Free Republic

There is a particularly American Hanukah story that occurred when Washington and his troops were at Valley Forge during Christmas of 1777. Dan Adler’s article “Hanukkah at the White House” recounts this tale of George Washington’s encounter with a Jewish soldier: “In December, 1778, General George Washington had supper at the home of Michael Hart, a Jewish merchant in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was during the Hanukkah celebration, and Hart began to explain the customs of the holiday to his guest. Washington replied that he already knew about Hanukkah. He told Hart and his family of meeting the Jewish soldier at...

The argument claiming that extraterrestrials don’t exist was actually proposed by the astronomer Michael Hart, in a paper he published in 1975. Hart supposed that if an extraterrestrial civilization arose in the galaxy it would develop interstellar travel and launch colonizing expeditions to nearby stars. These colonies would, in turn, launch their own starships spreading a wave of colonization across the galaxy. How long would the wave take to cross the galaxy? Assuming that the starships traveled at one tenth the speed of light and that no time was lost in building new ships upon arriving at the destination, the...

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect--potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel--and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless. The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer...

A woman is suing a police officer and the town of Skokie, Illinois, after she was seriously injured when a cop threw her into a jail cell face-first following a drunk driving arrest. Cassandra Feuerstein, 47, claims in a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday, that excessive force was used in the incident and that she needed reconstructive surgery to 'replace the bones that had been shattered' after being pushed into the cell on March 10. The video of the incident clearly shows the 47-year-old being roughly shoved into the cell by an officer, who was later identified as Michael Hart....

Eight men and women, including two employees of Chicago's scandal-plagued city water department, were arrested Wednesday as federal investigators rolled up what they described as one branch of a Colombian drug-trafficking operation. The water department itself, already awash in charges of bribery and other political corruption, was not charged with being part of the heroin distribution ring. But investigators did find that department workers "were engaging in this kind of conduct during weekdays, during workdays, when they should not have been," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said at a news conference. Federal officials said the ongoing investigation got under way...