The population implosion

 A couple featured in the NYTimes live in separate homes and do not have children.  Americans are not reproducing themselves and will eventually die out as a result.  The invasion of people crossing the Southern border could replace the children Americans are not having.  The problem is that the South American birth rate is only slightly above 2, which is not good enough.  However, the invasion is not just South Americans but also trekkers from Africa, where women have an average of 4.2 children. 

Demographics is destiny.  One of the reasons Russia is having military problems is that they are short of men.  Their fertility rate is 1.6, which means they are dying out and lack the manpower for sustained war.   They’re drafting retirees to fight.

The American fertility rate is roughly the same: 1.6.  This is not a big problem for today’s retirees.  But it is for people in their 20s or 30s who may want to retire and collect their social security benefits.  Sub-Saharan Africa has by far the highest fertility rate. If current trends continue, my grandchildren may depend on the benevolence of the grandchildren of Africans crossing the Southern border, who will continue to spend enough time together to reproduce.

Forget about global warming.  The end of Western Civilization will come from ideas born on the pages of the NY Times.

Drudge headline: Prince William warns there are too many people in world...

Reason for the Electoral College

Seven Big Failed Environmentalist Predictions

Over at The Federalist we are reminded that the environmental doomsayers have been spectacularly wrong too many times to be readily believed.  Here are a few excerpts, read the whole thing.

1) Global Cooling
A list like this has to start with the “climate change” catastrophe the environmentalists were all warning about in the 1970s: global cooling and a descent into a new ice age. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

As late as 1980, Carl Sagan was still presenting global cooling as one of two possible doomsday scenarios we could choose from.

2) Overpopulation
When environmentalists said that we were destroying the Earth, they meant it directly and literally. The biggest problem was the very existence of humans, the fact that there were just too darned many of us. We were going to keep growing unchecked, and we were going to swarm the surface of the Earth like locusts, destroying everything in our path until we eventually used it all up.

There were going to be an inconceivable seven billion people on Earth by the year 2000, and there was just no way we could support them all.

3) Mass Starvation
Predictions of global famine were part of the population growth hysteria, but they were such a big part that they deserve their own separate treatment.

My favorite failed prediction is this one, from Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.

4) Resource Depletion
In addition to running out of food, we were also supposed to run out of natural resources, such as nickel and copper, and above all we were running out of oil.

Here’s our friend Kenneth Watt again, with his present trends continuing: “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

5) Mass Extinction
At the first Earth Day, its political sponsor, Senator Gaylord Nelson, warned: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

6) Renewable Energy
This isn’t a prediction about a disaster that didn’t happen. It’s a prediction about a solution that never materialized. Don’t worry about the fact that we want to shut down fossil fuels and dirty coal, we were told, because there’s a bright new future from “Renewable Energy.”

But all of the alternatives we were promised fall into two categories. There are those that are still too unreliable and expensive; Germany is about to be crushed by the massive cost of its renewable energy boondoggle. And then there are those which have gone from being the alternative championed by environmentalists to being the targets of the environmentalist anger. This is by far the most common trajectory. [Shale oil, hydroelectric, wind farms] Now, even large-scale solar energy is under attack. And I’m still waiting for environmentalists to figure out exactly what goes in to those solar panels.

7) Global Warming
Which brings us back to global warming. I noted last week that after a multi-decade plateau in global temperatures, they are now at or below the low end of the range for all of the computer models that predicted global warming.

If we go full circle, back to the failed prediction of global cooling, we can see the wider trend. After two or three decades of cooling temperatures, from the 1940s to 1970, environmentalists project a cooling trend—only to have the climate change on them. After a few decades of warmer temperatures, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, they all jumped onto the bandwagon of projecting a continued warming trend—and the darned climate changed again, staying roughly flat since about 1998.

But by now you can get an idea for the major outlines of an environmental hysteria. The steps are: a) start with assumption that man is “ravaging the Earth,” b) latch onto an unproven scientific hypothesis that fits this preconception, c) extrapolate wildly from half-formed theories and short-term trends to predict a future apocalypse, d) pressure a bunch of people with “Ph.D.” after their names to endorse it so you can say it’s a consensus of experts, e) get the press to broadcast it with even less nuance and get a bunch of Hollywood celebrities who failed Freshman biology to adopt it as their pet cause, then finally f) quietly drop the whole thing when it doesn’t pan out—and move on with undiminished enthusiasm to the next environmental doomsday scenario.

When men fail as entirely as they have—well, I’m not going to ask them to fall on their swords. But we might ask them to understand why, when they assure us their newest doomsday predictions are really, really true this time, we’re not inclined to believe a single word they say.

60 percent of Richmond families are single parent

Well, it could be worse. 

And sure enough,

Within the African-American demographic, that number spikes up to 86 percent, a number that surpasses the national average.

Happy Father's Day.

What happens when you run out of other people's children to support you?

In a lively panel Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, author Robert Zubrin compared Obamacare-related comments by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Nazi propaganda.

Zubrin slammed Sebelius for promoting mandatory contraception coverage as a cost saving measure. “In testimony in Congress, Kathleen Sebelius actually said that Obamacare would save money — save the nation a lot of money,” Zubrin said, “because it would distribute contraceptives and thus reduce the number of births.”

“The notion that by preventing children from being born we will save the nation money, this mirrors Nazi propaganda calling for euthanasia of ‘useless eaters’ because it would save us all money, it was an incredible statement,” he continued.

The Population Control Holocaust

If you thought that "population control" is a good thing, think again.

New Yorkers Fleeing State

Taxed-out New Yorkers are voting with their feet, with a staggering 1.6 million residents fleeing the state over the last decade.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest:

Texas saw the greatest increase in population over the past decade, according to the initial data from the 2010 U.S. Census.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Senior Moment

When you get to be a certain age, you let go of your inhibitions (trust me on this) and say what’s on your mind. When you are a Supreme Court Justice with lifetime tenure and you are within a few years of retiring, you can let your inner racist-eugenicist out.

Jonah Goldberg is polite when he questions what Ginsburg meant in her interview with the NY Times.

Here's what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Frankly I had thought that at the time (Roe v. Wade) was decided," Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, "there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of." ...

Ginsburg's certainly right that abortion has deep roots in the historic effort to "weed out" undesired groups. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the revered feminist and founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist eugenicist of the first order. Even more perplexing: She's become a champion of "reproductive freedom" even though she proposed a "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," under which "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit." (Poor blacks would have had a particularly hard time getting such licenses from Sanger.)

If Ginsburg does see eugenic culling as a compelling state interest, she'd be in fine company on the court. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a passionate believer in such things. In 1915, Holmes wrote in the Illinois Law Review that the "starting point for an ideal for the law" should be the "coordinated human effort ... to build a race."

The assumption is made by Goldberg and others that these advocates of government control - or “encouragement” - of “family planning” were race based. But this is an assumption that may have penumbras and emanations (to quote one famous Supreme Court decision). Can’t we assume also that the eugenics movement may also have as an objective the selective breeding of people who no longer believe in God? The people who were in the forefront of the that movement also believed that religious belief was irrational and even dangerous to the kind of rational, ordered society they envisioned.

Even people who in other contexts make fine distinctions, have trouble seeing the difference between - say - Ayatollahs and Christians.

I can well see Ruth Bader Ginsburg – a leading light of the ACLU – deciding that too many fundamentalist Christians were breeding. Not good for a “enlightened secular” society, eh Ruth?

Of course, John Holdren, Obama's science czar shares Ginsburg's views on culling the human race, so why should we be shocked? Their views are become mainstream Democrat beliefs - again.

Maybe Craig can buy "gay offsets"

The Colossus of Rhody asks:

Perhaps Craig can be like many Hollywood dopes (and Al Gore) but instead of purchasing carbon offsets he can buy gay offsets to "reduce his gay footprint" (or, more accurately, his "wide stance").

Mark Steyn: Reverse Assimilation

Mark Steyn discussed demographics in Canada.

If native Canadians (if you'll forgive the expression) are already a 25 per cent minority in the country's population growth, they will be a small and ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. Indeed, they're already at such a low demographic ebb that it calls into question any kind of trans-generational inheritance: "Canada" is in danger of becoming merely a zip code. The novelty junkies have a point: maybe it is time to rewrite that "home and native land" lyric.

Prior to the boom of the nineties and oughts, the all-time blockbuster immigration year was 1913, when 400,000 "new Canadians" arrived. Whether they looked at it like that is another matter: most of them were British subjects moving from one part of His Majesty's realms to another. In that sense, it was not "immigration" at all, or not as currently understood. The 2006 census numbers take as a given that the Canada of the 21st century will be a project built almost exclusively by foreigners.

Not only is the Canadian state insouciant about this ultimate outsourcing, it welcomes and celebrates it. For example, anti-monarchists such as John Manley and Brian Tobin routinely build their case on the line that in an ever more diverse Canada immigrants from Syria and Belarus can't be expected to relate to the Royal Family. This would be a very curious argument even in countries with robust immigration traditions--that a foreigner admitted by the state at its discretion should have the right to decide not which of his old country's customs he was going to retain but which of his new country's customs he was prepared to accept. It would ring very odd in most places--go on, get a job in Saudi Arabia, and try the same line on their royal family. So, when we buy the Manley-Tobin pitch, we're essentially accepting the principle of reverse assimilation, the obligation that Canadians assimilate with immigrants rather than the other way round.

And thereby lies great peril. Not for the Queen. She'll get by, whatever Canadians decide. But the Manley-Tobin line raises some very interesting questions. If our Liberal grandees are so convinced new Canadians won't accept the Crown, what other features of our inheritance will they also reject? How many Canadians will be saying "eh?" in 20 years' time? Or following hockey (assuming there are still any hockey teams up here)? How many will recognize "Sir John A. Macdonald"? What would such a nation be remembering on Remembrance Day?

Germany's Dying

With the understanding that the AP is a suspect organization and it's "stories" are often no more than tall tales, here is an AP story that validates Mark Steyn's often stated opinion on the demographic catastrophe overtaking Europe:

BERLIN (AP)--Germany's population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2006 and recorded the biggest drop since the country's reunification in 1990, the government said Friday, days after launching financial incentives designed to stall falling birth rates.

The number of births, meanwhile, was the lowest since World War II.

At the end of 2006, the number of people living in Germany stood at an estimated 82.31 million, 130,000 below the total at the end of 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said.

Germany's population grew in 2001 and 2002. But since then, a birth rate among the lowest in Europe has contributed to widening annual declines of 5,000, 31,000 and 63,000.

Last year, deaths outnumbered births by 150,000, compared to 144,000 in 2005, the statistics office said.

German officials have been reluctant to permit easier labor immigration, despite complaints from industry that they cannot find skilled workers for some jobs. Demographers and economists say the problem will only grow worse, and that an aging population will put serious strains on pension funding and on the economy for lack of workers.

A recent government study forecast that the population could fall as low as 69 million by 2050.

In 2006, births fell from the 686,000 recorded in 2005. The agency gave only a range of 670,000 to 680,000 for 2006. That would be the lowest since World War II and far below the 922,000 births recorded in 1946, when the country lay in ruins after its defeat in World War II.

The population decline was also caused by a drop in net immigration, from 79,000 in 2005 to between 20,000 and 30,000 in 2006.

Starting Jan. 1, the parents of newborn children are entitled to share up to 14
months of leave from their jobs and receive about two-thirds of their net salaries in a bid to encourage couples to have more children.

The move, designed particularly to help working moms have more children, follows similar moves in other European countries concerned about their aging populations.



(END) Dow Jones Newswires

01-05-07 1351ET

Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.- - 01 51 PM EST 01-05-07

The Progressives:"...three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”

Jonah Goldberg reminds us what the Enlightened if the last century REALLY believed about their fellow men:

“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”

That was D. H. Lawrence daydreaming about population control. He was hardly alone. During the so-called Progressive Era, “enlightened” social planners were convinced that overpopulation was the gravest problem facing Western society. That’s why Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”

George Bernard Shaw, a thoroughgoing eugenicist, believed that the “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.” H. G. Wells smiled at the prospect that the “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people” will “have to go.” In America, Wells’s onetime girlfriend, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued that birth control was essential to stem the rising tide of the unfit. Leading feminists, Progressive economists and legal theorists shared a similar vision. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who concluded in the case of Buck v. Bell that the state had the power to forcibly sterilize “defectives,” believed that forced population control was at the very heart of Progressive reform.

The Holocaust diminished the popularity of eugenics, but the panic over overpopulation endured. Paul Ehrlich, author of the scaremongering “The Population Bomb,” predicted in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, roughly 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve or otherwise meet their doom in the “Great Die-Off.” Inspired by such fears, Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of coerced birth control — i.e. “compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion” — throughout much of the world.

Read the whole thing...