During the holidays, a shopping mall can be more like a shopping maul. One way to avoid that scene is to give books as Christmas gifts, since books can be bought on-line, painlessly.
A book that fits in with the holiday spirit is "No, They Can't!" by...
Random thoughts on the passing scene:When I was growing up, an older member of the family used to say, "What you don't know would make a big book." Now that I am an older member of the family, I would say to anyone, "What you don't know would fill more...
The political slogan "Forward" served Barack Obama well during this year's election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for "going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place."
It was great political rhetoric and...
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available....
Thomas Jefferson warned us, "I, however, place economy among the first and most important Republican virtues, and public debt as the … They end America's current welfare dependency trap where, as ThomasSowell rightly observes, "Someone who is trying to climb out of…
The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back -- and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.If there are any awards...
We all know not to take politicians' rhetoric at face value. But not enough of us have yet learned not to take media rhetoric at face value either, even when it appears in what looks like a "news" story, but is actually a disguised editorial on the front page.For example,...
Government budget crises can be painful, but the political rhetoric accompanying these crises can also be fascinating and revealing. Perhaps the most famous American budget crisis was New York City's, back during the 1970s. When President Gerald Ford was unwilling to bail them out, the famous headline in the New...
They say that, in politics, "overnight is a lifetime." In other words, the journey from triumphant hero to discredited scapegoat can be very brief.In the wake of the Republicans' triumphs in last November's elections, great hopes are being held out that Republican control of the House of Representatives can slam...
When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were...
While everyone's attention seems to be focused on the crisis in Egypt, a bombshell revelation about the administration's foreign policy in Europe has largely gone unnoticed. The British newspaper The Telegraph has reported that part of the price which President Obama paid to get Russia to sign the START treaty,...
Now that two different federal courts have declared ObamaCare unconstitutional, the administration's answer is to call the courts guilty of "judicial activism." Barack Obama has a rhetorical solution for every problem. Remember the repeated claims of "shovel-ready" projects that needed only federal stimulus money to get started? Last year the...
Dunbar High School in Washington is becoming a controversial issue again -- and the controversy that is beginning to develop has implications for American education well beyond the District of Columbia.
There has not been much controversy about Dunbar High School for a long time. Since sometime in the...
Many years ago, in upstate New York, there was a lady who was caught in a fierce snow storm that produced conditions called a "whiteout." That's when the snow is falling so thick and fast that all you can see in any direction is just sheer white. This lady wandered...
A political battle that is shaping up in San Francisco has implications for other communities across the country.
The issue that will be on the June ballot is whether voter approval shall be required to change the height restrictions on buildings along the San Francisco waterfront. Like so many...
There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to "do something" about rape on campus.
But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions.
Why are...
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Will the Veterans Administration scandal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a "single payer" system for medical care? Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a common denominator in government-run medical systems...
At one time, people in India had to get on a waiting list to buy Hindustan Motors' Ambassador automobile, even though it was an obvious copy of Britain's Morris Oxford of some decades earlier. The reason was simple: the Indian government would not allow cars to be imported to compete...
As ThomasSowell has written,“Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make … Thomas Paine once said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."…
