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As the presidential debates approach, and our grotesque candidates prepare to compete for Best Actor, with their supporting casts of pollsters, advance men, media shills, gestures coaches, focus groups, and allied technicians of mendacity, Americans of broad historical illiteracy, which is most of them, hear endlessly of the evils of China. Whether the evils exist... Read More
A (very) black man walks up to a white five-year-old and shoots him in the head with no apparent provocation except, maybe, that the child rode his bicycle over the killer’s lawn. A (very) black man, Emanuel Deshaun Aranda, throws a white child of five from a rooftop café for no reason other, perhaps, that... Read More
This admirable column gets a modest trickle of mail from European readers, for some reason chiefly in France and Italy but some from the Nordic realms. While these correspondents are intelligent and thoughtful, and sometimes translate my maunderings into their languages, they do not give a comprehensive view of what Europe thinks of the United... Read More
I’m gonna do it anyway. Being as I’m just a West Virginia boy, and mostly barefoot, and don’t have much sense, a lot of folk say, maybe I shouldn’t be explaining the world. But the world don’t make even as much sense as I do, so guess I’ll stick my fork in. Sometimes I go... Read More
Today, God save the Queen, the country is in the hands of pathologically aggressive Cold War leftovers, in particular Mr. Genghis Pompeo. In light of his desire to get America into a war with Iran, plus the acrid whiff of desperation wafting from the White House, plus increased provocations against Iran, one may wonder about... Read More
The following, except for the two cop novels, are chiefly collections of his Fred on Everything columns with some magazine pieces thrown in for ballast. In them he savages the pretensions of the pretentious, lambasts poltroons right and left, and makes suggestions for improving the world, such as by buying a codpiece for Hillary. He... Read More
Black militia at Stone Mountain. Cocky, heavily armed, outgunning the police. White militias have similar firepower. A fight is entirely possible. In downtown America. Hoo-boy. She’s ready to explode, go high order. Smoking ruins, dead bodies, seething hatreds, and a country that can’t be put back together. It may not happen, but she looks ready.... Read More
In the predawn coolness of five a.m., we made coffee, put the dogs in the CRV, and set out along the deserted carretera to Chapala, a few miles away, where we walk the beasts. The night was dark and empty as an anchorman's mind and a drizzle splattered across the windshield. Fulu Miziki poured from... Read More
A common topic around the web is whether automation will drastically increase unemployment. The usual scholarly answer is only a bit, and conservatives often insist that new jobs will always be found. Actually, automation has already created much joblessness. It continues to do so. We don’t notice because we have disguised the unemployment. Consider. In... Read More
Oh sigh. Recently we heard much huffing and blowing over the Supreme Court’s decision not to illegalize the DACAns. These, you may remember, are Mexicans’ brought illegally into the country while children. Obama gave them a sort of amnesty and allowed them to work. Anti-immigration activists say these interlopers are criminals and should be deported... Read More
What fun, what entertainment. And rare: One seldom sees the collapse of a landmark society in a rush of wondrous idiocy. Would I could sell tickets. Don’t look at it as a loss, but as a show, an unwanted but grand amusement. The coup de grace in our ripening decadence is the current uprising purportedly,... Read More
This will be a disoriented essay. These are disorienting times. Perhaps the reader should prepare himself with a double shot of Wild Turkey throat sanitizer, or a doob. I am still getting mail saying that Floyd’s death was due to underlying conditions. I see. By purest coincidence, he died of natural causes while hand-cuffed, face... Read More
It was murder, plain and simple. There are no contradictory witnesses, no he-said-she-said. It is on the video, with no lapses. The man on the ground is clearly heard imploring mercy, begging to be allowed to breathe. Onlookers also implore. The officer knows the man is choking, yet keeps choking him. No police protocol calls... Read More
OK, every self-respecting columnist is writing about that wretched virus, so I suppose I have to. (Actually any self-respecting columnist is probably delusional. but never mind.) Columnists do what they are programmed to do, like bugs. I think I’m supposed to say that the coronavirus is most perilous, and like the Black Death that is... Read More
The genius of America’s totalitarian system of government is that it is not totally total, and sometimes not very totalitarian at all. It is just total enough. Truly total government--"Your papers, citizen," stop-and-frisk, permission needed to travel from city to city--might spark revolt. By contrast, a sufficiency of totalitarianism, but not an excess, keeps the... Read More
The most portentous events in American history were the enforced importation of African blacks by the New England slavers, and the opening of the southern border to Latin America. Both have proved disastrous. Compulsory mixing of disparate peoples has not worked. In response to the Latino influx, Nativist groups arose to oppose immigration and (not... Read More
We will start this magisterial explanation of everything with the time-honored approach of the philosoñher, beginning with the things we know beyond doubt and then reasoning from them to suitably astonishing truths. As we know, Descartes began by saying, “Cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am.” (Ambrose Bierce, a more profound thinker, said, “Cogito... Read More
"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years, because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said. "You know guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot 'em." The first rule of human thought is that everything is... Read More
Readers sometimes reproach me, usually gently, for typos. These exist because I have poor and deteriorating vision because, years back, Dr. Phillip Francis Stanley, an ophthalmologist of sorts then at Bethesda Naval Hospital, pulled apart my good eye while removing sutures from a successful corneal transplant at Johns Hopkins. The transplant was done by Dr.... Read More
A mixed bag. This morning we sallied forth to stock up on the essentials of life in time of plague, such as throat sanitizer--Wild Turkey serves well. In the liquor store, employees wore face masks. At Walmart there was a hand-sanitizer squirter that all had to use before entering, and the PA system exhorted us... Read More
As you cross the Fourteenth Street Bridge from Arlington into Washington on a sunny spring day, the vista is magnificent, uplifting. Huge blue sky, brisk wind, the broad brown river flashing in the sunlight. As a portal to the capital of a world empire, it is suitable, even convincing. This new Tiber is at the... Read More
Oh God. Oh God. We are down to Biden. I think. Bad. Bad. But maybe no worse than any of the other dwarves and surreal curiosities offering themselves as our managers Look, if you can bear it, at what we started with. Two billionaires, three women, two Jews, a black, a self-proclaimed Indian, two threshold... Read More
Over the years I have written columns about the growing doubts among scientists and mathematicians over aspects of Darwinian evolution. The fury aroused among the faithful has been intense and often personal, the doubts being called “ridiculous” but with no explanation of why they are ridiculous. These assertions are frequently, but not always, made by... Read More
The road, little trafficked, ran past the college post office, past my grandfather’s house, and through a stretch of woods to Lanc’s store. Then it wound off through wooded Virginia countryside. Hampden-Sydney was one of the small Southern colleges founded well before modern times--1776 for Hampden-Sydney--offering liberal arts schooling of remarkably good academic quality. Many... Read More
It was 1953 in the white newly prosperous suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, just outside the Yankee Capital. I was eight, having been born, like so many of my small compatriots, nine months and fifteen minutes after our fathers got home from the war. These men, my father anyway, had spent years in the Pacific, being... Read More
Today, regarding China and America, we will have Thought Most Potent, adequate to lube a diesel, curdle milk, or seal a driveway. Whole departments of international studies will close their doors in despair. Ha. Why, we ask, does it seem that the Middle Kingdom advances speedily on so many fronts, while the US doesn’t? The... Read More
oday we will have Profound Thought. Actually it’s the only kind we ever have in this corner of the internet. Thunderous insight. Volcanic perceptiveness. That sort of thing. Anyway, some slightly addled questions about robots, and sexbots and their relations with people and how smart they are or aren’t. For example, can you love a... Read More
In the mysteriously continuing hoorawhaw over whether the Twin Towers were brought down by an “inside job,”I have often ignited the fury of the extraordinarily sensitive Truthers, who believe in intentional demolition,. My sin was pointing out that demolition is a physical undertaking. It is not metaphorical. Physical explosives in specific quantities must be put... Read More
Just got back to Guadalajara and environs after two weeks of Christmas in Washington. Good times were had, old friends seen, but it was not altogether a delight. Going back to America every nine months or a year is like watching something decay in time-lapse photography. It can be a shock. Arriving in the Virginia... Read More
I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer's account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis,... Read More
Lake Chapala at sunrise. It never looks the same twice. Though it is late in the season and should be chill, we do not seem to be having winter this year. The golondrinas, swallows, seem confused and have not migrated as early as they usually do. This year they sat in their thousands, three inches... Read More
Writing about intelligence is splendid fun if you like watching dogfights among towering vanities. (This assumes that vanities can tower, though I’m not sure how dogs come into it.) On one side you have the politically correct protectors of Appropriate Values. These secretly believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites and live in terror... Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
China has an upcoming maglev train that will run at 373 miles an hour. By comparison, the United States increasingly looks like a country from an earlier age. Pop Quiz: Was this train engineered (a) by heartwarming, puzzled, oppressed, suffering, agonized minorities who ought to be making pizzas, or (b) by the brightest people China... Read More
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
Pompeo: “My Faith in Jesus Christ Makes a Real Difference” Pompeo says God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” said Mr Pompeo….”I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” Pence, a Catholic Evangelical who almost became a priest: “I made a commitment... Read More
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
If you write long enough for publication, sooner or later you will make a fool of yourself, and then your choice is to admit it or prevaricate. For years I have regarded what I called “conspiracy theorists” as mildly delusional, as inhabitants of a remote societal fringe. I had never really examined their claims, dismissing... 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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