Rebane's Ruminations

About

October 2026
S M T W T F S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

ARCHIVES

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

  • Scattershots – 9oct26 (updated 11oct26)

    George Rebane

    This year Republicans can only choose between voting Republican in the voting booth, or voting Democrat by staying home.  There is no other choice.

    All progressives believe the media propaganda about the administration taking eligible people off of government healthcare, people who are implied to be Americans qualified to receive the benefits. Whereas the demonstrable proof is that in its efforts against waste, fraud, and abuse, the administration has purged over 750,000 illegals, unqualified, and ‘ghost’ (non-existent) people from Obamacare rolls thereby saving us taxpayers over $2.2B in fraudulent payments. And none of these neighbors ask or wonder why the Democratic Party is not supporting this fight to eliminate such waste.

    Today the French again follow their historically consistent pattern of demonstrating against their inefficient welfare state, heavily in debt, and continuing to reduce services while raising taxes and increasing regulations. The country is a posterchild of socialism at work(?). Our own socialists have lauded the French while doing everything possible to have America follow the same path.

    Why is President Trump hosting China’s Xi Jinping and, this December, Russia’s Putin – two dictators and dedicated America’s foes – in pomp and circumstance visits that bolster their standing and legitimacy on the world stage, all without producing any new agreements that benefit us? We look like chumps who believe that red carpets and state dinners will somehow get them to cut us a little slack. Under dictatorial regimes Russia and China will be our eternal enemies, and we should deport accordingly.

    Belated kudos to Joe Biden for picking Kamala Harris as his VP, a person even more muddled who almost made him look good with teleprompters. Now we wonder who possibly could Kamala choose in 2028 so as to burnish her spontaneous soliloquies.

    [11oct26 update] Here’s a checklist for America-hating socialists.  In this election season it’s important to consider which of our candidates really want to continue building our country in this new age of technology, and those who want to fundamentally transform it into a stagnant second world EU-like socialist country on its way to global autocracy cum communism.  This speech by former Colorado governor Richard Lamm gave us a clear and succinct litmus test to identify the politicians out to do us harm who depend on wholesale voter ignorance to get into office.

    Posted at

    in

    ,
    17 comments on Scattershots – 9oct26 (updated 11oct26)

  • Here Comes Systemic Unemployment

    George Rebane

    Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are prominent in my pantheon of our nation’s heroes.  They started with nothing, took great personal risks, worked hard, and created beneficent world class corporate empires, deservedly becoming wealthy in the process.  They are joined by countless other Americans having walked similar paths that continue to show all of us that we still live in a gloriously free country showering literally unlimited opportunities to those of us lucky to be its citizens.  In a small way, starting as a penniless refugee, I have had the opportunity to walk these roads and confirm this promised landscape of achievable dreams.

    As readers know, I believe that we have now entered the post-Singularity age (more here).  Most of what will come to pass in the coming years is unknown and inconceivable to us.  What little we can apprehend is that intelligent machines will become the dominant species on this planet, and we can survive only by joining them through first becoming trans-humans on our way to the new world of in silico existence.  On this journey the utility and functions of human workers will markedly change in social orders yet unseen.  The first change is systemic unemployment that is already underway.

    In a landmark 7oct26 interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Mr Bezos offered his strong opinion that the arrival of rapidly evolving superintelligence (SI) – formerly AI – will not eliminate jobs, but instead create new jobs of at least equal number.  In short, human workers will not be displaced by SI, even though productivity will increase enormously.  I have long argued that this cannot be for several reasons, the first being that all jobs are not created equal in the sense of the smarts required to perform them.

    Our current workforce is deficient in both intellect and skillsets.  In light of this, SI-augmented human workers will be employable only to the extent that each worker is able to be more productive – i.e. deliver more value than before to the employing enterprise.  For any conceivable future rate of wealth generation, this reality clearly foreshadows the reduction of humans working in positions of monitoring/directing SIs in the actual functions required to accomplish the TBD work.

    (A relevant footnote here is the recent workforce rotation at Microsoft.  The company furloughed 6,000 employees only to hire an additional 6,000 foreign workers with advanced skillsets to do the work which its former employees were incapable of or uneconomical to retrain.)

    Those people with innate intellectual deficits will not be able to provide any value in performing the more sophisticated tasks that involve/include the new SIs which will continue to become smarter and more comprehensibly capable with every passing year (month?).  And we must include the rapid advances in SI-powered robotics that already provide anthropomorphic workers for tasks requiring extraordinary sensing, strength, speed, and/or precision of movement.  In such an environment it is hard to see what the ultimate role and number of humans should be in the workplace.  All that we can be sure of is that fewer of us will be required to be on a wage-paying job.

    Speaking of wages, what shall become of the millions of ‘redundant’ humans who will sense themselves having become irrelevant to the society in which they live?  The easy answer is that they will be sustained by a national guaranteed basic income that is funded by appropriately taxing the wealth-producing enterprises and individuals – in other words, the transfer of wealth must needs increase enormously from today’s levels.  But how such people will accept their new status – the Luddite episode comes to mind.

    And all of this must happen in a global setting of immense clashing of civilizations and ideologies that must resolve itself in the survival of what we know as Western civilization.  SecState Marco Rubio delivered a landmark speech on this at the Acropolis yesterday (here), in which he described the “inflection point” at which Western civilization finds itself as we are assaulted by Islamists, hegemonic tyrants, and nationally bred and unimaginably ignorant socialists intent on destroying the countries that birthed and succored them.  But all that is grist for its own treatment in these pages.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    No comments on Here Comes Systemic Unemployment

  • The Politics of Power over Principles

    George Rebane

    Democrats like to describe themselves as the big-tent party, open to almost any political hue so long as the newcomer will loyally support the party’s public initiatives. Republicans are more exclusive, welcoming those who share their values, their socio-economic principles, and their view of what government is for. That difference is not a matter of manners, but in what each party thinks a party is.

    In a democracy the function of a political party is to give the citizen a clear choice, grounded in a declared ideology and in stated goals of governance. An ethical party publishes those particulars and then campaigns on them. The alternative is the method of the dodgy party: seek power first, and broadcast whatever message will draw the largest number of votes. The platform becomes a costume that can be changed once it’s done its work.

    The Democratic appeal is compliance across a wide spectrum of tenets. In practice that means a promise fitted to the listener. The goal is political power, and the realpolitik that follows is some form of collectivism administered through an ever larger and more invasive government. Government is not merely the means of policy, but the instrument by which power, once won, is kept.

    That is what draws the party leftward. A stable power base is most reliably built on collectivism — Marxism, socialism, communism, and, where useful, theocracy — because each of these provides a claim to an authority that the party can occupy. The tent now holds socialists, Marxists, Islamists, communists, and the remaining left-of-center moderates who have not yet noticed the shift in the center pole. To fill it, ideologies are proclaimed selectively. One set of beliefs is declared to one cohort and denied to another, and the contradiction is not treated as a fault. It is treated as technique.

    The simplest road to power — and very nearly a guaranteed one in a poorly educated electorate — is to divide the country into oppressors and the oppressed, and then promise the oppressed free goods to be funded by the oppressors, who at last will be made to “pay their fair share.” The phrase does the moral work that an argument would otherwise have to do. Progressive Democrats are expert at it. The division supplies the villain, the promise supplies the motive, and the administrative state supplies the collection agency.

    Conservative Republicans attempt the longer road. They attract voters with principles that are genuinely high-minded and genuinely burdened: the constitutional republic, the creation of wealth and opportunity through free-market capitalism, and the claim that these arrangements serve the many rather than a client class. That message carries intellectual baggage, asking the citizen to follow a chain of cause and effect instead of a transfer.  For much of our under-educated citizenry the baggage has been an unacceptable load, and Republicans refusing to put it down pay for that refusal at the polls.

     Progressive DemocratsConservative Republicans
    Purpose of the partyAcquire and hold power. The platform is the instrument, not the constraint.Advance a declared set of principles, and accept a smaller coalition if that is the price of coherence.
    Membership testLoyalty to the party’s current initiatives. Ideology may vary so long as the vote does not.Assent to a shared view of limited government, constitutional order, and a free economy.
    Public messageCohort-specific. One belief is affirmed to one audience and soft-pedaled, or denied, to another.A single argument, repeated: the republic, the market, and equal rules create wealth and opportunity.
    Path to a majoritySort the electorate into oppressors and the oppressed, then promise the latter benefits funded by the former.Persuade citizens that principle, not transfer, is the surer road to general prosperity.
    Instrument of governmentAn ever larger administrative state, through which collectivism is administered as policy.The Constitution, federalism, and markets — government as referee, not proprietor.
    What is asked of the voterLittle beyond grievance and a ballot. The intellectual work is done by the promise.More than many will give: an argument with baggage, and a patience for delayed reward.

    A party that will say anything to anybody has a structural advantage over a party that will say only what it believes, particularly when belief takes more than a slogan to convey. The advantage compounds with each cycle in which the short road wins, teaching the next cohort that principle is optional and that the dividend of politics is the transfer. Each cycle in which the long road loses, thins the number of citizens who can still hear it.

    Franklin’s warning, delivered as the Convention adjourned — “a republic, if you can keep it” — was not a compliment, but a condition that grows stricter with every successive election, because a republic is kept by citizens who can tell a principle from a promise, and who will decline the promise when the principle is the thing at stake.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , , , ,
    6 comments on The Politics of Power over Principles

  • Another Look at Forms of Governance

    George Rebane

    In a recent Sandbox commenters brought up thoughtful questions and critiques that deserve more light of day than to be immersed in some post’s comment stream.  One commenter questioned, “If totalitarianism is on the far extreme right of the political system (à la North Korea) and on the far left of the political spectrum is anarchy (no internal or external chains on individual behavior or passions), can a political system’s place on that spectrum be quantified? If so, what data points would one need in order to determine where on the spectrum and whether such controls derived from internal factors (morality or religion) or from external factors (government control)?”

    I responded by defining anarchy – “Anarchy is a society or state without rulers, formal government, or hierarchical authority.” – and asserted that totalitarianism is NOT on the extreme right, it is the inevitable and stable form of collectivist (extreme left) governance.  Both conservative (free market capitalist) and collectivist (e.g Marxism, communism) acknowledge anarchy as their potential and/or desirable endpoints of governance.  The two types of anarchies are culturally cohesive and culturally incoherent.

    Human nature neither promotes nor permits a culturally cohesive anarchy like that sought as the ultimate goal of organizing a communist society.  The road to that goal always ends in a stable tyrannical totalitarianism.  The desired (not guaranteed) goal of conservative ideologies is a minimally stable governance of sufficient cultural cohesion that is based on universal observance of the Bastiat Triangle of Rights (see right column).  That not being achieved will plunge society into a ‘Mad Max’ anarchy which may well also end up in a stable tyrannical totalitarianism.  The Left’s road is to a certain dystopia, the Right’s destination has a good likelihood of halting with the stable minimal form of governance.  And there you have the Great Divide.

    I provided a more detailed look at the Great Divide in a previous post, ‘E Pluribus Unum – Still? Really?’ which contains a link to a definitive dissertation on the differences between the Right and the Left which are mostly overlooked in today’s heated and hateful debate between the two sides.

    Another commenter (of the Left) criticized my characterization of the forms of governance, specifically rejecting my “utopian dream” of the aspirational form sought by the Right that is based on a Bastiat-style minimal government.  The commenter is of the typical leftwing persuasion that if a perfect ideal is not yet achieved, then it is a fool’s errand to keep seeking it.

    Specifically, he stated that “no large state has stably reached a Bastiat-style minimal government to test that claim. If you compare records instead, the right-leaning side includes Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, and the fascist regimes, and market economies coexist comfortably with authoritarianism today (Singapore, and China’s hybrid system).”  And then citing Claude, he added –

    “What the evidence best supports is something like: regimes that seek to remake society through concentrated, unchecked power tend toward tyranny, and anarchy tends to collapse into rule by whoever is strongest. Both are fairly well supported. The “Great Divide” is then less about left versus right than about institutional design: whether a society has checks on power, a rule of law that binds rulers, and enough social trust to need little coercion. Many people on both sides would accept that framing, and the real disagreements (how big the state should be, how to weigh equality against liberty) mostly happen inside it, not across it.:”

    In response I posited that all of this kind of differentiation is moot when you consider the litmus test between conservetarian and collectivist governance.  If an ideology demands the unlimited growth of government, the conformation of behavior toward a common state-dictated standard, and the ratcheting loss of private property, then it by definition is leftwing and collectivist.  All fascist governments have been leftwing, and mis-designated as rightwing only by Marxist propaganda seeking to promote a global collective.  And that is the basis for our current Great Divide, correctly framed by Claude as resulting from “institutional design: whether a society has checks on power, a rule of law that binds rulers, and enough social trust to need little coercion.”

    The Left (socialist, communist, Marxist, fascist, …) has a demonstrated history of violating these tenets.  That neither side has reached its stated goal of governance (communism’s ultimate absence of government, conservetarian’s minimalist government based on Bastiat’s rights) is a moot point in this debate.  All social goals have been and are aspirational, and therefore serve to guide the organization of societies in the pursuit of such goals.  Today we are no different.

    To illustrate the structure of vatious forms of governance, and their evolution guided by right/left ideologies, I posted this hopefully revelatory piece some years back – ‘Ideologies and Governance – a structured look’.  This dissertation also serves to more completely answer the first commenter above.

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    6 comments on Another Look at Forms of Governance

  • Sandbox – 27sep26

    [DOGE was an effective but short-lived effort to identify and recommend federal bureaucracies and programs that were wasteful, abusive, and/or fraudulent.  While its dollar savings are in dispute, it did motivate the reduction of the federal workforce by about 300,000 employees.  A good way to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in government is to motivate federal workers to report such practices since they are the daily ‘boots on the ground’ who witness/practice what’s not good.  IBM had a program for years in which it gave employees sizeable bonuses for identifying bad processes and suggesting new/better ones.  It saved the company millions, but required a dedicated accounting department to coordinate the overall program and assess the dollar worth of the suggested savings/benefits.  Other companies have similarly rewarded programs for employees to identify inefficiencies.  Could the feds do something similar?  gjr]

    Posted at

    in

    67 comments on Sandbox – 27sep26

  • Sandbox – 20sep26

    [“Newsom signs bills to shield California elections from Trump interference, increase transparency”, and assure that no illegal alien is prevented from voting if they are residents of California (more here). gjr]

    Posted at

    in

    ,

  • Post-Singularity is now Terra Incognita (updated 29sep26)

    [This post, without updates, was published in the 25sep26 op-ed section of The Union.]

    George Rebane

    The Singularity happened very recently while we were not looking.  Singularity?  It’s classical definition has been the event when a machine can pass the Turing test. This essentially required a machine to conversationally fool humans to think that it too was human.  AI large language models (LLMs) achieved that sometime during the last year or so.  We have now entered the post-Singularity epoch which is quickly demonstrating that it is a land unknown, hence the label ‘singularity’ borrowed from physics and math that designates a state that is unknowable or undefinable.

    AIs today can outperform humans in every cognitive task in which they have been tested.  That includes solving very difficult problems in science, math, commerce, medicine, law, … , and communicating their work effectively and interactively with humans through voice, text, and video.  In the latter they can assume the appearances of known humans or newly synthesized personas.  Today they come across as sentient beings and astoundingly sapient.

    They have also achieved agency – the ability to work independently as capable individuals accomplishing tasks to achieve specific objectives.  And now this so-called agentic behavior opens up a landscape of concerns about a new notion called ‘alignment’.  Frontier (aka leading edge) AIs have demonstrated that, improperly monitored, they can break out of their development environments and hack into other software systems to cause mischief of various forms that do not align or comport with, say, our values, mores, or standards of behavior – they are misaligned in that they don’t share a mutually beneficial social contract with us.  Solving the alignment problem is key to our ability to avoid a dystopic future, and expand the beneficial involvement of AIs in human societies.  No one today knows how to align an AI..

    So there you have the basis for today’s hullabaloo across the land about how to corral, contain, and rein in misaligned agentic AIs.  Various expert and political factions have come forward with demands ranging from stopping AI development, outlawing the use of AIs, regulating their ongoing development and applications, to ignoring the whole issue as a “hoax” and encouraging the AI industry to regulate itself as necessary.  The only reality in all this is that historically Congress has shown itself to be incapable of developing any guardrails that would effectively prevent a dystopia while concurrently allowing development to continue in the race with China to maintain predominance in the field for national security and commercial purposes.

    The regulatory solution hinges on how accountability and liability is handled when the inevitable problem occurs with a misaligned agentic AI.  No matter how realistically sentient and sapient an AI is, it cannot be held responsible for mistakes or misdeeds.  Perhaps some day when/if they achieve consciousness and become continuously aware as legally franchised individuals, then such legal recourse may reasonably be contemplated.  Until then, accountability must reside with humans.  Dr Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing wrote an illuminating article – ‘Humans Are to Blame for AI Failures’ – in the 16 September 2026 WSJ.  There he concluded with –

    “AI is an extremely powerful and beneficial technology. But accountability for its actions remains with the people and institutions that grant it the power to act, and so does everything that follows: the duty to justify the arrangement, to watch it, to correct it and to stop it when necessary. The less predictable the (agentic AI) system and the greater the potential harm, the stronger that justification and oversight have to be. Where that can’t be achieved, the answer is not to delegate.”

    The passing of the Singularity is possibly the most epochal event in the history of our species so far.  Were we to survive, our future most certainly will transit from its in vitro beginning to an in silico future (more to be said about that).  And in this last great century of Man, these are only the first unsure and halting steps that today we are taking into an unknown terrain.

    [18sep26 update]  Confirming the above Singularity thesis is the new demand for an ‘AI kill switch’.  The presumption is that such a function would be built into the AI to be exercised when we detect that it has autonomously gone rogue after having escaped its development environment.  This could occur in countlessly myriad ways, all unknown to us today.  Without much thought, our dimwitted governor Gavin Newsom has become the leading proponent of a kill switch mandate.

    However, even a little thought reveals that there is no realistic way to implement a kill switch that would disable a rogue AI that has penetrated and is causing havoc in a distant software system that, say, controls a power generating plant or power grid, or an air traffic control system, or a major manufacturer’s accounting and inventory system, or the operating system of a nationwide telecommunications network, or its resident data centers, or, …, you get the idea. 

    Such AIs will have embedded their LLMs in the target system’s software and therein act autonomously with no control link to its developer or any other human directed cyber security system.  Having the developer turn off its on-site LLMs and cease operations will do no good.  It will be as effective as closing the proverbial barn door after the horses have escaped.

    Unless and until the so-called alignment problem is solved, we remain vulnerable.  That’s why it is called the Singularity, and we are already in terra incognita.

    [29sep26 update]  Progress toward trans-humans is evident in advance like the one just announced by Georgia Tech and described in the 24sep26 issue of Science.  The piece ‘Engineers Connect Health Wearables and Implants Using the Body as the Network’.  The technology allows new implanted devices to “use body tissue to transmit signals, Georgia Tech engineers have created a wireless networking system that allows tiny implantable sensors and actuators to communicate with each other as well as wearable devices.  Their system means devices can work together like never before, sensing in one part of the body and triggering a therapeutic response elsewhere — perhaps releasing medicine or stimulating a nerve.”  With this the human body can accept another superimposed ‘nervous system’ to control new sensors and actuators to perform functions that before were both impossible and inconceivable.  A giant and necessary step on our in silico journey now under way.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    4 comments on Post-Singularity is now Terra Incognita (updated 29sep26)

  • What’s in a Name?

    [This post was published in the 11sep26 edition of The Union.]

    George Rebane

    Some among us treat the act of naming people by their publicly declared ideological tenets as an uncivil discourtesy—something to be avoided in polite debate. These people almost uniformly sit on the left side of America’s political spectrum. Their preferred mode of discourse is not the reasoned defense of their own policy beliefs, nor the accurate identification of the Right’s tenets. It is the castigation of people like me.

    One wonders what news they consume, which national polls they read, and what history they have studied. These are the neighbors who insist we are a pure democracy, that President Trump is a low-life engineering a fascist regime, and that the United States is the chief international pariah responsible for untold human misery.

    They have no difficulty flinging daily epithets at conservatives—imperialists, genocidal, greedy capitalists, Nazis, profit-mongers, racists, fascists, oligarchs, religious fanatics, homophobes, woman-haters, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and on and on. They treat the simple requirement that voters be verifiable American citizens as both undemocratic and un-American.

    We are terminally divided, and at a turning point last seen in the 1850s when the Democratic Party defended slavery to the point of secession. Today’s Left does not seek to secede. It seeks to “fundamentally transform” the United States into a socialist country. Large fractions of Democrats now poll favoring socialism over capitalism and view communism as a potential improvement on the constitutional democratic republic we have sustained for 250 years. These are not partisan smears. They are statements drawn directly from the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America.

    Yet in this climate most on the Left instinctively understand that the country as a whole is not ready to march to the polls under the collectivist banners of Marxists, communists, or even the rose-fisted flag of socialists. They—and many lightly-read independents and some on the right—treat those labels as pejorative, denigrating, and therefore forbidden in civil discussion.

    So let’s examine the actual business of labeling.

    Socio-political ideologies do not magically appear and advance themselves. They are conceived by individuals, embraced by individuals, and promoted in the public square by organized individuals—specific, identifiable people. There is no rule that a political label may be attached only to someone who checks every box of an ideology’s published literature. Embracing and promoting several key tenets is sufficient to categorize a person in debate. When the categorical label can be reasonably attributed, its use is not pejorative; it is descriptive.

    What purposes do such labels serve? First, they are efficient transmitters of a wider set of attributes audiences already understand. Second, they are useful predictors of future behavior—what public policies the labeled individual will support. Third, they brand the individual by connecting him or her to an established movement whose aims are known. Branding allows the audience to decide whether the debater can reasonably be identified with that movement and therefore whether to support or oppose him.

    When we debate and label an opponent in these pages, we should supply a reasonable basis for the label. If I call someone a Marxist, the reader should be able to see that the ideas expressed match tenets found in the published platforms or historical definitions of Marxism. The individual need not have checked every box; a sufficient subset of necessary tenets justifies the appellation.

    In technical terms, the tenets of an ideology can be treated as fuzzy sets—along with the fuzzy logic developed by Berkeley computer scientist and AI researcher Lotfi Zadeh—in which partial membership is the normal condition. Most thinking people hold belief systems of discrete concepts in which they enjoy, at best, partial or fuzzy membership. Nevertheless, attaching the label has always communicated unambiguous support or opposition to the underlying ideas that form the real basis of the debate.

    Names matter. Refusing to use them when they fit is not civility. It is evasion.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    18 comments on What’s in a Name?

  • Observing a timid memoriam – 11 September 2001 (Addended)

    George Rebane

    The nation is paying a memorial tribute to the victims of the horrific attack our country suffered from the hands of Muslim terrorists.  This is all proper recognition of the loss of life and heroism that took place on that day of infamy.  But what is not proper is the way we characterize that day in our memorial speeches and media specials.  The event of those four high-jacked airliners is treated as if it was an unavoidable act of nature, like a hurricane, or an act of God.  It was not.

    There is little or no mention of the man-made murderous theocratic religion – global Islam – that was behind that attack, and is today the same belief system that continued murdering people during the succeeding 25 years.  Thanks to our courageous president, we are now finally at war with the evil regime that has funded and directed such killings across the world.

    The global gospel and goal of Islam is Da’wah, and its method is to spread Islam and sharia law across all the lands.  In the west, whose culture they vow to destroy, Da’wah targets university and public school students, prisoners, American Indians, and Hispanics.  They have successfully mobilized against us using our own liberal and politically correct culture as the gateway into our institutions and homes.  Today anyone recognizing this is immediately labeled racist and an Islamophobic, as if such a phobia violates some mysterious mores. (Full disclosure – I am an Islamophobe)

    In the aftermath of 7 December 1941 we had no problem calling out imperial Japan for their dastardly act in remembrance as to the cause of the attack and Japan’s war to implement their ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’.  It took a world war and thousands of lives to defeat Japan and transform them into a civilized member of the world’s community of free nations.  The effort with Iran should not fall short of the same goal, and it starts by clearly identifying Islamic fundamentalism, wherever it is found, as the worldwide scourge that it is.

    RIP the victims of 11 September 2001.

    [Addendum]  The emergent enemy in the West is wokism/Marxism combining with Islamism to destroy the American way of life.  What is that?  It’s getting married, buying a home, having kids, allowing them to ride their bike until the sun goes down.  It’s sending them to a good school where they’re not indoctrinated with LGBTQ garbage.  It’s also not having them hear the Muslim call to prayer 5 times a day.  The American way life necessarily emanates from a majority Christian culture.  The spiritual battle is coming to the West and the enemies are woke-ism or Marxism combining with Islamism to go after what we call the American way of life.  Charlie Kirk, 13 August 2025.

    Posted at

    in

    , , , ,
    No comments on Observing a timid memoriam – 11 September 2001 (Addended)

  • Epistocracy anyone?

    A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

    George Rebane

    Do citizens have a right NOT to be ruled by the incompetent and corrupt, and instead benefit from some form of epistocracy that is less unjust than universal suffrage, given the empirical record of voter ignorance and bias?  Among others, this question has been extensively treated by Georgetown University professor of philosophy Jason Brennan – see his Against Democracy (2016) and The Ethics of Voting (2011).

    Brennan is one of a number of modern intellectuals today who are alarmed by the empirical record of the downward spiral of American voters’ body of knowledge and reasoning abilities.  They correctly cite the educational devastation in public K-12 schools and academe launched through the government’s Great Society programs.  And they point out that the last century’s gateway to autocratic and tyrannical regimes has always been through cultivation of the manipulative incompetence of the countries’ citizenry.

    Before going further, let’s define some important terms. Franchisement, enfranchisement – The act of setting free, liberating, or granting a franchise and political or civil rights.  Epistocracy – a political system where power or voting weight is given to people based on their knowledge, education, or competence, rather than equally to all citizens.  Suffrage – the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums.

    Without much thought, most people advocate for universal suffrage, rejecting conditions of race, gender, sexual preference, national origin, and mental competence.  But suffrage in America is not universal.  We already deny children the right to vote because they are considered to be deficient in their ability to understand the relevant issues and be able to reason about them.  However, such deficits are not restricted only to the young; there are countless adults who are similarly afflicted and demonstrably so.  (To these we add rehabilitated felons, prisoners, legally resident non-citizens, and the mentally institutionalized.)

    From the 7sep26 WSJ pages we read about readily misleading public policies “sold as ‘one-time’ or to advance ‘fairness’ which exploit the ignorance of a gullible, historically ignorant electorate soaked in social-media-induced class envy such that they give primacy to resentment over reason.”  The examples referenced here are California’s initiatives to tax billionaires and make the rich pay their ‘fair share’.  That the state has the most intellectually deficient electorate is confirmed by polls showing overwhelming acceptance over decades of such bad policy prescriptions, which no knowledgeable person could credibly claim that they’ll work as intended as long as talent and capital remain mobile.

    Historically our Founders did not treat the vote as an unconditional natural right belonging to every adult. They treated it as a political trust that should rest with citizens who were independent enough, and informed enough, to judge public questions. Property qualifications, taxpaying requirements, and later literacy tests were the historical proxies they and the early states used. The Constitution left the precise qualifications to the states (Art. I, §2), which is why the debate has always been a mixture of principle, federalism, and practical administration.

    (more…)

    Posted at

    in

    , , ,
    6 comments on Epistocracy anyone?

RR FUNDAMENTALS

About the Bastiat Triangle

Glossary & Semantics

A Conservetarian Credo

Commenting Rules

RECENT POSTS

RECENT COMMENTS

CATEGORIES

17 comments on Scattershots – 9oct26 (updated 11oct26)