Free Republic

"The people controlling Joe Biden have just erased the Constitution for good. All that is now required for a citizen to lose all rights to own property or conduct business in any way is a simple accusation of Russian ‘involvement.’ The American Thinker explained: Executive Order Canceling the Constitution On April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of...

Boys like Peter are Not Afraid of WOLVES An Edgy Re-Telling of Prokofiov's Class Musical Children's Tale  Peter stares out the window as Grandfather reinforces the fence, to the sounds of a high gale blizzard and the howling of the wolves.http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/1e62ead3ff/peter-the-wolf-avitar-style-animation?rel=player Set in a realistically shabby, modern Russia.  The animation realization of Peter's facial expressions highlights the fully artistic maturity of today's digital media.  More traitional tellings, like Peter Ustinov's 1960, seem to imply events taking place in warm weather. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_dkBC_Cno

The premiere of the opera War and Peace, to take place in Glasgow later this month, will not only be staged on a staggering scale, but a world first for Sergei Prokofiev’s original score, reconstructed without its Soviet-era political editing, has never before been staged.

ROME – President Barack Obama's call for a nuclear weapons-free world is welcome, but the huge U.S. defense budget may prove an "insurmountable obstacle" to reaching that goal, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Thursday. Talk of nuclear disarmament would be "just rhetorical" if other nations were asked to give up nukes while the United States maintains an overwhelming conventional military superiority, Gorbachev said. What's needed, he said, are talks to "demilitarize" world politics. Gorbachev, last leader of the now-defunct Soviet Union, helped inaugurate two days of discussions on nuclear disarmament involving some 100 former and current international leaders,...

An opera company has been banned from performing Sergei Prokofiev's Cinderella after setting the classic children's story in a brothel. The Latvian National Opera performed its Cinderella ballet only twice, after complaints from Prokofiev's estate. "There was a huge gap between the original music and the new story," said Noelle Mann, curator of the Sergei Prokofiev Archive. But the opera company said it was "a very beautiful and sincere story". Based on the classic fairytale, Prokofiev wrote the ballet Cinderella in the 1940s. The new Latvian National Opera (LNO) adaptation was performed in Riga before being cancelled. It set the...

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together. But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors. I refer to...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) won a Grammy Award on Sunday, but not for his famed saxophone playing. Clinton was honored in the spoken word album for children category for a project he worked on with fellow winners, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Italian screen siren Sophia Loren (news). None of them was at the ceremony to pick up the award for "Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf/Beintus: Wolf Tracks." Clinton's wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (news - web sites), was nominated in the spoken word album category for the audiobook version of...