Free Republic

I’ve been a car enthusiast for a long time. In my early teens, I would take a bus from my town in the mountains, down to the city. I walked to the avenue where most of the car dealers were. To their chagrin, I would end up with a large collection of their glossy (and for them pricey) auto brochures. I would pore over these with great interest. In those days, a fast car would run the quarter-mile in roughly 13 to 14 seconds and do 0 to 60 between six and eight seconds. Such a vehicle would need a...

U.S. employers say it's a hard time to find and keep talent. Workers are decamping at near-record rates, while millions of open jobs go unfilled. One reason for this labor crunch that has largely flown beneath the radar: Immigration to the U.S. is plummeting, a shift with potentially enormous long-term implications for the job market. In the middle of the last decade, the U.S. was adding about 1 million immigrants a year. But those numbers, which slowed down during the Trump administration, hit a brick wall when COVID-19 erupted in 2020.In 2020, immigration fell to half of its 2016 level;...

When reading the Ecclesiastical History of Hermias Sozomen—a work written immediately before the Council of Chalcedon when the universal Church was roiled by a variety of heresies—one picks up the venerable author’s animus for innovation. Indeed, Book IV, Chapter 27 begins with the following passage: When the spirit of innovation becomes regarded with popular favor, it is scarcely possible to arrest its progress. Inflated as it always is with arrogance, it contemns the institutions of the Fathers, and enacts laws of its own. It even despises the theological doctrines of antiquity, and seeks out zealously a new form of religion...

Like the New York Times with its roster of anti-Israel contributors, such as the anti-Israel post-Zionist Peter Beinart, the Washington Post favors op-ed contributors on Israel-Palestine who are very much on the side of the Palestinians. A recent example, featuring the Palestinian Mariam Barghouti, is reported on here: “Washington Post Publishes Op-Ed by Mariam Barghouti, Who Compared Israel to Nazi Germany,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, April 1, 2022: It would appear that having a documented history that has included comparing Israel to Nazi Germany does not preclude one from offering their opinions on the editorial webpages of The Washington Post,...

California electricity bills are among the highest in the nation and are set to continue skyrocketing, putting state and national green ambitions in the spotlight. The surging prices could act as an impediment for the electric vehicle industry in the state. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in 2021 banning new traditional gas vehicles by 2035 while President Joe Biden outlined a nationwide goal of having electric vehicles account for half of total car sales by 2030. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has repeatedly said Americans should buy electric vehicles to avoid the fluctuating costs of gasoline. “It’s a...

The brilliant Nazi-era system of segregating society based on health papers has once again become all the rage. Better yet, modern technology has made it possible to segregate people using digital codes, just like your supermarket organizes products. No need for all that paper anymore! Not only is digital tracking a more efficient way to control people and destroy the world, it's much greener, too. Of course, our inclusive society in which everyone immediately draws the same conclusions about everything, and behaves exactly as the caring elites who control information expect them to, has to pretend to respect people...

Multiple associates of Joe Biden called him the 'big guy' in emails – the latest in a mountain of evidence that the president was involved in his son's business dealings. Even after the Washington Post and New York Times conceded the laptop is authentic a year after DailyMail.com proved it, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki continued to claim the president has never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings in a press conference on Tuesday. But emails and documents on Hunter's laptop, many revealed by DailyMail.com, show Joe Biden: Was referenced under the nickname 'big guy' as a...

The United Nations recently named March 15—also rather ominously known as the Ides of March—as “the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.” In doing so, they have accepted and seek to mandate the idea that whatever fear (literally, phobia) non-Muslims have of Islam is unfounded and irrational, and therefore must be “combatted.” In reality, aversion to Islam is not new or something that “just happened”; nor is it a byproduct of temporal circumstances (say, resentment towards Muslims due to the terror strikes of 9/11, etc.). Instead, it is something that all rational non-Muslims have felt from the very inception of Islam...

A college student has ripped into CNN’s Brian Stelter for being “right up there” on delivering false narratives after members of the liberal media accused Fox News of being a “purveyor of disinformation”. The CNN anchor was a guest at the University of Chicago’s panel discussion on ‘Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy’ when a college student didn’t hold back arguing the network had made several mistakes including failing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. “You’ve all spoken extensively about Fox News being a purveyor of disinformation but CNN is right up there with them,” college freshman Christopher...

Being infected with COVID-19 raises the risk of developing serious blood clots, a new study suggests. An international team of researchers from Sweden, the United Kingdom and Finland compared more than 1 million people in Sweden with a confirmed case of the virus between February 2020 and May 2021 to 4 million control patients who tested negative.They found three to six months after contracting COVID-19, patients were at increased risk of being diagnosed with blood clots in their legs or lungs, according to results published in the journal BMJ on Wednesday. Specifically, patients had a significantly increased risk of deep...

The suppression of pro-Israel views on campus has been a troubling development in the ongoing cognitive war against Israel. Now, the silencing of pro-Israel voices even appears in college newspapers. The McGill Daily, as one troubling example, has a long-standing, publicly announced policy of never publishing pro-Israel content in its pages, deeming it to be racist or oppressive in its support of the Jewish state. This week, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, followed that same ignoble path by violating journalistic and free speech ideals in retracting an op-ed written by two students, “We Must Condemn...

WASHINGTON — As conservative states enacted stringent abortion bans in recent decades, there was one threshold they were loath to cross: Abortion was nearly always allowed in cases of rape or incest. It was a veneer of acceptance embraced by every GOP president from Reagan to Trump, and even the strongest abortion foes, that a woman should not be required to carry a rapist’s child. Not anymore. Just as states may be on the verge of regaining expansive authority to outlaw abortion, eliminating rape and incest exceptions has moved from the fringe to the center of the antiabortion movement. In...

For Marxism to take hold, everything that came before it must be burnt to the ground, according to the standards of today’s radical leftists. No matter the historical background, if it does not serve the purposes of the Great Reset’s dystopian agenda, it must be torn down to the ground. Even if it’s something as simple as a name. This has been proven across the culture, from iconic food brands like Aunt Jemima, which is no more – to Sports, where the Cleveland Indians have gone the way of the dodo – across all areas, the illiberal left is on...

he Russian central bank sharply cut its key rate to 17% on Friday and said future cuts were possible, as emergency steps had contained the risk to financial stability, brought deposits back to banks and helped limit the threat of inflation, it said. -snip- Annual inflation in Russia accelerated to 16.70% as of April 1, its highest since March 2015 and up from 15.66% a week earlier, as the volatile rouble sent prices soaring amid unprecedented Western sanctions which cut Russia off the global financial markets and limited its trade with the outside world. External conditions for the Russian economy...

SpaceX Crew Dragon Spacecraft Approaches International Space Station In this illustration, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft approaches the International Space Station for docking. Credit: NASA/SpaceX NASA and Axiom Space will provide coverage of launch and select mission activities for Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), the first private astronaut mission to the International Space Station. Liftoff is scheduled at 11:17 a.m. EDT Friday, April 8, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Coverage begins on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website beginning at 10:15 a.m. EDT Friday, April 8. Coverage will join the Axiom Space...

London (AFP) – UK climate activist group Extinction Rebellion shut down London's iconic Tower Bridge on Friday after two of its protesters abseiled over its sides. The activists were hanging from the bridge by suspension cords after unfurling a banner reading "End fossil fuels now" and letting off red flares. Tower Bridge was chosen as "the gateway to the City of London -- the root source of fossil fuel funding in the UK", Extinction Rebellion said in a statement, adding it ushered in a week of protests. The Metropolitan Police were on site but said they had made no arrests.

This Walmart job starts at $95,000 a year Walmart (WMT), one of the few retail chains that runs its own trucking fleet, said it's raising the average starting salary for first-year drivers from around $88,000 to a range of $95,000 to $110,000. Walmart needs drivers to deliver goods to stores and e-commerce warehouses, as well as meet growing demand for customers' online orders. Walmart added more than 4,500 drivers last year, a record hiring spree for the company, which employs around 12,000 truck drivers. Walmart is also trying to hire new drivers internally. It started a three-month development program for...

Bacho Kiro Cave. (Nikolay Doychinov/AFP via Getty Images) Last year, a genetic analysis of bone fragments representing our earliest known presence in Europe raised a few questions over the steps modern humans took to conquer every corner of the modern world. Whoever the remains belonged to, their family background was more entwined with the East Asian populations of their day than with today's Europeans, hinting at a far more convoluted migration for our species than previously thought. Now, researchers from the Universities of Padova and Bologna in Italy have proposed what they think might be the simplest explanation for the...

8 April 2022Friday of the 5th week of Lent St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Church, Kyiv, Ukraine Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Violet.First readingJeremiah 20:10-13 ©He has delivered the soul of the needy from the hands of evil menJeremiah said:I hear so many disparaging me,‘“Terror from every side!”Denounce him! Let us denounce him!’All those who used to be my friendswatched for my downfall,‘Perhaps he will be seduced into error.Then we will master himand take our revenge!’But the Lord is at my side, a mighty hero;my opponents will stumble, mastered,confounded by their failure;everlasting, unforgettable disgrace will be theirs.But you, O Lord of Hosts,...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A missile hit a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians, killing dozens of people Friday, Ukrainian authorities said while warning they expected to find more evidence of possible war crimes in parts of the country previously held by Russian troops. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said thousands of people were waiting to board trains at the station when the missile struck. Photos from the scene showed bodies covered with tarps on the ground and the remannts of a rocket with the words “For the children” painted on it in...