Free Republic

When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place. But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of...

A man shouting “Allahu akbar!” at a Paris screening of Joker was detained by police after the outburst caused moviegoers to panic Sunday night. The incident was reported by Le Parisien, which noted that the 34-year-old man was removed from the Grand Rex theater and placed under psychiatric observation. According to a witness, the man first started repeatedly shouting “It’s political!,” at first drawing laughs from the audience. Soon other audience members were asking him to “shut up” while others grew worried, the witness said. After the shouts of “It’s political,” the man stood up, placed his hands on his...

One day you’re feeling fine, the next, your nose is running, you’re sneezing and your throat feels like you’ve swallowed broken glass. Welcome to the annual cold season. Most of us will get between one and three colds each year, usually in autumn and winter, caused by one of more than 200 different cold viruses. And there is little you can do about it — a cure for the common cold remains one of the Holy Grails of medicine — but better understanding of how these viruses spread could be the key. What we do know for sure is that...

Confused by Brexit? Get ready for “Wexit.” Political leaders representing a large chunk of Canada are talking about breaking off from the rest of the country in the wake of Justin Trudeau’s re-election victory — and this time they’re not primarily in French-speaking Quebec, long known for its independent streak. Instead, it’s the country’s western, oil-dependent provinces fueling the breathless talk of secession, amid a perception that Trudeau and eastern urban liberals are calling the shots at their expense. And it's emerging as one of Trudeau’s most complicated headaches as the Prime Minister moves toward the start of his second...

California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation — it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life. More than 2 million people are going without power in Northern and Central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California’s best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires. Power — and all the goods it makes possible — is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn’t be a negotiable for anyone living in a well-functioning society, or even in California, which, despite...

Talk to Democrats today who live outside her bubble, those who either volunteered endless hours to help elect her or voted for her, and they will tell you that Clinton has no idea why she lost. Worse, they see their party going down the same road that led to her defeat four years ago, blaming white resentment, as well as Russia, the media, sexism and deplorables. You don't have to look any further than the sound bites from this past week's Democratic debate or the recent town halls. Confiscating guns, banning fracking, hiking taxes, providing free health care to illegal...

Boris Johnson faces a showdown over the election date this afternoon - after dramatically winning his battle for a pre-Christmas poll following a climbdown by Jeremy Corbyn. Although the ballot now looks almost certain to take place, the PM is still engaged in bitter wrangling with opposition parties over whether it should be on December 9. 10, 11 or 12. Battle lines are being drawn in the House over the process for passing a short Bill that will trigger an election. If it goes through by the end of the day it will move to the Lords, and Parliament is...

A day before President Trump addressed the annual gathering of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave some rather shocking advice to a young black student at Benedict College in regards to how he should behave around a police officer if he's pulled over while driving. .@BernieSanders to black student on how to handle getting pulled over by the police: “Identify who the police officer is - respect what they are doing so that you don’t get shot in the back of the head.” pic.twitter.com/MND84NELLL — chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 26, 2019 "I...

Note a Vanity posting of this a new podcast with Stephen K. Bannon, Jason Miller, & Raheem Kassam covering the Impeachment. They delivery interesting background and guests covering the Impeachment. Worth listen to their podcast.Media articles on the site announcing the podcast:THE HILL: Bannon returns from exile to wage impeachment battle for Trump WASHINGTON EXAMINER: ‘War Room’: Bannon launches daily radio show and podcast on Trump impeachment NEW YORK TIMES: In Steve Bannon’s Basement, a Rogue ‘War Room’ to Fight Impeachment POLITICO: Steve Bannon launches radio show and podcast on impeachment Go to WAR ROOM: IMPEACHMENT

A wildfire swept through the star-studded hills of Los Angeles on Monday, destroying several large homes and forcing celebrities like Kathy Griffin, LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger to flee along with thousands of other people. Meanwhile, a blaze in Northern California wine country exploded in size. Terrified students at Mount Saint Mary's University were also forced to flee around midnight, taking what they could in their cars, as the flames ramped up toward the campus. Classes at UCLA were also canceled. The flames roared up a steep hillside near the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles' Brentwood section illustrated...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Donald Trump. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Need I say more? This quote was a serious smackdown to the liberal sociopaths who denounce anything good in America these days. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle...

Has anyone notice that after having impeachment polls shoved down our throats every other day, that they have suddenly died off? Must be bad news for the Lamestream Media or they would be shouting them from the roof tops.

Joe Scarborough has a verbal tic—or is it a tick?—about bedbugs. When President Trump's Doral resort was under consideration as the G-7 site, Scarborough, on multiple Morning Joe episodes, went on riffs about bedbugs at the hotel, playing off a lawsuit someone had brought about being bitten. On today's Morning Joe, Al Sharpton managed to work Doral bedbugs into the conversation. That triggered Joe's bedbug obsession yet again. In the course of 90 seconds, the b-word was mentioned no fewer than 18 times. (Note: That's Joe in the screengrab scratching away an imaginary bug.) Get the rest of the story...

Syrian and Turkish armies opened fire on each other today for the first time since Ankara began its incursion against the Kurds. Artillery and machine-gun fire was exchanged near the village of Assadiya, south of the border town of Ras al-Ain, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Six Syrian soldiers were killed, according to the war monitor. President Bashar al-Assad had bolstered Kurdish strongholds in northern Syria after Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan began his offensive on October 9 to establish a 75-mile wide, 20-mile deep buffer zone.

Early Humans Sailed to Islands October 28, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Stone tools and bones on islands show that Neanderthals and other “archaic Homo” individuals must have sailed there. Paleoanthropologists have been wiping egg of their faces for years now, after continual findings reinforce the fact that Neanderthals were just as smart and capable as we are (29 April 2019), not dumb caveman brutes like evolutionists had portrayed for a century.

Apple has released new Emojis featuring gender-neutral characters and people with disabilities as part of its latest iOS software. Users will also now be able to select the ethnicity of each character in the 'holding hands' emoji, while a drop of blood designed to represent menstruation has been introduced following a campaign to fight period stigma. The new designs are part of more than 350 emoji approved earlier this year which have now been released to Apple users as part of the iOS 13.2 update. Many of the character-based emoji now also include a gender-neutral option alongside a male or...

Even though the left and right came together to celebrate the Obama administration’s victory killing Osama Bin Laden in 2011, the leftists in the media couldn’t do the same for President Trump, when the U.S. military led a raid Saturday that killed prominent ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The anti-Trump hosts of The View Monday were so bitter, that they basically admitted there wasn’t anything Trump could do that would be applauded by them, because he was “tainted.” Co-host Joy Behar gave a jaw-dropping response to the news. Whoopi Goldberg asked the table, “So can we at least agree that...

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is starting to sound disturbingly more and more like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. (More on that in a moment.) As we recently discussed, Pacific Gas & Electric has continued to impose rounds of blackouts across “red flag” areas of the state under warnings of high winds and possible wildfires. This has many residents feeling rather angry and demanding that something is done. To the rescue rides Governor Newsom. He doesn’t want the aging power lines to cause any more fires but he also doesn’t want his voters upset over having their power cut off.What...

America has had some difficult periods in its history, and I lived through one of the worst. I came of age during the radical anti-Vietnam War era in the late sixties. I remember the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention when radicals tried to take over the party. We saw the same sort of street violence over the Vietnam War that we see today against President Donald Trump in what is almost a repeat of that era. As a student journalist I covered the riots of radicals at the University of Florida. I reported on the protests after the shooting...

Speaking to the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference in Chicago Monday, President Trump discussed the issue of crimes committed with firearms and explained the best way to deal with the ongoing issue. "The best way to reduce gun violence is to put criminals with firearms behind bars," Trump said to applause from the audience. "And just so you understand, we will always protect our Second Amendment."