Bookworm Beat 12/3/18 — the “Paris is burning” edition and open thread

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Even as Paris burns, America’s media and other Democrat establishments demand that America institute the socialist policies that are destroying Europe.

Paris is burningParis burns — and the people call for Trump. The mainstream media truly believes in global leadership. Trump’s desire to be America’s, rather than following in his predecessor’s footsteps as a Left wing world leader, is seen as Exhibit A in indictment alleging that Trump is evil, racist, Hitler-esque, etc.

Those national leaders that the media exalts are the ones who put the world ahead of their nations. They demand a world without borders, no matter the profound damage roving immigrants from nightmare countries inflict on their own citizens. In this regard, it’s important to understand that most of these countries did not become nightmares because an evil strong man, along the lines of Hitler, Maduro, or Erdogan is destroying the civilized people in his nation. Instead, these are nightmare nations because of national values that the roving immigrants, like locusts, bring with them to their new locations.

The exalted global leaders are also the ones who have bought completely into the whole Climate Change mantra. This holds that mankind in the last few years has become more powerful than the earth, the sun, and the whole universe combined. Certainly, humans have shown that they have the power to alter and damage their local environment. There is no reliable evidence, though, that they can change the earth’s climate.

As I’ve taken to arguing, if humans really are warming the planet, we should be incredibly grateful. Because I’m not a Leftist, my knowledge of history goes back millennia, rather than years or (sometimes) merely weeks or even days. That’s why I know that humans thrive when the earth warms and they die when it cools. When it warms, there’s more arable land and more rain, which equals more food. If CO2 is increasing, that’s great too, because the food we eat needs it.

However, when the earth cools, whether because of (probably sun-controlled) climate change or because of dirty volcanoes that block out the sun, people die. Keep that last point in mind when you hear from those “scientists” who want to block the sun’s rays:

Scientists are to copy the effects of a massive volcanic eruption to block the Sun’s rays and combat global warming.

As part of a £2.3million ($3million) experiment partly-funded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, a team from Harvard University will spray tiny chalk particles into the atmosphere 12 miles above the Earth to reflect some of the Sun’s rays back into space.

They hope this will have a similar effect to an erupting volcano releasing sulphur dioxide. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, releasing 20million tons of sulphur dioxide. That cooled the planet by 0.5C for 18 months.

Blocking the sun is just a terrible idea. Without the sun, the absence of arable land and the lessening of rain (because ice traps the water) means less food. People also freeze to death (as happens in Europe every cold winter). Moreover, people weakened by cold and starvation are vulnerable to mass epidemics, such as the Black Death, which was preceded by a solar minimum that led to starvation and accompanying weakened immune systems or the horrors of 536 A.D.:

In A.D. 536, Europe had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.

It started when a mysterious fog swept over the continent, veiling the sun in a blue haze and casting Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia into darkness 24 hours a day, for 18 months. Falling temperatures ushered in the coldest decade of the past 2,000 years, crops failed from Ireland to China, and famine ran rampant. Those who endured the long, cold night faced even harsher times in the years to come; in A.D. 541, an outbreak of bubonic plague known as Justinian’s Plague scythed through the Mediterranean, killing up to 100 million people.

[snip]

In a new study published this week (Nov. 14) in the journal Antiquity, the team analyzed an ancient ice core pulled from the Swiss Alps containing more than 2,000 years’ worth of microscopic history lessons. Particles of dust, metal and airborne elements frozen at various levels of the 235-foot-long (72 meters) core hint at how the atmosphere over Europe changed throughout the past two millennia — a Saharan dust storm here, a silver-mining boom there — and, according to the new study, reveal that a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland directly preceded the beginning of Europe’s darkest days.

But back to those exalted world leaders. None of them have children (none!), so they are easily able to commit themselves and their nations to abstract ideas that will never affect them or their non-existent children.

While Europe’s leaders are immune to the damage they cause, that’s not true for the people they rule. I’m generally not that sympathetic to Europeans, because they long adored their soft socialism and condescendingly railed against Americans for not having that same soft socialism — all without ever acknowledging that the only reason their soft socialism worked was because we Americans paid for their defense costs. European ingratitude is not something I take lightly.

Now that the American well is running dry (and good riddance), ordinary people in Europe are struggling. Unfortunately for them, their globalist, elite leaders, in thrall to the ideas of open immigration and climate change, are ignoring them. Well, that’s not really accurate. The leaders are intentionally making their people suffer.

In France, the latest pain the government inflicted on the people is a huge gas tax intended to alleviate imaginary man-caused climate change. For the French people, this has been a bridge too far. Here’s a lovely video showing how the ordinary people, who have attired themselves in the bright yellow safety jackets they are required to have in their cars, are letting Macron know that, under his aegis, they feel anything but safe:

Even the police have taken sides:

The above may be slightly staged, but a spokesman for Paris’s police has said that the police support the protesters’ goals because the police too have taken huge economic hits because of Macron’s policies.

France, of course, is not alone in hurting its citizenry. Germany arguably started it all in 2015 when Merkel opened the border to a flood of people who brought with them a 7th century ideology hostile to Jews, Christians, women, work, etc. So here’s footage of the protests in . . . Berlin:

The Berlin protest is not a big one, but it’s a start.

But the most beautiful thing of all is the fact that the protesters have figured out who a true leader is and they’re letting their elites know who and what they want:

It looks as if Europe has its own Deplorables now. Hey, President Macron, do you hear the people sing?

The media still has too much power in America, as witnessed by the 2016 House outcome (with help from legal voter fraud in California), but across the Western world, the beleaguered worms — that is, ordinary citizens — are starting to turn.

Media again hides the real news. Considering that the MSM has entirely abandoned reporting actual news and, instead, now spends all of its efforts in Mean Girl stories about what a bad man President Trump is, I’m endlessly surprised by how high Trump’s kept his polling numbers. In a just world, of course, one in which the media reports hard news, rather than mean gossip and biased speculation, Trump would have an 80% or 90% approval rating.

The above is a predicate to pointing out that the MSM media has almost entirely ignored the fact that Trump negotiated a much better deal for America than the NAFTA deal:

It’s quite possible to take a cursory glance at the media and not even realize that a major event, a deal between the US, Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA, had even happened.

That’s because the media keeps catering to its core audience of lefty crazies hoping that Mueller will reverse the 2016 election for them. That’s the audience that has poured money into dinosaur properties like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And as a result, the media tends to give short shrift to major stories when they don’t easily plug into a conspiratorial Trump narrative.

Had the media chosen to report on the NAFTA deal, the angle would have no doubt involved an Ivanka Trump trademark in a foreign country or a Trump property, implying corruption (without ever proving it), rather than its impact on ordinary Americans.

And that’s another example of the toll of fake news.

It’s not just that the media continually subverts democracy, damaging trust in civic institutions and undermining confidence in the elections that it claims to be trying to protest from Russian trolls on Facebook, but it sucks the oxygen out of real news.

Read the rest here.

The Cohen plea deal is meaningless. For two good analyses showing why, once more, Democrats are engaged in meaningless exultation, I recommend two articles:

So What if Trump Wanted to Build a Tower in Moscow?

For Trump, Cohen Plea Deal’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Exoneration

Occasional-Cortex may benefit conservatives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the beneficiary of a $200,000 degree in economics from Boston University, has let loose with another statement of staggering ignorance about economics. This time, she misread a Nation article about the Pentagon audit and concluded that the Pentagon had lost $21 trillion. In fact, the entire Pentagon budget since our Nation’s founding totals only $18 trillion in modern dollars:

I’ll be the first to agree that, while our troops our amazing, our Pentagon is greedy and inefficient. However, even the Pentagon isn’t that bad. What the audit showed is that the Pentagon used accounting tricks to shuffle around $21 trillion without ever having spent it. The bottom line was that the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is ugly, but the money is mostly accounted for.

But back to Occasional-Cortex. As you can see from the above tweet, she used her economically ignorant conclusion to argue for Medicare for All, aka Socialized Medicine.

That kind of stupidity is worrisome in an elected official, especially because Occasional-Cortex wants to join Maxine Waters, the new chair of the House Financial Services Committee. However, the ever-hopeful Guy Benson posits that there may be a bright side to Occasional-Cortex’s endless gaffs. First, of course, considering that she’s the brightest star in the new Democrat Party, she reveals how intellectually bereft that party is.

Second, says Benson:

In some ways, AOC’s wildly inaccurate tweet is a gift to those of us who are desperate to demonstrate that single-payer healthcare is extraordinarily unaffordable.  She has accidentally illustrated the scope of its total cost, while helpfully allowing us to place military spending (a chronically-inflated, evergreen target for liberals seeking pay-fors) in proper context.  Perhaps the incoming Congressional freshman from New York would be better served to stick to tweeting substance-free potshots, such as lumping her ideological opponents together as a band of conspiratorial know-nothings who can’t grapple with realistic solutions to big problems. Talk about projection.

American academia cultivates evil. I know that there are a handful of good and smart professors in academia, and that many students just want to get in and get out without being politicized. Having said that, though, academia in America really is the heart of so many horrible ideas: socialism; third-wave man-hating feminism; racial obsessions; gender obsessions; antisemitism; open borders; and on and on and on. (Regarding the Israel hatred, keep in mind that academics, instead of supporting the only free, open, safe society in the Middle East, support Hamas. Hamas just sentenced 6 people to death for “collaborating with Israel.” Hamas is bestial.)

In New Jersey, police caught a very dangerous drunk driver who turned out to be an illegal alien. Rather than celebrating the police for saving lives, almost 120 Rutgers academics are saying how horrific it was that the police dared to arrest a person who has no right to be in America and who was endangering lives while here.

I do wonder if these professors would feel the same way if Luiz Alberto Lopez Lopez, while driving drunk, had killed one of their number. I’m not saying he should have killed anyone (I hope I’m not that immoral), but I am playing a mental game about “professors mugged by reality.”

And then there’s this amazing juxtaposition of images:

Also, at Gonzaga College, the administration banned Ben Shapiro from speaking there. Although Gonzaga is an openly Christian college, I’m pretty sure it didn’t ban Shapiro because he’s Jewish. It’s more likely that he advocates conservative views that, while coming from a Jewish mindset, align closely with the way Jesuits used to think: pro-Life, pro-expanding the mind, pro-intellectual rigor. Of note is the fact that, while Gonzaga is scared of Ben Shapiro, it happily invited Angela Davis, a communist and domestic terrorist, to speak on its campus.

I hate American colleges at so many levels, including just the competence level. I was helping one of my Little Bookworms edit a term paper. The main problem he had was trying to decipher the assignment. The philosophy and logic professor, I am sorry to say, is borderline illiterate and is unable to communicate simple instructions. I’ve seen that this is par for the course for way too many of my Little Bookworms’ college instructors, especially those in the Liberal Arts.

Israel is a good investment. I think this video was a little short on explaining how Israel’s and America’s interests align, but it did a good job of showing that, because our interests do align, money spent on Israel is money well spent:

Michael Avenatti is like the punch line to an old joke. I don’t like Michael Avenatti’s politics. I don’t like the way he walks away from debt obligations. I don’t like the way he filed a lawsuit when his client told him not to (which is grounds for disbarring him). I don’t like the way his client’s money vanished (another ground for disbarment.) I don’t like the way he beats up women. But, gosh darn it!, you have to admire his optimism:

“I think the field is shaping up to be even more advantageous for someone like me, not less,” Avenatti told Politico Sunday. “I think my chances have only gone up, not gone down.”

And here’s the joke:

A little boy is always optimistic. Always.

One day, a dump truck carrying tons of manure accidentally crashes into the little boy’s house, spilling all of the manure into his bedroom. When his parents rush in to check on the little boy, they find him digging away at the manure, crowing, “I know there’s a pony in here somewhere.”

Dear Michael Avenatti: You just keep on digging.

Is Western Civilization dead?. You and I are fighting for Western Civilization and I think we’re fighting the good fight. That is, we’re fighting the good fight unless what we’re actually doing is trying desperately to resurrect a corpse:

(The above story is real, although it dates back to April 2017. It took place in a Spanish-language reality TV courtroom in Miami.)

Nah! I think America still has some life left in her. I’m a short-term pessimist, which means that I always assume the worst, but I’m enough of an optimist to believe that, while we may suffer losses along the way, America and Western Civilization are worth saving and we should keep on fighting.

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