Free Republic

The extent of destruction and death wrought by Germany's recent floods is slowly becoming apparent. Dozens of people have died, with many still reported missing. The disaster has devastated entire towns, washing away residential houses, cars and trees. Natural disasters are nothing new. They occurred long before the advent of the industrial age, when humans began burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Over time, however, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have doubled, raising Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit). A greater frequency and intensity of natural disasters has been the consequence. As vast swaths of western Germany are dealing...

After stemming historic protests across Cuba by shutting down digital communications this week, the island’s beleaguered Communist government is now beefing up a more traditional way of stifling opposition — citizen spies. The rapid-response brigades, which are made up of civilian snitches — neighbors, co-workers and plainclothes cops loyal to the regime — are out in force after protesters demanding food, medicine and freedom took to the streets beginning July 11, according to dissident bloggers on the island. Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez reported an increase in the activity of the brigades, and “a heavy police presence” on the streets of...

There comes a moment in every good gangster movie when all of the villains come together in a remote hideaway to make nefarious plans. If the good guys are smart, this is the moment they swoop in and arrest everyone. In real life America, though, we consistently squander these opportunities, opting instead to sit back and gawk at the villains like a bunch of dazed paparazzi. It’s never too late to change that. ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ The Sun Valley conference is primarily known as a place where tech and media moguls gather to do a little fly fishing and strike...

Donald Trump is fuming after reports of a new book that says current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley believed Trump wanted to stage a coup to stay in power. Two Washington Post journalists, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, in their book, “I Alone Can Fix It,” alleged that Miley believed Trump would attempt to remain in power after the election via a coup. Trump sent a message to his supporters via his Save America Pac in which he called for Miley to be court martialed. “Despite the fact that the 2020 Presidential Election was Rigged...

ROME – Pope Francis’s decision to restrict celebration of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass, effectively rolling back wider permission granted under Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, is being met by predictably mixed reaction from Catholics around the globe, with some praising the move as prophetic.... ....liturgy expert and editor at the New Liturgical Movement blog Gregory DiPippo said that when he heard the news, he was filled with “profound sadness and dismay at the idea that the pope would so cruelly mistreat so many of the faithful.” Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, meanwhile, praised the pope’s decision on Twitter as, “A historic...

There is a slowdown in bank lending since The Fed’s intervention in March 2020. Bank credit has slowed since March 2021 resulting in banks parking money with The Federal Reserve in the form of reverse repos. Loans and leases are experiencing negative growth rates. Residential real estate loans are also experiencing negative growth rates and a corresponding rise in reverse repo usage. Commercial real estate lending remains in positive territory. Commercial and industrial loans? Also experiencing negative growth rates. Clearly, banks are nervous about inflation since lending at fixed-rates in an inflationary environment is bad news. Not to mention fears...

On Monday, June 28th, Fox host Tucker Carlson dropped a bomb mid-show, announcing he’d been approached by a “whistleblower” who told him he was being spied on by the NSA. “The National Security Agency is monitoring our electronic communications,” he said, “and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.” The reaction was swift, mocking, and ferocious. “Carlson is sounding more and more like InfoWars host and notorious conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones,” chirped CNN media analyst Brian Stelter. Vox ripped Carlson as a “serial fabulist” whose claims were “evidence-free.” The Washington Post quipped...

It added that the training “challenges candidates through adversity, always upholding validated, gender-neutral and operationally-relevant standards.” SWCC are experts in covert insertion and extraction, utilizing a unique combination of capabilities with weapons, navigation, radio communication, first aid, engineering, parachuting, and special operations tactics, the statement said.

Studies by Archaeologists from the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) and Wessex Archaeology, suggests that the Anchor Church Caves in Derbyshire, England, was the home of a deposed Anglo-Saxon King.The caves were carved from the Keuper Sandstone outcrop, close to the present-day village of Ingleby, and had previously been thought to have been an 18th century folly...Edmund Simons, a research fellow at the Royal Agricultural University said: “This makes it probably the oldest intact domestic interior in the UK – with doors, floor, roof, windows etc – and, what’s more, it may well have been lived in by a king who...

Facebook is pushing back against the White House's narrative that the social media platform is "killing people." "In private exchanges the Surgeon General has praised our work, including our efforts to inform people about COVID-19. They knew what they were doing. The White House is looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals," a Facebook spokesperson told NBC's Dylan Beyers. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any place on the internet," the spokesperson said. "More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our...

It’s all spilling out so fast this week, there’s no keeping up with it. For Thursday night, I’m resorting to short-ping treatments, mainly so our noble readers have a place to dive in. It’s hard to keep a straight face about the abjectly non-credible tale that will be coming out in full in a few days of a supposed near-coup by former President Trump in his final days in office. To hear the narrators and at least one participant (in quotes; General Mark Milley, USA, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) tell it, the method of staving off the...

The Hyde Amendment failed to make its way into the spending bill which advanced out of the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday. This is the first not to include the amendment, which protects taxpayers from having to fund elective abortions. Hyde has passed every year since 1976 with bipartisan support. The amendment failed 27-32, which all 26 Republican members and Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX) voted in favor of. Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) offered the amendment, which Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), a medical doctor and co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, spoke in support of. Both noted that the amendment...

In 1840, item seven of the Democrats' Party Platform read ... For six consecutive party platforms — from 1840 through 1860 — Democrats used their party platform to promote the institution of slavery.

Did you miss the big Chicago mayoral campaign coming out party for Arne Duncan the other day? Oh, you did? It was all over local TV news. https://wgntv.com/news/chicago-news/peace-march-led-by-st-sabina-pleads-for-action-on-violence/ But you have an excuse for missing it, because it wasn’t billed as a political event. Instead, it was billed as an anti-violence march starring Duncan, basketball buddy of Barack Obama. Much of media went along, offering it up as a non-political issue and if it nudged voters a bit, who’d complain? Yet here you are at johnkassnews.com. So, I’m going to assume that you, like me, don’t like being herded by...

Illinois doesn’t try that hard to attract businesses and workers. Its 9.5% corporate tax rate is the fifth highest in the country. Its property taxes are twice as high as those of its neighbors. And unlike most states in the Midwest, it doesn’t have a right-to-work law giving workers the choice not to join a union. Illinois does have one thing going for it: cheap and reliable electricity. The state would lose that too under an 800-page climate bill Democrats in Springfield are contriving to jam through the statehouse. “The proposed energy legislation being circulated will be the largest rate...

It makes me laugh to think of establishment Dems reading her tweet last night and groaning, knowing how it’ll be used against them in Florida. That was the site of their biggest disappointment last November with Biden losing decisively in a state that was supposed to be a toss-up and two House seats flipping from blue to red. Party centrists had a ready explanation for that in the aftermath: The Bernie wing of the party was seen as too soft on socialism, which alienated Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade. So here comes the most famous young member of the Bernie wing in...

The imminent fall of Afghanistan is more than a national disaster. It is not just that the gains made in the past two decades, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, look certain to be reversed as the Taliban advances. The Taliban’s victory is also al-Qaeda’s victory, and it has global implications. Even before the US military completes the final steps of its troop withdrawal, the Taliban are surging. They are now reported to control 212 districts – more than half of Afghanistan’s 407 districts. This is triple the territory it controlled on May...

“No Longer Aliens” (Ephesians 2:11-22) Aliens are not very popular. I’m not talking about aliens from outer space. I’m talking about aliens who are illegal immigrants, people who come in as outsiders. Often there is hostility between the aliens and the people who’ve been there their whole lives. They feel like their territory is being invaded. Foreigners, strangers, outsiders are seen as a threat. In whatever the culture, throughout history, aliens generally have been unwelcome. Well, that was what the situation was like at the time of the New Testament. The insiders were the Jews, God’s chosen people. The outsiders,...

I knew from the beginning that the “Windham Audit” was a SHAM. Four letters explain why: F-I-T-N. As in First-In-The-Nation presidential-primary. A lot of important, powerful people make a lot of money from the First-In-The-Nation presidential-primary. And so would lose a lot of money if New Hampshire lost its F-I-T-N status, which would have been a real possibility with a real audit … because everyone with a functioning brain knows, even if most will not say it, that Biden did NOT get 400,00+ legal votes in New Hampshire (an increase of approximately 400,000 over what he tallied in the primary)....

Biden administration officials are divided over the origin of the coronavirus, but an increasing number now believe that it could have leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to a report. The once-derided lab-leak theory is now being seriously considered by senior administration officials even as most experts on coronaviruses maintain that the virus had its origins in nature, jumping from animals to humans, according to a CNN report Friday. On Thursday, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said it was “premature” to dismiss the theory that the virus escaped from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology and...