Free Republic

Paula White-Cain, who has long been a member of President Trump's evangelical advisory board, is now joining the White House in the Office of Public Liaison. A White House official tells the New York Times the pastor and evangelist will advise the president's "faith and opportunity initiative" created by Trump to give people of faith more of a say in government programs. White-Cain began to advise Trump long before he was elected president, offering pastoral and spiritual counsel after he called her one day back in 2001, saying he'd seen her preach on Christian television and appreciated what she had...

Previously, I posted on “13 Signs of Leadership Fatigue.” Several readers asked me to write a follow up post about ways to deal with these signs. Maybe these suggestions will help you move past leadership fatigue. 1. Living by a “get me through the day” philosophy – You may begin the day with prayer, but surviving the day is your prayer theme. •Ask God each day to help you see glimpses of His work like an answered prayer or a restored relationship. •Actually watch for those glimpses. Trust that God will show you 2. Losing vision – Fatigued leaders...

I’ve been thinking a little more about how to go about cracking Scorpion Cipher S5. I mentioned before that I thought that the encipherer might well have started from an elegant-looking 26×16 grid filled with diagonally-downward families of shapes, and that this arrangement might offer codebreakers some additional kind of “spatial logic” to support their efforts that traditional ciphers don’t usually provide. From the letters that accompanied the ciphertexts, my inference is that the Scorpion is like a smart 12-year-old who has just ‘got’ the elegance of maths: but this leads me to a secondary inference that he/she probably didn’t...

Obscured by Jon Stewart’s well-publicized mockery of Texans’ reaction to Jade Helm 15—the US Army’s two-month-long exercise across nine states scheduled to begin in July—is the fact that the criticisms may not all be deranged droolings. The Daily Show‘s Stewart made headlines earlier in May when he ridiculed Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision ordering the State Guard to “monitor” Jade Helm. The comedian-cum-newsman called Jade Helm critics “Lone Star lunatics.” But are they? Or is there more to the story? As always, WhoWhatWhy has remained agnostic while asking questions. Now, we provide a few initial answers. More will undoubtedly...

Classical economics went wrong at its first turn, say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Man is not homo economicus, the rationally calculating actor that the dismal scientists from Adam Smith down through Milton Friedman supposed our species to be. No, we are emotionally driven, contextually influenced, socially conditioned: Humans, not Econs. Sunstein and Thaler famously lay out their Human vs. Econ divide in Nudge, their 2008 bestseller that popularized a new sub-discipline, behavioral economics. Behavioral economists recognize that people make hasty decisions for non-rational reasons, relying on rules of thumb, heuristics, and past experiences that bias their judgment and prevent...

This FROM THE EDITOR: We will have a major update to the Dennis Hastert child sex ring story here tonight. Witness, sworn statement. Stay tuned... We will begin our coverage of the so-called "Dennis Hastert Sex Scandal," with a video from the early 1990s, from a trusted source of this website. The documentary was set to air on the Discovery Channel in 1994, but was pulled at the last minute, and never ran on cable TV. Some blog sleuths eventually dug it up, years later. It contains some mind-numbing accusations and earth shattering evidence against some Nebraska politicians at the...

Over the past month we here in the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party Ministry of Truth have received a number of questions about which classic works of SF do and don't exemplify the goals of the Party. While our cohort John Z. Upjohn has done a fantastic job identifying SJW-infused works, we do not wish to present ourselves as wholly negative, so today we're going to talk about one of the all time great works of SF, a classic of yesteryear which could never win a Hugo today. Yes, Isaac Asimov's Foundation. This is of course a story about a...

What is Church Discipline? There is hardly a practice in the local church that is misused more than “church discipline.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have many answers and its misuse is understandable. I think there are three primary ways we can find it misused: 1) It is never used at all, 2) it is used in an unbiblical way, and 3) people are brought in for discipline for “sins” that don’t require its use. Matthew 18:15-17 is the primary passage that speaks to the practice of church discipline (even if we are still left with a lot...

Yesterday, upon the air, I heard a word that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today, I wish that it would go away… (With apologies to Hughes Mearns) In his report yesterday on the latest OSCE conference, Henrik Ræder Clausen included this summary of a dominant meme among ideological leaders in the West: Panel members stressed the importance of not calling the Islamic State the “Islamic State”, for doing so could give the impression that Islam motivates people to war, terrorism and other crimes. The avoidance of the I-word seems to have become a fixation in the revolving-door world...

As your new president, I am grateful to serve with you to preserve America’s unique freedoms. I first encountered the National Rifle Association as an 11-year-old growing up in Ohio. Mentored by the NRA in the 1950s by men who had a passion for owning firearms and shooting, I learned the true meaning of our Second Amendment. Recently, an old friend and I were remembering those remarkably free times: when “gun control” was not even in the lexicon; when a kid could take a shotgun or rifle to school and stow it in the cloakroom for after-school target practice...

The president’s address last week to Congregation Adas Israel as “an honorary member of the tribe” was something other than it seemed. Dear Congregants of Adas Israel: On Friday, May 22, President Obama, calling himself “an honorary member of the tribe,” addressed you not just as the president of the United States but also as an explicit adherent of the “tikkun olam” tradition: a Jewish viewpoint for “repairing the world” that, in his reading, promotes universal progressive ideals like fighting bigotry and working for social justice everywhere. Thus, for him, the same “shared values” that underlay the civil-rights movement in...

Last time we looked at suppressor legality, it was up to 37 of the 50 United States. (They’re banned in DC and all the Territories if memory serves). But that was months ago, so it was time to check again, just in time to learn that Minnesota, which banned suppressors for many years, legalized them, becoming State #40 to allow citizens who comply with the Federal National Firearms Act to own them. Even Minnesota’s anti-gun, anti-2nd-Amendment governor, Mark Dayton, signed the bill. A similar bill is on Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin’s desk. It is a very small change in the...

[Embedded Audio (7:39)] Fascism is an economic system that marries the state to business, where business holds the title but state holds control. Transcript: Some of you, though I trust not all of you, are familiar with what we call “Godwin’s law.” This is a particular law which is born out of empirical study of the Internet and it holds that, given enough time, any and all internet arguments will eventually involve some side of the argument accusing the other side of the argument of either being like Hitler or of being a Nazi. The corollary to that is...

Coming soon to a Capitol skyline near you: Giant blimps at 10,000 feet? The woman at the helm of the House Administration Committee thinks the Capitol needs eyes in the sky, after authorities failed to detect Florida mailman Douglas Hughes’ April 15 gyrocopter flight. Chairwoman Candice S. Miller, R-Mich., visited U.S. Customs and Border Patrol ground stations along the Southern border in January and was amazed at the clarity of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS. She is suggesting the “sophisticated technology” might suit the Capitol. That would mean giant blimps stretching along the Washington, D.C., skyline at...

Yet again, we've seen fighter jets dispatched to 'escort' aircraft to US airports after threats were made against them. Yet again, we've heard travelers and others remark how "comforting" the presence of those aircraft is to them. They clearly don't understand that those fighters are there for one reason and one reason only . . . to shoot down the aircraft if it has, indeed, been hijacked or otherwise turned into a danger to cities and installations on the ground. The fighters can't possibly intervene in a hijacking inside the cabin, and can't stop whatever's on board from manifesting itself....

The Slidefire (and other similar bump-fire stocks) is basically a toy when used form the shoulder. A genuinely fun toy, to be sure, but still a toy. However, I have reason to suspect that when used on a rifle with a bipod and large ammunition capacity it might actually do a good job of duplicating a true light machine gun without the cost and NFA paperwork. (For folks who are not familiar with the concept, the stock allows the action to freely reciprocate in the stock. By holding one’s trigger finger in a set position and pulling the action forward,...

John F. Nash Jr. is widely known as the subject of the Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind,” but his contributions to the advancement of human knowledge are far greater. Nash paved the way for game theory to spread from a collection of toy cases in mathematics to a generalizable theory applicable to virtually anything — board games, economics, politics, international relations — to the point where now it’s practically a mode of critical thinking in its own right. On Saturday, the 86-year-old mathematician and his wife, Alicia, were killed in a car crash in New Jersey. There have been...

In the world of modern firearms which use centerfire cartridges, there are two major types of mechanisms used to trigger the cartridge primer. One uses a hammer and another uses a striker. Therefore, mechanisms that use a hammer are called hammer-fired and the ones that use a striker are called striker fired. As you can guess, each mechanism has its own group of supporters. In today's post, we will study what this all means. In a hammer fired mechanism, the hammer is a heavy piece that is allowed to rotate about a pivot point. When the hammer is cocked, it...

Religions in the United States grow and shrink because of immigration, births, deaths and many other factors, but a recent report from the Pew Research Center offers a chance to look in detail at which religions are gaining and losing members the old-fashioned way: by recruiting new members. Pew took a look at which religions have gained and lost followers when people change faiths, and we used its data to run the tape forward and see which religions would be on the rise if people kept switching at the current rates. This model isn’t a projection of the future...

The Columbus Police Department recruited the inmates with the help of the state prisons agency and produced a YouTube video in which the offenders share their how-to tips COLUMBUS, Ohio — Police looking to educate the public about ways to prevent break-ins turned to the experts — a trio of convicted burglars. The Columbus Police Department recruited the inmates with the help of the state prisons agency and produced a YouTube video in which the offenders share their how-to tips. Most of the suggestions are common-sense warnings about locking up, keeping blinds drawn and not storing valuables in cars. A...