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Seven out of the top ten non-profits not only stayed in the top ten but increased their share of the market during the decade. So much for competition! And according to Jed Emerson and Paul Carrtar, only 6% of non-profits accounted for four fifths of all revenues in the sector.

LESS than one cent in every dollar raised by an Australian charity has gone to its intended cause in its first two financial years, documents show.
The Adelaide-based National Cancer Research Foundation last year picked up $387,864 in donations but gave just $4900 away, according to its audited profit and loss statements.
The year before, it raised almost $197,160, giving away only $935.
So far this financial year, one of the foundation's directors says the charity has passed on almost $30,000, but yesterday could not say how much had been raised.
Most of the money raised in the past two financial years went on commissions, management fees, travelling expenses and drivers.
The foundation's director, Neil Menzies, blamed the start-up costs of a charity.

NEARLY $537 million in tsunami aid for Sri Lanka is unaccounted for and over $686 million has been spent on projects unrelated to the disaster, an anti-corruption watchdog says.
Berlin-based Transparency International has demanded an audit of the money received by the Sri Lankan government to help victims of the Asian tsunami which hit the island on December 26, 2004, killing 31,000 people.

The results are striking. Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending. …
They report that “both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending. This effect is difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.”

notebuyer

A total of 56,399 contracts and grants totaling $157,028,362,536 were awarded in this first quarter for which Recovery.gov reports are available. The number of jobs claimed as created or saved is 638,826.54—an average of $245,807.51 per job.

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The journal chronicles van den Bogaert’s journey through the Mohawk Valley to Oneida, a pathbreaking trip in the winter of 1634.
Years later, van den Bogaert was made commander of Fort Orange, site of present-day Albany, but fled back into Indian country after his fellow colonists discovered he was gay. Van den Bogaert was pursued by the Dutch, captured and brought back, but he escaped when a sheet of floating ice damaged the fort. He drowned in the Hudson before he got very far.

The government I serve and speak for on certain issues cannot and will not in any way criminalize homosexuality; sexual orientation is a private matter and each individual has his or her own orientation - - this is not a State matter at all.

It was a reminder that laws preventing gay marriage don’t just discriminate against gay people. These laws also discriminate against their friends and families, all the straight people who have a stake in gay lives going as well as possible.

All men and all women have a right to marry, provided they wish to marry members of the opposite sex to whom they are not closely related by blood. Heterosexuals, like homosexuals, are prohibited from marrying people of their own sex. It is no more valid to allege wrongful discrimination in this context against gays than to argue that cycle lanes “discriminate” wrongfully against wheelbarrows.

The few countries and states where gay marriage is legal had to redefine marriage to do so. This new definition does not require the two halves of humanity, as had been the case in all diverse cultures throughout time - regardless of religion, law, or culture. …
Marriage is about the fundamental essence of humanity. Are male and female only needed in marriage and family if either is desired by the adults? This would seem to make the mystery and essence of your femininity and my masculinity pretty thin in human experience. It also changes the nature of parentage. …
Same-sex marriage prohibits us from saying there is anything uniquely special about a child being raised by her mother and father! Both become merely ornamental. …
At its core, same-sex marriage is not really marriage at all, but a deconstruction of our historic and universal understanding that humanity is one nature embodied in two mysteriously powerful forms - male and female - and that the family and every human child need what both provide.

According to Stanton same-sex parenting and parenting by other people than the biological parents are less than fully human.

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Since our world is currently under the iron grip of a consortium that includes 4chan and The Onion’s editorial board, the Nobel Peace Prize was just accepted by a man currently escalating a land war in Asia.

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag.

What we’re seeing is the natural sentiment of people who think of themselves as quintessentially American looking at an American popular and public culture that presents them as marginal.

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Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s.

This positive feedback loop was a bad news surprise that our climate models did not predict. Now we have evidence of a good news surprise that no model predicted--a negative feedback loop that acts to keep the southeast portion of Greenland's Ice Sheet from runaway glacial acceleration. We can expect many more surprises--good and bad--over the coming decades, as our climate responds to the huge shove human activities are giving it.

Tempers flared during an all-night plenary session, held after most of 120 visiting world leaders had left.
Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the draft text asked “Africa to sign a suicide pact”.
One Saudi delegate said it was without doubt “the worst plenary I have ever attended.”

But as the email story unfolds over the years, it is clear that the history of climate and temperature change over the past 10,000 years remains mostly speculative and largely unknown. The emails also imply that, in part because the past is so unknown, any attempt at long-range forecasts is, at best, uncertain.
Also clear is that the official science on climate change as we know it today, looking backward and forward, has been developed and controlled by the relatively small collection of scientists who wrote most of the emails. Working directly or indirectly for the IPCC, the scientists seem to have become captive of that organization’s objectives, which was to find “the hand of man” in climate records to justify plans to change the climate in future. The scientists, in other words, became engaged in the all-too-familiar business of decision-based evidence making. …
If the emails show anything on the climate scenarios, it is that the 100-year science projections never really got settled. They were a product of climate and economic models that remained problematic all through the 13 -year email record. Equally uncertain were the attempts to reconstruct paleoclimate records going back 1,000 years.

If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout. …
Over the next 10 years, the emails become a zone of internal conflict and external battles to suppress criticism, ridicule critics and resist all outside interference with the official science story they had assembled: The late 20th century was the warmest in history, and the next 100 years could be a climate nightmare.
The Mann technique of aggressive intervention in the peer-review process over Mr. Briffa’s work sets the tone for what would become a major strategy as all the scientists within the IPCC loop waged war on any science and papers that contravened or questioned the official view. …
The emails reinforce the worst of suspicions that the official scientific community did all they could to smear Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick, prevent publication of the work of skeptics, manipulate the peer-review process and isolate all skeptics as cranks. …
Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

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The scale and extremism of the literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims, by contrast, are traditional. We need to work with them to fight against liberal cultural imperialism in their countries. I wouldn't wish the humiliation of gay marriage on my worst enemy.

A few examples: When Our Lady of the Rosary, Qatar's first-ever church, opened last year, it did so minus cross, bell, dome, steeple, or signboard. Rosary's priest, Father Tom Veneracion, explained their absence: "The idea is to be discreet because we don't want to inflame any sensitivities." And when the Christians of a town in upper Egypt, Nazlet al-Badraman, finally after four years of "laborious negotiation, pleading and grappling with the authorities", won permission in October to restore a tottering tower at the Mar-Girgis Church, a mob of about 200 Muslims attacked them, throwing stones and shouting Islamic and sectarian slogans. The situation for Copts is so bad, they have reverted to building secret churches.

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My husband and the two friends with whom I went to see “An Education” did not initially recognize the stereotypes in the film. They had never experienced anti-Semitism; they had never felt like strangers in an inhospitable culture. They had never seen a Nazi propaganda film. The wandering Jew was unfamiliar to them — and perhaps meaningless in America, a land of immigrants, pioneers and vagabonds.
On the other hand, my close friend, Julia Ribak, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, found the movie deeply disturbing. Her mother had often described the hateful images of Jews that resulted in Auschwitz. “The movie is a magnificent and nasty creation of propaganda,” Julia e-mailed me. “The writer managed to include everything ... everything that would make the viewer of the film walk away hating Jews!”

When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them. …
People who have in the past applauded whistleblowers in business, in the military, or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data — and deliberate cover-ups of all this — in the global warming establishment.

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We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.
However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.

Some fear that if the situation continues, a gradual process of attrition will mean that in a few years' time people will feel too nervous about what they are and are not allowed to do, and that they will stop taking photographs of public buildings altogether.
'There is a danger to journalism,' says the British Press Photographers Association's Jeff Moore, 'because this is impeding the way we can report. And what about our pictorial history?
'When we think of the past, we think of iconic images, like the one taken by Bert Hardy of two women sitting on railings on the seafront with their skirts blowing around their waist. But if things go on, we run the risk that the visual history of our country will not be recorded.
'We won't have anything like that in future. It will only be recorded by the state, through police pictures, or security firms, through CCTV cameras.'
Then Big Brother really will have triumphed.

As a group, they feel furious at not being able to speak their minds.
They see the lack of debate and the damning of dissenters as racists or Little Englanders as deeply upsetting affronts to freedom of speech.

Traveling from the eastern edge of the European Union into Ukraine is educational, to say the least. Romania, Hungary, Poland, and other formerly Eastern bloc countries have largely recovered from communism, but much of Ukraine outside Kiev is still ruined. It still hasn't fully recovered from Soviet collectivization, the genocidal terror-famine, the Stalinist purges, and dekulakization. Kiev is a magnificent city and Crimea is a jewel, but large parts of the countryside feel haunted and doomed.

Germany spent more than 30 times as much collecting taxes on coffee beans ordered online from abroad than it received in the tax revenues, the accounting office said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate country, it would be tied with Germany as the world's third largest economy. It would also be larger than the entire economies of India and Russia combined.

The trouble signs surrounding Lend America had been building for years. A top executive was convicted of mortgage fraud but still helped run the company. Home loans made by its headquarters were defaulting at an extremely high rate. Federal prosecutors alleged in a civil suit that the company falsified loan documents and committed fraud.
Yet despite these red flags, a little-known federal agency continued giving its blessing to Lend America, allowing it to do business in the name of the U.S. government.

… policy changes also have unpredictable, unintended consequences. For example, policymakers never intended the War on Drugs to lead to a many-fold increase in the THC potency of marijuana, but that’s exactly what has happened. …
Over decades of research and dozens of studies, not one time did researchers find that limiting government reduces people’s income. This evidence is very strong. …
The evidence is very clear. States with the smallest growth in government experienced the best growth in desirable attributes. States with the largest growth in government experienced the worst growth in desirable attributes. States with middling growth in government experience middling growth in the desirable characteristics of societies.

Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.
It's time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year's city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short. …
This is a union town. You can't reform the city charter without winning an election; winning an election requires union support; and unions — almost by definition — don't want major reform. It would be a paradox — but that would contravene a number of union bylaws.
You can't get San Francisco running efficiently, because that would require large numbers of unionized city workers to willingly admit their redundancy and wastefulness. Inefficiency pays their salaries.

… land just inside Auckland’s MUL, or growth limits, was valued at approximately 10 times land that is just outside the boundary.

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