Protest Racial Injustice’ screams a headline with photos showing the usual crowd with t-shirts and signs assembling at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.  None of them know that they are blessed to live in the world’s most racially just country.  And the overwhelming share of them, those not of cynical purpose, suffer from ignorance on steroids.  Along with world-class racial justice in our land, every metric that may have pointed to racial injustice has been trending in the right way over the last decades.  What remains of evidence for residual racial injustice has been fomented and perpetuated for decades under Democrat administrations who have established and administered the plantations of reliable voters in inner cities. (more here)

    None of the know-nothings can describe what in their minds racial justice would look like in America.  Their only insane conclusion, embedded by their corrupt thought leaders like Sharpton, is that President Trump is the underlying cause of racial injustice and must be tossed from office this November.  Then with Biden there will be happy dancing in the streets while bullets continue to fly, and the thousands of black lives that don’t matter will continue to drop like flies.  Since they have no clue about or desire to improve black lives, you can bet the ranch that socialist planners are now busy coming up with the next round of rightwing scapegoats to blame for black under-achievement that the Democrats in charge can again sidestep.

    Taking the 50Kft view, it’s hard to tell where is the boundary between ignorance and stupid.  How many of them and theirs are intellectually irredeemable?  What dialogues or training remain in the realms of the possible or even the plausible?  It would not surprise me if tomorrow’s socialist planners will lament the premature rejection of eugenics (introduced and touted by America’s socialists), as they contemplate the latest uses of technology for creating Marx’s ‘perfect man’ to inherit the Earth.

    A parallel stream of contemplation comes closer to home when we consider the sorry state and direction of California.  In ‘California Needs Ideas’, Holman Jenkins reminds us of the utter idiocy that forms the foundation of our Democrats' obsession with what they believe to be preventable manmade global warming.  “No climate policy is available that would operate on a time scale relevant to California’s hellish wildfire challenge, except throwing enough opaque particles into the atmosphere to cool the Earth. … Anything that greens might favor, such as subsidizing green energy or taxing fossil fuels out of existence, is irrelevant. The effect would only manifest itself imperceptibly over many decades. To boot, it would require the participation of the world’s major economies, including China’s and India’s, which leaders answerable to California’s voters are in no position to deliver. … I make these points to underline an absurdity. California politicians spend much of their time obsessing about a climate change problem they can’t fix. Their state accounts for less than 0.1% of global emissions. There’s nothing they can do.”  In Sacramento stupid is forever, and the saddest part is that stupid is contagious in California – look around you.

    Continuing this line of thought brings us to this morning’s editorial in our beloved (29aug20) Union.  Their Saturday editorial reflects the aggregate thought of the newspaper’s editorial board – full disclosure, Jo Ann is a member.  Today they ask us to ‘Imagine if everyone voted’.  The piece begins by recounting the adoption of the 19th Amendment and the (silly?) reasons people argued against women becoming franchised to vote.  Well and good, but then they launch into a bit of perspective and philosophy to “give us a chance to reflect on where we’ve been, and remember what it took to get where we are.”  Immediately they trip over the much-disproven but still politically correct shibboleth – “The past is a chapter already written and set in stone.”  Nothing could be further from the truth today, if ever.  The past has always and many times over been rewritten by the victors.  Such wild revisionism continues to this day, and there is no sign that the practice will ever let up.  Today’s curriculum about our past is in a froth of wordsmithing that seeks to capture the most woke interpretation of our history to inculcate the current generation of young people. (more here) 

    The Union’s collected wisdom concludes with a heavy dose of hopeful fog.  “Imagine what our country would look like if everyone who could vote did, and exercised that right regularly.  Just imagine.”  Before our fevered imaginations can take wing, we do need a bit of clarity here.  Who are the “everyone who could vote”?  Are they all American citizens, or just registered American citizens, or just all legal adult residents of America, or all adult residents of America, or also our nascent middle school students, or …, who?  Our imaginations would be directed in very different directions were we to know who were the intended who.  Given the strong leftwing tilt of The Union, people of my ilk would not err much if such imagining began with some considerable trepidation.

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