Men, Women and Prophecy

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Yes, three of you have sent me guest posts.  But I woke up very late, and I hate to put guest posts up late.  I like them to have their full exposure.  So, they’ll run later.  I’ll also sometime today put up the ATH FAQ compiled for me by our inestimable Alma Boykin.*

When I was little, there was a half baked slew of prophecy floating around the consciousness of the village. Somewhat based on the Bible, somewhat based on stuff heard from grandparents, it held that fifty years before the end of the world, children would stop being born. Also, either there would stop being marriages or there would be polygamy. There was a lot of argument about that.

Elderly people would come to things like the opening of the school year and say they were reassuring themselves the world wasn’t ending yet.

At the time I used to think this was flat insane. Why would the human race stop reproducing?

Well, we’re not stopping, but the birth rate is collapsing in most industrial countries, and the fall in population is ONLY not catastrophic due to our added longevity.

I’m not claiming the prophecy really was a prophecy, btw. Though one has to wonder when one knows our species has gone through at least two genetic bottlenecks. I don’t mean there is some kind of mystical racial memory either, but one of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is the memories that pass on around the edges, as it were. The things half heard from the previous generation that are told our children. How much remains after 12 or 13 generations, considering it’s like a game of telephone, I don’t know – but some scraps might remain sort of a “beware not having children.”

Actually it’s very easy to plunge the birth rate for humans. All it takes is postponing births. Throughout history we’ve seen this.

I’ve long been of the opinion that there is a vast, unmentioned infertility epidemic. I went through it at a very young age, when most boomers were going through it because they’d left having babies too late. (Being ten years older than I.)

I have friends who got married late twenties early thirties and have kids, but I don’t know any who did so without at least SOME infertility treatment. There might be some (there always are. My friend’s parents who had 14 kids had them from early twenties till menopause.) However, the majority of women are wired to conceive in their late teens early twenties. After that things go… downhill. “Teen pregnancy” is not a social problem. It’s the way the human species was wired. (And yes, of course I know it’s used as an euphemism for young, umarried mothers. But still, the fact we use that term at all is wrong.)

The fact we don’t tell our women this and instead treat them like ersatz young men “Take care of your career first so you’ll be secure when you have babies” is a part of the problem.” Turns out that we’d be better off giving “scholarships for young mothers” and telling women to have their babies FIRST. (And yes, I’m staring this in the face, since both my sons and the girls they tend to be interested in are incredibly career oriented.)

It’s part of the lie of overpopulation (no, we don’t have overpopulation. Now, we don’t have exploding population. We’re a colonizing species. Overpopulation is a problem only bureaucrats could come up with. Malthus was wrong, as well as an *sshole. More population for a species like us, unless we’re artificially confined (and we’re not) just means more opportunity. Beyond that, there seems to be a natural, built in throttle like in most scavenging populations so that after a while our fertility throttles down.) Governments and societies started valuing “production” over “reproduction” never catching on that there isn’t one without the other.

But there is something else too to that entire “We’ll stop having marriages.” In places like the US and Japan we seem to be doing precisely that.

And that is the other part of treating women as ersatz males, combined with the blinkered idea that we need equal results. This has led to prejudicing education in favor of female styles, prejudicing society in favor of the promotion of women to better paid positions, pushing women into roles of leadership in the economy and business.

Notice my term: prejudicing. I’m a woman and I’m not in favor of “barefoot and pregnant” because though it might be best for the species as a whole, it sucks the life out of individuals and makes half the species slaves to its propagation.

I’m all for schools that treat people as equals. If that means fewer women have tech jobs in the end, or that more women get their feels crushed by men being better, cry me a river. I care for treating individuals as individuals, not as protected classes. Stop prejudicing and pushing and tweaking so you have so many innies in so many positions.

Because the problem with the society we’re pushing, where women are on top and men are unemployed is that men and women are different.

They’re different in their mating strategies, as well as in everything else. (And note, here I’m talking about humans as statistical units. Not individuals. Individuals exist on a continuum but statistics are true in the ‘majority sense.”

Most women want to marry above them. Men don’t care to marry above or below, usually their mating is visually driven.

But most women want to marry what they perceive as up the social scale. This might be for some a matter of marrying someone they consider “saintly” in a way or another. Literally for the very religious, more … ah… symbolically for, say, ecologically minded young people.

But for most women – the overwhelming majority of them – it means “marrying someone who can give me greater security.” Most of the time this means “someone who is richer/doing better than I.”

This is why we have all the “billionaire” romances. (Used to be millionaire.) Women will pick the rich guy over the poor one almost every time, and it has nothing to do with being mercenary. Evolution has wired them to look for security for their children.

What happens when almost all men are “socially inferior” to most women.

As happens I can tell you this. I don’t know if it was nation wide, in my generation, or just in the village. I know in the village in my birth year and oh, three either way, most of the boys were “bad seeds.” Most of them had criminal records. None of them went on to school past the “technical and vocational training” level, and even those there were fewer than women who went on to college.

Was it teaching? I don’t think so. Our teachers were the same they had been for decades. I think it was the revolution and sudden leniency to juvenile delinquency and perhaps ideas you shouldn’t beat teen boys with sticks (which yes, used to happen before). Anyone who was born in a more rural area will tell you that life is closer to the bone and what we consider delinquency in terms of violent fights, some theft and such is not rare… once per life. Then the switch or for worse cases a scare in the form of the law taking it very seriously indeed stops the nonsense. Which is why OVERALL rural areas are safer.

Well, the traditional structures of control of young males were removed.

This meant most of them went bad. Women don’t go bad that way.

Anyway, for whatever reason there were no men available in the village in my birth year – or no significant men – by the time we reached marriageable age.

Of 12 girls who graduated fourth grade (last grade in the village) my year, two married abroad. Four married local boys our age. Three married ridiculously YOUNGER boys (after the order had been restored) and three never married.

The expected number for “never married” is more like one. And usually there aren’t “and two married abroad.” Heck, marrying across the country was rare enough back then.

And the point is, when what you’re dealing with is not the village but the majority of civilization where are women who don’t find suitable men going to find them?

Mind you, I think as with infertility, assisted reproduction will come to our rescue to an extent. Most women want children, and a lot will get “assistance.” But that’s not a universal solution, even biologically, let alone sociologically.

So, the elderly people in the village might be right. Marriages might stop to the significant point of there being too few to make a difference. And children will more or less stop shortly thereafter.

Before you pop the bubbly for the defeat of overpopulation, remember that civilization is made of people. It’s only those who believe in a finite pie who believe fewer people means more wealth. The rest of us know that people CREATE wealth. (Which is why we’re all more wealthy than in Shakespeare’s day. Do the finite pie people think that, as in movies, the majority of the population then were Lords and Ladies?)

A world without people is an impoverished, struggling world for the few that remain. Since this is not an Atwood novel, the problem is not whether wealthy Londoners will treat dolls as children, but how CAN they be wealthy when there are so few people to produce and so few to buy what’s produced, which reduces options on what is made and available and…

You get my point, right? Yeah. Because I do.

A world without children is an impoverished world. Robots might produce some things, but robots take energy and maintenance and—

So, what are we going to do about it? We can stop lying to the young. We can tell them the facts of life about economics and overpopulation. And we can admit that while women should be equal under the law and have equal options, they are “equal” to men, but very different creatures.

That will start to respect women for what they are and stop treating them like defective men.

And then we can find ways to teach our young that don’t treat boys like defective girls and allow those who can to rise.

We can also get rid of the bureaucrats and their tendency to treat everyone as cogs in interchangeable machines.

Okay, that last might be a dream – but it’s a beautiful one, and I’m going to take it with me into my writing today.

408 thoughts on “Men, Women and Prophecy”

  1. (And yes, of course I know it’s used as an euphemism for young, umarried mothers. But still, the fact we use that term at all is wrong.)

    When the folks using it as an euphemism start padding the numbers by including marred women whose pregnancy started before they turned 20– or they pull the same junk as with “gun deaths” and include all of those under 24– then it’s no longer an euphemism. They can’t have it both ways, being literal when it gives them bigger numbers and then throw a fit because you’re “misunderstanding” them.
    (I’ve had arguments with folks who want to consider the married 19 year old the same, morally, as a pregnant 13 year old. It’s when I started blocking relatives, because when I pointed out what they were doing they started getting really nasty, and invited all their “rationalist” friends to join in.)

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    1. I married at eighteen and had my oldest daughter (Cedar) when I was nineteen. Re: Sarah’s point, I had no trouble whatsoever getting pregnant, nor did Cedar, who married at twenty. But relatives who got married later, in their late twenties/early thirties, ALL had trouble becoming pregnant. My aunt and one sister both were eventually able to have children (two each); my middle daughter, who married at twenty-seven, has gotten pregnant once and miscarried. She and her husband have been married nine years and have no children, though they very much want them. At least in her case, I think the fertility problems are probably due to undiagnosed celiac disease — it runs in our family, and the one time she got pregnant was after a month of her and her husband going gluten-free. They went back on gluten and lost the baby. I think there’s cumulative damage from celiac disease which possibly doesn’t cause infertility in a young mother, but does in an older mother. Just my speculation at this point, though.

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      1. Well, I know that Cedar has autoimmune, as I do — eczema — and that certainly causes cumulative damage. The immune system also gets more hyperactive as you get older. My last miscarriage was the result of an extreme allergy to the (then flowering, in Arizona, where we visited) gum acacia trees.
        For me the ideal age was probably 16 to 18. I still wish I’d married Dan four years earlier. (Also an early first pregnancy seems to make the others easier.)

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        1. I was also going to bring up the point that an early first pregnancy makes the later ones go easier. Otherwise, there would not have been so many families with 10-14 children in the past, like my dad’s family. And his mother started at 20.

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    2. I’ve had arguments with folks who want to consider the married 19 year old the same, morally, as a pregnant 13 year old. It’s when I started blocking relatives, because when I pointed out what they were doing they started getting really nasty, and invited all their “rationalist” friends to join in.

      You could probably hear my hand hitting my forehead all the way over where you live. If someone considers themselves a “rationalist” and doesn’t consider equivocation a bad thing, they don’t deserve the title. But of course, they only call themselves “rationalist” to make themselves feel better about their nigh-religious commitment to atheism (I would guess, anyway).

      I mean, in most states, you can get married at 18 when you’re a legal adult, or at 16 with parental consent. And because I’ve known some very mature teens, I’d even be willing to let 15-year-olds marry, in some cases, with about a dozen different people required to give their consent (and all of them being on the hook for large fines if the couple divorces before both of them have reached their 18th birthday, which should help cut down on abuses and ensure that only the REALLY mature 15-year-olds are allowed to take such a step. And I think the parents who give consent to a 16-year-old’s wedding should also be on the hook if the couple divorces, for similar reasons; though that could cause problems I haven’t thought of yet…)

      (Note that I am NOT in favor of lowering the age-of-consent for non-married sex. A 16-year-old should still be considered a minor in the eyes of the law if he/she is having sex, and if the other person is, say, 24, that should be statutory rape. But if the 24-year-old wants to MARRY the 16-year-old, and only have sex after marriage, and the parents are fine with it because they know their daughter is mature enough to start adult life properly and her soon-to-be-fiancé is a good man, that’s a completely different situation and I’m in favor of allowing it.)

      All that to say, yeah, lumping married 19-year-olds into the “teen pregnancy” category to inflate its numbers is a classic example of equivocation, and/or “how to lie with statistics”. And I shouldn’t be surprised that people will lie to push their agenda… but I still am. I value Truth* highly, and I keep expecting that other people do as well. Oh well, at least “does he/she value Truth?” makes a good filter for “whom should I really be friends with?”

      * With a capital T. Meaning that if it doesn’t fit with my agenda, my agenda needs to change to accommodate reality. As opposed to the debased postmodern concept of everyone having their own “truth” which can be tortured into fitting their agendas. That concept is a lie from the pit of Hell.

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      1. But of course, they only call themselves “rationalist” to make themselves feel better about their nigh-religious commitment to atheism (I would guess, anyway).

        Other than the qualifier of “nigh,” right on the head. Sadly. It was like watching a bunch of drunk 15 year old boys trying to be cool.

        *****

        /amen for the rest

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  2. One of my odd friends has a running joke where he would finish (your) sentences with ‘In accordance with prophecy.’, usually when you were talking about some other occurrence or activity. Haven’t read the post yet, but wanted to share that because the post title immediately made me think of that.

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  3. Your idea about a sort of folk memory encouraging people to have children may not be that far off. The 1600s were, well, they sucked in the northern hemisphere and probably were not that great in the south. China’s population may have dropped by as much as 70% in some regions because of climate-induced famine with war as a chaser. We all know what happened in Central Europe between 1613-1648, with “smaller” conflicts popping up after that. Plus periods of crop loss from cold and floods. The Iberian Peninsula was on the edge of it, but still suffered population loss in many areas. I’ve seen suggestions of up to 20% total global population decline between 1600-1700, with much higher drops in places like the upper Rhine Valley. Then, just as things started improving, the Corsican Cannoneer showed up. Fear of losing a generation would be a darn reasonable worry to pass along, even after people forget exactly why.

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      1. it shook up to the North, but no damage int he North. Not marked. And if truth be told, Lisbon being the center of government my ancestors were likely to conclude they had it coming.

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        1. I saw a documentary a few months back on some cable channel or another that indicated the population of Lisbon basically concluded they had it coming.

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    2. Sadly, I have found very few people with a clue about the Thirty Years War. I think it marks the end of medieval warfare and the beginning of ‘modern’ warfare. Modern in tactical, operational and strategic senses.

      As an aside, I can only think of one English language film set during the 30 Years War.

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      1. It’s hard to find much about it that does not center on military technology. Geoffrey Parker, bless him, has some good stuff, especially in recent years, and there are a few other fat monographs, but English language sources are hard to track down. Which is a shame, because sooo much (English Civil War, the Habsburg pivot toward the east and south, decline of Christian belief in the modern Czech Republicm, Calvinist and Lutheran church development, the rise of Prussia) stems from that period.

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  4. Most women want to marry above them. Men don’t care to marry above or below, usually their mating is visually driven.

    ….someone we can admire. For both sides.

    And for both sides, an initial attraction can be fueled by superficial things– he’s got a great job, she’s 36x24x36– but it will need more to keep going.

    By making women supposed to be like men, and way guys are treated, it makes it really hard to find anything to admire; they’re competing with you, they’ve got no spine/will, or even the guys who are supposedly all for “men’s rights” think that being a scumbag is a high achievement. How’s a mutual admiration supposed to grow from that?

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      2. *points at Sarah* She’s the one that made it fall in place, I was just playing with ways to phrase it and loved the way that it could be described as wanting the same thing in different ways.

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    2. An appalling amount of modern romance is fueled by the ephemeral. We confuse being infatuated with being in love, we value our partners not by who they are but by what they seem likely to be. We are translating consumerist values into our personal lives, and the results typically are not good. We have mistranslated “commitment” to one another into “so long as we are both hormonally deranged.”

      And then we lie about (and with) statistics. “Half of all marriages end in divorce” is both a lie and a self-fulfilling prediction. The statistic has long-since been parsed here and there is no need to revisit that, but the fact that it induces us to enter matrimony with one foot out the door and our guard up saps our commitment. We see long-married couples sitting with nothing to say (nothing needed to be said because they are now of one mind) and dismiss them as boring.

      Lately Dr. Helen has been writing on the hostility with which society treats the male of the species; pointing out that men — not women — are being called to sacrifice for society’s sake. There are good reasons for men to pursue committed relationships, but society is acting in many ways to preclude such relationships’ fulfillment of men’s needs.

      “What’s in it for me” is one of the questions any person asks of society. It was wrong to tell women to accept the plan offered them, it is grossly hypocritical for those who denounced women’s deal to deny men’s right to ask the same question. A culture that answers nobody’s needs is a doomed culture no matter how “rich” it appears.

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      1. Most young women have always had to choose between marrying a man who will be alive through and past the child-raising stage and marrying a man who’s successful but much older. So young women naturally attempt to assess what he’s likely to become when they’re looking at young men.

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        1. The markers they’re being conditioned to judge with are seriously flawed these days.

          There is evidence supporting an argument that the birth control pill is not helpful in this process.

          Then we have the problem of government standing as Daddy of Last Resort.

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  5. In the ‘prime years of reproduction’ for me, I never once found a single woman interested in dating me. I didn’t date in high school, I was a geek. I didn’t date in college, I was too much of a nerd. I didn’t date in the Army, I wasn’t a stud. It wasn’t until I got out that I actually dated a woman. And even then, she refused to commit because I wasn’t _____ enough for her, and I needed to improve that before she would consider so. Eventually, because I wasn’t making that improvement the way she wanted quickly enough, she dumped me.

    And I never once found a woman in my immediate vicinity who was interested in me…so I resorted to the internet, where I found plenty who would consider me. While dating from the internet, I discovered that there is a whole generation of women out there, bemoaning the fact that there’s ‘no good men left.’ That they’ll never find The One, that all the guys now are man-children, or have some sort of weird hangup, or aren’t very well employed. “There’s no good ones.”

    I’m now, at the age of 32, engaged to be married to an amazing woman of 35 who also went through an agonizing search, unable to find a guy who was interested in her because she didn’t meet the crazed ideals pushed in the rags of today, and because she dedicated her 20’s to serving God overseas. And I know we’re going to have fertility issues. It hurts me to know that she’s going to struggle there, and I pray that I’m not also bringing issues to the table as well.

    The frightening thing is, I know a huge number of friends who are also struggling in much the same way–a woman with physical problems which makes pregnancy dangerous for her; two couples who have endured miscarriage after miscarriage; another fearing for a familial genetic disorder….And each and every one of these couples are in my age bracket.
    And that’s just at the top of my head.

    I have no idea what the future holds for us, but I can tell you society is really screwing up our heads.

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    1. You might have some issues, but don’t despair.
      My mother had me when she was 35, my sister when she was 40. I was her firstborn. Both of us are reasonably intelligent people and reasonably socially well-adjusted.
      So, have hope.

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    2. Some of us didn’t have kids because they’d be horrible parents. Also labor is incredibly scary. You want me to what.. from where… for how long.. without painkillers?

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      1. I talked to my mom about doing it without pain killers– after all, she did.

        She informed me in no uncertain terms that if she hadn’t had labor so quickly that in one case the baby beat the doctor to the room, she would’ve been using the available pain meds and that further more childbirth is not a competitive sport, use the technology that’s available.

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          1. I’m more afraid of needles than giving birth. Human psychology is a weird thing.
            Foxfier, number three was born before the doctor got there. Apparently the labor and delivery nurses are quite used to catching babies. Number five outdid him, though: she beat the EMTs: the fire department got the bragging rights.
            ZeeWulf, I’ve got two friends who could be your fiance, except neither of them has a fiance yet, as far as I know. I’m kind of crossing my fingers here that I’ll be getting a note from one soon . . . but there are probably a lot more ladies in that boat than just the two of them.

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        2. Both of mine refused to come out at all, we had to go in after them. When people ask me about the pain of child birth, I tell them I was on some wicked drugs and don’t remember anything except the time of birth for both of them was 12:12pm.

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    3. I remember the mantra of “there’s ‘no good men left.’ ” being chanted in the late Seventies, early Eighties. I also recall casting a gimlet eye upon those complaining and wondering “What makes you think you deserve a ‘good man’ just because you want one? Too many were shopping for first-quality merchandise in the overstock store and then decrying the prices asked.

      Some facts are as true as the copy-book headings, and among them is “you can’t buy a Lexus for a Toyota price.” Women (and men) have been led to value partners by the least (long-term) significant measures.

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    4. Take heart. I’m 34. I’m pregnant. And I found my wonderful man through the net too. The internet is good for us Odds in finding each other.

      Branching topic to what ZeeWulf is talking about here…

      I wonder how many of the women who have fertility problems have them because of longterm use of contraceptives? I mean there are people who have multiple children who are conceived and born despite using contraceptives, but I’m wondering about the ones who had the contraceptives work but had an adverse side effect of lessening fertility.

      The only reason why I posit this is because drugs don’t affect people the same way – I haven’t run into a single hormone based contraceptive that doesn’t affect me adversely, and I’ve tried them. Condoms result in allergic reactions.

      Just that, I remember a friend of mine (guy friend) and I talking about contraception, and he mentioned that his wife and most of her friends take hormonal contraception to help regulate their periods – ergo, stop them from being utterly horrible experiences of misery – versus the women I knew back in the Philippines (of a wide range of ages) who, on a similar ratio (most being about 85% of ’em, roughly) who hated the effect of contraceptives on them (getting the bloating, negative reactions, horrible painful periods, etc). While I often hear the maxim of ‘anecdotes are not the plural of data’, it was a very interesting contrast of experiences.

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      1. We know that other pharmaceuticals have different effects on different populations, so it makes perfect sense that one-dose-fits-all hormonal stuff would have different results for different groups, as well as on different individuals. (I’ve never used them so I have no idea what their effects would be.)

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        1. I took it for about a year, for acne. None of it ever worked from me. Judging from what has gone on the last four years, when they tried to give me hormonal stuff for my hormonal stuff, it works for about a month, then my body adjusts and goes back to doing exactly what it was doing at a higher level.
          Considering this is what my body does with alcohol — if I manage to have near-poisoning levels, I pass out, turn cold and rigid, sweat a bucket, wake up half an hour later stone sober and with no alcohol in my system. Older son does same — I might be an alien.

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      2. I do wonder if this is why my wife and I haven’t had any since our first – she got a shot after the kiddo was born, and it’s been easy a decade since we’ve done any other prevention and we still only have the one.

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        1. I know that my own reaction to the shot contraceptive was so horrifically bad that Rhys felt bad for me. Never again. He keeps wishing he could be the one taking the contraceptive pill since he has less adverse reactions to medications as a whole than I do.

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      3. I wonder how many of the women who have fertility problems have them because of longterm use of contraceptives? I mean there are people who have multiple children who are conceived and born despite using contraceptives, but I’m wondering about the ones who had the contraceptives work but had an adverse side effect of lessening fertility.

        *nod* Just because some folks’ system doesn’t break when hit with a hormonal sledge hammer doesn’t mean that other folks’ won’t be broken permanently.

        Add in that we’re at least 50 years behind on actually learning about female fertility because everything has been treated with the same “hit it more” methods– the advancements of Catholic fertility centers in the last decade and a half are incredible, and that’s just the “stuff you can do at home” stuff. When they actually manage to mainstream checking out hormone levels and such? Oooh!

        There’s probably additional issues from one-size-fits-few nutrition.
        I started taking a B multivitamin, and it’s starting to look like the weight issues I’ve had my whole life were at least partly because of a @#$@# nutritional quirk! (I’m supplementing at about 200% of the RDA; the lowest “be careful” level is ten times that. In case anybody is worried. :D )

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        3. I lowered my blood cholesterol purely by diet.

          It requires 200% of the daily RDA of fiber — or more — a day.

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      4. Oh, the “making periods less miserable”– from my family, I know that “painful periods” have a high correlation with miscarriages, which would indicate there’s some other problem going on.

        Gee, if only some doctor would actually try to fix the problem, instead of cover it up.

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        1. My household hasn’t particularly had complaints about miserable periods — our issues mostly concern other punctuation marks, such as commas or colons attempting to become semi-colons.

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    5. I was 37 when I got married, and I was concerned about being able to have children. I conceived two or three weeks after the wedding. No problems except for weight gain. The second one took years, though — I conceived on the cycle where I visited the OB to discuss infertility issues (and recieved instructions to monitor more closely and see him again in a couple of months when I had that information, plus references to his favorite specialists and advice that at my age I should go see them now, while still working with him, not after six months to a year of only working with him.) Again, no problems during the pregnancy itself except for weight gain.

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      1. My second was conceived right after I’d discussed infertility with my doctor. Maybe there’s something in that.
        What bugged me was that at 34 they just assured me I was menopausal WITHOUT testing the hormones.

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        1. My wife and I married when we were 28 and 36 respectively*. We wanted children but she wanted to wait until we were “more settled”. So when she was 31 we started trying to have a baby. After a year of no luck we went looking into fertility issues. Part of the problem was me. Well, after a period of still no luck, we went to a different doctor. We were between treatments–had stopped with the previous and had not yet started with the new one when she became pregnant with our son (who, due to some complicated issues, is living with his grandparents in Japan). Two years later, entirely by surprise and without doing anything other than being sexually active and using “less reliable” birth control, she became pregnant with our daughter.

          *I would have been quite happy to marry much younger but it takes two, you know, and I was, and remain quite clueless socially.

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          1. I hate to give the SJWs their due, but I think it’s the “package” — female, accent, Latin, fiction writer… (I found out one of my doctors who had dismissed serious concerns about ten years ago ASSUMED I was hypocondriac because I was “bored”. See, he didn’t view writing as “real work” because “published, under contract” never registered. And being Latin he assumed I was pining for my “community” which I’d “left behind.”) That said, the SJWs make this work by making people like me sound like total nuts. Oh, and by buying into and propagating stuff like “Latinas long for communities of their kind.” And “I’m a writer, I just haven’t published anything/work when I’m inspired.”

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            1. (Sigh) I wish the climate wouldn’t kill you, because there are good doctors around here. Although, ironically, the Latin (probably Mexican, but never asked) one at the office where I go is probably the worst of that group..

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            2. Just because they are SJWs doesn’t mean they are always* wrong, but usually they can be counted on to be right for the wrong reasons.

              *See: Stopped clocks flashing 12:00

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    1. count the flaws in the experiment: mice don’t produce their own civilization. The place is enclosed — etc etc etc. What the experiment actually foretells is life in the projects.

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      1. I think that the projects represent the greatest act of stupidity that the expert class that were supposed to run everything for us produced. And that’s saying a lot, considering just how collectively stupid they are.

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      2. Am I wrong in seeing a similarity between the projects and Indian reservations? (the ones lacking casinos, of course)

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            1. *points at the mouse “experiment”*

              The model? Pointing out ways it’s flawed?

              The more I think about it, that he did it at over two-dozen times suggests that it was a polemic tool, not any kind of search for evidence/attempt to make a valid model.

              Liked by 1 person

                2. (Belatedly, it’s really nice to run into an example of a comment like yours at 5:54 that DIDN’T turn out to be a troll who was just laying groundwork to attack… getting so dang tired of 99 of 100 misunderstandings being “misunderstandings.”)

                  Like

    2. far more mice than meaningful social roles

      ….someone actually wrote that with a straight face.

      Great example of how the built in assumptions of an experiment can destroy the results, though; the mice simply aren’t a good stand-in for humans, unless the humans are prevented from doing anything.

      Might be a good model for those eternal refugee camps, if you add random cat attacks.

      Like

      1. Incidentally, if the guy didn’t already know that rodents eat their young if they’re over crowded– regardless of if there’s enough food– then he’s guilty of failure to understand the materials he built with; if he did know it, then he falsified the supposed research.

        Like

        1. The mouse experiment does match the entitlement state more closely than a society where the individual has to work for his daily bread (or rat chow).

          Like

              2. *Joins Dan in pushing the bar, sits waiting for a story*
                *Push…*
                *Push…*
                *PushPush*
                *PushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPushPush*

                Like

  7. “A world without people is an impoverished, struggling world for the few that remain.”

    As much as the theme of Ringo’s Zombie Apocalypse series is hope, the thing that struck me first is the realization of how much would be lost. We’re on the cusp of so many scientific and tech break-throughs, and they would be gone in an instant.

    Like

    1. Way back in the 1980s, I wrote a little SF piece, which ended up in a published compilation of Student SF. But my background notes went 50 pages for a 10 page story.

      I set it up that General Sir John Hackett’s “Third World War” in 1985 actually happened, and a biowar base buried in the Urals survived and kept going. In 1992, they released a killer plague. Weeks prior, the theoretical basis for FTL was announced. Then the plague hit. I estimated it took a century for us to get back. I may have been an optimist. . .

      Like

      1. That’s kind of the premise of the Colplatschki books, unstated until the last one (last to be published, first in Colplatschki chronology). Yeah, the tech crash caused a lot of trouble, but the population collapse stopped a lot of things cold. And the population was barely large enough in the beginning, before everything got . . . exciting.

        Like

        1. One of Jack McDevitt’s books had an AI invented and put in charge of SETI just before society collapsed. When someone found it a few centuries later it mentioned it was in contact with half a dozen civilizations, and they had no idea what it was talking about.

          Think it was McDevitt, anywy. ‘Eternity Rpad’. maybe.

          Like

    3. Many years ago, I read a book. I forget title and author. It was, I think, one of the ‘laser books” imprint. In any case, the starting point of the story was hat a “magic” (in the Clarke’s 3rd law sense) interstellar transport was invented that could move people off planet in job lots.

      For whatever reason the protagonist was not qualified (or maybe unwilling, it’s been a very long time) to emigrate. The story then goes into the degeneration of civilization on Earth with the protagonist making the observation at the end that a raid he was watching were “saxons”. As Earth’s population dropped to medieval levels so, too, did technology and culture.

      Didn’t entirely buy it then, particularly the way the author lined things up so neatly, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an element of truth to it.

      Simple math is that if you have a population of six million, you only have six “one in a million” geniuses (by definition). But if you have six billion, then there are six thousand such individuals out there. It makes a difference.

      Like

  8. Somehow, this ended up in the Promo comments. . .

    People **ALSO** seem to forget that only SOME groups aren’t breeding.

    In North America, Whites of Protestant roots: Catholics tend to have more kids. Hispanics tend to have larger families. As do Mormons (waving to Larry Correia 5 or so Hungry Viking Children. . . ). And of course, Muslims. . .

    So the “crisis” per se, is primarily amongst WASPs. . .

    Like

    1. Not PRECISELY true. Absent mormons and very observant Catholics (and even there) it’s mostly FIRST GENERATION IMMIGRANTS who breed. Second it decreases some and third the advantage is gone.
      Which means it’s the culture, stupid.

      Like

      1. Yeah. I grew up in Mormonville–80% LDS or so. I had friends with eleven siblings. Twelve-fourteen was the high side on number of kids.
        My generation it’s six-eight.

        Like

        1. Having kids has become LEGALLY more onerous. Like the “can’t leave them alone even for two hours, even with cell phone” until what? Fourteen here? So you have to go to the grocery store trailing all of them until the oldest turns fourteen. My parents would go shopping or whatever from the time I was five or six, and they didn’t even have cellphones on them.

          Like

            1. I tend to think this is why folks in rural areas tend to have more kids- it’s easier to. That sort of thing sounds sensible to me.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Twelve years old here, for staying home alone and babysitting. Which is scary, but then I know my twelve year old. (Actually, it’s the three-month-old who is scary. She scares Daddy even.)

                Like

                2. Our kids are really low maintenance, all things considered, but I knew my husband was suited to our kids when the lady that shares our back fence came and knocked on the door to say our toddler was on the roof… and he looked for the kids before saying “our kids are inside.”

                  Like

                    2. once, during our writers’ meeting, we’re sitting facing the window that’s under my older son’s bedroom porch (in the other house.) And discussing a book. And suddenly a kid goes by, head down. The woman next to me jumps up. It was her kid. He was fine. He landed on the flower bed. A foot to the other side would be concrete and he’d be dead. He was NINE there were littles up there, but he was the one who decided to dive. (HAD to decide because there were four feet of roof around the porch. First you had to go over the railing, then you had to WANT to dive.)

                      Liked by 1 person

                3. I remember being left at home over a weekend when I was 10. Didn’t want to go on a camping trip or some such. Not a problem; I knew how to run a can opener. A weekend to do nothing but read? Heaven!

                  Like

          2. I was the oldest of four – and I was considered responsible enough at 11 to babysit my infant brother, and the two who came in between. In a crisis, there was the stay-at-home neighbor lady across the street … but yes, ‘can’t leave them alone for two hours even with cellphone’ is terribly onerous.
            Having been a caregiver for my sibs at a fairly young age made having my own kidlet a much less daunting project.

            Like

          3. When I was nine I would volunteer to stay in the car, which was popular on hot days because it meant we could leave the windows open.

            Like

          4. Cultural, or Fiscal and Legal ? Stuff we were allowed to do as kids would now get our parents arrested for child abuse or neglect. Generic, simple, durable toys of low cost, likewise Children’s clothing, is virtually unavailable today. Even BOOKS are comparatively more expensive, and harder to find.

            When I was a kid, we had ONE TV and TWO phones. We had a lot less, and both valued it more, and took care of it. The ongoing costs of raising kids in a society that runs on replacement, not repair is significantly higher now, even after figuring inflation.

            And thanks to media culture, kids now demand specific brands of everything, including foods. Generic simply doesn’t count for most people.

            Like

      2. You forgot Amish and Mennonites as (very) prolific breeders. Around where I reside, it is hard not to notice them. In our small town, the number of kids is going up, the number of kids in public schools down. They run their own schools. Your standard Catholic parochial school will have a significant number of non-Catholics as students. I think the number of non-plain folk in their schools is zero.

        Like

    4. A lot of it gets mangled because of Cultural Xers– if you define Catholic and Mormon and such as people who actually practice the religion, you get a much different result than if you go only off of self-identified. (Usual method is to correct for “Regular Church-Goer,” even though that might include folks who go “hey, I go regularly– every Christmas and Easter!)

      Oh, and the Hispanic thing doesn’t tend to hang together– first generation immigrants are at least recorded as having a lot more kids (a lot of it for hispanics is estimates and might be mangled by deliberate lowballing of how many illegal women of child-bearing age there are, plus folks who give birth and vanish tending to use Hispanic names, and if they get info from tax returns then you’re counting folks who aren’t in the country and might not even exist) but it drops in the second and only going generations unless they’re part of other groups.

      Basically, “Hispanic” doesn’t hang together very well as a demographic indicator, any more than “self-identified Catholic” does; breaking folks into more cultural groups works better.

      For example, your WASP point is fairly accurate, but would be more accurate if we crafted some kind of cultural proxy for it.

      “Folks who don’t believe in much of anything bigger than themselves”? :evil:

      Mini-rant over. *grin*

      Like

      1. The other point is that the self-identified whites at this point are only those who can’t come up with anything else. You say what you are and the social services, etc, can’t investigate. I.e. Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill.
        If my husband were a different person, he might very well by now have had the genetic test and be listed as Amerindian, instead of white, if he wanted to claim minority status. Which most people wish to claim, because it confers advantages.

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        1. I had a running argument with a recruiter back in the day about that very thing. He wanted me to identify as Amerindian, which technically I am. I pointed out that I hadn’t been raised that way, so no dice. He insisted. *shakes head*

          These days when I need to specify a race, it usually gets marked as “Other” unless I am feeling especially snarky. I know it gets folks free stuff, but the principle of the thing offends me. I hold a dim view of any studies that use “race” as a data point to this day for that very reason. It’s like they are deliberately mucking with the *data!* Grrr.

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          1. All Dan had was the “rumor” in the family same as oh, Fauxahontas, so despite the eyes that had to be either oriental or amerindian we ignored it. But both sons have had health problems that almost for sure bespeak HEAVY Amerindian ancestry. (Well, the younger boy’s could be African, which I know I have.)
            The joke in the family is that we’ll have the tests and I’ll be the one with Amerindian ancestry. This is unlikely, of course, but not impossible, when you consider men who brought home souvenirs and all.

            Like

            1. If you were a “civilized” Indian in Ohio and your neighbors liked you, you mostly couldn’t be bothered to leave. So there were whole chunks of tribes who just didn’t leave like they were supposed to, like the Remnant Shawnee. Also there was a fair amount of intermarriage before the tribes left, and those folks didn’t go anywhere; and there were a fair amount of tribal folks who left Oklahoma and came back to their old stomping grounds in Ohio later. (One of the families in my Indian Guides/Indian Princesses group was fullblooded Shawnee who’d moved back, and one of my great-uncles on one of the side branches of my family was from some tribe out in Oklahoma, I don’t know which. That was back in the 1930’s or 1940’s that he came to Ohio.)

              But yeah, lots of medieval Portuguese fishermen visited America, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them brought back more than bacalao.

              Like

              1. But yeah, lots of medieval Portuguese fishermen visited America, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them brought back more than bacalao.
                I’ve mentioned this here before, so I’ll make it brief. The supposedly first white people in the Appalachians found a Mediterranean looking people already there who practiced Catholicism without priests and said they were Portugee, and called themselves the Melungian. A typical identifying Melungian family looks like… well, like the Hoyts, part Portugese, part Cherokee. You just summed up the best explanation.

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              2. I got a few ancestresses up the Acadian branches that, as far as the records go, could have appeared by spontaneous generation on their wedding days, which usually points to local.

                Oddly, nothing up the Quebec branch, even though I can trace my ancestry to many of the very first settlers.

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            2. *sudden interest*

              Do a lot of people in Dan’s family have ‘asian eyes’ or is it just him in his generation?

              Asking because- i have them. My niece has them. My youngest aunt has them. Its definitely and avatism, coming from multiple genetic threads in my case.

              Like

              1. I’m not Sarah’s Dan, but in my family, yes. My sister more so than me. My grandmother, great aunt, and that great aunt’s son and daughter, granddaughter, and great granddaughter all have the epicanthic fold. It seems to follow much more strongly in the female line, especially female-to-female.

                My sister and I are definitely throwbacks. We get it from both sides, but my Mother’s family more so than my Father’s. Dark hair, dusky skin (I can pass for Mexican, too, in the summer as long as I don’t open my mouth), and in the girl’s case, the eyes.

                Like

              2. Um… His mom has them. She’s an only child. I haven’t seen pictures from others.
                His family on his dad’s side immigrated in the 1600s though, so if they don’t have some Amerindian genetics, it would be weird.
                Older son has them too.

                Like

                1. I don’t know that coming to North America that early would necessarily mean some Amerindian genetics. In your Dan’s case, maybe, based on the physical features you describe (or maybe a sea captain brought home an Asian bride long ago!). But quite a few of my ancestors came here in the 1600’s and as far as I know (we have a somewhat complete family tree) we don’t have any Amerindian blood in us. However, one of my grandfather’s great-uncles founded a line of Vanderburghs in Montana who are now mostly Amerindian (he was a fur trapper/trader and had an Indian wife). And there must have been a slave-owner somewhere back there, because there’s a black family in one of the South-eastern states with the same family name, although, we think, no genetic connection (they took their master’s surname). Tracing family backgrounds is interesting.

                  Like

            3. One of our very Mexican-American-and-fiercely-proud-of-it neighbors had the genetic test done a couple of months ago. He started telling us by saying, “Hey, I just found out something about my family… you’ll never guess what!” And we bowled him over by looking unimpressed and saying, “Yer Anglo, right?!”
              It turns out that yes, is ancestry does include a larger proportion of straight European (Spanish) that he had never expected. This shouldn’t have surprised anyone who knows Mexican history, since the conquistadors and the peninsulares spread their genetic material pretty widely. But we had fun with it, though, telling him that he would now he would start craving bland food.

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              1. Oh, you know the thing about Amerindians being descended from Jews? Yeah, turns out it’s right. A Portuguese Jew in eighteenth century seems to have spread his genetics far and wide amid all the tribes. ;)
                Okay, it’s not true in the way they meant. The joke in my family, judging from extended family behavior is that his name was Almeida.

                Like

                1. I attended a First Nations Con in Wichita, KS a few years ago. One of the speakers spoke of how their group of singers and dancers did a tour of Israel a year or two before and the Israelis were surprised and pleased at how many of the words in Indian were basically the same pronunciation and meaning as there. I don’t remember which tribe, Sioux, I think. There were many cultural similarities as well.

                  Like

          2. I could mark as ‘Other’, technically, but just mark as ‘white’ because otherwise there is a long explanation involved. If i were in Hawaii, I could mark as ‘pacific islander’…

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            1. Back in High School, when I still had knees, my preferred race was the 2-mile race. Sprints and hurdles require native speed, but the 2-mile demands you stick to it.

              Like

              1. So I should be answering “Cross Country” or 5k Fun-Run?

                (Haven’t run either of those in quite a few years, but…)

                Like

  9. I have friends who got married late twenties early thirties and have kids, but I don’t know any who did so without at least SOME infertility treatment.

    My wife got preggers when she was 36 and I was 39. We’d put off having kids because in our 20s we weren’t all that interested and in our thirties we weren’t financially “stable” (looking back that shouldn’t have mattered much).

    However we had *no* trouble conceiving. We had decided that after a particular separation (3 months) we would make the attempt. We were back home on approx. July 1, our daughter was born on 29 March of the next year. You do the math :)

    A cousin of mine got married in his late 30s to a woman only a few years younger and almost immediately started popping them out. He’s Italian and she was Nigerian via Britain. I don’t know about fertility, but they’ve got two or three now.

    His sister got married late as well, and I think she’s dropped 2 at this point.

    Another cousin got hitched in her early 30s, and she’s had her 2, but she married rich, and is liberal to progressive, so that’s all she’s going to have.

    None of them (afaik) have had fertility treatments.

    As to the rest of it, the religious are out-producing the irreligious (and no, global warming is not a religion, it’s a faith). For example my brother (Lutheran this days IIRC) has 5 boys. I have 2 girls. His wife had 4-5 miscarriages. I think they were trying for a gurl, either that or his own ball team.

    Like

    1. Well, William — I pointed out there are exceptions. I was talking about the vast majority of the population, not the outliers. You guys just reinforce the “you can leave it as late you want” :-P

      Like

      1. If you’re going to ignore the science and look at outliers as prime examples, you’re going to have problems no matter what the realm, and I’m almost always an outlier.

        That said, how many of those people would have had trouble concieving in their 20s? It’s not unusual for that to be a problem–I’ve known more than a few couples who tried for 6 or 8 years before going to a doctor (and still failing).

        I should mention that my father (not genetically related) was born 12 years after his next closest sibling. His father was in his early 50s and mother was in her 40s, and this was in 1931/32. It’s a hell of a story, but has to be told in person.

        Like

        1. That said, how many of those people would have had trouble concieving in their 20s? It’s not unusual for that to be a problem–I’ve known more than a few couples who tried for 6 or 8 years before going to a doctor (and still failing).

          Still, statistically, it’s far more likely for younger women to be able to get pregnant without difficulty. AND that seems to prime their bodies for bearing children in later years. Naturally, there are exceptions, but that’s the way to bet, for the most part.

          Like

          1. One thing is that, for most women, you’re just overall healthier and full of stored nutrition when you’re in your late teens and early twenties. Once you hit the late twenties and your body is fully mature — then unless you have gotten pregnant at some point, your body starts to turn off the quality vitamin processing. You can’t get as much A, B, and D out of diet alone. You react differently to stress. You start going gray a little, if you’ve got any red hair. Etc. So I suspect that a lot of women would have slightly fewer childbearing problems in their late twenties if they would pump up their vitamins and minerals.

            The other thing is that, for many women, taking birth control pills is not particularly good for fertility later on, when they’re trying to be fertile. Particularly if they have been prescribed hormones for years without the doctor worrying about their individual hormone levels and reproductive systems. If your doctor just shoved them at you without doing any tests or followup, he is basically playing roulette with your body. Even if the Pill isn’t doing damage, it is often masking other reproductive system problems without helping them go away. How can you tell if there’s something wrong if you can’t observe your own menstrual cycle, or if you never even got a chance to see it settle down after your first couple months of periods? (Some people give the Pill to really young girls!)

            But yes, it used to be well-known that anybody marrying older women couldn’t be guaranteed any kids, whereas today people want to believe the exact opposite. We’re somewhat healthier, but not that much.

            Like

            1. “You start going gray a little, if you’ve got any red hair.”
              OOOOOOOOOH!
              My natural hair color was dark mahogany. It looked dark brown, unless I stood in the sun, when it looked RED. (In some light, it just looked reddish brown, which it was.) My kids found a picture of me standing in full sun, and said “Ew, why did you dye your hair bozo?”
              Anyway, broad streaks up from the temples at 28. Mostly white by 31. ALL white now. (And yep, I’m going to let it grow out. I’m tired of coloring.)

              Like

                1. Heh, Sarah, you were one of those anime redheads, where red or blue originally represented the highlights of black hair….

                  I’m more of a mixed brown, so I’ve got a lot of white hairs that used to be red and now, gray or silver hairs that used to be black. The brown part is still there being brown. :)

                  Like

              2. My hair is similar. I started going seriously gray with a white cowlick spray in my then-short hair, which I called my own chelengk (a la Capn Aubrey). Then it stretched back from the temple, then both temples, now entire broadsides of white. I never colored it after it got seriously gray; I have always found it jarring to see a middle-aged woman with bright hair … I know I’m odd that way.

                Like

              1. The least concern I have about my hair is its colour.

                After a certain point you find where it does — and doesn’t — grow is the greater issue.

                Like

  11. This one hits close to home. I can count my miscarriages on two hands and was almost married at 18. (Thank the Gods I listened to the red flags that started popping and broke that off.)

    The future husband, is the first man I’ve said yes to in terms of marriage since that first engagement. It took about… nine years before he came into my life. I said yes after only six months too.
    Both of us are cringing given my past history over what it is that’s going on with having kids.

    That said, we are completely open to adopting and have been talking a lot of people who have adopted. Now if I could just get him sold on the four to six kids *I* want instead of the only two he wants….

    Like

        2. We were going to wait four years. Got married Dec. 22nd, Eldest was born the following Oct.7.
          Turns out hormonal birth control isn’t working if your cycle won’t sync with the pills. Would’ve been nice to know.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. I’m just glad the women in my family were honest about that kind of thing. Every last female member of both sides outside of those of us like myself who went “Nope, not taking that mess.” has made several trips to the hospital because they had a reaction of some kind to the pill/patch/etc.

              My sister reacted the worst. My mother being the woman that she is, threatened everything possible (all in one felt swoop too) in order to get the doctor to actually check her body chemistry and find the right stuff for her to take. It took threats though.

              Like

              1. I’ve heard of a woman who went back to the doctor complaining of depression since she went on the Pill, and the doctor’s reaction was — how depressed are we talking about?

                Like

            2. I was very ill at 31 right after second son was born, so we waited till I was 34 to try again. Then I had hormonal issues. Went to doctor. Without testing, he told me I was menopausal. A few years later, I conceived and had a miscarriage, but stuff was still out of kilter. I’d go to doctor and be told either I needed to lose weight (well, thanks, I know that) or that I was menopausal. This went on till five years ago when I was having some very serious symptoms (no periods, hair falling out, etc.) and gynecologist (new one) tested. I actually had the inverse of menopause. Too much estrogen. which apparently can kill you. The thing had been spinning out of control slowly, probably since I was 34. They never tested. They just ASSUMED since my first period was at 11, I MUST be menopausal in my mid thirties. (I’m menopausal now. Like, in the last 3 months, since I know for a fact I ovulated 3 months ago — long story — but now my hormones are solidly “menopause has come.”)

              Like

              1. My condolences to Dan and the boys, though come to think of it they may very well not be able to detect a difference.

                Like

                1. Actually I’m not having ANY of the symptoms. Not hot flashes, no mood swings. If anything, it has stabilized my mood. Eh. I did mention I’m odd, right? I’m also writing again, which means I might fall int he statistically small number of women for whom PERImenopause is a problem mentally, and then things steady up.

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                    1. unfortunately I’m also not having cessation of periods, which is why I’m becoming very close to my gynecologist. On the good side, biopsy was negative. Just learned, because they wanted me to have a good New Year.

                      Like

                    2. Yay! Negative biopsy boogie!!

                      What? You don’t have a negative biopsy boogie? Why-ever not?

                      *I’m really irritated with WP, at the moment. I’m apparently in the shadow of the hive mind, again, and thus invisible to comment emails…*

                      Like

                    7. *offers Eamon a share of her cookies*

                      I’ve been learning that while the WordPress mobile app is nifty…not to rely on it for comments. I’ve missed several I’ve found. :/

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                    8. Mmm — cookies!

                      Yeah, the whole system is inconsistent. I bounce between “notify me” (which’ll work for a while and then — not, like today) and subscribe to comments on blogs I follow (which currently is doing nothing for me) to reading in Firefox where I have the Joel Solomon plug-in to at least highlight new comments for me. All I have at the moment.

                      If I could find the little bug causing the problems…

                      Like

                  2. So you have the negative biopsy boogie in the backyard, naked and twelve gauge at full bore. Believe me, oh really believe me, that is well worth celebrating.

                    Like

                    5. Honey, whether it puts hair on your chest probably depends on the man you’re drinking with, but there’s a good chance it will put you flat on your *.

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                    6. I get the sentiment, but really “mother’s milk” is not just a form of expression when one was raised in the village where alcohol “will increase your milk.” The people with low alcohol resistance never made it to kindergarten.

                      Like

                  3. Joel Soloman plug-in that highlights new comments? I’ve been relying on pulling an RSS-feed of all the comments which has the upside of not cramming my e-mail inbox but the downside of losing the context of the conversation.

                    Like

                    5. Oh, sure, caught that it required Greasemonkey, and that it’s for Chrome/Firefox, but I’m using Safari mostly right now so… (prepares to duck and cover for impending browser preference discussion)…

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                    6. What SlateStarCodex (the site for which the original script was written; I basically just replaced that site’s URL with ATH & MGC’s) did was load the Javascript file in the site’s header. See the installation instructions for “Very Special Users”.

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                    8. Mr. Salomon, apologies for the name-abuse. My brain wanted to stick an “a” in but wanted it in the wrong place (which looked wrong).

                      Man gives me a useful plug-in, least I ought do is get his name right…

                      :oops:

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                    9. There are six variant spellings of my name I’ve seen—and that’s just different placements of ‘a’ and ‘o’; there are also spellings that try to preserve the Hungarian pronunciation (“Shulumon” and variants thereof). And that’s before spill-Czech comes into play…. (In other words, no offense was taken.)

                      (I don’t spell my name correctly myself: some French bureaucrat changed it from the original “Salamon” when my grandfather moved there after WWII, and we’ve never bothered changing it back.)

                      Like

                    11. That thing’s a godsend. I’m just now learning how not to wear out my scroll wheel by either switching to page-up/page-down keys, or the middle click variable scroll thingie.

                      Like

                    12. With the plug-in, searching for “~new~” and hitting Ctrl+G (or however your browser handles “find next”) lets you follow threads without wearing out the mouse wheel.

                      Like

                    13. Doh, forgot about the inserted text….

                      Wish there were an easier way to make sure my laptop’s Firefox had the same plug-ins as my Desktop than searching them all out again.

                      Like

                    15. You can copy the Firefox profile folder from the desktop to the laptop and vice versa. You can locate the folder by clicking the Help menu and then troubleshooting information. You will have to copy the entire folder and then replace the name of the old folder with the new one in the profiles.ini file. The folder path will vary by OS; in my Win 8.1 machine it’s here: C:\Users\Steve Nelson\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

                      There’s also an updated Synch option which apparently does the same thing, but I haven’t tried it.

                      Like

        3. My wife told me on our second date she wanted a dozen or so. I asked her out again- the first guy to do so. We have 5 children. With 20 years between first and last. When people ask why so many, I tell them the truth. I’m married to a really good Catholic.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I’ve been on Catholic blogs where the topic of Catholic stereotypes come up. Catholics are really, really, really hung up about sex — and have large families. Real, live Catholics with large families find this very funny indeed.

            Like

              1. I’ve been told that observant Catholics will, of course, hate sex.

                They don’t appreciate when I ask them if they know where babies come from….

                (What they really mean is “you guys won’t tell me that what I want to do is great and wonderful, and you even point out when it can cause major problems, so you have a psychological issue and I don’t have to listen to you. But I am going to keep nagging you for approval and support, especially when the problems you foretold come to pass. Over, and over, and over.” Or something like that.)

                Liked by 1 person

                1. They don’t appreciate when I ask them if they know where babies come from….

                  That would have been a coffee-snorting moment, had I not been following the rules for reading, here. :-)

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                2. Observant Catholics will, of course, hate sex. They are profoundly enthusiastic about marital relations, however (and understand the difference between the two.)

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    2. Biology can pull some funny tricks on you. I have a cousin, almost my sister given we were raised that way, who had about the same issue. Rather more miscarriages than she’d like- a double handful that I know of, at least.

      Her doctor told her there was no way possible for her to carry a child to term. How, I didn’t ask. This was accepted as true and she stopped trying back around ’03 or so.

      My godson is five now. Healthy, rambunctious, and quite thoroughly his mother’s son. Seriously, I think she cloned him some days.

      She was thirty when she had him. When not even trying. *shakes head* I’m not saying this is *likely,* but just so you know, weirdness has been known to happen.

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      2. Yep. My issue is a lutheal phase deficiency, so lots of miscarriages EARLY. Then we had Marshall. I was 31. NOT trying. In fact, it was a terrible time, as we were moving. I carried massive boxes night and day… (With Robert I was on bed rest.) Marshall is fine.

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      3. I don’t worry too much about being put on bed rest or what not. I’m worried the Fiance whose very loving even now, is going to be become insufferable with his doting when/if I get pregnant. Outright insufferable.

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          2. As has been observed at other times, in other places – grandchildren are so much more fun. You should start with them :)

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          3. For whatever causes, most American men do not anticipate wanting or even liking a kid until they experience fatherhood. This signifies something seriously wrong in American society.

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            1. It’s called Child-Support-a-phobia.

              Being a father is great when you see your kids, but when that only happens every two weeks, and the government is taking half of an already small income, so how are you supposed to FEED the rugrats when you have them…

              Yeah, fatherhood is only a good experience two days out of every fourteen for far too many of us. It IS something to fear in the world of divorce and single-motherhood.

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              1. I believe one of the reasons my husband married me is because he decided I was more likely to murder him than divorce him.

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                  1. Do you guys have a club? Maybe with a signet ring? Maybe a special, identifying scarf knot?

                    How do I find the murderess>divorcee members?!

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                    1. My husband likes dangerous women… He says he fell in love with me when I was on a phone booth and took time-off from our call to bait commies with machine guns. (Some men are impressed with the silliest things. It was JUST commies.)

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        2. NO! you enjoy every minute of the insufferable lunatic. There is nothing that would make him more happy than to be the maximum loving man he can be. Then he will turn it to the kid, fine. Despite Fems, men really like proving how loving they can be while keeping up a rough demeanor.

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          1. If I were more used to that kind of behavior from a male… Yeah I would enjoy it….

            I’m still getting to used to the man. And we’ve lived together for almost 14 months now.

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        3. Fussing and pampering, I am told by my wonderful man, is a time honored tradition, an expression of vast appreciation, loving, tenderness and care.

          Plus, well, we ladies are doing all the hard work making the baby.

          In turn, he deals with understanding the spates of frustration that I’m less mobile, more tired, occasionally grumpy and weepy, have insane food cravings, and is expected to curb my hoarding instincts for food and crazed nesting instincts (No, we are not going to build this thing, it will not fit in the room).

          It works out ;-)

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    3. *commiserating* Oh, I would have been agreeable to at least four, if my daughter’s father hadn’t have been such a rat and ditched me the moment I said the magic words. I had never been on the Pill – my dad the research biologist had said early on that it was not such a good idea, messing around with the human hormones like that. If he had stuck with me, we would have had a nice number of kidlets. I’d have ditched the career and been the good stay-at-home ornament to his career. And he would have had one, too – if he had settled on me instead of moving on …
      OTO, I never would have written the books that I have, if I had been raising the team of children and encouraging his career, so there is that.

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    4. Worth your attention if you live in an area which values good foster care:
      Our troubled foster system needs more support, good parents
      By Naomi Schaefer Riley
      … [T]the problems of foster care go beyond money. Our system also fails to attract the people you’d want to be foster parents. Taking in a troubled child is not something you want people doing for money. Broadcasting messages about “Wednesday’s Child” on the evening news is not the way to actually get good, stable parents to feel responsible for those kids who are living on the fringes.

      Increasingly, churches are getting involved. A program in Georgia called FaithBridge helps connect churches with kids in need of temporary homes in their ZIP code. Not only does the organization look for foster parent volunteers, it also enlists and trains dozens of other adults to help provide transportation, babysitting and other support for the families who take these kids in. Having all that help makes good foster parents less likely to burn out quickly and more likely to volunteer again.

      Some additional funds help make these support systems and training more feasible. But what makes it more effective is the fact that these kids are placed in good homes to begin with and there is an entire community taking responsibility for their well-being.

      It’s not quite being adopted by Daddy Warbucks, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.

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  12. I’m going to riff on a section at the beginning, and then I’ll catch up on comments. I’ve got some other thoughts on the larger piece but I’m on my phone…

    If feminism really wanted to help women in this country (not that 3rd wave stuff, there’s nuts baked in), they’d get to some marketing. Start selling the value and experience of mothers. Talk about what mothers in their 40’s or so can bring to companies. Discuss the benefits of part-time career moms with school age children. Work to change the workforce, sure. By selling the benefits of hiring moms at different stages of their motherhood/career dichotomy.

    Lets get rid of the “just as good as men” marketing (not that women aren’t) and start talking about different skill sets and experiences, different career paths and value added as a result!

    Because we need young mothers to survive as a civilization, putting it off is strangling us.

    And because if I’m hiring (as I have done at various times) I’m all about hiring a Foxfier or a Holly (when the kids are old enough) and taking all the time they can give me. I know the value of the experience. I would snatch up a CACS or Freeholder45 before my heart could beat. Show me a (civilian) career field* that wouldn’t benefit from the experience and skills of a mother who’s sent her children into the world.

    I know some people might dismiss it as patronizing B.S. direct from penishood. They’re full of it.

    Business tends to be very conservative (non-political definition) and hesitant. We’re still working from assumptions about entering the workforce, staying with one company, retiring and dying. Which is not the modern pattern. Updating that model with an understanding of motherhood as work experience would be of incalculable value.

    It’s also hard, so I don’t expect the glittery hoo-has or sparkly rods to take note.

    *I know there are fields that require years to attain the necessary knowledge and experience. They’re outliers. And there’s no reason a woman of forty can’t start learning the ropes. Except for outdated expectations of the workforce…

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    1. And because if I’m hiring (as I have done at various times) I’m all about hiring a Foxfier or a Holly (when the kids are old enough) and taking all the time they can give me. I know the value of the experience.

      As I understand it, a lot of the tech companies (and probably the older ones, from the archetypes) that were really successful had an Office Mom– they did the secretary stuff, sure, but they also did stuff like make sure folks had food that fit their dietary requirements, that their appointments got made and kept, that the guy who always forgot ___ had a spare in his vehicle, that the guy who always left out ___ in his reports had someone making sure it got in. You usually only find out what they were doing when they get sick and nobody buys fresh creamer for the fridge. :D

      They don’t do so much on their own, they make it so everybody else does way more.

      It even shows up on TV Tropes, the Team Mom slot.

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      2. I think that my last place really started to go to crap when the company(we were purchased by a large outfit) in it’s less than infinite wisdom laid off our office mom. I know I missed her.

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        1. It’s an organizational category badly captured by standard metrics and little understood by MBA’s.

          Who frequently need a mother with a firm hand. As in callused.

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    2. *I know there are fields that require years to attain the necessary knowledge and experience.

      One thing that is done very badly by far too many companies is Customer Service. Instead of putting young kids on those phones to deal with, often angry, customers, try moms.

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      1. Won’t help.

        Companies have the wrong attitude about CS, they treat it as a cost center to be done as utterly cheaply as possible, not a way to reach out to a customer having issues and gather data on how to fix a problem.

        All they’ll do is piss the mothers off.

        Oh, and there are already places that *sort of* do that, I can’t remember the name off the top of my head, but it’s basically a company that does distributed call centers by hiring people to work from home over a cable or DSL connection. They don’t pay well, and it’s boiler room working conditions.

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        1. Yep – customer service under the ancien regime at the last place I worked (i.e. pre-acquisition) was a pretty high priority (and high prestige, as in promotion paths and logevity within th hotline group) just because the top two companies in the particular market (we were #3) did it so incredibly horribly that we were gaining design-ins just from the quality of our hotline service.

          Under the enlightened post-acquisition new order I understand that is no longer the case.

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        2. I’ve worked a lot of customer service jobs. I’m good at it and enjoy it…for a while. Until it becomes apparent that Customer Service means “make sure the customer doesn’t complain on Facebook”. When you actually want to use your skills and experience to help people, you burn out pretty fast.

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          1. Gah, I didn’t last long with external help desk work. Internal help desk is a bit more tolerable.

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            1. I tend to end up in retail and I’m the person who’s called in when someone comes in looking for a fight. The lady I handled today ended up leaving with some candy in her pocket, a cookie in her hand and instructions to come back and show us vacation pictures. This from a woman who walked in the door demanding the corporate number because she got bad directions from the *bus driver*.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Fortunately the two weeks of Christmas/New Years is incredibly slow since the offices in the UK are shut down then. It’ll pick up next Monday, though.

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    3. Now that I’m back on a functional machine (phones ain’t, unless you’re making phone calls…) I’ll clear a piece of that up a tad:

      I’m not saying men can’t do X or men or women are better at X, there are things where these apply and things where they don’t, but I’m speaking more generally.

      Take the project lead I noted above. Men are quite capable as project leads, they do it every day. But it’s a learned skill. Businesses are pretty good at looking at resumes and extracting a solid notion of likely learned skills. What the business world does a lousy job of is realizing that mothers (and other off-topic specific cases) have a whole host of learned skills that translate well to the business environment.

      What does 5, 10, 20 years of motherhood do to hone organizational skills? Time management? Scheduling? Collection and collation of disparate data? Multi-tasking? Organization of priorities? I could go on, but a mom’d be better at it.

      This sort of systemic experience is not well recognized in the workforce and business people, students, large chunks of our society have a bad tendency to see pregnancy/motherhood as lost time career wise.

      It is, emphatically, not.

      I could see some useful transition programs (community college?) giving women mechanisms to translate their skills to business environments. But that’s maybe a semester.

      In short, there really isn’t a reason why a mother cannot embark on a career at *designate age* with the same education as a recent graduate but be a higher quality candidate because of X years of skill attainment in motherhood.

      ‘Course, our 40 year old mother has to realize that while she’s got a leg up on the fresh graduates, she’s not equivalent to her age peers who’ve been doing the specific job for 15-20 years. This tanks all those expectations of equivalent outcomes…

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    4. I’ll be sixty in a couple of years, so (other than looking after Cedar’s mentally handicapped youngest sister) I’m not looking for work right now. But I do think you are right — I’ve thought, too, that experienced mothers have a unique skill set to offer.

      However, what I would like to see is more extended family (or close friends) living on the same property. I know it wouldn’t work for everyone, because some families contain too many, hmm, not-nice people, but for those whose families are decent people, there would be so many benefits. The older family members would be available to help the exhausted new mom, and to watch the little ones when parents needed to be elsewhere (I really don’t think mothers of little ones should be working outside the home, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want a break now and then). Younger family members would be available to help their elders, or someone who just needs extra help for a while. In my lifestyle, the men and boys and any girls up to it would go cut and split firewood together, while the women did the canning together. And so on. And people like my youngest daughter, who will never be able to care for herself, would always have someone to take care of them, even when the parents were gone.

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        1. It works, mostly. ‘Cept people will be people. We have the deplorable habit of punning here: Mom deplores it daily. Dad’s memory is gone and he’s got no patience with boys being idiots. It is a matter of observable fact that all boys must be idiots at least once per day. Not a day goes by when one of us doesn’t wish another one elsewhere–I’m sure my folks deserve to take a cruise somewhere soon. Anywhere.
          But Dad gets his meds remembered and his stove burners checked, and Mom helps us with the kids when she gets home from work, and we help them stay in their home of nearly thirty years and the kids grow up on acreage in the country where going outside and screaming is okay.

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      2. The writer kathleen Norris’s family has something like that in Hawaii. Much of the family and extended family (aside from her and a few other Odds) life in a cluster of houses on property her father and uncle bought in the 1950s (IIRC) while they were stationed there. Her grand-niece came home one afternoon, yelled for help, and at least twelve people swarmed the scene.

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        1. Fair similar to some knots of my family that have grown up in places around these parts.

          There’s one particular hill up the road a ways that eight of the ten houses are owned and lived in by my relatives. Cousins live on the same street or next-door to each other in other places, often enough. I can remember when I was little, the whole hill being basically one big back yard for us young ‘uns. Wild things that we were.

          There’s good and bad to living in your family’s back pocket like that. Great for all the good things that having your people close does. Not so great when the gossip gets a-goin’ round, and those of y’all from places more citified have *no* idea how the gossip train works around the back porches and kitchen tables of Speck.

          If we could harness the energy and speed-of-light quickness that those rumors spread, we’d be among the stars next week.

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  13. “That will start to respect women for what they are and stop treating them like defective men.”

    I’ll do that when women don’t attempt to work in a traditionally-male sphere — eg firefighters, soldiers (where male strength and derring-do are at a premium) and end up looking like defective men — and then try to redefine the rules to change that.

    I’ll also do that when women respect men for what we are and quit treating us like we’re defective. (See: male schoolchildren, drugging of, etc.)

    And unlike my normal ironic/sardonic comments, this time I’m deadly serious.

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    2. Well, exactly, and THAT is what I’m talking for. Hey, I do a lot of the male things around the house… okay, kill insects and carpentry. (No, seriously, drop a moth in this house and all the three men — two of them behemoths — scream like little girls.) BUT my husband’s mind is more male — in exactness and planning and… and all three of them are stronger than I. WAY stronger. I know that and appreciate it. (And Dan’s family had people to do the carpentry :-P)

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      1. Ah, so your menfolk are vulnerable to moths. Verrrry interesting . . . (takes notes for future use)

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  14. When I was young enough to have children, I didn’t find anyone. It was an agonizing experience for me too. I looked like a teenager in my late twenties, but my body was still ticking away. By the time I married I was almost 32. My hubby had already had a family and didn’t want another one. I was past my baby cravings so I agreed. Considering that I never had a pregnancy or miscarriage, I probably would have had a hard time conceiving by then. In my family of nine siblings, only three were unable to have children.

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  15. First – thanks. Insightful as always.

    One quibble.

    I get what you’re trying to say, but I don’t think that the feminists and SJW ideologues trying to push women into male-idealized jobs (where men are statistically better fitted) think of it as women being made into defective men.

    I think they honestly don’t realize that, with a few exceptions of women who bring something brilliant to the table, that may, sometimes, be better at one aspect, but so weak in the others that they are “defective” – not a good fit for the job.

    And they think of men as defective women, because they use female traits as the baseline for “good” – never stopping to think of why those male traits exist.

    I like the “team mom” comment above. It’s a lot like being the XO/ COB.

    I think that many women, thanks to the propaganda swimming about us like water, fail to realize how f*cking valuable a competent XO is.

    I know I’ve said this before.

    Yes, I could really not care who someone sleeps with (my brother, previous roommate, etc…). If a woman REALLY wants to be a programmer or engineer so much she’ll put up with the crap the rest of us guys have – more power to her.

    In some ways, it’s why I think Neal Stephenson hit the nail on the head with using the Victorian Age for “The Diamond Age” – a stable culture, public decorum, private failings and vices frowned upon, but overlooked. Sense of wonder and inquiry and scientific advancement.

    But take the totality of it. Abortion. Career first vice kids / possibly flex work and then career if desired. Me, me, me, me, me. DINKS.

    All the people who keep saying that all of these is an unfettered “good thing” and we’re nowhere near “too much” don’t seem to realize that these policies and concepts as they exist now are already causing a population crash that, within a few generations, may mean the kind of place they want to live may no longer exist.

    The other cultures with birthrate are no-where near so nice.

    Water is the stuff of life. Too much – and you drown. Hope we’re good at the back float.

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    2. No. I know they don’t think that way — except they do, if they admitted it to themselves. their entire push is to “have women be more like men” from promiscuity to lack of children, to career uber alas.
      It’s another case of their feeling they’re being “pro woman” when they’re really not.

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  16. This is kind of weird, but it is (tangentially) related to today’s post so I thought I would mention it since It deals with stories passed down through generations:

    Once upon a time, there was a glut of red wine on the market in France. Prices were falling, as were profits. They needed a way to get rid of all of the red wine, but who would they sell it to?

    Well, there were a bunch of ignorant rubes who knew nothing about wine right across the Atlantic. But how to get them to buy red wine? Well, Americans like red meat. I know! Let’s tell them that red wine is what goes with red meat! And there began a myth that is still perpetuated in the United States today. That red wine goes with red meat and white wine goes with fish/fowl, etc.

    True story.

    And yes, I used to sell wine. It is true that what type of protein a person is consuming does nothing to change the flavor of wine they are consuming and should not influence their choice of wine. Try a taste test at some point if you don’t believe me.

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  17. I may be odd. I just had my first child on Nov. 11. I am 34, and will be 35 in March. There was no issue with getting pregnant. Now, on both sides of my family there is a history of women waiting until later and then having several children. That may mean I have a genetic edge there or it may mean my family is the statistical outlier that every standard distribution has. On the other hand, I wonder if we might not see more families like mine in the future.

    (note the purpose of this is to provide a data point)

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    1. IMHO, your child(ren) will live longer then average lifespans. See my longer post below as to why. Out of idle curiousity, when did your last few generations of direct ancestors have their first kids?

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      1. My mother had me at 28, my brother at 32. Her sister (tangent data point) started at my age. If I recall correctly, their mother started similarly to my mother give or take (4 kids over roughly 8-10 years). On my father’s side, his mother started in her 30s and had her last child at 42 or 44 (Not sure which). His father’s mother held a similar pattern as far as I know. There’s also a trend on the females in my mother’s line to marry younger men (which I seem to be following even though I hadn’t realized the trend was there except in my folk’s case… and there it’s only a year’s difference.)

        These are the ones I know of, I’d have to research more to see if there is data for further extrapolation.

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    2. Well, if mostly women who don’t have problems with getting pregnant later are the ones having kids, that would obtain.

      And to be totally fair, there were a lot of hardscrabble places in Ireland (like the Aran Islands) where women and men both usually married very late, and yet did manage to have kids despite sometimes not even being able to afford to live in the same house. (Lots of romantic barn-shed evenings.) So this sort of thing may be hidden in genetics as a way to solve low birth rates from hard times.

      OTOH, these places usually experienced drops in population from both immigration and low birth rates.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Indeed, and 2-6 seems to be the trend for the ‘started late’ crowd in my line. There don’t seem to be a lot of double digits in the portions of the family tree I have seen. (We lost records for one branch in the San Francisco fire, so dead end there.) There’s strong scott/Irish in my line from both sides. (Very directly from my dad. His mother was half and half.)

        I’m not sure how much of this data is relevant but it’s hard to say over all in this case.

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        1. Hmmm … Beloved Spouse & I married at 21 and 22, more or less (not factoring marriage month for birth months) but didn’t manage reproduction until we’d been married eight years. I don’t think it was health issues so much as lack of proper instruction. They told us:

          “The woman piaba and the man piaba
          and the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
          The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
          And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

          Well, it was clear as mud but it covered the ground, and the confusion made the brain go ’round.

          Liked by 1 person

  19. On breeding later. There was an experiment done with fruit flies. The scientists separated them by sex, and delayed the breeding age. In five generations of progressively delaying the breeding age, they doubles the fruit flies lifespan.

    In my own family, tracing back my tree 6 generations, only one female ancestor had her first kid before age 20. In eras when first birth at 16 -18 was normal. My ancestors, including my parents with horrible lifestyle, tended to live longer then average, barring accidents. My wife and I married with her at 21, me 23, and first birth 2 years later, almost exactly 9 months after we stopped trying not to have any. (I joke about her being the end result of centuries of Catholics breeding to be able to breed.)

    My two oldest had their first when their wives were 27.

    And as far as lifespans go today, whites live longer then blacks in the U.S., and college educated whites live longer then non-college educated whites. There’s been some natural selection going on for a while now, where the better off breed later, the less well off sooner, and the even less well off soonest. Could be that the differing lifespans of different social groups in the U.S. have zip-diddly to do with medical care, and more to do with unconscous genetic selection at work.

    I’m actually a firm believer that this is a case. Someone looking for a Ph.D. project, could, by a sifting through a whole bunch of family trees, probably confirm this to be true. I think the college educated, by selecting to breed later, are creating longer lived offspring. Question is- how far can it go?

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    1. There’s long been some argument along those lines. Compare Cad vs. Dad and the crazier schools of innate criminality.

      I don’t buy it for changing the tendencies of the population one way, because ‘age of female at first pregnancy’. As for the other, I associate the prescriptions with crazy, and think we don’t measure well enough anyway to say.

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    2. And as far as lifespans go today, whites live longer then blacks in the U.S., and college educated whites live longer then non-college educated whites.

      So when you make proxies for high rates of single motherhood (which means worse pregnancy nutrition, along with other life-shortening stresses) and then take the largest group of what’s left, and sort it out into those who are more likely to have had good pregnancy and childhood nutrition, while putting almost all of those with serious health issues into the other group, you end up finding a pattern like this….

      And that ignores the secondary issues that depend on if the person collecting the stats was including the usual stuff that screws up the statistics, such as those who die in their 20s from violence or car accidents both heavily alter the life expectancy and didn’t complete college.

      Likewise, if you selectively (even passively) breed fruit flies so that you select against those who die before a set time, you’re going to raise the average lifespan.
      When trying to find the study to see what controls they’d done, I instead found lots of mention of a study where they found that male fruit flies that were exposed to mating pheromones but did not mate had a dramatic drop in their life span.

      The only result I could find that was anything like the fruit fly study you mention is explicitly pointed out as selective breeding, from the sixties:

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      1. I remember almost everything I have ever read fairly accurately, but lack any type of filing system to remember where. I could find several references to “Methuselah” flies with long lifspans. The key sentence in your citation was “My experiment was to let my flies reproduce only at late ages. This forced natural selection to pay attention to the survival and reproductive vigor of the flies through their middle age.” So I may have not recalled accurately how many generations it took to breed superfly. But it was though delayed mating, not selection for old age. Could also be the article I read exaggerated results…

        When researching past statistics, it is not possible to account for everything. But throwing out car accidents, violence, etc. still leaves longer lifespns for the college educated kids of college educated kids intact. And as I said, in my family tree, people have been breeding later then normal for at least 6 generations. I doubt seriously that my (5)great grandmother and grandfather in 1748 were eating better as infants and then growing up better nourished then anyone else in that era, and having better medical care. She had her first child at age 20. In that line, first births range from 20-25 according to ancestral records. I’m fairly certain that the other factors you mention- pregnancy nutrition and other stressors have really become a factor in the 1900’s. Although I did find that in another family line a great-grandmother, newly immigrated, lost several children in infancy, including one to marasmus. Several infants on that page in the Boston death records, and one or two elderly, were dead of same. Malnutrition. It was shortly after that, late 1800’s, infant formula started appearing. That is the shortest line I can trace back, at (2)great-grandparents. But the kids who survived their infancy lived longer then average lifespans. Her first birth was at 20- the child died at age 6 days.

        Statistics cannot tell you everything. But when they seem to show a trend, they’re a good thing to pay attention to. I wore my seatbelt before it was a law. Mounted a third brakelight on my autos before they became mandatory on new vehicles. And I’m happy my kids are having their kids later then normal. Also happy they’re having kids…

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        1. You apparently did not understand the objection, and you are misrepresenting a point the scientist was very careful to be clear about– it was a selective breeding system where those who bred earlier were culled. He adds a lot of theory after that, but the fact remains that it’s a formalized version of the joke about how if your parents didn’t have any kids, you probably won’t, either.

          Likewise, you didn’t address the actual objections to the groups with really obvious, well known economic and health differences.

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          1. It is possible in doing an initial family tree search for age at first birth vs. longevity to see if there’s a correlation; based on one tree, my own, there seems to be. If a search were done through a massive number of trees, it would be possible to see if the correlation holds. If it does, THEN, you would try to search for other variables. There’s a very large number of families in the U.S. that you could reliably trace the family trees back 5-6 generations. Like I said before, it would make a good Ph.D. thesis study for a budding sociologist. If I were a billionaire, I would be tempted, nay, I would start up a Howard Family Foundation. But instead of looking for long lived ancestors, I’d pay each generation a sum to push back childbirth by 1 year. About 300 years from now you’d start having really good data.

            But also, in the U.S., there is much more associative mating going on then there ever was. Methinks we’re already running the experiment. Interestingly enough, this is data the CIA tracks https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2256.html

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            1. But you can’t tell which is which. Here, my best friend in school had her first period at 17. I had the fist at 11. In a different age we’d have had kids in that order too. Because birth at 11, despite early menarche is very dangerous, I’d probably have done substantial damage, if not died.
              It’s really hard to tell cause from effect at that distance. Which is why few people use humans for that kind of experiment. And fruit flies aren’t that good a proxy for creatures from a different species clade and genus.

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        2. With humans, this notion doesn’t fly. Generally, children of women who begin having babies later in life are LESS healthy, not more. Your family is apparently outliers, as is mine, but in general, the opposite of our results is the case.

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          1. That may depend on how far back you’re pushing it. First births from age 30-40- you’re pushing it. Currently, we know fertility falls off rapidly after age 27 or so for women who haven’t had kids yet. Doesn’t fall off so much for those who already have a few. First birth at 20-25 instead of 16-20? You’re not pushing biological boundaries so much. And if you were to push it back deliberately, generation by generation, a year further back each time…

            I think we’re beginning to do that. And if you’re a Blackburn, we may welll be related. Joseph Blackburne b- 1842 m. Mary Ann mitchell, Henry Blackburne b. 1818, m. Jane Littlewood.

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            1. Well,I can’t find anything to corroborate what I thought I remembered in a quick search, so I can’t say for sure, though from the results I DID see, it seems to have more to do with the overall health of the mother than the children.

              As for ancestors, I was unable to find those names for those dates in the largest site which I know includes my branch of the Blackburns on the MyHeritage.com site. That branch came down to Kentucky from Virginia around the turn of the 19th century, in case that tells you anything.

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  20. I remember a feminist critique of a property that had female only magical powers inherited along the female line.

    Their basic concerns were a combination of expecting more radical results from said powers and being offended that a young for her rank officer, from a small and junior branch, might lack pull in a large military that one presumes developed in a very different sort of war.

    The super powers are not so strong that a prehistoric society that allowed carriers to choose using them, over breeding, wouldn’t have gotten out bred and wiped out by tribes that didn’t have the powers. That they existed at all in the setting argues that they were not generally used in conventional wars between humans.

    The part I found most risible was the classification of prime breeding years.

    Population growth is most heavily driven by the age of the female at first pregnancy.

    There are two practical and two moral constraints on the younger bound. a) physiological development b) life experience enough to help children learn c) ability to consent d) having a formed enough character to help form others. The character and experience issues help drive up estimates from our culture, because we apparently have so many older people that are weak at such. Think of what media would have us believe of women in their late twenties.

    As for upper bounds, I may overweight the defect matter. If one has a few children late in life, one may be very frail before they are properly on their own.

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  21. People used to politely ignore the fool wandering around with the sign “The End Is Nigh” as the crackpot wandered around preaching to the masses who ignored him … (oh sure, some got traction with other nuts, but really, not much) one used to see them following behind the “You Are Worshiping False Gods” folks prancing behind the Mardi Gras Parades.

    Now they all seem to be producers for History Channel who again have another new “End Times” show about Revelations coming soon (just saw the stupid ad for it)

    Liked by 1 person

  22. “It’s been so long since I last had sex, I forget who gets tied up.”

    In another two days I’ll be 49. In that time I haven’t managed to find a woman who will tolerate me for an extended period of time. I’m beginning to think it might be a bit too late for family plans….

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          1. Oh, wow….

            Was trying to see how old his parents would’ve been, and totally missed that his youngest was born in 2000, to the lady he’s been married to since the mid-70s. True, she was only 18 when they married, but he was in his 50s when they married.

            (Another example, one presumes, of a marriage that couldn’t possibly last– especially since he wad twice divorced and they hadn’t even known each other for a full year.)

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        3. Fiance is eight years older than me. Its… A little difficult sometimes because I’ll be talking about high school graduation back in 03 *ducks* and he was finishing a stint in Iraq during his last and 8th year in Corps. :(

          I have no idea how a 20 year difference would play out. Probably not easily.

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          1. My mom tends to point out there’s a big difference between a decade’s difference when one of the folks is 20, and a decade’s difference when one of the folks is 40….

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Yep – 10/30 is 33%, while 10/40 is 25%. As I tell my wife, the 6 years difference between us is narrowing steadily on a percentage basis as time rolls along…

              Liked by 1 person

        4. When my great-grandmother married my great-grandfather, she became the stepmother of a classmate of hers. (Said classmate was the oldest child, to be sure.)

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      2. Yeah, but I can’t really imagine a young, fertile (and everything else that might appeal to me) woman settling for a guy like me. She has a lot more better options. And at this point, I’d be spending Social Security money on college for my kids, if there’s any left by that point.

        I used to joke “The girl of my dreams has nightmares about me.” (Which is not to be interpreted as the having of nightmares about me being what makes her the girl of my dreams, mind you.)

        Another good one is:

        I have found the answer to all my hopes and dreams, to all my aspirations and desires.
        It’s “No.”

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        1. I know a guy who said “They say love finds you where you least expect it … I least expect it to be a buxom blonde in negligee, holding two beers, knocking on my door.”

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            1. or a version of The White Board where Doc is assaulted by cupid and blasts the begeebers out of him. “The guy was shooting a bow at him … obviously self defense”

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                  1. What? Really, how are we not going to shoot that?

                    That’s just cruel, sending that round to the bachelors.

                    It’s like sending ninjas round to invite you to tea. You’re probably not going to get the message!

                    Liked by 1 person

                    4. Those are helpful ninjas.

                      I was thinking ninjas showing up: do you wait to see what they want (dropping off message for tea) or do you take actions to save yourself because — NINJAS!

                      But your similar idea made me chuckle.

                      :)

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          2. That reminds me of the poster that several teenage boys I know admit to having. “They say you see more of what you’re scared of. I’m terrified of Emma Watson.”

            Liked by 1 person

        2. Accumulating evidence indicates that the sperm of older men is less potent and more susceptible to genetic damage. So, fertility older yes, but diminished.

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          1. I already know how it’s going to end. I’m going to die alone and unloved in a dilapidated Airstream trailer on blocks in the Arizona desert. The hikers who find my dessicated corpse will only steal what they can carry before reporting my body to the Sheriff.

            This is probably 40 years hence, so the question is how to fill the intervening time.

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                1. Why did I suddenly think of that line from Ghostbusters:
                  “That would have worked if you hadn’t stopped me.”

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                1. Ow. Cyborg exploration fleet, it’s been done, I believe and —

                  OW! Cut that out!

                  Sorry. Muse is poking at me. I’m being recalcitrant. Me and the muse, we’re going to come to an agreement about finishing projects already begun.

                  If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to step out back to the wild imagination. Maybe dig a hole. I’m not saying it’s a muse-size hole, but I’m sure not ruling it out.

                  :|

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                  1. I want my voder to give me a deep resonant voice.
                    “RUDIMENTARY CREATURES OF BLOOD AND FLESH-”
                    “Oh give it a rest.”
                    “YOU ARE NO FUN.”

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                    1. Can do. Just — don’t crack wise to the installers. You might end up sounding like Daffy Duck.

                      With more lisp.

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                    5. *snort*

                      Picture the scene and exploratory command:

                      —
                      “Unit Chester, You’re coming in garbled.” *snicker*
                      —
                      “Unit Chester, say again.” *snort*
                      —
                      “Unit Chester, it’s deep and resonant but I still have no idea what you’re getting at…” *guffaw!*

                      Like

            2. Rubbish. Even if you were to die physically alone, there would be Huns worrying about you, and we’d send one of the young uns (this group reproduces like crazy!) to check on you.
              This also tells you how to fill the next forty years. Take a chair. Oh, and write a story.

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            3. Eh, there’s a certain percentage of young women who prefer to go for the older and established man rather than the young man with potential.
              Attracting that group generally works better if you’re filthy rich, but you can probably land one if you’re just solidly secure. You’ve just to figure out how/where to land one of them.
              Or, like ZeeWulf was saying upthread, there are a number of ladies who passed their twenties in missionary work overseas who haven’t met a man yet.

              Like

              1. Back when I was a programmer, and the money was pretty good, I started building my shiny magpie nest. But I worked so much I had no social life (But of course not, I was a geek). So that didn’t work. Then I was out of work for a while, I had plenty of time, but I needed to nurse that wealth out, so I didn’t go out. Now I’ve got a job that actually has paid me more than my best year programming, but I work my butt off, and have no time to go out….

                How’s the Powerball jackpot looking?

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      1. Saw a comic that basically said, under the title “That which doesn’t kill you…” with a character walking past loving couples “Being single had better make me F*cking invincible!”

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        1. Saw something the other day, forget where, that said “Sex and Death: You’ll never know how close you were to either.” Hope may be on the shelf but don’t forget it’s there should opportunity come a knockin’.

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        2. well, I’m sure a few of the women who did show some interest in me might well have ended up killing me. Egad, I did draw the occasional insane sort. The rest were either not interested in even trying to return my interest, or had other issues (some caused by me … and knowing them seemed not to help, though I had to move away on one so who knows).

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              1. Go with a crazy that compliments your own. Given that nobody’s perfect, find the flaws that you can accept as well as what attracts you. Or so I’ve heard. *grin*

                Liked by 1 person

              2. Sounds like a story, where the female sexbot picks up with the male sexbot because the humans are too crazy, but they end up having totally logical, unfulfilling sex.

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    3. Foreign surrogate. Cheaper than a wife & won’t divorce you and take the kids. I screwed up by not going that route when I could.

      Think about it.

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        1. I’d suggest a gaming group, but being the sort of person that frequents here and– IIRC– being in the Seattle Blob means that you’ve got the same issue my husband and I do; all the geek gaming groups we’ve looked into think that a conservative is someone who thinks Obama is a centrist, not a hard right winger, and then there’s the religious differences. (Failure to worship at the Altar of Algore, we don’t tith to Organic Produce, etc.)

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          1. Heh, yeah. I recently departed a Seattle Area Personal Ads group without posting a word because they actually seemed to PRIDE themselves on how they would eviscerate anyone who dared to post an actual personal ad. (They descended like PC Locusts on a guy who said he’d like to meet a Middle-eastern woman).

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            1. Good grief. What a bunch of losers– “I can’t even bring myself to risk rejection to the extent of pursuing the purpose of the group, so I’ll make damn sure anybody who isn’t as gutless PAYS”?

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              1. Oh, they believe themselves to be superior. One of the worst was actually a MODERATOR of the group! Any Rube who came along and actually tried to use the group for that purpose had to run their gauntlet first.

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                1. Suuuure they’re superior; that their bad behavior just happens to make it so that those who will actually act to fix the problem will fail is puuuuuurely happenstance…..

                  (Is the sarcasm dripping much?)

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          2. Partially mitigated here in Austin (Yes, we’re part of Texas. Deal with it!) by finding at least one gaming compadre in my religious congregation. And his wife knew someone who’s husband had been looking for a gaming group… and there you go. Four man group – me, my co-religionist, an ex-military guy that I would NOT want to mess with but who I would have at my back in a fight anyplace any time. (More likely I’d be cowering behind HIM), and a former SCA member. Varying levels of crazy / broken, but it makes for interesting game play.

            (Seriously, I didn’t mean to firebomb that parade. I was a little distracted by the fact that we’d completely lost our engines thanks to some stupid Golan defense platforms that started firing on anything and everything moving as soon as we came in-system and hailed port control. TOTALLY not our fault. And the hold full of tibanna gas? Heh, I was NOT riding that all the way down on nothing but repulsorlifts. Who knew that the local Imperial garrison was out for a mandatory “Wave the flag” thing-a-ma-bob? Shame about the civilians out celebrating, but… *shrug* what can you do?)

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Summoning ritual?! That wasn’t the summoning ritual, it was the banishing ritual!

              Do you have any idea how many slimy portals and pocket dimensions packed with lint I had to crawl through to get back here!? Sheesh.

              And has anybody cleaned behind the kegs lately? Wow, is all I’m saying. Something’s nesting.

              Liked by 1 person

                1. Holler if you need a hand. I’m gonna go wash the residue of a couple’a hives of scum and villainy off my shoes…

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                  1. The dragonette again. I swear, the things are so bloody cute when they’re infants, but then they grow, and folks get tired of them and “let them free”, and they grow feral… *shakes head*

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                    1. It’s really a shame we can’t send them as gifts to deserving individuals and organizations anymore. I mean, we followed the shipping instructions exactly, labeled the boxes “this side up,” included a return address and phone number and everything. OK, so it wasn’t OUR exact address or phone number, but we did fill out the hazcrit* paperwork.

                      *Hazardous critter

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                    2. Blame the UN for that. When the US changed HAZMAT guidelines to RoHS/UN standards, a lot of things got messed up. They’re not MSDS forms anymore, and so on.

                      Now, we have to gain it’s parent/guardian’s approval before shipment and have it signed off on by the InterMagical Species Diversity Authority, which in practice never happens. It’s not that the parents actually *want* the little demons back, it’s more that they hate interruptions and the IMSDA is your typical SJW bureaucracy, taking your tax dollars and squandering them on misspelled protest signs for the goblinoid horde.

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              2. No, it was definitely summoning; they just garbled the “TO” variable value. Simple transposition, actually. Probably need to put error checking code in the spell. And not just an “Are you Sure?” button – actual error checking. Maybe require checksums in the addresses.

                Anyone seen the spell coding bug-report/change-request forms?

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                    1. Calmer, anyway.

                      I have a hard time putting docile in the same room with Fluffy. It seems unnecessarily cruel — what’d docile ever do to us?

                      Like

                    2. I dunno, docile’s dossier is suspiciously empty- twenty years based in Panama, no actions reported, but his medical file could double as a trauma textbook…

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  24. Jerry Pournelle talked about the issue of falling birthrates in the “FIrst World” more than 30 years ago. I found his writings on the subject on the order of 20 years ago.

    Nothing much has changed really.

    He was writing then in the context of countering the hand-wringing over “overpopulation” leading to widespread famine.

    Of course, if you really are worried about overpopulation and want to reduce birthrates, then the single best thing you can do is encourage industrialization and economic growth, the opposite of what the SJW’s do.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I skimmed through a book this past year about the horrible sex ratios developing in India and China (in some areas it is up to 120 men:100 women). The author almost got it right, but pointed her finger past the Chi Coms and Chinese (and Indian) tradition to the Western ideas of the 1970s and Western academics and economics.

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  26. Back in the day, I was considered a paragon of virtue because I fostered relationships that lasted years instead of weeks/months. Lots of women came to me for dating advice. All my choices weren’t awesome, but my luck strikingly better than average in nerdly circles. My advice?

    0/ Hunt for nerds/military guys. Each will be productive and are more likely to be straight with you. Less maintenance and hassle later, too. Be prepared for time alone and gun cabinets appearing in your home. Fortunately for me, this is a feature, at least in part. I need time alone, too. Gun cabinets are a total win.
    1/ Be friends first. Find out who that guy is before you bed him.
    2/ LIKE him, as well as love him.
    3/ Pick a guy who’ll stick around.
    4/ Aim for “problems I can live with”, because nobody is perfect. If he seems perfect– you aren’t getting the full story.

    You have no idea how much indignant whining I got from my (so called) fellow women. “Those kind of men aren’t sexy”, they sobbed. “I like bad boys”. My reply? If you like bad boys, snag a man in uniform. Seriously, you get honor and glory as well as a wicked streak. Chances are, they’ll be easy on the eyes, too. “But, but, but!” they chorused, for no apparent reason. My reply? Well, darlings, there are fixes for that. Do you really need sex advice from ME? Don’t answer that. So, sadly no one ever followed my advice, save one person. She’s now got a steady boyfriend and they are talking about getting married. (This shocks the whole social group for reasons.) If only one person listened, it was worth it, right?

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