Bookworm Room

Tweet As I’ve noted before, although merely (and gratefully) comfortable myself, I live in an affluent community.  I am a Marin resident, after all.  In response to this affluence, the local middle and high schools, both public and private, have all jumped on the bandwagon to require “community service” as a prerequisite for grade promotion [...]

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Tweet There is a pregnancy epidemic right now at the high school where I used to run a girls’ group. All the time I am shocked and saddened to see another young girl with a growing belly or another with babe in arms. There is no stigma at all. Whatever happened to shame or pressuring [...]

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Tweet I love my son dearly and he dearly loves me right back.  He’s bright, exceptionally well-coordinated and, if I do say so myself, he’s very good-looking.  He’s also selfish, hyper-competitive, lazy, ill-mannered and a total slob.  I have been working for years on all those traits and there has definitely been some improvement, but [...]

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Tweet I have friends who have taught in inner city schools.  Without exception, they have told me that, if a child’s parents are drug-addled, the school lunch may be the only meal the child gets.  There is a tremendous virtue to feeding starving children. Having said that, I found revealing a statement Michelle Obama made [...]

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Tweet Do you think this story is real or a hoax?  If real, it’s terribly disturbing.  If it’s a hoax, well, it’s also terribly disturbing that someone would do something like that.  Right now, Noisy Room is assuming it’s real but, because NR is committed to honest reporting, any useful information one way or another [...]

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Tweet More than a hundred years ago, writing in a deeply religious era, Robert Browning observed “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  Perhaps it’s no surprise that today, in a society with a pop and media culture dominated by secularists who have abandoned entirely the notion of [...]

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Tweet There is a post zooming around the liberal side of the internet, in which a mom says her son is gay . . . no, he’s not . . . yes, he is . . . who really cares?  The genesis for this post was the fact that her 5 year old son wanted [...]

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Tweet This is the kind of thing my kids have to suffer through:

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Tweet Some of you may have been aware of a very ugly situation that started when NewsRealBlog concluded that one of its contributors (not an employee, but a contributor), displayed a truly unhealthy sexual interest in young children.  Although the editors at NewsRealBlog are conservative, they also respect an individual’s right to privacy.  However, if [...]

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Tweet Some days seem to crystallize some of our society’s more discouraging trends. In my mental health work on the front lines I see a great deal of what the chattering classes cluelessly opine about. Today, for some reason, I saw, one after the other, a series of young women with similar problems and, as [...]

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Tweet By now you’ve all read that Levi Johnston is backing off from the slanders he stated about the Palin family and, to give him credit, he’s doing so public.  What intrigued me was the fact that he attributed his lies to “youthful indiscretion.”  Aside from the fact that he told those lies less than [...]

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Tweet I was at my child’s school the other day, and happened to glance at the daily handout the children receive.  It had the usual special announcements and ended with “Today’s Patriotic Quotation.”  I was rather pleased to see that there was a patriotic quotation included (on a daily basis, yet).  Reading the quotation, though, [...]

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Tweet The dodo, as you may recall, is extinct.  I wonder, though, how many people remember why the dodo became extinct.  It was because, lacking any serious natural predators in their homeland of Mauritius, the dodos were a bit too friendly to incoming colonists (and their animals), and simply allowed themselves to be eaten into [...]

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Tweet Two days ago, I brought to your attention the fact that the San Francisco School Board — despite facing a $113 million dollar budget shortfall over the next two years, despite its admission that it will be cutting summer school and academic programs, and despite the fact that there has not been a sudden [...]

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Tweet As you have probably guessed from my blog silence this weekend, I have been heavily engaged in various family activities, many of which seemed to involve soccer balls or (this weekend) footballs.  I haven’t had lots of time to think about current events (which must, in any event, take a back seat to the [...]

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Tweet This is an entirely  hypothetical scenario, because my daughter is only 12, and I’m not planning on her dating for at least another fifteen or twenty years, if not more.  However, the sad fact is that, contrary to my entirely reasonable wishes, the dating scene is going to start in three or four years [...]

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Tweet My views on abortion have changed mightily over the years.  The selfish, immature side of me still longs for a pro-choice label, but the mature, moral side of me has concluded that, subject to a few exceptions, pro-Life is the way to go.  I won’t expand on that right now, but you can see [...]

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Tweet My daughter’s Spanish class has spent the last couple of days watching a movie.  I know many people who learned English by watching American television, so I don’t have a problem with using movies as a teaching device.  I do, however, have a big problem with the movie chosen — La Misma la Luna [...]

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Tweet In Marin County, spanking a child is a very dangerous activity.  Although spanking is not illegal, it’s enough to entangle you with Child Protective Services and, from that moment on, parenting life as you know it is over.  Despite the danger, when my kids were little, I spanked them.  With two unguided missiles, sometimes [...]

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Tweet The first scandal that unfolded was an autobiographical confession from Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar.”  Jennings proudly wrote that, when he elicited from a teenage boy the fact that the teenager was sexually involved with an adult man, Jennings didn’t flinch.  Unconcerned about such minutiae as statutory rape, child abuse, and pedophilia, Jennings [...]

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Tweet I’ve been nostalgic lately, and have been thinking a lot about my favorite stories and books from my elementary school days in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  One story I particularly remember from my time as a 4th grader was about a teacher who had in her class a girl from a very [...]

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Tweet I have a bunch of open tabs on my monitor, so I’m just going to jumble all of the stuff here, in one post: On Obama, the UN, and the World: I noted yesterday that Obama seems to have a huge problem with the more democratic nations in the world, and a corresponding affinity [...]

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Tweet The conservative internet is appropriately riled by a video of New Jersey public school children singing a song to the Obama: Lyrics ======== Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said that all must lend a hand [?] To make this country strong again Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said we must [...]

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Tweet I’m struggling to figure out if there’s a larger message to the true story I’m about to tell, or if it just reflects the virulent sibling rivalry that my children feel towards each other.  As my daughter herself said when she realized how successful the new regime is, “We’re not very nice people, are [...]

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Tweet The American and world media go into a screaming frenzy whenever American or Israeli troops injure or kill a child.  They do this despite the fact that such incidents are rare and, more significantly, they are aberrant:  both the American and the Israeli military go out of their way to avoid injuring civilians, even [...]

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