Free Republic

Look whose photo graces the campus of UCLA, meant to be an inspiration to incoming students. The woman in the photo is standing above the slogan: “We Question.” On the right-hand side, in small letters, students are informed that they are “the optimists.” This banner adds to the shadow that today is cast over so many of our major universities. For those who can’t identify her, the photo depicts Angela Davis, the notorious former Communist Party USA leader who, beginning in the ’60s, molded together black nationalism with Marxism-Leninism. She created a heady brew for recruiting new cadre into the...

Note: This is the first in a series of essays examining the prospects for electing a republican president in 2016 and ultimately reining in the modern imperial presidency through the lens of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist essays on the executive branch. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a politician making Iowa or New Hampshire his second home must be in want of the presidency. We’ve got more than a few of those these days and can expect the 2016 presidential campaign to begin in earnest minutes after the mid-term elections conclude. Expect the Big Announcement from Hillary some time “around”...

On October 14 feminist speaker Anita Sarkeesian canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University upon learning that state law forbids the university from banning concealed carry on campus.

......a poetic plea from an 8-year-old boy. His message was broadcast inside a community center in Newark on Saturday afternoon, but his words were interrupted by gunshots. “Violence came as I was talking,” Nyeeam Hudson said. During Nyeeam’s plea for peace, a young man was shot and killed outside.

A Manchester High School student walked up behind a fellow student he knew in a music classroom Monday and repeatedly stabbed and slashed the victim in an attempt to kill him, a juvenile intake officer testified Tuesday at the defendant’s detention hearing. Reading from a police report during the hearing in Chesterfield County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, Chesterfield Intake officer Ronald Burroughs told a judge that Chad Hensley, 17, approached fellow student Benjamin Millefolie, also 17, from behind and began stabbing him multiple times in front of a class full of students.

In the debut of Reality Check, Ben Shapiro takes on Ben Affleck and the myth that only a tiny minority of Muslims worldwide are radical.

Pope Francis leads the synod of bishops in Paul VI's hall at the Vatican October 6, 2014. Pope Francis opened a global Roman Catholic assembly on Sunday showing his apparent irritation with Church leaders who have waged a sometimes bitter public battle between progressives and conservatives on family issues. A recently released midterm report from the Synod of Bishops on the family, which defended the traditional definition of marriage but used positive language towards same-sex couples in some situations, has garnered controversy among some bishops who say it does not accurately reflect the assembly's views. "In regard to homosexuality, there...

A Fuss Over Dust: Planck Satellite Fails to Confirm Big Bang 'Proof' by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * During a high profile news conference in March 2014, the BICEP2 radio astronomy team announced purported direct evidence for inflation— an important part of the modern Big Bang model.1 In Big Bang cosmology, inflation is a hypothesized "growth spurt" in which the universe enormously increased in size. Inflation was an ad hoc addition to the Big Bang model intended to solve some very serious theoretical difficulties, including the Big Bang's own version of the seeing-distant-starlight-in-a-young- universe problem.2 Inflation was originally thought to have...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcEL-NlxBk0There is widespread allegation -- really a slander -- that Israel is an apartheid state. That notion is simply wrong. It is inaccurate and it is malicious. And it will not help to promote peace and harmony in the Middle East. Its only purpose is to demonize Israel, and to isolate her in an attempt to de-legitimize Israel's existence. And because it is so inaccurate, it betrays the memory of those who suffered through a real apartheid. As a black South African, who was born under apartheid, in the administrative capital of South Africa, Pretoria, I know what apartheid is....

Goddard College's recent decision to have its students addressed from prison by a convicted cop killer is just one of many unbelievably irresponsible self-indulgences by "educators" in our schools and colleges. Such "educators" teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain — American citizenship — that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times. If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who...

Throwing Darwin a Curve by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. * “The pitch cuts the inside corner of the plate for strike two.” That familiar sound is heard on radios around the world. In fact, some of the best pitchers in America are not Americans. Great pitching ability is not limited to ethnicity or geography, but rather to human beings alone. Great pitchers make it look so easy, and “practice makes perfect,” but it helps that the brain power necessary for control, neurological connections, and muscular arrangements for the human arm are exceedingly better than any system that exists on...

Uh-oh: “We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control, because even a single infection is unacceptable,” Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a news conference. Frieden did not detail precisely how the extensive, government-issued safety protocols in place at many facilities might need to change or in what ways hospitals need to ramp up training for front-line doctors or nurses . . . Officials have said [nurse Nina] Pham wore protective gear, including a gown, gloves, a mask and a face shield, while caring for Duncan on multiple occasions. But...

I’m not a psychiatrist, I haven’t sat down and interviewed George Zimmerman or the cop who shot Michael Brown, I don’t know what their motives are, I don’t know what kind of people they are, what kind of childhood traumas they have experienced. But I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama.

In a dramatic shift in tone, a Vatican document said on Monday that homosexuals had "gifts and qualities to offer" and asked if Catholicism could accept gays and recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples. Roman Catholic gay rights groups around the world hailed the paper as a breakthrough, but Church conservatives called it a betrayal of traditional family values. The document, prepared after a week of discussions at an assembly of 200 bishops on the family, said the Church should challenge itself to find "a fraternal space" for homosexuals without compromising Catholic doctrine on family and matrimony. While the...

It was either Francis Parkman or Frederick Jackson Turner or the composer of the theme from F Troop who first laid down an essential truth about the American experience: In the end, Paleface and Redskin both turn chicken. Now the same white male power structure that made Black History Month the shortest month in the calendar and sabotaged the Susan B. Anthony dollar by making it indistinguishable from a quarter is at it again. And the oppression is coming from the supposedly sympathetic, progressive side: The city of Seattle, Washington, has designated an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” on the second Monday...

One Saturday afternoon last month, six second graders from P.S. 295 in Brooklyn got a head start on the fine-dining life when they visited the acclaimed French restaurant Daniel. There, five waiters presented them with a seven-course tasting menu (after the trio of canapés and an amuse-bouche, naturellement). The meal was overseen by the star chef and eponym himself, Daniel Boulud, whose goal was, he says, “for the children to really discover a lot of flavor, a lot of layers, a lot of texture.”

Scientists and others on a team assembled by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which focuses on free-market solutions to today’s problems, say the “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over.” It’s “past time” for the world to realize that and “stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat,” contends Kenneth Haapala, the executive vice president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project at the Heartland Institute. Institute experts said Thursday the Remote Sensing Systems, which provide data to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation, have confirmed...

Recently in a cave on a remote island in the Pacific anthropologists found this document sealed in a stone coffer. After months of hard work they translated it from an ancient tongue almost lost to history. I, the official scribe of my people, write this with full authority of the ruling body for those of you who should come upon it in good time. It is the story of a long-ago Emperor about whom you ought to know. The father of the Emperor was said to be a god from an ancient land across the sea who often imbibed too...

Thousands gathered Saturday for a second day of organized rallies and marches protesting Michael Brown’s death and other fatal police shootings in the St. Louis area and nationwide. The events remained peaceful but boisterous gatherings into the night. Vietnam-era peace activists, New York City seminarians and hundreds of fast-food workers bused in from Chicago, Nashville and other cities marched alongside local residents, spurred by a national campaign dubbed Ferguson October.

To prove my point, I have compiled a list of yummy quotes from a website called What Liberals Say, highlighting the extreme intolerance of the “tolerant” left, beginning with Vice President Joe Biden. Do Biden’s racist remarks represent intolerance? Yes, considering what would happen if a Republican had said anything similar. Joe Biden’s racist statement about Obama: “I mean you’ve got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean that’s a storybook, man.”