Hollywood lost one of its top directors on Saturday when 86-year-old Milos Forman passed away in Connecticut. Forman’s rise in the film industry embodied the American dream. He arrived in the United States in the late 1960s as a poor man who knew the perils of an oppressive government.
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Bon Jovi, the Moody Blues, Dire Straits, the Cars, Nina Simone and Sister Rosetta Tharpe joined music royalty on Saturday as they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Richie Sambora, the original guitarist for arena-packing rockers Bon Jovi reunited with the band for a rousing set at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland that included hits “You Give Love a Bad Name and “It’s My Life.”
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Kevin Fiala scored a goal and an assist as the Nashville Predators took a grip on their Stanley Cup playoff series against the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday with a 5-4 victory. The Predators — last year’s beaten Stanley Cup finalists — now lead the best-of-seven Western Conference series 2-0 as they head to Colorado.
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Best-selling author and syndicated radio host Eric Metaxas announced his support for former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain in Nashville’s special mayoral election in a Facebook post on Saturday afternoon. “I am deeply honored and moved by Eric Metaxas’s endorsement of my mayoral campaign,” Swain said in a statement released by her campaign on Saturday. “This is a vote of confidence in my ability to assemble a strong integrity-based team that will apply common sense solutions to meet the needs of neglected citizens of Nashville. We look forward to creating a government that works with citizens and not against them,” Swain added. The special election to replace disgraced former Nashville/Davidson County Mayor Megan Barry will be held on May 24, just 39 days from today. In October, Metaxas visited Middle Tennessee for a speaking engagement. “Well-known Christian writer and speaker Eric Metaxas recounted Luther’s life story Saturday at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro. Around 2,000 people turned out to listen to Metaxas, author of the new book, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World,” The Star reported at the time. Metaxas, is also the author of the New York Times best-seller Bonhoeffer:Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, among other…
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by Barry Brownstein “Our ignorance is sobering and boundless,” philosopher Karl Popper famously observed. Popper continued with what could be a credo for humble individuals willing to admit the limits of individual knowledge: “With each step forward, with each problem which we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux.” If the world is full of challenging problems and individuals with boundless ignorance, it is not surprising Popper believed, “There are no ultimate sources of knowledge.” We can only “hope to detect and eliminate error” by allowing criticism of the theories of others as well as our own. Popper was writing before the era of social media and the contemporary attack on free inquiry on college campuses. Endless opinions, based on nothing but feelings, are shared by those who want to eliminate criticism of their views and stymie debate on the critical issues of our time. Popper would be dismayed. We are Ignorant of Our Ignorance In their book The Knowledge Illusion, cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach report on experiments testing “the…
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Filmmaker Rob Reiner took to Twitter recently to accuse President Donald Trump of being a “childish sociopathic liar.” That’s quite a statement. One might wonder what could have possibly inspired Reiner to push out such extreme rhetoric. “Democracy is being tested. The rule of law and the press are under attack by a childish sociopathic liar.
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President Donald Trump thanked California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) Thursday on Twitter for “doing the right thing” by agreeing to send 400 National Guard members to bolster the United States’ southern border Thursday. Trump alarmed illegal immigrant activists last week when he proclaimed that he wanted to send between 2,000-4,000 National Guard members to guard the border. A White House statement said the National Guard would be deployed “to give our Border Patrol agents the support they deserve” in their fight against criminal activity and the flow of drugs until Congress “takes the action necessary to close the loopholes undermining our border security efforts.”
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Combined military by America, British and French forces involved more targets and twice as many weapons as a launched almost exactly a year ago, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said late Friday. Mattis told Pentago reporters that the action was necessary because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had not been deterred from using chemical weapons against rebel military forces seeking to overthrow him and civilian populations in areas controlled by the insurgents.
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WASHINGTON — Congress had an agency designed to help senators avoid the sort of embarrassment they faced when trying to understand Facebook — but lawmakers stopped funding it 23 years ago and have resisted reviving it Now there’s talk the Office of Technology Assessment could make a comeback. A subcommittee will hear Tuesday from interest groups…
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Unemployment is low, and the economy is humming, but concern is growing among some conservatives that President Donald Trump risks giving away gains from his historic tax cuts in a trade war with China. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation earlier this week projected that the $150 billion in tariffs that Trump has proposed would cut gross domestic product (GDP) and wage growth by a tenth of a percentage point over the long run and reduce full-time jobs by 79,000. Middle and lower-income taxpayers would absorb a disproportionate share of the hit, according to the analysis.
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Former Kansas Republican congressman Mike Pompeo got 15 Democratic votes last year for CIA director, but there appears to be a possibility not a single Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote to confirm him as secretary of state. That includes the panel’s two Democrats who previously supported him, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New…
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As people around the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, once again promising to “never forget” the genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II, a new study shows Americans appear to be doing just that. The study released Thursday by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, found two-thirds of American millennials cannot identify what Auschwitz is. Twenty-two percent of millennials said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they’ve heard of it.
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State Senator Bill Ketron (R-Murfreesboro), who is running to replace the retiring Rutherford County Mayor Ernest Burgess, exchanged volleys with rival and former County Commissioner Tina Jones over the gas tax and the Nashville transit plan this week, just as early voting in the May 1 primary election began. Ketron has endorsed the idea of a monorail running from Nashville to Murfreesboro. He has not “publicly endorsed” the Barry transit plan for Nashville, but he has expressed support for her light rail plans by text as soon as she announced them. Ketron has not denied “privately” endorsing the Barry transit plan, as WKRN reported. Jones has pointed out that Nashville wouldn’t even be having a tax increase referendum had it not been authorized by the Ketron-supported IMPROVE Act, Governor Haslam’s gas tax increase that passed the Tennessee General Assembly and was signed into law last year, which would also enable a similar tax increase referendum in Rutherford County. In her statement voicing strong opposition to the $9 billion transit plan proposal “Let’s Move Nashville,” Jones asserted: When Senator Bill Ketron voted for the gasoline tax increase as part of the IMPROVE Act, he voted to allow local tax increases like…
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