The Bookworm Beat 9/8/17 — the Hurricanes Are Normal edition

Hurricanes are normal, but Trump Derangement Syndrome obscures that fact. Of course, those subject to TDS are deranged in other ways as well. Just look….

Hurricanes are normal
Hurricanes are normal. It’s just bad luck this year that they’re making landfall in heavily populated areas of the U.S.

Before I get to the meat of this post — or, because it’s a round-up, the various meats of this post — I want to remind everyone that America has always been subject to ferocious hurricanes. They just seem worse today because we have more population in a hurricane’s path, especially when it’s an Irma-like hurricane, and because we have a 24 hour media that makes everything seem local.

In other ways, though, we’re better off when faced with hurricanes because we can prepare. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, residents did not see their Cat 4 hurricane coming. It killed 6,000 – 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in American history. For a list of other major hurricanes in the last 400 years, the bulk of which predate “climate change” and struck out-of-the-blue, go here. You’ll see that America was especially hard hit in the 1700s, long before CO2 was an issue.

Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay our two latest hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, both of which are or will be responsible for staggering property damage and, always, the loss of too many lives. I just want to amp down the usual climate change hysteria that’s accompanying this latest display of Nature’s normal.

And with that, let me turn my attention to all the other interesting things I’ve gathered, many of which reflect poorly on those most deeply lost to TDS.

Hillary admits her incompetence. Hillary has been on the warpath with her new book, blaming everything and everybody for her loss. She’s also admitted that she was incapable of speech on election eve because she was so devastated and that it was male advisers who caused her to react less strongly to both Trump and Bernie than she thinks in retrospect that she ought to have done. (Oh, and Trump “creeped” her out.)

So Hillary has just admitted that she’s incompetent in a crisis and incapable of standing up to men. Most of Hillary’s opponents at home and abroad would have been men, men like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, or Bashir al-Assad. Her latest book is just another reminder that we dodged a serious bullet when Trump won.

Europe’s Muslim future. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, sees which way the wind is blowing and he understands that, not only is Eurabia fast approaching, but that Western Europe leaders are hastening its inevitability:

Europe’s leaders seem to have neither the will nor the means to oppose the incoming waves of millions of Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. They know that terrorists are hiding among the migrants, but still do not vet them. Instead, they resort to subterfuges and lies. They create “deradicalization” programs that do not work: the “radicals,” it seems, do not want to be “deradicalized.”

Europe’s leaders try to define “radicalization” as a symptom of “mental illness”; they consider asking psychiatrists to solve the mess. Then, they talk about creating a “European Islam“, totally different from the Islam elsewhere on Earth. They take on haughty postures to create the illusion of moral superiority, as Ada Colau and Carles Puigdemont did in Barcelona: they say they have high principles; that Barcelona will remain “open” to immigrants. Angela Merkel refuses to face the consequences of her policy to import countless migrants. She chastises countries in Central Europe that refuse to adopt her policies.

European leaders can see that a demographic disaster is taking place. They know that in two or three decades, Europe will be ruled by Islam. They try to anesthetize non-Muslim populations with dreams about an idyllic future that will never exist. They say that Europe will have to learn to live with terrorism, that there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Pat Condell is another prophet who is being ignored:

Meanwhile, Britain prepares its citizens for dhimmitude. Several of my gay Leftist Facebook friends proudly posted a WaPo op-ed announcing that all the grim prophecies preceding legalizing gay marriage failed to come true. It is true that heterosexual marriage is cratering at pretty much the same rate as before, so one can’t say that same-sex marriage killed it. The article also essentially claims that America is better than ever because Christian bakers are being put out of business.

It’s that last point, of course, that’s the giveaway about the real target of gay marriage. Gay marriage, as I’ve said over and over, was never about competing with straight marriage and it was unlikely to affect straight marriage. What it was about was undercutting traditional values, especially if those values came from the church. Kill the traditional church (and the synagogue) and you kill the West. It’s heart goes out of it.

(Before I go further, let me say again, that I have no trouble whatsoever with same-sex civil unions. If states want to legalize same sex partnerships, that’s fine with me. I support people who enter into stable relationships. It’s the way the whole issue was framed as gay “marriage” that disturbs me deeply. Doing that made these unions the basis for a concerted attack against traditional Western values as a whole.)

If you really want to see where gay marriage leads, check out this Australian Spectator article detailing the way in which gay marriage has been used to attack core Western values, not to mention to destroy the integrity of our biological selves. I’ll focus on the gender and children sections, but you should read the whole thing:

Gender: Current Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, has revealed proposals to abolish the need for any medical consultation before gender reassignment. Simply filling out an official form will be sufficient. A ‘Ministry of Equalities’ press release, explicitly announced, that the proposals were designed to: ‘build on the progress’ of same-sex marriage. Guardian journalist Roz Kaveney boasted that changing your gender is now: Almost as simple as changing your name by statutory declaration’.

Manifestations of the ‘British gender revolution’ are not difficult to find. Transport for London, have prohibited the use of the ‘heteronormative’ words, such as ladies and gentlemen. Meanwhile, universities across the nation are threatening to ‘mark down’ students, who continue to use the words ‘he’ and ‘she’. Instead, ‘gender neutral pronouns’ such as ‘ze’, must be uniformly applied.

Such gender-theory radicalism has delighted Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT lobby. Their Orwellian tagline: Acceptance without exception’, can be seen plastered on posters and adverts. Politicians, attempt to ‘out-radical’ one another, in the race to be an original champion, in the next emancipatory front of ‘Trans-rights’.

[snip]

Children: Across the UK, ‘sex education’ has been transformed and disfigured. TV programmes, aimed at children as young as three, promote ‘gender fluidity’, as an enabler of thoughtfulness and individuality.

At the same time, Ministers have denied worried parents the right to withdraw their children from primary school classes. Meanwhile, ‘outside educators’ teach children about sex positions, ‘satisfying’ pornography consumption and how to masturbate. Concerns regarding STI’s and Promiscuity, are derided as ‘old-fashioned’.

Independent religious schools are under intense scrutiny. Dame Louise Casey, a senior government advisor, recently insisted that it is now: Not Ok for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage’.
Ofsted, the body responsible for school-assessment, has been wildly politicised. In 2013, Prior to the redefinition of marriage, Ofsted visited Vishnitz Jewish Girls School. They passed the school with flying colours. In fact, they went out of their way to highlight the committed and attentive approach to student welfare and development. Four years later, Ofsted returned. This time, they failed the school on one issue alone. While again, noting that students were ‘confident in thinking for themselves‘, their report, pointed to the inadequate promotion of homosexuality and gender reassignment. As such, it was failing to ensure: a full understanding of fundamental British values’. It is one of an initial seven faith schools that face closure.

You do understand that, not only is Britain destroying its moral center, it’s also effectively grooming its girls to become prostitutes and its boys to become catamites for their eventual Muslim overlords. One only has to look to at the tragedy and travesty of Rotherham to see how that dynamic will play out.

Sick adults lead the child’s gender fluid revolution. A couple of years ago, much was made in Australia of a young boy whose supportive mother allowed him to go full female at 12. Isn’t that wonderful? No, it’s not! It’s terrible that adults do these things to children. In this case, what happened was that, at 14, when his real hormones kicked in, he realized that he really wanted to be a boy after all:

In the beginning of 2017, teachers at school began to refer to him as a girl which triggered Mitchell to question if he had made the right decision.

“I began to realise I was actually comfortable in my body. Every day I just felt better,” he told Now To Love.

Patrick’s mother said he used to dress up in girls clothes (60 Seconds)

As a result, Mitchell confided in his mother and explained that he wanted to transition back into a boy.

That poor kid now needs surgery to remove the breasts that the hormones he took created. Also, only time will tell whether he will suffer lasting ill-effects, such as cancer or sterility, from the hormones the adults put in his body.

It’s significant that this was all done with reference solely to a mother. There does not seem to have been a father in the picture. I’ve written before about the problems that arise from missing fathers, both when it comes to blacks and when it comes to sexual and gender confusion.

Our emotionally weak children won’t be able to fight back. When the cultural clashes escalate into full out war between the West and Islam, those who ought to be our best and brightest won’t be able to defend themselves. The institutions that ought to harden them in the defense of their own culture and values are weakening them.

At Harvard, for example, the university finally backed down and authorized a Ben Shapiro talk. That’s good, albeit pathetic that it took so much pressure to make Harvard bow before the First Amendment and academic freedom and inquiry. What’s awful is that Harvard felt the need to protect its snowflakes from the horrors of learning a different world view (one that, until about eight years ago, was normal) and facing criticism:

If there ever needed to be confirmation that Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro’s characterization of Leftist students at American universities as “snowflakes” hits the bulls-eye, the campus-wide announcement issued by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Alivisatos of the University of California, Berkeley, regarding Shapiro’s September 14 speech at the university offered just that.

Why?

Because within the announcement was this gem:

Support and counseling services for students, staff and faculty

We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging. No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe. For that reason, the following support services are being offered and encouraged:
Student support services

Employee (faculty and staff) support services

Yup, those dainty, fragile students who cannot countenance views that differ from their own are being offered counseling because of the possible psychological damage incurred by Shapiro’s rhetoric.

Not Antifa’s violence. Shapiro’s rhetoric.

The “rape culture” worm is slowly turning. Betsy DeVos struck a blow for due process and against misanthropy when she announced that the Trump administration is withdrawing the vile “Dear Colleague” letter that Obama sent to colleges all over America. That’s the one that used the threat of withdrawing federal funds to bully colleges and universities into savaging men accused of “rape,” even when those accusations were utterly risible. Of course, with the third-generation feminists taking over campus administration — the feminists who aren’t about equality but are about man hatred — the letter was a green light for things that most of them had been itching to do anyway.

For people who had not pickled their brains in the Leftist Kool-Aid that passes for “thought” on college campuses, the kangaroo court stories periodically emerging were becoming untenable. Emily Yoffe, a Leftist who wrote the “Dear Prudence” advice column at Slate, got absolutely trashed when she dared to point out that women need to take responsibility for their own safety on campus. Moreover, she suggested that a lot of the “rape” stories involved alcohol.

Rather than backing down, Yoffe has come back with a three-part series being published in The Atlantic about the biased, totalitarian nature of campus “anti-rape” policies. Part 1 offers just some examples of men whose lives were destroyed when women claimed rape. What’s so surreal is that, as often as not, the women admit that they were the aggressors:

Kwadwo “kojo” bonsu, 23, was on track to graduate in the spring of 2016 with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bonsu, who was born in Maryland, is the son of Ghanaian immigrants. He chose UMass because it gave him the opportunity to pursue his two passions, science and music. He told me he hoped to get a doctorate in polymer science or chemical engineering. At UMass he was a member of the National Society of Black Engineers. He also joined a fraternity (he was the only black member), played guitar in a campus jazz band, and tutored jazz guitarists at a local high school.

In the early hours of Saturday, November 1, 2014, Bonsu, then a junior, was at the house where many of his fraternity brothers lived. There he ran into another junior, whom I’ll call R.M., a white, female marketing student. According to a written account by R.M., who declined to be interviewed for this story, the two started talking and smoking marijuana; eventually they kissed. As she wrote, “It got more intense until finally I shifted so that I was straddling him.” She told him she wasn’t interested in intercourse and he said he was fine with that.

Then, she wrote, “I started to move my hand down his chest and into his pants.” R.M. interrupted this to take a phone call from a female friend who was also at the house and trying to find her. The call ended and then, R.M. wrote, “I got on my knees and started to give him a blow job.” After a short time, “I removed my mouth but kept going with my hand and realized just how high I was.” She wrote that she felt conflicted because she wanted to stop—she said she told him she was feeling uncomfortable and thought she needed to leave—but that she also felt bad about “working him up and then backing out.” (In Bonsu’s written account, he stated that R.M. said she needed to leave because she was concerned her friend might “barge in” on them.) The encounter continued for a few more minutes, during which, she wrote, he cajoled her to stay—“playfully” grabbing her arm at one point, and drawing her in to kiss—then ended with an exchange of phone numbers. R.M. had not removed any clothing.

R.M. then went down to the kitchen to find her friend. As she explained in her statement, “[My friend] knows I was with Kojo. She probably told all the brothers in the room, and they’re gonna hate me when they find out”—she didn’t explain why. “I can never come back here.” Her friend started teasing her, asking how it had gone. R.M. was a resident adviser in her dormitory—someone tasked with counseling other students—and at that moment, she wrote, “as my RA training kicked in, I realized I’d been sexually assaulted.” She wrote that while in retrospect she should have left if she didn’t want to continue the encounter, she hadn’t wanted to be a bad sport—“that UMass Student Culture dictates that when women become sexually involved with men they owe it to them to follow through.” She added, “I want to fully own my participation in what happened, but at the same time recognize that I felt violated and that I owe it to myself and others to hold him accountable for something I felt in my bones wasn’t right.”

As she talked with her friend, R.M. wrote, she became distraught. She contacted the RAs on duty and reported that she had been sexually assaulted. The RAs called the campus police, who notified the Amherst police. R.M. gave her clothes to a police officer for evidence, although she said she was not ready to file charges. Then she went to the hospital, where she was given a battery of medications for possible STDs.

Just before Thanksgiving, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the university by Bonsu’s attorney, Brett Lampiasi, R.M. went to the dean of students and filed a complaint against Bonsu. She also reported him to the Amherst police. The police investigated and closed the case with no charges filed. On January 12, 2015, Bonsu got an email from a school administrator informing him that a “very serious” allegation had been lodged against him and that until a hearing was held, he was subject to “interim restrictions”: He could not contact R.M., he could visit no dormitories other than his own, he was limited to eating at a single dining hall, and he was forbidden from entering the student union.

What happened there was “gray rape”: A girl felt guilty about her own promiscuity and assuaged that guilt (egged on by her feminist friends) by destroying a young man’s life. I applaud both Yoffe and The Atlantic for having the courage to stand up to the man-hating feminists on this one.

Meanwhile, at USC, the powers that be are determined to destroy a young man’s life, even though he and his girlfriend both argue consistently and vociferously that they were engaging in fun, and consensual, rough-housing. Worse, USC is sticking to this position even thought it has video proving that there was no sexual assault.

America’s military once fought and won wars. I startled one of my Little Bookworms the other day when I walked into the living room and announced, “Just remember, if America fights a war to win, she wins.” My Little Bookworm was befuddled, because this statement seemed to come completely out of the blue. In fact, it came about because I was listening to Irving Berlin’s “American Eagles” song, about the Army Air Corp:

The lyrics that struck me were these:

Eagles
American eagles
America’s strong
Just as long
As they fly

(Give us some)
More bombers to attack with
More bombers till the skies are black with

No political correctness there. One fights to win.

According to Ray Starmann, our American military still had that “fight to win” ethos during Desert Storm, a war waged without the American media tagging along and kibbitzing. In the wake of that signal victory, the Leftists turned their gimlet gaze on the military and sought to destroy it from the inside out by making its mission one of social justice and its enemy climate change:

Since, 1991, the US military has been slowly coming apart at the seams. Stress cards, open homosexuality, transgenders on active duty, sensitivity training, pregnancy simulators for male troopers, lactation stations in the field, babies born on US ships of war, female graduates of Ranger School, including a 37 year old mother (it’s funny how the women looked so well fed), women in the SEALs, women in Marine infantry units and females in the field artillery (even though most cannot carry a 155mm round) are just some of the insanity that has taken place in the last 26 years, but which snowballed into hell under the Obama administration.

A social revolution engulfed the military, starting with Tailhook and continuing to this day. Warriors were forced out and feather merchants and PC flag bearers were promoted. Girl power was in and masculinity was out. The warrior culture was buried and a new culture was reborn that resembles corporate America, not the US military of yesteryear.

No, General Kennedy, it’s not your father’s army and that’s a problem, a big, festering problem.

And, now, with the world in flames, with ISIS blowing up Europe, with Putin pumping weights in the Artic while he watches his BMP’s on skis roll by, with Kim Jong-Loon on the loose with a toy chest of nukes and missiles and with Iran figuring out that Trump ain’t Barney Fife, the US military needs to be rougher and tougher and more ready for a fight than ever.

And, we ain’t. And, that’s the fact, Jack.

Many are waiting for Mad Dog Mattis to stick a pike in the heart of the military’s social engineering forever.

We are still waiting…

Turning into the Swedish military is something that it’s hard to walk back from. And I say this with all possible respect for the young men and women serving in the military. The changes are coming about from above, not below. Our enlisted men and women, and the less-politicized junior officers are just serving in the military that the Democrats handed to them.

Inspiring individual courage makes a difference. Here’s the story, one I didn’t know, of a Holocaust victim who elected to die on her feet, rather than on her knees, and who succeeded in taking out at least one Nazi before she died. She was a Polish Jew, so it seems fitting that, one year after she died, the starved and sick residents of the Warsaw Ghetto engaged the Nazis in one of the fiercest battles of WWII.

Yes, almost every Jew in the Ghetto died, but they were going to die in any event. Meanwhile, this ragged, under-equipped band slaughtered Nazis and may well have contributed something significant to the Nazis’ eventual defeat. I’m a coward, so I don’t know if I can live up to my own words, but it does seem to me that inevitable death is better if you take out the bad guy when you go: