Free Republic

With the national uproar surrounding the unpunished police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, some white Americans say they are rethinking the lack of diversity in their lives—and the work they need to do to help create social change that lasts. Take Philadelphia artist Katherine Fritz. In her attempt to understand events in Ferguson, she stumbled upon a 2013 national survey finding that white American social circles tend to be 91 percent white. Intrigued, she tested this finding in her own life. A self-described liberal who uses the term “micro-aggressions,” she was surprised to find that her social circle...

Having secured for himself the most expensive suite of all the leaders at the G-20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia on November 15th, The Daily Mail reports that President Obama's 4,096-room entourage of security guards and assistants cost taxpayers a stunning $1.732 million for the one-night-stand against Putin. "Some folks are being ripped off..." As The Daily Mail reports, The president's own room was the most expensive of all the world leaders at the summit as he based himself at the $2,000 (AUS$2,500) a night Marriott Hotel. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott opted for the thrifty $270-a-night Rydges hotel, while...

Wall Street has for some time attempted to put taxpayers on the hook for its derivatives trades. I highlighted this a year ago in the post: Citigroup Written Legislation Moves Through the House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt: Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:

In essence, Mister President, you blew it. Dear President Obama, I do not know if you are astute enough to recognize it. But, when you were elected president in 2008, you were given an extraordinary opportunity that very few individuals throughout the course of human history had been given. As America’s first African-American president, you had the chance to be recognized as an exemplary leader of true vision, a statesman par excellence. Indeed, your name might have come to be associated with great historical leaders such as Lincoln (to whom you like to compare yourself), King, Churchill, Washington and others....

Republicans should hope that it will begin to simplify the tax code, cut spending, reduce the huge national debt, aid the growth of the energy sector, and crack down on rogue agencies. That would be a good start Clearly President Obama did not get the message the voters sent in the November midterm elections, electing enough Republican Senators to shift power in the Senate and to increase it in the House. Many Presidents in their second term encounter this shift, particularly if they are seen by the voters to be incompetent in some respect. Writing in the December 9 edition...

After four years of battle with opponents of safe, economical nuclear energy -basically same dummies closing down our coal industry (Obama, Reid, et. al.)- the large federal nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada was recently deemed 'safe' by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission... so why not get going with that, then? Nuclear energy is simply wonderful in my view, and only real green kooks like the German left are walking away from it. Not even the tsunami disaster at Fukushima, Japan has scared them away from utilizing it... Tokyo knows the 1964, single-walled reactors were outdated and risky, and unlike anything you'd...

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House of Representatives on December 2 that he thinks it's a "bad idea" for Congress to consider a short-term funding bill in lieu of full funding for his department, so that it can implement the stunningly broad sweep of "executive actions" on immigration announced by the president during a nationally televised speech on November 20. He may think so, but it's not at all clear why the House should adopt that view given the executive branch usurpation of authorities granted to the legislature under Article I of the Constitution,...

As far as I can see, any exudations of PFCs come solely from the minds of GP activists and not from outdoor jackets The Greenpeace (GP) Detox Campaign to get rid of a variety of materials in textiles is in its third year. Let’s dig into just one aspect of it, namely per- and poly-fluorinated compounds (PFCs for short) that are used to make water repelling or waterproof high quality outdoor gear such as rain jackets and hiking boots. Let’s look at their claim and findings a bit closer. To begin with, what does “fluorinated” actually mean? What does “Fluorinated”...

How much does it cost to run a country? Each year federal, state and local governments confiscate more than $5.7 trillion from the economy, based on 2013 figures. Of that number, $1.1 trillion is eaten by local governments; state governments take in $1.6 trillion, and the federal government consumes more than $3 trillion. And still runs a deficit of hundreds of billions each year. Part of the problem is that We the People have developed quite a voracious appetite for OPM – other people’s money. Federal aid and entitlement programs consume the lion’s share of the budget; this is called...

Could rapidly falling oil prices trigger a nightmare scenario for the commodity derivatives market? The big Wall Street banks did not expect plunging home prices to cause a mortgage-backed securities implosion back in 2008, and their models did not anticipate a decline in the price of oil by more than 40 dollars in less than six months this time either. If the price of oil stays at this level or goes down even more, someone out there is going to have to absorb some absolutely massive losses. In some cases, the losses will be absorbed by oil producers, but many...

Friday's jobs data proves it - America is back baby!!! Or is it all totally manipulated statistical shenanigans? A quick glimpse at the following charts two rather uncomfortably 'non-recovery-like' lines - of structural unemployment and the percent of the US population of Food Stamps - would suggest that for much of America, the recovery never happened... and in fact has got worse...  

When the protests over the grand jury decision in the case of Eric Garner broke out I was expecting them to take place around police stations. It was also expected that the marchers would take to streets and sidewalks in popular areas where the media could easily film them. But there are new targets in their sights, and as you might expect they shut down business at the Apple Store and Macy’s. I’m sorry… what was that again? Protesters staged a “die in” Friday night in an Apple store on Fifth Avenue and in Macy’s at Herald Square. Hundreds of...

Ditching fossil fuels as proposed in Lima, Peru by the environmental architects of gloom and doom alarmism and replacing them with renewables The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Lima, Peru, December 1-12, 2014, determined to chisel a new treaty that would mandate a cap and trade on greenhouse gas emissions effective by 2020 and would “eliminate the use of fossil fuels entirely by 2050.” The hypothesis that rich nations caused climate change by burning fossil fuels to produce energy has never been proven by IPCC’s computer modeling. The fact that now the hypothesis changed its name...

AirBnB.Com, Uber.Com: If you own a house or car, should you be free to do what you want with it? If your plans for your personal property include making money, then you may find out the hard way that, no, you can’t do as you wish. That’s the harsh lesson being learned by many Americans as they participate in the new, burgeoning freelance services industries. Consider Raleigh, North Carolina resident Gregg Stebben. He and his wife Jodi are registered as service providers with AirBnB.Com, the new online venture that matches travelers in search of lodging with private homes, extra bedrooms...

Adam Smith's free market economics--built on subsistence wages--were dangerously defective, argues the cited link. American protectionists of the 1700 and 1800s understood the implications of failing to distinguish between free domestic markets and international free markets.

The death of Eric Garner has stirred the emotions of many, as have previous such instances of conflict with law enforcement. As a result of that, government officials are already talking about reviews of existing procedures and even looking at new laws to regulate certain tactics during arrests. In a way, no matter what you may think of either Garner’s behavior or of the officer’s methods during the encounter, it could be said that the freelance cigarette salesman may wind up being an agent of change in one form or another. Unfortunately, some writers tend toward hyperbole at times, and...

To have and to hold and to hitch it up in the Sunshine State: That's the honeymoon-swoon allure of a new Visit Tampa Bay ad campaign created in anticipation of Florida soon eradicating a ban on same-sex marriage. Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that a stay in the state's ban on same-sex nuptials will be lifted Jan. 5 because of the ban's unconstitutionality. If that holds up, Visit Tampa Bay, Hillsborough County's nonprofit tourism branch, would "almost immediately" court betrothed-minded LGBT folks with its glossy new "To Have and To Hold" blitz. There will be matrimonial-specific print...

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less. Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution . In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago . Others say that the figure is 45 million,...

During the last few years, the semiconductor industry has been having a harder and harder time miniaturizing transistors with the latest problem being Intel’s delayed roll-out of its new 14 nm process. The best way to confirm this slowdown in progress of computing power is to try to run your current programs on a 6-year-old computer. You will likely have few problems since computers have not sped up greatly during the past 6 years. If you had tried this experiment a decade ago you would have found a 6-year-old computer to be close to useless as Intel and others were...

Is it me, or is Sessions the guy we've been missing in the White House? I know he's older and been in Washington awhile, but he seems to be the one guy who really wants the truth out, wants limited government and border security, and stands up to the establishment. We need someone of unquestionable integrity. Shouldn't he be the guy?