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33a40f0
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If I've sounded a wee bit overwrought in recent columns, it's because America is seizing up before our eyes. And I'm a little bewildered by how many Americans can't see it. I see that chap at LaGuardia with on his chest and government bureaucrats in his pants. And I wonder if America's exceptional attitudinal swagger isn't providing a discreet cover for the withering of liberty. Sometimes an in-your-face attitude blinds you to what's goin..
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Mark Steyn |
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83a9f3e
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The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.
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Mark Steyn |
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c06f3f2
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The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report--more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand--suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world.
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Mark Steyn |
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8c9de20
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No Islamic nation could have flown to the moon or invented the Internet, simply because for a millennium the culture has suppressed the curiosity necessary for such a venture.
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Mark Steyn |
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a74a6d5
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A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness.
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Mark Steyn |
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6a92dc9
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Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came to America after September 11, 2001.95 That's to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that.
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Mark Steyn |
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421eae1
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A few weeks after the Climategate emails were released, Dr Sprigg spoke at the 13th Energy & Environment Expo in Phoenix177: Focusing closely on the Climategate scandal, in which leaked emails revealed IPCC gatekeepers hid, manipulated, and destroyed scientific data that contradicted claims of substantial human-induced global warming, Sprigg said the scandal has harmed the movement's scientific credibility.
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Mark Steyn |
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6e8abc4
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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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56f66cc
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If any "white supremacist" were really a "supremacist", he wouldn't be living in his mom's basement."
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Mark Steyn |
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66429f1
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When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust sui..
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Mark Steyn |
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31813ea
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Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation's highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7
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Mark Steyn |
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8532ec7
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Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy--creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it's easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
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Mark Steyn |
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cd3797c
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The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. By contrast, in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back....So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational..
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Mark Steyn |
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31bb09b
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the roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.
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Mark Steyn |
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e24a774
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No one likes to think of himself as a coward. People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it's safer or more convenient, but because it's the right thing..Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror's bidding, it's not because they're terrified but because they're socially concerned.' [George Jonas] This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It's easier to appease it, bu..
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Mark Steyn |
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aa546b7
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It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which ..
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Mark Steyn |
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229d47d
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Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: a government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back."
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Mark Steyn |
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6b40dc9
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For a century, Edison's light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a 'climate criminal." That transformation is American decline in a nutshell."
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Mark Steyn |
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a10e64b
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I'm opposed to the notion of official ideology--not just fascism, Communism, Baathism, but the fluffier ones, too, like 'multiculturalism' and 'climate change' and 'marriage equality.' Because the more topics you rule out of discussion--immigration, Islam, 'gender fluidity'--the more you delegitimize the political system.
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Mark Steyn |
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a2581ab
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Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can't bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast. As American universities, British playwrights, and Australian judges once understood, the 'safe space' is where cultures go to die.
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Mark Steyn |
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f86256f
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At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness. Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the worl..
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Mark Steyn |
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6dca5d1
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The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty.
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Mark Steyn |
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8a13419
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There was less private-sector business experience in Obama's cabinet than in any administration going back a century.30
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Mark Steyn |
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486a64a
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With Clinton, of course, the term "world stage" was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved."
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Mark Steyn |
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c35b116
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But in practice the lack of belief in divine presence is just as likely to lead to humans avoiding responsibility: if there's nothing other than the here and now, who needs to settle disputes at all? All you have to do is manage to defer them till after you're dead--which is the European electorates' approach to their unaffordable social programs. The meek's prospects of inheriting the earth are considerably diminished in a post-Christian s..
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Mark Steyn |
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db4f643
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It is easier," said Frederick Douglass, "to build strong children than to repair broken men."
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Mark Steyn |
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d2ef4fe
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The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president.
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Mark Steyn |
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1d10151
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I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American pre-eminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide "I take it you've heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?" "Oh, sure," I said. "We have the same piano tuner." Which we did."
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Mark Steyn |
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d60e7bb
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The easiest way to a "lifestyle" is a government job. The following year, another survey (from Newsweek) found that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States were in the Washington commuter belt.9 What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government."
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Mark Steyn |
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898647c
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In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the "free world" and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own security. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any t..
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Mark Steyn |
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82af20e
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Three quotes from the same column: Self-reliance --"work"-- is intimately connected to human dignity --"purpose."
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Mark Steyn |
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dcf6cbe
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Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.
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Mark Steyn |
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08a9235
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Nixon's avowedly 'square' White House was, in fact, less cheesy than Clinton's Lite FM programming and more confident than the Kennedys' culturally craven collect-the-set approach.
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Mark Steyn |
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066b2ee
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Every four years, the Republican Party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald Reagan, Governor of California for eight years, couldn't get elected in today's not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking productive cla..
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Mark Steyn |
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f980e14
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Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long.
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Mark Steyn |
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77b1553
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Reagan's was a full, varied American life, of which the presidency was the mere culmination. 'The Great Communicator' was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: 'We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around.' [from Reagan's inaugural speech]
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Mark Steyn |
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5d8634b
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America has potholed roads and decrepit airports, but it builds state-of-the-art offices for regulatory bureaucrats--and their enforcers. The federal Department of Education doesn't employ a single teacher, but it does have a SWAT team.
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Mark Steyn |
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18858a8
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To] the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated."
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Mark Steyn |
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7ca7ff5
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disregard other
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Mark Steyn |
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e2c92ef
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Queers Against Israeli Apartheid
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Mark Steyn |
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36b2ff5
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The drug cartels weren't Muslim last time I checked, but decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head.
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Mark Steyn |
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07ebb4a
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Clovis
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Mark Steyn |
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2236c03
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I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.
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Mark Steyn |
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56bd9a3
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America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it.
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Mark Steyn |