OrthodoxNet.com Blog

The Times | Tony Halpin

Last struggle is over for Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He was the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s long struggle for his beloved Russia ended last night at his home in Moscow, 14 years after he had returned in triumph from exile imposed by the Soviet regime that he had helped to bring down. His son Stepan said that the Nobel laureate had suffered heart failure, aged 89.

The former dissident had been in failing health for some years. He lived long enough to be fêted by a Kremlin that had once condemned him to slave labour. The former Russian president, Vladimir Putin, once a KGB officer, travelled to Solzhenitsyn’s home to present him with the State Prize for humanitarian achievement last year, thanking him for “all your work for the good of Russia”. Continue Reading »

The Wall Street Journal | Aug. 1, 2008

Hell — otherwise known as Congress — has officially frozen over. For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | David J. Rusin | Aug. 3, 2008

Persuading Western Muslim leaders to repudiate Shari’a-sanctioned violence against apostates can be a frustrating exercise, as Prince Charles discovered in 2004. Troubled by the treatment of Muslims who convert to Christianity in Islamic nations, the prince convened a summit of senior figures from both religious communities. It ended in disappointment. The Islamic representatives failed to issue a declaration condemning the practice, which the Christians had requested; they also cautioned non-Muslims not to discuss such matters in public, arguing that moderates would be more likely to make progress if the debate were kept internal. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Steven M. Warshawsky | Aug. 2, 2008

America recently marked the third anniversary of one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions of recent memory: Kelo v. City of New London. Kelo is the now-infamous “takings” case, in which the Supreme Court declined to rule unconstitutional a Connecticut town’s decision to use the power of eminent domain to take property away from a group of working-class homeowners and give it to a private development corporation for use as part of a government-approved “economic revitalization” project. Continue Reading »

The Totalitarian Global Warming Cult Following Democrats in California tried, yet again, to impose their unfounded religious beliefs and leftist dogma on the entire public education system.

Mercury News | John Boudreau | July 26, 2008

California public students will stick to reading, writing and arithmetic, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger decided as he vetoed a bill late Friday that would have required climate change be added to schools’ curriculum.

The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would have required future science textbooks to include climate change as a subject. Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | Phyllis Schlafly | July 25, 2008

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the July Fourth weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes global warming only because we are so hot,” “Hate is not a family value,” “The Christian right is neither” and “Gay rights are civil rights.”

The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA’s official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols. Continue Reading »

WorldNetDaily | Craige McMillan | July 24, 2008

Communist government officials always loved communism – because they never experienced it. Apparently the same is true of Democrat officials preparing for the “I’m a progressive, not a communist” lovefest in Denver, Colo. Consumers in the mile high city pay 40.4 cents per gallon to the state and feds for each gallon they extract at the gas pumps. Unless, of course, they are Democrat muckety-mucks zipping around Denver in their free (provided by General Motors) cars, which have been filling up at city pumps to evade gasoline taxes. Continue Reading »

When people stop believing in God they’ll believe in anything (no matter how foolish or far fetched).

LiveScience | Robert Britt | July 26, 2008

One of the greatest mysteries in science is how life began. Now one group of researchers says diamonds may have been life’s best friend.

Scientists have long theorized that life on Earth got going in a primordial soup of precursor chemicals. But nobody knows how these simple amino acids, known to be the building blocks of life, were assembled into complex polymers needed as a platform for genesis. Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | July 21, 2008

Unwilling to allow any expansion of drilling in American territory, Democrats are instead focused on changing American lifestyles. It’s consistent with the goals of the party that wants to run everyone’s lives. Continue Reading »

Human Events | Brian Darling | July 21, 2008

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) has pledged to block a Bush administration proposal being steamrolled through Congress to grant the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve sweeping new powers. Slowing things down would allow Congress to debate the issue fully before approving measures that could put taxpayers on the hook for billions in debt incurred by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed home-mortgage giants. Continue Reading »

The QandO Blog | Jul. 14, 2008

Atmospheric Physicist James A. Peden explains why the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that man-made C02 “causes” warming is false:

As a dissenting physicist, I simply can no longer buy the notion that CO2 produces any significant warming of the atmosphere at any rate. I’ve studied the atomic absorption physics to death, from John Nicol’s extensive development to the much longer winded dissertation by Gerlich & Tscheuschner and everything in between, it simply doesn’t add up.

Even if every single IR photon absorbed by a CO2 molecule were magically transformed into purely thermal translational modes, the pitifully small quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere [0.037%] doesn’t add up to much additional heat. And if the aforementioned magical 100% transformation from radiation into “heat” were true, then all arguments concerning re-emission (source of all the wonderful “greenhouse effect” cartoons with their arrows flying in all directions) are out the window.

Continue Reading »

American Thinker | Rick Moran | July 19, 2008

Ever wonder (in your worst nightmares) what it might be like to live in a totalitarian state like China?

This is the kind of power government has in the Communist country - they are shutting down a modern city in order to cut pollution levels for the Olympics: Continue Reading »

LifeSiteNews | Matthew C. Hoffman | Feb. 4, 2008

A federal appeals court panel has upheld a Massachusetts policy of indoctrinating elementary school students with pro-homosexual attitudes without their parents consent.

The three judge panel ruled that a lower court decision was correct when it denied parents the right to remove their children from such classes, while admitting that the purpose of the literature to which their children were being exposed was to influence children to “tolerate” gay marriage. Continue Reading »

American Thinker | J.R. Dunn | July 15, 2008

It’s difficult to avoid exasperation over the left’s absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody’s favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) — it’s as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place.

The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we’ve heard since 2003, concentrating on lone (and mercifully rare) suicide bombers, emphasizing Coalition casualties, and highlighting the new government’s difficulties. Continue Reading »

WorldNetDaily | Jill Stanek | July 9, 2008

Barack Obama is so radically pro-abortion he supports infanticide, as evidenced by his active opposition to the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act. This makes him further left than any U.S. senator and even NARAL [most aggressive pro-abortion organization in the US]. Continue Reading »

Townhall.com | Dennis Prager | July 15, 2008

The most effective of all morality-based arguments for same-sex marriage, the one that persuades more people than any other argument, is the one that equates opposition to same-sex marriage with the old opposition to interracial marriage.

The argument, repeated so often that it sounds incontestable, is this: Just as parts of American society once had immoral laws that forbade whites and blacks from marrying, so, today, society continues to have immoral laws forbidding men from marrying men and women from marrying women. And just as decent people overthrew the former, decent people must overthrow the latter. Continue Reading »

FrontPageMag | Mark D. Tooley | July 14, 2008

Officials of the declining 4.9 million Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have revealed what God’s priorities are in the U.S. presidential campaign. And remarkably, the divine priorities was very akin to the Democratic Party’s priorities, if not further to the left.

Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, with three other ELCA officials generously wrote both presidential candidates a public letter with the divine guidance. Although famed Protestant Reformer Martin Luther championed the Bible as God’s exclusive revelation, modern ELCA activists have located more useful counsel in the secular welfare state and environmental agenda. Continue Reading »

LifeSiteNews.com | Hilary White | July 11, 2008

Another young person has been dehydrated to death in the same hospice in Florida where Terri Schindler Schiavo met her court-ordered end. Bradley Whaley, 26, was severely brain damaged by an overdose of drugs and was minimally conscious, according to media reports. He died July 2 after the Hospice of Florida Suncoast removed his food and hydration tube. Continue Reading »

Mass Resistance.org

Extremely slick propaganda directed at the youngest of children! The videos below are from “It’s Elementary“, a 78-minute feature film produced by homosexual activists. These are actual scenes from elementary schools in Massachusetts and New York. It’s Elementary is meant to be a training video for homosexual activist teachers across the country. In addition, the film itself has been shown to schoolchildren in public schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

This is what is actually going on in more and more elementary schools across America. Watching this will really affect you! You will not believe what you are seeing. Continue Reading »