Free Republic

A Manhattan judge ripped Sam Bankman-Fried as a “remorseless” scammer obsessed with political power as he sentenced the fallen crypto mogul to 25 years in prison Thursday — five months after he was found guilty of stealing more than $8 billion of funds from customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Judge Lewis Kaplan said the 32-year-old convicted fraudster “presented himself as the good guy” all in favor of “appropriate regulation of the crypto industry” — but it was just an “act.” “He did it because he wanted to be a hugely, hugely political influential person in this country,” Kaplan...

This week, Harvard University has shut down a Bill Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. The controversial Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, run by professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch, aimed to study the potential future implementation of geoengineering by crop dusting sulphuric acid into our stratosphere. Nice. Even if you put aside the almost instant validity such an experiment would give to conspiracy theories like chemtrails and HAARP, it still sounds a bit too much, playing with our thin air like that — in an unprecedented, and potentially catastrophic, manner, too. But let’s not kid ourselves. The plug wasn’t pulled over...

Senate Democrats were left red-faced at a hearing on climate change as their 'expert witness' proved to be anything but when faced by veteran senator John Kennedy. Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse invited Olympic skier Gus Schumacher to give his perspective as the committee considered the impact of climate change on the recreation industry. But it was all downhill for the 23-year-old as he struggled to answer basic questions and could not remember his tweets claiming the war on drugs was designed to jail black people, and calling for the police to be abolished. The excruciating exchange continued with Schumacher insisting...

“It’s too easy to forge a deed and record it,” Real estate attorney Richard Alembik told WSB-TV. “It’s a big problem nowadays, because of the fact that e-filing, the e-recording of deeds is so easy. It’s very easy to record forged deeds.” Alembik said notaries don’t check the identification of the people who submit the documents to verify if they are the rightful homeowners. Victims of fraud who have proof to be the rightful homeowners can still be ordered by a judge to move out and pay fines, according to the outlet. An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of...

The Women's Cancer Fund raised $18.3 million by vowing to help patients, telling donors that their money would help pay the living expenses of women going through treatment for the disease. But a new lawsuit from the FTC and 10 states allege that the bulk of the money instead went to pay the charity's president and for-profit fundraisers. The lawsuit, filed on March 11 in federal court, alleges that the Women's Cancer Fund raised the money from 2017 to 2022 by making deceptive and misleading claims. In reality, the bulk of the donations went to the $775,139 salary of the...

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates. Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real? No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is...

Donald Trump's anodyne if overexcited comment that the U.S. auto industry would face a "bloodbath" if he's not elected and doesn't impose 50% or 100% tariffs on cars produced predictable results. "Don't outsmart yourself," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) posted, and Joe Biden's campaign promptly charged Trump with promising a "bloodbath" if he loses, without saying that he used a common metaphor and was talking about the auto industry. That's a subject Team Biden is understandably touchy about, given the conspicuous fiasco of its electric vehicle policies. It's summed up in a lengthy Wall Street Journal report on how a "dramatic...

By Executive Order, the Biden Administration weaponized all agencies of the federal government to push voter registration in populations where eligibility statuses cannot be effectively tracked, like students, prisoners, and noncitizens. Then, they opened the borders to a tsunami of illegal immigrants. In just the last three years, over 10,000,000 illegal aliens have been added to the federal dole, being flown on your dime to battleground states across the country. But the Biden regime, parroted by mainstream media, are quick to stress that illegal immigrants, or as the Administration is now calling them “New Americans”, wouldn’t dare vote because they...

A plan to locate a massive field of silos that suck carbon dioxide out of the air is planned somewhere in central Wyoming, and $11 million has been raised so far. An illustration of what an "orchard" of silos to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and sequester it underground in central Wyoming could look like. (Spiritus Technologies) A venture capitalist with a pedigree in the startup world and a scientist who has a background in materials research on sensitive military projects have teamed up to figure out a new way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air...

The Biden administration is funneling $1 billion in taxpayer funds to America's northern and southern borders to make dozens of federal ports of entry more climate friendly. The General Services Administration (GSA) announced it would direct Inflation Reduction Act funds to support the climate initiatives at the border, even as the ongoing surge of migrants strains federal resources. While GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan and Andrew Mayock, President Biden's Federal Buy Clean Task Force co-chair, said the action would reduce "harmful emissions," the move was slammed by Republicans and experts. “As usual, the Biden administration is refusing to address a problem...

It was a nightmare-bnb experience. A UK family had to cancel their dream Spanish vacation just hours before departure after losing more than $5,000 in an elaborate Airbnb “clone” scam. “I felt devastated for my children and my husband,” Emma Last, 48, told PA Real Life of the holiday hornswoggling. “One [of her children] didn’t speak for a day.” The Lancashire resident had planned an eight-night trip to Majorca — one of Spain’s idyllic Balearic Islands — in August 2023 with her husband Zak, 51, Last’s parents and their three children: Scarlette and Henri, both 17, and Xander, 14. The...

There’s no such thing as a wind or solar ‘farm’, just an ugly industrial siteIn a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions. After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been...

President Biden began his remarks during a Thursday visit to the southern border in Texas by addressing a devastating wildfire in the state’s panhandle and Oklahoma before calling climate change deniers “neanderthals.” Speaking in the border city of Brownsville, Biden first addressed the ongoing wildfire that has ravaged a portion of Texas and destroyed more than one million acres. “I’ve flown over a lot of these wildfires since I’ve been president,” Biden said. “Flown over more land burned to the ground. All the vegetation gone more than the entire state of Maryland in square footage.” “The idea there’s no such...

A woman in Ireland lost a more than $800,000 in an injury lawsuit stemming from a car crash after photos showed her launching a Christmas tree during a post-holiday competition – and winning the event. Kamila Grabska, 36, sued an insurance agency in the country, RSA Insurance, after a 2017 car crash she claimed caused her debilitating neck and back pain that prevented her from holding down a job for five years, the Irish Independent reported. Grabska is a mom of two from the town of Ennis in County Clare, Irish media reports. The car accident was the result of...

The Department of Energy announced more than $350 million for rural renewable energy projects from the bipartisan infrastructure law funds Tuesday. On a call with reporters, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the $366 million would be allocated across 17 projects in 20 states and 30 tribal nations. Twelve of the projects are on tribal lands, according to Granholm. “These projects showcase rural and remote communities [and] innovative approaches to clean energy deployment. They span technologies, they are replicable, they’re scalable, and they include everything from building micro grids for community health centers so they never lose power for lifesaving equipment,...

Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature, theatre, and cinema. Traditionally depicted dressed in Lincoln green, he is said to have stolen from the rich to give to the poor. Politicians have created the new “Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes. Part of the problem with the reverse Robin Hood model is the Federal Reserve itself. They helped punish the 99% with inflation due to excessive money printing. The share of total net worth held by the top 1% has exploded since The Fed’s rate cuts following the 2001 recession. The...

Maine’s Department of Education is reportedly urging school districts to stop using taxpayer-subsidized electric school buses that were purchased within the last year. The districts reported problems with the new buses, which were supplied by Canada-based Lion Electric Co., last fall ... The windshields on the buses would leak whenever it rained, as the glass didn’t appear to be securely in place. concerns about mixing electricity and water from the leaking windshields led them to stop driving some of the buses. The buses, which cost about $345,000 each, were also sold with misaligned or incorrect lettering on the sides, and...

Whenever elite media folks act as if they are smarter than the yahoos in the sticks, please keep the sad yet hilarious story of Charlotte Cowles in mind. She is the financial advice columnist of the New York magazine The Cut section and previously a weekly columnist in the Business section of the New York Times. She revealed on Thursday how, with a incredible level of gullibility, she handed a box containing $50,000 of most of her savings to a scammer in "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger."

Each year from 2023 to 2030, climate change sustainable development goals will cost every person in economies such as the United States $2,026, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development estimates. In lower-income economies, the per-person annual cost ranges from $332 to $1,864. In total, the global price tag comes to about $5.5 trillion per year. Separately, a report from the left-aligned nonprofit Climate Policy Initiative found that in 2021 and 2022, the world’s taxpayers spent $1.3 trillion each year on climate-related projects. It also found that the “annual climate finance needed” from 2031 to 2050 is more than $10...

Daniel Williams, come pick up your junk.For more than six months, a parade of unsolicited Amazon packages — large and small, cheap and expensive, free or fraudulently billed — have arrived at John DeFiore’s rural Woodside home, addressed to a mysterious Mr. Williams.“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” said DeFiore, 61, an electrical engineer who is meticulous about his online shopping habits and credit card use.“We don’t want any of this stuff,” he said. “It’s not ours. We have everything we need.”Online shopping offers near-infinite choice and convenience. But it has also created a global gathering place for digital crooks, fraudsters...