Free Republic

It turns out that not only did the Ministry of Truth brigade at the FBI push Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, but it also reportedly paid the Big Tech platform millions of dollars. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, who reported on the latest batch of Twitter files Dec. 19, noted that “The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.” An associate of former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker told him and Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett in a February 2021 email: “I...

Germany Has Provided The Means To Quantify The Human Cost Of The Experimental Vaccination Program ... Most sane people believe that the burden of proving safety should lie on the party conducting a questionable action, rather than their victim. For example, if a criminal shot someone, the prosecution would not be required to prove that the victim’s sudden death after the gunshot wound was not just a spontaneous coincidence, a result of extreme stress from the situation, or due to a pre-existing medical condition. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to establish a special type of privilege within the...

Stanford University released a guide this week on “harmful” language that it wants to remove from its online properties — noting that the term “American” is a no-go. The language guide, which was published Monday, aims to “eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased … language in Stanford websites and code.”

A mysterious shock wave in a gust of solar wind has sent a barrage of high-speed material smashing into Earth’s magnetic field, opening up a crack in the magnetosphere. The barrage of plasma could lead to a geomagnetic storm today (Dec. 19), according to spaceweather.com. The shockwave’s origins aren’t exactly known, but scientists think it could have come from a coronal mass ejection launched by the sunspot AR3165, a fizzing region on the sun’s surface that released a flurry of at least eight solar flares on Dec. 14, causing a brief radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean. Sunspots are areas...

Lawmakers have come to a $1.7 trillion deal to avoid a government shutdown Package includes $44.9 billion for Ukraine - the largest amount of assistance yet Ban on federal employees from using TikTok on government-owned devices Bill runs for 4,155 pages and had details released about 2 a.m. on Tuesday

Those who see the madness for what it is have only one escape: go to ground, fade from public view, become self-reliant and weather the coming storm in the nooks and crannies. A great madness sweeps the land. There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness and confidence in the rightness of one's opinions. Extremes only become more extreme even as the folly of previous extremes wearies rationality. Imaginary sins are conjured out of thin air to convict the innocent while those guilty of the most egregious fraud...

The owner of an exotic animal breeding business in Florida has been sentenced to five years' probation for illegally selling a capuchin monkey to singer Chris Brown. A federal indictment doesn't name Brown, only identifying the buyer as a celebrity in California, but key details match an Associated Press report that wildlife agents seized the singer's pet monkey after serving a search warrant on his Los Angeles home in early January 2018. Brown also was identified in court Wednesday at the sentencing hearing in Florida for the monkey breeder, Jimmy Hammonds. Wildlife agents moved in after Brown shared a picture...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made an unannounced visit to the front-line city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought a fierce, months-long battle. He met troops and handed out awards to soldiers, the presidency said. For months, Bakhmut has been a key target for Russian forces in the Donetsk region, and has been extremely badly damaged. However, Ukrainian forces have been able to hold back the advance. The visit is a significant show of defiance - and a demonstration of support for Ukrainian forces engaged in some of the fiercest battles in recent weeks.

The Second Amendment protects the right to people to "keep and bear arms," and at its core the right to self-defense, [judge] McConnell observed. [Reporter]The ban was a reasonable and measured approach to restricting large-capacity magazines, which in practice easily convert handguns into semi-automatic weapons capable of rapid fire, he said.

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...