Free Republic

Please take a moment to register who you think will win the presidency. This is a statistical study of how good people are at predicting presidential races. The results will be posted after the election. This is a self-funded study, so please be honest, please vote just once. This survey takes about one minute to complete and is completely anonymous. CLICK LINK ABOVE TO BEGIN The study closes midnight 22 September 2012. Help spread this study. Click on the Twitter or Facebook links below, or email the study to one of your friends. Post is on internet forums. We want...

A list of (non-fiction) books concerning a man’s knowledge, and the limits of his certainty, about his relations to other men. The Federalist Papers by Publius, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and others similar, which are all required reading, are not included here because their contexts are more directly political or economical. These works all share a common epistemology, which will be immediately obvious from the quotes I selected. From them you may deduce what to be a conservative means: one who holds certain truths to be self-evident but who is...

The man who took the knife and slit the throat of the woman whose money and body he wanted could not help himself. But the judge who sentenced that man to jail for life sure knew what he was doing. The judge had freedom, he could make a choice. He should have considered that the murderer had none. The murder’s brain made the murderer do what the murderer did (the personal pronoun is out of place here). The judge’s brain was under no constraints. The judge could have let the murder go. And, no, it’s not that mysterious entity Society...

Mr Obama, in his radio address of today (which your intrepid reporter caught a portion of) said, “Today, women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a huge discrepancy.” He called this “troubling.” He also told us that March is women’s month. Oops: it’s National Women’s Month. (Men don’t get a month.) Mr Obama’s statistics are faulty. I have done the numbers myself and can report that, within a job and age-matched with men, women not only earn as much as men, but sometimes more (on average). Particularly, women entering the workforce...

“Sir? Please step over here. You need to be x-rayed.” “What? Get outta my way. Who are you?” said the man. “Sir, please step over to the machine. You have been selected for random scanning,” said the TSA agent. The man did not understand or chose not to and began to walk on. Two other armed agents moved to block the man’s way. “Are we going to have trouble with you, sir? You have been selected for random scanning,” repeated the agent. “What are you talking about? I’m just walking down the sidewalk in front of my apartment. We’re nowhere...

If you’re an environmentalist, particularly a San Francisco version of that creature (one of the most virulent of the breed), it must have come as quite a shock for you to learn that your muck stinks just as bad as a Rush Limbaugh fan’s output. The stench from the sewers in that earth-loving city has become overwhelming, “especially during the dry summer months.” Why? The low-flow toilets insisted upon (by force of law) by enlightened legislators are not saving the San Francisco environment as the science said they would. According to SF Gate, the near water-free commodes have forced city...

It must be a joke. The punchline is surely coming. Ha, ha! Hoarding tomato seeds! Bars on his basement windows! Hilarious! This guy really nails nuttiness. He’ll shame a few zealots, boy. But…wait a minute…I’m awfully close to the the end. When is this guy going to toss in the zinger, the gotcha!, the line which says it’s all a spoof? It never came! He was serious! Thus was my shock when I finished Mike Tidwell’s “A climate-change activist prepares for the worst” in the Washington Post. What best explains his buying “a new set of deadbolt locks on all...

In Iowa, girls can now wrestle with boys—and not just in cars in the parking lot at the Friday night dance. But in the rings and on the mats. The news reports that one young man refused to wrestle with his female opponent in the State final. He did so because he was a gentleman of the Old School. We commend him. But his forfeit allowed the girl to “win,” thus beginning an accumulation of statistics showing equality between girls and boys. Of course, at the distant end of the 1970s at good old St. Mary’s High where yours truly...

In an interview with Bill O'Reilly, President O'bama said What I hear you saying is that the notion that us saying to people that don't have health insurance, don't make me pay for your health insurance, if you get sick, you have a responsibility to make sure you have coverage. There's nothing socialist about that. That's saying to Americans, we're going each of us be responsible for our own health care. The sentiments behind these words are not consonant. If each citizen is responsible for his own health care, then each citizen should pay should he become ill or not...

The party that ever has “Rights!” on its lips, the party with the mania about diversity, the party that is most anxious that religious fundamentalists will take over and impose their puritanical wills on the rest of us, the party whose members remind us constantly of the dangers of the government meddling in our personal lives has, in a fit holy self righteousness, taken away yet another right, decreased diversity, imposed its puritanical will on the rest of us, and has used the law to meddle in our personal lives once more. New York City Council Democrats have voted to...

Scene: Night Court, Manhattan, a date in the near future. Players: Prosecutor, Judge, and Gandler, the defendant. Judge: Mr Prosecutor. Prosecutor: Your honor, case 12A. The defendant, Mr Helmut Gandler, was caught giving possible offense earlier this evening, a clear violation of the Totenberg Act. Judge: Details? And since it’s almost that time, perhaps we can cut these short. Unless we’re expecting difficulties? Prosecutor: None that I foresee, your honor. Mr Gandler was coming out of Macy’s with an armload of parcels, and a gentleman—do we have his name? No?—at any rate, this unnamed gentleman opened the door for Mr...

Diversity: The Dumbest Idea Ever? Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part VSorry for the mass post, but I felt this idea important enough, and put in a new way, that all here would be interested. Please read all five parts and please comment on the last. Excerpt follows (limited to 300 words). How about "sexual orientation"? Should our list of diverse behaviors include necrophiliacs and pedophiles? Say no and once more you invoke arbitrary rules. Say no and you admit that diversity is not desirable. Say no and you deny that "human qualities that are different from...

The guy walked up to me and said—well, what he said started with a word not often seen in print. He ended his two-word phrase with a “you”. Far from being insulted, I was instead so overcome by his artistic brilliance, by the sheer eloquence of his remark, that I organized an ad hoc street committee so that we could vote this gentleman a major award. The man, whose named I discovered to be Cee Lo Green, gracefully accepted our honorarium but said he thought it was misplaced. He explained that he wasn’t speaking to me, but that I happened...

The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists by Roy W. Spencer This book was given to me for review by the publisher. Clouds The trick Spencer says Mother Nature played on the world’s top climate scientists was to pull the cotton over their eyes. Cotton, I say, as in clouds. Spencer says other climatologists don’t understand clouds the way he does. Everybody has noticed that, at times, there have been fewer clouds hanging about. Spencer’s special understanding impels him to claim that fewer clouds cause the higher temperatures we have also seen. The...

Here’s a bit of trivia that will help you win bar bets. When is the only time of year in which you can see women acting like idiots on television commercials? “Black Friday” sales announcements. The remainder of the year is given over to men to play clueless fools. But for a spare week before this great national holiday, which now surpasses in festive spirit the day of feasting and family which used to be Thanksgiving, women are portrayed as rabid, raving lunatics whose only goal in life, whose very purpose for being, is to march bleary eyed to our...

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake. When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon---they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it! Mark Twain made that first quip at a public lecture more than a century ago, a time in which bureaucracy was still a benign...

When TSA chief John "Grab, Grip, & Grope" Pistole was asked how he was able to calculate that massaging people's pertinents made air travel immune from terrorist attack, how, that is, he was able to muster the insight necessary to discern that at least three, and not less than three, fingers must trace the contours of each man's two balls and a strike and each woman's home run before he or she was safe to fly, he replied that he relied on "Experts." This answer was accepted. But nobody thought to ask who these experts were or how they gained...

Zzzzaapp! Some angry photons have just been blasted off toward your body, scouting for “contraband.” In the process of the search, these energetic massless particles will kick the crap out of some of your body’s cells, disrupting them in their duties. Some of these cells will be so desolated by the experience that they will lose their lust for life and will die. Others might be so incensed that they will turn rogue (i.e. cancerous). But it’s OK, because Janet “I’m Not A Scientist” Napolitano has said it’s OK. Your submitting yourself to an invasive X-ray probe is a matter...

s far as I can discover, Janet “There’s Nothing To See Here” Napolitano’s newly created policy of feeling up and peeking under the skirts of random airline passengers has not resulted in the apprehension of a single terrorist. Although Napolitano’s brainstorm—the Spanish tormenta en el cerebro is more evocative—gave us longer delays, missed flights, frustration, embarrassment, and ill will, and it hasn’t caught even one mad bomber, it has provided one positive benefit: a career path for perverts. The only thing this embattled minority had going for them previously was women’s prison guard. Now they can find ready employment at...

What’s better: (A) voluntarily reducing your salt intake, or (B) having the government mandate that you do so? Naturally, if you don’t opt for A, you get B, which we can call the Bloomberg option. Why reduce salt? Well, there’s a chance—a small one, but non-zero—of exacerbating your high blood pressure, assuming you have that condition, and because of the possibility of exacerbation, you might live a slightly shorter life. Sure, this possibly shorter life you lead will be full of flavor, and the time you spend here will be more savory, but no citizen should choose quality over quantity...