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From the Independent:

A six-year-old boy whose book will be published in the UK later this month has staked a claim as the world’s youngest author.

Yes, this is what I alluded to last month.

The Apostle Paul wrote about men such as this. Forget the rotting corpse of the Episcopalians, between Haggard’s homo-adventurism and Warren’s apparent dedication to the New World Order, it may be approaching time for Christians to abandon the Evangelical church as well:

I really didn’t expect to hear back from Warren – but, a few minutes later, I did, with an absolutely stunning retort.

He let me know he is a close friend of President Bush ”and many, if not most, of the generals at the Pentagon.”

He also told me he did not tape anything while in Syria, ”because it was a courtesy call, like I do in every country.”

Warren explained that he had also counseled with the National Security Council and the White House, as well as the State Department, before his little courtesy call for a neighbor.

”In fact,” Warren added, ”as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Oxford Analytica, I might know as much about the Middle East as you.”

Attending a church led by a man affiliated with the CFR is like investing in Enron stock, it’s a Bad Idea Jeans commercial. I have always been suspicious that there was something sketchy about Warren, the fact that he’s a One Worlder and a proud member of the power elite is a pretty powerful indication that he’s one of the long-toothed creatures that Paul warned Christians about.

I know I was shocked to discover that people who talk incessantly about how much they care about the less fortunate don’t actually do much about it. Well, at least not with their own time and money:

The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income.

In the book, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives — from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services — make conservatives more generous than liberals…. liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.

This is hardly news to anyone who actually knows both liberals and conservatives. I know precisely one liberal family who has opened their home to people in need of short-term shelter, (and they’re practicing Jews), whereas the majority of the callous, insensitive right-wingers that I know have had at least one couple unrelated to them living in their house for an extended period of time for one reason or another.

The unfeeling bastards.

Feministe is upset by the latest rap feud, which threatens to make the Tupac-Biggie, East Coast-West Coast conflict look like the Honduran Football War compared to World War II:

Everyone loves privileged Ivy-league kids rapping about how much better their top-three university is than another top-three university. Especially when they throw in lines about how they rape Harvard women, among other pleasant images of slitting throats and packing gats. Classy, fellas. You do your school proud.

Notably, this seems to be a pattern among these fine young gentlemen. What’s with this week and waste-of-space college kids trying to out-do each other on the misogyny front?

Well, considering that no one on the planet has had more feminist propaganda shoved down their throats than the current generation of Ivy League students, Newton’s Third Law suggests that their attitudes will likely make Dr. Dre and Eazy E look downright progressive.

But who would want to rape a Harvard woman? They’re a smart, but homely lot indeed.

Corsi and Smith argue that the deep abiotic theory of oil is a more reliable theory than the fossil fuel theory. It rejects the contention that oil was formed from the remains of plant and animal life that died millions of years ago. Instead, they believe in Thomas Gold’s argument that oil is abiotic: “a primordial material that the earth forms and exudes on a continual basis” and is “pushed upward toward the earth’s surface by the intense pressures of the earth’s core and the influence of the centrifugal force that the earth exerted upon the specific gravity of oil as a fluid substance.”

Even as a child, I never understood how oil was supposed to be produced by squishing plants and animals. If that were the case, then a) why is it so much more common than fossil material and b) why is oil in Venezuala pretty much the same stuff as oil in Saudi Arabia? And why can’t we just squash some ferns and lizards if we need to make more?

My dad once deeply upset a biologist with whom he was talking one day when he pointed out that the calcium in milk couldn’t possibly come from the cow’s bones; because he grew up on a dairy farm, he knew the amount of calcium in the milk produced over a cow’s lifetime exceeds the amount contained in its skeleton.

It’s interesting how arrogant scientists can be despite the fact that so much of our understanding of how the world works is based on their reasonable conjectures, never mind how much past reasonable conjecture is now known to be wrong. This bit in “The Selfish Gene” made me laugh out loud:

At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator…. Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines….

For simplicity I have given the impression that modern genes, made of DNA, are much the same as the first replicators in the primeval soup. It does not matter for the argument, but this may not really be true. The original replicators may have been a related kind of molecule to DNA, or they may have been totally different. In the latter case we might say that their survival machines must have been seized at a later stage by DNA. If so, the original replicators were utterly destroyed, for no trace of them remains in modern survival machines.

As I have previously noted, much “science” is increasingly less concerned with empirical evidence and rather more devoted to ontological speculation. Now, there’s nothing wrong with such speculation and certainly it’s possible for it to somehow advance human knowledge. But to call it science is a misnomer; Richard Dawkins openly admits here that he has no more evidence for his hypothetical founding “Replicator” than he has for God. In this particular example, he is writing as a sciencist, not a scientist.

But don’t let that vital distinction slow you down when you’re criticizing those ignorant of the latest developments in scientific ontology… or should I say… scientology?

This vicious anti-semite is less than enthusiastic about a record number of Jews in American government:

Statistics about the election have been cascading down upon us like a heavy Pacific Northwest rainstorm. However, one astounding fact about the 110th Congress has been studiously avoided. Never before in American history have so many congressmen and senators been Jewish. At least 13 United States senators are Jewish as are more than 30 House members. In addition, many powerful committee chairmanships are to be held by Jews.

Nearly 10 percent of the seats in the United States Congress are to be held by Jews, whose numbers in the population at large are barely over 2 percent – yet few consider this worthy of mention. That is strange. What could account for such reticence?

Oh, wait, he’s a rabbi…. My take on this is that if a small minority wishes to get along with a much larger majority, history suggests it is counterproductive to pursue a disproportionate amount of political power. I mean, it doesn’t matter how politely and professionally you go about your business, at a certain point people are going to notice something is wildly askew; to give a tangential example, if you only watch television, you’d think that there were more Jews than Hispanics, Asians and evangelical Christians combined living in America. This is not exactly the case.

(Of course, to be fair, you’d also think that the only occupations in America are policeman, lawyer, FBI agent, fireman, doctor, nurse and stripper.)

The problem is that beyond a certain point, the innocuous explanations for the situation begin to become increasingly problematic. If Congress feels it has no choice but to act when there are two percent more male athletes than female athletes participating in varsity sports at a university, then how can it possibly sit by complacently when there are 500 percent more Jewish congressmen and senators than there “should” be?

America is not anti-semitic. But as Rabbi Lapin demonstrates, one does not have to be to wonder about these statistical anomalies either.

The Evangelical Outpost lists seven reasons why Rudolph Giuliani can’t win the Republican nomination:

Rudy is pro-choice — Since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 there have been 29 Republican candidates over eight Presidential elections. Only three candidates (Arlen Specter, Morry Taylor, Pete Wilson – all in 1996) were pro-choice. None of them won a single primary.

Rudy is anti-gun – In June 2000, the Giuliani Administration was “pleased to announce” that they were suing 26 gun manufacturers because the companies were “Deliberately undermining New York City’s gun control laws by flooding other markets which have less stringent gun laws with firearms that the manufacturers know are destined to be illegally resold in New York City…” The mayor’s police commissioner, Howard Safir, even proposed a nationwide plan for gun licensing, complete with yearly “safety” inspections. Kiss those NRA voters goodbye, Rudy.

I agree with EO that anyone pushing Giuliani as a genuine contender simply isn’t worth taking seriously. While the Clinton camp would love to go up against Rudy, I suspect Pataki is more likely to be selected for the role of sacrificial lamb.

Episcopalians continue to abandon the rotting corpse of their former denomination:

The vestry — or governing board — of Truro Episcopal Church, an 18th-century church in downtown Fairfax, voted unanimously Saturday to depart from the 2.2-million-member Episcopal Church over questions of biblical authority and the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, an active homosexual.

Monday night, the vestry of the Falls Church, an equally historic Virginia congregation in the city of Falls Church, voted 15-2, with one abstention, to leave the Episcopal Church, a denomination it has called home for more than 200 years.

Once a Christian church accepts the anti-Biblical concept of female leadership, it begins its death spiral. First the women, then the gays. This is a reliable pattern, with the exception of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, which seems to have reversed the usual order. In fact, it was the breezy acceptance of female pastors that always concerned me about Woodland Hills, thus I was not terribly surprised to see that particular church, for which I still harbor great affection, begin to see a not-insignificant exodus about two years ago.

It will be interesting to see if the same holds true of the United States once Hillary and Nancy are running the show together.

By their fruit, you will know them.

UPDATE: on a related note, the Archbishop of Canterbury considers reconsidering:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has reopened the debate on women priests by suggesting that the Anglican Church may one day “think again” about the issue.

Speaking a week before his first official audience with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome, Dr Williams made clear that he remained a firm supporter of women’s ordination and that “practically” he did not see how the Church’s position could be reversed.

But in an interview with The Catholic Herald published today, he said he could “just about envisage a situation in which, over a very long period, the Anglican Church thought about it again, but I would need to see what the theological reason for that would be”….

Traditionalists said that Dr Williams’s measured assessment of the reform was in contrast to the enthusiastic claims of its advocates, who had predicted that it would trigger a major revival in the Church.

I see two obvious reasons, one theological, the other practical. As to the first, the Bible is quite clear on what manner of individual is to be in positions of authority in the church. As to the second, you don’t need priests of any kind once the entire congregation has departed.

But if by “major revival”, advocates of female ordination meant “slow death”, one would find it hard to argue with their assertion.

Adam is rightly unimpressed by ESPN’s latest effort in gender equity:

ESPN.com is obviously obligated to hire women for…some inexplicable reason. Yet, given the ridiculously self-centered, useless columnists they’ve used before, they wouldn’t possibly get another one who seems to think she’s more interesting than her subject matter, right?

Given how fast the last one disappeared, you wouldn’t think so. But now they’ve found the new Ralph Wiley, only female, uninterested in sports and without any discernible literary talent:

Me on Me
In her debut column for Page 2, Jemele Hill conducts a hard-hitting one-on-one interview with… herself.

You can’t parody this, even the most cynical mind can’t keep up with the reality. Unless a woman has posed in Maxim, wears a cowboy hat and truly madly deeply loves football, she has no business writing anything that appears on a sports page.

By the power and the glory:

THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 15, 2006, as America Recycles Day.

And don’t forget, WE ARE AT WAR! I’m just so grateful we have W. to protect us, keep us safe and wipe our widdle tushies.