I was thinking of the place I grew up which doesn’t exist in any meaningful way, except as geographical location. Every field has been built over with stack a prole apartment buildings; every farm is now a park or a plaza. Highways have obliterated most of the streets and alleys; the people who live there are not the people I knew, and when I walk down the street I might as well be in a completely foreign land which I’ve never before seen.
The assumption from the much higher population density in the village now, than it was when I was growing up would be that there has been a population explosion.
But in fact, if you drive not a great distance from the city — or any of Portugal’s three major cities — and stray from the highways which host the usual cluster of vendors and restaurants and the towns and villages that support such, you find … miles and miles and miles of nothing: areas so empty you can hear a radio playing somewhere a mile or so off.
In that way Portugal is similar to a lot of American states where the areas that were farms and grazing land became increasingly more depopulated, which the cities either grew or maintained. This is because agriculture takes fewer people of course.
Which is good. Regardless of what their statistics say — and I have no idea and I don’t even begin to trust them, anyway — there as here, beyond the cooked numbers (I’m not going to exhaustively describe all the ways the census is gamed even here, except to say if you believe they’re counting everyone and that everyone responds honestly, and that the bureaucrats don’t add some arbitrary number so they get paid more/get more subsidies, you’re a beautiful soul and possibly too good for this world) you can see an accelerating population collapse.
My parents generation with five or six siblings gave way to my generation with one, or maybe two children per couple (yes, I know, the boomers was usually three or four. But I came immediately after in the years aggregated to the boom for no good reason sometime in the oughts.) And my generation, those who married, have at the very most two children, but more commonly one, and not uncommonly none.
There are many reasons for that. Part of it is socialism — it kills, fast or slow — which as it does embuggered economies, so it became harder for families to survive on one income, or one income supplemented by work done from home by the woman which was the traditional way. This in turn necessitated child care and made it harder to raise a family.
But more than that, the cultural shocks of the long war of the twentieth century and all sorts of nonsense devaluing the traditional business of women, run from home, and making a fetish of higher education and specialization for all, stigmatized craft work, or simply homemaking and house keeping as professions and declared that the be all and end all of human achievement was “a corporate career.” This of course ties in with socialism, because it’s very hard to tax and regulate work for which you’re not paid in a traditional, regular way. So that sort of work must be discouraged, in favor of work that can in fact be controlled by the government.
Over it all there is a cultural belief that we were reproducing too much — a conclusion arrived at out of thin air and cooked statistics, with a few polemicists declaring on nothing much that the Earth was at carrying capacity — and that the virtuous thing to do was to have no children or as few as possible. The profound disconnect between this idea and the fact that wealth comes from humans and that of course most of the planet was barely populated at all outside large cities never registered.
Instead, the whole planet bought into the polemic and fell headlong into the hysteria of “too many humans” aided by the fact that Marxism, which has penetrated the culture everywhere, believes at its core that wealth can’t be created, only endlessly redistributed. And if that were true, then fewer humans would mean more wealth for everyone. (This is the lesson drawn from the great dying of the black plague when everyone became suddenly much wealthier. BUT the truth is that this was because it gave people a brief boost by acquiring already produced goods. What made the prosperity stick, after that, was the fact that the population exploded after forcing the exploration of new lands and new means of cultivation, etc. and leading straight into the industrial revolution.)
Because this hysteria happened when mass communication and top down government were possible (due to the technological developments of the time) this meant that everyone pretty much fell for it, from governments penalizing having more than one or two children, to private citizens doing the “responsible” and “socially approved” thing.
Which leads to where we are, with a severely contracting population worldwide. I believe our ridiculous open borders and propagandizing of people to come here for free benefits seems (briefly) like a boon for some countries which are getting rid of trouble makers and charity cases.
But long term it won’t wash. Human families cycle through uselessness on the regular, usually caused by circumstances and life being too easy. Human evolution doesn’t happen in a generation or two. (Which is why the whole strong and weak men meme is such a useless piece of nonsense.) Welfare cases can, and often do have, quite rational and productive children. Provided they have children. I think the countries emptying themselves are going to find they have no future and are a howling wilderness left empty and roamed only by the beasts of the fields.
We’re not that far off, and yes, we are providing all the wrong incentives and might end up with a near permanent underclass because we’re cultivating it… Except we don’t have the money to cultivate it forever and the problem will fix itself.
But in general people is better than no people, because we’re clever apes and can figure out ways to turn things around. (This is not to say that I approve of the flood of illegal immigrants. If we decide to attract more population, instead of making it through the dearth with mechanization until people get their heads out of their tight, dark, smelly confines and start having more kids, then we should import population that is useful to us now where we are technologically, and also that wishes to embrace our credal nation and become Americans in every sense of the word.) It surely beats no people.
The world might be very pretty with no humans in it, and the left particularly seems to have a fetish for post-collapse porn, endlessly dissecting how long it would take for our cities to return to wilderness, for instance, or trying to figure out which species would follow ours up the evolutionary scale to intelligence (thereby betraying a curiously pre-scientific mind set, since nothing dictates that the dominant world species be intelligent or use technology.)
But a world empty of humans is irrelevant. If pretty, who is there to appreciate the aesthetics.
And to me, since I am human, such an empty landscape is sad and bereft of my kind, those who give meaning to the future.
I’m haunted by a feeling that the area I grew up in, the area where some branch of the family or other seems to always have lived in, with children of our extended relatives running and playing down the old cobbled streets, getting in fights in the alleys and exploring the fields and the woods, will, one day, in the not very distant future, be empty of children voices and laughter. I can picture in my mind the empty, crumbling stackaprol apartments swallowed up by the encroaching forest.
It happened once. Before the black plague, what became a “village” when I was little, was a very large market town, about the same sprawl it currently occupies (presumably without stackaprol apartments save for a few built on the insula model.) The depopulation of the black plague and lack of commerce means that the woods and fields in which I hiked as a child were, back then, manor houses, workshops, mills.
Centuries later, one of dad’s and my stops for lunch was sitting on the medieval millstone that rested at the edge of the woods.
It will not be so bad if in five or six centuries a little girl and her father sit to have a picnic lunch on some lump that used to be the entrance steps of a crumbled apartment building. And it’s the most likely thing, as it’s unlikely humans will manage to eradicate themselves completely.
But the the loss of wealth, of ability, of tech, of life that would result from the years of population collapse in between make my heart ache with sorrow.
I’d very much prefer fields and dales were filled with the laughter and sounds of children at play, and the children were taught and made competent so they can keep civilization going, so that my grandchildren or great grandchildren — should I have them — can walk in different worlds, under different suns, building families and growing, and creating vibrant, joyful human civilizations where non exists.
World without end.
The other is a fairytale for nihilists.
According To Hoyt 
Amen
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This ^^^^^^
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Very much this, and not even the reverse: For something like 3.3 million years (possibly even more per the latest finds) critters sort of like us have been making and using stone tools, were arguably the most intelligent critters around, yet were not the dominant species at all, in fact they (we) were regular prey for various medium to large predators.
You do not count as dominant if your relatives are regularly eaten by leopards.
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We’re still the same species that provided tasty snacks for larger predators. We can’t run very fast, we’re not very strong, we don’t climb all that well, we have no claws, and our teeth are laughable.
That’s Homo Sapiens, quantity one (1).
After Sapiens started forming groups they picked up the ideas of spears, clubs, and deadfalls. Which made them not quite so easy as prey, but still relatively defenseless.
But Sapiens picked up a knack for managing groups, and as the groups got larger, they became force multipliers. So now when Mr. Tiger sees a tasty Sapiens lunch, said Sapiens might well ruin the day with a .300 Winchester Magnum.
Because despite their physical deficiences, Sapiens are pretty good toolmakers. And their tools are deadly.
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They are indeed, and that is a Good Thing (TM). And it should be pointed out that, as far as any evidence shows, H. sap is the first, and therefore so far, only, globally dominant species. In fact, we are the only global species, period, and despite the “anthropogenic global warming” idiotic scam (cui bono?), we do have the singular ability to change the environment in significant ways when we desire to do so.
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I liked one strip of Schlock Mercenary where a group of the mercs are trapped on a planet with neolithic tech and have to fight off a pack of local predators. The Narrator notes that evolution taught humans how to cheat. :D
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When it comes to physical tools, we’ve got all the other land animals beat on one thing: endurance. The metabolism and body temperature regulation we developed to keep those big brains humming mean that we can just…keep…going. Anything we decide to chase will have to go to ground long before we will, and if it doesn’t have some means of entirely escaping detection, it’s done for. As persistence predators, humans can’t be beat.
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It’s weird that the nightmare of the Cold War kids, of empty streets and buildings as far as the eye can see, is the dream of many people today.
I just say, You first.
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Why is it weird? We were sold nuclear holocaust as inevitable and thus feed fiction about how to survive it (and that surviving was pointless like the more recent The Road but those rarely gained traction). Thus we grew up to a world that wasn’t supposed to exist and are struggling to figure out how to live in it even into our 40s and 50s.
Is it any surprised we yearn for the world we were taught we’d have?
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What’s weird to me is the whole zombie apocalypse genre – mass depopulation combined with dead people trying to eat you. And while zombie stuff was certainly around as niche horror before 1991, it only really took off after the fall of the USSR, when Hollywood was insisting the Russians were now our friends and only South African NeoNazis were the allowable foe.
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I actually went to a very good panel on that, where the thesis provided was that the monster of the times reflects the fears of the time. So vampire fiction was very big during fears of sexually transmitted diseases, for obvious reasons. Zombie fiction is big due to fears of viral transmission and loss of individuality.
On that note, if genetic manipulation actually takes off in a big way, expect werewolves and Frankenstein to be big in horror fiction again.
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Okay, but what explains the heavily tanned vampire epic, Love at First Bite:
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I’m not going to exhaustively describe all the ways the census is gamed even here, except to say if you believe they’re counting everyone and that everyone responds honestly, and that the bureaucrats don’t add some arbitrary number so they get paid more/get more subsidies, you’re a beautiful soul and possibly too good for this world
I am not saying you are wrong, but there is a huge problem with this thinking.
At some point, if enough numbers are cooked people quit believing anything. And that is a problem.
The census is a lie; the vote counts are a lie; the vaccines are a lie; the COVID numbers are a lie.
You start asking “Is freedom a lie?” Is the past as a functioning Republic a lie sold to us by one set of power players to get us to be loyal foot soldiers in cultural/electoral/eventually shooting wars in their struggle against other power players?
Even you admit you have no living memory of a functioning Republic. If we mark FDR’s new deal as the end adult memory of a functioning Republic resides in no one under 109.
Maybe that’s another lie we’ve been sold.
Elections? Was there ever a real one? If it wasn’t for 2016 I wouldn’t think so and I now think that was an accident. Maybe Reagan? I’m not convinced Nixon’s were.
I don’t like thinking this way but having wasted my twenties fighting a war that wasn’t. We keep the Soviets propped with grain even after WW2. Why? I know you say everyone “knew” Communism was the future but then why not embrace it? It is easy to conclude the Cold War was a fake to keep us distracted and keep the grift flowing (after all “war is a racket” according to one of two people to win the Medal of Honor twice).
But once you start thinking this way the question becomes “why stick your neck out for lies”. Why not let the power players go play their games over there and avoid them as much as they allow you to and when they don’t, do the minimum until you can escape again.
To stand up from something in any realm something in that realm needs to be real. My faith is real and I can stand up for it.
There isn’t much else I believe is real anymore.
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Nixon’s election was real and the Deep State power players were so incensed that they created the Watergate scandal to diminish and finally oust Nixon.
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Nixon’s loss to JFK was so close and facially machine-Democrat fraudulent that Nixon’s advisors pushed him to challenge publicly, but he decided, based on how much the press hated him, that he would inevitably be cast as a sore loser if he did, so with an eye to a future run he conceded.
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And the more that comes to light, the more blindingly obvious it is.
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Very true.
Possibly the worst effect of Communism was not the misery it caused at the time. It’s the long chain of misery that spreads out from the way it undermines the rule of law, which is needed for capitalism. The atrocities were, admittedly, concentrated and large. The deaths and poverty caused by the loss of the rule of law are far more spread out. But they are real.
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Freedom is real regardless, because unlike censuses (censii??), elections, made-up epidemics, etc, it is not a construct of human hands. It is, as the founders of our country pointed out, a God-given right that cannot be bestowed or taken away by the hand of man unless we allow it. Part of the major problem with the left–and all their ilk around the world and throughout history–is that they DO view freedom as a lie. It is something to be bestowed by the “right people” (ie, them), and taken away again at their desire. Which is why all their efforts to ensure “equality” (actually equity), and other such crap always, ALWAYS involves curtailing the freedom of others in favor of whatever group they are propping up. The idea of “you leave me alone to live my life, and I leave you alone to live yours” is utter anathema to them.
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Believe in the Big 3: God, gravity and guns. ;)
Also understand the game is rigged and figure out a path from there…
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From Omni’s science fiction graffiti contest BITD:
Gravity doesn’t exist, the Earth just sucks.
Other quality entries that stuck in my memory:
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And of course the winner in the 2000/2001 grafitti contest (held mid 1981) was
Disco still s*cks
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—
They did, starting shortly after the October Revolution. And it was an integral part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Lenin had spent decades touring Europe, refining his schtick. His ideal Marxist government would support all sorts of whack-a-doodle ideas – equal rights under the law for men, women, and different races and religions. Some kind of nationalized retirement program, and another for welfare. Legal backing and expanded powers for trade unions. Official abolition of social class structures. Government control of means of production. Any of that sound familiar?
The Democratic Party had been backing Mussolini and praising the virtues of fascism, but after seeing how rapidly Russia was changing under Lenin, they adopted Lenin’s platform, or as much as applied to American society. Then they implemented it, partly because it sounded good, and partly because they wanted to cut the American Communist Party and affiliate groups off at the pass. Organized Communism never amounted to much in the US because they had little to offer after the Fed yanked their platform out from under them.
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What I still cannot fathom is how people can be that stupid. HOW could China implement that one-child policy and somehow no one went “Waitaminnit, if two people only have one child between them, we’re going to face a massive population decline. And if that one child is only a male…how is he going to find a spouse to have children??” (Or, if someone DID, they got sent to gulag, I suppose. But even so. This isn’t just basic logic, it’s straight up survival math–if you aren’t at LEAST replacing yourself and the other parent, you end up being a net loss. I’m one of those, sadly.) I’m faintly appalled at how many people of my generation (or a decade or so either side) declare they would never in a million years have kids. And half the time, it’s not a case (or at least not consciously) of “because we bought the overpopulation lie”, it’s because “My parents were awful, so I’m not going to be a parent.” Which is…a really weird way of trying to revenge oneself on one’s parents. And then there’s all the others like me, who can’t actually HAVE kids, even though we badly want/wanted them, whether from lack of spouse (and unwillingness to inflict single parenthood by choice on a child), biological inability to do so, or some combination of the two. And while adoption is a wonderful thing, and I wish more people would do it (people of the type who genuinely wouldn’t care that the children aren’t biologically theirs), it doesn’t really help the population tanking, alas.
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What I still cannot fathom is how people can be that stupid. HOW could China implement that one-child policy and somehow no one went “Waitaminnit, if two people only have one child between them, we’re going to face a massive population decline.
Three things:
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Heh. As I said: complete and utter stupidity. Any “peasant” could have told them IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT :D
But then again…the key word here is “peasant”–ie, anyone they consider beneath them. I expect this is why the left in our country is so pissed off: us peasants don’t know our place and refuse to acknowledge such a thing as “our place” exists!
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The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.
He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
― Adam Smith
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“…when the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go…”
Jefferson Airplane
(grin)
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Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.
― George Eliot
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X-COM 2 w/modded voicepacks? Okay, maybe not.
(…it’s an 95% chance to hit. Sure thing, right?) ;-)
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“That’s Wizard Chess!”
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Yep; rewatching HP movies this week.
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Speaking of chess, I remember during the BLM craze, dems in congress all kneeling on the floor in their African print stoles and looking like a Wakandan chess set.
Twits.
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Re. point one – as badly as the Great Leap Forward fouled up agriculture and silviculture in China, I can see bureaucrats believing that only slowing the population growth could prevent starvation.
They also didn’t get the Haber-Bosch fertilizer technology until the late 1970s, so all they had was “organic fertilizer,” which is limited. The Green Revolution of farming arrived late in China.
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It really is SUCH peak bureaucrat stupidity to think fewer people = more food, which on the surface seems correct…except for the part where you have to have enough people to grow the food… ::eyes bureaucrats and others in the US who appear to genuinely believe that food magically appears at the grocery store::
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Famines were regular occurrences before the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, in current memory, so thinking Marxian faith plus the Population Bomb crap plus the last three famines equaled DO SOMETHING DRASTIC is understandable, if obviously wrong. The extra stupids of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward just piled on top.
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They harangued the peasants, from the very beginning, that it didn’t matter whether your only child was a girl or a boy. And if people were as malleable as they thought they were, it would have worked for gender balance.
Of course, their current efforts to get the birth rate back up would also work, then.
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Given we hear American feminists claim they’d rather have a girl and might even abort male children perhaps the PRC figured we’d supply the balance.
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What balance? They were good Marxist and knew it was just false consciousness preventing Utopia.
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Balance of men and women in a generation….and I was joking.
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Abort or trans their male children. It’s a complete horror show.
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Heh. Because haranguing the peasants was TOTALLY going to overturn centuries (if not millenia) of cultural programming :D But then, as your Adam Smith quote essentially says: these idiots think people are widgets, not, you know, actual PEOPLE.
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They harangued the peasants and city dwellers and everyone in between while holding all the guns.
Various work-arounds evolved, however, with young women disappearing on extended visits with distant relatives, and then suddenly infant “cousins from the country” showing up to be raised by the local relatives. Enough shell-game misdirections, and a few local party enforcers slipped some extra cash or barter, and no investigations eventuated.
Humanity adapts.
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That helped. But the ratio remains. Partly because that, also, was traditional.
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Oh, yeah, they are still totally hosed. That new social pressure combined with the cultural baggage yielded the pampered princes generation and the demographic crash underway now.
But the Party Rules stuff should not be viewed as all-seeing-all-enforced.
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.
Define “aweful”.
Never underestimate parents ability to screw their children and their children lives.
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It doesn’t even have to be revenge. Just awareness that one is not a fit parent — even if better suited to it than the actual parents were.
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I think, though, that the tragedy is that what too many people think is awareness that they wouldn’t be a fit parent…is in fact a fallacy. You don’t KNOW what kind of parent you’re going to be until you are one. Of course by then it is too late–but as with so many other things, choosing to be a good parent is as much a choice as choosing to be a good human being. It’s not easy, it’s usually thankless, but it’s still a choice. I think it’s sad for them to just assume they couldn’t do it.
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Some of us do know we wouldn’t be fit. My nerves are shot, to put it mildly, and given I was responsible for part of raising my siblings and how they came out… yeah, no. Keep me away from children, it’s bad for them.
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In my nearly half a century of life, I’ve met as many people who didn’t want children and assumed they’d be horrid parents who ended up LOVING having children and being spectacular parents, as I have known people who planned on having children and “knew” they’d be so much better than the rest of us, who ended up being absolutely horrid parents or even flat out abusive ones.
There’s so many factors I think it’s really tough to tell beforehand. The very moment you have a child can reveal your character or fundamentally change you forever. I’d like to say the best indicator of a good future parent would probably be humility and integrity. But we are all terrible at judging who is truly humble and who really has integrity. Some people are crazy- good at crafting and maintaining believable façades. I’ve seen men who appeared to be absolutely arrogant self-involved bastards turn out to be extremely dads. And men who seemed to be very kind and giving and humble cause more damage to their children than if they’d just gone ahead and put their cigarettes out on their arms once in awhile. Because they grownup with that façade, and they believe that façade, but it clashes with their actual lived experience – that *messes* with you like few other things can.
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Abused children are more likely to be planned than a control group. Both abuse and planning spring from the root: the thought that the child is there to satisfy the adult’s needs.
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That makes sense. I mean, I wouldn’t automatically assume someone planning their children to be narcissists, of course. But I can see it. One of the reasons I married my husband was because he always talked about how much family means to him, and how I would be part of this amazing family, and all his philosophy on being a good husband and father. He lived up to hardly any of it, and for ages I couldn’t put my finger on what was so terribly wrong. Eventually I figured it out (and yes I feel extremely stupid at how long it took and how long I actively defended him). He took everything we did/didn’t do or say so damn personally because, in a very literal and earnest sense, he saw us as absolutely HIS. Not in the way of “I’ve been entrusted with this family to provide for and love”. But as in we were there to fulfill all his desires and needs, to obey and respect him no matter what, to make him look good, and absolutely never to question him any more than one’s arm should question us when we go to pick up our coffee cup. Our oldest son once told me he thought his dad saw me as an extra limb that refused to cooperate. That’s why he was so frustrated with me all the time. And he felt just as entitled to that level of obedience as any one of us feel entitled to our legs holding our weight when we stand up.
It’s. Mind-boggling.
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There is an old engineering joke: “Nobody is qualified to teach thermodynamics until they’ve taught it for 20 years”. Similarly, most people aren’t “fit” parents until the last child grows up and leaves the household. 😉
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Or the joke you don’t know if you succeeded as parent until your grandchildren are grown.
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lol. Absolutely. My kids have each asked me to help them with their kids, and I was like, “Aww, that’s so sweet. You think I’m a great mom!” And they said, “Oh, yeah, sure. But also so we can benefit from how MUCH you’ve learned through ALL you mistakes with us!” 🫤😏 (These kids don’t really pull punches)
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“I’d ask how you slow down how fast kids grow up … But you failed 3 times.” Or how many children you’ve had. FYI, mom and dad laughed.
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Don’t forget the option of deciding to be a parent in order to be better than their own parents. And then screwing that up so badly their children want nothing to do with them. Naturally, the next step is to blame the spouse for turning then kids against them.
We all screw up our kids *somehow*. We’re human beings raising human beings. Sometimes we screw up honestly. Just because of personality differences What would’ve been fantastic for one kiddo is terrible for another. Or life took a turn which genuinely could not have been forseen. Decisions made which were good for one path before us are now detrimental with this other one. It isn’t all abusive. Or even selfish or obtuse stuff.
But, sometimes it actually is abuse.
And sometimes we take way too long to see it. Which makes us complicit somewhere along the line.
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China has a long history of really bad central decisions, and bad decisions generally which includes a history of killing its girl children. Look up baby tower, or not — it’s really sad.
The more I learn about the place, the sadder it gets especially as they have no real moral compass at all. They used to, but Mao and later Deng killed it.
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The Reader thinks another thing that colored the thinking of the CCP’s leadership was that by the end of the Korean War China had been at war (with the Japanese, with itself, and then with us) for more than 20 years. No one knows what the death toll was from that, but it undoubtedly unbalanced the sex ratio pretty significantly.
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Another detail that they missed/ignored was existing Chinese culture. The elder son was to take car of the parents. Daughters joined their husbands family effectively. So you ended up with selective abortion (once that became possible) and with neglect of female children before that. So not only has china gotten USED to only children but the number of women to produce them is fairly reduced.
Communist central planning at its normal best…
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SaraThaRed –
“And then there’s all the others like me, who can’t actually HAVE kids, even though we badly want/wanted them…”
I’m so very sorry. Which you may not need to hear of course. And you’ve probably made your peace with it and all that. And maybe “badly” didn’t quite mean “desperately” but just like, “a little bit more than, ‘would’ve been nice'”. And it may come across as silly or condescending of me. And maybe you’ve had gobs of perfectly lovely loved ones who have sat in the pain with you when you needed it.
But,… just in case it hasn’t ever been acknowledged, or is one of those things that can’t be acknowledged enough: I am so very sorry. ❤️🩹
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There was speculation, knocking around in a couple of blogs that I read regularly – that places like Africa — are already pretty depopulated, just based on the google earth visuals of the cities; the buildings, infrastructure, roads and rail lines. Commenters who had more experience in things like analysis and interpretation of such aerial views said that there was no way that these cities had anything like the population numbers that their governments claimed.
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My husband is from Africa. He and all his siblings immigrated to the USA. I strongly suspect that back in his father’s ancestral village they, their spouses (or at least his and his brothers’ wives), and their children are counted, and my parents-in-law, who live in the big city, are counted. Then my parents-in-law are also counted in the big city, and if anyone asked them about their household, they likely listed all of us. Because that’s how you count family there. So it’s entirely likely that we’re counted three times: once in the ancestral village, once in the big city, and once in the USA. It would not surprise me at all, and it would involve no intent of deceit on the part of those reporting the count.
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That actually makes reasonable sense. A difference in culture.
When I started the first grade the teacher wanted to know the names and ages of all the members of my family. It never occurred to me not to answer, so I told her.
A few days later a pair of truant officers banged on my mother’s door and demanded to know why Tina and Randy weren’t in school.
My mother was quite confused, since Tina and Randy were locked in a bedroom, barking their heads off, and she didn’t think that dogs had to go to school.
Even if someone had pointed out to me that Tina and Randy were dogs, my reaction would have been something like “uh, yeah, and your point is?” They were part of my family; it would never of occurred to me to exclude them just because they were dogs.
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LOL
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Perfect! 😆
Someone should have suggested that she send them to obedience school, get a letter from the school, then claim them as dependents for the IRS.
“But…but…they are part of the family! This letter says so!”😉😜😜
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That would be Andy, Sandy, Ring, and Bluebell, for me. By first grade they were all residing at grandparents place 50 miles south. Farm border collies and barn cats do not transplant to trailer parks.
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Tareco, Lord, Vadia, Matateu, Moshe Dyan, etc. Lord was a dog. So was Vadia. I miss them. Some day on the rainbow bridge.
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Our son OTOH would have 9, ages 15 to 1, by the time he was in first grade. Then he would have sorrowfully added, but Pippie, Tyke, Shilo, Spooker, Bugs, Feathers, and Yeller, have all died. One dog, rest cats. Hey, he is an only child. Of coarse the fur 4 legged are his siblings. We’ve added another 5 to the rainbow bridge since then. It has been 45 years of having up to 6 pets at a time. We currently have 6.
Yes. Someday at the Rainbow Bridge. Miss them all. Hardest are the few we lost too soon.
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I’m hoping to meet your Thump visiting, if we all make it….
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Their governments have incentive to pad the numbers enormously.
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[Reads Heinlein’s afterword to “Inside Intourist” from Expanded Universe (pgs 442-443 in the trade paperback eidtion) where he compared the Soviet’s claim of 1960 Moscow population of 5 Million to reality, and from transport and infrastructure concluded that Moscow was no larger than 800,000 people.]
FWIW, I think $TINY_TOWN is seeing depopulation. We had a lump during Covidiocy when families with kids would move in with grandparents, but that seems to have gone away. The river by the bridge was a popular summer swimming hole, but it’s been silent for several years now. (And that’s with a sort-of park that the county did–the single-wide house got sold and towed, and the county got the land. Unimproved, but has parking and trees. But no kids swimming. Hmm.) Flyover Falls’ population might be growing, but it’s also growing older.
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Russia started losing population and birthrate in the late 20s. Stalin slaughtered tens of millions in the thirties, and WW2 idiocy cost them 20-40 million more. They had a small victory bump in the late 40s, and it was downhill after that.
They pushed that “overpopulated earth” crap to avoid getting swamped by the free world. Didn’t help. We didn’t buy it enough, and as Socialism wrecked the world, the many of the breeders with gumption came here.
Oops.
There are some groups that go for big families still. Some of them are so highly dysfunctional that all they do, mostly, is self-immolate. Long term, they fail.
Freedom works. Keep the place even somewhat free, and we collect the pot as the alternatives fold or fail.
Stay the course. We win.
Have another kid. We need brains to fill in gaps left by the nincompowon.
Don’t buy the doomporn. No, we ain’t doomed. We are the problem solvers. We put boots on the moon, and set information free almost everywhere. We will deal with bad weather on our way to terraforming Mars.
Hmm. Antarctica is just sitting there, closer and more hospitable. And a new homestead act for Alaska might be a couple centuries of boom-fuel. By then, we should have the Mars route we’ll established and miasteroids. asteroids.
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I will also say that other than the Social Security problem (enough workers to support the retired) we are far less dependent on population than we ever have been before.
The number of people it takes on farms to feed people is a fraction of what it was even back in the 80s, let alone pre WW1
And with automation, even factories need far fewer people to produce more goods (and if the Tesla Bot achieves even a fraction of it’s potential, that will cut down the requirements even further)
A large percentage of the people currently collecting money from the government (indirectly from us) could be put to work. If nothing else, they could replace many existing governmetn workers ;-p ) This would both increase production and decrease spending.
What we need more of are the people who are currently 1 in 100 or fewer who have the drive and creativity to do new things and think logically about problems (and be able to write the instructions to solve them). One way to get more of these people is to have a larger population, but I belive that the current educational system is killing off the drive and creativity of enough people that we could have 1/2 or less of the current population and still have more of this critical group.
David Lang
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$SPOUSE and I married far too late for children, though we help out $NIECE with presents for her two kids (so far. Don’t know plans).
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Had this discussion before. We wanted more than one. Getting one was a challenge. No known reason. Trust me if in vitro had been an option, would have in a heart beat. (We also looked into Adoption. That is a whole different conversation.) Just 20 – 30 years too late. Available. We weren’t allowed to try. Niece OTOH, they tried after just a year. Wasn’t happening. Went right to in vitro*. Now have two, a 3 year old and 6 months, plus his 10 year old son from a prior fling (50/50 custody, since infancy). Not sure if there are two or three embryos remaining (I think 2). But however many, last I heard, they plan to bring them to maturity.
(*) Might have been a specific medical cause. IDK. They have never said. Given me, her mother, and eventually our younger sister, problems having kids, that might have figure into the calculation too. Youngest sister, when she and her fiance made the choice to get married, they also made the choice to take what comes. Their oldest was born 11 months later. It was their 3rd where they had problems. Middle sister, niece’s mother, was told she could not have children after two failed IVF’s (3 biological ones later …). Then there is our extended maternal line history of infertility. A lot of mom’s cousins are adopted.
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My little town had a population of 33,000 in the 1970s. Since then, most of the industrial section is either abandoned or has been converted to warehouses. Almost all the stores (other than Wal-Mart) have closed. Even most of the fast food places have closed up. There are empty houses everywhere, and they razed at least one apartment building due to code violations. No new land has been annexed.
Yet the “official” population figure now is over 35,000.
Funny, that.
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And tribalism does not help. Charity we favor (Midwest Distribution Center) refurbishes treadle sewing machines for use in Africa. Story they tell to explain why:
Woman marries outside her tribe, goes to husband’s village. Has a couple of children. Husband dies, tribe says, “You are not one of us and we owe you nothing!” Traditional “choice,” she becomes the village whore . But with a treadle machine, she can start a small business mending clothing. And from there, there are other options.
I don’t know why the children (who were fathered by a member of the tribe) wouldn’t be accepted, but apparently they aren’t. And there goes a source of population.
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Because by tribal custom they’re only half human. He married an animal (outsider). He should have married his first cousin to keep the “good” blood in the family.
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It’s hard to raise a modern civilization in a continent of crab buckets. Even harder when most of the crab buckets are at war with each other.
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Which is what our ancestors were like for hundreds of thousands of years. The breakup of it was very gradual.
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Yes. I know this from friends who translate for NGOs
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The good thing about the population decline in the west is that it’s a decline in overall numbers, that can get reversed in a couple generations of people deciding to have kids.
This is opposed to the east where there is not only a drop in population, but what population there is is gender skewed very heavily towards males. That is a LOT harder to recover from as the breeding population is far smaller than the population numbers show. They can bring in some females from adjacent lands, but not a lot (they also suffer from the same type of problem, just not as drastically as China)
the ‘one child per couple’ rule, coupled with the availability of ultrasound/abortion to select ‘high value’ males vs the ‘liability’ of females has been devestating.
If the world gets away with ‘only’ a collapse of China (as opposed to a major war), we will be very lucky.
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India, also. Several sources I’ve looked at point out that parts of India have a sex ratio of 120:100 male to female. There are a few that go so far as to claim that parts of the Punjab and Kashmir are up to 150: 100 male:female. That seems horribly skewed, but 120:100 makes dreadful sense, given the push by some Indian political groups to ban neonatal ultrasound because of the large number of sex-selective abortions. “300 Rupees for an abortion vs. 30,000 for a dowry” is the thinking. Apparently 30,000 was at the very low end in some castes and regions.
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Yeah, dowry plus the cultural expectation that a son is the only one to care for his parents in old age (not to mention carry on the family name). I don’t know much about current Chinese customs, but I know in ages past a son was considered necessary to perform the needed rites for his parents in their afterlife as well. Throw communism/socialism into that heady cultural brew and…well, we see the rather disastrous results. :/
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One notes that skewed sex-ratios are not a novelty, though the effect here is disproportionate.
Even in modern times, a researcher noted a number of bachelors whose unmarried state stemmed from the Great Leap Forward famine.
And I’ve read a 19th century missionary talking of female infanticide and how a colleague had interviewed women about killing their daughters. The most deaths were from a woman who said she had killed eleven, but several woman did not remember how many daughters they had killed.
(On top of that, the wealthy normally had several concubines, and the official stance was that widowers should remarry, but not widows. The last often got ignored if she had not borne a son, so you could recoup the bride price.)
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yep, this is why I said ‘east’ rather than just ‘China’. the one child policy and it’s enforcement in China made it a very drastica case, but any culture where dowries are the norm will have the problem to some degree.
The worse the imbalance, the harder the population crash will be and the longer it will take to recover (it doesn’t help that most of these same cultures block females from education and a lot of work as well. the crash will increase their value as mothers, potentially setting back their ability to be anything else significantly)
does anyone have any idea how bad the imbalance is in China? I know we can’t trust any official numbers, but someone has to have an idea.
David Lang
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Last estimate I saw was 4 to 1, but it’s a decade outdated. The official numbers don’t address that, of course. They criminalized sex-selection abortion, but it still happened. Add to that a culture where the first son was expected to take care of his parents, which leaves parents out in the cold if they don’t have a son.
My understanding is that this imbalance is one of the main drivers in the recent real-estate boom/bust. Men trying to attract a mate in the future buy houses, property and apartments and so on, often on credit, build up assets in the hope that this will help their prospects.
One concern is that China might in the future just point to another country and say “Our enemies have women, take what you want.”
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We could send them our ‘transgender women’ and radical feminists. For humanitarian purposes, of course. :-P
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“Lia” Thomas would make a dandy bride for some poor schlub… :twisted:
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Well, thise people seem to largely worship China, so maybe a gofundme and let them do it to themselves?
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But that way we wouldn’t get rid of them. :-(
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Sure we would. Set up a gofundme to pay for 1 way tickets to China.
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Send them back in containers…. Put holes in for air. I’m not a monster.
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Well those containers they sent illegals in are empty, right? Just makes sense to send them back in the same condition they arrived.
I’m sure their destination will have lots of openings for gender studies majors and trained experts in Critical Theory in the mining, agriculture, and general unskilled labor sectors.
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Essentially they’re like human bower birds showing off their pretty blue objects to attract a mate.
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Re overall numbers – well, it’s actually the rate that has the statisticians concerned, as we’re below replacement rate and that’s a fairly difficult stat of which to bend the curve as it has a fair bit of statistical inertia.
Still we are in a lot better shape than a lot of the others around the world. This is Zeihan’s hobbyhorse and he rides it with flair, so see his videos and writings to wrap one’s head around the guts of the problem.
(Okay, “wrapping one’s head around the guts of the problem” is perhaps a construct I should not have come up with. Oh well.)
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Like Mulder and Scully: “I want to believe”. But how can one square this with “Africa always wins”-?
Is the dirt there black magic? Is it just that they ate communism at a tribal stage and closer to the bone?
In other words what’s stopping the world (not necessarily the U.S. – we’re certifiably weird) from Africanizing?
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Try Conquests And Cultures by Thomas Sowell. The part on Africa is stunning.
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I’ve read them. Also Migrations and Culture; hence the worries.
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Very easily. NO. It’s not the dirt. It’s TRIBAL culture. The only difference is whether thy leave tribalism behind. We have the same problem with South of the Border.
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“…The only difference is whether they leave tribalism behind.”
Agreed, completely. Hence the worry.
Don’t get me wrong: It changes nothing. Build up, build over, build around. Be a USAian even if the only U.S. is 1/4 of 1 state wide.
But it’s hard to be cheerful about it.
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Oh, I think the current crop of illegals needs to be deported, mostly because they were recruited from hard core communist organizations. This is not hard to find out.
BUT anyone who comes in after needs to be checked for “Do you want to work like hell to be American? No? GTFO”
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Well, one other thing to consider is whether a person comes from a “Roman” culture. Romans had clients. Clients did what their Patron said. German culture – meaning Angle, Saxons, and others, didn’t have that kind of system running their families. Just because you father worked for someone and got paid, didn’t mean you had to do the same thing when you grew up. You didn’t have to vote for the patron, and you weren’t under the headship of the paterfamilias once you had your own house. You don’t have to vote Democrat because your daddy did. Break the Latinate culture, and I think you can solve quite a few problems. Not all of them, of course.
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Meh. I come from a Roman culture. It’s the individual and what they are willing to do here.
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Fits this haunting song perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvcEP0EjqIc
Look for the translated lyrics.
But there are mornings you wake up crying
Mais y a des matins, tu te réveilles en pleurant
When you dream at night of a big table surrounded by children
Quand tu rêves la nuit d’une grande table entourée d’enfants
Dégénérations, Mes Aieux
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Yesterday I mentioned a low-level scandal identified by the left regarding a Republican Florida Congresswoman appearing in a short video that had her wearing a one-piece swimsuit emblazoned with “Make America Great Again!”
Since then, I’ve learned something that makes the story even sillier. The video was recorded back in 2016, before she ran for Congress.
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Also see the recent “demonic calendar models” kerfluffle.
Real problems, folks.The Augean Stables will not clean themselves, diverted waters notwithstanding.
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I voted for Congresswoman Luna and will again this year. And has nothing to do with how she looks in a swimsuit.
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Apparently, she’s having fun with the people trying to Make Something About those swimsuit pictures. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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As she should. The whole thing is very stupid and silly.
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i.e., “Democrat Usual”
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Another GOP Congress lady candidate is saying she might make her primary results into a suit and Luna said “I’d Wear It!”
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Though she looks quite well in said suit.
oofda
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She should. She mentioned that she’s appeared in Maxim (and SI, though that doesn’t mean so much these days… 😅).
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Sounds like the big ‘controversy’ about Dolly Parton wearing a cheerleader outfit. “She’s almost 80! What a disgrace!”
My reaction: “Good for her! Lookin’ good, too!”
But women are not allowed to ‘pander to men’ by being attractive. Iz Eeevul!
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I haven’t been back to the area where I grew up since the mid-90’s (post-funeral cleaning out of grandmother’s house so we could return the keys to the landlord before we had to renew the renter’s insurance), but from the satellite photos I’ve seen, I don’t think I’d recognize it either. Farmsteads were disappearing even while I was growing up — a lot of the ones we used to go past on the bus when I was in kindergarten were long gone by the time I graduated high school. Sometimes a few trees, a windmill, or a few outbuildings like barns or wooden corncribs would remain for some years after the house was torn down, but eventually those were removed and the land plowed under.
Even the town where I went to elementary school now shows a shocking number of vacant lots where I remember houses. There used to be a couple of churches and a restaurant with a gas station beside it, but they’re all gone. One church building is vacant, and the other is now used as the town hall (the building that was the town hall in my childhood having become so derelict it had to be torn down for safety reasons). The grain elevator is there, but I think the blacksmith’s store that used to fix my dad’s tools and implements is now gone.
Once farms consolidate and there aren’t as many farm families to need various services in town, the town starts to wither and die. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the little towns of my childhood become just a wide spot in the road, with a house or two lingering and a name, but no town government.
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That seems to be the fate of $TINY_TOWN. Water lawfare instigated by the tribes put the local river offlimits for non-tribal ranchers, and the bigger ranches in the area were white-owned. (One exception. Indian owner, a medium size herd, and he waters all the time. Don’t know if he’s allowed, but “Scofflaw” is his middle name.
As a result of the big ranches shutting down, there went the ranchhand jobs. Places 10 miles further south don’t have the water issues (as bad; courtesy state controls) and they are doing well, but it’s a lot of brown grasses where it used to be prime hay and cattle. Town has a few hundred people (there are three tribes in the group, and the locals don’t belong to the one in power. Sigh) and it’s going to fade.
One of our neighbors just put their house up for sale at nosebleed prices. Bless their hearts. Ain’t gonna see that much.
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They might get lucky, you never know. My brother-in-law was looking for a house for his mother, who’s planning to sell her house in Florida and move in with my sister and BIL. (She’s buying the house, but BIL, being the man on the spot, was doing the house hunting on her behalf). They’d found a house they liked, but the seller was asking something like $30K to $40K more than what comparable houses nearby were valued at. BIL made an offer at what he figured the house was really worth, and the seller was considering it… when someone from the city walked into the house, said, “We love it. We’ll take it!” and offered the (inflated) asking price.
Sometimes you get a buyer who doesn’t do his homework, and the seller gets lucky. Can never count on that, but can’t ever totally count on its not happening, either.
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To clarify, this is in a small town (less than 10K population).
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Homestead area towns (which is long gone) where dad’s family is from was dying for awhile. Been a recent resurgence as housing market in Willamette Valley is crazy expensive. So you have families buying in small towns and commuting an hour to work. Really is an hour since 40 – 60 miles away, VS 20 minutes for 5 miles in town. More than a few are from areas where two to 3 hour commutes are the norm, one way, for 30 or fewer miles. What’s an hour commute?
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Huh. This town is 2 hours from the “nearby” major city, but if your office is on the correct side of the city, then it might be a 1.5 hour commute. Yeah, it’s possible someone’s going for that: the town is right on the highway.
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When son was a supervisor (he has since changed jobs) he had someone on his crew commuting from one of the towns. The coworker lived with his family. I said, might be a distant cousin through grandpa (a lot still live in the wider area). Nope. Coworker is oriental. Highly unlikely.
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not to mention remote workers who don’t have to commute at all.
David Lang
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The town closest to me wants to be a bedroom community for Wichita. They keep trying to anex the land around for subdivisions, but the tax rate is way too high, corruption is insane, and at the same time they have made asinine rules to maintain the “small town” vibe. Businesses mostly take one look and go elsewhere unless they can get massive tax concessions, no one wants to pay those tax rates, and the town bleeds useful while sucking in the welfare crowd.
Give it two more generations, the town will be essentially dead. It might not be that long.
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Normal ish. I live in a small town south of PDX, and work all over the Metro Area. Normally it’s about a 30+ min commute, but I have a job on the back end of Hillsboro coming up that’s gonna be about an hour commute. F*^@# 217.
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The last existing subdivision they tried to annex chose to incorporate and become their own town rather than join the circus.
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Santa Clara (Eugene) tried that in ’64 or ’65 (hey, I was < 10). Vote passed overwhelmingly. Eugene took it to court and won. No incorporate town allowed, “not enough separation” (lie, but they got away with it). Look at now, and someone might go “so?” Back then there were still large farms south of Santa Clara and north of where River Road and Railroad Blvd intersect. Not anymore.
There have been numerous attempts at vote to, or forced, annexation. To date they have all failed. More than a few forced options slapped down by the courts, hard. At this point they pretty much have to encircle the area with incorporated properties, homes, industrial, and business. Last round forced the annexation of all non-home business, schools, and churches, within the urban growth boundary. Any new homes, even on properties split from non-city existing properties, are officially annexed. Suspect they will win, out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else, and the old guard and their children, are phasing out (death, nursing homes, etc). But it has been almost 60 years, and counting.
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I suspect they succeeded because this area is most of those with deep pockets and lawyers.
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This is Drain/Yoncolla to Eugene (or Roseburg for some). Even Eugene, the city “commute problem” is maybe 10 – 15 minutes normal *sludge. Since the commute was swing shift, only had to contend with afternoon traffic. Eugene at 2 AM is not quite dead, but not sludge either. (Every single time we have to deal with Portland Metro traffic hubby complains and states “I can’t imagine dealing with this day in and out!” He grew up in San Diego and commuted to LA. Granted this would have been ’60s and ’70s. But even when we’d go down in the ’80s, his comment was “this is nothing”. Way worse than Portland, now, even then.)
Writing of early AM traffic. Nextdoor had a spat of “Why are people ‘driving’ neighborhoods at ‘unreasonable hours’? Casing homes?” The poster got unloaded on hard. Wasn’t the only one to ask “Never heard of swing shift?”, “Newspaper delivery?”, etc. Heck even son’s current job is 6 AM – 3 PM. Don’t know where neighbor’s current job site is currently, other than he is home every night, but he is long gone before 5:30 AM. Hubby when sent out of town, or when he was commuting to Randle WA, he was leaving Monday morning at 3 AM. Friday he didn’t leave there until 5 PM because if he left after an 8 hour day when they were slow, he’d just hit the Columbia bridges at 5 PM, headed south? Why? Bad enough at 7 PM or latter.
(*) If there is a problem, then all heck break loose. Not quite “can’t get there from here”, if the problem is learned about fast enough. But almost.
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We figure that the place (based around a 1920 cabin that “just grew” into a 3-4 bedroom house) is worth maybe $400K. They’re asking $599K, and that’s with a 1920 vintage septic system and two parties on a shared well.
The house was renovated extensively, but not with high end materials. Laminate flooring* vs something more durable, butcher block countertops. I wish them luck, but it’s unlikely any locals would be interested (it’s just outside the Pop 400 $TINY_TOWN) and it’s 45 minutes to Flyover Falls when the roads are good. 4WD or AWD vehicles are close to essential, with studded snow tires a really good idea. (The national forest in the way has some icy stretches that eat unsuspecting card and drivers in winter.)
((*)) And it’s already showing wear signs. Oops.
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$600,000 is cheap relative to Kalifornia. ‘Round these parts, you can’t buy an outhouse for $100,000.
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Compared to prices in a similar area (Tulelake, CA), $400K for a rural home with some land is reasonable. Zillow has some in-town homes in that area for under $200K.
Similar situation just across the state line in Klamath (AKA Flyover) County. $400K not unusual, while $600K needs to be special. It ain’t special, at least not in a good way. 104 year old septic system? That’s really bad special. (SWAG says sand filter for replacement, maybe $50K. Separate well, maybe $20K if the aquifer is accessible. We have interesting geology here.)
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what do you get when you feed a million starving africans?
4 million starving africans!
natural selection do gooders
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Mainly because all that ‘charity’ has destroyed the farms. Farmers can’t compete with ‘Free!’ food so they wind up on the dole too. The farms go to weeds, the livestock die or go feral (mostly die) and the ‘charities’ get to pat themselves on the back for all the ‘good’ they’re doing.
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I remember hearing long ago that some of the charitable food organizations… or possibly the US government, I don’t remember… were talking about ways to distribute grain (Corn, whatever) that would prevent the people receiving it from using it as seed to grow their own crops.
I’m sure there was a good-sounding reason for the discussion.
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Probably “concerned” about upsetting the local ecosystem.
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Usually that means that a middle man is taking the “food to survive” for someone else, and selling it as seed-grain.
Kind of like how the UN will send out pictures of food aid being distributed… but not of the armed men taking it from the starving villagers and using it to feed their own soldiers, or selling it. Or just destroying it for power.
A lot of the news that gets out is folks whose gravy train got interrupted.
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Coming to the US should Harris/what-his-name prevail. Not kidding.
To combat food inflation prices will be set on what can be charged for food.
Fixed prices anyone? How’s that going to work out? I know how. No food for sale.
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good, im ready, about time people get smacked in the face with the consequences of their poor decisions, wont affect me much honestly so yea
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excuse me? Why should people be “smacked” with the results of rampant fraud? PRECISELY?
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if people actually vote for those two donkeys they deserve whatever awful BS they get. The rest of us deserve it for allowing that shit to blossom
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I don’t think they have more than 25% of the supposed vote.
The shit blossomed before I was born, and I’m not young. We are not to blame for the evil.
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My mid-to-late childhood home no longer exists. It was falling apart, so the owner bulldozed the remains and expanded the yard of the adjacent home.
Some of the early childhood homes have survived.
Blessedly, my cherished childhood summer camp survives and thrives, although the beloved camp director who saved it from shutdown finally retired after 37 years. The “campcraft” stuff alone was life saving layer, and thus well worth the time and expense.
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You can’t stop Human nature or human’s being human.
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Looking at the title of the post, I had an immediate association with Rachel Carson’s, “Silent Spring”. Probably not an association anyone wants. ;-)
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You’re not the only one. I detest that book (read it for an environmental history grad seminar.) I wish she’d stuck with natural histories – The Sea Around Us was magnificent.
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I recently saw some birth-rate figures for Europe and the East, and they’re terrifying. Birthrates in Sicily are down to 1.08. Spain, 1.16. Portugal, 1.20something. Japan, 1.20ish. South Korea, 0.79. Seoul specifically, 0.58. ZERO POINT FIFTY EIGHT. Japan’s stated population will drop from a peak of ~120 million to ~80 million in the next fifty years at these rates, exclusive of immigration. No wonder the EUnuchs love importing the Third World so much. They think they’re going to get a permanent group of doctors, nannies, and gardeners. What they’re getting instead is the disruption and destruction of a thousand years of culture and arresting their own people when they try and fight it.
By comparison, we here in the United States are horny little so-and-sos with a birthrate of 1.66 children per woman. But how many of those are anchor babies with zero attachment to the country that their parents are draining the coffers of? How many of them are, to be blunt, Mexicans or Guatemalans or Somalians or (fill in country name here)s who just happen to have an address north of the Rio Grande?
Demographics is destiny.
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And Portugal’s are mostly made up.
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At this rate my parents’ family will be well represented in the future, with 10 kids + spices producing 29 grandchildren, 2 of them currently with children of their own. Two of us never had kids (one by choice, and then there’s me) so that’s an average of 4 kids each.
I have also seen the liberal breakdown in our family. Two of my siblings married liberals, both had two children, and no grandchildren.
My scumbag BIL will be able to pass his “real estate empire” to the democratic party at this rate.
I wonder how the demographics change if you take liberals out of the picture?
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