Let me tell you a story about a girl that you have never even heard of before. I never knew she existed until late last night. Now, I will never forget her name and face for as long as I live. My soul has been deeply touched in a way it has rarely been moved until now. But, for Susan and I, it is too late…

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In the first week of April someone at an outfit called The Washington Free Beacon actually noticed Washington’s love of war criminals, mobsters, terrorists and organ-traffickers. Despite the fact that the terrorized, trafficked, and lynched people were mere Serbs.

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It takes a special kind of hatred to repeatedly stab an infant through the heart. Last year, in the Jewish community of Itamar, North of Jerusalem, Palestinians invaded the home of Ruth and Udi Fogel. The parents were killed. Then the practitioners of peace went to work on the kids. Yoav (age 11), Elad (age 4) and three-month old Hadas were stabbed through the heart and had their throats slit. Word of the atrocities was greeted with jubilation on the Palestinian street; where candy was distributed to children to celebrate this great victory over the Jewish people.

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Consider paper towel dispensers.

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A Google translation of this March 23rd story from Republika Srpska’s “Fokus”:

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The internet has made it clear that there is no such thing as free speech, but, actually, I’m not so sure there really ever was.

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At first blush, the news stories of tweeted Palestinian and Israeli photos could be seen as two examples of the same dishonesty. But it doesn’t take much digging to realize these two things are not the same at all, despite how it’s presented in the press.

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My new book “Ayn Rand Nation” is out this week, and as the title indicates, it describes how the Russian-born philosopher has become a phenomenon in the thirty years since her death.

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The newswire just delivered a stunner. Davy Jones of the Monkees died today of a heart attack. He was 66 years old. I liked him and their music. They were the Beatles Lite. They were fun. They were goofy. They sang the kinds of songs we all could sing along with and smile when we did it. The Monkees were my Generation’s Milli Vanilli. But, eventually, they learned how to play their own instruments and became credible.

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I’ve been meaning to do an update on Sami Osmakac, the Albanian would-be Tampa bomber. Of course, now we know that the name “Osmakac,” which caused me to question whether the offender was Albanian at all, is actually “Osmankaj,” as this caption makes clear: “A general view of the house where naturalized American citizen Sami Osmakac, 25, was born, in the Osmankaj family compound in the village of Lubizde, Kosovo.” As we learn in the article below, “U.S. officials are using a different spelling for his last name.” Hmm.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

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So a young kid plays basketball while at Harvard, goes undrafted, gets dropped by two NBA teams, kicks around for a while, bums couches to sleep on in New York, ends up playing for the New York Knicks…and becomes a sensation.

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When we lived in the city, my wife and I would load our two small boys into a big double stroller I called “the bus” and roll on over to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see our friend Adelor, the lion. He would welcome us with a low reverberating roar that you’d feel vibrating your sternum. That was in the late 1990s.

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The Washington Post just ran this thought-provoking piece on the Arab Spring by former Soviet dissident refusenik and Israeli Parliamentarian Natan Sharansky. As I wrote last spring, Recent upheavals across the mideast from Egypt to Tunisia to Syria can be viewed through the prism of Sharansky’s ideas on democracy and even as validation of them. But in the messy aftermath of these hopeful uprisings, some are questioning whether the Arab world can handle freedom. In this piece, Sharansky offers his thoughts.

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Serb town protests over wave of asylum seekers (by Jaksa Scekic, Nov. 6)

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Dorothy Goldberg is fine.

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Ten years ago he wanted a plush toy dog for his birthday. We got it for him.

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Recall a posting of mine from the summer, concerning a July 4th Associated Press item saying that at his first hearing in June, Mladic had drawn his finger across his throat toward the Bosnian-Muslims in the public gallery. Knowing that if this had really happened, there would have been wide coverage and footage (since it’s exactly the kind of behavior the media and public look for in the Serb Villain we’ve constructed), a reader named Nikole combed through reports from the June hearing. There was nothing. Except this: an AP item with a female Bosnian-Muslim “victim” boasting that she made the menacing gesture toward Mladic.

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Doubtful. But the rest of Hollywood came out in force to celebrate the man who raped Miss America.

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As I read the details of the beauty salon slayings I was sickened to my stomach. Not only did Scott Dekraai take out his ex-wife but seven additional, innocent people as well. To further prove his evil, we now know he was also a coward. When arrested, he had several guns in his possession, was wearing a bullet-proof vest and surrendered meekly to the police for fear of being shot himself. What a man he is, huh?

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And this summer, I got my iPad. And realized that, despite what Jobs thought he invented back in  1976 (and later in 1984), this was the true “personal computer.” Indeed, it is so “personal” that it doesn’t seem like a “computer.” Instead, the technological became an extension of the discrete diverse tastes and interests of the individual. It’s not about buttons anymore; it’s about a most intimate of human activities — touch. And you can carry your entire life — books, music, work, etc. in a slim, sleek device.

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As the son of Cuban exiles, junior Florida senator Marco Rubio should be particularly sensitive to attempts at painting a people as crazed criminals, often done in service of an underlying political agenda. But in his speech last week at the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, Senator Rubio said, “The American armed forces have been one of the greatest forces of good….They stopped Nazism and Communism and other evils such as Serbian ethnic cleansing.”

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I once heard someone say, “George W. Bush got elected because he seemed like the kind of guy you could get a beer with. Romney seems more like the guy who’d fire you.” In terms of image, Romney should loosen up a bit, get someone to muss his hair. On substance, he should make the case for digging ourselves out of the mess created in part by ideologues–as opposed to effective, realistic managers. He should also give Americans some straight talk about our economy–and the fact that it is cyclical, which means that there are no simple, instantaneous, total fixes (No hopey changey dreams that materialize just because we speak beautifully about it).

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This year brought the Council of Europe’s report on the murder-for-organs scandal involving top echelons of the Kosovo Liberation Army, now wearing suits as Kosovo’s “legitimate” rulers. While top Albanian and Kosovo officials are being indicted for corruption, war crimes, illegal weapon hauling, and deep mob ties, a Brooklyn man from Albania was arraigned last week on charges of providing material support to terrorists and planning to join a radical group in Pakistan — just months after an Albanian Kosovar shot five American servicemen in Frankfurt, killing two. (Which hearkens back not only to last year’s “North Carolina Eight” that included two Kosovo Albanians and targeted a Marine base, but also to the 2007 Ft. Dix plot in which three Albanian-Americans wanted to “kill as many American soldiers as possible”.)

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“The European Union is based on the Nazi plans published in Berlin in 1942.” — Rodney Atkinson

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Throughout Hurricane Irene, the Army kept guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: a reminder that the phrase “duty, honor, country” really means something.

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My mother-in-law owned six roasters. Six large oval covered pans, coated in black enamel with white specks.

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A man died this week. He was 47 years old. He was not famous. TMZ never wrote about him. He was never invited to the White House to meet the President. He spent most of his time in a small office stocked with pastry and fruit juices when he wasn’t running back and forth to a school gym or coordinating lunchtime activities. But, there was something charmingly unique about him. I knew that from the first time I saw his shining eyes and warm smile. His name was John Sawaya and he was my friend.

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