Bookworm Room

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

North Korea negotiations reveal media’s ignorance

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The pause in North Korea negotiations reveals that the media is locked in a dangerous imaginary world where negotiations play out like bad old-time movies.

North Korea Negotiations Trump and KimTo date, the stupid Leftists in the media have been trained like Pavlov’s dog to expect “a win” whenever there’s a summit with a foreign leader. Past presidents have always emerged from the meetings with “a deal,” even if that deal was either illusory or, worse, gave away the store.

Media hacks therefore have no template within which to fit an actual negotiation, such as the one Trump is conducting with North Korea. That’s why we end up with these headlines (to which I will not hyperlink):

Trump-Kim Summit’s Collapse Exposes the Risks of One-to-One Diplomacy (New York Times)

Trump Kim talks: What to make of the Hanoi summit collapse? (BBC News)

Trump Cuts North Korea Summit Short After Talks Collapse (iHeart News)

Will nothing go right on this trip? Officials have to manually push stairway from Air Force One after they broke down in Vietnam – just like Trump’s disastrous summit with Kim Jong Un (Daily Mail)

Hanoi summit collapse could be ‘big blow’ to North Korean leader’s pride, experts say (ABC News)

Summit Collapse: How Trump’s Hanoi Talks With Kim Unraveled (Bloomberg)

Aside from the Borg-like repetition of the word “collapse” (those “journalists” must all drink coffee around the same cooler), the collective media is displaying its inability to see beyond a Hollywood moment. You know what Hollywood moment I mean.

To the media, every negotiation is one of those old black-and-white films in which the leaders of two nations on the brink of war are sitting around a conference table, exhausted, their ties loose, their shirt sleeves rolled up, five o’clock shadow on their faces, ash trays stacked with cigarette stubs. If they walk away, the negotiation is over and the world explodes into war. Then, suddenly, our hero rushes in with a brilliant idea or a piece of breaking news. Instantly, the stalemate is broken, the joyous negotiators dance around the room, and the hero and his girl fall into each other’s arms, the world once again saved. [Read more…]

Catching a Progressive being good — and (maybe) helping him rethink guns

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Is it possible I had a civil, indeed, delightful conversation with a Progressive about guns because I gave him a vision of himself as an open-minded person?

Progressive Conversation GunsI had a very nice New Year’s Eve attending a couple of parties. At both parties, of course, I was the only conservative there. I know this because, in my world, people freely trumpet their liberal bona fides, confident that no one present could disagree with them.

One woman I’ve known for almost twenty years — and like a great deal — said that 2018 was one of the worst years of her life because Trump was in the White House. I gently counseled her not to take politics so personally. I didn’t mention that I eschewed public whining during Obama’s eight years, despite thinking them terribly damaging to the country and to my children’s future. I prefer to use my whining and persuasive skills where they might make a difference. Which brings me to the point of this memo, which sees me wondering whether I did make a difference.

To set the scene, I need to explain that, while I’m excellent at solitude, I’m also a very social person. When I go to parties, I don’t just talk to people I know, where conversations revolve heavily around children, work, and vacation. Instead, I also meet new people.

Anyway, one of those new people I met, a man raised in both Europe and America, apropos I can’t remember what, stated that ideally he would like to seize all privately held guns. Rather than bristling and accusing him of being a fascist tyrant, I mildly pointed out that he’d have a hard time doing that with the Second Amendment in place. He responded with the usual: “Well, the Second Amendment applies only to militias.”

This was my opening to tell him — politely — two facts most Progressives don’t know. The first is that all American men are automatically militia members. A man’s automatic membership in the militia was understood as a matter of common law in the colonies before the Revolution and was instantly instituted into American statutes after the revolution. After all, the whole point of the revolution was to get rid of powerful government armies operating on domestic soil and, instead, to make every man the defender of his own liberties.

In addition, I made two other points about the Second Amendment. First, I pointed out that it is the only Amendment in the Bill of Rights dedicated entirely to a single proposition. The other Amendments cover a multitude of issues. Take for example, the First Amendment, which addresses speech, assembly, the press, and religion. Others address broad topics such as criminal justice, police powers, and more. Only the Second Amendment focuses like a laser on a single proposition: A free people’s right to be armed. [Read more…]

Writings and sayings that have changed the way I live my life

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There are a few things I’ve read or heard that have completely changed the way I live my life.  The first and most important was Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. His light, accessible prose completely changed my life. I started looking at the people around me, not as adversaries whom I had to fight for resources (including such intangibles as friendship and popularity), but as collaborators in a giant project that sees all of us wanting to get ahead.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I became a nicer, kinder person overnight, and, moreover, one who truly believes that the majority of people I meet are interesting and have something good to offer me if I’m willing to be generous in return.  By the way, being generous doesn’t necessarily mean money.  It can mean interest, respect, friendship, friendliness, or myriad non-monetary ways to let people know you value them.

The next important thing I read was Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice, a book that helped me gain a bit of perspective about the (to me) overwhelming life choices I was making in my 20s.  My copy has disintegrated, and I have not bought another one, so pardon any errors I make as working from my memory here.  The book’s structure is a little unusual, as the narrator, Noel, is the lawyer for a young woman named Jean Paget.  He meets her after the war because he is the executor of a will that leaves her a legacy.

The first part of the book has Jean describe to Noel her experiences as a prisoner of war held by the Japanese in Malaya, a time of great hardship and personal tragedy.  The second part of the book is about Jean’s life after the war, and the way in which her wartime experiences end up profoundly influencing not only her life, but many other people’s lives as well.

At the end of the first half of the book, when Jean sees herself facing a bleak and lonely future, she concludes her narrative to Noel by saying “four years of my life wasted.”  Noel responds to the effect that we can never tell which of our life experiences truly matter.  The second half of the book, of course, shows the truth in Noel’s observation.

For me, Noel’s simple statement was a stunning truth:  I cannot control the future.  My responsibility is to make the best decisions I can now, and then to make the best of whatever effects those decisions have upon my life.  And that’s all I can do.  It was a simultaneously freeing and empowering revelation.

The last important thing I learned actually came by word of mouth, when a friend told me, with regard to my children “catch them being good.”  Wow!  Viewing my children as great human beings who occasionally fell off the path of goodness was better than viewing them as horrible little monsters who were good only rarely.  We now have what I can only describe as a great parent-child relationship, and I do believe they are genuinely good people.  How lucky I am.

I’ve read other things that have changed profoundly the way I approach my life, but I cannot summon them to mind as easily as I can the three I describe above.  Just yesterday, though, I read something that I might add to my canon of life-changing thoughts.  It came from John Hawkins who wrote a post at PJ Media entitled 5 Simple Hacks That Changed My Life.

What John describes are intellectual approaches to changing the way you view ordinary life experiences such as receiving criticism, making decisions, facing up to mistakes, etc.  Each of his suggestions helps your mind overcome its baser instincts (those being, for example, dealing with criticism through attack or collapse; dealing with difficult decisions by avoiding them entirely; or refusing to address mistakes because it’s too emotionally painful to do so).  Everything John writes is simple to understand and easy to undertake, but all five of his approaches enable us to bypass the barriers we erect in our own lives.  I urge you to read it.

Also, I would love it if you would share with me any simple, yet profound, insights that enabled you to deal with problems, turn your life around, achieve greater happiness, etc.  I am a big believer in reprogramming my brain so that I use new ideas to overcome old problems that arise from my personality issues.

The most important self-help book I’ve ever read

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“I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish.” — Dale Carnegie

There are a bazillion self-help books out there, all of which tell you what you can do about yourself to make your life more wonderful.  I’ve dipped into many of them and, while some had useful factoids, and some were more charmingly written than others, I don’t think any self-help book has ever contained a more important message than the original self-help book:  Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, written in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression.

Stripped of its charming anecdotes, Carnegie’s message was a simple one:  you can improve your own life by making other people feel good about theirs.  That’s it.  Carnegie did not advocate sycophantic flattery or lies.  He simply said that most people want others to think well of and appreciate them.  Show other people that you do indeed feel this way about them and their work, and they will be happy to demonstrate to you the best side of their personality and the best work that they do.

The world would be a much better, and very much nicer, place if more people heeded Carnegie’s lesson.