Free Republic

It has been said that money is power. Some have suggested that knowledge is power. For Nietzsche, language was a central aspect of power. Frederich Nietzsche noted that the “lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power.” Philosophers have long recognized language as a crucial faculty that distinguishes man from other creatures. Aristotle wrote that human beings, unlike other animals, possess “rational speech,” which is, among other things, for distinguishing between the just and the unjust. That is to say, language is employed...

There was a brief discussion yesterday about this paining by John F. Carlson (1874-1945) that pbird posted with the comment “not great, but nice” adding that “oddly, it feels a little off kilter to me.”Forest Silence Although I quite like it, it does seem “a bit off kilter.” There is something not quite right and as I am a sometime painter, and ostensibly a left-brained one at that, my brain immediately wants to solve the “problem.” For me painting requires skill, inspiration, intuition and…yes, problem solving. While some true artists can do the latter exclusively with intuition those of us...

<p>A 6-year-old boy who forgot his stuffed tiger Hobbes at Tampa International Airport when he went on vacation earlier this month got a big surprise upon returning home.</p> <p>Hobbes had been busy while he was in Houston.</p> <p>When the boy discovered he left behind his handmade tiger, his mother Amanda Lake called the airport to see if anyone could help find it.</p>

Two students at the University of California, Berkeley are calling for students to “Occupy the syllabus,” or consider dropping a course if it only includes the works of white men as class material. Students Rodrigo Kazuo and Margaret “Meg” Perret wrote an op-ed in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper, titled “Occupy the syllabus” where they called for a student-wide occupation of all social science and humanities classes after they found their upper-division course on classical social theory lacked the works of women, trans people, and people of color. “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that...

Bill Watterson is the Bigfoot of cartooning. He is legendary. He is reclusive. And like Bigfoot, there is really only one photo of him in existence. Few in the cartooning world have ever spoken to him. Even fewer have ever met him. In fact, legend has it that when Steven Spielberg called to see if he wanted to make a movie, Bill wouldn’t even take the call. So it was with little hope of success that I set out to try and meet him last April. I was traveling through Cleveland on a book tour, and I knew that he...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog “Hobbes and Bacon” is a “Calvin and Hobbes” tribute that takes place 26 years later “Hobbes and Bacon” is a “Calvin and Hobbes” tribute that takes place 26 years later. I had nothing to with creating these cartoons – I am merely posting them here so that you can see them. There are four – and only four – but that’s enough to get the message across. You can see larger versions of the images by clicking twice on each image:Part 1: http://www.pantsareoverrated.com/archive/2011/05/10/hobbes-and-bacon/Part 2: http://www.pantsareoverrated.com/archive/2011/05/12/hobbes-and-bacon-002/Part 3: http://www.pantsareoverrated.com/archive/2011/10/11/hobbes-and-bacon-03-2/Part 4: http://www.pantsareoverrated.com/archive/2011/10/13/hobbes-and-bacon-04-2/

In the end of days, an elite class shall arise under a despot. While the elites shall enjoy every comfort, for the average citizen, life will become a living hell: More dominant males will go berserk, attacking females, juveniles and less dominant males. Sexual deviancy will become the norm. Males will pursue females relentlessly. Rates of bisexuality and homosexuality will skyrocket. In the final phase, all society will collapse. People will stop reproducing altogether, mothers will stop caring for and attack their young and our civilization shall disappear.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Tigers could become extinct within 12 years but a top level meeting in Russia next month could help reverse the decline, nature conservation body WWF said on Thursday. "The worse scenario is that the tiger could be gone when the next year of the tiger comes along, in 12 years," said Ola Jennersten, head of the international nature conservation programme at WWF Sweden. The organisation is leading a global campaign to attempt to double the number of tigers by 2022, when the next Chinese calendar year of the tiger comes around. > "Despite the gloomy figures, the...

If you are not a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Watterson, then you may not know that Calvin was an imaginative little boy who created snowmen and put them in scenes that would be straight out of a snowman’s nightmare. Little Calvin would have the snowmen in scenes where the snowmen would die horrible, mostly painful, deaths. For ten winters, Calvin and Hobbes created entire worlds of snowmen living or dying in unhappily ever after ways. Here are some of the best snowmen nightmares, where fans of the comic strip created...

If recent trends are any guide, many Church of England parishes will have been cheered by higher attendances at Easter services. The last published statistics for 2006/7 show rises of 7 and 5 per cent in church going at Christmas and Easter. But these figures are just about the only signs of hope for the church and certainly not the first green shoots of a revival. Other statistics make for gloomy reading. Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years...

Just yesterday I was talking about this issue with one of my chickens. We were trying to figure out the nature of evil - where evil lies in the hearts of NAIS and men. On the one hand we have the beef exporters who push NAIS so they can reach foreign markets like Japan. This was the origin of what has become known as the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) which is the USDA's proposed plan for tracing the birth to death movement of every animal in the United States. I point out that Sam Sarpy, a rancher in Montana,...

Maybe someday, officials will put up a statue marking this quaint village as the birthplace of "Calvin and Hobbes." Just don't expect cartoonist Bill Watterson to attend the unveiling ceremony. It's been nearly 10 years since he abruptly quit drawing one of the most popular comic strips of all time. Since then, he's been as absent as the precocious Calvin and his pet tiger, err, stuffed animal, Hobbes. Some call Watterson reclusive. Others say he just likes his privacy. "He's an introspective person," says his mother, Kathryn, standing at the front door her home, its yard covered by a tidy...

The unforgettable, irreplaceable Calvin By Charles Solomon During the all-too-brief time it ran — from Nov. 18, 1985, to Dec. 31, 1995 — "Calvin and Hobbes" was simultaneously the most old-fashioned and the most innovative comic strip in newspapers. Its creator, Bill Watterson, returned to the principles of polished draftsmanship, visual imagination and character-driven humor that have been the source of comic strips' popularity since their inception in the 1890s. But he applied those venerable principles in new ways to make his strip personal, contemporary and very, very funny. Comic strips have always been regarded as a part of popular...

Calvin & Hobbes Philosophy on Liberal Left-wing Pseudo-Intellectual Academia

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

Last fall, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded agency chartered to spread liberty around the world, President George W. Bush delivered a speech holding out some "essential principles" as "common to every successful society in every culture." The first of these, the President declared, is that "successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military so that governments respond to the will of the people and not the will of the elite." That was what America had learned in its 200-year "journey" on the road...