Free Republic

THE SCREEN SCENE (WRBL): It’s easy to forget that Tom Clancy was a major brand in the 1980s and 90s. His novels topped the bestseller lists. The literary Mount Rushmore of the era was Stephen King, John Grisham and Clancy. Even President Ronald Reagan gave a blurb review for the paperback of the submarine warfare thriller, The Hunt for Red October. In the 1990s the Jack Ryan films, starring Alec Baldwin and then Harrison Ford as the family man turned spy, blew up the box office. But following Clancy’s death in 2013, his brand began to fade. The Clancy estate...

Welcome to Upstream Reviews! Posted on April 1, 2021 | by robkroese For a while now, I’ve been frustrated with what you might call the mainstream institutions of publishing–particularly science fiction and fantasy publishing. The Hugo Awards have been a joke for years, WorldCon and most other science fiction conventions have been taken over by the pronoun people, and now Amazon is starting to ban books that don’t fit within their approved spectrum of political thought. Many of the more conservative-leaning (or simply open-minded) people in this industry have been trying for some time to shine a spotlight on the...

Cougar Encounter in Utah | Mountain Lion Stalks Me For 6 Minutes! I found what I thought were bobcats on the trail during a run. Turns out they were cougar cubs and their mother was not happy to see me. She escorted me for over six minutes to get me away from her cubs. Although she was acting very aggressive, the cougar had no intent on hurting me. The mother cougar was most likely caught off guard and did what she had to do to protect her cubs. Mama, cubs, and I are safe.

I ran across Harry Turtledove's Twitter feed and it turns out he is an Trump hating super liberal loon. He just accused Sen Josh Hawley of being a Nazi and that was the final straw for me. I am pretty sure most (probably 90%) of his reading audience aka customers tend to be men who fall on the right of the political spectrum. Stop making this liberal and other liberal scum any money. So if I may humbly ask for a boycott against Harry Turtledove. I won't post links to his Twitter and I am pretty sure it is his...

I am not sure if this is OK to post. If not, please let me know and I will request removal. I am watching this video and, it is fascinating. Some may be over the top but so much seems accurate. https://vimeo.com/498357821

If pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood’s most recent tweets are any indication, he is descending into a level of madness that would make the Joker look like the epitome of sanity. On Sunday evening, he posted a series of tweets making outlandish claims and accusations against Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and promoted even more wild conspiracy theories. But here’s the real question: Is Lin Wood crazy? Or just crazy like a fox?Last night, Wood fired off multiple tweets claiming to have information regarding a widespread blackmail scheme involving sex trafficking and child abuse.“I believe Chief Justice John Roberts &...

A Supreme Court clerk reports that shouting and conflict between the justices of the nation's highest court occurred on Friday, Dec. 11, as the court was deciding to reject a Texas lawsuit challenging presidential election results in four key swing states.

The below free libertarian novels are presented in alphabetical order by author, and include explicit libertarian themes like the defense of private property, gun rights, individual choice, and free markets.

I thought I would give this a shot. As perhaps some Freepers with historical interest notice a certain Mr. Homer Simpson posts scanned copies of Harper's Weekly magazine form 150 years ago as the United States was headed to Civil War. Staring this week Harper's Weekly will be publishing as a serial Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations". Some would argue "Great Expectations" is Mr. Dickens' greatest work and it is my Dickens; novel. I have seen various movie and TV adaptations. Some of my favorites are the David Lean 1946 version with a young Jean Simmons as young Estella, the gritty...

I had the opportunity to interview author J.P. Redding (a pseudonym) shortly after his first book “Off Grid” came out. Initially, I thought it was a survivalist book. The subtitle “Is there anywhere to hide from the surveillance state?” suggested that. It turns out that it is a science fiction book, as well.

The lead writer of The New York Times’ anti-American “1619 Project” suffered a meltdown last week when a colleague at her paper offered fair criticism of its revisionist and inaccurate account of history.On Oct. 9, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published a more than 3,000-word essay outlining the project’s blunders that have led the academics with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke its award to the project’s chief essayist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.“Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have...

Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China. “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president...

As civilization crumbles around us, Bradbury and his fiction offer several primordial lessons we would be prudent to reconsider. In 2013, British writer Neil Gaiman wrote a story entitled “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.” It was about exactly what the title says: A man, losing his memory, tells the audience that he can only vaguely remember a writer who hailed from Waukegan, Illinois, who wrote wonderful and macabre fairytales of space and the otherworldly. Gaiman’s story is closer to home than what we might care to remember because, on the century of his birth, the world at large has...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) is rushing the pre-election release of a book that will detail his “leadership” during New York’s coronavirus crisis — which is not over, by the way; but let’s not dwell on semantics.

Michael Cohen published a first look at his book about Donald Trump on Thursday, revealing several bombshell claims, including that he witnessed a 'golden showers' incident. In the peek at his memoir 'Disloyal,' Cohen reveals the 'mob boss' mentality of the president in his foreword, which he titled 'THE REAL REAL DONALD TRUMP.' 'Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,' Cohen wrote, claiming he was the one who pushed him to run for president in 2011 and 2015. 'In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore...

A present day white supremacist gets thrust back in time where the African Americans rule and the whites are the enslaved.

Demands for climate action have largely faded into the background as the covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, and widespread protests over police brutality have seized the world’s attention. But for Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute and one of the architects of the Green New Deal, the issues are inextricably intertwined. You can’t appreciate the real toll of the fossil-fuel sector if you’re not looking at it through the lenses of racial justice, economic inequality, and public health, she says in an interview with MIT Technology Review. People of color are more likely to live...

Host Joy Reid said, “I want to get your comment. We know that during President Obama’s term, there were uprisings in Baltimore, in Ferguson, Missouri. So this is something that President Obama dealt with. How do you respond to the way the current president is handling this?” Jarrett said, “Well, first of all, tone starts at the top. If we have a president who says in the context of white supremacists and lawful demonstrators they’re good people on both sides, I don’t think we should be surprised it’s fueling anger out there. But I do want to begin if the...

Former US vice-president Al Gore has tried to mobilise the global elite to fight the climate crisis by comparing it to some of history’s greatest battles, from Agincourt to Dunkirk. Gore told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the scale of the climate emergency was much worse than people recognise, and getting worse much faster than people recognise. “The burden to act on the shoulders of the generation of the people alive today is a challenge to our moral imagination,” said Gore, during a session on protecting the Amazon and developing sustainable markets. “This is Thermopylae. This...

Mark Ruffalo may be most famous for his fictional portrayal of Dr. Robert Bruce Banner and his alter ego “The Hulk” in Marvel’s Avengers series, but he has recently been grabbing headlines for other reasons. Last month, Ruffalo made the news by submitting testimony in Congress based on his recent role in a largely fictionalized movie — Dark Waters — that is being portrayed as a “true story.”  While the media, Ruffalo, trial attorneys, and some politicians pretend that Dark Waters is a dramatization of a true story, its marketing materials merely claim it is “inspired by true events.” But it gets so...