Free Republic

In the late 1960s, the BBC produced this magisterial series. I learn something new from it every time I watch it. The entire series is on YouTube and well worth the twelve hours. They would never do something like this today.

I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. “Let us keep our silent sanctuaries,” Senancour wrote, “for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved.” Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal; but there are others too. We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find a breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations...

“It is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people who, biologically, are still men,” tennis legend Martina Navratilova recently proclaimed. “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.” Activists blasted Navratilova as “transphobic” and years after she identified as a lesbian the tennis star was booted from the board of a LBGT nonprofit.  Long before any of that happened, women who were biologically still men were competing against other women.  The Union...

PETER ACKERMAN'S QUEST TO TOPPLE TYRANNY Regime Change, Inc. by Franklin Foer   Post date 04.14.05 | Issue date 04.25.05 When the Rose Revolution began in the fall of 2003, there was little reason to hope for a happy ending. Twelve years earlier, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia had stepped from communism into civil war. The old Communist eminence Eduard Shevardnadze may have brought greater stability when he took over the government in 1992, but his corrupt rule also generated huge new pools of ill will among the populace. Some of this disgust manifested itself in small, peaceful street protests. But...

Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives. So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations. He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. However, their self-destruction is usually assisted. The Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many ills including overexpansion, climatic change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. But it was also brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Vandals in...

The character and legacy of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill is once again under assault by the radical left. Why are they going after him? What about other beloved “heroes” from history? Should our civilization even have founding heroes and myths?

From where Violeta Monterroso stood, in a migrant encampment near one of Tijuana’s main border crossings, she could almost see San Diego, the shimmering American city just beyond the frontier fence. She could see American cars as they slid down a highway and disappeared toward a ghostly skyline, and she could imagine what lay almost within reach. But that promised land was also infinitely distant. From the Mexican side of the border, mired in inches of mud that reeked of broken portable toilets, the entire U.S. might as well have been a mirage. When Monterroso and her husband Cándido Calderón...

The Long Now Foundation’s clock is a symbol for multi-generational thinking Jeff Bezos wants us all to be good ancestors. The Amazon supremo just tweeted that installation has begun on one of his pet projects of the last decade, the 10,000 Year Clock, also called the Clock of the Long Now. Designed to stay accurate for that huge time period, the giant clock will tick once a year, moving its century hand every 100 years, and send out a cuckoo once a millennia – just 10 times in its life. And it costs US$ 42 million. What is Bezos thinking?...

Premises: Civilized societies in general and democratic republics in particular require an informed citizenry to surviveAn informed citizenry requires a free, accurate, unbiased news media“Informed” is the opposite of “misinformed” and antithetical to “indoctrinated”           Conclusion:Coming soon: the 30 second argument regarding the state of the rule of law Posted from: MOTUS A.D.  

The ABC is being slammed, yet again. This time for their most recent episode of Q&A, where sexologist Nikki Goldstein suggested socially inept people could benefit from sex bots. “I feel like there are people who really do struggle to have these intimate connections,” Goldstein said. “I’ve interviewed people before that go to brothels, and they feel that the only way they can have this girlfriend experience is to be paying for it. They don’t necessarily want to be there.” “Now when I think of sex robots and where we’re going with A.I. technology, I feel like that’s the perfect...

A silver mask that had belonged to a Roman cavalryman of imperial times. It was found on the site of the battle of Teutoburg, fought in September 9 A.D. This year marks the 2000th anniversary of the battle that led to the annihilation of three Roman legions and changed forever the history of Europe. It was a tremendous shock for the Romans, who saw their mighty army destroyed by uncivilized barbarians. It was not yet the peak of the Roman Empire, but it was a first hint that something was deeply wrong with it. This text describes the presentation that...

Judge Robert Bork used to tell a prescient and darkly humorous story about watching Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings - etched in pre-hashtag history as the “Thomas–Hill hearings,” in homage to Anita Hill’s role as the Left’s heroic accuser. At the time, Thomas was a judge of the same eminent D.C. Circuit federal appeals court on which Bork had served. As he viewed Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” in horror, Bork recalled, a friend of his, the iconic Irving Kristol, approached and asked him what was happening. “The end of civilization,” the judge sadly quipped. “Of course it is,” Kristol deadpanned. “But...

Let me now begin with a striking passage from Niall Ferguson's recent book, Civilization. In it he tells of how the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was given the task of discovering how the West, having lagged behind China for centuries, eventually overtook it and established itself in a position of world pre-eminence. At first, said the scholar, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we concluded it was because you had the best political system. Then we realised it was your economic system. "But in the past 20 years, we have realised...

Every time I see another disparagement of American history and American white males, I am poked to compose a list of their accomplishments that put everyone on the left to shame. The left's contempt for America is total – suggesting that leftists see nothing redeeming in who we are. This list should be burned into our memory to counter the left's fifty-year slander of American history. The advances on this list are the result of a unique degree of freedom blended with the Founders' exceptional knowledge of history that created a trickle-down effect in moral influence that no one can...

Hermit who escaped civilization to live naked on a desert island is forced to return to Japan by authorities after 29 YEARS 82-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki 'escaped' civilisation in 1989 for life of solitude He stayed on rarely visited Sotobanari island — even fishermen don't go there But Japanese authorities moved him back to mainland after he was found 'weak' Nagasaki can't return to the island and lives 60km away in a house in the cityJapanese authorities denied a man the chance his wish to die a castaway on an island he called home for three decades. Masafumi Nagasaki was the...

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LquIQisaZFU TRANSCRIPT-- You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people. They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology. They have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt, oppressive and “patriarchal.” If you're a taxpayer—or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree—you're underwriting this gang of nihilists. You're supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective; that all sex differences are socially constructed; and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. They are the post-modernists, pushing “progressive”...

Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould had a piano partially converted to a harpsichord, piano hammers removed, replaced with posts & quills. The harsh sound was described as "2 Skeletons Copulating on a Corrugated Tin Roof". An apt word cartoon to symbolize the motivation of end-stage Western civilization. Doing It with anything, everything, all the time, is not sex, which makes babies, creates the new world, unites couples and weaves the seamless fabric of the next society after this one winds down its inglorious suicide. Catholic sex tracker Mary Eberstadt considers it a new religion. She doesn't call it, its proper...

A man raised by wolves says he feels disappointed with human life. Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja struggles with the coldness of the human world and wishes he could go back to living with the animals. Rodríguez was 19 when found in Spain's Sierra Morena mountain range, living among wolves, barefoot and half-naked - only using grunts for communication. The 72-year-old said his last happy memories are of his childhood with the animals. His mother died when he was three and his dad went to live with another woman. They took him to the mountains to replace a goatherd. While he was...

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Nations that abandon their Christian heritage wallow in self-loathing Beginning in the spring of 1915, the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic extermination of Armenian Christians who occupied territory west of present-day Turkey. Over 1.5 million men, women, and children were slaughtered during a two-year period, an event credited with coining the word genocide. To this day, the Turkish government rejects that label and has made it a crime (Article 301 of the penal code) to insult the nation by mentioning it. In 1937 the Japanese Imperial Army captured Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China. Over a...