Free Republic

There is no doubt in my mind that if General George Washington were alive to see how the permanent political class had defiled his good name, he would raze D.C. to the ground. "But George," I imagine Martha pleading, "there surely are some good people in the nation's capital who still serve the Republic." "I don't think so. They celebrate baby murder, educate children inside brothels, tax the people to death, corruptly enrich themselves, and send the poorest to fight foreign wars for vague reasons." "In that case, wait here; I'll go grab the torches." Martha was a patriotic and...

The sixth century historian Procopius, in both his History of the Wars, and The Secret History, mentions a sea monster--a gigantic whale--named Porphyrios that dwelt in the Bosporus Strait and the Black Sea, and which terrorized the shipping lanes around Constantinople for about fifty years, and which causes significant headaches for the Emperor Justinian & the Roman navy. Our information is fairly limited, but what can we say about this real life Moby Dick?SOURCES:The Secret History, ProcopiusThe History of the Wars, ProcopiusA Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, KaldellisPinned by The Historian's CraftPorphyrios: The Sea Monster that Terrorized the Late Roman Empire3:51...

It’s time that Americans faced up to the reality that their governing apparat is a corrupt, self-engorging Leviathan.Gertrude Stein famously warned that it was important to know how far to go when going too far. It pains me to admit that Democrats seem to have a far better sense of all that than do Republicans. Perhaps it’s because Democrats have a visceral appreciation of William Hazlitt’s observation that “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” The Democrats, that is to say, long ago became expert at the game of holding their opponents to standards that they themselves violate...

In that day the Lord will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, With His fierce and great and mighty sword, Even Leviathan the twisted serpent; And He will kill the dragon who lives in the sea. ( Isaiah 27:1)Isaiah’s Apocalypse ends in the destruction of Leviathan, the coiled or twisting Serpent.The LORD himself will slay Him with the “great and mighty Sword”.Who is Leviathan? In this passage we are told He lives in the Sea, and that He is a coiled, or undulating Serpent. In that description we hear an echo of the beast in Revelation 13. And the dragon stood...

The largest energy project in the history of the State of Israel is reaching its final stages of completion and remains on schedule to deliver first commercial gas sales to the Israel domestic market and regional markets before the end of the year. In recent weeks the Leviathan partnership –comprised of Noble Energy, Delek Drilling and Ratio – completed the construction and testing of the production units (topsides) of the Leviathan Platform that will process natural gas from the reservoir and transport it to Israel’s national gas pipeline. ...For the first time in history, Israel will also become a significant...

The discovery of more major natural gas fields in Israel since 2009 has transformed the Jewish state from an energy-dependent country into an energy supplier Polish state-controlled energy company PGNiG is considering the purchase of Israeli natural gas as it seeks to reduce its dependence on key Russian supplier, Gazprom. “We want to be the company at the crossroads of North-South and East-West... we need something to the south,” PGNiG chief executive Piotr Wozniak told Reuters last week. “So we are looking at all those places to the south of Poland very carefully... So yes, we are interested in Israel,”...

No, Dinosaurs Aren’t in the Bible: Part 3 How Young Earth Creationists Get Dinosaurs Wrong By Philip Cottraux For part 3 of this series, I want to critique Young Earth Creationism from a viewpoint that doesn’t get much attention; its scientifically incorrect portrayal of dinosaurs and the clumsy way it tries to factor them into the creation account. Let me disclaim once again; this has nothing to do with the age of the earth and although I’m personally an Old Earth Creationist, I’m not at all trying to prove that the planet is older than 6,000 years. One of the...

No, Dinosaurs Aren’t in the Bible: Part 2 Leviathan By Philip Cottraux Last week I wrote about how the infamous passage in Job 40 about the Behemoth is often misconstrued as a dinosaur. In the very next chapter, God describes a monstrous fire-breathing sea dragon, the Leviathan, which Young Earth Creationists speculate was a real-life marine reptile, even citing this passage as evidence that dragons from ancient lore must have been based on an actual animal. I pointed out that dual references of a cow-like fertility deity and a fire-breathing dragon of chaos often appear in ancient literature in conjunction,...

By Philip Cottraux It’s been a long time since I’ve weighed in on the creation controversy, mostly because I hate how divisive it is. But I want to start a series critiquing Young Earth Creationism on a particular aspect that doesn’t get a lot of attention: the clumsy and unscientific way it tries to factor dinosaurs into the creation account. Smart aleck atheists sometimes demand explanations why the Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs, implying Genesis is an ancient fairy-tale that gets Earth’s origins wrong. This isn’t a problem for old-earth interpretations, but the Young Earth Creationist claims that adding up the...

Brenda Arthur received an unexpected visit on March 8 that, one week later, leaves her feeling more than a little uneasy. At her door that day was an officer with the West Virginia State Police. He wanted to know about her involvement in a Freedom of Information request regarding a local mosque. Arthur, who will turn 67 this summer, is leader of the West Virginia chapter of ACT For America, whose mission is to educate Americans about the advancement of Islamic principles in Western societies. As a Jewish American, she was concerned about a major expansion of the Islamic Association...

How the US conducts surveillance and investigation of electronic communication media–particularly the internet–is largely shaped by three pieces of legislation: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act) Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act) To give a very brief history, FISA was enacted in 1978–before the proliferation of the internet–and governed both the physical and electronic surveillance of primarily foreign powers and agents. The Patriot Act, enacted shortly after the September 11, 2001...

The massive Leviathan gas field, nestled deep inside the Levantine basin off Israel’s Mediterranean coast, is considered a game-changer for both Israel and Europe, but a wide range of roadblocks is threatening development, and now production will be delayed by at least a year. Political hurdles, regulatory approvals and tricky investment decisions have already put production off until 2019, and there are now fears that all the problems surrounding a discovery that put Israel on the energy map for the first time in history will impact prospects for future foreign investment in the country. As the project landed in controversy,...

Harvard's Mossavar Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which I am privileged to direct, has just issued an important paper by senior fellow Peter Sands and a group of student collaborators. The paper makes a compelling case for stopping the issuance of high denomination notes like the 500 euro note and $100 bill or even withdrawing them from circulation. I remember that when the euro was being designed in the late 1990s, I argued with my European G7 colleagues that skirmishing over seigniorage by issuing a 500 euro note was highly irresponsible and mostly would be a boon to corruption...

As this is championship season in sports (yes, it’s always championship season for some sport), let’s begin our discussion with a sports analogy. Over the course of a game, we have seen our beloved Home team riddled with injuries. Our star players have been physically and emotionally clobbered, as the Visitors have used every tool at their disposal against us, regardless of the rule book. They tripped and tackled our starters, given us two broken legs and three broken arms, driving five of our best out of the game. Kicking our boys during time outs, shooting darts from dart guns,...

Tracking Down Leviathan by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * What exactly was the leviathan described so vividly in Job 41? Was it a swimming reptile like a plesiosaur or a mosasaur, or something we have yet to unearth? We may never know the answer for certain, but the latest discovery of a large, semiaquatic dinosaur offers another possibility.1 Most specimens of the large theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus, made famous by the Jurassic Park movies as the dinosaur that defeated T. rex, are found in North Africa. Whether an encounter between the two would have had the same result in reality is highly...

THIS ARTICLE WAS FROM TWO DAYS AGO. IT IS JUST AS RELEVANT NOW THAT THE SUPREME COURT HAS MADE ITS DECISION The Supreme Court next week will hand down a decision on whether the Constitution provides citizens the right to same-sex marriage. As recently reported in the New York Times, Jeb Bush pledged, and rightly so, to support further debate “irrespective of what the courts say.” Whether the Supreme Court plays kick-the-can back to the states or follows the more likely path of inventing legal fictions that turn constitutional silence on marriage into a redefinition of it, conservatives especially should...

Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act -- the controversial law that allows the NSA to collect Americans' phone records and secretly track suspected terrorists – will likely expire tonight, a former White House counterterrorism official told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "This Week.""What I think will likely happen tonight is the law will expire," Richard Clarke said Sunday morning. "And then later in the week, the USA Freedom Act, which is essentially the same as the PATRIOT Act with the exception of the telephony metadata program, that act will pass and most of the authorities will be restored." Though the White...

In the old country, life was predictable. If your father was a farmer, so were you. If your mother was a maid, so were you. If your father served in the House of Lords, so did you; if your father went off to war, possibly never to return, well… so did you. There were exceptions, in that feudal and post-feudal world, but not many. Poverty bred poverty; wealth bred wealth. There wasn’t much of a middle class, but merchants’ children did usually grow up to take over the family bakery, smithy, or cobbler shop, to be merchants themselves. Life was,...

If you think Vladimir Putin has enough worries on his plate ..., the turmoil in Ukraine and Russia’s sputtering economy, think again. A new potential source of trouble is brewing out in the eastern Mediterranean — one that could not only undermine Putin’s efforts to rebuild Russia’s influence in the Middle East, but his current strong hand in Europe. The threat: Israel’s recently discovered offshore gas deposits — one of the biggest global finds of the past decade. Those fields, dubbed Tamar and Leviathan, promise Israel an unprecedented degree of energy independence and a lucrative export market to its Arab...

Ever since the Depression-era enlargement of the Leviathan, successfully marketed as the "New Deal," conservatives have argued against proposed government programs by shouting “They’re Unconstitutional!” and “They Don’t Work!” Such complaints often fall on deaf ears, because the Constitution is barely taught or respected nowadays, and the question of whether they work or not so often appears to be subjective. Perhaps it’s time for a new approach. I would submit that it’s time to stop saying that "Big Government Programs Don't Work".... because the fact is, they usually do. It usually isn't that they don't work, it's that they work...