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It's the Demography, Stupid
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Colorado Beekeeper
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It's the Demography, Stupid
January 11, 2006, 08:48:02 PM »
It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."
As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree."
That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn't big enough to get you to give anything back. That's what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's dying--its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30 years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species. . . . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct . . ."
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked: "As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today--Australia, India, South Africa--and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People's Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a bleep: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.
Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.
Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for The New Criterion, in whose January issue this article appears.
what do you all think of that?
:?: :?:
Kenneth Lowry
Field Bee
Posts: 560
Re: It's the Demography, Stupid
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January 12, 2006, 12:33:44 AM »
Quote from: Colorado Beekeeper
what do you all think of that?
:?: :?:
I'm amused at the number of different types of bigotry that can be fitted into one article.
So Steyn predicts the demise of Europe by 2032. What about tomorrow? Here's a more factually grounded prediction for 2006:
2006: The Year of Oil Collapse?
By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted January 11, 2006.
The sheer weight and inertia of American life kept our systems on their feet through 2005, despite a worsening economic climate and some harsh body blows, like the hurricanes that pounded oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. In a way, some perverse law of sociopolitical physics seemed to concentrate all the year's destructive potential in the devastation of New Orleans, Biloxi and other Gulf Coast towns -- while the mighty din of motoring and cheeseburger sales roared on elsewhere without pause from Cape Cod to Catalina.
First, a little background briefing on where we are at -- to use some of the bad grammar now normative in American life -- before I make predictions (i.e., guesses) about the year ahead.
You can only introduce so much perversity into an economic system before distortions cripple it. From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit -- incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 percent to 20 percent a year, forever. It became a reckless racket, all predicated on sustaining an economy that had lost its other means for generating wealth -- foremost its infrastructure for making things besides suburban houses.
This housing bubble economy represented, holistically speaking, the wish to maintain a sense of normality in American life under conditions of disintegrating normality, and it is no symbolic accident that it centered on the images of hearth and home, because fundamental comforts were what many Americans actually stand to lose in a reality-based future. The decay of standards and norms in banking behavior applied to housing started, as in the case of the proverbial rotting dead fish, at the head, the Federal Reserve, and infected every lowly loan officer through the body until, in effect, lending standards ceased to exist.
The suburban housing bubble and its related activities were predicated on the idea that we could continue building out a living arrangement dependent on cheap oil and methane gas, and that all the subdivisions and strip malls would retain value for decades to come. Of course, this was the central delusion of the suburban sprawl economy, because it was obvious to anyone who gave the situation more than a cursory glance that cheap oil and gas were the things we were least likely to have in the decades to come.
This reality had begun to penetrate the American collective consciousness and will be represented in 2006 by millions of individual choices to not buy a new suburban house, either because the individuals fear the expense of long commutes, or they fear the cost of heating a 4,000-square-foot house occupied by only a few people (or both). As the inventory of unsold new houses mounts up, the prices of all houses, new and old, will start to go down. There will be enormous psychological resistance to this reality, expressed in a lag of correct pricing, as the owners of these value-shedding "investments" wait for the bubble behavior (anticipated 10 percent to 20 percent asset appreciation) to return. Eventually they will get the picture.
The velocity of change in the housing bubble (and the psychology involved) will be greatly affected by oil and gas prices. It seemed to many of us watching the energy markets that the world may indeed have passed through its all-time oil production peak in 2005. Production in 2005 was nearly flat over 2004. The world was producing and also using roughly 82 million barrels of oil a day. Oil coming into new production was not making up for signs of depletion showing among virtually all the world's major producers. Iran, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, the North Sea and, of course, the United States, were all past peak.
The big mystery was Saudi Arabia, but its inability to boost production from the 50-year-old fields that comprised its main reserves suggested that it was topping out, too. Which left an energy-hungry world with the need to either (a) make other arrangements for powering industrial economies or (b) contest for control of the remaining oil reserves, which were substantially concentrated in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Here, I hasten to remind the reader that peak is peak, meaning right now we are all operating on the basis of a lot of oil flowing around the world. The comfort level is still high. The factories are still humming in China, and the six-lane commuting corridors are still full of big cars around Atlanta, Dallas, Denver and Minneapolis. The problem is that the oil supply will soon steadily diminish at a rate of at least 3 percent a year, and that necking down of supply is likely to be expressed in greater geopolitical friction and turmoil between the great nations who crave oil.
The United States entered into the military phase of this turbulence before any other nation. We used our superpower status to set up a centrally located Middle East garrison in Iraq, under the idealistic cover story that we were removing a dangerous head-of-state and helping to set up a model democracy that would invite us to stick around the vicinity indefinitely and thus retain some control over the deportment of other oil-rich states in the region.
The foregoing is the background of my predictions for 2006, which will be the year that the hardships and difficulties I lump together as "The Long Emergency" get some serious traction.
The world's oil-allocation system is now so fragile that any disturbance in one producing region can send damaging shock waves around the planet. There is no more "swing producer." The United States squeaked through the huge loss of oil production capacity this fall by taking oil from our own strategic petroleum reserves and from Europe's. These actions kept oil prices in the high $50 range through the holidays, giving Americans a false sense of festive security. Those withdrawals are now over. Global demand for oil is still increasing. The strategic reserves will now have to be refilled (they're called strategic reserves for a reason). This will start oil prices moving upward again -- they already have moved above $61 as of Jan. 2.
I can't predict whether some maniac will drive a Zodiac boat into a tanker in the straits of Hormuz or fire a shoulder-launched missile at an Arabian refinery. If nothing like that happens, the first year of post-peak will express itself in turbulent oil markets. Fear of not getting enough will rule. Futures will be overbought and then dumped or shorted, and then overbought again. This will at least increase the violence of the ratcheting effect in the markets. Overall, I expect to see $100-a-barrel oil at some point this year. Last year I made a bet with a friend that oil would end 2005 at $75. I lost the bet. But it is a fact that the price of oil altogether ended the year 40 percent higher than 2004, so it is not as if the markets did not show extraordinary stress.
New laws regulating gasoline mixtures will also contribute substantially to higher gasoline prices (perhaps as much as 40 cents a gallon). So I will predict gasoline breaking through the $4-a-gallon mark sometime this year.
Our natural gas situation is pretty dire. Prices shot up for a while above $17 (per one million BTUs), but that was the energy equivalent of $100-a-barrel oil and was based at the time on the enormous damage in the Gulf of Mexico prior to the start of the heating season. The heating season so far as been abnormally mild in the northern United States, and prices have slumped back to the $11 range -- which is still a lot higher than the $7 range in 2004. Unlike oil, we will get no quick relief from international gas sources if the rest of winter turns sharply colder. We're short of terminals to receive significant quantities of imported liquefied natural gas, and they cannot be built quickly (or cheaply). The natural gas markets in the United States respond very sharply to current conditions. A warm week and the prices sink. A cold one and the price shoots up. Our gas storage for the year is slightly below 2004 levels. Even if we have a mild winter overall, there will be spikes of cold. Our production is still crippled in the Gulf. Therefore, I'll predict that methane gas prices will spike above $20 sometime before May.
High gasoline, heating oil and methane gas prices will absolutely kill the housing bubble for reasons I've already outlined. The production home builders will be idle, stuck with huge inventories in places that never should have been suburbanized in the first place. A lot of Americans holding "creative" mortgages -- no money down, interest only, adjustable rate, what-have-you -- will be crushed by the expense of their obligations. Many of them will go bankrupt under new bankruptcy laws that leave no wiggle room for escaping partial repayment. Their houses will flood the real estate markets in an orgy of distress selling. "Greater fools" will snap up these "bargains," failing to realize that many of the logistical liabilities will remain -- namely remote locations and huge heating costs of enormous McHouses -- even if the ownership terms are less hazardous than the previous owner's. At some point in the future, after several flippings perhaps, all those 4,000-square-foot houses 44 miles outside Denver (or Cleveland, or Seattle) will be seen as the mistakes that they are, and their cash value will reflect that.
With the cratering of the housing bubble, the U.S. economy has to fall on its ass. The global economy is likely to fall on its ass, too, since so much of it depends on the decisions of Americans to take out exotic loans for buying houses they can't afford. Large numbers of jobs will vanish in construction, remodeling, real estate sales, and the various mortgage rackets -- those things precisely related to the recent gains in GDP.
The sheer falloff in new mortgages will send a tsunami through financial markets addicted to continuous supplies of new "money" to preserve the illusion of expansion. I'd called for a Dow-4000 late in 2005. I think that was just an error in timing, and I still call for the Dow to sink into that range, or worse, in 2006. This will represent a moment of painful clarity for market professionals, as they realize that an industrial economy and the finance that serves it must be based on the expectation of generating real future wealth, not on zero-sum rackets, games of monetery musical chairs, or casino legerdemain. Hedge funds, which depend on predictable stability, will be especially vulnerable. They will certainly take some large banks down with them when they go. I'll call for the so-called government sponsored entities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to groan under and then drown in a sea of nonperforming loans, probably with overtones of criminal irresponsibility.
If these things occur, ugly things would happen to the dollar. I would predict an episode something short of hyperinflation -- say a rapid 30 percent drop in dollar value -- with a later deflation in the price of things like houses, paintings by Childe Hassam and many consumer goods. Which means that standards of living will fall across the board as incomes vanish with jobs, and food and energy prices rise -- while Americans try to shed their houses at the same time that consumer products sit unsold on the shelves of WalMart, Target and Best Buy. This will spell the beginning of the end for the chain store universe.
The commercial airline industry is already whirling around the drain. 2006 will send it decisively down that drain. Since we cannot do without aviation in a nation as large as the United States (with train service on the level with Bolivia), the government may have to take over the crippled air routes. If that happens, then service will certainly be greatly diminished. Fewer people will be flying under the circumstances, anyway, but there is no reason to believe that this will all occur smoothly. Among other things, huge pension obligations would remain to be worked out.
By similar reasoning, I see an excellent chance for General Motors and Ford to go out of business in 2006. Sales of their stupid SUVs were already tailing off in the second half of last year, and they are not positioned to offer much of anything else. Anyway, a middle class groaning under insupportable debt and bankruptcy is not likely to be assuming new time payments for exactly the kinds of vehicles they would be insane to depend on.
As America roils in economic pain, factory workers in China will be thrown out of work. They will be extremely angry off, and as their appeals go unappeased, they might start making political trouble in their country. That could easily stimulate Chinese leaders to divert their nation's attention with a compelling military project -- say some moves into the oil-rich former Soviet lands to China's west. Sooner or later, China eventually will go cuckoo from a shortage of fossil fuels. It only remains to be seen how this will express itself. So far it has only done so in terms of an aggressive outreach in oil contracts with producers like Venezuela and Canada. But those arrangements were based on a peaceful world and a peaceful China.
I have no idea what will happen with Iran. Their leader Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is clearly a maniac -- calling for Israel to be removed to Alaska, for instance. But here I invoke my allergy to conspiracy theories by saying I do not necessarily expect any U.S. or Israeli strikes against that country. One could argue that Iran could comfortably kick back and watch America get tortured by the insurgency next door in Iraq, and I think it will do just that through 2006. The nuclear card is wild, however, and anything could happen if they keep slapping it on the table.
Which brings us to the extremely sore subject of Iraq. I maintain that our reasons for being there have not changed one bit, namely to make sure that we don't lose access to Middle East oil in any shape or form. Now my stating that does not mean I think we will necessarily succeed. The creation of a constitution in Iraq and holding elections based on it amounted to an admirable stunt, but I tend to think this experiment will dissolve into sectarian violence and civil war, probably in 2006, no matter what else we do. I predict that circumstances will impel us to withdraw from the Iraqi cities, but that we will not give up large bases near the oil production areas of the north and south, and that we will continue to control the air space over Baghdad. Our position in that country would then devolve to a sort of Fort Apache situation. I imagine the vast emptiness of the desert combined with air cover will afford us some protection. But our presence there will only inspire more turmoil, hatred and jihad elsewhere.
King Abdullah seems to be in pretty good health, but he is going on 82. I predict that there will be fissures in the kingdom and continued confusion about its oil production capacity. But by the end of the year, it ought to be clear that they have not increased their output. Peak for Saudi Arabia may be the beginning of the end of the Saud kingdom -- since peak itself is highly destabilizing.
In Europe, we are beginning to see some of the first tectonic heavings over energy as Russia jerks poor Ukraine around on its natural gas shipments. England has managed to piss away all the former advantage of its North Sea oil bonanza, and it now faces a future of dependence on Russian gas, plus the bankruptcy of its remaining industrial base. France enters 2006 somewhat more energy self-sufficient, at least as far electricity is concerned, since 70 percent of it comes from nuclear reactors. The other nations of Europe are apt to get restive this year and may more actively join the worldwide contest for access to fossil fuels. At the same time, they will be struggling to contain large Muslim immigrant populations, and I would be surprised if there were fewer problems in 2006 than last year, with the riots in France and the London subway bombings. We tend to write off Europe as a region of sclerotic cafe layabouts, but for the time being, many of these nations can still mobilize potent military forces if they have to defend vital interests. Generally, I predict 2006 will see a shift in power to the big energy bear, Russia. It's industrial infrastructure is otherwise decrepit. Its armed forces are bankrupt. But it has at least enough nuclear arms to blow up the world a few times over, so that, combined with its oil and gas assets, require us to take it very seriously.
Japan has nearly been forgotten. It now imports 95 percent of the fossil fuel it needs to run itself. God knows what they will do if geopolitical turmoil shuts down the shipping lanes that bring a steady stream of oil tankers to the islands. They are capable of mobilizing to defend their vital interests. We just haven't seen them do it since the 1940s. What role Japan will play in the Pacific remains a mystery, especially in relation to the growing power of China. Perhaps some of this oriental mystery will be revealed in 2006. Perhaps Japan will enter into some kind of Asian coprosperity sphere alliance. Japan's economy will otherwise be subject to the severe economic strains emanating out of America.
South America is going loco on us. It will probably never amount to a united front, but one by one, its nations will become more hostile to us, in the manner of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and the newly elected Evo Morales of Bolivia, a former coca farmer who aims not to allow America any more say in what crops his people can grow. Chavez can jerk America around on oil imports if he wants to, but probably not without risking his health and position. Mexico's economy is dependent on ours, only Mexico will suffer by another order of magnitude if the U.S. economy turns down in a big way. In 2006 I think we'll see the first signs of overt hostility between our two nations as the United States desperately tries to come to grips with the flow of illegal immigrants, and Mexico attempts to divert its suffering peoples' attention by making threats of incursion and reviving claims to lands along the border. We could see the first shots of what could turn into a huge ongoing border nuisance, perhaps even a quasi-war. Meanwhile, Mexico's premier oil field, Canterall, has entered depletion. Mexico depends on imports of natural gas from us, and under the rather insane terms of NAFTA, we in the United States depend on gas imports from Canada to make up for the stuff we have to sell to Mexico. Those relationships may be subject to review.
Karl Rove will probably join Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the indictment pen for the Valerie Plame incident. Tom DeLay is going to have a very ugly trial in Texas, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist may end up being prosecuted for stock sale irregularities. These shows may so successfully entertain the public -- and the cable news impresarios -- that we will fail to notice the rising predicament of oil and gas prices and the cratering of the suburban sprawl economy (just as Watergate -- a very satisfying melodrama for those of us who were young reporters in 1973-4 -- diverted the United States from the first throes of the oil crisis). All this activity will tend to degrade the standing of the Republican Party to "junk" status. But there is no sign that the Democrats offer an alternative world-view to the "non-negotiable American way of life."
Political circuses will not completely divert the middle class from its own suffering, as mortgages devour what is left of Americans' financial lives. But as they sink in fortune and hope, I predict we will see a turning of all the recent celebrity envy -- and the infotainment value spun off it -- into a vicious hatred of the rich and famous, and a new desire not to emulate them, but to punish them. Look out, Nicole Ritchie and the Donald Trump. The grandchildren of Ozzie and Harriet will be looking to eat you for dinner starting in 2006.
James Howard Kunstler is a regular contributor to Orion magazine, Mother Jones and the Atlantic Monthly, and is the author of "The Long Emergency" (Atlantic Monthly Press).
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It's the Demography, Stupid
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This is just me and I may get some flack for saying this, but at 11 months old there is no way I would tolerate biting my hands for no reason. I actually put a dead stop to biting like that by 6 months because I don't want my dogs getting into the habit of thinking that behavior is ok. As puppies, I redirect, but once the adult teeth come in, the game is over. Its disrespectful behavior and would result in a correction. If a firm NO doesn't work, he would most likely get a sharp collar correction. I'd leave a leash on him in the house while he's out and about so that I could correct when necessary.
Other than that, you might want to look into finidng a reputable behaviorist to take on that "kill mode" issue. Unless thats the kind of behavior that you want with strangers in the house.
Hopefully others will chime in. This is again, just my personal opinion. I don't let my dogs teeth on me just because they feel like it.
Handsome dog, btw
Almost 11 months and still biting
Hi all,
Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to reply. I have searched the forum and found very similar posts. Everyones situation is at least a little different so I thought I would post my own thread anyway.
My boy Kaiser, will be 11 months on the 22nd Jan. Wow that went quick.
He has completed basic obedience training (can sit, lay down, wait for food, shake etc.) Still working on his recall!
We exercise him regularly. We are lucky enough to have a big backyard, more than enough room to play fetch. I take him for 2 x walks a ay. He has plenty of dog toys laying around and plenty of suitable things to chew on.
The main issue we are still having is we cant seem to get him to stop biting us. Mainly on the hands. He does this without it being instigated by us in any way. We are constantly re-directing him to a toy or something else suitable to chew on. We also have got into the habit of separating him from us until he calms down (like a timeout). Quite often he will also begin snarling and snapping his teeth at us when he gets a bit to excited.
This kind of behavior is only occurring at home. When we are out of the house he is very well behaved and friendly with strangers. He is very territorial at home, so I guess this may have something to do with how he behaves there. For example if i invite someone he doesn't know into the home he will be in kill mode for a while until he settles down.
Any advice/help greatly appreciated.
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Posted by Richard Fichera on June 5, 2012
Earlier this week at its Discover customer event, HP announced a significant set of improvements to its already successful c-Class BladeSystem product line, which, despite continuing competitive pressure from IBM and the entry of Cisco into the market three years ago, still commands approximately 50% of the blade market. The significant components of this announcement fall into four major functional buckets – improved hardware, simplified and expanded storage features, new interconnects and I/O options, and serviceability enhancements. Among the highlights are:


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The Canisius College men's cross country team took 19th place and the women's entry finished 20th as both programs took part in the 38th annual Paul Short Run presented by Brooks Friday afternoon at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. In the men's race, freshman Chad Maloy placed 42nd on the wet course, while senior Christine Mulvihill took top honors among the Canisius women's team with her 38th place finish.
On the men's side, the Golden Griffins placed 19th in a field of 46 teams with 556 total points. Maloy, who has led the team in each of the squad's previous three events, finished the 8K course in 26:28, four second ahead of teammate Nate McCabe, who placed 45th with his time of 26:32. Junior Aaron Hoven crossed the line in 27:08 to rank 116th in the field of 382 runners, while sophomore Ricky Looby posted a time of 27:33 to place 165th. Iona won the race with 125 team points after placing two runners among the top five in the field.
Mulvihill finished first for the Griffs for the third time this season with her time of 23:06, which placed her 38th in the field. Senior teammate Jill Shea crossed the line moments later in 41st place after she ran the rain-soaked 6K track in 23:09. Senior Julie Dahlkemper placed 112th after posting a time of 24:03 and sophomore Mikelle Cala placed 159th with her time of 24:25. Iona won the race on the women's side as well with 125 team points thanks to placing four runners among the top-20 in the field of 386 participants.
Both cross country teams will return to action Oct. 15, when Canisius travels to the New York state capital to take part in the UAlbany Invitational. Action is set to begin at 10:30 a.m.


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Yes, they do make locking cases.
What are your circumstances at home/ A child? Just U?
I have a child on the way now, so I am training myself to not leave guns out anymore, but they are still all loaded. And, in the past, I've just kept all my guns loaded. If U have no kids - get a locking case or a small pistol safe, and leave it at that.
If U have a child, maybe get a strigger lock that will work on a semi auto. They do make some cable locks U can use too (most new guns come w/ them, but U can buy them as well - or get them free from your local Sheriff's Office usually).


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Just got back from deployment a couple months ago...called the base Natural Resource Office the other day to find out about this year's required hunting indoc class and to ask if there were any changes to the duck hunting rules. Well, there is no real point in going to the class anymore, unless you want to smoke some dog sized deer... No more waterfowling on Dam Neck because they have a bunch of new construction around the lakes there...sucks. Just wanted to pass that on to everyone in the VA military community.
Anyone know if Yorktown allows waterfowling? I'm way behind timeline in finding places to hunt for this year.


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Results 13 to 24 of 36
Thread: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
11-14-2013, 05:46 PM #13Regular 1st Stringer
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Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
11-14-2013, 07:16 PM #14Legendary RSR Poster
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Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Good one from his quote: Theyre my ___ ____ team. They're the Irsays.
When Steadman covered Indy's first game, Irsay burst into the press room slobbering and drooling at the mouth as usual and shocked the Indy media saying how does it feel to lose your team now. John replied something like how does it feel to be a dick.
Irsay blamed the media and specifically held Steadman and Phil Jackman
as culpable.
Ah, the young ones have no idea what we went thru.
Last edited by AirFlacco; 11-14-2013 at 09:01 PM.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Irsay landing in a helicopter on the field at the Gator Bowl while 50,000+ chanted, "we want the Colts!". That was late summer 1979 when the Orioles were in a pennant race. Irsay figured he could sneak down there and not be noticed. LOL!
Man, who doesn't remember that 2-3 year stretch where he dangled the team to Jacksonville, Memphis, Phoenix and finally Indy. And denied he had any intentions of moving the entire time.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Exactly. I have an old Baltimore Cardinals T-shirt when Bidwell came here to flirt with Bmore. Only a few were made before they were forced to stop production.
I remember that helicopter ride that landed and Irsay stood at mid-field with thousands cheering for him. What a douche. Ironically, years later JAX would get the expansion team over us and Schaeffer cried on national TV.
But even before that, Rosey went to Tampa for an exhibition and Bubba busted his knee running out of bounds and into the chains on the side line. He was never the same again. Ironically we were playing the Squeelers and Rick Volk intercepted a pass and Bubba turned into a blocker for him when the play went out of bounds.
Remember the old bumper stickers on cars saying don't Tampa with our Colts. Rosey had every intention of moving there but the comish wouldn't let him. Ironically, when they expanded Tamp got a team and Culverhous who was a power tax atty was the owner of the team. He set up the Rosey to Irsay deal. By trading the team, Rosey saved millions in capital gains taxes. JOe Thomas was the one who introduced Rosey to Irsay and he became Irsay's GM and had some pretty good drafts here after giving Shula all that talent in Miami.
When Culverhouse died, Petey tried to buy the Bucs and move them here. The son wanted to sell to Petey because he offered more money
but the mother wanted to keep the team there. Tags brought in Glazer to buy the team who was in the local hierarchy of Tampa's power structure. The estate's attys threatened to tie the son's inheritance up in court for years if he blocked the sale to Glazer. He caved in but can you see Angelos as the owner of the Os and football team? Uck.
It was worth waiting for Art and two Lombardi Trophies. JAX has none
and Tampa has 1.
Ironically, Glazer was one of the prospective owners for a franchise team here and wasn't good enough for Tags here but he was good enough in Tampa. Tags was down there making sure Petey wouldn't get the team.
Last edited by AirFlacco; 11-15-2013 at 12:00 AM.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
A lot of young people are saying that. My nephews love the oldies from the Beatles. Lincoln Park is nothing compared to them. Pink Floyd's THE WALL is one of the greatest albums ever made. It drove American teachers nuts when their students walked down the hallways singing, "we don't need no education. We're nothing but bricks in the wall."
The Beatles Abbey Road is their last recorded album produced amongst tensions in the group. Considered one of greatest ever made. Billy HOlliday was the queen of the blues and influenced the Stones and Beatles. Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly did too.
Dustin Huffman, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino are considered 3 of the greatest actors ever and are still making films. NIcholson has been nominated for 12 Oscars, most ever, and won two. He turned down Pacino's role as Michael Corleone in the Godfather. He thought Italians should play Italians and indians should play indians.
Last edited by AirFlacco; 11-15-2013 at 02:21 AM.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Famous Jack Nicholson lines from Five Easy Pieces:
Bobby: I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.
Waitress: A #2, chicken salad sand. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee. Anything else?
Bobby: Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.
Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
Bobby: I want you to hold it between your knees.
And this Nicholson quote from Cuckoo's Nest where he got Best Actor.
Nurse Pilbow: Don't get upset, Mr. McMurphy.
McMurphy: I'm not getting upset, Nurse Pilbow. I just don't want anyone to slip me salt peter!
Last edited by AirFlacco; 11-15-2013 at 02:13 AM.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Airflacco, Let it Be was their last recorded album. It had across the universe, let it be, get back, and dig a pony on it.
And The Wall, eh, I think that album is overrated. It's good, but nowhere near as good as some of Pink Floyd's other albums, particularly Dark Side of the moon and Atom Heart Mother. Definitely check out Atom Heart Mother. The song Alan's Psychadelic breakfast has some of the most beautiful, chirpiest acoustic guitar playing you'll hear.
If you like Pink Floyd, I'd check out the albums "Here Come the Warm Jets" and "Taking Tiger Mountain." Brian Eno, lots of his music reminds me of Ernest Hemingway. Some of the same dynamics are used to magnify emotion.
But really, you must listen to the "It's a beautiful day" album. The melodies are so complex, and there's like 6 fluctuating melodies in each song towards the end. It's a husband-wife singing duo, and they both have fucking incredible voices so full of emotion but they can be violent too. The guy might have as large a vocal range as David Bowie. Bowie had a 4 octave 11 semitone vocal range. He could actually hit both a lower AND higher note than Freddie Mercury. But this guy in "it's a beautiful day" hits a note so absurdly high, and it is NOT falsetto whatsoever. It sounds like a C6 to me, absurd. He adds some NATURAL vibrato to it, at it's peak, and then he holds the note for ten seconds while descending it down into his chest voice and going down to about a Bb2. How does that even happen? 25 seconds into the song "Wasted Union Blues."
Also check out the album Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. The title song starts with some angry jive Afro-fueled Dada poetry, mellows out for 30 seconds with a beautifully simple guitar arpeggio, and then goes into a 9 minute guitar solo, the best guitar solo I have ever heard. Eddie Hazel, the creater of the solo, improvised it when his fellow bandmate told him to "pretend that you just found out yo mama died, but then found out she was still alive."
Oh, and Scary Monsters (and super creeps), Low, Hunky Dory, Heroes, And Lodger are some of my favorites of Bowie. Listen to "Lady Grinning Soul" if you want to be blown away by piano playing, it sounds like something Liszt would compose. And if you want to be blown away by saxophone playing, listen to "Neuköln."
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Yup, I know all those Floyd songs also Lead Zepplein another great group. I sing AC/DC on Fri nights, Highway to Hell, Drink on Me and Back in Black. Chicks go nutz.
But Let It BE was last Beatles album released. Abbey Road was last recorded album. Both were great. I have original cover of their very first album I Want to Hold YOur Hand - same with Stones with a lot of blues mixed in with the rock n roll - Time is On My Side.
Stones and Zepplein influenced heavy metal and rock n roll was changed to just ROCK.
The Beatles SGT PEPPERS LONELY HEART CLUB BAND was another break thru album. A song entitled Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds was equated with LSD but John Lennon always denied it but McCartney said it was about drugs and so was Day Tripper which McCartney said everyone missed. Both songsters wrote it.
The KInks were another great group and their mega song Lola was changed because it had Coca Cola in it and the BBC wouldn't play songs with trade names in it.
Another mega hit by Van Morrison called Brown Eye Girl was originally called Brown
Skin Girl but radio stations banned it because it was about an interracial relationship.
I've been getting into Blues since I go into iTunes and don't like any of the new releases. Love North Mississippi Blues and BB King and Billie Holliday.
Last edited by AirFlacco; 11-15-2013 at 09:09 AM.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Pretty sure Jimmy was joking around with this tweet, but just in case he was the least bit serious here's an example of 'alternate realities syndrome" that he may have inherited from his drunk ass dad. ;)
I met a bar owner in the Catskills while watching the MNF game where Ed Reed strip sacked Mark Brunnel, recovered the fumble and ran it into the EZ. The bar owner had gone to college at Chapel Hill with Baltimore Colts RB Don McCauley who was a seriously clutch 3rd down receiver for the Colts. This guy was big, but he never played pro ball. Anyways, Don had his buddy up to Bmore a couple times to attend games in the early 80's. One game the Colts actually won and afterwards all the players were partying in Tio Pepe's, Don's buddy among them. All of a sudden Bob Irsay bursts in, drunk as a skunk, hugging every body and congratulating them on the win. Buffoon Bob comes up to Don's friend (who never played)and says "I'm 'sp-'specially p-p-proud of you! You h-had a great game man!" and slobbers all over him! McCauley winked and told his buddy to just go along with it. Then Irsay proclaims to the restaurant staff to put everbody's bill on his tab, and stumbles out the door. As soon as he was gone, everybody started ordering bottles of Dom Perignon and similar type booze to go and the staff gladly added them to Irsays bill! ;)
Now that Rex has snagged Ed I'm wondering if he's been drinking too lol!If you break the rules you can't make the rules.
- Remove Coach Tomlin from the NFL Competition committee.
Re: Drinking: An Irsay Tradition
Ahh well.. like you said, we got the better deal when Art followed up the Glazer move by bringing us a team.


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Natural-Gas Boom's Flip Side
Abundance Aids Consumers and Industry, but Some Energy-Rich States Feel Tax Hit
BUCKHANNON, W.Va.— The boom in U.S. natural-gas production has driven economic growth across much of the country, but not everyone is a winner, including this rural town in Appalachia, rich in natural gas and coal.
A glut of natural gas has pushed prices lower for both gas and coal, which compete to supply electricity. This has lowered energy costs for homes and businesses, given a crucial competitive advantage to manufacturers that...


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The architect of a controversial state-level guest worker law took a first step on Friday to delay its scheduled July 1 effective date, hoping to give Congress more time to address illegal immigration instead.
Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, sought and received permission from the Senate Friday to create a bill file to delay the effective date of HB116 passed in 2010. He had to request that permission which was given unanimously because the normal bill submission deadline was Feb. 7.
"I suspect it will delay the effect date by two years," Bramble said later.
"The rationale for that is this Congress has convened for a two-year period. They are the ones who are saying they are finally ready to do something" about illegal immigration, Bramble said. "We'll give them a chance to do something, reserving the right to push it to the state level if we need to."
HB116 would require illegal immigrants in Utah to submit to background checks, pay a fine and develop some proficiency in English to obtain a permit to live and work here.
The law was so controversial that it was targeted by a Utah Republican Party resolution that sought its repeal, arguing it offered amnesty to people here illegally. That resolution passed at the state GOP convention in 2011.


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|Topic Review (Newest First)
Originally Posted by Courtney View Post
Try to get the poop picked up so he doesn't even have the opportunity to get to it. Are you putting tobacco sauce on his poop in the yard? That alone should help alot.
While my boy had firm poop when he was fed kibble when I switched to raw his poop was smaller and he really only poops once a day. Not sure if raw is an option for you.
Yes, I poured tabasco sauce ALL over his poop in the yard and he went crazy, licking the tabasco sauce. I then picked the poop up but he continued to lick the remains of the tobasco for 2 more days (it had absorbed into the snow).
Raw would probably be an ok option for us (have extra fridge/freezer) but we do both travel a lot, for business and otherwise and the dog will stay with either my parents or my in-laws during those times. They both have dogs and love Hans. I just don't think it's realistic to expect them to feed raw then, especially my MIL who won't even come near wet food as she finds it disgusting to look at/smell. So I wouldn't want to leave for 4 days or a week or 10 days at a time and then have to all of a sudden change his diet.
Try to get the poop picked up so he doesn't even have the opportunity to get to it. Are you putting tobacco sauce on his poop in the yard? That alone should help alot.
While my boy had firm poop when he was fed kibble when I switched to raw his poop was smaller and he really only poops once a day. Not sure if raw is an option for you.
|For a puppy in my opinion yes! Grain free helped my dogs as less waste in food, but my pup still poops 3-4 times a day like clock work. after breakfast, after snack time, after exercise and after final feeding. My two older ones still go 2-3 times a day. There is a supplement you can give to discourage eating poo but I would just teach the "leave it" command to your pup.
Puppy poop - can you reduce #/amount?
Hans is just over 12 weeks old and something like 23 lbs.
Apart from the stress diarrhea he got on the day we picked him up, I've never had a dog who had such consistently great poops. Always perfectly shaped logs, always on schedule, even with food/treat variation, and even with eating some marrow from a beef knuckle bone. Just amazing.
But he poops A LOT. 4 times per day and the poops are MASSIVE. Again, always perfect, never loose stools, never constipated. He eats Royal Canin for GSD puppies (I will switch him to grain free as this bag whittles down, I just didn't want to make a switch immediately after getting him from the breeder) + 1.5 tbsp top up of Wilderness CORE wet food. I've also tried the regular Wellness wet food and the grain-free Blue Wilderness for puppy and his stools were always the same. He eats approximately 2.5 cups of dry kibble and 3-4 tbsp wet food in total per day.
If I switched him to grain free, would he poop less? The reason I mind is that he is also intent on licking his own poop/playing with it. It's very frustrating and we've tried everything (hot pepper sauce, tabasco - he loves to eat both) and bitter apple (this does work pretty well but you need to have the bottle with you). Basically we have a dog walker come in 2x per day while we are at work because I am worried that he'll poop in his ex pen/crate otherwise and eat it (gross). I would have much less concern if he was pooping 2x or even 3x per day.
Any thoughts? Is 4x per day normal?
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How to use WebEx Meetings
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OH you guys crack me up, I always enjoy reading your Aussie lingo. Can I join the group even if not from downunder. /quote]Hi Nette and Toyota. You fellas can come along for the ride but ya have to be able to say Sinny like a dinki di lifesaver from Manly and know where Brissy is on the map. If you can do that without practice then we might make you a synthetic and you can try out your version of Strine on us.Lone, Isn't Toyota such a great name, much better than Ford or GMH .. almost as real as the bulldust along the TrackMick
Isn't Toyota such a great name


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Virtual Paintout comes to Summit County
January 12, 2012
Bill Guffey paints landscapes and locales all over the world, but he hasn't necessarily been to many of them. And he's created a community of artists who do the same.
For the past 36 months, Guffey and his virtual community have traveled together, painting pieces based on views they spy through Google Street View. He calls his project Virtual Paintout, and with it, he's amassed hundreds of images from Amsterdam and Barcelona to the Canary Islands, Cape Town, Cote d'Azur and Czech Republic, to Florence, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Romania and Norway.
This month, he's settled in Summit County, and as of Wednesday, 20 artists have shared their paintings on his Facebook page. People like Suzanne Queen submitted trees viewed from Keystone's ski lift as a watercolor, L.J. Change painted 164 County Road 1041 with pastels, and Ehren Snyder posted Giberson Bay as an acrylic. Guffey expects 60-80 submissions this month.
To participate, artists must use a view found through Google Street View as the reference for their painting or drawing; they can't use photographs or paint on site.
"The whole point is for the artist to treat this project as they would a real life plein air paintout where they walk the streets of a community, choose a subject and create their artwork," Guffey said.
Through Google Street View, artists search for a good composition to paint or draw, then send Guffey a photo of their completed piece, which he posts on his blog and on Facebook.
Guffey is a self-taught artist who works mainly in oils. He grew up and now resides in Kentucky, but he lived in Breckenridge from 1985-95, where he worked various jobs, including bartending and a seven-year stint at City Market. He was one of the artists in residence in April 2011 at the Tin Shop, where he completed a series of plein air paintings in Breckenridge, and he returns to the Tin Shop in June.
He made a name for himself worldwide by inviting people to use Google Maps with Street View to "meet him" at the same location, virtually take a 360-degree look at the place, and paint or draw their renditions. Major British newspapers, PBS Television, ABC News, "American This Morning" and many others have covered him.
"Bill's use of Street View, to inspire his paintings and to create a virtual community of artists, is a remarkable example that we hadn't imagined but are really excited to see," noted Google Street View product manager Stephen Chau on Guffey's website.


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Nashua, N.H. • Racing to get their last-minute messages across before campaigning is overshadowed by Hurricane Sandy, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney Saturday made impassioned pitches to voters in the swing states of Florida and New Hampshire.
As the potentially devastating storm began barreling up the Eastern Seaboard, Romney spent the day in Florida, where early voting began Saturday. Obama rallied supporters in New Hampshire on the last day people can register to vote before Election Day.
The storm's political impact was already being felt. Romney canceled scheduled Sunday appearances in Virginia to head for Ohio instead. Obama plans to leave Washington for a Monday Florida campaign event Sunday night, ahead of schedule.
Obama had another task: Monitoring and managing the federal government's response. At the outset of such catastrophes, presidents have an opportunity to gain support, since they can show they're effectively managing a crisis - though that can backfire, too, as President George W. Bush learned in the bungled aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"This an example yet again of the president having to put his responsibilities as commander-in-chief and leader of the country first while at the same time he pursues his responsibilities as a candidate for re-election," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Saturday. Obama Saturday spoke to federal emergency management officials on Air Force One by phone.
In Florida, Romney told supporters that they should keep residents along the Eastern Seaboard in "your minds, your hearts." "You know how tough these hurricanes can be," he said.
If the storm intensifies, it's likely to get tougher for Romney and Obama to get the attention of voters in these final, crucial days before the Nov. 6 election. It could also hurt their get-out-the-vote effort in early voting states. Polls show Obama and Romney locked in a statistical tie nationally and in the 11 swing states likely to decide the presidency.
Florida has 29 electoral votes, while New Hampshire has four. If the race remains tight, as expected, even those four votes could be important, and Obama and Romney are neck and neck there.
"These four electoral votes right here could make the difference," Obama told 60 supporters at his first stop Saturday at a Teamsters' hall in Manchester.
Next it was on to the Elm Street Middle School in Nashua, where Obama warned that Romney has "an entirely different view of what this country's about." An audience estimated at 8,500 booed, and Obama smiled and implored them, "Don't boo, don't."
He joked about Romney's 2003-2007 stint as governor of Massachusetts, a state just minutes away from the campaign site. "He raised fees to get a birth certificate," Obama joked, "which would have been expensive for me." Obama was born in Hawaii, and released his long-form birth certificate last year, but some critics have questioned his place of birth.
He also continued to make a special appeal to women, insisting, "We don't need a whole bunch of politicians in Washington, most of whom are male, making health-care decisions for women."
Romney made his case in Florida, which narrowly voted for Obama in 2008. Polls this week show Romney inching ahead there as the economic downturn has hit the state particularly hard, leaving a slew of home foreclosures and an unemployment rate higher than the national average.
He spoke at the civic center in Pensacola, a Panhandle city with strong ties to the military. Lines to get in stretched around the block. Romney spoke on a stage in front of a massive American flag and a massive blue sign promising "Real Recovery."
Romney criticized Obama for failing to get people back to work, pushing the new health-care law and for waging a campaign of petty attacks.
"Four years ago Obama spoke about big things and now he is reduced to talking about small things," said Romney, who for days has tried to appear presidential by sticking to broad themes without many specifics.
He talked about how Republicans would work with Democrats, as he did when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Romney also answered an Obama attack from Monday's presidential debate, when the president ridiculed Romney's complaint that the Navy has fewer ships than at any time since 1917 by saying the U.S. military also has "fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed."
"In fact, we do use bayonets," Romney said to cheers.
Crowds for both candidates arrived hours early and cheered enthusiastically. "How often do you get a chance to see the next president?" said James Peterson, who attended the Romney rally with his 10-year-old, Trevor. The two arrived at 8 a.m. for the noontime rally.
In Nashua, Obama supporters showed just as much passion for their candidate. Natalie Audette, a health insurance saleswoman, praised the administration's support for health-care programs. Her two children both need aid, and a Romney administration, she said, would leave such decisions up to states. Obama adds emphasis to the campaign!
President Barack Obama's campaign added an exclamation point to placards and banners bearing the campaign's motto.
Instead of a stoic period at the end of the single-word slogan, the signs now read "Forward!" The president's team added the exclamation point earlier this week, just in time for Obama to kick off a marathon, 40-hour battleground-state blitz.
Obama spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said the campaign pumped up the slogan to reflect "the stakes in this election and energy at our events."


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Commerce, culture and charm await in Ahmedabad; India's new capital of industry.
If you're keen to see the future of India, then Bengaluru should top your to-do list.
With its hot climate, fascinating culture and tasty cuisine, it should come as no surprise that Chennai is one of India's most visited cities.
Once flights to Delhi touch down, it doesn't take long for the city's vibrant spirit to charm its guests.
A beautiful mélange of historic narrow alleys and urban upscale modernity is just one of the many charms of Hyderabad.
Whilst Kochi is imbued with historical significance, there's a modern side too – including one of the finest modern art scenes in India.
There's no shortage of things to do in Kolkata, and its infectious creative spirit is sure to leave a lasting impression.
Twenty-first century Mumbai is a city of diversity and excitement, full of vibrant markets, colourful festivals, cricket and Bollywood glamour.
There's more to Thiruvananthapuram than meets the eye; this city's got personality and you'll want to get to know it.


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Hostility to Religion: The Growing Threat to Religious Liberty in the United StatesBy Family Research Council
Many of the first European settlers on American shores sought freedom from religious persecution. Decades later, the Founding Fathers considered religious liberty to be a paramount principle in the new United States. Religious liberty is our "first freedom," not only because it is listed first in the Bill of Rights but because without it, all other freedoms are impossible: The Founders affirmed that allegiance to God precedes allegiance to the state, and that our rights come from our Creator, not the government. This is the essential assumption upon which our entire system of government has been built. Religious liberty was so important to the Framers of the new United States Constitution that they included it in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ."
Fast forward three hundred years, and hostility to religious expression in the public square is reaching levels unprecedented in the history of the United States. Militant atheists target long-existing crosses and historical markers of America's religious heritage in public places. Teachers tell young school-children they can't read their Bible in school. Private citizens and the government alike are attacking religious expression by other citizens. Whether it's a media backlash to merely expressing a faith position on sexuality, or the use of nondiscrimination laws to punish religious business owners for their decisions, threats to free speech and free exercise are heating up both in the courts and the public square.
This publication contains a list of documented accounts of hostility toward faith in the United States today, broken down in the following four definable types of incidents: Section I: Suppression of Religious Expression in the Public Square; Section II: Suppression of Religious Expression in Schools and Universities; Section III: Censure of Religious Viewpoints Regarding Sexuality; and Section IV: Suppression of Religious Expression on Sexuality Using Nondiscrimination Laws.
Most of the documented accounts here have occurred within the past several years. This, in and of itself, is troubling. But in some areas, particularly with regard to statements and positions on sexuality (many of which are documented in Sections III and IV below), hostility toward religion has increased at an exponential rate. This trend should cause any freedom-loving individual to be truly alarmed.
Americans urgently need to be aware of the suppression of religion in this regard. Yet this should not just concern those whose rights are most immediately affected, for the principles underlying suppression of rights in this area will very quickly and easily lead to the restriction and suppression of free inquiry and critical thinking. All should be concerned that suppression of rights, particularly as outlined in Sections III and IV of this publication, is the product of more insidious forces which ultimately will erode liberties for all Americans, regardless of viewpoint or level of concern with these immediate issues.
As Americans' awareness grows, we can focus our attention on the public debate and the state of the law. Liberty does not maintain itself, and in a democracy, many voices are constantly clamoring for desired protections and privileges to be enshrined in law. As we become more fully aware of and engaged on the issue of hostility toward religion, we can more effectively defend civil liberties and restore religious liberty to its proper place in American society.


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text: I'm thinking of entering my 98 passat into an event. Just for fun and to push myself. I understand this 3300 pound car may be the wrong choice but still I wanna give it a go. Anyone else brave enough to do it. If anyone is let's see what you are driving or maybe you could give me some tips.