Free Republic

Have you ever noticed that people for NON-Southern states, especially BLUE ONES, don't tattoo their states names on themselves or bumper stickers and so on?

I haven't seen any state name tattoos, I have seen the following bumper sticker quite a few times:

"Say ya to da U.P., eh!"

I wonder what they want to serve for breakfast. At my high school they served breakfast, but instead of buying an entire breakfast, you could buy the individual items. On the days I got breakfast, I would get either a cinnamon roll or a Twix bar. Yummy, but probably not what nutritionists would recommend for breakfast. Also, a lot of kids at that school probably don't need breakfast because they have lunch so early. (First lunch was at 10:30 the last I heard.)

Freedom is the right to do what is known to be right; it presumes virtue and is ordered toward the common good.

I recently came across the following description of freedom in the book Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the story, Laura is about 14 or 15 years old and is at the town's Fourth of July celebration.

...Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song [My Country Tis of Thee] came together in her mind and she thought: God is America's king.

She thought: Americans won't obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences... Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. "Our father's God, author of liberty-" The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for Gods law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.

This is the best discussion of what freedom is that I've come across.

So if you wouldn't write it out on paper, why would you say it aloud?

If you always use perfect grammar when speaking, or even writing, you can come across as stilted. For example "Who are you gonna go to the dance with?" sounds much more normal than "With whom will you go to the dance?"

That said, there are way too many people whose use of grammar is so bad that it's difficult to tell exactly what they're trying to say.

To really compound the verbal felony, substitute "goes" for "says" or "said" and you wind up with "He goes 'lets grab lunch', and I go 'sure'!"

Or how about this:

"He's like 'lets grab lunch', and I'm like 'sure'!" I've heard that usage a few times too many.

Find a boutique type store that sells hand-knit. That would be in cities, resort-type areas. The woman I mentioned -- she hand cards, spins and looms the wool.

Thanks for the reply. I mostly knit with whatever yarn I have available. I did try spinning once, and plan on doing some more when I have more time and can get the wool. I can see how someone could get a lot more for things knit from homespun wool.

I'm not sure if that would work for me, (I may need to hone my knitting skills a little more) but you have given me a great excuse to devote more time to knitting and spinning. :)

Niche. I now a few local women who do pretty well at knitting. One sweater a few thousand.

Who do they find who would pay thousands of dollars for a sweater? I'm not doubting you, I'd really like to know, because I knit.

Few want to stick to their knitting, or basket weaving.

Because there's not a whole lot of money to be made knitting or basket weaving. If you know how to make a decent living doing that sort of thing, please let me know.

I don't think you can blame this phenomenon entirely on schools. Part of what is described in aritcle- students who are inarticulate and shy during interviews- is probably mostly because they are young and inexperienced. It's natural to be nervous at a job interview, and it's natural to be especially nervous if it's the first one you've ever had. People who have been out in the business world for a while probably have a much better idea of what to expect in an interview than students do.

I would say that there is some hope that these students will improve their communication skills with practice.

Perhaps it's time to start keeping the kids in school all year long. At least the older ones, anyway. Maybe junior-high and above. Heck, college kids should be going year 'round for certain, prepare them for life in the real world.

Most college kids and a lot of high school kids use their summer vacations to work. There are a lot of students who would be unable to afford to go to college year round.

And as a recent college grad who is now working full time, all year round, in many ways life in the real world is easier than life in college. The few vacations I do get are real vacations, unlike in college, when I spent them working. Also, when I get home from work I'm done for the day; I don't have homework to do or papers to write.

HONORS class? And pre-calc too(which I didn't take till college). WTF is he bitching about then? If honors class is like AP here, that's college credit and a whole different ballgame. If he didn't like it, he should have taken a different course.

Not necessarily. It could be a situation where Honors pre-calc is the only class math class he can take. They may not offer a non-honors version. (The way my old high school only offers AP Calculus; you can't take regular Calculus.) If this kid has already taken all the other math classes leading up to this one, and he still needs more credits in math to graduate or get into college, he may have no choice but to take this class. A lot of schools really push math but don't offer a lot of options as to which classes students can take. In fact, at my old high school, the kids who get on the advanced math track in middle school run out of high school math classes by their senoir year and have to take it at the local community college.

I wonder if they're still allowed to profile based on age. Evrey store I know of will allow a 40 year old woman to carry a large purse into the store. But if her teenage children want to stop by the store on their way home from school, a lot of stores will make them leave all bags outside.

As happy as I am to see live legally defined as occuring before birth, I am a bit concerned, since it was my impression that citizenship was only granted if the child was born in the US??? I hope I'm wrong on that point though :)

From the article, it sounds like the baby's father is an American citizen, which would mean the that the baby automatically becomes a citizen, whether he is born here or not.

They should assign a clerk to watch over the self check outs, IMHO

I thought that was standard practice. They always have a clerk to watch the self checkout at Meijers, and it seems to work really well.

I've read that part of the telephone taxes we pay was to finance some small war that was over a long time ago. We're still paying the tax!

If I rember correctly, the telephone tax was to pay for the Spanish American War, and Congress finally did repeal that one a couple years ago: about a century after the war the tax was supposed to pay for was over. So if we go by that example, we could very well be paying the proposed increased gas tax in the 22nd century.

The reasons that additional siblings hamper the intellectual growth of children (and particularly middle-borns) are fairly obvious—parental resources are a fixed pie, and children do better when they get more attention (and money

Interesting how this author just jumps to conclusions about siblings hindering intellectual growth. What about the fact that siblings can help each other with homework and younger siblings can learn from the older ones?

My English teacher for Early American literature was a blatant Feminazi. Every book we read for the course was about a turn of the century woman from upper class circles that committed suicide at the end of the book.

Sounds a lot like my high school English class. Was The Awakening by Kate Chopin amoung the books you had to read?

The worst book I've read recently is La Femme Rompue by Simone de Beauvoir, for a college French class. I'm in the middle of reading Les noces barbares for the same class, and it's even worse. Sometimes I find myself trying not to understand French.

I suspect that students are taking the test today who would have been channeled into auto shop or steno school in my day.

That depends. In Michigan, very few students take the SAT because colleges in the midwest rely mostly on the ACT. As a result, not even all honor students take the SAT.

If resources were limited, prices would be going through the roof. They are not!

If resources were unlimited they would be free. Every resource you have to pay a price for is limited, but the resources you pay more for are more limited than the ones you pay less for.

Not only are you forcing her to give him a child, you're forcing her to pay out of her wallet for 18+ years for his evil.

So make the rapist pay. Confiscate all his assets, and lock him in prison for the rest of his life to do hard labor with the money going to support the victims.