Free Republic

President Biden entered office triumphantly rejoining the Paris climate accord. He created powerful new climate positions, including one for former secretary of state John F. Kerry. He reversed Trump-era policies, revoking a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. And he declared the threat of climate change the “number one issue facing humanity.” But over the past few weeks, he has authorized a historically large release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, resumed selling leases to drill on federal land and announced he is waiving an environmental restriction to allow summer sales of ethanol-based gasoline — all moves that are anathema to...

Australian bishop condemns plenary council document for abandoning ‘fidelity to Catholic Tradition’The working document ‘fails seriously when it abandons fidelity to the Catholic Tradition expressed in the Scriptures and the Magisterium,’ including by pushing female ordination, said Archbishop Porteous. HOBART, Tasmania (LifeSiteNews) – A Catholic archbishop in Tasmania has strongly condemned the working document for Australia’s “Plenary Council,” a meeting of the entire Church in Australia, as representing a Church “that has lost confidence in its identity and mission.”Archbishop Julian Porteous, Archbishop of Hobart since 2013, issued his statement in an April 11 blogpost published on the archdiocesan website. “On...

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky. This sudden burst of gas in the atmosphere reflected away sunlight from Earth and lowered the planet’s average temperature by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a little longer than a year. If humanity wants to turn down the worst effects of global warming, then it simply needs to do that, with planes, indefinitely. That is the idea, at least, of solar geoengineering. To its supporters, mimicking a large volcanic eruption is an ethical necessity, a way to soften the blow of...

Pressure spikes were reported by weather stations all around the world, including in China, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. Watch as the Tonga volcano unleashed once-in-a-century planetary shockwave.A visually stunning depiction of how an underwater volcano adjacent o tthe Pacific island country of Tonga burst in January, unleashing a once-in-a-generation planet wide shockwave.Ángel Amores, a physical oceanographer at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Majorca, Spain, created the shockwave simulation, which was published in the New York Times.Amores first noticed the shockwave after seeing the wave’s radar signature while analyzing data from local weather...

I'd guess by the time the midterms roll around, the Democrats will have most everyone wanting to stand them up to a political firing squad.

Google has taken a variety of moves in reaction to the Kremlin’s military campaign since late February, including stopping ad sales in Russia and disabling Google Pay. Recently, Google Maps started revealing coordinates of Russian military airfields and navy warships. Google has disputed making any modifications to the way its Maps service displays Russia’s important military facilities. On Tuesday, Russia issued a statement in reaction to news that Google Maps had unobscured Russia’s military airfields and navy warships.“Google Maps has opened access to Russia’s military and strategic facilities,” said the caption on a handful of satellite pictures uploaded by an...

FARGO, N.D. (AP) — A majority of Americans continue to support a mask requirement for people traveling on airplanes and other shared transportation, a new poll finds. A ruling by a federal judge has put the government’s transportation mask mandate on hold. The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that despite opposition to that requirement that included verbal abuse and physical violence against flight attendants, 56% of Americans favor requiring people on planes, trains and public transportation to wear masks, compared with 24% opposed and 20% who say they’re neither in favor nor opposed. Interviews...

It is past time for Mike Lee to start fessing up to all he knows about the plot to set aside the results of an honest and fair election to keep Donald Trump in power. We know Utah’s senior senator had a much greater role in that plot than he has previously acknowledged, his constituents deserve a much more detailed accounting of what went on and the extent of Lee’s participation in it.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shouted at President Joe Biden's national security adviser when he was pressed on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and said he would not help the U.S. out by pumping more oil. The staggering decline of U.S.-Saudi relations under the Biden administration was outlined in a Wall Street Journal report Last September, Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with the Saudi Crown prince, who goes by his initials MBS, at a seaside palace. Sullivan brought up Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was murdered in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MSB shouted...

Artist reconstruction of Tupandactylus imperator. (Copyright Bob Nicholls 2022) For much of the history of paleontology, scientists thought all dinosaurs were covered in scales, like the lizards of today. That was until a spate of discoveries in recent decades revealed many of these marvelous extinct animals sported ancient feathers – just like their later descendants, birds. As for pterosaurs – the flying reptiles that reigned in the sky when the dinosaurs roamed – the issue has never been settled. Were they bald? Did they have feathers too? Scant evidence in the fossil record has never been definitive – until now,...

A New Holland Agriculture 100 series box spreader distributes manure for fertilizer. (CNH Industrial/Handout via REUTERS) The war in Ukraine is causing a rise in oil and wheat prices. Other items are hard to come by due to international restrictions on doing business with Russia. For example, many countries are seeing less fish than usual, because Russia usually catches and sells a lot of fish. However, one item you may not think of that often is harder to find than normal. That is the crop-growing aid known as fertilizer. Fertilizer is added to soil and provides plants such as wheat...

Defiant members of the media and other liberals have responded to the recent lifting of the travel mask mandate by taking selfies of themselves wearing masks on their recent travels and insisting to social media users that they feel safer from COVID-19 this way. After U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle voided the Biden administration’s travel mask mandate on Monday, there was some fear online from liberal media figures who didn’t feel safe enough going bare-faced on an airplane or Uber ride. MSNBC host Tiffany Cross posted a photo of herself on a flight wearing her black mask. Her...

Yesterday, the Palm Beach County PBA withdrew its endorsement of Angelique Contreras, a Palm Beach School Board, District 4 candidate. Monday, I was sent the following graphic taken from the PBC PBA website. The PBA revoked its endorsement by noon the next day because Contreras used a single word in headlining a video a year ago. In a Facebook discussion, Contreras was joking around with some friends when someone said people should dump garbage on a county commissioner’s lawn. Contreras said something like, maybe it should be the masks.

More communities are encouraging residents to put away their lawnmowers for next month to help pollinator populations grow Two years ago, Appleton became the first city in the U.S. to adopt "No-Mow May," an initiative designed to boost the population of bees and other pollinators. The idea is to give homeowners the option of letting their lawns get a bit overgrown for a few weeks to ensure that bees that are coming out of hibernation have plenty of options for the nectar and pollen they need. The initiative, which is optional everywhere it's been implemented, requires cities to temporarily waive...

A free download 22 page PDF report at the link. For subscribers, a Wall St Journal article. Along with "The Science", age and metabolic adjusted Covid death rate, all cause excess deaths, and mortality average the study included unemployment rate, GDP, economic average and in person school. An interesting read, but the graphic from the WSH tells a lot of the story.

... and fall under the category of characters who could require a disclaimer on the Disney+ streaming service, the report indicates. Disney's wokeness continues as they recently labeled iconic characters Tinker Bell and Captain Hook of the classic 1953 animated film Peter Pan as "potentially problematic" in a new report, according to The New York Times. Tinker Bell and Captain Hook are reportedly seen as perpetuating negative stereotypes and fall under the category of characters who could require a disclaimer on the Disney+ streaming service, the report indicates. Disney sees Tinker Bell as problematic because there are moments in the...

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has not announced his official support for GOP Rep. Nancy Mace as she tries to hold onto her South Carolina congressional seat, but her fundraising shows that the influential California Republican is still behind Mace even as McCarthy has shown a willingness to purge his party of members who have been vocal critics of former President Donald Trump. And McCarthy is not the only member of Republican leadership who has been quietly funneling campaign cash to Mace this election cycle. A review of the latest quarterly fundraising reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show...

Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney celebrated a major fundraising haul last week when this year’s first-quarter filing eclipsed $10 million raised for the endangered lawmaker in a competitive primary. After Cheney raised more than $2.3 million this year alone, her campaign war chest with $6.8 million in cash on hand four months before the GOP contest headlined the swamp-focused Politico’s Playbook. “In previous cycles, it was common for Cheney to raise a few hundred thousand dollars in a quarter, mostly from Wyoming residents,” the Playbook authors wrote on Monday last week, adding, “with the national attention her race has received,...

"They may have exposed her, but they'll never stop her. Long live @libsoftiktok." In the wake of the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz doxing the creator of the @libsoftiktok Twitter account in a hit piece, supporters of the account’s work have rallied around her in protest of this attack by establishment media forces. Some have even taken to replacing their Twitter names and profile pictures with Libs of TikTok branding. But ultimately the organized protest has advocates spreading the message that the account deserves to hit the one million followers milestone. Within five minutes of watching a real-time graph on SocialBlade,...

The Republican-led Florida Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would eliminate a special tax district that has allowed Walt Disney Co. to govern the land where its theme parks sit, as lawmakers target the company for opposing legislation restricting classroom instruction on gender and sexuality. The measure still needs to pass the GOP-led House, which is expected to approve it. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called for lawmakers to consider such a bill in a special session he convened this week, has made clear he would sign it. The measure potentially delivers a blow to the company’s operations in the...