Free Republic

A man who spent almost 12 days living in a tree on land that's set to become a $24.5 million golf complex in New Orleans City Park told WVUE Fox 8 News he "was a little sleep deprived, hungry and angry" during his time in the tree. Jonathan "Lloyd" Boover fell from the tree March 24 when he lost his balance while greeting one of his supporters. Hours after his fall, City Park officials cut down the tree Boover had lived in since March 13.

Johnathan "Lloyd" Boover, the man living in a City Park tree out of protest over a proposed golf complex, fell from his perch Tuesday (March 24) and was taken away in an ambulance, witnesses said. Boover fell from the tree shortly before 11 a.m., said Marilyn Eyer, a Gentilly resident who has followed Boover's tree sit-in since he started March 13. Boover was carried away on a stretcher into a waiting ambulance, witnesses said, which then left the area.Witnesses say Boover may have broken his nose and injured his foot and knee in the fall. He had been running low...

The Grateful Dead’s three-night farewell shows don’t seem like they’re shaping up to be a great time for the band’s most dedicated followers. Over the weekend, we reported that tickets for the event were being scalped for as high at $10,000. And now, Chicago’s police and fire departments have decided not to let Deadheads camp out or park overnight on the land in front of Soldier Field. Earlier this year, a petition circulated around asking the venue to waive their usual policy. “We took this seriously and did not want to dismiss it,” Luca Serra, a spokesman for Soldier Field,...

DENTON, Texas (AP) — The mayor of the North Texas city weighing a ban on hydraulic fracturing this week said he’s prepared for the court battles that might result if the ban passes. Denton Mayor Chris Watts told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he expects Tuesday’s referendum “may be just the beginning for us.” “The vote is not the end of the story,” Watts said. “It may just be the beginning. It may be decided at the courthouse or at the Statehouse.”(continued)

Marijuana legalization advocates in Oregon have launched a $2 million-plus ad campaign starring a 33-year police veteran. The new ad, embedded below, features Pete Tutmark, a former patrol sergeant and sheriff’s deputy. Tutmark criticizes what he calls a “broken” system that diverts resources from important crime-solving to drug arrests and urges his fellow Oregonians to vote yes on measure 91 this fall, which would legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use. “Last year in Oregon, there were 13,000 citations and arrests for marijuana,” he says in the ad. “That takes time, time better spent solving murders, rape cases, finding missing children....

It was a protest for the planet, or at least it was billed that way. Progressive activists marched under the “green” banner this week in New York City to call for “action” on climate change. But what was the “action” they were advocating? White the media covered senators, actors, and celebrities at the event, they stayed away from the masses. That wasn’t an accident. One idiot shows up at a tea party event with a Confederate flag and the media covers that person like they started the movement, but hundreds, if not thousands of violent, anti-capitalist, anti-American lunatics damn near...

Land-use conflicts between Barnett Shale wells and homes continues to pose a “major impediment” to Denton’s future quality of life and economic development, gas well administrator Darren Groth told the City Council Tuesday. The Council agreed, voting unanimously Tuesday to approve a moratorium on gas wells applications and permits through Jan. 20. This moratorium is separate from the Nov. 4 referendum to ban hydraulic fracking in the city of Denton, a first for Texas. The four-and-a-half-month extension gives city staff time to iron out problems with the city ordinance to prevent a repeat of what happened in the Vintage neighborhood...

Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to...

Hundreds of travelers on the road to Burning Man in their quest for oneness with nature and celebration of self-expression on a peaceful playa in northern Nevada's desert didn't expect to spend their first night in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart or Reno resort casino. But most were taking it in stride and were largely optimistic — as so-called "Burners" are apt to be — that the gates to the counterculture event would reopen Tuesday after rare rain showers in the Black Rock Desert turned the ancient lake bottom to a muddy quagmire the day before... ...Dozens of RVs...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Thousands of people gathered in more than 100 U.S. communities Thursday in remembrance of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager whom police shot to death last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri. The centerpiece of the observations — being held at such historic places as New York's Union Square, Boston Common and St. Louis' Gateway Arch — was a simultaneous national moment of silence at 7:20 p.m. ET. "We want to stand in an effort of love and support and organize community support for how we can mobilize our anger and our upset and our disappointment," said Renee Chapman, an organizer of...

College campuses in America are frequently teeming with all manner of liberals and trustafarian socialists who drive Volvos . Some of these schools are worse than others. Some are just egregiously awful.Here, The Daily Caller presents the 2014 rankings for the most annoying, rabidly politically correct, dirty-hippie, tree-hugging colleges and universities across the fruited plain. You have been warned. Swarthmore College in the suburbs of Philadelphia is a leftist hothouse full of wealthy white kids. In February, Swarthmore sophomore Erin Ching criticized her school for allowing a conservative — Christian thinker Robert George — to speak on campus. “What really...

While New Yorkers like to think of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the epicenter of the American hipster, it's hardly the only place in the country where vegan, handlebar-mustachioed trustafarians ride their single-speeds to nanobreweries inside organic farm-to-table restaurants inside abandoned artist lofts tricked out with rooftop gardens where they grow only kale. Pretty much any US city, short of maybe Birmingham, AL, has some elements/neighborhoods of hipster culture at this point (you really just need a fixed-gear bike shop, right?), but these 10 cities are vying for the title of hipster-est. Behind Williamsburg, of course....

The State of Colorado will start phasing in mandatory lab testing of marijuana edible products on May 1. Currently, marijuana product testing of any kind has been performed strictly on a voluntary basis. As Colorado ramps up its lab testing, CBS4 requested permission to perform independent lab tests of edible products but was forbidden by the Marijuana Enforcement Division. In a letter banning independent lab testing, MED Director Lewis Koski states, “licensed labs are only allowed to accept samples from ‘Retail Marijuana Establishments’ only.” (snip) But according to the labs, potency is just one issue with marijuana products. “We’ve found...

There are very few things in the world that have the power to make me roll my eyes as hard as Burning Man. I’m a lefty, but I’m also a curmudgeon with precious little patience for whimsy, specifically like, white-people-with-dreads-and-furry-boots-doing-fire-dancing whimsy. Particularly if it involves techno. It’s fine for other people, but not if they want to talk to me about it, as I find there is a lot of crossover between Burning Man types and people who will tell you the same story over and over again in the same conversation. However, I have to give my full-throated support...

Growing up in the 60’s, my older brother, Wayne, made certain that I was properly schooled in the fine art of psychedelic rock. He was generous with his sophisticated collection of vinyl and kindly tolerated my tagging along to live concerts by The Who, Blues Magoos, and Fever Tree. We even saw Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs once. My friends and I followed musicians like baseball card athletes as they migrated between The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, and Blind Faith. I came to understand that Frank Zappa was equal parts profound & bananas and that the best...

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling, according to democratic practice, of bad and good leaders. As the Russians push their imperial agenda in the Ukraine, and Western leaders wring their hands, the '70s come painfully to mind. I bring up the '70s -- of god-awful memory -- as much to...

Academics, the very people who claim they want “progress” “going forward,” frequently want to turn back the clock a half century or so. “Without hope—the fervent, animating kind—the 60s would have had no fuel to feed the engines of change,” Paul Kane wrote in The Chronicle Review on March 7, 2014. “To have seen our causes as hopeless would have drained them of force.” “No civil-rights movement, no antiwar protests, no feminism, no gay and lesbian rights, no counterculture and commune movement, no Woodstock, no environmentalism. Whatever we might think of that period now, we believed then in what we...

For most Americans, toilet paper is an absolutely necessary grocery list item, but some women are opting out for both economic and environmental purposes. In a HuffPost Live discussion, bloggers Angela Davis, Kathleen Quiring and Makala Earley explain why they've decided to go paperless, revealing that it's not as messy or unhygienic as it may sound. 'It is definitely possible,' insists Mikala, who says she and her husband stopped using toilet paper about a year ago. 'It is almost seen as a necessity [and] it doesn't have to be, and it's been a lot of fun to learn how to...

One of the great voices of folk rock...

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, D-Va. Military veterans are pressuring Congress to move quickly when it reconvenes this week to cancel cuts in pensions for working-age vets - a change set in motion as part of last month's budget deal. However, reversing the decision to reduce cost-of-living pension increases could be difficult and, at best, would take some time to negotiate, say some legislators and lobbyists. Federal lawmakers from Hampton Roads, which has one of the nation's largest concentrations of retirees and active-duty service members, strongly support undoing the cuts. Most have already proposed or are co-sponsoring legislation...