Controlled Chaos

QUOTE(AnthraxFan93 @ Jan 12, 2006 -> 11:25 AM) Have Faith I am not It's not working....sorry

QUOTE(AnthraxFan93 @ Jan 12, 2006 -> 11:14 AM) Again, this is just the way I word things.. Meet me in person and you would have a totally different viewpoint to that statement. nah nah ya see...I'm still hung up on just thinking your an asshole...

You guys are in deep trouble. http://www.av1611.org/hell.html

QUOTE(AnthraxFan93 @ Jan 11, 2006 -> 02:58 PM) You are part truth to that statement.. I might not know more than Yas, but I do know what is not true..I am going to assume that Yas was raise in a religious household, has been brainwashed to think that, that way was the only and right way.. I have seen this before, hell I was like that till I was in my mid-teens. Human nature is that to question everything and everyone, I did.. Why is it there are so many different religions each claiming to be "right". The Chruch and Bible lie to you, to tell you what they want you to know. And governments through out history have used this to brainwash their citizens to believe that what they were doing was "God's Work" The recent war we are in now is a perfect example of this. Yas, left and does not want to turn this into a theogical dicssucion he states, but can he debate on something he has only been told what is right? Yas, like most that are like him on this topic would rather run away then attempt to debate me on this, for the fact as soon as I prove to them that the bible is not a debate tool.. they have nothing further to debate. Wow...nice analysis, but me thinks people don't want to debate you cause you're kind of an asshole. It has nothing to do with your OPINION of the bible, God, hell or anything else.

My wife has been sending these things to me for the past few months...seems pretty alive to me. Approximately 1,370,000 abortions occur annually in the U.S. and 88% occur during the time periods below. Week 6 The fetus has a beating heart now. Other major organs are developing now too. The kidneys, liver, and neural tube (which connects the spinal cord and brain). You may begin to experience nausea, fatigue, and sore breasts. Week 7 The embryo is now the size of a raspberry. Its head is large and dark spots have appeared which will become the eyes and nose. The arm and leg buds begin to show themselves, as do the ears. Week 8 Webbed fingers and toes emerge. Your uterus is now about the size of a peach. Week 9 Your uterus is now about the size of a tennis ball. It is still low in the pelvis and presses against your bladder causing the need to urinate more frequently. The fetus is constantly in motion, although you will not feel it yet. You will notice that your bras no longer fit. Time to purchase some new ones. Week 10 The fetus now resembles a shrimp with its large head and disproportionately small body. The genitals have begun to form. The heartbeat may be heard after either the 10th or 11th week by a special stethoscope. Week 11 The fetus weighs about 1/2 ounce now. The doctor should be able to hear the rapid heartbeat of your baby by using a special stethoscope now. Vital organs are developing and your baby is forming tiny fingernails and hair. Week 12 The fetus’ kidneys have formed and the baby will start to pass urine into the amniotic fluid that surrounds him in the uterus. The eyelids have developed. Toothbuds are forming along with the vocal cords. The fetus now begins to bend and stretch, moving its arms and legs, making fists, opening hands and lifting its head. You will not feel these movements for quite some time. The chance of miscarriage has been greatly reduced after 12 weeks. Week 13 The fetus is constantly moving around, safely cushioned by the amniotic fluid. Although you still do not feel these movements, the baby is exercising as he grows. The chance of miscarriage is greatly reduced after 12 weeks. Week 14 Facial feature and fingerprints have now formed. The fetus is about 3-4 inches long now. Week 15 An ultrasound scan is usually performed in the 15th or 16th week. You will be delighted to see your baby’s entire body, beating heart, and the ultrasound tech or your doctor will be able to tell you the sex of your baby. Week 16 By now, the main organs in the baby’s body are formed. The amniotic fluid, the placenta and the surrounding membranes sustain his life. The baby’s environment sustains the perfect temperature regardless of the weather outside. However, avoiding high temperatures like a hot tub or sauna is recommended. Extreme heat may cause the mother palpitations. Week 17 Any nausea you may have experienced in the first 3-4 months has subsided now. You are feeling new energy and quite fit. The baby is now inhaling and exhaling the amniotic fluid. The circulatory system is also operating now. The chances of a miscarriage at this stage is greatly reduced. Week 18 You may be beginning to feel fetal movements known as quickening. The sensation feels much like flutters in your abdomen. Your waist is thickening and your breasts may be becoming quite large. The area around the nipple (the areola) may be becoming a much darker shade.

QUOTE(kevin57 @ Jan 11, 2006 -> 12:25 PM) As a priest, I can tell you that priests politically break down pretty much as society does, republican and democrat, liberal and conservative. Which I consider a shame. From the gospel and our respective traditions, we should have the privilege of critiquing the entire political spectrum, engage in value-oriented debates. Many, though, are in the hip pocket of one party or another. :headshake I would have figured priests were about even....just as catholics are about split as well.

Rex, Did you even read the article??

There are those on this site(you know who you are) who like to say there is no media bias because the right has Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh etc. I, along with many others here, have argued the media bias many times with you lefty's. Here's a good article on it.... The target audience of media bias Jan 11, 2006 by Todd Manzi Conservatives don’t have a level playing field because our country suffers from a liberally biased news media. Some people think media bias is not a fact, but merely a debatable opinion. These people are quick to point out that conservatives have venues for their ideas: talk radio, the Internet, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. Looking at the issue from a marketing prospective helps debunk the absurd claim that there is some sort of parity in the media for liberals and conservatives. Consider three target audiences: passionate liberals, passionate conservatives and normal people who vote. Those of us who fall in one of the first two groups, battle for market share of the third group. We want our ideas embraced. We want our candidates elected. Paradoxically, the primary target audience for those of us passionate about politics is voters who are disengaged from politics. How do you reach this group? How do they form their opinions? Talk radio and the rest of the new media doesn’t reach these people or sway their opinions. The primary audience of talk radio is those of us who are passionate about politics and are committed to a political ideology. We are not normal. Normal people don’t care as much about politics or liberal versus conservative ideology as they care about sports, hobbies, their jobs, family activities, etc. They are not interested in taking the time to understand issues on a deep level. They want sound bites and headlines. They want to glean information efficiently, form quick opinions and move onto something else more enjoyable. The target audience - people who swing elections and influence policy because of their answers to public opinion polls - is reached through the mainstream media. These people spend a few minutes with the newspaper and catch their local news on television. The claim that media bias is not a problem because conservatives now have a voice in the media misses the big picture perspective. Advertising types make decisions regarding getting their message out based on gross rating points (GRPs). Yes, the total GRPs from talk radio, the Internet and the rest of the conservative media, is huge. In fact, advertisers understand that for products disproportionately purchased by conservatives, they have attractive and efficient advertising opportunities. Although the reach of the conservative media is staggering when looked at on its own, it is tiny when compared to the reach of the mainstream media. Total all of the GRPs from news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC and their hundreds of affiliates across the country. Then add in the circulation of all of the nation’s newspapers and you have a Goliath that makes the audience of the conservative media look like a David. More importantly, the mainstream media reaches the audience that drives policy and swings elections, while the new media is preaching to the choir. Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann has more influence over public opinion polls than Rush Limbaugh does. Riechmann’s dispatches are printed in tens of millions of newspapers throughout the country and because she covers President Bush, her stories often get television coverage as well. Liberally biased Riechmann is pawned off as news, but it is understood that conservatively biased Limbaugh is presenting commentary. When Riechmann packaged Cindy Sheehan sympathetically, and covered President Bush harshly, it made an impact with the primary target audience that influences public opinion polls. Limbaugh’s excellent commentary on the subject helps those of us who want to dig deep into important stories understand why we have the opinions we do. Limbaugh doesn’t change our opinion as much as he solidifies them. Riechmann, on the other hand, serves it up to those looking for the fast food equivalent of the issues of the day. The opinions of the people she reaches are more easily swayed than the opinions of Limbaugh’s more thoughtful audience. The new media led by Limbaugh has been a wonderful development for conservatives. None of us would want to go back to the dark ages of the 1980’s. But, just because conservatives have a voice, it doesn’t mean the media is balanced. Liberal bias in the mainstream media is a huge problem in this country. Like other topics, those of us who take the time, understand the ramifications of media bias. Those who stay at the surface level of thinking, dismiss media bias as a non-issue.

Controlled Chaos is the name of my fantasy football/baseball teams. I like to bring the fury....but nicely. Plus, I like oxy morons.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 10, 2006 -> 09:19 AM) I majored in Poli Sci back in undergrad, so I've seen my share of teachers. Many were clearly in one party's camp or the other, but most managed to try to keep off the soap box on partisan standing. I had one great one, though, who taught my Presidency class. He came in the first day wearing a very expensive-looking business suit, tie and all (most Profs wore slacks and a button-down). But, he also had a completely shaved head and wore an earing. He stated the first day of class that he would feel he was successful if by the end of the semester, no one could tell where his allegiances lied. And sure enough, the class as a whole still had no idea by the end. THAT is the mark of an effectice, objective teacher of political science; teach the information, lead discussion and allow for the students to learn and build their own views. As for your teacher, since it's high school and this guy is obviously a moron, you might just want to bite your tongue and make it to the end. The very fact that he would do what he did seems to indicate he isn't going to be terribly reasonable. Wow...now that is how a class should be taught. I bet maybe 1 out of every 100 political profs can ask that question and get the correct response.

Well after expressing our displeasure in not getting tickets for opening day our ticket agent was able to "find" 20 tickets for us in Section 102. Hell YEAH!! You can't stop tradition baby!!!

If this is high school...which I think it is....See an administrator, drop the class and be sure to say why. I don't think you will win when debating teachers in high school. Good Luck.

QUOTE(mreye @ Jan 9, 2006 -> 02:56 PM) (I had to) One of the few proud 'wing nuts'

This dude is a total racist!! Most media got Katrina wrong Jan 9, 2006 by Armstrong Williams Did New Orleans blacks die at a higher rate than whites in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? On the evidence so far, the answer is no. Of the 1,100 bodies recovered in Louisiana after Katrina, 836 were found in New Orleans, and the state has released data on 568 of those that were judged to be storm-related. As of last week, blacks, which were 67.2 percent of the pre-storm population of New Orleans, account for 50.9 percent of the city victims so far identified by race. It was New Orleans Caucasians who died way out of proportion to their numbers-28 percent of the population, 45.6 percent of the city’s known Katrina deaths by race. This is far from the impression that the media have managed to leave, both during the crisis and in the months since. It’s possible, though unlikely, that these percentages may change in the final figures. Louisiana is not releasing any information on the rest of the dead until they are identified and their families notified. In the chaos of Katrina, the press was hardly in a position to know that whites were dying as fast as blacks. But it was responsible for strumming the racial theme so relentlessly in the absence of actual information. A mix of factors were operating-faces shown on TV were mostly black, quotable black spokesmen kept insisting that racism was at work, and national reporters on the scene may have thought that since this was the south, blacks were probably being victimized in some way. This hardened into a narrative line for New Orleans that stressed race, and to lesser extent, class. Jack Shafer of Slate.com said, “(We) in the media are ignoring that fact that almost all the victims in New Orleans are black and poor.” Wolf Blitzer said the victims were “so poor, so black.” The Washington Post, reflecting the resentment of its majority-black city, pumped up the racial theme. A questionable page one story headlined “To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People are Marked.” An unusually gassy essay in the style section talked about the sins of mainstream America and it’s “tattered racial legacy.” A story on the decline of Bush’s approval rating kept the racial theme aloft with the subhead “He Says Race Didn’t Affect Efforts; Blacks in Poll Disagree.” As Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler said in a different context, “When the press corps reaches an overall judgment, they often start looking for easy-to-tell stories to illustrate their global belief.” Racial agitators and entertainers played a big role. Randall Robinson, the former head of TransAfrica said, “This is what we have come to. This defining watershed moment in America's racial history." Jesse Jackson said, “Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying.” (That would be 5,000 blacks dying out of a total of 1,349 known dead of all races in all Gulf States combined.) The morning show host of a New York City rap station saw the New Orleans situation as “genocide.” Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics, said Katrina “disclosed our racism in multiple ways.” Comedian and activist Dick Gregory saw an anti-black conspiracy in New Orleans. And rapper Kanye West offered the opinion that “America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well off, as slow as possible,” adding his soon to be famous accusation, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” The media carried all the race chatter without much in the way or caution or evidence. Even now, mainstream media have done little to set the record straight. The numbers and percentages of death by race are easy to find among bloggers, very hard to find in mainstream reporting. On December 18, three days after the state of Louisiana delivered a breakdown of deaths by race, The New York Times ran a long analysis of Katrina that omitted the racial breakdown from the state report. By contrast, the Los Angeles Times ran an excellent article, also on December 18, that began this way: “The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city’s poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward.” The paper reported that its own analysis “contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit--that it was the city’s poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane.” Good journalism. Will the rest of the media catch on?

QUOTE(sox4lifeinPA @ Jan 9, 2006 -> 09:05 AM) I asked Miss PA's dad for permission to ask Miss PA to marry me... Congrats man!! Good Luck!!!!!!!!

Finished my wall....for now...

QUOTE(RibbieRubarb @ Jan 6, 2006 -> 02:58 PM) Went to Wildfire in Oakbrook last night. Wood oven roasted mussels to start Spinach salad Bone-in Filet with crusted blue cheese on top with redskin mashed pototoes Finished off with a dirty martini. Ha...I was gonna go there tonight....but you can never get in before 9. No matter how far ahead you call for reservations...they never have anything before 9...oh but you can just come in and put your name down. They want you just to come in and drink and wait for a table. :finger f*** it we're going to The Clubhouse tonight. They have a pretty dam good steak there as well!!

For those of you who are not aware, North Dakota and southwestern Montana got hit with their first blizzard of the season a month ago. This text is from a County Emergency Manager out in the western part of North Dakota after the storm. Amusing, if it were not so true........ WEATHER BULLETIN: Up here in the Northern Plains we just recovered from an Historic event --- May I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions"? --- With a historic blizzard of up to 24" inches of snow and winds to 50 MPH that broke trees in half, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed all roads, isolated scores of communities, and cut power to tens of thousands. President George Bush did not come. President George Bush was not expected to come... President George Bush did not cause the storm... Global warming did not cause the storm... FEMA staged nothing... No one howled for the government to do something... No one even uttered an expletive on TV... Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards... No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House... No one looted... Phil Cantori of the Weather Channel did not come... And Geraldo Rivera did not move in to be on camera. Nope, we just melted snow for water, sent out caravans to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars and trucks, checked on our neighbors, fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Aladdin lamps, and put on an extra layer of clothes because up here it is take care of yourself and others and work or die. We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trade votes for 'sit at home' checks. Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and we know how to deal with it ourselves. "In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about 45.25 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporate."

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 6, 2006 -> 02:17 PM) This author makes so many leaps of faith, so many out-of-context examples, so many bizarre assumptions and is so obviously not interested in the idea of religious freedom, that I can't see how he expects to be taken seriously. It's too bad too, because there is some interesting anecdotal information there, and even a few good points. Too bad they get lost in the cesspool. Interesting read either way.

THE CENTURY AHEAD It's the Demography, Stupid The real reason the West is in danger of extinction BY MARK STEYN 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 slut: 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.

QUOTE(Punch and Judy Garland @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 01:27 AM) I realize the Bears offense was much worse and the Bears defense had injuries but its hard to get the 04 beatdown in Soldier Field out of the head. I'm obviously not a Bears fan but I'm stunned how confident/cocky Bear fans that I know are about this team. It seems Bear fans think they will shut down Alexander with ease and steamroll their way through the NFC playoffs. I hear a lot about Seattle, but who the hell has Seattle played?? Fact is when they played tough defenses they lost. With the Bears Defense they can beat ANYONE. Bottom Line. that goes for Seattle and Indy. I'm not saying the Bears are the better team and have more talent...I'm saying they could beat anyone on any given day. If the D chokes though, they are done. Where as Indy can have an off day on Defense and still win. Sun 9/11 at Jacksonville L 14-26 Sun 9/18 Atlanta W 21-18 Sun 9/25 Arizona W 37-12 Sun 10/2 at Washington L 17-20 Sun 10/9 at St. Louis W 37-31 Sun 10/16 Houston W 42-10 Sun 10/23 Dallas W 13-10 bye Sun 11/6 at Arizona W 33-19 Sun 11/13 St. Louis W 31-16 Sun 11/20 at San Francisco W 27-25 Sun 11/27 NY Giants W 24-21 Mon 12/5 at Philadelphia W 42-0 Sun 12/11 San Francisco W 41-3 Sun 12/18 at Tennessee W 28-24 Sat 12/24 Indianapolis W 28-13 Sun 1/1 at Green Bay L 17-23

QUOTE(RockRaines @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 10:44 AM) Being from a psych background, I have absolutley NO belief in genes causing homosexuality. With that said, is the acceptance of being "gay" causing more people to explore or change to that lifestyle because they are looking for somewhere to be accepted, or are they just feeling more comfortable actually admitting they truly are "gay". Just like how many licks it takes for a tootsie pop, the world may never know. Here's something interesting to toss around. If a gay couple adopts a baby boy. Will he grow up to be gay, because of the acceptance of it? Can two gay guys raise a heterosexual boy? See I think it has to do with genes. When that kid hits 11 or 12 he is gonna see some girl and be like whoa!! It doesn't matter that his dads are gay...I think his body will tell him what he likes to see and what he doesn't. edit: BTW, I was trying to take this away from a s*** starting thread, into a legitimate discussion.

QUOTE(tonyho7476 @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 10:35 AM) I heard you are actually being hunted right now...aren't you Joey the Clown? What do I look like a clown to you??

QUOTE(tonyho7476 @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 10:19 AM) I think you should do it Outfit style...head down to Comiskey and make them an offer they can't refuse! Do you know me or something??

QUOTE(Steff @ Jan 5, 2006 -> 10:12 AM) CC.. full ST holders and packages have been buying them up since early December. It's got nothing to do with when they go on sale to the public. We've been hearing for weeks it's sold out. Remember comp's, MLB, and the Sox employees and players get theirs first also. As for that date schedule above.. it's not so true. We got our extras confirmed a few weeks ago. Well this is just gonna suck then...we had our order in the beginning of October. I understand they have to cater to ST holders first, I just can't believe they are all gone.