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The Bookworm Beat 9/19/16 — the “we’re still singing” edition and open thread

September 19, 2016 by Bookworm 4 Comments

The miserable sexism of Hillary’s supporters. I’ve agreed with myself to disagree with Jonah Goldberg about Donald Trump, while still greatly respecting and deeply appreciating Goldberg’s take on just about everything else. In the wake of Hillary’s 9/11 collapse, followed by her dehydration, followed by the media castigating as sexist anyone who dared suggest the woman is ill, followed by her “oh, it’s just pneumonia,” followed by the entire media admiring Hillary for the strong female way in which she “powered through” things, Goldberg had this to say:

But here’s the thing. After weeks of bleating that it was sexist to raise questions about Hillary’s health, the immediate response from the very same people was an irrefutably sexist argument. Men are just a bunch of Jeb Bushes, low-energy shlubs laid low by a hangnail. But women are the Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Bangas of the species. (For non-longtime readers, this translates from the original Ngbandi, “The warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.”)

This raises a subject of much fascination to “news”letter writers who are fascinated by it. I don’t want to go too far out on a limb, because you never know if you’ll fall into raging torrent of angry weasels, but I gather that the word “sexist” is supposed to have a bad connotation. That was the sense I got taking women’s studies courses at a formerly all-women’s college. I’ve also drawn this conclusion from a fairly close study of routine political argle-bargle.

The problem is we don’t really have a word for observations and statements that simply acknowledge that men and women are . . . different. Not better or worse. Just different. If I said that dogs aren’t the same as cats, no one would shout, “Dogist!” Everyone would simply say, “Duh.” In fact, if I said to about 90 percent of normal people, of either sex, that men and women are different, the response would be “duh” as well.

[snip]

The frustrating thing is that feminist liberals like to have it both ways (and not in the way that Bill pays extra for). Women are “different” when they think it means women are “better,” but when you say women are different in ways that annoy feminists — for whatever reason — they shout, “Sexist!” Lena Dunham rejects the idea that women should be seen as things of beauty, and then gets mad when she’s not seen as a thing of beauty. Women should be in combat because they can do anything men can do, but when reality proves them wrong, they say the “sexist” standards need to change. And so on.

Hillary Clinton is like a broken Zoltar the Fortune Teller machine shouting all sorts of platitudes about being the first female president, cracking glass ceilings, yada yada yada. She openly says that we need a first female president because a first female president would be so awesome. But she also wants to say criticisms that would be perfectly legitimate if aimed at a man are in fact sexist when directed at a woman. That is a sexist argument.

No campus safe spaces for Jews. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m happy to report that when it comes to the aggressive special snowflakes on America’s college campuses, consistency is never a problem. You see, it turns out that the whole thing about safe spaces and microaggressions and triggers and political correctness doesn’t apply to Jews:

But little has been said about how the idea of “intersectionality” — the idea that all struggles are connected and must be combated by allies — has created a dubious bond between the progressive movement and pro-Palestinian activists who often engage in the same racist and discriminatory discourse they claim to fight. As a result of this alliance, progressive Jewish students are often subjected to a double standard not applied to their peers — an Israel litmus test to prove their loyalties to social justice.

You and I have been tracking this problem for years, but I’m hoping that Jewish parents will start realizing that there’s a problem on American campuses. As it is, in today’s world, I would have to say that the single biggest reason that American Jews are so hard left is that they are so likely to go to college, which they get exposed to the pernicious disease that is Leftism. This has been going on for at least 40 years — I was exposed in Cal, although I was eventually able to build an immunity — but it’s gotten worse of late.

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The Bookworm Beat 4/21/16 — a round-up and open thread

April 21, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

My take on the decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 in place of Andrew Jackson? I find all this change and revisionism both silly and expensive but, having said that, here’s my position: They’re replacing the racist, slave-supporting, Indian-killing founder of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Republican black woman — what’s to dislike? I think it’s great. And now on to the collected news of the day.

Blame Democrats for today’s nasty politics. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business. After all, the people playing aren’t just winning cupcakes; they’re winning power. Nevertheless, for most of America’s history, there’s been a tacit agreement to conduct politics in a civil manner — fight hard, but attack your opponent’s politics, not his person. This year, that unwritten rule has vanished. One can point fingers at specifically nasty politicians, but the real story isn’t that nasty people do nasty things; instead, it’s that the American public is willing to accept that behavior. Andrew Klavan blames the Left for this cultural degradation:

As a proud right-winger, I’m appalled and disgusted by Donald Trump. Nonetheless, I feel a certain schadenfreudean glee at watching leftists reel in horror at his unbridled incivility. They truly don’t seem to realize: he is only the loud and manifest avatar of their own silent and invisible nastiness. In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are.

American immobility. I’ve commented multiple times about the fact that Americans are less willing to relocate than they once were. The entire essence of America for several hundred years was people’s willingness to leave their homes, whether in the old country or the new, and to head south, east, north, or west in search of better opportunities.

Today, though, the combination of being weighted down by possessions (even the poor today own more than all but the rich owned in the past) and having welfare to turn to (no matter how minimal that welfare is) means that people in economically dead areas can stick around. It’s not a nice life, but it’s the life they know, and they can always make themselves feel better about things with a bit of meth or heroin.

Kevin Williamson got a lot of flak for saying that we as a nation need to stop expending energy and money on dying communities and should, instead, focus on the vital communities. Obviously, I agree. Now, Williamson, in the face of that flak, has doubled down and I still agree:

My answer is that if there’s nothing for you in Garbutt but penury, dysfunction, and addiction, then get the hell out. If that means that communities in upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or west Texas die, so what? If that’s all they have to offer, then they have it coming.

Mixed in with that common sense you’ll find some hard-hitting attacks on those who challenged Williamson. And I still agree with him.

The bottom line is that,while dying towns are sad and forcing people to leave their roots is sad too, at a societal level, that’s not a reason to keep functionally dead towns on taxpayer-funded life support.

(Incidentally, the same goes for Europe, which in its effort to preserve its past has calcified, making it less of a charming place, and more of a bizarre and frequently unpleasant place. I totally understood what Robert Avrech’s friend was talking about when he said that Eastern Europe, even without the Soviets, is “oppressive.”)

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Europe’s dystopian present — and why, because I’m helpless to stop it, Schadenfreude overwhelms me

February 14, 2016 by Bookworm 53 Comments

Beginning on September 11, 2001, and with increasing speed since January 2009, I’ve had a very strong sense that the world — not just America, but the whole world — is unraveling. At home, venerable and often cherished institutions and ideas are falling into disrepair or being perverted beyond all recognition. Abroad, the Pax America that stabilized the world for so many years, with America acting not as a conqueror but as ballast, has broken down. I’m afraid of the world into which I’m launching my children. The dystopian future that become a stable of countless young adult novels seems to have become the dystopian present.

In many ways, the worst thing about watching the passing spectacle is that I’m helpless to do anything. Sure, I blog, but I recognize (and I don’t mean this with any disrespect, dear readers) that I’m mostly preaching to the choir. I’d be delighted if my words changed one mind, swaying one person from unthinking Progressivism to thoughtful conservatism, but I’m pretty sure that the best I can do is offer comfort and comradeship to people who share my values and my concerns. There’s nothing wrong with binding people together, but I don’t see what I’m doing as effecting any real change.

I’ve also tried to help my children understand that the Leftist political pieties forced upon them in their schools and through their media are false. Mostly, I’ve been successful — my children, when they’re willing to think at all about politics, seem to have absorbed my conservative world view, one that fears big government, believes in strong borders and self-defense, and is fanatic about a free market and the virtue for able-bodied people of self-reliance. I don’t know, though, if I’ve done them any favors. Their values clash with the world they’re entering and put them at odds with their generation. Maybe they could face their socialized, possibly Islamic, future with some equanimity if they didn’t believe in the alternative.

On my Facebook page, I politely tweak my Leftist friends by subtly inserting conservative ideas into their Feeds, but I’m not kidding myself. Even the most open-minded of them are open-minded only to the extent that they don’t “un-friend” me or get nasty. I can practically feel the pity radiating across the feed as they think “She was smart once. What the heck happened? Early dementia perhaps?” None think, “She has always been a really smart, well-informed person. Maybe she’s on to something.” Sigh.

Faced with a domestic scene that saddens me and an international scene that frightens me, I’ve come to a necessary conclusion if I’m to continue functioning — and I must continue functioning. After all, even as things come down around my ears, I still have meals to prepare, laundry to wash, bills to pay, and people (and dogs) dependent upon me for their care. I can’t allow existential anxiety to make me useless.

So here’s my philosophy: To the extent I can bring about change, I’ll fuss and try to come up with solutions that make a difference. However, when there’s nothing I do or say to make a damn bit of difference, I’m going to sit back and get whatever pleasure I can out of the show. I’ll only make myself crazy if I continuously bang my head against walls to no effect.

My lemonade-out-of-lemons philosophy applies strongly to Europe. If there were any way I could save it from its present existential collapse, I actually believe I would. However, because there is absolutely nothing I can do, I’m opting for the pleasures of Schadenfreude as I watch Europe’s passing parade.

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Is Europe worth saving? UPDATED

February 6, 2016 by Bookworm 22 Comments

Commentary Magazine ran a post asking “Can American Save Europe Again?” It seems to me that the better question is should America save Europe again? Europe is certainly a repository of some of the world’s greatest art and architecture, not to mention some damn fine food, but I am not feeling the love for Europeans, who always seem to learn the wrong lessons from history.

The problem, as I see it, with continental Europe is that it has absolutely no tradition of individual liberty. It is statist to the bone. Whether Europeans are indulging in garden-variety-dictatorships, medieval/Renaissance theocracies, monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, socialist parties (communist or otherwise), or rule by bureaucrat (i.e., the EU), the European model is always directed at total state control. That’s why there is no conservative movement in Europe, as we in America understand conservatism.

To Americans, conservativism means small government, free markets, and maximum individual liberty, a belief in the common man’s energy, imagination, and initiative that paved the way for America’s dynamic emergence on the world stage in the 20th century. To Europeans, being “right wing” or “conservative” still means total government control — it just means total government control with varying degrees of nationalism, as opposed to all those other -isms, thrown in. The European “right-winger” still wants his government checks and government regulations. It’s just that he just doesn’t want the “other,” whomever that other happens to be (sometimes Muslims, sometimes Roma, sometimes Italians or Greeks, and always Jews) to live with him under that tight government control.

Europe’s obsession with citizen control, whether it comes through the socialist party, the communist party, the church, the bureaucracy, the aristocracy, or the monarchy, may go some way to explaining Europe’s endless hostility to the Jews — the Jews have never and will never yielded to state control. They can be confined to ghettos or forced into a narrow range of professions or even routinely slaughtered, but they still insist on being Jews. They refuse to bow down to anyone but their God.

How frustrating for control freak nations to have these stubborn people living among them. If they are that stubborn, they must be dangerous. And in a total control society, when something appears dangerous, you must destroy it.

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The Bookworm Beat 1/26/16 — the “race heating up” edition and open thread UPDATED

January 26, 2016 by Bookworm 7 Comments

It wasn’t just women who were attacked on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. When I first read about the hundreds of sexual attacks that Muslim immigrants perpetrated against women in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve, I only vaguely recorded the fact that the Muslims were also setting off fireworks. It was only in the back of my mind that I asked myself “Are over-the-counter fireworks part of the European New Year tradition?” It turns out that, whether or not they’re part of the New Year tradition, they were definitely fired as part of the “We are Muslims and we don’t allow any other religions to function around us” tradition:

Barbara Schock-Werner, who served as cathedral architect between 1999 and 2012, was present at the well-attended religious service along with several thousand other worshippers. Shock-Werner told the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine, that the cathedral experienced an unprecedented and massive rocket and ‘banger’ fireworks barrage that lasted the whole service.

“Again and again the north window of the cathedral was lit up red, because rocket after rocket flew against it,” she said. “And because of the ‘bangers’, it was very loud. The visitors to the service sitting on the north side had difficulties hearing. I feared at times that panic would break out.”

Cardinal Rainer Woelki, who presided at the New Year’s mass, also complained about the “massive disruptions.”

“During my sermon loud ‘bangers’ could be heard,” Woelki said in the paper, Die Welt. “I was already annoyed beforehand about the loud noises that were penetrating into the cathedral.”

Shock-Werner believes the religious service was deliberately “targeted for disruption” due to the attack’s timing. The mass took place between 6:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m., which, she said, “is actually no time to be already shooting off New Year’s rockets in such great volume.”

If anyone tells you that more Muslims mean less violence, don’t believe them. That’s a fable that belongs in the “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” category. While nations under the jackboot of theocratic Islam may have less violent crime between Muslims within a given Muslim nation’s borders, the reality is that Muslims don’t play well with others (and “others” means everyone else in the world, including women, Jews, Christians, Hindus, gays, the wrong kind of Muslims, etc.).

Rome goes full dhimmi. Iranian president Rouhani is heading to Italy and, in his honor, the Italians are temporarily wiping out their culture (or, at least, for now the wipe-out is temporary). Here it is, the grandeur that once was Rome:

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The Bookworm Beat 10-29-15 — the spindle overload edition and open thread

October 29, 2015 by Bookworm 11 Comments

So much to share with you (23 separate articles at last count) and so little time. I’ll therefore get right down to business and you might want to give yourself some time to review all these fascinating articles at your leisure:

Another pundit figures out Cruz might be the man

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz, and have done so since he took a stand on Obamacare. Ross Douthat (whose writing I respect) has suddenly realized that those of us who support Ted Cruz might be on to something.

Ted Cruz makes sense on taxes

Certainly Ted Cruz’s flat tax plan ought to help people realize that he’s offering genuine change for the better, not just platitudes and painful socialism. Heck, you’d think that all Americans would support a candidate who wants to deep six, or at least severely de-fang, the IRS and, in doing say, make our tax system fairer and make doing business in America more tempting for both American and foreign corporations.

Daniel Greenfield waxes eloquent on the heckler’s veto that is Islam’s stock in trade

After clearing his throat about the Obama administration’s despicable pandering to Palestinian terrorists, along with its sickening chastisement of Israel (this from an administration that would never dare blame the victim if a drunk woman walked naked through a biker’s bar), Daniel Greenfield gets to the real point, which is the fact that the West lets the mere threat of Islamic anger paralyze it.

The world’s one billion Muslims, whose delicate emotions are always infuriated by something, enforce an Islamic status quo in which no non-Muslim dares to violate the Muslim superiority complex.

[snip]

Some might say that the billion Muslims are just looking for things to get angry at… but that would just make a billion Muslims angry.

When buildings fall or buses blow up, when people are stabbed, shot or exploded by the unofficial representatives of the bilious billion, we go right past the crime to the anger that motivated it. “Why do they hate us?” becomes the question and Muslim anger becomes the pivot of national security policy.

Since Muslim anger causes violence, we stop terrorism by tiptoeing around anything that might make them angry. Minor things mostly like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. If you’re a Coptic Christian who makes a YouTube video about Mohammed, you can be sent to prison when some of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda locals murder four Americans while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

After weeks of brutal Muslim murders, Kerry has gotten Israel to reinforce a ban on Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism because it offends Muslims. Next up, maybe Jews will be restricted to the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs again. Because that was the “Status Quo” under the Muslim conquest.

As my lengthy quotation in this “quick hits” round-up reveals, Greenfield’s article falls into the must-read category.

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Socialists and the dearth of babies

October 6, 2015 by Bookworm 14 Comments

Several of my recent posts have focused on the American Left’s death cult, otherwise known as unlimited abortion. As I’ve stated repeatedly, the Left’s risible claim that abortion does not take a life, combined with its obsessive demands that the right to abortion be unfettered up to, including, and even after a viable baby is born has turned me from a fairly mindless, garden-variety, pro-Abortion, old-time Democrat into someone who is edging remarkably close to being pro-Life. Even though I can still accept situations in which an abortion is reasonable, I’m so disgusted by the Left’s death cult that I want to run as far away from it as possible.

The Left doesn’t just have a death cult, it also has a lack of life cult. It is true that American women still seem to be shtupping like rabbits. In 2013, following a five-year drop in baby-making, American women gave birth to almost 4,000,000 new babies (and aborted about 300,000 more). Americans are therefore just about holding their own demographically.

In Europe, though, the demographics are a nightmare, which goes a long way to explaining Angela Merkel’s bizarre desire for her country to be repopulated with Muslim Arabs. While the Muslims are picking up where they left off in 1683 and looking towards a European conquest, Merkel is obsessively focused on cheap labor to care for an aging German population.

What’s fascinating about Europe’s declining baby numbers is that it’s entirely possible that the problem isn’t just because women are making good use of birth control and abortions to limit family size. Instead, as has been happening in Japan for a long time, it may be that the Europeans have lost interest in sex entirely.

I don’t have any scientific basis for reaching that conclusion. What triggered the thought is a video that a Danish travel company made urging wannabe grandmothers to buy their children vacation packages to the sexy warm climates in which they are most likely to get pregnant:

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The Bookworm Beat 9-8-15 — the “busy world” edition and open thread

September 8, 2015 by Bookworm 8 Comments

My apologies for my blog silence yesterday. I hope to make up for it now with a substantial round-up, some of which I compiled, and some of which comes from a friend who insists on remaining anonymous:

Your daily “Hillary is toast” report

As you know, Hillary did a national interview — fairly softball really — with Andrea Mitchell, who has long been a Hillary fan. Mitchell has now published her post interview take on it all (emphasis added):

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell said Tuesday she was concerned the Hillary Clinton campaign would have cut off her interview with the candidate if she asked too many questions about Clinton’s private email server at the State Department.

Clinton sat down with Mitchell on Friday and the main topic from the start was her use of a private, unsecured server as secretary of state, which has caused serious problems for her campaign with questions about her honesty, trustworthiness, and handling of classified material. While other presidential candidates have made dozens of media appearances, Clinton has given just threenationally televised interviews since her campaign began.

“We were told we had a 15-minute interview,” Mitchell said. “I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt, out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously, that I had to move on, so I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask, but I think we did get a good chance to ask a lot of questions and discover that she did not have an answer for why she did the personal server in the first place.”

Even members of the drive-by media are shaking their heads that Hildabeast has not come up with a believable lie for why she ran a personal server. There is only one obvious reason, but they claim to be mystified.

Meanwhile, Hildabeast spoke at a Labour Day event that included this gem:

“We’re going to go back to enforcing labor laws,” Clinton said. “I’m going to make sure that some employers go to jail for wage theft and all the other abuses that they engage in.”

She has apparently gone full Lenin and business owners are the new Kulaks. That said, there are two things Hildabeast should not be doing at this point: one is wear an orange jumpsuit, the other is use the word “jail.”

At NRO, Shannen Coffin has a great deal of fun with Hillary’s latest excuse for her private email, private server and numerous email shenanigans, that she simply “wasn’t thinking.” My but she took a lot of actions unconsciously.

It seems the Hot Air crowd has reached the same conclusion that my friend did as soon as he saw the second review panel’s determination of the top secret information Hillary had on her server. The argument had been that possibly they were discussing information that had somehow become available through public sources, such as a foreign news report. That is no longer at issue. It is now beyond question that Hillary committed multiple crimes and the DOJ cannot ignore it without applying a clear legal double standard:

The FBI and the Department of Justice will have to take some kind of action at this point. A federal grand jury will get them off the hook politically, at least for a short period of time, and that may be their best option under the weight of a presidential campaign.

Oh, one more thing: Since it’s from the National Enquirer, we know it’s true that Hillary really is a lesbian (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Donald Trump exaggerates his tough guy capabilities

Donald Trump, who has the same military record as Obama, Hillary, Hildabeast, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren, says in an interview “I always felt that I was in the military. . . . Trump said that his five years at the New York Military Academy provided him with “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

If you want to anger millions of Americans who have actually been in and understand the challenges and sacrifices, eh, couldn’t think of a better way to do it. Having experienced an extremely tough military training, followed by actual infantry service at the front lines, my anonymous friend can assure you, there is only the tiniest of comparisons between even the toughest military college and the actual infantry — plus there is that tiny bit about not having people shoot at you or engaging in training events that could claim your life.

One can only imagine what the Iraq and Afghanistan vets are feeling. Oh, and to put this in perspective, Trump got four deferments from the Vietnam Draft.

There’s nothing green about “green energy”:

I’ve been sounding the drumbeat for years — green energy is a resource hog. In order to get to market, green energy products suck up fossil fuel, coal, food crops, and vast tracks of land — and that doesn’t even touch upon the tax payer dollars green energy gobbles up.

It is unlikely that solar power, wind power, or biofuels will ever compete with traditional energy sources. Until we are willing to rely on nuclear power or until cold fusion is a reality, we have to figure out how to use existing energy sources in a more clean and efficient way, rather than wasting our time with the other stuff.

Anyway, that’s my story, and at the very least, Professor A J Trewavas, who represents Scientific Alliance Scotland, agrees with me:

Renewables use sun, water, wind; energy sources that won’t run out. Non-renewables come from things like gas, coal and uranium that one day will. But unless electricity and motorised transport are abandoned altogether, all “renewables” need huge areas of land or sea and require raw materials that are drilled, transported, mined, bulldozed and these will run out. Wind turbine towers are constructed from steel manufactured in a blast furnace from mined iron ore and modified coal (coke). Turbine blades are composed of oil-derived resins and glass fibre. The nacelle encloses a magnet containing about one third of a tonne of the rare earth metals, neodymium and dysprosium. Large neodymium magnets also help propel electric cars.

Currently China provides 95 per cent of rare earths; proven reserves of dysprosium will likely run out in 2020. Processing one tonne of ore generates about one tonne of radioactive waste, 12 million litres of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide, sulphuric acid and 75 thousand litres of waste water. Baotou, in China, mines and processes much of the rare earth ores. The town abuts a five-mile-wide, toxic, lifeless, radioactive lake of processed wastewater. Local inhabitants have unusually high rates of cancer (particularly in children), osteoporosis, skin and respiratory disease. This unseen environmental destruction may be far off but no less damaging.

A few thoughts about the dangerous influx of Muslim “refugees” into Europe

September 6, 2015 by Bookworm 47 Comments

In no particular order, my thoughts about the mass Muslim invasion of Europe:

The poster to the left implies that Muslim countries are heartless, which they are. But they’re also pragmatic. They’re refusing to accept those so-called “refugees” because they understand that there are terrorists embedded within them. The “refugees” are a Trojan horse. Pamela Geller is right on the money:

The question no one is asking is why all these people, all of a sudden? Did millions of Muslims across the Middle East and Africa get a text message that said, go now? This is clearly orchestrated, and as I previously reported, ISIS warned Europe of an invasion of “migrants.” This, too, is an act of war. How many jihadists are among the hordes?

Normal refugees are starving, shell-shocked women, children, and old men, fleeing with nothing but the shirts on their backs. This current batch of “refugees,” however, is dominated by hordes of healthy looking young men, who somehow managed to hang onto their selfie-sticks, expensive smart phones, and calling plans.

Here’s a little photographic proof. These Yazidi Christians are refugees, walking across deserts — women, children, and old men — with those left behind being crucified, behind, raped, enslaved, etc.:

Meanwhile these plump, affluent Muslims show no signs of being refugees from horror:

Syrian refugees pose for photo using selfie stick. #RIPEurope #HelloCaliphate pic.twitter.com/yVSc5ctrb6

— Bill O’Keefe (@DefendWallSt) September 5, 2015

If you read beyond the heartrending Leftist headlines (or “weaponized emphathy“), you will see that the real stories make it clear that this is an invasion of Muslims picking up where their forebearers left off in 1683. Islam has always wanted Europe.

And speaking of which, this is all Obama’s and Europe’s fault. All of it. Like the scorpion, Islam is what Islam is. Just as water will force its way through any available seam or crack, so too will jihadists. It’s what they do. The only way to prevent them from engaging in their innate behavior is to corral them within their own borders. The Middle East pre-Obama may not have been a very nice place, but it was quiescent.

With Obama’s response to the so-called Arab Spring, all the boundaries are gone. Obama pushed out a stable leader in Egypt; unleashed horror in Libya; destroyed the peace in Iraq; did nothing to aid the Green movement against the mullahs in Iran; and, out of that same deference to the mullahs, allowed Bashir Assad to proceed unchecked in Syria.

In other words, wherever he could, Obama fomented the spread of Muslim violence and terror within the Middle East. His manifest goal was to advance the interests of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran (a conflicting goal admitted, because the former is Sunni and the latter Shia), leading one to conclude that he intended for the Middle East to explode and, like a ruptured, infected pustule, to spread its poison everywhere.

So why do I blame Europe too? Because Europe has spent the last forty years funding the worst elements in the Middle East, both to keep the flow of oil heading its way, and to destroy those living Jews in Israel who are an ongoing reminder to Europe of each nation’s complicity in the Holocaust. After all, even those nations that were themselves victims of the Nazis gleefully helped the Nazis round-up and slaughter Jews.

Europe is also a reminder to be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Europe wanted a Judenrein continent. Well, as matters now stand, their malevolent oral and financial attacks on Israel will have succeeded, once and for all, in driving the Jews out. But by empowering the Muslims, their tactics will also drive out the Europeans, whether by turning them into refugees, or through their slaughter, conversion, or enslavement.

But Bookworm, you sound so callous, so hard? What about the children?

What about them? They’re pawns and pawns always get sacrificed.

As you know, when the world is upset, and most certainly when non-Judeo-Christian cultures are involved, the children always die. That’s a dreadful reality. If we save the Muslim children, we doom the nominally Christian European children, and vice versa.

Because once the fight is fully engaged, the children always suffer first, it’s important when the fight begins to ask which culture is the one most likely to lead to future generations of healthy, happy, peaceable children. It’s not the Muslim culture, which happily sacrifices its little pawns to the greater Muslim good.

But what about that poor two-year old and his father’s heartrending story. Pardon my language (and you know I seldom swear), but his story is BULLSHIT. I knew that immediately when I saw a quote from the father saying that, as he was trying to rescue his family, the two-year-old who died cried out “Please don’t die, Daddy.”

Have you ever had a two-year old in your life, especially one who is on the younger side of two as that poor dead baby obviously was? “Please don’t die, Daddy,” is not what actual two-year olds say in moments of crisis. Instead, they are inarticulate screamers.

Once you figure out that someone has told one major lie, it’s not hard to figure out that they’ve told lots of major lies. The Muslim Issue details the many massive holes in the father’s story. These are just a few:

Abdullah was never on that boat to watch his wife and children drown. That’s why he was the only survivor. The first time he learned of their death was from the hospital after the photos of his young son was circulating in the media. Listen to all the contradictions and holes in his story.

This was an attempt to send his wife and children into Europe before his own arrival to apply for refugee status as a lone woman with children, while they never even lived in a war zone.

[snip]

This is what he told the press initially, as reported in the Guardian yesterday:

“I took over and started steering. The waves were so high and the boat flipped. I took my wife and my kids in my arms and I realised they were all dead,” he told AP.

Let’s look at all the details of his story.

The report according to Abdullah’s own words is that he lived in Turkey for three years and prior to that he had lived in Damascus. His sister makes the story even more confusing saying that Abdullah was a barber originally from Damascus, who fled from Kobani to Turkey but “dreamed of a future in Canada” for his family. Was he living in Damascus or Kobani? Kobani is over 500 kms from Damascus.

After “fleeing” from “war zone” Kobani he now wants to return to Kobani to attend — a funeral. Huh…? So he’s safe to fly back by plane to Kobani and attend a funeral. And guess what? ISIS was not even in Kobani when Kurdi claims his family “fled” from ISIS.

ISIS was not in Damascus either three years ago when Kurdi claims he lived there. ISIS entered only a small rural part of northern Damascus last year and targeted a remote refugee camp with “Palestinians” earlier in 2015 and were pushed out. ISIS is present in a quarter of the country in Northern Syria, not in the South.

While Western media reports that he was trying to reach Canada, Swedish media are being given reports by Kurdi that he was trying to reach Sweden and that he had been receiving FREE housing in Turkey for three years. Abdullah claims he was trying to reach Canada but was denied asylum – while Canadian authorities say they have never received any application from him at all. Which story does Abdullah want to stick to?

We are once again being grossly manipulated into feeling compassion for an invading force by having that force sold to use as a pathetic band of refugees.

And finally, let’s be honest — no sane society should ever, ever, ever invite a horde of Muslims in. Remember what I said about conquest being in their nature? Even if every one of these health, military aged men was in fact a refugee, all those men will still play the scorpion to the helpful frog and kill it.

Muslims are not like other faiths. Even the Jews that Europeans so hate never forced conversions or raised arms. Indeed, they never did anything, which is what forced the Europeans to rely on conspiracy theories that had them busily connecting invisible dots with imaginary lines to justify the horrors they visited upon an insular, non-conquering culture. Muslims, however, are in-your-face conquerors, which their prophet required them to do. That they follow this dictum closely is borne out by 1,400 years of Muslim history.

Writing at Declination, a descendant of Armenians who escaped the massacre thanks to a kind Muslim, understands that Islam is like no other religion, political movement, or ideology. We make a terrible error pretending that its practitioners are, en masse (as opposed to individually) just like us:

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.

I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.

But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.

And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.

There are many good Muslim people around the world, I’m sure of it. But we cannot make policy based upon individuals. To survive, a society has to make policy based upon its best guess about how a mass of individuals will behave. Using history as our guide, the best guess is that, if you invite millions of Muslims into Europe, they will not become Europeans; instead, in a very painful, ugly, bloody, expensive, destructive way, Europe will become Muslim.

If I were really being compassionate, I would say that we will take in these Muslim refugees, but that all children under the age of 14 must be placed in actively Christian families, baptized, and brought up in the Christian faith. I would also require all adult immigrants be forcibly assimilated into Western culture in every way possible. No creating sub-cultures in ghettos, banlieues and, eventually, entire towns.

Thinking about that last step, though, I’m not sure it’s possible. So here’s the deal: We’ll take the children, subject to the Christian upbringing condition described above, but the adults have to stay behind.

ISIS and an antisemitic Europe: Looking for the good news buried in the bad

January 1, 2015 by Bookworm 12 Comments

Muslims praying on Paris streets

Sorry for the blog silence, but for the past few days, everyone has wanted not just a piece of me, but several pieces of me. I’m telling myself that this was just an end-of-the-year frenzy and will have no impact whatsoever on the year to come. As it is, though, I’ll be glad to see the last of 2014 and am hopeful that 2015 will be better. Nevertheless, I’m mindless of something that Robert Avrech says: “[W]e try to remain optimistic. However, after six years of Obama, this state of mind becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.”

Okay, in that spirit of optimism, here’s some blood-thirsty, rather weird good cheer for you. I have a friend who is very Jewish and very conservative. He is rooting for, of all things, ISIS. Why? For starters, he thinks of Europe as the Amalekites. The Amalekites were intractably hostile to ancient Israel. Their perpetual war against the Jews ended only when David finally annihilated them. The takeaway lesson, which is something Jews are reminded of every year, before Purim, when they read the chapter, “Remember what Amalek did unto thee” (Deut. xxv. 17-19), is that when you have an enemy dedicated to your destruction, your only hope for survival is to destroy that enemy first.

For a 60 year period after WWII, we deluded ourselves into thinking that WWII had, once and for all, wiped antisemitism from the European map. As the last few years have shown us, that was a false hope. Antisemitism in Europe is roaring back with ferocity. They turn on Jews on their streets and they turn on them in Israel.

It’s no excuse, either, to say that Europe’s renewed antisemitism comes from the Muslims in Europe. Even if one says the problems started with Muslims, the fact remains that Europe has embraced, rather than rejected, the Muslim approach to Jews and Israel. For Europe, antisemitism is bred deep in the bone.

To my friend, both the Europeans and the Muslims are Amalekites. The only way to deal with either is to see them destroyed. Right now, with ISIS and radical Islam ascendant, it looks as if radical Islam is on its way to destroy Europe. And as my friends said, ISIS’s escapades show that radical Islam has no compunction about destroying its enemies root and branch.

I protested, asking “What about the innocent?” My friend said “There’s nothing stopping them from leaving as they see Europe slipping back into genocidal antisemitism. They stay. They accept the consequences.”

“Okay,” I said, “but even if Europe as we know it is gone, we in America are still facing radical Islam, as is Israel.”

My friend wasn’t too perturbed. First, he said, we all know what happens when a nation goes fully Muslim: it becomes a third world entity, which makes it less of a risk to a nation such as America that still has the trappings, despite six years of Obama, of a first world nation. Second, he said, ISIS is currently on the bottom of the list of Israel’s worries. Israel is infinitely more worried now about America under Obama, Iran, and those Hezbollah missiles aimed at her. She’ll deal with ISIS when the time comes — and, if ISIS and Iran are busy fighting it out, she might not need to worry at all. In other words, don’t trouble Trouble until Trouble troubles you.

I did warn you that my friend’s view was blood-thirsty. His point, though, is an old one: Our enemies are on the verge of engaging with each other. Let them.

[VIDEO] Caroline Glick utterly demolishes European ambassadors

December 22, 2014 by Bookworm 5 Comments

Caroline Glick was not constrained by the meaningless language of diplomacy. She simply told the truth after listening to the Danish ambassador’s utterly revolting twaddle, in which he simultaneously expressed his antisemitism and his utter disdain for the Palestinian people who are the European tools to act upon that antisemitism:

The Bookworm Beat (10/17/14) — aka the Friday fish-wrap edition (and Open Thread)

October 17, 2014 by Bookworm 13 Comments

Before I dive into my round-up, I wanted to discuss with you a poster that a very liberal friend of mine put up on Facebook. It’s the Leftist version of various posters you’ve seen here discussing Leftist logic (e.g., as Dixon Diaz says, “A liberal is someone who lives in a gated community but says that a border fence won’t work,” or “A liberal is someone who thinks that Fox news lies, but Obama doesn’t.”). The Leftist version of this logic comparison involves voter ID and gun purchases:

Superficially, the comparison makes sense. I mean, ID is ID after all. Why should it be required in one place and not in another? Only a second’s thought, though, makes it clear that this is a bit of prestidigitation, meant to make us look in the wrong direction.

What we should be looking at is the fundamental right we’re trying to protect. In the case of voting, the fundamental right is the right to cast a vote that is not canceled out by an invalid vote from someone who, as a matter of law, cannot vote, whether because that person is actually dead, or is an illegal alien, or is a felon, or just hasn’t bothered to register. Demanding identification protects the integrity and weight of my legal vote.

The opposite is true for the requirement that one must show identification at a gun show. The right to bear arms is the fundamental right at issue. Putting government regulations between an individual and a gun is a burden on the exercise of that right. This is not to say that the state may not place that burden, but the state had better have a damn good reason for doing so.

So — is anyone out there skilled enough to reduce my argument to a poster that will counter the poster above? For the life of me, I cannot figure out an easily digestible way to counter a fallacious, but superficially appealing, argument.

Guns save lives

It seems appropriate after discussing the fundamental right to bear arms to lead off with a news report about an Army vet, carrying a licensed gun, who used his gun to save both his girlfriend and himself from a frightening attack by a deranged individual. Here’s the takeaway quotation:

“I firmly believe that in order to maintain a free society, people need to take personal safety into their own hands,” he said. “You should walk around ready and able to protect yourself and others in your community.”

Modern Islam flows from Saudi Arabia and Iran, and both are barbaric

Daniel Greenfield pulls no punches in “The Savage Lands of Islam.” With a focus on Saudi Arabia (along with nods to Iran) he explains that Islam, as practiced in the countries that are its heartlands, is an utterly barbaric religion that debases human beings. He also warns that Islam exists, rather like a parasite, to take over other countries and reduce them to precisely the same debased status. Or as I once said:

England continues voluntarily to plunge itself into the moral abyss

By a vote of 60 to 1, the student union at Goldsmiths College in London voted to discontinue all Holocaust commemorations. The reasons given were grotesque, starting with that given by the “education officer,” a gal named Sarah El-Alfy, which I read as an Arab name. According to her, Holocaust commemorations are “Eurocentric” and “colonialist.” Sadly, El-Alfy sounds marginally intelligent compared to students who opined that “The motion would force people to remember things they may not want to remember,” while another said that because the Union was (apparently appropriately) anti-Zionist, commemorating the Holocaust was impossible.

Honestly, I think the only time in modern history that a once civilized country so swiftly and completely debased itself was Germany, in the years between the end of WWI and the start of WWII. And, to England’s shame, Germany at least had the “excuse” of having been utterly destroyed, socially and economically, by having lost WWI. England’s slide into this abyss has no excuse, following as it does the fat years that Margaret Thatcher introduced and that continued through the 1990s.

England’s not alone: all of Europe is just as immoral

England didn’t sink into this moral black hole alone. All of Europe is there (with American Democrats tugging anxiously at the leash, desperate to plunge into the hole themselves).

How do we know this? Because Europe, England included, has decided to recognize the Palestinian state, despite the fact that there’s nothing state-like about the West Bank. Well, there’s nothing state-like unless you redefine state to mean “a dysfunctional terrorist organization, with no infrastructure, no rights for women, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or gays, and that has no ability to generate revenue but simply funds itself with hand-outs from the international community, most of which end up lining the pockets of those clinging with tyrannical fervor to ‘leadership’ positions.”

And if that sentence was too packed to make sense, you can and should read Caroline Glick on Europe’s disgraceful move to recognize a Palestinian State.

When it comes to moral black holes, let’s not forget The New York Times

As part of the Left’s desperate effort to emulate Europe’s moral abasement, the New York Times is leading tours to Iran, no Israelis allowed, and all Jews and homosexuals seriously discouraged from coming along:

The New York Times is offering a pricey, 13-day excursion to the “once-forbidden land of Iran,” one of a series of its Times Journeys tours. However, if you’re an Israeli, joining the “Tales of Persia,” trip, “once-forbidden,” is still forbidden, and letting anyone know you’re Jewish, or gay, isn’t particularly recommended, either, a representative told The Algemeiner on Monday.

How very 1938 of the Times. Can’t you just see exactly the same tour being given to Nazi Germany by the Progressives at the Times, all of whom would be overflowing with admiration for a powerful state that gives universal healthcare, discourages smoking, and designs fuel-efficient cars?

Did you know Hitler was a meth head?

This may be old news to some of you (indeed, I remember vaguely reading it somewhere), but it’s still a shock to read about the scope of Hitler’s doctor-approved drug abuse:

According to a 47-page wartime dossier compiled by American Military Intelligence, the Fuhrer was a famous hypochondriac and took over 74 different medications, including methamphetamines.

[snip]

He was initially prescribed a drug called Mutaflor in order to relieve the pain of his stomach cramps.

He was then prescribed Brom-Nervacit, a barbiturate, Eukodal, a morphine-based sedative, bulls’ semen to boost his testosterone, stimulants Coramine and Cardiazol, and Pervitin, an ‘alertness pill’ made with crystal meth-amphetamine.

One has to wonder how much all these drugs contributed to the paranoia and monamania that killed 40 million people, including 6 million Jews, in just six years.

No wonder conservatives are feeling apocalyptic….

The last couple of days have seen several conservative writers writing gloomy posts about America’s and the world’s slide into chaos, all under Obama’s aegis.

Roger L. Simon asks “Can It Possibly Get Any Worse?”

Stephen F. Hayes looks at the “Failure Upon Failure” of the Obama presidency. In theory, the article should make for satisfying reading for those of us who figured Obama out on the first day but it’s actually just terribly depressing, because Obama’s failure is America’s failure.

Ed Driscoll notes that the Left is getting downhearted too, in “The ‘Bam Who Fell To Earth.”

America’s campuses go full kangaroo court

Heather MacDonald is pleased about what she sees as neo-Victorianism on college campuses, by which she means the fact that colleges are starting to turn away from the hook-up culture and obsession with perverse sex that has characterized them for so many years. As the mother of a girl heading off to college one of these days, I’m delighted to learn that the sex saturated culture is finally drying up. However, as the mother of a boy who will also be heading off to college one of these days, I’m distressed that the change is coming about, not by demonizing the casual and perverse sex culture, but simply by demonizing boys and men.

As long as men leave the toilet seat up, why marry?

There must be as many reasons for the decline in marriage as their are non-married people. A female University of Washington professor thinks the decline in marriage is a good thing because men just aren’t very nice people to marry.

In keeping with her attack on men, I’d like pick up on a theme I touched upon years ago, when I first started blogging. Looking at the people I know, the couples I know, and the blogs I’ve read, I’ve concluded that liberal and conservative men are very different in their approach to women.

Liberal men applaud women in the abstract — calling them equal or superior, bowing before their right to do anything they damn well please, and feeling the need to apologize all the time for being men. Given all this, perhaps it’s not surprising that, except for the sex part, liberal men don’t seem to like actual women very much. If you constantly have to abase yourself before someone, it’s kind of going to kill the fun. Certainly, in my world, the harder Left men are politically, the meaner they are to the real women in their real lives.

Conversely, while conservative men believe in equity feminism (equal pay for equal work, equal access to opportunities on a level playing field), they view women as different from them and special in their own way. I’ve never seen a respectable conservative male blogger denigrate women, just as I’ve never seen one pretending there’s no difference, that women are superior, or that all men must perpetually apologize for erroneous opinions that men in past generations held about women. Conservative men have a better handle on the fact that, in a pre-industrial, pre-scientific era (that is, everything before about 1850), there was no way in Hell to pretend that men and women were fundamentally equal. Conservative men also seem not just to love the women in their lives, but truly to respect them.

So it seems to me that, amongst the Left, which is still driving the culture, marriage is less popular because feminism has made it reasonable for men to dislike women, and therefore to treat them disrespectfully, which in turn leads women to dislike men.

Very sad.

Andrew Klavan gives the American media a well-deserved shellacking

Still, there is beauty….

Adilyn Malcolm describes herself as follows:

Hi, I’m Adi! I’m 11 years old and I love dubstep! I have NEVER taken a dance class in my life………I learned from watching (YouTube) videos!! I have been dancing for about 6 months. I am actually a motocross racer but when I’m not on my bike, this is the next best thing! I hope you enjoy my videos. Thanks for watching!

Although the following is only her second video, she already has 2,421 subscribers and 2,005,997 views. You’ll see why she got so popular so fast when you watch her dance:

And a few pictures in lieu of thousands more words

And, from Sadie (who provided the caption):