“Why would anyone vote Green? People vote Green when they see the need for a different approach to governance. An approach where the Earth’s limits are acknowledged, respected and accommodated…” Mike Nickerson
Why do I think that people vote Green? Because they are cognitively challenged murderers. They are guilty of homicide on two counts.
Firstly, most Greens are afflicted with population-myopia. In deference to political correctness they took the “P” out the “IPAT” equation, which was the foundation of environmental comprehension when the movement took off some four decades ago. Greens seem to insist that every incremental increase in human population can be neutralized in its ecological impact by a corresponding diminution in consumption. That if every one lives like Ghandi rather than Gates, the planet and the nation can, and implicitly, should, accommodate more people. The Green slogan can thus be summarized as “More and More People consuming Less and Less”. According to SOA eco-footrpint analysis, for example, the present Canadian population of 33 million might indeed be sustainable. Providing we subsist on the per capita income that Cambodians enjoy, or about $1800 a year. Would that cover the heating bill in Ontario or Manitoba? And what would they do with the spare cash? Buy another loin cloth for their Ghandian wardrobe?
More than that, the global distribution of those people, for Greens, is not apparently an issue. Rather than see Canada as a lifeboat that will capsize if too many foreigners, however needy, however qualified, clamber aboard, they prefer to see Canada as either an aircraft carrier of boundless capacity or Canada as just one passenger on a planetary lifeboat. What they don’t understand is that even a lifeboat of this size cannot stay afloat if too many of the passengers on one side stand up and attempt to sit next to us and our American neighbour. Each immigrant quadruples his GHG emissions upon arrival to the US, and 12.6 acres must be destroyed to support just one of them, an environmental impact 10 to 30 times greater than he had in his country of origin.
Greens also don’t seem to understand that the lifeboat carries non-human passengers as valuable as us. Without biodiversity services, we are dead. We have already jettisoned 25% of them in the last 40 years and 200 every day go over-board to make way for our expansion. An expansion that can be measured by the fact than more humans are born every day than there are primates in all of the world. In Canada’s most populous province, 536 species are at the brink of extinction because they lie at the frontlines of urban sprawl, a phenomena which is fundamentally driven by immigrant-fed population growth. Land use planning, the panacea of growth managers, is a branch plant of real estate developers who own local councils and their planning departments. And “smart growth” strategies are a proven failure in the very areas that have showcased them (eg. Portland, Oregon). Perhaps this is why, when she is not promoting the concentration of Canadians new and old into the feedlots of dense urban living (smart growth), Elizabeth May is talking about settling immigrants into the snows of rural Saskatchewan and the Maritimes.
Here is a “Green” leader who tells us that yes, “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, a line coined by Paul Ehrlich, and then argues for a 38% hike in our immigration quota to 330,000 immigrants per year. Be a good green consumer and “Live like Ghandi” by reducing your per capita consumption, while a Green federal government radically increases the number of “per capitas”. This is the Green definition of “sustainability”.
Greens promote growth. The growth in the number of humans, and if that doesn’t necessarily involve an increase in total consumption as some dreamers insist, it certainly involves a loss in biodiversity. A Green Holocaust. Murder. On a grand scale.
Why can’t they see this? Cognitive deficits surely. Bingo. According to a new study from Oxford University, vegetarians and vegans are six times more likely to suffer from brain shrinkage than meat eaters. Cf.
http://www.asylum.com/2008/09/15/a-vegertarian-diet-shrinks-the-brain
Thus we see a positive feedback loop. Vegetarian, shrinks brain, as a result votes for Green Party which turns a blind eye to population growth and stresses only cut-backs in consumption, leading to more overpopulation, more social pressure to cut out meat to free up land to feed more people, more vegetarian half-wits, who vote for more Greens, who etc. Vegetarianism a scam to produce pea-brain people?
Seriously, a great many Greens are vegetarians, not just for reasons of personal health, by ideological conviction. They make the claim that meat production commits space and resources that might otherwise go to grain production and feed many more people. More people? More people who would breed more people, each one of whom would consume more resources than simply the land that it takes to raise or support livestock. The two vegans that might be sustained by the same unit of land that would only support one carnivore would nevertheless consume more housing, heating, transportation, water and non-food related resources than the purportedly socially irresponsible meat eater. This scale of consumption would only push back the wildlife enclave into more dense and desperate redoubts. It's them or us. We can afford a culling, they can’t.
The PC cult of vegetarianism is simply another kind of efficiency paradox, like that of Jevon’s or Boulding’s Second Theorem. It only provokes more growth and therefore leaves even less room for wildlife. Wildlife does not need “management”. It needs to be left alone. It needs distance from us. Homo sapiens need management, the management of a regional planner like Mr. T. Rex multiplied by one million or two facing a disarmed human population.
In the context of their complicity in the wildlife holocaust, it is curious that Green vegetarians accuse Malthusian omnivores of being insensitive to animals, conflating domestic animals that exist in surplus numbers with those in the wild who cling to a tenuous existence. Actually, I was under the impression that the plants vegetarians are eating were also alive too. In fact I once established an emotional bond with my plants, even talking to them, and when I pulled out a carrot, I found I just couldn’t bring myself to eat him. So I bought my neighbour’s chicken and chopped his fuckin’ head off. Maybe the next head that rolls will be a canvasser with a GP button.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
FAVOURED QUOTES OF 2008
My mother was a woman much ahead of her time. Circa 1960 she told me that her greatest regret was not that she had children, but that she gave birth to them. “As long as there is one orphan in the world,” she told me, “no woman should give birth to a child.”
A half century later, similar things are being said, with a global population level that is more than twice as large.
“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at expense of the planet. Every person who is born uses more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.” Tony Vernelli, who at 19, voluntarily chose to be sterilized.
“The most environmentally destructive act any one person can do is to have a child… There is nothing so special about any individual’s DNA that makes it more important than the thousands of lives every additional human will snuff out… If an individual cares about the Earth or the animals—hell, even if that person cares about other people—they will not breed.” Geddon Cascadia
It is appropriate then, for me to conjure up some bumper sticker slogans to encapsulate these sentiments. Perhaps some have already been composed. But here is what I have in mind:
Adopt Children.
Don’t Breed Them.
Not Having Kids
Is this Best Favour
You could EVER do
For Mother Earth
Your Kids Need Your Love
Not Your DNA
Your dog doesn’t have your genes either
So why must your children?
Uncles (Good Cops)
Have More Fun Than
Fathers (Bad Cops)
(note also applies to aunts and mothers)
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC.
Have a Happy and Fruitful (but not in a procreative sense) New Year!
A half century later, similar things are being said, with a global population level that is more than twice as large.
“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at expense of the planet. Every person who is born uses more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.” Tony Vernelli, who at 19, voluntarily chose to be sterilized.
“The most environmentally destructive act any one person can do is to have a child… There is nothing so special about any individual’s DNA that makes it more important than the thousands of lives every additional human will snuff out… If an individual cares about the Earth or the animals—hell, even if that person cares about other people—they will not breed.” Geddon Cascadia
It is appropriate then, for me to conjure up some bumper sticker slogans to encapsulate these sentiments. Perhaps some have already been composed. But here is what I have in mind:
Adopt Children.
Don’t Breed Them.
Not Having Kids
Is this Best Favour
You could EVER do
For Mother Earth
Your Kids Need Your Love
Not Your DNA
Your dog doesn’t have your genes either
So why must your children?
Uncles (Good Cops)
Have More Fun Than
Fathers (Bad Cops)
(note also applies to aunts and mothers)
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC.
Have a Happy and Fruitful (but not in a procreative sense) New Year!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
IS THE HOME BUILDING INDUSTRY KEY TO OUR ECOLOGICAL RUIN?
That the home building industry is the prime mover and catalyst of our ecological ruin was never more clearly illustrated than by statements recently made by University of West Florida economist Rick Harper, director of the UWF’s Haas Centre for Business Research. Harper argued that the real estate market would never recover from the current recession until population growth soaks up existing housing inventory and prices consequently begin to appreciate. “If we don’t stimulate population growth…we are going to take 10 years or more to recover from this recession”, he said, “we’ve had a huge overbuilding of the housing sector, there was just too much investment in residential structures.” He therefore advocates an easing of immigration standards to allow more people of higher education and net worth into the country. http://www.pnj.com/article/20081228/BUSINESS/812280306/1006/NEWS01
The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.
The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.
But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.
But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.
In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.
So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(RBC) support(s) environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example “engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year.1 One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.
To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.
Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.
The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.
The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the environment itself. And here we were, thinking that protecting the environment was their raison d’etre. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.
We knew that the environmental NGOs were myopic, hypocritical, soft, politically correct and cowardly, but how many of us thought that they were so fundamentally corrupt? I suppose after the David Gelbaum affair, we should not have been surprised, when the Sierra Club of America can accept a $100 million bribe to keep its longstanding support of restricted immigration off the policy books we should not expect that money-grubbing green NGOs north of the 49th should not fall prey to the same temptations. The difference is, at least a third of the Sierra Club in the US couldn’t stomach corruption, including three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of Earth Day, David Brower, a standard bearer of the organization for so many years, who quit because he knew that immigration was an environmental issue that had to be confronted. It was as if the Pope had resigned from the Vatican in protest. Alas there are no David Browers in Canada, only David Gelbaums on Bay Street with their hush money for green groups who will tow the corporate line and decoy sincere dupes at the grassroots level with inconsequential feel-good volunteer work which is akin to polishing the furniture in a burning house.
Arguably then, homebuilding is not the key to ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because Big money has thrown them a bone.
1. http://www.ontariofarmlandtrust.ca/issues-and-programs/saving-farmland
The former Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, once offered Australia a choice. It could sustain jobs and economic security by using its brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products it produces and by transforming manufacturing. Or it could continue to be a “lazy Australia” that depends on job growth simply by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building homes and shopping malls. And that is indeed what is it has done, adding a third to its population in less than three decades.
The Bush administration followed a similar course. By outsourcing decent working class jobs and tolerating the blatant mass employment of millions of low wage “undocumented” service sector workers they not only relegated 5 million Americans from the middle class but eviscerated what was left of the manufacturing sector. Land speculation and homebuilding assumed a greater importance in this new economy with a hollow core. Like a drug addict who has forsaken proper nutrition for energy, the new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix (and birth incentives to a lesser degree) for energy.
But each succeeding fix requires greater injections to achieve the same jump start, and the cycle of boom and bust plays out with greater and greater consequences. More severe labour shortages, that call for more foreign injections, and the devastating ecological results, largely unsung, manifested in massive losses in prime farmland at a frightening pace and a cost in wildlife habitat that lies at the perimeter of expanding urban boundaries. Not to mention the greater energy consumption, waste disposal and pollution involved with never-ending urbanization. North American studies reveal that at most, rational land use planning could only mitigate half these problems. The other half are the inevitable consequence of largely immigrant-driven population growth.
But real estate development itself requires fuel. It requires a favourable interest rate climate, and local governments bought and paid for together with their planning departments, staffed with growth managers who can converse in “greenspeak” and greenwash to assuage anxieties about their development plans. And of course it requires home buyers. People. The more the merrier. And where do people come from? Through the airport or the maternity ward, and the federal government is the gatekeeper at the first and most important port of entry, and quite influential in manipulating the volume at the other port too. Home buyers, in turn, have a requirement too. Financing. This holds the key, at least in Canada, to the demographic pyramid scam of the immigrant-propelled economy. For the big Canadian banks and credit institutions are not only the essential lubricants of home purchase and land development, but potent immigration lobbyists and influence peddlers as well.
In fact the president and CEO of Canada’s dominant Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in 2008 reiterated the position taken by an October 2005 RBC report that the government should hike its annual immigration intake from its present approximately 240,000 to some 400,000. No doubt he would be speaking on behalf of his competitors in that ambition. What is most impressive about Mr. Gordon Nixon’s political strategy is that is conducted on a broad front. RBC realizes that the federal government may be the gatekeeper, but the environmental movement is the barking dog which must be silenced if the gate is to be left open wide for the avalanche of consumers that it wants.
So RBC laid out a Machiavellian plan. To cover their quest to underwrite the conversion of Canada’s best farmland to sprawling subdivisions and hundreds upon hundreds of species at risk to extinction in the process, they concocted an “Environmental Blueprint” that would signal to the environmental movement that “(RBC) support(s) environmental sustainability”. They declared that would not for example “engage in new financing activities with corporations operating unsustainably in tropical rainforests or High Conservation Forests”. But the trees of urban Canada were presumably fair game, as are the rich fields of BC’s Fraser Valley and the Class 1 farmland of Ontario that is being developed at a pace of perhaps 60,000 acres per year.1 One might think that this kind of ecological damage, not to mention this threat to our national food security, would meet with the outrage of our environmental NGOs. Apparently RBC thought so too. That is why they bought their silence.
To prove their determination to “direct a significant portion of our philanthropic efforts to environmental causes”, they arranged to steer money to the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) for each client who switched to electronic bank statements. A cute deal for both parties. NCC, always thirsty for dough, got a corporate bag man, and RBC got to wear a green cloak over its mercenary endeavours. It was not done for the environment, it was a strictly commercial transaction, ecological dispensation for suburban sprawl in return for cash and acquiescence.
Many of us have been dumbfounded by the failure of flagship environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club of Canada or the David Suzuki Foundation to publicly contest the federal government’s mass immigration policy. NCC not surprisingly has been silent too, even though population growth is an obvious culprit in habitat loss. How could environmentalists ignore the Elephant in the Room? How could they ignore the obvious ecological impact of immigrant-driven population growth in Canada? Why didn’t they take the release of the Census report of March 2007, which revealed that Canada had the fastest growing population of all G8 countries, as an opportunity to attack government policy on this issue, and to educate people that population growth is a key variable of environmental degradation? That reducing per capita consumption without containing population is a futile enterprise.
The answer was not to be found primarily in their ideological myopia, but in the examination of their carefully guarded donor base, which should, but isn’t, made easily available for public scrutiny. A look at the accounts of the David Suzuki Foundation reveals that the Royal Bank of Canada not only gave an award to the good Doctor, but is a significant contributor to his foundation. No wonder that Dr. Suzuki will not publicly say what he says privately. That the importation of people from low consuming third world countries to Canada so as to convert them to “hyper-consumers” is, in his words, “nuts”, and that industrialized countries are already overpopulated.
The Sierra Club is equally gripped with demographic lockjaw. The 2005 Report of the BC Sierra Club, the country’s largest, showed that the Toronto Dominion Bank and the Van City Credit Union empire, both big real estate lenders, were prominent contributors to their “environmental” organization. Given these contributions, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is retrospectively clear why it has been difficult to make Sierra Club directors understand the environmental significance of mass immigration “if their salary depends on not understanding it.” Or is it that they understand it, but they tell “the silent lie”. The lie of knowing that something of vital importance is true and needs to be told, but deciding not to tell it. In this case, to protect a donor base at the cost of the environment itself. And here we were, thinking that protecting the environment was their raison d’etre. Bureaucratic self-preservation seems to take on a life of its own. Truth, integrity and courage are its casualties.
We knew that the environmental NGOs were myopic, hypocritical, soft, politically correct and cowardly, but how many of us thought that they were so fundamentally corrupt? I suppose after the David Gelbaum affair, we should not have been surprised, when the Sierra Club of America can accept a $100 million bribe to keep its longstanding support of restricted immigration off the policy books we should not expect that money-grubbing green NGOs north of the 49th should not fall prey to the same temptations. The difference is, at least a third of the Sierra Club in the US couldn’t stomach corruption, including three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of Earth Day, David Brower, a standard bearer of the organization for so many years, who quit because he knew that immigration was an environmental issue that had to be confronted. It was as if the Pope had resigned from the Vatican in protest. Alas there are no David Browers in Canada, only David Gelbaums on Bay Street with their hush money for green groups who will tow the corporate line and decoy sincere dupes at the grassroots level with inconsequential feel-good volunteer work which is akin to polishing the furniture in a burning house.
Arguably then, homebuilding is not the key to ecological ruin after all. Nor is it the greed of developers or the banks that finance them, or the dreams of the people that flood in to buy houses. It is, in my judgment, the ‘green’ watchdogs who haven’t barked because Big money has thrown them a bone.
1. http://www.ontariofarmlandtrust.ca/issues-and-programs/saving-farmland
Monday, December 22, 2008
David Suzuki’s Big Secret
Suzuki Accepts Hush Money From The Royal Bank
Niayah da da Niayah da, I know something you don’t know, I know something that you don’t know—-and I’m NOT telling! Publicly that is.
OK, OK, I’ll tell you my secret. But only if you promise not to tell the Royal Bank of Canada I told ya cuz then they won’t give me any more awards and they’ll stop giving my Suzuki Foundation ANY more money, OK? If I spill the beans and ruin their plans to fill up Canada with 400,000 consumers each year as their Chairman wants (150,000 more than the current intake) then I will be off their Christmas list.
But I have told some people privately, so I might as well tell you. But promise not to tell anyone else? Promise, promise, promise? Cross your heart and hope to die? OK, here is my secret:
Industrialized countries are “way overpopulated”. (October 15/08) And Canada is an industrialized country.
Bringing in more and more people from low consuming countries to convert them to high consumers is “nuts”. (Oct. 21/08)
In other words, immigration is a wrong-headed, crazy policy for Canada, a decisive catalyst in the degradation of our environment.
Tim Murray
VP of Biodiversity First
Niayah da da Niayah da, I know something you don’t know, I know something that you don’t know—-and I’m NOT telling! Publicly that is.
OK, OK, I’ll tell you my secret. But only if you promise not to tell the Royal Bank of Canada I told ya cuz then they won’t give me any more awards and they’ll stop giving my Suzuki Foundation ANY more money, OK? If I spill the beans and ruin their plans to fill up Canada with 400,000 consumers each year as their Chairman wants (150,000 more than the current intake) then I will be off their Christmas list.
But I have told some people privately, so I might as well tell you. But promise not to tell anyone else? Promise, promise, promise? Cross your heart and hope to die? OK, here is my secret:
Industrialized countries are “way overpopulated”. (October 15/08) And Canada is an industrialized country.
Bringing in more and more people from low consuming countries to convert them to high consumers is “nuts”. (Oct. 21/08)
In other words, immigration is a wrong-headed, crazy policy for Canada, a decisive catalyst in the degradation of our environment.
Tim Murray
VP of Biodiversity First
This article was featured on Suzuki Watch !
Sunday, December 21, 2008
THE ENVIRONMENT DOESN'T CARE ABOUT HUMAN POLITICAL ARRANGEMENTS
This report issued from Australia, almost a year from the demise of the hated “corrupt, right wing” administration of John Howard, a government that was castigated in some quarters for propelling dangerous population growth through its ambitious immigration policies:
Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that Australia's population is growing at its fastest rate in nearly 20 years.
Records show that the number of people living in Australia has increased to 21.374 million as of June 30th this year. This is an increase of 359,000 (1.7 per cent) from the previous year.
Fifty nine per cent of the growth can be attributed directly to immigration, with the Government's successful migration program enabling more foreign nationals to live and work in Australia. http://www.themovechannel.com/news/7C1DEC64-73FB
In light then, of the fact that growth is even more reckless under the progressive, democratic and enlightened watch of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government, one is given to wonder how population activists feel retrospectively about Mr. Howard. I would guess that environmentalists, so-called, would still regard Rudd as the green knight because environmentalists are typically anthropocentric. But the problem is, nature is not, is it?
If wildlife could cast a vote, I believe its vote would be vote for Adolf Hitler rather than Mother Theresa. The good Sister, while very compassionate on one level, the level of individual care for individual people, was, to be frank, inhumane to humanity. Anyone who promotes population growth by the advance of papal pro-natalist and pro-life but not pro-“quality of life” positions is coldly inhumane to the consequences of those positions. The consequences being fewer resources for more people.
The consequences of human population growth on non-humans is even more manifestly ruinous. It is lethal. Species extinction ranges in the tens of thousands a year from habitat destruction occasioned by growth. Adolf’s record was relatively stellar in comparison to the damage wrought by “compassionate”, Christian, socialist and democratic rivals. His Minister of the Interior, Hermann Goering, was the architect of gaming laws which were so progressive that they remained German law for several decades after the war. Nazi ideology was fully rooted in German romanticism with its love of nature and countryside. “Blut and Boden”, blood and soil, was a slogan of National Socialism. It emphasized that German identity was tied to the land--- unlike cornucopian leftists and greens today who seem to think that identity is drawn from the importation of diverse human cultures at the expense of the biological diversity of the land. Or that somehow technological advances will compensate for the absence of that biodiversity. Nazi culture stressed physical fitness, outdoor activity like hiking and respect for nature and the lessons that it teaches. Their opponents were urban-focused, as are the left-greens are today, sitting in their cafés discussing human rights issues. No wonder it took the Nazis to overhaul and modernize animal cruelty law, something that the Weimar socialists and liberals never bothered to do.
But the biggest contribution Hitler made to the environment was to engineer a war that ultimately resulted in 43 million fewer Europeans. Their footprint was high enough then. Had they lived, how many more people would Europe have today? How many more forests, farms and animal species would have been destroyed to accommodate them? What would CO2 emissions be today? Not that his war was motivated by environmental concerns. Or that he deserves all the credit for culling the continents most environmentally unfriendly species. Uncle Joe Stalin did his bit too. In fact Stalin murdered…wrong word. Let us be clinically scientific here. Stalin reduced three times as many homo sapiens under his rule than his megalomaniacal revival to the west. But Hollywood hasn’t gotten around to really publicizing that yet.
Now of course, this account of rapid population decline (RPD) of humans in mid twentieth century Europe may strike many as shocking in its emotional detachment. But what is surely more shocking is our detachment from the ongoing rapid wildlife holocaust. Many patriots have been quite gleeful in seeing potential enemies destroy themselves by warring with each other. After all, divide and conquer was a proven strategy for both the Roman and British Empires among others. One imagines that the Pentagon wasn’t choked to see Iran and Iraq to duke it out in the 1980s, or China fight it out with its comrades in Vietnam. Just as many in Anglo-America would have loved to see Hitler and Stalin consume each other totally before Normandy. At the end of the war, in fact, after the Soviets lost 20 million of their people, the Truman administration, were considering the application of the “Morgenthau” plan to de-industrialize and depopulate Germany by starving its citizens to death. Only the need for a strong West Germany to face the Communist bloc caused them to reconsider. Wildlife “managers” make essentially the same calculations. One species keeps the population level of another in check. If wildlife could view the human drama with the same perspective, would they not cheerlead our internecine quarrels as downsizing rituals that give them more space? Tribal wars are a form of “human” management that ecologists, planners and other ‘smart growth’ snake oil salesmen have yet to match in terms of results. The war economy is, de-facto, a steady state economy because it alone seems to be the most efficient means of reducing the most pernicious variable of growth, the “P” in the IPAT equation. Consumers.
And why would wildlife populations favour democratic or socialist regimes over undemocratic or fascist ones? Was Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista regime good news for Nicaraguan biodiversity? Ortega was not only oblivious to the country’s appalling TFR, the worst on the continent, he promoted it by his alliance with Catholic forces. A survey of other “socialist” governments in the third world would also be very disappointing for leftists of a Malthusian persuasion. China’s one child policy a notable exception.
Imagine if the Titanic had a large cargo of wild animals as it was steaming towards its mortal nemesis. (Right now it is the iceberg of human overpopulation.) Would they care if a cadre of socialists had seized control of the bridge and forced the captain to eliminate class privileges on the ship? That passengers in steerage would be allowed to come up to first class and share its amenities? That the hierarchical division between officers and crew was abolished in favour of a consensual decision-making process? That the stairways were made accessible to the handicapped and that anyone making disparaging remarks about women or the foreigners in steerage would be jailed or fined? Not likely.
Because if they were aware of these petty fixations they would also be aware that the socialists, the liberals, the conservatives, the officers and the captain all believed that the ship was, like our current growth economy, invincible. That it didn’t matter that there weren’t enough lifeboats for the number of passengers because, after all, the ship itself was one big lifeboat that wouldn’t sink. In fact, it could just as easily pick up even more passengers. And apparently, socialist, social democratic and progressive “captains”, historically, want to stop and take on more “passengers” than right wing, corrupt ones like Howard. Check out the immigration levels.
The fact that these new passengers may consist of proportionately more asylum seekers, or more family class immigrants, is completely irrelevant to the seaworthiness of the ship. The environment does not care what category of “passenger” a nation takes on board. Refugees, the persecuted, the homeless, the downtrodden, the skilled, the unskilled, English or non-English, white or brown----Mother Nature doesn’t take notice. They all have a footprint. Or shall we say in Australia’s case, and Canada and America’s too, a “bootprint”. And under that boot is biodiversity, our lifeline and insurance policy.
The Rudd victory may have been a victory for Australian “democracy”. But so far it is looking like a defeat for Australian wildlife, and by the immutable laws of nature, ultimately a crushing defeat for humanity too.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC, Canada
December 13/08
PS I might be cogently argued that notwithstanding the appalling losses of both world wars in the 20th century, their impact on impact on human population growth has been negligible while their toll on wildlife has been devastating. One immediately conjures up images of millions refugees streaming through the contryside foraging for food and in their wake causing much "collateral" ecological damage. In fact, the disease that ensues from war often takes more lives than war itself. The so called "Spanish influenza" following at the heels of the November 11, 1918 Armistice took more lives than the war itself. Points well taken.
But did Vietnamese wildlife appreciate that it was being carpet-bombed and napalmed out of existence by a Texas liberal, LBJ, architect of the Great Society and the impetus behind the Civil Rights Bill? A man, under whose direction American forces dropped more explosives than all combatants combined in the Second World War. Does the global atmosphere appreciate that the methane it is going to receive from Canada's boreal forest that is being clear-cut by the corporations blessed by the custodians of a universal medicare program and a "civilized" democracy?
If you were offered a stark choice between a "humane" egalitarian society that pursued growth at the cost of the environment on the one hand or a fascist steady state society that lived within ecological limits, which option would you choose.?
Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that Australia's population is growing at its fastest rate in nearly 20 years.
Records show that the number of people living in Australia has increased to 21.374 million as of June 30th this year. This is an increase of 359,000 (1.7 per cent) from the previous year.
Fifty nine per cent of the growth can be attributed directly to immigration, with the Government's successful migration program enabling more foreign nationals to live and work in Australia. http://www.themovechannel.com/news/7C1DEC64-73FB
In light then, of the fact that growth is even more reckless under the progressive, democratic and enlightened watch of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government, one is given to wonder how population activists feel retrospectively about Mr. Howard. I would guess that environmentalists, so-called, would still regard Rudd as the green knight because environmentalists are typically anthropocentric. But the problem is, nature is not, is it?
If wildlife could cast a vote, I believe its vote would be vote for Adolf Hitler rather than Mother Theresa. The good Sister, while very compassionate on one level, the level of individual care for individual people, was, to be frank, inhumane to humanity. Anyone who promotes population growth by the advance of papal pro-natalist and pro-life but not pro-“quality of life” positions is coldly inhumane to the consequences of those positions. The consequences being fewer resources for more people.
The consequences of human population growth on non-humans is even more manifestly ruinous. It is lethal. Species extinction ranges in the tens of thousands a year from habitat destruction occasioned by growth. Adolf’s record was relatively stellar in comparison to the damage wrought by “compassionate”, Christian, socialist and democratic rivals. His Minister of the Interior, Hermann Goering, was the architect of gaming laws which were so progressive that they remained German law for several decades after the war. Nazi ideology was fully rooted in German romanticism with its love of nature and countryside. “Blut and Boden”, blood and soil, was a slogan of National Socialism. It emphasized that German identity was tied to the land--- unlike cornucopian leftists and greens today who seem to think that identity is drawn from the importation of diverse human cultures at the expense of the biological diversity of the land. Or that somehow technological advances will compensate for the absence of that biodiversity. Nazi culture stressed physical fitness, outdoor activity like hiking and respect for nature and the lessons that it teaches. Their opponents were urban-focused, as are the left-greens are today, sitting in their cafés discussing human rights issues. No wonder it took the Nazis to overhaul and modernize animal cruelty law, something that the Weimar socialists and liberals never bothered to do.
But the biggest contribution Hitler made to the environment was to engineer a war that ultimately resulted in 43 million fewer Europeans. Their footprint was high enough then. Had they lived, how many more people would Europe have today? How many more forests, farms and animal species would have been destroyed to accommodate them? What would CO2 emissions be today? Not that his war was motivated by environmental concerns. Or that he deserves all the credit for culling the continents most environmentally unfriendly species. Uncle Joe Stalin did his bit too. In fact Stalin murdered…wrong word. Let us be clinically scientific here. Stalin reduced three times as many homo sapiens under his rule than his megalomaniacal revival to the west. But Hollywood hasn’t gotten around to really publicizing that yet.
Now of course, this account of rapid population decline (RPD) of humans in mid twentieth century Europe may strike many as shocking in its emotional detachment. But what is surely more shocking is our detachment from the ongoing rapid wildlife holocaust. Many patriots have been quite gleeful in seeing potential enemies destroy themselves by warring with each other. After all, divide and conquer was a proven strategy for both the Roman and British Empires among others. One imagines that the Pentagon wasn’t choked to see Iran and Iraq to duke it out in the 1980s, or China fight it out with its comrades in Vietnam. Just as many in Anglo-America would have loved to see Hitler and Stalin consume each other totally before Normandy. At the end of the war, in fact, after the Soviets lost 20 million of their people, the Truman administration, were considering the application of the “Morgenthau” plan to de-industrialize and depopulate Germany by starving its citizens to death. Only the need for a strong West Germany to face the Communist bloc caused them to reconsider. Wildlife “managers” make essentially the same calculations. One species keeps the population level of another in check. If wildlife could view the human drama with the same perspective, would they not cheerlead our internecine quarrels as downsizing rituals that give them more space? Tribal wars are a form of “human” management that ecologists, planners and other ‘smart growth’ snake oil salesmen have yet to match in terms of results. The war economy is, de-facto, a steady state economy because it alone seems to be the most efficient means of reducing the most pernicious variable of growth, the “P” in the IPAT equation. Consumers.
And why would wildlife populations favour democratic or socialist regimes over undemocratic or fascist ones? Was Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista regime good news for Nicaraguan biodiversity? Ortega was not only oblivious to the country’s appalling TFR, the worst on the continent, he promoted it by his alliance with Catholic forces. A survey of other “socialist” governments in the third world would also be very disappointing for leftists of a Malthusian persuasion. China’s one child policy a notable exception.
Imagine if the Titanic had a large cargo of wild animals as it was steaming towards its mortal nemesis. (Right now it is the iceberg of human overpopulation.) Would they care if a cadre of socialists had seized control of the bridge and forced the captain to eliminate class privileges on the ship? That passengers in steerage would be allowed to come up to first class and share its amenities? That the hierarchical division between officers and crew was abolished in favour of a consensual decision-making process? That the stairways were made accessible to the handicapped and that anyone making disparaging remarks about women or the foreigners in steerage would be jailed or fined? Not likely.
Because if they were aware of these petty fixations they would also be aware that the socialists, the liberals, the conservatives, the officers and the captain all believed that the ship was, like our current growth economy, invincible. That it didn’t matter that there weren’t enough lifeboats for the number of passengers because, after all, the ship itself was one big lifeboat that wouldn’t sink. In fact, it could just as easily pick up even more passengers. And apparently, socialist, social democratic and progressive “captains”, historically, want to stop and take on more “passengers” than right wing, corrupt ones like Howard. Check out the immigration levels.
The fact that these new passengers may consist of proportionately more asylum seekers, or more family class immigrants, is completely irrelevant to the seaworthiness of the ship. The environment does not care what category of “passenger” a nation takes on board. Refugees, the persecuted, the homeless, the downtrodden, the skilled, the unskilled, English or non-English, white or brown----Mother Nature doesn’t take notice. They all have a footprint. Or shall we say in Australia’s case, and Canada and America’s too, a “bootprint”. And under that boot is biodiversity, our lifeline and insurance policy.
The Rudd victory may have been a victory for Australian “democracy”. But so far it is looking like a defeat for Australian wildlife, and by the immutable laws of nature, ultimately a crushing defeat for humanity too.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC, Canada
December 13/08
PS I might be cogently argued that notwithstanding the appalling losses of both world wars in the 20th century, their impact on impact on human population growth has been negligible while their toll on wildlife has been devastating. One immediately conjures up images of millions refugees streaming through the contryside foraging for food and in their wake causing much "collateral" ecological damage. In fact, the disease that ensues from war often takes more lives than war itself. The so called "Spanish influenza" following at the heels of the November 11, 1918 Armistice took more lives than the war itself. Points well taken.
But did Vietnamese wildlife appreciate that it was being carpet-bombed and napalmed out of existence by a Texas liberal, LBJ, architect of the Great Society and the impetus behind the Civil Rights Bill? A man, under whose direction American forces dropped more explosives than all combatants combined in the Second World War. Does the global atmosphere appreciate that the methane it is going to receive from Canada's boreal forest that is being clear-cut by the corporations blessed by the custodians of a universal medicare program and a "civilized" democracy?
If you were offered a stark choice between a "humane" egalitarian society that pursued growth at the cost of the environment on the one hand or a fascist steady state society that lived within ecological limits, which option would you choose.?
THE NIGHTWATCHMAN WHO FELL ASLEEP ON THE JOB
"The economy we're evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won't support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we'll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration."
James Kunstler , futurist, author of “The Long Emergency”
Did that sink in, Mr. Olivia Chow (Jack Layton), Elizabeth May, Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, and assorted soft green dupes of the corporate cheap labour agenda? Renewables won’t fuel your growth economy nor support your never ending shopping list of social services. There will be no “global” market place to compete with to justify your madness. And no fantasy technologies to recover the ecological damage that your immigrant-driven population growth policies have inflicted on our landscape. Suzuki said that politicians who denied AGW climate change should be jailed. Sounds like a good prescription for the population deniers. Maybe when this is done, and the system crashes, there will be a Nuremburg Trial for those who shoved 5 million consumers down the throat of Canada’s environment since 1990----the number of immigrants that we have suffered since the mass immigration binge began. The first to be executed will not be the politicians but the leaders of the environmental movement, who should have been our watchdogs, but instead were the silent partners to the wildlife holocaust and loss of farmland that consequently took place. They are the Marshall Petains of the occupation we have endured, the Green Collaborators who have tried to pacify us with slogans like “smart growth”, “green living” and “renewable technologies”---as if we could live with infinite increases in our total consumption by reducing our per capita consumption, by being good “Green Citizens” and being clever in steering growth in the “right” direction.
We hired them as night watchmen to take care of business but when morning broke we found that our business had been robbed---all along they have been asleep on the job. Their resume of boy scout community work, of do-good and feel-good environmentalism made a good impression in the job interview but failed the litmus test of actually protecting the environment when it needed protecting the most. Like a rotten sundeck railing it offered us false assurance of safety from disaster, but when tested by the forces of growth we have all gone over the edge. It would have better had we saved our donations and our illusions and been without a railing altogether. Then perhaps we might have fended for ourselves and directed our resources into authentic institutions that would resist madness.
When history is written it will read that the environmental NGOs together with their talking heads---the Greens, the socialists, the social democrats, the progressives and the liberals---not only did nothing to prepare us for the Long Emergency---but they actually made us even more unprepared for it. The superstructure of social services that they insist on building up when the status quo cannot even be sustained is all funded by revenues from a fossil fuel economy. But instead of weaning us away from dependence on the state, in their bidding war for the feminist, immigrant and progressive constituency they promise more child benefits, more daycare spaces, broader medical coverage for unproven New Age medicine, free college tuitions, and more and more regulations that can only be enforced by a growing and expensive bureaucracy. All of this of course, is never paid for by “the people”, by some shadowy abstraction called the “big corporations” with whom “the people”, and their unions, have shares in, and which can take flight at the click of a mouse when taxes get uncompetitive. They believe in limiting the behaviour of corporations but not limiting the appetite of unsustainable government. As things take a steep downward spiral the tax grab will get frantic, but in trying to get blood out of a stone they will only succeed in chasing away what remains of their diminishing tax base. Read Gibbon’s treatise on the decline of the Roman Empire and follow the course of Diocletian’s reign. Same scenario.
The companion policy to tax and spend is more growth. That too is the trade mark of social democratic-progressive administrations. They can’t deliver their basket of social welfare goodies with income redistribution because of capital flight so they become growthists. But to salve their conscience they attach with great fanfare a “Green Agenda” to the program. A “cake and eat it” platform. Every NDP leader in Canada has espoused the same line. Jack Layton repeated what NDP Premier Lorne Calvert had once said. That the only thing that was wrong with growth was that its “benefits” were not evenly shared. Green Party leader Elizabeth May meanwhile recently joined the attack on the Harper government for not countering the recession that the country was falling into following the financial meltdown in the fall. Economic growth was called for---this from a leader who once mouthed the old slogan that “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
We are on a ship of fools with a corporate captain. But his “challengers” would have taken us on the same course to disaster.
Tim Murray
December 16/08
Note of explanation: I woke up suddenly at 4:30 am and went straight to the computer to write this rant. The quote by Kunstler was like a time bomb dropped into my subconscious the day before like one of those bombs the Germans dropped over London that would burrow deep below the basement of buildings and explode unexpectantly years afterward. It is a regurgitation of cumulative thoughts over the past two years but the Kunstler quote was the trigger. To have someone of his eminence step forward and validate my thinking was all I needed. Some wonder why I don't direct my rage at Exxon or the logging companies. For the same reason I am more angry at the nightwatchman who fell asleep than the burglars who robbed me. Burglars are burglars. Robbing is what they do. I know they are criminals. My enemies I can deal with. It is my so-called "friends", the ones hired by donations to protect me, but betray me by falling asleep on the job, or even worse, by misleading me, who deserve my rage. They are the ones at my back who need to be taken care of first before I deal frontally with the enemy.
James Kunstler , futurist, author of “The Long Emergency”
Did that sink in, Mr. Olivia Chow (Jack Layton), Elizabeth May, Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, and assorted soft green dupes of the corporate cheap labour agenda? Renewables won’t fuel your growth economy nor support your never ending shopping list of social services. There will be no “global” market place to compete with to justify your madness. And no fantasy technologies to recover the ecological damage that your immigrant-driven population growth policies have inflicted on our landscape. Suzuki said that politicians who denied AGW climate change should be jailed. Sounds like a good prescription for the population deniers. Maybe when this is done, and the system crashes, there will be a Nuremburg Trial for those who shoved 5 million consumers down the throat of Canada’s environment since 1990----the number of immigrants that we have suffered since the mass immigration binge began. The first to be executed will not be the politicians but the leaders of the environmental movement, who should have been our watchdogs, but instead were the silent partners to the wildlife holocaust and loss of farmland that consequently took place. They are the Marshall Petains of the occupation we have endured, the Green Collaborators who have tried to pacify us with slogans like “smart growth”, “green living” and “renewable technologies”---as if we could live with infinite increases in our total consumption by reducing our per capita consumption, by being good “Green Citizens” and being clever in steering growth in the “right” direction.
We hired them as night watchmen to take care of business but when morning broke we found that our business had been robbed---all along they have been asleep on the job. Their resume of boy scout community work, of do-good and feel-good environmentalism made a good impression in the job interview but failed the litmus test of actually protecting the environment when it needed protecting the most. Like a rotten sundeck railing it offered us false assurance of safety from disaster, but when tested by the forces of growth we have all gone over the edge. It would have better had we saved our donations and our illusions and been without a railing altogether. Then perhaps we might have fended for ourselves and directed our resources into authentic institutions that would resist madness.
When history is written it will read that the environmental NGOs together with their talking heads---the Greens, the socialists, the social democrats, the progressives and the liberals---not only did nothing to prepare us for the Long Emergency---but they actually made us even more unprepared for it. The superstructure of social services that they insist on building up when the status quo cannot even be sustained is all funded by revenues from a fossil fuel economy. But instead of weaning us away from dependence on the state, in their bidding war for the feminist, immigrant and progressive constituency they promise more child benefits, more daycare spaces, broader medical coverage for unproven New Age medicine, free college tuitions, and more and more regulations that can only be enforced by a growing and expensive bureaucracy. All of this of course, is never paid for by “the people”, by some shadowy abstraction called the “big corporations” with whom “the people”, and their unions, have shares in, and which can take flight at the click of a mouse when taxes get uncompetitive. They believe in limiting the behaviour of corporations but not limiting the appetite of unsustainable government. As things take a steep downward spiral the tax grab will get frantic, but in trying to get blood out of a stone they will only succeed in chasing away what remains of their diminishing tax base. Read Gibbon’s treatise on the decline of the Roman Empire and follow the course of Diocletian’s reign. Same scenario.
The companion policy to tax and spend is more growth. That too is the trade mark of social democratic-progressive administrations. They can’t deliver their basket of social welfare goodies with income redistribution because of capital flight so they become growthists. But to salve their conscience they attach with great fanfare a “Green Agenda” to the program. A “cake and eat it” platform. Every NDP leader in Canada has espoused the same line. Jack Layton repeated what NDP Premier Lorne Calvert had once said. That the only thing that was wrong with growth was that its “benefits” were not evenly shared. Green Party leader Elizabeth May meanwhile recently joined the attack on the Harper government for not countering the recession that the country was falling into following the financial meltdown in the fall. Economic growth was called for---this from a leader who once mouthed the old slogan that “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
We are on a ship of fools with a corporate captain. But his “challengers” would have taken us on the same course to disaster.
Tim Murray
December 16/08
Note of explanation: I woke up suddenly at 4:30 am and went straight to the computer to write this rant. The quote by Kunstler was like a time bomb dropped into my subconscious the day before like one of those bombs the Germans dropped over London that would burrow deep below the basement of buildings and explode unexpectantly years afterward. It is a regurgitation of cumulative thoughts over the past two years but the Kunstler quote was the trigger. To have someone of his eminence step forward and validate my thinking was all I needed. Some wonder why I don't direct my rage at Exxon or the logging companies. For the same reason I am more angry at the nightwatchman who fell asleep than the burglars who robbed me. Burglars are burglars. Robbing is what they do. I know they are criminals. My enemies I can deal with. It is my so-called "friends", the ones hired by donations to protect me, but betray me by falling asleep on the job, or even worse, by misleading me, who deserve my rage. They are the ones at my back who need to be taken care of first before I deal frontally with the enemy.
WHEN HUNTING GROWTH, CULTURE IS FAIR GAME
Once again we are reminded that in the matter of fighting immigrant-driven population growth, culture matters. An article in The Washington Post by Patrick Welsh on December 12/2008 entitled “They’re Having Babies. Are We Helping?---revealed that Hispanic teens are inviting and embracing their pregnancies.1 Welsh quotes a school nurse: “There’s a myth that these pregnancies are accidental, but many of them aren’t. I’ve known girls who’ve made ‘I’ll get pregnant if you get pregnant’ pacts. It’s a status thing. These girls go around school telling each other how beautiful they look pregnant.”
It is no coincidence that after an acceleration in illegal immigration during the Bush era that the teen birthrate went up for the first time in 15 years after dropping 36% since 1990. As Welsh noted, “Hispanics now have the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births of any racial or ethnic group in the country…double the number of black girls.” A report in the Chicago Tribune by Sue Ellen Christian and Teresa Puente in January of 2001 stated that “While the number of births to African-American and white teenagers fell in Illinois from 1997 to 1999, the number of births to Hispanic teens increased. In fact, Hispanic girls lead the nation in the teen birthrate, with about 93 births per 1000 Hispanic teens per year compared to the overall national teen birth rate of about 50 births per 1000….Newer immigrants are more likely to avoid pregnancy than second or third generation Hispanics.” In other words, young Hispanic females are not becoming “Americanized” according to the classic pattern of integration to the host culture. Why?
Welsh cites the fact that schools bend over backwards to jump to the aid of pregnant girls, implying that this serves as a birth incentive (as do child care benefits in general). But an American of my acquaintance who was well immersed in Latino culture went beyond such enticements to observe “…unwed teenage motherhood is by far highest among Latinas, who in this area, are all first or second generation immigrants. And these are NOT unwanted pregnancies. Having lived in Latin America and seen first hand that 19 year olds without babies already felt like old maids, why am I not surprised? And now we are allowing these traditional, environmentally inappropriate attitudes in support of early motherhood and high fertility to take root here. And those PC environmentalists who said we can’t talk about immigration rates or differential birthrates among different ethnic groups are partly to blame."
“This article poses the question of the conflicting messages girls get from pop (Latin) culture on the one hand (have fun; go for it: babies are beautiful!?) And sex and reproductive health education on the other (be cautious; wait). And the author, an English teacher, rightly wonders whether we aren’t contributing to this growing epidemic by making it so easy on them and utterly eliminating any sense of shame. No one ever talks about ‘illegitimate’ children anymore. That is so harsh and mean-spirited!”
It has been convenient for the population stabilization movement to ignore cultural realities, to focus purely on containing and reducing the numbers of consumers in their societies and to pretend that the ethnic, cultural or religious composition of those numbers is immaterial to their ecological impact. It is a stance however that is only justified by political strategy, not by reason. Open-borders advocates and human rights activists are anxious to discredit the movement with allegations of racism and have enjoyed some success in their smear campaigns. Cultural mudslinging offers them a fat target.
Criticism of the Hispanic fertility boom has met with a predictable backlash. Latino spokesmen claim that teen pregnancy is a function of poverty, not of immigration or culture and that education is the cure. Robert Rivera of the National Hispanic Environmental Council stated that “ those who argue that high birthrates are an environmental problem are essentially saying that Latinos are an environmental problem. Believe me that is so deeply insulting…” that it invites a retaliatory boycott of white mainstream environmental organizations, a “pushback” to use his terminology. Odd, because a survey of mainstream environmental NGOs would reveal little concern about North American birthrates. In Canada the media recently celebrated the birth of a Romanian couple’s 18th child in a province intent on cutting its carbon emissions, but no environmental group seized the opportunity to educate the public about the connection between climate change and the number of climate changers.
Mr. Rivera is among the vast legions of North Americans who apparently make a full time job out of being insulted and “offended” by what they read or hear. But in fact they were never “offended.” They chose to take offence, and have been counseled by the Assertive Training and anger management industry to begin their sentences with “I feel” as if I should care what they feel, because feeling doesn’t enhance their logic. I don’t want to hear people emote. I want to hear what they think. The secular theocracy that is multicultural “democracy” has come to resemble one big Group Therapy session where I am somehow your emotional caretaker who must blunt the truth because I supposedly bear responsibility for how you react to it. In this sense political correctness is nothing but the imposition of a feminine communication style upon the entire body politic. The quest to avoid causing offense at all costs-- tact at the cost of candour, diplomacy at the cost of truth--- fashions a discursive Newspeak which assumes that harmony among people is more important than the harmony between people and nature. But alas, just as Christ said that his mission was to sow discord, to pit husband against wife and son against father, to tear down a rotten structure so that it may be soundly rebuilt, my mission is to save precious time by telling identity groups that they have bad breath. All of them. Without mercy. No free passes for race, gender or ethnicity based on the curriculum vitae of victimhood that you wear like a billboard to get to the front of the line or gain exemption from responsibility. Sorry, help yourself to my box of Kleenex. I’ll save my tears for the unfolding Wildlife holocaust that your procreative binge and greed is responsible for. And in case you folks of colour feel picked on, let me take this opportunity to say this to white Mormons: Get fucked. No, wait, that is exactly what I don’t want you to do. Get fixed. Leave some space for the rest of us, OK? You are nice people, but you can have too much of a good thing.
What is needed is a population stabilization-reduction organization infused with the spirit of Paul Watson, who plays no favourites by fearlessly “offending” the leaders of every cultural and ethnic group he confronts. From Newfoundlanders to the Macaw natives to the Japanese and Icelandic whalers, and lately, Inuit hunters whom he described as “ruthless killers” who “laughed barbarously” as they shot narwhals. That charge brought the standard reaction of outrage and politically correct catechism when the eco-vandalism or socially irresponsible actions of an ethnic group is exposed. Canadian Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, in a joint statement with the fisheries minister2, complained that Watson’s remarks demonized her peoples culture and traditions, asserting that “Inuits strongly believe animals should be respected and should never suffer…” No doubt the Inuit who chased down polar bears with power boats and shot them down with rifles last year were imposters. Green Party leader Elizabeth May must have thought so because her conditioned reflex was to launch into a defensive riposte about how it was our (white) man-made global warming that was killing those bears. The Inuit are genetically or culturally invested with an ancient and superior ecological custodial wisdom (and the business acumen to realize the financial benefit of $1.5 million from visiting hunters, some of who will pay a guide $25,000 for a bear.)
In Canada, blatantly ethnocentric and even racist assertions of this nature are politically correct because in this case it is those of European origin whose culture is being denigrated. Fair game. But it is so curious that cultural relativists don’t realize that they too are judgmental, and as such, are absolutists. Xenophiliacs who attribute superior qualities to exotic cultures found wanting in their own, a greener pastures syndrome born of an ignorance and self-loathing which is the obverse of the xenophobe’s ignorance and other-loathing. Attitudes that form two sides of the same coin, both rooted in surrealism, unlike TFR statistics, which shout out objective reality, from which no culture can hide its shame.
I have come to believe that if I have not been threatened with a defamation suit at least once a year by one human rights champion or another in whatever ethnic guise, then I am simply not getting my message across. And that message is, that while there are far too many people on stage of every description, some of them are really bad actors and should be given bad reviews. Culture matters, for culture can be either an impediment or a catalyst to growth.
1. Washington Post article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/12/AR2008121203507.html?referrer=emailarticle
2. Dec.08/08 statement http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/media/statement-declarations/2008/20081208-eng.htm
It is no coincidence that after an acceleration in illegal immigration during the Bush era that the teen birthrate went up for the first time in 15 years after dropping 36% since 1990. As Welsh noted, “Hispanics now have the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births of any racial or ethnic group in the country…double the number of black girls.” A report in the Chicago Tribune by Sue Ellen Christian and Teresa Puente in January of 2001 stated that “While the number of births to African-American and white teenagers fell in Illinois from 1997 to 1999, the number of births to Hispanic teens increased. In fact, Hispanic girls lead the nation in the teen birthrate, with about 93 births per 1000 Hispanic teens per year compared to the overall national teen birth rate of about 50 births per 1000….Newer immigrants are more likely to avoid pregnancy than second or third generation Hispanics.” In other words, young Hispanic females are not becoming “Americanized” according to the classic pattern of integration to the host culture. Why?
Welsh cites the fact that schools bend over backwards to jump to the aid of pregnant girls, implying that this serves as a birth incentive (as do child care benefits in general). But an American of my acquaintance who was well immersed in Latino culture went beyond such enticements to observe “…unwed teenage motherhood is by far highest among Latinas, who in this area, are all first or second generation immigrants. And these are NOT unwanted pregnancies. Having lived in Latin America and seen first hand that 19 year olds without babies already felt like old maids, why am I not surprised? And now we are allowing these traditional, environmentally inappropriate attitudes in support of early motherhood and high fertility to take root here. And those PC environmentalists who said we can’t talk about immigration rates or differential birthrates among different ethnic groups are partly to blame."
“This article poses the question of the conflicting messages girls get from pop (Latin) culture on the one hand (have fun; go for it: babies are beautiful!?) And sex and reproductive health education on the other (be cautious; wait). And the author, an English teacher, rightly wonders whether we aren’t contributing to this growing epidemic by making it so easy on them and utterly eliminating any sense of shame. No one ever talks about ‘illegitimate’ children anymore. That is so harsh and mean-spirited!”
It has been convenient for the population stabilization movement to ignore cultural realities, to focus purely on containing and reducing the numbers of consumers in their societies and to pretend that the ethnic, cultural or religious composition of those numbers is immaterial to their ecological impact. It is a stance however that is only justified by political strategy, not by reason. Open-borders advocates and human rights activists are anxious to discredit the movement with allegations of racism and have enjoyed some success in their smear campaigns. Cultural mudslinging offers them a fat target.
Criticism of the Hispanic fertility boom has met with a predictable backlash. Latino spokesmen claim that teen pregnancy is a function of poverty, not of immigration or culture and that education is the cure. Robert Rivera of the National Hispanic Environmental Council stated that “ those who argue that high birthrates are an environmental problem are essentially saying that Latinos are an environmental problem. Believe me that is so deeply insulting…” that it invites a retaliatory boycott of white mainstream environmental organizations, a “pushback” to use his terminology. Odd, because a survey of mainstream environmental NGOs would reveal little concern about North American birthrates. In Canada the media recently celebrated the birth of a Romanian couple’s 18th child in a province intent on cutting its carbon emissions, but no environmental group seized the opportunity to educate the public about the connection between climate change and the number of climate changers.
Mr. Rivera is among the vast legions of North Americans who apparently make a full time job out of being insulted and “offended” by what they read or hear. But in fact they were never “offended.” They chose to take offence, and have been counseled by the Assertive Training and anger management industry to begin their sentences with “I feel” as if I should care what they feel, because feeling doesn’t enhance their logic. I don’t want to hear people emote. I want to hear what they think. The secular theocracy that is multicultural “democracy” has come to resemble one big Group Therapy session where I am somehow your emotional caretaker who must blunt the truth because I supposedly bear responsibility for how you react to it. In this sense political correctness is nothing but the imposition of a feminine communication style upon the entire body politic. The quest to avoid causing offense at all costs-- tact at the cost of candour, diplomacy at the cost of truth--- fashions a discursive Newspeak which assumes that harmony among people is more important than the harmony between people and nature. But alas, just as Christ said that his mission was to sow discord, to pit husband against wife and son against father, to tear down a rotten structure so that it may be soundly rebuilt, my mission is to save precious time by telling identity groups that they have bad breath. All of them. Without mercy. No free passes for race, gender or ethnicity based on the curriculum vitae of victimhood that you wear like a billboard to get to the front of the line or gain exemption from responsibility. Sorry, help yourself to my box of Kleenex. I’ll save my tears for the unfolding Wildlife holocaust that your procreative binge and greed is responsible for. And in case you folks of colour feel picked on, let me take this opportunity to say this to white Mormons: Get fucked. No, wait, that is exactly what I don’t want you to do. Get fixed. Leave some space for the rest of us, OK? You are nice people, but you can have too much of a good thing.
What is needed is a population stabilization-reduction organization infused with the spirit of Paul Watson, who plays no favourites by fearlessly “offending” the leaders of every cultural and ethnic group he confronts. From Newfoundlanders to the Macaw natives to the Japanese and Icelandic whalers, and lately, Inuit hunters whom he described as “ruthless killers” who “laughed barbarously” as they shot narwhals. That charge brought the standard reaction of outrage and politically correct catechism when the eco-vandalism or socially irresponsible actions of an ethnic group is exposed. Canadian Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, in a joint statement with the fisheries minister2, complained that Watson’s remarks demonized her peoples culture and traditions, asserting that “Inuits strongly believe animals should be respected and should never suffer…” No doubt the Inuit who chased down polar bears with power boats and shot them down with rifles last year were imposters. Green Party leader Elizabeth May must have thought so because her conditioned reflex was to launch into a defensive riposte about how it was our (white) man-made global warming that was killing those bears. The Inuit are genetically or culturally invested with an ancient and superior ecological custodial wisdom (and the business acumen to realize the financial benefit of $1.5 million from visiting hunters, some of who will pay a guide $25,000 for a bear.)
In Canada, blatantly ethnocentric and even racist assertions of this nature are politically correct because in this case it is those of European origin whose culture is being denigrated. Fair game. But it is so curious that cultural relativists don’t realize that they too are judgmental, and as such, are absolutists. Xenophiliacs who attribute superior qualities to exotic cultures found wanting in their own, a greener pastures syndrome born of an ignorance and self-loathing which is the obverse of the xenophobe’s ignorance and other-loathing. Attitudes that form two sides of the same coin, both rooted in surrealism, unlike TFR statistics, which shout out objective reality, from which no culture can hide its shame.
I have come to believe that if I have not been threatened with a defamation suit at least once a year by one human rights champion or another in whatever ethnic guise, then I am simply not getting my message across. And that message is, that while there are far too many people on stage of every description, some of them are really bad actors and should be given bad reviews. Culture matters, for culture can be either an impediment or a catalyst to growth.
1. Washington Post article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/12/AR2008121203507.html?referrer=emailarticle
2. Dec.08/08 statement http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/media/statement-declarations/2008/20081208-eng.htm
Saturday, December 13, 2008
MY PHONE RANT AGAINST THE CBC
The poor woman. A lady phoned just after 8pm. I was in a foul mood and on my computer. I growled “Is this a marketing survey ?!”. She answered, “Well, I am from the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting”, we are an organization to defend the CBC… I allowed her about 20 seconds until she said “Are you interested in helping to save the CBC”? “No!”, I began in a loud voice, “I spend my waking hours thinking of ways to DESTROY the CBC. It is a politically correct mouthpiece of favoured identity groups with whom they make corrupt arrangements…..”
She remained in shock while ranted on a spiel that must have lasted 5 minutes before she could break in with a question. I told her about the CBC, the BBC and the ABC, and while I was talking I called up the dozen rants against Mother Corp. on my folder. She became interested to know, as an individual, the titles of each of these so that she could google them. I told her to read Jack Parson’s “Treason of the BBC” to learn about a case study in biased and myopic journalism that seems to be the template for us too.
At the end when things calmed down, she said, “ Well, I must go but how should I summarize your comments. I replied thusly. “Proportional representation is the buzz-phrase of politics. And in commerce companies are told to hire a workforce that reflects the diversity of the public they serve. If police forces and fire departments must represent diversity, then surely the CBC should do as well. But not ethnic or cultural diversity so much, but the diversity of opinions that exist in Canada. The FULL spectrum of opinions. And spokesmen for causes deemed politically incorrect by CBC producers should not be invited to forums just to be ambushed and outnumbered four to one by the other side.” I had told her about several examples of this. And that if she read “Conspiracy of Silence at the BBC, the ABC and the CBC” she would realize that it was not a Canadian phenomena but a formula and pattern of state broadcasting in Anglophone countries. In other words, the problem is endemic to state broadcasting which is captive of powerful lobbies nurtured or promoted by the government. We need public broadcasting, not state broadcasting. And not journalists and producers who are recruited from the graduates of the mind-bending schools of PC journalism. If the CBC cannot be reformed, it should be scrapped. Rather uninformed than misinformed. Better to leave people to their own brains rather than have them downloaded from CBC Pravda in Toronto.
She got the full earful, and I was fortunate to be able to quickly glance at the text of one or two of my essays to make my words flow. But I didn’t need to touch base with notes. The venom just poured out.
I wonder to what purpose my tirade will be put when she is de-briefed by her superiors. My thought was, why don’t groups such as ours coalesce with other shunned voices to form a lobby like “Foes of Canadian Broadcasting” or some other label? A “Reform the CBC” coalition. Reform it or scrap it.
PS I wished that she could have seen my customized bumper sticker: “Do You Let the CBC Do Your Thinking For You? Or Do You Prefer Reality?” Or my customized T shirt. Front: “CBC: Manufactured Consent”. Back “We at the CBC respect your opinion. We just don’t want to hear it, and we’ll make damn sure our listeners won’t either.”
She remained in shock while ranted on a spiel that must have lasted 5 minutes before she could break in with a question. I told her about the CBC, the BBC and the ABC, and while I was talking I called up the dozen rants against Mother Corp. on my folder. She became interested to know, as an individual, the titles of each of these so that she could google them. I told her to read Jack Parson’s “Treason of the BBC” to learn about a case study in biased and myopic journalism that seems to be the template for us too.
At the end when things calmed down, she said, “ Well, I must go but how should I summarize your comments. I replied thusly. “Proportional representation is the buzz-phrase of politics. And in commerce companies are told to hire a workforce that reflects the diversity of the public they serve. If police forces and fire departments must represent diversity, then surely the CBC should do as well. But not ethnic or cultural diversity so much, but the diversity of opinions that exist in Canada. The FULL spectrum of opinions. And spokesmen for causes deemed politically incorrect by CBC producers should not be invited to forums just to be ambushed and outnumbered four to one by the other side.” I had told her about several examples of this. And that if she read “Conspiracy of Silence at the BBC, the ABC and the CBC” she would realize that it was not a Canadian phenomena but a formula and pattern of state broadcasting in Anglophone countries. In other words, the problem is endemic to state broadcasting which is captive of powerful lobbies nurtured or promoted by the government. We need public broadcasting, not state broadcasting. And not journalists and producers who are recruited from the graduates of the mind-bending schools of PC journalism. If the CBC cannot be reformed, it should be scrapped. Rather uninformed than misinformed. Better to leave people to their own brains rather than have them downloaded from CBC Pravda in Toronto.
She got the full earful, and I was fortunate to be able to quickly glance at the text of one or two of my essays to make my words flow. But I didn’t need to touch base with notes. The venom just poured out.
I wonder to what purpose my tirade will be put when she is de-briefed by her superiors. My thought was, why don’t groups such as ours coalesce with other shunned voices to form a lobby like “Foes of Canadian Broadcasting” or some other label? A “Reform the CBC” coalition. Reform it or scrap it.
PS I wished that she could have seen my customized bumper sticker: “Do You Let the CBC Do Your Thinking For You? Or Do You Prefer Reality?” Or my customized T shirt. Front: “CBC: Manufactured Consent”. Back “We at the CBC respect your opinion. We just don’t want to hear it, and we’ll make damn sure our listeners won’t either.”
SO I HATE MUSHROOMS--What Is Your Point?
Suppose I tell you that I am apprehensive of fungi as a food source, that I suspect that food of fungal origin cannot hold any great nutritional value. Mushrooms, I declare, are simply nature’s Styrofoam, and in the wild their EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is quite low. In fact, survival courses advise that in the search for available mushrooms, the energy it takes to search for them exceeds the energy that the mushrooms can give you by a wide margin.
So adamantly do I oppose mushroom consumption that I continue to write articles that expose their worthlessness, and to attack those who promote it. But my verbal attacks provoke anger and fear---especially among those whose livelihood depends on growing vast quantities of mushrooms. There are calls to have me silenced.
Some threaten to file a complaint with their local Committee for Public Safety---the Human Rights Tribunal. Others rely on smear tactics. They will not address my accusations about their product being worthless or that mushroom farms are environmentally costly. Instead they assign malevolent motives to my campaign of “hate”. The focus then becomes not on the empirical foundations of my argument, about the veracity of my data or the methodology I used to assemble it, but rather on the dark motives that inspire my campaign. For no intelligent citizen of liberal education or sound mind could possibly question the self-evident value of mushroom consumption. Every veteran of the counter-culture, every CBC journalist, every citizen of noble spirit could not possibly dispute the benefits of eating a diverse range of mushrooms, especially the imported ones or those that came from the forest.
Of course, it must be conceded that since psilocybin is the active ingredient of mushrooms of the magic kind, having a pharmacological effect similar to LSD, the consumer may see funky colours and patterns if he eats them. But hey, a lot of us love those trips. It also must be acknowledged other wild varieties might make you violently ill, but then so can food poisoning at the restaurant around the corner.
No, there must be an underlying psychological drive behind my cause, a hidden agenda. There is no other explanation. Decent, rational people can only adore mushrooms and embrace all of their varieties---especially those imported from another country that they can sell more cheaply than our own. Only those with xenophobic palates would disagree. So I can’t be rational or decent, and therefore my ideas about mushrooms do not warrant examination. They must be quarantined now before impressionable minds, minds not tuned into the CBC for mental conditioning or run through the ideological boot-camps of the politically correct universities and journalism schools, are fatally influenced. Never mind my nutritional critique of mushrooms. I am a bad apple who cloaks his visceral bias against mushroom-consumers with socially acceptable concerns about nutrition. Hatemonger! Silence him!
Well guess what, these self-appointed custodians of moral rectitude are right. I campaign against mushroom consumption for two reasons. One is that I truly believe that they are of no significant nutritional benefit. The other reason, the one I conceal, is that a mushroom-eater stole my girl-friend in Senior High School. And another one who bought foreign mushrooms, stole my job. Consequently, I hate mushroom-eaters. And I intend to dissuade people from trying mushrooms and I want to shut down those who profit from their sale. So what?
What does my vindictive rage against all mushroom-eaters, all but two of whom were not responsible for the loss of my girl-friend or my job, have to do with my case against the nutritional claims of mushroom promoters? If a mushroom-eater, or a producer, embarked on a campaign to counter mine, would his case for the nutritional benefits of mushroom consumption be similarly placed on a psychiatrist’s couch and similarly suppressed? Would his arguments be discredited by the fact that they were based on a study done by a “right wing think tank” funded by corporate dollars? If a study was published by the Mickey Mouse Club---or a left wing think tank---so often quoted by “rational and decent” CBC listeners----would that necessarily discredit its findings?
Should we dismiss the game theory of John Nash---subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”—because he was an anti-semite? Is Ezra Pound’s poetry not to be valued because Pound supported Mussolini and his fascists? Should I discount the diagnosis that my neighbourhood mechanic gave of my car’s problem because, after all, he is a bigot? Are the motives of people who promote unpopular ideas more material than the ideas themselves? Apparently so. At least in those countries where those with PC mentalities have captured control of the major educational institutions and graduated students who now colonize the broadcast studios and editorial rooms of strategic media as well all public sector bodies. A kind of left-wing McCarthyism pervades societies across Europe and the Anglophone world, eager to hunt down and cast out unbelievers found guilty of disreputable aspirations.
Such a pity. Mushroom-defendants could have made a case that fresh mushrooms are a cholesterol, fat and sodium free, low calorie source of riboflavin, niacin, copper, pantothenic acid, magnesium, potassium and selenium. But instead they employed the very tactics that they once denounced as the signature of Senator Joe McCarthy and his House on Un-American Activities. In so doing, they dealt a near mortal blow not just to my cause but to theirs too. For if you chop down every tree to chase out the devil from his forest lair, what will you do when he suddenly turns on you, when the political weather changes abruptly and the howling gale of public censure is with him and against you and there is no tree left for cover? What solid trees of free speech will you hide behind for protection? Your reasoned arguments will be of no avail then, for you have already set the table for the absence of reason by your attacks on motives. Reasoned arguments, and the facts that they are based on, will not count. Only the motives of those who present them. And who will be the judge of that?
In a secular multicultural theocracy, only the star chamber of politically correct journalists, professors, politicians and judges are licensed to read minds and hearts. Should this kangaroo court fall into my possession, where I can nominate my own set of prosecutors, will you trust me to evaluate your motives? If not, shall we then agree to deal with the merits of our conflicting opinions, and leave mind-reading to psychics and moral judgments to an omniscient being?
Mushrooms are worthless and I hate those who eat or sell them. You object? Then deal with my assertion and not my confession. Whether I love, hate or am indifferent toward anything or anybody is quite beside the point in discussing the merits of a public policy option.
“Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarianism is to be dismissed as a dietary alternative.” That is the conditioned reflex of politically correct logic, which wrote the rule book of Canadian political discourse. No wonder Canadians can’t discuss immigration or population policy. We are afraid to claim ownership of our opinions for fear of how we are seen, when just two generations ago, Canadians died to preserve a nation of fearless people. Now we are a nation of silent “sheeple”. Thanks to the mushroom lobby.
So adamantly do I oppose mushroom consumption that I continue to write articles that expose their worthlessness, and to attack those who promote it. But my verbal attacks provoke anger and fear---especially among those whose livelihood depends on growing vast quantities of mushrooms. There are calls to have me silenced.
Some threaten to file a complaint with their local Committee for Public Safety---the Human Rights Tribunal. Others rely on smear tactics. They will not address my accusations about their product being worthless or that mushroom farms are environmentally costly. Instead they assign malevolent motives to my campaign of “hate”. The focus then becomes not on the empirical foundations of my argument, about the veracity of my data or the methodology I used to assemble it, but rather on the dark motives that inspire my campaign. For no intelligent citizen of liberal education or sound mind could possibly question the self-evident value of mushroom consumption. Every veteran of the counter-culture, every CBC journalist, every citizen of noble spirit could not possibly dispute the benefits of eating a diverse range of mushrooms, especially the imported ones or those that came from the forest.
Of course, it must be conceded that since psilocybin is the active ingredient of mushrooms of the magic kind, having a pharmacological effect similar to LSD, the consumer may see funky colours and patterns if he eats them. But hey, a lot of us love those trips. It also must be acknowledged other wild varieties might make you violently ill, but then so can food poisoning at the restaurant around the corner.
No, there must be an underlying psychological drive behind my cause, a hidden agenda. There is no other explanation. Decent, rational people can only adore mushrooms and embrace all of their varieties---especially those imported from another country that they can sell more cheaply than our own. Only those with xenophobic palates would disagree. So I can’t be rational or decent, and therefore my ideas about mushrooms do not warrant examination. They must be quarantined now before impressionable minds, minds not tuned into the CBC for mental conditioning or run through the ideological boot-camps of the politically correct universities and journalism schools, are fatally influenced. Never mind my nutritional critique of mushrooms. I am a bad apple who cloaks his visceral bias against mushroom-consumers with socially acceptable concerns about nutrition. Hatemonger! Silence him!
Well guess what, these self-appointed custodians of moral rectitude are right. I campaign against mushroom consumption for two reasons. One is that I truly believe that they are of no significant nutritional benefit. The other reason, the one I conceal, is that a mushroom-eater stole my girl-friend in Senior High School. And another one who bought foreign mushrooms, stole my job. Consequently, I hate mushroom-eaters. And I intend to dissuade people from trying mushrooms and I want to shut down those who profit from their sale. So what?
What does my vindictive rage against all mushroom-eaters, all but two of whom were not responsible for the loss of my girl-friend or my job, have to do with my case against the nutritional claims of mushroom promoters? If a mushroom-eater, or a producer, embarked on a campaign to counter mine, would his case for the nutritional benefits of mushroom consumption be similarly placed on a psychiatrist’s couch and similarly suppressed? Would his arguments be discredited by the fact that they were based on a study done by a “right wing think tank” funded by corporate dollars? If a study was published by the Mickey Mouse Club---or a left wing think tank---so often quoted by “rational and decent” CBC listeners----would that necessarily discredit its findings?
Should we dismiss the game theory of John Nash---subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind”—because he was an anti-semite? Is Ezra Pound’s poetry not to be valued because Pound supported Mussolini and his fascists? Should I discount the diagnosis that my neighbourhood mechanic gave of my car’s problem because, after all, he is a bigot? Are the motives of people who promote unpopular ideas more material than the ideas themselves? Apparently so. At least in those countries where those with PC mentalities have captured control of the major educational institutions and graduated students who now colonize the broadcast studios and editorial rooms of strategic media as well all public sector bodies. A kind of left-wing McCarthyism pervades societies across Europe and the Anglophone world, eager to hunt down and cast out unbelievers found guilty of disreputable aspirations.
Such a pity. Mushroom-defendants could have made a case that fresh mushrooms are a cholesterol, fat and sodium free, low calorie source of riboflavin, niacin, copper, pantothenic acid, magnesium, potassium and selenium. But instead they employed the very tactics that they once denounced as the signature of Senator Joe McCarthy and his House on Un-American Activities. In so doing, they dealt a near mortal blow not just to my cause but to theirs too. For if you chop down every tree to chase out the devil from his forest lair, what will you do when he suddenly turns on you, when the political weather changes abruptly and the howling gale of public censure is with him and against you and there is no tree left for cover? What solid trees of free speech will you hide behind for protection? Your reasoned arguments will be of no avail then, for you have already set the table for the absence of reason by your attacks on motives. Reasoned arguments, and the facts that they are based on, will not count. Only the motives of those who present them. And who will be the judge of that?
In a secular multicultural theocracy, only the star chamber of politically correct journalists, professors, politicians and judges are licensed to read minds and hearts. Should this kangaroo court fall into my possession, where I can nominate my own set of prosecutors, will you trust me to evaluate your motives? If not, shall we then agree to deal with the merits of our conflicting opinions, and leave mind-reading to psychics and moral judgments to an omniscient being?
Mushrooms are worthless and I hate those who eat or sell them. You object? Then deal with my assertion and not my confession. Whether I love, hate or am indifferent toward anything or anybody is quite beside the point in discussing the merits of a public policy option.
“Hitler was a vegetarian. Therefore vegetarianism is to be dismissed as a dietary alternative.” That is the conditioned reflex of politically correct logic, which wrote the rule book of Canadian political discourse. No wonder Canadians can’t discuss immigration or population policy. We are afraid to claim ownership of our opinions for fear of how we are seen, when just two generations ago, Canadians died to preserve a nation of fearless people. Now we are a nation of silent “sheeple”. Thanks to the mushroom lobby.
ANNOUNCING "THE CARNAVORIUM"
A NEW RESTAURANT AND A NEW BEGINNING
IN SUSTAINABLE LIVING
SERVING MEAT ONLY AND MEAT ONLY
For those with a Malthusian palate who
Would ask Quadra Island Greens
This Question:
Am I helping the environment by being a vegetarian?
IF food production is currently what limits our population…
AND
IF food production that excludes meat can feed more people…
THEN vegetarians are encouraging a population explosion.
IF one vegetarian consumes just as much other resources (EG: heating fuel, transportation fuel, building materials, land to absorb sewage and waste, etc) as one meat-eater…
THEN a world with the maximum number of vegetarians has a larger environmental impact than a world with the maximum number of meat-eaters.
By eating as much meat as possible you will be using up space that otherwise might go to grain production, that would feed more people who would in turn breed more people and crowd out yet more biodiversity. The GHG emissions of those extra people would exceed the GHG emissions from the methane of beef livestock and the footprint of those extra people would surpass the damage done by the livestock as well.
Factored into the equation too, are the Amazonian rainforest land that has been clearcut for soybean cultivation for the tofu market overseas. (Check out National Geographic, Jan. 07)
Thus the politically correct cult of vegetarianism is just another efficiency that leads to higher population growth, thus erasing its alleged collective benefits. It is just another example of the the Jevons Paradox in another form, by practiced by sanctimonius Green hypocrites who chastise meat-eaters for socially irresponsible behaviour. But more than that, it is a scam to produce pea-brained people, “sheeple” with shrunken brains with less capacity to think and reason. According to a new study from Oxford University, vegetarians and vegans are six times more likely to suffer from brain shrinkage than meat eaters. Cf.
http://www.asylum.com/2008/09/15/a-vegertarian-diet-shrinks-the-brain
Thus we see a positive feedback loop. Vegetarian, shrinks brain, as a result votes for Green Party which turns a blind eye to population growth and stresses only cut-backs in consumption, leading to more overpopulation, more social pressure to cut out meat to free up land to feed more people, more vegetarian half-wits, who vote for more Greens, who etc.
OPENING NIGHT SPECIAL AT “THE CARNAVORIUM”
IN QUATHIASKI COVE
Paul McCartney served (well done) on a buffet of baby seal meat prepared by our chef, H. Lecter. We offer home delivery by a Newfie seal hunter dressed in native costume who will club you at your doorstep into unconsciousness and gaffe you if you bear any resemblance to Paul Watson. If you complain to us, Green Party leader Elizabeth May will apologize---to us.
Alternatively, if you are infirm, our waitress, and Paul’s ex, Heather, a former waitress with “I-Hop”, will bring a portion of Paul right to your table that has not only passed Health Canada’s hygiene standards, but has passed Heather McCartney’s standards, as she has personally taken Sir Paul’s hide to the cleaners. If the food is not to your satisfaction, our new manager, Ms. Sarah Palin, will step outside and nail fresh kill for you.
Our business plan envisages the capture and butchering of Quadra Island’s vegetarian population, which should, by my calculations, suffice for the protein needs of the carnivore population (including cougars/wolves/bears) for some 3 years. Aside from helping our food budget, it should relieve the pressure that our wildlife predators are feeling from human hunters, who would now have an alternative meat source available. It would be especially recreational if this new meat source was released naked in the woods so the hunters would be dissuaded from targeting their usual victims to go after them instead.
Our restaurant also will sell dehydrated take-home high-protein wafers that customers could buy on the way out, labeled with the names of hated former vegetarian neighbours and OCP political enemies from whom the wafers were extracted. Profits from the sale of these items would go to the National Rifle Association in memory of Charlton Heston who starred in that famous and prescient movie, “Solyent Green”.
Remember, “Go Green, Eat Meat!”
Tim Murray,
Owner, The Carnavorium
Quathiaski Cove, BC
How Cannibalism Could Relieve the Pressure on Wildlife and Feed a Sustainable Population: Example
If the 4% of Britain’s population who were vegetarian were fed to those who were not, the carnivores would have enough protein to last for an entire year. The UK would have 58.56 million rather than 61 million people. That would take some pressure off the environment! Assuming each individual on earth averages 150 lbs. (that’s high), if one half of humanity was fed to the other half, that half could survive 136 days alone on the 4 ounces of protein required to survive. Imagine what 136 days respite would do for our wild animal and fish stocks? In fact, why stop at 3.5 billion? Many indigenous cultures in the South Pacific islands lived in steady-state bliss by this “waste not, want not” philosophy, so what are we waiting for? Why confine organ donation to body parts? Let’s be rational here.
If this Swiftian proposal strikes the humanitarian sadists in the human rights and environmental movement as outrageous, what do you call people who want to exterminate wildlife worldwide by crowding it out with an exponentially growing human monoculture, ending in misery and starvation that they think can be cured by cutting out meat rather than cutting out breeding.
A comment from a potential customer?
Re. meat and vegetarian diets and their B12 deficits
• At the dawn of man, we humans got our asses kicked by every major animal in the kingdom. Early humans were pathetic gatherers who died young, usually at the claws of a predator. Then we figured out how to kill our first animal, and the sudden intake of meat exploded our brain sizes. Our new FUNCTIONAL brains figured out fire, and once we started cooking meat (and subsequently eating more of it) we rose quickly to be the controlling species in charge of an entire planet. It's because of meat eaters that vegetarians have a chance to live, in other words. Those who eat meat grow stronger, leaner, and smarter than those who don't. It is as simple as that. Just look at us humans today. And yes, fatty meats add fat and cholesterol to the diet. Duh. Some moderation (or better yet--lots and lots of lean meat) fix that problem instantly.
By the way, what's the logic of eating something unhealthy and having to take lots of supplements and vitamins just to make it passable as nutrition? Would a balanced diet, say, a salad, a burger, some potatoes, a pretty little rainbow of colorful veggies, and a glass of juice or milk be much healthier than a salad with a side of drugs?
Avoiding meat is unhealthy--every vegetarian I've ever seen looked emaciated and as strong as a 12-month-old. Tall, perhaps, but with a weight of 100 pounds soaking wet.
Got to say one thing, though: It's nice to live in a country where people have the choice of starvation.
IN SUSTAINABLE LIVING
SERVING MEAT ONLY AND MEAT ONLY
For those with a Malthusian palate who
Would ask Quadra Island Greens
This Question:
Am I helping the environment by being a vegetarian?
IF food production is currently what limits our population…
AND
IF food production that excludes meat can feed more people…
THEN vegetarians are encouraging a population explosion.
IF one vegetarian consumes just as much other resources (EG: heating fuel, transportation fuel, building materials, land to absorb sewage and waste, etc) as one meat-eater…
THEN a world with the maximum number of vegetarians has a larger environmental impact than a world with the maximum number of meat-eaters.
By eating as much meat as possible you will be using up space that otherwise might go to grain production, that would feed more people who would in turn breed more people and crowd out yet more biodiversity. The GHG emissions of those extra people would exceed the GHG emissions from the methane of beef livestock and the footprint of those extra people would surpass the damage done by the livestock as well.
Factored into the equation too, are the Amazonian rainforest land that has been clearcut for soybean cultivation for the tofu market overseas. (Check out National Geographic, Jan. 07)
Thus the politically correct cult of vegetarianism is just another efficiency that leads to higher population growth, thus erasing its alleged collective benefits. It is just another example of the the Jevons Paradox in another form, by practiced by sanctimonius Green hypocrites who chastise meat-eaters for socially irresponsible behaviour. But more than that, it is a scam to produce pea-brained people, “sheeple” with shrunken brains with less capacity to think and reason. According to a new study from Oxford University, vegetarians and vegans are six times more likely to suffer from brain shrinkage than meat eaters. Cf.
http://www.asylum.com/2008/09/15/a-vegertarian-diet-shrinks-the-brain
Thus we see a positive feedback loop. Vegetarian, shrinks brain, as a result votes for Green Party which turns a blind eye to population growth and stresses only cut-backs in consumption, leading to more overpopulation, more social pressure to cut out meat to free up land to feed more people, more vegetarian half-wits, who vote for more Greens, who etc.
OPENING NIGHT SPECIAL AT “THE CARNAVORIUM”
IN QUATHIASKI COVE
Paul McCartney served (well done) on a buffet of baby seal meat prepared by our chef, H. Lecter. We offer home delivery by a Newfie seal hunter dressed in native costume who will club you at your doorstep into unconsciousness and gaffe you if you bear any resemblance to Paul Watson. If you complain to us, Green Party leader Elizabeth May will apologize---to us.
Alternatively, if you are infirm, our waitress, and Paul’s ex, Heather, a former waitress with “I-Hop”, will bring a portion of Paul right to your table that has not only passed Health Canada’s hygiene standards, but has passed Heather McCartney’s standards, as she has personally taken Sir Paul’s hide to the cleaners. If the food is not to your satisfaction, our new manager, Ms. Sarah Palin, will step outside and nail fresh kill for you.
Our business plan envisages the capture and butchering of Quadra Island’s vegetarian population, which should, by my calculations, suffice for the protein needs of the carnivore population (including cougars/wolves/bears) for some 3 years. Aside from helping our food budget, it should relieve the pressure that our wildlife predators are feeling from human hunters, who would now have an alternative meat source available. It would be especially recreational if this new meat source was released naked in the woods so the hunters would be dissuaded from targeting their usual victims to go after them instead.
Our restaurant also will sell dehydrated take-home high-protein wafers that customers could buy on the way out, labeled with the names of hated former vegetarian neighbours and OCP political enemies from whom the wafers were extracted. Profits from the sale of these items would go to the National Rifle Association in memory of Charlton Heston who starred in that famous and prescient movie, “Solyent Green”.
Remember, “Go Green, Eat Meat!”
Tim Murray,
Owner, The Carnavorium
Quathiaski Cove, BC
How Cannibalism Could Relieve the Pressure on Wildlife and Feed a Sustainable Population: Example
If the 4% of Britain’s population who were vegetarian were fed to those who were not, the carnivores would have enough protein to last for an entire year. The UK would have 58.56 million rather than 61 million people. That would take some pressure off the environment! Assuming each individual on earth averages 150 lbs. (that’s high), if one half of humanity was fed to the other half, that half could survive 136 days alone on the 4 ounces of protein required to survive. Imagine what 136 days respite would do for our wild animal and fish stocks? In fact, why stop at 3.5 billion? Many indigenous cultures in the South Pacific islands lived in steady-state bliss by this “waste not, want not” philosophy, so what are we waiting for? Why confine organ donation to body parts? Let’s be rational here.
If this Swiftian proposal strikes the humanitarian sadists in the human rights and environmental movement as outrageous, what do you call people who want to exterminate wildlife worldwide by crowding it out with an exponentially growing human monoculture, ending in misery and starvation that they think can be cured by cutting out meat rather than cutting out breeding.
A comment from a potential customer?
Re. meat and vegetarian diets and their B12 deficits
• At the dawn of man, we humans got our asses kicked by every major animal in the kingdom. Early humans were pathetic gatherers who died young, usually at the claws of a predator. Then we figured out how to kill our first animal, and the sudden intake of meat exploded our brain sizes. Our new FUNCTIONAL brains figured out fire, and once we started cooking meat (and subsequently eating more of it) we rose quickly to be the controlling species in charge of an entire planet. It's because of meat eaters that vegetarians have a chance to live, in other words. Those who eat meat grow stronger, leaner, and smarter than those who don't. It is as simple as that. Just look at us humans today. And yes, fatty meats add fat and cholesterol to the diet. Duh. Some moderation (or better yet--lots and lots of lean meat) fix that problem instantly.
By the way, what's the logic of eating something unhealthy and having to take lots of supplements and vitamins just to make it passable as nutrition? Would a balanced diet, say, a salad, a burger, some potatoes, a pretty little rainbow of colorful veggies, and a glass of juice or milk be much healthier than a salad with a side of drugs?
Avoiding meat is unhealthy--every vegetarian I've ever seen looked emaciated and as strong as a 12-month-old. Tall, perhaps, but with a weight of 100 pounds soaking wet.
Got to say one thing, though: It's nice to live in a country where people have the choice of starvation.
YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER---Women Need More Than Access To Birth Control
Bill Ryerson has made, what is for me, a startling revelation. In an article he wrote 15 years ago, but which he has now just updated called “What’s Needed to Solve the Population Problem? Ryerson had this to say:
“….according to Charles Westoff of Princeton University's Office of Population Research, half the women categorized as having unmet need for contraception have no intention of using contraceptives even if they are freely available at their doorstep. The desire to delay or terminate childbearing is not adequate to bring about a reduction in fertility rates if women believe their lot in life is to take whatever God (or their husbands) give them, if couples cling to the tradition of producing large families, or if people are misinformed about the relative safety of modern contraceptives compared to the physical ordeal of bearing, say, ten children.”
He added, “ If this statement is true, the stunning significance of it is that, if all women everywhere had full access to contraceptives and used them with 100 percent efficiency to have only the number and spacing of the children they want, the rate of world population growth would drop only 30 percent.”
The primary problem therefore is not lack of access to birth control information about contraceptive services. It is cultural and religious prohibitions and programming. But ah, we Canadians just hand out the aid money unconditionally. We wouldn’t dream of telling the good bishops of the Philippines or Haiti or the mullahs of northern Kenya what they can do with their culture. After all, we won’t even tell bishops, mullahs, or religious cults what to do here in our own country. Because cultural relativism is the underlying philosophy of our national state ideology of multiculturalism. It’s Canada’s Ingsoc. All cultures and religions are created equal. A society that practices suttee is as good as one that provides for widow’s pensions, or one that tolerates bullfighting is no more to be held accountable than one that has a Royal SPCA. Fine.
But here is the deal. Country “A” now has provided access to birth control information to women despite religious and cultural roadblocks that have now been finally overcome, but the influence of religious and patriarchal attitudes still prevail and stop women from exploiting the needed information. But country “B” has done a cultural and religious housecleaning and women, armed with more educational training, are willing to use birth control but lack the information and medical supplies. Canada has a limited foreign aid budget, guess which country we should deploy our foreign aid money to?
When desperate religious patriarchies see that we can play hardball, and a tough love approach inspires other donor nations to follow suit, watch the old cultures get shaken up. Shape up, or ship out of the bread line.
That is my hunch anyway.
“….according to Charles Westoff of Princeton University's Office of Population Research, half the women categorized as having unmet need for contraception have no intention of using contraceptives even if they are freely available at their doorstep. The desire to delay or terminate childbearing is not adequate to bring about a reduction in fertility rates if women believe their lot in life is to take whatever God (or their husbands) give them, if couples cling to the tradition of producing large families, or if people are misinformed about the relative safety of modern contraceptives compared to the physical ordeal of bearing, say, ten children.”
He added, “ If this statement is true, the stunning significance of it is that, if all women everywhere had full access to contraceptives and used them with 100 percent efficiency to have only the number and spacing of the children they want, the rate of world population growth would drop only 30 percent.”
The primary problem therefore is not lack of access to birth control information about contraceptive services. It is cultural and religious prohibitions and programming. But ah, we Canadians just hand out the aid money unconditionally. We wouldn’t dream of telling the good bishops of the Philippines or Haiti or the mullahs of northern Kenya what they can do with their culture. After all, we won’t even tell bishops, mullahs, or religious cults what to do here in our own country. Because cultural relativism is the underlying philosophy of our national state ideology of multiculturalism. It’s Canada’s Ingsoc. All cultures and religions are created equal. A society that practices suttee is as good as one that provides for widow’s pensions, or one that tolerates bullfighting is no more to be held accountable than one that has a Royal SPCA. Fine.
But here is the deal. Country “A” now has provided access to birth control information to women despite religious and cultural roadblocks that have now been finally overcome, but the influence of religious and patriarchal attitudes still prevail and stop women from exploiting the needed information. But country “B” has done a cultural and religious housecleaning and women, armed with more educational training, are willing to use birth control but lack the information and medical supplies. Canada has a limited foreign aid budget, guess which country we should deploy our foreign aid money to?
When desperate religious patriarchies see that we can play hardball, and a tough love approach inspires other donor nations to follow suit, watch the old cultures get shaken up. Shape up, or ship out of the bread line.
That is my hunch anyway.
Once They've Served Their Time Down On The Farm, How Do You Keep Them From Gay Paris?
During the fall election campaign of 2008, Green Party leader and mass immigration cheerleader Elizabeth May denied that Canada was suffering from too high a volume of immigration. On September 14th, on CBC’s Cross Country Check-Up, she suggested that the gateway cities of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and the like that were under pressure from immigration could be relieved of that pressure if New Canadians were simply re-directed to the less-populated regions of the country that were crying out for more citizens. As she exclaimed: “there are areas of Canada experiencing serious problems of depopulation where it would be fabulous to have the programs that ensured that more immigrants moved into places like rural Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia. There's places where we really would benefit enormously from more new Canadians.”
Suddenly a proponent of smart growth, of concentrating people behind tight urban boundaries as a way, in her mind, of protecting green belts and lowering ecological footprints, was calling for a population policy that would disperse them. Very curious indeed !
As was pointed out, however, we have this trifle called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows Canadians freedom of mobility within the country. Once settled in rural Saskatchewan or Nova Scotia, there is no coercive measure, other than this never before used “notwithstanding “ clause, to compel New Canadians to stay there.
Alas comes an observation about Italy to illustrate the point.
“Dennis” of Optimum Population UK wrote:
“…in the 1990s southern Italian villages welcomed with open arms any immigrants from anywhere which would repopulate their deserted villages particularly with couples having children. The govt. helped out with this providing housing, repairing abandoned properties and with jobs. After a time (months or a few years) all these immigrants moved out to the cities for more money and a more exciting life.”
So there is nothing at all to keep them down on the farm, boys. And that is symptomatic of Green Party thinking. It is intellectually dishonest. May advocates high immigration levels, 38% higher than the incumbent Conservative government’s, and claims that immigrants would not stress cities because they could be settled in rural Canada. Moreover, that “smart growth” strategies and strict land use policies would protect green belts farmland and wildlife from any demographic spill-over. Canada would welcome the world, develop its cake and eat it too.
But Ms. May knows very well that municipal and city councils are bought and paid for by real estate developers. And that there are no campaign donations that grass roots opponents can entice to compete with them. So while Ottawa may dictate immigration policy, in a sense, it can only be implemented at the local level. Only a provincial government of the nature of Dave Barrett’s 1972-5 NDP administration ever found the resolve to enact a provincial-wide freeze on farmland---NDP governments in three other provinces who witnessed his civil war did not even go there.
Three decades later the Gordon Campbell government unraveled it by the simple expedient of decentralizing authority from the Agricultural Land Commission to regional bodies susceptible to local political, read realtor, influence. Now prime farm land near coveted urban areas in southern BC are taken out of the land reserve in favour of poorer acreage to the north. This was North America’s last great hope in land use planning. Put planning authority anywhere near a city hall, and developers control it. And Elizabeth May knows it. Just as she knows that 330,000 immigrants a year will not be lured to the snows of northern Saskatchewan or rural Nova Scotia and be made to stay there.
Get real Elizabeth. And for once, come clean about the costs of immigration. And tell your rival party leaders in the House of Commons to do the same while you are at.
Suddenly a proponent of smart growth, of concentrating people behind tight urban boundaries as a way, in her mind, of protecting green belts and lowering ecological footprints, was calling for a population policy that would disperse them. Very curious indeed !
As was pointed out, however, we have this trifle called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows Canadians freedom of mobility within the country. Once settled in rural Saskatchewan or Nova Scotia, there is no coercive measure, other than this never before used “notwithstanding “ clause, to compel New Canadians to stay there.
Alas comes an observation about Italy to illustrate the point.
“Dennis” of Optimum Population UK wrote:
“…in the 1990s southern Italian villages welcomed with open arms any immigrants from anywhere which would repopulate their deserted villages particularly with couples having children. The govt. helped out with this providing housing, repairing abandoned properties and with jobs. After a time (months or a few years) all these immigrants moved out to the cities for more money and a more exciting life.”
So there is nothing at all to keep them down on the farm, boys. And that is symptomatic of Green Party thinking. It is intellectually dishonest. May advocates high immigration levels, 38% higher than the incumbent Conservative government’s, and claims that immigrants would not stress cities because they could be settled in rural Canada. Moreover, that “smart growth” strategies and strict land use policies would protect green belts farmland and wildlife from any demographic spill-over. Canada would welcome the world, develop its cake and eat it too.
But Ms. May knows very well that municipal and city councils are bought and paid for by real estate developers. And that there are no campaign donations that grass roots opponents can entice to compete with them. So while Ottawa may dictate immigration policy, in a sense, it can only be implemented at the local level. Only a provincial government of the nature of Dave Barrett’s 1972-5 NDP administration ever found the resolve to enact a provincial-wide freeze on farmland---NDP governments in three other provinces who witnessed his civil war did not even go there.
Three decades later the Gordon Campbell government unraveled it by the simple expedient of decentralizing authority from the Agricultural Land Commission to regional bodies susceptible to local political, read realtor, influence. Now prime farm land near coveted urban areas in southern BC are taken out of the land reserve in favour of poorer acreage to the north. This was North America’s last great hope in land use planning. Put planning authority anywhere near a city hall, and developers control it. And Elizabeth May knows it. Just as she knows that 330,000 immigrants a year will not be lured to the snows of northern Saskatchewan or rural Nova Scotia and be made to stay there.
Get real Elizabeth. And for once, come clean about the costs of immigration. And tell your rival party leaders in the House of Commons to do the same while you are at.
JACK LAYTON AND THE NDP CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
According to Elections Canada, in the election that was held on October 14, 45,578 votes were cast in the riding of Toronto-Danforth. One hundred and ninety-one of these ballots were rejected for a total of 45,387 valid votes. Of that number, Jack Layton received 20,323 or 44.8% of the total. In other words more people voted against Layton (25,064) than voted for him (20,323). So where exactly did Jack Layton get the mandate to represent the good people of Toronto-Danforth in the House of Commons?
None of the other party leaders failed to get the support of at least half of their constituents. Stephen Harper (73.0%), Stéphane Dion (61.7%) and Gilles Duceppe (50.2%) all won their seats democratically. Not so Jack Layton.
Even Jack can’t have it both ways. If the Conservatives are illegitimate because 62.4% of Canadians didn’t vote for them, then Layton is the illegitimate MP for the riding of Toronto-Danforth because 53.2% of voters voted against him. Either getting less than 50% of the votes is sufficient or it’s not. If Jack Layton actually believes that the Harper government must go because a majority of people didn’t vote for them, then he must do the honourable thing and resign his seat in the House of Commons. Arthur Wienrub, Canada Free Press
I don’t have much sympathy for Layton’s constant whining about the iniquities of our British “first past the post” balloting system. It is of little concern to me that his party got 18% of the popular vote but not 18% of the seats in the House of Commons. As I am tired of saying, proportional representation deals only with the distribution of power between political parties, not between those parties and the electorate that they are supposed to represent. Because, as you know, even proportional representation wouldn’t give the Canadian people a real choice. Whoever forms the coalition government, and paralytic incessantly quarrelling and unstable coalition governments are the trademark result of proportional representation, that government could govern without popular support. For every legislative measure in parliament would be voted on exclusively by the parliamentarians sitting there. The people would not have a vote. When they cast a vote for a party, they are voting for a bundle of policies 90% of which they may vehemently take issue with. But they vote for that party because it supports the one or two positions the voter deems most important. Voters in a PR system, like ours, do not get to cherry-pick the menu. It is not a buffet. It is a take it or leave it menu. You buy the whole meal even though you only wanted the appetizer.
Neither Harper, Dion, or Layton have a moral right to govern. That right will occur when I get my right to have a meaningful form of Direct Democracy. Citizen-based initiatives, constrained, unlike the American experience, by strict election spending guidelines. A lot has happened since Edmund Burke wrote his dictum about the member of parliament owing nothing to us but his “good judgment”. I have discovered that ordinary citizens, by and large, have a judgment that is at least the equal of the average member of parliament, with usually twice the knowledge base. I ultimately don’t wish to be “represented” in Ottawa. I am looking more for a delegate than a representative. I suppose we’ll need implementors and caretakers to supplement a direct democratic model, but other than that, I can find little use for professional politicians.
None of the other party leaders failed to get the support of at least half of their constituents. Stephen Harper (73.0%), Stéphane Dion (61.7%) and Gilles Duceppe (50.2%) all won their seats democratically. Not so Jack Layton.
Even Jack can’t have it both ways. If the Conservatives are illegitimate because 62.4% of Canadians didn’t vote for them, then Layton is the illegitimate MP for the riding of Toronto-Danforth because 53.2% of voters voted against him. Either getting less than 50% of the votes is sufficient or it’s not. If Jack Layton actually believes that the Harper government must go because a majority of people didn’t vote for them, then he must do the honourable thing and resign his seat in the House of Commons. Arthur Wienrub, Canada Free Press
I don’t have much sympathy for Layton’s constant whining about the iniquities of our British “first past the post” balloting system. It is of little concern to me that his party got 18% of the popular vote but not 18% of the seats in the House of Commons. As I am tired of saying, proportional representation deals only with the distribution of power between political parties, not between those parties and the electorate that they are supposed to represent. Because, as you know, even proportional representation wouldn’t give the Canadian people a real choice. Whoever forms the coalition government, and paralytic incessantly quarrelling and unstable coalition governments are the trademark result of proportional representation, that government could govern without popular support. For every legislative measure in parliament would be voted on exclusively by the parliamentarians sitting there. The people would not have a vote. When they cast a vote for a party, they are voting for a bundle of policies 90% of which they may vehemently take issue with. But they vote for that party because it supports the one or two positions the voter deems most important. Voters in a PR system, like ours, do not get to cherry-pick the menu. It is not a buffet. It is a take it or leave it menu. You buy the whole meal even though you only wanted the appetizer.
Neither Harper, Dion, or Layton have a moral right to govern. That right will occur when I get my right to have a meaningful form of Direct Democracy. Citizen-based initiatives, constrained, unlike the American experience, by strict election spending guidelines. A lot has happened since Edmund Burke wrote his dictum about the member of parliament owing nothing to us but his “good judgment”. I have discovered that ordinary citizens, by and large, have a judgment that is at least the equal of the average member of parliament, with usually twice the knowledge base. I ultimately don’t wish to be “represented” in Ottawa. I am looking more for a delegate than a representative. I suppose we’ll need implementors and caretakers to supplement a direct democratic model, but other than that, I can find little use for professional politicians.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
TWO NATIONS UNITED IN SYMBIOTIC IDIOCY: The Fiscal Burden of Immigration in Canada and the US
The US National Research Council once posed a question that can be applied with equal urgency to the Canadian situation. Are immigrants an asset or a liability in the provision and financing of public services? The answer in both cases is, and has been the latter for some time. What is significant about the predicaments of the two countries is that again, in both cases, authoritative assessments have identified the immigrant selection process or the skill profile of newcomers as the decisive factor in driving up net immigration costs.
Edwin S. Rubenstein, who has written extensively and exhaustively on these matters, explains that mass immigration itself will accelerate a negative effect fiscal impact because “immigrants are poorer, pay less tax, and are more likely to reserve public benefits than natives. It follows that that federal government finances are adversely impacted by immigrants—and this will increase as the foreign-born share of the population increases.”
However, Rubenstein continues, “the quality of foreign entrants has deteriorated for decades. In 1960, for example, new immigrants were generally better educated, earned more, were less likely to be poor than natives. But by the end of the 20th century, new arrivals had two fewer years of education and earned one third less than natives.” Consequently an ever-increasing gap emerged between the public benefits immigrants earned and the taxes they paid.
Steven A. Camarota of the Centre for Immigration Studies concluded in his testimony before a House Committee on July 23, 2006 that “the primary reason why illegal aliens create a fiscal deficit is that an estimated 60% lack a high school diploma and another 20% have no education beyond high school.” Amnesty would solve not their fiscal drain.
Canadian problems issue from the same cause. In 1978 the Immigration Act was changed to favour family class and refugee claimants at the expense of more skilled categories. Charles Campbell, a veteran of the Immigration Appeal Board, wrote: “A 1995 Simon Fraser University study, based on the 1991 census, showed that those immigrants entering before 1981 had earnings equivalent to Canadian-born and the earnings of those arriving post-1980 averaged 60% or less of both pre-1980 immigrants and Canadian-born.”
Herbert Grubel, in his definitive “Immigration and the Welfare State” noted that four decades ago the typical male immigrant caught up to the income level of other Canadians within ten years, but today he would on average, achieve only 80% of the Canadian average. Poor skills, the progressivity of the personal income tax structure and the universality of access to government benefits add to a “net drain on net native taxpayers”. What is interesting is that those immigrants who arrived after 1975 and were surveyed in the censuses of 1990-2000 had higher rates of poverty than other Canadians.
Grubel tracked the 1990 immigrant cohort until 2002 and made some astonishing discoveries. Their economic performance was so poor that after a decade they still paid only 21.3% of the taxes that other Canadians paid. It was not they were absorbing more government services, it was just that they were not in a high enough tax bracket to reimburse other taxpayers for the services they were consuming. For example, they had no income earners in the top 10% echelon, that is, no one earning over $66,000. They paid 39% of the total taxes that other Canadians paid if sales taxes were factored in.
The shift in emphasis from the economic requirements of Canada to a desire on the part of prospective immigrants to re-unite with their families, as signaled by the Immigration Act of 1978, was motivated by both humanitarian and pragmatic considerations. It was thought in government circles that to best exploit that the Asian talent pool where family was so important, the carrot of reunification would lure the best and the brightest from that quarter. Unfortunately, it also lured an unskilled labour force on its family coattails that came to comprise about 80% of Canada’s immigrant mix. So much for the much vaunted Canadian “points” system, which was much compromised by this shift to the “family class”category and an open door refugee policy rife with abuse and fraud.
As Charles Campbell remarked, “family class immigrants and refugee claimants are accepted without consideration for their literacy, skills, age or ability to earn a living.” Kevin Michael Grace of Report Magazine is more colourful. “Family reunification resulted in an efficient Canadian policy of importing the worst and the dimmest: the unskilled and the illiterate in both French and English.” In fact financial journalist Diane Francis noted that 43% of the 600,000 immigrants admitted between 1998 and 2000 did not have a knowledge of either of the two official languages—a skill rather fundamental to financial success in the country.
This circumstance has consequences beyond an immediate fiscal burden. It affects the social security system. When an immigration policy becomes a de facto strategy to expand the pool of cheap labour under the cloak of injecting “skilled labour” the support foundation for the growing demographic of retirees is substantially weakened. American commentary suggests that it takes on average 2-3 workers on average salary to pay for the social security cheque of one retiree, but 5 Walmart employees or 9 workers at MacDonalds to deliver the same tax revenue required to pay for that same cheque. http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/RetirementandWills/P98826.asp If supporting an aged population is going to be the rationale given for mass immigration, a claim so far demolished by logic and analysis in at least two countries, then importing people qualified to work only at “McJobs” is not the answer.
Of course, for the liberal-left, these are precisely the kind of people we should welcome to our shores, the poor and huddled masses, not the skilled entrepreneurial types who might generate employment or dare we hope, pay for their own keep. Barack Obama, articulated that dated sentiment well when he criticized the Canadian-style points system in the Senate. He said that “it fails to recognize the fundamental morality of uniting Americans with their family members. It also places a person’s job skills over his character and work ethic. How many of our forefathers would measure up under this points system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”
Unfortunately, character and work ethic alone, which most unskilled immigrants have in abundance, are unable to balance a budget. And skilled immigrants can also come equipped with character and a work ethic, as can workers trained here at home. If morality is to be the test of immigration, then one must question of the morality of displacing the jobs of native workers or suppressing their wages by the importation of low skilled foreign labour that could be performed by those within the country. Labour market economist George Borjas established that such foreign labour reduced the average earnings of native born American men by 4% between 1980 to 2000, and by 7.4% among those American-born men without a high school education.
In Canada, Statistics Canada revealed in a May 2007 report that while mass immigration had increased the labour pool 13% from 1990 to 2006, the wages of educated workers suffered the most, going down 7%. Why? Canada drew slightly more skilled immigrants proportionately into the country than America and therefore its native educated workforce faced more competition. Fiscal burdens are borne in different ways. Not only in deductions from your paycheque, but reductions in your paycheque from job competion, or worse still, a layoff or contract lapse when you have been undercut by outside forces. That can happen to you if whether you wear a white collar or a blue collar. Ask an IT worker who used to make a hundred grand until someone with an H-1B visa came along and took his job and got paid 60% for doing the same thing.
What are the fiscal burdens borne by taxpayers? According to Grubel, the 1990 immigrant cohort cost Canadian taxpayers $18.3 billion per year, or $554.50 per Canadian per year. To put this in perspective, according to Rubenstein’s analysis of the fiscal impact of US immigration, $30 billion was transferred by native American taxpayers to immigrants in 1997. Canadians are therefore spending five and one half times as much on immigration subsidy transfers as their American counterparts, or 16% of total federal spending---more than what was spent on health care!
It was Milton Friedman who warned that a choice had to made between open immigration and the welfare state. Take your pick. You can’t have both. Canada, however, continues to wear blinders, inviting unsustainable immigrant numbers while watching lines for surgical procedures and emergency care grow and periodically pumping more cash into a public system on life support. And still in denial while doctors send patients across the border and private clinics are hounded to death. It was the NDP, Canada’s left wing party, or its predecessor, the CCF, which pioneered socialized medicine. Now, janus-like, it is at once a proponent of increased immigration that would favour more family class entrants, and at the same time a fierce tribune of uncompromised universality in health care, oblivious to developments in social democratic jurisdictions overseas.
As Grubel writes, “the hitherto tolerant and thoroughly globalized Nordic countries are building higher dikes at their borders not against goods and services, but against people and poor countries.” They have had to practice global triage medicine, with nationals accorded exclusive treatment. Compassion cannot have an unlimited price tag. In Australia that price was found to be $250,000 in health charges for each migrant over 65 who was sponsored by younger family. American states can’t build walls at their borders but they can close hospitals and some have even turned their backs on legal immigrants. In 2003 Colorado became the first state to remove legal immigrants from Medicaid, saving $2.7 million, and in June of 2007 the Governor of Maryland proposed to save $7 million by cutting off Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant women who are legal, permanent residents.
In the scramble for scarce dollars, something must give, and it will be universality and socialist rhetoric. “Make the rich pay” is something that should have gone out when the Laffer Curve came in. Canadian social democrats, when they are elected, quietly park their speeches about corporate welfare, and realize that ultimately individuals pay taxes, and that rich individuals, and corporations, if jittery, find wings. And when they fly a lot of union pension funds and individual worker’s stock portfolios fly with them. It is hard to tax a moving target or one that yields less revenue with each increase in the marginal rate. So where does a centre-left government turn to next to finance its hungry welfare state bulging with immigrants? You guessed it, the old stand by, economic growth. And what does it turn to fuel that growth? The other old stand-by, immigration. So the cycle continues.
Conspicuously excluded from this comparative continental glance at the fiscal costs of immigration was a mention of the costs of illegal immigration. This was done for two reasons. The central reason was that the issue of illegal immigration for the United States is paramount and for Canada it is not. The United States may have anywhere between 12 to 20 million or more illegal aliens and Canada has but 100,000 to 200,000. Less than 2 million if our nation had America’s population base, a joke by their standards. Only 8% of migrants entering Canada every year are coming in illegally. In America it must be quadruple that. The blatantly abused Canadian refugee process is costing taxpayers well beyond a $100 million a year but the American taxpayer spent $338 billion in 2007 on illegal immigration, or $1119 per citizen. No comparisons can be made.
But the second rationale for ignoring illegal immigration here is to rectify American neglect of the problems of legal immigration. Legal immigration and the establishment of a large immigrant foothold provides a safe harbour and magnet for illegal immigrant traffic. It is quite doubtful that the first problem, that of out-of-control illegal immigration, can be addressed until legal immigration is either shut down by a moratorium or dramatically scaled back.
In summary, Canada and the United States are two countries united by symbiotic idiocy, equally duped by the rhetoric of a population pyramid scam, of the myth of unending immigrant-driven population growth being the key to prosperity. But if a durable social safety net for all is a central feature of this prosperity, it is imperiled by the composition of the immigrants whom these countries recruit. They are customized to benefit cheap labour employers and to bankrupt American hospitals and strain the Canadian medical system to the breaking point. Mass immigration of this kind will not generate the revenues to support our budgets.
But this summation must be qualified with this observation. Not all burdens are fiscal. Some are environmental. While it would have been of great relief to our health and education budgets, to mention two, if immigration intakes had stressed quality rather than quality, skilled rather than family class, it must be noted that the environment doesn’t care about selection criteria. Stoffman’s question “Who get’s in?” is less pressing than the question of how many we allow in. The ecological footprint of legal, skilled immigrants is just as severe as that of illegal, unskilled ones. And their burdens are substantially less unforgiving than fiscal burdens.
So why devote attention to the fiscal costs of immigration? Because it is those fiscal costs which drive governments, including centre-left governments which profess to have a “green” agenda, to finance faltering social programs like medicare with immigrant-fed economic growth. It is important to draw them and their supporters to the underlying cause of the fiscal crisis. Rather than point the finger at corporate sharks hoping to feast on the corpse of a dying medical system, Canadian leftists and liberals would do well to look at their own hypocritical support for family-class mass immigration policies which guarantee its demise.
Mass immigration or the welfare state.
Economic growth or the environment.
Too bad those choices weren’t clearly written on the ballot last election.
Edwin S. Rubenstein, who has written extensively and exhaustively on these matters, explains that mass immigration itself will accelerate a negative effect fiscal impact because “immigrants are poorer, pay less tax, and are more likely to reserve public benefits than natives. It follows that that federal government finances are adversely impacted by immigrants—and this will increase as the foreign-born share of the population increases.”
However, Rubenstein continues, “the quality of foreign entrants has deteriorated for decades. In 1960, for example, new immigrants were generally better educated, earned more, were less likely to be poor than natives. But by the end of the 20th century, new arrivals had two fewer years of education and earned one third less than natives.” Consequently an ever-increasing gap emerged between the public benefits immigrants earned and the taxes they paid.
Steven A. Camarota of the Centre for Immigration Studies concluded in his testimony before a House Committee on July 23, 2006 that “the primary reason why illegal aliens create a fiscal deficit is that an estimated 60% lack a high school diploma and another 20% have no education beyond high school.” Amnesty would solve not their fiscal drain.
Canadian problems issue from the same cause. In 1978 the Immigration Act was changed to favour family class and refugee claimants at the expense of more skilled categories. Charles Campbell, a veteran of the Immigration Appeal Board, wrote: “A 1995 Simon Fraser University study, based on the 1991 census, showed that those immigrants entering before 1981 had earnings equivalent to Canadian-born and the earnings of those arriving post-1980 averaged 60% or less of both pre-1980 immigrants and Canadian-born.”
Herbert Grubel, in his definitive “Immigration and the Welfare State” noted that four decades ago the typical male immigrant caught up to the income level of other Canadians within ten years, but today he would on average, achieve only 80% of the Canadian average. Poor skills, the progressivity of the personal income tax structure and the universality of access to government benefits add to a “net drain on net native taxpayers”. What is interesting is that those immigrants who arrived after 1975 and were surveyed in the censuses of 1990-2000 had higher rates of poverty than other Canadians.
Grubel tracked the 1990 immigrant cohort until 2002 and made some astonishing discoveries. Their economic performance was so poor that after a decade they still paid only 21.3% of the taxes that other Canadians paid. It was not they were absorbing more government services, it was just that they were not in a high enough tax bracket to reimburse other taxpayers for the services they were consuming. For example, they had no income earners in the top 10% echelon, that is, no one earning over $66,000. They paid 39% of the total taxes that other Canadians paid if sales taxes were factored in.
The shift in emphasis from the economic requirements of Canada to a desire on the part of prospective immigrants to re-unite with their families, as signaled by the Immigration Act of 1978, was motivated by both humanitarian and pragmatic considerations. It was thought in government circles that to best exploit that the Asian talent pool where family was so important, the carrot of reunification would lure the best and the brightest from that quarter. Unfortunately, it also lured an unskilled labour force on its family coattails that came to comprise about 80% of Canada’s immigrant mix. So much for the much vaunted Canadian “points” system, which was much compromised by this shift to the “family class”category and an open door refugee policy rife with abuse and fraud.
As Charles Campbell remarked, “family class immigrants and refugee claimants are accepted without consideration for their literacy, skills, age or ability to earn a living.” Kevin Michael Grace of Report Magazine is more colourful. “Family reunification resulted in an efficient Canadian policy of importing the worst and the dimmest: the unskilled and the illiterate in both French and English.” In fact financial journalist Diane Francis noted that 43% of the 600,000 immigrants admitted between 1998 and 2000 did not have a knowledge of either of the two official languages—a skill rather fundamental to financial success in the country.
This circumstance has consequences beyond an immediate fiscal burden. It affects the social security system. When an immigration policy becomes a de facto strategy to expand the pool of cheap labour under the cloak of injecting “skilled labour” the support foundation for the growing demographic of retirees is substantially weakened. American commentary suggests that it takes on average 2-3 workers on average salary to pay for the social security cheque of one retiree, but 5 Walmart employees or 9 workers at MacDonalds to deliver the same tax revenue required to pay for that same cheque. http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/RetirementandWills/P98826.asp If supporting an aged population is going to be the rationale given for mass immigration, a claim so far demolished by logic and analysis in at least two countries, then importing people qualified to work only at “McJobs” is not the answer.
Of course, for the liberal-left, these are precisely the kind of people we should welcome to our shores, the poor and huddled masses, not the skilled entrepreneurial types who might generate employment or dare we hope, pay for their own keep. Barack Obama, articulated that dated sentiment well when he criticized the Canadian-style points system in the Senate. He said that “it fails to recognize the fundamental morality of uniting Americans with their family members. It also places a person’s job skills over his character and work ethic. How many of our forefathers would measure up under this points system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”
Unfortunately, character and work ethic alone, which most unskilled immigrants have in abundance, are unable to balance a budget. And skilled immigrants can also come equipped with character and a work ethic, as can workers trained here at home. If morality is to be the test of immigration, then one must question of the morality of displacing the jobs of native workers or suppressing their wages by the importation of low skilled foreign labour that could be performed by those within the country. Labour market economist George Borjas established that such foreign labour reduced the average earnings of native born American men by 4% between 1980 to 2000, and by 7.4% among those American-born men without a high school education.
In Canada, Statistics Canada revealed in a May 2007 report that while mass immigration had increased the labour pool 13% from 1990 to 2006, the wages of educated workers suffered the most, going down 7%. Why? Canada drew slightly more skilled immigrants proportionately into the country than America and therefore its native educated workforce faced more competition. Fiscal burdens are borne in different ways. Not only in deductions from your paycheque, but reductions in your paycheque from job competion, or worse still, a layoff or contract lapse when you have been undercut by outside forces. That can happen to you if whether you wear a white collar or a blue collar. Ask an IT worker who used to make a hundred grand until someone with an H-1B visa came along and took his job and got paid 60% for doing the same thing.
What are the fiscal burdens borne by taxpayers? According to Grubel, the 1990 immigrant cohort cost Canadian taxpayers $18.3 billion per year, or $554.50 per Canadian per year. To put this in perspective, according to Rubenstein’s analysis of the fiscal impact of US immigration, $30 billion was transferred by native American taxpayers to immigrants in 1997. Canadians are therefore spending five and one half times as much on immigration subsidy transfers as their American counterparts, or 16% of total federal spending---more than what was spent on health care!
It was Milton Friedman who warned that a choice had to made between open immigration and the welfare state. Take your pick. You can’t have both. Canada, however, continues to wear blinders, inviting unsustainable immigrant numbers while watching lines for surgical procedures and emergency care grow and periodically pumping more cash into a public system on life support. And still in denial while doctors send patients across the border and private clinics are hounded to death. It was the NDP, Canada’s left wing party, or its predecessor, the CCF, which pioneered socialized medicine. Now, janus-like, it is at once a proponent of increased immigration that would favour more family class entrants, and at the same time a fierce tribune of uncompromised universality in health care, oblivious to developments in social democratic jurisdictions overseas.
As Grubel writes, “the hitherto tolerant and thoroughly globalized Nordic countries are building higher dikes at their borders not against goods and services, but against people and poor countries.” They have had to practice global triage medicine, with nationals accorded exclusive treatment. Compassion cannot have an unlimited price tag. In Australia that price was found to be $250,000 in health charges for each migrant over 65 who was sponsored by younger family. American states can’t build walls at their borders but they can close hospitals and some have even turned their backs on legal immigrants. In 2003 Colorado became the first state to remove legal immigrants from Medicaid, saving $2.7 million, and in June of 2007 the Governor of Maryland proposed to save $7 million by cutting off Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant women who are legal, permanent residents.
In the scramble for scarce dollars, something must give, and it will be universality and socialist rhetoric. “Make the rich pay” is something that should have gone out when the Laffer Curve came in. Canadian social democrats, when they are elected, quietly park their speeches about corporate welfare, and realize that ultimately individuals pay taxes, and that rich individuals, and corporations, if jittery, find wings. And when they fly a lot of union pension funds and individual worker’s stock portfolios fly with them. It is hard to tax a moving target or one that yields less revenue with each increase in the marginal rate. So where does a centre-left government turn to next to finance its hungry welfare state bulging with immigrants? You guessed it, the old stand by, economic growth. And what does it turn to fuel that growth? The other old stand-by, immigration. So the cycle continues.
Conspicuously excluded from this comparative continental glance at the fiscal costs of immigration was a mention of the costs of illegal immigration. This was done for two reasons. The central reason was that the issue of illegal immigration for the United States is paramount and for Canada it is not. The United States may have anywhere between 12 to 20 million or more illegal aliens and Canada has but 100,000 to 200,000. Less than 2 million if our nation had America’s population base, a joke by their standards. Only 8% of migrants entering Canada every year are coming in illegally. In America it must be quadruple that. The blatantly abused Canadian refugee process is costing taxpayers well beyond a $100 million a year but the American taxpayer spent $338 billion in 2007 on illegal immigration, or $1119 per citizen. No comparisons can be made.
But the second rationale for ignoring illegal immigration here is to rectify American neglect of the problems of legal immigration. Legal immigration and the establishment of a large immigrant foothold provides a safe harbour and magnet for illegal immigrant traffic. It is quite doubtful that the first problem, that of out-of-control illegal immigration, can be addressed until legal immigration is either shut down by a moratorium or dramatically scaled back.
In summary, Canada and the United States are two countries united by symbiotic idiocy, equally duped by the rhetoric of a population pyramid scam, of the myth of unending immigrant-driven population growth being the key to prosperity. But if a durable social safety net for all is a central feature of this prosperity, it is imperiled by the composition of the immigrants whom these countries recruit. They are customized to benefit cheap labour employers and to bankrupt American hospitals and strain the Canadian medical system to the breaking point. Mass immigration of this kind will not generate the revenues to support our budgets.
But this summation must be qualified with this observation. Not all burdens are fiscal. Some are environmental. While it would have been of great relief to our health and education budgets, to mention two, if immigration intakes had stressed quality rather than quality, skilled rather than family class, it must be noted that the environment doesn’t care about selection criteria. Stoffman’s question “Who get’s in?” is less pressing than the question of how many we allow in. The ecological footprint of legal, skilled immigrants is just as severe as that of illegal, unskilled ones. And their burdens are substantially less unforgiving than fiscal burdens.
So why devote attention to the fiscal costs of immigration? Because it is those fiscal costs which drive governments, including centre-left governments which profess to have a “green” agenda, to finance faltering social programs like medicare with immigrant-fed economic growth. It is important to draw them and their supporters to the underlying cause of the fiscal crisis. Rather than point the finger at corporate sharks hoping to feast on the corpse of a dying medical system, Canadian leftists and liberals would do well to look at their own hypocritical support for family-class mass immigration policies which guarantee its demise.
Mass immigration or the welfare state.
Economic growth or the environment.
Too bad those choices weren’t clearly written on the ballot last election.
IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT? How Long Should Population Stability advocates Ignore Issues of Culture and Ethnicity?
Their mission statements are very clear. Those organizations fighting to achieve a stable population level for their respective countries do not want to muddy the waters with concerns that would decoy attention from the major task at hand: containing and reducing the numbers of consumers in their societies. The ethnic, cultural or religious composition of those numbers is immaterial to their environmental impact. That’s the party line, and it is defended and believed with conviction, against the determined efforts of open-borders critics and human rights activists to impute racism and bury the movement in disgrace.
When confronted by a reporter who asked if he was campaigning for the population stabilization of California because he didn’t like Mexicans---the driving force behind its growth---Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society responded that he didn’t care if 100% of California was Mexican, as it once was. Only that there would be fewer Californians.
Roy Beck of NumbersUSA said something quite similar: “To talk about changing immigration numbers is to say nothing against the individual immigrants in this country. Rather, it is about deciding how many foreign citizens living in their own countries right now should be allowed to immigrate in the future.”
SUSPS, a faction of the Sierra Club that promotes population stability for the United States by reduced immigration and low fertility, says in its statement No to Racism, Yes to Environmentalism , that it repudiates the support of “xenophobes and racists” and compares human diversity to the value of diversity found in animal and plant species. “We support U. S. population stabilization purely for ecological reasons. This requires we reduce both birth rates and migration to the U. S. to sustainable levels.”
Andy Kerr of the now defunct Alternatives to Growth Oregon, articulated the same sentiment. “To those who oppose immigration because of racist and/or xenophobic reasons, I say to you, Go To Hell. The issue is immigration, not immigrants. I came to my support of immigration reform from an ecological carrying capacity perspective. Be it a house, a block, a city, a waterfront, a state, a bioregion, a nation, a continent, or a planet—all have a carrying capacity.”
The Carrying Capacity Network echoes Kerr’s sentiments. “CCN is anti-mass immigration but not anti-immigrant…our battle is being waged for the future of the USA, for preservation of quality of life, respect for law, national security and a sustainable size and level of resource use.” They add that they were the founding sponsor of the “Diversity Coalition for Immigration Moratorium” because they are working as much for the benefit of immigrants as native-born Americans.
Optimum Population Trust of the United Kingdom puts the matter of “quantity” vs. origin of people in a more clinical language. “The OPT believes the UK is overpopulated and that its population should be allowed to stabilize to a sustainable level. The ecological issue is one of population numbers, and of resource demand and environmental impacts created by different sizes of population at given rates of affluence and technology, issues of race or religion therefore, are not relevant.”
Sustainable Population Australia meanwhile, simply aims “to advocate low immigration rates while rejecting any selection based on race.”
So the ecological verdict is in. Numbers matter. Nothing else does. It doesn’t matter if 450 million Americans will be singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish in fifty years. Only that the country can’t sustain 50% more people than it currently has, regardless of the language they speak. It is not imperative that an Anglo-European civilization survive in North America, Australia or the UK. It is more urgent that a civilization of any kind survive this century, which many, like James Lovelock, say it won’t. The cultural disintegration of Anglo-European nations and their colonization by third world migrants does not gain a ranking on the endangered species list of any environmentalist. It is my contention that it should. With all due respect I think the population stabilization movement has got it wrong. Culture and value systems do matter in the numbers game. How so?
Check out fertility rates, something those in the movement love to focus on because they can avoid the nasty “I” word, immigration. It seemed that as long as the Sierra Club could concentrate on telling white people not to have babies they were quite on board with population control. Every liberal is a champion of “reproductive freedom”. But when it became clear that it would have to mean telling “people of colour” not to come to America they got cold feet and dropped immigration from their policy book. David Gelbaum’s $100 million bribe persuaded them to keep it out. Other organizations are more comfortable with discussing fertility too, despite the fact that it accounts for about a third of population growth in North America and Britain, and half in Australia.
A briefing paper prepared by Migration Watch UK used census data to reveal that while the fertility rate for the UK-born population as a whole was 1.8, it was 4.8 for mothers born in Pakistan. In 2001, British women had 1.6 children while Pakistan-born women had 4.7. Bangladeshi women in Birmingham, to cite one city, and another country of origin, had a total fertility rate of 5.3 in 1991 and 3.9 in 2001. The Indian fertility rate was much lower at 2.3 but still higher than the national average. Then the paper makes an interesting observation. “The fact that Black communities have seen their fertility rate fall toward British norms reflects the settled nature of these communities.” In other words, as this assertion would imply, they have become somewhat assimilated.
A comparable statement was made by Statistics Canada. Noting that in 2006 36% of all children born in Ontario were born to immigrants, Statscan gave us the assurance that “studies have shown that immigrants have higher fertility rates compared with Canadian-born women, but these rates decline to Canadian levels with the second generation.” Again, the magic of assimilation.
But what if the newcomers are non-assimilable? What if there are too many, too fast, for integration? The British government’s Community Cohesion Panel was quoted by Migration Watch as reporting in July of 2004 that “there are other concerns about the speed at which the newcomers can be accommodated…the pace of change is simply too great in some areas at present.”
The same concerns can be heard in Toronto where 44% are foreign-born, Vancouver where 38% are foreign-born and other cities with large and assertive immigrant communities. Many Canadians would maintain that Canada is suffering from ethnic indigestion.
In America the new wave of immigration is fast transforming the nation. There are now more Asians in Chicago than in Honolulu and more Hispanics in Washington than El Paso. In more than six major cities the Hispanic population doubled in the last 7 years and it grew by 22% in small counties, seven times the growth rate of those areas. In 2000 non-Hispanic whites were a minority in 29 counties of more than 500,000 residents. Seven years later, they are a minority in 36 counties of that size. Ethnic minorities now form a majority in one-third of the most populated counties in the United States. And with immigration at a runaway rate of two million a year plus illegal immigrant flow, that proportion will continue to grow. Anglo-European culture in America is against the wall.
Two things are material about this trend. Mass immigration, legal or illegal, is bad news for the environment. The pressure on habitat, farmland and wetlands is manifest, so that ironically, the cultural diversity that migrants bring with them and to which environmental NGOs pay homage is delivered at the cost of our biological diversity. Moreover, each newcomer, according to the calculations of Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado, will dump 23.8 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
Particularly damaging are Americans, or aspiring Americans, who come from Mexico and apparently have more children while living in America than women who live in Mexico. The Hispanic fertility rate is 40% higher than non-Hispanics and Hispanic single women have the highest fertility rate of any group. The total fertility rate for Hispanics is 2.9 as compared to 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites, and 2.1 for the general population. Is their rate declining according to the classic pattern of integration to the host culture?
Not according to a January 2001 report in the Chicago Tribune by Sue Ellen Christian and Teresa Puente. “While the number of births to African-American and white teenagers fell in Illinois from 1997 to 1999, the number of births to Hispanic teens increased. In fact, Hispanic girls lead the nation in the teen birthrate, with about 93 births per 1,000 Hispanic teens per year compared to the overall national teen birthrate of about 50 births per 1000….Newer immigrants are more likely to avoid pregnancy than second or third generation Hispanics.” (cf. Steve Sailer, Assimilation, VDARE.com)
Young Hispanics, so it would seem, are not becoming Americanized. But this cannot be surprising. As the census shows, they are not actually living in America, but in Mexican colonies. This may not be of much alarm to Paul Watson, or to those with an environmental focus, but it should be. Failure to assimilate, a function of too many outside the core Anglo-European value group coming in too quickly, translates into a higher birthrate. That drives a third of our environmentally ruinous population growth. What then of the other two-thirds, immigration? Can it be that the multicultural character of immigration affects not only fertility rates but the volume of immigration itself, and hence, the environmental damage?
The Canadian example is instructive. Multiculturalism is not only a social fact but the state ideology and code language for mass immigration itself. Four decades ago Canada was described as Two Solitudes, English and French. Mass immigration drawn from “non-traditional” sources as mandated from a policy shift in the mid 60s has created a nation of twenty solitudes whose affinity with the host country is questionable. Their numbers grow every year and political parties compete in a bidding war for their votes. This has built up powerful lobbies for even higher levels of immigration leading to a vicious cycle, a veritable cyclone that has led Canada to the highest population growth rate in the G8 and the highest per capita immigrant intake in the world. As a consequence, the country has lost about 20% of its best farmland to subdivisions and 70% of its endangered wildlife lies within striking distance of more development.
Cultural fragmentation then, has become a force behind immigration, and therefore environmental destruction. And this is exactly how Garrett Hardin saw the danger of a multicultural nation. Each “tribe” lobbies government to open the doors so that can grow its membership. An ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, on the other hand, Hardin argued, could better reach a consensus on how to deal with a contentious issue. Jared Diamond made a similar point. Japan, facing post-war starvation with a population beyond its carrying capacity, was able to cut its birth-rate because there were no competing ethnic blocs fearful of losing demographic political weight. In Canada the francophone “tribe” of Quebec is pursuing pro-natalist policies of birth incentives driven in part, subconsciously at least, by that old fear of being swamped in an Anglophone sea.
There remains but one more nail to be driven into the coffin of multiculturalism over which so many in the environmental movement would mourn. That is the terribly awkward fact that those wonderful uninvited cultures that have colonized our cities do not harbour an environmentalist ethic.
It was the late Stephen Jay Gould who said that can’t fight for something you don’t love. A look at the roster of conservation and environmental organizations will confirm that it is substantially those of Northern European ancestry who love nature. This stands to reason as the conservation movement finds its roots in early nineteenth century Northern European romanticism. According to Steve Sailer only 7% of the Sierra Club’s 550,000 members are minorities of any kind, though minorities account for 28% of the US population. Those who frequent the trails of the Canadian rockies or Coast Mountains will typically encounter hikers with German, British, Dutch, Scandinavian or North American accents, while in Banff Alberta, the Japanese keep to the paved walkways. Leave them to go into the forest and you’d think you were in Bavaria for the Germans you would meet. There were 500 members in our Vancouver Natural History Society. It seemed half had come from the UK, one came from Southern Europe and none from Asia in a city with an Asian population of 25%.
By contrast, only 1% of visitors to Yellowstone national park are Hispanics, even though they comprise 10% of the general population. Sailer believes that during a recession Hispanic blue collar workers, unlike the British working class émigrés like my grandfather who relished “rambling” on the moors, would favour relaxing California’s environmental restrictions. What is worrisome is that the demographic shift away from the European core will undercut support for the national parks system when it becomes increasingly under siege in coming decades from the developmental pressures from immigrant-driven growth.
Looking to a future where the Hispanic population will grow from 52 to 190 million by century’s end in a country of an unsustainable 570 million, one might ask, are there any John Muirs in Hispanic America? Will futile outreach efforts to ethnic minorities and environmentally unfriendly cultures by the Sierra Club and other such timid, growth-colloborationist organizations bear any fruit? Steve Sailer offers some qualified hope:
“If immigrants tended to come from cultures that shared a green-orientation with us, like Germany… or if they tended to be well-educated like the typical Sierra Club member, they’d pose less of a threat to the environment. However, most immigrants today tend to be poorly educated, and originating in societies that put little emphasis on conservation…
Now, it’s likely that upper-middle class environmentalist views could be inculcated into today’s Hispanic-Americans over the next couple of generations. But the process depends on their being economically and culturally assimilated into today’s upper middle class. However, few will manage that trick if they continue to be engulfed by millions of additional Hispanic immigrants, driving down their wages, and surrounding them with environmentally lax Latin American cultural norms. The best way to kick-start this assimilation process is an immigration pause.” (VDARE, The Green Gag)
The sad politically incorrect fact is, for anyone concerned about population stabilization, culture does matter. The fragmentation, colonization and disintegration of a once dominant culture from which key conservationist values have been drawn cannot surely be a matter of indifference to environmentalists. Numbers of course are of paramount concern, but where people come from is as important as how many people come, if so many come that time is not allowed for their assimilation.
Assimilation, a dirty word in Canadian political lexicography, holds the key to lowering second-generation fertility rates, to breaking with identity politics and tribal loyalties, and to the absorption from the core culture of a conservationist ethic. Multiculturalism is an ideological riposte to the need for this essential process.
Multiculturalism is bad for the environment.
When confronted by a reporter who asked if he was campaigning for the population stabilization of California because he didn’t like Mexicans---the driving force behind its growth---Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society responded that he didn’t care if 100% of California was Mexican, as it once was. Only that there would be fewer Californians.
Roy Beck of NumbersUSA said something quite similar: “To talk about changing immigration numbers is to say nothing against the individual immigrants in this country. Rather, it is about deciding how many foreign citizens living in their own countries right now should be allowed to immigrate in the future.”
SUSPS, a faction of the Sierra Club that promotes population stability for the United States by reduced immigration and low fertility, says in its statement No to Racism, Yes to Environmentalism , that it repudiates the support of “xenophobes and racists” and compares human diversity to the value of diversity found in animal and plant species. “We support U. S. population stabilization purely for ecological reasons. This requires we reduce both birth rates and migration to the U. S. to sustainable levels.”
Andy Kerr of the now defunct Alternatives to Growth Oregon, articulated the same sentiment. “To those who oppose immigration because of racist and/or xenophobic reasons, I say to you, Go To Hell. The issue is immigration, not immigrants. I came to my support of immigration reform from an ecological carrying capacity perspective. Be it a house, a block, a city, a waterfront, a state, a bioregion, a nation, a continent, or a planet—all have a carrying capacity.”
The Carrying Capacity Network echoes Kerr’s sentiments. “CCN is anti-mass immigration but not anti-immigrant…our battle is being waged for the future of the USA, for preservation of quality of life, respect for law, national security and a sustainable size and level of resource use.” They add that they were the founding sponsor of the “Diversity Coalition for Immigration Moratorium” because they are working as much for the benefit of immigrants as native-born Americans.
Optimum Population Trust of the United Kingdom puts the matter of “quantity” vs. origin of people in a more clinical language. “The OPT believes the UK is overpopulated and that its population should be allowed to stabilize to a sustainable level. The ecological issue is one of population numbers, and of resource demand and environmental impacts created by different sizes of population at given rates of affluence and technology, issues of race or religion therefore, are not relevant.”
Sustainable Population Australia meanwhile, simply aims “to advocate low immigration rates while rejecting any selection based on race.”
So the ecological verdict is in. Numbers matter. Nothing else does. It doesn’t matter if 450 million Americans will be singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish in fifty years. Only that the country can’t sustain 50% more people than it currently has, regardless of the language they speak. It is not imperative that an Anglo-European civilization survive in North America, Australia or the UK. It is more urgent that a civilization of any kind survive this century, which many, like James Lovelock, say it won’t. The cultural disintegration of Anglo-European nations and their colonization by third world migrants does not gain a ranking on the endangered species list of any environmentalist. It is my contention that it should. With all due respect I think the population stabilization movement has got it wrong. Culture and value systems do matter in the numbers game. How so?
Check out fertility rates, something those in the movement love to focus on because they can avoid the nasty “I” word, immigration. It seemed that as long as the Sierra Club could concentrate on telling white people not to have babies they were quite on board with population control. Every liberal is a champion of “reproductive freedom”. But when it became clear that it would have to mean telling “people of colour” not to come to America they got cold feet and dropped immigration from their policy book. David Gelbaum’s $100 million bribe persuaded them to keep it out. Other organizations are more comfortable with discussing fertility too, despite the fact that it accounts for about a third of population growth in North America and Britain, and half in Australia.
A briefing paper prepared by Migration Watch UK used census data to reveal that while the fertility rate for the UK-born population as a whole was 1.8, it was 4.8 for mothers born in Pakistan. In 2001, British women had 1.6 children while Pakistan-born women had 4.7. Bangladeshi women in Birmingham, to cite one city, and another country of origin, had a total fertility rate of 5.3 in 1991 and 3.9 in 2001. The Indian fertility rate was much lower at 2.3 but still higher than the national average. Then the paper makes an interesting observation. “The fact that Black communities have seen their fertility rate fall toward British norms reflects the settled nature of these communities.” In other words, as this assertion would imply, they have become somewhat assimilated.
A comparable statement was made by Statistics Canada. Noting that in 2006 36% of all children born in Ontario were born to immigrants, Statscan gave us the assurance that “studies have shown that immigrants have higher fertility rates compared with Canadian-born women, but these rates decline to Canadian levels with the second generation.” Again, the magic of assimilation.
But what if the newcomers are non-assimilable? What if there are too many, too fast, for integration? The British government’s Community Cohesion Panel was quoted by Migration Watch as reporting in July of 2004 that “there are other concerns about the speed at which the newcomers can be accommodated…the pace of change is simply too great in some areas at present.”
The same concerns can be heard in Toronto where 44% are foreign-born, Vancouver where 38% are foreign-born and other cities with large and assertive immigrant communities. Many Canadians would maintain that Canada is suffering from ethnic indigestion.
In America the new wave of immigration is fast transforming the nation. There are now more Asians in Chicago than in Honolulu and more Hispanics in Washington than El Paso. In more than six major cities the Hispanic population doubled in the last 7 years and it grew by 22% in small counties, seven times the growth rate of those areas. In 2000 non-Hispanic whites were a minority in 29 counties of more than 500,000 residents. Seven years later, they are a minority in 36 counties of that size. Ethnic minorities now form a majority in one-third of the most populated counties in the United States. And with immigration at a runaway rate of two million a year plus illegal immigrant flow, that proportion will continue to grow. Anglo-European culture in America is against the wall.
Two things are material about this trend. Mass immigration, legal or illegal, is bad news for the environment. The pressure on habitat, farmland and wetlands is manifest, so that ironically, the cultural diversity that migrants bring with them and to which environmental NGOs pay homage is delivered at the cost of our biological diversity. Moreover, each newcomer, according to the calculations of Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado, will dump 23.8 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
Particularly damaging are Americans, or aspiring Americans, who come from Mexico and apparently have more children while living in America than women who live in Mexico. The Hispanic fertility rate is 40% higher than non-Hispanics and Hispanic single women have the highest fertility rate of any group. The total fertility rate for Hispanics is 2.9 as compared to 1.8 for non-Hispanic whites, and 2.1 for the general population. Is their rate declining according to the classic pattern of integration to the host culture?
Not according to a January 2001 report in the Chicago Tribune by Sue Ellen Christian and Teresa Puente. “While the number of births to African-American and white teenagers fell in Illinois from 1997 to 1999, the number of births to Hispanic teens increased. In fact, Hispanic girls lead the nation in the teen birthrate, with about 93 births per 1,000 Hispanic teens per year compared to the overall national teen birthrate of about 50 births per 1000….Newer immigrants are more likely to avoid pregnancy than second or third generation Hispanics.” (cf. Steve Sailer, Assimilation, VDARE.com)
Young Hispanics, so it would seem, are not becoming Americanized. But this cannot be surprising. As the census shows, they are not actually living in America, but in Mexican colonies. This may not be of much alarm to Paul Watson, or to those with an environmental focus, but it should be. Failure to assimilate, a function of too many outside the core Anglo-European value group coming in too quickly, translates into a higher birthrate. That drives a third of our environmentally ruinous population growth. What then of the other two-thirds, immigration? Can it be that the multicultural character of immigration affects not only fertility rates but the volume of immigration itself, and hence, the environmental damage?
The Canadian example is instructive. Multiculturalism is not only a social fact but the state ideology and code language for mass immigration itself. Four decades ago Canada was described as Two Solitudes, English and French. Mass immigration drawn from “non-traditional” sources as mandated from a policy shift in the mid 60s has created a nation of twenty solitudes whose affinity with the host country is questionable. Their numbers grow every year and political parties compete in a bidding war for their votes. This has built up powerful lobbies for even higher levels of immigration leading to a vicious cycle, a veritable cyclone that has led Canada to the highest population growth rate in the G8 and the highest per capita immigrant intake in the world. As a consequence, the country has lost about 20% of its best farmland to subdivisions and 70% of its endangered wildlife lies within striking distance of more development.
Cultural fragmentation then, has become a force behind immigration, and therefore environmental destruction. And this is exactly how Garrett Hardin saw the danger of a multicultural nation. Each “tribe” lobbies government to open the doors so that can grow its membership. An ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, on the other hand, Hardin argued, could better reach a consensus on how to deal with a contentious issue. Jared Diamond made a similar point. Japan, facing post-war starvation with a population beyond its carrying capacity, was able to cut its birth-rate because there were no competing ethnic blocs fearful of losing demographic political weight. In Canada the francophone “tribe” of Quebec is pursuing pro-natalist policies of birth incentives driven in part, subconsciously at least, by that old fear of being swamped in an Anglophone sea.
There remains but one more nail to be driven into the coffin of multiculturalism over which so many in the environmental movement would mourn. That is the terribly awkward fact that those wonderful uninvited cultures that have colonized our cities do not harbour an environmentalist ethic.
It was the late Stephen Jay Gould who said that can’t fight for something you don’t love. A look at the roster of conservation and environmental organizations will confirm that it is substantially those of Northern European ancestry who love nature. This stands to reason as the conservation movement finds its roots in early nineteenth century Northern European romanticism. According to Steve Sailer only 7% of the Sierra Club’s 550,000 members are minorities of any kind, though minorities account for 28% of the US population. Those who frequent the trails of the Canadian rockies or Coast Mountains will typically encounter hikers with German, British, Dutch, Scandinavian or North American accents, while in Banff Alberta, the Japanese keep to the paved walkways. Leave them to go into the forest and you’d think you were in Bavaria for the Germans you would meet. There were 500 members in our Vancouver Natural History Society. It seemed half had come from the UK, one came from Southern Europe and none from Asia in a city with an Asian population of 25%.
By contrast, only 1% of visitors to Yellowstone national park are Hispanics, even though they comprise 10% of the general population. Sailer believes that during a recession Hispanic blue collar workers, unlike the British working class émigrés like my grandfather who relished “rambling” on the moors, would favour relaxing California’s environmental restrictions. What is worrisome is that the demographic shift away from the European core will undercut support for the national parks system when it becomes increasingly under siege in coming decades from the developmental pressures from immigrant-driven growth.
Looking to a future where the Hispanic population will grow from 52 to 190 million by century’s end in a country of an unsustainable 570 million, one might ask, are there any John Muirs in Hispanic America? Will futile outreach efforts to ethnic minorities and environmentally unfriendly cultures by the Sierra Club and other such timid, growth-colloborationist organizations bear any fruit? Steve Sailer offers some qualified hope:
“If immigrants tended to come from cultures that shared a green-orientation with us, like Germany… or if they tended to be well-educated like the typical Sierra Club member, they’d pose less of a threat to the environment. However, most immigrants today tend to be poorly educated, and originating in societies that put little emphasis on conservation…
Now, it’s likely that upper-middle class environmentalist views could be inculcated into today’s Hispanic-Americans over the next couple of generations. But the process depends on their being economically and culturally assimilated into today’s upper middle class. However, few will manage that trick if they continue to be engulfed by millions of additional Hispanic immigrants, driving down their wages, and surrounding them with environmentally lax Latin American cultural norms. The best way to kick-start this assimilation process is an immigration pause.” (VDARE, The Green Gag)
The sad politically incorrect fact is, for anyone concerned about population stabilization, culture does matter. The fragmentation, colonization and disintegration of a once dominant culture from which key conservationist values have been drawn cannot surely be a matter of indifference to environmentalists. Numbers of course are of paramount concern, but where people come from is as important as how many people come, if so many come that time is not allowed for their assimilation.
Assimilation, a dirty word in Canadian political lexicography, holds the key to lowering second-generation fertility rates, to breaking with identity politics and tribal loyalties, and to the absorption from the core culture of a conservationist ethic. Multiculturalism is an ideological riposte to the need for this essential process.
Multiculturalism is bad for the environment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
