Free Republic

Commentary: Rich world’s social discontent will result in restored trade barriersBy Amotz Asa-El JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) -- “The basis of our government is the opinion of the people,” said Thomas Jefferson. A novelty when it was said in 1787, that insight now goes without saying, provided that one knows just what “the opinion of the people” is. Reuters An Occupy Wall Street campaign demonstrator holds a placard in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in New York on Oct. 17, 2011. However, as the world followed recent days’ social protest in 70 cities from New York and Frankfurt to Tokyo and Sydney,...

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr. Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only...

Transient meth-head Kirk Wise probably made more money than you did last year -- and he didn't even have a job. Wise, 45, is a professional copper thief who steals copper wire to support his $100-a-day meth habit. He's pretty good at it, too -- according to Wise, he's netted nearly $100,000 since January of 2010 by selling the copper to scrap-metal recycling businesses throughout the east Valley. (...) He admitted to everything -- he said he stole copper to support his meth habit and he'd netted $95,000 since last January. He told police he'd been stealing copper for three...

I watched a National Geographic special the other day on NetFlix. It was about the Mayan culture in South America and Mexico. This documentary was about several anthropologist who took it upon themselves to decipher the ancient hieroglyphics that covered the buildings and walls of the decaying Mayan structures. It was quite ironic how the anthropologists romanticized the undisturbed culture of the Mayans and the harm (they say) Spanish priests brought to their way of life. Well, according to the history of their "civilization" these people lived in constant conflict and fear. War and bloodshed was a common community concern....

In the 1930′s there were three newly planted gardens in which the snake of progressivism had invested much hope and inspiration; each garden was tended by three different gardeners with different styles but with much the same goal — to create the Garden of Eden or “utopia” as they preferred to call it – socialism by all other names. Stalin of the former Soviet Union was an international protetariat-variety socialist; Mussilini in Italy was of the similar school while Hitler mixed a little nationalism into his socialist mix, resulting in Nazism (Nationalsozialismus from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German...

Lots of pundits are trying to figure out why President Obama is facing disaster this midterm election, but few have said it better than Michael Oakeshott, despite his disadvantage of having been dead for 20 years. Oakeshott was an English philosopher. His specialty was politics and his disposition was to prefer "fact to mystery," "the limited to the unbounded" and "present laughter to Utopian bliss." He said all this in an essay titled, "On Being Conservative," in which he also trenchantly described politicians of the opposite sort, what I would call the Obama sort. Such people, he said, see government...

Todd Rundgren -dob 6.22.1948- is a multi-talented American musician, singer-songwriter and record producer who still tours on a limited basis, up-to and including earlier this year. Hailed in the early stage of his career as a new pop-wunderkind -absolutely adored by critics- and supported by the certified gold solo double LP Something/Anything? in 1972, Rundgren went on to produce a diverse range of recordings as solo artist and during the 70s/80s with the band Utopia. He has also been successful as a producer and engineer on the recorded work of other musicians. Todd Rundgren engineered and/or produced Stage Fright by...

Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable future, you need to look at the past. What was technological life like 50 years ago? 50 years ago was 1959. The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little appreciated. In 1959, we had...

A utopian dream of a new urban community, built here in the 1970s, had slowly degraded into a poor neighborhood plagued by aimless youths before it finally burst into flames three weeks ago. After Karim Boudouda, a 27-year-old of North African descent, and some of his friends had robbed a casino, he was killed in an exchange of automatic gunfire with the police. The next night, Villeneuve, a carefully planned neighborhood of Grenoble in eastern France, exploded. A mob set nearly 100 cars on fire, wrecked a tram car and burned an annex of city hall. The police, reinforced by...

White House Unveils Free Preventative ServicesBY JANET ADAMY JULY 15, 2010 WASHINGTON—Treatments for the prevention of alcohol abuse, depression and obesity are among the services that will be free to consumers with new insurance plans starting in September. As part of the new health law, the Obama administration on Wednesday released rules specifying which preventive health services insurers must provide to consumers at no additional cost. Democrats hope the change will be one of the most popular early pieces of the sweeping legislation. "Services like these will go a long way in preventing chronic illness," First Lady Michelle Obama said...

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression By Stephane Courtois, Mark Kramer (Translator), Jonathan Murphy (Translator), Karel Bartosek, Andrzej Paczkowski, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin (Contributors); Introduction to the U.S. edition by Martin Malia Published by Harvard University Press, 1999 Originally published in France, 1997 Reviewed by Claire Wolfe Examining the photos and reading their captions in The Black Book of Communism, you might expect the surrounding 700+ pages to contain a wail of outrage. The photos, though few, are as graphic and heart-rending as the worst from Nazi Germany. But the text is no impassioned partisan cry. It's something...

San Francisco is generous, good-hearted and socially conscious. It is eager to help the disadvantaged and the poor. There's just one flaw in our civic personality. Tough choices. We'd rather not make them. On Monday, a parade of hundreds of service organizations appeared before the Board of Supervisors, pleading for funding for their programs. These aren't bad people and their programs to help the young, the drug-ravaged, and the homeless are well-intentioned. But the hard truth is there are far too many service providers for this relatively small city. They duplicate efforts, they don't have enough oversight, and they spend...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Imagine no cars - or fewer, anyway. In New York, a two-mile stretch of the FDR Drive parkway is torn down to open lower Manhattan for parks and plazas, and bicyclists are given their own lane on the Brooklyn Bridge. An elevated highway in Guangzhou, China, is transformed into a pedestrian promenade, and rooftops are linked by raised walkways and bikeways. In Jakarta, Indonesia, traditional bike taxis called becaks are re-engineered to be lighter and easier to steer. --snip--

Calif. Pol Touts 'Pedophile Island' for Sex Offenders (May 21) -- California gubernatorial candidate Douglas Hughes has made quite a name for himself in recent weeks -- not so much by surging ahead in the polls, but rather by promising, if elected, to create a "Pedophile Island" for convicted sex offenders. "I read the newspapers, and always somewhere buried in the paper somebody has [been] raped, tortured, kidnapped and so forth," Hughes told AOL News. "We are not getting anywhere [by] putting them back in the neighborhood. ... It's like any alcoholic, sex or drug addict -- have it around...

A Nightmare for the European Dream A commentary by Christoph Schwennicke Political unity, a common currency, border-free travel and lasting peace. The European Union was to have become a kind of eternal utopia. Instead, no one has dared to further develop Europe since the days of Helmut Kohl. Now, the EU is looking decidedly mortal. /snip I am one of those people. I am one of those idealists who have always believed in the European idea and will continue to do so. It was and still is incredible how this continent has bundled together its economic, political and military forces,...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Swastikas, nooses, a KKK hood, graffiti, epithets and jeers. An ugly spate of bias incidents has crossed several University of California campuses over the past month, causing consternation, outcry and fear that bigotry is alive among the young and educated. Students have protested and administrators have condemned, but the question remains of what lies behind the sudden parade of prejudice — a growing climate of insensitivity on campuses or a bunch of immature kids yearning for peer acceptance and attention. "My guess is some of all of those things," said interim UC Provost Lawrence H. Pitts....

“Avatar” is wowing audiences with its groundbreaking 3-D technology (too bad the characters are one-dimensional). But in another way it’s ordinary: a science-fiction film that plays to leftist fantasies about capitalism and the military. Yet many sci-fi fans are on the political right. So why are sci-fi films and TV shows typically liberal? Hollywood films tend to be liberal, sure. But science fiction in particular lends itself to utopian visions that the world’s problems can be solved once and for all.

I stumbled across this 1948 cartoon video (below) entitled, "Make Mine Freedom", and for some reason took a few minutes to watch it. I'm so glad that I did! I'm not alone because over 2,000,000 have also tuned in. This cartoon, over sixty years old, is eerily timely and applicable to the state of our government and country. Don't cheat yourself. Watch the entire video because it saves the best for last. What's so incredibly, amazingly eye-popping about it is that it exposes the EXACT SAME LIBERAL LIES that are being repeated today ad nauseum. They recycle the same old...

I was struck by the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson’s opinion piece today entitled The Biggest Disappointment of the Obama Presidency. In it he berates Obama for giving short shrift to New Orleans when he visited Thursday. Of all the Post’s writers, Robinson has been the most supportive of Obama, seldom finding fault, but this time he skewers him. "President Obama's brief display of drive-by compassion Thursday in New Orleans was, for me, by far the worst outing of his presidency thus far -- and the biggest disappointment..." "So it was strange and disheartening that Obama would wait nine months to...

Afterburner with Bill Whittle  A Tale of Two Revolutions: The War of Ideas & the Tragedy of the Unconstrained Vision Sep 9 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   10min Bill Maher, Barack Obama and the Truth About American Exceptionalism Aug 31 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   15min MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness Aug 24 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   13min The Power & Danger of Iconography: The Resistance Steals Obama's Weapons Aug 14 / Afterburner with Bill Whittle   8min Beyond the Angry Mobs: Only You Can Bring Congress...