The Bookworm Beat 3-27-15 — “The World Turned Upside Down” edition and open thread

Woman writingWord must have gotten out that I have a temporary hiatus in the endless mountain of legal work that’s overwhelmed me, because the phone hasn’t stopped ringing all morning. Every time my fingers get anywhere near my keyboard, the phone rings, I glance at the caller ID and, yes, it’s a call I need to take.

The most interesting call I received came in a short while ago from a delightful, interesting man who will be speaking to a local conservative group with which I’m involved. His topic: Israel. In past weeks, some in the group have been a little worried that this man, a Democrat and Obama supporter, might inadvertently antagonize our group. Speaking to him today, though, I think he and our group will be singing the same song.  He seems to feel, as I do, that  — Obama is doing something unconscionably dangerous in allying us with Iran while giving Iran the nuclear go ahead, and something profoundly evil by sacrificing Israel to achieve this unconscionable goal.

I am deeply, deeply disturbed when I think what Obama is doing in the Middle East. By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. This is not ineptitude or misguided faith. Obama, dragging the United States along behind him, is deliberately embracing evil.

All I can think of lately, and you’ll see why as you read further, is the British military band in 1781, at the Surrender at Yorktown, playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Don’t just blame Lena Dunham; The New Yorker published her

Liberal Jews on my Facebook page are aghast that their Millennial darling, Lena Dunham, who humorously espouses the nihilistic sexual mores of her generation, wrote a manifestly antisemitic “quiz” comparing Jewish men to dogs — and not in a nice way. Dunham deserves every bit of opprobrium sent her way, but let’s be honest: This wasn’t just a random blog post. America’s premier lightweight intellectual magazine, The New Yorker published it. I’m willing to be that it was Jewish writers and editors who made the call. As I’ve noted before, when it comes to American antisemitism, no one beats young American Jews at this game.

Mark Steyn on America’s “rape culture”

I had the opportunity to see a copy of Williams College’s alumni magazine. It comes with a fold-out cover with pictures of earnest students, faculty members, and administration parasites boldly taking a stand against “sexual violence.”

Last I heard, uber liberal upstate Massachusetts’ Williams College was not a hotbed of rape. Indeed, if data is true, no American campuses are rape factories.  Or at least they’re not factories churning out what Whoopi Goldberg would call “rape rape.” When I say “rape rape,” I mean a situation in which a man uses physical force or his position of power to coerce a woman into a grotesque simulacrum of sex. Whoopi, of course, hasn’t really said what she means by “rape rape.”  After all, she didn’t think it was “rape rape” when a powerful Hollywood figure drugged a 13-year-old and sodomized her, so her standards are unlike mine.

What’s going on at America’s colleges is something different. I consider it a form of Leftist societal rape against women: It tells women it’s totally okay voluntarily to get incoherently drunk, so much so that women say yes to sexual encounters that they would never countenance when sober or women are too incapacitated to rebuff men who are usually just as drunk as they are. The latter is truly rape, but we live in an insane society that tells women just to keep on drinking. The former, however, is not rape, even though feminists and their pathetic male lap dogs keep saying that it is.  Young women, however, accept these distorted definitions, which ends up with them feeling raped.  In other words, they’ve been violated mentally by the Leftist establishment, even if they haven’t been violated physically by their male peers.

But don’t listen to me. Listen to Mark Steyn, who’s written an incredibly powerful piece about rape in America: One involves imaginary scary place (here be dragons) that the media excitedly reports, and the other is a place of genuine evil that the media assiduously ignores.

Yes, the world really is upside down

Obama is the most visible part of our morally inverse culture, but the insanity that drives him is all over — especially in those places that pride themselves on “culture.” Jay Nordlinger writes about an appalling display of moral inversion at a performance by the New York Philharmonic.

I’m about to embark on something that sounds like a non sequitur, but isn’t. Please bear with me.

As we all know, when someone writes a will, that will is effective only if the testator is “of sound mind.” That phrase, though, doesn’t mean what you think it means. In fact, the person can be crazy as a loon, provided that he understands the nature of the testamentary act, knows the scope of his estate (even if he doesn’t know the value), and names beneficiaries who can be identified in the real world (“my nephew by my sister Susie even though I’ve forgotten his name” as opposed to “the leprechaun living in my garden”).

It doesn’t matter a bit that Aunt Thelma wears a tinfoil hat all the time to prevent Venusians from gather her brain energy and selling it to Munchkins. If she knows she’s writing a will, if she knows she owns a house, and if she voluntarily wants to leave it to Michael Moore, she can.

Under the law, people can have one or more monomanias and still be sane. When I look at the really lovely people who share my world — kind people who will always lend a hand to a neighbor and who are genuinely decent in their personal actions — but who nevertheless think Rush Limbaugh is Satan and that drunken sexual fumblings on a college campus are the same as or even worse than an ISIS rape, all I can think is that their monomanias render them insane in some areas of their lives, but not in others.

Oh, and one more thing about those different attitudes towards race: The Progressives/Democrats/Liberals who hold these views are racist. The reason these so-called campus rapes agitate them is because it’s middle- and upper-middle class people, almost invariably white or Asian (which is like white, only smarter) doing it to each other. Our urban and suburban Lefties empathize with the victims and expect more from the perpetrators (to the extent there’s any perpetration going along with the drunken, fumbling penetration).

When it comes to those ISIS rapes, though, these same “Liberals” have a serious compassion deficit. They expect nothing more from brown men (although always castigating us for doing unnamed nefarious things to those same brown men) and cannot work up either empathy or sympathy for the brown women who are their victims. Racists.

Mark Steyn on Obama’s Bergdahl problem

I was surprised that the military actually charged Bowe Bergdahl with as a deserter. The Pentagon has become so deeply politicized under Obama’s watch I didn’t think there were enough people left there who wear big boy pants and salute the American flag to come up with any charge at all.  I suspect a more accurate charge would have been treason, but “desertion” is more than nothing.

Having Bowe Bergdahl in the headlines prompted Mark Steyn to revisit the prescient words he wrote at the time of Bergdahl’s release, everything from the lies told (and we now have confirmation that the administration knew that every word about Bergdahl’s honorable service was a lie at the time stated) and about Obama’s warm-hearted, Rose Garden embrace of a Taliban sympathizer who consecrated the White House for Islam (“In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful…”)

Military haircut gets 7-year-old kicked out of school

I’ll just quote the person who sent me the link: “In a world where the same boy would be lauded for his gender dysphoria, he is crushed for his military haircut instead.”

The template for pushing back against media attacks on Ted Cruz

I’ve already made my feelings known about Cruz. I think he can win, and I think we need a warrior, not a RINO at this pivotal point.

People I respect deeply prefer Walker for his executive experience, and I certainly can’t argue with that. As is true for Trevor Loudon, I’d be okay with a Walker presidency, although he’s demonstrating an unnerving tendency lately to be wishy-washy, and saying to any given audience whatever he thinks they most want to hear. Ted Cruz has an admirable tendency to say to all audiences what he believes is important for America’s ultimate well-being, even if it’s not necessarily what the particular audience before which he stands wants to hear.

Unsurprisingly, the Democrat establishment and the media (but I repeat myself) are going after him with a ferocity I haven’t seen since Sarah Palin appeared on the scene. It’s really tragic for them that he not only has Ivy League bona fides, but he’s brilliant — and has the testimonials and transcript to prove it.

Since I can guarantee you that your local paper will print one nasty article after another attacking Cruz, I’d like to direct your attention to the intelligent, witty, temperate, and informed letter to the editor that my friend Patrick O’Hannigan published at The Spectator. I think everyone should bookmark this letter, because it is the perfect template for all the letters we’ll want to write in the coming months:

You know better than I do that Senator Cruz does not have many friends in newsrooms. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to think of him as a buffoon the way you seem to do. In a petulant editorial published March 25, you led with the fact that he once quoted from “Green Eggs and Ham” during a Senate filibuster. Perhaps you thought that was disrespectful. Some of us remember Cruz scoring points with his winking tribute to Dr. Suess, and let’s face it: any legislative body where Joe “Malaprop” Biden has the tie-breaking vote cannot afford to put on airs, anyway. Do you not see the irony in citing a speech that you want the rest of us to think was sub-par? Disdain is not the same as argument. Moreover, the only other filibuster to make news in recent memory was done by another Texan, Wendy Davis, and nothing she said was quotable. People remember her pink sneakers more vividly than her marathon defense of abortion. If you run a web search on the phrase “Wendy Davis sneakers,” you’ll get more than 375,000 hits. If you do the same thing for “green eggs and ham,” you’ll be five pages deep into search results before the name Ted Cruz even comes up — so pick your battles more carefully.

Missouri has a new way to remove children from their families

I received an email from Duane Lester. I’ll just quote it here:

I just posted an article on The Missouri Torch about something that has national legs and it’s probably you have this going on in your state too.

It seems a local Missouri school is labeling runaways as “homeless,” even when they have a loving family that would take the child back into their home.

And then, once they get them declared homeless, the use the McKinney-Vento Act to get federal grant money for the school.

The school I’m writing about has 2,457 students. It says 262 of them are “homeless.”

School professionals in the state that I’ve talked with say that number is “bullshit.” Their word, not mine.

The story I tell is about a boy who ran away to live with his girlfriend and her family, and how the school signed him up as homeless, began buying him clothes and giving him free lunches, despite knowing the family as a good family. They did nothing to bring the family back together and everything to pay for the runaway’s choices.

I also put together a short film about the story, which I posted at the end of my story.

I do hope you’ll find this compelling enough to look around your state for similar cases. It’s quite nefarious and reminds me of “A Brave New World.”

Here’s the link to my story.

Therapeutic screen saver

It’s amazing how peaceful one feels watching this.

If it’s Passover, it must be time for an awesome video

I like Mark Ronson’s and Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk. After all, I did come of age in the 1970s, so it’s my kind of music. And I really like the Passover video that brings a little holiday to the music:

Enough for now. More to come later today (I hope).

Oh, one more thing. We’ve all been Cassandras. This song is our unhappy honor: