Fred Reed Archive - The Unz Review

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Let’s Invade Mexico!

Another Entry in the Tourney of Damn Fool Ideas

Fred Reed • November 7, 2019

• 1,600 Words • 346 Comments • Reply

I suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and effectively. “ Trump phrased this as an offer to help, not a threat to invade,... Read More

A Recruiting Poster

Why You Should Stay the Hell Away From the American Military

Fred Reed • October 24, 2019

• 4,400 Words • 212 Comments • Reply

Some advice: Don't get shot in the face. I don't care what your friends tell you, it isn't a good idea. Further, avoid corneal transplants if you can. If you find a coupon for one, in a box of Cracker Jacks maybe, toss it. Transplants are miserable things. Unless you really need one. What am... Read More

Greg, John, Razib, and Me

Fred in His Darkness Pleads for Help, Piteously

Fred Reed • October 10, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 468 Comments • Reply

A good bit more now than a decade ago I was a member of Steve Sailer’s HBD (Human Biodiversity) mailing list. This dealt with (who would have thought it’) human biodiversity, meaning such things as evolution, racial differences, evolutionary psychology, and genetics. It was a bright and usually congenial group, if doctrinaire, from which I... Read More

Immigration and Teething Pains

At Last, A Reasonable Voice

Fred Reed • September 19, 2019

• 1,500 Words • 377 Comments • Reply

I have often pointed out that the Dissident Right, fervently disliking Latinos, criticizes Hispanics for all sins real or imagined but never says what policies it favor toward the tens of millions American citizens of Latin-American descent. I have to retract. Recently John Derbyshire, the star writer at the anti-immigrant site Vdare.com, has stated clearly... Read More

Unused Militaries

Fred Reed • September 10, 2019

• 2,400 Words • 407 Comments • Reply

For a couple of decades I covered the military for various publications, as for example the Washington Times and Harper's, and wrote a military column for Universal Press Syndicate. I was following the time-honored principle of sensible reporters: “Ask not what you can do for journalism, but what journalism can do for you.” The military... Read More

Dispatches from the Race War

Fred Reed • August 31, 2019

• 1,000 Words • 405 Comments • Reply

All cultures are equal. At least, as things are going, they soon will be. But couldn't they be equal somewhere else? Month after month after month, surprising as sunrise, predictable as the value of pi, come the casualty reports documenting racial disaster. Details change. The substance does not. Gangs of American Africans beat whites into... Read More

U.S. Supreme Over Asia in Mathematics!

And Other Dismal Reflections

Fred Reed • August 13, 2019

• 1,400 Words • 423 Comments • Reply

America again wins the annual International Math Olympiad! The contest pits the brightest high-school students of countries against each other in six-member teams. The American victories continue the mastery by the European cultures that invented most of modern math. This supports the claim (I hope I do not sound racist) that European superiority is genetic.... Read More

Who the Hell Is Mitch McConnell Anyway?

And Why Would Anyone Care?

Fred Reed • August 2, 2019

• 1,000 Words • 105 Comments • Reply

It is curious: Though I have for decades worked in journalism, mostly in Washington, I know almost nothing of Congress. I mean this literally. I do not know who Mitch McConnell is, his function, or his politics, though I have the impression that he is a Republican. Who was, or is, Paul (I think it... Read More

Democrats for Trump, 2020

The Cockatoo Can’t Win Without Them

Fred Reed • July 24, 2019

• 1,200 Words • 265 Comments • Reply

They’re going to do it, I tell you: The whole touchy-feely do-gooding ratpack of Microaggression worriers, reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, race hustlers, bat.-Antifa psychos, and egalitarian enstupidators of universities. They are going to elect Trump. Again. Washington, where I shortly will be for a bit, is crazy. It has not the slightest, wan, etiolated... Read More

A Mid-Course Diagnosis

Soaring to New Lows

Fred Reed • July 11, 2019

• 1,100 Words • 124 Comments • Reply

As obsolete tanks rolled in Washington for the Fourth, and fighter planes howled in adrenal provocation, and the truculent classes reveled, besotted by in America’s eternal martial priapism, the alert might have asked: What, exactly, has der carrot-topped Fuhrer actually accomplished? A look at Trump’s report card: North Korea: A negligible country of twenty-five million,... Read More

Puerta Arroyo, Horrible Ugly Meddlesome Reptilian Old Women, Nacas Adineradas, Sex, and the Gringa Plague

A Dispassionate Sociology

Fred Reed • July 1, 2019

• 1,800 Words • 243 Comments • Reply

For seventeen years Violeta and I lived in town or in Guadalajara and had nothing to do with gated communities. We regarded these as custodial institutions for people who didn’t want to be in Mexico but liked the weather and cheap gardeners. For strange reasons irrelevant here, a year or so ago we moved to... Read More

Leisure Unsought, Neural Networks, and Other Dramas

Why We Will Soon Be Eating Each Other

Fred Reed • June 26, 2019

• 1,500 Words • 152 Comments • Reply

Today, FOE will explain economics, fraud, unemployment, and the end of the world. There will no longer be a need for economists, if there ever was. You will understand everything. FOE is that sort of column. Long ago, everybody worked on farms, growing food. This was a real service. People wanted food. They liked to... Read More

American Homeless picking their way through garbage

The View from Abroad

America as Others See it

Fred Reed • June 13, 2019

• 1,200 Words • 437 Comments • Reply

Americans are brought up to believe that the United States is a shining city on a hill, a light to mankind, that the world envies us for our values and freedoms, and hates us because we have them. This is ground into us from birth. Those of us now long in the tooth remember the... Read More

Stuyvesant High Versus China Rail

It is Time to Stop Celebrating Inadequacy

Fred Reed • June 6, 2019

• 1,400 Words • 266 Comments • Reply

Race Hustlers: I'd Rather Have Ebola

Fred Reed • May 28, 2019

• 1,700 Words • 636 Comments • Reply

Oh help. Why is America, seething with racial animosity, simultaneously afflicted by so many race hustlers, the grave worms of nationality, who thrive on making things worse? It must be the Russians. Everything else is Blacks have the Southern Poverty Law Center, Jesse, and Al, and Black Lives Matter. Hispanics have La Raza and Jorge... Read More

The torture facility in Zacatecas, Mexico, a museum of applied Christianity

Pence A Christian? POMPEO?

There Are Christians Who Love and Christians Who Hate

Fred Reed • April 26, 2019

• 1,500 Words • 324 Comments • Reply

Yesterday’s Country

Not to Worry, They Can’t Innovate

Fred Reed • April 17, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 589 Comments • Reply

For many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one,... Read More

Out and About: and Here and There in Jalisco

Fred Reed • April 1, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 98 Comments • Reply

On a sunny day Violeta and I will inhabit our faithful CRV and wander about, without being excessively directed toward anywhere in particular, along the south shore of Lake Chapala, maybe striking off randomly in search of interesting pueblos. Warm wind. Ranchera music. There are roads good and bad fraught with minor adventures and curiosities.... Read More

Biology Department at Lehigh University Mans the Ramparts

Enemy Forces Gather Without

Fred Reed • March 24, 2019

• 2,300 Words • 58 Comments • Reply

Years back, Dr. Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, published

The Proximate Cause of All Our Woes Is: Civilizational Apoptosis

Fred Reed • March 14, 2019

• 1,300 Words • 114 Comments • Reply

Today all manner of curiosities, as I once called them, propose that whites pay reparations for slavery. For example, our Democratic presidential candidates. Well, I am joining them. Yes. I am for reparations. It is only just. Once I lived in moral darkness, and thought reparations was crazy as Aunt Sally, that we kept in... Read More

Conspiracy Theories: Among the Illuminati

Fred Reed • March 5, 2019

• 1,900 Words • 463 Comments • Reply

The appeal of conspiracy theories is strong. They seem to provide the believer a sense of esoteric understanding, of elevation above the limited grasp of moiling herd. They may make life less boring. Yet to many people, including me, they seem borderline delusional. How come? The curious thing is that CTs–Conspiracy Theorists–seldom seem to be... Read More

The Empire: Now or Never

Fred Reed • February 20, 2019

• 1,100 Words • 289 Comments • Reply

Many people I talk to seem to think American foreign policy has something to do with democracy, human rights, national security, or maybe terrorism or freedom, or niceness, or something. It is a curious belief, Washington being interested in all of them. Other people are simply puzzled, seeing no pattern in America’s international behavior. Really,... Read More

Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache

Examining the Freak Show

Fred Reed • February 7, 2019

• 1,900 Words • 383 Comments • Reply

American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren’t crazy. Today’s administration would seem unwholesome in a... Read More

Notes on a Curious People

The Maya and Their Doings

Fred Reed • January 28, 2019

• 2,500 Words • 261 Comments • Reply

This is a greatly updated version of a column of some years back on an unusual and intriguing people. Maya civilization was not 1850 Vienna, but neither was it the primitive horror lovingly imagined by the ill-mannered and barely informed of the web. Inasmuch America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to... Read More

The White Man’s Burden

Reflections on the Custodial State

Fred Reed • January 17, 2019

• 1,500 Words • 373 Comments • Reply

A storm, methinks, is just over the horizon: The genetics of intelligence, perhaps of behavior. Geneticists know that intelligence is largely genetic. They know better than to say so. But research advances rapidly. Laboratories close in on the responsible genes. Things like genomic-sequence correlation proceed apace. Within ten or fifteen years, I will guess, the... Read More

China Overrated by Right-Wing Kooks

These Crazies Are Just Like Hitler

Fred Reed • January 6, 2019

• 1,200 Words • 310 Comments • Reply

One often sees the silly assertion by right-wing extremists that feminists, social justice warriors, and other “cranks” are enstupidating American education. The purpose, according to these fascists, who are just like Hitler, is “to make historically incompetent groups look competent.” The racism in these absurd claims is obvious. In particular such Neo-Nazis say that mathematical... Read More

Incoherent Thoughts from the Yankee Capital

Papua New Guinea Looks Better and Better II

Fred Reed • December 23, 2018

• 1,600 Words • 153 Comments • Reply

Having just returned from two weeks in the curious environs of Washington, DC, I offer a few observations on the national lunacy deposit: The de-Christianization of the country, or at least this part of it, is almost complete. I can think of hearing the word “Christmas” only twice in two weeks of trough-inciting retail advertising.... Read More

Fred Dworkin vs. the Sisterhood

Defending Women Against Bat-Brained Viragos

Fred Reed • December 7, 2018

• 1,300 Words • 145 Comments • Reply

In my capacity of shade-tree anthropologist at large, I am trying to make sense of the far Left. It is tough sledding. Most of it makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake. Help me. I am really confused. I can’t see that the Left actually is Left, I mean. The Left... Read More

Comparing China and America

Economies Diverge, Police States Converge

Fred Reed • November 28, 2018

• 1,700 Words • 343 Comments • Reply

I have followed China’s development, its stunning advance in forty years from impoverished Third World to a huge economy, its rapid scientific progress. Coming from nowhere it now runs neck and neck with the US in supercomputes, does world-class work in genetic engineering and genomics (the Beijing Genomics Institute), quantum computing and quantum radar, in... Read More

Cheng Two: More Notes on Two Weeks in China

Fred Reed • November 20, 2018

• 1,200 Words • 212 Comments • Reply

This is my second column on the two weeks that Vi and I just spent in Chengdu, China. It is meant not so much as a travelogue as a snapshot of what is going on in an economic juggernaut. Judging by email from readers, many do not realize the scope and scale of China’s advance.... Read More

Intelligent Design: Two Weeks in Chengdu and Environs

Fred Reed • November 12, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 325 Comments • Reply

Vi and I have just returned from Chengdu, a Chinese village of seventeen million and the gateway to Tibet. Since China is of some interest to the US these days, I thought a description of sorts, actually more in the nature of a disordered travelogue, might be of interest. I hadn’t been to the country... Read More

The current state of the American Army. Troops learn the hardships of pregnancy.

Let’s Have a War with Russia!

I’d Rather Be Ruled by Autistic Hamsters

Fred Reed • November 4, 2018

• 1,300 Words • 312 Comments • Reply

The United States seems to be contemplating war with Russia, Iran, China, or all three. Washington pushes NATO ever closer to Russia, leaves the nuclear-missile treaty and tries to destroy both countries and China economically. Why the push for war? Simple. Asia is awakening. China (from which I have just returned) grows economically at a... Read More

Kavanaugh Gang-Rapes Collie in Satanic Ritual

College Boys in KKK Robes Chant “Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!”

Fred Reed • October 1, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 143 Comments • Reply

Oh God. Oh God. Is there no surcease? I know, silly question. Squalling protesters: Half of the country seems fifteen years younger than its chronological age. Staged ire. Sordid passion of the herd. Hysteria. Irrationality. Weird accusations. Savage feminists. As per custom, it is all about how horrible men are. One of the sillier sillinesses... Read More

Darwin’s Vigilantes, Richard Sternberg, and Conventional Pseudoscience

Fred Reed • September 22, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 343 Comments • Reply

I am sorry. I admit it: I am a bad person. I promise I will never write about this again. Well, sort of never. It’s just too much fun. Anyway, it’s not my fault. My childhood makes me do it. Maybe I ate lead paint. Science is supposed to be objective study of nature, impelled... Read More

Fred to Take Wheel of Ship of State

Will Implement Thoughtful and Reasonable Measures

Fred Reed • September 14, 2018

• 1,500 Words • 270 Comments • Reply

I have no choice. I must don the mantle of greatness and take the reins of the country. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I will run for the office of dictator, or President in American parlance. Readers may ask, “But Fred, what makes you think you are qualified to be President?” To which I... Read More

How We Were: the Years of Hitchhiking

Recollectons of the Social Cryogenian

Fred Reed • September 5, 2018

• 1,600 Words • 133 Comments • Reply

The big roads were safe then, or we thought they were. Many of us, the more adventurous, poured onto the highways, just going, moving, looking. We were devotees of the long-haul thumb, crossing and recrossing the continent, dropping into Mexico, whatever. A camaraderie held. There were rules. On an onramp it was first come first... Read More

Violeta on the Face The Nation set at CBS DC. Is nothing sacred?

Travels with Vi

Not Up There with Marco Polo, But the Best We Can Do

Fred Reed • August 27, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 68 Comments • Reply

Today, nothing shocking. You won’t need your fibrillator. Some not-too-coherent thoughts from south of the border: In Guadalajara near the US Consulate there is the Estación de Lulio, an open walled restaurant, cafe and wine bar sort of place with unencrypted Wifi. Early on I could never remember the name and so began calling it... Read More

Decline in the Fall (Or Late Summer, Anyway)

by Fred Gibbon

Fred Reed • August 15, 2018

• 1,600 Words • 319 Comments • Reply

I am not sure why people write columns. Partly from boredom, I suppose, or lack of anything better to do. Partly from exasperation. Yet partly from the hope that if enough people collectively become aware of problems, they might, just maybe, do something about them. I can’t believe this any longer. Today’s crimes, lunacies, and... Read More

Cruelty Legitimized. NYT Hires from Caligula’s Basement.

Applicants Must Supply Own Pliers

Fred Reed • August 5, 2018

• 1,300 Words • 207 Comments • Reply

By now I suppose that everybody and his dog knows (well, actually, I haven’t asked my dog) that the New York Times has hired, and defended, one Sarah Jeong, an avowedly racist, sexist, mouthy, and apparently kinky twitess as tech writer. “Kinky” is the polite term for people who enjoy cruelty. Which, she says, she... Read More

More on Evolution: from the Mail Room

Fred Reed • July 28, 2018

• 1,400 Words • 388 Comments • Reply

Recently I wrote a

Signature in the Cell and Intelligent Design

An Introduction to Protracted Desperation

Fred Reed • July 15, 2018

• 1,800 Words • 456 Comments • Reply

A question that never ceases to fascinate is that of how life originated, and how and why it has progressed as it seems to have. The official story and de rigueur explanation is that that life came about through spontaneous generation from seawater. Believing this is the mark of an Advanced Person, whether one has... Read More

The View from Wheeling

A Twelve-Toed Analysis

Fred Reed • July 9, 2018

• 1,200 Words • 91 Comments • Reply

I’m trying to figure out politics. It’s slow going. I’m just a holler hopper out of West Virginia, and I guess I puzzle easy. Maybe you can help me. I reckon America is pretty much a dictatorship now. It’s because one man, just one, does anything he wants to other countries and to us and... Read More

Holmes, Uncle Clunk, and and Epic Con Job

How American Business Apparently Sometimes Works

Fred Reed • June 26, 2018

• 1,200 Words • 148 Comments • Reply

OK, book report time. I have just finished reading

Trump to Europoodles: “Roll Over. Bark. Beg…Crawl.

With a Korean Preface

Fred Reed • June 15, 2018

• 1,100 Words • 116 Comments • Reply

I don’t get it. I know, I know, I’m just some mutt in Mexico with a computer, and easily puzzled. But…huh? Trump, we are told, pulled off a master stroke in Singapore. All the world reels at this astonishment. We see Talleyrand and Metternich rolled into one gorgeous taco. But…but…. Who did the doing, and... Read More

Affirmative Action and the American Mind: If Any

Fred Reed • May 29, 2018

• 1,200 Words • 389 Comments • Reply

“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

Mexican Wall Blues: and Some Other Stuff

Fred Reed • May 21, 2018

• 800 Words • 132 Comments • Reply

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

Netanyahu: “Let’s You and Him Fight”

Brandishing the American Military

Fred Reed • May 12, 2018

• 1,100 Words • 217 Comments • Reply

Why did the Cockatoo-in-Chief renege on the Iran deal deeply prized by Russia, China, France, Germany, England, and the European Union? Why did he deliberately damage relations with Europe and cost American workers many thousands of jobs at Boeing among others? Why do all of this to hurt a country that poses no danger to... Read More

A Most Sordid Profession

Sanguijuelas, Garrapatas, Piojos, Capulinas, Lampreys

Fred Reed • April 27, 2018

• 1,300 Words • 267 Comments • Reply

A few thoughts on our disastrous trillion-dollar military: It is unnecessary. It does not defend the United States. The last time it did so was in 1945. The United States has no military enemies. No nation has anything even close to the forces necessary to invade America, and probably none the desire. A fifth of... Read More

Herding Hamsters and Other Cosmic Reflections

Fred Reed • April 16, 2018

• 1,000 Words • 102 Comments • Reply

Disordered thoughts on the National Cockatoo’s latest antics. One: The aghastment and horrilation about the terrible, appalling, shocking etc nature of gas warfare is nonsense. There is nothing unusually hideous about the use of toxic chemicals. Hideous, yes, but not unusually hideous. Boring old workaday artillery, that nobody criticizes, leaves children watching as mommy frantically... Read More

In Search of Intelligent Latin Policy

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream….

Fred Reed • April 7, 2018

• 1,500 Words • 243 Comments • Reply

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

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About Fred Reed

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.

Personal Classics

YouSSR, MeSSR

Not What Tom Jefferson Had in Mind

Fred Reed

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Up Periscope

Quick and Dirty

Fred Reed

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Eighth Grade In Mexico

Sounds Like A Low-Ranked American University To Me

Fred Reed