Free Republic

Why I'm Voting for George Allen Virginia Democrats have a long history of reckless spending; George Allen has a long history of opposing them. That's what this US Senate election is basically about. The ways in which ordinary people are harmed and impoverished by democrat policies are often less than clear or obvious; they take the form of higher taxes at all levels of government and, more often than not, the money piled up by these higher taxes is used for purposes which benefit nobody other than beaurocrats seeking to aggrandize power. Homeowners see rising local taxes directly; people living...

A major conference on Christian apologetics featuring Michael Behe and other key players in the Intelligent Design revolution: http://www.apologeticsconference.com/ November 16-18'th 06

I've got a cell phone which is trying to die and have just ordered a replacement from Ebay, but I've held off spending any more than just over a hundred dollars because the thing I'd really like to have doesn't exist yet, which is a crying shame since nothing in the way of nonexistant hardware would be required; it would be a pure systems integration project. I'm hoping somebody who sells or markets consumer electronics ends up reading this. What I'd like to have would be a cell phone, PDA, GPS, and navigation device rolled into one thing with Dragon...

When Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark out on their famous journey, he took extraordinary steps to provide for their safety. He provided them with a blank check backed by the United States government to purchase any ship they might figure they needed on the west coast, assuming they felt such a need, and he provided them with the ultimate small arm of the time. It appears as if this ultimate small arm might have been a major factor in the expedition not having been annihilated by Indians. Not that tribes were wiped out with the weapon, nonetheless...

With all the noise about the ABC miniseries in the last two weeks, a film at least as interesting has gone relatively unnoticed, and that would be the release as a DVD of "United 93". This film is not fiction; it is recent history. To my thinking, it should be almost impossible for a non muslim to watch this film and still want Islam to be legal in his country. From everything I've managed to read and learn about Islam over a long period of time, two major ideas strike me as glaringly obvoius: Islam is not like any other...

I was out yesterday afternoon for a sort of a final tuneup with my own two HCA bows and there was one other guy at the site with a recent Mathews bow, parallel limbs, set just under 70 lbs. I let him try several shots with my 280-gr arrows, then we checked speed with his own arrows vs the HC arrows; it was 275 fps vs 324 fps. That's pretty substantial. Misjudge distance by five yards out past 25 yards and that's the difference between being an inch off and missing the deer and never finding the arrow. The bow...

I was listening to WMAL while running errands tonight and Chris Plante was talking about the Palestinian Media Watch website and, in particular, about an interview with two eleven year old girls which you can watch on that site.You really have to watch this stuff to believe it. All indications are that virtually all palestinian children wish to die as suicide bombers, and believe they will attain paradise thereby. Basically, the "palestinian" people need to be separated from the rest of the human race for at least as long as it takes for this entire generation of them to grow...

Israel has been getting plastered for the last month by what amount to low-tech weapons, mainly katyusha rockets and mortar bombs. Those things are WWII vintage weaponry and it's not as if countermeasures did not exist. Granted we don't quite have the laser weapons we'd like to have to shoot those weapons down, we DO have radar which can triangulate the location of anything which obeys ballistic laws, including both mortar bombs and katyusha rockets, and put munitions down on top of the shooters before the incoming projectile even lands. Here's the question: Why is Israel not using this sort...

The one question I don't seem to be able to come up with any sort of an answer for regarding this "War on Terror" is how Ike and FDR would have managed to fight WWII while buying oil from Adolf Hitler for $75 a barrel and up. Moreover, if even a third of what I read is true, then even discounting the likelihood of money we spend on oil coming back to us in the form of aircraft crashing into our buildings, the United States should very definitely not be importing oil. If anything we should be exporting it. If...

When Shi'ites Welcomed Israel Into Lebanon: P.L.O. Mass Murder, Torture & Rape in "Fatah-land" By Debbie Schlussel How oblivious we are to the hypocrisy of the Lebanese Shi'ite Muslims, who in 1982, welcomed Israel into Lebanon to rescue them. To rescue them from the P.L.O., whose Palestinian supporters their Hezbollah is now allied with. To rescue them from these people who then allowed their fellow co-religionists in Iran to found a terrorist group in their country, Hezbollah, to attack their rescuers. Rapes, torture, murders. In 1982, that's what Shi'ite Muslims (and Christians) in Lebanon suffered daily and en masse at...

Assuming macroevolutionary scenarios were possible (they aren't), the question arises, how much time would you actually need for them? The basic answer to that question is known as the Haldane Dilemma, after the famous mathematician and population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who published his work in the mid 1950s. The basic answer is that you would need trillions and quadrillions of years, and not just the tens of millions commonly supposed. Walter Remine puts a simplified version of the idea thusly: Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for...

The world clearly needs more private ownership of firearms, and not less; in other words, the second amendment is an idea whose time has come all around the world, and not just in the United States. Anybody to whom that proposition is not sufficiently obvious at this point should take a good look at the news coming out of Lebanon. You look at the situation the Lebanese have fallen into and ask yourself what could possibly have spared them from such an experience, and the only thing that comes to my mind at all is the possibility of ALL Lebanese...

This little video was shown at the apologetics group at the McLean Bible Church last week and the effect on viewers was rather striking. Lucy is the 40% more-or-less complete australopithicus skeleton which is commonly presented as a missing link of sorts, and the thought processes behind the manner in which reconstructions of lucy are presented indicates a mindset in which, at every juncture at which reality clashes with ideology, it is reality which simply gets tossed. Lucy's actual remains did not included hands or feet and reconstructions are commonly presented with human or near-human hands and feet despite the...

You can't help but notice that there is a very vocal sort of a little clique of evolutionists on FreeRepublic, and there has always been a question in a lot of people's minds as to whether or not the theory of evolution is in any way compatible with conservatism. This new book ("Godless") of Ann Coulter's should pretty much settle the issue. Ann does not mince words, and she has quite a lot to say about evolution: "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story,...

There are a number of issues with which a competent republican propagandist could beat the dems and libs to death in short order, and which we don't ever read about. The easily made case that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks which followed 9-11 is one such. Another involves toilets. You can get a feel for this one by doing a google search on the two terms 'toilet' and 'smuggling'... One of the hits which turns up notes: Canadian Toilet Smuggling Ring Flushed Out The U.S. has beefed up their Canadian border patrol in midst of severe water shortage...

According to the Bush administration and the US senate, we need guest workers in this country, presumably to do the heavy lifting which Americans are no longer capable of. I've got an idea for a sort of an ultimate version of something like that... According to everything I read, gorillas in the wild are in danger of outright extinction, mainly due to human encroachment on teritories. Also from most of what I read, gorillas are basically bright, and very easy to get along with, as compared to chimps which should be regarded as dangerous. According to some of what I...