Free Republic

Tuesday on “The Five,” Fox News host Geraldo Rivera said Rep. Chip Roy (R- TX) was getting ‘”sexual pleasure from the chaos and the disruption” at Southwest Airlines. On pilots balking at the companies coronavirus mandate, co-host Jesse Watters said, “I think this is just the beginning. You will have firefighters, police officers, teachers. you will lose 10% of the reports on all union jobs, and that is not returning to normal.”

I am a Vietnam Era Vet. At age 75, I feel in good general condition. My PTSD is not related to any notable physical trauma. The more significant injury with ongoing pain & suffering is the lack of empathy from the leadership who conduct the affairs that use resources for their personal interests in spite of the national interests that we have sworn to support & defend. What we are becoming increasingly aware of, are the organized behaviors of individuals who seek power & wealth by any means regardless of the health or life of the very ones who provide...

FINLAND will be opening its first sex doll BROTHEL later this week as demand for silicone companions blows up all over the world. Russian-owned Unique Dolls will open its doors in Helsinki on Thursday - charging frisky Finns €100 an hour with its demimonde dolls. The silicone brothel is located in a discrete location behind a shopping centre in the Finnish capital. And they say they'll only ever be allowing a maximum of four clients in the building at any one time to keep noise levels at a respectable level. Each of the four models has its own room at...

Father Karol Wojtyła, who later became Pope John Paul II, is pictured in the early 1950s surrounded by young people. Father Wojtyła would regularly go on mountain excursions with a group of young married couples and students that called itself Środowisko, meaning environment or milieu. (Archival Collection of Adam Bujak)Karol Wojtyła, the man who became St. John Paul II, regularly escaped from two of the worst totalitarian regimes in history: German Nazism, and later, Soviet Communism. By “escaped,” I do not mean that he ran away. Rather, as a priest and bishop, he escaped only by going deeper.As the...

Why Is Our Tolerance for Pain Greater Than It Is for Pleasure? Msgr. Charles Pope • September 20, 2016 • “The Garden of Eden” by Thomas ColeOne of the great mysteries of our life in this world is that we can endure more pain than pleasure. Indeed, we can endure only a little pleasure at a time. In fact, too much pleasure actually brings pain: sickness, hangovers, obesity, addiction, laziness, and even boredom. Yet we seem to be able to endure a lot of pain. Some of our pain, whether physical or emotional, can be very intense and go...

One of the most pernicious lies of the modern world is that life is supposed to be easy and comfortable. There is even a sense in which moderns believe they are entitled to this comfort and ease—that it is some sort of fundamental human right.Many of us have absorbed this subtle thinking, even though we may not realize it. When trouble comes to us, when life is inconvenient or difficult, we are almost angry at the injustice of it. As if it were some sort of cosmic crime that violates that easy life we believe we should have. We complain and...

This spiritual tune is taken out Revelations 4: 11 to reveal the truth concerning Jesus the Lord. Rev. 4: 11 You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for you have created all things, and for your pleasure they are and were created.

It is critical for us who would preach the Gospel to ponder what sorts of presuppositions our listeners bring to the conversation. Today, sadly, there are many trends that have poisoned the culture and make our task much more difficult.But difficult does not mean impossible. And thus it helps to describe modern mindsets, not to despair of them, but to describe them with some insight, rather than be vaguely aware of them. And being more clear on the presuppositions that people bring we can better speak our message and also go to work on those presuppositions and ask people to...

One evening in March, during a visit to Italy, President Obama asked the U.S. ambassador to round up a bunch of—and I quote—“interesting Italians” for a dinner at the ambassadorial residence. The history of the property, the Villa Taverna, goes as far back as the tenth century. Its art collection includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts. The menu that evening included a variety of pastas, and wines from Tuscany and the regions around Venice. Dinner lasted four hours. In this sumptuous and Baroque setting, amid these beautiful artifacts of long-gone civilizations, enjoying the finest foods and most delicate wines,...

............my reaction to Mises' work underscores my particular problem with libertarianism in general: the fact that it has little to no soul,reducing man to a rational,pleasure-seeking animal. The central premise of Human Action, the basic theory of Mises' praxeology,is that all men are united by one logic,one universal bent toward happiness, which they seek in the most advantageous way possible. In short,man,though capable of making poor decisions,will even in failure choose the most logical poor decision known to him;he furthermore always desires one object more than everything else at any given moment,and the object of his desire is revealed only...

<p>Music triggers the same pleasure-reward system in the brain as food, sex and illicit drugs, according to McGill University researchers who have been peering into minds of music lovers.</p> <p>They've discovered the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine is released when people listen to their favourite music, be it rock, jazz or classical.</p>

You may never know which meal will be your last. It could be one chosen by a caretaker or hospital staffer, served to you in your sickbed. Perhaps your last bite will be a deliberate choice, such as the vegetable soup that Adolf Hitler sipped before killing himself. Or, it may be a random meal that you don’t expect to be your culinary goodbye — such as the Dover sole and champagne that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were served at the Ritz Hotel in Paris before a car crash took their lives. Final meals hold a special fascination for...

The NHS is telling pupils they have a 'right' to an enjoyable sex life in a leaflet being sent to schools. It encourages them to consider an 'orgasm a day' as a way reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.And if they can't get sex, the leaflet says children should consider masturbation.  The advice appears in guidance circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers. It says experts have for too long concentrated on the need for 'safe sex' and loving relationships - while ignoring the main reason people have sex, for enjoyment.But family groups condemned the guidance last...

Scientists say they understand more about how the body responds to pleasurable touch. A team, including scientists from the Unilever company, have identified a class of nerve fibres in the skin which specifically send pleasure messages. And people had to be stroked at a certain speed - 4-5cm per second - to activate the pleasure sensation.

PITTSBURGH - To the list of simple childhood pleasures whose safety has been questioned, add this: eating snow. A recent study found that snow — even in relatively pristine spots like Montana and the Yukon — contains large amounts of bacteria. Parents who warn their kids not to eat dirty snow (especially the yellow variety) are left wondering whether to stop them from tasting the new-fallen stuff, too, because of Pseudomonas syringae, bacteria that can cause diseases in bean and tomato plants. But experts say there's no need to banish snow-eating along with dodgeball, unchaperoned trick-or-treating and riding a bike...

Pleasure Now or Never by: Bethany Stotts, January 07, 2008 Chicago, Ill- At a 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) “Pleasure Now!” panel discussing the dreary emotional malaise permeating many classrooms, professors called for an integration of environmental, spiritual, and pop culture references into the classroom. The panel’s “Pleasure Now!” “manifesto for change” exhorts professors to “reassess the disciplinary habits that our generation has been so vital to articulating.”..... The authors of the manifesto also attribute their pedagogical angst to uniquely capitalist roots. “The corporatization of the university, escalating expectations for productivity, external monitoring of outcomes, scarcity of resources, and...

Something is going wrong in Christian communities. ... many Christians, even in churches that teach sex is only for marriage, have premarital sex. • Three surveys of single Christian adults [showed that]one third were virgins—meaning, of course, that two thirds were not. • In 2003, researchers at Northern Kentucky University showed that 61 percent of students who signed sexual-abstinence commitment cards broke their pledges. • Of the remaining 49 percent who kept their pledges, 55 percent said they'd had oral sex, and did not consider oral sex to be sex. So what is going on? In combating [unchaste behavior], we...

If you want to know what’s wrong with the West Coast drivel factory where our popular culture is manufactured, look no further than the 77th Annual Academy Award nominations. The Oscars are Hollywood’s way of celebrating its values – the agenda of a gang of celebrity cretins who need a teleprompter to think. The Academy Awards ceremony on February 27th will be another orgy of political correctness – this time paying homage to a culture of death. Garnering 12 nominations among them were “Million Dollar Baby,” “Vera Drake” and “Kinsey” – movies (respectively) promoting euthanasia, abortion and perversion. Two were...

There are two fairly well-defined positions that have emerged regarding the issue, under consideration by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, of whether the use of marijuana should be legalized for the treatment of certain medical conditions. The first of these sees marijuana's limited legalization as, in almost all cases, the effort of so-called "stoners" (in contemporary parlance people who pretty much can't live without getting high on marijuana on a daily basis) to find a way to circumvent existing laws that criminalize the use of wacky weed so that they (the stoners), with the consent of...

This is a link to the Public Integrity site, and a part of "The Buying of The President, 2004." Interesting read. http://www.publicintegrity.com/bop2004/candidate.aspx?cid=4&act=details