Free Republic

Christopher Newsom, Jr. and Channon Gail Christian. Raped and killed Those who did it. Diversity is remarkable for its homogeneity. From :Wikipedia: “Christian's parents found her abandoned Toyota 4-Runner two blocks away from the Chipman Street house on Monday, with the help of her mobile phone provider. An envelope recovered from the vehicle yielded fingerprint evidence that led police to Lemaricus Davidson and 2316 Chipman Street. When police went to the address on Tuesday, January 9, they found the home unoccupied and Christian's body in a trash can in the kitchen. Christian was strangled to death.[5] According to the grand...

I have decided that intelligence is pernicious, and should be extirpated. It just causes trouble. Practically every dang fool, deleterious thing our sorry race has done can be traced to intelligence. It is a bad idea. When it is not merely a bad idea, it is usually a waste of time. Consider. William Buckley is very smart. So is Gore Vidal. Yet in their debates they wrangled like excessively elegant cats and could never agree on anything, except that they were both very smart. So what was the use? Two taxi drivers in a Chicago bar could have failed equally...

Deer Hunting with Jesus Things You May Not Know June 19, 2007 Long ago, having had to write more book reviews than I wanted, I decided that I would rather have pile surgery by an ocelot than write another. Then I got an advance copy of Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant, and realized that I had to come out of retirement. It’s, you know, like noblesse oblige. Here goes. Bageant is a redneck, and his book is about rednecks, who are a huge, sprawling class of people found everywhere but mostly invisible. They aren’t what people think they...

Being a military thinker of the profoundest sort, I offer the following manual of martial affairs for nations yearning to copy the American way of war. Read it carefully. Great clarity will result. The steps limned below will facilitate disaster without imposing the burden of reinventing it. The Pentagon may print copies for distribution. (1) Underestimate the enemy. Fortunately this is easy when a technologically advanced power prepares to attack an underdeveloped nation. Its enemy's citizens will readily be seen as gadgetless, primitive, probably genetically stupid, and hardly worth the attention of a real military. (2) Avoid learning anything about...

GUADALAJARA--I'm wondering. Help me wonder. Either Georgie Bush is the minor, depressing, witless ferret I think he is, or I am. It has to be one or the other. If things don't start looking up pretty soon internationally, I'm going to be pretty sure which. As best as I can tell, what the Maximum Cipher lacks, among an inexhaustible list of other things, is a hop toad's understanding of how people work. Here we have the explanation of just about everything he does. He's dealing with a world full of people, but has no idea what people are. He probably...

I think it is time to close the universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. Universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization. I know this. I am sitting in my office in Jocotepec, consorting with a bottle of Padre Kino red—channeling the good Padre if you will. It is insight cheap at the price. A few bucks a liter. To begin with, sending a child to a university is irresponsible. These days it costs something like a...

I find myself wondering why the ruling classes of America are so grindingly antagonistic to religion. I understand having no interest in religion. I do not understand the animosity. One might say, “The world’s religions are so many, so internally inconsistent and contradictory of each other, and so dependent on assertions which seem to me not to be factual, that I cannot believe any of them.” The position is neither unreasonable nor rabid. One holding it might go about his affairs, leaving others to believe as they chose. He might respect the faith of others without sharing it, might regard...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the chairman of Afro-American studies at Harvard and is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks for slavery. Fred Reed is reporter that presents an interesting essay on this subject. This is a good read!!!!! Subject: How Many Slaves Do You Own??? For those of you unfamiliar with Fred Reed, he's a police reporter for one of the large Washington newspapers....... Anyway, Fred publishes (published) a weekly online column in which he Got to say the things his editors would never, ever have let him write in the paper. His stuff is iconoclastic and various...

The hemorrhaging circulation of the paleomedia gratifies me better than bubblegum. Lord I love it. The tube worms of the network suites have discovered that lo! Fewer of the citizenry sit nightly before the flickering propaganda modem. The readership of newspapers yet falls. This dereliction they ascribe to declining literacy, the lack of public spirit, and indeed anything but their own uselessness. Such thunder-buckets as Rupert Murdoch, noting that people go to the web, frantically buy web properties. It is not the abysmal content of the media, see, that turns people away. We just want our sewage through a different...

I begin to think that Mothers Against Drunk Drivers constitute a public nuisance, and need to be stuffed down an abandoned oil well. And indicted for fraud. We could dangle a microphone down the well on a wire so that they could testify. These tiresome biddies aren’t against drunk driving, which anyone with a possum’s brains is against. Your dangerous drunks are incorrigibles who time and again blow horrific BACs and wobble around the roads like student unicyclists. The proper response is permanent revocation of driver’s licenses. If they need to go to work they can buy a horse. But...

Fred Plans To Devolve Bacteria More Respectable October 16, 2005 I read with what would be despair if I cared enough that the courts, this time in Pennsylvania, are again getting their knickers in a knot over Evolution. Oh help. There must be another planet somewhere upon which to hide. Oprah, Rush Limbaugh, singing commercials, delayed flights, and Evolution. Anyway: Why, oh why, are the curricula of the schools the business of the courts? If Pennsylvania wants to mention Creationism, or to require three years of French for graduation, it seems mightily to me that these things are the business...

Repeatedly I hear that the misbehavior in New Orleans sprang from the exigencies of poverty. I would offer a countering view. Permit me to start with the family of Violeta, mi pareja in Mexico. I know them well. Listen, and judge. Her father was born poor 78 years ago. Poor in Mexico in the twenties meant poor--dirt-floor poor, village well with typhoid and no sewerage poor, no safety net, no medical care, and government by caciques who had unlimited power and didn’t care whether you lived or died. It was hookworm, roundworm, pinworm, tapeworm poor. It was louse poor. Obesity...

Evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does—except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions—overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use)—of...

When Thompson blew his brains out, a door closed somewhere and you could hear the latch click. The main man had gone. Most of us can easily be replaced. There was only one Hunter Thompson. I’ll heist one tonight to a fine, fine writer, a voice of his time, the embodiment of an age the like of which there never was and which, for good or bad, will never come again. The Sixties look drab now—unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There...

 Summers Falls In Winter's SpringPersonally, I'd Rather Have A Possum As President Of Harvard  February 20, 2005 It seems that Larry Summers, a timid man mysteriously president of Harvard, has suggested that men might be better than women at mathematics. He has been beset by the fanged mouselets of academe, and is now busily cringing like a puppy who has wet the rug. We must not mention what the correct do not want to hear. Yet maybe we should. Let us reflect on differences between the sexes:Men are taller, heavier, stronger, more durable, and more enduring. They have higher erythrocyte...

It seems that Larry Summers, a timid man mysteriously president of Harvard, has suggested that men might be better than women at mathematics. He has been beset by the fanged mouselets of academe, and is now busily cringing like a puppy who has wet the rug. We must not mention what the correct do not want to hear. Yet maybe we should. Let us reflect on differences between the sexes: Men are taller, heavier, stronger, more durable, and more enduring. They have higher erythrocyte counts, greater cardiac volume, build muscle faster with exercise, and are more strongly constructed. All of...

Seeptember 10, 2004 When I write that I like Mexico, that it enjoys much that we have lost, that Latin societies are more livable if less prosperous than ours, dismissive letters arrive. They amount to the same letter: “If Mexico is so great, how come they all want to come to the United States?” The writers invariably believe that they have made a telling point. Mexico is not so great, of course. It has plenty of problems. But why do Mexicans swim the river? Money. Period. If asked, an immigrant will usually say that he seeks “una vida mejor,”...

In Search Of Conspiracy August 24, 2004 From time to time I write about the cloacal morality of the media as they go about wrecking civilization and annoying hell out of me. For rhetorical convenience I use “New York” and “Hollywood” as a sort of abbreviation for the news racket and the screen trades. This column gets a lot email. Some of it assumes that “New York” and “Hollywood” are code words for “Jews,” and excoriates me mightily for not saying what I am assumed to mean. Let me give you a typical example, the subject line being “Fred...

-snip- Enlisted men do not undertake systematic complicated degradation and torture of prisoners without the knowledge and approval of their officers. The officers knew. Officers to what level? Officers are college graduates and understand the political implications of such things. A lieutenant is too junior to risk it and in any event couldn’t hide it from the captain. Prisons—I’ve been in a bunch of them—are intimate places. People know what goes on. Karpinski, covering her behind (as well she might: this is war-crimes stuff and she could take the fall) says why she had no idea and who would have...

Albinos Of The World Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Brains Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Being as I am an aspiring dead white male, I believe I could weary of hearing harsh words about what guttersnipes we are, and sludge, and sharpers, and impediments to civilization, and rapists and slave drivers and Marines: yes, and just no damned good. For one thing, I think we are a splendid lot. For another, I notice that most of the yapping comes from life’s camp-followers—from those who didn’t and can’t and aren’t likely to. Yet they seem perfectly willing to live...

Mail arrives, telling me that by going to Mexico I have sold out, fled, abandoned the United States. I’m a coward, some of my correspondents say, and a traitor, just like Lord Haw Haw, Kim Philby, Jane Fonda. I’m probably a devotee of Quisling. (Actually I’ve never quizzled in my life.) (OK, OK, I’m sorry.) Anyway, they’re upset, which is irrational. They think that just because I went to Mexico, I left the US. They don’t understand. I didn’t leave the United States. It left me. It was a bait-and-switch operation. I signed on to one country, and they slipped...

Faking It A Brief Textbook Of American Democracy Monday, January 19, 2004 While the United States is freer and more democratic than many countries, it is not, I think, either as free or as democratic as we are expected to believe, and becomes rapidly less so. Indeed we seem to be specialists in maintaining the appearance without having the substance. Regarding the techniques of which, a few thoughts: (1) Free speech does not exist in America. We all know what we can’t say and about whom we can’t say it. (2) A democracy run by two barely distinguishable parties...

I am sad to report that Mexico is the most criminal of countries. Let me illustrate. Suppose that you were subject to, say, horrendous sinus infections or earaches. In America, by law you would have to get an appointment with a doctor, $75, thank you-when he had time, how about day after tomorrow, whereupon he would give you a prescription for amoxicillin, fifteen bucks and a trip to a pharmacy. If this happened on a Friday, you would either slit your wrists by Saturday evening to avoid the torture, or go to an emergency room, however distant, where they would...

As I read about the recent forcible removal of the Ten Commandments in Alabama, I find myself thinking: How managed the United States has become! How well and subtly it has been done! I am filled with astonished admiration. In the heart of Bible country, swoop, Washington speaks, and Alabama obeys. The home of the brave, and the land of the free. Are we either? The quest for power by the government, and its subsequent abuse, are no surprise. The robber barons, unions, pols, this and that ethnic group, organized crime and such have always sought power and wealth. But...

As I read about the recent forcible removal of the Ten Commandments in Alabama, I find myself thinking: How managed the United States has become! How well and subtly it has been done! I am filled with astonished admiration. In the heart of Bible country, swoop, Washington speaks, and Alabama obeys. The home of the brave, and the land of the free. Are we either? The quest for power by the government, and its subsequent abuse, are no surprise. The robber barons, unions, pols, this and that ethnic group, organized crime and such have always sought power and wealth. But...

We live in a wantonly irreligious age-at least at the level of public discourse. In America the courts, the schools, and the government seek to cleanse the country of religion. More accurately, they seek to cleanse it of Christianity. We are told, never directly but by relentless implication, that religious faith is something one in decency ought to do behind closed doors-an embarrassment, worse than public bowling though not quite as bad as having a venereal disease. Which is odd. I do not offer myself as one intimate with the gods, and on grounds of reason would be hard pressed...

As the culture dies, the schools fail, the cities teem with functional illiterates and our children turn into tattooed primitives cosseted by a civilization whose origins they barely know, I watch them with…I will say it plainly…contempt. It is a mild contempt, yet it is contempt. Sadness also, for they have lost much, but yes, a contempt I do not want but cannot escape. So, to judge by my correspondence, do many people old enough to read fluently. None use the word "contempt." The taboos are too ingrained, the penalties too harsh, the unspoken laws protecting everyone's self-esteem too punitively...

Marriage, Horror, And Susan Reimer Take Horror. It's A Better Bet. July 21, 2003 Were I to offer thoughts on marriage to young American men today, in these the declining years of a once-great civilization, my advice would be as follows: Don't do it. Or, if you do, do it in another country. In America marriage is a grievous error. And why so? Because of The Chip. The Attitude. The bandsaw whine of anger, anger, anger that makes American women an international horror. It's there. It's real. You, a young man, may not recognize the Chip if you have never...

Adolph, Heinz, And Poland Why Johnny Fights     March 17, 2003   In my daily snowstorm of email I find furious appeals to patriotism, usually addressed to large lists of recipients. The writers invoke The Founding Fathers, urge fealty, and counsel solidarity with all the whoop and holler of a camp meeting. I'm puzzled. Why is patriotism thought to be a virtue? It seems to me a scourge. Judging by my mail, patriotism has little to do with a fondness for one's country. Yes, many Americans like America. They reflect affectionately on Arizona's painted deserts and the wooded hollows...

June 2, 2003   Expatriates. You see them in back-street bars of Bangkok, Manila, Guadalajara, along third-world waterfronts, in up-country Thailand, anywhere living is cheap and rules scarce. Some are old guys in their sixties and seventies with fading tattoos from other lives, lives that also fade into fewer and fewer living memories. Some are in their thirties and run little businesses, often legitimate. They are a bit rough-looking or maybe just eccentric, congenitally what they are and not concerned about what you think of them. You find them heisting a brewski in out-of-the-way spots, chaffing with the barmaids who...

Golf And Kidding OurselvesThrashing About In The ZeitgeistMay 26, 2003 All sorts of people are running around shrieking and pulling out their hair because a lady golfer played in some golf contest for men. I'm trying to figure it out. Mostly I'm coming up dry. Maybe I'm just a country boy, and slow, and can't understand things that don't make any sense at all. It takes a professor to do that. Anyway, the papers were hooting and hollering about how she was going to do real well and it was a new world and she was going to end the...

Achieving Bovocracy Git Them Dogies Moving    May 19, 2003   The Supreme Court, our unelected and irrefutable legislature of nine, now ponders, or pretends to ponder, the legitimacy of racial discrimination in collegiate admissions. Oh good. One assumes of course that, with unrebuttable presumptuousness, they will merely dress their prejudices in constitutional-sounding awkward English. Still:What is one to make of racial preferences?First, some de-twaddling. The question before the Court is said to be whether race may be a factor in admission. This is not at all the question—and we all know it. The question is whether blacks should enjoy...

Columnist At Work Not A Pretty Picture    May 12, 2003   Nine-thirty a.m., hunched over the computer in a friend’s bachelor pit in Washington. Surrounded by dirty clothes like nesting material for a Norwegian rat. Cup of coffee you could degrease an engine block with. Stack of grocery-store tabloids: The National Enquirer, The Star, The World Weekly News. I’m preparing to mine the nether regions of the American zeitgeist as soon as I have a pulse. I know. You thought this column got written on a sprawling wooded campus in the Catskills, with marble libraries, research assistants with nice...

Doing What We Can't Help Doing The Free Will Of A Newtonian Particle    March 24, 2003   Wars, like the political eruptions of teenagers, groan under the weight of moral justification: We are fighting to protect ourselves, protect democracy, establish democracy, end atrocities, avenge former mistreatment, dissuade dictators. We have to save something from something or for something. If we don't fight, this boogie or that boogie will take over the world. When you notice that all teenagers do the same things at the same time, you suspect that what is involved is hormones. So with wars. Military adventures...

Monolith Looms Over Harvard Foundations Of Civilization Shaken      March 2, 2003    I am informed by the Harvard Crimson* that the boys among the studentry recently fashioned a large penis from snow on the grounds of the university. Grave consequences ensued. A great squealing arose, as if a Victorian spinster had found a man under her bed. There was righteousness enough to gag Jonathan Edwards. Feminists made solemn asses of themselves. It was a splendid show and a good time was had by all. The--I will avoid all the obvious plays on words--construction of the offending organ was...

Getting Ours The Foundation Of EmpireFebruary 24, 2003       Today, my absolutely last war column, until something actually blows up. I promise. Kind of. Everybody else in the chatter racket is hooting lustily, so why shouldn't I? I concede that as a geopolitical thinker I have the credentials of a bucket of paint, a condition I share with the State Department and White House. Gonna do it anyway. They do.Why are we going to fight Iraq? By asking the question I'm not suggesting that there is no reason, just that I don't know what it is. Help me.The...

I am trying to understand Liberals and Conservatives. It isn't easy. I think I've about got it, though. Conservatives believe in the wisdom of common Americans to manage their affairs and make decisions for themselves. Exceptions to this are the half of the public who regularly vote Democratic. These common Americans are unfit to run their affairs and make decisions for themselves. It is because they been deluded by liberal propaganda. Liberals also believe in the inherent wisdom of common Americans, especially those who don't have any. They think that the mother lode of wisdom lies on the low side...

The trouble with terrorism is that it produces too many psychotherapists. I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. My first thought was to take them to the sewage treatment plant over at Blue Plains and plunk them in, but I figured it would contaminate the sewage. I am a radical environmentalist, and deeply concerned with the rights of coliform bacteria. Nuke the shrinks, I say, and save the E. Coli. Bacteria are people too. Anyway, terrorism. We have a sniper lurking about Washington who has killed nine or so people. He has also started a moping industry....

asm.org At Last! A Site For Dyslexic Sex Maniacs!          Actually, I just wanted to say that. The column is really about how I’m going stark raving mad trying to get out of the Yankee Capital and go live forever in fronded warm lands where you never have to listen to Connie Chung in bars. I know. You really wanted to know about the cross-referenced sex maniacs. Hey, it’s a recognized sales scam: Bait and switch. Tell the FTC. Anyway, I’m about ready. Condo rented, phone killed, power switched, addresses changed, stuff I don’t really want stored...

Mourning As A Performing Art Migraine Television Home Columns September 9--We’re going to do it, I know we are. We’re about to celebrate Bin Laden’s Victory Day. By all indications, it will be a media circus, like when Princess Di did—a grand battle in the ratings wars. We’ll wallow in mawkishness, and whimper, and humiliate ourselves. Watch. There will be manufactured solemnity, factitious reverence, sorrow by Disney, and an unremitting ooze of therapy. Heaven help us, we’ll probably get in touch with our feelings, and Heal. Maybe booths will sell cotton candy. It’s embarrassing. I suppose I have a bad...

Madison Avenue And Big Nasty Slugs: A Profound Economic Analysis I'm going to breed giant radioactive garden slugs that drip cobra venom, and latch onto prey like ticks on a cow, and turn them into formless gunch, and absorb them. I figure we'll feed them advertising executives. I put a bunch of slugs in a cigar box, with a radium watch thrown in so they'll mutate. I'm not sure how to get them to have a hunting instinct. Maybe I'll let them watch late-night TV about sharks and Nazis. I'll leave them at night on Madison Avenue. Come morning, some...

Marx In Disguise Pondering The Rot. More Fun Than Birdwatching.          On the principle that leprosy is more fun if you understand why your fingers are falling off, permit me a few thoughts on Karl Marx, his witless theories, and our descent into a Disney version of them. Marxism is a stupid, and almost comically wrong, hotchpotch of nonsense by a man who had little grasp of humanity, politics, or economics. He is an economist whose theories invariably lead to impoverishment. As a claim to greatness, this would seem defective. He is a major figure for the...

A Subliminal War The Average Possum Could Do It Better Yesterday I sat on the stump in the front yard and tried to figure out the War on Terrorism. It was hard going. It didn't seem like there was a war. Of course, I've been wrong about the War before. When those camel molesters dropped the buildings in New York, I didn't think the funny little countries over there would let us fly over them so's we could bomb Afghanistan. Was I ever wrong. Maybe I can work at the State Department. Those Bush fellers can do some coalitions. I...

Doing The DC BobYou'da Thought Moscow Was Too Big To Move          In Washington, it’s everywhere, like God and mendacity: The DC Bob. As people talk, in fern bars, in eateries, on the sidewalk, an incorrect thought occurs – something that might upset Them. You know who They are: The racial, sexual, religious, and political groups that One Doesn’t Offend, the ideas and policies one mustn’t mention, the simple observations of fact that one may not make. We all know where trouble lies. And we are careful. The incipient malefactor leans forward. He’s getting closer to his...

Men of today's older generation grew up in the chivalric miasma of their time, which held that women were morally superior to men, and that civilized men protected women against any available vicissitude. A corollary was that women needed protecting. So common has this understanding been throughout history that one may suspect it of being based in ancient instinct: In a less hospitable world, if men didn't protect women, something disagreeable would eat them, and then there would be no more people. So men did. And do. Instincts have consequences, particularly when the circumstances requiring them cease to exist....

Race, Rushton, And Us: Getting Used To What We Can't Change One marvels that a creed widely doubted in private, unsupported by evidence, and manifestly incorrect, can become compulsory in a society, shape its policy, and arouse furious support. Radical egalitarianism is such a creed -- the notion that people, both individually and in groups, are born equal and, preferably, identical. It would then follow that all differences arise from nurture. What if they don't? As a matter of daily experience we observe that some individuals are bigger, smarter, better athletes, superior artists, better singers. It isn't all nurture: Raise...

Must We Scorn Cannibalism?Toward Overcoming Euro-centric Western Prejudices        At first no one took it seriously. Harvard was quick to point out that it was not really a Department of Cannibalism, but rather the Department of Non-Western Nutrition. Once the media got hold of the story, though, there was no stopping them. In the public mind, it would forever be the Department of Cannibalism. The story began when the conservative students of Harvard held a mass meeting on a Saturday night in November. Both decided that since, in their words, “every other damn-fool idea finds flowering expression here,...