Bookworm Room

Tweet Pedophilia is an up and coming subject, as pedophiles strive to become mainstream.  In an article about Dr. Earl Bradley, a convicted pedophile, Fay Voshell makes an incredibly important point: Dr. Bradley’s behavior is illustrative of the sort of things a pedophile does to his victims, including sometimes killing the child he rapes, sodomizes, [...]

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Tweet I was thinking about prison yesterday.  Someone was telling me that his son, a student at San Francisco State University, had a teacher who announced, “I’m not going to make any pretense of being unbiased,” and then handed out a book about the evils of prison. My response was that, while prison isn’t a [...]

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Tweet My daughter started high school at our local public high.  It’s a great high school.  It’s got a beautiful facility, high quality staff, all the bells and whistles you can think of, an involved parent body, and a whole lot of very nice kids.  I always knew all that, but I had that information [...]

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Tweet This is quite the Saturday.  Not one BUT TWO of my friends have been published today at American Thinker. Navy One, who blogs at The Mellow Jihadi, and has for years been a Bookworm Room visitor, has a great piece there, a rumination (and book review) about Navy life, non-Navy life, and dogs.  In [...]

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Tweet It turns out that one of San Francisco’s premier sexual harassment attorneys enjoys a little S&M fun on the side.  So much so that he likes to run Craig’s List ads seeking women who like it rough: His lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, said the women had all come to Hoffman’s Van Ness Avenue apartment to [...]

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Tweet There is a story that Josef Stalin, hearing mention of the Pope, asked dismissively ““How many divisions does the Pope have?”  The quotation, if true, is compelling, because it perfectly illustrates the Leftist viewpoint that the only power is that which comes at the point of a gun.  The notion of moral behavior and [...]

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Tweet A man died while in the act of raping an elderly woman: The Refugio (reh-FYOO’-ree-yoh) County Sheriff’s Office identifies the man as 53-year-old Isabel Chavelo Gutierrez. Sheriff’s Sgt. Gary Wright says the incident happened June 2 after he rode two miles by bicycle from his home to that of his 77-year-old victim in the [...]

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Tweet You guys are all connected to the news, so I know that you already know about the Supreme Court decision forcing California to release up to 46,000 prisoners because of the appalling conditions in California prisons.  As a California resident, I’m less than thrilled about the fact that people who ought to be behind [...]

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Tweet Britain, apparently, has solved the puzzle of criminal recidivism (H/T Melanie Phillips of the Spectator). I know that this story provides us with a most important clue as to the greater disease that afflicts Western Civilization. I really just don’t know what to do with this story, so I am passing it on to [...]

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Tweet Bradley Manning got into some unknown type of dispute with his prison guards and ended up having to sleep in the buff for seven hours!!!  Are you outraged?  Or, like me, are you giggling at the fact that this story actually made the news? The lawyer for an Army private suspected of giving classified [...]

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Tweet If you’re a Mikado fan, you know the source of my post title: The song came to mind because of two stories today, both of which left me wondering whether the punishment fit the crime. One story you may already have read:  an Iraqi living in Arizona was convicted of 2nd degree murder for [...]

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Tweet As the younger citizens limit their involvement to videotaping a crime in progress (“Oooh, won’t this look cool when I show it to my friends”), a 71 year old grandmother, Ann Timson, acts with extraordinary — and effective — courage: You can read more about Timson here.

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Tweet The Archbishopric of Canterbury used to be a pretty important job.  The guy who held that position, going back to the earliest Middle Ages, was the premier leader of the English church, whether that church gave allegiance to Rome or the British Monarch.  The current Archbishop, Rowan Williams is, as best as I can [...]

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Tweet Small Dead Animals notices something interesting:  the crime stats in Sheriff Dipstick’s county, as compared to Sheriff Arpaio’s county, are appalling.  Appalling that is, assuming you’re a law abiding citizen and not a criminal.  If you’re a criminal, they’re pretty darn good. My only question is whether the lousy sheriff caused the bad stats, [...]

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Tweet The media does hysteria well.  It’s about the only thing it does well. It hysterically accused Palin and Beck and Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers of being complicit in mass murder despite a few readily known and very salient facts:  (1) the absence of a single quotation that can be attributed to any of [...]

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Tweet My sincerest condolences to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ family and friends.  What a horrible tragedy.  My thoughts are also with the others who were shot during this massacre. UPDATE (11:49 a.m. PST):  Five seconds ago, Breakingnews.com tweeted that she might still be alive: Update: Conflicting reports about Giffords – Reuters now reporting she’s alive and [...]

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Tweet Life can be tough when you break the law.  The people who murdered Annie Mae Aquash discovered this fact when they were arrested and tried for murder 35 years after killing Aquash.  Sara Jane Olson, an SLA terrorist during the 1970s, discovered that when her quiet, suburban life in Minnesota was revealed and she [...]

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Tweet I don’t see Harry Reid having the political umph to pass the DREAM Act, but I also never imagined back in 2007 that Barack Obama would be President, so what do I know? I do know that I have a problem with the DREAM Act, and that’s despite the fact that there are some [...]

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Tweet One of the things I hate about our culture is the way in which it cheapens the notion of heroism.  To me, a hero is one who puts his safety, or even his life, on the line, to protect others.  It’s that simple.  There are people who are altruists, which is also very virtuous, [...]

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Tweet I was very surprised to see an AP wire story reporting that Islamic militants (as opposed to mere “militants” or “insurgents”) were holding “Christians” (as opposed to mere “people”) hostage.  Even more surprising, the AP reported that the Islamic militants were probably affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity one apparently couldn’t acknowledge [...]

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Tweet When I’m in a strange down, I frequently rely on Yelp to help me find a decent eatery.  Turns out I shouldn’t.  Turns out I should delete Yelp from my iPhone entirely.  It’s not a peer review forum, it’s a shakedown operation.

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Tweet I arrived in England months after Peter Sutcliffe, the terribly brutal “Yorkshire Ripper,” had been arrested.  His last victim had been killed around the corner from the apartment in which I was to live for a year.  Although I was happy and felt safe where I lived, only once did I walk down the [...]

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Tweet Last year, an Oakland transit police officer, Johannes Mehserle, killed Oscar Grant, in a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station.  Grant was being, to put it mildly, obstreperous.  Mehserle’s defense is that he meant to taser Grant but, instead, shot him.  Video footage made at the time indicates that Mehserle did indeed make a [...]

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Tweet There are two storm warnings I want to give you, one of which requires action on your part, the other of which, depending on where you live, falls into the “sit, watch, and thank God you’re far away” category. First warning:  Drastic cuts to the military, courtesy of Bawney Fwank, that noted military expert.  [...]

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Tweet I have to boast just a little bit.  Despite driving for more than thirty years, I’ve never had a moving violation.  I have heard, however, that if the highway patrol pulls you over for speeding, it’s no defense to point to the traffic passing you and the officer by, while exclaiming, “But everybody is [...]

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