The ugly specter of sex-selection abortion is a reality in Asia, and unfortunately not just in China. Modern technology has met old attitudes and made this possible. It is legal here in the USA de facto, but not much practiced […]
Culture
The Fate of Planned Parenthood: It Isn’t Just About Abortion
In the last two weeks votes were taken on whether Title X should continue to fund Planned Parenthood’s work in pregnancy prevention, prenatal care, and education. No Federal money, and to my knowledge no state money, funds Planned Parenthood’s abortion […]
Are Corporations People?
The ‘corporation’ has been an item of controversy in the past, and not only on the left. This The Economist article, “Peculiar people,” is a good primer on the issue. I would add that: 1. Most corporations in America are not ‘big […]
Different Kinds of Freedom
Here is a quotation from Aldous Huxley’s 1946 foreword to Brave New World: “As political or economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty […]
Dear Urban Cyclists: Go Play in Traffic
P. J. O’Rourke has taken off on the absurdity of bicycles. However, there are some people that really need and use them, and I’m thinking of “Los Midnight Riders” from my earlier post. There does need to be some safe […]
The Uses of Classical Music in the Public Square
It turns out that classical music in the public square has a function of value. Adolescents tend to disperse from where it is played, so even such as McDonalds are now discovering the delights of the Western classical music tradition. […]
An Amazing Millay Sonnet
This sonnet by Edna St Vincent Millay has, for some reason, been sitting on my desk for a year or so, and I just found it. Keep in mind that it was written in 1939, thirty years before men actually […]
Moms
Abby Wisse Schachter, in a recent Weekly Standard, unfortunately not available to non-subscribers, finds fault with both the Tiger Mom and her chief opponent on the ground that one cares about achievement, the other about following your bliss, but neither seems […]
Chinese Parenting, Part II: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior
Here is David Brooks defending the upper middle class American approach to parenting. He declares that Amy Chua sheltered her daughters from the kind of social interactions that teach us how to deal with people in the real world. In […]
Chinese Parenting, Part I: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior
This article is not only interesting for its own sake, but because it illustrates a cultural division that has been raging in mixed Asian-Anglo communities such as Irvine, California. There are not separate school systems, but there are “Asian” churches […]