Free Republic

While Americans of all ages in Colorado happily celebrate the legalization of marijuana in various forms on April 20, 2014 as a “smoking holiday” the mental health and safety risks are being ignored by the media.

Modern greens who inappropriately and metaphorically often use the term “denier” to compare global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers are shockingly betrayed by their very own environmental history. Modern environmentalism was largely born in the racist forests of Germany in the 1800's that was at first anti-Semitic, but later became mixed up with Social Darwinian biological science in which the very word 'ecology' was coined in 1866. Today, the green movement is no longer racist, but has evolved into anti-humanism in general ...

Farmers intentionally feed chicken and other livestock antibiotics to increase their size. But antibiotics may be doing the same thing to you posits Dr. Oz in a new episode of The Dr. Oz Show that takes a look at why antibiotics may be making you fat and could be the cause of your obesity. “Today I’ve got breaking news. Experts are uncovering the hidden reason behind America’s obesity problem: Could you be gaining weight because of antibiotics that you take every day for problems like sore throats and earaches? Or from antibiotics found in our food? It’s an alarming finding,...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

As Star Trek: Voyager Captain Kathryn Janeway, Kate Mulgrew knew her way around a solar system or two. So there was a certain irony to the actress’ voiceover work in the upcoming documentary The Principle, which focuses on the notion of geocentrism: the idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. But Mulgrew has dispelled the notion that she buys into the documentary’s central premise, writing in a post on her Facebook page that she is “not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism.” “I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at...

Mad Science: The Environmental Protection Agency has been deliberately exposing people — including children — with asthma and other health issues to pollution to justify ever-more-stringent air quality standards. 'Improvements to EPA Policies and Guidance Could Enhance Protection of Human Study Subjects," released by the EPA's Office of Inspector General on March 31, confirms that the agency "exposed 81 human study subjects to concentrated airborne particles or diesel exhaust emissions in five EPA studies conducted during 2010 and 2011." According to the report, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the human subjects, said to have given their "informed consent,"...

A Canadian high school student named Bronwyn Delacruz never imagined that her school science project would make headlines all over the world. But that is precisely what has happened. Using a $600 Geiger counter purchased by her father, Delacruz measured seafood bought at local grocery stores for radioactive contamination. What she discovered was absolutely stunning. Much of the seafood, particularly the products that were made in China, tested very high for radiation. So is this being caused by nuclear radiation from Fukushima? Is the seafood that we are eating going to give us cancer and other diseases? The American people...

Three Los Angeles City Council members want city, state and federal groups to look into whether hydraulic fracturing and other forms of oil and gas “well stimulation” played any role in the earthquake that rattled the city early Monday morning. The motion, presented Tuesday by Councilmen Paul Koretz and Mike Bonin and seconded by Councilman Bernard Parks, asks for city departments to team up with the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to report back on the likelihood that such activities contributed to the 4.4-magnitude quake....

If the United States wants to avoid falling like the Roman Empire, it must avoid “overconsumption” and distribute resources equally, according to a study funded by NASA. “The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” reads the NASA-funded report published in the Ecological Economics journal. “Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed,” the study adds. “The stretching of resources...

“Maybe we can reach a point of reconsideration” on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Kerry said during a forum at the State Department. The Ugandan president committed to meeting with American “experts” on homosexuality to try to change his mind about the Anti-Homosexuality Act signed into law last month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday during a forum at the State Department moderated by BuzzFeed. Museveni claimed to have signed the law, which imposes up to a lifetime prison sentence for homosexuality, after being convinced no one is “born gay.” “I talked personally to President Museveni just a few...

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries...

The Mongol warlord built the world's largest land-based empire. But he couldn't have done it without a change in climate. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were...

OKLAHOMA CITY - Of the fourteen 4.0 magnitude earthquakes or higher recorded in Oklahoma, ten of them have occurred in the past four years. Between the years of 1975 and 2008 an average of one to three earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or larger occurred annually. From 2009 onwards the state has experienced over 200 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or higher, an average of more than 40 per year. Several of them have centered near the most populated part of the state, central Oklahoma. In addition, in 2013 Oklahoma experienced 99 earthquakes which measured 3.0 or greater, the second largest in...

Lake Ontario is the only major holdout, and the forecast there is for extreme cold during the next two weeks. (more images and comments at the link)

<p>Research from Stanford University in California holds out hope for hurricane protection that's better and cheaper than a seawall. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change, uses computer models to estimate the reduction in hurricane winds and storm surge that results from installing huge wind turbine farms. For example, had there been 78,000 turbines spread across a wide swath of Louisiana coastline when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the turbines would have reduced the wind speed by between 80 and 98 mph and the storm surge by 79 percent, the study showed. For Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York and New Jersey in 2012, the model projected a wind speed reduction of 78 to 87 mph and up to 34 percent decrease in storm surge.</p>

‘We had both higher temps and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today’ Unknown-4 Selected Highlights of Dr. Patrick Moore’s Feb. 25, 2014 testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee: ‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.’

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us. Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after...

Fire, brimstone, eternal suffering — hell is not a pleasant concept. But research has pointed to the societal benefits of a belief in supernatural punishment, including higher economic growth in developing countries and less crime. But there are also drawbacks, even in this life. A new study links believing in hell, and perhaps even thinking about it, with lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in life. "It seems there is this trade-off," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. In research published in January in PLOS ONE, Shariff and a colleague looked at international...

Editorial cartoons often aren't pretty, to paraphrase Steve Martin's observation about the perils of comedy. But one found in the Opinion section of today's New York Times is downright ugly. The cartoon, alluding to this year's brutal winter, suggests U.S. Department of Commerce "Strategies for Dealing With the 2014 Icicle Surplus." Among them are using icicles as "locally sourced hydration devices," "temporary doorsteps," and "brainteasers for dogs." Then comes a suggestion that one immediately looks at again, in disgust and disbelief -- icicles can also be used as "self-destructing sabers for dispatching climate-change deniers." (Entire cartoon shown after the jump)...

(big time BARF ALERT!)When I was a little kid, I used to hear my brothers, cousins, and friends say things like “That’s so gay!” on a pretty regular basis. I would usually laugh along, hoping with all my might that they didn’t know my secret. My parents and other adults in my life would tell me things like “Boys don’t cry” or “Be a man!” which essentially was their way of telling me that being emotional was forbidden or a sign of weakness. When I was a teenager, there were a few boys at my high school who ridiculed me,...