Free Republic

Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to...

Hundreds of travelers on the road to Burning Man in their quest for oneness with nature and celebration of self-expression on a peaceful playa in northern Nevada's desert didn't expect to spend their first night in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart or Reno resort casino. But most were taking it in stride and were largely optimistic — as so-called "Burners" are apt to be — that the gates to the counterculture event would reopen Tuesday after rare rain showers in the Black Rock Desert turned the ancient lake bottom to a muddy quagmire the day before... ...Dozens of RVs...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Thousands of people gathered in more than 100 U.S. communities Thursday in remembrance of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager whom police shot to death last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri. The centerpiece of the observations — being held at such historic places as New York's Union Square, Boston Common and St. Louis' Gateway Arch — was a simultaneous national moment of silence at 7:20 p.m. ET. "We want to stand in an effort of love and support and organize community support for how we can mobilize our anger and our upset and our disappointment," said Renee Chapman, an organizer of...

College campuses in America are frequently teeming with all manner of liberals and trustafarian socialists who drive Volvos . Some of these schools are worse than others. Some are just egregiously awful.Here, The Daily Caller presents the 2014 rankings for the most annoying, rabidly politically correct, dirty-hippie, tree-hugging colleges and universities across the fruited plain. You have been warned. Swarthmore College in the suburbs of Philadelphia is a leftist hothouse full of wealthy white kids. In February, Swarthmore sophomore Erin Ching criticized her school for allowing a conservative — Christian thinker Robert George — to speak on campus. “What really...

While New Yorkers like to think of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the epicenter of the American hipster, it's hardly the only place in the country where vegan, handlebar-mustachioed trustafarians ride their single-speeds to nanobreweries inside organic farm-to-table restaurants inside abandoned artist lofts tricked out with rooftop gardens where they grow only kale. Pretty much any US city, short of maybe Birmingham, AL, has some elements/neighborhoods of hipster culture at this point (you really just need a fixed-gear bike shop, right?), but these 10 cities are vying for the title of hipster-est. Behind Williamsburg, of course....

The State of Colorado will start phasing in mandatory lab testing of marijuana edible products on May 1. Currently, marijuana product testing of any kind has been performed strictly on a voluntary basis. As Colorado ramps up its lab testing, CBS4 requested permission to perform independent lab tests of edible products but was forbidden by the Marijuana Enforcement Division. In a letter banning independent lab testing, MED Director Lewis Koski states, “licensed labs are only allowed to accept samples from ‘Retail Marijuana Establishments’ only.” (snip) But according to the labs, potency is just one issue with marijuana products. “We’ve found...

There are very few things in the world that have the power to make me roll my eyes as hard as Burning Man. I’m a lefty, but I’m also a curmudgeon with precious little patience for whimsy, specifically like, white-people-with-dreads-and-furry-boots-doing-fire-dancing whimsy. Particularly if it involves techno. It’s fine for other people, but not if they want to talk to me about it, as I find there is a lot of crossover between Burning Man types and people who will tell you the same story over and over again in the same conversation. However, I have to give my full-throated support...

Growing up in the 60’s, my older brother, Wayne, made certain that I was properly schooled in the fine art of psychedelic rock. He was generous with his sophisticated collection of vinyl and kindly tolerated my tagging along to live concerts by The Who, Blues Magoos, and Fever Tree. We even saw Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs once. My friends and I followed musicians like baseball card athletes as they migrated between The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and Blind Faith. I came to understand that Frank Zappa was equal parts profound & bananas and that the best...

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling, according to democratic practice, of bad and good leaders. As the Russians push their imperial agenda in the Ukraine, and Western leaders wring their hands, the '70s come painfully to mind. I bring up the '70s -- of god-awful memory -- as much to...

Academics, the very people who claim they want “progress” “going forward,” frequently want to turn back the clock a half century or so. “Without hope—the fervent, animating kind—the 60s would have had no fuel to feed the engines of change,” Paul Kane wrote in The Chronicle Review on March 7, 2014. “To have seen our causes as hopeless would have drained them of force.” “No civil-rights movement, no antiwar protests, no feminism, no gay and lesbian rights, no counterculture and commune movement, no Woodstock, no environmentalism. Whatever we might think of that period now, we believed then in what we...

For most Americans, toilet paper is an absolutely necessary grocery list item, but some women are opting out for both economic and environmental purposes. In a HuffPost Live discussion, bloggers Angela Davis, Kathleen Quiring and Makala Earley explain why they've decided to go paperless, revealing that it's not as messy or unhygienic as it may sound. 'It is definitely possible,' insists Mikala, who says she and her husband stopped using toilet paper about a year ago. 'It is almost seen as a necessity [and] it doesn't have to be, and it's been a lot of fun to learn how to...

One of the great voices of folk rock...

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, D-Va. Military veterans are pressuring Congress to move quickly when it reconvenes this week to cancel cuts in pensions for working-age vets - a change set in motion as part of last month's budget deal. However, reversing the decision to reduce cost-of-living pension increases could be difficult and, at best, would take some time to negotiate, say some legislators and lobbyists. Federal lawmakers from Hampton Roads, which has one of the nation's largest concentrations of retirees and active-duty service members, strongly support undoing the cuts. Most have already proposed or are co-sponsoring legislation...

I had a familiar feeling at my first tea party rally. It was a sunny spring afternoon and Boston Common was packed with people passionate for change, excited to hear Sarah Palin speak and having a great time. It brought me back to my first political rallies, those glorious gatherings devoted to stopping the Vietnam War and demanding racial justice. How thrilling it felt to be surrounded by thousands of people who shared our commitment, joining their voices to demand new policies. We had flags with peace signs on them. The tea partiers had flags with coiled snakes. We shook...

I had a familiar feeling at my first tea party rally. It was a sunny spring afternoon and Boston Common was packed with people passionate for change, excited to hear Sarah Palin speak and having a great time. It brought me back to my first political rallies, those glorious gatherings devoted to stopping the Vietnam War and demanding racial justice. How thrilling it felt to be surrounded by thousands of people who shared our commitment, joining their voices to demand new policies. We had flags with peace signs on them. The tea partiers had flags with coiled snakes. We shook...

Chuck Smith, the evangelical pastor whose outreach to hippies in the 1960s helped transform worship styles in American Christianity and fueled the rise of the Calvary Chapel movement, died Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013, after a battle with lung cancer. He was 86. Diagnosed in 2011, Smith continued to preach and oversee administration at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa (California), where he'd been pastor since 1965. In 2012, he established a 21-member leadership council to oversee the Calvary Church Association, a fellowship of some 1,600 like-minded congregations in the United States and abroad.

Greenpeace activists arrested after trying to board a Russian oil rig are likely to face piracy charges, local media reports. Two New Zealanders are among the crew of the protest vessel Arctic Sunrise who were confronted and detained by armed members of the Russian coastguard on Thursday. Authorities said the rig was in an exclusion zone, but Greenpeace argues its boat was in international waters. All the activists will be prosecuted for the "attack" on the oil rig, an investigative committee told Russian media. In a statement the committee said it had opened a criminal case on suspicion of piracy....

Dale Vince sits in a spartan office in the corner of Ecotricity, one of the UK’s few green energy electricity networks, and taps away on an Apple Mac at his standing desk. The office is bare, other than a normal desk, a couple of chairs and a Union Jack flag hung on the wall. But the Union Jack is not sporting its normal Red White and Blue. This is a Union Jack fashioned in various shades of green. For Vince is a died-in-the-wool ecologist. While running his company, he blogs from a site called “Zero Carbonista” which has an image...

Prepare to be outraged.....Shocking Surveillance Video Captures Cop Brutally Beating Female Shoplifter In Front Of Her 1 Yr Old Child in Iowa. I worked in corporate loss prevention a long time ago...let me tell you...this is beyond lawsuit...these cops should be in prison. Video: http://www.ktrh.com/pages/michaelberry.html?article=11556885

No need for psychedelic substances: The cultural milieu at the week-long annual art festival known as Burning Man is enough to alter your mind. Research published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Emotion Science in July found that an individual’s social and cultural environment influenced how they controlled their emotional responses