Free Republic

Why the Narrative Trumps the Facts What Evolution is All About Greg Conterio, echoing Robert Bidinotto, makes the point that culture war differences often pit the facts versus the narrative. The facts can win every battle but the narrative wins the war. As Bidinotto puts it, “One of the most valuable insights I discovered in recent years is how Narratives trump everything else — including what most of us would call concern for ‘practical results.’” Conterio and Bidinotto are mainly concerned with political issues, but what lies behind their insight is our beliefs about origins. A predetermined narrative is...

Arguing with the Left: We Are Doing It Wrong! Greg Conterio | September 14 2014 If you have ever tried arguing with a liberal, leftist or progressive, at some point you have inevitably come away frustrated by your apparent inability to “win” an argument, despite proving conclusively the other side is objectively wrong. The subject doesn’t matter, it could be the failure of Obama’s foreign policy, the IRS targeting scandal, tax policy, (lack of) Global Warming, or “helping” the poor. There in fact is a literal parade of liberal/leftist social policies and issues that have been unequivocal, abject failures,...

Ok, I need some help here on a topic I know absolutely nothing about: how to evaluate colleges. My oldest son is graduating high school this year and wants to pursue a career in Law Enforcement. He has an excellent GPA (3.7/4.0) and achieved a 32 on his ACT test and as a result we're getting solicitations from colleges all over the country from as far south as Tulane in Louisiana, Hofstra in New York, University of Southern California, Michigan State, Valparaiso University, Marquette and others. We've narrowed down the list of colleges we're visiting based on his desire to...

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Environmental scientists at the University of Nottingham have made a shocking and expensive discovery: eco-friendly buildings made of "sustainable" wood burn much more easily than eco-unfriendly ones made of stone, concrete, steel or glass. They made their surprise discovery over the weekend when their new Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry burned to the ground in what local firemen claimed was the biggest blaze in over a decade. The £15 million building had been erected according to the most rigorous environmental principles, made with a wooden frame and other "sustainable" materials, and powered with "renewable" energy, so that the structure...

A former student at the elite Horace Mann School in The Bronx says his pedophile English teacher bragged about driving 12 kids to suicide — and vowed to make him the 13th. “You will join a long list of willful children who lashed out and then couldn’t make it on their own,” Robert Berman told one of his teen victims, Stephen Fife, according to Fife’s upcoming memoir, “The 13th Boy: A Memoir of Education and Abuse.”

To the delight of its families, Hamilton Elementary has replaced homework for kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders this year with PDF — play, downtime and family time — along with lots of reading for fun. Only a few days into the new year, life is already better, mother Sarah Rothberger said. Not only is there more time for family dinners every night, but evenings now are for playing UNO and Othello, and reading chapters from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “By The Banks of Plum Creek.” Beyond that, he wondered, why should school dictate what families do, given that families can’t control what...

Historically valuable items are continually being lost or destroyed or being found. For example, most R&L readers likely missed a two-paragraph item in the middle of page 10A of last Wednesday's edition. The title of the article was "Canada Finds One of Two Explorers Ships Lost in Arctic." I feel this discovery warrants more coverage. The two vessels were the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, both lost during an expedition to determine the feasibility of traversing the "Northwest Passage," a route over the top of North America to link the Atlantic Ocean and Europe to the Pacific Ocean and...

At Ohio State University, to avoid being guilty of “sexual assault” or “sexual violence,” you and your partner now apparently have to agree on the reason WHY you are making out or having sex. It’s not enough to agree to DO it, you have to agree on WHY: there has to be agreement “regarding the who, what, where, when, why, and how this sexual activity will take place.”There used to be a joke that women need a reason to have sex, while men only need a place. Does this policy reflect that juvenile mindset? Such a requirement baffles some women...

The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our cultural understanding. We all grew up learning that Fire is Hot and Ice is Cold. Therefor red and orange are warm colors while blue and cyan are cool colors.This association in our mind is so strong that filmmakers can actually invoke a sense of temperature just by the color palette they use in their films.Take for example Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing”The film beautifully photographed by Ernest Dickerson, is awash in yellows, oranges and reds invoking the heat of a long, hot day in the Bed Stuy...

With cameras and computers everywhere in our modern world, it’s easy to forget that the very first motion pictures were, themselves, essentially a special effect. It’s here at the beginning of filmmaking that we’ll start our journey:  the close of the 19th century with one of the world’s first prolific filmmakers – a man who spent his life studying the art of illusion – Georges Méliès.Georges Méliès In his 1898 film  Four Heads are better than one, (Un Homme De Tête) Méliès employs a visual trick that is the rudimentary beginnings of what we now think of as greenscreen compositing. The...

Lauren Squires, a sociolinguistic professor at OSU, is distressed by the success of the "Word Crimes" parody from Weird Al Yankovic. Professor Squires tut-tutted, “Many linguists are shaking their heads and feeling a little hopeless about what the public enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified in attacking those who don’t do things the ‘correct’ way.” In his highly entertaining video, Weird Al does not hesitate to insult people who use bad grammar. The professor thinks that Weird Al’s attitude “raises deep and long-standing questions...

The video is already generating death threats. SURPRIIISE! Is "ISIS" merely a radical group? What about EVERY SINGLE Islamic country committing gross violations of human rights? The video debunks... Also, Dana Loesch literally slaps an Islamic terrorist!

Public employee unions represent workers at every level of government - federal, state and local. Since contract negotiations for these workers are dependent not on private corporations, but on the size of government budgets, this is the one segment of the labor movement that can actually contribute directly to the people with ultimate responsibility for its livelihood. While their giving pattern matches that of other unions (which overwhelmingly support Democrats), public sector unions also concentrate contributions on members of Congress from both parties who sit on committees that deal with federal budgets and agencies.This broad category encompasses teachers, firefighters, police...

A New Jersey teacher has been charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinari announced the arrest of 23-year-old Oradell resident Rachel Permut. The woman is being charged with one count of distribution of child pornography and one count of endangering the welfare of a child.

I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth. Well, it’s back to school time and all across our country, college students are suffering from an insidious form of oppression called microaggressions. These are defined as commonplace verbal or, behavioral indignities... that communicate racist or sexist slights or insults...” Microaggressions take place when, for instance, a woman sees a black male and clutches her purse more tightly making it too damn hard for him to snatch the thing away from her... or when two men hear a woman speaking and look at one another like this [makes a face] the...

In Berlin, a Memorial to German Euthanasia Victims Wesley J. Smith September 10, 2014 4:46 PM | Permalink The Associated Press reports: Germany on Tuesday inaugurated a memorial to more than 200,000 people with physical and mental disabilities killed by the Nazis after their lives were deemed "worthless."The transparent 24-meter (79-foot) blue glass wall outside the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall is near memorials to the Jewish Holocaust victims and the Nazis' gay and Gypsy, or Roma, victims, opened over the past decade.It stands on the site of a villa where the murder of patients at hospitals and mental institutes was...

The matter remains unsettled, and probably will for quite a while. Many schools have gone with the flow of offering students a tablet or laptop computer that will contain all their most essential lessons. Many schools consider it a given, that within five to ten years, there will be no physical books at all. Every piece of study matter will be found on a computer owned or rented by the student. But wait, there is subtle pushback. Not so fast, say many of the students themselves. Most students, from elementary through grad school, have grown up surrounded with digital inventions,...

High school teachers in west suburban Hinsdale have taken a step closer to a possible strike, amid stalled contract talks with Hinsdale Township High School District 86. On Tuesday, the Hinsdale High School Teachers Association filed a strike notice with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. That starts a 28-day countdown until teachers can actually walk off the job. District 86 Board President Dr. Richard Skoda said, “I am especially saddened by this because last night the Board unanimously announced in public that we were seriously weighing the Union’s proposal, which we received at 10 p.m. Sunday night, and sought...

NEW ALBANY, IN (WAVE) - Child Protective Services is investigating the case of an autistic child placed in a closet during school where he scratched and clawed at the wall, according to an attorney representing the child's family. Kim Gosnell said her son may have had an outburst, but she claims Georgetown Elementary caused her child to harm himself because of how staff members reacted to the situation. School personnel drafted an individualized education plan with Gosnell to outline how staff should respond when the child is over sensitized, but Gosnell claims the plan did not include placing the boy...