Free Republic

A stunning wooden statue pulled from a Russian peat bog 125 years ago has been dated as being 11,000 years old after 'sensational' new analysis. This means the remarkable Shigir Idol, which is covered in ‘encrypted code’ and may be a message from ancient man, is by far the oldest wooden sculpture in the world. Previous dating attempts claimed it was made 9,500 years ago. ... The idol was originally dug out of a peat bog in the Ural Mountains in 1890. 'The first attempt to date the idol was made 107 years after its discovery, in 1997. The first...

Ongoing excavations at a site in the southern Peloponnese are offering rare insight into the ancient past of Laconia, about which very little physical evidence exists, the state-run Athens-Macedonian News Agency cited the Culture Ministry as saying on Tuesday. Covering an expanse of 3.5 hectares, the site on Aghios Vassilios Hill near the village of Xirokambi on the Sparta plain has been under excavation since 2009 and is believed to contain valuable evidence that will shed light on life in the area during the 17th to 16th centuries BC, the announcement said. A palace complex found on the site and...

The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Spanish Cristovo de Cea region and was originally built some 4000 years before the birth of Christ. Every builder, tradesman and DIY enthusiast knows the embarrassment of making a howler on the job, whether it's taps installed the wrong way round or a wonky shelf. But few will know the sheer panic these Spanish workmen probably felt when they discovered they had smashed up a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb and replaced it with a concrete picnic table. The tomb was a relic of the first settlers in the Cristovo de...

As s a young naturalist growing up in the Deep South, I feared kudzu. I’d walk an extra mile to avoid patches of it and the writhing knots of snakes that everyone said were breeding within. Though fascinated by the grape-scented flowers and the purple honey produced by visiting bees, I trembled at the monstrous green forms climbing telephone poles and trees on the edges of our roads and towns. Introduced from Asia in the late 19th century as a garden novelty, but not widely planted until the 1930s, kudzu is now America’s most infamous weed. In a few decades,...

Hosted by Craig Gottlieb, who is famously known as the weapons expert on the hit show Pawn Stars, this all new series reveals surprising stories behind iconic weapons. In this episode Craig takes us behind the barrel of the C93 Automatic Pistol

I have seen some nice statues. I have seen the Abraham Lincoln statue in Washington, D.C. I have seen the "Follow Me!" statue at Fort Benning, Georgia. My favorite statue of all is much smaller than these two statues. My favorite statue is "Old Shep" at Fort Benton, Montana. It is a bronze statue of a dog. Old Shep wasn't a champion show dog. I guess you could call him a "Heinz 57" breed. He was a bigger dog as was common for a shepherd's dog on the high-plains desert of Montana in the 1930s. His job was helping his...

To wit, artificial suppression of free market interest rates by the central bank is designed to cause households to borrow more money than they otherwise would in order to spend more than they earn, pure and simple. Its nothing more than a modernized version of the original, crude Keynesian pump-priming theory—–except it dispenses with the inconvenience of getting politicians to approve spending increases and tax cuts in favor of the writ of a small posse of unelected monetary mandarins who run the FOMC and peg money market interest rates at will. But the whole enterprise is a crock. The consumer...

Dr. Savage explained to his audience that issues such as illegal immigration and the weakening of America’s military were nothing new and not unique to Obama’s administration. He added that the last thing America needed was another Clinton in the White House and offered a suggestion for “President Trump.” “The emasculation of America’s military didn’t begin with Obama,” Savage told his listeners. It started with George W. Bush. The leftist machine has long been embedded in the Defense Department. But through Obama has done more damage to our military than al-Qaida has done. His military evisceration plan has seen hundreds...

President Bush today signed into law a bill providing for construction of a 700-mile fence along the country’s southwestern border. But he repeated his call for a far more extensive revamping of immigration laws. “It is an important step toward immigration reform,” Mr. Bush said at the signing in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The bill is what most House Republicans wanted, but it is not what Senate Republicans, or the president, originally envisioned.

They placed Hank Williams in a wheelchair and hauled him from the Knoxville hotel to his powder-blue Cadillac convertible, where his driver, a college freshman named Charles Carr, waited. Loaded on booze, morphine, chloral hydrate, and vitamin B12, Williams crawled into the back seat, wrapped a blanket around himself, and laid down. Tasked with ferrying Williams to a New Year’s Day gig in Dayton, Ohio, Carr drove out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and into legend. Near midnight, Carr stopped in downtown Bristol, Virginia, to get gas and look for a relief driver. He went to a cab stand and noticed a...

The Alinsky Man by Richard Fernandez August 25, 2015 - 5:55 pm Watch Jorge Ramos of Univision getting tossed out of a Trump press conference by security after trying to pressure the Donald into answering him in the video below this post. Instead of responding to Ramos, Trump lets security show him the door. Afterward Trump allows that he has no problem letting Ramos back in, and the Washington Post reports the subsequent conversation between the two men. After Ramos was allowed back in, a showdown over immigration ensued. “Good to have you back,” said Trump to Ramos. The two...

THINK ABOUT THIS, THE NEXT TIME OBAMA TAKES MORE OF YOUR FREEDOMS AWAY…….THEN REMEMBER WHAT OUR FOREFATHERS WENT THROUGH TO GET YOU THAT FREEDOM……. It’s always time to Remember: Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776? Here is their story and… Here is our heritage: Can We Live Up Too It ? Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured....

It was a brawl that forever defined one of sports' fiercest rivalries, with an ugliness that offered a new and frightening definition of sports violence. Yet, 50 years later, the most enduring memory of baseball's most famous fight is that it did not define the men. Monday marks the 13th anniversary of a far more powerful moment, one occurring at Roseboro's funeral, when, in a hall filled with old Dodgers, an old Giant suddenly walked to the lectern. It was Marichal, who wanted to say goodbye, and thank you.

In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters. Around the lush isles of the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — the eruption of Mount Tambora killed tens of thousands of people. They were burned alive or killed by flying rocks, or they died later of starvation because the heavy ash smothered crops.

Before the 20th century, the ruins of Palmyra, once a key crossroads of classical civilizations, existed on the dusty margins of the Ottoman Empire. European travelers, though, took a special interest in the city. The images sequenced above — photographs by the 19th-century French photographer Félix Bonfils and drawings by the 18th-century British traveler Robert Wood — were formative documents in the Western imagination and inspired the architecture of the industrial age's emerging powers. Wood's rendering of an ancient Roman eagle seen in Palmyra, for example, would later become the model for the Seal of the United States. The archaeological...

The United States is being flooded with Immigrants, many of which have children here, and those children are currently regarded by the law as US Citizens. We refer to these children as "Anchor Babies", because they then allow for the rest of the family to be brought into the United States, thereby "anchoring" the family in the United States, where it otherwise would have no right to be. An Interesting and clever way of addressing the problem has recently occurred to me. The 14th amendment was originally understood as not applying to Indians, because they were not regarded as "subject...

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) have destroyed one of Palmyra’s most well-known ancient temples, according to Syria’s antiquities chief. Carefully stage-managed photographs by Isil show the moment the terrorist group destroyed one of the best known temples at Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra. The images, released by Isil’s media wing in the central province of Homs, revealed the Temple of Baalshamin was littered with explosives before it exploded into a mushroom cloud on Sunday.

Tonnage and undersized propulsion, combined with the strength of the Savannah River's currents and tides, pigeonholed the vessel into becoming a floating battery across from Old Fort Jackson, where it guarded against a Union naval advance into Savannah.

The War Department Appropriations Bill of 1903 established many things, but the one that begins our story today is its founding of the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice. Teddy Roosevelt was in office at the time and his enthusiasm for the shooting sports, and this bill, also gave rise to the National Rifle and Pistol Trophy Matches. Needless to say that the government wanted its citizens proficient in firearms use, perhaps spurred on by the recently ended Spanish-American War (1899) and the numerous other conflicts in which America involved itself in the Caribbean, Pacific islands, and Central...

FULL TITLE: 'Blood oozed through the soil at grave sites. You could see the pits move, some of them were still alive': The secrets of Ukraine's shameful 'Holocaust of Bullets' killing centre where 1.6million Jews were executed WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Seventy years on from the end of the Second World War the full, shocking scale of the Nazi-inspired Holocaust in Ukraine is finally being revealed - thanks to pioneering work by a French Catholic priest to research the truth of the industrial-scale killing. Around 2,000 mass graves of Jewish victims have been located where men, women and children were shot...