The Bookworm Beat 10-29-15 — the spindle overload edition and open thread

Woman-writing-300x265So much to share with you (23 separate articles at last count) and so little time. I’ll therefore get right down to business and you might want to give yourself some time to review all these fascinating articles at your leisure:

Another pundit figures out Cruz might be the man

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz, and have done so since he took a stand on Obamacare. Ross Douthat (whose writing I respect) has suddenly realized that those of us who support Ted Cruz might be on to something.

Ted Cruz makes sense on taxes

Certainly Ted Cruz’s flat tax plan ought to help people realize that he’s offering genuine change for the better, not just platitudes and painful socialism. Heck, you’d think that all Americans would support a candidate who wants to deep six, or at least severely de-fang, the IRS and, in doing say, make our tax system fairer and make doing business in America more tempting for both American and foreign corporations.

Daniel Greenfield waxes eloquent on the heckler’s veto that is Islam’s stock in trade

After clearing his throat about the Obama administration’s despicable pandering to Palestinian terrorists, along with its sickening chastisement of Israel (this from an administration that would never dare blame the victim if a drunk woman walked naked through a biker’s bar), Daniel Greenfield gets to the real point, which is the fact that the West lets the mere threat of Islamic anger paralyze it.

The world’s one billion Muslims, whose delicate emotions are always infuriated by something, enforce an Islamic status quo in which no non-Muslim dares to violate the Muslim superiority complex.

[snip]

Some might say that the billion Muslims are just looking for things to get angry at… but that would just make a billion Muslims angry.

When buildings fall or buses blow up, when people are stabbed, shot or exploded by the unofficial representatives of the bilious billion, we go right past the crime to the anger that motivated it. “Why do they hate us?” becomes the question and Muslim anger becomes the pivot of national security policy.

Since Muslim anger causes violence, we stop terrorism by tiptoeing around anything that might make them angry. Minor things mostly like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. If you’re a Coptic Christian who makes a YouTube video about Mohammed, you can be sent to prison when some of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda locals murder four Americans while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

After weeks of brutal Muslim murders, Kerry has gotten Israel to reinforce a ban on Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism because it offends Muslims. Next up, maybe Jews will be restricted to the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs again. Because that was the “Status Quo” under the Muslim conquest.

As my lengthy quotation in this “quick hits” round-up reveals, Greenfield’s article falls into the must-read category.

When it comes to Jews, it’s always something

Obama is busy blaming Jewish provocation for the fact that Israelis are being stalked and stabbed, run over, hacked to pieces, and blown up in their own streets. The provocation? Building homes, praying, breathing . . . you know, the usual stuff that inflames antisemites.

But even Obama can’t keep up with Palestinian imagination when it comes to Jewish depredations. The most recent Jewish activity that pains the Palestinians? Trees. Yup, those damn anti-Islamic, imperialist Jewish trees.

By the way, if you take a gander at a few thousand pictures of the Holy Land a little over a hundred years ago, you’ll find a strikingly diverse population, heavy on the Jews and light on the Arabs.

Also, you can help change the narrative by donating to a GoFundMe campaign that’s trying to raise enough money to run a full-page ad in the New York Times, telling the Times’ benighted, ignorant readers, that the Times is lying to them by hiding the truth about Israel and her bloodthirsty neighbors.

French Jews can be prisoners in France or free people in Israel

A fascinating interview with a French-Jewish cop who has made aliyah, but still works with the French police to try to protect the Jewish community:

The question I most want to ask Ghozlan, 72, is whether his decision to move to Israel signals that there is no future for the Jews in France. And the answer he gives me is revelatory: “It’s not that there’s no future for the Jews in France. It’s that there is no future for the Jews in France that they want,” he says.

France is not 1930s Germany for the Jews, he elaborated. It’s not the regime, the government, that is persecuting them. Quite the reverse. The government is trying to protect them. But they are persecuted nonetheless, he says, to the point where you cannot wear a skullcap or a Magen David outdoors for fear of attack by Islamic extremists, cannot leave overtly Jewish material in your car for fear of it being torched. Which is why a record 10,000 French Jews are expected to have moved to Israel by the time this calendar year is over, up from 7,000 in 2014, and why there is every likelihood that 2016 will see a still higher exodus.

(Keep in mind that Caroline Glick says that this is France’s goal — not to stop the harassment against the Jews, but slowly to drive them out even while pretending to protect them.)

Antisemitism near the White House

Don’t you just love it when the Obama administration’s point man on Iran is a fan of antisemitic conspiracy theories? You don’t have to go to the state of Denmark to find something rotten.

Iran is busy using Western dollars for terrorism

Happily puffed up with all the money flowing thanks to Obama’s abject surrender, Iran is not just shoring up old terrorist groups but also making new ones. You certainly can’t accuse the Iranian government of spending its money inefficiently. It knows what it wants and goes after it with single-minded fervor.

Rabbi David Wolpe explains the connection between Jews and tyrannies

I don’t know how to summarize this, so I’ll just quote it:

The enemy of the Jew becomes the enemy of the world. That simple, albeit mysterious, historical rule has been repeatedly demonstrated. Regimes and ideologies that target Jews never stop there; they are imperialistic by nature, and begin by identifying the “other” — and Jews have been the quintessential other — and move on to target ever-larger circles.

So why is there not more sympathy for the Jewish people? Among the thousand theories perhaps there is no improving on Maurice Samuel’s simple declaration: “No one loves their alarm clock.” Jews have been the disturbers of the world’s sleep. Long before the Western world knew it was fighting a battle with radical Islam, Jews knew. That realization brought them more indifference or contempt than affection.

Everything you thought you knew about drugs and prisoners is wrong

I don’t know why I’m surprised to learn that everything I thought I knew about drugs and prisoners is wrong. After all, up until a few years ago, everything I knew I learned from the drive-by, agenda-driven, Left wing media.

And no, the cop probably didn’t do anything wrong

Among many things I no longer believe are those 10 second videos that purport to show that a white cop abused a black person. It seems inevitable that the next, more complete, round of videos shows that the black person was, in fact, resisting a reasonable order and that the cop’s so-called “manhandling” was a reasonable response to this behavior. David French argues that this is the case in the Spring Valley arrest video.

Incidentally, I’m not giving cops a free pass. Abuse is abuse and bad cops need to be called on it and weeded out with vigor.  it. The thing is, though, that these trashy little videos make it almost impossible to separate the wheat (which is to say that most cops behave appropriately) from the chaff (those few cops who do in fact abuse their power).

No, bacon won’t kill you

WHO is at it again, this time trying to get greedy Westerners to stop eating all the meat that the mouth craves and the body needs. Cancer!!!!

But who believes WHO, that’s my question. It comes as no surprise to me to learn that the headlines are exaggerated and WHO’s risk analysis is so mechanical as to be nonsensical.

Here’s the bottom line, per my life philosophy: Everything in moderation, and try not to eat too many foods that have as ingredients chemicals with names you can’t easily spell.

You can also enjoy the always debonair and entertaining Steven Hayward on the same subject.

Yeah, yeah! We know. Obama lied.

More evidence to add to the existence mountain proving that Obama was lying when he said that liking your doctor was the same as keeping your doctor under Obamacare.

Climate change: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Here at the Bookworm Room, and at just about every other site in the conservative blogosphere, we’ve argued two things repeatedly: (1) Climate is too complex for computer models to produce useful information; and (2) every single one of the past predictions based upon these computer models has proven wrong.

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, as good old Gomer would say. Even the most fanatic, fascistic climate “scientists” have started to realize that they’ve got problems. David Roberts, one of the harshest in his indictment of “deniers” (he wants to use RICO against us), has confessed:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.

And the “scientists” insist on hiding the garbage

It’s not just that the computer models are impossible and therefore useless. There’s something even worse going on, which is that the government is altering the data. And, having altered the data, NOAA is now trying to hide its egregious academic, intellectual, and scientific fraud: it’s refusing to respond to a House subpoena, claiming a hitherto unknown privilege called “scientist confidentiality.” Not only is that claim absolute garbage, it’s worth remembering that the House, which represents the American people, is NOAA’s employer — and you don’t get to hide your work from the boss.

Of course, this is par for the course in the Obama administration. Even water-carrying PBS had to admit that the administration is the least transparent ever, especially when it comes to responding to FOIA requests. The same article provides damning evidence of the fear running rampant amongst the minions tasked with carrying out the administrations’ whims, political and otherwise:

Under the president’s instructions, the U.S. should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing, but federal employees last year regularly misapplied the law. In emails that AP obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration about who pays for Michelle Obama’s expensive dresses, the agency blacked-out a sentence under part of the law intended to shield personal, private information, such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers or home addresses. But it failed to censor the same passage on a subsequent page.

The sentence: “We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH (White House).”

When you sever sex from love, girls get screwed — literally

Feminists have insisted for years that they can have sex just the way men do — often and with no emotional commitment. Just like men, they don’t even have to know their partner’s name. I mean, why bother if you’re only going to see the guy for one night or maybe only a few minutes?

And feminists are right — young women can have sex precisely that way. Except for one thing: women aren’t mentally wired like men and, instead of feeling like powerful studettes, they feel like pathetic, used whores . . . which, of course, say the feminists, is all the men’s fault too.

Feminism is a first world construct

Glenn Reynolds elegantly makes what one realizes is an obvious point: the only reason America’s screaming feminism works is because America’s men have already gracefully acceded cultural control to these harpies. Moreover, as the West cedes geographic territory to the Middle East, these women will find themselves dealing with a different class of men. Almost certainly, these women will find themselves retired, not to the boardroom, but to the kitchen, barefoot, pregnant, and abused.

Self-loathing Leftists

Christians have a nice doctrine: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I understand this to mean that you recognize each individual’s worth, and value each individual, but that you don’t give people a free pass for their conscious wrongdoing.

Trust Leftists to turn this idea on its head in the worst way. After a Leftist was the victim of an armed robbery in a New York eatery, she and her friends decided to hate and blame themselves, forgive the sin and the sinner, and blame economic forces and the gun for everything that went wrong on the day.

Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

From a friend:  “We are coming to an economic tipping point, I think, world wide.  China is in free fall, devaluing their currency and selling off US bonds, the US economy is running on smoke and mirrors and no longer has China to finance its grossly bloated spending, and Europe is circling the financial drain.  European 2 year bonds today are being sold at negative interest rates.  That means that the people with money buying those bonds are betting that their economy is going to go south in the near future and that losing x percent of their money is good insurance against losing 2x or 3x when the implosion hits.  It is the equivalent of taking out a life insurance policy the day after you’ve been diagnosed with cancer.  I can’t imagine a clearer or more ominous red flag than what is happening in Europe.”

Another Leftist unclear on the concept

Slate’s Emily Joffe, who writes the advice column and occasionally has very un-Slate flashes of sanity — as when she suggested that women would be less likely to get raped if they stopped getting paralytically drunk — got a doozy of a letter from a pregnant Leftist:

I live in a small town, and recently a number of local doctors signed a petition against Planned Parenthood, based on proven lies and obfuscation of facts. I was horrified to find a number of my own providers on the list, including a physician at my group OB practice. I am pregnant with my second child now, but long ago I had an abortion. I feel legitimately concerned about the quality of care I might receive if my OB knows I had an abortion (I disclosed this on my medical history). I’m almost into my third trimester, but I’m completely panicked about the potential of a doctor who may judge me or even deny me crucial medical care if something devastating were to happen during my pregnancy. I want to switch practices, but my husband thinks I am overreacting. There are not many other OBs in town. Should I talk to someone at the practice about my concerns? Am I being unreasonable here?

Joffe gives a polite response.  My response was less polite.  This woman is so stupid that she thinks that a doctor who opposes abortion, a position he presumably takes because he celebrates the value of each baby’s life, is going to get some sort of revenge on her by . . . harming a baby’s life.  Maybe it’s just pregnancy brain or maybe the woman is congenitally stupid.

I ran into a similar conceptual problem with a Leftist who had a very peculiar take on the Leftist claim that America has one of the worst infant mortality rates in the world.  I explained that this “statistic” is another garbage in, garbage out problem, because America classifies all births as live, while the countries against which America is compared wait awhile to see whether a baby will survive a few days after birth before calling it a “live birth.”  When you apply the same standards to the countries under consideration (either by subtracting vulnerable babies from America’s statistics or adding vulnerable babies to the other countries’ statistics), you discover that has exceptionally low infant mortality rates.

The Leftist with whom I spoke would have none of this.  The problem, she claimed, is that we don’t have socialized medicine.  If we did, poor people would have better prenatal care (questionable, because the problem of poor prenatal care is often a cultural one), plus, we would terminate more pregnancies.  In other words, we would kill the defective babies in utero so that they don’t mess with America’s infant mortality statistics by daring to be born alive.  The Leftie couldn’t seem to grasp that this too is a form of high infant morality, except one that causes our nation to bear a stain on its soul.

How do you spell corruption? C-L-I-N-T-O-N F-O-U-N-D-A-T-I-O-N

Ken Silverstein explains that the Clinton Foundation’s fraud is woven so deeply into the institution’s fabric that it may be impossible ever to figure out precisely where the fraud starts and ends.

It turns out Superman is not fictional

Tibor Rubin survived Nazi death camps (he was the only one in his family to do so) as well as a Chinese POW camp during the Korean War. In between internments, he fought like a berserker in Korea and, while in the POW camp, used the skills he learned during the Holocaust to save his comrades’ lives.

Nominated four times for a Medal of Honor, he was blocked by an antisemitic sergeant who didn’t want to see the honor go to a Jew. Fortunately, a review of recommendations made about blacks and Jews ensured that Rubin got his Medal while he still has time to enjoy it and the perks that come with it.

You really have to read his story; it’s frigging amazing.