Free Republic

“The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.” – Al McGuire “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” – Ambrose Bierce “It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads.” – Andy Borowitz “At every party there are two kinds of people – those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.” – Ann Landers “My...

SANTA MONICA, CA — Activision Blizzard introduced the world to its latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise, entitled Call of Duty: IRS Auditor. Developed by Treyarch Studios, IRS Auditor will take gamers on an epic adventure full of national warfare, political intrigue, and violent accounting. "This isn't your father's Call of Duty," said Activision Blizzard CEO Roberto Activision. "No one is safe from the will of the Internal Revenue Service. IRS Auditor will scare you to death with a single-player campaign that hits too close to home." "You can count on it!" he added, repeating the game's tagline....

Researchers found a type of common gut bacteria sometimes associated with inflammation, abscesses, bowel disease and cancer has a major silver lining: It seems to help prevent cardiovascular disease. The findings suggest the possibility of probiotic treatments for atherosclerosis, the dangerous buildup of fats, cholesterol and other substances in arteries that cause strokes and heart attacks and is linked to smoking, diet, age and a range of genetic causes. Diets heavy in animal-based foods have long been considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease as such diets are a major source of TMA—trimethylamine—which is converted by the liver to another...

Experts at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) unearthed a gold diadem from a huge burial urn while excavating the museum site at Adichanallur on Monday. This is the second gold ornament found at Adichanallur in the recent excavation phase.The officials said the precious metal was found inside a huge urn discovered in a pit with a diameter of 2.63 feet. The urn was interred into a rock of the same diameter. VP Yathees Kumar, who led the excavation, said the gold diadem was 3.5 cm long and found at the depth of 4.40 metres. “The diadem is yet to...

A top-level World Economic Forum (WEF) advisor says that we simply “don’t need the vast majority of the population,” and called for human beings to be replaced by machines whenever possible, saying that beyond producing data, people are just no longer “useful” to the global elite and their agenda. World Economic Forum advisor Yuval Harari, an Israeli national who is described as a “historian and futurist,” made the remarks during an interview with Chris Anderson that was published on Tuesday. Anderson, the head of TED, interviewed Harari as part of TED’s audio collective, which is meant to take a deeper...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has begun preliminary technical discussions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could lead to the temporary use of its launchers after the Ukraine conflict blocked Western access to Russia’s Soyuz rockets. ... The political fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already been a boon for SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which has swept up other customers severing ties with Moscow’s increasingly isolated space sector.

"The Michael Jordan of basketball before Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan (take THAT search engines), Julius Erving finally had his amazing genius (with a basketball) proven to the entire world when the NBA, for some reason that escapes us, decided to stop playing games and belatedly forbid anyone else from wearing his #6 forever! Julius started dunking as a little boy, first with donuts in milk. Later he dunked like Forrest Gump ran, everywhere and on everyone. And name anyone else who can sign their own dunk mid click! You can’t! And he did it not just once, but TWICE!...

Donald Trump’s recent campaign-style video that he posted to his social media platform Truth Social appears to feature a song titled after the slogan of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The former president on 9 August posted the nearly four-minute-long video on Truth Social that featured footage of himself speaking at his rallies and criticising Joe Biden after the FBI’s raid at his Mar-a-Lago home. The video starts with audio of rain and thunderstorms and has the former president criticising Mr Biden, accompanied with an instrumental track in the background Media watchdog Media Matters conducted a review of the video using...

From a distance, Orania looks like any other small town in rural South Africa. But once inside, the visitor is struck by an obvious difference. Everyone here is white. And in a country where menial work in wealthy areas is typically done by black employees, white people here mop supermarket floors, wield leaf blowers and harvest the nuts on pecan farms. Orania residents are 100-percent white in a country that has declared an end to racial segregation. The history of this incongruity dates back to 1991, when apartheid was in its death throes. White Afrikaners -- descendants of 17th-century Dutch...

Most of the 85,000 Stasi employees were out of a job when the two Germanys reunited in 1990, but some eventually found work in foreign intelligence operations or the many commercial intel companies that were becoming popular. Some went to work for the Russians, from inside Germany. That may explain a lot of the odd stuff that has been going on since the 1990s.

CNN anchor Chris Wallace said Friday on “New Day” that Republicans characterizing the FBI’s action at Mar-a-Lago as a “raid” using “Gestapo” tactics are out of touch with reality.

The FBI raid on Trump’s home isn’t just about prosecuting the former president for Jan. 6, it’s about fixing the next presidential election.The news cycle this week has been understandably dominated by the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where armed agents were supposedly looking for classified documents the FBI believes were improperly removed from the White House at the end of Trump’s term, in violation of federal law.But the FBI raid is just a piece of a much larger story that’s playing out in slow motion and in plain sight: the rigging of the...

Trump’s one-time chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says that only a small number of people who were “very close” to Donald Trump could have tipped off the FBI, resulting in the raid that occurred earlier this week. “This would be someone who was handling things day-to-day, who knew where documents were, so it would be somebody very close…” Mulvaney told CNN. “My guess is there’s probably six or eight people who had that kind of information.” According to Mulvaney, whoever spoke to the feds was close enough to Trump that he or she not only knew about the existence of...

This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Small arms, ATGMs, MANPADS, loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles, trailers and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When the...

America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth. The lie that 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious. It preys on those who love their country. It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law,

On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted approving the search warrant that resulted in the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, but aside from that, gave virtually no new information, sticking to DOJ boilerplate. During the brief statement that we waited three days for, Garland not only doubled down on the raid, but gave us no details about why he did so, or the justification for it. Instead, he put the onus on Trump “The search warrant was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause,” Garland said. “The property receipt is a document that federal law requires...

This past week, the Senate passed the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” which includes $368 billion for green energy spending targeted to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2030, a move that will almost certainly increase inflation. In a repeat of the renewable energy project failures that the Obama administration financed with federal grants and tax breaks, the Biden administration is betting more potentially inflationary deficit spending against the odds that renewable energy will be profitable this time. Ironically, on September 4, 2009, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the one who announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) had...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday announced a program to help U.S. veterans to become teachers in the Sunshine State, explaining that it is fitting to have those “who took an oath and put his or her life on the line to preserve, protect, and defend our flag and the freedom it represents” to teach the next generation. “We begin the new school year. Florida’s leading the way by bringing some of the best, the brightest, and the bravest among us into our classrooms through a new program that helps military veterans become teachers,” DeSantis announced. “If you served...

The economy has just seen two successive quarters of negative growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That means we are in a recession. However, since the unemployment rate is at a full employment level and since the economy continues to add hundreds of thousands of new jobs each month, some economists say that we can’t be in a recession. Maybe, though, we are experiencing something new: a full-employment recession. There is no doubt that the economy today is producing at rate that is about 2.5% less than the rate at year end 2021. In other words, we haven’t seen economic...

We've entered year three of the pandemic, and experts still know very little about long Covid, including how to cure its symptoms. On July 20th and July 21st, the Global Virus Network hosted the first-ever conference devoted solely to the science of long Covid. There, scientists spoke openly about what is known about the mysterious condition and the questions that remain. For example, researchers are still searching for answers to two key questions: * How do we define long Covid? * Will Covid-19 medication like Paxlovid treat long Covid symptoms as well? At this stage, even providing an estimate of...