Free Republic

San Francisco residents ripped into city leaders Tuesday after District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that her office would not be filing charges against the private security guard who allegedly shot and killed 24-year-old Banko Brown in front of a Walgreens store last week. Nowhere was the anger more visible than at City Hall. More than two dozen community members rose to speak during a Board of Supervisors meeting, where they called on elected officials to do something in response to Brown's killing. Many were visibly emotional and didn't mince words when speaking to the board. “The death of Banko Brown...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York state is banning natural gas stoves and heating systems in most new buildings, a policy that’s part of a national movement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The law negotiated by Gov. Kathy Hochul and her fellow Democrats in the Legislature is part of the state budget and puts New York in the forefront of states targeting emissions from buildings. When the phase-in starts in 2026, newly constructed buildings will have to forego fossil fuel equipment in favor of devices like induction ranges and heat pumps that run on electricity. The state mandate applies...

The California Reparations Task Force published documents Monday indicating it plans to recommend the state apologize for racism and slavery and consider “down payments” of varying amounts to eligible African American residents.

California’s official reparations task force has estimated that black residents of the state are owed $1.2 million each in compensation for the legacy of slavery, even though the state entered the Union as a free state in 1850. The committee, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) during the height of the Black Lives Matter panic in 2020, released an interim report last year backing reparations and proposing separate black schools, among other proposals. Though it narrowly decided that only those black residents who could trace their roots to Southern slaves should be eligible for reparations, it has determined...

Transgender cyclist Austin Killips wins Stage 5 Gila Monster to take home the overall victory at Tour of the Gila In what has been described as a "Lia Thomas moment" for cycling, Austin Killips, a 27-year-old transgender rider, has won first prize for women at the Tour of the Gila, the premier road race in New Mexico. It marked the most significant result yet for Killips, a trans-identifying biological male from Chicago, who also won a medal in women's cyclocross at the US National Championships and who is now tipped to challenge for a place at the Tour de France...

I've changed my mind.

Today I have just seen the 2022 movie, Tar, a film by Tom Field, starring Cate Blanchett. It looks like a work of collaborative genius to me. IMHO Western Society has become a destructive virtue-signaling tarpit in which men and women cannot be themselves. At the end of “Tar”, the heroine, Lydia Tar, escapes from the West to a country that looks like The Philippines. Blanchett gives an astonishing performance as a brilliant, kind conductor and pianist, deeply committed to standards in her art and proud of her place in Western culture, but who loses her career when too many...

Dylan Mulvaney said in a new interview that she doesn’t want brands to hire her as a spokesperson just to “check a box” off because she’s transgender — instead, they should turn to her because “I’m Dylan.” The 26-year-old influencer — who rose to fame chronicling her gender transition, and incurred widespread wrath from far-right critics after her partnership with Bud Light — told Bustle that she doesn’t want a brand to hire her for the sake of diversity. “A lot of brands will ask, ‘Could you relate a little bit of your struggle growing up into this?’ Like, no!...

Transgender women keep their prostates even after gender-affirming surgery, but the extent to which they remain at risk of prostate cancer has been unclear. Now a first of its kind study led by UC San Francisco has estimated the risk at about 14 cases per 10,000 people. The study drew on 22 years of data from the Veterans Affairs Health System. Although the sample size was necessarily small, it is still the largest study of its kind. It publishes Saturday, April 29, 2023 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and is timed to the annual meeting of...

A trans person suspected of child sex abuse was arrested at an in-home child daycare in Paulding County, Ga.Dion Blake Keaton, an 18-year-old transgender person who identifies as a woman, was first arrested by Dallas Police on Feb. 23 on suspicion of three felony counts of sexual exploitation of children, and felony purchase, possession, manufacture, distribution or sale of controlled substances. (Keaton was found with a white powder at the daycare believed to be meth, according to the police report.)Keaton’s iPhone and laptop were confiscated as part of the arrest. Following an investigation of those devices, Keaton was re-arrested on...

If you’re interested in really being depressed, read the coverage of the controversy involving the state representative in Montana who is a man pretending to be a woman. Or in our words, a "hemale." Conservatives, Christians and normal people have completely lost the culture when a newspaper in Montana, of all places, apes the jargon, euphemisms and outright lies that permeate and sustain the "transgender movement." The Independent Record — the newspaper in Montana’s capitol of Helena — might as well be The New York Times when it comes to covering the insanity of the transgenderist’s genital mutilation and chemical...

One of the very first things President Joe Biden did after taking the oath of office was to order federal agencies to revamp the way they evaluate the costs and benefits of regulations.It went largely unnoticed amid the flurry of executive orders in Biden's first days, but that January 20, 2021, memo to the heads of departments and executive agencies signaled the administration's intention to rev up the regulatory state by counting "non-quantifiable" benefits of new regulations. As Reason reported at the time, the memo made clear that the new regulatory framework would serve "as a tool to affirmatively promote...

Growing up, I never had a problem with gay people. I never thought they should be treated as criminals or discriminated against. And with the exception of some high-profile cases of gays being over-sensitive to lack of approval from Christians, most gays seemed to accept a live and let live attitude. Even Jack Phillips, who has survived relentless persecution, continues to post on his website that “Masterpiece Cakeshop will happily create custom cakes for anyone. But like many cake artists, Jack cannot create all custom cakes. He cannot create custom cakes that express messages or celebrate events that conflict with...

California suffers from a homelessness crisis, a drug epidemic, high taxes, and affordability issues, but there’s one thing the state’s residents won’t have to worry about in the future: diesel trucks. That’s because state regulators on Friday approved a rule that would forbid the sales of diesel vehicles by 2036 and require all trucks to be zero emissions by 2042.The California Air Resources Board also unanimously approved the Advanced Clean Fleets rule which will require delivery and garbage trucks to be electric.From the Associated Press:The rule cannot be implemented without approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But it’s related...

Jørund Viktoria Alme, 53, a senior credit analyst in Oslo, Norway, identifies as disabled and uses a wheelchair, even though she has no physical handicap. Alme is also transgender, according to Heraldscotland.com. Alme said on the morning TV program "Good Morning Norway" in 2022 that it had been a "lifelong wish" to have been born "a woman paralyzed from the waist down," the same source noted. In an even more shocking case, a 21-year-old North Carolina woman who identified as blind actually took steps to destroy her own eyesight, according to multiple reports from a few years ago.

Democrats’ highly expensive environmental policies have been developed without any meaningful strategic thinking or analyses about raw materials and geopolitics.Ford Motor Company recently announced it’s set to lose more than $6 billion on its latest electric vehicle plants while it gets them running, with the company CEO saying “we cannot continue to import batteries and rare earth from overseas.”“We can build all the plants, but what’s the good if we’re importing batteries?” he continued, highlighting U.S. mine closures and global shortages of the rare earths required for the batteries that power these cars.Joe Biden declared war on fossil fuels on...

Video at https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1640739808543662080Last Friday, a transgender woman from Colorado who posted a video loading an AR-15 after a conservative extremist called for eradicating “transgenderism” was fired from her federal job. Kayla Denker says sacking her from her job exemplifies a double standard where right-wingers can pose with guns, but transgender women cannot. A video of Denker went viral in March. The 36-year-old is holding a legally purchased AR-15 long gun. She repeatedly racks the weapon and shows off the loaded clip. “While advocating for trans people to ‘arm ourselves’ is not any kind of a solution to the genocide we...

Americans can’t afford to buy food, so Biden decided that they also shouldn’t be able to heat their homes during the winter. After an “environmental” measure that would prevent a majority of the country from being able to afford new cars, Biden is now going after their power bills. The latest EPA proposal would mandate ‘carbon capture’ at power plants. A study by MIT showed that carbon capture raises the cost of electricity from 30% to 50% depending on the type of plant. Another study by Australia’s Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis however showed that prices could actually...

New York state leaders led by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul reached an agreement late Thursday on the state's 2024 budget which includes a future ban on natural gas hookups in new building construction. Under the budget deal, natural gas hookups will be banned in small buildings beginning in 2025 and large buildings beginning in 2028, according to Hochul. The governor said in remarks that the budget insulates households from "exorbitant energy bills" while helping the state build a "more sustainable future." "Everyone knows we've seen the effects of climate change — the storms, the hurricanes coming to New York, record...

The now years-long Public Health™ campaign continues to reinvent the definition of “vaccine” in the service of accommodating Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA injections. These shots utilize the genetic manipulation of cells to produce spike proteins rather than introducing an inactivated sample of the virus to induce an adaptive immune response — the mechanism of every vaccine in recorded history.The Animal Farm pigs did the same trick when they rewrote the Seven Commandments in the dark of night to excuse their abhorrent behavior.“Vaccines do not require demonstration of the prevention of infection or transmission,” according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration...