Free Republic

As the national media continues to promote the idea that these absurd "Occupy" protests demonstrate some groundswell of popular opinion, reports continue to emerge from localized media showing how ugly these encampments are becoming. A report out of Cleveland that  police are investigating a rape claim made by a 19-year-old woman last weekend has received little attention. Do you suppose if a rape claim was made against a tea partier that it would receive more attention?It's gotten so bad in Baltimore that organizers are discouraging alleged victims from going to the police (maybe they should go to Sheriff Biden).Meanwhile,...

California's city governments, especially those that overspent windfall revenues during the housing boom, are in trouble as the state's recession grinds on. Vallejo already has filed for bankruptcy protection. Dozens of other cities face severe budget deficits that, unless closed, could lead to the same sorry place. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa even suggested it as a possibility while calling for spending cuts. The B-word has also been kicked around in San Diego, which has an immense unfunded retirement obligation. Stockton, hard hit by the housing meltdown, is finding that the lavish sports and entertainment venues it constructed – not...

On the Sunday, December 13, syndicated Chris Matthews Show, as he ended the show with words of praise for Morgan Freeman’s latest film Invictus and its depiction of Nelson Mandela uniting blacks and whites in South Africa in the 1990s, host Matthews referred to "white tribalism" having been stirred up in America, and showed clips of anti-Obama protesters. Matthews: "In this world of ours today, it seems that any idiot – almost any idiot can rally the forces of tribalism, including white tribalism in this country. You can do it with a frown or a smile – easiest thing in...

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.” Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will. The barbaric incident took place in a remote village of Jafarabad district and a PPP minister and some...

June 28, 2008 Is Mugabe the real problem in Zimbabwe? We are deluding ourselves if we think that getting rid of one mad, old tyrant will stop the barbarism Matthew Parris In politics as in our personal lives, just six words comprise one of the commonest falsehoods around. Those six words are: “It can't go on like this.” But it can. I've come to the melancholy conclusion that in Zimbabwe it must. This weekend there will be voices in our Prime Minister's ear suggesting how in one bound he might cast off his dithering reputation. To help to broker the...

The clash of civilizations we're living through is widely seen as a battle between Islam and Christendom. I'm convinced it's more basic than that. The reason Iraq and Afghanistan remain unsettled battlefields isn't that our two civilizations can't agree on the nature of God. It's because we can't agree on the nature of man. In the West, we take it for granted that human beings are autonomous individuals. We decide for ourselves how we dress, where we work, whom we marry. Our political system is an atomized democracy, in which everyone is expected to vote according to their own idiosyncratic...

Setting priorities in keeping with your values is a daily task for us all. I may, for example, feel the need to spend two hours exercising every day. But if that conflicts with my family responsibilities, I have to consult an overall worldview, a scheme of values, to decide which imperative comes first. So it goes in public life no less than in private. The world Jewish community is united in few things, but a rough consensus has emerged that our greatest worry, our top priority in need of being addressed, is the threat posed by Muslim extremists. With some...

So, what did you learn in school today? Margaret Wente Toronto Globe and Mail Tuesday, June 12, 2007 Shortly after the shooting death of Jordan Manners, the 15-year-old Toronto student, eighth-grade students at nearby Oakdale Park Middle School were called to an assembly. The subject: relations with the police. It's a hot issue in that part of town. The community is in an uproar over the shooting and allegations are flying that police have been heavy-handed in their hunt for Jordan's killer. But the group invited by the school to address the students weren't interested in improving relations with...

I just finished a (long) article by David Ronfeldt called "IN SEARCH OF HOW SOCIETIES WORK; Tribes — The First and Forever Form" Here, I'll post the Abstract: The latest in a string of efforts to develop a theoretical framework about social evolution, based on how people develop their societies by using four forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks — this installment focuses on the tribal form. The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and...

September 11, 2006— In the five years since 9/11, much looking-back has been done. The problem is we haven't looked back far enough. To understand the nature of the enemy in the Middle East and to evaluate the prospects for democracy and peace, we need to extend our gaze not five years into the past, but five hundred and even five thousand. I've spent the last four years writing two books about Alexander the Great's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, 331-327 B.C. What has struck me in the research is the dead-ringer parallels between that ancient East-West clash and the...

Confirming weeks of rumors, CBS has revealed the identities of the twenty castaways who will be competing in this fall's Survivor: Cook Islands and announced that the castaways will -- in what the show's producer and host both acknowledge to be a controversial move -- initially be organized into four tribes divided along ethnic lines (African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic and White.) "We're going to take some heat for it," Survivor executive producer Mark Burnett acknowledged to People about the segregated tribe decision that will no doubt give the thirteenth edition of the long-running reality series -- which will also include the...

Celebrate the 'Canadian achievement' John Geiger, National Post Published: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 When Australian Prime Minister John Howard visited Canada in May, commentators noted just how much Stephen Harper owed to him -- from his family-friendly platform of tax benefits to his determination to strengthen ties with the United States. During their talks, Harper also expressed interest in emulating the Australian approach to climate change outside Kyoto. But there is one policy area Harper and his government have yet to borrow and should, namely a Canadian version of Howard's concept of the "Australian Achievement." Howard used his Australia...

The debate about neonatal circumcision is over. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), neonatal circumcision is the result of ignorance, bad medical practice and American social and cultural pressure. Regarding the three most commonly cited justifications for neonatal circumcision (penile cancer, venereal disease and penile hygiene), the AAP now states that the benefits are negligible, which means that the majority of American men are walking around without foreskins for no good reason. Yet, the barbaric practice shows no sign of abating, and for this reason I plan to shed some light on the cultural dark spot of circumcision....

A question of loyalty George Jonas National Post Friday, March 10, 2006 As a footnote to Martin Collacott's outstanding report on Canada's refugee system, excerpted in these pages, I'll revisit a topic I've touched upon many times since the mid-1980s. It's a topic of increasing importance, I believe. Until recent times, the West has been spoiled by the loyalty of immigrants, even from hostile regions or cultures. During the First World War, with negligible exceptions, immigrants from enemy countries as well as their children remained loyal to Canada and the U.S. throughout the hostilities. During the Second World War,...

Ever wonder how to piss off an Iraqi? It's relatively simple. Just ask one, no sooner than you have been introduced: "So you're an Iraqi? How absolutely fascinating. Do tell: Are you a Kurd or a Sunni or a Shiite?" This will work every time, just as it's always so polite and so useful to ask a brown-skinned American if he or she is Chicano or, you know … Latina. If you fall into conversation with an Iraqi, you will soon enough find out what you want to know. Kurds are not shy about mentioning their nationhood, and followers of...

I’m generally an optimist, and it’s been my pleasure to be able to write mostly about the good and the noble things in our lives. But the events in the Gulf – of Mexico – have brought to a head a summer and a year that has been getting progressively uglier and more painful to watch. Who can not see the way the country has changed, not since 9/11, but before that – since the 2000 election? Who cannot feel the split, the division, that rips like a shredding sail on a broken mast, canvas tearing like the sound of...

Fascism in a Lei By Edward Hudgins ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org What could be friendlier or more welcoming place than Hawaii, America's 50th state? If S-147, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005, introduced by that state's Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka, is passed by the U.S. Congress, the ugly scourge of racism — the real, honest-to-badness type, not the name calling type that gets flung around too often — will rule those islands which, in the future, might cease to be part of the United States. The proposed legislation would divide Hawaiians into "natives" and all others. Anyone with a drop of...

With most of the nation distracted by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the first Supreme Court confirmation hearings in nearly a decade, the Senate may quietly approve a bill to recognize native Hawaiians as a new Indian tribe and establish a separate governing authority for people of their race within Hawaii. “This is the worst bill you’ve never heard of,” said John Fund, political analyst for the Wall Street Journal, speaking at the Heritage Foundation August 30. The bill would create an open-ended negotiation process between a proposed native-Hawaiian governing entity and the federal and state governments. The process...

Brock Chisolm, former Director of the (United Nations) World Health Organization, is quoted as saying, "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas." [GWB quote of the day, 7/7/1999]. Remove from the minds of men? Doesn't that sound like mental conditioning? How does that square with the Alexander Downer/Tim Fischer version of globalism as freer markets? It doesn't, does it? Some years ago another hero of the globalist-Left, B.F.Skinner, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, mounted a concerted attack on what he...

BOSTON (AP) - In this land of Kennedys, O'Neills, Fitzgeralds and Flynns, where shamrocks grace the jerseys of the basketball team, the Italians are taking over. With the ascendancy of Salvatore DiMasi to the speakership of the Massachusetts House last week, Italian-Americans hold the two top positions in the state Legislature for the first time in its 224-year history. "Finally," said Sheryl Iftikhar (maiden name Spataro), who works at a convenience store in DiMasi's lifelong home, the city's North End, a neighborhood where visitors can buy signs that read "Parking for Italians Only." DiMasi, who took over from Irishman Tom...