catching up on a few things

Europe has their own brand of crazy juice

Anytime someone has an excuse to use this phrase: "....would require improbably heroic levels of fornication....", I am all for it. Reminds me of the Mensa episode on the Simpsons. "Breeding will be undertaken every 7 years. For some of you this will mean much less breeding. For some of us, much, much more." I've yet to follow how the same types of people who will easily dismiss Malthusian projections about economics and population growth then turn around and accept in their open wide mouth breathing way projections about birth rate demographic trends of immigrants, particularly "undesired" immigrants in the flavor of the month (Mexicans here, Arabs or Muslims there). Every such trend when closely examined is erased by matching declines in naturalised immigrants' birth rates or by public consternation stirring up public plots to increase domestic child production (Russia's big on this). "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue, hey!" That's pretty much what these people are saying by looking at present data to determine a trendline in the future. Despite every evidence that suggests that trend line is unsustainable, already reversing, and probably irrelevant relative to any problems that may be caused by an influx of Islamic migrants.

Voting is not democracy

I already have to explain this problem all the time when people make this point about elections in Iraq. They have elections in Lebanon and Palestine too. They're even internationally monitored and observed and they elect people from Hizballah or Hamas (Lebanon remarkably turned aside Hizballah politically rather recently at least). Voting, even in America, does not automatically defend democratic traditions of human rights. Democracy itself requires a good deal of groundwork, such as the development of institutional practices that monitor or defend various human rights. It's not exactly something you learn to practice as a nation by picking up a civics book and pushing some buttons at a polling station. Of course, this is America where we do neither of the two, trying to explain such things to other places where they perfectly well understand "elections", they just don't understand democracy.