Free Republic

Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces. "I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop." In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not to jump...

Few things renew American patriotism better than a trip to New England. My wife and I had the opportunity to do that recently when we visited our daughter, who is working on a film project there for a couple of months. Although we had been to Boston before, we were reminded of the city’s realities even before reaching the bag claim area at the airport. This is the place where the notion took flight that simple colonists could recover their birthright of freedom by tearing themselves away from the oppressive rule of the British king and launching an experiment in...

Canadian band Walk Off The Earth — known for covering popular songs in unique ways — has created a cover of the classic Christmas song “Little Drummer Boy” with help from a few musical dogs. The track is available to purchase online from iTunes.

A swath of ice and a wintry mix later this week threatens to slow travel and cut power from parts of Texas to Kentucky. As dangerous cold sweeps southward and eastward over the Plains and Midwest in the wake of a North Central states snowstorm, it will set up a weather pattern favoring a narrow zone of freezing rain, sleet and some snow late this week.

We’ve been discussing here at the Hayride for a whole year now a concept we first saw forming in a speech given by James Piereson at the American Enterprise Institute last fall, developing in a lot of the videos put out by Bill Whittle after the 2012 election and approached from a slightly different direction by Kevin Williamson in his book The End Is Near And It’s Going To Be Awesome earlier this year. Namely, that American society is evolving beyond that which can be governed by the Industrial Age bureaucratic state the Democrat Party is so committed to, and...

Cats, according to new research, recognize their owner’s voice. They just can’t be bothered to react to it. Researchers in Japan arrived at this conclusion after performing experiments with twenty house cats. They played recordings of the cats’ owners’ calling to their pets in whatever cat-talk voice they typically used. They also played recordings of three strangers calling to the cats, using the same words. To quantify the cats’ reactions, the researchers recorded how often cats moved their head, tail, paws or ears, or whether they meowed or dilated their pupils. While the cats showed a significantly greater response to...

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. FICTION & POETRY THE ACCURSED. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906. ALL THAT IS. By James Salter. (Knopf, $26.95.) Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, demolishes any talk of...

I was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis on a muggy evening just before eight p.m. in late May 1955. Two months later, my father’s very first single, “Hey Porter,” backed with “Cry, Cry, Cry,” was released on Sun Records, a small record label and recording studio at 706 Union Avenue in downtown Memphis. Sun was owned by Sam Phillips, a young music entrepreneur, recording engineer, and record producer. The building still stands, essentially as it was in the early 1950s when my dad, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins created their first recordings. Now it is...

Economic equality will never be possible because some people are too stupid to get ahead, Boris Johnson said on Wednesday night. Natural differences between human beings will always mean that some will succeed and others will fail, the Mayor of London said in a speech. Despite calling for more to be done to help talented people from poor backgrounds to advance — including state-funded places at private schools — Mr Johnson said some people would always find it easier to get ahead than others. “Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a...

For over a century cranberries have been more than a Thanksgiving staple; they've also been heralded for their reported ability to prevent and even treat urinary tract infections.But clinical research attempting to link cranberry consumption to a reduction in urinary tract infections remains somewhat inconsistent. A 2012 study by a team from Taiwan and the U.S., published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that consuming cranberries did seem to prevent urinary tract infections in certain populations, but qualified the findings with a strong word of caution against using the "folk remedy" as a treatment. Most research on the cranberry's...

They were originally bred to rescue mountaineers trapped in snow storms. So it is perhaps no surprise this giant St Bernard also wants to help the needy, albeit of a rather different kind. For nine-year-old Yankee has been letting dozens of stray cats cuddle up to him when he goes to sleep every night to shelter them from the cold.

The tiny, intact skeleton of a baby rhinoceroslike dinosaur has been unearthed in Canada. The toddler was just 3 years old and 5 feet (1.5 meters) long when it wandered into a river near Alberta, Canada, and drowned about 70 million years ago. The beast was so well-preserved that some of its skin left impressions in the nearby rock.

I have a faded sticker on the back of my car that reads: I (heart) Scotland. I have a feeling it was stuck there by some fellows from Strathclyde police when they came down to help with the Notting Hill carnival, and I keep it there because it reflects my general feelings. I (heart) Scotland in the way that so many of us Sassenachs do: you know, fabulous place, lovely people, gorgeous purple moors, great white beaches and an incomparable contribution to Western thought and civilisation, from Adam Smith to Andrew Neil. I (heart) Scotland so much that I once...

The frozen remains of a horse more than half a million years old have reluctantly given up their genetic secrets, providing scientists with the oldest DNA ever sequenced. The horse was discovered in 2003 in the ancient permafrost of Canada’s west-central Yukon Territory, not far from the Alaskan border.And although the animal was dated to between 560,000 and 780,000 years old, an international team of researchers was able to use a new combination of techniques to decipher its genetic code. Among the team’s findings is that the genus Equus — which includes all horses, donkeys, and zebras — dates back...

Leonardo da Vinci, in between doing stuff like painting the best-known piece of art in the world, apparently had time to sketch up a quick blueprint for an instrument: the "viola organista," a piano-violin hybrid that he never built. It looks just like a piano, and plays like one, too, but instead of the hammers that connect to strings and play notes, cranks wrapped with horse-hair like violin bows rub the strings. The resulting sound is familiar but strange, something like a church organ that's just a little on the tipsy side.

Baylor's football team is undefeated because of its high-octane offense, its talented roster and its brilliant play-calling—and because of a long stretch of pavement known as I-35. Saturday's showdown at No. 10 Oklahoma State, the Baylor Bears are ranked No. 4 in the Bowl Championship Series standings. Should they win out, they could skip over Ohio State and slide into the national-championship game, if either Alabama /Florida State loses. Under Baylor coach Art Briles, a 57-year-old Texan who toiled for two decades in that state's high-profile high-school football leagues...Briles's offensive scheme has the Bears leading the country in scoring and...

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.” But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable,...

Around 20 percent of all humans are persistently colonized with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, a leading cause of skin infections and one of the major sources of hospital-acquired infections, including the antibiotic-resistant strain MRSA. University of Chicago scientists have recently discovered one of the keys to the immense success of S. aureus—the ability to hijack a primary human immune defense mechanism and use it to destroy white blood cells. The study was published Nov 15 in Science. "These bacteria have endowed themselves with weapons to not only anticipate every immune defense, but turn these immune defenses against the host as well,"...

A U.S. Army Special Forces sergeant from Keller was killed Sunday in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, Defense Department officials reported Monday. Staff Sgt. Alex Anthony Viola, 29, was fatally wounded when an improvised explosive device detonated, according to a news release. “This was Viola’s first deployment during his military career,” according to a news release from the U.S. Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. His unit was attacked “while on dismounted patrol.” Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/11/18/5348539/army-staff-sergeant-from-keller.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

I find Remembrance Sunday sadder each year. It’s partly that I’m becoming sentimental – I find it increasingly difficult to recite any poetry without a catch in my voice – but it’s mainly that the fallen are now closer in age to my children than to me. When I was a small boy, I was, as small boys are, uncomplicatedly pro-war. At around eleven or twelve, I started to read the First World War poets, but I was still mainly attracted by the heroic element in their writing: their endurance in monstrous circumstances. Later, as a teenager, I began to...