Free Republic

If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition. A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that. Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces. Wind and solar are now...

Reparations advocates had the wind in their sails last year. Cities across the US set up teams to hash out plans to compensate black people for the legacy of slavery, taking their cue from a successful pilot in Evanston, Illinois. The landscape in 2024 is very different. Squad member Cori Bush, the Missouri Democrat who has championed payouts, is under investigation for campaign spending violations. Her bid for a $14 trillion federal compensation package is dead in the water. The reparations task force in Detroit — a hub for African-American culture — has descended into a 'shambles' of quitting and...

Highlights: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that the expansion of the BRICS group signals the intention to build a new world order. . French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that the expansion of the BRICS group signals the intention to build a new world order.Macron said in a speech at the annual conference of ambassadors of the Republic at the Elysee Palace: "The expansion of the BRICS indicates the intention to build an alternative world order, which is seen as too Western.Macron explained that this creates the risk of "fragmentation of the world" that must be avoided,...

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as...

No wonder my listeners demanded this episode. Saifedean Ammous takes an economic perspective informed by the Austrian School and applies it to Bitcoin and why it matters. He discusses the various roles Bitcoin can play, and parries common objections. (We also take an animated detour into the BCH/BTC discussion, for those of you interested.)

Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun's rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet. Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels. Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant's full capacity due by the end of...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

BOND Action, Inc. has been created to educate, motivate and rally Americans to greater involvement in the moral, cultural and political issues that threaten our great country. If you strongly believe in the family, traditional moral values, and positive, honest race relations, we are asking you to become a member of BOND Action, Inc. We need your physical, spiritual, and financial support as we work together to stand up for our families, our communities and our great nation. Radio show airs m-f 6am to 9am! Tune in HereEverybody and their mama listens to the Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show!!

CNSNews.com) - The bill meant to combat global warming that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June would decrease the Gross Domestic Product of the United States by $2 trillion to $3 trillion between 2012 and 2030, a study shows. The study on the economic impact of the American Clean Energy and Security Act was commissioned by the American Council for Capitol Formation (ACCF), a non-profit that examines tax and environmental policy, and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the nation’s largest manufacturing trade organization.

EU ministers grapple with global warming goal French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, chairing the first top-level meeting under France's six-month presidency of the EU, was to ask his counterparts to identify two key areas of national concern to help spur the negotiation process. PARIS - EUROPEAN UNION (EU) environment ministers began an informal two-day meeting here on Thursday aimed at clearing some of the many obstacles besetting their goal of slashing carbon emissions by 2020. French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, chairing the first top-level meeting under France's six-month presidency of the EU, was to ask his counterparts to identify two...

Assembly Leader Tedisco called on Spitzer and the DMV to scrap the license plan-or face legal action and a new law to block it.....the Conservative Party unveiled a powerful new ad contrasting US policy along the Mexican border (where illegals are arrested) with Spitzer's plan to grant them licenses. Last month, Spitzer announced NY would provide free chemotherapy to illegals, despite a federal directive prohibiting states from seeking federal reimbursement. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates NY pays out $4.5 billion more than it collects from illegals' tax revenue (for health care, education and incarceration).

Why Global Warming is Probably a Crock By James Lewis As a scientist I've learned never to say "never." So human-caused global warming is always a hypothesis to hold, at least until climate science becomes mature. (Climate science is very immature right now: Physicists just don't know how to deal with hypercomplex systems like the earth weather. That's why a recent NASA scientist was wildly wrong when he called anthropogenic warming "just basic physics." Basic physics is what you do in the laboratory. If hypercomplex systems were predictable, NASA would have foolproof space shuttles --- because they are a lot...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

International journalists discuss Lebanon war coverage; NYT bureau chief: Israel 'not interested in Lebanese deaths' A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war. The panel of journalists, largely from the international media, convened to discuss their coverage of the war, at a conference arranged by the Media Line agency's Mideast Press Club. "Journalists' access to the battlefield is controlled exclusively by the IDF," said Simon McGregor-Wood, Chairman of the Foreign Press Association, and Bureau Chief of ABC...

You would think that Reuters learned its lesson about publishing to the world photos doctored to create a false image. After all, they were caught with multiple false photos from Lebanon, and had to take down more than 900 images from one stringer. Reuters promised it would have "experienced editors" look at all such photos in the future.

Fauxtography Defender's Faux News Turns out that Greg Mitchell, the Editor & Publisher editor who has been attacking the blogosphere like a rabid ferret for pointing out the bogus news from the Middle East, has first-hand experience with staging news. (Hat tip: Confederate Yankee.) Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts,...

It turns out that Osama bin Laden valued the western media so much that one of his media advisers had the pseudonym "Abu Reuters." Al Qaeda videos are specifically designed for play in the Western media, with its own production company providing English subtitles. Said one CNN producer, "The media meant and still means a lot to them.”

All Your Fakes Are Belong to Us A jawa video spoof on Beirut Fauxtography.

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both." By David D. Perlmutter (August 18, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks...