Free Republic

It’s hard to put a number on human suffering that isn’t arbitrary, but let’s say that China should pay $5 million for every life it may have extinguished. If the death toll rises from 4.3 to 7 million before the pandemic ends, that would put Beijing on the hook for $35 trillion in damages. While expensive, that number is just over twice China’s annual GDP. It is important for the world to place a high cost on China allegedly did, if for no other reason than to discourage it from happening again. Of course, Beijing will not pay—it never pays...

Artist’s impression of the fearsome Thapunngaka shawi. Credit: Adobe stock ============================================================================================================= Australia’s largest flying reptile has been uncovered, a pterosaur with an estimated seven-meter wingspan that soared like a dragon above the ancient, vast inland sea once covering much of outback Queensland. University of Queensland PhD candidate Tim Richards, from the Dinosaur Lab in UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, led a research team that analyzed a fossil of the creature’s jaw, discovered on Wanamara Country, near Richmond in North West Queensland. “It’s the closest thing we have to a real life dragon,” Mr. Richards said. “The new pterosaur, which we...

Do masks reduce Covid transmission in children? Believe it or not, we could find only a single retrospective study on the question, and its results were inconclusive. Yet two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sternly decreed that 56 million U.S. children and adolescents, vaccinated or not, should cover their faces regardless of the prevalence of infection in their community. Authorities in many places took the cue to impose mandates in schools and elsewhere, on the theory that masks can’t do any harm. That isn’t true. Some children are fine wearing a mask, but others struggle. Those...

The refined and moral Left places itself on a pedestal, above the fray—and as such it has a natural attraction to those in its midst who do not. By any empirical measure, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has proven utterly disingenuous, and far more so than average politicians. Unlike other political mediocrities, his inanities have led to roughly 13,000 unnecessary deaths or more, when he did not fully utilize the federal offer of a hospital ship and makeshift care facilities for COVID-19 patients. Instead, Cuomo sought to make rooms in New York hospitals available largely by transferring or redirecting elderly...

Everything about Wall Drug, arguably the most iconic and long-lasting drug store in America, exemplifies a doggedness. It took persistence not only to survive but also thrive against insurmountable odds in a place few thought a small business had any business starting an enterprise in the first place. In 1931, when Ted Hustead and his wife Dorothy were looking for a place to open a drug store, he told the local paper years later he picked the thinly populated town of Wall because the local doctor told them he’d give them all his prescriptions. Despite all their hard work, though,...

... The pro-Scott super PAC, Opportunity Matters Fund, has drawn support from conservative donors like Richard Gaby, who has bankrolled the likes of former President Donald Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Scott has also received backing from the party’s mainstream givers, like New York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, a financier of gay rights initiatives who is slated to host a fundraiser bolstering Scott later this year. .... Scott’s donor outreach has taken him to financial centers including Texas, where this spring he attended an event organized by former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.

Life with type 1 diabetes is a juggling act of diet, exercise, and insulin therapy to maintain normal blood sugar levels. While there's no shortage of solutions in the works for trying to make diabetics' lives easier, a promising new approach focuses on the insulin itself. Michael Weiss, a biochemist from the School of Medicine at Indiana University in the US, and colleagues have gone back to the drawing board on the insulin molecule, tweaking the structure to respond to the presence of a simple carbohydrate, with the aim of reconnecting the activation of insulin with internal levels of blood...

Alarming UN report blamed human activity for ‘unprecedented’ changes to the climate. Humanity will experience more extreme weather in the coming years and it will suffer the consequences of rising sea levels and melting Arctic ice, scientists working from across the globe said in a crucial UN climate report. The alarming report by a UN scientific panel, released on Monday, called changes to the climate “unprecedented”, added that it is “unequivocal” that humans are to blame, and laid out the case for drastic cuts to emissions in order to hold the global temperature to under the limits set by the...

The AMOC, which contains the Gulf Stream, is currently at its weakest state in over 1,000 years, and new evidence has indicated that it could already be nearing complete shutdown. Climate scientists have detected early warning signs that the Gulf Stream is in a state of collapse, indicating that it may have already been losing stability over the last century, which could lead to severe consequences for the climate, a new study reported. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a major Atlantic ocean current, to which the Gulf Stream belongs, and at the top of the ocean it transports...

What we now know as the Boston Tea party occurred on December 16, 1773, in Boston Massachusetts. Colonists boarded three merchant vessels in the city’s harbor and dumped a total of 342 chests of tea into the water. The incident has long been remembered as one of the key steps on the road to the American Revolution and an act of defiance against the British crown. It might better be categorized as a demonstration directed at an illegal combination on the part of the government of Great Britain and the British East India Company. SNIP Sort of like forcing...

Singer John Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, were guests at Barack Obama’s big maskless birthday party on Saturday in Martha’s Vineyard: Guests including Chrissy Teigen and her husband John Legend leave Barack Obama's 60th birthday EARLY https://t.co/ZyoDjV6jPc — Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) August 8, 2021 And we have yet to see a single masked guest anywhere in that poorly ventilated tent: Via https://t.co/QG9S7POklr, Obama and guests dancing maskless in the poorly ventilated tent. pic.twitter.com/LZG6wCs4T4 — Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) August 8, 2021 This would be the same John Legend who on August 2 said being “unmasked at a large indoor...

Biden Envoy Threatens Brazil Not To Question Electronic Vote Joe Biden’s diplomats have attempted to influence the internal affairs of Brazil ahead of upcoming elections in the country. On Saturday, newspaper Folha Di Sao Paulo reported U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan urged President Jair Bolsonaro not to question the integrity of electronic voting systems. Sullivan delivered this message ahead of 2022 elections in Brazil. Bolsonaro, who has been an ally of President Trump, said electronic voting systems may have been manipulated to alter election outcomes. Bolsonaro said paper ballots must be returned to ensure election integrity. “I want elections...

Too many parents complain that the Clark County School Board view Parents as an obstacle to their radical agenda. But Nevada schools have been ranked last in the country for the last 30 years, even though the schools are getting billions of dollars more now than they got 30 years ago. Parents haven’t failed our kids. The Clark County School Board has failed our kids. The Clark County school board has failed thousands of black children who’ve ended up stuck in poverty, in prison or dead. The Clark County School Board has failed to make the safety of our kids...

One-in-five Americans say they have lost friendships over disagreements on the Chinese coronavirus, a daily YouGov survey updated Friday found. The daily question surveyed 5,219 U.S. adults on August 5 and asked, “Have you lost any friendships because of differences in opinion related to the COVID-19 pandemic?” Twenty percent of respondents said they have, 68 percent said they have not, and 11 percent indicated they remain unsure. When broken down by party lines, nearly one-quarter of Democrats, 24 percent, said they have lost friendships, compared to 15 percent of Republicans. The survey comes as politicians begin to alter their rhetoric...

Workers at one of the world’s largest call center companies said additional monitoring would violate the privacy of their families in their home.. Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation’s largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found. Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued...

Like many other farmers and ranchers, Tennessean Mike Brundige is worried a proposed change in tax policy will keep him from passing the family’s farmland on to his children and grandchildren. Brundige farms with his two sons in Weakley County, in the northwestern part of the state. They represent the fourth and fifth generation, respectively, to farm that land. Brundige is counting on there being many more generations to follow. “Our main goal is to keep the land in the family in hopes that it will continue to prosper and grow enough that any other future family members would have...

Belarus preserved its economy by abandoning the idea of a curfew amid the pandemic, President Alexander Lukashenko said on Monday. "We didn’t go crazy and didn’t impose a curfew as was demanded of us," he said. Due to this, Lukashenko believes, it was possible to maintain the pace of economic development. "The foundation of what is happening in the economy in the first half of the year was laid when we did not stop the economy, when we did not force people into four walls, when we developed a clear approach to treating people: the outpatient stage, the clinical stage,...

“‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth’” (Matthew 6:19). A true believer is not to hoard earthly possessions. You may remember this old adage: “The miser says coins are flat that they may rest in stacks; the spendthrift says they are round that they may roll.” In Matthew 6:9 Jesus is specifically talking about the miser. The Greek verb translated “lay up” is thesaurizete, from which we get the word thesaurus—a treasury of words. Jesus is using a play on words by saying, “Do not treasure up treasures for yourselves.” The context of the passage shows that He...

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Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system. Child exploitation is a serious problem, and Apple isn't the first tech company to bend its privacy-protective stance in an attempt to combat it. But that choice will come at a high price for overall user privacy. Apple can explain at length how its technical implementation will preserve privacy and...