Free Republic

Sure, the incentive to compost is the putative reason for this regulation, but exactly how is it enforced? In order for city officials and trash collectors to know you have committed the civic sin of disposing of leftover food in your trashcan, they have to examine the contents of your trashcan. Let’s hope the citizens of Seattle and trash collectors can come to some kind of silent truce over this. Do they collectors really want to examine every load they dump into the truck for transgressions? (Lord help us, the city probably offers a bonus of taxpayer money for tagging...

Right now, there are more than 300,000 pieces of debris larger than a centimeter in diameter orbiting Earth. They range from tiny shards of metal to deactivated, decades-old satellites. Most are shrapnel from discarded rocket stages that have exploded after use, or satellites that have collided. Colloquially, all this debris is usually called "space junk." Together, the Department of Defense and NASA track the orbits of the 19,000 or so pieces of junk that are larger than a softball, alerting satellite operators when any satellite — including the International Space Station — is in danger, so they can move it.

After years of being a sucker and buying magazines off of the tables at gun shows, I'm done. I'm looking at my mags and I have about a dozen gun show mags and only maybe two or three are reliable and quiet. Most jam or don't activate the slide stop when empty or just plain rattle when loaded. I've spent an average of $15 each. For the same $ I could have bought 6 factory mags and have 6 good mags instead of 2 or 3. As an experiment I loaded a factory 7rd Ruger .45 mag with 7 rds...

Copies of a highly critical book land in the private, inaccessible mailboxes of all Members of European Parliament The last time Lithuania’s leader, Dalia Grybauskaite, talked to Vladimir Putin personally was in 2010, when he was still Prime Minister of the Russian government. But Ms Grybauskaite, the president of this small Baltic country of 3 million people, has been talking about him all the time since. And now, she is in trouble. It all started with an interview she gave to the Washington Post (Sept. 24) in which Ms Grybauskaite said that Russia is allowed by “Europe and the world...

HASKELL, Okla. – A chicken patty, small scoop of mashed potatoes and carton of milk aren’t enough to sustain a high school boy. But under the school lunch regulations championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, that’s what Haskell High School served recently. Haskell High School senior Darrel Bunch took a photo of one of his recent skimpy school lunches and sent it to Fox 23. “It’s mostly the portions,” Bunch says. “Last year we started getting less food.” “Last year, my boys started calling me, ‘Can you please bring me something to eat?’ ‘We’re still hungry,’ or, ‘This is gross,”...

BURLEY, Idaho – Burley High School has seen a 25 percent decrease in participation since changes to the National School Lunch Program went into effect. Michelle Obama hand on student 337x244Those students now “bring sack lunches, dash off campus for fast food or skip the meal altogether,” according to the Times-News. “It was not edible. It was a greasy little hot pocket,” parent Steve Wells says. “When we were little, everything at school was homemade.” The school lunch “doesn’t taste as good,” student Ana Inzunza tells the paper. “It’s missing flavor and tastes plain.” “There are a lot of challenges,”...

Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson's dad discovered his son was gay and a thief on the same day. The actor admits he had built up quite a collection of stolen gay pornography magazines when he was finally caught trying to leave a store in his native Montana with a backpack full of saucy publications at the age of 14. In a recent an interview with Aisha Tyler for her Girl on Guy podcast, the red-faced star revealed, "I always considered that (incident) my coming out... It was so humiliating. "I had been stealing porn for a while. I had...

Green Sky workers being told that the recycling plant is closing. A prominent Clifton-based recycling company abruptly closed its doors on Friday, informing more than 100 employees that they had worked their final day while dozens of North Jersey towns scrambled to forge temporary arrangements with other collectors. Green Sky Industries, which promoted itself as the stateÂ’s largest private recycler with 75 municipal contracts, many in Bergen and Passaic counties, announced in a letter to towns on Thursday that it was shutting both of its plants, in Clifton and Carteret in Middlesex County. The companyÂ’s Clifton employees on Friday were...

For reasons that have no rational explanations at this time, the US and Europe have embarked on a concerted program to demonize Putin, ostracize Russia, and bring the world as close to a major conflict as it's been since the Cold War, a time hardly memorable to many in the current crop of our elected officials. Within hours of the MH-17 plane crash, the United States pinned the blame on Russia generally, and Putin particularly. The anti-Putin propaganda (and if there were a stronger term I'd use it) has been relentless and almost comically over-the-top (see image above, and those...

The City of San Marcos is downsizing. It's reducing the size of its trash carts by 30 gallons to cut back on the amount of garbage being dumped at landfills... San Marcos customers will be put to the test October 1.That's when the older trash carts will be replaced by the new smaller ones. Customers who want to keep the bigger carts will have to pay at least $3 more a month.

Every Fourth of July, some Americans sit down to read the Declaration of Independence, reacquainting themselves with the nation’s founding charter exactly as it was signed by the Second Continental Congress in 1776. Or almost exactly? A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives contains a significant error – smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less. The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, concerns a period that appears right after...

And, of course, an over reaching government agrees...

First, let's pinpoint what's in question here. The official transcription from the National Archives reads (emphasis ours): We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. See that period? According to Princeton professor Danielle Allen, it's not actually in the original document. If she's right, then the individual rights of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" would share a sentence with what follows:

Governor Chafee said Wednesday that the George W. Bush administration kicked “a hornets’ nest” with its 2003 invasion of Iraq, an act that unleashed sectarian divisions among Iraqis that are playing out today as militants continue to wrest control of territory from the faltering government of Nouri al-Maliki. Chafee offered his views in an interview after the militants seized control of most of the city of Tikrit, hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein. They had captured the city of Mosul the day before. “I never understood the original push for war in Iraq, never understood the logic of regime...

I don’t often get nostalgic, but I have more than a suspicion that we’re being led by the nose into a “new normal”, like a frog being slowly boiled, we acclimate to our environment.  Taking a sniff of freshly squeezed garbage juice leaking from metal cans on a hot sidewalk is a good way to break the spell.  An equally retch-inducing way is to review all the reasons we have for getting rid of Barack Obama. This man deserves to be impeached more than any president, more than Andrew Johnson (who didn’t deserve it), Bill Clinton (who did), or...

Pitbull has received criticism in the past over the way women are depicted in his songs and music videos...

ack in 2007, Sean “Diddy” Combs teamed with Jay Z and 50 Cent to create a song titled “I Get Money: Forbes 1-2-3 Billion Dollar Remix.” Less than a decade later, rappers are closing in on ten-figure fortunes, and he’s the nearest of the bunch.

In a TODAY show exclusive, Lady Gaga will sit down with Savannah Guthrie Friday, March 21. Gaga will reveal a sneak peek of her new music video G.U.Y., which will debut on Dateline NBC Saturday, March 22 at 8 p.m., immediately followed by Dateline Saturday Mystery. The interview and video sneak peek will post on TODAY.com following the appearance....

POMONA, Calif. — A teacher in Southern California has been placed on administrative leave after being accused of forcing a student to eat food from a trash can. The incident was reported on Wednesday at Alcott Elementary School in Pomona. 10-year-old Gilbert Lopez said after he threw his lunch away, his teacher asked him to pull his sandwich out of the garbage and finish eating it.

HIDALGO COUNTY - Illegal immigration is forcing a rancher to move his livestock away from a property along the Rio Grande. Jose Cavazos said it's become nearly impossible to maintain his fences. He said immigrants damage them when they flee from Border Patrol agents. Cavazos isn't the only rancher dealing with the destruction. Damaged fences lead to stray cattle, ranchers said. "They completely destroyed the fence. I had to move (the livestock) to another 76 acres," Cavazos said. Cavazos lives along the Rio Grande, just south of Mission. Cavazos said Border Patrol boats force illegal immigrants onto his property. He...