Dave Weigel has a typically vivid piece about what the Knob Creek machine gun shoot was like this year, capturing the mix of gunnies, gawkers, conspiracy nuts, and folks looking for cheap ammo.  Arguably, the profile of the audience at Knob Creek is newsworthy because a good chunk of the people here form the Republican base.  The most revealing part of … [Read More]

Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border? Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan … [Read More]

It has never ceased to amaze me that, as our stalwart editor commented to me, “it reveals much about our age that the term ‘adult fun’ evokes pornos and strapons and not black-tie outings and champagne.” Indeed it does. As this writer lamented in an earlier piece, there seems to be an absolute hatred on the part of the Boomers, and … [Read More]

This might surprise you, but I wasn’t always such a mild, soft-spoken guy. Before my conversion to St. Francis of Assisi’s gospel of peace, you might have called me… contentious. Provoked, I acted rather “prickly”—and I mean that as an adverb. Growing up bookish in a blue collar ‘hood full of guys named Vito who thought my pointy head could … [Read More]

During the Cold War, conservatives rightly pointed out that the collectivist materialism of the Soviet Union was anti-human in the worst ways.  It elevated the state to mythic proportions.  It denied the value of individual human beings.  It suppressed the human spirit and focused on minimal material comfort to the exclusion of other values.  The state could undo social injustices, we … [Read More]

Some immigrants assimilate more slowly than others. My best friend from childhood had parents from Abruzzi who lived in NYC for 40 years and never learned English—the need for it never arose. I guess I’m another sort of “unmeltable ethnic,” having been for long periods of my life an expat New Yorker who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) learn how to drive. And … [Read More]

It was a balmy New England dawn, in that brief slice of the year when our clime is as mild as Malibu’s and the pine trees bend in sweet obeisance to the breeze…. On such a day, a man of my years climbs from the coverlets and thinks: “All shall be well….The perfect day for a colonoscopy.” Perhaps I view all … [Read More]

Like a catfish slipping off deck into cool, polluted waters, I’m back in NYC tonight—staying in an Orchard Street apartment rented off Craig’s List, taking a much needed vacation from hazardous trees, menacing highway entrance ramps, dour Yankees, and undergraduates. At long last, I can hear not a single cricket, bird, or bee—but instead the buzz of the street, and a … [Read More]

Tomorrow I take my first driving lesson: New Hampshire be warned! I did once drive, in Baton Rouge between 1994 and 1996, having almost achieved my lifelong goal of getting a Ph.D. before I got a license—which has long since expired. But I haven’t controlled an internal combustion vehicle in12 long years. In my brief tenure as a real American, I … [Read More]

I know this is supposed to be a lifestyle column, but each week I seem to find out that one or more of the habits which makes my life liveable could also possibly kill me. Last week it was eating and drinking. I responded by cutting my booze consumption by 5/7ths (e.g. I only get tipsy on weekends), and that’s working … [Read More]