Free Republic

Every interwar novel set in the UK is focused, at least in part, in the changing of the relationship between the classes. As we spend our Sunday nights glued to the final season of Downton Abbey on PBS, it appears the class system, in 1925, is breaking down far more quickly than those who have been at the top of the food chain can absorb. That may have something to do with what we are witnessing in the surprising - astonishing - success of both Donald Trump (R-sort-of) and Bernie Sanders (D-sort-of) in this election cycle. The shared fiction of...

What exactly did United States Senator-elect Jim Webb mean when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "the most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century." Certainly we can agree with him when he asserts that "In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future... . Manufacturing jobs are disappearing." And, of course, the average corporate...

Stalin's mutant ape army Evil science ... Josef Stalin       By JEROME STARKEY SOVIET dictator Josef Stalin ordered his scientists to cross humans with APES to create an invincible breed of Red Army soldiers, secret documents show.  Archive papers say the Kremlin chief demanded his Planet of the Apes warriors be “resilient and resistant to hunger”.He said they should be of “immense strength but with an underdeveloped brain”. He also wanted them to work on railway construction.Labs and ape skeletons have been found in the Black Sea town of Suchumi in Georgia by workmen building a kids’ playground.It...