by Fred Reed
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 …
For many years I had been casually interested in the powerful explosion of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait in 1883. As a small boy I had vaguely heard of it, as I had of dinosaurs, and accepted it as it was always described, an enormous volcanic eruption. This appeared reasonable, especially if one accepted the …
He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the …
We will start this magisterial explanation of everything with the time-honored approach of the philosopher, 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 …
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,“ …
The campaign to force the comingling of blacks and whites hasn’t worked, isn’t working, shows no sign that it will work, has become an industry, and enjoys the support of few. Usually the proselytizing for what seems unwanted togetherness is intense and swathed in righteousness. It is said to be intended to end mistreatment of …
The Immigrant Thing: Latinos (Mostly), the Racial Right, and Wokismo Startlingly, at least in today’s political climate, we will begin with the facts of immigration: America is eighteen percent Latino and climbing, six percent Asian and climbing. (Blacks, thirteen percent, cannot reasonably be called immigrants.) Given that over half of sub-eighteen children are not white, …
The Sixties look drab now—unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There was that. It was not a time for the weak-minded. But for those whose youth passed in the freak years, there was something gaudy and silly …
c Ages ago, for reasons of parental misjudgement, I studied at a small college in rural Virginia, Hampden-Sydney. While surprisingly rigorous, being resolutely Southern and as yet untouched by the foolishness that now degrades schools, H-S was also relentlessly preppy. The studentry tended to be vapid future bankers in small towns and pre-meds who would …
Coming up as I did a Southern boy, usually barefoot, lots of times with a cane pole and a string of bream I caught in Machodoc Creek, and other signs of higher civilization, I believe I could get tired of Northerners huffing and puffing about how moral they are. Ain’t nothing like a damn Yankee …