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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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Gotta love Australians.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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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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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Well, not really. But it is a nifty headline.

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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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Dentist Hisham Al-Drouby asked his assistant to become a Muslim so she could be his “additional wife”, a hearing was told.

Londonistan, here we come.

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The security chief for Missouri-based Joyce Meyer Ministries has been charged with the murder of his wife and family, and lawyers pursuing a wrongful-death case now say they want to include the financially successful ministry as a defendant.

Seth Godin is always worth reading.

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

At the hospital, it’s probably 5% on the upside (the doctor who puts in the stitches, say) and 95% on the downside (all the avoidance of infection or lawsuits, records to keep, forms to sign). Most of the people you interact with in a hospital aren’t there to help you get what you came for (to get better) they’re there to help you avoid getting worse.

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I am not making this up.

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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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This is just funny.

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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.

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

I’m going to start a pool on which Dinosaur Media outlet is the last to wake to the realization that the reason why he did it was THE GUY IS A MUSLIM TERRORIST.

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).

In all it’s ugliness.

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Muslims are the new Communists, in almost every sense.

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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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The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Well, there it is.

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

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A former FDA chief sounds the alarm about dangerously delicious food.

David Kessler is the Joycelyn Elders of the food and drug business.

Steve Sailer asks the question that every American ought to be asking.

If he survives, the Ft. Hood shooter will of course be charged with murder, but it’s reasonable to inquire whether treason should also be charged. After all, for a major in the U.S. Army, trained at taxpayer expense in the use of weapons, to shoot 40 unarmed comrades-in-arms would seem like a reasonable example of waging war on the United States.

On the other hand, with Jane Fonda still walking around free, one has to wonder whether treason is an obsolescent concept in American law.

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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Well, you know, the labor market is pretty tight right now, and I thought, hey, perhaps somebody out there is considering a career change, and almost everybody likes veterinarians….

Check it out.

Dude, if a lion jumps on the hood of my car, I ain’t gonna be smilin’.

Gotta love Australians.

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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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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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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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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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A gang made off with 80 kilograms of flour after police set up a drugs sting but went home before their targets arrived.

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One would have thought that the laws against counterfeiting would be sufficient. But I guess bureaucrats have to follow the manual however laughable the result.

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Apparently this guy has has never been to Washington. We all know where it goes.

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Admit it – it’s the perfect name.

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I am not making this up.

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Everything bad is good for you.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is a very wise man.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature. Pessimism doesn’t come easily. You have to struggle your way towards it.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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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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The Los Angeles Times draws attention to news that, as part of the health-care overhaul, “A little-noticed measure would put Christian Science healing sessions on the same footing as clinical medicine.”

Tax dollars are already paying to promote unscientific medical treatments. Consider the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCCAM). Created at the behest of Senator Tom Harkin (D- Iowa), the federal unit has already spent more than $100 million to study non scientific treatments, and, it turns out, finding out that such treatments don’t work. Senator Harkin, at a hearing earlier this year, admitted as much, when complaining, “One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that in this center and in the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.”

I can just imagine what the leftoid nutroots will say when they find this out — which they may not, given the general incompetence of the Dinosaur Media.

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Roy Dokka, the executive director of the Center for GeoInformatics at Louisiana State University, said up to 70 percent of the West Bank could be underwater if a monster storm were to hit it.

So why are the taxpayers being forced to subsidize the folly of those who wish to build in this vulnerable area?

“It’s the only land left for large populations to grow,” said state Rep. Ricky J. Templet, a Republican who represents a swath of the West Bank. “The sky’s the limit. On the West Bank, we were the last to get started on our flood protection. Some people will be able to sleep at night now.”

I guess the fact that there are other, non-flood-prone areas nearby is irrelevant.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The men – known by the names Saifullah and Qaiser – were members of the region’s most powerful group Hizbul Mujahedin and had been active in Indian Kashmir for more than six years, police said.

Sometimes you jihad the bear, and sometimes…