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Entry: War of the Babies--When Modern Warfare and Demography Square Off, Demography Wins Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/war_of_the_babies_when_modern_warfare_and_demography_square_off_demography#25735 Post contents: Mr. Brecher, Your article is too long and convoluted to comment on exhaustively, but I would like to make a few points: 1. The central point of the article seems to be that people, once they become more affluent, start having less babies. While there are certainly a lot of arguments to support this point, I seem to remember that the largest generation in the US - the baby-boom generation - was conceived when (and presumably because) their parents' life improved considerably, hence their being called "the good times generation". I would like to propose that affluence (nowadays) equates less babies because it first leads to less concern for matters of the soul, in the end with religion; Western Europe is notoriously losing its faith, no wonder all they care about is "me" and "now". 2. "Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will." What is missing from this analysis is a reference to the undermining role of the western world's leftist elites, for whom ideology trumps everything - national identity, culture, and so on. Morale and national will have not suddenly turned weak by an act of God or simply because of wealth (wealth, if anyhting, motivates people to maintain their personal and by extension their country's status-quo), but by careful and prolonged erosion at the hand of the PC activists. Even with a new Albanian majority in Kosovo, the Serbs would never have had any issues had the "international community" not intervened - having an ethnic group with a regional majority inside a country's borders doesn't automatically mean that region must secede and become independent. PC arguments have always been dishonest and are used to promote very different and often diametrically opposed ends. 3. "Makin’em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America." That depends: immigrants who don't want to live in their country often import the problems they are trying to escape. I've seen what many mexicans do when they have money - but bigger plasma TVs. The same applies to every ethnicity in the world, because no people is by definition barbaric or by definition refined. If only the best educated and refined Mexicans emigrated to the US, would they bring over any of the current crime, healthcare and unemployment problems? Ah, but the US immigration system actually penalises those who want to immigrate legally. If you are a middle-class (by education and aspirations) Eastern-European who can't live in your own country because of the post-communist corruption and destruction, you have to put your entire life on hold for, say, 15 years. At all the points in this process you are at a net disadvantage compared with any American citizen - you get a much smaller salary, your credit takes time to build, you can't buy a house, and your situation is quite insecure. You basically have to resign yourself to living and education your children as the lower class, although even they reject you - you're too "refined" for them. But should you want to sneak into the US and claim fraudulent benefits? Why, nothing could be easier. Therefore, the whole situation that Mr. Brecher presents as "inevitable" is the result of a system of incentives/disincentives that is destroying America's (and the world's) middle class. Just because we can't see clearly how it works (sometimes), doesn't mean it's not there. Sent at: 2008 07 24