Bookworm Room

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

Bookworm Beat 12/17/18 — the “world is fascinating” edition

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After a manic weekend, I got the chance to put my all into this Bookworm Beat, which covers politics, homelessness, immigration, antisemitism, and more.

Bookworm Beat Woman Writing American Left's FascismOh, my gosh, but do I have a lot to share with you — and tonight I’ve got the time to do so. Go get a nice cup of tea or coffee, and maybe a few cookies or a little ice cream, find a comfortable chair, and let’s get going.

I should warn you before you begin that these snippets aren’t in any particular order. I’m writing them down in the order in which I first read them. It’s a little chaotic, but consider it a challenging brain teaser.

Trump is not a show-boater about his patriotism. Saturday was “Wreaths Across America” day, a day on which volunteers descended on military cemeteries all over America to decorate veterans’ graves with wreaths. Without fanfare, Trump showed up at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the fallen. I’ll leave you with a few photos of this present and a past president:

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By the way, I know that Obama sometimes carried his own umbrella and that gateways can be tough. Still, there was something about Obama and umbrellas…. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 12/6/18 — the super quick edition

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This Bookworm Beat quickly looks at silly queers, the fake #MeToo movement, the party of non-science, bad Islam, dead England, the Iran Deal, and more.

Bookworm Beat Obama Brennan double standards insane leftistsHonestly, I don’t know where the day went. Here it is, after 8 in the evening, and although I’ve been busy all day, I can’t quite put my finger on what I did. The one thing I didn’t do, though, was blog. However, I’ve tagged a lot of things I’d like to share with you. This will be a quick rundown:

Queers for Palestine are idiots. Islam is not a religion friendly to the LGBTQ+ crowd:

The only place in the Middle East that is friendly to the LGBTQ+ crowd is Israel. Unfortunately, intersectional nonsense means that way too many LGTBQ+ people are this stupid:

They are, in a word, useful idiots.

The #MeToo movement was to cull the herd. Dems leaped all over the #MeToo movement, but it’s obvious that they didn’t mean it. Sure, they got rid of a few problematic people (culling the herd), but mostly they still follow the line from the 1990s, which is Dem men get a pass if they support abortion. There are two stories today proving that point: [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 11/20/18 — some quick links

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You’ll find it all in this Bookworm Beat: Airbnb, antisemitism, Women’s March madness, Obama madness, gender madness, climate madness, and so much more.

Bookworm Beat Obama Brennan double standards insane leftistsMy children are grown and off to college, but some days they still need their mother. I’ve spent quite some time on the phone today with both of them, which limited blogging. Here are some interesting links, though. I’m racing the clock for this post, so I won’t even make a pretense of proofreading. I apologize in advance for typos and incoherent sentences.

I’m boycotting Airbnb. I have never yet used Airbnb, because I don’t trust its quality control, but now I can assure you that I never will use Airbnb:

Airbnb has fueled the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement by announcing on Monday that it will cease to list Israeli homes in the West Bank.

In singling out Jewish West Bank homes for boycott, Airbnb’s disgraceful decision not only promotes anti-Israel charges but will work to further strengthen Palestinian intransigence and the larger war to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Airbnb said the company “concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

It made the decision after a fierce campaign waged against Airbnb by the extremist BDS movement and its anti-Israel allies.

In its statement, Airbnb refers to the West Bank, areas where Jews have had an historic presence for thousands of years, as “occupied territories,” implying that Israel stole the land from the Palestinians.

Israel opposes the “occupied” label, and has referred to the land in international forums as disputed. The framework for all previous peace proposals (each of which was rejected by the Palestinian Authority) never called for an entire Israeli evacuation from the West Bank.

Palestinians never had a state in the West Bank and they are not legally recognized as the undisputed authorities in those areas. Jordan illegally occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967.

I urge you to read the entire article from which I’ve quoted, because it explains how ignorant Airbnb is when it comes to supporting the BDS movement. Airbnb, of course, is not boycotting any other homes in disputed territories around the world. Only the Jewish ones:

Airbnb antisemitism bds

Smells like antisemitic hypocrisy to me.

[Read more…]

The University of British Columbia apologizes for being gender binary

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The University of British Columbia apologizes for the fact that its online application is so old-fashioned it contemplates only two sexes: male and female.

University of British Columbia logoThe college application process can be an eye-opening experience. Yesterday I blogged about the fact that the University of Oregon gives applicants two options when it comes to admission essays: (1) identify yourself as a victim or an oppressor or (2) explain how you will add to the school’s endless lust for diversity.

Today, it’s my proud duty to inform you that the University of British Columbia is terribly sorry that its currently constructed online application is so primitive that it contemplates only two sexes. No, I’m not kidding:

Currently only two gender designation options are available within the UBC Student Information System. Access and Diversity works with the University to create an inclusive living and learning environment in which all students can thrive and is currently exploring how to better accommodate students with non-binary gender identities within this database. For more information about available supports and services, please contact Access and Diversity.

My Little Bookworm was baffled that I would care about objective facts — in this case, objective facts being the scientifically irrefutable fact that, barring an infinitesimally small number of anomalies, human sex is binary: male and female. While he (thankfully) doesn’t believe in more than two genders, Little Bookworm doesn’t understand why it’s a problem to allow people to claim that there are more than two sexes. I explained to him that, once objective facts are devalued, one is only left with subjective emotions — and the person with the loudest hollering or the biggest gun always wins that argument. I’m not sure that this world view resonated with my 21st century youngster, though.

Here are two more thoughts about the application process, not just at the University of British Columbia, but at all of these colleges and universities: [Read more…]

Steve Crowder: Change my mind that there are more than 2 genders

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Steven Crowder politely asks passers-by to change his mind that there are more than two genders. Armed only with feelings, the youngsters struggle and fail.

Steve Crowder Change My Mind GendersOne of my favorite sayings of all times is Dennis Prager’s maxim that he prefers clarity to agreement. When his show used to air on local radio here (and I was constantly in the car ferrying children about), I’d see his invariably respectful questions cause his guests either to collapse in an incoherent heap, get terribly defensive, or surprise themselves by discovering that they don’t agree with their own stated principles but, instead, agree with Prager’s.

Steven Crowder takes this approach to college campuses in his “change my mind” video series. Acting through the campus Republican organizations, he obtains permission to sit at a little table and ask passers-by to change his mind about hot topics. To date, he’s done these videos on guns, hate-speech, abortion, and the number of available genders. It’s this last one that caught my eye.

I’ve blogged frequently here about transgender madness. If you’d like a sense of my position on the number of available genders, you can check out this post,this one, or this one. In brief, I think there are two, aside from a very small number of genetically intersex people. I recognize that there are feminine men and masculine women — and people who wish they were a member of the opposite sex — but that does not mean that they are, in fact, members of the opposite sex or no sex whatsoever. I was therefore interested in Crowder’s experience. [Read more…]

Reality-denying Progressives call MAGA supporters “losers”

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Progressives again show their retreat from reality, this time with a t-shirt claiming MAGA supporters, whose candidate and agenda won, are “losers.”

President Trump Oath of Office MAGADuring the 2016 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump had promised “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning.” The MAGA team believed him and he turned the electoral map red everywhere except in coastal areas and large urban enclaves.

True to Trump’s promise, while his administration has made some errors (President Trump should have fired Comey and indicted Hillary on January 22), there’s also been a whole lot of winning. Here’s a partial list:

  • Justice Gorsuch is a win.
  • The roster of conservative judges President Trump is nominating to the federal court system is an ongoing win.
  • Withdrawing from the Paris Accord was a win.
  • The speech President Trump made at the UN, defining and defending American sovereignty was a win.
  • The ongoing effort to shrink the administrative state is a win.
  • Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Ryan Zinke are wins.
  • The booming stock market is a win.
  • The slowly expanding economy is a win.
  • The Trump administration’s ability to block terror exporting nations from sending people to America is a win.
  • ICE’s stepped-up actions and the diminution in the flow of illegal aliens to the US are ongoing wins.

I don’t think any of the MAGA crowd are bored yet with this winning. They’re counting on more. The reality is that, with Trump slowly but steadily dismantling the Obama state, his MAGA supporters are very pleased. Moreover, as the guys at Power Line show (especially Paul Mirengoff), even those who did not vote for Trump, and are not true MAGA-ites, are pleased. It’s been a delight to watch the more reasonable NeverTrumpers come around.

It’s also been pretty darn pleasing watching the new converts talk to those who have walled themselves off in NeverTrump Land (a cold, dank, hopeless, ugly place). What they’re saying is that the obdurate NeverTrumpers have become intellectually dishonest and are making themselves pariahs to all thinking conservatives.

With all this MAGA winning in mind, how in the world does one explain this t-shirt? [Read more…]

Dunkirk review in Marie Claire: Fatally flawed gender identity assumptions

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My friend Lulu weighs in on the fact that the Marie Claire review of the Dunkirk movie suffers from fatal hetero-normative gender identity assumptions.

Retreat at DunkirkI must take issue with Mehera Bonner of Marie Claire and her review of the World War II film Dunkirk in which she states,

. . . my main issue with Dunkirk is that it’s so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I need every movie to have “strong female leads.” Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams “men-only” — and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I’m wrong about not liking it. . . .

Honestly, how dare she? As Bonner should well know, gender is determined by a personal identification based on an internal awareness. It is what we feel inside, what we know ourselves to be. Our external parts do not always conform. How could she not know that some of those soldiers had to have been non-binary. Some were undoubtedly queer or transgender on the inside. In fact, some of those soldiers were no doubt women — despite their penises.

I would advise Bonner to remember that when she assumes that the movie is men-only and caters to pretentious man-splaining men. How wrong she is. I did not see a toxically masculine film as she did. On the contrary, I envisioned brave transgender women soldiers fighting alongside male, hetero-normative, cis-gender soldiers and proving the historicity of the struggle against restrictive gender roles. Those were our brave sisters out there too and they deserve Bonner’s respect.

On race and gender, Democrats have always embraced the Big Lie

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For 150 years, Democrats used the Big Lie about race to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and now they’re using the Big Lie technique to challenge gender norms.

Big Lie Caitlyn Jenner Transgender Gender Delusions

Ce n’est pas une femme

I want to share a thought with you that starts with slavery and ends with transsexuals. To get from one to the other, I have to start with one of the few decent classes I had when I was at UC Berkeley. That senior seminar looked at the history of race relations in America versus those in Brazil.

When I took the class, I had no interest whatsoever in the history of race relations. I was an English history major — the English isle, to be precise — and everything else was a distant second. Still, it became apparent to me very quickly that I was not alone and that I would not get into my preferred seminar. You see, back in the day, when it came time for enrollment in senior seminars, the history teachers would seat themselves at random intervals in the big lecture room at Dwinelle Hall. Students would then approach the teachers as supplicants, begging to get into this or that seminar.

As soon as I walked in the room, I saw that the professors teaching the seminars in which I was interested were besieged. I had no desire to hurl myself into that scrum. Instead, I checked out the teachers who were not surrounded by adoring students.

Only one of the other teachers caught my interest because he was so darn handsome. After I ascertained that he had openings in his seminar and that it worked for my schedule, I signed up, not even caring what he was teaching. And so it was that I ended up learning about the history race relations in the US and Brazil.

Fortunately, for me, that handsome young graduate student was an excellent teacher. It made up for the fact that he was happily married, had a baby, and would in any event not have been interested in me. It also made up for the fact that the reading materials were deadly dull.

Thirty years later, the only takeaway I had from the class is that America was rather unique in its “one drop of blood” approach to racism. In Brazil, there’s a great deal of racism, but it’s on a graduated scale. The darker you are, the more racism you face and the lower your status in society.

Meanwhile, in America, it doesn’t matter what you look like. If you’re known to have even a drop of black blood in you, you’re black. Nor is that a racial view that’s changed since both slavery and Jim Crow ended. After all, Barack Obama, half-black and half-white genetically, was our “first black president.” He wasn’t really, of course. He was our “first half-black president” — but that’s not the way things roll in America.

The stigma against that single drop of blood has been so strong in America that it made for a great subplot in Edna Ferber’s Showboat, which started as a book, made it to Broadway as a groundbreaking musical, and then got made into two Hollywood movie musicals. (The 1936 version of the movie is the one to see.)

If you’re familiar with Showboat’s plot, you know that, when the showboat passes through Mississippi, a vengeful man, furious that the beautiful Julie LaVerne has rebuffed him, reports to the authorities that she is, in fact, a black woman. Given that her husband, Steve, is a white man, they have violated Mississippi’s miscegenation laws and he demands their arrest. The couple avoids arrest when Steve cuts Julie and licks her blood, enabling his friends on the boat to state honestly that he has that “one drop of black blood” in him. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/24/17 — “watching as the Left continues circling the drain” edition

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This Bookworm Beat has all shades of Progressive insanity (fake data, attacks on free speech, Chelseamania), complete with links and my trenchant comments.

Bookworm Beat logoKeep circling that drain. Before I get into the meat of this post detailing the worst emanations from the Democrats and their fellow travelers on their Left, I want to lead off with Kurt Schlichter’s article begging the Democrats not to change their current trajectory and tactics:

Look, Democrats, speaking sincerely as your friend, understand that everyone who says you need to take a deep look at yourselves is a racist, sexist, homophobe who won’t even ask about your preferred pronoun. Whatever you do, don’t you ever change.

[snip]

The problem isn’t you. It’s those stupid idiots who won’t obey you because they’re stupid idiots. How can those idiots be so stupid?

Who knows? But what’s clear is that it’s not your fault. It’s theirs. So when the going gets tough, and you aren’t making progress – in fact, when you’re moving backwards – what’s the smart play? Double down!

Hey, the dealer’s showing an ace in a face-heavy deck and you’ve got a six, what do you do? Double down!

Can I boast? I had the pleasure of meeting Kurt a couple of weeks ago and he’s every bit as smart, funny, and personable as his writing. Lord, but I do envy a brain like that.

Statistically illiterate accusation that Trump voters are racist. You know all about American colleges and universities by now. They’re the places in which self-regard exceeds accomplishments, feelings trump rational thought, antisemitism is great than that found anywhere else in America (except, probably in Dearborn and the DNC), and the First Amendment is subordinate to students’ feelings (provided, of course, that those feelings are consistent with the Democrat Party platform).

Thomas Wood, an assistant professor at Ohio State University, has emerged from this sewer to announce that Trump voters are racists. He thought perhaps they were mere Nazi-style authoritarians but it’s worse — they’re racists. He knows this because he’s got charts.

Why are Trump voters racist? Because Wood specifically defined racism in such a way as to apply to Trump voters. That’s how they do it at universities nowadays:

To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.

In other words, if you believe that only government can save perpetually hapless and helpless minorities, you’re not a racist. However, if you believe that minorities are rational, sentient beings who respond to incentives and disincentives in the same way as everyone else, and that they therefore deserve to be respected as our equals and not demeaned as perpetual wards of state, you’re racist!

You always win the game if you get to write the rules after the play is already run. Woods is a perfect example of why I keep saying that the best way to get America back on a track dedicated to individual liberty, free enterprise, and constitutional governance is to take every bit of federal money out of American “higher” education.

[Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 4/18/17 — a potpourri of interesting, random stuff

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Here’s a down-and-dirty Bookworm Beat that’s still replete with things to entertain and inform.

Bookworm Beat logoI’d meant to blog more today, as well as to clean my office, but I had a sick dog and that took both my time and my attention. All is well with the dog — it’s a long term problem and we’re doing maintenance care.

And now for some quick links:

Gadzooks! It’s Gorsuch: Last week, when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed, Myron Magnet wrote a much-read article about the revolution his ascension to the Supreme Court represents:

Suppose, now that Gorsuch has been confirmed and sworn in, it understood and intended to overturn the administrative state’s usurpation of the Constitution. Suppose, moreover, that it understood the promiscuous lawlessness with which the justices have been making laws out of thin air for half a century and more—claiming some vague basis in the Bill of Rights or the Fourteenth Amendment—and resolved to end that abuse, exercising only judgment, not will. Suppose President Trump got to appoint one more justice in the Gorsuch and Scalia mold, creating an irresistible majority that upheld Madison’s original Constitution instead of Wilson’s “living” one.

Magnet’s dream may well be in the process of being realized. How do I know? Because of the manic, fevered emanations from the Left after Gorsuch’s first official appearance on the bench, all stating that Gorsuch is a mentally-disabled moron wrongfully occupying Merrick Garland’s seat. They’re terrified:

After his startlingly humiliating performance during his first day on the bench yesterday, it’s possible his earlier reticence to answer the Senators’ questions was because he didn’t understand them. As it turns out, Gorsuch is a simpleton with almost childlike understanding of the law – and the existing Justices on both sides of the spectrum already seem to have concluded he’s an idiot.

In fact, Gorsuch was pointing out that the answer lies in actually reading the statutory language — and he was embarrassing those attorneys who were trying to make things complicated in hopes of getting a ruling that allows agencies to make their own laws. (I’ve lost my link for this, but I’ll fill it in as soon as I find it.)

If Dennis Prager is happy, I’m happy. Everything Dennis Prager says about the political and moral clarity of the last two weeks . . . I agree:

2. The terrible presidency of Barack Obama is beginning to be acknowledged.

Following President Trump’s order to attack Syria about 63 hours after the Syrian regime seemingly used chemical weapons, even many in the mainstream media couldn’t help but contrast his prompt response with Obama’s nonresponse to Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013. And almost every report further noted that Obama failed to do anything after having promised that he would regard the use of chemical weapons by Assad as crossing a “red line.”

Likewise, Obama’s do-nothing policies vis-a-vis North Korea are being contrasted with Trump’s warnings to leader Kim Jung Un about further testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pressure on China’s leaders to rein in the North Korean regime.

These contrasts are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which being there is now hope that Obama’s star will dim as time goes on.

This will come as somewhat of a surprise to those on the left, but many of us who are not on the left believe that Obama did more damage to America than any previous president — economically, militarily and socially.

[Read more…]