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  • ‘Critical Ethnic Studies’, say whaat??!!

    George Rebane

    CAseal_SNAFUCalifornia’s public education system has been dysfunctional for years, and now in the age of riots and the growing socialist revolution, it is ready to take its final turns around the drain.  You will not read any of this in the lamestream, because the new curriculum to be adopted by Sacramento next spring will put a nice bow on finally acknowledging that unionized state-run public schools will become literally nothing more than finishing schools in Marxist propaganda.  However, our Left considers that the country’s remnants of traditional American thought still number enough to require the adoption of this new brainwashing initiative not be publicized.

    Former US Asst SecEd and Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers lays the whole thing out in the 28aug20 WSJ – ‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California.  His report goes a long way to answer the perennial question of how our younger generation has turned out in the aggregate to be so uncritical, compliant, and just plain dumb.  And for the country’s hardworking Orwellians, the adoption of this new mandatory curriculum into our high schools promises that for them the best is yet to come.  No student will graduate without having passed this course.  Dr Evers makes the case that “the state’s new curriculum prefers victimization to minority achievement, and Marxism to liberal values.”

    Critical ethnic studies is actually making its second appearance at California’s Board of Education.  The “radical and jargon-laced” 2019 version was sent back for a more “toned down” draft.  Well, it didn’t work.  The new and improved 2020 version not only didn’t correct any of the 2019’s “conceptual problems”, but has now been told by our state’s Dept of Education “to resuscitate” the really bad parts cut from the 2019 version.

    Among the litany of dreadful stuff that our students will have rammed down their cognitive craws are the newly focused victim “groups that dominate the curriculum … African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians.”  However, “excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth)”.  The course will actually “boil down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics, and victimology.”  Among the identified bad people in the world will be America’s Irish and Jews; why? because they have “secured white racial privilege.”

    As you might expect from such bilge water, “the revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics.”  These critics are portrayed as ideologically correct and pure, without a tinge of bad parts like racism or discrimination.  Yet, as Evers reminds us, “history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?”  Other horrific examples are easily obtained from Nazi Germany, Red China, Yugoslavia, Turkey, … .

    All this history is omitted, and will neither pollute nor divert our high schoolers.  For our young minds the world out there will be exquisitely formed so that what they are carefully taught will stick when they hit the streets to look for a job, vote, and demonstrate.  They will have all the correct answers they need to understand and interpret what they see and experience.

    Dr Evers concludes his essay with –

    The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

    All this, coming to a California high school near you.  And some still wonder why SNAFU continues so perfectly to describe the state of our state.  Now you need wonder no more.

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  • Ruminations – 27aug20 (updated 29aug20)

    George Rebane

    Not only can you have your own opinions, but today you can also have your own facts, history, science, logic, and language.  Rebane Doctrine

    Orwellian Inclusivity.  Only a progressive works to achieve inclusivity by first rooting out all wrong-thinkers.  (See all the ongoing firings of leftist academics and journalists for even putting a lexicographic toe over the line in the narrowing narrative of the ongoing revolution.)

    The lamestream is still providing scant, if any coverage, of the destructive and murderous riots in our cities, instead characterizing them as peaceful protests by “frustrated” young people.  This has the effect of making their audiences sound somewhere between silly and foolishly naïve when they enter into conversations about current events.

    Kansas Mask Graphic is latest Big Lie that illustrates how Dems present their ‘science’ with methods already perfected in fashioning their climate change narrative.  “The state’s health secretary fudged the data to make the governor’s mask mandate look successful.”  (more here)

    ‘A Batscat Challenge’ reminder.  Back on 9 August  2020 I once more countered our leftwingers’ deficient debating attempts, making the case, and concluding with So here’s a thesis to debate – ‘It is proposed that dedicated Democrats, following in the footsteps of their political leaders and notable academics, are in various forms intellectually disabled or delinquent (aka batshit crazy).’  No one should hold their breath that this challenge will be answered.

    VP Pence's commencement speech cancelled. (here)  More of the same applications of 'inclusivity' by Wisconsin Lutheran College, a timid private college folding to the demands of its woke student body contingent.

    ‘Majority of Americans Report Self-Censoring Their Political Views’ reports a Cato national poll -  “self‐​censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62%—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”  The beat toward radical-Left autocracy goes on.

    [28aug20 update]

    Ramirez_200828

    Erratum??  A reader took issue with a statement in my 5aug20 KVMR commentary on voting by mail.  Specifically, it involves whether/how the USPS timestamps postage-paid bulk mail.  I have addressed this (here) with more links to references that extensively report on and discuss the historical tsunami of ballots the USPS will attempt to handle in a timely manner this fall.

    Gov Nuisance has spoken.  We now know the updated C19 rules for gatherings and businesses that give us our new 'Blueprint for a Safer Economy' – something we've all been waiting for since only Sacramento knows all that stuff.  H/T to the reader who dug out and sent this very informative site that covers all California counties.  Reade 'em and weep.

    [29aug20 update]  Another view (here) on voting by mail is provided by Sen Chuck Grassley (R-IA).  It appears that the USPS is not in a cash crunch as hyper-ventilated in yet another Big Lie by Team Pelosi, and at least Iowa (along with Florida) is ready to handle November's mail-in ballots.  (H/T to reader)

     

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  • California’s Blackout Blight

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 August 2020.]

    California’s irregular power blackouts remind us of visits to third world countries.  As with our state’s recent and still ongoing water shortages, these power blackouts are totally manmade.  We are needlessly doing it to ourselves to achieve political objectives neither known nor shared by most Californians.  Our electrical grid is operated by the California Independent Systems Operator or CAISO, the organization that determines the amount of electricity available to the utilities and allocates it across the state.  For years we have known that the politically proposed schedule of switching the state to renewables was untenable.  Last September, CAISO warned that electricity shortages were possible during a normal heat wave in the near term due to our rapid shift to renewable and less reliable power sources like solar and wind.

    The blackouts we’re talking about here are Power Shortage blackouts and not the Public Safety Power Shutoffs to prevent the start of disastrous wildfires by tree branches blown against power lines.  The power shortage blackouts are due only to our premature removal of natural gas and nuclear generating stations, and their replacement by sometime wind and solar power.  Gov Newsom responded to the increasing public outcry against blackouts by admitting, “We failed to predict and plan for these shortages”, and then followed that with a tautology and a sanguine conclusion – “Our capacity for storage in particular substantially needs to be improved, but I am confident in our capacity to deal with that”, since the state “cannot sacrifice reliability” going forward.  And with those pronouncements delivered, we continue with business as usual.

    Even Loretta Lynch, former US Attorney General and California Public Utilities Commission president, states that “CAISO doesn’t know how to manage the grid.”  Such assessments from Democrat leaders further support that because government has been the incompetent and unreliable watchdog of the power industry, all kinds of games are being played by utilities, middle-men, and generators, as politicians have come up with poorly thought out policies for our state.

    The bottom line here is that if we’re to continue progressing toward 100% renewables while providing reliable power to consumers and industry, then we must have fossil or nuclear back-up generating capacity of years, perhaps decades, to come.  Pursuing any other policy today is to guarantee increasing power shortage blackouts and their collateral damage indefinitely.

    Looking at today’s big picture for California adds power shortages to water shortages to highest fuel costs to regulatory overburdens, housing shortages, ever higher taxes, homeless encampments everywhere, and on and on.  The result today is that only the large corporatist enterprises and the very rich are the benefactors of California’s still growing economy, as they are immune to the nation’s top tax and regulatory burdens that are visited primarily on the backs of the remaining middle class.  The result is the great California exodus – we export productive workers and businesses, and import the indigent and illegals seeking the loudly promised government handouts that are the common currency for vote buying.  The poor, sheltered from the heavy hand of government for all the obvious reasons, are the recipients of ever-increasing redistribution of largesse.

    The most plausible and visible reason for this dismal state of affairs is our long-reigning political monopoly.  Single party management of public affairs has allowed state regulatory agencies to become both indifferent and incompetent.  In all spheres of human activity, competition is the only cure for incompetence, and that applies to single party control of a state’s politics, policies, and administrative oversight.  Dominant socialist and communist regimes have demonstrated this truth for over a century now.  For decades voters in California have succumbed to the siren song of ever more socialist policies promised and delivered by the Democratic Party.  In the final analysis, what we have today we have done to ourselves by ensconcing single-party state and local governments that have effectively shut down all opposing political and policy alternatives.

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended 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.

    [Addendum]  The major impediment to the availability of affordable renewable electrical power is the lack of affordable storage of excess power that cannot be ‘banked’ either in storage devices like batteries or heated fluids or pumped water, or sold to current users who would be reliable sources of power when California’s generating system cannot meet the state’s needs. The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent. That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.  (more here)

    Today more people, including productive black families, are moving out of California than moving in.  In recent years this net exodus phenomenon has occurred occasionally.  For example “From 2015 to 2017, California saw a net loss of between 129,000 and 143,000 residents to domestic migration each year, according to census estimates. … California has lost more people to other states than it has gained for much of the last two decades, census figures show.” And this year’s census is expected to show a net loss of at least 40K residents.  Such losses will be an historical first, since California’s population annual growth rate has averaged a bit under 3% for generations.  Nevertheless, the state’s population dynamics remain a subject of debate and disagreement that all depend on how one counts the immigrant and emigrant cohorts.  But there is no reasonable debate about where on the productivity scale lie the aggregate of workers and businesses. (more here and here)

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  • Wingman Riot Response Tactic

    George Rebane

    [I found this little bagatelle buried in my RR WIP folder where I had stashed it a couple of weeks ago after being inspired by some serious news videos from our inner cities reporting on a particularly egregious evening of riotous celebrations during our summer of love.  Anyway, since such observances continue unabated, I thought I’d just throw it out there for what it’s worth.]

    It is clear that the police assigned to man the line during street demonstrations and riots are not very organized in the way they encounter rioters who need to be addressed – constrained, pushed back, arrested, defended against – as individuals.  Today police appear to act either as loners without dependable support, or as members of an ad hoc squad that suddenly decides to form and descend on a rioter while other officers either join the engaged squad, thereby contributing to the disorganized appearance of piling on, or they individually just mill around while obviously not addressing the remainder of the rioters.

    The problem is that individual officers know that it is dangerous to go one-on-one with a rioter, because other rioters will come to the aid of one of their own and attack the lone officer trying to do his duty.  The result is that the overall response of the massed police operating in this manner turns out to be much less effective that what is possible with a different command structure on the ground.

    A workable solution to this problem is that EVERY officer on the street is first and foremost a member of a two-man team, every officer has an assigned partner or ‘wingman’ (a la fighter aircraft).  They operate as a team in constant communication with each other.  They are never more than, say, ten feet apart, always with an eye on each other.  They go after a rioter together in a tactic where one can address the rioter, while the other defends the encounter.

    Such two-man teams can also call for other such teams to support them as the need arises.  The fundamental point here is that no line officer feels alone and uncertain of what kind of support he may depend on or receive, when either attacked or in response to a decision taken to inhibit or arrest a rioter.  Everyone always has a wingman, everyone operates in pairs.

    This principle is already adopted and in practice with regular patrol officers up to the level of detectives who work with an assigned partner in relationships that endure anywhere from many months to many years.  This format needs to be replicated on the streets when responding to demonstrations and riots.  Every demonstrator should know that police operate in pairs, and that they will quickly be reinforced by other paired teams.  In short, no officer should feel like the Lone Ranger when it all hits the fan.

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  • Scattershots – 24aug20 (updated 26aug20)

    George Rebane

    Only Trump can defeat Trump.

    Our liberal readers really don’t understand what real ‘fake news’ is, and they throw that notion around as they do with terms like ‘racist’, which they also don’t understand.  Since they are a class-oriented people, liberals don’t look at the message, only the class membership of the messenger.  If it’s of the wrong type, they immediately disregard what the messenger brings, and vice-versa.  As demonstrated here for years, the NYT and WaPo are prime purveyors of fake news to the nation’s light readers, as always cited by the falsity of their messages.  Here is another example of fake news they manufactured regarding the Russian collusion imbroglio.  Read Daily Caller’s ‘Russian Oligarch’s Ties To Manafort, Steele Posed Intel Risks, Senate Report Says’, and note what critical parts of the Senate’s report these newspapers left out, altering the message to support their ongoing progressive narrative – all of it invisible to their blindered true believers.

    Bumblebrain bumbles again – “If the scientists say shut it down, I’ll shut it down.  I go with science.”  The manchild has no clue how science or the government works.  His concept of science is what mommy tells an 8-year-old about science.  There is only one science and the good scientist tells us what it is.  Young children are not exposed to the wide diversity of scientific interpretations of literally every phenomenon – science is simply what mommy says it is.  The executive listens to scientists of all hues and then decides – it’s not easy and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.  And shutting down the country’s social and commercial activities – the President has no constitutional authority to do that under our federal system; all he can do is jawbone the states.  And after 40 years in the Senate, Biden is still such a naïf, and getting more addled by the day, that he knows none of this.

    [25aug20 update]  America will suffer its greatest assault on religious institutions after a Biden victory according to the policy platform laid out by the Democrats.  The Big Lie that’s supposed to make us somnolent on the matter is bead-carrying Biden’s touted devotion to Catholicism.  As Bill McGurn points out here, nothing could be further from truth.  The Dems have never liked religion and its non-profit agencies and enterprises as a competitor that provide succoring services which always outshine similar government efforts in performance and cost.  Their solution, always practiced by socialists, is to constrain and reduce religious liberties.  The current approach by Team Biden and Democrats will be up the ante on licensing requirements and tax exemptions for non-profit, religious agencies offering everything from foster child care to parochial education.  According to their platform, these strictures will “reject” the “broad religious exemptions” that “allow businesses, medical providers, social service agencies and others to discriminate.” In other words, religious liberty.

    ‘The US Admits Too Few Refugees’ argues Reid Ribble, former Republican congress critter from Wisconsin.  His makes the point that “America should open its doors to those fleeing communism and religious persecution”, and goes on to cite our country’s core values in welcoming the oppressed as the basis for increasing our allotment of such refugees back to the almost 100K/yr level.  (more here)  I wish that he would have included some other criteria than just political or religious persecution to qualify the literally millions of so-oppressed people worldwide for US entry.  My own druthers would be the addition of some aspect of merit, say, academic, artistic, trade skill, STEM qualified, … .  But setting up a more comprehensive set of criteria becomes highly political as each side tries to size up who will wind up with more voters.

    [26aug20 update]  The first-rate, marquee-quality Democrat Big Lies are now coming in way too fast to count.  Today’s highlighter was delivered by Kamala Harris who pointed out that the insignificant Ebola and H1N1 deaths during the Obama/Biden administration demonstrated what proper pandemic leadership could deliver.  The sleazebag slut didn’t blink an eye in omitting to tell her debilitated devotees that Ebola’s transmission was restricted to exchange of bodily fluids, and that the H1N1 mortality rate was extremely low.  Added to that, the medical experts in charge of managing both diseases today freely admit that it was NOTHING that they did that choked the outbreaks, but only a couple of extremely lucky turns of events.  Yet that broad continues to spread the Big Lie that it was the Obama/Biden administration’s astute policies that scotched the spread of the diseases, and contrasts it with Trump’s equivalent task that he has mishandled.  Covid-19 is a couple leagues above the easy money maladies of Ebola and H1N1, but that no lamestream consumer will ever know.  (BTW, H1N1 is still among us with its insignificant death rate.)

    As a Lucky Strike Extra, the Dems have not been able to describe what else they would have done or promise to do in controlling C19, other than plagiarizing what Trump has already done and is doing.  Compared to the present administration, their prescriptions contribute a nothing burger.  Notice the leftwing crickets’ replies to these.

    Another Big Lie we pick up today is the Dems’ screams that the First Lady and SecState Pompeo violated the Hatch Act with their respective speeches yesterday.  To begin, the Hatch Act gives wide latitude and exemptions to the Executive Branch, and the WH South Lawn and Rose Garden are specifically omitted from the parts of the executive mansion in which it is inappropriate to conduct partisan events.  And, of course, Team Biden provided no evidence to counter Pompeo carefully circumventing using State Department offices for his privately arranged and funded canned speech from Israel.  But all that don’t make no never mind to the Dems.  All they hope to do from now until November is to continue diverting attention from their ‘Party Without A Platform’.

    Biden finally had to say he “won’t stand for violence in the streets” during his leftwing constituents' peaceful demonstrations across the land (actually, he referred only to Kenosha, but I’ll give him the rest of the country’s rioting cities which he has yet to acknowledge).  So my question to him is, ‘OK Bumblebrain, what would it look like to the rest of us when you won’t stand for the violence?’

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  • Sandbox – 24aug20

    [The Democrats' damage and destruction to America's black population reaches back to ante-bellum years.  In recent decades they have turned their tender mercies for our African-American neighbors onto cynical avenues that have laid waste to black families and the communities in which they live.  Under decades of Democrat rule we can echo the question asked by an enlightened black candidate for Congress – name any city in which life for blacks has improved over the last, say, forty years.  About all this our leftwingers respond with crickets.  Here is a campaign video that spells it out. (H/T to reader)  gjr]

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  • Biden’s Big Lies – 22aug20 edition

    George Rebane

    Bumblebrain read little that's new off his teleprompter last Thursday night.  The only policy statement he made was what he’d do to end the C19 epidemic in the US.  His Big Lie was the enumeration of everything that Trump has already done or has under way, save for a federal mandate to impose wearing of masks countrywide.  And the tragedy of the matter is that we have manufactured so many millions of double dummies with our public education system so that most of them out there in television land believe that Bumblebrain actually has some new initiatives that will work.  Now that’s another Big Lie.

    Also, did you notice that Bumblebrain, along with his lamestream lackies, never once during the Dem convention brought up the California power blackouts that their Green New Deal policies will impose on the rest of the country once they’re elected and control Congress.  That is a Big Lie that must not be made public, not even telling the country in their news programs that California is suffering blackouts because the Dems’ green policies have eliminated the state’s ability to provide base load capacity when the demand is high, and the wind and sun no longer cooperate.

    Biden’s biggest bamboozle is not telling the country what he stands for, and instead letting Kasich give one message while Bernie gives the one that’s 180 out.  RINO Kasich’s message attempted to tell everyone that ol’ Joe isn’t that far left after all, he’s just a moderate with good character traits.  While Comrade Bernie declared total victory on national television telling all that Bumblebrain has signed up for the Full Marxist Monty spelled out in the Green New Deal.  (And notice the complete silence on both the lamestream and during convention about the riots, lootings, burnings, murders, … going on across the country under Democrat leaders.  There’s a real whopper of a Big Lie.)

    Finally, we see that Russia and the EU are betting that Biden will win in November.  They are doing nothing to support America in its correct policy to impose UN authorized ‘snap back’ sanctions that were originally contained in the JCPA (the infamous Obama nuclear deal).  The mullahs have violated almost every provision in the horribly drafted agreement that still gives the UN Security Council ample grounds to stop Iran from acquiring and reselling advanced weapon systems and military gear.  But money talks.  Angela and her cronies, along with Vladimir, have some serious bucks at stake here in their sales of guns and grenades to the ragheads.  Iran remains the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism, and our allies don’t give a crap (Vladimir’s position is understood).  This again says that Biden continues clueless on foreign policy, and President Trump is the only one with the courage to call the shots and sanctions on the international stage.

    Now these are the real Big Lies told Americans by our country’s anti-American political party.  And no one, not even the local leftwing lackies, will dare address any of these issues for the simple reason that they have no leg to stand on.  On these issues crickets continue as the only working alternative during these election year debates.

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  • Sigfor: A Data Driven Pandemic Response Policy Evaluation Tool

    George Rebane

    The Covid-19 pandemic has called on hundreds of local jurisdictions to fashion response policies that are suitable for their particular locales and demographics.  In technical note TN2007-1 we introduce Sigfor, a computational tool that policy makers can use for monitoring the effectiveness of the current policy and yield an early prediction of the effectiveness of a policy change.  The tool inputs a continuing stream of mortality data, and forecasts the expected maximum number of deaths and when this number would be reached, given that the current response policy remains unchanged.  The technical note can be downloaded here – Download TN2007-1_Data Driven Pandemic Response Policies

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  • Sandbox – 19aug20

    [Please keep Nevada County fire comments under the appropriate topic headings.  gjr]

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  • Wildfire Diary – 18aug20 (updated 20aug20)

    George Rebane

    1. PG&E turned off power on Hind Tit Road and told us it was part of the 1-2 hour rolling blackouts all across the state. Our blackout has now been rolling along for 17 hours.  Moreover, it was beyond cynical that they decided to turn off power to neighborhoods hurriedly preparing to evacuate from the Jones Bar Fire.  Our power does not come through the fire area, it comes from the other direction.  As I mentioned before, there is no power shortage, the outages we are suffering are politically mandated by the state’s Democrat super-majority who have taken offline natural gas and nuclear power generators.
    2. Government incompetence and incapability has been on parade again during this fire. All information outlets, loudly proclaimed and lauded during calmer times, outlets that we’re supposed to access when the fire emergency comes, all of them were dysfunctional.  This in the sense that websites were down, phones weren’t answered, and media outlets not informed, most certainly not in any useful timely manner, of the state and extent of the fire.  County and Cal-fire failed utterly, informing us for hours of a 30 acre fire that was already over 300 acres, and no idea of its progress toward populated areas.  They couldn’t even “confirm” whether a home had burned.  Apparently in an environment of low winds and high humidity, the firefighters are doing a better job in the field than their colleagues sitting in command centers and emergency management offices.  No doubt through no fault of their own, Yubanet and KNCO have been particularly worthless as sources of useful and timely fire information.  And the nation’s useful idiots want government to nationalize our healthcare system??!
    3. Memo to county emergency management: have someone in the incident command center, that always has an updated map of the current burn area, draw the fire contours on the map in their pad, timestamp it, and then send it to the webmaster who can post on the advertised fire information sites.  Do this at least hourly.
    4. Yesterday afternoon we got multiple notifications, all concurrent and inconsistent, of “evacuation warnings”, “evacuation advisories”, and “evacuation orders”. You could take your pick by just choosing which outlet (website, radio), robocall, or text message you wanted.  After the power had been off for two hours, we had the Jeep and truck packed with some important irreplacables and more immediate necessaries, and evacuated to our daughter’s house in Alta Sierra.  It was a redo of a similar evacuation we did to her house in 1993 (more here).  We all had a laugh about it when we arrived – we now owe her two evacuations to our house. 
    5. This morning I caught up on the Democrat doings. They’re still singing lyrics from their tried and true TDS Anthem.  Nothing about policy specifics for their promised Socialist America – the leftwing constituent demands very little information from his politicians, as long as he hears promises of OPM coming his way.  In this regard Bumblebrain Biden is his man.  Biden has called for “an end to the era of shareholder capitalism.”  According to him, it’s “untrue and a farce” that "a company’s primary responsibility is to generate returns for shareholders."  (more here)  As I have pointed out countless times, the progressive has no idea how a functioning economy works.  EVERYWHERE in the world where they have gotten their hands on an economy, it either flushes immediately or immediately starts circling the drain hole. 
    6. Then there’s carefully cultured Kamelion Kamala who “when she changes her stands it tends to be politically convenient, slowly acknowledged and poorly explained. There are signals of seeing policy as an external thing, not an outgrowth of one’s own belief structure, and things can change.” She was born into a very liberal, upper-class, educated family, and enjoyed all the privileges that our land could offer.  She is a political powerhouse with few public service accomplishments save some very critical ones about which, perhaps, only Willie Brown knows the particulars. (more here) 
    7. Last night we gathered all the potpourri of fire information we could, mixed it with our own considerable experience about such things, and decided to spend the night in our own bed. We arrived in the dark, fired up the generator, and had a restful night listening to the fan we set up in the bedroom.  This morning we got up, checked the web for updates (no joy), listened to KNCO (no joy), and had breakfast.  The neighborhood up here on the ridge is very quiet; every once in a while we can hear an airplane in the distance.  No S-2 bombers in sight, but we’re told that Calfire is getting good use out of 800-gallon, single-engine, converted crop dusters since they can maneuver better in the South Yuba River canyon.  So, we’re still all packed up, with our bags staged by the door, ready to high-tail it out of here once there is some visible evidence to recommend that.  Otherwise, we just check on the fire info outlets that contain little besides yesterday’s newspaper.  At 930am PG&E's bullshit rolling blackout, it don't say nothin' but jes keeps rollin' along.
    8. [1313 hrs]  NC Emergency Service Fire Dashboard is over 13 hours old.  I just drove the peripheral roads of the fire and talked to stationed police and firefighting personnel.  No one in the field knows what's happening, the extent of the fire, or even where the incident command center is located.  The closest was a congenial CHP on 49 who opined that it was located in the Helling Library.  Turns out its in the Rood Center as expected.  When you try to call Emergency Service, you get blown off.  The government beat goes on; no one knows and everyone is quite sanguine about the fire.  And PG&E tells me that the dolts working for them are still trying to figure out the "cause" of my "outage".  Apparently the idiots can't determine if it's still their announced "rolling blackouts" or God knows what – power has now been out 22 hours.  And their Lucky Strike extra is that they have no information as to when they might get additional information about my outage.

    [20aug20 update]  Last night Jo Ann and I got texted that it was safe to return home, our part of Cement Hill Rd had its evacuation order lifted.  We were hunkered down at our daughter’s house in Alta Sierra, she had been the perfect hostess during our stay and made the sojourn actually fun (save for trying to find out what the Jones fire was doing).  We made numerous trips into town to get more groceries and pick-up some necessaries that we left behind.  During these forays we always stopped in Morgan Ranch at a spot that overlooks our entire ridge to the north, and also provides a view of the fire’s smoke coming up from behind a closer ridge to the northwest from our observation point.

    (more…)

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RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

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