The World is Having a Nervous Breakdown

By Alan Caruba

If one has been in the habit of reading history then the events of the past and of the present inform each other. For this reason, it occurred to me that the world is once again having a nervous breakdown.

It’s not just about money, though surely the nations of Europe along with the U.S. have spent themselves into the poorhouse in ways that defy the imagination. If it weren’t so serious, it would be comical to see the desperation that has led our Federal Reserve to print money backed by nothing and to watch the central bankers of Europe move gobs of euros around between the new mother church, Germany, and the banks of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Italy so that they can pay their bills.

They’re all broke. We have individual States that have a higher GDP than Greece that have balanced their budgets. Those are usually the States whose constitutions require they balance their budget. The rest are run by governors torn between taking the federal largess intended to deprive them of more sovereignty and hoping that the next natural disaster hits the State above or below them instead.

Few arrive at a nervous breakdown overnight. It takes time and a variety of bad decisions or bad luck or both. After blaming George W. Bush and Republicans for his problems, Obama has taken to blaming bad luck. Does he even know that people have concluded the economy is now officially and completely his fault?

When he proposed Obamacare, a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to tell them not to do it. He should have listened to them. Now we call them the Tea Party.

Obama cannot explain away having increased government spending by 50% between 2008 and 2010 while calling for higher taxes on everyone at the same time there are an estimated 14 million Americans out of work, stopped looking for work, or can’t get a job because Obamacare has so screwed up the near future that businesses are reluctant to hire anyone.

The 2008 financial crisis was 100% a government creation dating back to the establishment of Fannie Mae in 1938 to purchase mortgages from banks in order to encourage more lending, more home building, more home ownership. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ignored the timeless role of greed in banking.

Rule Number One: Almost everything the government touches, it ruins in some fashion. At the very least, it increases its cost of operation.

Rule Number Two: The government’s primary function is the defense of the nation against attack. As Ronald Reagan said, “Nobody ever started a war with us because we were too strong.”

Rule Number Three: Government exists due to its ability to tax and spend other people’s money. Spending always needs to be restrained.

Rule Number Four. Government will always produce more laws and regulations than are needed. It should be restrained. (See the U.S. Constitution).

Globally, we are just emerging from a bout of total insanity called “global warming.” This was a theory that said that something that represented 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere was trapping all the heat and would kill us unless massively reduced. That “something” is carbon dioxide, a gas on which—along with oxygen—all life depends. It is plant food; the less carbon dioxide, the less vegetation. Herbivores eat vegetation and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans, being omnivores, eat both.

The other craziness afflicting the planet is “radical” Islam. The truth is that it has been just plain old Islam for about 1400 years. There are a billion Muslims, most located in the Middle East, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Wherever they are, their non-Muslim neighbors cordially hate them because Islam teaches that all other religions are false and that those who believe them—infidels—can be killed for not being Muslims. The strange part of this is, depending on whether you’re a Shiite or Sunni, it is perfectly okay to kill other Muslims, too. Christianity went through this during the Reformation, 1517 to 1648.

When I was a child, the world went crazy and held a great big war. It involved Germany, Japan, and Italy as the “Axis” powers and just about everyone else did their best to destroy their military in every way possible. The Axis was defeated first and then, still holding out, the Empire of Japan had not one, but two, atomic bombs dropped on them before they quit.

World War Two was the direct result of Europe’s World War One. The surrender terms were so awful the Germans embraced a lunatic called Hitler and the Italians fell in love with Mussolini.

The Soviet Union came out of World War One when the Germans permitted Vladimir Lenin, a Communist, into Russia. He started a revolution and the Russians swapped a czar for a new dictator. Stalin took over from Lenin, but because communism has never worked anywhere it was tried, the Soviet Union eventually fell apart in 1991. Now a republic, the new dictator is named Vladimir Putin.

As the French say, “Plus les choses changent, ils plus elles restent les memes.” The more things change, they more they stay the same.

The world is having a nervous breakdown because institutions, religions, and political ideologies are having difficulty adjusting to the migration and growth of populations. Modern communications technologies are playing a role as well.

The chimera haunting everyone is the military capacity to inflict massive devastation and death has increased beyond the confidence of governments and people that it can be controlled without having to kill a lot of people, i.e., Iranians, in the process..

Capitalism, despite an abundance of communism still around, has triumphed, but like any system, has been subjected to a great deal of abuse, rocking the economies of the U.S., Europe, and making most other nations nervous, too.

And, finally, there are six-going-on-seven billion people on a planet that is probably not intended to have that many. It puts intense strain on everything from water to food to the sources of energy that fuel modern and developing nations.

So everyone’s on edge. Nations and continents are on edge. The world is having a nervous breakdown.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A World That's Coming Unglued

By Alan Caruba

After you’ve read history for a number of years, you begin to realize that the world goes crazy every so often. People and nations just lose their wits. It’s usually in times of great change when old truths or old ways of doing things are thrust aside by new discoveries, new technologies, or just the renewal of old pathologies.

Instances of this include the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of fascism in the last century.

I think we are in a comparable period, for how long or short I cannot say, but to quote from Star Wars, “There’s a disturbance in the universe” or, to be more specific, among the nations of planet Earth.

Part of the problem is the sheer size of the human population. We now number in excess of six billion and there are serious issues of how to feed all of us, ensure clean water, employment, and, of course, the provision of the energy that fuels societies dependent on electricity.

Photos from space of the Earth at night tell one everything about which parts of the Earth are enjoying the benefits of electricity and which are not.

In the past, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war, famine, disease, and death could be counted on to keep populations in check, but advances in technology, medicine, and agriculture have tipped the balance in favor of humanity.

Beyond sheer numbers, there is the problem of profligate spending that has several European nations, as well as the United States of America, in deep financial trouble. The merry-go-round of borrowing to keep bloated budgets afloat cannot continue indefinitely despite the efforts of central bankers to do so. Merely printing money has always led to bad events from riots to wars.

The financial problems are tied to the worst economic systems ever created, first as Communism, then its modified version, Socialism. Neither work. While politicians of every stripe like Socialism as a way to “redistribute” wealth, the entire system is confiscatory and based on coercion. It usually impoverishes the middle class of workers while creating an ever-growing class of those who will not or cannot work.

As harsh as Capitalism can be, it does work. It involves high levels of risk, often large amounts of investment, and it allows for failure. It is also the greatest engine of growth and the development of new industries, new technologies, and improved lives. Like fish in water, we are oblivious to the miracle a single supermarket represents.

All economic systems must strive to cope with corruption and, so long as there are three humans on Earth, there will be corruption. Having recently descended from the trees to walk upright, humans are subject to their aggressive nature.

Communism and Socialism promise equal misery. Capitalism offers the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of making the right investment guesses or developing new and better things people want to own. Competition improves life for everyone.

In sum, the clash between economic systems is still being worked out with nations that grant as much liberty as possible to their populations doing best. Where power is concentrated in a few, their populations and their nations do not prosper. As regards the world’s population, a huge cohort is young, unemployed and combustible.

It is the quest, the demand for more personal and political liberty that is causing much of the upheavals extant and no where is this more obvious than in those nations where Islam has been the prevailing religion. Islam translates as “submission.” It is based in seventh century strictures on how life should be lived. It is at war with modernity. It cannot prevail, but until it reforms or fails, there will be terrorism and war.

The greatest threat to humanity is the presence and continued quest for nuclear weapons. They are genocidal, capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Allowing Iran, a nation led by a handful of crazed theocrats, to acquire nuclear parity poses a threat to humanity that has never existed before. Permitting North Korea or Pakistan to retain their nukes can only result in a bad outcome.

Like a rumbling volcano, the tremors felt as the result of the United States being led by a dedicated Communist and likely Muslim is a destabilizing factor not only for its citizens, but for others around the world.

It is up to the present leaders of the world to thread their way through the upheavals and divisions causing growing instability. Some will do it better than others. Some will cling to failed systems and philosophies of the past. Some will simply pursue power for power’s sake.

Alliances will change. Allies will become enemies. Enemies will become allies. Nations will pursue their shifting interests.

For the world in general, a good start would be the abandonment of the United Nations, an institution that failed initially as the League of Nations, and which is now so putrid with corruption and schemes to impose a one-world government that it poses a threat to the sovereignty of all nations.

Just as neighborhoods thrive when the common interests of neighbors for security and peace are observed, international organizations designed to concentrate power inevitably fall short of their heralded benefits.

In the same way shifts in the Earth’s tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and the latest cooling cycle are posing massive challenges for humanity, the nations of the world are trying to cope with changes in the financial universe they have created as well as outmoded concepts of security.

How the present upheavals, financial, religious, and demographic work themselves out remains unknown. In a neighborhood people find it best to “get along.” In a world beset with rival systems of belief and governance, the outcome is far more murky and, ultimately, more threatening.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Parsing the (Very) Bad News

By Alan Caruba

The dictionary says “parse” means to break down into component parts of speech with an analysis of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part. The Caruba definition means to take all manner of bits of information and try to make sense of any of it, in part or in whole.

Part of the problem is that there are so many “experts” in the world, PhDs which often translates to “piled higher and deeper.” The lesser degrees are often lacking as well. A college education today is obscenely expensive and, as many employers will tell you, of dubious value when it comes to the mastery of skills that were formerly acquired by the sixth grade.

A recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek was devoted to the year in review and perhaps the most astonishing statistical data it offered was the way Americans are “stuck in the middle” when it comes to opinions on all the major issue which the nation must address, half are for and half are against. Whether it’s gun ownership, doctor-assisted suicide, how to deal with illegal immigrants, government control of healthcare, or whether President Obama is doing a good job, one is led to believe that we are totally divided pro and con.

The key phrase here is “led to believe” because the data was largely drawn from Gallup surveys, the Pew Research Center, the National Journal, and other sources. As much as I regard Gallup, Rasmussen, Zogby and other gatherers of today’s instant “truth”, I remain skeptical of all these polls. Opinion is fickle, subject to the economy, one’s religion, race, age, gender, political values, and yesterday’s events.

Most certainly, taking at face value anything “the government” has to say on any topic is the height of folly. It exists as the instrument of anyone and any political party that holds the reins of power. As such it disgorges masses of “information” that is intended to herd the public in directions that will ensure they remain in power while, at the same time, often engaging in the most appalling abuses of power, including neglect of duty.

History is testimony to the most egregious errors of judgment by presidents and congresses that arrived with their biases and ideologies intact. We want to know what principles a president adheres to. Some like Reagan believed in America’s greatness, its exceptional place and role. Others like Obama arrived with their views carefully hidden behind meaningless phrases such as “hope and change.” Obama’s first executive order was to deny access to his entire life’s paper trail of documents.

My first profession was that of journalist and from that I developed a lifelong search for factual information, historic and current, with which to make sense of events. Even when I segued into public relations, I insisted that it be fact-based, i.e. the truth!

I collect the “news” all the time and maintain vast files of data that go back years. On my desk today are stacks of items culled from all manner of sources, most of which I regard as reliable, but The New York Times is high on my list of the greatest collection of liars and fools since the glory days of Pravda, the state-controlled Soviet newspaper.

A recent Times editorial was titled “Comeback Against Malaria” citing “insecticide-treated bed nets” to protect people from mosquitoes that transmit the disease. No where does it mention the way the Environmental Protection Agency, ignoring the science, banned DDT, effective December 31, 1972, and thus condemned millions to an early, unnecessary death. If African and other nations plagued by this mosquito-borne disease could begin to spray DDT, it would drastically reduce malaria worldwide. The Times will not tell you that.

Another news item reports that Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, has announced that her department is creating “a new task force to battle the effects of climate change on domestic security operation.” This is just one example of the Obama administration’s insane devotion to the totally debunked hoax of “global warming”, now renamed “climate change.” Suffice it to say it has nothing to do with homeland security and is beyond the reach of any government on planet Earth.

Piers Corbyn of Weather Action, a London-based, independent forecasting firm, has proven infinitely more accurate than the British government’s debased weather agency. He is predicting extreme weather for December 25-31 in Britain. Much of the weather forecasts of the U.S. government are corrupted by computer models that use manipulated “global warming” data from government agencies such as NOAA and NASA. Thank God for weather satellites.

Much of the data collected worldwide is from weather stations either positioned on “heat islands” known as cities or simply non-existent. The best computers in the world cannot include data on clouds, a major indicator, because even meteorologists have no idea why they do what they do, changing from moment to moment. Similarly, it is still virtually impossible to predict earthquakes or when volcanoes will erupt.

The government consistently refuses to tell the public that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since the late 1990s. Winters for decade to come will be harsher and longer. Crops will fail. Food prices will rise. The latest “compromise” that extended income tax rates also wasted billions on corn-based ethanol production mandates that even environmental organizations now oppose.

The latest Census reports that the U.S. population is up an astonishing 27 million in just ten years! Immigration, legal and illegal, accounted for three-quarters of that growth. This growth is exceeded by only two other decades in the entire history of the nation! Either we change our immigration policies, reducing this flood of humanity, and lock down our southern border or you won’t be able to recognize America in the space of a few decades.

So, parsing the news remains critical if we are to understand or make sense of anything happening in the U.S. and around the globe. One thing seems clear, like all empires based on economic and military strength, power is moving elsewhere after a half century since the end of World War II that positioned the U.S. as a “superpower.”

The nation has wasted its potential on “entitlement” programs that are trillions of dollars in debt into the foreseeable future. The national debt is owned by our grandchildren!

The government is in the process of locking up its vast natural resources from use by its own citizens. It is seizing vast tracks of the nation’s landmass. It is restricting all new offshore oil exploration and extraction, and will force coal-fired power plants to close despite the fact that coal provides half of all the electricity generated nationwide.

U.S. currency is being systematically devalued because the government failed its oversight of the financial marketplace and its central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Because the government was permitted to intrude in the housing market in the name of “social justice”, it is in a state of complete collapse.

The same will occur to our healthcare system if Obamacare is permitted to move ahead.

The news is bad. We have precious little time to reverse the process.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Two Crazy Greens

By Alan Caruba

For a few hours on Wednesday the nation’s attention was on James J. Lee who took hostages at the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Negotiations failed to sway him from his mission or free his hostages. Lee was a Green zealot and police were left with no alternative than to shoot Lee dead.

Every movement has its crazies, but not every movement is as crazy as the one that calls itself “environmental.” Almost entirely devoid of any real scientific justification, the Greens have devoted decades to literally inventing one bogus crisis after another, culminating with “global warming.”

At the heart of the Green philosophy is the belief that the Earth’s problems are all caused by human beings.

“Humanity are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture,” Lee wrote in an eleven-point Internet communiqué.

“Saving the Planet means…decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies”, said Lee. “The planet does not need humans.”

We can dismiss Lee as a lunatic, but what are we to do regarding Dr. John P. Holdren, the top science advisor to President Obama?

In a new book, “Control Freaks”, Terence P. Jeffrey, the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews.com, devotes several pages to Dr. Holdren, along with his colleague, Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb.” Both academics have collaborated over the years and both share a contempt for humanity that can only come from fevered, delusional minds devoted to intellectual theories.

In a paper published in 1973 by the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Holdren asked “Is even the present U.S. population of 210 million too large? Should there be zero economic growth as well as zero population growth?” Together with Dr. Ehrlich, he later wrote, “Halting population growth must be done, but that alone would not be enough. Stabilizing or reducing the per capita resources in the United States is necessary, but not sufficient.”

The famous six degrees of separation between James J. Lee and Dr. Holdren is glaringly obvious. Lee’s manifesto said that finding “solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy” was the only way to save the planet.

Tell me that there is a whit of difference between Dr. Holdren’s and Lee’s “solutions”. Tell me there's any difference between Dr. Holdren’s and Dr. Ehrlich’s view that “What is actually required is nothing less than a transformation of human society” and the transformation that Obama has been imposing on the United States of America?

Jeffrey reports that “This transformation would start with population control, which might eventually require involuntary measures if voluntary ones failed.” Dr. Holdren recommended that “Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because societies may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means.”

“Political pressure must be applied immediately to induce the United States government to assume its responsibility to hold the growth of the American population,” wrote Dr. Holdren.

Dr. Holdren is no fan of the human race in general and those enjoying citizenship in the United States in particular, given his lack of regard for free speech. Both he and Dr. Ehrlich at one point advocated making it “illegal for any utility to advertise in such a way as to promote greater demand for power.”

What better way to reduce available electrical power than to advocate switching to wind and solar energy which together barely represent one percent of the electricity generated daily? Neither is dependable and neither can ever meet the needs of the nation.

What better way than to oppose the use of coal for plants that generate just over fifty percent of the nation’s electrical power or to keep a multi-billion dollar repository for spent nuclear waste closed?

What better way to kill millions of people who fall victim to a disease like Malaria than to ban DDT, the most effective way of eliminating mosquitoes from transmitting it?

What better way to embolden a nuclear attack on the nation, killing millions, than to advocate treaties to reduce our nuclear deterrent?

There are no environmental solutions except those similar to the Nazi “final solution” that killed six million of Europe’s Jews and five million other presumed enemies of the state in Germany. Those in charge of Germany in the 1930s were dedicated environmentalists.

So, James J. Lee is one less environmentalist thanks to a SWAT team, but what are we to do about Dr. John P. Holdren and the host of other environmental crazies seeking to eliminate humans from planet Earth?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

A Bad Future for Everyone

By Alan Caruba

Every so often it’s a good idea to take stock of the threats facing the modern world. Any student of history will know that this analysis is going to be grim. Take a deep breath and read this for a few minutes. After that, you may need a stiff drink!

I have this theory that the world goes mad every twenty to fifty years, forgets what the devastation of war does to nations and the lives of those who want nothing to do with war.

It has been sixty-five years since the end of the last world war, fought in Europe, Russia, and in the Far East, China, the Philippines, Pacific islands, and against Japan. Much of the world lay in wreckage, millions were dead.

After that the U.S. spent a total of twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, in Vietnam, followed now by nine years in Afghanistan, and seven years in Iraq, not counting an earlier invasion to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.

Though the scale was small, war came to the American homeland with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York at a cost of nearly 3,000 lives along with the attack on the Pentagon. There have been smaller terrorist attacks since.

In the combined military services, the U.S. has over 1.4 million men and women under arms. The United States of America maintains some 700 bases around the world. We are the sole guarantor of any measure of peace, of any resistance to tyranny.

The single greatest threat to freedom worldwide is the resurgence of militant Islam. More than a billion people are Muslims, but the locus of the attack on industrialized, modern nations has been the Middle East, a region of the world that remains trapped in this seventh century retrograde religion. If successful, it could drag the world back to a new version of the Dark Ages when humanity will be oppressed by a faith based on the hatred of all other faiths.

Trying to accommodate Islam is an invitation for conquest. It has a history of building mosques over or near the holiest sites of older faiths.

The environmental movement took shape in the late 1960s and, from around the late 1980s, the greatest “scientific” fraud ever perpetrated, global warming, was launched by the United Nations and maintained through a huge propaganda program and, as often as not, by various national leaders, including our own.

Billions were allocated to research and other responses to this non-event. The planet was not in the throes of a sudden and dramatic warming, nor is there any need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. For the past decade, the planet has been steadily cooling.

The rise of the United Nations following World War Two has been a ceaseless quest for control over the world’s population. The UN has never successfully deterred any war, large or small. It seeks to undermine the individual sovereignty of nations. It is a cesspool of corruption and deception.

The other major threat has been the specter of communism that gained momentum at the beginning of the last century, primarily in the former Soviet Union, thereafter spreading to China and other nations. It takes the form of socialism in many nations, including our own. As an economic system, it is a total failure. It engenders huge governmental apparatus, centralized planning, and attacks on the ownership of private property. It destroys innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

There is, too, the prospect of the growth of the Earth’s population to eight billion by 2050. It will be coupled with the demand for more sources of energy, oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. The Earth’s resources may or may not be finite, but the stresses this will put on nations as they compete for what does exist are seen in the bizarre refusal of successive U.S. administrations to open its own huge reserves of coal and oil for extraction and use.

Yet another factor is the stress on the global banking community. The potential failure of nations like Greece, Spain, Italy and others have put huge strains on other nations that are, in one way or another, invested in them. These troubled nations have two things in common, aggressive unions and socialism. The huge debt of the United States, now at $13 trillion, surpassing our annual gross domestic product, poses a threat to the entire world’s financial stability.

Population, financial stability, a militant religion, and energy all will place stress on the nations of the world in ways that have historically erupted in warfare.

Finally, there is something called the Grand Solar Minimum, a diminution of radiation from the Sun that is likely to precede a new ice age. Since the period between ice ages is generally 11,500 years we are at the very end of the current interglacial period.

To put that in context, we and the rest of humanity are living in the period in which the human race created what we call civilizations.

Dennis Avery. a scientist with the Hudson Institute, notes that “Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that begin in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted the severe cold of the early 1800s.”

These factors all portend a very bad future for the whole of the Earth’s population no matter where they live, what they believe, or how they behave.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Demography Decides Everything

By Alan Caruba

When I listen to politicians arguing the merits of some piece of legislation, I am usually 99% sure they have no idea how demography-—population—-will affect the outcome of their grand schemes.

This is particularly true of advocates of fixed and often flawed ideas about the environment. Most “save the Earth” true believers want to see huge reductions in the population of the planet. They don’t much care for human beings.

Demography is the study of population; focusing on things like fertility rates, aging, ethnic identity, and immigration. Knowing the accurate demographics of a nation is central to its governance and this is particularly true for a democracy. It is no accident that both words have the same root, demos as in people.

Knowing the size and distribution of the U.S. population was a serious concern for the Founders and it is part of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution which states that "[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct." Congress first met in 1789, and the first national census was held in 1790.

For the world in general, fertility rates have been falling as more women receive education and become part of the workplace. Higher standards of living and education reduce birth rates. It makes it easier for women to be part of the workforce and households have more money for savings as well as the consumption of goods. As nations like India and China improve their economic status, their populations will stabilize and population growth will slow. The odious one-child policy in China will, in time, pass into history.

Thus, industrialization, the increased spread of electrical power, a global economy with fewer trade restrictions, all will favorably impact population growth by slowing it. In contrast, the objectives of the environmental movement such as the reduction of energy use based on the false assertion that it produces carbon dioxide that, in turn, will heat the Earth, are in direct conflict with population stabilization and reduction.

In the United States, government policies have been in direct contradiction of what native-born and naturalized citizens want. If the latter had there way, there would not have been a sharp increase in the population. Instead, the government has pursued policies that increase, largely through legal and illegal immigration, the number of people in the nation.

In 1970, the U.S. population was about 203 million. This followed the unprecedented “Baby Boom” years,1946-1964. Today the population has surpassed 293 million. These numbers come from the Census Bureau. At no other time in U.S. history have recent immigrants and their children dominated population growth.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s official estimate is that there are eight million illegal immigrants currently in the nation. Most observers of illegal immigrant believe that the actual number range from twelve to seventeen million.

So, since 1970, each Congress and each President has adopted policies not only allowing, but encouraging, legal, and in particular, illegal immigration far above traditional levels and setting the stage for increasing economic and social problems.

As reported by USA Today, the U.S. population is expected to “soar to 438 million by 2050 and the Hispanic population will triple according to projections…by the Pew Reseach Center.

Moreover, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that “the future age structure of the population will be older than it is now. Very nearly 40% will be senior citizens, over 65, by 2050. The last members of the Baby Boom will reach 65 by 2029. All will be eligible for Social Security and Medicare if, in fact, these two entitlement programs have not become insolvent by then.

Here, again, we see government policy ignoring or just ignorant of population changes as the Congress moves toward passing a healthcare reform package that 80% of the voters disapprove; one that will slash a trillion dollars from Medicare funds and institute rationing of care as the number of older Americans increase. The harm to the current healthcare system is incalculable.

In addition, yet another amnesty bill has been introduced in Congress at a time when it is obvious that a growth in the genera population will only exacerbate and increase the costs of educating the children of the newly enfranchised, formerly illegal immigrants, along with the cost providing medical care to those who cannot afford it, and incarcerating those who break the law. These costs will add billions at all levels of society.

So, demographics do matter, even if politicians and other special interests ignore them. They have local, national, and international ramifications as populations either stabilize or increase worldwide.

A lesson for the United States can be drawn from the decline of the Roman Empire. It was a combination of the cost of far-flung military commitments and the invasions of populations from outside of the empire that ultimately caused its collapse through an inability to impose Pax Romana or stop the depredations of northern European tribes and threats from the Huns.

Policies that deliberately deny the benefits of the provision of widespread energy availability and of education to increase literary; policies that deny protection against the scurge of malaria and other diseases; discourage the use of genetically modified crops to avoid deforestation and to provide ample food supplies; policies that impose foolish mandates such as ethanol or even attempt to regulate carbon dioxide with the false claim that it is a harmful gas, all contribute to the waste of the Earth’s greatest resource, its human population.

There are, of course, events beyond our imagination, though not necessarily our control. As the great physicist Albert Einstein warned, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

A Numbers Game and a Losing One

By Alan Caruba

In 2006, Mark Steyn made a big splash with his book, “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It”, in which he said that, “much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.”

The subject of the book was the science of demographics, tracking and predicting the growth and loss of various elements of the planet’s population. It’s all about the mathematics of birth rates, migratory shifts of people moving about the Earth in search of jobs, freedom, et cetera.

If you have no real experience with political freedom, however, it is hard to know how to maintain it, particularly since it requires free speech, a free press, and other infrastructure.

For those who read the book, it stirred up a lot of discussion, but that has since receded. We are blessed or afflicted—depending on your point of view—with short memories and, for the vast bulk of the population, very little knowledge or even a sense of history. None of this, however, slows the inexorable arithmetic of birth and death among the world’s six billion-plus population.

Let me provide such one example. We all know about the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, but did you know that on September 11, 1683 a Muslim army was decisively defeated near Vienna? That battle saved Europe.

For Americans, Europe is a nice place to visit. It is the “old country” for many people whose grandparents and parents migrated from there in search of a better life here for themselves and their descendents. America was still a young nation in the 1800s when millions flooded in, mostly at the invitation of those in need of their labor. By the end of World War II, America emerged intact and as a great power. By the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was declared a superpower.

Most Americans have no memory of the Depression of the 1930s. Those born after World War II, the “Boomer” generation, are now beginning to retire. The only memories of America anyone has today is of a nation triumphant, albeit one that engaged in two wars, Korea and Vietnam, that turned out poorly at the time, but a look at a thriving South Korea today suggest it was worth it and Vietnam now is eager to do business with us.

Wars in the Middle East stir memories of those previous ones and, being quite different in nature, tend to make most Americans eager to just leave. We are not facing a massed army. Instead, we are killing the enemies of progress and freedom a few at a time. It’s tedious work, but necessary, and we have few friends to help us.

What does this have to do with demographics? The answer is that Muslims from the Middle East, the northern nations of Africa known as the Maghreb, and immigrants in general from Asia and Africa have been pouring into Europe to replace the dwindling native populations, providing labor. It is a migration comparable to our own but this group of immigrants either does not want to integrate with the European culture or are not invited to. They are building mosques or taking over abandoned churches.

Meanwhile, a flow of Mexicans and others from nations south of us is reconquering America while our nation’s leaders look the other way. Why? No one seems to know.

As Patrick J. Buchanan notes in a recent column, “In 1950, whites were 28 percent of the world population and Africans 9 percent. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed.”

No one is suggesting that whites are genetically superior to other races, but they have a history of cultural and technological development with which few can compare. My guess is that the Chinese will pick up where we leave off, when we leave off, as we will surely do if our economic and political system is subsumed in a population that is indifferent to what made it different.

Pax Romana is no more. Pax Americana could be looking at the end as well if the numbers continue. As Buchanan put it, “The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.”