Free Republic

Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great...

A couple of days ago, there was a quite successful thread here entitled Top Physicist Freeman Dyson: Obama 'Took the Wrong Side' on Climate Change. As an admirer and follower of Professor Dyson, I enjoyed it greatly, and posted several items on it. That thread got me interested in Dyson once again, and in looking for Dyson material I found this remarkable lecture on YouTube. I believe it is worth anyone's time to listen to in its entirety. At a little more than an hour in length, it is a bit long for one sitting, but I am sure most...

Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s top theoretical physicists and a self-described “100% Democrat,” criticized President Barack Obama for his views on climate change, stating that he was on the “wrong side” of the issue and that Republicans were on the “right side” of the topic. “I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side,” Dyson told The Register last week. Dyson’s name looms large in the scientific and political worlds. A contemporary of Albert Einstein, Dyson taught physics at Princeton University, worked...

The End Of The Petrodollar Is The End Of America’s Global DominanceEvery nation has had to convert its currency to the U.S. dollar, making it the de facto global currency. Thanks to Joe Biden, it’s all gone.The petrodollar agreement with Saudi Arabia began in 1974, two years into Joe Biden’s first term as a United States senator. It ended this week, a half-century later, during Biden’s first term as U.S. president. Among all the news stories that matter, few rank higher than this. It’s bigger than President Trump and Hunter Biden’s convictions, bigger than jobs reports and inflation numbers, and...

he edge of Greenland’s ice sheet looked like a big lick of sludgy white frosting spilling over a rise of billion-year-old brown rock. Inside the Twin Otter’s cabin, there were five of us: two pilots, a scientist, an engineer, and me. Farther north, we would have needed another seat for a rifle-armed guard. Here, we were told to just look around for polar-bear tracks on our descent. We had taken off from Greenland’s west coast and soon passed over the ice sheet’s lip. Viewed from directly above, the first 10 miles of ice looked wrinkled, like elephant skin. Its folds...

As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess. Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction? I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. ...the truth is that too...

He has a high-stakes job. War and natural disasters keep him on his toes. He is often on a plane to far-flung places, travelling to negotiate with local leaders. He has the best intelligence money can buy. And as November’s election nears, he will spend lots of time looking at lines on charts. The American president and swashbuckling oil traders, it turns out, have a lot in common. Indeed, Joe Biden also seems to have a knack for the oil trade. Two years ago his administration initiated the largest ever sell-off from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (spr), an emergency store...

The list of everyday necessities the climate fanatics at The Washington Post choose to complain about as enemies of Gaia continues to grow at an exponential rate. The Post threw a fit over the upcoming Olympic Games “taking a farcical turn” against Paris organizers’ supposed commitment to maintaining the “greenest Olympics” ever. The Athletes Village was supposed to not have air conditioning (AC) in the rooms because other eco-friendly cooling measures will be used, whined the leftist rag. However, The Post cried, “portable air-conditioning units will be everywhere. Wheeled in. Shipped in. Ordered by visiting countries that want their athletes...

@RepThomasMassie My off-grid home runs on a wrecked Model S Tesla car battery that I repurposed. This is the display I created for it 6 years ago. The upper left graph is a 24 hour history of the net energy into the battery. Today was a great solar day in Kentucky!

“What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is my own.” James Joyce penned those words while writing Ulysses, but he could have easily written them were he composing a report on the political attitudes of the pseudo-elite greenie left of the modern era.From an article by Greg Rehner at Fox News:California clean energy project threatens thousands of protected Joshua trees: reportsA California-based renewable energy company plans to clear thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert to make way for a solar project that will generate electricity for nearly 180,000 homes in coastal neighborhoods instead of the impacted communities,...

...The study, partially funded by Klamath County, shows that the region's farms and ranches, worth over $368 million annually and employing over 3,000 people, are in jeopardy. The study highlights that this is due to water restrictions, which have already led to a loss of $12 million in income, with more at risk if restrictions continue. ...

In a development sure to discombobulate those who trust the United Nations’ experts to save the planet, it turns out that one UN agency’s anti-pollution regulations have inadvertently counteracted another agency’s anti-global-warming rules, at least according to one study.Published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the study concludes that the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) 2020 regulations forcing a reduction in ships’ sulfur emissions allowed more sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface, causing a significant increase in alleged global warming.The IMO required vessels engaged in international shipping to reduce the sulfur content of their fuel by a whopping 86...

A former college professor has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison over a string of arson fires in Northern California in 2021 as fire crews were battling the second-largest fire in the state’s history. Gary Stephen Maynard, 49, of San Jose, pleaded guilty in February to three arson counts in connection to fires in the Shasta National Forest and near the Dixie Fire in the Lassen National Forest. The Dixie Fire burned over 1,500 square miles after igniting on July 13 and destroyed over 1,000 homes. Maynard was accused of setting fires behind firefighters battling the...

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg attempted to justify the progress on electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, prompting a laugh from CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brenna. After $7.5 billion of taxpayers’ money being plowed into the initiative, just a “handful” of charging stations have been built. The interview took a comedic turn when Brennan pointed out the discrepancy between the investment made back in 2021 and the reality of the results. Just seven or eight charging stations have been built despite billions being spent, according to the Federal Highway Administration, “Why isn’t that happening more quickly?” asked Brennan. Buttigieg responded...

The New York Times Bidenomics apologist Paul Krugman took a detour from regurgitating his usual awful economic takes — AGAIN— to throw another fit over climate change “denial.” Krugman decried the “Stench of Climate Change Denial” in his latest May 27 screed. Krugman drummed up scare-porn over an alleged “emerging sewage crisis” along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts and claimed it was due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. “In short, it’s not hard to see some terrible outcomes in the not-too-distant future, even before full global catastrophe arrives. Bad stuff is coming, and we’re already starting...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein said that America is the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, but they don’t want to see that continue forever, just for the timeframe that is needed for the green energy transition. Hochstein stated that Biden has “created an energy economy that supports the energy transition, on the one hand, but also has seen U.S. production that is at an all-time record of over 13 million barrels a day, our, both oil and gas, are producing as much as...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” White House Senior Adviser Amos Hochstein stated that the Biden administration “made enormous progress to advance renewable energy in this country, to advance electric vehicles, but that’s not the solution for everyday people on a day-to-day basis, for lower prices,” but it’s “about moving the economy towards a cleaner and more efficient energy economy.” Host Edward Lawrence asked, “Does the President still want to keep moving forward with the speed of his forced transition as quickly as it has been?”

Five members of Letzte Generation, Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil, have been charged with “forming a criminal organisation”, a move civil rights campaigners say could in effect criminalise future support for the climate campaign. Mirjam Herrmann, 27, Henning Jeschke, 22, Edmund Schulz, 60, Lukas Popp, 25, and Jakob Beyer, 30, were charged under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group. According to prosecutors in the state of Brandenburg, the charges relate to more than a dozen “attacks” against oil refineries, the...

Ocean water is pushing miles beneath Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier,” making it more vulnerable to melting than previously thought, according to new research which used radar data from space to perform an X-ray of the crucial glacier. As the salty, relatively warm ocean water meets the ice, it’s causing “vigorous melting” underneath the glacier and could mean global sea level rise projections are being underestimated, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise —...

For years we've heard that humans are the problem when it comes to the environment. The complaints in recent years have become so intense and extreme that we're being told that humans have been likened to a harmful virus, even to the point that some individuals have begun a "human extinction project" in the crazed belief that the only chance to "save the planet" is to erase humans from existence. It's gotten to the point where hardly a day goes by where we don't hear about someone who expresses a desire to see the Earth "depopulated", at least to the...