Free Republic

Governor Newsom: California’s COVID-19 peak may be lower than the state expected

Anyone who was looking for some assurance that politicians are giving appropriate weight to the potentially devastating economic impact of aggressive COVID-19 control measures will not find it in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's comments at his press conference today. "We're not going to put a dollar figure on human life," said Cuomo (D), who last Friday announced that "we're all in quarantine now" while ordering all "nonessential" businesses to close. The goal, he explained, is to "save lives, period, whatever it costs." In a world of finite resources, where government agencies routinely and appropriately weigh the cost of potentially...

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security. It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting a virus that thus far has killed less than 100 Americans. Declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday, President...

Some time ago, I had been asked to look over the final, pre-publication draft of a book, written by a friend of one of my West Point classmates whose father just happens to be a Medal of Honor recipient. More on that later. I made note of some things and informed the author. Below is my review of the final, published book. The book, Women in Combat; Feminism Goes to War, is written by Mark C. Atkins, a self-described, “failed Marine” (I checked; He has an Honorable Discharge) does what few folks today have courage to do, call out the...

Language is wildly important. That words have meanings, and those meanings are understood by everyone, are the key to communication. That’s why it’s becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with progressive leftists – they will not be bound by those definitions, they change them whenever it suits their needs. It’s to the point that it’s not even worth trying. On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi announced her call for articles of impeachment against President Trump, and what the Speaker of the House wants, the Speaker of the House gets (in the House). The only thing missing from her announcement was any charge she...

[Professor Ludwig analyses developments in New York State to show what our Education Establishment probably wants to do everywhere. Scary.]America's education system is driven decade after decade by a never-ending stream of jargon. Left-wing educators seemingly never get tired of reproducing their pap in schools of education and not-for-profit organizations. Their jargon continuously reconfigures and is infinitely creative in saying the same thing in different ways; decade after decade educational jargon expresses educational models that produce fewer and fewer diligent, capable, informed, goal-oriented students. The successive models since the 1890s can, in a general sense, be called "progressive education." These...

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow transgender individuals who meet all other physical, educational, and mental health standards to serve in the U.S. military. The amendment passed 242-187, with 10 Republicans voting with Democrats in support of transgender military service. The amendment, introduced by U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), is modeled after former President Harry Truman’s 1948 order that racially integrated the military. It incorporated much of the language from Truman’s order — including that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in...

The commandant of the Marine Corps will have five years to stop separating men and women at the service's oldest boot camp, if a new amendment added to the 2020 defense authorization bill survives to ratification. Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat and chair of the House Armed Services Military Personnel subcommittee, proposed the amendment on Wednesday, "Training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina, may not be segregated based on gender," the measure states. "The Commandant of the Marine Corps shall carry out this subsection not later than five years after the date of the enactment...

Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance. n 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China. For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going...

Liberals know about control and power. They revel in both. Power is what a liberal craves most. It seems counterintuitive but it is true. After all liberals are always taking about rights and what is fair. What I have realized is that liberals understand the most powerful weapon of all in a free society: the moral high ground. Liberals attain the moral high ground in a different way, however. They figure out what is attitude or behavior most destructive to the majority and then they put that attitude or behavior on higher ground. They then start a shame campaign to...

My husband and I managed to raise six children on a very limited income, (as I was a stay at home Mom for 15 years), sending them to private Catholic schools for twelve years. Now we enjoy watching them do the same with our 13 grandchildren. What is disheartening, however, is how today's children are being systematically exposed to issues we parents never had to contend with raising our own decades ago. Is it liberalism or just plain evil that's taking away the innocence of childhood? Why on earth should kindergarten curricula include lessons on gender reassignments or anything to...

The warrior culture in the US Army is dying every day, in a hideously slow death by a thousand lacerations of social engineering, diversity and political correctness lunacy, abated by senior army leaders who are too gutless to raise even a finger in protest. From Green Beret training standards lower than ROTC camp in the 80’s to Mommy Rangers, lactation memos, pregnancy simulators during physical training and a parade of cadets in red high heels, it’s more than apparent that this ain’t your father’s army anymore. Heck, it ain’t even your older brother’s army anymore. The army, like the rest...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) released a statement on Friday as members of Congress were leaving Washington for Christmas which attacked what she called the “Trump Administration’s cruel attacks” on transgenders in the military. “The Trump Administration’s cruel attacks against our brave transgender servicemembers is a misguided decision fueled by prejudice, not the interests of national security,” Pelosi said. “The White House’s hateful agenda serves only to weaken our military and the nation it defends.” …

Hillary Clinton announced Friday that she wants to enlist 5 million new volunteers into a “national service reserve” aimed at 18- to 30-year-olds. “What if we strengthen the culture of service in America? So it wasn’t just something we did one day a year, but it became a regular part of our lives,” she asked in a Florida rally on the topic of national service Friday. The former secretary of state argued that her volunteer plan would help combat growing self-segregation in America, where people surround themselves with people who think, talk, look and read the same news as them....

Just another attempt to herd human beings into tiny spaces in order to control land use, mobility, and urban sprawl, all Sustainable Development goals. Now Pushing U.N. Agenda 2030 with Social Engineering of the Elderly The One World Governance of U.N. Agenda 21, now morphed into U.N. Agenda 2030, requires that every societal decision be based on the environmental impact on global land use, education, and population control and reduction. The lynchpin of this agenda, Sustainable Development, has deemed “not sustainable” most human activities that form our modern civilization: private property, suburban sprawl, fossil fuels, consumerism, farming, irrigation, commercial agriculture,...

Botched social engineering and big lie strategy have backfired. And no, we are not done judging their crimes yet. And all this, because actions speak louder than Left When it comes to big talk, leftists are in their element: grandiose speeches, propaganda sprees –you name it. Dems do not even care about “global warming” while trying to inflate the entire planet with hot air. In the last ditch to preserve their monopoly of the media, they are still operating according to their golden rule:” If we want your opinion we will give it to you”. Sabotage´s main ingredients: subversion, obstruction,...

The American military under Obama received less focus about preparing to fight wars than as a laboratory for social engineering. The military was ordered to integrate Homosexuals and transgenders into the ranks. The armed forces had to place its war fighting training on hold in order to adopt the “politically correct,” liberal agenda of the far left. As a result, the military has begun to lose its fighting spirit and forgotten its heritage and history. The Obamas Regime’s “inclusive approach” has managed to minimize the expression of religion in the ranks. Officers and enlisted alike have been disciplined for displaying...

Whenever we recall Book VII of Plato's Republic, the "Allegory of the Cave" that many of us studied in college, we remember that the chained population in the cave was always looking at shadows on the wall of the cave and mistakenly believed that those shadows were reality. Shadows of unreality are being reflected today by the policies and practices of many school systems. Vague talk about improving our schools, becoming more competitive globally, and opening doors of opportunity becomes rubrics that express "shadows" of the reality that managers of education are in fact implementing progressive – i.e., totalitarian –...

A key congressional supporter of Donald Trump says the president-elect’s defense secretary should move quickly to reverse a number of social engineering policies adopted in the Obama years that “have cut down on the warrior mentality.”Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, told The Washington Times that the armed forces need a counterrevolution. It should reverse at least three policies: women in the infantry, open transgender troops and the near-banishment of the word “man” from Navy and Marine Corps titles.

Nudge Theory by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein says people should be given a limited range of choices and nudged toward what elites consider the right one. What are the problems with nudge theory, and how are people pushing back?