Free Republic

When was the fall of the Roman Empire? Was it in 410 when the Visigoths sacked Rome, or 455 when the Vandals plundered Rome? Or was it 476, when the last western Roman Emperor was deposed? Whatever the answer, the people alive on the ground at the time surely did not wake up to a headline saying: “Rome has fallen, commence medieval barbarianism.” Only later did historians pinpoint certain dates. It’s possible, therefore, that we are already past the date that will be considered the fall of the American Empire. Perhaps historians will look back and say that September 11,...

This is a 2 minute video worth your time.https://twitter.com/lizzywales/status/1335404538606612485

Maybe Donald Trump is such a powerful communicator and pot-stirrer that other countries, embarrassed by their own trade barriers, will eliminate them. Then I will thank the president for the wonderful thing he did. Genuine free trade will be a recipe for wonderful economic growth. But I fear the opposite: a trade war and stagnation -- because much of what Trump and his followers say is economically absurd. "(If) you don't have steel, you don't have a country!" announced the president. Lots of things are essential to America -- and international trade is the best way to make sure we...

BREAKING - Top US Source says "deal is done" re #NAFTA. Joint statement from @USTradeRep & Canada's Freeland expected soon. I'm told #NAFTA deal was reached around 9:30pm tonight. Canada giving a larger % of its dairy market to US products in exchange for cultural protection & some form of dispute resolution process (formerly Ch 19).

Hong Kong - a beacon of hope to the American worker? (photo: Randal Rayborn) The pundits told us the great transition from the Industrial Age to Information Age would be easy. Nothing like the wrenching social dislocations of the 1800’s, when people left behind the grinding poverty of rural agrarian life to earn better wages laboring in urban factories. This time, the transition would require nothing more difficult than a bit of retraining. Add a few computer skills to your resume, those pundits assured us, and all the golden rewards of the new Age would rain down upon you....

IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it. A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print...

Last week, top-down campaigning collided with bottom-up netroots organizing when Barack Obama's web team wrested control of an unofficial Obama MySpace page from its diligent proprietor. The power play resulted in the loss of 160,000 MySpace friends for the presidential candidate and one very disillusioned organizer. Twenty-nine-year-old Obama enthusiast Joe Anthony, a Los Angeles paralegal, created MySpace.com/BarackObama long before Obama's presidential bid began, and maintained it—with the campaign's knowledge and encouragement, he says—for more than two years. But as Obama's popularity grew, so did his MySpace profile, and as the page neared 200,000 members, the campaign became increasingly uneasy about...

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet....

At a Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center just a few miles from my office in the U.S. Capitol, you can glimpse a piece of American medicine's future. Sitting at an ordinary desktop computer, Dr. Ned Evans hits a few keys on the keyboard and clicks his mouse a few times. Sample patient data spill out: X-ray images, lab notes, and blood pressure numbers. "Everything I might want, everything I need, I can see right here," he says. "It's a seamless part of life. It lets me do just about everything better." And when the New England Journal of Medicine...

M.I.T. Norbert Wiener, a founder of computer science and the information age. [Review by]By CLIVE THOMPSON DARK HERO OF THE INFORMATION AGE In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. By Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. Illustrated. 423 pp. Basic Books. $27.50. TO be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. Newton had the apple and gravity. Even the lesser rock-star scientists have one shining achievement for which they're known -- such as Niels Bohr's theory of the atom. But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through,...

Without the information revolution spawned by talk radio and the role it played in this year's election, John Kerry would likely be taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2005. That's the assertion from longtime broadcast veteran Mike Siegel, whose new book "Power Talk!" chronicles his own exploits behind the microphone as perhaps the most pro-active radio host in America. "The Swiftboat veterans would have never gotten the time of day without talk radio," Siegel told NewsMax, citing accounts by the Vietnam vets who served with Kerry as the turning point of the presidential campaign. While elite media venues...

It is [said]... the only sure winner in American politics is the media.... Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority. Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer... National Guard... Abu Ghraib......

High Standards A gentleman in Alaska has sent me a copy of an exam the state of Washington required of all 8th-graders in 1910. I suspect that today many college graduates would have difficulty passing it. All of the questions were essay, and students were graded on their ability to write as well as on penmanship. Teachers did not "teach to the test." In fact, after the tests were handed out, the teachers left, and an outsider sat in the room. Students were not allowed to ask questions, and no explanations were given. Minimum passing grade in grammar and arithmetic...

For Immediate ReleaseJanuary 24, 2004 The President's Address to the Nation      Audio Good Morning. In my State of the Union address, I spoke of a great priority for our nation, to confront the rising cost of health care, and make sure that more of our citizens can afford the health care they need. Health care costs are rising too fast for many families and businesses. It is time to address this problem directly, with five clear steps that Congress can take this year. First, we can help control rising health care costs by cutting down on frivolous lawsuits against doctors...

Beijing Developing Electronic Chains to Enslave Its People For nearly a thousand years the Great Wall of China protected the Asian empire from foreign invasion. Today, red China is installing a great "firewall," hoping to stem the tide of foreign ideas from invading the authoritarian one-party state. Despite claims to be an open society, China has an extraordinary fear of free information. For example, when President George Bush recently visited the Shanghai economic conference inside China, the communist government removed blocks on the Web sites of several U.S. news services. Immediately after President Bush left Shanghai, the paranoid red forces...