Free Republic

I came down with the flu on 12/3 but am back to work. just have coughing left, however hubs, who is self employed, has been off his feet since 12/6. He received an RX for amoxicillin, however that is only working on the bacterial side. The viral side is keeping him down, fatigue, fever that comes and goes, soreness, headaches etc. We live in upstate NY and both are insured under my insurance plan (which I was going to retire next month but now doesn't look like it due to Bidenflation). We also have Ivermectin that we took early on....

MANORVILLE, NEW YORK: Long Island police have been looking for two teenagers who have disappeared after last being spotted catching a train to Manhattan on December 9. Couple Kaileigh Catalano and Vincent Abolafia, both 15, were to catch an afternoon train from Ronkoma to New York, according to Suffolk County Police. Their families reported them missing later that evening. Desperate pleas for leads on the whereabouts of the couple are being made on social media as both remained missing on Monday, December 13.

Heated runoffs in four Houston ISD trustee elections ended last weekend and two self-described conservatives unseated incumbents as national politics took center stage. "Just overall excited to serve,” District VII victor Bridget Wade said. Wade defeated incumbent trustee Anne Sung in an election that included issues such as critical race theory, library books and the district’s mask mandate. “I’m in favor of getting rid of masks," Wade said. "I’m in favor of it because I’d like parents to be able to decide what they want for their children.” Sung believes national political talking points seeped into what is supposed to...

Now more than ever we need substantive debate about decisions that affect the health of hundreds of millions of people, including views counter to official positions. The attacks on free speech and science are unrelenting. Academic publisher Elsevier’s suppression of an article documenting the myocarditis risk of the COVID-19 vaccines, with no excuse or pretext offered, is incredible enough. Viewed alongside Twitter’s censorship of the American Heart Association, YouTube’s suppression of a panel discussion of vaccine mandates on Capitol Hill, and the Orwellian call by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins for critics of the government’s COVID-19 policies to...

"An attempt by the U.N. Security Council to pass what would have been the first-ever standalone resolution linking climate change and the council’s primary mandate of maintaining international peace and security was torpedoed Monday by Russia. Russia used its veto power to kill the resolution drafted by Ireland and Niger. India also voted “no” while China abstained. ..."

Smiling happily at a baby shower: this is the mom-and-daughter crime duo busted for looting a San Francisco Louis Vuitton store in the run-up to Thanksgiving – one of a series of smash and grab raids that has turned the city's posh Union Square into a boarded-up fortress. Grabbing grandmother Francill White, 53, and daughter Kimberly Cherry, 28, were two of five looters nabbed by police over the November 19 incident that saw thieves make off with more than $1million-worth of designer goods.

"Declares that globalists want to create “a new man in their own image and likeness, that has nothing to do with democracy.” A senior German Cardinal has warned that the likes of Bill Gates, George Soros and Davos Economic Forum head Klaus Schwab are using the coronavirus pandemic to force the world under “total control” of globalist “super-rich elites.” Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, who also serves as a high ranking judge at the Vatican court, made the comments during an interview with Austria’s St. Boniface Institute. Mueller urged that “People, who sit on the throne of their wealth,” are seizing...

The inflation picture does not get any prettier, as the Labor Department reported on Tuesday that producer prices rose at a record pace in November. The 0.8% monthly increase was above expectations of a 0.5% increase. The 9.6% annual rate of increase was the highest for the series dating back to 2010 and above forecasts for a 9.2% rise. The reading on wholesale prices follows last week’s measure of consumer inflation that showed prices rose at an annual rate of 6.8% last month, the fastest pace in nearly 40 years.

Dirtbag Never-Trumper Chris Wallace announced on Sunday that he is leaving FOX News. The leftist activist has been host at FOX News Sunday for 18 years now. --- SNIP --- Wallace is famous for cheating for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election debate. Whoever agreed to allow Chris Wallace as debate moderator should have been fired. It was a disgraceful and abusive attack on the US president. The sound was a bit off in first minute of video)

The Department of Health says four testing hubs were not operational at the time of reporting, while eight laboratories were not able to submit their data MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines on Tuesday, December 14, reported 235 new COVID-19 cases, the lowest in nearly 19 months or since May 23, 2020, when the country logged 180 infections at the time. Tuesday’s cases bring the country’s total caseload to 2,836,868. Of these, 0.4% or 10,526 remain active or are currently sick. The Department of Health (DOH) also recorded 10 deaths. The total death toll in the country due to COVID-19 increased...

Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was torched by a former mob boss over the Democrat’s COVID nursing home scandal, saying that he "would never do that." The former boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, tore into Cuomo in a new series alongside former Colombo caporegime Michael Franzese over the deadly scandal that became a black mark on the former governor’s administration. "I hate to get into Governor Cuomo. I will a little bit because he’s Italian and I can’t stand it," Gravano said in the clip obtained by Fox News,...

The Omicron variant is starting to eat into Delta’s dominance in the United States. The new variant accounted for 2.9% of sequenced Covid-19 cases in the United States in the week ending Dec. 11. The week before, 0% of cases were from Omicron. Delta accounted for essentially all of the other sequenced cases, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new figures, updated Tuesday, indicate that Omicron started circulating before that week, given how long it can take for infections to be sequenced and reported. They show that Omicron’s advantage over the highly transmissible Delta...

"‘The Ben Shapiro Show’ host expects legal challenges against federal vaccine mandates to reach"

Figure 1: A photo of a Pfizer facility in Italy. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons On November 5th, 2021, Pfizer announced that it would seek FDA approval for its new drug, called Paxlovid. It is given to those with an active case of COVID-19 and reduces the risk of hospitalization and death due to severe COVID-19 infections by 89% in a Phase 2/3 clinical trial (Pfizer, 2021). The drug consists of a combination of a SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) nsp5 inhibitor called PF-07321332 (see Figure 2, below) and an inhibitor of Cytochrome P450 3A4 (a human protein that often...

The US inflation rate jumped 9.6% this year, higher than expected and the highest increase on record. In response Speaker Nancy Pelosi called members back to Congress to vote to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress. Screw the American people — Nancy wants to play politics!

If anything seems to unify the U.S. and European Union, it is the misguided belief that weaponizing antitrust legislation to target big tech will improve consumer outcomes. Nowhere is this dangerous policy goal better showcased than at the Future Tech Forum in London, where antitrust hawks from Washington and Brussels met to share notes on the measures their respective governments have taken to trample on consumer welfare, destroy innovation and delay progress. While the EU is further along in its desire to weaponize antitrust legislation against big tech companies, the U.S. still has time to stop, pause, and chart its...

The U.S. Postal Service pursued a project to build and secretly test a blockchain-based mobile phone voting system before the 2020 election, experimenting with a technology that the government’s own cybersecurity agency says can’t be trusted to securely handle ballots. Matt Masterson, who was then a senior adviser to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the federal government’s chief liaison to state and local election officials, said he was never aware of the Postal Service program while in office. CISA declined to comment for this story. The Postal Service was awarded a public patent for the concept in August...

If Love means never having to say you're sorry (it doesn't), then being a member of the media means never having to admit you were wrong (it does). I wouldn't write about the Jussie Smollett case and his conviction for lying about a hoax he perpetrated if it didn't reflect something seriously wrong in the culture. Smollett was convicted in Chicago last week of faking an attack by a supposed Trump-MAGA man he claimed uttered racist and homophobic slurs. Normally, I would ignore this story, along with other tabloid trash stories I don't care about, such as the Kardashians, Harry...

I'm not posting them and dont think anyone should but does anyone else find it disgraceful their using/leaking private text messages to smear Trump? This is surely a new low? The media are going to town on it and trying to smear Trump and frame it as some kind of new scandal. Never mind holding the Biden administration accountable for their lamentable record the main news is seemingly Donald Trump who isn't even in office! Frustrating!

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in a letter on Tuesday is calling for an update on a review of policies regarding guns on Capitol grounds. "The presence of deadly firearms only raises the dangers of a violent incident, an accidental discharge, or some other preventable tragedy," Hoyer writes in the letter. "That is why it is essential that rules and regulations regarding where personal firearms may or may not be carried must be communicated clearly to Members." The letter was written to Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Karen Gibson, House Sergeant-at-Arms William Walker, Capitol Architect Brett Blanton and Capitol Police Chief Thomas...