Free Republic

Archaeologists believe they have found the location of the battle between David and Goliath, narrated in the Book of Samuel, in a mysterious two-gated city from the early 10th century. Known by its modern name, Khirbet Qeiyafa, the site is located in the the Elah Valley, 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem. The excavation project took nearly seven years, and was led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel, the Yigal Yadin Chair of Archeology at Hebrew UniversityÂ’s Institute of Archeology in Jerusalem, together with SaÂ’ar Ganor from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Professor Michal Hazel of Southern Adventist University of Tennessee. Through the...

The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were known as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” The world today has two new nuclear bombs. One is named “Fat Bill.” The other is named “Little Hillary.” The “Bill Clinton” bomb is the one getting the most headlines as North Korea continues testing its nuclear weapons. The Communist dictatorship is on its fifth test already and achieved an explosion almost at the level of “Little Boy” which was dropped on Hiroshima. North Korea has let it be known that this test has allowed it to produce standardized nuclear warheads “able to be mounted...

We have gone way downhill from the epic truths of news giants like Edward R. Murrow, Jack Anderson, Helen Kirkpatrick, Walter Winchell, Katherine Graham, and other guiding luminaries of a long-dead, true journalism I’m a time traveler. I’ve come forward seventy years by extraordinary means. You see, I got here the slow way—-by living. And I’m even actually older than those seventy years—-and that’s the extraordinary part, because almost everybody I ever knew is dead, missing, or has Alzheimers. “So what?” You might ask. “What’s it to me?” Well, because here I am, and I’m come to you, as a...

Without leaving your Head out in the Open Guns that shoot around corners are more than grist for the mill of an old Bugs Bunny plot in a Saturday morning cartoon. They’re real, and were first used, with limited success, by the German army in World War II. The weapon in question was the STG44 Krummlauf, a variant of the standard STG44 assault rifle. Why on earth would you want to shoot around a corner? The better question is why on earth wouldn’t you? It’s a lot safer than standing out in broad daylight where the enemy can take shots...

During the War of 1812, the British enlisted the aid of black Americans to join them in the fight. These regiments were called the “Colonial Marines”, some of which fought on the side of the British during the attack on Ft. Mc Henry, where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write The Star Spangled Banner. The song had four verses, the first of which is what is typically heard when the anthem is played. The third refers to “hirelings and slaves”. While this may refer to the Colonial Militia, it could refer to the fact that the British commonly employed...

I am starting to plan a trip to Normandy and to the battlefields of The Somme. I was wondering if anyone on here has had any experience with any of the many tour companies that in and around Ypres/Paris etc.etc. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Scott.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign issued a explainer condemning a cartoon frog meme for allegedly being a symbol of white supremacy. The “Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists” explainer includes an image shared by Republican presidential Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., referencing Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” statement:

Looking back at 9/11 through the tunnel of years, like watching the painfully blue light of the memorial towers of light sweep the sky, is both remote and vast. Looking back through time is like looking at a mountain or the sky. At a skyscraper or thousands of graves. A vastness beyond meaning. "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here," Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address. It was not that way at Gettysburg, but it has been that way at Ground Zero. All the words fall...

A little, that is. Shadi Hamid writes in the LA Times about why Islam isn't like other faiths -- as I've long been explaining here. He explains the reason the Quran is different from the Bible in very articulate terms: Contrary to what many think, there is no Christian equivalent to Koranic "inerrancy," even among far-right evangelicals. Muslims believe the Koran is not only God's word, but God's actual speech -- in other words, every single letter and word in the Koran comes directly from God. This seemingly semantic difference has profound implications. If the Koran is God's speech, and...

Democratic operative James Carville sought to reassure Americans that the scope of any potential election fraud is too small to be concerned about. "It has been my experience that the maximum number of fraudulent votes from any one voting machine is around 100," Carville said. "I know of no presidential election that has ever been decided by 100 votes one way or the other. It would take an army of hackers to rig enough machines to reach a decisive impact on the outcome. And I just can't imagine that anyone would be willing to go to such lengths to steal...

O n the surface, Oppenheim looks like your typical German town resting along the banks of the Rhine River. But there's more to Oppenheim than beer halls and a Gothic-style cathedral from the Middle Ages. Beneath its narrow cobblestone streets lies something deeper—an entire labyrinth of tunnels and cellars. “The town is practically honeycombed with cavities,” Wilfried Hilpke, a tour guide with Oppenheim’s tourism office, tells Smithsonian.com. Hilpke should know. For the past ten years, he’s spent much of his time leading hour-long hardhat tours of Oppenheim’s elaborate tunnel system, taking visitors through a journey that covers just a fraction...

It turns out that Gulmurod Khalimov, the new ISIS military commander, was one of the “moderate” terrorists who received training from the US State Department. From 2003-2014 Khalimov participated in five counter-terrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program. Department spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala insisted that Khalimov had “been properly vetted.” The thoroughness of this so-called vetting was called into question by the revelation that he had appeared in a video in which he called Americans pigs and boasted “we will find your towns, we will come to your homes,...

In 2012, Mike Vanderboegh of the Sipsey Street Irregulars website put into clear and concise language the true purpose of an armed citizenry as conceived by the Founders of our nation and the authors of its Constitution. What follows is the article Vanderboegh posted. Read it, save it and pass it along to your friends. By Mike Vanderboegh We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments...

via periscope, analysis of Hillary and Trump

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's daughter went on ABC's The View talk show to express her dismay at polls showing that a huge majority of Americans consider her mother untrustworthy. "I realize that some of the things coming out from the emails she tried to conceal are raising questions, but I know my mother and I'm certain that if anything thing she did was wrong in some technical sense that she did it for a good reason," Chelsea explained. "What a lot of people don't understand is that her job as the nation's top diplomat often required her to deliberately...

Sum up our failed Middle East policy in a nine-letter word starting with an S. Stability. Stability is the heart and soul of nation-building. It’s the burden that responsible governments bear for the more irresponsible parts of the world. First you send experts to figure out what is destabilizing some hellhole whose prime exports are malaria, overpriced tourist knickknacks and beheadings. You teach the locals about democracy, tolerance and storing severed heads in Tupperware containers. Then if that doesn’t work, you send in the military advisers to teach the local warlords-in-waiting how to better fight the local guerrillas and how...

What happened to bring us where we are today – on the brink of social, moral, and financial collapse? We forgot the Principle set forth in our Declaration that the sole purpose of civil government is to secure our Natural God-given rights by protecting us from those who seek to take these rights away from us. We were seduced and deceived into believing that civil government should 1) Provide for our needs; and 2) Protect us from the risks and uncertainties of Life. The belief that government is responsible for all our needs is self-destructive. Historically, when this ideology has...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVqkUNJYS_E This is the history of persecution during Japan's medieval period during and following the Sengokujedai(Age of the country at war)period and during the Tokagowa shogunate. Also features segments on the Shinabara Christian rebellion, St Francis Xavier and The shoguns of Japan. In additon, an epic recreation of the Shimabara rebellion using Shogun 2 Total war, the battle of the last stand of persecuted Christian Samurai. WARNING! CONTAINS VIOLENT BATTLE SCENES AND SCENES OF CHRISTIANS BEING ASSASSINATED AND TORTURED TO DEATH! VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED! SIGN IN ON YT TO VIEW VIDEO!

America's terrorist shortage may be reaching an end. If Orlando didn't satisfy you and San Bernardino left you wanting more. If you thought, why can't we have more Boston Marathon bombings, Obama has your back, and your front and any other directions that a pressure cooker full of nails can hit you from. The land of Washington, Jefferson and Mohammed Atta has reached a new milestone by taking in Syrian refugee number 10,000. It’s unknown if the TSA will shower him with balloons and confetti once he passes the gate while clutching a Koran and a copy of the Caliphate...

Buford Pusser Was a Republican Over the Labor Day weekend I watched the original Walking Tall (1973) again. It was so long since I last watched it that it was like watching it anew. It is hard nowadays to recall the impact that movie made when it was first released. Many consider it the redneck's Billy Jack which was released a couple of years earlier which sounds like a good description. Like Billy Jack, the main character of Walking Tall, Buford Pusser, took vengeance upon the bad buys of the notorious State Line Mob of southwestern Tennessee. However, unlike...