Free Republic

How many satellites is overkill?

2008 Video but always a classic: "Deep in the woods of north carolina, an eco group Earth First.." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4

A Reuters reporter and photographer spent several hours traveling under the city to talk to those with nowhere else to go. Afraid of the coronavirus in the shelters, many are sleeping on ghost trains and on platforms abandoned by almost everyone else during the lockdown. The lights still scream for attention, but on this night Times Square has the feel of an abandoned Hollywood film set. Gone are the hordes of tourists shooting selfies with Elmo and Wonder Woman. Instead, a lone SUV glides by and a passenger’s phone glows as she records the scene from the safety of the...

We are Americans. We face the enemy, overcome fear and embrace the opportunity to better our lives for ourselves and future generations. The Revolutionary War saw the deaths of 25,000 American revoltionaries. 1 in 20 able bodied white free males living in America died during the war. We won, the country was born. We had the challenge of conquering the West. The Oregon Trail alone realized 20,000 deaths (10 buried every mile). Knowing the risks, facing fear, they were not ordered to stay home. Brave Americans traveled west. They won. America was expanded. In WWI, 120,000 Americans died facing the...

The anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine has been working in COVID-19 patients, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie said on Wednesday. Wilkie’s comments come after a study looking at the effects of the drug in 368 patients in Veterans Health Administration hospitals found no evidence the drug is effective against COVID-19, a new disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Responding to the results during an appearance on MSNBC, Wilkie said, “That’s just an observational study. It’s not a clinical study. It was done on a small number of veterans; sadly, those of whom were in the last stages of...

The COVID-19 outbreak has made a lot of things uncertain. Americans don't know the next time they'll see toilet paper in a grocery store, let alone whether or not they'll stay healthy or have a job in a week. But even amid the chaos, Americans don't have to worry about fueling their vehicles or powering their homes. The U.S. energy industry has what it takes to weather a crisis of this magnitude, and has already taken steps to secure the nation's energy supply during the pandemic. Unlike other major industries, the energy sector always prepares for disaster. It has no...

Vortex’s entry to the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Fire Control (NGSW-FC) program is a 1-8x first focal plane optic with an integrated rangefinder and overlaid display. (Photos: Vortex) Wisconsin-based Vortex Optics announced Monday they have entered into an agreement with the U.S. Army an agreement to deliver an optic for evaluation as a component of the service’s Next Generation Squad Weapon. The contract between the Pentagon and Vortex is an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement, an award type traditionally used to fund innovative prototype procurement and development of forward-looking technology. Vortex said in a statement they will provide the Army with...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden won the support of two of his party’s most prominent climate change campaigners, including former presidential candidate Al Gore, on Wednesday. The endorsements of Gore and Washington state Governor Jay Inslee came as Biden seeks credibility with liberal voters he is courting as he tries to unify Democrats ahead of the Nov. 3 election against Republican President Donald Trump. “I am proud to endorse my friend Joe Biden for President,” said Gore on Twitter.

Behold the Joe Biden from the alternate reality! He's coherently aware of all that is happening now and in the future as he confronts potential problems with energetic alertness. This is how Mika Brzezinski on Monday portrayed a Joe Biden almost no one else is familiar with on Monday's Morning Joe. Of course, Mika needs to do this in order to paint a picture of President Donald Trump being slow to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. And apparently Mika believes a great way to do this is to portray a bold Joe Biden possessed of supercharged coherency.

Today is Earth Day, a day that was founded in part by a murderer known as the "Unicorn Killer" (Ira Einhorn). Wikipedia, along with several other sources I've found, has written him out of the history--a couple sources just dusted him to the side. He committed homicide against his girlfriend, too gruesome for me to detail. Long live Earth Day.

House lawmakers were returning to Washington Wednesday amid a highly contagious pandemic to vote tomorrow on the Senate-passed $484 billion interim relief package that replenishes a small business loan program and also boosts funding to hospitals and testing, as Democrats demanded. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted that success in an interview Wednesday morning, and in a moment self-reflection, said she probably should be speaking out more strongly with President Donald Trump moving forward. "We must start to insist on the truth with the president. This is what, the conclusion I came to on Easter Sunday. I was saying, other people...

OK, maybe that's not fair. It took a bit of looking, but I was able to find a few articles where the MSM showed genuine sympathy for Americans whose lives have been upended by the The Kung Flu Virus and the Boogy-Wuhan Flu. First, we go to NBC:If the government-mandated shutdown continues through this week – and there is no end in sight – Friday will mark the second paycheck missed by affected workers, whose household budgets have been completely upended.  An estimated 800,000 employees have been caught in the political crossfire of the shutdown, now in its fifth...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite pockets of attention-grabbing protests, a new survey finds Americans remain overwhelmingly in favor of stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. A majority say it won’t be safe to lift such restrictions anytime soon, even as a handful of governors announce plans to ease within days the public health efforts that have upended daily life and roiled the global economy. The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that more than a month after schoolyards fell silent, restaurant tables and bar stools emptied, and waves from a...

Did you hear that President Trump recently tweeted that Mexicans were “Plague Spreaders”? Isn’t it shocking that Mike Pence, in referring to women in the workforce said, “We need a list of the virus-spreaders & the virus-adjacent”? Can you believe that Rush Limbaugh actually referred to non-Christians as members of a “Death Cult”? Yeah, me neither. Because they didn’t. However, a professor at Kansas State University recently said those exact things about Republicans when he wrote, “Has anyone developed an app to track Republicans & other plague-spreaders?” He also referred to local Republicans as, “Local branch of death cult, aka...

Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar of the history of ancient Greek warfare, he is a frequent writer and commentator, and a 4th generation farmer in California's central valley. At Professor Hanson's chair as the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, his focus is classics and military history. His podcast, updated several times per month, is The Classicist | Hoover Institution. Eric Metaxas is an Evangelical Christian with a cordial relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church. His show is at MetaxasTalk.com.

THIS POST IS CERTIFIED COVID-19 FREE Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) was a well-known portraitist during the Italian Renaissance, studying with a variety of artists from the age of 14. Upon receipt of a drawing she made for him, Michelangelo informally tutored her for a couple of years. A young Van Dyck visited her the year before her death at the age of 93, and wrote that she had taught him more than all of his teachers had up till then. Lost to history in the centuries since her death, the quality of her work is becoming known again. Music is from...

Yet another highly-predictable outcome. – Late Tuesday, a panel of “experts” – the same kind of “experts” who assured us just a month ago that the Wuhan Virus would kill 2 million Americans – announced their disapproval for hydroxychloroquine in combination with axithromycin as a treatment for the Wuhan Virus. Here’s an excerpt from an NPR report on the matter: A panel of experts convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommends against doctors using a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19 patients because of potential toxicities. “The combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin...

The Senate on Tuesday passed a $484 billion package to bolster small businesses and hospitals ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic and expand testing for Covid-19. After the unanimous Senate vote, the bill heads to the House, which aims to approve it by Thursday. The measure injects another $310 billion into a key loan program designed to keep employees on small company payrolls. The initial $350 billion in the so-called Paycheck Protection Program, created as part of the $2 trillion rescue package passed last month, dried up last week. It is unclear how many firms have actually received the money.

WASHINGTON - The financial conditions of the government’s two biggest benefits programs remain shaky, with Medicare projected to become insolvent in six years and Social Security on track to no longer be able to pay full benefits starting in 2035. And that’s without accounting for the impact of the coronavirus, which is sure to impose further pressure on the two programs. For Social Security, the projected 2035 date for exhausting the trust fund reserves means that it would be able to pay only 79% of benefits at that time. The projected timetables, which remained unchanged from last year’s estimates, were...

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau promised a ban on “assault-style weapons,” following the hours-long shooting spree that lasted Saturday night through Sunday morning and left at least 18 dead in Nova Scotia. Buzzfeed reported that the attacker, Gabriel Wortman, was allegedly “looking for a former significant other” when the killing spree began. He used “a replica police vehicle and what looked like a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform to pull over random drivers and execute them on the spot.” The Press Democrat reported that authorities have yet to confirm that “assault-style weapons” were used in the attack, but Trudeau indicated he...