Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Israel, United Nations
What Israelis would like to say:
And what Netanyahu, with courage and honesty, actually said at the UN:
Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Watcher of Weasels
The Council has exercised its usual wisdom, and passed judgment on this week’s submissions:
Council Winners
Non-Council Winners
Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
Actor Alec Baldwin’s ugly obsession with Michelle Malkin has flickered at the periphery of my awareness for some time now, but it wasn’t until Michelle Malkin did a comprehensive post about his obsession, and his follower’s horrible, frightening threats, that I got an insight into the level of venom directed at high profile conservatives, especially when they’re considered gender and race traitors, as the Asian Michelle is. I hope Michelle has contacted the FBI on this one.
Warning: If you follow the link, please be aware that it is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, nor is the content appropriate when children are around (unless, of course, you’re okay with your colleagues or children being exposed to the most grotesque violent imagery and the foulest misogynist and racist language).
Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Corruption
This is a really good video. I wish someone would come up with something similar for Operation Fast & Furious:
Hat tip: Hot Air
Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Mitt Romney, Open Threads, Rick Perry
Back in 2007 and 2008, I pretty strongly supported Romney. If you check out my Mitt Romney category of posts, you’ll see myriad posts in which I praised his economic acumen and his character. It looks as if I’ll be dusting those posts off again. When Perry came on the scene, I liked his fire, his American pride, and his small government attitude. His fire, though, seems to have turned into painful self-immolation and, unless he miraculously improves his showing in a few days, I don’t seem him going anywhere.
Romney had three problems going into 2008: Romney Care, his Mormonism (which I don’t mind, but which worries or is offensive to many Americans, both religious and non-religious), and his slightly plastic demeanor. He has only one problem now: Romney Care. Obama is so bad, most conservatives and many independents will willingly overlook both his faith and his demeanor. Romney Care, however, is a problem. As I said back in 2008, though, there is no perfect candidate. Romney was better than McCain back then, and he’s definitely better than Obama now.
As I’ve mentioned before in my posts, my support for one primary candidate or another is purely hypothetical. By the time the primaries reach California, it’s all over anyway (and, with California’s new open primary law, thank God for that, ’cause I really don’t need to have the Democrats selecting my Republican candidate).
What say you?
UPDATE: Since I didn’t watch the debate, I have no idea if James Taranto’s statement is accurate, but I just love the imagery (emphasis mine):
Rick Perry was awful in last night’s debate. Just awful. The swaggering Texas governor kept scrapping with the chipper Mitt Romney, and he kept losing. It was like watching Donny Osmond dominate John Wayne.
There’s still room for Perry to grow and move, and as the Duchess of Austin said in her comment, he’s still got much stronger conservative chops than Mitt with regard to everything except illegal aliens. Both are better than McCain was in 2008. (I still haven’t grasp how McCain got the lock on the Republican nomination back then, but that’s another story entirely.)
Bookworm on Sep 23 2011 | Filed under: Government
I’m working on a settlement statement in a very depressing divorce case (divorce cases, which I work on as infrequently as possible, are always depressing, but this one is worse than most), so blogging will suffer today. Nevertheless, I wanted to share with you a matched set about government overreach:
At the White House Dossier, reading about the way in which the White House is bypassing the Legislature entirely to exert ever greater federal authority over our children’s education.
And at Gateway Pundit, learn how your federal government wants to micromanage your taste buds. I see deep-fried bugs (good source of protein and sustainable) on the McDonald’s menu if we have too many more years of Obama in the White House.
Bookworm on Sep 22 2011 | Filed under: Books
I happen to be extremely fond of Georgette Heyer who, in the mid-20th Century, picked up Jane Austen’s mantle. Here is a lovely character description she wrote about the romantic lead in her book Black Sheep:
He was not a rebel. Rebels fought against the trammels of convention, and burned to rectify what they saw to be evil in the shibboleths of an elder generation, but Miles Calverleigh was not of their number. No wish to reform the world inspired him, nor the smallest desire to convert others to his own way of thinking. He accepted, out of a vast and perhaps idle tolerance, the rules laid down by a civilised society, and, when he transgressed these, accepted also, and with unshaken good-humour, society’s revenge on him. Neither the zeal of a reformer, nor the rancour of one bitterly punished for the sins of his youth, awoke a spark of resentment in his breast. He did not defy convention: when it did not interfere with whatever line of conduct he meant to pursue he conformed to it; and when it did he ignored it, affably conceding to his critics their right to censure him, if they felt so inclined, and caring neither for their praise nor their blame.
Miles is a hero Heyer likes. Here is what she has to say about an amiable but shallow society woman who hosts the eponymous heroine in Arabella:
She expected nothing but pleasure from Arabella’s visit, and although she knew that in launching the girl into society she was behaving in a very handsome way, she never dwelled on the reflection, except once or twice a day in the privacy of her dressing-room, and then not in any grudging spirit, but merely for the gratifying sensation it gave her of being a benevolent person.
If you like graceful writing, social satire and humor, and you’re willing to have a bit of romance on the side, I can’t recommend Georgette Heyer highly enough.
Bookworm on Sep 22 2011 | Filed under: Watcher of Weasels
It’s voting day over at the Watcher’s Council, so I’m enjoying myself right now, reading the following posts:
Council Submissions
Honorable Mentions
Non-Council Submissions
Bookworm on Sep 22 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
Reading the news today — markets collapsing, Israel in the cross hairs, mass unemployment — I hastened to my calendar. It’s supposed to remind me of deadlines, but it apparently forgot to tell me that today was going to be the Apocalypse. I would have groomed better if I’d known that I was facing Armageddon this afternoon.
Bookworm on Sep 22 2011 | Filed under: Constitution, Government
I woke up this morning to find that my Leftist friends literally plastered Facebook with the above poster. (Since I grew up and still live in the Bay Area, I have lots of Leftist friends.) If the text on the image is unclear, this is what it says:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you.
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory. [Bookworm note: Warren must have made this statement before the Gibson Guitar factory raid, when marauding bands of government agents did precisely that to a factory that forgot to pay off the Democrats.]
Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
There are so many things wrong with Warren’s statement that I really don’t know where to begin. Tonestaple sent me an email that certainly gets the tone right (which led to my post’s title):
They [meaning the middle class Leftists who applaud the above statement] seem to think it is the ne plus ultra of common sense. I think it sounds like a gangster saying, “Nice factory you’ve got here – be a shame if anything happened to it.”
As my interlineation about Gibson Guitar shows, Tonestaple perfectly nailed the reality behind Warren’s cutesy, nursery school-esque, “God blessy” statement that everybody should share with everybody else.” The reality is that, in Obama world, if you don’t make nice with the government, the government is not going to make nice with you. (The cutesy tone, incidentally, is classic Warren. She was one of my law school profs, and I found her invariably sweet in word, unintelligible in substance, and vaguely vicious in action.)
Tone aside, there are two major problems with Warren’s factory parable. The first is the assumption that the factory owner contributed nothing to roads, education, police and fire forces, etc. In Warren’s world, the factory owner is a pure parasite. Warren conveniently forgets that the factory owner pays taxes (hugely more taxes than all those people whom she posits paying for roads, education, etc.); that the factory owner provides work for and pays the salary of those employees who then pay taxes; and that a successful factory owner makes a product that provides a benefit to people.
The second problem with Warren’s statement is actually a much more profound one than her “forgetting” that it’s the employers who provide the goods, services and salaries that make all those useful taxes possible. Warren’s statement turns the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and everything else the Founders stood for upside down.
In Warren’s world, a socialist world, the government owns everything. (And don’t you love it when well paid Harvard professors advocate socialism?) The Founders would have been horrified by Warren’s pronouncement. As their writings demonstrate, they believed that natural rights, the rights that ought to govern any righteous nation, mandate that ownership is vested in the individual. The government is merely a servant of the people. We, the people, pay its salary (taxes) so that it can provide services for us. That’s all.
You don’t have to go very far to understand that the Founders wouldn’t have agreed with Warren that the government allows people to own things, provided that they then make nice with the government. Our seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, spells out the master-servant relationship, and it is the people who are masters and the government the servant, not vice versa:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
These were the principles on which our nation was founded, and they provided the guiding paradigm for our Constitution. When my children ask me what the Constitution is, I have a very simple answer: It’s a contract under which the federal government promises to provide certain limited services for the American people and, further, promises not to abuse the power that the people hand the government to enable it to carry out those services. Elizabeth Warren clearly has no use for our nation’s contract.
UPDATE: JoshuaPundit comments too on Warren’s dangerous economic ignorance and class warfare.
If you like my writing, you can get more, lots more, by purchasing The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land, available for $2.99 at Amazon
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Palestinians, United Nations
Are you familiar with Achmed the Dead Terrorist? Jeff Dunham, a ventriloquist, came up with a skeleton-shaped dummy named Achmed. Achmed is a self-identified terrorist, with the catch-phrase “I kill you.” Here, see for yourself:
Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with Achmed, read this bit of wisdom from the Palestinian representative to the UN:
“The UN is the only alternative to violence,” Shaath said during a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.”It will be very costly to us and the Israelis. Our new heroes are Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King.”
Could Dunham come up with better comedy than that? “If you don’t give us what we want, ‘We kill you.’ And, by the way, we get the inspiration for our ‘do as we say or die’ negotiation tactic from those famous pacifists, Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King.”
Is there any sanity left in a world that thinks these violent, duplicitous people are ready for their own state?
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: African-Americans, Barack Obama, Leftist morality, Race
From 2007 through August 2011, daring to question or criticize Obama meant you were a racist. Now, though, liberals are suggesting that Obama is so toxic he should just walk away from the job. Holding them to their own standards, aren’t they being racist? I mean, really, really racist?
Please don’t scold me for pointing out Leftist hypocrisy. I couldn’t leave it unsaid, no matter how obvious it is.
Danny Lemieux on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Corruption, Crime and punishment, Democrats, Elections, Leftist morality, Liberal blogs, Republicans
The Obama administration is headed for a big showdown with judicial accountability next year. Let’s look at the dance list thus far:
1. The “Fast and Furious” gunwalker scandal, involving potential collusion from the top of our government to funnel automatic weapons and explosives to drug cartels operating within and actively undermining a friendly government. Democrats lied, people died.
2. Solyndra: potential crony capitalism whereby more-than half a billion dollars of public monies disappeared and remain unaccounted for within a private company, actively supported by Obama administration officials, that went bankrupt. Who benefited? Where did that money go?
3. Lightsquared: a privately held company in which the President of the United States was a shareholder, that potentially benefited from tainted government testimony to implement a technology that may have put our defense systems at great risk.
Something tells me there will be other scandals to surface as well.
Put it all together and the Obama Administration may find itself in a maelstrom next year… just before election time.
As even major media outlets are acknowledging, this reeks of crony capitalism and the “Chicago Way”. Unfortunately, I fear that the details will go over the heads of most Americans, many of whom would prefer to avoid the facts altogether and worry about their personal economic lives.
Here’s my dilemma: if real crimes were committed, there has to be accountability. If not, crony capitalism and 3rd world corruption will become the new norm and, as Bookworm pointed out, we will inevitably evolve into a fascist state. However, to have accountability, we would need impeachment hearings to get out the truth.
The atmospherics for this would be terrible.
I suspect that most Americans are still emotionally and mentally exhausted from the Clinton impeachment hearings. Now, in the midst of a depression (let’s not kid ourselves otherwise) and a world spiraling into a new round of economic disasters and global conflicts, the American electorate would again be subjected to the divisive, gut-wrenching politics of impeachment hearings involving America’s first black president and attorney general.
Whether or not the Obama administration skates or we engage in impeachment hearings, I see either scenario as lose-lose-lose: for the Democrats, for the Republicans and for the country. We would end up at each others throats and it could tear our country apart.
Does anyone else see it differently? If so, please enlighten me, because I find this prospect to be so very depressing…either way.
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
Radio host Lars Larson teamed with Kurt Van Meter, a country western singer/songwriter (and police officer), and managed to make an upbeat song cataloging all of the scapegoats Obama has lined up to take his falls. I think it has chart potential.
Hat top: Hot Air
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Rick Perry
What do you think of it?
I find the over-the-top music on the “Perry is wonderful” part a bit distracting but otherwise agree with those who think it’s an effective ad.
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Capitalism, Communism, Liberal Fascism
My mother, who gets a lot of her news from the MSM, is nevertheless slowly becoming aware of the Solyndra scandal — not just the fact that a big solar panel company went bankrupt, but that it went bankrupt at great cost to her, because the Obama administration had bet the farm (or should I say, the taxpayer’s farm) on Solyndra. “That’s not what government is supposed to do,” she said.
“Au contraire, Mama,” I replied. “This is precisely what Obama-style Leftist government is supposed to do.”
I went further than that. The Obama approach to business is precisely like the Nazi approach to business. And before anyone gets all hot and sweaty here, and despite Obama’s disgraceful attitude to Israel, I am not likening Obama to Hitler or trying to say that the Progressives are Nazis. I am making, instead, a very specific point about American-style socialism, which is very different from Soviet, or North Korean, or Cuban style socialism.
When people think of socialism, they think in terms of government doing away with private industry entirely in favor of total nationalization. That’s why, when you remind people that the fascists were socialists (i.e., Leftists), they’ll always deny it. “That can’t be true. Hitler didn’t take over private business.”
While it’s true that Hitler left ostensible corporate ownership in private hands, the practical reality was that the Nazis made the big decisions. Baron von This and That and Herr So and So got to call the corporation their own, and got all the glamor that went with being rich industrialists, but the practical reality was that they looked to the Reichstag for direction and, because the Nazi Party conferred significant economic benefits on them, they supported it in word and deed. One could say that German businesses, although nominally private, were in fact subsidiaries of the Nazi government.
That fascist approach, which sees businesses retain their status as “private,” even while being completely answerable to the government, is the Obama model. He doesn’t want to nationalize companies, he just wants to direct them. American businesses, in his mind, should be subsidiaries of the Obama White House. That’s why Obama happily took over GM, and that’s why he and his Chicago cronies saw no problem with using taxpayer money to prop up an already failing solar company.
This same attitude permeates ObamaCare. We conservatives sometimes forget that the hardcore Left hates the individual mandate as much as we on the conservative side do. We hate it because it decreases individual freedom. The Left hates it because the insurance companies will continue to thrive and, indeed, can profit mightily. The Left cannot understand how their man in the White House could betray them that way. They forget that Obama, although a socialist, is not a Communist. He is an economic fascist, and merely wants to manage American business, which will keep a steady stream of money flowing from those same businesses right back to him.
In theory, it’s a lovely solution for both the government and the businesses. In practice, as Solyndra shows, Obama is a disastrously bad business manager. It’s also worth remembering, as the Germans learned to their great cost, that while power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s one thing for business to have a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” relationship with government. That’s the nature of power. It’s another thing entirely when a government simply co-opts a nation’s business.
Bookworm on Sep 21 2011 | Filed under: Anti-Semitism, Arabs, Israel, Palestinians
Bill Whittle narrates this clear summation of 20th and 21st century relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. It does not reflect well on the Arabs:
Bookworm on Sep 20 2011 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Corruption
I haven’t been following Operation Fast and Furious as much as I should have. I have no excuse. Bob Owens (aka Confederate Yankee) has been spelling it out with care and diligence. I’m not going to rehash things here, but Doug Ross has dropped in a tidbit that really, really got my attention: it seems as if at least one ATF agent was (jokingly?) toying with the idea of investigating Sen. Grassley in order to block the latter’s investigations into F&F.
The Obama administration will go down in history as an extraordinarily corrupt administration. What will distinguish it from other corrupt administrations (Andrew Johnson, Harding, Nixon, etc.) is that it will be the only administration that saw corruption, not for personal enrichment, but for American destruction. That’s an entirely new animal, and one I hope I never see again.
Bookworm on Sep 20 2011 | Filed under: Uplifting stories
The happy video for today:
Hat tip: Hot Air
(P.S. Remind me, please, how bad we Judeo-Christian westerners are with our racist modern medicine and charitable acts. When I see videos such as this one, I tend to forget all the lessons of my two minutes of anti-Western hate.)
Bookworm on Sep 20 2011 | Filed under: America, Barack Obama
I kept reading about Obama’s Rose Garden speech, but it wasn’t until this morning that I actually sat down and read the speech. Aside from the obvious factual and ideological problems (not to mention how pedantic and vulgar it is in its expressions and ideas), what jumps out at me about the speech is the way in which this man reveals his alienation from America. The guy may have been born here but, when it comes to understanding the American social and economic model, it’s clear that he was raised in mid-19th century Europe.
A little background: Mid-19th Century Europe was the setting against which Marx and Engels came up with the idea of modern socialism. It wasn’t the first attempt at upending the existing power structure (for example, a little thing called the French Revolution had preceded it), but it was the most sustained intellectual statement about socialism, and therefore the most powerful, and the one with the most lasting consequences.
I won’t rehash socialism here, but I will say one thing about it: it’s premised upon a complete lack of social mobility. The Marxist theory is that workers of the world need to unite and overthrow the existing power structure because, absent that unity, they will never achieve either economic, political or social power. Sure, an exceptionally talented person in France or Germany or England might squeak by, but on the whole, the class system is too rigid ever to free the poor. In a class world, say the socialists, there is no way up and there is no way out.
Even back then, when Marx and Engels were disseminating their poisonous ideology, America was different. Yes, we do have a class system, although it’s one defined by economic status (poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and rich), not by birth. More than that, it’s fluid and always has been. From the very earliest days, if you weren’t making it on the East Coast, you could head out West. And if you weren’t making it as a printer, you could become a farmer (or vice versa). For many young men, the military was a way up, as it still is today for men and women alike.
Our presidents, men such Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, demonstrated that you didn’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to ascend to the highest offices in the land. Likewise, the immigrants who crowded into New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries lived to see their children move out to the suburbs and partake of the good life.
While it is certainly true that their have been poor people and immigrants who never made it in America, and whose children didn’t make it either, “making it” — that is, leaving poverty behind and becoming middle class or even rich — has always been a real possibility in America, not just a fairy tale. To Obama, though, whose Leftist upbringing has alienated him from American values and reality, the possibility of “making it” without a Big Government fairy godmother is inconceivable.
In Obama’s speech, his first few paragraphs are the usual populist tripe. I’m ignoring that here, because it’s embarrassing to read that generic, uninspiring, obvious stuff, and we all know that he’s lying when he says he has a bill to pass; when he says that Congress, which has received nothing from him, is dragging its feet; when he claims that his goal is to shrink inefficient government; and when he says that government needs to pay its bills. I’ll also ignore the sleazy demagogic attacks against Boehner and the Republicans, something no decent President should do.
Instead, I’m honing in on a few paragraphs that explain a great deal about Obama’s mindset if you keep in mind the distinction between European rigidity (a rigidity that still exists in Europe) and American economic fluidity:
It was an approach that said we need to go through the budget line-by-line looking for waste, without shortchanging education and basic scientific research and road construction, because those things are essential to our future. And it was an approach that said we shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class; that for us to solve this problem, everybody, including the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations, have to pay their fair share.
Yes, the above is classic “class warfare” language: the poor and the middle class are fighting for a slice of the pay that the “wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations” are stealing. But the above dichotomy fails to consider that today’s poor kid can be tomorrow’s wealthiest American. It also ignores the fact that, unlike traditional European wealth, which was family based, ownership in America’s corporations can be bought and sold by ordinary people. My IRA and my mutual fund savings make me a member of dozens of American’s biggest corporations. If they get screwed, so do I. Obama’s statement is correct only if one moves to Europe, circa 1848.
The heart of Obama’s view of America is in this paragraph (emphasis mine):
So, today, I’m laying out a set of specific proposals to finish what we started this summer — proposals that live up to the principles I’ve talked about from the beginning. It’s a plan that reduces our debt by more than $4 trillion, and achieves these savings in a way that is fair — by asking everybody to do their part so that no one has to bear too much of the burden on their own.
Ignore for a moment that the rich and the corporations (or, as I call them, the employers and wealth creators) pay 40% of America’s taxes, while the bottom 50% of Americans (economically at the bottom, I mean) pay no taxes, something that one would think more than meets Obama’s requirement that “everybody . . . do their part.” What’s more interesting to me is, again, the assumption that America’s socioeconomic status is immutable. Obama has taken Jesus’ statement that “The poor you will always have with you,” and transmuted it into “You will always be poor.” We (Big Government) need to rescue you from the rich because you will never be able to take advantage of opportunities to rise above your poverty. Again, Europe, circa 1848.
The following are more examples of the same rigidity:
And that’s why this plan eliminates tax loopholes that primarily go to the wealthiest taxpayers and biggest corporations –- tax breaks that small businesses and middle-class families don’t get. And if tax reform doesn’t get done, this plan asks the wealthiest Americans to go back to paying the same rates that they paid during the 1990s, before the Bush tax cuts.
I promise it’s not because anybody looks forward to the prospects of raising taxes or paying more taxes. I don’t. In fact, I’ve cut taxes for the middle class and for small businesses, and through the American Jobs Act, we’d cut taxes again to promote hiring and put more money into the pockets of people. But we can’t afford these special lower rates for the wealthy -– rates, by the way, that were meant to be temporary. Back when these first — these tax cuts, back in 2001, 2003, were being talked about, they were talked about temporary measures. We can’t afford them when we’re running these big deficits.
I talk over and over again about the Regressiveness of the so-called Progressives. Their economic world view is Europe in the mid-19th century, their abortion view is America in the mid-2oth century, their race view is America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Obama is a product of the Left, and the Left is fundamentally un-American in that it refuses to acknowledge what America is: a country in which anyone has the opportunity to break free of poverty and race.
Bookworm on Sep 20 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
After reading this headline, which reports on a very real tragedy, the only reaction I had was “Duh! You think?” Getting murdered by your husband is kind of a giveaway that things aren’t right at home:
Danny Lemieux on Sep 20 2011 | Filed under: Sex, Uncategorized
L’affaire DSK is all the rage in France.
On my recent visit to France, you might say I was somewhat surprised that nobody asked me about the U.S. economy, the Euro’s impending collapse or Obama. Rather, the first question out of their mouths was “what do Americans think about the DSK affair?”. They were, of course, referring to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the recently deposed head of the International Monetary Fund and French President wannabee. DSK had been arrested in New York in somewhat dubious circumstances involving alleged transgressions with a chamber maid (think “Paula Jones”).
The reason that the DSK affair was on peoples’ minds, I think, is because it jolted the French to an awareness that there was something very wrong in their society’s treatment of women in the workplace and elsewhere. It’s about time.
During my visit, I spoke with a woman that had enjoyed a fabulous career in finance and who, as a university student, had been taught by DSK. “He was truly brilliant,” she said, “But…”. Another woman, a retired Air France flight attendent, described how she and her colleagues would beg and bribe their cabin mates in order to be reassigned out of First Class whenever certain French politicians were traveling. But then, on the flip side, I heard a few men talk about how such things should be expected of powerful men, you know, “droit du seigneur” and all. These men were the exceptions, not the rule.
But then, I listened to one man I know, an elderly, world-renown attorney who easily straddles both sides of the Atlantic, tell me how his law firm hires only women attorneys today. “We interview both men and women, but inevitably the women prove to be the better attorneys”. He got it. He was profoundly embarrassed and angry about the DSK affair. In his view, the grandstanding New York City prosecutor did a complete hack job on the case and DSK deserved to be completely discredited and set-up for a civil suit “even if his guilt can’t be proven in court” (for the record, I completely disagree with this premise on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”).
I can’t say anything about DSK’s innocence or guilt. What I do know is that France is having a major conversation with itself on the proper treatment of women and that this is a good thing. The conversation is moving them in the right direction.
I bring this up this narrative up with regard to the reports of misogyny emanating from our White House. I don’t know if they are true or not, but I suspect this isn’t the last we’ve heard of them. Our MSM press will cover it up, no doubt, just as they did with JFK and LBJ, but eventually the truth will out. We lost a lot of ground during the Clinton Administration (Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broderick, etc.) and I would hate to think that workplace misogyny will again become the new norm.
Perhaps we, too, need a national conversation.
Bookworm on Sep 19 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
One of my daily reads is Keith Koffler’s White House Dossier. His posts now have a new feature: you can report each and every one to AttackWatch.com. How cool is that?
Bookworm on Sep 19 2011 | Filed under: Uncategorized
I met someone recently who is working to “save” an African tribe that has been determined to have the oldest genes in the world. That is, genetically, they are closest to our common, prehistoric ancestors than any other people in the world. I put “save” in quotations because I’m a little confused about the foundation’s goals. I may have things all wrong here so, if you have better information, tell me, and if I get more accurate information in future, I’ll tell you.
The deal, as I understand it, is that this someone set up a foundation to preserve this tribe’s traditional way of life. The tribe lives pretty much as it did in prehistoric times: it’s nomadic, hunting food on a daily basis, birthing babies in trees (away from predators), and sleeping on the ground.
There are currently two big problems for tribal cohesion. (Again, this is what I came away understanding from my conversation. I am open to corrections.) One threat is that others are encroaching on the tribal range, which has a severe impact on the tribe’s hunting. The other is that the tribes people are leaving. It was when I heard this last point that I said, very nicely, “Well, I can understand that. I wouldn’t like sleeping on the ground or having babies in trees either. I bet some of them are thinking, ‘Yeah, I have really old genes, but I’d rather have a Jacuzzi.’” In other words, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that people might prefer comfort and plenty to historical authenticity.
And this is really the core point to this post: A lot of people in America spend an inordinate amount of time and money keeping indigenous people “down on the farm,” so to speak. But are we really doing them a favor ensuring that they get to enjoy the same marginal subsistence life they’ve had for centuries (or more), rather than giving them a passport to the modern world? Do they really deserve to be forced to be living archeological museum pieces to protect them from the poison of Western civilization?
Again, I may be framing this question wrong, because I’m unclear on the facts, but I think it’s a broader question than this one tribe. It seems to me that there are many instances of Americans feeling that the best that they can do for lost tribes is to keep them locked in the past. It’s certainly true that modern urban living can be terribly destructive for these people, but I have my doubts about the benefits of stone age living for them either.
Bookworm on Sep 19 2011 | Filed under: Open Threads
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Mike Devx on Perry vs. Romney open thread *UPDATED*
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