Free Republic

Brandon Wheeler has grown pot professionally for 20 years. His parents grew pot before him, and so did his grandparents. Despite these deep roots in the industry, he still felt a weight lift when he pulled his last pot plants out of the ground this July and shut down his legal weed farm in Mendocino County. He was happy to be leaving the family business. “It was sad and depressing, but it was also a relief because [running a pot farm] just had taken a serious toll on my mental and physical health, and the same with my family,” Wheeler...

Mary’s relationship with Joseph was briefly complicated by her blessing. May I not abandon my blessings due to worldly considerations. When we think of the Holy Family, we think of the perfect family. We see God Himself in the form of a child. We see the mother of Jesus who accepted her role in perfect faithfulness to God at the word of the angel. We see Joseph who stepped up to be their protector and provider. We pray our families can be as perfect and holy as this one. It’s easy to forget that the situation wasn’t without controversy.When his...

Gloria Estefan is opening up about why she didn't want her daughter, Emily Estefan, 27, to come out as a lesbian to her mom, Emily’s grandmother Gloria Fajardo, before Fajardo's death in 2017. "In the Latin community, a lot of these subjects aren't touched, they're taboo," Estefan, 65, said in a sit-down interview with CNN's Chris Wallace. "People see, but they don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to see it." "I have all these people that have loved me through the years and supported, and I want them to realize that we’re all just families trying to...

At dinner time on December 2 , I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter. Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ? snip In the days that followed, we—the journalist Matt Taibbi; investigative reporters connected to The Free Press, including Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse; plus Free Press reporters Suzy Weiss, Peter Savodnik, Olivia...

Illinois’ five statewide pensions system saw their debt increase by nearly $10 billion to a grand total of $140 billion in fiscal year 2022. Pensions will cost the state nearly $11 billion next year, but that’s still $4.4 billion too little. Illinois’ state pension debt now stands at $139.7 billion, according to a new report from the Illinois General Assembly’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. That is up $9.8 billion from 2021, when state pensions were benefitting from healthy investment returns. After markets cooled substantially, state pension debt in the fiscal year that ended July 1 continued to grow,...

More than 100 firefighters were called to the scene at the Radisson Blu complex in the German capital's Mitte district. The 16-meter aquarium houses 1,500 tropical fish. Two people have so far been reported injured.At around 5:45 a.m. local time (0445 GMT) there was a very loud noise and parts of the facade of the hotel where the aquarium was located flew onto the street, a police spokesman was reported as saying in local media outlet RBB. Berlin's traffic agency VIZ said an extremely large volume of water had spilled over onto the street outside while Berlin police said "massive...

The lobbying campaign spanned months and culminated with a private meeting between CDC officials and three advocates last summer, a collection of emails obtained by The Reload show. Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered. The advocates focused their complaints on the CDC’s description of its review of studies that estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States–attacking criminologist Gary Kleck’s work establishing the top end of...

A gang of armed robbers descended upon a gold shop in the northern Thai province of Tak, only to realise that they'd messed with the wrong target. The incident happened at about 12.55pm last Thursday (Dec 8), reported local media. CCTV footage from within the shop showed the four men arriving on motorbikes and proceeding to shoot at the shop's glass doors. After getting in, one of them began cutting through the steel bars to get to the jewellery. That was when shop owner Phisit Raphitphan took action. The 41-year-old owner of the gold shop was heard firing a gunshot...

A video of a rat dragging a slice of pizza down a flight of subway stairs nearly broke the internet when Matt Little posted the 14-second clip to YouTube in 2015. Seven years later and the viral video has more than 12 million views and still resonates for some who see it as a metaphor for gritty New Yorkers. Little, 41, shared how the rodent became a viral celebrity — and a moneymaker — in an interview with Insider. It all started around 1 a.m. when Little told the outlet he was walking to catch a Brooklyn-bound L train after...

Young people are discovering that “digital footprints” are real — and a real problem for our most-online generation. A TikTok user has gone viral after sharing their social media nightmare, claiming they missed out on a job because of something their potential colleagues had seen them post online. “Me realizing the digital footprint is real because when called for a job interview they loved me but when they did a background check they said they didn’t want to hire me anymore,” the TikTok user, @shoomew, wrote in text over a recent video — with more than 4.1 million views since...

There can be only one reason to promote or retweet real-time location information about a person or their family: You hope something bad happens to them. You hope someone acts on it. In this case, these reporters were amplifying a Twitter account that was posting location data about Musk’s private jet, and doing so on the heels of a disturbing incident in Los Angeles involving a stalker targeting a car that was carrying Musk’s toddler son. In other words, the media elite who for years absurdly claimed that “speech is violence” actually engaged in the promotion of violence and got...

Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued his 37th COVID-19 disaster proclamation. Illinois is one of only 10 states living under an emergency order. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has issued his 37th COVID-19 disaster proclamation, extending his emergency powers through Jan. 5. When it ends, Pritzker will have held emergency powers for 1,029 of 1,452 days in office, or 70% of his term. None of Illinois’ neighboring states remain under emergency orders. Illinois is one of just 10 states nationwide still being ruled through emergency powers, with eight of the 10 led by Democratic governors. ... New York was once the epicenter of COVID...

The National Institutes of Health is directing people to an absolutely absurd paper published in the journal Advances in Health Sciences Education. I have no idea how prominent the journal is, but I have a decent idea of the prominence of the NIH. A government agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, they essentially determine medical education in this country. The NIH actually invited these authors to lay out their theories of medical education. The paper is scary as hell. Not quite Canadian medical murder scary, but very very scary nonetheless. Why so frightening? Well, our NIH...

A New York Federal court on Monday released more documents regarding Ghislaine Maxwell’s defamation lawsuit filed by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre. Most of the documents as you would expect were heavily redacted when it comes to revealing names of the wealthy elite who were Epstein’s associates but what did come to light was a deposition by Epstein victim Sarah Ransome. In Ransome’s deposition she claimed that Epstein did make blackmail sex tapes of his elite friends and would go on to state she even has copies of the tapes. The Daily Mail shared this excerpt of the deposition: ‘When my...

Catholic Charities Is Not Exempt from Unemployment Compensation Statute In Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. State of Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, (WI App., Dec. 13, 2022), a Wisconsin state appellate court held that Catholic Charities and its sub-entities are not exempt from the Wisconsin Unemployment Compensation Act as organizations "operated primarily for religious purposes." It emphasized that the statute should be "liberally construed to effect unemployment compensation coverage for workers who are economically dependent upon others in respect to their wage-earning status." The court said that it must look to the work of Catholic Charities, not the...

“‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches’” (Matthew 13:31–32). A further lesson from this parable is that God’s kingdom will grow to become a blessing to the rest of the world. The tree that develops from the mustard seed symbolizes the kingdom, which in this age is Christ’s true church. The...

We have become so preoccupied in proving God that we have not prepared our hearts for the great tests of life whereby God proves man. Could it be that the great trial you are now facing, the burden you now carry, is actually God at work proving you? We see an amazing thing in 2 Chronicles 32:31: God left a great king for a season to prove him. “God withdrew from him, in order to test him, that he might know all that was in his heart” (2 Chronicles 32:31, NKJV). God proved an entire nation to find out what...

Seven months before he shot President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill Major General Edwin Walker Seven months before Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy, he took his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to Major General Edwin Walker‘s house, stood by the fence, aimed towards the window, and shot at him. Walker was a stark anti-communist voice and an increasingly strident critic of the Kennedy’s, whose strong political stances had him pushed out of the army in 1961. In an excerpt, published at the Daily Beast, from a new book, Dallas 1963, Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis tell the...

Parents in Boston are calling for mask mandates to return in schools amid fears over rising staff and pupil absences. A group of parents and school nurses gathered outside Boston Public Schools on Wednesday waving signs that called for 'universal masking after the break'. They have also launched a petition that around 200 parents have signed. Suleika Soto — who led the protests and has two daughters in elementary school — accused education chiefs of 'leaving the community vulnerable to further sickness and deaths' by making no plans to bring back masks after the holidays.

Retiring anti-Trump Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois used the occasion of his farewell address from Congress to slam his fellow Republicans for sheltering “the ignorant, the racist.”Mr Kinzinger, whose popularity with his own party members tanked due to his service on the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack, decided not to run for re-election to his House seat. He and Rep Liz Cheney are the only two Republicans on the committee, and neither will be returning to Congress next year after she lost a primary challenge to a pro-Donald Trump challenger.In his speech, Mr Kinzinger did not...