Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.
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
Continue readingLast 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
Continue readingSome 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
Continue readingKidkaroo, 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
Continue readingIt’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
Continue readingMuch 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
Continue readingThe 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
Continue readingMy 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
Continue readingI’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
Continue readingI 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
Continue readingAs 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
Continue readingMy 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
Continue readingJesse 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
Continue readingSpeaking 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
Continue readingThere are a lot of University of California campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco (medical school only), UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, etc. Oh, about those last two: UC Irvine and UC Riverside have become the hotbeds of pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish activism. The
Continue reading