Free Republic

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media.I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone: for kings and all those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. ~ 1 Timothy 2:1-2Religion Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind. Do you hear the people sing? Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge Him. As surely as the sun rises, He will appear;...

Launching assaults on the battlefield with a mere thought. Enhancing the human brain to create “super warriors.” Disrupting the minds of enemies to make them submit to the controller’s command.Once believed to only exist in sci-fi movies, the weaponization of the brain has been discussed by Chinese military officials for years. And Beijing is spending billions each year on neuroscience that could draw these scenarios ever closer to reality.“The study into brain science was born out of a vision for how the future warfare would evolve,” Li Peng, a medical researcher at a subsidiary of China’s state-run Academy of Military...

The unidentified Brooklyn resident took to the community online message boards earlier this week to ask strangers to send him a snap of their positive results so that he could get out of hosting visiting relatives. “I need help. I know this is a bizarre request, but I’m looking for a positive COVID test result from within the past few days,” the man reportedly wrote on NextDoor, a social media site designed for users to connect with neighbors. “You can obscure any identifying info (like your name), but I have relatives coming into town. I told them they couldn’t stay...

In a recent Op-Ed, I had outlined the causes and ramifications of a looming supply chain crisis. Shortfalls in fundamental goods and services, however, are just the surface symptoms of a silent, protracted war against human merit. Throughout history, the most universal and indispensable asset has been human resource. Civilizations were built on human ingenuity. Yet, despite the 21st century hoopla over smart cities, smart workers and smart futures of every kind, it is ironic that talent shortages persist in nearly every critical sector. In the United States alone, labor productivity recently hit a 40-year low even as unemployment claims...

The South African government has lifted most restrictions in the country as officials declare the country “may have passed the peak of the fourth wave.”Restrictions are being removed “[b]ased on the trajectory of the pandemic, the levels of vaccination in the country and the available capacity within the health sector,” according to a government statement from Mondli Gungubele, South Africa’s minister in the presidency.“All indicators suggest the country may have passed the peak of the fourth wave at a national level,” the statement reads, citing a decrease in new cases and hospitalizations in most provinces.The country’s Department of Health reported...

News AnalysisAs the holiday season begins to wrap up, Senators on both sides of the aisle are preparing for tough midterm battles as Republicans seek to take back Democrats’ one-vote majority in the upper chamber.The Senate, always an important aspect of the U.S. legislative process, has taken on new significance in recent months due to its peculiar ability to halt legislation sent to it from the less deliberative House of Representatives. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) slim majority in the House have sent several bills to the Senate that have been killed through the Senate’s filibuster power.Bills that...

The actions that the Biden administration just took to restrict monoclonal antibody treatments are going to get people killed, says a medical director in Maryland.As we noted yesterday, the CDC made a rather large mistake when they claimed that more than 73 percent of the cases of COVID in the nation were Omicron cases in the week ending Dec. 18. The number was only 22.5 percent of the cases at that point.Why was that important? Because then the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response halted the allocation of two antibody treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly...

Did British leftwing rag The Guardian pull down its “Person of the Year” poll after an undesirable took a commanding lead? That’s the allegation being made after voting was abruptly shut down following the realization that J.K. Rowling was going to run away with it.This per The Daily Wire.Readers of the British newspaper, The Guardian, are accusing the outlet of deactivating an online poll that asked readers to vote on “Person of the Year” after it became apparent that J.K. Rowling would handily win.“Tell us: who is your 2021 person of the year?” ran the headline, posted on Dec. 15,...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked in a press conference earlier this month whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks, despite often having access to insider information.Pelosi was all in favor of it, saying “We’re a free-market economy” and that members of Congress “should be able to participate in that.”REPORTER: "Should members of congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in congress?"PELOSI: "No…We are a free market economy. They should be able to participate in that." pic.twitter.com/2SNqSCwFEU— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 15, 2021Turns out that within a few days of that,...

Places with highest daily reported cases per capita Seven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

The Department of Defense is constructing a new courtroom for war crimes trials at Guantánamo Bay which will not allow the public inside the chamber, The New York Times reports. The courtroom, the second at the military base, will also allow two military judges to preside over separate proceedings simultaneously. In larger cases, such as the trials of five men accused of planning the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the hearings would take place in the currently existing chamber that is accessible by the public via a gallery. The new chamber, which costs about $4 million, would be used...

In his novel “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy writes that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Something similar can be said about New York City mayors: Successful ones share policies and leadership traits, while the failed ones chart individual paths of doom. Over the last five decades, Gotham has experienced both. The successful mayors — Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg — stand tall because they took office in times of crises and turned New York’s fortunes around. They had their warts, but each left the city better off than when he started.

Federal agencies don’t count what politicians don’t want to know. President Biden and other Democrats continuously invoke “science and data” to sanctify all their Covid-19 mandates and policies, but the same shenanigans and willful omissions have characterized Covid data.During his update on his Winter Covid Campaign on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” This was true from the start of the pandemic in early 2020, until the vaccines’ efficacy began failing badly in recent months. Oregon officially classifies roughly a quarter of its Covid fatalities since August...

Prosecutors dropped a case against two jail guards accused of sleeping on the job as Epstein died. They made the decision on December 13, in the middle of Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. The decision to drop the indictment against the guards wasn't made public until December 30. In the middle of Ghislaine Maxwell's child-sex-trafficking trial, federal prosecutors quietly dropped their case against two jail guards accused of sleeping on the job and falsifying jail records as Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in his cell. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan signed a nolle prosequi, a document announcing to the judge that they wished to...

While taxi drivers in New York City may have finally "ridden" out the absolute worst effects of enduring the ridesharing boom and the pandemic at the same time, the road to clearer skies still looks dim. That's because, as was pointed out by @JBaksht on Twitter this week, taxi medallions have still plunged 90% over the last decade.The plunge in medallion value came at the same time that Lyft and Uber began to register hundreds of thousands of daily trips in New York City. Prior to the pandemic, Uber had peaked at over 500,000 trips per day, while Lyft was...

“There’s been no monthly review of new therapies. There’s been no monthly review of data safety and efficacy for the vaccines. Nothing. Americans for two years have been stonewalled on any scientific information on COVID-19.” In this two-part interview, we sit down with Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and principal author of the first paper on early COVID-19 outpatient treatment involving multidrug regimens. We discuss the full body of evidence on COVID-19 treatment, including a preventative method that may have stamped out COVID-19 in Bangladesh. And with concerns growing about myocarditis and other effects of the vaccines, McCullough...

Last week South Africa became the first country to dial back COVID-19 restrictions after it became clear that the Omicron variant was far more mild than other strains, and that it had peaked much sooner than expected. On Christmas Eve, the government announced that contacts of Covid-positive cases will no longer need to test or self-isolate if they aren't showing symptoms, while those who develop mild symptoms will be required to isolate for eight days, and anyone with severe symptoms will need to isolate for 10 daysLet us remind you that South Africa is roughly 75% unvaccinated.Three days later, the...

Former Mickey Mouse Club star Tiffini Hale died on Christmas morning after suffering from cardiac arrest earlier this month. Tiffini Hale was only 46. Hale’s former Mickey Mouse Club co-stars made the announcement on social media, but did not offer any details about the actress’s death.

Podcast king Joe Rogan doubled down on his assertion that he will not get vaccinated this week, stating that it makes “no sense” for him because he has natural immunity from COVID.While announcing that he will likely have to cancel dates for comedy shows in Canada in the Spring due to vaccine mandates, Rogan said he doesn’t “think I can even get into the country. I’m not vaccinated, I’m not going to get vaccinated, I have antibodies, it doesn’t make any sense.”Rogan also bemoaned the continuing restrictions on events.“I don’t think I can go,” he continued, adding “Even if I...

We think of It's a Wonderful Life as a great American movie, a great Jimmy Stewart movie, a great Frank Capra movie — and, of course, as a great Christmas movie. We don't think of it as a great Italian-American movie. But we should, especially at Christmastime, when Italian-Americans — of Capra's generation and beyond — can be heard in every shop and restaurant singing many of the songs that define the season. Capra was born in Sicily, and at age 6 moved to Los Angeles. It's a Wonderful Life is spiced with subtle but significant references to his fellow...