Free Republic

Open AI CEO Sam Altman will attend the secretive Bilderberg Meeting, an annual gathering of over 100 political and corporate leaders from Europe and North America, which has announced AI as a key item on its agenda this year. Altman isn’t the only Big Tech figure in attendance. Other participants include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will also attend. As noted in a congressional hearing last week, CISA played a key role as a source of government pressure in...

The more marijuana is consumed, the more evidence mounts up that it ruins lives. As more states legalize marijuana, and as popular culture increasingly treats the narcotic as though it were harmless, it becomes increasingly apparent that using it involves serious risks. Lawmakers should stop decriminalizing recreational marijuana use, and allow it only as prescribed, via strict protocols, by licensed medical doctors. Even then, its use should be a last resort. The latest worrisome study, released earlier this month, was conducted by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Mental...

The combination of domestic and foreign turbulence is creating a crises of confidence in the nation’s leadership, making these days especially difficult for one group of Americans: the media people whose job is to shield Joe Biden from any and all blame. Talk about a tough assignment! Fortunately for the president, there is a creative cadre of bunco artists who can be counted on to see no evil when he throws open the southern border or when his extended family gets fat checks from foreign potentates and princelings. Move along, nothing to see here, they proclaim, their eyes wide shut....

Major urban areas in the U.S. are regaining some of the residents they lost when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many out of cities into less dense areas, according to new Census data. U.S. metro areas grew by roughly 0.4 percent between 2021 and 2022, the Census estimates, with around two-thirds of the 384 recorded metro areas seeing population increases in that same period. Many metro areas in the south saw increases in the new data: the metro area around Phoenix, Ariz., crossed 5 million and the Villages, Fla., metro area went up by a significant 7.5 percent. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington...

Scientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a "critical moment of agony" and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning.Orcas have mainly directed their efforts at sailboats, making a beeline for the rudder. (Image credit: Shutterstock) Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behavior is being copied by the rest of the population. Three orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, struck the yacht on the night of May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast...

Hong Kong bishop praises Vatican-Beijing deal allowing Communist-run church to pick bishops in ChinaBishop Stephen Chow, S.J., says he hopes to 'build bridges' with the leaders of Communist-run state church in China.HONG KONG (LifeSiteNews) — In a new interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, Hong Kong Bishop Stephen Chow, S.J., who was recently appointed by Pope Francis, downplayed fears about the scandalous Vatican-Beijing deal that grants a say in the appointment of Catholic bishops to the atheistic Chinese Communist Party (CCP).The Hong Kong bishop also encouraged the CCP agenda of Sinicization — by which the Communists seek to bring all religions...

How the pursuit of racial equity provided a lesson in unintended consequencesSan Francisco’s school district was in trouble. Only 19% of tenth graders had passed the state maths exam and were not required to repeat a maths course. That number dropped further, to 1%, among black pupils. And so, in 2014 San Francisco decided to move Algebra I from eighth grade (about 13 years old) to ninth grade for all pupils, hoping that an extra year of maths would leave pupils better prepared. Nearly ten years later, after much controversy, the first evaluation of the change was released in...

The CBS drama series FBI: Most Wanted attacked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in its latest episode by referring to his policy of busing illegal border crossers to New York as a “publicity stunt.”

Commentators were left aghast Thursday after Wired magazine published a fawning, over-the-top profile of much-maligned Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — with many seriously questioning whether the piece was satire. Buttigieg, 41, was trending on Twitter after the article by veteran journalist Virginia Heffernan — titled “Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang” — went up online. Critics were quick to point out that the puff piece largely failed to mention controversial issues that have dogged Buttigieg’s time as transportation secretary — including supply-chain problems, en masse flight delays and cancellations, and his handling of February’s toxic train derailment...

The lawyer for a Manhattan hospital worker accused of taking a Citi Bike from a young black man — who claimed that he paid for the two-wheeler — provided receipts that he says show she was the one who purchased the ride at the center of the viral incident. The second receipt shows another bike being taken out a minute later from the same docking station and was the bike Marino said his client used to get home after being “heckled and pressured to find a new bike” by the group. The hospital employee, who Marino says is a six-months-pregnant...

Disney has abandoned plans to open up a new employee campus in Lake Nona, Florida, amid rising tensions with the state’s governor. Citing “changing business conditions” and the return of CEO Bob Iger, Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney’s parks, experiences and products division, penned a memo to employees Thursday, announcing that the company will not move forward with construction of the campus and will no longer be asking more than 2,000 California-based employees to relocate to Florida. “This was not an easy decision to make, but I believe it is the right one,” D’Amaro told employees. Many Disney employees balked...

What a great ad for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. It sure sounds like an, “I’m running for President” ad, but it stops short. It builds on Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech before he ran for President.....

A domestic worker who stabbed her employer’s mother-in-law 26 times in 2018, after the 70-year-old woman threatened to send her back to Myanmar, was found guilty of murder on Thursday. Myanmar national Zin Mar Nwe, who is now 22, came to work in Singapore in January 2018. She was instructed by her agent to declare her age as 23, but investigations revealed she was 17 at the time. She started working for her third employer, identified as Mr S, on May 10, 2018. On May 26, 2018, the family of four was joined by the man’s mother-in-law, who had come...

Why his repulsiveness may have been exaggerated. Posted April 25, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk -His students Plato and Xenophon described Socrates as ugly and made much out of this. -His supposed repulsiveness did not prevent Socrates from leading a rich and remarkable love life. -Plato and Xenophon may have had good reasons for inventing or exaggerating their teacher's ugliness. Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, Socrates’s greatest love was with the...

The ancient Greek philosopher’s ‘know nothing’ credo could be the balm for our polarized timesA common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government. But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure – why everything seems so irreparably wrong. As...

Conservative syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead” that Republican “closet normals on the Hill” want to move beyond former President Donald Trump but are waiting for their voters to do so.Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Do you think that, assuming that Jack Smith does go forward and bring some sort of charges related to this, do you think that will have any impact whatsoever on Trump’s standing among must be members of Congress, Republican officials and voters?”Goldberg said, “Those are different constituencies, to be sure. I think there is a possibility, if not one that I think...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) tweeted Thursday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wanted to see Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY) lynched like Emmett Till after she claimed Bowman made her feel threatened. Greene complained about Bowman after he confronted her on the steps of the Capitol Wednesday, saying he had been “aggressive” and that he had previously called her a “white supremacist.” Video of the confrontation went viral, and appeared to show Bowman interrupting Greene to urge Republicans to expel Rep George Santos (R-NY). Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene outside the Capitol after George Santos had press...

Report: American Self-Government Is CollapsingWithout a civic life shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue, our republic will eventually descend into tyranny.Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright...

Examining the Most Profoundly Absurd Contradictions of Liberal Catholicism “Yes, truly, Vatican Council II is the ratification of liberal Catholicism. And when it is remembered that Pope Pius IX, eighty-five years earlier, said and repeated to those who were visiting him in Rome, ‘Be careful! There are no worse enemies of the Church than the liberal Catholics!’ — then can be measured the catastrophe that such liberal Popes and such a council represent for the Church and for the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, They Have Uncrowned Him, p. 222) All around us today we see...

a close up of a pill with a spiral of wire around it Credit: MIT MIT researchers have developed an electronic pill that allows them to hack the powerful gut-brain axis — and it could one day be used to treat everything from anorexia to obesity to diabetes. Your second brain: Your gastrointestinal tract is lined with more than 100 million nerves, known as the “enteric nervous system” (ENS). This system is so complex it’s been nicknamed the “second brain.” While the ENS controls digestion autonomously, without input from your real brain, the two can and do communicate with one...