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ROUND 5 OF THE '70S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 18 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. The Great 8! It's getting easier! Just 4 pairs of songs! Vote for your favorite of each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs, but please be clear about that.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end (hopefully) the following Monday.

ROUND 4 OF THE '70S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 11 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. SWEET 16! 16 songs, 8 pairs, 8 winners! Vote for your favorite in each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs but please be clear.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end the following Monday. Format: Billboard rank/seed - year - title - act

Dr. Jordan Peterson shortly outlines rule #8 in his new book '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.'

The Fragile Generation Guest Post by Lenore Skenazy & Jonathan HaidtBad policy and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the...

ROUND 3 OF THE '70S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 4 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. 32 songs, 16 pairs, 16 winners! Vote for your favorite in each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end the following Monday. Format: Billboard rank/seed - year - song title - act

America was founded to be free and democratic -- unlike England with its monarchy and rigid class system. While classes will always be with us, only in America is class mobility possible and likely. Over our two-hundred and forty-two years, millions of people have become successful because they were not bound to the economic plight to which they might have been born. Americans do not care about the state of one's birth. They revere hard work, invention, imagination, and success. Success, to most Americans does not necessarily connote great wealth. In this country it means having a work ethic, work...

It’s taken me a while to craft a concise wrap-up to this little series. I’ve realised via the responses to my previous articles that the typical XYZ reader is well-versed in the machinations of the loony left, so I’ve been asking myself “who am I writing these for?”. Bringing it back to my original question, I suppose it has always been a slightly selfish conceit – someone once said writing is therapeutic, and forcing myself to read, research and write these has been its own therapy. Truth be told, I never intended to write 10,000 words on anything in particular,...

Every now and then, I visit other churches in order to see what kinds of traditions they observe and what kinds of issues they tackle in their weekly worship services. Last weekend, I visited a non-denominational church. As I write this column on a Thursday morning, I am on my fourth day of trying to figure out what the pastor actually said, if anything. To be frank, I suspect that the pastor is still trying to figure out what he actually said, if anything.The thesis of the sermon, which was given to a church heavily populated with college students, seems...

"Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes....

According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, over one quarter (25.8 percent) of all Americans under the age of 18 has at least one immigrant parent, as of 2016—double the share of immigrant children from 1990. Specifically, there are 17,997,000 children with immigrant parents in America, as compared to 51,892,000 million children with two American-born parents: These figures are comprehensive, and include both anchor babies and illegal immigrants. The data here include only children (regardless of their nativity) who reside with at least one parent. The term “children of immigrants” (or children in immigrant families) refers to children under...

President Donald Trump's occasional unfiltered coarse cloudbursts belie a man who is enormously joyful, having an abundance of entertaining good humor easily expressed, fairly shared. Trump is having a ball, for good reasons. Trump's first year as president may have been the most extraordinary since the 1840s. While Trump has disrupted almost all presidential governance and communication norms, his tenure so far has produced capital market gains of some $7 trillion, spreading investment wealth to millions of regular Joes and Marys, while tax cuts have already distributed $3 billion in bonuses and wage hikes to over 2 million workers and...

ROUND 2 of the greatest hits of the '70s begins! Due date: Sunday, Jan 28 @6:00 pm (Eastern) This Round takes the top 6 songs of each year of the '70s per BILLBOARD, and pairs them in brackets along with the best 4 #7s as voted in Round 1.

If there is a single problem with our lives today, it is the breathtaking shallowness of modern life. We seem infatuated with grade-school gossip and a breathless yearning for "stuff," as if the latest gadgetry or a fatter bank account could make anything real in our lives better. We seem to believe in nothing but this gossip and these gadgets. This infantile fixation stretches across political party and ideology. This is a reflection of godlessness, shattered families, and the wicked drumbeat in education and media of indoctrination instead of learning or amusement. It is astounding how little most people know...

OK, FREEPERS, LET'S START THIS CONTEST FOR THE GREATEST SONG OF THE '70S. The baseline for the contest is the top 7 hits of each year of the '70s, as compiled by BILLBOARD. This is not based on personal preferences, biases, prejudices, or counter-culture fringe-element reactivity. The rules in general will be to vote for everything shown. NO equivocating, ties, or omissions. Votes will ONLY be counted if the "ballot" is COMPLETE. *ROUND 1* We begin by taking the #7 songs of each year and paring them from 10 songs to 4 (to set up brackets of 64 for the...

"A recent report from the Social Capital Project reveals that the American family is disintegrating, fast. Fully 40 percent of mothers are currently unmarried. This is bad news, because good families depend on good marriages. Marriage is the moral glue that binds them. It’s the stabilizing agent. There’s a reason that children from married couples do better in school, and are less likely to end up in jail as compared to children of unmarried mothers, known as “fragile families."

In 1953, Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that we need to hear today, because it’s about something we’ve forgotten as we stoke the flames of anger and blame others for our real and perceived sufferings — it’s about personal responsibility. Our refusal to accept responsibility is a rot within our society, a cancer that is eating away at our institutions, relationships, and liberty. We point fingers at others instead of pointing them at ourselves. We see ourselves as victims of everything — the economy, government action or inaction, other people, our parents, our...

Who wants to participate in a music play-off bracket-type poll for best songs of the '70s? 3 years ago I ran a "tournament" to pick the best songs of the '80s, based first on Billboard rankings, so only the best of the best are included! You can view how this played out here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3249477/posts That's what I want to do for the '70s. (Wouldn't mind doing it for other decades, either!)

There is reason to believe that an increasing number of young people regard unbridled free speech as a threat, showing themselves to be in the grip of rigid and intolerant ways of thinking about disagreement. But what are the intellectual tendencies behind this new intolerance, and how do they creep into popular discourse? The following list is not comprehensive, but nonetheless seems to me to cover the key problems.

When President Trump asked why the U.S. should accept immigrants from third-world nations he allegedly characterized as "s-holes," liberals (and some neo-conservatives) howled with outrage, branding the president a bigot and a racist. But...was Mr. Trump right? Perhaps far more than his opponents would like to admit. Don't take my word for it – take the word of the liberal, globalist United Nations, which celebrated its annual "World Toilet Day" and named its "Toilet Heroes" last November 19. Here are a few interesting statistics, straight from the U.N.: - Around 60% of the global population – 4.5 billion people –...

A year in review of crazy A lot of things happened in 2017 — including a lot of being offended. It was hard to narrow it down, but here — in no particular order — are the eleven most politically correct moments of 2017: 1. It was declared “cultural appropriation” for a white woman to wear hoop earrings. A resident assistant at Pitzer College sent out a campus-wide email declaring that it was unacceptable for white girls to wear hoop earrings — because wearing them was culturally offensive to “the black and brown bodies who typically wear hooped earrings.” This...