Free Republic

Finally, Gen. Casimir Pulaski became an American, 230 years after the Polish nobleman died in Georgia fighting for what became the United States. President Barack Obama signed a joint resolution today of the Senate and the House of Representatives that made Pulaski an honorary citizen. Pulaski's contribution to the Americans' effort to leave the British Empire began with a flourish. He wrote a letter to Gen. George Washington, the Revolution's leader, with the declaration: "I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it." Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, whose home city of...

There were, once upon a time, usury laws that generally held any interest rate greater than 10% was illegal. The Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker believed that interest rates needed to be raised to insane levels to stop the runaway inflation, which was the first stone that hit the water sending the shock waves that we are having to pay for today. Once the usury laws were altered so the Fed could fight inflation, it set in motion the doubling of household debt, not to mention the national debt. At 8%, the principle is doubled through interest in less than...

The children of the Nazi party began as a shining hope for the future, but by the end of the war they became reserve soldiers as the Germans faced military defeat. That descent from twisted idealism to cynicism and eventually disillusionment is traced in “Tempted, Misled, Slaughtered: The Short Life of Hitler Youth Paul B.,” an exhibit at the American Jewish Museum of the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill. The exhibit, on display in the Kaufmann Building through Dec. 31, is presented with the Holocaust Center of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh — part of a busy schedule...

Oct. 25, 2009 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: In 1942, it came down to one Marine It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia.On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield....

McNoughton's response to liberal criticisms of "One Nation Under God." Incredible painting. As you move your cursor over the various images, a brief description is revealed on the side panel.

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Scuba divers are exploring the depths of a volcanic lake in Guatemala to find clues about an ancient sacred island where Mayan pilgrims flocked to worship before it was submerged by rising waters. Samabaj, the first underwater archaeological ruins excavated in Guatemala, were discovered accidentally 12 years ago by a diver exploring picturesque Lake Atitlan, ringed by Mayan villages and popular with foreign tourists. "No one believed me, even when I told them all about it. They just said 'he's mad'," said Roberto Samayoa, a businessman and recreational diver who grew up near the lake where...

Gen. Stanley McChrystal will soon hear word on 40,000 reinforcements for Afghanistan...how have his predecessors fared? When they've asked for more troops, have they gotten them?...has fulfilling their requests made a difference? A look back: Revolutionary War Washington called on the Continental Congress to beef up his army. But it had to rely on the states, which raised far fewer than the 88 battalions promised. War of 1812 Generals were hesitant to attack the British in Canada without an influx of troops. More were OK'd, but logistics prevented ambitious operations, leading to a draw. Mexican-American War Gen. Zachary Taylor had...

Credit: Froese et al. 2009. The Klondike region of the Canadian Arctic isn't often thought of as an oasis for life. Today, the area is best known for its vast frozen wilderness, its goldfields, and as the namesake of a popular chocolate-coated ice cream treat. However, new research shows that the Klondike goldfields of Canada's Yukon Territory hold key records of a past environment that was much different than the harsh climate experienced by today's explorers, ice truckers and miners. The Klondike is part of a wider geographic area dubbed "Beringia," which includes parts of Siberia, Alaska and the Canadian...

Ok this was just funny enough to pass along. The Source of STFU. Southern Tenant Farmers Union. No seriously! In 1934 the biracial organization started up in response to the New Deal and the farm subsidies that had the effect of encouraging medium and large land owners to take a good bit of their land out of farming to get the subsidy. That had the effect of throwing about 200,000 black families off the land who were tenants and sharecroppers. It forced thousands of Black share Croppers and white small holders to drift to the cities. The STFU, was not...

General McChrystal has staked his entire reputation, not to mention the lives of our men and women in the field, on a counter insurgency strategy that almost exclusively focuses on population protection. His statement that 'success would be defined by the Afghans' harkens back to the Malayan Emergency and General Templer's contention that 'the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people'. The problem is, the insurgents in Malaya were different than the Afghan insurgency. Theirs was a political ideology. The 'insurgents' in Afghanistan are hardly an alienated element...

Nothing on the copyrighted website can be clipped to display here. It came to me not as an advertisement, but as an uplifting message. It makes a valid statement about our history and society.

The original makers of Côtes-du-Rhône are said to have descended from Greek explorers who settled in southern France about 2500 years ago... The study, by Prof Paul Cartledge, suggested the world's biggest wine industry might never have developed had it not been for a "band of pioneering Greek explorers" who settled in southern France around 600 BC. His study appears to dispel the theory that it was the Romans who were responsible for bringing viticulture to France. The study found that the Greeks founded Massalia, now known as Marseilles, which they then turned into a bustling trading site, where local...

Modern man and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to leading geneticist Professor Svante Paabo.Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the claim at a conference in the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York. But Prof Paabo said he was unclear if the couplings had led to children, of if they were capable of producing offspring. "What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said in an article in The Sunday Times....

Modern Men Are Wimps Oct 23, 2009 — Whatever happened to survival of the fittest?  Our ancestors were much stronger, says the author of a new book on anthropology.  PhysOrg reported on a book by Peter McAllister that says today’s males don’t measure up physically to their counterparts even a century ago, let alone those in the Roman empire and earlier. According to McAllister humans have lost 40 percent of the shafts of the long bones because they are no longer subjected to the kind of muscular loads that were normal before the industrial revolution,” the article said.  “Even our...

Sorry, folks, but all you techies just cannot convince me that the Internet is as permanent as a book. The information in books can have several thousands of years of life. But what of the Internet? In many cases info on the Internet is not even around for mere decades. A recent story in the L.A. Times about the now defunct web platform GeoCities is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Back in the mid 1990s in the early days of the web, when blogs had yet to get their eventual sobriquet, when there were no programs...

Today is Tuesday, Oct. 27, the 300th day of 2009. There are 65 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On Oct. 27, 1787, the first of the Federalist Papers, a series of essays calling for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, was published in New York. On this date: In 1795, the United States and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo (also known as "Pinckney's Treaty"), which provided for free navigation of the Mississippi River. In 1858, the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, was born in New York City. In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt married...

Crusader friar of Habsburg Austria London barrister and historian James Bogle discusses here the life and times of a great Catholic: Blessed Mark of Aviano (Marco d’Aviano in the original Italian), who deserves to be much better known in the English-speaking world.    On 27 April 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Rev Fr Mark of Aviano OFMCap (1631-99). The ceremony occurred without any world-wide protest from Muslims, and certainly nothing of the sort that accompanied the considerably more innocuous recent commentary of Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg.Mark of Aviano was a Capuchin friar, born Carlo Domenico, in Aviano in...

*snip* When the Constitution of the United States was framed it placed the exclusive legislative authority in the hands of Congress and with the President. Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution is concise in its language: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” That is no longer true. The Bill of Rights protected Americans against loss of freedoms. That is no longer true. The Constitution provided for a balanced separation of powers. That is no longer applicable. Perhaps it...

Most thoughtful commentators bemoan the decline of bipartisanship and the coarsening of political discourse in the United States. The president promised to reach out to the opposition and hoped for 80 Senate votes for his stimulus bill. But he disregarded all Republican suggestions for the bill and acquiesced in its Pelosification into a groaning, creaking, Democratic gravy train. I remember, as a very young person, the august comparative tranquillity of the Eisenhower era, when the president requested national air time only for matters of indisputable national interest. He never abused this privilege, and there was no call for equal time....

The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as "Ida" is not a missing link as some have claimed, according to an analysis in the journal Nature. The research is the first independent assessment of the claims made in a scientific paper and a television documentary earlier this year. Dr Erik Seiffert says that Ida belonged to a group more closely linked to lemurs than to monkeys, apes or us. His team's conclusions come from an analysis of another fossil primate. The newly described animal - known as Afradapis longicristatus - lived some 37 million years ago in northern Egypt, during the...

A publicity blitz called it "the link" that would reveal the earliest evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans. Experts protested that Ida wasn't even a close relative.

As American colonists battled for independence, Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne captured a British fort in New York at midnight, earning a reputation as a brilliant strategist in the chaos of battle. George Washington rode on horseback to congratulate him in person. Soldiers who noticed his reckless bravery gave him his nickname. Later, the fiery leader trained a fearsome army outside of Pittsburgh in 1792, conquered the Indians and negotiated a treaty with them so the Northwest Territory could be settled.*** After he died at age 51 from an attack of gout, his body rested for 12 years in an oak...

Forest of Broken Urns Volume 60 Number 2, March/April 2007 by Karen J. Coates Borneo's unexplored past is dying by the chainsaw. Tony Paran sits near a jar that held the remains of one of his ancestors. Soon, the forests that shelter these jars will be logged. (Jerry Redfern) Walter Paran was a lucky boy. Three minutes out his front door lay an old grave in the forest marked by big stone slabs, a broken jar, and human bones. A few minutes another way was a pit where the riches of the dead were purportedly buried. What more could an...

Belgian archeologist Julie Van Den Bergh... "The jars date back to the Early Iron Age (500BCE-200CE). But who made these jars? ..." The jars are in clusters, some with as many as 400 of the structures. Some are 3m tall and weigh 13 tons. Several come with angular or round disks that could have been lids, carved with images of humans, monkeys or tigers... French archeologist Madeleine Colani... in the 1930s... interpreted her findings on the sites as a prehistoric crematorium. At Site 1, she discovered a cave with handmade chimney openings. The cave floor showed the remains of burnt...

Built by mysterious ancient people for mysterious purposes (image credit: Chris Mitchell) Ancient Laos legends tell of the giants who drank water from these enormous mysterious "cups". Similar sites were also found in Thailand and in North India. Their locations are strung along a straight line, which suggests that they were built on some kind of a trade route. Chris Mitchell from Travel Happy sent us his travelogue about this ancient site: The Plain Of Jars is probably South East Asia’s most enigmatic tourist attraction. Situated in the remote north east of Laos, the mountainous communist country which has only...

The 4th of July is the time when we celebrate our nation-- a time to reflect on the freedoms which we believe are not granted by our government, but are self-evident rights for all humankind. Time for the Independence Day Quiz which asks, "How much do you really know?" Every day thousands leave their homelands to settle here in the land of the free. Before they become citizens they are required to take a citizenship test and score 80%. Could you pass this test if you took it today? Our quiz is made up of 20 questions found on the...

A lot of colorful phrases are associated with World War II. Like, "Nuts!" -- one American commander's defiant response to German surrender demands. Or, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," attributed to a U.S. Navy chaplain during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But here's another one, appropriate for this season. Trick or treat! The trick was setting up phony, inflatable tanks, trucks and artillery under cover of darkness. Then generating some ersatz radio traffic between units and commanders. Igniting flash canisters mimicking the glare of cannons firing. Erecting loudspeakers and playing the pre-recorded sounds of troops and vehicles...

The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one. No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten...

MAISONCELLE, France — The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one. snip...They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would...

(For all these stories and more, click on the excerpt link below) 1. BBC News: “Primate Fossil ‘Not an Ancestor’” Remember “Ida,” the missing link that wasn’t? In a Nature letter, scientists attack the lofty claims that surrounded the announcement of the fossil primate. 2. Did the Baby Mammoth, Lyuba, Suffocate in a Dust Storm? In a special guest news analysis, creationist (and mammoth expert) Michael Oard considers the well-preserved mammoth “Lyuba” (whom we first discussed in A Mammoth Discovery). The occasion? Lyuba’s worldwide debut. 3. National Geographic News: “Chimps Display Humanlike Good Will” Chimps, especially mothers and their offspring,...

Humans were living and thriving on open grassland in Africa as early as 2 million years ago, making stone tools and using them to butcher zebra and other animals... All of the other earlier hominins that have been found in the geological record -- such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis -- known as Ardi and Lucy, respectively -- lived either in dense forest or in a mosaic of woodland, shrub and grasses, says Plummer... Plummer's team first started excavating Kanjera South in the 1990s, in search of primitive toolkits consisting of hammer stones, stone cores that were struck to...

The Batavians, who lived in the Netherlands at the start of the Christian era were far more Roman than was previously thought. After just a few decades of Roman occupation, the Batavians had become so integrated that they cooked, built and bathed in a Roman manner. Dutch researcher Stijn Heeren... studied excavated artefacts and traces of settlements and burial fields in the neighbourhood of Tiel. In Dutch history, the Batavians are often presented as a brave people who resisted a cruel oppressor. But Stijn Heeren has now demonstrated that these 'simple people' also adopted a lot of Roman customs. According...

Ancient human remains have been unearthed during an archaeological dig at the Caythorpe Gas Storage site between Rudston and Boynton. Five human burials... One set of remains dates to the late Iron Age and had been buried with a simple iron brooch. Another dates back probably to the Anglo-Saxon period and had been buried with an iron knife. Archaeologists have also found evidence of a settlement at the site, including an Iron Age round house and at least one Anglo-Saxon building. Other finds recovered include a Roman brooch, an Anglo-Saxon coin, large fragments of a millstone and numerous fragments of...

KARONGA, Malawi (Reuters) – The latest discovery of pre-historic tools and remains of hominids in Malawi's remote northern district of Karonga provides further proof that the area could be the cradle of humankind, a leading German researcher said. Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters that two students working on the excavation site last month had discovered prehistoric tools and a tooth of an hominid.

In the world wide web and in the publishing world, there are conspiracy theories going about concerning topics from the Kennedy assassination, aliens, 9/11 being an inside job, Chariot of the gods, a book claiming that extraterrestrials influenced the ancient world, and corporate control over government. While some present some truth, some are fantastic and even fictitious. One such theory involves ancient history and a belief that we have not been alone in the universe for sometime. British Author and Green activist David Icke has compiled a series of books claiming that since the dawn of time, Earth has been...

Thirty million years ago, before Ethiopia's mountainous highlands split and the Great Rift Valley formed, the tropical zone had warmer soil temperatures, higher rainfall and different atmospheric circulation patterns than it does today, according to new research of fossil soils found in the central African nation. Neil J. Tabor, associate professor of Earth Sciences at SMU and an expert in sedimentology and isotope geochemistry, calculated past climate using oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in minerals from fossil soils discovered in the highlands of northwest Ethiopia. The highlands represent the bulk of the mountains on the African continent. Tabor's research supplies a...

Amateur divers discover hoard of gold and silver Cathedral baffled by items owned by former leader After almost 30 years, the riverbed below Durham Cathedral has given up a bewildering secret: a hoard of ecclesiastical gold and silver, including medals, goblets, and crucifixes once owned by the Queen, the pope and other state and church leaders. A total of 32 objects given as gifts to the late Michael Ramsey – a former archbishop of Canterbury who was bishop of Durham for four years in the 1950s and spent some of his retirement in the city – have been recovered from...

For all of history, the fundamental issue in the creation-evolution conflict has been philosophical presuppositions, not empirical evidence or ‘brute facts’. Creationists have been pointing this out for many years, with varying degrees of effectiveness. To their credit, the modern Intelligent Design movement has recognized this same point, and for almost twenty years now, has explicitly made philosophical argumentation central in the debate over Darwinism. Phillip Johnson played an important role in bringing the philosophy of naturalism out into the open and onto the dissecting table with his best-selling Darwin on Trial, the book usually credited with launching the modern...

When one wants to produce propaganda and get away with it they first need to do a couple of things: 1. Make it seem credible (false third party quotes) 2. Make it benefit the ones who are intended to believe it (The sky is falling, but WE have the solution) 3. Erase all facts from the past so there can be no informed dissent. I'm of the firm belief that we're finally gaining traction and getting the word out, but we need to continue to ensure that google can't remove old info from the web to "change" the past to...

by Alan Greenspan [written in 1966] This article originally appeared in a newsletter: The Objectivist published in 1966 and was reprinted in Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other. In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Jeffrey Kolowith's kindergarten students read a poem about Christopher Columbus, take a journey to the New World on three paper ships and place the explorer's picture on a timeline through history. Kolowith's students learn about the explorer's significance -- though they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend. ''I talk about the situation where he didn't even realize where he was,'' Kolowith said. ''And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy.'' Columbus' stature in U.S. classrooms has declined...

Image: via Food Court LunchAmong the chaos of the collapse of Hitler’s empire in April 1945 the biggest heist in history took place. Gold bars, jewels and stolen foreign currency with an estimated worth of $3.34 billion vanished from the Reichsbank vaults, in Germany.Reichsbank, Berlin 1933Image: German Federal Archive In the ensuing decades small quantities of this bounty have turned up in Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Sweden but the majority remains missing. Across the world search teams look for this missing treasure and the supreme prize of the legendary Amber Room, an acquisition from St. Petersburg during WWII,...

Michael Kuryla Jr. found strength from his fellow stranded Navy comrades floating in shark-infested waters of the South Pacific for nearly five days in 1945 during World War II. Their ship, the USS Indianapolis, sank in just 12 minutes after being hit by two Japanese torpedoes shortly after the ship had delivered the atomic bomb that would level Hiroshima. Three hundred of Mr. Kuryla's shipmates died that day when the ship went down. Nine hundred were left floating in only life preservers, facing a harsh sun and sharks, as three SOS calls went unanswered. An anti-submarine plane spotted them four...

In his memoir subtitled "Death In The Dark: Vietnam 1968-1972" Master Chief Thomas Keith, a self-described "Navy brat," tells readers how he embarked on his chosen career as a SEAL. Evolving from the underwater demolition teams of World War II, the Navy SEALs were formally established in 1962 as a "small, elite maritime force to conduct ... clandestine, high-impact missions." The name comes from the fact that they are trained in all environments (sea, air and land), but Keith writes, "historically SEALs have always had 'one foot in the water.' " As involvement in the Vietnam War grew, the U.S....

From the North Lake Beach parking area in the Catskill Forest Preserve, a narrow foot trail climbs a rocky incline. After following the trail for about 20 minutes, hikers reach Artists Rock, which gives a sweeping view of the Hudson Valley, the river a sliver of silver in the distance. The trail then leaves the ledge and in less than a half mile it meets a junction with a side trail toward Sunset Rock, the prized view from atop North Mountain that by the late 19th century had become an iconic view of the northern Catskills, celebrated in the work...

On Sunday night, the History channel be gins a remarkable three-hour, two-part program on the assassination of JFK, perhaps the best on that subject you will ever see. And even if you think you've seen it all and can't bear to see it again, well, then think again.

Is there anything left to be said—or seen—when it comes to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Just you wait. JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America, a two-part, four-hour special airing on History [Sunday, October 11, 9/8c and Monday, October 12, 9/8c] takes viewers back to November 22, 1963 and tells the story via a timeline using only archival news footage, much of which will be new even to assassination buffs. There is no narration (sorry, Peter Coyote). There are no talking heads. The project’s exec producers Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick used a similar technique in last year’s...

News to Note, October 10, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint...