by Fred Reed
Massive Archive I have been writing this column, off and on, mostly on, for–dear God, can it be nearly thirty years? Yet nothing lasts forever, neither columns nor columnists, and Fred on Everything, for unexpected reasons with which i will not bore the reader, has reached its end. Columnizing is a curious trade. I suppose …
Consider two children, white, boys, growing up in contented middle-class families in the same suburb of Washington, DC, equally bright, popular, successful with girls, and so on. One becomes a growling conservative, the other a chirping liberal. I think of them as woofers and tweeters.) Why the difference in outcome? A likely explanation, or so …
}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 …
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 says that he will deport perhaps twenty million illegal aliens. Can he? Legally, yes. Illegals are deportable. Polls show that a great many Americans favor the idea. But practically? If we accept an intermediate guesstimate of sixteen million, deporting them during Trump’s tenure of four years would require ejecting four million per year, …
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 …
If you are a young man wondering what to do with your life, you may consider enlisting in the military. Don’t. Yes, the military has its appeal, or seems to. You may need a job. The uniform looks good. There can be adventure. You might get laid by Asian lovelies in foreign countries. These things …
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 …