Free Republic

Watch the YouTube Video starring Mara Marini! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I51sxpY8CAo Dear Mr. Beck,Five days ago — on June 2nd, twelve-and-a-half minutes into the second hour of your radio show — you spent about five minutes telling your listening audience about my novel, Alongside Night.Here’s a transcript of what you said: The [novel] was written in 1979. Alongside … Morning? Something like that. It reads exactly like my show. It does! You know what the story is? A guy who is an economic expert has been saying “The economy is collapsing! The economy is collapsing and the government is going to seize control!”...

Fort Hood soldier currently deployed in Iraq calls for giving guns to American soldiers and families on base One of the readers of this column, even before I began writing about the November 5th Fort Hood massacre the day after it occurred, is Sgt. Brian Singer, a U.S. army soldier currently deployed to Iraq, but whose home station is Fort Hood. A few days after the Fort Hood shootings Sgt. Singer wrote a letter-to-the-editor to Stars and Stripes. An edited version of that letter was published in Stars and Stripes on Thursday, November 19th. You can read Sgt. Singer’s letter...

The American Humiliation Buried at Fort Hood It’s now been seven full days following Thursday November 5, 2009, when U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, using only unremarkable handguns, murdered 13 fellow American soldiers and civilians, and wounding 30-odd others, including combat veterans. Hasan — an American-born-and-bred Muslim who initiated his attack by jumping on a table and in Arabic shouting the Muslim affirmation “God is Great!” — continued to shoot unarmed soldiers and civilians unopposed by any armed military personnel, and was finally stopped only when — after ten-minutes — two civilian police officers with no previous combat experience...

Clinton-Bush Gun Control Enabled Fort Hood Massacre A Clinton Administration revision to Department of Defense Directive 5210.56 — Army Regulation 190-14, dated 12 March 1993 — permits the Secretary of the Army to authorize military personnel to carry firearms “on a case by case basis” for personal protection within the continental United States, but forbids military personnel to carry their own personal firearms and both requires “a credible and specific threat” before firearms be issued for military personnel to protect themselves. It further directs that firearms “not be issued indiscriminately for that purpose.”Thus did President Bill Clinton — Commander-in-Chief of...

Repent, Roman! A Modest Solution to the Polanski Problem by Brad Linaweaver Ever since the American economy was struck down by a hit and run driver on Wall Street late in 2008, the world has been holding its breath. What would happen next? Well, the Republicans lost power and the Democrats gained power, and somehow the War on Terror marches on without stumbling. The Pentagon budget remains untouchable even though we owe China a trillion dollars. “It's Chinatown , Jake.” The immediate struggle is about a shift in the economy over the possibility of National Health Care. Many people are...

The Ten Biggest Lies of My Lifetime by J. Neil Schulman This is my short list of “Big Lies” — propaganda which is promoted by major movements, and which denying often gets one tagged as a lunatic, denier, hatemonger, or simply irrelevant.If you’re looking for me to put the Holocaust of European Jewry or Jihadis being responsible for 9/11 on this list, look elsewhere. I’m 56 years old, born in April 1953. So I’m limiting myself to Big Lies present in my own lifetime.Here we go, not in any chronological order. 1. The biggest threat to the human race...

Warning: This article contains sexually explicit language. I’ve been a libertarian my entire adult life. Libertarianism, as I’ve been an apologist for it, is a philosophy promoting individual rights, civil liberties, and the freedom to have manifest destiny over one’s own life and property. I am opposed to the government telling people what they can do with their minds and bodies. I am consistent on this whether the issue is consensual intimate relations between adults, or the freedom to self-medicate and self-entertain oneself using the agricultural or pharmaceutical product of one’s choice, or the responsibility of parents to choose...

Lady Magdalene's to Screen at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival OPENPRESS) September 19, 2008 -- Jesulu Productions' new suspense-comedy feature film, Lady Magdalene's, has been selected as one of only five narrative-features, out of over 3,000 submissions, to be a finalist that will screen Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 4:45 PM, at the 2008 Cinema City International Film Festival, to be held September 29th to October 1st, 2008, at the AMC Universal City Walk, adjacent to Universal Studios. Admission to all Cinema City International Film Festival screenings, including the screening of Lady Magdalene's, is free. Lady Magdalene's will...

Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to anyone choosing to be a vegetarian, a Vegan, or pro-Ana for that matter. Short of cannibalism by murder, everyone should eat — and not eat — whatever they want to.I was married to a vegetarian and was a vegetarian, myself for five years — after my divorce. I even wrote an article in 1986 regarding my ignored suggestions to McDonalds and Burger King that they could get customers like me in — who wasn’t frequenting their fine establishments because nothing was offered for my wife — by putting veggie patties...

Often enough I hear my pro-RKBA, libertarian, and conservative/patriot friends complaining that Hollywood doesn't make movies for us and that the movies they do make are hostile to our core values.Here's your chance to turn that tide by supporting some new movies made by friends who do share our values.First up is the new comedy Witless Protection, starring Larry the Cable Guy, Jenny McCarthy, and Yaphet Kotto, released this past weekend by LionsGate. (This is the same studio that is producing Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.) The writer/director of Witless Protection is Charles Carner, a friend I met through our...

South Pasadena, California 10/20/2007 - A California “undercover investigator” identifying himself to this reporter as "Agent Egan" entered the Fremont Center Theatre at 8:00 PM curtain time tonight and halted the performance of Pulitzer Prize and National Medal of Arts author Ray Bradbury’s play Dandelion Wine. Bradbury was in attendance awaiting the start of the performance with a theatre full of celebrity guests including The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner.

Anti-Gun Film Festival Honors Pro-Gun Filmmaker -- Sort Of Apparently unaware that its producer/writer/director is an outspoken pro-gun advocate, the Moondance International Film Festival, whose stated goal is to "encourage and inspire non-violent conflict resolution," has selected J. Neil Schulman's Lady Magdalene's as a semifinalist in this year's competition. Upon learning of the selection, Schulman congratulated the festival's director "on her openness in placing art before politics, in an age when virtually all film festivals filter out any film not promoting their own narrow prejudices." Informed that Schulman is the webmaster of the World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock, which...

It’s Way Past Miller Time for the War in Iraq By J. Neil Schulman Sometimes I wonder if people even listen to themselves talk. The Bush administration tells us that the United States has not yet achieved its objectives in the War in Iraq so American troops have to stay there until a stable Iraqi democracy can fend for itself against an insurgency fueled by al Qaeda-fed Sunni Muslims and Iranian-fed Shia Muslims: that the Iraqi InSurgency has to be fought with an American Surgency The Democratic Party opposition tells us that, because of this InSurgency, the Bush administration...

Today, April 16th, the day of the Virginia Tech massacre, is my birthday. Every year for the rest of my life, I am going to be reminded on my birthday that my attempt to alert the American people to the lethal dangers of victim disarmament did not succeed in preventing this act of criminal terrorism. My 1994 book, Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns, makes the point -- through analysis of history, criminology, statistics, and dramatic examples -- that "Gun control increases violent crime by disarming helpless victims and shifting the balance of power to the illegally...

Martians Attack Boston! By J. Neil Schulman It’s a history lesson worth remembering today. On October 30, 1938 on the CBS Radio Network, Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater of the Air presented a dramatic Halloween radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel, The War of the Worlds. Howard Koch’s audio-play updated Wells’ classic story from Victorian England to contemporary America, and used the medium of radio to best effect by telling the story as if it were a series of radio news broadcasts. It was brilliant radio theater. Unfortunately, late-tuning-in listeners scanning across the radio dial and finding a...

Inaugural Address of the President of the United States Tuesday, January 20, 2009 By J. Neil Schulman and Brad Linaweaver The candidate for president of the United States who pledges to deliver this speech upon being inaugurated will get our support, whether he or she is a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, other party, or Independent. – J. Neil Schulman & Brad Linaweaver January 12, 2007 [After acknowledging the assembled dignitaries] … and my fellow citizens. The inauguration of a new president of the United States can be either a time for hope or a time for despair. It can be...

Hi. It's been a while since I posted here on Free Republic, and the main reason is that I wrote, produced, and directed a feature film this year -- Lady Magdalene's, starring Star Trek's Uhura, Nichelle Nichols. I'm not going to spoil my own plot, but let me just say -- as a long-time advocate of RKBA and author of Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns -- that Second Amendment advocates will find much in this movie to make them happy. One of the things that should make RKBA advocates happy is a musical firearms-tactical-training montage in the...

Here's what I think is going on with the Dubai Ports World deal to operate five American ports.United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East right now, trying to get Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to force the new Hamas-led government of the Palestinian authority to sign onto the "road map for peace" which would require Hamas to accept a two-state solution recognizing the legitimacy of Israel and renouncing terrorism.  Israel has cut off millions of dollars in funding to the Palestinian Authority because of the Hamas election victory, and Hamas is...

Steven Spielberg is one of America's greatest filmmakers. He wasn't always. Allow me to recap his career. This context-setting is important.Steven Spielberg's earliest commercial successes as a director -- Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, the Indiana Jones series, and Jurassic Park -- were great entertainments and great commercial successes, but there was no intellectual weight to them. The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun started showing his serious ambitions but he didn't quite pull it off. The Color Purple was a commercial success, while Empire of the Sun bombed, but neither film won him any Oscars...

Do You Believe in War? By J. Neil Schulman Recently my participation in an IMDb message-board discussion of an article Brad Linaweaver and I wrote regarding the movie Flightplan -- a recent feature film we were identifying as anti-war propaganda -- expanded to general discussions of terrorism, bigotry, and war. As a libertarian who has spent most of his career attacking collectivism of all sorts, I found myself in the odd position of having to explain why it's not bigotry to blame Muslims for 9/11, why a global jihad against the West is several orders of magnitude more of...