Free Republic

Unconditional love can be expressed in many ways. I think of unconditional love as the emotional expression of a part for its whole. A mother and her newborn are emotionally inseparable. That’s an expression of unconditional love. Brothers may share it, if they’re close confidants. Soldiers may feel a version of unconditional love for those they risk everything for. A priest may feel unconditional love for his parishioners and vice-versa. Unconditional love is usually detached from materialism but it can indeed exist over purely material relations. A zealous store owner may feel a version of unconditional love for their most...

A team of international scientists has unveiled a mosaic map of Antarctica compiled from satellite images. The new map allows experts and laypersons alike to observe its majestic landscapes online and in stunning clarity. The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is composed of high-resolution images taken from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Landsat 7 satellite between 1999 and 2001. It offers accurate, true-color images of the polar region.

The essence of the crises in our region is due to the fact that the majority of people remain unconvinced in terms of their capabilities, limitations and roles. All this tension is the result of feeling that the existing maps and political equations have been unjust to them. As such, I would like to examine the general picture, regardless of the daily events or the results of SyriaÂ’s participation in the Annapolis Summit or IranÂ’s negotiations with the West. All these details are of no significance here. Let us begin with Iran: Iran sees that it is being restrained and...

Satire: a manner of writing that mixes a critical attitude with wit and humor in an effort to improve mankind and human institutions. Philosophy: the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics. Cynicism: originally the philosophy of a group of ancient Greeks called the Cynics; believing the worst of human nature and motives. Political theater in the form of satire makes introducing taboo subjects relatively easy. Good satire has real power. Introducing a subject in the form of a joke is like adding a giggly escape hatch for all of a conversation’s participants. But comedic reprieves...

Seductive: tending to entice into a desired action or state. Successful: having succeeded or being marked by a favorable outcome. Solar Flare | Earth's Magnetic Field Survival depends on a clear conception of how the world works. You can be wrong but it always has consequences. Your personal understanding of the world and its mechanics is a model of reality. Your model transcends your personality. It transcends your nationalism. It transcends your religion. It’s is true no matter what threatens the survival of your model or what threatens your reality. Understanding our history in the context of world history helps...

Imperialism: any instance of aggressive extension of authority. Empiricism: an iterative approach that argues for study of events through observation and the formulation of new policy based on lessons learned. Locke | Hume | Aristotle | Archimedes | Plato | JeffersonHow long should the American People wait before they start taking foreign policy matters into their own hands? Indeed they already have! There is a domestic backlash against an absurd narrative that claims “the United States is an empire”. The United States is definitely not an empire, but few Americans are willing to state the obvious. Even fewer are willing...

Conscious Design: The product of an individual or engineer who formulates mechanisms based on tangible environmental constraints. Unconscious Design: An individual’s consumer choice made to satisfy real or arbitrary requirements they imagine exist. ANALOGY: Abraham is to Isaac as GM is to the electric car the Impact In the film, Who Killed the Electric Car there is a conclusive scene near the film’s end, where the vehicular hero of the film, the Impact, is side by side with the vehicular villain, the Hummer. The scene is as dramatic as it possibly can be. The two automobiles are shiny and clean;...

Entropy: A measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of a closed system always increases over time. This means that energy is being transformed by the mechanics of the universe into uniformly-distributed heat energy. What this means is that even a chemically neutral process will increase entropy. There is no way around entropy… no matter how green or chemically neutral mankind intends to become. Quote 1: Is it better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both? --- Niccolo Machiavelli Quote 2: War is an extension of politics...

Nearly a year ago, French-Iranian filmmaker Mehrnoushe Solouki arrived in Tehran to shoot a documentary about the burial rites of Iran's religious minorities. But when she stumbled upon a mass grave of regime opponents summarily executed in 1988, Solouki was suddenly thrown into Tehran's notorious Evin prison. She was released after about a month, but authorities confiscated her French passport, barring her exit from the Islamic Republic. Frightened, she briefly sought refuge in the French Embassy. "Every moment, I feel like I'm in a state of limbo between life and death," Solouki told RFE/RL's Radio Farda in a telephone interview...

Provo, Utah - The head of the Iranian opposition group in exile that supplied early intelligence on Iran's clandestine nuclear program says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has engineered a clever disinformation campaign to convince foreign experts that Iran is eight to 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb. But in fact, she says, the regime is less than two years away from producing such a weapon, as part of its plan to "create an Iranian empire" in the Middle East. In a wide-ranging weekend telephone conversation from her base of exile in Paris, Maryam Rajavi told me that Mr. Ahmadinejad...

EXCERPT CONCLUSION: Since 1945, there has hardly been one year in which some voices, mainly American ones concerned with preserving the U.S monopoly as far as possible, did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, none of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: In every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared. Retired Gen. John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the U.S Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts who believe the world can live with a...

Two brothers, a murdered father and an untold story of pain and forgiveness are the inspirations behind an award-winning documentary on the secret death of a prominent evangelical pastor in Iran. A Cry From Iran, co-directed by Bishop Haik Hovsepian’s two adult sons, tells the martyr’s story through the eyes of his sons. “This was not a payback to the regime but this was an honest telling of our dad’s story,” said co-director Andre Hovsepian, who was only 10-years-old when his father was murdered. “We could have been with the people who make bombs and think how we can...

The Iranian economy is starting to feel the sting from a raft of banking sanctions applied by the US to pressure Tehran over its controversial nuclear drive, analysts said. Washington has blacklisted Iran's three main banks and has also successfully encouraged virtually all major European banks to cut business with the Islamic republic. "Practically all the major European banks have ceased their cooperation with Iran," said an official from Iran's Export Development Bank, who asked not to be named. "It is no longer possible to wire money by dollar into Iran and for the payments in euro there are...

What would ancient philosophers think if they had access to the internet? Imagine Aristotle surfing the web… what would he Google? Thinking about philosophers and the Internet creates an opportunity to explore the philosophical origins of the Internet. Interestingly, the imagery of ancient philosophers surfing the WWW is particularly helpful. It will help us forecast the emergence of a group of hyper-aware individual internet users we should expect to enter adulthood in the next decade or so. Internet Savants, if I may coin a phrase, will eventually emerge as the intellectual progeny of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Locke and Hume among...

MENDELEEV SLEEP: The development of the periodic table of the elements was a leap forward in the chemical sciences. Although not responsible for discovering the elements he knew existed, Mendeleev organized the information available to him like no one else before him. It was his organizational skills that revealed something critically important to the advancement of mankind. What he discovered was new! Mendeleev noticed patterns in the properties and atomic weights of halogens, alkali metals and alkaline metals. According to the legend, Mendeleev had written what he knew about existing elements on the equivalent of flash cards and organized, reorganized...

For a society to guard against malicious ideological threats, it must at least recognize and respect the fact that some citizens will invariably believe in the power of God as a cohesive force separate from the power of the state. This is particularly true for any government run by militant atheists or militant theocrats. But why would any society believe they need to protect themselves from malicious ideas? To be sure, I’m not talking about recruiting a division of thought police to guard against threats to social morality. Free societies recognize freedom of religion as sacrosanct --- either consciously or...

ENERGY IS INHERENTLY VALUABLE: There will never be such a thing as free fuel, however, energy is now and will forever be the most important commodity in human society. Energy is valuable because it can be converted into virtually every other commodity. With enough cheap energy, civil engineers could create land – so there would be no need for feudal systems of land owning lords or renting serfs as was witnessed in history when people and energy were synonymous. Automation and mechanization has liberated mankind from most of the backbreaking labor of our ancestors, yet machines and automation still require...

US Democratic candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have expressed their intention to engage in “unconditional negotiations” with Iran, should either of them attain the presidency. The question is: Negotiate over what? Are the conflicts in the Middle East a result of a crisis in Washington-Tehran relations; or rather, does it revolve around Iran’s expansion ambitions and its interference in the internal affairs of Arab states for over 20 years? Is the Washington-Tehran crisis a result of the absence of dialogue, or is it by reason of Iran’s aspirations to destabilize the region? Iran occupies the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE)...

[EXCERPT] Turkish artillery hit the northern villages, while Iranian gunners hit the southern ones. Iranian troops attempted to cross into Iraq through the mountain passes, but PJAK fighters held the line. "The goal of the Iranians is to drive us from the border area," rebel leader Biryar Gabar told Newsmax. "They want to turn this area into a no-man's land, so they can use it to smuggle weapons and Islamist guerillas into Iraq to fight the Americans."

As I write this, close friends of mine are sitting in cells of Evin prison in Iran. They are suffering from torture, solitary confinement and denial of medical care. Despite their suffering, they write and smuggle out of prison essays about the brutality of Iran's government and about how the democracy movement can stay resilient despite mounting repression. [Illustration] Here in America, where I have been living since 2005 as an exiled activist, a controversy has emerged over the Bush administration's pledge to provide $75 million in democracy and human-rights assistance to Iranians. Critics of the funding, among them some...