Free Republic

At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point. The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child...children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event... The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting...

The United States is currently subject to a sharp political divide between the left and the right, with just around half of the country on each side. The two sides obviously differ in the government policies that they advocate, but there is another difference that I think is even more important. The right, or at least most of it, welcomes differences of opinion, while the left allows no dissent from the orthodoxy of the moment. An op-ed by Ben Shapiro in today’s New York Post provides several notable examples. But this one best illustrates the left/right divide on tolerance of...

Live Action News has uncovered a document which indicates that the Population Council, a non-profit founded by eugenicists (which brought the abortion pill to the U.S. and then created manufacturer DANCO Laboratories to market the drug known as mifepristone) was originally set up to receive royalties from sales of the abortion pill. The information was found within the organization’s 1998 990 and is seen in the image below. A review of Population Council annual reports reveal that, despite the group’s creation of an abortion pill company, millions of taxpayer dollars have been funneled to the Population Council since the late...

Eleven Americans explain how Big Tech’s cheap foreign labor cost them their livelihoods.

Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott said he would sign a bill that would abolish Columbus Day and replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” The bill to dump the traditional holiday passed through the state legislature in Montpelier on Wednesday and is now on the governor’s desk waiting for a signature, the Burlington Free Press reported. “I see no reason that I would not sign it,” Scott told the media, “but we’re reviewing the bill as we speak.” “I know it’s controversial from many standpoints, from many people, but you know, it’s just a day, and we’ll get through it,” Scott...

Shares of the ailing department store chain JCP, +6.10% crashed on Thursday, dipping as low as 92 cents before closing down 7.5%, at 97 cents — the first time they’ve ever closed below a dollar since the company went public in the late 1970s. [Shares remained below $1 Friday morning.]

When news broke that the upcoming Hollywood film about the moon landing leaves out the planting of an American flag in lunar soil (though it apparently shows the flag later), both sides of the ideological aisle instantly weighed in, each with compelling arguments. The film in question has only been seen by a select few, meaning the truth won’t be clear until its Oct. 12 release. That didn’t stop Social Media Nation. (Does it ever?) The problem began when Ryan Gosling, who stars as Neil Armstrong in director Damien Chazelle’s film, shared why we don’t see the astronaut planting an...

I have previously written that no one knows how long legal immigrant workers will have to wait for permanent residency (i.e. green cards) in the United States, particularly from India where the wait times are the longest. But now U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has released the number of applicants for each category, so we can compute rough estimates of the number of years it will take people applying today to receive their green cards. Table 1 provides the data. As of April 20, 2018, there were 632,219 Indian immigrants and their spouses and minor children waiting for green...

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory. “What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine. He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” SNIP--- Mr. Rhodes describes the reaction of foreign leaders. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of...

Dead malls are popping up all over the states, particularly in the Midwest, where economic decline has sped up the "going out of business" process. This map, put together by a Dead Malls Enthusiasts Facebook group, shows that well. As Americans are faced with multiple shopping options and more stores are leaving malls, it should be interesting to see if malls and mall culture will survive. What you are about to see is what happens when malls are abandoned. It's apocalyptic and really, really creepy....

Rules demand distribution during coming 12-day 'camping' event. . .The World Scout Committee is demanding that host nations “ensure that condoms are readily and easily accessible for all participants and IST [staff] at a number of locations on the site.” . . .

By 2014, California was the top state in eighth-grade algebra enrollment. Common Core erased all those gains almost immediately ... Before Common Core came along, California parents, faculty, and officials spent years developing some of the best-ranked K-12 math requirements in the nation. One result of their careful work was more than tripling the number of eighth graders who ranked proficient in math, and quadrupling the number of eighth graders taking algebra. By 2014, California was the top state in the nation in eighth-grade algebra enrollment. That was the year Common Core went into place. It erased all those gains...

Ford today announced it will phase out most cars it sells in North America. According to its latest financial release, the auto giant will "will transition to two vehicles" being the Mustang and an unannounced vehicle, the Focus Active, as the only traditional cars it sells in the region. Ford sees 90 percent of its North America portfolio in trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Citing a reduction in consumer demand and product profitability, Ford is in turn not investing into the next generation sedans. The Taurus is no more.

The New York Daily News, a tabloid that once boasted one of the highest daily circulations in the nation, has been sold to tronc, the Chicago-based former Tribune Publishing company, the companies said Monday night. The News, a nearly 100-year-old media company, is based in Manhattan and was owned by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. “Adding an iconic media property like The Daily News not only expands our tremendous portfolio of newspaper brands, it also allows us to grow our digital platform and broaden our services for advertisers and marketers,” Dearborn said.

For years now, the Kennedy Center Honors have been devolving from an award that recognizes stellar achievement across a diverse and rich tradition of American arts into an entertainment-driven event that rewards star power and pop-culture cachet. Representatives of the wide range of traditional arts, including classical music, opera and ballet, have been slowly edged out until, it seemed, they were lucky to be represented with a single award among the five given out each year. This year even that toehold looks precarious. Of the five artists to receive the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, only dancer and choreographer Carmen de...

Between 20% and 25% of the nation’s shopping malls will close in the next five years, according to a new report from Credit Suisse that predicts e-commerce will continue to pull shoppers away from bricks-and-mortar retailers. For many, the Wall Street firm’s finding may come as no surprise. Long-standing retailers are dying off as shoppers’ habits shift online. Credit Suisse expects apparel sales to represent 35% of all e-commerce by 2030, up from 17% today. Traditional mall anchors, such as Macy’s, J.C. Penney and Sears, have announced numerous store closings in recent months. Clothiers including American Apparel, Bebe and BCBG...

In 1973 the median household income was $9,265... Consider that the median sales price of a new home in January, 1973, was only $29,900—3.2 times the median household income. In other words, if the median family saved up every penny earned, and put it towards a new home, it would take just over three years to buy a brand new house. This held relatively steady for the next decade. In 1985, new home prices crept up a little, to 3.7 times the median household income. It was during the 1990s and 2000s that home prices began to skyrocket towards where...

Americans are stuck. Locked into our jobs, rooted where we live, frozen at our income levels. More than at any previous point in our history, we’ve stopped moving — whether moving up the income ladder or packing up a truck and finding another home. We’ve grown ossified, rigid. The flip side is that we’re stable. If we weren’t so content, we’d be more willing to gamble, to shake things up, to start a new firm or join one. Maybe we’re fine where we are. But maybe this period of stasis cannot last. Maybe it even portends a period of massive...

Baby Boomers: your millennial children are worse off than you. With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles. The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher. The generational gap...

The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see.