Free Republic

He got a round of applause for this at last night’s debate but it’s a silly claim when you think about it. His point is that there are good livings to be had in vocational training without any of the debt or fascism that come with today’s university experience. True enough, but the cultural bias towards college grads in hiring means that even a lowly philosophy major with a B.A. probably stands a better chance of higher earnings out of school than the average welder does. According to Bloomberg, despite comprising just 34 percent of the total work force,...

O’Reilly: Former Obama adviser Anita Dunn’s PR firm representing Sandra Fluke Jeff Poor March 3, 2012 Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke is being represented by a former Obama adviser’s PR firm, Bill O’Reilly explained on his Thursday night program “The O’Reilly Factor,” suggesting that the young woman was indirectly planted at the center of the contraception controversy by the Obama administration... .............. O’Reilly went on to reveal that SKDKnickerbocker, a PR agency whose managing director is former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, is now representing Fluke. Dunn is perhaps best known for her attack on Fox News and for...

In politics, it is the idea that counts. So also in philosophy, pop music, pedantry and philanthropy. The idea is everything. And between the idea and the reality, there lies that vast uncharted terrain of promises unfulfilled, of lies and deceit and of naked hypocrisy, all of which account for the failure of the public discourse and of public life. In short, this self-inflicted deception accounts for the failure of society.

What does it say about Barack Obama and his devout supporters that his White House communications director is a big fan of Mao Zedong? I know. I know. She said her two favorite philosophers were Mao and Mother Teresa. How's that for moral and intellectual disconnect? Did you ever think you would hear those two names mentioned in the same breath? Were there two people in the history of the world more opposite that Mother Teresa and Mao? One devoted herself to saving lives. The other devoted himself to taking them. One's worldview was shaped for her reverence for God....

For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilization was Christianity until around the year 1725, when Christianity declined and practically disappeared among intellectuals. Of course this left a vacuum. People cannot get along without a belief in something outside themselves, and during the next hundred years they concocted a new belief in the divinity of nature. By 1730 the collapse of Christianity was nearly complete in England and the nutballs were off and running, writing about modern man corrupting gentle peoples and destroying nature’s beauty. The Caucasian male, according to philosophers and idle soothsayers of the...