Free Republic

The title of this thread "Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?" refers to a recent post at Gates of Vienna Blog written by Baron Bodissey. The Baron reviews the book Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott. If you have an interest in the subject of the Greco-Roman legacy and Islam as they relate to the sudden decline of medieval Europe this book will expose the linkage between Islam's destructive forces at that time and have you reconsider the implications of current events related to Islam today. Scott argues that the collapse of Latin-Greek civilization...

Ten years ago next week, one of the strangest events in county history exploded into the public's consciousness. For several days, it was the biggest news story in the world. It began unfolding the afternoon of Wednesday, March 26, 1997, during a period when the Hale-Bopp comet could be seen in the night sky. Inside a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult lay dead. Convinced that a spaceship was traveling behind the comet and that they would be transported to the vessel to begin a new life “beyond human,” they had poisoned themselves. Twenty-one...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday sought to dispel the notion that he has backtracked from tough measures to combat global warming, saying he "can live" with capping greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. In response to a reporter's question at UC Davis on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger characterized the 2012 caps as "a great idea" toward achieving the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 - a 25 percent cut in pollution projections from current forecasts. --snip-- Feinstein said she favored the "cap-and-trade" approach - opposed by some businesses - in which companies that exceeded greenhouse gas reduction standards...

Editors' preface: In the spring of 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal drove headlines in the United States and the Middle East. Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a report in The New Yorker, entitled "The Gray Zone," describing the abuse of prisoners as the outcome of a deliberate policy. Hersh also made reference to a book, The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910-96): The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was...