Free Republic

I recently posted about taking Joe hunting, and how he is now capable of hunting on his own.   Joe is on the right, Jason is on the left.  Last year, Jason expressed an interest in hunting, but we were not able to make it happen.   This year, I was able to take Jason on his first hunt. I arrived to pick up the young hunters.   A mistake had been made in setting the alarm clock, so no one was up, and I was knocking on the door at 5:15 a.m.   They got up shortly, and we were able to...

This story shocked me. Sure, I understood how Lesbian Chic propaganda conceals the heartache, exploitation, abuse and violence that occurs between women. Yes, I realized that the “rape culture” rhetoric and angry lectures about “consent” were cynical political posturing intended to leverage the militant anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of radical feminism being promulgated by Women’s Studies programs on America’s college and university campuses. Still, even knowing all that, I was shocked by Wesleyan University student Caroline Catlin’s account at Huffington Post: At first, we laughed about it. My friend and I sat at a small table in a crowded coffee shop on...

This week’s Black Twitter brouhaha was over a new University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation study of Black Twitter itself. Like the world, the Internet has self-segregated into different communities, subcultures or as USC calls them, digital “neighborhoods.” And one of the largest — and some say one of the most powerful — of the social networking subcultures is Black Twitter. “Black Twitter is, loosely speaking, a group of thousands of Back Twitterers (though, to be accurate, not everyone within Black Twitter is Black, and not every Black person on Twitter is in Black Twitter) who a) are interested in...

Over glasses of wine and a disco-spinning DJ, more than a dozen government-funded game developers showcased their products on a Wednesday night in Washington, D.C. Various government agencies have been paying these developers millions of dollars to create educational video games. The games ran the gamut from a Common Core-aligned, Shire-themed math challenge to a “judgment-free” historical role-playing game—and none of them were cheap. One young developer was eager to explain that the government spends more on these programs than most people might imagine. They’re usually funded through the Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR), on which the government spends...

I had read about Moms Demanding Action's strident calling for a boycott of Kroger's over MDA's dislike of the exercise of the second amendment.  I had also read the new media's urging to show support for Kroger's polite reply that the MDA's should mind their own business.   Of course, political manipulation is the MDA's business... and that runs exactly contrary to the limits on government that allow for toleration of others. So I stopped at Fry's and filled up the tank.   I was open carrying, as I usually am in Arizona, especially at this time of year.  Opening day...

Last year, I wrote about mentoring a new hunter.   It is harder to bring new hunters into the gun culture now than when I was a child.   When I started hunting at age 11, with an air rifle on the farm in northern Wisconsin, I grabbed a gun, stepped out the door, and was hunting.   My father had carefully told me what pests I could hunt.  In  a year, I was using a real rifle,  a .22.  My father taught me to shoot, but most of my early hunting was alone or in the company of one or...

To drive home a point in a conversation with me about guns, someone showed me a video where Penn Jillette of the famous “Penn and Teller Magic Team,” in an attempt to show you that violent video games don’t cause violence, or do not make kids violent, brought the reality of the firearm to a young man at a shooting range. The kid, who is an efficient violent killer on a video game system, had the chance to fire a rifle with all of the big scary cosmetics added to it that make gun control addicts scream and yell that...

When a Kansas City family pulled their son out of a public elementary school to homeschool him, the local school referred them to the district attorney’s office for truancy. A homeschool advocacy organization intervened, and the school was forced to back down and apologize. In Kansas, as in several other states, families must register their homes as “private schools” to homeschool their children. The family followed the law exactly, naming and registering their school and notifying their son’s elementary school in February that he would be withdrawing. But a few months later, in May, the school sent the family a...

If the Michigan Department of Education were to take the socioeconomic status of students into consideration when ranking school performance, it would find that charter public schools outperform conventional public schools on the state's Top-to-Bottom list, according to an analysis done by Audrey Spalding, education policy director for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Spalding’s analysis found that if there are two schools of the same grade levels where both have the same percentage of students eligible for a free lunch — one a charter public school and the other a conventional public school — the charter would, on average,...

Younger generations can be forgiven if all they know of war is what they have learned in school or seen dramatized on film and television. For most Americans, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam are events that occurred “a long time ago.” For my generation, born just prior to or during World War Two, wars have been a constant element of our lives.

Process it yourself first, ask students what they want to know and by all means, don’t make the lesson colorblind. Find out these and more tips for classroom discussions about Michael Brown’s death.It’s no exaggeration to refer to the shooting death of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, the treatment of protesters and civilians by a militarized police force in in its aftermath, and the context of racial inequality in which they all happened as an American tragedy. But there’s little time to mourn such a thing when you have to head back...

My graphic artistic skill doesn’t extend much beyond stick figures and daisies, and my rather limited visual sense means that my home was designed more with an eye to utility than aesthetics. Despite my personal limitations, I’m actually very fond of, and quite knowledgeable about, art.More specifically, I’m fond of and knowledgeable about art through the early 20th century. I’ve taken numerous art history classes and can discuss with some sophistication all manner and times of sculpture and painting. I’ve been to most of the great museums in the Western world,* and bored my children silly by dragging them through...

Meet Melissa A. Horn. She’s the 40-year-old Wisconsin school principal who’s currently bullying an 11-year-old boy over a tiny picture of a gun and an American flag on the computer he uses only at home.The boy, Matthew, is “attending” — through distance learning, via computer — Wisconsin Virtual Learning, a 4K-12K virtual school run as an online pubic charter school by the Northern Ozaukee School District.Horn is its principal and executive director. For more on Horn, consult her LinkedIn page and her “Executive Director’s Message” in which she speaks about how, at Wisconsin Virtual Learning, “we pride ourselves in being...

Ted Cruz gave a great speech today, hitting four topics he said would be at the forefront between now and the elections in November: Amnesty, Obamacare, National Security, and the Rule of Law. His biggest applause line came when he called for the impeachment of Eric Holder, where he got a big standing ovation. There’s so many good soundbites you might as well watch the whole speech and you can do that below:

AUGUST 29, 2014 Teachers Hate Poor Kids In Florida, union goons line up to beat down poor minority families By Kevin D. Williamson Alberto Carvalho, the highly regarded Miami-Dade schools superintendent, jokes that he wants to be the most “underpaid” public servant in the country. Underpaid? Public-school types keep using that word; I do not think that it means what they think it means. I don’t really want to beat up on Carvalho, who seems to be a pretty good guy doing some pretty good things. But bottom lines matter. Under the leadership of the district’s (“underpaid”) $320,000-a-year superintendent, who...

Boy, am I glad I'm not in college anymore California has become the first state to adopt a "yes means yes" standard for sexual encounters. The law "would require 'affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement' by each party to engage in sexual activity." And not just at the outset of the tryst, as this article in the Washington Post explains:

Nearly four out of five students in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the Michigan Department of Education’s Top-To-Bottom Ratings for 2013-14 were eligible for the federal governments free or reduced-price lunch program. Only about 11 percent of the students in the top 5 percent of schools in those rankings were eligible for the free lunch program. Right now, the rankings rely 50 percent on overall achievement scores and 25 percent on the gap between the highest and lowest performing students. The other 25 percent is academic improvement. That raises concerns that the state education department is simply measuring...

One organization is working to not only honor the achievements and legacy of the late Michael Brown, but to also help his younger siblings achieve what he didn't have the chance to. Brown, the unarmed black teen who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month, was a recent high school graduate. He was scheduled to start classes at Vatterott College on Aug. 11, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but was killed two days prior. The Wisconsin Hope Lab -- a program that researches ways to minimize barriers for students of all backgrounds...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) DURHAM -- NC Central University's Black Law Students Association protested the shooting death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18 year old shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. On the same day as Brown's funeral, the students hosted a "Hands Up" rally. "The question is not if there will be another incident like this, but when and where," said NCCU Law Professor Irving Joyner during his remarks. Wearing all black on the same day as Brown's funeral, NC Central law students, professors and Durham community members posed for a picture with their hands raised...

Tarisai Mukahanana (26) says if she could, she would tell all those who are graduating these days that they have set themselves on a rough and tough road -- tougher than any university assignment. Perhaps like Mukahanana who graduated with a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Nursing Science in 2010 from a local university and many other graduates that are being churned out each year, today's university graduates already know that they are graduating into obvious unemployment. Considering the high levels of unemployment in Zimbabwe, Mukahanana believes the future of Zimbabwe's youth is hopelessly bleak. Mukahanana now survives on...