Free Republic

Sears was once the nation's largest retailer and its largest employer. In its heyday, it was both the Walmart and Amazon of its time. Formed in 1886 by railroad station agent Richard Sears, the company started as a watch business in North Redwood, Minnesota. Sears moved to Chicago in 1887, and he hired watchmaker Alvah Roebuck as his partner. The first Sears Roebuck catalog, which sold watches and jewelry, was printed in 1896. The Sears catalog was the way many Americans first started to buy mass-produced goods. That was an enormous shift for people who lived on farms and in...

Sears Holdings filed for bankruptcy protection early Monday after years of staying afloat through financial maneuvering and relying on billions of CEO Eddie Lampert's own money. The company also announced that Lampert will be stepping down as CEO, effective immediately, although he remains its chairman. The 125-year-old retailer, once the nation's largest, said Monday it was appointing Mohsin Meghji, managing partner of M-III Partners, as its chief restructuring officer. As part of the bankruptcy, Sears will shutter 142 stores toward the end of the year. It expects to begin liquidation sales shortly. The bankruptcy filing comes more than a decade...

Brandon Straka, the openly gay former Democrat behind the recent movement to #Walkaway from liberalism says he has seen an uptick in the number of people who say they’re ‘walking away’ from the Democratic party. He says hundreds of people have reached out to him since the Justice Brett Kavanaugh battle started, and he began receiving more video testimonials and messages from people who say they will now vote Republican because of the smear campaign launched against Kavanaugh. Straka also talks about the first #WalkAway Campaign march he will be hosting in Washington D.C. on Oct 26-28th. For more details...

...According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.” (snip) If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education....

When investigative journalist Julia Angwin worked for ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization became known as “big tech’s scariest watchdog.” By partnering with programmers and data scientists, Angwin pioneered the work of studying big tech’s algorithms — the secret codes that have an enormous effect on everyday American life. Her findings shed light on how companies like Facebook were creating tools that could be used to promote racial bias, fraudulent schemes and extremist content. Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news...

Video LinkFor those of you unfamiliar with Stephen Hicks, he is a professor at Rockford College (Illinois). He is an authority on Post-Modernism and is often cited by Jordan Peterson when Peterson speaks of Post-Modernism and/or Nietzsche.This somewhat short video is interesting because, in it, Hicks describes a little bit about how socialism and socialist resentment of capitalism/free markets evolved into Post-Modernism that we see today. In other videos I have seen he also describes how Marxism has evolved into Post-Modernism.His basic point is that socialism (based on old socialist writings) exhibited a resentment toward capitalism whereas Post-Modernism literally seethes...

Former General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz discussed Elon Musk’s Tesla in a recent interview stating that the company is “headed for the graveyard.” In a recent interview with CNBC the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, does not have high hopes for the future of Elon Musk’s electric-car manufacturer Tesla. According to Lutz, Tesla is “headed for the graveyard,” given the recent announcement that both the company and Musk are being investigated by the DOJ and the SEC. “They will never make money on the Model 3 because the cost is way too high,” Lutz said during...

The portion of children under 6 living with "married parents" in 2017 jumped about half of one percent from the year before. That may not seem like much, but it's a dramatic departure from long-term trends. I think the reason this isn't a news story is because the government looks to the Center for Disease Control for news about who's raising who, and this data comes from the Census Department. I gleaned these numbers from data that the Census Department was publishing showing the decline in the poverty rate; the CDC hasn't published 2017 figures. In 2016, 16.46 million children...

Winning: Americans’ use of food stamp assistance has now fallen for the eighth straight month as the POTUS Trump economy continues to expand, raising all boats and not just those of “the rich.”

More Americans have left Catholicism behind than any other religion in the U.S., according to a new report. About 13 percent of American adults are former Catholics – people who were raised in the faith but now say they have no religion, or converted to Protestantism or other beliefs, according to a survey by Pew Research Center. At the other end of the spectrum, 2 percent of U.S. adults report converting to Catholicism.

However, the high number might not be entirely reflective of how many kids actually have ADHD, said Dr. Scott Benson, a psychiatrist at the Creekside Psychiatric Center in Pensacola, Florida. Many children, especially those living in poverty or dealing with challenges at home, may struggle to focus. That's natural given the stressors they're dealing with, but it may cause some doctors to question whether the child has ADHD. Inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity are symptoms of ADHD, according to the American Psychiatric Association. "We know one of the common errors is misdiagnosis," said Benson, who was not involved with the study....

It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants.
 We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea. ...... Agriculture is now mostly in the hands of the young generation, 70% of whom are college graduates and refer to themselves as “urban farmer-scientists.” They grow all kinds of plants in containers...

Despite the expectations of many after the 2016 elections, the number of concealed handgun permits has again increased. In 2018, the number of concealed handgun permits soared to over 17.25 million - a 273% increase since 2007. 7.14% of American adults have permits. Unlike surveys that may be affected by people’s unwillingness to answer some personal questions, concealed handgun permit data is the only really "hard data" that we have on gun ownership across the United States. Still, an even larger number of people carry because in 14 states people don’t need a permit to carry in all or...

Sexist attitudes in the United States are most prevalent in the Southeast and least prevalent on the West Coast and in New England, according to a new study that highlights how sexism and gender attitudes affect earnings and job prospects for women. Researchers analyzed responses to decades of statistics and survey questions about women's roles in society and found that where a woman is born affects how much she works and earns. The study, which focused on the U.S., found that women from states where sexism is more widespread tend to get married and have children at a younger age...

Existing-home sales ran at a 5.34 million seasonally-adjusted annual rate in July, down 0.7% versus June, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. That was the lowest pace since February 2016... … For years, the Realtors have been warning that many would-be buyers, particularly at the lower end of the market, are being priced out. Now they’re also acknowledging that many others are just deciding to sit it out until market conditions change. … “Three years of exceptionally tight inventory and exceptionally strong price gains are catching up with the market, and are visible both in softer demand from stretched...

The inexorable rise of identity condiments has led to hard times for the most American of foodstuffs. And that’s a shame. [snip] Along about a decade ago, though, I began to notice I was toting home as much of my offerings as I’d concocted. My contributions were being overlooked — or shunned. Why should this be? Mom’s extraordinary potato salad — fragrant with dill, spiced by celery seed — went untouched on the picnic table. So did her macaroni salad, and her chicken salad, and her deviled eggs. … When I carted home a good three pounds of painstakingly prepared...

Dependence on 90% voting support from African-Americans for electoral success is the jugular vein of the Democratic Party.  President Trump's rising support among black voters is correctly seen as an existential threat to the party's – and progressivism's – ability to win national elections.  That's why I thought it was big news last Saturday when Rasmussen proclaimed that black approval of Trump had hit 29%, even though most of the media ignored it for reasons AT readers well understand. But the surge in black support for President Trump is real – so real that even the far-left NAACP discovered it in a poll,...

Overall enrollment in the country’s food stamp program has dropped to its lowest level in more than eight years as the economy continues to improve and the Trump administration attempts to tackle fraud in the program. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enrollment in the program dropped in March to 40,083,954. The last time food stamp participation dipped this low was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people were enrolled in the program. "As the economy continues to improve, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is...

**SNIP** The traditional concept of employment is the latest thing that the ever-contrarian millennial generation is reinventing. They’re quitting their jobs, without worrying about what they’ll do next. According to a 2018 Millennial Survey by Deloitte, 43 percent of millennials expect to leave their job within two years. The trend is in line with broader shifts. According to the Labor Department, the percentage of workers (of any age) quitting their jobs reached 2.4 percent in May, the highest level in more than 16 years. “Twenty years ago I never would have seen this,” says Cat Graham, a managing partner in...

Sometimes a society’s values change sharply with almost no one noticing. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was “ideal” — about the same number as Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the explosive baby boom after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war. Those values and numbers didn’t last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 39 percent considered three or more children “ideal.” The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent in the late-1990s...