Free Republic

It sounds like the University of Washington student Senate is struggling to make some progress. After turning down a memorial to a notorious World War II Congressional Medal of Honor awardee, alum "Pappy" Boyington, they are now considering a more general memorial. At least this time they are getting it all wrong in a different way. The real problem seems to be the students' "carefully taught" inclination to "massification" -- the tendency of liberal institutions, in the nocturnal twilight of Marxist collectivism, to insist on memorials to classes of people, not individuals. The kiddie Senate is now trying to figure...

I am an independent journalist who just got a good laugh over the latest "courageous stance" adopted by your student senate. Growing up in Oregon, I was always puzzled by why the lovely neighboring state of Washington seemed so heavily influenced by what I thought was a lunatic fringe. On the one hand William Gates and his baby boy Bill had produced two obscene monopolies, Boeing and Microsoft, and on the other your assorted elected officials seemed more at home in 1960s Communist Albania than the Wobblies "One Big Union" of sainted memory in the Northwest. Now I know what...

Google Inc. is offering a new tool that will automatically transfer information from one personal computer to another. Anyone wanting that convenience, however, must authorize the Internet search leader to store the material for up to 30 days. That compromise, sought as part of a free software upgrade released Thursday, might be more difficult to swallow now that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is demanding to know what kind of information people have been hunting through Google's search engine. Google is fighting the Justice Department's subpoena in a federal court battle that's focusing more attention on the...

Last November, the top floor at Ford in a speech called for government backing for the industry, which obviously of late seems to be in a bit of a financial pickle...Should government do that sort of thing?..Well, government already does that sort of thing, and with the exception of one area, shouldn't.....[more]

Last spring the press was all aflutter with news that big media companies were actually getting smaller. ''The media moguls built them up, and now they are breaking them apart,''...(snip) But never mind that. Connoisseurs of monopoly need to shift their attention to the Internet, where we're on the brink of a concentration of media control that a few years ago would have been unimaginable.

Despite acceding to Beijing's censorship requirements, which yielded Google access to the Chinese market, users of Google.cn in China found the site blocked at the government backbone server. Poor Google. Their stock has been hammered downward after missing market expectations on earnings, and they have received no end of grief from all quarters over their long-delayed entry into the Chinese market. Now even that has been problematic. Instead of the higher quality service Google expected to provide by having servers handle traffic for the censored Google.cn site, Internet users in the populous cities of Beijing and Shanghai found nothing but...

There are two simultaneous international uproars over the satiric cartoons that appeared in September in a small Danish newspaper, and they reflect the Wall between Western and Islamic values. In most of the West, there is reaction to the strong-arm tactics mounted by the Arab states against Denmark, and Muslim demands that the Western press be censored in line with Arab sensitivities. In Muslim countries, there is state inciting of outrage that Mohammed is dissed by cartoons. The Washington Post’s Jefferson Morley describes the two differing views: "Islam forbids any representation of the Prophet," the paper's [France Soir, before its...

The only thing that was surprising about Google's decision to self-censor its China-based service was that people were surprised by it. In the general media coverage, there were many gleeful references to the company's motto - boasted of in the preface to its IPO prospectus - of 'Don't Be Evil' (a phrase which, at the time, caused Wall Street investment bankers to lie down in darkened rooms). How could people who wore those admirable values on their sleeves kowtow to a corrupt, authoritarian regime which tortures dissenters and denies elementary human rights to its unfortunate subjects?

ast week America's second largest technology company, Google, announced a program that would assist communist China’s ongoing attempt to control the minds of its over 1.3 billion people. Simply put, Google will help make sure that when anyone in China looks up Tiananmen Square on the Chinese version Google is creating of its top rated search engine, that person will never see the famous picture of a student facing a Chinese Army tank. Google is perverting its own wonderful market leading search technology, that opens up the resources of the entire internet to everyone, into becoming the world’s most efficient...

It happened late in January on the FOX network's Hannity and Colmes program, with the pretty blonde, Estrich, in her abrasive voice subbing for the absent abrasive Colmes. The subject was eminent domain, a process by which a government "condemns" private property and takes it for "public" use. Until recently, I had never seen it used for any other purpose than to make way for a road or a public development of some kind. A park, a facility to keep equipment, like fire trucks, in a central location. A place to put a school. Those sorts of things. Then, the...

The first week of the semester is always hectic. This one was no exception. Of course I heard about the news that Google had kowtowed to the demands of the Chinese government and agreed to censor its search results. Hence, the graphic that I created above. Early Thursday morning finds me looking for a decent round-up on this matter. Since I can't find any, I guess I'll have to create one. Here goes. First, an exceprt from a source document: "Google to censor sensitive terms in China" by Eric Auchard and Doug Young of Reuters. Internet search giant Google Inc....

So Google is cooperating with the Chinese, and there's been a firestorm of criticism. The Times of London observes: “Until now, Chinese net users who were blocked from accessing a site knew that the information was there and was being kept from them by their own government. From now on it is Google which will be keeping data from them, in direct contradiction of its own declared mission ‘to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. “The reaction to Google's move has been highly critical. The watchdog organisation Reporters Without Borders called it ‘a black day...

It was supposed to eradicate grumpiness from Germany. Instead, the "Du Bist Deutschland" ad campaign flopped -- and the campaign's leaders became the global blogosphere's favorite whipping boy. Du Bist Deutschland was the top Technorati search in the world last week. Zoom Du Bist Deutschland was the top Technorati search in the world last week. The idea seemed like a good one: an ad campaign to buck up the German spirit and remind the depressive citizens of Europe's largest (but struggling) economy that things really aren't all that bad. Ad agencies, newspapers and a number of celebrities donated some €30...

Google's support centre has pulled an answer to the topical question "Does Google censor search results?" Since the answer clearly stated the company "does not censor results for any search term", and given the company's recent foray into the lucrative Chinese search engine market, it seems fair that the internet monolith would probably want to review that particular stance and relegate the offending item to cache.... Yup, democracy is not a word you want to be flashing about when you've just opened a big fat Yuan bank account. For the record, Google's justification for agreeing to censorship of search results...

Many of you may know Thomas Lipscomb as the intrepid reporter who in 2004 almost single-handedly, and without outside resources, did what the rest of the mainstream media were too lazy or biased to do: expose several of Presidential candidate John Kerry’s exaggerations and lies regarding his military record. Lipscomb and I have joked, ruefully, that any competent reporter could have done much the same, and more with the resources of mainstream journalism behind him or her. The information was pretty much right out there to be found or volunteered by those who knew. But, mainstream journalism turned its back...

<p>It was less than two years ago that Google Inc. co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thumbed their noses at the U.S. investment banking community with an auction-based IPO and their pledge not to cave in to the short-term demands of Wall Street.</p>

ast week Google announced its intention to resist a Department of Justice court action underway. DOJ wanted Google to allow a surveillance test of millions of its users’ search queries as part of its effort to enforce online pornography legislation passed by Congress to protect children. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN had already agreed to cooperate. But now, in an extraordinary development, Google has announced its decision to join the largest internet censorship effort in the world, being run by Communist China. Google will actively assist the Chinese government in barring access to thousands of web sites and search terms, in...

The stars run in their courses, in billions of galaxies, orbited by planets which are orbited by moons, and if they did not do so in ways which are predictable -- that is with many recurring similarities -- science would not exist. Predictability to some degree or other is the foundation of science. Those italics emphasize an extension of previous demands by science, which insisted on absolutes. Quantum physics took that down, and in the process angered Albert Einstein. But, still and all, even in the subatomic world one can safely play the odds. You cannot predict what any given...

Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial front-runner Ken Blackwell is “Jesse Jackson’s worst nightmare.” Ken Blackwell has just finished regaling a group of Ohio retailers with his vision of how to turn around the state’s struggling economy with a heavy dose of fiscal restraint and tax cuts. The crowd, accustomed to Republicans who tax and spend as furiously as Democrats, is rapt. But as Blackwell works the room afterward, on a warm fall afternoon in Columbus, one well-dressed woman stops him to outline her concerns. “I like your ideas on taxes,” she tells the former college football star, who at 6 foot 5...

The American Association of Retired Persons began as an organization dedicated to improving the lives of our elderly. These days it is being run by leftists. When you become a member, part of your dues go to support their political agenda. It was Winston Churchill who said (in other words) that liberalism is a natural state for the young, and conservatism a natural state for the same people, only a few decades farther down the road. This is a true statement, as all population group surveys prove. The reason for the evolution is time and experience. Life drives out fairy...