Free Republic

While the shutdown is needless, the Democrats are rightly concerned about healthcare cost coverage. MEDICAID EXPANSION FAIRNESS What I’m thinking of is to slightly and generally increase the state Medicaid expansion share to 5% plus the highest rate of state income tax. Right now, California pays for Medicaid expansion at 10% and rakes in 13% income tax from doctors. That would make Medicaid expansion cheaper for no income tax red states like Florida and Texas. To help fund likely Medicaid expansion to states like Texas and Florida, the state Medicaid shares (traditional & expansion) would increase annually starting in 2028...

We’re hearing it everyday that Americans are facing an affordability crisis. Housing, tuition, health care, and grocery prices are rising fast. But over the first six months of Trump’s second term, affordability has gone up, not down. Through June inflation adjusted median household incomes are up about $1,100 per household.The stress that consumers are feeling about affordability is the hangover effects of the near 20% rise in prices under Bidenomics from 2021-23.Who Caused the “Affordability Crisis?”Also, don’t forget that the average family will see a near $2,000 tax savings next year due to the Trump tax cut passed in July.

The consensus expects nonfarm payrolls for September to come in at 50,000, and I think that is too pessimistic. The charts below with incoming daily and weekly data for September show that:1) Trade policy uncertainty is improving2) Economic policy uncertainty is improving3) Consumer expectations to business conditions are improving4) Consumers are less worried about losing their jobs5) Corporate capex plans are improving, and jobless claims are still low6) The daily TSA data for the number of people traveling on airplanes is strong7) Data for the number of people going to Broadway shows, the movies and visiting the Statue of Liberty...

Elon Musk has emerged as a frontrunner in President Donald Trump's plans to build a 'Golden Dome' missile defense shield. Musk's SpaceX company is partnering with software maker Palantir and drone builder Anduril to build key parts of Golden Dome, six sources told Reuters. All three of the companies were founded by entrepreneurs who have been supporters of Trump, with Musk also serving as a special adviser to the president as the chief of DOGE. The Pentagon has reacted positively to SpaceX being involved in the project, which would build and launch hundreds of satellites around the globe to sense...

This Futuristic Fusion Rocket Could Slash Interplanetary Travel Time—And It’s Almost Ready | The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel ============================================================================ A secretive UK-based startup has just pulled back the curtain on a futuristic space propulsion project that sounds like something straight out of science fiction. Pulsar Fusion, a company working quietly behind the scenes for over a decade, has unveiled plans for Sunbird, a nuclear fusion-powered rocket that could slash travel times across the solar system—and fundamentally change how we explore space. Revealed publicly for the first time in March 2025, the rocket’s design is bold, its claims even bolder,...

Former President Trump shares how his administration plans to bring down energy and electricity prices if he wins in November.

A British team has reported hitting a major milestone...heating a nuclear reactor to the "magic figure" of 100 million degrees Celsius...The British company achieved the milestone using a "spherical tokamak" called ST40...Due to its design, the ST40 is "compact" – less than three feet across – and reaches around 13 feet in height.

Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new researchIs there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine. Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries. Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material. A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner...

Korea's 'artificial Sun' reactor has made headlines this week by officially sustaining plasma at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for more than 20 seconds. The team at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device reached an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).According to New Scientist, the reaction was only stopped after 30 seconds because of hardware limitations. KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilize ultra-hot plasma, with the ultimate aim of making nuclear fusion power a reality. You can see the footage below showing the reactor run over 24 seconds,...

OPEC+ and its allies agreed Thursday to increase oil production more than expected, opening the door for Saudi Arabia to ramp up its own output if wartime sanctions force Russia to pump less... The OPEC+ decision comes after sources told the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia is prepared to pump more. Concern over a more dire supply squeeze for crude oil has emerged since the European Union announced its partial Russian oil embargo on Tuesday, as well as a ban on insurance for Russian cargoes that could limit Moscow's exports to markets outside the EU.

Ukraine’s military successes against Russia have transformed calculations in Washington and other Western capitals, leading to a sharp increase in military help for Kyiv as a war that started with Western efforts at damage control has become one that offers a strategic opportunity to constrain Russia’s expansionist ambitions. The U.S. and its allies are now shipping large volumes of heavy weaponry to Ukraine, including more advanced Western systems to supplement the light weapons and Soviet-era arms that were funneled into Ukraine since before the invasion started. Those shipments are aimed at supporting Kyiv in the next decisive phase of the...

Poland has been preparing to give up Russian gas fuel for a long time, so Gazprom's decision to turn off the tap did not surprise her. Rather, the inevitable has accelerated. Poland's energy security should not be jeopardized, but the gas turmoil may again have an impact on Poles' bills in a few months. The former president of PGNiG draws attention to one important element of the entire gas puzzle. On Wednesday at 8.00, Gazprom will officially suspend gas supplies to Poland under the Yamal contract . The day before, journalists reported that gas fuel transmission from the east fell...

Russian forces have failed to make any major gains over the last 24 hours in their offensive in Ukraine as counterattacks by the defenders have hampered their efforts, according to UK intelligence and U.S. analysts.British intelligence said in an April 23 operational update that Ukraine’s airspace and its Black Sea waters remain contested as Russian air and maritime forces have been unable to establish control in either domain “owing to the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air and sea defense.”“Despite increased activity, Russian forces have made no major gains in the last 24 hours as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hinder their efforts,”...

“The old joke is that nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” quips Greg De Temmerman, managing director of Paris-based energy think tank Zenon Research. In fact, the joke has become so hackneyed over the decades it has been banned by editors at the Economist. “But more seriously, many things are happening right now in the field,” De Temmerman adds. Jokes aside, they are. Earlier this month, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor eclipsed previous records by sustaining a high plasma temperature for minutes (1,056 seconds). It reached two milestones: a one-million-ampere current and a 1,000-second...

Artist's concept of the Radian One spaceplaneRadian Aerospace VIEW 7 IMAGES A new company has entered the commercial space race. Startup Radian Aerospace has emerged from stealth to announce it has secured US$27.5 million in seed funding to develop a single-stage to orbit (SSTO) spaceplane called Radian One, which is designed to lift and land horizontally. The commercial space field has been growing steadily in recent years, with contractors taking over ferrying crews to the International Space Station, launching huge constellations of satellites into orbit, and even sending private missions and tourists into space. In addition, there are plans to...

This illustration provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory depicts a target pellet inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP ============================================================================== With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit—at least for a fraction of a second—a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence...

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working with Japanese researchers, made the observation on the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Japan, a twisty magnetic facility that the Japanese call a "heliotron." The results demonstrated for the first time a novel regime for confining heat in facilities known as stellarators, similar to the heliotron. The findings could advance the twisty design as a blueprint for future fusion power plants Researchers produced the higher confinement regime by injecting tiny grains of boron powder into the LHD plasma that fuels fusion reactions. The injection through a PPPL-installed dropper...

Physicists working on a type of fusion reactor called a stellarator are getting closer to actually harnessing the power of nuclear fusion. According to a new paper, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany is now capable of containing heat that reaches temperatures twice as high as those found in the core of the Sun. This means physicists have been able to reduce heat loss - a major step forward in stellarator technology. "It's really exciting news for fusion that this design has been successful," said physicist Novimir Pablant of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). "It clearly shows that this...

TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion company, has announced it will have a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant by 2030, which puts it years—or even decades—ahead of other fusion technology companies. The California-based company has raised $880 million in funding for its hydrogen-boron reactor. This reactor isn’t a traditional tokamak or stellarator; instead, it uses a confined particle acceleration mechanism that produces and confines plasma. All fusion technology has plasma, which mimics the extreme reactions that power all the stars—it’s what we’re emulating when we make fusion energy experiments. “Plasma is an oozy substance; the challenge of containing...

Yes, the ends justify the means. Nothing but the ends can justify the means. Perhaps better put, the ends justify means proportioned to certain ends.Being born in equality, we are all equally obliged to defend the rights given to us by God. It is for this purpose, the defense of rights, that men form government. Security in our rights is the end. Government is the means. Our Founders drew the following conclusion when government becomes disconnected from, or hostile to, its designed end.“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People...