Free Republic

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — It’s not often that bacon leads a roundup of new laws taking effect with the New Year in California. But even in progressive California, that’s the headline-grabber. It’s among a host of other legislation designed to safeguard employees, shield those seeking abortions, protect protesters from police, spare children from gender influence in store displays, and further ease criminal penalties to reduce mass incarceration. Several of the laws mark national “firsts” — first minimum wage to reach $15 an hour, first to protect warehouse workers from quotas, first to mandate hourly wages for garment workers, first to...

"The Pentagon is building a new $4 million war court chamber at Guantanamo Bay that will not allow for public access, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The new courtroom is expected to begin holding proceedings in 2023. Two military judges will be able to hold proceedings at the same time in the new chamber, and it will hold smaller cases, the NYT reported. While members of the public will not be allowed inside the courtroom, they’ll be able to watch the proceedings in a separate building via video, and on a 40-second delay. This separate room is described as...

“Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates” (Proverbs 31:28-31).

"Some states have used National Guard to support depleted health care work forces COVID-19 vaccine mandates have put some vital U.S health and safety institutions in a tough spot after cutting personnel who didn’t comply. Overlapping federal mandates for military personnel, state mandates for health care workers, and other private mandates have created an increasingly difficult situation in the face of the omicron variant as numbers continue to surge in some states due to the much greater transmissibility of the variant. President Biden in August issued a federal vaccine mandate that required military personnel in each branch to receive a...

"The medical profession has seen an influx of left-wing ideas about race and identity, according to multiple reports and experts. Writing in Quilette, Dr. Sally Satel declared that "indoctrinologists" were distracting medical professionals from their rightful purpose. Satel and others have pointed to examples like Boston physicians arguing for racial preferences in admissions. Fox News has also reported on the American Medical Association's (AMA) endorsement of critical race theory and using the type of theoretical buzzwords that have emerged in institutions across the country. ..."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Thursday it has streamlined the approval process for urgent use of National Guard forces in the District of Columbia, after months of study following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The changes give the defense secretary sole authority to approve requests that would involve D.C. National Guard personnel participating in civil law enforcement or that would require their deployment within 48 hours, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a written statement. That approval authority had previously been delegated to the Army secretary, the service’s top civilian official.... ...Prior to the riot,...

Conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene showed her true colors, again, while trying to diminish the meaning of Kwanzaa. Taylor made her latest ignorant statement while responding to a tweet from the College Republicans group, which tweeted "wishing you a happy and prosperous Kwanza." "Stop. It’s a fake religion created by a psychopath," the conservative said in response to the tweet. "You aren’t bringing in new voters, you are turning them away. People are tired of pandering and BS." Greene also attempted to slander activist Maulana Karenga, who created the seven-day holiday in 1966. Karenga, who was convicted of felonious assault...

On New Year’s Eve 1502, Cesare Borgia had two treacherous condottieri put to summary death at Senigallia. The “nephew” — that is, son — of Pope Alexander VI, Cesare resigned a cardinalcy in 1498 to follow his true passion, bloodshed, and set up as one of the Italian peninsula’s warring dukes. He had many a martial adventure before getting ambushed by a party of Spanish knights in 1507. Machiavelli considered him an able leader compromised by owing his temporal power to the pope’s territorial allotment. In The Prince, Machiavelli remarks on the lesson of Borgia’s reign, that “he who has...

"They are penalizing him for what the audience does due to that dumb reporter, or fake news reporter saying ‘Let’s Go Brandon…. so now the man can’t get sponsors. But now he gets one and the Left will flip out. lol"

"The OutKick founder reacts to a report about Lia Thomas’ teammates feeling ‘ignored’ and applauds Aaron Rodgers’ critique of the NFL’s vaccine policy."

The year is 2022. The place: a New York City so overpopulated that everyone is sleeping and dying on outdoor stairways. All sweating like pigs because of global warming. People have become unwitting cannibals because there is no more food. Elites still dine on delectables, but all that remains for the hoi polloi is the promise of a green wafer allegedly made of plankton, but in reality “It’s PEOPLE!!” That’s the setting of the over-the-top 1973 movie “Soylent Green,” produced in the wake of Paul Ehrlich’s classic fear porn book The Population Bomb. Time has proven Ehrlich’s predictions of mass...

Click here to view the full articleOn the same day a jury convicted disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell on five of six counts of sex trafficking related to her former lover Jeffrey Epstein, another Epstein associate received ominous legal news. According to Reuters, two New York judges ordered Wednesday that the 2009 settlement between Epstein and Virginia Giuffre, one of the financier’s numerous accusers, be made public. Giuffre, who said she was trafficked by Epstein, has accused Britain’s Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager.

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,...