Congressman Schock, a Republican from Illinois thinks this country need fewer Americans and more Mexicans. Maybe he should take to wearing a  Mexican flag on his lapel. After all, he care a whole lot more about Mexican peasant than he does American citizens.

There’s an old saying about the military always preparing to fight the last war. Like all such chestnuts, it gets abused and can mean just about anything after a while. Usually when you hear it is from a retired military guy on TV criticizing something. If only the military had listened to guys like him they would not be in whatever mess they are current in at the moment. There’s another side to it, of course. The German military after World War I decided they were not going to fight that war again. Instead they worked to overcome the things that lead to their defeat.

Sometimes, a nation will learn from a war they were not involved. We see that with the Russians.

Elite Russian troops are displaying a new arsenal of body armor, individual weapons, armor-piercing ammunition and collar radios — a menu of essential gear that gives them a big tactical advantage against a lesser-equipped Ukrainian army.

If President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion, the new-generation body armor, in particular, would provide exceptional protection against small arms if Russian troops go street by street to capture Kiev and other cities.

“What we saw and what was dangled in front of the West was a clear indication that Putin is on a roll,” retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales said. “It just seems to me from watching the films that their arrows are pointing up and ours are sadly pointing down.”Weapons specialists such as Gen. Scales have been studying images of Spetsnaz, Russia’s ubiquitous special forces, and airborne troops since they conquered the Crimea region and mobilized to strike eastern Ukraine.

What they see are the fruits of a modernization plan begun in 2008, not just in tanks and vehicles but all the way down to the individual warrior. Russia now has the world’s third-highest defense budget, at over $70 billion.

“They’ve got better equipment than they had five years ago,” said Scott Traudt, an executive with Green Mountain, a Vermont gun manufacturer. “They’ve got new grenade launchers that are awesome. The helmets are better than our helmets. The body armor is better than our body armor. They’re doing a lot of things right. I’m pretty amazed at it.”

The Russians watched how American forces were able to overcome insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Superior equipment allowed for superior tactics. Instead of hunting bad guys from choppers as the Russians did in Afghanistan, the Americans could get up close and personal. Having body armor, advanced electronics and coordinated assets, the superior warrior could go right at the insurgents, without getting into a war of attrition. In Fallujah the kill ratio was 50:1. A small force can effectively neutralize a corp strength army.

Russian military tactics have always been a reflection of their history. The “deep battle” philosophy developed by the Soviets was a sort of punch-counter punch approach to war. Big sweeping victories were not the aim. Rather, the premium was on holding territory, while putting pressure on the enemy. That’s a numbers game and for a country that always looked at their people as a surplus, it made some sense. In modern mobile warfare where holding strategic assets is the key to victory, this is not a useful strategy. The change in gear suggests a change in tactics.

Mr. Traudt is paying special attention to the body armor because it presents a big challenge to rifle and munition makers. It might be able to deflect NATO’s basic 5.56 mm rifle round. If so, Ukrainian soldiers face a daunting task because their AK-74 assault rifles fire a similar munition.

The Russians, in their new 6B43 model body armor, issued chest and back plates made of titanium and hard carbide boron ceramics.

“The stuff they have is impervious to 5.56, whereas our body armor is not completely proven against their weapons,” Gen. Scales said.Gen. Scales said the Russians carry AK-74s whose magazine is loaded with 5.45 “steel core” ammunition — a round that on April 8 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned from importation because the agency deemed it armor-piercing.

Gen. Scales described the 5.45 as “extremely lethal against any kind of body armor.”

While some national leaders focus on big defense issues, Mr. Putin has taken a personal interest in one of the smallest: the rifle. Last year, his government consolidated rifle manufacturing into one new firm, the Kalashnikov Corp., named after the AK’s famous inventor, Mikhail Kalashnikov.

“Putin actually goes out and shoots these things,” Gen. Scales said.

U.S. soldiers have complained that their main rifle and round, the M4 carbine and its 5.56, lacked lethality in Afghanistan against a Taliban enemy that does not often wear body armor. Without a shot to the head, the enemy could take several 5.56 hits and keep going, soldiers said in surveys.

“If the Russians are coming across mechanized, with airborne and infantry units wearing their body armor, it basically means the Ukrainian rifles have no ability to penetrate the body armor worn by the Russian troops, meaning you’re talking about having to shoot somebody six, seven, eight times, in the chest,” Mr. Traudt said. “They’re going to get bumped, but there’s no lethality involved.”

I think it is far to assume Ivan has been watching the Americans and learning for the last decade. Instead of rolling in tanks and blowing stuff up to intimidate the enemy, they will be looking to seize strategic assets and neutralize the enemy fighters. Given the ideological drift, the goal will not be the conquest of Ukraine, but neutralization. If they can provoke a conflict, they can seize the Russian speaking regions and then gut the Ukrainian military. That effectively ends this drama.

I bought some music from Amazon yesterday. It has been a while since I have done this so I was unaware of the changes they have made to their process. Once I bought the songs, I was asked if I wanted to launch the cloud player. There was no second choice so I agreed. Then I was informed my cloud player was out of date and I was asked if I wanted to download the latest. The only choice was yes.

Eventually, the cloud player opened and I saw my songs. Nice. A little looking around at the new interface I saw that the songs were in the cloud, not on my PC. I’m a prime user, but I don’t use the cloud service. I had configured my account originally to automatically download music purchases. Amazon decided we needed to take our relationship to the next level and changed that for me.

A little fiddling and I am able to download them. Not exactly. I kept hitting the download button and nothing happened. This was starting to remind me of every long term relationship I’ve ever had with a woman. I try again and I’m informed I have to change my settings. OK, we’re definitely in a relationship now. I fiddle with this for a while and I get no where. Well, I get frustrated. I guess that is somewhere.

I take a look at where I save my music and discover it is restricted for some reason. I then remember I was trying to get my PC to talk to my XBox. In order to do that I had to have an extended exchange with Microsoft Media Center and my XBox. I probably spent two hours trying to get that to work so I could play a mp4 I got from a friend. I wanted to play it on my big screen, but I ended up watching it on my PC after two hours of dealing with Microsoft.

Somewhere in the process, Media Center locked down all of my media folders. I guess this is Microsoft telling me they are jealous of my relationship with iTunes and Amazon. And yes, iTunes was not working now because it could not read those directories. I also noticed that Media Center had created a new user on my system. I guess this is for the XBox to talk to my PC. Who knows? Microsoft is such a jealous mistress.

Anyway, I unriddle all of this and fix the permissions. I finally download my music and my transaction with Amazon is complete. I still have the cloud player on there and I have to get rid of the crappy Microsoft junk that caused all of this. The point of all this is it is getting increasingly difficult to have a transactional relationship with these companies.

I’m not interested in building a relationship with Amazon. I just want to buy my stuff and move on. The word “share” has become this screaming siren, warning you that some multinational is about to waste hours of your time trying to get to know you. By “getting to know you” I mean gathering up details about your life that they will use to “monetize” you down the road. Monetize means ease you into a situation where they get to skim money from your wallet at will and sell your personal information to other skimmers.

This is the world in which we find ourselves as “citizens” in late empire America. You cannot be left alone. If you want to do just about anything, you have to have a relationship with some company that is usually working hand and glove with the state to “nudge” you in the direction they prefer. Simple transactions like buying a song suddenly turn into elaborate time wasting exorcises instead of quick transactions between anonymous parties. The great tech boom has resulted in the exact opposite of what libertarian technologists promised thirty years ago when this started.

Steve Sailer has a fantastic breakdown of this article in the Atlantic. The article is tedious, but Steve’s deconstruction is well worth the time it takes to read it. I’ve been meaning to post something about the piece, but I have not been able to plow through it. By nature and habit I am a deliberate reader. Wading through what will surely be emotive slop is hard for me.

It is why I rarely read anything written by women. Women want to share experiences and talk about them. Men want to see facts and state opinions about them. That does not mean all male writers are Spock-like in the prose. it’s that many lack the emotional baggage train that I find uninteresting.

Steve’s comment on this bit from the article

… In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools ….

is what is what I want to discuss. Steve responds, “In other words, the North was traditionally segregated spatially, while the South was segregated socially.”

Let’s back up here a second. The author, a black woman by the way, is writing for a northern publication about “resegregation” in the South, when she fully admits the north is vastly more segregated than the South. If I did not know better, I’d assume this is a very clever prank by someone trying to illustrate the blinkered idiocy of northern white liberals.

According to the author’s resume, she lives in Brooklyn, a place that is actively driving out black people so upper middle-class whites can live in trendy neighborhoods. She grew up in Iowa, went to Notre Dame and then went to UNC for a masters. Her choice of majors tells me she grew up middle-class or better. Her knowledge of the South and experience with the underclass can probably be written on a napkin.

I don’t want to get who/whom here. Outsiders often make the best observers as they lack the emotional blinkers of insiders. Her observations could very well be better than those of someone of the South and deeply familiar with the underclass. As Steve illustrates, what we’re getting here is the same old liberal platitudes about race dressed up with some statistics and stories.In other words, the story was written before she started gathering personal accounts, anecdotes and statistics.

The point is not to inform, but to confirm. Nikole Hannah-Jones is playing the same side of the street as Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a performance piece intended to flatter the all white northern liberal readership of The Atlantic. I bet town meetings in Iceland have more diversity than the readership of the Atlantic. It is not just super-white, it is culturally monolithic. Ms. Jones seems to have figured this out and parlayed that into a nice payday.

There is a theory I find compelling called The Smart Fraction Theory. The very short version of it is that every human society has a distribution  of IQ’s ranging from retarded to genius. These are absolute terms. Some populations have a high number of people, relative to human populations as a whole, with above average and better IQ’s. At the other end, some societies have a relatively low number of above average and better IQ’s. The former groups have rocketed ahead of the latter groups. The latter groups, in some cases, were still hunter-gatherers until contact with the Dutch.

There’s a lot more to it, a lot more, but that’s a useful shorthand for what I’m going for here. The point being is the smart fraction exerts upward pressure on society. The larger and more capable that fraction, the better able they are to drag the whole of society upward. If the fraction is too small, you get Zimbabwe or Uganda or Detroit. The smart fraction, unable to lift the whole of society, sets themselves up as a ruling elite, plundering what they can from society. It is why all the money in the world will not change the character of these societies.

There’s another fraction, one that is at the heart of what ails the West. That’s the nuisance segment. Whenever I’m out in public, I can’t help noticing some fool being himself and causing the rest of us to work around him in some fashion. For example, I was at my favorite lunch place the other day. It is a fancy SWPL grocery store with a cafe of sorts. The cafe is mostly a big buffet, but buffets are working class so they splash the word “cafe” all over the place and stock the bar with weird stuff from foreign lands. The most popular food is the typical American stuff, but the sushi and Indian food makes everyone feel better.

Anyway, there’s not a ton of room for people to navigate the serving areas. Inevitably, there will be a few mothers with baby carriages mucking up the works. A few vibrant people will be there with grocery carriages jamming up the walkways. As a result the store has had to rearrange the place  a few times to try and get ahead of the nuisance segment. They have been mostly successful, but the cost of these idiots is inevitably spread to the rest of us. The store’s efforts are not cost free and that cost is reflected in their prices. Every store and business in America faces the same problems. If every cost that made up the price of a product was listed, “stupid people’ would be on there somewhere.

On every product in your house, you will find a warning label. On the shampoo bottle I have in my hand, there are two paragraphs explaining what not to do with it. No one expects the stupid to read these labels, of course. Someone dumb enough to drink shampoo or shove the bottle up their arse is not going to read the warning label. It is just to inoculate the company from the inevitable. The stupid will hire a lawyer and sue if they manage to find some way to abuse the shampoo that was not listed on the bottle. The direct cost of litigation is 2% in America. The cost in warning labels is equal that or more. The stupid cost us at least 5% of GDP a year in direct costs.

That’s not the end of it. The regulatory bureaucracy which is the direct result of the nuisance fraction is enormous. So far Obama has added 12,000 pages of regulations to the quarter million or so already on the books. The exact number and nature of Federal crimes has now reached the point where it cannot be counted.  We are perilously close to the point where it is just assumed that everything is a violation of the law. In such a land, there are no laws. The people inevitably respond accordingly.

That’s just the federal level. In every state we have thousands of rules for diving, all of them aimed at the nuisance fraction. That means an army of soldiers cops making sure some dimwit is not texting while driving or operating his care in a reckless manner. Probably half of the cost of government is due to the people who simply refuse to do the obvious.

Reading first millennium history, one thing that jumps out to me is the high cost of being foolish. This was especially true of the elites. King Peada was murdered by his wife because he foolishly thought his connection with Oswiu, through his marriage to his daughter Alchflaed, would protect him. History of this period is full of examples where small mistakes in judgment resulted in death, often gruesome death. The nitwits pushing a cart through the buffet line never would have made it to adulthood in that era. Today, their wellbeing is the focus of much of our activity as a society. We even give away our liberty to protect them.

At some point, this is going to catch up with us.

This is a very interesting post on Russia and what’s going on in Eurasia. It is one of the rare times I’ve seen a public intellectual make mention of the peculiar American habit of assuming everyone is just like us. Despite the yapping about diversity and vibrancy, American elites see the world as a reflection of their idealized selves. When they look pout at the world they think, “They want what we want, they hate what we hate and they will be just like us if give the chance.” It is what led to the folly in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years. The entire foreign policy of Obama is best described as a mix of naivete and incompetence. It’s as if Obama and his team were dropped in from another planet and are just starting to figure out that humans come in more than one style.

I’ll elaborate what Putinism actually is, but before I do, it’s important to understand why President Obama and countless other Westerners cannot see what is right before them. Putin and the Kremlin actively parrot their propaganda, they are doing anything but hide it, yet we still cannot make it out.

This is simply because we are WEIRD. That’s social science shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic – and nobody is WEIRDer than Americans. In the last several decades many Americans, and essentially all our elites, have internalized a worldview based on affluence, individualism, and secularism that makes us unique, globally speaking. So much so that we seem unable to comprehend that there actually are opposing viewpoints out there.

Barack Obama, by virtue of his diverse ethnic and religious background and elite education, is almost an ideal stand-in for the WEIRD demographic, as he embodies so many things WEIRDos admire: education, affluence, diversity, progressive social views, etc. He comes close to being almost the perfect post-modern American, which perhaps is why so many Americans of that bent adore him deeply. Thus when President Obama says he detects no ideological rivalry with Putin’s Russia, he undoubtedly speaks the truth as he sees it.

Americans of all stripes have a well-honed ability to ignore inconvenient facts, and our better educated citizens seem particularly prone to this (as I noted with our “expert” inability to see what North Korea believes, even though they aren’t shy about it). At root, I suspect Obama and many Americans refuse to accept the in-our-face reality of Putin and his regime because they represent a past version of ourselves, caught up in retrograde views that are entirely unacceptable to our elites, therefore they pretend they do not exist, because they don’t actually exist in their world.

Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he’s what they thought they’d gotten past. He’s a traditional male with “outmoded” views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons – and he hates us.

Steve Sailer has pointed out quite a few times that American elites seem to have the biggest problem with Putin over homosexuals. Over the last two decades, having a homosexual on your piety bracelet has been the hallmark of progressive fashion. It is so well established now that it is inconceivable to them that any civilized person would have a contrary opinion on homosexual marriage, homosexual rights and so forth. It is why young males today work so hard to adopt bathhouse fashion, going so far as to get beard transplants so they can look like a young George Michael.

Of course, this also happens to explain why some Westerners who loathe post-modernism positively love Putin, at least from a safe distance. Some far-right Westerners – the accurate term is paleoconservatives – have been saying for years that the West, led very much by America, has become hopelessly decadent and they’ve been looking for a leader to counter all this, and – lo and behold – here he is, the new “leader of global conservatism.” Some paleocons have stated that, with the end of the Cold War, America has become the global revolutionary power, seeking to foist its post-modern views on the whole planet, by force if necessary, and now Putin’s Russia has emerged as the counterrevolutionary element. Cold War 2.0, in this telling, has the sides reversed.

I’m skeptical of all that, but it is important to note that the post-modernism about cultural and social matters that has become the default setting in the West in the last couple decades has had a hard time putting down roots in Eastern Europe. It’s an odd fact that living under the Old Left (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) inoculated Eastern Europeans from much of the New Left of the 1960s and after, with its emphasis on gender, sexuality, and race. “Critical Studies” didn’t get far with people who had to live under the KGB; indeed, East Bloc secret police in the 1980s viewed all this – the feminism and the gay rights stuff especially – as bourgeois deviance and a subversive Western import. Since 1990, Western countries have made actual efforts to import that, but it’s met a lot of resistance, and doesn’t make much of an impression outside educated circles; which is why when educated Westerners meet, say, educated Poles, “they seem just like us” – because they have accepted, verbatim, what we’ve told them is normative in a “developed” society.

Since as far back as we have records, “religion” and “culture” have been tangled up together. The Vikings, for example, lacked a word for religion. They had two words that roughly meant “cult” but did not carry the connotation they do today. The word “custom” is more accurate. People had private customs for how they appeased the gods. These were limited the family, the clan and the village. Public customs were how everyone participated in worship of the gods. These “customs” were intimately tangled up in the identity of the people. It is how they defined themselves and gave meaning and purpose to their lives. It was why they got up in the morning, so to speak.

The Russians had a perfectly good set of customs that defined who they were as people. Bolshevism came along and obliterated much of it, but replaced it with a new religion, Marxist-Leninism. Here we are two decades after the fall of communism and the Russians seem to be settling on a set of replacements. They tried liberal democracy in the 1990′s and into the 2000′s. That resulted in falling birth rates, drug abuse, Americans adopting what few children they had and humiliation on the world stage. Whatever you want to call this new organizing faith, it clearly is a rejection of American Progressivism.

Resisting Western post-modernism on a cultural level is but one component of Putinism, albeit an important one. What comes first, however, is an emphasis on national sovereignty, meaning a more traditional, indeed Westphalian, view of state power and non-interference in others’ affairs. That Putin has stolen Crimea indicates that Moscow’s views on this are highly conditional. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Putin’s regular incantations of the need for respect for sovereignty, which are of course aimed directly at the United States, which Russia views as a hypocrite of the highest order in international affairs, are popular among other regional powers who fear U.S. military might, especially China and India. Moreover, Putin would no doubt argue that his seizing Crimea is in no way a violation of sovereignty since Ukraine is not a legitimate country in the first place (an interview last year where Putin referred to Ukraine as a mere “territory” did not get the attention abroad that it merited). For most Russians, all this falls under the need to restore national honor after the disasters of the 1990s, and is to be applauded heartily. Additionally, there are plenty of people in the world who don’t like Putin or Russia, yet who are happy that someone, somewhere is standing up to American hegemony.

Nationalism matters too. This is a tricky issue in Russia, which possesses some 185 recognized ethnic groups and many religions, with ethnic Russians making up but four-fifths of the population, and that figure is declining. Until recently, Putin had done a good job of promoting state patriotism and a Muscovite sort of multiculturalism that celebrates citizens of the Russian Federation, of any ethnicity or religion, as long as they accept Kremlin rule; that this bears little resemblance to post-modern Western notions of “tolerance” and “diversity” should be obvious. All the same, hardline Russian ethno-nationalists, local equivalents of David Duke, have regularly faced arrest in Putin’s Russia, which has feared setting off ethnic disputes that could turn explosive quickly.

Yet the reconquest of Crimea has caused a clear change of tone in Moscow, with celebration of old fashioned Russian nationalism coming into fashion. In his speech to the Duma announcing the triumphant annexation of Crimea, when speaking of Russians, Putin specifically used the ethnic term – russkiy –  not the more inclusive rossiyskiy, which applies to all citizens of the Russian Federation. This came among incantations to the full Great Russian program, with a Moscow-centric view of Eastern Europe seemingly endorsed by mentions of great Orthodox saints. Unstated yet clearly, this was all of a piece with “Third Rome” ideology, a powerful admixture of Orthodoxy, ethnic mysticism, and Slavophile tendencies that has deep resonance in Russian history.

Westerners seemed shocked by this “Holy Russia” stuff, but Putin has been dropping unsubtle hints for years that his state ideology includes a good amount of this back-to-the-future thinking, cloaked in piety and nationalism. Western “experts”  continue to state that a major influence here is Aleksandr Dugin, an eccentric philosopher who espouses “Eurasianism,” an odd blend of geopolitical theory and neo-fascism. While Dugin is not irrelevant, his star at the Kremlin actually faded a decade ago, though he gets some Kremlin attention because his father was a GRU general. Far more important to divining Putin’s worldview, however, is Ivan Ilyin, a Russian political and religious thinker who fled the Bolsheviks and died an emigre in Switzerland in 1953. In exile, Ilyin espoused ethnic-religious neo-traditionalism, amidst much talk about a unique “Russian soul.” Germanely, he believed that Russia would recover from the Bolshevik nightmare and rediscover itself, first spiritually then politically, thereby saving the world. Putin’s admiration for Ilyin is unconcealed: he has mentioned him in several major speeches and he had his body repatriated and buried at the famous Donskoy monastery with fanfare in 2005; Putin personally paid for a new headstone. Yet despite the fact that even Kremlin outlets note the importance of Ilyin to Putin’s worldview, not many Westerners have noticed.

This is fundamentally why Obama has been repeatedly humiliated by Putin. It is not simply that Obama is a thumbless klutz. While it is true that American foreign policy is run by rather foolish people with little going for them other than useless credentials, the real reason is Putin needs to do it. His NYTimes piece after outfoxing Obama over Syria was more than a victory lap. It was a signal to his people that he is not just smarter than the American leader. Putin is different in kind from the Americans and their European toadies. A part of building his new culture in Russia is defining it as different and, of course, uniquely Russian. The fact that it is a winner closes the sale.

Historians generally point to the Whiskey Rebellion as the point at which the American public accepted the authority of the new federal government. The aftermath established the limits to and avenues for resisting the federal government. You could organize to get your people in Congress, but you could not burn down the local offices and hang the federal agents. In other words, the people had embraced the authority of the new government and legitimate and therefor defensible. That last bit is important. It implies ownership.

The Civil War, on the other hand, ushered in a new relationship between the citizen and the national government. The states, despite maintaining the fiction, were no longer sovereign. If you cannot leave the union, you are not sovereign. That’s not difficult to understand. What is difficult to grasp is it undermined the foundation of the Republic. The government created by the Founders pitted the power of sovereign states against the power of the federal government. Certain rights were granted to each exclusively. The idea being that this tension would put limits on both, thus providing the maximum amount of liberty to the people.

Here were are 150 years on and this broken relationship staggers on. The reason for this is that America is a big country with loads of resources. Being rich and powerful cures a lot of ills. There’s a limit to this papering over the problem and we may be reaching that limit. The Bundy Ranch imbroglio is possibly a hint of what’s to come. Wealthy interests allied with powerful members of the national government are stealing the property of citizens. All the technical nonsense aside, that’s what is going on here. Harry Reid has a long history of doing land deals with gangsters. The man is a criminal, in addition to being Senate President.

That’s what is going on these days. Gangsters operating at the national level are looting the American economy. The trouble with that is the states. More than half of the states are effectively bankrupt. That is, they are not able to meet their cash requirements. They borrow to cover the gaps, but that only delays the inevitable. As public pension liabilities come home, the crisis will overcome the state’s ability to pay. According to the numbers, 32 states have been borrowing from the Fed to make ends meet. Demographics tells us the problem is just starting. Simple mathematics says it must get much worse.

In order to avoid collapse, states will be looking around for money. They will be looking at the state resources that Harry Reid wants to sell off to China. This means we are heading to a very serious problem. The states are already making noises about regaining control of their lands.

It’s time for Western states to take control of federal lands within their borders, lawmakers and county commissioners from Western states said at Utah’s Capitol on Friday.

More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-, timber -and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.

“It’s simply time,” said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. “The urgency is now.”

Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was flanked by a dozen participants, including her counterparts from Idaho and Montana, during a press conference after the daylong closed-door summit. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee addressed the group over lunch, Ivory said. New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington also were represented.

The summit was in the works before this month’s tense standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing, Lockhart said.

“What’s happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Lockhart said.

Fielder, who described herself as “just a person who lives in the woods,” said federal land management is hamstrung by bad policies, politicized science and severe federal budget cuts.

“Those of us who live in the rural areas know how to take care of lands,” Fielder said, who lives in the northwestern Montana town of Thompson Falls.

“We have to start managing these lands. It’s the right thing to do for our people, for our environment, for our economy and for our freedoms,” Fielder said.

Idaho Speaker of the House Scott Bedke said Idaho forests and rangeland managed by the state have suffered less damage and watershed degradation from wildfire than have lands managed by federal agencies.

“It’s time the states in the West come of age,” Bedke said. “We’re every bit as capable of managing the lands in our boundaries as the states east of Colorado.”

Ivory said the issue is of interest to urban as well as rural lawmakers, in part because they see oilfields and other resources that could be developed to create jobs and fund education.

Moreover, the federal government’s debt threatens both its management of vast tracts of the West as well as its ability to come through with payments in lieu of taxes to the states, he said. Utah gets 32 percent of its revenue from the federal government, much of it unrelated to public lands.

“If we don’t stand up and act, seeing that trajectory of what’s coming … those problems are going to get bigger,” Ivory said.

He was the sponsor two years of ago of legislation, signed by Gov. Gary Herbert, that demands the federal government relinquish title to federal lands in Utah. The lawmakers and governor said they were only asking the federal government to make good on promises made in the 1894 Enabling Act for Utah to become a state.

The intent was never to take over national parks and wilderness created by an act of Congress Lockhart said. “We are not interested in having control of every acre,” she said. “There are lands that are off the table that rightly have been designated by the federal government.”

A study is underway at the University of Utah to analyze how Utah could manage the land now in federal control. That was called for in HB142, passed by the 2013 Utah Legislature.

None of the other Western states has gone as far as Utah, demanding Congress turn over federal lands. But five have task forces or other analyses underway to get a handle on the costs and benefits, Fielder said.

“Utah has been way ahead on this,” Fielder said.

In fairness, there’s a bit of emotion and romanticism at work here. But, money is at the root of the issue. The federal government owns a lot of land. That land has value the states would like to exploit. The resulting collision is inevitable. Bandits like Harry Reid versus the states. Maybe this time we can address the errors of Lincoln.

I have nothing to add to this. I just thought it was hilarious for some reason.

Ten-man Mohammedan Sporting lost 4-5 to Shillong Lajong in arguably one of the most entertaining games of the season. Ashim Biswas had handed the home side an early lead which was soon cancelled by Cornell Glen from the spot with Luis Barretto getting his marching orders. The first half finished with Lajong leading 3-2 but goals from Josimar Da Silva once again gave hope to the Kolkata outfit. However goals from Subash Singh and Glen gave them a two-goal advantage. Josimar did manage to pull one back but they failed to capitalise on the chances that came their way and hence missed out on three points.

Sanjoy Sen decided to start with Josimar Da Silva upfront with Penn Orji operating from behind while Ashim Biswas and Basanta Singh were the two wingers.

Thangboi Singto had Cornell Glen operating as the lone striker while Uilliams Silva was lurking behind in a number ten role.

The away side were out of the blocks the quicker of the two as Uilliams pushed on past Dhanarajan with a quick burst of acceleration but could not get a cross in the box.

However Mohammedan opened the scoring through Ashim Biswas in the fifth minute itself after he snuck in at the far post and headed in a peach of a cross from Basanta Singh.

The Black and Whites had two more chances before the tenth minute which they wasted. Josimar who jostled his way past Minchol Son before scuffing his final shot and later, it was Penn Orji who tried to hit a half volley from the edge of the box after Phoolchand Hembram played him on.

Disaster struck for Mohammedan in the 12th minute as Luis Baretto was sent off for tripping Boithang Haokip in the penalty box after Dhanarajan was easily beaten in possession. It was a slightly contentious sending off as Dhanarajan had sprinted back to cover at the goal-line.

Cornell Glen made no mistake and sent substitute goalkeeper Ashok Singh the wrong way, dispatching the penalty with ease in the 15th minute.

Manish Maithani managed to slice the ball over, from close range in the 19th minute after Josimar cushioned a header towards him from a Penn Orji free kick.

Shillong made their numerical advantage count and took the lead in the 29th minute as Subash Singh was first to the ball after Uilliams Silva crossed from the byline on the left giving Ashok Singh no chance.

Mohammedan wasted no time and equalised five minutes later after some good work from Josimar who held the ball on the left before cutting in and placing it onto Penn’s path whose mishit saw the ball loop over the goalkeeper into the back of the net.

Josimar could have given the home side the lead just two minutes later as he managed to go down the right but his shot across the goal was tipped wide by Lalthuammawia Ralte who was at full stretch.

However Cornell Glen had the last laugh before the end of the first half as he completed his brace in the 43rd minute after beautifully turning in Robin Gurung’s cross from the right and that was without taking a second touch.

Mohammedan made their intentions know at the start of the second half. A long ball from midfield found Josimar taking Fanai for a spin on the right before smashing it past a helpless Ralte to bring the game on level terms.

The Brazilian had two further chances as he darted down the right but on both occasions, Ralte came to the rescue as he managed to make himself big to save the day.

Sanjoy Sen’s men had a glorious opportunity to get into the lead as Lallawmzuala had tripped Josimar in the penalty box as he was about to shoot. Luciano Sobrosa stepped up to take the spot kick but Ralte guessed right and pulled off a stunning save at the hour mark.

Lajong made them pay for the missed chance as Uilliams sent in a free kick after Glen was fouled. Minchol Son cushioned a header towards an unmarked Subash Singh who smashed it in to give his team the lead for the third time now in the 69th minute.

Glen left Sobrosa sprawling on the ground before being shaken off the ball by Mehrajuddin Wadoo. The ensuing rebound from Seikhohao Tuboi only found the post before hitting Ashok Singh and going out for a corner.

From the ensuing corner-kick, Glen completed his hat trick as he smashed home a perfect Uilliams delivery from the left.

The game was lit up again after Penn turned brilliantly on the half line before accelerating past his marker and put in an inch perfect through ball for Josimar to chase who this time made no mistake and smashed it past Ralte who was off his line with about ten minutes to go.

The nine goal thriller somehow was goal less for the last ten minutes as the inspired Mohammedan comeback was cut short as Shillong held on to take it 5-4. The defeat leaves them with 21 points with only a solitary match to go.

Diversity sounds good until you lose your Shillong to ten sporting Mohammedans or something.

Religions are not tolerant things. In fact, they are extremely intolerant. They have to be. Otherwise, what would be the point? A religion, after all, is a set of rules. Adherents agree, as a condition of admission to the faith, to follow a list of rules. Catholics, for example, have a list of things they cannot do and a list of things they must do. The former includes things like the use of birth control and sex outside of marriage. The latter is contained in the Catechism as a list of precepts of the Church. Weekly attendance at mass, yearly confession, communion at Easter and so on.

Like a baseball team, if you cannot or will not obey the rules, you can’t be on the team. There can be no tolerance for breaking the rules as a matter of logic. Things, including religion, are defined by their limits. A baseball team has uniforms and they must show up at certain times and do certain things. If they can dress as they please, they are not a team. They are a bunch of guys in a park.

Religions also have an obligation to recruit new members. If you believe your way of doing things leads to salvation, the afterlife, eternal bliss or even just a discount at the local deli, you are obligated to encourage others to join. The reason for that is simple logic. If your customs are the right ones, rational people will want to join you. The test of that is to recruit new members to your faith.

The exception would be those based on race. Black Muslims will not be recruiting me to their faith. Jews do no recruiting. Norse pagans were not interested in spreading their faith for a number of reasons, but primarily because they saw their gods as unique to them. With the exceptions noted, the general rule holds. Religions are covetous and seek to push out other faiths and dominate society.

We see this with the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Everywhere it tries to chase off its primary competitor, Christianity. America is a country founded by Christians. The founders, with a few exceptions, took their religion quite seriously and they wanted the people to do likewise. They were men of their times and understood the danger of state religion. Continental Europe tore itself to pieces over state religion. The Thirty Years War left parts of Europe depopulated. Other parts were reduced to cannibalism. There was also the suppression of Catholics by Protestant monarchs and the persecution of Protestants by Catholics. A limited government, in the minds of the Founders, could have no opinion about the religion of the people.

To the Founders, it clearly meant that the national government would be indifferent to religion. The states had official religions and the people, could and should insist on members of their faith running their communities. As the ideas of the French Revolution (and later its demented heirs in the form of socialism and communism) washed up on the shores of America, the new religion was born and spread amongst the ruling classes. This is the religion we call liberalism today. Unlike the exhausted Christian sects, it had no interest in living alongside other religions. Like Islam, it was aggressive and determined.

Thus the war on Christianity has been with us for a long time now. Few members of the ruling class are Christian. Even the Jews are the cafeteria style Jews. The religion of the ruling class is liberalism, a mix of socialism, managerial-authoritarianism and cultural Marxism. Because it is a pagan faith, the rules are always changing, but one thing never changes. That’s the continued focus on Christianity as the enemy of the faith. No matter how much Christianity fades from public life, they will continue to hunt it wherever they can.

Way back in the olden thymes when the Cult was starting to ban Christianity from schools and public places, Christians made the argument that it was part of a larger assault on their religion. First it was kicking Christmas out of public buildings and then it would be banning Christianity from private life.

This was laughed off with the claim that “freedom from religion” was ensured in the Bill of Rights. They would wave around Jefferson’s off-hand comments to the Danbury Baptists as proof. The fact that Jefferson did not have a hand in writing the Constitution because his peers largely thought he was a bit of a weirdo by that point was never mentioned. As we always see with paganism, appeals to authority are never rational.

It looks like the Christians were right all along. The Cult’s assault on middle class health care arrangements has provisions designed to weaken Christianity. Forcing Catholic charities, for example to fund things they believe are sins has nothing to do with health and everything to do with religion. What the cult learned about their destruction of Protestant sects like Episcopalianism is that once you stop enforcing the rules, people stop showing up. It turns out that decent people are not all that interested in being ministered to by sodomites.

They also learned that banning public displays of Christianity makes it really hard to get and keep members. That’s what is behind this new front opened by some outfit ironically calling itself The Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has sent a letter of complaint to Clemson University, citing “constitutional concerns about how the public university’s football program is entangled with religion.”

According to the foundation, Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney has promoted a culture in the program that violates constitutional stipulations of the separation of church and state.

No, he has promoted the wrong culture. That’s really what this is about. If he were preaching about the joys of sodomy, you can be sure the Cult would applaud him for promoting their culture.

The foundation said it had submitted an open records request in February and reviewed emails and published articles.

The foundation, a national nonprofit educational charity based in Madison, Wis., says it is the nation’s largest association of atheists and agnostics. According to Elliott, the organization does not intend to infringe on Swinney’s beliefs, but to ensure that the players’ constitutional rights are protected.

The foundation has recommended the elimination of Clemson’s chaplaincy position, currently held by former Clemson player James Trapp. It contends that Swinney and Trapp have used their positions in the program to proselytize, by arranging Bible studies, organizing devotionals and distributing Bibles and other religious materials.

“What we have observed in the records is that the football coaching staff is doing a number of things to promote Christianity to their student-athletes,” foundation staff attorney Patrick Elliott said.

“While student-athletes can pray, conduct Bible studies and engage in religious activities, the coaching staff, as public employees, should not be doing that with their student athletes.

In other words, Christianity must be banned from all public places. What logically must follow is you cannot be a Christian outside your home. After all, if a bunch of Christians were employed at a firm and were permitted to be Christian outside of their home, wherever they congregated, like the office, would take on the culture of Christianity. That, under the rules of liberalism, is forbidden. therefore, the only solution is to restrict the practice of Christianity to the home and approved places of worship.

What comes next is the last bit. If you cannot be a Christian outside, your worship houses cannot be Christian outside either. Unless Christian wise up, it will not be long before zoning boards dominated by ululating lunatics from the Cult begin banning crosses and other religious iconography from public view. If “freedom from religion” is to be taken seriously, how can such public displays ever be tolerated?

My advise to Christians on Good Friday is to think about what lies ahead and where you will draw the line. It is at that point things will change.

We in the West have our biases like any other people. We like to think we have a wide-eyed view of the world, but that’s nonsense. Humans are as much a product of their culture as of their genetic, both of which are thoroughly tangled up with one another. One of the more hilarious things about the Cult is they are convinced they are the exception to this bit of biology. It is why they chant about ethnocentrism and diversity. Yet, as our elites make war on the rest of the world’s cultures, they barely stop to listen to the complaints from those cultures. The recent troubles in the Ukraine are one such case.

Another is the Middle East, particularly Islam. This story from Iran is a good example. In the West, it has been a matter of faith that we have too many humans. Therefore, setting up abortion mills in the schools, putting girls on birth control and severely limiting our “carbon footprint” are ways to thin the herd. It’s eugenics with a smiley face. It’s also worked. If you look at the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) by country, you see that the West is well below replacement just about everywhere. The US is right at replacement, but that includes high birth rates amongst non-Asian minorities. White birthrates are well below replacement.

Our nuts happen to think this is just a good start. They used to be public about it, but today they are more circumspect. Still, they would like to see the population decimated. Iran, particularly, and the rest of Islam generally is of a different mind. Iran has a TFR of 1.67 and that may be overstated. Persians are the majority population, but not the only population. Their TFR is much lower than the whole.

Iran’s parliament is seeking a ban on vasectomies and a tightening of abortion rules as the country moves away from its progressive laws on family planning in an attempt to increase the birthrate.

Two decades after Iran initiated an effective birth control programme, including subsidised male sterilisation surgeries and free condom distribution, the country is to make a U-turn.

Last year the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticised existing policy on contraception, describing it as an imitation of western lifestyle.

The 74-year-old has urged the government to tackle what he believes to be an ageing population and to double the number of people in Iran from 77 million to at least 150 million.

This week Tehran’s conservative-dominated parliament, the Majlis, voted to discuss banning vasectomies and introducing punishments for those involved in encouraging contraceptive services and abortions, local agencies reported.

The semi-official Fars news agency reported that an overwhelming majority of Iranian MPs had consented to consider the bill. Given the influence of Khamenei among MPs, the proposals are likely to pass.

“If we move forward like this, we will be a country of elderly people in a not too distant future,” Khamenei said in October, according to Fars. “Why do some [couples] prefer to have one … or two children? Why do men or women avoid having children through different means?

That’s what the numbers tell us. In fact, Islam in general is headed for a demographic nightmare never seen on this planet. They have stopped making babies. This comes after a couple of decades of astronomical birth rates. The result is nations full of young middle-aged people right now. Two decades from now it means nations full of people on the cusp of old age. In the West, technology and stored wealth will permit us to get past the Baby Boom retirement without societal collapse – maybe. In Iran, this is not a possibility.

In America, Iran’s obsession with babies seems strange and barbaric, but they are actually ahead of the game a little. I’m fond of pointing out that you can’t run a society very long without children. If you doubt that, go as a Shaker. I think there are a handful left in New England somewhere.If the cradles are empty, the future is bleak for any species, including humans. Despite what the Cult believes, this is immutable biology.

That’s what Iran gets and what the Russians get. Putin is further ahead in this game because he knows something the Iranians can’t quite grasp. That is the old Greek saying. “A successful people have old men who plant trees in whose shade they will never rest.” In other words, men who think their decedents will remember them act differently than men who can’t imagine having decedents. A whole lot of men in Russia see no reason to have decedents and that’s what Putin is trying to change. Ukraine is a means, not an end. Iran is now searching for a reason to give their young, so they will have children.