Bookworm Room

They seem to have deviated significantly from the book (which simply describes a series of picaresque adventures), and it’s in 3D, which gives me a headache, but it actually still looks like a good movie.  I’ll certainly be at the theater to see it:

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Some days seem to crystallize some of our society’s more discouraging trends. In my mental health work on the front lines I see a great deal of what the chattering classes cluelessly opine about. Today, for some reason, I saw, one after the other, a series of young women with similar problems and, as I [...]

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If you’re the powerful leader of a powerful nation, you tell the Chinese to release a jailed activist (who just won the Nobel Peace Prize) immediately.  If you’re an empty suit who admires Leftist authoritarianism , you let the Chinese set the time table (emphasis mine): I welcome the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the [...]

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Cuddling up with a Chris Christie video is better than chocolate.  The first minute and a half of this video is a slightly boring statement about Christie’s decision not to build a tunnel from new Jersey to New York.  Don’t give up, though.  After that wooden intro, the rest is Christie’s usual lucid discussion about [...]

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Carla Marinucci is a political writer for the SF Chronicle.  In this post, she describes how the Liberty and Freedom Foundation put up a billboard advertising a Sarah Palin’s appearance in San Jose soon.  It’s not just any billboard, though.  They put it in SF’s Castro district –known for its activist gay community .  The [...]

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The other day, I did a post about the fact that bureaucracies, in their ceaseless question for administrative protection, run the risk of killing us all.  I think Zombie makes my point precisely, in a post pointing out that people and nations most deeply wedded to perfection through bureaucracy (i.e., totalitarianism) all seem remarkably comfortable [...]

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I keep meaning to blog about Meg Whitman’s maid, and then I don’t.  Factually, it’s an insanely stupid story, although the lurid headlines in California’s lefty papers may be enough to confuse some independents into abandoning any vague ideas they may have been having about voting for Whitman.  In other words, the story is ridiculous [...]

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For my book club, I’m reading The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850.  The title is self-explanatory and the book’s premise simple: Following a fairly halcyon early medieval period that saw global warming, and with it a rare stability in an intensely agrarian world, the world cooled down, with devastating effects on the [...]

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Okay, it’s not a new blog, but it’s new to me, so that’s what counts for purposes of this post.  You already know Ben Howe from his well-received Last Best Hope video.  It turns out that Ben is not a “one hit wonder.”  Instead, he is a film maker for the new political era, someone [...]

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I found the report about the White House solar panels interesting.  In theory, I think solar panels are a fine idea.  In practice, here in the land of PG&E, I do not.  You see, we have solar panels.  It cost us roughly $15,000 to install them.  Before we even purchased them, it was obvious that [...]

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I have a rush project today, so the blog will be silent, at least for a while.  If you’re looking for good reading, though, I can’t give you a greater gift than this week’s Watcher’s Council submissions: Council Submissions The Colossus of Rhodey – R.T.T.T. stress — and more Rhymes With Right -Attack On Christian [...]

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(Welcome, Best of the Web readers!  James Taranto is correct that nobody’s asking this question, and my readers are correct that Specter’s doing this “because he can,” but it still drives me nuts that, as a taxpayer, I’m funding this old duck’s last political hurrah.) We all know who Arlen Specter is.  He’s a career [...]

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I told my friend Don Quixote about the way in which liberals were boasting that the crowds at One Union exceeded those at Restoring Honor, despite the fact that the pictorial evidence showed the opposite to be true.  Don Quixote, a lifelong conservative, responded by asking “Do liberals really believe what they say?” I came [...]

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I don’t think as well as Dennis Prager, so I’ve never been able to organize my thoughts as beautifully as he did in this column about illegal immigration and the reason legal Hispanic immigrants should look to conservatism as their political home.  This hits every moral nail squarely on the head.

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It was a wonderful week’s worth of materials over at the Watcher’s Council, and the voting outcome shouldn’t surprise you. Council Winners First place with 2 votes! – The Razor – Obamacare – The Worst of All Worlds Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – The Glittering Eye – Why Aren’t the Lowest 99% [...]

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I was speaking the other day with a friend who is contemplating a different type cancer treatment, one that is neither chemo, nor radiation.  She has reacted badly to both, so they simply aren’t an option for her. Her doctor highly recommends this third type of treatment, which he believes will provide an optimal outcome, [...]

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All over my “real me” facebook, my liberal friends have been treating Tyler Clementi’s tragic suicide by framing him as a victim of an anti-gay crime.  I saw it as him being the victim of the total loss of sexual privacy.  I was going to blog about that, but IBD got there first and did [...]

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I’m still catching up, but this stuff caught my eye: Geert Wilders, on Islam and Western culture.  This link, by the way, ties in tightly with the next link, since both involve looking at people’s actual words and acts, rather than suppositions about who, or what, they are.  As I keep saying regarding Islam, we [...]

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Will 100 of you check out the USO’s website?  You don’t have to give, although I think you’ll want to after seeing the site.  (I certainly did:  that is, I wanted to and I gave.)  And if we all give $10 (or $1 or $100), we’ve made a difference.

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This is a great picture.  You can just feel the cat’s incredible relief.

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Yesterday, I blogged about the eerily prescient episode of the Simpsons, from 1998, which saw Homer running as garbage commissioner on the slogan “Can’t someone else do it?”  If you haven’t already read it, check out that post and then think of it as you view this video:

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I’m wrapping up a project right now, so can’t blog.  So, here’s an Open Thread, with a little Elizabeth Warren thrown in for good measure: Now we know why President Obama sought to avoid a messy confirmation hearing for Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She might have had to respond to [...]

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After being dismissed and diminished by the media and administration as [fill in your condescending or derogatory epithet here], the Tea Party, which was a response to the Democratic tidal wave in 2008, has changed the face of politics into the foreseeable future. Sarah Palin is no small part of the grassroots movement. I think [...]

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I listen to a whole lot of The Simpsons.  Not watch, listen.  You see, we have a DVD player in the car, because the kids spend a ridiculous amount of time being ferried around in big circles (to visit far away family) or small circles (after school activities).  Whether the passengers are my own kids, [...]

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