Free Republic

The announcement of record profits for Barclays Capital on Monday was greeted with a bigger dose of resentment than of relief that the financial crisis has not proved absolutely terminal.There remains a deep sense of unease about investment banks and the techniques they use to make money. In my view, this is due in part to the veil of mystery that shrouds their operations. There's a lingering suggestion that money is being generated out of thin air and that this shouldn't be possible. It's unlikely that any hedge fund or investment bank will open their doors and say "look guys, here's how...

In 1943 during WW2, an army Sgt., Ed Davis, was working in Iran near the Turkish border, in charge of locals hired by our army to build a road through Iran to the Soviet border, which would carry supplies to the Soviets instead of flying them in. In short, Ed did a tremendous favor for a little Kurdish village near Ararat. His workers were mostly Kurds and the chief of the village came to Ed and asked if he would like to see Noah's Ark. He said the summer on the mountain had been hottest in many years and the...

Thank heavens for Peggy Noonan who so often manages, so elegantly, to articulate the meandering germs running through my brain but remaining unexpressed due to my lack of skill.In appreciating William F. Buckley today she writes: …When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, “Oh, we are losing her kind.” He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill’s passing, that we are losing his kind–people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of...

I live in a beautiful rural valley of 700 people in eastern Idaho and after I came to live here I found out that Utah isn’t the only place that is fifty percent Mormon. As a compulsively inquisitive geo-political junkie I decided to look through the Book of Mormon so I could learn a little about the belief of my neighbors. As with any outsider looking into another’s faith, I found many outlandish passages that would require faith to swallow, however, this is a characteristic that all religions share. What I have learned of my Mormon neighbors in the years...

"Nothing there," is what Case Western Reserve University physicists concluded about black holes after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes. In nearly 13 printed pages with a host of calculations, the research may solve the information loss paradox that has perplexed physicists for the past 40 years.Case physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss report in the article, "Observation of Incipient Black Holes and the Information Loss Problem,” that has been accepted for publication by Physical Review D. "It's complicated and very complex," noted the researchers, regarding both the...

NEW YORK - Call it the Clinton contradiction. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a political trailblazer, pursuing the precedent-setting achievement of becoming the first female candidate to win the presidency. How, then, did she also become the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment — a title historically attached to less-than-scintillating contenders like John Kerry, Al Gore and Walter Mondale? It's a curious paradox for Clinton, a presidential hopeful who calls herself a feminist and touts her experience as a woman and a "mom." But her long career in Washington, army of political consultants and marriage to a former president have all...

Study Explains Why We're Not All Beautiful By Andrea Thompson LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 28 March 2007 09:47 am ET A new study explains why we aren't all born with Brad Pitt’s perfectly chiseled features or Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips. A long-standing thorn in the side of biologists has been the difficulty in accounting for the enormous variation between individuals when sexual selection by females for the most attractive mates should quickly spread the “best” genes through a population. “It is a major problem for evolutionary biology,” said study team leader Marion Petrie of Newcastle University. The lek paradox For...

His friends, the folks at his church in San Jose -- they know what "Alan" did in 1999 to that 11-year-old boy. The boy had a troubled home life. Alan, then in his 40s, became a father figure. Then came the oral sex, a confession and five years at a men's colony. That they know doesn't bother him, he said. It shields him. "That's my best defense. I'm being held accountable. Where am I going to go without anybody knowing about it?" said Alan, who insisted on anonymity. "Let's say I've got to move to Morgan Hill. My social circle...

If California's spendthrifts will not balance the state's budget in a good financial year, will they ever do so? The Legislature passed a $131 billion budget last month with comfortable bipartisan support. But Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislators missed a chance to put the state's finances on more solid footing by closing the existing budget gap and taking steps to avoid future deficits. The fiscal year 2006-2007 budget is, in the words of state Sen. Tom McClintock, "a paradox." "We've enjoyed astounding revenue growth ... And the economy has blossomed," McClintock said in a June 27 debate. "But if you adopt...

While reading [about the Stockdale Paradox], I had what could only be termed an epiphany. The modern Left are precisely analagous to Stockdale's "Optimists." Their philosophy: if we ignore the global war on terror, the problem will simply go away. Consider, if you will, just a few recent events on the world stage...

In south Tehran there is a huge walled cemetery dedicated to the martyrs, the young men who died fighting in the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. This vast city of the dead, complete with its own subway station and shops, does not share Arlington National Cemetery's sublimely stoic aesthetic of identical tombstones, row upon row. In Tehran's war cemetery, each of the fallen is remembered individually with his own martyr's shrine, a sealed glass cabinet on a stand. The cabinets are filled with faded photos of men forever young, some in helmets or red bandannas, some carrying...

THE laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness inherent in laws of quantum physics. Some solutions to the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity lead to situations in which space-time curves back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to loop back in time and meet younger versions of themselves. Because such time travel sets up paradoxes, many researchers suspect that some physical constraints must...

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated.Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind. The new model, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics, gets...

George F. Kennan, who died last week at 101, was a unique figure in American history. I greatly admired him but disagreed with him profoundly on many critical issues, and, in the 35 years I knew him, I often reflected on this strange paradox. His extraordinary memoirs had made the idea of a life in the Foreign Service seem both exciting and intellectually stimulating to me. He had watched Joseph Stalin at close hand, and sent Washington an analysis of Russia that became the most famous telegram in U.S. diplomatic history. This was followed closely by the most influential article...

Crocodile and the Baby Paradox A crocodile swipes a baby, but he tells the mother he will return it if the mother is able to correctly answer a single question: "Am I going to return your baby?" The mother says, "No, you will not." How can her answer be correct, though? If he returns the baby because her prediction was accurate, then her prediction wasn't accurate after all, and by the set up of the problem, he must keep the baby. If he keeps the baby because her prediction was inaccurate, then her prediction was correct and he must return...

China is tightening controls on online video games. It has set up a censorship committee to monitor games following the banning of a Swedish game called Hearts of Iron, which portrayed Manchuria, Tibet and Xinjiang as independent nations. A previous Norwegian game, Project IGI2: Covert Strike, incensed officials for its portrayal of the Chinese army. The committee is charged with banning content that "could threaten national unity", said the state press. Future imports "Online games with content threatening state security, damaging the nation's glory, disturbing social order and infringing on other's legitimate rights will also be prohibited," said a Chinese...

The devil beyond the mirror ? © One must realize that the depth, the reality of the image in a mirror is false, merely a reflection that hides the reality behind it. Call it a cancer, call it an error of philosophy, call it the work of the devil. But social programs dealing with family violence and abuse are creating social programs, in a paradoxical effect. Paradox...as in Truth can lie ! Stop violence by women? A missing truth, among others...! Back in 1987, it was noted that the programs dealing with abuse in North America had been seriously manipulated...

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...

Nathan McCall, author of the best seller "Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America," teaches journalism at Emory University. He is a former reporter at The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Related: • Why African-American boys often fail in school • How mentoring can help African-American boys succeed Some years ago, when I was a young boy, I decided that the gritty streets were far more promising than a good education.I was in junior high -- right around the time experts say young black males tend to disengage from school -- and I was fairly...

<p>Another political poll arrived the other day to remind us that Latinos are walking contradictions. Thank you, very much.</p> <p>The New York Times and CBS poll said Latinos back big government and President George W. Bush, who is famously in favor of little government. It said Latinos want more government services and lower taxes. But tax cuts mean service cuts.</p>