Free Republic

Tuesday, May 10, 2016 Who Can Count the Dust of Jacob Posted by Daniel Greenfield "Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel." Numbers 23:10 The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood...

This is what I would like to hear on January 20th, 2017. I would like to hear it even more on the first of October but hey, I'm a patient man ... "My fellow Americans ... You may be surprised to hear me say this, but I am a humble man today. As I stand in this place in the center of our government and our enduring freedoms, beside the outgoing president (looks around), hey where is that dude? oh well, not to worry, our government continues through a peaceful transition, and only a few people will be arrested, almost...

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan will meet very soon to discuss their differences. What's at stake is basically the level of commitment of the GOP to the Donald Trump candidacy. I think in some ways this is a solution in search of a problem. Don and Paul, read this, and see if you can't both agree that this would be a great platform for any Republican candidate for president: FIVE KEYS TO AMERICAN RESTORATION 1. Fair taxation. Simplify, rationalize, reduce spending rather than increase taxes wherever possible. Fix Obamacare and make sure medical coverage does not pose a threat to...

Sunday, May 08, 2016 The Betrayal of the USS Cole Posted by Daniel Greenfield On Thursday morning, sailors on board the USS Cole were lining up for an early lunch. Seventeen of them died as an Al Qaeda bomb on board a fishing boat tore through the hull outside the galley. The dead included 15 men and 2 women, one of whom had a young child. For three weeks the crew of the USS Cole struggled to keep their ship from sinking while working waist deep in water with bucket brigades, sleeping on the deck and living surrounded by the...

As touched upon in Part I, and against the backdrop of an orchestrated South Sea Bubble, subsequent economic crash, and unpunished stock-jobbers, Cato interwove Lockean concepts regarding the laws of nature, civil society, and high crimes which were found some fifty and sixty years later in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. What follows are illustrative of the thought train of two foundational truths, from Locke to Cato to our Declaration of Independence, which culminated in the free government design of our Constitution. The Purpose of Government. John Locke: Civil Society comes into being when every individual has resigned up...

A government designed to secure our unalienable rights has become something of a black-hole that devours liberty. In the sum total of our three national branches, fewer than 1,500 (One president, 435 congressmen, 100 senators, and about 875 Article III judges) men and women push around over 320 million citizens without restraint or fear for their personal safety. What is to be done? If we weigh the potential benefit, meaning the restoration of our republic, against the remote disadvantages of an amendments convention, there is little reason to avoid one. Some prominent conservatives have expressed concern over the possibility of...

"This map compares the population of Northern Virginia with that of Southwest Virginia and the rest of the state, and shows a significant change over the past century. In 1920, the combined population of area “A”, or the three Virginia counties furthest to the southwest (the counties of Lee, Scott and Wise–the independent city of Norton did not exist), was 96,569. The combined population of area “C”, or the Northern Virginia region (the city of Alexandria and the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William–the independent cities of Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park did not exist), was...

Thomas Jefferson famously adapted key passages of John Locke’s Second Treatise in his draft Declaration of Independence. An 18th century gentleman could hardly regard himself as learned without the ability to quote a few Lockean passages from memory. Yet, what of the average colonial? Books were expensive imports. How were the yeomanry educated well enough in Lockean concepts to readily understand and accept this radical document, the Declaration of Independence? Through newspapers. Like modern Americans, our colonial forebears were also political junkies. Freewheeling editorials, letters to the editor that criticized parliamentary and colonial governments were standing features of public life....

In 2005, the Fort Trumbull area of New London Connecticut was a growing middle class neighborhood. The people there were hard working and spent much of their lives building their homes and living out prosperous lives. That came to an end in 2000 when Liberal Fascist Democrats in City hall and in the state capitol of Hartford made a deal with Pfizer corporation to allow them to build a research laboratory and upscale housing in Fort Trumbull. According to estimates by the same lying fascists, over 5000 new jobs would be created. Connecticut was one of the states hardest hit...

This picture was taken near Tacna, Arizona at the beginning of April, 2016.  I believe the missile is a mock-up of a Scud B and the MAZ-543 launcher, mounted on a trailer.  I do not think a dually Ford would be able to move around a real Scud and launcher, but maybe.  The Scud B, loaded, would be about 7 tons.  But I cannot see sane U.S. military forces  allowing an missile fuelled with tons of kerosene and nitric acid out on the highways and desert for a training exercise.  Without the fuel or warhead, maybe the Ford could...

(Professor and Bisbee students conduct archeology dig at Warren Ballpark) BISBEE — Warren Ballpark was the scene of a groundbreaking expedition Wednesday as students from Bisbee High School participated in an archeological dig in their own backyard. University of Arizona anthropology professor Rob Schon came to the idea to do a dig at the park through his love of baseball. “My family and I are into baseball and I was searching on the internet, and Warren Ballpark came up,” he said. “I found their website and found Mike Anderson’s book ‘Warren Ballpark’ and realized we know a lot about the...

Big Tim Sullivan on right New York state, but particularly New York City, has long been a nexus of infringement of Second Amendment rights.  New York had more than its share of Tories during the revolutionary war, and New York is one of only six states that has no protection for the right to keep and bear arms in its state constitution.  Still, the right was routinely respected until 1911.  That was when the infamous Sullivan law was passed to protect organized crime from armed citizens. The bill was created and pushed through the legislature by "Big Tim" Sullivan,...

Seeking to dissuade West Virginia voters from holding her promise "to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" against her, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton maintains that "those remarks have been distorted by being taken out of context." The specific context, according to the candidate "was the need to get the votes of environmentally conscious individuals in states that have no coal industry. For my opponents and the media to inject that statement into the West Virginia primary distorts the nuanced messages I am trying to express to the varied constituencies around the nation. It...

This biathlon rifle was designed for target competition, not to kill people. A common slogan of disarmists is "Guns are designed to kill people".  There are several variations; the only purpose of guns is to kill people; guns are designed for one thing: to kill; assault weapons are designed for one purpose: to Kill as many people as quickly as possible.   All are false.  It is easy to demonstrate that this is true. First, what are guns designed to do?  Guns are designed to project force at a distance.  They do this by propelling a projectile out of the...

This sudden and orchestrated list of events -- Cruz drops out, Kasich drops out, Romney not to attend GOP Convention, Bush family not to attend -- and others beyond -- suggests to this observer that the other shoe is about to drop. We must be careful at Free Republic to realize that a prevailing mood here is not necessarily an indication of a strong prevailing mood elsewhere in American political culture. It might be at best what one third of one half are thinking, in other words, what one-sixth of the voters accept to be orthodox self-evident truth. The fact...

On April 27, 2016, Governor Fallin signed the latest in a series of knife reform bills. The bill, HB1159, will go into effect on 1 November, 2016. The infringement on the carry of knifes dates back to early statehood at the beginning of the "progressive" era. Text of the 1921 Oklahoma Criminal Code, pages 523 to 525, shows that specifically named knives were forbidden for most people to carry. It seems that the laws were enacted enbloc from other states, as some of the statutes seem contradictory. The 1921 text refers to laws from 1910. Oklahoma became a state...

"Hang up the phone." comes from one specific kind of land-line phone that had a kind of hook you'd hang the handset from when you were done. Doing so would pull down the hook that was connected to a switch inside the phone that would disconnect the line. And lots of nautical stuff: Groggy - In 1740, British Admiral Vernon (whose nickname was "Old Grogram" for the cloak of grogram which he wore) ordered that the sailors' daily ration of rum be diluted with water. The men called the mixture "grog". A sailor who drank too much grog was "groggy"....

Cynics, skeptics, and fiction-peddlers are frowned upon by the Obama administration (and the mainstream media) when it comes to our glorious leader's economic miracle. So we thought a simple litmus test might be useful to judge just how 'doomed' the nation really is... "When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing;  when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors;  when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work; and your laws no longer protect you against...

When the people turn to man as the answer rather than God, failure and bondage will always be the outcome. It is the process we see in motion with Obama who has a pharaoh complex, and it will continue when Obama is gone regardless of whether we have a Democrat or Republican president if salvation is looked for from the greatness of a man. We have been given a historic example of this phenomenon in the story of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Nimrod (meaning: rebel, or, let us rebel) was the first renown tower builder who united the...

I don’t know how I managed for so long to put off reading Allan Bloom’s 1986 The Closing of the American Mind.. I’m only through the Preface and Introduction, and the condition of American higher education he described thirty years ago is chilling. I might not read any further. The young people of that era are now the heads of various university departments and occupy high positions in government including the presidency. Today, the students of Bloom’s book coddle all the dangerous nonsense we’ve recently seen in the form of moral relativism, Black Lives Matter, White Privilege, LGBT baloney, and...