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NORWEGIAN SOCCER: One player was knocked down, and several members of the audience were threatened with decapitation and rape when several of the players in the 7.division game flew of the handle. The audience got more than they bargained for when they attended Sunday’s game between Djerv 2 and Hetlevik at Askøy outside Bergen. Several of the Djerv 2 players acted aggressively towards both other players and the audience. According to the local paper Bergensavisen, one person was injured after being knocked to the ground by a Djerv player. Violent threats The sudden outburst of rage was also directed against...

Denunciations of television have become as routine as breathing: the programming is crass, stupid, propagandistic, so bad that only an idiot would watch it yet everybody does. Actually things are worse. They are much worse. To see what is happening, start with what may be the crucial truth of our times: People will watch a screen. They will watch anything in preference to nothing, watch programs they don’t really like, comedies so unfunny that only the laugh track tells them when to respond. The bright know that the fare is witless, that it is directed at fools. The ads irritate...

Firearms users often get an undeserving negative portrayal in the popular press and films. It's time for the real story to be told. A new book and a DVD provide some much-needed balance By James A. Swan, Ph.D. Author "In Defense of Hunting" A lawyer by training, John Grisham has penned some of the most popular thriller novels of recent years, most of which have become successful feature films. Many of Grisham's stories involve courtroom drama and the legal battles. In "Runaway Jury," 12 jurors who have been investigated, manipulated and harassed by lawyers and consultants trying to secure a...

On Sunday morning, March 21, I saw what I never expected to see. The lead story on the "Sunday Morning" news show was on the future of Social Security/Medicare: "Cloudy Future For Retirees." Charles Osgood, the show’s host, introduced the segment by saying that Social Security is the third rail of American politics: "Touch it, and you die." This is a familiar slogan, based on an analogy with the New York City subway system’s electrical power supply. The slogan goes back to the Goldwater campaign, but it’s nonetheless true. Yet the show basically called for Congress to touch the rail....

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Hollywood is not how debauched, depraved and decadent its stories are — considering how untouched this area of American culture is from Christian influence, we could hardly expect different. No, what is most surprising is how many films still manage to capture brief flickering lights of truth in an industry that feeds almost solely upon darkness — a darkness that disguises itself as “tolerance” (when it is in fact a refusal to acknowledge any moral law) and “self-empowerment” (that is in reality little more than self worship). True, our silver screen icons celebrate fornication,...

Straight and narrow As I waded through page after page of interminable dogma and municipal jargon, one statement suddenly leapt out at me: ‘Some 50 per cent of people being approved of as adoptive parents in Brighton and Hove are from the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.’ Those words — from a policy document entitled ‘Sexuality — the New Agenda’, published this month by the Local Government Association (LGA), the umbrella body for local authorities — were followed by another disturbing sentence: ‘Brighton and Hove Council has also shown that it is committed to taking rigorous action against homophobia, including,...

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia's Labor opposition promised a tough new crackdown on illegal immigration if it won the upcoming election, with identity cards for foreign workers and a coastguard with specially equipped patrol boats. Far from relaxing Australia's immigration controls as many of its own supporters had hoped, opposition leader Mark Latham said Labor would increase them to make it even harder for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to enter the country. "Labor will always put the national interest first and that means keeping our labour market free of organised rackets that rely on illegal and exploited workers," he said...

The fate of families and children in Sweden shows the truth of Ludwig von Mises's observation that "no compromise" is possible between capitalism and socialism. Here I show how the welfare state's growth can be viewed as the transfer of the "dependency" function from families to state employees. The process began in 19th-century Sweden, through the socialization of children's economic time via school attendance, child labor, and state old-age pension laws. These changes, in turn, created incentives to have only a few, or no children. In the 1930s, social democrats Gunnar and Alva Myrdal used the resulting "depopulation crisis" to...

John Lott (buy his book), Richard Poe (buy his), and all manner of libertarians have been making the case that widespread gun ownership decreases crime; and that personal gun ownership is consistent with, even guaranteed by, the 2nd amendment. Even the government, following the war between the states, saw it that way as freed black slaves were guaranteed gun-ownership rights because, as several courts decided, gun ownership was the most important test of whether a man is truly free. Thomas Sowell and John Lott have shown that multiple-shooting incidents, where a single nut goes on a killing spree, happen mainly...

Guns and Communism A gun store clerk told me recently that many young men come into his shop offering to sell their entire gun collections. They dump the weapons on the counter and announce, "I’m getting married and my fiancée says it’s either me or the guns." The anti-gun ideology has burrowed its way into the tenderest corner of Americans’ hearts – the place where love resides between man and woman. "There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition," says Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. "A...

Protestant America by Joseph Sobran Today I write in an unaccustomed vein. I speak as a member of a minority group, though maybe not in the usual aggrieved style of minority group members. I am a Catholic in a Protestant country. Even if Protestants are no longer a numerical majority, they have made this country what it is, and its culture remains thoroughly Protestant. What does it feel like to be a Catholic in Protestant America? It feels wonderful. On the whole, Protestants must be among the world’s most decent people. I feel grateful to live among them, and it’s...