Bookworm Room

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

“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.

The gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. Does that affect military service?

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A question that no one is asking, but someone should, is whether the peculiar excesses of the gay lifestyle affect the military’s readiness to serve.

Gay Lifestyle Gays in the Military[Content warning: Of necessity, this post talks about sex, especially gay sex. Some of it is graphic, some not.]

It seems, lately, as if the only news that the media sees fit to print has to do with people on the alt-sexuality spectrum. The latest outrage amongst Progressives is Trump order barring transgenders from serving in the military. This outrage, of course, is a bait-and-switch. You see, to this day, transgender troops are officially barred from the military.

Throughout the entirety of Obama’s presidency, transgender troops were officially barred. Then, in July 2016, Obama signed an order changing the policy. But he didn’t change it instantly. Instead, he ordered that the change be implemented one year from his order, so that it would happen on his successor’s watch. In other words, all the screaming and shouting and anger is because Trump has announced he’s going to retain the Obama era status quo. See? Bait-and-switch.

Obama’s transgender decision followed on the heels of his overnight conversion, once elected, to the belief that gay people ought to be able to serve openly in the military. I was opposed to allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Despite my opposition, I don’t think I’m a homophobe. Instead, I believe that openly gay relationships, especially in frontline service, are dangerous for unit cohesion. I’m blindingly aware of the fact that the military exists to take young people who are physically and mentally fit and then to prepare them to fight. If two men in a combat unit are in an open relationship, that puts at issue the question of whether their loyalty is to each other or their unit.

Incidentally, I don’t believe women and men should be serving together when that service involves close quarters. Someone once described Navy ships as floating brothels. I know that’s an exaggeration, but the fact is that sexual relationships on ships are a huge problem:

Unintended pregnancy is a significant problem across the general population, but the Navy’s rate is higher.

In 2006, about 49 percent of all pregnancies in the United States were classified as unplanned, according to 2011 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Up to 65 percent of pregnancies in the military are self-reported as unplanned, according to a December report by The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Health Care for Underserved Women.

Nearly three-fourths of all Navy pregnancies were unplanned, according to a recent parenthood survey conducted by the service. Of those, only 31 percent of the couples were using birth control at the time they conceived. With pregnancies involving enlisted servicewomen, 70 percent of the fathers were also in the military.

Youth, proximity, and stress = bad sexual decisions. And when life and death are at stake, the last thing you need is the volatility of sexual relationships, especially foolish ones.

My other problem is that the gay lifestyle is an unhealthy one. It’s a different kind of unhealthy from that associated with transgenderism. The latter sees extraordinarily high suicide rates, staggeringly expensive surgical procedures, and a lifetime commitment to dangerous hormonal medications. Take away the magic word “transgender,” and no person with these physical requirements would ever be a candidate for service in the military. An actively lived homosexual lifestyle has a different kind of unhealthiness, one that may also be antithetical to creating a tip-top fighting machine.

Since Obama’s executive order about openly gay service, both the military and the media have been mum about whether that policy has affected the military and, if so, what the effect is. One of the things that I’ve especially wondered is whether the excess that typically characterizes gay men’s sex has made an appearance in the military. [Read more…]

Transgender folks in the military — this is what the slippery slope looks like

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Obama planted a poison pill when he put transgender folks in the military. Republicans should discharge them, instead of quibbling about surgery.

Two interesting headlines about transgender people in the military. The first comes from Gateway Pundit:

Transgender military

The second is at Truth Revolt:

Transgender military

Here’s the short story: Republicans tried to stop forcing taxpayers to provide the money so that mentally ill service members who reject their body’s sex and, instead, believe they belong to the opposite sex, can have their external sexual organs sliced off and be given hormones that can cause cancer and other nasty things. Twenty-four RINO’s sided with Democrats to continue federal funding for this surgery.

The problem the Republicans who oppose funding have is that the Obama Pentagon officially declared that thinking you’re really a member of the opposite sex is not a mental illness. If it’s not an illness, but is merely a problem with ones body, why in the world should service members with hernia’s or dislocated shoulders get free medical care while people suffering from excess penises or breasts are denied?

The issue, then, isn’t the funding question, it’s the “who let mentally ill people openly service in the military to begin with?” question. That’s the problem.

In terms of the mental illness known as body dysmorphia, all of the following people suffering from exactly the same problem: [Read more…]

National Review cruise — Hillary’s America, the military, and abortion

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img_1903That title is correct: I’ll give you a brief rundown of Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America, an abortion panel, and a military panel. Things happen quickly on a National Review cruise and if I miss a bit of blogging, I’m seriously behind the eight ball.

Hillary’s America. Because Hillary’s America showed only briefly in Marin, I missed it. Fortunately for me, the movie’s two writers and producers were on the cruise and hosted a special showing yesterday.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite a good movie, as it is well-researched, well-written, and very professional produced. The movie begins with Dinesh’s sentencing for a campaign donation crime that, when it is a small, first-time infraction, as was the case with Dinesh, is invariably treated with fines and other minimal punishments.

Dinesh was special, however, for at the time the Justice Department got him in its sights, he was the writer and producer of the scathing (and prescient) Obama’s America, a documentary that ranks immediately behind Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine when it comes to popularity and revenue. Not only was Dinesh prosecuted with the full force of federal law, he had the misfortune to appear before a Democrat-appointed judge who sentenced him to time-served, plus two years of sleeping in a supervised facility, five years probation, mandatory public service, and court supervised therapy.

The first four items were the normal punitive stuff one would expect from a corrupt government. The last punishment was purely Orwellian punishment for “wrong thinking.”

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The Bookworm Beat 9/15/16 — the “polls they are a’changin'” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265If Bill Clinton and Al Gore couldn’t do it, then no one can. A Leftist Facebook friend posted an article from The Hill with a lede saying that Donald Trump “floats rolling back food safety regulations.” The implication, obviously, is that in Trump’s America, we’re all going to die from salmonella and e. Coli. Read through to the end, though, and you discover that Trump is instead making a remarkably sensible suggestion:

Trump’s economic policy plan also calls for “an immediate halt to new federal regulations and a very thorough agency-level review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.”

Agencies would be required to list all regulations and rank them in terms of their contribution to growth, health and safety. The goal, Trump said, would be to strengthen the rules that are useful and reduce the rules that harm the economy.

One of my Leftist Facebook friends stopped with the lede, of course, and envisioned our nation drowning in fecal matter emanating from food-poisoned Americans. In a comment, I quoted the above language and suggested that it was a good idea to control regulations, which are so big no one can know them, are often non-effective, are frequently inconsistent with each other, and are too often quasi-legislation.

To seal it for this Leftist, I reminded him that Bill Clinton had assigned Al Gore this very task of cutting back on America’s burgeoning regulations, although it never came to anything. And that’s when my Facebook friend essentially said “Well, if Al Gore and Bill Clinton couldn’t do it, then no one can. After all, Trump has never been a politician, and he’s really stupid, so what does he know?”

My reply was that voters may be hoping that it’s an advantage that Trump hasn’t been a politician. He may have out-of-the-box (i.e., out-of-D.C.) ideas that actually work. The response? A reiteration that Trump is stupid. (Has there ever been a Republican candidate, no matter how successful and brilliant, whom the Left hasn’t called stupid? I don’t think so. It’s a tired idea.)

Agencies must be reined in. Exhibit A in the “agencies need to be cut back and God willing Trump is the man to do it” category is the fact that the FBI thinks it is more important than Congress is. So it was that Jason Chaffetz had to explain to the acting FBI chair that, no, Congress gets to have all of the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview — and then serves him, then and there, with a subpoena.

The funny thing about the WaPo’s indictment of Trump as a scam artist.  The Washington Post is beside itself with excitement that ardent Hillary supporter, and pay for play attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is starting an investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation. I got three paragraphs into the WaPo editorial supporting this investigation and castigating Trump before I broke into uncontrollable laughter:

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[VIDEO] Basic training is not what it used to be (NSFW — obscenities)

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The army isn't what it used to beI have a friend who went to college on a ROTC scholarship and has been an active duty officer for the past thirty-three years. When we last spoke, he told me that, while the new generation of enlistees has great potential, basic training has changed substantially. I forget his exact words, but they were something along the line of “we have to handle them with kid gloves, or we get in trouble.” This funny video would seem to support his sense of a drastically changed military:

The Bookworm Beat 7/27/16 — the “random stuff” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Everything that’s wrong with the Left in one website. At City Journal, Oren Cass has written a short article that looks at modern Progressivism through the filter of Hillary’s campaign website. In some ways, the article says something we all know, which is that the modern Democrat party is not concerned about America’s well-being but, instead, is concerned only about its only survival, something it achieves by getting special interest groups to vote for it:

Framing issues as who instead of what leads to a governing model that would divide society by race, gender, sexuality, profession, and location, targeting policies to each defined demographic. A divide-and-conquer strategy may achieve electoral success, but it is toxic to good government. When politicians treat elections as exercises in log-rolling, each policy becomes tailored toward the special interest that cares about it most. Thus Clinton’s crime policy emphasizes a friendlier attitude toward criminals. Her immigration policy concerns itself primarily with helping those who have violated immigration law. Her education policy explicitly endorses the status quo for most students but promises to “listen to teachers.”

In a world of fixed resources, such a model inevitably undermines the idea of equal protection under the law, pits groups against one another, and leaves some explicitly favored by government as winners. It also normalizes subjective standards for government action. Clinton promises to extend President Obama’s executive actions on immigration to “additional persons with sympathetic cases.” Whatever one thinks of our immigration policies, tilting them toward “persons with sympathetic cases” does not suggest rigorous application of the law.

When it comes to blacks, which are the group most harmed by the Progressives’ “divide and control” strategy, Thomas Sowell has the right of it:

Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry, and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians.

Racial polarization makes both the black population and the white population worse off, but it makes politicians who depend on black votes better off.

Hillary Clinton desperately needs black votes in this year’s close election. Promoting fear, anger, and resentment among blacks — and, if possible, paranoia — serves her political interest. Barack Obama has mastered the art of keeping black voters aroused while keeping white voters soothed — thanks in part to the gullibility of much of the public, who mistake geniality and glib rhetoric for honesty and good will.

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The Bookworm Room 7/17/16 — the “I’m all riled up” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Blacks and Muslims should be angry at their criminal cohorts, not at us. In the context of an article about political correctness, Andrew Klavan said something I’ve been struggling to say for some time. He acknowledges that blacks are on the receiving end of much more police activity, something frustrating and insulting to law-abiding blacks, but that’s because the black community’s bad eggs commit a disproportionate amount of American crime. Likewise, because children have big mouths, perfectly nice Muslim kids in school find themselves being called terrorists, reflecting the fact that acts of mass violence all over the world come primarily from their co-religionists. That’s certainly not nice, but Klavan says that law-abiding blacks and Muslims are putting blame in the wrong place:

It seems to me if you are an innocent black person being troubled by the cops, if you are an innocent Muslim under suspicion from your neighbors, the people you should be angry at, the people to blame, are not the people acting on rational suspicion. The people at fault are the bad guys who have drawn that suspicion unfairly onto you.

A black man targeted by the police shouldn’t be angry at the police. He should be angry at the thugs and criminals who look like him and make his race a target. And before Muslims blame non-Muslims for the prejudice against them, maybe they ought to look to — and openly condemn — those Muslims who have given their religion a very bad name indeed.

The problem is prejudice, yes. But it’s the tribal prejudice that says we should blame others before we blame “our own.” “Our own” are the good guys, no matter what race or religion we are.

Someone should read those words out loud at the Republican Party Convention. They’re very important.

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The Bookworm Beat 6/2/16 — the quick round-up edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265I’m doing actual legal work today, but I want to clear my spindle before it gets completely out of control. Here goes, a quick, down-and-dirty round-up:

President Trump? Scott Adams has pretty much nailed everything that’s happened so far in this election, at least when it comes to Trump’s tactics and trajectory. Watch him on Bill Maher’s show explaining precisely why he thinks Trump will win, and win big. He also says not to worry: Trump will not be a crazy, war-mad, racist, irrational president — although Hillary could be a problem if elected because she’s a walking alcohol cabinet and drug pharmacopeia.

ACLU Director mugged by reality and other bathroom musings. When Maya Dillard Smith, interim director of the Georgia chapter of the ACLU, went into a public bathroom with her daughters, only to have the girls frightened by some manly looking so-called women, she summarily quit the ACLU, went public with the reason she quit, and was roundly and soundly ignored by America’s mainstream media.

Incidentally, I asked two boys who are in high school if they think the Obama directive will result in boys who are not transgender taking advantage of its broad language and visiting girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Both boys instantly answered “No! No one would ever do that.” Then they said, “The girls would chase them out.” Then, after a moment’s cogitation, they proceeded to name all the “weird,” “goofy” boys they knew who would, in fact, probably take advantage of the opportunity to see teen girls naked or nearly so.

And while I’m on the subject, people concerned by the ongoing sexual assaults against Muslim women in refugee camps have a radical solution for the problem: separate bathrooms for men and women. No, I’m not kidding. The Lefties on my real-me Facebook page, the same ones championing Obama’s transgender diktats, are thrilled about this idea. We truly are a culture that’s moved beyond parody.

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Something strange about “missing” Medal of Honor recipients

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One of my Facebook friends proudly noted that only West Point and Annapolis exceed Harvard when it comes to the number of Medal of Honor recipients who attended any single educational institution.  He posted a picture of those so honored:

Harvard Medal of Honor recipients

Do you see what I see about the names listed? Surprisingly (to me at least), the lists of Medal of Honor recipients at West Point and Annapolis have exactly the same weird quality.

The weird quality, of course, is the fact that, for all three institutions, the last people who received the Medal of Honor did so for their heroism in Vietnam.

Why in the world did these institutions, which were so heavily represented up to Vietnam, later stop producing Medal of Honor recipients? It’s easy enough to say that Harvard went all peacenik and wasn’t sending any students or graduates to serve in wars since Vietnam, but that doesn’t explain the absence of West Point and Annapolis names since Vietnam.

Can anyone explain this to me?

The Bookworm Beat 5/30/16 — the illustrated Memorial Day edition

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I’ve got several very moving images here but, before I dive into them, I want to make sure you read the story of Army Sergeant James John Regan, the man whose life and death led to this picture, one so moving that it has appeared repeatedly on social media every Memorial Day since his death in 2007:

Military James Regan's grave

And now for the other illustrated reminders of what today is all about:

Military high price of freedom

Military facts about Vietnam wall

Military memorial day underpins other holidays

Military day at the beach

Military owing the dead

Military Ronald Reagan on Memorial Day

Military a day to remember what they did

Military planting flags on Memorial Day

Military Memorial Day not barbecue day

Military Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

And a political one, because it matters:

Obama Hiroshima but not Pearl Harbor

(Thanks to Caped Crusader for helping compile this post.)

Memorial Day 2016

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Memorial_Day_at_Arlington_National_CemeteryWhen my teenage son realized that Monday isn’t just a school holiday but is, in fact, a national holiday honoring the men and women who have died serving our country, he made an interesting comment about those who died. “It’s hard to appreciate that they’re real people because you never know who they are.”

Think about that: Despite the fact that our country has been actively at war for three-quarters of his life, my son has never known someone who died while fighting on America’s behalf, nor has he ever met someone who lost a loved one to war. For so many in America — and this is true whether they support or oppose the war against fanatic Islamism — this multi-front war is an abstract thing. Thanks to our all-volunteer, professional, and efficient military, while our taxes help fund the war, most of us are utterly disconnected from it.

No wonder that for Americans young and old, Memorial Day is just understood as the excuse for another three-day weekend in the list of American holidays. To the extent people think about it, many confuse it with Veterans’ Day, believing that it’s a day to honor the troops, not to remember and honor the dead. And if you’re celebrating the troops, most of whom, thankfully, survive battle to come home and live out their natural lives . . . well, heck, a pool party and barbecue is a great way to do it.

Focusing on the dead — or the “honored dead” as they rightfully said during the Civil War — one realizes that my son is right that the sheer numbers make it hard to get a handle on each individual loss. The sad fact is that Americans have lost many men to battle throughout our history. According to a Wikipedia post documenting fatalities in every single American war, from skirmishes to Civil and World wars, the total of American dead in combat is somewhere above 664,440, with another 673,929 deaths from things other than combat (presumably disease, imprisonment, training accidents, etc.). That’s a grand total of at least 1,354,664 war related deaths

[A little interjection, which is that as I’m writing these words, my Spotify playlist, which is randomized, came up with one of the saddest Civil War songs I know:

It’s a particularly apropos song because it involves a young woman trying to separate her brother from the unknown dead and wounded in the bloodiest war in American history.]

Back to the main point, I realized that my son had accidentally stumbled upon precisely the formulation attributed to Stalin: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.

How does one bring the young to realize that, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a free country that values the individual over the collective, each number is a person? Those who died were children who left grieving parents, parents who left grieving spouses and lost children, brothers or sisters whose siblings will now age alone, or friends whose loss is a never-ending hole.

I started the process of giving the dead names by showing my son a picture that I found on a friend’s Google+ feed. As you can see, it’s an iconic picture, but one with a difference — every person in the photo is identified. They’re not icons at all. They’re real young men who fought — and most of whom died — defending America’s security and bringing freedom to parts of the world most Americans never had seen and never would see:

Memorial Day Flag raising Iwo Jima

The transformation in my son when he realized that these were young men just like himself — young men who played sports, flirted with girls, went to dances, and just enjoyed their lives — was surprising. He was suddenly awed and saddened. They weren’t historic curiosities; they could have been him or his friends.

As war becomes a pocket industry for a small subsection of society, those of us insulated from its reach have an obligation to make others aware that we are, and long have been, the beneficiaries of those who, willingly or not, fought for America. And while a few of our wars were misbegotten or foolish, the vast majority have seen Americans shed blood to bring freedom, whether at home or abroad.

Those who gave their lives truly are the honored dead and it behooves us to remember that none were statistics — all were individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice for liberty. I recommend a visit to Honor the Fallen, which puts a face to every person who has died in the last 13 years defending Americans against the Islamic fascism that has been the bloodiest, most genocidal force in the history of the world. Also, if you’d like to remember the dogs who served so well, many of whom died protecting American troops, go here.

UPDATE:  Mike Rowe made much the same point, only with more focus.