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It certainly makes for a good story: a scrappy kid from Baltimore flunks out of an English class at what is now Loyola University Maryland only to become an international bestselling author. The problem is that the oft-told tale concerning Tom Clancy is just as fictitious as Jack Ryan. “It was an urban legend that just wouldn’t die,” said Carol Abromaitis, the English professor accused of giving Clancy an F in her class. For decades, Abromaitis urged English majors to let others know the truth. Her efforts bore little fruit. “One major said to me, ‘Of course not. It makes...

My first novel, Enemies Foreign And Domestic, is available free in the Amazon Kindle store today through Thursday. Then on the next two Mondays I'm going to do it with the other two novels in the Enemies trilogy. If you haven't read my novels about defending freedom while America is being "fundamentally transformed" into a socialist police state, I hope you will take this opportunity to do so. But even more importantly, I hope you will share these links beyond the "conservative choir." We already understand why the 2nd Amendment is so critical to our freedom, but millions of reachable...

IS a college degree's worth best measured by the income its recipient makes five or 10 years down the road? Is college primarily a catapult to wealth? These were questions implicitly raised by President Barack Obama's recent proposal that the Federal Government look at graduates' earnings when rating schools in an effort to steer students towards the best ones. Is time in the military, in a store or at home with children comparable to time in a classroom, and should it count in some way towards a degree? There are university administrators who think so and who are trying to...

HONG KONG - When Chinese President Xi Jinping hails the "Chinese dream" as a "national rejuvenation for the Chinese people", he clearly does not have Tash Aw's latest (and most ambitious) novel in mind. In Aw's Five Star Billionaire, five vividly drawn characters, all outsiders who have recently arrived in China's throbbing financial capital of Shanghai, desperately search for love and riches amidst the city's towering skyscrapers and equally imposing dreams. There is Phoebe, the illegal migrant worker; Gary, the down-and-out former pop star; Yinghui, the one-time social activist turned hard-working businesswoman; Justin, the clinically depressed scion of a wealthy...

Big news from author, warrior, and patriot Matt Bracken. On Monday (10/14), "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" will be available for free download on Kindle for four days. "Domestic Enemies" will be made similarly available the following Monday (10/21), and then "Foreign Enemies and Traitors" on 10/28. On social media, the author stated: "I can't see much point in 'hoarding' the Enemies trilogy. If it's going to do any good, make any impact outside of the already-converted patriotic American 'choir,' it has to happen pretty soon. Nobody will give a damn about the Enemies Trilogy as a footnote to history if we...

In July, the Montana State University police arrested Clemente Garcia Arciga, 33, after he reportedly raped a teenage girl multiple times over a three month period. In September 2012, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle ran a glowing story on Arciga for a four-day series of articles, entitled "The Immigrants Among Us," which basically praised those who have entered the country illegally, detailing their "struggles" along the way. His father was killed in a gunfight, and he crossed the border with his mother when he was 11, initially settling in the San Francisco Bay area, according to Arciga. Mediatrackers reported: “...staff writer...

Is having a college or university diploma still the avenue to a well-paying job or is the ability to access information technology enabling job seekers to bypass costly higher education that may leave them in debt for years to come?

It’s damn nice to be in the hands of an author who leaves nothing to chance. Who knows how to convey a thought that is deeper than the words he uses to convey it. Consider this sequence: “I couldn’t stand another of those damned prayer sessions without bursting out with the news that I’d been laying his wife so frequently that the only excitement left in it was the increasingly likely possibility that we’d be found out.” The other man, though, is kind and generous, and this quickly follows: “By the time I left I disliked Harding because he had...

...Most of us think in terms of Nature vs. Nurture. We have genetic traits that give us something to work with, and the environment we live in shapes us. Scott Jurek adds a dimension: he’s an agent in his own life. His will is equal to or greater than the other forces, and the success he’s achieved, the records he’s set, the boundaries he’s pushed, have been all him. - See more at: http://www.claytonlindemuth.com/2013/09/21/eat-and-run-book-review/#sthash.CxJOT43m.dpuf

ACORN’s former CEO Bertha Lewis urged Africans-Americans to support increased immigration as a strategy to gain political power. “We got some Latino cousins, we got some Asian cousins, we got some Native-American cousins, we got all kind of cousins,” said Lewis, who spoke Thursday at the annual political conference of the Congressional Black Caucus. “Cousins need to get together because if we’re going to be [part of the non-white] majority, it makes sense for black people in this country to get down with immigration reform,” said Lewis, whose ACORN group was formally disbanded in 2010 after a series of scandals....

The president said that fewer Taiwanese students were being educated in the US, and this was an area that could be improved upon President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英�) yesterday said that non-governmental exchanges between Taiwan and the US are a key effort in strengthening bilateral ties. Speaking at the launch of the US-Taiwan Policy Forum, Ma said that relations between the two countries are at their best since diplomatic ties were severed in 1979, noting that Washington has described Taiwan as an important economic and security partner on many occasions in recent years. Pushing those ties further will require continued cooperation...

Leo Tolstoy was born 185 years ago today, on September 9, 1828. This archive video tells the story of the last days of the giant of Russian literature and the fate of his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

been reading a new sci fi series "Trilisk" , good fast paced read. here is the description of the first book in the series: http://www.amazon.com/Trilisk-Parker-Interstellar-Travels-ebook/dp/B005Q22AI2/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1378468018&sr=1-3&keywords=trilisk Telisa Relachik studied to be a xenoarchaeologist in a future where humans have found alien artifacts but haven't ever encountered live aliens. Of all the aliens whose extinct civilizations are investigated, the Trilisks are the most advanced and the most mysterious. Telisa refuses to join the government because of her opposition to its hard-handed policies restricting civilian investigation and trade of alien artifacts, despite the fact that her estranged father is a captain in the...

Some parents of the more than 3,000 students of a Hefei middle school were displeased that their children were given the script of a lecture by US President Barack Obama, Xin'an Evening News reported on Sept 5. Obama gave the lecture in September 2009 to students in Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, encouraging them to assume the responsibility to learn and develop their talents. Sun Yeqing, vice-principal of the school in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, said he decided to distribute the script to the students at the opening of their third day of the semester because the speech...

A court in central Germany has ordered four children to be taken into care because their parents refused to stop home-schooling them. The parents are deeply religious and have even refused to send the children to a Christian private school, saying they wanted to keep them away from "undesirable influences". The children, aged 8 to 14, were taken from their home in Darmstadt in a police raid last Thursday. Home-schooling is banned in Germany. Officials said the parents had kept their children away from the outside world. The children were taken into care as a last resort, in order to...

Representatives of the LGBT community like to point out that remarkably creative people are abundant in their community. This is a correct statement, considering the level of creativity with which the idea of homosexuality is promoted and propagated among children in the Russian hinterland by some publishers. This is evidenced by a scandalous story that recently took place in Vladimir. Another "book" scandal erupted in Vladimir, Russia. Local Ombudsman for Children Gennady Prokhorychev came across children's literature of a very specific nature in a local bookstore. Formally, the book was one of the many "encyclopedias" on the burning topic of...

SEOUL – A newly authorized South Korean history textbook includes some positive passages about Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before and during World War II, according to local reports. The textbook describes how new cities that developed under colonial rule became transport and distribution hubs, a newspaper reported. It also states that during the Japanese occupation, industrialization progressed while a new type of educated woman emerged. The descriptions are based on the theory that Japanese colonial rule helped promote South Korean modernization. Such explanations have never appeared in textbooks in South Korea, where the colonial period is widely...

In a country of over 300 million people, we freely give power to a tiny percentage of people and pay little attention to what they do. We often live to regret it. Orwell, Bradbury and Huxley warned us of what governments become. Sometimes we listen, more often that not, we don’t. Fiction, however, is a powerful wake-up call and Agenda 21 joins these other novels of warning. Set in the near future, it depicts a dystopian America after the full effects of the real-life Agenda 21 has been implemented for many years. Agenda 21 started out as some vague U.N....

Why are Thrillers named such? That’s largely up to the talent of the writer. They have to grab us and not let go for hundreds of pages. The best of them draw many details from the real world. Even in all the action and far-from-our-own-life-as-possible events happening to the characters, it’s those truths that hook you even further. They draw you in, get you thinking or upset you. Tom Clancy is known for coming up with details in his techno-thrillers that seem almost too real. Sometimes prophetically so. They have even caught the attention of the military, wondering how he...

Writers in South Korea who defected from North Korea said they secured a list of some 10 North Korean writers who have been purged and imprisoned in the North since the 1980s. The list includes a number of famed writers who were beloved by the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Chairman Jang Hae-seong of the “PEN Center for Exiled North Korean Writers,” an organization of defected North Korean writers, and poet Lee Won-pil, a North Korean defector, said they would announce a report containing a list of North Korean writers imprisoned in the North and cases of their...

One of the more interesting stories I came across while researching and writing "Lexington, Virginia and the Civil War" was that of slave Robert Price. Price is little more than a forgotten footnote in the history of the Civil War and Hunter's raid on Lexington, but he provided a valuable service to the Virginia Military Institute and the family of Superintendent Francis Smith. As I tell the story in the book . . .

The employment rate of Chinese secondary vocational school graduates reached 96.85 percent in 2012, according to a Thursday statement from the Ministry of Education. As many as 3 million secondary vocational school graduates, or 57.6 percent of the country's total 6.6 million such graduates, get employment in the service sector. The proportion was four percentage points higher than the 2011 level, the statement said. Those who were employed in primary and secondary industries accounted for 8.94 percent and 33.4 percent of the total graduates.

BRATISLAVA, August 29 (RIA Novosti) – The chairman of Russia’s lower house of parliament has likened fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden to the hero of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel. “You know, I compare him [Snowden] to Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote,” State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin said Wednesday in an interview with Slovak television during an official visit to Bratislava. “He is very much like him in some way: also naïve to a certain degree, honorable and selfless,” Naryshkin said. “But unlike Don Quixote, who fought windmills, Snowden fights violations committed by the state machine,” he said. “Can he be...

For President Obama, the student loan crisis is personal. The Obamas had not repaid all of their $120,000 student loan debts until his election to the Senate in 2004. In a series of speeches last week, Obama pushed for measures that he hopes would force colleges to control costs for massively indebted students. He also expressed the view that law school should only last two years, rather than three. These views are likely informed by Obama’s own college debts, which were recently quantified by The Chicago Sun-Times. Though Obama received a scholarship to attend Occidental College, the money ran out...

The grandson of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is going to start studying at an elite French university next month, the weekly L'Express reported Monday. Kim Han-sol is the son of Kim Jong-il's eldest son Jong-nam and the nephew of current leader Kim Jong-un. He will attend the Paris Institute of Political Sciences' Le Havre campus, joining the Europe-Asia undergraduate program. French President Francois Hollande and former President Jacques Chirac as well as France's deputy minister for digital economy Fleur Pellerin also graduated from that school.

If you’re Caucasian, have a pulse and all your teeth, you’re guaranteed an English teaching job in Asia. This is a running joke in English as a Second Language (ESL) circles, which is indicative that racism abounds in the TEFL industry in the continent. For those with fair skin and a university degree or an English teaching certificate, finding a teaching job in Asia is uncomplicated and easy as recruiters actively seek the quintessential all-American. For everyone else, racial discrimination is a harsh reality. In South Korea and China it isn’t uncommon to come across job posts that read “white...

Korean children and adolescents are the least satisfied with their lives in the OECD, despite increasing material comfort. Korea ranked fourth among OECD member countries in terms of youngsters' material happiness but last in terms of subjective happiness, according to research published Friday by the Social Development Institute at Yonsei University with the support of the Korea Pang Jong-hwan Foundation. This is fourth consecutive year Korea ranked bottom in the institute's annual happiness index. The material happiness index rankings of Austria and Spain are more or less on a par with their subjective happiness index rankings, but among Korean youngsters...

A growing number of educated young people are learning practical skills at vocational training centers, because they are often more useful than college diplomas for landing a job in an increasingly competitive environment. Others learn new skills even after they have found work because they believe that will ensure more stable employment. The Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday said 3,100 people completed various vocational training programs last year, and a record 52 percent of them were college graduates or college dropouts. The KCCI runs vocational training centers in Busan, Incheon, Gwangju, and Gyeonggi, Gangwon, North and South...

Alas, Brave New Babylon By Matt Bracken 1. THE REGAL INN MOTOR LODGE I used to be a history teacher at a private Christian school in Louisiana. I was in my mid-thirties then, unmarried and unattached. It was June and I was on a road trip, cruising up Interstate 81 through the northeastern corner of Tennessee in my Maxima. I was going to spend the month in Pennsylvania, hiking another 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail. The trail ran 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine, and over previous summers I’d hiked it in sections, from south to north. After a...

This was the “Question of the day” CNN posed for its’ viewers on April 4, 2013. It’s a question that is increasingly being asked, in different ways, by graduates, their families, and the public. It’s a question we should have been asking at least twenty years ago. If we had, we would have significantly fewer unemployed/underemployed graduates today. Universities have been shortchanging their graduates for years and the main culprits are the senior bureaucrats who are in charge of our education system and the senior administrators in charge of our post secondary institutes. These people have never missed a paycheque...

Free Kindle book on Amazon. Features dozens of never-before-seen photos of the B-29 in action A fast-paced, riveting account that puts the reader in the cockpit of a four-engine bomber over enemy territory Detailed account of combat, mission by mission The B-29 bomber was made to soar in thin, cold air, dropping its massive bomb load from heights so great that the crews might never see their targets through the clouds below. That was just fine with Ben Robertson, pilot in command of one of the big four engine bombers hammering Japan to its knees in a nonstop bombing campaign...

SINGAPORE: The current buzz phrase in the Republic's education system, "every school is a good school", is in fact the principle on which the Finnish education model was built over the last four decades. But as Singapore strives to realise this vision, Finland's widely praised education system is being challenged because of an increasingly diverse student population, said the country's Minister for Education and Science Krista Kiuru. In an interview with TODAY, Ms Kiuru also responded to doubts about her country's education system, given the high number of jobless youths. The solution does not lie in changing the education system...

BEIJING — Li Sha, 23 and with a fresh college degree in waste water management, meandered tentatively through the Saturday job fair at the China International Exhibition Center. She passed booths advertising vacancies for software whiz kids, Sichuan restaurant cooks, writers for the glossy monthly Wives of Servicemen. But even in a nation with staggering air and water quality issues, there was nothing that jumped out for a college grad with her expertise. "I just want to find a position that matches my knowledge," said Li, who added that she'd accept a salary as low as $330 a month, roughly...

For Catholic parents with intelligent high school children, this can be a trying time. A good many ostensibly Catholic universities have simply become indistinguishable from the mass of U.S. colleges. Take Georgetown, for example, which the New York Times gleefully reports has become a gay-friendly campus. During the month of “OUTober,” described by the Times as “a month jam-packed with celebrations related to all things L.G.B.T.Q., or lesbian, gay,” Georgetown students are invited to same-sex smooching parties in a campus “kiss-in.” The dominant culture is like a great tidal wave that sweeps almost everything before it. We fought the Times—and...

A photo of students taking exams while wearing paper blinker hats meant to prevent them from cheating was not intended to humiliate the students, Kasetsart University (KU) Student Administrative Board... The picture, posted on Facebook, drew mixed reviews. Some said the hats _ fitted with paper ear flaps to prevent students from looking at each others' answer sheets _ insulted the students' dignity.

AFP - Vietnam is offering free classes in Marxism, Leninism and the teachings of Ho Chi Minh in a bid to revive interest in the ideology behind the country's system of government. Philosophy students will not have to pay university tuition fees under a new scheme aimed at encouraging more people to embrace the unpopular classes. "We have not received enough applications for these subjects," a professor of philosophy at a state university told AFP on condition of anonymity Thursday because he was not authorised to speak to the press. "Students only apply for subjects which offer realistic prospects of...

The Third American Revolution has begun. Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is the revolutionary blueprint millions of Americans have been waiting for. Released today, Levin leads the charge for “restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathan.” Carefully and powerfully written, the book uses the Constitution itself to illustrate how to reform the Constitution itself. To finally turn the tables on progressives and liberals — Statists, to use the term Levin has brought back to life — who have spent the last century slowly and not so slowly...

GUMI (South Korea), Aug 9 — A South Korean city has begun testing an “electrified road” that allows electric public buses to recharge their batteries from buried cables as they travel. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which developed the system, said yesterday it would be tested over the next four months on a 24km route in the southern city of Gumi. Pick-up equipment underneath the bus, or Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), sucks up power through non-contact magnetic charging from strips buried under the road surface. It then distributes the power either to drive the vehicle or...

Sometimes a high school baseball coach gets thrown a few curves too, such as that initiated when one of our players came to the mound as I was pitching a scrimmage for the kids, to ask whether he could talk to me after practice.

According to the Department of Labor, in the week ending August 3, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 333,000, an increase of 5,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 328,000. The 4-week moving average was 335,500, a decrease of 6,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 341,750. joblessc080813 Continuing claims rose above the 3 million mark, printing at 3,018,000. This represents an increase from the previous week of 2,951,000. Yet we seem stuck in a continuing claims slump since April. ontjc080823 Consumer confidence? It rose to -23.5, the highest level since early 2008. bcc080813 Delinquent...

On a literacy forum, a somewhat hostile teacher demanded to know if I was trying to frighten people? I answered: Yes, I am. I've studied Whole Word for almost 10 years. It doesn't work; it couldn't work. That our education establishment pushed this thing on people is a crime. If I can help frighten people away from it, that's good. As for phonics, people should understand that this is almost an umbrella term. In fact, I'm starting to think it's not so much a program or set of rules as a concept. If a kid knows that the letters on...

The following literary essay recounts my post-shooting thoughts & experiences specific to getting shot by a black, retired New York City police officer. The whole story soon will be revealed. For now, a snippet. Click through if you wish to read the entire piece via Gravel: A Literary Journal.So this is how my life’s going to end. My mind latches onto the sound of footsteps approaching as I lie face down on the filthy sidewalk. I let my mouth droop open, smuggling and releasing puffs of air through my nostrils, appearing—I hope—to look as if I’ve ceased breathing. I...

Danilo Lopez will be allowed to stay in the country, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says. Lopez, a Vermont migrant-worker-turned-activist from Mexico, advocated for a new law allowing people without legal status to get drivers' licenses. Lopez was scheduled to be deported on July 5. In 2011, Lopez was traveling in a friend’s car when a police officer pulled them over for speeding. Lopez was turned over to Border Patrol, detained and released. Since then, he’s helped Vermont’s migrant worker community get access to driver's licenses. Earlier this year, Lopez said that the campaign for driver's licenses is really...

For those who have followed the research linking the political psychologies of Conservatism and Liberalism to the r and K-Selected reproductive strategies in nature, the Kindle version of the book consolidating all of the research into this will be free on Amazon tomorrow. It basically posits that in nature, evolution molds psychology to best function within an environment, as documented in r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Biology. As examples, look at the natures of rabbits and wolves. Rabbits are designed for what is called the r-selective environment, where resources are freely available (as rabbits experience in fields of grass they...

Alliance, Nebraska Newspaper Jobs Right after getting my bachelor’s degree a friend of mine found a job for me in beautiful Alliance, Nebraska. It was selling advertising for the local newspaper, which basically revolved around walking around town and talking the local merchants into buying advertising in the newspaper. Alliance was at that time, a pretty boring town. Most of the railroad workers spent their waking spare time in one of the bars, like “Wonderbar” or “The Iron Horse”. There was also a combination bowling alley, strip joint bar. You just walked through a door from the bowling alley and...

My apologies if this is particularly uncouth - but I figured that I would share with this community my brand-new novel about drone/robot/cyber warfare that went live on the Kindle Store yesterday: http://www.amazon.com/Robot-General-ebook/dp/B00DX35YIY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373907380&sr=1-1&keywords=Robot+General+Yoshida I've previously written a series of moderately popular books about a US-China Third World War as well as the first book in a series about a Second Civil War.

I want to make Freepers aware that the Kindle version of the book, “The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics” will be free at Amazon next Thursday. The book explains the fundamental psychology behind Liberalism, and why it exists within our species. Ten years ago, I would have been unable to explain how such a weak, foolish, cowardly, instinctively treasonous and disloyal, reality-blind psychology could have ever survived in the world. In my view back then, I would have thought that no Liberal would last ten seconds in a state of nature, and their very existence would have been an unsolvable mystery....

I want to make Freepers aware that the Kindle version of the book, “The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics” will be free at Amazon next Thursday. The book explains the fundamental psychology behind Liberalism, and why it exists within our species. Ten years ago, I would have been unable to explain how such a weak, foolish, cowardly, instinctively treasonous and disloyal, reality-blind psychology could have ever survived in the world. In my view back then, I would have thought that no Liberal would last ten seconds in a state of nature, and their very existence would have been an unsolvable...

Hello Freepers. I’ve put a novel on Amazon.com and, if I’ve done it properly this time, it’s free through Saturday. It is fantasy and humor. I’d be grateful if you’d write something kind in the comments area. http://amzn.to/12doAeu (You can Google an app for your PC if you don’t have a Kindle or eBook, or, unlike my other novels, this one is short enough to print.) Your help is greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Bern

Hello Freepers. I’ve put a novel on Amazon.com and it’s free for four days. It’s fantasy and humor. I’d be grateful if you’d write something kind in the comments area. You can get an app for your PC if you don’t have a Kindle or eBook. Thank you for your help. http://amzn.to/12doAeu