Free Republic

Fausta, a longtime compatriot, just posted the following missive. I am considering ceasing to blog on politics. For eight years I have posted on serious issues taking place in our hemisphere that affect our everyday lives, and, to be honest, I’ve about had it. Every post on Latin America takes time researching sources from the country in Spanish, French or Portuguese, plus English-language reports. And what for? The American media and the American public would care more if the Iranians were making deals with Martians than they care if Hezbollah makes deals with the Zetas right in our own country....

For decades, scientists thought that the Clovis hunters were the first to cross the Arctic to America. They were wrong — and now they need a better theory The mastodon was old, its teeth worn to nubs. It was perfect prey for a band of hunters, wielding spears tipped with needle-sharp points made from bone. Sensing an easy target, they closed in for the kill. Almost 14,000 years later, there is no way to tell how many hits it took to bring the beast to the ground near the coast of present-day Washington state. But at least one struck home,...

University archaeologists found 14,000-year-old knives while studying elephant ancestors. Archaeologists and anthropologists excavating a site in the south of Chile have uncovered stones that are believed to have been used as tools by humans 14,000 years ago. Scientists from Universidad Católica de Temuco and Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) were able to determine these were tools because they exhibit the marking congruent with ancient knives and cutting utensils. The Volcano of Osorno nearby the site where scientists uncovered 14,000-year-old tools. (Photo by Claudio Sepúlveda Geoffroy/Flickr) “There are rock detachments from a simple, intentional blow that demonstrate that they were doctored,...

Legends and bits of evidence tell a story of Asians arriving here long, long ago. Part one of two. "Even pale ink is better than memory." -- Chinese proverbAs the tide creeps over the sand flats of Pachena Bay south of Bamfield, it brings ashore the flotsam of the Pacific that -- on occasion -- hints at extraordinary travels and a mystery of historic proportions. Amid the kelp, in decades past, hundreds of green-glass fishing floats would arrive intact on the Vancouver Island coast, having ridden the powerful Japanese Current in year-long transits from Asia. But on rare occasions, entire...

The sixteenth century Spaniard, Hernando de Soto, is remembered by historians for his exploration of the southeastern United States, which began in Florida. A former mercenary soldier in the conquest of Central and South America, he hoped to increase his notoriety and fortune by leading an expedition through parts of North America. In the end, De Soto’s army spent over four years and covered 4,000 miles in its quest for gold and new territory to colonize. Neither resulted from his efforts. With approval from the Spanish Crown, De Soto assembled his expedition. He financed the endeavor himself with the understanding...

Cliff Kincaid introduces the “Soros files” conference and the new www.sorosfiles.com website, a project of America’s Survival, Inc. He says the public must understand how hedge fund billionaire George Soros and his puppet, Barack Obama, are transforming and destroying the American system.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to various countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, the New York Times reported Monday. The countries where the commando teams have been deployed include Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize, all countries struggling to combat drug trafficking, the daily wrote. The program, known by its acronym FAST -- Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team -- dates back to the George W. Bush administration. It was created originally to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. But US President Barack...

Mapmakers once thought the earth was flat. Astronomers used to believe the sun circled the earth. As late as the 1990s, archaeologists were convinced that the original American settlers crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska, found daylight between the glaciers, and gradually followed it south. According to what had been orthodox thinking, that happened about 12,000 years ago. “Suppose it were true,” says Jack Rossen, associate professor and chair of the Department of anthropology. “Suppose you could find a corridor through a mile-high wall of ice and follow it for a thousand miles. What would you eat? Popsicles?”...

For half a century, the global energy supply's center of gravity has been the Middle East. This fact has had self-evidently enormous implications for the world we live in -- and it's about to change. By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern megasuppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s. The reasons for this shift are partly technological and partly political. Geologists have long known that the Americas are home to plentiful hydrocarbons trapped in hard-to-reach offshore deposits, on-land...

Share27 Print Forward Rachel Marsden 110 Comments Of Course America's Psychos Are Ripe for London-Style Riots by Rachel Marsden 08/14/2011 The riots that ravaged urban England take root in phenomena that aren't exclusive to that country, but are increasingly on the rise everywhere. Could the same thing happen in America? Of course it could. And here's why. The acute social breakdown sparked by a single police killing of a perp who happened to be waving around a gun wasn't unlike the rioting that took place in Vancouver, Canada, earlier this year when the Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost the Stanley...

Thousands of middle-class U.S. families are being forced to sleep on floors in public buildings because so many have lost their homes and jobs in the economic crisis. These shelters were once the preserve of drug addicts and alcoholics but now normal Americans are having to bed down in halls and corridors as they have no other place to go. An investigation has also found many from the Midwest are spending their benefits to stay in motels for up to ten days a month to avoid having every night on mattresses surrounded by dozens of strangers.  Experts say that these...

Latest dispatch from the Department of Dissent Is No Longer Patriotic: because they won't raise taxes, Republicans are more dangerous to US national security than al Qaeda. That is the view of Nicholas Kristof in his column, "Republicans, Zealots and Our Security", in today's New York Times. View excerpts here.

Brazil’s new former Marxist terrorist President and Obama friend, Dilma Rousseff, is wasting no time in cuddling up to America’s enemies. From the Communist Party of China website Beijing, April 13, 2011. The presidents of China and Brazil on Tuesday signed a joint communique after their talks in Beijing, pledging the two countries will continue to promote cooperation in culture, education, sports and tourism. The two countries reiterated their willingness to deepen exchanges in education and highlighted the importance of exchanges between students, teachers and scholars from both countries, according to the joint communique. The two sides also expressed their...

Underneath headlines about Libya, the Japanese disaster and the Republicans’ dainty attempts to nip around the edges of our massive federal debt, the culture war is raging. The left is lobbing nukes into the institution of marriage and the military. Obamacare is going forward, complete with funding for abortion and massive increases in the size of the already enormous Department of Health and Human Services. Defunding this increasingly unpopular power grab should be in every budget bill - but it’s not. Using a combination of judicial activism, executive malfeasance and

The impending threat of radical Islam is not one that stops at America’s borders. A detailed new analysis featured in the April issue of Townhall Magazine, posted here as an online exclusive for Blaze readers, examines how Muslim radicals are aggressively using liberal courts, American businesses and outspoken activists inside our own country to implement Islamic Shariah law — an uncompromising religious code that runs counter to freedoms preserved in the American Constitution. ——————- The Shariah Threat by Kathy Jessup A judge refuses a protection order for a woman raped by her Muslim husband, ruling the man’s abuse is allowed...

Okay, folks, place your bets. Was it clueless incompetence on a cosmic scale? Or, was it John Deweys collectivist wet dream turned Clockwork Orange? One of these ways or the other, we became a country with 50,000,000 functional illiterates, people who can't read a cereal box, never mind instructions on a pill bottle when that exact skill might save a life. Prisons are full of people who can't read. The country's schools wallow in mediocrity. All thanks to educational malfeasance, decade after decade. Illiteracy_in_AmericaJ'accuse! J'accuse! The so-called experts in charge of reading are derelict and destructive. Please, remove these parasites...

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren't helping things -- Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack... The major new development is that NOW liberals want to get rid of a dictator in the Middle East! Where were they when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms? Remember? The one who had gassed his own people, invaded his neighbors and was desperately seeking weapons of mass destruction? The guy who emerged from a spider hole looking like Charlie Sheen after a three-day bender?

Egypt: As the U.S. pushes for the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in a new Egyptian government, a frightening revelation emerges: The fundamentalist group would be part of a regime that has an active WMD program. The U.S. wants to include the Muslim Brotherhood in talks on a future government, with the possibility it might even be part of a coalition. All very innocent sounding, except inclusion of hard-liners in such coalitions can lead to an eventual takeover of the government. Expect no different in Egypt. As retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis wrote in Human Events this week, "An...

Admittedly, the Egyptian uprising, the nullification of Obamacare and the ongoing ramifications of "Snowpocolypse 2011" could render the controversy about an MTV original program insignificant by comparison. After all, MTV is only out to destroy an entire generation. No big deal. Every adult - not just parents - should take the time to learn about the MTV show "Skins," a new "teen drama" that the Parents Television Council (PTC) has deemed "the most dangerous show on TV." Be careful when you go hunting for information about "Skins" lest your spouse conclude you've developed an interest in child pornography. The publicity...

ORLANDO—There are hundreds of plausible nominees for the title of America’s Second-Smarmiest Politician, but surely the top spot is un-contested. Americans of all political persuasions can come together in affirming one proposition: Public life would be improved by scrubbing Rep. Alan Grayson from it. This act of civic hygiene probably will be performed Nov. 2 by voters of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District. Polls indicate that a majority of them plan to deny Grayson, 52, a second term by electing his resonantly named opponent, Daniel Webster.