Free Republic

With the recall of California's Gavin Newsom looming, and with Bruce (AKA Caitlyn) Jenner shaping up to be the most popular "Republican" on the ballot, Larry Elder decided that a grown-up needed to step in the save the state. A successful lawyer and TV and radio personality who was raised in Los Angeles and has been open for years about his conservative politics, Elder instantly shot to the top of the charts for Republicans. No wonder, then, that the California secretary of state used an easily remediable error in his campaign filings to kick Elder off the ballot.

There is a lot of attention being paid to continuously updating servers to patch security vulnerabilities on Linux servers running in data centers – a basic step underpinning technology infrastructure in every industry. Yet, staff resources to deal with maintaining servers are not sufficient to meet the workload, said 55% of respondents in a worldwide survey by CloudLinux. Dealing with insufficient staff resources with automationThe survey finds 76% are deploying automated patching procedures and that live patching to fix vulnerabilities is commonly used (47%) to avoid downtime that is normally associated with patching. This is not surprising given the volume...

Scientists who are skeptical of chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci’s proclamations about the coronavirus pandemic don’t want to go public with their concerns for fear it will affect their funding, Sen. Rand Paul claimed Tuesday. “He’s been there for 40 years, probably 39 years too long, but he controls all the funding, so people are deathly afraid of him,” Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, told “Fox News Primetime” of Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. “I get letters from scientists all the time. You can find them. They’re very...

BOSTON — Massachusetts public health officials reported 716 new COVID-19 breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated individuals in the past week, data from the Department of Public Health shows. A breakthrough case is when an individual tests positive for COVID-19 after they've been fully vaccinated against the disease. Advertisement Numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health show there have been 5,166 cases of COVID-19 in fully vaccinated individuals as of July 17, a significant increase from the 4,450 reported one week earlier. As of Tuesday, the DPH reported 1,649 new positive COVID-19 cases between July 10 and July 16. When...

1. Some ponderables: Do twins ever realize that one of them is unplanned? What if my dog only brings back my ball because he thinks I like throwing it? If poison expires, is it more poisonous or is it no longer poisonous? Which letter is silent in the word "Scent," the S or the C? Why is the letter W, in English, called double U? Shouldn't it be called double V? Maybe oxygen is slowly killing you and it just takes 75-100 years to fully work. Every time you clean something, you just make something else dirty. The word "swims"...

Vitamin C is a key ingredient for immune cell function. Credit: La Jolla Institute for Immunology ================================================================================= Harnessing the combined power of Vitamin C and TET proteins may give scientists a leg up in treating autoimmune diseases. You can’t make a banana split without bananas. And you can’t generate stable regulatory T cells without Vitamin C or enzymes called TET proteins, it appears. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) help control inflammation and autoimmunity in the body. Tregs are so important, in fact, that scientists are working to generate stable induced Tregs (iTregs) in vitro for use as treatments for autoimmune diseases...

A third state went into lockdown on Tuesday. Stay-at-home orders are now in place in South Australia, Victoria and parts of New South Wales. Many people have expressed frustration at being back in highly policed lockdowns 18 months into the pandemic. And re-openings in the UK and the US have put pressure on the government. Fewer than 14% of people are vaccinated - the worst rating among OECD nations. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been heavily criticised over the slow vaccination rate, but has resisted calls to apologise. "No country has got their pandemic response 100%," he told reporters on...

I’m on the first big cruise ship to sail to Alaska in nearly 2 years. As I look around, I count just two other passengers on the ground level of the room. A few more are in the balcony spaces above. Nearly all the clusters of chairs that fill the Centrum are unoccupied. Last night, as I was dining at the ship’s Italian eatery, Giovanni’s Table, I noticed at one point that the entire staff was attending just to my table and one other table that was occupied. A Royal Caribbean executive this week told me that there are about...

On Monday afternoon, MSNBC provided global warming alarmist and Penn State University professor Michael Mann his latest forum to blame fossil fuels for extreme weather as fill-in host Chris Jansing hosted a discussion during the 3:00 p.m. Eastern hour about recent wildfires in the West and flooding in Germany. After correspondent Jake Ward concluded a report by claiming that "the effects of climate change" are "amplifying this natural fire cycle," Jansing brought in Mann and talked about her own reaction to seeing the floods in Germany: "It really hit me as we were seeing these first flood waters come into...

Francis Won’t Abolish ‘Hindu Rite’ EucharistVatican-approved liturgy using Sanskrit fuels caste divisions in IndiaBENGALURU, India (ChurchMilitant.com) - Pope Francis isn't likely to abrogate the Vatican-approved "Indian rite" Mass even though it uses Sanskrit, has intensified caste divisions among Catholics, and sparked discord between Hindus and Catholics, Church Militant has learned. Indian Catholics are asking if Francis will cancel the syncretic Hinduized liturgy after the pontiff issued his motu proprio Traditionis Custodes imposing draconian restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) — blaming it for triggering division in the Church. Seminarians in Austria participate in a "Hindu rite" Mass

A remarkable situation is evident right now. Fires over the western U.S. are producing a dense veil of smoke that moved across the continent and then descended over the East Coast. And there is a great irony in all this: most of the West Coast has excellent air quality while the air is unhealthy over the northeast U.S. To illustrate this strange situation, here is the latest AIRNOW air quality map showing the air quality based on PM2.5, small particles that can move deep into your lungs. ( I want to acknowledge UW Bothell professor Dan Jaffe, who brought this...

I tried. Lord knows I tried. I tried to believe Anthony Fauci. As a member of the medical community, I wanted to believe Anthony Fauci but his inconsistencies started aggravating me. Things he said just weren't holding water. Eventually the posturing and lies were too much. I was irritated with his support of WHO head Tedros who assured us in January 2020 that COVID was not transmissible person to person. Tedros just swallowed what China told him and it cost an untold number of lives as nations were not able to take appropriate action. Let's not forget that somehow Fauci...

The Biden administration promoted a handbook urging teachers to 'disrupt Whiteness and other forms of oppression' in their Department of Education guidance on reopening schools, it has been revealed. The government document published this year linked to the Abolitionist Teaching Network's 'Guide for Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning' in a section describing how schools are a 'microcosm of society' and conversations essential to 'race and emotional learning' should be 'anchor tenets' in schools. The Department of Education handbook on how to welcome children back to classrooms following COVID states that schools have a share of $122 billion...

A fresh wave of pandemic lockdowns like the ones that crippled the country last year loom on the horizon if people don’t wise up and get vaccinated against COVID-19, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned. “These shots need to get in everybody’s arms as rapidly as possible or we´re going to be back in a situation in the fall that we don’t yearn for — that we went through last year,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said at a news conference Tuesday, adding, “This is not complicated.” Asked about comments from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox alleging that conservative pundits are killing people with...

One of the natural laws in Philadelphia seems to be that WHYY CEO Bill Marrazzo’s salary becomes a talking point at least once a decade. In 2007, an anonymous group of WHYY staffers called on Marrazzo (salary then: $430,786) to resign over, among other things, the pay disparity between him and everyone else. In 2017, Philly Mag covered Marrazzo (salary: $842,832) and his $139,000 pay bump from the year before. And now, Marrazzo (salary: $740,009, --SNIP--- When WHYY staffers ask for raises, though, they say they’re often told that making less money is part of what it means to work...

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Tuesday the resignation of its top administrator for "possible improper behavior" after an outlet linked Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill's phone activity to gay bars and the LGBTQ dating app Grindr.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- Governor JB Pritzker kicked his re-election bid into full gear Tuesday. He spoke with ABC7 Political Reporter Craig Wall in a one-on-one interview about his record and why he wants another term. "You know, when I ran for governor four years ago, I wanted to tackle the big challenges facing our state, and of course, put Springfield back on the side of working families," Pritzker said. "So I'm running for reelection because there's so much more that we can do to help Illinoisans reach their full potential."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that a climate jobs proposal called the Civilian Climate Corps will be part of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that Senate Democrats plan to pass. The move reflects the high priority many Democratic activists place on climate change measures, even as businesses raise concerns about the financial cost of conversion to non-fossil fuels. The furthest-left lawmakers, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, have long pushed for the “Green New Deal,” which calls on the federal government to wean the United States from fossil fuels and curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...

Bacteriophages on a bacterium. (Graham Beards/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0) ================================================================================= Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms. These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the...

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wanted former President Donald Trump to go on a "thank you" tour of the nation during the 2020 presidential campaign, according to a new book released on Tuesday. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker make the claim in their book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year. Christie, a Republican who led New Jersey from 2010 to 2018, was a close ally of Trump during his first presidential campaign and his time in the White House, endorsing him in February, 2016.