Free Republic

If Republicans don’t act fast, Virginia will turn into Colorado, but it doesn’t have to happen that way, although it’ll be hard to undo the damage. Election Day 2025 was a broad disaster for Republicans. Everyone could see that. New Jersey stayed blue, but Virginia went back to being blue at the state level, and the Virginia Democrat party took greater dominance over the Old Dominion’s state legislature. Nationally, Republicans could not avoid the backlash in voter turnout, since the common pattern is that the party out of power rebounds in the Virginia and New Jersey elections the year after...

A Florida pastor who wrote an advice book on how to love your spouse was arrested this week for allegedly having multiple wives. Leslie Williams, 62, was arrested Wednesday on an outstanding warrant for bigamy near his house in rumored swingers’ paradise, The Villages retirement community, according to the Sumter County Sheriff Department and the Villages News. The pastor, who runs his own ministry out of the sprawling 55+ community, is wanted in Georgia after the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department there issued a warrant for his arrest on bigamy charges on April 3. Williams was nabbed by Sumter County sheriff...

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The excavation of the Villa della Pisanella in Boscoreale has yielded one of the most extraordinary archaeological finds of the Roman era: the world's only known intact Roman boiler, complete with all its pipes, valves, and accessories. This unique artifact provides a fascinating insight into the technological sophistication of the ancient Romans, highlighting their advanced engineering skills and meticulous craftsmanship...The Villa della Pisanella first came to light in November 1868, when Modestino Pulzella, while laying the foundations for a new wall, discovered remnants of ancient structures. Further exploration revealed mosaics, but the work was soon halted by a neighboring landowner,...

“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.” That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks full. Stars crowd the darkness. It seems reasonable to think someone else should be out there, and close enough to find. Yet the deeper physicists look into the laws that govern the universe, the more that silence starts to seem less like a cosmic riddle and more like a built-in feature of reality. Human intuition is not much help. It developed for ordinary...

In 2016, a routine excavation in a supermarket car park near Andover uncovered a grim secret—over 100 shallow graves filled with mostly young men, many brutally executed. Dating back to Anglo-Saxon England, the site reveals a hidden execution cemetery where individuals were hanged, beheaded, and discarded without ceremony. As archaeologists investigate, they uncover evidence of harsh medieval justice, social outcasts, and centuries of punishment stretching from Saxon to Norman times. This chilling discovery exposes a brutal world where law, power, and fear shaped life—and death—on the edges of society. Archaeologists Discover Execution Site Hidden for 1,000 Years | 43:26 Journal...

From software engineers to nontechnical staff, Google has urged its employees to fully embrace AI. And it seems like the push to use the tech has resulted in a major productivity leap.In a Wednesday blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that three-quarters of the company’s new code is AI-generated.“We’ve been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while,” Pichai said. “Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall.“We’re now shifting to truly agentic workflows. Our engineers are orchestrating fully autonomous digital task forces, firing...

"Not only did they influence media, they've had a death grip on academia." Click on link above to watch.

Mentalist Oz Pearlman, who hosted the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night, is revealing the magic trick he performed on Karoline Leavitt moments before shots were fired. Pearlman was seen speaking with the White House press secretary and First Lady Melania Trump, who was sitting next to President Donald Trump, and then showing them a mysterious piece of paper. Moments later, they all ducked to the ground behind the table on stage, before Trump and Melania were rushed out of the Washington Hilton ballroom. ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl later caught up with the mentalist, who revealed...

One of the most pressing issues facing the scientific and medical communities is the catastrophic loss of the public’s trust in accepting their advice and/or recommendations. And it’s overwhelmingly due to their own actions and statements. There are books' worth of examples worth of examples. Such as the early part of the pandemic when they flip-flopped on masks, from claiming that they didn’t work to stating that getting 80% of the public to wear them would end the pandemic in a matter of weeks, to their claims that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory, and all the way...

[snip] In an interview with Steve Schmidt, a founder of the disgraced Lincoln Project, asked whether the country has a “rhetoric problem” in light of multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, Schmidt pointed squarely at Trump: “I think that there's one person, beyond and above all others, who's responsible for poisoning the rhetoric in America. And that guy's name is Donald Trump . . . He's an insurrectionist, the foremost domestic enemy of the Constitution in American history. He is a vile and disgusting man. A convicted sex predator, and likely a pedophile.” Steve, we've got your "vile and disgusting...

A Florida doctor accused of fatally removing the wrong organ from a patient was recently arrested while working a shift for Lyft — much to the horror of his vacationing passengers. Thomas Shaknovksy, 44, was cuffed April 13 in Miramar Beach, Fla., on charges of second-degree manslaughter while carting around two customers in his silver Mitsubishi. An officer with the Walton County Sheriff’s Office hauled Shaknovksy out of his car and handcuffed him while pressing the suspect against the back driver’s side window, where one of his stunned passengers was sitting, according to police body-camera footage obtained by NBC News....

UFC President Dana White said being at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the shooting was “-–-ing awesome,” in a characteristically unfiltered reaction rapidly circulating on social media. White, 56, a longtime Trump ally, said he was seated “right in front of the president” when the gunfire broke out, and described the hectic scene to a reporter recording him on his phone. “It started getting noisy — tables getting flipped over, guys running in with guns and screaming ‘get down!'” he recalled. “I didn’t get down, it was -–-ing awesome. I literally took every minute of it in. It was...

Well— it happened again. Thank heavens, they failed again. Some curious patterns are emerging from the three shooters. All three episodes share a common shape: a lone, heavily armed man, apparently motivated at least in part by politics, probing the edges of Trump’s protective bubble and exploiting a specific vulnerability in the environment. When does a ‘lone wolf’ become a pack? In Butler, Pennsylvania, shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto an unsecured rooftop just outside the rally perimeter; in Florida, Ryan Wesley Routh built a sniper’s hide along the fence line of Trump’s golf course; and at the Correspondents’ Dinner,...

It is broadly agreed by constitutional scholars that the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Many in Congress initially argued that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 granted citizenship and the rights and liberties attached to that status. Others argued that there should be explicit legislation, which resulted in the Civil Rights Act the following year. Still others thought the Civil Rights Act was insufficient because future majorities could repeal it. This concern became the impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionalized the Civil Rights Act.The citizenship clause was a...

Washington establishment’s totally opposed to Trump. They don’t want anything that Trump campaigned on to happen. They don’t want an outsider coming in and succeeding and thereby demonstrating how it can be done. Nobody on the outside is supposed to be able to come in and reform Washington and improve it. The establishment has set it up so they have an exclusive, exclusionary club that very few people are capable or qualified to be part of, and that’s that. So the last thing they can afford is for somebody like Trump, who’s not a politician by trade, to come in...

HISTORIC PHOTO 10:15PM, President Donald Trump rushes into the Oval Office after an assassination attempt — analyzing intel on what happened Flanked by Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and more

Explanation: Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The huge monster, actually an inanimate series of pillars of gas and dust, measures light years in length. The in-head star is not itself visible through the opaque interstellar dust but is bursting out partly by ejecting opposing beams of energetic particles called Herbig-Haro jets. Located about 7,500 light years away in the Carina Nebula and known informally as Mystic Mountain, the appearance of these pillars is dominated by dark dust even though they are composed mostly of clear hydrogen gas. The featured image...

Both eruptions came from a sunspot region on the sun's western limb, AR4419. The first solar flare peaked at 9:07 p.m. EDT on April 23 (0107 GMT April 24), followed by the second at 4:14 a.m. EDT (0814 GMT) on April 24. These are the strongest solar flares we've seen in 78 days, according to solar physicist Ryan French. The bursts of radiation from the flares triggered strong radio blackouts on the sunlit side of Earth — the first affecting parts of the Pacific Ocean and Australia and the second impacting East Asia. The active sunspot region is putting on...