Bookworm Room

Andy Stern, who led the SEIU to its current status as a statist political powerhouse, has a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, touting the wonders of China’s economic model.  His basic point:  China’s recent economic surge shows that government should control the economy.  To support this premise, he points, not to China’s [...]

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Over the past week, China has been convulsed by a video that shows a little girl — 2 years old — clad in pink trousers, struck by two vans and then ignored by over a dozen passers-by, who cavalierly stepped around her broken, bleeding body: Little Yue Yue has since died, but China, in an [...]

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Given this blog’s recent flogging of the China versus U.S. (“us”) question, here is  a primary example of how China may surpass the U.S. by becoming more business friendly as it decentralizes while the U.S. risks having to learn the lessons of socialist history all over again as our over-regulated economy grinds down to a [...]

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Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang plays an old, Korean-war vintage anti-American song, “Battle on Shangganling Mountain”, at Obama’s state dinner for Chinese President Hu-Jintao. The Chinese, of course, just loved it. I can just feel the respect our competitors in the world have for us, now that international relations have been “reset”. This will not end [...]

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Why didn’t they figure out before November 2008 that there was no there there?  The parody is good, but is it too late?

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Liberals assured us back in 2008 that, after the horrible Cowboy Bush years, we needed someone charming to bring rogue governments back into the American fold.  So far, these same rogue governments have been resistant to Obama’s charm, whether in Russia or the Palestinian territories* or Iran, just to to name a few instances of [...]

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Okay, maybe I’m overreacting, but WHAT THE HELL IS THE EMPIRE STATE DOING HONORING A BRUTAL REGIME THAT KILLED TENS OF MILLIONS OF ITS OWN CITIZENS, THAT STILL PUNISHES SPEECH WITH TORTURE AND DEATH, THAT USES SLAVE LABOR, AND THAT SEES ITS POLITICAL PRISONERS AS ORGAN DONOR MACHINES? Just asking. And yes, I’m definitely a [...]

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Obama’s foolish decision to pick a trade war with China has larger implications about his governing style, as Jennifer Rubin explains: [D]omestic political considerations and the good opinion of his base are more important to Obama than just about any other concern. That seems to be the motivating factor in a lot of what he does. [...]

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Clearly, predator nations smell blood in the water — and that blood is Obama’s manifest inability to cope with predator nations.  At least, that’s how I read this, from BNO News at 9:30 ish p.m. PST: N. Korea says it is no longer bound to the armistice which ended the war and says the peninsula [...]

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The Dalai Lama spoke today in Berkeley, and reminded me strongly of Gandhi.  This was Gandhi’s approach to the Nazis, as expressed to the English (who were, you remember, the nation against which he was rebelling): “I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity.  [...]

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This morning, Mr. Bookworm asked me “Who is Charles Freeman?”  Because he reads only the Times, he’d never heard of him before today.  I gave a brief summary of Freeman’s views re China, the Middle East and 9/11, as well as the fact that he lives in Saudi and Chinese pockets financially.  Mr. Bookworm listened [...]

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Catherine the Great’s beloved Grigori Potemkin used to be her advance man as she toured Russia.  He become famous in history for building entirely false villages in the recently conquered Crimea to elevate the status of her new conquest: Potemkin villages were purportedly fake settlements erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin [...]

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As you may recall, I was both impressed and dismayed by the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics.  I’ll quote the point I made that comes back again in this post: They were gorgeous.  They also reminded me very strongly of the public spectacles that socialist countries have always loved:  vast numbers of people moving [...]

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I got my filing finished today, which ate up the morning, but I have a little — a very little — time now to doodle around before I have 15 kids swarm my backyard for a party.  The problem is that, as always, one seems to lose as much as one gains when switching to [...]

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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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There was a round-up of illegal aliens in Marin County. The story included the obligatory reference to the children who had to watch their parents being arrested for illegal activity: Wilson said children watched while their parents and other adults were taken away by authorities. Some were removed while accompanying children to the school bus, [...]

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So sad. I think many of America’s planning departments have a Code fetish that is counter productive, since they try to impose on every single building — and every aspect of every building — a standard of perfection that is unreasonable for the ordinary risks and uses people face in connection with those structures.  For [...]

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Dennis Prager writes really movingly about the unfairness of a world that elevates Palestinians to “chief victims,” while ignoring the murderous horror that the Chinese have visited on the Tibetans.  I doubt we’ll see a principled stand that has the world boycott the Olympics, but we should.  I’m no fan of Jimmy Carter, but he [...]

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