Freeberg nails it once again. ‘Christian In Name Only’ is a beautiful term for a very ugly thing.

And he nails Anne Rice in passing:

One, she’s a revolving-door-slammer. And I think you know perfectly well what I mean by that. “I’m out” means a cessation of interest, and I would expect so accomplished a writer to string together some words more in keeping with her true sentiment. She’s not out. She seeks to use shame to shape and mold something into her way of thinking.

The other thing I don’t like is that it reminds me of Meghan McCain. Yes, I’m comparing a literary giant to a bubble head. Because it fits. Anne Rice is doing to Christianity precisely what McCain has been doing to the Republican party.

It is a destructive thing to say “I love this thing over here and want to be part of it…I think it’s just adorable…and so it disappoints me when it doesn’t tolerate everything like I think it should.” To require an object to tolerate everything, even things that are injurious to it, is destructive to that object. It really doesn’t matter if the destruction is intended or not. Everything cannot tolerate everything. That’s just the way the universe works.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

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

Tell the truth: You’ve never heard of Howard Zinn, have you? Trust me, you didn’t miss anything.

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Pakistan’s intelligence agency has cancelled planned talks with security experts in Britain following David Cameron’s claim that elements within the country are promoting the export of terror, it is reported.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

The population of the U.S. in 1980 was 227 million. In 2050, the Census Bureau forecasts it will be 439 million, with most of that growth due to immigration. By 2050, immigration will have made the U.S. about 150 million people more populous, or about 55% more. Thus, to reduce U.S. carbon emissions to any particular level, per capita emissions will have to be reduced about 35% more than if there had been no immigration.

And it’s not as if global emissions would be the same. People move to the U.S. from the Third World so they can afford a car, air conditioning, and the like. One plausible estimate is that Mexican immigrants emit four times as much carbon in the U.S. than if they had stayed home.

One of the most amusing aspects of Progressivism is that it includes a bizarre amalgam of special-interest groups whose positions are incompatible; the double-think required to get them all marching in the same direction toward the New World Order is one of the most amazing achievements of the Crust.

Moe Lane turns over a Really Big Rock.

DEMOCRATS DO NOT DRAIN SWAMPS.  That’s because swamps are wetlands, and thus must be protected by the full power of the federal government.

The Crust take care of their own.

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

The Crust take care of their own.

Read it.

Women are attracted to macho men and see modesty as a sign of evolutionary weakness, a study has shown.

Oh, as if anybody cares what they think….

Read it.

OK, this one is going to require a bit of background.  Short version: Ohio courts have just indicted a bunch of Democrats – some of whom have links to both Governor Strickland (D-OH) and Lt Governor Fisher (D-OH) – in a complicated real estate corruption case.  The word ‘tendrils’ comes to mind: stick around and you’ll see why.

Well, there’s that old Culture of Corruption that Nancy Pelosi is always on about. Of course, she’s talking about the Republicans, but, funny thing, the people getting indicted somehow all turn out to be Democrats. I guess it’s the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy that Hillary’s always on about. Knew the Republicans had to be in there somewhere.

Read it.

A woman was arrested and hauled to court for swearing at a group of youths after a brick was thrown through her window.

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

In order to be a Christian:

1. It’s not enough to call yourself a Christian, any more than calling yourself a Navy SEAL or a Congressman makes you one.

2. It’s not enough to talk like you think a Christian ought to talk, if you’re not saying the same things that real Christians are saying (and have said for two thousand years).

3. It’s not enough to believe what you think Christ wants you to believe if that’s not what the people who were taught by Christ  believe.

4. It’s not enough to dress up like a Christian, as the Episcopal Church is demonstrating in painful detail.

5. It’s not enough to ‘be a Christian in your own way’ if your way is not His Way.

6. It’s not enough to pick and choose your beliefs from what you happen to like among the variety of tasty offerings, like ingredients at a salad bar.

Just like creating a simulacrum of an airfield with a mock control tower and fake hangers won’t bring you any cargo, so creating a crude parody of Christianity that kinda sorta looks like Christianity if you close your eyes and wish real hard won’t bring you any salvation.

Read the New Testament. It was written by people who either knew Christ in the flesh or were taught by those who knew Christ in the flesh. Accept that they know about being Christian than you possibly ever could. If what you believe is inconsistent with what was taught by people who knew Christ or were taught by those who knew Christ, then you aren’t a Christian, and you’re not fooling anybody but yourself.

Read it.

This Time cover has led to much consternation on the internet. Most of the outrage isn’t over the image but, rather, the headline. Still, the image itself is shocking. It depicts Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by the Taliban to have her nose and ears cut off after she fled her abusive in-laws.

A potent reminder of what sort of people our enemies are. ISLAM IS AN OPPRESSIVE TOTALITARIAN IDEOLOGY WITH WHICH NO CO-EXISTENCE IS POSSIBLE. Remember that every day of your life, or you (and your family) will wind up like Aisha.

Read it.

Second, if BP was solely bowing to political pressure by assisting people it’s harmed, that would be one thing. But what it’s doing here is assisting people the Democrats have harmed, by a moratorium on offshore drilling by companies other than BP. In other words, the Democrats have used the leverage of fear of government to get BP to pay to cover up the damage caused by their own policies.

Third, consider this dynamic in the context of the vastness of BP (the company’s size is the only reason it hasn’t been run out of business by the spill). Other oil companies are big, too, but not everyone in the industry is on the same scale as BP, and equally able to buy off an angry government or weather the storm of the moratorium. This entire process of shaking down companies for political favor is designed with large corporations in mind – if you’re a smaller business, you’re not worth shaking down (or can’t afford the extra burdens of unionized workforces and heavy regulatory obligations on top of paying off politicians) and can be left to whither on the vine as collateral damage of insane economic policy.

That’s the way the Crust works, boys and girls.

Read it.

A useful reminder of what Communism is like on the ground.

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The Army investigated the incident and concluded that the soldiers had acted properly. Nevertheless, twice in the last seven years, Spain’s Supreme Court has overruled the National Court’s decision to drop the matter, and has ordered the National Court to pursue Sgt. Thomas Gibson, the tank sergeant who fired the shell, Captain Philip Wolford, who ordered the attack, and commanding officer Colonel Philip deCamp. What does Spain have to do with the 2003 incident? Absolutely nothing, but that country has assumed authority to pursue politically-motivated persecutions of anyone, anywhere in the world.

And Spain is considered an ally. Did we have a Real Government, it would put the hurts on Spain until it quit this horseshit. Unfortunately, all we have is a bunch of tax-and-spend kleptocrats. Sheesh.

Read it.

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

Whatever else he may be, Julian Assange is an enemy of the United States, and ought to be treated accordingly. If he had insulted Mohammed, he’d be dead already; unfortunately, the CIA is incompetent and the President is an arrested adolescent.

Read it.

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The laptop signaled the end of the mouse. The iPhone and Android signal the end of the desktop. Swype signals the end of the keyboard. Just to prove the point, I wrote this post on my Android phone using Swype. No mouse or keyboard. The future is here.

We have the technology.

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Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was an International Guild of Knot Tyers.

Read it.

That’s not really the question. The question is, why do beautiful women marry butt-ugly men? They can’t all be rich. Nothing is more common than seeing some really hot college-age babe walking around with a guy who doesn’t appear to have either showered or done laundry lately, much less combed his hair, and who doesn’t look as if he could pick his nose and scratch his butt at the same time but would be more than willing to try.

Read it.

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The U.N. is such a joke, I don’t see why anybody wastes bandwidth on them any more.

Read it.

Muslims: It’s their way or the highway.

Read it.

Works for me.

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OMG! We’re going to be overrun by self-reliant, hardworking pacifists!

Somehow I can’t bring myself to see that as a problem.

Read it.

I’ll be curious to know what the grounds of her suit might be, unless publishing a video of her talking racism is somehow actionable.

Funny how she’s not suing the Secretary of Agriculture, who panicked and fired her. Funny how she’s not suing the NAACP, who panicked and threw her under the bus even though they had all the information.

Read it.

Convenience for the Crust, the little people can go pound sand.

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Motorists face a £200 fine if they stray into specially designated “Games lanes reserved for competitors, officials and the media during the 2012 Olympics.

They could just do what they do over in the U.S. — call them ‘H.O.V.’ or ‘carpool’ lanes, and everybody would be good with it.

Read it.

With even Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald reporting that the BP gulf spill, now capped, “does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage” and even the New York Times reporting, “The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected,” the question arises: where does BP go to get its $20 billion back?

Much like those the-world-ends-Thursday cults, the EnviroNazis seem to think that, when their doomsday scenarios fail to pan out, they can just say ‘Never mind!’ and everybody gets a do-over.

Megan McArdle likes to dive deep into a topic that may seem eccentric.

We seem to be in a situation where we are systematically depriving employers of any potential information about employees.  This is both bad for businesss, which end up with unnecessary turnover, and bad for employees, because it results in the use of less accurate proxies that aren’t banned.  As Alex Tabarrok pointed out, banning inquiries about criminal history is likely to result in (illegal, but harder to detect) racial discrimination.  Imposing liability for truthful bad references results in the use of things like FICO scores.  And banning FICO scores–well, it may not be a good proxy, but what are bosses likely to use instead?

Erick Erickson has a new book out.

George W. Bush gave us steel tariffs in Pennsylvania, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit, TARP, and the auto bailout. His father before him gave us his lips on which we read a lie. They, like so many other Republicans, paraded around in conservative’s clothing while having little in common with actual conservatism.

The Republicans gave us progressivism (read up on Robert LaFollette and Teddy Roosevelt). The Republicans gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Heck, Republicans gave us Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, Dede Scozzafava, Charlie Crist, and the list goes on and on and on.

The Democrats, by contrast, have given us over to European socialism, degenerated our moral society, destroyed the nuclear family, never met a race they didn’t bait, and mushroomed the GOP’s spending programs.

For too long the Republican Party has decided to be the Democrat-lite party, and the American voters in 2008 decided to just go with the real thing. Turns out, there is a difference between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. While both may be terrible, the Democrats are worse.

Can’t really argue with any of that.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

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I don’t know why, I just like brass and wood more than plastic and chrome.

Read it.

Freeberg nails it yet again. His explanation for Palin Deragement Syndrome rings true.

There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.

Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.

So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary.

I think that this is behind my objections to Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord of the Rings movies. The woman is a thousand years old, and she looks and acts like a prom queen? Oh, please. Cheerleader? Sure. Sorority? No problem. Most beautiful woman alive? Not even close. Try, oh, Angelina Jolie. Or, better yet, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Not only drop-dead gorgeous, but it’s entirely believable that she could kick your ass and run a global corporation. Liv Tyler? She could maybe put her makeup on in the morning, and then rest for a while. But casting someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones as Arwen would have been offensive to the Target Demographic, and Jackson (consciously or unconsciously) realized this, and stepped back from the brink.

Read it.

As any Tomb Raider fan would know, Ms. Croft was conceived in Derby, so the voluptuous star was a natural choice, topping an online poll to choose the road name.

Read it.

Ladies!

If you should have a large piece of furniture, and if that large piece of furniture should have doors with hinges, and if for some good and sufficient reason you should decide to remove those doors, and if the removal of said doors leaves you with a number of loose screws that might be wanted again some day, then the thing to do is to put them in a ziplock bag and store them with the doors, preferably by fastening them to the inside of one of the doors with rigger’s tape, so that some gentleman friend in the future when called upon to re-attach said doors will have the relevant screws near to hand and will not be required to poke around in the four hundred little drawers containing various fasteners that you have cunningly placed in your garage. This will make life easier for all concerned.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

Surprisingly enough, none of them appear to have targeted Barbra Streisand.

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There are three major components to the Islamic strategy for overcoming the infidel democracies: the Ummah, Dawah, and Jihad. Each is necessary for Islamic success, but Jihad is the final stroke, and consumes far less time, resources, and manpower than the other two.

This is an excellent synopsis, and deserves much thought.

Read it.

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Four months after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” a congressional panel has released the first chart illustrating the 2,801 page health care law President Obama signed into law in March.

Developed by the Joint Economic Committee minority, led by U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the detailed organization chart displays a bewildering array of new government agencies, regulations and mandates.

Get a copy of the chart, and have fun.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to confuse you.’

Read it.

Well, a lot of people talk about doing that….

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Especially considering how the Horns are doing on the field these days.

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Judging by the ‘hip and trendy’ vestments he’s wearing in that picture, I don’t see that as unreasonable.

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This is God telling you not to wear high heels, which are stupid anyway.

Megan and Sara had been to an Indian restaurant in Worthing, West Sussex and on their way to the station for the last train home, they finished off the vodka and Red Bull they had bought earlier in the evening.

The inquest was told that on the train also were two sisters who had walked through the carriage where Sara and Megan were sitting and saw the empty vodka bottle fall on the floor.

That too.

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This incident quite handily illustrates the collectivism inherent in all such ‘labor’ organizations. Individuality and free choice are suppressed, and this is touted as ‘principle’. Well, yes, it is — socialist principle. And these are the first people to bitch and moan when companies combine (and they do) to keep wages below the market rate.

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I like Daniel Hannan, but on this topic he’s full of shit. However shabby a deal Turkey may have gotten from the E.U., it’s less shabby than they deserve. Turkey is not a European country in any meaningful sense — indeed, one of the definitive experiences in European history is the centuries-long effort to keep Turkey the hell out of Europe — and it doesn’t belong in the E.U.

Turkey has been a drag on European civilization since the Seljuks stole Anatolia from the Byzantines a thousand years ago, and eventually Europe will wake up to the fact that no Muslim country is anything other than a long-term enemy of Europe and its civilization (what there is left).

Read it.

I can see it now: Hid in the jungle. Killed people. Overthrew the government. Killed people. Destroyed the economy. Starved people. Lived in luxury. Tortured people. Slowly decayed into senility. Brainwashed people.

Makes for a gripping narrative.

Read it.