Rebane's Ruminations
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  • George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 December 2019.]

    ‘Tis the season of peace, joy, and giving, of both the complimentary and compassionate kind.  Every year during these weeks we are deluged with pleas to open our wallets for uncountable good causes.  ‘Twas ever thus.  But compassionate giving on an international scale has often been the precursor, if not the actual cause, of the subsequent death for tens of millions.  And as a nation that continues to give and has given lavishly in the past, this should give us Americans some pause as we reflect on the history of such gifts.

    Recently published is one such history of a program of compassionate giving that turned out to give rise to the subsequent deaths of 20 to 30 million Soviet farmers in the 1930s.  The book is The Russian Job – the forgotten story of how America saved the Soviet Union from Ruin (2019) by award-winning historian Douglas Smith. (reviewed here)  In it Smith describes in devastating detail of how during 1921-23 the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, working over a vast land area, saved 10 million Russians from certain starvation.

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  • “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

    George Rebane

    Sierra Business Council CEO Steven Frisch took to task my criticism of Terry McAteer’s Union column (here) in which he glossed over the real problems that California has under Democrat leadership.  Along with McAteer, Frisch also appears to be blind to California socialists’ homegrown catastrophes, and counsels those who would point them out to “stop acting like a bunch of babies and work together.”

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  • [“But Conservos made zero, ZERO arguments regarding the constitutionality of what Trump has been doing…”  One of our liberal commenters sought to make a curious point with this statement re Trump being impeached.  There is nothing in the Constitution about a president’s ‘abuse of power’ or ‘obstruction of Congress’ – these are political charges fashioned entirely out of whole cloth by Democrats desperate to somehow cripple the president going into the 2020 election.  Therefore, ‘constitutionality’ need not even enter into any defense argument.  Just pointing out the Democrats’ political perfidy is enough to indict their motives.  gjr]

     

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  • George Rebane

    Factory workers now starting to require college degrees – ‘American Factories Demand White-Collar Education for Blue-Collar Work’.  We saw this coming some years back in these pages and described the process in some graphic detail (here).   Given the acceleration of technology in general and AI in particular, that was not a hard prognostication for those of us in the field.  The million plus manufacturing jobs added since the recession are tilted definitely to those with “the most complex problem-solving skills”.  Numeracy as a requirement is understood, and that’s just the start of advanced skill sets required on today’s factory floors.  Correspondingly, the jobs requiring the least skills have declined during this same interval. (more here) 

    University of California is sued by leftwing activists to drop SAT and ACT admissions tests. (here)  From the battery of available standardized tests for high schoolers, SAT and ACT both remain as the most reliable predictors of college and post-college success.  But this is discriminatory according to the plaintiffs because “According to College Board data from this year, 45% of white students who took the SAT in California scored at least a 1200 out of a possible 1600, and 55% of Asian students did, compared with only 9% of African-American students and 12% of Hispanic students.”  So going along with the remainder of the Democrats’ program to destroy America’s public education institutions (more here), we now have a full court press on our colleges and universities to drop academic merit as an admission requirement.  Instead, institute the double-dummy quota system so everyone can get a college degree.  (Why not make it a civil right and have government mail everyone a bachelor’s degree on their 18th birthday?) Digest this news in light of the previous item above.

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  • George Rebane

    ‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico.  He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left.  But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).

    Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments.  Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out.  He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare.  The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers.  Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.

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  • George Rebane

    Public schools are a government institution, and its teachers are civil servants and public sector workers.  As FDR warned more than 80 years ago, unionizing public sector employees is a very bad idea, and that has proven to be true over the intervening generations.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in what has happened in our unionized public schools over the last half century.  The Democratic party has filled our classrooms with undereducated leftwing ideologues and propagandized union flacks, which accurately characterize the aggregate of America’s classroom cadres of ‘educators’.

    What they have produced in this interval is an innumerate citizenry with minimal critical thinking skills and a knowledge base to match – more than one in four Americans do not know the structure of their governance and the three branches of our government, never mind knowing what each does.  Internationally, we are at the bottom of the barrel of developed first world countries, and this considering that we are still the world hegemon and the second largest economy on the globe.  Our youth’s academic achievement, upon which our future and wellbeing rest, is poor and stagnant, while we watch teachers strike ‘for the children’(!?) demanding ever more money for their pension funds, administrative staffs, and unions.

    Take a look at the most recent PISA test scores just released.  The Asian countries, led by Red China, are eating our lunch in each of the three critical academic categories – reading, math, and science.  (more here)

    PISA2018resultsAll this while daily, without being aware, we relinquish more freedoms to the state in the false promise of more prosperity and security.  The Left has been faithfully following Lenin’s dictum on education, and achieving the predicted results.  We now have an electorate half of which consists of a cohort of compliant slogan reactive sheep, ideologically herded by a lamestream media totally beholden to and the hand servant of the Democrat Party.  It is difficult to believe that our poor schools are just the natural result from being staffed by two generations of incompetent teachers.  But it is easy to cite reams of evidence from their own ‘educational literature’ that the product our academic factories produce is the result of a purposive and cynically conspiratorial effort by the Left.  And all this for the objective of weakening America internally through compliant collectivism so as to eliminate it as an impediment to globalization.

    Once more we turn to Thomas Jefferson – ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  The Democrats live by it, and the Republicans don’t have a clue.

  • George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 December 2019.]

    OK, let’s try something different this week.  This being the Christmas season and all, it’s time to think about our souls and eternal life.  Well, on second thought, maybe we should back off on all that divisive spiritual stuff, and just take the secular humanist look at immortality which, since the sci-fi novels of the 1950s, has focused on ‘uploading’ the contents of your brain into some super-computer, or a phantasmagorical robot, or cyborg which then in principle can live forever.

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  • George Rebane

    It’s a relief to see that no-count Kamala Harris get out of the race.  To indicate the level of politicians who cause grief to California, given Hillary or Kamala, I would take Hillary in a heartbeat.  And now that the Christmas season is upon us, I expect a lot more of the Dem clown car occupants sans traction will start hitting the silk.  Imagine dragging your staff through the holidays, having to go to your campaign offices, and knowing the handwriting is on the wall – this campaign ain’t goin’ nowhere nohow.

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  • [From the last Sandbox I will repeat my 920am invitation.  'Paul, you guys continue going after the low-hanging fruit on Trump. Why don't you instead take on something more meaningful to Americans? – your assertions that tax rates don't affect economic behavior, or 'border walls don't work', or more regulations encourage commerce and entrepreneurial activity, or capitalism has created all the world's ills, or bigger government taking on a bigger share of the economy is better, or people are indifferent to living among others more like themselves, or … .  There are so many things you guys believe in that you should really attempt to substantiate instead of displaying your ongoing spasms of TDS.' gjr]

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  • George Rebane

    Sharp-eyed readers informed me that I missed former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak dropping out yesterday.  That has been corrected in the illustrated data below.  Gov Bullock of Montana withdrew today; another Democrat who was unclear on the concept and fates of those unknowns who entered the party’s ‘Y’all Come!’ candidacy for president.  In our Dropout Derby the Estonian Fox has jumped into the lead again.  Many thanks for the correction.

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