Free Republic

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical...

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable. History is a curious thing, and Niall Ferguson investigates not only what happened but why. 20 minute video at the link

FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) — Florence police say a 9-year-old girl stabbed her grandmother after they argued about whether she could watch television. Investigators said the girl stabbed her 64-year-old grandmother in the back with a kitchen knife as she read the newspaper around 2 a.m. Thursday. The woman called paramedics, while the girl called her mother. Authorities say the grandmother was treated and released from the hospital, while the Department of Social Services placed the child in the custody of another relative. The girl will be charged in Family Court. Her name was not released because of her age.

Rights campaigners and politicians Wednesday condemned a video showing women from a protected and primitive tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food on India's far-flung Andaman Islands. British newspaper The Observer released the video showing Jarawa tribal women -- some of them naked -- being lured to dance and sing after a bribe was allegedly paid to a policeman to produce them. Under Indian laws designed to protect ancient tribal groups susceptible to outside influence and disease, photographing or coming into contact with the Jarawa is illegal.

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged  in a circle. Around 11,600 B.C. hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.There are plenty of mysteries on this hill.  Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings...

A noted left-wing author who teaches at a bastion of so-called progressive education recently delivered a surprising defense of Western civilization—and an attack on prevailing academic attitudes towards it. Unfortunately, Christopher Hitchens said, confidence in the superiority of the West has been eroded in recent decades. Hitchens teaches at the New School in New York City. Hitchens criticized those Americans (on both the Left and the Right) who responded to the September 11 attacks by asking what America had done to deserve them—a question belonging to a mindset he called “moral suicide.” Such relativism, Hitchens said, is the result of...

22 Signs That The Thin Veneer Of Civilization That We All Take For Granted Is Starting To DisappearNovember 14, 2011 In order for a society to function, there has to be a certain level of trust. Each day when we leave our homes, we take for granted that most people are not going to attack us for no reason, that there will only be isolated incidents of theft in our community and that rioting and violence are not going to erupt in the streets. Whether we realize it or not, we depend on the fact that the vast majority of...

On Oct. 31, the U.N. Population Fund marks the arrival of the 7 billionth person on Earth and raises the population estimate for the planet at mid-century to 9.3 billion people.         There is a possibility, says the United Nations, that, by century's end, world population may reach 15 billion. What does this mean for Western civilization?         It may not matter, except to identify who inherits the estate. For while world population is exploding, Western peoples are dying. Not a single European nation, except Muslim Albania, has a birth rate that will enable it to replace its present population.         By mid-century,...

Leading Population Researcher: There Is A 90% Chance Of “Collapse Of Global Civilization” (Ehrlich) Mac Slavo October 25th, 2011 Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and professor of population studies at Stanford University, has been warning for decades (The Population Bomb, 1968) that the earth is becoming increasingly unstable and incapable of supporting our ever expanding population growth. With 7 billion people on the planet and growth estimated to continue at a pace that would reach 15 billion by the end of the 21st century, Ehrlich notes that our concerns about feeding the world’s population and meeting energy resource needs for future...

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...

  Going Directly From Adolescence to Senility David C. Stolinsky Sept. 15, 2011 I once remarked that I intended to go directly from adolescence to senility, bypassing adulthood entirely. Yes, it was a joke, but the underlying facts aren’t at all amusing. We seem to be trying to make my joke a reality. A few good people can help pull up a civilization, and a few bad ones can help pull it down. But in statistics, there is a phenomenon called “regression toward the mean.” A few outliers can pull the figures one way or the other, but over...

A child in a Hamburg residential complex: A new report has found that parents in 7 percent of German households can't afford to finance hobbies for their children. Despite substantial subsidies aimed at increasing the birthrate, the number of children in Germany continues to shrink. A new report by the federal government has found there are 14 percent fewer children under 18 than in 2000 -- and 15 percent of them, alarmingly, live in poverty. For Germany, the figures are the warning signs of a demographic time bomb in a fast-graying society. The number of children under the age of...

It begins with self-doubt; it ends with self-destruction. Historian Arnold Toynbee, who developed the theory of challenge-and-response to account for the survivability of civilizations, has said that great civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide — by not meeting their challenges. A variation of this historical insight may be phrased thus: When a civilization or an empire feels inwardly that it is dying, or as Oswald Spengler put it in The Decline of the West, that it wants to die and “wishes itself into the darkness,” it begins to go mad. Collective madness is a sure portent that an end...

Every society has its red lines. Areas that are off limits. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Lines that should not be crossed. And the left has progressively dismantled the red lines that constrain it, while seizing control of the infrastructure that marks out a society's red lines. By controlling that cultural infrastructure, the left can insure that all of a society's remaining standards are double standards. The inability to hold the left accountable for its actions is traceable back to this lack of standards. How does one call for accountability when there is no objective standard to measure the wrongness of...

GREECE Lesson on spending Greek civilization has lasted for thousands of years. It has survived domination by Persia, Turkey, Rome and Nazis. It has survived untold natural disasters including the 300-year-long "little ice age." It has survived the Dark Ages, famines, plagues and internal struggles. It has survived invasions and domination. It has survived two world wars and the Cold War. One of the world's oldest and most formative civilizations may soon face its end by a much more insidious enemy than it has ever faced in its thousands of years of existence. Uncontrolled deficit spending and the welfare state...

Let's compare two countries side by side. Country A has a sizable middle class and economy, social welfare benefits and a low birth rate. Country B is a failed state where thugs run amok in the street, a few families control the economy and the birth rate is off the charts. Country A's citizens are taught that nationalism is evil and that everyone should get along. Country B's citizens are taught that they are the greatest people that ever lived and would be running the world if not for Country A. But despite all this, Country B's citizens all...

A lot has happened in the past 40 years that has been of benefit to the gay community. Some I agreed with, others went too far, but marriage between people of the same sex giving them equal status with heterosexual couples, in my view, goes way beyond the pale. They argue that the present law discriminates against them. It does. And it's the same reason why I can't marry Jamie or Hamish. And how about the discrimination against pedophiles, prohibiting sexual relations with children? Why do we discriminate against 15-year-old girls and boys for what used to be called carnal...

Thoughts on Japan There is no more ordered, successful and humane urban society than found in Japan. Like most Americans, these last few days I have been moved as never before by the courage and calm of the Japanese people amid such horrific conditions, as one of the most sophisticated and complex urbanized cultures on the planet in a split second is nearly paralyzed. I confess I do not quite fathom the constant American news blitzes about all sorts of China Syndrome scenarios. Radiation pollution is a serious worry, but right now no one has died from exposure and perhaps...

Forget about Tokyo. Anyone having traveled from Paris through Belgium, the Netherlands and the Ruhr District in Germany (like I have) wouldn't be impressed by a small, rural Far-East Asian settlement like that. However, this part of the World isn't the only candidate to the title. Some experts would say the largest "cityscape" found on Earth is the Eastern Seaboard Conurbation of the United States of America extending from Maine down to Florida, housing around 110 million inhabitants. Personally, I've only visited the southern part of it (Fla.) and although there is plenty of farmland between cities like Miami and...

We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships. [snip] What many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in...

We see evidence of the Plague all around us. A recent book called Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre illustrates evidence of the Plague quite well. Far from being a voice alone in the wilderness, though, I find prophets of Doom all around me. There was a band out a few years back called Rage against the Machine “I’ll give ya a dose But it’ll never come close To the rage built up inside of me Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy” They seem to have a sense of the Plague but who are...

Five years ago, Lt. Col James G. Lacey published the article "The Impending Collapse of Arab Civilization" in The Naval Institute: Proceedings." He disputed the conclusions of two books which have particularly influenced recent foreign policy and grand strategy: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, by Bernard Lewis, and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington. In his article, he stated: A more accurate understanding of events leads to the conclusion that Arab, not Muslim, civilization is in a state of collapse, and it just happens that most Arabs are...

I watched a National Geographic special the other day on NetFlix. It was about the Mayan culture in South America and Mexico. This documentary was about several anthropologist who took it upon themselves to decipher the ancient hieroglyphics that covered the buildings and walls of the decaying Mayan structures. It was quite ironic how the anthropologists romanticized the undisturbed culture of the Mayans and the harm (they say) Spanish priests brought to their way of life. Well, according to the history of their "civilization" these people lived in constant conflict and fear. War and bloodshed was a common community concern....

For those legislating and regulating industry out of the country and reducing our living standard back to maybe 1800 to call themselves Progressives requires a sense of humor, but in a way, they're right. Closing Post-Classical civilization to move into a new era can be called progress, at least by some. Most in the newborn Western Christian era during its early Dark Ages might not have seen it as progress but we at the intended end of its flowering of wealth and technology certainly think of it that way. History leaves no doubt that civilizations rise and fall; the fall...

OUR FAILURE IS GUARANTEED (9 stages of Civilization)

A new Dark Age on the horizon?Catholics, Protestants, Agnostics... the vast majority of conservatives of every stripe would agree with this almost non-reported speech made by Pope Benedict XVI on 20 December, 2010.In a speech to Papal representatives from all over the world, the Pope spoke in the context of a the near total collapse in the Western world of any moral consensus rooted in Christian ethics and heritage.In comments aimed directly at the secularization and abandonment of God by the West, Benedict stunned those in a attendance when he stated; "Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy...

During the last ninety odd years western civilisation has been coming to an end in three revolutions: the Russian and German revolutions, and the Second American Revolution which is still shaping life in the West today. Let me clarify three key terms. A civilisation is essentially a grounded hierarchy of rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community's rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period. "Over a long period" (unless a military or natural disaster overwhelms it) because the community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense, and therefore goodness, that it finds...

Beirut - Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, chairman of the Arab Thought Foundation (ATF), has urged Arabs to play an effective role in the making of human civilization. Addressing ATF’s annual conference here, he commended the innovative initiatives made by Arabs in various fields that include modern technology. Prince Khaled also emphasized the importance of interfaith and cultural dialogue initiated by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah. (Snip) Speaking about Arabs’ role in civilization, the prince said: “Arabs have an important role to play in planning the world’s future in the light of its role in the past.”

70 years ago, Britain and America together murdered the industrial capacity of Continental Europe. (I have dared to arrive in Dresden early morning - doing so will rip your heart out, the marks of the bombings still are extremely present, words can't describe what you'll encounter) 50 years ago, Continental Europe stood up very well against America and Britain. 21 years ago, the Berlin wall came down. Today, Communism and Nazism are stone dead in Europe, economic growth is decent in Germany and our school children are not instructed to salute Hitler or Stalin. We Europeans are annoying when we...

Good question, huh? I've wondered about this for awhile. Cordoba House changed its name to Park 51 which is odd since the address of the location is 45 47 Park Place. Look to the Koran-the book of islamic conquest Qur'an CHAPTER 51, Verses 45-47 explains all: 51:45 And they were unable to arise, nor could they defend themselves. 51:46 And [We destroyed] the people of Noah before; indeed, they were a people defiantly disobedient. 51:47 And the heaven We constructed with strength, and indeed, We are [its] expander. The numbered Qur'an verses celebrating the Muslim conquests match up to the...

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that...

GEERT WILDERS: Of course you have to use arguments, and I have a lot of arguments - a lot of facts - it is very difficult to make clear to the people that Islam is not just another leaf on the tree of religions. It is not to be compared with Christianity. It is a violent ideology like communism and fascism and we should deal with it that way. If we don't, at the end of the day, Islam will eat us.

You’ve met TED, haven’t you? Maybe you’ve sat through a patronizing video here, or a read a condescending article there, lately? Contrary to what you may think, TED does not stand for Tediously Egocentric Dweebs — at least that is not what they intended. The acronym is meant to signify the bright ones getting together to lead the rest of the world with planned Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Wait, am I being redundant? (Taking a moment, thinking to myself… T… E… D… above.) Yes, sorry, please pardon the tautology. TED is essentially an attempt to indoctrinate the generators of the...

Here ya go, boys and girls. They are just starting to roll: http://www.nba.com/lakers/multimedia/2010_parade_stream.html

The Gun is Civilization by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret) Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes...

I'm certain that by now, you have seen and heard just about everything regarding the illegal overthrow of our country and the people that built and support it. Please add this slice of information to your collection. This is truly unbelievable, yet somehow not surprising. This type of thinking is the result of people haven been given too much for doing too little. As this criminal administration continues to perpetrate a lie that it represents the people, a continued solid flow of illegals will go unabated until by shear numbers force all others out. I am reminded of Charles Manson's...

THE GIST: * A series of low, long walls are cleverly constructed traps that used the landscape. * Gazelle, ibexes, wild asses and other large herding animals were the targets. * No one is sure why the kites were abandoned. British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines...

Civilization points not to itself but to what is beyond itself. The word "civilization" means, roughly, the capacity to live in the city while freely and intelligently participating in its order. The city is the "this-worldly" locus wherein all the potentialities of mortal man, both those for good and for evil, can and usually do come forth. Civilizing distinguishes, in this living order, what is good from what is evil. Civilizing defines and accounts for what is noble through laws, customs, artifacts, and our self-articulation. Yet something strange is always found in civilizations. At their best, all have some relation...

If We Wait for Armageddon by Norma Zager “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist…” The Usual Suspects Evil never ceases to amaze me. Each moment as man progresses toward the demise of planet earth, he manages to regress by centuries. The terrorist double agent who murdered the CIA operatives recorded himself shortly before the killing. He was not intending to commit such a mass murder, but upon learning of the possibility of taking so many more lives, he commented the extra killings were “a gift from god.” “Whose god?” is what I...

Had somebody snuffed civilization in its multiple cradles, the Middle East would probably still be forested, as would Greece, Italy, and North Africa. Lions would probably still patrol southern Europe. The peoples of the region would quite possibly still live in traditional communal ways, and thus would be capable of feeding themselves in a still-fecund landscape. Fast forward a few hundred years and we can say the same in Europe. Somehow stop the Greeks and Romans, and the indigenous people of Gaul, Spain, Germany probably still survive. Wolves might howl in England. Great auks might nest in France, providing year-round...

This is Whittle's own repost of one of his best essays. Long, but worth every second (IMHO of course) A note from Bill Whittle: I'm slowly trying to move the best of the old archives over here to the new. Mostly that consists of the SILENT AMERICA essays, but there were a number of pieces that I really liked, and this is one of them -- courtesy of a request by an old friend who was looking for it.In a month or two I'm going to be putting out two compilations of previously unpublished materials: SEEING THE UNSEEN: ADVENTURES IN...

One of the sad characteristics of contemporary Western society is the tendency to embrace noble lies. These are assertions and acts that don’t square with reality, with what we see and hear—and are voiced for apparently noble social purposes. Here are a few politically-incorrect examples.1.  Debt and Deficits. At our current rate we will very soon pile up between $18 and $20 trillion in accumulated national debt. We use the euphemism “stimulus”, talk of massive borrowing in terms of percentages of GDP, and casually pontificate about “inflating” our way out of the debt. The  fact is that the borrowing is now...

Dear Potential Immigrant: Now that you've decided to make your way to these treasured shores, ostensibly in search of freedom and the opportunity to build a better life, there are some things you need to know. I'd like to assume that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services filled you in on them, but I'm going to tell you myself anyway just to be sure.

... It was like listening to the blind talk about art, the deaf about music or eunuchs discussing sex based on hearsay. Because with the exception of the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, the conservative Die Welt and the centrist Die Zeit, every German newspaper and magazine followed the advice of Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth, who said "de-escalation begins at home," and erred on the side of caution by not republishing the cartoons. Prominent German psychoanalyst advised: "The West should refrain from any provocations that produce feelings of debasement or humiliation." Of course, ... left open the question of whether "the...

... But a civilization becomes incompetent not only when it fails to learn the lessons of its past, but also when it becomes crippled by them. ... Our deeper incompetence stems from an inability to recognize the proper limits to our own virtues ...  Thus we reject profiling on the commendable grounds that human beings ought not to be treated as statistical probabilities. But at some point, the failure to profile puts innocent lives recklessly at risk. We also abhor waterboarding for the eminently decent reason that it borders on torture. But there are worse things than waterboarding—like allowing another...

Gold, Guns And The Process Of Civilisation Politics / Social Issues Jan 02, 2010 - 02:10 AM By: Douglas French In his extraordinary book Democracy: The God that Failed, Hans Hermann Hoppe points out that the process of civilization is stopped when government continually violates property rights. The natural process of civilization comes through delaying consumption, saving, and building capital. Undoing it leads to higher societal time preference. When natural disasters strike or a gunman robs you in an alley, "the effect of these on time preference is temporary and unsystematic," Hoppe explains. Victims are entitled to defend themselves against...

Girls, can we talk? I don’t really like piling on a man in the midst of a multi-million-dollar public and personal implosion, but here’s one big obvious lesson to be learned from Tiger Woods: Sex makes people stupid. And not just the men. How else do you explain the mistresses and semipros coming forward to say that a married Tiger betrayed their trust by sleeping with other women, too. Sex makes people stupid. This is why we need a little thing called “civilization” to intervene between people and sexual passion, so we don’t leave the young-uns to rely on their...

Every child, Muslim or not, KNOWS Islam hates what America stands for. As a European, I understand why many Americans wonder why we don't give more support to the US than we do. You, indeed, supported US, even in our darkest hour; at a point in history we Europeans didn't even support our own freedom. This was just some decades ago. One sort of answer to this question is that deep somewhere in the intrinsic soul of Europe, there is true resistence to evil and enslavement, but after having experienced so much of it, we are somewhat unable of expressing...

Russia is a very disorganized part of the World. In what way have they contributed to humanity? Russia simply isn't fit for life and furthermore lacks true a sense of leadership. How my country could contribute to getting rid of Russia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eENe0bBhvSM

While our greedy authorities, hungry for other country’s territories, passionately cling to some stolen Japanese islands, tiny pebbles in the ocean, the inhabitants of another island, a large and undoubtedly Russian one, are busy collecting signatures. I received a call from a certain local democrat. His name, address and appearance, I will not reveal for anything, lest some terrorist in Guantanamo Bay remember that said democrat, many years ago, equipped for their last mission the Boeings which crashed into the twin towers. Unbelievable, says you? Well, no more unbelievable than what happened to human rights defender Alexei Sokolov, when a...