Bookworm Room's Podcast

The starting point for any podcast today has to be Ukraine-gate, but I also throw in the physical dangers to our children because of college insanity and Mattel's new gender neutral dolls.

For more details, check out the accompanying post at Bookworm Room.

A lively Bookworm Beat covering gun control and suicides, Marianne Williamson (the Proggie Id), Justice Kavanaugh, free speech on campus and much more.

To read this instead of listen, please go here.

Socialized medicine is bad and the "moderate" plan to have a public/private hybrid healthcare system only draws out the agony on the road to single payer.

In Scott Adams' Friday podcast, he noted that, while he's aware of many attacks on Bernie's and Warren's "Medicare for All" plan (aka socialized medicine in an already debt-burdened society), he hasn't heard challenges to a slightly different plan coming from others, most notably Biden and Buttigieg. This alternative Democrat healthcare plan promises "free Medicare for everyone who wants it," while allowing those who prefer private insurance to opt-out and buy their own insurance.

To Adams, this second plan sounded kind of like the free market, with insurers competing with the government for customers. If the government could squeeze a low price out of drug manufacturers, Adams posited, wouldn't that mean insurance companies could do so too? He hastened to add that he was just thinking out loud, rather than advocating for this "Medicare for All Lite."

I'm glad Adams was just advocating and not thinking. When you start thinking about it, you realize that this is a recipe for worse care than we have now, plus increasing health care inequality for the American people.

Before going further, I should begin with my two strong biases against socialized medicine, because these biases inform my belief that even a hybrid system is a bad system: My first bias is that I don't believe medical care is a right. I think it's a wonderful thing. I'm tremendously grateful I live in modern times because I didn't die from a massive cyst in my 20s or during childbirth. I'm also not consigned to a wheelchair or in perpetual pain from joint problems, nor am I rendered dysfunctional by chronic migraine syndrome, nor am I legally blind. Modern medicine has been very good to me.

Just because it's good, though, doesn't make it a right. Instead, the blessings of modern medicine are a product of the free market system. In America, the medical field has been given room to grow in extraordinary ways, both in terms of medical and scientific breakthroughs (which overlap, but aren't always the same) and in terms of ease-of-access. That's why those who say we have lousy medical care in America are talking through their hats.

On the subject of the quality of care in America, as Scott Atlas wrote in an article that should be required reading in every American high school and college, America has the best medical outcomes in the world. To conclude the opposite, you have to game the statistics in one of two ways. The first is to give a high value to factors other than a good medical outcome. This means arguing that the best medical care means seeing a doctor for free, even if it's after an interminable wait and even if you die unnecessarily, are euthanized, live in constant pain, or otherwise never get any meaningful treatment. The second is to lie about the economic cost, as Elizabeth Warren did with her faulty, shoddy study that grossly overestimated medical bankruptcies.

But back to the point about healthcare being "a right." Traditionally, in America, rights are freedoms inherent in all people and have nothing to do with government. Rights aren't given by government; they need to be protected from government.

The only way to protect an inherent right is to amend the Constitution to state explicitly that "X" is a right inherent in all people, separate from government. Progressives talking about "rights" should therefore agitate for a 28th Amendment saying, simply, "Americans have a right to healthcare."

The problem is that this amendment wouldn't achieve Progressive goals. Enshrining the "right" to medical care in the Constitution means only that state and federal governments cannot prevent Americans from seeking healthcare. The Amendment, if it existed, could not impose on the taxpayer the obligation to pay for everyone else's healthcare in a government-run system.

To read the whole thing, please go here.

If listening to Trump irks you, stop listening and start focusing on his accomplishments. Then do the same for the Dem candidates. Then vote for Trump.

When I'm bored, I watch video compilations showing how to do things better. Each video has 20-30 clips showing clever tricks for doing anything better (cleaning, packing, cooking, etc.). The videos are "show and tell," without narration, but with a music soundtrack. These soundtracks are always horrible.

This video, viewed over 270,000,000 times, shows both the useful information and the horrible music.

The bad music doesn't make me avoid the content. Instead, I mute the music.

There's a point to his seemingly irrelevant anecdote: When NeverTrumpers start wittering on about about Trump's latest bombastic tweet or speech, or another act of boastful puffery, I want to tell them to do as I do with my life-hacking videos: Turn off the sound and just focus on the content -- the content, in this case, being his achievements in office.

It occurred to me that this would be an interesting test to apply as well to the top Democrat candidates, each of whom functions at three different levels: (1) Promises to the base; (2) personal style; and (3) actual accomplishments.

To learn more, go to Bookworm Room -- or listen to this podcast.

I'm not normally focused on or inspired by the thought of chicken sex, but a video out of Spain about roosters raping hens changed all that.

A friend and I play a game. He sends me headlines and asks me to guess whether they're real headlines about actual events or satirical headlines from sites such as the Babylon Bee. Showing both how crazy the Left has become and just how darn good the Babylon Bee is, I'm wrong at least half the time.

This post/podcast is about the most recent headline my friend showed me: "Vegan activists separate chickens from cockerels on Spanish farm 'so the hens aren't raped' because they do not give 'consent' in video released by 'anti-specist [sic], transfeminist' group."

"Definitely Babylon Bee," I said.

"Nope," he replied. "It's from the Daily Mail. It's real."

According to the Daily Mail, a Catalanian Spanish-language vegan group called Almas Veganas (translated as Vegan Souls) released the video. But I do the group an injustice. It's not just about veganism. Instead, its members are also "anti-speciesist" and "transfeminist."

Read the rest (and watch the video) here.

The American college has lost its way. Saving it requires removing all taxpayer funds and refocusing the mission on high-level, job-based skills.

Several people have emailed me the link to Victor Davis Hanson's latest article at American Greatness, entitled From Icon to Just a Con. It's about the downfall of America's colleges and universities.

My friends have sent the link to me because, if they've followed my blog over the last 15 years, they know that it's peppered with my disdain, disrespect, dislike, and sometimes downright hatred for education in America, from elementary school to post-graduate degrees.

When my kids were younger, after I transferred them from a Montessori school to public school, my attacks were aimed at a few specific issues. The first was that their teachers were, with almost no exceptions, young, pretty, good-natured . . . and totally moronic women, none of whom knew nothing outside of their teaching manuals.

(To read more of this content, and to find videos and hyperlinks, go here.)

Help me develop a polite, persuasive argument to challenge a young friend of mine who has bought into the media narrative about right-wing extremism.

I have a young friend — my children's age — who is an extremely bright, thoughtful, and (so he believes) informed young man who wants to pursue a graduate degree in politics and terrorism. His biggest concern is "right-wing extremism in America."

When I first heard this, my initial impulse was to say, "That's just wrong. It's a stupid Leftist lie. You're being brainwashed. If you want to make a difference in the world, tackle left-wing extremism."

Fortunately, I've finally figured out that insulting people is not the way to get them to agree with you. There are better persuasion techniques. Because I respect my young friend's intelligence, I want to take some time to assemble an argument that will present data in a way that challenges his beliefs without insulting his intelligence. This post represents the first draft of that email.

Maybe it's my legal training, but I believe that one of the best ways to challenge an argument is to start by identifying bias, both my own and the bias of the person(s) advocating the opposite view. I've been open with my friend about my bias. My problem is to convince him that the media from which he gets his ideas about right-wing extremism is biased too. Very biased.

The other day on his podcast, Andrew Klavan played two videos, one of the media celebrating Trump's anticipated downfall and the other celebrating Obama's allegedly scandal-free presidency. In both videos, raw partisanship is on display. The video below is Andrew Klavan's show, which I've queued up to those back-to-back videos, starting at 19:15:

[To read the rest, rather than listening to the podcast, please go here.]

Though slavery was awful, for today's American blacks what would have been even worse was an absence of the slavery that brought them to these shores.

My co-blogger, Wolf Howling, has already written two excellent posts savaging the shoddy scholarship and evil motives behind the New York Times' 1619 Project. He's right, of course, but that hasn't stopped the project from benefiting from the fact that the Times, while it no longer even makes a pretense of reporting news (instead it works as a Democrat propaganda arm), still has a disproportionate reach into American minds. For example, at Twitter, Stu Cvrk does a quick rundown of the Times' decades'-long control over American newsrooms, a power it still holds today -- as can be seen from the fact that USA Today has already published its own echo of the 1619 project.

Even the meanest intellect can understand the message that the Times' and its fellow travelers are pushing: Americans cannot hide behind the Constitution to claim that they are a society founded on a great and colorblind idea (albeit one that was imperfectly implemented for a long time). Instead, from the moment Europeans set foot on America's shores, they brought with them an evil so great that America is irredeemably corrupt. And of course, the proggies know the only way to purge that corruption: America must be destroyed and rebuilt in a socialist mold. ***

Read the full companion post, complete with all hyperlinks, here.

In this podcast, I'll take you on a very quick journey through Stone Age and Roman History to remind you that a pre-modern, pre-Judeo-Christian, pre-Bill of Rights world was a terribly violent place. One of the horrors of the modern era is that the Leftists, in their push for power, are trying to return us to that violent tribal worldview.

If you want to see the full written version of this podcast, you can find it here.

Back in the day, the mainstream media would probably have castigated Israel for refusing to admit Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Nowadays, though, thanks to the internet -- and despite Leftist control over search engines and social media -- ordinary people have a much louder voice than before and can still counter the media's very bad ideas.

Also, the New York Times is arguing that slavery made America and that slavery is interwoven, in the worst way, in America's soul. This is just plain wrong.

If you don't have the patience to listen to this podcast, the companion post to this podcast develops the above ideas at greater length here.