Free Republic

God, the Creator, a lover of the beauty in His created world, invited Adam, one of His creatures, to share in the process of "creation" with Him. He has permitted humans to take the elements of His cosmos and create new arrangements with them. Perhaps this explains the reason why creating anything is so fulfilling to us. We can express a drive within us which allows us to do something all humans uniquely share with their Creator. God has thus placed before the human race a banquet table rich with aesthetic delicacies. He has supplied the basic ingredients, inviting those...

Picture in a picture photos that will inspire those creative juices for your weekend shoot. You may just have to break down and get a Polaroid. Window to the Soul by Stephen Poff

Unemployment is tickling 10%. The once muscular American economy is beginning to buckle under the increasing threat of exorbitant government boondoggles. Anyone who looks to Obama’s latest scheme to “save and create jobs” has a screw loose. Until we can dump this fiscally brash socialist and his congressional drones it’s up to us individually to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. Great Depression veterans know that the woe-is-me mode won’t cut it during unemployment. Swallow your pride and get going. The optimum word here is “hustle.”

Capitalism is creative. Obama's America promises to be excruciatingly boring, among many other flaws. So two kids in a garage build something we now call a "micro computer" and end up beating Big Blue IBM and its hulking business empire. And then some Stanford nerds develop the software for Google; now they are the new IBM. Repeat the story thousands of times, with most of them failing, and you have the digital-silicon-micro-web revolution, a series of technological tsunamis that swamped the old corporations, and the old government-run programs, to make it possible to do what you are doing right now....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A top White House economic adviser said on Tuesday the Obama administration will be "creative" in dealing with the issue of bonuses paid to American International Group employees but said the law must be respected. Lawrence Summers, interviewed on CNBC television, also said the White House is seeking a method for dealing with failed institutions that has been missing in the current financial crisis. "We are going to be pushing very hard for a so-called resolution regime, a system that will enable the government to intervene when a big financial company gets in trouble in the future...

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to...

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal...

The Black Dog, symbolising depression and made famous by Churchill, was the bane of ad executive Matthew Johnstone’s life – until he put it in a book and brought it to heel. Interview by Catherine O’Brien Matthew Johnstone’s meteoric career as a creative director in advertising took him from Sydney to San Francisco and New York, earning him a clutch of awards on his way. He was a man who appeared to have it all – and yet, for many years, he hid a dark secret. He was suffering from clinical depression. “Advertising is about being shiny and up. You...

The rise of the procreative class Posted: October 26, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern From coast to coast, economic development honchos read Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class" with highlighter in hand. On the wings of the thesis contained therein, Florida has taken flight as the nation's leading urbanist. According to Florida, cities that attract creative people will do better economically than those that don't. To rank cities he employs a "creativity index" with four equally weighted variables. Three of the four make perfect sense to me: the number of creative workers, the number of high-tech workers and the "innovation...

Many authors of fiction are not content to create their imaginary worlds for our entertainment. After all, they are 'artists', striving for higher truths. They like to pretend that they possess superior moral wisdom and understanding of the real world. Unlike most of us, their falsehoods, if skillfully and entertainingly rendered, can win them acclaim and sometimes Nobel Prizes. Doesn’t their creativity make them special? Well actually, no...

One exciting thing about the free market is that you can't predict what the market will create. Big-government advocates tell you exactly what will happen when their plans work (as if they actually would work!), but we who trust the free market can only say that people will compete and good ideas will win. We do know that competition works. It works because it gives people the chance to be creative...

Don't Believe the Hype. We're Still No. 1 What the doomsayers don't say: America is a marvel of creativity By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER What would the most advanced, most forward-looking, most self-assured country in history do without its periodic crises of confidence? In 1957 the Soviets put a tin can into space, and the U.S. thought the sky was falling. In the 1980s we began crying into our soup because Sony was selling so many nifty Trinitrons. "American decline" was all the fashion until the vaunted Japanese model of tight organization and industrial planning took a nosedive and a bunch of...

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. - Hoping to breach the walls of supposedly liberal colleges and universities with intellectual ammunition, the Center of the American Experiment recently launched a new Web site for conservative college students. Center CEO Annette Meeks said the Web site (www.intellectualtakeout.com) is the first of its kind and is intended to ''support free exchange of ideas on campus.''''The point is not to indoctrinate students,'' she said, but to ''expose students to points of view not readily available in the classroom.'' While most of the site is informational, it also has an edgier feature called the ''Daily Dish.'' The debut...

Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us. Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing...

The article follows... Hi everybody. Have been following the Commercial art=Bad art thread for a couple of days and wanted to throw in my two cents. On the topic of 'commercial illustration=bad art' and Rockwell, Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth, et al. be damned: I can't say I agree. If one has to say that the damning detail of the art was the fact that Rockwell had to accept guidelines as to what he was to paint (i.e. paint Santa having milk and cookies for our December issue of The Saturday Evening Post) so then his art isn't art, but...

    Tastes and interests change in literature. Different themes, different styles, indeed whole different genres come in and out of being depending on the spirit of the age.     Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a “classical” style—not in a restricted sense as the style of Greco-Roman antiquity, nor any later genre which took inspiration from it—but rather a super-cultural literary style that rises up above its own genre and belongs as much to the ages as its own time period.     This is the old concept of the “Republic of Letters”—a community not of time and space...

While public officials, schools, and the ACLU worked overtime this year to ban every vestige of Christmas from the public square, the recently invented holiday known as Kwanzaa is gaining in popularity among black Americans. These occurrences are not unrelated. In an earlier time, blacks held a strong faith in God. But over the past 40 years, the black community has largely let God slip away. Sure the community has maintained the outer trappings of religion, but the solid morality at its core is nearly gone. Enter a God-hating black racist named Ron Karenga. Born Ron Everett on a poultry farm...

Creative types now rule the world, or the global economy at least, says the forward-thinking Richard Florida. Gabriella Coslovich explains American author Richard Florida is fashionably late. Fifty minutes late. Probably been up all night being creative, offers his publicist. Perhaps. Irregular hours befits one of his class. The usual rules don't apply. Play bleeds into work, work into play. Florida is an economics professor based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the author of the US bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class. The book's premise is simple and made headlines two years ago when it was released. The creative individual,...

CHAPTER 1 One hundred years ago, California was a dream, and for Baldasare Forestiere, that dream was his home. No rambling estate, no soaring edifice — when Forestiere closed his eyes, he saw a world no one had imagined. Summers here were cool, winters warm. Lemons grew on orange trees, and orange trees sprouted lemons. Starlight and sunshine carpeted the ground. Fish swam in ponds overhead, and tree roots laced the sky. The year was 1905, a time when such dreams were possible, and when Forestiere set out to pursue them, he didn't pick up a hammer and a saw...

<p>Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.</p>