Free Republic

Though always fatal, mad cow disease is a pussycat when compared with other maladies such as cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis and AIDS, to mention just a few. The two most feared cancers – breast and prostate cancer – kill 43,000 women and 31,000 men, respectively, every year. In contrast, 143 people have died in Great Britain from mad cow disease over the past few years. As a reaction to the panic caused by mad cow disease in Great Britain and the European continent, control measures were put into effect, including the slaughter of millions of cattle. The disease, which is...

Last September in Shanghai I was sipping tea at the Grand Hyatt with Steve Forbes. In walked George Gilder, hyperkinetic from a 12-hour flight and too much coffee. George was waving a newspaper article that predicted an average of 6% U.S. GDP growth over the next two quarters. In September such a prediction was like saying the Detroit Tigers would win the American League pennant and the Cincinnati Bengals were poised to win the Super Bowl. Nevertheless, we were obligated to take the article seriously, because its author was Brian Wesbury, an economist with Chicago's Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson,...

<p>LOS ANGELES -- All that was lacking to complete the awfulness of California's recall was supplied when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shoved its oar in.</p> <p>Until judicial vanity intruded, there were three authors of California's suffering -- the governor, the Legislature and the public that elected both and now thinks of itself, in the modern American manner, as a blameless victim. The public has repeatedly used the initiative process to mandate spending that prevents sane budgeting. And the public has used this recall to throw a tantrum about what it, the public, has wrought.</p>

The Design and Manufacturing Show was held in Chicago on March 5, 2003. Bob Dwyer is a manufacturing representative with 19 years of experience and was one of the participants. His observations should make us reflect on the fundamental crisis regarding what has gone wrong with the American economy, its corporate culture, job creation and economic growth, and the heavy hand of government interference in the name of political correctness. His concerns also illustrate the deception and disconnection of the transnational establishment and corporate sector from our core, our foundation, our value as a nation-state and certainly the disconnect from...

If Newton saw today's astronomical evidence, would he come up with a different law of gravity? A growing number of people think so, says Marcus Chown There's something wrong with our understanding of spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way. The stars in their outer parts are being whirled around far too fast. Like children on a speeded-up roundabout, they should be flung into intergalactic space. To explain why this does not happen, astronomers have been forced to propose that the visible stars and nebulae are supplemented by at least 10 times more invisible stuff. The gravity of this...

<p>More than 40 years ago, the film "Inherit the Wind" presented the controversy over the teaching of evolution as a battle between stick-figure fundamentalists who defend a literal reading of Genesis and saintly scientists who simply want to teach the facts of biology. Ever since, journalists have tended to depict almost any battle over evolution in the schools as if it were a replay of "Inherit the Wind"--even if it's not.</p>

The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering Barry Commoner is senior scientist at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, City University of New York, where he directs the Critical Genetics Project. Readers can obtain a list of references used as sources for this article by sending a request to cbns@cbns.qc.edu. Biology once was regarded as a languid, largely descriptive discipline, a passive science that was content, for much of its history, merely to observe the natural world rather than change it. No longer. Today biology, armed with the power of genetics, has replaced physics as the...

The Spectator Interview Author of Mirror Worlds, which anticipated the World Wide Web, founder of Mirror Worlds corporation, which may well reshape it, David Gelernter is a demiurge-a creator of worlds, not merely their reflector. A computer scientist, he has wrought new languages (Linda), realms (tuple-space) and a radical new challenge to the dictatorship of the desktop: the lifestream. Marshalling the immense advances of computer storage, his Scopeware enables its users swiftly and elegantly to move between past, present and future-summoning all the files, e-mails, documents, and images of a past epoch or the plans and promises of a future ...

Darwin and the Descent of Morality by Benjamin Wiker Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 117 (November 2001): 10-13. An important part of the current controversy over the theoretical status of evolutionary theory concerns its moral implications. Does evolutionary theory undermine traditional morality, or does it support it? Does it suggest that infanticide is natural (as Steven Pinker asserts) or is it a bulwark against liberal relativism (as Francis Fukuyama argues)? Does it rest on a universe devoid of good and evil (as Richard Dawkins has bluntly stated) or can it be used to provide a new foundation for natural law ...

An earlier thread entitled "The Human Genome - A Map To Nowhere" reproduced an article by Tom Bethell in the April 2001 American Spectator which I characterized as anti-Evolution, much to the dismay, nominal puzzlement and consternation of the Evolutionist Crowd, and in response to that characterization, among other motivations, some of their posts read much Mr. Langhorst's letter (June 2001 Spectator), which appears below. (Now THAT is a stream- of-consciousness sentence if I've ever written one.) Tom Bethell, of course, has the last word since he writes for the magazine, and it's a great last word which I thought ...

Government: How big is too big? By Jane Chastain © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com With the Democrat takeover of the Senate, perhaps – just perhaps – we will have an open discussion on the size of our government. This year, we will reach a new milestone: For the first time in our history, total U.S. government spending will go over the $3 trillion dollar mark. Philosophically, Democrats think government should be larger; Republicans think it should be smaller. But how big is too big? In a pre-release copy of a study for the Institute for Policy Innovation in Lewisville, Texas, economist Stephen Moore says ...

A Map to Nowhere The genome isn't a code and we can't read it By Tom Bethell The principal actors had appeared in the White House last June -- Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics. Now they were back with a supporting cast and a more detailed analysis, in the Capital Hilton Hotel, with the TV lights glinting off the ballroom chandeliers, 250 journalists packed into the hot room, and James Watson of DNA fame on hand to take a bow. There would be one more blaze of publicity about ...

© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Mainstream Americans have been losing the values battle for many years. Presidential candidates who run on resolutely moral platforms earn only single digits in polls, and often the best we can hope for are "establishment Republicans," whose commitment to values rarely seems to go much beyond their speeches. Like other Americans, I watched as one scandal after another broke about Bill Clinton over the past eight years. Each time, I said to myself, "This one will be his downfall." But the fall never came -- even though any one of those scandals would have ruined a president 40 ...

by James Perloff © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Mainstream Americans have been losing the values battle for many years. Presidential candidates who run on resolutely moral platforms earn only single digits in polls, and often the best we can hope for are "establishment Republicans," whose commitment to values rarely seems to go much beyond their speeches. Like other Americans, I watched as one scandal after another broke about Bill Clinton over the past eight years. Each time, I said to myself, "This one will be his downfall." But the fall never came -- even though any one of those scandals would have ruined ...

My Life After Darwin by John R Morgan, MD Like most people, I never really bought the idea that life just spontaneously developed out of nowhere, and then humans came from fish or whatever. It just didn’t make sense. A man named William Dembski with a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois has developed one good explanation why I always felt this way. Let’s say that you go to see the carving of Confederate heroes on Stone Mountain right outside of Atlanta. Even though you didn’t actually see ...

Against Sociobiology Tom Bethell Copyright (c) 2001 First Things 109 (January 2001): 18-24. To future generations, the Sociobiology Wars may come as something of a puzzle. The shared beliefs of the disputants were so much more impressive than their disagreements that historians may wonder what the fuss was about. Perhaps the controversy will come to resemble the Wars of the Roses, all of whose contestants believed in the divine right of kings. Their differing opinions as to succession seem rather trivial by comparison. In the case of sociobiology, all the principal actors accept the premise of materialism, sometimes called naturalism. ...

I believe that we are in the wilderness, that we are in the wilderness because of too many lies told and too many lies believed, and that, if left unchecked, this habit of untruth will destroy us. I was born in 1947, and in my lifetime have seen three American political crises. Of these, two have come in the last two years. Whereas European political crises are almost always about power, American political crises are almost always about truth, which is why Europeans almost always mis-translate and misapprehend us. It is also why Winston Churchill, wholly British and half ...

As scientists delve deeper into the mysteries of nature, they are being confronted by evidence that demands a supernatural Creator. ‘‘If I should seek to prove God or to argue about God you would rightly sweep up my words and deposit them in the wastebasket," wrote the great poet and essayist E. Merrill Root. Root was no atheist, nor was he an agnostic. He was a believer. But like Frederick Copleston said of St. Augustine in his A History of Philosophy, "he was not so much concerned to prove to the atheist that God exists...," as he was concerned about ...

1.      How would you describe the main purpose of The Wedge of Truth in comparison to your other books? Each of my books builds upon the logic that was erected in my previous ones.  My prior books argued that the real discoveries of science – as opposed to the materialist philosophy that has been imposed upon science - point straight towards the reality of intelligent causes in biology.  When you realize that fact, then you are ready to recognize that there are two definitions of "science" in our culture.  One definition says that scientists follow the evidence regardless of the ...