Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Preston Cabral eats meat nearly every day at home, but his favorite meals at school are served on “Meatless Mondays” and “Vegan Fridays.” “Today I ate chips, tangerines and this thing that looked like chili but without the meat — just beans,” the 12-year-old said after lunch. Programs like these are among the few proven to work for one of the thorniest problems of the 21st century: How to get people to eat less meat. Experts agree that the urgency of climate change and the demands of a surging global population call for an overhaul of...

The term "pedestrian" has a derogatory meaning because peasants walked while nobles were "equestrians" and rode horses. The industrial revolution eliminated this class difference, as it did so many others, by making car ownership available to the masses until eventually Herbert Hoover was able to boast that "Republican prosperity has reduced and increased earning capacity” to "put the proverbial 'chicken in every pot' and a car in every backyard to boot." Democrats have spent two generations trying to get those cars out of every backyard. Biden is trying to bring back Obama's mileage standards that were estimated to raise car...

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the effort to prevent the shooters from getting additional notoriety, I will refer to them, not by name, but as the Buffalo shooter and the Uvalde shooter, respectively.Quite some time ago, after Sandy Hook's school shooting in 2012, then after another school shooting at Umpqua Community College in October of 2015, I began to be suspicious of the frequency and the targets of these shootings. I wrote an editorial titled "Thinking the unthinkable: A case for orchestration". In it, I explored the possibility that the mass shootings were being orchestrated and enabled by members of certain three-letter...

The problem with elected officials isn't always the elected politician themselves, but their behind-the-scenes crew of so-called advisers, counselors and strategists. It's been said, though not anymore, that "behind every great man is a great woman." Oh, is that sexist? Well, too bad. Take, for example, one of our Founding Fathers and second president of the United States, John Adams. He would have never reached the heights he did without the intelligent counsel of his wife Abigail. But the opposite is also true. Behind every bad politician, or bad leaders of any kind, are often even worse advisers. Heck, even...

For Immediate ReleaseTuesday, October 5, 2021Office of Press Relationspress@usaid.govToday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is launching an ambitious new project that will work with partner countries and the global community to build better preparedness for future global health threats. Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens - Viral Zoonoses (DEEP VZN), a five-year, approximately $125 million project (pending availability of funds), will strengthen global capacity to detect and understand the risks of viral spillover from wildlife to humans that could cause another pandemic.The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how infectious diseases threaten all of society, up-ending people’s lives and...

President-elect Joe Biden announced Tuesday he was nominating Samantha Power, a former Obama administration official and key unmasker of Trump campaign staffers, to a top position in his incoming administration. “Ambassador Samantha Power is a world-renowned voice of conscience and moral clarity — challenging and rallying the international community to stand up for the dignity and humanity of all people,” Biden said in a statement. “As USAID Administrator, she’ll be a powerful force for principled American engagement.”

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

This is a real headshaker that should send chills down your spine.Washington Free Beacon: The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.” The university has received $919,917 so far for the project....

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/289290-jeff-bezos-neil-degrasse-tyson-join-pentagon-innovation-board July 26, 2016 - 02:15 PM EDT Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos join DOD innovation board By Rebecca Kheel Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson were among the big names Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday as joining the Pentagon’s recently formed Defense Innovation Advisory Board. “I've given them the very specific task of identifying innovative private sector best practices that could be of use to DOD [the Department of Defense] — not unlike our recent Hack the Pentagon pilot program, which invited hackers to help find vulnerabilities in our networks," Carter said during an...

Records Show Obama Hired Behavioral Experts to Expand Use of Govt. Programs - Judicial Watch http://www.judicialwatch.org/the-blog/records-show-obama-hired-behavioral-experts-expand-use-govt-programs/ Records Show Obama Hired Behavioral Experts to Expand Use of Govt. Programs SEPTEMBER 08, 2016 The Obama administration quietly hired 20 social and behavioral research experts to help expand the use of government programs at dozens of agencies by, among other things, simplifying federal forms, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch. The controversial group of experts is collectively known as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) and it functions under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In 2015...

Maya Shankar, a White House adviser cultivating a team tasked with subtly influencing Americans’ behavior, previously worked closely with the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, WND has learned. Shankar has discussed utilizing cognitive science for social activism and is a champion of so-called social justice.

Steve Bannon tried to distance himself from the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Thursday, claiming: “I didn’t even know anything about the Facebook mining.” Bannon is a former vice-president and board member of the political consultancy, which he agreed he “put together.” He claimed to a conference in New York that neither he nor Cambridge Analytica had anything to do with “dirty tricks” in the use of information harvested from Facebook to make computer models to sway elections. Besides, he said, “Facebook data is for sale all over the world”. {snip} He blamed any “dirty tricks” on Cambridge Analytica’s parent company,...

Obama Issues Executive Order for the government to use individual's behavioral data.

On September 15, 2015, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order with the intent on implementing “Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People.” The Executive Order (EO) is based on a “growing body of evidence demonstrating that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.” Furthermore, the EO continues, “Where Federal policies have been designed to reflect behavioral science insights, they have substantially improved outcomes for the individuals, families, communities,...

The rage-wing of the Democratic Party has gotten active again. Former Obama administration United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power followed former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan to make big threats to the Trump administration in the wake of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying. It's fascinating because it's something President Trump had absolutely nothing to do with, given that it was apolitical watchdogs in the Department of Justice and the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility who made the call. Yet they are lashing out and now making threats - because it's dawning on them that they...

Samantha Power has been a notorious critic of Israel for years and that, naturally, makes her well-qualified under President Obama's criteria to serve in such a crucial post. She will be welcomed with open arms at the United Nations. We at American Thinker have been warning about her influence with Barack Obama since 2008 (see Samantha Power and Obama's Foreign Policy Team). But her bit of nastiness seems to be tinged with a bit of anti-Semitism as well. When concerns arose in 2008 regarding Barack Obama and his views towards Israel it generated wrath from Ms. Power, who was a...

That’s … a lotta unmasking. The fact that Samantha Power is at the heart of the “unmasking” investigation in the House barely qualifies as news at this point, as her name has been floating around in connection with it for months. In fact, Trey Gowdy quizzed John Brennan about a mysterious ambassador and her strange unmasking requests at a House hearing all the way back on May 23. By mid-July the Free Beacon’s sources had identified her as a “central figure” in the probe. Note this quote from that piece: “Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly...

RUSH: Snerdley is pointing out to me that all hell broke loose in the last 24 hours. Let me guess. I assume you’re talking about Trump’s interview in the New York Times. You’re talking about what he said about Sessions. You’re talking about the Mueller investigation. It’s getting ridiculous. And it’s just confirming everything I have thought about what’s really going on here between the establishment and Trump. You know, not only is this program’s 30th anniversary coming up a week from Tuesday, today is an anniversary, folks. Today marks Donald Trump’s sixth month in office. And you know what...

"Devastated by Justice Scalia's death. One of the most important justices ever, a defender of the Rule of Law, and a truly wonderful person."

Liberals won't like it. If Ted Cruz is elected president, he has big plans for the Supreme Court -- namely, picking extremely conservative candidates to fill any vacancies among the nine justices. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he'd be different. "Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative," Cruz said. As solicitor general,...