Hattip Cowboy at Belmont Club.

...while it is still in your mouth."

Love it!  That's a keeper!

An article posted by Gromgoru at Rantburg gives a series of three links to the "Gates of Vienna" blog that outline the details of the control system built into Islam that maintains it and propagates it.

Walter Russel Mead points out how legal painkillers are being abused to show how legalizing currently illegal drugs would only cause bigger problems.

The link is to a specific day of publication: scroll down and read the article "Killer Pain Pills Dent Case for Ending War on Drugs".

The fact is that the rest of the Free World doesn’t spend enough on defense to maintain itself as the Free World. Its dependence on the US was tolerable after WWII while the US was the only economically intact democracy on the planet. Nowadays, though, there’s no excuse for them to lecture us on the inadequacy of our entitlements while they pour the money that they should be using to defend themselves into porking up their useless classes.

"Porking up"!

Gotta love it!

Wretchard posts an article where he notes that it was on the Eastern front that we witness the clash of two men who ruled their nations like gods, and thus were unfettered by morals.

The results were not pretty.

This essay on the debate between evolution and design points out that many of the objections to the idea of the world being designed made by Scientists are actually religious and philosophical, relying on a specific (and naively idealistic) view of God's character.  In a sense, men picture how they would want the creation to be like, extrapolate that desire into a "perfect" version, and impute that vision to God.  While the author fingers a specific Roman Catholic scholastic for propagating the "God is better than what we can imagine as being good", Roman Catholic literature directed to laymen of that era uniformly project such an attitude.

In such a system, self-revelation of God is not permitted: Science doesn't want that self-revelation, since then God would be manifested, but neither does a religion that untruthfully projects God as "a perfect man", in the way that Job's friends and Elihu imputed behaviors to God in an effort to "Buff Him up".  In the end, God revealed Himself to Job, then rebuked those men for lying about Him while justifying Job's honest attempt at dealing with God-as-revealed-by-Himself by way of His actions.

This is the title of an essay by Wretchard of Belmont Club on the creation of an entire generation of dependents whose only ability is to riot when the subsidies and the handouts run out.  It springs from a masterful article by Theodore Dalyrymple in City Journal.

Comment #33, provides a valuable link to how a Catholic Bishop in pre-Civil War New York City saved the Irish from a similar fate using Biblical methodologies. Here's an interesting quote:

A religion of discipline, stressing conduct and the avoidance of sin, can be a pinched and gloomy affair, but Hughes’s teaching had a very different inflection. His priests mitigated the harshness with the encouraging Doctrine of the Sacred Heart, which declares that if you keep the commandments, God will be your protector, healer, advisor, and perfect personal friend. To a people despised by many, living in desperate circumstances, with narrow economic possibilities, such a teaching was a bulwark against anger, despair, and fear. Hughes’s Catholicism was upbeat and encouraging: if God Almighty was your personal friend, you could overcome.

Not at all different from the core ideas that I am pursuing.