Sports is the toy department of life.

It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui.

It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices.

The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.