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Interesting things you’ll find on my real-me Facebook feed INCORRECT LINK FIXED

February 9, 2018 by Bookworm 174 Comments

A trip through a few days worth of my Facebook posts shows that, with little effort, I can expose Proggies to ideas and facts they usually miss or ignore.

Of late, between paying work, family demands, and a touch of the blecchies (not the flu, thank goodness, but I wasn’t feeling great), I’ve been posting on my real-me Facebook more than I’ve been blogging. Blogging requires paragraphs; Facebook requires sentences, a word here or there, or no comment at all to introduce an article.

My two goals on Facebook are to entertain people, so they keep coming back to my feed, and to place before them things that they won’t normally see as they shuffle back and forth between The New York Times, The Washington Post, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and the usual mono-ideologues who make up their intellectual world. I try to do the latter in an entirely non-judgmental way, so that people will stop and think, rather than block and argue.

To give you a sense of my M.O., here’s a sampling of things from my real-me Facebook feed over the last few days, many of which you’ll probably recognize from Instapundit and other familiar sites:

I knew that Cape Town’s imminent water shortage was its own fault because it failed to plan for drought, despite living where they regularly occur and despite a population much larger than the last time a drought rolled around. That was the same problem California had with its recent drought (and may continue to have, because last year’s big rains, rather than heralding the end of drought seem to have been just a pause). What I didn’t know was that it was South Africa’s poisonous antipathy to Israel that prevented it from saving itself. Now, when I see Cape Towners lined up with little cans at communal fountains, I don’t feel sorry for them, just as I really didn’t feel sorry for Californians (myself included) stupid enough to live in a state that failed to prepare for inevitable dry periods.

Everybody loves MacDonald’s — even Lefties. That’s why, back in 1990, when the first MacDonald’s opened in the former Soviet Union, 30,000 Russians lined up for the chance to eat there:

Emotional support pets on planes are too often a scam. I adore my dog, who makes me happy, and I’d definitely be a less panicked airplane passenger if I held him in my arms, but he’s still not medically necessary, and most other so-called emotional support pets aren’t either. The way people have abused the service pet exception to animals on planes is especially bad because it’s making things so difficult for those people who genuinely need an animal at their side to help them navigate their world or to guard them against dangerous seizures and other serious ailments. And so I said on Facebook.

Sharyl Attkisson, one of the last honest reporters, explained that the Nunes memo indicates that the FBI violated Woods Procedures. So that my friends don’t have to exhaust themselves clicking over to the article, I explain that this means that the FBI isn’t attesting to its own probity, or even the probity of the person who assembled a dossier. It needs to make a colorable showing that the person who first voiced the information — the anonymous source — is credible. I added that I was interested in learning more about those sources. Since then, of course, we’ve had intimations that the sources are Sidney Blumenthal and friends, people so devious and untrustworthy that only the Clintons could bear their presence. I haven’t mentioned those last facts to my Proggie friends. [Read more…]

With Donald Trump paying homage to the Second Amendment, let’s remember why it matters.

April 28, 2017 by Bookworm 13 Comments

Donald Trump told the NRA that “The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end.” Here’s why the promise matters.

Donald Trump spoke today at the National Rifle Association’s 2017 Leadership Forum. While it’s clear that he’s not necessarily up on the finer details of the intellectual arguments supporting our Second Amendment rights, there’s no doubting his sincerity when it comes to preserving them:

The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end. You have a true friend and champion in the White House. No longer will federal agencies be coming after law-abiding gun owners. No longer will the government be trying to undermine your rights and your freedoms as Americans. Instead, we will work with you, by your side.

The fact that President Trump will de-fang the federal government’s attacks against Second Amendment rights, however, does not mean that the Left will stop their relentless press to disarm Americans. They constantly tell us how disarmament works in other countries, and insist that we can be just as safe as such sweet, law-abiding little countries as England, Sweden, Germany, and Norway, it works so well.

Except that it doesn’t work well at all, at least not when a genocidal tyrant arises, as happened in Germany. And it doesn’t work well when a formerly culturally homogeneous country welcomes people in who bring with them violent values and an anti-Western animus, along with their guns, knives, trucks, gang rapes, bombs, etc.

While it’s great that Donald Trump backs the Second Amendment, the fight is not over. As long as there are Leftists, the fight will never be over. We therefore have to be prepared to defend our Second Amendment rights whenever they come under attack. Here’s a small toolkit for that defense. It addresses the following facts: (1) Armed citizens are the best defense against the world’s most dangerous killer: government; (2) the Founders understood that government was dangerous and added the Second Amendment as a bulwark against that threat; (e) the Jewish experience reminds us that disarmed people are easy victims; (4) only racists want to disarm minorities; and (5) a self-defended society is a safe society. [Read more…]

[VIDEO] Dennis Prager explains that without God, there is no morality; there are just opinions

March 21, 2017 by Bookworm 26 Comments

With his usual acuity, Dennis Prager explains that true morality exists only if there is a God. Absent God, people just opine about what they like or dislike.

The phrase “moral relativism” gets thrown around a lot. The Right things it’s bad; the Left thinks it’s good — indeed, that it is the only non-arrogant way to view the world. With his usual clarity and acuity, Dennis Prager explains why the Left is wrong. Absent an external source of absolute morality — and Prager I both think that the Judeo-Christian God is the best way to define good and evil — people have nothing but feelings and opinions to guide them. And as the 20th century shows, absent God, the wrong kind of demagogue can manipulate these feelings and opinions in a way that leads to tens of millions of dead people, and incalculable numbers of people who live in fear and squalor.

If you don’t have time to watch the video, or you’d like to expand your understanding of its contents, I highly recommend Wolf Howling’s post about the war on religion. He wrote it many years ago, but events since he published it prove him prophetic:

[Read more…]

Personalities matter

November 16, 2012 by Bookworm 7 Comments

At Cal, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand that I was being taught the Marxist version of history. All I knew is that my love for history was predicated on the power of personalities, while the history they taught at Cal ignored individuals and focused on mass movements that were described in terms of a Marxist economic narrative.

Would England have had a schism from the Catholic Church without Henry VIII’s lust for Anne Boleyn and his belief that she would give him a son? I doubt it. Anne Boleyn’s personality played a part in it too. Things would have turned out differently if she’d just yielded, as her sister had, and become his mistress.

And how about Elizabeth I’s refusal to marry? Whether she just didn’t want to share power or had a deeper psychological fear of marriage (death by beheading or childbirth), the fact remains that her single status made for an interesting balance of power during her reign — and handed the monarchy over to the Stuart line. The Stuart line, of course, led to a stubborn Charles I who refused to yield on his royal prerogatives, triggering a revolution — which could be said to have paved the way for our own Revolution.

My examples are from the era of absolute monarchs. Modern times are no different, though. Germany was not a totalitarian dictatorship when Hitler entered politics. His personality and beliefs transformed it into one, and his paranoia and sheer evil made it one of the worst places on earth.

Speaking of paranoia and evil, would a tyrant other than Stalin have murdered 20 million of his own people? Do mass movements and Marxist economics create killers (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), or is there a horrible alchemy that brings such individuals to the fore? I don’t know. But I do know that different tyrants would have resulted in different tyrannies, with different targets, and different MOs.

I mention all of this because of the Petraeus affair. Up until six weeks ago, most of the nation, Left and Right, viewed him as a military visionary and a strong, noble hand at the helm of the CIA. Now, it turns out that his personal failings, his libido and his arrogance, may have contributed to a web of deceit, as well as systemic corruption and antagonism. Had he been less egotistical, events before, during, and after the Benghazi affair might have played out quite differently. That is, if he hadn’t had a Sword of Damocles hanging over his head — one he placed there himself through his unethical conduct — and if he’d had better relations with his own people, he might have had more flexibility in dealing with Benghazi, and more incentive to be honest.