Category «Uncategorized»

A Farewelll

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 …

Constructing the TerminatorA Top-Down Approach

}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 …

On Poking Dragons

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 …

Trump’s Deportations: Bluster or Promise?

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, …

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  …

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 …