Over the last few days, as I watched both the homicidal antics of the Boston Bomb Brothers and the characteristically competent Tom Cruise science-fiction movie Oblivion, I was reminded that one of the least expected developments of my lifetime has been how the vast majority of the world’s ...
Covert agendas play a sizable role in the gun-control debate. If you were to pay attention solely to the handful of homicide cases the press emphasizes, you would assume that the country's biggest problem is white males committing mass shootings. Yet the total death toll from all mass shootings in ...
In 1999, I was interrogated on suspicion of being an Irish Republican Army terrorist plotting to assassinate Baroness Margaret Thatcher with a letter bomb. I was startled by a phone call from the police chief of the Maryland town where the former prime minister was going to attend a conference ...
With gun control, murder, and race much in the news, it's worth noting that the Obama Administration has solved its longstanding problem that, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit the majority of homicides in the US. For years, the press has been explaining that ...
What do people really mean by the word “vibrant?” Until the disco era, “vibrant” was used only rarely, mostly in connection with vibrations, literal or metaphorical. A quick search online finds no examples of “vibrant” in the works of George Orwell or John ...
While reading up a couple of weeks ago on the Oberlin College KKK fiasco, I became fascinated by the various Web pages at colleges such as Oberlin, Smith, Scripps, and similar advanced, lesbian-heavy institutions for the documenting of “microaggressions.” Since the Ku Klux Klaxon ...
We are constantly told that the GOP is doomed because it’s the party of straight white men. That may well be true, but few have asked: How can the diverse Democrats hold together? How can special interests as different as blacks and gays be kept in sync? The answer appears to be: The Obama ...
The current identity-politics hysteria was launched about a year ago (conveniently enough for the Obama reelection campaign) with the news that an angelic black baby named Trayvon Martin had been gunned down by white racist George Zimmerman. In the latest brouhaha, Oberlin, a (very) liberal arts ...
With immigration policy back in the news, I’m reminded that when I was a lad 40 years ago, the cutting-edge wisdom was that rapid population growth was a major problem. (Granted, my parents didn’t let me stay up school nights to watch Johnny Carson, who had Paul Ehrlich, author of the ...
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as a silent-screen legend plotting a comeback and William Holden as her toy boy, remains one of the most famous movies ever. Yet Sunset Boulevard’s origins in an Evelyn Waugh novel have been forgotten. This cultural amnesia is curious ...
