Bookworm Room

Tweet Students, not normally a personally wealthy group, are all for redistributing other people’s money.  Apparently, though, they draw the line at redistributing the fruits of their own labors: The next step is to get the students to listen to Jon Lovitz’s F-Bomb laden rant and understand that, whether we’re talking grades or money, it [...]

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Tweet From Season 1 of The Simpsons (waaaay back in 1990), comes “Bart the General“: After defending Lisa from school bully Nelson Muntz, Bart becomes Nelson’s latest target. Sick of the harassment and torment, Bart, Grampa Simpson, and Herman (a slightly deranged military antique store dealer with a missing arm) rally the town’s children into [...]

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Tweet The other day, Zombie put up a post that resonated with me on more levels than you can imagine.  It turns out that Zombie deciding to drop in on a lecture at UC Berkeley (my alma mater) to hear a lecture by an English as a Second Language, or ESL, professor (my father’s job), [...]

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Tweet Sproul Hall houses UC Berkeley’s administration.  Back in pre-computer days, when you wanted to get anything done (i.e., enroll in classes or get forms or whatever), you had to go to Sproul.  The lines at Sproul were always ridiculously long and slow.  Way too often, after I’d stood in line seemingly forever, just as [...]

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Tweet California used to have the finest public education system in America.  It wasn’t lack of funding that killed it; it was Leftist corruption and insanity.  Don’t believe me?  Read these two articles. From Bruce Kesler:  Important Report On The Sinkhole That Is Higher Education From Donald Douglas: California State Colleges and Universities May Screen [...]

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Tweet Throughout my legal career, the Harvard Law grads of my generation and after have bewildered me.  The ones I met practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area, more often than not, were distinguished by two things:  lousy legal skills and strident aggression.  I was pretty sure that this perception on my part wasn’t simply [...]

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Tweet [My friend Lulu wrote this post. Now you'll know what I already know about her: she's extremely bright, well-informed, analytical, and morally centered.] Andrew Breitbart didn’t just try to fix the existing problems. He challenged the entire narrative as presented to us by the Left. In my small way I will attempt to do [...]

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Tweet I’ve got a new post up at PJ Tatler: The University of Southern California (“USC”), an expensive private university in Los Angeles, used to rejoice in the nickname “University of Spoiled Children.”  I’m happy to report (my tone is dryly sarcastic as I write this) that the University is doing its best to ensure [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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.  [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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