Free Republic

Museum collections in Sweden contain thousands of Iron Age board-game pieces. New studies of the raw material composing them show that most were made of whalebone from the mid-6th century CE. They were produced in large volumes and standardised forms. The researchers therefore believe that a regular supply of whalebone was needed. Since the producers would hardly have found the carcasses of beached whales a reliable source, the gaming pieces are interpreted as evidence for whaling. Apart from an osteological survey, species origin has been determined for a small number of game pieces, using ZooMS (short for Zooarchaeology by Mass...

A seventh-century slate window ledge inscribed with an intriguing mix of Latin, Greek and Celtic words, names and symbols has been unearthed at Tintagel Castle in north Cornwall. The discovery adds weight to the view that the rugged coastal site, which is most often associated with the legend of King Arthur, was home in the early middle ages to a sophisticated and multicultural port community. Put together with other finds including Iberian goblets and bowls from what is now Turkey, the slate ledge suggests Tintagel may well have been an important royal base with trade links stretching from Europe’s Atlantic...

Germany has much more severed itself from God and Christian tradition than the US. The culture is deeply anti-Christian. AfD and PEGIDA [German nationalist, anti-Islam movement] for example long for a return to the days of a thoroughly Christian culture only in as far as “personal peace and prosperity” is concerned as Schaeffer put it way back when. Unless there is a bottom up moral cultural renewal in this country/on this continent, parties such as AfD or movements such as PEGIDA will be hapless, romantic attempts to impose some well-meant principles/policies on a people that have given up on God....

POTUS, Donald J. Trump, always the strategic thinker, is outsmarting the Democrat Party once again. Just as he did with his tax reform package and his meeting on Immigration with Democrats months back....he has them heading for a corner they cannot back out of, unless they to vote to pass "Trumps" immigration package. Not one Democrat voted "Yea" on Trump's tax reform package, or Trumps legislation that would have given legal status and citizenship to 1.8 million DACA folks. The Dems wanted a canpaign issue, instead. The Democrats are going wild over their newest tact for winning the Mid-Term elections...beating...

Hold onto your engineer caps, railroad history lovers. Seventy years after the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, the steep Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Utah were still giving the Union Pacific Railroad trouble. Despite having massive steam engines, the Union Pacific, one of the biggest railroads in America, still struggled to move heavy freight trains over the mountains and would often have to use multiple locomotives to get trains to their destination. This practice required more workers and more fuel. In 1940, the Union Pacific’s mechanical engineers teamed up with the American Locomotive Company to build one...

On June 16, 2015, businessman Donald Trump stepped off a golden escalator and officially announced his candidacy for the presidency. Trump had flirted with running for political office in the past, and almost everyone watching — with the possible exception of the man giving the speech, notes CNN's Brian Stelter — considered this to be some type of publicity stunt. We were all wrong.

As American golf popularity skyrocketed at the start of the 20th century, Scottish immigrant professionals like Willie Dunn found their career footing. Dunn was a combination superb player, golf instructor and owner of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, built near the Shinnecock Indian reservation in Southampton, New York. One of Dunn’s best young students was John Matthew Shippen Jr., one of nine children of Eliza and John Shippen Sr., an African-American Presbyterian minister who had moved his family to the reservation in 1888 from Washington, D.C. At age 15, young Shippen was introduced to golf. A year later, he was employed...

"My wife went to school in North Korea. That was one of the reasons that we could get in and talk to the leaders – that made it possible for us to go," Graham said. Ruth Graham’s parents were Christian missionaries in Pyongyang, a city once called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Today, possessing a Bible there can lead to criminal charges. He drew the kinds of crowds in Asia usually reserved for a pope, famously preaching to more than 1 million people in South Korea in 1973. “Love one another!” Graham told the congregation during his tour through Seoul,...

Corey Stewart is the Republican candidate facing "Dim Bulb" Democrat, Senator Tim Kaine for the Senate seat in Virginia. I have no doubt that Stewart will run a terrific, pro-active, effective campaign against the failed, Hillary Clinton, VP choice..."the well known, asleep at the wheel, deadbeat, Democrat, Tim Kaine". Rumblings are heard that the Establishment GOP Senate campaign group will not fund the Stewart race. It's hard to believe....but Stewart can defeat Tim Kaine. It's amazing, because if Stewart takes down Kaine early in the evening of election day, the entire country (who will still be voting) will witness a...

Marion Marechal-Le Pen, often tipped as a future leader of France's far right, has dropped one of the most famous – and infamous – names in French politics.. On her social media accounts Marion has changed her profile names from Marion Le Pen to simply Marion Marechal. The change “was a way to demonstrate my transition to civilian life. I have never and will never feel ashamed of my name”, she told the rightwing Boulevard Voltaire website. Marechal, a 28-year-old former MP and devout Catholic, added her mother Yann Le Pen’s name to her surname in 2012 as she launched...

"Despite the differences we see between Nato allies on issues like trade, we see a Nato which is delivering on strengthening our collective defence and the biggest reinforcement to our collective defence since the end of the Cold War." "Not only do we see a Nato which is united, but we see actually a Nato which is able to strengthen our cooperation and transatlantic bond," Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato head and former Norwegian PM, told press in Brussels on Thursday (7 June). US defence minister Jim Mattis echoed Stoltenberg when asked in Brussels on Thursday if the trade clash could...

A police department in Virginia sat on a seized German military rifle for almost a decade before moving to turn it over to a military museum. The Chesapeake Police Department seized a Sturmgewehr 44 in 2009 from a felon that could no longer possess the firearm. Seeing that it had historical significance — the StG 44 is considered by many to be the first true “assault rifle” due to its select-fire design and use of an intermediate cartridge — the agency rendered it inoperable and this week moved to have the City Council approve donating the piece to the...

An FBI agent joked about how a witness who lied in the Hillary Clinton email investigation would never be charged, according to a Justice Department inspector general report released Thursday. The witness had obviously lied to the FBI about handling sensitive information, the agent told one of his colleagues, but it didn’t matter, because regardless of what the Clinton associate said, the FBI wasn’t going to do “sh-t” about it. Here’s the exchange: FBI Employee: “boom…how did the [witness] go” Agent 1: “Awesome. Lied his -ss off. Went from never inside the scif [sensitive compartmented information facility] at res, to...

In their never-ending effort to Balkanize America and buy black votes by stealing from all taxpayers, including black ones, the Democrats are reviving their call for reparations for slavery. After all, with blacks waking up to the fact that Democrats are doing nothing for them, a new bribe appears to be necessary. Given that there are no living Americans who were slaves or who owned slaves, it's clear that the idea of reparations has nothing to do with justice or concern for blacks; it's just another political effort to bribe voters with other people's money – just like Paul Ryan...

So what are the best and worst fighter aircraft of all time? What plane would you pick for a war in the sky? On the surface, the questions seem easy to answer. One might look at which planes performed the best in combat as opposed to fighters that did not. Or, one could look at which planes had the best technology, took advantage of historical circumstances, or utilized a combination of the two. Does America dominate the field of best fighters? What about Russia? Does China get any mentions? Does any one nation have more negative mentions? All good questions....

________________________________________________________________________________________ In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". demimonde [dem-ee-mond; French duh-mee-mawnd] noun 1. (especially during the last half of the 19th century) a class of women who have lost their standing in respectable society because of indiscreet behavior or sexual promiscuity. 2. a demimondaine. 3. prostitutes or courtesans in general. 4. a group whose activities are ethically or legally questionable: a demimonde of investigative journalists writing for the sensationalist tabloids. 5. a group characterized by lack of success or status:...

Beginning in 1936, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin set about deliberately murdering 700,000 people in the Great Purge, an act of mass killing that “constituted a form of rule” unto itself, as Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin explained. The armed forces were not spared. The purges swept through the officer corps, including 154 division commanders — of 186 in total — and resulted in the NKVD executions of several of the country’s most innovative and senior military thinkers, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky who was forced into signing a confession under torture before his murder. Thousands of officers were executed.

The families of Australian victims of the MH17 tragedy have written a heartbreaking open letter warning soccer fans this year's World Cup in Russia is “under a dark shadow”. In May, prosecutors investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 say they identified the missile used to shoot down the plane as coming from a Russian military unit. All aboard died, two thirds of them Dutch and 38 of them Australian residents. “That a sophisticated weapon belonging to the Russian Army was dispatched and used to shoot down a civilian aircraft should be of grave...

Listening to FBI Director, Christopher Wray this evening, made me sick to my stomach. I am done with this DOJ/FBI farce from A-Z. POTUS, Trump I love you ....but, this ugly game of Obama/Clinton/Democrat fools, turncoats and traitors needs to end right now. Sir.....fire Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, Christoper Wray, Robert Mueller, immediately...like right now!!! Screw them and the horses they rode in on. Do it SASPO & MAGA!!! The DOJ/FBI are corrupt, criminals from A-Z...period.

A glimpse in the rear view mirror at the land and cars of long ago.