Speaking at a meeting at Westminster of the campaign group Reform Section 5, Atkinson placed the freedom to offend people as second only to the right to the means of “sustaining life itself.”
Obama will not be immortalized by a Communist with a rifle. Instead he is doomed to be mortal, his hair turning white and his musical tastes turning worse. Any day now he will admit to a fondness for Kenny G and after that there will be no saving him from the dread ravages of time.[...]
Obama has gotten desperate. His fundraising emails walk the thin line between emotional blackmail and hysteria. Increasingly they read like Cousin Larry phoning for bail money from Tijuana.
In the same spirit, I see that I’ve just been awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Under Ireland’s citizenship law, I’m an Irish national (through my father). Ireland is a member of the European Union. The EU has just been given the Nobel Peace Prize. QED. Come to think of it, my mother’s Belgian, so I’ve been awarded two Nobel Peace Prizes..
Religion as cosmetic reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue only the postmodern, post-doctrinal West could love: its self-congratulatory elites having evolved beyond anything so quaint as doctrine and arrived at . . . nihilism. Ratzinger knew better. Doctrinal differences never lose their salience because it is doctrine that defines a believer. To airbrush our differences — even for the well-intentioned purpose of elevating “peace” as a transcendent value — is to deny the essence of who we are.
[...]
There is no common concept of God, and the mush that passes for this feel-good illusion cannot obscure that real faiths exist. They are different because they represent different claims about ultimate truth. One cannot apprehend what those claims are, and how the believer is apt to act on them, without studying doctrine and respecting the divergences between faiths. Substantive differences, civilizational chasms, and supremacist ambitions do not evaporate just because we wish to believe everyone wants “peace.”
[...]
Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant. In the Middle East, about 80 percent of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan tell pollsters they desire to live under sharia strictures. Even in the Far East, in Indonesia, where the practice of Islam tends to be more moderate due to its syncretism with other traditions of worship, sharia is on the march — preferred by half the population . . . and rising. Throughout the West, including in the United States, governments are under pressure from their swelling, aggressive Muslim communities to accept and adopt sharia standards — legitimizing them in our law and our culture, even as their brute repression of speech degrades our capacity to assess the wages of conferring legitimacy.
Large operations tend toward greater degrees of inefficiency due to the diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Large systems respond to inefficiency by creating more redundant structures which only increase the inefficiency.
Bureaucracies cope with all problems by adding new layers of paperwork without recognizing that paperwork is itself the problem. The world outside comes to be modeled through paper so that rather than interacting with problems, the system interacts with a paperwork model of the real world that is detached from the real world and requires ever increasing resource of paperwork handlers to maintain.
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The problems become institutionalized and unsolvable because the institutionalization of a problem creates a bureaucratic mandate for the survival of the institutions dedicated to solving the problem and the institutions dedicated to solving the problem seek to survive by not solving the problem.
Obama is not the first "black" man elected president, no matter how many people think so. I'm "black," and I can tell you: "black" in this context is more than the color of my skin. It's a shared experience, a purely American experience -- if you will -- which stretches back to when the first Africans were brought in shackles to our shores in the mid-1600s.
Nothing in Obama's background speaks of the American experience. It's not difficult to understand why. Obama is the son of a white woman with jungle fever and a commie Kenyan. He was raised in circumstances that almost all Americans -- let alone blacks -- would find foreign.
Obama is best described as an "African in America." (And no, I'm not a birther, despite the earlier "Nairobi" joke.) The difference between Obama's actual identity and an actual "black" person's is no small distinction. It explains how he could hold such an outdated view of the violence plaguing black communities across the nation. It explains why you never see him campaigning in black communities or dropping by for photo ops. (Well, that and because he knows that 95 percent of "those people" are going to vote for him anyway.)
It's also explains why Obama's first instincts are always to blame America first and profusely apologize for past American actions.
"The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner."He says that like it's a bad thing!
Dana Goldstein, writing in Slate, urged her fellow progressives to resist the temptation to homeschool, arguing that the practice is “fundamentally illiberal” and asking incredulously: “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive?” She went on to argue that the children of high-achieving parents amount to public goods because of peer effects — poor students do better when mixed with better-off peers — meaning that “when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.” She does not extend that analysis to its logical conclusion: that conscientious, educated liberals should enroll their children in the very worst public schools they can find in order to maximize the public good.
Yet somehow a bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture wound up with a monopoly on what your kids eat.
9) Ongoing. This is a great favourite, especially when nothing is in fact going on. “Our investigations are ongoing” translates as: “We are doing nothing about it at present, except fob you off with words.”
6) Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Just ban it. Now. Never let these words be mentioned together again. Ever.
3) Share.
2) Faith Community
As a former California girl, I am aware that my state of origin is full of contradictions like women who are on the Pill eating nothing but organically grown produce.
Californians are not the only one who seem conflicted about genetic engineering. There are many people who would support cloning for stem cells but would not eat meat from a cow cloned with the same technique. I have always said that if I was forced to choose between implanting myself with stem cells from my dead embryonic clone or drinking milk from a cloned cow, I would ask, "Do you have any Oreos?".
But the increased scarcity of the fertile female body, combined with IVF technology that allows for egg harvesting and surrogacy, creates conflict between generations of women. Older women with more power and resources put their interests ahead of younger women’s and make up for their past mistakes or misfortunes by risking the health and well-being of their successors.
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If heterosexual couples can use sperm donors to create children who are separated from their biological fathers, so the logic goes, then lesbians should be able to do the same thing... And if lesbians use sperm donors to create fatherless children, then it’s only equal and fair for gay men to be able to use egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children too..
The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed imflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.
This constantly updated vitality, this 'aggiornamento', does not mean breaking with tradition; rather, it is an expression of that tradition's ongoing vitality. It does not mean reducing the faith, debasing it to the fashion of the times using the yardstick of what we like and what appeals to public opinion. Quite the contrary, just as the Council Fathers did, we must mould the 'today' in which we live to the measure of Christianity. We must bring the 'today' of our times into line with the 'today' of God.Funny how some people still think Vatican II is all about, "Baptize contraception, abortion, homosexual activity and women's ordination! Doesn't God know it's _____?" (fill in any year, starting with 1963).
“This tour is different from others we’ve done,” the band’s promoter explained.
How different? For openers, the Steel Wheelchairs tour will not be playing big stadiums, but smaller arenas and theaters. “Half our fans are dead, and the other half are on Medicare,” the Stones’ business manager explained. “They can’t fill up stadiums they way they used to. Heck, they can’t make it up the stairs the way they used to.”
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Here are a few of those reworked hits, with the old titles first, followed by the new ones:
“When the Whip Comes Down” / “When the Hip Goes Down”
“Brown Sugar” / “Brown Splenda”
“Start Me Up” / “Help Me Up”
“Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” / “Hello, Blueplate Thursday
“(Hey, hey you) Get Off of My Cloud” / “(Hey, you kids) Get Out of My Yard”
“The Girl with the Faraway Eyes” / “The Girl with the Hairs on Her Chin”
“Midnight Rambler” / “Early Bird Scrambler”
“She’s So Cold” / “She’s So Old”
“Honky Tonk Women” / “Bingo Parlor Women”
“Waitin’ on a Friend” / “Waitin’ on the End”
Yesterday evening, to celebrate the opening of the Year of Faith, a torchlight procession organized by the Catholic Action group with thousands of people participating from every continent and state of life in the Church took place here in Rome. The procession ended in St Peter’s Square, and, as had his predecessor, the Blessed John XXIII on the same night exactly a half-century earlier, Pope Benedict XVI appeared at his window in the Apostolic Palace to greet the faithful. “Today, as 50 years ago,” said Pope Benedict, “we can be happy, because we carry the joy of the gospel, with us.” Evoking the extraordinary and prophetic gentleness and familiarity of Blessed John XXIII, Pope Benedict said, “50 years ago, at this very window, the good Pope John appeared and spoke to us with unforgettable words, words full of poetry, goodness, the words of the heart.”
Pope Benedict concluded his remarks by making his own the request of ‘Good Pope John’: “Go home to your children, and hug them tenderly. Tell them, ‘this tenderness is from the Pope.’
One observes first that the damsels are not in distress. They are doing just fine, with good jobs, an active circle of friends, participation in health clubs, book clubs, even a dynamic parish life. They are not lounging on the couch, playing video games and waiting for the phone to ring.
Perhaps many of them feel like Snow White, waiting for their prince to show up while stuck with the seven dwarfs, men of arrested development content to hang out with their “bros.” An increasing number of young women hear the depressing compliment from their boyfriends that they are “just like one of the guys.” The dream of every girl: to be an eighth dwarf.
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Every woman wants to find somebody who puts her wishes ahead of his own interests. Westley does so in an extreme and endearing fashion. In time, Buttercup learns that love demands the same of her, to sacrifice for the good of the beloved. She, like Westley before her, rises to the occasion. The measure of love, and its only real evidence, is the willingness to sacrifice my good for the one I love.
Sexual freedom fits this model as well as any other of the causes. Like all the other fake freedoms, it has come to mean the freedom to have power over others, to dictate their values, denounce their views and compel them to pay allegiance to the new system. These fake freedoms do not mean the ability to individually do what one could not do before, but the power to have the system compel others to do what you want them to do.
It is a perversion in the purest sense, all the more so because it begins with the whine of entitlement, "Why can't I just be accepted for who I am?" and ends with the roar of power, "Now you will do what I say.
Some gay activists are one step away from claiming that if someone disagrees with them, they shouldn’t be allowed to work anywhere. The original Hollywood blacklist never went that far, but you won’t see any movies made about the current intolerance of supporters of traditional marriage..
With middle class incomes deflating, four Americans recently assassinated by al-Qaeda, poverty and gas prices increasing, and the debt already saddling our children and grandchildren with mortgage-sized debt, Americans aren’t likely to be any more enamored than the media with Obama's non-stop "smallness."
The debates revealed Obama as a lightweight. But they also revealed that for four years, the mainstream media has covered up that fact.
If I were a part of the brain-dead racist herd of African-Americans who voted for Obama solely because he is black and celebrated him winning the presidency, I would feel pretty betrayed and embarrassed by Obama’s debate performance.
[...] I am a black Conservative because I have witnessed, in my own family, the devastatingly negative effects of the tired old Democrat rhetoric articulated by their slick black empty-suit president. A large segment of my family is prematurely dead after spending their entire lives on government welfare – AIDs, drug abuse, alcoholism, serial out-of-wedlock births and prison. They had free food, housing and heath-care. Their lives should have been wonderful. Right? Wrong. They suffered hopeless, dreamless and wasted lives. Why? Because the Good Book says, “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.”
Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator.I can already see the billing for the next debate: Killer Mormon v. Listless Sourpuss
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Free speech is a gift given to us in 1948 by U.N. officials? Who knew?
The only appropriate response of free-born peoples to such a statement is: **** off, ******. Free speech is not in the gift of minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrats, either to grant or withdraw..
Our ambition is to try a blog entitled “Essays in Idleness”; which hyperlinks only sparingly, & always with caution to the MSM; which does not celebrate the incursion of “events”; which may sneer at “breaking news,” ignore the polls, & give no advice in an election; which makes statements that could actually be contradicted, but only by someone who knows something; which rebels against the oppression of “democracy”; then flees from its howling mobs.h/t BCF
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