Free Republic

In his first press conference since being elected president, Donald Trump thanked the media. He praised news outfits that didn't publish a story about a document that describes alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, even though many of those news organizations had the story for months and held on to it. The two press outfits that did publish the story, CNN and BuzzFeed, got whipped by the president-elect. Trump called them "fake news" and refused to take questions from reporters representing their organizations. You almost have to wonder, though, if he shouldn't be going easy on them, especially BuzzFeed, which...

May I ask a question of anyone - I just sat down at my laptop to do a few things and the only site I can reach so far is FR. Nothing else. No gmail, no national weather service, Drudge, Breitbart, etc. I can mysterious access FR. Every other site I keep trying is not opening. Am I the only one this is happening to? I get this message on Chrome: This site can’t be reached twitter.com’s server DNS address could not be found. Try: Checking the proxy, firewall, and DNS configuration Running Windows Network Diagnostics DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_BAD_CONFIG And this on...

The French government has recently demanded that the United States government and American based net providers of blogging, social media and forums such as wordpress, Twitter, Yahoo, Google and others trash the first amendment and its guarantee of free speech and Freedom of religion and adopt the same totalitarian censorship as the leftist European union. France has made demands to the US that they censor its blogs, posts, and other social media in order to comply with its views of liberalism, multi-culturalism and tolerance. This while having no toleration whatsoever for competing views on traditional values, Christian faith, family values,...

President Obama has put Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified material, on his short list for a possible commutation, a Justice Department source told NBC News. A decision could come as soon as Wednesday for Manning, who has tried to commit suicide twice this year and went on a hunger strike in a bid for gender reassignment surgery. "I have more hope right now than I have the entire time since she was sentenced," Manning's aunt, Deborah Manning, told NBC News....

So the website BuzzFeed decided to publish a series of memos that have been floating around for months alleging all kinds of terrible things about Donald Trump. Some of those terrible allegations have to do with efforts to influence the American elections and Trump. Some of them have to do with Trump’s personal sexual conduct. Readers of this newspaper know well not to include me among Trump’s supporters. But the scurrilousness of what BuzzFeed has done here is so beyond the bounds of what is even remotely acceptable it should compel even those most outraged by Trump’s political excesses to...

President-elect Donald Trump's meeting with Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma on Monday was brilliant — but not for the obvious reason of making him look good for being part of a conversation about creating 1 million jobs. What's really smart about it is that puts China on its heels. Trump and Beijing have been engaged in a back-and-forth rattling of sabers from the minute Trump won the election. Remember that Trump took a congratulatory call from Taiwan's president and on the same day Trump met with Ma, a state-run Chinese tabloid warned that China would "take revenge" if...

Pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli was banned from Twitter on Sunday for alleged “harassment” after he asked a Teen Vogue writer on a date. The “harassment” began when Shkreli sent Lauren Duca, known for her piece about President-elect Donald Trump “gaslighting America” and defending the man who harassed Ivanka Trump on a plane, a private message inviting her to the inauguration as his date. Duca responded by publicly posting his message and writing, “I would rather eat my own organs.”

Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for "suspicious" amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize. Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy -- Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day. According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally located on Rettenmaier's computer...

Through studying the geometry of strong structures, MIT researchers are now one step closer to 3D printing graphene. By comparison, 2D graphene is better at conducting electricity than copper wires, ten times stronger than steel, and lighter and certainly more transparent than both of them. The problem is that these properties as are all theoretical and scaling the nanomaterial has proved challenging. Furthermore, in order to compete with copper and steel, graphene has to be 3D. 3D graphene – here’s the deal The challenges of making a 3D structure out of a 2D material is that the material’s atomic structure,...

Let’s be clear: Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 election because of Russian meddling or WikiLeaks. And here is the proof: WikiLeaks began publishing its trove of Democratic National Committee emails on July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic National Convention. By then, Hillary Clinton was already in a deep hole with American voters. Long before WikiLeaks, Americans had concluded that Clinton was a congenital liar. A CNN poll taken July 13-16 found that 65 percent of voters said Clinton was neither honest nor trustworthy and that 57 percent would not be proud to have her as president....

Because Trump “has Breitbart and Twitter and he’ll just swamp you.” If Hillary Clinton had won, Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett would have kept their day jobs. The three friends, all in their mid-30s and veterans of the Obama White House, had gone to the West Coast, where two started a consulting firm and the third wrote screenplays. Last year they dipped back into the campaign fray through an election-focused podcast, “Keepin’ It 1600.” The trio of political junkies got their fix with the part-time initiative, mixing it up with political operatives and Washington journalists. Lovett, a former...

The more we learn about Russia’s hacking and the release of its electronic loot during our presidential election, the more it becomes clear that Donald Trump’s victory and his imminent presidency are already tainted beyond redemption. While Russian hacks “were not involved in vote tallying,” the publishing of pilfered emails and promulgation of fake news altered the zeitgeist, poisoned the political environment and shifted public opinion, all of which redounded to Trump’s benefit. Donald Trump is as much Russia’s appointment as our elected executive. The legacy of his political ascendance will be written in Cyrillic and affixed with an asterisk....

An interesting read about the future… In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt.What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years and, most people won’t see it coming.

It's magic! No one noticed the hand not moving, The Deception... The Diversion...The Distraction... or the Depredation The Democrats have not been this decimated since 1928. They’ve become hysterical, unhinged, wholly ineffective as a political party, repudiated, recalled, replaced, and marginalized by a nation they had not served. Their media, their propaganda arm, has been discredited. Into this vacuum the Hacking Narratives arrived to explain away the disaster that was the Obama Presidency; to salve the wounds and medicate the collective self-inflicted anxiety experienced by the once-great party’s supporters.

Lena Dunham’s post-election meltdown is showing no signs of letting up in the new year. The woke celebrity continues to express her anguish at the election of “terrifying” “predator” Donald Trump by doing gross, bizarre things and documenting them on social media. Over the weekend, for example, Dunham posted a photo of herself wearing a dog collar on her Instagram account, which currently has almost 3 million followers. In the accompanying caption, Dunham acknowledged that the black studded collar, which features the phrase “I [heart] L D,” was meant for a dog. But that didn’t stop her from wearing it....

When iPhone launched in 2007, it was called the Jesus phone, the one that everyone wanted, and other manufacturers wanted to mock. The iPhone was launched by Apple CEO and co-founder, the late Steve Jobs at the MacWorld conference in 2007.

Thousands of tech companies descended on Las Vegas for CES 2017 this week to show off what they think you'll buy in the coming year. Although we saw more of what dominated the tech scene last year -- smart home products, wearables and enough Amazon Echo partnerships to make your head spin -- some new products shined brightly above the rest. From an underwater drone to the car of the future, here's a look at what impressed us most.

Julian Assange told Sean Hannity this week that “a 14-year-old boy” could have hacked John Podesta’s emails. It just so happens I live with two 14-year-old boys, my sons. Both are extremely tech savvy, unlike Dad. So I thought I’d ask their opinion about Assange’s assertion. First, their bona fides. At 10, they created YouTube videos teaching how to use Rainbow Loom, a popular toy for kids that age. They attracted half a million views and earned $450 from Google AdWords. My wife and I tried to get them to do household chores for allowance money. “We have our own...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed in a new interview that he is completely confident that the Russian government was not the source of the hacked emails that his organization released leading up to the U.S. presidential election. He also shrugged off the question of whether the politically damaging emails affected the outcome of the race. The publisher of classified and private information released embarrassing emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Fox News political pundit Sean Hannity asked Assange to address the allegation that WikiLeaks was a...

The Wikileaks publication of a raft of embarrassing emails hacked from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta may have undermined Hillary's chances to be elected president. For his part, Podesta has complained loudly about presumed Russian involvement, claiming that "intelligence sources say only the Russians have the kind of sophisticated techniques required." Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, refuted Podesta's claim saying that "a fourteen-year-old could've hacked Podesta's email account. His password was 'password.' His email could hardly have been less secure." Podesta labeled Assange's assertion "grossly misleading. My password wasn't 'password.' It was 'passw0rd' with a zero. The chance that some...