Free Republic

As news stories generally go, the retirement of a longtime member of Congress typically causes barely a ripple in the pool of politics. Unless the personage was a major power player or notorious for some other reason, our system of government treats the coming and going of most elected officials with only a modicum of interest. So it is likely to be with Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who, having served seven terms in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate, announced he is retiring at the end of next year. The senator’s record in the overall...

Yes, the headlines are bleak. Yes, scientists are sounding the alarm. Yes, a growing pile of studies warn that the world is “on the brink of irreversible climate disaster,” as a recent “state of the climate” report put it. It’s easy to feel like the planet is on fire — because, well, sometimes it literally is. But even amid the floods, droughts and devastating forecasts, it’s not all doom: Innovators are reimagining how we power our lives, nature is pulling off surprising comebacks, cities are cleaning their air and nations are opening their wallets. This Earth Day, take a break...

SAN FRANCISCO — Former Vice President Al Gore on Monday compared President Donald Trump’s administration to Nazi Germany and issued a dire warning about Trump’s use of power in a speech devoted to climate change. Speaking at an event at the start of San Francisco’s Climate Week, Gore said the Trump administration was “trying to create their own preferred version of reality” to achieve their sweeping objectives similar to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s and ‘40s. “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore said to an...

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 (King James Version) The only thing more corrupt than the US gummit is American science. These are the people who have used every trick in the book to promote every Communist weapon they could to destroy America in the name of science. They have abused and destroyed the name of science to promote the darkest form of slavery against the people they hate in...

CNN — The last 140 years have been littered with promises by presidents to fix the federal bureaucracy. Back in the late 1880s, when unqualified political appointees were wasting taxpayer dollars, there was a move to professionalize government workers in a merit-based bureaucracy. The effort gained momentum after then-President James Garfield was shot and killed by a disaffected former supporter with mental illness who was angry at not getting a job in Garfield’s administration. The US has a bureaucracy for a reason The political “spoils” system, which the bureaucracy replaced, was demonized for its cronyism, inefficiency and graft. Now, ironically,...

Oil and gas companies would be liable for damages caused by climate change -related disasters in California under legislation introduced Monday by two Democratic lawmakers. The proposal claims that the oil industry intentionally deceived the public about the risks of fossil fuels on climate change that now have intensified storms and wildfires and caused billions of dollars in damage in California. Such disasters have also driven the state insurance market to a crisis where companies are raising rates, limiting coverage or pulling out completely from regions susceptible to wildfires and other natural disasters, supporters of the bill said. Under state...

CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten said Monday on “News Central” that Americans don’t understand the connection between climate change and wildfires. Host John Berman said, “Just a few minutes ago, you heard FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell talking about the role that climate change has in helping create the conditions for these wildfires burning out of control, the most destructive in some ways that we’ve ever seen in and around Los Angeles. So how do Americans feel about climate change and the danger it poses? Do they feel the same way that they used to?” Enten said, “I mean,...

California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough. This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is blaming the raging California wildfires on climate change. “80,000 people told to evacuate. Blazes 0% contained. Eight months since the area has seen rain. The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable,” the senator began before blaming the devastation not on poor fire management but on climate change. “Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax,'” he said, demanding President-elect Donald Trump to “treat this like the existential crisis it is.”

Firefighters are battling multiple fast-growing wildfires in Los Angeles that have destroyed buildings and forced thousands of people to flee their homes. Almost 3,000 acres have burned in the city's Pacific Palisades neighborhood after a fire broke out on Tuesday morning. About 30,000 residents were ordered to evacuate. Fire photos show Palisades destruction—"Looks like Mars" Read more Fire photos show Palisades destruction—"Looks like Mars" Two more blazes broke out later on Tuesday. The Eaton Fire has since burned 1,000 acres in the hills above Altadena, prompting evacuation orders for parts of Altadena and Pasadena. The Hurst First has burned at...

Recently President Biden and some Democrat-controlled states have taken what they claim are decisive steps to combat climate change. But in the end, it was all nonsense, hypocrisy, and wasteful spending — with taxpayers picking up the tab. The Biden administration put the final touches on a new regulation that will ban most types of domestic water heaters that use natural gas. Under the new regulations, approximately 40% of the tankless water heaters in production today would be banned by the year 2029 and replaced with less efficient models. The Department of Energy claims that the new regulations will reduce...

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering. It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world.

On Sunday, December 22, a US Navy guided-missile cruiser, the USS Gettysburg, mistakenly shot down an American fighter jet over the Red Sea. This was not the first incident of friendly fire by the U.S. Navy, nor the most tragic. On Sunday morning, July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser in the Persian Gulf, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR 655. Captain Will Rogers III and his crew had mistaken the ascending passenger jet with 290 people on board for a descending Iranian F-14, a fighter...

The Arctic Ocean may see its first ice-free day before 2030, earlier than scientists predicted. While most projections of the Arctic’s sea ice have focused on month-by-month conditions, a new study has revealed possible predictions down to the day. Previous expectations had the Arctic Sea loss predicted around 2030, but these results reveal that an ice-free day could occur as early as late summer 2027. Nine other simulations, while less likely, predict that it could occur within the next three to six years. Scientists, from the study published in Nature Communications, say the Arctic’s first ice-free day is now inevitable...

@goddeketal The more I dug into @GretaThunberg's story, the more I realized that something stinks here. It's no COINCIDENCE that her first appearance was on August 20, 2018, with a sit-in protest in front of the Swedish Parliament, followed COINCIDENTALLY four days later by the release of a book she co-authored with her mother. But that's not all - the PR machine for her was already in full swing on August 20, thanks to a man named Ingmar Rentzhog, who financed and drove the campaign through his company, @WeDontHaveTime. And guess what? Rentzhog is also COINCIDENTALLY the chairman of the...

The Biden administration’s “climate envoy,” John Kerry, claimed that the United States was “on the brink of needing to declare a climate emergency.” During a forum hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics last week, when asked what people who care about the climate and are concerned about the future “should be doing,” Kerry stated that people needed to “start focusing” on the arguments that went with President-elect Donald Trump’s transition. Kerry added that there were “seven million people” who were dying each year due to poor air quality.

Former Vice President Al Gore raged against “polluters” during an address at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, demanding that people listen to scientists about climate change. The COP29 summit, which started Monday, previously featured speakers who proposed taxes on the meat and dairy industry and “climate finance” initiatives for less-developed countries. While addressing the conference, Gore claimed that predictions by climate scientists had been proven to be “dead right.” “The fact that the scientists who predicted all of this decades ago have been proven dead right should cause the rest of us to pay more attention...

A group of massage therapists in Florida have been arrested amid claims they offered to perform sex acts to undercover detectives during a two-day sting dubbed 'Operation Skin So Soft'. During the two-day operation, which began this past Monday, undercover detectives went to 22 different Asian massage parlors around Polk County to get massages from licensed therapists. But 20 of those women - who are all from the Republic of China - offered sex acts to the detectives completely unprompted. One of the women arrested was said to have 'tried to have full sex' with the detective even after he...

In 1989, Shell published an internal report analyzing two possible futures, one in which fossil fuels were brought under control and one in which they weren't. In the former, which they called the "sustainable world" scenario, greenhouse gas emissions began declining rapidly around the year 2000 and global warming was kept in check. In the other, where fossil fuel production continued apace, Shell researchers predicted a world of climate chaos—one with massive increases in "violent weather," particularly "more storms" and "more deluges." These disasters, Shell concluded, would create crises of such severity that "[c]ivilization could prove a fragile thing."....... If...

"No one can deny the impact of climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don't. They must be brain dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger. They're not going to get less; they're going to get stronger." -- President Joe Biden, Oct. 2, 2024 Three years ago, Science News published an article with the following headline: "Hurricanes may not be becoming more frequent, but they're still more dangerous -- There aren't more of the storms now than there were roughly 150 years ago, a...