The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Yale Girls Are Sluts

On an elevator in the lobby of the Gaylord National Convention Center during CPAC, I spotted a smiling girl wearing a T-shirt that indicated she was a volunteer for the event. She was carrying a stack of books, and when I commented about this, she explained that she had received them as freebies, distributed in […]

Something For The Evangelical Atheists To Contemplate

— by Wombat-socho One of the most annoying things about the new crop of evangelical atheists – the people who not only don’t believe in God but are insistent that you shouldn’t either – is their ingrained belief that no intelligent person could possibly believe in God, and therefore anybody who does is stupid. This […]

Meanwhile, Elsewhere In The Culture War…

— compiled by Wombat-socho While Stacy is off trying to pound sense into the thick skulls of young Marxist wannabees, I feel compelled to help fill the content gap, and since I’ve actually been able to get some reading in between stints in the tax mines, I have a few things I’d like to recommend. […]

The Dahlia Lithwick Theory Fails

“Pick up the nearest book to you, turn to page 45. The first sentence explains your love life.” Does that make any sense at all? Of course not. She writes for Slate. OK, so the nearest book — atop a stack of books on my desk, to the right of my laptop — was Fred […]

A Death In Bedford Falls

— Wombat-socho Once in a while you trip over a book that normally you wouldn’t look twice at, and so far this month I’ve found two of them. The first is a peculiar beast: It’s A Wonderful Death is a noir sequel to Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie It’s A Wonderful Life, starring former New […]

Blood, Horror, And Other Things I Found At The Library

— Wombat-socho Unusually, we don’t have any leftover recommendations from the comments the last book post two weeks ago, although for those of you who missed it, there’s some words from Tom Kratman in the comments. Worth looking at. Going to start off with something from the Damning With Faint Praise file. Scrapyard Ship by […]

Veterans: The Next Generation

— Wombat-socho There’s never been any shortage of military vets among SF writers, the most obvious example being Robert Heinlein. More recently, David Drake and Joe Haldeman have sold a fair amount of books informed by their experiences in Vietnam, and between the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, it should surprise nobody that we have a […]

‘Silence of the Conservative Lambs’

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna employs that evocative phrase for the unwillingness of many people to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Diana West’s American Betrayal. He has written a quite literary and erudite examination of the problem, tending toward a conclusion that I am reluctant to endorse, i.e.: Are exaggerated fears of anti-Semitism […]

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