Free Republic

Pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli was banned from Twitter on Sunday for alleged “harassment” after he asked a Teen Vogue writer on a date. The “harassment” began when Shkreli sent Lauren Duca, known for her piece about President-elect Donald Trump “gaslighting America” and defending the man who harassed Ivanka Trump on a plane, a private message inviting her to the inauguration as his date. Duca responded by publicly posting his message and writing, “I would rather eat my own organs.”

Through studying the geometry of strong structures, MIT researchers are now one step closer to 3D printing graphene. By comparison, 2D graphene is better at conducting electricity than copper wires, ten times stronger than steel, and lighter and certainly more transparent than both of them. The problem is that these properties as are all theoretical and scaling the nanomaterial has proved challenging. Furthermore, in order to compete with copper and steel, graphene has to be 3D. 3D graphene – here’s the deal The challenges of making a 3D structure out of a 2D material is that the material’s atomic structure,...

New York state must stand as an alternative to Donald Trump, showing the nation that tolerance, progressive policies like a higher minimum wage and investments in education can create an economy that works for all, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday. Without mentioning the Republican president-elect by name, Cuomo, a Democrat, said it is up to New York to find a different way to address the middle-class angst that propelled Trump to the White House. His remarks came during a state of the state address at Manhattan's World Trade Center, the first of six addresses planned for locations around the state...

Two weeks ago we previewed that the U.S. Department of Energy could begin to sell off some of its strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) as soon as January, the beginning of a multi-year process to shrink the nation’s stockpile of oil. Congress has authorized DOE to sell off $375.4 million worth of oil in its recent budget resolution. The DOE said that such a sale could be held in January 2017. Part of the motivation to sell crude is to finance upkeep for the SPR itself. The reserves are held in salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas, setup decades ago in...

Obama took something of a victory that had been achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan and replaced it defeat born by the premature withdrawal of American troops for no other reason than a crass political desire to be done with the whole affair, and in the former's case his facilitated the rise of Islamic State, possibly the most heinous entity of the twenty first century. He stood by and did nothing as the Arab Spring destabilized the entire Middle East, and in those cases where he did act such as Libya his interventions served only to make matters worse. Iran is...

Is America great again yet? It feels like, every few days since November 8th, we get another happy story about the U.S. business outlook. Whether it’s Carrier sticking around, Ford scrapping it’s Mexico plant, or SoftBank creating jobs for 50,000 Americans, it seems we’re just being inundated with good news. Now, we have some more. Fiat Chrysler will be investing a billion dollars in Michigan and Ohio, creating 2,000 jobs in the process. I’m not sure what happened on November 8th, but it sure looks like it’s working out.

The catastrophe of ObamaCare was and is complete Plain and simple, the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) must be repealed utterly, no replacement or residual “good idea” left to haunt us. This is stated emphatically for the following reasons and I pray that Congress, particularly the republicans, are listening to the people and not to polls purposely skewed by the misleading, malpracticing media. It doesn’t take someone who has worked in healthcare to understand the overwhelming disaster that has been ObamaCare although I’m one who has, so it behooves us to go back to the beginning… why people...

Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Sunday suggested President-elect Donald Trump stands by his campaign vow not to cut Medicare. "I don't think President-elect Trump wants to meddle with Medicare or Social Security," Priebus said on CBS's "Face The Nation." "He made a promise in the campaign that that was something that he didn't want to do." The president-elect does plan to grow the economy and help "shore up Medicare and Social Security for future generations," Priebus said. "And if we can get 3 to 5, 6 percent growth, we'll do that," he said. "And we'll explode...

VILLA DE REYES, Mexico (AP) -- Word spread quickly through cellphone messages and shouts between co-workers that Ford Motor Co. had canceled its new $1.6 billion car plant at its sprawling 700-acre high desert site in north-central Mexico. "When I saw it on the phone, (I thought), 'Well, no, it can't be,'" said Higinio Salazar, a security guard who spent the past five months logging traffic into and out of the site and hoped to have steady work for months to come. "It was on orders of Mr. Trump," he said bitterly....

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Defense intends to move forward with its $126 billion plan to procure 12 new nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Under the plan, the Navy's existing Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines will be replaced by the developing Columbia-class submarines at an estimated cost of roughly $8 billion per ship. Pentagon acquisition undersecretary Frank Kendall voiced his approval during a recent interview with Bloomberg. "I'm hoping to have it done before I leave," Kendall said, noting his job ends when President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20. President Obama has supported the...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s top advisers have had about a dozen high-level meetings with President-elect Donald Trump’s most trusted officials, CTV News has learned. The two sides have met 10 or 12 times since the U.S. election, and as recently as Tuesday -- a five-hour meeting between Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, his principal secretary Gerry Butts, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The meetings have been mostly focused on trade, with the intention of convincing the incoming Trump administration that any tariffs on Canadian goods would hurt the U.S. economy. CTV News was...

Donald Trump pledged that his administration would be about three things, "jobs, jobs, jobs." When Ford Motor Company announced on Tuesday that it would invest $7 billion in a new U.S. plant in Flat Rock, Michigan and hire 700 new workers, Trump appeared to be keeping one of his most important campaign promises. According to experts, if Trump wants to continue on his path towards millions of well-paying American jobs, there is only so much he can do from the Oval Office and on Twitter. Trump will need buy in from lawmakers to get regulatory and tax reforms if he...

SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico -- Ford Motor Co's (F.N) abrupt move to scrap a planned $1.6 billion car plant in central Mexico has spooked a network of suppliers who bet on a growing customer base and dramatized the risk that Donald Trump's agenda poses to the country's broader economy. Many auto parts makers had started to expand in anticipation of Ford's plant in the state of San Luis Potosi, where industry is "easily 70 percent" dependent on the auto sector, said Julian Eaves, managing director of Preferred Compounding de Mexico, a U.S.-owned maker of rubber compounds operating here. "It's going...

Reflections on the future of retail… As the new year began, right in the midst of outgoing Resident Barack Obama’s ever-more-urgent pleas for a “legacy,” two announcements hit the news: the family of Sears and K-Mart will close yet another 109 K-Marts and another 41 Sears’ stores in 2017, and Macy’s will close another 68 of theirs. It was to be expected, of course. The analysts say that these stores are of an old breed that hasn’t kept up; they still use brick and mortar, unlike the darlings of the new age of retail, Amazon and Etsy et al, which...

No One Cared About Hacking until We found Out How Corrupt Liberals Are By S. Noble - January 6, 2017 US major government and military organizations are hacked all the time by endless numbers of foreign and domestic actors. Nothing was done to fix our cybersecurity. But let a privates organization like the DNC get hacked or careless John Podesta’s emails get hacked and all hell breaks loose. John Podesta left his smart phone in a cab, he fell for a phishing incident and his password was ‘passwØrd”. Hillary put our state secrets on a personal server she kept in...

As I drove around the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex during Christmas season, 2016, I stopped at four area Walmart stores.  The first one was a couple of days before Christmas.  I did not have a car until the 24th, so I only looked in the Walmart at Frankford and Marsh Ln before Christmas.  I have written about .22 at that store for a year and a half.  It has had .22 LR in stock pretty reliably during that period, so I was not surprised to see a a couple thousand Winchester Super X, a couple of thousand CCI Stingers, a...

New Sheriff Who Defeated Arpaio (With Help of Soros) Calls Illegal Aliens “Guests” Newly sworn-in Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Paul Penzone, in a January 4 interview with Phoenix TV station ABC 15, referred to illegal aliens as “guests.” Penzone , who assumed office on January 1 after defeating six-term Sheriff Joe Arpaio in November, said during the interview: We will need to work with the guests who are here in our nation and are pursuing citizenship and separate that from those who are committing crimes and make sure that we a caring community that is serious about public safety. While...

Oh no, they're making America great again! Last week, we learned that Ford was cancelling plans to build a $1.6 billion dollar plant in Mexico. Instead, the company would be investing $700 million in Michigan, creating hundreds of permanent jobs. As USA Today reported: Ford Motor announced Tuesday that it would cancel plans for a $1.6 billion Mexico plant and launch a Michigan expansion in a move that may be viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.

Stanley Black & Decker is opening a new $35 million manufacturing plant in the United States to help it rebuild, and perhaps more importantly "re-Americanize," the Craftsman tool brand it just bought from Sears Holdings. While the extra capacity should help get a once-iconic $2 billion a year line back on its feet, the move also potentially offers Stanley Black & Decker another benefit: shielding it from a potential surge in economic nationalism under President-elect Donald Trump. Though Stanley Black & Decker chief executive James Loree did not mention Trump by name in his comments to Wall Street analysts and...

If President-elect Donald Trump is going to meet his pledge to energize the U.S. economy, there's a simple yet tough way to do so: Put more men to work. The proportion of men in their prime working years who either have a job or are looking for one has been dropping for decades – and limiting economic growth in the process. The full brunt of the 60-year decline burst into view during the 2016 election. Trump triumphed in part by vowing to restore jobs at steel mills, auto plants and coal mines – the types of work that had once...