Free Republic

Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard played a decisive role in shifting CDC guidance and ushering in mask mandates across America. Zeynep’s role in the COVID story goes far deeper than most realize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeynep_Tufekci But alas, the pro-mask establishment responded with a trump card of their own: a New York Times op-ed by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work, highlighting a statement of clarification from Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, that the review’s conclusion had been “open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize.” This new trump card was a disaster for mask opponents—the proverbial queen of...

Dr. Anthony Fauci - who offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans - has been accused by Congressional investigators of having 'prompted' the fabrication of a paper by a cadre of scientists aimed at disproving the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.On February 1, 2020, Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists participated in a conference call during which several of them warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China - may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.Three days after the call, four participants from the call...

A 1,900-year-old building that would have served as an apartment within the estate of Roman Emperor Hadrian has been discovered in Tivoli, Italy. The building is full of lavish artwork, archaeologists said. "The exceptionally well-preserved decoration of the rooms includes mosaic floors with both vegetal and abstract patterns, marble revetments [panels], wall paintings, and an almost entire ceiling fresco," the archaeologists wrote in the summary of a paper recently presented at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in San Francisco. Much of the art is now in pieces, and the process of excavating and conserving it is a difficult...

The estranged wife of Rep. Steven Horsford is accusing the Nevada Democrat of bullying and intimidation, including digging through trash to find dirt on her. Sonya Douglass’s charges against the congressman come a bit over a week before Horsford faces voters in the northern Las Vegas area and rural central Nevada 4th Congressional District. Horsford and two Nevada House Democratic colleagues, Reps. Susie Lee and Dina Titus, each face tough reelection fights in the Silver State, which, along with tight Senate and governor races, has turned into a premier 2022 electoral battleground. Republicans are focused on capturing all three seats...

Columbia University students shared mixed reactions to their college ranking last for free speech on campus, with some expressing confusion while also shunning hate speech. "I think everyone here is very open-minded, and so I'm not really sure where that's coming from," one student told Fox News. However, Arianna, a senior at the Ivy League school, said, "Of course people think they can't say things. I think people think they might be judged by the majority." The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Columbia last in its third annual College Free Speech Rankings, which surveyed nearly 45,000 students...

'Real Time' host Bill Maher said Republicans would 'secretly love' to see Trump incarcerated over January 6 as much as Arab countries 'love when Israel would bomb Iraq.' Maher, 66, returned to his show Friday night after a month-long break and was joined by Politico's White House Editor Sam Stein and Columbia Associate Professor John McWhorter. The liberal host jumped into the roundtable discussion by calling former President Donald Trump the 'cloud hanging over this country,' but admitted the January 6 committee hearings were 'pretty impressive.'

Liberals love to insist they're on the "right side of history," and their confidence crests in the liberal dominance among historians. Just as the liberal media dominate our evaluation of day-to-day developments, liberals count on their historians to dominate our evaluation of the decades behind us. It's not just historians but our taxpayer-funded storytellers, like the insufferable PBS documentarian Ken Burns. On the day before President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, NPR's "Morning Edition" presented him as an American treasure with no partisan bias. So, skip over the propaganda film on Ted Kennedy he made for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which...

New York City Council Member Antonio Reynoso (D) has introduced a bill to abolish the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) gang database as gang crime reaches a new high throughout the city. By October 2021, more than 100 children aged under 18 were involved in street-gang related shootings. Almost all of the children killed in gang-related violence in New York City are minorities, predominantly black. A police source told the New York Post that, “the gangs are eating these kids alive.” A gang member has also been arrested in relation to the stabbing-murder of a Columbia University student, injuring a...

New York City Council Member Antonio Reynoso (D) has introduced a bill to abolish the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) gang database as gang crime reaches a new high throughout the city. By October 2021, more than 100 children aged under 18 were involved in street-gang related shootings. Almost all of the children killed in gang-related violence in New York City are minorities, predominantly black. A police source told the New York Post that, “the gangs are eating these kids alive.” A gang member has also been arrested in relation to the stabbing-murder of a Columbia University student, injuring a...

When Columbia University in New York City holds its virtual graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2021, it wants to be sure that there are separate ones for certain identity groups. “Complementing our school- and University-wide ceremonies, these events provide a more intimate setting for students and guests to gather, incorporate meaningful cultural traditions and celebrate the specific contributions and achievements of their communities,” the Ivy League university said in announcing a series of graduation ceremonies designed for those groups Columbia has deemed special. The ceremonies begin with one for Native Americans on April 25. Next comes what is called...

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why canÂ’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sunÂ’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt. âž¡ The world is weird. We'll show you how it works. In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard...

Bogus-black college professor Jessica Krug once denigrated the death of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz, who was murdered by machete-wielding gang members at a Bronx bodega. Krug, speaking on a Columbia University panel in 2019, implied that Guzman was attacked because he was collaborating against his community as a member of NYPD’s Youth Explorer Program, according to a since-deleted clip of her remarks obtained by the Daily Mail. “That kind of violence against people who are collaborating or working against their communities we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a...

Most people think that the two most important names in the Democratic race for the White House in 2016 are Obama and Clinton. However, the two names you should be paying attention to are Cloward and Piven. Don't know who they are? Don't worry, most people don't — but conservative commentator and generally kicka** guy Chuck Norris is going to make sure they do. In an op-ed for WND, Norris explained that the two people — Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — were academics who came up with a plan to introduce permanent socialism in the United States. Norris...

Markets are superb at turning what participants believe to be facts into prices. An intriguing new National Bureau of Economic Research study on market expectations about climate change looks at the price trends of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) weather futures contracts. "The evidence shows that financial markets fully incorporate climate model projections," conclude Columbia University's agricultural and resource economist Wolfram Schlenker and sustainable development researcher Charles Taylor. "We find that the market has been accurately pricing in climate change, largely in line with global climate models, and that this began occurring at least since the early 2000s when the weather...

Over 250 news outlets and journalists partnered with Columbia University School of Journalism’s flagship magazine to shape control of “climate crisis” coverage in the lead up to the United Nations climate conference. The coverage-coordination initiative included directing how much time, space and prominence should be devoted to the coverage, and asking that climate “news” be added to seemingly unrelated stories. Some of the biggest media outlets in the country, such as CBS and Bloomberg, joined the effort. But others, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, declined to participate in a project they reportedly feared appeared activist...

Chesa Boudin will serve as San Francisco's next district attorney, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. Boudin, the most progressive candidate on the ballot, won a tight race against interim district attorney Suzy Loftus. Boudin held 85,950 votes as of Saturday afternoon, with about 1,200 ballots left to count, the Chronicle said. Loftus had 83,511 votes. The 39-year-old won the seat following four days of ballot counting in the city's first open election for district attorney in over a century following sitting District Attorney George Gascon's departure to run for district attorney in Los Angeles. "We are all feeling the...

President Donald Trump tweeted and retweeted 80 times between Friday and Sunday, a seemingly panicked flurry of activity that showed just how big a threat the Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry are. Among those tweets was a quote from Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress, an evangelical pastor from Texas, who warned that if Trump were successfully removed from office, civil war would follow. Apocalyptic rhetoric often flows readily from preachers' pulpits and politicians' platforms. Yet this warning of a looming civil war takes on a different meaning when it appears on the President's Twitter feed -- not only because of...

Scenes from the higher education apocalypse: I don’t know whether Columbia University’s graduate program in English literature is as premier in the field as it was back in the glory days of Lionel Trilling, but yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this: Columbia Had Little Success Placing English Ph.Ds on Tenure Track. “Alarm” Followed, and the University Responded The story is unfortunately behind the Chronicle‘s paywall, but when you get into the story it turns out the headline is misleading: It should read “No Success” rather than “Little Success,” because the number of Columbia English Ph.Ds placed in tenure-tracked...

President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press? The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light. The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed. “In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR...

Spacecraft already navigate our solar system using gravity wells as slingshots. The same basic principles operate in the intense gravity wells around black holes, which bend not only the paths of solid objects, but light itself. If a photon, or a light particle, enters a particular region in the vicinity of a black hole, it will do one partial circuit around the black hole and get flung back in exactly the same direction. Physicists call those regions "gravitational mirrors" and the photons they fling back "boomerang photons." Boomerang photons already move at the speed of light, so they don't pick...