2006-08-21

Damn! Cain’t believe it! Hoo-yeeha-wow! And all.
Let me try to get this to make sense, though the odds are long. I was tending the computer in the bedroom of my house in Jocotopec in darkest Mexico, maybe ten in the morning. The Mamas and the [...]

2006-08-17

I found myself some time ago under social circumstances in a group that included an angry radical feminist, which is to say a radical feminist. Out of nowhere that I remember, she announced, “Men are sexist pigs.” Such assertions are [...]

2006-08-07

I’m wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don’t start looking up pretty soon internationally, I’m going to be pretty sure which.
As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, [...]

2006-07-31

Back before the beginning of time, in the late Fifties when the sun lowered over small-town Alabama like a steaming towel, and it was so humid a tadpole could just about fly, we kids of eleven didn’t have many store-bought [...]

2006-07-21

I think it is time to close the universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization, Universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
I know this. I am sitting in my office in Jocotepec, [...]

2006-07-09

One hears often now that boys flounder in school, drop out, generally perform less well academically than girls, and don’t go to college. A certain amount of this commentary comes from women who seem quietly to enjoy the spectacle. Given that women control the schools, this [...]

2006-06-19

The whole curious story began one evening when Harvard’s Conservative Student Union held a mass meeting in a local beer chute. The membership both agreed that the university’s practice of affirmative action had gone too far. In particular, it irritated them that the Native Peoples Impressment Office had recruited as students a hundred thirty-seven Tloxyproctyl [...]

2006-06-11

The New America. From the MARC train betweem DC and Baltimore.

Yesterday I got back to Mexico after visiting Washington for a week. Returning to the United States at long intervals is like watching a flower wilt in time-lapse photography. As with the slow but inexorable [...]

2006-05-24

I get a lot of email asking me, “What’s it really like in Mexico, Fred?” A book would be needed to give a good answer. Since people seem interested, I’ll take a few random shots at the topic. Don’t expect literature or organization.
The quick answer is that it isn’t nearly as bad as many Americans [...]

2006-05-17

People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can’t get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, [...]

2006-05-14

It is possible to derive an ashen satisfaction from watching really stupid people dancing on a tight rope over a den of alligators. At each resounding dental snap one yells “Yeeeeeeeee-ha! Told you so!” and reaches for another beer.It makes a better Saturday night than a six pack and a bug zapper.
From the Washington Post: [...]