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MICHAEL BROWN SR. AND THE AGONY OF THE BLACK FATHER IN AMERICA Thanksgiving at the Brown house, with family, friends, ham hocks, a little football, and an empty chair.

I don't know too much about Jim Rickards, just found this to be an interesting video about the overall economy and some tidbits about what our government agencies are up to. The video is a 45 minutes long interview of sorts and discussion. Just posting in the event other are interested.

Ferguson isn’t simply black versus white. A peculiar Vine floated around social media Monday evening following the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, Mo. The short video shows an Asian-American shopkeeper standing in his looted store, with a hands-in-his-pockets matter-of-factness and a sad slump to his facial expression. “Are you okay, sir?” an off-screen cameraman asks. “Yes,” the storeowner says, dejectedly. The clip is only a few seconds, but it highlights the question of where Asian-Americans stand in the black and white palette often used to paint incidents like Ferguson. In the story of a white cop’s killing of a black...

The violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., are part of the American experience. Peaceful protesting is a luxury only available to those safely in mainstream culture

An Oopart (out of place artifact) is a term applied to dozens of prehistoric objects found in various places around the world that, given their level of technology, are completely at odds with their determined age based on physical, chemical, and/or geological evidence. Ooparts often are frustrating to conventional scientists and a delight to adventurous investigators and individuals interested in alternative scientific theories. In 1991, the appearance of extremely tiny, coil-shaped artifacts found near the banks of Russia’s Kozhim, Narada, and Balbanyu rivers brought about a debate that has continued to this day. These mysterious and minuscule structures suggest that...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus claimed the discovery in the name of Spain. "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said. Erdogan said that Ankara was even...

ISTANBUL – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is claiming that Muslim sailors reached the Americas more than 300 years before explorer Christopher Columbus. Speaking Saturday at a gathering of Muslim leaders from Latin America, Erdogan said that contact between Islam and Latin America dates to the 12th century. "It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492," Erdogan said. "In fact, Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178."

Some historians and political observers were surprised over the weekend when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chief of America’s NATO ally, said Muslims discovered the Americas more than 300 years before Christopher Columbus. But the Islamic leader was doing nothing more than stating publicly what Islamic historians have said, including some who believe Native Americans who spoke Arabic greeted Muslim adventurers hundreds of years before the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria sailed. Among those reporting Erdogan’s statement was the BBC, which noted his AK Party “is rooted in political Islam.” Erdogan said, “Muslim sailors arrived in America in 1178,” but...

The USSR claimed to have invented absolutely everything. Soviet children were taught that everything from the locomotive to the airplane had been invented in Russia. Muslims can’t seem to stop jumping headlong into the same xenophobic delusional propaganda. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday hit back at ridicule of his claim that Islamic explorers discovered the Americas three centuries before Columbus, accusing his Muslim critics of lacking “self-confidence”.In an aggressive rebuttal of the criticism heaped in some quarters on his comments, Erdogan also suggested that the purported “discovery” of the Americas by Muslims should be taught in schools.“A big...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 -- The Planned Parenthood Federation of America issued the following news release: Planned Parenthood Federation of America commends President Obama for taking long overdue executive action addressing key issues in our nation's broken immigration system, and calling on the administration and Congress to work to extend healthcare coverage to these individuals. Statement from Cecile Richards, president, Planned Parenthood Federation of America: "We commend President Obama for extending much needed and long overdue relief to millions of women and families currently living in fear of deportation due to our nation's broken immigration system. This is a bold...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday urged police to show restraint in dealing with any protests that may follow a grand jury's decision on whether to bring charges against the white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.

A few years back I worked with a guy who was probably a genius. In fact, he often struggled in life interacting with people because his brain simply performed at a higher level than the average person. I remember asking him what his biggest belief was in making life decisions and he always, without fail, told me “think of the bigger picture.” And while I’ve always tried to be a big picture thinker, knowing him when I did helped me understand it a little better. He always told me the biggest issue he faced when dealing with people was that...

It has been over three months since the horrific death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It has been over three months since Brown's parents and loved ones began awaiting a semblance of justice and closure on this painful chapter in their lives. And it's been over three months since a community started searching for answers and justice after another one of its children died at the hands of police.

A jump, hop, and a rocket ride away lies Earth's blushing sister: Mars. While apparently lifeless today, some 4 billion years ago, Mars featured rivers, oceans, and potentially even microbial life. The good times obviously didn't last. On Earth, we fear asteroid impacts as harbingers of destruction, but to early Mars, they were cascading gifts of life. The energy and gas they provided helped keep the planet hot and wet. But as the solar system settled down after its turbulent birth, those impacts grew to be few and far between. At the same time, Mars' core was cooling, quieting the...

VATICAN CITY - Retired Pope Benedict XVI said dialogue with other religions is no substitute for spreading the Gospel to non-Christian cultures, and warned against relativistic ideas of religious truth as "lethal to faith." He also said the true motivation for missionary work is not to increase the church's size but to share the joy of knowing Christ. The retired pope's words appeared in written remarks to faculty members and students at Rome's Pontifical Urbanian University, which belongs to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Archbishop Georg Ganswein, prefect of the papal household and personal secretary to retired Pope...

Geoscientists now overwhelmingly agree that a single large asteroid or comet impact, such as Chicxulub in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, could not have been the sole cause of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Instead, new research in both planetary/space science and multiple earth-science specialties reveals that concomitant volcanic activity and the associated climate and environmental changes were significant contributing factors in four of the five major mass extinctions in Earth history.

We managed to repeal the 18th Amendment, which created Prohibition. It is time to repeal the 17th. What? You have no idea what the 17th Amendment is? Well, it is the one that effectively ended federalism by taking the power to appoint U.S. senators from state legislatures and having the citizens directly elect them, as they had always done with the House of Representatives. We may not get better senators, but it is likely they would not try dictating to the states what they should do — as they did when they set the national speed limit at 55 mph...

What is up with the ubiquitous Mitt? He’s flitting about—as would any public office aspirant trying to gain voter interest in their candidacy—making the scene on radio and T.V., while enthusiastically endorsing the go-along-to-get-along hack candidates backed by the Progressive RINO Establishment; champions of crony capitalism, electoral criminality (remember Mississippi), and fraternal loyalty to the ruling class: still neglecting to embrace a concise articulation of the Constitutional Conservatism they rightly view as a threat to their established Inside-Beltway political racket pecking order. The elitist, morally relativistic, self-serving behavior of the establishmentarians illustrates a resistance and incapacity to communicate with their...

“Doing nothing new and simply working with pre-existing [federal bankruptcy] procedures would have been much better than anything we’ve done so far.”–Harvard Professor Jeffrey Miron, “The Case for Doing Nothing,” July 10, 2009I’ve been a big fan of the Austrian school of economics and have written books on the subject, including “The Structure of Production” and the first purely “Austrian” textbook, “Economic Logic.” The ideas and policies of giants like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek have much to offer the world. They are better than other schools in identifying the imbalances in the global economy that can cause trouble...

After conservative icon and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh blasted House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for declaring that impeaching Obama was off the table, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin praised Limbaugh for understanding the importance of not emboldening Obama to act even more lawlessly. "Rush is right," she wrote in a Wednesday Facebook post. "The GOP wants to take impeachment off the table? When will you learn liberals won't hate you less if you play nice in these tumultuous times? No matter how polite, complacent, and complicit you are, Obama will continue to harm our Republic and make you impotent....