Free Republic

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...

Agency officials coached tribes on how to oppose Alaska’s Pebble Mine. Obama has repeatedly urged that science guide environmental decisions, regulators inside the Environmental Protection Agency secretly worked with tribal and environmental activists to preempt a full review of an Alaskan mine and veto the project before the owners’ permits could be considered, internal memos show. Charged with being neutral arbiters, EPA officials instead began advocating for a preemptive veto of the Pebble Mine project in western Alaska as early as 2008, long before any scientific studies were conducted or the permit applications for the project were even filed, ......

Before today, the Obama administration had only approved six of the more than two dozen pending permit applications for natural gas export terminals for countries with which we do not already have free-trade agreements. In just the past few months, however, the Obama administration has tentatively signaled that they are finally ready to really recognize the boon the recent shale gas bonanza has been for boosting the economy as well as consider the potentially helpful long-term geopolitical benefits that could be reaped from allowing our domestically produced oil-and-gas to flow more freely into the world market — and even of...

The punishment for killing a golden or bald eagle in the United States comes at a hefty price. Simply having eagle feathers or parts in your possession will land you in prison with a heavy fine to pay. Felony killing of eagles comes with a fine of $250,000 and prison time. These penalties fall under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. This law, originally passed in 1940, provides for the protection of the bald eagle and the golden eagle (as amended in 1962) by prohibiting the take, possession, sale, purchase, barter, offer to sell, purchase or barter, transport,...

Dramatic new footage has been released of the moment a Greenpeace ship was raided by the Russian authorities following a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic. The footage, shot on 19 September, shows a Russian helicopter hovering over the deck of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise. Armed men drop on to the deck, while members of the Greenpeace crew are seen with their hands in the air. The footage also shows the ship being towed towards Murmansk, where the 30 people on board were taken ashore and arrested. The families of all six UK nationals being held by the Russian authorities...

As the Global Warming gang has done in recent years, over the centuries the Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) have destroyed the lives of perhaps millions of people with their bogus “predictions” of the end of the world. Both have fooled people into radical changes in their lives to avoid the phony Armageddon they have been preaching. It has been painful to watch and listen to these poor deluded people regardless of which hoax was destroying them. Nevertheless, as destructive as the JW’s phony predictions have been to individuals at least the rest of us have not been forced by some government...

Not all scientists are panicking about global warming — one of them finds the alarmism “hilarious.” A top climate scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lambasted a new report by the UN’s climate bureaucracy that blamed mankind as the main cause of global warming and whitewashed the fact that there has been a hiatus in warming for the last 15 years. “I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies...

Why don’t people behave in more environmentally friendly ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with environmentalists. That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for feminist goals is hampered by a dislike of feminists. Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.” Writing in the...

“I do not come here to lose my freedom; I beg you-get out of Seven/50. Do Not Destroy Our Freedom,” a political refugee from Romania pleaded with the St. Lucie County (FL) Commissioners recently.(1) In chilling details she told the silent room what it was like to live in the Communist country under the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu during the l980s. General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, Ceausescu “maintained strict controls over free speech and the media; internal dissent was NOT tolerated,” according to Wiki. His violent, repressive, brutal regime was overthrown in December of...

Well done to Australia's new Prime-Minister-Elect, the conservative Tony Abbott. He pledged, as his two top priorities, to stop the tide of asylum seekers to the country and to scrap the highly unpopular tax on carbon emissions. Both very admirable intentions. Cutting CO2 does nothing for the environment but a lot for the economy: it destroys it. The environmentalist movement is fundamentally socio-communist. It has proclaimed itself the only saviour of the earth, but the reality is that one does not need to agree with its pseudo-scientific, highly ideological theories or belong to it to care about the environment. Being...

When it opened its timber doors three years ago, this £7million ‘eco primary school’ was applauded for its environmentally friendly credentials. It was heated by solar power and its plumbing system relied on rain collected from the roof, which was made of locally grown sweet chestnut. Sadly, the zero-carbon building is not quite as sustainable as the designers had hoped. In fact, thanks to a series of water leaks and mouldy walls, pupils are now being taught in tents erected in the school grounds. The local authority in Devon has already spent £250,000 to investigate the problem, and plans to...

The more vegetable oil used for biofuel production, the less there is for food use. The report lays out forecast consequences for three proposed EU restrictions on the use of crop-based fuels.

Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.The event page for the “Climate Change Day of Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones: ZERO PEOPLE at the OFA rally at the Georgetown Waterfront this...

Nineteen firefighters died fighting a forest fire in Arizona earlier this summer. Curiously, almost no one is talking about why it happened, only that it was a tragedy. Arizona Deputy State Forestry Director Jerry Payne has been the only one to speak out about the cause, and he backtracked immediately afterwards, apologizing for what he said. He claimed that the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots violated wildlife safety protocols while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30th, 2013, 60 miles north of Phoenix. According to Payne, the superintendent’s violations allegedly included not knowing the location of the fire,...

Environmentalist killjoys pretend that this is the worst time in history to live on Earth. By Jonah Goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about the apocalypse itself.

Members of the Mongolian neo-Nazi group Tsagaan Khass stand near a quarry where they questioned a worker. A Mongolian neo-Nazi group has rebranded itself as an environmentalist organisation fighting pollution by foreign-owned mines, seeking legitimacy as it sends swastika-wearing members to check mining permits. Based in an office behind a lingerie store in the Mongolian capital, the shaven-headed, jackbooted Tsagaan Khass stormtroopers launch raids on mining projects, demanding paperwork or soil samples to be studied for contaminants. "Before, we used to work in a harsh way, like breaking down doors," the group's leader, Ariunbold Altankhuum, 40, told Reuters. "But now,...

Dozens of birdwatchers who travelled to a Scottish island to see an extremely rare swift have been left distraught after it was killed by a wind turbine. Around 40 people were watching the White-throated Needletail, the world's fastest flying bird, on the Isles of Harris when the tragedy happened. Sightings of the bird have only been recorded eight times in the UK in nearly 170 years, most recently in 1991, prompting around 80 ornithologists to visit the island in the hope of catching a glimpse. David Campbell, from Surrey, told BBC Scotland the incident took place late on Wednesday afternoon....

Typically environmental organizations target consumers with overwrought warnings of how some everyday product or activity is destroying the world and threatening their health. Yet now, activists are turning their targets toward major retailers. These companies should reject these scare tactics, which will harm not only their businesses, but consumers too. The “Mind the Store” campaign, the latest initiative of a radical environmental organization, pressures the nation’s top ten largest retailers to remove products from store shelves that contain, in any amount, a list of one hundred chemicals the organization deems hazardous. Following the alarmism playbook, the organization claims these chemicals...

In a news cycle where the lack of transparency is revealed daily, it is refreshing when something previously opaque exposes its true motives. Such is the case for the Sierra Club and its desire to block oil and gas drilling. I’ve written many times on environmental groups’ influence over use of public lands and how they often use claims of some endangered flora or fauna as cover for their efforts to block any beneficial economic development, such as mineral extraction or agricultural activity. They cry about some critter when in fact it is really about control—control of public lands.

(CNSNews.com) – The Department of Interior is providing $472,150 grant funding to increase the survival of two endangered fish species by “training” them to “recognize and avoid predators.” “The objective of the proposed project is to determine if training increases Bonytail and Razorback Sucker survival when exposed to predators,” the grant abstract states. “This proposal builds upon the 2012 Bureau of Reclamation assistance agreement with the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) tasked with investigating the potential for training Bonytail and Razorback Suckers to recognize and avoid predators. “One of the early conclusions of the prior work is that the...