Free Republic

We exhort young people, born into this society of audio-visually conditioned robots, to rise up against the reign of untruth. Leave television to its willing slaves; read the masters of your religious and national culture, read your mystics, your thinkers, your poets. Seek after truth, obey it as you would a sovereign, don’t let yourself be closed in by worldly or ecclesiastical conformity. To bind oneself unconditionally to an ideology or a religion, beyond what is just and unjust, is a properly satanic aberration. Totalitarian states that alternate between lies and violence (lies to cover up the violence, and violence...

Dear pilgrims of Notre-Dame, [snip] The Christian life is a pilgrimage, often painful, which passes through Golgotha, but is illumined by the splendours of the Spirit. And which leads to glory. Oh! We may well be persecuted, but I forbid that we be pitied. For we belong to a race of exiles and voyagers, gifted with a prodigious power of invention, but refusing—that is its religion—to be distracted from the things of Heaven. [snip] If we seek to pacify the earth, to beautify the earth, it is not in order to replace Heaven, but so that the earth be Heaven’s...

SACRAMENTO -- Assembly Democratic leaders thought they were doing Assemblywoman Nicole Parra a favor when they installed her as chairwoman of the Assembly Veterans Affairs Committee. It's no secret that she was given the job to give her a chance to win points with one of the more conservative voting blocs in her tight re-election battle this year. It didn't work out that way. When politically active veterans got together in Clovis on Monday night and listened to both candidates, they endorsed her Republican opponent, Dean Gardner. The fact is, Parra probably never had a reasonable chance to win the...