Bookworm Room

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

Welcome to Arkansas!

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While driving through Arkansas I had a run-in with law enforcement . . . which showcased professionalism and the benefits of mutual respect.

Welcome to ArkansasI’ve been driving cross-country across the southern U.S. and it’s been a lovely trip. For the past many years, barring one summer trip to Civil War battlefields, my trips have been to Europe and Southeast Asia. They’ve been great trips and I’ve seen wonderful things. I don’t regret those travels at all.

Nevertheless, I really enjoy traveling in my own country. I like how vast America is. I like how friendly Americans are. I like American architecture, from the cheesiness of the roadside attractions to the charm of classic American houses, schools, and churches. I like the comfort of an American fast food place where I can get a cheap, reliable meal and a clean bathroom. I like that, with the chain motels, I can always find a clean room, in towns big and small. (Currently, Best Western is my favorite, just as it was when I was a child in the 1960s and early 1970s as a child traveling with my family.)

But this post is about entering Arkansas, for no other reason than that I want to tell the story. Within twenty miles of entering the state, I saw flashing lights in my rear view mirror, and it was clear that the Arkansas highway patrol officer wanted me to pull over. I did so responsibly and carefully and kept my hands on the steering wheel because I’ve been taught well.

[Read more…]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveils the “Green Leap Forward.”

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Green Leap ForwardToday’s new Leftists like to promise us Swedish style socialism. They make these promises ignoring the fact that Sweden long-ago stopped socialism and became a market-based economy although one with a large social welfare infrastructure. They also like to ignore the fact that, as Sweden has morphed from a small, homogeneous country into a larger country flooded with immigrants, the social welfare infrastructure is struggling.

Alternatively, today’s new Leftists like to promise us European style socialism. They make these promises ignoring the fact that Europeans managed to have this socialism because, for decades, America paid all their defense costs. In other words, it wasn’t socialized medicine, it was American medicine. They also ignore the fact that the medical care provided gave people access to doctors, but not access to actual health care. As Scott Atlas long ago explained, you have to look behind the praise and rankings to the actual outcomes. And of course, the new Leftists ignore the fact that, as American monies dried up and immigrants changed the social structure in European countries, all that nice welfare became all flipsy-wopsy.

To sum things up, the new Leftist’s first tier big lie is that the Europeans actually had a loving, all-supporting, high-functioning soft true socialism, which they did not. Alexandria-Ocasio’s Cortez’s Green New Deal, however, exposes the really big lie, which is that the new Leftists didn’t intend to go full communist. As her plan, which most of the front-running Democrat primary lemmings have endorsed, is full-bore communism.

If you haven’t seen the amazing FAQ Cortez prepared and then hid, you have to read it. It demands a mind-boggling takeover of the entire economy using technology that doesn’t exist and almost certainly cannot exist. Perhaps it’s the imaginary technology that led Ocasio-Cortez to propose a ten year time-line, rather than the standard communist Five Year Plan. It’s easier to kill all the farmers and demand that peasants produce impossible farm output than it is to retrofit every building in America, turn all cars electric (never mind the fossil fuel needed to make those cars run), and regulate car farts. The first just involves killing people; the second, as I said, requires actual magic.

I have derived great pleasure during my travels listening to podcasts of people having a laugh at Ocasio-Cortez’s mad plans. The retreat from reality is perfectly emblematic of the direction in which the entire Democrat Party is headed.

What I haven’t seen many people speak about is the full horror of the command and control economy Ocasio-Cortez envisions. Her plans are silly, but the real plan is the complete takeover of the American economy. This isn’t the soft corporate crony fascism the Lefties have previously been pushing (plans remarkably similar to both German and Italian economic plans in the late 20s and early 1930s). This is full-out communism. It is a Green Leap Forward —- and Mao would be proud.

Even the funny line about jobs for everyone, including those who don’t want to work was scarily ambiguous. It really wasn’t clear if she was promising free money for slackers or forced conscription for slackers. Either is a bad idea but the second interpretation has the reek of gulags in America.

The Dems are essentially doing Mao backwards. He started with the Great Leap Forward, which saw 50-75 million deaths, and then, when the population was sufficiently softened up, he went for the murderous Cultural Revolution. That entailed intellectual purges, thought crimes, forced confessions, and re-education camps —- all of which the Democrats have already implemented at institutions across America.

Hard to blog well on an iPhone but I’m just trying to say that, while Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is being deservedly ridiculed, we would do well to be afraid that Kamala Harris, who is thought to be the front runner, thinks this coercive, true communist Green Leap Forward is a great idea.

(A friend commented that this was probably a revamp of someone’s high school paper . . . which got an A. In academia, you don’t have to defend ideas, you just advance the politically correct ideas, no matter how ludicrous, and happiness ensues.)

Heading off for a road trip; not a lot to say

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Open Thread bubbleI’m heading off on a road trip tomorrow, so I spent all day getting ready. Today’s blog silence, though, isn’t just because I didn’t have time to write (which I didn’t). It’s also because I don’t have anything particular to say. Even now, after a day spent listening to podcasts while I worked and ruminating about issues, I have only a few brief points to make.

As I already wrote yesterday, I loved Trump’s speech. It remains to be seen whether it was any kind of game changer. It had an enjoyable bread and circuses quality, with Trump happily giving voice to core conservative thoughts, and with the Democrat party faithful sitting stone-faced when hearing that the interest groups they think they own are thriving under the Trump administration. Still, as I said, bread and circuses aren’t game changers on their own.

I’m also enjoying the spectacle in Virginia, with the state’s Democrat Party leaders either racists or sexual predators. Incidentally, I find it hard to get my knickers in a twist about two men who, back in the 80s, when blackface was still semi-acceptable (if you weren’t in Berkeley, which had already progressed beyond that), did blackface.

As you all know, I believe in remorse, repentance, and redemption. I happen to think that the Democrat Party is still a race obsessed party that thinks very poorly of blacks, and that promotes policies that actively harm blacks, but the reality is that it’s the Democrat Party has the imprimatur of the race hustlers (Jackson, Sharpton, Coates, etc.), and these two Virginia politicians have done their obeisance over the years.

Regarding the sexual assault, which seems to have been brutal, extremely non-consensual, and highly illegal . . . that’s never forgivable, unless of course the sexual predator is a Democrat.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to blog in the next couple of days. Please enjoy this as an open thread if I don’t. And please don’t forget me while I’m gone….

Trump’s State of the Union speech open thread

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The State of the Union speech was a triumph of principle over the ugliest and most divisive politics. I loved it and am very proud of President Trump.

Donald Trump State of the Union speechI watched the State of the Union speech from beginning to end and thought it was marvelous. It was also a remarkably courageous speech. Despite all the attacks against him, Trump has not only not retreated from his principles, he’s doubled down, whether on the Wall, abortion (and wasn’t that a beautiful moment as Democrats stood strong for infanticide?), Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the evil that is North Korea, and NO SOCIALISM.

One of the best things about the speech was the fact that the state of the union is, as Trump, said “strong.” As he reeled off numbers about record low unemployment for all demographics, about trade successes, about military strength, about getting other NATO members to cough up money, etc., the Democrats were paralyzed. Because they couldn’t applaud Trump they also barred themselves from applauding Americans and American success. I especially enjoyed the resting bitch faces of the Democrat women in white who got enthusiastic only when they could applaud themselves.

Trump’s guests were also well chosen. Having a Dachau survivor and a Dachau liberator seated side-by-side was so moving. And the police officer who almost died at the Tree of Life synagogue. . . . And the little girl who survived cancer. . . . And the Hispanic border agent. . . . And Buzz Aldrin. . . . It was all good. Really good.

Stacey Abrams, a failed political candidate, sounded like the person at the end of the parade tasked with cleaning up the elephant poop. Trying to be upbeat but still buried in fecal matter.

I want this to be an open thread for you, so I’ll just say one more thing: America will never be a socialist nation! From Donald’s lips to God’s ears….


De-toxify America by pulling federal funds out of higher education

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The best way to get America back on track is to elect a strong conservative federal government in 2020 and withdraw all federal money from higher education.

Higher Education Academia College Race university educationWould any conservative quarrel with me about the fact that the worst ideas at work in America today were first incubated in academia before integrating themselves into the population at large? Just the other day I noted the straight line between the ethical framework for infanticide as developed in academia and Gov. Ralph Northam’s advocacy for infanticide. (And if you want an insight into the moral inversion that is 21st century American Leftism, think about the fact that, when Leftists realized that ordinary Americans were appalled by Northam’s honesty, the only way they could get their own party to drive him out of office was to accuse him of racism back in 1984.)

Infanticide is only the most recent academic idea to infect the public sphere. The most globally dangerous, of course, is the love affair with socialism. Leftists do not care that socialism, when put into practice, was responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, as well as decades of poverty and terror for billions in that same benighted century. They’re in love with the idea (“It’s so morally pure!”) and to hell with the reality (“It’s always been done wrong, you know.”).

As I remarked in an older post, the socialist infection was placed in academia as early as WWII and has festered there ever since. Since WWII, this ideological plague has given birth to, or incubated, the following pernicious ideas (and this is an incomplete list, off the top of my head):

  • social justice,
  • multiculturalism,
  • political correctness,
  • trigger warnings,
  • virtue signaling,
  • queer studies,
  • womyn’s studies,
  • gender studies,
  • rampant antisemitism,
  • cultural appropriation,
  • moral relativism,
  • anti-Americanism,
  • transgenderism,
  • gender fluidity,
  • victim status,
  • rape culture,
  • toxic masculinity,
  • toxic whiteness,
  • anthropogenic climate change,
  • allegedly violent Islamophobia,
  • aggressive atheism (usually anti-Christian)

That, as I said, is an incomplete list. I know you all can come up with other examples of Leftist academic madness. [Read more…]

Northam: Watching the abortion of a political career

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Because VA Gov. Northam is a Dem, it’s not clear if his career is dead. What is clear is that he’s fodder for funny, pointed, astute conservative tweets.

Ralph NorthamNow that the media has confirmed that the 1984 yearbook page showing Ralph Northam either in blackface or a KKK hood is real, the tweets are rolling in. My take is that Northam came of age in a non-woke time, when that conduct was not considered too outré. Nevertheless, considering that Northam’s current wokeness has seen him become the poster boy for a procedure that often kills more blacks in utero than are born in some black communities, that picture is nothing if not prescient.

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A Comic Interlude: The Babylon Bee

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The finest satire site on the web is The Babylon Bee.

While we wait for Bookworm to finish her legal research and turn her attention back to providing insightful and thought provoking posts on this blog . . . how about a laugh or two.  I thought comedy dead with the rise of the proggie left and their countless victim-centric shibboleths.  Fortunately, there is a wonderful  site, the Babylon Bee, that you really should visit several times a week.  It is a Christian based satire site that pokes clean fun at everyone and everything, very much including Christians.  I’m tempted to say that the writers at that site have a wicked sense of humor, but somehow, that does not feel appropriate.  Some examples:

Chick-Fil-A Commits To Using 100% Born-Again Chickens
January 31st, 2019

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Legal research Friday open thread

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Open Thread bubbleSorry for the silence yesterday, but it was a very busy day. This morning, I have a legal research problem, which has a delightful irony that makes me happy to do it.

My client, as is the case for just about everyone in my world, is a Leftist who wanted Hillary. (He’s also a seriously nice person as a client: thoughtful, a good communicator, intelligent, and swift to pay his bills.) In addition to being a Leftist, my client is a good businessman. That’s why he’s asking me to research a Trump era deregulation that’s very good for his business.

Because this is a professional matter, when I finish my research (and I already know the direction in which it’s heading) I won’t rub in his face the fact that Trump’s deregulation, which will save vast sums of money and make life easier, is not random but is part of an ideological tilt to smaller government. I’m hoping that this man’s intelligence and good will lead him to that conclusion on his own.

Anyway, I hope to be back blogging later today, but until then, please enjoy this post as an open thread.

Academia: the incubator for total abortion and all other bad ideas

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Academia — that is, the world of colleges and universities — is the incubator for all of the worst ideas in America, with abortion as the latest example.

Scott Adams abortion AcademiaI’ll start with a three-part time-line, and then get to my point:

1. 1993, Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, a college text-book by Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne:

n Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics – not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant – disabled or not – has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.

The difference between killing disabled and normal infants lies not in any supposed right to life that the latter has and the former lacks, but in other considerations about killing. Most obviously there is the difference that often exists in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents. They have, nowadays, often planned for the child. The mother has carried it for nine months. From birth, a natural affection begins to bind the parents to it. So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents.

It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities vary, of course. Some are trivial and have little effect on the child or its parents; but others turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents, and any other children they may have.

Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against killing it. Some parents want even the most gravely disabled infant to live as long as possible, and this desire would then be a reason against killing the infant. But what if this is not the case? in the discussion that follows I shall assume that the parents do not want the disabled child to live. I shall also assume that the disability is so serious that – again in contrast to the situation of an unwanted but normal child today – there are no other couples keen to adopt the infant. This is a realistic assumption even in a society in which there is a long waiting- list of couples wishing to adopt normal babies. It is true that from time to time cases of infants who are severely disabled and are being allowed to die have reached the courts in a glare of publicity, and this has led to couples offering to adopt the child. Unfortunately such offers are the product of the highly publicised dramatic life-and-death situation, and do not extend to the less publicised but far more cormnon situations in which parents feel themselves unable to look after a severely disabled child, and the child then languishes in an institution.

Infants are sentient beings who are neither rational nor self- conscious. So if we turn to consider the infants in themselves, independently of the attitudes of their parents, since their species is not relevant to their moral status, the principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here too. As we saw, the most plausible arguments for attributing a right to life to a being apply only if there is some awareness of oneself as a being existing over time, or as a continuing mental self. Nor can respect for autonomy apply where there is no capacity for autonomy. The remaining principles identified in Chapter 4 are utilitarian. Hence the quality of life that the infant can be expected to have is important.

2. 2013, Planned Parenthood lobbyist Alisa Lapolt Snow, testifying before the Florida House:

REP. JIM BOYD: So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?

SNOW: We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.

REP. DANIEL DAVIS: What happens in a situation where a baby is alive, breathing on a table, moving. What do your physicians do at that point?

SNOW: I do not have that information. I am not a physician, I am not an abortion provider. So I do not have that information.

I can’t find biographical information on Snow, but I’m willing to bet she’s a college graduate and, judging by her look in the video, probably post 1985.

3. January 30, 2019, Ralph Northam (Dem), Governor of Virginia, educated at the Virginia Military Institute and Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he got an M.D. and after which he practiced as a pediatrician:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

AND NOW TO MY POINT: Whatever starts in academia does not stay in academia. Academia is where: [Read more…]

Lesbians and transgender activists: a growing schism based in reality not insanity

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Lesbians are finally figuring out that men who claim to be women are in fact inherently hostile to real women, whether those women are straight or lesbian.

Lesbians Transgender JennerFor the past twenty, maybe even thirty, years, I have been telling the following absolutely true story:

My sister has a friend — we’ll call her Abby Doe — who, while not exactly estranged from her parents, certainly wasn’t close to them. Some time after Abby’s mother died, she was in her home town, so she decided to visit her father.

When Abby arrived at the apartment building in which he lived, she was confused to see that the nameplate on the apartment’s front door bell, rather than saying “John Doe,” said “Jane Doe.” Still, this was the apartment in which her parents had lived and it was the same last name, so Abby rang the bell.

To Abby’s surprise, her father answered the door in full drag, complete with wig, make-up, nice dress, and platform shoes. He explained to her that he had always been a transvestite, something that he and his wife had kept secret from Abby.

Once his wife died, though, Abby’s father had started dressing in women’s clothes full-time. By doing so, he came to realize that he wasn’t a man at all. Instead, he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. After living with this concept for a while, Abby’s father had decided to take make it official: he was going to take hormones and have surgery. His first step was to change his name, hence the door bell information.

Abby is an open-minded woman so she considered her father’s lifestyle choice more amusing than shocking. Also, as I said, while she wasn’t estranged from her parents, she wasn’t close to them, so her father’s decision had no impact on her.

About a year later, a year during which she never spoke with her father, Abby once again found herself in her home town. Yet again, surprises awaited her.

Now, the door bell name tag had reverted to “John Doe,” rather than “Jane Doe.” Moreover, when Abby’s father answered the door, he was dressed in traditional male attire, which meant no make-up, no wig, no dress, and no fabulous shoes.

“What’s going on, Dad?” Abby asked.

“It’s like this,” her father answered. “Even though I know I’m a woman, I’m still sexually attracted to women. That means I’m a lesbian. And I’ve learned that I have much more success as a lesbian if I look like a man.”

Again, the above is a true story that happened 20-30 years ago. The following is also true and comes from today’s news (and please note the language I emphasized): [Read more…]

Anti-Semitism in the Democrat party: how we got here *UPDATED*

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Anti-Semitism in the Democrat party represents a pragmatic confluence of socialism, African-American anti-Semitism, and Islamic anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism Democrat PartyMy sister, who is fairly apolitical, asked me why the Democrat Party is becoming openly anti-Semitic. I’ll give you the same primer I gave her:

Antisemitism is baked into the socialist cake because (a) Karl Marx, who come from a family of converts, was a self-loathing Jew and (b) Marx’s writings permanently connected Jews with the capitalism that socialism seeks to overthrow. It did not matter to him that the vast majority of the world’s Jews were not capitalists. There were visible Jewish capitalists and that was sufficient.

Antisemitism is also baked into the socialist cake because socialism is all about collectivism, not about the individual. The Bible, however, is about individualism: Each human is important because each is made in God’s image. That viewpoint is the antithesis of collectivism. That’s another reason to hate both Jews, who are the people of the book and started the whole Bible thing, as well as to hate Christians.

The Democrat party started as a racist party. It has always been about race. No matter the political winds, it obsesses about race. It just substitutes different races at different times for liking and loathing.

The Democrat party, first under Wilson and then with increasing enthusiasm under FDR, became a socialist party. Initially, though, it was a soft socialism, one that did not affect the ordinary voter’s deep love for America. This was a soft socialism that promised, not to destroy America, but to speed the working classes’ assimilation into the American dream.

The Democrat party learned to “love” Jews in during the 20th century because Jews associated the Democrats with (a) beating the genocidal Nazis and (b) recognizing the state of Israel. In the 20th century, this Jewish fealty still mattered to Democrat victories in key states.

Jewish allegiance to the Democrat Party became locked in from the 1960s forward because Jews almost always go on to higher education. As we know, colleges and universities since the 1960s have been staffed almost entirely by Democrats at both the administrative and faculty levels. Moreover, these colleges and universities have become petri dishes for increasingly radical socialism, always under the umbrella of the Democrat party. As a result, Jews will vote for Democrats even if the Democrats go full bore national socialism and march them into the gas chambers. For a smart people, Jews are appallingly stupid. [Read more…]

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2019

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What is it that we are remembering on Holocaust Remembrance Day?  Is is just a day of mourning, or is it a warning as well?

Holocaust RemembranceI am sure there is not a one of us unaware of slaughter of the seven million innocent Jews and several million other undesirables by the Nazis as part of their Final Solution.  But few of us are ever forced beyond the superficial knowledge of those facts.

Ms. BWR is one step removed the Holocaust and can tell the stories of her father who escaped it, other of her family and her parent’s friends who survived, and others of the same ilk who did not survive it.  Her “remembrance” on this day is without doubt exponentially different from mine and most other people, who only read of the Holocaust in school, seeing the occasional anodyne picture of the horrors.  We know intellectually that what happened was evil, but not emotionally — not viscerally.

And unfortunately, without something to trigger the visceral emotional response of horror to what happened, it is hard to get to the other purpose, I think, of Holocaust Remembrance Day and that is to recognize the danger of evil and the danger of governments with enough power to effectuate that evil on a grand scale, leaving mountains of bodies in their wake.

Holocaust Remembrance Day focuses on that evil in relation to the Jews, perhaps the most persecuted people in history.  For much of our history, that is because the Jews made the perfect scapegoats in largely tribal societies — they were a very insular minority that refused to bow down and eschew their religion regardless of the pressure placed upon them.  Can anyone doubt that scapegoating such people and using that as justification to carry out murderous pogroms against them was evil.  In a sense, Holocaust Remembrance Day should have us contemplating our historic treatment of the Jews, for Hitler’s Final Solution was no or more less evil than the Jew hatred and bloody slaughters of old.  Rather the Final Solution was the natural culmination of it all,  a horror that Hitler was able to effectuate on an industrial scale simply because of the power his government had accumulated, his disarming of the Jews, and the technology of his era.

Certainly one of the things we should recognize on Holocaust Remembrance Day is that the danger for Jews to suffer yet another Holocaust is well imaginable in our lifetimes.  Murderous Jew hatred could not be more alive and well amongst many in the Muslim world.  Muslim triumphalists want to see all non-Muslim faiths wiped out, but the Jews are and have always been first on their list.  The Muslims simply have never had the power to make it happen — yet.  Does anyone doubt the truth of the rather dark joke going around, that if you take away all of the guns from all of Muslims in the Middle East, you would see no more war there, but take the guns away from all of the Jews and you would see no more Israel there.

And I think there is a secondary lesson from Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is to remember the near certain danger of allowing any government to accumulate so much power that they can disarm the populace and, once disarmed, scapegoat and murder whatever pockets of them are necessary to advance the government’s agenda.  We’ve seen variants on that throughout the 20th century, where the rise of socialism ended in the mass murder of nearly a hundred million innocents.  We see it still today in places like Venezuela and Cuba, two of socialism’s last failed vestiges.

But now to come full circle.  As I wrote above, without something to trigger the visceral horror of what happened with the Holocaust, it is hard for one to fully appreciate the warnings that are part and parcel Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I’ve been fortunate enough — or perhaps unfortunate enough, depending on how you look at it — to have had an experience that triggered the visceral horror.

Many years ago, I visited the site of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.  It was one of the most memorable and shocking experiences of my life.  On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I include a post I wrote about that visit with minor edits:   [Read more…]