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George Rebane
Well, I am relieved to see the socialist demagogue Booker retire from this race. The man was a way too good-looking and smooth talking Marxist with the ability to bamboozle a lot of people before November. He may still be a candidate for Warren’s VP, unless she wants to pick someone less rabidly leftist like Buttigieg.
George Rebane
While Messrs Smith, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, and Freedman explained it all, Mr Henry Hazlitt succinctly summarized the whole thing in his classic, Economics in One Lesson (1946). This book has become such a fundamental text, that you don’t even have to buy a copy of it any more. It is now online in its entirety – many of us did buy it, having read it long before the internet, and now displaying it on the bookshelf for dinner guests. The Foundation for Economic Education features it here. For readers wishing to free themselves from the stifling Marxist economics that our progressives use to mismanage both our national and state economies, I strongly recommend checking out FEE’s ample and informative offerings on economics and society. See also the Mercatus Center.
America is such a blessed country that illustrates the economic principles taught by the above giants. An example of this is the graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shown nearby. It shows how Obama’s leftwing economic policies held back the nation’s recovery for eight straight years, and what happened during the first three years of President Trump’s administration when the straps on free markets were loosened a bit (they still need to loosen much more).
This information appeared in the 11jan20 WSJ under a piece titled ‘The Economy’s Inequality Dividend’. When posting such compelling data that exposes and illuminates another Big Lie of the Left, it is always interesting, revealing, and entertaining to read the countering apologetics from the chorus of collectivists who dare to venture into this arena of ideas so foreign to all they have been taught. Albeit, there are not too many of them, for here as elsewhere, discretion is still the better part of valor, especially of the misguided kind.
Coincidentally, today the 11jan20 Union published an excellent supporting column by Mr Jim Driver (here), who offered ‘Twelve Real Economic Facts’ first published by FEE. Here we present them as published.
RR’s longtime assiduous readers will recognize that the above flies in tight formation with my credo, and the part of Rebane Doctrine published in these pages over the years. My duty, as I see it 😉
[Many apologies for letting the last sandbox get a little soggy. So many issues, so little time. gjr]
George Rebane
Marianne Williamson, self-help and spiritual adviser, and part of the Democrat menagerie of candidates, withdrew from the race to POTUS today. From my perch, her withdrawal was probably for the best, since displacing the former residents of the Pantheon, the secular humanist Democrats have eschewed anything that might have out-evolved their own kind.
George Rebane
The Dems’ Chorus of Cacophony is now shrieking at Trump for taking out Soleimani the terrorist as a prophylactic for imminent acts of terror, exactly the same thing they blamed and still blame Bush2 for NOT taking out Bin Laden in order to prevent 9/11. We recall it was Bill Clinton who declined to take out Bin Laden when he was actually in our cross-hairs.
More liberal worthies are also blaming Trump for Iran’s downing of the Ukrainian airliner, claiming that our president caused the deaths of the innocent passengers. No doubt all subsequent atrocities committed by the rump ISIS contingents will now be blamed on our president since he also took out ISIS leader al-Baghdadi. Such accusations are a daily testament to the anti-American propaganda of our progressives who promote the longevity of every leftwing tyrant across the globe.
Our voting teenagers should make US foreign policy a “higher priority” argues a learned 17-year-old in the 10jan20 edition of The Union (here). The young man appears to have been successfully inculcated in our public schools to embrace TDS as the proper political support for voting decisions (he likes Buttigieg), while ignoring the capacities of his much less knowledgeable and more malleable peers. His point would be better made were our schools really a forum for open discussion of ideas instead of founts of mind-melding progressive propaganda.
'Tax the robots' is the new cry arising across the land as a way to slow down automation and save the jobs of the un- and less-skilled. This, along with universal basic income (q.v.), appears to be the half-way solution to the advent of systemic unemployment. Other deep thinkers are of the mind that smart machines will be like all other past innovations, they’ll create more new jobs as they change and take away old jobs. No one yet knows how to tax this latest advance in what used to be called automation. And you can be sure that nothing promising about all this will come out of our polarized legislatures. The real problem of systemic income was outlined in these pages some years back (here, here, and here).
[12jan20 update] The winds of woke. Oh it’s hard to be a progressive without getting daily instructions from PC Central. For years they taught us about the benefits of adopting cross-cultural artifacts, arts, and affectations into our supposedly banal and racist western culture – inclusivity and globalism and all that. Now suddenly it has become ‘misappropriation’ to do any of that – a definite no-no for all the woke folks. The latest is that white women should no longer wear hoop earrings which were originally connected with African women’s adornments. Gotta stay current.
"The ongoing turmoil in U.S. politics is part of a larger political crisis that is shattering old alignments of left and right in North America and Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, embattled establishments are besieged by populist insurgents. The rebellion takes different forms in different countries—the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., Brexit in the U.K., the revolt of the yellow vests in France. But the underlying dynamic is the same: the revolt of alienated, mostly but not exclusively native and white working-class voters against post-national metropolitan elites." So argues University of Texas Prof Michael Lind in a major 11jan20 WSJ essay (here). New insights, definitely worth a read for those paying attention.
[13jan20 update] ‘Stack & Pack’, an important objective of Agenda21 (now Agenda2030), takes a huge step forward in California under SB50 which Gov Newsom will sign into law. Here’s the headline – “Senate Bill 50 tramples over local control to push densification”. Our leftwingers will again sing the A21 conspiracy song. And again I reply that with Sacramento’s one-party system of governance, there is no conspiracy needed to promote collectivist central planning and control. (H/T to reader) Oh, and did I mention AB5?
George Rebane
Progressives’ public displays of caring social involvement will abruptly end when they finally destroy the economy that enables such displays.
Joining the chorus of all Democrats, Sen Tim Kaine is a POS and a lying scumbag every time he opens his mouth. Last night on FN he lied about there being members of Congress who favor a “war with Iran”. He continued spewing his crap by claiming that we actually are at war with Iran, thereby violating the 1973 War Powers Act (which was only a joint resolution of Congress). We are NOT at war with Iran, but only responding militarily in the type of push-back operations that George Kennan first outlined in his 1946 ‘Long Telegram’ from Moscow, and which we have been doing for over 70 years. (Granted, we had two non-declared wars in Korea and Vietnam in the interlude under Democrat presidents.) And the POS finished his interview by lying that Bolton needs to testify to the Senate since he has appealed “please subpoena me”. In truth, far from Kaine’s mouth, Bolton has only said that he was willing to testify were the Senate to subpoena him.
The progressive pinheads of Middletown, Ohio have established expanded facilities for its homeless and publicized that they welcome all comers. Well, all comers from all over the state are now being shipped to Middletown. And wouldn’t you know it, the Middletown mamas and papas are shocked at the response – I mean, talk about room temp IQs. 3 of 4 homeless in town now are from out of town, and Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw (his real name, I swear) says, “We have a huge problem with other cities (they know who they are), dumping homeless people here because they don't want them in their city.” Now folks hereabouts know that Nevada City and even Grass Valley are real concerned about becoming more caring and welcoming to the homeless, both indigenous and immigrants. RR recommends that our Nevada County worthies put in a call to Chief Muterspaw, and go over their plans to handle the homeless from the I-80 corridor.
[Later] Authoritarian progressivism is America’s metastasizing cancer that is quietly eating away here and there at the social fabric that binds our people and has made our country the shining beacon for all humanity. Like cancer, authoritarian progressivism does its focused work quietly and mostly out of sight until irreparable damage is done, only then does it step out and don the mantle of the government gun. Its ongoing war on philanthropy is an area where our Democrat leftists intend to wipe out one of the most effective instruments of civil society, but one that visibly and successfully competes with the notion that the government collective should be the source of all civil good. The Big Lie that private philanthropy is an “elite charade” is now promoted by lamestream outlets like WaPo, NYT, and NPR – the full court press is on. More specifically, as editor of Philanthropy magazine Karl Zinsmeister points out (here), “Today’s critics of private giving are most misleading in their suggestion that it is primarily a game played by “the billionaire boys’ club.” That’s not even close to accurate. The lion’s share of America’s vast philanthropy comes from ordinary citizens, 100 million of whom make charitable gifts annually, with the average household donating around $3,000. In addition, 77 million citizens volunteer time and labor. This broad generosity powers some 1.5 million independent nonprofits across the country, operating in every imaginable part of the economy, pursuing a panoply of approaches to national improvement.” (Much more to be said about this war, but I do want to point out that this is another of RR’s series highlighting leftwing's Big Lies – abiding and impactive lies that really do matter.)
George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 January 2020.]
Do black lives really matter? Well that clearly depends on whose talk and whose walk you pay attention to. The loud talk from our congresscritters and black leaders is that black lives very much matter, and that it’s the police and white racists who are wantonly killing blacks across the land. But by their walk and the abundant facts on record over the last half-century, these same people demonstrate that they really don’t care much about how African-Americans live and die. They only demonstrate their concern and ire after a rare and unfortunate incident occurs where a black American is killed by a law enforcement officer. Then it is time to gather their constituents in the streets and continue the narrative that blacks are dying in great numbers at the hands of cops and whites.
The reality is quite different in that blacks die by the hundreds every month at the hands of other blacks. This ongoing carnage does not raise a murmur in the national news. No black leaders or members of Congress, or media outlets express their outrage on Monday mornings after another weekend of murder and mayhem in the Democrat controlled urban ghettos.
From the conservative National Review we learn the big picture that “From 2000 to 2015, the mean African-American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That’s more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4 (despite disadvantages comparable to those of blacks) and over seven times the average white rate, 2.7. Moreover, … from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of the killers of black murder victims were other African Americans. In short, this is about exceptionally high as well as overwhelmingly intraracial black violent crime. White-on-white homicide is equally intraracial, but the rates are not astronomically high. … (And) in the contemporary period, from 1976 to 2014, it is estimated that (over 198,000) African Americans died nationwide at the hands of black killers. That’s (more than 5,200) deaths per year on average, roughly 19 times the annual number of deaths of African Americans in confrontations with police.” (more here)
There have been a few short-lived programs attempted that effectively reduced crime rates in our urban centers. The most notable of these was carried out under NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a white Jewish liberal politician now running for president. The ‘Broken Windows’ and ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ programs during his 2002-2013 tenure saved over 21,000 lives of which 90+% or over 19,000 of them would have been black. So what happened?
The response after Bloomberg left office was immediate and disastrous. Under leftwing Mayor DeBlasio, stop-and-frisk, which took hundreds of illegal guns off the streets, was discontinued because cops ‘unfairly’ stopped and frisked more blacks than people of other races. As reported in the WSJ, “the rap on stop-and-frisk was that stops of African-Americans were disproportionate to their percentage of the population. That is true. But as (Mayor Bloomberg) pointed out, they were not disproportionate to the descriptions of the people committing crimes given by witnesses.” (more here) No matter, progressive views on political correctness and social justice demanded that neighborhood maintenance was no longer required, illegal guns returned to the streets, and, as predicted, the crime rate began increasing. And blacks again started dying at the hands of other blacks in greater numbers.
So today, the Democrats know that they have no chance against Trump without the black vote. And for reasons no one dares to study or answer, our urban African-American populations demand policing policies that cater to proportions propagandized by Democrat politicians, instead of caring that black lives matter. So now we have candidate Bloomberg doing a 180 on the stop-and-frisk apology circuit for having saved thousands of black lives, and promising never to do it again.
The questions no one is asking are, ‘Was it fair to blacks that an effective policing policy was discontinued, thereby again raising black-on-black murder rates?’, and even more importantly, ‘What does all this say about the priorities and/or the understanding of the black voters who year after year return disastrously incompetent and corrupt politicians to office, who then perpetuate their lives on the “plantation”?’ As reported in the Washington Post, Candace Owens has a YouTube video (here) that explains the matter – I recommend it to you.
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.
George Rebane
Thanks to President Trump, we are again at a crossroads which gives us an opportunity to define America’s stand in the Mid-East, and a related strategy for a new crisp and clear global foreign policy, one understood by all to achieve and maintain a power balance that promotes peace and prosperity to a satisficing level. In the following I once more outline such a policy, this time in a structured format for easy reference in subsequent examinations.
For the above outlined policy I humbly solicit contributions and criticisms before incorporating a refined version into the body of Rebane Doctrine.
George Rebane
On hubris and nemesis in the Deep State – an interview (here) with Victor Davis Hanson sheds some new light on the goings on in the unelected state within a state. (H/T to correspondent)
Consulting Congress required? The Constitution is very specific on the matters of national security that require the President to consult with Congress before acting. And the Constitution purposefully gives the President sole power to decide what constitutes an imminent threat to our national security. The War Powers Act (actually a Resolution) of 1973 was enacted only to check the President’s power to unilaterally commit the US to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress (e.g. the Vietnam War). None of this is material to the opportunistic assassination of another high level terrorist leader in the course of conducting longstanding regional security operations. The Democrats are demogauging their hopefully ignorant constituents.
Listening to Tucker Carlson quoting polls taken of all Americans on matters of economics, foreign policy, ecology, …, and anything requiring numeracy is a misleading and futile effort, because the population as a whole is not read on such topics. That is why our Founders feared a pure democracy and instead gave us a republic, ‘if we can keep it’. Anti-Americans of all stripes always advocate doing away with our republican Constitution and substituting a pure democracy as the shortcut to an overarching tyranny of the elites. Tucker should know better.
[6jan20 update] Obama’s blatant treachery (without congressional approval for those so concerned) was secretly releasing and delivering to the mullahs pallets of Iranian cash sequestered by the US since that country declared itself a sworn enemy of America and acted accordingly for decades. That money went directly to support the rogue country’s killing of Americans across the globe, and funding its world threatening nuclear weapons program. And we have yet to discover who all in the free world took Iranian bribes to support the horrible nuclear agreement under which the mullahs have continued their nuclearization unopposed and unobserved.
The Union demonstrates once again its open-door editorial policy to let profoundly ignorant local ideologues embellish their op-ed pages. Today a Nevada City worthy gets to vent in a particularly long diatribe titled ‘The billionaire’s (sic) lament’. Here we learn that it has been our billionaires who have prevented “working/nonworking class families (to) be able to live sustainable lives.” It is they who have squirreled all that money, taken from the poor, in their mattresses instead of investing it to build companies, provide needed goods/services, and create jobs for the rest of us. Happy days lie ahead when the likes of Bernie and Pocahontas put in place their new asset and income taxes to finally launch what “is a ‘class battle for power,’ one between the wealthy old rich males (super rich 1%) with their minions (rich 19%) against all of you, no matter who you are.”
The nation’s progressive pinheads have now fastened on “imminent threat” as a demonstrated prerequisite for killing Soleimani, the murderous mastermind of Islamist ragheads everywhere. Congressional Democrats and their lamestream lackeys grudgingly admit to Soleimani’s decades of dastardly deeds, but now see ‘imminence’ as a useful distraction to refocus their ongoing TDS. From the 6jan20 WSJ, “If the threat to Americans from Soleimani was real, it doesn’t matter under international law whether the threat was “imminent.” The traditional law of war couldn’t be clearer on this point. If Soleimani was an enemy combatant waging war on the U.S., then the U.S. has every right to target him. If he was directing attacks on the U.S., as not even Chuck Todd doubts he was, then he can be legally targeted.” (here)
George Rebane
My dear friend Russ Steele died this morning in the loving arms of Ellen, his wife of 56 years. Russ was taken by pancreatic cancer which he had been fighting for the past year. The Steeles and Rebanes have been close friends since we moved here in 2002, having worked on various community projects together, frequently entertaining and travelling together and with friends, and, of course being ideological twins in the great partisan battles that have raged over these years in our county, state, and country. Lieutenant Colonel Steele retired after 20 years in the Air Force as an EW officer on B-52s, and then moving to systems test planning staff. After the Air Force, Russ joined a large aerospace company to manage a group doing R&D in advanced transportation electronics, and moved back to Nevada County where he was born.
Since retiring from aerospace, Russ has been very involved in the county’s efforts to support local economic development through expansion of our telecommunications and broadband access. Russ and Ellen were also very active in Nevada County’s Friends of the Military. The Steeles raised four daughters who eventually left Nevada County to live in the Sacramento area with their families. Three years ago Russ and Ellen moved to Lincoln to be closer to family and healthcare services. Russ continued his interest in and love for Nevada County through frequent visits and consultations with various county managers and regional business development organizations. He was also a prolific author, contributing articles to local business magazines and writing a book on his years growing up in a small Idaho mining village.
Jo Ann and I will miss Russ’s penetrating insights and always ready sense of humor – he was a man of information and avoided daisy talk – above all he was a patriot and a gentleman. Today an important and intimate part of our life is gone. I am reminded of John Donne’s words made famous by Hemingway, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…. Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
