Author: Bookworm

This may be true: Tiny solitary cells under constant illumination, a mere 20 minutes of fresh air daily, and beatings at the hands of guards are indicative of the "torture" endured by some of the 17 people accused of plotting terrorist attacks in Canada, lawyers for the group said Monday.

A couple of weeks ago, Glenn Reynolds did a great Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he pointed out that parenting is very little fun nowadays: Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. Yet

I'm still trying to lose the weight I gained with my pregnancies, and have embarked on another mental bargain with myself to limit my food intake.  Before babies, I never had a problem, so I never learned to be a disciplined eater.  It was simply "open mouth, insert food."  I

After the Soviet Union fell, long-simmering regional disputes exploded, and we got to witness the ugliness of Central European civil war and genocide.  It was a reminder that a common enemy often serves to unite otherwise deep factional divisions.  I was reminded of this when I saw yet another story

It's common on the Left to toss around warnings regarding Christian extremists, an amorphous group of people that wants to do something very, very bad to us, such as uh, uh . . . well, something very bad. That's for sure. They might even take us back to a world

On Saturday, I commented about the by now trite and hackneyed "Hamas vows revenge" line in a headline reporting the story of the family killed during a picnic. The revenge bit arose because Hamas alleged that the deaths resulted from a wayward Israeli offensive. It turns out that Hamas killed

Theodore Dalrymple has written a review of Efraim Karsh's Islamic Imperialism : A History. It sounds like a book well worth reading.  Unsurprisingly, considering the generally high quality of his writing, Dalrymple's review is itself well worth reading.  After giving a generally positive review to the book itself (which, as

I've always found the obsession with beheading one of the most horrifying aspects of Islamofacism.  Mark Steyn comments on its deeper meaning: Take the subject of, say, decapitation. There's a lot of it about in the Muslim world. These Somali Islamists, in the course of their seizure of Mogadishu, captured

From Little Green Footballs, we learn about two facts Time Magazine slipped into its Al-Zarqawi story.  The first is that one of the women killed was his 16 year old wife.  The other, that their 18 month old son was killed too (which, as I've noted before, is a tragedy). 

Even though there are people clamoring for my attention right behind me, I couldn't resist commenting on three things I saw on the front page of today's online San Francisco Chron. The first is a Washington Post story which the Chron introduces thusly: Al-Zarqawi alive when Americans found him U.S.

Today is one of those crazy suburban Mom days, which will see me running from store to store, sport to sport, and party to party.  It's definitely not conducive to blogging (or even to thinking beyond "to do" lists).  I'll catch up later.

Jonah Goldberg on why "making nice" is no defense in today's world: The presence of a profoundly evil, homegrown terror cell in Canada has understandably provoked a lot of soul-searching to our north. As one Canadian editorial put it: “We are Canada, peacekeepers to the world, everybody’s nice guy. Who

If you want to buck the MSM trend and read an article detailing why Al-Zarqawi's death mattered, read this. By the way, have you noticed how all the MSM reports (at least the ones I hear on NPR), make sure to add that, not only were Al-Zarqawi and his second