Free Republic

Since the beginning of Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine, the United States, the European Union – and their allies – have provided Kiev with $126 billion worth of aid, a number almost equal to the country’s entire GDP. Moreover, millions of Ukrainians have found refuge in the EU where they were given housing, food, work permits, and emotional support. The scope is huge, even by western standards. Considering that the bloc has been funding Kiev while coping with an economic and energy crisis of its own, the assistance is perhaps especially notable. Kiev bases its endless funding requests on the...

Cardinal Zen’s conviction shows that no one is safe in Hong KongCardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, has been convicted of failing to register a humanitarian relief fund and fined 4,000 Hong Kong dollars (about £400) after being punished for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators during the mass protests in Hong Kong. The fine may seem small, but this is Beijing’s way of saying that even a frail and saintly cleric who walks with the aid of a stick is not safe to endorse democracy. No one is.All Beijing has done is decided not to proceed with...

While LGBTQ candidates and their supporters celebrated several milestone victories around the nation in this year’s midterm elections, California quietly reached its own: At least 10% of its state lawmakers identify publicly as LGBTQ, believed to be a first for any U.S. legislature. The California legislators, all Democrats, are proud of their success but say it underscores the hard work that remains in their own state and elsewhere, such as handling the fallout from measures such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans some lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, or laws in other states limiting transgender students’...

... [I]n graduate school, I read a 1995 paper titled “The Role of Premarket Factors in Black-White Wage Differences.” Using a nationally representative sample of more than 12,000 14- to 17-year-olds from 1979, Derek A. Neal and William R. Johnson estimated that blacks earned between 35% to 45% less than whites on average. They examined how much of the wage gap could be attributed to present-day discrimination in the workplace versus differences in skill as measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a cousin of the ACT and SAT. Importantly, they weren’t trying to measure the effect of America’s racist...

(CNSNews.com) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) went down to the House floor on Thursday to announce her farewell to the Democratic leadership and the American people. In her speech, Pelosi announced that she would not be seeking reelection to the Democratic congressional leadership in the upcoming Congress. In doing so, she described herself as a “devout Catholic” and a “patriotic American”

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located. This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack...

Moscow, November 23, Interfax - The ban on selling goods promoting LGBT will also apply to marketplaces, Russian State Duma Information Policy Committee head Alexander Khinshtein said. "This amendment prohibits the sale of goods, including imported, containing information for the dissemination of which administrative or criminal liability is envisaged, therefore, it, of course, will apply to marketplaces, to computer e-commerce," Khinshtein told a plenary session of the State Duma on Wednesday. "If we, for example, ban the sale of literature promoting non-traditional sexual relations in bookstores, but keep the possibility of buying them online, in that case our laws will...

President Trump confirmed to Axios reporter Jonathan Swan on Friday that he had dinner this week with old friend Kanye West and anti-Semite groyper leader Nick Fuentes, telling Swan that he did not know of Fuentes and that West had brought him to Mar-a-Lago uninvited.West, who also calls himself Ye, has been in hot water over several anti-Semitic remarks he recently made. Fuentes is a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.Swan reported on Twitter, “NEW: Statement from fmr President Trump in response to our story about his dinner w Ye and Fuentes: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our...

One local mayor even complained that the punishment was ‘too light.’(LifeSiteNews) — An elderly priest at the head of 17 small parishes in the east of France has been barred from speaking in public by his diocesan superiors for four weeks because he declared that the worldwide number of victims of abortion was far higher than that of the First World War. Father François Schneider made the “controversial” statement while preaching during the commemorative Mass on Armistice Day on November 11 in the tiny village of Bertrimoutier (307 inhabitants), near Epinal in the Vosges Mountains. “Abortion has killed more people...

Disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried financially backed half a dozen media outlets including ProPublica, Vox and the Intercept, it has emerged. SBF's crypto exchange sensationally collapsed earlier this month, after the company filed for bankruptcy amid reports it owes billions of dollars to customers. But the repercussions could be even more far-reaching, with one media outlet warning it has a 'significant hole' in its budget now FTX has folded. Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried funded half a dozen media companies - including ProPublica to the tune of $5 million - with at least one, The Intercept, warning staff it...

How it all happened.

For decades, American leftists have been insisting that the way to beat America’s soaring health costs is through socialized medicine. England, Europe, and even Cuba, they assure us, are the models we should look to when it comes to bringing affordable healthcare to everything. However, healthcare in these countries isn’t looking so healthy lately. In England, for example, a 61-year-old man with a cancer diagnosis was just told that he must wait three years (not a typo) to be seen at a hospital. When it comes to socialized medicine, there are myriad factors involved, all of which dovetail to say...

Musk said that he'd make an 'alternative phone' if there's 'no other choic Twitter Chief Elon Musk says he'd consider making an "alternative phone" in the event that Twitter is removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Musk made the comments on Friday night in response to conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, who tweeted, "If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone. Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?" "I certainly hope...

Elon Musk revealed that he believes Twitter should release the chat logs regarding their decision to restrict sharing a story from The New York Post on Hunter Biden’s laptop. On Wednesday, Mr Musk responded to a tweet from the account @alx asking for the new owner of Twitter to look into the company’s decision to not allow people to tweet The Post’s story. “Raise your hand if you think @ElonMusk should make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election in the interest of Transparency,” @ALX tweeted. Mr...

I wont post it, it is profane, it is a Jesus looking figure praying while standing behind a woman who is naked and has a twitter bird covering her with the label trump of the jesus figure

While there’s been no official word, legendary British rockers Pink Floyd have been shopping their recorded-music catalog and other assets for several months, seeking as much as $500 million, according to the Financial Times, with both major music companies and investment firms as the top bidders. But sources say an explosive new interview with founding member, main songwriter and stakeholder Roger Waters — in which he makes extensive remarks about Israel, Ukraine, Russia, the U.S. and other political matters that one could politely characterize as controversial — is giving at least one potential buyer cold feet and seems likely to...

Legal action has been taken against the Swedish government by a group of children and young adults led by conspiracy theorist Greta Thunberg for failing to take appropriate steps to combat “climate change.” On Friday, hundreds of activists, led by Greta Thunberg, marched through the Swedish capital to a Stockholm district court to sue the government for allegedly not doing enough to address climate change, NBC reported. The 87-page document filed with the Stockholm District Court was signed by over 600 people under the age of 26 who are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The group argued that Sweden’s climate...

Our Western Elites™ are obsessed with promoting suicide, but usually it is the suicide of someone else. But in the case of Nature, the British science journal, it is their own suicide that they are rushing toward. A once proud journal that was widely held to be the most prestigious in the world, Nature’s editors have decided that Western science is vastly overrated and should be “decolonized.” If there is one thing science is not, it is colonized. Science, as we currently understand it, is a wholly European invention of recent origin. No colonizing required. Westerners as far as I...

Former President Donald Trump confirmed Friday he met this week with Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West — and far-right activist Nick Fuentes, whom the Justice Department has called a “white supremacist.” Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he was not expecting Fuentes to attend the dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort and claimed he didn’t know anything about Fuentes, who led “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 presidential election in support of Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud. “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” said Trump, who...

More and more apartment compounds in Beijing on Friday forbade residents from leaving for at least a few days. "You constantly hear of someone going into lockdown and you have this constant feeling that you're going to be next," Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, said Friday. It was not clear how many people were affected at a city level, and to what degree stay-in-place measures were being enforced. This morning most of our 30+ staff reported their communities went into a 7-day lockdown," James Zimmerman, partner in the Beijing office of Perkins Coie, said...