Free Republic

FIFTH WEEK OF LENTJohn 8:31-42Friends, in today’s Gospel,and that the truth will set them free.Jesus was distinguishing between sins and sin, between the underlying disease and its many symptoms. When the Curé d’Ars was asked what wisdom he had gained about human nature from his many years of hearing confessions, he responded, “People are much sadder than they seem.” Blaise Pascal rests his apologetic for Christianity on the simple fact that all people are unhappy. This universal, enduring, and stubborn sadness is sin.Now, this does not mean that sin is identical to psychological depression. The worst sinners can be the...

SIX YEARS AGO.

Orthodox monks who've been ordered out of a monastery in Kyiv refused to leave on Wednesday, as a deadline to vacate the complex expired. The dispute over the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, Ukraine's most revered Orthodox site, is part of a wider religious conflict playing out in parallel with the war. The monks using the property belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has been accused of links to Russia. But the site is owned by the Ukrainian government, and the agency overseeing the property notified the UOC earlier this month that, as of March 29, it was terminating the lease.

Explanation: Which star created this bubble? It wasn't the bright star on the bubble's right. And it also wasn't a giant space dolphin. It was the star in the blue nebula's center, a famously energetic Wolf-Rayet star. Wolf-Rayet stars in general have over 20 times the mass of our Sun and expel fast particle winds that can create iconic looking nebulas. In this case, the resulting star bubble spans over 60 light years, is about 70,000 years old, and happens to look like the head of a dolphin. Named Sh2-308 and dubbed the Dolphin-Head Nebula, the gas ball lies about...

New York imposes the most burdensome taxes on its residents of all the country’s 50 states, according to a new study. WalletHub compared the 50 states in terms of their property taxes, individual income taxes, and sales and excise taxes in order to calculate their “overall tax burden,” or the proportion of total personal income that residents pay toward state and local taxes. […] Overall, Democrat-led blue states finished with an average rank of 19.68 on the list of 50 states compared to 31.32 for Republican-led red states, indicating the former had significantly higher tax burdens. States were designated red...

Garland said defendants' lawyers should make the argument in court that they have been held for too long.Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday declined a request to examine whether the civil rights of some Jan. 6 defendants have been violated due to the lack of a speedy trial and said it's the job of their lawyers to make that argument in court. At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said he toured the D.C. Department of Corrections last week and met with some of the 20 prisoners still being held because of their participation in the Jan....

March 29 (Reuters) - An explosion hit a natural gas pipeline near a village in northern Siberia late on Wednesday but there were no casualties, Tass news agency cited a local official as saying.

The Colorado dentist charged in his wife’s poisoning death had serious financial trouble — from going bankrupt, to gambling issues to losing big in crypto, according to documents obtained by The Post. James Craig racked up $2 million in personal debt while his dental business was losing about $120,000, according to his Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, which was finalized in July. The money woes got so bad, his practice failed and he was forced to sell it off. All this came as the 45-year-old’s wife, Angela, 43, had three life insurance policies out on her when she died on March...

Amid issues like climate change and fluctuations in the global price of oil, American motorists are increasingly interested in electric vehicles (E.V.s). In early 2022, new E.V. registrations rose 60 percent even as overall new car registrations declined by 18 percent. Of all considerations, the biggest barrier to acceptance is price: The price of the average new E.V. runs nearly $67,000, while the overall average new car costs just under $50,000. Clearly the key to greater adoption of E.V.s is bringing the price down to be more in line with gas-burning alternatives. Last week, Volkswagen introduced a new concept car,...

A North Carolina public school says it's exploring ways to "revise campus policies" after children as young as 14 were invited to a drag queen show on campus. Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem was thrust into the national spotlight Tuesday after a video published by Libs of TiktTok showed a drag queen straddling a young girl during an LGBTQ Pride Festival at the school. The school confirmed in an earlier statement that students of all ages were allowed to attend, and photos posted by the school’s official Instagram account showed drag queens posing with young girls. Promotional materials for...

Pregnant Russian women are reportedly fleeing to Argentina to make sure their newborn children are not born under the rule of Vladimir Putin, RadarOnline.com has learned. According to Daily Star, the phenomenon has been dubbed “birth tourism” because the majority of the mothers will leave Argentina and return to Russia shortly after their children are born. “5,800 of them were in the last three months, many of them declaring they were in the 33rd or 34th week of pregnancy,” Florencia Carignano, Argentina’s immigration office director, recently said.

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era. For more than half a...

An off-duty NYPD sergeant was punched in the face and knocked to the ground by a biker on the Upper East Side after he asked the reckless motorcyclist to slow down, police said Wednesday. The 52-year-old sergeant was walking his dog at East 90th Street and First Avenue around 7 p.m. Tuesday when he spotted a man whizzing around on a green motorcycle and asked him to go easy, authorities said. The two men began fighting — and the biker repeatedly punched the off-duty cop in the face, causing him to fall to the ground, police said. The ruthless attacker...

Jesse Watters What do Spring Breakers know about politics...and what's going on down there? Johnny goes to find out #FoxNews... HILARIOUS VIDEO AT LINK.....................

With the most recent General Assembly, the negotiations and democratic votes of the so-called "Synodal Path" came to an end. The decisions made with a majority are now to be implemented. However, the resolutions do not meet with the undivided approval of Rome and the Pope, both of whom represent the universal Church and thus 1,300 million Roman Catholics and who are both responsible for guaranteeing the unity of the two-thousand-year-old Church in the truth of Christ, yes, the resolutions were not only by German Catholics, but also criticised worldwide.

Aformer Google engineer has made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in eight years - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct. Ray Kurzweil spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.' These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer. The predictions that such a feat is achievable by 2030 have been met with excitement and skepticism, as curing all deadly diseases seems far out of...

LGBTQ groups from both sides of the aisle are urging police not to release the Nashville school shooter’s manifesto Advocates of transgenderism are pushing back on calls to release the manifesto belonging to the biological woman who shot and killed six at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, even as many on the right demand the release due to concerns the shooter’s actions were motivated by hatred for Christians. Multiple LGBTQ groups are speaking out against calls to release the manifesto belonging to Audrey Hale, the trans-identified person who police say wreaked havoc at The Covenant School until being swiftly...

On March 9th Matt Taibbi testified before the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.At the same time, he was testifying before the committee the IRS paid a visit to his house–an almost unheard-of tactic used by the agency. Usually, they use the mail. The weaponization of Government? Not a thing, we are told. And if you disagree the IRS will remind you of that fact, forcefully and in person.John did a write-up yesterday that lays out the facts, although I admit to being more cynical than he. I need to get a few beers or bourbons in...

'Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable' A group of artificial intelligence (AI) experts and industry executives, including Elon Musk, in a letter called for a six-month pause in developing systems that could become too powerful that they pose risks to society and humanity. Earlier this month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4 AI program, which has wowed users with its vast range of applications, from engaging users in human-like conversation to composing songs and summarizing lengthy documents.

The Russian president admitted today that sanctions over his war in Ukraine are having a negative effect on the Russian economy. But Vladimir Putin was also keen to highlight Russia’s nuclear capabilities – announcing that the Americans will no longer be given a warning ahead of a nuclear test launch. Meanwhile in Ukraine, military action in the region around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is increasing, according to the head of the international atomic watchdog, who visited the site today.