Free Republic

Late this night* in 1628 was the fictional execution of The Three Musketeers antagonist Milady de Winter. This conniving minx bears the fleur-de-lis brand of a teenage crime upon her shoulder — a very naughty beauty-mark indeed — but becomes a secret agent of Cardinal Richelieu. (Richelieu is a point of friction for the Musketeers right from the start.) This novel — which has long been in the public domain (Text at Gutenberg.org or ClassicReader.com | Free audio book at Librivox.org) — features Milady continually bedeviling the protagonist d’Artagnan. He loves her; she keeps trying to kill him. Pretty typical...

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pp., $27.00) In 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His surprise bestseller, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, cast him in his role as an activist-historian, ambitiously attempting to make 600 years of racial history digestible in 500 pages. In his follow-up, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi––now 37, a Guggenheim fellow, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic––reveals his personal side, weaving together memoir, polemic, and instruction as he invites the reader...

"What's So Great About Christianity" by Dinesh D'Souza is a look at the reasons why Christianity is responsible for the success of the Judeo-Christian West and the positives Christianity has wrought around the world. What are the strengths of Dinesh D'Souza's book? And what are the weaknesses of D'Souza's Christian apologetic work?

The most famous fiasco in literary history occurred when Thomas Carlyle gave John Stuart Mill the first part of his great work The French Revolution to critique. Mill’s maid thought the manuscript was wastepaper and threw it into the fire. The loss was total. Carlyle had no copy. Carlyle and his formidable wife, Jane, were newly arrived in London from Scotland, with scant savings in their purse. The loss of the book, and its anticipated revenue, threatened them with ruin. Carlyle (who had just been introduced to high society, and was keeping company with grandees such as Mill and Wordsworth)...

...Now Nimro was a mighty hunter, and among carnivores, a beast among all beasts. And having gained over time notoriety above all others, he was exalted in Babolongna and became very great. And when he was great, he became exceedingly proud and lifted up within his heart. And the spirit of Belzub rested upon him. https://devilsnemesis.com/ainigma-1

The media continues to publish polls that assume a turnout completely different from 2020. The latest CNBC poll, which has Biden up by 6 points, is no different. Highlights - significant oversampling of younger voters, undersampling of older voters. The CNBC poll oversampled 18-49 year olds by 20%, compared to 2016 turnout.The CNBC poll undersampled 50+ year olds by 15%, compared to 2016 turnout.The CNBC poll undersampled Republicans by 8%, compared to 2016 turnout. SEE THE DATA...

On a drizzly morning this date in 1856, Elizabeth Martha Brown (or Browne) was hanged for murder as a young and fascinated Thomas Hardy looked on.Brown was born Clark(e), but she took the name of a husband 20 years younger than she, which is how she got into this mess. Said John Brown was rumored to have made the match for money, though his older wife sure seems to have held her own in the looks department. (More on that in a bit.) In due time, John afflicted their already-tempestuous wedded life with an affair — courtesy of one Mary...

Freedom is amazing because, unless you are God, it is impossible to know exactly what it is and where it will take you. (See the micro-movie in the link for how this has happened to me today: from street art to Whitman to Virgil to God knows what next.) Is this the most important American presidential election for freedom since 1964? Nobody knew then that the presidential careers of two two-term presidents (Nixon - debatable as a two-termer? - and Reagan) would have a re-beginning in Nixon's case and a beginning in Reagan's case. As I see it, this happened...

I am locked down very, very badly in a police state. On the weekend, China-loving Premier Daniel Andrews declared his own state a disaster because of Coronavirus figures that, while bad by Australian standards, would be the envy of most of the rest of the world. This is the Aussie equivalent of the type of treacherous stupidity that Pat Buchanan condemned in Houston in 1992 when he spoke of “politicians who only know how to build themselves up by tearing America down” Dictator Dan’s stage four lockdown fining people found more than 5 km from home $AUD 1652 ($US1,170) and...

Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time. Yet, rare among such thinkers, Sowell manages never to provoke, in the reader, the feeling of being towered over. As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is “that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken.” From 1991 until 2016, his nationally syndicated column set the bar for clear writing, though the topics he covered were often complex. “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional...

If you work this right, you will get an inscribed copy from the author. Required reading or get the funk out. Ranya Lives!

[ Mr. St Clair has posted a useful muzzuzzle vel. chart as well ] Absolved Chapter Links [Note, 10/23/2016: My reformatted copy of the entire available Absolved book is at billstclair.com/absolved/absolved.html] The following is the list of intended chapters for Mike Vanderboegh's novel Absolved. The title numbering and names were listed at Mike' site here. Links are mostly from David Codrea's Examiner site, now only available at archive.org. The asterisk ("*") links at the end of each line are to my local copy of each chapter. Chater 32 (in three parts) was not in Codrea's index. Thank you to @EisAugen@gab.com...

On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western civilization at Warsaw in 2017. Trump also ordered a federal project called the Garden of National Heroes, mandating the artwork to be classical and “not abstract or modernist.” On the same day, The Washington Post published an article by a professor urging Americans to consider the global legacy of 1776 as furthering “white supremacy.” The Post wasn’t the only one. While major news outlets focused on the evils of America,...

There is a poem written many years ago by Irish poet William Butler Yeats that I reread recently and it made my hair stand on end. This poem named "The Second Coming" caught the spirit of our human condition which never fails to repeat itself when culture,virtues,national values founded upon Eternal values fade away.

July 20, 1934 was the third and last of Walter Lett’s scheduled execution dates for raping a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama. A thirty-something ex-convict, Lett’s protestations of innocence stood little chance against the word of a white woman named Naomi Lowery, herself a penniless drifter. Lett was almost lynched but despite his certain condemnation there was something wrong about this case — something discomfiting even for Monroeville’s worthies. We have seen elsewhere in these pages that a rape accusation was a powerful weapon on the ambiguous fringes of the color line. Just three years before this story, nine black...

Victor Davis Hanson is, I think, now regarded as one of the two or three most important military historians alive. This is largely because of his incredible book "Carnage and Culture," but also his books on generals and battles "Soul of Battle," "Ripples of Battle," and his numerous columns during the Iraq War. I'll never forget one of his best columns was "I'd hate to be fighting us." His latest foray, however, isn't up to the same quality, despite a massive 529 pages of densely packed text. Its strengths: *It is well researched with extensive notes and bibliography. That said,...

Men and women wearing masks shuffle wearily through the desolate ruins of a failed country. It’s not healthy or safe to be out, and public places are barren. Storefronts are boarded up. Encounters of any length with other human beings are few and far between, and often revolve around the transactional or coerced provision of food or sex....The government, or what’s left of it, is an aloof, hostile presence. Citizens have been conditioned to hate their heritage and culture, or what little remains; they’ve come to hate themselves. Believing in the value of what past generations have done, built, and...

We need each other. That is being forgotten. PC fear is dominating discourse and too many people are forgetting to be kind. Hiding in a basement to win more votes? Some people remember to connect.

I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen. White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid...

Weird things are happening — moderate Lefties are being attacked by the Anarchists and Occasional Cortex's. Now, the moderates are suddenly recognizing the value of FREE SPEECH! A short letter was sent to Harper's Magazine and signed by scores of prominent Liberal/Leftist writers/journalists/pundits such as J. K. Rowling and Noam Chomsky. I summarize the key points of the letter below. YouTube Commentator, Dr. Steve Turley, tells the story and analyzes the political fallout of Leftists battling each other on this issue. FR's V K Lee turned me on to Dr. Steve a few days ago and I've been enjoying his...