Free Republic

Time and again the American left—led by the mainstream media, Hollywood elite, and the Democrat Party—lectures us about the ignorance of conservatives, Christians, and anyone else who isn’t devoted to a “progressive” (amazing how regressive is “progressivism”) worldview. With their talk shows, columns, commercials, movies, sitcoms, roundtables, protests, Facebook posts, tweets, and the like, liberals unashamedly, repeatedly, and without hesitation (and often without much thought) denigrate those with whom they disagree. Yet, time and again, as they preach their philosophy and live out their “faith,” it is liberals who are stubbornly hindered by the facts of science and morality. Examples...

Abstract This paper provides novel empirical evidence of the effects of a plausibly exogenous change in relative factor prices on United States manufacturing production and trade. The shale gas revolution has led to (very) large and persistent differences in the price of natural gas between the United States and the rest of the world reflecting differences in endowment of difficult-to-trade natural gas. Guided by economic theory, empirical tests on output, factor reallocation and international trade are conducted. Results show that U.S. manufacturing exports have grown by about 10 percent on account of their energy intensity since the onset of the...

A man calling himself “One Hand Jason” cut his right arm off because he felt like he was really disabled. His hand was more or less a “birth defect,” according to body modification website ModBlog. Jason trained in first aid for months and eventually severed his arm with a power tool. He also allowed people to think it was an accident for years. If you think this is wrong in any way, you’re a bigot — at least if you follow trans-logic to its natural conclusions.

New research shows the islands are growing, not receding Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea. No doubt, residents are leaving the Marshall Islands, but it is not because of climate change, reports Bjorn Lomborg. 1

As 3D printing continues to develop and evolve, we’ve begun to see it branch off quite a bit from the typical image of a machine depositing layers onto a flat build platform. 3D printing has been adapted to print onto preexisting objects, onto fabric, and in multiple directions. Machines capable of doing these fancy tricks are still rare and expensive, though, and not quite accessible to the average maker, but that may not be the case forever. A group of UK researchers recently published a paper about their efforts to develop an affordable system that can 3D print onto uneven,...

I keep hearing people say that 97% of climate scientists are on the same side of the issue. Critics point out that the number is inflated, but we don’t know by how much. Persuasion-wise, the “first offer” of 97% is so close to 100% that our minds assume the real number is very high even if not exactly 97%. That’s good persuasion. Trump uses this method all the time. The 97% anchor is so strong that it is hard to hear anything else after that. Even the people who think the number is bogus probably think the real figure is...

President Trump, we need to go to Mars. That is all.

The four mega-trends shaping the global auto industry over the next 15-odd years are undoubtedly vehicles with lower emissions, new powertrain technologies, autonomous automobiles and vehicle digitalization. Reflecting these mega-trends, one can anticipate more developments in lightweighting, drivetrain optimization, car computerization, infotainment and driverless transportation in 2017. Here PlasticsToday gives its take on some of the key developments expected in 2017. Staying connected, and entertained Rather than being interested in the size of the engine and the shape of the car, consumers are now more interested in “infotainment” systems, being connected, autonomous driving and diverse mobility, notes consultant McKinsey. Traditionally,...

As part of his energy plan, President-elect Donald Trump is promising to develop clean coal. It’s a goal shared by Ohio University and the state of Ohio but viewed by many to be impossible to achieve. The Ohio Coal Research Center at OU has been working for years to “develop clean and economic technology for the conversion of coal… into electric power (and) fuels.” The Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment (ISEE) at OU is also conducting coal research, but with a different focus: the development of materials from coal. The term “clean coal” refers to a variety of...

The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress. My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science? My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But...

Scientists with the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) claim NASA’s results ‘re-confirm’ what they’d already achieved, and have plans to implement it in satellites ‘as quickly as possible.’ China claims they’ve created a working prototype of the ‘impossible’ reactionless engine – and they say they’re already testing it in orbit aboard the Tiangong-2 space laboratory. The radical, fuel-free EmDrive recently stirred up controversy after a paper published by a team of NASA researchers appeared to show they’d successfully built the technology. The implications for this could be huge. For instance, current satellites could be half the size they are...

On Thursday, Donald Trump created controversy when he tweeted, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” In case anyone was confused, he followed up Friday morning with an off-air remark to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that clarified his intentions: “Let it be an arms race,” he said. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” The backlash was swift and unanimous. Critics charged that there is no plausible reason to expand U.S. nuclear weapons, that Trump’s comments contradicted a decades-old bipartisan consensus...

As we close out 2016, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to take a risk and venture into a topic I’m personally compelled to think about… a topic that will seem far out to most readers. Today’s extraordinary rate of exponential growth may do much more than just disrupt industries. It may actually give birth to a new species, reinventing humanity over the next 30 years. I believe we’re rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what I call a “Meta-Intelligence,” a future in which we are all highly connected—brain to brain via the cloud—sharing thoughts,...

Princeton Physics Professor Discredits Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory  

Trump’s Personality and IQ Evaluatied by Psychotherapist by Samuel Orrin Sewell - bestselfusa@gmail.com Trump may be a genius, but personality is more important. The most well-known high IQ society is Mensa. To join Mensa one must score in the top 2% of a standardized IQ test. That really isn’t all that outstanding. One out of 50 people have IQs high enough to join Mensa. Numerical IQ scores are not an accurate indicator of intelligence. For instance a score of 72 on the U.S. Navy GCT test is about equal to score of 150 on the WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.)...

The last 5 1/2 years massive amounts of fukushima radiation has been pouring into the Pacific. Because Obama was president this was an ignored and deliberately covered-up disaster. The evidence of hardly any life left by fisherman and boat personnel who have years of travel across the ocean, and seeing all kinds of fishes and sharks with internal and external tumors, commonplace, is so huge media cant cover it up anymore. This is a heads up as it will now all be blamed on Donald Trump. We know the template uniparty media is using and just do not be surprised...

Deep within a mine in Canada, there is a pool of water bubbling out of the ground. It’s close to 2 miles below the surface of the earth and, according to the scientists who discovered it, it’s been there for 2 billion years, making it the oldest pool of water in the world.Previously that record was held by a pool further up in the mine, about 1.5 miles down, which was discovered in 2013 and given the age of 1.5 billion years.The scientists date the water by analysing the gases trapped inside. As the CBC explains, gases like helium...

Satellite broadband firm OneWeb on Dec 19 announced a US$1.2bil (RM5.37bil) funding round led by SoftBank, the first concrete investment from the Japanese group which made a pledge to President-elect Donald Trump. SoftBank, which is providing US$1bil (RM4.47bil) of the funding for the project aimed at providing global internet access via satellite, made the announcement just two weeks after its chief executive Masayoshi Son met Trump and pledged to invest US$50bil (RM223.97bil) in the US economy and create 50,000 jobs. ”Earlier this month I met with President-elect Trump and shared my commitment to investing and creating jobs in the US,”...

The scientific community remained silent for too long, accepting populism into the strict environment of cold blooded facts. The old have betrayed the young, teaching them that facts should not always come first. On the contrary, facts are the only relevant aspect in science.

While liberal mainstream media concoct fake news that President-Elect Trump is Moscow's Manchurian Candidate, they ignore the latest real threat from Russia. Russian state television "accidentally" disclosed plans for a robot submarine, reportedly armed with a massive 100 megaton warhead-the largest nuclear weapon ever deployed by any nation. The submarine doomsday bomb would explode underwater to radioactively contaminate and inundate with tsunamis U.S. coastal cities and seaboard, where are concentrated much of America's military-industrial strength and population. A diagram of the robo-bomb was shown on Russian TV, supposedly inadvertently, over the shoulder of a Defense Ministry officer. Reportedly, according to...