Free Republic

In 1909, in the great state of Illinois, school teachers one February day were directed to spend at least half the school day in public exercises, patriotic music, and recitations of sayings, verses, and speeches to mark the centennial birthday of a great hero. At the end of it all, they were to have their students face in the direction of Springfield and chant in unison the following: “A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears; “A quaint knight errant of the pioneers; “A homely hero, born of star and sod; “A Peasant Prince, a masterpiece of God.” Who...

To ensure that psychiatry “permeate every educational activity of national life” and “infiltrate the professional and social activities of [all] people” was a global goal that originated with British Brigadier General Dr. John Rawlings Rees in a 1940 speech to the National Council for Mental Hygiene. He ended on an ominous note: “Though our knowledge be incomplete … I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity.” Canadian colleague Dr. Brock Chisholm chimed in with sinister comments of his own at the close of the war in 1946, in a speech to the World...

Concern over the H1N1 swine flu has inundated the airwaves and the newspapers since active swine flu was first identified in Mexico in April. And though the panic has waned slightly in recent weeks because this variant of the flu is not living down to its deadly predictions (in fact, it’s not even as deadly as the seasonal flu), for many people, if not most people, perception trumps facts and statistics, and so there have been mass mobilizations to combat the contagion.  The campaign has included classes to convince people to avoid unnecessary contact with others; a huge expenditure to...

Death from the flu is often heartrending for those who have to watch: the victim, having been weakened from the flu virus, contracts pneumonia from bacteria or viruses that have taken hold in the lungs, and he or she struggles for every breath.  The victim’s breathing is often raspy, and it is abnormally fast, like the panting of a worn-out dog. As the victim’s body fights the lung infection, the lungs fill with pus and other fluids, cutting off the flow of oxygen and causing the victim to turn colors — from shades of gray to a bluish purple. The...

Autumn had come to the Mediterranean, and more than a hint of the blustery winter to come was in the air, as two formidable armadas gathered for battle near Corinth. By far the larger force was the fleet commanded by Ali Pasha, servant of Ottoman Turkey’s Sultan Selim II.   From the deck of his fearsome flagship Sultana, Ali directed 270 war galleys and a massive collection of lighter craft. The fleet, appropriately, was deployed in a huge crescent stretching from the rocky shores of Albania in the north to the coast of Peloponnesus in the south.From the Sultana’s mast flew...

Arielle Levin Becker of the Washington Post wrote about John Philip Sousa’s professional stature as regards his past association with the Marine Corps Band: If there’s any question about the place Sousa has in the band’s memory, a visit to the director’s office settles any doubts.  Sousa is immortalized in four photographs and paintings, including one of him in a Navy uniform, and perhaps in a fifth — there is speculation that, in the front row of a Civil War-era photograph of the band, a young Sousa is hiding between two trombone players. The baton that [departing U.S. Marine band...

The environmental movement, bent on regulating America under its green thumb, has such a vast array of lobbying groups, proposed measures, and specialized terminology, that it is difficult for busy Americans who are wary of this movement to stay current with the debate.   To the rescue comes Steve Milloy’s Green Hell. At 294 pages, it is not encyclopedic, but just the right length to bring readers up to date on the methodologies, motives, and fallacies of this movement, and how to combat it. Green Guilt The core environmental “danger” greens currently discuss is global warming, allegedly caused by man-made carbon...

Not long ago, Americans feared and ridiculed the police states cursing too many parts of the world. We worried that they might one day conquer us despite their poverty and general misery even as we mocked their totalitarian tactics — especially their “Papers, please” mentality.  Indeed, being forced to prove one’s identity to a bureaucrat on demand, having to carry and produce documents with personal information for his approval — or condemnation — seemed especially horrifying. One of our classic films, Casablanca, revolved around the deadly hassles of obtaining or forging such papers under the Nazis; episodes of Mission Impossible...

“All warfare is based on deception.” — The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, Chinese General, military strategist (sixth century B.C.). It was late in the evening of February 12, 2008 when the bearded, pudgy, middle-aged man left a meeting at an Iranian school in the quiet Kfar Suseh neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, and walked to his car, which was parked on the street. No sooner had he climbed into his Mitsubishi Pajero than the vehicle erupted in a mighty blast, killing him instantly.   A few hours later, consumers of the morning news learned the identity of the car-bomb victim....

President Barack Obama took office with an extraordinary set of promises as a candidate. He has fulfilled many of the promises to the left-wing base of his party, such as his executive order three days after he was inaugurated restoring the funding of abortions with foreign-aid money.  But how has he done with the popular campaign promises he made to middle America, the promises that got him elected? Candidate Obama pledged to cut taxes for the middle class, lower overall taxes, cut government spending, reduce the deficit, cut the cost of healthcare waste, eliminate most government secrecy, and reform ethics...

It began as a series of explosive claims in a British newspaper on Tuesday, October 6, and quickly turned into an all-out rout of the already beleaguered U.S. dollar on international markets.  By early October 2009, the price of gold, off for several quarters from its all-time highs reached in March 2008, was back above the $1,000/ounce level, driven by concerns that the Federal Reserve’s inflationary activities might seriously undercut the dollar’s strength. Then the bottom fell out. The catalyst was a brief article, “The Demise of the Dollar,” by investigative journalist and longtime Middle East expert Robert Fisk, writing...

According to media reports, Pope Benedict XVI is continuing his efforts to return some disaffected Catholic traditionalists to the “fold.” In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) were at odds with the papacy on several issues resulting from the council, which both sides viewed as fundamental.  Lefebvre and five others were automatically excommunicated in 1988, when he consecrated four bishops. However, the excommunication of the four surviving bishops was lifted earlier this year as part of the present pope’s outreach to the Traditionalist Catholics. According to the Associated...

Benito Mussolini has an infamous place in modern history, as well he should. Nearly everyone knows Mussolini as the dictator of Fascist Italy and the ally of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. But that is only part of the story.  Mussolini began his political career as an avowed Marxist (defined as the atheist philosophy which holds that capitalism is bad because it enriches a few capitalists to the detriment of masses of laborers and that laborers should take control of all means of production — in order, in theory though not in practice, to be fair to the...

British General John Burgoyne must have been bitterly disappointed one day in July 1777 in the upper Hudson Valley — the day his army, hot in pursuit of the Americans they had just driven from Fort Ticonderoga, ran into a lake that wasn’t supposed to exist.  This part of upstate New York had already been thoroughly explored and mapped, yet the Redcoats, confident of speedily overtaking and finishing off the American force, suddenly found themselves blocked by a brand-new body of water where dry forest and field was supposed to provide swift passage. The British must have soon ascertained, as...

Stroll casually along the bulging bookshelves of your local bookseller, and you’re sure to see rows and rows of books chronicling the lives and times of the generation of men known reverently to us as the “Founding Fathers.”  These were the fearless men who boldly declared independence from the tyranny of the world’s most formidable empire and then set about establishing the steadfast moorings upon which to build the mightiest republic in the history of the world. This plot of land on the field of history is ripe for scholarship, and there is never an end to the “hows” and...

The buck (or the pound, in this case) stops at the desk of perpetually embattled British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. According to numerous reports in newspapers in the U.K. and worldwide, a clandestine oil-for-prisoners deal with Libya facilitated the recent “compassionate release” of convicted terrorist Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi from the Scottish prison where he was serving a life sentence for having bombed a commercial airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people.Despite weeks of Brown’s denials and pretended offense at the very suggestion that either his government or the government of Scotland would ever make such a behind-the-scenes...

Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, is not afraid to ruffle some feathers in order to halt what he considers violations of the U.S. Constitution.In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (commonly referred to as the Brady Bill), which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton and went into effect on February 28, 1994. A provision of the Brady Bill compelled state and local law-enforcement officials to perform mandatory background checks. Mack, then a Graham County sheriff, was outraged. In response, Mack gained distinction by being the first sheriff in the nation to file...

There has long been a certain objection to the divine command that we should worship God. It is simply: Why does God need you to worship Him? It is, really, an eminently fair question, and it has an eminently logical answer: God doesn’t need you to worship Him. You need to worship Him.  Worshipping God has, among other things, the very great by-product of reminding us who God is and, by extension, who He is not: us. This may seem obvious, but history has shown that this simple fact more often than not eludes man. For instance, Egyptian pharaohs were...

September, 9 A.D., Kalkriese Hill, northern Germany: the Germanic warriors waited in grim silence. Three Roman legions, commanded by General Publius Quintilius Varus, advanced across the Rhine into Anglo-Saxon territory. The Romans hoped to expand Roman power, Roman law, and Roman culture. The Germans hoped to preserve their Teutonic laws and institutions and their way of life.  Probably neither side realized that the Battle of Teutoburg Forest would decide the course of Western law and Western civilization for millennia to come.  And now, in the year 2009, the 2,000th anniversary of the battle, very few Americans have even heard of...

Most Americans today would probably still recognize the stirring words from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,/ Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,/ Here once the embattled farmers stood,/ And fired the shot heard round the world.” Most of us are still aware that those embattled farmers won for us the freedoms we too often take for granted today.  But how many of us are aware of the extent to which faith motivated those farmers to leave their families and homes and risk their lives for a cause that most would have considered...

“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every 12 people on the planet. The only question is: how do we arm the other 11?” said the gun-running protagonist in the 2005 Nicolas Cage film Lord of War.  The filmmakers based that character in part on real-life weapons dealer Viktor Bout, a former Soviet officer turned arms merchant on the black market. But was he just a businessman seeking a quick profit, or is there more to the story? The New American has previously reported on Bout’s ties to Russian intelligence, as well as his...

Americans have been conditioned to fear Islamic terrorism, but most Americans have been told little about how much of the international terror web was created by the former Soviet Union. The roots of Soviet sponsorship of international Islamic terrorist organizations go all the way back to the beginning. And the beginning of “Islamic” terrorism can be laid at the feet of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).PLO/Fatah Former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Pacepa claimed outright that in 1964:The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for “liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created...

On January 22, the Worldwatch Institute, a group having the goal of bringing the global community together to address climate change, environmental degradation, population growth, and poverty, approvingly said about the UN’s Convention on the Law of the Sea: “The Law of the Sea [Treaty] has set international standards for fishing, deep sea mining, and navigation since the majority of the world’s countries signed it in 1982. It provides coastal nations with exclusive rights to ocean resources within 200 nautical miles of their borders — areas known as ‘exclusive economic zones,’ or EEZs.” (Note: the treaty was initiated in 1982,...

With bailouts and other unabashed socialist projects being embraced by both political parties to "save our economy," has free-market economics been proved faulty?  In the bailout-a-week political climate, it is all too easy to believe that free-market economics are as passé as powdered wigs. Everyone, it seems, is a socialist now, and the old gospel of laissez-faire and free enterprise has been discredited by a cascade of free-market failures that threaten to bring down the economy of the entire developed world. "For too long, the prevailing attitude in Washington has been that the market always knows best," Congressman Henry Waxman...

Believers in Intelligent Design have often been scorned as being opposed to science, but science itself is showing that it is the evolutionists who are opposed to rational inquiry.Though The New American has no official position on evolution, we have published a number of articles over the years pointing to flaws in the theory and arguing for academic freedom on the subject. We did this most recently in "Allow Intelligence" (May 12, 2008 issue), our very favorable review of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled. In the following article, Selwyn Duke suggests that it's possible to believe in both an evolution of...

Can we reliably, efficiently, and economically store energy to make solar and wind power viable options to replace fossil-fuel or nuclear plants?Few things get our attention more quickly than a loss of electric power. Many of our activities cease the instant energy from a generator many miles away stops supplying the electricity to light our homes or businesses, run our computers, lift our elevators, operate the industrial machinery on which our food supply depends, and countless other labor-saving tasks. While just a slap in the face at first, after a few hours, as food begins to spoil, sewage begins to...

“The entire federal government,” laments Congressman Ron Paul in his newest book, End the Fed, “is one giant toxic asset at the moment. It certainly has no business telling the private sector how to run its affairs. It is in worse financial shape than all the companies in the private sector put together.”Hard words, but Congressman Paul knows whereof he speaks. It was Ron Paul, unique among congressmen for his understanding of how a free-market economy is supposed to work, who warned repeatedly of the coming economic calamity. It was Ron Paul, too, who warned both the Bush and Obama...

As the Ford Taurus slowly approached the signal site, hidden FBI agents readied for a possible arrest. For weeks they had been staking out a path in Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Their elusive quarry was a Soviet mole in the FBI, codenamed “Ramon Garcia.”  ver the course of more than two decades, “Ramon” had done incalculable damage to the United States’ security, selling Top Secret information to the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) and KGB, and to the KGB’s Russian successor agency, the FSB, and its foreign arm, the SVR. Would “Ramon” stop this time? More than...

Wilbert Joseph “Billy” Tauzin pledged $80 billion for a “seat at the table” in White House negotiations over the healthcare reform that Barack Obama campaigned for as a candidate and has been promoting during the first year of his presidency. Tauzin, a former congressman from Louisiana’s Third District, is now president and CEO of the powerful drug lobby Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.  He promised an $80-billion savings in drug costs in exchange for a continued ban on importation of foreign drugs and a White House pledge that the administration would not seek even greater savings by negotiating for lower...

At 3:47 a.m. on June 26, the Rules Committee reported out the 1,100-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 for debate in the House of Representatives. Later in the day, its sponsor — Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce — added a “managers’ amendment” traditionally employed to clean up technical errors. But in this instance, the amendment was 300 pages of changes that modified the language of dozens of sections of the original document.The resolution (H. Res. 587) that provided for consideration of the bill — sponsored by Rules Committee member Doris...

Hulk Hogan is returning to the profession -- but not to the organization -- that made him a household name. Hogan is coming out of retirement to join TNA Wrestling (the name sounds dirty, but it actually stands for "Total Nonstop Action"), the outfit behind Spike TV's Thursday night series "TNA Impact." "I'm thrilled to be jumping back into the world of professional wrestling," said Hogan, 56. "My fans have been asking me to return to the business for many years on a full time basis, but the timing or the opportunity has never been right until now." His specific...

The New Jacobin Elite | Print | Written by William F. Jasper    Wednesday, 24 June 2009 06:00 The Socialist Party of Great Britain is celebrating the reissuing of Peter Taaffe’s book, The Masses Arise: The Great French Revolution 1789 -1815. “Its republication by Socialist Publications, in time for the 220th anniversary of this great event in July 2009, is extremely timely,� says the party’s website. A different page on the party’s site promoting the same book instructs readers: “An understanding of the French Revolution remains crucial for all revolutionaries. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky studied it intensely to gain an...

Environmental doomsayers may still be claiming that we must radically reduce carbon-dioxide and other “greenhouse” gas emissions in order to prevent catastrophic global warming, but they cling to that position despite the fact that the warming they’ve been forecasting has not occurred. In fact, the average global temperature has gone down, not up, in recent years. The graph at this link from icecap.us shows that the average global temperature has been dropping since at least 2002, even though the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing. A graph based on satellite temperature readings can be found at the...

The Russian parliament and media refer to him merely as a “Russian businessman.” But to much of the rest of the world, Viktor Bout is known as the “Merchant of Death,” the most notorious member of the dark fraternity of global weapons traffickers who arm terrorist organizations, as well as the tyrannical regimes and brutal warlords and militias responsible for horrendous genocidal slaughters over the past two decades. Since his March 2008 arrest in Bangkok, Thailand, in an elaborate U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting, Viktor Bout has been in Bangkok’s Klong Prem Special Prison awaiting trial. The U.S. Department of...

As part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, “the Energy Department has begun releasing more than $6 billion in stimulus money to clean up 18 nuclear sites from New York to California, more than doubling the typical yearly funding for the program,” a May 18 Washington Post story recounts. The sites were involved in Cold War-era nuclear weapons production, and the cleanup will deal with radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. But it is another type of waste that is causing a concerned reaction and prompting “sharply worded warnings from some government officials and lawmakers who say the stimulus funding is...

Clearly pandering to the green lobby, President Barack Obama proposed on May 19 “the highest auto fuel efficiency standards ever attempted in the United States,” according to an Environment News Service story posted online that same day. “A senior administration official told reporters Monday night that Obama's national program for higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy, CAFE, standards is scheduled to start in model year 2012. If the proposal is enacted, by 2016 the fleet average requirement would be 35.5 miles per gallon, said the official, who declined to be named. Currently the CAFE standard is 27.5 mpg for cars and...

"Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is 'missing link' in human evolution," ran the Guardian headline on May 19. The media was abuzz with excitement over the find. As the website of New Scientist magazine pointed out in “Why Ida fossil is not the missing link,” even "Google's homepage evolved, incorporating an image of the new fossil — nicknamed Ida — into the company's logo.” The fossil was nicknamed Ida by the paleontologist from Oslo University who assembled the scientific team to study it, Dr. Jørn Hurum. The Guardian mentioned that “Hurum chose Ida's nickname because the diminutive creature is at the equivalent...

Innocent-seeming questionnaires, tests, and surveys are increasingly being disseminated by government officials so that they have complete histories on every citizen. At this writing, Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina is busy apologizing for her politically incorrect gaffe in arguing against legislation that would expand federal hate-crime laws to include sexual orientation. She pointed to the infamous Matthew Shepard case as a “hoax” inasmuch as Shepard’s killers appeared to have been interested in drugs, not sexual-identity issues. Were Foxx a teenager today, she would be spared the necessity of balancing her conservative views on sexuality against the left’s Orwellian...

The publisher does not permit any reposting of materials so I have only provided a link to a very moving article telling the stories of several babies that have survived abortions. Some of them are now adults and able to speak out for themselves and for the little ones that lack voices of their own yet.

Recently, Americans have elected a string of lying presidents. First, there was George Bush the elder, who said "Read my lips, no new taxes,” and then signed tax increases as president. Then we had Bill Clinton, who proclaimed to us: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”  After that, George W. Bush blatantly lied to the American people when he said, “Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing...

Obama’s economic stimulus package is causing quite the stir among America’s governors, particularly the Republican ones. The New York Times reports: "Republican governors split sharply over the weekend over how to respond to the economic crisis, a debate whose outcome will go a long way toward shaping how the national party redefines itself in the wake of its election defeats of recent years."   It looks like the Republican governors are dividing along the lines of moderates and conservatives. The epitome of moderate Republicans, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was one of the biggest advocates for the stimulus actually poked a...

The Second International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by the Heartland Institute of Chicago will be held March 8-10 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. While the mainstream media continues to parrot the claim of Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC that “the science is settled” regarding global warming, the expected 1,000 attendees from across the globe are living, visual proof that such a claim is merely an excuse to avoid debate.The keynote speakers for the three-day conference are:• Arthur Robinson, Ph.D.  Professor of Chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.  Among many other duties, Dr....

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says that Americans are not part of the “land of the free and the home of the brave” but instead a “nation of cowards” when it comes to race. In a February 18 speech to Department of Justice (DOJ) employees, he said: "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved...

In 1943, when Germany had virtually no sources of petroleum to fuel its Luftwaffe, U-boats, and Tiger tanks, its scientists (arguably among the best in the world at that time) didn’t turn to solar and wind power. Evil does not equate to naïveté. Hitler’s technical advisers turned to another energy source to keep their Wehrmacht running steadily for several years without petroleum. They used the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal into diesel fuel and employed the Bergius hydrogenation (or liquefaction) process to convert coal into aviation gasoline and high-quality truck and automobile gasoline.Coal-to-liquid TechnologiesGasoline and diesel fuel are hydrocarbons....

The site of what is arguably the world’s leading research program in nuclear energy lies just a short drive from the city of Marseille through the picturesque and romantic countryside of southern France. At Cadarache, the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, the French atomic energy agency, operates a complex of research facilities that is soon to be the home of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which will be the most advanced and powerful Tokamak fusion reactor ever built. This reactor is being funded by the EU, China, Russia, the United States, and others. Though famous as the future site of...

What began early last year as a "credit crunch" and an "economic downturn" is now being characterized as a "long, severe recession." Once upon a time, such a crisis was known as a "depression" before Americans became squeamish about such stark language.  As with our reluctant semantic retreat from "credit crunch" to "recession," the reality of another Great Depression will probably not be acknowledged until years after the fact. But America and the rest of the modern world, by doggedly pursuing the same mistaken policies of the 1920s and '30s, have made a full-blown depression — lasting years, not months,...

President Barack Obama's inaugural committee billed his January 20 National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral as a celebration of America's "diversity of faith." Among the official participants offering prayers at the event was Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.   Mattson was also a guest speaker later that evening at the first Muslim Inaugural Celebration at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington, D.C. This was not the first time Mattson had been so honored at Obama shindigs; she was also given center stage at the Democratic Convention's opening interfaith prayer service last August in Denver....

Now that record-cold temperatures across the globe are making a mockery of human-caused global warming, we look to see if this is merely a "weather hiccup." Judge: Counselor, do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence on the accused? Attorney: Yes, your honor. Might I remind you that the victim my client was accused of murdering showed up earlier and is very much alive, sitting there in the front row? Judge: Sir, this court does not deal in trivialities. Attorney: But your honor, I'd respectfully suggest that since there is no victim, there has been no crime and...

Considering that John McCain himself was a POW during the Vietnam War, why is he so dismissive of the evidence that other POWs remained in captivity after the war's end?    When the Senate created the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in mid-summer 1991," writes Vietnam veteran and POW activist Ted Sampley, "a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed 69 percent of Americans surveyed believed Americans remained captive in Southeast Asia and 75 percent said the U.S. government was not doing enough to bring them home." Like the many Americans seeking a thorough accounting of our POWs and MIAs, Sampley had...

Famed Blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan tells about his involvement in the movement to restore our constitutional republic. Guitar Player magazine called Jimmie Vaughan "a living legend." He's one of the most respected guitarists in the world of popular music. He started playing guitar when he was 13, and his mother said of his immediate adeptness, "It was like he played it all his life." His fans aren't just "fans"; they include other guitarists and musicians of significant renown, including Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and his brother, the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. He is that good. But...