Free Republic

Two months ago, after much lobbying by the biggest satellite company in North America, DigitalGlobe, the US government relaxed restrictions to allow for commercially available satellite imagery up to 25 cm resolution—twice as detailed as the previous limit of 50 cm. Now, the first commercial satellite set to capture these high-res images, DigitalGlobe's Worldview-3, will launch this Wednesday. The extra sharp images from Worldview-3 will greatly increase the maps' level of detail to the point where it can make out 10-inch objects, which means Google will soon be able to see “manholes and mailboxes” from its hired eyes in the...

WASHINGTON — World View announced June 5 it performed the longest flight to date of its stratospheric balloon, demonstrating its ability to carry out missions traditionally reserved for satellites. The company said its Stratollite balloon system recently completed a 16-day test flight, taking off May 18 from the company’s headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, and landing June 3 in Nevada. Prior to this flight, the longest flight by a Stratollite was five days. In addition to proving its ability for extended flights, the Stratollite also demonstrated its ability to maintain position. That included “multiple” tests where the balloon stayed within an...

Can Islam Be Defeated? Two of the questions I am most often asked are, “Why does Islam seem so attractive to converts?” and “Can Islam be defeated?” Not surprisingly, these two questions are interrelated. There are many elements to Islam that attract Western converts today, including its seeming clarity on right/wrong, its unwavering commitment to monotheism and its appeal to anti-Jewish and anti-Christian sentiments in our post-Christian culture. But I believe there is an even greater appeal to the heart of fallen human nature. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul speaks of the fallen human heart as the life...

You may have noticed that conservatives are blessed with an impressive lineup of intellectual heavyweights. Liberals have none, literally none. A few of those on the conservative side are Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager, Shelby Steele, Jordon Peterson, and Mark Levin. *snip* You cannot name a single liberal who has anything approaching the above credentials or intellectual output. Why? There are a number of reasons. Liberalism is fundamentally about feelings rather than thoughts. Also the left focuses on intentions, the right focuses on results and the ways by which results are achieved. An advantage of making intentions your...

As Christians around the world enter the holiest weekend of the year, non-Christians as well should be grateful for the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  As I show in my book, Christianity and the World: Essays Philosophical, Historical, and Cultural (Stairway Press 2017), there isn’t a facet of 21st century human life, particularly life in Western civilization, that doesn’t bear the impress of the religion that has informed the collective consciousness of European peoples for the last two millennia. As the Reverend D. James Kennedy puts it, Jesus of Nazareth is “the greatest man who ever lived” and “has changed virtually every...

To write a thorough and well-documented history of the Left is an impressive accomplishment in itself.  To write such a history so that it reads with the ease and flow of a good, gripping novel is another thing altogether, but that is what Mark Melcher and Stephen Soukup have done with Know Thine Enemy: A History of the Left (Volume One).  This comprehensive history of the Left’s major figures and movements is page-turning read for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the threat to America’s culture, politics, and future posed by the Left’s radical agenda.The book’s opening alerts the reader...

If you think of American Christianity as a pendulum, we’re currently at the opposite extreme from the First Great Awakening. When Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he compared human beings with spiders, dangling by a thread over the fires of God’s just judgment, upheld only by His mercy. Accounts from the time tell of listeners who clung to the pillars of their churches, lest they fall through the floor into the Lake of Fire. Like I said, we’re no longer in this territory these days. In fact, according to Professor Michael...

This is just a very interesting map of the world. As a retired programmer, I would love to see the source code that produced these images. Link here: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-341.16,59.05,422 The word "Earth" visible in the lower-left corner can be clicked to show other "views" of the earth, from air and water currents to particulates in the air.

Why does propaganda sometimes stick — and sometimes not? Consider the Catholic kids who got strict Catholic dogma in the 1940s and 1950s. Most of them moderated or turned away from Catholicism altogether. While the nuns succeeded in teaching them to read and write, they couldn’t stop them from thinking for themselves. Yet with today’s millennial generation, most of whom attended America’s government-run schools under the ideologically left-wing Common Core curriculum, it’s quite different. Young people are running with the left-wing brainwashing, well into their 20s, 30s and maybe beyond. As Invenstor’s Business Daily writes, “Americans’ heavy flirtation with socialism...

Teleios conducted a survey regarding the benefits of Christian society on an Instagram account frequented by Christian adolescents and millennials. There were 565 responses. The majority of responders were: female (78%), <34 years (67%), primarily from the United States (60%) and evangelical (88%). Approximately half of respondents each indicated they live in a Christian versus a secular society. Further, the majority believed that living in a Christian Society was important, compared to a secular or other religious based society (41%), or at least compared to a secular society alone (18%). Participants noted the advantages of living in a Christian society...

Every time I see another disparagement of American history and American white males, I am poked to compose a list of their accomplishments that put everyone on the left to shame. The left's contempt for America is total – suggesting that leftists see nothing redeeming in who we are. This list should be burned into our memory to counter the left's fifty-year slander of American history. The advances on this list are the result of a unique degree of freedom blended with the Founders' exceptional knowledge of history that created a trickle-down effect in moral influence that no one can...

Victor Davis Hanson discussed the decline of the American academy, threats to Western civilization from within and without, “The Resistance” and its assault on the Trump presidency, and a great deal more with Encounter Books’ Ben Weingarten. Watch their interview here or read the full transcript of their discussion below, slightly modified for clarity. Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall...

William J Slattery calls for Catholics to do again what they did during the dark agesby Francis Phillips, 5 May 2018It is impossible to read Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build – and Can Help Rebuild – Western Civilization by William J Slattery (Ignatius), without being caught up by the author’s enthusiasm for his subject, alongside his evident knowledge and erudition. Starting in AD 200 he goes through the centuries, showing how priests (including bishops, saints and theologians) painstakingly brought a Christian culture to bear on the Dark Ages. As Lord Clark was to demonstrate in his television...

Jonah Goldberg has a new book coming out next week and today National Review published a lengthy piece adapted from the book. There’s a tremendous amount to unpack in this piece so I won’t even try to do it justice in a single blog post, but there is an idea here that really struck me as insightful and worthwhile: Conservatism is a form of gratitude. There’s a foundation to this idea. According to Goldberg, we’re living through a historical “miracle” brought about by the triumph of liberal-Democratic capitalism. On any longer time scale, Goldberg points out, our current lives are...

The only way to save Western civilization is to convince more people that leftism — not liberalism — is a nihilistic force. Quite literally, whatever the left touches it ruins. So, here is a partial listing of the damage done by the left and the Democratic Party: The most obvious — and, therefore, the one more and Americans can resonate with — is the near destruction of most American universities as places of learning. In the words of Harvard professor Steven Pinker — an atheist and a liberal — outside of the natural sciences and a few other disciplines (such...

One of the least known but most influential characters of early American history is the industrialist Samuel Slater. One of my significant resources in documenting Slater's life and work came from author George S. White, who, in 1836, published his book, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American Manufactures. I found White's book a fascinating account of early industrial America. In the introduction to Slater's memoir, while singing the praises of the industrious Slater – he's known today as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution," – Mr. White also speaks against the "Occupy" fools of the early 19th...

If you were to list the “greatest” nations in world history, you’d come up with some like the United States and Great Britain that are still doing fairly well. However, quite a few once great nations like Greece, Egypt, and Iran are sad, pathetic shells of what they used to be. Then there are the once formidable (and sometimes evil) empires like the Soviet Union, the Roman Empire, and Ottoman Empire which swallowed vast swathes of territory and then fell to pieces.How did nations that dominated their regions and, in some cases, projected power worldwide fall so far from grace?...

A common theme among progressives is that conservatives aren't just wrong; they're dumb. Reagan was dumb. G.W. Bush was dumb. Trump is dumb. "Knuckle-dragger," "mouth-breather," "stupid," and "uncultured" are typical pejoratives hurled at conservatives, who apparently tend to live in trailer parks, require dental care, handle snakes, and marry first cousins. Why, I had a liberal actor (excuse the redundancy) tell me once that I wasn't necessarily bad, just not as "evolved" as he was. (I had a great retort at the ready, but I decided just to lash him with my tail instead.) The reason for this arrogance isn't...

Hollywood, media, music industry, and political left-right Humanists are incapable of suspending their will-to-power, arrogant egotism fueled by an erroneous sense of 'moral' and 'intellectual' superiority or their scientism and evolution idolatry and a priori hatred of and contempt for President Trump, faithful Christians and Jews, middle class Conservatives, and the Christian-grounded America of its founding. Thus they are incapable of objectively considering the possibility that the ideology they religiously affirm is an unholy mixture of fantasy, scientism, lies, and evil and that a Scientific Dictatorship (NWO) – a global conspiracy run by super wealthy Western Luciferians and other pagan...

"On or about December 1910, human character changed," wrote British novelist Virginia Woolf in 1924. "I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless." Woolf's famous quote refers specifically to an exhibition of naturalist paintings. More broadly, 1910 marked the approximate date of a huge shift in the world of art: out went the traditional goal of creating beauty, replaced by the modernist goal...