New Year’s Day is the most active-minded holiday, because it is the one where people evaluate their lives and plan and resolve to take action.
CULTURE
A Letter from a Child
Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But you don't need a dictator...
Books: Another Ayn Rand Novel for Our Times
A book for Americans.
Choosing The Right College
There is so much for high school seniors and their parents to know about colleges that they not only need to get a lot of information but also need to make sure it is the right kind of information. A number of college guides have useful information but, unfortunately,...
Multiculturalism is No Boon to Education, But an Agent of Anti-Western Ideology
By reshaping the curriculum, the purveyors of “diversity” in the classroom calculatedly seek to prevent students from grasping the objective value to human life of Western culture–a culture whose magnificent achievements have brought man from mud huts to moon landings.
Not Much: What Will They Learn in College?
When parents plunk down $20, $30, $40 and maybe $50 thousand this fall for a year's worth of college room, board and tuition, it might be relevant to ask: What will their children learn in return? The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) ask that question in...
TJ Walker’s Secret to Foolproof Presentations
Many books offer great advice. Some are so powerful they change your mind on issues you consider settled. Very few are so clear you can learn something about thinking just by reading them. TJ Walker's Secret to Foolproof Presentations is all three. At first...
Aiding Willpower
I think willpower draws on a kind of reservoir of emotional energy. Because it is so important to be able to call on willpower when I need it, I do several things to conserve that energy by reducing how often I need willpower: 1) I schedule my activity so it matches...
Vicious Academic Racists Take On “The Asian Menace” at The University of California
Ward Connerly, former University of California Regent, has an article, "Study, Study, Study -- A Bad Career Move" in the June 2, 2009 edition of Minding the Campus (www.mindingthecampus.com) that should raise any decent American's level of disgust for what's routinely...
Three Good Things
Here's a daily practice I learned from Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness. Once each day, write down three good things that happened in the last 24 hours. You can write them before going to bed or first thing in the morning. You can...
College Education: To Much of a “Good Thing”?
Even if the "stimulus" package doesn't seem to be doing much to stimulate the economy, it is certainly stimulating many potential recipients of government money to start lining up at the trough. All you need is something that sounds like a "good thing" and the ability...
Tell Me Everything You Know
I have invented a new educational game. I call it "Tell Me Everything You Know." Here is how the game works in my grammar class: I write a sentence on the board, set a time limit, and then have the students write down every grammatical fact they can name about the...
Setting Standing Orders
I'm a believer in using checklists and notes as memory aids. But sometimes you need to be able to rely on your own memory. This is particularly true for things you want to remember every time, like: Remember the car keys. Pronounce that word PREF-ur-u-buul, not...
Praise Your Child’s Thinking
Daily life offers us parents many opportunities to strengthen our children 's minds. One way to do that is by noticing and taking advantage of opportunities to praise our children's thought. "Yes, that's right." "Very true," "I didn't know you knew that!" "You...
The United States Of America And Islam Have Nothing Fundamental In Common
We are in the ongoing war between reason and faith. An American president has just yielded to the enemy.
Sharia Law: Coming to An American Law Court Near You?
Sharia is a complex and comprehensive unity that traditional Muslims believe to be the unalterable law of Allah. To open the door to one aspect of it is only to open the door to the rest — which inevitably will result in the institutionalized subjugation of women and non-Muslims, and the extinguishing of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.
New ‘Star Trek’ Movie is Bland, Not Bold
Kirk is a playboy, Spock is tortured and everyone sounds like they’re reading from a script.
Physics By Induction: The Genius of Learning Science The Proper Way
My students had the extreme good fortune of being taught physics by David Harriman, a scholar of physics who is currently writing a book on the influence of philosophy on the history of physics. With his vast knowledge of physics and pedagogy, Mr. Harriman designed a...
Jesus Christ or John Galt? The Republican Party’s Identity Crisis
Republicans who support capitalism need to understand that those who combine religion with politics are their enemies, and must be ostracized from the party. In order to be successful, they need to defend capitalism on ethical grounds, which means recognizing that their best pitchman is not Jesus Christ, but John Galt.
Part III: The Bumpy Road to Individualism – Conclusion
By the end of the Italian Renaissance the battle remained horrifically one-sided. Collectivism is the political expression of altruism, i.e., that each man should live for others. Altruism is a known and widely accepted moral code. It has been the foundation of the...
Part II: The Bumpy Road toward Individualism
Individualism began as a doctrine implicit in the Ancient Greek view of man, best captured in their art and in Aristotelian philosophy. That view consisted essentially of reality being knowable and the base of all knowledge, and of man as a heroic being. Such a view...
Part I: The Bumpy Road To Individualism
With the rise of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt (between c. 5000 and 4000 BCE), men’s social groupings expanded. Previously, the social groupings of prehistoric man had slowly developed from family to clan to tribe. The advent of the Neolithic...
The Real Math Magic: Understanding vs Memorizing
These children are not treated like human calculators, they are treated like thinking beings. And when they truly grasp the concepts they are using, when they can explain them fully and articulately, when they retain them because they are not memorizing, but understanding–that is real math magic.
The Religious Left at The Democratic Convention
The Democrats are justified in adopting religion as their base, because religion belongs on the left.
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