5th June 2009, 06:16 pm
Congratulations to this week’s winners.
Council: Mere Rhetoric - Abbas: Olmert Offered Us The West Bank And The Right Of Return, But It Wasn’t Good Enough
Noncouncil: Commentary Magazine–Michael J. Totten - The Mother of All Myths
Complete voting here.
5th June 2009, 04:59 pm
I recently received a Facebook alert showing the 15 books of a friend that she considered life changing. Here are mine in no particular order.
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- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig – When my life got crazy, I always found comfort in this book.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie – I wish I could take this book and inject its wisdom into my DNA. I still have my tattered copy from high school freshman year.
- Holidays In Hell – PJ O’Rourke. Funniest book I ever read, and the only book I took with me to both Japan and Africa.
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac – The Beats searched for the divine in the mundane – an exercise in Zen that I admire and fail miserably at.
- Stranger In a Strange Land - Heinlein would have invented a better religion than LRH with this book had he wanted to do so.
- Ubik – Philip K. Dick’s classic that begs to this day for a movie. Are we alive or dead – a dream within a dream? This short book poses deep questions about perception and the nature of reality.
- Angry Candy – Harlan Ellison – I have grown into Ellison’s middle-aged frustration that he outlined here.
- The Panda’s Thumb – Stephen Jay Gould helped me to understand one of the most elegant yet complex theories ever invented – the theory of evolution. This is the first book of his that I read – but it wouldn’t be the last.
- Good Night Moon - Margaret Wise Brown – A children’s book that I memorized while reading our son to sleep. The ultimate example of warmth and coziness.
- Japan: Story of a Nation – Japanese history in a nutshell by a foreigner who truly understood the Japanese the best, Edwin Reischauer.
- Art of War – Sun Tzu/On War – von Clausewitz – Nearly 2000 years and 2 continents separate the works of these two military geniuses, but I view their works as two chapters in the same book.
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli – The first chapter in that book that explains the sources, uses and abuses of power. As relevant in today’s Obamanation as it was when it was written 500 years ago.
- And the Band Played On – Randy Shilts’s classic on the spread of a virus, and how society and politics enabled it on it’s deadly path.
- The Logic of Failure – Dietrich Dorner -Why do complex systems fail and how does the human mind play a critical role in that failure? A must read for anyone involved in complex projects such as engineering or software design.
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – This book is so funny that I think I have to introduce it to my son. Adams’s creativity is beyond compare and the humor is timeless.
5th June 2009, 11:11 am
I consider him the second – after Jimmy Carter. Still a good article.
It started in a speech he gave in 2007 when he stated, “Whatever we once were, we’re no longer a Christian nation.” At that same speech he criticized Christian leaders, claiming they have used their religion for political purposes.
I guess he thinks “Jihad” is a Christian word.
He repeated again that “America is not a Christian nation” a few weeks later. Little was made of it during the Presidential campaign because the media protected Obama from controversy at all costs. Either that or they just didn’t grasp for themselves the “Dhimmi” implications Obama’s words had for Muslims around the world.
