Free Republic

• In the sequel to our Wintel Wars article, we offer the ultimate deep dive into the tectonic shifts happening in the tech industry, giving unparalleled context to Karp's cryptic musings. • We lay out how Google and Facebook gradually created privatized versions of secretive DARPA programs, and why Palantir and Apple are leading a push for privacy as industry tensions ignite. • We discuss how Palantir threatens the current paradigm with software for a decentralized alternative. Europe's GAIA-X offers significant upside potential as Palantir seeks a new European hub in Switzerland. • While the last decade focused on the...

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I sure wish I could feel extremely small and awed right now"? Do we ever have the solution for you! After over a decade of painstaking work, Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released an absolutely jaw-dropping 1.7-gigapixel mosaic of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic started in 2009, with photographing various nebulae around the Milky Way as independent compositions. The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is around 1,250 hours. (To load the full image in...

A scientist who led the Chinese World Health Organization team in investigating the origins of the coronavirus said the WHO will shelve the theory that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan lab when the United Nations health agency issues a report in the coming weeks.

It's a misrepresentation of Anderson's views, which is a disservice not only to him but to Boorstein's readers, who deserve accurate information.Michelle Boorstein made a simple mistake. Boorstein, a religion reporter for the Jeff Bezos-backed Washington Post, tweeted, “Some religious objectors to the Equality Act say the issue isn’t exemptions — it’s that LGBT equality is akin to ‘what gave us the Holocaust,’ a concept that humans are trying to overrule God.” She was partially quoting from a lecture Ryan Anderson gave in 2016. Boorstein’s attempt to paraphrase Anderson conveyed a verifiably false representation of his position on the legislation,...

The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is home to Harvard University, has officially recognized polyamory, making it the second city in the state to do so. Last week, the Cambridge City Council approved an ordinance amending the city’s existing statute so that domestic partnerships are not limited to only two people. The city of Sommerville, Massachusetts, the community just north of Cambridge, implemented a similar change last summer. A domestic partnership in the city that is home to Harvard University is now defined as “the entity formed by two or more persons” who are not related and "consider themselves to...

Star formation in the Orion Complex. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Megeath, University of Toledo, Ohio) What we thought may have been an off-switch for star formation doesn't appear to work that way after all. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show the powerful astrophysical jets and stellar winds that flow from baby stars do not have the expected effect of quenching the stellar growth process. This poses quite a significant conundrum for our models of star formation. The birth of a star is quite a long process on human timescales. It's not as if we can sit and watch a baby star...

We didn't have high hopes in the Biden administration's ability to deal with China, but what we saw yesterday is being characterized by even friendly leftist and international news outlets as a disaster. This seems to be more than just bad diplomacy. It seems very likely intentional. ======================================================================== The administration’s opening volley into diplomacy with China was an international scandal that demonstrated our worst fears being realized. Instead of opening with mutual respect in public before straight-talk diplomacy behind closed doors, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went after China hard only to be...

A number of White House staffers were asked to resign or demoted for past marijuana use — regardless of whether those employees had been in one of the 14 states where the drug is legal, according to a report.The Biden administration had required workers to disclose past marijuana use on a background check form, but told some new hires that it would “overlook” those who answered yes, the Daily Beast reported.Despite this, White House director of management and administration Anne Filipic reportedly led a series of one-on-one calls with staffers this month, asking those who admitted to past marijuana use...

Does President Joe Biden really want the United States to cede its hard-won energy independence and leadership position in the world? Because that is precisely what will happen if the president tries to sweep away the inexpensive, reliable forms of energy that have been powering America for decades. To understand the disaster that awaits the nation if Biden makes good on his pledge to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, we need only look to California and Texas, two states that have already tried to do exactly that. Power outages are now commonplace in California. Its troubles are...

After taking control of the country in a military coup provoked by allegations of voter fraud earlier this year, the Myanmar military government has seized several bank accounts belonging or affiliated with George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and has announced arrest warrants for 11 members of the organization in the country “on suspicion of giving financial support to the civil disobedience movement against the military junta.” The government will also take legal action against the Open Society Foundations, which they allege violated “restrictions on the activities of such organizations” and did not receive approval from Myanmar’s authorities for the deposit...

Police have arrested at least four men after shots were fired in Miami Beach on Thursday night, sending crowds of Spring Break revellers running. An eyewitness said people were 'literally on top of each other in a stampede' as they fled the Ocean Drive thoroughfare in search of cover around 8.40pm local time. Pictures and video taken shortly after showed officers speaking to handcuffed men, one of whom appeared to be injured, seated on the ground next to police cars.

WASHINGTON—President Biden’s trip to Atlanta on Friday, originally planned as part of his Covid-19 stimulus promotional tour, will take on a different tone after shootings in the region this week left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent. Mr. Biden intended to celebrate the $1.9 trillion package, which passed two months after a pair of victories in Georgia runoffs gave Democrats control of the Senate. He now plans to meet with Asian-American leaders in a state that has become a focal point in a national conversation about violence against Asian-Americans, as well as a partisan battleground over voter access....

No crowd. Those who showed up sound like they're jeering.

If the Atlanta shootings aren't about race but sexual pathology, it's an indictment not of racism but prevailing sexual attitudes among our elite.There’s something off about press coverage of the shooting rampage in Atlanta earlier this week. Nearly every corporate media outlet has framed the killings as a racially-motivated “hate crime” against Asian Americans, noting that six of the eight victims are Asian and the alleged shooter is white. Yet race doesn’t appear to be a significant motivating factor here, at least not according to the accused gunman, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, who was arrested Tuesday evening after targeting three...

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, cannot be as stupid as his words make him sound, but the alternative is worse than mere rank stupidity. On the Senate floor, he said: "Does anyone really believe the American people were voting for an entirely new system of government by electing Joe Biden to the White House and a 50/50 Senate? ... There was no mandate to completely transform America by the American people on November 3rd. ... Does anyone believe that millions of Americans thought that's what they were electing?" The real question is, did Senator McConnell, and his fellow...

In the Marine Corps, we don't have quotas, but we do have goals. And Marines accomplish goals," my officer-in-charge told me and a few other brand-new second lieutenants, each of us assigned to temporary recruiting duty while awaiting orders to Quantico. The captain then told us we had to sign up a certain number of college-enrolled racial minorities and females. No need to be too strict on physical fitness or academics, he said. Just bring them in. That was in 2009. Discrimination of this sort has been an ingrained yet lamentable part of the military's recruitment, retention and promotion practices...

The “esteemed” National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky testified Thursday with other federal officials on the COVID-19 response. In an heated exchange at a hearing on the nation’s coronavirus response, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul pushed back against Fauci’s ludicrous claim that masks should be required for every American, including those who are already immune from COVID-19. “There have been no reports of significant numbers of reinfections after acquiring COVID-19 naturally,” Sen. Paul said.

Parisians piled on to trains in an exodus from the French capital today hours before a third of the country is plunged into a new month-long lockdown. Trains heading west to Brittany and south to Lyon were fully booked on Friday with platforms packed at the Gare Montparnasse as 12million people in the Paris region brace for the new restrictions. French PM Jean Castex announced the new measures last night amid a third wave of Covid-19 cases which has thrown Paris hospitals into crisis, with vaccines coming too slowly to protect large chunks of the population.

Ever since getting a big spotlight in the public eye, the National Institutes of Health's Dr. Anthony Fauci, billed by a fawning press as America's foremost expert on infectious diseases, has revealed himself a slippery chameleon or magician of sorts, constantly changing his recommendations and positions on public health in a bid to extend the coronavirus crisis as far out as possible.He's pretty well burned up all of his credibility with the public as a result, as New York Post columnist and Instapundit-himself Glenn Reynolds notes here, but he doesn't seem to know it. He continues his role as snake-charmer,...

Matt discusses tech elitist view of people as ants where they don't worry about how many ants they step on as they walk. This view was disclosed in a Project Veritas undercover video with Facebook executive Benny Thomas. Tech elitists are also working with the CCP to monitor all human activity. Coming soon to a country near you.