Free Republic

After President Biden’s face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva last week, I couldn’t help but think of my trip to Russia in 1993. I was on a congressional delegation visiting Moscow when Boris Yeltsin was president and the West had great hopes for a more open, democratic Russia. I went to see the then-vice president, who was an air force general, in his office. One entire wall of the room was a map of the Soviet Union. Being cheerfully ignorant, I said to him, "Gosh, that’s a map of the Soviet Union." He looked at me and he responded,...

A group of nine moderates is threatening to withhold their votes from Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution later this month, endangering Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s two-track plan to push both a massive infrastructure bill and social spending agenda through the House in the coming weeks. The House Democrats outlined their threat in a letter to Pelosi and obtained by POLITICO on Friday morning. The group has been issuing veiled warnings for weeks — calling on Pelosi to bring the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill up for a vote as soon as it’s ready — but this is the first time the lawmakers...

A Carnival ship that set sail from Texas had 27 COVID-19-positive people aboard Wednesday, the highest number of reported cases on a US ship since the cruise industry opened back up this summer. The Carnival Vista arrived in Belize City with 26 infected crew members and one infected guest, according to the Belize Tourism Board. Officials noted that there were more than 4,000 people on the ship, and 99.98 percent of the crew was vaccinated, along with the vast majority of the passengers. The infected crew members are now in isolation, but “most are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms,”...

Jack Posobiec Flag of United States @JackPosobiec BREAKING: Biden Weighs Vaccine Mandate for Interstate Travel Biden Weighs Vaccine Mandate for Interstate Travel In efforts to further enforce coronavirus rules and regulations, Joe Biden is considering a vaccine mandate for interstate travel. humanevents.com 12:57 PM · Aug 13, 2021

It’s been over 500 days since people were told to make sacrifices to help slow the spread of COVID-19. The self-imposed and state-mandated decrees came at an incalculable cost. Children lost a year of in-person classes, deaths from addiction and despair spiked, small businesses shuttered — with some closing forever. Countless people said their final goodbyes to loved ones over Zoom calls, watching them die alone. As we enter our fourth wave of this virus, government officials and much of the national media tell us there’s no personal sacrifice too great. Except, that is, it comes to migrants at the...

The United Nations refugee agency on Friday called on Afghanistan’s neighbors to keep their borders open to avert a humanitarian disaster as the Taliban continue the offensive to retake the country. “An inability to seek safety may risk innumerable civilian lives. UNHCR stands ready to help national authorities scale up humanitarian responses as needed,” a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees told a briefing in Geneva. A spokesperson for the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, said food shortages in the war-torn country are “quite dire” and worsening, adding that the situation had all the hallmarks...

Move over pumpkin spice-flavored Oreos, Chobani yogurt, and Cheerios, there's a new brand jumping into the sea of endless pumpkin spice-flavored products, and it's something that has many scratching their heads: ramen noodles. That's right, for those who just can't get enough pumpkin spice, Nissin's Cup Noodles brand is releasing pumpkin spice-flavored ramen noodles. In a news release, Nissin stated: There’s a fine line between genius and insanity ... Care to cross it with us? Cup Noodles jumps on the Pumpkin Spice crazy train with a special pumpkin seasoning that’s the perfect blend of sweet, savory and spiced.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday waved off concerns over hospitals exceeding capacity due to COVID-19, saying “we can’t live forever.” During an interview with right-wing network “Real America’s Voice,” Greene claimed that the media and public health officials are over-hyping the number of people that have been hospitalized with COVID-19. “I've talked to local hospitals here in my district in here in my state. Yes, the waiting rooms get full, but guess what? The waiting rooms are full of all kinds of things, not just COVID,” Greene said. “But they're seeing about 30 percent of those numbers being...

We all knew this was coming. The same people who were wrong for over a year about the power of surgical masks — at a very painful cost to our children and society — are now seamlessly pivoting to their new position without ever apologizing for their original mistakes. They now want children to wear the even more cruel N95 masks. The twisted irony is that after causing more discomfort and potential medical harms to children, they will still not provide protection against the virus. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Scott Gottleib, a former FDA administrator under Obama,...

Reduced hydropower output in Iran amid a water scarcity has prompted Tehran to suspend electricity exports to neighboring Iraq, which relies on Iranian power and gas supply, Iraq’s Electricity Minister Adil Kareem was quoted as saying by Iranian Mehr News Agency on Tuesday. Major Iraqi power plants are dependent on Iranian natural gas supply, and Iraq also imports electricity from Iran, as Baghdad’s power generation is not enough to ensure domestic supply, especially with crumbling infrastructure and 110-plus degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Even after the U.S. slapped sanctions on Iran’s energy exports in 2018, Iraq continues to import natural...

In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter — a crystal made from electrons. The idea was simple; proving it wasn’t. Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades to nudge electrons into forming these so-called Wigner crystals, with limited success. In June, however, two independent groups of physicists reported in Nature the most direct experimental observations of Wigner crystals yet. “Wigner crystallization is such an old idea,” said Brian Skinner, a physicist at Ohio State University who was not involved with the work. “To see it so cleanly was really nice.” To make...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” host Erin Burnett pointed out that both White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and former adviser to President Joe Biden’s transition team Dr. Michael Osterholm have made statements about the effectiveness of cloth masks that are similar to the statements on cloth masks that got Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) YouTube account suspended. Burnett began the discussion by stating, “Back in early 2020, obviously before the Delta variant, Dr. Fauci did say in an email, ‘The typical...

Video of a young girl CLEARLY reacting to her nipple being pinched by President Joe Biden in 2015:This girl who is now 14 says "yes" her nipple was indeed pinched by Biden.

The Taliban are advancing across Afghanistan as the US withdraws, but the US military is continuing to conduct airstrikes, often to destroy military equipment captured by the Taliban, NBC News reported Thursday, citing a US defense official. It was first reported in late July that the US military was launching strikes targeting "captured military equipment that the Taliban [were] able to seize from the" Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. Such strikes have continued as the Taliban gains ground. NBC reported that the US military is conducting one to five strikes a day, typically with drones, with most of the...

A bloc of House Democratic moderates is threatening to withhold support for the $3.5 trillion budget resolution until the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill is signed into law, throwing a potential roadblock into congressional leaders’ two-track legislative strategy. Nine Democrats laid out their position yesterday in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), saying they disagreed with her decision to hold off on passing the bipartisan Senate package, H.R. 3684, until that chamber first passes the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package under development. “Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months — until the reconciliation...

Compilation of Mark Dice asking people to support what should be outrageous ideas, and it's depressing that people actually agree with them. As he says, he tried to warn us. Heaven help us.

As hospitals across the country, including in Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi, scramble to meet the rising need, Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses United, the nation's largest nursing union, pointed to a systemic health care issue that predates COVID-19. Similar to public health funding, hospitals follow a pattern of panic and neglect. They pour money into acute problems, like a COVID surge, then disband those efforts when the situation becomes anything less than a crisis. Preparation and prevention are afterthoughts. "There was a failure to plan before the pandemic," Ross said. "There was a failure to listen...

More than one in ten COVID-19 patients in 314 UK hospitals caught the infection in hospital during the first pandemic wave say researchers conducting the world’s largest study of severe COVID-19. . . . They found that at least 11.1% of COVID-19 patients in 314 UK hospitals were infected after admission. The proportion of COVID-19 patients infected in hospital also rose to between 16% and 20% in mid-May 2020, long after the peak of admissions in the first wave.The researchers said: “We estimate between 5,699 and 11,862 patients admitted in the first wave were infected during their stay in hospital....

Too much/not enough: Pulling into a gas station in the 3900 block of Northlake Boulevard, a motorist’s vehicle drew the attention of several employees. In addition to make strange noises, the wounded SUV was missing a tire and riding on the rim. Stopping by a pump, the driver entered the station, paid for some fuel, then when out and pumped it into the vehicle. He then pulled into a parking space and appeared to pass out. Next, for reasons unknown, he regained consciousness, put the car in reverse and ran over the parking block before slamming into a concrete structure....

East Germany, formally known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), wanted to be a paradise for the common folk. It called itself a “workers’ and peasants’ state.” Its anthem, “Risen from Ruins,” brought to mind a phoenix rising gloriously from the ashes of World War II. From cradle to grave, the East German government cared for its citizens, providing childcare, housing, and job assignments. Even now, shops peddling goods from the GDR years dot the former East. They appeal to those afflicted with Ostalgie, nostalgia for life under the bygone socialist regime. But despite the modern, sanitized images of East...