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The Vans Are Still Warm

Just after two in the morning on March 29, 1984, fifteen Mayflower moving vans pulled out of the Baltimore Colts’ complex in Owings Mills and scattered onto different highways so no single court order could catch them all. Maryland’s legislature had spent that week advancing a bill to seize the team by eminent domain, and Robert Irsay beat the bill out of the state. By sunrise the Colts belonged to Indianapolis, which had spent $77.5 million raising the Hoosier Dome on speculation, a nest built before Indiana had any bird to put in it. One landed. The city took its bows, Irsay took the building, and Baltimore took four decades of grief it can still recite by heart.

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Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst

We have a severe and dangerous water problem in the Unites States.  We’re running out of that liquid gold and there’s no way to replace what we’re using at the rate we’re using it.  We can live without oil or natural gas or electricity.  We cannot survive a week without water.

Sure, we lived through the Dust Bowl Days and the horrific droughts of the 1930’s — but that didn’t stop us from building cities in the middle of the desert and the lack of such a precious resource didn’t stop us from planting tons of trees and lots of agriculture that our water tables could not naturally support.  Now, we’re not only in danger of growing fewer crops, we’re tempting the death of our Empire in total loss swaths of our nation as water wells and aquifers naturally dry up and die. Continue reading → Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst