Free Republic

When Coco Layne, a Brooklyn-based producer, meets someone new these days, the first question that comes up in conversation isn’t “Where do you live?” or “What do you do?” but “What’s your sign?” Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now believe it is not necessary to believe in God to have good morals, a study from Pew Research Center released Wednesday found. The percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who “never doubt existence of God” fell from 81% in 2007 to...

Tourism organisation VisitScotland is encouraging people to celebrate Sunday's National Unicorn Day. The unicorn is the official national animal of Scotland and continues to feature on Royal Coat of Arms today. For Sunday, willow artist Woody Fox has created a 2.1m (7ft) unicorn sculpture for the Crawick Multiverse art project in Dumfries and Galloway. VisitScotland is also encouraging people to "spot" unicorns elsewhere in Scotland. Carvings and sculptures of unicorns can be found on historic buildings, such as the National War Museum at Edinburgh Castle. A tapestry called, Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn, hangs in Stirling Castle and a unicorn...

WASHINGTON, June 28 (UPI) -- A tracking poll in the U.S. presidential election shows Democrat Hillary Clinton widening her lead over Republican Donald Trump and approaching the 50 percent threshold nationally in a head-to-head matchup. The NBC News/SurveyMonkey online weekly tracking poll shows Clinton with a 49 percent-41 percent lead over Trump, her largest lead in that poll since it began tracking the likely general election matchup in early May.

MADERA (CBS13) — A California Highway Patrol helicopter tracked down an escaped unicorn on Wednesday in Madera. Officers were called out when the less-than-mythological white pony with a fake horn escaped twice from a children’s birthday party. It was captured shortly after its first escape, but it darted out in the road again at around 5:30 p.m. Photo Courtesy: DJ Becker A nearby resident with another horse on her property helped officers approach and finally capture it. CHP officers were concerned the roughly 500-pound animal’s size would do serious damage to a vehicle that hit it, possibly resulting in the...

They call their group "The Unicorns." The six young girls teach themselves things they didn't learn in the Girl Scouts, like building a campfire. "I got jealous of what my brother got to do because he's a Boy Scout ...," said 10-year-old Ella Jacobs. Jacobs and her friend, Allie Westover, decided they were more interested in what the boys were doing. So last fall, they started participating in activities alongside a local Boy Scout troop. "I really like competitions and I really enjoy competitive nature and also working in teams and so being in Boy Scouts gave me the opportunity...

In November 2008, California voters narrowly approved Proposition 1A, which provided $9.95 billion in government money for a statewide bullet-train network. The initiative passed, even though the California High-Speed Rail Authority had been legally required to release a detailed, updated business plan by October 1 of that year, so that voters would have time to learn exactly how the state planned to finance what was then billed as a $43 billion project—and no updated plan was in view. Rail officials failed even to release a preliminary report before the election, claiming that state legislators’ long delay in passing the fiscal...

SAN FRANCISCO -- The herd of $1 billion-plus startups -- the so-called "unicorns" -- is growing. But the workforces at these oversized startups are raising a question now familiar to Silicon Valley: do these mythical creatures only come white and male? A year ago, Rev. Jesse Jackson drew attention to Silicon Valley’s lack of diversity and spurred Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and many others to start issuing “diversity reports” to hold themselves accountable. But now he has a new target: the unicorns, which are delaying their IPOs and, in a sense, public scrutiny, as they look to establish markets around...

The United Nations (UN) has delivered its latest verdict on the measures necessary to save the world from global warming and the news is as grim as it is predictable and wearisomely familiar: More regulation from "experts", technocrats and bureaucrats at supranational organisations, such as the one whose initials begin with U and end with N.More taxpayer subsidies for expensive, inefficient renewable energy.More nuclear power (with shale gas used as a transitional fuel to replace coal). The abandonment of fossil fuels. Less meat consumption.A single, globally-regulated price for carbon dioxide. More local-government-enforced walking, cycling and public transportation. More back-door wealth...

Evolve, adapt or die. That is the fate of our current Republican party. We must evolve as a party and find a way to attract millennials to the conservative movement or we will never succeed in realizing our ideals of individual freedom and freedom from government interference. Initially, I received criticism from political pundits for speaking to non-traditional audiences. I was told it was a waste of time to reach out to these audiences, specifically students from both Howard University and University of California, Berkeley. My response is this: I have never been one to watch the world go by...

Last week, the Detroit Free Press concluded that the massive giveaway of state tax dollars to electric vehicle battery makers failed to generate the thousands of jobs that were promised. In particular, a March 16 article noted that, "today, Michigan has only a few hundred battery workers in four plants — despite $861 million in Obama administration stimulus grants and $543 million in Michigan tax credits awarded by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s administration in 2009." Readers of Michigan Capitol Confidential are not surprised by this news given that the failures of the electric vehicle battery industry in Michigan have been...

A Craigslist ad out of Goffstown, New Hampshire is getting a lot of laughs on the internet and probably the attention of 5-year-old girls everywhere. Someone posted the ad a couple of weeks ago offering up two unicorns for sale. The asking price is $1.86 million.

[I've clipped the entire piece leading up to his conclusion, where you will note he takes Sen. Ted Cruz to the woodshed for not compromising and looking for the middle ground - but the fact is Texans took Cruz to the U.S. Senate because he stood for what we want and he's following through on his word to the voters.. So you can decide what to do about reading the rest of his blither.] ___________________________________ .......One thing that now appears incontestable is that GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has damaged his party badly in the short term, making the GOP...

A Turkish customs official waved Emily Harris through customs at Antalya airport—after stamping a passport identifying her as a unicorn. Mom Nicky Harris, from Cwmbran, South Wales, said: ‘The passport doesn’t even look real—it’s got gold teddy bears on the front.’ZA couple were left stunned after their nine-year-old daughter managed to pass through Turkish customs officers - with a passport identifying her as a UNICORN. Emily Harris had taken a toy passport she had made for her toy unicorn, Lily, on holiday with her. And when the family passed through customs at Antalya airport to start their one-week holiday, flustered...

The Environmental Protection Agency is getting taken to court left and right for their many overzealous regulations and intrusions into private industry, with varying results– but on Friday, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that, why no, the EPA may not punish the oil industry for their noncompliance with the EPA’s lofty Renewable Fuels Standard mandates in failing to blend a certain amount of cellulosic biofuels into their product, seeing as how those biofuels are not actually available.

Pyongyang, November 29 (KCNA) -- Archaeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences have recently reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryo Kingdom (B.C. 277-A.D. 668). The lair is located 200 meters from the Yongmyong Temple in Moran Hill in Pyongyang City. A rectangular rock carved with words "Unicorn Lair" stands in front of the lair. The carved words are believed to date back to the period of Koryo Kingdom (918-1392). Jo Hui Sung, director of the Institute, told KCNA: "Korea's history books deal with the unicorn, considered to...

Federal regulations can be maddening, but none more so than a current one that demands oil refiners use millions of gallons of a substance, cellulosic ethanol, that does not exist. "As ludicrous as that sounds, it's fact," says Charles Drevna, who represents refiners. "If it weren't so frustrating and infuriating, it would be comical." And Tom Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research says, "the cellulosic biofuel program is the embodiment of government gone wild." Refiners are at their wit's end because the government set out requirements to blend cellulosic ethanol back in 2005, assuming that someone would make it....

Obama green-tech program that backed Solyndra struggles to create jobs A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show. The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies. President Obama has made “green jobs” a showcase of his recovery plan, vowing to foster new jobs,...

Remains of the oldest known Caspian horse, otherwise referred to as the "Kings' horse" due to its popularity among royals the world over, have been unearthed in northern Iran, according to CAIS. The more than 3,000-year-old remains were found at an Iranian site named Gohar-Tappeh. In ancient times, royals often chose Caspian horses to ride them into battle and/or to pull their chariots. During more recent history, individuals such as Price Philip of England have popularized the Caspian, which is the oldest breed of horse in the world still in existence. The Shah of Iran gifted such a horse to...

Deep in Tibet... the explorers came upon the first of the enigmatic creatures. They saw one, and then three of them grazing in the open forest. Soon, to their astonishment, a whole herd of the unusual horses appeared. "They looked completely archaic, like the horses in prehistoric cave paintings," said Michel Peissel, a French ethnologist and the expedition leader. "We thought it was just a freak, then we saw they were all alike." A team of French and British explorers, who have just returned here from a six-week expedition in Tibet, say they believe that they found an ancient breed...

Genetic investigators say the partnership between people and the ancestors of today's donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago. The findings, reported today by an international research team in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paint a surprising picture of what small, isolated groups of people were able to accomplish when confronted with unpredictable storms and expanding desert. "It says those early people were quite innovative, more so than many people...