Free Republic

<p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) – Country music singer Trisha Yearwood as contracted COVID-19, according to a press release.</p><p>Yearwood and husband Garth Brooks were quarantining at home after a member of their team recently tested positive for COVID-19. Subsequent tests they’ve had recently revealed Yearwood tested positive, while Brooks remains negative.</p>

....One doesn’t have to have Covid in order to have a life that’s meaningful and to suffer a death that’s mournful. Yet most of the public, media, and governments have reacted to Covid as if the only deaths that matter are Covid deaths – as if the only lives that matter are the lives of people with Covid – as if the only risk that matters and, hence, the only risk worth reducing is the risk of suffering from Covid. This lack of proportion – this sudden ignorance that our lives are inescapably filled with many different risks that must...

2-part panel discussion about the tragedy of infanticide in America. (Gene Bailey, Abby Johnson, Senator Rapert, Mario Murillo and Dutch Sheets) An Inside Job? Part 1An Inside Job? Part 2

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Proverbs 25:11 KJV).

Salesforce has shut down the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) ability to send emails through their platform. Salesforce.com is a Silicon Valley-based giant in the enterprise software space with over $13 billion in revenue. The company was founded by Marc Benioff in 1999, who acquired Time Magazine in 2018. In a just-published Project Veritas video, an undercover journalist leaked a recording of the company’s top executives during a video teleconference discussing their decision to stop the RNC’s emails and what they see as their role in “policing free speech”. By the way, Salesforce shut down Project Veritas, too. They cite their...

A letter sent Tuesday from members of Congress to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm is demanding a “prompt and thorough investigation” into the National Institutes of Health’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party-run Wuhan Institute of Virology. The 28 congressional signers, led by Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., write: "The NIH, unfortunately, has played a major role in supporting [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] and this treacherous research and the promotion of spurious claims dismissing the NIH-funded lab’s potential role in the COVID-19 pandemic." The Wuhan Institute of Virology is suspected by experts, including...

COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria (CQV) will undertake a pilot scheme of a robot that captures both audio and video at one of its hotel in coming weeks as part of a wide-ranging review of the state’s troubled hotel quarantine system. Security company Monjon, who first offered a similar solution to Victorian officials in September, will provide the technology that was successfully used in the hotel quarantine program for the US Open. There have been multiple leakages out of hotel quarantine despite Premier Daniel Andrews boasting Victoria has the strictest regime in place. The state was plunged into its third lockdown about...

Thank you all for all that you are doing Could you please do one more thing and read the following proposal? I originally researched it and wrote it back in 2009. Our Constitution has already been corrupted to the point where we will need to sustain the type of activities in which you and so many others are valiantly engaged. What it looks like to me is that many of our conservative leaders (not you, or any of the grassroots members/leaders, by the way) are having more fun playing the game and so enjoy having such a broad and robust...

South Dakota’s attorney general — who said he hit a deer after fatally striking a pedestrian last year — allegedly had the victim’s glasses inside his car, according to newly-released interviews. The state’s Department of Public Safety on Tuesday released recordings of investigators questioning Jason Ravnsborg about the Sept. 12 crash that left 55-year-old Joseph Boever dead. The footage shows how, during a Sept. 14 interview, detectives told Ravnsborg that they had discovered a pair of broken glasses on the front passenger floorboard of his vehicle. During a second sit-down on Sept. 30, interviewers asked about the glasses again, telling...

The Carter Center, set up by former President Jimmy Carter, is being asked to explain events it has held "which seem to promote Chinese Communist Party propaganda."

Folk singer Peter Yarrow has been accused in a new lawsuit of raping an underage girl in a Manhattan hotel room in 1969. The accusations were lodged against Yarrow, the founding member of legendary ’60s trio Peter, Paul and Mary, in a Wednesday Manhattan Supreme Court suit that was brought under the Child Victims Act. Before the alleged rape, Yarrow met his accuser, who was a fan of his music, several times at his band’s performances, the suit says. He then “took an interest in her,” acting what in what the minor thought was “paternal way,” according to the suit.

...Besides the caterers who had no events, think of the venues that hosted weddings and conventions that have been idled for a year, then add in the rental equipment companies that brought the linens, glassware, and china. They can't all have survived. And then there are the small photographers, florists, videographers, and event planners. The wholesale food suppliers may have fared a bit better, but from what I can see, a lot of them are probably gone, too. That's just one example. There are more, across every aspect of our economy. There is a depth of field in each market...

The Oklahoman reports that Lawrence Paul Anderson has been arrested for the deaths of three people and the assault on another. According to police, Anderson killed his neighbor on February 9, then went to his home and killed his uncle and 4-year-old niece (pictured right). He allegedly stabbed his aunt in both eyes but she survived. ... The incident has caused outrage among the community since Anderson is a convicted felon who was released from prison after the governor commuted his sentence to nine years. In 2017, he was sentenced to serve 20 years behind bars for drugs and gun...

More adult Americans are identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. A Gallup poll found that 5.6% of adults described themselves as LGBT in 2020, up from 4.5% in 2017.

...“While masks are widely available in many different shapes and sizes, many low-income Americans still lack affordable access to this basic protection,” Zients argued. The initiative will involve “more than 25 million” “well-fitting cloth masks available in children’s and adult sizes” at “more than 1,300 community health centers and at 60,000 food pantries nationwide.” Medical advice on masks has vacillated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC has recommended different kinds of masks. In this context, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond asked a rather important question. “Just lastly on the question of the mask shipments, I’m wondering how much it is costing the...

“‘Follow Me’: The Call to Discipleship” (Mark 1:14-20) Today we begin a series of four messages based on the four “Follow me” sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. “Follow me”: In saying those words, Jesus was calling people back then to be his disciples. “Follow me”: Jesus is still saying those words to us today. He is calling us to be his disciples. So hear him now, as Jesus says to each one of us: “Follow Me.” Our first entry in this midweek series has to do precisely with “The Call to Discipleship.” We hear it in our...

Virginia — whose state capital Richmond was once the capital of the Confederacy — is about to become the first state in the South to declare racism a public health crisis. The state Senate approved the declaration Tuesday and sent it to Gov. Ralph Northam — who’s expected to sign it. It had previously passed the House of Delegates on an almost party-line vote, with Democrats voting overwhelmingly in favor. The American Public Health Association says 145 cities and counties in 27 states have declared racism a public health issue — up from just seven in 2019. Virginia lawmakers also...

...Like it or not, we live in a police state, controlled by an increasingly authoritarian regime with near-total electronic surveillance. The national security apparatus views conservatives and free-thinkers as domestic terrorists, and there are now more military deployed in our nation’s capital than in war zones overseas. If America were any other country, it would be considered a non-permissive environment—not a free country. The pundit class recommends midterm elections and unifying the GOP as remedies, but they ignore the real elephant in the room—representative government is not representing us. While conservative and independent voices are censored and banned from the...

Health chiefs in Belgium are concerned that 15 million fabric masks given to pharmacists may be toxic and cause pneumonia. According to a preliminary report carried out by Sciensano, the Belgian Institute for Public Health, the masks contain nanoparticles of silver and titanium dioxide that when inhaled could damage the respiratory tract. The face masks were made in Asia by Luxembourg-based company Avrox.

The “Flynn Effect” is the phenomenon identified by intelligence researcher James Flynn. He found that average intelligence quotients, or IQ’s, as measured by standardized tests were steadily increasing through the course of the 20th century. That sounds quite natural because, after all, each generation gets better nurturing. They get better health, improved medical care, more nutritious food and greater schooling. But IQ is supposed to be mainly about nature, not nurture. Nurturing can certainly affect a person’s well-being, but in theory it doesn’t change a person’s IQ much (except of course when the nurturing is so bad that it produces...