Free Republic

Russia has never been a technological superpower. The downsizing of the scientific budgets in the 1990s killed much of what was left of Soviet tech potential centered around closed scientific towns. Subsequent attempts to spur government-induced innovation, in particular under former President Dimitri Medvedev — a young Western-looking technocrat who’s now the chief Russian hawk — failed. Top-down tech ventures such as Rusnano and Skolkovo Center ended up as Potemkin villages, incapable of producing a fraction of the R&D output of American, European, or Chinese scientific clusters. ...But these diversions mask a broader collapse of Russian imports. Even though Russia’s...

BUFFALO, NY. — As the Earth continues to warm, some of the coldest places in the country could become a more desirable place for people to live. Scientists expect more and more people to move out of warmer places, leave the coasts and flock to cities that are seeing less severe impacts from climate change. Those places are being called "climate havens." “There's no place that's safe from climate change,” said University at Buffalo professor, Nick Rajkovich. However, there are places across America that will be safer, and less impacted by the extreme consequences of a changing climate. “People will...

“Israel is a reality, Arabs and Israelis must negotiate their future together.” When those words appeared on my screen last week, they looked like good advice from a European or American source, the kind of advice that Arabs usually ignore. Instead, they turned out to be from an interview with the deputy head of the Oman journalists association. Oman is a small (population: four million) oil-rich Sultanate in the Arabian Peninsula. And Oman’s foreign minister has remarked that Arab nations must reassure Israel that they do not pose a threat to its existence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently paid a...

And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased, and lifted up the Ark on high from the earth. For they overflowed exceedingly: and filled all the face of the Earth: and the Ark was carried upon the waters. And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth. AND ALL THE HIGH MOUNTAINS UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVEN WERE COVERED. (Genesis 7:17~20)

 

Warren County, Ohio (CBS CLEVELAND) – A pile of political pranking was dumped on an Ohio Democratic headquarters early Tuesday morning. Volunteers at the Warren County Democratic headquarters, just north of Cincinnati, were shocked and disappointed by a political prank unloaded on them early Tuesday morning – someone dumped a pile of horse manure in the parking lot of the headquarters building on US 42, just north of Lebanon. Warren County Democratic chair Beth Goldenfield told CBS Local 12 news that the pile was dumped in the parking lot, blocking the entrance to the building, sometime between 10 p.m. Monday...

Warren County, Ohio (CBS CLEVELAND) – A pile of political pranking was dumped on an Ohio Democratic headquarters early Tuesday morning. Volunteers at the Warren County Democratic headquarters, just north of Cincinnati, were shocked and disappointed by a political prank unloaded on them early Tuesday morning – someone dumped a pile of horse manure in the parking lot of the headquarters building on US 42, just north of Lebanon. Warren County Democratic chair Beth Goldenfield told CBS Local 12 news that the pile was dumped in the parking lot, blocking the entrance to the building, sometime between 10 p.m. Monday...

Her Majesty's Ship Challenger set sail in 1872. Stripped of her guns and outfitted for science, her mission was to sail around the globe sampling as she went. Among other scientific triumphs, the Challenger gathered the first global set of ocean temperature readings, more than 260 in all. The British expedition measured from the surface to a depth beyond 900 meters. In 2004, a set of drifting buoys began to make similar measurements. There are now more than 3000 of these floats bobbing in the world's seas, collecting oceanographic information. Comparing the data sets, separated by more than a century...

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in...

Just a brief exposure to an image of the American flag shifts voters, even Democrats, to Republican beliefs, attitudes and voting behavior even though most don't believe it will impact their politics, according to a new two-year study just published in the scholarly Psychological Science. What's more, according to three authors from the University Chicago, Cornell University and Hebrew University, the impact had staying power. "A single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months," the study found....

Let’s say that you are President Obama. You’ve inherited a health care system that is the insane spawn of a team of evil geniuses from an alien power. Pay is divorced from performance. Users are separated from costs. Rising costs threaten to destroy your nation and everything you hold dear. Because you have a lofty perspective on things, you know there are basically two ways to fix this mess. There is the liberal way, in which the government takes over the health care system and decides who gets what. And then there is the conservative way, in which cost-conscious consumers...

Palin will name Tom Selleck for VP

This publication marks the 150th anniversary of the joint presentation of Darwin and Wallace of their thinking about evolution by natural selection to the Linnean Society. The book is a blockbuster because it claims that "Darwin perpetuated one of the greatest crimes in the history of science". It concludes that Darwin plagiarised Alfred Russel Wallace, deceived the world about the maturity of his own ideas before 1858, and, to satisfy his personal need for glory, failed to give credit to scholars who influenced his thinking...

Now that politically correct language has fallen from favour, demonised and discredited, where should we go next? Can we afford to ignore the return of derogatory language directed at black, Muslim, gay, disabled or elderly people, anyone deemed different? Derogatory words make way for degrading treatment. Language is more than our basic tool of communication; it shapes perceptions and so influences behaviour. Referring to "faggots" or "wrinklies" strips people of respect, and it's just a short step to thinking them less equal. Terms such as "cripples", "spastics", "thick" and "retarded" stigmatise disabled people as less human. A recent increase in...

Top Democrats in Congress left a White House meeting with President Bush on Friday frustrated over what they perceived as his reluctance to embrace major recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. "I just didn't feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically," Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. "He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes." Bush has been cool...

Do you think TV comedy writer and talk radio host Al Franken is a credible candidate for U.S. senator in Minnesota?

Wisconsin's a great place to live, and we love it. The idyllic summers and sparkling lakes, the dramatic pageant of the seasons between the spectacular geography and the varied weather, our state is a terrific place to grow food, raise a family and enjoy life outdoors. But all that's changing. We had a handful of unprecedented air-quality alerts last summer. And one day with 28 tornadoes. We've been seeing record-setting temperatures. And a growing infiltration of pests, from purple loosestrife to the gypsy moth and coming soon the emerald ash borer. These phenomena have two things in common: One, they...

PIERRE, S.D. - The superintendent of Mount Rushmore was surprised at first when people from all over the country started calling up to express their opinion about South Dakota's ban on nearly all abortions. Some callers said they were so upset that they would never visit Mount Rushmore, South Dakota's No. 1 tourist attraction. Others said they were so thrilled that they would make a point of coming to see the chiseled faces of four U.S. presidents in the Black Hills. On further reflection, Superintendent Gerard Baker decided that the messages from far and wide made sense, because Mount Rushmore...

Fellow Americans, there comes a time every mans life when we must give up ourselves before we are worthy to recieve. There comes a time in this war on terror when in order to protect liberty, we have to give it up in the mean time for safty. That's right folks. Today, Americans have forsaken the creator for the creation and have decided that they would value our "civil liberties" than protecting western civilization and rich white people from the tender mercies of radical Islamic terrorists. Selfish liberals insist and whine that Bush has no right to spy on Americans...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The producers of a global warming documentary starring former Vice President Al Gore have landed a worldwide distribution deal with Paramount Pictures' specialty label, the Viacom Inc.-owned studio said on Tuesday. "An Inconvenient Truth," profiling Gore's campaign to raise awareness about the links between carbon emissions and climate change and making his case for what should be done about it, will open in U.S. theaters on May 26, Paramount said. The release schedule for other territories has not been decided, a studio spokeswoman said. The 95-minute film, which grew out of Gore's lecture circuit PowerPoint presentation...