Free Republic

I’m thinking of possibly marketing my product. The basic selling point is that the mask is completely invisible. With a small amount of additional effort I was able to add a second feature: you can’t feel the material it’s made from.

Now that President Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president, he wants to hit the ground running and attend to urgent priorities. One of his first moves was to extend student loan payment deferrals until October, buying time for further reforms to America’s higher education system. Deferrals will be one small part of a larger strategy to shift higher education costs away from borrowers and toward taxpayers, regardless of cost and consequences. Rather than creating a bank-breaking new strategy to subsidize (predominately) well-off graduates, President Biden should offer low-income students better alternatives to the broken status quo. Millions...

<p>I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.</p>

Over 14,000 school boards, with about 100,000 members, set the course for instruction in classrooms across the country. To understand the views of parents and school board members in debates about K-12 content and policy, The Heritage Foundation commissioned a nationally representative survey.

Most college professors applaud what American higher education does and want to see it expand to include even more students. One dissenter of note, however, is Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel. In his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit, he argues that higher education has become a big part of the problem he sees with the country—that it’s dominated by a “meritocratic elite.” While I find Professor Sandel’s main argument in the book unpersuasive, his thoughts about higher education are worth considering. Before going into them, let’s look at his main argument. He writes that the U.S. has allowed its...

In her fine opinion piece for the Martin Center, Megan Zogby bemoans the “Quixotic” requirement that North Carolina college and university students take between two and four courses in a language such as Spanish, French, or German. This requirement, Zogby asserts, “appears to have no meaningful effect on the language proficiency of college graduates.” What is more, the coursework “adds to [students’] tuition bill, but doesn’t teach them a new skill for their careers.” Anyone who has struggled through Spanish 102, only to find it difficult to impossible to ask for directions to the restroom in a Latin American restaurant,...

See below. I am quite terrified to see where this is all headed. The full text of the letter being circulated at Harvard is below: Revoke their Degrees The campaign to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election left five dead and nearly killed many more as armed, organized insurrectionists with Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia stormed the Capitol in search of members of Congress to kill or capture. Nationwide violence is expected in the weeks to come. Is Harvard University prepared to take a stand for representative democracy and against violent white supremacy?

The creepiest but most accurate protests are the ones that go one step farther than what the insane person is demanding. The Youtube video here is spot on.

On January 13, 1776, General Washington sat down to write a letter to the Massachusetts state legislature, reporting how dire their situation was. Such letters were unfortunately to become the norm throughout America’s long War of Independence; the General felt that the civilian legislature needed to be kept apprised of the state of the fight, and in particular, they needed to know how much more material support the troops required from their government. In January of 1776, the Continental Army had been conducting the Siege of Boston for eight months. That’s eight months of sitting, encamped outside the most important...

Alan Jacobs’ new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, is a coaxing argument to read “old books that come from strange times.” Readers of his previous works The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think will not be surprised that Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor University, brings intellectual heft to the self-help genre. Jacobs focuses on why we ought to pay attention to old books. There is no surprise in learning that such reading makes us deeper, fuller persons, and more humble. Ex post facto...

People.com reports: "Police have identified three people who died from "medical emergencies" during the violent riot at the Capitol building Wednesday." 3 medical emergency deaths at the Capitol. How unusual is that? What are the full stories behind these deaths? Truth is the only healthy basis for society. This is particularly true for the police, a group of people who cannot function if they lose the people’s trust. (https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/09/06/respecting-the-police-its-a-two-way-street/) Can we restore shared faith in truth or is it gone forever in all the world’s different bubbles? In evaluating the events of last Wednesday and what should be done, America...

Public schools across the country are quickly responding to Wednesday’s events at the U.S. Capitol by offering “emotional support” for students and teaching vocabulary words such as “insurrection” and “sedition.” Ally Stanton, a kindergarten teacher in Needham, Massachusetts, told 25 News: I had a lot of students coming in this morning saying things such as Mommy and Daddy were watching a lot of news, bad guys got into the White House, there were bad people that were trying to hurt others in Washington. A lot of them were really concerned because they know that people shouldn’t be breaking into buildings…...

The California State Bar has released the results from the October 2020 online bar exam. The overall pass rate was 60.7%, up 10.6 percentage points from last year's July exam. For California ABA-accredited law schools, the pass rate for first time test-takers was 84%, up 13 percentage points from 2019. The was the first exam graded under the new cut score of 1390, reduced from 1440 by the California Supreme Court on July 16, 2020....The California State Bar has released the results from the October 2020 online bar exam. The overall pass rate was 60.7%, up 10.6 percentage points from...

The previous essay dealt with the moral decline of the student body in higher education—one of the motives behind my recent retirement after three decades of teaching college English. When I began teaching, most of the English faculty members, including the chair who hired me, had earned their doctorates in the late 1970s. They were oleaginous liberals, naturally, but they were also ladies and gentlemen of actual education and considerable high literacy. They took it for granted that the purpose of a literature program was to bring to life in students the Intuition of Form or Imagination about which George...

Basically, somebody was in Nancy Pelosi's office and she had left her computer open. However, I can't see what emails she had and would love to know what is there. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10223197410016161&set=a.10208210014460639

Radicals on campus do more than just “cancel” speakers. Failure by administrators to stand firm alters the atmosphere at colleges as well as, eventually, our system of government. The most profound consequences may come less from ideological zealots than from our own cowardice to oppose them. Some colleges now respond to ideological intimidation not by defiantly defending their principles, but by devising furtive techniques to eliminate politically incorrect faculty. In a new Martin Center policy brief, Scholastic Gag Orders: NDAs, Mandatory Arbitration, and the Legal Threat to Academics, I explore how non-disparagement agreements (NDAs) and mandatory arbitration (MA) provide a...

At a time when the pandemic has exposed a growing shortage of nurses, it should have been good news that there were more than 1,200 applicants to enter the associate degree program in nursing at Long Beach City College. But the California community college took only 32 of them. North of here, California State University, East Bay isn't enrolling any nursing students at all until at least next fall. Higher education was struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing demand for nurses even before the COVID-19 crisis. Now it's falling further behind. Health protocols are limiting in-person instruction. Nursing teachers...

The year 2020 brought changes that colleges would have never made by choice. Enrollment declines, remote classes, and dramatic employee cuts (for faculty and some staff alike) were unthinkable a year ago. But, for the sake of the future, more work remains. Below are some priorities the Martin Center staff would like to see catch fire on campus. Jenna A. Robinson, President Expand the Number of Universities Committed to the Chicago Principles In 2021, more universities should adopt the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—especially here in North Carolina. The Chicago Principles go beyond merely legal protection for free speech. They...

All throughout high school, Brian Williams planned to go to college. But as the pandemic eroded the final moments of his senior year, the Stafford, Texas, student began to second-guess that plan. "I'm terrible at online school," Williams says. He was barely interested in logging on for his final weeks of high school; being online for his first semester at Houston Community College felt unbearable. "I know what works best for me, and doing stuff on the computer doesn't really stimulate me in the same way an actual class would." Paying for college was always going to be hard, but...

“Too many universities and school systems are about radical left indoctrination, not education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt status and/or funding, which will be taken away if this propaganda or act against public policy continues. Our children must be educated, not indoctrinated!” -President Trump on free speech on college campuses. Remember that part in the previous section where I mentioned that because universities take public funding (even many private ones), they have to follow federal policy? Well this is one way they enforce their rules. By using the power of the purse. So, if...