There's no telling what might have happened to our defense budget if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait that August and set everyone gearing up for World War II. Can we count on Saddam Hussein to come along every year and resolve our defense-policy debates? Given the history of the Middle East, it's possible.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

The average IQ in America is—and this can be proven mathematically—average.

Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.