Free Republic

The City of San Francisco is handing out bottles of beer, glasses of wine and shots of vodka to homeless alcoholics - and spending $5m a year on the program. The alcoholic drinks are served by nurses as part of the city's 'managed alcohol program', which has been running for four years, as a way of taking care of vulnerable homeless people. The program is designed to curb the amount of alcohol homeless people drink. It still allows them some, but in a more managed way, in the hope of curbing their addiction in a controlled manner.

We all have sad stories to tell occasionally and I have one. I have a friend I known for well over 40 years and she has always been fun to be around and we have stayed in touch all this time on and off. Until about a year ago I had no idea she was a committed, hard core, alcoholic. The last two years she had been talking about a decline in her health. She had taken the Covid vaccines and at least one booster and I was fearful this caused her to have some adverse effects. But the surprise...

A couple years ago I noticed a trend in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The meeting was no longer ending with the Lord’s Prayer.For more than 30 years every meeting I attended ended the same way — with the “Our Father,” then the Serenity Prayer, then the chant of “Keep Coming Back, It Works if You Work It!”Suddenly, meetings were going straight to the Serenity Prayer and then the final pep chant. The “Our Father” was gone. This seems to be part of a larger trend. As reported in the Daily Mail, one group was censured for saying the prayer:An Alcoholics...

A JetBlue pilot is out of a job and in huge trouble after he was pulled from the cockpit for being drunk. This all unfolded Wednesday morning at the Buffalo Airport, just before takeoff, with a plane full of passengers. Pilot James Clifton, 52, was in the cockpit, getting ready to fly 133 passengers from Buffalo to Fort Lauderdale around 6:15 a.m. when NFTA officers pulled him from the plane. TSA agents suspected something was off about Clifton when he was checking his gun through security just minutes earlier. “There was some questions and some suspicion. That’s when we became...

<p>An Oklahoma Democratic congressional candidate is under fire for allegedly verbally attacking several pre-teen girls while at the home of a friend who was hosting a sleepover with multiple middle school girls present.</p><p>Abby Broyles, a candidate for Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, went to the friend’s house on Feb. 11 and became more and more aggressive as she continued to drink wine throughout the night, according to NonDoc.com.</p>

An Alcoholics Anonymous group In Somerset, England was recently censured for reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the start of its meetings, according to London’s Daily Mail. The group was told by A.A. leaders that it had become too Christian-focused and has therefore been removed from the organization’s online directory. A.A. administrators first raised concerns about the prayer at a meeting in Somerset.The move didn’t sit well with John Palmer, the group’s treasurer, who correctly noted that Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Christians, and that it adopted and popularized the Serenity Prayer. The Serenity Prayer has been recited at the end...

“Donald Trump is the right's Anthony Weiner,” Beck told Business Insider, adding that “this will only end in epic shame.” “I would hope that conservatives will take a step back and see who they are looking to as their champion,” he said. “For the good of our credibility I would beg people not to defend this or excuse this horrific behavior. If this was said in front of you, what would you say? If your son said this, what would you say? If it was said about your daughter or it was your wife, what would you say?" Beck asked.

AND NOW: LIBERAL HATE MAIL! Here are some of the Email and comments on youtube and my blog I got for this month. Eric131313 : CAPITALIST PIG! F***K YOU AND DONALD TRUMP! AND UR GREEDY SYSTEM!! Kay B writes: I guess your butt hurt still losing the debate about Sarah Palin and communism with sammy Jeans. Racist nut. Vampiressondaprowlq sez: Oh go away! Stay off my channel you fascist libertarian nut! Who's funding your blog! TELL ME! I'll FIND OUT!! TELL ME WHO YOUR RIGHT WING BACKER ARE AND WHO IS PAYING YOU TO LIE FASCIST RIGHT WING HYPOCRITE!! Wez...

M. Simon of Classical Values responded to a recent posting concerning Obamacare by linking to a piece by Milton Friedman "The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise". I confess to being so intrigued by the title that I read it to see where this came from. Socialism has a meaning: government ownership of the means of production. If Friedman's point was that there are two choices: free markets or command and control, this is true. But prohibiting something is not socialism. Many libertarian ideologues believe that drug prohibition is a net loss for the society emphasizing the substantial crime and...

A city in western Germany will start a controversial project on Wednesday to employ alcohol and drug addicts to clean the streets in return for beer, tobacco, food and small amounts of cash. Social workers will closely oversee the project dubbed “Pick Up” in a dilapidated area around the central railway station of the industrial city of Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia. An initial six people will sweep streets and collect garbage in return for €1.25 per hour, a warm meal and three bottles of beer after their shift, as well as tobacco for smokers. …

Texas Gov. Rick Perry probably shouldn't have attempted to make the case that gay people can "decide not to" be gay despite genetic predisposition, he conceded Thursday, offering no semblance of an apology but trying instead to rally attention back to his message about jobs and the economy. "I got asked about an issue," Perry, a Republican, explained during a lunch hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "And instead of saying, 'You know what? We need to be a really respectful and tolerant country - to everybody - and get back to talking about: Whether you're gay or straight, you...

This was proven by a study by Grethe Jensen and co. (1993), who meticulously counted neurons in matched samples of non-alcoholics and alcoholics. What they found was that there was no real difference in the density or overall number of neurons between the two groups. In every group, those who drank moderately on a regular basis throughout their lives always had a diminished chance of becoming mentally impaired in their old age compared to those who didn't drink at all or almost never drank. Now for the negative (there's a lot when it comes to intemperate alcohol consumption, so I'll...

Nicholas Cecil Leading Horse was born into the Sioux Nation in Valentine, Neb., on Christmas Eve 1946. The youngest of Lewis and Margaret Leading Horse’s six children, he would grow up to become Tacoma’s most expensive street drunk. From his mid-40s into his early 60s, he would cost taxpayers an estimated $2,407,100. The money was spent on emergency fire, police and medical care, ambulance rides, food, shelter, detox and sobering services, court and jail time, and rehabilitation efforts. A decade ago, The News Tribune added up Leading Horse’s tab from the previous 10 years and put it in the seven-figure...

A British coroner says singer Amy Winehouse died as the unintended consequence of drinking too much alcohol. Coroner Suzanne Greenaway gave a verdict of death by misadventure, saying Winehouse died of accidental alcohol poisoning. The singer, who fought drug and alcohol problems for years, was found dead at her London home in July. An autopsy was inconclusive, but found no trace of illegal drugs in her system. Winehouse was reportedly more than five times over the legal drunk-driving limit, which is the same in the United Kingdom is as it is in the United States, when she died.

Midnight on St Mary Street in Cardiff and everything is exactly as expected. Half a dozen young women slump in a gutter, men urinate outside a health-food shop and, as hordes stagger between nightclubs, someone lifts up a blow-up doll with a sex toy protruding out of it. The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it's a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has 'only' drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of...

The Obama Administration is suing a trucking company for firing a driver who admitted he was alcoholic. Unreal. FOX News reported: Citing a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Obama administration is suing a trucking company for taking the keys away from an Arkansas driver and eventually firing him after he admitted he was battling alcohol abuse. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit this week arguing that Old Dominion Freight Line discriminated against Charles Grams by stripping him of his position and offering him a demotion even if he completed a substance abuse counseling program....

Sober at Last! How John J* Went From Gunslinger to God-lover It was a January midnight, and I was driving down Woodward Avenue, looking for a place to continue my evening of fun. Over there! I pulled up in front of a noisy bar. Leaving my new Pontiac running at the curb, I walked inside and fired a shot into the ceiling. In the sudden hush, a hundred startled faces turned my way. I must have looked pretty funny, swallowed up in my father’s felt hat and oversized trench coat, with a red cowboy bandana over my nose and...

Drew University, like many colleges, is working harder to deter underage drinking, but that didn't stop students younger than 21 from drinking heavily at campus parties Labor Day weekend. "The parties are in dorms, on top of buildings, wherever people find an ample place where they're not going to be bothered," said 18-year-old Dean Shtainhorn of Millburn, who admitted to experimenting with alcohol. The Madison campus is not unlike colleges across the country dealing with the problem of underage alcohol consumption and binge drinking. That is why Drew University president Robert Weisbuch said he joined the Amethyst Initiative, a national...

Previous observational studies have reported that heavy alcohol intake is a risk factor for hypertension but such studies may be confounded by factors such as diet, smoking, exercise levels and socio-economic position. Clinical trials exploring the link are difficult to implement and have limited follow-up time. The Bristol study, led by Dr Sarah Lewis of the University's Department of Social Medicine, took a different approach focused on people who have a mutation on a gene which affects their body's ability to eliminate alcohol. Alcohol is initially metabolised to an intermediate compound, acetaldehyde, which is further metabolised and then eliminated from...

Aboriginal children in Outback Australia are so neglected by their alcoholic parents that some have suckled from dogs' teats in a desperate search for food, it has been reported. The shocking revelation came from a coroner investigating the appalling rates of suicide among Aborigines living in the remote and beautiful Kimberley region of Western Australia. Earlier this month the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered a much-publicised apology to Aborigines for past injustices, but critics questioned whether his words would lead to any practical improvement in the wretched lives of indigenous people. "The plight of the little children was especially pathetic...