The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom

I like this pope more than any pope in memory.

Simon Caldwell writes:

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

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Who Hasn’t Gone To A Bar, Had A Few Drinks…

…picked up a woman, taken her home, had a lovely night, and woken up the next morning to discover she’s your sister. (From Fox’s Red Eye)

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Kosher Asian Fusion Restaurant Opens On Pico

It’s called Mamash. Entrees go for more than $30 so you can eat there safely knowing I’ll never get in unless I’m bludging off somebody. It offers private booths (for lap dances?).

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Subway pole dancers enrage MTA

From the NY Daily News:

On a dare from a Web site promising $10,000 for the best pole dancing in public, the quartet took a ride on the wild side and their winning video has become a rage on the Internet.

"It was literally get on the train and go," said Laura Lee Anderson, 24, of Queens, one of the vivacious vixens videotaped performing Scores-type moves on a Manhattan-bound N train.

Gal pals Jessica Wu, Marissa Lupp and Isis Masoud joined Anderson for the hip-grinding stunt that had male riders ogling and skipping their stops, females smirking – and the MTA fuming.

"The last thing we want is for anyone to turn our subways into roving burlesque stages for crude exhibitionists," said NYC Transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges.

"While the rules don’t specifically state lap or pole dancing … what is depicted here is disorderly conduct," Fleuranges added.

The N train divas had no regrets and saw their cleavage-baring act as a golden opportunity.

"Strip dancing in public can be a little nerve racking, but we were all broke and in between jobs and it seemed like a good way to make some cash," said Masoud, an aspiring actress and choreographer.

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Why Do Pro Athletes Get A Free Ride When They Kill People?

A great line from Tuesday night’s Red Eye program on Fox.

It’s hosted by Greg Gutfeld.

From Canadian Press:

NEWARK, N.J. – Lawyers defending Jayson Williams in a manslaughter case are seeking details about a racial slur made by a prosecution investigator against the black former NBA star.

The lawyers, in a court filing, said the Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Office only recently revealed the slur, and that lawyers could have used it to discredit the prosecution case during the first trial for Williams.

Williams faces a retrial next year on a manslaughter charge in the shooting of a hired driver in 2002. Williams was convicted in 2004 of attempting to cover up the slaying but was acquitted of the more serious charge of aggravated manslaughter.

Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on the reckless manslaughter count, voting 8-4 in favour of acquittal, leading to a retrial on that single count.

Based on what the details show, Williams will consider seeking a new trial on the counts he was convicted of, his lawyers said in the filing.

Williams, 39, remains free on bail and has yet to be sentenced on the four cover-up convictions.

His wife, Tanya Young Williams, told The Post the prosecutor’s office was shielding a racist. "Consequently, my husband was denied his constitutional right to a fair trial. I am outraged and saddened by this enormous turn of events," she said.

Former first assistant prosecutor Steven C. Lember, who tried Williams in 2004 with assistant prosecutor Katharine Errickson, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he knew of an internal affairs investigation regarding the investigator but was never given any details or a report. Lember said his former boss, Hunterdon Prosecutor J. Patrick Barnes, had the information.

The slain driver, Costas Christofi, 55, had driven some of Williams’ friends to a restaurant following a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game, then back to Williams’ estate in Hunterdon County early on Valentine’s Day 2002.

Witnesses at the first trial testified that during a tour of the house, Williams took a 12-gauge shotgun from a case and snapped it closed. The gun fired once, striking Christofi in the chest. The defence has maintained the shooting was an accident and that Williams panicked afterward.

I thought Greg Gutfeld was gay but according to Wikipedia he’s married to a woman:

After graduating, he interned at The American Spectator, as an assistant to R. Emmett Tyrrell. He then got his first full-time job as a staff writer at Prevention magazine. In 1995, he became a staff writer at Men’s Health.

He was promoted to editor-in-chief of Men’s Health in 1999. In 2000, he was replaced by David Zinczenko, and became editor-in-chief of Stuff. At Stuff he increased the circulation from 750,000 to 1.2 million. In 2003 he became head of "brand development" at Dennis Publishing.

He helmed Maxim Magazine in the UK from 2004 to 2006. However, Gutfeld’s contract expired without renewal after losses in readership under his tenure. His final year at Maxim saw a loss of about 40,000 readers; he was replaced by Derek Harbinson.

Since February 5, 2007 he has been host of the Fox News late-night program Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld.

He has been a contributor to the website The Huffington Post since its launch, and currently also blogs at his own site, "The Daily Gut". Frequent targets of Gutfeld’s sarcasm include his Huffington Post colleagues Deepak Chopra, Cenk Uygur and Arianna Huffington.

He has authored two books, including "The Scorecard" for Henry Holt, and is currently working on a book about England for Simon and Schuster. He also writes a monthly column called "From the Gut" in The American Spectator

I learned on Tuesday night’s show that the economy’s decline has reduced the number of breast jobs.

Reason magazine senior editor Kerry Howley was on the show. She’s way hotter than Matt Welch and almost as hot as Nick Gillespie. She’s funnier than both.

According to Reason.com:

 

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of Reason, the libertarian monthly named one of "The 50 Best Magazines" three out of the past four years by the Chicago Tribune. Established in 1968 and a four-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, Reason has a print circulation of 40,000 and won the 2005 Western Publications Association "MAGGIE" Award for best political magazine. Reason Online, the magazine’s Web edition, draws 1.75 million visits per month, and the staff weblog Hit & Run has been named by Playboy, Washingtonian, and others as one of the best political blogs.

She first came to the magazine in 2003 as the Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern. After her stint at Reason, she moved to Southeast Asia as a reporter for the Myanmar Times and Business Review, a privately owned newspaper based in Yangon. There she covered the United Nations and development issues until returning to Reason as a permanent staff member in 2005. Howley’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Newsday, Reader’s Digest, and The New York Sun, and she has been a guest on NPR’s On the Media and Fox News’ Red Eye. She was promoted to associate editor in August 2006 and to senior editor in June 2007.

Howley is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she received a B.A. in philosophy and English. She lives in Washington D.C.

I was shocked to see an ad during the Fox News show for the porn satellite channel TEN. It was a hilarious ad.  A young man is making out with his girlfriend when the video store leaves a message on his machine that various salacious titles are overdue.

 

I hate it when that happens.

I remember when I was 20, I was leafing through a Penthouse magazine in a convenience store when a young attractive female reporter at the Auburn Journal (with whom I sat through many Auburn city council meetings) caught me and landed a stinging one-liner.

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Camera Of Death Vs. Katie Lohmann’s 20th Calendar Release Party At Vice

Click here for photos and report.

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Dump The CIA?

From Dennis Prager’s blog:

Dennis talks to Christopher Hitchens about his latest piece in Slate. The CIA’s record is so undistinguished and so counter-productive, Hitchen contends, that the time has come to scrap and start over.

Mark Taylor talks to Kinglsey Browne, professor of law at Wayne State University Law School. His new book is Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars.

NYT distorts Romney’s speech. Did they even listen it or read it? Maybe their just so blinded by their antipathy for anything religious that it doesn’t matter.

Dennis talks to Dinesh D’Souza, former White House domestic policy analyst, and currently the Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His latest book is What’s So Great About Christianity.

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In Politics Values Matter, Not Theology

Dennis Prager writes:

There are some Americans — presumed usually to be evangelical Christians — for whom voting for a Mormon for president of the United States is difficult, if not impossible. While I will try to show these voters why that decision is wrong on religious as well as moral grounds, it is important for the rest of us to understand their opposition.

Most traditional Christians regard Mormonism not merely as not Christian, but as a falsification of it. It does not matter to the vast majority of evangelicals if a candidate is a Christian. Most are quite prepared to vote for a non-Christian — a Jew, for example. And they are certainly prepared to vote for Christians with whom they differ theologically — whether non-evangelical Protestants or Roman Catholics.

But they do not regard Mormons as fellow Christians with whom they differ theologically; they regard them as having a theology so different from mainstream Christianity that they are no longer Christian. It is quite possible, even likely, that if Mormons simply announced they were not Christian, but a new religion, even one based on belief in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, evangelicals would have fewer objections to voting for a Mormon with whom they shared social values. Rightly or wrongly, many evangelicals resent Mormons calling themselves Christian.

It is analogous to the resentment among Jews of "Jews for Jesus." What Jews resent is not that a Jew who adopts Christian beliefs has become a Christian — most Jews recognize that in a free society people convert to and from all religions. What many Jews resent is that "Jews for Jesus" call themselves Jews and not Christians after leaving Judaism (even while continuing to identify ethnically as Jews) and embracing Christianity. So, too, it is that Mormons call themselves Christians while embracing a different belief system that rankles so many traditional Christians.

It is not for this Jew to define a Christian. I only explain evangelical Christian opposition to Mormons calling themselves Christians to make the point that even as I understand their opposition to Mormons calling themselves Christian, I equally oppose voting for anyone based on his theology. Evangelicals have the right to proclaim Mormons as non-Christians, but they hurt themselves and their country if they measure a candidate’s theology. They should concern themselves with a man’s theology only when choosing a religious leader. When choosing a political leader, theology should not count.

The reason is — and I have come to this conclusion after a lifetime of interaction with people of almost all faiths and writing about and studying religion — theology does not appear to have much impact on people’s values. Liberal Christians and Jews share virtually no theological beliefs yet think alike about virtually every important social value. So, too, conservative Christians and conservative Jews share virtually no theological beliefs, yet they think alike about virtually every important social value.

Meanwhile liberal and conservative Protestants are in agreement on theological matters — both believe in the Trinity, in the Messiahship of Jesus, on Jesus being the Son of God, on salvation through faith rather than through works, and more — yet they differ about virtually every social value. Obviously, shared theology doesn’t create shared moral or social values.

Or take Judeo-Christian values. I have written 24 columns explicating the meaning of Judeo-Christian values, yet never once used the term "Judeo-Christian theology" because there isn’t a Judeo-Christian theology. Judaism and Christianity differ on most of the major beliefs of Christianity — the Trinity, the place of Jesus, whether the Messiah has come, the nature of salvation, and more. But they share almost every important social and moral value. Once again, the relationship between shared theology and shared values is next to nil.

Therefore the theological beliefs of a public figure should matter only when one is choosing a theological leader, never a political leader — unless those beliefs form the basis of social and moral values that one abhors. It is very important to know the theological beliefs of one’s clergyman or the head of one’s seminary, but as far as the head of one’s country is concerned, only his moral and social values matter. I would much sooner vote for an agnostic whose values I shared than for a believing Christian or Jew whose values I did not share.

None of this is an endorsement of Mitt Romney’s candidacy or of his values. It is an endorsement of the irrelevance of his theological beliefs.

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Conversion To Judaism For Marriage

Rabbi Gil Student writes:

R. Gedalia Dov Schwartz recently reached the milestone of serving as the Av Beth Din of Chicago for 20 years. The Chicago Rabbinical Council published a book in honor of this event titled Sha’arei Gedula (link, scroll down). The book has a long biography of R. Schwartz, with plenty of "color commentary" added. The next and largest section is an overview of the halakhic challenges facing the American Orthodox rabbinate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is an extremely fascinating series of essays that, while lacking some of the historical sense of a trained historian, is nevertheless an extremely valuable historical treatment and simply a fascinating halakhic study. The final section is a long list of "Ask the Rav" questions and answers, often based simply on quoting other halakhic authorities but occasionally answered with R. Schwartz’s unique perspective.

Let me quote part of the section on conversion that is relevant to contemporary discussion. However, let me briefly note that this should not be understood as an endorsement of the work of the EJF because 1) it does not address their practice of reaching out to intermarried couples (link), and 2) it certainly does not justify their dismissal of the Modern Orthodox rabbinate (I, II).

Click here to read moreR. Gedalia Dov Schwartz, Sha’arei Gedula, pp. 219-221 (I am taking the liberty of omitting some footnotes and incorporating others into the text):

Naturally, while there are teshuvos regarding the practical application of conversion, the teshuvos germane to intermarriage were principal in the minds of the twentieth century Rabbonim. For example, in 1927 Rabbi Chaim Fischel Epstein wrote concerning a woman who had converted in order to marry a Jew. The question was asked to Rabbi Epstein by Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Greenwald, was whether one would be permitted to perform the marriage of this couple in light of the halacha that a convert is not accepted unless his or her sincerity is substantiated, which would naturally preclude conversion for marriage. Rabbi Epstein wrote that the suspicion of insincerity only applies before the conversion; once the conversion is performed the principle of "???? ???? ?? – they are all converts" [see Yevamos 24b], takes effect. In addition, Rabbi Shlomo Kluger wrote that a conversion may be performed if there is a concern that the Jewish partner may otherwise become less religious. Accordingly, Rabbi Epstein permitted Rabbi Greenwald to perform the marriage [Teshuvah Shelemah, vol. 2 Even Ha-Ezer no. 10; see below].

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National Review Endorses Mitt Romney

From National Review:

Many conservatives are finding it difficult to pick a presidential candidate. Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything — all the traits, all the positions — we are looking for. Equally conservative analysts can reach, and have reached, different judgments in this matter. There are fine conservatives supporting each of these Republicans.

Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.

Uniting the conservative coalition is not enough to win a presidential election, but it is a prerequisite for building on that coalition. Rudolph Giuliani did extraordinary work as mayor of New York and was inspirational on 9/11. But he and Mike Huckabee would pull apart the coalition from opposite ends: Giuliani alienating the social conservatives, and Huckabee the economic (and foreign-policy) conservatives. A Republican party that abandoned either limited government or moral standards would be much diminished in the service it could give the country.

Two other major candidates would be able to keep the coalition together, but have drawbacks of their own. John McCain is not as conservative as Romney. He sponsored and still champions a campaign-finance law that impinged on fundamental rights of political speech; he voted against the Bush tax cuts; he supported this year’s amnesty bill, although he now says he understands the need to control the border before doing anything else.

Despite all that and more, he is a hero with a record that is far more good than bad. He has been a strong and farsighted supporter of the Iraq War, and, in a trying political season for him, he has preserved and even enhanced his reputation for dignity and seriousness. There would be worse nominees for the GOP (see above). But McCain ran an ineffectual campaign for most of the year and is still paying for it.

Fred Thompson is as conservative as Romney, and has distinguished himself with serious proposals on Social Security, immigration, and defense. But Thompson has never run any large enterprise — and he has not run his campaign well, either. Conservatives were excited this spring to hear that he might enter the race, but have been disappointed by the reality. He has been fading in crucial early states. He has not yet passed the threshold test of establishing for voters that he truly wants to be president.

Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill. He has demonstrated it in everything he has done in his professional life, and his tightly organized, disciplined campaign is no exception. He himself has shown impressive focus and energy.

It is true that he has less foreign-policy experience than Thompson and (especially) McCain, but he has more executive experience than both. Since almost all of the candidates have the same foreign-policy principles, what matters most is which candidate has the skills to execute that vision.

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