Free Republic

--The Left Never Knows When To Stop-- It was a shock. Jay Leno went Jaywalking and revealed the startling fact that a lot of Americans didn’t know much history, geography or anything else. Who won the Civil War? What country is Mount Rushmore located in? People didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. Many thought that was the high watermark of dumb. What could be dumber than not knowing who won the Civil War? Jimmy Kimmel has astonished the nation by showing that America is even dumber than we worried it is. He sent a crew out to the streets...

The survey, released Oct. 3 by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation with the research firm Lincoln Park Strategies, sampled 1,000 American adults. It showed that only 36 percent actually passed the test. Respondents 65 and older scored the best (74 percent), while only 19 percent of test-takers 45 and younger passed.

If you have not watched this you need to. A well written film that will enlighten you to the real world of politics. This is a documentary that will show what is going on and why.

If you can’t afford a doctor and feel you need a check up, go to the airport. you will get a free x-ray and breast exam and if you mention al queda you will also get a free colonoscopy. Adultery is a sin; you cannot have your Kate and Edith too. I had a really bad day. First, my ex got ran over by a bus - then I got fired from my job as a bus driver. Wife: Look at that drunk guy. Husband: Who is he? Wife: 10 years ago he proposed to me and I rejected him....

A mother in Chicago wrote for help: “Dear Abby: All of my grown children are underachievers. When contemporaries talk about their children getting jobs, getting married, having kids, going on vacation, buying a house/car, I have nothing to contribute. My children do not have lives; they work low-paying jobs and scrape by. Worse, they have no ambition to do better.” Dear Abby responded with little insight: “Your children are adults. If they were motivated, they would be doing more with their lives than scraping by. Be glad they are independent and have good relationships with each other—it’s a plus, and...

Is there a law somewhere which requires that public schools must aim for mediocrity?Nobody denies that our toys, including games and robots, are smarter than ever. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that we humans are moving in the other direction: dumber and dumbest.The unanimity of opinion is rather shocking. You see on the Internet a lot of headlines like this: “Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing — and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak.” As for why, there is a colorful variety of opinion. Some people blame pollution, diet, and/or environmental degradation....

Summary: One thing our public schools do well is undermine real education.... K-12 education is a big swirl of unnecessary problems and impasses. Millions of children are damaged by what seem to be ideological decisions. Our self-appointed experts, which I call the Education Establishment, appear unable to improve the schools. Worse, they don't seem to want to. Let’s identify the three main problems as the first step toward fixing them: First, our schools seem to become dumber by the year and probably by the month. Government statistics say that the majority of our students, in both fourth grade and eighth...

There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement. Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism, Common Core) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career, to impress ordinary citizens). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is...

Siegfried Engelmann is the real thing, an educator who loves to teach children and knows how to do it, both personally and in his books. As far back as the late 1960s, he told the Education Establishment: you’re doing it all wrong. Engelmann takes a scientific approach. He believes you formulate programs, test them, revise them, and keep doing this until you get solutions that give you the greatest success in the ordinary classroom. Q: As you look at the entire field of education, what is the one thing that most offends you? A: The disconnect between what occurs in...

I recall reading or hearing of research to determine the level of understanding of opponents political arguments by conservatives and leftists/liberals. The research, as I recall, showed a list of policy questions, and asked the recipient, who was self identified, as conservative or liberal/leftist, to give the opposite sides arguments on each policy question. My understanding was that conservatives consistently understood and knew the opposite sides arguments, while liberal/leftists were ignorant of the conservative arguments. I have been looking for the source of this research, but have not found any. Is this research a myth, or is there an actual...

1) Good Christmas present for smart people. Somewhat complex sophistries are explained in simple terms. It’s fun knowing how this stuff works. 2) This book is a guidebook to what’s really going on in our public schools. Weird, unproven theories and methods are commonplace, such as Sight-words to teach reading, Constructivism to teach knowledge, Common Core Math to teach arithmetic, and so on. Once you understand these gimmicks, then you can fight back more successfully against the school system. 3) A group, whether 2 people or 20 people, can use this book to initiate and focus discussions. You can pick...

SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING ? A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue. A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/ 100th of a second. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes. A snail can sleep for three years. Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. All 50 states are listed across the top...

Christopher de Bellaigue stresses how, over the centuries, many Muslim leaders have been paragons of enlightenmentChristopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation. As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And we’d better understand it, because it’s an...

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

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...