Free Republic

 A Lioness in the Streets   In the 1930s, someone heard Adolph Hitler being screamed at behind closed doors by the head of the German Central Bank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Who could get away with screaming at Hitler and live? Someone fronting from a group so powerful, it could have ordered that Hitler be made into Hoffaburger. It turns out that when Hitler first assumed power, he went with hat in hand to make his case to the heads of German industry that his gangster militias could deliver labor peace.  The big talking heads are mum about all this, so let this...

Dear EarthTalk: What is the best way to measure how close we are to the dreaded "point of no return" with climate change? In other words, when do we think we will have gone too far? — David Johnston, via EarthTalk.org While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return” - when no amount of cutbacks on greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic global warming - climate scientists warn we may be getting awfully close. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average global temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees...

Laurence H. Tribe, the highly regarded liberal scholar of constitutional law, still speaks of President Obama as a proud teacher would of a star student. “He was one of the most amazing research assistants I’ve ever had,” Mr. Tribe said in a recent interview. Mr. Obama worked for him at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Tribe has taught for four decades. Many in the Obama administration and at Harvard are bewildered and angry that Mr. Tribe, who argued on behalf of Al Gore in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, has emerged as the leading legal opponent of...

San Francisco activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Super PAC Monday announced the billionaire Democrat will wage a campaign to put Republicans on the “hot seat” about climate change and spend “what it takes” for an aggressive new high-tech “war room” to track — and attack — GOP candidates in 2016. The program, based at the NextGen headquarters in the Financial District — with satellite offices in Washington, D.C., and other cities — aims to make climate change a “top tier” issue next year. It will focus its firepower on turning environmental concerns into a “wedge issue,” especially with young voters,...

Ever wonder where the droves of Russian-language Internet trolls get those satirical graphics they deploy to smear Western and Ukrainian leaders? Turns out there's a website with a vast archive of images helping them pepper their posts with visual invective. Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on April 2 that the website with the Cyrillic address[...]translates from Russian as "in the headquarters") hosts thousands of these ready-made images for use by hundreds of paid trolls working for a secretive organization in St. Petersburg. The images -- mainly crude mash-ups or regular photographs touched up with sarcastic and juvenile captions -- are largely...

Alevtina is one of several teachers who lost their jobs in St. Petersburg after being outed by an anti-gay activist. While most resigned quietly, the 27-year-old music teacher decided to fight her dismissal in court — an unusual step in Russia where gays have faced increasing pressure in recent years. The rising anti-gay sentiment has coincided with the passage of a controversial Russian law that prohibits exposing children to gay "propaganda." The law has made it easy to target teachers, because they work directly with children.

A New Jersey girl had a once in a lifetime thrill this week when she went to the White House to meet President Barack Obama and even had a chance to sit in his chair in the Oval Office. "I'm trying to be a community organizer," Sparkle Prevard, of Atlantic City, told Obama. Prevard visited Washington D.C. with several other young women who were all named Youth of the Year winners. The South Jersey teen, who graduated from Atlantic City High School, plans to attend Richard Stockton State College in the fall, according to the Boys & Girls Club in...

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared Monday that “reading the Quran” reminds him of “quintessential American values.” The Muslim Brotherhood-aligned influence operation he addressed was pleased. The rest of us should be alarmed. There are, of course, passages of the Koran that are peaceable and encourage tolerance. Presumably, those are the ones to which Mr. Johnson was referring. Unfortunately, according to the authorities of Islam and their supremacist doctrine of shariah, such passages have been explicitly replaced by others that are virulently hateful and intolerant. They demand adherents engage in holy war, not practice true American values. Mr. Johnson is...

More and more, posts and commentaries on the Internet in Russia and even abroad are generated by professional trolls, many of whom receive a higher-than-average salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online. There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. Many emanate from Russia's most famous "troll factory," the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg's Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle. In recent weeks, former employees have come forward to talk to RFE/RL about life inside the factory, where hundreds of people work...

An American blogger turned down the offer of a lifetime this past weekend: getting paid to do nothing. The slight catch was that he had to publish articles written by someone else on his blog and claim them as his own—no big deal, right? According to the blogger, David Swanson, after giving a talk at an anti-war event in Washington DC on March 20, he was approached by a young man with a thick Russian accent who introduced himself as Alexsei G. Padalko. This man showed Swanson his business card, which identified him as an air attaché assistant for the...

Pharrell Williams spoke to the UN General Assembly on International Day of Happiness according to the Daily Mail. At least, that is what the headline of the article is supposed to make you think.

You’ve probably heard the old statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters that they'd eventually pound out the complete works of Shakespeare. Now we know, thanks to the Internet, that this isn't true. The evidence can be seen by anyone who spends any time on Facebook, where sentient intelligence seems to have been replaced by boring insipid images. Facebook has gradually risen to a level of stature that’s taken on a dimension that’s even bigger than a posted photo of Kim Kardashian’s rear end. This premiere social media platform has evolved into an online political playground that...

The Ukrainian government needs to find a “fine line” that would allow it to both protect free speech and fight Kremlin propaganda, a top official of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said in an interview with the Kyiv Post. There has been a debate in Ukraine on whether pro-Kremlin media, which are inciting Russia’s war against Ukraine and fabricating lies, should be banned. While some argue that they are a threat to national security, others condemn such measures as an attack on free speech. “The Ukrainian government needs to find a very fine line with the help...

ST. PETERSBURG -- Last May, Tatiana N decided she wanted a higher salary than the average journalist can expect. After responding to an advertisement in the popular HeadHunter job-search website, she became a Kremlin-paid Internet troll. Tatiana -- who, like others interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used -- worked out of a 2,500-square-meter warehouse in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. The job paid 40,000 rubles a month, significantly more than the 25,000-30,000 most journalists make. But it came, she said, "with pain." Tatiana joined a round-the-clock operation in which an army of trolls disseminated...

3. “The social contract” A valid contract must be presented honestly and agreed to voluntarily, without duress or fraud. The social contract does not meet this standard because the state will initiate the use of force against anyone who does not voluntarily enter into the social contract. The state is also not automatically dissolved when it fails to uphold its obligations under the social contract, so the presentation is dishonest if it even occurs at all. Therefore, the social contract cannot be considered a legitimate contract.

Liberal philanthropist George Soros and the Ford Foundation have lavished groups supporting the administration’s “net neutrality” agenda, donating $196 million and landing proponents on the White House staff, according to a new report. And now, as the Federal Communications Commission nears approving a type of government control over the Internet, the groups are poised to declare victory in the years-long fight, according to the report from MRC Business, an arm of the conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center. “These left-wing groups not only impacted the public debate and funded top liberal think tanks from the Center for American Progress...

We hear a lot about the United States' Judeo-Christian heritage, but according to President Obama, "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding." That's what the president told a White House conference on "countering violent extremism" on Wednesday. Obama has said similar things in the past: "I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” Obama said in a June 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt. "Islam has always been part of America," he said in a 2010 statement marking the start of Ramadan. And in a 2014 statement marking Eid, Obama...

Everyone wants to know whether Jeb Bush can survive his support for Common Core and comprehensive immigration reform in today's Republican Party. One deal-breaker that might surprise people, though: His opposition to gay marriage. NBC News and Marist College are out with a batch of new 2016 primary polls. And as you might expect, Common Core, immigration reform, belief in man-made climate change and support for raising taxes on the wealthy are among those with the potential to alienate lots of conservatives. But according to the polls, so does opposition to gay marriage--an issue on which Bush agrees with basically...

Contestant: "Who is Barrack Hussein Obama?" Trebek: "I'm sooooo sorry. Who..." All of a sudden, Trebek's legs start to shake, uncontrollably. The huge bulge in his tight pants starts to vibrate violently. Trebek stops; reaches down; he answers his i-phone1.

RIGA/VILNIUS — Responding to what they see as a wave of Kremlin propaganda over Ukraine, the governments of the three Baltic states are keeping a wary eye on pro-Moscow television channels and stepping up their own broadcasts in Russian. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all part of the Soviet Union until 1991, are nervous of a newly assertive Russia and fret that their large Russian-speaking minorities could be susceptible to Moscow's message. But at a time of dramatic developments in eastern Ukraine, with fierce battles followed by a new cease-fire deal this week, the Baltic efforts to fight back over the...