Bookworm Room

I’ve been thinking today about unmatched combatants and a combatant’s willingness to take hits in order to win a fight.  I think about the former often because, when I do jujitsu, I am an unmatched combatant.  I’m usually the only woman in the adult classes, which means that the people (i.e., men) with whom I’m [...]

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Mom’s in the hospital again and suffering greatly, not in body, but in mind. She’s mildly delusional, and very paranoid, angry and anxious. I can’t imagine how grim it is to live in her head. I slipped away for an hour and had lunch with Don Quixote. Our conversation turned to evil. I believe evil [...]

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Winston Churchill wrote the following in a book published in 1899 about the Sudan.  It is remarkably prophetic (emphasis mine): How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects [...]

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My belief, getting stronger by the minute, is that Obama’s sole Afghanistan policy was to be the un-Bush.  Bush’s critics claimed Iraq was the bad war and Afghanistan the good war.  So Obama immediately stated that he’d focus on Afghanistan.  Obama, though, true Leftist that he is, and with his deep affinity for totalitarian rulers [...]

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Bruce Kesler sent around an email asking whether we thought victory was possible in Afghanistan.  My reply was that I don’t think the Democrats can conceive of victory as a possible outcome.  As I wrote to him, I’m the child of parents who fought in WWII and the Israeli War of Independence.  Although they were [...]

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During the 1970s, there was a post-Yom Kippur War joke that was very popular in Jewish circles: Arab soldiers realized that at least half the Israeli troops they were fighting were named David.  They decided to use this information to deal with situations in whch they were facing Israeli fighters who were hidden from sight.  [...]

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For many years, I’ve thought that people confuse fairly neutral conduct with bad motives, resulting in false syllogisms.  I first came to this conclusion after reading John McWhorter’s wonderful Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  Although my memories are a bit hazy about the details of the book, I seem to recall reading him [...]

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Last night, my husband had the kids join him while he watched the last 45 minutes of Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. I blogged about it here.  If you haven’t watched it — and I don’t recommend it — I would summarize it briefly as an incredibly stupid anti-War, anti-American movie that cannot be salvaged [...]

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My father, who was a veteran of World War II and the Israeli War of Independence, was still alive during the first Gulf War. I vividly remember his comment that it was idiotic how much the press made of how nice Americans were and how our troops were so good that they didn’t want to [...]

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