Free Republic

It was early in the evening when the fire surged toward the homes in a mountain settlement called Turkey Rock, a raging orange hell of 50-foot-high flames that roared off a ridge, pushing a thick, super-heated cloud of soot and blazing embers. In moments such as these, when nature swings its heaviest fist, the human instinct to survive cries out. It is when ordinary people run. But Monday night, as the catastrophic Hayman fire raged across the parched Rocky Mountains just above our village, driven northward through Jefferson County by fierce and relentless winds, 19 members of the Colorado Springs...

June 19, 2002 Heavy equipment moved into Rampart Range Road area ~The Colorado Springs Gazette Massive flames from the Hayman fire leap into the air Tuesday north of Florissant. U.S. Forest Service personnel estimated the flames at 60 to 100 feet high. The blaze has consumed 120,000 acres. Wind pushed it farther east toward Woodland Park. The Army joined the battle against the Hayman fire early Wednesday, hoping to hold back flames that advanced Tuesday to the back doors of Woodland Park and Palmer Lake. At dawn Wednesday, a group of bulldozers and other pieces of earthmoving equipment from Fort...

Link to articleTerrorism Is as Terrorism Does Local peace activist may be on FBI list by Terje Langeland Bill Sulzman has protested nonviolently against U.S. military policy for more than 30 years. That, he discovered last week, apparently makes him a "terrorist" in the eyes of the government. Now, Sulzman, a veteran Colorado Springs peace activist, is concerned that he and others will be subjected to FBI surveillance under new rules that allow the agency to spy on domestic groups and individuals suspected of terrorism. Last Thursday, May 29, Sulzman was arrested while participating in a political protest at...

Not one, but four towns use albino squirrels as their claims to fame, and none is particularly happy about the others. Kenton, TN, accommodates about 200 of the furry rodents. Residents insist that the squirrels "have been here the longest" and claim they were left by a "Gypsy caravan" in 1869. Is Kenton, we asked, where the other towns got their white squirrels? "Well, they had to come from somewhere." Olney, IL, is the loudest booster of all albino squirrel towns, titling itself Home of the Whitey Squirrels. It scoffs at the other towns' albinos. "Most of theirs have...

The campaign to stampede the federal government into drastic action to counter "global warming" has never let honesty cramp its style. The most recent ploy has been the release of a study from the Environmental Protection Agency which concluded that human actions were responsible for rising temperatures and that government restrictions on those actions were necessary to prevent various disastrous scenarios from unfolding. The problem is that all this hysteria was based on a computer model which had been shown to be incompatible with factual data. Patrick Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, had already...

In the story "Is This Warm Winter a Sure Sign of Global Warming?" we looked at a number of factors that cause changes in global mean temperatures on both the short and long term. We showed that although most of the attention in recent years has been on the greenhouse gases as the primary driver of the global temperature trends, it may still be a relative "bit player" in the climate ride we, like it or not, all find ourselves on. When I give a talk or write on the subject of climate change, I frequently get the response "How...