Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian – Page 49

'Barack Obama is manufacturing conservatives at a clip unparalled in history'

This post is for Liz, a commenter who asked me today for an easy way to keep track of books I recommend, which I am providing by creating a new category and tag, “Books I recommend.”

Here’s how I think Liz came by her request:

Roger Simon published a post on January 1 about a book entitled The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, in which Roger pointed out how very much the worm had turned between the time the author wrote the book and now.

I commented:

Roger, I laughed out loud when I read these lines in your post:

I feel sorry for Tanenhaus, in a way. How could he have known (well, maybe he should have) when writing his book nine or ten months ago that Barack Obama would now be manufacturing conservatives at a clip unparalleled in history? Our President is a veritable conservative mass production factory.

I am one of the new conservatives Obama has created! My “Hell, no!” moment was the revelations about Rev. Wright and my “last straw” was the choice of Biden over Hillary for VP. Then I had to read up to be able to explain my choice to my liberal friends — stop laughing, yes, it WAS just like spitting into the wind — and poof! I saw the point of becoming a fiscal conservative.

But since reading was so fundamental in my transformation, and we are talking about books, the ones that I think provide the most insight into Leftism/liberalism are Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and the new book that applies Hoffer’s insights to our current era, Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate. Glazov is particularly insightful about the Left’s rage against capitalism and once you understand what he’s saying, then you’ve got a lever, a fulcrum and a place to stand: you can move the world.

The books that best explain Obama are therapist Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door and Sandy Hotchkiss’s Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism.

For the bonus reading list, to understand Michelle Obama and Rahm Emanuel, I suspect the best book is Randi Kreger’s Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder. An excellent introduction to Kreger’s work is Dr. Helen’s recent interview with her on Pajamas TV.

I want to thank you and the commenters for my first belly laughs of 2010!

Here are links to all the books mentioned in this post — Amazon pays me a small commission if you buy a book linked from this blog but you do not pay extra:

Bookworm explains how San Francisco became Potterville

OK, just to make sure, even though we are still in the It’s a Wonderful Life season, I want to remind my allusion-impaired gentle readers that if Jimmy Stewart’s character lived, because of his virtuous actions, his hometown of Bedford Falls would remain clean and wholesome. However, if he had never been born, then it would turn into corrupt Potterville, with a Main Street lined with bars and drunks and prostitutes. Sadly, this would have been a consequence of ruthless and unfettered capitalism, so that it represents the exact opposite of the results of fiscal conservatism and merit-based advancement, but whatever.

Bookworm explains in a recent post how San Francisco became Potterville due to Leftism and liberalism. I think she is spot on.

I appreciate that Bookworm took care in expressing her objections to the excesses of the gay community. These excesses, and the mindset behind them, illuminate the sense of mission I feel about getting the Pharaoh of liberalism to let my gay and lesbian people go and make their new home in Fiscal Conservative Land. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, due to discrimination and second-class citizenship, gays and lesbians actually are extremely resourceful and self-reliant about creating their own businesses and going into entrepreneurial professions. We belong in Fiscal Conservative Land, not the Nanny State.

Another thing I like about Bookworm’s post is her temporal panorama of San Francisco from the 1960’s — when my family lived in Walnut Creek and visited my father’s parents in Berkeley and we occasionally went to San Francisco — to the present. I’m also glad she fingered the Left’s animosity toward capitalism as one of the causes of San Francisco’s decline — but Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate, is a much better explanation of the Left as a totalitarian movement in love with other totalitarian movements and determined to destroy capitalism than the book she references, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, which flabbergasted me by having no indication whatever that Goldberg is aware of Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. Glazov is an intellectual heir of Eric Hoffer and brings Hoffer’s landmark work into our contemporary world, so his insights are considerably more apt than Goldberg’s.

Here is an excerpt from Bookworm’s post, “America’s Homegrown anarchic totalitarianism“:

The one thing that Jonah Goldberg’s book misses is the fact that the New Age, crystal-gazing American socialist utopia does not allow itself to control all people within its political borders. Instead, in the name of political correctness, American socialist cities have a two-tiered system: law-abiding citizens are on the receiving end of heavy-handed government control, while politically correct protected victim classes are removed from any controls whatsoever. The result is the worst of all possible worlds, with law abiding citizens beaten down both by their own government and by those whom the government allows to roam free. San Francisco provides a perfect example of this Western socialist dynamic.

San Francisco’s intense hostility to capitalism

Some of the contrasts between intense government control versus anarchy are very obvious in San Francisco. On the control side, the City’s mandates pry into every area of business and even personal life. At a macro level, the City is very, very hostile to business. It has its own minimum wage law (SF Admin. Code, Secs. 12P, 12R, & Appx. 68), which controls anyone doing business in or with the City of San Francisco. The City apparently feels it’s not a big enough burden on businesses to have the feds set wages too. The minimum wage laws are great for those who can get jobs; but lousy for those who discover that, as a result of the hostile environment, there are fewer businesses around to provide jobs.

Read the whole thing.

P.S.

I just found related snark from Little Miss Attila via Instapundit about Berkeley High School ending science labs because black kids never excelled there and therefore the labs should not exist if they only benefit white kids. I gather it hasn’t occurred to anyone that then they wouldn’t be there for the next George Washington Carver or Charles R. Drew, when he or she comes along, either. I’m starting to understand the general tone of peevishness toward liberalism in the conservative commentariat.

Movin' on up — Stacy McCain has classy new digs

Congratulations to my dear friend, Stacy McCain, on moving his blog, The Other McCain, from Blogger to TheOtherMcCain.com as a self-hosted WordPress blog. At last! My trackbacks will get through and FINALLY justice will be done on FMJRA days!

Oh, wait — I should be thinking about how nice this will be for Stacy and his co-blogger, Smitty. OK, here goes: the blog just looks better and is much easier to read, which will be very helpful with Stacy’s longer posts. Also, in 2009, Google, which owns Blogger, effectively killed the libertarian blog, Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, not long after a post critical of Obama. Google slapped it with an “Adults Only” rating. You can see how that would be a sword of Damocles over Rule 5 Sunday (the post explaining that is only on the old site right now). Now Stacy can blog without worrying about that kind of censorship.

Hubert P. Yockey says it's time for science to change its nomenclature to 'Darwin's Laws of Evolution' rather than 'Darwin's Theory of Evolution'

As my regular gentle readers know, my father is Hubert P. Yockey, the nuclear physicist whose scientific papers and books have been seminal in the field of applying information theory and coding theory to molecular biology, the origin of life and evolution. The driving intention of my father’s work in this field has been to rid the field of any proposals that have their foundation in faith, whether religious or secular, so that the only theories that prevail in science are the ones founded on the application of the tools of science: “counting and measuring,” as he quotes Socrates.

(BTW, it is stilted to refer to him as “Hubert P. Yockey,” but his name is a Google key phrase in this subject so I am going to go with sounding stilted so that people searching for his work online can find this post.)

Hubert P. Yockey’s work on the origin of life and evolution sends science and religion to their respective corners: scientists must discard speculations and theories that are proved to be based on faith AND they are wrong to use science to make pronouncements about religious beliefs that are beyond the tools of science. For example, Copernicus and Galileo were right, while the Catholic Church was wrong. Likewise, people of faith are wrong to try to mask their religions as science, that is, factual so that their dogmas must be accepted by all. Hubert P. Yockey includes the secular faith of dialectical materialism, which is the foundation for scientific theories of the origin of life, as one of the faiths that scientists must reject.

Hubert P. Yockey points out that Darwin himself in his book, The Origin of Species, noted that he was not addressing the origin of life because the origin of life is an axiom of biology just as the origin of matter is an axiom of physics and chemistry. Hubert P. Yockey’s most important scientific contribution has been to apply information theory and coding theory to show WHY the origin of life is an axiom of biology and that THAT is what should be taught about the origin of life.

And, this morning, when I was talking over my recent post about him, Hubert P. Yockey said it really IS time to change the scientific nomenclature from “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” to “Darwin’s Laws of Evolution.” He compared it to quantum theory — which is now also referred to as the laws of quantum mechanics. He also pointed out to me that lay people think that “speculation” and “theory” mean the same thing. They do not. In science, the word “theory” indicates the steps of how a phenomenon occurs. THEN scientists go to work to understand the mechanics of the theory. So, physicists went to work to discover WHY quantum theory was such an apt explanation of phenomena and discovered the LAWS of quantum mechanics.

So, Hubert P. Yockey points out, the discovery of DNA, the genetic code, the genome, the sequence hypothesis, information theory and coding theory, and the tools of gene sequencing have allowed scientists to elucidate WHY Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Origin of Species is such an apt explanation for the phenomena of biology and therefore now deserves to be called Darwin’s LAWS of Evolution and the Origin of Species.

Religious people have wrongly appropriated Hubert P. Yockey’s work to re-brand Creationism as Intelligent Design — see Yockey’s amicus brief for the 2005 Dover “Panda” trial. (I have over 20 years of private correspondence to back this assertion, plus my own conversations with my father, at least one of which I have on video, but I am barred by copyright law from publishing anything except my father’s letters.) The intention of these religious people is to appropriate the apparatus of the state — in this case, the educational system — to brand their religious dogma as science in order to force people to accept it. This is wrong in every possible way.

One of the most cunning arguments that religious people make to deceive people into believing that their religious dogma should be accepted in the scientific marketplace of ideas is that Darwin’s theory of evolution is “only a theory” — in order to capitalize on lay people’s incorrect belief that “theory” and “speculation” are synonyms in science — and that therefore their “theory” of Creationism/Intelligent Design is equivalent and should be taught in schools along with Darwin’s theory of evolution because it’s “Darwin’s theory,” not “Darwin’s LAW.”

No. No. No. No. NO!

“Science has sufficiently elucidated the mechanics of Darwin’s theory of evolution that now the scientific nomenclature should be changed to Darwin’s LAWS of evolution and the origin of species,” says Hubert P. Yockey.

Cite this post when you quote him on that.

Thank you to everyone who voted for me for Gay Patriot's Grande Conservative Blogress Diva

Congratulations to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs for her victory as Gay Patriot’s Grande Conservative Blogress Diva 2010! I am so glad I got to meet her last year at CPAC and tell her in person how much I admire her courage. Neoneocon was second and I am not familiar with her writing, but I will have to start giving her a look-see. And Michelle Malkin was third, although I consider her the real giant in the field of journalism and conservative blogging — with just the caution that this was a poll at a GAY conservative blog, and since I was the only one of the nine finalists who has a consistent track record of advocating both for fiscal conservatism AND homosexual equality, then even in that company, I do feel I belonged.

I am grateful to everyone who voted for me — including those who stopped by to check out this blog but preferred one of the other candidates. I am most grateful to my darlings at Hill Buzz (see link below) for posting several times to ask their readers to vote for me. The goal I wanted to achieve by winning was to gain more credibility for my work for homosexual equality and fiscal conservatism. I think I’ve achieved that goal. Thanks to the Hill Buzz boyz and their readers who voted for me, I made a very respectable showing considering that this time last year I didn’t even have a blog — I’ll celebrate this blog’s first birthday on January 12.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments at Hill Buzz on 12/30/09 in their post asking their readers to vote for me:

I just want you all to know how much I appreciate all of you — my dear HillBuzz boyz, the readers who are voting for me — even the ones who didn’t but dropped by to check out my blog. I am honored and grateful. Thank you.

For new readers: my blog is a mix of personal and opinion posts because I think conservatives, especially social conservatives, may be wary of someone who is openly lesbian and supports both fiscal conservatism AND equality for homosexuals, unless they can get to know her very well. So I do personal posts so conservatives can get to know me and feel secure that when I advocate something, I’m coming from a good place.

For 2010, my opinion post topics will include explanations of why the only way the terrorists can be defeated is by killing hate — and how to do it; how totalitarian movements work and how to defeat them; and why homosexual equality is for the highest good for everyone

Hill Buzz has done an excellent job of earning the respect and linkage of conservatives, and I do love their work — and dear Pattymelt’s — so I have a track record of linking them whenever I think they have something especially important to say to conservatives. I will keep that up in 2010, especially since they are so smart about campaigning and it’s an election year with the fate of America hanging in the balance. We’ve really got to pull together.

And in between all the above, I will continue to do my best to make my readers ROFLOL.

Thank you, my dears! Thank you,thank you, thank you!

And I also first noted the results of the contest at Hill Buzz in the comments for the same post:

Gay Patriot just closed the Grande Conservative Blogress Diva poll — the tallies were as follows:

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs: 3,140 (45%)

Neoneocon: 1,646 (24%)

Michelle Malkin: 836 (12%)

Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian: 500 (7%)

The Anchoress: 329 (5%) (Note: I greatly admire her blog-fu!)

Ann Althouse, who, as far as I know, has not repented of her vote for Obama:

149 (2%)

Tammy Bruce: 138 (2%)

Jennifer Rubin (Commentary Contentions): 115 (2%)

Fausta: 87 (1%)

I would never have gotten to fourth place in such worthy company without the loving and zealous support of my dear Hill Buzz boyz and the gentle readers of Hill Buzz. Thank you, my dears, with all my heart! We are going to work together and save America in 2010!

P.S.

When Gay Patriot announced this year’s poll, they said they would give awards to the top three blogress divas. How funny would it be if they suddenly cooked up a Miss Congeniality award for fourth place, which would be — come to think of it! — me. Not that I’m hinting that anyone ought to mosey over to their place and suggest it or anything ….

P.P.S.

How many of you just figured out the character in “Glee” I identify with the most is … wait for it … Rachel?

hillbuzz Says:

Surprisingly enough, we’re more Finn than Kurt.

Though Panda’s a whole lot more Mercedes than anything else.

Cynthia replied:

After I wrote the P.P.S. above, I imagined every single one of you looking at each other and then saying, “Ohhhhhh! THAT explains A LOT!”

Comice pears — the supreme pear is now in season

One of the flavors I’ve come to associate with Christmas is the heavenly sweetness of Comice pears. They are in season from August to March in the United States, but I’ve only seen them in the grocery stores in November and December. If you like pears, you will be in for a treat when you try the Comice pear for the first time.

Wikipedia reports that the Comice pear constitutes only one percent of U.S. pear production, so you might have to look in the pear section at your grocery store carefully for the distinctive squat shape of the Comice — its display is not likely to be as large as the other pear varieties. If you can’t find them in stores, just search online — they are available for delivery.

I let my Comice pears ripen in a bowl away from sunshine and check for ripeness by pressing the pear near the stem. If it gives a bit, it’s ripe. You don’t want to use them for cooking because they are so juicy they won’t hold up. The skin of Comice pears is somewhat grainy, so I prefer to peel them before I eat them. They really are the supreme fresh pear.

Evolution deniers SHOULD be run out of academia AND Hubert Yockey supports evolution

I just clicked a link in a Google Alert with my father’s named misspelled and it turns out someone has written a book claiming it is a terrible injustice that people who deny evolution are not being admitted to Ph.D. programs in biology because this cheats them of the credential they need to teach the various forms of re-branded religion that deny evolution as factual so they can use science to force people to believe their religion.

It is the mirror image of Climategate, where suddenly Right wingers believe in the science showing that global warming/climate change is a big, fat hoax being perpetrated to destroy capitalism globally and enrich Al Gore, et al., via green enterprises and investments, while it is Left wingers clinging to their religious faith that weather is not supposed to change and is not primarily controlled by sunspots and ocean tides. Even though it is.

Here’s the passage that inspired this post:

“Is this only a “Christian fundamentalist” issue? Hardly! To begin with, the ranks of Darwin doubters include not only non-Christians, but also non-theists such as David Berlinski, Michael Denton, Periannan Senapathy, Chandra Wickramasighe, Murray Eden, Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger, Herbert [sic] Yockey, Stanly Salthe, Christian Schwabe, Gerald Kerkut, Professor Lime-De-Faria, Pierre Grasse, Soren Lovtrop, David Stove, Fred Hoyle, John Davison, and others who are closeted for obvious reasons.”

I have edited my father’s work since the late 1980’s. My father, Hubert P. Yockey, considers Darwin’s theory of evolution to be one of the most well-established in science. The epitome of his life’s work is that he has demonstrated why the origin of life is an axiom of biology, just as the origin of matter is an axiom of physics and chemistry. The belief that scientists will be able to re-create the origin of life is based purely on faith, even if it is a secular one.

Similarly, Intelligent Design is re-branded Creationism and originated in a misunderstanding of my father’s work that has since morphed into a deliberate distortion. Hubert P. Yockey points out in his book Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life why Intelligent Design is wrong: the genome does the job that ID’ers claim require a Designer AND since there are no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to the present day, and we now have the ability to look back at the development of species using the genome, the objection to evolution that there are gaps in the fossil record is obsolete.

That was the year that was

Once upon a time, when I read newspapers, specifically, the Washington Post, I loved Dave Barry’s column, especially his annual review of the past year. My favorite joke from one of these is from 1997. Early in the piece Barry writes that foreign car manufacturers have agreed to level the playing field against American carmakers by giving all their future models really ugly names. Then, toward the end, he has Motor Trend magazine naming as its “Car of the Year, the Nissan Rat Vomit.”

Barry’s column reviewing 2009 is one of his best ever, and surprisingly, leans conservative. Here’s a sample, in keeping with the theme of the competitiveness of American car manufacturers:

General Motors, which has sold only one car in the past year — a Buick LaCrosse mistakenly purchased by an 87-year-old man who thought he was buying a power scooter — announces a new four-part business plan, consisting of (1) dealership closings; (2) factory shutdowns; (3) worker layoffs; and (4) traveling backward through time to 1955.

H/T Kathy Shaidle, Moe Lane and Instapundit.

A progressive's anti-Obama epic rant

Thanks to Instapundit for linking an anti-Obama epic rant by progressive political science professor David Michael Green — apparently, it smarts something fierce when the Kool-Aid wears off (boldfacing mine):

Like any good progressive, I’ve gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I’m fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

Amazingly, it appears that Prof. Green has looked into what the healthcare reform bills passed by the House and Senate actually would do, as opposed to believing what Obama/Pelosi/Reid claim they will do — I could be wrong, but I get the feeling he no likee:

But here’s a little riddle that any sixth-grader can easily figure out, although it seems to have eluded the brain trust at the White House: If [health] insurance companies are winning big-time [in the proposed healthcare reform bills], then who is doing the losing? Something tells me that if Democrats are dumb enough to pass their own legislation, voters will provide them the answer to that puzzle in November of 2010, and then again two years later. What could be stupider than saddling thirty-five million Americans with a new monthly bill that will probably represent the second or third biggest item in their budget, in exchange for crappy private sector health insurance that is unlikely to pay out when needed, and wastes a third of the dollars paid in premiums on bureaucracy and profits anyhow? Slapping big fines on them if they don’t pony up for the insurance, perhaps? Yep, that’s in there too.

This bill alone could mobilize legions of people to go to the polls and vote for whichever party didn’t do it, and I’m pretty sure the GOP won’t be shy about reminding Americans who that is. I mean, if Democrats were searching for legislation less likely to win them votes, why didn’t they just bring back slavery or the debtor’s prison? Why not come out for pedophilia? It would have been so much more efficient.

I’m going to leave the pedophilia remark alone since I’ve done my best to ignore the Kevin Jennings controversy. But I am delighted that progressives/liberals are finally getting a grip on what the actual healthcare reform legislation would do to them individually and collectively, rather than relying on their politicians and news media to tell them. (When Harry Reid was announcing the Senate votes last week and describing all the good things the healthcare reform bill would do — none of which were true — I had the thought that either Reid is a very good liar OR he is just repeating what he’s been told about the bill and actually believes what he is saying.)

Prof. Green works in a swipe at Republicans, calling them sociopaths, so he is at least aware that there is a syndrome where a person makes promises he does not intend to keep in order to get people to hand over their money and power. The fact that he can’t match it to Obama’s behavior after such a lengthy rant denouncing him reveals how very hard it is to give up on someone for whom you ignored a continent of red flags in the hope that the promises he made to you would be the ones he would choose to keep.

'The initiative and resourcefulness of common men and women'

Pondering how the passengers on Flight 253 saved the day after Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab’s bomb failed to ignite properly, law professor Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, links a column he wrote after the D.C. snipers were caught in 2002 by a citizen who spotted their car and blocked it from escaping with his own vehicle (boldfacing mine):

Regardless of whether or not the D.C. snipers count as “terrorists” under your particular definition (they do under mine, but the authorities seem to be shooting for a much narrower standard) there seems little question that in coming weeks, months, and years we’re going to be dealing with a lot of fast-moving, dispersed threats of the sort that bureaucracies don’t handle very well. (Every domestic-terrorism victory so far, from Flight 93 to bringing down the LAX shooter to spotting the D.C. killers was accomplished by non-law-enforcement individuals, after all). Rather than creating new bureaucracies, we need to be looking at ways of promoting fast-moving, dispersed responses, responses that will involve members of the public as a pack, not a herd. Even if doing so reduces the career satisfaction of shepherds.

Read the whole thing — my headline comes from another writer that Reynolds quotes in his piece.

The initial news reports were rather bland, but Hot Air has a video (which is on auto-play) of how the bomb was made and only required an amount of explosive material the size of a matchhead to bring the airplane down. And Mark Steyn has the best analysis on why the solutions Fareed Zakaria touted in his HBO whitewash of the 2008 attack on Mumbai, in which my friend, Alan Scherr, and his daughter were murdered, just will not work — and, in my opinion, are being offered as a tactic to delay and delude.

But the reason I’m writing this particular post is that it reminds me of a story my father likes to tell about why America beat Germany in World War II. First, he points out that America’s armed forces included an awful lot of farm boys who were accustomed to fixing things themselves on their own initiative. So, my father says, when a Jeep or tank broke down, the soldiers immediately got busy repairing it and improvising when they didn’t have the needed tools or parts. Their officers did not resent this — they demanded it. In contrast, my father continues, the German soldiers had to wait for orders when equipment broke down, regardless of any doom bearing down on them.

Then Dad drives home the point of the disastrous effects of such top-down, command-driven social orders by explaining that Hitler was asleep when the Allies launched their D-Day attack and HIS GENERALS HAD TO WAIT FOR ORDERS BUT EVERYONE WAS AFRAID TO WAKE HIM. (I hear tell Obama wasn’t notified of the Flight 253 terrorist attack until three hours after it happened, but certainly there’s no connection and no one will ever expect to derive future strategic advantage from attacking while their victims sleep. That would be mean.) By the time Hitler woke up and started giving orders, the advantage had tipped to the Allies.