Free Republic

I don't usually watch 60 Minutes, having learned 20 years ago how left-wing the program is and how much of it is devoted to liberal propaganda. Last night though, after seeing a promo, I decided to watch the episode on forest fires to see if it would be a propaganda piece for Cap & Trade (Climate Change or man-made global warming).I was right. My suspicions were justified. With no evidence whatsoever, except that forest fires in the west have increased substantially, the program blamed the fires on global warming. They did mention in passing the fire problems caused by past...

Global warming is a complicated subject.  It therefore takes a lot of hubris or ignorance to think you can explain either the "for" or "against" case in a few hundred words.  But I stumbled onto some data that meets my "keen grasp of the obvious" threshold for understanding. Recall that we really need to answer "yes" to four separate questions before we join the Al Gore religion of "sign the treaty immediately or we will all die." (1) Is the globe getting warmer? (2) If so, is man doing it? (3) If so, is it bad? (4) If so, is...

I've been suffering under the wrong paradigm for decades. All this time I thought what mattered was "reality." How wrong I've been. Somewhere in the transition from trying to wade through the CBO's analysis of President Obama's budget and putting it aside to read some James Thurber, I had an epiphany. Before my epiphany, if you had asked me about some problem or policy, I would have tried to analyze it -- asking, or even answering, what I thought were pertinent questions. Say we were talking health care. I would have looked up what we spend on it, life expectancies,...

With today's economy, wouldn't it be nice if we knew how to make an economy grow? To know what works and what doesn't? Well, we do. We just prefer to ignore the truth.What works is economic freedom. What doesn't work is more government. I'm sorry that those words sound simplistic and like Republican "ideology" (or at least what used to be Republican ideology - before the Bailout Fairy arrived). But they have the benefit of being true. If you were to start from scratch, ignoring all ideology and going simply by the evidence of what produces prosperity, you would come...

Return to the Article November 28, 2008Making the World Safe for MarxismBy Randall Hoven In the novel Catch-22  there is a character named Howard Snowden who is injured when his aircraft is shot.  The novel's protagonist, Yossarian, treats the wound on Snowden's leg and thinks he's done a satisfactory job of tending to his injured crewmate.  It is a recurring vignette in the novel, but we don't get to its conclusion until near the end of the novel. After thinking Snowden's wounds adequately treated, Yossarian opens Snowden's jacket.  He finds him basically eviscerated; his intestines are pouring out of...