Bookworm Room

I’m very suspicious of “studies.”  As a liberal, I was ready to trust anything that came out of academia.  As a conservative, I’m suspicious of academia, because I know it’s more interested in specific outcomes than in the scientific method.  A good example of this is a survey that was sent around to Marin County [...]

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That post caption is a complete lie.  I can issue as many reminders to myself as I like, but when the spirit doesn’t move me, you could look through my house with a magnifying glass and you still wouldn’t find any profundity.  Heck, today I’m not even sure if I could come up with any [...]

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Thomas Friedman has a habit of making obvious statements in grandiose and portentous tones, only to ruin his credibility by following his astute grasp of the obvious with utterly fatuous and meaningless conclusions, bolstered by totalitarian-themed practical recommendations.  His latest column is a perfect example. In the first paragraph, Friedman describes a piece of decaying [...]

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This is the cozy mansion New York Times‘ columnist Tom Friedman calls home: Judging by its size, it probably has a carbon footprint roughly equal to a small nation’s: As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just [...]

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Am I the only one who has had it up to here and more with the relentless imperative that I buy green?  I have this incredible urge to pollute and waste.  I do not like being bullied, and I am being bullied. When I’m at the store, surrounded by all the little soldiers staggering under [...]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about responses to my post regarding the gal who is running for town council, the one who donated to Obama, and who nevertheless seems to be a fiscal conservative.  I asked how she can live with the cognitive dissonance.  Several of you pointed out, in one form or another, that [...]

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Tom Friedman, man of the New York Times, writes to assure American Jews that Obama is no threat whatsoever to Israel’s security.  His column is a nasty little piece of work, not for what it says, but for what it doesn’t say.  It opens with a series of scare quotations purported from Barack Obama, all [...]

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