Free Republic

Home mortgage rates have surged past 7%, hitting the highest level in more than 20 years and dealing another blow to Americans trying to break into the housing market. The average rate on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage was 7.09% this week, up from 6.96% last week and the highest since 2002, according to data released Thursday from mortgage giant Freddie Mac. One month ago rates were at 6.78% and for much of the year held in the low-to-mid-6% range. But borrowing costs have been on the rise lately. Inflation is a major driver of mortgage rates and amid continued...

'For the foreseeable future': Bureaucrats urged to stay away from hideous structure in notorious drug haven What happened: The Biden administration urged hundreds of government employees in San Francisco to stop coming to work at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building due to safety concerns. • The 18-story building, which houses various federal agencies and former House speaker Pelosi's office, sits adjacent to the city's Tenderloin district, a notorious haven for drug-addled vagrants and other violent criminals. • Pelosi reportedly raised concerns about the safety of the building's tenants, including members of her staff, in a recent meeting with the...

Recently some liberals became incensed at the actor Woody Harrelson. His offense was being photographed wearing a campaign hat for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while posing with Kennedy's wife, actress Cheryl Hines. Left-wing Twitter soon became very angry, with one user declaring Harrelson "dead to me." An early comment on Hines's Instagram page explained the reason for the anger. "You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat," it said, "because that's who a Kennedy campaign will elect." In recent weeks, many Democrats have coalesced around the idea that support for Kennedy would equal support for former President Donald Trump,...

Last week, Barack Obama’s private chef, Tafari Campbell, fell off his paddle board and sank below the surface of Edgartown Great Pond. His drowned body was recovered on Monday morning in the water off the former president’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Currently, there’s no foul play suspected, and it’s worth noting that Campbell was not wearing a lifejacket. However, certain peculiarities have presented themselves, causing some people to raise questions. For example, the reason for the 911 call that prompted the search was left blank in official logs. The person Campbell was with at the time of the accident remains unidentified,...

The job of physicists is to worry about numbers, but one number has perplexed physicists for more than a century. That number is 0.00729735256—approximately 1/137. This is the fine-structure constant. It appears everywhere in the equations of quantum physics. The fine-structure constant, designated by the Greek letter alpha (α), is one of the many constants of nature that power our laws of physics, like the speed of light, the gravitational constant, or Planck’s constant. These constants can have different values depending upon which system of units are used to express them. For instance, the speed of light in vacuum is...

Dr. John F. Clauser, born 1942, is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” Dr. Clauser spoke in July at the event Quantum Korea 2023. What follows is a transcript of his remarks that prompted the International Monetary Fund to cancel his appearance this week, and began a predictable trajectory of broader cancellation. Below find the speech and transcript. Oh,...

Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison allegedly paid herself millions of dollars in a single bonus payment despite knowing about massive holes in FTX’s finances. Months before FTX filed for bankruptcy, she allegedly moved the money between various accounts until it landed in her own. Crypto exchange FTX spectacularly imploded late last year, dragging Alameda Research, its affiliate trading firm, down with it. Alameda itself was losing huge amounts of money thanks to high-risk bets, with FTX accused of secretly redirecting its users’ funds to its sister firm to help plug its losses. Legal proceedings launched in the wake of FTX’s...

Another billionaire has added a media company to his wishlist: John Catsimatidis, the chairman and CEO of grocery chains Gristedes Foods and D'Agostino Supermarkets. He’s telling news outlets he’d be willing to purchase CNN from Warner Bros. Discovery. “I’d go run the place tomorrow morning, and all I’d want is $1 per year and a piece of the upside,” the grocery mogul, told the New York Post. Catsimatidis’ comments follow a difficult year for the media outlet, which has faced declining viewership and turnover in the C-suite. Chief executive Chris Licht was let go after a brief one-year stint as...

Google has developed a quantum computer that instantly makes calculations that would take the best existing supercomputers 47 years, in a breakthrough meant to establish beyond doubt that the experimental machines can outperform conventional rivals. A paper from researchers at Google published online claims that the company’s latest technology is “beyond the capabilities of existing classical supercomputers”. Proponents of quantum computers say the technology, which relies on the peculiar states of quantum physics, can create hugely powerful machines able to battle climate change and create breakthrough drugs. However, they also threaten to undermine today’s encryption systems, making them a national...

President Joe Biden began using a CPAP machine "in recent weeks" to treat the sleep apnea he has suffered from since at least 2008, ABC News reported Wednesday. This new detail about Biden's health, revealed after observers noticed an unusual indentation on his face, suggests the octogenarian president has put himself at increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline. Biden has suffered from sleep apnea since at least 2008, when Politico reported that Biden "has suffered from atrial fibrillation, or an irregular heartbeat," which doctors said was probably "linked to Biden's reoccurring problem of sleep apnea." Dr. Joseph Krainin, M.D.,...

Republicans traditionally have been the party that supports business. That's taken a lot of forms, but the classic member of the Grand Old Party supports lower taxes and fewer regulations and stands against unions. In the modern era, being a member of any political party seems to have taken on connotations beyond whether you support higher taxes on business profits or raising the minimum wage. Now, candidates can't simply paint their feelings about business with a broad brush. That's because in the current political world not every business gets treated equally by some candidates. Companies now get judged for their...

The first half of 2023 will come to a close on Friday. And when it does, one of Wall Street's big predictions for 2023 will officially be a bust — the stock market did not fall and the US economy did not enter recession. When the year began, we flagged a "surprising consensus" among Wall Street strategists, many of whom expected a dip in the stock market in early '23 as the economy fell into a downturn before a rebound over the second half of the year. Instead, investors have been treated to a stock market rally accentuated by AI...

If you own a business, the leftists in Congress are coming for you. The only thing standing in their way is the US Constitution. Whether you own a mom-and-pop diner, an auto-repair shop or shares in a multinational corporation, your property is at risk. The Constitution’s “takings clause” was designed to protect us from government grabbing our property without paying fairly for it. But last year, Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act, boasting it would enable Medicare to “negotiate” lower prices for medications for seniors. “Negotiate” is a lie. Under the new law, the feds can strong-arm companies to...

The Trevor Project, whose mission is to “end suicide among LGBTQ young people,” has partnered with common household brands to develop their respective pride-themed collections and has, in some cases, received seven-figure donations from corporate sponsors. The major corporate partnerships, which include iconic clothing brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch to fast food chains like Chipotle, come despite the organization’s unsafe online practices. The youth-oriented LGBT activist group hosts an anonymous online chat forum “Trevor Space,” which allows adults to communicate with minors, National Review previously reported. The organization hosts multiple age-segregated chatrooms but has no age-verification system in place,...

Who says bromance is dead? Our ever-fickle ex-prez Donald Trump has found a new fave in an old enemy: disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on whom he basically showered praise from his Truth Social account for his handling of New York’s COVID crisis by contrasting it favorably with that of chief GOP rival Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis. And Cuomo, a founding member of his own fan club, kindly reciprocated, tweeting that “Donald Trump tells the truth, finally. New York got hit first and worst but New Yorkers acted responsibly. Florida’s policy of denial allowed Covid to spread and...

Good news of a tentative deal for the U.S. debt ceiling impasse may quickly turn out to be bad news for financial markets. While an end to uncertainty would be welcome, the relief that may come from a deal may be a short-lived sugar high for investors. That's because once a deal is reached, the U.S. Treasury is expected to quickly refill its empty coffers with bond issuance, sucking out hundreds of billions of dollars of cash from the market. The raising of ceiling is expected to be followed by the issuance of nearly $1.1 trillion in new Treasury bills...

If the pandemic brought us too close for comfort to one of life’s certainties — death, that is — then it also got many Americans thinking about the other one: taxes. Or at least it seems that way considering how many Americans chose to move, and in doing so picked states that offer less of a wallop on the wallet taxwise. Two of the most populated and highest taxing states in the country — California and New York — lost about $92 billion in income over two years as a result of the recent exodus. Here’s what’s driving this great...

The 2020 Georgia situation mirrors events of 60 years ago in Hawaii, revealing that everything the media have said about ‘fake electors’ is wrong.Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump’s “fake” electors accepted immunity deals. Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors’ testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct. Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media’s continued peddling of the “fake electors” narrative. There were no “fake” electors. There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve...

The Supreme Court on Thursday finally ended one of the most brazen examples of bureaucratic tyranny in modern times. Naturally, liberals were outraged and warned that curbing federal power will doom the environment. Congress enacted the Clean Water Act in 1972 to prevent pollution of the nation’s waterways. In subsequent years, federal judges decided the law also applied to adjacent wetlands, since they could contribute to pollution. But “What is a wetland?” is the DC version of “How many angels can dance on a pinhead?” Since 1972, federal agencies have changed the definition of wetlands jurisdiction 13 times. Up to...

Bud Light sales show no signs of recovery as the Dylan Mulvaney controversy continues to bite, and now parent Anheuser-Busch Inbev ABI +0.02% may be unleashing a beer price war that could depress profits industrywide this summer. Bud Light sales volumes were down 28.4% in the week ended May 13, worse than the 27.7% decline in the previous week, according to Beer Business Daily, which uses NIQ scan data. Other Anheuser-Busch (ticker: BUD) brands are hurting, with Budweiser Red volumes down 14.9% in the latest week and Michelob Ultra, the company’s strongest U.S. brand, down 6.8%. Rivals continue to benefit,...