Bookworm Room

** Newsflash*** Heard on the popular “Don and Roma” show on WLS AM890 Radio during this morning’s Chicagoland commute: In his interview with the radio hosts, Illinois Senator and naval intelligence officer Mark Kirk explained that the U.S. policy toward Somali piracy is apparently to capture them and release them near their home ports, presumably [...]

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News out of the Ivory Coast is that death and chaos are rising quickly.  The Obama Administration is, as always, “deeply concerned.”  (Has it occurred to anybody that the administration’s real strength might be writing sentiments for condolence cards?  They’re very good at empathetic, and occasionally bathetic, pabulum.) Every time I read a story such [...]

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Whenever it comes to mentioning presidential policy, this New York Times article about the collapse of AIDS care in Africa is studiously neutral.  Read between the lines (and make it almost to the end of the article), though, and you’ll see the truth peek out:  Bush, the quintessential “white man,” helped Africa enormously, while Obama, [...]

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Through the Bush years, those in the grips of BDS likened him to Hitler based upon their contention that he was running the most oppressive administration ever in American history.  They made this claim despite the fact that, insofar as I know, no protestor was ever imprisoned merely for having protested.  (This is separate from [...]

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If this is the African Way, it explains a great deal about modern Africa. My daughter, in her history class at school, has been spending some weeks on African history.  Not Egyptian history, but African history.  I mention this distinction because my daughter has noted that there’s very little material there.  They’re mostly being taught [...]

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While Bush haters rant on about conspiracy theories in which people who dared to cross him vanished forever (despite a complete lack of any evidence, direct or inferential), we continue to get real world examples of horrible dictatorships in which daring to criticize the government results in punishment or even death — with the most [...]

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Burt Prelutsky today, in a longer column about Obama’s political failings, launches into a blistering attack against US aid to Africa: Speaking of Africa, when are we going to wean the dark continent? Are we ever going to get over this nutty notion that we have an obligation to keep pumping money down that particular [...]

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J. R. Dunn has a wonderful antidote to political despair.  I have some optimistic predictions of my own: I think the current gas crisis, coupled with the holes being punctured into Global Warming, and China’s status as No. 1 C02 polluter, will create a popular ground swell that will force the Demos’ hands (1) on [...]

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The title of my post was a fatuous, smarmy expression during its heyday in the 1960s. With the UN “peacekeepers,” though, it’s taken on a whole, horrible new meaning: Sexual abuse of children as young as six by aid workers and United Nations peacekeepers has continued unchecked despite repeated promises to stamp it out, according [...]

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I haven’t quite gathered my thoughts, but I found this an amazing story on so many levels: Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts By CELIA W. DUGGER Published: December 2, 2007 LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of [...]

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Despite the fact that we live in a vaccine age, Britain is facing an outbreak of measles, a disease can cause life long damage to its victims: Parents were urged today to give their children the MMR jab before they returned to school after figures showed measles cases have more than trebled in the last [...]

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All the early reports of the riots at Paris’ Gare de Nord train station — and most of the subsequent ones, as well — have referred to those ubiquitous “youths” as the troublemakers. (And if you’ve ever seen the movie “My Cousin Vinny,” every time you hear the word “youths,” you want to giggle.) This [...]

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Soccer Dad ruminates about the different ways in which at least one Ethiopian and all Palestinians handle the tools of war.

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My blog title is an exaggeration.  The hardline Islamists in Nigeria who are denying children polio vaccinations are not planning on creating a worldwide polio epidemic, or even a pan-African epidemic.  They are just operating on a paranoid, anti-Western intellectual model that doesn’t have a problem with sacrificing children to religion induced paranoia: Kenya has [...]

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The popular image of the peacekeepers who travel to troubled regions is of a legion of selfless Mother Theresas, putting aside the comforts of their First World lives to aid those most in need.  And that image may well be true for the greater number of them. Unfortunately, one of Africa's many plagues is parasites [...]

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I don't have any conclusions to draw, or insights to offer.  I'll just offer, in no particular order, a short laundry list of some of the horrors visited upon so much of the African Continent.   The Ethiopian famines The slaughters in Sudan Idi Amin Robert Mugabe The Civil War in the Congo Charles Taylor and [...]

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