Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending non-stop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys. When a year later the North Vietnamese took Quang Tri in the north and were about to attack Hue, Bill Buckley send me a cable asking for one thousand words on whether Hue could hold out this time. In 1968 the old imperial city had fallen to the Viet Cong and every priest, doctor, and community leader had been slaughtered by them. The Marines had retaken it at great cost and now forty NVA divisions … 
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“Progressive London Conference”: the phrase is simultaneously gruesome and narcoleptic. It hints at almost illimitable tedium, wishful thinking, a tincture of vitriol and much more than a soupcon of sanctimony. It carries bland and bathetic connotations—like a recurring nightmare of rainy Friday afternoons in school combined with Sunday School lessons as excruciating as they are esoteric. It conjures up visions of a hot and airless room (perhaps in a 1960s building) over-filled with blank-eyed or frankly dozing “delegates”, slide shows full of meaningless statistics and spelling mistakes, adenoidal or heavily-accented voices reading from looooong papers cut and pasted from sociology books … 
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“Make a child smile—kill a counselor.” A passable joke and an admirable sentiment. Face it, a kid cannot even fart these days without being offered counseling or Ritalin. We are enfeebled by prevailing victim culture, brought low by its burgeoning support industry of hand-holders and quack fixes; we are considered remarkable—borderline freakish—should we actually manage to cope. The price paid for the bullshit peddled is high. Dignity is replaced by dependency, reserve by emotional incontinence; humor has given over to grim earnestness, stoicism and grit to flaccid self-pity. To ‘have issues’ is to be interesting (it used to be called flakey), … 
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Soon after starting from “Junction” the first time on the Cresta Run, my mind went racing, “This cannot be happening. I am going way too fast and there is no control. Why didn’t somebody warn me?” Somehow I made it safely to the end, which was in Celerina, the next village over from St. Moritz. Sheer luck. I was simply holding on for dear life. Nothing can quite prepare you for the experience. Your nose is approximately 4 inches from the ice; due to that proximity, you seem to be traveling a hundred miles an hour, even though you are going … 
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No, it is not 1860 again. But with all the talk of the 10th Amendment, nullification and interposition, states rights and secession—following Gov. Rick Perry’s misstatement that Texas, on entering the Union in 1845, reserved in its constitution a right to secede—one might think so. Chalk up another one for those Tea Party activists who exploded in cheers when Sister Sarah brought up the dread word in endorsing Rick Perry in the primary. Looking back in American history, however, these ideas, these sentiments, decried as insane inside the Beltway, were once as American as “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” “I … 
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There’s nothing quite like a New York Times columnist for spouting gobbledegook on matters economic: perhaps only the editorials themselves are worse. Tom “Airmiles” Friedman gives us a lovely example here: Banks, multinationals and hedge funds often hire foreign policy experts to do “political risk analysis” before they invest in places like, say, Kazakhstan or Argentina. They may soon have to add the United States to their watch lists. Now he’s right so far, investors really are adding the US (and the UK) to their list of places where political risk is a concern. But Tom then goes on to waffle … 
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        I was impressed. In less than five minutes, Magda here had managed to check us in, book us our wake-up calls, add our Ibis points onto our Ibis Elite Members Club Cards, and all that while being practically shot at through the hotel window. That’s a damned sight better than I could have done, let me tell you. I had a job as a receptionist myself, once. I did. It was while I was working in a hotel in a ski resort in Colorado for a few months during that period of my life when I was … 
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The inflation from five to ten in Best Picture Oscar nominees means that to have any hope of keeping them all straight in your head, you’ll need to group them. Fortunately, the Best Picture nods fall into five obvious pairings: —The Easily Confused Titles: Up and Up in the Air. —The Exes’ Action Flicks: James Cameron’s Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. —The Movies about 350-Pound Black 16-Year-Olds: Precious and The Blind Side. (Two films that, together, teach us that if you are going to be an impoverished but colossal teen, it’s better to be a guy than a girl.) … 
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I often wonder as to why people are shocked, shocked—Captain Renault-like—to discover that modern football is a malodorous cesspit teeming with leeches and crooks, or that Tony Blair is a congenital liar not worthy of any position except that of orderly in a prison gym. The latest shock is the discovery that Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, has fathered his 20th child. Unlike football players, owners of football teams, and Tony Blair, I like Jacob Zuma, a polygamous roly-poly Zulu who preaches safe sex by advising those indulging to take a shower once they’ve finished the business. Zuma is … 
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They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment, universal health care, early retirement and comfortable pensions. Most consume 40 percent to 50 percent of their gross domestic product annually, a crushing burden on the private sector. Dying populations is a second cause. After two world wars, the Europeans lost their faith and embraced hedonism … 
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