Author archives

The Digifuture in Its Parts

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 …

Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture

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  …

Police, in the Real World

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 …

Life in a Third World Hell Hole: Mexico for Beginners

Being as I am a creature of little judgement and less discrimination, I have friends both woke and White Nationalist. These being hypergolic, I have to keep them separated so they don’t leave each other’s body parts on my rug.  Like most Americans, both have odd and, usually, badly inaccurate notions of Mexico, the White …

It Cometh from the Pit, and It Hath a Knout II

Once upon a time there was a fairy kingdom that lived inside a place called The Beltway, and was surrounded on all four sides by a land called America. The Beltway was aligned with another kingdom called Manhattan, inhabited by disembodied heads that spoke from the walls of bars, and with yet another closed kingdom …

A View from Mexico

We gringos south of the border hear considerable rumbling and grumbling from the US about things that Mexico does that set poorly in the north. Well, yes and no. There are other ways of looking at things. A few reflections. In 1965 the United States, not Mexico, changed the immigration laws, apparently to encourage immigration …

Here We Go Again in the Holy Land

‘Nuther day, ‘nuther few morgue loads in Gaza. It has become almost boring, 25,000 dead and counting.  Should we go for a record? But questions do arise to reinvigorate flagging interest. What kind of human will intentionally bomb a hospital? Or a refugee camp? Is there nothing so foul that an Israeli pilot will not …

Communing with Rastus

What happened was, I came to the Yankee Capital from where I growed up in East Needle, Tennessee, that’s so far back in the mountains that the sun don’t hardly shine and we don’t get too much news about what they do in the flatlands. Mostly people in East Needle just stays where they are. …