Free Republic

I began our New Years Eve Late Night Mass (Which begins at 11:15 PM) with the observation that we begin this Mass in one year, and end in another. New Years Eve features the mysterious passage from one year to another. In a way I suppose it is no more mysterious than the passage from Tuesday to Wednesday or from 10:00 AM to 10:01 AM.In one sense, nothing could be simpler than time. What time is it? It is 1:15. Simple! But time has mysteries about it.What is time? Some say it is merely a measure of change. But that...

As spotted by Steve Goddard, and linked to by Climate Depot: In 1974, Time Magazine blamed the cold polar vortex on global cooling. ‘Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.’Another Ice Age? – TIME Forty years later, Time Magazine blames the cold polar vortex on global warming ‘But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global...

A recurring theme during the Obama presidency has been that, despite the distinct sense he gives of a man who sees himself as “above it all,” the president is a regular down-to-earth Joe. His efforts to connect with the hoi polloi have not always succeeded. His most recent attempt, enrolling in Obamacare, was sullied by the revelation that he didn’t actually dirty his own hands navigating the exchanges — his “staff” enrolled for him — and the gesture was purely symbolic anyway. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen observed at the Washington Post that the cynicism of the move would be

"If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers."

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology. Is...

I invite you to keep the attention of everyone on the important issue of respect for human life from the moment of conception. - Pope Francis at the Rome March for Life, I continue to love the current pontiff, Pope Francis. This adoration continues even after hearing the liberal magazine Time (who knew they still published?) has named Pope Francis as Time’s Man of the Year. The beauty I see in Pope Francis is that everyone seems to view him through their own eyes. Be you liberal, conservative, Catholic, non-Catholic, etc. . . . One day he is angering conservatives,...

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson. How do you practice humility from the most exalted throne on earth? Rarely has a new player on the world stage captured so much attention so quickly—young and old, faithful and cynical—as has Pope Francis. In his nine months in office, he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of...

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far. The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments. Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year.

Now that the Big Lie has been exposed for everyone to see, it’s going to take some time for it to sufficiently sink in. I imagine most low-information voters who don’t follow politics regularly -- the obvious exception being people who’ve already been negatively impacted by the Affordable Care Act -- aren’t too familiar with the president’s now-broken “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” pledge. That will all change soon enough. Now, of course, when Americans head to the grocery store -- or perhaps to their local pharmacy -- this cover will...

Time magazine calls the Affordable Care Act a "broken promise" on the cover of its latest issue. The image splits a pill with "Obamacare" inscribed on it in half, separating "Obama" and "care." The cover story, by Nancy Gibbs, looks at how President Barack Obama needs to fix what has been a disastrous rollout of the federal health law — and fix it fast: So the sign that the Obama presidency had reached a turning point came not when his poll numbers sank or his allies shuddered or the commentariat went hunting for the right degree of debacle to compare...

Can I get it to show up at the right time?

When is the Correct Time to Burn Fallen Trees? Has the forest benefitted from government interference with Mother Nature? When the government does not allow the forest to burn off naturally the result is uncontrollable fires in the future. I think they may be a correlation between all misguided government endeavors and the outcomes. The government interferes with the natural order of the economy and the economy remains broken. The government interferes with the world’s absolutely finest most advanced health care delivery system and chaos results. The government attempts to correct poverty results in more poverty. The government borrows money...

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days. It would seem...

Never Enough Time This old QA axiom came to mind observing the hapless Obama administration trying to cover up Obamacare failures. Sadly, I have experienced this on many occasions, too many.

This fact marks our political age: The pendulum is swinging faster and in shorter arcs than it ever has in our lifetimes. Few foresaw the earthquake of 2008 in 2006. No board-certified political professional predicted, on Election Day 2008, what happened in 2009-10 (New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts) and has been happening, and will happen, since then. It all moves so quickly now, it all turns on a dime. But at this moment we are witnessing a shift that will likely have some enduring political impact. Another way of saying that: The past few years, a lot of people in...

Time Warner Inc is planning to transfer its U.S. retirees from company-sponsored health plans and move them to private insurance exchanges. According to an August memo obtained by Reuters, the media company will make allocations to a Health Reimbursement Arrangement account for retirees to use towards the purchase of coverage on an exchange. Previously, Time Warner provided an indirect subsidy through a supplementary Medicare program.

Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from...

When the Class of 2017 arrives on campus this fall, these digital natives will already be well-connected to each other. They are more likely to have borrowed money for college than their Boomer parents were, and while their parents foresee four years of school, the students are pretty sure it will be longer than that. Members of this year’s first year class, most of them born in 1995, will search for the academic majors reported to lead to good-paying jobs, and most of them will take a few courses taught at a distant university by a professor they will never...

Websites belonging to the Washington Post, CNN, and Time have been attacked by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Some links on the sites were redirecting readers to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The breaches have been blamed on a third-party link recommendation service that all three sites used. The SEA has hit several media companies in recent months, mostly via social media. In this attack, the group was able to manipulate links served by content recommendation service Outbrain, which has now been taken offline.

Climate change alters the way in which species interact with one another — a reality that applies not just to today or to the future, but also to the past, according to a paper published by a team of researchers in the journal Science. "We found that, at all time scales, climate change can alter biotic interactions in very complex ways," said paleoecologist Jessica Blois of the University of California, Merced, the paper's lead author. "If we don't incorporate this information when we're anticipating future changes, we're missing a big piece of the puzzle." Blois asked for input from researchers...