Bookworm Beat 11/1/19: Student Loans, Emotional Women, Rapacious nature, Whistleblowers, and Photoshopping

As Bookworm Beat echoing Podcast 30, that covers emotional women, student loans, rapacious nature, Whistleblowers, NeverTrumpers, and Trump.

Bookworm Beat Benghazi Leftists Social MediaBefore I begin, a heads up: I’ll be traveling this weekend to visit the Revolutionary War Field Day in Camden, South Carolina, so blogging will be light, if not nonexistent. I’m sure, though, that I’ll have a lot to say when I get back.

Frankly, I find every aspect of the Southeast fascinating. Just the other day, for the first time in eight months, I visited the shopping mall in my eastern Tennessee town, the one anchored by Belk and J.C. Penney.

In the middle of the mall was a hat kiosk and I took a picture. Please note that, while the kiosk owner is selling a MAGA hat (along with all sorts of military hats on the other side of the kiosk), the owner is also making it clear that s/he wants Trump in 2020. You’d never see this in the Bay Area, no matter what the owner’s personal preferences:

And now, on to blogging.

The feminization of American. Before I begin, let me say that, as a woman myself, I have a generally high opinion of women. I think they can be as intelligent, as brave, and as loving as men. They can also be as stupid, cowardly, and mean as men.

I also believe that men and women are different. It’s true that women are more emotional, which is important for nurturing children. Likewise, men are more rational, which is important for going out and hunting for food. These are lizard brain traits and they are real. They also exist on a bell curve, which means you can have naturally highly rational women and emotional men. These are generalizations, not traits specific to every individual.

I mention all this because of a comment thread at this blog saying that it’s bad for America that women vote, since women do not vote rationally. Someone replied to point out that 40% of American men must also be irrational, because they vote Democrat, not to mention all the women who vote Republican.

My two cents, having spent a lot of time around college students isn’t that women are the problem. It’s the feminization of our culture that’s the problem — and by feminization, I mean the push to dump rationality, a more male trait, and replace it with emotionalism, a female trait. That’s how you get Paul Joseph Watson’s much derided soy boys:

Everywhere you go in the academic world, starting in elementary school and culminating explosively at college, the culture is feminine. Most elementary schools are staffed almost entirely by women, with a few gay men thrown in. As the education trends upwards, there are more men, but they are (often) gay and they’ve been tamed to be and think like women.

The name of the game in education is femininity, not in the “I enjoy being a girl way,” but in the “assume female traits” way. Recess and competition are cut back; sitting still in the classroom and being cooperative are mandatory. The children read about feelings, not about adventures and heroism. Feminism is on the agenda, and boys are told in ways both overt and covert that masculinity is toxic, composed as it is of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision. And that’s how you make Democrats, my friends.

I also complained on my most recent podcast that, even as Leftists insist that we pay for voluntarily assumed student debt, which itself is offensive, students aren’t learning squat. If they’re in the STEM fields, they’re learning a trade, but if they’re in the liberal arts, they know nothing of traditional humanism. Their writing is gibberish, and they’ve never read a canon that revolves, not around skin color, but around core human values: Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Pope, Donne, Locke, etc. It’s tragic.

Yes, California is premodern. Victor Davis Hanson wrote a much appreciated article entitled Is California Becoming Premodern? The short answer is yes, it is. With no power, fires, medieval diseases, broken roads, endemic poverty, rampant crime . . . yes, these are all premodern traits.

What I would add is that one part of pre-modernism is that Nature wins. Put another way, a large part of the modern is that we use fossil fuel, plus human energy and ingenuity, to keep nature at bay. It takes work to keep fire, floods, famine, darkness, and disease away from us, not to mention the ever-encroaching jungle or woods or plains that surround human habitation.

Our Gaia worship and gooey climate change madness are giving Mother Nature the upper hand. The environmentalists may deny this, but that’s never a good thing for humans.

As I always say, we are Nature’s stewards and should not waste, abuse, or despoil it, but Nature is always out there, waiting to kill us if we lose control.

Facts about the Whistleblower. I, like every other curious, intelligent, informed American, read Paul Sperry’s epic The Beltway’s ‘Whistleblower’ Furor Obsesses Over One Name. It’s a powerful piece of journalism and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet had the chance to read it.

However — and this is just me — the fact that Sperry didn’t put the facts about Eric Ciaramella (char-a-MEL-ah) in chronological order left me a little confused. I therefore offer you a chronology gleaned from Sperry’s article:

Ciaramella is an Ivy League graduate and a registered Democrat. He started his government career at the CIA, where he specialized in Russia and Ukraine, for he is conversant/fluent in both languages, as well as in Arabic.

In mid-2015, John Brennan — yes, that Brennan — detailed him to the National Security Council to work under Susan Rice and work with Biden. For the rest of 2015 and throughouot 2016, he worked on Ukrainian policies for Biden.

Unusually for a low level federal employee, Ciaramella attended an October 2016 state luncheon that Biden hosted for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a lunch that Brennan, Comey, and Clapper attended. (And remember that Barr and Durham were in Italy. . . .)

In 2016, Ciaramella worked with a DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American Hillary supporter. They deamed to dig up dirt on Trump. Ciaramella even invited Chalupa to the White House.

When Trump became president, no doubt due to Ciaramella’s linguistic abilities and to have continuity of knowledge, Trump had him continue to staff the Ukraine desk for the NSC. Ciaramella eventually ended up in the West Wing. While he was there, it was clear to all that he had policy differences with Trump.

Ciaramella left the West Wing (I think that’s a polite way of saying “was kicked out”) in mid-2017 over concerns he was leaking negative material about Trump to the media. He had sent an email to another agency stating that Trump met with Russian diplomats the day after he fired Comey – and that Putin had talked to Trump a week before Trump fired Comey. Ciaramella even said that Putin told Trump to Comey. This improper (out of the chain of command) email was leaked and it ended up in the media, generating the “Putin fired Comey” narrative. Mueller’s reluctant conclusion that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia put the lie to this.

Ciaramella is currently still employed at the CIA.

After Trump’s phone call with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Ciaramella sought guidance from Schiff’s staff. Significantly, the staff included people Schiff had recruited from Obama’s NSC, two of whom were Ciaramella’s friends and colleagues.

One of the most interesting questions that now arises is whether Ciaramella is the “Charli” Strzok and Page texted about when they were trying to find someone who could keep tabs on Trump in the White House. I don’t have the data to discuss this, but if you’re interested in that question, I highly recommend this Dan Bongino podcast.

A space-eyed view of the impeachment. Others smarter and more informed than I have written about the procedural travesty that the Dems have created in the House, as well as about the witness testimony (what we know, what Dems are promoting, etc.), and the factual merits of the case.

I have a larger view than these details. We know that what the President did isn’t impeachable, for he did nothing more than any other president has done. Also, we know that all the huffing and puffing about an allegedly mishandled phone call is garbage, because we’ve never before had the privilege of listening in to such a phone call. There are no points of comparison because such calls are always confidential — meaning, of course, that the leaker violated national security rules.

What’s at issue here — and what Vindman made clear in his leaked testimony — is that the Dems are complaining about policy disagreements regarding Ukraine. Policy disagreements do not constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors.” They are, instead, material for the next election.

Dems, however, don’t believe in elections that they haven’t or probably won’t win. Instead, they are opting for the wholesale destruction of America’s political system. Every American should fight against going down this destructive, existentially dangerous path.

There are no perfect candidates. A friend of mine dislikes Trump so much that he cannot agree with me that, even if you dislike Trump’s style, if you genuinely believe in conservative values, you have to support him against the hard Left opposition. My friend believes that this kind of support degrades American politics and that the voters have the responsibility to reject debauched, imperfect candidates.

My contention is that this voter responsibility exists at the primary level. That is why Leftist states, with California in the lead, have opened primaries up. If you’re interested, I’ve explained here why I think open primaries veer very near to violating the First Amendment, for they stifle minority speech at elections. In last year’s California election, Republicans had no choice as to the Senator — it was Dem v Dem. Even at the primary level, they’re fighting, not members of their own party, for how the party responds to issues, but instead are fighting Leftists when it comes to naming their preferred Republican candidate.

The system is broken, but we don’t make it better in a binary situation by refusing to vote. Instead, if we love a constitutional America, I believe we have a duty to vote for the most conservative candidate, even if we have to hold our noses to do so. To back up my argument, just look at the damage Obama did to America’s constitutional fabric, something that may well have happened because fastidious voters couldn’t make themselves pull the lever for McCain or Romney. Admittedly, both of those men proved to be the sorest of sore losers, but they still would have governed to the right of Obama.

With Trump, we’ve got a blessedly sore winner who, inch by inch, is dragging America back to her constitutional center with strict constructionist judges, a shrinking administrative state, lower taxes, a strong military that serves America rather than the rest of the world, a booming economy, a real border, and a respect for life, coupled with an unwillingness to force taxpayers to fund death. Overall, every conservative should be pleased with the agenda, no matter the imperfect vessel making it happen.

And that’s my two cents. I’ll put up an open thread later today, but as always, feel free to comment here.

Photoshopping. You’ve probably had a good laugh at the media’s insanity over President Trump tweeting out a cute and obvious Photoshop of him giving a “Medal of Honor” to the dog that took out al-Baghdadi. I won’t rehash that. I’ll just say that, if you listen to the last five minutes of my podcast, you can hear my dog’s strong opinions on the subject.