The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times. How many people today even know of this...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: If there was affirmative action in golf, nobody would give Tiger Woods half the credit he gets -- and deserves. Would you prefer to have a "compulsory" health care system imposed on you and your doctor or to have "universal"...
Major league umpires are complaining about an electronic device that is being used to check how accurately they are calling balls and strikes. They say that the device itself is too variable to be relied on. Whatever the merits of each side in this issue, it all...
As the Supreme Court of the United States wrestles with the issue of affirmative action as it exists in college admissions at the University of Michigan, the justices are taking on an issue that has been wrestled with in many contexts by courts in India for far longer...
The June issue of National Geographic contains one of the rare honest looks at India. The article "India's Untouchables" gives a shocking picture of some of the most persecuted people on earth. For far too long, India has been one of a number of countries used by the...
The idea of a slave memorial on the Washington Mall is so appalling that it is hard to understand how it has as much support as it does. Among politicians, it is much easier to understand why Democrats support the idea than why so many Republicans go along. Except for...
Old-time civil rights activist Bayard Rustin once said that blacks should issue a blanket amnesty to whites -- just so that guilty whites would not keep on doing counterproductive things in order to make up for the past. The proposal that Congress create a slave...
With the passing years, it becomes ever more painful for me to read the preambles of legislation. Time and time again, the wonderful and inspiring words in those preambles have turned out to have no relationship whatsoever to the actual consequences that followed. The...
A decade ago -- in May 1993 -- this column first mentioned unusually bright little children who are also unusually late in beginning to speak. Unknown to me at the time, this set in motion some remarkable developments which have not yet run their course. Letters from...
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That was certainly true of a recent photo of a little 7-year-old boy holding a sign demanding more money for the schools and holding his fist in the air. He was part of a demonstration organized by his teachers, and...
The term "useful idiots" has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book "Useful Idiots" shows that such people are...
In the old movie classic "Citizen Kane," there is a dramatic scene where a political opponent has just found a way to thwart Charles Foster Kane's bid to be elected governor. "This should be a lesson to you," the politician says to Kane. "But you are going to need...
The New York Times' famous motto -- "All the News That's Fit to Print" -- has been dishonored by the revelation that one of its own reporters has been printing stuff that he made up or stolen from other publications. Isolated scandals can strike anywhere. But this was...
Those for whom indignation is a way of life often inform us of the fact that families or households in the top 10 or 20 percent in income make far more money than people in the bottom 10 or 20 percent in income. What they almost never inform us of are how much money...
Two unrelated events last week provide some clues as to why our education system is failing. First, Canada College in San Mateo, California, held a job fair -- for kindergartners! Apparently there is nothing too silly to spend the taxpayers' money on, even when the...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Even though Saddam Hussein's regime has been toppled, there are still pockets of resistance -- not only in Iraq but in Paris, Berkeley, and in the editorial offices of the New York Times. These die-hards may hold out for years....
Princeton professor James M. McPherson's recent arguments for affirmative action, in a newsletter to members of the American Historical Association, makes many sweeping assertions and implicit assumptions that need not even be challenged to show the shakiness of his...
Old-timers may remember a radio program about a crime-fighting hero called The Shadow, who had "the power to cloud men's minds, so that they cannot see him." Affirmative action has that same power today. Some of the murkiest thinking of our times has come from those...
An old television special featured great boxing matches of the past, including a video of a match between legendary light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore and a young Canadian fighter named Yvonne Durrell, in which each man was knocked down four times during the...
Perhaps nothing so epitomized what is wrong with the media as Wolf Blitzer of CNN "reporting" on the war in Iraq, talking not about what had happened but about something that had not happened. No one had yet found weapons of mass destruction, he said, even though it...
Those of us whose pessimism about our country's social degeneration sometimes borders on despair have been given a reality check by the dedication, discipline, and decency of our troops in Iraq, as well as by the advanced technology of the military equipment they use....
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