Free Republic

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

Those who have not followed U.S. politics closely, and more specifically the political constructs of those who have hidden inside the DC politburo on both sides of the UniParty, may possibly be missing a very essential perspective.

Thomas Jefferson made the gloomy prediction that we can be ignorant or free, not both. Given how ignorant the country has become, our prospects are sinking. If you're not acquainted with how bad things have gotten, there is a quick way to find out. YouTube has dozens of videos where people are asked easy questions, but they don't know the answers. Jay Leno, former host of the Tonight Show, used to go "Jaywalking" and talk to Americans who didn't know what body of water is to the west of California. Another person, asked who won the Civil War, answered: "Germany?"...

Hindsight is 20/20, right? That’s the premise of a new book that poses the question: What if we were wrong? Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?” (Blue Rider Press, 2016) deals with the fact that the great march of history shows us that, well … we’re always wrong. Aristotle had his run as the smartest man on the planet, but he got disproved by Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost. And while there have been some hints of “proving Einstein wrong,” nothing has really stuck. But even so, scientific “fact” is a fact only...

The Inclination to the Truth Msgr. Charles Pope • March 14, 2016 • In a recent post (Is There a Way Back to Undeniable Reality and Universally Binding Norms?) I discussed how we today tend to “live in our heads” a lot more so than did the people living in biblical times and even those who lived up to and including the High Middle Ages and the Scholastic Period. Prior to that time, the “real world” was taken to be largely self-evident. But in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a school of thought later called “nominalism” began...

When was the last time you read a book? For almost 1 in 4 of us, it was more than a year ago, according to Pew Research. That's three times the number who didn't read a book in 1978. In America, we have a literacy problem. But more concerning to me, we have a biblical literacy problem. Americans, including churchgoers, aren't reading much of any book, including the Good Book. Christians claim to believe the Bible is God's Word. We claim it's God's divinely inspired, inerrant message to us. Yet despite this, we aren't reading it. A recent LifeWay Research...

Just because you’re not interested in politics doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you. Americans seem to have forgotten this dictum. A brand-new poll, taken in the form of an online survey, was just issued by the Pew Research Center. It paints a melancholy picture about the abysmal state of knowledge the U.S. public possesses on public affairs – the more so when you reflect that self-selection was probably present. In other words, you probably are brighter than Joe Sixpack if you could be bothered to take the test in the first place. Most people knew who Martin Luther King...

We Cannot Love God if We Do Not Love His Word from R.C. Sproul Mar 27, 2015 Category: Articles Emil Brunner, the twentieth-century Swiss theologian and one of the fathers of neoorthodox theology, wrote a little book titled Truth as Encounter. His thesis was that when we study the things of God, we are not studying truth in the abstract. We want to understand theology not merely so that we can make an A on a theology exam. We want to understand the doctrine of God so that we can understand God, so that we can meet the living God...

... The book’s title is Mr. Harari’s reminder that, long ago, the world held half a dozen species of human, of which only Homo sapiens—thee and me—today survives. The trajectory of our species, Mr. Harari says, can be traced as a succession of three revolutions: the cognitive revolution (when we got smart), the agricultural revolution (when we got nature to do what we wanted), and the scientific revolution (when we got dangerously powerful). Humanity, Mr. Harari predicts, will see one more epochal event. We will vanish within a few centuries, either because we’ve gained such godlike powers as to become...

".......For decades now, America's higher education system has poorly served Americans.If you can weld,you can land a job making six-figures tomorrow.If you recently acquired a B.A. in sociology,well, can you tell me how you do that thing where you make the foam on top a latte look like a heart?There's a reason why the lack of a college degree is practically celebrated in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg,Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are all college dropouts. Peter Thiel says a college "diploma is a dunce hat in disguise" and wants to blow the higher-ed system up entirely. Sixty-three of the people...

A history professor, writing in VEER (an arts and culture magazine published in Norfolk, Virginia), tells a startling anecdote: “A couple of years back, a student came to me for a conference, late in the semester, and asked, ‘Which came first, the Civil War or the Revolutionary War?’ Never mind that we had spent a week on both, and that he had been in attendance (physically, at any rate), for all of those sessions.” Note that the professor and the student seem equally unashamed. This is not a homeless man with a drug problem. This is an adult student taking...

An interesting theoretical issue in education from the beginning has been, who needs this stuff and how much of it do they need? Let's imagine a farmer sitting behind a mule plowing his field. Does he need an education? Is it wasted on him? Would life be better or worse if he knew some history, could sing some opera, or do puzzles in his head. What if he knows some Shakespeare and, as he’s going around the fields, regales the mule with speeches from Hamlet? Would this make life a little more interesting? Or would having such knowledge be a...

Previous (basic) Ronald Reagan quiz -here- ________________________________________________________________ This week's (moderate) quiz: 1. What was President Ronald Reagan's US Secret Service codename?a) Rawhideb) Bonzoc) Beand) Knute 2. During his first term as President, Reagan fired what politically unreliable Secretary of the Interior?a) James Wattb) Donald Reganc) Caspar Weinbergerd) George Schultz 3. At a young age, Ronald Reagan's nickname became "Dutch"- Why?a) He thought Ronald wasn't a name rugged enough for a red-blooded American boy and liked "Dutch" betterb) His father called him "the Dutchman" upon seeing his newborn sonc) Ronald Reagan's family was descended from Dutch ancestryd) Ronald Reagan's family was...

1. When was Ronald Reagan first sworn in as President of USA?a) 20 January 1981b) 4 November 1980c) 20 January 1989d) 4 March 1981 2. When was Ronald Reagan born?a) 6 February 1911b) 3 April 1912c) 4 July 1916d) 25 November 1921 3. Where was Ronald Reagan born?a) Honolulub) Los Alamosc) New Hampshired) Tampico 4. Which college did Ronald Reagan attend?a) Eureka Collegeb) Bethany Collegec) Trinity Colleged) Brown College 5. When did Ronald Reagan marry Nancy Davis?a) 4 March 1952b) 9 May 1956c) 6 June 1946d) 14 December 1948 6. What was Ronald Reagan's preferred nickname until the late...

Sixty years ago, Benjamin Bloom came up with what he said was a superior way to categorize educational goals and activities. The Taxonomy was famous for reducing everything to six steps: remembering; understanding; applying; analyzing; evaluating; creating. Note that "remembering" (or "knowing") is the first and LOWEST step. Bloom concocted this taxonomy to describe education at the college level. College professors, however, ignored the Taxonomy. Meanwhile, the people in charge of our public schools put this thing on a pedestal. Why? Because the Taxonomy scorned what had always been considered the most important step: knowing information. Bloom and his Taxonomy...

This (online) one is quick and easy, yet only 7% of the US adult population get all 13 questions correct (I got 12).  Take it yourself here, you only need a minute or two... good luck! ___________________________________________________ Pew Research   The JR Experiment   -h/t Kirby-

[SUMMARY: the latest educational theories require that teachers stop teaching. No one should be surprised if children stop learning.]--- A few years ago the city of Virginia Beach paid a Harvard consultant to come down and announce the big news: teachers must stop teaching. They would be given a new name and a new job. They would be called “facilitators.” Their job would be to “facilitate.” Imagine the shock. These teachers have been ordered to forget what they spent years learning. They have been downgraded from doing something that the world has always esteemed, i.e., teaching, to doing something that...

Our Lord has a special place for His babies 36 Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, 37“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”~~~ Mark 9 Today’s Society faces many challenging issues such as abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and gay marriage, and people are either interested in the subject or could care less. This booklet is directed at those who care less. Care less people usually are in that...

The word “pseudoscience” is used to describe something that is portrayed as scientific but fails to meet scientific criteria. This misrepresentation occurs because actual science has creditability (which is to say it works), and pseudoscience attempts to ride on the back of this credibility without subjecting itself to the hard intellectual scrutiny that real science demands. A good example of pseudoscience is homoeopathy, which presents the façade of a science-based medical practice but fails to adhere to scientific methodology. Other things typically branded pseudoscience include astrology, young-Earth creationism, iridology, neuro-linguistic programming and water divining, to name but a few.

The brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive, scientists believe. Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains, scientists believe. Much like a computer struggles as the hard drive gets full up, so to (sic) do humans take longer to access information, it has been suggested. Researchers say this slowing down it is not the same as cognitive decline. “The human brain works slower in old age,” said...