Free Republic

History and culture are not merely rituals repeated every year to keep the memories of dead people and traditions alive -- but is our daily living being created anew each and every day. And that should be the significance of the King Day beyond the remembrance of the particulars that tend to grow irrelevant in time -- as they well should. Every moment that’s ever been, has been the summation of all that has gone before -- and is not merely the old being made to seem fresh and new. Those moments, had their own unique place and time in...

Hurricane Katrina and its horrific aftermath has filled the media and blogosphere. As a wakeup call about the fragility of civilization, even in the world's most powerful country, it's a worthy story. And as a story, it's vastly beyond politics, too, but politics goes wherever human events are. Sharp differences are emerging between left and right in this crisis. It's evident in the blogosphere, which now drives the framing of U.S. political debate. Bloggers on the left are awash in finger-pointing, using this catastrophe as their grand opportunity to Blame Bush, once and for all. But on the right, there's...

Hawaii citizens see it as a mark of distinction that they have a high cost of living -- because every justification and demand for a wage increase is not based on merit or increased productivity, but on the cost of living and the cost of living adjustment based on the rate of inflation. Therefore, it is desired that the rate of inflation be as high as possible, not realizing that wage increases fueling inflation may decrease their buying power, and value they receive for their exchanges. The highest inflation is when all the money in the world gets one nothing...

Liberal’s disease involves a subset of liberal-oriented people. Its chief symptoms are negativity, jealousy and an enlarged ego. Liberals who focus all of their attention on the need to help others don’t have this disease. They are only concerned with the potential good that can be done for those in need. Liberals who don’t claim great knowledge or expertise in the understanding of public policy don’t qualify since they don’t have the ego symptom of this disease. The person suffering from liberal’s disease is most easily identified by the types of arguments they make. Words like “greed,” “selfishness,” and “exploitation”...

Sometimes it seems as if liberals have a genius for producing an unending stream of ideas that are counterproductive for the poor, whom they claim to be helping. Few of these notions are more counterproductive than the idea of "menial work" or "dead-end jobs." Think about it: Why do employers pay people to do "menial" work? Because the work has to be done. What useful purpose is served by stigmatizing work that someone is going to have to do anyway? Is emptying bed pans in a hospital menial work? What would happen if bed pans didn't get emptied? Let people...

Or are we thinking at all anymore? It’s easy not to. The morning newspapers direct us that we MUST solve the pressing problems of the European Union or we SHOULD put more pressure on the North Korean dictator — on the top of our “To Do” lists for the day. However, it’s been my observation that those who actually solve a problem are those closest to it, are directly affected, involved, and in charge, rather than all the armchair quarterbacking on the other side of the globe. Usually when those becomes the pressing issues of the day in our local...

One of the great megatrends is this movement towards decentralization rather than increased centralization. The leading paradigm of this is the personal computer and how it decentralized information processing from highly centralized processing of the mainframe computers. The wireless movement took this even further, in liberating us from the limitations of wires. Rail was the solution for transportation in the 19th century; the automobile supplanted them in the 20th century, and because of that success, created problems of its own. However, it is highly unlikely that the solution to the auto problem is to go back to rail; that would...

In one of the early Star Wars movies, it was famously said, “Beware of the Borg.” The Borg was this mass that subsumed everything like a black hole. It was an ominous warning — of another time and place in history, in which the collective and universal intelligence was to be feared and struggled against because it threatened our individuality in a seemingly increasing world of impersonality and anonymity. On the other hand, The Blog is just us — what we all make of it and contribute to it, and once it gathers critical mass, takes on a life of...

At first, House Judiciary Chair Sylvia Luke, D-Nuuanu, did not care for the governor’s proposal to make Hawaii’s roads safer for pedestrians. Gov. Linda Lingle wanted a bill passed that would require drivers to stop, rather than yield, should a pedestrian step onto a crosswalk – Luke did not hear the bill. But in conference committee this week, the language from the governor’s proposal got inserted into a traffic bill, and at first Luke balked at the proposal. Instead she offered her own plan to make Hawaii’s roads safer – only trouble was everyone thought she was kidding. Luke pushed...

The Hawaii State Teachers’ Union (HSTA) is asking Hawaii teachers to ratify a new two-year contract Thursday, April 28, that will reward the HSTA’s upper echelon with the largest salary increases while cutting entry-level Class II teacher pay to $28,357 from the $35,486 won during negotiations last year. A computer assisted analysis shows the contract will allow teachers on Step 1 and 2 on the salary schedule to move up in 2006 after a year stuck at the lower pay scale. Some teachers believe the cut to new teacher pay is the unintended result of Superintendent Pat Hamamoto and HSTA...

The story I'm about to relate took place on my visit to the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu last week. It is entirely indicative of the unprofessional, ungracious, and unacceptable behavior of many professors on our college campuses, in this case the chairman of the Political Science Department at this school, a man named Jonathan Goldberg Hiller. The student who invited me to the University on behalf of the College Republicans -- I will call him Jamie -- is a political science major. In anticipation of my visit, Jamie had asked Professor Hiller if his Department...

In a lively exchange of ideas, David Horowitz, leader of Students for Academic Freedom, argued his case for an Academic Bill of Rights before 150 people at UH Manoa's Art Auditorium Wednesday night. While speaking from the same podium Ward Churchill used to deliver a controversial address only weeks before, Horowitz gave a very different speech and received a very different response. Many of the same campus leftists who had so urgently proclaimed the importance of defending Churchill's right to call some of the 3,000 murdered on 9-11 "Little Eichmanns" came to the Horowitz' event armed with signs reading "No...

Happy moments 'protect the heart' Happiness was more commonly linked to leisure, rather than work Every moment of happiness counts when it comes to protecting your heart, researchers have said. A team from University College London said happiness leads to lower levels of stress-inducing chemicals. They found that even when happier people experienced stress, they had low levels of a chemical which increases the risk of heart disease. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their...

Freedom of speech on many university campuses is being exercised with an increasingly liberal bias that is staking a worrisome monopoly on the free marketplace of ideas. Evidence of this bias is a new study published in the March issue of Forum, which showed that—by their own description—72 percent of professors in American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative. Hence, it is reasonable to question whether students are receiving a fair and balanced education. The concern is understandable. As stated by one of the study’s authors, Robert Lichter, “In general, even broad-minded people gravitate toward other...

WASHINGTON - Pessimistic, anxious and depressed people may have a higher risk of dementia, U.S. researchers reported Thursday. A study of a group of 3,500 people showed that those who scored high for pessimism on a standardized personality test had a 30 percent increased risk of developing dementia 30 to 40 years later. Those scoring very high on both anxiety and pessimism scales had a 40 percent higher risk, the study showed. “There appears to be a dose-response pattern, i.e., the higher the scores, the higher the risk of dementia,” Dr. Yonas Geda, a neuropsychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic in...

“There is a strong inverse association between intelligence test scores and suicide,” Finn Rasmussen, an associate professor at the institute, said in the report published in the British Medical Journal. Rasmussen and his team called for more detailed studies to investigate the possible underlying reasons for suicide.

Many people are surprised to learn that any movement that can be done with any apparatus, can also be done without the apparatus -- usually to much greater effect and productivity. So when one sees the apparatus advertised on television as the latest great thing, one merely needs to simulate the movement without the apparatus to see if such a claim is possible and plausible. While the apparatus (machine) does suggest the general idea of the intent and purpose of the exercise, the limitation of most machines is that it loses effectiveness at the very extreme of the movement --...