Free Republic

State insurance regulators are taking the first steps on what will be long and difficult effort to mitigate climate impacts. Foremost it will require cooperation and buy in. To that end, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners took the rare step of holding a media briefing Friday to again spotlight its landmark National Climate Resilience Strategy. Adopted March 18, the strategy is a desperately needed first step, said Andrew Mais, Connecticut insurance commissioner and 2024 president of the NAIC. “The goal of a strategy is to drive faster and more effective risk reduction by state insurance regulators to ensure that...

Want more food deserts in San Francisco?Here's how you get more food deserts in San Francisco.According to Reason magazine:The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months' written notice to the city before closing down.Supermarket operators would also have to make "good faith" efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form...

The Biden administration announced recipients of the climate law’s biggest grant program Thursday, kicking off a $20 billion effort to transform community lending and green the U.S. economy. EPA will award eight initial grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, ranging in size from $400 million to almost $7 billion. The largest award will go to Climate United, a partnership that includes a nonprofit impact investment firm and two affordable housing lenders. EPA chose three nonprofits — Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities — to distribute a total of $14 billion in capital to finance projects...

The jobs board for the American Climate Corps is set to officially launch in April, and it’s likely to be flooded with eager applicants. Since President Biden announced the New Deal-inspired program in September, more than 50,000 people have expressed interest in joining. “I think the idea is to make it as broad as possible so all young people can find something, whether they’re at a 7th-grade reading level and they’re coming out of the foster care or juvenile justice system, or whether they’re a PhD candidate at a university,” said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps...

Fire Department brass ordered an East Village ladder company to remove its “red line” American flag honoring the squad’s six brothers killed on 9/11 – after a neighborhood resident complained it was “fascist” and a local lefty pol questioned whether it was a “politically charged symbol.”The shocking order came March 22 after a man claiming he was a staffer for Democratic Manhattan Councilwoman Carlina Rivera confronted firefighters at Ladder Co. 11, sources said.The man pedaled up to the East 2nd Street firehouse on a bicycle and told firefighters he worked for Rivera and that the councilwoman’s office “complained” to the...

The cataclysmic disaster that was the great depression of 1929 would cause chaos around the world for the best part of a decade. The powerhouse that was the American economy was the saving grace of most of the world after WW1. This however, would also serve to be it's undoing. ..... Follow along using the transcript.

Residents of the Evergreen State will soon be able to report their neighbors for expressing “bias.” The governor of Washington is poised to sign a bill that ends free speech in certain counties – and the rest of the state probably sometime thereafter. Recently passed by the Washington state legislature, this measure creates a “bias incident hotline” to the State Attorney General’s Office. You read that right: American citizens in the northwestern state will soon be able to turn in their friends, neighbors, family members, or even strangers for not only physical “hate crimes” but also expressions of “bias.” Substitute...

The similarities between the Obama administration and Italian fascism have been pointed out many times. Over a dozen articles about this are on this site alone (1, 2, 3, 4). It is usually said that fascism is a strain of socialism in which the means of production are beneficially owned by private persons but controlled by the government. Both the Obama administration and Mussolini used a financial crisis to take over banks and industry. Mussolini openly assumed complete control of them, even though partial private ownership was allowed to remain. The U.S. government bailed out banks and the auto industry...

President Joe Biden on Tuesday will launch a task force to combat “unfair and illegal” corporate pricing amid record inflation under the 46th president. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) will lead the task force to police what the Biden administration believes are the reasons consumers are experiencing higher prices than ever. “We’re excited to be co-chairing the president’s new Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing, which builds on the FTC’s far-reaching work to promote competition and tackle unlawful business practices that are inflating costs for Americans,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said.

Meanwhile, Biden gives an interview boasting about his commitment to the First Amendment. Paramount is on the chopping block and as part of that, CBS News began a purge of journalists. One of its top targets was former FOX News reporter Catherine Herridge: a serious reporter respected even by liberals. What happened next was more shocking though when CBS News seized her files including confidential source information. The source said the network boxed up all her personal belongings except for Herridge’s notes and files and informed her that it would decide what — if anything — would be returned to...

Tyrannical leftist New York Attorney General Letitia James has revealed she is prepared to seize (steal) President Trump’s assets if he cannot pay the outrageous court fine as ordered by compromised Judge Arthur Engoron. “If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James told ABC News. As the Gateway Pundit reported, Engoron fined Trump $355 million and banned him from doing business in New York City for the next three years. Engoron claimed Trump “participated in aiding and...

Today a law was passed in France qualifying any opposition to mRNA-LNP injections as a “sectarian aberration”. It carries a penalty of up to 3 years’ imprisonment and 45,000 euros. “It will not tolerate any criticism of the therapeutic treatments which will be recommended or made obligatory by the state. Any person who dares to openly criticize these therapies will be liable to fines and imprisonment.”

The payment company's CEO Alex Chriss told staff on Tuesday that another 9% of the workforce — about 2,500 positions — will be slashed. The news comes after PayPal said it would reduce its headcount by about 2,000 in January last year."We are doing this to right-size our business, allowing us to move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth," Chriss wrote in a memo. "At the same time, we will continue to invest in areas of the business we believe will create and accelerate growth." The cuts will come from current positions as...

Joseph Stalin is roaring back to life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Monuments are being built, “Stalin centers” are being constructed, and Putin’s war against Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine is being compared to Stalin’s victory over Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Given the fascist nature of Putin’s regime and the imperialist, genocidal war he’s conducting in Ukraine, Stalin’s rehabilitation makes perfect sense. More important than the political rationale behind Stalin’s “return” to Russia, however, are the moral implications of such a move. Back in 2011, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder asked, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?” His answer implied that both men were...

The political adage “If you cannot beat them, join them” has been well-known for centuries. So, the Left made one extra step and arrived at the “if you cannot beat them, lead them.” The Left has been trying (unsuccessfully) various methods to eliminate capitalists and private property. Eventually, Leftists learned their lesson and decided to preside over private property instead of confiscating and spreading it around. Lenin used it (the so-called “New Economic Policy” in the Soviet Union 1921-1928), Mussolini used it, Hitler used it, and Mao Zedong used it (his campaign is still alive and well in China). It...

Rebel News reporter David Menzies was brutally arrested by Canadian police after he tried to ask Chrystia Freeland questions.

'Tis the season to look back on a truly unprecedented year in America's courts, when the sight of a former president sitting before a judge went from unheard of to almost commonplace, and his ongoing campaign fused courtroom appearances into stump stops. These were the 12 days of Trump court appearances: April 4: On the first day of Trump court, the former president was whisked into a Manhattan criminal courthouse fortified by a massive security apparatus. June 13: On the second day of Trump court, a Miami courthouse was largely shuttered and a crowd of protesters loomed outside as law...

What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right? How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. There are those not quite yet there, such as Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, currently mourning the leftism she now believes ​“gaslit” her about a ​“crime wave” it refuses to admit....

Half a century ago, George Orwell, writing on literary censorship, wrote that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” That dynamic now broadly extends to an opaque network of government agencies and self-proclaimed anti-misinformation groups that have repressed online speech. There’s no official ban on discussing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines or criticizing American involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war, but editors and journalists have realized that writing on such topics can come at a cost. News publishers have been demonetized and shadow-banned for reporting dissenting views and the bureaucratic means...

DUBAI — For 30 years, with temperatures and sea levels rising, global negotiators have managed to discuss the health of the planet without addressing the root cause of the problem. In meeting after meeting, document after document, even in the landmark 2015 Paris agreement, one phrase has been conspicuously absent: any mention of fossil fuels. “This is really difficult stuff. We are talking about the future of humanity, the future of economic structures and geopolitics,” said Hana AlHashimi, the lead negotiator for the United Arab Emirates. U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry has said that Washington supports language “requiring the...