Free Republic

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory. Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add. "He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the...

In a recent interview on CNBC with Ron Insana, one of the "old-timer" funds manager, Julian Robertson, predicted "utter global collapse" as a consequence of the bursting of the world-wide property bubble. Often called "Never Been Wrong Robertson", the former head of Tiger Management (once the largest hedge fund in the world), is extremely worried about the speculative bubble in real estate. Specifically, he is very worried about a world that is sustained by American consumer spending which is in turn 1/4 sustained by a property bubble. He predicts that 20 million people could lose their homes once the property...

MoveOn, the left wing political action group, sees a White House conspiracy in the announcement of President Bush's new Supreme Court nominee. When the White House revealed that the President would release the name of his pick Tuesday night, MoveOn quickly issued a press release suggesting the timing of the announcement was simply a "wag the dog" effort to help Karl Rove. The MoveOn release reads: "President Bush has apparently speeded up the announcement of his Supreme Court nominee to deflect public attention from the Karl Rove scandal." Evidence of the timing conspiracy? MoveOn cites an unnamed "Republican strategist" who...

Episode 35: Border Slingshot Is it feasible to fly over the frontier? In this episode, Adam and Jamie take on the myth that illegal immigrants are firing themselves 200 yards across the border and into the United States with a slingshot so accurate, it can land the human projectiles safely on a carefully placed mattress. Border patrols are reportedly baffled — can the MythBusters' handbuilt human-sized slingshot solve the puzzle? premiere: July 27, 2005

Thin Sandar, a chicken seller in Myanmar, had always dreamed of being a man. When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old treated it as an awe-inspiring omen - as have the thousands of stunned villagers who have traveled to a pagoda to see him. print "On the morning of the full moon day of June 21, I noticed my thing (sex organ) was not the same as before," Thin Sandar, who now goes by the male name Than Sein, told AFP in an interview at his home. "And my breasts disappeared," Than Sein added. "So I called...

Stone: 'Terrorists Are Like Einstein!'Why he shouldn't direct Paramount's big 9/11 film.By Mickey KausUpdated Tuesday, July 12, 2005, at 12:23 PM PT Does Brad Grey Have NEXIS? Here's what Oliver Stone, the man Paramount CEO Brad Grey picked to direct the studio's upcoming 9/11 picture, had to say about those events a month after they happened, as reported in The New Yorker. It's the smoking gun on the grassy knoll! Stone depicts the 9/11 attack as a "revolt" against the "six companies who control the world" and "control culture, and control ideas"--not oil companies, in other words, but media companies. 9/11 was, in short,...

I just realized...I mean that. It's going to come down to this. I have often argued, as many here have, that when FReepers said they would sit home rather than vote for (McCain, usually, sometimes Guiliani), that such sitting out would put Hilary in the Whitehouse. But I'm not moving on this.

These two documentaries make Michael Moore's crap look good by comparison.

Note: This article is an addendum to The Roswell Crash, and Roswell, 50 years and counting. (Links on website:http://ufocasebook.com/rameymemo.html Barely noticeable in one of the 1947 photos and clutched in Gen. Ramey's left hand is a slip of paper (boxed in red). Probably unwittingly, Gen. Ramey had the text side facing towards the camera, allowing the text on this paper to be photographed. When blown up and analyzed, it tells a remarkably different story of events from the one Ramey or contemporary Air Force counter-intelligence wants you to believe. The message turns out to be a telegram from Gen. Ramey...

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years. Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution. The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity. But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs...

The first thought screen helmets were made in 1998 and used aluminum foil. They were sent to an investigator in Iowa. The investigator reported that one user tried it for a short time with no results. Afterwards, the investigator could not be reached and the whereabouts of the helmets are unknown. About 8 thought screens were made in early 1999 using a metalized plastic which is used in static shielding bags. Six users reported success but two users were overcome by telepathic commands from the aliens, removed the helmets and were taken. From 1999 to 2004 about 50 people abducted...

Alien Skull Mystery Continues Last Updated: 10/27/2004 8:03:47 AM. Early in 1999, a misshapen skull was presented to Lloyd Pye, who thought it would take six months to interest U.S. scientists in testing it to determine it's biological heritage. Six months turned into six years as Lloyd tried to interest scientists to have a serious go at a skull given the unfortunate name of "Starchild." Scientists would have nothing to do with something even casually suggestive of alien heritage. Fortunately, in early 2004, Lloyd was invited to London to have a series of bone chemistry tests run at the...

Friend just alerted me to "Coast to Coast" promoting 9/11 Conspiracy... on now. Never have listened before. Kooky callers.

The link above will get you to listen to the show. Just before the end of the last hour, Todd Schnitt took a call from "Doug" (?) I think that was his name. Schnitt is going to talk with him off the air.The guy claims to have had personal contact with Muslim extremists who tell him a bomb will go off in the San Fernando valley in California "on the ninth"...though he says he is UNSURE of what MONTH on the "ninth". I do NOT put much credibility into these claims--but I did want to post this in case anyone...

Weve all seen and heard of a place called Free Republic, its full of divorced or wife-beating conservative slobs who have the hygene of John Goodman after a long picnic. They thrive on stupid,worthless topics that focus around the "wonder of life" and "lets keep people who cant feel or think alive because were to stubborn to admit that its pretty damn foolish". But above all other abominations in this world is the wretched "Admin Mod", a man of horrible values and the judgement of a meth lab. It is he who makes free republic, well not free at all,...

The Problem of Race in America We do not speak of the black underclass. We need to begin. For over five years now I have gone as a reporter with the police, into the cities and the suburbs, into Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver. I have visited prisons and jails, spent night shifts in the precincts where whites don't go. What I have seen of the vast festering hordes of the black forgotten is grim. White America doesn't grasp the magnitude of the underclass, its isolation, its hopelessness, its resistance to change. Or its anger. Go into the sprawling necrotic...

The US House of Representatives passed a spending bill last week that contains provisions establishing a national ID card, and the Senate is poised to approve the measure in the next few days. This week marks the American public’s last chance to convince their Senators they don’t want to live in a nation that demands papers from its citizens as they go about their lives. Absent a political miracle in the Senate, within two years every American will need a conforming national ID card to participate in ordinary activities. This REAL ID Act establishes a massive, centrally-coordinated database of highly...

I imagine that Revenge of the Sith is very much the film Lucas's fans want to see, but are some of them ready for an anti-Bush diatribe? Though every Star Wars film until now has existed in an insular comic-book world, a lot has happened since 1999 and 2002 in the real world and Lucas dares, for the first time, to address how the hollow political conflict in his franchise correlates with the reality outside its panels. (It would have been stupid not to strike a parallel.) Revenge of the Sith's two greatest moments tap into the uncertainty of our...

Russ Baker —an investigative reporter and essayist—is a longtime TomPaine.com contributor. He is involved in the development of  a new not-for-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing investigative journalism in America . To read more about the problems in the 2004 presidential election and proposals for reforming our electoral system, see  Best Of TomPaine: Election Irregularities In 2004.Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be...

Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?