Free Republic

... While the pistol was manageable, even comfortable to hold and fire, the rifle was a different beast altogether. Everything about it — its weight, tactical scope and overall lethality — was downright intimidating. The fact that the first magazine refused to click into place didn't help either, further unnerving me. What if I just broke a $3,500 rifle? A fresh magazine worked just fine, though, and after loading it, I sent the target out to 15 yards. When ready, I lined up the target in the cross hairs, pulled the stock onto my shoulder, squeezed the trigger and —...

Known as “Bobos” in France — short for bourgeois-bohemian — young hipsters are finding it increasingly more difficult to maintain their lifestyles in the French capital and, as a result, many are packing up their bags and heading elsewhere, Paris Zigzag reports. Between 2009 and 2014, the city saw 14,000 Parisians leave the city and head into the provinces for a different lifestyle, with more and more Parisians saying they would rather live in the countryside. In March, a study by L’observatoire société et consommation (L’OBSOCO/Society and Consumption Observatory), found that 72 per cent of residents in the French capital...

If you've been to any major city recently, you've probably noticed people whirring by on motorized scooters to get from point a to be point b. At first what seemed like a convenient and affordable way to venture across a city has now become hazardous and annoying for pedestrians as more and more scooter rental companies pop up, leaving their riders all the more brazed in their travel on their rental transportation.The Texas Senate just passed a bill "that would crack down on increasingly popular motorized scooters, including setting speed limits and banning the use of rented scooters on sidewalks." “We...

What's the one thing you always wish you had around the festive period? You've already got a case of the finest ales, had a drone last year that you became really bored with, really quick and an unlimited supply of pigs in blankets are a given. So, there's only one thing left and that's to light up your beard with Christmas lights, right?! If you've been blessed with a good chin of facial hair (unlike myself, thankfully) this is surely going to be top of the list. Firebox is selling beard fairy lights that flash (added bonus) meaning they're definitely...

The problem with Whole Foods is their regular customers. They are, across the board, across the country, useless, ignorant, and miserable. They’re worse than miserable, they’re angry. They are quite literally the opposite of every Whole Foods employee I’ve ever encountered. Walk through any store any time of day—but especially 5:30pm on a weekday or Saturday afternoon during football season—and invariably you will encounter a sneering, disdainful horde of hipster Zombies and entitled 1%ers. They stand in the middle of the aisles, blocking passage of any other cart, staring intently at the selection asking themselves that critical question: which one...

Naomi Tomky was still laid out on the operating table after an emergency C-section when the earliest pangs of regret kicked in. “The baby was being lifted over my head,” the 34-year-old freelance writer remembers, “and the anesthesiologist was like, ‘what’s her name?’ I started explaining and was like, oh God, what have I done?” Tomky’s now 8-month-old daughter is Tove (pronounced TOH-vah), a Swedish moniker that’s typically said like TOO-vah, but in this case, the expectant parents from Seattle changed the pronunciation for a twist. “My husband has Swedish heritage and then Tova, or Tovah, is a common Hebrew...

Johan Land has a life that stands out even among Silicon Valley’s tech elite: He’s the lead product manager at Waymo (formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project), a job that keeps him glued to computer screens and fixated on the future. Excelling at his work, Land said, requires an obsessive focus on it. But maintaining that passion — especially with his fourth child on the way — means knowing when to detach. Land’s secret to success: relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep. It’s...

Denver just decriminalized public defecation in order to make life easier for immigrants and the homeless. After decriminalizing defecating on sidewalks, the Chamber of Commerce will probably rename Denver as the “Mile High Pile City.”No Board of Health? That’s how diseases spread. Now every time I think of Denver I will see visions of poop and other body fluids on the sidewalk. People are required to dispose of dog poop and Denver is letting humans defecate any where they please.What’s disturbing as well is that they also decriminalized camping out on private land. So now you can go out to get...

BOSTON -- Four fans seated above the Green Monster at Fenway Park dropped down a sign that read "Racism is as American as baseball" during the fourth inning of the Red Sox's game against the Oakland Athletics on Wednesday night. The sign was draped over the top middle section of the Green Monster and had a black background with white letters.

To cleanse the palate, how did it take until 2017 for pro (or semi-pro) wrestling to come up with a sneering leftist as a heel? Half the fun of following the WWF in the 1980s was booing Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik. If last year’s election proved anything, it’s that condescending uncharismatic liberals are the villains everyone of this era loves to hate. Even so, I was going to slam this guy for not doing nearly enough to embrace the caricature — where’s the hipster beard? — until I read this and discovered … he really is a...

Cosmetics brand Lush, popular among young girls and hipsters for their “bath bombs,” is launching a new anti-President Trump hair care product. According to Cosmopolitan, Lush announced plans to release a hair treatment called “Yuge,” a play on the way Trump pronounces the word “huge,” alongside an “orange faced, tiny-handed man” at their 2017 Lush Summit. The “Yuge” product is reportedly a hot oil treatment that will “add volume and softness to your hair.” Cosmopolitan notes the product is not currently available as it is being tested on humans in the U.K. (Lush opposes animal testing). Lush’s homepage features two statements opposing...

A West Philadelphia neighborhood has lost its block party privileges, and others around the city will have to find an alternate form of aquatic entertainment after the Philadelphia Department of Licenses & Inspections came down with a firm – if obvious – edict: Residents are not allowed to tap into fire hydrants to turn dumpsters into swimming pools. "We are not screwing around, Philly," the Department of Licenses & Inspections wrote, listing several reasons why "you shouldn’t swim in a receptacle most often used for waste." City officials said they were obliged to make that declaration after several residents in...

Two brothers behind a popular brand of craft chocolate have apologized for 'misleading' customers after they were accused of 'defrauding the public' by allegedly covering-up how some of their bars used to be made. Rick and Michael Mast, who both sport impressive beards, launched Mast Brothers chocolate in New York in 2007. Their range, which costs up to $23 (£16) a bar, is now on sale at flagship stores in Brooklyn, New York, and London's trendy east end.

Beard baubles are so last year. This year, hirsute hipsters too cool for ugly Christmas sweaters have decided to pay tribute to the spirit of the holidays by glitter-bombing their beards.

What do we call me? I’m a 26-year-old writer who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. I’m a straight white man with a single-speed bike and a mustache. I studied liberal arts in college, and I have ideas about stuff, you guys. Millennial? Hipster? Yuppie? All of these, or none? We don’t have a term that quite encapsulates this corner of the despicable millenn-intelligensia. And like any other privileged member of a so-called “creative class,” being called a hipster offends me for its inaccuracy. I demand to be snarked in precise terms. Let's consider something new: Yuccies. Young Urban...

A new play, World Factory, asks the audience to run a clothing factory in China – and even the creators have been surprised at how people have behaved.The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start. In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit...

Apple Watch. Seems like Apple has a hit on its corporate hands. Or a preorder hit. The company sold a million Apple Watches in the first 24 hours—just in the U.S.—according to one piece of analysis. That would make it the most successful new product category launch in Apple's history—so what do you do if you've been talking smack about it for months? If you're Roger Kay, you stuff a straw man full of nonsensical numbers that will allow you to declare the device a failure no matter what. It's a neat trick so long as no one applies a...

<p>Ever since Ted Cruz and the Koch Brothers invented racism, it’s been a well-known fact that conservative middle-class Americans are the biggest racists to ever be racist. Disgustingly, ridiculously racist. Oh my God, the racism practiced by everyday citizens who want lower taxes and go to Church on Sundays is just appalling. Racists, racists, racists.</p>

Republicans have long struggled to catch-up to Democrats on high-tech voter outreach as well as courting younger voters. Jeb Bush may have found a way to kill two birds with one stone. The former Florida governor has tapped the co-founder of Hipster.com as his chief technology officer, according to his LinkedIn profile. Ethan Czahor, a Santa Monica-based technologist, will run the preparations for Bush’s presidential run at his political action committee, Right to Rise. Last week Czahor developed the microsite jebspeech.com, which accompanied Bush’s address to the Detroit Economic Club domain registration records show. Hidden in the website code was...

A Berkeley, California man died last December after paramedics were delayed nearly an hour because of an unruly protest against police brutality, recently released records show. Berkleyside, a self-described “independent news site” serving the Berkeley area, reports that the 62-year-old Alvin Henry Jones Jr. would have normally received treatment in minutes. However, due to a nearby #BlackLivesMatters protest, paramedics were instead ordered to go to a local fire station and await a police escort before attempting to rescue Jones. It took 52 minutes to get Jones to a hospital, after which he died two days later. Paperwork filed by the...