Free Republic

<p>As Gov. Paterson and legislative lead ers meet today to tackle a multibil lion-dollar budget shortfall, they should note a new report's warning: New Yorkers are fleeing in droves -- and it's wreaking havoc with the public fisc.</p> <p>The report, by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, shows that some 1.5 million people left the state between 2000 and 2008 -- including 1.1 million from New York City alone.</p>

THE Rudd government should be wary about using high levels of immigration in coming decades as a means to counteract the decline in productivity resulting from an ageing population because more over-55s are staying on in their jobs, a population expert warns. Monash University demographer Bob Birrell said Treasury's new population estimate for Australia -- 35 million by 2050 -- was based on immigration levels of about 180,000 a year, a rate that may not be necessary to keep the economy running and will be difficult to provide for in terms of urban infrastructure and services. "The government seems to...

Quite contrary to the received wisdom concerning Islam's advance on Scandinavian soil, recent birth statistics from Stockholm, sole Scandinavian city boasting more than two million inhabitants, indicate that Muslim immigrants of Stockholm fail to keep up with native Swedes in this domain. According to today's edition of the free daily newspaper of City Stockholm, the inhabitants of Sweden's capital have lately been catching up with the rest of Sweden in terms of breeding, which actually is something rather unique. For a long time, Stockholm has been way behind the rest of the nation in this regard (- during the last...

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction.  With Greece's fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman  -- well below the replacement level of 2.1 -- "big" is not a modifier demographers would associate with today's Greek families.  In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.  Worse still, Greece is no anomaly.  Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it's now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures.  In fact, while it may seem counterintuitive...

Democracy's forces can’t beat demography's power Even in the age of high-tech warfare, shifts in the world population give a military advantage to ‘underdeveloped’ countries Richard Ehrman The word jingoism originated from a music hall ditty of the Boer War: “We don’t want to fight”, it ran, “but by jingo if we do, we have got the men, we’ve got the guns, we’ve got the money too.” A hundred years later it often seemed that Tony Blair was intent on pursuing the reverse policy — always up for a fight but painfully short of the means to pursue it. The...

They make up the largest and most loyal constituency within the Republican party, but social conservatives get little respect from party leaders, nominees, or elected officials. Not only have Republican elites rarely engaged the moral, cultural, and family issues dear to their base, but the popularity of Barack Obama and the gravity of the economic crisis have spooked them further. From ex-governors Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney to congressional leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, most national GOP leaders seem more convinced than ever that social issues should remain on the back burner as the party seeks to rebuild for...

SUBPRIME DEMOGRAPHY Steyn on Culture Tuesday, 21 April 2009 HAPPY WARRIOR from National Review As National Review’s in-house demography bore – oh, hang on, the self-deprecating “demography bore” shtick is getting even more boring than just boring on about demography… Well, okay, usually I bore on about it, as my detractors have it, in the Head-for-the-hills-the-Muzzies-are-coming sense. So, just for a change, here’s the Subprime Bailout Variations of my same old demographic song. Take a “toxic asset”. What would improve its current pitiful value? That’s easy: More demand. Less supply. An asset is only an asset as long as there’s...

The French government is strongly advocating the teaching of Arabic language and civilization in French schools. Not surprising, considering the number of Arabs and Muslims in France, and the unctuous deference with which they are treated by officials, beginning notably with Nicolas Sarkozy, who cannot praise enough the splendor of Arabic contributions to the world. ************************* In his message to the participants, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Arabic the "language of the future, of science and of modernity," and expressed the hope that "more French people share in the language that expresses great civilizational and spiritual values." "We must invest...

WASHINGTON - Many people like to stop and play with newborn babies, but now some adult women are playing house with fake babies. Some women are even going as far as taking day trips with the fake babies to the park, out to eat, and even hosting birthday parties for them.

An ugly, unrecognizable recession Most of us haven't seen an economic decline like this one before, and as the slowdown gets slower, few will be unaffected. Are you ready for the 'frugal future'? [Related content: stocks, investments, recession, consumer goods, Jon Markman] By Jon Markman MSN Money Feeling frugal? You're not alone -- not by a long shot -- as butchers, bakers and billionaires alike are feeling the credit crisis this month in a way not experienced since at least 1946 or even 1938. It's not just a temporary wave of Scrooginess that's to blame for a retail-sales drop of...

Within less than 20 years, theistic religion will become the developed world's primary organizing and motivating force — not through orderly growth, but suddenly and by default, as today's wrongheaded social patterns and perspectives become untenable. Atheism in particular is about to fall victim to its own errors, while Roman Catholicism is uniquely positioned to gain tremendous stature. Historians may one day refer to this event as the "Theistic Revolution." .... The resulting "baby bust" is about to destabilize nations, because the most self-sufficient members of society are not replacing themselves with similarly capable citizens who can support pension programs...

They are born in France and called Louis, Laurent or Marie but they want to become Abdel, Said or Rachida. Such requests from immigrants’ children for name changes are mounting in the French courts and worrying a state that lays store on melding a single national culture. In a sign of a new assertiveness, children with families from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are reversing the old custom in which immigrants from the old colonies gave French names to their children. Driven by a feeling that they do not belong to their Gallic Christian names, the applicants are meeting resistance from...

Earlier this year I had to warn people about the various siren voices advocating the recognition of Islamic Sharia in the public law of this country. It seems now that this was no theoretical advocacy, and that Sharia courts are not only operating here but claim to have the sanction of the County and High Courts in the enforcement of their decisions. As no one, to my knowledge, has denied this claim, we must assume it is true.

With Wall Street convulsing, and the White House race intensifying, the question "Who lost Europe" is on no one's lips, let alone minds. Indeed, the question begs another: "Is Europe lost?" The answer to the second question is, "No, not yet." And losing Europe, I would add, is by no means inevitable. But that doesn't mean the continent isn't currently hell-bent to accommodate the dictates of Islamic law, bit by increasingly larger bit. Such a course of accommodation, barring reversal, will only hasten Bernard Lewis' famous prediction that Europe will be Islamic by century's end. And what do I mean...

While the indigenous Christian Europeans don't reproduce, in 2-3 generations Europe will be majority muslim. The same is true for Russia much to my regret. He actually says "I am the victim." Have a view.

"A HATE fanatic has boasted that Muslims will one day conquer Britain — by having more BABIES. Speaking at a rally marking 9/11, Anjem Choudary bragged that a birth explosion would let followers of Islam take control of the country. Undercover Sun investigators secretly recorded Choudary telling a young and impressionable audience that they would eventually rule under strict Sharia law. And our team listened in chilled silence as he predicted: “Islam is superior and will never be surpassed. The flag of Islam will rise over Downing Street.” Lawyer Choudary also said it would be easy for vast numbers of...

As National Review's in-house demography bore, I've been struck this last week by the left's fierce hostility to Sarah Palin's fecundity. One gentleman - well, okay, maybe not a "gentleman" but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male - wrote to me from Shelton, Washington: This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains.And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed. Each to her own, Mister Sensitive. You can be a 44-year old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and...

Here's Mark Steyn at the Heritage Foundation (January 10, 2007) expounding on the thesis of his great book, America Alone. If you haven't read the book yet, take the time to listen to this hour as it basically sums it up. It's tough to swallow, but Steyn's got a point...if you look at the demography, the Western world is willfully giving up the fight...

Britain's Jewish community is enjoying a demographic revival for the first time in 50 years because of massive growth in its haredi population. Almost three out of every four Jewish babies in the UK are born to ultra-Orthodox families, who account for 46,500 out of the estimated 280,000 Jews in the UK, according to Dr. Yaakov Wise of Manchester University's Center for Jewish Studies. By the second half of this century, haredim will outnumber secular ones, he said. "Though Britain's Jewish population is the fifth largest in the world, it has declined by 40 percent, from over 450,000 in 1950...

Hispanics now account for more than 15% of the U.S. population, and their surge is largely the result of births among people already in the country, according to new Census Bureau data. In an annual report, the Census said there are 45.5 million Hispanics in the U.S., up from 35.7 million in 2000, when they made up 12.6% of the population. It said growth among Hispanics was responsible for half of the U.S. population gains between 2000 and 2007. WSJ's Conor Dougherty discusses the rising Hispanic/Latino population among the findings from the latest Census data. In the 1990s, a flood...

Fifty-five years ago, 80 percent of American television viewers, young and old, tuned in to see Milton Berle on Tuesday nights. Tens of millions, rich and poor, worked together at Elks Lodges and Rotary Clubs. Millions more, rural and urban, read general-interest magazines like Look and Life. In those days... --snip-- The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties. In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama...

Jews in Israel and the Diaspora follow the peace process closely and a majority of them favour the two-state solution. As Yoram Ettinger explains below, this is due in part to their fear of the alleged Demographic Time Bomb. Yoram Ettinger explains. 1. Support – among Israeli Jews – for the proposed Palestinian state (“Two States Solution”) is soft and reluctant, according to a March 31-April 1 poll conducted by the Tel Aviv University Center For Peace Research. 2. The establishment of the proposed Palestinian state is supported by 68%, many of whom – other than the Israel’s traditional Left...

This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” — or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of time...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - One was a Somali refugee, the other an Argentine investment banker. Both are now high-profile Dutch women challenging this country to rethink its national identity. Princess Maxima, the Argentine-born wife of Crown Prince Willem Alexander, triggered a round of national soul-searching with a speech last month about what exactly it means to be Dutch in an age of mass migration. "The Netherlands is too complex to sum up in one cliche," she said. "A typical Dutch person doesn't exist." Her comments have tapped into an unsettled feeling among many Dutch who fear traditional values have been...

Jerry Syrovatka says that at 51 he can still run circles around his 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. But who knows how long that will last? The Weston Ranch resident is part of a growing phenomenon among baby boomers: men who father children well past the age of 40. "I'm in construction, so I can keep up with the big guys and the little guys," Syrovatka said. "I still got the old spunk in me." There's a joy to fatherhood no matter when someone has a child, but many Americans are waiting longer. Research shows the percentage of married men...

Industrialized nations fret about their declining population, but the more pressing problem is that developing nations can't control their growth. Anew divide is opening between shortsighted industrialized societies and the world's poorest countries. It's all about babies. In Japan, in Russia, in Germany and elsewhere in what development gurus like to call "the global North," panic has set in about fertility declines, and couples are exhorted to have and are rewarded for producing more children. Economic growth demands it. Bigger retirement bills come due every year as populations age. A shrinking labor force spells disaster. So fascinated are we in...

The Once & Future Christendom From death of the West—to knights of the West The Call of Duty—and Destiny In one of the great epics of Western literature, the hero, confronted by numerous and powerful enemies, temporarily gives in to weakness and self-pity. “I wish,” he sighs, “none of this had happened.” The hero’s wise adviser responds, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.” The old man continues, “There are other forces at work in this world … besides the will of evil.” Some events, he adds, are “meant” to...

This Labour Day, I thought about the working class, the masses. No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they'll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they're not a homogeneous "working class," they're not conscripts in Karl Marx's "masses." The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers' solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism. If you want to see what "the masses" are meant to look like, buy a...

Birth rate hits 15-year high in Russia RBC, 03.09.2007, Moscow 17:19:29.The birth rate reached a 15-year high in Russia in the first six months of 2007, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated at a traditional Monday meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin with government officials. According to Medvedev, 142,000 babies were born between January and June 2007, a record number since the collapse of the USSR, the radio station Mayak reported. The number of childbirths increased 6.5 percent in the first half of 2007, compared to the same period a year earlier, while the death rate decreased by the...

Demographers have long acknowledged that the Malthusian population explosion is a myth. The threat of a skyrocketing population eventually sucking up all Earth's resources, leading to rampant starvation and disease is simply junk science. With the modernization of the global economy, worldwide fertility rates have been falling for decades. A more realistic concern is actually the extent to which birth rates have fallen, and may continue to fall. Today in most European and many East Asian countries fertility has sunken perilously low. Economies are bogged down as more retirees depend on fewer workers, as the article acknowledges. At least as...

Mark Steyn earned his place in the pantheon of magnificent conservative writers due to his personal ability, skill, and God-given wit -- which turns out to be a highly unusual method for establishing oneself nowadays. After beginning as a theatre and film critic, he progressed to political commentary where he has become among the liveliest, most irreverent, and original of conservative voices. A former "Culture Vultures" columnist for The American Spectator and North American correspondent (and movie reviewer) for the Spectator of London, he now writes regularly for the Chicago Sun-Times and National Review. His books include the brilliantly original...

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

Hi-Tech mogul Benny Landa calls on leaders to 'act responsibly' and take measures to bring down Israeli birth rates as these are becoming a 'burden on the economy' Tani Goldstein Published: 01.24.07, 09:32 Israel should work to lower the birth rate in the country, millionaire Benny Landa, founder of Indigo, a market leader in digital color printing systems, said Tuesday. Landa was speaking at the Herzliya Conference held by the Institue for Policy and Strategy at Interdisciplinary Center. Landa advocated lowering the Israeli birthrate to salvage the economy. “We are quickly marching towards becoming a third world country. Children under...

Pelosi a rare example of a woman who 'has it all' January 14, 2007 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist I don't know where they stand on apple pie, but the Democrats have come out for motherhood in a big way. In fact, who needs apple pie when you've got the extra-sugary content of the Washington Post? Last Wednesday, the capital's newspaper of record (now available in print, online and in granulated form) published a column headlined ''Grandma With A Gavel.'' Can you guess which grandma it was, boys and girls? Yes, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has single-handedly, as...

If you ever wanted to see Paris or Rome before you die, but haven't had a chance to do so, you might want to hurry. Soon enough, most of what we now think of as Western Europe will be transformed into a branch of the Muslim world, which is sure to make it an even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews. That, at least, is the unpleasant, yet entirely unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from Europe's headlong demographic drive toward oblivion. Think I'm exaggerating? Consider a few cold hard facts. According to a recent report by the...

Suppose for a moment that the birth in Bethlehem that Christians celebrate this week never happened --that it is, as the secularists would have it, mere mumbo jumbo, superstition, a myth. In other words, consider it not as an event but as a narrative. You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use? The birth of a child. If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn...

Quartet of Ladies Shows Where We're Headed November 26, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist Have you seen a movie called ''Four Jills In A Jeep''? Don't worry, it's not at the multiplex. It came out in 1944. A wartime movie, about the contribution of the gals to the big existential struggle. Great title, and downhill after that. This column is, metaphorically speaking, four Jills in a jeep: It's about a quartet of ladies who provide useful glimpses of where we're heading. The first is Fatma An-Najar, a 64-year-old grandmother who had a livelier Thanksgiving than most grandmas. She marked...

The Last Youth Standing - What the West and Islam share are elites detached from their own demographic realities Mark Steyn - November 20, 2006 I was watching Mansbridge One on One the other day. Don't ask me why. May have been an "encore presentation." Or more likely an encore presentation of an encore presentation. For a 24/7 news network, there's an eerie timelessness about CBC Newsworld: one would be only mildly surprised to switch on and find Mansbridge One on One with Lester B. Pearson or Sir Charles Tupper. Anyway, this week, the one he was on was the...

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist and columnist widely read in the United States and Great Britain, whose current book, "America Alone," is an alarming portrait of a rapidly rising Islamic Europe, has served his cause better than he could have hoped. Not only does his book convincingly demonstrate the catastrophic demographic consequence of Europe's descending birth rate and ascending Muslim population, it did one thing more. The only review of it that I could find in Canada's largely liberal print media showed unmistakably that the liberal Western world has no solution to the problem. It is utterly baffled. It doesn't...

. . . it may be too late for that. The “paleocons” do not want to fight for any country but America, “neocons” have come to resent Europe for failing to stand with them in Iraq, and “blue” Liberals (the only Americans most leading Europeans feel affinity with) lack the guts to fight for anything at all, including their own hedonistic values. We can deplore this as much as we want, but, again, this is the situation we are stuck with. I doubt whether the mid-term elections showed that neoconservatism is dead. I think they announced the death of the...

With Europe locked in the depths of demographic winter, the World Congress of Families offers a thaw ("the natural family" as "the springtime of nations") as it prepares for its 4th Congress -- Warsaw 2007. The population bomb, hyped by the likes of Paul Ehrlich (AKA: Malthus Man), turned out to be a dud. The Western world now faces the reality of depopulation. Since the 1970s, worldwide fertility rates have been cut in half. In all, 59 nations with 44% of the world’s people have below-replacement birthrates. To maintain a stable population requires a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman....

Here is Theodore Faron, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, writing in the year 2021: "Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought." That's from the first chapter of P. D. James' novel The Children Of Men. On the shelves at Borders, Baroness James is the Agatha Christie de nos jours, but she has other strings to her bow and her dystopian vision of a world in which the human...

Most Europeans want two kids but are discouraged NewsStand - Friday, February 17, 2006 Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) Brussels (dpa) - Most European couples would on average like at least two children but end up having only one because of worries about financial costs, a European Union study showed Friday. The study, funded by the EU Commission and based on data from 30,000 people in 14 European countries, said that more than half of all those questioned - male or female - wanted to have two or more children. But it said many stopped after one child because they did not...

Yoram Ettinger, Arnon Sofer are demographic scare mongers A lot of us have "outie" belly buttons. It's hard to tell just who they are, they usually cover the them up with clothes. But don't think for a minute that they are like you just because they look like you. You've got a nice, elegant "innie," whereas they've got "outies." Minority belly buttons, in other words. But don't fool yourselves. The outies are gaining on us, they are cunning and devious, and one day they will outnumber us. We've calculated it. We've got statistics and scientific methods, and we've got the...

Eye on Eurasia: A Caliphate in Russia? By PAUL GOBLE TALLINN, Estonia, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- If current demographic trends continue, Russians have fewer than 60 years left until that country's Muslims will be in a position to set up a "Moscow caliphate," according to a leading Russian Orthodox publicist, who warned that such a development would mark "the end of Orthodoxy in Russia.". Deacon Andrei Kurayev, an outspoken Orthodox Christian missionary who is no stranger to controversy, told a section of the Russian Orthodox Church's annual meeting on religious life and education that "this is not a prophecy but...

“Europe will be Islamic by the end of this century at the very latest.” The floodgates opened with that comment from Bernard Lewis. Since its publication in Die Welt in July 2004, countless responses have appeared from writers as varied as George Weigel and Patrick Buchanan. The latest is Mark Steyn, in a New Criterion essay (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal) titled, in his customary understated style, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” An unusual unanimity has prevailed – almost every writer concurs with Lewis that Europe is a lost cause, a casualty in the war against Islamofascism. The argument is...

Mark Steyn’s analysis of “The Real Reason the West is in Danger of Extinction” is completely correct in his important recent article, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” But behind the problem of the West’s below replacement fertility levels, lies the problem of sex. Babies come from sex. The modern view of sex has created the demographic collapse of the West, and the human void into which Islamic fertility is rapidly flooding. Sex is an organic reality, with two natural purposes written on the human body. The first is procreation. The second is not so obvious but equally important. Sex builds up...

Despite the disengagement, record numbers of Jews are moving into new homes in Judea and Samaria. The Jewish population living across the post 1967 lines (excluding Jerusalem) now tops 253,000. Proponents of the disengagement as well as government statisticians might have expected that the number of Jews living across the country’s post 1967 borders would have declined after the disengagement, at least in the short term. But in fact, the exact opposite has occurred. On the eve of the disengagement, 250,179 Jews were officially registered as living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, according statistics kept by the Israeli Interior Ministry....

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes

It’s the demography, stupid By Mark Steyn Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise,...