Free Republic

A paywalled IT industry publication called The Information has published a blockbuster report titled, “Inside Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal with Chinese Authorities.” Only 2 paragraphs are visible to non-subscribers, Hartley Charlton of MacRumors has published a summary of it that is available to all. You can read the whole thing quickly, but here are some highlights:Tim Cook‌ personally forged a five-year agreement with the Chinese government during a series of in-person visits to the country in 2016. The need to push for a closer alliance with the Chinese government reportedly came from a number of Apple executives who...

Great Climate Conspirators of Our TimeJust before he died the popular communicator Clive James wrote an essay entitled “Mass Death Dies Hard” in which he noted that in reporting climate science the BBC “has been behaving for several years as if its true aim were to reproduce the thought control that prevailed in the Soviet Union”. When he died, the obits mostly glossed over his apostasy, although in his lifetime the fount of eternal doom George Monbiot called him a “sucker”.“When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean they will switch...

Active swarm of earthquakes happening this am.

FOX News Media CEO Suzanne Scott informed staffers Wednesday that FOX News Media’s All-American Christmas tree would be rebuilt as "a message that there can be peace, light and joy even during a dark moment" after it was set on fire outside Fox News’ New York City headquarters. "Earlier this morning, FOX News Media’s All-American Christmas tree outside our building on FOX Square was set on fire in a malicious arson attack. The 50-foot tree, which was just lit in a beautiful on-air ceremony on Sunday night, was engulfed in flames and smoke permeated the building," Scott wrote in a...

The chief executive of the world’s largest stock owner says life is about to get a lot harder for companies that fail environmental, social and governance tests set by institutional investors. Nicolai Tangen, who runs Norges Bank Investment Management from Oslo, says the degree to which ESG dictates a company’s prospects is “starting to hit now.” Firms that don’t adapt face a world in which financing will dry up, insurance companies will walk away, employees will defect, social-media shaming will intensify and customers will disappear, he said in an interview. As CEO of Norway’s wealth fund, Tangen oversees about $1...

I regularly look at the COVID data on Google Maps, which uses the New York Times as its data source. COVID cases on the map are expressed as number of daily cases per one hundred thousand people on a rolling seven-day average. You can see the numbers for each country in the world, each state in the U.S., and each county within each state. They are all color-coded by levels of case density. Today I saw something absolutely incredible, if it's accurate. Every county in the state of Florida shows zero current cases of COVID over the past seven days....

Environmental groups opposed to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been very influential for a considerable time and capable of raising large public protests. But the anti-GMO movement is now in decline as the EU and various influential environmental organisations begin to cautiously welcome selected genetically engineered organisms.

It will be ONLY by the Prince of Peace that TRUE and EVERLASTING PEACE will finally come to the City of Jerusalem (Isa. 9:6-7, 33:5, 53:5, 62;1, Jer. 33:16, Zech 8:3, Matt. 5:35, Rom. 10:2-4, Eph. 2:12-19, Col. 1:20, Heb. 1:3, 10:7-14). How many in vain through out the ages have sought and prayed in sincerity for the peace of Jerusalem WITHOUT knowledge nor understanding (Isa. 29:13, 58:1-8, Matt. 7:21-23, 15:3, 7-9, Mark 12:24)? Throughout the last 2600 years, how many sons of Abraham have totally missed the reality and truth of the Holy Scriptures of just how this Divine...

Is CNN a fount of journalist corruption? Right after the cable broadcaster fired its star journalist, Chris Cuomo for collaborating with his brother in a bid to fend off sex harassment charges, it now comes to light that CNN's Don Lemon was essentially caught doing the same thing. According to the Washington Examiner:Following reports that Chris Cuomo helped his brother with his high-profile sexual harassment scandal, another one of CNN's prime-time anchors faces controversy.Actor Jussie Smollett revealed during his testimony Monday that CNN anchor Don Lemon texted him during the early stages of the Chicago Police Department's investigation into his...

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said 2022 will still be a “transition year” for COVID-19 despite the omicron variant. “I still think this is going to be a transition year,” Gottlieb said on Tuesday in an appearance on CNBC's “The News with Shepard Smith.” Gottlieb said he expects COVID-19 to “go from a pandemic into a more endemic phase” in 2022, however, it could happen later in the year due to the rising cases from the omicron variant.

Newly released monitoring data shows that San Francisco’s Millennium Tower tilted a quarter inch during the four days it took to install the first test pile to bedrock last month. Veteran geotechnical engineer Bob Pyke said the sudden fluctuation is a telltale sign. Other experts say the water pressure drop is evidence that the method designed to limit settlement may not be working as well as hoped.

The Ambiguity of the EvidenceThe God Hypothesis should be considered as a possible explanation for our universe.Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first philosophers to wrestle seriously with the implications of Charles Darwin’s theories. In Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche considered the metaphysical consequences of Darwinian evolution: Formerly one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other dreadful beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction! One therefore now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind...

Residents of Wicker Park, a Chicago neighborhood with enough cachet to have a major mystery movie named after it, are worried about the closing of their local convenience store due to unsustainable levels of shoplifting. It is already too late for their 7-11 – its owner is closing and there is a Walgreens nearby that they fear for.They seem to see the possibility that the expression “food deserts,” referring to urban neighborhoods that lack supermarkets or other venues to buy nourishing food, will soon be replaced by “retail deserts” (my expression) where there are no stores to buy anything. As...

Demonic influence, deception, decay and darkness EXPONENTIALLY saturates this present world of ours, but the ETERNAL Christmas message is an ETERNAL GLORIOUS LIGHT and REALITY shining forth out of the hearts of those who personally know Jesus in RIGHTEOUSNESS (Matt. 5:14-16, John 17:17; 1 Thess. 5:4-5)! This Christmas we as His blood brought children need to be looking into Almighty God's RIGHTEOUS mirror and Word and examining ourselves in His RIGHTEOUS Presence to see if we are indeed His light houses shining forth to a lost dark and dying world (Matt. 5:13-16; John 17:17; Gal. 2:20; 1 Cor. 10:31; 2...

COVID deaths under Trump - 400k. COVID deaths under Biden - 390k.

Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, raised eyebrows and cast doubt on her fitness for her elevated office during oral arguments over the pending Mississippi abortion case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. Constitutional scholars were taken aback by her injection of politics:“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception – that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor asked. “I don’t see how it is possible.”And her casual rejection of the Constitution as the arbiter of Supreme Court decision-making:Justice Sonia Sotomayor even said at one point that the...

“The whole aim of practical politics,” H.L. Mencken famously quipped in the 1920’s, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” How very true. Although written a century ago, Mencken’s metaphor of an endless series of imaginary hobgoblins easily describes the string of new “variants” of the COVID virus, all which send petty tyrants from New York’s Bill de Blasio to Australia’s Scott Morrison, clamoring for new lockdowns and restrictions – for our safety, of course. As I wrote last week,...

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, an economic globalist, is seemingly waving the white flag on globalism, suggesting that economic nationalist policies will be “necessary” to reshoring supply chains to the U.S. from overseas. During an online conference this week, Yellen admitted that it is so-called “protectionist” policies that will be vital in reshoring supply chains back to the U.S. to avoid the current ongoing crisis where supply chains have significantly disrupted the American economy. “It’s possible that policies that people will describe as protectionist are going to be necessary in order to create the appropriate incentives to produce things...

The nation’s large and diverse group of Hispanic voters is showing signs of dividing its support between Democrats and Republicans more evenly than in recent elections, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, a troubling development for the Democratic Party, which has long counted on outsize Hispanic support. One year after giving Democratic House candidates more than 60% of their vote, according to polls at the time, the Journal survey found that Hispanic voters are evenly split in their choice for Congress. Asked which party they would back if the election were today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would...

The women of “The View” took some time to discuss President Joe Biden’s first nine months in office on Tuesday, assessing what he has and hasn’t done. Though the women (mostly) agreed that he’s done a lot, Joy Behar noted that she’s more unhappy with how he’s been covered by news media. Citing a recent post from Slate called “Why Isn’t Anyone LIstening to Joe?” moderator Whoopi Goldberg posed the question of whether average viewers and listeners simply don’t want to hear the good things that Biden has accomplished. “I believe that that’s because the media is not portraying him...