Bookworm Room

Tweet I went to law school in the Bible Belt, so many of my fellow students were devout Christians. Thomas, however, out-Christianed everyone. His parents were missionaries, and he’d been raised with a level of faith no one else at the school could equal. He was one of the nicest people you could ever hope [...]

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Tweet I won’t go into the genesis of the teddy bear kerfuffle, because I assume you know all about it, including the fact that a Sudanese court imprisoned a British woman for 15 days for naming a teddy bear Muhammad, an insult that apparently has the prophet rolling in his grave. The teacher claims, with [...]

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Tweet You and I know that children — thank goodness! — are remarkably adaptable. Indeed, the younger they are, the more adaptable they are. It’s for this reason that pricey private schools and public schools in wealthy communities offer foreign language classes to the kindergarten set, rather than waiting, as they used to do in [...]

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Tweet Sorry for the blogging silence, but I have spent the day on the move without actually going anywhere.  This morning, I didn’t work because I had to bring my son to the orthodontist, which is one town away from me.  Then, I brought him to school, which is a different town away from me.  [...]

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Tweet I’ve got a few news stories to throw out at you, all of which, in my mind, are related. At the end, I’ve got a couple of questions for you. First, the news stories, many of which are just from the last couple of days: Under the Labour Government, England has had an overwhelming [...]

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Tweet During the last Democratic debate, it looked as if CNN had planted Democratic activists in the audience — people who it identified as undecided voters as if they were political tabula rasas – — to throw softball questions at the candidates.  It now looks as if someone at CNN planted a Democratic activist to [...]

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Tweet My view of the Annapolis talks has been that they will turn into something of a gang bang, with Israel, led by the inept Olmert, as the victim. I just know that Israel is going to concede and concede and concede, with nothing to show for the experience except a ruined reputation and some [...]

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Tweet Sadly, ‘Okie’, of ‘Okie’ on the Lam, has commitments that will prevent him from continuing to serve on the Watcher’s Council.  I will certainly miss his thoughtful insights, ably presented through an amusing and interesting writing style.  His departure creates an opportunity, though, for another blogger to step up to a place on the [...]

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Tweet I’ve been thinking lately about self-perpetuation. Although I can’t remember the source of their outrage, Mr. Bookworm told me that Greenpeace is outraged by something. Hearing that, the thought popped into my mind that, well, if they’re not outraged about something, they may as well disband. I read somewhere, and I can’t remember where, [...]

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Tweet Okay, I admit it. I’ve for years thought of Fabio as a joke. The bulging muscles, the overly squared jaw, the flowing locks — to me he looked like a caricature of a man, rather than a man. I’m now doing mea culpas for having been guilty of that kind of look-ism. It turns [...]

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Tweet I kid you not — the language I put in quotations in this post caption is the precise language the BBC uses to describe those who are engaged in a little bit of urban unrest In France. You know, the kind of innocuous urban rioting that results in more than 80 policeman being injured [...]

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Tweet I just wanted to remind those of you who haven’t visited it lately that marvelous suggestions for reading are still coming in at the “Books!” page I set up at this blog. If you’re looking for something to read, it might be a very good place to start.

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Tweet There is an extraordinary story hidden behind the latest album Swedish soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter is releasing. The album itself should be lovely and moving, because it’s a collection of songs from Terezienstadt, including lullabies a nurse composed for her charges in the days (weeks?) before she and they were shipped off to Auschwitz [...]

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Tweet National Review has a Rich Lowry article asking if Obama is this generation’s Jimmy Carter (an article available in its entirety to subscribers only). Here’s how Lowry describes Jimmy Carter, circa 1976: Carter wasn’t really in the McCarthy-Hart-Bradley mold. He ran a conservative, or at least an ideologically indistinct, race in the 1976 Democratic [...]

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Tweet Regarding Annapolis, I’ve had little to say. I feel as if I’m watching a car accident in slow motion, horrified by the spectacle, but helpless to do anything. I do have one hope, though, and one comment. My hope is that the Arab nations attending get into “the enemy of my enemy is my [...]

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Tweet I don’t know anything about Evergreen State College, except that I’d certainly steer clear of one history professor there — and if she’s representative of the rest of the faculty, I’d avoid the school entirely. But let me back up. In today’s NY Times, one of the top most emailed articles is an op-ed [...]

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Tweet I’m not giving away anything by quoting here the concluding paragraph from Noemie Emery’s long and fascinating article about the Democrats’ desperate and, at the moment, unsuccessful anti-Surge efforts in the last year.  If you read only this paragraph, good as it is, you’ll have missed all of the really interesting stuff: As they [...]

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Tweet I really try not to be neurotic about germs.  I understand that, especially with kids, a few bacteria here and there are good for their immune systems.  Indeed, when my kids were little, I read somewhere that kids who grow up in houses where Mom is too aggressive with the antibacterial sprays actually have [...]

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Tweet If you’re a friend of Israel, go here, read and, if you’re like me, you’ll then want to take the recommended action, action that I already suggested here. I won’t badmouth Condi Rice here, but I’d like to.

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Tweet Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator that assembles movie reviews and then, depending on the number of positive or negative reviews, assigns any given film a “freshness rating. ” The higher the rating, the more favorable the majority of reviews are. For example, as of today (11/25 at 18:06 PST), Enchanted gets a 93% freshness [...]

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Tweet I’ve disliked the EU ever since, in a moment of absolute insanity, I took a class on EU law when I was in law school. It was a Kafka-esque nightmare — and that was just studying about it, not experiencing it. If you want some small insight into experiencing it, read this Spiegel article [...]

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Tweet Three paragraphs of perfect political analysis from Mark Steyn: If I could just sneak out in the middle of the night and saw off Rudy Giuliani’s strong right arm and John McCain’s ramrod back and Mitt Romney’s fabulous hair and stitch them all together in Baron von Frankenstein’s laboratory with the help of some [...]

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Tweet I’ve often pointed out that the Nazis were not of the Right, but of the Left.  (The giveaway, of course, being the word “Socialism” in their full name.)  I’ve been challenged on the view by people on the Left who simply won’t accept that the Nazis were a variation of Marxism, not conservatism.  To [...]

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Tweet Dennis Prager likes to say (and I’m paraphrasing here) that liberals and conservatives have entirely incompatible world views. They understand facts in such a different way that there are few points of intersection. I had a reminder of that truism the other day when I watched Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center with a liberal [...]

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Tweet Despite the press of Thanksgiving, the Weasel crew managed to get its votes in. I have to say, Thanksgiving must have been inspiring because, from my point of view, this is one of the best crops of articles I’ve read since I became a Weasel Watcher. I am, therefore, very proud to have placed [...]

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