Free Republic

Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme and, like all Ponzi schemes, it will eventually fail when the cohort paying in becomes smaller and poorer than the cohort receiving the money. It’s going to take a sea change to remedy the problem, which means re-thinking the government’s role. Here’s what could be done: (1) The Constitution has the federal government’s job description, so we must defund any federal spending that is not within that description, and the projects, whatever they are, need to be kicked down to the state level where they either belong or taxpayer money shouldn’t be spent...

Kaiser Permanente is America’s oldest HMO and largest healthcare provider. It’s a superb institution but is suffering the consequences of embracing the leftist COVID narrative. As a sign of its retreat from its COVID dead-end, it’s now trying to get its unvaccinated doctors back into the fold. For 33 years, I’ve been a completely satisfied Kaiser patient.* I’ve never received anything but good care from the people who work there, whether doctors, nurses, physical therapists, receptionists, pharmacists, or anyone else. I also think it’s a fantastic model of how medical care can be done well and affordably. Kaiser is named...

Despite the flashing of actual swastikas at pro-Hamas protests among the Dearborn set which votes Democrat, Joe Biden is determined to pin the 'Nazi' label on President Trump, which is falling flat. He's done it at least once, errantly hammering over and over again the misheard, out-of-context "fine people" statement President Trump made about a riot. And in his raging warnings about Trump being a threat to 'democracy,' he's looked distinctly Hitlerian himself against a red backdrop.But now he's trying to paint Trump as a Nazi based on fine print he found in a campaign ad, because he doesn't have...

The years-long saga of former Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's downfall and criminal processing may finally be at a close. This week, she went to court to learn her fate after multiple convictions for fraud and perjury. The prosecution had been seeking a two-year prison sentence, while Mosby's attorneys had pleaded for probation. As so often happens in these cases, the judge decided to split the baby and handed down a sentence of one year of home detention followed by three years of supervised release. She was also ordered to forfeit her condominium in Florida that she and her husband...

The freak-out is real. Never Trump Republicans and their fellow travelers on the left cannot accept the trend that former President Trump is gaining support among Latino voters. The worst critics are the strategists and pundits who once made a living off the Republican Party. Trump effectively made them irrelevant in 2016. Professional traditional Republicans held no sway with Trump. He went his own way. For advisers like Ana Navarro, the gravy train was over. She, like others, switched sides and threw in with Democrats to remain relevant in some circles. Grifters are gonna grift. Navarro was a longtime adviser...

Melina Abdullah is the co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles. She's also Cornel West's running mate in his run for president. When she's not out protesting or campaigning, Abdullah is a professor at Cal State LA. She recently made news for her opinion that Taylor Swift fans are "slightly racist."Why do I feel like it’s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?— Melina Abdullah (@DocMellyMel) February 11, 2024Someone reacted to that with sarcasm but Abdullah's response tells you a lot about her.Indeed!— Melina Abdullah (@DocMellyMel) February 13, 2024Lately, Abdullah has been spending her time on lawsuits. Last...

NBC News reporter Dasha Burns was taken by surprise by her interviews of Black and Latino supporters at former President Donald Trump's campaign rally in the Bronx on Thursday. The MSNBC reporter expressed her disbelief to host Ana Cabrera that immigrants would actually back Trump and his immigration policies."Well, this might sound a little counterintuitive, but I did talk to folks in that crowd who themselves were immigrants, a lot of folks from the Dominican Republic. A lot of the people that I talked to were born and raised in the Bronx. For some of them, this was their first-ever...

Shares of vaccine stocks Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX), and BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) rallied this week, appreciating 23.4%, 16.4%, and 9.3%, respectively, through Thursday trading, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. While these three stocks gained notoriety back in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears this week's detection of avian bird flu in a second U.S. citizen and the first-ever detection of avian flu in a human in Australia are spurring fears of an outbreak and thus a possible boon for companies that can quickly produce a bird flu vaccine. Bird flu detected in Michigan...

It's not a laptop in first class or a cheap Chinese scooter smoking ominously in the plane's cargo hold. Nor is it a massive commercial ship packed to the gills with cars being transported across an ocean that has had one of the EVs parked onboard light off, and now the whole vessel is hopelessly ablaze. It's not another fiery EV in a driveway or garage or the solar panels on a rooftop, even though I have covered all of those. Comments regular Global Traveler turned me on to an ongoing drama in, of all places, San Diego County that...

We've seen this happen at other major papers. Earlier this year the LA Times had layoffs that impacted about 20 percent of the staff. The union held a walkout over the cuts which accomplished absolutely nothing. Basically they were demanding that the billionaire owner keep writing checks of up to a million dollars per month to keep the paper afloat despite there being no sign that it was ever going to make a profit at that staffing level. It was like watching spoiled adult children demand that mom and dad keep paying their rent.Things are looking at least as bad...

Where did China get the idea to dominate specific sectors of the tech industry by pushing out US competitors? The plan, known as "Made in China 2025," was at least partly inspired by a 300-page book written for them by McKinsey and Company, an American strategy and management consulting firm. The Financial Times was the first to report on McKinsey's contribution to China's 13th five-year plan back in February.A McKinsey-led think-tank advised China to deepen co-operation between business and the military and push foreign companies out of sensitive industries as part of a project for the central government in 2015.The...

As their desperation grows, Democrats and their media allies have pulled out all the stops in recent weeks to try and disqualify/discredit another conservative Supreme Court Justice for the crime of WrongThink. This time around, it's not Justice Clarence Thomas Democrats have taken aim at but Justice Samuel Alito, whose apparent sin was his wife briefly flying the American flag at their home upside down 11 days after the Capitol riot, and the "Appeal to Heaven" flag being flown at his beach house for a period of time in 2023.Both flags, the New York Times breathlessly proclaimed, were "January 6...

Interest payments on the nation’s ballooning debt just eclipsed spending on defense and Medicare, worrying policy experts who have warned this threatens to undermine U.S. economic stability. In the first seven months of fiscal year 2024, which began in October, spending on net interest surged to $514 billion, surpassing spending on both national defense ($498 billion) and Medicare ($465 billion). In fact, interest costs have topped spending on veterans, education and transportation combined. Rising debt will continue to put upward pressure on interest rates," the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonpartisan group that advocates for lowering the...

The House of Representatives on Thursday voted along bipartisan lines to advance legislation blocking the Federal Reserve from creating its own central bank digital currency (CBDC). Three Democrats joined all Republicans in voting for the bill — moderate Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine., Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. The CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act was led by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and backed by Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee. If passed in both chambers of Congress, the bill would be a significant step toward curbing the federal government's ability to regulate cryptocurrency, but it's...

* Chipmakers ASML and TSMC can disable advanced chipmaking machines remotely, Bloomberg reports. * The move addresses growing fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a key semiconductor producer. * A China-Taiwan conflict could severely impact the global economy. Two of the world's most important chip companies can flip a "kill switch" remotely on their most advanced chipmaking machines should China invade Taiwan, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Netherlands' ASML — Europe's top tech company by market value — supplies advanced machines to chipmaking companies. They include Taiwan's TSMC, which produces, by some estimates,...

We are living through the most destructive bout of inflation in 45 years, one that threatens to become worse and perhaps just as ruinous in the long run as the last one.And yet daily and for years, we’ve been told it’s not so bad and that it’s nearly over anyway.How can we reconcile these two realities? They cannot both be true.An image of verified accuracy has been circulating all over social media lately: A list showing the price increases from the end of 2019 to now at major fast-food outlets. It fits with your own experience. It indicates that in...

When I woke one recent morning to severe pain from a bout of kidney stones, I knew I had an excruciating day ahead of me. I didn’t realize how excruciating until I arrived at George Washington University Hospital’s emergency room where one of the ER’s resident physicians greeted me wearing a pin: “Ask Me About My Pronouns.” The remainder of my morning became a real-life demonstration of how woke physicians prioritize ideology over patient care. The bloodwork taken upon my arrival showed a high white blood cell count, and during my stay, I complained of pain in both my kidneys....

The U.S.-built temporary "humanitarian pier" on Gaza's Mediterranean coast — announced by President Joe Biden in his March State of the Union address and completed last week — has quickly turned into a chaotic, dangerous place. In addition to American troops injured in non-combat accidents, the pier is not moving aid to residents in the enclave at the level hyped by Pentagon officials. Earlier this week, the Department of Defense said that none of the hundreds of metric tons of aid delivered across the pier to Gaza had made it to Gazans. Even worse, the pier has been the target...

A former United Methodist Church pastor who was defrocked about 20 years ago for being in a same-sex romantic relationship has been reinstated by the mainline Protestant denomination. The UMC Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference voted overwhelmingly during a closed session of around 200 clergy on Tuesday evening to readmit Beth Stroud. Bishop John Schol, head of both the Eastern Pennsylvania and Greater New Jersey annual conferences, said he was “deeply grateful for the discernment of the clergy” and “grateful that the church has opened up to LGBTQ persons.” “I couldn’t be prouder as your bishop, and you couldn’t have given...

Trans-identifying adults who underwent body-mutilating surgeries as part of an effort to look like the opposite sex had an elevated suicide attempt risk, according to a recent study.The study, titled “Risk of Suicide and Self-Harm Following Gender-Affirmation Surgery,” was published in April in the medical science journal Cureus. Researchers conducted the study by assessing over 90 million adults aged 18 to 60. According to the study, individuals who underwent “gender-affirming surgery” had a 12-fold higher suicide attempt risk than those who did not. The researchers found that 3.5% of people who had an elective trans surgery were treated for attempting...