Free Republic

The twentieth century was the start of the age of high technology. The technological advances of our age have eclipsed all previous generations. It was the nineteenth century that evoked an unprecedented spirit of human optimism. The Enlightenment concluded that man no longer needed the God-hypothesis to explain his origins and purpose. An optimistic humanism was born that promised a coming utopia. Education, science, and technology would produce the acme of evolutionary development. Peace would prevail and poverty, disease, crime, and war would be banished by the modern techniques of government, economics, and education. World War I temporarily burst the...

What do you mean by free, Bernie? Do you mean that nobody pays? Do you mean that you as president will abolish college tuition and that everybody will attend at no cost? That is what you have been saying, so I guess you mean it. But if everything is free where will the money come from to pay the professors, or the college presidents or the janitors? Or will they all be volunteers and work for nothing?

Two New Jersey Assembly members want school districts to stop teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because of racist language and themes in the 134-year-old story. The book chronicles the travels of Huckleberry Finn, who ran away from his abusive father, and Jim, a runaway slave, along the the Mississippi River. It’s set in the antebellum south but was written in the early days of the JIm Crow Laws. It contains more than 200 uses of the N-word and “its depiction of racist attitudes can cause students to feel upset, marginalized, or humiliated and can create an uncomfortable atmosphere...

WINSLOW, Neb./CHICAGO (Reuters) - Midwestern farmers have been gambling they could ride out the U.S.-China trade war by storing their corn and soybeans anywhere they could - in bins, plastic tubes, in barns or even outside. Now, the unthinkable has happened. Record floods have devastated a wide swath of the Farm Belt across Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and several other states. Early estimates of lost crops and livestock are approaching $1 billion in Nebraska alone. With more flooding expected, damages are expected to climb much higher for the region.

A Catholic priest, who was arrested for allegedly groping a woman in October 2018, has been removed from the Diocese of Austin after the diocese said he "failed to maintain proper boundaries with an adult" in an unrelated incident in February. According to the affidavit for the arrest of Gerold Langsch, 75, the victim suffers from several medical conditions and was put in hospice care after falling ill from diabetes. However, police said the victim, who is still alive, was fully aware of what was happening when she made the allegations. Police said the victim's ex-husband contacted the Knights of...

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6 KJV).

Japan requires trans people to be sterilized if they want to update their ID. In Japan, a transgender person is required to be sterilized if they want to update their gender on their ID card, Time reports. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the country to discontinue the human rights violation immediately.

The judiciary’s rulings are not the supreme law of the land, even rulings from the Supreme Court. The judiciary is not the only or even final arbiter on the Constitution. Benjamin R. Dierker By Benjamin R. Dierker MARCH 22, 2019 Several 2020 candidates are determined to mainstream the perverse idea of expanding the Supreme Court to achieve policy victories. Such court-packing defies the intent, function, and ideals of the American judiciary. Americans have been told a lie about the constitutional balance of power. Despite activist assertions to the contrary, the Supreme Court is not a supreme constitutional council with the...

Atheism Is Inconsistent with the Scientific Method, Prizewinning Physicist Says In conversation, the 2019 Templeton Prize winner does not pull punches on the limits of science, the value of humility and the irrationality of nonbeliefLee Billings Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Valued at just under $1.5 million, the award from the John Templeton Foundation annually recognizes an individual “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Its past recipients include scientific luminaries such as Sir Martin Rees and Freeman Dyson, as well...

When Walther came out with the hammer-fired PK380 they knew it would be tough going up against the Joe Tactical or Dirty Harry wannabes. Walther also knew that a certain percentage of the gun community need a smaller gun, a slide they can manipulate while under pressure. WaltherÂ’s PK380 is an older design with an endearingly old-fashioned manual safety, paddle-style magazine release, and disassembly tool. That said, the grip is surprisingly comfortable, its feature set makes a lot of sense for many shooters, and considered one of the softest-shooting .380s on the market. Trigger The trigger is a typical hammer-fired...

Liberals are that strange species that supports abortion on demand. And yet in their strongholds, like the District of Columbia, they hire inspectors to fine restaurants hundreds of dollars for offering their customers plastic straws. It's not surprising that television shows don't base entire plots on the "Straw Cops." But they do insert plots that promote the feminist "empowerment" of abortion. The latest example is the aptly titled show "Shrill," with six episodes streaming on Hulu -- now owned 60 percent by Disney, 30 percent by Comcast and 10 percent by Time Warner. "Shrill" is mostly a show about "fat...

President Donald Trump made a rare appearance at a church last Sunday. It’s a safe bet the sermon was not based on Proverbs 15:1—”A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” If it was, it didn’t appear to have much effect. Before and after church, the president engaged in a tweet storm that insulted several people, including the late Sen. John McCain. Trump accuses McCain of being complicit in the leak of the Steele dossier, a private intelligence report compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele for the political research firm Fusion GPS, which, among...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) The Democrat presidential nomination battle is already a three-ring circus, and the far left elements of the Democrat base are going to make sure it stays that way. Yesterday, ex-Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who is struggling to gain a foothold in the race, found himself in trouble with the social justice warrior crowd when his effort to imply that a woman may well win the nominating contest fell flat with the humorless left. The first mistake Hickenlooper made was accepting CNN’s invitation to get a little (very little, given CNN’s dwindling audience)...

If, like me, you’re an avid observer of human affairs at their most vain and status-crazed, you have been studying the College Cheating Scandal, or what investigators called Operation Varsity Blues, with all the intensity of a rabbinical scholar poring over Leviticus. Each reading yields delicious new details of greed, ambition, hypocrisy, and decadence. “Ah! Vanitas, Vanitatum!” as the author of the classic nineteenth-century novel Vanity Fair sighed. But eventually the mordant fun gives way to the recognition that what we have here is evidence of a serious sickness in the American meritocracy. The story is well known by now,...

Now that we've all had a good airing of grievances about elite colleges and their attendant injustices, let's get some perspective. While the numbers of high school graduates heading off to college has increased in recent years, the percentages graduating with a four-year degree have not increased much. Many students, especially those who are the first in their families to attend college, drop out before receiving a degree. (They cannot drop out of student loan payments though.) Data from the Lumina Foundation show that among Americans aged 25-64, 52.4 percent have no more than a high school diploma (though 15.4...

"You magnificent bastard" A description of politics in the US since the mid-sixties. Evan Douglas Sayet is a comedian and conservative speaker. He is the nation's leading conservative speaker, an in-demand Master of Ceremony for Republican events. Sayet is the author of The Kinder Garden Of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks And Why He's Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss. He Fights . by Evan Sayet My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #Never Trumpers) constantly ask me if I'm not bothered by Donald Trump's lack of decorum. They ask if I don't think his tweets are "beneath the...

The mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge is a very interesting subject. Indeed, our world is filled with all kinds of interesting things going on. Some can even possibly be considered an extraterrestrial riddle. Even if it is wholly terrestrial in nature. All we need to do is take a good look at what surrounds us. Because, if we look at things with open eyes, and with an open mind, we will see new things, and come to new understandings on our world, and what is just going on within it. With the advent of new technology, we are able to...

Liberal ideology is rife with inconsistencies, but none is greater than how its supposedly animating motivation -- human compassion -- is contradicted by its devaluation of human life. Liberals have long claimed superior compassion and demonized conservatives as being uncaring. This has always been untrue while superficially appearing to be true, and liberals have evangelized countless young minds with this seductive canard. It's difficult to convince embryonic liberal activists that individual liberals may be compassionate but their governing ideology and the inevitable consequences of their policies are not. It's also difficult to make them see that conservatives are compassionate and...

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Paris (AFP) - Feminist icon Gloria Steinem would not be so meek "or worried about approval" if she had her life again. The veteran campaigner, one of the leaders of the American women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s, told AFP that she regretted being too "hesitant" about doing what she knew was right. "I would have done lots of things differently," said the soft-spoken journalist and campaigner who was in Paris Tuesday to promote her memoirs, "My Life on the Road". "I would have done things faster. I would have been less hesitant. I knew what I wanted to...