Free Republic

PUEBLO, Colo. -- Hackers are hitting construction signs in Southern Colorado. The latest message? An electronic sign that warned "Caution: Zombie Stripper."

In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff’s department adapted. “We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to...

In May 2009, a remarkably well-preserved extinct primate, nicknamed “Ida,” was hailed as one of the most important fossil finds ever. It had features that some interpreted as a link between two primate body forms. At the time, ICR News suggested that its evolutionary significance was far overblown, predicting that the scientific consensus would offer retractions. Those retractions came three months later, confirming that the fossil―called Darwinius―was really just an extinct lemur variety...

By Duncan Mansfield Associated Press Posted Nov 02, 2009 @ 09:00 AM KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The convicted ringleader in the 2007 carjacking and torture slaying of a young Tennessee couple has been sentenced to death. Memphis native Lemaricus Davidson, 28, showed no reaction after jurors concluded four hours of deliberations and announced the sentence Friday in a case that raised racial tensions and inflamed Internet bloggers because the victims were white and the defendants are black. The same jury convicted Davidson on Wednesday of more than 30 charges, including premeditated murder and felony murder, for the January 2007 attack on...

Fish Studies Answer Flood Question by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the Bible, the world before Noah’s Flood, including the oceans, must have been idyllic. That was destroyed by the year-long global deluge, during which the earth’s land mass broke into continents, massive amounts of sediment were deposited and then partially eroded, and new and perhaps deeper oceans became more salty from continental runoff. If this historical picture is accurate, then at least one area of confusion needs to be addressed: How did “saltwater fish” live through all that?...

Evolution: hacking back the tree of life 13 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Laura Spinney If you want to know how all living things are related, don't bother looking in any textbook that's more than a few years old. Chances are that the tree of life you find there will be wrong. Since they began delving into DNA, biologists have been finding that organisms with features that look alike are often not as closely related as they had thought. These are turbulent times in the world of phylogeny, yet there has been one rule that evolutionary biologists felt they could...

Money Matters by: Bethany Stotts, October 03, 2007 The numerous problems with the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have sparked criticism from both liberal and conservative policymakers. The National Education Association (NEA) has pushed for higher teacher salaries, smaller classrooms, and ‘indicative’ longitudinal testing. In contrast, the libertarian CATO Institute education policy analyst, Neal McCluskey, argues for the end of federal and state government intervention in education. Although increased funding has not translated into educational gains, special interest groups continue to push for increased expenditures. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) 2006 Education Report Card, between...

The overall grade point average at the University of Colorado has fallen in three years because the school is cracking down on grade inflation... Student GPAs fell from 2.99 in 2004 to 2.94 last year, ... "I think that's a fairly significant change," DiStefano said. "It's going in the right direction." The drop represents the first decline in grades at CU in more than a decade. From 1993 to 2004, GPAs rose 4.5 percent. The drop in GPA isn't because kids are dumber; students today are as bright as those in the past, officials said. CU knows this because it...

....The main contributing factor is probably the disintegration of the family. The divorce rate has grown from 12 percent in 1970 to almost 40 percent in 2005; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; one third of all mothers are living alone; 40 percent of all children are born to unmarried parents. Indeed, the “recombined family” has become the French sociological and ethical norm, the result of successive unions and separations in which children wander from home to home under arrangements of “shared parental authority” and must learn to get along with a host of similarly forlorn children produced...

...Using new technology to study the genomes of 270 volunteers from four corners of the world, researchers have found that while people do indeed inherit one chromosome from each parent, they do not necessarily inherit one gene from mom and another from dad. One parent can pass down to a child three or more copies of a single gene. In some cases, people can inherit as many as eight or 10 copies....

Evolution is on the way out - more than 30% of students in the UK say they believe in creationism and intelligent design. Harriet Swain reports on a surprising new survey. *snip* This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin - evolution theory rang true for only 56%. Opinionpanel Research's survey of more than 1,000 students found a third of those who said they were Muslims and more than a quarter of those who said they were Christians supported creationism. Nearly a third of Christians and 10% of those with no...

Are Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers Evolving or Devolving?   03/11/2005 Anthropologists typically view stone age tribes as stuck in an eddy from primitive beginnings, never advancing into civilization.  Yet some tribes of hunter-gatherers in Thailand and Laos appear to have been farmers in their past, reports Science Now with apparent surprise: Traditionally, anthropologists thought that modern hunter-gatherer tribes like the Mlabri descended through the ages unchanged.  But an analysis of the tribe led by Mark Stoneking of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, indicates that these communities are more complex than previously imagined.   (Emphasis added in...

The band members wore uniforms and did some synchronized moves. Their songs had snappy little hooks and robotic drumbeats. They even started their set with an introductory video. But Devo was hardly a boy band when it played on Friday night at Central Park SummerStage, in its first public New York concert since the 1980's. Just in time for the current new-wave revival, Devo, which got started in Ohio in 1972 and released its first album in 1978, returned to prove that its songs still have some bite. Paradoxes have always collected around Devo. It started as an art project,...

"Shed Powers!!" (To be sung to the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers") Folks, when you're sitting there, thinkin' 'bout supportin' Kerry... Votin' fer some rich bloke you don't know... Well, Hanoi John LOATHES the FRee...prefers Sosh'list Tyranny!! He's a Massachusetts Lib'ral to the bone!! Devolve Power, Prez'dent Dubyuh!! Devolve Power!! Our Righteous dreams can be real if Bush leads US now!! That's Right...we can devolve Power to individuals... Must devolve Power to the States... States, devolve Power to the Counties... Folks, it's time we Liberate the U.S. of A.!! Now hear me, DemonRATS...Right did Liberate Iraq!! Folks're FRee 'cuz George Dubyuh...

<p>Kneel down. Put your hands together. Offer thanks right this very moment to whatever deity you desire that that you are not 18 years old and gay and living in the state of Kansas right now.</p> <p>This gratitude, it is a given. This is so much of a given you might not even need to hear why. You just say to yourself, oh my freaking God, I can only imagine.</p>

Contact: Ann Cairns acairns@geosociety.org 303-357-1056 Geological Society of America Debate heats up on role of climate in human evolution Boulder, Colo.- Scientists at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Seattle next week are taking a comprehensive new look at drivers of human evolution. It now appears that climate variability during the Plio-Pleistocene (approximately 6 million years in duration) played a hugely important role. Astronomically controlled climate forcing on scales ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 years down to El Niños (5-7 years) made a highly unpredictable environment in which generalists with intelligence, language, and creativity were best able to...

Equipped with an abundant knowledge of history, Michael Tuggle has cast a discerning eye on the trends of the present. Not the 'trendy' trends but the real ones, those which can guide our steps into the future (as far as the future can be known to us mortals). The trends suggest to him something very hopeful - the probability and suitability of a change in the principle by which human affairs are governed. We have been living for a long time by the organising principle of command from the top down - something the American Founding Fathers decried as 'consolidation'-...