Free Republic

Lane Funkhouser, his wife Susan, and their two children (whom we will call James and Kat) were all very sick. They went to their family doctor, who was unable to diagnose the problem. Because the children were not getting better, their attendance at public school became an issue. So Lane and Susan decided that they would homeschool James and Kat while they searched for a diagnosis and treatment. School officials filed truancy charges against the family, which were quickly dismissed. But, as a result of these charges, the family became embroiled with a social worker named Michael Austin, an investigator...

People in places such as Ferguson, Mo., often talk about the police as though they were an occupying force, and there is, in Ferguson and in many other places, a strong racial component. During my time in Philadelphia, the city had a black mayor, a black police commissioner, and a heavily black police force, and the city’s worst crime was concentrated in two black neighborhoods. Police innovations such as sending extra patrols to schools at dismissal time were criticized by community leaders who complained that the police were “targeting” black neighborhoods. Which, of course, they were: That’s where the crime...

Consider the very first interactions: A cop and young black male interact on the street, and both give the other a bit of attitude. The officer gives some attitude because he's tired of getting attitude from other young men, and the young man gives some attitude because he's tired of getting attitude from other cops. Now, who's at fault? This, as simple as it sounds, is how it starts. Once the infection begins, it grows quickly. If you want to say the cop's at fault because he's the adult with training, you are right. And if you want to say...

The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown is an awful tragedy that continues to send shockwaves through the community of Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation. If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off. But, I wouldn’t have expected to be shot. The outrage in Ferguson is understandable—though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting. There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military...

When American Ebola patient Dr. Kent Brantly arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, Aug. 2, he had reportedly already had one course of treatment with an experimental drug called ZMAPP made with genetically engineered tobacco. Although it has only been tested previously in animals, the FDA is rumored to have authorized emergency approval for the drug for Brantly and another American who contracted the virus doing medical aid work in Liberia during the ongoing West African Ebola outbreak. MAPP is produced by a small San Diego-based biotech company. The scientists use a common tobacco bacteria, genetically engineered with different components of the...

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week's Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared - on social media! - and that's all that matters, isn't it?

If someone shoots up a grade school or a movie theatre, the cable airwaves fill with experts demanding gun control. But every day Americans are shot for no reason other than that armed bureaucrats "don't have time for this". Any chance of a little more gun control there? As I always say in these circumstances, if you need to shoot a schizophrenic, a teenage partygoer, a lame septuagenarian, a confused hobo, etc, etc, etc, you're doing it wrong. "The book" is the problem. "The book" is what needs to change. Anyone who goes into law enforcement assumes the risk that...

People keep asking me whom I favor for the 2016 Republican nomination. I politely demur — and not just because it's almost three years till Election Day, and at this stage in the 2008 cycle I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Barack Obama. As a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than 37 people, I don't have to seek out presidential candidates; they're there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. I've seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar...

I've been told by various experts in America's "justice" system that I shouldn't risk incurring the wrath of judges by talking about them. We'll see how that pans out. But I'm heartened by the stirring example of Lou Pelletier, a Connecticut father who took his sick daughter to hospital in Boston only to have her kidnapped by the tinpot tyrants of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. That was a year ago. Since then he has been under a "gag order" imposed by Suffolk County judge Joseph Johnston. Initially, Mr Pelletier abided by the terms of the gag order,...

BOISE, Idaho — Idaho wildlife officials have killed 23 wolves in northern Idaho in an effort to boost the number of elk in the region. The Idaho Fish and Game announced Friday afternoon that the animals were killed by USDA Wildlife Service agents using a helicopter in the Lolo elk zone near the Montana border. It's the sixth time the agency has taken action to kill wolves in the Lolo zone in the past four years, bringing the total number of wolves killed there to 48. The efforts are part of the state's predator management plan, which calls for killing...

n 2002 Richard Warman appointed himself Canada's Hatefinder General and went around the Internet hunting down so-called haters and turning them in for lucrative tax-free sums amounting to many thousands of dollars. Hatefinder Warman and his enablers at the Commission abused the extremely narrow constitutional approval given to Section 13 by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision and instead turned it into a personal inquisition for himself and his pals. Parliament took my advice and abolished Section 13. Now it's déjà vu all over again: Michael Mann turns out to be the Richard Warman of climate science, a man...

Mann and his lawyers doctored a quote and put their own version of it in direct quotation marks. That's bad enough. But they did it for a specific reason. Because the original makes clear that Sir Muir's findings apply only to the "CRU scientists" - that's to say, employees of the University of East Anglia, who are the only people the Russell panel was charged with investigating, and were therefore the only people it was in a position to exonerate. So, as evidence of Michael Mann's "exoneration", the best his lawyers can come up with is a fake quote from...

Well, I can't speak for Dr Mann or my co-defendants, but I want to put it in front of a jury - in part because I loathe "settling" and regard it as a malign and corrupting influence on the American "justice" system. Nobody's guilty or innocent any more, are they? It's all about the settling. But the pressure to "settle" means that, for a litigious goon like Dr Mann, simply launching suits relieves him of the need to win them. Nuts to that. He wanted this case, so he can have it and take it to a jury.

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

Thank you also to all those who've made suggestions with respect to both the science and the law. The good advice I'm keeping close to my chest, the not-so-good ones we might publish here to throw Dr Mann's Big Tobacco lawyers off the scent. Speaking of the upcoming trial, Denyse O'Leary was a key part of the Internet pushback against Canada's squalid "human rights" commissions five years ago, and she has noted the banner above. Denyse has a post today about the Scopes Monkey Trial comparison, and writes: The choice of symbolism is interesting. The only thing one can be...

On this week's appearance on "The Hugh Hewitt Show", Hugh wanted to discuss the pitiful state of the Steyn-for-Senate campaign in New Hampshire. It was a real chest-baring session:

John Kerry played the same old card he always plays - Vietnam: I have to tell you, my friend, I've been, quote, attacked before - by people using real bullets, not words. This would be a pretty funny line from the characteristically tin-eared Kerry applied to almost anyone from the Belgian Deputy Tourism Minister on up. But it's especially hilarious directed at Mr Bennett, who's a veteran of two of Israel's toughest special-forces units and could undoubtedly kill the Secretary of State with his bare hands were he minded so to do.

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

Speaking of "befuddled effete new-male eunuchs", "Climate Science Is For Sissies Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Well, okay, not quite. The actual headline is "Climate Science Is For Second-Raters Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Our old pal James Delingpole is referring to MIT prof Richard Lindzen's testimony to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster this week. This exchange with the ghastly, condescending Tim Yeo was especially choice:

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...