Free Republic

Until Lockheed Martin finally builds the SR-72 Mach-6 spy plane it announced in November, the iconic SR-71 Blackbird, capable of flying three times the speed of sound, remains the fastest warplane ever flown operationally. So fast that no missiles fired at it had a chance of hitting. When the U-2 spy plane was built in the 1950s, its designer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson already knew that it would be vulnerable to enemy defenses.

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Lithography was invented in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder and was used initially for printing sheet music. By the 1890s, artists including Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had adapted it for artistic purposes, using it to create color prints and posters. Lithography can be one of the most direct printmaking mediums, since images are executed on a flat surface—either a polished limestone slab or an aluminum plate—in much the same manner as crayon drawings or watercolors on paper. After chemicals are used to securely bond the image to the stone or plate, it can be inked and printed. The Expressionists—and...

A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please. If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual –...

Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries. In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years. The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans....

A Japanese submarine that was preparing to attack the Panama Canal during World War Two has been discovered off the coast of Hawaii. The 400-foot (122-meter) ‘Sen-Toku’ class vessel - among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built - was found by chance in August off the southwest coast of Oahu. It has been missing since 1946 according to scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around the world without refuelling.

"Rock-ribbed Americanism confronts communism abroad and liberalism at home in this conservatives’ chronicle of post-war history. Schweikart and Dougherty ... continue their account of how an “American exceptionalism” based on Christianity, private property, common law, and free markets shaped the world. "....

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Why did he go there? Why did Merrill Newman, a Veteran of the Korean War, decide to go to North Korea? I thought we were legally restricted from traveling there, as with Cuba. I guess I was incorrect. Did Mr. Newman really think all would go well there? Does he know that Kim Jong Un had his ex-girlfriend killed by firing squad a few weeks ago? What about passports, is it likely Mr. Newman would have had to explain what his travel plans were, or not really? This was unwise on so many levels. The elderly gentleman has walked right...

Scientists plumbing the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaii coast have discovered a Second World War era Japanese submarine, a technological marvel that had been preparing to attack the Panama Canal before being scuttled by U.S. forces. The 122-metre "Sen-Toku" class vessel — among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built — was found in August off the southwest coast of Oahu and had been missing since 1946, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa said. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around...

New dating indicates... a well-known group of early Homo (early human) fossils discovered in previous investigations at Koobi Fora in the Turkana Basin of East Africa have an age range that is older than previously estimated. Led by archaeologist Josephine C.A. Joordens of the Netherlands' Leiden University, the researchers combined magnetostratigraphy and strontium (Sr) isotope stratigraphy techniques to develop a new age constraint range for 15 selected hominin fossils found in deposits on the Karari Ridge of the Koobi Fora region in the eastern Turkana Basin (Kenya). Magnetostratigraphy measures the polarity of Earth's changing magnetic field at the time a...

Edward R. Murrow – “Orchestrated Hell

Archaeologists have found a mass grave close to one of Britain's favourite cathedrals. Bones from 18 bodies have been discovered by Durham University experts during building work at the Palace Green Library, part of the World Heritage Site in the historic city centre. At first it was thought the bodies were buried in Durham Cathedral's medieval cemetery which was bigger than the current burial plot. But further examination revealed an unorthodox and intriguing layout to the bodies which archaeologists say is proof of a mass burial. Richard Annis, senior archaeologist, Archaeological Services Durham University, said: "We have found clear evidence...

Archaeologists said fortifications of the largest neolithic Chinese city ever discovered were excavated on Wednesday and Thursday in northwest China's Shaanxi Province. The ruins of two square beacon towers, once part of the city wall of the 4,000-year-old Shimao Ruins in Shenmu County, have been uncovered, according to Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology. One of the towers is 18 meters long, 16 meters wide and four meters tall, while the other is 11.7 meters long, about 10 meters wide and three meters tall, said Su Zhouyong, deputy head of the institute. Sun said the discovery is a breakthrough and contributes...

A team of archaeologists from London’s Kingston University has mapped a prehistoric temple complex at a Neolithic site near the village of Damerham – located about 15 miles from the iconic Stonehenge – and discovered a sink hole of material that may hold information about plants that thrived there 6,000 years ago. “The site at Damerham is on chalk land, so we don’t often find materials like this that capture and preserve the plant remains – pollen or phytoliths – from a specific time period,” said Dr Helen Wickstead, head of the archaeological team. “It was evident that prehistoric people...

8 PM Eastern/7 PM Central - White Heat

Italian archaeologists have unearthed a 2,600-year-old intact Etruscan tomb that promises to reveal new depths of one of the ancient world’s most fascinating and mysterious cultures.

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J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 12 (2013) 105–142 Research Article Phonon–nuclear Coupling for Anomalies in Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Peter L. Hagelstein ∗ Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Irfan U. Chaudhary Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology. Lahore, Pakistan Abstract Excess heat in the Fleischmann–Pons experiment is thought to have a nuclear origin, yet there are no energetic particles observed in amounts commensurate with the energy produced. This in our view is the most fundamental issue in connection with theory. In earlier work we developed a mathematical model...

It looks and plays like a piano, but it sounds like a string quartet — and it took 500 years before anyone built it. Leonardo da Vinci’s flight of fancy in designing a hammerless piano, called a “viola organista,� has come to life half a millenium after da Vinci designed it, thanks to a Polish concert pianist and musical engineer. It couldn’t have sounded any better in da Vinci’s head (via Brad Thor and Dan Gainor): A bizarre instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up...

Refusing to surrender he led his men on an epic 1500 mile flight through the anarchy of a lost war to continue the fight. Joseph Orville Shelby was born December 12, 1830 in Lexington, Kentucky. He was classically educated at Transylvania University before moving to Missouri. Before the civil war He was a hemp rope manufacturer and espoused the pro-slavery cause and took active part in several shady schemes to make Kansas a slave state. At the beginning of the war he accepted a commission as a Captain of Cavalry in the Missouri Confederate militia, being bloodied at the Battle...

The perennial gun-control debate in America did not begin here. The same arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration. Law-abiding persons complied with the law, but the Communists and Nazis committing acts of political violence did not. In 1931, Weimar authorities discovered plans for a Nazi takeover in which Jews would be denied food and persons refusing to surrender their guns within 24 hours would be executed. They were written by Werner Best, a future Gestapo official. In reaction to such threats, the government authorized the...

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Title Shortened. Full Title: Improved understanding of self-sustained, sub-micrometric multi-composition surface Constantan wires interacting with H2 at high temperatures: experimental evidence of Anomalous Heat Effects Francesco Celani, E.F. Marano, A. Nuvoli, E. Purchi, M. Nakamura, S. Pella, B. Ortenzi, E. Righi, G. Trenta, S. Bartalucci, A. Ovidi, G.L. Zangari, F. Micciulla, S. Bellucci, G. Vassallo Abstract This article is an extension of what presented by our team at 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion, ICCF-17, in Daejon, Korea, in 2012 [1]. It documents the improvements on Constantan-related experiments, started in 2011, in order to study the feasibility of new Nickel...

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Is it possible to teach students the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without mentioning the Civil War? According to the government’s new Common Core education standards, the Gettysburg Address must be taught without mentioning the Civil War and explaining why President Lincoln was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. …

Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II...At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine. The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, though they made up less than half of Palestine's population. The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the...

[Summary: The country’s traditional leaders, the movers and shakers as they were called, have abandoned us to an alien presence: our own Education Establishment.]--- Many Americans feel abandoned, first, by the people officially in charge of education: National Education Association, Department of Education, National Council of Teachers of Math, National Council of Teachers of English, the Common Core Consortium, and another 20 groups with pretentious names and sly agendas. These groups have plotted, many suspect, to dumb down our public schools. Parents have to grapple with the thought that our Education Establishment has deliberately devised reading methods (Whole Word) that...

We simply must refuse to allow libtards to continue their nefarious and dangerous practice of hijacking and twisting our language, the most pernicious example of which is their application of the term “progressive” to themselves. Here's a question for those of you who somehow escaped the government school indoctrination process with your critical thinking skills intact: When these people say “progressive”, to where or to what do they propose to progress? Among America's founding documents is the Declaration of Independence. Because many of you younger readers may not have been exposed to the Declaration in school (or, worse, were exposed...

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When it comes to historical memory, the old saying that you can't choose your relatives is just plain wrong. Americans have chosen the Pilgrims as honorary ancestors, and we tend to see their story as inseparable from the story of our nation, "land of the Pilgrims' pride." We imagine these honorary founders as model immigrants, pacifists and pioneers in the democratic experiment. We have burdened them with values they wouldn't have recognized and shrouded their story with myth. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. If you visit Plymouth today, you'll find a distinctive rock about the size of your living-room...

A team of Iranian and Italian archaeologists has unearthed ruins of an ancient temple in an Elymais site in the Kaleh Chendar region in southwestern Iran, the Iranian director of the team announced on Saturday. Most parts of the structure have been built with large stones without mortar in form of a broad platform like those built at Persepolis, Jafar Mehrkian told the Persian service of CHN. The structure also includes platforms made of brick, which were usually built in the ancient temples, he added. Vito Messina of the University of Turin and a number of his colleagues accompanied the...

Italian technology will allow the restoration and preservation of thousands of very delicate papyri at the Egyptian museum in Cairo...part of the 'commodity aid' programme of Italian cooperation. High tech instruments in particular provided by Italtrend Spa and produced by Bresciani Srl, which will play a role in saving the museum's secular papyri, were shown during the ceremony. They are a laser and a portable instrument. The laser, an Italian-made groundbreaking tool in the preservation of artwork, uses non-invasive technology to clean very delicate and sensitive surfaces and allows not to use chemical products. The spectrometer is used for chemical-physical...

Västra Vång in Blekinge is now a sleepy rural community on Sweden’s southern Baltic coast. It has never been mentioned in ancient or medieval writings. So why are gold figurines and bronze busts turning up there? ... No less than 29 guldgubbar have been found beneath the turf. The term means “little old man of gold”, and is also found in Norway and Denmark. These are thin pieces of hammered gold, fashioned as clothed men or women. The figurines date back to the 6th century AD and were made for a few centuries. They are made of very thinly beaten...

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The old man sitting on his purple electric scooter in his son’s Port Charlotte, Fla. home was once a sniper in the 10th Armored “Tiger” Division when it landed in France shortly after D-Day during World War II. Staff Sgt. Steve Kruger arrived on the beach at Cherbourg on Sept. 13, 1944, and became part of Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army. He helped run the German forces back into Germany. By then Kruger had received a Purple Heart and a couple of Bronze Stars for valor.

CNN has made significant cuts to its interview with the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, most notably his comments on the number of people that actually support Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Elforsk Takes Lead in Preparing for LENR November 26, 2013 • 24 Comments The extensive report just published about LENR by the Swedish energy research organization Elforsk raises an important question. Why should Elforsk, when there is still so much doubt and skepticism about LENR in the mainstream of academia and the media, spend so much time and effort chronicling the history and current developments in the LENR field? To my mind the answer seems to be that Elforsk must be at least reasonably convinced that there is something behind the LENR phenomenon to write a report like this. Certainly...

Scientists excavating within the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, Nepal, have unearthed a timber structure that they date to the sixth century BCE. It is situated within and underlies a temple that is considered sacred to many as the birthplace of Siddh�rtha Gautama, or Buddha. Until now, there has been no archaeological evidence supporting a date any earlier than the third century BCE for Buddha's life. Some historians have suggested the death of Buddha took place sometime in the late 4th century or early 3rd century BCE, although there are a number of traditions...

One of the mysteries of Stonehenge is how some of its stones were brought from Pembrokeshire in Wales to Wiltshire. Photograph: I Capture Photography/Alamy For almost a century archaeologists have been braving the wind and rain on an exposed Welsh hillside in an attempt to solve one of the key mysteries of Stonehenge. But new research about to be published suggests that over the decades they may have been chipping away at the wrong rocky outcrop on the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire. The work in the hills is a crucial element in the understanding of Stonehenge because it is generally...

Cher told her fans on Wednesday that she does not celebrate Thanksgiving. In fact, she appears to deplore the American holiday, calling in the “beginning of a great crime.” Cher said that the American settlers were guilty of taking land from native Americans who had no concept of property ownership and also intentionally infected them with smallpox. “You don’t celebrate the holiday I thought?” a fan asked Cher. “I DON’T,” Cher replied emphatically. She said that, to her, Thanksgiving is a day to see family, eat food together and watch a movie. “Not 2 celebrate the beginning of a GREAT...

beautiful and expertly-flaked obsidian tool which formed part of a cache, rescued from a development site, offers a greater insight into the lives of ancient people that inhabited the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea (PNG). In October 2010 Dr Robin Torrence a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum Reseach Institute was contacted by the General Manager at Barema oil palm plantation on New Britain Island. The company was in the process of bulldozing the side of a hill to make a house terrace. In the process they had uncovered a group of finely worked obsidian (volcanic...

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Going into the shopping season, any ideas for Christmas gifts that inspire patriotism -- for kids 6-12 years?

Not too far from the Colorado River, on the low desert just west of Highway 95, lies one of the most spectacular ancient creations in California––a group of immense drawings that, like Peru’s famous Nazca lines, can only be seen properly from the air. They are called the Blythe Intaglios. Unseen by whites until the 20th century, these huge figures hidden on the desert floor were rediscovered from the air. In 1930, aviator George Palmer was flying over the area when he spotted enormous outlines of a man, a woman, a horse, a coiled snake,

In September, major U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods was purchased by Chinese holding company Shanghui International Holdings, Ltd for $4.7 billion. The deal represents the largest purchase of a U.S. company by a Chinese entity. Of course, this is certainly not the first time that a major U.S. brand has been acquired by a foreign operation. Established American brands are extremely valuable to foreign companies. Building a reputation in this country, which is one of the largest consumer markets in the world, can take decades, if it can be done at all. Many of America’s most well-known names have been...

There was a time when the balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade weren't inflated billboards for terrible movies and cartoons. Eighty years ago, the balloons were instead weird animals and dead-eyed people — suggesting that, for once, the dominance of marketing might have been a good thing. The creepiness appears to have peaked in the mid-1930s, about a decade after the parade first began. Most of the balloons, according to the pictures we found, floated fairly close to the ground. The ones that appeared high in the sky look smaller — but that could be a function of the...

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