How Does The Left Lie? Let Me Count The Ways.

Chelsea Handler says she would not bother interviewing Melania Trump because "She can barely speak English!"  Let's unpack this dog turd, shall we?

First, Melania speaks five languages: her native Slovene, plus French, Italian, German, and...English.  Now, this may sound extravagant to Americans who struggle (not always successfully) with one language, but I know as a matter fact this kind of linguistic virtuosity is very common in Europe, especially among the small nations of central and eastern Europe.

For example, my father spoke five Languages:  his native Romanian, plus French, Italian, German, and English.  Yiddish might be a sixth language, but he did not speak it well.  Ok, my father was a very well educated man, so consider my mother, a brilliant woman but with only seven formal grades of education.  She spoke:  her native Yiddish, plus Romanian, French, and English.  Four languages.

My parents were not unique.  In Amsterdam I watched the cafe manager speak English, German, and French to his customers, as required, and he was bantering extensively, not just settling the bill.  As I was paying my bill and expressing my admiration, he shrugged his shoulders and nonchalantly explained that "nobody comes to Holland speaking Dutch".

At a restaurant that straddled the Franco-Belgian border, I watched a young waitress do exactly the same thing, as she moved from table to table.  I did not have a chance to express my admiration to her, but I already knew the explanation.

Pretty much everybody in all of Europe (with the possible exception of the French, who are as linguistically chauvinistic as the English), speaks one or three of the major world languages:  English, French, and German, and very commonly two or three of the minor languages.  For example, I encountered Hungarian speakers in Romania and Romanian speakers in Jugoslavia.  In Paris, I even encountered Romanian speaking Greeks (sic!).  Thessaloniki, you see.  Lithuanians speak Polish, Scandinavians speak German and English, and so on.

I could go on just from my own experience, but on the basic proposition it would be strange if Melania did not speak several languages with credible fluency, especially the world's Lingua Franca, English, and especially since she has been living in the U.S. at least since 2001.

So the basic conclusion is inescapable:  Chelsea Handler is malicious and stupid.  What makes Chelsea Handler's stupid assertion interesting to me is that I have seen this sort of thing before.

In the long and bitter debate about Israel and her Muslim neighbors, people who tend to be sympathetic to the Arabs despise Bernard Lewis. Now, this is an odd thing, that should be explored another time.  Until his retirement a few years ago, Bernard Lewis was the pre-eminent scholar of Islam and the Near East.  For his work, he had full mastery of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, classical Turkish, and he was a fluent speaker of modern Turkish.  Lewis had more than a nodding acquaintance with Aramaic.  He is a gifted man.  (Wikipedia says he is still alive at age 100.  May he live to 120.)

It came to pass that I was in debate with a man of the Left (let's call him Thomas), a scholar poseur, sympathetic to the Arab cause.  In discussing some question of fact, I referred to Bernard Lewis.  Thomas dismissed Lewis with a wave of the hand, saying his opinions are worthless in such matters since he doesn't even speak Arabic.

Friends, you have to think about this for a moment.  Here is what could not have happened:  Thomas never investigated the life of Bernard Lewis or came to know him, or his work, in any way.  Either someone simply told Thomas that Lewis did not speak Arabic, and we now have an isnad of lies, or Thomas simply made up his assertion.

If Thomas had simply made up his false assertion, then he is an asshole.  This is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty.  If Thomas accepted this false fact on somebody else's authority, then Thomas is a very poor scholar, indeed.  Not only was he accepting an outrageous and incredible assertion about a recognized scholar without checking sources, he was not even aware that it is not possible to do any scholarship on the "Near East" without the mastery of at least three difficult languages:  Persian, Arabic, and Turkish.  With considerable justification, some would include Hebrew and Aramaic in that list.  So, yeah, Near Eastern scholarship is really difficult, which is why not many people do it (well).

The point is that somebody, Thomas or someone else, made up the slander that Bernard Lewis does not know Arabic. Why on earth would anyone make up such a thing?  To discredit Lewis, of course!

For the Left, any lie will do to discredit the opposition.  I saw this first hand with Bernard Lewis, and we are seeing it first hand with Melania Trump and the contemptible Chelsea Handler.

BTW, Melania and I have something in common.  She once lived in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana, on her way to becoming First Lady of the United States.  I once at a plate of spaghetti Bolognese there.

I Feel Your Pain, Really I Do

Dear Socialist Friends (of whom I have a few),

I know you feel wounded by the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency of The United States, and I am sorry for you loss.  I want to tell you that I feel your pain.  Probably, I feel your pain more acutely than you felt mine on the election, and re-election, of the anti-Semitic and endlessly destructive Barack Obama.  But, never mind that, now.

I write to confess what you already sense:  that as much as I feel your pain, I cannot take it very seriously.  You will get over it.  I know this because, however real the pain seems to you right now, the cause is an illusion.  You are suffering from a political form of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.  In other words, Hillary Clinton wanted power so she and her friends abused you to get attention for themselves.

You see, controlling borders is what every normal nation does.  There is no war on women.  There is a war on Black men, but it is not being waged by the police departments of our metropolises and certainly not by Donald Trump.  And so on down the list of Democratic talking points.

During most of my adult life I have tried to understand the socialist mentality.  Gently and with respect, I poke and I prod, but most socialists are uncomfortable having their cherished misconceptions questioned, let alone challenged, so they tend not to be forthcoming.  When I do get a little further in the discussion, I usually find "no there, there."  Let me give you an example.

I have a good friend, let's call him Jack, who is maximally risk averse.  He pays a premium for rent on a shitty little Brooklyn apartment because it is rent stabilized.  He understands perfectly well he could get more apartment for less money, but he would have to give up rent stabilization.  For Jack, rent stabilization is insurance against the market uncertainty he cannot tolerate, and the extra rent is the premium he is willing to pay for that insurance.

I, for one, never saw such a thing coming.  Most people (I think) think of rent control as a way of keeping rents down.  It never occurred to me that someone would pay more to have rent control, which has become a good in itself.  But, never mind that, now.

Jack also tends to be politically disinterested, so it came as quite some surprise when he vehemently expressed a deep antipathy to Donald Trump.  Jack was so agitated by Trump that he was reluctant to even discuss the subject, at first.  Eventually, his concern came out.

All that Jack knows of Trump is that Trump wants to tear down regulations.  Jack concluded that Trump wants to eliminate rent control in NYC, so he felt personally threatened.  Hence the profound animus.  Jack has no concept of the federal structure of American government.  He was flatly unaware that some things are the business of the federal government and many things are not.  I tried to explain to Jack that the President of The Republic has no authority over NYC rent regulations, which are a matter of state law.  And, more than likely, the POTUS has much bigger fish to fry than Jack's rent stabilized apartment.

Jack was glad to hear it, but remains unconvinced.

What am I to think?   On the one hand, Jack is a friend and his pain is very real.  On the other hand, the pain arises out of a profound ignorance of American government.  Jack is terrified by an eventuality that will never happen.  Oh, NYC rent control may well be repealed someday (when Hell freezes over), but not by Donald Trump.  And yet, it is Donald Trump that Jack hates.

So yeah, I definitely feel poor Jack's pain.  But I can't take it seriously.  And so it is with most of my socialist friends and their political night terrors.

Globalize This!

At first, you might think this is getting tiresome.  The NY Times, in the voice of Charles M. Blow, calling our president-elect a "Troglodytic lout" (now can I call Hillary Clinton a lying cunt?).  But wait!  There be brilliance, here.

In Part The First, Blow writes,

"While Russian hacks “were not involved in vote tallying,” the publishing of pilfered emails and promulgation of fake news altered the zeitgeist, poisoned the political environment and shifted public opinion, all of which redounded to Trump’s benefit."

In Part The Second, Blow characterizes Russia's work (assuming it was Russia that really did this) thusly,

"...this is no different than physically breaking into an American office and carting off boxes of written letters — and funneled that stolen material to a willing conspirator, Julian Assange."

And I think, we've seen this before.

In the notorious Pentagon Papers case, breaking American law Daniel Ellsberg (paraphrasing Blow)

"physically broke into an American office and carted off boxes of written documents---and funneled that stolen material to a willing conspirator, the NY Times."  

Very much to the effect of (paraphrasing Blow)

"poisoning the political environment and shifting public opinion"

And it hits me, the NY Times and their media friends have lost its minds over the DNC and HRC hacks because they feel History leaving them behind.

Once upon a time, The NY Times was the Great Arbiter of the political firmament.  The public hanged on every word of "the paper of record" and politicians quaked in their boots.  No more.  Today, foreigners are doing the political work that the American mainstream media does not want to do, and the NY Times and their mass media friends are fading into irrelevance.

It seems the NY Times is as angry with Globalization as the "Angry White Men" they love to sneer at.

Barack Brings a Knife to A Gunfight

The New York Times asks and answers the question,

"Why did it take the Obama administration more than 16 months to develop a response?
The short answer, suggested by the report the agencies released on Friday, is that the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict."

In other words, Barack brought a knife to a gun fight.

Like Donald Trump says, it gets tiresome being right all the time.  Five minutes into the first Barack speech I ever heard I knew that, if we were going to elect him, we would be electing a 19th century man for a 21st century job, and that it could not possibly end well.  Of course, I had in mind social and economic policies.  This was a guy, I thought, whose mental landscape is uncluttered by the monumental events of the 20th century.  He is still a socialist, despite everything.

What I did not appreciate at the time, though I should have, is that his 19th century mentality would ramify outside of social and economic policies and into Cyberia.  The first major instance of this was the sad case of the Obamacare website, which you must remember had a very difficult birth.

Yes of course, complicated websites are difficult to produce, so you have to meditate on this for a bit to fully appreciate the enormity of that experience.  We are not talking about some cash-strapped start-up, we are talking about the United States of America.  The USA is home to a deep bench of the best digital talent on the planet, and most of that talent is highly sympathetic to Barack.  Furthermore, major private companies have long experience in health insurance and in developing and maintaining online services.

With an essentially unlimited pot of money and a deep well of sympathy, Barack could have easily organized an enthusiastic working group of the best talent on earth to develop the Obamacare website.  It would have been a model of how to get things done.

Barack Obama did none of that, and you have to wonder why.  The only answer that comes to me is that Barack simply did not know better.  He is a 19th century man in a 21st century job.  Too bad for us.

If you suppose that Barack, and the people who surround him, simply do not know better, that they are 19th century people living, rather uncomfortably, in the 21st century, then the recent hackings, of the DNC computer and of Hillary's personal server, must come as no surprise.  These are the people who, when confronted with a phishing link, "Send Me Your Password," click on it.

Why did the DNC's technical support not respond to multiple warnings by the FBI?  Only because they did not know better.  What other answer could there possibly be???

And none of this is new.  The U.S., both government agencies and private companies, have been under intense cybernetic assault for years.  This is not about a slow response over 16 months, as the NYT suggests.

In other words, we have the answer to a question that the NY Times failed to ask.  This abject failure of Barack Obama to protect the most fundamental interest of the United States, the integrity of the electoral system:  was it malice or incompetence?  People like me tend to suspect the worst, i.e., I suspected malice.  It is now obvious that I was wrong.  That the DNC, itself, actually had no digital defenses clearly reveals that these people are incompetent.

I had violated "Hanlon's Razor":  Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.