Free Republic

Advancements in technology have fueled this White House's obsession with controlling the message. Jay Carney is free. But not loose – at least so far. After resigning as the press secretary for President Obama on June 20, Carney gave insight into the Obama administration’s handling of classified documents, and responded to criticism that this administration has been the most Orwellian in recent history. “I know — because I covered them — that this was said of Clinton and Bush, and it will probably be said of the next White House,” said Carney in a recent New York Times Magazine interview....

Here Are The Two Soviet Propaganda Posters Hanging In The White House Press Secretary's Home Washingtonian MOM magazine's spring issue has a profile of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's wife, ABC News contributor Claire Shipman, that features a picture taken inside their home. In the background of the photo, you can see two framed Soviet-era propaganda posters. One of Carney's posters is a version of this iconic design by artist Dmitry Moor with a soldier pointing his finger alongside text that says "Have YOU Enlisted?" in Russian: The other poster features a female factory worker. According to this eBay...

Ah, the beaming confidence of a vacuous intellect! Might this be what Professor Alan Bloom prophesied of in his book "The Closing Of The American Mind"? I ran across a story about a young woman (at least she claims to be and bears the marginal outward appearance thereof), that is a senior, scheduled to graduate from Haaaavaaad (Harvard) U this year. It was at once, fall out of the tree funny – because this chicky poo is serious as a breast exam about her batty, hyper-progressive notions about what constitutes the ideal academic environment at her school. It was,...

Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).

Actor Andy Serkis is set to direct an upcoming movie adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm. But there will be a slight deviation from the story’s original focus: rather than serve as a cautionary tale about Communist totalitarianism, this updated version will address Hollywood’s predictable, go-to embodiment of evil, the Darth Vader of our time: corporate greed. Orwell’s brilliant allegory Animal Farm was written during World War II as a satire on Soviet Communism (and very nearly wasn’t published, critical as it was of our Russian ally). It has since been adapted to film twice, a British animated...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm-vfxZyJwo

For anyone interested in the politics of left and right -- and in political journalism as it is practiced at the highest level -- George Orwell's works are indispensable. This week, in the year marking the 110th anniversary of his birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays. The winner and still champ, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Orwell's essay, published in 1946 in Cyril Connolly's literary review Horizon, is not as sarcastic or funny as Twain's, but unlike Twain, Orwell...

BBC Radio 4 recently aired a two-part reading of extracts from George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, a book recounting his personal experience of the Spanish Civil War. Superbly dramatised, the readings brought Orwell to life and set me wondering how this man of the left, albeit one of integrity, would have viewed the oppressive, liberal-left socialists who rule the Western roost nowadays? Long story short: Orwell went to fight for a Communist (anti-Stalinist) group against Franco's Nationalists, only to find the bizarre coalition of Republican forces he had joined being attacked by their supposed allies: namely, Stalin's men who, per...

Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. This article is based on his report “The Obama Administration and the Press,” forthcoming Thursday from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Watergate era, the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. That was one of the reasons why Bob Woodward met with FBI official Mark Felt (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) in an underground parking garage in Arlington, and why he and Carl...

A former U.S. official told The Journal that some of the technology allows the FBI to remotely activate the microphones in phones running on Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations.

“1984” Live! US Surveillance Scandal Is The Biggest Story Of Your Lifetime By Julio Severo “The (National Security Agency) NSA surveillance scandal is the biggest story of your lifetime” – that was, according WND, Michael Savage’s message all this week, as details emerged about the US government spying on Americans and people around the world. However, “They obviously weren’t spying on Muslims, or people known to have associated with terrorists,” Savage pointed out. Otherwise, the authorities would have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing. The White House assures that its massive surveillance is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t...

George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, was published in 1949, and he predicted that people in the future would have no privacy, as governments would monitor all their activities. The "big brother is watching" phrase became well known. But Orwell could never have predicted the technologies of the future, when he described a fictional system of oppression based on technologies that were available in 1949. In 1949, there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no internet, no satellites, etc. In the communist regimes of 1949, most people did not own telephones, therefore there were no phones to bug. Most people...

Sales of George Orwell’s "1984" are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.

The inventor of the World Wide Web said the internet is facing a “major” threat from “people who want to control it on the sly” through “worrying laws” such as SOPA, the US anti-piracy act, and through the actions of internet giants. “If you can control [the internet], if you can start tweaking what people say, or intercepting communications, it's very, very powerful...it's the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever.” Sir Tim was speaking as it emerged that the US government has been collecting...

AUSTRALIA and the US will merge to form one super nation called Ameristralia. Sound like a gag? Maybe not. A petition has been created on the official White House website calling for the Obama Administration to join "America and Australia to form Ameristralia". The "We the People" section on the whitehouse.gov website was launched in 2011 to allow the public, in accordance with the First Amendment of the US Constitution, to petition the US government on issues deemed important.

George Orwell published the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. It is a satirical vision of a future society dominated by omnipresent government surveillance and public mind control. Individualism or any independent thinking is prosecuted as a thought crime. Since we now live in a world that seems closer to Orwell’s vision, a world where more and more it seems individualism is discouraged, a closer appraisal of Mr. Orwell’s work might be in order. Oh, you don’t see the connection? Take a look at Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village or President Obama’s warning to achievers, “If you’ve got a business...

Any serious discussion of “hate speech” laws should start with a consideration of George Orwell’s prophetic look into the future—specifically the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Recall that in Orwell’s book, Big Brother sought to control not only all thoughts but also to language used to form thoughts. To that end, he created the language of “Newspeak,” described as “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” In a separate essay, Orwell explained that Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. In the book, this suits the totalitarian regime...

How is it possible that Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney on who can better handle the economy when it's been in decline all year? Economists on both sides say this is one of the weakest recoveries since the Great Depression. New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman, one of Obama's early supporters, said, "This is still a terrible economy." The overall economy barely grew by 1.7 percent in the second quarter, down from 2.0 percent in the first three months of 2012. Business economists have lowered their forecasts to 1.5 percent or lower for the year. The Federal Reserve Board...

The fifth and final paper in The Lancet Series on physical inactivity explained that because of the global reach, high prevalence, and colossal harms of inactivity, it should be considered pandemic. Harold W. Kohl, III, leading author and from the University of Texas Health School of Public Health, said:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg loves us. He wants us to be healthy. So he’s taken it upon himself to pass laws to stop people from eating too much salt, trans fats, and big sugary drinks. He believes these new laws will make a difference. Of course, they might, but so will passing a law that requires everybody to eat only 1800 calories per day. When Mayor Bloomberg gets a hold of the new exercise study, there’s no telling what new laws will be passed. According to the medical journal The Lancelot, “a third of the world’s adults are physically...