Free Republic

Around noon of February 1, 1968, in the opening days of the communist Tet Offensive, South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon — and photographer Eddie Adams captured perhaps the war’s most unforgettable image. An American cameraman also captured it in on celluloid. Caution: This clip shows … well, a man being shot in the head at point-blank range. Though the image brought Adams the Pulitzer Prize, he would express discomfort with it later in life, and eulogized General Loan in Time magazine when he died in the U.S. in...

Today is director John Ford's 129th birthday. He said: "..... the sweetest freedom is an honest heart." 2 very different musicians in whom I see honest hearts are German trombone player Phil Zey and Bluegrass Band Leader Del McCoury. I met Phil at Dieng temple in Central Java Indonesia. He played a bit of Sinatra in the temple and hit a golf ball just outside it. The footage in the main link to this post show Phil leaving the temple. (I published the temple footage 3 years ago today.) Later on in Australia, I took him up into mountain forests...

On this day, 1865, the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery. Are we free now? Our spirits or our lives? Annika looks like she is. (Click the red link below the title if you wonder why you cannot see her here.)

On this date in 1744, Skinnar Per Andersson was beheaded in Stockholm — a cautionary examplar of the limits of electoral change. Andersson, (English Wikipedia entry | Swedish) a farmer from Dalarna, was his constituency’s most eloquent exponent of grievances against the ruling Hat party. The latter had proven deeply unresponsive to the complaints of farmers and peasants while also harrowing the countryside for recruits to die in the Hats’ insane war of choice against Russia. Andersson tore into the war policy at a public meeting in July of 1742, demanding punishment for the politicians who had launched it; he...

There are many idiotic narratives forming around the beating death of Tyre Nichols by five former Memphis police officers. The most obvious one is that this is somehow a sign of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” even though all five ex-cops who beat Nichols severely are black. Why would the radical left demand pure cognitive dissonance in order for the people to embrace their narrative? It seems counterproductive, especially in light of the facts that justice is in the process of being served. All five officers were fired, arrested, and charged. The “Scorpion” division of which they were a part...

"Obviously @count18899. That is why he believed in WMD, when I didn't, and supported the Iraq war, when I didn't. No contest, really. Do you want to add that the wrong brother died (it's all included in the Twitter admission price), or are you quite done for the day?" Peter Hitchens Twitter Post Saturday 1/28/2023 About His Differences With His Brother The Late Christopher Hitchens Over The Notion Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction In Iraq In the aftermath of 9/11 it certainly made sense for the US military to go after Osama bin Laden and is Al-Qaeda Organization in Afghanistan....

On this date in 1547, the Duke of Norfolk was to have been beheaded. But thanks to the previous day’s death of the corpulent 55-year-old King Henry VIII, the duke’s death warrant was never signed, and the condemned noble died in bed … seven years later. A force in the gore-soaked arena of English politics for two generations, Thomas Howard had steered two nieces into the monarch’s bed. Both girls had gone to the scaffold,* and the disgrace of the second, Catherine Howard, brought a collapse in the whole family’s fortunes. Thomas Howard’s son Henry was not as lucky as...

A senate hearing to evaluate the suitability of Spokane Superior Court Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, a Biden nominee for US District Judge for the Eastern District of Washington, resulted in some interesting answers. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La) asked Judge Bjelkengren several basic questions about the Constitution's Article II (the powers of the executive branch) and Article V (the power to amend the Constitution). To both, the Judge responded "nothing comes to mind at the moment." Considering that US judges frequently have to adjudicate issues in which the Constitution has some bearing it is disturbing that this nominee was so ill-prepared for...

Can an extensive nation keep free government and avoid centralization? In 1787-1788, the Anti-Federalists didn’t think so and the Federalists couldn’t be sure. Charles de Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, “It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views.” Only in small republics, ideally of the Greek city-state size, are private interests and abuses minimized and the general welfare of the public is better understood and within the reach of every citizen.1Free...

Novak Djokovic has just won an Australian Open in straight sets against a much younger man. His victory was the triumph of a strong, moral, Christian man after PC stupidity attacked him last year and his father this year. The Serbian people I saw watching his televised performance were enthralled. Families. All generations together. Having fun. God Bless Freedom.

When women are beautiful and have brains its a heady combination. In the 1921 photo in the above link (red type below the headline) mystic philosopher Simone Weil looks like she could have done very well in pre-code Hollywood to me. Another celebrated French writer was Colette. Apart from her writings, perhaps Colette's greatest claim to fame was discovering Audrey Hepburn. Colette was being pushed along the Monaco seafront in a wheel-chair when she saw Audrey wearing a one-piece black swimsuit. Colette exclaimed, “Voilà ma Gigi!” because what she saw in Hepburn was exactly what was needed for the role...

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:..And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26, 28) And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave...

On this date in 1591, Agnes Sampson, the “Wise Wife of Keith”, went to the stake at Edinburgh during the North Berwick Witch Trials. Perhaps Scotland’s most notorious witch hunt, the 1590-1591 sweep caught up something approaching 70 supposed sorcerers thanks to the king’s security panic after dangerous North Sea storms had beset the sea voyages uniting King James VI of Scotland and his new wife Queen Anne of Denmark. An inquisition in Denmark had made witches the culprit, and the young James — amusingly described by one commenter as “a superstitious and distrustful poltroon”* — opened an inquiry of...

A group of M1 Abrams tanks sit in a holding area after being offloaded from the freighter ship “Resolve” at the port of Antwerp April 24. Photo by Staff Sgt. Warren W. Wright Jr., 21st TSC Public Affairs As the U.S. government is now preparing to send dozens of M1 Abrams tanks to the Ukrainian military, much attention has been given to concerns about how their complex electronic components and especially their gas turbine propulsion systems could make them particularly difficult to operate and maintain. Though it’s not yet clear what specific variant of the Abrams Ukraine’s military is set...

Its is Douglas MacArthurs 143rd birthday. Was he the 1950's equivalent of Donald Trump? The times when he showed great leadership were many. He modernised Wrest Point, asking when he had recently begun the task post World War One, "Why are we still preparing for the War Of 1812?" He resisted Australians who wanted to betray their own country in WW2 and surrender half the continent to Japan above the Brisbane line because he knew the all conquering Japanese were over extended and could be beaten. He did that aged in his 60s with island hopping strategic brilliance. In his...

Video @ Link........................ The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds. One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why...

Tucker Carlson made some explosive assertions recently, suggesting that the CIA and the FBI brought down Richard Nixon because he was on to their efforts to undermine the American system as the Founding Fathers had intended it to run and knew that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Carlson’s segment quickly became wildly controversial, but is it true? We may never know for sure — and that in itself demonstrates yet again the need to demand and enforce complete transparency and accountability from these agencies that all too easily can go rogue. Carlson said: “Richard...

On this date in 2010, American-occupied Iraq hanged Ali Hassan al-Majid — Saddam Hussein‘s cousin and longtime aide, better known as Chemical Ali. Al-Majid acquired his chilling nickname for the notorious March 1988 attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja. That day, after an appetizer of conventional bombing, Iraqi jets dropped a cocktail of multiple chemical weapons — mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and VX, give or take — killing up to 5,000 people. “It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame,” wrote the ethnically Iranian BBC correspondent Kaveh Golestan,* who...

They think they are being clever. But they aren't. This week, Democrats in states across America — Washington, California, and New York in particular — are proposing wealth taxes modeled after the federal wealth tax originally proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). These taxes are nothing like the taxes you are used to. Instead of taxing a stream of income — the sensible, rational way to raise money for government, from available income streams — they focus on wealthy people and attempt to take a portion off the top of their overall net worth each year. They do not care...

In 2009 Mary Tyler Moore said she was a fan of Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly. For me she is a great Indigenous Woman of the Anglosphere. A woman who loved, understood and helped develop the culture she was born into. She was an icon for the feminist movement but rejected Gloria Steinem's attempts to get her support. She described herself as a libertarian centrist. She believed in freedom and in women focusing on being moms. Her production company MTM facilitated Steve Bochco in getting the creative freedom for his team's acting filming and writing talent to revolutionise television through...