Free Republic

And one of those making the demand is a U.S. senator. Before you say this could never happen, let me ask you: Did you ever think people would be given six-figure fines for declining to bake a cake? And not only that, but see significant numbers of Americans agree with it happening? Orthodoxies are powerful things, and just as the left is riding one that defines non-participation in gay weddings as “discrimination,” it also thinks it can gain mainstream support for the idea that dissent on the global warming orthodoxy is some sort of crime. Actually, if Democrat U.S. Senator...

Delusional in Chief. Remember: War is peace, Ignorance is strength, Freedom is slavery, and Putin isn't "challenging" anything If you were worried that your President was a feckless foreign policy failure who was being outplayed by an old Soviet hardliner, think again. Obama’s international “leadership” remains unchallenged - at least in Obama’s own mind - and he’s actually at the vanguard of the only foreign policy issue that really matters. It’s not ISIS, it’s not trade, and it’s not the Iran nuke deal. If Obama is to be believed, Putin is acting out of weakness, and his “definition of leadership”...

The purveyors of Climate Change do not understand how there could be any opposition: They are fully prepared to prosecute you and imprison you for daring to be a voice of dissent They say, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” When those good intentions are made to look like good intentions, but are really a ruse to create more government control, the road to Hell, I am sure, takes a fast-track. I was reading about a “contentious” interview President Barack Obama had on 60 Minutes, and I marveled at the line that Obama said, after being challenged...

There's a reason Jonah Goldberg referred to Progressivism as "nice fascism": you will be forced to comply. For your own good. And Warmists are primarily Progressives (UK Telegraph) We might think that a semi-secret, international conference of top judges, held in the highest courtroom in Britain, to propose that it should be made illegal for anyone to question the scientific evidence for man-made global warming, was odd enough to be worthy of front-page coverage. Last week I mentioned that the Prince of Wales had sent a message to this conference calling for the UN’s forthcoming climate meeting in Paris to...

THE JACKI DAILY Show! Listen live at 2PM Eastern! The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a corporate litigator, and as an Assistant Vice...

From hand-held blasters to planet-destroying death rays, laser weapons are a fanciful staple of science fiction. But at their core, lasers are just concentrated beams of light that generate heat. As simple as that sounds, they've proven remarkably difficult to weaponize. Until now. Quietly and without great fanfare the laser weapon has arrived, and warfare will never be the same. This week Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, announced it was exploring ways to put a laser on the controversial fighter. The U.S. Navy has already fielded a laser weapon on the USS Ponce. And...

This week, Sen. Ted Cruz held a hearing to attack the clean air and clean water safeguards that protect millions of families all across America. Sierra Club President Aaron Mair was there to talk about how communities of color, which are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate disruption, rely on these safeguards to protect them. A friend to big polluters, Cruz unsurprisingly tried to cover all their talking points. His game? To attack the climate science that shows how carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels is causing climate disruption in the first place while assailing the Clean Power Plan, which...

Sometimes you have to think outside the box. Faced with some of the universe’s most stubborn mysteries, such as the identity of dark matter, physicists are turning to a technique that employs the weird laws of quantum mechanics: atom interferometry. Atom interferometers allow the study of various physical phenomena by splitting atom waves using a nanograting, such as this one. Composed of silicon nitride, this grating, imaged with a scanning electron microscope, has a period of 100 nm. Image courtesy of Alex Cronin (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ). This method, which takes advantage of the fact that quantum particles behave...

Newest menace to the globe: Laughing Gas Some dentists use Laughing Gas for its analgesic effects instead of local anaesthetics. It’s supposed to prevent pain when they get close to your nerves. I’ve never had the pleasure of such a treatment and my dentist prefers the modern “slight discomfort” version of the poke and needle variety. Of course, that’s miles ahead of the procedure I experienced in my early years when the dentist appeared to use a hammer drill to lay bare the live nerves of my teeth—without any analgesic at all. But I’m getting sidetracked. This post is about...

The U.N.'s dream of Sustainable Development is precisely a Brave New World It was just a matter of time before Eugenics met Climate Change. Even if it sounds like science fiction and absurd speculation, the discussion is taking place now in scientific circles. In fact, this is the ultimate application of science to the human condition. For instance, designer babies might be genetically engineered to be smaller as adults: This would proportionally reduce their carbon footprint. Or genes might be inserted to improve night vision. That would allow nighttime lighting requirements to be reduced, thus saving boatloads of energy and...

Here’s what happens if astronomers make contact with a civilization on another planet.The false alarm happened in 1997. The Green Bank Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, was picking up some unusual signals—and Seth Shostak, then the head of the Center for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research in Mountain View, Caifornia, was convinced that they had come from intelligent life somewhere in the universe. “It looked like it might be the real deal,” Shostak recalled. Within a few hours, he had a call from The New York Times. But within a day, it became clear that the source...

While other commodities are floundering or completely collapsing in this market, lithium—the critical mineral in the emerging battery gigafactory war—is poised to explode, and going forward Nevada is emerging as the front line in this pending American lithium boom. Most of the world’s lithium comes from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Australia and China, but American resources being developed by new entrants into this market have set up the state of Nevada to become the key venue and proving ground for game-changing trade in this everyday mineral. Nevada is about to get a boost first from Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) upcoming battery gigafactory, and...

Scientists say the rat is part of an "amazing group of rodents" only found in a remote part of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia.A new species of rat has been discovered on an island in Indonesia. The previously unknown hog-nosed shrew rat (Hyorhinomys stuempkei) was found in a remote and mountainous region of Sulawesi Island located about two days' hike from the closest village. Scientists consider the rat so exceptional that they have described it not only as a new species but a new genus - a step up from the "new species" label. The rat was discovered by an international...

This column has already documented officialdom’s unrelenting war on e-cigarettes. In fact, those articles were some of the best-read I have ever posted, so I guess we touched a nerve. The insidious tag team—comprised of Big Tobacco and the supposed public health interest groups against smoking—is perfectly evocative of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon, originally described by economist Bruce Yandle. This latest attack comes in the form of certain Indiana laws, passed this year. Specifically, we refer to Indiana House Enrolled Act 1432 (regulates e-liquids); and Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 463 (regulates the sales of e-cigarettes, treating them as tobacco...

A serendipitous deal between a history museum and a smuggler has provided new insight into one of the most famous stories ever told: "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The new finding, a clay tablet, reveals a previously unknown "chapter" of the epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. This new section brings both noise and color to a forest for the gods that was thought to be a quiet place in the work of literature. The newfound verse also reveals details about the inner conflict the poem's heroes endured. In 2011, the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Slemani, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, purchased...

The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature. "What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW. "We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate - the central building block of a quantum computer - and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading...

In Today's show, Jacki interviews Alex Epstein, the author of "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels".

The long-lost Biblical city of Sodom — a city that the Bible claims was destroyed by God because of its immorality — may finally have been found. Archaeologists have uncovered a slew of monumental structures and artifacts in a Jordan Valley mound known as Tall el-Hammam offering evidence of a city-state that is believed to have thrived during the Bronze Age when other Holy Land cities were being abandoned or were in decline. Based on the location, dates of occupation, and the remains of other ancient cities nearby, archaeologists think it's the best candidate yet for what was once Sodom....

Technology also offers the prospect of transforming our societies and cultures in ways we need to examine unless we intend to fly into the future blind In many ways I have always been a dystopian believing that the inevitable rise of a future technology enhanced totalitarian state will regiment and control a society that is as dehumanizing and as unpleasant as possible. I was influenced by early and repeated readings of such works as 1984, The Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and the Iron Heel. I was also influenced by the History of the Twentieth Century and the steady...

3D printing is proving to be a potential game changer for a wide variety of fields. One group in particular that could benefit is the medical community, thanks to a recent development by scientists that could make it easier to print organs from living tissue. How? By printing structures inside of special gel that provides support during the build process. New Scientist reports that researchers from the University of Florida in Gainesville came to the breakthrough method while searching for a way to enable the printing of items that cannot support their own weight. The technique prints objects inside a...