Bookworm Room

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

Is our US Navy incompetent or did Obama seriously undermine it?

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The US Navy has been in the news lately for crashes and corruption. Is this the reasonable follow-up to 8 years of Obama’s approach to the military?

NavyA few days ago, word came down that the Navy relieved of duty the U.S.S. Fitzgerald’s commanding officer, executive officer and senior enlisted sailor. They suffered this fate because, on June 17, on their watch, a Philippine merchant ship crashed into the Fitzgerald, killing seven American sailors.

Also a few days ago, ten sailors were reported missing and presumed dead after the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker near Singapore. The media, of course, has tried to make this about Trump, because he responded to a question about the crash before being briefed about the resulting deaths. His response, therefore, appeared cavalier when it was not.

This is not about Trump, however. Losing seventeen American lives in two separate peace-time incidents hints that there is something rotten going on in America’s Navy. If our ships can’t even survive commercial traffic, what the fugue can we expect of them should they have to answer a true call to arms?

Superficially, it appears that the Navy is having a competence problem. It’s equally likely, though, that we’re seeing a reflection of a very serious morale problem. Eight years of Obama attacks on the military may be taking their toll. Here are two things to keep in mind as you think about that theory. First, during the Obama years, the Pentagon engaged in a massive purge of officer ranks across the services. A list compiled in 2014, while the purges were still ongoing, gives an idea of the purge’s scope.

It’s entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they were calcified, ineffective holdovers from a previous era who were damaging military effectiveness. It’s also entirely possible that these officers got the boot because they believe that the military exists to defend America against her enemies, rather than to serve as a social justice experiment for people with gender body dysmorphia or to be a leader in the fight against “climate change.”

People like that would not have been welcome in Obama’s military. When these officers left, they took with them knowledge and experience, leaving in their wake a blow to morale.

And second, there’s the corruption problem, especially in the Navy. I don’t know how many of you followed the story when it broke, but it turned out that military officers were absolute whores when it came to accepting bribes from a macher in Malaysia: [Read more…]

“The Princess and the Frog” shows that military and transgender don’t mix

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A few striking visuals in a charming Disney movie perfectly illustrate the Big Lie hiding behind the transgender movement.

Transgender Military Bradley Manning Chelsea ManningBefore anyone asks, there is no actual transgender content in Disney’s delightful The Princess And The Frog, a movie I praised lavishly here. Nevertheless, after reading about the travails of a woman who identifies herself as a “transgender man” (meaning that she is a biological woman who believes she’s a man), but still has periods, I was irresistibly reminded of a scene in that movie.

Let me start with that poor woman who thinks she’s a man. Writing at a blog called Everyday Feminism, she explains that she suffered a lapse in her hormone therapy because her “government insurance” prevented her from finding a doctor with expertise on all things transgender. This hormonal lapse caused her to have periods again. Because the writer believes herself to be a man, she had to come up with creative ways to pretend that periods don’t mean what nature says they mean; namely, that she is not a transgender man but is, instead, a woman. The following paragraphs describe her hormonal travails:

You see, I decided I wanted to switch from needles to cream. No medical reason, I just wanted to. I’m not wild about needles, and successfully sticking myself an estimated 150+ times was enough adventure for me, thankyouverymuch.

But the fact nonetheless remains that, unbeknownst to me, my doctor decided to start me on a cream dose so low that it would’ve created virtually no effect on the raging estrogen of my body, now super-pissed because I’d caged it for so long.

And so, after so many blissful years of being blood-free, my cycle returned with a vengeance.

And because my doctor had flubbed as hard as she flubbed and I didn’t find out until significantly later – there was a fantastic while there where I was convinced something was seriously wrong with my body until she admitted that I had, in verbatim, been her guinea pig – the war is still waging as she ever-so-slowly ups my dosage back to cis levels.

Because—you know—no rush, right?

Suffice it to say that she never got how mentally debilitating man-struation is to me. No matter how much I tried to explain it to her. I can handle quite a bit in life – trans or otherwise – but I always stumble when I try to handle this.

If it were me, I’d work with this troubled woman to help reconcile her to her own body. However, we live in a different time, and instead we slice and dice her, pour potent chemical cocktails into her body, and pretend that her reasoning is sound, and that she really is transgender — meaning one who has successfully crossed the gender barrier.

No matter what modern medicine and magical thinking do, though, this woman’s body knows the truth. And that’s where The Princess And The Frog comes in. [Read more…]

Best visual commentary ever on transgenders in the military?

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It’s quite possible that this is the best poster yet made to comment on the whole transgenders in the military debacle — a debacle predicated on a lie.

And if you want the proper commentary to go with that poster, I highly recommend Brendan O’Neill’s brutal honesty about the Orwellian thinking that is being pushed on ordinary people. His starting point is the Tory proposal that people can edit their birth certificates at will to state their preferred gender (of the moment):

It’s madness. And most people know it’s madness. Ask any normal, decent member of the public if Dave, 32, born a boy, still in possession of a penis, and a five o’clock shadow on a rough weekend, is a man or a woman, and I bet you they will say: ‘Man.’ Not because they are prejudiced or ‘transphobic’ – the latest phobia slur designed to pathologise dissent – but because they understand reality. And truth. And biology and experience. They know that in order to be a woman, you first have to have been a girl. They know womanhood is not a pose one strikes in front of the mirror but is biological, relational, cultural and social. They know the man who wears a dress is a man who wears a dress. Which is cool, and his choice, and he must have the right to wear that dress. But he isn’t a woman. We know this. At some level he knows this. Why won’t more people say it?

Because it has become the great unsayable. To say there are two sexes – leaving aside that infinitesimally small number of nature’s hiccups that are intersex people – has become tantamount to a speechcrime. To say a man cannot become a woman – no matter how many hormones he takes or operations he undergoes – is now next to blasphemy. Even if you fully accept that these people are trans-women, and that they should enjoy exactly the same rights as every other person, from the right to speak to the right to work, you will still be hounded and harassed if you dare say, ‘They aren’t women, though’. As trans-sceptical feminists have discovered, the utterance ‘Men cannot become women’ is to the early 21st century what ‘Jesus is not the Christ’ was to the 15th. We must accept that the person with a penis and a birth certificate that says ‘Boy’ is a woman. We must accept the lie. Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, beavering away at the past-altering Ministry of Truth, we are made to lie. Trans agitators’ greatest accomplishment has been the institutionalisation of lying.

Transgender folks in the military — this is what the slippery slope looks like

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Obama planted a poison pill when he put transgender folks in the military. Republicans should discharge them, instead of quibbling about surgery.

Two interesting headlines about transgender people in the military. The first comes from Gateway Pundit:

Transgender military

The second is at Truth Revolt:

Transgender military

Here’s the short story: Republicans tried to stop forcing taxpayers to provide the money so that mentally ill service members who reject their body’s sex and, instead, believe they belong to the opposite sex, can have their external sexual organs sliced off and be given hormones that can cause cancer and other nasty things. Twenty-four RINO’s sided with Democrats to continue federal funding for this surgery.

The problem the Republicans who oppose funding have is that the Obama Pentagon officially declared that thinking you’re really a member of the opposite sex is not a mental illness. If it’s not an illness, but is merely a problem with ones body, why in the world should service members with hernia’s or dislocated shoulders get free medical care while people suffering from excess penises or breasts are denied?

The issue, then, isn’t the funding question, it’s the “who let mentally ill people openly service in the military to begin with?” question. That’s the problem.

In terms of the mental illness known as body dysmorphia, all of the following people suffering from exactly the same problem: [Read more…]

National Review cruise — Hillary’s America, the military, and abortion

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img_1903That title is correct: I’ll give you a brief rundown of Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America, an abortion panel, and a military panel. Things happen quickly on a National Review cruise and if I miss a bit of blogging, I’m seriously behind the eight ball.

Hillary’s America. Because Hillary’s America showed only briefly in Marin, I missed it. Fortunately for me, the movie’s two writers and producers were on the cruise and hosted a special showing yesterday.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite a good movie, as it is well-researched, well-written, and very professional produced. The movie begins with Dinesh’s sentencing for a campaign donation crime that, when it is a small, first-time infraction, as was the case with Dinesh, is invariably treated with fines and other minimal punishments.

Dinesh was special, however, for at the time the Justice Department got him in its sights, he was the writer and producer of the scathing (and prescient) Obama’s America, a documentary that ranks immediately behind Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine when it comes to popularity and revenue. Not only was Dinesh prosecuted with the full force of federal law, he had the misfortune to appear before a Democrat-appointed judge who sentenced him to time-served, plus two years of sleeping in a supervised facility, five years probation, mandatory public service, and court supervised therapy.

The first four items were the normal punitive stuff one would expect from a corrupt government. The last punishment was purely Orwellian punishment for “wrong thinking.”

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[VIDEO] Basic training is not what it used to be (NSFW — obscenities)

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The army isn't what it used to beI have a friend who went to college on a ROTC scholarship and has been an active duty officer for the past thirty-three years. When we last spoke, he told me that, while the new generation of enlistees has great potential, basic training has changed substantially. I forget his exact words, but they were something along the line of “we have to handle them with kid gloves, or we get in trouble.” This funny video would seem to support his sense of a drastically changed military:

The Bookworm Beat 7/27/16 — the “random stuff” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Everything that’s wrong with the Left in one website. At City Journal, Oren Cass has written a short article that looks at modern Progressivism through the filter of Hillary’s campaign website. In some ways, the article says something we all know, which is that the modern Democrat party is not concerned about America’s well-being but, instead, is concerned only about its only survival, something it achieves by getting special interest groups to vote for it:

Framing issues as who instead of what leads to a governing model that would divide society by race, gender, sexuality, profession, and location, targeting policies to each defined demographic. A divide-and-conquer strategy may achieve electoral success, but it is toxic to good government. When politicians treat elections as exercises in log-rolling, each policy becomes tailored toward the special interest that cares about it most. Thus Clinton’s crime policy emphasizes a friendlier attitude toward criminals. Her immigration policy concerns itself primarily with helping those who have violated immigration law. Her education policy explicitly endorses the status quo for most students but promises to “listen to teachers.”

In a world of fixed resources, such a model inevitably undermines the idea of equal protection under the law, pits groups against one another, and leaves some explicitly favored by government as winners. It also normalizes subjective standards for government action. Clinton promises to extend President Obama’s executive actions on immigration to “additional persons with sympathetic cases.” Whatever one thinks of our immigration policies, tilting them toward “persons with sympathetic cases” does not suggest rigorous application of the law.

When it comes to blacks, which are the group most harmed by the Progressives’ “divide and control” strategy, Thomas Sowell has the right of it:

Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry, and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians.

Racial polarization makes both the black population and the white population worse off, but it makes politicians who depend on black votes better off.

Hillary Clinton desperately needs black votes in this year’s close election. Promoting fear, anger, and resentment among blacks — and, if possible, paranoia — serves her political interest. Barack Obama has mastered the art of keeping black voters aroused while keeping white voters soothed — thanks in part to the gullibility of much of the public, who mistake geniality and glib rhetoric for honesty and good will.

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The Bookworm Room 7/17/16 — the “I’m all riled up” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Blacks and Muslims should be angry at their criminal cohorts, not at us. In the context of an article about political correctness, Andrew Klavan said something I’ve been struggling to say for some time. He acknowledges that blacks are on the receiving end of much more police activity, something frustrating and insulting to law-abiding blacks, but that’s because the black community’s bad eggs commit a disproportionate amount of American crime. Likewise, because children have big mouths, perfectly nice Muslim kids in school find themselves being called terrorists, reflecting the fact that acts of mass violence all over the world come primarily from their co-religionists. That’s certainly not nice, but Klavan says that law-abiding blacks and Muslims are putting blame in the wrong place:

It seems to me if you are an innocent black person being troubled by the cops, if you are an innocent Muslim under suspicion from your neighbors, the people you should be angry at, the people to blame, are not the people acting on rational suspicion. The people at fault are the bad guys who have drawn that suspicion unfairly onto you.

A black man targeted by the police shouldn’t be angry at the police. He should be angry at the thugs and criminals who look like him and make his race a target. And before Muslims blame non-Muslims for the prejudice against them, maybe they ought to look to — and openly condemn — those Muslims who have given their religion a very bad name indeed.

The problem is prejudice, yes. But it’s the tribal prejudice that says we should blame others before we blame “our own.” “Our own” are the good guys, no matter what race or religion we are.

Someone should read those words out loud at the Republican Party Convention. They’re very important.

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Memorial Day 2016

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Memorial_Day_at_Arlington_National_CemeteryWhen my teenage son realized that Monday isn’t just a school holiday but is, in fact, a national holiday honoring the men and women who have died serving our country, he made an interesting comment about those who died. “It’s hard to appreciate that they’re real people because you never know who they are.”

Think about that: Despite the fact that our country has been actively at war for three-quarters of his life, my son has never known someone who died while fighting on America’s behalf, nor has he ever met someone who lost a loved one to war. For so many in America — and this is true whether they support or oppose the war against fanatic Islamism — this multi-front war is an abstract thing. Thanks to our all-volunteer, professional, and efficient military, while our taxes help fund the war, most of us are utterly disconnected from it.

No wonder that for Americans young and old, Memorial Day is just understood as the excuse for another three-day weekend in the list of American holidays. To the extent people think about it, many confuse it with Veterans’ Day, believing that it’s a day to honor the troops, not to remember and honor the dead. And if you’re celebrating the troops, most of whom, thankfully, survive battle to come home and live out their natural lives . . . well, heck, a pool party and barbecue is a great way to do it.

Focusing on the dead — or the “honored dead” as they rightfully said during the Civil War — one realizes that my son is right that the sheer numbers make it hard to get a handle on each individual loss. The sad fact is that Americans have lost many men to battle throughout our history. According to a Wikipedia post documenting fatalities in every single American war, from skirmishes to Civil and World wars, the total of American dead in combat is somewhere above 664,440, with another 673,929 deaths from things other than combat (presumably disease, imprisonment, training accidents, etc.). That’s a grand total of at least 1,354,664 war related deaths

[A little interjection, which is that as I’m writing these words, my Spotify playlist, which is randomized, came up with one of the saddest Civil War songs I know:

It’s a particularly apropos song because it involves a young woman trying to separate her brother from the unknown dead and wounded in the bloodiest war in American history.]

Back to the main point, I realized that my son had accidentally stumbled upon precisely the formulation attributed to Stalin: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.

How does one bring the young to realize that, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a free country that values the individual over the collective, each number is a person? Those who died were children who left grieving parents, parents who left grieving spouses and lost children, brothers or sisters whose siblings will now age alone, or friends whose loss is a never-ending hole.

I started the process of giving the dead names by showing my son a picture that I found on a friend’s Google+ feed. As you can see, it’s an iconic picture, but one with a difference — every person in the photo is identified. They’re not icons at all. They’re real young men who fought — and most of whom died — defending America’s security and bringing freedom to parts of the world most Americans never had seen and never would see:

Memorial Day Flag raising Iwo Jima

The transformation in my son when he realized that these were young men just like himself — young men who played sports, flirted with girls, went to dances, and just enjoyed their lives — was surprising. He was suddenly awed and saddened. They weren’t historic curiosities; they could have been him or his friends.

As war becomes a pocket industry for a small subsection of society, those of us insulated from its reach have an obligation to make others aware that we are, and long have been, the beneficiaries of those who, willingly or not, fought for America. And while a few of our wars were misbegotten or foolish, the vast majority have seen Americans shed blood to bring freedom, whether at home or abroad.

Those who gave their lives truly are the honored dead and it behooves us to remember that none were statistics — all were individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice for liberty. I recommend a visit to Honor the Fallen, which puts a face to every person who has died in the last 13 years defending Americans against the Islamic fascism that has been the bloodiest, most genocidal force in the history of the world. Also, if you’d like to remember the dogs who served so well, many of whom died protecting American troops, go here.

UPDATE:  Mike Rowe made much the same point, only with more focus.

Found it on Facebook — the “Leftists always get it wrong” edition, part 1

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Some of my harder-Left friends on Facebook are going crazy with posters again, so I thought this would be a good time to deconstruct a few of them.  Let’s start with this one, which requires its own post.  (Incidentally, the fact that it takes just one sentence to spin out a series of lies and a sadly long post to deconstruct all these lies explains why Progressives get away with so many lies:  Everyone will read a short poster; few will read a long post.)

President Obama made America weak

In the above poster, Occupy Democrats takes on the contention that President Obama has weakened America (a claim made by all Republican candidates, not just Trump).  To challenge this assertion, OD contends that Obama’s list of accomplishments includes “tripling the stock market, cutting the unemployment and uninsured rates in half, cutting the Bush deficit by three-fifths, saving the auto industry, ending two wars, and getting bin Laden.”  Let me take these claimed accomplishments one at a time:

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The Bookworm Beat 3/23/16 — the “catching up” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265Bush didn’t, Obama wouldn’t, but the next president should: Call into the Oval Office the leaders of Muslim communities throughout America to say, “Because of the First Amendment, the fact that you and the people in your community practice Islam is irrelevant to us in America. Your faith is your business. What is relevant to me as leader of this nation is whether you support America or not. When all of you leave this office, you need to carry a single message to your communities: ‘You are either supportive of America or working to undermine America. If you’re in the latter category, you are on notice here and now that my administration will use every constitutional means available to track you, capture you, prosecute you, and imprison or deport you.’ End of story. Thank you for coming. Goodbye.”

Having got that off my chest, I’m about to engage in a speed round-up, because I’ve got about 40 articles — really good articles — to share with you.

A Cruz convert explains why.  The most interesting point is that Trump started with something no other Republican has had since Reagan — vast name recognition.

Slowly catching on to the fact that Trump is the Republican Obama.  I’ve been saying from Day 1 that Trump is a white Obama.  He promises hope and change by using government power to shape America to his will.  And let me say, that is my sole problem with Trump:  That he’s all about big government, precisely as Obama is.  I find that unacceptable.  Jonathan Tobin is another one who’s finally figured out the whole Obama  Doppelgänger thing.

Trump is a special interest candidate.  And that special interest is Donald Trump.

Is the media sitting on big Trump stories?  Ted Cruz thinks that there are some horrible stories to be told about Trump, which wouldn’t surprise me given his sordid personal life and . . . ah . . . colorful business life.  Once Trump is the candidate, says Cruz, the media will “suddenly” discover stories that make Trump unelectable.  I think Cruz is right because we all know the media, don’t we?

Trump’s enemy list makes me like him.  George Soros has given money to 187 different special interest groups that are attacking Trump.  (To be honest, a lot of them are attacking Cruz too. Indeed, on Sunday, I heard a New Yorker news hour on NPR during which the speakers agreed that Cruz is the more dangerous of the two leading Republican candidates because he actually believes in the Constitution.) In other words, here’s a list of 187 Soros-funded organizations that try to destroy anything conservative.

Will Trump win the nomination?  Scott Elliott, an extremely astute election watcher and a man with a history of accurate election predictions, is not a Trump fan.  He’s therefore created the “Stop-Trump-O-Meter,” which tracks the outcomes of state primaries and projects the outcome at the convention.  Even if you’re a Trump fan, you’ll like Scott’s meter, because, if you ignore the name, it tells in a clear way where the candidates stand in the Republican primary.

If you destroy the polite people, you create room for the impolite ones.  Glenn Reynolds points out that the GOP, RINOS, and the Leftist media establishment did everything possible to destroy the happy, tidy, law-abiding Tea Party.  Now they’re horrified that destroying the Tea Party left rage in its place.

USA Today editors question Hillary’s fitness for office.  USA Today, in its quest to be “America’s newspaper,” the one read in more hotel lobbies than any other paper, is careful about taking strong partisan stands.  That’s why it’s impressive that the editors see Hillary’s penchant for secrecy, and the security-evading steps she took in pursuit of her paranoia, as a serious impediment to the presidency.

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