Free Republic

Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) made his third visit of the year to Pennsylvania Wednesday night, aiming to fire up grassroots supporters of former President Donald Trump with a simple message. “The Biden administration,” Hunt said with a pause, “sucks.” That quoting of Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) drew laughter from a raucous crowd at Lehigh Valley Tea Party headquarters. Hunt held two events in Philadelphia last month — as part of the Republican push for African-American voters, which he’s leading — before trekking up to Allentown, a city with notoriously purple suburbs that often decide statewide elections. *** “If President Trump...

A void left in the wake of a particularly powerful gust of solar wind caused the atmosphere of Mars to dramatically balloon outwards...As the MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around Mars recorded a sudden, sharp drop in solar particles when the wind passed on 26 December 2022, it simultaneously recorded a bizarre and startling change in the Martian atmosphere...The last time we saw this phenomenon was in 1999, when a sudden drop in the solar wind caused Earth's magnetosphere to swell outwards, increasing its volume 100-fold.

Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful cosmic rays ever observed – and it was beamed at Earth from a mysterious part of deep space.The cosmic phenomenon carried the energy of 240 quintillion electron volts – that’s 240 billion billion (followed by 18 zeros).For comparison, a typical lightning bolt is about 300 million volts.The cosmic ray – named Amaterasu, after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology – was detected by a telescope system in Utah in May 2021 by scientists who described it as ‘unprecedented’ in modern times.

Somebody needs to tell Gov. Andrew Cuomo that when you are in a hole, it’s time to stop digging. Once again at his Emmy Award-winning press conference on Friday, Cuomo deflected and denied when faced with his mishandling of nursing homes and state data. He continued to blame something he calls a “void” in information. Friday there was even a picture of the void in his PowerPoint presentation. It looked like a black hole in space, and Cuomo looked like a shaken shell of a governor. It’s almost sad how the mighty have fallen. The only void at work here...

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no longer restricted by the Trump administration, issued an extensive federal public health order late Friday requiring all individuals to wear masks over their mouth and nose on nearly all forms of public transportation and private ride-sharing services—and makes refusal to wear a face-covering a violation of federal law.” CDC—No Longer Constrained By Trump—Issues Order That Makes Not Wearing A Mask On Public Transportation A Federal Crime, Tommy Beer, Forbes, 1/30/21The underlying assumption providing authority to the CDC’s mask requirement is that human life is valuable and must be preserved at all costs....

When you read descriptions of hell, it's a place where God is absent. He does not stop anything occurring there, nothing bad is prevented or stopped from happening. There is no healing. There is no release from torment and pain. People do not realize just exactly how much God prevents bad things from hitting us and not stopping, or not recovering from them, in this world. Because the physical world is fallen and broken, the natural laws have things wearing out and breaking down, we age, our bodies will wear out and cease to work. We do have bad things...

Our Milky Way galaxy is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group. The Local Group is dominated by the Milky Way and its larger sibling, the Andromeda Galaxy. The many dwarf galaxies clinging gravitationally to the Milky Way and Andromeda round out the Local Group's population. The Local Group itself is part of an even larger structure, called the Laniakea Super-Cluster, which contains over 100,000 galaxies. Local Group and nearest galaxies. (Wikipedia Commons/Antonio Ciccolella) The new study is titled "Cosmicflows-3: Cosmography of the Local Void." Cosmicflows-3 is a compendium of over 17,000 galaxy distances in our cosmic...

NASA and Handel hook up.

Dear Nancy, I want to thank you for the years of allowing those of us who call Cochise County home to have your husband, Larry, as our sheriff. I first got to know Larry when I came to this newspaper in 1984, a couple of years after the Miracle Valley Shootout, the only title we in the media could come up with. I know he took a lot of heat, which was mostly generated by outsiders who flew in, made accusations, and then flew away. I left in 1987 for a five year period to work at another Wick paper...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: It appears, ladies and gentlemen, the regime is just going to ignore the judge's ruling. We go now to... Polito.. "What's the administration gonna do?"CUMMINGS: I think the administration is just going to move forward and hope for the best and hope that they get the ruling that they argue they deserve. Clearly this judge in Florida went further than anyone else did, and basically put the entire issue of the law now before the Supreme Court once the case gets there. But the Supreme Court would have had the ability to review the whole law anyway....

PR extends deadline for voiding birth certificatesPosted on Thursday, 09.23.10 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Puerto Rico is giving islanders one more month to use their original birth certificates before they are no longer recognized, as offices struggle to handle a flood of applications for new, more secure documents. Thursday's announcement comes a week before the birth certificates were to be voided under a new identity fraud law affecting about 5 million people - including some 1.4 million on the U.S. mainland. Puerto Ricans commonly use their birth certificates for a variety of everyday uses such as enrolling in schools...

We often think about interstellar probes only in the context of what they find at the end of their journeys — astrobiologically interesting planets seem to be the whole story. But not so fast. As Ian Crawford (University of London) notes in a recent paper, there are quite a few fascinating — and indeed critical — things we need to learn about interstellar space itself, in this case what is known as the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM). Crawford, who has been analyzing these matters for the Project Icarus team, notes how much we’ve learned about the LISM since the Daedalus...

The apparent development of a large void of some billion light-years in diameter in the Constellation Eridanus appears to be improbable given current cosmological models. A radical and controversial theory proposes that it is a "universe-in-mass black hole" rather than hypothetical dark matter responsible for the phenomenon described as the expanding-accelerating universe. This radical theory of cosmology suggests that stars at the edge of the Hubble length universe are being consumed by a universe-in-mass black hole. In August of 2007, astronomers at the University of Minnesota located a gigantic hole in the universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion...

Gov. Tim Pawlenty has made good on a threat to veto a Democratic plan to repair Minnesota's budget because the bill includes a tax increase. Pawlenty vetoed the bill on Tuesday, less than a day after the Legislature passed it with only Democratic votes. The bill would have created a new income tax bracket for some Minnesota residents who make more than six figures. His letter accompanying the veto wasn't immediately available. The legislation also contained spending cuts and payment deferrals similar to those proposed before by Pawlenty. The veto leaves state leaders just days to fix a $2.9 billion...

SAN FRANCISCO -- California Attorney General Jerry Brown has changed his position with respect to the state's new same-sex marriage ban and is now urging the state Supreme Court to void Proposition 8. Brown filed a brief Friday saying the measure, which amended the California Constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman, is itself unconstitutional because it deprives gay couples of a fundamental right.

The void: Imprint of another universe? 24 November 2007 Marcus Chown Magazine issue 2631 IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of...

PHILADELPHIA -- Religion and science can combine to create some thorny questions: Does God exist outside the human mind, or is God a creation of our brains? Why do we have faith in things that we cannot prove, whether it's the afterlife or UFOs? Snip ...brains of Pentecostal Christians ...brains of Tibetan Buddhists in meditation and Franciscan nuns in prayer ...brains of novice yoga practitioners

Legendary singer Tony Bennett has slammed his home country of America for not contributing anything other than jazz music to world art and culture. The If I Ruled The World crooner feels that Europe and Asia offer far more culturally than America does. Bennett says, "I have travelled around the world to Asia and Europe. They show you what they have contributed to the world. The British show you theatre, the Italians show you music and art, the French show you cooking and painting, and the Germans show you science. "The only thing that the United States, which is still...

MARINE CORPS RECRUIT DEPOT SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Nov. 18, 2005) -- After a worried college student found his mother was in harm's way during a roadside bomb in Baghdad, Iraq, he contemplates the situation he chose to ignore and focuses his thoughts on joining the Marine Corps. Pvt. Phillip M. Oesterblad, Platoon 2130, Company E, grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and never had any thoughts of joining the military while in high school. After attending college in Alaska and Arizona, he realized that he did not know enough about America's role in the situation in Iraq. "While I was in...

A lawyer who wants the Mount Soledad cross off public land in La Jolla filed a lawsuit yesterday to try to invalidate the July 26 election in which San Diego voters will weigh in on the contentious issue. Attorney James McElroy wants a Superior Court judge to intervene as soon as possible. His lawsuit won't affect the mayoral election set for the same day. City Attorney Michael Aguirre said the election on Proposition A should proceed, and a lawyer working to keep the cross in place as a war memorial called McElroy's challenge "frivolous." Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett, who...