Free Republic

The dominant narrative of modern Middle East history emphasizes European colonization and accepts as a truism that the former colonial powers prioritized the protection of their material interests—in oil, above all—above the dignity and self-determination of the region’s inhabitants. --Thus did botched decolonization result in endless instability...Thus did the region become a breeding ground for radicalism, intensified by Cold War rivalry between the superpowers, who replaced the European colonizers as the region’s meddling overlords...Then came Mikhail Gorbachev—a Westernizing reformer. At last, the Cold War was over. A new world order was at hand. What if this conventional wisdom is nonsense?...

"Those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created," argues a new article in New York Magazine titled "The Internet Apologizes". Today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being "weaponized." Even Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he lamented recently...

By Noah Shachtman It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program! The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing? The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone...

[DHS] wants to track the comings and goings of journalists, bloggers and other “media influencers” through a database. The DHS’s “Media Monitoring” plan, which was first reported by FedBizOpps.gov, would give the contracting company “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”

I walked by the television this morning and saw Trump's picture and the block letters "FACEBOOK SCANDAL" in red on a blue background. The sound was turned down, but the earnest-appearing, attractive young woman in a tight black form fitting dress was clearly portraying the appropriate gravity for this "situation". It was the same thing I saw last night before going to bed, an older, serious looking man with a similar backdrop and identical grave look on his face. Again, the sound was turned down, but it is clear there is a real problem in American society right now. And...

By Philip Cottraux In George Orwell’s 1984, all freedom is a thing of the past and the world is run by an authoritarian government known as Big Brother. People live under misery and oppression, every move they make being watched carefully by the sinister party, INGSOC. Every room of every home is equipped with a telescreen that monitor’s one’s every move, the slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You” playing over and over again. Even showing a facial expression of slight disinterest over one of the Party’s big announcements can cause one to be arrested for suspicion of “thought crimes.” Our...

For the first time since 2010, an American man has made to the Australian Open quarterfinals. The aptly named Tennys Sandgren is the last American standing in the men’s singles division, an achievement that is ever-so-slightly tainted by the fact that he’s probably a huge Trump supporter — and not the craven “Trump is terrible but I voted for him anyway because I am a Republican” kind, but the out-and-proud MAGA hat-wearing, “Pizzagate is real” kind. At a post-match press conference on Monday, a reporter asked Sandgren about his Twitter account, where he’s retweeted and engaged in conversation with prominent...

Police have arrested more than 3,400 people for ‘offensive’ online comments in one year an investigation by The Times has revealed. Figures obtained through the Freedom of Information Act has revealed that political police chiefs have been spending taxpayers’ money on arresting internet trolls under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” introduced in 2016. Given that thirteen police forces have refused to submit the figures of their arrests of internet commentators, the total number of politically motivated harassment and arrest by police is certain to...

LONDON — A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.

On his first day of kindergarten, my son came home and told me that his classmates should be punished because all they did was run around and play instead of listen to the teacher. As he grew up, he played basketball at the Jewish Community Center, was a farmer in the musical “Oklahoma!” and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at age 13. In the summer, he can be found at a grill, making hot dogs and hamburgers for kids in the neighborhood. But my son is a teenager and he is black. So he must be in a gang. At least...

The American Academy of Pediatrics board committed $583,000 in resources to establish the Clinical Health Information and Longitudinal Data Registry, AAP News Editor-in-Chief Anne Hegland wrote Nov. 21. To develop the CHILD Registry, the AAP will capture children's health data through EHRs, health payers and existing pediatric disease registries. The organization's goal for the project is to collect, store and analyze health data from all U.S. children, including information related to well-child and sick visits, chronic disease management and specialty care. The clinical data registry, which AAP officials plan to develop over the next five years, contributes to two of...

Nightmare neighbours smoking cannabis inside their own homes is a common problem for communities across Britain. The notoriously pungent stench may be a sign of a recreational user smoking the odd joint next door or the drug being grown in large quantities close by. And while you may not be bothered by what other people get up to in their own homes, there’s no denying the smell can be off-putting. So what action can you take if you suspect the drug is being used near your home? The Derby Telegraph and DevonLive took a closer look at the law surrounding...

Take George Orwell’s "1984." Now sprinkle in that episode of "Black Mirror" where characters live in a world in which every aspect of their lives is dominated by ratings. That’s one way to think about the Social Credit System, a plan that the Chinese government will make mandatory for all its citizens by 2020. It’s like a credit score system, but instead of just financial information, this one will also pull together a person's political leanings, purchase history and even their social interactions to calculate their "trust score." Chinese officials say it’s a way to influence their citizens’ behavior to...

Porn, spam and hate among the top reasons cited for blocking Facebook and Twitter users Canadian government departments have quietly blocked nearly 22,000 Facebook and Twitter users, with Global Affairs Canada accounting for nearly 20,000 of the blocked accounts, CBC News has learned. Moreover, nearly 1,500 posts — a combination of official messages and comments from readers — have been deleted from various government social media accounts since January 2016. However, there could be even more blocked accounts and deleted posts. In answer to questions tabled by Opposition MPs in the House of Commons, several departments said they don't keep...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

Figures obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 3,395 people across 29 forces were arrested last under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”, in 2016. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, as thirteen police forces refused to provide the requested information and two did not provide usable data. Around half of the investigations were abandoned before being brought to prosecution, which critics say is an indication that the authorities are being excessively strict in their interpretation of...

British authorities like to pretend that there is equal terror threat coming from both jihadis and “right-wing extremists.” That leads to a diversion of resources that could be used to fight jihadis, and the persecution of innocent people, such as the politician Paul Weston, who was arrested for publicly reading Winston Churchill’s remarks about Islam. The really insidious aspect of this, however, is that for years, Leftist and Islamic supremacist spokesmen have been claiming that any opposition to jihad terror that involved honest discussion of its motivating ideology was “far-right propaganda.” In light of that, what Amber Rudd is essentially...

"if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. Big Brother, a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive...

The subject head of the document, carried under the words, “Special Importance,� read: “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov.� According to the memo, Senator Kennedy was “very troubled� by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the murderous tyrant running the USSR but to President Reagan. The problem was Reagan’s “belligerence,� said the memo, and made worse by Reagan’s stubbornness. “According to Kennedy,� reported Chebrikov, “the current threat is due to the President’s refusal to engage any modification to his politics.� That refusal, said the memo, was exacerbated by Reagan’s political...

It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group. The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate. But it will re-open its investigation should it receive...