Free Republic

The Black Hole of Organizational DysfunctionDystopia Note: When this book was prepared, the terms Dystopia and Utopia were widely used to describe the two complementary but opposite categories of the social system. As progress continued, we evolved away from those popular, but vaguely-defined terms. When you encounter “dystopia,” think organizational dysfunction. When you encounter “Utopia,” think happy prosperity. General Remarks Book 1 of the Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), “Philosophy,” presented the purpose of the pilgrimage. It is assumed the reason you’re here is that you are interested in joining one. Following along with the derivation of the paradigm of the...

Hurricane Harvey's massive flooding has displaced tens of thousands of people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes across southeast Texas and Louisiana. Now, Wired reports Harvey's devastating path has also left as many people without cars. Insurance companies have received at least 100,000 claims for cars impacted by Harvey, according to Wired. Seventy-five percent of those claims have been for totaled cars, with the number of claims expected to rise. Others estimate Harvey has destroyed up to five times more: Cox Automotive chief economist Jonathan Smoke told USA Today he believes 300,000 to 500,000 vehicles were destroyed by Harvey's...

Listeners of the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say programme were treated to a bizarre analysis of the Star Wars franchise today by a caller who claimed that “Dark Raider” was a “racial stereotype” who listened to rap music and “the only female character ends up in a gold space bikini chained to a horny space slug.” Godfrey Elfwick is a student from Sheffield who regularly fools observers with his parody Twitter account, an off-the-deep-end “social justice warrior” persona that tweets bizarrely and hilariously about racism, sexism, misogyny and other favoured topics of the political Left. Elfwick attracted the...

Recenty uncovered audio from a radio interview conducted in 2011 reveals Stephen K. “Steve” Bannon — who was named by President Elect Donald Trump on Sunday to be “chief strategist” in the Trump administration — using a derogatory term for lesbian women to refer to all women with liberal political beliefs. Audio here. Bannon, 62, was promoting his film Fire From the Heartland: the Awakening of the Conservative Woman. In the interview, he discussed how right-wing women such as Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin “cut to the heart of the progressive narrative.” “That’s why there are some unintended...

Soros: Trump will win in a landslide in the popular vote, not in the electoral vote, because, there, paid political [mumble] (elements/announcements?) will have a big role, and so the electoral thing will be closer, but the popular vote will be a landslide because we are a small minority of extremists, so we are all moving in that direction, and while I don't think Donald Trump has any chance of being elected ... Interviewer: But you think Hillary Clinton is a done deal? Soros: Yeah.

When Jessica Leeds was a traveling paper saleswoman in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she told herself that sexual harassment was just a fact of life. "You didn't complain about that sort of thing," she told NPR in an interview Friday, which will air on All Things Considered. But an encounter she says she had with Donald Trump on a New York-bound airplane more than 30 years ago was different. As she initially recounted to the New York Times in a story published Wednesday, she says Trump groped and kissed her as the two sat next to each other...

Police departments nationwide anticipated “Day of Rage” protests, following the announcement by an account claiming to represent the hacker group Anonymous. It called for 36 cities to participate in response to killings of civilians by police. Despite the passion and compassion shown in recent days and weeks by people taking to the streets over killings of and by police, the hyped “Day of Rage” protests largely failed to materialize on Friday. Instead, a #BashBack contingent of protesters, LGBT activists, took to the streets of New York City in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter, at one point chanting, “Stonewall was a riot, queers...

Lots of women look forward to motherhood — getting to know a tiny baby, raising a growing child, developing a relationship with a maturing son or daughter. All over the world, people believe that parenting is the most rewarding part of life. And it’s good that so many mothers treasure that bond with their child, because the transition to parenthood causes profound changes in a woman’s marriage and her overall happiness … and not for the better. Families usually welcome a baby to the mix with great expectations. But as a mother’s bond with a child grows, it’s likely that...

A South Sudan immigrant and standout basketball player at a Catholic high school in Canada has been arrested after it was revealed that his true age is not 17, but closer to 29, the authorities said.

In the Barbershop, Arsalan Iftikhar, Bridget Johnson and Jimi Izrael discuss the San Bernardino shootings, the shakeups in the Chicago Police Department, and NBC's live production of The Wiz. LYNN NEARY, HOST: Time now for a visit to the Barbershop - that's where we gather some interesting folks to hear about what's on their minds and what's in the news. Sitting in the chairs for a shapeup today are Bridget Johnson. She is Washington bureau chief of PJ Media. That's a conservative-libertarian news and commentary site. Attorney Arsalan Iftikhar - he serves as senior editor for The Islamic Monthly magazine...

What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as...

The energy source has been long on promise and short on reality. Now private companies think they can succeed where the government has failed. For more than half a century governments around the world have been trying to solve the challenge of nuclear fusion. In theory it could provide a cheap, clean, and almost boundless source of energy. Consider this: One tablespoon of liquid hydrogen fuel—a mix of deuterium and tritium—would produce the same energy as 28 tons of coal. But smashing two hydrogen atoms together at 100 million degrees centigrade to create a fusion reaction has proved to be...

A prominent North Carolina investor is backing a new kind of fusion that operates at much lower temperatures than thought possible, which would make it easier to commercialize. So far the early results show promise. Tom Darden, the founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, made his mark by acquiring and cleaning up hundreds of environmentally contaminated sites. Today he is also an early stage investor in clean technology, having put his own money into dozens of companies in areas ranging from smart grid to renewable energy, and prefab green buildings. More recently he’s...

Fifty-eight years old. That was the average age of principal farm operators in the U.S. in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture. Over the past 30 years, the average age of principal farm operators in the U.S. has increased as fewer young people have taken up farming. For many farmers' children, leaving home means leaving the business. Nikiko Masumoto grew up working the peach harvest every year on the Masumoto Family Farm in California. Though she was a fourth-generation farmer in the making, when she went to college, she thought she was leaving the farm...

Solar Hydrogen Trends, Inc., developer of innovative breakthrough technology with the world’s first hydrogen reactor for production of unlimited hydrogen, conducts final series of control tests on technology PR NewswireMENLO PARK, Calif., July 22, 2014 MENLO PARK, Calif., July 22, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ —  American company, Menlo Park based technology firm Solar Hydrogen Trends, Inc. (www.SolarHydrogenTrends.com) today announced that it has conducted a final series of control tests on hydrogen reactor Symphony 7A.Photo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140722/129200A follow-up series of tests was required due to the fact that the two previous series of tests had shown such incredible production of hydrogen in reactor...

We are pleased to announce the completion of the Flyspeck project, which has constructed a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture. The Kepler conjecture asserts that no packing of congruent balls in Euclidean 3-space has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing. It is the oldest problem in discrete geometry. The proof of the Kepler conjecture was first obtained by Ferguson and Hales in 1998. The proof relies on about 300 pages of text and on a large number of computer calculations.

From a blogging friend of mine: END OF SINCERITY? IS THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NBA TO TRUMP THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES? James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. © April 30, 2014 When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa, after a physics lecture, Rex Jamison invited me to have coffee with him. Rex was valedictorian of his high school class at Story City, Iowa. He was also number one in my class at Iowa as well. He would go on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Cambridge in Great Britain, and subsequently to graduate from Harvard...

Going into the shopping season, any ideas for Christmas gifts that inspire patriotism -- for kids 6-12 years?

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

Money quote: For Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and former assistant education secretary, the program is predicated on “the idea that you can’t trust teachers.” If we want our children taught from standardized scripts, she told us, let’s say so and accept the consequences. For our part, we’re tired of seeing teachers cast as scapegoats, of all the carping over unions and tenure. It is time teachers are as revered in society as doctors or scientists, and allowed to work professionally without being bound by reams of rules.