Free Republic

This is progressive ideology 101 here. Forget that this is gun grabbing. Forget that this is running to the camera seeking the spotlight. Kamala Harris, who is working very hard to position herself as a future presidential candidate, recently said the following: When you see the effect of this extreme violence on a human body, and especially the body of a child, maybe it will shock some people into understanding this cannot be a political issue. We have to be practical. I support the Second Amendment, but we have to have smart gun safety laws. We cannot tolerate a society...

Changing Brains Mean that Adolescents Act Differently From Adults Pictures of the brain in action show that adolescents' brains work differently than adults when they make decisions or solve problems. Their actions are guided more by the emotional and reactive amygdala and less by the thoughtful, logical frontal cortex. Research has also shown that exposure to drugs and alcohol during the teen years can change or delay these developments.Based on the stage of their brain development, adolescents are more likely to: * Act on impulse * Misread or misinterpret social cues and emotions * Get into accidents of all kinds...

As was recently shown, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with its central claim that police around the country are hunting and killing innocent black men, is a lie. Yet the BLM myth is enmeshed within a larger narrative, a narrative of eternal White Racism. And couched within this tale are distortions and outright crucially false ideas of slavery. In the interest of that "honest discussion" of race that the Eric Holders and Barack Obamas of the world claim to want, I submit considerations without which no such discussion can be had. One glaringly inconvenient truth that, odds are, few...

“Gross domestic product,” popularly known as GDP, measures spending on finished goods and services. GDP grew 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 and is expected to grow far more in the first quarter of this year. But is GDP the best measure of economic activity?

The first two months of 2018 have given both parties reasons for optimism. Republicans have cut Democrats' lead in the FiveThirtyEight average of generic congressional ballot polls in half, from roughly 12 points in December to about six points today. As debates over unpopular health care and tax bills have subsided, news of strong economic data and record-high stocks (at least until late last week) has likely aided the GOP. However, most new district-by-district fundraising and polling numbers are downright terrible for Republicans, even in seats previously thought to be safe. In the fourth quarter of 2017, 39 Republican House...

Since the Left are pushing the narrative that President Trump doesn't support those who enforce the Law, I thought I'd start a list of those (numerous) times that the Left attacked and questioned the integrity of LEO's at all levels of government. Let's start with an oldie but goody:

ABSTRACT This study examines the history of African American soldiers at Fort Huachuca, Arizona from 1892 until 1946. It was during this period that U.S. Army policy required that African Americans serve in separate military units from white soldiers. All four of the United States Congressionally mandated all-black units were stationed at Fort Huachuca during this period, beginning with the 24th Infantry and following in chronological order; the 9th Cavalry, the 10th Cavalry, and the 25th Infantry. During World War II, both all-black Army Divisions, the 93rd and 92nd trained at this Arizona fort. This study clearly demonstrates that Fort...

Rudolf Flesch, writing in 1955, noted that “things have changed in the last 10, 20 years. For the first time in history, American parents see their children getting less education than they got themselves. Their sons and daughters come home from school and they can’t read the newspaper; they can’t spell simple words like February or Wednesday; they don't know the difference between Austria and Australia. The fathers and mothers don’t know the reason for this, but they know that something terrible has happened to their most precious dreams and aspirations…” Isn’t it beautiful the way Flesch perceives the decline...

With the FBI claiming a "Samsung glitch" resulting in "missing texts"...why is not a single person in the MSM questioning this letter from the OIG indicating he already has them?? “…the OIG sought from the FBI all text messages between Strzok and Page from their FBI-issued phones through November 30, 2016, which covered the entire period of the Clinton e-mail server investigation. The FBI produced these text messages on July 20, 2017. Following our review of those text messages, the OIG expanded our request to the FBI to include all text messages between Strzok and Page from November 30, 2016,...

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment." In plain English: s--- is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause...

Happy Monday! Heritage Action’s new website is live, along with the Scorecard! Thank you for your patience as we have revamped the site and Scorecard to be better and more user-friendly. Check out the Scorecard here: https://heritageaction.com/scorecard Please feel free to send us your feedback as we strive to make our tools the best for activists. Be sure to join our Sentinel Strategy Call today at 5:30PM Eastern. The government is currently shut down after Democrats refused to vote for a Continuing Resolution on Friday as it did not contain amnesty. Heritage Action Vice President Dan Holler will have a...

Liberal Elites Are Killing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Vision By Nancy Pearcey | January 17, 2018 | 9:35 AM EST It may have sounded like routine political platitudes. On Friday, when President Donald Trump signed a declaration honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he said, “Today we celebrate Dr. King for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that … we are all created equal by God.”Far from being platitudes, however, today those are fighting words. King’s vision of equal rights is no longer “self-evident” to many of America’s opinion makers in media, politics, and academia. Why...

Putin has made the creation of a pro-Russian “alternative media ecosystem” to, in his words, smash “the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the information stream” a top priority of his foreign policy. A significant prong of those operations is aimed at the American military community, and the Russian activity has ramped up in recent years as tensions have increased over sanctions, the annexation of Crimea and the expansion of NATO. In the 20th century, intelligence agencies looking to build ties with foreign soldiers might have gone through the trouble of sending agents out to watering holes near military bases, waiting for servicemen...

The way in which China-linked money percolates through elite-level US policy discussions on China on both sides of the aisle, and in supposedly impartial think tanks and universities, should be a concern to all US citizens who depend on places like Harvard for unbiased political analysis and leadership. China-linked donations to universities can be relatively opaque, including the sources of those funds. The donation of US$350 million to Harvard in 2014 by Ronnie Chan’s family foundation, the Morningside Foundation, appears from an analysis of its Form 990s to be staggered over six years... US professors who are experts on US-China...

Descartes’s Blunder Michael Egnor January 17, 2018, 6:51 AM What is it that we are most sure of? It’s a fundamental question, the object of philosophical analysis for millennia. Our modern answer to this question was provided by René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes’s answer is the answer most modern men would give. But Descartes got it wrong.Descartes set out to rethink metaphysics from the ground up. In Meditations on First Philosophy, he asked this question: How do I know what is real? Of what can I be certain? He suggested this scenario: Imagine that his mind is controlled...

Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world. - Antonin Scalia

Have you ever wondered why you crave chocolate when you get stressed out? Research justifies our cravings and provides healthier ways to get our chocolate fix. Chocolate Makes Us HappyIt’s not all in your head. Well, actually it is, but in a literal sense. Physically, the consumption of chocolate does make you happy by stimulating the release of dopamine in your brain. This neurotransmitter has been called “the happy hormone”. Chocolate also stimulates the release of serotonin, a hormone that has a calming effect on the mind and body. The limbic system is the part of the brain responsible for...

Salon Magazine has called Norway one of the “eight best countries to be an atheist,” along with Sweden, Denmark, Japan and the Czech Republic, suggesting that Norway’s “socially just government” has effectively taken the place of God for many Norwegians. In 2012, Norway eliminated Lutheranism as the official state church. “The Evangelical Lutheran religion will no longer be the state’s official religion,” parliament wrote in a statement, which meant that the church would receive public financing “on par with other religious and belief-based societies.” Norway’s decline in religiosity has been constant. A year ago the number of Norwegian atheists equaled...

In his book The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly wrote the following: (page 29) But although Hamilton is much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman, there were certain limitations in his ideas and sympathies the effects of which have been almost as baleful as the effects of Jefferson's intellectual superficiality and insincerity. He perverted the American national idea almost as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea, and the proper relation of these two fundamental conceptions one to another cannot be completely understood until this double perversion is corrected. To make Hamilton and Jefferson...

The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics[1] that states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined[further explanation needed] in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.[2] It is named after presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.[3][4] The issue arose in 1964 when Fact published the article "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater".[3][5] The magazine polled psychiatrists about U.S. Senator Barry...