Free Republic

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE~ DECEMBER 13, 2014 4:00 AM What Exodus: Gods and Kings Gets Right Ridley Scott offers some fresh perspectives without straying unforgivably far from Biblical orthodoxy. By Josh CraddockJoel Edgerton (left) and Christian Bale in Exodus: Gods and KingsBringing familiar Bible stories to the silver screen is a risky enterprise. A director must avoid mere rehash of previous tellings (think Cecil B. DeMille’s opus The Ten Commandments) but without allowing artistic license to veer off into offensive parody. That’s a difficult task when some 3.8 billion people believe the source matter is sacred revelation from God himself. In...

A prehistoric water well hinting at the existence of a thriving Neolithic settlement has been excavated under water at Israel's East Mediterranean coast. The 7,500-year-old water well, currently under five metres of water, was submerged following prehistoric rise in sea level. Maritime archaeologist Ehud Galili of the Israel Antiquities Authority led the excavation at Kfar Samir site in collaboration with experts at Flinders University in South Australia and University of Haifa in Israel. Archaeologists said that the well which was a source of fresh water for the village dwellers was abandoned as the sea level rose. "Water wells are valuable...

I went down to Al Sharpton March at Freedom Plaza today, which featured the Mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner with a crowd of mostly out of towners that numbered between 8,000 to 10,000 at the height of it all. The march and rally pretty much ended with around 3pm with Sharpton making a very brief appearance and mostly White Leftwingers hijacking the march afterwards as the out of towners headed for their buses. The signage held up by these Leftists radical included environmental messages, the overthrow of the capitalist system. One sign proclaimed that, "Capitalism was the disease...

In layers older than roughly 350,000 years, almost none of the flints are burned. But in every layer after that, many flints show signs of exposure to fire: red or black coloration, cracking, and small round depressions where fragments known as pot lids flaked off from the stone. Wildfires are rare in caves, so the fires that burned the Tabun flints were probably controlled by ancestral humans, according to the authors. The scientists argue that the jump in the frequency of burnt flints represents the time when ancestral humans learned to control fire, either by kindling it or by keeping...

Sen. Kelly Ayotte returned home to New Hampshire Friday, planning to see “The Nutcracker” with her daughter this weekend. But there was an unexpected conflict: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, along with Utah Sen. Mike Lee, took to the floor Friday night to demand Republicans stop President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration and scuttled a bipartisan agreement to push back votes until Monday, effectively forcing the Senate to return for a rare weekend session and cast a marathon series of procedural votes. Senior Republicans say there’s a problem with Cruz’s strategy: The GOP lacks the votes to stop Obama...

.... Di-Natale provided coverage of the [Osama bin Laden] raid's aftermath, including an exclusive interview with Shakil Afridi, the doctor who helped U.S. agents verify Bin Laden's presence, and who remains imprisoned in Pakistan to this day. Di-Natale notably reported from Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound in the aftermath of the US raid, and is known for chiseling out a brick from the compound: Call me a conspiracy theorist, but when I heard about Di-Natale's death, the first thing that popped into my mind was this: Who killed him? It isn't that far-fetched to suspect foul play when a journalist...

Vote on legality of executive action scheduled for 9:00 p.m. EST.

Of all the numerals, "0" -- alone in green on the roulette wheel -- is most significant. Unique in representing absolute nothingness, its role as a placeholder gives our number system its power. It enables the numerals to cycle, acquiring different meanings in different locations (compare 3,000,000 and 30). With the exception of the Mayan system, whose zero glyph never left the Americas, ours is the only one known to have a numeral for zero. Babylonians had a mark for nothingness, say some accounts, but treated it primarily as punctuation. Romans and Egyptians had no such numeral either... Found on...

Mark Levin 25 mins · Levin Surge!If your senators aren't answering their phones tweet them! Let's go! Tell them you want them to vote for the Cruz-Lee constitutional point of order.

Tia and pistols near Yuma, AZ In Alaska, a couple is not content with teen age girls learning how to shoot .22 rifles and pellet guns.   Not that their is anything wrong with that.  Air rifles and .22 rifles are excellent tools for teaching beginners to shoot, and for target practice and hunting small game.   But this course goes further and involves a wider variety of firearms.   From peninsularclarion.com: In addition to safety, the course includes trigger technique, accuracy practice, shooting from a full range of positions, and a chance to gain experience with a variety of guns. Ted...

What the Individual Mandate means for you and your family:: By: Larry Walker II ::Under the Affordable Care Act, beginning in 2014, State governments, insurers, employers, and selected individuals are supposed to share in the responsibility of providing health insurance coverage. The Act’s shared responsibility provision, also known as the individual mandate, requires you and each member of your family to either: Have minimum essential coverage; or An exemption from the responsibility to have minimum essential coverage; or Pay an Excise Tax. You will report minimum essential coverage, claim an exemption therefrom, or make an excise tax payment when...

Smart agricultural practices and an extensive grain-trade network enabled the Romans to thrive in the water-limited environment of the Mediterranean, a new study shows. But the stable food supply brought about by these measures promoted population growth and urbanisation, pushing the Empire closer to the limits of its food resources... Brian Dermody, an environmental scientist from Utrecht University, teamed up with hydrologists from the Netherlands and classicists at Stanford University in the US. The researchers wanted to know how the way Romans managed water for agriculture and traded crops contributed to the longevity of their civilisation. They were also curious...

Marcus Mariota, widely considered the favorite over co-finalists Melvin Gordon and Amari Cooper, won the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night in New York. College football's top honor punctuates the Oregon junior quarterback's list of 2014 accolades, which include the Walter Camp, Davey O'Brien, Maxwell and Johnny Unitas Golden Arm awards. Mariota's banner season included 3,783 passing yards and 38 touchdown passes against two interceptions. The dual-threat quarterback also racked up 669 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns on the ground.

Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi said Sunday an investigation had found a list of “ghost soldiers” in the Iraqi military. Uncovered the presence of 50,000 fictitious named in four military units. “There are two kinds of ‘fadhaiyin,’” one experienced officer in the security forces said, using a word which, literally translated, means “space men,” and refers to the fictitious soldiers crowding the payroll.

House and Senate conferees negotiating a package to fund the Department of Defense through September 2015 have protected commissary operations by restoring 90 percent of a planned $100 million cut. Once again lawmakers thwarted a cost-saving initiative targeting military compensation and endorsed by the Joint Chiefs as a way to dampen personnel costs so more dollars can be spent on training, weapon buys and other readiness accounts being victimized by arbitrary “sequestration” cuts. Only last week House and Senate conferees on a different bill, the 2015 defense authorization act, unveiled a deal to lower the Defense Commissary Agency annual $1.3...

The ascetic and moralizing movements that spawned the world's major religious traditions -- Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity -- all arose around the same time in three different regions... The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia... It seems almost self-evident today that religion is on the side of spiritual and moral concerns, but that was not always so, Baumard explains. In hunter-gatherer societies and early chiefdoms, for instance, religious tradition focused on rituals, sacrificial offerings, and taboos designed to ward off misfortune and evil. That...

The new technique of analyzing DNA found in ancient parchments can shine a focused light on the development of agriculture across the centuries. Millions of documents stored in archives could provide scientists with the key to tracing agricultural development across the centuries... Amazingly, thanks to increasingly progressive genetic sequencing techniques, the all-important historical tales these documents tell are no longer confined to their texts; now, vital information also comes from the DNA of the parchment on which they are written. Researchers used these state-of-the-art scientific techniques to extract ancient DNA and protein from tiny samples of parchment from documents from...

Other members of the Senate fumed Saturday over objections by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that held up a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill meant to keep the government open. The objection was fueled by the two conservatives' desire to fight President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration. The objections by Cruz and Lee mean that the Senate must slog through procedural votes Saturday on nominees and also vote to end a filibuster on the omnibus bill at 1 a.m. on Sunday. It was too much for Democrats and even Republicans to bite their tongues over....

The Importance of Mothers and Fathersby Archbishop William E. LoriNo one loves us quite so tenderly and persistently as our mothers. Where would we be without them? They are the glue that holds families together. Even though Mother’s Day is past, it is never too late to pay tribute to our mothers, living and dead, and to commend them to the Lord. Let me wager, however, that good mothers desire, more than anything else, good husbands and fathers. They deserve husbands who are loving and faithful. Mothers understand how important a father’s love and example is for their children....

A site on Apache Mountain, where Apache warriors plunged to their deaths to avoid the U.S. cavalry, may soon overlook a copper mine. Archaeologists and Native American tribes are protesting language in a Senate bill that would approve a controversial land exchange between the federal government and a copper mining company -- a swap that may put Native American archaeological sites at risk. The bill is needed to fund the U.S. military and is considered likely to pass the Senate as early as today. The company Resolution Copper Mining hopes to exploit rich copper deposits beneath 980 hectares of Arizona's...