Free Republic

Acclaimed British Novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.” However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism. Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of Jew-hatred. Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”...

THE BASIC PROBLEM OF DEMOCRACYWHAT MODERN LIBERTY MEANS BY WALTER LIPPMANN FROM our recent experience it is clear that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. At a time when the world needs above all other things the activity of generous imaginations and the creative leadership of planning and inventive minds, our thinking is shriveled with panic. Time and energy that should go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding off the pin-pricks of prejudice and fighting a guerilla war against misunderstanding and intolerance. For suppression is felt, not simply by the scattered...

Hunter-gatherers had almost no malocclusion and dental crowding, and the condition first became common among the world's earliest farmers some 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia... By analysing the lower jaws and teeth crown dimensions of 292 archaeological skeletons from the Levant, Anatolia and Europe, from between 28,000-6,000 years ago, an international team of scientists have discovered a clear separation between European hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern/Anatolian semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and transitional farmers, and European farmers, based on the form and structure of their jawbones... In the case of hunter-gatherers, the scientists from University College Dublin, Israel Antiquity Authority, and the State University...

For decades, scientists have recognized the upright posture exhibited by chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans as a key feature separating the "great apes" from other primates, but a host of questions about the evolution of that posture -- particularly how and when it emerged -- have long gone unanswered. For more than a century, the belief was that the posture, known as the orthograde body plan, evolved only once, as part of a suite of features, including broad torsos and mobile forelimbs, in an early ancestor of modern apes. But a fossilized hipbone of an ape called Sivapithecus is challenging that...

...In the Egyptian religious architecture of the Old Kingdom (2686 - 2181 BC), the builders... mirrored less durable materials in stone buildings -- including wood and mud bricks... made on regular, rectangular plan, with an area of tens of square meters. Structures were built tightly next to each other. The windows were small and located in the upper part of the wall... Lintels and window had support beams -- their task was to relieve the empty space, and to protect mud bricks against erosion of and mechanical damage. As is clear from contemporary analogies and archaeological documentation, the lower part...

Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome... You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and...

Just wanted everyone to remember the President's admonition and stay safe and alert out there, and watch for signs of any Christian Crusader activity. I thought I saw a Crusader in armor, waving around the flag of St George, up to no good and about kill some innocent Muslim schoolchildren, but it turns out it was just a silver Dodge Neon at a stoplight. I think Homeland Security should come up with some sort of color coded Christian Crusader Threat lever alert chart for us.

A 7,700-year-old skeleton may bear the oldest confirmed evidence of twins, and be one of the earliest examples of death during childbirth, according to archaeologist Angela Lieverse of the University of Saskatchewan. She found the skeleton, which had been excavated at Lokomotive, a hunter-gatherer cemetery near the southern tip of Russia's Lake Baikal, in storage at Irkutsk State University. It had been thought to represent the death of a mother and a single child, but Lieverse soon realized that some of the fetal bones had duplicates. "Within five minutes, I said to my colleague, 'Oh my gosh; these are twins,'"...

The rope used to execute ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could be yours for the right price. Ex-Prime Minister Mowaffak Al-Rubaie has put the item up for sale more than eight years after he witnessed Saddam hanged in 2006. An unidentified senior Iraqi political official told the Middle East news site Al-Araby al-Jadeed this week that several individuals from Israel, Iran and Kuwait are vying to purchase the rope — with one making a $7 million bid.

When did dogs first become domesticated? A sophisticated new 3D fossil analysis by biologists Abby Grace Drake, visiting assistant professor of biology at Skidmore, and Michael Coquerelle of the University Rey Juan Carlos contradicts the suggested domestication of dogs during the late Paleolithic era (about 30,000 years ago), and reestablishes the date of domestication to around 15,000 years ago... Whether dogs were domesticated during the Paleolithic era, when humans were hunter-gatherers, or the Neolithic era, when humans began to form permanent settlements and take up farming, is a subject of ongoing scientific debate. Original fossil finds placed dog domestication in...

“Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy,” writes Simpson, “but the Soviets had their reasons. Much of Russia is desolate wilderness. A single mishap during descent could strand cosmonauts in the middle of nowhere.”

Twenty-five years ago today, the New York Times ran its first profile of Barack Obama. On February 6, 1990, it announced (in a headline that's now pretty dated), "First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review," and explained that the 28-year-old's new role was considered the "highest student position" at the school.

Did You Hear About The Time Ben Franklin Wrote a Column For The National Gazette, Quoting From the Koran, and Calling For The Enslavement of Christians? I bet you think I'm kidding. I'm not. The first thing we need to understand is Ben Franklin was petitioning Congress for the abolition of slavery in the USA: Author, "Theodore Parker" wrote “Historic Americans” in which he describes founding father, Benjamin Franklin, abolitionist extraordinaire, quoting the koran in defending his abolition petition to Congress You see the young nation in its infancy. “Hercules in his cradle, “ said Franklin; but with a...

Lawmakers have failed in past attempts to rename North America’s highest mountain, but a new proposal may have a better chance this year under a Republican Congress, according to an aide to an Alaska lawmaker who is resurrecting the effort. U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have introduced a bill to give Mount McKinley its historical Alaska Native name. The Alaska Republicans announced a Senate bill Wednesday to formally call the 20,320-foot mountain by its Athabascan name, Denali, KTUU reported. The bill comes after previous efforts by Murkowski failed. …

In 2002, former British Army soldier Colin Berry was in Afghanistan working as an agent for MI6, the United Kingdom’s secret intelligence service. Berry’s mission was to buy as many Stinger and Blowpipe man-portable surface-to-air missiles as he could before they wound up in Al Qaeda’s arsenal. Western government had given the weapons to the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s to help them shoot down Soviet attack helicopters. But now governments worried the SAMs, in terrorists’ hands, could shoot down civilian airliners.

On Tuesday, I read about a Syrian man that ISIS threw off the roof of a building for being a homosexual. He too survived his initial punishment. But rather than invoke God’s will, the cheering mob of barbarians waiting for him on the ground proceeded to stone him to death. Shortly thereafter, we learned that ISIS burned alive the Jordanian pilot being held captive. And while the civilized world experienced feelings of disgust, sadness, and anger, the animals responsible for the atrocity set up movie screens across the city for cheering crowds to view and celebrate. Civilized human beings are...

Kate Bender loved to flirt. The beautiful young woman smiled and batted her eyes at male travelers who stopped during the early 1870s at the tiny inn where she lived in southeast Kansas. But those travelers were flirting with death. Kate and the inn's other keepers -- thought to be her father, mother and brother -- would rob and murder at least 11 people. Often, as a lone visitor sat at a dinner table with his back to a canvas curtain, a Bender man behind the curtain would use a hammer to bash the visitor's skull. The Benders would slash...

Were the Middle Ages, also known as the Dark Ages, characterized by oppression, ignorance, and backwardness in areas like human rights, science, health, and the arts? Or were they marked by progress and tolerance? Anthony Esolen, an English Literature professor at Providence College, explains.

An ancient gospel has been discovered in the pages of a diminutive book dating back to the 6th century. The text, dubbed the 'Gospel of the Lots of Mary' is written in Coptic and contains oracles that would have been used to provide support and reassurance to people seeking help for problems. It is not a gospel in the traditional sense, because it doesn't predominantly teach about Christ, and its translator suggests that the discovery could rewrite the ancient definition and purpose of gospels. The ancient book was given to Harvard University's Sackler Museum in 1984 by Beatrice Kelekian, in...

LONG BEACH (CBSLA.com) — Royalty will meet Thursday for the first time in the Port of Long Beach. The Queen Mary will be visited by her “niece” when the Queen Elizabeth II, which is in the midst of a global cruise, pulls into a nearby dock around 7 :30 a.m. It is the first time a modern Cunard liner will dock and disembark passengers in the Long Beach harbor. The Queen Elizabeth is a replica of the original ship, which, along with the Queen Mary, made more than 2,000 trans-Atlantic crossings while in service.