Marin County Sheriff: I love everything about the 2nd Amendment, except the part where it lets people carry guns

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Heading into Marin CountyIt turns out that even in Progressive Marin County, law-abiding residents want to carry guns on their persons.  In the weeks since the 9th Circuit (!) held that county’s cannot condition concealed-carry permits on the sheriff’s determination that the applicant has made a credibly showing that he or she is in fear for his (or her) life, the upswing in concealed-carry applications has even reached true blue Marin (emphasis mine):

As Californians in some locations have flooded sheriff’s offices with applications and inquiries for permits to carry concealed guns, in Marin, sheriff’s officials say they have been fielding more calls than usual.

Demand is being driven by a federal appeals court ruling last month that made it easier for some residents to obtain the hard-to-get permits. About 56,000 Californians have a concealed-weapons permit in a state of 38 million residents. [Prior to the ruling] In Marin County, the sheriff’s office has issued only 21 concealed weapons permits.”

Those in Marin afraid of guns, though, need not worry that their perfectly nice neighbor, the one who brings casseroles when they’re sick and helps prop up fences in winter storms, will be packing legal heat any time soon.  Although the 9th Circuit may have spoken, that’s not good enough for Marin’s Sheriff:

Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle said he doesn’t plan to loosen how permits are issued until the issue has been conclusively decided by the courts. He said he’s not sure how may people have applied for permits since the ruling as most of the inquiries in Marin have been phone calls.

“We’ve had more requests than usual since the ruling. We’ve told people they can apply, but we’re going to apply the same standard of demonstrating ‘good cause’ until it’s finally been decided by the court,” Doyle said. “The decision has basically been put on stay for three weeks to give the parties time to respond.”

Color me cynical, but I’m willing to bet that, if Sheriff Doyle had been in charge, Marin would have been issuing same-sex marriage licenses within minutes of the 9th Circuit’s decision striking down California’s Prop. 8, the much-maligned law holding that marriage is between one man and one woman.  A foolish consistency, though, is never the hobgoblin of Leftist minds.

What’s so incredibly funny in all this is Sheriff Doyle’s position on gun rights:

Doyle said he’s a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment, but believes concealed-weapons permits should be reserved for those who have some sort of verifiable threat in their lives.

“I don’t agree with the adage that the more guns we have, the safer we are,” Doyle said. “We do have business owners that have been robbed and some people that carry large sums of money in the course of their employment carrying concealed guns.”

Properly translated, what Doyle is saying is that “I strongly support the Second Amendment, except for the part where it says that the right to carry arms is inherent in the people, and not dependent on the whim of the government.  But otherwise, if I decide someone deserves to have a gun, I might actually give that person permission.  Maybe.”

I shouldn’t poke too much fun at the sheriff.  He is, after all, a perfect reflection of the county he serves.  Everyone here claims fealty to the Bill of Rights, provided that it’s eviscerated to conform with Leftist norms.

Even if Doyle is, as I suspect, a very nice man, I’d rather have Milwaukee’s Sheriff Clarke in charge of our concealed-carry licensing program:

Police chief get a gun

The Progressives’ worst mistake is thinking that they know what others want

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Homeless woman (photo by dbking)At a certain level, all of us are solipsistic, in that we inevitably exist at the enter of our own universe.  As it is with individuals, so it is with belief systems.  Whether we like it or not, we assume that our way is the way to do things.  That others would do things a different way is invariably a surprise (although, as is the case with Dutch chocolate, often a pleasant surprise).

One of the things that distinguishes the mature mind from the immature mind is the ability to recognize that your way isn’t always the right way.  Sometimes the other person’s (or nation’s) way is fine, even if it seems inadequate.

(As a side note, I’m not discussing moral absolutes here.  I think we’re entitled to be solipsistic about certain moral absolutes, such as “cold-blooded murder is wrong,” cold-blooded stealing is wrong,” “child-beating is wrong.”  Even there, though, we do make distinctions.  Cold-blooded murder is wrong, but we are open to extenuating circumstances.  Cold-blooded stealing is wrong, but it’s probably okay if you’re starving and steal food.  Child-beating is always wrong, of course, except that some describe “beating” as a slap on the butt with a hand, while others describe it as using a child’s head as a battering ram against a wall.  All decent people oppose the second; many decent people, myself included, do not consider that the first constitutes a “beating.”)

Outside of moral absolutes (or moral somewhat absolutes), what remains are behaviors and beliefs.  It’s here that we all fall prey to believing our way is best.  Where conservatives and Progressives differ, though, is that, while conservatives believe their choices are best, they do not believe that it is up to government to impose those choices on others.  They prefer persuasion to coercion. Progressives, however, are sufficiently self-righteous (or emotionally immature) that they believe that they must impose their ways upon others.

What got me thinking about this was a discussion I had with my sister about a couple of homeless men she and her husband have befriended (don’t ask).  Both men are enthusiastically homeless.  They get government checks, but are incapable of — and, more importantly, hostile to — embracing a middle class lifestyle.

The two men live near a city in a somewhat rural area.  They can bike to amenities, but live in a homeless encampment in the woods (which means they offer minimal inconvenience to the bulk of the city’s residents).  One of them built a teeny, portable wooden structure in which he lives, and powers the TV, the lights, the radio, and the electric cook stove with solar panels.  The other dwells in a tent and mooches happily off friends.  They get water from a nearby water pipe that the city makes available to the encampment.  They get free food from various charities, and spend their government checks on food and drugs.

From my middle class, suburban perch, they live a terrible life.  From their point of view, though, they’re free men who have all their needs met:  shelter, food, chemical stimulants.  They don’t want anything more.  Both are a little loopy (one has a mildly aggressive paranoia, while the other believes he communes with alien beings), but neither is rendered dysfunctional by those “quirks.”  They are free to be themselves.  They don’t miss hot showers, and La-Z-Boys, and cars, and the internet, and X-Boxes, and all of the other things with which we fill our lives.  Nor do they miss health insurance, which means that they’re in sync with previously uninsured Oregonians who got Medicaid.  When they’re sick, that’s what the ER is for.  They like that status quo and, despite living in a state that’s embraced government medicine, they refuse to join up.

I thought of these two men when James Taranto pointed out a Fox-Butterfield moment in the San Francisco Comical:

Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
“San Francisco spends $165 million a year on services for homeless people, but all that money hasn’t made a dent in the homeless population in at least nine years.”–Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, March 12

San Francisco has long spent exorbitant sums on the homeless because the Progressive government believes that it can bribe, cajole or co-opt the homeless into adopting a middle class lifestyle.  The experience of 30 years of failure has only convinced the Progressives that they need to spend more.  They cannot comprehend that, while there are people amongst the homeless population who are genuinely down on their luck and need a hand, there are many amongst the homeless who affirmatively embrace that lifestyle.  They are homeless,  not because we (society) have failed them, but because they like the freedom that comes with homelessness.  They have no amenities, but they have no obligations either.

Progressives aren’t insane, notwithstanding the oft-repeated definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Solipsism isn’t insanity.  It is, instead, a failure of imagination and an emotional immaturity that makes it impossible for a person or belief system to accept other attitudes and desires.

Watcher’s Council results for March 14, 2014

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And the winners are in!

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

Agatha Christie and the missing airplane

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Agatha ChristieJust because I haven’t blogged about the missing airplane doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it.  As it is, with no data, I have nothing to say, except….

Okay, this is a pretty random observation, but as the story unfolded and it appeared that the plane might have been spirited away, I kept thinking to myself, “This sounds like something I’ve read before.”  I finally figured out last night why it was familiar.

Back in 1954 (the same year in which she sat for the portrait, above), Agatha Christie first published Destination Unknown.  The premise was that important scientists from all over the world had been vanishing.  When the wife of one of those vanished scientists died in an accident, a young woman who resembled that dead wife was substituted in her place, in the hope that she would help British and American law enforcement solve the mystery.  I’m not giving too much away when I say that the first phase in a group’s “vanishing” was a faked airplane crash.

In the case of the book, those in the faked crash lived.  Here, if the plane was indeed hijacked by evil forces, I suspect that almost three hundred people were summarily executed in cold blood, which is somehow a thought even more appalling than thinking about them dying in an actual plane crash.

Again, though, I’m avoiding any substantive writing about the missing plane because there seems so little to say (although it does strike me as strange that, in a world monitored constantly by satellites, something can vanish so completely).  Today’s evidence could just as easily point to alien abduction as to terrorist hijacking or mechanical failures and abnormalities.  If I had to bet, though, I’d say hijacking and, if I were forced to bet more, I’d say Islamist-related hijacking, with some terrible denouement still to unfold.

Thursday afternoon round-up (and Open Thread)

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Victorian posy of pansiesYesterday, I was in a blogging frenzy.  Today?  Not so much….  I’m a little depleted after having spent more than an hour trying to reach someone at the Social Security administration to resend my mother’s tax info, which had gotten lost in the mail.  The first half hour was spent trying to figure out how to connect to a human.  The rest of the time was spent waiting to speak to the human.  If this was a business, I’d cease doing business with it.  But it’s not.  It’s a government monopoly and I was trapped.  Sheesh!

I wish I had known beforehand that, today and tomorrow only, I could download for free Dennis Koller’s The Oath. At least I would have been able to while away pleasant my time on hold (although it was hard to concentrate on anything because the SSA has the worst, most crackly, most poorly chosen “hold” Muzak ever created).

***

One of the hallmarks of tyranny is the attitude that “the end justifies the means.” With this attitude, you give yourself a carte blanche to do anything you like, far from petty little things such as due process, rule of law, morality, decency, etc. That’s why Jamelle Bouie thinks it’s just fine that D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray engaged in unabashed campaign financing corruption — it was for the greater good. If I ever get stopped by a cop for rolling through a stop sign, I’m going to tell him it was for the greater good, since hypermiling, which includes using as few stops and starts as possible, helps save the environment. Yeah, that should get me out of a ticket.

***

Harry Reid’s increasingly unhinged attacks on the Koch brothers are disturbing at two levels. First, as I mentioned, they’re unhinged. Reid has gone from malevolent and corrupt (only corrupt career politicians become multimillionaires, as he did) to insane. Someone ought to reach out and help him before he needs a straitjacket and padded room. Second, no one is going to help him, because his insanity is representative of the Democrat party as a whole. The whole party has run itself off the rails — and since the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, the madness just keeps rolling. It’s not “Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez,” it’s “Laissez En Temps Fous Roulent.”

***

I’m impressed that American businesses still have the capacity to be “stunned” (The Hill’s words) by Obama’s announcement that he’s going to create a rule mandating overtime pay for management level employees, something that will devastate American productivity. (No kidding. I’ve worked in enough offices to know that the energy in the offices comes from striving mid-level management and executives seeking bonuses, promotions, pay raises, and fame through overtime work.) Obama has attacked businesses from his first day in office. Wouldn’t you think that they’d be used to it now?

***

The only difference between Obama and Nixon is that Nixon had a hostile press corps — something that arguably saved America as a constitutional republican democracy. Our generation isn’t so lucky.

Obama also has the advantage of an utterly compliant Congress, with complete Dem control in the Senate and complete RINO/Dem control in the House.

***

In my blogging frenzy yesterday, I wrote that I no longer believe uncorroborated stories about incidents, either positive or negative, involving gays. Too many hoaxes, I said. And right on time comes another story about another hate-crime hoax.

***

The sexual revolution came about because of the baby boom, the Pill, and antibiotics. The baby boomers are now old and wrinkled, the Pill is being handed out to 12 year olds, and antibiotics no longer work. Regarding that last one, the CDC says gonorrhea is on the verge of going pre-modern and becoming untreatable once again.

***

There are two problems with the Associated Press. The first is that it’s ubiquitous, providing “news” content for just about every outlet in the world. The second is that it’s almost laughably partisan and dishonest. The only problem with that “laughable” part is that the joke is on American political discourse.

***

And why not put transexuals in the military? We’ve done everything else we can think of to make it an uncomfortable place for the vast majority of troops who, like most Americans, espouse a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to people’s sexual orientation, but are much less comfortable with being placed at the front line of the culture wars. Our president has made it increasingly obvious that he doesn’t view the military as our defense in a dangerous world; instead, it’s an institution that he can manipulate to his heart’s content to make it conform to his ideas about what an appropriately PC society will look like. It’s not a military; it’s a sociology experiment.

***

I think the new “nagging mom” meme that the Department of Health and Human Services is using in an effort to encourage young people to enroll in Obamacare is perfect. It’s the visual embodiment of the Left’s belief that American citizens are perpetual children who must be bribed, managed, bullied, and cajoled by their wise parents in the Democrat Party.

***

My kids have already been watching “The Story of Stuff” in high school. It’s times like this that I’m grateful that they’re not perfect students, paying attention to everything in class.

***

My friend Rob Miller (aka JoshuaPundit) has appropriately unkind words about Palestinian premier for life Abbas.

Watcher’s Council nominations for March 13, 2014

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The usual good stuff.  And no, it never gets repetitious to write those four words.  I’m proud to be part of an organization in which good stuff is normal, not aberrant.

Council Submissions

Honorable Mentions

Non-Council Submissions

More clever posters nailing complex issues

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I’m grateful that Caped Crusader sent me a few more very clever posters.

This first one shows timeless wisdom, because it touches on my fear about Obama’s newly announced initiative to aid young black men.  These men are, indeed, a disastrous demographic, insofar as they’re overrepresented in prisons, morgues, and unemployment lines. The problem, of course, is that it was the federal government that did this to young black men. Can we really expect it to fix things?

Woodson on government handouts

We’re all familiar with the version of this poster comparing Obama and Bibi. I like the Putin addition:

World leaders at 21

Even as police in Connecticut plan to seize guns from law-abiding citizens, it appears that a sheriff in Milwaukee trafficks in common sense:

Police chief get a gun

I have a dream Presidential ticket for 2016. What’s yours?

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Presidential SealCPAC brought to the front the ideological war Ted Cruz, a committed Tea Party conservative, and Rand Paul, a libertarian conservative, are waging against each other. I think both have many virtues and serve the constitution very well in Congress. Indeed, I thought Ted Cruz did a good thing when he took his stand against Obamacare last fall. Nevertheless, I don’t want either one as a presidential candidate. Both are provocateurs and, while that’s important for getting messages across and rallying the troops, being a provocateur is not the same as being a leader.

So, what is my current dream ticket for the 2016 Presidential election? Scott Walker for President and Allen West for Vice President.

Scott Walker’s travails and triumphs in Wisconsin told us a great deal about the man: He’s a principled conservative; he can stand the heat without getting ruffled; he’s stalwart; and he’s an extremely good manager, especially economically. In other words, absent such further evidence as may develop in the next two years, he’s perfect chief executive material. Moreover, to date, the worst that the media has been able to discover about him is that, in college, he started campaigning for student office one day early. I think the American people will forgive that.

As for Allen West, there are two reasons I like him. First, I just do. It’s the same way I like Keanu Reeves. It happens at a visceral level that I can’t articulate. But the other reason I like West is because he’s got what it takes to be a Veep preparing to be a president:  He’s a principled conservative; he’s a fiery fighter; he’s stalwart; and he understands command. If he’d also had a successful term as a governor, I’d readily put him on the top of the ticket. We’ve learned the hard way, though, that being president is not a good place for on-the-job training in political management.

So, here’s my dream ticket, based on information available today (subject to change as new information becomes available):

Walker West 2016 Dream Ticket

Please chime in with encouragement, derision, new facts, and alternative suggestions.

Mistakes are human — and they’re dangerous when an entity aggregates too much power

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erase_mistakeMistakes.  We all make them. Lord knows, anyone reading my blog knows that there are days when I can call myself the Mistake Queen. I’m a careless typist and a lousy proofreader, especially when rushed or stressed, two things that describe me most of the time.  I have a large fund of facts squirreled away in my brain, but I still get facts wrong and am always grateful when those more knowledgeable than I correct them.  I’m a savvy internet user, but not infrequently fall prey to false information on the internet (especially falsely attributed quotations that dovetail too perfectly with my beliefs).

Here’s the deal, though:  My mistakes have minimal impact.  They amuse some and offend others.  When I learn about them, I’ll correct them (unless they’re ancient typos).  I don’t want to make mistakes because my credibility and quality are at issue, but nobody’s going to die or go broke because I’ve made a typo.

The same holds true when individuals in government make mistakes.  For example, Earl tipped me off to a very funny one from the offices of Rep. Paul Cook (R., Cal. 8th Dist.).  I have no bone to pick with Cook.  He’s a retired Marine colonel and Vietnam Vet, and he deserves full honors for both those things.  He’s a Republican and I’ll happily assume for now that he’s not a RINO.  Without further information, therefore, Rep. Cook is all good things and I wish him much success.

But the stuff that comes out of his office!  Oy vey!!  His staff recently mailed out a flyer to his constituents.  The flyer had on its cover this stirring image:

Paul Cook flyer cover

So far so good. We like Congressmen who look first to the Constitution before passing laws. The problem comes with the survey included with the mailing:

Paul Cook survey

Please think long and hard about how you would answer Question No. 2.  If pressed, I would pick “unsure,” only because, of all the answers that make no sense, it’s most honestly acknowledges the inevitable bewilderment the question creates.

So it’s not just me messing up.  This kind of carelessness, thoughtlessness, illogical, foolishness, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is an inherent part of human nature.  The problems begin when we give these careless humans too much power.  The fact that Rep. Cook has silly people in his office says nothing about him and his agenda.  Likewise, although it was good for a laugh, you can’t fault every Democrat for some foolish drone’s reference to Reagan’s hitherto unknown years in Congress.

The contrary is true, though, when we’re looking at mistakes in an all- (or almost all-) powerful organization, such as a modern federal bureaucracy.  In that context, mistakes can be catastrophic.  And that’s precisely what Jim Geraghty touches upon in his National Review article about the fact that liberals cannot govern — they have put too much power into entities whose mistakes are devastating and whose self-correcting mechanisms non-existent:

In most professions, when you end up spending ten times what you budgeted, the consequences are swift and severe. Heads roll. Responsibilities are reassigned. Budgetary authority gets yanked. This, of course, is not how things work in the federal government.

[snip]

Liberals’ belief in the inherent goodness of a far-reaching federal government drives them to avert their eyes from its wildest abuses, even when they are occurring right in front of them. Waste and mismanagement are ignored, dismissed, downplayed, and excused, because confronting them too directly would undermine the central tenet of their worldview: that the federal government is an irreplaceable tool for making the world a better place.

I hope I’m not being too mean when I point to Rep. Paul Cook’s silly flyer as a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with big government, even if that government is not actively malevolent and partisan.  When careless error comes out of a single Congressman’s office, it’s inconsequential; when it comes out of an all-powerful, unconstrained bureaucracy, it ought to scare the Hell out of each one of us.

Dartmouth reveals the moral weakness of the American intellectual

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A small cadre of Dartmouth students threatened violence if the school didn’t invest a great deal more money in “diversity” (skin color and gender diversity, of course, rather than intellectual diversity).  Dartmouth caved, diverting funds from actual academics to appease the radicals.  The theory on the right is that Dartmouth’s administrators backed down in the face of physical violence.

After all, we know that intellectuals can happily contemplate violence in the abstract but they don’t like it when it shows up on their own doorsteps.  We’ve seen that reality play out frequently when the West’s self-styled intelligentsia run afoul of Muslim demands.  There’s something about staring in the face of a man who thinks beheading you is a really good idea that makes a lot of people second-guess their values.

You and I know, though, that the violence threatened at Dartmouth wouldn’t include beheading.  It would be bomb threats, acts of vandalism, low-grade physical assaults, graffiti, office takeovers, etc.  (The diversity cadre, thankfully, hasn’t yet gone full sharia.)

Knowing that we’re not talking the full-sharia press here, is it really possible that the Dartmouth powers-that-be can be pushed around simply because they’re worried that their cars will be keyed?  I don’t think so.  I think there’s something different going on here.  In this context, Shelby Steele’s White Guilt makes for illuminating reading.

Steele was part of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and was there, on the ground, in an Iowa University president’s office when he saw white guilt kick in, rendering the guilty party completely helpless, anxious only for the faint hope of redemption that acceding to extremist demands could provide:

I know two things about Dr. McCabe that help explain his transformation before our eyes into a modern college president: he was a man of considerable integrity, and he did not deny or minimize the injustice of racism. He had personally contributed money to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference when this was not typical of college presidents. Thus, on some level—and in a way that may have caught him by surprise—he would have known that behind our outrageous behavior was a far greater American outrage.

And in this intransigent piece of knowledge was the very essence of what I have called white guilt. Dr. McCabe simply came to a place where his own knowledge of American racism—knowledge his personal integrity prevented him from denying—opened a vacuum of moral authority within him. He was not suddenly stricken with pangs of guilt over American racism. He simply found himself without the moral authority to reprimand us for our disruptive behavior. He knew that we had a point, that our behavior was in some way connected to centuries of indisputable injustice. So he was trumped by his knowledge of this, not by his remorse over it, though he may have felt such remorse. Our outrage at racism simply had far greater moral authority than his outrage over our breach of decorum. And had he actually risen to challenge us, I was prepared to say that we would worry about our behavior when he and the college started worrying about the racism we encountered everywhere, including on his campus.

And this is when I first really saw white guilt in action. Now I know it to be something very specific: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power. (Steele, Shelby, White Guilt [Kindle Locations 370-374]. HarperCollins; emphasis mine.)

It wasn’t physical cowardice that drove the Dartmouth decision — it was moral emptiness. The school’s administrators have been steeped for decades in white guilt. That is the new original sin in America. Moreover, there is no Christ the Redeemer to save the individuals burdened by the knowledge that their melanin-free DNA means that they are marked from conception by this original sin. Each of them is responsible for a never-ending cycle of guilt, remorse, and self-abnegation, with no possibility of redemption in sight.

So no, they’re not that chicken at Dartmouth; they’re that morally empty, unable to stand for anything as it relates to who and what they are — or all the great good their fore-bearers — have done for the world.  All that they can do is crouch down in a perpetual mea culpa, acceding to even the most outrageous demands in an effort to excuse their very existence.

Abortion and self-loathing blacks

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black_babyThere’s a story out of Santa Barbara today about a UC Santa Barbara professor who went berserk in a campus free-speech area when she saw a pro-Life display with graphic pictures of aborted fetuses.  She tried to lead a mob against it, grabbed a display and ran off with it, and then got into a physical altercation with a 16-year-old.  And just who was this professor?

The professor at the heart of the controversy is Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor whose area of emphasis is black cultural studies, pornography and sex work, according to her faculty webpage. She could not be reached for comment Tuesday by The College Fix.

A check at her website confirms that she’s not a white person dabbling in black cultural studies but is, instead, a black person.

So, to recap:  A black woman who’s entire intellectual life revolves about being black violently attacked an anti-abortion display.  Gawd, she must really hate herself.  And no, she doesn’t hate herself because of her lack of self-control; she clearly hates herself because she’s black.

Just to clarify what seems like a rather blithe conclusion, let me add some other facts to the mix:

The number of black babies aborted in New York in 2012 –31,328 — was greater than the number of black babies born in New York in 2012 –24,758.  Moreover, although blacks are only 25% of the New York population, 42% of all New York abortions were black babies.

Between 1994 and 2010, black Mississippi women aborted 39,000 fetuses.  Over the same period, white women aborted 14,500 fetuses.  Put another way, over a 16 year period, black women had abortions at a rate more than twice that of white women.  While blacks make up 37% of Mississippi’s population, they accounted for 72% of its abortions.

In 2011, throughout  the entire US, 7,380 blacks were homicide victims.  So yes, these posters are correct:

MostDangerousPlace1

Most dangerous place for a black

We often speak of self-loathing Jews, people such as George Soros or Noam Chomsky, who are deeply hostile to Judaism and Israel. We don’t speak often enough about self-loathing blacks. Only someone deeply conflicted about herself and her place in society would violently attack members of an organization that are working hard to save tens of thousands of black children annually from a premature death.

You know that I’m not hardcore pro-Life.  Instead, I’m a former abortion supporter who is finding it harder and harder to carve out any legitimate moral and intellectual ground to support America’s abortion culture.  People such as Professor Miller-Young are facing the cognitive dissonance of abortion, not be sitting back and reevaluating the facts and revisiting their values, but by engaging in violence so that they can avoid that kind of reevaluation.  (It is, I should add, a painful process.)

When it comes to stories told by gay activists, have we come to the point where we must verify before we trust?

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Gay-flowerThere have been a lot of stories lately about hate-crime hoaxes that gay rights advocates have perpetrated.  Just to list a few examples, there was the waitress who falsely claimed that a receipt included a scathing gay insult along with a refusal to tip; there was the radio station that doctored an invitation to make it appear parents refused to let their child socialize with a child from a same-sex parent home; there was the massive hate-crime hoax at Oberlin, which apparently was suddenly overrun by racist, homophobic, antisemites; and, most recently, there was the transgender student at a California high school who falsely alleged a hate crime.

In addition, there’s also a trend to paint every long-dead famous person as gay.  Lincoln was gay, we’re told (he shared a bed with his business partner when they traveled through the backwoods, a common practice at the time); Norman Rockwell was gay, we’re told (he painted pictures of little boys); Florence Nightingale was gay, we’re told (she never married).  There’s no proof for any of this, of course.  Just supposition and hope.

Given that many gay rights activists don’t feel they owe any fealty to the truth, I’m suspicious of the newest uncorroborated story advancing the gay rights agenda.  This one, though, isn’t a story about hate.  It’s allegedly a story about love:  Grant Rehnberg, a gay young man, claims that, shortly before dying, his 90-year-old Baptist minister grandfather, James, who had been married for 65 years, confessed that his entire life had been a lie, that he was gay, and that a friend from his youth was his true love.  Grant has now put together an art installation — and is looking for funding — celebrating his gay grandfather (and shredding the Bible he alleges that James gave him when he was a boy).

There’s no doubt that Grant’s story could be true.  Gay people have for centuries sublimated their desires to live mainstream lives.  Just last month, I linked to a post about a gay Mormon man who has made the conscious decision (with his wife’s agreement) to live a heterosexual life.  He believes that the rewards of that life exceed that transient pleasures of gay sex.

There’s also no doubt that Grant’s story could be a bald-faced lie.  Right now, these lies tend too often to be the stock in trade for gay rights advocates — and that’s a shame.  When your cohort cries “wolf” once too often, no one will believe you anymore.  The coin of your realm has been debased, making everything suspect.

Given the rush of cheap lies and dishonest speculation, why in the world should anyone believe an unverified statement about gay love or gay hate without independent proof and investigation to support those claims?  If Grant is telling the truth,  his grandfather’s life story and decisions are certainly worth examining and understanding.  If he’s telling a lie, though, he ought to be ashamed of himself for painting a false picture of a dead man.  It would therefore be interesting to hear what other friends and family members have to say about James Rehnberg’s life and love[s].

 

Is it really only Tuesday? Round-up and Open thread

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Victorian posy of pansiesFor those of us who believe in free speech, the antidote to bad speech isn’t censorship, it’s good speech. The problem for France, which is trying to censor an antisemitic, pro-Nazi “comic”, is that it has no good speech to counter the antisemitism that is breeding in France’s toxic stew of Islam and Leftism. That’s always the problem in socialist countries. They have no good to counterattack the bad — usually because they created the bad in the first place.

It was the French Left that opened the door to unlimited Islamic immigration to atone for sins in North Africa. The North African Muslims come, bringing their antisemitic culture with them, and there’s no one in France brave enough to challenge their culture or philosemitic enough to speak for the Jews.

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Lee Smith argues that Israel fails to understand the Obama narrative about the Middle East, and is therefore failing to make the winning arguments to the Obama government vis a vis Iran’s attempt to ship major supplies of Syrian weapons into Palestinian hands. He’s right. He is also right insofar as the article implies that, to the extent that Obama’s goals are now antithetical to Israel’s continued existence, there is no winning argument Israel can make to Obama.

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Must-read about why Palestinians are not American blacks living under Jim Crow.

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As the mother of a teenage girl, I find incredibly amusing the latest feminist campaign to ban the word “bossy” in relationship to girls, or at least to pretend that it’s not a derogatory word. While we’re at it, let’s just ban the word “wet” in relationship to “water,” or at least pretend it has an entirely different meaning.

Bossy is exactly what little girls and teenage girls are. Boys (both little and teenage) have their own sins, but bossiness is not one of them. It’s girls who are certain that they are right and that they have the power to order everyone else around.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that girls are bossy.  Gender-deniers notwithstanding, little girls model on their mother and, within the home, Moms are the bosses. To a young girl’s mind, this means it’s the female’s role to make and enforce rules. End of story — and changing labels will not change that reality.

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A matched set about Obama’s megalomania: From Ron Fournier (who has decided that there is no bloom left on the Obama rose), an indictment of the preening self-righteousness that leaves Obama blind to any information inconsistent with his sense of reality. And from Jeffrey Folks, another indictment of Obama’s “great man syndrome,” one that leaves him believing that he must make things happen, no matter how bad they are.

Winston Churchill thought he was special too (“We are all worms, but I believe that I am a glow-worm”), but he didn’t make the mistake of believing he was a god, or even the God. Perhaps that’s because he was raised within a religious tradition and, even if he was not devout, he knew that there was a divine presence bigger than he was. The problems begin when you have a man who believes, quote erroneously, that he really is a god (or, given the messianic language he and his followers use[d] about him, the God).

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Writing in the L.A. Times, Jonathan Turley, a left-of-center law professor again expresses concern about the way in which Obama is usurping Congress’s powers, and the way in which Congress (both Democrats and Republicans) meekly lets it happen. I put it on my Facebook, and my Leftist friends assiduously ignored it.

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HBO and SHO are increasingly trafficking in nude women, while Hollywood generally is delighting in the joys of lesbian lip locks, especially between actresses who deny being lesbian. Ed Morrissey talks about the sexual exploitation of women driving the trend. Julie Blindel, an open lesbian who comments on “lesbian chic,” adds her bit, which is that Hollywood cares little about advancing LGBTQ rights, and is infinitely more interested in catering for profit to the same male demographic that buys Penthouse. And so a culture sinks ever lower.

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Apropos low-sinking culture, I caught a millisecond of Rush today. He was talking to a 57-year-old man who is deeply depressed about America’s ability to recover from the low point she now faces (economically, national security, etc). Rush asked him if there was another time in his life when things were this bad and the man pointed to the end of the Carter presidency and beginning of the Reagan presidency. The difference, he felt, was debt, which is infinitely worse now. Rush, however, expressed an inchoate optimism that had him believing that an up-and-coming young generation will have had enough and fight back.

I disagree with Rush and side with the caller, although for a different reason than he expressed. What both the 57-year-old man and Rush ignored is the sea-change in American culture since the last really bad time in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Before the 21st century, no matter how bad things were, America had a huge, strong middle, ranging from working class to upper middle class.  This middle group was traditional: patriotic, hardworking, able to recognize external enemies, family-centric, capitalist. It was the middle class as America’s backbone.  Since then, that middle has been culturally destroyed.  The young ones, the ones upon whom Rush is relying, have no knowledge or understanding of an other, better, way to do things. This HBO demographic is incapable of either a 1950s or a 1980s social and economic comeback.

Think of it this way:  When George Orwell created Newspeak, his point was to show that, when you contract language, you contract ideas.  And without ideas, people cannot rebel against a status quo, because they are incapable of thinking of an alternative.  That contraction of ideas is precisely what has happened in the last 30 years.  Unless we can introduce ideas again, about patriotism, family, hard work, etc., nothing will change because the young generation lacks the mental landscape to envision change.

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A perfect example (from one of those benighted young people I spoke of) of “stupid is as stupid does.”

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Leftist states vote for Obama. Leftist states have the worst income inequality. Hmmm. Could it be that tax and spend policies, rather than making everyone have access to economic success, concentrate wealth amongst a favored few cronies, leaving everyone else out in the cold? It’s certainly true in California’s basket-case, Democrat-run economy, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class flees the state.

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Michelle Obama is taking her girls (and mother) on another un-frigging-believably expensive, taxpayer-funded vacation, this time to China. Even Marie Antoinette didn’t have it so good. She just got to head off to the Petite Trianon — and she still had her head cut off, a fate that (thankfully) will not await anyone in this administration, no matter how much they abuse the People’s good will.

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Yeah, we know that the IRS’s Lois Lerner is a bad girl. She’s also the face, the front-man, the scape-goat, the tip of the iceberg. It is ludicrous to believe that she was acting alone. The question remains whether her superiors, her peers, and her subordinates will also be called to account for turning the IRS, the most feared branch of the American government, into a partisan arm of the Obama administration.

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The Left lives in an alternate reality. The real reality is that the biggest spenders in American government by far, both state and local, are leftist unions. The first Republican-leaning donor doesn’t even hit the list until 17 donors down.

The Leftist reality is that the libertarian Kochs, who rank 59th on the donor list and who share many of the Left’s favorite liberal shibboleths (e.g., legalized pot), are the evil geniuses who control American government and they must be destroyed. That’s why the New York Times is applauding Harry Reid’s deeply disturbing attacks against the Kochs.

That a man with his hands near the levers of American power would deliberately target two individuals and try to destroy them has . . . yes, I’m going to say it . . . a Nazi feel to it. This is revolting. It’s not even McCarthy-esque. Sen. McCarthy at least went through the motions of having hearings, creating a simulacrum of Due Process.

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Speaking of unhinged from reality, here’s a good cartoon at Director Blue showing yet two more examples of the disconnect.

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All I can say is that, if this flight story happened with a modern Brit in the cockpit, the squeals coming out over the intercom would have drowned out the passengers’ cries.

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The Connecticut government is coming for its citizens’ guns. There’s a line being drawn here. Just as Obama is obliterating the line between his executive limitations and Congress’s role, Connecticut is seeing what it can get away with in terms of eviscerating the Second Amendment. I hope the state backs down, for this will not end well otherwise.

If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong Open Thread

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Thought-Bubble-White-Board_8296556

Another day, another apology. The fact is that the last day and a half have been Murphy’s Law every step of the way. Yesterday morning started out bad and then went downhill. Nothing earth-shattering — we’re all alive and in one piece, the house didn’t burn down, and no wars have started. It was just a series of domestic problems that escalated, along with new problems cropping up constantly. By the time I got the last phone call with inconvenient and expensive bad news, I was numb, and probably surprised the caller by showing almost no emotional response at all. More of the same today, of course.

However, to the extent bad things happen in threes, I’ve had my three bad things, and then cubed them, for another three. I hope I’m done now. I’m finally in front of my computer, reading and thinking, which is always the best antidote to any despair or anxiety that seeks to envelope me. All will be well.

So, check back in about an hour, and see if anything interesting has happened here. Or, ever better, leave a comment at this Open Thread and you will be the interesting thing that happens.

And for a little perspective, it’s always been bad (including California droughts and protests against the 1%):

Found it on Facebook: The few, the proud, the grammatical

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The few, the proud, the grammatical

And while I’m here, let me just throw in a soupcon of data: U.S. Military more educated than the population it serves.

Moreover, considering that college leeches out common sense and inserts PC nonsense, along with a substantial dollop of extended adolescence helplessness, I’d be inclined to believe that enlistees who choose the military over college come out of their experience more competent, more knowledgeable, more functional, more useful, and better citizens than the average Ivy League college grad.

Tyranny and the 5th Amendment

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To the extent this implies that the government itself is hiding behind the Bill of Rights, this poster isn’t quite right. An individual in the government, rather than the government itself, is pleading the 5th. Just because one works for the government doesn’t mean one gives up ones rights as a citizen.

Nevertheless, I liked the poster because it’s a reminder that we currently have an exceptionally corrupt administration in Washington. Should we be able to switch to a Republican administration, Lerner will be followed by a long line of 5th pleaders:

Tyranny and the 5th

Hat tip: Caped Crusader

Watcher’s Council winners for March 7, 2014

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Watcher's Council logoAnd the winners at the Watcher’s Council are….

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

A response to Judith Levy’s comment about a “religion versus science” post I wrote

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Last week, I wrote about an image I saw in Facebook, which sought to disparage religion by showing that religion tears people down, while science builds them up:

Facebook poster saying religion demeans people

My response was to mock up an alternative poster that the little girl could have held up, one that shows that religion elevates the individual while pure science has no regard for the individual:
Religion versus Science
Somehow that post came across the radar of Judith Levy, who blogs at Ricochet. Judith believes that I used the wrong tactics in the battle against anti-religious bias:

The incredibly depressing photograph to the right has been flying all over the interwebs recently. As you can see, a cute little girl is being used as a prop to bash religion and tout science (which, of course, are assumed to be mutually exclusive).

I was struck by the response to this photo on a blog called Bookwormroom.com, the subhead of which claims that “conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions”.

At this point, Levy offers a few quotations from my poster, the one that has religion acknowledging life’s creation from the moment of conception, versus the scientific view that we are a bag of chemicals. She then wraps up by concluding that I offered the argument to defend religion:

Now, I understand the anguish of religious Christians when they see offensive tripe like the above photo disseminated, especially with the big steaming side of self-righteousness that always accompanies it. (One yearns to give the people zipping it out to all their Facebook friends a good patsch to wipe away the smirk.) Still, responding by announcing that religion = pro-life seems counterproductive: it reduces the issue down to pro-life vs. pro-choice and shuts the conversation down immediately. (It also discounts the reality of religious believers who are also pro-choice, but that’s a secondary issue here.)

What has always amazed me about the God vs. Science line of thinking on the left is how unimaginative it is. Why not attack on that line instead? Why not force a leftist to explain why the math behind the movement of the spheres disproves the existence of a creator? Put them on the defensive, don’t go into your own defensive crouch. A person who puts a sign like this in his own daughter’s hands is not going to hear a word you say if you open with a pro-life argument. That’s for later, no?

Aside from finding it amusing that Levy thinks that I, a vaguely theistic Jew, am a “religious Christian,” I think it’s worth clarifying what I was setting out to do.  Levy apparently believes that I somehow abandoned my commitment to facts by engaging in pro-Life propaganda, and others may also have misunderstood what I set out to do.

Contrary to Levy’s assumption about my goal in writing that post, I was not attempting to prove religion. Why not?  Because I don’t see disproving religion as the central point of the original photograph.  Look carefully at the poster.  It can be summed up as follows:  “According to religion I am [all sorts of negative things]” versus “according to science I am all sorts of [wonderful].”  The point that child’s parent is trying to make isn’t that God is dead, but that religious practices and people devalue humans beings, while pure science, especially as practiced on the Left, elevates them.

You don’t have to take my word for it.  Go back and read the poster carefully.  It doesn’t challenge religion at all. There is not a single word in there that can be interpreted to mean “There is no God.” Instead, it says only that those who believe in God do not value human life, while those who believe in science do. That was the central canard I was attacking.

Within the context of the poster’s implicit argument, every statement I made was a factually true challenge to the poster.  I wasn’t arguing religious doctrine or ultimate scientific fact.  Instead, I took on the poster writer’s world, in which religious people think humans are worthless, evil and valueless, and demonstrated that, in the real world — and the world of those facts I cherish — America’s religious Christians (as opposed to those Leftist’s who, like the Devil, can quote scripture) have a fanatic belief in each individual’s value. To that end, I focus closely on the way in which America’s religious class practices its religion.

On the flip side, I wasn’t challenging whether science is right or wrong. (Although I will say here that, to the extent science is based on data and conclusions that can be drawn from that data, it’s rather silly to think that hard, real science deals in value-laden terms as “beautiful,” “full of wonder” and “smart.”)  Instead, I pointed out, entirely accurately, that it’s the nature of science to reduce life to the lowest common denominator — a collection of chemicals.  Moreover, it’s the “scientific” Left that has taken this definition and concluded, in true Orwellian fashion, that not all lives are equally valuable.

In sum, Levy seems to believe that I failed to counter the original photo because I didn’t engage in a theological argument about God’s existence.  And she’s right, I didn’t and nor would I do it differently if I could re-write the post.  To the extent I believe that the original photo intended to say that religion and God place different values on human lives, I cut through the conclusory language in the original photo and replaced those value-laden terms with hard facts about the way in which religious people differ in their approach from those who elevate science to a religion when it comes to determining each individual’s true worth.

My post on PJ Lifestyle: 8 Lessons I’ve Learned By Self-Publishing 3 Kindle E-books

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Book publishing back in the dayI have a new post up at PJ Lifestyle:

When I was in my 20s and 30s, my dream was to publish the Great American Junk Novel. I had no illusions about my ability (or, rather, inability) to write something profound, but I truly believed I could write a Bridges of Madison County or Da Vinci Code. I was wrong. After innumerable efforts, I gave up. I have no imagination, no sense of character, and I’m incapable of writing dialog.

Thanks to the blogosphere, however, I discovered in my 40s that, while I’m not and never will be a novelist, I am an essayist. Over the past decade, I’ve written over 11,000 essays, which easily qualifies me for “expert” status. My blog has become a vast repository of my thoughts on just about everything: politics (mostly politics), parenting, education, Hollywood, social issues, national security, travel — you name it, and I’ve probably written about it.

Considering how many hours I’ve spent at the keyboard, I’ve always hoped that I could monetize my blog. Unfortunately, while I’ve got a solid, and very dear to me, following of readers who genuinely like the way I think and write, I’ve never leveraged my way into the Big Time amongst conservative bloggers. Not being in the Big Time means that any monetization I’ve done has earned me just enough money to buy a few books, not to make a mortgage payment or two.

A few years ago, it occurred to me that I might be able to make some money if I took my writings to a new readership. That’s how I decided to try my hand at self-publishing. I saw it all clearly:  I would assemble my essays, package them attractively, upload them at Kindle Direct Publishing, and sell them for a profit on Amazon. It seemed so easy….

Sadly, it wasn’t easy, at least not the first time around. That didn’t deter me from publishing a second e-book and, just recently, a third. Each book has been easier than the one before, so I’d like to share with you some lessons I’ve learned, many of which I learned the hard way.

Read the rest here.

For those unfamiliar with my writing, the three books are:

The Bookworm Turns: A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land

Easy Ways To Teach Kids Hard Things : The fun way to teach your children important life principles

The Bookworm Returns : Life in Obama’s America

AP engages in the most despicable kind of media manipulation

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A few years ago, a graphic went around that perfectly illustrated the way in which photographs can be used, not only to capture the moment, but to distort the moment:

Media Manipulation

That graphic popped into my head the moment I read a story about a really evil act by the hard-Left Associated Press:

Associated Press photo fraud of Trail Life

“I was horrified,” said John Stemberger, chairman of the board of Trail Life USA, a new, rapidly-growing scouting organization that doesn’t allow openly gay members.

Stemberger was referring to an Associated Press photograph that accompanied an in-depth story about Trail Life. The image showed a group of young boys gathered in a circle with their hands raised at an unusual angle. The AP’s original caption on the photo said they were reciting the organization’s “creed” during a meeting in North Richland Hills, Texas.

[snip]

The photograph ran last Sunday in newspapers across the nation and generated hundreds of angry emails and some threatening telephone calls to Trail Life headquarters.

But it turns out that the boys were not saluting Hitler and contrary to the first Associated Press caption, they were not reciting a creed. The boys were singing “Taps,” a longtime Boy Scout tradition that the Texas Trail USA troop had adapted as their own.

The boys had gathered in a circle with their hands raised straight into the air. They gradually lowered their hands as they sang the song. It concludes with their hands flush against their side.

What’s even more despicable is that the AP, having published this gross calumny, initially refused to correct it:

But what really infuriated Stemberger was the Associated Press’ initial reluctance to remove the photograph and correct the caption. The Trail Life leader provided me with email correspondence he had with Nomaan Merchant, the writer of the story.

Eventually, the AP did correct the photo, and remove it from its archives, and Merchant (who was not responsible for the photo) apologized, but the whole thing smells bad — that the AP did that in the first place and that the AP took so long to correct its libel by implication that the implied message from the photograph took on a life of its own. As Churchill (or Mark Twain, or someone else entirely) said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” a situation made worse when a major media outlet promulgates the lie onto the internet and then takes its own sweet time correcting it.

Per an email I received, veterans are organizing to clip the wings of an anti-military Commander In Chief

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Marines dismounting from an amphibious assault vehicleI cannot vouch for the following email’s veracity. That is, I do not know whether it’s true that there’s rising distress in the military about the Obama administration or whether it’s true that troops and veterans are beginning to share political information amongst themselves directed at clipping Obama’s wings in 2014. A lot of the information about ROEs sounds old, but the reference to the 2014 election indicates that this is a current email. All I can say is that I got this and found it interesting enough to pass along:

You may not be a veteran but you might know someone who is to pass this on to.

VET’S BACKLASH AGAINST OBAMA, A movement has been started by our armed forces, to get out the vote in 2014. They are organizing themselves, but this can be done by all of us. The President, the Commander in Chief, has made the Rules of Engagement (ROE) so difficult, that our troops are often killed before they can even get permission to fight. Nothing has been done to stop our troops from being murdered by Afghanis they are training, either. Now, the President wants the US to sign on to the UNs International Criminal Court (ICC), which would allow the UNs ICC to arrest and try US troops for War Crimes, without the legal protections guaranteed under US Law, and from which there is no appeal. The President, with his Democratic control of the Senate, has nearly all the power. If the Non-Establishment can take back the Senate in 2014, our troops can once again be protected from unnecessary danger. Please consider this, and send it on to your mailing lists. Thank You and Semper Fi,

Interestingly enough, when GWB was president you heard about the military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan almost daily. With Obama in the White House, the mainstream media has been strangely quiet. More than 1,000 American soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan in the last 27 months. This is more than the combined total of the nine years before. Thirty have died in August. During the last month, over 50 additional NATO and US servicemen have been murdered, inside jobs by those who are hired to be a force for good in Afghanistan .

The commander in chief is AWOL. Not a peep, although he ordered the White House flag flown at half-staff for the Sikhs that were killed. There is a deep disgust, a fury, growing in the ranks of the military against the indifferent incompetence of this president.

It has taken on a dangerous tone. No one knows what to do about him, but the anger runs deep as the deaths continue with no strategic end in sight to the idiocy of this war. Obama has had 4 years to end this futile insanity, during which time he has vacationed, golfed, campaigned, and generally ignored the plight of our men and women in uniform. But, there is now a movement afoot in the armed services to launch a massive get out the vote drive against this president. Not just current active duty types, but the National Guard, Reserves, the retired, and all other prior service members. This is no small special interest group, but many millions of veterans who can have an enormous impact on the outcome of the November election if they all respond.

The million military retirees in Florida alone could mean an overwhelming victory in that state if they all show up at the polls. It might not keep another one hundred U.S. troops from dying between now and November, but a turn out to vote by the military against this heart breaking lack of leadership can make a powerful statement that hastens a change to the indifference of this shallow little man who just lets our soldiers die.

(Thanks to Caped Crusader)