Free Republic

FORT LAUDERDALE— Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her. She's not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that's been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days. "Warning: You are under video surveillance," reads the bold message on the side of the truck. From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: "Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?"

<p>President Obama is putting plans in motion to give the Commerce Department authority to create an Internet ID for all Americans, a White House official told CNET.com.</p> <p>White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt told the website it is "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet.</p>

28 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Are Rapidly Being Turned Into Indoctrination Centers And Prison CampsDecember 30, 2011 It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being "educated" in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, "education officials" and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction. Instead of learning how to think, our children...

It figures. The Obama-Pelosi stimulus package failed in its objective to create jobs. It added a trillion dollars to the national debt and didn’t even dent the record unemployment rate. But it did allow the government to snoop into personal information about your child. The New York Post reported: ...The department has taken a giant step toward creating a de facto national student database that will track students by their personal information from preschool through career. Although current federal law prohibits this, the department decided to ignore Congress and, in effect, rewrite the law. Student privacy and parental authority will...

Would it bother you to know that the federal Centers for Disease Control had been shown your daughter’s health records to see how she responded to an STD/teen-pregnancy-prevention program? How about if the federal Department of Education and Department of Labor scrutinized your son’s academic performance to see if he should be “encouraged” to leave high school early to learn a trade? Would you think the government was intruding on your territory as a parent? Under regulations the Obama Department of Education released this month, these scenarios could become reality. The department has taken a giant step toward creating a...

As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America. Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty"...

An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users. In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he had reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged...

Brad Feld tweeted this web site, and Fred Wilson blogged about it. After viewing this video, I support it. PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo. Here is a link to the website if you would like to support American Censorship Day too. I appreciate the sentiment of Hollywood and the music industry. People download stuff off of the internet without paying for it. Artists should get paid for things they produce-but the two bills pending before both houses of Congress are the wrong way to go about it. I don’t know the right...

What a great evening it was that night as the results came. Back then we were so positive and proud of our country.

We're not exactly lacking in opportunities for Minority Report references these days, but sometimes they're just unavoidable. According to a new report from CNET based on documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the US Department of Homeland security is now working on a system dubbed FAST (or Future Attribute Screening Technology) that's designed to identify individuals who are most likely to commit a crime. That's not done with something as simple as facial recognition and background checks, however, but rather algorithms and an array of sensors and cameras that can detect both physiological and behavioral cues that are...

The prospect of uniting with Kazakhstan and Belarus is unlikely to fill most Russians with a sense of grand imperial destiny. But for a small group of committed “Eurasianists”, the announcement by Vladimir Putin of a “Eurasian Union” between the three countries marks the epitome of their ambitions, the pay-off for a lifetime spent in the political wilderness. “We have waited for 25 years for these words to be uttered in public by our leadership,” the leader of the Eurasianist Movement, Alexander Dugin, said in Moscow on Tuesday. For two decades he has worked to make dictatorship hip. Bearded and...

For anyone interested in "Hate speech", the Council of Europe has published a 104 page manual detailing what exactly might be considered "Hate speech", and thus subject to serious preventive punishment. From the manual (page 5): The identification of statements that could be classified as “hate speech” seems all the more difficult because this kind of speech does not necessarily manifest itself through expressions of “hatred” or emotions. “Hate speech” can be concealed in statements which at a first glance may seem to be rational or normal.” Potential "Hate Speechers" are encouraged to read the manual. It is surprisingly easy,...

Imagine this scenario: The IRS may soon just do your taxes for you — and send you the bill.If this sounds farfetched, it’s not.With a new congressional “super committee” tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts by November, creative ways to find additional revenue are in high demand. And allowing the IRS to prepare you taxes could be one solution.The idea has been around for a while, but has been picking up steam in recent years. In 2006, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) argued it would close a $345 billion annual difference between what the government believes taxpayers...

Hmm. I viewed many of the comments earlier and they weren't so flattering toward the One. I wonder just who at the WH was reading the "flattering" comments and decided to call NFL.com because now they're closed and not viewable. You can see the number of comments left in the Most Commented tab. Still #2 as of this writing. UPDATE: Now the most commented tab is now scrubbed free and you'd never know there was any interest in the article. UPDATE II: You can find the cached page with only three comments here. Reminds one of Stalin's practice of airbrushing...

Police in Salisbury say a driver who was stopped for having tinted windows ended the night with drug charges after they saw crack fall from his pants and watched him eat it in front of them. According to police, Salisbury's Police Interdiction Team stopped the vehicle of 31-year-old Kenneth Dwayne Swann Thursday night along Green Street at the dead end. Officer's say Swann was pullled over for having tinted windows in his vehicle, but when he stepped out of the car, officers noticed him walked stiffly. Thats when police say a small bag of crack cocaine fell out of his...

After refusing for months to say where he stood, Republican Gov. Rick Perry signed a Texas hate crime bill Friday that strengthens the penalties for offenses against minorities, gays and others. The James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act was named for the East Texas black man who was dragged to his death from a pickup truck in 1998 by three white men, including two avowed white supremacists.

At 3:22 p.m., I posted this photo of Vice President Joe Biden and Shimon Peres, with an accompanying caption that indicated it had been taken last year in Jerusalem, Israel: The point of posting the photo was to show that, although the State Department refuses to say that Jerusalem is in Israel, even the White House website acknowledges this elementary truth (at least for Western Jerusalem, west of the 1949 armistic lines). But not any more. Within two hours of posting, the White House has apparently gone through its website, cleansing any reference to

Implicit in the contemporary American health care system is a threat: Conform and spend your life behaving yourself in limited jobs or we will deny you insurance and put your health and your family’s future at risk. Restrictions on health care availability are an effective form of social control. We often talk about this in terms of women’s health care. But too often lost in the health care debate is the broader truth: health care is used as a weapon of control. In a certain sense, we can be healthy or we can be truly free. So much for Patrick...

You now have another reason to check your privacy settings. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Social Intelligence Corp, has been given the legal thumbs up to archive seven years worth of your Facebook posts. These archives will be used by SIC (oh the applicability of the acronym) as part of their background checking service for job applicants. There are a couple sides to this argument that have been hashed out many times over. A hiring manager could say that they were glad they discovered that Johnny the master of the great resume also drank heavily every night and...

Sorry, did I say fire? I meant lies. Chariots of lies. They sound, and look, a lot alike. Fuzziness, please remember, is as good as accuracy. For many disadvantaged children, it’s better. They should not have to deal with further rejection and humiliation. You’d understand that if you weren’t a capitalist stooge. This is one of our most important lies. Sorry, I meant truths. Our job is to correct the ills of society, and provide advantages to the disadvantaged. Fuzziness is an important tool in this agenda. Let’s say that A is almost as tall as B. Surely we can...

A blog purportedly written by a gay woman in Syria, which described life in Damascas amid the current political unrest, has been revealed to be a hoax. A Girl Gay in Damascus gained a worldwide readership and was closely followed by news organisations. But the true author has now come forward - Tom MacMaster, an American man studying in Scotland. Many Syrian activists have reacted angrily, accusing him of trivialising or even harming their cause. "One day if I'm kidnapped by my government, many readers won't care because I could turn out to be another Amina," wrote one Lebanese blogger....

...“Paula Brooks,” editor of Lez Get Real since its founding in 2008, is actually Bill Graber, 58, who said he is a retired Ohio military man and construction worker that had adopted his wife’s identity online... Brooks’s identity came under suspicion after news broke that a woman called Amina Arraf on the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” might not really be a Syrian lesbian. Over the weekend, as journalists, bloggers and fans of Amina hunted for clues to the identity behind the blog, Brooks came under review as a possible suspect. Liz Henry, a Web producer at BlogHer.com, questioned...

If the robot is tumbled to the ground, or swatted by someone with wants to toy with it, the bot will roll to absorb the impact and prevent as much damage as possible. This same trick works on other surfaces, should the robot bounce into walls, fixtures on the walls or anyone who happens to be in the room. Though, at this stage the robot cannot apologize for this breach of etiquette, which in Japan is an important detail. Navigation for this robot is achieved with a single propeller that gives the device thrust. The device also features a set...

OK, I admit it: when I heard this morning that Rep. Weiner had supposedly sent a coed a picture of his (encased) genitalia via Twitter, I assumed that somebody was just having his or her little joke by hacking into the man’s account and indicating that Weiner is, as I put it, one of the bigger d*cks in Congress.  But that was before Ace of Spades demolished this argument utterly (H/T: Neil Stevens) (remember, folks [and bad Moe!]: identity theft is a crime), so now I am taking this seriously as a possible scandal, and I found something interesting going...

Trend: Dropouts might lose drivers licensesBy Sara Lenz, Deseret News Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 2:34 p.m. MDT Lawmakers around the country are looking at a new way to keep kids in school — not letting them get a drivers license if they drop out. Although Minnesota's law states that students only have to stay in school until they are 16, lawmakers there are considering a bill that would not allow school dropouts to get their license, the StarTribune reported on Tuesday. "Driving is not a right, it's a privilege, and it's perfectly within bounds for the state government to...

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Party members of Orwell’s futuristic society are forced to watch daily the government’s Two Minutes’ Hate… a film projected on telescreens depicting The Party’s enemies. The purpose was to brainwash its own skeptical citizens and reinforce the rest using emotionally based sound and images. Today, we just call it television. The marriage between the Democrat Party and Hollywood is the new Big Brother. And Big Brother is tasked with indoctrinating a large society into a left wing perspective. The most efficient way is to present a single message to a massive audience and this...

A group of Navy SEALS may have stormed a Pakistani garrison town and taken off the top of Bin Laden's head, but he still lives on in the heads of the political establishment. The big Bin Laden has gone to feed the sharks, but it is the little Bin Laden who dictated that he receive a Muslim burial, forbade the release of the death photos and warned off the town of Virginia Beach from celebrating their hometown heroes. It was never the big Bin Laden that the West was afraid of, but the little one. A small turbaned figure that...

Pity the poor singles who live in the Salt Lake City area of Utah. 5,000 single Latter-day Saints between the ages of 18 to 30 who gathered at the LDS Church’s Conference Center were told by Apostle M. Russell Ballard that 147 student and Young Single Adult wards between North Salt Lake and 4500 South in Taylorsville are being dissolved. In their place will be 121 new Young Single Adult wards.  The reason for the change: too many Latter-day Saints in this age range are abandoning the faith.  Redrawing the boundaries has been tried in other parts of Utah...

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage "fake people" on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues. The contract calls for the development of "Persona Management Software" which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week. Click here to view the government contract (PDF) According to the contract, the software would "protect the identity of government agencies" by employing...

Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured. Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded 'criminals' for protecting their property. Locals had reinforced their windows with wire mesh after a series of shed thefts but were told by community police officers that the wire was 'dangerous' and could lead to criminals claiming compensation if they 'hurt themselves'.

Fifteen years before there was a Community website called OurtownFLA.com, there was a Community Cable Channel that was run by Anthony Masella Jr. in Kent, Ohio that covered local events of interest for the community and “cablecasted” them on the cable system. After four years of covering events for the community using a video camera the end had come for this experiment in journalism. The cable company was to be sold at the end of 1984 and Masella decided to relocate to Land O’Lakes but before he did, he had one last assignment, the 1984 Presidential Campaign Ohio Whistle stop...

The following was emailed to me from a friend on youtube named noguff He is an excellent activist promoting libertarianism and always has something excellent to say. He emailed for example this...25 OF THE BIGGEST PROPAGANDA LIES FROM THE LEFT 1. OUR FOUNDING FATHERS were rich racist White men only interested in their own wealth & status, and were non-religious Liberals. 2. THE CONSTITUTION is outdated and has nothing to do with a modern society. It was made to be constantly changed to serve the changing needs of society. Politicians no longer need to abide by it because we should...

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… George Orwell thus laid the groundwork for the coinage of doublespeak, at best a simple euphemism, sometimes mere ambiguity, and at worst deliberate deceit. The purpose of doublethink is to synthesize the irrational. The purpose of doublespeak is to...

Gather 'round, fellow Right Wing Extremists! It's short story fiction time! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was a cold winter morning. Mary Jane was happy she wasn't pregnant during the summer. All of her friends who had been pregnant during the summer were universally miserable. This cool weather was a welcome treat, as she remembered that awful time in Florida when she and her husband Ric went to Miami to celebrate The Chairman's 5th term in office. Her appreciation of the wonderful Detroitoronto winter soon melted away into worry. Dr. Charrington, Mary Jane's assigned OB-GYN, wanted to see her right away. Like most...

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not...

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT newsroom at MSNBC, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein Sarah...

Reagan re-election campaign's famed 1984 TV commercial... I can remember this playing on TV like it was yesterday. And back in late Summer/Fall 1984, I had the pleasure of seeing Reagan speak live twice... once just once 100 ft from the whistle-stop tour's platform. He ended his speeches in those days with "you ain't seen nothin' yet!"- while going on to bring our country 8 of the best years it's ever seen... [YouTube] Video/more at Reaganite Republican  Have a great weekend, FReeper patriots~ More Gipper's Greatest features -here-

What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch—present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun. The effort is spearheaded by Twain expert Alan Gribben, who says his PC-ified version is not an attempt to neuter the classic but rather to update it. “Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in...

So Im in the middel of a debate between a group of left wing commies Very hard core I might add. The debate was touched off after a friend of mine from California who was a homeschooling mother of 3 kids came under attack by the commies. It was started off by an evil woman named vampiressontheprowlq who is known for calling freedom a form of fascism and advocating the destruction of America on youtube with her girlfriend and lover. Here are some excerpts of the filth I have recieved... Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451", from fresh thoughts in his...

Though the group is barely formed, two things seem patently obvious. First, since elite liberals have failed in branding themselves as “liberal” and then “progressives” in a country that is center-right, No Labels seems to be another center-left attempt at re-branding the movement. Taken in this light, the group’s deciding not to have a label says a lot about how poorly any group or policy that has an overt center-left tag performs in the center-right political marketplace. Second, No Labels, which purportedly seeks consensus on a range of issues, accomplished its primary goal of bringing together the left, right, and...

President Barack Obama signed a sweeping overhaul of child nutrition standards Monday, enacting a law meant to encourage better eating habits in part by giving the federal government more authority to set standards for food sold in vending machines and elsewhere on school grounds. Among other things, the $4.5 billion measure provides more money to poor areas to subsidize free meals and requires schools to abide by health guidelines drafted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To help offset the higher cost of including more fruits and vegetables, the bill increases the reimbursement rate for school lunches. The bill is...

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment... (ORWELL 1984)

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment... (ORWELL 1984)

Revelations that the Department of Homeland Security is instituting a program by which citizens will be asked to rat one another out has sent reverberations throughout the land. Has 1984 finally come to America? First, it was the invasive body scans and pat-downs at U.S. airports. These sexual assaults on the American people may soon be extended to other forms of mass transportation. And in at least one major U.S. city, pat- downs are already being conducted by police on the streets targeting people who act suspicious, by doing things such as putting their hands in their coat pocket. How...

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also will not be permitted to simply leave the airport. That person will have to remain on the premises to be questioned by the TSA and possibly by local law enforcement. Anyone refusing faces fines up to $11,000 and possible arrest. "Once a person submits to the screening process, they can not just decide to leave that process," says Sari Koshetz, regional TSA...

The Communist Party USA has scrubbed its website of references that stated it "actively supported" President Obama's election. An article posted on the party's official website on Dec. 30, 2007, previously stated, "Our Party actively supported Obama during the primary election." The article was referring to Obama's 2004 election to the Senate. It detailed how the African-American community and trade unionists played key roles in defeating the "ultra right." "This was also reflected in the historic election of Barack Obama. Our Party actively supported Obama during the primary election," stated the article, a screen shot of which was captured by...

(Wired) -- A California student got a visit from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online.

The concept of an Elite was described by George Orwell in his book 1984: his portrayal was so graphic it seems our current Socialists borrow as heavily from Orwell as they do from Alynsky. Orwell condemned and ridiculed the Elite: Alynsky described how to use the concept to achieve power and confuse the opposition. Both the authors have been extremely useful in defining the mission for the Elite wannabe, the Rules for Radicals is an effective guide that capitalizes on the absurdity that is the image of the Elite: an image that is still useful in the audacity of...

Airport Scanner Technology Mounted On US Gov't Vans To Scan What's In Nearby Vehicles from the illegal-search? dept Already thought those full body scanners at the airports were a bit much when it came to privacy? How about having government officials sitting in a van next to you scanning your car as you drive by with the same basic technology, without you even knowing about it? Jay points us to the news that a version of the same backscatter x-ray scanner technology found in airports has also been sold to the US and other governments to mount on vans to...

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government...