Free Republic

Call it the chaos theory for picking the next House speaker. Those Democrats trying to stop California Rep. Nancy Pelosi from reclaiming the job say they don’t need a rival candidate just yet. Instead, they plan to show that Pelosi lacks the votes to win the race. And then, they say, new challengers will emerge. It’s strategy that has other Democrats cringing at the prospect of their new House majority in disarray. They say voters swept them to office in this month’s elections to govern, not become bogged down by the kind of Republican infighting that sent Ohio Rep. John...

From the University of WisconsinFrom rocks in Colorado, evidence of a ‘chaotic solar system’Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.Alternating layers of shale and limestone near Big Bend, Texas, characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds definitive geologic evidence that the planets in our solar system behave...

Is there a better way to do the people’s business in commerce, legislation, education, bureaucracy and even religion in a Constitutional Republic? Is chaos only violent disorder? The weather and climate change naturally operate on Chaos Theory. Chaos is not disorder unless it goads the ignorant into rioting in the streets, usually burning and pillaging the visions and labor of others. In human discourse, the beautiful freely formed fractals of natural chaos makes a free society work by creating infinite beauty, opportunities for new relationships, ideas, ventures and true diversity based on our individual endowments from God. Chaos Theory views...

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution: “[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” Over the years, Congress has sought to — and largely succeeded in — expanding the scope of “commerce” to include the growing and personal consumption of food on one’s own land, solely for one’s own use. The theory being, of course, that by *not* consuming food grown on someone else’s land in an altogether different state, one has affected “interstate commerce” by *not* doing something one could reasonably be expected to do....

Science has long been based on the notion that law and order rule the universe. When primitive people looked at the sky, they could make sense of what they saw only by attributing it to the whims of powerful gods. But in the sixteenth century the German astronomer Johannes Kepler reduced the motion of the planets to three simple laws that guided them along elliptical orbits. His work led Isaac Newton to discover a law of gravitation that applied to any object in the universe. The universe, scientists subsequently assumed, is a predictable, clockwork system. Some parts are more complex...

Treating a failing heart by zapping it with a painful, powerful electrical shock has become the standard procedure. Now, a medical device company, based in West Henrietta, NY, has patented a technique that avoids the need for such dramatic treatment, by predicting the onset of fibrillation -- the heart rhythm that can lead to sudden death -- and treating it before it occurs. The preventative treatment does, like defibrillation, involve electrically stimulating the heart, says Michael Weiner, CEO of Biophan Technologies. But this new technique's weak signal would be minuscule compared to the jolt that defibrillators normally deliver. "I know...

Stem cells have two important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of cells. First, they are unspecialized cells that renew themselves for long periods through cell division. The second is that under certain physiologic or experimental conditions, they can be induced to become cells with special functions such as the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. Scientists primarily work with two kinds of stem cells from animals and humans: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells, which have different functions and characteristics that will be explained in this document. Scientists discovered ways...

The Unscientific Root of Atheism(Altamont, Tennessee, USA) A local author claims that intelligent design is a required element in any origin of life hypothesis. In his just published book, The Blind Atheist, Raymond Hendrix points out the difference between scientific possibility and the impossibility of the information-based machinery of life evolving according to the laws of physics. The controversy boils down to the difference between patterns and order in nature and information. Hendrix, whose life experience ranges from the navigation of submarines to commercial pilot, seems to have discovered a fatal flaw in all abiogenesis (the field of science dealing...

If we succeed in blocking climate change," Gore says, "it will be because of the dedication" Sabrina and her compatriots have shown. Gore is telling teenage girls that if they plant trees and recycle, climate will no longer change on a world that has had billions of years of changing climates. However, fear ye not therefore, Sabrina, for Gore will arise, and rebuke the winds and the sea; and there will be a great calm. But the men will marvel, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!