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The Bookworm Beat 9/28/16 — the Israel and Islam edition

September 28, 2016 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Bibi’s speech to the UN. Bibi Netanyahu gave an amazing speech to the UN in which, after cheerfully castigating the UN for its biased and reprehensible behavior, he equally cheerfully assured the UN that Israel is a thriving, dynamic culture making strong new alliances all over the world. You can watch the speech, which takes about 40 minutes or if you prefer reading here’s a link to the transcript:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The UN, begun as a moral force, has become a moral farce. So when it comes to Israel at the UN, you’d probably think nothing will ever change, right? Well think again. You see, everything will change and a lot sooner than you think. The change will happen in this hall, because back home, your governments are rapidly changing their attitudes towards Israel. And sooner or later, that’s going to change the way you vote on Israel at the UN.

More and more nations in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, more and more nations see Israel as a potent partner – a partner in fighting the terrorism of today, a partner in developing the technology of tomorrow.

Today Israel has diplomatic relations with over 160 countries. That’s nearly double the number that we had when I served here as Israel’s ambassador some 30 years ago. And those ties are getting broader and deeper every day. World leaders increasingly appreciate that Israel is a powerful country with one of the best intelligence services on earth. Because of our unmatched experience and proven capabilities in fighting terrorism, many of your governments seek our help in keeping your countries safe.

Obama, with his Leftist idea of historical determinism will discover sooner rather than later that his drive to abandon Israel and partner with Iran will be looked upon as one of the greatest mistakes, not just in American history, but in world history.

Abbas, of course, had to content himself with lies big and small when he spoke.

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The Bookworm Beat 9/21/16 — the “I’m mad as Hell” evening edition and open thread

September 21, 2016 by Bookworm 8 Comments

I can’t say too much lest I breach Little Bookworm’s privacy, but suffice it to say that, after only two weeks at her Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College, she has already taken a giant step in the direction of moronic, damaging Leftism. I have refrained from berating her because that would be counterproductive. Instead, I provided her with objective information about the direction she has taken and she, with all the confident arrogance of an uninformed youngster, has refused to reconsider. I’m not feeling the love today.

I hope blogging helps me vent my spleen. Otherwise, if you read tomorrow that a woman suffered a deadly attack of spontaneous combustion during the night . . . well, that just might be me.

Preachy Leftist “comedians” may be harming Hillary. Mr. Bookworm adored Jon Stewart and was endlessly certain that, if I just sat and watched for a while, I’d be riotously amused and return to the Democrat fold. His confidence in Stewart’s powers of persuasion was misplaced. I found Stewart intentionally both ill-informed and dishonest.

When Stewart resigned, Mr. Bookworm transferred his allegiance to John Oliver and Samantha Bee, both of whom are even harder Left than Stewart, and both of whom have the same shtick: They say something insulting about a Republican or conservative, following it with a strained analogy, and then pause for the adoring audience’s laughter. It’s like a call-and-repeat in the Church of Leftism.

Mr. Bookworm has suggested that I lack a sense of humor, which may well be true. I prefer a bit of wit and intelligence to flavor political insults, so I’m probably expecting too much from the current generation of humorists. I, on the other hand, have tried suggesting to him that these smug Leftist harridans simply aren’t funny.

Ross Douthat might agree with me on that last point. He also thinks that these cultural avatars, along with the Lefties on football teams and at award shows, have pushed themselves into such an extreme political corner that they’re leaving no room for Hillary Clinton to survive:

The culture industry has always tilted leftward, but the swing toward social liberalism among younger Americans and the simultaneous surge of activist energy on the left have created a new dynamic, in which areas once considered relatively apolitical now have (or are being pushed to have) an overtly left-wing party line.

[snip]

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

Isn’t that just delicious? All I can say is, from Douthat’s essay to God’s ear.

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The Bookworm Beat 9/21/2016 — the “hurry up” edition and open thread

September 21, 2016 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Trump has an ideology and it’s a good one. Trump has an actual plan that explains his appeal. How do I know this? Because, for unclear reasons, Politico.com decided to engage in actual journalism. Rather than viewing Trump as Satan in the Church of Leftism, Joshua Mitchell, a Georgetown professor looked at Trump’s actual platform and came up with some surprising conclusions.

It turns out that Trump is not Hitler reincarnated. Instead, he’s breaking the existing political paradigm and coming up with new ideas in American politics (although I view some of them as tried-and-true traditional ideas that worked well for everyone before the Democrats in the old South and the new Progressive party perverted them):

If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.
These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

Put that way, how could I not support Trump?

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The Bookworm Beat 9/13/16 — the “I feel deplorably faint” edition and open thread

September 12, 2016 by Bookworm 14 Comments

I’m going to divide this post into “Hillary stuff” and everything else. Let’s go to town and have fun.

Hillary stuff:

Ah, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.” It’s the gift that will keep giving and giving and giving. Scott Adams believes that the same people who feel guilty knocking her off their mental ballot just because she had the (ahem) “bad luck” to get pneumonia will grab onto the “deplorables” remark as the lifeline they need to vote against her. Since he’s been darn near psychic about everything else in this crazy election cycle, I’m inclined to believe he’s got a point.

Trust James Taranto to dig deep into what Hillary Clinton said. I love his observation about Hillary’s differing standards for Americans and illegal or potentially dangerous immigrants:

Apart from “half,” she stands behind every word she said on Friday, including these: “They are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

As Mollie Hemingway suggests, “They are irredeemable” is a strange thing for a professed Christian to say about anybody. Theology aside, it is a shocking thing for someone who aspires to the powers of the presidency to say about fellow Americans, even if she rightly thinks they hold deplorable views.

But according to Mrs. Clinton, “thankfully they are not America.” They are voting in an American election, which means by definition they are Americans. People beat up on Trump a while back for proposing an “ideological test” for naturalization. Here is Mrs. Clinton putting forth an ideological test for people who are already American citizens.

Assuming she makes it to the debate two weeks hence, a good question to ask her would be about the policy implications of all this. What if anything, as president, would she do about the “deplorables”?

David P. Goldman, one of the smartest, most objective conservative commentators around thinks that Hillary’s “deplorables” remark was the headshot that kills her campaign. From his keyboard to G*d’s ear, that’s all I can say.

What’s certain is that the Trump campaign is making hay out of the comment while it can:

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The 40th anniversary of the Raid on Entebbe

July 1, 2016 by Bookworm 9 Comments

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of Israel’s daring, and staggeringly successful, raid on Entebbe. It’s a simultaneously exciting and tragic story, and one that deserves to be remembered. This is a slightly edited version of a narrative I’ve published here before.

For those of you too young to remember, here is a short-ish version of the long and exciting story about the Entebbe raid. (I culled these facts from a much longer article by Maj. (Res.) Louis Williams, which I found once at the Israeli Defense Forces website, but can’t find now.)

It all started with the metal detector no one looked at. On June 27, 1976, as passengers in Athens boarded the already partially full Air France 139 flight to Paris, no one paid any attention to a young woman traveling on an Ecuadorian passport, a young blond man with a Peruvian passport, and two other men, one with Bahraini and the other with Kuwaiti papers. A little more on-the-job attention could have saved four lives and a world of trouble. It would later turn out that these four people were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Baader-Meinhof Gang and they were heavily armed.

The flight out of Athens began in ordinary enough fashion. It was a mid-day flight so, as soon as the plane was airborne, the flight attendants began bustling around, preparing lunch. The 246 passengers — 77 of whom were Israeli citizens — settled in to do what passengers do: read, sleep, and talk. Unfortunately, they had little time to engage in any of these ordinary activities. Within eight minutes of being airborne, the woman, who called herself Ortega; the blond man, who went by the name of Garcia, but was really Wilfried Boese; and their two Arab companions, sprang into action. Ortega, gun in hand, covered the first class compartment, the Arabs took over the coach compartment, and Garcia, who had both a revolver and a grenade, invaded the cockpit. Within minutes, they had secured the plane.

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After the Orlando shooting, Leftists again fail to read the handwriting on the wall

June 12, 2016 by Bookworm 44 Comments

Belshazzar was a great king who sneered at the Bible, partied decadently, and failed to read the handwriting on the wall when he might still have saved himself and his people.* His story is the story of the American Left.

For the entirely of the Obama presidency, the Left focuses obsessively on sex and drugs, gun control, and abandoning reason, whether this abandonment takes the form of their faith in the failed gods of climate change; their insistence that sex, which is embedded in our DNA, is a mere societal construct; or their refusal to recognize that there is an enemy massing at the gate. (Heck! Their chosen leader keeps inviting the enemy in, in ever greater numbers.)

Here’s what we know:

Islam is fanatically anti-gay:

This is what Muslims do to gays when they get the opportunity —

ISIS throws them off roofs:

Iran hangs them:

Saudi Arabia imprisons, beats, and executes gays. “Malaysian law currently provides for whipping and up to a 20-year prison sentence for homosexual acts involving either men or women.” Being gay in the Palestinian world is so dangerous that gay men routinely seek haven in Israel. Afghanistan imposes the death penalty for homosexuality. However, in a world where men can go throughout their lives without ever seeing any women except their mother, the Afghanis have added a sick twist: Sex with a beardless boy is not considered homosexuality, so child rape is normative and, indeed, subject to full societal approval.

That’s the Muslim culture — it’s sick, ugly, violent, and murderous.

And what do we know about Omar Mateen, the man responsible for shooting up an Orlando nightclub, killing 50 and wounding 53 members of the LGBT community? Well, we know a lot:

1. Mateen was an American-born Muslim.

2. His father ran for President of Afghanistan and strongly supported the Taliban.

3. Mateen opened the attack by hollering “Allahu Akbar,” the standard jihadist cry.

4. During the rampage, Mateen specifically called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS (see photos ISIS throwing gays off buildings, above).

5. During the same call, Mateen made known his support for the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon.

6. U.S. Security knew about Mateen’s Islamic loyalty, but beyond questioning him a few times, was passive. (Probably because the Obama administration’s top-down leadership makes it clear that law enforcement should not scrutinize Muslims.)

7. The evidence for his alleged non-Islamic instability is that his ex-wife says he was violent and beat her — which is unstable by American standards, but normative in Afghani Muslim culture.

So let’s put the pieces together: A culture that loathes gays; a culture that kills gays whenever it has the power to do so; and a man who comes from and swears allegiance to that culture and who, when he has the power to do so, kills gays. I think we’re on to something here. The problem is Islam.

For a few, brief hours this morning, the Leftists on my Facebook feed were mourning the dead and making tentative little comments in the direction of Islam maybe, just maybe, having a problem. Heck, over at Mediate (a Progressive outlet), Tommy Christopher temporarily took his blinders off entirely:

We don’t know much about the shooter yet, but let’s keep it real, folks, we know enough about him to know that maybe it’s time we take the politically correct gloves off and realize that maybe the people calling for a total ban on these people aren’t completely off-base. Just a temporary ban, until we can figure this out.

As a liberal, it’s hard for me to admit that maybe I’ve been wrong in supporting the sorts of half-measures that allowed this atrocity to take place, but freedom is important to me. But our weak-willed politicians have failed to keep us safe from these people, unwilling even to find abetter way to vet them, let alone to keep the most dangerous ones from slipping through. I’ve heard all of the arguments before, that not all of them are killers, but all of the killers seem to be them. Meanwhile, we have a president who refuses to even identify them by name.

The Constitution protects their most cherished practices, but it doesn’t, or it shouldn’t, protect this unmitigated slaughter. We shouldn’t need to infringe on the good ones to weed out the bad ones, we just need the good ones to be a little more cooperative. When was the last time you heard one of them denounce their own for this perversion of their beliefs? They act like this scourge has nothing to do with them, when clearly, this scourge emanates from within their ranks, and they actively oppose any effort to stem it. In fact, their perfect solution is to attract more converts.

After reading that, a friend and I were speaking and we thought/hoped that maybe those who died in Orlando were martyrs to a real cause — with that cause being the Left finally waking up to the reality, which is that the enemy is real, it is reading the Koran, and it wants to kill us.

I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Obama instantly put the blame where he feels it belongs to be — on Americans and their guns (emphasis mine):

We are still learning all the facts. This is an open investigation. We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer. The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism. And I’ve directed that we must spare no effort to determine what — if any — inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups. What is clear is that he was a person filled with hatred. Over the coming days, we’ll uncover why and how this happened, and we will go wherever the facts lead us.

[snip]

The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live. The place where they were attacked is more than a nightclub — it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.

[snip]

Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.

Boom!

First, no mention of Islam. Indeed, Obama questioned whether there even was an ideology (“if any”) driving the attack, despite the fact that the killer belongs to a religion that hates and kills gays, and swore fealty to the worst branch of that religion as he was slaughtering the innocents.

In Obama’s eyes, Islam will forever remain pure and peaceful. Indeed, Obama once said that the call to prayer is ““one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” This is the call to prayer, just so you can compare its prettiness to, say, bird calls, the wind in the trees, a loved one’s voice, a Beethoven concerto, or anything else you like.

Second, he makes it political: Gay nightclubs, he assures us, are about civil rights. Back in my youth in San Francisco, when I had a bunch of gay friends, I had the occasion to visit gay nightclubs with them. They are not venues for advocating for civil rights. They’re for dancing — great dancing — and anonymous gay sex.

Third, Obama makes the death about Americans — read: Republicans — and their love of guns. San Bernardino was a gun control failure. Orlando is a gun control failure. Apparently 9/11, during which no guns were used, was also a gun control failure. Because in Obama’s world, when it comes to Islam, it’s never about Islam; it’s always about destroying the Second Amendment.

Well, within minutes of Obama’s statements, my Progressive friends got their marching orders. Here’s a sampling of my feed:

You know what? These people are sick. And when I say “these people,” I’m not talking about murderous Muslims, I’m talking about brain-dead Progressives. They worship multiple false idols. (Speaking of which, Planned Parenthood came out strongly against murdering innocents. Really, it did:

The handwriting is on the wall in letters big enough to be seen from outer space and they witter on about guns. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of them that if one or more of the people in the nightclub had also been armed, there’s a real possibility that they could have stopped the shooter when the number of victims was still in the single digits. That’s what happened in Israel when it relaxed its strict gun laws in the face of Muslim machine gun attacks.

How many more conservatives and others who recognize the threat from Islam are going to have to die because of this blind stupidity? And honestly, as long as they’re shouting for gun control, not Muslim control, I don’t give a flying fuck how many more gun control Leftists die. They deserve to be the first sacrifices on their own insane, blood-drenched altar.

In the coming election, as between Trump and Hillary (and no, neither Scott Walker nor Mitt Romney, nor anyone else, will get drafted at the convention), I’m voting for Trump and wish I could vote twice. Hillary is the queen of gun control and the friend of every Muslim, from her aide Huma Abedin (a true daughter of the Muslim Brotherhood), to all the Saudis** and Iranians whose backsides she’s kissed over the years in exchange for their money. Trump, whatever else his other issues, has the raw courage to state loudly and brutally that we have a problem with Islam, because Islam has a problem with us.

So ask yourself: Do you really want this woman in the White House?

Hillary getting friendly with Yassir Arafat’s wife, Suha

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* 1 Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. 2 Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein. 3 Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. 4 They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. 5 In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. *** 24 Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. 25 And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. 26 This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. 27 TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. 28 PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians. 29 Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. 30 In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. (From The Book of Daniel, Chapter 5, King James Edition.)

** And yes, I know that the Saudis, terrified by the Iranian threat, are drawing closer to Israel, but that does not erase the fact that it is their money that funded the Sunni Wahabbism that underlies so much of the Muslim world’s fanaticism today. Israel is making common cause with Saudi Arabia because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Hillary is making common cause with a country that bans all religions but Islam, cuts of thieves hands, gives its beheaders full-time work, censors all free political speech, subordinates women, and kills or tortures cause because . . . money.

***

For more of my thoughts on the incalculable benefits of our Second Amendment, complete with actual facts and real arguments, please think about buying my latest ebook, Our Second Amendment Rights In Ten Essays

The Bookworm Beat 5/26/16 — the “day after hump day” edition

May 26, 2016 by Bookworm 16 Comments

The migraine is fading, helped by a surprise three-hour nap, and my energy is returning. Yay!!! Now I can blog:

Was losing good for Ted Cruz? I was really in it to win it for Ted Cruz. I continue to think he is the most principled conservative in American politics. But was that principled stand his Achilles heel? Peter Weber argues that, if nominated, Ted Cruz had only two choices, neither good: Be principled and lose, or abandon his principles . . . and still lose, because then he wouldn’t be Ted Cruz.

Me? I still would have preferred Ted Cruz who actually is what Trump pretends to be — a game changer destroying the entrenched Washington way of doing things.

The empty Palestinian museum is an apt metaphor for the Palestinian cause. Daniel Greenfield finds a useful metaphor in the expensive, empty building meant to commemorate the “Palestinian” people:

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The Bookworm Beat 5/25/16 — the “damn migraines” edition and open thread

May 25, 2016 by Bookworm 3 Comments

Thankfully, it’s not the kind of migraine that has me rushed off to the ER, or that sees me sunken into abject misery in a darkened room. I’m just lethargic, hence the fact that this Open Thread opened at almost 7 p.m. Pacific Time. Still, migraine or not, I’ve got good stuff to share, and if it’s too late for you to read tonight it will still be good tomorrow:

American colleges — un-educating our children. Or is it “dis-educating?” I really don’t know because we in America have never before had an educational system that strips kids of knowledge and analytical abilities. I have a few posts I want to share with you on that point. The first looks right into the dark heart of the new academic methodology, which claims to teach kids “critical thinking” but, instead, teaches them emotional reaction and group thinking as a substitute for actual analysis and thought.

The second is an article you may already have seen floating around the internet today. Written by Nathan Heller at The New Yorker, it takes a sympathetic look at activist students attending Oberlin. Sympathetic, though, should not be confused with appealing. These are extremely damaged young people and a sympathetic look doesn’t make them any more pleasant. His special focus is on those students who can claim some victim identity status, whether racial, gender mixed-up, handicapped, or anything else that isn’t a white, heteronormative cisgendered male.

Heller has an interesting observation about the bind the universities have created for these students thanks to their obsessive focus on diversity combined with their desired end-product of sameness:

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The Bookworm Beat 5/24/16 — the “world keeps turning” edition and open thread

May 24, 2016 by Bookworm 1 Comment

I’ve switched migraine medicines and have been a little limp and dazed, but the migraines are passing and my energy is returning — so what better thing to do than write a round-up?

No, more Muslims will not save us from the ones we already have. Daniel Greenfield takes up the challenge of those (including Petraeus) who claim that the only way to save ourselves from the bad Muslims who are already here is to import still more Muslims:

Muslim immigration isn’t a solution. It’s a problem posing as a solution. And we are told that we need to make the problem bigger in order to solve it. Muslim immigration has yet to reduce terrorism in any country. The increase in Muslim populations has not made Europe any safer. On the contrary, it has increased the risk of terrorism. The same is also true in Africa, Asia and across the Middle East.

Debunking yet another Palestinian lie. Palestinians claim that they hate Israelis as imperialists because the latter forcibly occupied Palestinian land after the Six Day War. Michael Freund debunks this completely by pointing out that, in 1965, Levi Eshkol, Israel’s third prime minister, offered the Arabs a comprehensive peace plan that would have given them everything they wanted — everything, that is, but the Jews voluntarily walking into the Mediterranean to commit genocide against themselves. The Arabs, naturally, refused.

By the way, events in 1967 are very important to the Palestinian narrative. Claiming that the Jews stole their land and subjugated their people to a foreign occupation is how you get pig ignorant people to sign on to your murderous agenda. And by pig ignorant, I’m not exaggerating, I’m probably being too nice:

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The Bookworm Beat 5/13/16 — the “to Trump or not to Trump” edition and open thread

May 13, 2016 by Bookworm 17 Comments

I’ll be away all day tomorrow, first doing an activity with the kids, and then listening to this year’s best a cappella groups (although this wonderful group from Israel won’t be there). I therefore hope that this post gives you lots of interesting stuff to read on Saturday.

Pro-Trump? Anti-Trump? Pro-GOP? Anti-GOP? Pro-Conservative? Anti-Conservative? Who the heck knows anymore? Trump’s ascendancy has caused normally staid, solid, and scholarly conservatives to become wildly partisan for or against Trump.

I was listening to someone explain a seizure yesterday, and he described it as all the neurons firing simultaneously and randomly. American conservatives are having a seizure.

Anyway, I thought I’d consolidate in one place some of the differing viewpoints about Trump and about how best to serve America over the long haul. As you know, my hot buttons are the Supreme Court; the Second Amendment; Israel’s security, because it’s the right thing to do and because Israel is the world’s “canary in a coal mine”; and naming and then fighting the evil that is fundamentalist, radical Islam. With those hot buttons front and center, I’ve switched from #NeverTrump, which was my position when the primaries were contested, to #NeverHillary.

My dream candidate is, and has been since 2013, Ted Cruz, but that dream is dashed. Here, in reality-land, I believe that the Republican party is dead whether or not Trump wins, and that conservativism needs to be re-taught to Americans from the ground up, just as they were taught Leftism from the ground up over the past 40 years, with the Leftist takeover of American education, news, and entertainment. If Hillary gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, destroy the Second Amendment, abandon Israel, and take policy advice from the Muslim Brotherhood figures who surround her (and even sleep with her for alleged health reasons) I think America will be too destroyed ever to rebuild.

I’ve assembled here a good collection of pro and con posts about Trump’s candidacy. I have no idea if reading all of them will clarify things for you or further confuse you, but they are all interesting:

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The Bookworm Beat 4/21/16 — a round-up and open thread

April 21, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

My take on the decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 in place of Andrew Jackson? I find all this change and revisionism both silly and expensive but, having said that, here’s my position: They’re replacing the racist, slave-supporting, Indian-killing founder of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Republican black woman — what’s to dislike? I think it’s great. And now on to the collected news of the day.

Blame Democrats for today’s nasty politics. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business. After all, the people playing aren’t just winning cupcakes; they’re winning power. Nevertheless, for most of America’s history, there’s been a tacit agreement to conduct politics in a civil manner — fight hard, but attack your opponent’s politics, not his person. This year, that unwritten rule has vanished. One can point fingers at specifically nasty politicians, but the real story isn’t that nasty people do nasty things; instead, it’s that the American public is willing to accept that behavior. Andrew Klavan blames the Left for this cultural degradation:

As a proud right-winger, I’m appalled and disgusted by Donald Trump. Nonetheless, I feel a certain schadenfreudean glee at watching leftists reel in horror at his unbridled incivility. They truly don’t seem to realize: he is only the loud and manifest avatar of their own silent and invisible nastiness. In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are.

American immobility. I’ve commented multiple times about the fact that Americans are less willing to relocate than they once were. The entire essence of America for several hundred years was people’s willingness to leave their homes, whether in the old country or the new, and to head south, east, north, or west in search of better opportunities.

Today, though, the combination of being weighted down by possessions (even the poor today own more than all but the rich owned in the past) and having welfare to turn to (no matter how minimal that welfare is) means that people in economically dead areas can stick around. It’s not a nice life, but it’s the life they know, and they can always make themselves feel better about things with a bit of meth or heroin.

Kevin Williamson got a lot of flak for saying that we as a nation need to stop expending energy and money on dying communities and should, instead, focus on the vital communities. Obviously, I agree. Now, Williamson, in the face of that flak, has doubled down and I still agree:

My answer is that if there’s nothing for you in Garbutt but penury, dysfunction, and addiction, then get the hell out. If that means that communities in upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or west Texas die, so what? If that’s all they have to offer, then they have it coming.

Mixed in with that common sense you’ll find some hard-hitting attacks on those who challenged Williamson. And I still agree with him.

The bottom line is that,while dying towns are sad and forcing people to leave their roots is sad too, at a societal level, that’s not a reason to keep functionally dead towns on taxpayer-funded life support.

(Incidentally, the same goes for Europe, which in its effort to preserve its past has calcified, making it less of a charming place, and more of a bizarre and frequently unpleasant place. I totally understood what Robert Avrech’s friend was talking about when he said that Eastern Europe, even without the Soviets, is “oppressive.”)

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The Bookworm Beat 4/18/16 — the “tax day” edition and open thread

April 18, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

My little writing lady is paying the IRS today, which is why she looks sad.

My little lady is paying the IRS today, which is why she looks so sad.

Yes, it’s tax day, and what better day could there be to talk about all the distressing, expensive, and scary foolishness in the world?

Ripping off taxpayers with climate change craziness. Today has been a “suffer the climate change” day for me, so it’s appropriate to open with a riff about California’s infamous — and incredibly expensive — high-speed train to nowhere. The Independent Institute, a great libertarian think-tank located right here in the Bay Area, has this to say:

California’s “bullet train” is nowhere near completion, but already the high-speed rail system is taking the state’s voters and taxpayers for a ride. The gulf between the glowing promise and the gloomy reality is gargantuan. For this reason, the agency that manages the voter-approved project, which lacks transparency but not arrogance, has just won the California Golden Fleece Award, a prize Independent Institute gives each quarter to a state or local agency, official, or program guilty of egregiously fleecing taxpayers, consumers, and/or businesses.

[snip]

When voters approved a $9.95 billion bond measure in 2008 to help fund a high-speed bullet train connecting the San Francisco Bay Area with Southern California, they were promised nonstop service from S.F. to L.A. in 2 hours and 40 minutes, at a total cost of $45 billion—all without taxpayer subsidies. Since then the California High-Speed Rail Authority has planned on dropping nonstop service, changing to non-dedicated tracks, and raising the travel time to almost four hours—changes that would cut ridership and revenue while raising total costs, now estimated at $64 billion.

Read more here and do think about subscribing to the Independent Institute’s newsletter.

And while I’m on the subject of climate change. A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a bunch of kids can continue their climate change lawsuit against the United States government and the Fossil Fuel Industry. If this insanity is not nipped in the bud, the Fossil Fuel Industry will be bankrupted, and all of us will be re-living the wonders of the pre-industrial era, complete with windmill power, Hobbesian mass starvation, and life expectancies in the 30s.

The gift of an “imperfect” child. This segment probably deserves its own post, but I’ll try to pack it in here. I was in a restaurant the other day and saw something one never sees any more in Marin, or anywhere in the Bay Area for that matter: a young child who had clearly been born with Down Syndrome.

There are certainly older people around with Down Syndrome. That the young people are missing isn’t because they’re being cured; it’s because, thanks to amniocentesis testing, they’re being destroyed in utero.

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