Free Republic

Background and Introduction. The dispensation of Israel began with the Exodus in B.C. 1441 and concluded with the birth of our Lord in 4 B.C. Therefore, most of the Old Testament Canon is devoted to the study of Jewish client nations. There were five Jewish client nations in the dispensation of Israel. The Theocratic Kingdom from the Exodus to the time of Samuel, B.C. 1441 - 1020. The United Kingdom from Saul to Rehoboam.,B.C.1020-926. The Northern Kingdom from Jeroboam to Hoshea, B.C.926-721. The fifth cycle of discipline was administered to the Northern Kingdom by Assyria, commanded by Sargon II....

Washington (CNN) -- The National Transportation Safety Board Tuesday called on states to require all motorcycle riders wear helmets. The announcement, made at a news conference in Washington, is part of the NTSB's "Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety" -- an initiative directed at state governments. The board added motorcycle safety to the list this year and dropped recreational boating safety -- an area it said improvements have been made.

Political leaders and the mainstream media have been blindsided by the sudden mood shift of the country in the last few years. The reason they have been blindsided is they believe world history is linear. Liberals have now begun referring to themselves as progressives. These people think the world only progresses. The facts indicate otherwise. History is cyclical. History is replete with grand empires like Rome, Spain and Britain. It is also replete with Dark Ages, depressions and wars. Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four...

Since the beginning of the year, everyone has expected either one of two outcomes: (1) The election of Barack Obama would spark a recovery and the economy would be saved by his stimulus package, or (2) we would see a major wave of rising interest rates to pay for the Obama spending-spree that would spark serious inflation. But there is a much darker side to these shallow views. To put it mildly, it may just be a far more complex outcome than anyone has dared to guess. We may be in the midst of a "Waterfall Effect" that could undermine...

NORFOLK, Va., April 14, 2006 – Supporting the global war on terror, homeland defense, humanitarian crises and disaster relief missions while maintaining deterrence around the world requires something of a juggling act - especially when you're striving to reduce stress on the force, according to a U.S. Joint Forces Command official. That's a challenge Jay Burdon, chief of JFCOM's Joint Deployment Operations Division, and his staff here deal with every day as they strive to ensure combatant commanders have the troops they need to carry out their missions. As the military's central "manpower broker" for conventional forces, JFCOM looks across...

Tiny amounts of salt and dust trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet for the last 740,000 years shed new light on changes to the Earth's climate. The results, published this week in the journal Nature, come from the team who extracted a 3 km long ice core from Dome C, high on East Antarctica's plateau - the oldest continuous climate record obtained from ice cores so far. Since reporting in 2004 that the Earth experienced eight climate cycles (each consisting of an ice age and warm period) the team have been analysing the chemical impurities in the cores to unravel...

I just finished reading about that sorry b*st*rd, George Clooney: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1528789/postsHe whines on about the past twelve months being the worst year of his life. Boo Hoo. I guess being a world traveling multi-millionaire isn't as wonderful as we might think.What I have discovered over the years is that good and bad times are somewhat cyclical. Everything can be going well and then, all of a sudden, a bad cycle will emerge. The same is true in reverse.I thought it might be enlightening to hear what real people have to say about the worst year of their life. I am...

River of data decodes Nile cycles The Old Testament may seem like an unlikely source from which to draw inspiration for a modern-day climatology study. But a story from the book of Genesis — in which Joseph predicts seven years of abundant crops, followed by seven years of famine for Egypt — drove researchers to scour centuries of water-level data for the Nile River to determine if such a cycle actually exists, and if so, what causes it. This Byzantine-period mosaic from northern Israel shows a man carving on a “nilometer” the highest level the Nile reached in that year....

The Law of Unintended Consequences "There has been widespread denial that there could be anything like a real estate 'bubble,' even given recent activity. Yet, anyone with a pulse can see wild speculation taking place all around them." --William F. Hague, President, W.F. Hague Investments Question: Why has the Fed allowed a housing bubble to develop? Answer: Because they didn't have any choice. The past several years of low interest rates have allowed households to extract cash from inflated property via cash-out refis, home equity loans, and sales; and to use lower interest rates to reduce monthly mortgage payments and...

Today was the 2nd Annual Support the Troops Rally at Public Square in Cleveland. It was sponsored by the Blue Knights Motorcycle Group, (Cleveland, and Ohio area Police Departments), and it couldn't have been a better day for it.Sunny, temps in the middle 70's, clear skies, and between 5000 and 10,000 people.Patrick Henry Chapter of the Free Republic was represented by Neefer, Las Vegas Dave, Las Vegas Dave's FReeper widow Ann Marie, GOP Lady, DollyCali, Oliver the Wonder Dog, (and a pretty good dancer),Bill the Almost FReeper, and your's truly.Not having been there last year, I thought it was going...

Based on a theory of cooperative herding and imitation working both in bullish as well as in bearish regimes, we have detected the existence of a clear signature of herding in the decay of the US S&P500 index since August 2000 with high statistical significance, in the form of strong log- periodic components. Please refer to the following paper for a detailed description: D. Sornette and W.-X. Zhou, The US 2000-2002 Market Descent: How Much Longer and Deeper? Quantitative Finance 2 (6), 468-481 (2002) (e-print at http://arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0209065). For a general presentation of the underlying concepts, theory, empirical tests and concrete...

Watching the global economy over the past few years has been like sitting through a rather complicated play. It's been a story of several acts - the characters established in the mid 1990s, the spectacular rise of the star (the United States), the hubris, the fall. Our emotions have been jolted as the plot develops. Now, however, as a spectator of this drama, one can't help but feel this darn play is going on a bit long. 'Too much stuff' The economic news was meant to be getting better around now, not worse. We were meant to be coming out...