Free Republic

The other day I was talking to Kipp Greggory, our morning talk show host, during whose program this radio blog broadcast airs. We do not see each other very often, but when we do, it’s a fast-paced gab fest! He brought up a point of aggravation to him that amazed me, because it is something that bothers my husband and me, as well, and I have not heard anyone else make the point. It is the profusion of advertising that appeals to the prevalent sense of entitlement that infects many people in our society today. You have heard the ads...

Revealed: The priest who changed the course of history ... by rescuing a drowning four-year-old Hitler from death in an icy river * Future Fuhrer was plucked from certain death by boy who grew up to join the church * German newspaper from 1894 reveals incident It may be the most devastating act of mercy in history. A newspaper report chronicling how a boy of four was saved from drowning has surfaced in a German archive. The child – who historians believe could have been Adolf Hitler – was plucked from the icy waters of the River Inn in Passau,...

The Newt Surge is official. Over the last week, Gingrich’s Intrade odds of winning the nomination rose from 16% to 39%. Romney has faded a little but still leads with 47% odds. No one else is above 5% odds. The polls are even more stunning. Rasmussen shows Gingrich leading 38%-17% in a national poll. Real Clear Politics lists polls with Gingrich leading Romney by 15-30 points in Florida, South Carolina and Iowa, and trailing Romney by only 10 points in New Hampshire. In the general election match-up, Rasmussen has Gingrich leading Obama by 2% and Romney trailing Obama by 6%....

After a tense night of vote-counting yielded no clear result, Australia was heading for a hung parliament with independents Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter, who hail from regional areas, becoming the unlikely kingmakers. Independents (L-R) Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor While they all have links to the National Party, the minor party in Tony Abbott’s conservative coalition, the independents have said that past allegiances will not influence their negotiations. The most unpredictable member of the trio is Mr Katter, the MP for the vast seat of Kennedy in northern Queensland which covers more than 340,000sq miles. A...

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter...

A former Cottonwood man who served 10 years on Texas death row until his murder conviction was overturned last year by an appellate court was killed Saturday in a solo truck crash in eastern Texas. Michael Toney, a 43-year-old Redding native, was killed when his pickup, which had oversized tires, rolled while going around a curve on Farm Road 347 in the rain Saturday morning, a spokeswoman with the Texas Department of Public Safety in Jacksonville said Monday. He was thrown from the pickup and died at the scene, she said. Toney, who had long maintained his innocence, was released...

The Art Archive/Biblioteca Braidense Milan/Gianni Dagli Orti “Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.” It’s been clear for a while, at least since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall, that what we have to fear above all is hope itself. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to propel us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy, but—believing calm and happiness to be the norm—unhappy that we’re unhappy....

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday that the length and depth of the U.S. recession will depend on who is the next U.S. president and the policies he puts in place to react to any slowdown. A series of grim economic reports in recent weeks have made clear that even if unprecedented government measures to stabilize banks succeed in restoring lending, the economy has been seriously damaged. Many analysts agree that the United State is in recession. "The range of possibilities is very wide," Soros said of how long a recession will last. He was...

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 11, 2008 – Seven years ago today, Army Col. William Stoppel dropped his 9-month-old son, Will, at day care and went to work. “It was my son’s first day at Pentagon day care,” Stoppel said. “I came in early, got him situated and went in to the office.” The day happened to be Sept. 11, 2001. Stoppel was assigned to the Army’s personnel office, where he processed promotion packets. When Stoppel got to his office, he borrowed some socks from Chief Warrant Officer William Ruth of the Maryland National Guard, talked to newly engaged Medical Service Corps...

John Piper pastors Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, whose main campus is about 1 mile from the I35 bridge over the Mississippi River that collapsed August 1. His reflections on that tragedy has been distributed far and wide and helped provide a biblical perspective on such events. Piper also responded forcefully and helpfully to the awful, God-dishonoring, soul-destroying and comfort-robbing words of Rabbi Harold Kushner on that tragedy. Both articles are worth reading and passing along to anyone and everyone who wonders "why bad things happen to good people." They are models in pastoral theology and ministry. Roger Olsen used...

Contact: Erik Trinkaus trinkaus@wustl.edu 314-935-5207 Washington University in St. Louis The emerging fate of the Neandertals For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them. As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those...

ROCK HILL, S.C. — Smoking just might have saved Brenda Comer's life. She said she had just finished washing dishes Monday and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette when an 80-foot oak tree crashed through her roof, landing across the sink where she had been standing just seconds before. "Honey, I know you fuss at me for smoking," Comer said she told her husband. "But today it saved my life." The tree, felled by strong wind, also missed the couple's adult daughter, who was at the other end of the house. The family's insurance agent said they could not live...

"They have made a desolation, and they call it peace." -Tacitus Much in the way of criticism of the United States comes in the form of accusations of imperialism. According to this view, echoed by everyone from Harold Pinter to Noam Chomsky to the Arab press, the U.S. has for decades run roughshod over the globe, in defiance of agreements and civilized norms. Enforcing its policies unilaterally and always for its own benefit, the U.S. has effectively colonized huge swathes of the planet, if not through direct military action, then by economic exploitation or diplomatic chicanery. No one dares raise...

See for example this thread first. Fidel Castro hands over power To his brother, Raoul, in this hour While under the knife (In risk of his life?) Should Cubans rejoice, or just cower?

WASHINGTON – It's a war memorial. It includes a cross. It is on public land. And while politicians use congressional maneuvers to keep the cross there, others say it's unconstitutional and should be removed. This sounds a lot like the cross atop Mount Soledad in La Jolla, but it's not. About 275 miles away in the Mojave Desert stands a far less prominent but nonetheless controversial cross that, like the Mount Soledad cross, has been the subject of lawsuits and court-ordered removals. Unlike Mount Soledad, however, the battle surrounding the desert cross at a place called Sunrise Rock has focused...

The fate of the nation's most ambitious stem cell research agency will soon rest in the hands of a California judge as the weeklong trial challenging the institute's legality neared conclusion Wednesday. Three taxpayer groups have alleged in two lawsuits that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine lacks the proper state government oversight to dole out $3 billion in stem cell grants over the next 10 years. They also accused the board that oversees the agency as being rife with conflict of interests and wrongly exempting itself from the state's open-meeting law. The trial was expected to end Thursday after...

Greetings. I think I have resolved the matter of fate and free will. Please criticize me. Thank you. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE The quandary posed by the perennial matter of fate v. free will is complicated, but I believe I have resolved it as much as such a thing can be resolved. First, free will in itself is a misnomer--I am not even sure what our will is expected to be free from. External influence? Internal influence? Even if we could live free from all influence whatsoever, which is impossible, we did not create ourselves in the beginning. You would...

Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsynat Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and...

Katrina is gone -- and so are many kids Team pursues difficult search for more than 1,300 missing children TINA SUSMAN Newsday Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2005 Royce Osbourne, in a skeleton mask, marches in a protest for hurricane victims' rights in New Orleans December 10, 200. Protesters feared they would receive federal funds to rebuild their homes. REUTERS/Lee Celano NEW ORLEANS - Three months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, the fate of more than 1,300 children remains unknown. Until a few days ago, Lil Joe and Kolenik Williams, brothers from New Orleans, were among the...

Ex-Clinton aide's fate in jury's hands Rosen denies wrongdoing in reporting cost of gala to FEC Wednesday, May 25, 2005 Posted: 11:53 PM EDT (0353 GMT) LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Jurors in the federal trial of David Rosen, former finance director of Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate campaign, will begin deliberating his fate Thursday. **SNIP** Defense and prosecuting attorneys finished their closing arguments Wednesday. The jury was to convene Thursday at 8:30 a.m. (11:30 a.m. ET). Rosen's attorney, Paul Sandler, described his client as "courageous and truthful," adding that Rosen "has suffered for years with this sword of Damocles over...

This was written in the Daily Record (Ellensburg's paper) on Wed. Oct. 6, 2004. It was written by Mathew (only one t) Manweller who is a Central Washington University political science professor. The title of the article was "Election determines fate of nation." "In that this will be my last column before the presidential election there will be no sarcasm, no attempts at witty repartee. The topic is too serious, and the stakes are too high. This November we will vote in the only election during our lifetime that will truly matter. Because America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more...

Fate of Nation -- Editorial This was written in the Daily Record (Ellensburg, Washington) on Wed. Oct. 6, 2004, by Mathew Manweller, who is a Central Washington University political science professor. This should transcend political affiliations, and is not a matter of Republicans, Democrats or Independents, it is about being an "American". "Election Determines Fate of Nation" "In that this will be my last column before the presidential election there will be no sarcasm, no attempts at witty repartee. The topic is too serious, and the stakes are too high. This November we will vote in the only election during...

In the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the very buff-and-ready Sarah Connor pulls out her K-Bar from her belt holster and carves "No Fate" in to a park bench somewhere in the Desert Southwest. This is further explained in the movie to mean "No fate but what we make." What a pithy, yet profound, statement. Much of the Left complains that Bush's policies vis-a-vis Iraq do not reflect reality. To play off the above notion, I will say that there is no reality but what we make. The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor (sorry - I was channeling John Belushi aka...

<p>Lodi, San Joaquin County -- If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeds in persuading voters to approve his $15 billion deficit bond, then the victory may well hinge on how it plays in Central Valley towns like Lodi, a community that traces its fiscal conservatism back to the frugal German farmers who settled the area.</p>

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. bombs never hit Saddam Hussein's grandiose presidential palace in Baghdad, making its ample meeting rooms and vast conference tables an ideal headquarters for U.S.-led occupation authorities after the war. Now the building — the physical seat and biggest symbol of Saddam's 23-year dictatorship — is the likely site for the next U.S. Embassy in Iraq, U.S. officials in Washington and Iraq said this week. A State Department official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the palace is among several locations under consideration for the embassy, where the U.S. government's official representative will be based...

Hardliners 'make Iran risk fate of dictator' By Robin Gedye, Foreign Affairs Writer (Filed: 08/05/2003) Reformist Iranian MPs warned the country's powerful and entrenched clerics yesterday to give way to reforms and normalise relations with the outside world or suffer the fate of Saddam Hussein. An open letter, signed by 153 deputies in the 290-seat Majlis and read out in the chamber, said Iran was in "a critical situation" and the ruling establishment risked losing the support of the people, who had overwhelmingly voted for reform. The appeal reflected concerns in the region over the ease with which the coalition...

Missing, presumed dead The fate of many people - on both sides of the conflict - is still unclear 13 April 2003 The soldiers "I didn't receive any order from the beginning." An Iraqi colonel with the elite Republican Guard, who commanded a force of about 600 men, has revealed that his demoralised men fled from their units, without fear of punishment, as Allied bombs crashed on to their positions. The colonel, who joined other comrades changing back into civilian clothes to catch the bus home about a week before Baghdad was taken, said he had initially been ordered to...

Survivor or suicide? Intelligence agencies debate Saddam's fate SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMMonday, March 17, 2003 LONDON — Western intelligence agencies can agree on one thing: For the first time Saddam Hussein knows that war is imminent. But there is no agreement on how the Iraqi president will respond in the final days of a 12-year showdown with the United States. The argument pits intelligence officials who assess that Saddam will offer to abdicate against others who conclude that the president will fight to his death. The intelligence debate was sparked by the clearest signals by Saddam that he is...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 3 Will the Universe End in a Big Rip? Illustration Credit & Copyright: Lynette Cook Explanation: How will our universe end? Recent speculation now includes a pervasive growing field of mysterious repulsive energy that rips virtually everything apart. Although the universe started with a Big Bang, analysis of recent cosmological measurements allows a possibility that it will end with a Big Rip. As soon as few...

February 4, 2003The space program must fly higher WASHINGTON--First we will mourn the brave and beautiful who fell out of the sky. Then, however, we will proceed to the usual post-catastrophe ritual: investigation and recrimination. We will search for the culprits. Some human agent will be hauled out to bear the blame. And we will search for the cause: flying foam, wing damage, insulating tiles, whatever--we will find it. But we will miss the point. The point is that the first 150 or so miles of space travel--braving the gravitational well of Earth and shooting through the atmosphere--is the...

<p>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -- In the end, it seems it was just another dumb blond joke.</p> <p>The World Health Organization (WHO), the Geneva-based health arm of the United Nations, insisted on Tuesday that despite the many media reports to the contrary, it had never conducted a study predicting the extinction of the natural blond hair gene.</p>

IF I KNEW If I knew it would be the last time That I'd see you fall asleep, I would tuck you in more tightly and pray the Lord, your soul to keep. If I knew it would be the last time that I see you walk out the door, I would give you a hug and kiss and call you back for one more. If I knew it would be the last time I'd hear your voice lifted up in praise, I would video tape each action and word, so I could play them back day after day. If...

<p>For 45 horrifying minutes, Christine McMichael teetered inches from doom inside her SUV snagged on an overpass guardrail on Interstate 4.</p> <p>McMichael, 28, was apparently driving home to New Smyrna Beach when her green 1999 Ford Explorer careened into the guardrail about 5 p.m. Wednesday as she passed over State Road 46 near Seminole Towne Center mall.</p> <p>The only thing that kept the Explorer from falling to the roadway below was a tiny wishbone-shaped bolt near the vehicle's right front tire that caught on the guardrail.</p>