Free Republic

Three years ago today, the IMF added China’s yuan to the basket of currencies underpinning its Special Drawing Rights (SDR)—its proprietary reserve accounting unit and means of extending credit to countries in need. At the time, the IMF touted it as “an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system.” Many investors took a less benign view, seeing the IMF’s move as threatening to end the dollar’s status as the world’s leading reserve currency—sending interest rates spiking and rendering US debt unaffordable. That was always a false fear, in our view, as the...

... Moving on to the 1990s, there is the very unsettling saga of Ray Boeche, an Anglican priest and a former state-director for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. In 1991, Boeche met (at Lincoln, Nebraska) with two US Department of Defense physicists working on a project to try and contact what were termed “Non-Human Entities,” or NHEs. While the initial assumption on the part of the DoD team-members was that the NHEs were extraterrestrial, that view soon changed. And radically so, too. Eventually, the project personnel concluded that far from being the aliens they purported to be, the NHEs were...

Initiative 522 in Washington state gets voted on in the general election in November. It would require MOST items sold in supermarkets to plainly label "May contain GMO products". Opposition has been fierce, as it was in California when a similar initiative was proposed - and lost out. The anti-disclosure people set up a PAC to front the advertising campaign, and refused to say who was what, so a lawsuit was filed. The PAC lost the suit - and was forced to tell who had contributed what. So here you go, folks - These are the businesses who don't want...

The $1 trillion farm bill will serve as the first test of how deeply the shutdown fight has damaged relations in Washington. Congress has made the legislation its first order of business as it pivots away from the battles over government funding and the debt ceiling. The leaders of the agriculture committees in Congress and K Street lobbyists are eager to put the finishing touches on the bill, which could get wrapped into a year-end budget deal that replaces automatic sequestration cuts. But some fear Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who has vowed to complete the legislation, might be too wounded...

I’d say it’s official; President Obama’s Watergate has arrived.  And the witty question originally formed for Nixon’s big scandal can now be re-applied to President Plausible Deniability, “What did he not know and when did he not know it?”  While I do think that IRS-Gate spells the end of this President’s ability to effectively advance the liberal agenda, I do not see an impeachment on the horizon; at least not for Barack Obama – but perhaps for the Sixteenth Amendment.The recent parade of citizen witnesses to congressional hearings has laid bare the raw suffering that inevitably comes from tolerating the...

A new study from researchers in Europe claims that the average IQ in Western nations dropped by a staggering 14.1 points over the past century. "We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online in the journal Intelligence on Thursday. "Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence and are considered elementary measures of cognition."-snip- The results were measured using data from 1889 to 2004 and were analyzed by Michael...

US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford yesterday sneaked into northern Syria to meet with Syrian opposition leaders. A US official confirmed the visit and said that the meeting took place along the Turkey-Syria border and that the Ambassador did not go deep into Syria. As the official said: ““(The meeting) was literally just across the border.” However, he refused to provide additional details for security reasons. “Obviously, this is a dangerous area so we don’t want to get into the movement of diplomatic personnel,” he said. A Syrian activist reportedly said Ford met with a rebel leader from Aleppo who...

For Americans, financial and economic Armageddon might be close at hand. The evidence for this conclusion is the concerted effort by the Federal Reserve and its dependent financial institutions to scare people away from gold and silver by driving down their prices. When gold prices hit $1,917.50 an ounce on August 23, 2011, a gain of more than $500 an ounce in less than 8 months, capping a rise over a decade from $272 at the end of December 2000, the Federal Reserve panicked. With the US dollar losing value so rapidly compared to the world standard for money, the...

'I've had my phone tapped': Susan Sarandon claims 'government is watching her'... and reveals she was denied White House security clearance Actress and left-wing activist Susan Sarandon has claimed she was recently denied security clearance for a visit to the White House - and that the government has been tapping her phone. The Oscar winner, who has vehemently condemned the war in Iraq, made the claims on Sunday during a Q&A session at the Tribeca Film Festival - an 11-day event in New York's Lower Manhattan. One audience member asked whether Sarandon, who was answering questions alongside documentary filmmaker Michael...

THE EXECUTION OF THE SEAL TEAM SIX - PARTS 1 and 2 - By Ann Barnhardt - August 2011, #0, by macaense, 01 September 2011 08:26 PM THE EXECUTION OF SEAL TEAM SIX (PART 1) POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT - AUGUST 6, AD 2011 4:08 PM MST You're damn right I said it. On May 5th I had an email conversation with a retired military man with spook contacts. All were in total agreement that the Bin Laden episode was pure theater. The SEALS were sent into a compound as evidenced by the lost chopper on site. But Osama Bin...

Something strange happening in the skys over Phoenix. Pairs of Jets (not commercial) are flying in traffic patterns not used for commercial flights (to my knowledge). They sound like fighter jets (at 18000 feet - or so) going toward S. Calif. Many sets of two flying in alternate flight paths (north and south of Phoenix) and two jets flying pattern (probably out of Luke AFG). The two local jets are flying a search pattern and go dark from time to time. Making hard right and left hand turns. Started at or before 9:45 Arizona Std time. That is when I...

McCain and the U.S.S. Liberty By Tony Wicher - Jun 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm EDT Also listed in: 5 groups LIKE FATHER LIKE SON. THE COVER-UP CONTINUES ON THE USS LIBERTY April 12, 2008 — crescentandcross When Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander in Chief, United States Naval Forces, Europe, ordered the cover-up on the attack of the USS LIBERTY GTR-5 it was a sure act of treason perpetrated on the American people and the crew of the LIBERTY to hide the true facts surrounding the unprovoked attack by the Government of Israel on our ship, the USS LIBERTY....As...

NASA started it all back in 1976 with an image of an interesting mountain on Mars and a caption that described it as appearing to have eyes and nostrils. Thirty years later, the Face on Mars still inspires myths and conspiracy theories. New images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter will confirm for many that the features are natural, while no doubt offering tantalizing "clues" to others of an ancient intelligent civilization at work. The spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera provides data the researchers turn into colorized perspective views, which simulate the scene as though you were flying...

The World Health Organization has detailed the first evidence that the deadly bird flu virus mutated and spread from person to person within a family, but experts said Friday the genetic change does not increase the threat of a pandemic. The investigation said the H5N1 mutation occurred in a 10-year-old Indonesian boy who was part of the largest cluster ever reported. The index case is believed to have been infected by poultry. She then likely passed it to the boy and five other blood relatives. The boy is then thought to have infected his father, whose samples showed the same...

I know many of you love to hate the conservative website WorldNetDaily. I will admit they along with newsmax may have published a story now and then with an factual error or two. (I wish the Sheeple were so harsh on the Lamestream media!!!) But until conservative sites are less the exception and more the rule I remain a loyal reader. Anyone know what happened to them today?

Airplane vapour trails may blot out our view of the stars in as little as 30 or 40 years, astronomers say, making ground-based telescopes -- which still do the bulk of our astronomy even in the Hubble age -- nearly useless. As cheap air travel expands, the sky gets criss-crossed with little ice crystals that can hang up there for a couple of days as thin clouds, dimming the view. This warning comes as Canada and other countries are currently designing a new generation of "Extremely Large Telescopes" with mirrors 30 metres or more across, and a view sharper than...

Both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Americas are vulnerable to tsunamis like the one that devastated Indian Ocean shorelines in December and experts said on Tuesday they are scrambling to try to get warning system in place before politicians lose interest. "It's not if but when," said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center run by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the United Nations (news - web sites) Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization. She and other experts want to use momentum from the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed or left missing nearly 300,000 people...

Federal and state authorities are investigating a nuclear terrorist threat against Boston after a man calling from Mexico told California police that he smuggled two Iraqis and four Chinese over the border, the Boston Herald has learned. ``They got a call from across the border in Mexico to the California Highway Patrol and he said he brought two Iraqis and four Chineses (individuals)across the border and according to him, they stated soon to follow behind them would be some sort of material,'' said a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. ``He refers to some sort of nuclear material that...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Two third-party presidential candidates asked a federal court Thursday to force a second recount of the Ohio vote, alleging county election boards altered votes and didn't follow proper procedures in the recount that ended this week. Lawyers for Green Party candidate David Cobb and the Libertarian Party's Michael Badnarik made their request in federal court in Columbus. The two candidates, who received less than 0.3 percent of the Ohio vote, paid $113,600 for a statewide recount after the vote was certified earlier this month by the secretary of state. They have said they don't expect to...

Conservatives continue to feast on Rudy Giuliani's misery. As Rudy begins to distance himself from the ethically challenged, briefly nominated Homeland Security chief wanna-be Bernard Kerik, some right-wing hardliners claim White House strategist Karl Rove devised the Kerik debacle to hurt Giuliani's presidential chances in '08. "Rove used Rudy and Kerik to tout Bush as the anti-terrorism candidate," says one Republican party player. "But Rudy is too socially liberal for the true-believers. So they let him shoot himself in the foot. Rove knew about Kerik's baggage - and that he could never be confirmed. But he went along with the...