Bookworm Room

Tweet I'm intransigently hostile to a great deal of modern pop music, because I consider it ugly, crude, vulgar, violent and hypersexualized. (I feel like saying here, "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) I don't even like Radio Disney because, although it presents the slighter cleaner end of the [...]

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Tweet Frederica Mathewes-Green writes a screamingly, hair-pullingly funny article about her failed effort to book a flight for herself and her family. We've all been there: the extremely nice Indian phone operator who never quite understands your American English; the fact that, when dealing with a big company, every employee has different ideas about corporate [...]

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Tweet My son belongs to a music group that functions in a large urban area, but has suburban satellites. My son trains with one of those satellites. In the days leading up to performances, all of the satellite groups descend on the urban center for final rehearsals. I got to audit one of those rehearsals [...]

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Tweet Some time ago, when I was still blogging at Blogger, I wrote a post asking what an American theocracy would look like.  I asked this question because it occurred to me that, while liberals were frantically throwing around statements about Bush's "ultra conservatism" and "scary fundamentalism," none were articulating what they thought would happen [...]

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Tweet Working away today, I caught an NPR story about social and behavioral scientists who are beginning to study altruisim and freeloading (which can be flipsides of each other). The results of the studies indicate that the healthiest groups (at least in economic models) are those that, not only do not reward freeloading, but actively [...]

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Tweet I did something I rarely do:  I made an impulse purchase of a just-released movie on DVD.  I simply couldn't resist buying  The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I then watched it again with the kids, and found it just as good as I remembered from viewing it [...]

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Tweet Faith is a tremendous virtue — when it comes to religion.  It has dubious value in the political field, as Thomas Sowell so neatly explains: What is more frightening than any particular policy or ideology is the widespread habit of disregarding facts. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey put it this way: "Demagoguery beats [...]

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Tweet I seem to be on a binge of books that make me wonder. Today's book is Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. This is a book I mentioned before in connection with my reflections on whether a religion can abandon founding tenets and still be considered true to [...]

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Tweet The whole Cynthia McKinney kerfuffle is a distillation of entitlement run amok.  McKinney, who belongs to a "protected" group (several, actually, since she's black, female and anti-Semitic), feels that she is entitled to treatment denied others:  she is entitled to refuse to wear her Congressional badge, which alerts the Capitol police to her special [...]

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Tweet In a rather stumbling way, I asked why immigrants don't love America, and said that I wished our schools would be required to teach students what's great about America.  Ironically, one day later, the Wall Street Journal published Peggy Noonan's elegant, lyrical reflection on the same point.  She begins by speaking of Medal of [...]

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Tweet The Drudge headline is that Sharon Stone advocates oral sex, but that's not really the whole story.  The real story is how this well-intentioned lady goes about carrying out her advocacy: She [Stone] explains, "I was in the store the other day and I watched a young girl trying on clothes, showing her abdomen. [...]

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Tweet I’m heading into another insanely busy day, so won’t post until later. However, I couldn’t wait to tell you about a disturbing book I’m reading called Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy. In it, Levy takes on the raunch culture that is developing around young women [...]

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