It’s May, and the chilly dawn here in Virginia brings singing birds, velvet-soft breezes, and the rich perfume of freshly mown grass and damp earth. I take pleasure and joy in the time I spend on my front porch, sometimes singing a few lines from Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.” After a few minutes,
READ MOREThe Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, by Joseph F. Johnston, Jr. (Republic; 385 pp., $30.00). How would you know your country is in mortal decline? Joseph Johnston first explains how the Roman Republic and the British Empire rose to greatness and then declined. In light of these
READ MORE“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson. Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue. Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme
READ MOREThe Republican Party has been shamelessly embracing blacks on the sole criteria that they embrace capitalism and rehash stale talking points crediting dead Democrats for starting the Ku Klux Klan. Such overtures are acceptable to many, however, because the modern Republican Party rarely articulates a conservative message. The party does excel at something, however, namely,
READ MOREWe’re fast approaching Mother’s Day. Go to floral shops, candy emporiums, or grocery stores, and we find beaucoup gifts we can buy for Mom. Throw in other special gifts and treating Mom for brunch, and we will produce one of the more lucrative retail seasons of 2021, with over $28 billion dollars projected spending on Mother’s Day.
READ MOREIn a recent conversation with an internist, the good doctor asked me whether I’d gotten a COVID-19 vaccine. When I told him ‘No,” he then asked if I intended to get it at all. “Not unless someone forces it on me,” I said. I then asked him the same question. “I got the first injection,
READ MOREIn case you haven’t heard, billionaire power couple Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced. Mourning the end of the Gates’ marriage, The Washington Post proclaimed, “If Bill and Melinda Gates can’t make a marriage work, what hope is there for the rest of us?” Pshaw. If we leave our assessment of marriage to the
READ MORECrime is back in the news and hardly a day now passes without headlines about shootings at largely peaceful funerals and all the rest. The obvious question is whether this soaring criminality will render big cities like New York City unlivable—a return to when movie audiences cheered Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Today’s crime is deceptively
READ MOREThere’s always a silver lining, even in the dreadful lockdowns the world endured during COVID-19. One of these little glimmers of light surfaced recently in a Guardian article about children who, locked out of in-person classes, dove deeper into reading. Citing a Renaissance Learning report, the Guardian noted that “compared with the previous year, children
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