"I've only been shot twice. Once was with my Mom..."
"I HAVE never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob.'Orthodoxy.'
"It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village, who is mad. Those who urge against tradition -- that men in the past were ignorant -- may go and urge it at the Canton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable.
Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes -- our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth: tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father."
"Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
"Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.
"Brown claims: 'Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.'
"Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: 'The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.'
"Brown claims: Churchill was a 'staunch Catholic.'
"Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.
"Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa 'to some obscure chapel across town' because it was too racy for the Vatican.
"Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s 'obscure chapel'). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.
"Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
"Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed..."
"Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor said today that 'if President Obama were a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, he would have picked a less controversial court nominee.'
"Judge Sotomayor said she doesn’t blame the President for his unwise choice, 'after all, as a black male, he can’t be expected to demonstrate much more wisdom than he has so far. He’s certainly sharper than a white male, but the fact remains that he’s male, and has no discernible Latino heritage.'”
"Do I seriously mean to suggest that Tiller was as bad as Dahmer? No, because Tiller was almost certainly a more evil man than Dahmer was. There are at least five considerations that favor this judgment.
"First, Tiller’s victims were more numerous than Dahmer’s.
"Second, Dahmer expressed remorse for his crimes. Tiller never did.
"Third, and relatedly, Dahmer was apparently fully aware that what he did was evil, while Tiller pretended, to himself and others, that what he did was not evil. Some might think that such self-deception lessens Tiller's moral corruption, but in fact it exacerbates it. A man who knows that what he does is evil but does it anyway is corrupt; a man who has become so desensitized to the evil he does that he can no longer even perceive it as evil is even more corrupt. The sins of the former are likely to be sins of weakness; the sins of the latter, to be willful sins of malice. (Older moralists understood this. The modern cult of 'authenticity' and 'sincerity' has blinded us to it – and is itself a mark of our own grave moral corruption.)
"Fourth, and again relatedly, Dahmer was evidently to some extent acting out of compulsion. This does not exculpate him, and the compulsion was a consequence of his freely indulging his evil for years. Still, his will evidently had become so corrupted that he eventually reached the point where he could barely control himself. The problem was only exacerbated by the fact that his murderous impulses were associated with various sexual perversions – always unruly under even the best circumstances – and that he had learned to indulge his dark desires in secret, free from the fear of exposure and shame that would deter most others afflicted by the same bizarre temptations. Tiller’s murders, by contrast, were committed openly, and resulted from no compulsion at all. It was neither bloodlust, nor sexual perversion, nor any other ungovernable passion that drove him to baby-killing, but the cold and cruel willfulness of the ideologue. If Dahmer was a miniature Caligula, Tiller was a poor man’s Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot.
"Finally, Tiller added to his already unspeakable crimes the grave sin of blasphemy, insofar as he was (we now know) a churchgoer who evidently regarded his obeisance to Moloch as fully compatible with the religion of Jesus Christ. To my knowledge Dahmer never had the temerity to claim that a good Christian could be a cannibal..."
"'The pope is correct,' Green told National Review Online, 'or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope's comments.
"'There is,' Green added, 'a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded "Demographic Health Surveys," between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction technology such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by compensating or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.
“'I also noticed that the pope said monogamy was the best single answer to African AIDS, rather than abstinence. The best and latest empirical evidence indeed shows that reduction in multiple and concurrent sexual partners is the most important single behavior change associated with reduction in HIV-infection rates (the other major factor is male circumcision).'”
(see the full interview with Green here)
"Do you want to make poor people healthier? Then restricting the growth of discount chains is the last thing you should do. Instead, repeal programs that distort incentives--like agricultural subsidies that make junk food made from corn and soybean derivatives artificially cheap. Next, cut payroll taxes. With more take-home pay in their pockets, lower-income workers can afford to buy foods that are better for their health."
"Yang Yi, the chief executive of Tengzhong, said in a statement released by G.M. 'We will be investing in the Hummer brand and its research and development capabilities, which will allow Hummer to better meet demand for new products such as more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.'”
"...[P]ersonality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included 'sensitive', 'cultural,' and 'introspective') and Republicans ('pragmatic' and 'organized')."
