Free Republic

<p>In any time and place, war is fiendishly simple. It is the ultimate zero-sum contest -- you win or you lose.</p> <p>That eternal truth is so obvious that it should not need to be said. Yet even after the horrific slaughter in Paris, there remains a distressing doubt about whether America's commander in chief gets it.</p>

On October 16, I launched a 9,000 word essay on my conversion from a climate-change believer to skeptic. Anthony liked it and decided to run a short summary on WUWT. That page now has over 450 comments, the essay has been viewed over 50k times, and it has had over 9k reads. It has led to discussions across the web, and, via the survey at the end of the essay, has led to a surprising 46% conversion rate of people becoming climate skeptics. These are small numbers, but they are also small steps toward an important goal. My essay is...

American public diplomacy is in disarray. We are not winning--indeed, we are hardly waging--the war of ideas, and it is vitally important that we do, because in our war against the radical Islamists the final victory will take place not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.The purpose of U.S. public diplomacy is to reach key audiences in foreign countries, outside of the bilateral channels of traditional diplomatic relations, with ideas that are powerful enough to form their disposition toward us and our political purposes in the world. In essence, public diplomacy is the defense and promotion of...

No gun is a “point-and-shoot” gun. Most women, by nature, are not fighters, and telling someone to just point and shoot is nonsense. For a woman to pull the trigger, when it could end a life, is an emotional and stressful experience. Even the thought of it makes most women shudder. Advice like this leaves her ill equipped and unprepared for what will be required in self-defense.

A plan by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for dealing with the European refugee crisis anticipates that as many as 5,000 Middle Eastern refugees and migrants could pass from Turkey into Europe each day over the next four months—with a total of 600,000 moving into Europe from November through February.

The growing body count as of this writing is 120 slaughtered in the Bataclan. We'll never know how much that body count could have been reduced if the foolish French allowed their citizens to go armed. Their imprudent gun control laws contributed to unnecessary carnage. Once again, when seconds counted, the police were just too many minutes away.

When Congress left town for the August recess, it did so without coming to an agreement on a long-term transportation bill. Instead, the president signed a three-month extension that set the stage for another showdown this fall. More than 30 such temporary extensions have passed since the last multi-year transportation bill expired in 2011. The inability of Congress to come together to pass a transportation package has frustrated the myriad special interests whose lobbyists want assurances that the dollars will keep flowing for years, and not just months, to come. And the media, which seldom miss an opportunity to push...

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun violence is set to present Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the inaugural Governor Mario M. Cuomo Leadership award at the Bear Awards on Nov. 19, The Washington Free Beacon reports. The awards, named after Jim "Bear" Brady, President Reagan's secretary who was shot during an assassination attempt, will be held at Cipriani on Broadway in New York City with tickets to the event priced at $1,000 each.

When leftists start talking about “civility,” watch out for your freedom of speech. This again comes to mind with reports that some media outlets are eliminating online comments sections in civility’s name. And while it’s not a First Amendment violation (these are private-sector actions), it is largely motivated by the same mentality spawning speech codes on college campuses and “hate speech” laws overseas. And as with those phenomena, the nixing of online comments is justified with noble-sounding sentiments. As the AFP recently reported, “Last month, Vice Media's Motherboard news site turned off reader comments, saying ‘the scorched earth nature of...

Chaos swept over college campuses around the nation Thursday, as the ousters of the embattled University of Missouri system's president and chancellor earlier this week were followed by dozens of other student protests calling for more faculty and staff heads to roll. A popular professor at Missouri said he resigned Wednesday after students lashed out at him for pledging to give a scheduled exam amid spiraling protests, but the university said Thursday it rejected his resignation. The Dean of Students at Claremont McKenna College in California, Mary Spellman, resigned in a letter to the community Thursday, after some at the...

Democratic Poll: Donald Trump Will Be "Hardest to Beat" Jim Hoft Nov 13th, 2015 12:46 am 31 Comments It was another PACKED HOUSE for Donald Trump tonight in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Democratic voters believe Donald Trump would be the most challenging candidate to beat in 2016. 31% of Democratic voters say Trump would be the hardest to beat. In a distant second - 15% say Ben Carson would be the hardest to beat. CBS News reported: Far and away, Clinton remains the candidate Democratic primary voters think has the best chance of winning a general election - 76 percent say...

On October 12, two Arabs cousins, one 17 (some sources say 15) and the other 13 set out on a mission to hunt and kill Jews. Armed with knives, the felonious duo traveled to Pisgat Zeev, a quiet Jewish community in northern Jerusalem to carry out their act of savagery. Their first target was a 25 year old man who sustained serious injuries but nonetheless managed to escape his attackers. Their second target was a 13-year old boy on his bicycle who had just exited a candy shop. They stabbed him in the neck and kicked him in the head...

The lobby of the University of Massachusetts Student Union shook as roughly 250 students leapt up and down in unison, shouting chant after chant Thursday afternoon as a part of a national day of action focused on higher education reform. Nine student groups presented demands during UMass’ Million Student March. Nearly 100 campuses nationwide held similar demonstrations, according to the event’s emcee and policy and legislative director for the Center for Educational Policy and Advocacy Filipe Carvalho. Members of each group proudly held up posters and draped banners over the Student Union’s balcony, plastered with phrases such as, “Education is...

Video footage of Yale students losing the plot over a faculty head and his wife, who said everyone should calm down about Halloween, has caused much head-shaking in liberal circles. And it isn’t hard to see why. The head’s crime was that his wife sent an email suggesting academics and students should chill out about ‘culturally insensitive’ Halloween costumes. It’s okay, the email said, to be a ‘little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive’ on this one day. For his wife issuing this mildest of rebukes to over-sensitive over-18s, the head was accosted by a mob of students insisting...

Universities can’t withstand mobs, as countless assaults have proven. I’ve lived through two: at Washington University in St. Louis, in 1968, and then about a decade later at the University of Rome. In the summer of ’68 I saw a good deal of the French “Revolution,” which took over most of Paris for a week or so. Its headquarters were at the Sorbonne. It’s in the nature of campus revolts that the leaders aren’t going to be satisfied with limited reforms to the school; they are inspired by inflated rhetoric, and they see themselves at the center of a great...

Why are we paying their rent again? This woman has been waited on hand and foot for almost seven years and she still has to take pot-shots at America for a struggle she barely knows. It will be very nice to one day have people in the White House who don’t feel so apologetic about the country that gave them everything.

There are times when you see or read something that you just know you want to share. On this Veterans Day I was fortunate enough to have the following excerpts shared from the logs and diary of a then 23 year old B-24 pilot. Mr. Drummond, who is still with us today and is the 94 year old father of our banker, wrote these words back then and I think they say something to each of us. To those of us who are aviators they surely speak to how it must have felt to command a 4 engine bomber with...

Pilgrim Governor William Bradford described in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” that sharing “all profits & benefits … in ye common stock,” regardless of how hard each individual worked, did not work: The failure of that experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men, proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, – that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as it they were wiser than God. …

On several different occasions over the years, I have taught as an adjunct at the University of Missouri campus here in KC. (How about them Royals?) I know MU politics well and have watched up close the university's desperate forty-plus-year quest to recruit and retain minorities both as students and as faculty, African-Americans especially. No one here is fooled by the ubiquitous Equal Opportunity posters. These signs, all understand, are a vestigial reminder of MU's brief liberal moment. Today, blacks are the first hired and last fired, and they get paid more for the same work. Nothing unique here -...

It is absolutely amazing that this crap is sponsored by the United Nations. I posted this in light of what happened at Mizzou. What you see in this video with these air heads is taking society back a thousand years where you were guilty and then proven innocent. Mizzou is the illustration of what these people want in this video. This is simply unbelievable that the UN pays for and sponsors this crap.