Free Republic

Comparing the Wealth of U.S. Geographic Regions Over Time Every year, the average American takes home about $51,600 in personal income. Of course, what you make each year depends on factors like your job, work ethic, education, and personal circumstances – but it also varies significantly over geography. The Geographical Wage Gap Today’s chart uses data from the Brookings Institute, and it focuses on the geographical wage gap, or the difference in per capita income that exists between various U.S. regions. Interestingly, it’s a gap that has historically narrowed over time. Just after the Great Depression, income per capita in...

Spain — For more than nine months, Spain has existed without a traditional national government. In the face of this lack of central authority and planning, Spaniards have done the impossible: they have survived without a government. The New York Times recently reported on this phenomenon: “After two grueling national elections in six months, and with a third vote possible in December, no party has won enough seats or forged the coalition needed to form a government. For the first time in Spain’s four decades as a modern democracy, this country of 47 million people has a caretaker government.” Spanish...

This week, a team from the University of California, Los Angeles claimed to have found several epigenetic marks—chemical modifications of DNA that don’t change the underlying sequence—that are associated with homosexuality in men. Postdoc Tuck Ngun presented the results yesterday at the American Society of Human Genetics 2015 conference. Nature News were among the first to break the story based on a press release issued by the conference organisers. Others quickly followed suit. “Have They Found The Gay Gene?” said the front page of Metro, a London paper, on Friday morning.

President Barack Obama in his second inauguration address called for new action to “respond to the threat of climate change.” Taking advantage of the bully pulpit and a huge national audience, Obama mustered his best possible arguments in a brief case for why addressing global warming is supposedly necessary. Unfortunately for global warming alarmists, Obama’s case was exceptionally flimsy. Then again, Obama did not have much to work with, as the overall case for global warming alarmism is exceptionally flimsy.

Why is stealing wrong? Is it wrong because it’s illegal? Or is stealing wrong because individuals have a God-given or natural right to their own property? To some people, that’s like asking, “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” — in other words, they think the answer is unknowable. But there’s an essential difference here: Unlike the chicken-and-egg question, we know that our God-given/natural rights precede government — both logically and historically. As our country’s Declaration of Independence so eloquently states, we are all endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of...

ANKARA, Turkey – Syria's prime minister defected and fled to neighboring Jordan, a Jordanian official and a rebel spokesman said Monday, evidence that the widening cracks in President Bashar's Assad's regime have reached the highest echelons of government. Riad Hijab -- who planned the break for months, according to an aide -- is the highest-level political figure to switch sides and is certain to encourage rebels after a string of military and diplomatic figures abandoned the regime. A senior U.S. official said the defection is more evidence that the Assad regime "is crumbling." The official, traveling with U.S. Secretary of...

Classical liberalism — or simply liberalism, as it was called until around the turn of the century — is the signature political philosophy of Western civilization. Hints and suggestions of the liberal idea can be found in other great cultures. But it was the distinctive society produced in Europe — and in the outposts of Europe, and above all America — that served as the seedbed of liberalism. In turn, that society was decisively shaped by the liberal movement.

Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason to assume that the American religious model will prevail “Religion is proving perfectly compatible with modernity in all its forms, high and low.” This conclusion by John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, seems calculated to enrage secular rationalists of all stripes. Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a...

The mind is not the brain. Confusing the two, as much neuro-social-science does, leads to a dehumanised world and a controlling politics ‘Can a machine read your mind?’ – the title of a recent (February 2009) article in the Times -- is meant to be sensational but is similar to hundreds of other articles appearing with increasing frequency, and merely repeating a story that has been familiar for the last 50 years. ‘It’s just a matter of time’ is the assumption behind such articles – just a matter of time before the gap between physical brain-stuff and consciousness is bridged....

Physical attractiveness is important in choosing whom to date. Good looking people are not only popular targets for romantic pursuits, they themselves also tend to flock together with more attractive others. Does this mean then that more attractive versus less attractive people wear a different pair of lens when evaluating others’ attractiveness?

Executive Summary The United Nations is celebrating its 40th anniversary amid much hoopla and endless expressions of goodwill. Last month dozens of heads of state descended on New York for the opening of the 40th session of the General Assembly; scores more are expected for the official commemorative festivities the week of October 21. Despite widespread and withering criticism of the institution in recent years--in September Singapore's foreign minister, Suppiah Dhanabalan, told the General Assembly that the UN's prestige "is at an all time low"[1]--hope burns eternal. Austrian ambassador Thomas Klestil recently reaffirmed his nation's support for the international body:...

Ian Clifford wants to start a global revolution by building a practical, everyday car with no gasoline engine, no batteries, and no emissions. While big Detroit automakers ponder a future plug-in car that goes 40 miles on a battery charge before its gas engine kicks in, Mr. Clifford's tiny ZENN Motor, a Toronto maker of low-speed electric cars, announced in March that it will build a new highway-speed (80 m.p.h.) model that goes 250 miles on a charge – and can recharge in just five minutes. Having no batteries, the new "cityZENN" model will use a breakthrough version of a...

The Physics of Christianity By Frank J. Tipler 'I have a salary at Tulane," says Frank Tipler, "some 40 percent lower than the average for a full professor at Tulane as a consequence of my belief." Physicists today, he says, are not supposed to believe in God. But he does, though I suspect that in itself would not reduce his salary. What may well do, however, is his belief that the Cosmological Singularity is God. In other words, he believes that contemporary physics has found God and that physics explains Christianity. In fact, it is probably true to say that...

Multiple Shooters Possible, Study Says In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the two bullets that struck and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

As the debate over stem cell research resumes in Washington this week, the moral principle on which the White House bases its position remains largely unexamined As the Senate prepares to take up stem cell legislation this week, Congress and the president are at odds over a tangled question at the boundary of science, ethics, and religion. President Bush has restricted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and last year cast the first veto of his presidency when Congress tried to ease the restriction. With majorities in both houses of Congress ready to try again, the president has threatened...

When the BBC needed a man to eat and drink like an Edwardian gent, it sent for Times restaurant critic Giles Coren. Could he stomach it? The Edwardian era, from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 to the expiration of her obese but happy son Edward VII (who announced her passing to friends at Osborne House with the words “Gentlemen, you may smoke”) from a not entirely surprising double heart attack in 1910, was the Golden Age not just of cricket, motoring, amateurism and one-piece swimsuits for chaps, but of eating. Unlike his famously stay-at-home mum, Edward VII loved...

It must be nice for Leslie Bennetts to have the luxury to write a book as unnecessary as "The Feminine Mistake." It's a topic she chose, no doubt, from a list of ideas she nurtured in spare moments between raising her children and writing sycophantic celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair. Was it on the plane trip home from interviewing Jennifer Aniston at her Los Angeles mansion when she realized that full-time moms need jobs to be truly, emotionally fulfilled?

The debate over creation and evolution, once most conspicuous in America, is fast going global THE “Atlas of Creation” runs to 770 pages and is lavishly illustrated with photographs of fossils and living animals, interlaced with quotations from the Koran. Its author claims to prove not only the falsehood of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but the links between “Darwinism” and such diverse evils as communism, fascism and terrorism. In recent weeks the “Atlas de la Création” has been arriving unsolicited and free of charge at schools and universities across French-speaking Europe. It is the latest sign...

Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 761 pp., $35.00. Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2006), 392 pp., $28.95. IF MORAL clarity graced our times, the publication of Paul Hollander’s comprehensive compilation of first-hand accounts by former communist victims, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, would elicit a collective shudder of horror and sorrow. “Systematic evil at work: evil without conscience.” So does Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield describe the grotesque crimes...

There is one retailer that has the power to call the winner of the protracted Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD fight and that vendor is Wal-Mart. Over the weekend they apparently leaked plans to bring in a massive number of low cost (possibly sub $200) HD DVD players for Christmas. The manufacturing side of this has apparently been in the works for a few years but this is the first time we have had projected prices for the result. Why Wal-Mart, Why Now? Wal-Mart uses DVDs to build store traffic. They tend to subsidize the price for the movies they feature...