Free Republic

There is so much chaos going on that I don't even know where to start. For a very long time I have been warning my readers that a major banking collapse was coming to Europe, and now it is finally unfolding. Let's start with Deutsche Bank. The stock of the most important bank in the "strongest economy in Europe" plunged another 8 percent on Monday, and it is now hovering just above the all-time record low that was set during the last financial crisis. Overall, the stock price is now down a staggering 36 percent since 2016 began, and...

Mama needs a brand-new bag! According to a recent study by Baghunter, the legendary Hermès Birkin bag is a better investment than both gold and stocks. The luxury site compared the returns on the three investments over a 35-year period, and, as it turns out, the value of the Birkin, which starts at $11,000 on Baghunter, has never decreased. In fact, while the values of gold and the stocks have fluctuated, the top-handle tote's value has steadily increased more than 500 percent in the last three and a half decades. That makes for an average annual increase of 14.2 percent,...

Groups of people often emulate flocks of sheep. Sheep are not politically correct, but political correctness appears to be a subset of herd behavior. In October of 2012 I wrote that Political Correctness is a Communicable Disease. Political correctness (also known as rhetorical cowardice) involves being less than candid, not only about various protected classes but also about unprotected classes. Protected classes include some but not all members of racial (Black, Latin American and American Indian but generally not Oriental) and religious (e.g., Muslim) minorities, gender specific (Feminist and “gay”) and ideological (Librul) groups. Unpleasant truths must not be tolerated. Pleasant truths sometimes...

NEWPORT -- A Lincoln County jury on Tuesday found a Yachats woman on trial in connection with feeding black bears guilty of one count of chasing and harassing wildlife. She was acquitted, however, of five counts of recklessly endangering another person. The Lincoln County district attorney's office brought the charges against Karen Noyes, 61, after the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife responded to a call from Noyes and found pictures in her house of her feeding the bears. She was originally charged with four counts of chasing and harassing wildlife. But Judge Thomas Branford moved to consolidate the multiple...

Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Wild deer also display this behaviour - a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

Back in the 1970s, it was a major event when a Mexican cow would wander on to the Palominas border-front ranch of Jack Ladd and his son, John. But after tightened border security in San Diego and El Paso began to funnel illegal immigration though Arizona in the early 1990s, holes began to appear more regularly along the 10 miles of barbed-wire fence separating the ranch from Mexico. The holes, cut by individual migrants or blasted out by fence-crashing vehicles, also created an easy passageway for cattle. So, in an effort to keep Mexican cows out and their own cows...

Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age' Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants....