Ronald E. Yates 
Now that the United States has slinked out of Afghanistan following yet another ignominious defeat reminiscent of its “lost crusade” in Vietnam, people are asking the question: Is this the end of the American Empire? Is the United States done for? Did we meet our match in the fundamentalist Muslim …
C.S. Lewis, author of The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, had some sage advice in 1948 as the world was entering the atomic age. Atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three years before and as a result, World War II came to an …
When I learned that actor Ed Asner had passed away at the age of 91 the other day, I couldn’t help thinking about the old “Lou Grant” television series in which Asner played the gruff and curmudgeonly city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. By the way, in case …
Today, I am stepping away from the FUBAR disaster that has occurred during the past several weeks in Afghanistan, to something “completely different,” as they used to say on the old Monty Python TV show. Instead of Afghanistan, I am taking you to Japan, where there is a national holiday …
By now you have heard about the military weapons, vehicles, aircraft, drones, classified technology, and encrypted communications equipment the feckless and incompetent Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff left behind for our new friends the Taliban in Afghanistan. Clearly, the deaths of 12 U.S. …
Joe Biden is a disgrace. He is feckless. He is a coward. He is a liar. Yesterday, he went on television to talk about the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. But how did he begin? He started by talking about the Democrat’s Build Back Better plan and all the “free stuff” …
Recently I was interviewed on Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” show, hosted by Jan Jakielek about the similarities and differences between what is happening now in Afghanistan and what happened in Saigon in April 1975. Here is a link to that interview. It lasts about 30 minutes. I hope you …
Ocassionally, I post stories I wrote while working as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. I filed the story that follows in Febrary 1987 after returning from a foray into Afghanistan with a warlord and his Mujahideen militia. The Mujahideen, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, were fighting the …
Accomplished wordsmith William Safire once defined a gap between the generations as “a frustrating lack of communication between young and old, or a useful stretch of time that separates cultures within a society, allowing them to develop their own character.” That’s a pretty good definition. But it doesn’t tell the …
In the past few weeks, two stories caught my attention. One decried the growing wealth gap between the young and old in America. The other highlighted the growing difference between older and younger Americans on issues such as social values and morality. Should we be surprised by either of these …