Free Republic

The pandemic has highlighted a serious problem with K-12 education that we ignore at our own peril. Public K-12 education in this country suffers from a lack of effective competition that prevents market forces from working the way they should. What would happen if there was school choice in America today? Parents who are dissatisfied with the educational product their public schools provide could vote with their feet and take their tax dollars and their children to schools that offer better value. Opposition to school choice is highly regressive because the wealthiest families have the ability to pay twice for...

We are reading from Hebrews 12 in the Liturgy this week (Monday of the 4th Week) which mentions, among the heroes of ancient Israel, Jepthe. More on that in a moment.But one of the most strange and horrifying stories of the Bible is the story of Jephthah (Pronounced “Jeff-tha” and alternately spelled Jepthe) and his ritual murder of his daughter. It is a tale of faith and piety gone terribly wrong and a teaching of what happens when error and false religion are substituted for the true faith. It is also a tale of how God can work even...

There may indeed be White Supremacists, White Nationalists, Christian Identitarians, or other unsavory groups that progressive minds associate with the political right, but in my two decades of living in Hollywood, I never met any. I met Russian gangsters, Armenian gangsters, hookers and pimps of all stripes, MS13 gangsters, White Fence, independent criminals, and various other miscreants, but never the Central Casting Racist depicted in television or the movies. Working on a tuna boat, or in an oil field, or on a construction site, I have never met the feared Neo-Nazi. Even working for eight years in the steel town...

It has been with some amusement that over the past four years we watched segments of the media to express outrage at the favoritism Fox News would show for the president. The unspoken, but recognized subtext was, ‘’They cannot do that - only WE can do that!’’ For anyone in the press to pretend that a connection between journalists and an administration was unprecedented it showed a desperate attempt at deflection away from what has been a long established relationship.We are now getting details that the civil union between journalists and the Democrats has already been reestablished, and the brazen...

Dramatic video shows a Texas mom body-slamming a suspected peeping tom accused of looking into her teenage daughter’s bedroom window, according to reports. "First instinct was just to make sure he didn’t go any further," said mom Phyllis Pena. "My kids are my life and just making sure I protect them," Pena added. The Lake Jackson mom said she got home from a store around 7 a.m. on Jan. 31 to find the suspect staring into the window of her 15-year-old daughter. He ran away as the mom called police. The suspect was found in the neighborhood by police, but...

February 12 2021 . St. Mary Star of the Sea church, New York Lectionary 332/p> Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green.First readingGenesis 3:1-8 ©The fall of manThe serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made. It asked the woman, ‘Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ The woman answered the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, “You must not eat it, nor...

You may have heard that San Francisco’s Board of Education voted 6-1 to rename 44 schools, stripping ancient racists of their laurels, but also Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. In normal times, bemusement would be the right response to a story like this. Cities should have idiosyncratic, out-there politics. You need to earn your “Keep X weird” bumper stickers. And for all the Fox News hosts who’ve collapsed onto their fainting couches, America isn’t suffering from a national shortage of schools named for Abraham Lincoln. But San Francisco’s public schools remain closed, no matter the name on the front....

Australian lawmakers agreed Friday to enable world-first legislation that will make Alphabet’s Google and Facebook pay publishers for content. The news media code, which Google has complained is “unworkable”, makes Australia the first country to challenge the market dominance of the U.S. tech giants. “The bill will now be considered by the parliament from the week commencing 15 February 2021,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in an emailed confirmation, Reuters reports. As Breitbart News reported, the Australian push to rein in media companies has been months in the making and led to claim and counter-claim by Big Tech operators that making...

With the Democratic control in Washington, there appears no chance that the next pandemic relief bill will include one of the most high-profile items from previous negotiations: virus-related lawsuit limits for responsible businesses. It looks as if businesses that simply did their best to stay open, scrape by, and serve consumers as safely as they could during the pandemic will have to keep waiting and hoping. And it is pretty easy to figure out why these businesses are being left out — commonsense lawsuit limits would run afoul of the nation’s trial lawyers, who are favored allies of Senate Majority...

Won’t someone think of the children? Perhaps, but it won’t be the teachers unions. They aren’t called the children’s unions, after all. Those union contracts negotiated not with someone representing taxpayer interests but the state government, which is uniformly Democratic and decides the salary/benifit increases knowing a portion is funneled back to the party’s campaign coffers, and round and round we go. The teachers unions are the reason students aren’t in school...but Biden is flagrantly disregarding infectious disease experts and federal health institutions while undermining their position among the public. And so, press sec. Psaki has been sent out day...

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has finally recognized that the masks they’ve had everyone wearing for the better part of a year are largely ineffective because aerosols easily go around the top and sides. Their latest recommendation is “placing a sleeve made of sheer nylon hosiery material around the neck and pulling it up over either a cloth or medical procedure mask,” or using knots and tucking to fit a mask closely to the face. They came up with these techniques in experiments with mannequins in a lab and have not tested them on actual humans. They have...

1. LONG - TERM PARKING Some people left their car in the long-term parking at San Jose while away, and someone broke into the car. Using the information on the car's registration in the glove compartment, they drove the car to the people's home in Pebble Beach and robbed it. So I guess if we are going to leave the car in long-term parking, we should NOT leave the registration/insurance cards in it, nor your remote garage door opener This gives us something to think about with all our new electronic technology. 2. GPS: Someone had their car broken into...

WASHINGTON - More than $50 billion in funding is on its way to New York State as part of President Biden’s enormous $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, The Post has learned. The bailout includes $12.6 billion in New York state coronavirus recovery funding and $10.64 billion for local governments, Pelosi wrote in the letter obtained by The Post. Another $12.3 billion has been earmarked for the state’s shuttered schools while the Empire State’s run down transit system would receive an $8.8 billion infusion. New York airports are earmarked for $418 million in the aid bill and small businesses will be...

In a nutshell, the definition of socialism is not tax and regulation policies, but whether the government says it is a socialist government. As long as it doesn't use those words, it is not socialist. 100% taxation and 100% regulatory policies and it's not socialist, because it hasn't called itself that. Question: Is it true that it is okay in USA if someone said that they love the US healthcare system because they derive immense pleasure/gratification from seeing low income people suffer, but saying this is taboo in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Me: No, but it is more...

Paraprosdokians are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected, and is frequently humorous. (Winston Churchill loved them.) 1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it. 2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you -- but it's still on my list. 3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until they speak. 4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong. 5. We never really grow up -- we only learn how to act in public. 6. War does not determine...

At least six pirate skeletons were recently discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Cape Cod. The remains were unearthed from the wreck site of the Whydah, which sank near the town of Wellfleet in 1717, according to The Boston Globe. Investigators at the Whydah Pirate Museum said the skeletons were identified in several large concretions, or hard masses of minerals, from the wreck site. They are now being examined by a team of archeologists led by underwater explorer Barry Clifford, who discovered the Whydah in 1984, the museum said.

The first ever mention of Sherlock Holmes came in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887. Dr Watson is looking for lodgings, and meets an old acquaintance who knows of someone he could share with, but does not recommend. More than 130 years on, Holmes remains Watson’s, and our, almost constant companion. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective landed a Guinness World Record for the most frequently portrayed human literary character in film and television in 2012, beaten only by the (non-human) Dracula. He remains enduringly popular on screen: when Benedict Cumberbatch plunged off the roof at the...

“The electric bills don't stop, the other bills don’t stop.”A country pub in Somerset is being forced to throw away £700 worth of pints as a result of the third lockdown in England. England entered its third lockdown on January 5, although The Crown Inn in Catcott was forced to close its doors under tougher tier restrictions from Boxing Day. This family pub, just off the A39 between Bridgwater and Glastonbury, is run by Daniel Kilduff, the son of Rowena Kingston, who ran it with her husband for 12 years. Mrs Kingston said: "Although we guessed the lockdown may be...