Free Republic

Is there any sanity or decency left on our college campuses? Isn’t there one of these fake “intuitions of higher learning” where the adults who draw a paycheck for running them feel an obligation to blow a whistle, stop the recess and correct the children whose parents are supporting both of them? It’s difficult to find a college where the foolishness of its poorly educated students is discouraged let alone stopped. The people running some of our biggest and most influential colleges and universities have stepped aside and walked away from their OBLIGATION to teach. When I taught at the...

"...and we shouldn't have to worry about that."Nelson County Sheriff Ed Mattingly stated bluntly Monday that officials were “glad” that a man who was shot by a deputy was “white,” adding that though they “shouldn’t have to be worried about that,” they didn’t want “backlash or violence” due to the public being “misinformed” by the media. In a joint press conference Monday with Bardstown Police Chief Rick McCubbin about the shooting of John Kennedy Fenwick, 25, over the weekend, Sheriff Mattingly said candidly that they couldn't help but "take notice" of the mishandling of police-involved shooting cases by media outlets...

An interview with Walt Heyer, who lived eight years as a woman following ‘gender reassignment’ surgery before undergoing therapy, turning to Christ and returning to living as a man. Courtesy of Walt Heyer Walt Heyer reverted to his biological male identity after living as a woman following ‘gender reassignment’ surgery. Walt Heyer lived for eight years as a woman named Laura Jensen. Having suffered from gender-identity disorder since he was a child, Heyer was a married, successful businessman when he underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his sex at age 42. However, Heyer said surgery and hormone treatment failed to address...

Not wanting to court danger, the Boca West Country Club has refused to host the Palm Beach Republican Party's "Lobsterfest" dinner that advertised controversial Islamic critic Geert Wilders as the keynote speaker. Geert was part of the Garland, Texas, cartoon contest that invited participants to draw the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic law prohibits any image of the prophet to ward off idol worship. However, extremists have violently attacked or threatened with death anyone who has published a drawing or depiction of Muhammad over the years. The belief was what prompted extremists to attack the headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,...

Mayor Bill de Blasio, you have a life-and-death problem. “This guy de Blasio is a disaster,’’ Thomas Von Essen, the former New York City fire commissioner, told me. Von Essen presided over New York’s Bravest on Sept. 11, 2001 — the day terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocents, including 343 valiant souls under his command. “I already gave this city my husband. I’m not going to give it my son,’’ a woman who lost her firefighter husband on 9/11, and whose son followed in his dad’s footsteps by joining the Fire Department, told me. She asked to remain anonymous so as...

A computer virus that tries to avoid detection by making the machine it infects unusable has been found. If Rombertik's evasion techniques are triggered, it deletes key files on a computer, making it constantly restart. Analysts said Rombertik was "unique" among malware samples for resisting capture so aggressively. On Windows machines where it goes unnoticed, the malware steals login data and other confidential information. Endless loop Rombertik typically infected a vulnerable machine after a booby-trapped attachment on a phishing message had been opened, security researchers Ben Baker and Alex Chiu, from Cisco, said in a blogpost. Some of the messages...

The University of North Dakota has unveiled the complete list of suggestions it received for a new team nickname to replace the "Fighting Sioux," which was retired in 2012. And boy, were some of the names ridiculous. You can check here for the list of 1,172 names still in contention, but let's pay tribute to some of the more amusing monikers suggested -- with shoutouts to Kobe Bryant, "Game of Thrones" and "South Park" -- and promptly missed the cut. And as you can see below, many people who submitted names (UND had to whittle down the 628-page list of...

A two-star general resigned his command in San Antonio last week after making a racially-charged comment during a lower-ranking officer's disciplinary hearing, the Air Force said Monday. Maj. Gen. Michael Keltz, then commander of the 19th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, told an accused officer that he appeared “drunker than 10,000 Indians” in a photo of him and another airman. The Air Force confirmed that Keltz made the remark, which initially was reported in a blog.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two New York City cops approach a gray sedan with a suspected drunken driver slumped over the wheel. They ask him to get out, and that's when the trouble begins. The suspect, dressed in a rumpled suit, curses and hollers at the officers because he doesn't want to go to jail. He refuses to be handcuffed and backs away, yelling, "Can't we work this out?"

Our scientific method and traditions of free speech and open debate are under assault as never before, by intolerant inquisitors in our media, universities, government agencies, and even Congress and the Vatican. They threaten our most basic rights and freedoms, our political and scientific processes – and ultimately our continued innovation and invention, energy reliability and affordability, job creation and economic growth, and modern living standards, health and welfare. Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their...

A comment deemed ethnically offensive has ended the 34-year career of an Air Force major general, a decorated combat pilot who oversaw about 32,000 personnel. Air Force officials have not disclosed the specific words that led to the resignation of Maj. Gen. Michael Keltz, commander of 19th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, Texas. The comment was made at a public, nonjudicial punishment proceeding, at which a company-grade officer was appealing an Article 15 punishment before Keltz, the convening authority. The hearing was held April 9 in San Antonio. Article 15 hearings are typically held for minor infractions and...

All CSUN students registering for the 2015 Fall Semester are being forced to participate in an online, SIMS-style character game about sexual assault before being allowed to claim a seat for any course. The game, titled “Agent of Change” and designed by feminist activists, does not allow students to complete the game until they have given enough “correct” answers as per the designers’ stated philosophical influences, such as “norms challenging,” and “social norms theory.” According to the Agent of Change website, the program helps users “see the connections between these power-based violations, how these problems affect their lives, and what they can do to challenge the cultural...

One of the more contentious ideas to recently emerge from the culture war is that of "safe spaces." We are said to be at risk of social dangers. Sometimes these dangers are labeled denialism (in which someone's identity isn't recognized) or triggering speech (speech that sets off traumatic responses in unwitting listeners). The way some students at elite colleges combat these social dangers is to create, or demand the creation of, safe spaces. And just as often, students demand that their entire campus become a safe space. Hence the wrong kind of speech is re-labeled as violence. The space only...

The security situation in the Mediterranean will continue to deteriorate to the point where we can expect Islamist raids on European islands, a recently retired Royal Navy Admiral has told Breitbart London. [snip] Rear Admiral Chris Parry CBE, the straight-talking former Director General of the Ministry of Defence Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre, ... made the comments in an interview this week as European nations gathered to discuss the sudden migrant crisis gripping the Mediterranean. THE THREAT OF ISLAM Parry, who warned in a government paper in 1990 that Islam would replace Communism as the main threat against the West...

We’ve written quite a bit about Trigger Warnings since before it became fashionable: The fragile college student mind is getting more fragile by the day.As if the normal run of political correctness were not enough, we now have “Trigger Warnings” — the notion that students need to be warned that the material they are about to read in class may “trigger” emotional upset….Of course, how the trigger is defined says much about the theory behind the movement — it almost always serves left-wing critical race and gender theories ….The Trigger Warning movement is all about enforcing a conformity of thought...

Higher education professionals are dismayed at the growing number of students who expect their universities to protect their tender emotions from over-stimulation. If you graduated from college in the previous millennium, you may be unaware that many students now believe that college professors and administrators should protect them from, rather than expose them to, ideas they disagree with, especially ideas that disturb them. Much of the recent debate over the current state of college campuses was spurred by Judith Shulevitz's March 21 op-ed in The New York Times, "In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas." The Brown University campus, Shulevitz...

...'Isis' has been taken off from the formal checklist of names of foreseeable future hurricanes as it was now considered inappropriate mainly because of the eponymous militant group....

A Pittsburgh-area school district is investigating allegations of harassment involving students. Several parents and students from McGuffey High School in Washington County have reached out to Channel 11 News voicing concern about a so-called “Anti-Gay Day” allegedly organized by some students. A group of students allegedly spread the news that if they were “Anti-Gay,” they were to wear a flannel shirt and write “Anti-Gay” on their hands. Below is a statement from Dr. Erica Kolat, the superintendent of McGuffey School District. “Yesterday afternoon, April 16, 2015, allegations of harassment were brought to the attention of our administration. McGuffey School District,...

"....The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate,Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.Like sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space became a culture-war battlefield.“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or...

When an institution sets out to ban something, more often than not the thing they choose to ban simply reflects back on that institution’s way of thinking. So what does it tell us about the Oxford University Press that they are banning authors from using words that refer to pigs? Yes, you read that correctly. Oxford UP is prohibiting authors from using the words pig, pork, sausage, or other pig-related words because they are afraid of offending Jewish or Muslim readers who consider pigs and pork to be off-limits for religious reasons. Now, I can understand how Oxford UP would...