The Bookworm Beat 5/2/16 — the “Hell in a hand basket” edition and open thread

Today’s challenge is to see how many articles I can bring to your attention in the 20 minutes before I head off for the dojo to punch and kick my political blues away. Here goes:

UNESCO tries to erase Jewish history.  The world would be a better place without the UN and all of its many subparts, including the malevolent UNRWA and UNESCO.  The latter is in the headlines now for denying a Jewish connection to Jerusalem that spans more than 3,000 years, and instead giving the imprimatur of ownership to the Ottoman Turks who imposed their tyrannical rule for a few hundred years in recent history.

Hatred of Jews is hardwired in Europeans:  Seth J. Frantzman has written a deservedly viral post about the endemic hatred of Jews that seems to be hardwired into European DNA:

The moment the gas chambers finished operating many European states embraced “human rights” and began lecturing the world on “human rights.” The day they stopped committing war crimes, they wanted to have an international criminal court to put on trial non-Europeans. The continent that produced the greatest engineered mass murder in human history, on such a precise, mechanical scale, then became the arbiter of what is “human rights”.

[snip]

At the precise point when many Europeans abandoned Christianity, which had been their excuse for hating Jews who were accused of “killing Christ”, Europeans now decided Jews were a separate “alien” and “parasitical” race. Secularism informed them of race theory and social Darwinism and Jews were at the bottom of that ladder. Anti-semitism, the hatred of Jews as being semitic and thus non-white, non-European, became the new reason to hate Jews. In each generation in Europe the reason for hating Jews took on a new logic. Grandfather hated them for being non-Christian. Dad hated them for “racially scientific reasons”, for being semites. And the current generation hates them for being nationalist and having a state.

[snip]

It’s extraordinary that such a small group of people in the world, who only make up some 12 million or so out of 7 billion, are always the object of this European obsession. It isn’t enough they put 6 million in gas chambers. Nothing satisfies the anger and visceral obsessive, pathological hatred in these European minds but the disappearance of the Jewish people. In Norway, France, the UK, so many politicians, academics and others obsess over Jews. They don’t obsess over Sikhs or Albanians, they aren’t concerned with Burma or Zimbabwe, only with Jews and Israel.

Please read the whole thing and share it.

Incidentally, I do think the latest generation of Jew hatred can be summed up in a single sentence: “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

The gender warriors are also genderists.  The scariest gender trend of all isn’t bathrooms, it’s the fact that highly “progressive” parents (often same sex couples with a child of the opposite sex) are asking for, and getting, medical treatments to change the gender of children as young as 6.  A couple of years ago, a woman wrote an exceptionally good article pointing out that it’s just as bad for gender warriors to assign a child the opposite of their sex at birth as it is for parents to do that which offends the gender warriors — namely, raising the child consistently with their sex at birth.

Her point:  Raise a child, not a gender.  Her secondary point is that, given enough time just to “be,” most children, during or after puberty, will settle into their biological gender.  (As an aside, I loved Matchbox cars when I was little and had a huge collection, something my parents neither encouraged or discouraged.  It was just me being me.)

American Muslims on the war path.  As the Obama administration pushes to bring in ever more Muslims, keep in mind the fact that too many of the Muslims already here — many of whom have spent the larger part of their life in America — want to kill us.

Evil people do evil things.  I like Daniel Greenfield’s essay reminding us that, when we do a favor to something or someone evil, we are not showcasing our virtue.  Instead, we have become complicit in evil.

The atom bomb was a good thing.  With rumors that Obama is planning to apologize for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby quickly ending a brutal war that the Japanese started, Victor Davis Hanson looks at the ethical and practical situation facing Truman when he made the decision to drop the bomb.  One of the things Truman considered, of course, was the number of civilians like my mother held in, and dying like flies in, concentration camps all over the Malayan peninsula.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — who is the biggest Jew?  Did you know that the answer to that question was the subject of frequent arguments in the Burton-Taylor household?  Neither did I until I read this.

Marines lower infantry standards in 5, 4, 3….  Women are washing out in their efforts to get into the Marine infantry.  How long will it be before the Pentagon forces the Marines to lower their standards, putting at greater risk every one of our sons and daughters who make it into a Marine infantry unit?

Government destroys everything it touches.  I have a new, top-of-the-line, water-and-energy-efficient washing machine.  It takes two hours, an extra dollop of detergent, and a ton of vinegar in the pre-wash to clean and deodorize teenage boys’ clothes.  I have a fairly new, water-and-energy-efficient dishwasher.  The only way I can get things clean is to wash everything in the extra-long “pots and pans” mode.  Otherwise, I find myself having to run a regular load twice to clean things.  The reason my expensive appliances are so bad — with performance worse than the creaky machines of my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s — is because of government regulations controlling electric and water consumption, not to mention limiting the ingredients in detergents.  ‘

I’m not the only one complaining.  Even gas cans, for filling up empty tanks, don’t work anymore.  And there’s more to come — pretty soon your dishwasher, however well it worked before, won’t get the job done either.

Helicopters are safer than they were.  In the old days, if a helicopter’s rotors stopped turning, you were dead.  That’s what America’s most overrated physicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson, still believed until taught otherwise. Modern helicopters have some cool safety features, provided you have a pilot who knows how to use them: