Bookworm Room

This was an obituary that was meant to be enjoyed, written about a man who clearly lived life to the fullest.  Pay special attention to the penultimate paragraph.

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The past was never as good as it now looks.  Just as we forget, as we age, the emotional pains childhood (only to revisit them as we watch our children suffer through the same experience), history tends to take on a romantic patina. Sure, in the pre-industrial age, the countryside was a thing of exquisite, [...]

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I am 100% opposed to book burning, any book.  You don’t fight ideas by sending the paper on which they’re printed up in flames.  You fight ideas by debate and discourse. Of course, the problem for Westerners, is that the Prophet himself made debate and discourse unlawful.  So what do you do?  Burning books is [...]

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A friend of mine is horrified that I’m affiliated in any way with the Tea Party movement.  They are, he tells me, Nazis.  They are, he says, the direct descendants of George Wallace’s racist, antisemitic, separatist movement.  They are, he assures me, far right wing paramilitary nutcases who want to take over the country for [...]

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The MSM is bewildered.  How is it that nine years after 9/11, people are more hostile to Muslims than they were the day of 9/11, when 20 Muslims murdered thousands of Americans, and sought to decapitate the American government?  This article from the San Francisco Chronicle nicely presents the liberal confusion: Anti-Muslim sentiment grows 9 [...]

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The problem with an assault and a tragedy that is the magnitude of 9/11, and that now lives nine years away in our memories, is that, as a writer, I become more and more at a loss of words with each passing year. It seems to me, therefore, that the best I can do is [...]

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The problem with an assault and a tragedy that is the magnitude of 9/11, and that now lives nine years away in our memories, is that, as a writer, I become more and more at a loss of words with each passing year.  It seems to me, therefore, that the best I can do is [...]

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The problem with an assault and a tragedy that is the magnitude of 9/11, and that now lives nine years away in our memories, is that, as a writer, I become more and more at a loss of words with each passing year.  It seems to me, therefore, that the best I can do is [...]

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[I didn't take notes at the meeting I'm about to describe.  If you were there and did take notes or have a better memory than mine, and if you find any mistakes in what I wrote, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I'LL CORRECT MY POST AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.] I just returned from a Carly [...]

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As the last part of our Alaska cruise, which started and ended in Seattle, we went to the Museum of Flight.  I wrote about our museum visit here, and mention this earlier post because I wrote that all four of us were riveted by the monitor playing fairly extended interviews with living Medal of Honor [...]

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I totally forgive Jan Brewer for her brain freeze, because she’s proven to be a clear thinker.  Her ability to think clearly and active decisively is much more important than whether she can turn a pretty phrase. Having said that, I have to admit to suffering from total political lust for Chris Christie, ’cause he’s [...]

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I deeply appreciate the emails some of you have sent me asking me if I’m okay.  I live about 25 miles away from the San Bruno fire, so I was totally unaffected by it.  I can see it in my mind’s eye, though.  Growing up in San Francisco, I traversed that area of the Highway [...]

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Clifford May beautifully explains the fact that Jihadis, who use violence, and Islamists, who use more subtle means, are both threats to the West — and he manages to mention, too, why reform isn’t happening: Terrorism is not the core of the problem. It is merely the weapon of choice for some of the regimes, [...]

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[How many people caught the fact that I put the wrong year in the post caption (2008, instead of 2010, which I've now written in)?  As I'm sure you've noticed before, I have problems with numbers.  This is why I'm not an economist.  What's the excuse the Democrats have for their budget failures?] The year [...]

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Cool, very cool:  TV for conservatives, and it’s not Fox.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Fox, of course (although I’m not excited about the Saudi ownership).  But we shouldn’t have just one conservative media outlet, ranged against the rest of TV, not to mention Hollywood. I’m also feeling smug, because I’m listed as a [...]

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Pete Wehner looks at the creepy, whiny, bitter, self-centered, self-satisfied stuff that routinely oozes out of our president when he goes off the teleprompter.

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L’shana tova!  I hope this marks the start of a wonderful year, not just for Jews, but for everyone.

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My post caption is mangled version of an English expression popular in the years leading up to and during WWI:  “The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet.”  It was a reference to the fact that Germany was a deeply hierarchical, undemocratic nation, with only the haziest notions of equality. England wasn’t [...]

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One of the dominant PC d0ctrines is that you’re not allowed to dislike people based upon race, religion, creed, country of national original, sexuality, gender, etc.  This is one step beyond federal law, which merely says that you cannot discriminate against people on those grounds. I heartily agree with the federal law.  In a free, [...]

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As I ready myself to nominate a couple of posts for this week’s Watcher’s Council vote, I have important business to do too.  First, as the title of this post shows, I have to post last week’s winners.  Second, though, I have to let you know about the amazing work fellow Council members Omri Ceren [...]

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I was thinking about the Pentagon’s constant desire for money so that it can have bigger and better weapons.  Anti-War people tend to write this off as institutional greed, sublimated violence, and an indecent expression of “big boys and their bigger toys.”  I tend to have a very different view of military spending. To begin [...]

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Showing that he can go off teleprompter — and that he probably shouldn’t — Obama whined (pun intended) about the treatment he feels Republicans are meting out to him: “Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about [...]

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I’ve always enjoyed “Rock Me Tonite,” which is a great, hard-driving rock song.  It’s incredibly funny, therefore, to watch Billy Squier do a low grade, and quite feminine, Jennifer Beals imitation in the accompanying video: Rumor has it that this pastel-toned ballet killed his career.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised….

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Israel has no greater friend than Sarah Palin.  She has shown repeatedly that she has a deep and abiding respect for the Jewish state, and that she understands the existential stresses under which it survives.  Benyamin Korn gets this and, despite incredible derision from Jewish Democrats, has begun working to build a Jewish coalition recognizing [...]

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Because it’s a holiday and I have a drop-dead deadline tomorrow, blogging will have to wait.  Meanwhile, I’d very, very, very much like to hear what you guys have to say about this article at the HuffPo.  The gist of it is that Sharia is nothing more than Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (not that [...]

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