Bookworm Room

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

No. 33 Bookworm Podcast: Understanding “Left” and “Right” in America

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In this Bookworm Podcast, I examine how the term “Right Wing” is misused to imply that conservative Americans are fascists lusting for world domination.

Bookworm Podcast transgenderism Russia HoaxMy latest podcast is up and running. You can listen to it through the audio embed below, or at LibSyn, or through Apple Podcasts. Also — and this is a grand experiment I cooked up while spending 12 hours hopscotching from Tennessee to California and another 12 hours (a week later) making the return trip — I’ve made a companion video, which I’ve also embedded below.

The video is very much an experiment and I have to confess that the video and the companion podcast (which is a direct copy of the audio on the video, minus some long pauses) have a few rough spots. I’ve figured out how to work out those rough spots, but after spending more than six hours yesterday making a 35 minute video, I was just too “done with” the project to make repairs. Bear with me, though, for it will get better. [Read more…]

Movie Review: Book Smart

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Book Smart

By The Closet Conservative

Read my previously posted movie review, on Long Shot. (Short version: I did not like it)  That movie was Citizen Kane compared to Book Smart.  Yet, most critics love this movie. 97% favorable on the Rotten Tomatoes web site. I REALLY am truly a relic from the past. Two things strike me as odd and depressing about the popularity of this movie, ONE: was the reaction in the nearly full house I sat with on opening night. 80% of the audience was under 25 years old and eating it up. Laughing, while I was either bored, disgusted, depressed, or beside myself at the idiocy of the characters, that the audience seemed to be sympathetic to… TWO: The fact that adult critics found this movie funny, innovative, clever…

Just about every character was either stupid, or mean. (Certainly the only 4 adults shown in the movie were fools; two parents, one school teacher and one school principal.  This school principal made Principal Rooney from Ferris Bueller seem like Jaime Escalante.) If there was a character to root for in the movie, it may have been the blonde friend who started off with no backbone, but gained some courage later in the movie. (Question: Is it part of the current pop culture that EVERY youth show HAS to have at least one or more main characters gay, even when most numbers show that 90-95% of the population is heterosexual? Gay – not that there’s anything wrong with that –  is “in”, as being Christian or Conservative is out…) [Read more…]

The Dark World of Krugman

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We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and friends being conservative, she targets her venom at conservatives. We who love her nonetheless, understand: “conservatives” remind her of her father, a redneck sort of fellow who was a very bad father. She blames him for her mother’s suicide, which occurred when she was very young.

 

If you dig deep into people’s psyches, you can often find the reason for visceral hatreds and, usually but not always, they have to do with childhood experiences. As Oprah (an abused child) famously remarked, some people seem incapable of shedding their childhood baggage.

 

So, what is it with Paul Krugman, once a brilliant economist and now a dark troll fulminating ugly thoughts under stone bridges in Liberal-land? This article, contributed by Peter Foster in Canada’s Financial Post, does a brilliant dissection of Krugman’s visceral hatreds and the warped views he espouses on economics, conservatives and climate change (some of which have been repeated rote on this blog by certain participants).

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/06/28/peter-foster-the-demons-in-krugmanomics/

 

What the article doesn’t do is explain from whence do Paul Krugman’s demons arise. What happened to cause his descent into madness?