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Egyptian border guards have opened fire on Palestinians who breached the border to escape Israel’s assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

So much for Muslim brotherhood.

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I say we go them one better, and feed the entire family to the shark. I’m sure they would want it that way.

Mark Steyn looks at what we owe to Samuel Huntington.

This should have been obvious: If a man is a Muslim bus driver, which is more central to his identity – that he is a Muslim or that he drives a bus?

Forty years ago, the mills of northern England needed workers so Britain imported them from Pakistan. The mills closed, but the workers stayed, and now Yorkshire has adopted Mirpuri customs of arranged cousin marriage: in Bradford, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins. As to the seductive assimilatory charms of time, 30 years ago the percentage was half that. A victory for culture over economics.

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I was only mildly suprised, a few weeks ago, when I found ABC News peddling a fake video Q&A with President Bush, in which segments of his answers to two different questions were spliced together, out of order and out of context, with no indication that this surgery had been performed (“In president, out president, fake president”, 12/5/2008). Perhaps I should have been more indignant, but I’ve learned not to expect much in the way of journalistic ethics from broadcast news organizations.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

And I accepted, years ago, that even first-rank newspapers like the New York Times routinely fabricate virtual quotations in textual form, by splicing together out-of-context fragments from widely separated parts of an interview.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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It can be done.

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Of course not, they’re needed to provide victims for propaganda purposes.

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Those who point out that Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible get all the great hate mail.

Those who try to draw an equivalence between Islam and Christianity just can’t seem to talk their way around the fact that Jesus never led an army, Jesus never robbed caravans, and Jesus never exterminated innocent people just because they didn’t agree with him. Funny thing about that.

Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana’s chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, one of the Muslims beheaded him. [4] Kinana’s wife was taken as a war prize; Muhammad claimed her for himself and hastily arranged a wedding ceremony that night. He halted the Muslims’ caravan out of Khaybar later that night in order to consummate the marriage. [5]

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Further evidence that legalizing recreational drugs isn’t the cure-all that some arrested adolescents would have you believe.

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Well, that depends on which God you have. Nigeria and Sudan have a lot of Muslims who “have God”, and I can’t say that it helps a whole lot.

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Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, told The Times: “This story is very common, unfortunately. We have tried to plug some of the holes in the whole system, but unfortunately our clerics do not live on this planet.

Ain’t nothin’ murky about it. Muslims think that they’re entitled to four wives, and they think that this entitlement trumps whatever the law may be wherever it is that they live. Suck it up and report the truth.

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I am not making this up.

Yet another episode in “lifestyle theater”.

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Kids, do not try this at home.

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Yeah, that’s what America is all about — having the government seize somebody’s property because they happened to be in the way of a bunch of highjackers crashing the plane, and they need the land to create a huge crescent pointing toward Mecca to memorialize the event.

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Hint: No.

But if Bush did it — whoa, Katy bar the door….

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This sort of attitude is why Republicans are LOSERS and will continue to be LOSERS while people of this caliber are in charge of the party.

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Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing — even issuing reports overstating their progress — to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project, former officials say.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Government states that government is in the business of hiring and paying government workers, whatever its formal business may be.

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Note that they never “call for ceasefire” during the continual bombardment of Israel by rockets and mortar shells coming from Gaza and Lebanon. Guess they do learn from experience after all.

Mark Steyn is not impressed.

What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these last few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

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On Tuesday Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Sharia criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, the code legalizes crucifixion.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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I am not making this up.

Scott Adams gets in touch with his Inner Socialist.

In a prior post I questioned whether ignorant citizens should be allowed to gamble by buying individual stocks, as opposed to investing in an index of stocks to reduce risk.

But surely there is a better way to raise capital than by convincing idiots they know more than they do.

Although he claims to be some kind of libertarian (what kind is never actually made clear), Adams consistently demonstrates that contempt for ordinary individuals (or “induhviduals”, as he puts it), and the propensity to constrain individual behavior “for their own good”, that is the hallmark of statists everywhere.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Much like attracting the attention of a taxing authority.

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Bet he’s a Democrat. Sounds like something a Democrat would do.

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Police said the call included a scream and sounds of a struggle, but Gahagan had said she heard nothing unusual when she picked up. She ended the call after repeatedly asking if there was an emergency and receiving no answer, and didn’t call the number back or send police to investigate as the 911 center’s policy suggested.

The case has been complicated by misinformation from the call center, which mistakenly told homicide investigators that Gahagan had called back Zimmermann’s cell phone and two men answered.

The county also didn’t acknowledge the existence of Zimmermann’s call until a news report mentioned it nearly a month after the slaying. Joe Norwick, the center’s director, had insisted Gahagan had no way of distinguishing the call from dozens of daily accidental and hang-up calls received by the center even after county officials realized someone had screamed during the call.

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Tell the truth: Which of us hasn’t wanted to do that?

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First it’s AlGore bringing ice storms wherever he goes to preach about Global Warming, now it’s Obama bringing power failures.

Rod Blagojevich represents a distillation of everything that the Democratic Party actually is, rather than what it pretends to be. Chief among these is unrepentant corruption, unrepentant because it is clueless about what constitutes virtue in the public sphere; indeed, it does not recognize that the phrase “virtue in the public sphere” has any actual meaning.

Thucydides captured it best in the Melian Dialogue: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.”

Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.

Jerry Pournelle waxes dyspeptic.

Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn’t always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that.  It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person — he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn’t take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can’t we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation — since of course they won’t be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won’t be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can’t pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class.

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As Obama entered the room, it was absent of the regular fanfare of cheering and clapping. The diners were polite, staying seated at their respective tables and waited for the president-elect to come to them to stand up.

The president-elect spent about an hour with the troops. Obama transition aides say that Obama did not eat with the uniformed men and women — he ate at his beach home with his family and friends Christmas night.

Needless to say, Bush (who has actually worn the uniform) is roundly cheered whenever he shows up, and always stays to eat with the “guys”.

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We have the techology.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

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So as you see the bloviation of wealthy, wasteful Hollywood and East Coast elites, and see them loudly proclaim their Progressive dogma, keep in mind that they’re just trying to sell products. If they believed what they said, they’d live in inner city neighborhoods and be activists first and actors/marketers/politicians second.

But they don’t, and that’s the proof positive that elite liberalism is a marketing ploy and not an honest, well-considered belief. Feel free to laugh at anyone who takes it seriously.

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She’s the closest we’ve got to a Heinlein Girl in politics today. What’s not to like?

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As Jayne Cobb used to say, “Saw that comin’.”

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I am not making this up.

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Fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Muhammad.

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The iPhone goes on sale at Wal-Mart on Sunday, the retailer said. An 8GB iPhone will cost $197 at Wal-Mart, while the 16GB model will sell for $297. Both prices are $2 off what Apple charges for the mobile device.

Wow, a whole $2 off. That will really bring technology to the masses.

And they still require service through AT&T. I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominees.

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The historical presence of non-Muslims in lands currently controlled by Muslims is obvious, but often overlooked. And the fact of their presence is crucial in answering the skewed or nearsighted historical narratives that inform many a discussion on foreign policy: It can be employed to highlight the double standards that exist with respect to Islamic law and the “right” to possess a particular territory (e.g. Israel, the “right of return,” etc.).

Time for a new Crusade — let’s take back all the lands they stole from us, and put the Arabs back into Arabia.

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Suggest to Jews that they ought to invite a Storm Trooper to Hannukah and see where it gets you. Or put Simon Legree in a Kwanzaa scene.

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Note that nowhere on the entire first page of the article does it mention the word “annulment” or explain what the legal issue is.

We used to have journalists. Ah, those were the days.

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One of the things to think about as you read this article is that some of the criticism it contains — an objection to the commercialization and excessive materialism that has come to be associated with Christmas — is not specifically Muslim. It’s a reminder of why Islam appeals to people who are repelled by the hedonistic sinkhole that Western popular culture has become.

Ho ho ho.

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This Christmas, remember that the Islamic supremacist program has you on its list. You may not be a Christian. You may not be a Jew. You may not be a Hindu. But the jihad is universal. You are on the list. So this Christmas, may all of us whose conversion, subjugation, or death is envisioned by the adherents of Sharia stand together. Let us stand together as Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, secularists, what have you, and stand up against those who would kill us or subject us to institutionalized discrimination because they find our beliefs offensive.

Read it.

Merry Christmas.