Bookworm Room

Here, at home, it’s barely news.  In England, it’s a true epidemic, with the current spread and death rate hinting at up to 65,000 deaths as the disease runs its course. Are we in the U.S. hit less hard?  Are we hearing less about how hard we’re hit? I’m asking, but I’m sure not answering, [...]

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England has generated a lot of pig headlines lately.  The first round involved Britons actually removing, just thinking about removing, pigs from public sight for fear of offending Muslims.  Those stories were scary in an attenuated fashion, because they symbolized England’s loss of will and her willing submission to a dominant minority. This current round [...]

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WHO excitedly announced a few days ago that swine flu was a pandemic.  To my old-fashioned mind, pandemic means a deadly disease running riot around the world, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions.  Swine flu is definitely traveling, and it’s out of season, but so far (thank God), deaths have been [...]

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Our school system is dealing with a very fluid situation, as information about the swine flu changes from minute to minute.  My sense, currently, is that it’s real, it’s out there, it’s spreading fast (as if it was November, not April) and, in the U.S., it’s not a very serious threat as compared to any [...]

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October 2008:  McCain finally looks poised to lead in the polls, the market collapses and cool, calm, collected, Ivy League educated Obama vaults forward to victory.  April 2009:  It starts to look as if both the American public and Congress may be getting leery about Obama’s proposal to nationalize healthcare (i.e., have the government take [...]

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Michelle Malkin has caught on to the fact that the Left side of the blogosphere has a new meme:  they contend that, should there be a pandemic, it can be traced to the always evil GOP because Rove/Collins opposed flu pandemic funding in the porkulus bill. The only problem with this is that it’s a [...]

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Questions swirl (a little bit) about whether the fatal swine flu plaguing Mexico is a “man-caused disaster” or just the run-of-the-mill Nature triumphs kind of thing.  There can be no doubt, however that the earthquake  that just struck is Nature’s little reminder that she is now, and always will be, in charge. From Twitter’s breaking [...]

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Here are a few tweets from minutes and hours ago, almost all concerned with swine flu (culled from BNO news at 5:49 PST on 4/26): California school closed as officials investigate suspected swine flu case; second case being investigated in Ohio: http://adjix.com/axm737 minutes ago from BNO Headquarters Kyodo: Government expects Japan’s economy to shrink postwar [...]

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I just copied the following from Drudge: Possible Swine Flu Outbreak At NYC Prep School… Most fatal flu victims aged between 25-45… Swine flu could infect trade and travel… Schwarzenegger has ‘rigorous’ plan… WHO ready with antivirals… The mysterious respiratory illness… CDC says too late to contain… 60 DEAD: Mexico City launches huge vaccination campaign… [...]

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