He tosses out the baited hook.  She, like some ravenous trigger[ed] fish, swallows it whole.  Well done, sir, well done.

The post Golden . . . appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Last week saw Trump almost completely erase the Obama legacy — an event that, peculiarly enough, coincided perfectly with delightful benefits for America.

*****

The post Bookworm Beat 5/16/2018 — the vanishing Obama legacy edition appeared first on Bookworm Room.

This Bookworm Beat has as its starting points Obama’s self-aggrandizing, offensive speech. Then it gets to the fun and interesting stuff for you to enjoy.

Obama as a sleeping aid. I visited my father’s best friend today. The two met in 1935. My father passed away more than twenty years ago, but his friend is still going strong at 98.

He’s a dear man, except when he gets on politics. Then, his inner communist emerges, loud and shrill. He listened to Obama’s speech this morning but when I asked him about it as a conversational gambit, he couldn’t tell me what he had heard. Having looked at the speech myself, I’m not surprised at his failure to discuss the speech. This inability wasn’t due to advanced age. As always, aside from self-aggrandizement and insults, Obama has little to say.

Pres. Trump says he watched former Pres. Obama’s speech this afternoon “but I fell asleep. I’ve found he’s very good, very good for sleeping.” https://t.co/a4VmXG4UZF pic.twitter.com/PImMdqIIZW

— ABC News (@ABC) September 7, 2018

So let’s move on to more interesting stuff, including more riffs about Obama’s many failures:

The Trump economy is still going strong. The economy is booming as it has few times before in American history. In his forgettable speech, Obama tried to own it.

It’s true that Obama presided over a decent stock market, but that was because investors were too afraid to do anything with their money in his hyper-regulatory environment but plant it in the stock market. They didn’t invent things, grow businesses, or hire people. To the extent people had jobs, they were dead-end, low-paying, part-time affairs. And so the economy staggered on for eight long years, without a single serious upward blip.

And then Trump got elected and, magically, the economy started roaring. It roared with even more vigor when Trump got the tax man off the back of businesses (i.e., employers) by bringing America’s corporate tax rate in line with the corporate tax rate in most of Europe. (Yup, all those semi-socialist nations so beloved of the Left had corporate tax rates lower than America’s.)

Based upon the soaring economy, I’m going to venture a prediction. I doubt that many minorities will be able to make themselves pull the lever for Republican candidates. However, I suspect that they’ll passively-aggressively do so by failing to turn out for Democrats. After all, the Democrats did not improve their living standards; at least one Republican has.

The true story behind Obama’s Iran deal made me want to cry. Wait! That’s wrong. It didn’t make me want to cry. It actually made Wendy Sherman, the chief American negotiator cry — right in front of the Iranian team. Apparently staying in a super luxury hotel for several days and eating only five star cuisine, weakened her so much that, in the face of their meanie demands, she broke down.

Matthew Continetti has the story and I urge you to read it. Then you can decide whether you want to laugh or cry. All I know is that, having read it, I thanked God once again for President Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump garners praise for his Iraq policy. Obama incontinently left Iraq, giving birth to ISIS and creating an opening for Iran. According to one man at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, while Trump cannot undo the sum of damage Obama inflicted on that beleaguered nation, he’s making really smart decisions:

[T]he real reason why the US is staying put in Iraq is to prevent it from becoming an Iranian client state, as Lebanon has become and as Syria might soon become. The investment of 2,000 troops, most of whom serve as advisors and trainers of the Federal Army of Iraq, is worth its price in gold in achieving this objective compared to the 100,000 American troops who were on the ground before the massive withdrawal in 2010.

[snip]

This underlying quest for independence from Iranian tutelage justifies President Trump’s wager that 2,000 troops might be worth maintaining to prevent the new fall of Baghdad. The least it could do is stave off the Iranians sufficiently for Iraq’s government and citizens to decide for themselves what the nature of their relationship with Iran will be.

The whole analysis makes for fascinating reading.

A deputy’s widow casts well-deserved shade on Nike. Sherry Graham-Potter’s husband was killed in the line of duty in 2005. She helped herself recover by running . . . and she wore a Nike hat while she ran. In a moving Facebook post that has since gone viral, Potter explains why she won’t be buying Nike products any more.

Beto O’Rourke follows the proud Democrat tradition of being embarrassed by the American flag. Okay, maybe it wasn’t Beto, but just his advance team. Nevertheless, I’d like to think that Texans outside of Austin and Houston might find the following unappealing:

As part of his self-proclaimed campaign promise to personally drive to all 254 counties in Texas, O’Rourke hosted a town hall meeting Saturday, Aug. 25, in Navasota, renting the hall at the VFW Post #4006.

[snip]

According to VFW Post #4006 Commander Carl Dry, the Veterans of Foreign Wars is not a political organization and the rental agreement with the O’Rourke campaign was part of the standard rental contract for any event.

“I do not normally attend rental events, but I attended Saturday to make sure things ran smoothly,” said Dry, who noted there were only two requests he could not allow at the VFW Post. “They wanted to open the doors (to the Flight Deck Lounge) and I couldn’t allow that and they wanted to take the flags down, I didn’t only say no, I said hell no, you don’t take the flags off the wall. I can’t believe any American would ask us to do that and I don’t know why he wanted them down or what he was going to put up instead.”

I’ll just leave this picture here:

Cory Booker and the Yiddish joke. I strongly disagree with Jonah Goldberg’s NeverTrump stance, which I think is a kind of blind monomania on his part. Aside from that monomania, though, he’s still a gifted, insightful, funny writer. In his scathing post about the Democrats’ disgusting behavior during the Kavanaugh hearing, he wrote this marvelous take on Cory Booker’s miserably executed Potemkin-village version of Spartacus theater:

In Yiddish humor, which has its own absurdist bent, a schlemiel is a clumsy person who often spills his soup and a schlimazel is the sort of chronically unlucky person the soup lands on. Booker achieved a double play: He spilled the soup on himself.

The anonymous White House office drone proved there is a Deep State. However, in the New York Times essay that has D.C. a’quiver, the drone tried to dress up Deep State sedition as a “steady state,” but it still is what it is: unelected apparatachicks who believe that they, not the American people, get to choose our government and the direction it takes. Tucker Carlson has a good riff on the subject:

Remember, California is geographically a red state. As is true for most of America, geographically California is mostly a red state. It’s only the population density in the major urban areas, that’s sees it regularly vote true blue.

That may be changing, however, as Californians watch the Trump economic juggernaut and then listen to their Democrat politicians plot ways to ensure that the juggernaut never benefits anyone but Silicon Valley and Hollywood. How else to explain this news?

According to a new poll, California’s two biggest statewide races in 2018 are tightening, as the leads for front-runners Gavin Newsom and Dianne Feinstein have been cut to single digits.

The poll, conducted by Probolsky Research between Aug. 29 and Sept. 2, found that Lt. Gov. Newsom leads Republican businessman John Cox 44 percent to 39, with 17 percent of the poll’s participants saying that they are undecided.

Of course, the same poll shows that hard Left Kevin de León is gaining on Dianne Feinstein in the Senate race, but that may have more to do with (1) the fact that the open primary means there are no Republicans on the ballot (although I still think people should write in Travis Allen’s name) and (2) Feinstein’s idiotic decrepitude.

Write-ins or note, how about if we conservatives make damn sure to vote in order to mix things up a little in California’s gubernatorial politics?

There are a new breed of taxi drivers at SFO. According to the Daily Mail, San Francisco airport is beginning to smell like San Francisco streets thanks to taxi drivers peeing and pooing outside the airport. Included in the article one finds this passive voice sentence, giving an unattributed opinion about the problem’s genesis:

It is believed taxi drivers are reluctant to go to the bathroom for fear of losing their place in the highly lucrative airport taxi queue.

I don’t think so. You see, for decades . . . forever . . . or at least since there’s been an airport outside of San Francisco, taxi drivers have been worried about losing their place in line. But this disgusting problem is of fairly recent origin. What’s changed?

I think the picture included with the article suggests what’s changed:

I have no reason to believe that the above picture is of San Francisco’s taxi drivers, but it nevertheless captures the fact that the majority today’s taxi drivers come from third world countries. When you land in America, if you can drive, being a taxi driver is a good way to break into the economy. I approve of anyone who works hard at a paying job, so this is not meant to be a rant about third world men driving taxis.

Having said that, there’s no getting away from the fact that the people in third world countries, are not averse to public urination or defecation. Without at all disparaging how generally decent and hard-working this new generation of taxi driver is, I’m betting that their toilet standards are very different from ours.

In the same vein, I wouldn’t be surprised if past generations of taxi drivers with more Western roots had a culture with more mutual trust. This would mean that that drivers would help each other hold places in line so that they could run to the bathroom. One of the things that makes third world countries third world is that they don’t have trust cultures. Instead, it’s an in-your-face dog-eat-dog world from which they came. In those places, you snooze (or run to the bathroom) and you lose.

In other words, it’s not the lines, it’s the culture.

China discovers it’s not smart to mess with Mother Nature. Austin Bay points out that China’s brutally enforced one-child policy (wiping out female fetuses, forced abortions, etc.), is proving to have some side-effects that many of us predicted a long time ago, including serious demographic problems:

China now permits larger families. But the damage has been done.

China’s fertility rate in 2010 dropped to 1.5 children per woman; the zero population growth replacement rate is 2.1 children.

It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In 2011, China had 925 million workers. By 2050, China’s working-age population will fall by 225 million, about 23 percent of the projected population. Between 2040 and 2050, 25 percent of the population will be over 65 years old, retired and drawing pensions. The “squeezed” worker cohort must then support both pensioners and dependent young.

[snip]

The one-child limit created a marriage problem. In Chinese culture, an eldest son is prized. If limited to one child, families tend to abort girl babies. For Han Chinese born between 1981 and 2000, an imbalance exists between marriageable women and men. The official sex ratio in that cohort is roughly 106 males for every 100 females. That’s bad, but the numbers are hazy. Some critics claim the actual male figure is between 115 and 120.

This imbalance has spawned social and criminal problems. “Bride traffickers” smuggle Southeast Asian women into China to marry Han Chinese men. If it sounds like a type of sex trafficking, it is.

Feminists’ misogyny. Faith Moore wrote a fine article about the University of Kansas’s new “Feminist Parenting Group,” which helps sad, angry Leftist women raise sad, angry intersectionalist children. In the course of that fine article, she made a very important point:

Why is it so important for feminists to convince us that gender is socially constructed, not biologically innate? It’s an important question, given that studies have repeatedly shown that this isn’t true. And important, too, since these poor children are now being indoctrinated into an ideology that has no basis in fact, which can only lead to confusion and misery as they try to live in a way that goes against their own biology. The truth, I think, is that, of all the ideological groups out there, it’s feminists most of all who have fallen victim to the patriarchy.

Modern feminists believe that everything male is good, and everything female is bad. They believe that success looks like male success — a flourishing career, a position of power, a salary — and they see femininity — caring for children, supporting their husbands, keeping house — as weakness. If this is the lens through which you view the world — and if you believe that women are just as capable of success as men are — then you have to convince everyone that “male” traits aren’t really male, and “female” traits aren’t really female. You have to rebrand them into “successful” traits and “unsuccessful” ones.

In other words, true feminism celebrates the feminine, rather than trying to force women into either male or weirdly androgynous molds.

And in honor of that idea….

The lesson of Steve Jobs. The new book by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs’ daughter, exposes the man as a nasty bit of work. He was by turns dismissive and vicious, but always obsessed with sex — inappropriately so given that he was having conversations with a nine-year-old. Maureen Callahan, having read the book, makes an interesting point (emphasis mine):

Steve pushes Brennan-Jobs out of family photos. He treats her like hired help, except he doesn’t pay her. He tells her she’ll never get anything from him and will grow up to be nothing. She hears her half-sister Eve describe her as “Daddy’s mistake.” On vacation, Jobs introduces Lisa to his friend Larry Ellison, and squeezes her tight when Ellison brags he’s just flown one woman out of town and is flying another one in, neither any wiser.

These are the gods of Silicon Valley, exacting their revenge of the nerds.

It’s a poisonous ethos, largely untrammeled, and Brennan-Jobs, intentionally or not, has written more than a memoir. It’s a revelatory depiction of tech-world hypocrisy — the belief held by these men that they, in making our lives better, are beyond rebuke.

Michael Moore’s ugly marriage secrets. Michael Moore’s ex-wife is claiming that Moore was a cheap guy who stiffed his wife out of some of his millions in movie profits. The obvious comment, of course, is that no one is more cheaply vicious than a socialist with money of his own. But I had something else to say, because I’m not a very nice person.

What I have to say starts with this tweet from the New York Post:

EXCLUSIVE: Michael Moore’s ex-wife claims he stiffed her out of movie profits https://t.co/JgncJ0dZyD pic.twitter.com/pRdmKT1qqT

— Page Six (@PageSix) September 7, 2018

The moment I saw the tweet, I finally figured out that, if one goes back a few decades, those two greedy Lefties could have inspired Winnie the Pooh’s nightmarish and greedy Heffalumps and Woozles:

The post Bookworm Beat 9/7/2018 — the “won’t that boring Obama ever shut up” edition appeared first on Bookworm Room.

D.L. Hughley’s “humor” illustrates that today’s black rights and feminist movements are a form of Stockholm Syndrome rather than signs of true strength.

D.L. Hughley is a well-known “woke” black comedian, which means he is considered to be on the cutting edge of modern social justice *ahem* comedy. (I added the ahem because so much social justice comedy seems to consist of saying “That’s not funny.”) I’d like to share with you one of Hughley’s riffs from September 2017 (language alert):

Now, the black man in me is appalled by Trump, but the nigga in me is intrigued. “How is he getting away with this?”

[snip]

Now they want to build a wall and kick all the Mexicans out. I ain’t no engineer, but you better not kick those Mexicans out before that wall get built. ‘Cause black people do not work outside like that no more. Fuck that shit. We had our turn. That’s what February’s all about. When a job’s too hard for us, we call Mexicans. “Hey, Javier, what you doing, man?” “Yeah. Meet me in front of the Home Depot.” “You can wear your soccer shoes. I need a living room built by tomorrow.” “Oh, and happy Cinco de Mayo, my brother.”

Want to kick out the hardest-working people in America. I cannot wait to see white people cutting they own grass. “Jesus Christ, is it always this hot out here?”

[snip]

A lot of poor white people voted for Donald Trump. How the fuck you broke and white in America? How did you blow a 400-year head start? “Aw, you almost had it.” “Got to be quicker.” If you broke and white in America, you are wasting your whiteness. You should put your whiteness on eBay. Black people will buy that, won’t we? “Ah…” “Gently used whiteness.” “This is from West Virginia. I don’t need that. That’s just…” “That’s like being a nigga right there. I don’t need this.” “Percocet come with this. I don’t know. What’s that?” “Ooh, give me some of that New York whiteness. Ooh, Fifth Avenue whiteness. Sprinkle a little Jew on it. Shit!”

You can read the whole shtick at the link. The humor eluded me, but I seldom laugh at racism, antisemitism, misinformation, and hatred. Thinking about it, though, I can see why the Left loves him.

What actually fascinated me about the shtick was the overwhelming sense of victimhood that pervades it. Blacks are no longer heroes in their own narrative. They are weak, used, abused, degraded. In Hughley’s words (not mine), they are “niggas”.

I’ve never heard a Jew refer to himself or other Jews as a Kike. I’ve never heard an Italian refer to himself or other Italians as a Guinea. I’ve never heard an Asian person refer to himself or other Asians as a Chink. Yet “hip” blacks routinely refer to themselves by a term that they consider so debased no one else is allowed to utter it. Talk about internalizing self-loathing.

That same sense of victimhood pervades modern feminism. When I was growing up, Helen Reddy sang the feminist anthem: “I am woman, hear me roar!” We were strong, we were invincible. We women were empowered. We could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never, never let you forget you’re a man. (Yeah, that’s the Enjoli commercial.)

Joking aside, the message I heard growing up was that we were nobody’s victim. Given the opportunity, we could function well in a man’s world and still be women. We were tough.

Today’s message to young women, though, is all about being victims because every man is a predator. Even the term “rape survivor” has whiny quality. The whiny quality comes about because we no longer limit the term to women who have actually been “raped.” In this time of fragile, victimized women,  you’re also a “survivor” if someone looked at you funny. Ford’s narrative, if one accepts it at face value, is that she got dry humped and freaked out. So suddenly, she’s a “survivor.”

If that’s what it takes to be a survivor, then I guess I’m a “survivor” too. Like most women of my (and her) generation, I’ve been dry humped by drunk guys. That’s what drunk guys do and, if you push them away, as Ford allegedly did, drunk guys who are not rapists stop. Indeed, even Ford concedes that there was more guy rough-housing going on than dry humping. (And I cannot remember where I read it, but today somebody pointed out that, according to Ford’s own narrative, the guys promptly forgot her once they started tussling.)

You want something more serious? I’m pretty sure that once, when I was on a bus in San Francisco, a guy rubbed up against me. At the time, I thought he had a pencil in his pocket, but now that 30 years have past, I know that he was trying to rape me. I’m not sure what day it was, or even what year, but I think it was on the N Judah and I was wearing a black skirt. Do you think if I tell the FBI, they can find that guy and vindicate my survivorship?

I never thought about any of those experiences as #MeToo moments. That’s why I cheerfully said during the #MeToo uproar that it had never happened to me. I’m not a survivor, because nothing bad happened to me. Because I’m not a victim, I didn’t have to survive anything.

Maybe I have some perspective that Americans, especially young, suburban Americans such as Christine “Baby-Voice” Ford lack. You see, I’ve grown up knowing real victims who actually survived horrible things.

My mom survived a Japanese concentration camp; my dad escaped the Nazis in Germany and then fought them at El Alamein and Crete; a family friend argued with Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz and managed to avoid the gas chamber; an in-law was a refugee whose parents died in the camps while she survived the London Blitz; many of my school friends’ parents escaped the Cultural Revolution in China; another friend’s father was a Japanese American whom Franklin Roosevelt unconstitutionally interned — all of these people were actual victims of truly horrible things.

All of those people (and I knew them well) were scarred by their experiences, but interestingly enough, none defined themselves as victims. To the extent they were true survivors, that was a badge of strength, not the whining weakness the women’s movement has devolved into — or the self-loathing that D.L. Hughley expresses.

As far as I can tell, D.L. Hughley exemplifies the Stockholm Syndrome that characterizes blacks who are Democrats. I bet you will never hear a conservative black speak of himself or other blacks in such derogatory terms — terms, moreover, that perfectly echo the way that Democrats spoke of blacks from the founding of the Democrat party through to the tail end of the Civil Rights movement, right down to Hughley’s word of “nigga.”

You can tell that Hughley thinks he’s brave and free by taking ownership of black pain by using those words and saying those insults. However, he’s not doing this to encourage blacks to strive and better themselves. Instead, he’s simply taking the line of a perpetual victim who has embraced the outlook of his torturers. The women’s movement is doing exactly the same thing, painting women as frail Victorian flowers, rather than strong, self-reliant, effective people.

Blacks have not fared well under this new Stockholm Syndrome paradigm. Women will not fare well either.

As for me, I am woman, hear me roar!

The post D.L. Hughley and the all-encompassing victim status that is Leftism appeared first on Bookworm Room.

The Kavanaugh hearings have served a useful purpose in that they revealed the Leftists’ vicious and unbridled lust for power to all Normal Americans.

I’m delighted that it looks as if the Republicans, with help from Manchin and no help from Murkowski, will be able to drag Kavanaugh across the finish line. However, while Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court will enhance that Court’s reverence for the Constitution as written, not just as Leftists desire it, the fissures in America have deepened, which the articles and videos below highlight.

The only bright spot is that, while the fissures are deeper, those on the Leftist side may find themselves more marginalized as those people whom Kurt Schlichter calls “Normals” are increasingly disgusted by the self-styled elites excess and hostility to both Normals and constitutional norms. And with that, some things for you to enjoy:

A reminder why Normals recoiled from the unfounded charges against Kavanaugh. This video is from a Catholic Women’s organization, but I think it readily applies to all women who don’t hate men:

I know that, since the day my son was born, I realized that boys, in their own way, are just as vulnerable as girls. I also realized that today’s social norms are incredibly hostile to men, tearing them down instead of cultivating their manly virtues.

A PragerU video reminds us that feminism is also bad for women. Not only is today’s Third Wave man-hating feminism bad for boys, it’s bad for girls too:

I don’t think we can make enough of the point Klavan advances that Third Wave feminism, instead of cultivating women’s virtues as things that contribute profoundly to the good of society, insists that women must be weaker versions of men. This has resulted in women who drink more, sleep around more, and insist on getting in the way on the battlefield, all while downplaying the one thing that they’re uniquely suited to do: nurturing. It’s ironic really that I say this, because I hate nurturing. But I’m good at it. It’s hardwired, whether I like it or not.

I was actually primed for Klavan’s message because years ago I read an excellent book called Female chauvinist pigs: Women and the rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, a very depressing book that first exposed me to a world in which young women try desperately, and in a soul-killing way, to compete with men when it comes to sexual excess and debauchery. Men used to think this was a good idea. Sex! Sex! More sex! However, when you look at the horribly damaged women this creates (see the Steve Crowder video, below, and what I have to say about it), men have to be having second thoughts.

The Kavanaugh defamation is a terrorist tactic leading to real violence. So far today, three people have sent me a link to James Simpsons’ article The Kavanaugh Allegations Are Psychological Terrorism, And It’s Time They End. The article is long, but well worth reading because it talks about the way the Left uses these tactics both to drive good people out of the public square and to incite the masses to actual violence:

The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.

This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.

Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence. How many people, for example, never used Donald Trump yard signs or bumper stickers out of fear of ostracism, or even property destruction?

The hypocrisy goes deeper than I realized. A friend of mine, a well-respected lawyer, wrote an interesting post about the breakdown of the Supreme Court nomination process. In it, he remembers something I’d forgotten, which is that the same people savaging Kavanaugh for being emotional savaged Bork for not being emotional:

Many observers trace the breakdown of civility in the confirmation process back to the hearings on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. When asked why he wanted to sit on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork answered that he had spent his professional career “in the intellectual pursuits of the law,” and that sitting as a Supreme Court Justice “would be an intellectual feast.”

For this, Judge Bork was roundly criticized by Democrats, who argued that such unemotional intellectualism demonstrated a lack of judicial temperament.

For example, former federal judge Shirley Hufstedler testified against him, calling his “quest for certitudes” a way to avoid “having to confront the grief and untidiness of the human condition.” She said that Judge Bork’s testimony showed “a lack of appreciation of what happens to real human beings.” A liberal columnist pointed out the absence of any reference by Judge Bork to “the concrete human realities” of the cases he would be judging. The columnist bemoaned the Judge’s apparent lack of interest in “the range of human experience.”

Judge Kavanaugh displayed the untidiness and range of the human condition in spades.

Democrats — or Republicans for that matter, when positions are reversed — can’t have it both ways. Do we want Supreme Court nominees to be dispassionate Dr. Spock’s, or do we want them to be all too human creatures who, like Judge Kavanaugh, cry out in pain and anger when they and their loved are attacked? We need to come to some sort of consensus on the meaning of judicial temperament, and then to apply it to nominees with consistency.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of which, the hard Left ABA has announced that it’s going to re-evaluate Kavanaugh’s rating because of that “temperament” thing. The only reason I wish I still had an ABA membership is so that I could cancel that membership all over again.

Also speaking of which, I thought Christopher Caldwell summarized nicely the Kafka-esque cruelty of the Left’s attack on Kavanaugh’s temperament:

The question is not “whether he’s innocent or guilty,” said Cory Booker. “I am emphatically not saying that Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did,” says Wittes. “The evidence is not within 100 yards of adequate to convict him. But whether he did it is not the question at hand.”

What is that supposed to mean? This amounted to saying that Brett Kavanaugh lacks a “judicial temperament” because he objected to being summarily executed following a show trial. If you permit the criteria of culpability to shift, then you have the circular logic typical of totalitarian regimes. Just as there are people famous-for-being-famous, now there are people guilty-of-being-accused.

The quoted language also reminds us what an execrable weasel Corey Booker is, as if the events of the past few weeks haven’t already made that fact evidence.

You’d think Ford would want her evidence out there. Lest you have any lingering doubt that Blowsy-Ford is an unprincipled liar, please remember that she refuses to turn over the documents she repeatedly reminds us proves she’s telling the truth:

Chuck Grassley has again asked Dr. Ford and her lawyers to “turn over the therapy notes, polygraph materials, and communications with the Washington Post that Dr. Ford has relied upon as evidence.” And he is right to do so. For an accuser to rely upon evidence that is not made available to the accused is extraordinary. For that accuser to refuse to comply with a request from the person in charge of a process that she herself initiated is even more so.

I figured out early on that Blowsy was a liar. The fact that her only corroborating evidence was statements she allegedly made to a therapist decades after an alleged incident was a giveaway. That kind of allegation it wouldn’t stand in a court of law, which has owned over centuries of Anglo-Saxon and American jurisprudence what constitutes credible evidence. If it can’t pass muster under time-trusted methods for winnowing out the trust, I’m suspicious.

And then the lies started piling up: The front door remodel that definitely happened years before she claimed it had and that seemed to be for the purpose of building an illegal office; the alleged witnesses who disavowed her story; the lies about flying and closed spaces; the probable lie about polygraph knowledge; and on and on. Add to that the bizarre little girl voice and demeanor, and for me it all spelled sociopath, not victim.

Because I didn’t believe Blowsy from day one, I found irksome her being called a “survivor.” As Stephanie Gutmann asked, “What if Ford is not truly a ‘survivor’? Don’t we have to establish whether she’s a survivor first?”

Whither (or wither) the University of Texas? The University of Texas at Austin is one of my alma maters. When I was there, it was a fairly conservative place, so much so that I really stood out as a California Democrat, even though I was a moderate. That historic UT no longer exists. Instead, UT is just another hard Left university that uses public dollars to turn out screeching, criminal mobsters:

A leftist group released the personal information of a group of pro-Kavanaugh protesters at the University of Texas at Austin.

A far left group called the Autonomous Student Network (ASN), which was first reported on by Campus Reform, published the private personal information of a group of pro-Kavanaugh protesters at the University of Texas at Austin. The information included personal phone numbers, emails, and employer phone numbers.

“Yesterday, members of the Young Conservatives of Texas tabled with pro-Kavanaugh & anti-#MeToo signs on West Mall. They were swiftly confronted by a growing crowd of students, who made signs in protest, destroyed YCT signs, and chanted slogans like ‘we believe survivors!’” the far-left ASN group wrote in a blog post. “With women of color taking the initiative, the protests grew increasingly militant and also confronted the administration and the police enabling the YCT rally. Within two hours, the YCT had fled in the face of the massive backlash.”

In the post, the group encouraged readers to use the information provided in the blog post to ensure that the protesters face repercussions for defending Kavanaugh.

“We encourage people to use these to wage campaigns and ensure there are repercussions for the actions they took yesterday. Demonstrating in defense of rapists and making campus hostile to survivors should not go unanswered. At the same time, students should prepare for backlash,” the blog post reads. “Already, one student is facing harassment and threats because of a video circulating from yesterday. Students should expect to organize solidarity campaigns against targeted harassment, and begin securing their own information to avoid harassment.”

The Left’s thuggish habit of chasing people down is becoming epidemic. It was, after all, an elevator attack on Flake that caused him temporarily to derail the entire confirmation process.

Just today, protesters again chased Lindsey Graham. While he fought back with his extraordinary newfound élan, the fact remains that allowing this mob behavior to continue unchecked is a dangerous precedent. In a civilized democracy, with voters having a say in governance through their elected representatives, for the losing party to try to run those same representatives to ground like harried foxes is a societal breakdown that needs to be stopped very fast and hard.

Here are just three recent emblematic examples of the violently aroused Left’s thinking . . . except that “thinking” is the wrong word, because the first tweet, from someone with 167,000 followers, explicitly tells Lefties not to think, but just to feel:

The second tweet probably deserves a visit from the Secret Service:

The third tweet, which is explicitly from a communist “Democrat Socialist,” might also merit a little Secret Service visit:

Please note how many likes and retweets the above sentiments earned, especially the first two. Also, please keep in mind that this is precisely the type of behavior that Maxine Waters has actively encouraged:

To date, state and local governments have done little to stop these Leftist intimidation tactics. Sure, the police arrest protesters, but Leftists consider those arrests a badge of honor. Moreover, they congregate in industries with employers who also see these arrests as badges of honor, whether they’re working for universities, coffee shops, news outlets, movie studios, or even political offices.

Once arrested, these thugs are invariably released, sometimes without even a slap on the wrist. That needs to stop. These domestic terrorists (because that’s what they are) need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Given that they are snowflakes, spending some hard time in prison might help rejigger their world view.

Texas kids ain’t what they used to be. I mentioned UT-Austin in the above snippet. The rot goes far beyond that. If you haven’t already seen it, you have to watch one . . . I was going to say “young woman” but that’s too kind . . . one shrieking savage at Texas Christian University fall apart when Steve Crowder challenges her about the “rape culture” narrative. It’s not just her lack of logic that should disturb anyone who watches the video. It’s also her abandonment of all civilized behavior that makes it so disturbing (her hysteria begins at 16:00):

This gal’s disgraceful, embarrassing, animalistic behavior is a loss of control that, rather than increasing my sympathy, actually makes me suspect that her “rape” was a drunken hook-up which, after the fact, made her feel like a pathetic sleaze. When you watch Yazidi women, whose families were murdered and who were turned into sex slaves for filthy, disgusting, abusive ISIS fighters, they don’t behave that way.

Even worse, though, than this mindless, repulsive, and definitely not credible hysteria, is the craven response from TCU’s administration:

“Today, Steven Crowder chose to challenge our students on a public sidewalk in front of the university. While the Constitution gives him the right to express his views, the sentiments he expressed do not align with TCU’s values,” the university said in a tweet. “His views adversely affected many members of our campus community. The health and safety of the Horned Frog Family is of utmost importance and we encourage individuals to contact campus resources for support.”

I don’t know if TCU gets federal funds, but I’ll say again that every college and university in America should lose all federal funding. Every one. If these institutions can survive in the marketplace, great. If they can’t, their buildings should be razed and the ground sown with salt to make sure that these grotesque excrescences never again emerge to destroy America’s youth.

Media hacks encourage silencing the opposition. Matthew Dowd, one of ABC’s resident hacks, may call himself a conservative, but he has some really weird ideas about what conservativism entails:

I am going to say this again as I have said for the last few years: the media does an incredible disservice when they seek balance, instead of the truth. Having guests on to get balance, but who take us further from the truth, hurts our world.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 4, 2018

Again, please note the vast number of people who approve when a media figure says, “You Normals can’t handle the truth . . . unless I spoon-feed it to you through my personal media filter.”

Kimberly Strassel was having none of this:

it is worth sending this out again, to meditate this terrifying argument. The left believes itself to be the only arbiter of the “truth.” Dowd advocates shutting down speech of anyone who doesn’t agree with that “truth.” I can think of countries where that happens–dictatorships https://t.co/PjrimuckSk

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) October 4, 2018

Sadly, Strassel’s tweet has had a much smaller reach than Dowd’s profoundly anti-free speech little temper tantrum.

Mark Judge on gay predator priests. Before Mark Judge came to national prominence as a proto-rapist in Blowsy-Ford’s fevered and partisan imagination, he was someone speaking out about gay priests who deliberately got themselves teaching positions in schools with hordes of adolescent boys. In that context, you won’t be surprised to learn that the media ignored him as hard as it could, both by being lazy and by being biased:

On August 17, Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein tweeted the following: “the 2018 Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis for some U.S. Catholics is the opening of civil war over homosexuality and Vatican II. The unanswered question is how many Catholics.”

In fact, the Catholic civil war over homosexuality has been going on since at least 2006. That’s when Boorstein herself ignored a tip I gave her about homosexuality and its connection to sexual abuse at a Catholic school I had attended from 1979-1983.

[snip]

When Fr. Orr was first accused of sexual abuse in 2003, Boorstein called me, a former Prep student, for comment. I told her there was a much larger story at Prep and in the larger Catholic Church. That story was the mass infiltration in the priesthood of gay men. It made an all-boys school like Prep an interesting and sometimes harrowing place to be.

I was especially appalled that one of my teachers had been Bernie Ward. Ward is a former socialist radio talk show host who is now serving a prison term for trafficking in child pornography. Ward had studied to be a priest. He then taught sex education at Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s, before decamping to San Francisco where he became a socialist version of Rush Limbaugh. As early as 1978, Ward had been accused of sexual misconduct around students. In 2007, he was convicted of distributing child pornography. He served a sentence of seven years.

[snip]

Boorstein said she would call me back.

“Listen,” she said a couple of days later. “I talked to Georgetown Prep. They say Bernie Ward never taught there. So that won’t be part of the story.”

I still remember standing there, dumbfounded. I had just tipped off a reporter for the Washington Post — the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post — that a former priest who had been indicted for child pornography had once taught sex education at the same school where another man had been caught making “inappropriate contact” with a student. Boorstein was taking the school’s word for it.

Finding out the truth was as simple as opening an old yearbook. Boorstein later confessed that she and her Post colleague felt I had “a gay problem.”

There’s more at the link. After you’ve read it, ask yourself whether it’s a coincidence that, when Ford and her friends concocted their little story, they added Mark Judge to the mix. Knowing how the Left operates, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lefties, once they realized that Kavanaugh and Judge were friends, saw Ford’s story as a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Jennifer Rubin and the political rectification of names. What I know about Confucius qualifies as one of the world’s shortest books. However, I have been exposed to his idea about the “rectification of names.” When someone asked Confucius what he would do if he were governor, he said he would “rectify the names” to make words align with reality:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

One of the current starting points for the rectification of names is found in a request from multiple conservatives that the WaPo stop calling Jennifer Rubin its “conservative” columnist. The woman is anything but conservative. No one has outlined better than Charles C.W. Cooke the ways in which Rubin has abandoned conservativism. It’s not just that she hates Trump; it’s that she hates all the values she once championed:

If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind. And how potent is the control he exerts over Rubin’s. So sharp and so sudden are her reversals as to make effective parody impossible. When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was ‘ephemeral,’ ‘a piece of paper,’ ‘a group wish,’ a ‘nonsense’ that would achieve ‘nothing.’ That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so ‘devoid of substance,’ she added, illustrated the ‘fantasy world’ in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for ‘phony accomplishments,’ his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any ‘bill of goods’ they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a ‘senseless act,’ a ‘political act,’ ‘a dog whistle to the far right,’ and ‘a snub to ‘elites’’ that had been calibrated to please the ‘climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy’ (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the ‘ephemeral’ ‘piece of paper,’ Rubin submitted, would ‘materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness’ and represent conduct unbecoming of ‘the leader of the free world.’ One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.

When Rubin wrote for Commentary, she was an intelligent, insightful, and intellectual consistent moderate conservative. When I look at her anger and her un-grounded, un-explained intellectual U-turn, I keep wondering if she has an organic problem. Her behavior is consistent with people who have brain tumors or other physical problems. Time will tell….

Fake news was born when Muhammad al-Durah didn’t die. Back in 2003, the Palestinian cause got a shot in the arm with footage purporting to show a 12-year-old boy named Muhammad al Durah shot to death by Israeli troops. Except that’s not what happened. Other footage almost certainly proves that this was all a propaganda hoax. al Durah is probably a young man now hurling grenades at Israeli soldiers or sending incendiary devices into Israel to burn crops.

Richard Landes, who was instrumental in exposing the hoax, has written an article revisiting this crime. One of the important points he makes is that, even then, Western journalists knew that they were reporting fake news, but they did it anyway because of “the narrative.” Before “fake but accurate” was a CBS catchphrase, the media was happily living the lie:

I already knew that Palestinians faked footage, but what I now understood was that the mainstream news media, whose first imperative was to filter out such blatant propaganda, had accepted it as a normal practice, and used the fakes to tell the “real” story. Professional standards for journalists in the West can make even staging B-roll problematic. But apparently, in the Middle East, Western journalists have few problems with staged A-roll as long as they can cut it into believable site-bytes of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood.  Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon would later describe Netzarim Junction as the focal point of the new Arab-Israeli war, one in which “more than 30 were killed and hundreds injured.”

I could go on because I have endless material, but I can’t go on because of time constraints. The above, though, should keep people busy for a while.

The post Bookworm Beat 10/5/2018 — the “Leftists don’t speak for this woman” edition appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Here it is — a round-up about American life in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings, with everything from politics to plumbing thrown in.

This will be my last big post before my week-long hiatus (during which, as I said, I’m sure something big will happen). Fear not, though, because my friend, the brilliant and inimitable Wolf Howling will be holding the fort in my absence. Meanwhile, here’s some stuff about American life that you can chew on while I’m gone.

But before I get to that, I wanted to update you on the dog situation. Mr. Bookworm finally conceded that our aged, demented, blind, deaf, arthritic dog with an anxiety disorder was (a) miserable and (b) unreasonably burdensome. When she began needing walks every 90 minutes to stay ahead of the incontinence, and even that wasn’t always successful, he made the appointment at the vet. And when she started keeping us up all night long, panting, restless, unhappy, and incontinent, he said he wouldn’t dream of canceling the appointment.

So it was that yesterday our little dog made the journey over the rainbow bridge to doggy heaven. The vet did everything she could to make it a comfortable experience, including having a special cushion for the dog, rather than a scary metal table. She also provided premium doggy treats and our little gal happily munched through those treats to her very last breath.

It was what I call a “Bing Crosby death.” As some of you may recall, Bing Crosby was an avid golfer. It was his favorite pastime. He died of a massive heart attack while golfing on a lovely course in Spain, overlooking the Mediterranean. I always like imagining Bing in the midst of a good round, winding up for a massive swing, and being felled in an instant, with his last conscious thought before Death claimed him being “I am happy.”

Many thanks to all of you who chimed in with your stories and opinions about when to put a beloved pet down. I don’t think I clearly conveyed in the comments how grateful I was for all the wisdom you so generously shared with me.

And now back to our regularly scheduled Bookworm Beat round-up:

Kavanaugh inflamed the moderates. My friend Neo is one of the smartest people blogging today. It’s no surprise, therefore, that she had an incredibly brilliant insight about the reason Kavanaugh’s confirmation process was an earthquake, rather than a temporary tremor. She makes nine specific points, all of which are worth reading, but I want to focus on her last three points:

(7) At that point, it was the moderate wing of the GOP that was galvanized. They suddenly discovered that the rules they thought they’d been playing by all this time, the ones they thought at least some of their Democratic colleagues shared, meant nothing to the opposition.

[snip]

(8) And that’s why it was the moderate side of the right that stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods in the Kavanaugh fight. Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, all of them harshly vilified in the past by the more conservative wing of the party, found themselves uttering words that those who had previously reviled them were now cheering.

(9) Those words from the RINOs had more power to rally the base than if the same messages had been delivered by senators further to the right. The factor of surprise made for a much more attention-getting story. Lindsay Graham’s tirade was much more newsworthy because it came from Graham rather than, for example, Ted Cruz.

I clipped a lot from the above quotation, because I want to encourage you to read the whole thing. Neo will help you understand the catharsis in the Republican party over the last two weeks.

The things we’re learning about Christine Blowsy-Fraud. Blowsy-Fraud hit the public scene so quickly that there was little time to learn who she was. On the insane Left, all the energy went to destroying Kavanaugh, which meant that those supporting Kavanaugh (as well as Due Process, Congressional norms, and the core value that someone is innocent until proven guilty) kept a tight focus on Blowsy-Ford’s allegations, not on learning more about the woman herself.

Regarding Blowsy-Ford, we were told only that she was a respected academic (more on that in a minute). Her social media footprint was practically invisible, though, so it was impossible to get many insights about her, beyond the fact that she was a Hillary supporter and Pussy-Hat marcher — with the latter fact, standing alone, being something I think that should automatically disqualify anyone from being taken seriously.

That absence of social media ought to have tipped people off instantly that something was going on. Neo points to it as an indicator that Blowsy-Fraud was part of a sophisticated endeavor:

One of the strangest aspects of Ford’s story is that, by the time her identity was revealed, much information about that identity had been removed from the internet with an unusual degree of thoroughness for a layperson, indicating the participation of someone who knew exactly what he or she was doing, not an amateur such as Ford herself. How was this done, and who did it?

For me, one of the most curious aspects of all is that her high school yearbooks disappeared from their online site as well, not long after almost all of her personal information was scrubbed . Ford did not have the power to do this because the yearbooks were not displayed at her site or social media pages. So who did it for her, and why, and at whose behest? What’s more, the site that claimed to have archived and displayed the yearbooks disappeared as well not all that long after.

It takes quite a bit to get me into conspiracy theories, but this has been extremely odd. Are the yearbooks that were displayed at that site authentic? If so, why did the site that offered them disappear without any explanation? The yearbooks revealed massive drinking and partying by the young ladies of Holton Arms, including Ford herself. I’d love to get some clarification on all of this.

Blowsy-Fraud’s academic career was also unexplored. I think the emphasis on Palo Alto was meant to make people think she was affiliated with Stanford, the most prestigious Palo Alto institution. It turns out to be anything but. As this video, out of Ottawa, reveals, Blowsy-Fraud works at a social justice institution. Seriously, even though it’s ostensibly a school to train therapists, its primary goal is social justice:

Given more time, it’s going to become blatantly apparent that this whole Blowsy-Fraud thing was a con from ig to zack.

From top to bottom, the Left wants war. No matter where one looks, the Left wants war. Just watch what happened in Portland, when a compliant mayor let Antifa take over the streets:

This is the type of street anarchy that routinely happens where I live. Here is video from 6 Oct showing Antifa directing traffic in downtown & threatening people who don’t obey with violence. Mayor @tedwheeler, who really runs this town? pic.twitter.com/OgjZNByxat

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

And here is video of an elderly man who didn’t heed their street orders — so they chased him down. #Portland pic.twitter.com/AeXvhUKijO

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

Saturday’s street take over was just one in a string of events where the city’s leaders abdicated responsibility to uphold the rule of law. Here’s an example I investigated from the summer that lasted for weeks: https://t.co/0tukZ1cMih

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

Here is local reporting from the Oregonian about Saturday’s protest. https://t.co/IzpndvIpVV

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

Here is another angle of when the driver was surrounded and hit one of the protesters. https://t.co/G3jiSwGARs

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

I went to sleep and woke up seeing the video retweets have gone effectively “viral.” I did not shoot these videos myself. A lot of independent journalists/vloggers now focus on Portland because protests are numerous and sometimes extreme. Credit to @FarleyFilms.

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 8, 2018

You’ve already seen the video of the crazed leftists banging and clawing on the doors of the Supreme Court, while screaming in incoherent rage. You’ve also read about the enraged Google manager demanding the death of the GOP and the elementary school teacher seeking people to assassinate Kavanaugh’s death.

While all this crazy has been going on, the Democrat leadership has been silent and that’s foul. Democrat leaders ought to have been out there telling people to calm down. Telling them that this is how a representative democracy works. Telling them to vote if they want change. But none of them did.

Oh, wait! I’m wrong. One of them did speak up — to encourage more violence. That would be Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, former Secretary of State, and former two-time Democrat party presidential candidate:

WATCH: Hillary Clinton endorses violence, says “You cannot be civil” when fighting Republicans. pic.twitter.com/j7q1LlQtpB

— Sourced Reports (@SourcedReports) October 9, 2018

The fish rots from the head and the Democrat Party fish has been rotting non-stop since the Clinton administration.

The horrors of Fourth Wave Feminism. First wave feminism was about getting the vote. I support first wave feminism.

Second wave feminism was about equal pay for equal work and equal opportunities to get jobs for which women were/are manifestly qualified. I support second wave feminism.

Third wave feminism has been about women as victims. It’s loathsome.

There’s now something I’ve seen called “fourth wave” feminism. Linda Fox’s post does not use that phrase, but she does call today’s feminism the “Bitchy insistence that Womyn are the Queens of the Universe, and ALL MEN should Bow Down to Them.” This feminism is also loathsome — and the fact that Normal women are not amused may help explain why only Blue city Leftists got hysterically on board with Blowsy-Fraud’s manifestly false accusations.

For the Left, no matter the problem, the solution is control. My friend Earl sent me a link to a post about the now-forgotten Ice Age panic of the 1970s. Earl’s accompanying comment adds the necessary context:

Note the “cure” for “global cooling” . . . straight from the news of the day.

Less freedom (get RID of that automobile), more power for the government.

When “the worm turned” near the end of the ‘70s, and it began to warm a bit, suddenly no one was talking about The Coming Ice Age, it was all We’re Going to BURN!!

But the solution was the same: Less freedom (get RID of that automobile), more power for the government.

And THAT was when I knew for sure that this was political, and not scientific.

The consequences of scorched earth politics. My friend Patrick O’Hannigan has a rare knack for looking underneath social and political trends and seeing the profound moral shifts they represent. In a short, extremely rich essay, entitled Scorched earth and its consequences, he examines the damage wreaked by Progressive ideas that have interwoven themselves into America’s consciousness.

A 1987 movie foresaw today’s dating scene. Today’s news is filled with stories about the end of romance and the beginning of micromanaged sexuality. Campuses are telling students (men, of course, not women) that they need permission for every step they take in a romantic or sexual encounter. “May I touch your arm?” “May I hold your hand?” “May I kiss you, without tongue, for no longer than 5 seconds?” There are even apps for it.

Intrusive, almost-state-mandated creepiness has been substituted for romance. No wonder then that sex robots are something some men think are a really good thing.

But here’s something really funny: It turns out that a little-remembered 1987 comedy sci-fi movie called Cherry 2000, which is set in 2017, predicted all this:

Oh, Brave New World!

Remembering the Yom Kippur war. I vividly remember October 6, 1973. I was just twelve-years old. It was a beautifully sunny Saturday and I was sitting my room — done in bright yellow, orange, and white — re-reading Gone With The Wind for the first time when my Mom came into my room, white as a sheet. “Israel’s been attacked,” she announced.

Our family was glued to the television set in the coming days, although I didn’t really understand what the news was reporting. Afterwards, I met young men, both Israeli and American, who had served in that war. They didn’t want to talk about it.

Now I know that Richard Nixon was a great help at the time because, while he had the casual antisemitism common in most of the world (disdain, but not virulence), he was also a Cold Warrior. Israel needed help and he made it happen. The real people who made it happen, of course, were the Israeli soldiers. Ari Lieberman has a short rundown of Israel’s amazing victory and of the Arab’s pathological inability to understand, to this day, what happened to them.

Signing off for now. I’d hope to write more, but we’ve had a little plumbing crisis when a hose exploded. That’s not as bad as it sounds. Had this little plumbing crisis happened after we left for our trip, it would have been a disastrous plumbing event that could have destroyed our house. As it was, with help from our blessed wet vac, plus a lot of rags, plus a lot of running around frantically, finished off with a visit from the plumber . . . all is good.

The whole event was a reminder (which we might have remembered on our own) that you should always turn off the water before you leave for an extended period of time, even if it’s only for 24 hours. Our plumber told us a hair-raising story about a guy who’s pipe exploded back into the dry wall and destroyed the entire house over a long weekend while he was out of town.

Add to the above mini-crisis a frantic call from a client with a short-term research issue and my blogging is over for the day.

The post The Bookworm Beat 10/9/2018 — the American life edition and open thread appeared first on Bookworm Room.

The posters I gathered are overwhelmingly about Stupid Leftists and the stupid things they think and do, so this Bookworm Beat will make you laugh and cry.

The post Bookworm Beat 12/19/18 — the Stupid Leftists illustrated edition appeared first on Bookworm Room.

To help keep ourselves grounded over the screams from the Left, it’s periodically helpful to contrast Progressive belief systems with reality.

When I read the news of late, I keep thinking of the ancient proverb that serves as a title to this post: “Whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad.” In the West, the Left is in the grip of a fierce insanity, enthusiastically, fiercely, and even violently embracing delusional thinking.

In the real world, throughout the animal kingdom, there are boy animals and girl animals, distinguished by different DNA, different biology, and different behaviors. There are always outliers who, by quirks of nature or by choice, reject these differences, but the differences exist nonetheless and inform the bell curve of behavior across species. In Progressive world, though, as The Kinks once sang, “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls; It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.” An edgy rock song about a guy’s accidental (or maybe on purpose) hook-up with a transvestite has become the Progressives’ core truth.

In the real world, the climate has changed incessantly for the last 6 billion years. Moreover, the last two thousand plus years of human history reveal that humans thrive when the world warms and die when the world cools. The best example of this last point is the medieval warming period — a time during which wines were made in Greenland — which saw an explosion in population. That warming period was followed by a cooling period which saw starvation across the medieval world, weakening people’s immune systems and forcing specific changes in global trading patterns that led to contact with the plague carrying marmot in the Russian Steppes. The result: A pandemic that killed 1/3 to 1/2 of the world’s population. In the Progressive world, the combination of 150 years of temperature records (for it was the Victorians who slowly began tracking temperatures); systematic scientific fraud aimed at adjusting pre-1950 temperatures down and post-1950 temperatures up; and computer models that are incapable of reflecting the complexity of future climate events, has resulted in a push to return the world to a Hobbesian pre-industrial era during which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In the real world, communism has consistently failed to deliver on its promises of equality and material prosperity, offering instead violent, repressive totalitarian dictatorships, starvation, chronic shortages of all goods, and invariably brutal warfare. Likewise, in the real world, capitalism has consistently lifted people up from poverty and despair, bringing about in every generation riches and luxuries unimaginable just a generation before. Capitalism functions even better when it operates in a society shored up by a strong moral tradition (I prefer the Judeo-Christian one myself). In the Progressive world, capitalism impoverishes and socialism brings peace, harmony, equality, and wealth. Moreover, stabilizing moral traditions are dangerous, hate-filled, and must be destroyed.

In the real world, a fetus is utero is a human developing human life, the early step in a continuing transformation that leads from conception and birth to old age and the grave, and must therefore be respected as a human life. In the Progressive world, from conception to birth, a fetus is an inaminate clump of cells that can be treated with the same cavalier approach as a scab. Meanwhile, Progressives enthusiastically support jail time for those who mess with eagle or turtle eggs.

In the real world, since the day it burst out of the Arabian desert, Islam has been a belief system bent on total warfare and conquest. It is genocidal to those who fail to embrace Islam, leaving alive only those who can function as slaves (both for labor or sex) or who will provide the taxes necessary to support true believers. Moreover, since its intellectual peak in the early medieval era, Islam has proven to be a retrograde faith that rejects knowledge and humanism. Islam is also fiercely racist, for North Africa proves that Arab Muslims (the “original” Muslims), when given the chance, will happily enslave or slaughter their black Muslim brothers and sisters. I don’t quarrel with the fact that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are basically just “Saturday” worshipers who do not sign on to Islam’s racist, imperialist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-everything mindset, but there are still enough true believers to make Islam a dangerous, destabilizing force across the world. In Progressive world, Muslims are a race (not a non-racial ideology), Islam is a religion of peace, and the fact that Muslims routinely and openly speak out against Leftist values (homophilia, transphilia, feminism, etc.), must be ignored. It is enough that central tenets of Islam are a hatred of the West and Israel. Who could ask for anything more?

Speaking of Israel, in the real world Israel is the only democratic, pluralist nation in the Middle East. It embraces all races and faiths. It offers equality to women, the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and anyone else who is willing to live a civil life within a civil society. The Arabs in Israel have greater rights than any other Arabs across the Muslim world. Since its birth, the surrounding nations have sought to destroy it yet Israel, with its vast military might and armory, meaning that it could annihilate any of those nations, fights only defensive wars — and is so humane that it willingly puts its own citizens at risk rather than run the risk of killing the women and children that Hamas and PLO fighters routinely use as human shields. Israel is also, per capita, the greatest contributor in the world to medicine and science. In Progressive world, Israel, which was created out of the wreck of the Jewish race left by the Nazis’ genocidal plans, is itself a Nazi race nation that must be (again) destroyed.

I have to run now, for I am meeting friends for brunch, but I invite you to use the comments that contrast the real world with the Progressive fantasy.

To wrap things up, I don’t mind seeing the Left driven made if it means they are driven from power. Trump, who uses Twitter to inflame Leftist hysteria, is doing his best. What I fear, though, is that the rest of America may be caught up and badly burned in the conflagration of Leftist insanity.

The post “Whom the Gods would destroy they first drive mad” appeared first on Bookworm Room.

The 19th Amendment was a good idea in its time, but leftist women have become so perverted by the power it gave them, that we should seriously rethink it.

People are beginning to notice that the new leaders on the left are female. As a woman myself, some might think that I would find this a gratifying sign of progress in America. I don’t. I find it a worrisome thing because these women are driven by pure emotionalism, which has been channeled over the last few decades, especially at colleges, into a sense of perpetual victimhood and a deep hatred for America and her constitutionally-based institutions.

My theory is that the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake when women were given weren’t so angry but for the last few years, thanks to academia, and its evil spawn in K-12 education, the media, and Hollywood, women have marinated in anger. For those who embraced that toxic marinade and emerged as Democrats, Progressives, Democrat-Socialists, or whatever name they give their leftism, it’s destroyed them.

These modern leftist women are not the people who got the vote 100 years ago. They have become a different creature altogether, and not the kind that should be trusted anywhere near power.

I’ve been aware for some time that there’s something wrong with women on the left. The evidence is all around us. Let me just throw some names and some videos at you with examples of women who are paranoid, hate-filled, and often demented (not that I’m judging):

Nancy Pelosi

Maxine Waters

Michelle Obama

Ilhan Omar

Rashida Tlaib

Ayanna Pressley

Barbra Streisand

Cher

Alyssa Milano

Greta Thunberg

The woman with the mace can:

These alleged “moms”:

I recognize a lot of the so-called “moms” as the same antifa women who dressed in black as recent as a couple days ago. They just put on a yellow shirt now for optics. Most of these people aren’t mothers & many don’t even identify as female. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/UPffcao0fv

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020

This earnest protester:

[UPDATE: Finally tracked down another example of a crazy protester:

Police ordered her to back up. “Or f—king what?” she asked. And then found out. pic.twitter.com/bGbB9NPxmL

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) July 26, 2020

There are a lot of young women like her out there — and please notice her screams of outrage.]

The young women described in an article about uber-leftist Macalester University in St. Paul, Minnesota:

The claim that women and POCs (people of color) are unwelcome at Macalester is, of course, absurd. The college’s student body is 60 percent women, and in 2019-20, four of the student government executive board’s five members were “women of color.” “Diversity, equity and inclusion” permeate every aspect of college life. But where zealotry rules, facts are of no importance.

Not surprisingly, during the 2019-20 school year, the most powerful student at Macalester was student body president Blair Cha, a “woman of color.” In her campaign, Cha traded on her alleged underdog status, telling the Mac Weekly she was driven to run by her “passion”
to “empower students” by “speaking up about her experiences” as someone with a “marginalized” identity. She trounced her white male opponent with 60 percent of the vote.

After her victory, Cha made a play to upgrade her victim status. At a faculty meeting in March 2020, she stood up—surrounded by sign-waving female students—and accused one of her professors of discrimination on the basis of “gender, race, ethnicity and national origin in the classroom.” During the nine-month Title IX investigation that had followed her original accusation in Spring 2019, she said, “I struggled every day with extreme anxiety to the point where I could not stand the pain.”

The professor, who had already been officially exonerated, responded that Cha had breached a confidentiality agreement by discussing the matter publicly. He characterized her conduct as “totally beyond the pale.”

Cha’s inability to highlight real injustice during her run for office reveals how slim the pickings really are at Macalester. In an interview with the Mac Weekly, here’s the best she could do: “On the whole campus, it still feels uncomfortable to talk about intersectional topics such as menstruation, being queer, being a POC, etc., at Macalester.” As a result, she said, she had become a leader in initiatives like “Better Sex at Mac” (Title IX, “sexual violence”) and “the Menstrual Hygiene Project” (free menstrual supplies as a human right).

Incidentally, “menstrual health”— or “menstrual equity”—is now one of the hottest social justice issues on American campuses. Its appeal may arise from its combination of two intersecting “woke” causes: feminism and Green activism.

At Macalester, student Miriam Eide, a “Zero Waste Project Coordinator” in the college’s Sustainability Office, was a leader in the menstrual equity project. “I know we have free tampons, but why don’t we have free menstrual cups, too?” Eide said in a Mac Weekly interview in November 2019. She decided to use menstrual cups from OrganiCup, a “sustainability-focused company,” noting “they had a lot less waste in their packaging.” She dubbed the project “SustainaCup.

“OrganiCups are reusable, vegan and cruelty-free, and they are made completely out of hypoallergenic, medical-grade silicone,” according to the Mac Weekly. (You can’t make this up.) “Health and inclusivity are also very important parts of the program,” the paper noted, adding that according to Eide, “a lot of people struggle with the chemicals in tampons.”

By the way, the word “woman” does not appear in the Mac Weekly article about SustainaCup. These menstrual products, it seems, are not for women, but for “people that have periods.” Presumably, it’s important not to exclude “trans women.”

Sadly, the examples above are just a select few of the seemingly infinite number of instances in which women, mostly young, but some old enough to know better, have embraced a purely emotional, logic-free world. In this world, they are perpetual victims, they make cause with others they deem victims, and their power lies in lies. (Not a typo; I meant that wordplay.)

Churchill figured out the problem over 100 years ago. I say this based upon my reading Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts. I recommend it. It’s a highly readable look at the most brilliant and amazing man of the modern era.

As I read the book, I was struck by something Churchill wrote when he was a young man in India, in the 1890s. At the time, he was studying everything he could get his hands on to grow in wisdom and prepare himself for a career in politics. He was also jotting down the ideas that would shape him in the decades ahead.

Although surprisingly modern in many ways, Churchill shared the values of the late-Victorian era in which he lived. One of those was that he believed women should not vote. (He later changed his mind about this and was supportive of women in politics.)

The fascinating thing about Churchill’s view was that he did not object for the usual reasons. That is, he wasn’t saying that women were not constitutionally or intellectually suited for the vote. He didn’t talk about women’s sphere being in the home. He didn’t say it would make them less feminine.

Instead, Churchill had a very pragmatic concern about the women’s vote. As Robert’s writes, quoting Churchill, “‘If you give women votes you must ultimately allow women to sit as members of Parliament,’ after which inevitably ‘all power passes to their hands.'”

That’s what we’re seeing now. Democrat power is passing to women’s hands, and it’s an ugly business. They shield themselves defensively behind their femininity, as AOC did when Rep. Yoho allegedly spoke to her as he would to a man (and I believe him when he says he didn’t), but they fight offensively like rabid honey badgers. They use their femininity to pervert everything they touch, even while claiming to disdain being treated differently because they’re women.

Looking at the Democrat party, one can’t help feeling that the young Churchill was right and that the 19th Amendment was a mistake. I’m trying to come up with some sort of weird female corollary to Lord Acton’s expression that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Something along the line of “If you give a woman a vote, just wait a hundred years and watch that power cause the brains of her descendants on the left to dissolve into appalling, hysterical, ignorant, hate-filled, manipulative, mean-spirited anti-American mush.” Something like that….

(This is one of those ideas that’s haunting me and that I’m developing and refining as I go. Expect to see more of it in later posts.)

The post It’s time to repeal the 19th Amendment appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Good morning, all.

Ms. Book W. Room, writing under the nom de guerre of Andrea Widburg, is employed by the conservative site, American Thinker, to edit submissions to the site and to write several daily posts of her own.  Below are her posts on this date.  Since commentary to the posts are restricted at American Thinker (long story), feel free to comment on the day’s offerings below.

Today’s Offerings:

The Democrats’ war on women continues unabated

Democrats insist that they are the women’s party. They have phalanxes of women at pro-abortion events, showcase them as pink-hatted marches against Trump, celebrate them as shrieking harridans against both Kavanaugh and cops, and paraded their congresswomen as symbolically white-clad neo-suffragettes whenever Trump appeared in Congress. However, what’s become very clear of late is that the Democrat party despises women. It seeks to erase them, drive them mad, or destroy their very essence. The DOJ’s attack on mothers at school board meetings is only the very latest example of this deep hostility.

What tipped off me and many other women, including hardcore feminists, to the Democrats’ animus to women was their fervent embrace of so-called “transgender women”—that is, men who claim, not just that they like to dress and act like women, but that they are, in fact, actual women.  . . .

Continue reading at American Thinker

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