Free Republic

Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human beings on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them. I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It...

Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road. You may have seen the recent New York Times op-ed that admonished us to start referring to our mobile devices as “trackers” instead of “phones.” Perhaps as ALPR technology spreads we should start saying “tracker” in place of “car,” too. We need statutory protections to limit the collection, retention,...

I hadn't heard of him since I last debunked him some years back but he is still at the same old stall selling the same old secondhand ideas. He has issued a book called "The Little Blue Book: Quotations from Chairman Lakoff" Lakoff's central "insight" is that you must use distorted Leftist language to have any hope of promoting Leftist ideas. But telling that to people who already call racism "affirmative action" and abortion "choice" must be one of the most unoriginal ideas ever proposed. George Orwell beat him to that idea by half a century. I suppose that telling...

Sloppy George Orwell, Photo: WikipediaSloppy language works for cheats and charlatans. In the search for the truth only accurate language will do. Orwell understood the power of language to change the way we think, indeed to fence off some possible options completely.Roger Pielke Snr put out a call today asking for precise definitions and protesting about the misuse of the term “climate change”. But when did this nonsensical term start? Where else, but with the UN. All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):“Climate...

Political writing tends to be bad writing, noted George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Too often it's a tool for deception and obfuscation rather than clear communication. Orwell criticizes particularly those who rely on political catch phrases devised by others, throwing their minds open and “letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.” It's an easy way of avoiding the hard work good writing demands, says Orwell. Catch phrases “will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service...

Margie Omero [above] is a Democratic pollster and president of Momentum Analysis. She’s well-up on the dark art of creating a poll that delivers the results her client seeks. And Marge is pissed off that her competitors keep publishing poll results which show that most Americans don’t support gun control. So the Big O has written an open letter for the Huffington Post exhorting her colleagues to go all George Orwell and literally change the “terms” of the “gun control debate.” It’s a clever piece of writing that educates by example; ceding the right to keep (but not bear) arms...

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

Making houses and cars smokefree is the only way to protect children from second-hand smoke, according to a new government campaign in England. The TV and radio adverts show how pervasive invisible second-hand smoke can be. Breathing it in can damage lungs and cause cancers, research has shown. Snip The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said it wanted to see smoking in cars made illegal, when children are present. "I have no doubt an outright ban on smoking in cars would have the same positive results [as banning drink-driving]” - Prof Terence Stephenson Royal College of Paediatrics &...

This is truly Orwellian: the latest and greatest Executive Branch/Federal Reserve power grab is labeled "consumer protection." I am indebted to correspondent Jim S. who seems to be one of the few Americans to have actually sorted through this monstrosity and gleaned its true nature: an unprecedented extension of Executive (i.e. Imperial Presidency) and Federal Reserve power.

Read Aldous Huxley’s review of 1984 he sent to George Orwell Several months after George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 was published in 1949, Aldous Huxley sent a letter to his former French pupil. The Brave New World author had received a copy of 1984 from the publisher at Orwell's behest, but his poor eyesight prevented him from finishing the book for several months. In his letter to Orwell, the fifty-year-old author compared the two books' screwed-up futures and saw the Orwellian Oceanic dystopia as a predecessor to his own World State. Wrote Huxley in October 1949: Agreeing with all that...

In the post-news environment, media no longer exists to report, it exists to disseminate glib talking points that sound good at first, but don't stand up to examination. Fact checks, one of the latest media gimmicks, have become another vector for disseminating talking points. So have media blogs which began repeating the same ridiculous thing over and over again.

As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America. Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty"...

In George Orwell’s iconic 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ill-fated protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the so-called Ministry of Truth in which his job is to alter or re-write history as propaganda for the ruling party of Big Brother. Now, over sixty years later, we are seeing this very thing taking place in our own nation. Over the weekend I received an email with a link to Leo Donofrio’s latest report. You may know that Mr. Donofrio is an attorney who has fought since 2008 to have Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) held accountable for proving his constitutional...

The ink was barely dry on the asterisk in Jimmy Hoffa, Jr.'s rant about taking out those "son-of-a-b*tches" -- referring to Tea Party members -- when the vice president made his own contribution at a Labor Day rally. "This is a fight for the existence of organized labor," the veep shouted. "You are the only ones who can stop the barbarians at the gate!" And the diatribes have continued with the establishment of a website designed to track unfair comments made by those who, in President Obama's words, want to "cripple" America. Congresswoman Maxine Waters' snippet about telling the Tea...

Imagine that you couldn't drive on major highways without agreeing to put a camera in your car -- one that could film either the occupants or the vehicle’s surroundings and transmit the images back to a central office for inspection... It's hard to imagine Americans would tolerate such a direct, Big-Brotherish intrusion. But they might not notice if the all-seeing cameras were tucked inside another kind of government tracking technology that millions of Americans have already invited into their cars. Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that just signed a 10-year contract to provide in-car transponders such as the E-Z...

Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPSBy ADAM LIPTAK Published: September 10, 2011 WASHINGTON — The precedent is novel. More precisely, the precedent is a novel. In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described. **SNIP** Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down...

Imagine this scenario: The IRS may soon just do your taxes for you — and send you the bill.If this sounds farfetched, it’s not.With a new congressional “super committee” tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts by November, creative ways to find additional revenue are in high demand. And allowing the IRS to prepare you taxes could be one solution.The idea has been around for a while, but has been picking up steam in recent years. In 2006, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) argued it would close a $345 billion annual difference between what the government believes taxpayers...

Implicit in the contemporary American health care system is a threat: Conform and spend your life behaving yourself in limited jobs or we will deny you insurance and put your health and your family’s future at risk. Restrictions on health care availability are an effective form of social control. We often talk about this in terms of women’s health care. But too often lost in the health care debate is the broader truth: health care is used as a weapon of control. In a certain sense, we can be healthy or we can be truly free. So much for Patrick...

When you were growing up didn’t you hate the kids that changed the rules of the game when they were losing? Usually those kids were the bullies and you had to accept it and move on! But as adults you would think we would have outgrown such behavior. Maybe we have, but somebody at the City of Tallahassee has not! Tallahassean Todd Twilley recently challenged his red light camera ticket in the local court based on a Florida Department of Transportation rule that stated the timing of the yellow light he was charged with running should have been longer. The...

Sorry, did I say fire? I meant lies. Chariots of lies. They sound, and look, a lot alike. Fuzziness, please remember, is as good as accuracy. For many disadvantaged children, it’s better. They should not have to deal with further rejection and humiliation. You’d understand that if you weren’t a capitalist stooge. This is one of our most important lies. Sorry, I meant truths. Our job is to correct the ills of society, and provide advantages to the disadvantaged. Fuzziness is an important tool in this agenda. Let’s say that A is almost as tall as B. Surely we can...