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No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.

Mark Steyn

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Mark Steyn
Age: 64
Born: 1959
Born: December 8
Film Critic
Journalist
Music Critic
Pundit
Writer
City of Toronto
Add
Pain
Return
Ever
Ones
Thing
Loved
Lasts
Prosecuted
American
Ransom
Hostage
Last
Paying
Family

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A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us?
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If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power.
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One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly.
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It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.
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You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete.
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But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.
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General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.
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Mr Hughes's current claim of bisexuality has the whiff of artful centrist positioning about it: bi- is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.
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The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.
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Even if you don't mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters.
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Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?
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It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do.
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[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
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Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
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The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
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Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
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Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
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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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Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment.
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After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.
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