A secondary benefit of this is that all the ads have timed out and now I read ad free except for the little notice telling me to turn on my wireless in order to get more “special offers”.

A tertiary benefit is that the battery lasts far longer with wireless always off.

I’m far more concerned about a situation where the American Library Association is to be on the side of the bad guys. The flip side of censorship (government barriers to publication or distribution) is indoctrination (government requirements to read, listen or watch). You’ll note that Orwell’s 1984 has both. The latter is particularly dangerous when the target population is children.

And yet the ALA, in what I hope is no more that utter cluelessness, routinely treats parental efforts to block indoctrination (i.e. The Catcher in the Rye as required reading), as if that were censorship. That’s makes no sense. Opposing indoctrination isn’t supporting censorship. The books in question are still freely available. And if anything, indoctrination is the far more dangerous of the two, particularly in our digital age where any smartphone or laptop is a printing press.

Keep in mind that, if our schools can, over the objection of parents, require kids to read books of dubious value for the mental health of students, then those same schools can also mandate the reading of works with nasty political agendas.

Nor is that hypothetical. Apparently a debate is developing over Obama administration plans to use the stick of federal funding to force public schools to replace the reading of some novels with ‘factual’ material it judges useful. The very idea that To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced with EPA propaganda-like tracts on home insulation makes me sick.

–Michael W. Perry, author of Hospital Gowns and Other Embarrassments