The Bookworm Beat 4-10-15 — the mother of all round-ups
This is it — the ultimate round-up, consisting of more than 20 links that I’ve collected over the past couple of days and wanted to share with you. Nothing works better at squeezing a nice long blog post than a series of legal pleadings I really don’t want to write. By the way, these squiblets aren’t in any particular order, so you never know what gems you might not find as you scroll down.
The weakening of the Leftist mind
In an earlier post, I wrote about the fact that our younger generation has turned into a passive, sheeple generation, meekly towing the Leftist party line. Astute readers pointed out that, aside from the 1960s children, who were spoon-fed their rebellion by communist spies, past Americans generations also weren’t given to a rebellion. That’s true — but at least past generations were taught analytical and reasoning skills. If they desired, they could analyze and challenge their era’s zeitgeist. Our current generation can’t.
And how do I know I’m correct in reaching that conclusion? Because my reasoning coincidences with Daniel Greenfield’s. In a post about the closing of the liberal mind, Greenfield explains how so-called “liberals” have reduced themselves to this state:
The American liberal is dead from the neck up. A member of the elite, he rules, but has no talent for it. Like the Bolsheviks, he is adept at blaming others for everything and at manufacturing simple slogans. And like them he thinks only in terms of power, control and leverage, without understanding why his intellectual predecessors spent so much building up the institutional influence that he casually squanders by destroying the credibility of journalism, public service and academia.
Generational degradation has robbed him of any sense of time. He is always living in the present, which also seems to him to be the future. The past to him is a treasure trove of eccentricities. And he cannot conceive of any future that supersedes his way of life. Patience, like objectivity, is a foreign notion to him. Nothing can wait for tomorrow or ten years from now. Everything must come about right now. Battles are won, but wars are lost. The liberal hare races ahead into the post-everything future, never considering that in the long-term, it is the slow conservative tortoise that wins the race.
And these people are the ones teaching the current sheeple generation.
Thankfully, since these uneducated Lefties, no matter how capable of intelligence they are, have been trained into being stupid, they can be challenged . . . if you do it right. A couple of years ago, Larry Coreia came up with a handy-dandy guide to dealing with Leftist trolls.
Sally Kohn perfectly exemplifies the profoundly stupid sheeple mind
Sally Kohn is put forward as one of the examples of the best and brightest of the Leftist generation. She isn’t, of course. She’s glib but, as her comments about government power reveal, she’s profoundly ill-informed, even stupid.
And speaking of Kohn, I have a random observation to make here. When I was growing up, Jews were always interested in who was, and who wasn’t, Jewish. Unlike all but the most light-skinned blacks, some Jews can pass as gentile (a fact that saved many lucky youngsters whom righteous gentiles sheltered during WWII). So, to Jews, it mattered to know that Leslie Howard and Lauren Bacall were actually Jewish.
Part of being Jewish in my childhood was the sense that one wanted to be proud of ones co-religionists. See, you’d think, a Jew made it (even if it meant hiding that Jewishness). The flip side of this was that, in my family circles, it was tremendously embarrassing when someone Jewish went wrong in a visible way, either through criminality or stupidity.
Even now, I believe, many Jews were deeply embarrassed that Bernie Madoff was a co-religionist. In the same way, I’m embarrassed by Sally Kohn. It’s bad enough that American Jews won’t give up their fealty to the Democrat party, even as it shows with increasing vehemence that it hates them. It’s even worse when they’re publicly stupid!
And here’s another thought: Have you noticed how the severe speech and thought restrictions that Leftists place on American blacks operate so that successful, law-abiding, assimilated (if you will) blacks are not allowed to be embarrassed by those members of their race who bring that race into disrepute. Blacks who chastise other blacks are viciously attacked. Meanwhile, our president celebrates his faux son, Trayvon Martin.
Scratch a Leftist, find a fascist
The hatred that so many gays feel for traditional Christianity really has to be seen to be believed. On Facebook, a friend of a friend has said that Pastor John Hagee is exactly the same as Hassan Rouhani and the other Mullahs. This gay guy — another perfect example of the closing of the Leftist mind — can’t grasp that there’s a difference between saying “My faith holds that marriage is between a man and a woman” and saying “Let’s hang that gay guy from the nearest crane.”
It was after getting a full-faced blast of this moron’s ill-informed, paranoid, hate-filled reaction to Christians that I read an excellent analysis of Frank Bruni’s New York Times editorial insisting that Christians must be forcibly brought around to supporting the entire package of gay behaviors, including marriage.
The French are only friends to the French
Many (myself included) have commented favorably about the French hostility to Obama’s insane Iran “treaty.” Who knew that the French could be so stalwart?
Well, they’re probably not as stalwart as we think. The fact is that they’re very dependent on Saudi oil, so their stance vis-a-vis the negotiations is driven more by Saudi demands than by French principles.
Understanding that makes it easier to understand why there’s word afoot that the French will make a bid for a Palestinian state that pretty much sets Israel up as a target to be destroyed:
Now France is doing things its own way. This resolution calls for the old 1949/1967 Jordanian armistice lines to be the basis for borders, as well as making part of Jerusalem a Palestinian capital, and finding a “fair” solution for Palestinian refugees. There are conflicting reports on whether the resolution will recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Either way, only the other day President Abbas reiterated before the Executive Committee of the PLO that he would never recognize the Jewish state. So will the Obama administration now be threatening to abandon the Palestinians at the UN as they did following Netanyahu’s comparably milder comments during the Israeli elections?
In a pre-Obama era, this proposal would have been destined for the garbage can, since the US would have vetoed it. In an Obama era, I hope Israel has some very good contingency plans.
California’s man-made drought and our irrational response
California always has droughts. The problem isn’t really the droughts themselves, though; it’s the execrable water management. Thanks to decades of Leftist control over the California assembly, our population doubles, but we’ve done nothing in this arid state to trap more water. In thrall to environmentalists, not only have most water projects been blocked, but significant amounts of water are simply sent to the ocean.
The policies are also so gosh-darned centralized. Here in Marin County, we’re gearing up for rationing — even though Marin’s own water supplies are higher than usual:
Although its reservoirs are above average, the district — with 190,000 customers between Sausalito and San Rafael — is working to adhere to new state requirements, as much of California is in a drought. Officials with the North Marin Water District, which serves 60,000 customers in Novato and West Marin, were expected to set a public hearing for April 21 to consider similar restrictions at their Tuesday night meeting.
A little known secret is that about 20% of Marin’s water comes from Napa and Sonoma aquifers and that those are running dry. Rationing will not address that problem — and unless something is done quickly, Napa and Sonoma will be the next dust bowl.
Words, words, words! I’m so sick of Obama’s words!
I’m never more charming than I am in writing. I think that in real life I’m rather shrill and/or overwhelming. But for me, words are everything, so a lot of you read me and think “Wow, she sounds nice.” Heh!
Given my passion for words, you can understand why I appreciated so much Robert Avrech’s splendid post about Obama’s mis-use of words in connection with the non-existent Iran deal that now turns out not even to be an agreed-upon framework:
Because Barack Obama uses language so promiscuously, with such disregard for the very meaning of words, he thinks this is the norm among other politicians. And because Obama routinely lies and strikes poses that are so obviously at odds with reality (“If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor”) he calculates that others rape language with the same abandon.
This is a narcissist’s view of the world where nothing exists beyond Obama’s fevered word count, where reality is replaced by vocabulary. And, lets face it, it is an endless stream of Obamanisms. Has any POTUS every talked so much about himself, so endlessly, and in such tedious cliches?
The bottom line is this: Obama is selling the Iranian framework non-deal-deal as an historic agreement. As if the word historic is itself a sign of legitimacy.
When it comes to Obama, you know he’s lying if his lips are moving.
Obama’s push to feminize the military
Women have always fought in war. Boudicca fought the Romans. Polish partisan women fought the Nazis. Israeli women are in the front lines against Palestinians. Kurdish women are fighting ISIS. But if you think about it, you’ll notice a common denominator in the examples I gave: These are situations in which the women didn’t go to war; instead, the war came to them. I can’t think of any example in which women have gone marching off to far-away wars the way men have.
And yet that is precisely what Obama dreams of seeing: An American military in which women march off to the front lines, complete with periods, pregnancies, vulnerability to rape, and much less physical strength than men.
And how is Obama doing this? By trying to shame our warriors by accusing them of thought-crimes and even mere-existence-crimes (you’re male, therefore you’re guilty of sexism and discrimination). Wolf Howling looks at the mind games our administration is playing with the men who have volunteered to put their lives on the line for us — and have done even as Obama has created an increasingly dangerous, unstable world. And WH reminds us that, while I bring this up in the context of women in the military, Obama is using the same despicable tactics against the most racially harmonious institution in America.
New York Times indicts those damn Jews
The New York Times is seriously p*ssed off. How dare those uppity little Jews in Israel plead with Obama that, as part of his negotiations creating a pathway for Iran’s going nuclear (something even Obama conceded) that there be a clause in which Iran promises not to evaporate Israel and, generally, a clause that says they can’t actually go nuclear.
I’m thinking of adding my own precondition to any future friendships: If you take the New York Times seriously, I cannot be friends with you.
Just remember: Whatever the media says about Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians IS WRONG.
It seems appropriate to stick into this incredibly hodge-podge squiblet a link to Seth Mandel’s post about the incredibly churlish attack Obama’s White House made against Netanyahu in the context of a completely dishonest explanation about the non-existent framework.
It’s Germany, circa 1936, on America’s college campuses
If I had my way, I’d cancel entirely the federally-subsidized/guaranteed student loan program and stop all federal funding to college and universities. It’s not just that they’re not teaching students anything useful outside of the hard sciences (and even there, as the climate change fiasco shows, science bows before politics). It’s that America’s college campuses are copying England’s campuses, and becoming precisely as anti-semitic as Germany’s universities were in the 1930s. Academics are always on the frontline of cultural destruction, aren’t they?
America’s romantic military
A couple of days ago, I wrote about my suspicion that America’s troops are the most romantic people in America. I was incredibly honored when my friend Patrick O’Hannigan, whose new blog focuses on religion, culture, and morality rather than politics, took my idea and ran with it.
Music and the moral man
I was equally flattered when my friend Mike McDaniel took my post about music and morality, and used it as the springboard for a beautiful rumination about the musical mind and the fact that good music and good minds are a match made in heaven.
Also, I must confess that I was incredibly jealous after I read Mike’s post. While I enjoy listening to music a great deal, I’m not musical. Despite playing flute for six years in school, and being able to sing almost in tune, I cannot play anything by ear, not even Mary Had A Little Lamb. That’s how unmusical I am. Mike, however, describes a mind that sees music as another language, one that he speaks as fluently as he speaks English. Fortunate man!
Arsenic’s also all natural
My mother, who was educated long before political correctness came along, didn’t need to be a scientist to figure out that “all-natural” doesn’t necessarily mean all safe.
Beginning in the late 1960s, while mindless Leftists were assuring us that everything chemical is bad and everything “natural” is good, Mom invariably pointed out that arsenic, hemlock, and a whole host of other toxic substances are entirely natural. I’ve got to show her this study about the incredibly high rate of toxic substances in “natural” and “green” household products.
Rand Paul, Abortion, and Women
Rand Paul’s announcement that he’s running for president revealed two nasty sides of the mindless media. First, it promptly tried to destroy him on the abortion issue. Paul, bless his heart, simply turned the attack around. Seth Mandel applauds him for doing so.
Second, the media went after Paul for giving as good as he got with a female media talking head. How dare he disrespect a woman!! I’ll leave it to Wolf Howling to tackle that stupid attack on Paul. (And as an added bonus, WH also discusses the abortion question.)
I don’t think Paul is ready for prime time because his foreign policy views seem like a bizarre, unformed amalgam of his father’s extreme libertarianism and Paul’s own struggles to move to the center on that issue. Nevertheless, I see Paul as a valuable intellectual addition to the Republican primary.
Two Declarations of Independence by former Democrats
Susan Brown explains why she left the Democrat party.
So does Mitch Ginsburg. Ginsburg’s post is especially compelling because he explains how he, a Jew, realized that Obama is not a friend either to Israel or to the Jews. Nor is Obama a neutral. He’s an enemy. Ginsburg’s post title is great: “How I learned to stop loving Obama and worry about the bomb.”
A little humor from the Marines
America’s First Sergeant hears things and, bless his heart, he repeats them. The last item in the post is my favorite.
Robotic butterflies
Beautiful — and kind of creepy.
