Thread: ARE WE DESTINED FOR SELECTIVE REDUCTION?

http://www.newswithviews.com/Betty/Freauf23.htm

ARE WE DESTINED FOR SELECTIVE REDUCTION?

By Betty Freauf
May 11, 2003
NewsWithViews.com

The greatest coupling in the history of the human race occurred after WWII said the author of BEHOLD A PALE HORSE (c) 1991. It was a point in history when the birth rate so exceeded the death rate that the world's population doubled between 1957 and 1990. Now, in America, we worry there won't be enough taxpayers around to keep the Social Security system afloat and government entities are strapped for funding all their unconstitutional agencies.
A symposium was held in 1957 which was attended by some of the great scientific minds then living. They reached the conclusion that by, or shortly after, the year 2000 the planet would self-destruct due to increased population and man's exploitation of the environment.

The late Jacques Cousteau, a famed advocate for the oceans and the environment, was quoted in a November 1991 UNESCO Courier, "One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladesh...This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."

Cousteau, a doctrinaire socialist and one-world humanist, convinced the National Geographic Society in 1966 to run a T.V. special about the "death of the ocean, the end of life on earth." Cousteau died in June 1997 thereby leaving a little more room on planet earth for the rest of us.

Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of Planned Parenthood, wrote of the necessity to the "elimination of human weeds". The May 1919 issue of Sanger's REVIEW featured the slogan: "More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control." A 3/14/1988 NEW AMERICAN story on Sanger called her the "American Nazi." Her son, Alexander, in the early 1990s was pushing the oxymoron "gentle genocide". He wanted to keep inner city women from having babies proclaiming "We need a race of thoroughbreds."

Negative Population Growth, Inc. of Teaneck, New Jersey circulated a letter stating "We believe that our goal for the U.S. should be no more than 150 million... and for the world not more than two billion."
The 10/4/1993 NEW AMERICAN said, In its 1991 work, the First Global Revolution. The Club of Rome (a conduit for the British Tavistock network) candidly admitted that in the global eco-crusade, "The real enemy is humanity itself. The question of 'overpopulation', like nearly every other environmental 'crisis', is a contrived rationale for expanded regulation of the individual."

Then there was the COLORADO FORUM. In its Spring 1994 publication, it debunks all of the above by asking, "Is the World Overpopulated? The answer: All of the world's five-and-a half billion people (today about 6 1/2 billion) could fit in Texas with each person having 1,352 square feet of space, which would be less than a third as crowded as Manhattan was in 1994 (and that was before 9/11/2001).
Part of the lore of Daniel Boone was that when he could see the smoke of another cabin, things were getting too crowded and he headed west.

But the die had been cast. The population would have to be reduced if not voluntarily, then by forcible controls, i.e. governmental-orchestrated famines, wars and genocide.

The homosexuals began to come out of the closet in the early 1970s. They cannot procreate so they recruit. The contraceptive pill was approved for sale by the FDA in 1960. Then there was the RU-486 (Are You For 86?) and now "The Patch". The 11/6/2000 NEW AMERICAN said this is the same old eugenics movement. The saga of RU-486 is just the latest development in a coordinated population control movement that can trace its lineage back through the Rockefellers to the Nazis... The Population Council, which holds the American Patent to RU-486 was co-founded by John D. Rockefeller, said the article.

The Roe -vs- Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 made abortion legal. This began the slippery slide towards partial birth abortions, euthanasia and the harvesting of body parts. In China, brute force is used to enforce its one-baby only policy.

In November 1994, the Hemlock Society and its ilk convinced Oregonians to pass a Death-With-Dignity bill making it the first state to allow terminally ill adults to obtain prescriptions for lethal drugs "under certain conditions." This is currently being challenged by Attorney General Ashcroft's Department of Justice. [Suicide Law Hearing Turns Contentious]

And if cures for degenerative diseases and the host of emerging viruses such as AIDS and cancer could be suppressed, population reduction was achievable. Lately it is the SARS scare. Read Mary Starrett's articles [SARS Simply Another Ridiculous Scam] [So Much Sewage]

In decades past, when immigrants came to our shore they were immediately examined for communicable diseases and sent back if they were infected. Today there are no such requirements and T.B. infected immigrants are arriving on our shores and T.B. is again on the rise.

Has the medical profession resisted a cure for cancer? If so, why? A cure would be like killing the goose that lays the golden egg! Pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are lucrative. Chemo and radiation destroy the immune system (which fights off diseases) and while there are some cancer survivors who use these methods, most eventually die of cancer leaving some families with huge medical bills.

MONEY magazine reported in December 1996 with government approval, drug companies had been allowed to sell vaccines that could leave your child brain damaged and could spread polio to you and kill!
he 7/2/2001 NEW AMERICAN said, "By virtually banning DDT use worldwide, the United Nation's POP treaty would condemn millions to death by malaria -- a desired result in the eyes of those seeking radical depopulation.
Dr. Doug Rokke and his colleagues were sent to Iraq after Gulf War I in 1991 to try to clean up the depleted uranium mess and now tells how those exposed to depleted uranium are sick and dying and the Veteran's Administration is doing very little to help returning 1991 Gulf War vets.

I fear if we could see accurate up-to date- as-possible figures on this incredible carnage, which has the approval of world puppet leaders and population control organizations funded by many tax-exempt American foundations, we would truly experience "Shock and Awe."

United Nations nongovernmental organizations derive their funding from major foundations such as Rockefeller, Pew, MacArthur, Ford and Carnegie. Without funding from these groups, the environmentalists and those looking to reduce the population would not have a chance with mainstream America! There are thousands upon thousands of these organizations all over the world. They are set up as nonprofits, and most of them have special recognition at the United Nations.

The social engineers had been sent across the world to proclaim the dangers of overpopulation. These zealots aimed first at reducing births by the black or brown population, uneducated and poor while at the same time introducing "sex education" classes in the public schools over the objection of parents.

Contraceptive choices were presented; however, these classes ended up counter productive and soon children with raging hormones were forgetting about the contraceptives and were having children overloading the welfare system in nearly all ethnic populations. Promiscuous sex, in addition to pregnancies, has the consequence of sexually transmitted diseases.

A law was passed in Oregon making it necessary for teenage parents to return to classes or face hefty welfare cuts so in April 1990, Oregon public schools were preparing to accommodate and further indoctrinate as many as 3,500 teenage parents and their children while those who chose abortions were escorted out the back door of the school, without parental consent, to abortion clinics.

Death education became a popular subject in the public schools. Evolution suggests every time we die that we evolve into something greater so we saw an increase in teenage suicides and school shootings leaving grieving parents and other family members behind wondering why. And all we've done is evolve into barbarians.

The American Education Association reported in July 1998 that WWII was a catastrophe that left 55 million dead and the mass murders in China and the Soviet Union dwarfed those figures by more than two million and yet the only numbers we ever seem to hear about on a regular basis is the holocaust.

An October 23, 1997 A-P report said Pol Pot admitted mistakes but defended the genocidal rule in Cambodia.
A January 3, 1998 A-P story reported 412 had been slaughtered in Algeria. We've had genocide in Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire. In 1999 a Muslim sect rivalry was blamed for a Ramadan massacre in Pakistan.

The scientific and medical industry can already determine if a child is going to be handicapped so it can be destroyed before birth. Now they are letting potential parents select the sex and I.Q. of their child.
There is an old saying, the only two things for certain in this old world is death and taxes so who is next for annihilation or taxation?
© 2003 Betty Freauf - All Rights Reserved

In one breath they're killing us off and in another saying there aren't enough people to keep the world spinning.

How about they don't know diddly about much of anything? If they went for gene selection......I don't think alot of them would have passed the test.

I remember in the 60's and 70's when we were taught in school about keeping the population the same. It was a very simple we each have 2 children to replace us a husband and a wife. It was taught in Social Studies and health. It was taught because the teachers said our resources were running out and it was our responsibility to make sure that the world didn't become over populated. This would of been during the baby bommers era. Oh yea birth control was taught in health class. I know that alot of us took this to heart and stuck to this idea! Now I ask what good did it do?

Yep.....that's what I was taught. The delicate balance of nature. Cut a tree, plant a tree. The ecological effects of too much building. (not proper drainage, polutents, stress, disease etc) Running animals, birds and insects out of their natural environment. Wasn't that when they started the endangered species and all? Concern about the rain forest and how quickly they were destroying it. Pesticides, fertilizers, clean drinking water.......wasn't that also when they had the ad on TV with the American Indian having a tear run down his cheek as he looked at the trash and toxins being thrown in our rivers and streams? Ya by the 80's I was doing volunteer work with the Wildlife Federation.......so afraid there would be too many people for the earth to sustain. We were doing our part but what about the places where people were having baby after baby and no means to feed them because of the draught and the tainted water because they hadn't learned about not drinking the same water they used as a toliet.....? The diseases that were spread by unhealthy living situations and improper sanitation. It was a big thing drilled in our heads. I was ready to join the peace corp and save the 3rd world nations. Either that or study Gorillas with Jane Goodall.

I remember in the 60's and 70's when we were taught in school about keeping the population the same. It was a very simple we each have 2 children to replace us a husband and a wife. It was taught in Social Studies and health.

posylady I remember that myself. Replacement only...

Here is another .02



Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 18, 2006

I’M honored to be asked to give the C D Kemp lecture before members of the Institute he founded and which lives on after him. I’ve been in Australia for a couple of weeks on what I like to think of as my “Head for the hills! It’s the end of the world!” tour. But don’t worry, it’s like Barbra Streisand’s farewell tour, I’ll be back to do another end-of-the-world tour in a year or two.

Whether or not the western world is ending, it’s certainly changed. It’s a very strange feeling from the perspective of four decades on to return to a famous book C D Kemp wrote in 1964, Big Businessmen, a portrait of a now all but extinct generation of Australian industrialists. They were men whose sense of themselves in relation to the society they lived in was immensely secure. They had an instinctive belief in the culture that raised them and enriched them. To have pointed out such a fact at the time would have seemed superfluous: it was still shared by many forces in society – bank managers, kindergarten teachers, even Anglican clerics.

None of these pillars of what we used to regard as conventional society is quite as sturdy as it was, and most of them have collapsed. Many mainstream Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political cliches. In this world, if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican vicar in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally-friendly car with an “Arms Are For Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

Yet, if the purpose of the modern church is to be a cutting-edge political pacesetter, it’s Islam that’s doing the better job. It’s easy to look at gold-toothed Punjabi yobs in northern England or Algerian pseudo-rappers in French suburbs and think, oh well, their Muslim identity is clearly pretty residual. But that’s to apply westernized notions of piety. Today the mosque is a meetinghouse, and throughout the west what it meets to discuss is, even when not explicitly jihadist, always political. The mosque or madrassah is not the place to go for spiritual contemplation so much as political motivation. The Muslim identity of those French rioters or English jailbirds may seem spiritually vestigial but it’s politically potent. So, even as a political project, the mainstream Protestant churches are a bust. Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.

As for many teachers, they regard the accumulated inheritance of western civilization as an unending parade of racism, sexism, imperialism and other malign -isms, leavened only by routine genocides. Even if this were true – which it’s not – it’s not a good sustaining narrative for any nation unless it’s planning on going out of business.

And, speaking of business, even the heirs of those Big Businessmen C D Kemp wrote about feel obliged to join the ranks of the civilizational self-loathers. I notice that in its commercials the oil company BP – that’s to say, British Petroleum – now says that BP stands for “Beyond Petroleum”: the ads are all about how it’s developing environmentally-friendly ways to conserve energy; in other words, it’s ashamed of the business it’s in.

The question posed here tonight is very direct: “Does Western Civilization Have A Future?” One answer’s easy: if western civilization doesn’t have a past, it certainly won’t have a future. No society can survive when it consciously unmoors itself from its own inheritance. But let me answer it in a less philosophical way:

Much of western civilization does not have any future. That’s to say, we’re not just speaking philosophically, but literally. In a very short time, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries we regard as part of the western tradition will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. They don’t have a future because they’ve given up breeding. Spain’s population is halving with every generation: Two grown-ups have a total of one baby. So there are half as many children as parents. And a quarter as many grandchildren as grandparents. And an eighth as many great-grandchildren as great-grandparents. And, after that there’s no point extrapolating, because you’re over the falls and it’s too late to start paddling back. I received a flurry of letters from furious Spaniards when the government decided to replace the words “father” and “mother” on its birth certificates with the less orientationally offensive terms “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B”. This was part of the bureaucratic spring-cleaning of traditional language that always accompanies the arrival in law of “gay marriage”. But, with historically low numbers of progeny, the designations of the respective progenitors seem of marginal concern. They’d be better off trying to encourage the average young Spaniard to wander into a Barcelona singles bar and see if anyone wants to come back to his pad to play Progenitor A and Progenitor B. (“Well, okay, but only if I can be Progenitor A…”)

Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility – 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you’re so far down the death spiral you can’t pull out. In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 35 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room. So large parts of the western world are literally dying – and, in Europe, the successor population to those aging French and Dutch and Belgians is already in place. Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever’s at the switch.

But what if they don’t? In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House’s survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest “freedom” score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France’s fortunes as a fourth member of that group.

If you think a nation is no more than a “great hotel” (as the Canadian novelist Yann Martel described his own country, approvingly), you can always slash rates and fill the empty rooms – for as long as there are any would-be lodgers left out there to move in. But there aren’t going to be many would-be immigrants out there in the years ahead – not for aging western societies in which an ever smaller pool of young people pay ever higher taxes to support ever swelling geriatric native populations. And, if you believe a nation is the collective, accumulated wisdom of a shared past, then a dependence on immigration alone for population replenishment will leave you lost and diminished. That’s why Peter Costello’s stirring call – a boy for you, a girl for me, and one for Australia – is, ultimately, a national security issue – and a more basic one than how much you spend on defence.

Americans take for granted all the “it’s about the future of all our children” hooey that would ring so hollow in a European election. In the 2005 German campaign, voters were offered what would be regarded in the US as a statistically improbable choice: a childless man (Herr Schroeder) vs a childless woman (Frau Merkel). Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged African proverb – “It takes a village to raise a child” – only to discover they got it backwards: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village. And most of the villagers still refuse to recognize the contradictions: You can’t breed at the lethargic rate of most Europeans and then bitch and whine about letting the Turks into the European Union. Demographically, they’re the kids you couldn’t be bothered having.

One would assume a demographic disaster is the sort of thing that sneaks up on you because you’re having a grand old time: You stayed in university till you were 38, you took early retirement at 45, you had two months a year on the Cote d’Azur, you drank wine, you ate foie gras and truffles, you marched in the street for a 28-hour work week… It was all such great fun there was no time to have children. You thought the couple in the next street would, or the next town, or in all those bucolic villages you pass through on the way to your weekend home.

But the strange thing is that Europeans aren’t happy. The Germans are so slumped in despond that in 2005 the government began running a Teutonic feelgood marketing campaign in which old people are posed against pastoral vistas, fetching young gays mooch around the Holocaust memorial, Katarina Witt stands in front of some photogenic moppets, etc., and then they all point their fingers at the camera and shout “Du bist Deutschland!” – “You are Germany!” – which is meant somehow to pep up glum Hun couch potatoes. Can’t see it working myself. The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness – war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents – and yet their people are strikingly unhappy. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of 9/11: 61 per cent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 per cent of Canadians, 42 per cent of Britons, 29 per cent of the French, 23 per cent of Russians and 15 per cent of Germans. I wouldn’t reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

What’s the most laughable article published in a major American newspaper in the last decade? A good contender is a New York Times column by the august Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline was “French Family Values”, and the thesis is that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values”, the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly”. On the Continent, claims Professor Krugman, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff – to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

How can an economist make that claim without noticing that the upshot of all these “family friendly” policies is that nobody has any families? Isn’t the first test of a pro-family regime its impact on families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they don’t go to church and they don’t contribute to other civic groups, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the county fair.

So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism red in tooth and claw as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. And in fairness some of their quasi-state corporations are very pleasant: I’d much rather fly Air France than United or Continental. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren’t Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got? Their pop culture is more American than it’s ever been. Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies. Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a swell idea. It’ll come in very useful for large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015.

“When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do,” writes Charles Murray in In Our Hands, “ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.” The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies at the video store, and millions of porn sites on the Internet, yet think it perfectly to demand that the state take care of their elderly parents and their young children while they’re working – to, in effect, surrender what most previous societies would have regarded as all the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

Australia has more economic freedom than the EU and fewer distorting demographic problems, so, along with America, it’s one of the two countries with a sporting chance of avoiding the perfect storm about to engulf the rest of the west. But at some point it too will have to confront these issues – not just the falling birth rate and aging population, but the underlying civilizational ennui of which the big lack of babies is merely the most obvious symptom. I feel bad running around like a headless chicken shrieking about this stuff. But let’s face it, scaremongering is the default mode of the age. We worry incessantly, because worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good about feeling bad. So he worries mostly about what offers the best opportunities for self-loathing – climate change, or the need to increase mostly harmful foreign aid to African dictatorships. This is a kind of decadence. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10th, 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.

But it’s important to remember: radical Islam is only the top-eighth of that iceberg – it’s an opportunist enemy taking advantage of a demographically declining and spiritually decayed west. The real issue is 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 call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are:
i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.

None of these is Islam’s fault. They’re self-inflicted. If you doubt that, forget about fast Islamifying Europe and look at 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 labor 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? Birthing is a dying business.

At the beginning of the century, the country’s toymakers 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 core responsibilities, 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 license 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 alienated young Muslim men, it may well be 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.

The advantage Australians and Americans have is that most of the rest of the west is ahead of us: their canoes are already on the brink of the falls. But Australians who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world in which ever more parts of the map fall prey to the reprimitivization that’s afflicted Liberia, Somalia and Bosnia.

If it’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term, think short-term: Huge changes are happening now. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs and ever less civilizational confidence, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then western civilization will go the way of all others that failed to meet a simple test: as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, “Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”

Mark Steyn is a regular opinion-page contributor to newspapers across the western world, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Wall Street Journal, the London Daily Telegraph and The Australian. This is the text of his 2006 CD Kemp lecture at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne last night.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 83,00.html

In one breath they're killing us off and in another saying there aren't enough people to keep the world spinning.

Crazybird, many of our politicians on the Hill think there aren't enough people in the country to keep our ecomical wheel humming. From 62 million in 1890 to 300 million in 2006. The funny things is, I haven't heard any projections on what our goal population should be. Personally, I think we've peaked, but obviously our idiots in Washington think we have a lot of growing room left. How about someone tell us exactly what number is enough. Unfortunately it's all about the money.

Unfortunately it's all about the money.

Always seems to be the bottom line doesn't it? At the expense of everything.