Bookworm Room

Tweet Yesterday, I wrote a post about the Ten Commandments.  Today, Dennis Prager published a long, deeply analytical, intelligent article about the Ten Commandments.  He’s right.  I’m right.  They are the Big Rules for a functioning society, and that is true whether you believe in God or not.  (That’s true even for the first rule, [...]

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Tweet When he was 6, my son suddenly started stealing things from his classmates.  Market value wasn’t the object.  Like a magpie, he went for the sparkling, brightly colored stuff.  Naturally, he got caught.  The school imposed appropriate consequences, but it was left to me to explain to him that stealing is bad, not just [...]

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Tweet There is a story that Josef Stalin, hearing mention of the Pope, asked dismissively ““How many divisions does the Pope have?”  The quotation, if true, is compelling, because it perfectly illustrates the Leftist viewpoint that the only power is that which comes at the point of a gun.  The notion of moral behavior and [...]

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Tweet The discussion on my recent climate change post has one side saying “expert consensus” and the other side saying “facts.”  Let me state something very important here:  An expert consensus is not a fact.  Experts used to think the sun revolved around the earth (wrong), that bad air caused disease (wrong), that spicy food [...]

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Tweet “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.”  — Deuteronomy, 24:16. One of the things that always struck me as bizarre about old-fashioned Christian antisemitism was how anachronistic it [...]

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Tweet I read someone today who said that Jesus must have been a socialist, because he didn’t seek profit, which is the hallmark of capitalism.  Instead, gave away his time, energy and skills to those who could not pay.  Since he didn’t have a profit motive, he must have been a capitalist.  QED.  It was [...]

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Tweet In connection with the British judges’ decision barring as foster parents people who disapprove of homosexuality, I posited that making gay marriage a Constitutionally protected civil right could expose conservative faiths to lawsuits.  Many had a hard time envisioning this, but legal expert Richard Epstein had exactly the same thought: To this day there [...]

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Tweet Rodney King got his 15 minutes of fame for (a) getting beaten up while resisting arrest; (b) having his name attached to some horrific riots; and (c) plaintively asking “Can we get along?”  The last is a great thought.  I’d like to get along with people better myself.  “Getting along,” though, presupposes that people [...]

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Tweet Ricky Gervais distinguished himself well yesterday by savaging the same people who usually savage us, the ordinary Americans.  The video makes for somewhat uncomfortable viewing, since the victims of Hollywood’s barbs are usually sitting anonymously in theaters and living rooms, not in the same room in which the insults are being issued.  Hollywood’s stars [...]

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Tweet One of my oldest blog friends is Patrick O’Hannigan, a devout Catholic and a true humanist.  He has written a simply gorgeous article over at the American Spectator, about religion’s role in the public square.  Being Patrick, he manages to take this often challenging subject, and weave into ruminations about Palin, the Kennedy clan, [...]

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Tweet Liam Neeson, who does the voice of Aslan the Lion in the Narnia movies, has upset people by claiming that Aslan could as easily be Allah or Buddha as he could be Christ: Ahead of the release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader next Thursday, Neeson said: ‘Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but [...]

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Tweet The Chris Coons-Christine O’Donnell debate over the First Amendment has cast into stark relief the fact that the Left believes the First Amendment’s purpose is to keep religious people out of the public square.  I’ve blogged on this point before, so I won’t belabor it.  I’ll only say briefly that the Amendment’s language, the [...]

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Tweet Two of my absolute favorite political writers, Peter Wehner and Jennifer Rubin, have chastised O’Donnell for her recently reported constitutional error.  I think that, perhaps, they’re being unfair.  It’s clear from reading the news reports that the Constitutional portion of the debate was intended to be a pile-up on O’Donnell: Also during the debate, [...]

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Tweet I have to admit to being a little suspicious of an AP report that has O’Donnell appropriately saying that there’s nothing in the constitution about separation of church and state (that, as you know, comes from a letter Jefferson wrote), but then states that she does not know that the 1st Amendment says that [...]

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Tweet You’ve all heard by now about the group of Massachusetts school children taken to a mosque where they were taught utterly fallacious history about Islam and America, and then led in prayer: A mosque spokesperson is seen teaching the children that in Mohammed’s 7th century Arabia women were allowed to vote, while in America [...]

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Tweet Abercrombie & Fitch is all about “the look.”  I mean, the whole point of the store is to get people, especially young people, to cough up money for “the look.”  To this end, the ads are soft porn, all aimed at showing the ultimate sexy cool. Have I mentioned that I hate the whole [...]

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Tweet In the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, the Left’s trump card has been the language in the First Amendment stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  All of us correctly understand this to mean that government cannot create a state faith, nor can it dictate the religious tenets [...]

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Tweet Sometimes, to their creator’s dismay, ideas take on a life of their own.  In the wake of Comedy Central’s decision to censor a South Park episode that didn’t actually draw Mohamed, but merely suggested the possibility of doing so, Molly Norris came up with the idea of “everybody draw Mohamed Day.” Then, terrified by [...]

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Tweet Wolf Howling has put together just a stellar post about the ongoing attacks on the Catholic church (along with a very nice link to yours truly).  If this is a subject that interests you — and it should, whether or not you’re a Catholic, because it goes to attacks on a pillar of Western [...]

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Tweet The media is making hay of the pedophilia scandal involving the Catholic Church.  I think that Leftists see issue this as the single brick, down at the bottom of the wall, that, if pulled at hard enough, will bring the whole edifice tumbling down. Just as Jews are persecuted because they symbolize justice (whether [...]

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Tweet Readers of my blog know that one of my personal bête noires is liberal indoctrination in public schools.  I blog about it frequently.  My last outing on that subject was here, and I’ll get back to that in a little bit.  First, though, I’d like you to see how one public school teacher saw [...]

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Tweet Shortly after I started practicing law, the California State Bar decided mandated that all lawyers must comply with annual “Minimum Continuing Legal Education” (“MCLE”) requirement.  I was instantly incensed, because it was immediately obvious to me that this had nothing to do with improving the practice of law and everything to do with providing [...]

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Tweet I went to church yesterday, as I periodically do when one of my children performs at a church service.  Since I don’t take communion, I can sit in the pew and watch people as they file back from the experience.  Some look businesslike, some contemplative, some uplifted and some, interestingly, look self-righteous.  It’s the [...]

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Tweet Brutally Honest brought to my attention the fact that the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUSA) has released a statement denouncing Israel in terms that a Hamas member or Ahmadinejad could easily love: The Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUSA) is about to release a report which denounces Israel as a “racist” [...]

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Tweet On the subject of the “secular humanism religion” that guides liberals, it’s informative to read this quotation from William Kristol, writing about Obama’s sudden imperative need to do away with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the American military: But the repeal is something that Obama campaigned on. He believes in it. But with all [...]

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