Bookworm Room

Tweet Sadie strikes again (thank you Sadie!) with another excellent topic suggestion, asking each of us as the new year begins to look back to the best and worst moments of last year and forward to predict the best and the worst of the year to come. I’ll start.  On a personal level, the worst [...]

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Tweet Sadie has another good suggestion: “Need another topic..here’s one.  Anyone else notice the cost of gas and food lately. The food doesn’t get to the shelves by magic wand or windmills. The rise in the cost of a barrel effects everything and everyone. “Five dollars per gallon of gas by 2012! A former president [...]

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Tweet Well, actually, a whole newspaper full of it!

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Tweet In response to my question about what you would like to talk about, Sadie made this suggestion: “How about a PSA to ‘welcome the new and old/er’. I think many of us have taken care of aging parents with love and kindness, but we’re also taking care of current and retiring representatives, who pay [...]

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Tweet This really is a continuation of yesterday’s post and a new topic in one.  The comments to that post indicate a concensus that “one world government” is a Utopian pipe dream.  Some commenters even suggested that it was desirable to have many smaller countries.  Okay, but we do have the capacity to blow humanity [...]

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Tweet I’ve been reading with great interest the 1949 edition of The Outline of History, written mostly (except for the WWII part) by H.G. Wells.  The book provides a nice perspective of the socialist mind in the first half of the last century.  To his credit, Wells makes no pretense of objectivity, and the closer [...]

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Tweet We’ve got another week until Bookworm gets back.  I’ve got a topic I want to write up tonight and a few others in mind, but I’m curious.  What would you all like to talk about?

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Tweet This article caught my eye.  The view of the future it presents does sound like science fiction, but, of course, most of our current technology was science fiction 50 years ago.  This is interesting in it’s own right, but it also got me thinking about the conservative and progressive reaction to progress.  Conservatives welcome it, and [...]

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Tweet It’s Christmas morning as I write this and I hope you all are having a lovely Christmas.  Perhaps the way to celebrate in the Bookwormroom is to share Christmas stories.  I don’t have much to share myself, but I do have one and my wife has a better one, so I’ll share them both. [...]

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Tweet I echo Danny’s Merry Christmas to you all!  Perhaps because it is Christmas Eve, I don’t feel like blogging on anything serious today.  Still, there is one problem President Obama promised during his campaign that he would fix that he has made no progress on at all. Indeed, I fear he has given up.  [...]

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Tweet To each and everyone, a very Merry Christmas! Whether Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or other, please accept my family’s very best wishes to you and your loved ones for the peace and shared human fellowship that this season offers for us all.

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Tweet . . . but if you are a football fan or just enjoy complete silliness, check out Mike and Mike’s Stone Cold Lead Pipe Locks (something Bookworm herself would never post here).

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Tweet At a minimum, Pat Robertson is calling for lower penalties for people who smoke marijuana.  I quite agree, but then I’ve been for legalization of  marijuana forever.  Anyway, what do you think, both about Roberton’s comments specifically, and about how our society should deal with drug (and alcohol) use generally?

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Tweet As we approach Christmas, which celebrates of the birth of the Prince of Peace, I am visiting family deep in the mountains of Colorado with only intermittent access to the web.  I appreciate that this “season of peace” is a time of great tension for many (witness the shopping malls), but I also like [...]

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Tweet For months, I’ve noticed the growing number in the box to the side that counts Islamist terrorist attacks.  However, I’ve never before checked out the site that counter comes from — TheReligionOfPeace.com.  It is an awesome site, which I recommend you check out. I was especially taken by the following comment I found there:  [...]

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Tweet I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been reading up on Judaism.  The history of that religion is filled to the brim with prejudice and persecution.  I think it would be hard being Jewish and coming to trust even that my Gentile friends were free of that prejudice.  This history may explain why, years ago, as we [...]

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Tweet The Daily Beast ranked the top “Grinchiest” cities.  Is it any surprise that four of the top 15 were California cities and that number 1 was Boston, Mass.?

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Tweet I’ve been reading a book on Judaism (on which more later) when I came across a paragraph I found particularly interesting for its parallel to today: “As Moses Mendelsson achieved fame, he acquired the admiring acceptance of many of the leading intellectuals of Germany.  They were ready to befriend this extraordinary person despite his [...]

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Tweet Haley Barbour has gotten himself into some hot water the last few days.  According to the linked-to AP article, Barbour originally said, “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a [...]

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Tweet Remember that Rockwell song from the 1980s?  “I always feel like somebody’s watching me….“  It turns out that, if you’re having any dealings with the FCC, that feeling is right on the money.  I just received the following email from a friend: I just called the FCC and asked for info on how to [...]

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Tweet Every time I visit the Bookwormroom I check the little section that shows where the last ten or so visitors are from.  I’m amazed to find people from all over the world are visiting here.  That, in turn, got me to wondering who these people were who visit and how they found out about [...]

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Tweet I’m heading for two weeks in Incommunicado-ville, a land with sunshine and restaurant food (yay, no cooking!), but no internet access.  Barring wandering in an internet cafe somewhere, which is unlikely, I won’t be blogging at all. Fortunately, the wonderful Don Quixote and the equally wonderful Danny Lemieux are both going to post.  I [...]

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Tweet I’ll be missing the next two weeks of Watcher’s Council votes (more on that in another post), but I can make sure that you get last week’s Watcher’s Council winners: Council Winners *First place with 3 votes! – The Colossus of Rhodey –What makes America great …? Second place*t* with 1 2/3 votes – [...]

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Tweet Years ago, NPR did a story about the disgraceful way in which President Bush used executive orders to circumvent Congress.  Shame on him!  Sadly, I can’t find that story (although, maybe, if I had the time and patience to weed through 8 years of NPR archives I could.)  I just remember the anger about [...]

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Tweet Yay!  Palestinian Media Watch is back on YouTube.

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