Withering on the Vine

The Demographic Time Bomb is Most Marked in Japan

The demographic time bomb – whereby the elderly population assumes a greater and greater proportion of the total population – is no more marked than in Japan.

Falling birth rates (as a result of abortion, contraception and delaying childbirth) and increasing longevity as a result of better medical care have created this situation.

If we look at the population age structure in Japan (see graph above) we can see how dramatically its shape has changed since 1950 and how much more it will change by 2050.

The same trends are spelt out numerically in the table below where different countries are compared.

Unless something is done to reverse the demographic trends, ‘economic necessity’, together with the ‘culture of death’ ideology which is becoming more openly accepted, may well mean that the generation that killed its children through abortion will in turn be killed by its own children through euthanasia.

The population pyramid of 1950 shows that Japan had a standard-shaped pyramid marked by a broad base. The shape of the pyramid, however, has changed dramatically as both the birth rate and death rate have declined.

In 1950 the population of elderly citizens (65 years and over) accounted for just 4.9% of the total population. This had risen to 21.5% by 2007 and will rise to 39.6% by 2050.

This growth in numbers of older people has been matched by a shrinking of the younger population. In 1950 those under 15 made up 35.4% of the total population but this had fallen to 13.5% by 2007 and will fall further to 8.6% by 2050.

Note also that those of working age (15-65) constituted 65% of the population in 2007 (two thirds) but will account for only 51% (half) by 2050.

They could well account for much less given that many of those in the 15-65 age group, as of now, might be in education, or alternatively not in education, employment or training.

The speed of aging of Japan’s population is much faster than in advanced Western European countries or the USA but the trends are similar throughout the industrialised world.

Add in increasing debt and rising unemployment and you have a very toxic cocktail indeed.

Unless something is done to reverse the demographic trends, ‘economic necessity’, together with the ‘culture of death’ ideology which is becoming more openly accepted, may well mean that the generation that killed its children through abortion will in turn be killed by its own children through euthanasia.

Some European politicians and economists have been chillingly open about the economic incentives for euthanasia.

Jacques Attali, the former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said in 1981 in an article in L’Avenir de la vie:

‘As soon as he gets beyond 60-65 years of age, man lives beyond his capacity to produce, and he costs society a lot of money… euthanasia will be one of the essential instruments of our future societies.’

The real answer is not euthanasia. The real answer is in our grasp, but it requires a completely different mind-set to that which has led us, in our reckless pursuit of affluence and personal peace to mortgage our present, bankrupt our futures, and see those who rely on us as a burden rather than a privileged responsibility.

We need instead, as a society, to stop killing our children, build up our families, live more simply, give more generously and focus our priorities on providing for our dependents, especially the older generation which fought for our freedom in two world wars, provided for our health, education and welfare, and left us the legacy of wealth, comfort, peace and security which we have squandered and taken for granted.

Data on Japan obtained from online ‘Statistical Handbook of Japan’

The Odd Couple

Asininity and Contumacy

Here’s a different take.  A geneticist, who is also an atheist, has argued that Christianity could well triumph over atheism.  Naturally, he employs both genetic arguments to develop the proposition.  This, from The  Telegraph:

Christianity will rise as sceptics die out, geneticist claims

Growth of Christianity in Africa coupled with population decline in Europe will trigger new resurgence of the religion, UCL academic claims 

The world could see a resurgence of Christianity driven by population decline in sceptical countries, the geneticist Steve Jones has claimed. Professor Jones said history had proven that religion grows rapidly during large population booms, particularly in poorer countries. He argued that rapid growth in Africa could spark a new resurgence of major religions like Christianity.

However in increasingly atheist countries in Europe people are no longer reproducing in sufficient numbers to avoid population decline, he told the Hay Literary Festival. “Britain is the only country in Europe that’s replacing its population,” said Prof Jones.

Might there be a causal connection between atheistic cultures and population decline?
  Does atheism produce declining populations?  We believe that, at least in general terms, there is a causal relationship.  Firstly, atheism is at least open to widespread cultural pessimism.  Evolution is a cold doctrine.  There is no certainty at all that any species wills survive under evolutionism.  On the contrary, evolutionism evidently produces decay and extinction everywhere.  It is only wishful thinking that suspends such destruction from humanity itself.  Evolutionism as a cosmology is blind.  But the bearing and raising of children–in large numbers–requires a fundamentally optimistic view of the future.  People usually trade on a hopeful outlook for the future in order to bring children into the world.

Secondly, atheism has no fixed nor authoritative doctrine of the family.  Children may as well be produced in a laboratory as by sexual intercourse between a wife and a husband.

Thirdly, atheism has no transcendent values or ethics to inculcate to children.  Consequently, the children of atheism have a peculiar susceptibility to narcissistic self-gratification.  It’s all about Me.  An earnest longing to bear and raise children for the glory of God and the good of mankind simply does not exist.  Consequently, atheistic societies have low and falling birth rates, below replacement.  Atheistic populations decline.

Professor Jones continues:

“We atheists sometimes congratulate ourselves that the incidence of religious belief is going down.  But religious people have more children. Where are people having the most children? It’s in the tropics and in Africa.  It’s clearly the case that the future will involve an increase in religious populations and a decrease in scepticism.  We may not need more scientists but more theologists.” 

Or, as Richard Dawkins has argued, children of Christians should be stripped away from their parents, lest they be seduced into that macabre belief.  But Professor Jones is a bit more conciliatory.  He suggests that it is possible to learn some things from Jesus Christ.

However he admitted that when you removed the supernatural elements and miracles, the New Testament was one of the greatest political documents ever written.  “It’s very easy to be sarcastic about religion,” he said, “But many think that the New Testament is the finest political document ever written and you would be pushed to argue with that. Our entire society is based on tenets of the New Testament.”

However, as they say in New Zealand, “Yeah, . . . Nah!”  When you “remove” God from the New Testament, all you have left is wishful thinking–a whole bunch of high-faluting sentiments hung on sky-hooks for decorative purposes.  “Love your neighbour as yourself”?  The challenges no atheist can ever overcome when confronted with such a sentiment are, firstly, why? Then, who says?  Then, who cares?  And then, what is “love”? and so forth. 

But, then, Atheism has usually tried to have it both ways: it insists that God is dead and that the world is a cosmic accident, but on the other hand, we ought to live as if it were not. 

Asininity bound together with contumacy.  Odd couple.
 

Voices in the Wilderness

Why Does the World Still Ignore 2.6M Stillborn Children Every Year?

Posted on | May 20, 2014 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Why are the nearly three million children who die on their birth day every year still ignored? This is the question posed by a report released today in the Lancet. And it’s the question that should be on the table at the World Health Assembly  this week in Geneva. The high number of deaths hasn’t changed over the years, and neither it seems have the reasons for the utter failure of the world’s maternal health policy elite–see my blog of three years ago.

Delegates interested in making a real difference through the nascent Sustainable Development Goals now under negotiation will be keen on the report’s findings that what could save millions of maternal and newborn lives in the coming years is straightforward: more skilled birth attendants and better health facilities.

To put the matter baldly, we suggest the reason why these children continue to die is because the United Nations and its agencies want them to.  The Malthusians, the population controllers, the eugenicists, and the Greenists all advocate a smaller population for the world as a solution to its problems. 

The Annals of Hard Despotism

Withering on the Vine

We use the term “soft-despotism” to refer to the smothering embrace of the Western nanny state, driven by the demands of perverted consciences, riven by pseudo-guilt and self-righteous pity.  The alternative to soft-despotism is hard-despotism.  China is a nation with a hard-despotic system.  China is attempting to change, we are told, and we are sure there is truth in it.  But the social consequences of decades of hard despotism will take generations to work through and out.

Many of those consequences arise out of China’s hard despotic attempt to control its population growth–something which the current leaders are now starting deeply to regret we suspect.  It is a startling lesson in what happens when a culture institutionalises and enforces atheistic rebellion against the Living God.  The curses of God’s covenant fall–and they are exacting, hard, and remorseless.  Deep remorse, turning away from Unbelief, returning to the Creator and Redeemer and walking along a new road, His road, are the only ways of genuine escape.  Traditional Chinese pragmatism will not suffice.  The societal damage is too severe.

A recent article in the Telegraph succinctly presents just some aspects of the burgeoning social dislocation and economic disruption facing China as a result of the One-Child Policy.

Some economists fear the double-digit growth China has enjoyed for the past decade may rapidly unwind – and the one child policy is to blame. The 1979 policy was introduced to curb China’s booming population, with families heavily fined for breaching strict birth control limits.

The policy has left China short of 50m women…

A preference for boys – not least because they can earn more to support their parents – means endemic illegal sex-selective abortions and the abandonment of baby girls. The sex ratio is estimated at 120 boys for every 100 girls, far above the global average and leaving the country with 50m fewer women than men.

…a generation of ‘little emperors’…

The one-child cohort became known as the ‘spoilt generation’. Scientists claim it has fundamentally changed the psychology of a generation, leaving them less altruistic, trusting and competitive. And all that pampering has left China with one of the fastest growing rates of childhood obesity.

…and a booming lonely hearts industry. 

Competition for brides is fierce, particularly in the countryside. Love hunters – agents who find brides for China’s army of wealthy but lonely young bachelors – are big business, as is internet dating.

Now it’s inflating China’s housing market

Many mothers will only accept a son-in-law who can provide a spacious home. Economists reckon competition for large homes is driving China’s rampant property boom. A small two-bedroom Beijing flat now costs the average of 32-years’ salary, or $330,000 dollars. China’s property moguls are uneasy – and fear the boom has become a bubble at risk of bursting.  

Researchers Zhang and Wei reckon between 30 and 48 per cent in the rise in house prices between 2003 and 2009 was down to gender imbalances, with strong correlations between sex ratios in different towns and house price increases.

Meanwhile, the army of grandparents is growing… 

The Mao generation of big families is hitting retirement, and the birth rate has been below replacement level since the mid-1990s. China is rapidly ageing, and by 2050 a third of the population will be over 60. By then there will be just two workers to support every elderly person.

 The result: the world’s biggest care homes, and the rise of 4-2-1 families: four frail grandparents, two parents and one grandchild to support them all.

China’s stonking growth has been built on cheap exports and plentiful industrial labour, as tens of millions of people were willing to move to the cities and work long hours for low wages.  But the country is approaching what is known as the Lewis Turning Point – where the glut of cheap labour dries up, and businesses have to invest in expensive technology to keep expanding.

…and that will hit everyone.

Policy makers are alarmed. The one child policy is leaving the economy short of 140m workers. That will drive up wages, hit profits and push away investment. Citigroup economists warn it could cut 3 per cent off China’s GDP – a slowdown that would be felt around the world.

And many countries in Africa and Latin America have got stuck at a relatively low level of development after a spate of rapid growth after failing to make it over the Turning Point. That fate could befall China – dashing its hopes of becoming a superpower.

What is the Lewis turning point?
It is based on a development model created by Nobel prize winning economist Arthur Lewis, who looked at the dual aspect of a developing economy.

The first is represented by its agricultural sector, which engages a major part of the labour force, and the second by the modern market-oriented sector, which is primarily engaged in industrial production.  The growth of the economy is driven by the modern sector with the support of unlimited supplies of labour, which is mainly drawn from the agricultural sector. This migrant labour force accepts low wages corresponding to the living standards prevalent in farming.

The modern sector (also called the capitalist sector) is able to reap profits and—helped by low labour costs—generate savings. The growing savings finance the capital formation for expansion.  However, a point is reached when no more labour is forthcoming from the underdeveloped, or agricultural, sector and wages begin to rise. This is known as the Lewis turning point. [http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-07-30/news/32942096_1_labour-agricultural-sector-china]

 
 

Impeccable Ignorance

Population Control Goes Out With a Whimper

Posted on September 6, 2013
by Stefano Gennarini, J.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

 Here are three articles from the past week that address the slow hard fall from grace of population control…

1. Jonathan Last’s Review of a book that exposes Paul Ehrlich for the fraud he was. Ehrlich, an entomologist, not a demographer or economist, wrote the all-famous “Population Bomb” in the 1960s and became a world celebrity by prophesying that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices causing humanitarian disasters of biblical proportions. Needless to say, his poor science helped the world turn a blind eye to brutal population control programs for the past five decades. He was exposed repeatedly by Julian Simon, an economist, who rightly predicted that with population increases, production would also increase and commodity prices would go down. Simon believed human ingenuity could resolve resource scarcity, and he was right. He also insisted that what populations need are robust civil and political rights regimes to enable individuals and enterprises to flourish.
Simon perhaps never gained popularity among conservatives because his science led him to be in favor of a liberal U.S. immigration regime.

2. The Daily Beast has a piece about Obama’s “science diplomat”, John Holdren, people say he is a genius, but they find it hard to explain why he espouses Ehrlich’s bad science, even after it has been repeatedly disproven. So much for making decisions based on scientific evidence. The U.S. is still funding population control programs, and is still advocating that other countries do it. We are currently involved in re-educating women in the developing world, and especially Africa, to have fewer children. Apparently, they have been living for millennia with the false belief that having many children will ensure a comfortable retirement for their future. We are informing them instead that having fewer children (2 children max) will ensure a better future for them because the few children they have will love them all the more when in their old age they have to support them by themselves without the help of other siblings.

3. In this week’s Friday Fax, Susan Yoshihara looks at the profound instability created in China by the one-child policy. According to Yoshihara the changes to the one child policy that are in the works are too little too late. Not only is an economic and humanitarian disaster already unfolding, the one-child policy has actually become a cultural norm so engrained in the chinese way of life, that few chinese couples are even interested in having more than one child, preferably male. This is the kind of social engineering that U.S. family planning policies want to achieve in Africa. It is also the kind of norm that European countries are actively trying to fight, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, with little success.

After decades of population control programs to avert a seemingly inevitable population Armageddon, the people and institutions that are primarily responsible for the false alarmism are on their way out. While some at the United Nations, UNFPA, USAID and the Obama administration still cling to their condoms and bad science under the pseudonym “family planning program” or the oxymoron “reproductive rights” ( it never has to do with women choosing how many children to have and always with USAID telling women not to have any more children), economists and demographers are all agreed that the problem the world is facing is population aging and population decline – caused by human beings. Unfortunately, it will takes  decades, and maybe centuries to re-trace the trail of misery and ignorance they have left.

The Future of China

 Long, Slow, Lingering Decline

China’s one-child policy is going to devastate that country more than any other ill-conceived utopian folly.  The grim harvest has just commenced.  The Middle Kingdom has condemned itself to a long, slow lingering decline, as its social fabric rots away.  

Some of the poisonous fruits include:

• A growing hatred of the government for its stupidity and folly and the damage, pain, and suffering it has inflicted upon its people.
• A sense of being betrayed by the government.
• Gender imbalance, leaving men without any prospect of marriage and children.
• Labour shortages looming.
• Depression amongst the aged.
• Financial hardship.
• Ever more intrusive state bureaucracy.

The piece below was originally published in the Washington Post, and republished in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Why one child is simply not enough

Xu Min, 53, and his wife lost their 23-year-old son in a car accident last September. Many such bereaved parents are physically too old to conceive again, and most experience depression and struggle financially to support themselves in old age. Photo: Washington Post/William Wan

Panjin: It’s been 11 months, and Xu Min still rarely leaves the house.  He spends his days on the couch in front of a TV, trying to block out memories of his dead son. He blames fate for the car accident that killed the 23-year-old last September.  But for the loneliness that will haunt him and his wife the rest of their lives, Mr Xu, 53, blames the Chinese government.

Painful memories: Baby picture of Xu Zijie. Photo: Washington Post

China told the couple they could only have one child and threatened to take away everything if they did not listen. They were good citizens, he said, ”so for 20 years, we put our whole future and hope into our son”.  Now, they have no one to support them in old age. But even more crushing, Mr Xu said, is they have nothing to live for.

Since the death of his son, the only comfort Xu Min has found has been online forums where other bereaved parents of only children connect with one another. Photo: Washington Post/William Wan

For more than three decades, debate has raged over China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in population growth.  It has reshaped Chinese society – with birth rates plunging from 4.77 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.64 in 2011, according to United Nations estimates – and created the world’s most imbalanced gender ratio, with baby boys far outnumbering girls.

Human rights groups have exposed forced abortions, infanticide and involuntary sterilisations, practices banned in theory by the government. Officials are increasingly deliberating whether the long-term economic costs of the policy – including a looming labour shortage – now outweigh the benefits. The government announced last weekend that it is studying possible ways to relax the one-child policy in coming years, state media report.

Largely ignored, however, is a quiet devastation left in the policy’s wake: childless parents.

A parent’s worst nightmare in any country, the deaths of children in China are even more painful because of the cultural importance of descendents, increasing financial pressures on the elderly and the legal limits on bearing additional offspring.  Few reliable numbers exist on such grieving parents. But one study at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that there are already more than one million parents who have lost their only child, a number expected to rise rapidly.

Many such parents are too old to conceive again, and some say they regret not pushing for a second child when they could have, even if it would have meant losing their jobs and getting hit with overwhelming fines.  Parents who have lost children describe lives of emptiness and a depression so deep that some thought about suicide.  Almost all characterise their child’s death as a crippling financial blow because of how strongly China’s elderly tend to depend on their children to supplement modest government pensions.

Many note bitterly the enormous resources the government has plowed into one-child enforcement, creating an entire new wing of bureaucracy down to the township level.  The government collects steep fines from offenders, each year estimated to be in the billions, although the precise amount is kept secret. Yet, the parents complain, it wasn’t until 2007 that China began to disburse small sums as compensation to families whose only child had died.

Mr Xu and his wife rarely leave their cramped apartment for fear strangers will bring up the topic of children.  They have tapered off contact with family and friends, finding their pity just as painful. Some friends  suggested they pretend their son, Xu Zijie, had moved abroad or was too busy to visit. Others seemed to avoid them.  ”They view us as bad fortune and worry our bad luck will transfer to them. I can’t say I blame them,” Mr Xu said.
Washington Post

Simplistic Nostrums Don’t Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations’ World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That’s a truly alarming number, because it’s hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion – more than a third of the world’s total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

Everything has been visited, everything known, everything exploited.  Now pleasant estates obliterate the famous wilderness areas of the past.  Plowed fields have replaced forests, domesticated animals have dispersed wild life.  Beaches are plowed, mountains smoothed and swamps drained.  There are as many cities as, in former years, there were dwellings.  Everywhere there are buildings, everywhere people, everywhere communities, everywhere life . . . . We weigh upon the world; its resources hardly suffice to support us.  As our needs grow larger, so do our protests, that already nature does not sustain us.  In truth, plague, famine, wars and earthquakes must be regarded as a blessing to civilization, since they prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.  

Spot anything wrong here?  The first citation comes from international correspondent, Gwynne Dyer in a recent edition of the NZ Herald.   The second comes from Tertullian, writing about 200AD, quoted by Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009), p.246f.]

Clearly someone is wrong–or both are.  When Tertullian was working, the estimated global population (note estimate only) was between 190 to 256 million people at the time.  Yet to Tertullian and his contemporaries the earth was full, too full, of people.  So full that plagues were a blessing in disguise. 

What is wrong with his  assessment?  It was wrong because it was one-dimensional, and therefore simplistic and trite.  Subsequent centuries have demonstrated that with technological development and economic growth the earth can support a vast increase in human population.  And still it has only scratched the surface.  Today’s global population is 6.8 billion people, a 2.5 thousand percent increase from Tertullian’s day.  Yet the larger proportion of the earth’s surface remains wilderness and uninhabited. 

Tertullian might be excused the error, since he was ignorant of the historical explosion in knowledge, technology, and economic growth that in our day brings emphatic testimony to us moderns.  Dyer’s assessment, therefore, represents the greater error.  It is even more simplistic, trite, and ignorant because he has two millennia of human history to prove just how wrong Tertullian and others were.  Yet he recites the same simplistic nostrums as if they were proved beyond reasonable doubt. 

In other days, Dyer has written about the wonder of the green revolution in the latter decades of the twentieth century when genetic engineering produced a significant increase in agricultural output of such staples as wheat, corn, barley, rice  and other grains vital to support human life.  Where once doomsters such as Paul Ehrlich was announcing the population bomb and warning that mass starvation was just around the corner, in fact grain production increased so rapidly that his proclaimed doom never transpired.  Dyer knows this–but has apparently concluded that such technological and economic advances will not re-occur.  

The biggest impediments faced today to growing vast new supplies of food and sustenance are governmental and political ones.  Beneath it all runs a strong luddite stream.  Here is just one example.  Grass carp have been found not to reproduce naturally in the NZ wild.  They do not despoil waterways, but actually keep them clear of invasive grasses.  They are beautiful to eat–a wonderful food.  New Zealand could produce a limitless amount using judicious farming technologies.  But the resistance to this wonderful opportunity is strong: it comes from those who view change with fear, who have the view that the world is about to end in some great catastrophe.  It is better to do nothing than risk calamity. 

In the long run it is only Christians (better taught than Tertullian on this matter) who relish the divine command and responsibility to multiply  fill the earth and make it bring forth and bud. (Genesis 2:15,16; 9:1-4)  But when a culture or civilisation turns away from God deathly patterns begin to form and emerge.  Those who love God, love His creation; they love life.  They look forward to a world more joyous, merry, bounteous and full than a craft beer bar on a Friday night. 

Mass Liquidation Project

Facing the Facts

We posted recently on Malthusian Cassandras who are predicting the end of civilization and humanity as we know them. The only solution (we are told) is twofold: reduce population growth and globally redistribute property.

Now The Onion has got in on the act, “reporting” on a recent scientific convention in the US.  Here are some excerpts.  (Warning: contains advocacy of extreme justifiable violence.)

WASHINGTON—Saying there’s no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet’s resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

Representing multiple fields of study, including ecology, agriculture, biology, and economics, the researchers told reporters that facts are facts: Humanity has far exceeded its sustainable population size, so either one in three humans can choose how they want to die themselves, or there can be some sort of government-mandated liquidation program—but either way, people have to start dying.

And soon, the scientists confirmed.

“I’m just going to level with you—the earth’s carrying capacity will no longer be able to keep up with population growth, and civilization will end unless large swaths of human beings are killed, so the question is: How do we want to do this?” Cambridge University ecologist Dr. Edwin Peters said. “Do we want to give everyone a number and implement a death lottery system? Incinerate the nation’s children? Kill off an entire race of people? Give everyone a shotgun and let them sort it out themselves?”

“Completely up to you,” he added, explaining he and his colleagues were “open to whatever.” . . .

“The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with,” said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer­sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. . . .

Sources confirmed that if a death solution is not in place by Mar. 31, the U.N., in the interest of preserving the human race, will mobilize its peacekeeping forces and gun down as many people as necessary.
“I don’t care how it happens, but a ton of Africans have to go, because by 2025, there’s no way that continent will be able to feed itself,” said Dr. Henry Craig of the Population Research Institute. . . .

Charity Begins At Home

China’s War Against Families

China’s One Child policy has been hailed by an effete liberal West as an intelligent and progressive response to population control.  In reality it represents a brutal destruction of individual and family life.  It also is beginning to tear the fabric of Chinese society apart.  Genuine Chinese patriots understand that an ancient demon that has been loosed upon the Middle Kingdom. 

One such patriot, Jing Zhang comments upon the case of blind Chen Guangcheng, who has been actively protesting the One Child regime, and upon the tyrannical policy in general.

China’s War on Baby Girls

Jing Zhang
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 
May 2, 2012 4:00

The blind Chinese human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from house arrest on April 22 and may be under the protection of the U.S. Embassy, was initially detained for exposing the massive abuse of Chinese women under China’s one-child policy. His documentation of forced sterilizations and abortions landed him in jail for four years, followed by a year and a half of house arrest.

His daring escape has now triggered renewed attacks on organizations engaged in helping Chinese women keep and feed their infants. Since April 28, the Family Planning Commission of Susong County in China’s Anhui province has been harassing families of pregnant women and infants who have received aid from a charity that helps rural families raise infant girls. Often the girl is a second child, in violation of China’s one-child policy.

PRC government agents have issued heavy fines to families for over-quota births and have threatened forced abortion for mothers with “illegal” pregnancies. Li Bin, the former chairman of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, is the current governor of Anhui province.

The offending charity is the Rural Chinese Infant Assistance Program, which has grown in response to the severe gender imbalance among newborns. Allowed only one child, many parents abort their female children or stop trying to conceive after the birth of a boy. The Infant Assistance Program aims to elevate the cultural value of infant girls through direct aid, without any conditions, to their families. Several hundred families have benefited in Susong County alone. Rural families have welcomed the program enthusiastically.

Since Chen Guangcheng’s escape, the high-profile persecution initiated by the Susong Family Planning Commission has created panic among benefiting families and their communities. Many lives are directly threatened. Government agents have announced that any family with an “illegal” birth will face a fine of 50,000 yuan ($7,700, about ten times China’s annual per capita income). Any woman found to be pregnant “illegally” — without a birth permit — will face a forced abortion.

Family Planning agents have also threatened to take action against volunteers and employees of the Infant Assistance Program if they do not cooperate with the authorities by turning over all material related to the program.

In the 30 years of the brutal one-child policy, hundreds of millions of infants have been killed. This has led to serious social problems that are now obvious — not only the gender imbalance but also the aging of the general population. Regardless, the PRC government forges ahead with its notoriously inhumane policy.
The Susong Family Planning Commission’s persecution of the Infant Assistance Program should outrage observers in China and abroad.

The organization I head, Women’s Rights in China, demands that the Susong Family Planning Commission immediately stop all harassment of the Infant Assistance Program; cease threats and fines against volunteers and families who are beneficiaries; and treat “Harmonious Society and People First” as a principle and not just a Party slogan. We call on Family Planning agents to listen to their own consciences and to heed the outcry from the Chinese and international public.

As long as the Susong Family Planning Commission continues to persecute the Infant Assistance Program’s volunteers, pregnant women, and the families of baby girls, Women’s Rights in China will raise its voice to condemn it in the media and to take legal action against all responsible officials.

— Jing Zhang is president of Women’s Rights in China. She suffered five years in prison for her belief in freedom and democracy. After leaving China, she spent 20 years building a career as a newspaper editor in Hong Kong and the United States. She founded Women’s Rights in China in 2007. 

Malthusian Cassandras

Purblind Arrogance and Invincible Ignorance

Malthusian despair grips the Western world in a vicious vice.  It is a puzzling phenomenon if one considers that the economic theories of Thomas Malthus were discredited centuries ago.  But the puzzlement exists only if one also believes in a false, objective rationalism, ignoring the blind foolishness attenuating the human heart.  Did not the prophet say, “the heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately sick; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

We are sonorously told by modern sages that over-population threatens the continued existence of the planet.  Assuming that the world is one vast fixed, zero-sum game, our oh-so-wise cassandras insist that more mouths to feed means less food for everyone.  If one eats more, everyone else is condemned to eat less.  If a country expends more energy, there is less energy for every other nation. 

The latest voice is the respected and revered Royal Society.  Its purblind stupidity belies its reputation.
  But its “official”, don’t you know.  And we are sure that The Guardian gets thrills from contemplating the terrible plight in which we poor humans find ourselves.  Horror fascinates, after all.  Besides warning the world of impending doom like a brazen klaxon does give one a sense of moral self-righteousness and elitist raison d’etre. Someone has to be smart enough to sound the siren, after all.

As we review the Royal Society’s latest stupidity, let’s be mindful that from the time of Malthus onward, such ignorant speculations of the coming destruction of the planet and of humankind as we know it have always been a pre-occupation of elites and the relatively wealthy.  Scratch the scrofula and underneath you will discover a paternalistic disdain of others–particularly those peoples who are living in relative poverty.  The rumoured extinction of the British snob is greatly exaggerated, it would seem.

World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid “a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills”, warns a major report from the Royal Society.

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston.  The assessment of humanity’s prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.

Before we turn to the needs of poorer, developing nations, let’s pause to inquire how reducing consumption in the developed countries could possibly help poorer countries?  After all, if the West stops consuming all those goods and services, the markets for export in poorer countries collapse, consigning them to continuing poverty and degradation.  Only if you have swallowed discredited Malthusian theories could you seriously make such an argument.  It represents a modern equivalent of the Flat Earth Society. 

But the sheer number of people on earth is not as important as their inequality and how much they consume, said Jules Pretty, one of the working group of 22 who produced the report. “In material terms it will be necessary for most developed countries to abstain from certain sorts of consumption, such as CO2. You do not need to be consuming so much to have a long and healthy life. We cannot conceive of a world that is going to be as unequal as it is now. We must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than a $1.25 a day out of absolute poverty. It’s critical to slow population growth in those countries which cannot keep up with services.”

Last time we checked the elements of carbon and oxygen were pretty plentiful.  And CO2 is the life-gas, the greenest gas of all.  The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the better the growth of all plants and trees.  But beside that, note the attendant sub-theme: population growth must be controlled in poor countries.  The more people you have, the less everyone gets.  Economics is the art of distributing a fixed, finite pie.  Therefore, the less mouths, the better for all.  And it’s your mouths, over there, that must be shut down.  (We in the West are a dying civilization.  We appear to be in terminal population decline.  Demographically, it is impossible now to reverse the declining population growth unless there is a rapid change of mind towards childbearing and raising large families.  We want the rest of the world to follow our ignoble example.)
    

Most of the global population growth in the next century will come from the 48 least developed countries, of which 32 are in Africa, said Ekliya Zulu, one of the authors and president of the Union for African Population studies. “Taking Africa alone, the population will increase by 2 billion this century. If we fail and fertility levels do not go down to 2.1, (from 4.7 now) the population [there] may reach 5.3 billion. When we slow down population growth we empower women and provide more money for least developed countries to invest in education. The majority of women want fewer children. The demand to reduce fertility is there”, he said.

Get this, slower population growth means more money for less developed countries.  How on earth does that causality work?  We have no idea, unless . . . unless the economic theory which is a step-child of Malthus’s ideas is coming into play.  And the step child is socialism. You guessed it.  Limited resources.  Need to be fairly distributed (“from each, according to his ability, to each according to his need”). The State must so regulate and thus re-distribute. 

The authors declined to put a figure on sustainable population, saying it depended on lifestyle choices and consumption. But they warned that without urgent action humanity would be in deep trouble. “The pressure on a finite planet will make us radically change human activity”, said Pretty.

“The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption. Fairly redistributing the lion’s share of the earth’s resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates”, said an Oxfam spokeswoman.

There we have it.

Malthusianism is discredited.  Socialism is discredited.  But the purblind foolishness of Unbelief keeps clinging to these exploded nostrums because it has nothing else.  These “experts” insist on playing god.  Their own arrogance demands it.  Their foolish speculations stroke their arrogant egos, as they tell themselves they are making  a real contribution towards being the Saviour of the human race.  Yet what they have advocated will bring unimaginable suffering and degradation to millions.  But that’s ok.  They, themselves, at least will be protected.  Their moral superiority knows no bounds. 

The heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately sick; who can know it? 

Cheering for the Seventh Billion

Beware Malthusians posing as progressives
 
Don’t be fooled by the fashionable new crowd of Malthus-bashing greens: they’re as misanthropic as old-style population scaremongers.
Brendan O’Neill
Wednesday 12 October 2011

As we approach the Day of Seven Billion, when the seven billionth human being will be born, a debate is raging. On one side, population scaremongers are fretting about the arrival of Child No.7,000,000,000, claiming that he or she will add to a growing human swarm that is heaping pressure on the environment. On the other side, liberal observers slam these Malthusians, claiming that their lament about overpopulation is ‘a mask for misanthropy’. As one headline put it: ‘Welcome baby seven billion – we’ve room for you on Earth.’

Well, that is what it looks like through a casual glance – that a fiery debate is taking place between followers of the Reverend Thomas Malthus on one side and hip questioners of the Malthusian thesis on the other. But this is deceptive.
Dig a little deeper, and you’ll see that what’s really unfolding in the countdown to the Day of Seven Billion is a clash of alternative Malthusianisms, an unseemly spat between two sides that are as miserabilist as each other and which both cleave to the notion that humanity’s problems are demographic in nature rather than social.

Of course, with yawn-inducing predictability, the old guard of the population scaremongering lobby is out in force in the run-up to 31 October, the day when the UN predicts that humanity will number seven billion. Those rather fusty adherents to the Malthusian outlook – as first posited by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) – may have adopted PC-sounding lingo in recent years, using phrases like ‘climate change’ in place of ‘apocalypse’, but they’re still motored by a misanthropic view of speedily breeding human beings as the authors of society’s downfall.

Population Matters (PM), formerly the Optimum Population Trust, is marking 31 October by sticking ads all over the London Underground – ‘in an environment that itself highlights the problem of overpopulation: the overcrowded transport system’.

PM’s belief that overcrowding on the Tube is a result of overpopulation gives a brilliant insight into the narrow-minded, ahistoric thinking of old-world Malthusians. They seem incapable of understanding that squeezed conditions on rush-hour trains are actually down to a failure of infrastructure, a failure to expand and innovate, rather a result of Londoners having too many babies or immigrants coming over here and stealing all our seats. And so it is above ground, too, where global problems like poverty and hunger are a product, not of too many black babies demanding grub we don’t have, but of a social failure to develop all human societies and liberate all human beings from need.

The problem with Malthusian thinking is that it misunderstands social problems as demographic ones. It reinterprets social limits as natural limits, repackaging problems of social development as problems of nature’s shrinking bounty. Malthus fans make the dunderheaded error of imagining that human population is a scary variable, always going up, while everything else, including the amount of natural resources and the level of human ingenuity, remains constant. This profoundly anti-social outlook means they constantly fret about there being too many mouths to feed, when even just a cursory glance at our history will show that we have continually come up with ingenious ways to get more and more from nature in order to feed and clothe more and more people.

But the new Malthusian-bashers aren’t much better. In fact, if anything they’re worse, since they pose as progressives who want to protect Africans and Asians from the hectoring of white population scaremongers yet at the same time they promote the central tenets of the Malthusian outlook. Their rallying cry is effectively, ‘Ignore the right-wing Malthus-loving lobby – the problem today is not overpopulation over there but overconsumption over here’. How blissful is their ignorance – they seem oblivious to the fact that their fashionable fretting about fat whiteys hoovering up scarce resources is every bit as Malthusian as that guy in tweed who worries about Nigerians popping out too many ankle-biters.

So at the Guardian, Lynsey Hanley lays into old-style Malthusians, criticising their ‘moral crusade’ against the poor and the foreign. Yet she then argues that the real crisis facing the world today is overconsumption, calling on Western governments to implore people to ‘reduce their consumption’, especially of ‘petrol, meat, imported fruit and other adoptive “necessities”’. (Yeah, who needs meat?) Revealing that she isn’t on principle opposed to population control, she says that ‘for there to be any significant impact on the environment, [population] decline would have to take place in countries that already consume a far more than sustainable share of the world’s resources’.

This echoes other post-Malthus Malthusians, who likewise imagine that bigging up the ‘real’ problem of overconsumption distinguishes them from those saddos obsessed with human numbers in the Third World. So in his book Peoplequake, Fred Pearce is scathing about Malthus and his modern-day disciples, because ‘rising consumption is now a much bigger cause of our growing impact on the planet [than population]’.

Yet this panic about humanity’s overuse of allegedly scarce resources is entirely in tune with the Malthusian mindset. Trendy thinkers keen to disassociate themselves from the chequered history of Malthusianism may have jettisoned explicit talk about ‘too many babies’, but their concern about ‘too few resources’ is just a different way of saying the same thing: that nature’s bounty is under threat and thus we must be careful how we approach it. Right from its origins in the 1790s through to its rebirth as a green idea in the 1970s, Malthusianism has been fuelled by this very notion of ‘overconsumption’.

The original Malthusian idea of ‘too many people’ was based on a concern that these people would deplete resources, which were apparently naturally limited, thus giving rise to scarcity and destitution. Fred Pearce might say that overconsumption has led to a situation where we have ‘overshot the planet’s carrying capacity’, where Malthus was far less PC and claimed that poor people having too many babies threatened to unleash famine, but behind their very divergent lingo the idea promoted by these two thinkers is the same: that mankind’s lifestyles and aspirations should be straitjacketed by so-called natural limits.

The Malthus-haters demanding that we focus on consumption rather than population are rehabilitating the underlying theme of Malthusianism and of the broader conservative, traditionalist, environmentalist outlook of the past 200 years: the notion that the problems facing mankind are natural rather than social. And when you take that view, when you accept the fundamental premise of Malthusianism, your ‘solution’ will always be to shrink human horizons, whether by hectoring African women to stop having babies or mocking American men for eating too much meat, rather than to expand human society. It is this across-the-board naturalisation of social problems, this repackaging of today’s dearth of social imagination as a crisis of natural limits, which must be shot down as we give three cheers for the seven billionth human being. And that is what spiked intends to do.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11159/

Salute the Beckhams

Choosing Life, Not Death

When a culture turns away from the Lord and giver of Life, it ends up championing death.  The transformation is normally not immediate, but gradual.  Nevertheless, it is ineluctable.  The particular manifestation of death-devotion can vary.  As Germany transformed from a Christian nation to a champion of Enlightenment rationalism and idealism, it eventually elected a government which went on to exterminate six million Jews and millions of Gentiles–all in the name of the Volk and its superior “life”.

The West generally has championed death through a perverse celebration of human rights.

>Reaping the Whirlwind

>The War Against Girls

Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons
By JONATHAN V. LAST
This review appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In Unnatural Selection, Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.