Watching President Obama deliver his State of the Union Address, I got to thinking of my dad. Derb, Sr. was born in 1899 and was compulsorily retired from his job as a furniture-company repo man at age 65. That point in time—the mid-1960s—was one of great changes, in Britain as much as in the ...
The other evening one of my dinner clubs had a meeting. I’m getting addicted to these clubs—I now belong to three of them. This one is conservative-dissident. By “conservative” I mean skeptical of social change, especially of vast social-engineering experiments—the ...
A couple of hard-luck stories: First story: Randy Johnson of Marion, Indiana was laid off from his job at a paper-products company in 1995 along with 200 other employees. The company had been purchased by Bain Capital six months previously. Mitt Romney was a principal of Bain Capital at the time. ...
I was reading Eric Dondero’s revelations about the time he spent working as personal assistant, campaign coordinator, and senior aide to Ron Paul. Dondero plays down Paul’s rumored offenses against political correctness but has a few things to say that are giving liberals the vapors ...
A week is proverbially a long time in politics. A year is 52.14 times longer than that. Our own lives occupy the fronts of our minds, while public affairs rumble in the background. To most of us this was the year that Jimmy went off to college, Suzy got married, dad lost his job, or grandma died. ...
My dream of a Bachmann-Paul Republican ticket in 2012 is fading fast. Vain are the hopes of man! My notion was that Ron would educate Michele in foreign aid’s futility and the virtues of minding our own national business, while Michele would enlighten Ron about how a country without well-defended ...
A couple of years ago I floated the notion of an Arctic Alliance wherein people of north Eurasian origin (Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese), with their 100-or-so mean IQs and low fertility rates, would pool resources to defend their demographics against inundation from Islamia’s ululating ...
Walking around central Moscow, the thing you notice is the Russians—I mean, the near-total absence of non-Russians. There is, of course, a tourist element. Appearance is not much to go by here, but I can recognize—not necessarily understand, but recognize—most of the world’s major languages ...
I’ve read few things more depressing than this GQ piece about the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas earlier this year. On March 8 The New York Times had reported on “a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang ...
I am a pessimist, for reasons I have expatiated upon at book length. In that book’s first chapter, I distinguished two usages of the key word: I’m using the word “pessimism” in two slightly different senses: to indicate low expectations of one’s fellow men, and to name a ...
