The Bookworm Beat 9-8-15 — the “busy world” edition and open thread
My apologies for my blog silence yesterday. I hope to make up for it now with a substantial round-up, some of which I compiled, and some of which comes from a friend who insists on remaining anonymous:
Your daily “Hillary is toast” report
As you know, Hillary did a national interview — fairly softball really — with Andrea Mitchell, who has long been a Hillary fan. Mitchell has now published her post interview take on it all (emphasis added):
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell said Tuesday she was concerned the Hillary Clinton campaign would have cut off her interview with the candidate if she asked too many questions about Clinton’s private email server at the State Department.
Clinton sat down with Mitchell on Friday and the main topic from the start was her use of a private, unsecured server as secretary of state, which has caused serious problems for her campaign with questions about her honesty, trustworthiness, and handling of classified material. While other presidential candidates have made dozens of media appearances, Clinton has given just threenationally televised interviews since her campaign began.
“We were told we had a 15-minute interview,” Mitchell said. “I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt, out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously, that I had to move on, so I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask, but I think we did get a good chance to ask a lot of questions and discover that she did not have an answer for why she did the personal server in the first place.”
Even members of the drive-by media are shaking their heads that Hildabeast has not come up with a believable lie for why she ran a personal server. There is only one obvious reason, but they claim to be mystified.
Meanwhile, Hildabeast spoke at a Labour Day event that included this gem:
“We’re going to go back to enforcing labor laws,” Clinton said. “I’m going to make sure that some employers go to jail for wage theft and all the other abuses that they engage in.”
She has apparently gone full Lenin and business owners are the new Kulaks. That said, there are two things Hildabeast should not be doing at this point: one is wear an orange jumpsuit, the other is use the word “jail.”
At NRO, Shannen Coffin has a great deal of fun with Hillary’s latest excuse for her private email, private server and numerous email shenanigans, that she simply “wasn’t thinking.” My but she took a lot of actions unconsciously.
It seems the Hot Air crowd has reached the same conclusion that my friend did as soon as he saw the second review panel’s determination of the top secret information Hillary had on her server. The argument had been that possibly they were discussing information that had somehow become available through public sources, such as a foreign news report. That is no longer at issue. It is now beyond question that Hillary committed multiple crimes and the DOJ cannot ignore it without applying a clear legal double standard:
The FBI and the Department of Justice will have to take some kind of action at this point. A federal grand jury will get them off the hook politically, at least for a short period of time, and that may be their best option under the weight of a presidential campaign.
Oh, one more thing: Since it’s from the National Enquirer, we know it’s true that Hillary really is a lesbian (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Donald Trump exaggerates his tough guy capabilities
Donald Trump, who has the same military record as Obama, Hillary, Hildabeast, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, says in an interview “I always felt that I was in the military. . . . Trump said that his five years at the New York Military Academy provided him with “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
If you want to anger millions of Americans who have actually been in and understand the challenges and sacrifices, eh, couldn’t think of a better way to do it. Having experienced an extremely tough military training, followed by actual infantry service at the front lines, my anonymous friend can assure you, there is only the tiniest of comparisons between even the toughest military college and the actual infantry — plus there is that tiny bit about not having people shoot at you or engaging in training events that could claim your life.
One can only imagine what the Iraq and Afghanistan vets are feeling. Oh, and to put this in perspective, Trump got four deferments from the Vietnam Draft.
There’s nothing green about “green energy”:
I’ve been sounding the drumbeat for years — green energy is a resource hog. In order to get to market, green energy products suck up fossil fuel, coal, food crops, and vast tracks of land — and that doesn’t even touch upon the tax payer dollars green energy gobbles up.
It is unlikely that solar power, wind power, or biofuels will ever compete with traditional energy sources. Until we are willing to rely on nuclear power or until cold fusion is a reality, we have to figure out how to use existing energy sources in a more clean and efficient way, rather than wasting our time with the other stuff.
Anyway, that’s my story, and at the very least, Professor A J Trewavas, who represents Scientific Alliance Scotland, agrees with me:
Renewables use sun, water, wind; energy sources that won’t run out. Non-renewables come from things like gas, coal and uranium that one day will. But unless electricity and motorised transport are abandoned altogether, all “renewables” need huge areas of land or sea and require raw materials that are drilled, transported, mined, bulldozed and these will run out. Wind turbine towers are constructed from steel manufactured in a blast furnace from mined iron ore and modified coal (coke). Turbine blades are composed of oil-derived resins and glass fibre. The nacelle encloses a magnet containing about one third of a tonne of the rare earth metals, neodymium and dysprosium. Large neodymium magnets also help propel electric cars.
Currently China provides 95 per cent of rare earths; proven reserves of dysprosium will likely run out in 2020. Processing one tonne of ore generates about one tonne of radioactive waste, 12 million litres of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide, sulphuric acid and 75 thousand litres of waste water. Baotou, in China, mines and processes much of the rare earth ores. The town abuts a five-mile-wide, toxic, lifeless, radioactive lake of processed wastewater. Local inhabitants have unusually high rates of cancer (particularly in children), osteoporosis, skin and respiratory disease. This unseen environmental destruction may be far off but no less damaging.
Read more here.
You may also enjoy watching Ted Cruz school two greenies who try to play gotcha with him. They’re somewhat handicapped by the fact that their combined IQs don’t equal his. It’s also rather scary to watch them stick to message like two cheaply programmed robots. It’s quite obvious that Cruz’s straightforward, easy-to-understand information does not penetrate their sealed-off brain chambers.
Notes on Islam and the refugee issue
If you have only one article you can read today about Europe’s suicidal approach to the stream of Muslims storming her borders, read David P. Goldman’s “The Price of Europe’s fecklessness“:
In Luis Bunuel’s eponymous 1961 film, the young postulant Viridiana leaves her convent to claim her uncle’s rural estate, and creates a refuge for local beggars. They ransack her house in a bachannalia staged to lampoon the Last Supper, and a couple of them rape her. The classic film should be mandatory viewing for European officials caught up in refugee euphoria. This is going to end very, very badly.
The Europeans, to be sure, are a pack of cynical hypocrites. If they had cared about Syrians, they might have sent a couple of brigades of soldiers to fight ISIS. But not a single European will risk his neck to prevent humanitarian catastrophe. The last time European soldiers got close to real trouble, in Srebrenica in 1995, Dutch peacekeepers stood aside while Bosnian Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslims.
The horror has now piled up on Europe’s doorstep, thanks evidently to the skill of Turkish gangs who have turned the Turkey-to-Balkans smuggling route into a superhighway. Europe said and did nothing while the global refugee count exploded from 40 million in 2010 to 60 million in 2014, according to the UN High Commission on Refugees, but was shocked, shocked to find such people on its doorstep.
Read the rest here.
Meanwhile, although I’m not feeling the love for Hungary lately because its antisemitic elements have been growing strong, credit must go where credit is due: Hungary seems to be the only European nation that’s figured out that taking in massive numbers of Muslims, especially young men of military age, is not a good idea:
One of the few European voices of sanity comes from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (here, here) He has identified the issue with clarity, so, therefore and of course, he is being called right-wing, nationalist, and–wait for it–fascist. Orban has written that,
We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation. . . . We shouldn’t forget that the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim… That is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots . . .
Daniel Greenfield, meanwhile, reminds us that the Syrian refugee crisis is not our problem because much of what we’re seeing is an illusion:
The Syrian refugee crisis that the media bleats about is not a crisis. And the Syrian refugees it champions are often neither Syrians nor refugees. Fake Syrian passports are cheaper than an EU politician’s virtue and easier to come by. Just about anyone who speaks enough Arabic to pass the scrutiny of a European bureaucrat can come with his two wives in tow and take a turn on the carousel of their welfare state.
Or on our welfare state which pays Christian and Jewish groups to bring the Muslim terrorists of tomorrow to our towns and cities. And their gratitude will be as short-lived as our budgets.
The head of a UNHCR camp called Syrian refugees “The most difficult refugees I’ve ever seen. In Bulgaria, they complained that there were no jobs. In Sweden, they took off their clothes to protest that it was too cold.
In Italy, Muslim African “refugees” rejected pasta and demanded food from their own countries. But the cruel Europeans who “mistreat” migrants set up a kitchen in Calais with imported spices cooked by a Michelin chefdetermined to give them the stir-fried rabbit and lamb meatballs they’re used to. There are also mobile phone charging stations so the destitute refugees can check on their Facebook accounts.
It had to be done because the refugees in Italy were throwing rocks at police while demanding free wifi.
This is the tawdry sense of entitlement of the Syrian Muslim refugee that the media champions.
I will add only that some Americans do bear moral responsibility for what’s going on, because they elected Obama, and it is his Middle Eastern policies — from his kowtowing to Iran, to backing off from his Syrian red line (in deference to Iran), to failing to support Iran’s Green revolution, to ousting Egypt’s Mubarak, to backing the Muslim Brotherhood, to destroying Qadaffi’s stable Libya — that created the utter chaos that is today’s Middle East. I think these Americans should do penance, but that penance does not include inviting the Middle East’s murderous chaos into our borders.
There are some other lying liars, the ones who defamed Israel, which is the only stable, true democracy in the Middle East, and created false martyrs out of the murderous Muslims surrounding them, who also need to do everlasting penance for their negative impact on the Middle East. But first, they need to be educated. This video might enlighten them about the nature of the “concentration camp” they claim Israel created in Gaza (soundtrack is NSFW; images should be mandatory viewing for everyone in America and Europe):
Name-calling aside, it’s not conservatives who are racists
This PragerU video is almost a year old, but it’s been making the rounds again. I gather that the combination of the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the usual election-time slanders thrown at conservatives have renewed interest in the topic of alleged conservative racism versus actual Leftist racism. Here’s some intellectual ammunition for you as the Leftist rhetoric heats up:
Money laundering for the Left
A friend of mine points out that much of what the Left does is set up programs that launder tax payer money and then send it to Leftist coffers. Here are a couple of links that support that premise.
First, Labor Day is now yesterday’s news. Starting today, let’s really do something for the working stiff. Get rid of public sector unions.
Second, watch Obama’s un-elected administrative bureaucracy grow and grow and grow:
In 2014, 3,291 pages of new laws were passed by Congress – the branch of government with the constitutional authority to…
Posted by United States Senator Mike Lee on Monday, January 26, 2015
(If that FB post/video didn’t load, you can see it here.)
For an infinitesimally small minority, transgenders sure make a lot of noise
As a society, we are currently being asked to turn ourselves inside out for transgenders. Cops need to be trained to identify dead trans bodies in a non-offensive way:
The training comes two months after a Tampa transgender woman’s murder — and law enforcement’s handling of it — captured national attention.
After 25-year-old India Clarke’s body was found in a Tampa park July 21, law enforcement identified her by the name and gender she was born with even though she had identified as female for years. Backlash from across the country followed, surfacing a discussion about how law enforcement handle the identities of transgender people.
Officers can’t rely on anatomy or what is on a person’s driver’s license to identify them and generally they should use pronouns based on a person’s outward appearance — or avoid them if unsure.
You see, even when investigating murder — a particularly fact-based activity — ideology must trump reality.
Also, at a San Francisco school, all bathrooms are now unisex. I especially love the quotation that the school’s principal attributed to one parent:
“There’s no need to make them gender-specific anymore,” he said, adding there has been no pushback from parents. “One parent said, ‘So, you’re just making it like it is at home.’”
I don’t know about you, but my home bathroom doesn’t have stalls around multiple toilets, with the stalls open at both top and bottom for prying eyes. It makes you wonder what’s going on in San Francisco homes.
A friend of mine had the perfect solution: If you’re going to have group toilet facilities, you need to have one facility for those humans with penises and one for those without. End of story.
But I opened this by saying that we’re turning upside down for a very small group. How small? Well, I’m too lazy to research it, but I can tell you that even uber-Leftist Harvard, which must be lusting after trans students in the same way it once lusted after Fauxcahontas (boasting rights, you know), has only 6 students, or one-half of one percent of its entering class, identify as “transgender.”
Keeping those teeny-tiny numbers in mind, it’s one thing for us not to discriminate actively against people who are different (a type of prejudice Muslims feel comfortable engaging in); it’s quite another thing to turn our institutions upside down and inside out for people whose numbers as a proportion of the overall population probably hover around 1%.
The future is nearly here and it’s scary
This is an eye opening article on the capabilities of 3D printers to manufacture not merely guns, but eventually WMD. It will mean that anyone having a bad day and access to a 3D printer, likely to become ubiquitous over the decades, will also potentially be able to kill a lot of people on that day. I suspect the article it is a bit over-done as to the nuclear, since it would require many specialized materials not likely to be available on the open market, but perhaps not as to the bio and chemical. And the DNA sequence for small pox is in fact openly available on the web.
Just so you understand what’s really going on with our immigrants
The illegal immigration movement in America and La Raza are not about making sure legal immigrants get equal treatment under the law, which would be a reasonable thing to do. There’s a different agenda at play.
When politics still involved intelligence and class
Nowadays, the premier Democrat candidate (that would be Hillary) is corrupt and clueless, and just wishes the American public weren’t so stupid. Meanwhile, the Republicans have arrayed themselves in their usual circular firing squad, using up all their ammunition on each other rather than challenging Leftist in politics, media, and society.
Once upon a time, though, pundits on both sides had a bit more to say — even though, already then, Alinsky tactics were the Left’s favorite approach to destroying the opposition. Never argue issues; always destroy people.
Incidentally, if you’d like guidance on standing against the Left’s Social Justice Warriors and their Alinsky tactics of personal destruction, check out Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
And some fun stuff that’s NOT POLITICS
On the lighter side of the news . . . a massive great white shark catching its lunch has Aussie tv presenters swear off swimming in the ocean:
