Free Republic

Click on the link to read the list of this year's winners.

One of the unique features of the Sukkot service in the Beit HaMikdash was the daily offering of bulls, with the number declining from thirteen on the first day to seven on the seventh and last day. Throughout the holiday of Sukkot, a total of seventy bulls were offered, corresponding to the proverbial seventy nations of the world. These bulls served as atonement for their sins, which would ensure that they, too, were blessed with heavenly rain and prosperity. “Rabbi Yochanan said: Woe to the idolaters who lost something and they don’t know what they lost. For when the Beit...

Charlottesville is what happens when the Left empowers extremists.In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers. The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black...

A protester at the Charlottesville, Virginia white supremacist rally on Saturday said that the "f**king Jew-lovers are gassing us man,'' while being interviewed by a Fox News reporter. He also said that he had "survived genocide" at age 6.

Click on the link to read this year's list of winners (exactly what you'd expect).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ijWkRYPepI

Almost two weeks after buying a brand new computer, it's still giving me fits. They one they sold me is an HP with an AMD processor. Other than having trouble with Flash on Firefox it's been doing great, until Sat. night when, while watching a movie on YouTube, the computer suddenly froze up completely and rebooted. Then the next evening, while watching another long video on YT, it happened again. An online acquaintance has talked me into taking this back (I have one more day to do so) and switching it for a Dell with an Intel processor for practically...

Hey everyone. Just in case you've been wondering . . . Well, I bought a brand new computer at a good price. But it is so blasted different from anything I'm used to that it's running me nuts. First I couldn't figure out how to hook the thing up (being unused to these contemporary power cords) and wound up taking the thing back to the store the very day I bought it. Okay--that's one hurdle. Then I had trouble turning it on. Then I couldn't increase the text size in my browser without increasing the size of the tab as...

I have reason to believe a fellow FReeper has done something very nice for me. Please contact me via PM.

I was so looking forward to the inauguration, after refusing to watch the two preceding ones. Unfortunately, fate intervened. Our little family has had some rough luck the past month, and last week was especially so. Fortunately I could kick back and do anything on my trusty used computer, and had been watching a great deal of old movies. Thursday night while surfing I saw a couple of junk tabs open with Firefox allegedly wanting me to download something or other for safety. I've seen these before and have always just closed them. However, it's possible that this time I...

. . . I can't help but enjoy the attention paid this time of year to classic monsters and grade-B sci-fi. I'm sure it has something to do with being a little kid during the monster craze of the early 60s which gave us "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family" and similar things. Pop culture historians tell us that it all started when Universal began re-releasing their classic horror movies in the mid-50s and teenagers discovered them. I'm too young for that. But I remember monsters being everywhere in the early 60s even though I didn't really know what a...

When the history of the West is written it will say: they educated themselves to hate themselves and love what they hate about themselves in the other.On a fairly consistent basis people in the West embrace values abroad that they shun at home. This is particularly odd and contradictory among those who self-identify as “Left” and “liberal” and then embrace movements, leaders, ideologies and religions that are manifestly illiberal and right- wing extremist abroad. For instance American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler said in 2006 that “understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on...

I rarely write about American politics. Here in Israel, existential national threats prevent me from dwelling on America’s problems. In Israel, Arabs butcher our thirteen-year-old daughters in their bedrooms and gun down our brothers and fathers, and the impotent leadership responds in typical fashion— with powerful speeches to comfort the bereaved. So naturally the demise of America cannot take up much of my time. But that doesn’t mean I’m disinterested. I am concerned with America’s welfare. As a Jew with a sense of history, I appreciate the haven America provided us throughout the last few centuries, when most countries offered...

Click on the link to watch this interesting video.

Way back in the early 70s, my mother's youngest brother (who was a seasonal worker for the US Army Corps of Engineers), as was his habit, brought his car over to our house while he was away on "the boat" (as we all called it). But this time he left something else . . . an very plain-looking, ordinary radio. Back in those days FM was still fairly exotic. AM was still king, and that's where most of the music and regular radio programming was. This little radio happened to have both AM and FM. But it had a third...

Searching for Bobby Fischer . . . The Hustler . . . The Natural . . . Hoosiers . . . The Big Lebowski . . . Some of the most memorable movies center around a game and dedication to mastering it. What are your favorite movies in which a game plays a central role? Board games, card games, sports . . . any games will do!

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Okay people. You all know that this year is the 100th anniversary of the Cubs' first season in Wrigley Field. You also know that as of last year the national version of WGN no longer carries Cubs games. The Chicago station does, but the "superstation" apparently makes more money showing episode after episode after episode of a show called "Bluebloods" (which I know absolutely nothing about) than it does showing the Cubbies. So I looked up the radio station that currently carries the games and found it online. Well guess what? At game time I get the very beginning but...

Click on the link to watch the movie.

Jewish holidays are not merely a commemoration of an event in time. The time of year in which the amiracle occurred was an opportune time for the conception of that miracle. As we make our way toward the Purim holiday, we are entering a time zone in which the all the Haman's of the world can fail and Jewish redemption is born. The death and downfall of Stalin is an example of a miraculous, yet untold, modern day Purim story. Joseph Stalin, tyrant of communist Russia dubbed the invincible “man of steel,” who murdered approximately 20,000,000 of his own people,...