Free Republic

Click on link

In today’s gospel there is a very familiar story of the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus. As with any familiar story, the danger is that we, upon hearing its opening lines say, “Oh that story,” and we just sort of tune out. But there are many things in the details of the story that we can easily miss. Ultimately the story of Bartimaeus is also our story, for we too must let the Lord heal our blindness and give us sight. One paradox of this gospel that we shall note, is that the man receives his sight as the...

October 25th, 2021St. Ambrose Edward Barlow, English martyr Sacred Heart Church, Liverpool, UK Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green First readingRomans 8:12-17 ©The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of GodMy brothers, there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives. If you do live in that way, you are doomed to die; but if by the Spirit you put an end to the misdeeds of the body you will live. Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son of God. The spirit you received is not the...

...(New York Post) Dr. Anthony Fauci is facing calls from a bipartisan group of legislators to respond to allegations that his National Institutes of Health division provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia to torture and kill dozens of beagle puppies for twisted scientific experiments. In a letter to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and 23 colleagues addressed their “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.” “According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White...

WASHINGTON — The head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog says his monitoring program in Iran is no longer “intact” after Tehran refused requests to repair cameras at a key facility, creating the possibility the world will never be “able to reconstruct the picture” of what the Iranians have been doing. In an interview with NBC News, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi says he’s been unable to establish the type of direct communication with Iran’s government that he had before a new hardline government run by President Ebrahim Raisi was elected in June.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on Thursday released a letter to President Joe Biden penned by an American citizen from San Diego, California, who is still trapped in Afghanistan alongside his wife. “I am pleading with you again as a fellow proud American and as a husband to help my wife and I get home from Afghanistan,” the American citizen wrote in the October 15 letter to President Biden, weeks after the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from the Taliban-controlled country. The American explained that he and his wife risked their lives to get through Taliban checkpoints, only to discover that the...

The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is investigating a Friday incident in which a police officer shot a suspect after the suspect attempted to flee authorities. Officers were responding to reports of an armed male suspect, Natango Robinson, chasing another male just before 5 p.m. Friday. When officers arrived and located Robinson, 35, a "struggle ensued and the suspect was able to flee from the officers" and get into his vehicle, the D.C. police department said in a press release. While officers entered Robinson's vehicle in an attempt to get him out, the suspect started driving with one officer...

Social media users are calling for the arrest of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his removal as the nation's top infectious disease expert after his agency was found to have used taxpayer funds to finance cruel experiments on dogs. The hashtag #ArrestFauci was trending on Twitter over the weekend, amplifying the outrage over the experiments, including one which saw beagles trapped in cages so flies could eat them, and another where they were 'debarked' before being pumped with drugs and killed. One of the most disturbing incidents funded by Fauci's National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases involved $375,000 given to...

Hopes for a more progressive Chile have been dealt a blow as a far-right candidate surges in opinion polls ahead of the first presidential election since massive demonstrations against inequality erupted in 2019. A month before the vote, polling shows that the leftwing candidate – former student leader Gabriel Boric – has slipped behind (by one percentage point) José Antonio Kast, a supporter of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who has suggested digging ditches along the country’s border to stop migrants. After months of political unrest, voters chose by huge majority to replace the country’s Pinochet-era constitution, and then elected a...

13-year-old Maddie de Garay volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine clinical trials. According to her parents, she volunteered to help, but did not expect that she would suffer significant Pfizer vaccine-related injuries. Maddie’s mother wants to warn other parents that the COVID vaccine is not safe. But Comcast pulled the mother’s ad telling Maddie’s story. Comcast is complicit in the deadly conspiracy. Maddie's mom wants to warn other parents that the C-19 Vac was not safe for her daughter in the Pfizer trial. They hid this from us. Comcast pulled the ad at the last minute. See the ad. Hear more...

The Nets’ home opener was a wreck, from the testy pro-Kyrie Irving protests outside that forced Barclays Center to briefly close its doors, to getting their doors blown off in a 111-95 loss to the Hornets. After leading by double-digits just before halftime and by nine in the third quarter, the Nets got blitzed 32-17 in a sorry fourth quarter to lose their home opener before a sellout crowd of 17,732, including Jay-Z sitting right next to their bench. [cut] Durant had a game-high 38 points, but James Harden, who scored 15 points, was the only other Net in double-figures....

When Stephanie and Patrick de Garay enrolled their 12-year-old child Maddie and her two brothers in Pfizer’s Covid-19 clinical trial, they believed they were doing the right thing. That decision has turned into a nightmare. Maddie, a previously healthy, energetic, full of life child, was within 24 hours of her second dose reduced to crippling, scream-inducing pain that landed her in the emergency room where she described feeling like someone was “ripping [her] heart out though [her] neck.” Over the next several months the nightmare continued, during which Maddie was hospitalized several times and suffered numerous systemic injuries, requires a...

They defended their practice of holding computers for ransom after the FBI took down a major ransomware group. Some of the most destructive ransomware hackers in the world appear to be on edge after the U.S. reportedly took down one of their colleagues. Several ransomware gangs posted lengthy anti-U.S. screeds, viewed by NBC News, on the dark web. In them, they defended their practice of hacking organizations and holding their computers for ransom. They appear prompted by the news, reported Thursday by Reuters, that the FBI had successfully hacked and taken down another major ransomware group called REvil....

A river winds its way through Ljubljana and the surrounding villages. A river that hides Slovenia’s most threatened cultural heritage. Now thousand-year-old jewelry, swords, pitchers and boats are being laboriously hauled out of the river mud, restored and exhibited.An earring from the first century, a five-thousand-year-old wheel, a sword from Roman times. For thousands of years, different artifacts have mysteriously ended up in the Ljubljanica River...The green Ljubljanica River is a wonder of the world. But it is an endangered wonder; the riverbank is collapsing and cultural treasures are in danger of disappearing forever...The fragile wooden structure is barely visible...

A top US Marshals official currently under investigation for allegedly sleeping with a junior colleague now stands accused of pawning off his post-graduate program homework to his subordinates, The Post has learned. Multiple law-enforcement sources outed the Marshals bigwig as Andrew Smith, the assistant director of the Tactical Operations Division — while revealing more details about the alleged romp at the agency’s Virginia headquarters. The Marshals Service is probing Smith for allegedly getting underlings to do his homework assignments while attending a post-graduate program at the Naval War College...

Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border? Afghanistan — the most humiliating defeat in recent US military history? A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out? The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels? Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring? Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences? Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls? Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months. Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of...

“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...