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I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I’m pretty sure that no one in the government does.

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The Episcopal Church has less than half the membership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But the former gets much more media coverage than the ELCA. But both are experiencing division under similar circumstances. Both churches have lost significant numbers of members in recent years, with congregations occasionally deciding to leave as a unit. And the problems in both churches deal with how the denomination interprets Scripture. The big fissures have been sparked by dramatic changes in church doctrine on sexuality.

This is why Real Christian Churches, where doctrine doesn’t change over time, have the advantage.

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Of course she does.

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Another reason why I don’t fly. Do not allow yourselves to be subject to the forces of fascism.

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The rot deepens…. I am prepared to defend the notion that just because one or even a hundred famous writers use a demonstrably incorrect construction doesn’t make it correct.

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Pretty bad when so useless a legislator as Lindsey Grahamnesty can eat your lunch.

Obama ought to have known better than to depend on a Clinton administration retread like Holder.

The Other McCain doesn’t much like Rod Dreher.

I have to confess that I don’t have a lot of use for him, either. I put him in the same class as David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and Malcolm Gladwell.

“To you, you’re a conservative; and to the media, you’re a conservative; but to a conservative are you a conservative?”

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“People would tell me, ‘How could a writer like you – that we like – like a fascist, an imperialist dog?’ ”

Gaiman, who started his career as a graphic novelist steeped in fantasy and science-fiction, commented: “They usually had not read any Kipling, and had been told not to like him by legions of right-minded people.”

If you stray an inch from the Party Line, they will throw you off the cliff, no matter who you are.

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Just consider that detected early, the five year survival rate for breast cancer victims is in the neighborhood of 98%. Detected late, that rate falls to about 26% a decrease in survival of 72%. And that doesn’t begin to cover the additional suffering from the treatments and dislocation of families when diagnosis is delayed.

My first wife died of breast cancer, which she discovered through self-examination. She was 43 at the time. Under these guidelines, it would have been discovered too late for her to have even the slight chance that she did have. I am not a supporter of these guidelines.

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There’s a government program for that….

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Al Gore has made an enormous amount of money by pretending to know something about science. He is by no means the first such charlatan, but he must be one of the most successful.

It is a remarkable fact that Al Gore has had a significant influence on public policy relating to science when he is, in fact, utterly uneducated in scientific matters and is of very limited intelligence.

On the other hand, he’s gotten rich, so I guess the joke is on us.

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You’d almost think that the U.S. were an Arab country. (Hm. Well, sometimes it acts like one….)

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These northern California counties–which include Sonoma, Napa, Solano and Marin–have become beacons for middle- and upper-class residents from the Bay Area. These generally liberal people came in part to enjoy the lifestyle of this mild, bucolic region, and many have little interest in changing it.

“The yuppies have insulated themselves here for the long term,” notes Robert Eyler, a director at the Center for Regional Economic Analysis at Sonoma State University. “The boomers have blocked everyone else different in age and skill from rising up and making their place.”

Only in America could such people be characterized as ‘liberal’ rather than ‘conservative’, or even ‘reactionary’.

California’s high-tech greens may talk a liberal streak in terms of diversity and social justice, but their prescriptions offer little for those who would like to build a career and raise a family in 21st century California. Their policies in terms of land use regulation and greenhouse gas emissions will make it even harder for existing factories, warehouses, homebuilders and other traditional employers of the middle- or working class. “In effect,” Eyler notes, “the progressives have become regressives.”

Well, some of us think that the correct term for all modern ‘progressives’ is ‘regressive’ – just look at the environmentalists, who won’t be happy until all white people move back to Europe, and maybe not even then.

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Well, duh. And I’m quite sure that she didn’t give two seconds’ thought to how her choices would affect anybody else but her. We live in the ME World, of which Twitter and Facebook are the iconic reflections.

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We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets. The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees’ International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn’t toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.

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With Russia playing President Obama like a fiddle, it’s natural that China would want to get in on the act. Thus, it’s no suprise that the Chinese regime invited Obama to Beijing. Nor is it any suprise that Obama accepted the invitation.

I remember when Khruschev rolled Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, leading directly to the Cuban Missle Crisis. We now have a President who had never run an organization in his life before being elected President of the fargin’ United States, and it shows. Unfortunately, the rest of us will wind up paying for it.

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I have not, in the last ten years, had a computer setup at the office that was as good as I had at home. There really is no reason for that — plenty of excuses, sure, but no reason.

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Similar legislation no doubt pending in Congress — after all, we have to do it the way the Europeans do it.

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Parents could be unwillingly packing more than 12 teaspoons of sugar into their children’s lunch-boxes, a consumer campaign group claimed.

They say that as if it were a bad thing. Personally, I rarely give much credence to advice from magazines whose names consist merely of an interjection and punctuation mark. “Consumer campaign groups” don’t rank very highly, either. (Ever notice how “consumer groups” seem dedicated to restricting the choices that consumers have? Perhaps “anti-consumer group” would be the more accurate term.)

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That must be why American foreign policy sucks so badly.

To the Palestinians, Clinton argued that, although America wanted Israel to freeze settlement activity, Israel’s refusal to comply should not stop the two sides from talking. But the Palestinians depend on the U.S. to beat up the Israelis until they make concessions; this is their understanding of the “peace process.”

Clinton also told the Palestinians that by refusing to talk with Israel, they risk irking the international community, which might then blame them for the stalled peace process. But the international community is never irked by the Palestinians for long. And it’s not in the international community’s DNA to blame the Palestinians for problems with the “peace process.” If you’re the “victim,” you’re the victim for all purposes.

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The United States House of Representatives, now overwhelmingly controlled by the Boomers, signed a $787 billion legislative “stimulus” package comprised of 1,071 pages and a hefty 8 pounds. Not one legislator read the bill before signing it. Months later, the same House members publicly screamed at the corrupt executives of AIG who received bonuses in 2008 – bonuses specifically allowed in the very legislation they passed without reading.

Talkin ’bout my generationnnnn….

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Need more reasons to demand honest services from a banker? Try this list:

1. Congress raised the FDIC insurance to $200,000 to make depositors comfortable leaving money in banks; then the banks passed the insurance premium on to customers – including those that never had $200,000 cash in the bank in their lives and probably never will. Seriously, how much money do you have to have before it makes sense to have $200,000 in cash in a savings account earning 0.25%?
2. Banks can borrow at 0% from the Fed yet they raise the interest rates they charge even their best customers. The bank I use for my company willingly lent me $10,000 last year to open a new office and approved a $7,000 credit card limit. Last month they sent me a letter saying they are raising the interest rate by +1.9 percentage point – though I have never missed a payment deadline.
3. The banks can use our deposits to purchase securities issued by the Federal government, which are yielding better than 3 percent. They pay us about 0.25 percent yet still find it necessary to tack on a multitude of fees – which amount to 53 percent of banks’ income today, up from 35 percent in 1995.

Daniel Henninger has some answers.

The only good news out of the Fort Hood massacre is that U.S. electronic surveillance technology was able to pick up Major Hasan’s phone calls to an al Qaeda-loving imam in Yemen. The bad news is the people and agencies listening to Hasan didn’t know what to do about it. Other than nothing.

The problem is confusion. The combatants at each end of the spectrum in the war over the war on terror know exactly what they think about surveilling suspected terrorists. But if you are an intel officer or FBI agent tasked with providing the protection, what are you supposed to make of all this bitter public argument? What you make of it is that when you get a judgment call, like Maj. Hasan, you hesitate. You blink.

Now everyone thinks the call was obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious before the tragedy. Not if for years you have watched a country and its political class in rancorous confusion about the enemy, the legal standing of the enemy, or the legal status and scope of the methods it wants to use to fight the enemy.

In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did.

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

Arnold Kling draws attention to the old guy behind the curtain.

The alleged goal of reducing economic inequality is trumpeted by people who want to strengthen inequality of political power. The goal is to entrench Harvard while delegitimizing those who are less educated.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

No doubt appropriate legislation to ban lollipops (‘It’s for the children!) is being prepared.

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The biggest reason that America nowadays has as much ethnic friction as it does is that there are so many incentives against assimilation.

Forty or 50 years ago, the newly-landed immigrant encountered a mainstream American culture that was almost triumphantly self-assured, so that to become an American was certainly a step upward. Now, we’re so busy celebrating “diversity” that it’s more rewarding to stay outside the mainstream, to form your own particular identity-group, to play the victimhood card and demand recognition in terms of “civil rights.”

And Sully is himself a classic example of this, as his pet cause is gay rights — a self-imposed minority identity. Note how the gay-rights movement has popularized the pejorative “closet” to apply to gay people who don’t advertise their sexual orientation to the world. This is very much akin to the claims of some black activists that middle-class black people are guilty of “acting white” or “abandoning the community.”

Except for straight, white, Protestant males, the only path to authentic identity under the multicultural regime is to separate yourself from the mainstream and strike a pose of alienated grievance. You’re only an authentic woman if you’re a militant feminist, and you’re only an authentic Latino if you’re marching with MALDEF.

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No, it isn’t. There is more imaginative fiction on the front page of the New York Times than in a Victorian three-decker novel. And don’t get me started on the op-ed pages….

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Somali pirates on Monday attacked an oil tanker some 1,000 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia.

In the Old Days, the Royal Navy would destroy every boat along the Somali coast and round up all their weapons.

That’s in the Old Days.

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This is a strong hint from God warning you not to take up these stupid fargin’ hobbies.

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An Australian man who had an affair with a woman for 20 years while he was married has been ordered to pay the mistress more than $100,000 (£55,000) under the country’s new laws that give rights to people in de facto relationships.

Gotta love Australians. Ordinarily I’d say this is just another example of Unintended Consequences, but I don’t know–they may have had this in mind all along.

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… which illustrates part of the problem. You get to be a colonel by being a good soldier; you get to be a general by being a good politician, as the memoirs by Norman Schwartzkopf and Tommy Franks make clear. Quite often that produces a useless ass-covering paper-pusher, like Al Haig and Wesley Clark. And it always produces an upper leadership in the armed forces that walks the walk of Political Correctness. This process has been going on since Vietnam, as limned in James Webb’s first (and best) novel, A Sense of Honor … and it is almost impossible to resist, as Webb’s subsequent career makes clear.

General George Casey, U.S. Army chief of staff, cautioned against jumping to conclusions about whether religious beliefs motivated the accused gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim born in the United States of immigrant parents.

This is just pure stupidity, and somebody this stupid ought not to be a General at all, much less hold office as Chief of Staff.

At least Joe Lieberman gets it.

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A sight-impaired gamer is taking various branches of Sony to court for failing to make their games accessible enough to disabled gamers.

Alexander Stern filed his suit in California at the end of last month. He claims that Sony Entertainment and Sony Corporation of America is failing to do enough to follow the US Disability Act by not making its games more accessible to disabled gamers.

The Americans With Disabilities Act is the poster child for what happens when a Republican President betrays his trust.

The Other McCain likes to point and laugh.

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their “nothing to see here” reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

What is most amusing is how the elite assume that the rest of us are so stupid as not to notice the pattern.

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Hasan may of course have been a victim of some form of mental illness recognized in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. With any luck, in time we will find out. But on the surface, close to where the media have found a traumatic disorder afflicting a man who suffered no trauma, is the disorder that Americans became familiar with on 9/11. If it were to be given a psychiatric designation, It might be post Islamic stress syndrome (PISS).

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When, oh when, will we stop being our own worst enemies?

Perhaps when ‘journalists’ named Yasmin Alibhai-Brown stop obsessing about it in print? That’s just a guess, you understand.

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Hey, that’s what Democrats do. Not that Republicans are all that much better.

Jerry Pournelle on the Ft. Hood incident.

I would presume that arming oneself and shooting 43 US soldiers is (1) levying war against the United States, and (2) an overt act, and that Major Hassan should be charged with treason. I would further argue that prior to his actions he had made a number of overt acts which were evidence of adherence to their enemies, and he could have been charged with treason for those; but I won’t argue the case too strongly.

The Legions remain faithful; but for how long when their officers are no longer faithful? Hassan had been through ROTC and a US armed forces medical school as a commissioned officer. Why was his failure of loyalty to the armed forces not detected earlier? But of course he was a Muslim, and it would not be politically correct to wash someone out of an armed forces medical school for lack of loyalty to the armed forces of these United States.

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A wealthy Indian family discovered their seven month old son was being rented out to beggars by their own nanny while they were out at work.

It is so hard to get good help these days.

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Two of Leon Trotsky’s best-known quotes are his statement that “Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation” (made famous, especially among libertarians, in part because it was quoted by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom), and the very next sentence in the same paragraph: “The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”

Not really news, but a useful reminder that Islam is not the only danger to freedom in the world; Communism remains fashionable among the Crust, and has not yet been defeated. The stake is through it’s heart, but we still need to cut off the head and fill the mouth with garlic.

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I thought all armored cars had remote-controlled bombs inside? If not, they certainly ought to consider it.

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It always surprises clueless people when they discover that Democrats really hate democracy and try to kill it wherever it raises its multifarious head.

Then they discover that ‘progressives’ really want everybody to revert to the 18th century, around 1789 – and their heads explode. It’s fun to watch, but messy.

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Recently a female documentary film maker was saved from a group of iron bar-wielding “feral girls” by the bike-riding mayor of London (I’ve always wanted to write the headline for the story).

Said Lord Mayor is Boris Johnson, perhaps the strangest elected politician since Traficante went to prison.

The Guardian piece quotes research by the group Women in Journalism back in March as finding that, among other things, 79% of adults are more wary of teenage boys than they were a year ago, and that the most commonly used descriptions of such boys in the UK press were ‘yobs’ and ‘thugs’ followed by ‘sick’, ‘feral’, ‘hoodies’ and ‘louts’ (PDF version of the report is here.)

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

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More dirt on why rich people like to argue for high taxes.

Nobody argues for a result that will leave him worse off. Not now, not ever, never. If someone appears to do so, there’s something going on that you’re not seeing. Look closer. FOLLOW THE MONEY.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Mark Steyn uncovers the environmentalism scam.

In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy ef?ciency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.

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The announcement (pdf) this morning that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is acquiring Burlington Northern railway raises some interesting questions. To begin with, if Mr. Buffett had $44 billion sitting around to spend, why did the taxpayers have to put $25 billion into Wells Fargo, $6.6 billion into U.S. Bancorp, and $3.38 billion into American Express through the Troubled Asset Relief Program? Berkshire Hathaway, as of its last annual shareholder letter (pdf), owned 13.1% of American Express, 7.2% of Wells Fargo, and 4.3% of U.S. Bancorp. These are significant positions, worth a lot more than the Buffett stakes in See’s Candies or the Washington Post Company that you read more about in the newspapers because they fit with the folksy, straight-shooting image Mr. Buffett likes to project. If Mr. Buffett had all that capital to spare, why didn’t he use it on propping up his own positions himself rather than accepting a government handout for which he later hailed Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner as “heroes”? And that doesn’t even touch the matter of Berkshire Hathaway’s investment in government-backed Goldman Sachs, on better terms than the taxpayers received for their Goldman aid.

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You know, we can debate about what the bedrock principles of the Republican party ought to be, and what they should not be. But I think — and feel free to call me a right-wing nutjob for entertaining such a thought — those principles ought not have a whole lot to do with helping Democrats win.

As a cause, it explains why the Republicans, and conservatives in general, will continue to be blitzed from all sides by this Scazzafava problem. All these David Brocks, all these Ariana Huffingtons, all these Andrew Sullivans. They’re just moral cowards. People with a desire to say stuff, to pretend they have something important to say, but really just want to go after whatever is the most popular.

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Another good reason to stay away from South Korea.