Free Republic

We have an unelected, unaccountable administrative state that sees itself as separate from, and above the people. Now, it is intervening to make sure it gets a government that will be amenable to its rule. The latest example of this is a stunning statement from former Fed monetary Vice Chair William Dudley. He was quoted in Bloomberg saying that the Fed should help defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. “Officials could state explicitly that the central bank won’t bail out an administration that keeps making bad choices on trade policy, making it abundantly clear that Trump will own...

A panel of three judges dismissed a case brought by Britain's former Prime Minister John Major and businesswoman Gina Miller arguing that current Prime Minister Boris Johnson's attempt to suspend parliament through prorogation is an abuse of power, Bloomberg reported Friday. The case will be appealed to the U.K.'s highest court, handing Johnson a second legal victory and setting up a final battle over parliament and likely the fate of the U.K.'s exit from the European Union (EU) in the Supreme Court. Miller slammed the ruling in a press conference Friday, according to Bloomberg, and vowed to continue the battle...

In partnership with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recently proposed that certain pharmaceuticals should be cleared for import from Canada. Although the proposal seeks to lower prices for consumers, it poses critical unintended risks to both American businesses and patients. The logic behind the proposal is simple. If ‘big pharma’ companies charge American patients high costs while offering their products for lower prices abroad, why not break down trade barriers and increase price competition? While the goal is admirable, the policy would unleash a slew of dangerous side effects.In Canada, the...

TGIFF! Its Fiddle Friday and we have Tater Tate playing Crazy Creek. The tune was recorded in Nasville in November of 1978 and released in 1981. THE WESTERNER https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/

Marriage isn’t as popular as it once was. In fact, the marriage rate in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in at least 150 years, reports PBS. A new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, may have one explanation as to why: There aren’t enough “economically-attractive” men — ones with a good income and a stable job — for single women to marry. In the study, researchers examined couples in heterosexual marriages from 2008 to 2012 and 2013 to 2017, compiling character profiles (education and income levels) of the husbands. When they analyzed the pool of...

Converting low-energy beams into high-energy emissions is crucial to making laser weapons practical. But it's currently unmanageable. CBGO crystals promise to make that conversion with unparalleled efficiency. But Chinese scientists face the same struggle their American counterparts do in controlling thermal management. There's a global race for better laser crystal technology, a race in which China has invested heavily. =========================================================================================== Laser could become more efficient in the future, thanks to a discovery from Chinese scientists. Through crystals of caesium bismuth germanate (CBGO), an inorganic chemical compound, the scientists believe that they could convert low-energy beams into high-energy emissions with "unparalleled...

Over the Labor Day weekend, Seth Aaron Ator shot and killed seven people. He wounded more than 20 others in his senseless rampage. Police killed him during his attack. Ator was a man marked with mental illness. As they searched his home, police noted that this man was on a downward spiral, which apparently culminated when he was fired from his job the day he committed his heinous crime. As the anti-gun Left mobilized again, many questions remained. How did Ator get a rifle? He failed a previous background check via mental health adjudication. Well, it seems Ator obtained his firearms...

Hackers infecting the computer systems of the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, with ransomware wouldn't settle for anything less that than $5.3 million to decrypt the data. The ransom was too high and they got a big fat nothing in return. ...The infection did not spread to other machines due to Management Information Systems (MIS) staff's response to contain the data encryption process from spreading by disconnecting servers and shutting down workstations on the network. The city tried to negotiate for $400,000, which was in line with payments from other cities hit by ransomware attacks. Creating backups and storing them...

Trying his best to raise the profile of a Democratic presidential campaign consistently polling in the 1-3 percent range, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke has adopted the favorite strategy of 14-year-old’s arguing with their parents: the F-bomb. The O’Rourke campaign recently released a t-shirt that displays the text “This Is F*cked Up” six times followed by “End Gun Violence Now” and “Beto for America.” The quote references a statement O’Rourke made at an appearance in Fairfax Station, Virginia, after hearing of the massacre in Odessa, Texas, that left seven dead and 22 injured. “Not sure how many gunmen. We don’t know how...

Let’s put aside for a moment that the current idea of “separation of Church and state” is not what the Founders (specifically, Thomas Jefferson) intended. I simply want to make an observation. When liberals quote the Bible to support their views, nobody bats an eyelash (aside from conservatives raising charges of hypocrisy). When conservatives quote the Bible to support their views, liberals howl, “Separation of Church and state!” But this has been the pattern for years. Christian faith on the left is praiseworthy. Christian faith on the right is dangerous. Think back to the 1988 presidential elections when both Pat...

A new tank destroyer concept, built for the Polish Army, could become the most effective tank killer in any army. The unnamed vehicle is armed with up to 24 Brimstone anti-tank missiles and can unleash a salvo of tank-hunting missiles, knocking out enemy tank units it can’t actually see.

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Antonin Scalia. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Antonin Scalia was the cornerstone of the constitutional wing of the Supreme Court until his suspicious death in 2015. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares on the bottom half...

Qasim Rashid, an Ahmadi Muslim who is running as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate, is enraged at the dirty tricks of his opponent, Richard Stuart. “My Republican opponent,” fumed Rashid in a video last week, “is launching anti-Muslim, Islamophobic attacks against me questioning my loyalty to the United States and questioning my ties with terrorism, I mean just the most ridiculous, meritless claims that are imaginable.” What did Stuart do to warrant these charges? Why, the racist, bigoted Islamophobe had the temerity to quote Rashid’s own words. Rashid, according to WMAL, “posted a screenshot on Twitter of one...

VIDEO Of all the things that YouTube does that irritates YouTubers the most, one of the worst is the way they shove Legacy Media channels down our throats. It's like they are flooding the zone of the search results on anything that is in the news with Legacy Media at the expense of YouTubers. Sort of like using Legacy Media as a cloaking device to shield YouTubers from each other. The solution to this is to set up a Legacy Media filter in their search function. That way, people who really do want to see Legacy Media coverage can...

A high school in North Carolina is under fire for an assignment entitled "Diversity Inventory" that left students crying and parents outraged. Heritage High School English teacher Melissa Wilson gave out an assignment to her class last week that asked them to categorize themselves, their parents, their doctor, friends, and more by race, class, sexuality, and religion, among other things. (Photo credit NC Values Coalition) Students reported that Wilson made them go stand by a sign on the wall that correlated with their sexuality. One student called a parent during the exercise to express her discomfort with it. Another...

Efforts to prevent homeless people from setting up camp inside BART stations has resulted in a lot more homeless spending their time riding the trains themselves. Today the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the numbers it got through an FOIA request: BART embarked on a “blitz” operation in April in which agency police officers and yellow-vested staff members swarmed downtown San Francisco stations at dawn. It mainly targeted fare-jumpers, but BART also discouraged homeless people from camping in station halls and on stairwells…Combined, these measures led to a sharp drop in transients in downtown San Francisco stations, from 142...

In an article for the Atlantic, “social justice” columnist Jemele Hill advised all black student athletes to leave “white” colleges because of inherent racism.- Snip

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I’m grateful that others had the time and patience to sort through that seven-hour “climate crisis” ratings debacle on CNN this week, because I certainly couldn’t sit through it. One of the key moments, at least in terms of the nation’s future energy policy, came from Elizabeth Warren when she decided to weigh in on America’s nuclear energy capabilities. The consensus among virtually every expert in this field, including scientists who are concerned about carbon emissions and climate change, is that we need more nuclear power (actually, a lot more) not less. And yet there was Warren, vowing to...

Zimbabwe's preening socialist strongman, Robert Mugabe, a man who left his once prosperous country a hellhole, is gone, and his end didn't come soon enough.  He went out as one of the world's worst curses against humanity. Here's the New York Times announcement: Robert Mugabe, the first prime minister and later president of independent Zimbabwe, who traded the mantle of liberator for the armor of a tyrant and presided over the decline of one of Africa's most prosperous lands, died on Friday. He was 95. The death was announced by his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa. "It is with the utmost sadness that I...