Free Republic

Hollywood isn't alone in its anticipation of Armageddon. Writing in the summer issue of World Policy Journal, Maurice Strong - Canada's very own prophet of doom - unequivocally embraces the apocalypse. Straight-forwardly entitled "Facing Down Armageddon: Environment at a Crossroads," Mr. Strong's essay ends with a dire warning. "Human existence is at risk," he says. "We face an Armageddon that is both real and imminent." Yet he implicitly grasps for hope - choosing at any rate not to specify (as the new film 2012 does) the precise day, month and year of the catastrophe. More so than most people who...

When academics relay their understanding of religion to the rest of us, they offer interpretations that the religiously observant may find a tad bizarre. “Religion has a certain kind of legitimacy among many people and in many parts of the world that secular life simply doesn’t have,” philosophy professor Roger S. Gottlieb explained in an interview with Jennifer Howard that appeared in the June 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “In Madagascar, where the fishermen were dynamiting to get fish and destroying the coral reef and fish stock, when the government said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they kept doing...

Let me first preface my remarks by stating for the record that I didn't attend this demonstration in order to voice support for a particular faction in the Iranian democracy movement, and was-quite honestly-surprised by the extent to which the MEK/NCRI had monopolized the crowd that had gathered in the shadow of the United Nations General Assembly in order to protest the visit to this country by a man who is the president of what is-bar none-the leading state sponsor of international terrorism. The minute you entered the rally you began to spot the nearly beatific images of Maryam Rajavi...

Plano, Tex. When Jackie Gan first learned about Southern Methodist University's graduate-level video-game-design program, she was sitting stark naked in front of its inaugural class -- 28 young men who had abandoned jobs as computer programmers, artists, or office workers to try to live out their fantasy of creating games for a living. Ms. Gan, who was then a student at a nearby community college, was earning extra money by modeling for art classes. When she answered a call to model at Southern Methodist, she didn't realize that the class was part of a game-design program and that she might serve...