Free Republic

I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. It’s just that I shouldn’t have put it past us. It was tough to keep track of the currents of politics and pageantry swirling at once. All my life I had seen myself, and my people, backed into a corner. Had I been wrong? Watching the crowds at county fairs cheer for Michelle Obama in 2008, or flipping through the enchanting photo spreads of the glamorous incoming administration, it was easy to believe that...

Despite the turbulence of the Weimar years, Germany has followed a steady capitalist economic model since the end of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean people like the idea, a new study shows. Contrary to the US, where belief in capitalism is as entrenched as hot dogs and baseball, Germany has always had a more complicated relationship to the philosophy of competitive markets. This is, after all, the country that gave us the founding communist thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And a study published by Statista and YouGov on Tuesday shows that only 16 percent of Germans...

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...

A group of Native Americans in Arizona is taking on two Australian resources giants to try to save a sacred desert campground from being destroyed by a huge mining development. Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of Australia's Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, plans to turn the area around the Oak Flat campsite in the Tonto National Forest into the biggest copper mine in North America. Members of the local San Carlos Apache tribe said Oak Flat was a sacred place where they had held religious and cultural ceremonies for centuries. "It is no different to what people can relate to about...

"Representative democracy" has failed; the private sector is "inept"; and only bigger government - led by China and the US - has the power to save the world from climate change. So says Bill Gates in a dogmatic but somewhat confused interview with The Atlantic in which he simultaneously pours scorn on green tech solutions but insists that more of them are needed - on a scale bigger than the Manhattan Project - if we are to deal successfully with a problem whose nature he admits may well have been exaggerated by environmentalists.

The controversial pastor who preached at a church attended by President Obama said on Saturday that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” alluded to Israel as an apartheid state and compared “the youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine” during a speech in Washington, D.C. Jeremiah Wright, who led Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago from 1972 to 2008, spoke at a Nation of Islam event titled “Justice or Else!” on the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.

Anti-capitalism, pro-AGW, and anti-gun By now, you’ve probably seen the Tweets, read the quotes, or listened to the proclamations coming from the Vatican. The Pope has decided to embrace the global warming faith, attack capitalism, decry the successes of western nations, and rail against guns, gun manufacturers, and those who support the industry. In short (abortion and gay marriage aside) he’s taken a turn to the hard-left. In the span of a decade, we’ve gone from a Pope teaming with Reagan to defeat the Soviet Union to a Pope who embraces the classist financial rhetoric of our old enemies. That’s...

Since 1880, when global temperatures began to be systematically collected, no year has been warmer than 2014. The 15 warmest years, with one single exception, have come during the first 15 years of the new millennium. Indeed, it has become an open question as to whether global warming can be stopped anymore—or at least limited as policymakers have called for. Is capitalism ultimately responsible for the problem, or could it actually help to solve it? […] Following the Copenhagen fiasco, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands, resigned in...

One in five Germans believe that a revolution would be the only way to truly reform society, a study released by the Free University of Berlin on Monday shows. Anti-capitalism, anti-fascism and anti-racism were all are prominent positions according to the study entitled “Against state and capital—for the revolution”, which has revealed a public much further to the left than previously thought. In the report, 20% of the people surveyed agreed with the statement that “Living conditions won’t be improved by reforms—we need a revolution”. A similar percentage of people said they saw the rise of a new fascism in...

A social media campaign calling for a boycott on spending this Black Friday has caught the attention of celebrities. In an effort to protest the Missouri grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August, US celebrities have taken to social media to use the hashtags #NotOneDime, #BlackoutFriday and #BlackoutBlackFriday to advocate for a retail boycott. They include actors Michael B. Jordan and Jesse Williams, Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler, actress Kat Graham, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and journalist Soledad O’Brien . The hashtags are meant to encourage people...

… Opponents of the carbon tax implemented in 2012 had the media largely on their side. Electricity prices soared—not mainly because of the tax, but because power companies were spending billions on infrastructure. Most electricity users were compensated for the added cost of the tax, but many of them didn’t know that. And rising gas prices fed the fury—even though the tax didn’t apply to gasoline. Australia’s experience illustrates how easy it is to scuttle complicated environmental laws, and serves as a warning to President Barack Obama, whose recent proposal to force a 30 percent cut in power plants’ carbon...

Obama’s inability to make a decision on Keystone has finally yielded a result – Canada has made the decision for him. Breitbart reports Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project – a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil to Asia. The Canadian oil will still be burnt – in Asia, instead of America. All the jobs and energy security which Canadian oil could have delivered to America, will instead be delivered to Asia. Rather than purchasing crude from a friendly and allied neighbor, the United States will most likely need to continue its reliance upon hostile sources like...

That National Public Radio has nice things to say about socialism shouldn’t be surprising. After all, “Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public,” explains NPR’s own website. “Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism…and eventually the loss of public radio stations.” NPR’s brand of journalism came under fire most recently when Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn sponsored a bill in 2011 to defund the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. “Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds programming for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, has received...

Speech Delivered by Josef Vissarionovich Stalin at a meeting of voters of the Stalin Electoral District, MoscowFebruary 9, 1946Comrades! Eight years have passed since the last elections to the Supreme Soviet. This has been a period replete with events of a decisive nature. The first four years were years of intense labour on the part of Soviet people in carrying out the Third Five-Year Plan. The second four years covered the events of the war against the German and Japanese aggressors -- the events of the Second World War. Undoubtedly, the war was the main event during the past period....

I was at a bar in Chehalis, WA where the conversation was very anti-capitalist. The bartender stated that he was pro-communist. I mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and he replied that capitalism was going to fall too. This guy is looking at the current recession as a vindication. The bar owner then jumped in to say that capitalism was everything wrong with the country and that things need to change. I pointed out that being a business owner makes her a capitalist. She then said that politics should not be discussed in a bar and ended the discussion....

NIKE has pulled a pair of leggings after the design was criticized for being racist. The monochrome print, which features on the label's Pro Tattoo Tech Tights, has caused controversy in Australia and New Zealand for its similarity to the traditional Samoan Pe'a male tattoo.

On Memorial Day weekend, 2 million people marched in protests against seed giant Monsanto for the purpose of bringing awareness to hazards from genetically modified food, which it and other companies manufacture. Organizer Tami Canal said protests were held in 436 cities in 52 countries. Genetically modified plants are grown from genetically modified, or engineered, seeds, which are created to resist insecticides and herbicides so that crops can be grown to withstand a weed-killing pesticide or integrate a bacterial toxin that can ward off pests. The Chicago Tribune reported that because genetically modified organisms are not listed on food or...

Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it. Excluding, of course, those who’ve made money from it, appropriately represented in the public’s mind by Monsanto. That corporation, or at least its friends, recently managed to have an outrageous rider slipped into the 587-page funding bill Congress sent to President Obama.[1] The rider essentially prohibits the Department of Agriculture from stopping production of any genetically engineered crop once it’s in the ground, even if there is evidence that it is harmful.

Young, single ladies: America is worried about you. You just keep going to college, moving to urban areas after graduation and finding yourselves outnumbering, sometimes dramatically, the available men of your demographic. How will you ever get married? How will you ever go from being the subject of one kind of magazine cover to being the subject of another? Clearly the best thing to do is stay back on the farm to live in a male-dense rural area, where the marriageable boys are there for your picking. Or it was, until Tuesday, when an enterprising New York Times journalist named...

Lisa Jackson is the boss at one of the most contentious government agencies in the Obama administration and is responsible for numerous controversial actions that will have a significant financial effect on American consumers: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). So it’s no wonder Congress is miffed to discover that her decision-making process on key issues was conducted in the most secretive manner Washington has ever devised—under an alias. Jackson’s secret identity email account name is “Richard Windsor.” The name is part family dog (Richard) and part hometown (East Windsor, N.J.), and it turns out there are at least 12,000 recently...