Bookworm Beat 11/2/16 — the “Please Save America” edition and open thread

11914571234_1039e62caa_tattered-american-flagThis is it: the countdown to learning whether Obama will have been successful in fundamentally changing America or whether we can still resurrect something from the wreckage. This is an umbrella post with a variety of articles that touch upon the election, America’s culture wars, politics generally, the Middle East, and other interesting things. The only thing I don’t have here, because Assange keeps promising but not delivering, is a single smoking-gun document that hands Hillary her “go directly to jail” card. Instead, each Wikileak tranche, while confirming Hillary’s and the Democrat’s core corruption and self-interest, fails to be the jail card.

The #NeverTrumpers still have time to reconsider. Some of the people I admire most are #NeverTrumpers. I don’t understand them on the issue and they don’t understand me, but it’s ultimately a good thing that we’re not Democrat herd animals but, instead, have independent minds. Still. . . . Roger Simon makes what seems to me to be a very compelling argument that, no matter how flawed Trump is (and he is very flawed), Hillary will be infinitely worse. We’ll be plagued by a corrupt media, the culture wars on steroids, a level of corruption unimagined in American politics, the constitutional risks of a president under FBI investigation, and the horrors of Hillary’s manifest incompetence.

Trump offers a return to “normalcy.” Peter Thiel, whose gayness the Gay “Baby, I was born this way” Mafia now denies because he supports Trump, made an important point, which is that Trump represents a return to the norm. What the Left offers is no longer even remotely normal. We’ve spent the last eight years in Looking Glass Land, and people are turning to Trump to back away from Progressive insanity.

Hillary’s terrible incompetence. One of the things that’s come through loud and clear with the Wikileaks is that Hillary and Company are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They’re terrible at what they do, and they get away with it only because they have a media infrastructure that vouches for them (“She has a vagina so, leave Hillary alone!!“). And of course, because that are the bridge connecting money (no matter how dirty or anti-American) to American power and assets.

This is almost certainly untrue, un-sourced rumor, but I couldn’t pass it up. Please keep my caveat in mind: There is no reason to believe that this post, which has the NYPD saying that the Weiner dox are much worse than anyone imagined, is true. However, I can’t resist linking to it to the extent it claims to represent unnamed sources in the NYPD and alleges this kind of stuff:

But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top-secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to:

* Money laundering
* Child exploitation
* Sex crimes with minors (children)
* Perjury
* Pay to play through Clinton Foundation
* Obstruction of justice
* Other felony crimes

NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.

Well, there was no way I could pass it up. Let me just say once again: Regarding that link’s validity, you have been warned.

The FBI agents may have done something good. I argued a long time ago that, when push came to shove, career FBI agents would not stand up and shout out Hillary’s guilt. The chains of salaries, and pensions, and mortgages, and college fees would be too much. (Please note that I did not excuse myself here. I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe that I’d show exceptional moral courage either when staring at the end of the middle class life I love.)

It turns out I was partially right. As David Goldman sees it, while none of the FBI agents went public, the rising number of resignations as well as the anger and hostility within the FBI is what drove Comey to do the decent thing, which was to walk back his now erroneous statement that the FBI was not currently investigating Hillary. And for having done that, says Goldman, those agents, who did put themselves at risk, deserve our thanks. I agree.

Progressivism is anti-science. Academics are beginning to catch on to the fact the Progressive belief systems do not operate in the real world. This article explains how Third Wave feminism (which has nothing to do with equal pay for equal work or equality of opportunity) is antithetical to science. And Mike Rowe has a wonderful little essay saying that, considering all that we manifestly do not know about our universe, those who call skeptics “deniers” are the true anti-science people.

Calling Black Lives Matter on their core anti-black racism. When the campus censors at Calif. State Univ. — Bakersfield objected to Mike Adams using the slogan “All Lives Matter” for a speech he was to give, Dr. Adams wrote an open letter to the campus BLM reps, suggesting that they, too, might want to look at whether their name honestly represented their activities and suggesting some alternative names:

2. Shacked Lives Matter. Illegitimacy rates have skyrocketed in recent decades. And this matters more than anything. It matters if a man gets a woman pregnant and decides to shack up with her for a little while and move on – as opposed to marrying her and actually raising the child. If the child is male, the consequences of the father’s absence are particularly severe. Put simply, there is a clear and inverse relationship between time spent interacting with dad and time spent interacting with the police. Presently, there is only one racial group in America for which fatherlessness is the rule rather than the exception. To be specific, the black community is now experiencing a whopping 72% illegitimacy rate. This simply must be dealt with now and without relying on the government. In fact, government cannot be part of the solution because it is the root of the problem.

Binge drinker named Woman of the Year. You may recall that I was livid about the Left’s take on Brock Turner. As you may recall, he was convicted of rape because he and a girl both got incoherently, black-out drunk and somehow or other they ended up having sex behind a dumpster. The girl admits that she has no idea what happened — that is, she doesn’t know whether she said yes or not. The only thing certain is that when people caught up with this disgusting duo, she was no longer conscious — and no one knows when she lost consciousness, nor is it reasonable to believe that had she first consented and then past out, the disgracefully drunk Turner would have noticed.

So it was that Turner became the most hated man in America, while this pathetic piece of alcohol sodden humanity, who denies being responsible for the situation in which she found herself, is now touted to America’s teens and young women as one of Glamour’s “Women of the Year.” This “honor” seems to have come about because she’s now made a career of blaming everyone (Turner, Stanford, fraternities, the judge) but herself for a situation in which she bears the largest part of the blame for her travails.

The real antisemitism isn’t around Trump. A Jewish(ish) (i.e., nominally Jewish) Hillary supporter keeps telling me that Trump is antisemitic. And I keep telling him that the fact that some nasty fringe of people has attached itself to him is small potatoes compared to the grotesque and growing antisemitism at the heart of the Democrat party — something Hillary, no friend to Israel herself, has never addressed or disavowed. The latest example of what’s going on with the Left is “soft” Holocaust denial, which involves saying “We’ll agree that the Holocaust happened, but it wasn’t that bad, and the Jews had it coming, and they’re even worse in Israel.” And Hillary says nothing….

Really, there’s no daylight between Hillary and Obama on Israel. Many Israel supporters are very worried that, once he’s in the last two months of his Presidency, Obama will move to destroy Israel through the UN. Charles Krauthammer wrote a representative column. Progressive friends of mine say it’s unfair to indict Obama for something he hasn’t yet done, but the point of openly worrying is to try get Leftist Jews energized enough to stop him from doing anything. Meanwhile, Daniel Greenfield looks at the kind of village in Israel that Obama wants to destroy — an act that Hillary would certainly support.

This is a very touchy subject for me today because one of the Little Bookworms, despite my strong opposition, joined J Street and went to a weekend seminar. After assuring me that the seminar was pointless, boring, and poorly managed, Little Bookworm nonetheless said, “Don’t worry, Mom. There are some things on campus, like BDS, that are really antisemitic. And some things, like Hillel, that are too pro-Jewish. But J Street is right in the middle, because it just wants to end Israel’s illegal occupation of the territories. And no, I don’t want hear from you about it.”

While I’m on the subject of Obama, he’s a liar. I’ve been writing since 2008 about the fact that Obama is a liar, although a more subtle, intelligent one than Hillary. The public started catching on when his Obamacare lies were exposed. Now, with the Wikileaks, he’s been revealed in yet another blatant lie, this one about his alleged ignorance of Hillary’s private server.

The anti-Israel, pro-Muslim indoctrination is everywhere. How can I get too angry at my Little Bookworm when so many facets of American society buy into or actively promote the Left’s Big Lies. Even the Metropolitan Museum in New York has gotten in on the act, with a gauzy, loving, completely dishonest exhibit about the first Muslim occupation of Jerusalem before the Ottomans came along.

No, Obamacare can’t be fixed. Megan McArdle speaks the truth: there is no quick fix for Obamacare. It’s broken down to the bone.

If this magnificent man were an American, he’d vote for Trump. As Brexit showed, the British are sick to death of politicians like ours — the kind who put a matter to the vote and then, when they don’t like the outcome, ignore it:

Davy Crockett’s introduction to limited constitutional government. Back in 1867, before Harper’s Magazine was just another Left-wing outlet, it published an article about the lesson Davy Crockett learned when he once voted to use public money for someone’s private benefit. The someone for whose benefit the money was to be used was a good person, but a voter explained to Crockett that, once a government starts treating money as if it’s the government’s own, to be doled out as the government sees fit, the government has ceased to become representative and is on its way to tyranny.

Actual science backs historical events. When Britain first staked a claim in North America, it chose the Irish to be its slaves — both as true, owned slaves, and as endlessly indentured servants. The problem was that the Irish died like flies. The reason the British turned to Black Africans, saddling the future United States with the stain of black slavery, is that the Black Africans were more resistant to many of the diseases that made the Irish inefficient.

What’s fascinating is that the Irish susceptibility to disease may come about because Northerners, unlike Africans, mated with Neanderthals, which created different immune systems — with the African immune system possibly better suited to combating infections, which were a major killer, especially for field workers:

Barreiro and his team studied blood samples taken from 175 Americans – roughly half of which had African ancestry, with the other half being of European descent.

From these samples, the team extracted macrophages – immune cells that work to kill pathogens – and infected them with two kinds of bacteria: Listeria and Salmonella.

When comparing the samples 24 hours later, the researchers found that the macrophages from the African group had reduced the bacterial growth three times faster than the European group, thanks to a stronger inflammatory response.

In terms of combating these specific bacteria, that’s a definite advantage, but the researchers point out that it also comes with certain disadvantages.

“The immune system of African Americans responds differently, but we cannot conclude that it is better,” says Barreiro, “since a stronger immune response also has negative effects, including greater susceptibility to autoimmune inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease.”

History might have been very different if African slaves had weaker immune systems so that they were a poor investment, rather than a good one.

Incidentally, I’m reading Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South, which relies heavily upon contemporaneous documents to show (a) how unutterably cruel white slaveholders were to their slaves and (b) the terrible lies the slaveholders told themselves and others to justify what they did. Very depressing, but important to know. It’s a reminder that slavery is horrible — including slavery as practiced today in most of the Muslim Middle East.

Democratic socialism is still socialism. When Bernie was still a contender, rather than a quisling, I argued hard that his putting the word “democratic” in front of “socialist” didn’t mean that he wasn’t a hardcore socialist who sought government control over every aspect of American lives. Steve Crowder makes the same point, only much better than I ever could:

Two points, one smart and one stupid.. The smart point comes (naturally) from a conservative who is kind enough to read my blog and correspond with me. The other day, I received the following note from Kathy, and I couldn’t agree more:

Just a short note on something that has bugged me since I first heard it and today I heard it again and am finally fed up, the phrase “working people.”

Politicians constantly talk about how they want to tax the “rich” to provide relief for “working people.” The implication is that the “rich” don’t work. Therefore it’s “fair” to tax them. What a load of cr@p! How do politicians think the “rich” got rich? Most of them worked hard to acquire their money. To imply the “rich” don’t work is insulting and ignorant. “Rich” people work and many work harder and longer than the politicians” “working people.”

Yes! Exactly right.

And the stupid point (naturally) came from one of my Progressive Facebook friends. Only a Progressive could be this clueless. After putting up a Facebook post decrying the fact that Hillary is on the ropes only because of sexism, the friend wrote this in a comment:

This is not just about sex – it is anything and everything to distract from the issues. I’m sorry, but those taxes?

I suspect that the phrase “but those taxes” is not some weird shorthand for the IRS’s illegal (and ongoing) attack against conservative groups, which goes to a serious issue about the size of government, government accountability, and government corruption. Instead, to her, an “issue” is that Trump won’t reveal is taxes, while it’s not an “issue” that Hillary used her four years as Secretary of State to enrich herself at America’s expense and then, to hide this criminal conduct, set up an illegal email system that exposed America’s security secrets to anyone who wanted to take a hack at her system.

Photo by ** RCB **