Free Republic

LONG before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran. Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in underground cellars of an old Assassin castle at Alamut, near the Caspian Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights. The discovery of these...

Will too many boys make China and India aggressive militarily? Our country is preoccupied with terrorism. But looking ahead, terrorism may be only one of our problems. China and India between them have 2.3 billion people. Although both nations have embraced some aspects of a market economy, one of them, China, is ruled by autocrats who manage a large military establishment. The People's Republic wants to control Hong Kong more than Hong Kong wants to be controlled and harbors aggressive tendencies toward Taiwan. Both India and Pakistan, though engaged in diplomatic talks, wish to control Kashmir, and each country has...

In promoting its political agenda, one of the world’s largest philanthropic agencies has made itself the biggest single financial contributor to a self-described Roman Catholic group dedicated to vigorously fighting the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and birth control. For more than 20 years, the Ford Foundation and Catholics For A Free Choice (CFFC) have forged a strong political and financial alliance that sacrifices the lives of the unborn to a discredited view of international economic development.[1] Founded in 1973, CFFC has been led since 1982 by Frances Kissling, a feminist who has actively promoted abortion for more than...

The German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) was a major contributor to theory and field studies in sociology. [1] He is best remembered for his distinction between two basic types of social groups. [2] Tonnies argued that there are two basic forms of human will: the essential will, which is the underlying, organic, or instinctive driving force; and arbitrary will, which is deliberative, purposive, and future (goal) oriented. Groups that form around essential will, in which membership is self-fulfilling, Tonnies called Gemeinschaft (often translated as community). Groups in which membership was sustained by some instrumental goal or definite end he termed...

The Myth of Socialization by John Loeffler, Steel on Steel Radio Program September 13, 2002 Every time I run into a public school teen it happens. "Hi, Ryan." Unintelligible grunt response. "Whatcha doing?" "Nuthin'." "Anything happenin'?" "Naw." Whereafter Ryan hurries off to pursue his active life of nothing happening with his friends and I check to see if I have acquired dengue fever without knowing it. So tell me, where is this socialization the government school crowd always promotes as a reason for not home schooling? When home schooling took on serious momentum two decades ago, educrats chanted the...

(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers.) Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us...

Wednesday, December 24, 2003 A Tale of Two Catholic Sociologists: One Incisive, the Other Delusory Bright Promise, Failed Community is a small book, but it has the effect of dynamite. The title refers to the bright promise of an American Catholic Church poised in the nineteen fifties to influence American culture through the natural law philosophy of Catholicism. But the title also refers to the failure of translating that promise when, with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the apparent political success of American Catholics ironically became a death sentence for Catholic influence in American culture. Here is how...

Please help a fellow FReeper. For a school project, I need to interview someone who has immigrated to the United States. Just simple questions - what was life like back home, why did you come, cultural differences experienced, etc. This is for a college level sociology class.

Vast changes since attack mostly negative FALL RIVER -- Nancy Lee Wood, chairwoman of the Bristol Community College Sociology and Psychology Department, believes much has changed culturally since Sept. 11, 2001. But she says the changes almost entirely have been negative. "There have been vast changes in the political culture of America, and they are not for the better," the doctor of Sociology said. "The Patriot Act alone has unraveled 200 years of constitutional legitimacy and we the public are not recognizing this. "An enormous transformation has taken place." She said the political elite and the corporate media are not...

 Here On The Island - by Lewis NapperA Scholarly Critique of the Style, Symbolism and Sociopolitical Relevance of Gilligan's Island  Great works of literature often attempt to confront us with the obvious in such a way as to call the inevitable into question. Some strive to explain through metaphor that which is too complex or too abstract to state literally. Other forms seek only to capture some moment in time so that future generations may experience and learn from what has gone before them.  All of these qualities are ambitiously gathered in Sherwood Schwartz's masterwork, "Gilligan's Island." Through a...

The Politics of Deviance by Anne B. Hendershott (Encounter Books, 2002), 194 pages Most sociologists today deem the study of deviance an academic irrelevancy. In The Politics of Deviance, Anne B. Hendershott, a professor of sociology at the University of San Diego, seeks to put it back in the curriculum. "[F]or the majority of sociologists today," Hendershott writes, "the only reason to study deviance is to dissect a long-dead discipline in order to understand why so many sociologists once deemed it important." "Most of the sociology textbooks today," the author continues, "are critical of the notion of defining deviance and...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- How infants respond to their mother's touches and smiles influences their development in a manner much like what young birds experience when learning to sing, according to a research project involving the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington and the Biological Foundations of Behavior Program at Franklin and Marshall College. An article on the research, titled "Social interaction shapes babbling: Testing parallels between birdsong and speech," will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Web site for the journal...

The events of Sept. 11 loom so large in our public and private consciousness that they now form the context in which everything else takes place. They altered the course of history; they altered how we see the world around us. And they will alter the future just as surely as they have altered the past.

<p>AT THE ANNUAL meeting of psychology researchers in Boston three years ago, two scientists weighed in on a question that seemed to be as much in need of investigation as whether the sun rises in the east.</p> <p>The pair had asked a professor to send weekly e-mail messages to students of his who had done poorly on their first exam for the class. Each missive included a review question. In addition, one-third of the students, chosen at random, also received a message -- advice to study, for example -- suggesting that how well they did in the course was under their own control. The other third received the review question plus a "You're too smart to get a D!" pep talk aimed at raising their self-esteem, which everyone knows boosts academic performance.</p>

BENNINGTON, Vt. (AP) -- Wander down a certain hallway at Molly Stark Elementary School, and before you see it your nose will know it's there: The air is sweet, antiseptic, a bit minty. It's ... a dentist's office? In this sleepy southern Vermont town, nearly half of the school's 400 students visit dentist Michael Brady regularly. ``They go to gym, they go to reading, they go to the dentist -- it's all the same to them,'' Brady said. At a time when schools are being asked to focus on academic essentials more than ever, a small but growing number are...