Free Republic

JACKSON, MI - Marion Blumenthal Lazan has experienced the horror of constantly having death on her mind. Blumenthal Lazan spent six and a half years in refugee, transit and prison camps, including the infamous Bergen-Belsen, during the Holocaust. As just a child she battled mental and physical hurdles, witnessing countless deaths each day. "When I talk about those years it is a long related nightmare, a very bad dream," Blumenthal Lazan said. "I separate myself from it ever having happen to me and that is how I deal with it." On Wednesday, Feb. 11, Blumenthal Lazan shared her story of...

It’s going to be a lot harder to suspend unruly students under the first overhaul of the public-school disciplinary code announced Friday by the de Blasio administration. No longer will inappropriate clothes, profanity and insubordination earn students an automatic boot from class. Principals will have to get permission from the Department of Education run by Chancellor Carmen Fariña before kicking out kids who talk back to teachers.

Do you agree? Good, then please pass this little summary to everyone you know. Or were you thinking, that’s crazy talk. Afraid not. It’s quite accurate, comparable to saying, “The sky is blue.” Reading instruction in our country has been insane and/or a criminal conspiracy for 80 years. The resulting illiteracy is a giant hemorrhaging wound. We cannot have a successful school system or a successful civilization unless children typically learn to read in the first grade or two. This is the 60th year since Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book explaining why Johnny cannot read. Everything Flesch said in...

CINCINNATI, An Ohio teacher with a phobia of young children lost an appeal accusing her former district of failing to accommodate her disability. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati rejected the appeal from Maria Waltherr-Willard, 63, who had accused the Mariemont district of age discrimination and a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Waltherr-Willard, a French and Spanish teacher, alleged the district knew she suffered from pedophobia, a fear of small children, when she was transferred in 2009 from Mariemont High School to the district's middle school. The teacher, who retired in January 2011...

(CBS) — We’ve been telling you about families whose children were diagnosed as intersex not clearly male or female. WBBM’s Steve Miller spoke with adults who underwent surgery as newborns and have faced a lifetime of grief. He was born in 1966 and grew up in a small Indiana town of about 800. His name is Alex McCorry

I follow Hoover on twitter. I guess they are part of a federal task force or symposium on cyber security....good enough.... But lately their tweets seem awfully infatuated with the fact that they are getting some face time with Hussein. As if Valerie's ward REALLY CARES about protecting Americans..... The same team that has the NSA monitoring every American suddenly wants to be sure we are secure? Don't make me laugh.

Today is the 206th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a day now celebrated by some as Darwin Day. Darwin, of course, is best known for his theory of evolution through natural selection. When Darwin's work was first made public in 1859, it shocked Britain's religious establishment. And while today it is accepted by virtually all scientists, evolutionary theory is still rejected by many Americans, often because it conflicts with their religious beliefs about divine creation.

Happy Darwin Day? If Darwin Day devotees want to be viewed as more than the mere members of a quirky cult, they need to start engaging their thoughtful critics. By John West Published on February 12, 2015 Today is the birthday of Charles Darwin, and enthusiasts around the globe will be marking the occasion with special dinners, lectures, birthday parties and more.Darwin boosters often insist they are inspired simply by a disinterested commitment to science, while their critics are motivated primarily by religion. But Darwin Day festivities make it painfully obvious that many promoters of Darwinian theory are just as interested...

A Florida school board has made a controversial decision to ban the distribution of religious and political material in its schools. The Orange County School Board previously allowed copies of the Bible in their schools, but they decided to reconsider the policy after receiving a request from the Satanic Temple to hand out Satanic coloring books. The board decided that to avoid legal action, it had to ban Bibles and any other religious material from being passed out to students. …

19-year-old Alecia Faith Pennington has spent her life so sheltered by her Christian fundamentalist parents that now, as a young adult, she is finding it almost impossible to prove to the government that she actually exists. In a video uploaded to YouTube and quickly going viral, Pennington documents the various ways her parents have managed to prevent leaving even a single speck of evidence to help her gain an official identity or to prove that she is a United States citizen. For starters, they gave birth to her at home, and declined to get a birth certificate or social security...

In September 2013, Oklahoma passed a bill safeguarding student data, and since then, student and family data privacy issues have received greater attention in state houses, largely because of increased data collection requirements and availability of data. There is also a growing need to provide parents with timely, relevant data to make informed choices regarding schooling options. To successfully navigate data privacy issues, it is important to consider existing policies and safeguards in place at the federal level. These safeguards include several significant and far-reaching policies such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection...

The Book That Deflated Darwin Day By John G. West February 11, 2015 February 12 is Charles Darwin’s 206th birthday. As secularists push for a worldwide celebration of “Darwin Day,” we’re featuring the following excerpt from John G. West’s acclaimed book Darwin Day in America, released today in an updated edition.If someone prior to 2012 had predicted that Oxford University Press would publish a book with the title Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, one might have wondered about his sanity, or at least about how familiar he was with current discourse...

A Chinese girl with a rare medical problem has the appearance of a child - despite being 19-years-old. Zeng Yushan was born in June 1994 in the township of Huzhu in Fushun County in south-western China's Sichuan Province. At seven years old, she stopped growing and was diagnosed with a tumour on her pituitary gland, which caused a deficiency in growth hormones. The pituitary gland is found behind the bridge of the nose and below the base of the brain, and is about the size of a pea. It releases hormones growth and puberty hormones, among others, directly into the...

Big Ten mascots, you’ve done it again!When it comes to sticking together and joining forces on fun projects, few conference’s mascots rival the Big Ten’s. There’s this, this and this. And, who can forget their “Call Me Maybe” parody? Actually, we’re just going to go ahead and say the Big Ten boasts the best mascots.New proof of this fact surfaced Monday, when the mascots – all but Testudo, Willie the Wildcat and Nittany Lion – released their entertaining “Shake It Off” parody.For those of you who don’t know, “Shake It Off” is Taylor Swift’s catchy and highly addicting new hit.

Jeb Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future promotes Common Core and is hosting an education conference TODAY. Keeping the Promise: A Florida Education Summit is convening top Florida policymakers and education stakeholders for a conversation about accountability and choice, two of the most important factors for unlocking student potential. Tuesday, February 10, 2015 from 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM (EST) The Alumni Center at Florida State University 1030 West Tennessee Street Tallahassee, Florida http://www.eventbrite.com/e/keeping-the-promise-a-florida-education-summit-registration-15357014243

Affinity Photo is a new program that was launched today by the England-based software company Serif. It’s designed to be a powerful alternative to Adobe Photoshop for professional photographers and retouchers who work on a Mac.

From science to scientism in the Obama era  | An excerpt from the newly updated edition of John G. West’s Darwin Day in America Just how far some [Obama] administration officials were willing to take the idea that science should override ethical concerns became apparent with the disclosure of a multiyear experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) involving more than 1,300 premature infants. As part of the experiment, premature infants were randomly assigned to receive higher or lower levels of oxygen. Those receiving lower levels of oxygen were more likely to die, while those receiving higher levels of...

“The thing from which the world suffers just now more than any other evil,” wrote author and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton, “is not the assertion of falsehood, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.” Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized freedom, but denied morality. Sigmund Freud stressed instinct, but suppressed the spiritual. Friedrich Nietzsche glorified the individual, but disdained the community. Karl Marx celebrated the community, but rejected the individual. Charles Darwin was enamored of empirical science, but excluded metaphysics.It is an all-too common theme. Chesterton, himself, I am happy to note, was not speaking in half-truths. More contemporaneously, Richard Dawkins has...

Keeping the Promise: A Florida Education Summit is convening top Florida policymakers and education stakeholders for a conversation about accountability and choice, two of the most important factors for unlocking student potential. Tuesday, February 10, 2015 from 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM (EST) The Alumni Center at Florida State University 1030 West Tennessee Street Tallahassee, Florida

So with all the discussions about vaccines, I did some more studying on the subject and vaccines go way back in time. Government has also mandated them for as long. So what would be the current population be if we never had a created a vaccine for anything, ever? Any epidemiologist slash statistician want to take a stab?