joshnbecki's Xanga

Breakthrough????

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:04:46 GMT

Becki and I had a very positive conversation Sunday, and I crunched some numbers that reveal she can quit basically as soon as I get paid for one of my ghostwriting projects! YAY!

Then we found out some very good news Monday. In the morning I got a call from the insurance company handling my accident claim. I had been hoping and praying for a large enough settlement to pay off our credit cards. I've never dealt with an insurance claim like this before and didn't know what to expect.

With a little help, they offered settlement amount just a few hundred dollars less than our credit card debt!!!!

Then later in the day I met up with the man for whom I was working on the magazine. He owes me a month's wages, and he told me yesterday that he thinks he should be able to pay me in the next few weeks! Not getting that month's money was very hard on us financially, and a different credit card (with no interest) took that hit, so we'll be able to pay that off too when he pays up!

That will leave us with NO credit card debt!!!

Also (and this isn't as clear cut a good thing) he has a revenue stream now and wants to resume work on the magazine. He has a more practical plan this time, and so we discussed the possibility of me working for him part-time under the banner of my editing company. I told him I made a mistake to leave behind my dreams to work only on his last time and that I won't make the same mistake this time. So if I do go back to work for him, I'm going to put all of the editing needs that any magazine or any other media outlet he wants to create, under the banner of Aegis Editing. If we hire extra editors, they hire through me, and I intend to make my company a partner along with his.

So we're putting the possibility of working with him before God. I'm more than a little wary, but I need the income, and if he can be consistent I did like working with him.

We shall see. But God is good and has really been providing for us, so we're full of confidence for the future...finally!!!

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:29:52 GMT

I'm bringing Xanga back - drop a comment if you're with me!

It's been a while....

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:44:38 GMT

Xanga Update

This spring and summer has been an interesting time for us, primarily in the job arena.

Becki finished up with Jenks at the beginning of summer, marking one heck of an accomplishment in my book. NO ONE who hasn't been with severely disabled kids for 7 hours at a time (this includes me) has the faintest clue as to the mental fortitude, patience, endurance, grace, and mercy—not to mention creative smarts and stubbornness—it takes to do one-on-one time with these kids. She was bitten, peed on, daily dealt with pooh, hit, scratched, and generally run ragged, all to a symphony of constant screaming (at least at the beginning of the semester) and Barney. I won't even mention the teacher.

Becki considered quitting early on, as the combination of demeaning pay and grueling classroom conditions reduced her to tears the first few weeks and periodically throughout the whole year. She thought about it again at the mid-semester break, but something—a masochistic streak or just some serious backbone—kept her in the game, and she saw the thing through. Yeah!

She spent the summer just recovering—a clout to the ear served as a reminder of what she'd left behind by hurting all summer—but has now taken a position at a local high-end retirement center called Montereau. A little city unto itself, Montereau hunches atop a small hill overlooking a goodly portion of Tulsa, and with its size, the well-healed seniors within have a pretty good view and one dang good activities director. They call her something more pc, but Becki has left behind the wailing, abusive world of out-of-control severely disabled kids stranded in the academic twilight zone to work with slower, quieter individuals.

She loves it, and that's all I need. The pay still isn't great, but the benefits are top-notch and she doesn't come home with headaches from screaming or any fresh bruises. Vast improvement, in my book.

As for me, I had a fun summer. I've been working various contract jobs doing technical writing—three months here, four there—and in the middle I started getting sick. After some tests, we learned my gallbladder was pooping out on me—one of the tests, I'm totally convinced, stopped the little bugger in his tracks—so first it was time to haggle with the insurance company and hospital time and then under the knife I went.

Unlike Laurie and Debbie's day of near-butchery, my surgeon made three cute little incisions and then pulled the offending, dysfunctional organ out through my belly button. The day after was deceptively good and I walked around the block, but a very ill-advised chicken soft taco on the second day exposed the fact I was a little ahead of schedule. Nothing hurts like throwing up with a belly full of knife holes—nothing except, perhaps, the gas they pump into you when it rises into your shoulder and creates this odd little pocket of agony that makes the incisions feel like pin pricks.

All in all, I missed three days of work, and while I was exhausted that first week back, we made it with me going to bed seemingly shortly after getting home. As of today, roughly four weeks later, I'm doing great. The first 75% of my healing came fast, and the remainder is a bit slower, but we're good all-in-all.

On the work side, as I already mentioned I have been doing contract work. I've also pulled in a few dandy freelance jobs—some more ghost writing and a website copywriting job that I hope sets the tone for the future. I have spent most of the second, four-month tech writing job thinking they're going to finish the housekeeping they started near the beginning of the project by letting all the contractors go. But one other tw and I faced down the firing squads and budget cuts and kept pulling money from old MetLife in exchange for editing their phone center scripts and a boatload of other things I could mention at the cost of my own life.

So while expecting the inevitable end of the contract, I started looking for alternatives and ended up interviewing with a guy who is starting three new magazines and needs editors. An experienced magazine publisher and West Point grad, this guy APPEARS to have it all together. At this point, though, it could all be smoke and mirrors; I'll hopefully update after Sept 1 when I'm supposed to start full time. At first he had me pegged for an interesting magazine on college life and culture, but now it appears I might be in for something far greater—executive editor for all three, one step below the chief editor. Were this to happen, my salary might be considerable after the initial startup period. For the near future, I'll at least be making the same I have been with my contract work, which, while not mind-blowing, has been enough.

So we shall see.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. You're all in ours!

The One Theory

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:25:41 GMT

This is my wife Becki’s soapbox, so I don’t know if I can really add much to the personal experience, understanding, and wisdom she has on this topic, but I feel the need to rant for a bit, so here goes…

People love the romantic idea that somewhere out there, hiding under a rock or snowboarding in the Rockies, is THE ONE. This person, people believe, is their soul mate—the perfect person for them, custom-made to fit and COMPLETE THEM. People sometimes drift around—you’ve perhaps seen them—with their heads in the clouds, daydreaming about when they will meet this special individual.

After all, we have all kinds of evidence that this is how it works. I mean, read a book, watch TV, or go the movies for gosh sake. Lonely person after lonely person stumbles through their pathetic little lives until one day—BAM!—they have the romantic traffic accident of their lives and are suddenly face to face with that one individual who will make their lives worth living and bring meaning to their existence. It’s sometimes rocky, and there is often some confusion, but such is life, no? Se le vie.

Then we have certain sects of modern Christianity, which reveal that, in fact, God Himself came up with this idea one day while rolling out the clay for a few new snakes or inventing the laws of physics. Now, most preachers don’t go so far as to spell it out from the pulpit, but they drop the hints and let peer pressure do the rest. Almost 80% or ORU marriages can attest to this phenomenon.

Take the Bible: Abraham had Sarah, Isaac had Rebecca, and Hosea had Gomer. I mean, think of the destinies these couples enabled by coming together under God’s will! We have Ruth, a foreigner, who somehow gets into Jesus’ lineage—not to mention a harlot, too! Then, think of David, the paradigm of the tragically flawed hero—warrior, king…adulterer. But somehow God chose his line through which to bring His Son to earth. Dang! Talk about destiny!!!

Think of what would have happened had the stars not aligned to bring these people together, right? I mean, surely this is the greatest cosmic mystery of all time—that God could line up two people’s lives from birth and set their course so that at the right day, at the right hour, those two would walk into Starbucks and both happen to grab the last aluminum travel mug AT THE SAME TIME.

And heaven forbid that you, as a Christian, should risk your eternal matrimonial bliss by bucking the system and moving to Seattle instead of New York or going to school at OSU instead of ORU (lord knows you’ve a better chance at happiness at a Christian school because God likes them better). Or what if you miss the light that day because you weren’t paying attention to the Holy Spirit prompting you to floor it right then and there because you were getting a secular CD out, and you miss Ms. or Mr. Right by a whopping thirty seconds at the afore mentioned Starbucks, screwing your ONE CHANCE (and coincidentally missing out on a great aluminum mug because she grabbed the last one).

Shoot, partner, you’re SOL. YOU ARE JUST SCREWED!!!

Right?

Hopefully this sounds just a little preposterous. Hopefully something in you, as you read this, is crying out that this is absurd, that you can’t take your life cues from movies or books or other romanticized notions of how life works. Hopefully—dear God, I hope—you’re not so self-deluded that you’re convinced you’re so special that God would base another individual’s entire life around your odd sense of humor, making it so he or she doesn’t mind your smelly feet, and predisposing this person to really dig your fascination with kung-fu.

Let me ask you this, Christian: does God care if you go to Sonic or Burger King for breakfast today? What about what kind of car you drive? How many bedrooms your house has? Whether you wear the green shirt or the blue one?

He might. Then again, He might (maybe) just leave it up to you. Now that doesn’t mean you don’t give Him the right of veto, ignoring Him when you’re on your way to America’s Drive In and change course to visit Burger King instead because you feel weird. But don’t bet on receiving that divine breakfast direction every day.

Might the same be true of your car? What about your house? Your job? Maybe it is—maybe (just maybe) God wants us to grow up and learn about Him and make choices that are like His. Not because He’s telling us what to do, but because it’s becoming our nature—because the Holy Spirit inside of us is becoming PART of us instead of just this angel on our shoulders that wars it out with the little demon sitting on the other shoulder.

OK, all of that to say this: if we’re left to choose life or death, blessing or cursing—as well as a host of other choices each and every day—why would we assume that our spouse (and that relationship) is any different?

Why do Christian couples go into marriage so ill-equipped for hard times? Why do we think it’s all going to be roses and stolen kisses—in sort, perfect?

Because, quite simply, we want the easy way out. It’s easier to think that God’s going to dictate your every decision and can make them all perfect and error-free if you’ll follow His lead. It’s easier to seek the blueprint of the design, to get the road map for the rest of your life, so you don’t have to wonder anymore. It takes the fear out of it—takes the guesswork out of these harder choices like who to marry, where to live, and what to do with our lives.

The “One” is a fantasy, Neo—it takes WORK. You BECOME somebody’s “the one” and he or she becomes yours. You stay that way through WORK, because it isn’t always easy. And those who think it is fall by the wayside and wonder what the license plate number was on the truck that just ran them over.

There are three types of love, right? I forget their Greek names, but basically they’re erotic, brotherly, and commitment love. We humans have the erotic love thing down—we meet, Cupid strikes, and it’s all pounding hearts and dreamy eyes from there. On TV they’ve got JUST this down to an art—meet, get interested, get in bed. Zero to guilt-free sex in one date. No commitment, no caring—just good old fashioned licentious sex.

Some people even have the brotherly thing down—they’re very caring, polite, and understanding. They’re tolerant, considerate, and compassionate. Isn’t that wonderful?

But what about commitment? That one is hard. I want to see a movie about commitment love where the guy sticks it out with his verbally abusive wife, the woman nurses her husband through his obsession with race car driving, or the man loses his penis in a freak steak knife incident at the Outback but his girlfriend marries him anyway. I want to see the troubled marriage partners who work it out for their kids, who survive tragedy together, who get tempted and make the right choice, who choose EACH AND EVERY DAY that they’re going to love each other through thick and thin, heaven and hell, sickness and health.

Now THAT would be a movie—especially if it was all in the same picture.

So does this mean that it’s ALL up to us, that God has no role in helping us out or helping to make an “us” work? Certainly not, as Paul would say. He’s our ever present help in time of need, directs the paths of a righteous man, etc, etc.

And what about choices? Does this also mean that God doesn’t have any opinion on who you marry, where you work, or which school you send your kids to? NO! He does...sometimes. And you’ll understand it…sometimes.

So what, you may ask, about the rest of the time? What do you do when your life is going to crap and the person you thought you’d spend the rest of your life with cheats on you? Or when your job falls through, you don’t get the ministry position you thought God had preordained, or the car you thought was divinely maintained breaks down on the BA?

Hard as it is, you have faith.

You trust that He is good, He’s working in your life, and He’s making YOU into the person He wants you to be. This includes being a person who can make godly choices. It includes having the wisdom to see into the heart of a situation and make the right call. It includes the grace to make it through when your life is ashes all around you, you’ve got third degree emotional burns, and you think it’s over.

Problem is, that’s the hard way.

That’s life.

Rough Times

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:52:33 GMT

It’s been a while since my last post, but a lot has been happening—most of it not good.

I got laid off at the end of November. Not a good time—“merry Christmas, here’s your pink slip.” They did give me both severance (a month’s pay) and my vacation time (what I had coming plus a few days, actually). So it wasn’t totally cold-hearted, but they sure could have waited, in my opinion, and started off the New Year with their volley of layoffs.

So that wasn’t good. All manner of people we trust have said encouraging things like, “The next one will be even better!” or that God was going to use this as a way of blessing us. While we’re not discounting those things at all, let’s just say that hasn’t happened yet.

December saw me interview and get a technical writing contract with a local oil company, via my neighbor (who incidentally was in the process of leaving the company). It’s been a horribly awkward time—I feel like I’m dressing out for high school gym every day; that locker room discomfort that has something to do with the smell and the companionship and the circumstances. Nevertheless, before I complain too much, it pays the bills…sort of …if I work overtime. It’s supposed to be a three to six month job, but we’ll see.

For some reason, getting laid off was also a signal flare to little money-consuming gremlins that have attacked with rare vigor. We of course had Christmas presents we wanted to buy for people (and each other). Some friends of ours wanted us to go skiing with them, and we accepted—but I got dumped about a week after they booked everything. Becki’s truck suddenly developed not one or even two unrelated problems but a host of them—seemingly all at once. I hit a massive pothole on my way home from the oil company and ruined one of my car’s brand-new tires, which I of course neglected to insure. Tulsa also experienced record snow/ice storms, forcing me to miss two days and Becki to miss a slew of them, since the school was closed.

Yet in the midst of all that, God provided. My vacation pay and some Christmas savings enabled us to get people what we wanted to give them, including each other, and Christmas was a wonderful time of remembering why we celebrate the holiday. We had enough of my vacation money leftover to pay for this bargain-basement ski trip, and we really need the break. The dealership’s quote for fixing ONE of Becki’s Pathfinder problems was $550; I followed a friend’s recommendation and took the truck to this junky-looking little shop he uses—they fixed EVERYTHING for $350! My tire’s radial separated from the inner portion, but I have a full-sized spare in great condition, so I was able to swap my tire with the spare and keep on driving. And the school decided to pay their people for a week even though they worked three days out of two weeks.

Clear-cut triumphs? No. But neither were they wholesale slaughters like they could have been, and somehow the money has been there.

And we got another lesson in God’s faithfulness this Thursday. I had made a doctor’s appointment for horrible acid in my stomach (an ulcer and some gray hairs all since I turned 29?!?!), but I took some over-the-counter 14-day stuff, and within a week it was doing better. Yet I didn’t cancel the appointment, and, as it would happen, Becki was able to use it. We wanted to get her checked out for her asthma before we leave on this perhaps financially ill-advised ski trip.

I don’t want to go into detail, but I felt this compassion and even belatedly acted on it after we were almost to the door as we walked up from the parking lot. I must admit, my overactive little mind was wondering if I was contemplating my action simply out of an expectation for divine reciprocation—i.e. whether I was doing what I was about to do out of true obedience or formulaic quasi-Christianity.

But I went ahead and did it, partially because of a conversation with Pastor Ed last Sunday in which he brought up an email I had sent expressing some doubts about some other motives I have in another area. He told me quite simply that it’s really rare for our motives to be purely altruistic, holy, and benign. We shouldn’t let that stop us, however, from doing good or whatever God would have us do.

So I did what I felt God would want me to do, despite some misgivings.

And here’s where it gets good—our doctor just left his previous practice to start his own, and we followed him. He has a neat vision for holistic, faith-based healthcare that bridges the gap between pure medicinal treatment, more natural treatments, and prayer, etc. He wants to find the middle ground that isn’t purely secular but isn’t wacky, either…and he wants my help in writing some literature for his clinic!

But it gets better. His nurse found Becki a sample of her super-expensive asthma medication and told her that as soon as she started to run out she should call; the nurse said she would set aside more samples for her!

But it gets even better! We have no insurance right now, though we’re looking, and our doctor knew that. He made the whole visit complimentary AND loaded Becki with a few other samples of different asthma meds! We walked out of there without spending a dime, loaded with a few hundred dollars worth of medication, and energized by his vision and hope for future freelance work!

So the drama evolves. We continue to have boundary issues with Becki’s family, and it sucks like crazy to have to stand firm on them every two weeks or so. It doesn’t do their relationship any good, either, but the alternative is worse. I’ve got some potential leads with a guy I’ve worked with before here in Tulsa; he’s a VP for Thomas Nelson and may have some work for me, either freelance or in his office or both. I’ve got some other ideas too, but they’re longer-term fixes rather than the short-term solutions I wish they were. And we’re thinking about moving. For some reason Boise, Idaho has jumped out at us, and my folks just got a cool deal that will get them two free airline vouchers to get us out there to scout it out. I’ll keep you posted on that, but it would put us in striking distance of my family in Cali and a bunch of friends we have relocating to Seattle. And it’s purdy and has mountains.

So keep us in your thoughts and prayers because it’s a challenging time right now. I get down, and so does Becki, and we wonder how the heck we’re going to make something work during the in-between times. But somehow, deep down, I’m confident that it will indeed work out.

Seasons Greetings

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:05:45 GMT

Dear Friends,

I wanted to send out some sort of holiday greeting to my friends and

family, but it is so difficult in today's world to know exactly what to

say without offending someone. So I met with my attorney, and on his advice

I wish to say the following:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes

for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,

non-addictive gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice

holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the

religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your

choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or

traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or

secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and

medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally

accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the

calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society

have helped make America great (not to imply that America is

necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "AMERICA" in

the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color,

age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual preference of the

wishes.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This

greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely

transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no

promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for

her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is

revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted

to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for

a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday

greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement

of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the

wisher.

Disclaimer: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message,

however, a significant number of electrons were inconvenienced.

If the Bible says it's right, it's right. If the Bible says it's wrong,

then it's wrong. If you disagree then you're on your own, and good luck.

Just kidding--Merry Christmas!!!

catch up

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:33:26 GMT

In an effort to use this to communicate with people flung far and wide, I thought I might use my Xanga page for fewer (ahem) witty posts and more info on Becki, myself, and our lives. Here's November so far in a nutshell!

Birthday--29 and Holding
As some may know, Nov 15th was my b-day. I think I'll stop now, thank you very much.

My birthday was great--I have wonderful family members and incredible friends. Becki and my folks treated me royally to dinner and some pretty nifty gifts--my honey had been stashing $$$ for an iPod for months!!! The folks bequeathed a needed little TV for the bedroom, which receives our dish AND plays DVDs, so we're the king and queen of our closet-sized domain!

I had friends over the following weekend for poker, which was loads of fun. Patrick, that incomparable friend, splurged and bought me a new PS2 game. I hadn't bought one for myself in so long I'd forgotten that it's a nice way to blow off steam, and he went all the way with a brand-new, good one! Three cheers for the monkey! Joe and Sarah, John and Julie, and Shane all made appearances and were wonderful. Thanks you guys!!!!

Thanksgiving, schizophrenic style
Well, being the friendly folks we are, Becki and I tried to make everyone happy this year. Again. Becki was feeling the pressure days or weeks in advance, but a few days before Thanksgiving, I too woke up to the fact that both sets of parents wanted/needed our attention.

Going over to Becki's family's place is always problematic because of the frequent domestic disputes, drama, etc; oh, and I disappear in the sofa. So while we love them, we always keep our fingers crossed. Also, both sets of moms traditionally have dinner at the same time.

My folks have no one else around, so we feel obliged to make sure they have family around, and, while both sets of parents are friendly to one another, it's like mixing fish and birds in the same aquarium when they're together--doesn't work so well.

However, just when we were starting to feel the squeeze, my mother yielded on her dinner timing and was content to just take us when we could get there. This freed us up to pick up Becki's grandma (who wonders why we no longer visit "every" Sunday "like we used to" (uh-oh)) and get over to the Braswell home. Becki's bros were on their best behavior, the new sofa doesn't swallow me whole, and the ham was incredible. Not only that, we were able to be family and then leave in time to get to my folks' place to be with them, too, thus making both sets happy!

Boy were we full, though.

Cooper Seeks New Home...for himself
As some of you may know, we adopted a second golden, Cooper, a few months ago. He's cute, smart (maybe smarter even than Gracie, our other golden), and energetic. Maybe too much so. My back yard is an excavation site, and Coop has recently figured out how to get over our (admittadly low) fence.

Anyone with dog-training tips or who might want to give a home to a wonderful Golden Retriever, comment or call me (406-1106). Shane, perhaps you can forward this on to La Casa circles?

We've gone back and forth on what to do with Coop, and right now he's tied up in the back yard on a 30' tether--not what he needs but necessary nevertheless. Also, this year we didn't take the dogs to the lake like we took Grace last year, so I wonder if the who two-dog thing was an ill-conceived idea from the get-go.

Headache 24/7
In other news, I've had a sinus headache for roughly 10-12 days straight. Yeah, as in constant, even-with-drugs-in-me headache. Becki's getting over a NASTY cold, which I think I got in mild form (just enough to give me a sinus infection, thus the headache?). Hopefully I won't even mention it in future posts.

Philanthropy Expert: Conservatives Are More Generous

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:38:56 GMT

By Frank Brieaddy
Religion News Service

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is about to become the darling of the religious right in America -- and it's making him nervous.

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

In the book, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives -- from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services -- make conservatives more generous than liberals.

The book, titled "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism" (Basic Books, $26), is due for release Nov. 24.

When it comes to helping the needy, Brooks writes: "For too long, liberals have been claiming they are the most virtuous members of American society. Although they usually give less to charity, they have nevertheless lambasted conservatives for their callousness in the face of social injustice."

For the record, Brooks, 42, has been registered in the past as a Democrat, then a Republican, but now lists himself as independent, explaining, "I have no comfortable political home."

Since 2003 he has been director of nonprofit studies for Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Outside professional circles, he's best known for his regular op-ed columns in The Wall Street Journal (13 over the past 18 months) on topics that stray a bit from his philanthropy expertise.

One noted that people who drink alcohol moderately are more successful and charitable than those who don't (like him). Another observed that liberals are having fewer babies than conservatives, which will reduce liberals' impact on politics over time because children generally mimic their parents.

Brooks is a behavioral economist by training who researches the relationship between what people do -- aside from their paid work -- why they do it, and its economic impact.

He's a number cruncher who relied primarily on 10 databases assembled over the past decade, mostly from scientific surveys. The data are adjusted for variables such as age, gender, race and income to draw fine-point conclusions.

His Wall Street Journal pieces are researched, but a little light.

His book, he says, is carefully documented to withstand the scrutiny of other academics, which he said he encourages.

The book's basic findings are that conservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure.

Conversely, secular liberals who believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to charity. They want everyone's tax dollars to support charitable causes and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when governments don't provide them with enough money.

Such an attitude, he writes, not only shortchanges the nonprofits but also diminishes the positive fallout of giving, including personal health, wealth and happiness for the donor and overall economic growth.
All of this, he said, he backs up with statistical analysis.

"These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago," he writes in the introduction. "I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book."

Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.

In an interview, Brooks said he recognizes the need for government entitlement programs, such as welfare. But in the book he finds fault with all sorts of government social spending, including entitlements.

Repeatedly he cites and disputes a line from a Ralph Nader speech to the NAACP in 2000: "A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity."

Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University and 2004 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, does not know Brooks personally but has read the book.

"His main finding is quite startling, that the people who talk the most about caring actually fork over the least," he said. "But beyond this finding I thought his analysis was extremely good, especially for an economist. He thinks very well about the reason for this and reflects about politics and morals in a way most economists do their best to avoid."

Brooks says he started the book as an academic treatise, then tightened the documentation and punched up the prose when his colleagues and editor convinced him it would sell better and generate more discussion if he did.

To make his point forcefully, Brooks admits he cut out a lot of qualifying information.

"I know I'm going to get yelled at a lot with this book," he said. "But when you say something big and new, you're going to get yelled at."

Down with Buffets

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:33:49 GMT

I have discovered what is arguably the best (or worst) example of what's wrong w/our country--all you can eat buffets! I ate lunch on Sunday with Becki and her family, who wanted to go to Ryans Steak House, and my eyes were opened!

First of all, it was expensive for what you get--$23.00 for the two of us. I gripe a bit about restaurant prices, but when you're straying over the $10.00 for a meal, I expect it to be good, which leads to the second gripe.

Second, the food isn't great, it's just average down-home cooking we could cook... well, at home. I like go out for things I CAN'T cook. So what's the point of going to a restaurant that serves such boring fare?

Third--and this is the worst--I was horror-struck by the sheer amount of food the patrons of Ryan's failed to eat from their repeated trips to the buffet line. I mean, it's ridiculous! We could feed a small country on the scraps leftover from ONE of these all-you-can eat "let's turn Americans into tubs of lard" places.

If portion size is favoring our "hardy" appetites, than the all-you-can-eat buffet has to be the quintessential representation of our insatiable gluttony. Mix that with unacceptable waste, and you have one irresponsible nation of big buffet eaters.

Down with buffets, I say!

Crazy-scary (and long) article

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:37:06 GMT

October 20, 2006

The future belongs to Islam

The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.

MARK STEYN

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

Let's start with demography, because everything does:

If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries. And they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.

For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number:

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk -- in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, "Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself." By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related. In America, politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we're piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids or grandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;

Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture. Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it's riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don't think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents -- in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim's pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism.

For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then they'll end their days in societies dominated by people with a very different world view.

Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake. As it happens, that third point is closely related to the first two. To Americans, it doesn't always seem obvious that there's any connection between the "war on terror" and the so-called "pocketbook issues" of domestic politics. But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama's famous thesis The End Of History -- written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism -- is that the victors didn't see it as such. Americans -- or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans -- may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea. With the best will in the world, it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.

In Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a droll joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATM card, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart of the metropolis within hours.

Here's another difference: in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.

And another difference: technology. In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.

But beyond that the very phrase "Indian territory" presumes that inevitably these badlands will be brought within the bounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today's "Indian territory" was relatively ordered a generation or two back -- West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That the parts of the world under pressure will turn into post-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? In Europe, the demographic pressures favour the latter.

The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.

We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the "war on terror" for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little." This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.

Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war." Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower. The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That's what makes doing anything about it even more problematic -- because different countries' reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions -- no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbour -- China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place -- like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.

Let's start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It's a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.

At first it doesn't sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you're in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is "presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labour force." For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That's when the maternity ward is open -- first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you've been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you'll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?

The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn't expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.

So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios: whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won't empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan's plant.

And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.

And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you'd grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It's like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England's early 19th century population surge but with England's Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional -- and indeed, if most of the available manpower's Muslim, it's actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestly suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is Â£20000 a head... During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: as United Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what's now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today's Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.

That's where civilizational confidence comes in: if "Dutchness" or "Frenchness" seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter's strength of will.

Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.

If America's "allies" failed to grasp the significance of 9/11, it's because Europe's home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty's Government used to call an "acceptable level of violence." But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles," the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory "of courses": of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the "good cop" end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists' demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality -- because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that's not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He's jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.

You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with -- what's the word? -- "youths." When I pointed out the media's strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-Ã -vis the rioting "youths," I received a ton of emails arguing there's no Islamist component, they're not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they're secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it's the lack of jobs, it's conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, "You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad."

Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything's about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: "youths." What's the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man's game.

In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six -- what's that word again? -- "youths" boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some 40 passengers aboard. But the "youths" were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three "youths" were arrested, and proved to be -- quelle surprise! -- of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. "You see what happens if you intervene," a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. "If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive."

No, he wouldn't. He would be as dead as those 40 passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in "their" country do Mr. Demoor's two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the -- here it comes again -- "youths." In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.

Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country's Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The "youths" get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those "youths" to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn't think so:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign -- Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens -- British subjects, citoyens de la RÃ©publique franÃ§aise. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses "only" on the Nazis' (alleged) Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis' ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.

How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant's counsel argued he couldn't get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country's patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he's too "militaristic" and "offensive to Muslims." They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George's cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow streak.

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from America Alone Â© 2006 by Mark Steyn

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