Free Republic

‘Binary and absolute differences’ are ‘exploitative’ A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press. Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark...

A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington, D.C., often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion. Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data. He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has...

Documents Confirm that Obama IRS Improperly Targeted Conservatives JW Exposes Dangerous Criminals Protected by Texas Sanctuary City Policy Climategate Obstruction Challenged in Court U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz Addresses Government Oversight Challenges at JW Documents Confirm that Obama IRS Improperly Targeted Conservatives We continue to undercover the details of the Obama IRS’ arbitrary and capricious behavior toward those presumed to be “enemies” of President Obama. This week we released 695 pages of new documents containing admissions by IRS officials that the agency used “inappropriate political labels” to screen the tax-exempt applications of conservative organizations. Other records reveal that the IRS...

Wildlife conservation groups are collaborating with a federal government agency to halt construction of the southern border wall by fudging science to claim that unimpeded trans-border corridors are essential to an “endangered species” with 99% of its population in Mexico. Under the plan, large areas of Arizona and New Mexico would be prohibited from erecting a border wall so that jaguars—which don’t even occupy the area—can roam back and forth between the two countries. More than ¾ million acres in Arizona and New Mexico would be designated as critical habitat for jaguars under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which...

On March 2, there was one of those oh-so-revealing events that makes people realize that very bad trends are at work in America, trends that are corroding the essence of civilization. Middlebury College in Vermont is a liberal arts school. The prolific author and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray was asked to speak at Middlebury and answer questions from faculty and audience members. He is used to confrontations, but could not have imagined how vicious things would get up in the Green Mountain State. Inside Higher Ed’s story on the event explains that college officials admonished the students prior...

Representatives from a coalition of veteran Republican officials — including five who have either served as treasury secretary or as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers — met Wednesday with White House officials to discuss the idea of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change.[snip]Despite the group’s impeccable Republican credentials — Baker, Paulson and Schultz served as treasury secretaries and Feldstein and Mankiw served as CEA chairs under GOP presidents — the proposal faces long odds. Many congressional Republicans are adamantly against a tax increase of any kind, and President Trump repeatedly...

The radiation levels at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at "unimaginable" levels. Adam Housley, who reported from the area in 2011 following the catastrophic triple-meltdown, said this morning that new fuel leaks have been discovered. He said the radiation levels - as high as 530 sieverts per hour - are now the highest they've been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor. "To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people," he explained. He said that critics, including the U.S. military in 2011, have long questioned whether Tokyo Electric...

A whistleblower says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rushed a landmark study claiming the planet was warming much faster than expected in order to influence international climate negotiations. Dr. John Bates, the former principal scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., told the Daily Mail NOAA’s 2015 study was meant “to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Bates said NOAA scientists made a “blatant attempt to intensify the impact” of global warming to eliminate the...

In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency: The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations....

I’ve just watched the London liberal media’s heads exploding like ripe watermelons. It was great – a bit like that No Pressure video that the enviro-loons made a few years ago, only better because this time the victims weren’t blameless schoolchildren but grisly, puffed-up, righteously eco, Trump-and-Brexit-hating TV and newspaper Environment Correspondents, all of whom hate my guts. (They hate yours too, so don’t get smug.) The occasion was a press conference hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation for Myron Ebell, head of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Satan’s Emissary, as liberals prefer to think of...

If there’s one thing we can say about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s unlike any other world leader we’ve seen to date. The problem, however, is that his differences fail to set him apart in a positive manner. Almost daily, Trump tweets about the “biased media,” “fake news,” or a world leader who has suddenly done something so terrible that he must take to Twitter to publicly berate them. Notice, however, that it’s always someone else with the problem. It’s never him. However, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School seems to think...

It gets harder and harder to keep track of every single piece of terrible news coming out of Washington these days, so much so that amongst the litany of despair from the last 36 hours or so — the prospective implementation of Donald Trump’s ban on the acceptance of refugees and on immigration from several Muslim countries, the possible death of net neutrality, the ridiculous ongoing smokescreen about “electoral fraud”, etc etc etc etc — it was easy to miss the news with perhaps the most dramatic ramifications for the future of this planet: the continuing efforts to silence the...

"Closer to 'Doomsday' Than Any Year Since '59" screams the headline in the Huffington Post. The story, and many others like it, point to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' famous "Doomsday Clock," which is supposed to be a reliable indicator of the risk the world faces of a nuclear war. The clock shows how many minutes there are until midnight, which was supposed to mean nuclear annihilation. This year, the group moved it to 2.5 minutes to midnight, 30 seconds closer than it was last year. When the Doomsday Clock launched in 1947, the initial setting was seven minutes...

Scientists say the world has edged closer to apocalypse in the past year amid a darkening security landscape and comments by Donald Trump. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BPA) moved the minute hand of the symbolic Doomsday Clock from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. It is the second closest it has been. BPA chief Rachel Bronson urged world leaders to "calm rather than stoke tensions that could lead to war". In a report, the BPA said President Trump's statements on climate change, expanding the US nuclear arsenal and the questioning of intelligence agencies had contributed to the...

Just days after The National Park Service (NPS) was forced to shut down its Twitter activity over two retweets the Department of the Interior deemed inconsistent with the agency’s mission, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota seems to have gone rogue, tweeting numerous scientific facts about climate change that have since been deleted. The first tweet about climate science came at 11:40 a.m. local time Tuesday. It said: “The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm.”

I call this fake news because it’s not news – media headlines around the world today (New York Times, Washington Post, DailyMail) are trumpeting the release of a final version of a draft report released with (similar fanfare) more than a year ago, announced today by the US Fish & Wildlife Service in the official US government publication, (Federal Register).(Without action on climate change, say goodbye to polar bears”) is exactly the kind of sensationalized nonsense I address in my new detailed science book, (Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change) (announced (here) and discussed (here)

Dr. Wallach points out very convincingly in this YouTube that most diseases are caused by poor nutrition.

‘Gold standard’ study’s striking findings: children of heterosexual parents happier, healthier The most scientifically credible studies show that children of heterosexual parents fare better on numerous indicators of personal well-being than children of homosexual parents. Authored by Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the study was published in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research. Children of lesbian mothers are nearly 12 times (≅ 1200%) as likely to say they were sexually touched by a parent or adult as those raised in intact biological families. Asked if they had ever been raped, 31...

In the world of climate science, the skeptics are coming in from the cold. Researchers who see global warming as something less than a planet-ending calamity believe the incoming Trump administration may allow their views to be developed and heard. This didn’t happen under the Obama administration, which denied that a debate even existed. Now, some scientists say, a more inclusive approach – and the billions of federal dollars that might support it – could be in the offing. ~snip~ The field is cluttered with entrenched figures who must toe the established line, he said, pointing to a recent congressional...

I keep hearing people say that 97% of climate scientists are on the same side of the issue. Critics point out that the number is inflated, but we don’t know by how much. Persuasion-wise, the “first offer” of 97% is so close to 100% that our minds assume the real number is very high even if not exactly 97%. That’s good persuasion. Trump uses this method all the time. The 97% anchor is so strong that it is hard to hear anything else after that. Even the people who think the number is bogus probably think the real figure is...