Free Republic

"I am sorry, that with reverence I did not entertain thee as thou art" By Yervand Kochar At an early stage movies, and arts in general, were not, yet, divided into entertainment and pure art. Art for its own sake is a relatively new and in a way conventional concept. I can't imagine Leonardo DaVinci thinking about whether he should entertain or create something of an eternal value. He did what he felt doing in tune with the sensibilities of his time and people.Great art is always entertaining butentertainment, even great entertainment,cannot be art. In other words, Chaplin was entertaining...

Postmodern Epistemologies by: Bethany Stotts, February 19, 2008 ...How does style affect our perception of the text, and does style itself impart its own distinct meaning?...Modern Language Association (MLA) professors attempted to answer these questions by drawing upon postmodern academics who remain skeptical of absolute knowledge, one of whom belongs to the radical “naturalist” Brights movement. Among the scholars mentioned were Donald Freeman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mark Turner, Daniel Dennett, and Noam Chomsky.... Instead, Chodat referred the audience to the works of radical atheist and Brights Movement member Dennett, who is listed on the site as one of the movement’s “enthusiastic...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2007 – Janet Southby has been a driving force behind the Walter Reed Society since the group’s beginning in 1996. The Walter Reed Society works to enhance patient support and improve morale by funding special unmet needs of soldiers and their families during treatment and recovery. Southby served as first vice president of the group until being elected president in 2001 and has held that position ever since. “I have been privileged to serve with a dedicated group of volunteers on the Board of Directors and in other volunteer positions for the past six years,” said...

Western Individualism is most pronounced in America, and especially the part of the country where I grew up and now live, Texas and Oklahoma. Yet that attitude resounds in the early pages of our nation’s history, from a Tea Party in Boston Harbor to those shots fired at Fort Sumter replying what they could do with their tariffs on cotton. Often that undercurrent cuts against identity with a group. "I am an individual." Echoing in that statement are the words of Patrick Henry emblazed in our psyche, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Identity with a group somehow seems...

...Those who say that Mr. Bush's campaign for global democracy is overreaching (again, including this writer) should also note that democ- ratization is a thread that runs through American history. One of President Wilson's goals in World War I was to make the world safe for democracy. That is not quite the same thing as making it democratic, but it's a big step. Even before Pearl Harbor, in the State of the Union message in January, 1941, President Roosevelt proclaimed a goal of ensuring "four essential human freedoms." They were freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and...

Bill Donaghy Other Articles by Bill Donaghy   The Nativity Story: A Well-Timed Gift Touched By Grace November 27, 2006I've just come from a private screening of the New Line Cinema movie The Nativity Story. The evening was orchestrated by the wonderful Daughters of Saint Paul in Northeast Philadelphia. What a humble, hardworking and techno-savvy group of sisters! The film chronicles the year in the life of Mary and Joseph that forever altered the course of human history. It's the Christmas story, told beautifully in rich tones. The journey takes us from the garden annunciation of Gabriel to the...

Is This Victory? by Tommy Franks, Stephen Biddle, Peter Charles Choharis, John M. Owen IV, Daniel Pipes, Gary Rosen and Dov S. Zakheim 11.10.2006 The Meaning of Victory: A Conversation with General Franks How should victory be defined? What constitutes victory? I think that is a fundamental question, and it is good for each of us in this country to ask ourselves that from time to time. When we try to decide whether or not we’ve been victorious, we have to think, for just a second, what the term “victory” means. Victory means the accomplishment of objectives and goals that...

Engineer struggles to keep family safe while contributing to the reconstruction of Iraq. TIKRIT, Iraq, Oct. 6, 2006 — Having one brother murdered and a brother-in-law kidnapped and tortured, Sa’ad Rasheed narrowly escapes with his life but continues working in the reconstruction of his country. Daily, Iraq is featured in western media headlines. Reports of insurgents jam the news waves with doom and gloom. While the dangers are real and bad things do happen, stories of bravery and dedication to ones’ country are lost to the masses. Bricks and mortar may not be as exciting or as riveting as insurgents...

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our...

I would like others input on examples from the title. As an older adult I am learning something new that takes thinking. The leason book is written for a young adult but works for this old adult to grasp basics. I decided to take a year long class on the Catholic Faith via our Church and also attend weekly Marine Biology Seminars. So in this weeks lesson of the Catholic teaching the above came up and I thought well a liberal type would be in my mind a subjectivist person and the avg. Freeper an objectivist in moral truth. Other...

Some of my leftist friends have one thing in common with the Muslims now sacking foreign embassies: a fundamental lack of understanding as to how democracy works, and how precious it is. The leftists have grown up knowing nothing but freedom and opulence, and take things like the Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers, and Constitution for granted (if they have even read these hallowed documents). The Muslim radicals (Islamists) are throwing lit jugs full of gasoline at Danish embassies because they have known nothing except Big Brother (One Newspaper, One Nation, One Religion, One World), and do not even know...

FALLUJAH, Iraq (Dec. 14, 2005) -- A maxim exists in Marine Corps infantry platoons and loosely paraphrased, it goes something like this: if squad leaders falter, freeze or fail, all the paper-smart strategic plans made by higher headquarters are worthless. Cpl. Chris W. Adair, a 20-year-old native of Custer County, Colo., knows about this adage from experience. He is one of many veteran squad leaders with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines Regiment, between the ages of 20 and 22, who are on their second deployment to Iraq. This is the third Operation Iraqi Freedom deployment for the Marine Corps Air Ground...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2005 – Retired Navy Rear Adm. Greg Slavonic was visiting wounded coalition soldiers in Baghdad's International Zone hospital last year when he started a conversation with a badly wounded soldier. That day, the soldier was being prepared for evacuation to Germany to receive critical medical care. "There was no doubt his rehab was going to take months," Slavonic recalled. As medical staff continued to ready the soldier for his flight out of Iraq, the soldier looked at Slavonic and said "'Sir, I want to go back to my unit and my buddies. The job's not done here,...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2005 – After receiving the 1.4 millionth thank-you letter for servicemembers and veterans in her "A Million Thanks" campaign, a California teenager realized there was something special about that number. Since 1.4 million people serve on active duty in the armed forces, Shauna Fleming, 16, decided that the letter symbolizes every active duty servicemember receiving a thank-you letter from a grateful American. A 10-year-old student in Dallas wrote the 1.4 millionth letter. Now Fleming has accepted a challenge from recently retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers to collect a total of 2.6 million...

CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Nov. 3, 2005) -- When Marines departed Camp Lejeune, N.C. to continue the war on terrorism here, many said farewell to families knowing their next visit would have to wait until after the deployment. However, some married spouses never had to say goodbye. For married couple 1st Lt.’s Donald and Heather Traves, saying goodbye was more of a, “see you soon,” since they would be relatively close to each other deploying together. Although they are stationed on separate bases, this has not deterred the couple from keeping in touch, according to Donald, who is the officer in...

The Venona decodes, their meaning and interpretation, are too large a subject for this thread.

When Illinois Senator Richard Durbin apologized for his characterization of the interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay as being akin to those of the Nazis, Pol Pot, and Soviets, he said something that has always struck me as being odd coming from the likes of faux liberals. He said that he thought our troops were the best in the world, which is a variation on what anti-war faux liberals say when cornered with their attitudes about the war: "I support the troops." "I support the troops" is a nice, touchy-feely statement that few people can disagree with, but there is...

Thomas Sowell, writing on the pending Senate showdown over judicial confirmations, notes that: "A disinformation campaign has already been launched to depict judges who believe in following the written law as being "activist" conservatives, just like liberal activists." "Those who play this game of verbal equivalence can seldom, if ever, come up with concrete examples where conservative judges made rulings that went directly counter to what the written law says or who made rulings for which there is no written law." It is indeed remarkable that the opponents of many of the current nominees can go so far in their...

When some members of Congress violate the Constitution, how can we have any confidence in their leadership? Yet that is precisely the effect these unlawful filibusters of judicial nominees are having -- undermining confidence in the Senate. Instead of voting yes or no on President Bush's picks for certain federal judgeships, Democrats are refusing to allow a vote to even take place, using a Senate rule that no motion may come to a vote while still under discussion. The filibuster, as it's called, has been used by both sides for over a century and a half to delay votes while...

These are the times that try English majors’ souls. The sacred rules we were taught, and struggled to grasp and live by, are violated in the daily papers, not to mention radio. Doesn’t anyone these days know the difference between may and might? I grant there are gray areas where either can be argued. But there are some areas that aren’t gray: “I might go to the movies tonight.” I don’t want to seem priggish about this. I may wince inwardly at a split infinitive, and I try (with some strain) never to split one myself, but I don’t complain...

Many judges these days like to refer to the Constitution of the United States as a "living, breathing document", implying that its text is designed to be flexible. It is not. The Constitution is a set of rules, and like any other set of rules, it is meant to be strict and uncompromising. Of course, the Constitution can be modified through the amendment process, but once ratified, any amendment becomes like the rest of the Constitution; rigid. And while any amendment may be repealed, as was the case with the 18th Amendment (The Prohibition Act), until that happens, it is...

From whence cometh those fears?

In this maelstrom of crass commercialization and acrimony surrounding the day on which we celebrate your nativity, Jesus, I want to wish you a Happy Birthday. How remiss we are. The family of man is a distracted and rancorous lot, and as we scurry to and fro scratching items off our Christmas lists while others try to scratch your Holy Day off calendars, we forget what’s truly important. So my birthday gift to you will be, simply, to thank you for what really matters, all of which has been your gift to us.

You were hard-pressed to find the story or to see the images anywhere in the mainstream media. Three unarmed Iraqi election officials recently murdered in cold blood on their way to work – dragged from their car and shot in the head, execution style, by spineless terrorists. The entire massacre was caught on film. Their crime? Helping to further the cause of a free and democratic Iraq. Since the end of major combat operations, hundreds upon hundreds of innocent Iraqi men women and children have been deliberately targeted and blown limb from limb by foreign invaders – by the same...

America was not founded on the concept of a "wall of separation between church and state," it was founded upon pluralism. The "wall of separation" phrase does not appear in any of our founding documents; it is taken from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. To base our laws on the correspondence of Jefferson, rather than the Constitution ratified by representatives of each of the original " united states ," is in direct opposition to our system of representative government. Jefferson was a brilliant man, but he also favored slavery and was fanatical about macaroni and cheese. However, slavery was...

  ADVENTThe word Advent is from the Latin adventus for "coming" and is associated with the four weeks of preparation for Christmas. Advent always contains four Sundays, beginning on the Sunday nearest the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, (November 30) and continuing until December 24. It blends together a penitential spirit, very similar to Lent, a liturgical theme of preparation for the Second and Final Coming of the Lord, called the Parousia, and a joyful theme of getting ready for the Bethlehem event.Since the 900s Advent has been considered the beginning of the Church year. This does not...

Victory At Yorktown: The Campaign That Won The Revolution by Richard M. Ketchum, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 350 pages. Index, maps, Notes, Principal Character bios. $27.50. “A surprising number of these men had six years of punishing, bloody warfare behind them; six years of hardship and suffering, hunger and tedium, no pay, and unparalleled neglect by their government and fellow Americans… some of these men standing under the hot Virginia sun were survivors of the fights at Concord and Bunker Hill, had suffered bitter defeat with Arnold and Montgomery before Quebec, had been part of the humiliating loss...

...Derrida... was... one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure.... What is deconstruction? ...[D]econstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible.... the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable. [I]f you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you...

The Ten Commandments    GRACE MACKINNON Dear Grace, My son and I were discussing the importance of the Ten Commandments and how they are to be used as a guide. He says they are part of the Old Testament and therefore we need not focus that much on them. His attitude towards them is that they are just a lot of "Do Nots." Can you help me explain why God gave us these commandments and why they are still important for us today? While it is certainly true that many people have this understanding or attitude towards the Ten...

  A Universal Mistake One of the most important of Ayn Rand's contributions to the field of epistemology is contained in the seventh chapter of her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology entitled, "The Cognitive Role of Concepts." In it she explains how the world we are conscious of is comprised of an infinite complexity of existents, events, and relationships and why it is not possible for us to comprehend this complexity simply by perceiving it. To understand it, we must "break it up," into manageable pieces we can identify and understand. This, Ayn Rand explains, is the role of concepts."The essence...

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc: Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or... the press" also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases -- or even the...

At about 10 Minutes to Midnight I had a jolt of revelation That answered life's hardest question At least for the year gone by. I was partying with a friend Who had a bunch of us over To celebrate a new year And all the great things about the past one. I brought my friend a gift That I knew he would appreciate I dropped a C-Note on the liquor store And brought him over the good stuff. A solid, worthy Cognac Graced my elegant glass And shone like a precious garnet In the light and glow of celebration. I...

<p>Kwanzaa, being observed today through Jan. 1, is a celebration of African-American culture and a remembrance of its history, said Roxanne Chase-Clark, president of the United Families of African Descent. A Kwanzaa celebration will be held at 1 p.m. tomorrow at the Monmouth County Library Headquarters, 125 Symmes Drive, Manalapan. Admission is free.</p>

Just a week before Christmas I had a visitor. This is how it happened. I just finished the household chores for the night and was preparing to go to bed when I heard a noise in the front of the house. I opened the door to the front room, and to my surprise, Santa himself stepped out from behind the Christmas tree. He placed his finger over his mouth so I would not cry out. "What are you doing?" I started to ask him. The words choked in my throat, as I saw he had tears in his eyes. His...

I'm Not Religious, But I'm a Very Spiritual Person 10/02/03 “It's not a religious film, it's a philosophical film. It uses themes and elements from various religions and spiritual beliefs. Stop simplifying things... Look, I’m not religious, I just have my own spirituality.” In This Article... Yes, Humptey Dumptey, There is a Meaning The World Comes with Instructions Whoops, Too Late Yes, Humptey Dumptey, There is a Meaning How many times have we heard, or perhaps even made, remarks like this? Better yet, what in blazes do these remarks mean? It seems that people throw around words like “philosophical”, “religious”,...

When ART Becomes InhumanKarl ZinsmeisterReprinted from the ART Renewal Center Origionally published in TAEmag. Many of today’s avant-garde artists, I’ve decided, have modeled themselves on that well-known societal fixture, the snot-nosed teenager. Since the 1960s, the hippest modern art has aspired to exactly what every garden-variety 13-year-old brat aims for: maximum opportunities to shock, flout, insult, and otherwise chuck rocks at polite society. And so “artists” spread American flags on the floor and invited gallery and museum patrons to walk on them. “Sculptors” stacked bricks in low heaps and convinced collectors to pay bags of money for something they...

As modern technology, international travel and cross-cultural business deals rapidly are making our world a smaller place, we find ourselves coming into contact much more frequently with people of other cultures. Learning a new and foreign sounding name often presents a challenge. Arabic names are sometimes difficult for the unaccustomed ear because of their strong consonants and guttural intonations. Most Arabic names have unique and beautiful meanings. For example, the name "Muhammad," which is the most widely-used first name in the world, means "revered." Below is an alphabetical list of some of the most popular Arabic and Islamic names...