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I Love You, Madame Librarian By Kurt Vonnegut August 6, 2004 I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books. And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over...

The Republican Party is uneasy as it shambles toward the crucial 2006 congressional elections. Many of its supporters claim to feel demoralized, if not seduced and abandoned, by the conservative president they thought they elected in 2004. With President Bush's Nixonian economic policies and unwillingness to curtail federal spending, and the Republican faithful as confused as everyone else about the Iraq War, this is a good time to gain some political perspective from two veteran architects of the Reagan Revolution. In the midst of another difficult political predicament, Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, once said he had finally found...

"The invasion of Iraq was not an act of revenge or justice. (Just as the bombing of the Ploesti fields was not an act of pique at the occupied Romanians.)From the Time Traveler's perspective -- and from the Bush Administration's perspective -- the Iraq invasion is seen as the second move in a very serious chess game in which the only absolute goal is to neutralize an opponent's ability (and stated goal) to acquire and deliver weapons of mass destruction more devastating than fully fueled Boeing 737's."......" The point here is that we can argue that the second move in...

The Fallaci Code By Brendan Bernhard March 17, 2006 -- Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy? In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades? How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that...

Dear Locus, I have been diagnosed with amyloidosis. That is a rare blood disease which affects only 8 people out of a million each year, and those 8 per million are divided among 22 distinct forms of amyloidosis. They are distinct enough that while some have no treatment at all, for the others, the treatment that works on one will have no effect whatsoever on any of the rest. An amyloid is a misshapen or misfolded protein that can be produced by various parts of the body and which may deposit in other parts of the body (nerves or organs)...

Rome paid tribute to the barbarians clamoring at her gates. It didn't do any good. Paying ransom only postponed the inevitable sacking, burning, and looting of the empire's capital. The UK's Neville Chamberlain sought to pacify Hitler, only to see Brits hiding in basements from the blitzkrieg a few years later. Instead of remembering history's lessons, the Washington Post today indulges in feel-good, intellectual rationalization of Muslim intolerance and hatred. In a 5-page manifesto entitled, "Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement," authors Anthony Shadid and Kevin Sullivan exercise unlimited poetic license, calling Islamist hooliganism "a rare moment of empowerment among...

I'm very angry because I'm sick and tired of what I see as deception and dishonesty within the literary community. It's been going on for far to long and nobody seems to want to pay attention to it or to care about it. I love my publisher which is Publishamerica and it's a first rate Publisher however I have seen firsthand with my own eyes individual authors that meet on discussion boards asking each other to do reviews of one anothers books that most always turn out to be four or five star reviews. These people then go on every...

by Terry Mattingly Other Articles by Terry Mattingly Calling More Christian Writers 09/17/05 It was hard for businessman Jim Russell to pick up his local newspaper without thinking about one simple church statistic. According to the Yellow Pages, there were 400 churches in and around Lansing, Michigan. That meant there were 400-plus ministers and many thousands of lay people who either read the newspaper or decided not to. Surely, he thought, these readers must have some kind of reaction to what they saw in the news. Yet Russell kept looking — usually without success — for letters to the editor offering...

The Arabic word indihar is being used these days by Palestinians who view Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank as a victory for the al-Aksa intifada, which erupted in September 2000. And there appears to be a growing number of Palestinians who are truly convinced that the pullout is nothing but a retreat achieved through the blood of thousands of shahids, or martyrs. Still, many also consider it a conspiracy designed to tighten Israel's grip on the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic translates indihar as "banishment and defeat." Hamas...

MY STRAIGHT LINE LEARNING CURVE Learning can be a slow process for me. It never ceases to amaze me how amazed I can still get when some factoid finally manages to bore a hole in my skull and jump in. I mean, not to sound too self-congratulatory or anything, but when you're nearing the end of your sixth decade, you start thinking there aren't too many surprises left. So imagine my surprise when one of those surprises that had been lagging for 58 plus years decided to finally show up. The occasion was the Monday morning writers' group I regularly...

After the 7/7 London bombings many have raced to renounce the phrase “Islamic terrorism.” A London Anglican priest named Paul Hawkins said in a sermon: “We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.” It may seem odd to deny to the likely perpetrators of the bombings the name that they themselves prize above all others, but such are the politically correct dogmas that prevail in most contemporary public discourse. No one is better versed in those dogmas, or more relentless in her pursuit of any dissenters from them...

Dear Ms Mystery Writer, I'm not going to mention the title of your book,because I stopped reading it about halfway through.(Fortunately, I had only borrowed it from the library .) Okay:You started out fairly well. I was able to wade through the relationship between the heroine (Is it still all right to use that word ?) and her demandingly pregnant sister (Pregzilla),because,after a while,our heroine (Dr.Smuglisexi) was called to the scene of a probable suicide. Once on the scene,she made some VERY sharp observations: correctly identifying the victim's condition as the result of a fall,instead of the apparent sexual assault...

Freepers, my agent told me he had come across reports that suggested that the Amazon rankings of books are partly (even mostly) driven by "hits" on that book's site as opposed to "scans" of actual sales. I'd appreciate some help testing this: I will list three Freeper books, and ask you each to go to their Amazon site. Let's see if there is a sudden change in the numbers. (PS, if you think I'm going this to bump up my own Amazon ratings, then please ignore my book and JUST do the other two.) Matthew Bracken, "Enemies, Foreign and Domestic."...

Jan 11, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby staff reports Edited by David H. Smith, Newsbriefs Correspondent ECONOMIST MAGAZINE SHOWS TRUE COLORS FreeMarketNews.Com, Jan. 11, 2005 – The Economist Magazine is at it again. The magazine that many incorrectly associate with free-markets and entrepreneurialism has released another analysis of an international social, political and cultural trend that ducks the hard questions and predictably proposes more government as a solution. Even a cursory read of the Economist will find many of its articles focus not on entrepreneurialism but on governmental issues and policies, from big countries to small, with nary a question as to...

In 2000, Michael Bellesiles published what the nation took to be a groundbreaking work of history. His book, Arming America, argued that Revolutionary Americans disdained gun ownership. He said the idea that individuals had a right to bear arms came from a myth created in the post Civil War era in order to justify the new boom in gun ownership. The book was an instant hit. Walter Wink of Christian Century flatly stated that the book "debunks this myth [of widespread gun ownership]" (March 21, 2001). In Insight on the News, Phillip Gold called it "a brilliant history with unintended...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

UN threatens authors of 'racy' exposé By Charles Laurence in New York (Filed: 02/05/2004) The United Nations has threatened to fire two officials who wrote an expose of sleaze and corruption during its peacekeeping missions of the 1990s. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, is understood to have favoured an attempt to block publication of the memoir, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, a True Story from Hell on Earth, due to be published next month. Still reeling from the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, officials in the upper echelons of the UN are alarmed by the promised revelations of wild sex parties,...

"Counterterrorism czar" Richard Clarke spent nearly 30 years in government service, including eight years in that capacity during the Clinton administration and briefly retained by the current Bush administration.Now comes Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," in which he accuses the Bush administration of ignoring the terror threat, yet claims that President Clinton gave terrorism the highest priority. But during Bill Clinton's administration, when Clarke served during the entire time as "counterterrorism czar," Clinton failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Indeed, on Clinton's watch, numerous extremist Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks occurred: 1993 attack on the...

Who Really Wrote the Gospels?    FR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS I recently attended a religious education workshop, and the teacher said that the Gospels were written by the early Church community probably between the years 200 and 300, not by St. Mark, etc. I find this strange. If this is true, then the Gospels really don't tell us much about Jesus but seem more "made up" by later believers.  The notion that the Gospels are the product of the early Church community in the third century is "strange" indeed. However, we must be aware that a lot of "strange" things have...

It was Shavua Hasefer HaIvri - Hebrew Book Week - an annual Israel book fest, which draws Israelis from all walks of life. They come in droves with their babies and children to view, touch, thumb through the thousands of new, and tens-of-thousands of old, books published in Israel. All the major publishers, and most of the minor ones, put their books on display in cities and settlements across the land at discount prices. If you didn´t buy a book all year long, you´ll buy one now. Other book activities take place this week, as well. Authors are at a...

<p>NEW YORK -- The success of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and other conservative authors has led many publishers to turn more to the right.</p> <p>The operators of the Book-of-the-Month Club announced yesterday that they are forming a new club, as yet unnamed, devoted to works with a conservative point of view. Within the past month, Penguin Putnam and the Crown Publishing Group have started branches with a conservative bent.</p>

Hello everyone; I'm busily downsizing my life right at the moment preparing to go to grad school and live out of the trunk of my car (well, not really). But things that take up space are on the chopping block. One of them is my collection of conservative books. I've read them all, and they've been collecting dust. Yes, it's not a huge collection by any means, but it's there. Rather than Ebay them to someone who is probably going to resell them or have a garage sale, I'm going to give (yes, all you have to do is reimburse...

TWO YEARS AGO, "historian" Michael Bellesiles gained national fame for his book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," in which he posited that gun ownership in early America was rare and that there was no historical basis on which to claim that the Second Amendment protected individual rights to bear arms. His book won the Bancroft Award, the highest American award for a history book. Then objective reporters and historians began picking apart his book. What they found was a mountain of lies. Bellesiles left out most historical evidence that contradicted his theory — evidence which...