Free Republic

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the effort to prevent the shooters from getting additional notoriety, I will refer to them, not by name, but as the Buffalo shooter and the Uvalde shooter, respectively.Quite some time ago, after Sandy Hook's school shooting in 2012, then after another school shooting at Umpqua Community College in October of 2015, I began to be suspicious of the frequency and the targets of these shootings. I wrote an editorial titled "Thinking the unthinkable: A case for orchestration". In it, I explored the possibility that the mass shootings were being orchestrated and enabled by members of certain three-letter...

President Obama's re-election team has already been lauded for its mastery of data and organziation, but a feature in today's The New York Times looks at another secret, and more subtle, weapon: Behavioral science. Reporter Benedict Carey talks to some of the members of the campaign's "COBS" team, an informal group of unpaid advisors who shared their knowledge on the latest academic research and theories on how to influence the public's knowledge behavior. Publicly, the group—which it gave itself the name of "consortium of behavioral scientists"—where just friendly volunteers offering advice. None of the social scientists and psychologists who took...

A Dutch company and an American ethanol producer hope to put a new kind of fuel in your gas tank — whether it makes economic sense or not. Thanks, Washington. Amid the cornfields of Emmetsburg, Iowa sits an ethanol plant that takes in 20 million bushels of corn and churns out about 55 million gallons of corn ethanol a year. Rising next to it is a revolutionary new facility. It will make ethanol as well, but instead of using juicy kernels of corn, its feedstock will be 285,000 tons a year of corncobs, leaves and husks. Although its 25 million...