Free Republic

A proposal to build a Ku Klux Klan monument steps from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama received the support of a downtown committee despite some loved ones of 1963 bombing victims finding it offensive. The 13-story White People’s Cultural Center was unanimously endorsed by the 12-member Community Board financial district committee. The $100 million project, called Fiery Cross, is proposed for the old laundromat building at 606 16th Street N, just one block from the site of the September 15, 1963 bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan that took the lives of four children. “I...

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan -- In commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, Headquarters U.S. Forces Japan has developed a manga comic entitled “Our Alliance; A Lasting Partnership” to highlight this historical landmark. Read 永続的なパートナーシップ (Eizoku-tekina pātonāshippu) online

In a way, we should be grateful for the controversy in Perry v. Schwartzenegger (whose legal aspects I discuss here) because it provides an occasion to clarify the sort of things that a state must do. Marriage has functioned in various ways throughout human history, though with different emphases and even degrees of seriousness. (The term has hitherto been used with respect to a relationship between men and women, with trivial and merely analogical exceptions). Very frequently, if not quite invariably, marriage has been regarded as the recapitulation on the human level of cosmic principles, and particularly as the reconciliation...

Video report

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...

One of the most genuine and spiritually significant victories accomplished in the history of man is the triumph of the Russian White Army. If we can take everything from this victory that was laid into it, then Russia will soon be reborn in power and glory and evince still unseen greatness. And this greatness will be a living edification and support for the rebirth of other nations. This is the primary meaning of our “White” existence and suffering. Strategic naivete, historical ignorance, the inertia of prejudice or reactionary stubbornness are nowhere behind this claim. Our opponents and enemies can be...

THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music, a robot that teaches foreign languages to children. This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools. But such conclusions aren’t just changing how we think about computers — they are reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways. [...] Some would...

Diboll police officer Grant Jones has resigned amid a flurry of debate surrounding a controversial traffic stop last week. Jones gave his formal resignation Tuesday afternoon at 2:30. "His resignation was short, and to the point," according to Diboll City Manager Dennis McDuffie. [...] Upon hearing of Jones' resignation, [victim] Johnny Hodge said it's good that Jones realized he was wrong and stepped down from his position. The city attorney for Diboll has promised to release the Diboll Police dash cam video on Wednesday. The stop in question occurred on July 27 as Tracey Lott was driving his friend, Johnny...

"Mad Men" is definitely my favorite Television show ever! Mad Men's Matthew Weiner is obviously a genius. Hope he does many more "Period Pieces" for TV and the Movies. If you like this website, you'll the Mad Men TV show (so fans of this site are hereby commanded to watch it!). It just blew me away that they would shoot scenes in Mad Men in places like The HMS Bounty restaurant, The Prince Korean Restaurant, Musso and Frank's, Cicada, the Biltmore Hotel, the Los Angeles Theater and Casey's Bar. What other TV show would do that! The costume and set...

In 1789, in the [French National] Assembly, the increasingly alarmed partisans of the ancien régime sat on the right-hand side (Côté Droit) of the president, the revolutionaries on his left-hand side (Côté Gauche). This terminology was first made familiar to the English-speaking world by Thomas Carlyle, in Volume I of “The French Revolution”: “Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.” That recognition of the character of so-called progressive...

I don’t know about you, but I love to fly. Put me in a Boeing 707, a Douglas DC-8, or a Convair 990 and I’m literally in heaven. Once we’re safely aloft I sit back in my roomy, brocade-upholstered seat, loosen my tie, stretch my legs all the way out, and call that slender, honey-voiced 23-year-old stewardess in the attractive Pucci uniform over there to bring me a pillow, an aspirin, and an Old Fashioned. Later, she’ll give me a deck of cards and I and maybe even sit in the empty seat beside me for a hand of gin...

Adolf Hitler was infamous for many things, but among the late Führer‘s most well-remembered obsessions was eugenics — the practice of breeding human beings in order to improve the race. In his rantings, he alluded to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, or “overman”, as the hoped-for end result of the Nazi eugenics effort. (It is important to note that Hitler’s concept of the Übermensch was different from Nietzsche’s in many ways.) This superbeing, the product of “pure Aryan blood”, was, in Hitler’s view, the only hope for mankind — a being of great power and will, capable of destroying the...

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Harvey Pekar's life was not an open book. It was an open comic book. Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic book series, "American Splendor," portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive "flunky file clerk" engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety. Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. Monday by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death. Pekar and Brabner wrote "Our Cancer Year,"...

There are many who, ignorantly or otherwise, equate monarchy with tyranny. Unfortunately, some ill-informed monarchists also push this point-of-view as a positive (since such people view totalitarianism as a good thing). This has been a plague for monarchism and I see it time and time again. It is ingrained in the minds of so many people that a monarch is either a tyrant or a totally ceremonial waste of money. At one time the common model of the constitutional monarch could be used to counter this belief but even that model, which worked well for a time and became fairly...

How does a society go about checkmating itself? There is no shortage of real-world examples, but real life is complicated, so here is a simple allegory. Let's suppose that there is a tribe called the Merkanoids, which remains quite ordinary for most of its history, but which at some point undergoes a strange cultural mutation. An accidental synergy between atmospheric electricity and chemicals in the water produces a strange effect on their minds that causes them to decamp from the towns and villages wherein they had hitherto happily dwelt, and take up residence in little huts scattered throughout the surrounding...

A patient, believed to be having a stroke, says an officer with the Chattanooga Police Department blocked her husband from taking her to the emergency room at Erlanger Wednesday night. Aline Wright is a cancer survivor, amputee and a newlywed. Wednesday night she began to show signs she was having a stroke. "I started feeling some left arm numbness and a facial droop," said Aline. "It appeared to me that I was probably having a stroke." That's when her husband of four days, Jesse Wright, put her in the car and rushed her to the Erlanger Medical Center. Wright knows...

Mutual friend Bob Cabeen has just informed me of the passing of my former business partner Carl Macek. Carl died of a heart attack on Saturday. Among his many accomplishments Carl created Robotech, co-founded Spumco with John K. and co-founded Streamline Pictures (Akira, Fist of the North Star, Laputa, etc.) with me. Carl began his career doing grassroots promotional work on sci-fi films such as Star Wars and Alien, and worked for numerous industry icons including Dino Di Laurentiis and Ivan Reitman. He wrote the book The Art of Heavy Metal (Animation for the Eighties) in 1981. In 1984, Macek...

Blessing for the City of Angels At the USCCB Fall Meeting in Baltimore in November of 2008, I had the privilege of sitting down for a brief conversation with the man that Pope Benedict XVI recently named as Coadjutor and the next Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles; Most Reverend José H. Gomez, S.T.D. As I made arrangements for the interview that afternoon, I’ll never forget what the USCCB Media Relations staffer said to me just before His Excellency and I sat down, “Be nice to Archbishop Gomez, he’s my friend!” I soon got a sense for why this...