Free Republic

Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules documentary is debuting this week in hundreds of cities nationwide. I like D’Souza largely because of his up-from-poverty background and his aggressive fight for liberty. However, I had no great expectations of the film, imagining a rehash of election irregularities already aired on Fox News — poll watchers kept 60 feet away in Philadelphia while cardboard was placed over windows to block their view, shifts of ballot counters that closed down for the night only to open within a half hour with no supervision but lots of new ballot boxes.Other instances involved people dismayed to find,...

In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.They have a very good reason. Actual...

Can we reliably, efficiently, and economically store energy to make solar and wind power viable options to replace fossil-fuel or nuclear plants?Few things get our attention more quickly than a loss of electric power. Many of our activities cease the instant energy from a generator many miles away stops supplying the electricity to light our homes or businesses, run our computers, lift our elevators, operate the industrial machinery on which our food supply depends, and countless other labor-saving tasks. While just a slap in the face at first, after a few hours, as food begins to spoil, sewage begins to...

Environmental doomsayers may still be claiming that we must radically reduce carbon-dioxide and other “greenhouse” gas emissions in order to prevent catastrophic global warming, but they cling to that position despite the fact that the warming they’ve been forecasting has not occurred. In fact, the average global temperature has gone down, not up, in recent years. The graph at this link from icecap.us shows that the average global temperature has been dropping since at least 2002, even though the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing. A graph based on satellite temperature readings can be found at the...

The Second International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by the Heartland Institute of Chicago will be held March 8-10 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. While the mainstream media continues to parrot the claim of Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC that “the science is settled” regarding global warming, the expected 1,000 attendees from across the globe are living, visual proof that such a claim is merely an excuse to avoid debate.The keynote speakers for the three-day conference are:• Arthur Robinson, Ph.D.  Professor of Chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.  Among many other duties, Dr....

In 1943, when Germany had virtually no sources of petroleum to fuel its Luftwaffe, U-boats, and Tiger tanks, its scientists (arguably among the best in the world at that time) didn’t turn to solar and wind power. Evil does not equate to naïveté. Hitler’s technical advisers turned to another energy source to keep their Wehrmacht running steadily for several years without petroleum. They used the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal into diesel fuel and employed the Bergius hydrogenation (or liquefaction) process to convert coal into aviation gasoline and high-quality truck and automobile gasoline.Coal-to-liquid TechnologiesGasoline and diesel fuel are hydrocarbons....

The site of what is arguably the world’s leading research program in nuclear energy lies just a short drive from the city of Marseille through the picturesque and romantic countryside of southern France. At Cadarache, the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, the French atomic energy agency, operates a complex of research facilities that is soon to be the home of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which will be the most advanced and powerful Tokamak fusion reactor ever built. This reactor is being funded by the EU, China, Russia, the United States, and others. Though famous as the future site of...

Now that record-cold temperatures across the globe are making a mockery of human-caused global warming, we look to see if this is merely a "weather hiccup."Judge: Counselor, do you have anything to say before I pronounce sentence on the accused? Attorney: Yes, your honor. Might I remind you that the victim my client was accused of murdering showed up earlier and is very much alive, sitting there in the front row? Judge: Sir, this court does not deal in trivialities. Attorney: But your honor, I'd respectfully suggest that since there is no victim, there has been no crime and my...

Even before the Bolsheviks took over the Kerensky government and formed the Soviet Union, the main propaganda arm of Soviet Communism was the newspaper Pravda. It continued as the voice of the Communist Party throughout the history of the Soviet Union, though some contend it remains that voice today. The irony is in the name "Pravda," which in Russian means "truth." Yet virtually every pronouncement in Pravda was the exact opposite of the objective truth.  The Soviet dictators considered truth to be whatever promoted the welfare of the Communist Party, and that was almost always a falsehood of some dimension.More...