Free Republic

There have been a lot of news stories recently about young children being punished for talking about guns, making toy guns, owning toy guns, and drawing guns. This new story takes the cake: a group of students from Chase Lake Elementary School in Edmonds, Washington, asked their teacher if they could bring Nerf guns to school. The teacher gave permission, but the school punished the children with suspension anyway. The students even had a perfectly legitimate reason to bring the guns to school; they wanted to fire foam darts 100 times as part of a probability experiment. The school...

The other day, I learned that President Obama has canceled our Mars Rover explorations, along with all other planetary missions. NASA's science mission chief just quit in disgust, and who can blame him? Apparently, even robots' lives are too precious for us to risk these days, so America is giving up the thrill of discovering space. While I was stewing over the news that the Russians will now take over our Mars missions (the Red Planet is turning that kind of Red), I decided to relax by watching the Super Bowl -- just in time to see the lights blow...

The National Academy of Sciences creates virtual blacklists of scientists who dare to disagree with 'the consensus.' While most people understand that governmental entities are politicized, there are some we like to think maintain enough integrity to serve the public good. We hope, for example, that the Centers for Disease Control would be free of politicized determinations for what to do about swine flu. And we hope that the Food and Drug Administration were more concerned about whether a drug were beneficial than about how the cost of that drug might influence new healthcare legislation.One such entity we have relied...