Free Republic

This image from homemadeguns.wordpress.com appears to be from a Portugese  police agency.  Shotgun shells are often used for the clandestine manufacture of pistol ammunition.  It many countries it is much easier to obtain shotgun shells than pistol or rifle ammunition.  In countries where severe restrictions on the private ownership of firearms have been imposed, shotguns are the least restricted.  In the extremely restrictive Soviet Union, shotgun cartridges were relatively available.  In England, the easiest firearm license to obtain is the shotgun license, as it is in Japan. With a source of shotgun cartridges, you have everything you need to...

Paula Heap and Joel Coe live 6,400 kilometers apart. They don't even know each other, but they share the same sense of outrage. She voted for Brexit and he intends to vote for Donald Trump in November. She hails from Preston, a city in northwest England that never truly recovered from the decline of the textiles industry. He's an American from the small town of Red Boiling Springs in northern Tennessee. His textiles factory, Racoe Inc., is the last of its kind still in business in the area. It's Heap's view that globalization has created a lot of winners and...

Let’s for a second imagine a world without nuclear energy. That’s a tough one but let’s try. No nuclear bombs, of course, no Chernobyl and Fukushima, no worries about Iran and North Korea. A wonderful world, maybe? Probably not, because without nuclear energy we would have burned millions more tons of coal and billions more barrels of oil. This would have brought about climate change of such proportions that what we have today would have seemed negligible. Nuclear energy and uranium, which feeds it, are controversial enough even without any actual accident happening. Radioactivity is dangerous. Nobody is arguing against...

This is for free trade globalists only. Specifically, to post here you need to adhere to the following viewpoint: 1. You want Trump to be President. 2. You are in favor of increased trade and want more trade deals and find Trumps rhetoric troubling. 3. You are a trade globalist but not an immigration globalist. You like Trumps views on immigration.

A little more than a week ago, I was in the local Yuma WalMart.  There are three, but I primarily visit one.  Last Friday, I was surprised to find 2300 rounds of CCI Mini-mag .22 Long Rifle cartridges and 1,000 rounds of Standard Velocity CCI .22 Long Rifle cartridges for sale.  The clerk, Yittzel, told me that it was unusual, but they saw .22 come in about once a month.  She said it would be gone quickly.  I had not seen .22 ammunition in the store for three years. Yittzel tempered this by saying it appeared to be coming...

In 2015, the Honolulu Police Department destroyed over a half a million dollars worth of pistols for no apparent reason.  The Hawaii Police Department has shown that it is much smarter, and serves its constituency much better.  As with the Honolulu department, the Hawaii Department is in need of upgrading from its current 5906 Smith & Wesson stainless steel auto pistols.  The Hawaii department has decided to convert to 9 mm Glocks, a popular choice all over the world.  From westhawaiitoday.com: The guns will first go to the recruits, who will learn on the new Glocks right from the...

Want to invest in the oil majors? Take a look at Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell, but steer clear of ExxonMobil, BP, and Total. That is the conclusion from a new analysis from Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., which identified Chevron and Shell as the best of the lot. The reason for choosing Chevron, for instance, is that the American oil major will have high-margin growth, largely due to the completion of several large-scale projects. The Gorgon LNG project is one example – with huge capex requirements behind it, Chevron will enjoy free-cash-flow turnaround. Tudor Pickering Holt also likes Chevron’s...

There has been a lot of optimism returning to the energy markets of late as oil prices have climbed to the $50 a barrel region. Ironically, while a few years ago $50 a barrel would have been seen as an unthinkably low oil price, today it is regarded as much needed relief from prices that ran in the $25 a barrel region earlier this year. Yet with the climb in prices, analysts are now starting to forecast prices per barrel of as much as $80 in the next year. That view is not the mainstream though. Instead most analysts are...

Calm returns, as it always does The day after British voters decided to leave the European Union, we were barraged with media stories about how the sky was falling. And nowhere did they turn to support their case more so than the plunging financial markets. The drop in the markets surprised no one. Markets have a natural inclination to like stability, and when there’s a big change it’s common to see markets react negatively. What’s also common is that markets gather themselves quickly and make corrections in response to impulsive movements. So a big sell-off brought on by widespread panic...

Robin Chase and Martin Ford explain why at a White House roundtable. Automation is going to make universal basic income a necessity sooner rather than later, a White House panel discussed today. Technology entrepreneur and Zipcar founder Robin Chase and author Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots) today during a Facebook Live discussion with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. “We need to start thinking about universal basic income,” Chase said, referring to the concept of a base-level of income each person would get just for being alive. “If people had that platform, that basic minimum, we could be...

Donald Trump’s campaign is launching a venture called the Trump Leadership Initiative fellowship program to ramp up its organization in key states. But at least one of the states where Trump is organizing could best be described as a long shot. In an email sent out by Donald J. Trump for President Inc., the campaign seeks volunteers and fellows based in California, with a seminar being held in Stanton on July 13. The email, passed along by a recipient to The Huffington Post, gives a clear indication that Trump is following through on his pledge to put traditionally Democratic states...

Secrecy is the linchpin of a stealth aircraft's ability to carry out strikes deep within enemy territory, but when it comes to the tax dollars that are going to be spent on the U.S. Air Force's new B-21 bomber, some members of Congress say it is time pull the curtain back. The Air Force said it has no plans to publicly disclose the cost estimate for the aircraft touted as the "backbone" of the U.S.'s future strike and deterrence capabilities, arguing it would reveal too much information to potential adversaries and compromise a classified program. That's infuriated some lawmakers, including...

Representatives of the trust which runs Pilgrim Hospital have travelled to the Philippines in a bid to fill nursing vacancies. Matron of Nursing at Pilgrim Hospital, Michael Brunton, was in the team from United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULHT) who travelled to the islands on a 12-day trip to recruit registered nurses. The team returned having made 85 job offers to nurses, who it is hoped will fill vacancies at Boston,and the rest in Lincoln and 
Grantham The hospital currently has 92 vacancies for registered nurses. Interim Head of Nursing at Grantham Hospital John Boulton said the visit had been...

An Orange County woman claims she was tossed from a Mexican restaurant Sunday, not for too much tequila — but for too much Trump. Esther Levy, 61, of Warwick, said an employee at the popular Cancun Inn eatery in Sugar Loaf chucked her out for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and a Trump button. Levy said she was booted for her support for the presidential candidate who wants to curtail illegal immigration and build a wall on the Mexican border. Joined by retired local judge Alvin Goldstein, she took a seat and ordered two sangrias from a smiling...

The Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) were a major driver of the rally in oil markets over the past several months, as the outage of roughly 600,000 barrels per day helped push up crude oil prices. In June, a 30-day ceasefire between the NDA and the Nigerian government led to a few weeks of relative calm, and Nigeria’s oil minister said that the country was able to bring back a large chunk of the disrupted supply, bringing output up from 1.4 million barrels per day to 1.9 mb/d at the end of June, but still down from the 2.2 mb/d Nigeria...

In the powerful digital world, ‘Kill the Messenger’ has been simplified to ‘Kill the Message’. Everybody, including America’s most dangerous enemies got emails from Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, bathroom email server, but if yours are being serviced by Gmail, no one’s getting them and haven’t for some time. Google, Gmail’s owner, has been directing your emails to ‘Spam’ and ‘Promotions’ Tabs. In other words, everywhere but where you intended them to be. Worth repeating: Since at least May of 2016 Google which controls the Gmail email flow has been deliberately directing email messages into your spam tab or one of its...

An attendee at Busch Stadium in St Louis was shot and mugged in November of 2015.  Justin Hulsey was inspired. He designed a business to make events safer and more convenient for the public. Because the Stadium is a gun free zone, he developed a way to minimize the time that people will be left unarmed. He created a way for them to safely store their self defense tools during the event they are attending. From fox2now.com: Hulsey calls it Mobile Safe Storage. He is outfitting a 22 foot-long step van with armor and security cameras and has hired...

ExxonMobil and British Petroleum have been facing off over the terms of the renewal of the “contract of the century” in Azerbaijan, according to sources that spoke to Reuters. BP currently operates the Azeri-Chigar-Guneshi fields in the middle of the Caspian Sea—a region that contributes a tenth of the firm’s global output. The British company has reportedly agreed with the Azeri government on the terms of a 30-year contract, but in an effort to expand its presence in the ACG region, Exxon has been pushing for a piece of the $100 billion pie.

The collapse of oil prices has killed off any appetite that the oil industry had for megaprojects that cost tens of billions of dollars. With scarce resources, oil companies have shifted their focus, pouring resources into short-cycle projects, which often means shale drilling. Liam Denning over at Bloomberg Gadfly put some numbers to the phenomenon, using data from Oslo-based Rystad Energy. The data is revealing, painting a portrait of an industry that has scaled down the size of new oil projects. Intriguingly, the focus on smaller oil fields began before the plunge in oil prices, although the price crash is...

A company in China has unveiled a house created entirely though a 3D-printer. Experts took part in the creation of the building which was printed in one go at a construction site in the Tongzhou district of Beijing. It took just 45 days for the project to be completed. The entire large villa was printed in one go without being cut and then put together using a number of different pieces. Construction firm Beijing Huashang Tengda worked to build the 4,305 square foot home which stands at two storeys tall. The company claims that the walls are as thick as...