Free Republic

Since I first started following Aussie Rules footy at the age of 9 in 1967, the qualities I have most loved seeing are courage at the contest and skill, speed and flair. Outstanding players I have seen in this regard are Barry Price, Keith Greig, Robbie Flower, Barry Cable, Garry Ablett Senior, Eddie Betts, The Krakouer brothers and the current Number 5 of the North Melbourne Kangaroos AFLW team, Tess Craven. As a human being Tess is modest, kind, friendly and helpful and always puts her team ahead of herself. The strength, skill and determination she shows above in tackling...

84 years ago today, Bob Dylan was born. At his Nobel Prize winning best, from 1961 to 1966, he challenged us to rethink everything with everything he wrote. Donald Trump, born about 5 years after Dylan, in 1946, looks to me like he is just entering into a period of his Dylanesque best. Trump forces us to revealuate this modern world all the time. Bob Dylan mastered and elevated American music twice to great literature in a few short years, first as a folkie but then as a great rock n roller. Potus 45 surprised everyone to come down a...

I think that men and women should be treated as equal in everything except the three female spheres of activity of being pregnant, giving birth and breast feeding. But I think that there are subtle differences in abilities and tendencies between men and women such as a slight tendency for women to be more empathetic than men. Overall, empathy is also a very common quality in men, but my life experience has been to see a little more empathy in women than in men. To me there is an emotional beauty in the way that the Fitzroy footballer pictured in...

The day I took this photo of Melbourne ruckwoman Georgia Campbell being tackled by key forward Tayla Harris, the configuration of elbows, heads and hands caught my eye as something special. Together, the two players looked like a Lotus Flower - the Buddhist symbol of purity, spiritual enlightenment and rebirth. I asked Tay if she'd like a song to be written about it and she said she'd prefer a rap. So I tried (without huge ability in the art form) to make one. (click here) In Melbourne, Aussie Rules football is often called a religion. Could the game become more...

On January First, 1953, Hank Williams died of heart failure in the back seat of a car on the way to a gig. (He had hired a student to drive him from Alabama to West Virginia to be there. Dedication.) Hank liberated the pop music voice to sound wholeheartedly and powerfully American with unparalleled directness and emotional honesty on the hit song charts in ways no one had done before. He is not the father of The First Amendment but he is for me a pivotal grandfather of modern freedom of speech. The cultural achievements I revere of Dylan, Elvis,...

Weldon Kees write in his poem “June 1940″ : ” ……. the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform./An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.” Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind is a masterpeice or a messterpeice of fractured emotions and traces of deep love (“Sweet lady ……. a lone soldier on the cross (who) won the wars after losin’ every battle ……. Down the road to ecstasy/I followed you beneath the stars/Hounded by your memory/And all your ragin’ glory ……. } What I hear Dylan sing in the Chris is “Yediot Wind” What is that? A condemnation of...

Lets Remember All Mothers At Xmas. Mothers are the foundation of family and therefore of society. But in the modern industrialised materialistic world not all mothers have the respect owing to them and the protection of family or society. Lest We Forget All Mums Matter.

Pat Buchanan wrote of suicide of a superpower. Australia sings of choosing suicide over persecution every chance it gets. Banjo Paterson started writing the lyrics in August, 1895. I had another go at the first verse today: "Now the modern Swagmen sleep on the city streets Under the shade of Australian trees And their hearts sing with their modest yearning in: 'Who'll come a Waltzing Matilda ..... with me?' "

When it comes to identity politics ..... Victoria is very much Australia’s place to be. Since late last year, the Victorian government has been headed by a hard-left premier, Jacinta Allan. But voila, this week Allan has put Victoria on the international map with one of the most bizarre pieces of identity politics yet seen from a western government. On her Twitter account, Allan announced that ‘We have appointed the first Parliamentary Secretary [equivalent to a junior minister] for Men’s Behaviour in Australia’. She’s actually wrong: it appears this is the first appointment of its kind, anywhere. On seeing Allan’s...

Over the course of my lifetime these are some of the film makers I have revered: Charlie Chaplin (more for his silent features than his talkies) and Shirley Temple, (both as a child and adult for the former and as a child only for the latter), Woody Allen (when i was a tertiary student in the 1970's and 1980's but less so now) Steve Bochco, primarily for the reinvention of what television can do through Hill Street Blues and Shawn Ryan and Micheal Ciklis for The Shield which I consider an even better drama than HSB and the best thing...

I cannot think of anything in comedy in my lifetime more deeply meaningful to me than Babylon Bee. There was Mark Twain. Who agrees? Who believes that the Bee's Trump Bible is sacrilegious?

French screen legend, Brigitte Bardot, was born on the 28th of September, 1934, in Paris. She has, in different ways, and for two very different sets of beings, been a great libertarian all her life. I believe her own words prove that: “I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian ……. I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy ……” “It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen ………. I gave my...

Anne Boleyn was a beautiful woman who died for an effectively polygamous man, Henry the VIIIth. In 1532, on September the first, he made Anne the Marquess of Pembroke in her own right. Henry created this title for her. These words attributed to her suggest she was very much a woman who was ready for a man: “Seduce me. Write letters to me. And poems, I love poems. Ravish me with your words. Seduce me.” Anne married Henry but when he did not have a son by her to be heir to his throne he had her executed. She spoke...

Ingrid Bergman was one of her photographer father’s favourite subjects. She once said, “I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.” When she was two and a half years old her mother died and when she was 14 her father died. Later she said, “The theater was my mother and my father.” and “I have had my different husbands, my families. I am fond of them all and I visit them all. But deep inside me there is the feeling that I belong to show business.” She died at midnight on her birthday, August 29, in 1982. Does that mean something?

Arma Virumque Me Cano. Rewriting Vergil, I sing of weapons, and of myself as a man. In this land where, as freedom fighter Steve of Wonthaggi tells it, " ......... men have been decommissioned of traditional roles. ....... (Some people) want us to be demonised as non accepting, small minded , woman-bashing shits." That isn't what we are. It is misandry. Lest We Forget.

Conservative writer and broadcaster Tammy Bruce was born on August 20, 1962, in Los Angeles. I love her intelligent mastery of English: "No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others." "One of the goals of the Feminist Elite is to reinforce to women the idea that men are obsolete." "Gone are the days when reality fed the feminist movement." "For women who turn to welfare, Big Brother becomes Husband." I see here the seeds of a fourth wave of feminism....

In 1951, Swedish actress Ulla Jacobsson preceded Marilyn Monroe by three years in her free celebration of her female form on camera. In classical Latin her first name "Ulla" meant "any female". She died in Vienna on August 20, 1982. Jacqueline Susann, author "Valley Of The Dolls" and "The Love Machine" about fictional television producer Robin Stone, was born on August 20, 1918 in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. "Love shouldn't make a beggar of one. I wouldn't want love if I had to beg for it, to barter or qualify it. And I should despise it if anyone ever begged for my...

Melbourne Freedom Fighter Pauline is shocked at the torture of Julian Assange for telling truths. All we mortal human beings usually seem to need to speak our truths as best we can. Godless tyrants now frequently destroy what's best in themselves and too many innocent victims. “I do not play games," Mila Kunis has said, "but always just say what’s on my mind. Ostentatious Godless tyrants now frequently destroy what's best in themselves and too many innocent victims. – for fools. If a man's afraid of your honesty, it means that he is not the one you need."

Norma Shearer (121st birthday today on august 11, tomorrow, American time) said "A woman today is good, or she is bad, according to the way she does a thing - and not because of the thing itself." And “The morals of yesterday are no more. They are as dead as the day they were lived. Economic independence has put woman on exactly the same footing as man.” This is easy to disapprove of. And to be drawn to. Freedom works. Morality? Whose?

Poet Emma Lazarus was born on July 22nd, 1849 in New York City. She is most famous for the words: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me ....." She also had some great thoughts about the dangers of anti patriotic crap: "“Let our first care today be the re-establishment of our physical strength, the reconstruction of our national organism, so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded, and where...