Free Republic

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's chatbot achieved only 17% accuracy in delivering news and information in a NewsGuard audit that ranked it tenth out of eleven in a comparison with its Western competitors including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and gave vague or not useful answers 53% of the time in response to news-related prompts, resulting in an 83% fail rate, according to a report published by trustworthiness rating service NewsGuard on Wednesday. That was worse than an average fail rate of 62% for its Western rivals and raises doubts about AI...

Election 2024 is in the rearview mirror. Pollsters won’t be bombarding voters anymore. Today’s entertainment is liberal heads exploding on social media or the latest Democrat threatening but not actually following through on everything from drinking cyanide to setting themselves on fire to leaving the country if Donald Trump won the election. So far, few have followed through on their promises, although a handful have left the country. Good riddance to them. Trump did win, bigly, in a landslide of sorts. He won the Electoral College handily, 312 to 226. Trump also won the popular vote, 49.9% to 48.3%. As...

KEY STATE POLLS: ANOTHER MESS IN THE MAKING? Who is leading the presidential race in the seven states considered most critical to victory in 2024: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada? The answer is we don’t really know. If you look at the RealClearPolitics average of state polls, you’ll see that Pennsylvania is exactly tied between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump .... Obviously, all those numbers are within the polls’ margins of error. So anyone who cites them is advised to be cautious. But even more caution is called for when you look...

Unless you’re an avid shooter, there tends to be only a handful of ammunition types a person can list off the top of their heads, and even fewer if we’re talking specifically about rifles. Although there’s a long list of projectiles to be fired from long guns, the ones that tend to come to mind for most of us are almost always the same: 5.56 and 7.62, or to be more specific, 5.56×45 vs. 7.62×39.National militaries all around the world rely on these two forms of ammunition thanks to their range, accuracy, reliability, and lethality, prompting many on the internet...

Question One: How do we know the Bible is true? (Hebrews 4:12) According to the Bible, all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). Peter confirmed this when he said that those who wrote the Bible were not speaking on their own but spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). Many parts of Scripture are directly attributed to God through use of phrases like This is what the Lord says (e.g., Exodus 4:22). Finally, Jesus often quoted from the Old Testament and affirmed it as being God’s Word. Prophecies that were later fulfilled...

Between a professor of economics at a prestigious university and President Trump, who should you trust to choose his words carefully, check his sources and quote reliable figures? The answer might surprise you. Case in point: George Mason University Professor Donald Boudreaux’s recent op-ed “Chinese IP ‘theft’ doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs” (July 20, TribLIVE). Notice the word “theft” in quotes? That’s because Boudreaux believes that Trump is exaggerating the case for tariffs by exaggerating the extent of Chinese “theft.” According to Boudreaux, “the extent of such theft is overblown” because “Much of this ‘theft’ is in fact in-kind taxation. Beijing...

How Accurate Are Today’s Rifles? by Bryce M. Towsley - Friday, July 5, 2019 More SUBSCRIBE The internet is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. It allows us to share the knowledge of the world and to communicate throughout that world. It’s allowed life saving surgery to be performed in remote locations and has brought the truth of freedom to repressed countries. It probably is the single biggest technological and social advancement in the history of man.So why do so many of us use it to argue endlessly with people we don’t know? The internet has...

Is it the Arrow or the Indian? - When testing a rifle for accuracy with a new load, its ideal to have multiple shooters to test it out. For the serious long range shooter working on a load for a new rifle can be overwhelming with all the possible variables that can come up. Such as charge weight, seating depth, neck tension and so on. When you think you got all the variables tackled in the load. The results on target can be a let down. You can quickly jump to the conclusion that the load needs to be changed....

The NY Times and Siena College are polling the "tossup" Midterm districts. Of the polling done in September so far, 7 REPs are leading, 3 DEMs are leading and 1 tied race out of 11 districts polled (DECENT RESULTS FOR REPUBLICANS!) 5 more districts are being polled right now. Results can be viewed in Real Time. Republicans are leading in 3 of the 5. What is shocking to me is the very low response rate. For example, in Colorado 6, there have been 489 responses out of 26,456 phone calls. That is less than 2% taking the poll. How can...

With a straight face, professors mostly tell you that they avoid advocacy. “The American Economic Association has never taken a position on any public-policy issue,” Beth McMurthie wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 21, 2014. “The American Political Science Association is thinking about becoming more active.” “And some members of the American Studies Association are wishing their organization were less so. In academe, where every argument quickly finds a counterargument, the role of the disciplinary association in matters of public advocacy is a curious one. Recent, heated debates within the American Studies Association and Modern Language Association...

Click the link to see the accuracy of the Gallup poll from 1936 to present. With a few exceptions, it's been quite accurate, usually not off more than a few points either way. And those that are off more than 3 pts on the plus side have usually gone to the Dem.

It may not come as surprising news to many of you that the United Nations doesn’t approve of our Second Amendment. Not one bit. And they very much hope to do something about it with help from some powerful American friends. Under the guise of a proposed global “Small Arms Treaty” premised to fight “terrorism”, “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates” you can be quite certain that an even more insidious threat is being targeted – our Constitutional right for law-abiding citizens to own and bear arms.

Football story better than Leach v TTU-pretty phenomenal accuracy.

Many obsessive riflemen “know” a lot of things about the insides of their barrels. They know they must break-in barrels and that any bore only slightly smudged by the passage of bullets will shoot less accurately compared with a barrel as clean as Aunt Josie’s kitchen floor. First, let’s examine “proper” barrel break-in. According to just about everybody, this is accomplished by firing one shot, cleaning the barrel of all powder and copper fouling, firing another shot, cleaning, etc. Advice on how long to continue this tedious routine varies from 10 to 30 rounds. The procedure supposedly smooths the bore,...

(LEAD) N. Korean missile launches aimed at improving accuracy: official SEOUL, July 5 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's latest missile launches appear to have been aimed at improving the missiles' accuracy, a South Korean official said Sunday, noting the launches may have provided some results. "Five out of seven missiles North Korea fired yesterday landed within the same area in the East Sea, about 420 kilometers from the launch site," the official said, asking not to be identified. "This means the accuracy of North Korean missiles is improving," the official added. North Korea is said to have about 1,000 ballistic missiles...

People for whom indignation is a way of life — and there seem to be an increasing number of such people — repeatedly have outbursts of outrage whenever the police fire a lot of shots at some criminal. People who have never fired a gun in their lives, and have never had a split second in which to make a decision that could mean life or death for themselves or others, are often nevertheless convinced that the police used excessive force. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, it has never seemed strange to me that...

To continue on the serie "learn the US history without political correctness", here is part one of a documentary on an American soldier tarnished by political correctness. Please spend a little time to learn what this soldier did and why it is so important that the American people know their history without the rewriting of the left. They fought for the flag, the flag must not forget them. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1qzg2_general-custer-part-1 See the other video of this serie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4534E1cCLyQ

Every election, I seem to recall Sabato and Dick Morris being wrong at some point. Although Morris goes back and forth so much it's hard to tell. Is there any website that tracks the accuracy of pundit predictions. I'm particularly interested in a historical look at Sabato's so-called "crystal ball."

It occurred to me as my fellow Freepers are likely as gut-wrenched as I am over the next poll release, to look at comprehensive averages of all non-partisan public polls in the last two election cycles (the two in which Karl Rove's GOTV apparatus has been in place). We're counting on this wonderful, well-oiled machine to pull us accross the line in the close ones. Did we really defy the polls to an extent that this is likely this year? There are a couple of ways to measure this. We can examine how the poll averages compare in terms of...

These are targets printed in Ned Roberts book "The Muzzle Loading Cap Lock Rifle". Accurate rifles are not a new invention.