Free Republic

You probably visit the meat counter every time you go to the grocery store, but have you ever wondered about what goes on behind it? To learn the tricks of the butchery trade, we spoke with butchers from grocery-store chains, gourmet supermarkets and specialty shops. Read on to get the inside scoop on freezing, preparing, shopping and saving money on meats so you can carve out some savings next time you hit the counter.

The hotel maid who claims former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped her has been accused of working as a prostitute. Allegations have emerged that the 32-year-old cleaner was was taking extra money from male guests at the hotel for sex. 'There is information... of her getting extraordinary tips, if you know what I mean. And it's not for bringing extra f**king towels,' a source close to the defence investigation told the New York Post. The woman also had 'a lot of her expenses – hair braiding, salon expenses – paid for by men not related to her,' the source added....

Freedom of information laws are being misused to harass scientists and should be re-examined by the government, according to the president of the Royal Society.

Democrats and Republicans not only vote differently and see the world differently, but they get their information and entertainment from very different places.A new study on media consumption in the Midwest illustrates how this works in individual media markets like Milwaukee.Heavy radio and Internet users here tend to skew Republican, while big television and newspaper users skew Democratic.Viewers of Fox News, the Golf Channel, the History Channel, the Speed Channel, ESPN and Country Music Television lean Republican.Viewers of MSNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, Lifetime and Bravo lean Democratic.“We know Wisconsin is polarized politically. We’re also polarized in how we pay attention...

Herb Meyer: We’re living through an information revolution. It’s wonderful—but we can drown in it if we don’t learn how to use this information properly. Information is the raw material of knowledge, and in How to Analyze Information I’m trying to explain the step-by-step process of turning information into understanding. In short, this is a guide that shows readers how to think...

Obama Administration Responds to Fewer Information Requests in 2010Published March 14, 2011 Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Two years into its pledge to improve government transparency, the Obama administration handled fewer requests for federal records from citizens, journalists, companies and others last year even as significantly more people asked for information. The administration disclosed at least some of what people wanted at about the same rate as the previous year. People requested information 544,360 times last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act from the 35 largest agencies, up nearly 41,000 more than the previous year, according to an analysis...

The following is excerpted from an email sent out to my company: Google has set up a Person Finder in both English and Japanese: http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/ The Japanese Red Cross Society (Nippon Sekijujisha) website is here, with links to both English and Japanese: www.jrc.or.jp/english/index.html NEWS RESOURCES Live coverage from BBC News are at the following two links, with automatic updates streaming on the first: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698 www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12709598 CNN provides coverage on the quake and Tsunami as well as warnings of other Pacific coast nations at threat: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/11/tsunami.hawaii.japan.warning The Diplomat's Tokyo Notes provide news on the Earthquake here: http://the-diplomat.com/tokyo-notes/2011/03/11/japan-earthquake-update Numerous major Japanese newspapers...

Driving to Anchorage, AK from South Carolina in Mid March. 4,288 miles one way!

Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, February 4, 2011, 11:49 AM Stunner. President Obama gets his Middle East news from the anti-Semitic anti-American Aljazeera channel. The Business Insider reported, via FOX Nation: The Daily Beast just posted an “exclusive” look inside the White House’s “scramble” to find the right response to the unfolding crisis in Egypt this week. The short version is that the crisis caught U.S. intelligence off guard and they were slow to react. But here’s the line that jumped out at me. Now, huddled in the big office of their boss—one of the administration policy-makers trying to...

Republican Congressman Proposes Tracking Freedom of Information Act RequestsBy ERIC LIPTON Published: January 28, 2011 WASHINGTON — Representative Darrell Issa calls it a way to promote transparency: a request for the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years. Mr. Issa, a California Republican and the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations....

Michael Mounir, spokesman of Hand-in-Hand for Egypt, has received calls from White House officials inquiring about the criminal blast that took place outside the Al-Qiddissine (The Saints) church on Saturday, killing 21 people and wounding 97 others. In an exclusive statement for Al Youm Al Sabe3, Munir said that Paul Monteiro, Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, told him that the President Barack Obama "strongly condemns" the suicide attack, asserting that "Those behind it targeting faithful Christians do not show respect for human life and must be brought to justice, expressing his hope that the Egyptian...

Turns out there’s a fairly clear answer to the question Why is Julian Assange doing this? Anyway, it’s as clear as the topic of human motivations ever really get. Back in 2006, Assange wrote a couple of essays on the topic of conspiracy and control. He takes the position that all authoritarian structures are conspiracies of power. His thoughts are interesting. Their may even be some truth to some of what he says. In any case, if you want to understand his motivation, grasp what he’s saying here: Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial...

It's high summer and we're all out there seeing each other. We're not hidden away in our homes and offices as we are in winter's cold. We're part of a crowd—on the street, in the park, on the boardwalk, on the top deck of the ferry to Saltaire. And we can see in some new or clearer ways how technology is changing us.

The following text SNIPPET is a quote: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-10-1084A1.pdf PUBLIC NOTICE Federal Communications Commission 445 12thSt., S.W. Washington, D.C.20554 News Media Information 202 / 418-0500 Internet: http://www.fcc.gov TTY: 1-888-835-5322 DA 10-1084 Released: June 16, 2010 MEDIA BUREAU ANNOUNCES THE RELEASE OF REQUESTS FOR QUOTATION FOR MEDIA OWNERSHIP STUDIES AND SEEKS SUGGESTIONS FOR ADDITIONAL STUDIES IN MEDIA OWNERSHIP PROCEEDING MB Docket No. 09-182 Suggestions for Additional Studies Deadline:July 7, 2010 Requests for Quotation for Media Ownership Studies. As part of the Commission’s 2010 Quadrennial Media Ownership proceeding,1the Commission is commissioning nine economic studies to evaluate the current marketplace and the state of...

Kim being duped by subordinates Power may be shifting to son, or aides are too fearful to tell the truth June 21, 2010 North Korean leader Kim Jong-il inspects chicken eggs during a trip last October to a poultry farm located in the communist state’s North Pyongan Province. [YONHAP] Kim Jong-il’s subordinates are duping their leader with false or deliberately incomplete reports on national affairs, according to sources in Seoul informed of North Korean politics, a possible indication that his grip on power may be weakening. The sources said there are two possible reasons why Kim is being cut out...

Can someone on here (I know you can if you want to) please provide an internet source showing publicly traded companies that have recently filed for bankruptcy? Thanks in advance.

Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream. While increased satellite on-board computing capabilities ideally would mean that only the most useful information would be transmitted to Earth, an unresolved question had been how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in...

Where’s Jimmy? Just Google His Bar Code By Gene J. Koprowski - FOXNews.com Scientists currently tag animals to study their behavior and protect the endangered, but some futurists wonder whether all humans should be tagged too. Scientists tag animals to monitor their behavior and keep track of endangered species. Now some futurists are asking whether all of mankind should be tagged too. Looking for a loved one? Just Google his microchip. The chips, called radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, emit a simple radio signal akin to a bar code, anywhere, anytime. Futurists say they can be easily implanted under the...

Obama's "million-mouthed dog," Organizing for America (OFA), was especially busy the week leading up to Obama's commencement address at Hampton University on May 9, in which he bemoaned information technology as "a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment." On May 6, the OFA blog encouraged its 13 million supporters to engage in the "fun" technology of the President's twitter account:

In the years since the Cold War ended, the U.S. military has become heavily dependent upon satellite communications to maintain its global connectivity. Without such links, it would be difficult for the military to operate in a coordinated fashion or exchange information critical to situational awareness. Defense experts have repeatedly warned that the availability of space-based communications could be compromised in future conflicts by the fact that 80-90% of all military traffic is transmitted on vulnerable commercial satcom channels. However, there is a related problem that far fewer military observers have noticed: only about 1% of defense communications today are...

The new role that quantum information plays in gravity sets the scene for a dramatic unification of ideas in physics One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things. A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over...

Click here to find out more! Top of the Ticket Politics and commentary, coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times « Previous Post | Top of the Ticket Home | Next Post » An Obama secret: They're rejecting more Freedom of Information requests than those secretive Bush folks March 16, 2010 | 5:10 pm Doorchained Here's a not-so-tiny tidbit of data that's getting lost in the White House-driven public frenzy over healthcare legislation this week: The White House Democratic administration of Barack Obama, who denounced his presidential predecessor George W. Bush as the most secretive in history, is now...

N.Korean executed for calling S.Korea: report SEOUL (AFP) – A North Korean has been publicly executed for using a mobile phone to tell a defector friend in South Korea about living conditions in the communist state, a rights group said Thursday. The man identified only as Jung was executed in late January after security officials discovered a Chinese mobile phone in his home, said the Seoul-based Open Radio for North Korea. It said Jung, a munitions worker in the northeastern port of Hamhung, confessed under torture that he had mentioned rice prices and living conditions.

Even today there are some still blank stares when I suggest to an audience of C-level executives or security professionals that they should all read the front pages of the Financial Times, the Yomiuri Shimbun, etc., as well as the technology news, if they want to know what cyber risks and threats to prepare for. Oh, the battle might be waged in bits and bytes, and bloodied patch bulletins that arrive six months too late; but the war will be won by those who could read between lines of the lead stories in politics and business, and it will most...

This video is incredibly informative on our rights when it comes to the upcoming census. Jerry Day outlines some of the outrageous questions the census asks and tells us, clearly, that the Constitution not only does not authorize their access into our lives like this but it clearly violates the 4th amendment. Please, watch the video and send it to everyone you know.

It looks like America, teetering as it was on the brink of a 'kinder, gentler' tyranny, has pulled back. Between the shocking election of Scott Brown in ploddingly-liberal Massachusettes, the overturning of much of McCain-Feingold's ban on election advertisements prior to elections, and the Russian disclosure that the Global Warming hoaxers were making up data, America emerged from this rather close call with a new direction. It appears that direction -- much to the consernation and dismay of the President and much of Congress -- is back to freedom. What made this possible? What forces drove back the blitzkreig of...

Americans are known for gorging on food, but we're also gluttons of another sort: A new study finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day-and that's only on our free time. One byte of information is equivalent to one letter of text. One gigabyte is equal to roughly 8 minutes of high definition video. Thirty-four gigabytes of data would fit on about 7 DVD disks or 1.5 Blu-ray disks. A mix of old and new media contribute to our daily information diet, the study finds, including TV, radio, books, the Internet,...

Last February I mentioned the events that would commemorate the life and work of Charles Darwin in 2009. I had no idea at the time that I would be invited to participate in one of these events. But there I was, precisely 150 years after On the Origin of Species first appeared, seated with other scientists in front of a packed room that featured, among other interesting things, a life-sized model of a baleen whale. The venue was the National Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, and the occasion was a panel discussion titled Design without a Designer? [1]...

December 7th, 2009 3:29 pmDirective Number 9 During the Algerian war, the terrorists promulgated an order which with variations would provide the backbone doctrine for information warfare into the 21st century. Dr. Cori Dauber, the author of the SSI monograph “The YouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop on Every Computer� describes the ground zero of the modern information Jihad. The Algerians’ “Directive Number Nine” argued that it was better to kill one man where the American press would hear of it than nine where no one would find out. What Khattab realized...

The current treatment of young-age creationists in the scientific community and society at large is unfair and unwise. Scientists and philosophers of science, including old-age creationists and naturalists, should respect youngage creationists as legitimate contributors to science. Young-age creationists offer to the current origins science establishment a competing rational viewpoint that will augment fruitful scientific investigation through increased accountability for scientists, introduction of original hypotheses and general epistemic improvement...

Here is but the latest act of submission to Islam by your State Department. A State Department cable has just been sent out with this announcement: The Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) has assembled a range of innovative and traditional tools to support Posts' outreach activities during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Here, in contrast, is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,...

BOSTON (AP) -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message... ...Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship... ...Zittrain started Herdict in February -- a month before China's block began -- to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked...

U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S. Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some...

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and friend to the national Messiah, has been tapped to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Sunstein was one of the major influences on a young Obama’s attitudes on government regulation and economics, a scary proposition considering the degree to which the Obama administration is attempting to pull us toward Soviet-style communism. According to the Journal, many of those familiar with Sunstein’s work and philosophy have said that his fingerprints are obvious in many of the administration’s policies, including credit card reform and...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Transparency-Access-to-Information/ THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10TH, 2009 AT 6:34 PM Transparency: Access to Information Posted by Michael Fitzpatrick The Federal government is the largest single producer, collector, consumer, and disseminator of information in the United States. Providing meaningful access to this information is a key goal of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. As part of the Open Government Initiative, the President tasked Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag with issuing an Open Government Directive to Federal agencies. The OMB Directive will be informed by recommendations being...

News to Note, May 23, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (READ THE FOLLOWING STORIES AND MUCH MORE BY CLICKING THE EXCERPT LINK AT BOTTOM) 1. ICR: “‘Missing Link’ Ida Is Just Media Hype”The news media has been awash this week in hype over an alleged missing link fossil nicknamed Ida. As it turns out, the fossil wasn’t fraudulent, but the hype definitely was. 2. The Telegraph: “New ‘Super Rats’ Evolve Resistance to Poison”Is this “super rat” an example of evolution in action, or the result of an information-reducing mutation? 3. Gallup: “More Americans ‘Pro-Life’ than...

Chapter 12: Life Requires a Source of Information by Dr. Werner Gitt May 14, 2009 The common factor present in all living organisms, from bacteria to man, is the information contained in all their cells. It has been discovered that nowhere else can a higher statistical packing density of information (see appendix A1.2.3) be found. The information present in living systems falls in the category of “operational information” as discussed in chapter 7. This information is exactly tuned in to the infinitude of life processes and situations, and its origin can be ascribed to creative constructional information (chapter 7). The...

In the Beginning was Information: Some Quantitative Evaluations of Semantics (Ch 10) by Dr. Werner Gitt We can now begin to evaluate semantic information quantitatively, after having considered the essentials at the semantics level in the preceding chapters...

Marklevinshow.com (archived shows as well) Live from 6-8 Eastern RushLimbaugh.com Glennbeck.com I'm sorry folks but these sources actually 'cite' sources and what is happening. Mark Levin, although somewhat abrasive, is a constitutional lawyer and is right-on with his

News to Note, May 2, 2009A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (Read the following stories, and much more by clicking excerpt link at the bottom) 1. LiveScience: “Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action”Swine flu—both the virus itself and the associated paranoia—seems to be sweeping the world. Is it evolution in action? 2. LiveScience: “Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact”The widely taught model of dinosaur extinction doesn’t line up with the latest fossil findings. 3. National Geographic News: “Baby Mammoth CT Scan Reveals Internal Organs”The preserved baby woolly mammoth shows that it died in an “oxygen-deprived environment” that...

Having been following the Swine Flu / H1N1 outbreak for some time, I thought it would be interesting to put together a reference to the various State home pages, as well as references to their Department of Health. It was an elightening experience. Had this been a biological warfare, there are some things that the States could do to make it easier to share information. First, finding the various State home pages was not necessarily straight forward. Using Google, for example, State Universities trumped State Government web pages in the links ranking and it took some digging to find the...

Does Instant Information Promote Market Efficiency? April-26-2009 I have been reading the updated sixth edition of Security Analysis from cover to cover and on more than one occasion, I have stopped to consider the major advantages modern day investors have compared to Graham and Dodd. Investors today have access to a wealth of information that Benjamin Graham lacked during his career. However, more widespread information also would theoretically lead to more market efficiency and reduce opportunities to find mispriced securities. Is it true that the market is more efficient due to the widespread dissemination of information made possible by the...

Information accosts us from all sides and presents itself over a wide range of manifestations: —From messages pounded out by drums in the jungle to telephone conversations by means of communications satellites. —From the computer-controlled processes for producing synthetic materials to the adaptive control of rolling mills. —In printed form from telephone directories to the Bible. —From the technical drawings which specify the construction of a gas-driven engine to the circuit diagram of a large scale integrated computer chip. —From the hormonal system of an organism to the navigational instincts of migrating birds. —From the genome of a bacterium to...

Information in Living Organisms Theorem 28: There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter... (for remainder, click link below)

... We can now formulate two fundamental properties of information: Property 1: Information is not the thing itself, neither is it a condition, but it is an abstract representation of material realities or conceptual relationships, such as problem formulations, ideas, programs, or algorithms. The representation is in a suitable coding system and the realities could be objects or physical, chemical, or biological conditions. The reality being represented is usually not present at the time and place of the transfer of information, neither can it be observed or measured at that moment. Property 2: Information always plays a substitutionary role. The...

In the Beginning was Information: The Five Levels of the Information Concept ...Because of the philosophical bias, both information and life itself are regarded as purely material phenomena in the evolutionary view. The origin and the nature of life is reduced to physical-chemical causes. In the words of Jean B. de Lamarck (1744–1829), “Life is merely a physical phenomenon. All manifestations of life are based on mechanical, physical, and chemical causes, being properties of organic matter” (Philosophie Zoologique, Paris, 1809, Vol. 1, p. 104 f). The German evolutionist Manfred Eigen expressed a similar view [E2, p. 149]: “The logic of...

3.1 Information: A Fundamental Quantity The trail-blazing discoveries about the nature of energy in the 19th century caused the first technological revolution, when manual labor was replaced on a large scale by technological appliances—machines which could convert energy. In the same way, knowledge concerning the nature of information in our time initiated the second technological revolution where mental “labor” is saved through the use of technological appliances—namely, data processing machines. The concept “information” is not only of prime importance for informatics theories and communication techniques, but it is a fundamental quantity in such wide-ranging sciences as cybernetics, linguistics, biology,...

Preliminary Remarks about the Concept of Information by Dr. Werner Gitt February 26, 2009 By way of introduction, we shall consider a few systems and repeatedly ask the question: What is the reason that such a system can function? 1. The web of a spider: In Figure 1 we see a section of a web of a spider, a Cyrtophora in this case. The mesh size is approximately 0.8 x 1.2 mm. The circle in the left picture indicates the part which has been highly magnified by an electron microscope to provide the right picture. The design and structure of...

Hi everyone, Please check out a new grassroots activism site that I'm trying to build up which would work off of a "cell/viral" model. There is also a FREE weekly newsletter that several others and myself (including some FReepers) are involved with. Please sign up if you'd like the free .pdf newsletter (printable and forwardable - both of which are encouraged). http://conservativesunderground.us/index.html Thanks!

The Congressional Budget Office has released their analysis of the House version of the stimulus bill (H.R. 1). You can read the full analysis in PDF form here, but we thought it would be useful to take some of the budget numbers in the analysis and present them in chart format. Shown below are several different views of the how the dollars for H.R. 1 would be spent over time. Most striking is that in total, the CBO estimates that less than 21% of the funds would be spent in 2009. Apparently, it is a huge crisis which requires swift...