Free Republic

WASHINGTON — President Biden looks supercharged. On social media, his eyes glow Terminator-like in images depicting him as an all-powerful figure imposing his will on the nation. Known as “Dark Brandon,” the memes began as an ironic portrayal employing a nickname from the offensive, anti-Biden chant of “Let’s Go Brandon” embraced by former president Trump’s supporters. But after a slew of recent legislative wins, Democrats have appropriated the imagery to celebrate a president suddenly rejuvenated heading toward the fall midterm elections after a nearly yearlong stretch in which he seemed more impotent than almighty... “Over the last few months, it...

Family members of murder defendant Isaiah Rivera-Perez and shooting victim Jaiden Connor filled nearly every seat in a Hillsborough County Superior Court hearing room Tuesday morning as a trial opened that will hinge on the state’s self-defense law. Homicide prosecutor Nicholas Chong Yen showed the jury a home security video that captures Connor, 17, running down Central Street and collapsing, where police found him with a bullet hole in his back. “He shot Jaden Connor in the back. He shot Jaden Connor while Jaden was running away from him,” said Chong Yen, an assistant New Hampshire attorney general. “That is...

I recently discontinued cable TV, which also provided phone service. I decided to get a wireline service, mostly because it works when the power goes off. Problem: 99% of the calls are robocalls. I looked into how to stop this, which (according to the internet) is expensive, difficult, and something about which the FCC and the rest of the State is powerless. This seems absurd to me. Why can't this practice be outlawed, and its practitioners be executed?

Since the Deep State is obviously about to kick Biden out, and since Harris is unfit to serve, it's time for discussion of one of my favorite parts of the Constitution - Amendment XXII. This rushed Amendment, hastily drafted after the death of FDR, prevents a person who has served two terms as POTUS from BEING ELECTED again. Please read it for yourselves if you doubt this. It does NOT amend or alter Article II and Amendment XII as regards eligibility to BE President - it just prevents a former President from getting back in office BY BEING ELECTED. So-...

No way in hell you are going to put a wok on an electric stove.”That was Steven Lee, a San Francisco official and restaurant investor, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle last year after the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to outlaw natural gas in new buildings.Nevertheless, they persisted. Per the Sierra Club, the quickening campaign to phase out natural gas recently notched its 50th city-level win in California alone. (Take a bow, Encinitas!) No. 50, as with some others, has “situational exemptions” for restaurants and the like, but the overall push to compel an all-electric design for homes...

University of Massachusetts President Martin Meehan on Monday condemned a threatening e-mail sent recently to a number of Black student groups at the Amherst flagship campus as administrators hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate the source of the anonymous message. “The blatantly racist e-mails recently sent to Black student organizations at UMass Amherst and other deplorable acts of anti-Black hatred are appalling and disgusting,” Meehan said in a statement. “The messages in no way reflect the true character of the UMass community and we have zero tolerance for such behavior.”...In a statement posted on Facebook and Instagram, the UMass Black...

We sang patriotic songs in grade school (yes that makes me at higher risk of death from COVID). I’ve got a couplet stuck in my head from an old war song and even though everything is on the internet, I can’t find it anywhere. The lines are: “We did some fancy fighting down in Santiago Bay/And fixed it so Cervera found it hard to get away” Does anybody here know the song?

Leaders of the Satanic Temple aren’t just outraged with Texas’s strict new abortion law. They say it’s also a matter of religion. “Consistent with our tenets that call for bodily autonomy and acting in accordance with best scientific evidence, The Satanic Temple, based in Salem, religiously objects to many of the restrictions that states have enacted that interfere with abortion access,” the religious group’s website says.

Here's a LINK to the best explanation I have run across about how SARS-CoV 2 could have been created, and why a lab origin is more probable than a natural one.I just came across it although it's about a year old.

Recently, the dissemination of misinformation has become an important global issue. While the spread of misinformation is not a new phenomenon, the emergence of social media platforms that connect networks of people, who often have similar opinions and cultural beliefs, has exacerbated and amplified this problem. Although misinformation is often associated with political campaigns, the public health community has not been exempted from its negative effects. Characterizing the spread of science- or health-related misinformation can allow for a more critical and evidence-based analysis of misinformation and inform risk communication strategies during public health emergencies. During infectious disease outbreaks, effective communication...

This paper has been referred to many times on FR in the past week, but with many varying accounts of what it says and doesn't say.Biorxiv is a website where papers can be posted as soon as they are written - they have not been reviewed, they may not even have been submitted for publication.You will see that this paper is in "withdrawn" status, but the authors comment that they are revising in response to reader comments.The site affords a kind of "mass peer review" where the comments come from everywhere, instead of from reviewers selected by a journal editor.Anyway,...

It’s not just generals who are always prepared to fight the last war. President Biden’s April 14 announcement that U.S. forces will leave Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has a long and complicated backstory. Biden said his decision will allow America to put this violent and ambiguous past behind it, to retire the frameworks that conditioned its foreign policy for a generation, and to focus its energies on the competition with China.Perhaps so. The risk, however, is that Biden’s fixation on settling old scores has blinded him to contemporary realities, and has prevented him from answering the question...

Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan has criticized President Trump’s Saturday phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump asked the state election chief to “find” additional votes to overturn election results in the state... "I understand that the Fulton County [Georgia] District Attorney wants to look at it,” Raffensperger said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.” The Secretary of State said his own office would likely not attempt a prosecution, citing an unspecified conflict of interest...

CONCORD — Gov. Chris Sununu said it was “outrageous” and “insulting” that members of Congress such as U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., were “cutting the line” to get the coronavirus vaccine ahead of more needy New Hampshire residents. Sununu, 45, took to social media over the weekend to criticize Congress after several confirmed they had gotten a shot, including Kuster and 2020 presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “Congress has literally done nothing these last eight months. Now they are cutting the line and getting the vaccine ahead of residents in long-term care, nurses and essential workers who stock...

Sweden’s Covid-19 experiment is over. After a late autumn surge in infections led to rising hospitalizations and deaths, the government has abandoned its attempt—unique among Western nations—to combat the pandemic through voluntary measures. Like other Europeans, Swedes are now heading into the winter facing restrictions ranging from a ban on large gatherings to curbs on alcohol sales and school closures—all aimed at preventing the country’s health system from being swamped by patients and capping what is already among the highest per capita death tolls in the world. The clampdown, which started last month, put an end to a hands-off approach...

Today was Columbus Day. It was also my Dad’s birthday. He would have been 97. I miss you Dad.

I have a comparison graph of various nations "new cases" of COVID over time I'd like to post on one of Doughty One's update thread. It's just a file on my computer, so it doesn't have a URL. You can't copy and paste images into FR, as far as I know. Can someone explain to me how to do this?

TOKYO – The number of people with coronavirus on a cruise ship in the port of Yokohama nearly doubled to 135 Monday, prompting imperiled crew members to plead for help and setting off debate among experts over whether the more than 3,700 people quarantined aboard should be taken ashore or left on the ship... Eleven Americans were among the 65 people aboard the Diamond Princess who were newly diagnosed with the respiratory infection, giving the ship the largest number of infections outside China... The cruise ship company, Princess Cruises, said that because the quarantine was imposed a few days ago,...

We finally have consensus. The Iranians don't want the US in IraqThe Iraqis don't want the US in IraqAND, the Americans don't want the US in Iraq.So who or what is keeping us there?

Richard Nixon was elected to his second term as President in November 1972 with 60.1% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes. Less than two years later, he was removed from office (forced to resign) by a conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA (Woodward), the FBI (Felt), the media (Bradlee, Bernstein) and Democrats in Congress. At the time, no American was more enthusiastic for his removal than me. I was a true Watergate fanatic. I ate, slept, and talked Watergate. The day he resigned, I was overjoyed. I was fooled, and many are being fooled right now, in the same...