Free Republic

Now that Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is complete, many people are suddenly turning to Mastodon in their hunt for alternative venues for tweet-like social media consumption. Mastodon hews close to Twitter’s overall style, with “toots” instead of tweets and “boosts” instead of retweets, along with mentions, hashtags, and a chronological feed. The key difference is that Mastodon has no ads, no creepy data mining, and no centralized ownership. It can be a little tricky to set up, though, and you may quickly discover that its attempts to clone Twitter are at odds with its decentralized nature. But don’t let that...

Toots Hibbert, one of reggae's founders and most beloved stars who gave the music its name and later helped make it an international movement through such classics as "Pressure Drop," "Monkey Man" and "Funky Kingston," has died. He was 77. s with other reggae stars, Hibbert's following soared after the release of the landmark 1972 film, "The Harder They Come," which starred Jimmy Cliff as a poor Jamaican who moves to Kingston and dreams of a career in music. The Jamaican production was a word of mouth hit in the U.S. and the soundtrack, often ranked among the greatest in...

A professionally shot video of Barack Obama from 1995 has recently surfaced. Shot at the Cambridge, Mass. Public Library, the video captures a skinny, youthful Obama promoting his then newly released memoir, Dreams from My Father. In this hour-long presentation, Obama openly talks about his relationship with his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist and pornographer. Perhaps more importantly, Obama gives us a much clearer picture of who he was in 1995, on the cusp of his political career, than we had seen before. Some observations: The Obama of 1995 was not a very good speaker. He had a halting...

Passing gas: Everybody does it – and no one wants to admit it. This embarrassing habit may seem foul, but breaking wind is simply an unavoidable byproduct of our daily digestion. In fact, the average individual can pass gas anywhere from 13 to 21 times a day. But your gaseous patterns can actually speak volumes about your health, especially in regards to your eating habits, and they may even serve as an indication of larger digestive health issues. “People who produce excessive amounts of gas and particularly foul smelling gas – if you’re eating a super high fiber diet, that...

LARKSPUR, Colo. – A Colorado teen said a bear got into his empty car, honked the horn and sent it rolling into a thicket with the bear inside. .. he and his family were asleep in their Larkspur home, 30 miles south of Denver, during the joyride early Friday. He said the bear got into the car through an unlocked door and knocked the shifter into neutral, which sent it rolling backward 125 feet. Story thinks the door slammed shut when the car jolted to a stop, trapping the bear inside.

Hmmmm . . . so, Barack Hussein Obama's "typical White person" racist granny, Madelyn Duham, has been dead for almost two months. And still, not a single act of memorial for her. Not a special trip to Hawaii. Nothin'. It tells you a lot about him--he doesn't give a whit (or is that . . . White?) about the person who raised him. After he threw her under the bus when she was alive, he clearly didn't feel any obligation to attend any sort of funeral. And don't expect him to any time in the next four to eight years....

Wife's Lotto secret costs years of grief If you won a $28.5 million jackpot, would you tell your spouse? Bernice Heslop won -- and didn't tell. The legal fights continue 12 years later. BY EVAN S. BENN When Bernice Heslop opened the paper that Sunday in 1995 and saw the six Lotto numbers, her first thought must have been: ''I can't believe it. I'm RICH!'' And then, the evidence suggests, another thought formed, something like: ``Hmmmm . . . no need to tell the hubby about this.'' It was a fateful decision that has tangled three people -- Heslop, her...