Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Operation Encore: Veterans making beautiful music together

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I wish that Operation Encore, a group that helps veterans make music, had been around in my Dad’s time, for I think it would have made him happy.

Operation Encore

Image credit: Screen grab from Operation Encore donor page

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a very creative – and I mean that word literally – a very creative outreach program for veterans. It’s called Operation Encore. I could make a total hash trying to explain the concept to you, but why would I do that when Operation Encore has a perfectly good description of its purpose?

Operation Encore is a non-profit veterans organization that provides opportunities for veteran and active duty singer-songwriters and musicians to take their music to the next level through artist development, professional recording, and industry-focused educational services.  We seek out talent from across the military and veteran communities to produce and highlight their original music and provide opportunities to showcase their talents and advance their careers.  OE has been featured on numerous print, television, and radio media outlets and has played live shows across the country and overseas.  As we advance the careers of our artists, we also help bridge the gap between the public perception of veterans and reality by using the powerful medium of their original music.

[Read more…]

Women in combat and The Three Ps — peeing, periods, and pregnancy

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Women in combat isn’t bad only because of physical stamina and unit cohesion issues. The Three Ps (peeing, periods, and pregnancy) also militate against it.

Women in combatHeather MacDonald, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant conservative writers and thinkers around, has written about the military’s decision, based upon Obama administration dictates, to water down physical standards to allow women to serve in combat units. The article is behind a pay wall at the Wall Street Journal, but you might be able to access it through Outline.*

MacDonald begins by reminding readers that the Marine Corps did a lengthy study in 2015 that eventually revealed what any sentient being already knows: women do not have the same abilities as men and, most specifically, they lack those physical abilities that serve best in combat situations:

The all-male teams greatly outperformed the integrated teams, whether on shooting, surmounting obstacles or evacuating casualties. Female Marines were injured at more than six times the rate of men during preliminary training—unsurprising, since men’s higher testosterone levels produce stronger bones and muscles. Even the fittest women (which the study participants were) must work at maximal physical capacity when carrying a 100-pound pack or repeatedly loading heavy shells into a cannon.

Leftists, of course, never allow facts to interfere with or, God forbid, override theory. That’s why Ash Carter, who was Obama’s Secretary of Defense (and who was a lifelong desk jockey who never served in the military), nevertheless went ahead and ordered that the U.S. military open combat roles to women.

Carter further mandated that the military create “gender neutral” standards for admission to combat units. The only way to do this, of course, was for the military to lower standards to ensure that some visible percentage of women could qualify for combat units.** For the Marines, that meant doing away with the requirement that combatants be able to carry their own equipment. MacDonald notes that “The weapons-company hike during the IOC is now ‘gender neutral,’ meaning that officers can hand their pack to a buddy if they get tired, rather than carrying it for the course’s full 10 miles.”

Trying to force women into combat units hasn’t just downgraded combat troops’ physical military readiness. Adding women to the mix has also interfered with discipline and morale:

A Marine commander who served in Afghanistan described to me how the arrival of an all-female team tasked with reaching out to local women affected discipline on his forward operating base. Until that point, rigorous discipline had been the norm. But when four women—three service members and a translator—arrived, the post’s atmosphere changed overnight from a “stern, businesslike place to that of an eighth-grade dance.” The officer walked into a common room one day to find the women clustered in the center. They were surrounded by eager male Marines, one of whom was doing a handstand.

Another Marine officer, who was stationed on a Navy ship after 9/11, told me that a female officer had regular trysts with an enlisted sailor in the engine room. Marine Cpl. Remedios Cruz, one of the first women to join the infantry, was discharged late last year after admitting to a sexual relationship with a male subordinate. Army Sgt. First Class Chase Usher was relieved of his leadership position for a consensual relationship with a female soldier that began almost immediately after she arrived at his newly gender-integrated unit in Fort Bragg, N.C.

After describing problems so obvious that any fifth grader could have predicted them, but that still managed to elude the best social justice warrior minds both in and out of the military, MacDonald chastises the Trump administration for not withdrawing from this misguided policy. She points out that, while Trump challenged the effort to put transgender individuals (who have a 40% suicide rate, both before and after medical intervention) into the military, he did so on the narrow ground that taxpayers shouldn’t be stuck with the cost of their sex mutilation surgeries. MacDonald argues that “those costs are minute compared with the future medical bills for women’s combat-battered bodies. And women pose a far greater challenge to combat-unit cohesion than do transgender troops, because of their numbers and the nature of sexual attraction.”

There’s more in MacDonald’s excellent article, but I have a few points of my own to make. These points refine on a post I wrote six years ago, when Leon Panetta greenlighted lifting the ban on women in combat. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/5/18 — the American Left’s fascism

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Taking a hard look at the American Left’s fascism (its silencing speech, antisemitism, and moral depravity), with room for some fun and uplifting news too.

Bookworm Beat Woman Writing American Left's fascismThe Flynn sentencing memo shows collusion. No, I haven’t gone crazy. Instead, I agree with Joel Pollak, who says the memo highlights that the real collusion, which took place between the media, the Deep State, and the Obama administration:

In fact, the most explosive piece of information in the sentencing document is not about collusion with Russians, but about the collusion between the media, the intelligence services, and the outgoing members of the Obama administration.

The document begins its recitation of Flynn’s offenses by citing information that had appeared in the Washington Post from a leaked, classified surveillance transcript in which Flynn’s name had been “unmasked”:

Days prior to the FBI’s interview of the defendant, the Washington Post had published a story alleging that he had spoken with Russia’s ambassador to the United States on December 29, 2016, the day the United States announced sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to that government’s actions intended to interfere with the 2016 election (collectively, “sanctions”). See David Ignatius, Why did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s hacking?, WASH. POST (Jan. 12, 2017).

That information, the document suggests, led the FBI to interview Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017 — the conversation in which he did not (according to Comey) lie to them, but which landed him in trouble.

The government had the surveillance transcripts, and it knew what Flynn had told the Russian ambassador. But the Post‘s intervention was crucial in setting the trap in which to ensnare Flynn and turn him into a government witness.

Mueller’s sentencing document does not mention the fact that the information published in the Post was illegally leaked to the press by the intelligence services. And the reason that happened was that the outgoing Obama administration changed the rules on the sharing of classified surveillance among government agencies, weakening privacy protections, probably intending that such information be more difficult to keep secret, and easier to leak.

Moreover, someone in the Obama administration — we do not yet know who, though it had to be someone senior  — “unmasked” Flynn’s name to make sure he was exposed.

So while we do not yet know Mueller’s next moves, what the Flynn sentencing document reinforces is the that the Russia collusion investigation was tainted from the start by a crime committed against Flynn himself — with the collusion of the media, the deep state, and Obama’s loyalists.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Weingarten reminds us, again, that while Inspector Bob “Javert” Mueller took Flynn down for unintentionally lying about something he’d forgotten, which the FBI knew because of illegally unmasking, people guilty of massive, intentional perjury go completely free. After detailing how Clapper blatantly lied to Congress with no repercussions, as compared to the full-bore attack against Flynn, Weingarten discusses D.C. perjury: [Read more…]

Did I ever tell you about the openly gay drag queen in today’s Navy?

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It’s not your father’s Navy. Thanks to Obama’s order allowing openly gay service in the military, the USS Ronald Reagan now boasts its own drag queen.

Navy Harpy Daniels Drag Queen Joshua Kelley

Yeoman 3rd Class Joshua “Harpy Daniels” Kelley, drag queen and member of the U.S. Navy. Picture from Kelley’s Instagram.

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying of the British Navy “Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.” Here in America, jokesters in the other branches of the military have spent decades pretending that the Navy is the gayist branch of the services.

The reality, though, is that, up until recently, the Navy was about as “gay” as any other all-male enclave, which is to say that there were almost certainly covert homosexuals reveling in the company of men and that, as always happens when heterosexual men go too long without female companionship, things happened. When female companionship returns, things stopped happening. End of story.

That was then. This is today’s Navy, per an article in the Navy Times, the unofficial newspaper of the Naval Service (emphasis mine): [Read more…]

The 82nd Airborne’s “God Bless America” and a reverence for liberty

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The 82nd Airborne’s beautiful recording of Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, reminds us that reverence for liberty is at the heart of American patriotism.

82nd Airborne sings Irving Berlin's God Bless AmericaIrving Berlin’s family came to American in 1893, when he was five, leaving behind forever the ethnic, genocidal pogroms that destroyed his family home in Russia. His only memory of his time in Russia was of hiding in the woods as Russians torched his family home for the “crime of being Jewish.”

Berlin’s family settled in New York’s Lower East Side, which was then the most densely populated spot in the world. At 13, his formal education ended when Berlin became a singing waiter to help support his family. The rest, of course, is American musical history. I’ll just note here that he was one of the few members of the great American Songbook who wrote both music and lyrics.

I happen to love Irving Berlin’s music. The melodies are accessible, but not simplistic, and the lyrics are incredibly sophisticated, all the more so when you consider the “English-as-a-second-language” and “almost-no-formal-schooling” issues in Irving Berlin’s life. Look at the vocabulary choices and the internal rhyme schemes in this verse from Lazy:

Under that awning
They call the sky
Stretching and yawning
And let the world go drifting by

I want to peep
Through the deep
Tangled wildwood
Counting sheep
’til I sleep
Like a child would

With a great big valise full
Of books to read where it’s peaceful
While I’m
Killing time
Being lazy

By way of contrast, here are some lyrics from Child Gambino’s This is America: [Read more…]

Memorial Day, 2018

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On Memorial Day 2018, President Trump honors the dead by celebrating what they fought for — and by making future fights less likely.

Memorial DayWords — or at least my words — are inadequate to the task of fully honoring those who gave their lives to defend American freedoms. President Trump, though, knew what to say. He’s under attack for an allegedly “tone deaf” tweet, but I think he nailed it:

That’s the right thing to say. Those whom the Civil War era called “the honored dead” (an old-fashioned, but appropriate term), were not plaster saints who died so we could be a solemn, embalmed nation. They were living, breathing people who were unlikely to resent us for celebrating the gift they gave us.

Those who fought on America’s behalf fought so that we — their children and grandchildren, and their fellow countrymen and women — could be a free and great country. The marvelous thing about Memorial Day 2018 is that we are today a free and great country, and getting more so every day under the leadership of a president who loves both our country and the people of our country.

Moreover, using his amazing persuasion skills, backed up with a believable threat of military might, President Trump is rapidly bringing some of the world’s worst actors to heel, without firing a shot. That kind of leadership promises a decreasing number of deaths for us to honor on future Memorial Days, and I can’t think of a better way to be grateful to those who led the way.

Kurt Schlichter’s post on military power channels Miracle on 34th Street

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Kurt Schlichter writes that America’s military power is a force for good — which managed to remind me of the psychologist scene in Miracle on 34th Street.

American PowerIs there anyone here who has not seen the original Miracle on 34th Street, the one from 1947? No one? I didn’t think so. Everyone has seen that movie at least once.

In case you’ve forgotten, though, it’s about a man named Kris Kringle who claims he’s Santa Claus (Edmund Gwenn); an overworked, cynical single mother (Maureen O’Hara); and a little girl who believes only in those things she can see and touch (Natalie Wood). John Payne plays the love interest who is willing to believe in Santa Claus.

The scene in the movie I’m thinking of is the one in which Kris Kringle learns that a psychologist who gives intelligence tests has convinced Alfred, an innocent, sweet, naive young man, that the latter is in fact mentally ill. Kringle confronts the egotistical, pig-headed, really evil psychologist. When the latter won’t budge, Kringle says “There’s only one way to handle a man like you. You won’t listen to reason. You’re heartless. You have no humanity.” And then he bops the man on the head with an umbrella:

The officious, cynical characters in the movie think Kringle is insane, but the movie’s wise people understand that he was right — sometimes might and right go together. And that’s what Kurt says: [Read more…]

[MUST-SEE VIDEO] Gen. John Kelly’s press briefing is essential viewing

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Gen. Kelly’s press conference about military phone calls is breathtaking, moving, informative, and devastating to the Progressive chattering classes.

Gen. Kelly doesn’t waste a single word. Everything he says is powerful and true. Please watch the whole video. When Gen. Kelly gets near the end of his briefing, his indictment of a culture that has lost its way, and parasitical politicians who take advantage of that fact is incredible.

UPDATE: If you don’t want to or can’t watch the video, here’s the transcript: [Read more…]

The New Yorker magazine proudly sponsors Bradley Manning

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Showing its anti-Americanism, The New Yorker celebrates the treasonous Bradley Manning as a mover and shaker who was more sinned against than sinning.

Bradley Manning Chelsea Manning Transgender Mental IllnessMr. Bookworm has a subscription to print version of The New Yorker. Most of the time I ignore this weekly magazine, finding it alternately banal, pompous, and boring. My time on this earth is finite and I have better things to do with that time than struggle through The New Yorker’s smug self-righteousness.

Occasionally, though, when I can’t get my hands on anything else to read, I’ll glance through its pages. That’s how I found myself yesterday riffling through the most recent edition, where I learned about the upcoming “New Yorker Festival.” Here are the pages boasting about this apparently epic event:

For one weekend only [October 6-8], in New York City, the artists, authors, thinkers, and personalities shaping the world today will take the stage with The New Yorker’s celebrated writers and editors, in an open exchange of ideas and insights bound to make news.

With a come-on like that, I simply had to turn the page and learn about these “artists, authors, thinkers, and personalities shaping the world today.” I mean, my God. The future is here! The future is now! The future is at The New Yorker.

For the most part, the list of people “shaping the world today” is a line-up of the usual Progressive suspects. Here are some of the names The New Yorker feels are important enough to put on the home page within the magazine promoting its upcoming festival (with all of the people attending to be found here):

  • James R. Clapper, former National Intelligence director, Trump hater, and the man who lied to Congress about spying on Americans.
  • Andy Borowitz, alleged comic writer and known Trump and conservative hater.
  • Jessi Klein, a “comedian” who writes for the almost staggeringly unfunny Amy Schumer (who is related to Chuck Schumer), whose sex jokes would have earned her a place in Minsky’s Burlesque. She’s also a Trumper hater and, to judge by this tweet, in which she castigates Trump, whose favorite daughter is Jewish, as anti-Jewish, an idiot.
  • Al Franken, about whom I need say nothing, as you already know what I’d say.
  • Naomi Klein, a hard-Left Canadian activist believes socialism will prevent global warming, and who appears to “discuss life and resistance in the Trump era.” She seems to be clueless about the fact that, even as the Western world had the wealth in the 1970s to start fighting pollution, the communist bloc continued to befoul all the land under its control, from Russia to China, and all lands surrounding and in between.
  • Rob Reiner, who made charming films in the 1980s, and is now reduced intelligent political commentary that sees him calling Trump “insane” and “utterly garbage.”
  • Colm Tóibín, Irish writer who writes about gays, gay activist, and Trump hater.
  • Robert Caro, wrote massive LBJ biography and Trump hater, who can admire LBJ and still call Trump a “demagogue.”
  • Rachel Weisz, an actress who hates Trump and Brexit. For me, she’ll always be the gal who starred in the painfully stupid anti-corporate movie, The Constant Gardener, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that a big corporation made and profited from that movie.
  • Tracee Ellis Ross, a barely-black actress who hates Trump.
  • Reverend William J. Barber II, a hard-core, Democrat party, political black preacher, who also “speaks truth to power.”
  • Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor, who also “speaks truth to power.” This “truth” involved going after journalist Dinesh d’Souza in an unprecendent manner for the latter’s small-dollar campaign funds violation, an abuse of power that seemed more closely tied to d’Souza’s bestselling books aimed at Obama and Democrats than at d’Souza’s legal infractions.

and… [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 9/8/17 — the Hurricanes Are Normal edition

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Hurricanes are normal, but Trump Derangement Syndrome obscures that fact. Of course, those subject to TDS are deranged in other ways as well. Just look….

Hurricanes are normal

Hurricanes are normal. It’s just bad luck this year that they’re making landfall in heavily populated areas of the U.S.

Before I get to the meat of this post — or, because it’s a round-up, the various meats of this post — I want to remind everyone that America has always been subject to ferocious hurricanes. They just seem worse today because we have more population in a hurricane’s path, especially when it’s an Irma-like hurricane, and because we have a 24 hour media that makes everything seem local.

In other ways, though, we’re better off when faced with hurricanes because we can prepare. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, residents did not see their Cat 4 hurricane coming. It killed 6,000 – 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. For a list of other major hurricanes in the last 400 years, the bulk of which predate “climate change” and struck out-of-the-blue, go here. You’ll see that America was especially hard hit in the 1700s, long before CO2 was an issue.

Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay our two latest hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, both of which are or will be responsible for staggering property damage and, always, the loss of too many lives. I just want to amp down the usual climate change hysteria that’s accompanying this latest display of Nature’s normal.

And with that, let me turn my attention to all the other interesting things I’ve gathered, many of which reflect poorly on those most deeply lost to TDS.

Hillary admits her incompetence. Hillary has been on the warpath with her new book, blaming everything and everybody for her loss. She’s also admitted that she was incapable of speech on election eve because she was so devastated and that it was male advisers who caused her to react less strongly to both Trump and Bernie than she thinks in retrospect that she ought to have done. (Oh, and Trump “creeped” her out.)

So Hillary has just admitted that she’s incompetent in a crisis and incapable of standing up to men. Most of Hillary’s opponents at home and abroad would have been men, men like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, or Bashir al-Assad. Her latest book is just another reminder that we dodged a serious bullet when Trump won.

Europe’s Muslim future. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, sees which way the wind is blowing and he understands that, not only is Eurabia fast approaching, but that Western Europe leaders are hastening its inevitability:

Europe’s leaders seem to have neither the will nor the means to oppose the incoming waves of millions of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. They know that terrorists are hiding among the migrants, but still do not vet them. Instead, they resort to subterfuges and lies. They create “deradicalization” programs that do not work: the “radicals,” it seems, do not want to be “deradicalized.”

Europe’s leaders try to define “radicalization” as a symptom of “mental illness”; they consider asking psychiatrists to solve the mess. Then, they talk about creating a “European Islam“, totally different from the Islam elsewhere on Earth. They take on haughty postures to create the illusion of moral superiority, as Ada Colau and Carles Puigdemont did in Barcelona: they say they have high principles; that Barcelona will remain “open” to immigrants. Angela Merkel refuses to face the consequences of her policy to import countless migrants. She chastises countries in Central Europe that refuse to adopt her policies.

European leaders can see that a demographic disaster is taking place. They know that in two or three decades, Europe will be ruled by Islam. They try to anesthetize non-Muslim populations with dreams about an idyllic future that will never exist. They say that Europe will have to learn to live with terrorism, that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Pat Condell is another prophet who is being ignored:

Meanwhile, Britain prepares its citizens for dhimmitude. Several of my gay Leftist Facebook friends proudly posted a WaPo op-ed announcing that all the grim prophecies preceding legalizing gay marriage failed to come true. It is true that heterosexual marriage is cratering at pretty much the same rate as before, so one can’t say that same-sex marriage killed it. The article also essentially claims that America is better than ever because Christian bakers are being put out of business.

It’s that last point, of course, that’s the giveaway about the real target of gay marriage. Gay marriage, as I’ve said over and over, was never about competing with straight marriage and it was unlikely to affect straight marriage. What it was about was undercutting traditional values, especially if those values came from the church. Kill the traditional church (and the synagogue) and you kill the West. It’s heart goes out of it.

(Before I go further, let me say again, that I have no trouble whatsoever with same-sex civil unions. If states want to legalize same sex partnerships, that’s fine with me. I support people who enter into stable relationships. It’s the way the whole issue was framed as gay “marriage” that disturbs me deeply. Doing that made these unions the basis for a concerted attack against traditional Western values as a whole.)

If you really want to see where gay marriage leads, check out this Australian Spectator article detailing the way in which gay marriage has been used to attack core Western values, not to mention to destroy the integrity of our biological selves. I’ll focus on the gender and children sections, but you should read the whole thing: [Read more…]

Is our US Navy incompetent or did Obama seriously undermine it?

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The US Navy has been in the news lately for crashes and corruption. Is this the reasonable follow-up to 8 years of Obama’s approach to the military?

NavyA few days ago, word came down that the Navy relieved of duty the U.S.S. Fitzgerald’s commanding officer, executive officer and senior enlisted sailor. They suffered this fate because, on June 17, on their watch, a Philippine merchant ship crashed into the Fitzgerald, killing seven American sailors.

Also a few days ago, ten sailors were reported missing and presumed dead after the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker near Singapore. The media, of course, has tried to make this about Trump, because he responded to a question about the crash before being briefed about the resulting deaths. His response, therefore, appeared cavalier when it was not.

This is not about Trump, however. Losing seventeen American lives in two separate peace-time incidents hints that there is something rotten going on in America’s Navy. If our ships can’t even survive commercial traffic, what the fugue can we expect of them should they have to answer a true call to arms?

Superficially, it appears that the Navy is having a competence problem. It’s equally likely, though, that we’re seeing a reflection of a very serious morale problem. Eight years of Obama attacks on the military may be taking their toll. Here are two things to keep in mind as you think about that theory. First, during the Obama years, the Pentagon engaged in a massive purge of officer ranks across the services. A list compiled in 2014, while the purges were still ongoing, gives an idea of the purge’s scope.

It’s entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they were calcified, ineffective holdovers from a previous era who were damaging military effectiveness. It’s also entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they believe that the military exists to defend America against her enemies, rather than to serve as a social justice experiment for people with gender body dysmorphia or to be a leader in the fight against “climate change.”

People like that would not have been welcome in Obama’s military. When these officers left, they took with them knowledge and experience, leaving in their wake a blow to morale.

And second, there’s the corruption problem, especially in the Navy. I don’t know how many of you followed the story when it broke, but it turned out that military officers were absolute whores when it came to accepting bribes from a macher in Malaysia: [Read more…]

“The Princess and the Frog” shows that military and transgender don’t mix

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A few striking visuals in a charming Disney movie perfectly illustrate the Big Lie hiding behind the transgender movement.

Transgender Military Bradley Manning Chelsea ManningBefore anyone asks, there is no actual transgender content in Disney’s delightful The Princess And The Frog, a movie I praised lavishly here. Nevertheless, after reading about the travails of a woman who identifies herself as a “transgender man” (meaning that she is a biological woman who believes she’s a man), but still has periods, I was irresistibly reminded of a scene in that movie.

Let me start with that poor woman who thinks she’s a man. Writing at a blog called Everyday Feminism, she explains that she suffered a lapse in her hormone therapy because her “government insurance” prevented her from finding a doctor with expertise on all things transgender. This hormonal lapse caused her to have periods again. Because the writer believes herself to be a man, she had to come up with creative ways to pretend that periods don’t mean what nature says they mean; namely, that she is not a transgender man but is, instead, a woman. The following paragraphs describe her hormonal travails:

You see, I decided I wanted to switch from needles to cream. No medical reason, I just wanted to. I’m not wild about needles, and successfully sticking myself an estimated 150+ times was enough adventure for me, thankyouverymuch.

But the fact nonetheless remains that, unbeknownst to me, my doctor decided to start me on a cream dose so low that it would’ve created virtually no effect on the raging estrogen of my body, now super-pissed because I’d caged it for so long.

And so, after so many blissful years of being blood-free, my cycle returned with a vengeance.

And because my doctor had flubbed as hard as she flubbed and I didn’t find out until significantly later – there was a fantastic while there where I was convinced something was seriously wrong with my body until she admitted that I had, in verbatim, been her guinea pig – the war is still waging as she ever-so-slowly ups my dosage back to cis levels.

Because—you know—no rush, right?

Suffice it to say that she never got how mentally debilitating man-struation is to me. No matter how much I tried to explain it to her. I can handle quite a bit in life – trans or otherwise – but I always stumble when I try to handle this.

If it were me, I’d work with this troubled woman to help reconcile her to her own body. However, we live in a different time, and instead we slice and dice her, pour potent chemical cocktails into her body, and pretend that her reasoning is sound, and that she really is transgender — meaning one who has successfully crossed the gender barrier.

No matter what modern medicine and magical thinking do, though, this woman’s body knows the truth. And that’s where The Princess And The Frog comes in. [Read more…]

Best visual commentary ever on transgenders in the military?

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It’s quite possible that this is the best poster yet made to comment on the whole transgenders in the military debacle — a debacle predicated on a lie.

And if you want the proper commentary to go with that poster, I highly recommend Brendan O’Neill’s brutal honesty about the Orwellian thinking that is being pushed on ordinary people. His starting point is the Tory proposal that people can edit their birth certificates at will to state their preferred gender (of the moment):

It’s madness. And most people know it’s madness. Ask any normal, decent member of the public if Dave, 32, born a boy, still in possession of a penis, and a five o’clock shadow on a rough weekend, is a man or a woman, and I bet you they will say: ‘Man.’ Not because they are prejudiced or ‘transphobic’ – the latest phobia slur designed to pathologise dissent – but because they understand reality. And truth. And biology and experience. They know that in order to be a woman, you first have to have been a girl. They know womanhood is not a pose one strikes in front of the mirror but is biological, relational, cultural and social. They know the man who wears a dress is a man who wears a dress. Which is cool, and his choice, and he must have the right to wear that dress. But he isn’t a woman. We know this. At some level he knows this. Why won’t more people say it?

Because it has become the great unsayable. To say there are two sexes – leaving aside that infinitesimally small number of nature’s hiccups that are intersex people – has become tantamount to a speechcrime. To say a man cannot become a woman – no matter how many hormones he takes or operations he undergoes – is now next to blasphemy. Even if you fully accept that these people are trans-women, and that they should enjoy exactly the same rights as every other person, from the right to speak to the right to work, you will still be hounded and harassed if you dare say, ‘They aren’t women, though’. As trans-sceptical feminists have discovered, the utterance ‘Men cannot become women’ is to the early 21st century what ‘Jesus is not the Christ’ was to the 15th. We must accept that the person with a penis and a birth certificate that says ‘Boy’ is a woman. We must accept the lie. Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, beavering away at the past-altering Ministry of Truth, we are made to lie. Trans agitators’ greatest accomplishment has been the institutionalisation of lying.