Free Republic

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The U.S. government appears to have a closer relationship with the Taliban than with its Afghan and NATO allies. The military withdrew from Bagram Airfield in the dead of night “without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left.” The allies were not consulted when the US withdrew from forward military bases or withdrew from Bagram Airfield. Apparently, NATO allies were not informed about the closure of the U.S. embassy. This was only revealed when "German diplomats on their way to work noticed the US had withdrawn the forces to...

With an assist from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and H. G. Wells.On Thursday night, Joe Biden delivered himself of brief remarks about the slaughter perpetrated earlier that day by Islamic terrorists at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. At least 170 people were murdered, including 14 U.S. servicemen. Many more were injured. The commentator Scott Johnson spoke for most candid observers, I believe, when he wrote at Power Line that the president’s remarks were “pathetic and stupid. He gives human form to our humiliation. He embodies it. Anyone can see that.”That is correct. And I think Fox News reporter Peter Doocy raised a...

Michael Gove stunned clubbers who spotted him raving in a suit on the dance floor of an Aberdeen nightspot. The Conservative Cabinet minister's arms flailed wildly along to heavy techno beats in the surprising clip filmed by a fellow clubber last night. It’s thought the 54-year-old Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who grew up in Aberdeen, was on a summer trip to see family when he turned up at O’Neill’s at 1.15am. After last orders were called, punters urged a suited, solo Gove to join them upstairs at nightclub Bohemia, where a fellow partier said he stayed until at...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday to double down on Biden’s ‘knock on wood’ strategy in Afghanistan. Blinken said the U.S. State Department will be “looking to” the Taliban to guarantee safe passage out of the Islamic terrorist state. “You may have seen that just yesterday, a very senior Taliban official went on television and radio across the country and repeatedly assured people in Afghanistan that they would have the freedom to travel after August 31,” Blinken said. “He even specifically said, those that work for the Americans and those that want to leave...

A child in Kabul has been killed in an explosion as the US launched a military strike targeting a vehicle containing ‘multiple suicide bombers’ driving to the Afghan airport, just hours after Joe Biden warned of the possibility of another jihadist atrocity following this week’s attack. Two US officials speaking on condition of anonymity told Reuters that American forces launched a strike in the capital city targeting suspected ISIS-K militants who were aiming to attack Hamid Karzai International Airport, where Afghans are trying to flee the Taliban. A Kabul police chief later claimed that a child had been killed after...

BEND, Ore. (AP) — The death toll from COVID-19 in Oregon is climbing so rapidly in some counties that the state has organized delivery of one refrigerated truck to hold the bodies and is sending a second one, the state emergency management department said Saturday.So far, Tillamook County, on Oregon’s northwest coast, and Josephine County, in the southwest, requested the trucks, said Bobbi Doan, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.

Guido Marini - new Bishop of Tortona As anticipated by Messa in Latino yesterday, Msgr. Guido Marini's appointment as Bishop of Tortona was included today, August 29, in the Vatican Bollettino. The same announcement was made at the Santuario della Madonna della Guardia by the Archbishop of Genoa, Marco Tasca OFMConv. Msgr. Marini was present and Tasca placed the purple zucchetto on the new Bishop-elect right after. It now feels like a distant era, but Marini's appointment as Master of Pontifical Liturgical Ceremonies in October 2007 had ushered in a time of renewed beauty in the papal liturgies of...

Before you heed those calls to remove Dementia Joe Biden via either impeachment or the 25th amendment, remember the old saying: Be careful what you wish for. As another incompetent Democrat by the name of M. Stanley Dukakis used to say, “The fish rots from the head.” Check out the current chart of presidential succession and you will realize just how rudderless the ship of state is. How hopeless is the federal government? Marty Walsh, the bust out former mayor of Boston who is now Secretary of Labor, is number 11 in the line of succession to the presidency. Does...

Sometimes I find that the simplest images communicate the most content. I created this:

Fortune 500 corporate boardrooms increasingly have embraced a “woke” agenda — from Gillette lecturing its shavers about toxic masculinity to the Bank of America having guest speakers declare capitalism evil. In response, some Wall Street players now are offering exchange traded funds (ETFs) that exclude left-wing companies, taking a page from the activist playbook that created investment programs to boycott enterprises deemed environmentally unfriendly. A pair of investment programs that launched in the last year — the American Conservative Values ETF and the 2ndVote Advisers ETF — are led by directors who seek companies that have not launched ad campaigns...

Dallas-based Texas Instruments will require all U.S. employees and contractors to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 29, the company said in an internal email. According to the message sent to employees last week, those who don’t comply with the mandate and don’t have an approved medical or religious exemption will be fired. The mandate applies to all employees, even those working from home full-time. “In light of the accelerating spread of new variants, we are requiring our U.S. employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19,” said a company spokesperson. “We have no greater responsibility to our employees than to...

To avenge some 3000 Americans killed on 9/11, Washington caused a hundred or two hundred times as many deaths. To respond to an assault on two American cities, the U.S. plunged two nations into years, even decades of war. In the end, there were more jihadists fighting allied regimes and terrorists at work targeting civilians than at the start. What kept America safe was not endless war, which struck one hornet’s nest after another, but targeted counter-terrorism efforts at home and abroad.

The United States warned of a “specific, credible threat” near Kabul airport on Sunday as its forces rush to complete evacuations from Afghanistan by the August 31 deadline and the Taliban prepares to take charge of the key airfield. In a security alert, the US embassy in Kabul warned of an attack in specific areas of Kabul airport, including its access gates, as US President Joe Biden told reporters in Washington, DC, his commanders informed him another “attack is highly likely in the next 24-36 hours”. The United States carried out a military strike on Sunday in Kabul, two U.S....

Uchikoshi: Laser Condensed-Matter Fusion Experiments. Oral and Poster Takeru Uchikoshi, Shunsuke Ono, Yuki Nakashima, Yuta Kitagawa, Katsuaki Tanabe* Department of Chemical Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan * Email: tanabe@cheme.kyoto-u.ac.jp The intensity and density of the triggering energy supplied to activate the nuclear fusion reaction are key factors to produce a smooth and reproducible initiation of the reaction. We previously proposed and numerically analyzed a scheme to provide high-density optical or electromagnetic energy to fusion-fuel materials by lasers and plasmonic field-enhancement effects, to significantly increase the reaction probability [1,2]. In another project, we experimentally observed temporal behaviors of heat generation unable to...

WASHINGTON, Wednesday, Aug. 28. quarters there is conflicting information on the subject. It is certain, however, that Gen. MCCLELLAN with his customary activity and watchfulness, returned from thence at 11 1/2 o'clock last night, but from his conversations with military friends nothing of an important or serious character was elicited. It is probable, however, as mentioned by a gentleman of respectability, that a disunion force of three companies of cavalry and about the same number of infantry, with two field-pieces, have been hovering in the vicinity of Ball's Cross Roads, manoeuvering with a view to draw out a detachment of...

12 days ago, I wrote and posted, "Fire them all." Since then, others have agreed. Kurt Schlichter had a message for Milley and the other members of the Joint Showboats of Staff, "Rip those stars off your pathetic nostalgia costumes and resign. Quit. Tell that crusty Pinocchio in the White House and the faculty lounge Geppettos tugging his strings that you will have no more to do with his human centipede of failure in Kabul. "It’s not hard – your stars are right there, generals, right on the shoulders of those new uniforms you decided to adopt with the express...

Within hours after Andrew Cuomo’s stunning resignation as governor of New York on Tuesday, state and national Republican leaders were optimistic about their chances of winning the governorship of the Empire State for the first time in 20 years. Backed by more than 80% of the Republican county organizations in New York and certain of the ballot line of the New York Conservative Party, Rep. Lee Zeldin has so far raised more than $4 million toward a race for governor.

Amid the blood-spattered horrors of Kabul, perhaps the most startling response has been an outpouring of warlike passion from disaffected young Western men. But they’re not backing Western soldiers. They’re cheering on the Taliban. Far-Right groups are gloating. One user on an online message board called the toppled Western-backed Afghan government ‘globohomo-clownworld’. He characterised this as powered by ‘liberalism, consumerism, secularism, usury, democracy, global capitalism… and most of all, feminism/women’s rights/women’s liberation’. Such men consider abhorrent this value system that an America-led coalition spent trillions of dollars trying to instil, via two decades of Afghan ‘nation-building’. These alienated men hate...

The general officer U.S. military ranks have a big problem: The field grade officer and noncommissioned officer ranks have had enough of the double standards applied to leadership. Top line: Whereas those out in the field are held strictly accountable for any failure, real or imagined, general officer ranks are rarely held accountable for far worse leadership failures that have a far greater impact. One Marine lieutenant colonel just evinced this sentiment in a Facebook video post. Looking directly into the camera, Stuart Scheller stated , "I think what you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing...