What a sense of humor God has! He permits people
to choose a mechanism (of their own free will)
that effectively weeds them out of the gene pool. :) ~ Janice
Key excerpt:
"..“Every person who is born,” says Toni
Vernelli, “produces more rubbish, more pollution,
more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of
overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and
sterilization is the solution. The best way to
bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.
What’s the “pro-choice” line? “Every child should
be wanted”? Not anymore. The progressive position
has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.
By the way, if you’re looking for some
last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University
Press has published a book by Professor David
Benatar of the University of Cape Town called
Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming
Into Existence. The author “argues for the
‘anti-natal’ view-that it is always wrong to
have children… Anti-natalism also implies that it
would be better if humanity became extinct.” As
does Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us which
Publishers Weekly hails as “an enthralling tour
of the world… anticipating, often poetically,
what a planet without us would be like.” It’s a
good thing it “anticipates” it poetically,
because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.
Lest you think the above are “extremists,”
consider how deeply invested the “mainstream” is
in a total fiction. At the recent climate
jamboree in Bali, the Reverend AlGore told the
assembled faithful: “My own country the United
States is principally responsible for obstructing progress here.”
Really? “The American Thinker” website
<http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/12/kyoto_schmyoto.html>ran
the numbers. In the seven years between the
signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here’s what happened:
* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.
It’s hard not to conclude a form of mental
illness has gripped the world’s elites. If you’re
one of that dwindling band of westerners who’ll
be celebrating the birth of a child, “homeless”
or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A
year or two on, and the eco-professors will
propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example." ~
Read on:
[]
December 16, 2007 12:00 AM
O Little Town of ... Public Housing?
When will the eco-professors propose banning
nativity scenes because they set a bad example? By Mark Steyn
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGU0YjY1MGVmN2Y1MGEyNzdhYjJiMzdlODQ2ODRlMDQ=
This is the time of year, as H illary C linton
once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth
of a homeless child” or, in AlGore’s words, “a
homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”
Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He
had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But
he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was
census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep
halfway across the country to register in the
town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly
bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big
Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of
time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it.
But the point is: the Christmas story isn’t about
affordable housing. Joseph and Mary couldn’t get
a hotel room: that’s the only accommodation
aspect of the event. S enator C linton and VPGore
are over-complicating things: December 25th is
not the celebration of “a homeless child,” but a child, period.
Just for a moment, let us take it as read, as
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the
other bestselling atheists insist, that what
happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of
mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it
not as an event but as a narrative: You want to
launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?
The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could
be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the
other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately
powerless. For, without new life, there can be no
civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if
it’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to
root Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His
birth expresses a profound and rational truth
about “eternal life” here on earth.
Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline
and became a big demography bore, and it’s
tempting just to do an annual December audit on
the demographic weakness of what we used to call
Christendom. Today, in the corporate headquarters
of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out
of his window at a city where children’s voices
are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest
birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family
wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, gram’pas,
gran’mas, but ever fewer bambinos. The
International Herald Tribune this week carried
the latest update on the remorseless
geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty
pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70;
the country is second only to Sweden in the
proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest under 15. Etc.
So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of
a child this Christmas unless you count the 70
percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30
who still live at home, the world’s oldest
teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the
room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade.
That’s worth bearing in mind if you’re an
American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When
that cool 29-year old with the Mediterranean
charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad
for a nightcap, it’ll be his mom and dad’s place.
I’m often told that my demographics-is-destiny
argument is anachronistic: Countries needed
manpower in the industrial age, when we worked in
mills and factories. But now advanced societies
are “knowledge economies”, and they require fewer
working stiffs. Oddly enough, the Lisbon
Council’s European Human Capital Index, released
in October, thinks precisely the opposite that
the calamitous decline in population will prevent
Eastern and Central Europe from being able to
function as “innovation economies.” A “knowledge
economy” will be as smart as the brains it can call on.
Meanwhile, a few Europeans are still having
children: The British government just announced
that Mohammed is now the most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom.
As I say, the above demographic audit has become
something of an annual tradition in this space.
But here’s something new that took hold in the
year 2007: a radical anti-humanism, long present
just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable.
In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said
that “the biggest cause of climate change is
climate changers in other words, human beings,”
and Professor John Guillebaud called on Britons
to voluntarily reduce the number of children they
have. Last week, in The Medical Journal Of
Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell
with this wimp-o pantywaist “voluntary” child-reduction.
Professor Walters wants a “carbon tax” on babies,
with, conversely, “carbon credits” for those who
undergo sterilization procedures.
So that’d be great news for the female
eco-activists recently profiled in London’s Daily
Mail boasting about how they’d had their tubes
tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet.
“Every person who is born,” says Toni Vernelli,
“produces more rubbish, more pollution, more
greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of
overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and
sterilization is the solution. The best way to
bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.
What’s the “pro-choice” line? “Every child should
be wanted”? Not anymore. The progressive position
has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.
By the way, if you’re looking for some
last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University
Press has published a book by Professor David
Benatar of the University of Cape Town called
Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming
Into Existence. The author “argues for the
‘anti-natal’ view-that it is always wrong to
have children… Anti-natalism also implies that it
would be better if humanity became extinct.” As
does Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us which
Publishers Weekly hails as “an enthralling tour
of the world… anticipating, often poetically,
what a planet without us would be like.” It’s a
good thing it “anticipates” it poetically,
because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.
Lest you think the above are “extremists,”
consider how deeply invested the “mainstream” is
in a total fiction. At the recent climate
jamboree in Bali, the Reverend Al Gore told the
assembled faithful: “My own country the United
States is principally responsible for obstructing
progress here.” Really? “The American Thinker”
website
<http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/12/kyoto_schmyoto.html>ran
the numbers. In the seven years between the
signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here’s what happened:
* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.
It’s hard not to conclude a form of mental
illness has gripped the world’s elites. If you’re
one of that dwindling band of westerners who’ll
be celebrating the birth of a child, “homeless”
or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A
year or two on, and the eco-professors will
propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.
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Received on Sun Dec 16 13:38:13 2007
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