Bookworm Room

It’s already old news to you that statistical data shows that Obama is the most polarizing president ever.  Much as I’d like to blame Obama, it seems that, rather than causing the polarization, he reflects it: One Gallup chart ranks presidents from Eisenhower to Obama on polarization during their third year in office. Obama is [...]

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Back in the day, I thought the University of California was overpriced, because the professors lived like (Marxist) kings and taught like fools (boring fools, I might add).  It’s only gotten worse, as the professors still live like kings and teach like fools, but the tuition has skyrocketed, far beyond anything the middle class can [...]

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American universities pay lip service to multiculturalism and inclusiveness, but one of their despicable secrets is that, while conservative and Jewish speakers are ignored or shouted down with no push-back whatsoever from the university administrations, pro-Palestinian speakers are given a bully pulpit.  The worse their rhetoric — the more anti-inflammatory and antisemitic — the more [...]

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Whoopi Goldberg got some airplay on conservative sites the other day for pointing out something I’d already learned by the time I was 13 — Leftism is great in theory, but it doesn’t work so well in the real world. To that “duh” moment (although I doubt it will convert her from worshiping at the [...]

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We spend a lot of time talking here about the way our Progressive culture infantilizes young people.  Just think about the way the whole liberal world had a collective head explosion when Newt suggested that young people get jobs to learn the value of discipline and achieve the satisfaction of wages.  But all is not [...]

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Whew!  That was a long drive home.  We got caught in traffic jams caused by two accidents, so we got to spend an extra couple of hours in the car.  Still, better to sit around because of an accident than to be in an accident.  I’ve done both and prefer the former. While we were [...]

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Regular readers know Marica, who occasionally comments here.  If you like her comments, as I do, you might want to check out the blog she’s started, Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life.  While you’re there, be sure to read this post, about the Left’s smug belief in the righteousness of its “scientific” views, and about [...]

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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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In a previous post, I opined that spoiled kids who don’t want to deal with their student loans are one of the motivating forces behind the Wall Street protests.  Flush with neo-1960s pride, students have been pouring out of classrooms.  That’s not news.  One expects that from the young, Marxist-informed and excitable. What is news [...]

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I hated UC Berkeley.  Loathed it.  Despised it.  Couldn’t shake the dust off my feet fast enough after I graduated.  But graduate I did, and pretty well too, if my Phi Beta Kappa key has anything to say about it.  Knowing my feelings about UCB, my daughter asked a good question:  “Why didn’t you transfer [...]

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I’m growing very fond of Jill Tucker, a “journalist” at the San Francisco Chronicle who gives me lots of meat for my blogging.  A couple of weeks ago, I looked at her incurious (some might say lazy) reporting about the decision the Oakland Children’s Museum’s made to cancel a controversial art show consisting of pictures [...]

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My Dad was a teacher, and he worked like a dog.  Of course, back in the day, he got a salary that was only slightly above poverty level, so his hard work wasn’t really the teaching itself.  Instead, it was all the private lessons he gave on the side.  He put in as many hours [...]

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Last night was back-to-school night at my daughter’s new high school.  I was deeply impressed.  The facility is beautiful; the classrooms are clean, bright and well-maintained; the teachers are engaging; the test scores are over-the-top; and the expensive extras (fancy computers, lab equipment, etc.) are all in place.  My daughter loves her new school.  All [...]

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Some friends of mine have put together a clever blog.  (If you follow me on facebook, you’ve already seen me trying to help them out.)  It’s called “A Kid’s I View” and it offers travel posts that kids write.  As a mom, I see it as a good resource for kids’ writing exercises; and as [...]

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Kidkaroo, in a comment to my earlier post about the federal requirement that I racially classify my children, explains that, in today’s South Africa, racism is still alive and well — it just runs in the opposite direction from the old days: Down here in the “new” South Africa, we have something similar; I have [...]

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It’s the start of another school year, and I’m filling out forms again.  This year, many of the forms are on-line, which is mostly a blessing.  The “curse” part, though, is that the forms do not allow for any flexibility in answering a question that invariably irritates me, which is the one that forces us [...]

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Much has been written about playwright David Mamet’s coming-out as a conservative and his reasons for so doing, but there is still much gold to be mined from Mamet’s mind.   Today’s National Review Online revisits Mamet in this stellar piece by Matthew Shaffer that contains this one gem that perfectly encapsulates some of the [...]

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The news is good, at least for the time being, but I was rather amazed to learn that JROTC, which has been around since before WWI, all over America, is “controversial”: The San Francisco school board gave the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps yet another vote of confidence Tuesday, ensuring that the controversial military leadership [...]

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My dad was a California teacher and a member of the teachers’ union.  He’d also been a communist in his youth in Weimar Germany and socialist Israel, so you’d think a union would have been a comfortable fit (although he was a Democrat by this time). In fact, he loathed the union. He had two [...]

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I’ve often heard people use the expression “he saw the handwriting on the wall.”  I wonder, though, how many know that it originates in the Book of Daniel, which is a part of the Old Testament.  I’m reasonably sure that most of my readers are familiar with the story of Daniel, but for those who [...]

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I admire my blog friends.  They are people I know only through their writing, but their writing has convinced me that they are intelligent, thoughtful, informed, and that I admire and often share their moral principles.  I am always happy to recommend their work. Sometimes, though, my blog friends, who always write and think well, [...]

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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 and [...]

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My son is extremely bright, but reluctant to push himself.  He’s averse to challenges, and would infinitely prefer to have things fall into his lap.  Since he’s a natural athlete and mathematician, many things do fall into his lap.  Unfortunately for him, writing is not one of those things.  Combine his naturally execrable writing skills [...]

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Jesse Kornbluth was again good enough to visit my post commenting upon his article lauding Andrew Sullivan as a blogger amongst bloggers.  If I was a guy, and he and I had met in person, I would have slapped up on the back with a cheery “Hey, Jesse man, great to see you again.”  I’ve [...]

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Speaking of Harvard, I just got a gander at Harvard Magazine, which has a smugly grinning Andrew Sullivan on the cover, as the exemplar of “The New Media.”  I thought the article would be about bloggers generally, but the table of contents tells me I’m wrong:  “World’s Best Blogger?” it asks.  It then explains that [...]

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