Free Republic

The Federal Aviation Administration issued an advisory at 4:18 am Eastern Time, saying the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system had failed. All flight departures were temporarily halted. By 9 am, flights were slowly getting back on track, the agency said later this morning. IMAGE “Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the United States following an overnight outage to the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that provides safety information to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. The agency continues to look into the cause of the initial problem.” This was the first time all...

I think that the old Communist East Germany should have been bought by the Disney Corporation, and kept going permanently, exactly as it was, as a tourist attraction. Schoolchildren from all over the Western world could have spent a few days there to find out what a dogma-driven society was really like. Tourists could have paid for package tours, escaping at the end of each gruelling day to special cordoned-off Western-style hotels. They could have realized, in time, what was happening here in supposedly Conservative Britain, where, as a new report has revealed this week, huge amounts of money and...

The arm of the American Bar Association that accredits U.S. law schools on Friday voted to eliminate the longstanding requirement that schools use the Law School Admission Test or other standardized test when admitting students. But under a last-minute revision, the rule change will not go into effect until the fall of 2025—giving law schools time to plan for new ways to admit students. The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar overwhelmingly voted to do away with its testing mandate after years of debate and over the objections of nearly 60 law school...

A Rubicon has been crossed in Australia. For the first time, someone has lost their job not because of something they said or did, but because of the church they belong to. Essendon AFL is an Australian rules football team. Based in Melbourne, it has a membership of over 80,000 and is a major player in what is a large and lucrative sport in Australia. This week it appointed a local businessman, Andrew Thorburn, as its chief executive. He lasted one day in the job and the story is best summed up by the Herald Sun headline, "Essendon's chief executive...

Disney has reportedly given the boot to its chairman of general entertainment content, Peter Rice. Disney confirmed Rice's departure in a news release on Thursday, adding that he would be replaced by Walt Disney Television Chairman Dana Walden. Sources told The New York Times that Rice was "an ill fit with Disney's corporate culture." Variety reported that Rice's firing was "entirely business and strategy-related" and had nothing to do with any personal behavior by Rice. Variety's sources said that Rice was completely blindsided by the decision. As chairman, Rice was tasked with overseeing Disney's original entertainment and news programming for...

The administration and board of regents at Concordia University Wisconsin has been deathly silent about this widely reported transgression against academic freedom.Today’s academic landscape is littered with the dry bones of academic freedom. This is true of my own religious university, Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), from which I have been suspended and put under threat of termination for publishing an academic essay critiquing identity politics. As reported by The Federalist in March, soon after I published that essay, I was banned from campus and put on administrative leave. There I remain three months later, with no clear path to restoration...

A professor was locked out of his classes and email account without warning in apparent retaliation for criticizing his Christian university’s use of “diversity” and “equity” as criteria for selecting its new president, he and several witnesses told The Federalist. The Rev. Dr. Greg Schulz was immediately and indefinitely suspended from his classes at Concordia University Wisconsin and banned from campus by interim college President William Cario on Feb. 18, a Friday. That was not formally conveyed to Schulz, however, until his lawyer obtained the suspension letter on Feb. 22, Schulz’s Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty attorney Dan Lennington...

Former Fort Lauderdale police chief Larry Scirotto, 48, was fired after an inquiry found that he asked 'which one is blacker?' when considering a promotion The inquiry also claimed Scirotto once said a conference room wall of photos was 'too white' and added, 'I'm gonna change that' Scirotto has vehemently denied the accusations, and has insisted he gave promotions based on merit to staff who happened to be minorities He is also accused of working as a high school basketball referee while being on the clock as chief 'The Chief was paid by the City for these unauthorized schedule adjustments,...

PENTAGON—In response to Russia's minor incursion into Ukraine, the Pentagon has issued a directive for all military personnel to ramp up their diversity and inclusion training. "If we are to go toe-to-toe with Russia, we need to wield our most powerful weapon: diversity," said General Mark Milley to reporters while waiting for his fresh manicure to dry. "Starting today, our top priority is to make sure all Marines, Airmen, Seamen, and Soldiers have completed modules 1-17 of our mandatory whiteness and gender studies training." In a statement, President Joe Biden voiced support for the inclusivity directive, emphasizing unity, diversity, and...

Newspeak is alive and well in the "diversity and inclusion" offices of academia. Anyone who is familiar with the Dystopian (and alarmingly relevant) novel “1984” by George Orwell is familiar with the concept of ”Newspeak.” In short, “Newspeak” is the language that the citizens of the autocratic future superstate “Oceania” speak, and it basically works by drastically reducing the number of words in an individual’s vocabulary or in the dictionary that the state deems “unnecessary.” Of course, the real purpose of “Newspeak” is to eliminate words that might cause an individual to think about ideas contrary to the state’s agenda...

This video, done by Dr. Jordan Petersen is VERY alarming! Speaking about the cultural implosion in Canada, and a loss of sanity among academic elites. People need to wage a war, to return to giving titles, position and honor, to people of any race, religion, and ethnicity, if they acquire the knowledge, pass the TESTS, and know their stuff. Rewarding people on gender identity, color of their skin pigment will ruin the entire world.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion staff often act as “political activists” and contribute to hostile conditions for Jewish students at universities, according to a study recently published by the Heritage Foundation. Jay Greene, senior research fellow at the foundation’s Center for Education Policy, and James Paul, director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, co-authored the December report, titled “Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities.” The study should help people understand that the “nice-sounding words” of diversity, equity and inclusion are “masking university programs that actually spew hate and division, particularly with respect to Jews,”...

OK, we learned something new today. We’ve written a lot about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) but we’d never heard of DEIBJ, which stands for “diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice” (how soon until we see DEIBJ+). The Skimm interviewed UC Berkeley’s new Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion, Dania Matos, who describes the emotional toll of her $325,000 a year gig. At the time of her interview, she’d only been at UC Berkeley for about a month, so her typical day consisted of “holding informal and formal listening sessions focused on truth-telling, trust, and transformation.” The Skimm asked her...

Universities and corporations are desperate to hire people whose sole job is to tell you how racist you are. In a recent discussion about the "wokeness" situation in American universities, Prof. Kimberly Johnson presented a table showing the salary compensation data for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) personnel at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2018–2019. It contains 82 full-time positions ranging from a modest $42,000 salary for the administrative assistant to $408,000 for chief diversity officer (that's just above the salary of the POTUS, at $400,000). The total annual compensation for DEI staff at MSU is $10.6 million. Isn't that too...

Leaders at one of the largest investment firms in the world, State Street Global Advisors, will need to ask permission to hire White men as it rolls out a diversity hiring initiative. "This is now front and central for State Street — it’s on every senior executive’s scorecard," said Jess McNicholas, the bank’s head of inclusion, diversity and corporate citizenship in London, according to the Sunday Times. "All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and the number of colleagues from ethnic-minority backgrounds."

I discovered this series titled “What the Progressive Socialist Liberals Have in Store for Conservatives” only yesterday, and I read all six parts in a row non-stop. This is a masters-degree-level course on the history and lessons of government-sponsored genocide. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Some of the many embedded images are gut-wrenching, but this lecture series does not hold back any punches. The hosting website permits you to save these lectures as PDF files, and I recommend that you do so. The powers-that-be in the coming years will not want people to be armed with this knowledge. This...

I’m so old I remember the tired old feminist gibe about it taking 2 men to replace a woman. Perhaps that was a bit of hyperbole, given that it’s sometimes the other way round.Daily MailTen million dollars, wow! Now that sounds like hyperbole. The damages seem high I know, but then, Donald Trump was still in office when they fired him. Ten months into Joe Biden sized inflation that sounds about right, doesn’t it? These are the stickers Raj made for me. I’ve found them quite useful.Way to go David and David’s attorneys! Even if there were valid reasons for...

As Oscar Wilde tells us, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” This is especially true of bureaucracies on college campuses. Once their seeds are planted, their growth often continues without check. Administrative offices have been growing on college campuses since the 1980s, undoubtedly contributing to the increasing cost of a degree. Besides being expensive, administrative growth shifts resources away from education towards administrative programming. This threatens to undermine higher education’s central mission of teaching and research. There has been particularly rapid growth over the past two decades in the area focused on the promotion of diversity, equity,...

An alarming discovery out of Baltimore City Schools. Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment data that North Avenue does not release publicly. That data shows some students who could soon graduate, are performing at an elementary school level, academically. Project Baltimore, over the years, has heard from many parents who say their children are being pushed through Baltimore City Schools without getting the education they need. Julie Gaskins told us back in 2018 that her seventh grader was doing math and reading at a second-grade level. Project Baltimore also spoke with Gregory Gray, a Baltimore City Schools father, back in...