Free Republic

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) claims the film Judas and the Black Messiah inspired him to introduce a bill that would strip J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI building.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday called for “improved world governance” as one solution to constant geopolitical upheaval, with the globalist body central to his appeal for the revival of multilateralism. The Por­tuguese socialist spoke as the U.N. marks its 75th anniversary and the coronavirus pandemic continues its deadly toll.

Three weeks ago I wrote a post titled Joe Biden Can’t Be President: I’m not saying Biden shouldn’t be president. That has always been true. I am saying that he lacks the physical and mental qualities necessary to to the job–not to do it well, but to do it at all. Evidence of Biden’s incapacity continues to pile up. Earlier today, he gave an interview to MSNBC in which he pontificated about the coronavirus, or tried to. It was a sad spectacle.

The remainder of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was canceled Wednesday as officials in both Houston and Harris County declare a health emergency. According to an alert from the Houston Rodeo app, the grounds at NRG Park will be closed as of 4 p.m. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the new presumptive positive case of coronavirus that was reported Tuesday in Montgomery County was not related to international travel, and there was evidence of community spread in that case. That is what led to the decision to cancel the Rodeo, Turner said.

President Trump's Senate acquittal and his rise in polls have been a disappointment for Tehran's regime. ------------------------------------------- An "Asia" newspaper article published a few days before the Senate vote states: ------------------------------------------- Given the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, the impeachment is highly likely to be voted on, no matter if the Senate approves of the impeachment or not. It could weaken Trump's power and his decisions.

<p>Say you’re a secret federal court that signed off on wiretaps of a Trump campaign official based on Russian disinformation financed by the Clinton campaign and midwifed through anti-Trump partisans at the FBI. The court did nothing about this deception for three years despite accumulating evidence presented to it. Once this is all publicly exposed, would your response be to hire a former Obama official and media apologist for the FBI to restore the court’s credibility?</p>

Once upon a time, those who had an abortion realized it was something sad. Yes, they had one, but they weren't exactly happy about it. In fact, they often spoke about it with regret, seeing it as the only option they had at that time. Sadly, we are now living in a completely new era in which abortions are actually glorified. See how actress Michelle Williams used her Golden Globe speech to explain that she could never have won the award if she hadn't aborted a baby several years ago.

Adam Schiff is back in the news in a big way. He’s about as funny as a rubber crutch, but it can’t be wrong to call a timeout to laugh at him. Tom Shillue has mastered the bizarreries of Schiff’s deportment in a manner that brings insight to impersonation. The compilation of Shillue clips below made me laugh out loud. It is the second of two such compilations on YouTube.

Summary: Let’s hit “pause” in the climate wars and see how we got here, where we are going, and what we can learn from this mess. “I can’t use this result. It doesn’t support the narrative.“ At the time I thought this statement was daft. Now I see that she was spot on, but not in the way she meant it. And with results that she did not intend. (snip) But the damage to climate science is effectively forever. Generations of scientists have learned that success is political, and I believe the resulting long slide of research quality has just...

...the most interesting part of liberal writer George Packer’s widely noticed recent Atlantic essay, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” The article details his dismay at the identity politics/standards-shredding orthodoxy that has overtaken New York’s public schools under leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Is he still a candidate for president, by the way? I’ve lost track. . .) Packer here sounds like a late-60s liberal who is about to move to a New York suburb for better schools for his kids. Worth reading the whole thing if you have time, but the interesting part to me begins in...

The climate cult has gotten out of hand. It now threatens to prevail in politics by convincing the ignorant that the science is settled. Anybody who has a basic understanding of the science knows that it is not settled. A number of inconvenient facts seriously undermine the idea that catastrophic global warming caused by humans is about to overwhelm us. ------------------ Climate science has been corrupted by the money and prestige that flow to it so long as its supposedly objective research yields findings that support the climate cult narrative. Climate scientists have been bought with government money. Reporters have...

Readers of Watts Up With That will know from Mark I that for six years I have been trying to publish a manuscript with the post title. Well, it has passed peer review and is now published at Frontiers in Earth Science: Atmospheric Science. The paper demonstrates that climate models have no predictive value. ------------ From the perspective of physical science, it is very reasonable to conclude that any effect of COâ‚‚ emissions is beyond present resolution, and even reasonable to suppose that any possible effect may be so small as to be undetectable within natural variation. Nothing among the...

As President Trump threatens to transport illegal aliens to sanctuary cities, suddenly, many on the Left are feeling significantly less generous and magnanimous regarding illegal immigration. Colloquially, this is known as "skin in the game." When people have no skin in the game, then the issue is "no skin off their back." Cher, for example, was gung ho when it came to immigration, as she had no skin in the game. However, when she had some skin in the game, her position suddenly became more conservative.

The IPCC’s AR5 estimated the global warming caused by a tonne of livestock methane would be 28 times that of a tonne of carbon dioxide. New research destroys that estimate. The war on meat has been gathering pace amongst our Western elites. The Economist makes a detailed case for “plant-based food” in the interests of quelling climate change – The FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of the greenhouse gases from livestock, and are the world’s fifth largest source of methane. If cows were a country, the United Herds of Earth would be the planet’s third largest greenhouse-gas...

The dossier that launched several investigations into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign was based, in part, on posts from "random individuals" from a CNN website that allows the public to publish unverified information. Christopher Steele made the admission in a deposition given in connection with a lawsuit against the dossier. The judge released portions of the deposition this week. Washington Examiner: According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN's iReport website and said he wasn't aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the...

Let’s start with what isn’t scandalous: the charges against Roger Stone. Scott embedded Robert Mueller’s indictment here. Byron York has a good summary of the charges. The salient point is that Mueller’s indictment of Stone confirms that the Trump campaign had nothing to do with the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee or their publication by Wikileaks. The allegations against Stone all have to do with what happened after Wikileaks dumped the first batch of DNC emails. Stone tried–unsuccessfully–to get in touch with Julian Assange or someone else who could tell him whether Wikileaks had more emails, and...

So, here's a story. You probably saw it in the news, in the dueling op-eds, in the outrage that swirled around it. But the story is still worth revisiting as a microcosm, a little diorama, of our cultural situation. This past July, The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee called "How-To," narrated by a panhandler offering advice to other panhandlers, explaining how to gin up sympathy among the passers-by. As a poem "How-To" was, meh, just about average: one of those not-particularly-good-but-not-particularly-bad productions by authors and editors well versed in the mechanisms taught by writing schools. We have a...

Of course, the global highlights are what the mainstream media and alarmist blogs parrot. Some may even report on the Global Temperatures and Regional Temperatures portions of the NOAA report. Few will venture beyond that. BIAS OF OMISSION 1 It’s not until readers scroll down to the rankings table in the SOTC report that NOAA introduces uncertainties. See my Figure 1. So, according to NOAA, the “annually-averaged temperature was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F), easily breaking the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.04°C (0.07°F)”, but then NOAA clarifies their global surface temperature anomalies...

The acronym GIGO, (Garbage In, Garbage Out) reflects that most working around computer models knew the problem. Some suggest that in climate science, it actually stands for Gospel In, Gospel Out. This is an interesting observation, but underscores a serious conundrum. The Gospel Out results are the IPCC predictions, (projections), and they are consistently wrong. This is no surprise to me, because I have spoken out from the start about the inadequacy of the models. I watched modelers take over and dominate climate conferences as keynote presenters. It was modelers who dominated the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and through them,...

The war on climate change has produced many dubious “innovations.” Intermittent wind and solar energy sources, carbon markets that buy and sell “hot air,” and biofuels that burn food as we drive are just a few examples. But carbon capture and storage is the Edsel of energy policies. Carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon capture and sequestration, is promoted by President Obama, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for coal-fired power plants. In September, the EPA proposed a limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, a regulation that...