Free Republic

Today we celebrate the 13 original states seceding from the Union and forming a confederacy. (Articles of Confederation.)

Native American leaders are furious with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass after she abruptly replaced the first-ever Native American commissioner of the Department of Water and Power (DWP) with a “queer” white male. Mayor Bass removed Cynthia Ruiz, who had only been in office a year, and is well-liked by stakeholders, with George McGraw, a “a leading queer voice in social entrepreneurship, environmental justice, and water.”

The suspect wanted in connection with a shooting in Southwest Philadelphia on Monday night has been identified as 40-year-old Kimbrady Watson Carriker. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carriker was arrested on Monday evening after allegedly shooting and killing five people and injuring two children in the Kingsessing neighborhood. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said law enforcement responded to gunfire in the area of South 56th Street and Chester Avenue shortly before 8:30 pm. Around 10 minutes later, police followed and cornered the suspect in an alleyway on the 1600 block of South Frazier Street. On Facebook, Carriker was seen posting in...

"But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy...

Can't copy and paste from the article so here's the link. It's pretty intriguing. Sadly this may be the closest we get to having The Winds of Winter, it's been twelve years since the last Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire book. And Martin isn't getting any younger.

I've added new descriptions now to our movie genre pages for our 10 movie genres and their 62 movie sub-genres.These descriptions will help you find the genre you're looking for and what to expect in the movies that are categorized there. In this blog post,I'll just list our 10 main movie genre descriptions, and you can click them to further explore the sub-genres and their descriptions. You can start browsing all of (con...)

Sharks have been spotted swimming in shallow waters at several Florida beaches this Fourth of July weekend, sending frantic swimmers fleeing to safety as beachgoers took videos of the startling incidents. A hammerhead shark appeared zipping in and out of shallow waters in Perdido Key Sunday afternoon — at one point swimming five to 10 yards offshore, WEAR TV reported. The massive creature can be seen aggressively thrashing about in the ocean as concerned onlookers yell out: “Shark!” Swimmers sprint out of the water, peering over their shoulders, as onlookers cry out about the danger.

ChatGPT and other intelligent language tools are bad at picking stocks – but that doesn't mean there's not a role for AI in the world of investing, according to Bridgewater's co-CIO. Greg Jensen said Monday that while large language models like OpenAI's chatbot are "awful" at reading the market, the world's largest hedge fund is using them to produce hypotheses that are then tested through rigorous statistical analysis. "If somebody's going to use large language models to pick stocks, I think that's hopeless – that is a hopeless path," he told Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast. Bridgewater is instead "combining large...

Years for US/nato to catch up even to current Ukrainian artillery ammo usage, starting from now...

Bethany Mandel has gotten a lot of traction for an interesting story: A small Lithuanian clothing company that sells “traditional” dresses decided to “partner” with a bearded male influencer to help market its clothing. Real women, many of whom were stalwart customers, were not happy. However, if those same women had carefully perused the website in advance, they wouldn’t have been surprised. The woke clues were all there. Son de Flor’s motto is “Timeless Linen Dresses with a Story.” If you scan the company’s Instagram page, you’ll see picture after picture of women in traditional dresses that provide full coverage...

Anti-woke businessman Vivek Ramaswamy broke into double digits in the Republican primary race, the latest Echelon Insights survey found. Similar to other national surveys, the poll finds former President Donald Trump with a strong lead in the primary race at 49 percent support. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis falls 33 points behind with 16 percent support. Ramaswamy comes in a close third place at ten percent support, just six points behind DeSantis, making him the only other candidate to break into double-digit territory.

Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a temporary injunction on Independence Day blocking members of the Biden administration from having further contact with social media companies during a censorship trial. The judge, an appointee of President Donald Trump, is presiding over a case brought by Missouri and Louisiana challenging federal efforts to block alleged misinformation about the coronavirus and elections on social media.

At first, it was scary: A bag of white powder was found in the White House’s West Wing, causing the Secret Service to do a partial evacuation. However, once it became known that the white powder in the White House was cocaine, that opened the way to some interesting questions. Is there a Biden staffer (or more than one) who uses cocaine while working for a person who is theoretically the most powerful man in the world? Or has Hunter Biden, an acknowledged serious drug addict who’s allegedly “clean” and who’s been hanging around the White House lately, relapsed? The...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Sheetz convenience store is celebrating the Fourth of July holiday by dropping gas prices. Today, the price of gas has dropped to $1.776 per gallon for regular, mid-grade, E85 (flex fuel), Unleaded 88, and premium fuel gas. The special Independence Day offer is set to last all day, according to the company, or until supplies runs out.

Matthew 8:23-27 Friends, in this wonderful story of the calming of the storm at sea, we witness some of the spiritual dynamics of fear and trust. The disciples stand symbolically for all of us journeying through life within the narrow confines of the fearful ego.When they confront the storm and the mighty waves, they are immediately filled with terror. Similarly, when the trials and anxieties of life confront the ego, the first reaction is fear, since there is no power beyond itself upon which it can rely. In the midst of this terrible storm, this inner and outer tension, Jesus...

[Catholic Caucus] Analysis of motives behind Francis appointing Victor Manuel Fernandez to the Doctrine of the FaithCaminante - WandererBuenos Aires July 3, 2023A few weeks ago, when we learned of the appointment of Archbishop García Cuerva as the new Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I commented in this blog that Pope Francis had already let go of Bishop Tucho Fernández's hand. A reader sent a comment saying that, in reality, the Supreme Pontiff was reserving Tucho for Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith. I did not publish the comment because I do not publish nonsense. And in view of the...

Baseball bat-wielding gangs of children are mugging mothers and nannies on the school run in the latest crime wave to hit San Francisco. Last week Noe Valley, also known as “stroller valley” because of the growing population of young families, endured 11 phone robberies that are believed to have been carried out by the same gang who are targeting women picking up children from school. One woman was reportedly hit with a baseball bat, while another was punched in the face, before the offender ran to a getaway car and drove off. There has been a 11 per cent increase...

Police have identified the suspected gunman in the Philadelphia mass shooting that left five men dead and two children injured as 40-year-old Kimbrady Carriker. Carriker of Philadelphia was arrested shortly after the killing spree on the eve of the Fourth of July holiday in the Kingsessing neighborhood of Philadelphia, police said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Five men between the ages of 16 and 59 were killed in the shooting. The fifth victim wasn't found until four hours later when an unnamed man returned home and found his 31-year-old son dead in the living room, his body riddled with bullet...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A bus carrying migrants from a Texas border city arrived in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday for the second time in less than three weeks. The office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was not formally notified but became aware on Friday of the bus dispatched from Brownsville, Texas, to L.A. Union Station, Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl said in a statement.

SOMEONE'S GETTING FIRED at the US Navy for posting photo of US Pacific Fleet saluting Russian fighter jets and a Soviet destroyer on 4th of July (American Independence Day Holiday). Whoever runs the account underestimated Internet's Eagle Eye, so good they figured out they're Russian from the equipments' silhouette alone! IntelRepublic https://twitter.com/dana916/status/1676252717323354116