Free Republic

How did harmful content and misinformation online get so bad — after so much time, money, and scores of people trying to limit the spread of inaccurate, violent, obscene, and harmful content? For starters, the problem is much bigger than it used to be, and human-driven efforts cannot keep up. Even with tens of thousands tackling the problem (Meta’s Trust & Safety team has swelled to an army of more than 40,000) the sheer amount of digital content is too overwhelming. Moderating this content by human review is not only time-consuming, ineffective, and error-prone, it also can endanger the mental...

On Monday, June 6, we will be live blogging as the court releases orders from the June 2 conference and opinions in one or more argued cases from the current term.

A retracted study on hydroxychloroquine and news that the coronavirus may be mutating drew reactions Friday night from Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel. "So Lancet, with egg on its face, a renowned journal, is suddenly withdrawing this study," Siegel noted during an appearance on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" A database by Surgisphere Corp. of Chicago was used in an observational study of nearly 100,000 patients that appeared May 22 in The Lancet, an influential medical journal. The study tied the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to a higher risk of death in hospitalized patients with the virus. The validity...

The Trump administration is handling the coronavirus outbreak better than previous administrations addressed earlier emerging contagions, said Dr. Marc Siegel, professor of medicine at New York University, Fox News medical correspondent, and author of False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear. Siegel shared his analysis on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with special guest host Joel Pollak. “I’ve been handling these emerging contagions for about 20 years now, and I have to tell you, I’ve never seen one handled better,” said Siegel of President Donald Trump’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) erred in...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In an interview posted on the conservative Breitbart site, Palm Beach County Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel says Jews shouldn’t trust pro-Israel Christians. “The Christians just want us to be there so we can be slaughtered and converted and bring on the second coming of Jesus Christ,” Siegel said while attending the Democratic National Convention.

...Mark Alan Siegel, the Palm Beach County Democrat Chairman spoke with Scottie Hughes of Patriot TV and made some rather pointed and anti-Christian statements. Mr. Siegel was wearing a “Jews for Obama” pin. Ms. Hughes spotted the pin and asked the chairman about his support for Obama despite the administration’s record with Israel. Here are a couple of the offensive comments made by the Palm Beach Democratic Chairman: “I’m Jewish, I’m not a fan of any other religion than Judaism.” “The worst possible allies for the Jewish state are the fundamentalist Christians who want Jews to die and convert so...

Occupy Wall Street sues NYC over confiscated booksBy Joseph Ax | Reuters – 9 hrs ago NEW YORK (Reuters) - Occupy Wall Street filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against New York City, claiming authorities destroyed $47,000 worth of books, computers and other equipment confiscated from the protesters' encampment in lower Manhattan last fall. **SNIP** As part of the sweep, Occupy claims, police officers seized more than 3,000 books from the "People's Library." While some of the books were eventually returned, many were in unusable condition, while the rest were apparently destroyed, according to Occupy's lawyer, Norman Siegel.

Lunelle Siegel helps her husband Bart Siegel with his tie before the beginning of the first Southern Cultural Festival, held Friday at the Channelside complex in Tampa.

TEMPLE TERRACE — Bart Siegel, an outspoken advocate for the display of the giant Confederate flag near the intersection of Interstate 4 and I-75, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in his Temple Terrace home Thursday. Siegel, 50, was a Republican accountant who penned long letters to newspapers and verbally sparred with columnists. In 2000, he announced his desire to "stir things up" by running against then-Hillsborough Clerk of the Circuit Court Richard Ake, a Democrat unopposed since 1986. Siegel lost, but kept stirring things up. In the face of a protest, Siegel professed his love for the...

In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Wolf Blitzer of CNN made much of an e-mail, exclusively provided to him by a close associate of Bhutto and a Hillary Clinton supporter, casting blame on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for her murder. We can now understand why Musharraf’s November 3 state-of-emergency decree took foreign news outlets like CNN off the air. Musharraf, who is one of the main targets of the Al Qaida international terrorist organization, recognizes that the so-called “CNN effect” in global affairs can destabilize foreign governments, including his own. It’s no wonder that he recently complained about being...

The Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church hired Jewish rabbi Joshua Martin Siegel to provide his spiritual and theological input to conference Christian Methodist affairs. From the Baltimore-Washington Conference website (originally, it says, from the New York Jewish Times): http://www.bwcumc.org/news_detail.asp?PKValue=2242 Rabbi carries on teaching tradition with Methodists BY IRA RIFKIN Special to the UMConnection It takes a certain chutzpah for a Jew to lecture believing Christians about the New Testament’s spiritual message; even more so when church officials are in attendance. Yet that’s the core of an experiment in spiritual cross-pollination involving one of the nation’s leading Protestant denominations...

In recent years, The New Republic, one of the nation's leading magazines of political and cultural commentary, has been embarrassed by scandals involving two of journalism's original sins: fabrication of stories and plagiarism. But the latest scandal, involving the magazine's cultural critic Lee Siegel, has to do with a transgression peculiar to the Internet age: sock puppetry. A sock puppet, in Internet parlance, is a false Internet identity created for deceptive purposes. Siegel, who had been writing a culture blog for The New Republic, had started using the pseudonym "sprezzatura" on the blog's forums to praise himself and savage his...

The Future for Investors by Jeremy Siegel, Ph.D. Is Real Estate a House of Cards? Monday, December 19, 2005 Real estate has been the hottest asset class over the past five years. Some locales have seen prices double in two or three years and news of investors flipping condos reminds me of the frenzied days of Internet IPOs in the late 1990s. But with the latest rise in mortgage rates there's been an unmistakable shift in sentiment. Recent data from the research firm ISI shows that the dollar value of unsold homes in the U.S. has now surpassed $500 billion,...

When finance professor Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania published Stocks for the Long Run in 1994 (Irwin Professional Publishing), he found himself getting booked on the lecture trail, called on for magazine and newspaper articles, and taking stands on various stock market debates of the day. Inevitably, he found himself asked, "Okay, stocks for the long run, fine. But which stocks?" Another question persisted as well: "What happens when the baby boomers retire?" In his new book, The Future for Investors: Why the Tried and the True Triumph Over the Bold and the New...

I spent a good chunk of the 1990s writing mutual fund advertising, so much of it that the required caveats and footnotes still trip off the fingers: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." "The Fund is offered only by prospectus. Please read the prospectus carefully before investing or sending money." Financial services advertising, you see, is ringed about by careful regulation. You can't cherry pick and show off only one good year. You can't make false comparisons. And so forth. One home truth came through that long experience, and I share it here with doubters and fear-mongers who...

If you come closer, we will whisper one of the political season's best-kept secrets. Ready? Here goes. Four weeks from today, an election will be held in New York for United States senator. This obscure fact was uncovered through crackerjack investigative reporting. We looked at a calendar. Otherwise, who would have known? It is one thing to be ignored in presidential elections. New Yorkers got over that one a long time ago. We recognize that this Democratic city isn't in play at the national level. Our role is to provide visiting presidential candidates with television studios and lots of rich...

Grand jury indicts Siegelman, 2 othersSiegelman characterizes charges as 'baseless' attack by Republicans against him and other Democrats Friday, May 28, 2004 By SALLIE OWEN, JOE DANBORN and JEFF AMY Staff Reporters Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and his former chief of staff were indicted with a third person by a federal grand jury in Birmingham on charges they illegally rigged bids for medical services, prosecutors announced Thursday. The 25-page indictment alleges that while he was governor, Siegelman and his chief of staff, Paul Hamrick, manipulated the bid process to help Dr. Phillip Bobo of Tuscaloosa win a multimillion-dollar Medicaid...

<p>The nation's health agency plans to closely watch flu complications among children, who have swamped hospitals in some states and surprised doctors with the severity of their illnesses.</p> <p>A new concern is the rise of a common drug-resistant staph infection that is complicating efforts to treat children with the flu, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.</p>