Never steal anything so small that you’ll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum security federal tennis prison.
P.J. O'Rourke Quotes
The concept of “nature” is itself, so to speak, artificial. Are Ring-Dings elf food? Is Wal-Mart part of the spirit world? For people who live in what we would call “the state of nature” – for Yaguas, Orejons, riberenos, me when I’m fishing in Michigan – nature is nothing in particular. It’s meat locker, wastepaper […]
I got to watch a lot of Egyptian TV, owing to a miscalculation in my attempt at cultural understanding. I’d arrived in Egypt in early December, in the middle of Ramadan. Not that Ramadan itself is hard to understand. It’s a kind of Lent or extended Yom Kippur, with fasting from sunrise to sunset. Nothing […]
Arriving in Egypt during Ramadan is like arriving in an American small town on a holiday weekend about the time that the bowl games come on.
Farming in much of the Middle East requires irrigation, a horribly communal activity, like being trapped in an endless Amish barn raising. Then the people of the region went and invented writing. Writing is the enabler of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy leads to the Department of Motor Vehicles model of government, with patronage jobs, wire pulling, and […]
I just came back from a month on the Mexican border, where I personally captured three illegal aliens. This saved the United States a lot of money in welfare, social services and unemployment benefits. Therefore, each of you owes me 50 cents. Unless, of course, you happen to be illegal aliens, in which case you […]
Some people are better imagined in one’s bed than found there in the morning.
What if people who had been away for ages, out and on their own, suddenly showed up at their old home and decided to move back in? My friends with grown-up children tell me this happens all the time. What if the countless ancient tribal groups that are now defeated, dispersed, and stateless contrived to […]
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay’s a lot worse.
