Free Republic

Negotiators from more than 170 countries on Saturday reached a legally binding accord to counter climate change by cutting the worldwide use of a powerful planet-warming chemical used in air-conditioners and refrigerators. -snip-While the Paris agreement included pledges by nearly every country to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels that power vehicles, electric plants and factories, the new Kigali deal has a single target: chemical coolants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.-snip-And while the Paris pledges are broad, they are also voluntary, often vague and dependent on the political will of future world...

Renewable energy companies have hiked up the prices consumers have to bear to cover their costs, leading to accusations the country’s “energy transition” is running out of control. Germans will be paying 8.3 percent more to subsidize the renewable energy industry in 2017, after grid operators announced that households will be paying 6.88 cents for every kilowatt hour of energy used to fund renewables. The previous subsidy was 6.35 cents per kilowatt hour, Bild reports. Germany has one of the most ambitious green energy policies in the world, the so-called Energiewende (energy transition), which aims to reduce its greenhouse gas...

Significance Political beliefs have been shown to spill over into nonpolitical domains, such as consumer spending, choice of romantic partner, and job hiring. Our evidence suggests that political beliefs predict the professional decisions of primary care physicians. On politicized health issues, like marijuana and abortion, physicians' partisan identity is highly correlated with their treatment decisions. Because physicians regularly interact with patients on politically sensitive health issues and because the medical profession is increasingly politicized (e.g., state governments are regulating politicized aspects of medicine), it is necessary to understand how doctors’ own political worldviews may impact their actions in the medical...

A Democratic operative is defending leaked e-mails bashing the “backwards” faith of orthodox Catholics, saying they are not anti-Catholic because most American Catholics disregard Catholic teaching on moral issues, anyway... Halpin called a traditional, conservative reading of Catholicism “an amazing bastardization of the faith.” Donald Trump’s campaign responded by demanding the officials be fired... But Julie Roginsky, a Democratic strategist, told Fox News last night that the e-mails express the authentic voice of American Catholics, who also disdain the authority of the papal Magisterium.... Roginsky cited a host of polling data showing that most American Catholics believe contraception and homosexuality...

<p>The Human Rights Campaign, America's largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization, has threatened to penalize Johns Hopkins University if it does not denounce a report from two of the institution's scholars which concludes that there is little scientific evidence that people are born gay or transgender.</p>

Yemeni rebels fired on the USS Mason in The Red Sea Wednesday at 6am ET. The strike originated from south of the town of Al Hudayah, not far from Yemen’s capital of Sana’a. The area is controlled by the Iranian backed Houthi insurgent group. Defense officials report that the vessel was fired on by a Cruise Missile, which failed hit its intended target. The US destroyer class ship fired countermeasure projectiles to prevent it from being damaged. No sailors aboard the USS Mason were harmed. The same ship, and also the amphibious USS Ponce, were victims of a similar attack...

African-American students are getting a raw deal because — in the name of diversity — the system is superficially propping up those students who are doing poorly, according to economist and conservative columnist Walter E. Williams. “I am glad that I got all of my education — I received all of my education before it become fashionable for white people to like black people,” Williams said in an interview Wednesday on Tallahassee’s Morning Show with Preston Scott. He was recalling a comment about his education that he offered in the documentary “Suffer No Fools.” Williams, who is 80 years old,...

Two Boston police officers were gunned down by a suspect armed with an assault rifle and wearing body armor. The officers are in critical condition while 9 other officers were injured in a firefight that resulted in the death of the suspect. The circumstances of the ambush are eerily similar to the murder of two Palm Springs police officers last week. This is the fruit of Black Lives Matter rhetoric which suggests police are terrorists and out to murder black men. Some members of BLM haven't been shy about advocating violence against officers. It is this sort of incendiary rhetoric...

As far back as the 2016 party conventions in July, Hillary Clinton was blaming the Russians for hacking and releasing embarrassing emails. Now the Obama administration, through an executive agency, has decided to back up her claim. Russia Today noted recently that emails and documents of the DNC were first released by Guccifer 2.0 in June, “but the DNC did not react until WikiLeaks released more files – which Guccifer 2.0 said he supplied to them – on the eve of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.” “Within hours, the Clinton campaign was accusing Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally of...

It was a year ago when a long list of scientists wrote to the Obama administration urging the federal government to use RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, against global-warming skeptics. They said in a letter addressed to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren they “appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress.” “One additional tool – recently proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act)...

Farmers in the U.S. are pouring out tens of millions of gallons of excess milk, amid a massive glut that has slashed prices and has filled warehouses with cheese. More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of 2016, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools, and the most wasted in at least 16 years of data requested by The Wall Street Journal....

What would scientists say if North Korea nuked their labs? Not much. Two articles about rogue nations underscore the importance of morality for science. In Iran, a shady market for papers flourishes (Science Magazine). Readers of scientific papers naively assume that the authors are honest. It presupposes a moral code among scientists: to understand nature, everyone must report findings correctly, striving to maintain the dignity and integrity of science. This story shows that one cannot assume everyone follows that moral standard. A shady business of papers-for-hire is flourishing in Iran... North Korea’s nukes are nearly ready for launch. Now what?...

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may have inadvertently done Donald Trump a favor on Monday, when he held a conference call with House Republicans to inform them he would not be campaigning for the party’s nominee. Ryan irritated pro-Trump Republicans while renewing a bad news cycle that Trump’s strong debate performance on Sunday might have otherwise ended, probably to the benefit of nervous down-ticket candidates. But Ryan also gave Trump something new: clarity. Trump is now free to run against Washington as a whole, which is likely what he meant by tweeting Tuesday morning that “the shackles have been...

Published on Oct 11, 2016 While talking on the phone on a plane

Oh anti-Catholicism. You’re always in vogue. And just what we needed to add to this wonderful election journey. Today, the anti-secrecy and disclosure site WikiLeaks released more than 1,000 emails as part of an ongoing leak of the hacked emails of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Previously, Podesta worked as the President for the Center for American Progress, or CAP, and the Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton. Within these leaked emails was a 2011 email thread titled “Conservative Catholicism” sent by CAP Senior Fellow John Halpin to Podesta and to Hillary for America Communications Director Jennifer...

Vindolanda Roman Fort Yields Hundreds of Shoes Tuesday, October 11, 2016 NORTHUMBERLAND, ENGLAND—Chronicle Live reports that more than 400 shoes sized for men, women, and children, were recovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda over the summer, bringing the total of shoes from the site to more than 7,000. The 1,800-year-old shoes included ones made solely for indoor wear, boots, sandals, and bath clogs. The footwear was found in a defensive ditch, along with pottery and the remains of cats and dogs. Andrew Birley, director of Vindolanda’s excavations, thinks the contents of the ditches may have been discarded when the...

A Progressive friend is relentlessly pushing “Trump is awful” stories on me. I, a conservative, invariably counter by pointing out that Hillary’s list of sins and failures is infinitely worse.I realized yesterday that my arguments are irrelevant. My friend will never vote for someone who is not 100% pro-abortion, pro-socialized medicine, or pro-open borders.  Given a choice between a rotting dead body that is pro-Abortion and a genuine angel from Heaven that is pro-Choice, he’d vote for the rotting body every time.Even as we endlessly talk down the other side’s candidates (because few people are really comfortable talking their own candidate...

The good news is that the Left has noticed what a scam college accreditation is. The bad news: They want the federal government to take it over. "Accreditors are self-regulating membership organizations," Ben Miller, David Bergeron and Carmel Martin write in a report released this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP). "This means that agencies' revenue comes almost entirely from dues and fees paid by the institutions they oversee." "This includes annual sustaining fees, as well as payments for specific functions such as an initial review to judge if an institution meets standards for approval or special visits...

Professor Cornel West put it bluntly when giving a speech in front of an audience of hundreds at Smith College this past February. “I want you all to know you are in this class to learn how to die,” he said. Not long ago, a Latino friend of mine was coming out of a bar and was stopped by an Amherst police officer. I’m unsure of what exactly transpired between the two of them because I wasn’t there. But his story was that, as a result of whatever verbal altercation transpired, the officer threw him against the hood of the...

This is a classic.  Please share with all.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj78yWOiKkw