Free Republic

When Melody Hensley first met Lawrence Krauss, she was a 29-year-old makeup artist at a department store, and he was one of her intellectual idols. She ran an atheist website in her spare time and had just started volunteering for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a nonprofit group committed to promoting science and reason above faith. She was hoping to build a career in the burgeoning “skeptics” movement, and Krauss was one of its brightest luminaries. At a CFI event in November 2006, Krauss asked Hensley for her card, and later, as she was leaving, asked her if she was...

The Obama administration's policies are bad. Bad in the sense that the policies are morally corrupting. They take money and control away from people and give them to government bureaucrats, who then decide what should be done. The policies encourage people to be less responsible personally and to rely more on the government. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that "socialism itself -- in all its incarnations, wherever and however it was applied -- was morally corrupting," Claire Berlinski wrote in "There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters" (Basic Books, 2008). "Socialism turned good citizens into bad...

PARISLast Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) -- a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees -- and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers -- both Arab immigrants -- became more and more incensed."They're idiots," said the...

The free-market system, it is now fashionable to say, is to blame for the current financial crisis. By way of rejoinder, a growing cohort of commentators have argued that the crisis should be understood not as a failure of free-market economic theory but as its vindication. They argue that the U.S. government perverted the wisdom of the market by encouraging banks to make loans no rational actor would make -- and that the players took the risks they did because they held a reasonable expectation of a government bailout should things get hairy. The problem, in this view, is not...

..."They charged that many of the new cabin crew, for example, were graduates of religious Imam Hatip schools rather than of technical universities - Imam Hatip schools were, the pilots said, classified as 'trade schools' and the Imam Hatip alumni were therefore 'camouflaged' as trade school graduates. This is no trivial claim, if true: the main responsibility of cabin crew is not to serve meals, but to handle in-flight emergencies or evacuations"

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history. [snip] For instance, the...

theism, as theologian Alister McGrath understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and political history and may be mapped to particular historic events — the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint....

This could well be the most outrageous insult yet to the free market economy: In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina. Do I need to explain how many kinds of wrong this is? Not only is the federal government saying to Boeing that it gets to decide where it...

Conservatives of a fatalistic bent -- their numbers this month have swollen -- like to depress themselves with the maxim that government programs never perish. Statism's relentless march can be checked at times but rarely beaten back. Just look, they say, at those New Deal relics known as farm programs. And then they see Time magazine's cover this week -- Barack Obama pictured as FDR, with the cover line "The New New Deal" -- and they head for the window ledge. [snip] But the greatest refutation of their dour outlook can be expressed in a single name: Margaret Thatcher. When...

Andrew, ever since I ran into a spot of bother in Canada, I’ve found myself giving speeches in defense of freedom of expression in Toronto, London, Copenhagen, etc. I did not think it would be necessary quite so soon to take the same stand in the land of the First Amendment against craven squishes of the political class willing to trade core liberties for a quiet life. I have no expectations of Harry Reid or the New York Times, but I have nothing but total contempt for the wretched buffoon Graham. A mob of deranged ululating blood-lusting head-hackers slaughter Norwegian...

Margaret Thatcher is on the cover of Newsweek, or — the next best thing — Meryl Streep is on the cover as the former British prime minister in a new biopic. Thatcher is a rich theme. If the types who expound on such things didn’t so hate her politics, she’d launch a thousand dissertations on those inexhaustible academic themes of class and gender. As the daughter of a grocer, she was looked down upon as the personification of, in the words of one highfalutin critic, “the worst of the lower-middle-class.” As a woman in a man’s world, she was venomously...

No comedy show, no matter how clever or winning, is going to eradicate the suspicion that many Americans have of Muslims. This is because Americans are concerned about Islam not because of the work of greasy Islamophobes, but because of Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and...

Deep ignorance: Most Turks know nothing about what really happened on the "Mavi Marmara" In May, a ship full of civilians — but not full of humanitarian aid — sailed from Turkey to join the Free Gaza flotilla. Having warned the Mavi Marmara that it would not be allowed to breach the blockade, Israeli commandos raided the ship. In the clash, nine Turks were killed. I've lived in Istanbul for five years and I've spoken to hundreds of Turks about these events. A Turkish documentary filmmaker and I have filmed some of these conversations. Something will immediately strike the...

In an increasingly urbanized world, earthquakes threaten unprepared cities with mass destruction.Seismic risk mitigation is the greatest urban policy challenge that the world confronts today. If you consider that too strong a claim, try to imagine another way in which bad urban policy could kill a million people in 30 seconds. Yet the politics of earthquakes are rarely discussed, and when discussed, widely misunderstood. Take the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, which released 600 million times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The ensuing partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactor prompted international hysteria about nuclear power, but few...

Since he can’t quite put his finger on what makes him “nervous” about Governor Palin. He may as well double-down upon what is actually cowardice, by just stealing left-wing talking points in an utterly lazy fashion. I know Governor Palin has given a hundred interviews since the 2008 Presidential election but hey, let’s talk about that Katie Couric hit-piece as though it wasn’t a highly edited, highly contentious “interview.” Give me a break. One one hand, this podcast was composed of some talking heads from the establishment giving some minimal ‘props‘ to the most active political force on the Conservative...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Claire Berlinski , the author of the new book Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too. Photo credit: David Gross FP: Dr. Berlinski , welcome to Frontpage Interview. Berlinski : It’s a pleasure. Please call me Claire. FP: Okay Claire. So introduce us briefly to the menace in Europe. Berlinksi: In brief: Europeans are lazy, unwilling to fight for anything and willing to surrender to anyone; they are fascinated by decadence; they favor the bureaucracy over the corporation; they are unable to assimilate their immigrants; they no longer have children; they...

After five days of rubber bullets (not commonly reported in the MSM), tear gas and water cannon aimed at them at least some of the demonstrators are getting an official apology from Turkey's government. The Deputy Prime Minister of the Islamic regieme Bulent Arinc says police overreacted when they fired tear gas at the environmentalist protestors in Istanbul last Friday. Sky News quotes Arinc as saying "The excessive violence that was used in the first instance against those who were behaving with respect to the environment is wrong and unfair. I apologise to those citizens....But I don't think we owe...

Here's an eyewitness diary of the events in Turkey. My friends there have given me some information, but this is a more comprehensive view than anything I've received directly. I don't know the author, but I know the area she writes of, and it sounds like she knows what she's talking about.

Here's more from Ms. Berlinski on the Turkish protests. Looks like Obama botched asnother one.

Book Description Old Europe’s new crisis. Europe, the charming continent of windmills and gondolas. But lately, Europe has become the continent of endless strikes and demonstrations, bombs on the trains and subways, radical Islamic cells in every city, and ghettos so hopeless and violent even the police won’t enter them. In Spain, a terrorist attack prompts instant capitulation to the terrorists’ demands. In France, the suburbs go up in flames every night. In Holland, politicians and artists are murdered for speaking frankly about Islamic immigration.