Free Republic

Teachers are (mostly) getting a bad rap these days. Sometimes, it seems like conservatives revile them even more than Antifa, BLM, or The Squad. We blame them for shutting down the schools, making kids wear masks, and pushing critical race theory. We accuse them of being lazy and coddled, being bad at their jobs, and thinking only of themselves. None of that is entirely fair. Sure, we’ve all seen videos of teachers behaving like self-absorbed little tyrants. We’ve read the statements from craven teachers’ union officials. We’ve heard our own kids’ stories about crazed classroom commies. But those descriptions do...

Actor John Cena's cringe-worthy apology to China has become a viral sensation. While it may seem trivial to some, it serves as a visual touchstone to the aggressive tactics China employs to achieve domination. While promoting the ninth installment of the "Fast and Furious" movie franchise to a Taiwanese broadcaster, Cena said in part: "Taiwan is the first country that can watch 'F-9.'" Cue the outrage among the leadership of the People's Republic of China - and the apparent panic within the leadership of production companies behind the film, and those at Universal Pictures distributing the film, who need China's...

According to an indigenous group, the remains of over two hundred children have been found at a now close Canadian residential school. The Canadian government used the school to take indigenous children from their families for forced assimilation.

All Yamina MK's but one say they will back leader in joining bloc parties seeking to oust Netanyahu; unapologetic Bennett insists coalition won't be leftist. Yamina leader Naftali Bennett told his party's lawmakers Sunday that he intends to join with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid in forming a coalition, a move that, if completed in the next few days, would end more than 12 consecutive years of rule by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...

US security agencies are keep a close eye on two Iranian warships that may be headed toward Venezuela. An Iranian frigate and a former oil tanker known as the Makran are currently sailing south along the east coast of Africa, anonymous sources told Politico on Saturday. Intelligence officials remain mystified by Iran's motivations with the two vessels and they are unsure what kind of cargo they may be holding. However, if the ships do end up in Venezuela it could be a sign Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is trying to intimidate Washington. The 755-foot long Makrtan was commissioned this year....

MEXICO CITY - The notoriously violent Jalisco cartel has responded to Mexico’s “hugs, not bullets” policy with a policy of its own: The cartel kidnapped several members of an elite police force in the state of Guanajuato, tortured them to obtain names and addresses of fellow officers and is now hunting down and killing police at their homes, on their days off, in front of their families. It is a type of direct attack on officers seldom seen outside of the most gang-plagued nations of Central America and poses the most direct challenge yet to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s...

Today's Republican Party is building a political bomb -- and the ingredients for the explosive concoction are being mixed before our eyes. When it all blows up -- and it will, unless the party changes course soon -- the result will be not just rhetorical extremism but could well include real violence.A chilling new poll by PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, found that nearly one in four Republicans (that's tens of millions of people) believe the QAnon mythology that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles."

The Word was with God in the beginning and was sent to live among us. John wrote “we beheld His glory” elsewhere it says “the law came through Moses,but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”. The law written by the hand of God on stone was to show people that they could not of their own volition keep the law to please God; it was a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ, to come to the awareness of their human nature. In the new covenant, as it was foretold by Jeremiah, God said “I will write my law in...

"If a mother can kill her own child, what is there to stop others from killing one another?" Well, I guess those are fighting words today. But the speaker was hardly controversial at one time: Nobel Peace Prize winner and canonized saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. But even saints aren't safe these days. The New York Times recently published an op/ed with the headline "Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader?," about a recent documentary that depicts a missionary group that Mother Teresa founded "as a hive of psychological abuse and coercion. It raises the question of whether the difference between...

SPECIAL DISPATCH FROM WASHINGTON. WASHINGTON, Wednesday, May 29. The Government is becoming embarrassed with the question of how the prisoners captured in this conflict now going on shall be disposed of. Our scouts are daily picking up men proved to have disunion sentiments, and already the number taken exceeds one hundred. The rebels are capturing Union men, assuming that the Government will exchange prisoners, and that by having a sufficient number they will be able to secure the release of the thirty-six rebels captured at Alexandria. Here is the embarrassment. If the Government treat these men as rebels taken in...

There is a saying among some farmers in the Carolina Sandhills: “A man would have to be a fool to cut down a longleaf pine.” It’s not because the gangly-limbed tree is particularly beautiful. The pine doesn’t have a magnolia’s flowers or an oak’s shade. He could get $4,000 an acre for clear-cutting his mature longleaf pines for timber. Or, he said, he could earn $1,200 an acre collecting pine needles from the same trees — every year.

An online trend that involves using tiny magnets as fake tongue piercings has led the NHS to call for them to be banned amid people swallowing them.Ingesting more than one of them can be life-threatening and cause significant damage within hours.In England, 65 children have required urgent surgery after swallowing magnets in the last three years.The NHS issued a patient safety alert earlier this month and is now calling for the small metal balls to be banned.It said the "neodymium or 'super strong' rare-earth magnets are sold as toys, decorative items and fake piercings, and are becoming increasingly popular".It added...

Explanation: Auroras usually occur high above the clouds. The auroral glow is created when fast-moving particles ejected from the Sun impact the Earth's magnetosphere, from which charged particles spiral along the Earth's magnetic field to strike atoms and molecules high in the Earth's atmosphere. An oxygen atom, for example, will glow in the green light commonly emitted by an aurora after being energized by such a collision. The lowest part of an aurora will typically occur about 100 kilometers up, while most clouds exist only below about 10 kilometers. The relative heights of clouds and auroras are shown clearly in...

In 251 A.D., a young woman resisted the sexual advances of Quintian, a Roman proconsul. Her resistance cost her a sentence in a local brothel and, eventually, her life. Before she died, she was subjected to tortures that included having her breasts torn off by pinchers. To the end, she refused to give in to the sexual predator who sought to force her to repudiate her Christian faith. St. Agatha's endurance despite the tortures inflicted on her, including being deprived of one of the chief markers of her femininity, earned her a spot among the numerous Catholic saints who refused...

"They'll never say it publicly," Politico reports in Thursday morning's Playbook. "But Republicans in Washington are dreading Donald Trump's return to the stump, predicting his rallies will cause a major headache for the party as it mounts a bid to take back Congress in 2022." Congressional Republicans are privately relieved Twitter and Facebook banned Trump, Politico says, but the resumption of his rallies in June likely means he just gets a new platform to "spout conspiracy theories about the election and air his grievances," denying the party a chance to move on and attack President Biden's agenda. "If we win...

Texas Republican state legislators on Saturday unveiled a sweeping voting restrictions bill amid efforts by Republican-led states to overhaul election laws in the wake of former President Trump's electoral loss. The bill, S.B. 7, includes several controversial provisions that critics say would disproportionately affect poor and minority voters. It also specifically targets voting practices employed this past year in Harris County, which includes Houston, by banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting. Those practices were used by 140,000 voters in 2020.S.B. 7 makes it a state jail felony for local officials to attempt to send mail-in ballot applications to voters who...

Aside from the blunders President Biden has made concerning the border crisis, energy policy and foreign policy, his biggest blunders are on economic policy. Based on his latest budget proposal, he is trying to commit his biggest blunder. Biden’s proposed budget vastly increases government spending and government taxation, while creating trillion-dollar annual budget deficits well into the future. Let’s factually take a look at the current situation. The economy right now is growing at the fastest pace in nearly four decades. It is likely that growth this year will hit 8%. Last quarter we grew at 6.4%, up from 4.2%...

Security camera footage from election night shows that in Fulton County, what appears to be tens of thousands of ballots were counted in the absence of party or state monitors. The video seems to show that election workers scanned the same batches of ballots repeatedly. This could be a legitimate action when there’s a scanning error in the batch, such as when the ballots get jammed in the scanner. In that scenario, the workers are supposed to discard the whole batch of scans and scan the ballots again, but the video quality makes it hard to discern if that was...

MIAMI — Two people were killed and up to 25 people wounded in a mass shooting at a concert early Sunday morning in Northwest Miami-Dade, officials say. One of those injured is in critical condition, according to police. The shooting started after midnight at a concert at a billiards hall in the 7600 block of Northwest 186th Street, an unincorporated area of the county west of Miami Gardens, Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo “Freddy” Ramirez said.

Trinity Sunday Mass reminder of Heaven here on Earth, and what was done for us. And what many sadly decline to participate in... The Heavenly Mass "Do This, in memory of me...." +++