Bookworm Beat 1/28/18 — the brilliant Trump Jay-Z beatdown edition
From Trump’s epic response to Jay-Z, to Dennis Prager’s surprise admission, to Daniel Greenfield’s Leftist exposé, and more — there’s lots of brilliance here.
Trump’s genius approach to Jay-Z’s “superbug” attack. I am getting wise to the ways of Trump. That’s why I know that the war into which he’s entered with Jay-Z is one of his more brilliant moments. I’m sure, without looking, that some “higher minded” #NeverTrumpers are horrified that, after Jay-Z insulted him, Trump decided to go on the attack. I, on the other hand, am delighted. Let me go back to the beginning to explain why.
First, you might want to know who Jay-Z is. He’s a rapper, he’s black, he’s married to super star Beyoncé, and he’s sold more than 100 million records. He’s big. Really, really big. His demographic, as a rapper, is young people, especially black young people. Jay-Z’s real name is Shawn Corey Carter, so his twitter handle is Mr. Carter (@S_C). He has 3.34 million followers, at least some of whom are not bots.
Jay-Z was a guest on Van Jones’s new CNN show. Van Jones is a self-admitted black communist who got a gig in the Obama administration. When that ended, he found his natural home at CNN. When Van Jones contended that Trump called “every African country” a “shithole” (something Trump and others at the meeting strongly contest), and then asked his guest Jay-Z to comment, Jay-Z had this to say:
You don’t take the trash out, you keep spraying whatever over it to make it acceptable. As those things grow, you create a superbug. And then now we have Donald Trump, the superbug.
George W. Bush would have ignored that insult in dignified silence. Trump is smarter than George W. Bush. He sent out this tweet:
Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018
The only thing that would have made that tweet better is if Trump had included Jay-Z’s twitter name it to ensure that the tweet hit Jay-Z’s feed. But maybe that would have been too obvious.
As it is, though, one can make a reasonable guess that some part of Jay-Z’s 3.3 million Twitter followers are being exposed for the first time to data that the MSM hoped would never enter their worlds. Moreover, the media, because it’s as incapable of resisting Trump’s tasty treats as a mouse is incapable of resisting cheese in a snap trap, is now headlining black unemployment:
Dig down into that article, and you will discover that, despite the headline, CNN is scared to touch Trump’s data point . . . because it cannot. There’s no mention in the article of actual employment rates.
The reality, however, is that anyone with a smidgen of curiosity, especially those aching to prove Trump wrong, will search up “black unemployment,” and come with data like this:
Unemployment among black workers is at its lowest since at least the early 1970s, when the government began tracking the data.
The black unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in December was the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking it in 1972, a year in which the rate ranged from 11.2 percent to 9.4 percent. In the 45 years the data has been tracked, the unemployment rate for black or African-American workers aged 16 years and older has never fallen below 7 percent.
Trump is rapidly proving himself to be the smartest president in my lifetime, perhaps in the last 100 years, perhaps ever. Thanks to Van Jones (communist) and Jay-Z (shallow thinker), with one tweet Trump brought to an otherwise misinformed public accurate data about something that’s very important. Bravo, Mr. President! Bravo!
If the media covered abortion the way it does guns. A while back, Progressive women got a meme going saying that guns should be subject to the same strictures as abortion. It was, in a word, stupid, especially because it ignored entirely the Second Amendment. MRCTV came back with something much more clever: what if the media covered abortions as they cover guns?
And as a bonus, what if we spoke about abortion as the media speaks about young people whose parents bring them to America illegally?
Dennis Prager also realizes Trump’s genius. I love Dennis Prager. He can be a bit pedantic, but he is always wise. It is he who says “I prefer clarity to agreement,” which is a wonderful way to expose both surprise agreements and actual schisms, not to mention arguing about the real issue, not fake ones.
Prager also says that, if someone says mean and stupid things, but does good and wise things, he measures them by their acts, not their words. Like Queen Elizabeth, he will not make windows into men’s souls.
Given Prager’s intellectual honesty, his recognition that Trump is a great man means something. The #NeverTrumpers can continue to obsess about Trump’s style, but Prager focuses on what’s really important:
I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t understand them. I said, “Are you not aware of what he said about John McCain? Isn’t that enough to disqualify the guy?” They perceived in him what I did not perceive in him, that these over-the-top statements – as objectionable as the statements themselves may be, and none of them defended the statements – nevertheless, what they perceived was accurate: a man who doesn’t give a damn about what the press says about him. That is the only way to govern. It is the only way to advance the principles of conservatism in the United States is to not give a damn.
We are not heading for civil war; we are in a civil war. Daniel Greenfield is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, possibly the smartest person I’ve ever met. His fund of knowledge, coupled with his unusual intellectual clarity, gives him insights into deep issues that are unparalleled and an ability to express those insights in terms people can understand.
The latest example of Greenfield’s analytical genius, which every American should either watch or read, is the speech he gave in South Carolina to a Tea Party convention. Here’s the video. If you prefer reading, Greenfield has included a transcript at his site.
Greenfield’s point is not that Leftists are sore losers. His point is that, not matter an election’s ostensible outcome, Leftists always win by co-opting whatever institutions are necessary to deny conservative the fruits of their victories. This has gone on for decades, but Trump’s unexpected victory has brought the battle into the open. It is a brilliant speech and an important one.
A bumper sticker for the immigration battle: “America used to invite makers; now she suffers an invasion of takers.”
Think about it: we used to get the innovators, the strivers, the hard workers, the ones yearning to make their way in the world, far from the stifling orthodoxies and laws of their home countries. Now, against our will, we find ourselves flooded with people from fundamentally socialist backgrounds who, like locusts, are looking for greener pastures to strip bare.
People on my real-me have accused me of being a racist because I’m opposed to illegal immigration. My response is that I’m just as loath to take in illegal Scandinavians as I am illegal Latin Americans. I don’t like illegal immigration.
More than that, I’d be deeply suspicious of taking in legal Scandinavians too, unless they can provide a record of objecting to the socialist mentality endemic in their lands. I want workers, strivers, and immigrants, not takers, regardless of race, color, creed, country of national origin, etc.
Just remember: You can always tell it’s a conspiracy when the Jews appear in it. How do we know that the Russia, Russia, Russia thing is a conspiracy, not a reality? Because Glenn Simpson and his ilk (and remember, Leftist packs are always “ilks”), couldn’t stop themselves from bringing the Jews into it. Jews showed up in the Steele brief, probably because Simpson put them there. Jews showed up in a bizarre Politico article trying to link religious Chabadniks to some vast Russian conspiracy. And Jews keep walking around in the show. Lee Smith elaborates:
Conspiracy theories are a kind of mental virus that posits a single, malevolent prime mover—Vladimir Putin, the Jews, Freemasons, Illuminati—for rationally grounded and objectively verifiable assessments of cause and effect. Societies that indulge in conspiracy theories are sick places, whose citizen-victims dwell in a kind of demented fantasyland where everything that goes wrong is the work of demons, whose existence is so obvious that very little in the way of concrete proof of their malevolent existence is needed to require the most drastic remedies. Living inside a conspiracy theorist’s head is hellish, which seems like a fair description of the effect that Glenn Simpson’s famous dossier, which FBI director James Comey called “salacious and unverified,” has had on the American public sphere.
But Simpson, as a conspiracy theorist, believes that his conspiracy theories are true. He is “shocked” because he can barely believe the scope and size of the network of possible Trump-Russia co-conspirators that his investigations uncovered. There are so many Russian names in Simpson’s testimony—Russian mobsters, Russian bankers, Russian officials, Russian businessmen, filling his imagination like the characters in a party scene from Anna Karenina. Naturally, there are Russian women, too, like the “big Trump fan in Russia” who enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C., “which I assume gets you a visa,” says Simpson. “I think she’s suspicious.”
[snip]
What this tells Simpson is that the Russians are trying to infiltrate the NRA as well as other conservative organizations that have an important place in American society, like Chabad, the outreach arm of the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement. After all, Chabad has a presence all over the world, including Moscow, where Putin lives, and New York City, where Trump is from. The Jewish diaspora, says Simpson, “appears to be a very interesting route for the Russians.”
Indeed, according to the dossier that Simpson produced, Russian intelligence, the FSB, was approaching “U.S. citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin on business trips to Russia” as potential foreign agents. “In one case,” reads the dossier, “a U.S. citizen of Russian ethnicity had been visiting Moscow to attract investors in his new information technology program. The FSB clearly knew this and had offered to provide seed capital to this person in return for them being able to access and modify his IP, with a view to targeting priority foreign targets by planting a Trojan virus in the software.”
So we are to assume that in exchange for cash, Jews were helping to spy on America.
Is it surprising that Russiagate would incorporate Jews into its narrative? No. There was zero chance that a conspiracy theorist like Simpson would not find a role for the Jews in his grand Trump-Russia collusion narrative. A conspiracy theory without an international cabal of un-rooted cosmopolitans exerting their influence on finance and politics in whatever society they inhabit would be like writing a symphony without a string section. You could do it, but why bother? At least one publication paid full price for orchestra seats.
Read the whole thing — and then mentally congratulate Tablet Magazine, a basically Leftist Jewish publication for giving a seat at the table to Lee Smith.
The time factor of energy. We know that fossil fuel saves labor. And we know that, when it comes to travel, it saves time. Indeed, in the old days, before airports became hellish time-suckers, airplanes were a fossil fuel usage that saved time on trips that could be driven in ten hours or less. Now, not so much.
We don’t often think, though, about the fact that fossil fuel use, in addition to saving backbreaking labor, also saves time when it comes to household tasks. My low-energy consumption, low water usage dishwasher takes four hours to wash a load of dishes. My energy and water efficient washing machine takes over an hour to do a load of laundry.
Because I have solar panels, meaning I pay extra for energy during ordinary weekday hours, I do all of my laundry on the weekends — which means that I spend all day Saturday washing and drying clothes. You know who also used to spend an entire day a week doing the family laundry? Women in a pre-industrial time, before they had washers and dryers. The labor is minimal, but the time-consumption is ridiculous.
