Bookworm Room

In the past week, two decisions came out regarding the way in which private organizations spend their money.  The first decision was the Obama administration’s announcement that businesses in America must provide their employees with insurance that covers birth control, sterilization, and abortifacients.  The only exception was for businesses that had no employees other than [...]

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Does history repeat itself? I fervently hope not. Ok, I have grudgingly thrown my support behind Mitt Romney. It’s not that I am excited about Romney as a candidate, but I am genuinely excited about the need to get Obama out of office before he does irreversible damage to this country. But, here is where [...]

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Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z. I’ve been reviewing our last few [...]

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What the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors don’t realize (yet) is that they have been suckered into becoming the agents of their own enslavement. Orwell had it so right in defining the Left because he was a man of the Left. The term “Orwellian” now refers to the Left’s use of terms to mean the [...]

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Maybe it’s Americans’ innate capitalist instinct — the need to commercialize everything — that is our true bulwark against a Russian or French style revolution. Sadly, though, it’s that same acquisitive quality, the one that sees most American young people grow up as Veruca Salt, that encourages the temporary ravages and inconveniences of publicly staged [...]

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A short time ago, my priest gave a sermon that addressed the deep sorrow and sense of worthlessness internalized by our parishioners that were unemployed. The point of the sermon, actually, was how the unemployed felt “useless” and demeaned for being unable to provide for their families, but that nobody in God’s family should ever [...]

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My mother, who gets a lot of her news from the MSM, is nevertheless slowly becoming aware of the Solyndra scandal — not just the fact that a big solar panel company went bankrupt, but that it went bankrupt at great cost to her, because the Obama administration had bet the farm (or should I [...]

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Romney, when he said “corporations are people” was correct in two ways:  (1) As a matter of law, corporations are considered people, an approach that justifies taxing them.  (2) Corporations are agglomerations of people:  they are owned by people, run by people and provide goods benefiting people.  It’s a Marxist delusion to pretend that something [...]

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Given this blog’s recent flogging of the China versus U.S. (“us”) question, here is  a primary example of how China may surpass the U.S. by becoming more business friendly as it decentralizes while the U.S. risks having to learn the lessons of socialist history all over again as our over-regulated economy grinds down to a [...]

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I read someone today who said that Jesus must have been a socialist, because he didn’t seek profit, which is the hallmark of capitalism.  Instead, gave away his time, energy and skills to those who could not pay.  Since he didn’t have a profit motive, he must have been a capitalist.  QED.  It was a [...]

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Is our democracy germinating the seeds of its own destruction? Alexis de Toqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has come. It is not yet gone. Democracy  in ancient Athens lasted about 250 years. We in the United [...]

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When it comes to jiu-jitsu, my dojo is a pure Brazilian jiu-jitsu school.  I’ve even attended a seminar given by one of the Gracies.  Brazilian jiujitsu is a thing of beauty, since it’s all about the physics of movement. The people who run my dojo — and truly, you could not find nicer people anywhere [...]

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I know I’ve mentioned here before that I have lousy vision.  Really lousy.  I started wearing contacts when I was 12, and they served me well for decades.  Then, I had babies and my eyes rebelled against the contact lenses available 14 or so years ago.  Still, I don’t give up. Because contacts lenses are [...]

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Believe it or not, in an act of near heroic intellectual prestidigitation, I’m going to explain to you how Little Women, housekeeping, socialism and capitalism are all related.  Or at least I’m going to try.  Here goes: One of my all time least favorite movies is the 1994 version of Little Women.  It is a [...]

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I know this will come as a surprise to all of you, but I was not born wise or well informed.  I blush to think of some of the behaviors in which I indulged, and the ideas that I held, when I was younger. When I was a very little girl, I picked up from [...]

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D.E. Stevenson, born in Edinburgh in 1892, wrote 42 novels in the years between 1923 and 1970.  Most are out of print, so I’ve had the pleasure of reading only the small handful I’ve stumbled across in local libraries over the years.  She writes about the British and Scottish middle class, always with a loving, [...]

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“Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” — C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Neither Data nor Mr. Spock, two relentlessly logical creations, could ever be liberals or Democrats or Progressives, or whatever the Hell else they’re calling themselves nowadays.  (For convenience, I’ll just lump them all together under the [...]

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Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit.  The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win [...]

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In his latest opining about world events, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has certainly managed to assure that every one of his illustrious predecessors is rolling in his grave.  Please recall that Williams is the same Church prelate who advanced Sharia law. He’s now calling for the end of economic growth the save the [...]

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Okay, Steven Chu wasn’t as explicit as my post caption suggests.  Nevertheless, buried within his peculiar remarks about companies deserting the U.S. Chamber of Congress is a profound disdain for the American way of doing business: Our energy secretary applauds and encourages companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its position on climate [...]

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I have a question: what are “profits” and why do so many people associate “profit” with something bad? Oh, I understand the envy mentality that says, “if someone is earning profits, it’s unfair and I demand my fair share.” I also understand the entitlement mentality of people that say, “I have a right to food, [...]

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As you may recall, I said at the beginning of the summer that I was going to introduce capitalism into the house by giving my children big chores with meaningful rewards.  This plan worked fairly well.  It wasn’t quite the juggernaut I’d hoped for, with the kids taking care of all the backlog in the [...]

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Here in California, the hands-free cell phone law went into effect July 1.  (By the way, does anyone know whether there was an actual increase in traffic accidents after cell phones became popular?)  This morning, I heard a story that said that 1,800 fires and dozens of injuries resulted from fireworks last year.  Of course, in [...]

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This is the beauty of the marketplace:  American Apparel can use its advertisements for clothes to advance a political agenda that urges us to dissolve our borders (which probably makes a wholesome change from the semi-pornographic ads it ran before) and I can refuse ever to buy these clothes, and urge all of you not [...]

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I’m still enjoying every page of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, and I thought I’d share with you a few more points that I thought either summed up perfectly something most of us have already figured out or explained why I’d been [...]

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