Free Republic

Personally, I gave Musk - always known before his Twitter acquisition as sympathetic to Democrats, and still to this day a proponent of Solar power - a serious look after he rescued freedom of the press by making Twitter an honest web site.

So much so that I began following Tesla bulls on youTube, and buying a significant - to me - holding of $TSLA. And I now ride a Tesla Model Y. I have friends who moved a two day drive from me about 15 years ago, and I hadn’t seen them since. That was too long a drive for me to undertake, until I got my Y equipped with “Full Self Driving” software.

The title has always been an aspiration rather than a true description - but the software I have makes driving so much less stressful. It’s so good that when my friend’s wife saw me, not driving but supervising the driving performance of the FSD software, she went gaga over it. And it’s expected that the requirement to supervise may be eliminated in 2025.

In fact, Tesla is experimentally running taxis in Austin with safety supervisors in the RH front seats and no human in the “driver’s seats.” And they plan to expand that service very widely very quickly. Providing access to the service to half the population of the country in half a year’s time.

. . . no doubt Soros was still pulling some of those strings. Look how much $$$ he has put into bringing down the GOP and installing leftists in every spot imaginable.

OTOH it has to be said that Elon Musk rescued freedom of the press by overpaying for Twitter and making an honest web site out of it.

And was hard in against Kamala (and for Trump until very recently).

I don’t know of anyone good enough to replace [Alito or Thomas]

Nor I, for that matter. But I hope that Alito and Thomas, whenever they leave the Court, are replaced by a Republican POTUS and confirmed by a Republican controlled Senate. If one or both of them retires when their replacements can be nominated by Trump and confirmed by a Republican-controlled senate, I’m fairly confident that Trump will have a better choice(s) in mind than he now thinks Justice Barrett to have been.

I happen to like JD Vance as the next president contender. But I’ve been fooled in the past and am now thrice (or more) bitten and shy about my estimation re: worthy presidential candidates. Pretty bad when the DS swamp ends up making you question your own judgement.

I, too, like Vance. If only he had the management credentials of, say, the governor of, say Florida . . .

Except for 1964, when I was recovering from the flu on election day (remember when election day was a thing?), I have voted every presidential election since 1960 . . . and I do not exclude my 3 votes for Nixon when I say that I have never regretted any of all those votes against Democrats. I will confess that I am less enthusiastic about both Bush 41 and Bush 43. It turns out that the Reform Party would have been just as good a vote in ’92 (considering that Trump has converted the Republican brand to Reform Party policies) and I like the result.

At one point I even questioned Trump before he proved himself to be a man of his word and one that actually does fulfill campaign promises. Now I’m wishing that, much like I wished re: Reagan, that we could clone Trump and keep him as president for ...uh.... ever…lol.

I favored Cruz in the 2016 primary, but Trump certainly impressed early, when he stuffed his “Only Rosie O’Donald!” riposte down Megyn Kelly’s throat in the first debate. Speaking of presidential debates, the MSM doesn’t have the clout to force the next Republican nominee to debate the Democratic nominee and two journalists simultaneously. Those days, I hope, are over. We don’t need no stinkin’ moderators . . .

A microphone for each candidate, and a chess timer to control which one is live, will be just fine, thank you.

One caution about Vance; neither “Senator” nor “VP” - nor the combination of the two credentials - has ever defeated a governor for the presidency, other than the wave election of 1920. Same went for trying to unseat a sitting president - until the suspicious case of Biden in 2020, which I think was the only time a sitting POTUS lost even while winning more votes than he had in his winning previous election. So I hope the Democrats don’t unite behind a (present or past) governor in ’28 . . .

Where it really gets interesting is the Supreme Court.

Did President Biden sign the actual nomination or was it signed by the Auto pen?

Yea, verily, that is a really interesting question.

But the autopen issue would have to very hot indeed before there would be any hope of overturning that. But I think that even in the best (worst?) case, we couldn’t expect a new Justice to replace Jackson to be named before 2029.

. . . and even that would be an awfully heavy political lift.

The reality of the “Biden” Administration was, of course, that Biden wasn’t in charge. And if the video of “former” president Obama being fussed over by all Biden’s “subordinates” while the “sitting president” wandered around looking lost is anything to go by, Obama was calling the shots then. Enough so, at least, that we should “thank” him for the “Biden” policies . . .

[Journalism] has ‘evolved’ to the point now that only bad news about one party, the GOP, is reported.

No question. But again, there is hardly any limit to the scope of libel against Republicans which, absent Sullivan, could be proven in court (given a neutral, let alone a judiciously selected favorable, judicial venue). I would suggest naming “the Associated Press and all its members” in one gigantic libel action for “any amount that” journalism “can count.” Such high stakes that it would be not only “a” story but the only story. We already know what the journalism/Dem pol complex would be, they’re doing it now at relatively nominal stakes.

My wife, of blessed memory, was a Rush Limbaugh fan like myself. But all of our descendants “drink the Koolade” of the journalism/Dem pol complex.

You can count me among the legions tens of millions of people who, had they lived in easy commuting distance of DC, very likely would have been ensnared by the false flag operation which was the “January sixth insurrection.” So naturally my opinion is that Adam Schiff belongs in jail solitary confinement. And no one who did not, does not, condemn the “insurrection” false flag con has any credibility at all. And even if there were something to connecting Trump to Epstein, the infamy of that would not begin to match that of so many Dem pol/journalist operations. Arguably every day of the "Biden Administration” was worse, just considering the “secure border” of that time.

The fact that Obama is not, and never was, a patriot is beyond peradventure. But given the cover he has in the support of so many tens of millions of Koolade drinkers, I unhappily conclude that the tactic of calling him out for “treason” is almost certainly counterproductive. The real message which must be pressed, IMHO, is that the history of the conduct of the Democrat Party in producing and supporting the Biden Administration disqualifies its future presidential nominees from consideration by anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

I would favor a constitutional amendment which would raise the minimum age for any elective office nationwide to 35 years. This would reduce the problem of professional lifetime politicians, at least a little. Biden was a senator before he was 30. And I would create a mandatory age limit of eighty for senator, or representative. As to the presidency, the people nationwide have a say, so as long as there is visibility the office does not require a chronological limit. But if we learned anything at all from the “Biden” Administration, it is that presidential candidates as well as sitting presidents need to pass valid mental exam of some sort. Tho exactly what that would consist of would have to be given serious consideration. One possibility would be have to annually conduct a 3-hour long televised Q and A session in front of a politically hostile audience (consisting, say, of congressmen and senators). Trump could do that before coffee, any day of the week. Biden, not so much.

But clearly the 25th Amendment is not self-enforcing, and has flunked the test of time.

The stunning and incredible bias by the media, which causes them to ONLY report bad stuff about Republicans.

I’m not the only FReeper who’s been around the block a few times . . . I was 2 yo when "the Japs" - as they were scornfully referred to during the war - bombed Pear Harbor. Altho we knew back then that “loose lips sink ships,” and journalism couldn’t tell us the whole story while the war was going on, some of that censorship was conducted not to protect “our boys” but to protect the government (read, FDR) from terrible PR. The shining example being the devastating scale of the losses to US shipping immediately after Hitler’s declaration of war a week after Pearl Harbor, and the corresponding rate of destruction of the attacking U-boats (which was zero). None of which was a secret to Hitler.

Speaking of the declaration of war by Hitler, nothing was said at the time but the causus belli Hitler used as justification in his declaration was absolutely true. That is, the Lend Lease Act was not the act of a neutral but of a ”neutral” on the side of Britain and the USSR. True neutrals don’t supply war materiel to one side while harassing the other. Truths can be disappeared in plain sight when they are uncomfortable, and that certainly was the case in this context.

The long and short of it is that I grew up in thrall to “what was going on” as journalism reported it. It was only in the context of the Carter (mal)Administration that I even fully accepted the fact of “bias in the media.” But the issue before the house is why journalism as a whole is joined at the hip with the Democratic (as if) Party. It took decades (blush) for me to crack the code, but I think I have a good model of it. Which, necessarily, goes back a long way.

First, the newspapers of the founding era made little secret of the fact that their core mission was to express the opinions of their printers. Those printers were small, the papers were single page affairs (exclusively, I think), and they operated on relatively long deadlines - in some cases, no deadline at all, only “when I’m good and ready to go to press.” Claims of objectivity were made, but not taken seriously.

Second, Samuel Morse demonstrated his Baltimore-to-Washington telegraph line in 1844, and it was a revelation. Telegraph lines spread rapidly and widely in the North (but, due to the conservative/reactionary nature of the South at the time, not so much elsewhere). The New York Associated Press was formed in 1848, and soon “New York” was dropped from the name. The AP doesn’t have customers, it has members - newspapers pay (expensive) membership fees and they contribute stories to “the wire.”

Since they were expressing the opinions of their printers, they wanted to contribute stories to “the wire.” But a not-so-funny thing happened on the occasion of the assassination of President Lincoln. The first story coming out of Washington afterward “buried the lede,” first reporting other local affairs and only relatively incidentally mentioned at the end of the piece that the president had been shot in the head. This was definitely a scandal in journalism circles, and the AP Stylebook is the result. The effect of any and all wire services is to homogenize journalism.

The potential of the AP to disseminate propaganda nationwide was questioned as early as the 1870s, but the AP responded that its material mostly came from its members, and (as noted above) newspapers had the reputation of not agreeing with each other on anything. Meanwhile the Stylebook was gradually obliterating that formerly indisputable fact.

Yes, but why is the resulting homogeneous journalism anti conservative? That is because journalism is slanted, for commercial reasons, towards bad news. Bad news attracts the attention of an audience, and bad news is more common than good news. The construction of a house takes time, and over the course of time that construction constitutes no dramatic news. But let that house burn down . . .

“No news is good news” because good news “isn’t news.” Journalism is criticism implicitly, and it criticizes everyone from the perspective that any bad news might have been prevented by the government. From, that is, the left.

It is conventional to refer to the problem as “bias in the media,” but I prefer to simply refer to the leftist perspective of journalism. Certainly fiction can and does have political ramification, but fiction after all does not explicitly claim to be factual. I see no possible gain in attempting to censor fiction in any way.

Purveyors of tendentiously misleading “nonfiction” can be sued for libel. And the only genre of “nonfiction” which is politically potent is journalism. Wire service journalism.

That is one ‘more’ thing that we need to fix while Trump is president, if at all possible. The stunning and incredible bias by the media, which causes them to ONLY report bad stuff about Republicans.

Trump is on that case - it’s what all his libel lawsuits are about. The 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan precedent has, until Trump, intimidated Republican “public figures” from suing for libel. Trump is doing so anyway, and the libelers are chickening out and settling because they understand that the Roberts Court may have its quisling holding on occasion, but Clarence Thomas has been chomping at the bit for decades to have a shot at writing the opinion that overturns Sullivan.

Sullivan was a unanimous (8-0) holding by the Warren Court - but one which exaggerates the First Amendment in a way that was understood to be bogus for all of US history until the bogus Warren Court (amplified by media toadies) handed down Sullivan in 1964.

The First Amendment - the entire Bill of Rights - was not in the unamended Constitution, not because the Federalists didn’t agree with the rights itemized in the BoR, but because of (fully vindicated) fear that a BoR would not function as a floor under our rights but as a ceiling over them.

1A did not create "freedom of speech, or of the press.” They already existed, and already were limited by laws forbidding, for example, libel, slander, and pornography. And 1A did not touch the laws against libel, slander, or porn. Which explains why “banned in Boston” was a thing, long after 1964 and Sullivan.

So Sullivan is illegitimate as a matter of law. As a matter of equity, Sullivan stinks on ice for the simple reason that it assumed a level playing field between parties - a conceit which draws guffaws from any Republican who is even slightly sentient.

Regime change should be our objective, even if we say it isn’t.

It's not like it would be Iran's first CIA driven regime change…

There’s no gainsaying that the CIA installed the Shah whom the Ayatola overthrew. I will add that my uncle told me that he had commercial dealings in pre-ayatolah Iran, and he asserted that the shah’s regime was unstable and my uncle didn’t think it would be safe for him to go back to Iran.

Jimmy Carter basically pulled the plug on the Shah, and the ayatollah took over. That was then, and this is now. Just think what Iran has gone thru since then! The thanks Carter got from the Ayatollah was the takeover of our embassy, and months of TV coverage entitled, “America Held Hostage.”

During the Reagan Administration, not too much was publicly made of the fact that the US Navy eviscerated Iran’s navy - but that happened.

Subsequently Iran went to war with Saddam’s Iraq, and an awful lot of Iranians got drafted as cannon fodder and killed. Which was never going to happen to the citizens of a pro-American Iran under the Shah. America would either have influenced a peace deal - or assured that Iran wasn’t on the ropes in any fight with Saddam. Instead of withdrawing US sales of spare parts for the F-14s the Shah had bought.

. . . and American economic sanctions against Iran wouldn’t have happened either. Under the Shah, IIRC, Iran engaged in commerce with Israel.

Actually, it’s not clear to me that American “blacks” are all that enthusiastic about immigration of people of similar coloration to their own who, not being descended from the former slaves of the American South, do not necessarily have their cultural values.

the catholic church is wrong in supporting open borders.

Any American constitutionalist would be tempted to suggest that the main thing wrong with open borders is the danger that immigrants might weaken constitutionalism here. Perfectly clear that is precisely what would suit the Democrat Party.

Says KKK Aligns with Republicans

Anyone can they say they align with anyone.

But I do NOT align with the KKK, whatever any nominal or actual KKK member might choose to say.

Sowell is, unfortunately, clearly showing his age now.

IMHO President Trump should award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, without delay.

And Florida’s efforts to make its public education respectful of the genius of the founders and of the constraints within which they labored would be advanced markedly if Florida started mandating in school the reading and discussion of Professor Sowell’s inspiring writings.

Ping.

PURPOSE AND URGENCY

In many of our most prestigious educational institutions, you can go literally from kindergarten to the Ph.D., without ever encountering an argument that differs fundamentally from whatever beliefs are being indoctrinated in these institutions. Such indoctrination has long been common in totalitarian dictatorships. But, in recent times, it has also become increasingly widespread in American educational, corporate and other institutions.

On many college campuses, it has become common for invited speakers, with viewpoints different from the viewpoints of the campus indoctrinators, to be prevented from speaking by mob disruptions and threats.

This website provides an alternative way that people can access information and viewpoints that differ from the prevailing indoctrination viewpoints. There are vast sources of factual information, analysis and viewpoints that allow people to decide for themselves what they want to believe.

The purpose of this website is to enable people who want to think for themselves to readily find many sources of information and analysis on many subjects— whether in the form of brief commentaries or hour-long interviews of knowledgeable people in electronic media. Written material is also available, ranging in size from essays to books written for either a general audience or for others seeking scholarly studies in great depth.

There are also whole college courses available on-line— some free— from Hillsdale College. Students can compare how the same subjects are taught in the college they are attending. So can parents who are paying for their education. More important, mobs cannot stop you from learning things they don't want you to hear.

You can readily sample what is available, just by clicking on whatever subjects you might be interested in, from the list on the home page. It is an easy way to escape those who want to indoctrinate— whether on campus, in the media or elsewhere. A free society requires free minds.

The ultimate purpose of this website is not to simply replace particular beliefs on particular subjects with different beliefs on those subjects. What is crucial, for young people especially, is to develop and exercise the ability to confront opposing beliefs and put those beliefs to tests of facts and logic.

Even if all the beliefs currently being indoctrinated were completely correct, that would be of little value to people graduating from college today— with more than half a century of life ahead of them, in which new issues are almost certain to arise. At that point, knowing the correct answers to the issues of the past would be of little use, without having developed and exercised the ability to confront new opposing beliefs and test them against facts and logic.

The history of a people or a society that succumbs to rhetoric and groupthink has often been a history of tragedies and even horrors.

​

Thomas Sowell, CEO
Facts Against Rhetoric
434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, California 94305

P.S.: For anyone ready to put themselves to the test, a small excerpt about income statistics, from a book of mine, is attached. Other people with opposite views on that subject are quoted— and cited, so that you can look up what they said, in their own words. Whether you end up agreeing with me or with them is beside the point. What matters is whether you can independently confront opposing viewpoints with systematic tests, rather than accept popular rhetoric or widely held assumptions. That is ultimately what this website is about.

Significant Ti used in the F-14, as well . . .

Who leaks it?

Who is so presumptuous that they actually think it will not leak?

HOORAY Elon!

Entrepreneurs in general lie awake nights evaluating ideas to produce goods and/or services which are worth more (to themselves and/or others) than it would cost to provide them.

Elon is astonishingly good at that. So much so that his AI-controlled anthropomorphic robot project bids fair to make human physical work anachronistic.

The original mission of Tesla was to speed the transition to sustainable energy. Nobody with the trace amount of skepticism could avoid thinking that that mission was a Democrat boondoggle. But the Biden (?) Administration made it excruciatingly clear that the synergy between unions and the Democrat Party transcended in importance to Democrats any real concern about pollution from energy. Elon saw the suppression of freedom of expression which was Biden Admin’s principal project and, by making Twitter honest, abandoned his connection with the CA Democrat party which was a principal support of the market for Tesla automobiles.

I long ago disclosed that TSLA was the largest single holding in my investment portfolio. As I told my broker, TSLA represents hope for future prosperity for my descendants. But it has to be said that CA is no longer the logical primary market for Tesla, precisely because Elon has, what Democrats consider, “gone rogue.” “Flyover country” represents a very large untapped opportunity for Tesla, for political and geographical reasons. Fuel prices are lower in “flyover country” than anywhere else, and gas stations are much more plentiful than standalone fast chargers. But home chargers are cheap and economical, and unless you do a lot of daily driving, fast chargers are strictly for trips rather than daily use - always assuming you have a garage . . .

But with self-driving AI, Tesla’s project is to make individual car ownership less dominant in personal transportation within population-dense areas. And also transcend the need for busses by making taxi rides cheap and convenient.

I recently purchased a Tesla Model Y, the largest-selling single model of any make of car worldwide. And as a late adopter of iPhones and similar tech, I have to say that I don’t naturally understand all the symbology in the software of the car. I was pushed into the purchase by my children, who I inferred thought that my assumption that the best time to buy a Tesla would always be “tomorrow” implied that in effect that meant “never.”

“Full self driving” was the primary selling point for me; if you want to travel by auto, and if you are my age, that can definitely be a restful way to do it. Once you get comfortable supervising it - tho the necessity to supervise will, I suspect, be transcended in this calendar year. Reportedly supervised self-driving is safer than manual driving already.

Take the SOB to court. He is not a dictator, but merely one who interprets the law.

There is not, and cannot be, a law which could be used to “take” this - or any other sitting judge - “to court.”

The only “court” to which a judge can be haled is Congress - in which the House can indict (“impeach”) by a simple majority, but it takes 2/3 of the Senate to convict.

This is annoying, but think what Schumer et al would have done to Justice Thomas et al if he had had any mechanism other than impeachment to employ against them.

These entry level judges’ rulings are mere pinpricks compared to the depredations of the Warren Supreme Court back in the day. Happily the present configuration of SCOTUS supports confidence of which I could only dream back in the 1960s.