Free Republic

Two planes began their takeoffs on intersecting runways at Chicago’s Midway airport on Tuesday evening, before being ordered to stop by air traffic control and averting a collision in the center of the airport, the FAA confirmed. The two planes involved were Southwest Flight 3828 bound for

Pope Francis blames wealthy nations for the plight of the poor in his anticipated encyclical on Global Warming junk science. Red Francis also says Global warming is real and wealthy countries must do more to save the planet. The National Journal reported:

This is exactly what the left pushed for… Fast food chains were never meant to be a place for someone to raise a family of 6, they were to be part time positions with some full-time advancements. Mostly the fast food restaurants were for school aged kids to learn how to interact with people, with a job, to offer spending money, and to begin responsibility learning for their future.

On Saturday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry shared her thoughts about the Rachel Dolezal story with one of her guests. Perry said: “But is it possible that she might actually be black? The best way that I know how to describe this and I want to be very careful here. Because I don’t want to say it’s equivalent to the transgender experience. But there is a useful language in trans and cis, which is to just to say some of us are born cis-gendered, some of us are born trans-gendered. But I wonder can it be that one would be cis-black...

The leader of the Spokane NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, canceled a chapter meeting Monday where she was expected to speak about the furor sparked over her racial identity. Her parents have said she has falsely portrayed herself as black for years though she is actually white. Dolezal sent out an email Sunday cancelling the meeting "due to the need to continue discussion with regional and national NAACP leaders." Some, however, questioned whether she had the power to do so. KREM-TV in Spokane, quoting from an email thread sent to NAACP members, says the head of the chapter's executive committee questioned whether...

The May Amtrak derailment outside of Philadelphia put the sorry state of passenger rail in the United States briefly back on the public agenda, leaving many people wondering not just about the specifics of the crash but about the more general issue — how is it that a rich and powerful country that was a pioneer in railroad adoption in the 19th century has such terrible trains? The United States is a big country, with lots of trains in it. So you can really think of this big generic question as composed of three separate questions with separate answers. One...

When Walt Disney World opened in an Orlando swamp in 1971, with its penny arcade and marching-band parade down Main Street U.S.A., admission for an adult cost $3.50, about as much then as three gallons of milk. Disney has raised the gate price for the Magic Kingdom 41 times since, nearly doubling it over the past decade. This year, a ticket inside the “most magical place on Earth” rocketed past $100 for the first time in history. Ballooning costs have not slowed the mouse-eared masses flooding into the world’s busiest theme park. Disney’s main attraction hosted a record 19 million...

New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces. Their suicide rate is so high that it approaches that of male veterans, a finding that surprised researchers because men generally are far more likely than women to commit suicide. "It's staggering," said Dr. Matthew Miller, an epidemiologist and suicide expert at Northeastern University who was not involved in the research. "We have to come to grips with why...

That’s one of several phrases deemed a ‘microaggression’ at faculty leader training sessions initiated by University of California President Janet Napolitano “America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say. These so-called microaggressions – considered examples of subconscious racism – were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions,...

f you have any business to conduct in Boston City Hall, you will be able to share the bathroom with people of the opposite sex or any sex for that matter. "Mayor Martin J. Walsh established gender-neutral bathrooms in Boston's City Hall Thursday, according to a statement from the city. The move comes during Boston's Pride Week, which celebrates the LGBT community and raises awareness of discrimination." USA Today explains the new bathrooms "can be used by anyone including individuals who may identify as transgender, caregivers helping someone of another gender and parents with small children."

How far will our ideologically demented ruling class push Affirmative Action before people start pushing back? Already it has played a role in destroying our schools, with a liberal judge actually abolishing aptitude tests on the grounds that blacks don’t score as well. But apparently people don’t think it matters whether teachers have any qualifications other than skin color. If being black can get you into the White House, why not a classroom? Maybe airliners crashing into each other will wake people up:

Always forward! Not resting on its gay-marriage laurels, and while still celebrating the bravery of a man in drag, the house organ of crazy modern “liberalism” now stamps its high-heeled combat boots...[snip]...Let’s face it: we’ve wandered into the realm of barking insanity at this point, as the Left tries to linguistically (and thus politically) redefine the most elemental aspect of our physical nature. All part of Critical Theory: attack everything and anything. And with America’s defenders now running away even faster than the Iraqi Army, who is left to stop them?

Just before Congress slunk away for the three-day weekend — which it was, of course, planning to stretch into a week — senators from the Northeast held a press conference to denounce Republicans for underfunding Amtrak passenger rail service. “Amtrak has some infrastructure that is so old it was built and put into service when Jesse James and Butch Cassidy were still alive and robbing trains,” said Senator Charles Schumer of New York. “In Connecticut we have a bridge that was built when Grover Cleveland was president,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Now you have to admit, this is...

All of a sudden, aircraft carriers are back in fashion. Over in Russia, they're drawing up plans to build the world's biggest aircraft carrier, a 100,000-ton beast that can carry 100 combat aircraft. China's building one, two, or maybe even four aircraft carriers. And here in the United States, we're busy building our second ­Ford-class supercarrier. Around the world and across the seas, aircraft carriers are popping up in the unlikeliest of places -- in Korea, in Thailand, in India, Japan, and maybe soon in Singapore, as well. But you'll never guess the latest country to announce plans to acquire...

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

[Snip]... To be honest, the BSA hasn’t been doing well for a while. Membership has been steadily declining for decades, and recent decisions to go full Episcopalian—and you never go full Episcopalian—haven’t helped. But with this decision, and the resulting onslaught of righteous indignation, we see just how far a once-proud paramilitary organization has fallen. Why the change? The cynic in me, the one who remembers how long it took to evacuate us when we were sleeping in the woods without shelter and the skies opened up in biblical fashion that one weekend, thinks the BSA is now run by...

A second submariner pleaded guilty Wednesday to sharing videos of female officers undressing for a shower, continuing a case that a prosecutor calls a "black eye" for the Navy's integration of women into the nation's sub fleet. Electronics technician Joseph Bradley entered his guilty pleas in a court-martial and was sentenced to 30 days' confinement and a reduction in rank. Bradley received the videos after they were secretly recorded by another sailor aboard the USS Wyoming nuclear submarine based at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia, prosecutors say. Bradley admitted in a plea agreement to sharing the images with...

The American mainstream media is filled to the brim with liars, frauds, partisans, cheats, plagiarists, and those who tolerate, defend and enable all of them. There is no American institution — not the NFL, not the tobacco companies, not any corporation or enterprise regularly targeted by the media — that engages in anywhere near the amount of fraud and dishonesty that serially oozes from Our Media Overlords. Forget bias for a moment. Forget mistakes and misstatements and stupid or nasty things said during live telecasts. There isn’t enough Internet to begin to list the countless instances of left-wing bias and...

At least 43 people died Friday in what authorities described as a fierce, three-hour gunbattle between federal forces and suspected drug gang gunmen on a ranch in western Mexico, the deadliest such confrontation in recent memory. All the dead were suspected criminals except for one federal police officer, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said. He said the officer died trying to help a colleague wounded in the shootout.

A focus group of ten Iowa Democrats were assembled by Bloomberg Politics and while all of them confidently pledged their support for Hillary Clinton as president, not one of them could name a single accomplishment while she was Secretary of State...[Snip]...The takeaway from the focus group accentuates the problem with an uninformed public. These Democrats were more than willing to stand behind a candidate they know little or nothing about. Their awkward silence when trying to conjure up a single political accomplishment of their preferred candidate speaks volumes.