“Affirmative action” means hiring people because they can’t do the job well. Near-synonyms are “diversity,” meaning groups that cannot do the job well, and “inclusiveness,” which means seeking people who you know cannot do the job well. These underpin American society, and have ruined education. For some time the sciences seemed less susceptible to the... Read More
Being as I am a self-appointed explicator of things Latin to Americans curious about what lies to the south, and has come north, I occasionally and in a scattershot and prejudiced manner try to offer a picture of life below the border. There is more to the place than narcos and MS-13. If I lived... Read More
The obvious and intelligent course regarding immigration from the south is to stop further influx and assimilate those who are not going away and, being citizens, cannot be deported. Mr. Trump’s placing of troops along the border, if carried out, can quickly and practically accomplish the first of these, as his silly wall would not.... Read More
In times of desperation, such as being medically sidelined, columnists resort to the shameless practice of republishing old titles. It is embarrassing. But I am doing it. The abyss is everywhere, the unknown chasm that lies beyond the world we think we understand. Especially in carburetors.The other day I went to the back yard to... Read More
I see that a man named Sessions, apparently Washington’s Attorney General, threatens to unleash the coercive powers of the federal government against the state of Colorado, his reason being that he does not like the state’s policy with regard to marijuana. This is most curious. Why he believes the policies of Colorado to be his... Read More
It is strange: Jews have been disliked everywhere and in all times. The dislike appears in odd places. I was astonished to find that my Nepalese trekking guides were intensely hostile to Jews. They said that Jews (actually Israelis in most cases I think, but the Nepalese do not seem to make the distinction) were... Read More
OK, so why is the country falling apart? Specifically, why are kids blowing each other away? America has become a source of wonder the world over with its Colulmbines and hundreds and hundreds of dead in Chicago and Baltimore and its burning cities and riots. Other advanced countries don’t do these things. America didn’t either... Read More
Gazing out over the chaos of America today, the racial and ethnic antagonism, the hostility over sex and faith and politics–I have never seen anything like it. The country is imploding. The main culprit is diversity–in the broad sense, not just the juxtaposition of races, but the mixing of ideas and philosophies with no dominant... Read More
Everything goes to hell. It warms a curmudgeon’s heart. I remember when, as God intended, reporters were bright and profane drunks with no respect for anything. This philosophical end-point was natural for men steeped daily in the lying, thieving, corruption, bribes, shysterism, misery, and unrelenting stupidity that are public life. Ashen-souled, cynical, with a wonderful... Read More
Mr. Trump’s comment regarding his preference for immigrants from Norway instead of “shithole countries” such as Haiti engendered among the commentariat a great squealing. I cannot fathom this. Are they geographic virgins, and just don’t know anything of the world? Is it only the usual schadenfreudian gotcha pile-on? The if-A-then-B response to stimulus of a... Read More
Methinks that, for the good of the country, it is time that the “Alt-Right,” those bitterly hostile to our Latin-America population, stop and think. There is a difference between opposing further immigration, a good idea, and constantly attacking American citizens. Many good reasons existed for preventing massive immigration from the south. But it happened. Some... Read More
With regard to Mr. Trump’s Border Wall, I am skeptical. Now, I freely concede that I am not an authority on Border Walls. In fact, I have never built a Border Wall. This may surprise readers. Yet it is true. So all that follows is in the nature of speculation. Be warned. Still, though I... Read More
In the dog hours after two a.m., the empty time when the streets are dark and lifeless, a police car is an alien bubble, a small moving world unconnected with the streets, not part of the neighborhood. Yet it has to be there. The city is dead. Blank windows, alley mouths leading into nowhere. Parked... Read More
The other night we watched a documentary, The Dark Net, on Netflix on child pornography. Dim as I am, I didn’t realize that there was such a huge amount of it, mostly on the Darknet. This refers to transmission of material by layered encryption and quickly becomes technical: TOR, asymmetric encryption, IP packets, session keys,... Read More
The Atlantic waters off Snead’s Ferry in North Carolina are shallow, maybe 125 feet to the continental shelf. Several wrecks lie on the bottom, mostly in advanced stages of disintegration, sunk by U-boats in the early years of the war. I know them well as for years I was a member of Capital Divers, out... Read More
A Truth Not Welcome: People do not like being with those different from themselves. Sometimes, briefly, we find it interesting, as in traveling, but for extended periods, no. This distaste pervades society, often unnoticed, with consequences. Instances of untogetherness: People cluster by intelligence. With high consistency, we choose mates of intelligence close to our own.... Read More
In America two narratives about Mexico dominate. The first, chiefly emanating from anti-immigrant ideologues who usually have never been here, holds that Mexicans have low IQs and cannot function at other than a primitive level. Breitbart News and something called Vdare are chief among these. They don’t quite expect to find all Mexicans either robbing... Read More
OK, immigration, the ongoing soap opera. Let’s start with the week’s logical disaster: The Dreamers, 800,000 artfully named Latinos who were brought over as children, sometimes as children of thirty-five. Under something called DACA, a sort of almost amnesty, they had work permits. They were working. Yes, doing their part as Americans: paying taxes to... Read More
To understand many Mexican attitudes toward the United States and immigration, you have to go back to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, of which most Americans have never heard. The United States attacked Mexico in a war of territorial acquisition, occupied Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, and drove south to conquer Mexico City. It... Read More
Katie, bar the ever-lovin’ door. Compromise seems a forlorn hope in today’s strange version of America. Anger runs too deep. All that is left is to choose sides. We will then see whether the country sinks—continues sinking–into a Soviet future already largely upon us, or we see armed mobs battling in the streets. Does this... Read More
We ashen-souled columnists, the galley slaves of journalism, are accustomed to abuse from web louts, though it makes us see humanity as having the charm one associates with the underside of a theater seat. We bear up manfully under this, perhaps in the company of Mr. Daniels of Tennessee. To be fair, we get a... Read More
You gotta understand about biker bars. Well, maybe you don’t, but you ought to want to at least. They are the last redoubt of American civilization in an age of Snowflakes, Cupcakes, milquetoasts, mollycoddles, and fizzing herds of witless mall rats. My biker bar is the Iron Horse, just across the carretera from our house.... Read More
The tall scrawny freak with the red hair converted in the spring of 1972, several months before Jerry wandered, roaring, onto the scene. I had recently graduated from both Vietnam and college and, not knowing what else to do, was living with a collection of hippies at Stafford Court House, Virginia. The other freaks were... Read More
Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, their horrendous rates of crime, or their parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for... Read More
The man was perceptive. Amalgamation of the states under a central government has led to exactly the effects foreseen by General Lee. In, say, 1950, to an appreciable though imperfect extent America resembled a confederacy. Different regions of the America had little contact with each other, and almost no influence over one another. The federal... Read More
Do you wonder why the legacy media are such puzzled otherworldly twits? Why, for example, they had no idea what was happening in the recent election? Why they seem to know so very little about America or much of anything else? Some thoughts from a guy who spent a career in the racket: Ask journalists... Read More
Oh Lord, where is my Haldol? Recently I saw online a documentary on sex robots. The reporteress, a short-haired woman seething with quiet indignation, Viewed With Alarm the very idea. Progress is rapid on these love assistants, she said. They move. Some do, anyway. They talk, but not too much. Before long they will have... Read More
Boot camp. Yawning gateway to military life, an adventure outrageously funny and frightening, source of a lifetime of lies, all growing worse with each bull session. No one forgets boot. Get two GIs together over a bottle of gin, talking about old times, and sooner or later the talk will turn to tales of boot,... Read More
In today’s irreligious and indeed anti-religious climate the fashion is to dismiss Christianity as crude superstition, and to babble wisely about the separation of church and state. This is unfortunate, and stupid, since Christianity was the heart and soul of as yet the greatest civilization the world has seen. Those who know nothing of it... Read More
As a society crumbles, as bitter divisions grow and disorder spreads and nothing seems to work, anger comes and people begin to want a man who will say “Enough!” and slap down the malefactors–by any means necessary. A man who will make the trains run on time. A man who will make it safe to... Read More
Today I will explain why America is going to hell, and probably deserves it. It has to do with conservatives and liberals, who may be thought of as Woofers and Tweeters. They should all be taken out and shot. The country would then be a much better place. Worth a try, anyway. Some observations: (1)... Read More
In Washington, where the rice paddies of self-importance are nourished with the night soil of mendacity, columnists are viewed with the seriousness properly reserved for lung cancer. This is ridiculous. Columnists, the rodent class of journalism, have the dignity of carney barkers and merit the social standing of bellhops. It’s a living. For most of... Read More
Trump did not cause the deep division in the country. It caused him. There are two very different Americas. I suspect that the half of the country that voted for Trump, that voted with wild enthusiasm, that roared at huge rallies, was not so much voting for Trump as against the other America. It was... Read More
Intelligence is worth talking about because both the reality of intelligence and perceptions regarding intelligence set limits on the possible and influence policy. For example, if the population of India on average really is below borderline retardation, the country can never amount to anything. If Latino immigrants really are as stupid as white nationalists hope,... Read More
I love it. Of all the things about Trump that our silly-ass Aunt Polly media might have considered–policy toward China, relations with Iran, reform of taxes–they seemed most agitated about…his sex life. Yes. Sure, he is a misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe, fascist, Nazi, anti-Semite, and probably kicks his dog. Maybe a cannibal. But the truly horrid... Read More
Having for decades been exposed to the hostility of radical feminists, to the enormous harm they have done the schools and universities and the military, to relations between men and women, to their ashen tediousness and endless fury, their victimhood, I finally began to yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take... Read More
This is a reprint of a column from long, long ago. I do it not from laziness, though I am fond of laziness, but because it may provide a window into a happier America that we will not see again. These days, we need any cheer we can get. In the year of the Great... Read More
In looking for a piece I seemed to remember in which John, a prolific internet presence, advocates abolishing public education, I came across his overall diagnosis of schooling in America, well worth reading and a marvel of concision and accuracy. On its strength I hereby nominate him as SecEd, as one says in the as-yet... Read More
Almost all advanced countries, if not all, have national medical care. It is telling that in the debate over Obamacare, few looked at systems in other countries to see how well what worked. The reason seems to have been a mixture of the classic American arrogance and lack of interest in anything beyond the borders.... Read More
Since Hillary has presumably gone to a home for used basilisks, we will perhaps hear less about gun control for a bit. As in, maybe, eight years. The unending drive to outlaw firearms remains fascinating in various ways, first in that it represents a desire for conclusive abandonment of constitutional government. This is far along... Read More
A great uproar goes forth from the enemies of the Trump Beast, with much gnashing of hair and pulling of teeth. He will be a terrible President, they say, and they may well be right. There are ominous signs, particularly as regards foreign policy, and he seems radically incoherent and contradictory. Interestingly, his critics have... Read More
In the ever-entertaining dispute over Darwinian evolution, “irreducible complexity”–IC–has provided a serviceable bone on which intellectual rodents, such as myself, can gnaw. Briefly, for those who have had better sense than to entangle themselves in such brambles, irreducible complexity is the observation–if it is an observation–that many things in biology consist of many parts such... Read More
All right, we have him. My reaction to Trump’s victory is barely of interest to me, and so it may be that the world is not waiting in quiet desperation for an account. I have no information on this matter from Ulan Bator or Sulawesi. Insofar as my reaction was that of half of the... Read More
More fun in the Indispensable Nation: As we have all heard by now, according to Hillary, ardent of becoming National Basilisk, half of Trump’s supporters are evil and the other half losers, deplorables all. That is, she holds half of Americans in contempt. Unsurprisingly she said this in New York, which is barely America, and... Read More
I am in hiding. Write me care of general delivery, Tierra del Fuego. Recently I wrote a column about the variegated conspiracy theories that surround accounts of Nine-Eleven. Friends warned me against it. They said that the resulting attack on me would make the Normandy Landing look like a church picnic. It did. I believe... Read More
We’re all crazy. This explains everything. I will elaborate in hopes of joining Plato, Burke, and Hunter Thompson as a lighthouses of the intellects The human mind cannot think of more than a very few things at once. We cannot for example think of a billion citizens of China as individuals, so we say “China,“... Read More
Headline on Drudge. THUGS OF CHARLOTTE WHITE MAN DRAGGED, BEATEN BEGGING FOR MERCY Just another day at the Exceptional Nation. Racial attacks, racial threats, looting, burning. When I am politically upset, I loot stores. Don’t you? It is worth understanding what we deal with. The video makes it clear. The rioters grow in imagination. This... Read More
Don’t look for a walk-over. The T14 Armata, Russia’s latest tank. You don’t want to fight this monster if you can think of a better idea, such as not fighting it. Russia once made large numbers of second-rate tanks. That worm has turned. This thing is way advanced and outguns the American M1A2, having a... Read More
Encountering almost daily criticisms of the police by Pathologically Virtuous Whites of the sort one finds at Salon and NPR, many of these criticisms being nonsensical, I find myself wanting to ask these unpleasantly nice people: Do you know any cops? Have you ever known any? I mean known them well enough to have a... Read More
“White nationalists” as they call themselves would like to US to be close to one hundred percent white. So would I. So would many tens of millions of Americans who do not call themselves white nationalists, but are. Diversity causes nothing but trouble, and is doing so now. However, America can’t be completely white, or... Read More
Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.
He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers.
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