Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Movie Review: Long Shot

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Long Shot

By The Closet Conservative

A funny thing happened on the way to the  Forum….. I became a prude. I turned 60 earlier this year, and without a doubt, I’ve become quite conservative in what one might refer to as the “public square”.  Language and behavior that is vulgar (yes, a very subjective word) now bothers me.  Not so much behind closed doors, or in “locker room” type situations, but in the public square of political rallies, television, commercials, music, and movies.  Long Shot aims low and hits the mark. Some of the talk, and visual images of Long Shot would clearly have earned it an “X” rating in the 70’s or 80’s.  Today, this behavior is considered main stream in Romcom’s (Romantic comedies)  I find it tasteless and cheap. (And this is coming from a viewer who in 1977 thought Saturday Night Fever was the greatest movie of all time – a movie that in its day was quite graphic in its hard core street language and behavior)   If your idea of humor are penis erections, masturbation, ejaculation, accompanied by the gutter euphemisms of each action, then  hurry on down and see Long Shot. [Read more…]

Leftist politics and the power of visual images

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Leftists know that people respond strongly to visual images and use them to great effect. If Republicans want to win, they need to start doing the same.

A picture is worth a thousand words. — Newspaper/advertising adage.

Buttigieg Time Magazine Visual ImagesSome years ago, in a post I wrote about the Second Amendment, I noted the fact that one of the advantages the gun-grabbing crowd has when pushing its message is that it has the intense visuals of dead bodies (something the Left used with special force in the wake of the terrible Sandy Hook massacre). This means that these same anti-gun people are completely resistant to any data that doesn’t create powerful images.

When it comes to guns, the gun grabbers suffer from a very bizarre limitation: Their mental horizons allow them to see only those who died because of guns, not to recognize those who did not die thanks to guns. This myopia creates the giant intellectual chasm that separates those who oppose the Second Amendment from those who support it. The former see only the people who died in the past while the latter also see the ones who will live on into the future.

I then introduced Frédéric Bastiat’s magnificent Parable of the Broken Window, which the French economist wrote in 1850, to make the point that destruction doesn’t benefit the economy but instead has money flowing in a fairly meaningless loop. Thus, Bastiat noted how people consoled someone whose window had been broken by pointing out that the repair meant work for the glazier and the contractor and so on. These people, said Bastiat, saw positive economic energy without ever understanding that it was actually lost economic energy because the money could have been used to create, rather than repair. What appealed to me about Bastiat’s essay was the final paragraph (emphasis mine):

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

After quoting the Parable, I dragged the issue around to the war that the Left is constantly waging against the Second Amendment:

Just as is the case with the economic illiterate who cannot imagine that money might be spent on something more useful than fixing a broken window, a gun control advocate’s world view “is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.” He counts those who have died, but cannot even begin to imagine those whose lives were saved or never threatened.

Point such an advocate to a story about an off-duty deputy who was able to stop a mall shooter, and he will say only that, “The gun still allowed the shooter to kill one or two people, and there’s no way to tell if the shooter intended to kill more people, so the armed deputy is not relevant.”

To the gun-control proponent, a story without dead bodies is no story at all and it certainly has no statistical validity in the debate over the Second Amendment. To one who believes in the Second Amendment, however, stories about people using concealed-carry guns to stop mass shooters matter because we, unlike the gun grabber, are able to take account of those people who survived what would otherwise have been a mass shooting.

Dead bodies resonate in our imagination. The absence of dead bodies, even when reported at excellent sites such as Ammo.com, which tracks stories about defensive gun use, is an empty space in the imagination. This is especially true because the media, even before it became fanatically determined to destroy the Second Amendment, always operated on the principle that “if it bleeds, it leads.” If it doesn’t bleed, it will at most be a feel good story in the last 30 seconds of the news or a squiblet on the last page of Section C in the local newspaper.

With no blood and no bodies, those who support the Second Amendment find themselves limited to statistics. The statistics, frankly, are spectacular, with an Obama-era study showing that people across the U.S. routinely and successfully use guns to defend themselves between 500,000 to 3 million times per year. Statistics, however, are not visual. Instead, they’re dead numbers on a page, exciting only to wonks and people who work well with abstract ideas. [Read more…]

Immigration, character, welfare, and economic destiny

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America’s economic growth will benefit from an immigration policy that sees people with skills come to work, not to latch onto America’s welfare benefits.

Immigration Welfare Person Taking moneyA few decades ago, when I was getting my history major at Cal, something very rare and special happened: I had a brilliant professor. Every lecture he gave was fascinating, so much so that, while I’ve forgotten most of what my other teachers told me and that I memorized for just long enough to pass the exams, I remember an amazing amount of what Professor Rothblatt had to say.

One of the things that especially stuck in my mind over the years was how he explained the fact that the British industrial revolution petered out (even before WWI and the Great Depression sank their talons into Britain), while the American industrial revolution kept going and going and going, rather like the Energizer Bunny.* According to Professor Rothblatt, the problem was the English class system. It wasn’t that the government used the class system to limit people’s economic opportunities. It was that the workers themselves felt constrained by the class system. It wasn’t a glass ceiling for them; it was a cast iron ceiling.

In many industries, once the abuses and upheavals of the first half of the 19th century wound down, especially in the late Victorian era when classic liberals in government started instituting some basic workplace protections, working people were able to make a decent enough life for themselves. Their definition of a “decent life,” though, was limited by class mobility. Within the confines of their working class neighborhood, their decent life meant that they could have enough food on the table, money for Sunday clothes in addition to work clothes, a snug home, etc.

What they could not do with earning and saving money, or with innovating and creating new ways of doing old work or creating new products altogether, was move into the next class. They could not move to better communities or get into better schools. There were, of course, exceptions as there are to every rule, but for the vast mass of working class Brits, Henry Higgins, channeling Alan J. Lerner, summed it up: “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Thus, there was no benefit to be had from working longer, harder, or more creatively. In real estate terms, the working class person who made this extra effort would be in the unenviable position of having the fanciest house in the neighborhood — he could never get a return on his investment.

In America, at least before the modern era of college-/university-educated elitists dawned, there was a tremendous amount of social mobility. People were applauded for leaving their class of origin, not denigrated for doing so. With Americans, whether native-born or immigrant, always believing that there was room at the top, they were willing to spend the time and energy to work harder and to innovate. This is why in America, once the brutalities of the early industrial revolution were tamed, that same revolution, rather than reaching a stopping point, was an endless springboard for rising classes of workers, allowing the disciplined, the diligent, and the creative to move up the economic scale.

Put simply, British culture contributed significantly to its industrial slowdown. [Read more…]

Abortion: the modern death cult that rejects Nature

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By embracing today’s abortion Death Cult up to and including birth, the self-identified party of science and Nature rejects both science and Nature.

Scott Adams abortion AcademiaAbortion is in the news again as some states legalize it up to the moment of birth while other states already have or are talking about limiting it to the moment before the first detectable heartbeat. Those who oppose abortion talk about the rights of “preborn” babies; those who support abortion talk about women in chains, enslaved to white male legislators. Although I started out my political life as completely pro-abortion, at a certain point I realized — quite reluctantly, I might add — that the anti-abortion people had the better argument because . . . science or, more accurately, Nature.

One of the things that the Left is always anxious to impress on the world is that it is the party of science. It dons this mantle because it sees science as something that stands in opposition to religion. to Leftists, religion — at least conservative Christianity and Judaism — is about blind, mindless faith. Its adherents owe fealty to texts that are 2,000 or more years old, going back to a time when humans were primitive and had no understanding about how the world worked at a scientific level. It was a world of magic and invisible, malignant forces that showered people with an invariably inexplicable, random brew of life and death, love and hate, and good and evil.

Faith, therefore, is bad because it’s inherently irrational and illiterate about the world around us.

In addition to embracing “science” (which I always imagine Leftists saying the way it’s said in Thomas Dolby’s 80’s hit “She Blinded Me With Science“), the Left has also embraced Nature (said in the same tone, I’m sure as “science”). They do so in part because Genesis gives man dominion over Nature and works assiduously to distinguish humans from other animals, and in part because capitalist and colonialist oppression are seen as enemies to the untouched wonders of communist, indigenous nature. (Ironically, of course, communist countries have been blights on their lands and poor indigenous people care only about getting enough food in the here and now, which often means treating their environment very badly.)

In theory — and often in fact — it’s entirely possible to balance religion, science, and Nature. Problems arise when there are overlaps. For religious people, when science and Nature crash into each other, or crash into religion, it’s religion which, even if it’s not a practical guide, offers moral guidance. For Leftists, though, who operate without that moral religious foundation,* when science and Nature clash, they look not to God, but to politics — and, more specifically, to identity politics as their guide. [Read more…]

Data collection, privacy, and being “un-personed”

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In a pre-internet era, I worried mostly about losing privacy — and therefore losing face — locally; now, individuals lose privacy and face nationally.

Privacy Security Memo Steele Dossier Fifth Column Deep State FISA NSA 4th AmendmentIn 1986, I attended a lecture by Arthur R. Miller. The lawyers among you might recognize him as one of the two authors of Wright and Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure. For the non-lawyers among you, Federal Practice and Procedure is (or at least was then) the single most important treatise on practicing law in the federal court system.

(As an aside, Charles Alan Wright, the other author, taught at my law school, although I was not in his Civil Procedure class. Rumor had it that he was an indifferent teacher, but that he kept students entertained with his photographic memory, which included being able to cite with perfect accuracy to every single page in his multi-volume treatise.)

I’m digressing a bit, but my point is that this was a lecture from one of the finest judicial minds in the country. The topic Miller chose to address was privacy. The obvious things to raise in the lecture would have been seminal Supreme Court cases about privacy, such as Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), which held that states had no business interfering in a married couple’s contraception decisions because of the inherent constitutional right to privacy; Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), which extended the Griswold privacy right to unmarried couples; or Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), which held that the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures applied to places in which someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy. I don’t remember Miller addressing any of those subjects.

Instead, what I remember him talking about was the fact that the computer age (which was over 30 years less developed then than it is now) meant that corporations were compiling databases about consumers through customer loyalty cards and general credit card use. Corporations, he said, learned our every purchase and this, he argued, was itself a violation of our privacy. I don’t think Miller could have been at all surprised to read in 2012 that Target figured out that a teen girl was pregnant before her father did:

Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.

I won’t quote from the article at length, but if you missed it the first time around, back in 2012, I suggest you check it out now just to see how deeply corporations can pry into our lives to try to figure out our shopping needs. [Read more…]

A few thoughts about the trade war with China *UPDATED*

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China has been slowly sucking America dry through unfair trade. Trump is right to demand that it treat us fairly and I think he’ll win this trade war.

China Trade War Trump XiWhen I graduated from high school, a family friend, recently widowed, sold me her deceased husband’s eight-year-old car for a price I could afford with the money I’d saved over the years from babysitting and summer jobs. I drove that car for the next eight years, during which time I commuted one to two hours a day to college and work, and then, after graduating, drove it halfway across the country and used it while I attended law school in Texas (and worked then too).

The car was an amazing lemon. I got stranded in all sorts of places, from storm ridden freeways to scary neighborhoods to high mountain passes. During my last year in Texas, the heater broke and was stuck permanently in “on” position . . . in Texas . . . during the summer.

When I got my first real job as a lawyer, with a lovely (and completely undeserved, considering my abilities) paycheck, my very first purchase was a new car. I got the very first Acura Integra that rolled off the assembly line. It didn’t have a radio or air conditioning, but neither did my old car. What it did have was splendid reliability. That car lasted me for years and I got rid of it only when I had my first child and traded it in for the ubiquitous mom minivan.

But back to that old car. The problem for me was that, whenever it broke down, I had just enough money to pay for fixing it. But because I kept paying to fix it, I was never able to stockpile enough money to buy a new car that wouldn’t break down. Over the eight years I owned that car, little bit by little bit, I paid my mechanics substantially more than I ultimately paid for my brand new Acura. To put it more graphically, when it came to that darn car, I was chronically hemorrhaging and was only able to blot up the latest blood flow without ever being able to end the bleeding altogether.

My relationship with my old car is a metaphor for America’s trade relationship with China for the past four decades. China has been bleeding us here and bleeding us there. Thus, over the decades, he’s been stealing our intellectual property, cheating on trade deals, using government subsidies to undercut our industries and (much worse) using slave labor to undercut our workers. [Read more…]

Reminder about new commenting policy

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I just wanted to remind everyone that, in order to rid the comment threads of abusive people, I’m still using Disqus to moderate comments. Once you pass through moderation, though, and I’ve identified you as a trusted user, you’re good, and you shouldn’t find your comments caught in limbo again.

RIP, Tim Conway

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The death of Tim Conway marks the end of an era of wonderful American comedy that was based on simple things and aimed at a general audience.

Tim ConwayTim Conway was truly one of the funniest men in my remembered lifetime. Or maybe it was just that magical alchemy on the Carol Burnett show, especially in sketches with Harvey Korman. When I need a laugh I return to some of those sketches like a homing pigeon.

What’s especially delightful about Tim Conway’s comedic moments is that they deal with every day things. There are no politics, no wokeness, no identity issues — he just brought us ordinary situations in which human beings are being very, very silly in a wonderful way.

By the way, a lot of what Conway did was improvised. He’d rehearse it straight and then, with the director’s permission, throw surprises at his co-stars. The results were magical.

By the time he died, Tim Conway had already been retired from show business for a very long time. His passing, though, really represents the last gasp of an American style of entertainment meant for all Americans, not just for minute segments steeped in identity politics and voluntary misery.

Here are some of my favorite Tim Conway sketches from a man who lit up the screen with his wonderful humor: [Read more…]

Harvard Law School turns its back on humane jurisprudence

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Harvard Law School has abandoned one of the core principles of American jurisprudence — a citizen’s right to counsel when standing alone before the state.

Harvard Law School Ronald Sullivan

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! I hope you appreciate this post — and I hope that you read it through the filter that Glenn Reynolds provided: “To be fair, Rakesh Khurana is the Dean of Harvard College. The Law School itself hasn’t done anything wrong.” It was careless of me to make that mistake, but I stand by the general principles that animate this post regarding a lawyer’s role in keeping the government honest.]

I went to law school in a red state during the Reagan era. As you can imagine, law and order was a big deal there and then. Early on in my Constitutional Law class, our professor (a very famous Con Law scholar, I might add) asked the class for a show of hands signaling which of us would be willing to represent a defendant we knew was guilty of a heinous crime. Not a single hand went up.

He scolded us soundly and I have never forgotten what he said. I can’t remember it verbatim, I’m sorry to say, but I can remember the gist:

He said that, because the state’s police power is so vast; because it is judge, jury, and executioner; because it has a permanent cadre of lawyers dedicated to prosecuting law that they know intimately; and because of the breadth and depth of the state’s access to information, no one should ever have to face the law entirely alone.

Every individual, no matter how awful he is or seems to be, should have someone at his side when facing the awesome majesty of the government. We do this, not to allow bad people to escape justice, but to ensure that the government doesn’t abuse the tremendous power it has.

I found that very profound. But apparently my professor — and I did mention that he was a very famous Con Law professor — would be drummed out of Harvard Law School for that viewpoint: [Read more…]

Open Thread

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Open Thread bubble

I’m sorry, but I’ve just got nothing tonight. My brain is about as exciting as yesterday’s fried mackerel. If you have something exciting to write, please, please, pretty please, share it here.

Part II of the Mueller Report is a singularly dishonest political document

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This post offers you five reasons to view Part II of the Mueller Report as a purely political document without any supporting legal rationales.

Robert Mueller ReportPart I of the Mueller Report conclusively found no evidence that President Trump or anyone close to him ever conspired with, or attempted to conspire with, the Russian government to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. That should put the matter to bed.

Those who say that the Mueller report also doesn’t find affirmative proof that President Trump did not conspire with the Russians need to go back and study their basic American jurisprudence. In America, individuals do not have to prove their innocence; it is the prosecution that bears the high burden of proving their guilt. Case closed.

With Russian Collusion a dead-in-the-water talking point, the President’s critics have swung to Part II, which implies that the president of obstructed justice, whether it came about in the form of fulminating against what he knew was a witch hunt, debating with his attorney whether it was possible to fire the chief witch hunter, issuing orders to keep quiet about those discussions, or refusing to appear for an oral deposition.

See that, say President Trump’s critics. President Trump clearly had bad motives, which makes him unfit for the office he holds.

But for presidents, just as for everyone else, having bad motives doesn’t matter unless they’re followed by conduct. The fact that I put myself to sleep at night, not by counting sheep but by figuring out different ways to poison my enemies is irrelevant if I never poison my enemies or inflict any other criminal harm on them. My motives also do not make it a crime if someone later catches me sneering at one of those enemies, because sneering, while rude, is not a criminal act.

The record shows that Trump did not fire anyone and that his subordinates spoke freely to investigators. As for refusing to appear for a deposition, Mueller acceded to Trump’s request that he be subject only to written questions. That was a bargain, not an obstruction.

I’ve also noted before that it’s questionable whether one can claim “obstruction of justice” when there was no actual justice going on. The laws about obstruction of justice posit a known, actual crime; a prosecutor honestly investigating who did that crime; and a person, even an innocent one, deliberately engaging in affirmative acts (destruction of evidence, silencing of witnesses, etc.) to block that investigation.

In this case, however, the facts we know argue against “justice” having any part in this farce. Instead, a continuously emerging stream of new information tells us that government investigative agencies under Obama used illegal means to spy on the Republican presidential candidate. Then, when Trump won, he was accused of doing something bad with the Russians, although no one could quite finger what the precise illegality was. Trump’s FBI director then illegally leaked classified material to the media to trigger a special prosecutor. Although Mueller lacked evidence of an actual crime, he zealously spent two years and $35 million hunting for a crime, any crime, that he could pin on Trump.

That’s not justice. That’s Soviet-style political persecution. [Read more…]

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