[M]onkeys in India are a gigantic pain in the ass and a genuine menace, too: Every now and then, they kill somebody, or maim somebody pretty good. - Kevin D. Williamson

America is not an idea or a collection of documents, but neither is it a closed ethnolinguistic set. It is a nation in which relations among the people and between the individual and the state are defined by the terms of citizenship.

[T]he broad movement oriented toward advocacy for sexual minorities has become more hysterical and more insistent as the stakes have in general declined. This is characteristic of many similar political movements: We have much cleaner air and water today than we did a generation ago, but the environmental movement is six times as hysterical as it once was. It is a curious thing.

Nobody but nobody is quite so dumb as to believe that all, most, or even very many uses of firearms to prevent acts of criminal violence result in justifiable homicides. Most of them do not result in anybody’s being shot, much less shot dead, because most of them do not involve discharging a firearm. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a would-be assailant is in many cases a very persuasive gesture.