My Favorite Books

Stained Glass
Witness
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography
The Iliad
James
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Animal Farm
Doctrine of Endless Punishment
Marco Polo, If You Can
Who's on First
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1984
The Hunt for Red October
A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss


Bill Peacock's favorite books »

Links

The Administration’s New Approach to um, er, poverty, no wait, political instability, no, let’s try social unrest, hold on …

A sampling of recent remarks from John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism:
“What I want to do today is to talk about the new thinking and the new approach that President Obama brings to the task of safeguarding the American people from violent extremism and terrorism.”
“The president understands that military power, [...]

National Geographic and the 1980s

When I was born, my grandparents gave me the wonderful gift of a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazine. In addition to supplying a curious young boy with many years of amazement over the wonders of creation, at 50 years and counting it must have been a great value—especially when one factors in the rampant [...]

Computer Prices and Creative Destruction

I ran across a 1989 product comparison of several top-of-the-line computers. Including one from Dell, which featured an 80286 (20 MHz) processor and a 40 MB hard drive, all for the bargain price of $4,099!
I remember consistently paying $3,000 for a new computer from Tandy (my first one, with an 8086 processor purchased in 1986) and [...]

Stubborn Facts and Stubborn People

Ronald Reagan once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” And he is right. Sometimes, the truth becomes almost impossible to ignore. I think we are seeing that now in the national debates over climate change and health care.
Yet, even more stubborn than facts are people. It is a person’s worldview, more than the facts that they [...]

Our Expensive Energy Future

This is a glimpse of the future under the energy efficiency regime being pushed in Texas and across the U.S. The picture shows a new home in the SOL neighborhood, three miles east of downtown Austin. It is being built on the premise that energy efficiency is the cheapest option for “new” energy.

A new [...]

At Least One Nobel Prize Make Sense

The recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences shows that at least one of the Nobel prizes is based on common sense.
The prize was awarded to Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University and Oliver E. Williamson at the University of California, Berkeley for their work on the “tragedy of the commons.” As John Tierney [...]

Marxism Isn’t Enough

William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale, examined the anti-Christian and anti-capitalist mindset which, even in 1951, was pervasive among the Yale University faculty. The book caused quite a bit of controversy—not because it wasn’t true, but because the radical liberals/socialists/communists in American academia and other institutions (the press, government, etc.) [...]

Quote of the Day

“Some scholars believe that the spread of democracy, which then put land ownership and wealth in the hands of many, and the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production of goods possible and spread wealth throughout society, are at the root of the environmental crisis,” and “By destroying paganism, white Christianity helped to exploit nature.” [...]