Free Republic

Many of my fellow conservatives love Ayn Rand. And many of my liberal friends love to hate her. You can understand why progressives enjoy blasting Rand's presumably nefarious influence on the conservative movement. She makes for a convenient punching bag for progressives, because she embodies the caricatured version of what progressives imagine conservatives really think: that egotism and greed are good and that the parasitic weak deserve to be trod upon by the capitalistic powerful. And then there are people like me: Conservatives who view themselves as Christians first. To us, Rand's worldview is repellent, and the fact that her...

Why Hitler wished he were a Muslim (WSJ)From The Wall Street Journal, a book review of two new books on Nazi Germany, ATATÜRK IN THE NAZI IMAGINATION by Stefan Ihrig and ISLAM AND NAZI GERMANY’S WAR by David Motadel. : ‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was...

A team of archaeologists are discovering new finds on a tiny island just off the Black Sea coast near Sozopol, Bulgaria -- finds that may shed additional light on the location and features of a lost temple to Apollo erected by Archaic Greeks in the late 6th century BCE. Epigraphic sources document that a temple to Apollo was raised on an island near the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia Pontica, which is located near present-day Sozopol. But there has been no evidence to suggest where the temple was actually located -- until recently, when an archaeological team under the direction...

On Tuesday we ran a story detailing how much new regulations issued by the Obama administration in 2014 were going to cost the economy this year (and beyond). The figure was hardly insignificant – $181.5 billion in new compliance costs imposed on several industries that will ultimately be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. Add these new costs to the $2 trillion annual cost of earlier regulations, and you begin to see how compliance costs reduce productivity, cut down on employment and curb business expansion. But there is more to these regulations...

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

Does anyone recall an accord that states that every nation importing oil from opec, the bulk of which comes from the middle east, must allow a certain number of muslim immigrants into their nation. I first read of this maybe 8 to 10 years ago. I do not know if it was true. That is why I am seeking it now, to verify.

This month is the forty-second anniversary of the legal decision, Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court eliminated the abortion laws of all 50 states. Here are five facts about the plaintiff behind the case that transformed America: 1. “Jane Roe” was the legal pseudonym for Norma McCorvey the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. McCorvey filed court documents against Henry WADE, the district attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987, who enforced a Texas law that prohibited abortion, except to save a woman’s life. 2. In 1969, McCorvey was 22 years old, divorced, homeless, and pregnant for the...

Despite multiple attempts by the US Air Force to retire the A-10 Warthog, the aircraft has carried out 11% of all airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria since Operation Inherent Resolve began in August.

Seven decades after thousands of “balloon bombs” were let loose by the Imperial Japanese Army to wreak havoc on their enemies across the Pacific, two forestry workers found one half-buried in the mountains of eastern British Columbia. A navy bomb disposal team was called and arrived at the site Friday in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, B.C. “They confirmed without a doubt that it is a Japanese balloon bomb,” said RCMP Cpl. Henry Proce. “This thing has been in the dirt for 70 years .... There was still some metal debris in the area (but) nothing left of the balloon...

For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile. Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes used in breast scans. They believe that other scrolls could also be deciphered without unrolling.

Germany launched its first ever aerial blitz on Britain exactly 100 years ago tonight when two Zeppelins were sent on a bombing mission which killed four. On the nights of January 19 and 20, 1915, two of the airships were heading for Humberside but were blown further down the east coast by strong gusts. Heralding a new era of warfare, their first two targets - King's Lynn and Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk - were chosen purely by the direction of the wind.

On Martin Luther King Day, 2015, how stand race relations in America? Selma, a film focused on the police clubbing of civil rights marchers led by Dr. King at Selma bridge in March of 1965, is being denounced by Democrats as a cinematic slander against the president who passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the movie, King is portrayed as decisive and heroic, LBJ as devious and dilatory. And no member of the Selma cast has been nominated for an Academy Award. All 20 of the actors and actresses nominated are white. Hollywood is like the Rocky Mountains,...

A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping to narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them. Figuring out what these fast radio bursts are or where they come from could help answer some of the biggest cosmological questions. They last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as the sun does in a day, all seemingly in a tight band of radio-frequency waves. Their source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years...

At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, a packed theater in Franklin, Tenn., was completely quiet. As the credits rolled, some folks were filing out, but many more were standing, still looking at the screen, honoring the man whose life they’d just seen portrayed on the silver screen. Before the movie, I’d never seen the parking lot so crowded. I had to park more than a quarter-mile away, hidden in the corner of a restaurant parking lot (hoping I wouldn’t be towed), and watched in amazement as people were streaming into the theater from parking spaces scattered far and wide. It...

In June the world will celebrate 800 years since the issuing of Magna Carta. But 2015 is also the anniversary of another important, and far more radical, British milestone in democratic history, writes Luke Foddy. Almost exactly 750 years ago, an extraordinary parliament opened in Westminster. For the very first time, elected representatives from every county and major town in England were invited to parliament on behalf of their local communities. It was, in the words of one historian, "the House of Commons in embryo". The January Parliament, which first met on 20 January 1265, is one of the...

The funniest part about this video? Liberals are already complaining that voicing an MLK cartoon is "just like blackface!" Surpppriiiiiiiise!

Alice Kearns Geoffroy Bernard, the last known living Orphan Train rider in Louisiana, died Saturday (Jan. 17) in Lafayette. She was 98. The Orphan Train Movement from 1854 and 1929 was a social experiment in child relocation, in which more than 250,000 orphans and unwanted children were taken out of New York City and given away at train stations across the country and in Canada. The program stopped in large part due to growing measures by state legislatures to restrict or forbid the interstate placement of children, according to the Louisiana Orphan Train Society.Ms. Bernard, who lived most of her...

The culture ministry said research on the tomb's bones showed the buried woman was over 60 years old and about 1.57 metres tall while the two men were aged 35 to 45 years old. One of the men had cut marks in his left chest that were most likely from mortal injuries inflicted by a knife or small sword, the ministry said. The men had an estimated height of 1.62 to 1.68 metres. The few burned bone remains of the fifth interred person, who was cremated, could not reveal the person's gender and authorities said further testing would be carried...

Martin Luther King was never himself a Communist—far from it. But the FBI's wiretapping of King was precipitated by his association with Stanley Levison, a man with reported ties to the Communist Party. Newly available documents reveal what the FBI actually knew—the vast extent of Levinson's Party activities On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy committed what is widely viewed as one of the most ignominious acts in modern American history: he authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin wiretapping the telephones of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy believed that one of King's closest...

Sons of Liberty Three-Night Event Begins Jan 25 at 9/8c on the History Channel. Video at source link. Topics will include Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, and more.