I recently completed a book defending free speech. Emerald Press scheduled it for publication but then decided not to proceed. Here's what it said about the book in Emerald's September 2019 catalogue:

In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor
Author James R. Flynn, University of Otago, New Zealand

Synopsis: The good university is one that teaches students the intellectual skills they need to be intelligently critical — of their own beliefs and of the narratives presented by politicians and the media. Freedom to debate is essential to the development of critical thought, but on university campuses today free speech is restricted for fear of causing offence. In Defense of Free Speech surveys the underlying factors that circumscribe the ideas tolerated in our institutions of learning. James Flynn critically examines the way universities censor their teaching, how student activism tends to censor the opposing side and how academics censor themselves, and suggests that few, if any, universities can truly be seen as 'good.' In an age marred by fake news and social and political polarization, In Defense of Free Speech makes an impassioned argument for a return to critical thought.

The government wants to tax, ban or reformulate our vices.

Slipped out in the dying days of Theresa May's administration, the government's consultation paper on the future of health deserves more attention than it received at the time. One of the main messages from the paper is that the methods employed to attack smokers will be applied with increasing enthusiasm to every aspect of our lifestyles.

Most widely publicised was the government's plan to eliminate smoking by 2030. As Christopher Snowdon pointed out on spiked, the aim is much bolder than before: prohibition, rather than reduced use. The argument is as follows: if tobacco products are available for sale, a proportion of the population will want to use them. The only way to 'eliminate' smoking is to ban it altogether. Of course, as the experience of prohibiting various other products tells us, from alcohol in Prohibition-era America to cannabis, heroin and cocaine today, a ban on tobacco products would not actually eliminate the supply and use of these products. It would simply change the supplier from legally run shops to criminals. Indeed, the high level of taxation applied to cigarettes is, in itself, a form of prohibition. And - surprise, surprise - there is a thriving black market in cut-price baccy.

The UK's Labour Party is considering extending voting rights to all foreign citizens with residency rights in the country, a move guaranteed to upset the balance of power - especially in the case of a future Brexit referendum.

Labour will "extend equal rights to vote to all UK residents" if it wins the next general election, according to a motion set to be voted on during the party's annual conference in Brighton on Tuesday. It is "fundamentally wrong" that millions of UK residents cannot vote in general elections, the motion states. It is very likely to pass, according to the Independent newspaper.

The measure was inserted by Labour for Free Movement, a coalition of party members working to extend citizens' rights to migrants. It also seeks to "close all detention centres" and "scrap all Hostile Environment measures," referring to laws designed to make life as difficult as possible for people who are in the UK illegally, hoping to convince them to leave the country.

This day, 18 years ago, the world watched aghast as arguably the worst terrorist attack in history supposedly unfolded before out eyes. The shock and anger generated by 9/11 was understandable. Nearly three thousand innocent people, citizens from across the world, lost their lives that day. Many thousands more have perished, and will perish prematurely, due to the toxins in the dust they inhaled on 9/11. It is truly a day we should never forget.

Many people believe that the official account of 9/11 is totally unbelievable. We are going to look at some of the reasons why. For considerably more people, even suggesting this is a gross act of disrespect. At least that is what the mainstream media would have us believe. If so, it is a disrespect shared by many of the families of 9/11 victims who have been fighting for answers to numerous unresolved questions for nearly two decades.

In truth, the allegation of 'disrespect' is preposterous. If you believe you witness a murder and the wrong person is then convicted, is it an act of disrespect to the victim to point this out? It doesn't matter if you are wrong, what matters is that you believe the evidence of your own eyes and act upon it in good faith. In such circumstances, saying nothing is the true act of disrespect for the victim. Those who question 9/11 aren't disrespecting anyone's memory. They are fighting for the truth they believe the victims deserve.

9/11 - The War On Terror In Perspective

9/11 Propelled the world into the global "War on Terror." Research shows that, to 2018, more than one million people have been killed in the resultant U.S led wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, with the number of lives subsequently lost in Pakistan also notable in the study. Further wars and conflicts, linked to the war on terror, in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Chad, Palestine and elsewhere have killed at least one million more since 9/11. There is also considerable evidence that this horrific post 9/11 death toll has been grossly underestimated.

The folks at Union Theological Seminary are taking the concept of "talking to your plants" to a frightening new level. Each year, students at the seminary pay a ridiculous amount of money to go to the school, and they are there to be trained to be the Christian leaders of tomorrow. But instead, they are being taught to confess their "climate sins" to potted plants, and eventually these impressionable young minds will be leading churches and Christian institutions all over America. I realize that this story is so bizarre that it sounds like somebody made it up, but it is actually true. The following was posted by the official Twitter account of Union Theological Seminary last week...

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

What do you confess to the plants in your life?

"I'd rather report her mother to the police than review her book for the newspaper. It's horrifying reading," Danish journalist Mikael Jalving has said of the book Scenes from the heart about Swedish teenage climate activist and icon Greta Thunberg, penned by her own mother.

Jyllands-Posten star journalist Mikael Jalving has called award-winning Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg "poor thing" caught in a "disintegrating family" and a "devilish covenant" with her own mother.

Jalving dismissed Thunberg's mother Malena Ernman's book Scenes From the Heart as scary reading and rated it only one star.

"The book contains a story of failure," Jalving told the Danish newspaper BT.

Jalving called Thunberg "poor thing" and stressed that she has previously suffered from depression and an eating disorder, whereas her current diagnoses include obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Asperger's syndrome. Beata, her little sister, has also been diagnoses with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Asperger's and OCD.

According to Jalving, Ernman's book conjures a picture of a family that's disintegrating. Jalving believes Ernman focuses too much on making Greta Thunberg a star instead of addressing why both her daughters are so sick and feel an extreme urge to save the world instead of dealing with their own teenage lives.

A US soldier arrested for sharing information on how to build bombs also allegedly planned to travel to Ukraine to fight with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and plotted to bomb a major American news network, according to the FBI.

Jarrett William Smith, a soldier stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, has been arrested after unwittingly sharing bomb-making instructions with an FBI informant. The private first class is charged with one count of "distributing information related to explosives and weapons of mass destruction," according to charging documents released Monday.

Smith reportedly planned to travel to Ukraine to fight alongside the far-right Azov Battalion and also talked about a plot to blow up the headquarters of an American news network with "a large vehicle bomb" in his conversations with the informant.

Dramatic cell-phone video shows the moment a 5-year-old girl crawls out from under a Bronx subway car that her suicidal dad had just fatally leaped in front of — with her cradled in his arms.

"Little by little, my love, little by little!" one onlooker can be heard encouraging the little girl in between sobs, as she inches out from under a southbound No. 4 train at the Kingsbridge Road station.

Once she grasps the outstretched arm of a good Samaritan who had lowered himself onto the track, the girl is hoisted up onto the platform, into a crowd of shocked strap-hangers who rush to console her, footage shows.

Moments earlier, the girl's dad, a 45-year-old Bronx man, lifted the girl into his arms and leaped in front of an oncoming train around 8 a.m., ending his life in front of horrified commuters — but miraculously leaving her nearly unscathed, authorities and sources said.

Adolescent climate change protester Greta Thunberg has stage-parents, literally. Her mother sang opera internationally until the teenager convinced her to quit due to greenhouse gas emissions from flying, and her father and grandfather both gained fame through acting and directing.

Now they've pivoted into the parental act of every stage-parent looking to secure the next generation of fame. Apparently, the Swedish version of a Teri Shields pimps their kid out — not to Penthouse, but to the cause of climate apocalypse.

For all that conservatives have rightly griped at the performative pointlessness of Thunberg's schtick, and for all that liberals have rightly griped that a waning but still significant segment of conservatives deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the biggest travesty lost in the hype about the Swedish activist who recently sailed to American shores is that her parents, the media, and the climate alarmist left are basically engaging in child abuse.

Cases of kids entering public discourse out of sheer discourse, such as Parkland survivors Cameron Kasky and Kyle Kashuv, are sometimes inevitable and sometimes valuable. Some political causes require spokesmen with lived experiences. But even as we saw in the aftermath of Parkland, putting children in the public spotlight is more likely to backfire on them than not.

A US-backed raid by the Afghanistan security forces on an Islamist militants' hideout in the Helmand province turned into a bloodbath when a nearby wedding party was hit as well and dozens of civilians were killed and injured.

The raid on the hideout, located in the central Afghan town of Musa Qala, occurred late on Sunday. The targeted facility has somehow been used by both the Taliban and Al Qaeda to train suicide bombers, according to local officials.

The operation, however, turned into carnage as a wedding party was being held next door with a large group of civilians in attendance.

"We were going to the bride's house for the henna ceremony, some of us were outside the home and some inside, [when] suddenly the battle began...We told the security forces that we were not members of the Taliban," Mohammad Salim, a survivor of the massacre and a relative of the victims, told Reuters.