Free Republic

While community colleges are known as a low-cost path to higher education, some might be shocked to learn that their enrollments took a steeper hit than the four-year sector in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Usually, economic downturns help the two-year sector’s enrollments when learners are attracted by the more affordable tuition and no-frills, no-nonsense approach to the calling of higher education. In that rather sobering observation, however, lies a lesson that could help community colleges move forward: stay true to the mission. Once the million-dollar fancy marketing campaign for the brand new dorm or the cool robotics...

Memos posted on bulletin boards from seminary rectors rarely make news anywhere outside the campus, but one put up Aug. 31 from Father Peter Harman to the community at Rome’s Pontifical North American College (NAC) was an exception to the rule. In short, its message was: no more pre-Vatican II Mass here. The note explains that when Pope Benedict XVI liberalized permission for celebration of the older Mass in 2008, the NAC began offering training for celebrating the so-called Tridentine-rite Mass and slotted in a weekly older Mass on Saturdays. Now that Pope Francis has retracted that permission, however, the...

“I have been and continue to be a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade, number one,” Biden said Friday morning. “And the most pernicious thing about the Texas law, it sort of creates a vigilante system where people get rewards to go out and to …” He did not finish the thought.

All dissent must be banished.. Forbes deleted an article written by an education expert who asserted that forcing schoolchildren to wear face masks was causing psychological trauma after the piece began to go viral. The article (archived here) was written by Zak Ringelstein, who has a a PhD in education from Columbia University and founded Zigadoo, an educational and development app aimed at helping children. Ringelstein explains how he worked hard to remove standardized testing from schools but that this was derailed when the pandemic began, a process that “transformed the American public education system into something unrecognizable: a system...

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) will test the use of central bank digital currencies with Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa in an experiment that could lead to a more efficient global payments platform. Codenamed “Project Dunbar,” the study aims to develop prototypes for a common platform that will enable international settlement in digital fiat currencies issued by central banks, BIS said in a release Thursday. The system would allow direct transactions in central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, between institutions, while reducing time and cost, according to BIS. Globally, central banks are trying to come to terms with...

Neuroscientists have tried to map various categories of mental function to specific regions of the brain, but recent work has shown that the definitions and boundaries of those regions are complex and context-dependent. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. To the...

The vaccination campaign is proceeding at full speed with more than 100,000 shots administered on most days. So far, more than 2.15 million Israelis have received their third shot. On Sunday, anyone over the age of 12 who has been vaccinated for at least five months became eligible for the booster shot.[…]Israel now leads the world in the seven-day rolling average of new daily #COVID19 cases per capita, overtaking Montenegro and Georgia, according to the Oxford University-based Our World in Data...

Georgia Ballot Traffickers Dump Thousands of Ballots into Drop Boxes VIDEO AT LINK............................ According to John Fredericks on War Room this morning, Georgia state officials now have video of 240 democrat ‘ballot traffickers’ dumping tens of thousands of ballots into drop boxes in the middle of the night, in multiple locations across the state. If you can’t see the Rumble video, turn off your AD blockers. CFP runs zero ads. Privacy Badger in Chrome and Firefox also blocks Rumble. Turn it off. FOIA request for communications between DOJ and leftist groups. GEORGIA!🍑🚨 @GaSecofState filed a FOIA request Thursday seeking communications...

I have long been convinced that Nature has all the solutions we need to solve our past ... that will be the primary source of the treasures and solutions that we seek." ~Professor Satashi Omura, Nobel co-laureate for the discovery of ivermectin Looking at 2019 CDC guidance, one has to wonder if one of the reasons why there is such a run on ivermectin is because our own government is using it. And no, not for horses, but for refugees. Yet these same government agencies are running a blood libel-style smear campaign against the drug and its users by misleading...

China’s government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote “revolutionary culture,” broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality. President Xi Jinping has called for a “national rejuvenation,” with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society. The party has reduced children’s access to online games and is trying to discourage what it sees as unhealthy attention to celebrities. Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy...

President Biden on Thursday told Jewish leaders that he spent time at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the October 2018 mass murder of 11 people there — but the synagogue told The Post he never visited. “I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden said in a 16-minute virtual address ahead of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Video below: Twitter LinkBarb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly...

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are now the second NFL team to have a 100 percent vaccination rate after the Atlanta Falcons became the first

A brief respite from the dung heap of current events. Quick Video Here.

I thought I'd seen it all. https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1433337923827601413/photo/1

Apple DELAYS the roll-out of its controversial plan to scan iPhones for child abuse images and report 'flagged' owners to the police, following a furious backlash regarding customer privacy The tech firm revealed plans to scan US user phones and computers last month It said it would scan devices for child abuse images and report 'flagged' owners But now the firm has indefinitely delayed the roll-out following fierce criticism The contentious plans, revealed by the tech giant on August 5, involve scanning iPhones for child abuse images and reporting 'flagged' owners to the police. It had planned to rollout the...

MILLBURN, N.J. (CBSNewYork) — New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy continues to tour the path of destruction Ida left behind Friday, speaking with residents who say they are overwhelmed by the cleanup ahead. The storm is now blamed for at least 25 deaths in the Garden State, and six other people are still missing. Murphy’s first stop Friday was downtown Millburn, which saw colossal flooding. He went door to door with other state leaders to survey the damage. “Millburn was crushed. The downtown small business community was crushed,” he said. “The damage caused by Ida is significant by any measure, and...

Politics is often full of corruption and other money-related issues. This affects both parties, of course, but it’s the Democrats who have been found guilty of certain violations.This involves the Tennessee Democratic Party and a large six-figure settlement. It also highlights a lot of “misreported” money that didn’t go to the right places, and failure to report financial info.The end result — the DNC has admitted its guilt.Back in January, FEC commissioners voted unanimously that they had “reason to believe the Tennessee Democratic party” was in violation of the law.That’s because the Party reportedly “failed to report total receipts and...

Some things are just meant to be together. College football has seen plenty of change through the years. From world wars to racial integration to the more recent labor movement that resulted in players’ ability to profit from their likenesses, evolution has been a constant. This is to say nothing of the innovation and rule changes that brought us from the single wing to this era of wide open passing games, with the wishbone and “three yards and a cloud of dust” in between. One constant throughout college football history, however, is Alabama competing for and winning national titles. Starting...

‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success.Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements...

Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced Friday that it was halting the publication of its GDP Nowcast model’s read of the economy due to pandemic-related uncertainties. “The uncertainty around the pandemic and the consequent volatility in the data have posed a number of challenges to the Nowcast model. Therefore, we have decided to suspend the publication of the Nowcast while we continue to work on methodological improvements to better address these challenges,” the New York Fed said in a statement posted to its website.