Free Republic

The coronavirus has led to the greatest economic catastrophe in our lifetimes. Record losses in the market, record bankruptcies, record unemployment and, soon, record insolvency of local governments. This social and economic firestorm will lead to massive shifts in political alignment. The question is, which way will politics shift this year and over the next several years? Powerful arguments can be made on all sides. But a few factors are worth considering.

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function. Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Barack Obama's presidency has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests. That's no coincidence. It's what the former community organizer sought from Day One. And it's just going to get worse before he leaves office. The senseless protests we're seeing break out on the campuses of the University of Missouri, Yale and other colleges, as well as on bridges and highway overpasses and outside police stations, are precisely the kind of thing Obama was trained to organize while attending leftist agitation schools founded by Chicago communist Saul Alinsky. He learned to a fare-thee-well how to "rub raw the sores of...

<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>

Thanks in very large part to The Donald, the illegal immigration issue has come raging to the fore in the consciousness of a great many American citizens (and others) in recent times. People are not only thinking about the issue, but they have started talking about it, oftentimes with great passion. And this is so regardless of which side of the dispute the contenders align with. It seems there are two basic, contending schools of thought, both premised in the Fourteenth Amendment, which says: Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction...

Do We the People Need an Article V Convention of the States in the Aftermath of Obergefell? The short answer to the title question would seem to be: Very likely YES. And that for a number of reasons. First, Congress has been utterly derelict in executing its constitutional powers designed to constrain excesses emanating from the Supreme Court. There are three constitutional legislative “checks” on SCOTUS — or any other federal court. Other than the Article III Supreme Court, Congress is the creator of all the other federal courts — and all are firmly within its lawful legislative power in...

He’s the Staller in Chief — President Obama has punted almost every hot-button issue past the key midterm elections on Nov. 4. Obama has postponed decisions on a raft of contentious issues related to ObamaCare, Gitmo, immigration and his Cabinet. This is partly to protect Democratic candidates and hold onto the Senate. But it’s more than that. Obama plans a number of radical moves later this year when the administration believes the media, and the public, are paying less attention. This includes a forced transformation of our neighborhoods, a huge influx of immigrants and billions of dollars in additional taxes....

Progress: “Forward or onward movement towards a destination…. Development towards an improved or more advanced condition.” Progressive: “Happening or developing gradually or in stages.” [Compare with Darwinist evolution theory.] “(A person or idea) favouring social reform; Favouring change or innovation.” Progressivist: A person who is “modern, liberal, advanced, forward-looking, forward-thinking, go-ahead, enlightened, enterprising, innovative, up-and-coming, new, dynamic, avant-garde, modernistic, disruptive; radical, left-wing, reforming, reformist, revolutionary, revisionist” So much for definitions provided by the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language . It seems to me there is a whole lot of pure hope (and hype) associated with the idea of “human...

A 'gigantic hole' in the sun's atmosphere, hovering over the solar north pole, has been photographed by a space telescope. The dark spot, which covers almost a quarter of the sun, is a large 'coronal hole' — a dark, low density region of the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the corona. It was spotted by the European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft between 13 and 18 July, during which time it was spewing out material including solar wind into space. While the hole looks devoid of solar activity, it was in fact releasing violent blasts of solar wind and...

Psyche, Nous; Faith and Reason: The Classic View By “classic view” we mean to denote the epochal legacy of ancient Greek philosophy, and the epochal genius of thinkers who could and did “isolate” psyche as a bona fide constituent of Reality. Instantly, there seems to be two problems. How is “Reality” to be defined? Who’s doing the “defining?” For answers to such questions, we must have access to Nous. This incredibly compact Greek word is usually translated into English as Reason. But the Greek nous carries other meanings as well: c.f., reason; mind; intellect; self-reflective consciousness; logic; creative will; truth....

A PeakProsperity.com reader recently lamented: I have been trying to get my head around the mechanism of QE. Not being an economist or experienced investor I don't really understand a lot of the jargon. The usual simple definition of QE as "thin air money printing" does not satisfy my need for understanding either. Have hunted for a description of QE for dummies that leaves me feeling like I get it, but with no luck. My difficulty is in understanding how thin air money gets into circulation. So I'm going to do my best to answer this plea in as intuitive...

Middle-Class Wealth Protection, Post-Fiscal Cliff By Jean F. Drew I don’t know about you, but I’m a lifelong, middle-class working stiff who has managed to accumulate a certain modest amount of “wealth” designated to be sent to the future, to supply my support and lifestyle needs when I am “old” and no longer have employment income. I’m speaking of my 401(k)s and IRAs. The way I have assets deployed in these accounts very likely will need to change, given the absolutely predictable outcome of the much-hyped impending fiscal cliff. At least, that is my supposition. Consider: We get the fiscal...

BAR STOOL ECONOMICS Suppose that every day, ten men go out for a beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this: The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1.00 The sixth would pay $3.00 The seventh would pay $7.00 The eighth would pay $12.00 The ninth would pay $18.00 The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.00 So that’s what they decided to do. The men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite...

Here's an interesting viewpoint. The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15 2011. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe — and possibly to the rest of the world. "EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ" By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez I walked down the street in Barcelona and suddenly discovered a terrible truth — Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity,...

Class Warfare, Obama-style by Jean F. Drew For Aristotle, to be a “mature man,” a spoudaios, implies the state of existence of a public-spirited man — a man who understands that the well-being of individuals in a society ultimately depends on the justness and truthfulness of the order of the society itself. And this order is not something that can ever be left on automatic pilot; rather it is something that the people must constantly strive to defend and preserve. In Aristotle, we find the distinction between the mass of the people, the plethos — who basically function at the...

The Debt Crisis: Why There Is a Stalemate By Jean F. Drew Ask just about any person on the street nowadays what the U.S. “debt crisis” is all about, and he’ll probably tell you it’s about “raising the debt limit.” He has had it drilled into his head — by the Obama Administration, the Democrat Party, the labor unions, and their various enablers in the “official” media — that the international credit reporting agencies threaten to downgrade sovereign U.S. debt from Triple A to a lesser — and costlier — grade because Congress has failed to increase the debt ceiling...

When Barack Hussein Obama was Democrat Party presidential nominee in the 2008 national election, he presented himself to the American public as a sort of New Messiah of “Hope and Change,” the new god of “Yes We Can!” (whatever these vaporous, vacuous statements could actually mean). He probably garnered the vote of every passionate ignoramus in the land. Moreover, there was evidence of irregularities in polling procedures in certain jurisdictions. Few people bother to investigate such matters these days, and certainly not the Dept. of Justice. In the end, with the help of union and left-progressive interest money and the...

New World Order, New World Religion By Jean F. Drew     Executive Summary: Our thesis is the New World Order needs a “new age” religion to back it up. “Old age” religions obligate their followers to a moral code ill-suited to “new age” progressivist designs and purposes. So people worldwide need to be “re-trained” in the spirituality department. Perhaps a clue as to what sort of training this would be can be found at the United Nations itself. The U.N. has chartered two NGOs — World Goodwill and Lucis Trust — which serve as advisors to various U.N....

The epiphany of Social Justice as the end-stage of history is perhaps the holy of holies for communists of all descriptions. And all communists defend their ideological system as the only true means to this end. And yet it cannot be denied that all communist attempts to achieve this goal in the past have been miserable, bloody, wasteful, and immensely costly failures, involving incalculable suffering by, and injustice towards, a hundred million human persons at least, according to conservative estimates. This plain fact of history, however, never seems to discourage a “true believer.” For the “true believer,” just because all...

An Open Letter to My Physicist Friend RE: Darwinism and the Problem of Free Will By Jean F. Drew Dear A — Regarding the discussion of “free will” at www.naturalism.org, you wrote: “I am surprised to find a ‘scientific naturalism’ so similar to the utmost banality, shallowness and false superficiality of the ‘scientific materialism’ that I [had] to learn in … school [during] the communist regime.” I think this is a very striking statement; and I understand what you mean. I read in your Book of the Living Universe long ago that you were aware of the problem of “tampering”...