Free Republic

The United Arab Emirates is spending $20 billion on OpenAI’s Stargate UAE. The project is billed as a sovereign AI capability, yet it relies entirely on American chips, software, and infrastructure. This is the sovereign AI paradox: The harder nations push for AI independence, the deeper their dependencies become.The UAE is not alone. From Paris to New Delhi, governments are pouring billions into so-called “sovereign” frontier models. France backs Mistral. India promotes BharatGPT. Each promises strategic autonomy yet is dependent on a globalized stack.The term “AI factories,” adopted by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, rebrands data centers as strategic infrastructure akin...

The hollowing out of U.S. cities’ office and commercial cores is a national trend with serious consequences for millions of Americans. As more people have stayed home following the COVID-19 pandemic, foot traffic has fallen. Major retail chains are closing stores, and even prestigious properties are having a hard time retaining tenants. The shuttering of a Whole Foods market after only a year in downtown San Francisco in May 2023 received widespread coverage. Even more telling was the high-end department store Nordstrom’s decision to close its flagship store there in August after a 35-year run. In New York City, office...

The problem with promising all things to all people is that eventually tradeoffs become inevitable.While running for president, Donald Trump pledged he would tackle the scourge of inflation that sparked a cost-of-living crisis for many Americans, while simultaneously leading the country to record wealth and prosperity—a difficult balancing act to pull off.Now, just three days into his new administration, he’s already pressuring Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell to stimulate the economy by reducing the cost of borrowing. This comes in spite of the U.S. central bank’s concerns that recent consumer price data is coming in hotter than it would like.“I’ll...

Leave it to leftist rags like Fortune magazine to target older Americans to insulate President Joe Biden’s disastrous economic policies from blame for the ongoing inflation struggle. The magazine published a condescending Nov. 30 story with a ridiculous headline: “Aging boomers are making it harder to tame inflation—and there are no quick solutions in sight.” Fortune complained about “fewer older Americans handing over your fast food order or working part-time at the local grocery store” before dipping deeper in the toilet of brazen elitism. “Those missing workers are not just causing the ‘help wanted’ signs to linger, but are actually...

The Elon Musk Twitter saga just keeps getting weirder. Days after Musk finally took control of the social media platform, he fired off a head-scratching tweet from a dubious source about the man who violently attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then his tweet, which he posted early Sunday, vanished later in the day. Amid many doubts about where Musk will take Twitter, the sequence only deepened the uncertainty. Musk was responding to a tweet from Hillary Clinton, who shared a Los Angeles Times article about the suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who became immersed in right-wing...

Fortune magazine ran one of the dumbest liberal takes on inflation yet. Its propaganda piece even puts fraudulent economists like Paul Krugman to shame. The liberal magazine had the audacity to publish a tone-deaf inflation story with the headline: “Why you should be happy about inflation and worried about something else, top economist Brad DeLong says.” The magazine pushed the insane propaganda of University of California, Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong who reportedly said that so-called “‘reopening inflation’” has “‘so far been a very good thing.’” The liberal rag continued: “DeLong argues that there is a major economic shift taking place...

On New Year’s Day, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) tweeted: “Fighting inflation and lowering costs for the middle class must remain a top congressional priority going into 2022.” Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) also rang in the new year by tweeting about inflation: “Rising prices and inflation won't be going away with the start of the New Year thanks to #Bidenomics.” So did Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN). Now that the midterm elections are just a little over six months away, inflation is dominating the political discourse, but new data shows it’s not dominating the discourse evenly. Republicans are talking about inflation six...

Keep watching, it gets worse.Pat Sajak’s reactions are hilarious. https://youtu.be/0YSz_52Sa7U

Business leaders are clearly not buying the continuing narrative from many political leaders that efforts to overturn American democracy after the last election were “legitimate political discourse.” Newly released Federal Election Commission filings this month, now encompassing the entirety of 2021, show that all 93 of the incumbent members of Congress who failed in their constitutional duties to confirm the certified ballots of the Electoral College have suffered a major plunge in business support. We’ve seen a resurgence of whining from cynical media about companies that let expire last year’s pledges to halt donations to these “objectors” in Congress. But...

The world is facing the prospect of a dramatic shortfall in food production as rising energy prices cascade through global agriculture, the CEO of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International says. "I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest," said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of the Oslo-based company. "I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis." Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Holsether said that the sharp rise in energy prices this summer and autumn had already...

The March 2020 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the "existential threat" to the Earth posed by global warming, despite the fact that no significant global warming seems to be taking place. With its appealing cover art — an image of the Earth tied up in a plastic trash bag — this issue is just what I'd expect from a liberal outfit. It's typical of climate alarmists to begin by assuming their premise: warming is an existential threat because, well, it is. And anyone who questions that premise is a criminal. Just what is meant by "existential threat" is a...

California Senator Kamala Harris is again formally asking Twitter to suspend President Donald Trump's controversial Twitter account, but the social media platform may be reluctant to do so. In a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the Democratic presidential candidate wrote on her campaign letterhead that the president's constant tweets attacking the whistleblower that ignited an impeachment inquiry violates Twitter's user agreement rules. Harris points out several tweets in the past week that appear to "target, harass, and attempt to out the whistleblower who set forth credible allegations that the President has abused his power by urging a foreign government...

After black women delivered some notable advances for Democrats during last year’s midterm elections, they have emerged as a key voting bloc going into the 2020 presidential race.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter this morning accused British diver Vern Unsworth of being a pedophile, after Unsworth criticized Musk’s proposal to use a small submarine to rescue a trapped soccer team in Thailand. Unsworth was instrumental in the rescue of the boy’s soccer team, but lambasted Musk’s submarine plan in an interview published by CNN Friday. Among other comments, Unsworth said the submarine “wouldn’t have made the first 50 meters into the cave” and was “just a PR stunt.” Musk, responding to further criticism from professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, wrote this morning that he...

Dicks serves as another warning for why people have been saying ‘Get Woke Go Broke’. Ever since going political, their sales have been kind of … limp. Just as the now-infamous school shooting in Florida was beginning its transition from “Horrific Crime against the Defenseless” to “Vehicle of the Left’s Political Agenda” Dick’s Sporting Goods made a decision. Dick’s Sporting Goods made the decision to blame the tool rather than the killer or the many layers of protection that WOULD have disqualified the young killer from owning firearms in the first place. Did kissing the activists’ ring help or hurt...

Since that time, the project—one of the world’s most complex, large-scale civil engineering projects ever attempted—has been plagued by fraud. In 2014, Venice’s then-mayor Giorgio Orsoni, along with 30 others, was arrested for charges including corruption, illicit party financing, and tax fraud totaling $6.8 billion. Orsoni was accused of taking roughly $635,000 (€560,000) in illicit campaign financing from the consortium behind the flood barrier. Orsoni resigned and received a four-month suspended sentence. He was also required to pay a $17,000 (€15,000) fine, according to the Telegraph.

Imagine a world with affordable, clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, and decent work and economic growth for all. That is the world the United Nations imagined when it defined the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development with “the desire to create a future where there is no poverty, the planet is protected, and all the people enjoy peace and prosperity.” But the reality is, that world can’t exist without the equal participation, and leadership, of women—as business and political leaders, investors, and contributors to the global economy.

Once upon a time in New York City, Sherman Jackson lived at the glittering heights of public life in a privileged place of bold-faced names and media stars. For a time, he appeared on TV sets citywide as a newsman at NBC. Later he appeared on-air as a press secretary for some of the biggest politicians in the city. The schools chancellor. The parks commissioner. Mayoral candidate Herman Badillo. He stood in front of cameras and parried with reporters, shaping the narrative of the city itself. From the 1970s into 2000, Jackson’s quotes appeared in every newspaper in town. In...

...But Democrats weren’t about to let facts get in the way of advancing their collusion narrative. The House Intelligence Committee released their cherry-picked examples of “Russian Facebook ads” in November. [....] The media didn’t let facts get in the way of fueling the collusion narrative, either. After receiving their marching orders from CNN, the media swung into action: This includes Vanity Fair, Natasha Bertrand at Business Insider, The Daily Mail, Fortune, The Hill, Reuters, and CNBC. Far-left sites like the Daily Kos, Vox, Salon, and Talking Points Memo joined the fray to falsely characterize all the ads as targeting swing...