by Fred Reed
Ages ago, for reasons I no longer remember, I was wandering across Asia and decided to spend some time in Taiwan. The Chinese interested me, and Taiwan was then as close as it was practical to get. Then, as now, the Chinese were thought by many to be exotic, inscrutable, devious and unlike normal people …
Oh help. As I write, the mumbling egg plant in the White House shovels money and arms into two wars, neither necessary, and he and Lockheed Martin prepare for a third, also unnecessary, over Taiwan, which is none of their business. Since in the Federal Bubble on the Potomac there is chatter at the mental …
}these are deranged ramblings, perhaps of psychiatric interest. If pressed, Fred will deny authorship and possibly bring an action for defamation. }beware. These days, not unreasonably I think, people wonder whether artificial intelligence will produce an electronic being superior to, well, us. Others of darker immaaginings ask whether we don’t face the arrival of a …
The congenitally alarmed express horror and perturbation over White Nationalists, of whom they know little. They seem to think–or perhaps hope, life being boring in Washington, that in conjunction with the election of Trump, WhyNats will bring back lynching. This is overwrought. In fact WhyNats are seldom awful enough to be interesting, or awful at …
Everybody and his dog is writing about the Trump conviction, so I guess I’ll add my few grains to the sand pile. Otherwise I’d kill something, preferably a New York judge. Or several of them. On the observable principle that each succeeding President is worse than his predecessor, Biden has, barely, taken the title for …
I wonder how many Americans quite understand what the Us is facing in its aggressive confrontation with China. Washington clearly prepares the public for another unnecessary war. Given America’s routine defeat in war and catastrophic miscalculations in fighting small powers, picking a fight with what, increasingly, is again becoming the Middle Kingdom seems less than …
Donald Trump, always interesting if not obsessively cogent, says that he will deport perhaps twenty million illegal aliens if again elected. Can he? Legally, of course, Trump is in the right. The illegals are in the country illegally and the law clearly says that they may be deported. Polls show that a great many Americans …
How time flies, said Fred with scintillating originality. When I was a young lad in rural Virginia in the mid-Sixties, the only thing digital was the local drive-in movie, known colloquially as the Finger bowl. Now the world runneth over with bits and bytes and screens and all. Regarding which: Much of the unpleasantness of …
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing, except how …
For years I worked as police reporter for the Washington Times, spending long hours in squad cars in various cities getting to know cops well. Now I listen to nice white people in the suburbs, and self-assured voices from NPR, talking about the police. They know nothing of the world where the police work. They …