Free Republic

On Saturday, during a campaign speech in Durham, New Hampshire, Donald Trump invoked Vladimir Putin (of all people) as proof that he's being persecuted: "Putin says that Biden's—and this is a quote—politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy." Some commentators see this and other Trump assertions about being persecuted as calculated efforts to fuel his base. But what if Trump really thinks he's being persecuted? What if he has a persecution complex? What if he believes his...

Trump has been engaged in a several-years-long attempt to undermine the institutions of the US government and it shows no sign of abatingTrump’s attempted coup against the US continues. We are now in phase three. Phase one was his refusal to concede the loss of the 2020 election and his big lie that the election was “stolen” from him, without any basis in fact. Trump’s actions in phase one were not illegal, but they were immoral. They violated the norms that every president before Trump had dutifully followed. Phase two was his plot to overturn the result of the 2020...

Mirabilis, one of the pairs of dwarf galaxies detected. (NASA/CXC/University of Alabama/M. Micic et al./International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) For the first time, astronomers have spotted evidence of a pair of dwarf galaxies featuring giant black holes on a collision course with each other. In fact, they haven't just found just one pair – they've found two. The first pair of merging dwarf galaxies is in the cluster Abell 133, about 760 million light-years away from Earth, and the other is in the Abell 1758S galaxy cluster, which is about 3.2 billion light-years away. It's hoped that these sightings and further investigations...

Quaoar is one of the so-called trans-Neptunian objects, small planets orbiting beyond the solar system's outermost planet Neptune. Quaoar is a proud owner of its own moon, the 100-mile-wide Weywot. And a recent observation campaign revealed that it also has a ring of material in its orbit. Quaoar's ring is at a very unusual distance from its parent body. In fact, before astronomers discovered Quaoar's ring in observations from several telescopes conducted between 2018 and 2021, they had thought that it was impossible for a ring to exist at such a distance. With a radius of about 2,420 miles from...

The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies. Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was. At least the US responded to Trump’s lies. Trump had 88 million Twitter followers before Twitter took him off its platform – just two days after the attack on the Capitol, which he provoked, in part, with his tweets. (Trump’s social media accounts...

All is not well among the miscreants wreaking havoc in Syria. Heshmat Alavi, an Iranian human rights campaigner and blogger, spotted an incident broadcast on Turkish television that reveals mutual contempt between Russia's dictatorial leader, Putin, and Turkey's dictatorial leader, ErdoÄŸan, at a public ceremony that also included Iran's dictatorial leader, Rouhani. Watch closely in the first seconds of the video embedded in the tweet, as Putin unmistakably responded to a body language insult by ErdoÄŸan (failing to rise fully to shake his hand) by quickly and casually flipping ErdoÄŸan's chair over and walking away to greet Rouhani as a...

How Earth Moves

These gnome houses in hollowed out logs were one of the first along the east end of Fisherman's Trail in Little Buffalo State Park. Park management has evicted the gnomes. As Steve Hoke was leaving Little Buffalo State Park on Monday after removing 38 gnome homes, he met a man and his daughter. The 7-year-old girl had just finished her last chemo treatment. Her dad asked what she wanted to do – she said she wanted to see in person the gnome houses that she had seen on Facebook. Hoke was pulling a garden wagon full of the 38 gnome...

Mitt Romney has turned into such a skilled debater that he could trounce President Barack Obama in their three head-to-head encounters in the run-up to the election, former Democratic Labor Secretary Robert Reich believes. Romney “is going to be debating somebody who is not nearly as good a debater as his reputation,” Reich tells Atlantic Magazine in its September issue. He says that under live questioning, Obama “can seem kind of wooden” and “at a loss for words.” “Even if Romney is scripted and not spontaneous, he will come across as ‘on his game,’ ” Reich tells the Atlantic. “The...

A deterioration in the health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has delayed a long-awaited Workers’ Party meeting in Pyongyang, a South Korean government official told the JoongAng Daily yesterday. But Kim is not ill enough for the meeting to be canceled altogether and it will be convened soon, said the official, who asked not to be identified. The communist leader’s health worsened after his unexpected visit to China last month, according to the source. Kim was expected any day to preside over a meeting of the Workers’ Party, the first in 44 years. The meeting is widely expected to...

Myth of Dwarf Dinos in Dracula Country Confirmed Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News June 13, 2008 -- In 1900, the sister of an eccentric Austro-Hungarian aristocrat named Baron von Nopsca found a tiny bone on the baron's family estate in Transylvania, a historical region in present-day Romania. The baron, who was a dinosaur buff, identified the bone as belonging to a dwarf dino that likely once lived on an island in the region. The motorcycle-riding baron's outrageous theories were ridiculed and largely dismissed, but now new evidence suggests his proposed island of dwarf dinosaurs did indeed exist in the land of...

February 06, 2007 Hobbit Skeptics Split on What a Second Skull Would Mean Advocates of a human Hobbit reveal what--if anything--would make them soften their stance By JR Minkel Image: COURTESY OF KIRK E. SMITH/Electronic Radiology Laboratory, Mallinckrodt Institute of RadiologyDOUBLE TROUBLE? A second small Hobbit skull similar to the first [right] would convince some skeptics—but not all of them—that they are dealing with a new species, as opposed to a dwarf or a diseased human [left]. For three years researchers have feuded over the rightful classification of the Hobbit, a diminutive, 18,000-year-old specimen unearthed from the Indonesian island of...

An Australian academic who has examined the skeletal remains of a three-foot hominid discovered in an Indonesian cave and nicknamed a "hobbit" disputed Friday a report that they represent a new species of human. Professor Maciej Henneberg, head of anatomy at Adelaide University, said he thought the bones found in 2003 on Indonesia's Flores island were simply those of a normal human stunted by a viral disease, microcephaly -- a conclusion rejected in the earlier report by another team of scientists. That team analyzed the find and said the partial skeleton was evidence of a new, dwarf species of human....

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet. Chris Stringer, director of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London, holds a cast taken from a skull that is said to be that of a new species in the evolution of humans named Flores Man. Richard Lewis, Associated Press Chris Stringer, director of human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in...