Free Republic

... A few years ago I was given the opportunity to witness via email to a graduate student residing in an ivory tower netherworld in southern California. He had responded to a column I had written about forgiveness and the Vietnam War for the Los Angeles Times. I failed miserably to dent that guy’s conception of reality, receiving only the hoots and derision of an outrageously arrogant God-basher. I admitted defeat with a promise to pray for his salvation, whereupon he went ballistic with offense. (Such a reaction has become the…uh…rage now among the unbelieving, as if they’ve been taking...

Science fiction has long been stereotyped as a hardware-obsessed, techno-jargon laden refuge for computer nerds and outcasts. Especially on television, which lacks the geek chic afforded by big-screen Hollywood budgets, the genre's reputation for hokey dialog and cardboard-and-wire effects have saturated it with a distinct odor of disrespectability. It is somewhat ironic, then, to see the Sci-Fi Channel, a network which often seems devoted to the pulpy and lowbrow, serve up Battlestar Galactica, a show about spaceships and killer robots that is also arguably the most potent, dramatically vibrant series on television. An unflinching examination of how the military, government,...

France said on Thursday it would be ready to launch a targeted nuclear strike against any state that carried out a terrorist attack on French soil.

Not since frightened mice sat around a wheel of camembert, arguing over who would bell the cat (which every little mouse agreed would be a very good thing to do), have so many mice occupied themselves with high statecraft. Everybody who's anybody is getting very cross with Iran. The Europeans, suddenly aware that a nuclear Iran might interrupt German reveries of sausages and raise the temperature of Islamic nightmares in France, are grumbling that somebody really ought to do something. Russia and China, who make a fine living selling exotic arms to famously bad-tempered regimes, agree with the United States...

TRINITY CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture of a revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God—a denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream. Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined country roads intersect McMansion subdivisions....Reconstruction—an obscure but increasingly potent theology whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return....Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive...

OVER THE last few years, due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many commentators have discerned the emergence of a new American empire. Some critics blame the Bush Administration, arguing that, but for Bush, there would be no crisis over American "unilateralism" or "hegemony." Others blame the end of the Cold War for "unleashing" America on the world. Actually, American pre-eminence extends much further back--to World War II or before. It really continues a British primacy that dated back at least to 1815. During the 20th century, Germany, Japan and Soviet Russia challenged the Anglo ascendancy, but they were...

There is a second rescue urgently needed in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and one that is long overdue: saving New Orleans school kids from their broken public-school system. The tragedy of the storm provides America with a golden opportunity, and the answer lies in the tens of billions of dollars of federal emergency spending. Let's create emergency school-choice vouchers for the children displaced by Katrina. The New Orleans public-school system has been failing its kids for years. Fully 73 of its more than 120 schools are considered to be "failing" according to the state's educational accountability standards. On...

Strong relations with (New) Delhi make sense for many reasons such as energy security and counterterrorism, but, perhaps, for no more important purpose today than balancing China's strategic rise in Asia. China's emergence onto the world stage as a major regional - and global - power will define this century's international political landscape. Fortunately, India and the U.S. are natural, even well suited, allies in managing and tempering China's ascendance.

In a well-known urban legend, college students simultaneously flush all the toilets on campus and break down the town's sewage system. While this story about overtaxing a sanitation system may be a myth, real-world Germans have learned what happens when you don't tax the system enough. It's a vivid example of the damage caused by the "birth dearth." The "birth dearth" is what demographers call plummeting birth rates in most of the industrialized world. Throughout Western Europe and East Asia, the birth rate is well below 2.1 births per woman; which is the minimum needed to maintain a stable population.

NORFOLK (Furious) Are you threatening me, Cromwell? CROMWELL My dear Norfolk … This isn’t Spain. — Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons, Act Two The Britain of July 2005 is not the Spain of March 2004, either. To say the least of it, there is no general election due in Britain this weekend. There is, in fact, none to be expected for at least three years. Nor did a weak, distracted, and incompetent prime minister immediately try to stick the blame for the London terrorist attacks on the IRA, as José María Aznar did with the Basque terrorists. ........

Judging from today's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn't accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of...

There appears to be one issue on which both Republicans and Democrats agree -- the high price of oil and the vulnerability of Middle-East supplies to terrorist attacks calls for a national effort to reduce oil imports. Concern over our dependence on foreign oil was expressed in the Bush Administration's 2001 National Energy Policy report. John Kerry talked about the need to reduce oil imports during last year's presidential campaign. More recently, a bipartisan group of former national-security officials urged President Bush to accelerate the adoption of energy policies designed to reduce U.S. consumption of foreign oil. The proponents of...

I have a theory that bad judicial opinions generally require a whole lot of “explanation” that consumes much more paper. Consider the number of pages in the following opinions. To be fair, a few include one or more dissenting opinions, but the cause of the paper consumption is still the majority. Dred Scott v. Sandford: Chief Justice Roger Taney wasted 175 pages explaining why “the [Negro] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Roe v. Wade: The Supreme Court used 50 pages to explain that a woman’s “right” to terminate the life of her unborn child...

A long-festering Sino-Japanese rivalry is becoming increasingly apparent. If tensions between the Asian giants continue to sky-rocket, Northeast Asian peace and stability may crumble, provoking serious consequences for American interests. Beijing has been stoking the fires of Chinese nationalism recently, precipitating one diplomatic crisis after another. In the process, it has called into question whether China remains committed to pursuing its self-proclaimed "peaceful rise." Last month, Beijing passed a militant "anti-secession" law directed at Taiwan. The action came just before the European Union was poised to lift its arms embargo against China. Beijing's move cooled E.U.-Chinese relations precipitously, leading Brussels...

Wisconsin is considering allowing the hunting of cats. Not cougars or mountain lions or tigers on the loose but putty-tats: Sylvester the cat. Morris the cat. Garfield. The aim is to prevent the mass-killing of birds by cats, mostly of the feral — i.e., wild — variety. In other words, some people want to give granny a shotgun so she can kill Sylvester before he gets Tweety Bird. I'm more of a dog guy, but I like cats. Nonetheless, a cat massacre makes more sense than you might think.

Revealed: Israel plans strike on Iranian nuclear plant Uzi Mahnaimi ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme. The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave “initial authorisation” for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert. Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets...

It's been a tough year for Democrats. They lost the presidential election, their favorite news outlets have been abjectly humiliated, they had to sit through a smashingly successful election in Iraq, and most painfully, they had to endure unwarranted attacks on a cartoon sponge. So I understand liberals are upset. Let go, let God ... Oops – I'm talking to liberals! Let go, let Spongebob ... Democrats tried working out their frustrations on blacks for a while, but someone – I can't remember who, but it probably wasn't Sen. Robert Byrd – must have finally told them it really wasn't...

While the media have been focusing on the flap at Harvard growing out of its president's statement about the reasons for the under-representation of women in the sciences, a much worse and more revealing scandal has unfolded at the University of Seattle, where a student mob prevented a military recruiter from meeting with those students who wanted to meet with him. At first, the university president said that the student rioters should apologize. But the storm this created forced the typical academic administrator's back-down under pressure. One of the student rioters explained that she didn't want anyone to be sent...

Muslim-bashing. That’s the accusation many of my fellow Muslims now hurl at the various news outlets for their news stories about a Freedom House investigation that found extremist Islamic literature in some leading American mosques. This name-calling is unfortunate. Since 1980, the Muslim world has experienced an enormous growth of religious fanaticism and extremism the likes of which Islam has not experienced in its 1,400 years. This movement continues to grow because of the spread of Saudi-created and funded Wahhabi Islam, a sect that used to number no more than one percent of all Muslims. But now because of money...

Maine State Rep. Brian Duprey introduced an unusual piece of legislation this month. It's a pro-life bill designed to tighten protections for the unborn. That's not the unusual part. That happens all the time. The interesting part is that Duprey's bill is designed to protect gay fetuses. Rep. Duprey told a local paper, The Magic City Morning Star, that he'd been listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio show when Limbaugh commented that if scientists ever located the genetic cause for homosexuality — the so-called "gay gene" — then homosexuals would become pro-life "overnight." "Most people would agree that to kill someone...