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During the past 2,500 years, the Parthenon—the apotheosis of ancient Greek architecture—has been rocked by earthquakes, set on fire, shattered by exploding gunpowder, looted for its stunning sculptures and defaced by misguided preservation efforts. Amazingly, the ancient Athenians built the Parthenon in just eight or nine years. Repairing it is taking a bit longer.

Worth a listen and a viewing.

In her column for tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan makes an astute observation about the Obama presidency--one that also presents a puzzle, which this column will endeavor to solve. The observation is that Obama's presidency was permanently damaged by the way he and his men reacted to "the trash-talking some Republican leaders indulged in after the 2008 campaign."

Remember the ad that Hillary Clinton ran against Obama> The one that questioned his experience and reaction when an emergency phone call came in at 3:00 AM? Well, they both got the 3:00 AM phone call and failed to try to protect our diplomats and our brave security folks. And the President's response was to go to Nevada on an election fund raiser since he called this a "bump in the road."

Whee! (As the twig is bent, so grows the tree)

The PJ Tatler has obtained documents from the Justice Department detailing efforts to recruit attorneys and staff who are dwarfs or who have “psychiatric disabilities” or “severe intellectual disabilities.” On May 31, 2012, Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez issued a directive to affirmatively recruit people with these “targeted disabilities.” This DOJ policy does not merely involve prohibitions against discrimination, but rather the documents reveal deliberate recruitment efforts to hire as attorneys and staff for the Department of Justice people suffering from psychiatric disorders and intellectual disabilities. Moreover, applicants can “self-identify” their disability by means of the “Standard Form 256, Self...

HIDALGO COUNTY, TEXAS — In Part One of our exclusive Border Conspiracy series, we went inside the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department. We watched as a crime analyst admitted on hidden camera to changing the crime codes in the Uniform Crime Reporting system. Downgrading the nature of the crimes that the sheriff’s office reports to the federal government makes the Texas county appear safer than it really is. The statistics also help the Obama administration argue that the border is now safer than it was just a few years ago, despite the drug war raging across the Rio Grande in Mexico....

A shipwreck discovered in Tonga is thought to be a famous pirate vessel that sank in the 19th century with a hold full of treasure. Legend has it that the Port-au-Prince was attacked by warriors near the South Pacific archipelago in 1806 and most of its British crew massacred on the orders of King Finau 'Ulukalala II. The British had captured the ship from the French and made into a privateer - meaning it had permission to attack and plunder boats belonging to rivals Spain and France.

In a little noted decision on July 23, a federal district court judge concluded that internal DOJ documents about the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case “contradict Assistant Attorney General [Thomas] Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in” the decision to dismiss the case. In other words, the sworn testimony of Perez, the Obama political appointee who heads the Civil Rights Division, before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was apparently false. The decision in Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice by Judge Reggie Walton was in a case filed by Judicial Watch after the Civil...

Salon contributor Eric McHenry will likely be surprised to find himself categorized as "the media," but his omissions and evasions about Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis so impressively mirror the major media's that he deserves the honor... That much said, the Davis persona in Sex Rebel, the narrator, insists that the book's adventures are all "taken from actual experiences." For the record, the narrator confesses to being "bisexual" as well as "a voyeur and an exhibitionist." In the introduction to Sex Rebel, an alleged Ph.D. named Dale Gordon goes further. He describes the pseudonymous author, Bob Greene, as having "strong...

Wait til the kids find out they have to pay up for insurance. This Obamacare tax is going to hit the young people who voted for Obama hard in their disposable income. The truth is that most young people who are out on their own, living as single adults simply don't buy insurance because (a)they think they aren't going to need it for a long time. (b)they want to spend their money on cars, cosmetics, partying, etc. (c)they'll wait until they are married with families. Oh, but some will say it won't cost them because they can stay on Daddy's...

Hitler Finds Out Scott Walker Won in Wisconsin

Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage announcement. Not only is the supposed CIA asset not a CIA asset at all, but the entire operation was exposed prematurely and the double-agent’s life was immediately threatened by an intelligence leak that very well may have come out of the White House for political gain. As...

Newt Gingrich is now less a presidential candidate than a target. He's a natural for all the slings and arrows sure to come his way. Why? Let us count the ways. First, as has been noted before, he's not so much a man with an ego as an ego with a man. Ex-wife problems. Multiplied. No filter between brain and mouth. Moon colony? But today I come not to bury Mr. Gingrich but to praise him. Sort of. Because now that he's safely out of the race, and therefore stands no chance of becoming president of the United States, let...

1. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization With a culture that stretched from western India to Afghanistan and a population numbering over five million, the ancient Indus Valley people—India's oldest known civilization—were an impressive and apparently sanitary bronze-age bunch. The scale of their baffling and abrupt collapse rivals that of the great Mayan decline. But it wasn't until 1922 that excavations revealed a hygienically-advanced culture which maintained a sophisticated sewage drainage system and immaculate bathrooms. Strangely, there is no archaeological evidence of armies, slaves, social conflicts or other vices prevalent in ancient societies. Even to the very end, it seems,...

ST. CROIX - After 45 years operation as the territory's largest private employer, HOVENSA announced Wednesday that the 350,000-barrel-per-day refinery will shut down and more than 2,000 employees will be dismissed. "This is a catastrophic event. This is like a hurricane hitting a community or an earthquake," said Sen. Louis Patrick Hill, who began a Senate committee hearing with an announcement of the news Wednesday. HOVENSA has 2,150 direct and contract employees, and its operations account for about 20 percent of the territory's gross domestic product. The refinery's closure represents "at a minimum" a loss of about $60 million in...

Today’s Washington Post carries a story about a “curious case in the annals of the FBI,” but the only curious aspect of the story is why the Post published it — with the headline FBI considered a sting aimed at Newt Gingrich in 1997. That implies that the arguable GOP frontrunner for President had committed some sort of conduct that was shady enough to get the FBI to propose an Abscam-like operation to take Gingrich down. However, that’s not the case at all, but you have to get past the lead paragraph to figure that out:

The GOP primary voters reflect this helter-skelter search for leadership. And I predict that when the general electorate is engaged in the general election campaign next year, the independents and some Democrats will reflect the same desperate confusion and search for the right kind of leadership for these treacherous times. But what kind of candidate is most likely to make sense of the terrible events and forces that weigh down our country; be capable of vividly describing our plight and what needs to be done; and convince the public that he or she has the intelligence, courage, experience and sheer...

MomHouston has been a bit of a heartwarming story trend of late, what with the couple who died holding hands after 72 years of marriage. There are certain benefits to staying married so long, raising children, shared history, loving your best friend, etc… And now there’s this: After 52 years of marriage Pat Shoop, 75, received the ultimate gift from her husband Bob: a dose of his fecal matter, a transplant that cured her of a horrible illness. According to MSNBC, Pat suffered from a bacterial illness called C. diff infection. She was diagnosed in May of 2010. The disease...

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release one of its members, kidnapped from a street protest, or it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates, from corrupt police to taxi drivers, as well as reveal the syndicates' businesses. The vow is a bizarre cyber twist to Mexico's ongoing drug war, as a group that has no guns is squaring off against the Zetas, a cartel blamed for thousands of deaths as well as introducing beheadings and other frightening brutality. "You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release...

The controversial Obedient Wife Club in Malaysia has spawned new outrage by producing an explicit Islamic sex manual. The 115-page, pocket-sized guide to Islamic sex suggests that Muslim men can have sexual relations with all their wives simultaneously. Islamic teachings say a man can take up to four wives if he has the means to support them.

“Now when did Odysseus return to Penelope? The date is given with a precision most unusual in epic poetry.” "Because the lines describing the alleged eclipse are considered suspect, we shall use other passages in the Odyssey to shed some light on the issue, without assuming an eclipse. Given an interpretation of certain passages in the Odyssey as describing astronomical phenomena, we will look for dates in which the phenomena match. We shall find that the most likely day matching these other phenomena is 16 April 1178 B.C., suggesting there may be corroborating information in the epic for the eclipse...

The elderly are killed. Young women are raped. And able-bodied men are given hammers, machetes and sticks and forced to fight to the death. In one of the most chilling revelations yet about the violence in Mexico, a drug cartel-connected trafficker claims fellow gangsters have kidnapped highway bus passengers and forced them into gladiatorlike fights to groom fresh assassins. In an in-person interview arranged by intermediaries on the condition that neither his name nor the location of his Texas visit be published, the trafficker also admitted to helping push cocaine worth $5 million to $10 million a month into the...

A new study of DNA suggests North America was originally populated by just a few dozen people who crossed a land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age. About 14,000 years ago, humans crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America, most experts agree. But just how many intrepid explorers were involved in spawning subsequent populations has not been known. "The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is about 70 individuals," said Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University.

FP: Nonie Darwish, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Today I would like to discuss with you the photos we are exhibiting below of Cairo University graduates over the course of this era. There are the 1959 and 1978 photos compared to the 1995 and 2004 photos. These pictures tell quite a story. Radical Islam has taken over even the minds of educated women in the Muslim world. Since you’re from Egypt, I would like to get your take on this phenomenon. What’s going on here? One would think that people yearn for freedom rather than enslavement, but I guess life experience...

The long-sought source of the aqueduct that brought clean fresh water to ancient Rome lies beneath a pig pasture and a ruined chapel, according to a pair of British filmmakers who claim to have discovered the headwaters of Aqua Traiana, a 1,900-year-old aqueduct built by the Emperor Trajan in 109 A.D.

Beneath Rome's Fiumicino airport lies a "mini-Colosseum" that may have played host to Roman emperors, according to British archaeologists. The foundations of the amphitheater, which are oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, have been unearthed at the site of Portus, a 2nd century A.D. harbor near Ostia's port on the Tiber River. A monumental seaport that saved imperial Rome from starvation, Portus is now reduced to a large hexagonal pond on a marshy land owned by a noble family, the Duke Sforza Cesarinis. The two-square-mile site has been known since around the 16th century, but...

A well done video that honors Roy P. Benavidez remarkable courage in Vietnam that earned the Medal Of Honor. How remarkable was he? The Navy named a ship after this soldier extraordinaire. We need to stop and honor our heroes once in a while. And not just the Roy Benavidez' but all our men and women in uniform, standing watch for us.

I'm making do on a small Social Security pension and felt obligated to make a small donation to FR because of all the news and fun it gives me during the year. If I can do it, I know all you youngsters with jobs out there can give something. After I made my donation, a screen appeared that showed the top states in donations and the disgustingly small number of FREEPERS who care enough to donate to keep our site going. It's an outrage.

MEXICO CITY — It had been an elaborate farewell to one of Mexico's fallen heroes. Ensign Melquisedet Angulo, a special forces sailor killed last week during the government's most successful raid on a top drug lord in years, received a stirring public tribute in which the secretary of the navy presented his mother with the flag that covered her son's casket. Then, the next day, only hours after the grieving family had finished burying him in his hometown, gunmen burst into the family's house and sprayed the rooms with gunfire, killing his mother and three other relatives, officials said Tuesday.

Humans are unusual animals by any stretch of the imagination, ones that have changed the face of the world around us. What makes us so special when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? Some things we take completely for granted might surprise you. -

All it took was the gunshot fired outside his Walker County home to trigger training ingrained in former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor of a dramatic battle in Afghanistan in 2005. He did a sweep through the house. Checked on his mother. And bolted out the door, where he found dead his beloved Labrador retriever, Dasy, a dog given to him to help him recover from his own wounds and the loss of his fellow Navy comrades. “I could tell she tried to get away because there was a blood trail,” Luttrell recalled in a phone interview Wednesday....

Was Eric Holder complicit in a political coverup during the Clinton Administration? http://www.slate.com/id/1083/ Excerpt: On Dec. 21, 1994, Lamberth dismissed the suit against the government, but he asked U.S. Attorney Eric Holder (now deputy attorney general) to investigate whether Magaziner should be held in criminal contempt for supplying false information in his affidavit, filed March 3, 1993. The investigation turned on a single sentence in which Magaziner states, "Only federal government employees serve as members of the interdepartmental working group." Lamberth insisted that this sentence contradicted indisputable evidence that private citizens attended the working groups, and that some of them...

Jan. 7, 2009 -- Stonehenge was built as a dance arena for prehistoric "samba-style" raves, according to a study of the acoustics of the 5,000-year-old stone circle. Using cutting-edge technology, Rupert Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University in northern England, discovered that Stonehenge's megaliths reflect sound perfectly, making the stone circle an ideal setting for listening to repetitive trance rhythms.

He was a junior in high school when the routine shower generated his first thoughts about harnessing the power of magnets to propel cars and trucks in a more fuel-efficient way. Before going to bed, he sketched out a few rough ideas. Gonzalez, now 21, has since turned that idea into a proposal that last week netted him the $100,000 first-place award in the ConocoPhillips Energy Prize competition, which offered cash to aspiring young entrepreneurs with ideas about energy-conserving technology. In the typical motor vehicle, Gonzales said, just 20 percent of the energy generated by the engine actually makes it...

I'm an Ike evacuee and won't be getting a permanent place to set up my desktop for months. I'm lost without a computer with my own programs and set up and am tired of borrowing friend's machines. Especially since I am on the Board of my destroyed condominium. I need a very cheap laptop that will let me use internet and write documents. Viewing some anti-Obama vids is a plus. I won't use it much after things get settled down. I found this model for $300 at Buy.com. Any comments or ideas would be much appreciated. Product Description: Dell Laitude...

On his Sunday show today, Blitzer interviewed the new President of Pakistan. He showed bias in his choice of only a film clip of Palin's interview statement on Pakistan. No similar clip from Obama.

I would like to share a story on Senator Joe Biden that happened 27 years ago. It involved his international humiliation of a good man, and it became a habit for Biden. I’m confident Biden will repeat the performance with Sarah Palin, perhaps during their first vice-presidential debate on October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule,

Video: See it to believe it. His pledge to the Caucus for Priorities Group who want to cut 60 Billion from defense.

There's a bear in the woods. For some people its easy to see. Others don't see it at all....

There's trouble in paradise. Cancel the coronation. Send back the commemorative medals. Put those “Yes We Can” T-shirts up on eBay. Keep the Change. Barack Obama's historic procession to the American presidency has been rudely interrupted. The global healing he promised is in jeopardy. If you're prone to emotional breakdown, you might want to take a seat before I say this. He might not win. How can it be, you ask? Didn't we see him just last month speaking to 200,000 adoring Germans in Berlin? Didn't he get the red carpet treatment in France - France of all places? Doesn't...

A study that interviewed HIV-infected crack users at Grady Memorial Hospital highlighted the risky behavior and lack of care among this population. Researchers interviewed 190 HIV-infected crack-using patients at Grady and Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami over 14 months half had not seen an HIV specialist in the last six months, and more than three-fourths were not getting important medical treatments.

SCIENTISTS have been stunned by the discovery of a shark that had eaten a polar bear. Part of the jaw of a young polar bear was found in the stomach of a Greenland shark in Svalbard, northern Norway. Kit Kovacs, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said: "We've never heard of this before. "We don't know how it got there. We can't say whether or not the shark took a swimming young bear or ate a carcase.

Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama was in Houston on Thursday for a pair of private fundraisers. When he was here for a speech at the Toyota Center a few months ago, the photos were free. This visit was much different. After depending on smaller donations during the primary season, Obama is now focused on more traditional campaign finances – big money donors. Where as in the primary season more than one million individuals donated to Obama's campaign, less than a quarter of them gave the maximum $2,300. On Thursday, the minimum to even attend the fundraisers was $2,300. To...

Ready for the Oil Bubble? Source: http://www.star-telegram.com/104/story/651928.html ------------------------------------------------------------ One law is causing prices to go through the roof By Ed Wallace Special to the Star-Telegram "There’s a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak [oil] theories and hot buttons of supply and demand and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come, they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy." — National Gas Week, Sept. 5, 2005 as reprinted in the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report, "The Role of...

The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession. But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared. “It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as...

AUSTIN — A Travis County judge ruled Friday that the state's new $5-per-patron strip club fee is an unconstitutional tax, but the state promised to appeal... The Legislature enacted the adult entertainment fee, effective Jan. 1, and dedicated the first $25 million to sexual assault prevention and additional revenue to low-income health care. The fee was expected to raise more than $50 million for health care in its first two years. It was the dedication of money to health care that caused the tax to be unconstitutional, Jenkins said. He heard testimony from club owners, state employees and sexual assault...

Now the world knows Prince Harry is in Afghanistan, the question on many lips is whether it was right for the media to keep quiet about it for so long.

300 rounds per minute, recoiless, plus grenade rounds with HE, frag, and special rounds up to 100 meters.