Free Republic

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is battling to prevent US President Donald Trump undermining the world leaders' united front on climate change. At the Paris climate deal, all world leaders spoke in favour of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees but that was after a massive diplomatic effort by President Barack Obama made membership of the climate club a moral imperative. He and the French hosts created such an atmosphere that even the normally foot-dragging Russians and Saudis committed to the deal, despite their long history of slowing progress in climate negotiations behind the scenes. They own vast fossil fuel...

“Ordo Ab Chao” - Order out of Chaos, Count de Grasse Violence and the Democratic Party go together like the Black Death and fleas. Even for them, the increase in democratic violence since 2009, the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland, Occupy Wall Street, the George Zimmerman trial, Ferguson, Baltimore, the rise of BLM, the massive number of attacks against the Trump campaign, and inauguration, the insane reaction of the Leftopaths during the first months of Trump’s Presidency and the shooting of Republican Steve Scalise, is undeniable. The escalating string of violence from the Leftopaths is also not going unnoticed; every...

No, silly. Leftists don’t want $32 trillion in new taxes. They want around $15 trillion in new taxes over the next decade plus a cool $32 trillion or so in new debt to pay for single-payer, at least if Bernie Sanders’s platform last year is the template. CNN asks upstart Ryan opponent Randy Bryce about that here. You’re a single-payer proponent, they say. What do you think of $32 trillion to socialize medicine? Bryce: Well, ah, a lot of people aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, you know. That’s a sentiment a lot of Americans, including Steve Bannon, share....

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths. March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science". But that was so three months ago. Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready...

Hopes that the world’s huge carbon emissions might not drive temperatures up to dangerous levels have been dashed by new research. The work shows that temperature rises measured over recent decades do not fully reflect the global warming already in the pipeline and that the ultimate heating of the planet could be even worse than feared. How much global temperatures rise for a certain level of carbon emissions is called climate sensitivity and is seen as the single most important measure of climate change. Computer models have long indicated a high level of sensitivity, up to 4.5C for a doubling...

... Imagine, if you will, that you spend your entire professional life trying to do one thing to the best of your ability. In my case, that one thing is to study the nature and causes of climate change. You put in a long apprenticeship. You spend years learning about the climate system, computer models of climate and climate observations. You start filling a tool kit with the statistical and mathematical methods you’ll need for analyzing complex data sets. After decades of seeking to advance scientific understanding, reality suddenly shifts, and you are back in the cold darkness of ignorance....

"White privilege" (their term for self-sufficient productive people) is a direct result of our American heritage and Judeo-Christian work ethic and free market economy. America was founded on the Judeo-Christian principles of liberty, freedom, self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, self-governance, respect for God, respect for self, for each other and the law, civic responsibility and the value of family, church, tradition, education and hard work. The liberal/progressive/atheist/socialist democrats have been working overtime for a hundred years or more trying to tear all that down. They are teaching our children that there is no God, that government is all powerful and will provide for...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Seattle’s Minimum Wage Ordinance, passed in 2014, exemplifies courageous experimentation by a local government. The ordinance aims to increase earnings of low-wage workers as one response to the troubling rise in income inequality and stagnant wages of low-wage workers. There is national and international interest in knowing how it is working. Unfortunately, not all social experiments work entirely as planned. On April 1, 2015, the...

The United States is a nation built on the values of equal opportunity, hard work and self-determination. It prides itself on the belief that in this land of opportunity any woman, man and child should be able to reach their full potential. The challenge is to create the environment in which people can thrive. That includes a strong social compact in which government, business and the social (non-profit) sector invest in the well-being of individuals and families and ensure pathways to opportunity and success. At the most basic level that begins with ensuring access to life's basic needs, including quality,...

The “Socialism 2017” conference is rolling into Chicago next month and more than 1,500 professors, authors, students and activists are expected to attend and strategize systems to “fight the right” and resist the “political system that spawned Trump,” and build the left from a “Marxist perspective.” Some of today’s most controversial anti-white, anti-Trump professors are headlining the event, which boasts more than 100 workshops committed to tearing down our country, “building a socialist society,” and covering the debates on the left along with the hidden history of working-class and socialist struggles. In layman’s terms, the conference is predicated upon stripping...

Years ago Marxist-socialist leftists, embarrassed at being Marxist-socialist leftists, made up a shiny new name for themselves, “progressives.” It’s a word that sounds like a garden of forward-thinking delights, but is simply code for the failed, human-spirit-destroying government-command-and control that birthed all the evil “isms” of the past. That’s why every time I hear a conservative commentator in print, radio, or on TV call lefty-socialists “progressives” my 200 billion brain cells swoon. The Fourth of July brings to mind how far alleged progressivism deviates from this nation’s founding freedoms. The government command-and-control against which the American revolutionaries fought was King...

Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) needs to get his facts straight about social security. You pay 6.5% as an employee, Your employer pays 6.5%. You pay 1.5% to Medicare, Total 14.5%. If you are self-employed you must pay the 14.5% yourself. How could he say, because senior citizens expect their social security and medicare benefits when they retire, they are greedy? “Alan Simpson, Senator from Wyoming, Co-Chair of Obama’s deficit commission, calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he compared “Social Security” to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats.”

This scene is a microcosm of how liberals seek to silence the opposition by censorship and leveling personal attacks while avoiding the issues at hand. It further elucidates their ignorance of the issues, their bad habits of changing the subject during the debate, and their wild self-constructed fantasies of the world at large. Liberalism is a mental disorder.

A European court has ruled that the parents of a critically ill baby cannot privately pay for him to go to the United States for “experimental treatment”, and the child must stay in a British hospital to “die with dignity”. The parents of 10-month-old Charlie Gard are reported to be “utterly distraught” after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) denied them a final effort to save their dying son. After losing a battle in the UK’s Supreme Court, they had appealed to the court in France to fight the decision of British doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital,...

Politicians are notorious for making promises they can't keep. But they really outdid themselves in Illinois -- and now the state is paying for it. Illinois is on the verge of becoming America's first state with a junk credit rating. The financial mess is the inevitable result of spending more on pensions and services than the state could afford -- then covering it up with reckless budget tricks. After decades of historic mismanagement, Illinois is now grappling with $15 billion of unpaid bills and an unthinkable quarter-trillion dollars owed to public employees when they retire. The budget crisis has forced...

Californians pay more for gasoline and other goods to finance the state’s war on climate change. The state Supreme Court decided Wednesday they’ll continue paying for at least three more years. The court declined to hear a lawsuit challenging the state-run auctions of carbon-emissions allowances, which cement makers, food processors and others must purchase in order to spew greenhouse gases. Two lower courts already ruled the auctions, which have raised billions of dollars since their introduction in 2012, are constitutional. The auctions are an integral part of California’s cap-and-trade program, which is designed to reduce carbon emissions. Companies get most...

Avoiding dangerous levels of climate change is still just about possible, but will require unprecedented effort and coordination from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists in the next three years, a group of prominent experts has warned. Scientists have been warning that time is fast running out to stave off the worst effects of warming, and some milestones may have slipped out of reach. In the Paris agreement, governments pledged an “aspirational” goal of holding warming to no more than 1.5C, a level which it is hoped will spare most of the world’s lowest-lying islands from inundation. While the greenhouse gases...

... Pakistani officials are certain their country is enduring the new extremes of global warming. In the United States, the current leadership is not so convinced. Even though the Department of Defense lists global chaos caused by climate change as a daunting security challenge in the years to come, our president (who pays little attention to what experts in his government have to say) seems not to give a hoot. His big idea for protecting national security is a travel ban on Muslims that does little to enhance procedures that already exist for catching terrorists who may try to slip...

Errors in how scientists account for water loss from leaves may be skewing estimates of how much energy plants make through photosynthesis, according to the latest research. This in turn could jeopardize models of how individual leaves function and even of the global climate. The errors are particularly pronounced when a plant’s water supply is limited — a condition of increasing interest as plant breeders and climate scientists grapple with the effects of global warming. “If you’re trying to understand why a crop you’re growing or a particular plant is able to survive and do better under drier conditions, you...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Tuesday that opposing the Republican health-care bill wasn't enough and the Democratic Party should start running on a new national single-payer plan. "President Obama tried to move us forward with health-care coverage by using a conservative model that came from one of the conservative think tanks that had been advanced by a Republican governor in Massachusetts," she told The Wall Street Journal. "Now it's time for the next step. And the next step is single payer." Polling has shown government-provided health care to be a very popular notion among Americans. Depending on whether it's described as...