Free Republic

“Grumbling on the Way to the Promised Land” (Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29) Our text this morning is the Old Testament Reading from Numbers 11. At the start of this text we hear the Israelites grumbling against God and against his servant Moses. It says: “Now the rabble that was among [the children of Israel] had a strong craving. And the people of Israel also wept again and said, ‘Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our...

Death, destruction, charity, salvation, war, money, real estate, spouses, babies, and other September 11 statistics The initial numbers are indelible: 8:46 a.m. and 9:02 a.m. Time the burning towers stood: 56 minutes and 102 minutes. Time they took to fall: 12 seconds. From there, they ripple out.

image from pagunblog.com The Washington Post published an article meant to convince the American people that their perceptions of gun ownership in the United States are wrong. They attempt to convince people that surveys showing lower numbers are goodthink. The article admits that gun ownership numbers are hotly disputed. They admit that ownership numbers are difficult to determine. Then they make the claim that ownership rates are falling and that  "In reality, only about 25 percent of Americans own a gun." From the Washington Post: As some 70,000 people attended the NRA’s annual convention last week, nearly three months after...

Former congressman Anthony Weiner’s old haunts are coming back into the spotlight once again after he was arrested and sentenced to 21 months in prison for sexting a minor. A list recently released to the public contains information on all of Anthony Weiner’s contacts; names, addresses, work, and so forth. The kicker? All of this information was released straight from Weiner’s laptop, which is currently being held under evidence by the FBI. It’s important to note that we are not trying to “witch hunt” anyone, and this information is not meant for you to do the same. We are not...

President Trump’s historical successes in the first year of his presidency, word and the results are getting through to the only people that matter, voters. And the latest job approval numbers for the president reflect this. Even the Gallup poll, which has been an outlier with its bad news, has Trump at 40 percent approve (55 percent disapprove) after weeks in the mid-thirties. One of the reasons Gallup is an outlier is that it polls all U.S. adults, rather than screen for registered or likely voters. For a time, Trump’s disapproval in this poll was over 60 percent. The Rasmussen...

Las Vegas (CNN)In addition to his frequent forays into casinos and gun shops, Las Vegas strip killer Stephen Paddock took 20 cruises, many of them in Europe and the Middle East, investigators have learned. New video shows concertgoers fleeing scene 02:57 The cruises included stops at ports in Spain, Italy, Greece, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, according to information provided by a law enforcement source who asked not to be identified because the source was not authorized to share information about the investigation. Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, accompanied him on nine of the cruises. [...] In the wake of...

Chart done by David Scott Total private guns in the United States,  404 million Gun Watch Total private guns added during President Obama's two terms, 96 million Gun Watch Murder rate in the U.S. (latest from 2015)  4.9 per 100,000  FBI Murder rate in the U.S.  1993  9.5 per 100,000  FBI Murder rate in Brazil (latest) 24.6 per 100,000  Wikipedia Murder rate in Mexico  2013 15.7 per 100,000  Wikipedia Number of people with Concealed Carry permits in the United States: 14.5 million  CrimeResearch.org study Number of States where no permit is required to carry concealed or openly:  12 No...

Not only did anti-Trump professional protesters disrupt and block inaugural attendees, but security checkpoints also kept untold numbers of Trump supporters from getting through to the National Mall to witness the president take the oath of office. An online search for information about the security checkpoints revealed the following: Six hundred fifty thousand general admission attendees were expected with 12 TSA checkpoints along the parade route and the mall. Two hundred fifty thousand who had tickets were processed through separate checkpoints. The TSA said they could screen 1,500 people per hour. So it would take 36 hours to process 18,000...

Arizona – -(Ammoland.com)-Chart done by David Scott2016 has become the year with the most gun sales ever. The 2016 NICS checks have surpassed those for 2015, the previous record holder. In December, 2016 there were 2,771,159 National Instant Checks done.  In 2015, the number done in December was 3,314,594. December 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, slumped to only the third highest number of NICS checks in a month, the second highest being December, 2012, at the height of the Obama push for more infringements on the Second Amendment. There were 2,783,765 NICS done that month. December, 2016 was...

In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote. In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump. If Trump rouses even a fraction of these notoriously disaffected Americans — like this grease-smudged, 61-year-old first-time voter in western Pennsylvania — he could surge to victory. There’s just one catch: If we’re on the cusp of a blue-collar Great Awakening, it’s not yet showing up in the registration data....

Hundreds of thousands of bikers have descended on Washington DC to commemorate America's war dead and veterans, at an annual event known as Rolling Thunder.

Almost all of the companies in the S&P 500 (^GSPC) have announced their quarterly earnings, and now Wall Street’s number crunchers are finalizing their conclusions as to what actually happened during the last three months of 2015. Unfortunately, it’s become an increasingly challenging task to understand the true financial performance of the big publicly traded companies because of the widening of something called the “GAAP gap.” Don’t worry: this topic isn’t as scary a concept as it sounds. In a nutshell, there’s a standard known as generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, which encourages some uniformity in how companies will...

A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave. o mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan...

The 22 million digit number and the amazing maths behind primes January 21, 2016 by Steve Humble, The Conversation Primes: here be magic. Credit: Shutterstock It is a quite extraordinary figure. Dr Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri has found the largest-known prime number - written (274207281)-1. It is around 22m digits long and, if printed in full, would take you days to read. Its discovery comes thanks to a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) to search for primes. A number which can only be divided by...

"God is a pure mathematician!" declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.03599913. Let me explain. When scientists measure any quantity they must specify the units being used. The speed of light, for example, is either 186,000 or 300,000 depending on whether it is expressed as miles per second or kilometres per second. Likewise your weight might be 150 or 68 according to whether you are measuring in pounds or kilograms. Without knowing the units being...

New Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there were 665,000 jobs lost in January, a blunt finding that confuses the heralded report that 151,000 jobs were created in January in non-farm payrolls. But who got them? The very same BLS finds that jobs to "native born" and immigrant workers dropped. Ditto for men and women. It is possible that many employees took on a second job, according to analysts. But a difference of 816,000 is too big, one said. Same for the differences in the two surveys the BLS uses to gauge jobs, household data from the Current Population Survey,...

There was no jackpot winner of Saturday's biggest-ever $900 million Powerball drawing, and the jackpot for Wednesday's drawing will grow to an estimated $1.3 billion, officials said, NBC News reported.

There was a ton of bad news for Hillary Clinton in two new polls that put the former Secretary of State’s favorability deeper into negative territory amid harsh voter assessments of her personality – particularly her trustworthiness. When asked by CNN/ORC if Clinton was honest and trustworthy, only 42 percent of respondents said yes while 57 percent said no. That was down from 50/49 percent in March and 56/43 percent in March 2014. Clinton’s favorability ratings are also the lowest in a Washington Post-ABC News poll since April 2008 when she first sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Today, just 41...

In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge Marco de LeijaIn Cuernavaca, Mexico, a “spy” network makes the decentralized bus system more efficient. As a consequence, the departure times of buses exhibit a ubiquitous pattern known as “universality.”  By: Natalie WolchoverFebruary 5, 2013 Comments (1) print In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized crime, he learned, but another shadow trade: Each driver paid a “spy” to record when the bus ahead of his...

A new study from the School of Medical Sciences at Australia’s University of New South Wales points to profound brain changes that junk food causes, making a junk food habit “more deadly than war, famine, and genocide”. “We observed that rats fed a cafeteria diet for 2 weeks showed impaired sensory-specific satiety following consumption of a high calorie solution. The deficit in expression of sensory-specific satiety was also present 1 week following the withdrawal of cafeteria foods. Thus, exposure to obesogenic diets may impact upon neurocircuitry involved in motivated control of behavior.” "the consumption of junk food overrides this natural...