Talk on the Collapse of Fertility Rates at the CRC Conference

That was definitely worth watching. Great work! -though I wish I could have seen the graphics...

As the illegal immigration issue maybe gets fixed in the next few years this will become an increasingly important topic in the US (finally).

I hope your more extended analysis includes mention on the male side of the equation of the bind men have been put in over the last 25-40 years by those who perhaps didn't think very far ahead about what they were doing (or not doing) to the social fabric: on the one hand 1) women still require the male to play the traditional role of being the initiator, while on the other hand 2) a part of the feminist project has been to criminalize the traditional male role via nebulous and subjective laws on stalking, sexual harassment, and date rape -- all of which have made the traditional male role much more risky and potentially costly, especially for those both with more to lose should they be unfortunate enough to cross paths with the wrong crazy, as well as those who are more sensitive and responsible about not doing the wrong thing.

In other words, being the one who takes the initiative is now both required and prohibited, or at least it's so problematical as to not be worth both the effort and the risks.

Item #1 has been kept in place by all the propagandistic pandering to women telling them how great, special, and valuable they are, how much they're worth it and deserve to be hotly pursued like the great prizes they like to imagine themselves to be. In fact, the newest thing is for well-educated modern women in their upper twenties to feel they are so superior to any man who could possibly exist that they're now claiming they're actually 'over-qualified' for love. It almost makes Gordon Roy Parker's quip about how "the hotties are saying that they'd love to date a decent man, but only if he learns how to seduce them the way a player would" seem doable by comparison. Twenty years of anti-sex roles and equality-based talk about getting women to come down off their pedestals and share the 'ask-out' responsibility/task/job have not only fallen on totally deaf ears but have actually seen things go in exactly the other direction.

Item #2 simply plays on the natural tendency of men and society in general to protect women from harm, which is not inherently a bad impulse at all. But as the Kobe Bryant or Duke lacrosse cases (and many others) seem to show, some women have no problem taking advantage of this impulse, and may even see it as a cause to attempt easy extortion. Clearly, men need protection in this area.

On top of all that, you've had pretty much a thirty year lecture from women to men about all the things women aren't going to do for men anymore. This pretty much leaves but one thing to cause a man to be attracted to a woman for the purposes of establishing a relationship, and we all know how women feel about that circumstance.

One almost certainly couldn't have engineered a better way to tank birth rates if one had deliberately tried. It's amazing anyone's being born at all... And it certainly doesn't help that even raising some of these issues brings rad-fems out of the woodwork claiming you want to roll back the clock fifty years, shove all women back into kitchens, keep them barefoot and pregnant, beat them senseless every other day, and all the rest.

* MB

Those of you who use outdated O/Ss (like myself) may have trouble getting embedded Flash video to show up in your web browsers correctly. The fix is to save the Flash video data to file and watch it in a stand-alone viewer. Problem is, sites like youtube.com don't make this easy.

Get out your propeller beanies if you want to do this, but believe me, it's worth it, even if you don't have embedded media problems, since streamed media usually plays better when run from a file rather than the stream itself. OK, so how to capture streamed media, esp. from youtube.com? Follow these five EASY :) steps:

1. Get the Firefox browser if you don't already have it. Go to to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ and DL and install it.

2. Get the UnPlug Firefox extension. Extensions are 3rd-party installable modules to Firefox that allow the functionality to be revised and extended. There are a lot of these out there, some better than others. I can vouch for UnPlug. Find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2254/. Read about extensions here.

3. OK, so now you have it installed; note the UnPlug green fish icon in the upper-right corner of the Firefox browser window. When you are on a web page with embedded media in it click the green fish icon on the browser (tip: you needn't wait for the whole page to load or the media view box to appear; in fact, that will slow you down. Once the page starts loading, after you see the text banner at the top of it, click the browser's "Stop" button and then click the UnPlug green fish icon), and a new page opens listing the streaming medias' URLs. This works well with youtube.com, in fact the author had youtube.com in mind when he wrote it (or so I have read), as well as with other sites that use embedded streamed media. However sometimes it doesn't work with some sites, so there are times you have to deal with that-- sorry, what ya want, it's free after all!

4. Locate the streamed media you want on the opened UnPlug page and click it. You get a save-file dialog box. In the case of youtube.com, the default name of the file is simply "get_file" with no file extension. Change the name to something more meaningful and add ".flv" as a file extension. Note where you are saving the file, then click "Save". The saving process could take some time depending on your Internet connection speed and the size of the streamed media file itself. (For example, the one in this MANN article is 37 MB in size). High-speed connections are always recommended for embedded media.

5. Now, play the file. But with what, you ask? Windows Media Player won't play it, neither will RealPlayer! But, the Wimpy FLV Player will, and it's free - no adware or nagware, too. Get it here. Other stand-alone FLV players will do also, but I have had good experiences with this one.

There, now you are liberated from the grip of embedded streaming media crashing your browser and bunging up your O/S and making you dread surfing to media sites.

Now if only we could all be liberated from the grip of feminism!

Excellent obesrvations, MB, as usual!

I am slowly working my way through Laura Kipnis' slim new book THE FEMALE THING: DIRT, SEX, ENVY, VULNERABILITY.

It's quite a treat, and especially juicy reading for MRAs.

Her main thesis appears to be that feminism is less a conspiracy than a side effect of female's inevitably conflicted psyches --- i.e. women really truly are crazy, and they know it; but can't deal with it. (And so, project their hormonal curse of madness upon men....)

I could turn to any page in this funny, insightful, postfeminist author's book and get a laugh, a political point, a strategy.

So, here's a completely random excerpt ---

"The irony is that even women who really DON'T want a man -- don't want them as boyfriends or husbands or sex partners -- usually still want SOMETHING that men have: their salaries, for one thing, or their social privileges, or their access to those coveted corridors of power. Even proclaiming "independence" from men invariably ends up steeped in defensive posturing, since proclaiming it doesn't exactly eliminate men from the equation -- not as long as they're the benchmark for achievement and equality. Whether it's wanting to have a man or have what men HAVE ... they're still so darn central to everything, not only in the external world of social reality, but (possibly more to the point) in internal female reality as well."

(From the sleeve -- "For all the upbeat 'You go girl' slogans, women remain caught between an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing the injured party and claiming independence. Feminism is bedeviled by the same impasses and contradictions it seeks to rectify." )

I haven't watched the presentation yet, so perhaps I've missed the explanation about why lower fertility rates are a problem and about why higher fertility rates (Ponzi scheme?) are needed.

I admire some of Thomas Malthus's work, and in addition to my interest in men's rights and men's issues, I'm also an advocate of negative popluation growth, so I'm wondering why lower fertility rates (in and of themselves and not as an issue related to male-female dynamics) are a problem and not something to be celebrated. According to the entry for "world popluation" in the Wikipedia, the world's population is about 6.6 billion.

Given that the world's popluation is expected to continue to increase, and, in some cases (such as the United States's) to continue to explode, the toll that overpopulation has taken on global and local environments, and the possibility of a large "die off" as a result of the world's running out of oil (aka "Peak Oil") relative to its popluation, decreased fertility would appear to be, not the problem, but rather the solution.

If you live in the United States, you need to ask yourself whether you want to live in a U.S. of 500 million people and to consider how that would affect your quality of life. After all, "they don't make land anymore". The real estate, the natural resources, the open space, the clean air, the clean fresh water, the sewers, the roads, and the food all have to come from somewhere.

They definitely do make land. Japan has many man made extensions of several kilometers and islands to allow it's port cities to grow. Kansai international Airport was built on a man made island and it's new expansion is built on another man made island.

The USA fortunately still has plenty of open spaces compared to Japan. India has over 1 billion in population in a far smaller area then the USA. China has almost 1/3 of the Global population in a country that is only slightly larger then the USA in land area.

If you don't like the population, come on up to Canada, we have only 32.5 million people and the second largest country on Earth. We are practically deserted. Did you know the worlds largest game preserve is not in Africa but Ontario Canada?

I am not of the belief that the population is as serious a problem as we are led to believe.

The problem I think that has people here worried about is that the birth rate of generational North Americans is dropping drastically. Keep in mind every couple has to have at least two children who survive to adulthood simply to maintain the population. North Americans are not having children at a rate that will maintain current levels of population. The problem is from a political perspective, that in order merely to maintain the population we have to allow ever increasing numbers of new immigrants into the countries. This creates social issues because the new generation of Global migrants is not the same today as it was in 1492 when Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue. They are not Europeans. Not that that is a bad thing really, but there are very large cultural differences between pre-existing groups and new immigrants these days. They don't share the same roots in Europe as the North American population has for the most part traditionally.

This causes some people to think American culture is in jeopardy because "Americans" are quickly (in broad terms of the number of generations of people not the number of years) becoming the minority in America.

I personally don't care what the colour of the skin of a person is or where they came from. I do care that Canadian and American culture and traditions continue and are valued. All I ask is that new comers be proud of their new home and assimilate the culture.

I think that is the gist of where people's fear comes from concerning declining populations. I draw this conclusion in part from the current panic over immigrants from Mexico to the United States.

The majority of newcomers to Canada are also from Central Asian countries and secondly East Asian countries. The Global Migrants are primarily from these regions due to the situations you have outlined.

The largest Chinese population in a single city North America is now in Vancouver, not San Fransisco.

Hispanic immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America are are almost exclusively an issue that the USA is dealing with. Very few of these migrants make it up to Canada or travel to other regions of the world.

India indeed needs to grow its economy rapidly, but it is doing just that. India has established R&D capabilities and a strong manufacturing base that is growing extremely fast. There will be Indian made cars on the roads of the United States before there will be Chinese made cars. India is changing very rapidly and I am hopeful that they have the ability to resolve their own social problems and assume a place among the great nations of the world.

I am certain there will be Global shifts in population and power, but I am not certain that it will be catastrophic. The fact that there are Muslims increasingly migrating to nuclear nations means absolutely nothing to me. You seem to be implying that Muslims pose a threat of some kind to these countries or to other countries by their presence alone. I completely disagree. Muslims are no more or less dangerous to the world then Judeo-Christians (perhaps less even, as virtually all of history's Global tragedies have been the responsibility of the Judeo-Christian world). I would love for you to expand on that idea because I really don't see where you are going with it. Are you saying Muslims are going to gain control of nuclear weapons through Europe and destroy the world? I certainly don't buy that argument.

Thomas, thank you for the insightful comments and excellent presentation. It's great to finally see an actual face and voice behind the words.

Your side comment (in the presentation) on the instability of non-linear systems was quite amusing because I've often thought the same thing about population demographics. In my career, I've done much in the way of geophysical inverse applications where there are many local minimum in the solution domain. At some point, the dynamics forces the problem over a local energy hump and the solution moves into an entirely different realm. In many developed countries, this is exactly what is happening with respect to population.

There are many merits to the opinion that the worlds population is too large and should be controlled. After all, resources are limited. However, and as you point out, the countries that can best support population growth are the one's with the shrinking populations. The countries that can least support population growth are the one's with (often) dramatically increasing populations.

The Europe that currently exists is all but doomed. The only way to stop the inevitable would be for European governments to put guns to the heads of their citizens and force them to procreate. This is not an off the wall comment. The CIA, for example, generated a report a year or two ago that came to this conclusion. The Europe of the future will be radically different than the Europe of today due to the changing demographics.

The situation is a little different in the United States because the fertility rate is at least marginal and incoming immigrants have, up until now, largely adapted to the existing culture (and the cultures are not too different).

This is one of my favorite subjects because, if for no other reason, it emphasizes the concept of "what comes around goes around." The cause of these changes is primarily the destruction of the family unit, and much of this has been brought about by feminism and their kind. The irony is that the very world that they are bringing about is diometrically opposed to feminism. Feminism is it's own worst enemy.

I'm fascinated by how some governments are attempting to mitigate the pending crises with solutions that ignore the cause. "Let's pay women, married or not, to have children." While they recognize the problem is quite severe, they are willfully blind to the cause. They ignore the role of men because it is politically correct to do so. In the end, this political correctness will kill them.

>There will be Indian made cars on the roads of the United States before there will be Chinese made cars.

India may have to do some real hustling to beat out China. My son is a sales manager at a local car dealership and he told me over a month ago about plans already in the works for them to start selling cars from China. Here's the website he sent me.

He told me he heard that they are going to have Mitsubishi drivetrains and look like Toyotas. Ha! Ha! Not only that, one model has the name "Chery". I told him I couldn't believe there is a guy in the U.S. who's going to buy a car with that name. What do you think? Is it possible that they haven't been told what that word means here in the U.S.?