Free Republic

The So-Called “New Pentecost” vs. True Renewalhis article first appeared in the May 2021 Print Edition of Catholic Family News (click HERE to subscribe; current subscribers can access the E-Edition HERE).Pentecost: The Coming of the Holy Ghost“And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: And they were all...

A Chicago man who wore a neon yellow “peacekeepers” vest helped a group of people beat and rob a motorist in Little Village on Friday night, according to a Chicago Police Department report. Oscar Montes, 31, is scheduled to appear in felony bond court Sunday afternoon on charges of robbery, aggravated battery, and unlawful vehicular invasion, a CPD spokesperson said. City and state officials have lauded the use of “peacekeepers” as a tool they would deploy over the Memorial Day weekend to tamp down violence across the city.

Fly me a river. Hunter Biden cried poverty at his Arkansas child-support hearing earlier this month — despite flying to and from the courthouse aboard a luxury private jet owned by his close friend Kevin Morris. The 2001 Dassault Falcon 50 — formerly owned by country singer Brad Paisely — is registered to Plato LLC, for which Morris is the principal, California business records show. The $6 million jet took off from Los Angeles on April 30 just after 7 a.m, according to flight records reviewed by The Post. It flew cross-country to Washington DC where it landed at Dulles...

A trio of Vladimir Putin's leading hypersonic scientists have been detained on suspicion of high treason in what fellow scientists have declared a 'witch hunt' Aerodynamics specialist Dr Valery Zvegintsev, 78, is the latest of three prominent scientists from the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk to be arrested on extremely serious charges. Zvegintsev, 78, along with Anatoly Maslov and Alexander Shiplyuk, are seen as key figures in the development of Russia's hypersonic weapons programme which is thought to be one of the world's most advanced. News of their detention on suspicion of high treason comes days...

Chancellor David C. Banks said the city is going to make major changes to how reading is taught in order to address the fact that half of city children in grades three through eight are not proficient in reading, according to the report. Banks noted in a recent interview that the city’s reading instruction methods are “fundamentally flawed” and fail to use scientifically proven ways of teaching students to read. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” Banks said. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.” The city’s 32 school districts will begin...

Among the topics, British police who are men - who say they are women - are allowed to intimately search women. (Go to 13:30 in the video.) British police pay to the "Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme," for "advice on gender-neutral facilities and pronouns, which leading barristers have said 'misrepresents" the 2010 Equality Act.'" Reference articles: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/public-bodies-pay-thousands-to-join-stonewalls-lgbt-diversity-champion-scheme-qhtm5b6c6 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/08/exclusive-police-forces-threatened-legal-action-links-stonewall/

Heeere we goooo. Fingers toes and eyes crossed for a successful test flight of the 33-Raptor engine Superheavy booster and Starship first time into space. Both vehicles are planned to splash down...the booster in the Gulf of Mexico and Starship off of Hawaii.

I recently wrote how public educators and unions were methodically killing public education. The best example this week comes from New York where a school board committee has solved the dismal math and reading scores for children in the system . . . they lowered the standards. This is not the first system to gut its standards rather than improve its quality of education. As teachers and unions object to school choice, they continue to make the case for private education. Parents are increasingly voting with their feet. The board is simply calling the lack of proficiency “the new normal”...

Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts who helped design the landmark banking safety legislation after the 2008 economic crisis, defended his involvement with the now-defunct Signature Bank, which was taken over by New York state officials this week. “I worked as a member of Congress for a certain objective,” Frank said in an interview with the Financial Times. “And then having retired, not having a pension by my choice, not wanting to be a lobbyist for reasons personal, I need to make some money.”

Oh but so many climate-related firms are going to fail to make payroll! - Any one of a thousand Internet scolds. My answer: So what? Next up - Republic, which apparently had lines out the door (if you believe the Internet) on Saturday. Again: So what? Folks, bubbles attract stupidity. Stupidity is a constant in the universe; in fact it is likely the only thing that is truly infinite (with all due respect to the late Mr. Einstein.) The so-called "Chief Risk Officer" at SVB had a masters in..... public administration. Anyone care to bet if she passed any form...

At the end of 2022, SVB had uninsured deposits in its US offices of $151.5 billion, versus total deposits of $173 billion. That's 88% of all SVB deposits that didn't have FDIC insurance.

Yet another of CNBC host Jim Cramer’s hot stock market takes just fell harder than President Joe Biden stumbling up the steps of Air Force One. Cramer listed his top ten biggest stock “winners of 2023” during the Feb. 8 edition of CNBC’s Mad Money. In the ninth spot for Cramer was Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company, SVB Financial Group. Cramer characterized the institution as a “merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street has mistakenly been concerned about.” In Cramer’s ludicrous view, the stock was a good buy because “being a banker to these immense pools of capital...

The former president told Sean Hannity’s radio show:...Mr Trump added: “That’s without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal. And now Ukraine is just being blown to smithereens.”

Natalie Boyce was a “fit and healthy” student who dreamt of travelling the world and buying her own home. The 21-year-old from Rowville in Melbourne’s southeast — a competitive netball player and hardworking student in her fourth year of law and commerce at Deakin University — would have turned 22 on Monday. Nearly one year ago, on March 27, 2022 — her late grandmother’s birthday — Natalie died of heart failure at The Alfred Hospital, six weeks after receiving a booster dose of the Moderna vaccine. “You’ll never be the same,” her mother Deborah Hamilton, 52, told news.com.au. “No parent...

Sorry folks, other than meritocracy is not acceptable in a society where we routinely use -- and rely on -- things that are dangerous. If you'd like to go back to the 5th Century or so, then its fine. Which is where we're headed if we don't cut it out. Personally, I prefer not to get there by being poisoned due to a train derailment or freezing to death when its -5F outside. RTWT

More signs of the failure of our secular and self-centered culture Anyone who is paying attention knows that there is something deeply wrong with American society today. That much is obvious. Increasingly obvious, albeit less well known, is the fact that the fixes that all too many people are applying to heal their broken lives are not helping a thing; in fact, they’re only making things worse. In many cases, they’re the source of the problem. But when will we turn away from these spurious therapies and embrace some genuine solutions? Take, for instance, a Monday news item from WCBI,...

Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.” But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient. Spry is one...

Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner Group of mercenaries has dominated headlines in Ukraine, has reportedly been sidelined by Vladimir Putin after failing to make good on his promises of military gains. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Prigozhin's "star has begun to set" following his boasts that his forces could capture the Donetsk city of Bakhmut. The think tank said on Sunday that Putin wanted to see what Prigozhin and his previous commander in Ukraine, General Sergey Surovikin could do after the conventional Russian military had suffered disastrous setbacks. "Both efforts failed," the ISW said, as Prigozhin's attempts...

Russia has put forward a highly contentious list of security guarantees it says it wants the west to agree to in order to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine, including many elements that have already been ruled out. ...The demands, spelled out by Moscow in full for the first time, were handed over to the US this week. They include a demand that Nato remove any troops or weapons deployed to countries that entered the alliance after 1997, which would include much of eastern Europe, including Poland, the former Soviet countries of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and...

The partisan January 6 Committee’s report published Thursday ignored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) role in the failure to provide enhanced Capitol security before the protest. Instead, the Committee’s report attempted to place the blame for the riot squarely on former President Donald Trump. “Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office watching the violent riot at the Capitol,” outgoing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote in the report, ignoring the days and events leading up to January 6.