Bookworm Room

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 data." [...]

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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 itself. [...]

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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 identity; [...]

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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 Freedom [...]

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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. "Her [...]

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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 today: [...]

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