To turn off commenting, go to Settings > Discussion and un-check Allow people to post comments on new articles.
If you would like to remove the posts from appearing on front page, do the following:
1) Make a child theme of Small Business and make it active.
2) Copy front-page.php from parent into the child theme directory and edit it. Delete this code and change
<?php get_sidebar( 'frontpage' ); ?>
to
<?php //get_sidebar( 'frontpage' ); ?>
3) Make a copy of featured-box.php from parent directory into the child theme directory and edit it. Delete
<div class="content-ver-sep"> </div>
Sample screenshot after doing above changes: https://i.imgur.com/OHb8dH8.png
