by Fred Reed
In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda, the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had …
Back before the beginning of time, in the late Fifties when the sun lowered over small-town Alabama like a steaming towel, and it was so humid a tadpole could just about fly, we kids of eleven didn’t have many store-bought toys. We didn’t need’em, neither. On slow barefoot afternoons with nothing to do, we did …
Of a late afternoon long ago I sat in the clearing above the swamp, headwaters of Machodoc Creek, where my parents lived in Virginia’s Tidewater. I was reading. The air was thick with summer almost silent, except for the occasional bird and bug going about their affairs and the distant cough and roar of big …
The other day a friend and I were partaking of the mortal remains of quite a number of defenseless grapes, and the subject of law enforce arose. Having spent a number of years as a police reporter, I began thinking of curious and often erroneous ideas that people have of what we regard as a …
Cave divers are the world’s most witless people. This is not mere Freddian assertion but a neurological fact. They have fewer brain cells than normal people. MIT did a massive study, and concluded that a cave diver has the reasoning capacity of a lemur. A smaller study by CalTech equated them intellectually with woodchucks, though …