Free Republic

According to the survey, 75 percent of respondents will hit a point where they need time away from the crowd. They can be creative in their ways of escaping — 1 in 4 has hidden in a relative’s house to take a moment alone, while 37 percent have gone so far as to make an excuse and leave the house altogether. The survey was commissioned by Motel 6 and conducted by OnePoll. It examined the delicate balance between wanting to spend time with family and also needing a bit of space. Of those surveyed, 95 percent believe it’s important to...

Clay Travis @ClayTravis KJP said today that January 6th was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Even if you accept that January 6th was some awful event, which I don’t, did Pearl Harbor and 9/11 not happen? This is one of the dumbest things she’s ever said.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday that the United States has “definitely” been harmed by having Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) serve in the Senate. Musk made the comment in response to a tweet from former Tesla program manager Farzad Mesbahi, who is now a content-creator, according to his LinkedIn profile. Mesbahi retweeted a post about a letter that Warren sent to the chairman of the board of Tesla, which Musk also owns, asking if shareholders have been hurt financially by Musk’s time running Twitter. “Elizabeth Warren is the last person I would ever want anywhere close to Tesla,” Mesbahi...

Patients with cancer who were living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection had increased epigenetic age—a type of biological age defined by DNA methylation patterns—compared with patients with cancer without HIV, according to a study presented at the AACR Special Conference: Aging and Cancer, held November 17-20.

Kim Yo-Jong, a top North Korean communist official and sister of dictator Kim Jong-un, published a barely coherent string of insults and threats on Tuesday suggesting that international experts doubting the quality of North Korean weapons may soon prompt an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch across the Pacific Ocean. Kim, officially a vice department director at the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party (the ruling communist party), published her statement through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), one of the few legal media outlets in the country and a government-run propaganda platform. Kim appeared to be responding to the free...

Just imagine for a moment that Donald Trump, Jr. (or Eric) sat on the board of directors for a foreign company and “earned” millions of dollars for literally doing nothing. He didn’t know the industry and didn’t speak the language. The only thing Junior brought to the table was his last name. He made deals with foreign agents and foreign corporations to acquire rare materials like cobalt (used in electric cars) that was sold to Chinese interests for profit. While on an extended drug binge, he took a computer with lots of incriminating evidence to a repair shop and forgot...

A large earthquake rattled Northern California early on Tuesday morning. The 6.4 earthquake was centered about 7.5 miles west-southwest of Ferndale, California, in Humboldt County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Following the initial earthquake, two aftershocks of 4.6 magnitude and 3.1 magnitude were recorded. No injuries or damage have been reported. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there is no risk of a tsunami following the quake.

They never had a chance. Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training. Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from a half-century ago and virtually nothing to...

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary. The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to...

Since the time of Hippocrates, medicine has had one common thread – first, do no harm. Often, the harm done is only clear in retrospect – bloodletting, various treatments involving toads, the “humours” system of diagnostics all seem just plain batty to us today (let alone the humour balance test that involved tasting the patient’s urine, but that was more the doctor’s problem.) Moving closer to today, the idea of putting x-ray machines in shoe stores, giving codeine to three -year-olds, and touting the healing power of drinking potions laced with radium all seem like bad ideas now.

CINCINNATI—On December 4, 5 and 9, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers seized three shipments of improperly imported Sildenafil pills and jelly transiting through the Port of Cincinnati. Officers found 28,600 pills of the prescription drugs in two shipments of pens, while the third shipment was manifested as flavored jelly. This shipment contained 700 packets of jelly laced with sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra. Two shipments originated from India, while the third was arriving from Singapore. One of the shipments from India contained 1,860 packets of 10 Sildenafil Citrate tablets, for a total of 18,600 pills. This shipment...

Christmas is almost upon us, that magical time of year when the Christian faithful can look forward to attending seasonally themed Holy Masses centering upon such traditional, comforting festive fare as the miraculous Annunciation, Immaculate Conception, and Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ…and now, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the equally sacred occasion of His Divine Abortion, too. On 20 December 2013, Eloïse Bouton, a young Frenchwoman associated with the radical global feminist movement Femen, interrupted a carol service in Paris’ La Madeleine Church dressed as a topless parody of the Virgin Mary, with the...

(Daily readings from the USCCB)And the angel said to her in reply, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Luke 1:35Try to set aside all that you know about Jesus and simply ponder these words of the Archangel Gabriel as if you were to hear them as our Blessed Mother did for the very first time. She was told she would have a child, even though she had not had relations with a man. She was...

A former Nazi concentration camp typist known as the “Secretary of Evil” has been convicted by a German court for her role in more than 10,000 murders during the Holocaust. Irmgard Furchner, 97, was found guilty on Tuesday of complicity in the deaths of 10,505 people at Stutthof, the internment camp near Gdansk, Poland, where she served as a typist and stenographer from 1943 through 1945, BBC reported. Furchner, who was tried as a juvenile because she was under 21 when she worked at the camp, was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison term. Although Furchner’s lawyers repeatedly denied she...

crypto trading looks a lot like the forms of finance we’re all familiar with. It’s made up of things called “exchanges,” “brokers,” “lenders,” “deposits” and “hedge funds.” Crypto also carries the special mystique of the blockchain, which has let traders treat critics as anti-innovation Luddites. [however] the purposelessness of the crypto trading system emulates finance the same way the board games Risk and Monopoly emulate war and real-estate investing. Crypto trading is also gambling. It performs no intermediation function to help expand the economy or improve society. Crypto trading is, as “Seinfeld’s” George Costanza might have said, finance about nothing....

Critics argue that connecting Russia’s culture with its current leadership is counterproductiveUkraine is calling on its Western allies to temporarily boycott Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer behind Christmas classic The Nutcracker, and other Russian works. In an opinion piece published in the Guardian last week, Ukraine’s culture minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, wrote that the Kremlin is using Russian culture as a “tool and even a weapon,” wielding it to “justify their terrible war.” “We’re not talking about canceling Tchaikovsky, but rather about pausing performances of his works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion,” Tkachenko wrote. “Ukrainian cultural venues have already done this...

The island of Puerto Rico becoming a state might not lead to Democrats obtaining two additional senate seats, despite the party’s high hopes. The U.S. House passed a bipartisan bill to put Puerto Rico’s territorial status up for a vote with three potential options: statehood, full independence, or sovereignty will full U.S. association. In a symbolic 2012 referendum, statehood received over 60% of the vote with the other two options included. New York Democratic Reps. Nydia Velazquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have led the push for Puerto Rican self determination, which was included in the party’s 2020 election platform. Democratic proposals...

Tuesday 20 December 202220 December Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio Church, Rome Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Violet. Year: A(I).First readingIsaiah 7:10-14 ©The maiden is with childThe Lord spoke to Ahaz and said, ‘Ask the Lord your God for a sign for yourself coming either from the depths of Sheol or from the heights above.’ ‘No,’ Ahaz answered ‘I will not put the Lord to the test.’ Then Isaiah said:‘Listen now, House of David:are you not satisfied with trying the patience of menwithout trying the patience of my God, too?The Lord himself, therefore,will give you a sign.It is this: the maiden is...

A 17-year-old boy in Ozark, Missouri, is being charged as adult for the murder of a 16-year-old girl to whom he allegedly provided a fentanyl-laced pill, leading to her at-home overdose death in September. He was charged more than three months after Jones’ untimely death and released on $50,000 bond. Now, Jones’ mother in sounding off on social media, accusing Sayre of letting her daughter die. Sayre is on house arrest under electronic monitoring and is expected back in court on Jan. 31, 2023. Victoria Jones, 16, died of a fatal overdose. Her 17-year-old alleged supplier of a fentanyl-laced pill...

Democratic California Rep. Zoe Lofgren earmarked $2 million in federal taxpayer money for the renovation and relocation of a Planned Parenthood clinic in the omnibus spending bill currently working its way through Congress, according to analysis of the federal government’s budget by Open the Books. Members of Congress sometimes agree to vote for a spending bill under the condition that it includes funding for an unrelated cause or project they’re interested in in a process known as earmarking. The omnibus bill for the federal government’s 2023 budget includes $2 million for a Planned Parenthood clinic at the request of Lofgren,...