Free Republic

George Orwell’s novella ”Animal Farm” is regarded as one of the great books of Western literature. Orwell’s allegory reveals its epiphany when the pigs, symbols of the Communist ruling class, revise it’s seventh commandment from “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Meanwhile the Marxist-affiliated group, Black Lives Matter, is a prime example of life imitating art. Reports that BLM has $42 million in assets, while going on real estate spending sprees for mansions, stock market purchases and other luxuries, should raise the interest of the IRS and other law...

After two years of strong demand and soaring prices, the supply of rentals in the Hamptons is surging, leading to a wave of last-minute price cuts. Median rental prices in the first quarter fell 26%, according to Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel. Brokers say some owners are slashing prices by 30% or more just to fill their properties. “There is a tremendous amount of inventory and people are not renting it,” said Enzo Morabito of Douglas Elliman. “And it’s across all segments, from the very low to the very top of the market.” The weakness marks a dramatic and...

LIFE CHOICES What would you do? You make the choice. Don't look for a punch line...there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice? At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: "When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He...

Joe Biden was evacuated to a fire station and two military jets were scrambled after a light aircraft veered into airspace over the president's Delaware beach house. The 79-year-old and his wife Jill were rushed from the home to the secure location in Rehoboth following the breach on Saturday afternoon. The plane was immediately escorted from the restricted airspace. Preliminary investigation revealed the small private plane entered the restricted airspace 'by mistake' and there was 'no threat to the President or his family,' a Secret Service spokesperson confirmed. The security detail, which is set to interview the pilot, claims the...

[Catholic Caucus] Priest in Ontario promotes ‘Pride Month’ in a Catholic school board video'[W]e proudly fly the rainbow flag to mark Pride Month,' Fr. Joseph de Viveiros, C.R. said. KITCHENER, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest appeared in a video for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board to promote “celebrating” so-called “Pride Month” in June.“Yes, it is the time that those of us who identity as 2SLGBTQIA+ to celebrate who God made us to be,” opened Fr. Joseph de Viveiros, C.R. in a video titled “We All Belong – Pride Month,” posted by the WCDSB on June 1.“But it’s also...

History can be a powerful tool, particularly in a high-inflation environment like this one in which no suitable economic model seems to apply. Inflation — running at 8.3% as of April, near a four-decade high — has stayed stubbornly persistent for a full year to the surprise of virtually everyone who tracks it. Now there’s a risk that price gains could take much longer than expected to fall back down, even when the Federal Reserve is aggressively hiking interest rates. That risk was highlighted on Thursday by BofA Securities strategists Vadim Iaralov, Howard Du and others, who point to the...

Image Captured from Microsoft’s “Powering a Connected and Circular Future for Fashion” Did you feel the shift in the fashion world? Coming to a tee shirt near you, Microsoft, in partnership with Eon, announced they are planning to digitally tag 400,000 fashion items by 2025. Retailer H&M and global apparel company, PVH (known for the labels Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) have signed up to be part of the initial launch. The idea behind this new technology seems to be two-fold: to provide transparency on the journey of an item from manufacturing to consumer and finally to waste recycling to...

Angeli Gomez told CBS News that she received a call from law enforcement suggesting that she could face consequences for speaking to media outlets about her experience. --------------- A Uvalde mom who says she was handcuffed by law enforcement while trying to rescue her sons from the school shooting has claimed that authorities warned her not to speak to the media about her experience. Angeli Gomez, a farmworker in Uvalde, spoke to CBS News on Thursday, describing how she was able to rush into Robb Elementary School and save her kids during the shooting that killed 19 children and two...

Cleveland Federal Reserve President Loretta Mester said Friday that she doesn't see ample evidence that inflation has peaked and thus is on board with supporting a series of aggressive interest rate increases. "I think the Fed has shown that we're in the process of recalibrating our policy to get inflation back down to our 2% goal. That's the job before us," Mester said in a live interview on CNBC's "The Exchange." "I don't want to declare victory on inflation before I see really compelling evidence that our actions are beginning to do the work in bringing down demand in better...

One of Australia’s largest regional food processors says energy costs are “out of control”, with already elevated gas prices tripling since the company signed new contracts in early 2022. Consumers will inevitably cop higher prices on their products with other costs also on the rise, including a jump of as much as 40% for raw materials such as tomatoes, carrots and apples in the past year, Jason Fritsch, the chief executive of Kagome, said. Kogame produces about 200,000 tonnes of tomatoes, 30,000 tonnes of carrots, 10,000 tonnes of apples and 7,000 tonnes of beetroot annually. The firm’s gas bill will...

California: come for the poo-covered streets, stay for the crippling gas prices. That’s right, while the national average gas price hit $4.76 per gallon this week according to AAA, Californians are now paying a record $6.24 average per gallon after the state saw prices surge past the $6 mark for the first time in history last week. Via the Daily MailAt one station in coastal Mendocino, prices are just pennies away from $10 – the highest ever in history, according to the Daily Mail. Breaking it down by city, San Francisco motorists are paying an average of $6.50, while San...

Turkey's inflation climbed to its highest level since 1998, hitting an annual 73.5% in May, official data showed Friday, an issue dogging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of elections next year. Critics have blamed the country's economic woes on Erdogan's unorthodox economic policy of pushing for lower interest rates to combat price rises. The central bank refused again last week to raise its main rate, keeping it at 14%. Soaring food and energy prices pushed inflation even higher last month. Transport prices jumped by 107.6% in May while food was up 91.6%. Rumours of a military intervention in northern Syria...

News anchor Norah O’Donnell’s salary was reportedly slashed by more than half at CBS Evening News as the struggling news program continues to make substantial budget and cost cuts, Radar has learned.According to The Post, CBS News re-signed the 48-year-old news anchor in April for a yearly salary of $3.8 million – which is a remarkably less sum than the $8 million she was previously making to host the evening news program. But while O’Donnell accepted the new pay package, an insider familiar with the negotiations revealed that CBS executives offered the anchor a “low ball” sum that they “expected...

A pair of federal programs compensating people who suffer injuries from vaccines and pandemic treatments are now facing so many claims that thousands of people may not receive payment for their injuries any time soon. A second program designed for vaccines and other treatments created or used during pandemics has seen unsustainable growth. Between 2010 and 2020, the Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program received 500 complaints. In the two years since Covid-19 appeared, it has received over 8,000 complaints. Yet the pandemic fund has paid zero claims, in part because officials are waiting for people to submit detailed medical records and...

Douglas K. Uhde, the 56-year-old felon who is accused of murdering retired Wisconsin Judge John Roemer in his own home, urged people to vote for President Donald Trump and advocated against gun confiscation on Facebook. He also posted graphics that referred to both Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno as a “b****” Online records show that Douglas Keith Uhde, also known as Doug Uhde and Douglas K. Uhde, most recently lived in Saint Helen, Michigan, but had previous Wisconsin addresses in Adams, Marshfield, and Friendship, Wisconsin. Uhde had multiple Facebook pages. Some of them contain innocuous photos of cats or trucks....

No one has ever known quite what to make of Job. The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with a member of the Heavenly Host, haSatan (“the Adversary”), who claims he can make even goodly Job curse the deity. Soon, Job’s servants are killed. His children are...

Bill Maher has argued Republicans could easily 'steal' the issue of federal marijuana legalization by making it an issue about freedom after Democrats inserted 'too much stuff' about racial 'equity' in the House-passed measure aimed to decriminalize pot. The comedian, argued Friday night that legalization of marijuana swings in the favor of Republicans and is 'something we ought to do.' 'Republicans are gonna steal the issue. I think eventually,' Maher told former Attorney General Eric Holder after being asked why President Joe Biden hadn't yet pushed for federal legalization of pot. 'I mean, it could be one of those freedom...

Hong Kong authorities on Saturday detained several people as they pounced on any attempt at public commemoration of the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, while around the world tributes were paid to the victims of the bloody event. As night fell, candles appeared in the windows of several foreign countries' missions to Hong Kong -- in defiance of a warning not to do so -- and on various street corners around the city. Discussion of the events of 1989, when China set troops and tanks on peaceful protestors, is all but forbidden on the mainland. Semi-autonomous Hong Kong had...

Archaeologists have unearthed the ancient burial of a woman lying on a bronze bed near the city of Kozani in northern Greece. It dates to the first century B.C. Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo. The woman's head was covered with gold laurel leaves that likely were part of a wreath... The wooden portions of the bed have decomposed. Gold threads, possibly from embroidery, were found on the woman's hands, Chondrogianni-Metoki said. Additionally, four...

It's inevitable that, sooner or later, some pivotal moment in your life – a cultural or political event that changed what you did or thought – will become history. In that moment you realize not just that (a lot of) time has passed, but that your memory of that moment is wholly subjective, and open to interpretation – or misinterpretation. In my young life, that moment was punk rock, and I was naïve enough to believe for years that it was a wholly subcultural event, and hardly likely one day to become a six-part miniseries streamed by Disney. (If I...