Free Republic

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

Why not legalize same-sex marriage? Who could it possibly hurt? Children and the rest of society. That’s the conclusion of David Blankenhorn, who is anything but an anti-gay “bigot.” He is a life-long, pro-gay, liberal democrat who disagrees with the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexual behavior. Despite this, Blankenhorn makes a powerful case against Same-Sex marriage in his book, The Future of Marriage. He writes, “Across history and cultures . . . marriage’s single most fundamental idea is that every child needs a mother and a father. Changing marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would nullify this principle in culture and in...

A much more insideous move is behind the Gay Rights movement than most of us dare to imagine. It is an attempt to stamp out Moses and the laws handed him by God. You talk about the Audacity of Hope! The leftists are going for the "whole enchilada" on this one.more...

Lord Of The Flies Savages: Gang of Children Stripped, Beat And Tortured Boy, 15, Before Leaving Him For Dead In A Shallow Grave By CHRIS BROOKE 28th April 2009. Four children stripped and whipped a teenager before dumping him unconscious in a shallow grave in a scene reminiscent of the novel Lord of the Flies. The 15-year-old victim, who has a mental age of seven, was hit with planks and had lit cigarettes forced up his nose. He begged for mercy from his tormentors - a girl of 14, two boys aged 11 and another boy of 13. The girl...

Why do the most deliberate and sustained attacks on the family so often come from the socialist side of the political spectrum? While modern industrial capitalism puts pressure on the family, this pressure is incidental to the main structures of the market economy. By contrast, the most profound attacks on the family, including easy divorce, abortion and same sex marriage, have come deliberately from Socialism, not as its unintended by-product. My purpose today is to show that the socialist ideal of equality has played an independent role in the breakdown of the family. Socialism, which has grown up in parallel...

All across the country, archeologists, paleontologists and biologists are taking part in what is perhaps the greatest example of political correctness in history – their adherence to Darwinism and their attempts to ostracize any scientist who does not agree with them. In doing so, they are not only ignoring the vast buildup of recent scientific discoveries that seriously undermines the basics of Darwinism, but they are also participating, due to politically correctness, in a belief system that indirectly resulted in the deaths of millions of people – those slaughtered by the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Maos, the Pol Pots and...

Sometimes to understand one’s own era you have to immerse yourself in another. I pick up my copy of Paul Edmonds’ Peacocks and Pagodas as an example. This — though you’ve probably never heard of it — seems the best-regarded book ever written on the people and society of Burma. You may know it as Myanmar. What could be more esoteric, and yet profoundly revealing, about much broader issues? My copy is a first edition from 1924 and in its long life and travels it once belonged to T.N. Jayavelu, Antiquarian Bookseller of Choolai, Madras, India. But now it resides...

It looks as if the media will have to find another pretentious intellectual to refer to as “the conscience of the American theater” (according to The Boston Globe), “the moralist of the American theater” (The New York Times), and, most gratuitously, “the moralist of the past American century” (The Denver Post). In fact, given their track record, elitist intellectuals should probably refrain from using the word “moralist” altogether. Those words were written about Arthur Miller, the playwright who became famous by penning dreary plays about America’s alleged failures. Miller’s pompous liberalism has been forced upon high school and college students...

GOVERNMENT BY THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED In 1998, the people of Arizona approved public funding of state political campaigns as a means to reduce the influence of special interest money in our electoral process. A Citizens Clean Elections Commission was created to regulate this public funding program with the power to levy fines and in certain circumstances to require participating candidates to forfeit office for violating commission rules. The Citizens Clean Elections Commission has determined that David Burnell Smith, a participating candidate elected by the voters of his district to the Arizona House of Representatives, has violated commission rules...

As the sixth class in this mini-art appreciation set of lectures, it’s time to consider Dada and Surrealism. The roots for this movement of art fantasy goes back to Henri Rousseau and de Chirico in the late 19th and first decades of the 20th century. These unusual, dream-like settings provoke our imagination more than the emotion of Expressionism and the intellectual structure of Cubism. Henri Rousseau Sleeping Gypsy and de Chirico Mystery and Melancholy of a Street Note in the street images, how the long shadows create a mysterious, imminent mood, and that the “girl” is only a shadow of...

George Bush: re-elected. Tony Blair: re-elected. John Howard: re-elected. Meanwhile the two outstanding opponents of the Anglo-American anti-terror alliance, Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac, are in the pangs of the most humiliating defeat and repudiation in recent European politics. Who says there's no justice in the universe? Schroeder's Social Democratic party this weekend suffered a crushing defeat in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany's biggest and for many years a Social Democratic bastion. Chirac meanwhile is confronting a likely defeat in the May 29 referendum on the European Constitution. Schroeder had won his first election in 1998 as a...

...Her book is thus animated by dismay and perplexity over the way the French Enlightenment is seen as the main intellectual event of the 18th century, whereas a parallel and in many respects more successful movement in Britain is routinely relegated to an inferior status. Her heroes, therefore, are not Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau as much as Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke. In a similar spirit, she invokes and concurs with Hannah Arendt's notion that the American revolution, rather than the revolution in France, was the great political watershed of modern times. For Himmelfarb, the contrast between the...

Democratic Despotism By Ilana Mercer [posted September 16, 2004] Inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectual, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people. —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy, The God That Failed James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as "incompatible with personal security or the rights of property." Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a "small spot" (like Athens). Indeed, the Bush administration’s deafening demagoguery notwithstanding, democratic majoritarianism is thoroughly...

Unconditional Surrender to the Volonté Générale Tage Lindbom The Myth of Democracy | 1991 (from parts XI and XII) Nowhere is man so insignificant as in a democracy. …. But does not modern man have a great compensation in citizenship? Is not citizenship the great human assumption of responsibility and social morality? Actually, the father of universal citizenship, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has abolished the foundations of this citizenship because he proclaims the unidimensionality of popular sovereignty. For Rousseau, the highest norm is not law; the highest norm is the will of man, above which nothing can be admitted. But genuine...

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, OR THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC . . . According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century B.C. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ration 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the strings two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the...

Locke, Hume, & Rousseau - Classic Liberalism (not modern) revisited. ACTION The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. - John Locke, The True End of Civil Government, 1690. Two causes combine to produce every free action: the one moral, namely, the will, which determines the act: the other physical, namely, the strength which executes it. When I walk towards an objective, I must in the first place, have made up my mind to reach it: in the second, my feet must be capable of carrying me thither. A paralytic may wish to run, an active man...

An excerpt from "Culture Wars Invade the Lives of Boys". [full text] ... Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor turned popular writer, is the author of the most intense salvo: The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon and Schuster, 2000; $25). Now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Sommers throws down the gauntlet from the book's opening pages. She writes that it has fallen to her to tell "how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness and corporal daring of normal, decent males is...