Free Republic

On Sunday, James S. Crown died in an unusual single-car accident, reportedly on a motorsport racetrack at a “member-owned country club” in Aspen, Colorado. The Pitkin County Coroner’s Office said in a statement that “The official cause of death is pending autopsy, although multiple blunt force trauma is evident.” The Sheriff’s Office indicated that the earliest new information would be made available to the public is next week. In August of last year, Wall Street On Parade made a referral to the U.S. Department of Justice involving James S. Crown, who was a long-term member of the Board of Directors...

Leftist citizens of the world are uncomfortable at the sight of unabashed and self-confident patriots celebrating the founding of a nation dedicated to undeniable truths. Tough. Let the micro-aggressions roll as we stand athwart the progressive junking of all that is good and decent. On our nation’s 150th anniversary in 1926, Republican president Calvin Coolidge gave a speech in which he responded to the progressive wave that muddied the minds of the nation. Only thirteen years after the passage of the destructive 16th and 17th Amendments, Coolidge deftly reminded Americans not to discard principles that had served the nation...

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence took that fateful July 4th day in 1776 risked everything for the future of their nation. How is Philadelphia doing now?

In the post just below, Steve notes that the liberal media are trying to make some kind of hero out of new Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. Good luck with that: based on what we have seen so far, I would assess her as incompetent.Her dissent in the UNC race discrimination case was awful. It was one long political screed, devoid of legal argument and oblivious to the standards (the 14th Amendment and Title VI) that she was supposed to be applying. Also, she can’t deal honestly or competently with data.At Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader disassembles Jackson’s dissent:[A]ccording to the dissent by...

Despite its many advantages, glass has one major Achilles' heel – it’s brittle. Now, engineers at Penn State have developed LionGlass, a new type of the material that’s not only 10 times more damage resistant, but requires significantly less energy to manufacture. The most commonly used form of glass, which you’ll find in everything from windows to drinking glasses, is technically known as soda lime silicate glass. Manufacturing this common material requires furnaces that get up to 1,500 °C (2,732 °F), which of course consumes a lot of energy and releases a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere....

A widely watched section of the U.S. Treasury yield curve hit its deepest inversion on Monday since the high inflation era of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, reflecting financial markets' concerns that an extended Federal Reserve rate hiking cycle will tip the United States into recession. The closely-watched spread between the 2-year and 10-year U.S. Treasury note yields hit the widest since 1981 at -109.50 in early trade, a deeper inversion than in March during the U.S. regional banking crisis. The gap was last at -108.30 bp. Signs of strength in the U.S. economy have prompted market participants to price in...

"It appears this web designer only went into the business for the purpose of provoking a case like this."

The United States is a divided mess as Democrats have encouraged tribalism in their efforts to gain power, splitting us apart. Patriotism is at a low point. Fox reported most voters think America’s best days are a thing of the past. Rubbish. When America turned four score and seven, Americans were slaughtering one another at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. America became great again by the time its centennial arrived. The deterioration and abandonment of Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to the tall ships arriving in New York Harbor to celebrate the bicentennial. The nation was 130...

Apparently Western "leaders" are giving the little perv ten days...

"The GOP is trying to recruit Muslim Americans, a community that makes up less than 2% of the U.S population, against another tiny marginalized group of Americans — transgender people."

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued a warning to taxpayers about a new scam mail scheme that attempts to trick people into believing the government owes them money. “The new scheme involves a mailing coming in a cardboard envelope from a delivery service,” the IRS said in a statement on July 3. Inside the cardboard envelope is a letter on IRS masthead while fraudulently claiming that the notice is “in relation to your unclaimed refund.” While dangling the prospect of obtaining unclaimed tax refund dollars, the letter asks taxpayers to provide sensitive personal information, including detailed photographs of drivers’...

Fifty years ago, one American faced Independence Day having just lost much of his personal freedom. Dwight Elliot Stone, the U.S. military’s last draftee, was inducted into the United States Army on June 30, 1973. Private Stone served not in Vietnam but in the safer yet equally humid swamps of Fort Polk, Louisiana. His 17 months in uniform brought down the curtain on the draft. Stone was the last of more than 17 million men conscripted into the U.S. military. Those who joined the American military in July of 1973, and in the five decades since, have been part of...

Just as the July Fourth holiday weekend gets into high gear, thousands of hotel workers in Southern California began striking Sunday morning seeking to negotiate a contract with higher wages and other benefits, according to the union representing the workers. Members of UNITE HERE Local 11, which says it represents more than 32,000 hospitality workers in Southern California and Arizona, are striking at more than a dozen hotels throughout Los Angeles and Santa Monica after their contract expired just after midnight, according to posts on the union’s Twitter page. Participants include cooks, dishwashers, servers, front desk workers and room attendants,...

VIDEOMy wife loves the images of fat rich piggies on slot machines so, naturally, on July 3 she played the machines with that porcine image. Our strategy, as always, was to put $20 into the slots and to cash out whenever the winnings go over about $30. That way the most we can lose for the evening would be limited to the initial $20 in the machine. After cashing out we place another $20 in the machine and if we lose that then we are done for the day. However, if we win again we repeat the process of cashing...

From behind the wheel, cars and trucks today are safer than ever before. But for people on the street, vehicles haven’t been this dangerous in over a generation. A study of State Highway Safety Offices data released by the Governor’s Highway Safety Association in June assessed American drivers killed at least 7,500 pedestrians in 2022. That’s the most of any year since 1981. Missing data from Oklahoma means the final number is likely even higher. Experts attribute the increase of deaths on faster driving speeds, a lack of pedestrian-friendly road infrastructure and consumer tastes shifting towards increasingly heavier and high-riding...

Russian air defenses on Tuesday foiled a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow that prompted authorities to briefly close one of the city's international airports, officials said, as a Western analysis said Russia has managed to slow Kyiv's recently launched counteroffensive. Ukrainian authorities, which generally avoid comments on attacks inside Russia's proper territory, didn't claim responsibility for the raid. The Russian Defense Ministry said four of five drones were downed by air defenses on Moscow's outskirts and the fifth was jammed by electronic warfare means and forced down. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that there were no casualties or damage. The...

Paris and other French cities resemble war zones, with burnt homes and streets littered with charred cars, as the nation reels under the sixth night of violence triggered by last week’s police shooting that killed a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent. “In just six nights, over 5000 vehicles were set on fire, whereas around 3300 persons were arrested, according to a report from the Ministry of Interior on Monday,” French newspaper Le Parisien reported. Rioters damaged more than 1,000 buildings, the daily added. According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, “police and gendarmes are paying a heavy price, with 700...

As artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology takes off, the Biden Administration is allegedly pursuing efforts to make sure that such new technology adopts a left-wing worldview by default. According to Fox News, the report comes from the watchdog group American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which said in a new memo that top officials in the Biden White House are attempting to program “dangerous ideologies” into new A.I. systems. “Under the guise of fighting ‘algorithmic discrimination’ and ‘harmful bias,’ the Biden administration is trying to rig AI to follow the woke left’s rules,” said Tom Jones, the president of AAF. “Biden is being...

Many have raised alarms about the potential for artificial intelligence to displace jobs in the years ahead, but it’s already causing upheaval in one industry where workers once seemed invincible: tech. A small but growing number of tech firms have cited AI as a reason for laying off workers and rethinking new hires in recent months, as Silicon Valley races to adapt to rapid advances in the technology being developed in its own backyard. Chegg, an education technology company, disclosed in a regulatory filing last month that it was cutting 4% of its workforce, or about 80 employees, “to better...

Colorado has a law on the books that says, in simple terms, a business open to the public can’t discriminate against gay people. The radical right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling last week saying that, yes, it can. The court took the side of a web designer in Colorado who said it was her First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. Arizona has a law much like Colorado’s. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced in no uncertain terms that her office is determined to enforce it. The Supreme Court be damned.