Free Republic

“Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain” (Proverbs 25:14).

Freedom anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere. That is why authoritarians must destroy all freedom and why liberty lovers, and even the merely “lib-curious” (liberty curious), must not just resist blatant authoritarianism, but reject it in all its guises. The fate of the nation, and the world, again hangs in the balance. To the extent that any freedom persists, authoritarian diktat can be subverted, albeit at a cost. History is rife with examples of bizarre entities, like nonbank banks (I kid you not!), rent-a-banks (ditto!), and gold caches, designed to work around branching restrictions, usury laws (maximum interest rates),...

...That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive,...

U.S. Border Patrol plans to fire agents who don’t receive the COVID-19 vaccine. According to reports on Friday, the agency is looking to enforce Joe Biden’s federal vaccine mandate by the end of November. They said those who refuse to do so without an approved religious or medical exemption could face action up to termination. Critics have said this would only further complicate the crisis at the southern border, where over 1.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed in 2021 alone. Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs (R) said he believes as many as 5,000 agents could separate from Border Patrol over the...

n front of scenic cliffs and an ornamental European-style windmill is a secret People’s Liberation Army Navy pier. Here, at a former tourist resort on China’s northern coast, is where the PLAN is developing some of its most secretive, and previously unreported, naval programs, USNI News has learned. The pier near Dalian is where China is testing its large uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), according to satellite photos provided to USNI News by Maxar and an analysis of open-source intelligence. Construction of the new pier started in early 2016 and took about a year, according to satellite photos. Since then it...

Winter is approaching and many restaurants that have relied on outdoor dining to recoup some of their lost business during the pandemic will soon lose their lifeline as temperatures drop.... Restaurateurs across the country this week called on their cities' mayors to extend outdoor dining, warning them that many more closures could be imminent if they don't push for the measure, as the Delta variant compels the majority of patrons to steer clear of indoor dining rooms, new research shows. About 110,000 restaurants and bars have either temporarily or permanently closed during the pandemic, according to National Restaurant Association.... ...Specifically,...

Actress Melle Stewart is fighting for her life after she suffered a stroke after taking AstraZeneca COVID vaccine. The 40-year-old actress suffered a rare blood-clotting side effect following her AstraZenaca vaccine injection.Actress fighting for life after stroke caused by AstraZeneca vaccine’s blood-clotting side effect https://t.co/o84y5tRCaj— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) October 24, 2021Stewart reportedly continues to be an advocate for the vaccination.The Daily Mail reported:An Australian actress was fighting for life in ICU after suffering a stroke caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine’s rare blood-clotting side effect.Melle Stewart, 40, received her first dose of the Oxford-made vaccine on May 24 in London,...

Twitter user Brad Pilon has noted some concerning statistics from Canadian Public Health [DATA HERE] regarding adverse events for 12 to 17-year-old males as the vaccination rates increase. ¹Myocarditis has almost doubled from 1 in 10,000 (August) to 1 in 5,000 in two months:Oct 17th 1 in 5,208 Oct 10th 1 in 5,491 Oct 3rd 1 in 5,543 Sep 26th 1 in 5,938 Sep 18th 1 in 6,414 Sep 11th 1 in 6,640 Sep 4th 1 in 6,752 Aug 28th 1 in 6,973 Aug 21st 1 in 7,880 Aug 14th 1 in 8,361 Aug 7th 1 in 10,060[DATA LINK]¹Myocarditis is...

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia assumed the role of director-general in 2017 The Ethiopian head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, looks set to serve a second term as director-general following reports that no nation will challenge him despite his controversial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and close relationship to China. Observers say that if as believed the U.S. did not put up a challenger it has lost a major opportunity for wielding influence. The nomination deadline ended late last month....

An Australian actress was fighting for life in ICU after suffering a stroke caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine's rare blood-clotting side effect. Melle Stewart, 40, received her first dose of the Oxford-made vaccine on May 24 in London, where she lives with her husband, and fellow actor, Ben Lewis. Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome is an extremely rare condition involving low blood platelet levels and only 156 cases of the illness have been reported from nearly 13million doses of AstraZeneca administered in Australia. Of those, only 8 have died, and it's still unclear whether those could be attributed to underlying conditions....

Joshua Corneilius, 17, should be enjoying his senior year of high school, but instead, he is constantly worried about the violence occurring both inside and outside of his North Philadelphia school. In the last year, nine kids at Simon Gratz High School were shot to death -- three of them just last month, the school's principal, Leyondo Dunn, told ABC News.... ...Since 2015, more than 10,000 people have been shot in Philadelphia, and of those, three out of four were Black males. More than 80% of homicide victims in the city over the las year were Black males, according to...

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, is hitting back at President Joe Biden and his vaccine mandates.On Thursday he said that the vaccine mandates will “not be tolerated” and that he will take on Biden alongside Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Breitbart News reported.Gov. DeSantis, flanked by Attorney General Moody, Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, and others, in Clearwater, Florida, announced his call for a special session to legislate protections for Floridians against vaccine mandates imposed by localities, businesses, and the federal government.Moody spoke after the governor, announcing that the state has taken legal action in Orange County, specifically,...

Florida is reporting fewer cases of the Chinese coronavirus per capita than its blue state counterparts, according to the New York Times’ Saturday data.The Times’ chart provides the daily average of cases, as well as the number per 100,000. Florida is at the bottom of the list in terms of cases per capita, reporting 10 per 100,000 as of Saturday — a decrease of 42 percent in the last two weeks. Only one state, Hawaii, is reporting lower cases per capita, coming in at eight. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) state of Michigan is reporting 39 cases per 100,000, while Gov....

The director of “Rust” told investigators that he had been standing beside the film’s cinematographer as the actor Alec Baldwin sat in a wooden church pew, rehearsing a scene in which he draws a gun and points it at the camera lens, according to an affidavit released Sunday night. The director, Joel Souza, said he then heard what “sounded like a whip and then loud pop.” Mr. Souza saw the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, grabbing her midsection and starting to stumble backward. Then he noticed he was bleeding from his shoulder. He and Ms. Hutchins had been shot by the lead...

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va (WDTV) - Three Maryland counties are calling to secede from their own state are hoping to find a new home in West Virginia. The announcement has many asking, is this even possible? Lawmakers from Garrett, Allegany, and Washington Counties sent letters to the West Virginia legislature stating, “We believe this arrangement may be mutually beneficial for both parties.” Delegate Gary Howell from Mineral County says there are advantages to both states. “For Maryland, these counties are their poorer counties and they actually send more money from Annapolis than Annapolis gets from them so they are a drain on...

Progress towards replication; revisited Michael McKubre SRI International, USA (retired to New Zealand). E-mail: mmckubre@gmail.com 53 Churchill Drive, Napier, 4112, New Zealand I addressed this topic first in 2002 in a presentation at ICCF-9 held at Tsinghua Univ. in Beijing. Subsequently in the proceedings of that conference I and three of my closest collaborators (F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi and V. Violante) published [1] “Progress towards replication”. In this we described a collaborative effort formally established between SRI International in Menlo Park, California, and ENEA (Frascati) in Italy. to provide a framework for an International replication effort that focused the complementary...

We are almost two years into the plague di tutti plagues, the virus with a 3 in 1,000 death rate (give or take), which rounds down to roughly 0 in 1,000 for the non-elderly and morbidly obese.Along the way, lots of different states and countries have pursued lots of different strategies, from Zero Covid to Zero Restrictions, from early vaccines to late vaccines to (basically) no vaccines.Two years should be long enough to know who wore it best, amirite? So let’s go to the videotape!Here’s the United Kingdom (heavy early lockdown, 70% vaccinated, tons of testing, just like the public...

The question over whether the NIH funded risky gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China was officially 'answered' last week, after the agency claimed that one of their partners - EcoHealth Alliance, failed to report that they had 'accidentally' created a chimeric coronavirus that was able to infect humanized mice.To review, in a Wednesday letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak admits to funding a "limited experiment" to determine whether "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model." According to...

As the party began trying to piece together its big social-spending and climate package, a split emerged between lawmakers who wanted to pass fewer programs (but do them well) and those who wanted to pass more programs (even if it means doing them poorly). A big part of this argument boiled down to how long policies should be funded for. The less-is-more crowd, dominated by party moderates, wanted to set policies in place permanently. The more-for-less brigade, dominated by progressives, wanted to fund programs temporarily in order to make their budget math work, essentially rolling the dice on the idea...

American truckers don’t like taking orders. But the Biden administration has increased pressure on some of them to take the vaccine—willing or unwilling.All through the pandemic, truckers endured hardships to keep America’s infrastructure running. They waited in line for hours in sight of bathrooms they weren’t allowed to use. On the road, some died alone of COVID-19.Now, with supply chains disrupted, Americans need them more than ever. But faced with the prospect of a mandated vaccination, many drivers are considering quitting.“I’d fight it,” said veteran trucker Mike Widdins, referring to a vaccine mandate. “I think a lot of us will...