Free Republic

My dear friend Kathy Shaidle was fond of saying that The Who were "better than that stupid band you like." So it only follows that Quadrophenia, the movie they produced about the British youth subculture where they started, is better than anyone else's youth subculture movie. So – better than Trainspotting, Suburbia, Singles, American Graffiti, The Wanderers, Reality Bites, Dazed and Confused, This is England, Jubilee, Rude Boy, Northern Soul, Absolute Beginners, 24 Hour Party People, Performance, Backbeat, Control, That'll Be the Day, Velvet Goldmine, Stardust, Young Soul Rebels, Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, A Hard Day's Night,...

A follower in New Orleans built a public shrine in her honor. An actor in Albuquerque credits her with helping him land a role on the TV show "Breaking Bad." She turns up routinely along the U.S.-Mexico border at safe houses, and is sighted on dashboards of cars used to smuggle methamphetamine through the southwest desert. Popular in Mexico, and sometimes linked to the illicit drug trade, the skeleton saint known as La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a robust and diverse following north of the border: immigrant small business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among...

AFP - When police officers arrived at 13-year-old Masha's home, searched her room and inspected her computer, it was not because they suspected her of any crime. Her offence was simply to be a devoted follower of the angst-ridden punk-rock subculture known as 'emo', in an ex-Soviet state where pressures to conform remain strong. "It was offensive and frightening at the same time," said Masha, a schoolgirl in the Armenian capital, clearly upset by the experience. Police in Yerevan have been conducting a campaign against the capital's small but controversial emo community since the recent suicides of two teenagers who...

WELLINGTON (AFP) - They say you are what you eat, and growing numbers of vegans are shunning sex with meat-eaters because they see them as "a graveyard for animals", a New Zealand researcher says. These vegans not only refuse to eat meat or animal products but refuse to have sexual contact with meat-eaters because their bodies are made up of dead animals, the researcher was reported saying in The Press newspaper on Tuesday. Annie Potts, co-director of the New Zealand Centre of Human and Animal Studies at New Zealand's Canterbury University, said she coined the term vegansexuals during her research....

This weekend over 10,000 classic cars will converge on Västerås at the Power Big Meet as car enthusiasts from Sweden, Europe and as far afield as Russia, Israel and Australia make their annual pilgrimage to the biggest Classic car event in the world. For Sweden’s Raggare, the Power Big Meet is more than just a car show - it’s a celebration of a way of life that is peculiarly Swedish, despite being entrenched in the fashions, music and motor cars of Americana. Since the 1950s, a version of the American Dream has been embraced with an enthusiasm that has endured...

Demise of multiculturalism can help root out terrorism Jonathan Alter - For the Journal-Constitution Wednesday, June 28, 2006 Multiculturalism, rest in peace. There may have been no obituary for the notion that every group and every belief in a multiethnic society is deserving of mutual respect and tolerance. But thanks to jihadism, multiculturalism and moral relativism --- its necessary counterpart --- are now 6 feet under. Signs of multiculturalism's demise first began to appear in Holland, a nation that officially embraced its precepts in 1983. In theory, the Minderhedennota, or minorities policy, extended the Dutch tradition of tolerance to a...

Thursday, March 30, 2006 No rave crackdown coming Teen rules wouldn't have stopped tragedy, officials say By ANGELA GALLOWAY AND D. PARVAZ P-I REPORTERS Faced with the senselessness of last week's slaughter of six young people hours after an all-night, all-ages dance party, many parents want not only answers -- but also accountability. That has some in Seattle's "rave" scene worried about a government crackdown reminiscent of the controversial and now defunct "Teen Dance Ordinance." But it's more likely that the only new restrictions on raves here will be self-imposed -- with at least two events scheduled for this weekend...

Atila Sinke Guimarães’ new book, Vatican II, Homosexuality and Pedophilia, is a must read for Catholics wanting to understand why Rome has essentially done nothing to remove the dissident rot that has spawned a sodomite subculture in the Church. Guimarães meticulously charts the reasons for the moral disintegration of the Church from within as a function of the increased influence of a sodomite clergy since Vatican II. His conclusions come as no surprise to those who have taken the time to logically connect the dots as to why Rome is unable to right the Barque of Peter and have sadly...

Illustration: Carly Sertic / 20Below artistUnshaven legs. Chicken-fried tofu. Strange body piercings. These are considered normal in my home. I live in an 88-acre hippie commune. For those of you with raised eyebrows, that's not its official title. It's actually called Lost Valley Educational Center and it's an intentional community-conference center near Dexter. Twenty other people live with me (although not in the same building). We eat lunch and dinner together, we have meetings together and we're like an extended family. True, a rather strange family, but a tight-knit one just the same. We also have "visiting hippies" who come...

<p>Burning Man, the wild counterculture festival held annually in one of the nation's most remote areas, is coming to cities across America.</p> <p>It's time to try to influence the very culture against which this year's record 30,500 Burning Man participants rebelled, the phenomenon's founder and resident visionary said in an interview.</p>