Free Republic

And it's Berkeley, so the rioters get their way. We talked about this a little bit yesterday, the whole idea that the left deludes itself into thinking it’s winning with stunts like this. Yay. You destroyed the town and silenced the evil right-wing guest speaker. You won! Except that the rest of the nation saw what you did, and wasn’t too impressed.

os Angeles (AFP) - US President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to withdraw federal funds from UC Berkeley after violent overnight protests against a planned appearance by a controversial editor of conservative news website Breitbart. Hundreds of students and other protesters chanting "shut him down" smashed windows at the University of California campus, set wooden pallets on fire and threw fireworks and rocks as police in full riot gear responded with tear gas. The university was placed on lockdown as the sold-out appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative firebrand, was canceled Wednesday evening. "If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech...

A protest at UC Berkeley turned fiery and violent Wednesday night, shutting down a scheduled speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The Breitbart News editor was set to deliver a speech inside a UC Berkeley campus building but hundreds of protesters began throwing fireworks and pulling down the metal barricades police set up to keep people from rushing into the building. Windows were smashed and fires were set outside the building as masked protesters stormed it, and at 6 p.m., one hour before his scheduled speech was to begin, police decided to evacuate Yiannopoulos for his own safety. The Berkeley...

FULL TITLE: Protesters tear down barricades and set fires during furious protests against speech by conservative Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley Protesters have torn down barricades, let off fireworks and thrown rocks during furious protests against speech by conservative Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley. Police reportedly opened fire on demonstrators using non-lethal bullets during the uproar on campus in California. Yiannopoulos's speech been cancelled amid the chaos and he has been evacuated, according to a post on his social media. The 32-year-old right-wing provocateur is a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and a self-proclaimed internet...

Milo's event was cancelled, and he is off the property. They have toppled barricades, smashed windows, a big fire, and are cheering and burning American flags. They are setting off firecrackers and fireworks. A tree caught on fire. They are of course protesting Trump and chanting, "No KKK, No Fascist USA, No Trump!" They have signs that say "Resist!" and "This is War!" The police asked them to leave, but they are sticking around, and the crowd is growing. They are cheering because they stopped Milo.

University of California, Berkeley administrators on Monday reinstated a Palestinian history class amid an outcry over its suspension last week. The school’s social science dean announced in letter to faculty that the ethnic studies class was reinstated after the teacher revised the course description. Social science dean Carla Hesse suspended “Palestine: A Colonial Settler Analysis” after receiving a complaint from Jewish and civil rights groups that the course syllabus appeared to describe a politically motivated, anti-Semitic class. Hesse suspended the class, saying it wasn’t properly vetted to ensure it wasn’t espousing a single political viewpoint. The suspension triggered protests from...

In the past, left-wing student activists at UC Berkeley have joined unions in pushing for higher wages, including a “living wage,” for campus staff. Campus minimum wages have lagged behind local minimum wages because the university, as a public state institution, is exempt from local minimums. On Monday, University of California Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks announced that the educational institution will be eliminating 500 jobs over the course of two years, which will wind up saving an estimated $50 million. “My concern and the public’s concern is that UC Berkeley is going to start cutting the people it can ill...

Users who download the app will be sending data to scientists when an earthquake as small as a magnitude 5 hits. By harvesting information from hundreds of phones closest to the earthquake, scientists will be able to test a computer system that could, in the future, dispatch early warnings that shaking is seconds or minutes away to people farther away from the earthquake’s origin. For instance, if a quake started in San Bernardino, cell phones there could register the quake and quickly help send warnings to smartphone users in Los Angeles. "This is a citizen science project," said Richard Allen,...

It's an El Niño winter, and the news is full of rain, sleet, and snow. If only California was as well. Precipitation so far in this wet winter that is supposed to save us from the worst drought of our lifetimes is only slightly above "normal" — and in some parts of California, including the southern Sierra, precipitation is still below normal. Think about that. The long-awaited wet weather event has, so far, just barely pushed things to around what's supposed to be "normal." This may be a hard fact to fathom this weekend, as you drive through more rain...

In the wave of protests that rocked college campuses this fall, one proffered demand was the creation of a system for students to report microaggressions committed by faculty and staff. Presumably, such reporting would be used in faculty evaluations for decisions such as granting tenure and promotions. If new research by University of California-Berkeley and Paris Institute of Political Studies scholars is accurate, such a reporting system would disproportionately harm female instructors. Inside Higher Ed reports that the research found "student evaluations of teaching" (SET) tend to be better at "gauging students' gender bias and grade expectations than they are...

Donald Trump is one of the most extreme presidential candidates to gain widespread support in contemporary American politics. Despite championing policies like the end of birthright citizenship, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and a registry of Muslims living in the United States, Trump has consistently polled atop the Republican field since July. A popular perspective thus attributes Trump's success to a "right wing fringe" of GOP voters. But this conventional wisdom misses something important: Trump meets the textbook definition of an ideological moderate. Trump has the exact "moderate" qualities that many pundits and political reformers yearn for in politicians: Many...

In 1969, the proposed use of a parking lot on the South side of the Berkeley campus triggered a confrontation between police, students, and local residents. How President Reagan dealt with the Berkeley protesters in 1969...watch the video.

With the number of UC applicants at a new high, California residents faced tougher odds of gaining acceptance into next fall's freshman classes. A record number of students from other countries and states, meanwhile, received offers of admission.. About 60% of the 103,117 California applicants were offered a spot on at least one of UC's nine undergraduate campuses, according to university figures released Thursday. That appears to be a record low acceptance rate, down from about 63% of the 99,955 applicants last year, and about 79% in 1999, the oldest available systemwide figures. However, Stephen Handel, UC associate vice president...

Cass Sunstein, the former Obama administration “regulatory czar,” has warned the campus crusade against “microaggressions” could potentially be enforced by a “new cadre of thought police.” […] Sunstein chastises the University of California at Berkeley for its “willingness to consider disciplining people for making one of a large number of statements, many or all of which most Americans would consider harmless or even correct.” He also mentions another university, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, has taken a stand against microaggressions by publishing a list of “examples of racial microaggressions.” …

Natural scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans bear some of the blame. Social scientists are now attempting to assess the economic and political price societies are likely to pay for turning up our planet’s thermostat. The security policy community is especially eager for an answer. In the academy, the debate over climate change and its security implications gained momentum after researchers from Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard observed that civil wars were more prevalent during years that experience hotter temperatures. The chief explanation for this relationship is that higher temperatures...

Video at link. A black student organization at the University of California at Berkeley is demanding the university rename a building on campus after Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther, convicted cop killer and the first woman named to the FBI's Most-Wanted Terrorist List. A jury convicted Shakur of killing a New Jersey State Trooper in 1979. She escaped prison and fled to Cuba. The FBI calls her a domestic terrorist. In 2013, the agency added her to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List, alongside several members of Al Qaeda, airline hijackers and bombers. But to the Black Student Union...

Haditha: Where Are They (the Accusers) Now? Diana West January 18, 2012 Eight charged; seven cleared; one, please, let’s hope, to go.Finally, the last “Haditha” trial is in progress, and, thanks to Nat Helms at Defend Our Marines, everything you need or want to know about the proceedings, the witnesses, the facts about the case of SSGT Frank D. Wuterich, the last of the Marine Mohicans, is here. Tim McGirk, source of the Haditha myth-acre. Of course, I still have a few questions — the exact same questions I had when I first looked at the case back in late...

Two students at the University of California, Berkeley are calling for students to “Occupy the syllabus,” or consider dropping a course if it only includes the works of white men as class material. Students Rodrigo Kazuo and Margaret “Meg” Perret wrote an op-ed in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper, titled “Occupy the syllabus” where they called for a student-wide occupation of all social science and humanities classes after they found their upper-division course on classical social theory lacked the works of women, trans people, and people of color. “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that...

"In 1993, the [Volvo Environment] Prize went to Professor Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University and Professor John P. Holdren of the University of California in Berkeley, whose work laid the foundations of our understanding of how the dynamics of population growth, rising living standards and changing technology, as well as the relationships between them, interact in the context of environmental problems." List of past winners (and their work) from 1990 - 2014 Professor Paul R. Ehrlich, Professor John P. Holdren

On Wednesday evening, in the very hall where the University of California at Berkeley had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, demonstrators shut down a speech by billionaire tech guru--and noted libertarian--Peter Thiel. The activists who broke into Wheeler Hall were protesting the non-indictment of police officers in the deaths of black suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY for the fifth straight evening.