Free Republic

The crown of California is lying on a filthy sidewalk, waiting to be picked up with a pooper scooper.

To fulfill the Sign of Jonah, Jesus had to be in the grave for three days and three nights. This contradicts traditions which say that Jesus died on a Friday afternoon. There is a resolution to this problem.

Consider the mindset of your stereotypical Silicon Valley computer nerd: hyper-intelligent, introverted, socially awkward, often weird. Consider also what they are tasked to do for their day jobs. They dissect the ambiguous statements of natural language into the deterministic logic that a machine can “understand.” The resulting tangles of logic are often huge, more than any human mind can contemplate at once. So a large part of the job is organizing that logic into hierarchies so a human can focus on manageable chunks at a time. And even then, the more chunks one can hold at a time, the better....

For the second half of my public school education I lived in a small rural county which had just one high school -- a high school which graduated significantly less than 200 students/year. In other words, the local school board had exactly one high school to supervise, and a rather small one at that. Given that the county had significantly less than 10,000 residents in it, school board members were accountable. Any naughtiness in order to appease wacky academic trends could be countered by disgruntled parents in short order. When I was in junior high, they had a Bible reading...

Andrew Breibart wrote that politics is downstream from culture. So what happened to American culture? We used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now we are the land of Helicopter Parents, Trigger Warnings, and Snowflakes. Once upon a time America was barbarian and badass compared to Western Europe. We had football, guns, dangerous hillbillies, and a president who joked about bombing the Soviet Union. They had soccer, bicycles, coffee-swilling philosophers, and calls for Accommodation. The image is reversing. We still have our guns, and our aging motorcycle gangs. But we also have our...

A general election poll which includes both nominated candidates and potential alternatives (including some Establishment Republicans). Four different voting systems are used, so you get to express your true feelings without the lesser of two evils problem.

“Free Trade” isn’t. Low tariffs combined with high taxes on domestic labor is not Free Trade. It’s Subsidized Outsourcing, subsidized destruction of our industrial base and our national character. We tax domestic manufacturing in order to pay unemployment and welfare to those who lose their jobs to foreign competition. This is an evil positive feedback loop that has been crushing our working classes since the 70s. Our core cities are turning into uncivilized war zones and our college campuses into communist indoctrination centers. But at least we are subsidizing a rising fascist superpower with a terrible environmental record.

Eight different taxes. That’s what I had to compute every time I wrote a paycheck back when I was running a small business on the side. Eight taxes: •Federal income tax •State income tax •Federal unemployment tax •State unemployment tax •Medicare – employer’s portion •Medicare – employee’s portion •FICA – employer’s portion •FICA – employee’s portion At least I “only” had to send the payments to four different government agencies. ... Yes, the governments provided some nice hefty books. The IRS provided a 67 page two column guide. My state’s employer guide was only 59 pages. Keep in mind that...

It is hard raising a child with only one parent – especially if that parent makes a low income. Decent child care is expensive. And so over the years the government has created various programs to aid single-parent families, from the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children to today’s child care subsidies. As a result the government has ended up paying people to get divorced, or not get married in the first place. Single parent families are more needy than two-parent families generally, so need-based welfare pays families to be single-parent. Subsidized child care programs pay the poor to...

Why did the Catholic Church wait until 1992 to pardon Galileo? Answer: the Pope is no mere president, the Church hierarchy no mere Congress. They cannot simply change opinion. They derive their authority from a higher, infallible authority. To admit error, is to question the Church’s connection to the higher authority, and thus undermine the institution. The Supreme Court is in a similar position. The Court is no mere legislature, free to change its mind through personnel turnover or popular demands. The Court seeks Truth, the meaning of the Constitution. At the very least, it must maintain the pretense that...

If you are a liberal of the greeninsh variety; if you shop at Whole Foods and drive a Prius; if you look forward to spending your golden years sipping fair market lattes and eating non-GMO croissants on the street corner café watching the hippies pedal past, beware! Your ecotopian future is in jeopardy. But even if you are more forward thinking; if you consider yourself a child of the Enlightenment and look forward to a Star Trek future, take heed! Your pleasant future is at stake as well. Whereas Star Trek posits advanced starships in the future, it also features...

Consider first a static economy, with no inflation, no population growth, and stable wages. Under these conditions the rate of return for a pay as you go system is exactly zero, the same as putting money in a mattress. Social Security is purely insurance against living longer than average, with the benefits paid for by those who die younger than average. (Social Security also transfers some wealth between those making upper middle class wages over a long career to those making lower class wages.)

Obama associated with Marxists and other lefty radicals when he was young. This is not controversial. The real question is whether he still associates with such radical riff-raff today, or worse, is secretly carrying out their nefarious plans. In one case the answer is: we can only hope so. I am referring to the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy, an undemocratic plan to force a basic income guarantee by overloading the welfare system with applicants.

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.” These are the words inscribed on the Liberty Bell. Today they ring like feel good fluff to commemorate a nation liberated from a far away king, but that was not their original purpose, nor was it the reason they were inscribed on the bell. The words come from Chapter 25 of Leviticus. It behooves all who love liberty to read this chapter carefully, for it contains the keys to make liberty work for centuries at a time, to prevent the descent into oligarchy or the converse evils of...