Free Republic

Today we pay homage to a trio of WWII Medal Of Honor recipients: Pfc. Herman C. Wallace Company B, 301st Engineer Combat Battalion, 76th Infantry Division Gy.Sgt. William Gary Walsh, USMC Company G, 3d Battalion, 27th Marines, 5th Marine Division Pvt. Wilson Douglas Watson, USMCR 2d Battalion, 9th Marines, 3d Marine Division "I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life.I am prepared to give my life in their defense."

The sniper is an incredibly efficient fighter, compared to the typical infantryman. Consider that in World War II, American infantry units fired 25,000 rounds to kill just one enemy soldier. By the Korean War, that figure jumped to 50,000 rounds, and the select-fire M14 and M16 infantry rifles of the Vietnam War only seem to have produced more misses, requiring the expenditure of 200,000 rounds to kill one enemy combatant. It is ironic that a country built on a tradition of rifle marksmanship took nearly 200 years to formally embrace the sniper, the man that represents the military apex of...

Pharaoh Senebkay, one of the earliest kings of a forgotten Abydos Dynasty, was brutally killed in battle more than 3,600 years ago, says a study that has reconstructed, blow by blow, the king’s last moments. The research identified 18 wounds on the pharaoh’s bones. It also established that Senebkay is the earliest Egyptian pharaoh to have died in battle. Woseribre Senebkay was unknown to history until last year, when a University of Pennsylvania expedition led by archaeologist Josef Wegner, working with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, found his remains in a four-chambered tomb at South Abydos in Sohag province, about...

This is a very brief excerpt of Marie Harf & Matt Lee going at it .It's and oldie but a goodie-& freaking funny I love how Harf chastises Matt Lee and at the very end puts her emphasis on the word "AGAIN"

Early farming began in the Near East about 10,500 years ago. Farming first reached the Balkans in Europe some 8 to 9,000 years ago, and then crept westward. Locals in Britain, separated from the mainland by the relatively newly formed English Channel, did not start farming until about 6,000 years ago. But an analysis of sediment from a submerged British archaeological site called Bouldner Cliff found something unexpected. “Amongst our Bouldner Cliff samples we found ancient DNA evidence of wheat at the site, which was not seen in mainland Britain for another 2,000 years.” Robin Allaby of the University of...

The Present and Future Timeline of Libertarian Foreign Policy RE: Iran I have long believed that Iran was THE problem in the Middle East, and given that they are clearly DaWon's heart throb thy are worthy of continued monitoring. Their presence on the word stage is a continued source of confusion for Libertinians who tend to fall into the pattern of thinking below. 1. All nation states are evil, in fact equally evil, so no nation state including the USA should engage in actions against other nation states like Iran (or even extra-national entities like ISIS). 2. Since all nation...

Looks like Bobblehead Al is on his way out

Suspected Israeli nationalists set fire to a Christian seminary in Jerusalem and vandalized an elementary school in Nablus on Thursday, officials said. The attacks, which came a day after a similar group burned a mosque near Bethlehem, have been characterized as hate crimes by Israeli officials and "terrorism" by Palestinians. According to local media reports, the assailants poured flammable liquid into a bathroom window of the Greek Orthodox seminary and ignited it. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said "anti-Christian" slogans were scribbled in Hebrew on the seminary's walls — including “Jesus is a son of a whore” and “the redemption of...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Tuesday that Senate GOP leaders were making a major error by agreeing to pass a “clean” Department of Homeland Security bill that doesn’t defund President Barack Obama’s immigration plans.

So we’re in late February, which means it’s the season for local Jefferson-Jackson Days, when local Democratic Parties hold potlucks to raise money and get people pumped for Get Out the Vote drives. It’s also shortly after President’s Day, which is, for me, always a day spent reminiscing about random presidential trivia and tweeting unpopular opinions. And for once one of those unpopular opinions caught the attention of an editor and now I’m writing about how the “Jackson” in Jefferson-Jackson Day is an abomination. Indeed, I want to grab my fellow Democrats who say stupid, historically ignorant things about how...

It is 30 years since Amadeus swept the board at the Academy Awards. Miloš Forman’s 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, took home eight statuettes that night, including best film, best director, best actor and best adapted screenplay. Arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity, it has taken its place in motion picture history and is invariably described as a masterpiece. All this is despite the fact the film plays shamelessly fast and loose with historical fact, taking as its basis a supposedly bitter rivalry...

So, here we are. The enemy is in the White House, and in charge of most State and many Local Governments. The purge of the Military and the Pentagon is complete. They own the Mainstream Media, and virtually all of Academia. A populace consumed and mesmerized by their mobile electronic devices, Dancing with the Stars, and Justin Beiber, is no threat to them whatsoever, but rather a useful tool. As we speak, we are guaranteeing a psychotic enemy Nuclear Weapons, and fomenting/supporting Islamic fanaticism worldwide, while we also actively engineer class and racial unrest domestically. I feel like one of...

George Bush predicts the formation of ISIS in Iraq (various clips from 2007)

If cleanliness is next to godliness (which I doubt), then the following should also be true: the more you boast about it, the more suspect you are. I’m amazed by the number of people who insist on telling me they take two showers a day, as if they’re the Mother Teresa of personal hygiene. What manner of grime are they washing away? It’s hard not to think of Lady Macbeth’s frenzied attempts to scrub the blood from her hands. So when I read of a survey that stated 4 out of 5 British women don’t shower every day, I applauded...

A woman who survived a Nazi gas chamber because it ran out of gas is preparing to celebrate her 101st birthday. Klara Marcus, 100, from the town of Sighetu Marmatiej in the northern Romanian county of Maramures was captured in 1944 and sent to the infamous Nazi death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland. Then aged 30, she was forced to strip naked along with hundreds of other women and marched into the gas chamber. She said: "I was chosen towards the end of the day with a large group of other women and we were made ready for the gas...

The centenary of the artistic movement known as Dada is coming up in 1916 and it ought to produce a lot of nonsense. The word “Dada” is supposed to come from the Kru language in Africa, and refers to the tail of a sacred cow. Up till then, the purpose of art had been to say something about humanity, and how to be a human being. Dada had the contrary purpose that there is nothing to say about human beings. The artist’s mockery and nihilism is supposed to be proof of his superiority to the stupid public.

Season 2 of Turn starts April 13 on AMC. Link is to trailer.

The frescoes of the Santa Priscilla catacombs in Rome call our knowledge of the past into question and challenge the teachings of the Church. Amanda Ruggeri investigates. When archaeologists in Rome at the end of the 19th Century began to excavate the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla, they hoped to find treasure: intricately carved monuments and vibrant frescoes of the type found in other ancient, underground cemeteries. Instead, they found devastation.

A new Argentine banknote featuring a map of the Falklands is to enter circulation next month. The disputed archipelago will appear on the face side of the blue 50 peso note - worth £3.70. The reverse side will carry the image of an Argentine folk hero who led a bloody 19th century uprising against the British in the Falklands. Antonio Rivero will be pictured riding across the islands on horseback with an Argentine flag hoisted above his head.

...when there was a Texas drought that hurt the crops of farmers there, Congress allotted $10,000 to buy seed grain to help them recover. But [President Grover] Cleveland vetoed the expenditure and explained why like this:I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think,...

If you've read your share of sci-fi, and I know you have, you've read stories about another Earth-sized planet orbiting on the other side of the Solar System, blocked by the Sun. Could it really be there? =========================================================== Color illustration showing the scale of planets in our solar system, focusing on Jupiter and Saturn. Credit: NASA =========================================================== No. Nooooo. No. Just no. This is a delightful staple in science fiction. There's a mysterious world that orbits the Sun exactly the same distance as Earth, but it's directly across the Solar System from us; always hidden by the Sun. Little do...

#5. MacArthur's Nuclear War #4. Fall Grun aka Stopping Hitler Before WWII #3. War Plan Red, aka The U.S. Invasion of Canada #2. Defense Scheme No. 1, aka The Canadian Invasion of the U.S. #1. Operation Unthinkable

Parton and colleagues writing in Geology, present a unique alluvial fan aggradation record from southeast Arabia spanning the past approx. 160,000 years. Situated along the proposed southern dispersal route, the Al Sibetah alluvial fan sequence provides a unique and sensitive record of landscape change in southeast Arabia. This record is to date the most comprehensive terrestrial archive from the Arabian Peninsula, and provides evidence for multiple humid episodes during both glacial and interglacial periods. Evidence from the Al Sibetah alluvial fan sequence indicates that during insolation maxima, increased monsoon rainfall led to the widespread activation of drainage systems and grassland...

Hard water contains less Carbon-14 than the atmosphere, because dissolved carbonates are Carbon-14 free. A fish caught in hard water has thus a higher Carbon-14 age than contemporaneous terrestrial samples. If such a fish is then cooked in a ceramic pot, the radiocarbon age of the food crust will be higher than if a terrestrial animal was cooked in the pot. This is known as the “reservoir effect” because the fish’s carbon actually comes from another “reservoir” than the carbon in terrestrial animals from the surrounding area. “Reservoir age” is the difference between the true age and the Carbon-14 date......

A team of archaeologists at a 2,000-year-old limestone quarry in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley recently excavated around a megalith weighing approximately 1,000 tons and dubbed Hajjar al-Hibla, or “stone of the pregnant woman.” It was intended for the Temple of Jupiter, which sits on three limestone blocks of similar size at the nearby site of Baalbek. To the team’s shock, they unearthed yet another block, this one weighing an estimated 1,650 tons, making it the largest known megalith. The German Archaeological Institute’s Margarete van Esse says excavation was suspended when the trench became dangerously deep. “Hopefully in a following campaign we...

Perhaps even more intriguing is a single shell with what appears to be a geometric pattern—zigzagged grooves carved into the center of the outer shell. Analysis points to the patterns being carved on purpose. Again the team turned to modern mussels; they tried carving similar patterns into Potamida littoralis with a shark tooth and compared that to weathering and natural abrasions. Sure enough, their carvings were the closest matches to the ancient pattern. “That must have been an appealing thing for Homo erectus,” says Joordens. “You can imagine sitting there with a shell in one hand and a tool in...

I’m sorry Mr. President, but it seems our Founding Fathers were not very fond of Muslims. It seems we have a president attempting to prove Muslims were “woven into the fabric of our society.” While he is correct there is a history between radical Islam and our nation, he seems to stretch the truth to attempt to make it look like they made “great contributions.” During his thirty minute speech this week, President Obama make a few political pitfalls, which made educated people cringe. He had to jump back to 1890 to find a historical event to “prove” we were...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy7hI_xRnnE

It will be interesting to see what they put in his "Presidential Library" about his early years, when he is out of office. In a country where we take notice of many, many facets of our public figures' lives, doesn't seem odd that there's so little we know about our current president, Barack Obama. For example, we know that Andrew Jackson's wife smoked a corn cob pipe and was accused of adultery; Abe Lincoln never went to school; Jack Kennedy wore a back brace; Harry Truman played the piano. As Americans, we enjoy knowing details about our newsmakers, but none...

The Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D. 1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer, seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people, modern-day inhabitants of the area, have...

Seventy Years Ago TodayFebruary 23, 1945, Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima From This Day In U.S. Military History: During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines take the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island’s highest peak and most strategic position, and raise the U.S. flag. "Marine photographer Louis Lowery was with them and recorded the event. American soldiers fighting for control of Suribachi’s slopes cheered the raising of the flag, and several hours later more Marines headed up to the crest with a larger flag. Joe Rosenthal, a photographer...

The Hill reports on the House Oversight Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee demanding correspondence between the nominally independent Federal Communications Commission and various organs of the Obama Administration, in an effort to determine whether the White House exerted improper pressure on the FCC to engineer the proposed “Net Neutrality” takeover of the Internet:

A World-Weary Puppy In Antarctica, Circa 1912 This poignant image (cheer up, buddy!) of a pup named "Blizzard" was taken in 1912 by Antarctic adventurer Frank Hurley, who two years later would be the photographer on Ernest Shackleton's famed Endurance Expedition. This shot is from the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1911. Over a period of years, Hurley visited the frozen continent six times and came away with a trove of stirring images.

NEW YORK – Did President Obama just set up Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to be a candidate for impeachment instead of himself if conservatives convince the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate that his “executive actions” on immigration are unconstitutional? The inquiry begins with the question: Where are the executive orders Obama supposedly signed to permit up to 5 million parents of young illegal aliens to remain in the United States for three years? The White House appears to have engaged in administrative sleight of hand, changing U.S. immigration law not by executive order but...

The Obama administration is hustling to move quickly on contracts for the president’s executive-memo-driven amnesty program, even though a federal judge has ordered Washington bureaucrats to stop in their tracks, according to Judicial Watch. The Washington watchdog organization said Friday it has a source inside the industry of government contracts who said there is “no indication that the court order has impacted, slowed down or modified the procurement in any way.” “They’re really rushing into it,” the source said. Judicial Watch cited a government solicitation for companies to provide services for Obama’s plans to process illegal aliens and give them...

We might think of state supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it's a much older tradition than that. In fact, texts from a village dating back to Egypt's New Kingdom period, about 3,100-3,600 years ago, suggest that in ancient Egypt there was a state-supported health care network designed to ensure that workers making the king's tomb were productive. Paintings on the walls of King Merneptah’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Workers living in Deir el-Medina would have worked on tombs like this. Credit: Asmaa Waguih/Reuters Health care boosted productivity on the royal tombs...

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani blasted President Barack Obama, saying in a recent speech that Israeli Prime Minster Bejamin Netanyahu is a “a man who fights for his people, unlike our president.” Guiliani’s comments came during a Feb. 13 speech on countering Islamic extremism

Kobi Sharvit of The Israel Antiquities Authority Fatimid period gold coins that were found in the seabed in the Mediterranean Sea near the port of Caesarea National Park in Caesarea, Israel, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015. A group of amateur Israeli divers have stumbled upon the largest collection of medieval gold coins ever found in the country, dating back to the 11th century and likely from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit) Israel on Wednesday unveiled the largest collection of medieval gold coins ever found in the country, accidentally discovered by amateur divers and dating back about a...

In 2010, scientists made a startling discovery about our past: About 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians. Now two teams of researchers have come to another intriguing conclusion: Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of Asians at a second point in history, giving them an extra infusion of Neanderthal DNA. The findings are further evidence that our genomes contain secrets about our evolution that we might have missed by looking at fossils alone. "We're learning new, big-picture things from the genetic data, rather than just filling in details," said Kirk E. Lohmueller, a geneticist...

"Our [Palestinian] people have been submitted to the daily and intensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children."Although Hillary Clinton was sitting on the same stage and receiving a simultaneous translation of Mrs. Arafat's speech, she sat silent.

Capt. Joseph J. McCarthy, USMCR (MOH) From This Day In U.S. Military History: 21 February 1945 – Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, Japan Citation: "For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as commanding officer of a rifle company attached to the 2d Battalion, 24th Marines, 4th Marine Division, in action against enemy Japanese forces during the seizure of Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, on 21 February 1945. Determined to break through the enemy’s cross-island defenses, Capt. McCarthy acted on his own initiative when his company advance was held up by...

Rational discussions about National Socialism are often hard to come by. The word “Nazi” has become a vitriolic buzzword that only the Left has a license to use, especially against conservatives where many on the so-called political right are metaphorically and wrongfully characterized as present day fascists. All too many have since precluded that Nazism was a right wing Christian racist capitalist movement of some sort, even though the very name, the National Socialist Worker’s Party, betrays that presumption ...

Al Bowlly's last recording, from 1941.

Jack Hylton & His Orchestra plays "Plenty of Sunshine" on HMV B-5451. The song is by De Sylva, Brown, & Henderson.

Pfc. Jacklyn Harold Lucas, USMCR (MOH) From This Day in U.S. Military History: 20 February 1945 – Iwo Jima, Japan Citation: "For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with the First Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines, Fifth Marine Division, during action against enemy Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands 20 February 1945. While creeping through a treacherous, twisting ravine which ran in close proximity to a fluid and uncertain front line on D-plus+1 Day, Private First Class Lucas and three other men were suddenly ambushed by a...

Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, will visit Washington, DC and Louisville. The visit to the nation's capital is scheduled for March 17-20 and then the heir and his wife come to Louisville on March 20. In Louisville, they will highlight the work being done by members of the local community and charitable organizations to protect, preserve, and promote the health and well-being of the people of Kentucky's largest city through community cohesion, clean air, and food literacy initiatives, according to a news release.

A group of divers in Israel has discovered almost 2,000 ancient gold coins—the largest cache in the country’s history—off the coast of the city of Caesarea, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. The coins have been at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea for about 1,000 years, said Robert Cole, a numismaticist for the Israel Antiquities Authority. * * * The majority of the coins were forged in Egypt and North Africa and have been traced to the 10th- and 11th-century Fatimid caliphs Al-Ḥ�kim and Al-Ẓ�hir. The coins are still in near-perfect condition because gold isn’t affected by air or...

On the evening of 10 November 1938 many people all over Britain would have sat down, taken a sip of their Bournevita, and with a comfortable sigh, opened their latest issue of Homes and Gardens. Meanwhile in Germany, seven months after the country had invaded Austria, Kristallnacht began – the Night of Broken Glass, when with sickening violence, the Nazis burnt over 1000 synagogues and destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses throughout Germany and Austria. Ninety-one people were killed by the Stormtroopers and for the first time Jews were arrested on a massive scale and about 30,000 Jewish men were sent to...

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. The life of toil and effort, of labor gold strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little...