Bookworm Beat 11/20/18 — some quick links

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You’ll find it all in this Bookworm Beat: Airbnb, antisemitism, Women’s March madness, Obama madness, gender madness, climate madness, and so much more.

Bookworm Beat Obama Brennan double standards insane leftistsMy children are grown and off to college, but some days they still need their mother. I’ve spent quite some time on the phone today with both of them, which limited blogging. Here are some interesting links, though. I’m racing the clock for this post, so I won’t even make a pretense of proofreading. I apologize in advance for typos and incoherent sentences.

I’m boycotting Airbnb. I have never yet used Airbnb, because I don’t trust its quality control, but now I can assure you that I never will use Airbnb:

Airbnb has fueled the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement by announcing on Monday that it will cease to list Israeli homes in the West Bank.

In singling out Jewish West Bank homes for boycott, Airbnb’s disgraceful decision not only promotes anti-Israel charges but will work to further strengthen Palestinian intransigence and the larger war to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Airbnb said the company “concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

It made the decision after a fierce campaign waged against Airbnb by the extremist BDS movement and its anti-Israel allies.

In its statement, Airbnb refers to the West Bank, areas where Jews have had an historic presence for thousands of years, as “occupied territories,” implying that Israel stole the land from the Palestinians.

Israel opposes the “occupied” label, and has referred to the land in international forums as disputed. The framework for all previous peace proposals (each of which was rejected by the Palestinian Authority) never called for an entire Israeli evacuation from the West Bank.

Palestinians never had a state in the West Bank and they are not legally recognized as the undisputed authorities in those areas. Jordan illegally occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967.

I urge you to read the entire article from which I’ve quoted, because it explains how ignorant Airbnb is when it comes to supporting the BDS movement. Airbnb, of course, is not boycotting any other homes in disputed territories around the world. Only the Jewish ones:

Airbnb antisemitism bds

Smells like antisemitic hypocrisy to me.

Just remember — Jews were in Israel centuries (indeed, millennia) before the imperialist, conquering Arab colonists came there, bringing death and slavery in their wake:

More stunning scenes have been uncovered at the site of a fifth-century synagogue in Israel, where archaeologists have been excavating an ornate mosaic floor since 2012.

The discoveries at Huqoq, a site three miles west of the Sea of Galilee, are especially striking due to the unusual subject matter depicted on the floor of the synagogue, says excavation director Jodi Magness of UNC Chapel Hill.

Along with images from biblical stories such as Noah’s Ark, Moses’ spies, and the parting of the Red Sea—which are rare or even unattested in other synagogues of the period—the mosaic depicts non-biblical details including cupids, classical theater masks, and an enigmatic scene of two powerful men accompanied by soldiers and battle elephants—the first non-Biblical scene ever found in a synagogue and one that Magness believes may depict Alexander the Great.

Speaking of antisemitism, the pussy hat is dying. Gosh, but it’s good to see crazy Leftists turn on each other. Here’s what Teresa Shook, one of the March’s founders had to say:

I’m glad she’s seen the light on antisemitism, but thinking back to the insanity and hatred of the women’s march, I still think she’s a stupid cow and deserves all bad things.

And here’s what the antisemites fired back:

Women's March supports antisemitism

My take is that both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were awful, hate-filled people. The tragedy of Russia was that both sides couldn’t lose simultaneously. It will be the saving of America if the entire Women’s March movement, both the antisemitic and the merely insane swirl down the drain together.

Nature Magazine has abandoned science entirely. I seem to remember a time in the not too distant past when Nature Magazine was actually a reputable publication. Those days are gone:

Nature Magazine gender madness

Do I need to add anything? I don’t think so. If you’re still sane, you’ll understand that this represents 50 years of non-stop Leftist influence in American education. If you’re insane after 50 years of non-stop Leftist influence in American education, you’ll be incapable of realizing that Nature Magazine has departed its moorings.

Jim Acosta is released into his new quality-controlled environment. This just made me laugh:

Barack Obama hates you; he really hates you. I know Obama was trying to attack Trump, but either because he’s an idiot or because the Freudian truth leaked out, he ended up attacking half of Americans. Both explanations are equally possible:

Also, considering how he claims all these things were so “easy” to do, it’s impressive that he didn’t accomplish a damn one of them!

Aside from being a nasty little man, I’m always impressed by how incoherent and boring he is once he’s on a stage without a TelePrompter.

Americans are good people. Notwithstanding Obama’s insistence that Americans are evil, selfish, toxic, racist, sexist, etc.-ist people. Fortunately, many Americans aren’t paying attention:

Dane Cummings was driving his garbage truck on his normal route in Magalia, California, on Thursday morning when a mandatory evacuation was issued for the area due to the rapidly spreading Camp Fire.

Cummings decided to go check on the elderly residents, and that’s when he saw Margaret Newsum, a 93-year-old whose home he has serviced for eight years, out on her front lawn.

“I decided that we were gonna get her out of there,” Cummings told TODAY. “I don’t know that much about fires, but I knew if that fire came over that hill they were in trouble.”

Cummings, a waste management driver, knew that the 93-year-old typically had a caretaker staying with her. When he approached her, Newsum said the caretaker had gone home that morning.

That’s when Cummings decided he was going to get her to safety, as NBC News affiliate KCCI originally reported.

Newsum had made it to her lawn despite having broken her back eight months ago during a fall — she was determined to get the attention of someone that could help her evacuate.

“I am positive, and I knew I was going to get out of there,” Newsum told TODAY. “I didn’t know how, and here I got an angel driving this great big, green monster.”

Read the rest here to learn that there wasn’t just one angel involved in Newsum’s rescue.

“Horrible racists” try to block human caravan. Here’s a picture of one of those “horrible racists” — it’s the mayor of Tijuana who, along with a substantial number of Tijuana residents, is horrified by the effects of mass migrants making an illegal charge for the California border, only to get bogged down in a civilized city that fears it will be unable to retain that civilization in the face of migrant hordes:

Mayor of Tijuana Make Tijuana Great Again

Illegal aliens are expensive. Ignore the Left’s lies. Illegal aliens are expensive and you’re paying:

Current federal policy is to prohibit federal tax funding of health care to unauthorized immigrants through either Medicaid or Obamacare. Nevertheless, rough estimates suggest that the nation’s 3.9 million uninsured immigrants who are unauthorized likely receive about $4.6 billion in health services paid for by federal taxes, $2.8 billion in health services financed by state and local taxpayers, another $3.0 bankrolled through “cost-shifting” i.e., higher payments by insured patients to cover hospital uncompensated care losses, and roughly $1.5 billion in physician charity care. In addition to these amounts, unauthorized immigrants likely benefit from at least $0.9 billion in implicit federal subsidies due to the tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals and another $5.7 billion in tax expenditures from the employer tax exclusion.

All told, Americans cross-subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year. Of this total, federal taxpayers provided $11.2 billion in subsidized care to unauthorized immigrants in 2016.

I can’t imagine Bill de Blasio helping anyone on his own initiative. For de Blasio, New York’s openly Leftist mayor, it’s all government, all the time. I’m not making this up. It’s what he said himself:

Nature Magazine gender madness

If you’re wondering what it looks like when the de Blasio’s of the world get their hands on business, here’s a good example:

Also, just as a reminder, here’s someone who agreed with de Blasio:

Mussolini on the state as all powerful

You know what bad years in history had in common? Bad years in history had cold weather in common.

Take for example the years leading up to the Black Death, which killed roughly 1/3 – 1/2 of Europe’s and Asia’s populations. First there was a warming period that did wonders for crop yields, pushing people closer to wilderness areas and causing unprecedented population growth:

Sometime between 750 and 800, Europe entered the Little Optimum, a period of global warming. Across the continent, temperatures increased by an average of more than 1 degree Celsius, but, rather than producing catastrophe, as many current theorists of global warming predict, the warm weather produced abundance. England and Poland became wine-growing countries, and even the inhabitants of Greenland began experimenting with vineyards. More important , the warm weather turned marginal farmland into decent farmland, and decent farmland into good farmland. In the final centuries of Roman rule, crop yields had fallen to two and three to one—a yield represents the amount of seed harvested to the amount planted: a return so meager, the Roman agricultural writer Columella feared that the land had grown old. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as winters became milder and summers warmer and drier, European farms began to produce yields of five and six to one, unprecedented by medieval standards. (Quoting John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time.)

By the 13th century, though, the medieval warming period was coming to an end. As Kelly explains at length in his wonderful, but distressing, book, the cooling meant that people started to  starve, thereby weakening their immune systems. Couple that with trade routes that pushed close to starving rodents that harbored plague in the Russian steppes and you had the perfect set-up for the greatest die-off in world history.

1816 wasn’t such a great year either. That’s when Mt. Tambora exploded. It was a very dirty volcano and essentially wiped out the sun for a growing season. In pre-modern times, that meant mass starvation as crops failed.

And now we’re told that the year 536 was a pretty lousy year too, complete with starvation and plague, again because of a dirty volcano that triggered global cooling:

In A.D. 536, Europe had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.

It started when a mysterious fog swept over the continent, veiling the sun in a blue haze and casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for 18 months. Falling temperatures ushered in the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years, crops failed from Ireland to China, and famine ran rampant. Those who endured the long, cold night faced even harsher times in the years to come; in A.D. 541, an outbreak of bubonic plague known as Justinian’s Plague scythed through the Mediterranean, killing up to 100 million people.

[snip]

When looking at samples dated to the spring of 536, the team found two microscopic shards of volcanic glass, which were later traced to volcanic rocks from Iceland. According to the researchers, these well-traveled shards are evidence of a massive volcanic eruption that spewed a monstrous plume of ash into the air over the Northern Hemisphere, riding the winds south to Europe and engulfing the sky for more than a year.

With the above in mind, when the Global Warming tinfoil hat brigade starts talking about all the terrible things that will come with global warming — bed wetting, voles, etc. — I’m thinking, “We can handle that.” Indeed, I’m also thinking, “We should be lucky enough to have a future of global warming not, as declining sun spots scarily predict, global cooling.”

Moreover,  I don’t buy into the “climate change caused the California fires” claim. California has always caught fire. In the old days, nobody lived in it so it didn’t matter. In the less old days, the government acted aggressively to cull dead trees and flammable debris near areas in which people lived. Now, lots of people live in California and, thanks to the environmentalists, the government is no longer taking any steps to keep fire at bay. That’s not climate change. That’s human behavior change.

I think Trump meant England when he referred to “shithole” countries. I used to live in Leeds when it was a tough Northern England town. In addition to having a significant Muslim population, both in Leeds itself and in the surrounding towns, it’s also got insane people in charge:

Lecturers have been banned from using capital letters when assigning work to students because it might upset them.

A memo sent out to staff at Leeds Trinity journalism department suggested using uppercase letters may ‘scare them into failure’.

It also suggested ways they could address their students, such as writing in a friendly tone and avoiding overbearing and negative language.

[snip]

The memo says: ‘Despite our best attempts to explain assessment tasks, any lack of clarity can generate anxiety and even discourage students from attempting the assessment at all.’

It also suggested that writing a word in capital letters could make the assignment seem more difficult and therefore worry the students, according to the Express.

Not only won’t there always be an England, there doesn’t deserve to be an England.

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