Free Republic

Having been alternately bored and disgusted by the clichéd rhetoric and marshmallow stands of candidates vying for the nation’s highest office, I’ve decided to announce my candidacy for president of the United States. At the outset, a solemn pledge: I will not set myself forth as an agent of “change,” a Washington “outsider” or a businessman who can bring his management skills to bear on the federal behemoth. I will not speak of my vision. I won’t choke up while telling you that I just “want America to be a better place, and I’m doing it for the children.” I...

When news leaked out of the September 6th Israeli Air Force and commando raid on a Syrian Nuclear facility followed by revelations about the deaths of dozens of Iranians and Syrians in a Chemical warfare missile accident in July the world was jarred. Recently, it was revealed that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) had aided Syria in its chemical warfare programs. I noted in a recent interview with former US UN Ambassador John Bolton his early concerns about the Syrian Bio Warfare threat. Questions arose, specifically about the size, nature and danger of the Syrian bio-warfare military...

American journalist, essayist and satirist H L Mencken's dictum that every problem has an easy solution that is neat, plausible and wrong applies doubly to the Middle East. The George W Bush administration is divided over two neat, plausible and wrong solutions. The recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) marks the momentary ascent of the "realists", who believe in balance of power and deterrence, and a defeat for the "idealists", who want to export democracy to the region. Contrary to Cold War mythology, deterrence never worked, while pursuit of balance of power in history invariably led to the mutual annihilation of...

The West at the beginning of the 21st century suffers from a lack of cultural confidence, and is in some ways engaged in an internal struggle over the very meaning of Western civilization. This ideological “war within the West” has helped paved the way for the physical “war against the West” that is waged by Muslim Jihadists, who quite correctly view our creed of Multiculturalism and our acceptance of Muslim immigration as signs of weakness and that the West has lost contact with its civilizational roots. Perhaps we will need to resolve the war within the West before we can...

The California conference of entrepreneurs, scientists, celebs, and politicians highlights the environment, Rwanda, and war photos, among other topics In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9. "I'm scared," he told the audience, looking down at his 15-year-old daughter in the front row. "I don't think we're going to make it." Doerr issued a passionate call to action for everyone to make...

If the 1976 western The Last Hard Men has it right, we Occidentals metamorphosed into jellyfish sometime around the early twentieth century. Although this title is more movie marketing than historical statement, there may be something to it. After all, Robert Baden-Powell, a lieutenant general in the British Army, was motivated by the belief that western boys were becoming too soft when he originated the Boy Scouts in 1907. Regardless of the origin and rapidity of our transition from he-men to she-men, one thing is for certain: We have become a very soft people. When pondering this, I think about...

Many in the West are congratulating Pope Benedict XVI’s recent trip to Turkey, where in the Blue Mosque he prayed facing Mecca and made other gestures meant to salve the wounds raised by his references to Islam’s history of violence. Personally, I found the whole scene a depressing exhibit of the West’s terminal failure of nerve, one particularly distressing given this Pope’s documented understanding that what we call the “war on terror” is in fact the latest episode in the centuries-long struggle with a militant Islam.

Every so often I visit the family crypt of the Wittelsbacher dynasty in Munich's Frauenkirche, to make sure that the former kings of Bavaria are still there. They give every appearance of being dead, but deceased undesirables have a way of showing up at inconvenient moments - for example, former US secretary of state James Baker III. Like King Saul conjuring the spirit of the prophet Samuel, President George W Bush has conjured the undead of his father's administration, namely the Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group". Samuel's ghost told Saul in effect (I Kings 28), "You're toast," and the unfortunate president...

Agriculture employs half the world's population outside the advanced countries, where only one person in 40 still farms. In the United States, the ratio is one in 50. By prevailing standards of technology, 1.25 billion workers are redundant, and nearly 3 billion people (including their dependants) stand to be displaced. [1] The good news is that Chinese and Indian farmers comprise three-fifths of the world's total, and have good prospects of eventual integration into the world economy. But that leaves more than a billion people at risk, mainly in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of history.One of the very few...

Haifa, Israel — I am writing this in between ducking in and out of a bomb shelter as Haifa is bathed by the Katyusha rockets and other missiles that Ehud Barak has allowed to be fired at the city. Why Ehud Barak? Because, as Israeli prime minister in 2000, he ordered the cowardly unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from the security zone in southern Lebanon, which led to the positioning of thousands of Hezbollah rockets on Israel’s northern border. It occurs to me that now would be as good a time as any to sum up everything that has been...

PALO ALTO, Calif. — U.S. chip designers are still the best in the world, though how long they can hold that position as India and China continue to produce hordes of engineers in the next few years remains an open question, according to EDA CEOs participating in a Thursday (Feb. 2) panel discussion here. John Bourgoin, CEO of MIPS Technologies Inc., said U.S. chip designers are unquestionably still the best on the whole, though he added that the degree to which that is true varies by specific applications. But with China now graduating an estimated 700,000 engineers per year, Bourgoin...

Books discussed in this essay: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy by William Appleman Williams The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism by Joshua Muravchik Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq by Larry Diamond A Republic Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny by Patrick J. Buchanan The Sheriff: America's Defense of the New World Order by Colin S. Gray American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy by Andrew Bacevich America's Inadvertent Empire by William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise...

American-trained scientists like Han Jie are playing an important role in Beijing's efforts to boost China's accomplishments in both science and technology. Han, a 48-year-old nanotech expert who has worked at NASA and at IBM in the U.S., returned to his native China last year and is now the director of the new National Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology in Shanghai. A key part of China's effort to build a nanotech base that can be on the cutting edge of an emerging industry, the center is focusing on practical applications rather than pure research in nanoelectronics and nanobiotechnology.

Declaring that some of the words used by Orianna Fallaci in her book about Islam were "without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith," an Italian judge has ordered her to stand trial for anti-Islamic defamation. Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice has in effect accused all of America of anti-Islamic defamation, saying that a single mishandling by a single U.S. serviceman of a single copy of the Koran is a terrible offense that tarnishes the image of our country. Yet even as our Secretary of State condemns America for its bigotry, the Saudi government funds the massive...

Law enforcement has a term for the period after a crisis when things revert to norm -- condition white. Well, the American people are just about there, three-and-a-half years after the 9/11 attacks. But as the media obsess over Michael Jackson's favorite lubricants and Paula Abdul's dalliances with idol wannabes, al-Qaida is "very active" recruiting and planning to attack the United States again. "As months and years pass," Vice President Dick Cheney warns, "they are hoping that our country will grow complacent" and forget the horror of 9/11. And they're getting their wish, judging from the picayune issues that are...

As federal election commissioners struggle for last-minute consensus on proposed rules for applying campaign-finance law to the Internet, some civil-liberties groups and election-finance watchdogs optimistically predict limited regulation. At press time, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) still had not released its draft rules on public communication and generic campaign activity. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Thursday, and the FEC usually releases its proposals ahead of time. "It's a complicated document," an FEC source said. Typically, commissioners try to resolve their differences before hearings for such politically charged issues, the source added. At issue is to what extent...

LAS CHEPAS, Mexico -- An ancient blue school bus pulled up at Erlinda Juarez Martinez's house one recent afternoon, and 20 poor farmers wearing jeans and baseball caps hopped off. They had traveled for days to reach this village of crumbling adobe homes, separated from the United States by nothing but a few strands of barbed wire and a dirty desert breeze. Every hour, mud-caked buses and pickup trucks dropped off other new loads of travelers, their backpacks filled with tortillas and toilet paper, their heads filled with dreams of America. For them, Las Chepas was a locker room of...

From the beach at Santa Monica on a clear day in fall, with 3,000 miles of this country invisible at one's back, the Pacific horizon is a precisely etched line empty of event and set in alluring color. But beyond the rim lie two things now tightly interwoven: China, and the destiny of the United States.

Something remarkable has been happening to me in the past nineteen days. Wherever I go, no-one launches abuse at me. When I open my mouth to speak, I am received with civility and the occasional ’ Have a good one.’ I am not attacked or intimidated to the point of abject fear and loathing. Where have I been visiting for the past two and a half weeks? And where do I live? The answer lies in a conversation I had with my sister in a charming ice cream parlor in Philadelphia’s historic Suburban Station this afternoon. I looked up from...