People who don't need people [Mark Steyn]
"Humanity is the greatest challenge," says Colorado environmental activist John Feeney in "The Green Room" at BBC News. It's not enough to reduce emissions, we have to reduce the folks doing the emitting:
We must end world population growth, then reduce population size. That means lowering population numbers in industrialised as well as developing nations.
It's fascinating to observe how almost any old totalitarian racket becomes respectable once it's cloaked in enviro-hooey. For example, restrictions on freedom of movement were previously the mark of the Soviet Union et al. But in Britain, they're proposing limits on your right to take airline flights to other countries - and, as it's in the name of environmental responsibility, everyone thinks it's a grand idea. Mr Feeney's views are the logical reductio, which means in another six months or so European cabinet ministers and UN officials are bound to start taking them up. Nobel Peace Prize winner and notorious cat slayer Jimmy Carter will turn his shotgun on two-legged targets and start building Habitats for Inhumanity.
I'm with this guy:
George Osmond married his wife, Olive, on Dec. 1, 1944. She died in 2004. The couple had nine children, many of whom became singing stars; 55 grandchildren; and 48 great-grandchildren.
Disingenuous, moi? [Mark Steyn]
Derb, I'm not being disingenuous. You may regard the George Osmonds of Karachi as a problem, but it's not obvious that they're anything to worry about if you're in Karachi. Pakistan exports its surplus manpower not just to Britain and Canada but to countries with which it has no imperial ties, such as Scandinavia.
As I like to say, the future belongs to those who show up for it. The guys showing up are the highly fecund Osmond brothers of Utah, and the even more fecund al-Osmond brothers of Yemen, but not the Italians, Germans, San Franciscans, Vermonters, the John Feeneys of this world, or followers of the near parodic Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalian Church:
Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations... We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.
Which is why they'll be as irrelevant to the future "stewardship of the earth" as, say, the Inuit are today. See also Phillip Longman on "The Return Of Patriarchy".
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