Free Republic

The Atlantic last week hosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” at the University of Chicago, where I’m a student. Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Smith, Brian Stelter, and other boldface names studded the program, alongside many lesser-known members of the prestige press. They would gather, as a news release put it, to explore “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it...

Even inside a hotel so secure that it has body scanners at the entrance and snipers on the roof, US Vice President Mike Pence travels with a vast security detail. Its main function, it seems, is to elbow people out of the way so that the vice president and his unsmiling wife can walk through a lobby, crowded with European officials and military brass, and speak to no one. Which is perhaps unsurprising, for Pence was heading to the main forum of the Munich Security Conference - an annual event whose origins lie deep in the Cold War - to...

LAS VEGAS -- A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference, sources said on Saturday. He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project. Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland flight Thursday morning when he was pulled aside by customs...

Brothers, it is time to help you disappear! No, I have not invented a magic cloak, but DARPA (under bush) invented an anonymizing engine called TOR (www.tor.org) that accomplishes that with your Internet traffic. You can download the following file: http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/dist/tor-im-browser-1.1.12_en-US. exe (Note the extra space between the . and the "exe". Remove that and paste into your browser window for direct down load (DDL). Or, alternately go here for more information (http://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en). Now, the .exe link is better because it is a standalone copy of firefox with all the proxies and whatnot configured. All you do is run the...

The punchline to an old cartoon is "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but these days, that's no longer true. It's easier than ever for the government, Web sites and private businesses to track exactly what you do online, know where you've visited, and build up comprehensive profiles about your likes, dislikes and private habits. And with the federal government increasingly demanding online records from sites such as Google and others, your online privacy is even more endangered. But you don't need to be a victim. There are things you can do to keep your surfing habits anonymous...

There is no nihilism like the .... anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement, some of which do indeed filter down to children as young as 9. There have been many radical statements of this latter creed. In the infamous words of a National Park Service ecologist, "We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." One of the founders of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also allegedly declared that "Humans...

Yesterday, I just considered Anne Applebaum to have a conflict of interest over Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland. After her response to criticism for failing to disclose her husband’s efforts to get charges dropped against the director, it seems clear that Applebaum has lost whatever sense she formerly had — and that her readers are overwhelmingly repulsed by it. In responding to Patterico, Applebaum scoffs at the notion that the 13-year-old girl had been victimized — because she called her mother before the attack. I’m not kidding: Of course, there were some very legitimate disagreements, including two excellent ones from...

When Your Doctor is a Muslim: Medical Terrorism Comes to America By Debbie Schlussel www.debbieschlussel.com May 17, 2007 Sometimes--so many times--diversity is not what it's cracked up to be. Just ask Joseph Applebaum. Well, you could ask him. But you won't get an answer. He's dead. And he's dead because he was a Jew, and his doctor is a Muslim and grad of "Ayman Al-Zawahiri" Medical School. But Applebaum wasn't denied treatment for being a Jew in Egypt. Or elsewhere in the Muslim world. It happened right here on U.S. soil. In Chicago. As Muslim doctors continue to flood into...

Why would it be so difficult to find clarity on the absurd Islamic reaction to the Pope's recent speech? Muslims have proven the Pope's point. Many have become angry and violent precisely because of being accused of being violent. And their violence is slowly but surely convincing more and more people in the West that Islam has a serious problem (my empirical analysis of Midwesterners). I have been almost amazed at the clarity of reporting on this subject, even from the Associated Press. Today, the Washington Post was willing to publish an ostensibly decent editorial on the Pope controversy, written...

...The problem with the Gulag wasn't that the letter of the law wasn't followed — that the prisoners were given "arbitrary and indefinite" sentences. It's that the charges were trumped up and confessions were coerced. The situation at Gitmo is entirely different. No one argues that, at the very least, the vast majority of those imprisoned there were, in fact, al Qaeda personnel. The problem, according to those who scream about the unfairness at Gitmo, is that the prisoners aren't being treated as lawful combatants under the terms of the Geneva Convention or as prisoners of war. They have been...

Shubert Spero said that almost every time he visited his son-in-law's home on Shabbat, the meal was interrupted by someone knocking on the door to ask a medical question. It wasn't office hours. They interrupting a family meal, because David Applebaum, 50, the head of the emergency department at Shaare Zedek Hospital was everyone's personal doctor, Spero said. Spero's daughter-in-law, Yehudit, added, "he was a busy person, but he made time for everyone." Relatives said he always did additional research or made that extra phone call to help people. His son Natan said, "my father was one of the 36...

Sunday, May 25th, 8pm Eastern, CSPAN's Booknotes program will feature Anne Applebaum, author of the new book, Gulag, a History. Since some of you are interested in the book, thought you might want a heads up on this.