The left reinforces its anti-life credentials

[fossten]

March 22, 2009


UK population must fall to 30m, says Porritt

Jonathan Leake and Brendan Montague

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

Population growth is one of the most politically sensitive environmental problems. The issues it raises, including religion, culture and immigration policy, have proved too toxic for most green groups.

However, Porritt is winning scientific backing. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, will use the OPT conference, to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, to warn that population growth could help derail attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Rapley, who formerly ran the British Antarctic Survey, said humanity was emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

“We have to cut this by 80%, and population growth is going to make that much harder,” he said.

Such views on population have split the green movement. George Monbiot, a prominent writer on green issues, has criticised population campaigners, arguing that “relentless” economic growth is a greater threat.

Many experts believe that, since Europeans and Americans have such a lopsided impact on the environment, the world would benefit more from reducing their populations than by making cuts in developing countries.

This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.

Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction.

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: “You can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.”

The Tory leader, David Cameron, has also suggested Britain needs a “coherent strategy” on population growth.

Despite these comments, however, government and Conservative spokesmen this weekend both distanced themselves from any population policy. ”

 

[fossten]

Nancy Pelosi's Modest Proposal

By George Neumayr on 1.27.09 @ 6:09AM

"It will reduces costs," Nancy Pelosi said on This Week, in reference to the "stimulus" rationale for sending millions of dollars to the states for "family planning."

What would once have been considered an astonishingly chilly and incomprehensible stretch is now blandly stated liberal policy.

The full title of Jonathan Swift's work, A Modest Proposal, was, For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.

Change a few of the words and it could be a Democratic Party policy paper. Swift suggested that 18th-century Ireland stimulate its economy by turning children into food for the wealthy. Pelosi proposes stimulating the U.S. economy by eliminating them.

Other slumping countries, such as Russia and France, pay parents to have children; it looks like Obama's America will pay parents to contracept or kill them. Perhaps the Freedom of Choice Act can also fall under the Pelosi "stimulus" rationale. Why not? An America of shovels and scalpels will barrel into the future.

Euthanasia is another shovel-ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama's plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus too. Controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs. It's all stimulus in the Brave New World utopia to come.

Let's not punish the economy with future workers. Maybe Social Security can be pushed back a couple of decades and the elderly can just work twice as hard.

Pelosi has helpfully if dimly blurted out what's often implicit in many of the left's schemes for human improvement: that, after all the rhetorical bells and whistles have fallen silent, the final solution concealed within the schemes is to eliminate people.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us isn't a horrifying thesis to the liberal elite but enjoyable beach reading. Al Gore lists population control as the first solution to global warming and they nod and give him a Nobel Prize.

They name awards after eugenicists like Margaret Sanger. "Unwanted" children are immediately seen as an unspeakable burden. Pregnancy is a punishment, and fertility is little more than a disease.

Pelosi's gaffe illustrates the extent to which eugenics and economics merge in the liberal utilitarian mind. Malthus lives.

Hillary Clinton's State Department will soon treat people-elimination, in one form or another, as "development." She implied as much in her opening prattle about "development" and the "long-term" security interests of the U.S., which is a euphemism for saying that UN-style population control ideology and America's interests are seen by the Obama administration as identical.

Not only will the American taxpayer be expected to pay the rent for Planned Parenthood at home, but now with Obama's reversal of the Mexico City policy he will get to underwrite third-world abortions too.

Population is the poverty, not the riches, of a country, according to the left. Never mind that the only developing countries are the ones with growing populations. No matter: While nature can grow unfettered, human nature is to be controlled at all costs. We must preserve everything purely except ourselves. We must send money to the UN to save rain forests and destroy humans.

Pelosi's idea would have appealed to Swift at some level. Mocking the fashionable utilitarian theories of the day, he attributes his Modest Proposal to a "very knowing American of my acquaintance in London." He also had his own satirical notion of stimulus: have the poor be run "through a joint-stock company." Who knows what he would have done with TARP?

 

[shagdrum]

Who's 'Hitler' now?
By Doug Powers

President Obama's crack about his bowling acumen being worthy of the Special Olympics has raised a few hackles. Normally I'd say "lighten up," but this time some examination is in order.

George W. Bush was called "Hitler" virtually every day, with no real basis for the accusation other than that liberals said so -- and liberals are like, really smart, so it must have been true.

But Obama's comment, for me anyway, means that we're just a few weeks into the new administration and the new president is already more worthy of a Hitler comparison than Bush ever was.

Obama's Special Olympics comment may have been merely a clumsy attempt at self-deprecating humor. But the likelihood exists that it was a sneak peek at the heart and mind of The One who has a philosophy that cannot work unless human beings are gauged based upon their usefulness to the state -- and for any leader attempting to construct those kinds of underpinnings, the helpless and handicapped are as undesirable as governors who won't accept stimulus money.

Obama the politician is smart enough to know he never should have said that, but Obama the Grand Visionary of Exemplary Communities obviously isn't. That Obama is vehemently pro-abortion, even during late term up to and including the moment of natural birth, is Hitleresque in its design as well, and tends to take away any humor of his Special Olympics joke.

The first truly horrific thing Hitler did -- long before the German invasion of Poland -- was to issue orders to "clean up" and purify his society. The handicapped and the helpless were among the first targets, and it all started with a little, perhaps even seemingly innocuous, statement -- except it was in the form of writings in Mein Kampf instead of regrettable wise-cracks on The Tonight Show.

David Nicholls wrote in his book, Adolph Hitler: A Biographical Companion, that Hitler created "Hereditary Health Courts" as well as "A Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring." In other words, Sarah Palin would have been forced to give up her son instead of what ended up happening to her in 21st century America, which was to give birth to the child while getting bashed by some for not killing her own baby in the name of societal perfection. Heaven forbid a "mentally handicapped" person should ever be allowed to grow up and prove that he or she is smarter than a liberal.

The Hitler/Obama similarities cease, however, when we take into account that Hitler, as Nicholls wrote, called for the sterilization of "asocials" in the belief that the state could not afford to have beggars and vagrants reproduce. Obama would never do this -- after all, somebody's got to attend his town hall meetings.

Basing a system of government on an individuals "worth to society" is a most frightening slope to begin to slide down -- be those individuals the innocent unborn or the mentally challenged. "Jokes" about the latter are all the more disturbing coming from this president when we consider his position on abortion. The same mental handicaps Special Olympics competitors have would, only years earlier when these same people were in their mothers' wombs, have been considered legal justification for their slaughter. This is one reason why Obama's joke was anything but funny to so many people, and the real reason it was so offensive to parents of those with special needs.

We must be very careful though, because once that "usefulness to society" ball gets rolling, it's only a matter of time before another leader comes along who deems bad bowlers as unnecessary to the state.

Of course, Obama didn't call for the euthanasia of the disabled and mentally handicapped (once they're already born, that is) -- all he did was make what for now seems to be a clumsy, off-the-cuff crack. But as much as I want to chastise the president's critics in this situation for being too thin-skinned and knocking Obama over the head with the very PC we should loathe, I can't help but ask this question: Are we witnessing Obama not only taking the "Hitler" torch from Bush, but adding a speck of merit to the flame?

If some Special Olympians weren't much better bowlers than Obama, I'd answer "yes" to that.