Free Republic

The Trump administration, pushed by the Department of Government Efficiency and deployed by the Office of Personnel Management, has sent another email to all federal employees with a normal request to present five tasks accomplished in the last week. It’s an easy task. It takes 5 minutes. In the service industry, this is entirely normal, even routine. Taking inventory of the workforce is standard for any new management in the private sector. Oddly, absolute mania broke out among the pundit class. Government unions are preparing lawsuits. The panic and frenzy is palpable. As it turns out, no new president has...

A beloved father of 13 children who saved his family from a house fire started by their landlord was gunned down outside of a Brooklyn brownstone early Sunday morning in an apparent targeted attack. Lavel Fraiser, 40, known by friends as “Flip,” was ambushed and fatally shot in the torso by a group of gunmen who were “waiting for him,” neighbors and police said. Fraiser was found in the backyard of a building at 673 Sterling Place just after 1 a.m., police said. “He got shot outside in front. He staggered in all the way to the back. He was...

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on...

Jordan Peterson’s interview with Jay Bhattacharya is one of the more insightful conversations to come out of the post-pandemic period. It’s fascinating to see Peterson coming to terms with the sheer scale of the lockdown during which time he was rather sick. We could have used his voice then and I have no doubt that he would have been fantastic. Fortunately for the whole world, we did have Jay. It’s not just his credentials or his position at Stanford University. It’s his erudition that gave him the reach to make sense of our times. In this interview, Jay explains the...

The Foegen Effect: How Mask Wearing Can Make You SickIt took a long time, but my study on masks has finally appeared in the prestigious journal Medicine. What is my study about?It is about whether masks decrease case fatality from COVID-19 (because less viral material is transmitted) or increase it. Increase sounds illogical? Ask yourself if you would wear the mask of a Covid patient. You probably wouldn’t, otherwise you could become infected by inhaling the viruses he or she breathed into the mask.My study, based on the U.S. state of Kansas, provides the answer: case mortality was significantly lower...

New York City’s antiquated method of calculating property taxes has long allowed owners of multimillion-dollar brownstones in Brooklyn and high-rise co-ops by Central Park to pay less in taxes than working-class homeowners in the South Bronx, relative to the value of their properties. Now, a high-level city commission empowered by the mayor and City Council speaker is proposing a major overhaul that would fundamentally shift the tax burden to those wealthier neighborhoods and lessen it for low- and moderate-income homeowners. In a preliminary report posted online Thursday, the commission recommended that the city assess most homes, including co-ops and condominiums,...

AFTER struggling to fix up a brownstone in Harlem for the last 16 months, Meyghan Hill, a model and actress, and her husband, Daniel Scarola, a ballroom dancing instructor, are thinking about giving up and moving out. But what may drive them away is not the neighborhood, which they have come to love, nor their four-family house, where they have painstakingly stripped a century of varnish and paint from doors and balusters, but the shock of a tax notice they received last month from the New York City Department of Finance. The notice indicated that the taxes on their 19-foot-wide...