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7203f2f
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At bottom, today's Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.
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Mark Steyn |
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1866e71
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Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty.
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Mark Steyn |
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6cec406
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When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is f***ed.
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Mark Steyn |
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c83c74f
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For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different worldview.
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Mark Steyn |
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f660541
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We're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The "population explosion" is a prop of the Western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place."
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Mark Steyn |
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9999f8d
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One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn't take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe's wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive.
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Mark Steyn |
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cf84c68
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Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.
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Mark Steyn |
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ff6a54c
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Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.
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Mark Steyn |
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d33c66b
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You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those num..
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Mark Steyn |
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300da63
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We've elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. If you don't "go forth and multiply" you can't afford all those secondary-impulse programs, like lifelong welfare, whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are."
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Mark Steyn |
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fe10977
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Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody's garage--the one place where innovation isn't immediately buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit.
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Mark Steyn |
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3463401
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The election of Obama was a profoundly unserious act by an unserious nation, and, if you were Putin, the ChiComs, or the ayatollahs, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of it....He's WEIRD in the sense of those students in the behavioral studies: Western Educated Idle Rich Deadbeat. He's not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure--as Bill Clinton or Joe Biden are. Instead, he's a creature of the broader culture:..
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Mark Steyn |
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a8a683b
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Leave "corporate America" and get a non-job as a diversity enforcement officer: that's where the big bucks are."
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Mark Steyn |
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a6c50ac
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Popular sovereignty may be fine in theory but not when the citizenry are so obviously in need of "re-education" by their betters. The alliance of political statists and judicial statists is moving us into a land beyond law--a land of apostasy trials. The Conformicrats have made a bet that the populace will willingly submit to subtle but pervasive forms of re-education camp. Over in England, London's transportation department has a bureaucra..
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Mark Steyn |
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c37f6cc
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We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off. Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That's our greatest threat. We are our problem.
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Mark Steyn |
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4cb6fc7
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When California goes bankrupt, the Golden State's woes will be nationalized and shared with the nation at large: the feckless must have their irresponsibility rewarded and the prudent get stuck with the tab. Passing Sacramento's buck to Washington accelerates the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminates any advantage to voting with your feet. It will be as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two ..
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Mark Steyn |
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6a484e3
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What is there to hold a post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-dreamt America together? The nation's ruling class has, in practical terms, already seceded from the idea of America. In the ever more fractious, incoherent polity they're building as a substitute, why would they expect their discontented subjects not to seek the same solution as Slovenes and Uzbeks?
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Mark Steyn |
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3aa09f8
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Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks,...but others among the ruled class just get unruly.
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Mark Steyn |
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f186688
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So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009. How's that working out?
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Mark Steyn |
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f0af3cd
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It was not "ironic" that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over..
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Mark Steyn |
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6ec2e3e
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but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-some-government-funding spirit. And it's hard to get an inspirational heart-warmer out of that.
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Mark Steyn |
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872156a
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As every economist knows, third-party transactions are always more expensive, whether the third party is an insurer or the government...Third-party transactions are always inflationary. So let's return as much of daily life as possible to a two-party system--buyer and seller. You'll be amazed how affordable it is. Compare cellphone and laptop and portable music systems prices with what they were in the Eighties, and then ask yourself how it..
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Mark Steyn |
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fc6d559
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I'm an immigrant to this great land. For fellows like me, this is where the bus terminates. There's nowhere else to go. Everywhere else tried this, and it's killed them. There's nothing new about Obama-era "hope" and "change." For some of us, it's the land where we grew up: government hospitals, government automobiles, been there, done that. This isn't a bright new future, it's a straight-to-video disco-zombie sequel: the creature rises fro..
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Mark Steyn |
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eefdba9
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You can live as free men, but if you choose not to, your society will surely die.
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Mark Steyn |
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19dc871
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Americans face a choice: you can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea--of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest--or you can join most of the rest of the western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult.
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Mark Steyn |
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1e8a377
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The unhealthiness of Dependistan underlines the real problem with the modern welfare state: it's not that it's a waste of money but that it's a waste of people.
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Mark Steyn |
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e2e8ced
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America is now a land that rewards failure--at the personal, corporate and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it lavishly as the federal government does, you'll get the Radio City Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only the huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, fro..
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Mark Steyn |
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bcb4480
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America and Greece are at different stops on the same one-way street, all too familiar to us immigrants. There's nothing new about Obama: been there, done that. Nothing could be less hopeful, or less of a change. He's the land where we grew up, with its union bullies and marginal tax rates and government automobiles and general air of decay all re-emerging Brigadoon-like from the mists entirely unspoilt by progress. it's like docking at Ell..
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Mark Steyn |
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32e1eda
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Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are ..
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Mark Steyn |
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02552f1
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Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that "in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis"." --
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Mark Steyn |
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560508f
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That's the most basic truth the young could impose on the old--the immorality of spending now and charging it to Junior. Next time Obama tells Joe the Plumber he wants to "spread the wealth around," it should be pointed out that you can't spend it until you've earned it. "Redistribution" from the future to the present is a crock, and if you happen to have been assigned to the "future" half of that equation, you should be merciless in your c..
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Mark Steyn |
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3b1070a
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But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.
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Mark Steyn |
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ccea61e
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There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren,"
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Mark Steyn |
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cf130eb
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the nationalization of the family proceeds apace, and America is as well advanced on that path as anywhere else. "The west has nationalized families over the last 60 years," writes Vaidyanathan. "Old age, ill health, single motherhood--everything is the responsibility of the state."
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Mark Steyn |
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fd85705
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In 2008, America elected a man with no "hands-on" experience" of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of "doing" than any previous administration in American history. You want "change", so you vote for a bunch of guys who've never done nuthin' but sit around talking?"
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Mark Steyn |
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fc20503
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much of the western world has a big hole where its sense of identity ought to be.
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Mark Steyn |
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5285ea6
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I saw a fellow in a T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but having them pawed while wearing a T-shirt is certainly one of them.
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Mark Steyn |
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5162363
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Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic building block of the sexes.
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Mark Steyn |
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1e375a6
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is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.
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Mark Steyn |
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e1c5b18
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Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but 'safe spaces' where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, 'gender fluidity,' and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
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Mark Steyn |
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d46825a
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The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making.
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Mark Steyn |
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a95086d
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He loved Minnesota's flora and fauna and seemed ill-suited as either a fawner or floorer, a
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Mark Steyn |
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548a314
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Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn't declare himself president; America chose him.
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Mark Steyn |
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954d6e5
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Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it.
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Mark Steyn |