Free Republic

They were coming from the plane’s loudspeaker. Flight attendants assured passengers it was a technical mixup. It was presumed that once the flight got underway, the noises would cease. Instead, they continued for hours: weird guttural moans and grunts projected over the intercom, apparently coming from nowhere. In an interview with Gizmodo, Collins characterized the noises as a cross between “explosive diarrhea, vomiting, and a weird, vaguely sexual moan.” Having listened to the noises, this writer would add “bad impression of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster” to that list. In general, the noises are weird, uncomfortable, and resistant to easy...

The bronze hand and its thin gold cuff, along with a bronze dagger and a human rib bone, were discovered by the metal detectorists near Lake Biel in the Bernese Jura, about 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Bern, Switzerland, according to a Canton de Bern press release. The items were handed over to specialists at the Ancient History and Roman Archeology Department in the Bern Archaeological Service one day after the discovery. The hand of Prêles, as it’s now called, is slightly smaller than an adult hand and was cast from about a pound of bronze, according to National...

An apparent rip-off of Donald Trump’s social media network Truth Social has racked up downloads in the six figures on Google’s Play Store, causing confusion by MAGA types who failed to realize the distinction. Insider first reported that the app, which is titled “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump” on the Play Store, has crossed 100,000 downloads as of Tuesday. While the app itself was launched in August 2021, well before news broke that Trump was pursuing the “Truth” branding for his social network, most of the downloads appear to have been in the last few weeks. Trump Media &...

Members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous claim to have hacked web registration company Epik, allegedly stealing “a decade’s worth of data,” including reams of information about its clients and their domains. Epik is controversial, having been known to host a variety of rightwing clients, including ones that previous web hosting providers, like GoDaddy, have dropped for various reasons. Its users have included conservative social media networks Parler and Gab, as well as conspiracy-theory-laden YouTube wannabe Bitchute and former President Trump fansite, The Donald. The company recently hosted prolifewhistleblower.com—the website designed to help people snitch on Texas residents who want abortions—but...

Despite not voting for the Green New Deal in the senate this past winter, Vermont Democratic Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders introduced a Green New Deal of his own on Thursday as part of his 2020 campaign platform. The price tag for the global warming defeating -racial injustice combatting - pro-socialism on steroids catch-all bill is a whopping 16 trillion dollars and zero cents. As noted by the New York Times, the proposed bill by Sanders would declare "climate change a national emergency; envisions building new solar, wind and geothermal power sources across the country; and commits $200 billion to help...

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something filled with the coagulating blood of one’s enemies. The Trump household apparently wasn’t content turning the White House into a dark alternate dimension where all hope dies for just one year—this house of horrors has now become an annual holiday tradition. The White House has shared an official look at First Lady Melania Trump’s latest holiday decor at the White House. Last year, Mrs. “Be Best” turned the hallways of the presidential residence into a living nightmare straight out of Get Out or Voldemort’s bathroom. Shadowy branches crept over the walls, reaching forth...

If you’ve spent time on the Trump-supporting parts of social media, you’ve probably come across a strange meme in the past couple of years. MAGA-loving Twitter is constantly offering people “free helicopter rides.” But what does it mean? The offer of “free helicopter rides” is a reference to the practice of killing people by dropping them from helicopters, made most famous by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s. Sometimes Pinochet’s “death flights” were conducted over the ocean, but they were also done over rivers and sometimes the land. Hundreds of political dissidents are still unaccounted for from the Pinochet...

Carl Sagan is arguably science's biggest rockstar—the ultimate champion for logic and reason. Which makes it all the more painful to find out that his son is a vehement 9/11 truther. In a recent interview for a radio show called 9/11 Free Fall (already off to a great start), Jeremy Sagan—the younger son of Sagan senior and his first wife, fellow scientist Lynn Margulis—went off on all us closed-minded sheeple. In response to a prompt asking when he first "woke up," Sagan remarks:

Like a real-life version of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a visitor to a Portuguese museum was injured last week when he stepped into an art installation resembling an inky void. Currently on exhibit at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Descent Into Limbo by Anish Kapoor includes an actual eight-foot hole that’s painted black—so it appears to have no depth at all. According to Britain’s Times, attendees of previous showings of the work have questioned “whether there really was a hole in the floor or whether it was simply a circle painted with an extremely dark black paint.” Presumably there will...

YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that’s been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust. According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term “UFO” on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting “to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail.” The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke’s clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the...

Less than a year after famed (or infamous) media gossip site Gawker was forced to close by a eight-figure settlement in favor of wrestler Hulk Hogan, the successor to the former Gawker Media empire finds itself in the legal crosshairs. It's for another lawsuit seeking major damages — and it’s the same lawyer taking aim. This time, attorney Charles Harder, who has also represented First Lady Melania Trump in her libel lawsuit against the Daily Mail, is handling the lawsuit on behalf of RJ Bell, real name Randall James Busack, the founder and CEO of Pregame.com, a sports handicapping Web...

How serious has the war gotten between Donald Trump's White House and the government he supposedly runs? Gizmodo - a website that deals with science and technology as well as politics - has launched a new site to encourage government employees to leak damning information about the Trump administration. TellonTrump.com is the subject of a massive advertising campaign on Facebook and will give government turncoats a safe and secure means of passing along damaging documents.

It turns out the algorithms that govern the internet can be as biased as the people who create and update them. That may be the most surprising takeaway from the political bias scandal that has enveloped Facebook after former employees told the tech blog Gizmodo that they would sometimes suppress conservative-friendly items and promote liberal reports on the newsfeed’s “trending topics” box. Even if no humans were involved, however, the algorithm would not have been completely neutral because it was written by humans, digital media analysts say.

It is always hilarious when leftwing girly-boys who couldn’t pick a shotgun out of a line-up criticize others for firearms safety violations.The latest entrant is some assclown named Wes Siler writing at that hotbed of gun sports Gizmodo. He makes this claim: Hey @TedCruz, you’re holding your gun backwards: https://t.co/orXK3FVXOZ pic.twitter.com/gpvCgKFbYU- Wes Siler (@IndefiniteWild) November 3, 2015 Seriously, you can almost hear this little fellow squeal with delight at the thought that he’s made a killer of a political hit. Staunch gun rights advocate Ted Cruz is here seen holding a shotgun while being interviewed by CNN. Can you see...

Not even a leeeeetle bit! Wes Siler, who blogs at Indefinitely Wild (part of Gizmodo), can barely contain his glee over footage of Ted Cruz;holding [his] gun backwards:

How a Jailbird Con Artist Uncovered a Secret FBI Surveillance Tool 43,960 7 Kate KnibbsFiled to: Stingrays 6/19/15 2:30pm A convict lawyer, sitting in jail, obsessed with a wacky theory that the government tracked him by sending secret rays into his house... ends up discovering a secret government cell phone tracking program. Sounds like bizarre noir, right? But it’s true.It happened to Daniel Rigmaiden, who found out that the government had used Stingrays—covert surveillance devices that act like a fake cell phone towers—to catch him running a fake tax return scheme. He’s the guy who brought Stingrays to light. Rigmaiden...

Gizmodo, as part of a series of stories about space, ran a piece on Thursday called ‘What is Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, it’s not Tech.” The article attempts to examine some of the political impediments that have stymied the settlement of the high frontier. Unfortunately, the piece would have been more convincing had it not been for one rather glaring error. The piece suggested that the United States attempted to claim the moon as sovereign territory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. “So much of...

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the most amusing aspect of the whole #GamerGate phenomenon (background here and here and here) has been the angry progressive media types confusedly looking around trying to figure out how we got to a point where they would be targeted for boycotts and the like for casual comments they have made. As Varad Mehta noted, Crazy, right? They don’t quite understand the world they’ve created. They think it’s the worst thing in the whole world for Internet Tough Guys to make death and rape threats* and also that it’s cool to joke about Bristol Palin actually...

A screenshot of one of the images obtained by Gizmodo.  The website Gizmodo has published 100 pictures of body scans taken at an Orlando Federal Courthouse. The scans are not from the "naked scan" machines that the Department of Homeland Security announced were going into 28 airports in the country, earlier this year. Instead, they are much more pixelated and less embarrassing.Still Gizmodo points to TSA's Advanced Imaging Technology's privacy policy, which states that the machines "cannot store, print, transmit or save the" images and that they are "automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely...

This water pool can create waves in any shape you can imagine. Not just rough sketches, but perfectly clear shapes like hearts, stars with hard angular points, and even a musical note. It uses computer-controlled actuators that move the water in perfect synchronization. The computer software uses fluid dynamics algorithms to calculate the necessary motions. The whole thing looks like a computer rendering, but it's real.