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Notre Dame open thread

April 15, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

A post in which I share my thoughts about the Notre Dame fire and an open thread at which you should feel free to post your thoughts too.

Some random thoughts:

Just yesterday, the Gatestone Institute ran this Raymond Ibrahim article:

European Churches: Vandalized, Defecated On, and Torched “Every Day”

Countless churches throughout Western Europe are being vandalized, defecated on, and torched.

In France, two churches are desecrated every day on average. According to PI-News, a German news site, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17% increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered— meaning that such attacks are only going from bad to worse.

Among some of the recent desecrations in France, the following took place in just February and March:

Vandals plundered Notre-Dame des Enfants Church in Nîmes and used human excrement to draw a cross there; consecrated bread was found thrown outside among garbage.

The Saint-Nicolas Church in Houilles was vandalized on three separate occasions in February; a 19th century statue of the Virgin Mary, regarded as “irreparable,” was “completely pulverized,” said a clergyman; and a hanging cross was thrown to the floor.

Vandals desecrated and smashed crosses and statues at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, and mangled the arms of a statue of a crucified Christ in a mocking manner. In addition, an altar cloth was burned.

Arsonists torched the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris soon after midday mass on Sunday, March 17.

Similar reports are coming out of Germany. Four separate churches were vandalized and/or torched in March alone. “In this country,” PI-News explained, “there is a creeping war against everything that symbolizes Christianity: attacks on mountain-summit crosses, on sacred statues by the wayside, on churches… and recently also on cemeteries.”

Who is primarily behind these ongoing and increasing attacks on churches in Europe? The same German report offers a hint: “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles set on fire, baptismal fonts overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu Akbar.'”

[Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/12/18 — the Trump border reality show edition

December 12, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Trump turned the debate over funding a Southern border wall into a brilliant reality show, with Pelosi and Schumer as his hapless foils . . . and much more.

Funny day today, with a lot of people who are important to me needing me. That’s not to say that they are needy people. It’s just that, I found myself spending several hours on the phone with people who were looking to me for specific things, practical or emotional, that they felt only I could provide.

Overall, it was flattering, and I neither regret nor resent the time spent, but it was also a bit tiring and definitely time-consuming. I’ll try to pack as much as I can into this Bookworm Beat, but no promises.

The Trump border reality show. The consensus from conservatives and savvy Leftists seems to be that, when Trump insisted on televising his meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer regarding border wall funding, he was the winner and undisputed champion. My friend Thomas Lifson (one of the smartest people I know) started his post about Trump’s three traps thusly:

President Trump clearly shocked House speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer yesterday with his televising of the Oval Office sit-down over his demand for $5 billion in funding for border security, including funding of critical mileage for his border wall. Knowing well that Pelosi had already vowed publicly that “transparency and openness” would characterize the Democrat-run House starting next month, her plaintive request to speak in private scored points for Trump and revealed her hypocrisy before any substance at all was considered.

John Nolte was also impressed by Trump’s dominance:

The point is that the very first thing Schumer said during this meeting, the key message he wanted to send, is that Trump is weak on the border and lying about it.

Think about that

No seriously, think about that.

I’ll wait.

As the 17-minute made-for-TV spectacle progressed, Trump boldly pledged to shut down part of the government — the part we can all live without that should be closed permanently anyway — if he does not receive adequate border security funding. Meaning, he would not sign on to continue funding the government.

All of this was a calculated set up on Trump’s part, and a successful one.

Pelosi had no idea she was being set up, which is why, like a prim schoolmarm always caught off guard, she chose to lecture Trump about the legislative process.

Schumer, though, is nobody’s stupe, and knew exactly what Trump was up to.

This is what Trump knows… Between now and Election Day 2020, there will be an organized effort to separate Trump from his base, and the best way to do that is to make Trump look weak on border security, and the best way to do that is for leftists to continue to organize and fund illegal immigration, especially through these caravans.

Trump can see the future and he knows it is going to be plagued with an orchestrated and well-funded campaign to create border chaos, to make him look feckless.

But what he did yesterday was flip the script.

Katie Pavlich was another who was impressed: [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/3/18 — the “Paris is burning” edition and open thread

December 3, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Even as Paris burns, America’s media and other Democrat establishments demand that America institute the socialist policies that are destroying Europe.

Paris burns — and the people call for Trump. The mainstream media truly believes in global leadership. Trump’s desire to be America’s, rather than following in his predecessor’s footsteps as a Left wing world leader, is seen as Exhibit A in indictment alleging that Trump is evil, racist, Hitler-esque, etc.

Those national leaders that the media exalts are the ones who put the world ahead of their nations. They demand a world without borders, no matter the profound damage roving immigrants from nightmare countries inflict on their own citizens. In this regard, it’s important to understand that most of these countries did not become nightmares because an evil strong man, along the lines of Hitler, Maduro, or Erdogan is destroying the civilized people in his nation. Instead, these are nightmare nations because of national values that the roving immigrants, like locusts, bring with them to their new locations.

The exalted global leaders are also the ones who have bought completely into the whole Climate Change mantra. This holds that mankind in the last few years has become more powerful than the earth, the sun, and the whole universe combined. Certainly, humans have shown that they have the power to alter and damage their local environment. There is no reliable evidence, though, that they can change the earth’s climate.

As I’ve taken to arguing, if humans really are warming the planet, we should be incredibly grateful. Because I’m not a Leftist, my knowledge of history goes back millennia, rather than years or (sometimes) merely weeks or even days. That’s why I know that humans thrive when the earth warms and they die when it cools. When it warms, there’s more arable land and more rain, which equals more food. If CO2 is increasing, that’s great too, because the food we eat needs it.

However, when the earth cools, whether because of (probably sun-controlled) climate change or because of dirty volcanoes that block out the sun, people die. Keep that last point in mind when you hear from those “scientists” who want to block the sun’s rays: [Read more…]

Viral photos showing Paris in its death throes

April 18, 2018 by Bookworm 2 Comments

A viral email showing cultural changes in Paris reminds us that, for better or worse, Europe as we know it is dying as a new Europe takes its place.

I’ve received emails from three people forwarding a series of photographs a Czech couple reputedly took during a recent visit to Paris. I doubt whether Czech people were the ones who took these photos. I certainly cannot find any citation to an original blog post or email. Indeed, astute observers will note that one of the photos has an illegible website attribution, suggesting that some or all of the photos come from sources other than a single Czech couple’s photo album. (I know that I can research the images, but I’m too lazy. If you decide to do so, please let me know the result.)

I suspect that what happened is that someone got hold of an email containing observations about a trip to France’s capital and then inserted representative photographs. Since the photos show scenes familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to Europe’s demographic changes in the last few years, the combination of text and photographs is powerful. I’ll add some videos after the photographs to provide support for the images’ legitimacy in terms of showing modern Paris.

I was last in Paris in 2005, when the North African takeover was already in progress but still in its fetal state. The takeover is now akin to a toddler in its development. Give it a few years and Paris’s streets will be indistinguishable from Cairo’s or Islamabad’s.

My issue, as always, isn’t with the skin color of the “new Europeans.” It’s with the values. If they want to assimilate to European values, great, but I doubt that’s what they want to do. Islam is inextricably intertwined with conquest — after all, that’s the mandate Mohamed laid upon his followers. I have a feeling that, inside the heart of many of these new immigrants, beats a single mantra: “Today Paris; tomorrow the world.” [Read more…]

Europe and Islam — it’s not just terrorism there; it’s all-out war

October 22, 2017 by Bookworm 24 Comments

While we’re paying attention to Russia’s corrupt dance with the Obama administration and the Clintons, don’t forget that Islam is still at war in Europe.

My wanderings across the internet today put two closely related things before my eyes, one of which is a news report and the other an analysis. First, from the Daily Caller, the news:

The number of terrorism-related cases investigated by German authorities have quadrupled over the past year, newspaper Welt am Sonntag revealed Sunday.

Prosecutors have opened more than 900 cases so far this year, compared to 240 throughout 2016. Just 80 cases related to terrorism reached the courts in 2013.

The federal prosecutors office can’t keep up with the increase and nearly 300 cases have been transferred to the state level. Not all cases involve plans to carry out attacks. Migrants from Syran [sic], Iraq and Afghanistan have been tried over alleged membership in terror groups without being suspected of planning attacks on European soil.

Germany’s federal police (BKA) estimates 705 Islamist extremists are willing to carry out terror attacks, up from 600 during an estimate in February. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) recently said around 24,400 Islamists are active in the country but most of them don’t pose an immediate terror threat.

Up until a couple of years ago, most of Germany’s Muslims were fairly well-integrated Turks who hadn’t been too poisoned by Erdogan’s increasing Islamism in the home country. This new batch, though, is something quite different. Germany only needs to look to France to see what happens once Islam really get its teeth into a European country.

And that leads me to the second thing, which is Daniel Greenfield’s analysis of the war being fought in France: [Read more…]

The French election provides another entry in the “Do Progressives even listen to themselves?” category

May 8, 2017 by Bookworm 5 Comments

Macron’s victory in the French election has provided Progressives with another opportunity to reveal their hypocrisy, stupidity, and all-around nastiness.

I had a marvelous trip this past weekend, and came back yearning to blog, only to find waiting for me a legal project with a tight deadline. While I work on that, though, I want everyone to enjoy yet another exquisite example of Progressives on parade. This particular example is a very silly Progressive’s response to the French election, which he used as an occasion to attack his fellow Americans. As with other screeds from Progressives, the author is either a hypocrite or blessed with an extraordinary lack of self-awareness:

For those reading this on an iPhone, let me compress the message to reveal its idiocy or hypocrisy, whichever description you prefer. In the wake of Macron’s victory in the French election, Mr. Franks begins by praising the French people for their gracious forbearance and ends with ad hominem, exceptionally nasty insults against his own countrymen. Somehow or other, forbearance as a virtue leaked away in just three paragraphs.

Also, in the idiocy category, where in the world do Progressives keep coming up with the idea that Jihadists hate it when we yield to them? Have you seen al Qaeda or ISIS saying that? I haven’t.

Photo credit: Macron World Company INC. _DDC0082 by thierry ehrmann. Creative Commons license.

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

September 15, 2016 by Bookworm 17 Comments

If 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:

[Read more…]

[VIDEO] When human hyenas circle their prey, having this helps UPDATED

January 18, 2016 by Bookworm 31 Comments

A video has emerged from France purportedly showing a gang of Muslim immigrants armed with rocks and truncheons, descending upon a lone French man. The way these human predators slowly close in on the Frenchman reminds me of nothing so much as hyenas encircling a wounded lion or elephant. If this video is real, the Frenchman was fortunate in that he was armed and made it clear he was willing to defend himself. Not all Europeans are so lucky — especially, of late, European women, who are completely at the mercy of the hyenas in their midst:

In situations such as this, guns save lives. And if the situation had escalated, and (assuming the video is what it purports to be) the Frenchman had been forced to fire at the thugs, killing one or more, it would have saved the life worth saving. As for the other lives . . . well, in a civilized society, you shouldn’t be stalking and threatening ordinary people. If you do, in a sane society, you’re assuming the risk that you, the bad guy, may not walk away from the encounter.

UPDATE: Danny Lemieux, who is fluent in French, provides further, even more disturbing, information about this video:

Book, there was an error in translation: the news commentator makes clear that the person carrying in the video was a policeman (obviously plain clothes). Ordinary citizens in France are not allowed to carry – the people that he was protecting would have been completely vulnerable. The other things to note are that: a) this happened in plain daylight; b) this was apparently a fairly nice section of the town and c) ordinary traffic in the background was totally unaffected by what was happening and d) the police felt powerless to call back up, crack heads and make arrests. This is really, really bad…far worse than I imagined. It tells me that the violence has now spilled out of the “zones sensibles” (“no go” zones) into the communities at large.

The Bookworm Beat 12-1-15 — “Last month of the year” edition and open thread

December 1, 2015 by Bookworm 5 Comments

We’re 11/12 of the way through a rather challenging year. I wonder what the last month will bring, not to mention the remaining 12.5 months of Obama’s presidency. Well, the future will be what it will be. Let’s use this round-up, which I compiled with a friend’s help, to focus on the present:

JFK’s assassination killed America

The 1950s had its economic ups and downs, its worries about a nuclear future, its Red scares, its Jim Crow/Civil Rights face-off, etc., but overall the 1950s was defined by its boundless optimism. People, including Democrats, believed that America was a wonderful, world-saving country, and that the future held immeasurable promise. In other words, the general outlook was a complete 180 from the dislike Progressives feel for America and the despair with which conservatives view it.

George Will says that Kennedy’s assassination did this. What Will adds to this bromide is important. It wasn’t Kennedy’s actual death that wrought the change, he says. Instead, in order to avoid admitting that a communist killed their hero, Democrats had to savage America:

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified JFK’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.”

[snip]

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism.

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

That’s as scathing an indictment of the Leftist mindset as one can imagine, as well as a sad eulogy for the end of the American dream at the hands of the people who claimed most to represent that dream.

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 11-29-15 — the “tidy office-tidy mind” edition

November 29, 2015 by Bookworm 2 Comments

Inspired by Marie Kondo’s advice that true organization begins with throwing out everything that is neither useful nor sentimental, I am continuing to plow through every nook and cranny in my house. This is the first organization system that’s made sense to me, which is why I haven’t already given up and relapsed into my usual vaguely tidy-looking mess. My mind is also a vaguely tidy-looking mess, but it’s still yielded these interesting links:

Ignore people who tell you Cruz is divisive and uncooperative

According to those rooting for candidates other than Ted Cruz, he’s an arrogant blowhard who won’t play well with others. In fact, Cruz’s work history proves that the opposite is true:

At the FTC, Cruz’s agenda could have been written by Milton Friedman.

Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers. Based on his early support of disruptive online companies, Cruz has some grounds to call himself the “Uber of American politics.”

Moreover, and perhaps surprising to some, Cruz sought and secured a broad, bipartisan consensus for his agenda. Almost all of Cruz’s initiatives received unanimous support among both Republicans and Democrats.

Ted Cruz a consensus-builder? He was, at the FTC.

Read the rest here. Cruz has the chops to make the best kind of President: True conservative values, love for America, phenomenal intelligence, and the ability to work and play well with others.

[Read more…]

John Kerry’s reprehensible statements following the Paris massacre were all about Islam denial

November 23, 2015 by Bookworm 13 Comments

In the wake of the Paris massacre, John Kerry went out and made a fool of himself. There’s nothing new there, but I did want to comment on something I did and to explain why I did it — or more accurately, why I didn’t do something that every other commentator did. My point in writing this is to prove that I’m not quite the half-wit people may have assumed I am.

Let me begin with Kerry’s words:

In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

Everybody and his uncle latched onto the first part of that paragraph, in which Kerry seemed to say that satirical journalists and Jews were legitimate terrorist targets. I went in a different direction and focused on the second part where, in keeping with the Democrat-party line, Kerry again denied that massacres — whether ten months ago or a week ago — have anything to do with Islam. It occurred to me later that some readers might have thought I was stupid, careless, or otherwise deficient for not lambasting Kerry for his bizarre statement about legitimate and illegitimate terrorist attacks.

All I can say is that I’m not as stupid as I look. I actually had an analytical framework that I’d completely clicked through by the time I sat down and wrote. I’d processed Kerry’s remarks, and concluded that the most important part was his denial about Islam’s role. Everything else was just Kerry’s generosity in giving us an opportunity to see his obtuse brain working through a problem.

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 11-18-15 — “the mother of all round-ups” edition and open thread

November 18, 2015 by Bookworm 4 Comments

I have been collecting links for days and will try to share them all with you. Here goes:

Only conservatives are paying attention

In an attempt to deflect attention of Muslim depredations in Paris, the Left and its foot soldiers (all of whom seem to be my Facebook friends) immediately attacked Americans and other Westerners for failing to pay attention to a bombing the day before in Lebanon (an ISIS v. Hezbollah bombing, so it was Horrible People v. Horrible People). I eventually got tired of commenting on their posts to the effect that I have been paying attention to all of these attacks, primarily because they are all different manifestations of a single radical Islamic entity, and I’ve been trying to get everyone to pay as much attention as I do.

Emma Kelly says what I was too polite to say explicitly to these Leftists: The reason you didn’t know about these other attacks isn’t because the newspapers didn’t report them, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.

I’ll add something that Kelly didn’t, though: You weren’t paying attention because American and European media outlets don’t want you to see that Islam is a problem, so they report on these incidents, but downplay them. Meanwhile you get loud noise about Ben Carson’s alleged lies, Hillary’s brilliance, Republicans’ meanness, Donald Trump’s hair, and Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy.

[Read more…]

John Oliver’s potty mouth ravings reveal what’s wrong with the Left’s approach to Islamic jihad

November 17, 2015 by Bookworm 14 Comments

John Kerry is a rather frustrating Secretary of State, not just because he’s uniformly awful, but because he’s so stupid there’s nothing left to parody. The guy parodies himself. Take, for example, his deep and profound statement following last Friday’s Islamic massacre in Paris. It is a tour de force of mental disorganization, banality, and incoherence.

The mere existence of a statement like this from our State Department attests to the depths to which our nation has fallen under the Obama administration. Even Hillary did a better job of saying nothing. And when I say that Kerry said nothing, I mean it. He especially had nothing to say about who perpetrated the massacre:

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yezidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it. [Emphasis added.]

Did you get that? Our Secretary of State is baffled, completely baffled, by the Paris attackers’ motivation. The only thing he knows with certainty is that Islam had nothing to do with it. The killers’ cries of “Allahu Akbar” were a mere coincidence. They were probably just struggling to say something clever in French, along the lines of “l’état, c’est moi” or even “hinky dinky parlez vous” but, because they were hopped up on speed to facilitate the slaughter, were at a loss for words and used “Allahu Akbar” as their default statement.

John Kerry can be excused his meaningless fatuity because no one listens to him anyway. Most people tune out politicians. Instead, they listen to pop culture figures.

[Read more…]

The Left’s inordinate fear of speaking Islam’s name #Paris

November 15, 2015 by Bookworm 36 Comments

Immediately after radical Islamists slaughtered at least 128 people in cold blood, and wounded more than double that number, my Facebook feed lit up with posts and posters expressing solidarity with the people of Paris. I’m posting here a sampling of the images included in the posts. As you scroll through them, think about what’s missing:

(Yes — the posters included things this dumb)

In addition, Facebook added a feature so that people can have a French flag layered over their profile picture. Here’s an example of an overlay that several of my Facebook friends used:

[Read more…]

Brief thoughts about today’s news #Paris #Islam #Mizzou #terror #Yale

November 13, 2015 by Bookworm 15 Comments

Before I begin, I want to extend my sincerest condolences to the French people. This Mumbai-style attack is terrible and cruel.

Having said that, I feel obligated to point out that France, which has expended a great deal of energy trying to appease the Muslim crocodile (including trying to undermine Israel at every turn and punting on a moral nation’s obligation to protect its Jewish population) failed as signally at appeasement as Churchill implied would happen to all appeasers.

I was speaking to a friend who said that the Paris attack would almost certainly improve Marine Le Pen’s political prospects. Although she’s a socialist through and through, she at least understands that the medieval strain of Islam is France’s enemy, just as it is the enemy of all civilized nations. Thinking about Le Pen, I realized that we have a Le Pen too: Donald Trump.

Unlike a true conservative who believes in individual liberty, which can only be achieved through limited government, Trump, a former Democrat, is a Big Government guy in both theory and practice. And like Le Pen, the only thing that really distinguishes Trump from any other statist political figure is that he too is hostile to immigrants. They are both xenophobic nationalists. Neither is a true conservative.

As it happens, I support Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration. As it happens, my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, is also a hardliner on immigration but — and this is why I like him so much — he’s also a true individual liberties kind of guy, one who believes federal government should fulfill limited functions that happen to include strong border and national security.

And of course, let me be one of many to comment that, last I heard, Obama still can’t make himself choke out the words Islam or Muslim.

Closer to home, I’m getting the feeling that the Mini Maos who have taken over America’s colleges and universities might have finally broken through the wall of ignorance behind which middle class parents have been hiding when it comes to the Leftist insanity they’re funding. I had three Progressive friends ask me today (because they know I follow the news fanatically) what the heck is going on. I was happy to explain.

Indeed, I’m wondering if today won’t be an inflection point — a “come to Jesus moment,” if you will — when mindless liberals finally realize that conservatives are not racist, censorial fascists, but have, instead, been the tocsin desperately shouting out a warning about the dangers of fascism at home and Islamism both at home and abroad. Certainly, every Progressive with even a few functioning brain cells should ask him or herself if things in Paris would have been different if the Parisians had concealed-carry. And those who have been watching events in Israel must surely have noticed by now that the best defense against a terrorist with a knife is a gun.