Here’s what I don’t understand about garbage like this, which — as Glenn Reynolds points out — would never be tolerated if it were directed against women:  why do women with sons put up with it, knowing their silence supports hatred against their boys?  Why do they support anti-male “affirmative action” when they know someday their sons will be on the receiving end of legalized discrimination?  I don’t get it.

Here’s another courageous column on one of our society’s biggest problems.

Did y’all know that Anni-Frid Lyngstad of ABBA fame is a princess? Since 1992, when she married Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss of Plauen, she has been known as Her Serene Highness Princess Anni-Frid Synni Reuss, Countess of Plauen.

You’ve learned something here today.

Okay, I know you’re dying for it. Here’s her hit single, which we can blame Phil Collins for:

And with ABBA:

Ah, Anni-Frid, Agnetha, Benny and Bjorn — good times… good times.

The more I listen to their album, the more I realize that it’s just sick how good these guys are.

My friend Carrie Burbrink pointed out another area of office gear deserving of disparagement:  the roller bag.

Really, I’m sure there are people for whom there’s no other solution.  I mean, I had a serious back problem a couple years ago for a blessedly short time, and I know all too well that anyone suffering chronically from such a thing deserves all the mechanical assistance he can get.

But that’s a tiny fraction of the office populace.  I see far too many roller bags, statistically speaking.  Y’know, if you look like you’re headed to the airport for a business trip, but you’re not, you look like a doofus.  And really, if you’re reasonably healthy and you need a roller bag to tote all the stuff you take back and forth, you need a change.  C’mon — you’re not doing that much work, am I right?

Well, yes on the righteous part; and maybe a little bit on the ripped part.

But honestly, I don’t work out so I can think I’m better than other people, and I’m guessing Jack LaLanne didn’t either.  So I think this article is a big fat bunch of hooey.  I’ve had enough experience with letting myself go to know that I feel miserable when I do… so I try not to.

And lately, I’ve come to believe that if you’re not routinely causing yourself some productive pain, you won’t be as prepared when pain you don’t control comes into your life — and it will, surely, unless you just drop dead of an aneurism or something when you’re still relatively young.  The statistics would say that’s a pretty remote possibility.

There is assuredly a self-discipline facet to fitness as well.  There is also a self-discipline facet to running your own business, or raising children well, or becoming a painter, or anything that takes time and energy to master.  Do we do those things to make ourselves feel superior to others?  Perhaps, but I’d wager that most people involved in those pursuits aren’t motivated primarily by self-righteousness.

The fact is, every single one of us has limited time and energy, and we all must make choices about how we spend them.  I may be fit, but I’m not going to be a professional poker player, because I don’t have the time.  I guess my buddy Bill, who is one, must be doing it so he can feel righteous around me.  Or not.

I had the privilege of seeing The Honorable Mayor Corey Booker of Newark, New Jersey, speak at the Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast here a couple weeks back.  Booker is an outstanding orator (no, he really is — he’s funny and powerful and self-deprecating and seems to be speaking directly to you individually).  And his message of personal responsibility and action was a good one.

But it, and the more general theme of victimhood at the event, completely missed the mark.  There is one single overarching enemy of the downtrodden in America today (and I mean the downtrodden of all races, though the numbers are much more stark and hideous for some than others):  the demise of the family, and our culture’s dissolution of the concept of personal morality.  This subject was not even broached, not even hinted at, during the festivities two weeks ago.

Here’s an interview with the gifted economist Walter Williams in which he points out that very obvious truth:  “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do… And that is to destroy the black family.”

And here’s a trenchant and timely report from a teacher on the front lines.

If Mayor Booker wishes his gilded words actually to make a difference in society, this is a subject he can no longer afford to ignore.  And neither can the rest of us.

Please allow me to heartily recommend a book by a buddy of a buddy of mine, The Inner-Work of Leadership by Barry Brownstein.  As I say in my Amazon.com review of it, this book has changed my life.

When I sent my initial praise for his book to Barry, he offered me the honor and privilege of sharing my thoughts on the book and the application of its ideas via an interview with his wife Deborah.  Here’s the outcome of that interview.

Barry’s notions are based heavily on shedding our egos in the workplace, so it was ironic that my interview was at first nixed by the public relations folks at my company — because, they said, it was obvious that the sole reason any author would involve me in such a thing would be to have the tacit endorsement of our organization!  In the end, we came up with a solution to let the interview be published.  It was an interesting lesson in how organizations can have ego problems, as well as individuals.  I can confirm that, based on my every interaction with these two warm and wonderful people, Deborah and Barry, they live personally their value of the shedding of the ego.

I will continue to recommend this book to anyone who will listen.  It has taught me much, and I discover new lessons almost daily as I try to put its ideas into practice.

So, I’ve previously mentioned a couple other books I read over the holidays:  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson and Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza.  Both were excellent.

I also finally finished a book I’d been working on for months, The Counter-Revolution of Science by Friedrich Hayek.  This was one of those incredibly dense books, similar to Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (though this one, blessedly, is much, much shorter) that are valuable to have in mind for those times when we think we’re just waaayyy too smart.  Nothing like a book where you’re routinely thinking, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I get that — maybe…,” to put you in your place intellectually.  But it was a good summary of the corrosive influence of folks like Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel on society even today.

Best of all, I got to re-read a book I’d enjoyed as a boy — and then some.  My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George was about a teenage boy who runs away from home in New York City to live in the wild on ancestral family land in the Catskill mountains.  In tracking down a copy to buy, I discovered that it was available in a single-volume trilogy with two of George’s sequels (of which I’d previously been unaware), On the Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful’s Mountain.  Well, the first book was as riveting as I remembered, though I remembered far less of the details than I might have imagined.  The other two books were very good too, though they got increasingly preachy, and by the end the main human characters at times seemed mere mouthpieces for environmental activism.  (That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the introduction to the last one speaks volumes.)  Still, they were all very good stories, and just when the preachiness seemed ready to overwhelm the tale, it would blessedly recede.

I have a handful of new CDs I’ve been working through.

Finally getting Deep Purple’s Perfect Strangers was a great look back at the mid-’80s reunion of the Machine Head band lineup.  Rolling Stone rated it two stars out of five back when it came out, so you know it’s really very good.  The title song is Ritchie Blackmore’s favorite song, according to Wikipedia, which means that’s probably not true.  But it’s still a great effort; it sounds very ’80s, which is not at all inappropriate, inasmuch as it was, at the time of album’s release, actually the ’80s.

I also finally got Disturbed’s latest album, Asylum.  I like it.  They manage not to simply regurgitate stuff from their first four albums, and even break some new ground, which is awfully rare when a band reaches album #5.

What is it with bands who won’t let you embed their YouTube videos?  Wouldn’t that be, like, free advertising?  Disturbed is one of those bands.  Go figure.

Nick Moss is a Chicago blues master I got to discover with my brother John’s help, thanks to his Christmas present of Nick’s latest album, Privileged.  Good stuff — he’s true to the the Chicago sound, but has his own take on some old classics.  Here’s one:

Last, and absolutely not least, is Black Country Communion. My three brothers were raving about their first album a couple months ago, and I got my own copy a couple weeks ago. Wow. My brother Rich is absolutely right when he says that every single song on this CD is great. Here’s my favorite: