Free Republic

Most record company executives search for hits. Chris Strachwitz, a German immigrant who founded Arhoolie Records in 1960, recorded whatever he liked. ...Mr. Strachwitz derided most of the slick popular tunes of his day as “mouse music.” His Arhoolie label, named after a term for field hollers, favored the most obscure country blues, Tex-Mex, Cajun, zydeco and other regional or local artists snubbed by bigger record companies. He liked his recordings raw, unrehearsed and unadorned. “My stuff isn’t produced,” he said. “I just catch it as it is.” “He was the last of the great musical gold miners,” said Ry...

As I try to make sense of the chaotic state of the country's as well as the world's economy I keep running across various articles that contain doom and gloom over derivatives and the fact that there are some unimaginable economic losses looming tied to them. So as a financial illiterate I am asking is there a 'bubble brust' on the horizon for derivatives and if so how bad would it be?

Libya's dictatoship of Kadhafi has decided to suspend its oil selling toward Switzerland after Swiss authorities arrested and briefly detained Kadhafi's son in Geneva, last week, under the charges of having beaten two employees. Khadafi's son, Hannibal, seeks revenge. The Libya National Oil Company announced Libya will cancel its oil sells to Switzerland. Libyan oil represents 48% of Switzerland's needs.

Let's say you are an 18-year-old kid with a really big brain. You're trying to figure out which field of study you should devote your life to, so you can understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come. Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them. This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally...

Nothing has changed during the war on terror as much as our definition of the enemy. In the days after Sept. 11, it was commonly believed that the conflict between the jihadists and the West was a conflict between medievalism and modernism. Terrorists, it was said, emerge from cultures that are isolated from the Enlightenment ideas of the West. They feel disoriented by the pluralism of the modern age and humiliated by the relative backwardness of the Arab world. They are trapped in stagnant, dysfunctional regimes, amid mass unemployment, with little hope of leading productive lives. Humiliated and oppressed, they...

For so many years, America's economy was so dominant on the world stage, so out front in so many key areas, that we fell into the habit of thinking we were competing largely against ourselves. If we fell behind in one area or another - whether it was math and science skills, broadband capacity or wireless infrastructure - we took the view that: "Oh well, we'll fix that problem when we get to it. After all, we're just competing against ourselves." In recent years, though, with the flattening of the global playing field, it should be apparent that we are...

OP-ED COLUMNIST I hate to be the bearer of good news, because only pessimists are regarded as intellectually serious, but we're in the 11th month of the most prosperous year in human history. Last week, the World Bank released a report showing that global growth "accelerated sharply" this year to a rate of about 4 percent. Best of all, the poorer nations are leading the way. Some rich countries, like the U.S. and Japan, are doing well, but the developing world is leading this economic surge. Developing countries are seeing their economies expand by 6.1 percent this year - an...