A good friend – a keen observer of the human condition – asked the other day if the Notre Dame fire is a metaphor for the destruction of the Western World? There’s an instant recoil from that suggestion; of course things will be okay! Then you start to think about all the negative news of […]

I have a couple Georgetown alumni in the circle. Here is what Arrias has to say about that. – Vic ======================= Reparations I’ve read that students at my alma mater are pushing the school to provide reparations to descendants of slaves the school owned – and sold – 180 years ago. Slavery was, and is, […]

“Welcome, Comrades, to another Monday! There is word of hostage release, doubling down on collusion charges, criminal referrals to DOJ from Congress- or part of it, anyway- 24 gunshot victims on the first decent night in Chicago- and the change in leadership at DHS as the Border becomes more complex. Of course there is more […]

America faces several existential threats. Two of them – Russia and China – are somewhat ordinary, in that we’ve faced them for years. They remain threats none-the-less, but we know how to deal with them. Then, there’s debt, huge, multi-tiered layers of debt – federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, multiple federal and state […]

Sometimes you need fiction to fully grasp what is happening in the real world. This occurred to me the other day when I read a politician’s glaringly anti-Semitic remarks. A scene from Herman Wouk’s novel “Winds of War” came to mind, where the Nazi banker calmly comments to the US Naval Attache to Berlin, telling […]

In the Pentagon, fascinated as it is with “joint” warfare, few people seem to understand questions of naval policy or naval theory, but we are a maritime nation. That has a host of implications, but the most immediate is that it means our true first line of security is our navy. We need a great […]

Last week Congress passed an omnibus spending bill and the President signed it. It funded the wall – in part. Then there was some more yelling by nearly everyone about what it said or didn’t say. Here’s what I saw: Another omnibus spending bill. A $1,300,000,000,000 (that’s 1.3 trillion) omnibus bill, a demonstration that Congress […]

Jonathan Swift, where are you when we need you? Roughly 300 million people have died in all the wars ever fought. Slightly less, between 250 million and 300 million have been killed by their own governments (perhaps a quarter of them by Chairman Mao). Maybe 600 million in 6,000 years. Worldwide, since 1973 nearly 1.5 […]

There’s been a lot of talk about Socialism and Socialists of late, with several being elected to Congress. All this even as Venezuela – a land blessed with natural resources – unravels under socialist rule. When challenged that socialism has never worked, the Socialists respond that true Socialism has never been tried and that if […]

Comedies are often far better at revealing subtle truths than are drama; perhaps that’s why good comedies are more rare than good dramas. In a scene in the movie “Major League” the Cleveland Indians, ahead by one run, face a tight situation: runners on, the big Yankee slugger stepping into the batter’s box. The relief […]