Free Republic

When it comes to detecting laser pulses aliens might shoot at Earth to attract our attention, scientists now find they can detect signals as faint as a single photon of light every few tiny fractions of a second. Astronomers have gazed at the skies for decades searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Lasers can in principle help transmit messages over extraordinary distances, but while scientists have monitored a large number of stars looking for alien laser signals — for instance, facilities at Harvard and Princeton scanned more than 10,000 sun-like stars for several years — no evidence for any have...

Hope you enjoy. ”There’s Always Something There To Remind Me”

Explanation: A Full Moon sets as the Solstice Sun rises in this June 20 dawn skyscape. Captured from a nearby peak in central California, planet Earth, the scene looks across the summit of Mount Hamilton and Lick Observatory domes on a calendar date that marks an astronomical change of seasons and hemispherical extremes of daylight hours. Earth's shadow stretches toward the Santa Cruz Mountains on the western horizon. Just above the atmospheric grey shadowband is a more colorful anti-twilight arch, a band of reddened, backscattered sunlight also known as the Belt of Venus. The interplay of solstice dates and lunar...

The fart heard 'round the world is an underdog story. It's the tale of a humble fart, unloosed on the world in a moment of innocence in the anonymity of a game between Swedish soccer clubs nobody had ever heard of. Its maker is Adam Lindin Ljungkvist, a left back for Järna SK's reserve team. They were playing Pershagen SK. He already had a yellow card. He also had "a bad stomach," per the Guardian. So, as he told Länstidningen Södertälje, which we're going to guess is either a newspaper or a cheap, self-assembled coffee table, "I simply let go."...

How Earth Moves

Office Caesar Goodson, who was driving the police van inside which Freddie Gray incurred his fatal neck injury, has been found not guilty of second-degree “depraved heart” murder Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams. Goodson, 46, has also been found not guilty on charges of manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.

Hope you enjoy. ”You Don't Own Me”

How bad of a candidate is Hillary Clinton? She just read “sigh” from her Teleprompter instead of making the sound.

Stu Varney just broke in that there are multiple shootings in Germany... that's all we heard.

Neoconservative by birth, Bill Kristol, apparently thinks the libertarian moment is over. Kristol was in San Francisco yesterday and appeared at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for a "conversation with" event. He fielded questions from the audience and also the moderator neocon Kori Schake, mostly about Donald Trump. At one point, he named a list of non-mainstream Republican candidates that had their moment in the sun and then faded away. This included Ron and Rand Paul. "We beat back Ron Paul and Rand Paul," he said. Implying that they were nothing but a footnote in Republican history.

Democrats’ recent efforts to secure votes on gun control measures in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida have stoked criticism not just from Republican leadership but from some on the left. The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday sent a letter to senators laying out its opposition to the latest legislation up for consideration, a proposal by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) that would bar anyone on certain federal government watchlists from buying guns. “The ACLU strongly urges you to vote against the Collins Amendment because it uses the errorprone and unfair watchlist system, along with vague and...

I simply could resist putting this in Breaking News. Sorry. Here's to another 15!

'Don't email hrc anything sensitive': How Clinton's server was wide open to hackers for WEEKS - and Huma Abedin warned other officials not to use secret address Devastating new emails reveal how Hillary Clinton's 'homebrew' server had a technical problem so serious its security systems were shut off The then Secretary of State's closest aide Huma Abedin emailed other high-ranking staff a warning in December 2010 'Don't email hrc [Clinton] anything sensitive. I can explain more in person,' she wrote, newly-discovered documents reveal Weeks later a hacker DID attempt to access the secret server Clinton campaign deny her server was...

Dear Hillary, Donald Trump listed his picks for the Supreme Court, how about if you do this too? I mean, don't you want us to know, or are you ashamed to tell us? In short, when are you going to list them, and if not, why not?

One such weapon is the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System, which uses directed energy—a focused beam of millimeter waves—to make targeted individuals feel that they are burning up, without actually doing harm. The effect ends when the target flees or the weapon is turned off. ... Regrettably, the human-rights groups were intransigent, and most of us in the military concluded that we shouldn’t spend scarce dollars on systems that would never be used.... Unfortunately, even the existing VMADs weapons will probably never be used and more-capable weapons never developed. Why? Because of complaints by human-rights advocates, who seem to think that...

The world of Game Of Thrones is filled to the brim with evil, scheming psychopaths who think nothing of exacting the most unthinkably heinous punishments and persecutions upon enemies and strangers alike. That’s probably why the HBO series is so popular—it’s remarkably similar to the real world. Case in point: A few sinister maesters of technology have created an online service, Spoiled.io, that will, for just 99 cents, anonymously text show spoilers to anybody deserving (or undeserving) of a little distress. The surprise-ruining tidbits are dispersed throughout the world by automated Faceless Men immediately after the newest episode airs, and...

Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com, The EU is studying a proposal that would count robots as people for tax purposes. Although the proposal is deemed “too early” to implement just yet, rest assured once nannycrats get a bad idea in their heads, it never leaves. This provides yet another reason to vote in favor of Brexit. Please consider Europe’s Robots to Become ‘Electronic Persons’ Under Draft Plan. Europe’s growing army of robot workers could be classed as “electronic persons” and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address...

The U.S. Navy is weighing whether to punish several officers and sailors for the botched mission that resulted in two boats inadvertently straying into Iranian waters, embarrassing Washington and handing Tehran a propaganda victory, Foreign Policy has learned.

Voters in the EU referendum are killing two birds with one stone today. Not only are they exercising their electoral right, but they exercising their pet pooches at the same time. However, unlike being able to take your own pen into the polling station, you're not able to take your dog inside. As a result, many pets have been snapped waiting patiently for their owners. Twitter users have taken to social media to document this (of course) and #dogsatpollingstations is now trending in the UK. We thought it was only right that we sum up some of our favourites:

> > > > > > > > > > > > > > >