Free Republic

Tom Hanks is a big fan of the community college system. The Oscar winner graduated from high school in Oakland, California, in 1974 and with "lousy SAT scores" and no money for tuition, he enrolled at Chabot College nearby his home. In an op-ed in the New York Times published today, Hanks, 58, remembers those days where he went to a school that was basically "all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks." Then Hanks brings up President Obama's hope to "make two years of free community college accessible for up to nine million Americans." "I...

The world's oceans are now rising far faster than they did in the past, a new $tudy says. The current sea level rise rate — which started in 1990 — is 2.5 times faster than it was from 1900 to 1990, according to a $tudy published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Scientists say that faster pace of sea level rise is from melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica and shrinking glaciers, triggered by man-made global warming. "We're seeing a significant acceleration in the past few decades," said $tudy lead author Carling Hay, a geophysical researcher at Harvard University....

Although most of us worry about other things, climate scientists have become increasingly worried about the survival of civilization. For example, Lonnie Thompson, who received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2010, said that virtually all climatologists "are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization." Informed journalists share this concern. The climate crisis "threatens the survival of our civilization," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Ross Gelbspan. Mark Hertsgaard agrees, saying that the continuation of global warming "would create planetary conditions all but certain to end civilization as we know it." These scientists and journalists, moreover,...

... CoOportunity Health has failed. The Affordable Care Act set aside funding for health care co-ops, to enable the organizations to compete in places where there aren’t many insurers. CoOportunity Health was the second largest co-op in the country in terms of membership, and one of the largest in terms of the federal funding it received. But then CoOportunity hit a kind of perfect storm, says Peter Damiano, director of the University of Iowa’s public policy center. First, the co-op had to pay a lot more medical bills than those in charge expected. “CoOportunity Health’s pool of people was larger...

Wow! Venezuela bishops tell Pope Francis the downside of socialism and communism Pope Francis, a native of Argentina, has established himself as a critic of capitalism, but now he has received a statement from the bishops of Venezuela offering some insight on that Latin American nation’s experience with socialism and Marxism. I am not an expert on the internal workings of the Catholic Church, but this strikes me as an extraordinary move. Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Monica Showalter lays out the message the bishops delivered:  Venezuela's bishops Monday blamed "Marxist socialism" and "communism" by name for the horrors...

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a...

FULL TITLE: Volcanoes are cooling Earth: Aerosols from small eruptions have reduced global temperatures and tropical rainfall. Small volcanic eruptions over the past 20 years have been protecting the Earth from global warming, according to a new study. Scientists have confirmed that droplets of sulphur-rich aerosols spewed into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes have been reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. Until recently it was thought that only particularly large eruptions had any noticeable affect on the climate. This could have helped decrease the global temperatures by between 0.05°C to 0.12°C over the past 15 years. Since 1998, the warmest...

Monday January 12, 2015 01:40 PM Last Friday, dozens of people spent the night in the surroundings of the Andrés Bello square (north Caracas) to buy food in an outdoor market organized by the Venezuelan Ministry of Food. For taking home staples such as rice, pre-cooked corn flour, milk, oil, sugar, beef or chicken, people had to wait in line for at least twelve hours. Buyers had numbers written on their arms. With fear and anger, but with the need to buy food, they were waiting there since the day before. "No matter if I am very fond of this...

The economic damage caused by a ton of carbon dioxide emissions – often referred to as the "social cost" of carbon – could actually be six times higher than the value that the United States now uses to guide current energy regulations, and possibly future mitigation policies, Stanford scientists say. A recent U.S. government study concluded, based on the results of three widely used economic impact models, that an additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted in 2015 would cause $37 worth of economic damages. These damages are expected to take various forms, including decreased agricultural yields, harm to human health...

In the American liberal compass, the needle is always pointing to places like Denmark. Everything they most fervently hope for here has already happened there. So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris, Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5% of Danish men have had sex with...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up another broad challenge to President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law. The court rejected an appeal filed by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the Alliance for Natural Health USA. The groups had challenged various aspects of the law known as Obamacare including the so-called individual mandate that requires people to obtain health insurance or pay a tax. In March 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of the Obama administration. In 2012, a district court judge also ruled against the...

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — Rita Gorenflo’s 7-year-old son Nathaniel was in severe pain from a sinus infection. But since the boy was covered by Medicaid, she couldn’t immediately find a specialist willing to see him. After days of calling, she was finally able to get Nathaniel an appointment nearly a week later near their South Florida home. That was in 2005. Last month, ruling in a lawsuit brought by the state’s pediatricians and patient advocacy groups, a federal district judge in Miami determined Nathaniel’s wait was “unreasonable” and that Florida’s Medicaid program was failing him and nearly 2 million...

In a global warming series Eco Eye, experts warned about the catastrophic dangers of climate change, predicting significant coastal damage and the extinction of many plant and animal species. “Climate change is a reality. It’s here. That’s something as a society we haven’t bought into. It will be a very difficult problem for Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast,” said Professor Robert Devoy. “What is coming down the tracks is a significant warming of the planet. The last time it warmed of this order, 88 per cent of life on earth disappeared. “I have five grandchildren. Whatever time is left to...

Lines are swelling at Venezuelan supermarkets, with some shoppers showing up before dawn in search of products ranging from chicken to laundry detergent, as a holiday slowdown in deliveries sharpened the nation's nagging product shortages. Queues snaked around the block at grocery stores and pharmacies around the country on Friday, with consumers in some cases gathering before dawn under the gaze of National Guard troops posted to maintain order. Business leaders have assured Venezuelans the situation will improve in the coming days as distributors return from the often extended Christmas holidays, though many consumers blamed the socialist economic policies of...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Venezuelan military tells customers not to take pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets The Venezuelan military has troops stationed in supermarkets, and they are telling customers not to take pictures of empty shelves. But that hasn’t stopped people from doing it. During the first week of 2015, the Twitter hashtag #AnaquelesVaciosEnVenezuela (“Empty shelves in Venezuela”) listed more than 200,000 tweets.For example: (posted here under fair use from https://twitter.com/Indiferencia/status/551547489565016064/photo/1 ) Nicolas Maduro, the country’s president, has continued the policies of Hugo Chavez, the country’s previous president who died in March 2013.Chavez was an incompetent, communist dictator, who...

Climate change predictions can be scary, and political opposition to climate action is fierce. But EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says she can’t help but be optimistic about the future. McCarthy, speaking at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting in Phoenix on Wednesday, struck a decidedly positive tone. “If there is ever a challenge where the U.S. can shine and provide leadership, it is the challenge of climate change,” she said. “The real danger and the real economic problem we face is not taking action,” McCarthy said. She emphasized the importance of the work of the thousands of weather and...

The Gold ‘N Silver Inn in Reno, Nev., has long offered health coverage to its employees — but many of the cooks, dishwashers and waiters who make close to minimum wage can’t afford the $100 monthly premium. Last January, when Nevada became one of more than two dozen states to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, 10 of the diner’s 55 employees qualified for the government insurance program for low-income Americans. None of them realized it, however, until the family-run restaurant hired BeneStream, a New York-based start-up funded partly by the Ford Foundation. BeneStream charges $40 to screen each...

Venezuelans not 'lovin' it' as McDonald's fries go scarce CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan fast-food lovers are mourning the disappearance of McDonald's golden staple: the french fry. A recent shortage at the U.S. fast food chain comes as socialist Venezuela grapples with shortfalls of basic goods ranging from medicines to flour due to strict currency controls that stymie imports. McDonald's restaurants are coping by replacing the spuds with salad or local fare such as fried yuca or "arepa" corn pancakes - but Golden Arches fans are none too happy about the new meal. "Hamburgers don't go with arepas and this salad...

As if Silicon Valley hasn't given us enough already, it may have to start giving us all money. The first indication I got of this came one evening last summer, when I sat in on a meet-up of virtual-currency enthusiasts at a hackerspace a few miles from the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. After one speaker enumerated the security problems of a promising successor to Bitcoin, the economics blogger Steve Randy Waldman got up to speak about "engineering economic security." Somewhere in his prefatory remarks he noted that he is an advocate of universal basic income—the idea that everyone should...

Forget the French fries. How about a side of yuca with that Big Mac? Venezuela's more than 100 McDonald's franchises have run out of potatoes and are now serving alternatives like deep-fried arepa flatbreads or yuca, a starchy staple of traditional Venezuelan cooking. McDonald's franchisers are blaming a contract dispute with West Coast dock workers for halting the export of frozen fries to the country. The dispute also caused several days of French fry rationing in Japan last month. But Sonia Ruseler, who runs McDonald's restaurants in Latin America, declined to say Tuesday why other countries in the region are...