Bookworm Room

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

Immigration Open Thread

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Immigration Immigration Illegal Alien Children

Children detained under Barack Obama, 2014 (Credit: Breitbart Texas)

I am not ignoring you, dear friends. It’s just that I’m in the midst of a perfect storm: both kids home, work from clients, and planning for a trip. I’ve been going from dawn to dusk, making only small inroads in my to-do list — which means blogging (sadly) becomes a low priority.

I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, but will try blogging whenever I get the internet. I’ve also asked a few friends to guest blog, but they are busy people, so I make no promises on their behalf.

In the meantime, because immigration is a hot issue again, please consider this an open thread. I won’t be able to police the comments, but I do trust that, no matter how strenuous your disagreements, you’ll all debate in a polite and civilized fashion, without obscenities, threats, or insults. After all, I only get the highest caliber of people here, so high level behavior should be as easy as breathing.

My views on the children kerfuffle haven’t changed: This is (a) intended to divert attention from Trump’s success with economics and foreign policy; (b) to weaken his presidency; and (c) to create an open border policy. I’ve been saying for at least a decade that the Left likes to use children as the thin edge of the wedge. Of course, they ignore the children hurt by their policies: the ones killed by illegal immigrants; the ones whose parents are killed by illegal immigrants; and the ones whose families are less well off because illegal immigrants skew the economy, especially amongst poor people.

This hysteria also ignores the fact that, when people are arrested, they are always separated from their children. There are a few choices: incarcerate the children with the parents, which is incredibly dangerous for the children; throw the children on the street, which we stopped doing in Victorian times; put them in foster homes as we do for children whose parents are arrested for domestic crimes; or (and this is the Democrats’ dream) simply release into America all illegal aliens who have children attached to their side, something that destroys our border and that is an invitation to child trafficking.

Let’s also note the number of children of active duty military (and reserve military) who find themselves without their parents for long, long stretches of time.

Comedians : they don’t offend me; they just don’t make me laugh

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SJWs flex their power by being “offended” when they hear comedians. I’m seldom offended by the content, but I’m always offended by the lack of humor.

Comedians The Beverly Hillbillies Free SpeechLast night, I had some down time (a short commodity today) and I watched a movie that came out in 2015, but is still quite pertinent. It’s called Can We Take A Joke?, and focuses on the fact that audiences today, especially on college campuses, object to comedians on the ground that the comedians offend their delicate sensibilities. The movie, which interviews comics such as Adam Carolla, Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, and Jim Nortan, and free speech advocates such as Greg Lukianoff (of FIRE) and Jonathan Rauch, a Progressive who apparently believes in free speech, is a joint project of Reason and FIRE.

Over and over, the comics interviewed (including some as-yet-unknown college age comics) make the point that it’s their job to push the limits, a job that came into being with Lenny Bruce. And over and over, they point out that people, despite knowing that a comic today will be crude or push buttons, start screaming “I’m offended.”

What’s funny in an ironic way about all the comics interviewed is that they are most funny — and most effective — when they are simply talking to the camera about their job, about free speech, and about censorship that comes, not from the government, but from society itself. As Rauch and Nortan both point out, even if speech is ostensibly free because the government doesn’t quash it, it’s not free if societal norms are so narrow nothing can be said anyway. As one of the comics said, and many others have said before, this situation means that speech in America is only as free as the most sensitive, easily offended person in any room, any state, or any nation. Charlie Hebdo, anyone?

My issue with all the comics is that I don’t think they’re funny. Merely saying the “f” word repeatedly or the “c” word repeatedly doesn’t make me laugh. Lenny Bruce at least worked the obscenities into larger, rather intelligent jokes. These comics, when they’re not talking intelligently to the camera (or, in Penn Jillette’s case doing the most amazing magic in family friendly shows that help showcase constitutional rights), tend to be as in love with dirty words as the average child . . . and, in their acts, to use them as intelligently.

Years ago, when my son was 3 or 4, we took a walk up to Eagle Lake in the Desolation Wilderness (part of the Lake Tahoe region). It’s not a long walk and it’s stunningly lovingly — or was, when I was a child, and it was empty, rather than a busy freeway of hikers. In any event, whether because he’s never been a hiking fan or because the crowds were getting to him, my little guy started whining very early in the walk.

We carried him a bit, but mostly, because it was a walk easily within his capability, we tried to cajole and cheer him. I described to him the wonders of the trail (surprise views, cool rocks to climb, a lovely lake), but he was unimpressed. Finally, he’d had it. Digging deep into his barely-out-of-the-toddler-phase vocabulary, he came up with the biggest, nastiest insult he could imagine: “I hate this. It’s a dirty, stinky walk to poo-poo lake.”

If he hoped to shock me, he failed. I laughed so hard I almost fell over. Please note, though, that what he said wasn’t inherently funny or clever. It was funny only because it was the outer reaches of a very small child’s imagination and vocabulary when it came to the art of the insult. [Read more…]

Is Trump a Nazi monster for separating illegal alien children and parents?

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Obama deliberately encouraged an influx of illegal alien children as a means of circumventing immigration law. Trump is merely reinstating the rule of law.

Immigration Illegal Alien Children

Children detained under Barack Obama, 2014 (Credit: Breitbart Texas)

I should have known that the weekend would explode into talk about Trump’s policies towards illegal aliens when I had an . . . ahem . . . “interesting” conversation with a very Proggie neighbor on Thursday at an end-of-the-school-year get together. He opened by telling me that “Your president Trump is destroying my business.”

“Well, hello to you too, neighbor.”

Here’s the story: This guy has for years been running a network of odd job people who do everything from power-washing decks to detailing cars to gardening. He relies primarily on illegal aliens to do this work. I have nothing personal against his team. He’s been working with many of them for years, and I’m sure they’re hardworking, solid people who simply want to give their families a better chance. Nevertheless, they are here illegally — and, importantly, my neighbor’s entire business model is dependent on their illegality.

Because of labor shortages in Marin (housing is too expensive for blue-collar and day labor people), he still has to pay these guys almost twice minimum wage. Nevertheless, I’m guessing that he doesn’t bother with things like employment taxes, benefits, etc. I don’t know for sure, but let’s just say that I have my suspicions.

When the neighbor greeted me by saying that Trump is destroying his business, the first thing I wanted to say was, “If your business is built on illegality, you must have known from the beginning that there was a chance law enforcement would catch up with you or at least force a change in your business model.” Indeed, as I see it, he’s quite lucky because his business is so diffuse that he hasn’t been on the receiving end of an ICE raid. His problem is that it appears that some of his employees have decided to self-deport — which is what one can predict will happen if our existing laws are actually enforced.

However, because this was a party, I wasn’t going to match my neighbor’s rudeness with my own. Instead, I just told him, “Trump’s enforcing the laws as written. If you don’t like the laws, get them changed. Obama had two years during which he could have changed the laws to grant amnesty and increase the number of Latin American immigrants . . . but he didn’t, so please don’t come crying to me.”

After a few more pointless ad hominem attacks on Trump, which I ignored, my excitable neighbor drifted away. I was no fun.

That confrontation, though, primed me for what happened over the weekend, which was the complete explosion of the “Trump is a Nazi for putting children in cages” meme led by (of course) a former CIA head (because we’re learning that many are crazy, anti-American, Deep State sociopaths):

Hayden is an ignorant man. A really, really ignorant man, not to mention intellectually shallow and manifestly stupid. Here’s what happened with the Nazis:

Starting in the 1930s, the Nazis starting enacting laws based, not on conduct, but on race. They declared that German citizens, people whose families had often been in Germany for centuries, were illegal simply by virtue of being Jewish. Then, for having committed the crime of just being, the Nazis hunted down these German Jewish citizens, stripped them of their possessions, tossed them into sadistically run, slave-labor concentration camps (splitting parents from children), and then killed as many of them as possible, both parents and children.

Beginning in 1939, the Nazis exported this practice. They violently invaded other countries and, once in power, declared that anyone who was Jewish was an illegal being simply by virtue of being Jewish. Then, for having committed the crime of just being, the Nazis hunted down Jews, stripped them of their possessions, tossed them into sadistically run, slave-labor concentration camps (splitting parents from children), and then killed as many of them as possible, both parents and children.

That’s the Nazis. What’s happening here, in Trump’s United States?

We have borders. We also have laws saying that it is illegal to cross into the United States over those borders without prior permission. Two segments of America hate those laws: the Proggies, who want as many votes as possible, giving them an incentive to bring in people whose votes can be bought. They also need bodies for census purposes. In the Leftist states to which the illegal aliens flock, counting those bodies in the census allows for more Leftist representatives in the House. That’s why Leftists are hysterical that Trump wants to exclude illegal aliens from the 2020 census. California, for example, isn’t quite so populous when you don’t count the almost 3,000,000 illegal aliens living in the state. And of course, as part of all the intersectional, white-male-hating Leftist craziness, Proggies simply want to drown out whites.

The other group that hates our immigration laws is the Chamber of Commerce cohort, to the extent it is composed of people desperate for cheap labor. The cheapest labor, as my neighbor knows, is to pay illegal immigrants under the table, while avoiding all the other required payments for legal employees, such as social security matching, unemployment, disability, taxes, etc. The next cheapest labor is to pay immigrants legitimately, but paying only minimum wage, because illegals are not always in a position to demand more. Were the illegals not around, these businesses would have to pay more to American-born laborers, including the blacks and American-born Hispanics against him the illegals compete. [Read more…]

The core flaw in the IG Report is its pretense that bias is meaningless

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The IG Report ignores that the Clinton investigation was completely and irreparably compromised by agents whose biases went to the heart of the case.

The IG Report on HillaryThe IG Report is a strange beast. To begin with, it’s a rather ironic companion piece to Comey’s July 5, 2016 press conference. Back then, Comey laid out facts that ought to have sent Hillary to prison for 100 years. Just as we were all expecting him to say, “So we’re going to arrest her,” though, he abruptly announced a nonexistent legal standard, assured us that Hillary didn’t mean to do something naughty under this new standard, and gave her a get out of jail free.

What jumps out is that the IG Report does the same thing. Horowitz blandly dismisses any FBI actual wrongdoing affecting the outcome of the Hillary investigation, but lays out facts that ought to send all of the FBI’s upper management for 100 years. The only exception to that bland dismissal on those ugly facts is . . . Comey. There’s irony for you.

Thus, the IG Report fails for the same reason that the Comey report did, which is that there’s a gaping chasm between facts and conclusion. Only the media and Democrat party operatives (but I repeat myself) could look at that chasm and pronounce that it’s nothing more than a tiny hole in a smooth, coherent narrative.

The indispensable Andy McCarthy appropriately slams the IG Report for its weaseling approach to facts and conclusions:

The trick here is the premise the IG establishes from the start: It’s not my job to draw firm conclusions about why things happened the way they did. In fact, it’s not even my job to determine whether investigative decisions were right or wrong. The cop-out is that we are dealing here with “discretionary” calls; therefore, the IG rationalizes, the investigators must be given very broad latitude. Consequently, the IG says his job is not to determine whether any particular decision was correct; just whether, on some otherworldly scale of reasonableness, the decision was defensible. And he makes that determination by looking at every decision in isolation.

But is that the way we evaluate decisions in the real world?

[snip]

For all his assiduous attention to detail, IG Horowitz has weaved a no-common-sense report.

[snip]

How does the IG pull this off? Two ways.

The first, as mentioned above, is methodology. By disavowing any intention to pass judgment on the rightness of any particular investigative decision, by announcing upfront that he is confining himself to an assessment of whether the decisions were rational, Horowitz reads motivation out of the equation. If there were two investigative options — e.g., (1) give immunity to Paul Combetta (the service technician for Clinton’s server who lied to the FBI and destroyed evidence) or (2) prosecute him for false statements — the IG says his analysis is limited to whether the option chosen was objectively defensible.

[snip]

The IG’s second tack involves the facts he chooses to present. The report is truly half-baked because it omits half the story — all Clinton emails, no Trump-Russia. Of course, that’s neither how the cases evolved, nor how the investigators looked at them.

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP presidential race, making Trump the de facto nominee, the very first thing Strzok said upon hearing the news from Page was, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE” — i.e., “Mid Year Exam,” the code name for the Clinton caper. The best way to “stop” Trump was to free Hillary to beat him. So, the bureau simultaneously labored to close the case on her and invent a case on him.

Everything McCarthy says is absolutely true. I’m going to add one point, which is that we don’t even need to analyze the facts as McCarthy does. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 06/15/2018 — the IG report and Open Thread

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Following the release of the IG report, people are agog over the FBI’s oozing contempt for Trump and his supporters. You’ll see that “agog-ness” here.

IG Report revealed Strzok text

[Read more…]

A work-in-progress book on the Revolution proves Romans is applicable

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The usual suspects went ballistic when AG Sessions cited Romans 13 to support Trump’s immigration policy; history shows that, as usual, they were wrong.

Paul's letter to RomansJeff Sessions shocked the progressive left by citing the letter of the Apostle Paul at Romans 13 in support of enforcing immigration policy. According to the Daily Caller:

The Washington Post compared Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “slaveholders” after he quoted the Bible on Thursday while discussing his department’s policy of prosecuting all illegal immigrants who cross the border.

Sessions made the statement during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

WaPo ran a story entitled “Sessions cites Bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families” by general assignment editor Keith McMillan and religion reporter Julie Zauzmer on Friday. Rather than detailing the statistics Sessions cited in the speech that explain the immigration policy, the story quoted John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

“This is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made,” Fea said.

Specifically, Fea and the Wapo are referring to this statement by Sessions:

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”

It is true that politics and religion meet at Romans 13. It was used by the Apostle Paul to admonish Christians to be good citizens on earth. But it is a section of the Bible misused by tyrants to support unlimited submission to government and it was misused by proponents of slavery in the run up to the Civil War. But virtually all of the Biblical admonitions towards government was to obey “good” government. A good government is one that respects everyone’s natural rights to life, liberty and property. Such rights are completely destroyed in the institution of chattel slavery. Thus Fea’s criticism of the Bible because it was misused is a slander.

I find all of this fascinating because, as many of you know, I am writing a book on life in the American colonies leading up to the American Revolution. Book 1 runs from 1760 to 1761, ending on two critical events. The first, the “morning gun of the revolution,” was Thomas Mayhew’s sermon on government given in 1750 that dealt explicitly with Romans 13. The second is the intersection between a biblical “good” government, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and chattel slavery, all of which came together in a legal argument made by James Otis, Jr before a Massachusetts Colonial Court in 1761.

I include four chapters of the book below (exponentially shorter than the first half of the book I put up here). Feel free to comment. [Note from Bookworm: You’re getting the very first look at the latest installment in Wolf Howling’s work, so we haven’t corrected any typos or done any really deep editing yet. This is all about substance, not style. For that reason, you also shouldn’t worry about footnotes, some of which are included here, and some of which are not. This material, drafty though it may be, is copyrighted, with all rights reserved to D. Wolf (2018).] [Read more…]

Obama’s Marxist predestination v. Trump’s free will future

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The video that Trump showed to Kim Jong Un is a direct challenge to Obama’s Marxist predestination; it promises the triumph of great men with free will.

Trump peace North Korea PredestinationPresident Obama always had a lot to say about history. More specifically, he had a lot to say about future history.

As Obama made repeatedly clear, he believed that has a “right” side that will inevitably unfold if the world implements Obama’s policies. History also has a “wrong” side, which means doing anything counter to President Obama’s beliefs about how the world should be run. I won’t bore you with his “wrong” side critiques, but I find it quite instructive to see assembled in one place all his “right side of history” statements he made during his presidency:

  • “Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.” The President’s News Conference, June 23, 2009 (remarks about those who died in Iran protesting the mullahs, a protest Obama refused to support).
  • “I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt, that we were on the right side of history.” The President’s News Conference, February 15, 2011 (speaking of the Obama administration’s support for the radically Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, a political leadership so vile that millions of Egyptians later turned out to overthrow it).
  • “Those around him have to understand that violence that they perpetrate against innocent civilians will be monitored and they will be held accountable for it. And so to the extent that they are making calculations in their own minds about which way history is moving, they should know history is moving against Colonel Qadhafi and that their support for him and their willingness to carry out orders that are direct violence against citizens is something that ultimately they will be held accountable for.” The President’s News Conference With President Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa of Mexico, March 3, 2011 (justifying his decision to betray an ally — admittedly an ugly ally, but still an ally — during the Iraq War).
  • “And I think that the region [the Arab Middle East] will be watching carefully to make sure we’re on the right side of history, but also that we are doing so as a member of the world community and being willing to act on behalf of these values, but doing so in a way that takes all the various equities into account.” The President’s News Conference With President Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa of Mexico, March 3, 2011 (justifying, again, the decision to throw American weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood).
  • “And whether it’s helping the people of Haiti or it’s helping the people of Japan, whether it is being on the right side of history in the Middle East and North Africa or making sure that innocents who are seeking their freedom aren’t slaughtered by tyranny, what we’ve been able to do is to once again form the kind of American leadership that brings people together, as opposed to drives them apart, and that renews old alliances and creates new coalitions.” Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in New York City, March 29, 2011 (justifying yet once more his decision to throw America’s weight behind the Islamists during the Arab Spring).
  • “That’s why we’re on the right side of history now throughout the Middle East, because we believe in preventing innocents from getting slaughtered, and we believe in human rights for all people.” Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in Chicago, April 14, 2011 (Obama seems to be getting a tad defensive about allying himself with the Islamists).
  • “And as Clay has said, nothing is going to stop us from getting this done, because we’re on the right side of history. It is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do for our economy, our businesses, and our families.” Remarks at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas, November 6, 2013 (after the disastrous Obamacare launch, trying to get people to sign up).
  • “But we’re on the right side of history on that issue.” Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Reception in San Jose, California, May 8, 2014 (expressing befuddlement at people who don’t like Obamacare).
  • “We’re on the right side of history.” Remarks on Signing an Executive Order on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Employment Discrimination, July 21, 2014.
  • “What gives me confidence is that we’re on the right side of history here.” Remarks at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Fundraiser in Baltimore, Maryland, September 12, 2014 (commenting about the fight against ISIS, a fight, incidentally, that he barely waged for, as he later told Americans, it was enough to contain it. Trump, of course, thought it was enough to destroy it completely).
  • “We will impose a cost on Russia for aggression, and we will counter falsehoods with the truth. And we call upon others to join us on the right side of history.” Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, September 24, 2014 (offering bold criticisms about Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, a situation about which Obama ultimately did . . . nothing).
  • “America is leading the effort to rally the world against Russian aggression in Ukraine. Along with our allies, we will support the people of Ukraine as they develop their democracy and economy. And this week, I called upon even more nations to join us on the right side of history.” The President’s Weekly Address, September 27, 2014 (see comment above).
  • “My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history.” Address to the Nation on United States Counterterrorism Strategy, December 6, 2015 (speaking about counterterrorism efforts after the San Bernardino attack — efforts that expressly included refraining from conflating Islam with terrorism, while conceding delicately that a subsection of Muslims are not nice people).
  • “If we don’t do what’s required now, I think future generations are going to look back and ask why we failed to act when the right course—the right side of history and of justice and our best American traditions—was clear.” Remarks on Closing the Detention Facilities at the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, February 23, 2016.
  • “And so it’s important for the U.S. President—and the U.S. Government—to be able to work with people who are building and who are creating things and creating jobs and trying to solve major problems like climate change and setting up educational exchanges for young people who are going to create the next new, great invention or scientific breakthrough that can cure diseases. We have to make sure that we lift up, and stay focused, as well, on the things that are most important to us. Because we’re on the right side of history.” The President’s News Conference With President Mauricio Macri of Argentina in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 23, 2016.
  • “By the way, what’s happening with respect to her position on refugees here in Europe, she is on the right side of history on this.” The President’s News Conference With Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Hannover, Germany, April 24, 2016 (proving to his own satisfaction that Merkel was right to open Europe’s gates to millions of Muslims, a policy that has not turned out well, both because it turned the 1683 Battle of Vienna to save Europe from Islamic imperialism into a delayed defeat and it led to a populist uprising that horrifies Obama and his fellow ideologues).
  • “You will never be strong enough to destroy America or our way of life. You are going to lose. But part of that is because we’re on the right side of history, and part of it is because we can mobilize others to work with us.” Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2, 2016 (applauding his ineffective anti-ISIS policy).
  • “In every position he held, Ab’s integrity and wisdom consistently put him on the right side of history, from fighting against prejudice and discrimination and for free speech and civil liberties. He reformed Illinois’s criminal code, defended consumers’ rights, and although his decision striking down the ban on gay Americans serving in our military was overturned, history proved him right.” Statement on the Death of Former White House Counsel Abner J. Mikva, July 5, 2016.
  • “Standing here now, in retrospect, I think what I can say is that the United States was on the right side of history when it came to the cold war.” The President’s News Conference in Vientiane, Laos, September 8, 2016 (Finally! Something about which Obama and I can agree, although he seems strangely disappointed in being forced to make that statement).

It’s easy to lead from behind if you already know where the parade is going to end. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 6/12/2018 — Trump Takes on The World illustrated edition

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This illustrated edition is overflowing with the best takes on Trump’s triumphs at the G-7 and in Singapore. I am so loving the Trump presidency!

[Read more…]

Is suicide up in America because our culture is hopeless and deformed?

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Newly obsessed with a spike in suicide, Leftists argue that Americans are mean. I contend that the suicide spike is because Leftists have denied us hope.

The recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have brought suicide into the American spotlight. Although an “N” of two is not a trend, the CDC says that there is, in fact, an unpleasant suicide trend in America. According to the CDC, since 1999, America’s suicide rate has increased on average by 30%, with the steepest climbs in the upper Midwest, where suicide has increased by as much as 57%.

Strikingly, the CDC also asserts that more than half of these suicides did not have known mental health risks. All of which forces one to ask “Why are Americans killing themselves in greater numbers?”

As someone who has suffered in the past from serious depression, I suspect hopelessness is a significant factor. When you’re deeply depressed, not only are things bad, they are hopeless.

Moreover, from the depressed person’s point of view, they will never get better. Nothing will change. The depressed person knows deep inside that grim, dark, and awful is a permanent, unchanging condition.

That’s why it doesn’t help if friends say things such as “You just have to get through this bad patch,” or “If you would (get a new job, get out of a bad relationship, etc.), you’d feel better.” Anything that friends tell the depressed person in an effort to steer them away from that blackness is premised on hope. Part of depression, though, is that hope is a delusion. The reality is that it is absolutely inconceivable that things will get better.

I’m fortunate in that I was never depressed to the point of feeling suicidal. Instead, I was a slogger. I slogged through may day, doing what needed to be done, but was deeply unhappy. Moreover, I was unable to make changes that would have increased my happiness because the depression told me (quite falsely) that change was useless. Nothing would improve . . . ever.

Fortunately, the three times that I found myself in one of those dead-end funks, external events happened that forced changes on me. I graduated from the school in which I was unhappy, I recovered from a serious illness that made me unhappy, and a different serious illness allowed me to step back from a job that made me unhappy. In other words, I was always the lucky recipient of a deus ex machina event that broke the depression cycle.

I’ve sometimes wondered how things would have ended up if I hadn’t had an external force to save me from Churchill’s “black dog.” I’d like to think that, like Churchill, I might never have quite abandoned that little spark of hope that keeps one going, no matter how bad things get. In that regard, one of my favorite Churchill quotations comes from a time when he was struggling with depression. As I heard it, he was at a dinner party and, instead of talking to the young woman seated next to him, spent most of the dinner staring unhappily at his plate. Suddenly, he turned to her and said, “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.” No matter his mood, he never lost faith that he had something to offer.

Others, however, lack that little spark, whether because of nature, nurture, or whatever else combines to make each individual’s psyche. For those people, the thinking is brutally clear: if nothing will ever get better, if life will always be, not just hedged about with failure and isolation, but also drab, pointless, and meaningless, why live?

All of the above describes individual hopelessness. This essay asks whether there be societal hopelessness too?

I think there can be. Of course, we know that, no matter the circumstances, there are people whose will to live always burns, offsetting situational despair. That’s why people survive concentration camps and gulags. That’s why they survive poverty and totalitarianism. That’s why they survive pain and fear. We are hardwired, for the most part, to survive. That hard-wiring can break down, though, and that’s where I want to go with the rest of this post — I want to discuss a society in which the hard wiring has broken down or, more accurately, a society in which the dominant culture has deliberately broken the hard-wiring. [Read more…]

Gender madness continues to turn female domains into the patriarchy

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As the Left continues to push transgender madness, women are in danger of being marginalized in everything from sports to the art world.

Transgender Curtis, Tony (Some Like it Hot)_01Yesterday the Daily Wire put together a post about high school track meets in Connecticut. Usually high school track meets do not make the national news. What made this particular statewide track meet noteworthy was the fact that in both the girls’ 100 and 200 meter runs, the winners were boys.

10 years ago, people would undoubtedly have asked “What were boys doing running in the girls track race?” Now, of course, we don’t ask those questions anymore. We know that all a person has to do is announce that he or she feels that he or she is in fact a person of the opposite sex and all must accept that is true.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the insane intellectual gymnasts the people in charge of this travesty go through to justify forcing girls to compete against boys. The reality is that boys have much stronger musculature, especially if they haven’t done any gene therapy, and even the slowest boy is equipped to leave a faster girl in the dust. Still, the bureaucrats go on:

Asked about the two girls who worked for years who got knocked out of the finals by Miller and Yearwood and the two girls who finished seventh and eighth in the finals who were denied a chance to compete in the New England championships, CIAC executive director Karissa Niehoff said, “We do feel for them. Fully agree it doesn’t feel good. The optic isn’t good. But we really do have to look at the bigger issues that speak to civil rights and the fact this is high school sports.”

Interestingly, the person quoted above is apparently a female bureaucrat. The male coach, Gary Moore, was less sanguine about the pretense that a girl is a boy. Well he made the politically’s correct statement that one of the boys ought to be able to compete as a girl, he added that the situation “wasn’t fair to the girls,” and that something should be done to “level the playing field.” Ya think?

The same insanity is now entering the ballet world. Ballet has traditionally been a woman’s world. While there are male ballet dancers, the women dramatically outnumber them. Classical ballet has been very strict about gender roles — women dance the women’s part and men dance the men’s part. The men in the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, while wearing tutus and dancing women’s roles, never make any pretense that they are anything other than men:

They’re marvelous dancers, and they do the women’s roles with grace and elan . . . but they’re still men. That’s part of the fun.

In England, though, the New York Times tells us that things are changing: [Read more…]

The leftist obsession with poop just keeps rolling along

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The European artists who created a poop exhibit in Holland aren’t American Progressives but they’re consistent with the Leftist love of all things fecal.

Progressives Party of Poop Gelitin Screen ShotIt was a mere two days ago that I did a post entitled A new entry in my ongoing Progressive Party of Poop Series. Then, just yesterday, the New York Times had an article in the Arts Section entitled In This Exhibition, You Walk Through Excrement. It begins as follows:

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — When I entered the exhibition, I was invited to get nude. I searched a clothes rack filled with skin-toned “naked costumes” featuring all shapes and sizes of male and female genitalia, and chose a peach-color hermaphroditic garment, with teddy-bear fur, a male member between its legs and wide-set breasts. I pulled it on over my clothes.

Then I walked into the excrement.

There were four giant turds inside the 16,000 square feet of museum space. One mammoth piece of feces was reminiscent of a long, winding steel sculpture by Richard Serra. One was a brown spiral. Another resembled an enormous chocolate chip. Yet another featured intertwined layers with a gap in between that I could have crawled through, if I had been brave enough.

All four sculptures of fecal matter sat on elegant Persian rugs, like welcome-home gifts left by a huge, vengeful dog.

You can see the links in my earlier post about Progressive poop fixations to learn my theories about the primitive, immature Leftist brain. Suffice to say that this outburst from leftists in Holland simply supports my theories.

Image credit: Screen shot of Gelitin.net projects page

Bookworm Beat 7/6/2018 — The post D-Day edition and open thread

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There are so many interesting things out there (apologies, pardons, STDs, war, etc.) that I had to do a Bookworm Beat to share all of them with you.

Bookworm BeatSamantha Bee apologizes as only a narcissist can. One of the surest signs that someone is a narcissist is the fact that he or she cannot offer a heartfelt apology. Narcissists only traffic in non-apology apologies.

For example, if a narcissist breaks your vase, the narcissist will not say “I am so sorry I broke your vase.” Instead, the narcissist will say “I’m sorry you’re upset that your vase is broken.” Translated, this means that the narcissist is sorry that you are angry at the narcissist. The narcissist, in his own mind, has done nothing to merit this anger. It was undoubtedly your fault, in some way as yet unknown, that the narcissist was forced to break your vase. And it’s a damn shame for the narcissist’s peace of mind you’re upset about it.

Samantha Bee is a narcissist. The appropriate thing for Bee to have done after calling Ivanka Trump the C-word, would have been to say “I am so sorry I called Ivanka Trump the C-word. It was crude and uncalled for. I did it for effect. I was not thinking and I am ashamed of myself for what I have done.” Instead, Bee, a true narcissist, essentially doubled down.

She first complained that people were mad at her. They should not be mad, she implied, because she is trying to reclaim the C-word.  Her mistake was in having momentarily abandoned this reclamation by wasting the word as an insult to Ivanka (who, Bee implies, deserved whatever insults came her way).

Having explained to her own satisfaction that people were too dumb to understand her feminist linguistic goals, Bee was ready to issue Phase 1 of the non-apology apology: “I crossed the line, I regret it, and I do apologize for that.” In other words, she’s not at all sorry that she launched a vile insult against Ivanka. She’s simply sorry that she got caught crossing the line.

It only got worse from there. Phase 2 was for Bee to say she was sorry that people didn’t understand that she was talking about immigration (how stupid of them). She was sorry that stupid people didn’t realize that her mis-use of the C-word (remember, she’s reclaiming it) obscured the fact that everything she did was “for the children.”

Bee ended by once again blaming Ivanka and all the other stupid conservatives for forcing her to issue the non-apology apology: “Civility is just nice words. Maybe we should all worry a little bit more about the niceness of our actions.”

As I said, she’s a narcissist.

Also, if you want to have fun watching a narcissist not apologize, I hope you’ve been following Bill Clinton’s travails as he tries to function in a #MeToo world.  You can just see him thinking to himself that nobody was demanding these ridiculous apologies back in the 1990s. Clinton is not sorry he destroyed Monica Lewinsky’s life — although she was complicit in her own seduction, Bill and Hillary went out of their way to destroy her reputation. He’s not sorry about Pedophile Island. He’s not sorry about assaulting and raping women. He’s just really, really sorry people nowadays keep demanding that he apologize. [Read more…]

Trump is the Democrats’ Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

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Ben Shapiro’s insight that the media created Donald Trump reminds me of nothing so much as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

Donald Trump Stay Puft Marshmallow ManIt’s no secret that Ben Shapiro does not like Donald Trump. Shapiro, a refined type himself, really struggles to see past Trump’s vulgarity and the constant dodging and weaving of someone for whom everything is a negotiation. Still, Shapiro is an honest man, and he recently acknowledged that Trump is the most conservative president in his lifetime:

The above clip reveals that Shapiro has yet to figure out that Trump’s rhetoric is not wild, but tightly controlled, and is part of his power. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about one other thing that Ben Shapiro said in an article he recently wrote. Shapiro thinks, and I agree, that it was reasonable to believe when Trump, a lifetime Democrat and a social liberal, started campaigning, the he would have governed as a centrist or even as a soft Leftist. Certainly that’s what most conservatives worried about when they thought of President Trump. I wouldn’t denigrate Trump as Shapiro does, but he’s right about the fact that a warm Democrat embrace would have resulted in a very different Trump presidency:

Democrats had a massive opportunity when Trump was elected. As an ideological nonconformist and a reactionary personality, Trump seems particularly susceptible to praise and flattery. Imagine if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) had strolled into the Oval Office during the first week of Trump’s presidency, sidled up to Trump, and told him that they’d love to impose indelible change on America by granting everyone comprehensive health care. There’s a decent shot that with the help of then–White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Trump would have gone full Bernie Sanders. That isn’t complete speculation — in September 2017, Trump went over the heads of congressional Republicans in favor of working with Schumer and Pelosi to avoid a government shutdown.

Democrats, though, were so invested in Hillary, and so reflexively hostile to anything Republican, that they went in an entirely different direction. First, they ridiculed Trump: [Read more…]

A new entry in my ongoing Progressive Party of Poop Series

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Every few years, some Progressive outdoes him- or herself when it comes to the Leftist poop obsession. Here’s my Twitter thread on the subject.

Here’s the tweet to which I allude above:

And now back to my thread:

[Read more…]

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