Free Republic

sorry! but that is not an APC! It is a tank. The surrendering soldiers will split $100K reward.

Sigh. I remember when Free Republic was populated with knowledgeable folks who took the time to understand what they were looking at, and had a basic grasp of military equipment in use around the world.

That is, emphatically, not a tank. It's a BMP-2, an APC or IFV originally deployed by the Soviets in the early 1980s. It is a direct descendant of the BMP-1, and many of its upgrades and improvements are the result of analysis performed by the Red Army after the BMP-1 was used extensively in combat by the United Arab Republic (Syria and Egypt) versus the State of Israel in the the Yom Kippur War.

The closest western analog is probably the original M2 Bradley, but it's not an apples to apples comparison.

They are not going to turn Ukraine into a nuclear wasteland.

There's a lot to consider here from a tactical perspective, politics aside.

A properly fused airburst whose yield is primarily derived from fusion is only going to have some fast fission products from the initial triggering device. Hardly the stuff of radioactive nightmares. A true tactical device - yields in the low kilotons - to take out ground forces by overpressure and shock effect isn't going to cause much, if any fallout.

The only real radiation you get will be the neutron burst from the actual fission initiator itself, whose effect is eclipsed by the heat and blast (unless it's an enhanced radiation weapon, i.e. a neutron bomb).

Granted, most "production" weapons (at least in the American arsenal) use Uranium-238 tampers for the tertiary yield, which does produce a lot of fission products, but that's on three-stage, multi-hundred kiloton or megaton weapons. Conversely, a tactical yield (ten, even five kilotons) probably doesn't even need a fusion stage and could be a pure fission device, making it relatively "dirty" by design. Again, employment is key: the commander would want to optimize for overpressure, not a ground burst, since he's not going for a buried/hardened target (like a missile silo). He's trying to destroy exposed troops/armor in the field, so an airburst and a properly calibrated shockwave is what he wants. The generation of fallout products would (theoretically) be minimal if the weapon was employed correctly.

Before you can have secession, GA and AZ would need to fight their own Civil War...

Huh? Can you elaborate on that statement? I'm curious what you mean. I am very interested in modern secession movements; I think a breakup of the country is probably the best path forward in order to preserve True Conservative Government. We must jettison the liberals and their foolishness if we want to live our lives in a state of genuine American reality, free of Socialism like Medicare and Social Security.

Going on three months now and nobody has questioned suitcase girl.

You mean the ballot cases that all the ballots were kept in? This has been debunked over and over: Video From Georgia Does NOT Show Suitcases Filled With Ballots Suspiciously Pulled From Under A Table

Even Fox News debunked this completely

Remember - Hannity, Laura, and Tucker are entertainers, not reporters. They went to court to protect their right to lie to you and call it news.

How does a Venezuelan company have standing to bring a lawsuit in the US?

LOL. Do you seriously believe the crack pipe insanity spewed by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani about Dominion? I know that the line between conservative entertainment and news gets awfully muddy at times, but seriously... "Venezuelan company"???

Dominion was founded in Toronto, Ontario. That's where it's name comes from - the Dominion of Canada.

They have standing, clear evidence, and a very good case of documented harm. They are eager to bring a case to the discovery phase. They want everyone's lawyers turned loose on their equipment, records, documentation, and personnel. They will refuse to settle the Giuliani and Powell lawsuits. They crave a media circus.

One by one, Dominion has used the 2020 election cycle to finally demonstrate that lying and calling it news has consequences. Fox News, Newsmax, and American Thinker have all been forced to retract their bald faced lies about Dominion. Not only were they forced to issue retractions, they have been forced to rein in their liars on air going forward.

Consider the circumstances: this is not some case of the "liberal establishment" grinding some small conservative outfit down with their massive bank accounts or the evil Soros Machine™ with its European tendrils gripping some poor defenseless scrappy American startup... Dominion demanded a retraction from Fox News, the most popular cable news channel in America. Owned by Rupert Murdoch, a multi-billionaire with endless resources and legions of lawyers. If there was any truth whatsoever to Fox's claims that Dominion had engaged in any kind of chicanery in the 2020 election - if there was even a shred of truth to their claims - they could have stood up to Dominion's demands and probably countersued them out of existence.

Instead, Fox News, one of the richest, most powerful media corporations in the world, with billions of dollars and hundreds of highly skilled lawyers at its disposal, folded like a cheap suit and scurried off with its tail between its legs.

Think about that for a moment. The world's most powerful conservative media company, owned by Rupert Murdoch, himself personally worth twenty billion dollars, was told by their lawyers to retract everything they said about Dominion and immediately forbid their on air talent from telling any more lies about them.

There was a time when Free Republic was a place where I could come to find the truth, even when it was a bitter pill. Conservative values used to include the truth; dealing with reality while the liberals spun their fairy tales of endless "wealth" from Other People's Money, fifteen "genders", and denial of the light of our Lord Jesus Christ. The advent of Trumpism suddenly ejected the truth from the pantheon of conservative values, along with fiscal responsibility. I can only hope that at some point, we can course correct and come back to the truth as a core value of what it means to be an American Conservative.

Would you accept having worked in the exotic animal from 1989-onwards, specifically with big cats and other carnivores, as well as being on the research side, and having had interactions, both direct and indirect with Carole all the way back to when she was Carole Lewis as perhaps “knowing a few things about both Carole and Joe” and perhaps having done a bit of “research” via direct, personal experience?

Wow. Thank you very much for sharing your perspective. It is a great example of how deep and authentic Free Republic is as a community and not just some website full of people yelling 😁 It always makes me smile when someone gets to share or opine about a relevant topic like this. Much obliged 🧐

E. Pluribus Unum's link about setting up a network ten years ago...

A little late to the party, I just want to reinforce that this ten year old link is 100% relevant and correct a decade later! You do not need to spend a lot of money or install software to solve this problem. It's actually defined as part of the wifi standard: you can have the same network name and password set up on multiple routers around your house.

If you have old routers lying around, this is a great way to utilize them. Make sure you understand what you are doing, though! Turning on a bunch of new wireless stuff might blow up the carefully set up wireless environment installed by your kids, etc. 😅

Old hardware can sometimes find new life with open source software. The dd-wrt project has been writing a router operating system for almost twenty years, that can be used to turn your old routers into repeaters with ease.

I have been doing this kind of stuff for a long time, happy to answer questions.

What is... I don’t even...

You don’t even bother to post HTML links to your content.

The content itself is recycled bogus disinformation that wouldn’t even pass muster on some rando’s Parler comments on the Sixth.

In essence, this appears to be a half-baked attempt at trolling Free Republic at a critical time with nonsensical Q-bait, and you can’t even do that right.

0/10 would not troll again

Nothing like this witch hunt happened to antifa or BLM. Eff DC. No patriot can be loyal to that cesspool anymore.

The man beat an unconscious police officer in the head with a flagpole. Are you telling me you do not believe that is a crime worth pursuing someone for? Seriously?

As for BLM and antifa, 14,000 people were arrested in 2020 for rioting in connection with BLM and antifa violence nationwide. As a specific example, over the weekend of May 30 through June 2, 427 arrests were made in Washington DC alone.

52 people were arrested in DC on the 6th. Another 48 or so have been arrested nationwide by the FBI, for a total of barely one hundred Patriots arrested out of tens of thousands who stormed the Capitol.

The Feds are going out of their way not to arrest Patriots for their action on the 6th, and thousands of people have been charged for BLM related violence and thuggery.

Arkansas antifa.

Wow, second post before someone blames it on antifa. It's become a parody of itself. At this point I'm starting to believe it's a coordinated troll campaign to make Free Republic look like idiots. Patriots are literally posting videos of themselves declaring their allegiance to Trump and the MAGA movement, their friends and family talk to the press about how their lives have been dedicated to advancing the cause, but no, clearly, they must be antifa false flag sleeper agent Soros minions or something?

There's a video of Stager (the Patriot who allegedly bludgeoned the unconscious police officer with an American flag and flagpole) declaring (of the Capitol) that "(e)verybody in there is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building." He also told the FBI that he believed the police officer he was beating was in fact, part of antifa, despite wearing a jacket which said "Metropolitain Police" on it.

She must have mad cow disease. Utterly insane.

Shouldn't that be udderly? :P

hey drama queen, they’re NOT blocking you. You are not the center of the comment universe. They’re REVIEWING your comments. Even LAT and websites do that due to the nature of the climate nowadays and BB has the right to do that due to the many trolls who now go on the attack there. This must be the 20th Breitbart “they block my comments” crybaby thread in the past week..

Dude, why the hostility? Some folks aren't as internet savvy as you are, and the political internet is in a state of upheaval right now. Some folks are worried after things like Parler completely failing to secure their data and GPS tagging all their videos. You can explain what's happening without being a jerk about it.

mtrott, I think it is probably a combination of many factors, including the ones you mentioned and the ones people are mentioning here. I personally think that some sites may have tightened their moderation standards, since Amazon cited repeated failure to moderate violent speech as their reason for refusing to host Parler. It would not surprise me, for example, if Breitbart has started requiring comment moderation on all stories or for all users now, where in the past it was only certain users or certain topics that did so.

This is a textbook example of a "chilling effect". Just like George W. Bush and the Republicans after 9/11, liberals have successfully tamped down speech they don't like, overreaching in the name of "fighting terrorism" and suppressing real political speech (as in, not violent speech) by making an example of Parler. In doing so, they have gotten the rest of the social networks and content providers to "fall in line" with the new regime regarding conservative speech online.

They sure didn't go to any trouble to find any of the antifa BLM rioters who cause damaged so many places including dc.

What is your source for that information? According to Forbes magazine:

• In just three days alone - May 30 through June 2 - 427 people were arrested in DC for BLM protest/riot activity

• In contrast, 52 people were arrested the day of the Patriot action at the Capitol

• 14,000 people were arrested nationwide for taking part in BLM protest/riot activity in 2020

If anything, it looks to me like the Feds are bending over backwards to avoid arresting Patriots at this point.

joined the dollar a month club

Day. Dollar a day club. My proofreading skills clearly need more coffee. Now I look like an even bigger idiot-troll! Oh well.

I only seem to be able to respond to my own comments in this post, so I am tagging some folks who think I am trolling.

The person who posted this follows the tried and true methods of trolls, post and no reply.

I apologize for doing that. It absolutely was not my intent to troll with this post. I was just about to go to sleep when I found the article, and I thought it was very interesting, so I posted it. Again, I apologize for doing that.

Given the age of my account I don't expect anyone to read anything I contribute, so I was rather surprised to find people had read it overnight and were openly discussing it.

I also tried to make sure I was not editorializing with my opening comment, particularly with regard to Q and Anon culture. (I am not Anon in the 2021 sense of the label, but I participated in Operation Chanology back in 2008.) It's difficult to have a debate when the opening round sounds like Gore Vidal vs William Buckley from the get-go.

I posted this article because I thought it provided an alternative viewpoint that was clear and logical. As I stated at the beginning, it helps explain the behavior of various political actors in such an abrupt fashion. I also believe it can provide context for the potential backlash from law enforcement towards Patriot organizations, et al.

What I explicitly did not do was editorialize the content I posted. I presented it as-is, in its entirety, not a cherry picked excerpt to drive a particular narrative.

My bad. Don’t feed the trolls. July 2020.

Yes, my account is young, but I have lurked since the mid-2000s (not that I can prove it). I have also joined the joined the dollar a month club in the two most recent Freepathons. I don't see your name on the board, going back to at least 2018. You could, of course, have requested that your donation be anonymous, so I suppose we will never know the truth of that issue. In any case, why would a liberal troll help support a site that they consider evil, racist, blah blah?

This is a very good explanation of why so many Republicans did such a one eighty after the events of the Sixth; why Cumulus Media ordered a halt to the fraud talk; and why Big Tech is terrified of being held liable for anything related to the events. It's not censorship, it's their lawyers telling them to get that stuff off their platform yesterday if they don't want to be charged with aiding and abetting terrorism.

Blockchain is the next big innovation right around the corner.

I agree. Institutional investment in blockchain is taking place under the radar at an incredible pace. I believe BTC will hit 50k easily this year and 100k is not out of the question in my opinion. This recent bull run and correction shows that BTC is being treated like any other store of value by the institutions, and there's no better endorsement of the technology than that. I took a position at 3k a few years ago and am happily HODL for the foreseeable future :) I mean, it could all blow up in our faces, too, but life is short, y'know?

How did big tech get so much power over the internet? Did they buy it? Did they just take it? How?

"Big Tech" isn't any different from any other large accumulation of capital in American history. In general, they are companies that created a product which revolutionized the market, or created a new one, or displaced the existing market leader, etc etc. There isn't anything special about it, for the most part:

• Google created the best search algorithm and became the most powerful corporate entity in the world. From there, they gathered the most traffic, sold the most ads, hired the best people, and created the best products to offer along with search and ads

• Facebook created the most popular social network

• Twitter came up with an idea perfectly suited for our short attention span lifestyles and text message culture

• Netflix created the first viable digital media streaming platform and disrupted the established media landscape, finally breaking the monopoly grip of the cable and satellite providers and making cord cutting viable

• Amazon defined the online retail experience and ruthlessly drove down prices while increasing customer expectations in terms of service. Then, almost by accident, they basically invented cloud computing when they realized they could sell their internal virtualization project as a service; AWS started life as an internal project to streamline their own hosting efforts and is now one of their core businesses

• Microsoft started in the seventies and eighties providing operating systems. Their big break came when they provided DOS for the IBM PC, which grew into Windows as we know it today (a very long story which I am happy to tell if anyone wants to hear it). But in the twenty first century, Microsoft has reinvented itself; long gone are the days of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer with their paranoia and FUD. Microsoft is a savvy, modern competitor, eagerly participating in the open source world, happy to distribute its development tools, and selling time on its Azure cloud services

• Apple is a cult. No, really, they are. I use that word descriptively, not pejoratively. The Apple way of doing things is a way of life for millions of people, and they are willing to pay extra for the privilege. They'll tell you all about how much they love it, get excited about the next version of it, wait in long lines for it, etc. That's their business model: Apple stuff works a certain way, it always works and it never breaks, and if it does break, they will fix it and say they're sorry. But you have to buy a new one when they tell you it's time, you have to pay more for it, and it only works with other Apple stuff, so you have to be all-in on the idea. Thus is Apple a trillion dollar company

So, there's nothing magical about "Big Tech". Like "Big Oil" or "The Big Three" auto makers or "The Big Banks" or any other group of powerful moneyed interests, they are accomplished capitalists; nothing more, nothing less. And at this point in human history, their products are critical to the function of human society, giving them disproportionate power over our lives.

Hot damn. This is impressive. I wish I could buy services from these guys. Like Gab, they are acting like capitalists and using the power of markets, free enterprise, and consumer choice to make a statement and promote conservative values. This is how it should be done, not whining about "muh censorship" like soyboy liberals, all while being bankrolled by globalist billionaires and complaining on Fox News and Newsmax all day long about how "unfair" the free market is.

Big props to them for protecting their users from Twitter and Facebook's tracking cookies and telemetry. Even if you have never created an account on either platform, they have a tracking ID for you, and an advertising profile for you. If you're not using an ad blocker, they're watching what you read.

Section 230. Now.

Repealing Section 230 would be an unmitigated disaster for the conservative internet. Section 230 is absolutely crucial to the continued existence of Free Republic, Gab, and other independent conservative voices. The "purge" that everyone is afraid of will actually happen if Section 230 is repealed; no one will be willing to risk hosting conservative content anymore for fear of being sued for "libel" or being liable for "inciting violence". Think about how badly the courts have treated conservatives lately - without the safe harbor provision of Section 230, they will be positively gleeful at the prospect of punishing companies for having the nerve to host conservative content.

What good is an email list if you cannot buy email service? The CEO of Parler wrote "Every vendor from text message services to email providers..."

Stand up your own SMTP services, like Free Republic and Gab do?

The more I hear from the Parler team, the less respect I have for them. They keep whining about being victims and how they expect to have the work done for them. Meanwhile, Gab is pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and stepping up to support the conservative community at-large, without whining about witch hunts or "muh censorship".