Free Republic

Are you more valuable than a dog or a cat or, for that matter, a tree? One of the biggest differences between Judeo-Christian values and secular values concerns this very issue: the worth of the human being. According to the Judeo-Christian value system, human beings are infinitely valuable. On the other hand, secular humanism devalues the worth of humans. As ironic as it may sound, the God-based Judeo-Christian value system renders humans infinitely more valuable than any humanistic value system. The reason is simple: if there is no God, human beings are only material beings - and therefore not worth...

Full Title: Any woman who claims her son's better off without a dad needs her head examined: As actress January Jones says she is GLAD her little boy doesn't have a father, a guilt-ridden single mother blasts her comments Chatting to my teenage daughter over a family dinner the other evening, I paused to reprimand my nine-year-old son for slurping his spaghetti and making a terrible mess in the process. 'You can't tell me off,' he spat back. 'I'm the man of the house.' Of course I was cross with Charlie for being so impudent, and told him so in...

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry told Fox News host Tucker Carlson she was so sick of politicization of global warming in academia she resigned from her tenured position at Georgia Tech. “I’ve been vilified by some of my colleagues who are activists and don’t like anybody challenging their big story,” Curry told Carlson Friday night. “I walk around with knives sticking out of my back,” she said. “In the university environment I felt like I was just beating my head against the wall.”

On January 7–the day after the heinous attack in the Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood international gun-free zone–the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence Tweeted that you can “carry a gun and ammo in a checked bag” when you fly.

A truck rammed into pedestrians in Jerusalem on a popular promenade overlooking the walled Old City of Jerusalem on Sunday, injuring at least 15 people, police and the ambulance service said, calling it a deliberate attack. "It is a terrorist attack, a ramming attack," a police spokeswoman said on Israel Radio, which reported that bodies were "strewn on the street". The radio said the driver of the vehicle was shot. The Magen David Adom ambulance service said some 15 people were hurt and at least two were seriously injured.

“Equality” is one of those words that has gained far too much currency in the modern West. The use of it constitutes an exercise in stultiloquence, making it the perfect sort of term for use by social justice warriors (SJWs) and others on the Left. Equality has been a powerfully destructive force on our society. Because of it, laws are passed which force businesses to hire suboptimal employees who end up harming not only the productivity of the enterprise, but also the social and trust structures within it as well. Because of the demands of “equality,” relative power within a...

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.” And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing...

Late on a Sunday evening a little more than a year ago, Marine Le Pen took the stage in a depressed working-class town in northern France. She had just lost an election for the region’s top office, but the leader of France’s anti-immigrant, anti-euro National Front did not deliver a concession speech. Instead, Ms. Le Pen proclaimed a new ideological struggle. “Now, the dividing line is not between left and right but globalists and patriots,” she declared, with a gigantic French flag draped behind her. Globalists, she charged, want France to be subsumed in a vast, world-encircling “magma.” She and...

These days, even shipwreck museums showcase evidence of climate change. After diving recently among Key West’s fabled ship-destroying barrier reefs, I immersed myself in exhibits from the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, the fabled Spanish galleon that foundered during a ferocious hurricane in 1622. The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum now houses many of the gold, silver, emeralds and artifacts that Mel and Deo Fisher’s archeological team recovered after finding the wreck in 1985. Also featured prominently in the museum is the wreck of a British slave ship, the Henrietta Marie. It sank in a hurricane off Key West in 1700, after...

As we watch the rise of the Snowflake Generation with a mixture of bemusement and horror – you know, the young people unable to use a can opener but who are certain they’re qualified to dictate business and social policy, the generation who can work a smartphone like a brain surgeon but can’t figure out what gender they are – it should come as no surprise that manhood and masculinity have come under fire. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to be a man, look no further than the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There you’ll find the answer: Real men...

Authorities believe the suspect in Friday's deadly attack retrieved his a handgun from checked luggage before firing indiscriminately on the baggage claim area at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International airport. Transportation Security Administration rules allow travelers to pack unloaded firearms in checked luggage, so long as passengers declare their weapons to the airline while checking in, and they are packed in a locked, hard-sided container.

Police are hunting vandals after a series of chapels and shrines were desecrated within the space of a few days in northern Austria. Statues have been beheaded, prayer books burned and sacred images destroyed since the New Year in the Innviertel region on the Bavarian border. On New Year’s Eve, the vandals struck a chapel in the village of St Radegund, damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary before burning prayer books and wooden objects from the chapel in a nearby wood. That same day, another chapel at the nearby town of Auerbach was also attacked, with vandals smashing the...

They'll never stop this. I guess it's just a fact of life. The left-wing mainstream media are obsessed with race. The very people who point their fingers endlessly at conservatives and call us racists see a racial angle to every thought, every action and every reaction that ever happens on Earth. So no one should be surprised that the Washington Post decided to publish a story yesterday, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence, that Trump voters were motivated by nostalgia for the good old days in America, when there weren't all those durn minorities around. You know that's not why...

Been a little busy and haven’t posted in a long time. But I watched this fine video and feel like the creator must have read my "Why The Patriarchy is Needed" article. WOMEN DON’T DESTROY CIVILIZATIONS. FEMINISM DOES Now first of all, I would disagree with his title, “Why Women Destroy Civilizations.” Women don’t destroy civilizations. They play a very prominent role in creating them. Creating people, supporting the men who are involved in the production/building of that civilization and so on. In fact, without the equal distribution of chaste and obedient wives, there would be little incentive for men...

Virginia's top transportation oversight body voted earlier this month to move ahead with a major tunnel expansion. If everything goes as planned, the multibillion-dollar project could be good news for the traffic-snarled Hampton Roads region when it opens in 2024. But the commonwealth may also be setting itself up for a major financial body blow - and demonstrating the long-term consequences of mismanaging public-private partnerships.

Big Science Pops its Zits If you think institutional science has a smooth complexion, look closer. From every angle, serious blemishes are coming to light. Observational Errors There are five times more urban foxes in England than we thought (New Scientist). Some biologists think red foxes are multiplying in cities and vanishing from the countryside. This article puts the blame on scientists’ methods of counting them. “It is also possible that foxes haven’t become much more numerous in cities – we just didn’t realise they were there before,” Aisling Irwin writes. And it’s not just foxes. “Older figures for bird...

Dear Editor, As states and municipalities around the nation struggle to find ways to afford much-needed improvements to aging and congested roadways, the Commonwealth of Virginia has established itself as an innovative leader when it comes to carefully prioritizing the state’s transportation investments and wisely leveraging private sector resources to ensure the best deal for state taxpayers. The I-66 Outside the Beltway project exemplifies this leadership, and Cintra, together with its partner Meridiam, is proud to be part of the team selected by the Commonwealth to finance, design, build, operate and maintain this more than $3 billion transformative project at...

I look forward to working with the ACLU. I look forward to working with the DOJ on the monitors and getting everybody on the same page so this community can be in a better place."

PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump has proposed a $1 trillion plan to fix America’s infrastructure. It relies on public-private partnerships as its primary source of financing. Our country’s complex transportation network needs an overhaul, but private investment is not the answer, mainly because of the returns that investors expect. Public-private partnerships can be an excellent procurement tool, but selecting the right project is key. Virginia has been a national leader in such deals since the General Assembly passed the Public Private Partnership Act in 1995. The law was designed for the partnerships to be used as an option for certain projects if...

Yesterday North Carolina Republican Richard Hudson introduced the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 for consideration in the House. If passed, the legislation would allow concealed carry holders in any state to travel across state lines without fear of criminal retribution. “Our Second Amendment right doesn’t disappear when we cross state lines, and this legislation guarantees that. The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 is a common sense solution to a problem too many Americans face. It will provide law-abiding citizens the right to conceal carry and travel freely between states without worrying about conflicting state codes or onerous civil...