Free Republic

Former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said bipartisan concern over climate change could see the United States adopt a tax on carbon emissions, with the proceeds shared with households, if Democrat Joe Biden is elected President in November. Yellen, who served as Fed chair from 2014-2018, said the combination of social injustices exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, and wildfires in California, could boost support for the proposal. “There really is a new kind of recognition that you’ve got a society where capitalism is beginning to run amok and needs to be readjusted in order to...

Devastating 'World War ZERO' destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age 11:41, 13 MAY 2016 UPDATED 11:44, 13 MAY 2016 BY JASPER HAMILL Controversial theory finally identifies mysterious 'Sea Peoples' blamed for cataclysmic series of events which changed the course of history It was a disaster which destroyed the ancient world's greatest civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age that lasted centuries. Now one archaeologist think he's worked out who's to blame for sparking an event he calls "World War Zero", but which most academics refer to as the The Late Bronze Age Collapse ....

This is graphic, so warnings needed! But this is what they are teaching their kids.

Reference Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003. Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701. What was done In the words of the authors, "high-resolution records of ð13C and ð18O in stalagmite SF-1 from Buddha Cave [33°40'N, 109°05'E] are used to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." What was learned Among the climatic episodes evident in the authors' data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and...

Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete. He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".

Double impact may have caused tsunami, global cooling Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters. Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria (see map) revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) wide....

Today's genre books are full of future dystopias, which only have one weakness: teenagers. And everybody knows that most dystopias are kind of contrived. But here are 10 lessons from real-life rebellions against repressive regimes, that we wish the creators of fictional dystopias would pay attention to. 10. The Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend Politics makes strange bedfellows. It even makes some unacknowledged bedfellows. Any repressive government — any government at all, for that matter — will prohibit something. It could be hard drugs, or it could be booze, or it could be untaxed salt, or it...

Wednesday, March 26, 2014 The Shape of a Post-American World Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The post-American world will be many things, but multilateral isn't one of them. There will be no world government and international organizations will be good for little except sucking up the last drops of wealth and prestige of the United States. It will be a chaotic place with everyone out for themselves. The Cold War map of the world divided into two camps was simple and clear. The post-American world will be a much more ambiguous place. Instead of two global...

Some folks who are serious about space colonization are upset by this video. The gist of their fear is that we aren't going to establish humanity off-world before the Green freaks, eco-nuts, and Luddites drag us down into a new Dark Age. Sadly, the Dark Age we all fear has to come before we can open the frontier. This is a world at war. The forces of Good (God, order, duty, love) are fighting the forces of Evil (Satan, chaos, liberty, self-worship). The Good Guys go by many different names. I call the bad guys the Revolution. Today, the Revolution...

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

Civilization is a fragile thing. Humans thrive best in almost every way when they are able to band together in large numbers and live peaceably together. Any community helps improve the odds of survival and reproduction of the individuals within it, but the larger and more stable the society, the more those odds improve. A larger community will be better able to promote safety from outside invasion. The larger the community, the larger the pool of potential mates for each new generation, so that the genetic mixture is more likely to stay robust and varied. The larger and more...