Free Republic

This topic is inspired by the many what book / what music topics over the years, also by mairdie's cool vids of classical or jazz soundtracks over art montages.

The first time I met Laura Deckelman was on a ferry, which, if you know anything about Laura Deckelman, is fitting. Back in 2014, I had only been working at The Wave for a few weeks, and I was invited to take a ride on the then-Rockaway ferry by Seastreak President Jim Barker. It was a “simple meet and greet” to inform the public of some of the details of what expanded service could entail. We got stuck on a sand bar, got inconvenienced for an hour or so, the FDNY “rescued us,” and I met Laura. She told me...

The New York Times has apparently stolen its Pulitzer Prize-winning stories from Russian journalists – the same liberal anti-Putin reporters its correspondents have lionized. By Ben Norton The New York Times has been accused for a second time of stealing major scoops from Russian journalists. One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also happen to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin that Western correspondents at the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted heroes.The Pulitzer Prize Board is...

I decided it would be fun on Karl Marx’s birthday to make a list of all the things and quotes I could offer during this pandemic to highlight the destructive nature of socialism: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/05/05/using-fear-to-spread-socialism-and-attack-human-rights/ I only ended up writing down eight of them. In summary: 1 Premier Andrews. 2-5. Four attacks on our human social needs. 6. AOC 7. Marx 8 Chairman Mao contrasted with President Lincoln. I suppose this short list leaves plenty of room for other Freepers to entertain me by telling us all what you think about the ones I have left out. Go for it, my...

A struggling family faces many challenges with Social Service Agencies, while residing in America and in Israel. The Grandparents at some point come to the rescue of their Granddaughters.

https://archive.org/details/IsThisTomorrowAmericaUnderCommunismCatecheticalGuild/mode/2up This is a comic published in 1947, it's public domain now and a really good read. It depicts a step-by-step communist takeover of America. "First, we must touch off a real crisis in this country so we have an excuse to seize power..." Amazing how relevant this is today. It closes with this: TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CITIZENSHIP 1. Know your government. 2. Know the issues before it. 3. Keep up on foreign problems. 4. Be tolerant of other races, religions, and nationalities. 5. Practice your own religion. 6. Read newspapers and magazines critically. 7. Use your vote. 8. Follow...

On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics. What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on...

Help! I need recommendations for fun reading material. I really enjoy mysteries and have been re-reading some Agatha Christie books, because so many of the newer books are PC or extremely gory. Also, I prefer my reading material to be clean. Humor books are also good, as well as real crime and crime solving methods, as long as it's not too hair-raising. Fiction or non-fiction, as long as it's entertaining. Are there mysteries out there where the detective has at least somewhat conservative values? Are there ones set in the past that don't have feminist females entirely out of character...

We can't know what Mark Twain, who died 110 years ago today, would have said about the Coronavirus but here is what he had to say about truth in newspapers and about buying life insurance for railroad travel: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/04/21/remembering-mark-twain-and-media-driven-fear-of-death/ “Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm.” “....... the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies.” Was Mark Twain better than...

Is there still a profoundly entrenched inability to allow freedom in British culture? The American woman who married into their royal family has come back home. Why? Can Brexit set the English spirit free?

I think the idea that the word or Logos is God is amazing. But what does it mean?

What are the great lessons from Paul Revere's ride for us today as we face a health care crisis which we call a war? Is Donald Trump giving a wake-up call, as Paul Revere did with his midnight ride, in his willingness to try to get people back to work and buck the international trend of governments emphasizing "safety" and locking down?

... In Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar has performed the absolutely necessary task that her title promises, and has done so with admirable energy, persistence, and relentless attention to detail, leaving Zinn’s already shaky credibility in utter ruins. She brings the intensive scrutiny of a jeweler’s eye to Zinn’s work, topic by topic, and shows in no uncertain terms how flawed and unreliable it is. But that is not all. She also shows us Zinn the man: An utter charlatan and naked partisan, an admirer of Stalin and Mao, a relentless self-promoter and self-mythologizer, and a media-savvy celebrity of the...

Over the last two decades the writings of Pat Buchanan have taught me so much that my own background and education, born into a progressive family, could never have taught me. He has converted me to conservatism. (Ron Paul and Aussie P.M. Tony Abbott helped.) What do Freepers think of Pat Buchanan’s analysis of the current crisis: https://buchanan.org/blog/what-price-victory-in-the-coronavirus-war-138432 ? I consider it brilliant.

I love Wordsworth's original but I also find value in refocusing on God.

William Wordsworth restored vitality to the stuffy English literature of his lifetime with fresh down to earth language. In the current madness I have turned to Wordsworth this weekend to restore my faith in what is right about humanity. I have found myself rewriting his classic lines written above Tintern Abbey to direct them more to God and a little less at The Self. (Correcting the mistakes of “the Poms” – a.k.a. the British - is a national pastime in Australia.”) https://tujuhbelasan.com/2020/04/04/literary-tujuhbelasan-2-tintern-abbey-revisited/ What do Freeepers have to say about this?

Jack Posobiec joins Stefan Molyneux to reveal China's mad plan for world domination - and how it can be stopped! Bring your questions! Get Jack's book: "4D Warfare: A Doctrine for a New Generation of Politics" https://amzn.to/2Ia26vJ

The police state over reaction in Australia to the coronavirus is part of the social suicide of the West. Police here hold democracy and human rights in contempt to serve leftist politics. I am proud that I created this in homage to a man who has at least admitted in these times that the social fabric of freedom matters: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/02/07/one-minutes-silence-for-sotu/

As I post this in Australia, it is still 26 March in America, the 128th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s death. I invite Freeepers to reflect upon freedom via this collage of Whitman with some of my own thoughts: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/03/27/american-energy/ Does Trump rediscover Whitman for America in …….. ………… his celebration of people scorned by Obama and Clinton as clinging and deplorable? ………… and in his urge to keep working when medical science around the world is saying stop and self-isolate? If we have to self-isolate, is there any place better to do that than in the glories of Walt Whitman?...

Donald Trump won the presidency by tuning in to the hearts of Americans who had been left out. Are his current public ruminations on the nature of the American people and what sort of responses America CAN make to the C-19 crisis showing the same insight into his people? How Whitmanesque is he in this democratic capacity of tuning in to a national psyche? I have contrasted the thought of Whitman and Beethooven who both died on the same day, March 26, at different ends of the nineteenth century: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/03/26/who-we-are-beethooven-and-whitman/ Both are undeniable giants in The West, but in Whitman...