Free Republic

Critics have recently argued that plans to form NAFTA Super-Highways in the United States were largely “urban legend” or just pure “hype.” These same critics note that many state departments of transportation are strapped for cash and that states north of Texas have no current plans to build super-highways, extending the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) north to Canada. Currently no state except Texas currently has plans to build TTC-like highways, with designs to build transportation corridors up to four football fields-wide that integrate highway toll roads, railroad transportation and utility zones for oil and natural gas pipelines, alongside towers to transmit...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The good guy in the Wachowski brothers' latest cinematic adventure is a "terrorist" at war with the British government. The masked crusader makes homemade bombs, which he plants on London's subway system, and condones violence in pursuit of justice. The Orwellian authorities rule chiefly by fear. With "V for Vendetta", the scriptwriters who brought us "The Matrix" may be asking for trouble. Starring a shaven-headed Natalie Portman as the foil to the mystery man known only as V, the film is based on a 1980s graphic novel warning readers about the danger of lurching to the political...

As the John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination fight opens, the predicted battle to save or kill Roe v Wade already has taken to the streets, the Internet and the media. But the 32-year-old constitutional right to an abortion may face its gravest challenge not from red state values triumphing on the Supreme Court, but from medical research being carried out in elite blue state universities and in Europe and Asia. It is the very language of Roe that carries the seed of its own possible irrelevance within the next several years. Roe enunciated the more or less unencumbered right of...

(TERRE HAUTE, Ind.) -- A man who claimed doctors "locked" his brain in a federal computer has been locked in the Vigo County Jail on a charge of threatening a physician. Kriss L. Rehmel, 38, of Coalmont, was accused of sending letters to several people, including President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, asking them to unlock his brain, which he believes has been controlled by a computer since Sept. 11, 2001, said Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel. The letters claimed Dr. Michael Rader of Terre Haute was to blame. The writer said that he would...

CHESAPEAKE, Va. - Consumed with righting racial inequality and injustice, sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo became yesterday the latest young defendant to use the film The Matrix as part of an insanity defense to explain killings that seem to have no clear explanation. The 1999 film has been used, with some success, in at least three other murder cases in which young defendants attempted to justify their crimes with allusions to the movie's philosophy that the world people live in is only a dream sequence controlled by a computer. Violence is condoned as a way to get out of the...

There's No Exit From the Matrix The Matrix Reloaded" is so dull, so literally ruled by Laurence Fishburne's trance-inducing Morpheus, that I had to reload the "Matrix" DVD to remember why I had been taken with all those streaming digits the first time around. But never mind. You can't argue with a $135.8 million four-day opening, which in itself validated the movie's premise. It's the conceit of the "Matrix" films that most of mankind is plugged into a virtual-reality program conjured up by all-powerful machines to tease our brains while they loot our bodies for bioelectric power. AOL Time Warner,...

That is what Morpheus, a character in the movie, “The Matrix,” said to Neo as he explained that the world had been largely destroyed in a great battle between the computers and the humans. The conquered humans were kept in a sedated state of mind, living in a dream world. All but a few were perfectly content to serve as slaves to the computers. Shocked that everything he knew of the world around him was only a virtual reality, Neo could barely breathe. The premise of the movie, while science fiction, quite accurately sums up the political situation in our...