Free Republic

Some scholar, whose name I cannot recall, did a seriously in-depth study to identify all of the government "success stories" throughout recorded history. He could not find a single, solitary example. Every action the government has taken throughout history has either resulted in a zero-sum outcome or an abject failure. An example of zero-sum outcomes would include income-redistribution schemes where you rob Peter to pay Paul. Abject failures would include Obamacare, the Iraq War, and public education. If anyone can identify the author of this study or book, or provide additional information that could help me identify the study/book, please...

The Dead Sea Scrolls - (Bible Archaeology, Part 9)(Clocks in at about an hour).Wasn't sure if this should go in General or Religion. Since it focuses more on the archaeological find than the religious implications, I decided to post it here.

One of the creators of a television science fiction series has produced a highlight video, set to David Bowie's Starman, that shows some new footage of the core stage watery crash.....I have embedded the video below the fold. To me, the best part is the footage of the spectators, including the many children, wonder-struck by the launch. Some of that footage is very reminiscent of footage taken during the Apollo Saturn 5 launches in the late 1960s.....To the next generation: We are going to the Moon -- and beyond. And this time we are going to stay.

The French and Indian War ended in 1763 with the French losing Canada and all their land east of the Mississippi River. King George III decided to leave troops in the American colonies in case of future French incursions or native uprisings. British troops were to be paid with taxes collected from the colonies: the Sugar Tax of 1764 the Stamp Tax of 1765 the Townshend Acts of 1767, taxing glass, paint and paper As the Colonies had no representative in Parliament, the cry arose, “No taxation without representation.” The king imposed Writs of Assistance in 1765 allowing British authorities...

March 5th is the anniversary of Winston Churchill's epoch-making "iron curtain" speech in 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri - the most famous acknowledgement of the existence of a "Cold War" between Russia and the West, which put an end to the alliance that defeated the Nazis in World War II. The Cold War, which would often became quite hot in places like Korea and Vietnam - and damn near led to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - continued for 45 years until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. "From Stettin in...

"For everyone who knows something of the story of the space telescope and its travails, this book provides a fascinating look behind the scenes. An excellent contribution to the history of technology." --Robert P. Kirshner, author of The Extravagant Universe

A newspaper says a long-lost film reel with nine minutes of footage capturing San Francisco two weeks after the deadly 1906 earthquake surfaced at a flea market in the city. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday that the rare find portrays the city's post-quake devastation, including City Hall with its dome nearly destroyed. The so called "great quake" and ensuing fire on April 18, 1906 killed thousands. The newspaper says the nitrate film reel was shot by early filmmakers the Miles Brothers. The footage is a bookend to their most famous work ``A Trip Down Market Street,'' a 13-minute silent...

I finally watched it today. It is not a hilarious comedy as the trailer suggests. It is a very very black comedy as everything in this movie really happened and the atmosphere it hints at without going too dark is very real. Perhaps this is a good way to teach this part of the history so far often neglected. The kids and adults will see this movie and think it was over the top and then will seek more information only to learn that this is how insane that horror really was and the movie was basically the exact retelling.

Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral is in a dismal state of disrepair and needs $70 million for urgent renovations, according to Michel Picaud, head of Friends of Notre Dame de Paris. One possible solution for the famous church and other religious monuments is to ask patrons to pay an entrance fee, but so far the Church has been against that. Taking a tour of the decrepit parts of the cathedral (its construction began in the 1100s), is a long, breathtaking and dispiriting experience. Around the back of the cathedral, Picaud points to a collection of stones – including finely worked pinnacles...

According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election. On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Donald Trump, and almost never Hillary Clinton. One imaginative Russian troll urged Trumpsters to dress up a female volunteer in an orange prison jump suit, put her in a cage on a flatbed truck, then append the slogan, "Lock Her Up!" How grave a matter is this? This...

In one of the undercover video segments released by O'Keefe, one of Creamer’s consultants, Scott Foval ⸺who in 2011 established a consulting firm called the Foval Group ⸺provided key details about the Democrat bird-dogging strategy. Specifically, Foval explained that the operation was structured in a manner that ⸺if the public were ever to find out about it⸺ would allow the DNC and the Clinton campaign to pretend that they knew nothing of it. “The thing that we have to watch is making sure there’s a double-blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing,” said Foval....

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean, not content to do slap and tickle histories, has gone on to trivialize a malady that afflicts millions. "Nancy MacLean, the Duke University historian who wrote Democracy in Chains, the deeply conspiratorial and much-criticized biography of public choice economist James Buchanan, told an audience in New York last week that Buchanan and other early leaders of the limited-government movement 'seem to be on the autism spectrum,'" Robby Soave reports on Reason.com. "According to MacLean, there is a connection between autism and libertarianism, and that connection is not feeling 'solidarity or empathy,' and having 'kind of...

Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin spends several pages of his book discussing the lessons to be learned from Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy in the early 1920s. It was something that happened gradually, in stages, when institutions that should have been able to bring him to heel did nothing, either due to their own lack of resolution or tacit support of his power grab.Italy after the First World War was, like many European countries, rife with instability and factionalism. Mussolini’s “fascist” party in 1922 had collected only 35 out of 500 seats in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; despite this apparent...

February 17th is the anniversary of the death in 1909 of that legendary Chiricahua Apache chieftain, Geronimo (born ca. 1829), whose actual Indian name was Goyathlay ("One Who Yawns"). The name by which Geronimo is remembered was supposedly bestowed on him by a detachment of Mexican soldiers so stunned by the ferocity of his resistance that they repeatedly invoked the name of St. Jerome against him. The reason that U.S. airborne troops yell "Geronimo!" when they jump out of airplanes has to do with a 1939 movie entitled Geronimo which was viewed by a group of early paratroopers (the Parachute...

A new interpretation of Serpent Mound, based on American Indian mythic stories portrayed in a remarkable series of pictographs from Picture Cave in Missouri, is offered by James Duncan, Carol Diaz-Granados, Tod Frolking and me in a paper published online last month in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal. We argue that images of serpents and other supernatural beings on the walls of Picture Cave help us make sense of those parts of Serpent Mound that weren't restored. One group of pictographs shows a serpent facing a humanoid female with her legs spread apart next to a large oval that might be...

Let's do some good here: Post photos and tributes to your favorite black conservatives!!!

It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of the people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. ~ Lincoln February 12 is the anniversary of the birth of the 16th - and arguably the greatest - president of these United States, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois, Lincoln was largely self-educated and became a country lawyer in 1836, having been elected to the state legislature two years earlier. He had one term in the U.S. Congress (1847-1849) but failed (against Stephen A. Douglas)...

First, 2016 was the worst year for the Russian rocket industry in decades...Second, China has been aggressively ramping up its launch rate, and in 2016 moved clearly into the top tier of space-faring nations...Third, the United States is clearly transitioning away from a government owned and operated rocket industry to one owned and operated by the private sector. Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the federal government has not launched a single rocket that it designed, built, and owns. Instead, every payload put in space by the U.S. has been put there by a private sector rocket.

Yuri N. Afanasyev, a Russian historian and former Communist loyalist who became a leading democratic politician in the late Soviet era ...died Sept. 14. He was 81. In 1989, Mr. Afanasyev helped found Memorial, an organization dedicated to exposing Stalin’s atrocities and commemorating the victims. That year he also joined the Soviet Union’s first freely elected parliamentary body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, which was created under Mr. Gorbachev’s reforms. But he grew disenchanted, doubting that its unwieldy mix of Stalinists, democrats and Communist Party functionaries could bring about change, and denouncing both its “aggressively obedient majority” and Mr. Gorbachev....

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties. "Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not...