In taking a fellow population-control campaigner to task for his implied suggestion that we give death “a helping hand” by ignoring the cries of starving Africans, “Jane” (name changed) argued that “ The Guardian is running a very popular campaign to help the Ugandan village of Katina. Imagine if we were to say, better to leave them to die and condemn the campaign as damaging to the (future) environment? To set ourselves as AGAINST decent life styles for the very poor now? …I believe arguments like those put forward by George are at the heart of why politicians and others back off from discussions about population. There are others - some despicably racist and sexist - which we need to confront head on, as they are a major handicap to promoting family planning… So for me it is indefensible to argue that more death is a solution to rising world population and it is a terrible, terrible mistake to allow the suggestion that it might be.”
To that reproach “George” responded with three questions.
“How do we recognise true compassion? If we can be tolerably certain that feeding 5,000 starving children will inevitably lead to 25,000 starving children in 20 years - isn't it more compassionate to leave the 5,000 unfed?
Of course it is not compassionate to let 5,000 starve.
My question was whether it was MORE compassionate than causing 25,000 to starve. Given the continued rate of births in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, I fear that your supply of compassion will not be matched by supplies of food- however much we try. Are you at all willing to recognise that many of those births have been made possible by many years of compassionate aid?”
I replied to “George” with an affirmation of his stance, saying that his logic had always been mine, and enjoyed the support of several people in my organization, most notably Brishen Hoff, the President of Biodiversity First. In one excerpt I stated:
(Jane’s) attitude is enormously frustrating. I just came back from an argument at the village. Parked in front of the entrance to the store was a table with pictures of hungry African children. The woman seated at the table was soliciting donations on behalf of some group (mostly like Christian) to “help” Africans. I gave her an earful, facts and figures. When I left and looked at the queue which formed in front of the lady with their money. Soft green dupes. If I had set up a rival table I not only would not get any money, but tremendous abuse.
I have written a lot of essays on this topic in the past two years. Let me sum up my attitude. “True compassion comes with a hard edge.”
What offends me most about Jane and her like, is that they are murderers. Murderers of other species. Why should I have more “compassion” for another human infant than for the primates who are being wiped out as we speak? More kids are born in any given day THAN ALL THE PRIMATES that exist in the entire world. Should I care more about the multitude of dandelions than the precious few roses that the weeds are crowding out? Oh let me hear it. “This man is a misanthrope who places non-human life above human life.” No, actually, the “compassionate” ones, the Geldoffs and the Stephen Lewis’ are the TRUE misanthropes. For nothing is more certain to end our days as homo sapiens than fish stocks and wildlife and wetlands and forest disappearing at their current rate due to overpopulation Want to save children? Then slash their numbers.
The point I am making here is that morality is a function of time and place. And that morality will not do us any good if we are all dead.
In a follow-up email I explained that in my meeting with Bill Ryerson, Bill actually favoured “Jane’s” position, which we sharply opposed. He said that it was not possible to persuade a local politician or tribal chief whose constituents were starving to adopt our prescriptions for family planning and population control if we declared our indifference to their death or our refusal to help them. While I understand the real politik of Bill’s approach, I developed my argument thusly (edited):
Consequences Matter More Than Our Foolhardy Sainthood
…. Oddly, in Ryerson’s 16 Myths about over population, he explicitly states that birth control will not accomplish our goal. Example, India had zero population growth in 1925. Why? The birth rate was much the same as it is now, but the DEATH rate was much higher. Improvements in health care delivery, sanitation, etc. have lowered it considerably. Result: population “boom” but not birth “boom” relative to past history.
Sorry, but I thought we are in the business of population stabilization and reduction, or are we clerics and moralizers? Would my pharmacist change my doctor’s prescription because he thought I wouldn’t swallow it? I don’t frankly care whether some tribal chief, mullah, bishop or government bureaucrat with a Swiss bank account is offended, insulted or outraged by my decision not to throw more aid at a problem he won’t control. Again, I am to be compared to a loans officer in a bank. I will NOT provide you with a loan “to feed your kids” if you have a track record of siring more and more mouths to feed without getting a vasectomy and cannot find the income to support them. Is that a death prescription? No, I am not the guy who is prescribing death. It is THE FATHER of those starving mouths who prescribed death by siring them. The moral ball is in HIS court, not mine. I am NOT morally obliged to give lunch money to my teenager if he continues to spend it on illegal drugs. We are NOT obliged to foster overpopulation BY ANY MEANS including the provision of unconditional food aid that is justified by “humanitarian” reasons.
And BTW, what about “other species reasons”? What moral right has “Jane” to prescribe death for the species who bear the brunt and bitter fruit of her “compassion” for her own species, one that is killing off 43,000 other species a year (or more than that)? Humanity is like a voracious cannibal that is consuming its own legs. As I am tired of saying, by killing off wildlife and biodiversity services we are committing suicide. How is the feeding of irresponsible breeders of the killer species compassionate or sensible in that context? Once again, I ask, would Jane and her allies in this debate, as surgeons in an operating room, refuse to amputate a gangrenous leg that threatens to infect and kill the patient because “every living organ is precious and has an equal right to live?” That was the point Bill was making to me. “Everyone one has an equal right to live”. His words verbatim to my recollection. With all due respect that sounds a lot like uncompromising anti-abortionists. Risk the mother’s life by forcing her to give birth because the fetus has an equal right to live.’’ I am sorry, but I cannot accept that position as “moral”. Politically marketable maybe, but in the long run counter-productive in my judgment. In Biodiversity First, our stated motto is “Rather ecologically correct than politically correct”, and that is still my guide post. I am fundamentally a truth-teller, not a salesman or a politician. Here are the brutal facts---I have presented them and my obligations are now discharged. I have written the prescription---‘tough love’--- and you may or may not choose to fill it. Once again, Canada is not a supplicant. WE have the aid and the leverage to impose conditions. Tell me why they should not be set and enforced.
Somewhere on my archive is an essay that I wrote that is appropriate here. It is about the character played by Jack Hawkins in “The Cruel Sea”. Just he was directing his destroyer to pick up freezing survivors from a U Boat attack, he spotted the submarine, and made a decision to plough right through the struggling swimmers to pursue it. He killed them all and was heckled by a sailor who called him “a bloody murderer”. In fact, the captain knew that if that U Boat was not sunk, it would go on to kill a great many more people than the number whom he just cut through. After all, it was not him who was responsible for the survivors’ demise---but the U Boat and its crew. He just chose not to rescue them in order to foreclose MORE misery on a GREATER scale. In my moral philosophy course of some 39 years ago, I wrote a paper in defense of what is known as “Rule Utilitarianism”, roughly the doing the greatest good for the greatest number. I have still not encountered an alternative morality to contest its logic. In our case, it would be more like “the greatest good for the SUSTAINABLE number”.
Doing the right thing is not the same as achieving the right results. Future generations of hungry mouths will not appreciate that their misery was the result of our “good and compassionate” intentions. Nor would the species that they extinguished to survive, if other species could be heard. I don’t want Jane as my surgeon. I would prefer a cold-hearted, calculating bastard who has the head to compute the math, measure the odds and come up with the right answers. Like the Hawkins’ character in “The Cruel Sea”.
Tim
Sunday, January 25, 2009
THE ECOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OF THE ONE-CHILD FAMILY IS ALSO BETTER FOR CHILDREN
Old myths die hard. If not aggressively challenged by the demands of logic and science at the onset, they tend to gain an irresistible momentum until they become too deeply rooted in the collective consciousness to be dislodged, even by irrefutably contrarian research.
Such has been the case with “The Theory of Demographic Transition”. Despite a head-on collision with the facts, it still reigns as conventional wisdom and persists like genital herpes immune to empirical medication. So the broadest spectrum of people from editorialists to taxi cab drivers alike parrot the cliché that rapid population growth will eventually be cured by economic prosperity. So the answer then is to ruin the developing nations with economic growth, depleting their natural capital and despoiling their environment to the point where the fertility rate drops.
It’s fundamentally a “General Westmoreland” strategy of achieving population stabilization and ecological equilibrium. Just as he endeavoured to destroy Vietnam in order to “save” it, growthists would destroy the environment in order to save it by making environmental clean-up “affordable” and convincing parents that a robust economy is a better guarantor of their security than having more children would be. Fine theory---except that there is no proven correlation between economic standing and fertility. But try telling that to the media or the business and commerce departments of any university. One might as well try to tell them that the Law of Gravity is a falsehood. Or that pension income cannot be sustainably supported by a demographic pyramid scam of generous birth incentives and mass immigration.
Equally vexing is the durability of the myth surrounding the “only” child. The stubborn notion that children of that kind are destined to be spoiled, lonely, maladjusted, narcissistic and bratty continues to trump one hundred studies that contest it. (Refer to the survey done by Dr. Toni Falbo of the Univerisity of Texas) The conventional wisdom is still in accord with the view of G. Stanley Hall, the founder of child psychology, who concluded in 1896 that being an “only” child is “a disease in itself”.
In fact the “only” child is just as equipped with maturity, emotional stability and social aptitude as his peers with siblings. They may even be more motivated to acquire social skills as they are more likely aware that companionship is not a given, and pre-school, play centres and team sports offer abundant opportunities to develop them.
More than that, “only” children prove to be slightly superior in verbal ability, academic accomplishment and self-esteem. The reason is simple. Parental resources are finite. Money, books and above all, time, exist in limited quantities. Additional siblings siphon off a share of parental involvement that otherwise would have been available to the one child instead. It is not surprising therefore, that “only” children exhibit higher intelligence and pursue more education than children with brothers and sisters. Susan Newman, a social psychologist at Rutgers, attributes the higher scores and higher educational attainment of “only” children to their monopoly of parental focus. “They have all their parents financial resources to them extra lessons, to get them SAT training, but more critical is the one-one time at the dinner table.”1
This is good news for the 20% of families ( more than double the percentage of a generation ago) that now raise but one child, who on average costs between $200,000 to $300,000 to rear by the age of 17, and substantially more if college is his or her ultimate destination. 2Yet amazingly, only 3% of Americans recently polled believe that one child is the optimum number for a family.3 Apparently the myth still persists.
If it is any consolation, the people of China share America’s view. Despite the crucially enormous dividend that their government’s stringent family planning policy of one-child-per-family has paid in saving the environment from an additional 400 million surplus consumers, research reveals that 70.7% of women would like to have two or more children. And fully 83% desire to have both a son and a daughter, which together coincidentally translate into “good” in Chinese characters. 4
Should the Chinese government lose its resolve to resist this ambition, and to continue to grow its population, our species is in even bigger trouble than it is presently. 1.36 billion people is surely a problem for China. But 1.36 billion rich Chinese people is everybody’s problem. That many formerly poor but suddenly prosperous Chinese now determined to chase the California dream would be a global calamity of the first order.
Consequently it is commonly thought the one-child-family, while an ecological necessity, is nevertheless a sociological tragedy. Now that we know that science has demolished the empirical falsehood of this fatal prejudice, there should be no inhibition in aggressively promoting the Chinese solution in every industrialized country, beginning with our own. We can debate alternative mechanisms for imposing birth limits and endlessly navigate the moral ambiguities and relative merits of public education, moral suasion, fiscal incentives or government fiats backed by draconian measures. But however we manage it, we must manage it and follow through with it post haste.
Even if from this moment forth, no female conceived a child, our planet would still be burdened with over 3 billion homo sapiens in four decades, barring of a pre-emptive die-off. Three billion is far, far, more than is sustainable. Forget climate change, water shortages or renewable technologies, our soils, mined to exhaustion, will simply not carry the weight of those numbers when fossil fuel-based fertilizers are unavailable.
Surely extinction is too high a price to pay for parental self-indulgence and fealty to a myth long over-due for the trash can. We must stop at one child. For their sake if nothing else.
Footnotes:
1. http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/only-child-syndrome-or-adavantage
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090116/twl-life-us-china-babies-9020220.html
Such has been the case with “The Theory of Demographic Transition”. Despite a head-on collision with the facts, it still reigns as conventional wisdom and persists like genital herpes immune to empirical medication. So the broadest spectrum of people from editorialists to taxi cab drivers alike parrot the cliché that rapid population growth will eventually be cured by economic prosperity. So the answer then is to ruin the developing nations with economic growth, depleting their natural capital and despoiling their environment to the point where the fertility rate drops.
It’s fundamentally a “General Westmoreland” strategy of achieving population stabilization and ecological equilibrium. Just as he endeavoured to destroy Vietnam in order to “save” it, growthists would destroy the environment in order to save it by making environmental clean-up “affordable” and convincing parents that a robust economy is a better guarantor of their security than having more children would be. Fine theory---except that there is no proven correlation between economic standing and fertility. But try telling that to the media or the business and commerce departments of any university. One might as well try to tell them that the Law of Gravity is a falsehood. Or that pension income cannot be sustainably supported by a demographic pyramid scam of generous birth incentives and mass immigration.
Equally vexing is the durability of the myth surrounding the “only” child. The stubborn notion that children of that kind are destined to be spoiled, lonely, maladjusted, narcissistic and bratty continues to trump one hundred studies that contest it. (Refer to the survey done by Dr. Toni Falbo of the Univerisity of Texas) The conventional wisdom is still in accord with the view of G. Stanley Hall, the founder of child psychology, who concluded in 1896 that being an “only” child is “a disease in itself”.
In fact the “only” child is just as equipped with maturity, emotional stability and social aptitude as his peers with siblings. They may even be more motivated to acquire social skills as they are more likely aware that companionship is not a given, and pre-school, play centres and team sports offer abundant opportunities to develop them.
More than that, “only” children prove to be slightly superior in verbal ability, academic accomplishment and self-esteem. The reason is simple. Parental resources are finite. Money, books and above all, time, exist in limited quantities. Additional siblings siphon off a share of parental involvement that otherwise would have been available to the one child instead. It is not surprising therefore, that “only” children exhibit higher intelligence and pursue more education than children with brothers and sisters. Susan Newman, a social psychologist at Rutgers, attributes the higher scores and higher educational attainment of “only” children to their monopoly of parental focus. “They have all their parents financial resources to them extra lessons, to get them SAT training, but more critical is the one-one time at the dinner table.”1
This is good news for the 20% of families ( more than double the percentage of a generation ago) that now raise but one child, who on average costs between $200,000 to $300,000 to rear by the age of 17, and substantially more if college is his or her ultimate destination. 2Yet amazingly, only 3% of Americans recently polled believe that one child is the optimum number for a family.3 Apparently the myth still persists.
If it is any consolation, the people of China share America’s view. Despite the crucially enormous dividend that their government’s stringent family planning policy of one-child-per-family has paid in saving the environment from an additional 400 million surplus consumers, research reveals that 70.7% of women would like to have two or more children. And fully 83% desire to have both a son and a daughter, which together coincidentally translate into “good” in Chinese characters. 4
Should the Chinese government lose its resolve to resist this ambition, and to continue to grow its population, our species is in even bigger trouble than it is presently. 1.36 billion people is surely a problem for China. But 1.36 billion rich Chinese people is everybody’s problem. That many formerly poor but suddenly prosperous Chinese now determined to chase the California dream would be a global calamity of the first order.
Consequently it is commonly thought the one-child-family, while an ecological necessity, is nevertheless a sociological tragedy. Now that we know that science has demolished the empirical falsehood of this fatal prejudice, there should be no inhibition in aggressively promoting the Chinese solution in every industrialized country, beginning with our own. We can debate alternative mechanisms for imposing birth limits and endlessly navigate the moral ambiguities and relative merits of public education, moral suasion, fiscal incentives or government fiats backed by draconian measures. But however we manage it, we must manage it and follow through with it post haste.
Even if from this moment forth, no female conceived a child, our planet would still be burdened with over 3 billion homo sapiens in four decades, barring of a pre-emptive die-off. Three billion is far, far, more than is sustainable. Forget climate change, water shortages or renewable technologies, our soils, mined to exhaustion, will simply not carry the weight of those numbers when fossil fuel-based fertilizers are unavailable.
Surely extinction is too high a price to pay for parental self-indulgence and fealty to a myth long over-due for the trash can. We must stop at one child. For their sake if nothing else.
Footnotes:
1. http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/only-child-syndrome-or-adavantage
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090116/twl-life-us-china-babies-9020220.html
Friday, January 16, 2009
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION COSTS NORTH CAROLINA $1.2 Billion Annually---More Comment
This is just one state in 50. Then consider the gateway states and what their costs are. Here are some additional points advanced by James S. of London, Ontario. They are points not often considered in computing the long-term effects of illegal immigration, which, I believe, should not be framed as an issue of legal vs. illegal immigrants, but for fiscal concerns, as an issue of unskilled vs. skilled immigrants. Illegals are almost universally unskilled. And in Canada, even the legal immigrants are overwhelmingly unskilled (80%). And so, one must stress, are the extended family members and children of those accepted into the country as “professionals”. The first pearl in a necklace may be authentic, but chain migration ensures that the rest of the necklace that is hauled into Canada is fake and economically worthless. Tim
“Immigrants have children too. It is quite possible that the children of immigrants are different from their parents in terms of their economic impact on the host country. If the parents are unskilled and over their lifetime in the new country receive more in social transfers than they pay in taxes, that doesn't mean that their children will do the same.
Unfortunately, in many countries the second generation of immigrants is a bigger burden than the first. The immigrants themselves may work at McJobs, but they are working. Their children often aren't working at all. Very few Hispanics who come to the US as adults become criminals, but their children are overrepresented among the criminals.(My note: also true of France, Holland, Sweden, and other European destinations.) Be that as it may, when considering the impact of immigration, it is best to take the long view.
If immigrants depress the wages of the native-born, then those native-born will also pay less tax. Our tax system is progressive, and for this reason, the bigger the share of low-income people, the lower tax revenues will be, everything else being equal.” James S.
“Immigrants have children too. It is quite possible that the children of immigrants are different from their parents in terms of their economic impact on the host country. If the parents are unskilled and over their lifetime in the new country receive more in social transfers than they pay in taxes, that doesn't mean that their children will do the same.
Unfortunately, in many countries the second generation of immigrants is a bigger burden than the first. The immigrants themselves may work at McJobs, but they are working. Their children often aren't working at all. Very few Hispanics who come to the US as adults become criminals, but their children are overrepresented among the criminals.(My note: also true of France, Holland, Sweden, and other European destinations.) Be that as it may, when considering the impact of immigration, it is best to take the long view.
If immigrants depress the wages of the native-born, then those native-born will also pay less tax. Our tax system is progressive, and for this reason, the bigger the share of low-income people, the lower tax revenues will be, everything else being equal.” James S.
COUNT ON "THE ECONOMIST" TO PAINT A GLOOMY PICTURE OF MIGRANTS' REPATRIATION
The Economist magazine, of all the sappy porous-borders rags in the world like “The Age” in Melbourne, or the New York Times, is the most articulate organ in the defiance of common sense.
I was interested, then, in reading how they would manage to put a bad spin on the fact that the global recession is pushing migrants, legal and illegal, back to the land from whence they came. One would think that this would be good news for any domestic workforce, and good news for citizens who don’t want to have the population density of a full sardine can. Or an environment dying from greenbelts developed for immigrant housing, the wildlife that is lost in such development, the extra GHG emitted from the unwanted occupation, the crowding of schools and hospitals, traffic congestion and the stress on infrastructure. Not to mention the increased opportunities now afforded to native born people to be no longer served by staff in language so badly contorted by unintelligible accents that customer “service” has become too often an excruciating test of patience.
The multicultural growthist, defacto one-party state has had, in its quest for employment “equity” (ie. foreign leap-frogging into coveted jobs) a talent for placing people of impenetrable third world dialects into positions where communication is decisively important. PA announcers, weather forecasters, internet support agents, telephone operators----all those jobs where getting the information clearly is crucial, have lately been the province of employees who might as well be telling you the information in ancient Aramaic. Or so it has seemed. It is as if every time I need computer help on the phone or need to hear from which port my plane is loading I get Peter Sellers as he was in “The Party”. Dialing “1” for English is no guarantee of a conversation in English. Pity that sign language can’t be seen on the phone or heard from a loudspeaker. How I fantasize about taking a job with Microsoft in India and giving internet customers bad advice in a Canadian accent that they can’t understand.
All of this, of course, is not a problem that should necessarily be laid at the feet of ESL employees. Rather it is the fault of employers who deliberately chose the cheapest labour source and the governments who oblige their wishes. The foreign employees themselves should not be the target of wrath or abuse. Canadians have experienced excellent service from so many people whose command of either of our two official languages is poor. But still, fluency in the mainstream language is an important job skill, and less than half of our migrants have had even that. This indicates that the motive of corporate Canada, as elsewhere, has never been to serve us, but serve their pocket book. Whatever job skills are lacking here, we have had the resources to train our own nationals. But population growth of the kind that we have suffered lately (1.08 % annually) soaks up dollars that might have been directed to education, training and the repair of infrastructure.
Back to the Economist. http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12932296 Following the template of PC journalism, they focus on the hardships of migrants feeling the pinch of recession rather than on the multitudes of native-born workers whose jobs have been displaced or incomes suppressed by the invasion, or who have endured crowded hospitals and schools in the bargain. Like the plight of the “Kigezi kids”, the poor young workers in London from southern Uganda. Countries that “enjoyed” rapid economic growth and who sucked in foreign labour are now shedding them. A third of Ireland’s 200,000 Polish workers are expected to leave within a year, while Britain and America will also likely see sharp drops in the foreign-born workforce. The Economist cites the International Labour Organization in voicing fears that 20 million jobs will soon be lost and that consequently “the rich will close the doors”--to the applause of our poor, a tiny fact that went unmentioned.
What is classic about the Economist’s analysis is that the deportation of illegal immigrants and the hostility of Britons and Americans to them is evidence of “xenophobia”. An anecdote about Russian skinhead attacks on innocent foreigners is a tried and true red herring. But is it fear of imported cheap labourers or fear of imported cheap labour? A distinction never entertained by PC commentators, as is the possibility that the working class may have a rational reason to fear or resent the loss of their livelihood.
The Economist then devotes six paragraphs to the negative impact that the loss of remittances will have on the homelands of immigrants, on countries who rely on the lucrative flow of migrant money sent home. And if immigration doors are slammed, nations with surplus populations risk social and political upheaval. Dear me, do they mean that those nations might have to come to grips with their overpopulation and finally break down the cultural barriers that impede a solution?
The Economist ends its eulogy for migrants facing re-emigration with a warning that closing borders will make it “tougher for migrants to flow where they are needed.” Needed by whom? And who engineered this need?
As a reader commented, “Pardon me, but I thought the point of a nation was to protect the well-being of its CITIZENS.
I was interested, then, in reading how they would manage to put a bad spin on the fact that the global recession is pushing migrants, legal and illegal, back to the land from whence they came. One would think that this would be good news for any domestic workforce, and good news for citizens who don’t want to have the population density of a full sardine can. Or an environment dying from greenbelts developed for immigrant housing, the wildlife that is lost in such development, the extra GHG emitted from the unwanted occupation, the crowding of schools and hospitals, traffic congestion and the stress on infrastructure. Not to mention the increased opportunities now afforded to native born people to be no longer served by staff in language so badly contorted by unintelligible accents that customer “service” has become too often an excruciating test of patience.
The multicultural growthist, defacto one-party state has had, in its quest for employment “equity” (ie. foreign leap-frogging into coveted jobs) a talent for placing people of impenetrable third world dialects into positions where communication is decisively important. PA announcers, weather forecasters, internet support agents, telephone operators----all those jobs where getting the information clearly is crucial, have lately been the province of employees who might as well be telling you the information in ancient Aramaic. Or so it has seemed. It is as if every time I need computer help on the phone or need to hear from which port my plane is loading I get Peter Sellers as he was in “The Party”. Dialing “1” for English is no guarantee of a conversation in English. Pity that sign language can’t be seen on the phone or heard from a loudspeaker. How I fantasize about taking a job with Microsoft in India and giving internet customers bad advice in a Canadian accent that they can’t understand.
All of this, of course, is not a problem that should necessarily be laid at the feet of ESL employees. Rather it is the fault of employers who deliberately chose the cheapest labour source and the governments who oblige their wishes. The foreign employees themselves should not be the target of wrath or abuse. Canadians have experienced excellent service from so many people whose command of either of our two official languages is poor. But still, fluency in the mainstream language is an important job skill, and less than half of our migrants have had even that. This indicates that the motive of corporate Canada, as elsewhere, has never been to serve us, but serve their pocket book. Whatever job skills are lacking here, we have had the resources to train our own nationals. But population growth of the kind that we have suffered lately (1.08 % annually) soaks up dollars that might have been directed to education, training and the repair of infrastructure.
Back to the Economist. http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12932296 Following the template of PC journalism, they focus on the hardships of migrants feeling the pinch of recession rather than on the multitudes of native-born workers whose jobs have been displaced or incomes suppressed by the invasion, or who have endured crowded hospitals and schools in the bargain. Like the plight of the “Kigezi kids”, the poor young workers in London from southern Uganda. Countries that “enjoyed” rapid economic growth and who sucked in foreign labour are now shedding them. A third of Ireland’s 200,000 Polish workers are expected to leave within a year, while Britain and America will also likely see sharp drops in the foreign-born workforce. The Economist cites the International Labour Organization in voicing fears that 20 million jobs will soon be lost and that consequently “the rich will close the doors”--to the applause of our poor, a tiny fact that went unmentioned.
What is classic about the Economist’s analysis is that the deportation of illegal immigrants and the hostility of Britons and Americans to them is evidence of “xenophobia”. An anecdote about Russian skinhead attacks on innocent foreigners is a tried and true red herring. But is it fear of imported cheap labourers or fear of imported cheap labour? A distinction never entertained by PC commentators, as is the possibility that the working class may have a rational reason to fear or resent the loss of their livelihood.
The Economist then devotes six paragraphs to the negative impact that the loss of remittances will have on the homelands of immigrants, on countries who rely on the lucrative flow of migrant money sent home. And if immigration doors are slammed, nations with surplus populations risk social and political upheaval. Dear me, do they mean that those nations might have to come to grips with their overpopulation and finally break down the cultural barriers that impede a solution?
The Economist ends its eulogy for migrants facing re-emigration with a warning that closing borders will make it “tougher for migrants to flow where they are needed.” Needed by whom? And who engineered this need?
As a reader commented, “Pardon me, but I thought the point of a nation was to protect the well-being of its CITIZENS.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
ETHNIC CLEANSING IN CONNECTICUT: McDonald's Serves the American Working Class Pink Slips With Their Burgers
When the “Concerned Citizens for Immigration Reform” monitored 152 McDonald’s franchises in Connecticut they discovered that Hispanics were over-represented as staff 6 to 9 times in relation to their proportion of the general population of the state. Missing in action for the most part were African Americans, Euro-Americans, seniors and high school students who formerly depended on those jobs to scrape by or supplement the family income. They found that Hispanics accounted for 87% of McDonald’s employees in Fairfield County and 64% in New Haven---quite an achievement for a demographic that comprised just 10% of the population at the time of the survey. http://www.alipac.us/article757.html
McDonald’s of course would not over-represent Hispanics because they love Mexican culture or have any plans to switch to a Mexican menu. They simply love the bottom line: cheap wages and low benefits. A business motive that is as old as the hills, only in this era, that motive is dressed up as a quest for cultural diversity and liberal tolerance, and any opposition to it is depicted as nasty, nativist and bigoted. One wonders how “diverse” MexAmerica will be in 2040 with 450 million people living without the diversity of wildlife, farmland or water and the absence of a 1st amendment to do anything about it because free speech has long been sacrificed on the altar of ethnic harmony.
Too many Canadians, especially those who engineer public opinion, elect governments and frame immigration policy, believe that Canada also needs a “McJob” fix to plug a gap in skilled labour or supply the demographic base for an aged workforce that will need pension and medical support. They seem willfully ignorant of consistent studies that demonstrate that unskilled workers, who comprise the vast portion of immigrants legal or illegal on both sides of the border, are unable to pay enough income tax to even reimburse government coffers for the services they consume, never mind subsidize the needs of others.
According to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation each family of illegal immigrants, almost universally unskilled, cost American taxpayers some $22,000 annually in services provided minus taxes paid.
Some $338 billion in expenditures were paid out in that same year (2007) in total for an illegal immigrant population that was conservatively estimated to be 12 million in number. Other studies, mostly done by Edwin Rubenstein, only confirmed this portrait of a crushing unskilled immigrant burden.
Herbert Grubel, economics professor emeritus of Simon Fraser University, did a report for the Fraser Institute that painted the Canadian problem in similar colours. For the period studied, 1990-2002, immigration cost taxpayers $18.3 billion in 2002 alone. Why? A politically driven immigration selection process that favoured the recruitment of unskilled workers, who comprise an incredible 80% of the total intake. Many are brought in under the extended family wing of the skilled or professional migrants who sponsor them, and most of those deemed “refugees” lack meaningful skills. Incredibly, most apparently lack the most important vocational skill of all---fluency in at least one of the two official languages. Of 600,000 admitted in 1998-2000, only 43% spoke English or French.
American commentary suggests that it takes on average the salaries of 2-3 workers 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. We are merely trying to build a welfare state on a foundation of imported low-wage quick sand---and killing the environment in the process.
And if a skills shortage does indeed exist, uncorroborated as it is by any thorough and objective inventory, it is one chronic to a growth economy that ultimately must be abandoned in favour of a steady-state model. In the meantime, immediate needs could be satisfied with an immigration quota 20% or less of its present level and targeted to those who could assist us rather than the reverse, therefore delivering more bang for the ecological “buck” we are paying by allowing any increment to our hyper-consumer society. The money saved from abandoning mass immigration and population growth, the formula for economic success in other jurisdictions like Japan, money that according to Grubel is equivalent to what Canadians spend on health care, could be deployed in training Canadians to fill Canadian jobs. And any surplus monies could be more cost-effectively spent on increasing our foreign aid budget to help potential immigrants where they should be helped---in their own countries, especially if the aid was tied to family planning.
Let McDonald’s hire locals at decent wages and train them to cook real food at realistic prices. If they can’t afford that, they shouldn’t be in business.
McDonald’s of course would not over-represent Hispanics because they love Mexican culture or have any plans to switch to a Mexican menu. They simply love the bottom line: cheap wages and low benefits. A business motive that is as old as the hills, only in this era, that motive is dressed up as a quest for cultural diversity and liberal tolerance, and any opposition to it is depicted as nasty, nativist and bigoted. One wonders how “diverse” MexAmerica will be in 2040 with 450 million people living without the diversity of wildlife, farmland or water and the absence of a 1st amendment to do anything about it because free speech has long been sacrificed on the altar of ethnic harmony.
Too many Canadians, especially those who engineer public opinion, elect governments and frame immigration policy, believe that Canada also needs a “McJob” fix to plug a gap in skilled labour or supply the demographic base for an aged workforce that will need pension and medical support. They seem willfully ignorant of consistent studies that demonstrate that unskilled workers, who comprise the vast portion of immigrants legal or illegal on both sides of the border, are unable to pay enough income tax to even reimburse government coffers for the services they consume, never mind subsidize the needs of others.
According to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation each family of illegal immigrants, almost universally unskilled, cost American taxpayers some $22,000 annually in services provided minus taxes paid.
Some $338 billion in expenditures were paid out in that same year (2007) in total for an illegal immigrant population that was conservatively estimated to be 12 million in number. Other studies, mostly done by Edwin Rubenstein, only confirmed this portrait of a crushing unskilled immigrant burden.
Herbert Grubel, economics professor emeritus of Simon Fraser University, did a report for the Fraser Institute that painted the Canadian problem in similar colours. For the period studied, 1990-2002, immigration cost taxpayers $18.3 billion in 2002 alone. Why? A politically driven immigration selection process that favoured the recruitment of unskilled workers, who comprise an incredible 80% of the total intake. Many are brought in under the extended family wing of the skilled or professional migrants who sponsor them, and most of those deemed “refugees” lack meaningful skills. Incredibly, most apparently lack the most important vocational skill of all---fluency in at least one of the two official languages. Of 600,000 admitted in 1998-2000, only 43% spoke English or French.
American commentary suggests that it takes on average the salaries of 2-3 workers 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. We are merely trying to build a welfare state on a foundation of imported low-wage quick sand---and killing the environment in the process.
And if a skills shortage does indeed exist, uncorroborated as it is by any thorough and objective inventory, it is one chronic to a growth economy that ultimately must be abandoned in favour of a steady-state model. In the meantime, immediate needs could be satisfied with an immigration quota 20% or less of its present level and targeted to those who could assist us rather than the reverse, therefore delivering more bang for the ecological “buck” we are paying by allowing any increment to our hyper-consumer society. The money saved from abandoning mass immigration and population growth, the formula for economic success in other jurisdictions like Japan, money that according to Grubel is equivalent to what Canadians spend on health care, could be deployed in training Canadians to fill Canadian jobs. And any surplus monies could be more cost-effectively spent on increasing our foreign aid budget to help potential immigrants where they should be helped---in their own countries, especially if the aid was tied to family planning.
Let McDonald’s hire locals at decent wages and train them to cook real food at realistic prices. If they can’t afford that, they shouldn’t be in business.
NEWS FLASH TO CBC "GREEN LIVING" DRUM-BEATERS: A "Million Acts of Green" won't compensate for 33 Million Acts of Canadian Consumption
Mother Corp doesn’t get it. “A million acts of green” do not compensate for the collective consumption of 33 million Canadians and their act of breathing. Projecting the methodology of Chris Clugston’s “Societal Overextension Analysis” eco-footprint analysis of the United States (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46892) upon Canada, 33 million Canadian Ghandis would have to suffice with the annual income of Cambodians ($1800). Unless they had the ambition to starve to death, the heating bill alone would absorb most of their income, and the world would not see many of them in loin cloths. Fur coats from dead animals might become fashionable again. But killing animals to wear their coats, while discarding the meat, seems too incongruous even for Greens.
Mother Nature doesn’t award brownie points, that is , “greenie” points, for virtuously austere living. It doesn’t care about boy scouts who follow the Bible of ‘green living”, or the multitude of ways for individuals and businesses to reduce, reuse and conserve their way to “sustainability”. Its scoreboard simply records Total consumption. Number of people times their individual consumption rates. That’s it.
Whether 33 million consumers live like Cambodians or whether there are only 1 million Canadian consumers left to consume at present levels is a matter of complete indifference to the environment. Take your pick. But one thing it is adamant about. For every extra Canadian, whatever his origins, consumption would have to be reduced in a measure equivalent to the contribution of the new Canadian. Within reasonable perameters, population and consumption are interchangeable qualia. One cannot enjoin to “conserve, reduce and re-recycle” while at the same time throw out the welcome mat to immigrants who will quadruple their GHG emissions or sire a litter of three more children, each of whom, as Canadians will emit 23 tonnes of green house gases annually and consume 3.7 million pounds of metals, minerals and fuels in his or her lifetime if present trends continue.
The limits of green lifestyle habits can be illustrated clearly by a study conducted by the Stockholm Institute that found that one new citizen either born or admitted as an immigrant to Britain, wiped out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling. Put differently, a lifetime of responsible recycling would only make up for one and one-quarter per cent of the damage(as it relates to waste volume) done by a new citizen. Even if all of domestic waste was recycled, only 10% of the waste contributed by an additional citizen would be counter-acted. (http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=2883)
Yet everywhere now we are blitzed by Green Living propaganda from every angle. Environmental NGOs like the David Suzuki Foundation, a benefactor of the Royal Bank of Canada, a powerful lobbyist for dramatic increases in immigration, advise corporations on how they may “green” their company. They will tell them to ban styrofoam, install recycling bins in every room, buy disposable cups and paper plates, remanufactured toner cartridges, use renewable electricity, eco-friendly appliances and light bulbs, offer bicycle storage, reduce paper (while buying paper cups and plates), and choosing green business partners. But the David Suzuki Foundation will not tell businesses or anyone else to work for lower population levels because, as one of their representatives, stated, the DSF doesn’t have the resources to deal with the population issue. After all, folks, what does population growth in Canada or the world have to do with the environment? It only has to do with plans of big donors like the Royal Bank to vastly increase our population.
So instead of growing at 1.08 % per annum, the fastest population growth rate of all G8 countries, we will grow at 1.5% yearly but somehow reduce our collective ecological footprint by running around using paper cups, bicycles and florescent light bulbs. If businesses follow these green living prescriptions, according to the DSF, they will achieve several “competitive advantages”, including higher productivity from employees who become loyal and inspired from the cosmetic changes. Just what the Royal Bank wants to hear. It can go ahead and continue financing the development of the subdivisions that grow over Canada’s prime farm land thanks to runaway immigration quotas that the DSF and other environmental NGOs on the take will not question, but at the same time “Go Green” at the office and feel good about it too.
More than that, they have the taxpayer-funded State Propaganda Machine, the CBC, to befuddle the masses by disguising this ecological crime spree with a Green Fog of social responsibility that all patriotic Canadians now can be a part of. Business and government working hand in hand. A masterpiece of deception and collusion.
Mother Nature doesn’t award brownie points, that is , “greenie” points, for virtuously austere living. It doesn’t care about boy scouts who follow the Bible of ‘green living”, or the multitude of ways for individuals and businesses to reduce, reuse and conserve their way to “sustainability”. Its scoreboard simply records Total consumption. Number of people times their individual consumption rates. That’s it.
Whether 33 million consumers live like Cambodians or whether there are only 1 million Canadian consumers left to consume at present levels is a matter of complete indifference to the environment. Take your pick. But one thing it is adamant about. For every extra Canadian, whatever his origins, consumption would have to be reduced in a measure equivalent to the contribution of the new Canadian. Within reasonable perameters, population and consumption are interchangeable qualia. One cannot enjoin to “conserve, reduce and re-recycle” while at the same time throw out the welcome mat to immigrants who will quadruple their GHG emissions or sire a litter of three more children, each of whom, as Canadians will emit 23 tonnes of green house gases annually and consume 3.7 million pounds of metals, minerals and fuels in his or her lifetime if present trends continue.
The limits of green lifestyle habits can be illustrated clearly by a study conducted by the Stockholm Institute that found that one new citizen either born or admitted as an immigrant to Britain, wiped out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling. Put differently, a lifetime of responsible recycling would only make up for one and one-quarter per cent of the damage(as it relates to waste volume) done by a new citizen. Even if all of domestic waste was recycled, only 10% of the waste contributed by an additional citizen would be counter-acted. (http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=2883)
Yet everywhere now we are blitzed by Green Living propaganda from every angle. Environmental NGOs like the David Suzuki Foundation, a benefactor of the Royal Bank of Canada, a powerful lobbyist for dramatic increases in immigration, advise corporations on how they may “green” their company. They will tell them to ban styrofoam, install recycling bins in every room, buy disposable cups and paper plates, remanufactured toner cartridges, use renewable electricity, eco-friendly appliances and light bulbs, offer bicycle storage, reduce paper (while buying paper cups and plates), and choosing green business partners. But the David Suzuki Foundation will not tell businesses or anyone else to work for lower population levels because, as one of their representatives, stated, the DSF doesn’t have the resources to deal with the population issue. After all, folks, what does population growth in Canada or the world have to do with the environment? It only has to do with plans of big donors like the Royal Bank to vastly increase our population.
So instead of growing at 1.08 % per annum, the fastest population growth rate of all G8 countries, we will grow at 1.5% yearly but somehow reduce our collective ecological footprint by running around using paper cups, bicycles and florescent light bulbs. If businesses follow these green living prescriptions, according to the DSF, they will achieve several “competitive advantages”, including higher productivity from employees who become loyal and inspired from the cosmetic changes. Just what the Royal Bank wants to hear. It can go ahead and continue financing the development of the subdivisions that grow over Canada’s prime farm land thanks to runaway immigration quotas that the DSF and other environmental NGOs on the take will not question, but at the same time “Go Green” at the office and feel good about it too.
More than that, they have the taxpayer-funded State Propaganda Machine, the CBC, to befuddle the masses by disguising this ecological crime spree with a Green Fog of social responsibility that all patriotic Canadians now can be a part of. Business and government working hand in hand. A masterpiece of deception and collusion.
REDUCED POPULATION ECONOMICS: A Dialogue of the OPT UK Forum
--- In mailto:optimumpopulation%40yahoogroups.com, wrote: simon.optblog@googlemail.com > Hi all,> > Great to find OPT and this forum! I've been thinking a lot about the> future recently, what with the financial crisis, and longer term the> worries I have for my children's futures. I'm 33, have 3 kids of which> the eldest is 5 and I work in semiconductor/chip design.> > I have been doing a lot of independent research on the issues of> demographics and economics, which has led me to the followingconclusions:> >
1) I think that the population of the developed world is going to> moderate much quicker than people think - probably along the lines of the UN 'low' scenario. (Dan)It's not just the developed world we're worried about. (Simon)>
2) I think the current financial crisis is partly due to the falling> population growth rates and hence lower gdp growth of the developed> world and monetary economy since the 60's. The 2008 credit bubble may have been a mistaken attempt to stave off this outcome. (Dan)The alternative of growing population growth rates would be worse. (Simon)>
3) History shows that tough economic times lead to lowered fertility,> and times are about to get very tough indeed as the boomers retire and> depression bites, which will in turn lead to even lower fertility in> the developed and developing world. (Dan)> Good, hope so. Though that doesn't explain why the poorest countrieshave the highest birth rates. (Simon)
> It seems to me that once population growth of the monetary economy> really slows or stops, then GDP growth will basically stop which will> result in our current financial system - which needs growth to remain> stable -stop working completely. This can happen even while overall> population continues to grow worldwide, and I expect that it will take> the form of repeated recessions that will follow any recovery from the> present one. (Dan)Peak oil and climate change won't help either. (Simon)> >
However on the upside the imminent threat to our financial> infrastructure should help to focus minds on how to organise a> political economy which is not predicated on continued population and 'economic' growth. > > I have plenty more ideas along these lines but for now I'll leave it> here by way of an introduction. I'd love to be able to discuss some of> these trends in more detail. (Dan)
Go for it (Simon)> > Regards to all,> Dan
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adrian Stott replies
Daniel et al.,> 1) I think that the population of the developed world is going to> moderate much quicker than people think - probably along the lines of the UN 'low' scenario. (Daniel)What makes you conclude that? I fear that the only reason it is likely to be the case is if one or more of the horsemen increase death rates. Which is worryingly likely. (Adrian)>
2) I think the current financial crisis is partly due to the falling> population growth rates and hence lower gdp growth of the developed> world and monetary economy since the 60's. The 2008 credit bubble may have been a mistaken attempt to stave off this outcome. (Daniel)I doubt that. I think a lot of it was due to unwise financial engineering. The loss of confidence this generated led to bouts of selling of both assets and commodities, resulting in large price drops and thus significant reductions of personal wealth. This then produced declines in demand for manufactured goods. I think none of that chain was much affected by population growth rates.OTOH, I'm confident that the selling of commodities has been greatly overdone. As population continues to increase, demand for commodities (especially food-related ones) is bound to increase too, while increases of supply will become ever more expensive to produce. (Adrian)>
3) History shows that tough economic times lead to lowered fertility,> and times are about to get very tough indeed as the boomers retire and> depression bites, which will in turn lead to even lower fertility in> the developed and developing world. (Daniel)I think that "tough times" have not been noticeably reducing fertility in poor countries, where people are still having lots of kids even when living at subsistence levels. > > It seems to me that once population growth of the monetary economy> really slows or stops, then GDP growth will basically stop which will> result in our current financial system - which needs growth to remain> stable -stop working completely. I suggest that the the key statistic is not total GDP growth, but GDP growth/capita, which, if positive, represents an increase in standard of living. That can occur without population growth, as a result of demand for a better standard of living and to increases in productivity. (Adrian)>
However on the upside the imminent threat to our financial> infrastructure should help to focus minds on how to organise a> political economy which is not predicated on continued population and 'economic' growth. (Daniel)
You wish! (Adrian)Adrian Stottmailto:reply%40sdfg.co.uk
1) I think that the population of the developed world is going to> moderate much quicker than people think - probably along the lines of the UN 'low' scenario. (Dan)It's not just the developed world we're worried about. (Simon)>
2) I think the current financial crisis is partly due to the falling> population growth rates and hence lower gdp growth of the developed> world and monetary economy since the 60's. The 2008 credit bubble may have been a mistaken attempt to stave off this outcome. (Dan)The alternative of growing population growth rates would be worse. (Simon)>
3) History shows that tough economic times lead to lowered fertility,> and times are about to get very tough indeed as the boomers retire and> depression bites, which will in turn lead to even lower fertility in> the developed and developing world. (Dan)> Good, hope so. Though that doesn't explain why the poorest countrieshave the highest birth rates. (Simon)
> It seems to me that once population growth of the monetary economy> really slows or stops, then GDP growth will basically stop which will> result in our current financial system - which needs growth to remain> stable -stop working completely. This can happen even while overall> population continues to grow worldwide, and I expect that it will take> the form of repeated recessions that will follow any recovery from the> present one. (Dan)Peak oil and climate change won't help either. (Simon)> >
However on the upside the imminent threat to our financial> infrastructure should help to focus minds on how to organise a> political economy which is not predicated on continued population and 'economic' growth. > > I have plenty more ideas along these lines but for now I'll leave it> here by way of an introduction. I'd love to be able to discuss some of> these trends in more detail. (Dan)
Go for it (Simon)> > Regards to all,> Dan
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adrian Stott replies
Daniel et al.,> 1) I think that the population of the developed world is going to> moderate much quicker than people think - probably along the lines of the UN 'low' scenario. (Daniel)What makes you conclude that? I fear that the only reason it is likely to be the case is if one or more of the horsemen increase death rates. Which is worryingly likely. (Adrian)>
2) I think the current financial crisis is partly due to the falling> population growth rates and hence lower gdp growth of the developed> world and monetary economy since the 60's. The 2008 credit bubble may have been a mistaken attempt to stave off this outcome. (Daniel)I doubt that. I think a lot of it was due to unwise financial engineering. The loss of confidence this generated led to bouts of selling of both assets and commodities, resulting in large price drops and thus significant reductions of personal wealth. This then produced declines in demand for manufactured goods. I think none of that chain was much affected by population growth rates.OTOH, I'm confident that the selling of commodities has been greatly overdone. As population continues to increase, demand for commodities (especially food-related ones) is bound to increase too, while increases of supply will become ever more expensive to produce. (Adrian)>
3) History shows that tough economic times lead to lowered fertility,> and times are about to get very tough indeed as the boomers retire and> depression bites, which will in turn lead to even lower fertility in> the developed and developing world. (Daniel)I think that "tough times" have not been noticeably reducing fertility in poor countries, where people are still having lots of kids even when living at subsistence levels. > > It seems to me that once population growth of the monetary economy> really slows or stops, then GDP growth will basically stop which will> result in our current financial system - which needs growth to remain> stable -stop working completely. I suggest that the the key statistic is not total GDP growth, but GDP growth/capita, which, if positive, represents an increase in standard of living. That can occur without population growth, as a result of demand for a better standard of living and to increases in productivity. (Adrian)>
However on the upside the imminent threat to our financial> infrastructure should help to focus minds on how to organise a> political economy which is not predicated on continued population and 'economic' growth. (Daniel)
You wish! (Adrian)Adrian Stottmailto:reply%40sdfg.co.uk
RESCUING THE CORE OF 50'S SOCIALISM: My CONSERVATIVE project
In a nutshell: an authentic conservative, one who wishes to preserve nature and the best of the social order, must oppose corporate capitalism, which is inherently dynamic and subversive of things. In this opposition, he will find enemies both in the so-called "left-wing, progressive, feminist" camp and the so-called "conservative, right-wing growthist camp", which ironically work together, as a tag team in destroying our quality of life. The state was once regarded as our shield and agent of social and economic equity. In fact, it is a weapon of oppression and manufactured consent that the left unwittingly perpetuates by bloating it with the revenues of an unsustainable fossil fuel economy. When that economy collapses and nothing remotely adequate can substitute to support the bureaucratic and inefficient albatross we built, people will suddenly be forced to look to themselves for help. Then there will be the two real left/right options.
The right wing fantasy is every man for himself like the homesteader of Hollywood westerns. But the reality of survival will be the same as it really was a century or more ago. Cooperation between families in egalitarian communities that are more or less self-sufficient. That is the socialism Jack Layton and company should be talking about. Not encouraging people to become yet even more dependent on state services. More daycare space. More child care benefits. More injections for a broken health care model. More social programs. arts subsidies, multicultural services--- a shopping list confined only by the imagination . That is not empowering people, but disempowering them and making them helpless before the coming storm and long emergency. Rejection of the culture of dependency is the recipe for survival, better mental health and the preservation of what little is left of our natural environment.
That is the message I am trying to convey here and in the essays previous to that. If it is not clear, ignore them and let me try again. Or find someone who better articulates it. But please allow someone in some forum to present a social-conservative, anti-industrial, anti-globalist and anti-corporate-state-capitalist position that many people of my generation intuitively support. We know something has gone terribly wrong, and like Winston Smith, we know that the bad old days were not nearly as bad as the Ministry of Truth says they were in relation to the “liberation” that we enjoy now. We still believe in the same ideals, but know that nothing in any mainstream political program represents them. The state is no longer to be trusted. Don’t look to it for help or solutions. Shun it and those whose careers depend on its perpetuation. Abandon ship.
Tim Murray
January 2/09
“To fight those who would control me, I will happily foreclose any options to control them”. TM (Statement of Personal Principles).
The right wing fantasy is every man for himself like the homesteader of Hollywood westerns. But the reality of survival will be the same as it really was a century or more ago. Cooperation between families in egalitarian communities that are more or less self-sufficient. That is the socialism Jack Layton and company should be talking about. Not encouraging people to become yet even more dependent on state services. More daycare space. More child care benefits. More injections for a broken health care model. More social programs. arts subsidies, multicultural services--- a shopping list confined only by the imagination . That is not empowering people, but disempowering them and making them helpless before the coming storm and long emergency. Rejection of the culture of dependency is the recipe for survival, better mental health and the preservation of what little is left of our natural environment.
That is the message I am trying to convey here and in the essays previous to that. If it is not clear, ignore them and let me try again. Or find someone who better articulates it. But please allow someone in some forum to present a social-conservative, anti-industrial, anti-globalist and anti-corporate-state-capitalist position that many people of my generation intuitively support. We know something has gone terribly wrong, and like Winston Smith, we know that the bad old days were not nearly as bad as the Ministry of Truth says they were in relation to the “liberation” that we enjoy now. We still believe in the same ideals, but know that nothing in any mainstream political program represents them. The state is no longer to be trusted. Don’t look to it for help or solutions. Shun it and those whose careers depend on its perpetuation. Abandon ship.
Tim Murray
January 2/09
“To fight those who would control me, I will happily foreclose any options to control them”. TM (Statement of Personal Principles).
WHY NOT BE INHUMANE?
In the most perniciously inane but representative comment that a socialist politician could make, an MP from London, Ontario told us that “since there is no humane method of reducing global population, we must look to alternative solutions to reduce ecological impacts.” Of course, as a leftist, she claimed that those solutions involved redistributive justice between classes, nations and hemispheres, all underwritten by her assumption that enough exists to indefinitely satisfy the needs of all.
Her contention was idiotic on two counts. Firstly, her premises are patently false. The “humane” avenues to population stabilization and reduction have not been exhausted. Access to family planning is still not available to vast numbers of women, who remain uneducated and un-empowered. Pro-natalist incentives are the policy of too many governments and foreign aid is not made conditional on birth control. Population control has not failed because it has not really been tried, China and India notwithstanding.
Her position is also nonsensical for another reason. Suppose she is right. Suppose there is no effective, humane method of achieving population control. So what? Why not then try “inhumane” methods? The Pianka solution, for example. Killing off 90% of the world’s population with the distribution of an air-born virus sounds horrifying to most, but less horrifying, surely, than our total extinction. Would you not amputate your gangrenous legs to save your life? Humanitarianism is a poor excuse for mass suicide---the ultimate penalty for our collective unwillingness to deal with overpopulation.
I am the captain of a lifeboat filled beyond its safe carrying capacity. Our ship went down and the frigid waters are littered with hundreds of desperately cold swimmers. Unfortunately our boat is designed to be seaworthy to a limit of only 20 passengers. In an impulsive fit of irresponsibility, I launched it with 30 aboard due to my too human weakness to let emotion prevail over rational judgment.
Now, in the face of an impending storm, I finally summon the courage to order at gunpoint ten passengers to jump overboard. If the boat doesn’t lose ten people, all 30 of us will drown, that is a certainty. It is a utilitarian judgment call.
Should I relent because a politician on board tells me that this is not a humane method of saving the passengers? Would standing pat with 30 passengers and eventually seeing them all drown in the approaching inclemency be more humane?
Incredibly, some would answer in the affirmative. Some in our boat even think that I should not only not jettison ten people but I should endeavour to pick up ten more. Why? Because we have a “humane” reputation to uphold. Or because of those swimmers calling out for help, most are “people of colour”, “asylum-seekers”, “the persecuted”, “environmental refugees” or people whose skills are needed for our long journey to safety.
One of the bleeding heart lobbyists is a famous Canadian ecologist of world stature who cited Canadian criminal law and demanded that I assist those who are in need, especially when their fate allegedly resulted from my misjudgment as the captain of the sunken ship. I was unconvincing in my attempt to make this man understand that the Criminal Law of Canada did not supersede the Law of Gravity. Number of people, size of life boat. All other considerations are irrelevant.
The notion that we can only deal with problems in an “humane” fashion is a curious one. Had that concept prevailed in the six years after September 1939 it is doubtful that you would be reading this rant in English right now. A “humane” way to bomb the Ruhr? To destroy the Wehrmacht? To liberate the camps? It seems to me that in facing an evil one employs any method that is necessary to its defeat. No more, no less. Was there any evil worse, more lethal , in our history, than the overpopulation which now drives climate change and biodiversity collapse?
Her contention was idiotic on two counts. Firstly, her premises are patently false. The “humane” avenues to population stabilization and reduction have not been exhausted. Access to family planning is still not available to vast numbers of women, who remain uneducated and un-empowered. Pro-natalist incentives are the policy of too many governments and foreign aid is not made conditional on birth control. Population control has not failed because it has not really been tried, China and India notwithstanding.
Her position is also nonsensical for another reason. Suppose she is right. Suppose there is no effective, humane method of achieving population control. So what? Why not then try “inhumane” methods? The Pianka solution, for example. Killing off 90% of the world’s population with the distribution of an air-born virus sounds horrifying to most, but less horrifying, surely, than our total extinction. Would you not amputate your gangrenous legs to save your life? Humanitarianism is a poor excuse for mass suicide---the ultimate penalty for our collective unwillingness to deal with overpopulation.
I am the captain of a lifeboat filled beyond its safe carrying capacity. Our ship went down and the frigid waters are littered with hundreds of desperately cold swimmers. Unfortunately our boat is designed to be seaworthy to a limit of only 20 passengers. In an impulsive fit of irresponsibility, I launched it with 30 aboard due to my too human weakness to let emotion prevail over rational judgment.
Now, in the face of an impending storm, I finally summon the courage to order at gunpoint ten passengers to jump overboard. If the boat doesn’t lose ten people, all 30 of us will drown, that is a certainty. It is a utilitarian judgment call.
Should I relent because a politician on board tells me that this is not a humane method of saving the passengers? Would standing pat with 30 passengers and eventually seeing them all drown in the approaching inclemency be more humane?
Incredibly, some would answer in the affirmative. Some in our boat even think that I should not only not jettison ten people but I should endeavour to pick up ten more. Why? Because we have a “humane” reputation to uphold. Or because of those swimmers calling out for help, most are “people of colour”, “asylum-seekers”, “the persecuted”, “environmental refugees” or people whose skills are needed for our long journey to safety.
One of the bleeding heart lobbyists is a famous Canadian ecologist of world stature who cited Canadian criminal law and demanded that I assist those who are in need, especially when their fate allegedly resulted from my misjudgment as the captain of the sunken ship. I was unconvincing in my attempt to make this man understand that the Criminal Law of Canada did not supersede the Law of Gravity. Number of people, size of life boat. All other considerations are irrelevant.
The notion that we can only deal with problems in an “humane” fashion is a curious one. Had that concept prevailed in the six years after September 1939 it is doubtful that you would be reading this rant in English right now. A “humane” way to bomb the Ruhr? To destroy the Wehrmacht? To liberate the camps? It seems to me that in facing an evil one employs any method that is necessary to its defeat. No more, no less. Was there any evil worse, more lethal , in our history, than the overpopulation which now drives climate change and biodiversity collapse?
DEFINITION OF A CANADIAN NEWBORN
It has long been an annual ritual each New Years Day for local Canadian media outlets to announce the winner of the unofficial “First Baby Born in the New Year” derby. So for those of you who may be uninformed as to just what exactly a Canadian newborn is, this is my definition:
“A Canadian newborn is yet another earth-trampling shit machine off the assembly line poised to become a hyper-consumer in the madly unsustainable shopping mall culture of a country which preaches diversity but practices conformity of thought and behaviour.”
Each one of God’s miracles will come to emit about 23 metric tonnes of green house gases on average and consume about 3.7 million pounds of minerals, metals and fuels in his lifetime, assuming that this binge is not cut short by ecological or economic collapse from resource shortages.
A New Canadian, by any port of entry, is the very last thing the environment needs, nationally or globally.
Now do you understand why I was never much of a “ladies man?”
“A Canadian newborn is yet another earth-trampling shit machine off the assembly line poised to become a hyper-consumer in the madly unsustainable shopping mall culture of a country which preaches diversity but practices conformity of thought and behaviour.”
Each one of God’s miracles will come to emit about 23 metric tonnes of green house gases on average and consume about 3.7 million pounds of minerals, metals and fuels in his lifetime, assuming that this binge is not cut short by ecological or economic collapse from resource shortages.
A New Canadian, by any port of entry, is the very last thing the environment needs, nationally or globally.
Now do you understand why I was never much of a “ladies man?”
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, January 13, 2009
WHO WINS THE NORTH AMERICAN STUPID TROPHY?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the dumbest North American nation of them all? Despite the documented statistics presented below by Virginia Abernethy on February 7/08, on behalf of my countrymen I must step in to claim the idiot prize for a country subsidizing the suppression of its own workers’ wages and the displacement of their jobs. Of course we can’t match America’s $338.3 billion a year in sucker money. But give us a break. We are only a nation of 33 million and the United States is a nation of what, 304 million (officially). So on a per capita basis how does it look?
Forget Rubenstein and forget Robert Rector who calculated that each illegal family cost American taxpayers some $22, 000 per year, or the equivalent of a new Ford convertible Mustang, if memory serves me correctly. $338.3 billion divided by 304 million citizens works out to $1112 each.
The definitive Canadian study was done by Professor Herbert Grubel of Simon Fraser University on behalf of the Fraser Institute. It analyzed immigration in its most flattering light---legal immigration, over the twelve period from 1990 to 2002. Its central conclusion? Immigration cost Canadian taxpayers more in taxes than it recovered in revenues. In 2002 alone the difference was $18 billion. On a per capita basis, that would be about $545. One can only imagine what the per capita costs of illegal---oops---our “undocumented” fellow human beings are. But their numbers are not nearly so imposing as America’s ---yet. So far, though, there are guesstimated to be between 200,000 and 600,000 illegal migrants here. Roughly approaching our legal intake or two to times that. So take the $545 and double or triple it.
Then there is the wild card, refugees, the great sacred cow of Canadian discourse. They belong to a separate category altogether and are like ghosts. Even iconic environmentalists apparently believe that the intake of refugees in their tens of millions would somehow have no footprint, and when the world sees and believes Michael Moore’s film about our health care, half of them will be here to test it, and join our two year waiting list that is oh-so universal. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board is much like Will Rogers, it apparently never met a refugee claimant it didn’t like, or at least believe.
While Norway rejects 97% of refugee applications, Canada’s 80-100,000 dollar per year 180 or so board members accept 58%, and the rest often go into hiding to await amnesty. Norway prefers to direct its relatively meager resources to the truly genuine refugees in the Spartan camps of the world, while Canada on the other hand, chooses to squander its massive expenditures on the 70% of claimants who originate from safe countries. With or without the help of a smuggling agents who charge up to $50,000 a head, by virtue of simply stepping on Canadian soil these “desperate” people have an “Open Sesame” to our unlocked candy store, difficult to discredit, but once discredited and rejected, near impossible to expel.
According to the former Executive Director of the Canadian Immigration Service, James Bissett, refugee processing cost taxpayers $150 million in 2001 alone, exclusive of the far greater costs of welfare, housing and medical care, which he estimates to be $10,000 to $12,000 per claimant. That would be about $440-528 million at last count. But then he states that the Total Bill for the whole refugee system is anywhere between $2-3 billion. What the 36,000 rejected (therefore illegal and fraudulent) refugee claimants evading arrest warrants do for sustenance is any police officer’s guess.1 The collection of ethnic crime statistics are forbidden by law in Canada because, just as we believe outlawing guns will foreclose gun crime, we also believe that if you throw away the thermometer (statistics, free speech) you cure the fever. No ethnic crime reporting, no ethnic crime.
Not part of the tabulations are the environmental costs that one day become economic costs. The 60,000 precious acres of premium farmland that is lost every year in Ontario alone because of immigrant-driven population growth. Sorry Sierra Club, research shows that “sprawl” can’t wear the goat horns for your willful blindness to the blatantly obvious. And immigration is contributing 10 million metric tonnes of Green House Gasses or the equivalent of a entire Alberta tar sands project every four years. Biodiversity is also taking a big hit, with 536 species on the ropes. Oddly, immigration is not even in the Green vocabulary nor that of the labour movement. Welcome to Alice in Wonderland North.
The race toward the finish line of immigration-induced fiscal ruin appears like a dead heat, after phony refugees are counted as illegal immigrants. But ah shucks, I am a biased patriot, I admit, so the decision goes to…..
Canada! The inaugural Winner of The Stupid Trophy.
Or shall we call it “ The Michael Moore Award”, in honour of the filmmaker whose documentary fiction about the greener pastures of the gentle giant to the north have many believing that free lunches can be made available to all who come to eat them at our expense.
1. Cf. Two articles by James Bissett. “A Defence of the Safe Country Concept (2002) and “Stop Bogus Refugees Before They Get In”. (Sept. 2007)
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC;
October 14/2008
THE DOCUMENTED COSTS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS TO THE U.S :
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. http:< http://tinyurl.com/zob77> 2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html 5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html 9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html 11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht < http://tinyurl.com/t9sht > 12. The National Policy Institute "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period." http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf 13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm 14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ". http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Are we THAT stupid???
Forget Rubenstein and forget Robert Rector who calculated that each illegal family cost American taxpayers some $22, 000 per year, or the equivalent of a new Ford convertible Mustang, if memory serves me correctly. $338.3 billion divided by 304 million citizens works out to $1112 each.
The definitive Canadian study was done by Professor Herbert Grubel of Simon Fraser University on behalf of the Fraser Institute. It analyzed immigration in its most flattering light---legal immigration, over the twelve period from 1990 to 2002. Its central conclusion? Immigration cost Canadian taxpayers more in taxes than it recovered in revenues. In 2002 alone the difference was $18 billion. On a per capita basis, that would be about $545. One can only imagine what the per capita costs of illegal---oops---our “undocumented” fellow human beings are. But their numbers are not nearly so imposing as America’s ---yet. So far, though, there are guesstimated to be between 200,000 and 600,000 illegal migrants here. Roughly approaching our legal intake or two to times that. So take the $545 and double or triple it.
Then there is the wild card, refugees, the great sacred cow of Canadian discourse. They belong to a separate category altogether and are like ghosts. Even iconic environmentalists apparently believe that the intake of refugees in their tens of millions would somehow have no footprint, and when the world sees and believes Michael Moore’s film about our health care, half of them will be here to test it, and join our two year waiting list that is oh-so universal. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board is much like Will Rogers, it apparently never met a refugee claimant it didn’t like, or at least believe.
While Norway rejects 97% of refugee applications, Canada’s 80-100,000 dollar per year 180 or so board members accept 58%, and the rest often go into hiding to await amnesty. Norway prefers to direct its relatively meager resources to the truly genuine refugees in the Spartan camps of the world, while Canada on the other hand, chooses to squander its massive expenditures on the 70% of claimants who originate from safe countries. With or without the help of a smuggling agents who charge up to $50,000 a head, by virtue of simply stepping on Canadian soil these “desperate” people have an “Open Sesame” to our unlocked candy store, difficult to discredit, but once discredited and rejected, near impossible to expel.
According to the former Executive Director of the Canadian Immigration Service, James Bissett, refugee processing cost taxpayers $150 million in 2001 alone, exclusive of the far greater costs of welfare, housing and medical care, which he estimates to be $10,000 to $12,000 per claimant. That would be about $440-528 million at last count. But then he states that the Total Bill for the whole refugee system is anywhere between $2-3 billion. What the 36,000 rejected (therefore illegal and fraudulent) refugee claimants evading arrest warrants do for sustenance is any police officer’s guess.1 The collection of ethnic crime statistics are forbidden by law in Canada because, just as we believe outlawing guns will foreclose gun crime, we also believe that if you throw away the thermometer (statistics, free speech) you cure the fever. No ethnic crime reporting, no ethnic crime.
Not part of the tabulations are the environmental costs that one day become economic costs. The 60,000 precious acres of premium farmland that is lost every year in Ontario alone because of immigrant-driven population growth. Sorry Sierra Club, research shows that “sprawl” can’t wear the goat horns for your willful blindness to the blatantly obvious. And immigration is contributing 10 million metric tonnes of Green House Gasses or the equivalent of a entire Alberta tar sands project every four years. Biodiversity is also taking a big hit, with 536 species on the ropes. Oddly, immigration is not even in the Green vocabulary nor that of the labour movement. Welcome to Alice in Wonderland North.
The race toward the finish line of immigration-induced fiscal ruin appears like a dead heat, after phony refugees are counted as illegal immigrants. But ah shucks, I am a biased patriot, I admit, so the decision goes to…..
Canada! The inaugural Winner of The Stupid Trophy.
Or shall we call it “ The Michael Moore Award”, in honour of the filmmaker whose documentary fiction about the greener pastures of the gentle giant to the north have many believing that free lunches can be made available to all who come to eat them at our expense.
1. Cf. Two articles by James Bissett. “A Defence of the Safe Country Concept (2002) and “Stop Bogus Refugees Before They Get In”. (Sept. 2007)
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC;
October 14/2008
THE DOCUMENTED COSTS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS TO THE U.S :
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. http:< http://tinyurl.com/zob77> 2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html 5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers. http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html 9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html 11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroine and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht < http://tinyurl.com/t9sht > 12. The National Policy Institute "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period." http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf 13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm 14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ". http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Are we THAT stupid???
Sunday, January 11, 2009
BE IT SO MOVED
Whereas the mental disorders of cornucopianism and the obsessive fixation on per capita consumption reductions seem too deeply rooted in Canadian environmentalists who typically speak with a middle class voice,
And whereas ordinary working people are largely unimpressed with white collar and relatively affluent environmental activists who strike an enlightened pose until they feel that own class interests are threatened when the services they demand would become more costly from any restriction in the flow of cheap immigrant labour.
Resolution: Be it resolved that we accept that it is much easier to convert a blue collar “redneck” to the neo-Malthusian principles of restricted immigration and birth disincentives than it is to keep banging one’s head into the brick wall of soft green yuppy population-growth-denial. And that therefore we target that working class demographic with our message rather than persist in the naïve belief that green yuppies will one day experience a shocking epiphany and realize that growth has limits that cannot be stretched by technology, good management, responsible green living or positive perceptions.
Tim Murray, mover of motion.
Graduate of the school of Realpolitik and Unrequited Pursuit of Soft Green Dialogue.
And whereas ordinary working people are largely unimpressed with white collar and relatively affluent environmental activists who strike an enlightened pose until they feel that own class interests are threatened when the services they demand would become more costly from any restriction in the flow of cheap immigrant labour.
Resolution: Be it resolved that we accept that it is much easier to convert a blue collar “redneck” to the neo-Malthusian principles of restricted immigration and birth disincentives than it is to keep banging one’s head into the brick wall of soft green yuppy population-growth-denial. And that therefore we target that working class demographic with our message rather than persist in the naïve belief that green yuppies will one day experience a shocking epiphany and realize that growth has limits that cannot be stretched by technology, good management, responsible green living or positive perceptions.
Tim Murray, mover of motion.
Graduate of the school of Realpolitik and Unrequited Pursuit of Soft Green Dialogue.
WILL OUR CREDIBILITY GO DOWN WITH THE AGW SHIP? The Dangerous Folly of Making and Defending Dogmatic Predictions
In commenting upon an essay that I wrote almost a month before, Peter Salonius quoted my last line:
"As a multiplier of all evils, population growth must be stopped and reversed, and the necessity of that mission does not depend on the veracity of AGW theory. For public enemy Number One is biodiversity loss, and it is the inexorable spread of human monoculture that is its main cause."
“I agree absolutely, and I fear that when the cornucopians understand that the human family may have been taken down the garden path with AGW 'group think' from the IPCC ---- they may suggest that any and all Malthusian, ecological economics, energy depletion and biodiversity concerns may be similar stories perpetrated by scientific sheep.” Peter Salonius
Very well put and exactly the point that Richard Wakefield was trying to make a very long time ago. The credibility of everything we say on a broad front of concerns will be irreparably damaged if AGW is disgraced. Any warning we make will be countered with “Yeah, sure, that is what they said about global warming.”
Just think how much of an albatross Paul Ehrlich’s lost bet with Julian Simon has been for us. Four decades later and we are still having to defend Malthus and Ehrlich for failed predictions. Predictions that we believe were right but just very premature. Every internet debate and every media interview inevitably features an opponent who, with great relish and haughtiness, challenges us with their examples. When we keep crying wolf and the wolf never appears at the appointed hour we not only lose respect but lose an audience, an audience that must be there when the catastrophe finally is upon us. People have become inured to environmental doomsayers, and have developed an impatient fatigue that is ripe for a mood of contemptuous dismissal.
Dr.Craig Chalquist of JFK University was once asked this question: “Do you have any tips for environmental activists? ”He replied, “Yes, don’t frighten or shame the audience, they only tune you out….“….there are plenty of social science studies that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of shock tactics and scaring people who might otherwise be willing to take a deeper look at the growing planetary crisis….People generally respond to attacks on their defenses by going numb and turning away. We can't afford the luxury of that.”
I answered him thusly: So what do I do then? I have a blow horn. I know a fire has broken out in the theatre. Do I just give out a mild whisper in a calm voice urging those present to think about moving to the exits as a lifestyle option? The reviewer said that we cannot afford the “luxury” of turning people away by our scare tactics. The trouble is though, we haven’t the luxury of time. The time it takes for patient explanation. Do we?
He countered: “I hear it a lot, and I feel a similar urgency. After all, it’s my business to stay up on all the latest dreadful environmental news. I’m also a Californian and have seen my state ruined by overdevelopment for more than four decades now. So I get the urgency.
But it’s a psychological fact that for some of the people we try to educate, there is no urgency. You yell through your bullhorn in the theater, people go outside and see no fire, they come back in and kick you out of the theater. That’s what actually happens, with the exception of a few people who take the warning seriously. An even better analogy is a family alone in their livingroom watching TV. They see you on the TV issuing warnings. They change the station.” (Dr. Chalquist’s website can be found at terrapsych.com)
In reviewing and recommending David Orrell’s book, “Apollo’s Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything”, Buster Welch warned me of the habit of making apocalyptic predictions. Predictions that I feel so tempted to make because I feel the need to shock people out of their somnabulent lethargy before time has run out the clock, if it is not too late already. But in doing so I can be like a hockey coach who initially wins the attention of his team by yelling at them, but when they are subjected to a diet of yelling over time they just tune me out and my initial success is followed by a complete inability to motivate them. I am like Kevin McCarthy in the first version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, where as a small town doctor he becomes aware that his town has been victimized by an extra-terrestial force that replaces humans with exact alien duplicates and that their conquest of humanity will spread with great rapidity. I remember feeling his horror and frustration when he escaped their clutches to warn another town, only to be seen as a raving madman who had to be subdued, medicated and confined to hospital. That was my nightmare as an 8 year old. That is my nightmare now. If I must shout, it had at least better be the truth that I am shouting.
Once again, the critique of AGW that “rocked” Peter’s belief system was found at
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
Marisa Cohen, who heads an international conservation organization centred at Assisi, Italy, had this to say about AGW and credibility:
Regarding AGW,it has never appeared in all my articles, association pubblicity, projects, because:1) it is irrelevant, even if true: all the issues that were the reason for the environmental concern before the "discovery" of AGW, are still the same, unresolved, because the whole scientific and popular concern is focused on the New Fashion;2) because, if proven false, we, as environmentalists, will become the laughing stock of every cornucopians, politicians, business, media and popular opinion, dismissed as nuts and never to be believed again.That is the worst outcome of the insistence in pubblicising this theory as "scientifically proven".
"As a multiplier of all evils, population growth must be stopped and reversed, and the necessity of that mission does not depend on the veracity of AGW theory. For public enemy Number One is biodiversity loss, and it is the inexorable spread of human monoculture that is its main cause."
“I agree absolutely, and I fear that when the cornucopians understand that the human family may have been taken down the garden path with AGW 'group think' from the IPCC ---- they may suggest that any and all Malthusian, ecological economics, energy depletion and biodiversity concerns may be similar stories perpetrated by scientific sheep.” Peter Salonius
Very well put and exactly the point that Richard Wakefield was trying to make a very long time ago. The credibility of everything we say on a broad front of concerns will be irreparably damaged if AGW is disgraced. Any warning we make will be countered with “Yeah, sure, that is what they said about global warming.”
Just think how much of an albatross Paul Ehrlich’s lost bet with Julian Simon has been for us. Four decades later and we are still having to defend Malthus and Ehrlich for failed predictions. Predictions that we believe were right but just very premature. Every internet debate and every media interview inevitably features an opponent who, with great relish and haughtiness, challenges us with their examples. When we keep crying wolf and the wolf never appears at the appointed hour we not only lose respect but lose an audience, an audience that must be there when the catastrophe finally is upon us. People have become inured to environmental doomsayers, and have developed an impatient fatigue that is ripe for a mood of contemptuous dismissal.
Dr.Craig Chalquist of JFK University was once asked this question: “Do you have any tips for environmental activists? ”He replied, “Yes, don’t frighten or shame the audience, they only tune you out….“….there are plenty of social science studies that demonstrate the ineffectiveness of shock tactics and scaring people who might otherwise be willing to take a deeper look at the growing planetary crisis….People generally respond to attacks on their defenses by going numb and turning away. We can't afford the luxury of that.”
I answered him thusly: So what do I do then? I have a blow horn. I know a fire has broken out in the theatre. Do I just give out a mild whisper in a calm voice urging those present to think about moving to the exits as a lifestyle option? The reviewer said that we cannot afford the “luxury” of turning people away by our scare tactics. The trouble is though, we haven’t the luxury of time. The time it takes for patient explanation. Do we?
He countered: “I hear it a lot, and I feel a similar urgency. After all, it’s my business to stay up on all the latest dreadful environmental news. I’m also a Californian and have seen my state ruined by overdevelopment for more than four decades now. So I get the urgency.
But it’s a psychological fact that for some of the people we try to educate, there is no urgency. You yell through your bullhorn in the theater, people go outside and see no fire, they come back in and kick you out of the theater. That’s what actually happens, with the exception of a few people who take the warning seriously. An even better analogy is a family alone in their livingroom watching TV. They see you on the TV issuing warnings. They change the station.” (Dr. Chalquist’s website can be found at terrapsych.com)
In reviewing and recommending David Orrell’s book, “Apollo’s Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything”, Buster Welch warned me of the habit of making apocalyptic predictions. Predictions that I feel so tempted to make because I feel the need to shock people out of their somnabulent lethargy before time has run out the clock, if it is not too late already. But in doing so I can be like a hockey coach who initially wins the attention of his team by yelling at them, but when they are subjected to a diet of yelling over time they just tune me out and my initial success is followed by a complete inability to motivate them. I am like Kevin McCarthy in the first version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, where as a small town doctor he becomes aware that his town has been victimized by an extra-terrestial force that replaces humans with exact alien duplicates and that their conquest of humanity will spread with great rapidity. I remember feeling his horror and frustration when he escaped their clutches to warn another town, only to be seen as a raving madman who had to be subdued, medicated and confined to hospital. That was my nightmare as an 8 year old. That is my nightmare now. If I must shout, it had at least better be the truth that I am shouting.
Once again, the critique of AGW that “rocked” Peter’s belief system was found at
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
Marisa Cohen, who heads an international conservation organization centred at Assisi, Italy, had this to say about AGW and credibility:
Regarding AGW,it has never appeared in all my articles, association pubblicity, projects, because:1) it is irrelevant, even if true: all the issues that were the reason for the environmental concern before the "discovery" of AGW, are still the same, unresolved, because the whole scientific and popular concern is focused on the New Fashion;2) because, if proven false, we, as environmentalists, will become the laughing stock of every cornucopians, politicians, business, media and popular opinion, dismissed as nuts and never to be believed again.That is the worst outcome of the insistence in pubblicising this theory as "scientifically proven".
WE MUST ALWAYS LEAVE ROOM FOR DOUBT (AND DOUBTERS)
If I make an assertion that I claim to be scientific, I must be prepared to set out conditions under which my assertion can be proved false. If I tell you that my car can take you from Calgary to Edmonton on one tank of gas, I should be prepared to allow you or someone else drive it that distance and see for themselves. If my assertion is not testable, is not scientific, it is something else. The fact that the assertion may be made by a recognized “scientist’ or man of credibility is immaterial to this question. Is it is testable? Is it an hypothesis or a statement of religious conviction?
Consensus does not add up to truth. One billion falsehoods repeated one billion times do not make them true. If 500 million people fervently believe something to be true, it does not make it true. And if only one person in 6.8 billion people believe something to be true, it does not make it false. Truth is not subject to a democratic vote. For forty years the British scientific establishment stubbornly refused to entertain doubts that “Piltdown Man” was a fraud. They were determined to believe that it was indeed the missing link, despite early poignant criticisms, most notably from a German anatomist who twelve years later demonstrated that the skull of this pre-hominid consisted of the skull of a human being artificially attached to the jaw of an orangutan.
But finally the truth will out. Consensus yielded to inconvenient fact.
Anthropogenic global warming to be a credible hypothesis must be testable. True believers must at some point tell us at what point they would be prepared to admit that they were wrong. How many consecutive years of cool weather would be required? How many polar ice shelves would have to reform? How much bigger would the polar bear population have to get? It is already two to four times larger now than it was four decades ago.
We must always allot a space in our brains for doubt. A space to remain skeptical about orthodox opinions---on any subject. I accept AGW, but only provisionally and under advisement. As a multiplier of all evils, population growth must be stopped and reversed, and the necessity of that mission does not depend on the veracity of AGW theory. For public enemy Number One is biodiversity loss, and it is the inexorable spread of human monoculture that is its main cause.
Consensus does not add up to truth. One billion falsehoods repeated one billion times do not make them true. If 500 million people fervently believe something to be true, it does not make it true. And if only one person in 6.8 billion people believe something to be true, it does not make it false. Truth is not subject to a democratic vote. For forty years the British scientific establishment stubbornly refused to entertain doubts that “Piltdown Man” was a fraud. They were determined to believe that it was indeed the missing link, despite early poignant criticisms, most notably from a German anatomist who twelve years later demonstrated that the skull of this pre-hominid consisted of the skull of a human being artificially attached to the jaw of an orangutan.
But finally the truth will out. Consensus yielded to inconvenient fact.
Anthropogenic global warming to be a credible hypothesis must be testable. True believers must at some point tell us at what point they would be prepared to admit that they were wrong. How many consecutive years of cool weather would be required? How many polar ice shelves would have to reform? How much bigger would the polar bear population have to get? It is already two to four times larger now than it was four decades ago.
We must always allot a space in our brains for doubt. A space to remain skeptical about orthodox opinions---on any subject. I accept AGW, but only provisionally and under advisement. As a multiplier of all evils, population growth must be stopped and reversed, and the necessity of that mission does not depend on the veracity of AGW theory. For public enemy Number One is biodiversity loss, and it is the inexorable spread of human monoculture that is its main cause.
ARE WOMEN GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OPTIMISM?
Are women irrationally optimistic? Is not optimism by definition irrational, in our present circumstances?You know my hypothesis articulated in the draft of The Culture of Positive Thinking. As a species we would not have survived 100,000 years without delusional thinking. The denial of death, which we only acknowledge intellectually and at rare moments, but live each day as if it were not going to happen to us or our species----is necessary to carry on---so most would argue.
The ‘self-help’ industry has definitely demonstrated that positive thinking pays dividends in personal living. And in having a child, hunter gatherers to peasant farmers to industrial serfs to post industrial Doris Days made a fantastic statement about the prospects of the human society, ignoring the odds of its demise. But this last century and particularly, this last half century, delusional thinking is not an evolutionary advantage but a decided disadvantage. Positive thinking, nothwithstanding its benefits as a personal coping strategy, is a lethal mindset for a species aboard the SS Ecological Titanic which must be concerned not with “self-help” but collective action in solving pressing problems that must be acknowledged as real and durable and not something that can vanish by being “perceived” differently.Growthists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and genders, but statistically it is North American and European women who are disproportionately afflicted by positive thinking. A disorder that can be defined as the willful disregard of the blatantly obvious in order to maintain mental buoyancy. Unfortunately, on the Titanic your perception can be buoyant but your body can be in for drowning.
In our culture, women are typically the people walking on board with a cocktail glass of champaigne slanting 20 degrees with the ship’ s list. When you mention Heinberg, Kunstler, Tainter, or Jared Diamond to them they point to the champaigne, or the bottled water as they of the Jane Fonda mold would do and offer the rebuke “You are such a downer, can’ t you see, my glass is HALF FULL, but you doomsayers say that it is half empty. What evidences this mentality? Two things. One is the membership profile of the “doomsday organzations”. I surveyed some two dozen population stabilization/reduction and immigration limitation groups in four Anglophone countries. Result, only about 20% of the membership of these groups was female. And they, according to anecdote , were mostly post-menopausal women without children or older single women. That is exhibit number two in establishing the link between delusional thinking and the maternal instinct. Apparently western women like hanging around doomsday men as much as they like dating undertakers. They are ‘downers’.It is my belief that women are hard wired for this delusional thinking. If they were not, we would not have survived as a species. But now that we are 6.8 million, and adding 200,000 per day and almost 80 million a year, it is a decisive handicap to our survival. I put this proposition to two brain scientists and both were intrigued by the argument. One was in complete agreement, but both said that I needed more research and the funding to support it. And there is the rub. Given what happened to Larry Sommers of Harvard, any research that carries the least criticism of women will be met with savage criticism at the very least. Neither academic believed that I could ever receive funding for research of this nature.
The mantra in the population movement is the politically correct one. That we have a high fertility rate in the third world because the men of patriarchal societies control womens’ options and deny their access to birth control, as well as education. And male religious authorities buttress this arrangement. This may be true of the undeveloped world. But women in affluent societies, in North America, face a different situation. They have options that women elsewhere don’t. And the one option they don’t take is to view the world realistically rather than positively, to pick up Heinburg and Kunstler and drop Peoples’ Magazine, and to stop driving the consumer economy with a shopaholism more crazed than ours.
So to the question, “Are (North American women) irrationally optimistic?”, I would answer unequivocally yes. Can I prove it ? Without research , no. Comparative data on frontal lobe activity in men and women would be enlightening.Would this research prove useful? Great question. Probably not. So we can prove that women are afflicted with optimistic thinking. What then is the remedy, a pill of some kind? Should we change our message to appeal more to women? How would we make a “doomsday” message upbeat to a female readership?
The ‘self-help’ industry has definitely demonstrated that positive thinking pays dividends in personal living. And in having a child, hunter gatherers to peasant farmers to industrial serfs to post industrial Doris Days made a fantastic statement about the prospects of the human society, ignoring the odds of its demise. But this last century and particularly, this last half century, delusional thinking is not an evolutionary advantage but a decided disadvantage. Positive thinking, nothwithstanding its benefits as a personal coping strategy, is a lethal mindset for a species aboard the SS Ecological Titanic which must be concerned not with “self-help” but collective action in solving pressing problems that must be acknowledged as real and durable and not something that can vanish by being “perceived” differently.Growthists come in all shapes, sizes, colours and genders, but statistically it is North American and European women who are disproportionately afflicted by positive thinking. A disorder that can be defined as the willful disregard of the blatantly obvious in order to maintain mental buoyancy. Unfortunately, on the Titanic your perception can be buoyant but your body can be in for drowning.
In our culture, women are typically the people walking on board with a cocktail glass of champaigne slanting 20 degrees with the ship’ s list. When you mention Heinberg, Kunstler, Tainter, or Jared Diamond to them they point to the champaigne, or the bottled water as they of the Jane Fonda mold would do and offer the rebuke “You are such a downer, can’ t you see, my glass is HALF FULL, but you doomsayers say that it is half empty. What evidences this mentality? Two things. One is the membership profile of the “doomsday organzations”. I surveyed some two dozen population stabilization/reduction and immigration limitation groups in four Anglophone countries. Result, only about 20% of the membership of these groups was female. And they, according to anecdote , were mostly post-menopausal women without children or older single women. That is exhibit number two in establishing the link between delusional thinking and the maternal instinct. Apparently western women like hanging around doomsday men as much as they like dating undertakers. They are ‘downers’.It is my belief that women are hard wired for this delusional thinking. If they were not, we would not have survived as a species. But now that we are 6.8 million, and adding 200,000 per day and almost 80 million a year, it is a decisive handicap to our survival. I put this proposition to two brain scientists and both were intrigued by the argument. One was in complete agreement, but both said that I needed more research and the funding to support it. And there is the rub. Given what happened to Larry Sommers of Harvard, any research that carries the least criticism of women will be met with savage criticism at the very least. Neither academic believed that I could ever receive funding for research of this nature.
The mantra in the population movement is the politically correct one. That we have a high fertility rate in the third world because the men of patriarchal societies control womens’ options and deny their access to birth control, as well as education. And male religious authorities buttress this arrangement. This may be true of the undeveloped world. But women in affluent societies, in North America, face a different situation. They have options that women elsewhere don’t. And the one option they don’t take is to view the world realistically rather than positively, to pick up Heinburg and Kunstler and drop Peoples’ Magazine, and to stop driving the consumer economy with a shopaholism more crazed than ours.
So to the question, “Are (North American women) irrationally optimistic?”, I would answer unequivocally yes. Can I prove it ? Without research , no. Comparative data on frontal lobe activity in men and women would be enlightening.Would this research prove useful? Great question. Probably not. So we can prove that women are afflicted with optimistic thinking. What then is the remedy, a pill of some kind? Should we change our message to appeal more to women? How would we make a “doomsday” message upbeat to a female readership?
NO MORE THE JANITOR FOR CORPORATE CANADA: Let Open Borders Advocates Clean Up The Mess
So, I WAS right then. Hummers ARE 3 times more environmentally friendly than a Toyota Prius. The same logic applies to meat consumption. GO FOR IT! Is our object to extend the life of an unsustainable system so as to buy MORE time for MORE homo sapiens to crowd out and annihilate MORE biodiversity? To kill off 80% of all life forms rather than 50% before we quit?
Let me put it another way. You are a waitress at a restaurant You strongly suspect that the customer you are serving is a serial killer and will go on to kill more and more people until the end of his natural life. He is too clever to be caught. But he is obese and there is hope that his murderous lifestyle will come to a sudden end with a heart attack. When he asks for a dessert suggestion, are you going to recommend a low-cal healthy snack, or a magnificently huge mound of ice cream topped with chocolate syrup? Promoting the longevity of killers, like the species that is killing off tens of thousands of other species every year, is not in the interest of our clients, or wards---wildlife (not WILD life, not domesticated animals).
The mania to cut per capita “waste” is no different than the austerity drives of the Second World War. My parents were told to cut their consumption so that the Canadian government could fight a war against Hitler. And the formula worked because they put 10% of our population in uniform and built the world’s third largest navy by wars’ end, besides a bomber force and planes for our allies. Now our war is against wildlife and whatever soil nutrients are left in the laughably tiny amount of good arable land that we have. Unfortunately, we are winning that war too, with the assistance of the hypocritical, cowardly, blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporate lackeys in the environmental NGOs like our dear Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club. I do hope that we lose that war, and that the victor is able to conduct a Nuremburg Trial to convict and hang every Green collaborator alongside his favourite corporate benefactor.
Where is the liberator going to come from though? Remember that Star Trek movie where an Intelligent Alien presence that was genetically related to the earth’s whales dropped in to see how they were faring under our custodial care? They got pissed off with Homo Sapien civilization and proceeded to wreck it. Count me in as a Fifth columnist in THAT invasion !
Let me put it another way. You are a waitress at a restaurant You strongly suspect that the customer you are serving is a serial killer and will go on to kill more and more people until the end of his natural life. He is too clever to be caught. But he is obese and there is hope that his murderous lifestyle will come to a sudden end with a heart attack. When he asks for a dessert suggestion, are you going to recommend a low-cal healthy snack, or a magnificently huge mound of ice cream topped with chocolate syrup? Promoting the longevity of killers, like the species that is killing off tens of thousands of other species every year, is not in the interest of our clients, or wards---wildlife (not WILD life, not domesticated animals).
The mania to cut per capita “waste” is no different than the austerity drives of the Second World War. My parents were told to cut their consumption so that the Canadian government could fight a war against Hitler. And the formula worked because they put 10% of our population in uniform and built the world’s third largest navy by wars’ end, besides a bomber force and planes for our allies. Now our war is against wildlife and whatever soil nutrients are left in the laughably tiny amount of good arable land that we have. Unfortunately, we are winning that war too, with the assistance of the hypocritical, cowardly, blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporate lackeys in the environmental NGOs like our dear Suzuki Foundation and the Sierra Club. I do hope that we lose that war, and that the victor is able to conduct a Nuremburg Trial to convict and hang every Green collaborator alongside his favourite corporate benefactor.
Where is the liberator going to come from though? Remember that Star Trek movie where an Intelligent Alien presence that was genetically related to the earth’s whales dropped in to see how they were faring under our custodial care? They got pissed off with Homo Sapien civilization and proceeded to wreck it. Count me in as a Fifth columnist in THAT invasion !
EUROPE'S IMMIGRATION CHALLENGE by Brian McGavin
Over 15,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended by coastguards as they tried to enter Greece by boat in 2008, up 65 per cent on the previous year. Over a 100,000 African illegal immigrants have landed in the Spanish Canary Islands trying to gain access to the EU in the last few years.
In Italy, the number of illegal immigrants entering the country doubled in the first seven months of 2008 over 2007.
Spain, Portugal and Malta have all become similar targets. Approximately 1,000 illegal immigrants were picked up at sea when they landed in Malta between January and June 2006. Officials in Valletta compare this as the equivalent of 50,000 reaching Spain in the same time frame. The majority were attempting to reach Italy. This is the magnitude of the problem of illegal immigration in Malta where the population density is 1,200 per square kilometre, says Maltese Foreign Minister Michael Frendo.
Both Spain and Italy have faced major influxes of illegal immigrants. Italy, after announcing a new amnesty in July 2006 that it would grant citizenship to immigrants that could document they have stayed in Italy for five years, has now implemented state of emergency measures.
More than 15,000 illegal immigrants entered the EU via Italy between January and July 2008. The figures come in spite of a government crackdown on crime and an increase in the number of deportations. Many illegals arrive on boats organised by people traffickers. Most come across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa. Once ashore they hope to take advantage of the Shengen zone’s open borders within the EU and locate work.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi crackdown on crime has seen stringent new measures introduced, making it an offence punishable by up to four years jail to enter the country illegally. A decree allows the government to use troops to monitor the country's immigrant internment centres and to deploy soldiers to several cities in an effort to control crime. Property rented to illegal immigrants can be confiscated under the new legislation.
Though expulsions have increased the Italian authorities, like others in Europe, often find the countries of origin of illegal arrivals are reluctant to accept them back if they are deported. Italy's prisons are already crammed with foreigners. Some 20,000 people out of the 55,000 prisoners currently serving sentences or awaiting trial in Italian jails are foreigners. The number of foreign prisoners continues to increase because of difficulties carrying through expulsions ordered by the judiciary.
Italy's measures have hit the Roma most severely. Many came from Romania when that country joined the European Union in 2007. Berlusconi's predecessor, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, had ordered some deportations of Roma, despite their EU citizenship. Under Mr. Berlusconi, Italy has gone further, initiating a census and fingerprinting of Roma.
Estimates range from 500,000 non-EU citizens currently living illegally in the country to the 600,000 cited by Italy's three largest labor unions CGIL, CISL and UIL and 800,000 according to the research institute Eurispes’s annual report on immigration.
Both Italy and Greece had unemployment rates of around 11 per cent in 1999, whereas Spain’s unemployment rate exceeded 15 per cent in the same year. Nevertheless, Italy has admitted over 2.5 million, Spain about 2.5 million and Greece nearly 1.5 million immigrant workers in the last 15 to 20 years.
Five amnesties have taken place in Italy since 1986, involving more than two million immigrants; four in Greece and four in Portugal since 1992 and three in Spain. These amnesties confirm that such strategies do not solve in the long term the challenge of dealing with undocumented migration.*
Senegal is becoming a jumping off point for many would be immigrants, smuggling them to the Canary Islands, where they move on to Spain and the EU. Stories of success are fuelling efforts to make the attempt. By June 2006 more than 10,000 had made the attempt from Senegal to the Canaries that year. Senegalese fishermen, many out of work due to intensive foreign fishing in their waters, have found a lucrative new business in smuggling. In an economy where the local wage is approximately $80 USD a month, a boat owner can charge over 100 individuals $1,000 each to attempt the journey.
Spain: Balancing rights
In Spain, where legal immigrants alone make up nearly 9 percent of the population, Prime Minister Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies. In June 2008, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, ban them from returning. Faced with a 10.7 percent unemployment rate, Zapatero announced plans that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries.
Zapatero's immigration policy has been criticised by immigrants-rights organisations. Antonio Abad, secretary-general of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR), points out that by increasing the monitoring of the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, Spanish authorities have compelled sub-Saharan migrants to begin their sea journey from points farther south, endangering themselves even further. "It takes the people who need the most protection and makes things even harder for them," he says. He also criticizes Zapatero's support for the Return Directive. "When you limit one person's rights, you limit all of society," he adds.
The Aegean
With its beaches, and historical sites the Greek island of Patmos has long been a popular tourist destination. But recently the tiny Aegean island has drawn a new type of visitor to its sandy shores.
Over 4,000 illegal immigrants arrived on the island in 2008, many being transferred from the nearby islet of Agathonisi, where they had been abandoned by smugglers. Municipal authorities have now said they will block their ports to would-be immigrants arriving from neighbouring Turkey, arguing that the unwanted visitors have exceeded the number of permanent residents on the island.
The islands of Lesbos, Samos and Patmos have been besieged with almost daily boatloads of migrants, the largest influx being Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians. Arrivals from Africa, mainly Somalia are increasing - a sign that routes to Italy and Spain are proving more arduous.
Athens has called on the European Union to establish a coastguard to halt the flood attempting to enter the 27- member bloc by sea. Greece is faced with monitoring 16,000 kilometers of coastline, the largest external sea border of any EU member state.
Last year Greece received 112,000 would-be immigrants, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry. Some end up staying in Greece while many more continue their journey westward. Clashes between illegal immigrants battling to sneak aboard ferries bound for Italy from the western Greek port of Patras have broken out on an almost daily basis, with hundreds of immigrants living in makeshift camps at the port. Local authorities are appealing for help to contain the violence.
"We must do all we can to curb the phenomenon of illegal immigration by helping migrants countries of origin and their residents," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos said. However, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said that asylum seekers face "undue hardships" in Greece, often lacking legal aid to ensure that their claims receive adequate scrutiny from the asylum authorities. The refugee agency has described Greece's recognition rate for refugees as "disturbingly low." The overall protection rate for refugees of all nationalities in 2006 was 1 per cent in Greece, compared to 45 per cent in Italy and 50 per cent in Sweden. Greece routinely arrests all illegal immigrants and asylum seekers found in its territory and detains them in reception centres for up to three months.
About 80,000 migrants have travelled to Greece in 2008 and decided to stay illegally, according to the authorities. While initial problems with the flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East centred on the Aegean islands, migrants are now causing problems in the capital. The historic center of Athens has been riven by several street battles in recent months, involving rival groups, often involved in dealing drugs, from Afghanistan, Iraq and war-torn African countries, wielding swords, axes and machetes.
"People are scared and depressed, it's getting worse and worse," said Vassiliki Nikolakopoulou of the group, Panathinaia. The top policy adviser for immigration issues at the Interior Ministry blames the influx of 80,000 migrants this year. "Because of this phenomenon, we see more and more immigrants in central Athens trying to survive, often through illicit activities," Official, Patroklos Georgiadis, said that Greece supported the stricter line on immigration being promoted by the bloc's French presidency. "There will not be another wave of legalisation of immigrants in Greece in the near future," referring to the three programs that have granted work and residence permits to some 500,000 migrants since 1997, most of them undocumented foreigners - at least half from Albania -
Thomas Hammarberg, a Swede who is human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, has criticized Greece and other EU states for "criminalizing the irregular entry and presence of migrants as part of a policy of so-called migration management." "Political decision-makers should not lose the human rights perspective in migration," Hammarberg wrote in an e-mail message when asked to comment for this article. "Migrants coming from war-torn states should be given refuge."
Portugal has also allowed thousands of immigrants from Brazil and former Portuguese colonies in Africa to settle in Portugal, to boost the population from its current decline in numbers. This will lead to more immigrants accessing other EU countries.
The European Parliament has now approved new rules for expelling undocumented immigrants, among them a provision allowing member nations to keep migrants in detention centres for up to 18 months. Foreigners who have been forcibly deported also face a five-year ban on re-entering the European Union.
The measures met stiff opposition from liberal lawmakers and human rights groups, but aim to standardise rules for deporting immigrants, which vary widely across the 27-nation bloc. Under the terms, EU countries are required to give illegal immigrants seven to 30 days to leave Europe after receiving deportation orders. Those who don't depart voluntarily, or who officials fear may go into hiding, can be detained for up to 18 months while awaiting removal to their home country or a third nation. This includes families and unaccompanied children, though EU nations are urged to detain minors only as a last resort.
Supporters contend the rules were needed to give weight to immigration laws but critics argue the EU measure will erode humanitarian standards in Europe and beyond. Critics of the new EU directive take issue with the five-year re-entry ban, saying it doesn't make enough provisions for shifting political realities or unforeseeable events, such as famine and war.
A Swedish Dilemma Immigration has also had a big impact on Sweden. For some time, the government has been concerned about unemployment levels among the foreign born as compared to natives of the country, higher levels of social-welfare dependency, school dropouts and crime. Although Sweden does not require potential citizens to pass a language test, immigrants who have been sentenced to prison for a criminal offence are not allowed to naturalise. In an article ‘Immigration and the welfare state’, Christopher Caldwell of the Swedish ‘Weekly Standard’ in February 2005 reported that in the last two decades, Malmö has acquired a population that is almost 40 percent foreign. Most of the students in its schools are of foreign parentage. Some immigrant neighborhoods in the city have unemployment rates exceeding 50 percent. Crime is high.
While Malmo is the city in Sweden most touched by immigration- it's not unique. Sweden has become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. Of 9 million Swedes, roughly 1,080,000 are foreign-born. There are around 900,000 children of immigrants, between 60,000 and 100,000 illegal immigrants, and 40,000 more asylum-seekers awaiting clearance. The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I).
Modern Sweden has built its sense of identity on two pillars: its generous welfare state and its status as a "moral superpower”. Indications are that the latter achievement is in the process of destroying the former, says Caldwell. It married solidarity to prosperity. This prosperity spurred a generosity towards the Third World that along with the generous welfare system helps explain how cities like Malmö became a magnet for immigration.
The Rosengard housing project in Malmo turned into a problem almost as soon as it was built. Today the windblown courtyards, convenience stores, and halal butchers are filled with heavily veiled women pushing baby carriages.
Swedes are looking at their neighbours' immigration policies. They see that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the Danish People's party has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Denmark's crackdown has left Swedes wondering what is to stop everyone in the E.U. from coming to their generous welfare state.
In 2008, net immigration into Sweden reached record levels, with more than 100,000 people entering the country and projections that the foreign-born population will reach 14 percent by the end of the year.In neighbouring Norway the number of people applying for asylum has more than doubled in 2008 putting huge pressure on the immigration agency UDI. As many as 60 new asylum seekers are arriving in Norway every day, and the UDI predicts 2008 will show a total of nearly 15,000. Asylum was granted to just over 40 percent of the applicants. UDI has asked all of Norway's mayors how they can help accommodate the influx. Initially, many immigrants settled in East Oslo, but social pressures have resulted in the Government introducing a dispersal policy to other areas of Norway. It is common now to see burka-clad women on the streets of remote fiord towns.
Britain too has long been a magnet for immigrants attracted by existing large immigrant communities in the country, easy access to welfare and housing and the government’s poor rate of removals of those refused permission to stay. The notorious Sangattte camp near Calais for years acted as magnet for illegals seeking to board ferries to the UK and claim asylum rather try elsewhere in the EU. Since Labour came to power in 1997, government statistics show the number of foreign nationals given UK passports has soared with 84 per cent of immigrants coming from outside the EU. By 2051 the Government Actuary’s Department estimated the UK’s population could rise from the current 62 million to over 90 million, 70 per cent of this due to inward migration.
Net immigration topped 300,000 in 2006, three times the average figure in the mid-'90s—a level "unprecedented in our history," according to a parliamentary inquiry in 2008. With the exception of the United States, Britain took in more immigrants in 2006 than any of the world's leading economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Add to this an unknown number of illegal immigrants who arrive each year, with an estimated 600,000 now living in the UK.
Many other west European member states now have significant immigrant populations, notably France, with its former African colonies, but eastern EU countries remain largely untargeted by immigration as welfare payments are much less attractive to would-be economic migrants and there are no significant immigrant communities to provide support.
The safety valve of migration is part of our collective history, but large-scale migration now raises vital social, environmental and economic questions about where the world is going and how we deliver reform and a better life for people wherever they are born. (2,657 words)
*European Immigration: A Sourcebook Published: December 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7546-4894-9. Price: £75.00 Edited by Anna Triandafyllidou, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.
In Italy, the number of illegal immigrants entering the country doubled in the first seven months of 2008 over 2007.
Spain, Portugal and Malta have all become similar targets. Approximately 1,000 illegal immigrants were picked up at sea when they landed in Malta between January and June 2006. Officials in Valletta compare this as the equivalent of 50,000 reaching Spain in the same time frame. The majority were attempting to reach Italy. This is the magnitude of the problem of illegal immigration in Malta where the population density is 1,200 per square kilometre, says Maltese Foreign Minister Michael Frendo.
Both Spain and Italy have faced major influxes of illegal immigrants. Italy, after announcing a new amnesty in July 2006 that it would grant citizenship to immigrants that could document they have stayed in Italy for five years, has now implemented state of emergency measures.
More than 15,000 illegal immigrants entered the EU via Italy between January and July 2008. The figures come in spite of a government crackdown on crime and an increase in the number of deportations. Many illegals arrive on boats organised by people traffickers. Most come across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa. Once ashore they hope to take advantage of the Shengen zone’s open borders within the EU and locate work.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi crackdown on crime has seen stringent new measures introduced, making it an offence punishable by up to four years jail to enter the country illegally. A decree allows the government to use troops to monitor the country's immigrant internment centres and to deploy soldiers to several cities in an effort to control crime. Property rented to illegal immigrants can be confiscated under the new legislation.
Though expulsions have increased the Italian authorities, like others in Europe, often find the countries of origin of illegal arrivals are reluctant to accept them back if they are deported. Italy's prisons are already crammed with foreigners. Some 20,000 people out of the 55,000 prisoners currently serving sentences or awaiting trial in Italian jails are foreigners. The number of foreign prisoners continues to increase because of difficulties carrying through expulsions ordered by the judiciary.
Italy's measures have hit the Roma most severely. Many came from Romania when that country joined the European Union in 2007. Berlusconi's predecessor, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, had ordered some deportations of Roma, despite their EU citizenship. Under Mr. Berlusconi, Italy has gone further, initiating a census and fingerprinting of Roma.
Estimates range from 500,000 non-EU citizens currently living illegally in the country to the 600,000 cited by Italy's three largest labor unions CGIL, CISL and UIL and 800,000 according to the research institute Eurispes’s annual report on immigration.
Both Italy and Greece had unemployment rates of around 11 per cent in 1999, whereas Spain’s unemployment rate exceeded 15 per cent in the same year. Nevertheless, Italy has admitted over 2.5 million, Spain about 2.5 million and Greece nearly 1.5 million immigrant workers in the last 15 to 20 years.
Five amnesties have taken place in Italy since 1986, involving more than two million immigrants; four in Greece and four in Portugal since 1992 and three in Spain. These amnesties confirm that such strategies do not solve in the long term the challenge of dealing with undocumented migration.*
Senegal is becoming a jumping off point for many would be immigrants, smuggling them to the Canary Islands, where they move on to Spain and the EU. Stories of success are fuelling efforts to make the attempt. By June 2006 more than 10,000 had made the attempt from Senegal to the Canaries that year. Senegalese fishermen, many out of work due to intensive foreign fishing in their waters, have found a lucrative new business in smuggling. In an economy where the local wage is approximately $80 USD a month, a boat owner can charge over 100 individuals $1,000 each to attempt the journey.
Spain: Balancing rights
In Spain, where legal immigrants alone make up nearly 9 percent of the population, Prime Minister Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies. In June 2008, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, ban them from returning. Faced with a 10.7 percent unemployment rate, Zapatero announced plans that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries.
Zapatero's immigration policy has been criticised by immigrants-rights organisations. Antonio Abad, secretary-general of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR), points out that by increasing the monitoring of the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, Spanish authorities have compelled sub-Saharan migrants to begin their sea journey from points farther south, endangering themselves even further. "It takes the people who need the most protection and makes things even harder for them," he says. He also criticizes Zapatero's support for the Return Directive. "When you limit one person's rights, you limit all of society," he adds.
The Aegean
With its beaches, and historical sites the Greek island of Patmos has long been a popular tourist destination. But recently the tiny Aegean island has drawn a new type of visitor to its sandy shores.
Over 4,000 illegal immigrants arrived on the island in 2008, many being transferred from the nearby islet of Agathonisi, where they had been abandoned by smugglers. Municipal authorities have now said they will block their ports to would-be immigrants arriving from neighbouring Turkey, arguing that the unwanted visitors have exceeded the number of permanent residents on the island.
The islands of Lesbos, Samos and Patmos have been besieged with almost daily boatloads of migrants, the largest influx being Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians. Arrivals from Africa, mainly Somalia are increasing - a sign that routes to Italy and Spain are proving more arduous.
Athens has called on the European Union to establish a coastguard to halt the flood attempting to enter the 27- member bloc by sea. Greece is faced with monitoring 16,000 kilometers of coastline, the largest external sea border of any EU member state.
Last year Greece received 112,000 would-be immigrants, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry. Some end up staying in Greece while many more continue their journey westward. Clashes between illegal immigrants battling to sneak aboard ferries bound for Italy from the western Greek port of Patras have broken out on an almost daily basis, with hundreds of immigrants living in makeshift camps at the port. Local authorities are appealing for help to contain the violence.
"We must do all we can to curb the phenomenon of illegal immigration by helping migrants countries of origin and their residents," Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos said. However, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said that asylum seekers face "undue hardships" in Greece, often lacking legal aid to ensure that their claims receive adequate scrutiny from the asylum authorities. The refugee agency has described Greece's recognition rate for refugees as "disturbingly low." The overall protection rate for refugees of all nationalities in 2006 was 1 per cent in Greece, compared to 45 per cent in Italy and 50 per cent in Sweden. Greece routinely arrests all illegal immigrants and asylum seekers found in its territory and detains them in reception centres for up to three months.
About 80,000 migrants have travelled to Greece in 2008 and decided to stay illegally, according to the authorities. While initial problems with the flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East centred on the Aegean islands, migrants are now causing problems in the capital. The historic center of Athens has been riven by several street battles in recent months, involving rival groups, often involved in dealing drugs, from Afghanistan, Iraq and war-torn African countries, wielding swords, axes and machetes.
"People are scared and depressed, it's getting worse and worse," said Vassiliki Nikolakopoulou of the group, Panathinaia. The top policy adviser for immigration issues at the Interior Ministry blames the influx of 80,000 migrants this year. "Because of this phenomenon, we see more and more immigrants in central Athens trying to survive, often through illicit activities," Official, Patroklos Georgiadis, said that Greece supported the stricter line on immigration being promoted by the bloc's French presidency. "There will not be another wave of legalisation of immigrants in Greece in the near future," referring to the three programs that have granted work and residence permits to some 500,000 migrants since 1997, most of them undocumented foreigners - at least half from Albania -
Thomas Hammarberg, a Swede who is human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, has criticized Greece and other EU states for "criminalizing the irregular entry and presence of migrants as part of a policy of so-called migration management." "Political decision-makers should not lose the human rights perspective in migration," Hammarberg wrote in an e-mail message when asked to comment for this article. "Migrants coming from war-torn states should be given refuge."
Portugal has also allowed thousands of immigrants from Brazil and former Portuguese colonies in Africa to settle in Portugal, to boost the population from its current decline in numbers. This will lead to more immigrants accessing other EU countries.
The European Parliament has now approved new rules for expelling undocumented immigrants, among them a provision allowing member nations to keep migrants in detention centres for up to 18 months. Foreigners who have been forcibly deported also face a five-year ban on re-entering the European Union.
The measures met stiff opposition from liberal lawmakers and human rights groups, but aim to standardise rules for deporting immigrants, which vary widely across the 27-nation bloc. Under the terms, EU countries are required to give illegal immigrants seven to 30 days to leave Europe after receiving deportation orders. Those who don't depart voluntarily, or who officials fear may go into hiding, can be detained for up to 18 months while awaiting removal to their home country or a third nation. This includes families and unaccompanied children, though EU nations are urged to detain minors only as a last resort.
Supporters contend the rules were needed to give weight to immigration laws but critics argue the EU measure will erode humanitarian standards in Europe and beyond. Critics of the new EU directive take issue with the five-year re-entry ban, saying it doesn't make enough provisions for shifting political realities or unforeseeable events, such as famine and war.
A Swedish Dilemma Immigration has also had a big impact on Sweden. For some time, the government has been concerned about unemployment levels among the foreign born as compared to natives of the country, higher levels of social-welfare dependency, school dropouts and crime. Although Sweden does not require potential citizens to pass a language test, immigrants who have been sentenced to prison for a criminal offence are not allowed to naturalise. In an article ‘Immigration and the welfare state’, Christopher Caldwell of the Swedish ‘Weekly Standard’ in February 2005 reported that in the last two decades, Malmö has acquired a population that is almost 40 percent foreign. Most of the students in its schools are of foreign parentage. Some immigrant neighborhoods in the city have unemployment rates exceeding 50 percent. Crime is high.
While Malmo is the city in Sweden most touched by immigration- it's not unique. Sweden has become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. Of 9 million Swedes, roughly 1,080,000 are foreign-born. There are around 900,000 children of immigrants, between 60,000 and 100,000 illegal immigrants, and 40,000 more asylum-seekers awaiting clearance. The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I).
Modern Sweden has built its sense of identity on two pillars: its generous welfare state and its status as a "moral superpower”. Indications are that the latter achievement is in the process of destroying the former, says Caldwell. It married solidarity to prosperity. This prosperity spurred a generosity towards the Third World that along with the generous welfare system helps explain how cities like Malmö became a magnet for immigration.
The Rosengard housing project in Malmo turned into a problem almost as soon as it was built. Today the windblown courtyards, convenience stores, and halal butchers are filled with heavily veiled women pushing baby carriages.
Swedes are looking at their neighbours' immigration policies. They see that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the Danish People's party has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Denmark's crackdown has left Swedes wondering what is to stop everyone in the E.U. from coming to their generous welfare state.
In 2008, net immigration into Sweden reached record levels, with more than 100,000 people entering the country and projections that the foreign-born population will reach 14 percent by the end of the year.In neighbouring Norway the number of people applying for asylum has more than doubled in 2008 putting huge pressure on the immigration agency UDI. As many as 60 new asylum seekers are arriving in Norway every day, and the UDI predicts 2008 will show a total of nearly 15,000. Asylum was granted to just over 40 percent of the applicants. UDI has asked all of Norway's mayors how they can help accommodate the influx. Initially, many immigrants settled in East Oslo, but social pressures have resulted in the Government introducing a dispersal policy to other areas of Norway. It is common now to see burka-clad women on the streets of remote fiord towns.
Britain too has long been a magnet for immigrants attracted by existing large immigrant communities in the country, easy access to welfare and housing and the government’s poor rate of removals of those refused permission to stay. The notorious Sangattte camp near Calais for years acted as magnet for illegals seeking to board ferries to the UK and claim asylum rather try elsewhere in the EU. Since Labour came to power in 1997, government statistics show the number of foreign nationals given UK passports has soared with 84 per cent of immigrants coming from outside the EU. By 2051 the Government Actuary’s Department estimated the UK’s population could rise from the current 62 million to over 90 million, 70 per cent of this due to inward migration.
Net immigration topped 300,000 in 2006, three times the average figure in the mid-'90s—a level "unprecedented in our history," according to a parliamentary inquiry in 2008. With the exception of the United States, Britain took in more immigrants in 2006 than any of the world's leading economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Add to this an unknown number of illegal immigrants who arrive each year, with an estimated 600,000 now living in the UK.
Many other west European member states now have significant immigrant populations, notably France, with its former African colonies, but eastern EU countries remain largely untargeted by immigration as welfare payments are much less attractive to would-be economic migrants and there are no significant immigrant communities to provide support.
The safety valve of migration is part of our collective history, but large-scale migration now raises vital social, environmental and economic questions about where the world is going and how we deliver reform and a better life for people wherever they are born. (2,657 words)
*European Immigration: A Sourcebook Published: December 2007 ISBN: 978-0-7546-4894-9. Price: £75.00 Edited by Anna Triandafyllidou, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.
Friday, January 9, 2009
IS THERE NO LIMIT TO THIS HYPOCRITE'S GALL?
In an on-line article posted on January 9/08, entitled “Canadians Must Take Personal Responsibility for Climate Change”, His Highness Dr. David Suzuki told readers that they could not depend on the imaginative leadership of politicians or businessmen who might care more about just the bottom line. Instead, they must look to themselves as well to fight climate change. In his words,
“We must also take responsibility in our own lives. A new report from Statistics Canada notes that individual Canadians are responsible for almost half the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, through our vehicle and electricity use and the choices we make in the products we buy.
That shouldn’t make us feel guilty; rather, it should show us how much opportunity and power we have as individuals to make a collective difference through personal choices and small steps. Another Statistics Canada study showed that Canadians are making efforts to recycle, compost, switch to environmentally friendly electrical and plumbing products and vehicles, and more.
We can’t wait for the politicians to save the world, but we do have to hold them to account. And we must all get informed and involved. If we act now, we—and our children and grandchildren—can hope to lead fulfilling and prosperous lives rather than moving from crisis to crisis. But the window of opportunity is closing a bit more every day.” http://www.straight.com/article-178473/david-suzuki-canadians-must-take-personal-responsibility-climate-change?
Those not umbilically connected to the CBC and able to think and research for themselves, or who are not of the mesmerized green yuppie members of the Suzuki cult on Quadra Island, reading this, his latest declaration of how WE should conduct our lives, would wonder on what historic day the good Doctor will take responsibility for HIS life. For HIS personal choices. And when we will be allowed to hold HIM to account in the manner that he wants us to hold politicians to account.
We wonder when HE will account for his use of the local marine garbage bin to dump his own personal garbage? For emptying the raw sewage from his house into the bay adjoining his Quadra property via a discreet pipe? For buying tropical fruit from the local Heriot Bay store when he instructs Canadians to live by a “100 mile diet” that consists of products grown only within that radius? For hunting and fishing in the Queen Charlottes with native friends under the protection of their exceptional quotas despite telling us to “live within OUR limits” and even telling us to avoid fishing altogether on page 98 of his “Green Guide”? For racking up more air miles than Richard Branson or an NHL hockey player in his trips between here there and everywhere. For using that big motorhome in last summer’s cross-Canada tour. And most of all, for siring 5 children from two relationships, who, using Canadian averages, would collectively emit 119 metric tonnes of Green House Gases per year, or thereabouts. I drive a Suzuki Sidekick and burn 11 litres of gasoline per week. Using carbon footprint analysis I determined that David Suzuki inflicted 86 times more damage to the atmosphere this past year with the five Suzukis he introduced into the world than I did driving my one Suzuki.
David Suzuki, in concluding his article, implores us to get “informed and involved”. That I am. I became informed that his David Suzuki Foundation is a benefactor of the Royal Bank of Canada, and that he is a recipient of an award from that nefarious growthist institution. What is RBC’s quid pro quo? Ask yourself this fundamental question. Once upon a time, the foundation of a comprehensive understanding of environmental problems was based on the “IPAT” equation partially formulated by Paul Erhlich, a man that Suzuki apparently once revered and interviewed. It stood for environmental impact (I) equals population level (P) times per capita consumption (A) times technology (T). But Dr. Suzuki and the rest of Canada’s environmental icons and the organizations they represent, have taken the “P” out of the IPAT equation, making nonsense of any sensible analysis of our ecological predicament? Why?
Because in the North American context, it is immigration which drives population growth, and mention of that ugly word not only offends the politically correct yuppie donor base, but also the big player on Bay Street, the Royal Bank. Its chairman, Gordon Nixon, has made public representations to Ottawa that he wishes to see immigration boosted by 167% to 400,000 people annually, a increase of 150,000 over the current level, despite the fact that Canada already suffers the highest growth rate of any G8 country. Even at the present pace, immigration can be cited for the loss of at least 60,000 acres of prime farmland in Ontario alone, and more in other rich farm enclaves like BC’s Fraser Valley and as well as the emission of GHG equivalent to one quarter of what the Alberta tar sands is now producing. Yet the David Suzuki Foundation has nothing to say, other than that they don’t have the resources to examine population issues! As if that should be of little environmental priority. Suzuki himself has made several anti-immigration remarks privately, but publically he is a wallflower every where but in Australia, where he is bold and outspoken about THEIR predicament. It is so easy to complain about your wife to the bartender, but not so easy to come home and tell her she’s overweight face to face. One wonders, what has he left to lose?
“We must also take responsibility in our own lives. A new report from Statistics Canada notes that individual Canadians are responsible for almost half the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, through our vehicle and electricity use and the choices we make in the products we buy.
That shouldn’t make us feel guilty; rather, it should show us how much opportunity and power we have as individuals to make a collective difference through personal choices and small steps. Another Statistics Canada study showed that Canadians are making efforts to recycle, compost, switch to environmentally friendly electrical and plumbing products and vehicles, and more.
We can’t wait for the politicians to save the world, but we do have to hold them to account. And we must all get informed and involved. If we act now, we—and our children and grandchildren—can hope to lead fulfilling and prosperous lives rather than moving from crisis to crisis. But the window of opportunity is closing a bit more every day.” http://www.straight.com/article-178473/david-suzuki-canadians-must-take-personal-responsibility-climate-change?
Those not umbilically connected to the CBC and able to think and research for themselves, or who are not of the mesmerized green yuppie members of the Suzuki cult on Quadra Island, reading this, his latest declaration of how WE should conduct our lives, would wonder on what historic day the good Doctor will take responsibility for HIS life. For HIS personal choices. And when we will be allowed to hold HIM to account in the manner that he wants us to hold politicians to account.
We wonder when HE will account for his use of the local marine garbage bin to dump his own personal garbage? For emptying the raw sewage from his house into the bay adjoining his Quadra property via a discreet pipe? For buying tropical fruit from the local Heriot Bay store when he instructs Canadians to live by a “100 mile diet” that consists of products grown only within that radius? For hunting and fishing in the Queen Charlottes with native friends under the protection of their exceptional quotas despite telling us to “live within OUR limits” and even telling us to avoid fishing altogether on page 98 of his “Green Guide”? For racking up more air miles than Richard Branson or an NHL hockey player in his trips between here there and everywhere. For using that big motorhome in last summer’s cross-Canada tour. And most of all, for siring 5 children from two relationships, who, using Canadian averages, would collectively emit 119 metric tonnes of Green House Gases per year, or thereabouts. I drive a Suzuki Sidekick and burn 11 litres of gasoline per week. Using carbon footprint analysis I determined that David Suzuki inflicted 86 times more damage to the atmosphere this past year with the five Suzukis he introduced into the world than I did driving my one Suzuki.
David Suzuki, in concluding his article, implores us to get “informed and involved”. That I am. I became informed that his David Suzuki Foundation is a benefactor of the Royal Bank of Canada, and that he is a recipient of an award from that nefarious growthist institution. What is RBC’s quid pro quo? Ask yourself this fundamental question. Once upon a time, the foundation of a comprehensive understanding of environmental problems was based on the “IPAT” equation partially formulated by Paul Erhlich, a man that Suzuki apparently once revered and interviewed. It stood for environmental impact (I) equals population level (P) times per capita consumption (A) times technology (T). But Dr. Suzuki and the rest of Canada’s environmental icons and the organizations they represent, have taken the “P” out of the IPAT equation, making nonsense of any sensible analysis of our ecological predicament? Why?
Because in the North American context, it is immigration which drives population growth, and mention of that ugly word not only offends the politically correct yuppie donor base, but also the big player on Bay Street, the Royal Bank. Its chairman, Gordon Nixon, has made public representations to Ottawa that he wishes to see immigration boosted by 167% to 400,000 people annually, a increase of 150,000 over the current level, despite the fact that Canada already suffers the highest growth rate of any G8 country. Even at the present pace, immigration can be cited for the loss of at least 60,000 acres of prime farmland in Ontario alone, and more in other rich farm enclaves like BC’s Fraser Valley and as well as the emission of GHG equivalent to one quarter of what the Alberta tar sands is now producing. Yet the David Suzuki Foundation has nothing to say, other than that they don’t have the resources to examine population issues! As if that should be of little environmental priority. Suzuki himself has made several anti-immigration remarks privately, but publically he is a wallflower every where but in Australia, where he is bold and outspoken about THEIR predicament. It is so easy to complain about your wife to the bartender, but not so easy to come home and tell her she’s overweight face to face. One wonders, what has he left to lose?
A NEO-MALTHUSIAN GARBAGE STRIKE: A Civil Rights Protest for The Age of Overshoot
Here is an idea. Folks of my generation recall the famous Memphis garbage strike in the late 60s when predominantly African-American refuse collectors in Memphis, Tennessee got fed up with being treated like garbage. They worked at a dirty, disgusting and physically taxing job, so necessary to public health and city life, but were very poorly remunerated for it, and received no respect for the work they were doing. Then Dr. Martin Luther King weighed in, and gave a memorable speech that was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. I remember him at the mike before an audience of sanitation workers and their supporters and saying loudly, “I am a garbage collector, I am a man, I AM SOMEBODY.” The crowd went wild. That was my recollection.
Imagine if we were to pull off our own garbage strike. Boldly and ostentatiously before public eyes, we arranged to be seen to mix our garbage. Our plastics, our newspapers and our bottles all coalesced with fruit and vegetable peelings, empty tin cans and the like. Before cameras and witnesses, we made a public statement that we weren’t going to pick up after the corporate agenda anymore. They didn’t care about being demographic litterbugs so we decided that we were no longer going to be their mothers, picking up after them where ever they went and cleaning up their rooms.
If they and their supporters, or the green yuppies in the environmental NGOs, were not going to call them out for their littering, we were no longer going to play the patsies. It was mass immigration and birth incentives which were turning our environment into a dump, not the “million acts of green” that were not happening. We’ll stop filling the landfill when they stop filling the country with more and more landfillers. Fair enough?
According to a study done by the Stockholm Institute, one newcomer to Britain erases 80 lifetimes of responsible and conscientious recycling. As long as an unsustainable torrent of immigrants are encouraged to enter the country, conservation and recycling are nothing more than a do-good, feel-good distraction from the main project, which is stopping population growth. Until government at any level is sincere in containing and reversing growth, then we should not be complicit in their cowardly diversion of managing it. A "million acts of green" do not compensate for Canada's 33 million acts of consumption.
I am a neo-Malthusian. A garbage mixer. And I am SOMEBODY.
Imagine if we were to pull off our own garbage strike. Boldly and ostentatiously before public eyes, we arranged to be seen to mix our garbage. Our plastics, our newspapers and our bottles all coalesced with fruit and vegetable peelings, empty tin cans and the like. Before cameras and witnesses, we made a public statement that we weren’t going to pick up after the corporate agenda anymore. They didn’t care about being demographic litterbugs so we decided that we were no longer going to be their mothers, picking up after them where ever they went and cleaning up their rooms.
If they and their supporters, or the green yuppies in the environmental NGOs, were not going to call them out for their littering, we were no longer going to play the patsies. It was mass immigration and birth incentives which were turning our environment into a dump, not the “million acts of green” that were not happening. We’ll stop filling the landfill when they stop filling the country with more and more landfillers. Fair enough?
According to a study done by the Stockholm Institute, one newcomer to Britain erases 80 lifetimes of responsible and conscientious recycling. As long as an unsustainable torrent of immigrants are encouraged to enter the country, conservation and recycling are nothing more than a do-good, feel-good distraction from the main project, which is stopping population growth. Until government at any level is sincere in containing and reversing growth, then we should not be complicit in their cowardly diversion of managing it. A "million acts of green" do not compensate for Canada's 33 million acts of consumption.
I am a neo-Malthusian. A garbage mixer. And I am SOMEBODY.
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