Free Republic

Font Size: How Much Worse Off Are We? By Arnold Kling  Published   07/15/2004  "…millions of low wage American workers are earning less in real, inflation-accounted for dollars today than they earned in the 1970s."-- Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders Today, there are two Americas. One America agrees with Congressman Sanders and Senator John Edwards that life is getting harder for working Americans, that things have been going down hill for thirty years, and that our only hope is bigger government. The other America realizes that it is nonsense to suggest that the middle class is disappearing and that the standard...

On Saturday, when 600,000 high school students open their SAT test booklets, one question they won't find is: Why are they required to complete this key college admissions exam within three hours? The correct answer: Because the tests always have been strictly timed. Yet the College Board, which administers the test, concedes the time limit isn't intended to measure how students perform under deadline. Rather the restriction merely serves a logistical purpose. Providing more time would complicate efforts to book rooms and protect against cheating. Because the College Board is wedded to a stopwatch system, it places unnecessary time pressures...

GOING TOO FAR by Timothy Rollins, Editor and Publisher September 22, 2003 For some, it's love of the game. For others, it's an opportunity to get away for two or three hours to watch athletes at the top of their game doing what they do best. For players, it's a dream come true, getting paid to do what they did in the playground as a kid. For fans, it's a chance to relive their childhood as they take their children or just some friends to whatever game they're watching.However, in the last couple of years, I've had to ask myself...

JAPAN plans to deploy advanced interceptor missiles to beef up its defence system amid fears North Korea has up to 170 medium-range missile units targeting the country, a daily newspaper said today. The Security Council of Japan and the cabinet will adopt a plan to allocate funds for two types of missile systems - Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) - in late July, the Yomiuri Shimbun said, quoting government sources. The government intends to begin the 200-billion-yen ($US1.7 billion ($2.54 billion) defence program as early as April 2007, the mass-circulation newspaper said. The plan came after the...

State of ConfusionBrouhahas — intellectual and otherwise. Conservatives are accustomed to liberals not understanding the zoology of our movement. But the use and abuse of the term "neoconservative" has exceeded even the high allowance for cliché and ignorance generally afforded to those who write or talk about conservatism from outside the conservative ant farm. In fact, neoconservative has become a Trojan Horse for vast arsenal of ideological attacks and insinuations. For some it means Jewish conservative. For others it means hawk. A few still think it means squishy conservative or ex-liberal. And a few don't even know what the word...

Whoever said that the university stands as a pillar of civilization has obviously never been to Arizona State. Arizona's public universities, now infamous for their broad progressive curricula composed of subjects to the likes of queer pulp fiction, postmodern pornography and special workshops on "sex workers," have always been a string of lone islands surrounded by a reality that remains alien to the hermitic Marxists lying within their academic workings. There is indeed a dark underside lurking beneath the trite silliness of academic department heads – who for the most part missed out on the latest social and political developments...

The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has blamed misleading intelligence for the deaths of 14 people, including nine children, in an operation to assassinate the Palestinian fugitive at the top of Israel's most-wanted list. Only a day after describing the raid that killed the Hamas military chief, Salah Shehadeh, as "one of our major successes", Mr Sharon said he and the Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, would never have approved the air strike against a block of flats in Gaza City had they known innocent people were at risk. Mr Sharon has reportedly called for an investigation into the intelligence brief...

No more JPEGs - ISO to withdraw image standard By Andrew Orlowski in London Posted: 07/23/2002 at 12:09 EST The ISO standards body will take the unprecedented step of withdrawing the JPEG image format as a formal standard if Forgent Networks, a small Texan company, continues to demand royalties on a seventeen-year old patent. The Register has spoken to representatives of both the JPEG committee and Forgent Networks this week. According to Richard Clark, JPEG committee member and JPEG.org webmaster, Forgent's royalty grab - coming after two decades of royalty-free use - means that ISO is obliged to withdraw the...