tabarnick
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“The value of life, all life. must trump all else. Or else.”
The fallacy being that there is only one place on Earth where a human being can live, and that is Europe.Meanwhile in this valley of tears we call Earth, previous immigrants from Morocco have been busy spreading joy and laughter in the streets of Barcelona. The only reasonable policy is to make sure that as many more of them as possible can be brought to Europe, as safely as possible.
In other migrant news:
https://www.ilgazzettino.it/italia/cronaca_nera/napoli_otto_profughi_minorenni_sequestrano_responsabile_casa_famiglia-2607731.html
Martedì 8 Agosto 2017
Naples (It.) : 8 young african migrants lock up and threaten the manager of a refugee centerWelcomed in a family home for unaccompanied minors, eight young people, all 17 years old and originally from Gambia and Guinea, kidnapped Ciro Cristiano, the 50-year-old manager of the center. Blocking the entrance to the center with some furniture. They forced him into his office and told him to hand over money and their personal documents otherwise they would set the place on fire.
The police quickly agained access to the facility, released the detainee and arrested minors for kidnapping and extortion. The first 2 policemen to arrive could barely hold the man, bitten deeply, until further reinforcements arrived,
Eskalation im Supermarkt: Psychisch Kranker attackiert Kunden und Polizisten
4. August 2017
Karlsruhe (Ger.) :
Karlsruhe – After quarrels in a supermarket, a 42-year-old Congolese bit two policemen that had come to arrest him causing them deep wounds.The man, who had already been convicted of several violent crimes, and was also mentally unstable, was now to be placed temporarily in a psychiatric facility.
According to the first investigations, the 42-year-old had started a dispute with a 23-year-old Chinese at around 12.15 pm in the checkout area of the supermarket. Meanwhile, a 23-year-old German had called the police. For the 42-year-old was apparently the occasion to hit the caller from behind on the neck as well as in his face. Several employees of the shop overwhelmed the aggressor and were able to hold the man until police arrived.
https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/a-metz-des-jeunes-sement-la-terreur-dans-un-camp-de-demandeurs-d-asile-1232362.html
08/08/2017
Metz (France) Some 15 young people of Albanian nationality attacked other refugees in the Blida camp in Metz.“This camp is a real powderkeg. “The observation has been the same for several months without the authorities willing to intervene. On Saturday night, violent incidents broke out between asylum seekers in the Blida camp in Metz, whose management was entrusted to Adoma, a company accustomed to managing foreign workers’ homes. Several people were injured, while the police, solicited, did not intervene, according to the volunteers.
It was around 10:30 pm when volunteers from the collective Le soleil de Blida received first calls from this camp where 400 people live. On their arrival, “half of the camp was outside the camp, frightened, ready to flee, children were terrorized …” because of a violent clash that broke out earlier in this camp where refugees from the Balkans, Central Africa and Afghanistan have been set up every spring since 2013.
The origin of the fight is to be found in a mixture of alcohol, drugs and fuzzy rancor between communities. Some 20 Albanian youths attacked other refugees their age, molested them and threatened families to set fire to their shelters. In total, about 20 tents were destroyed. “Seventeen young people were attacked, they no longer have a tent, clothes and, for some, IDs,” says Claude Thirion. “Today we have 17 young people terrorized, without resources, without anything.” Other families were hosted by volunteers. Several people were reportedly injured, according to the volunteers.
https://www.infiniteunknown.net/2017/08/07/study-only-18-5-of-swedish-girls-feels-safe-outdoors-frequently-harassed-by-groups-of-immigrant-boys-migrantcrisis/comment-page-1/
August 7, 2017
Only 18.5% of girls in the Swedish city of Uppsala feel safe outdoors, frequently harassed by “groups of immigrant boys”“the British and French started the war by declaring war on Germany”
I am afraid Mr. Paul Craig Roberts has become completely unhinged.
“Locking up children just because they have fled bombs is beyond insane.”
But have children fled bombs? Eurostat recently published its stats regarding refugees in Italy. For the first 4 months of 2017, of the 46995 immigrants, 635 were Syrians and 170 from Libya. In contrast, 10,000 came from Nigeria, 4,135 from Bangladesh, 3,865 from the Gambia, 3,625 from Pakistan and 3,460 from Senegal – countries not under any bombing. As to Syria, well now that Al-Assad is emerging as the victor in the foreign-encouraged civil war, peace is returning to government-control areas, and the flow of refugees has reverted, with half a million refugees now returning to Syria.
In other migrant news in Europe:
https://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/news/world/ivory-coast-man-facing-expulsion-stabs-bus-driver-italy-article-1.3367566
In Siena a man from the Ivory Coast who faced expulsion from Italy for previous aggressive behavior stabbed a public transit bus driver […] Police said the man retrieved a knife from a home for asylum-seekers where he previously resided after an apparent argument with the bus driver at the end of the line. He returned to stab the driver twice in the stomach and once in the arm.https://bari.repubblica.it/cronaca/2017/07/30/news/gioia_del_colle_76enne_violentata_in_casa_da_un_ragazzo_che_si_era_offerto_di_portarle_la_spesa-171965588/
Gioia del Colle (Italy)
A 76 y.o. woman was beaten and raped in her home by a 26 year old migrant from Nigeria in Gioia del Colle. The victim is recovering in severe conditions at the Miulli Hospital in Acquavivahttps://www.polizei.sachsen.de/de/MI_2017_51414.htm
Zwickau (Ger.): a 49 y.o. man was stabbed by 3 asylum seekers coming from Libya, in a restaurant in downtown Zwickau. The 3 men were arrested for theft and aggravated assault.Yesterday, Sunday July 30th a tunisian immigrant, 22, attacked a family in front of a bar in the neighborhood of Aurelio, in Rome. The young man asked a woman, then alone, for a cigarette but when she refused, the Tunisian started insulting her. When her husband and her son rushed to her help, they were attacked and hit with a stool. The man was arrested.
—https://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/08/01/four-teenage-girls-raped-swedish-music-festival-many-sexually-abused/
Police in the southern Swedish province of Småland say at least four teenage girls between the ages of 15 and 17 were raped at the Emmaboda Festival over the weekend. They say that four girls, between the ages of 15 and 17, were raped, 11 women over 18 were sexually abused, 113 people were reported as possessing drugsFestival organisers have said that this year’s festival will be the last […] The possible cancellation of the festival echoes the story of the Bravalla Festival in Norrkoping which was plagued by sex attacks in 2016 in which up to 40 girls were attacked and again this year with fewer victims but still significant numbers. Organisers announced the cancellation of the 2018 festival saying that despite their best efforts they were unable to stop the continued sex attacks.
—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4728890/Lorry-driver-attacked-migrants-Calais.html
A lorry driver was attacked and left for dead in Calais by migrants who hijacked his truck in a bid to reach Britain, it has emerged. The victim stopped on the A16 motorway near the northern French port town before seeing men trying to get into his vehicle. He climbed out of his cab only to be set upon by attackers who hit him with a brick and stole his truck before driving off towards the port. He was left bleeding on the ground after being hit with a brick and is now in hospital with a serious head injury.The truck was stopped by police five miles away before it could reach the port
in other migrant news today:
– an islamist asylum claimer stabbed one person to death with a machete shouting Allahu Akbar, wounding several others in Hamburg, Germany.
– police detains dozens of migrants in Milan main train station in an effort to curb the increasing lawlessness and criminality around the station caused by migrants. This might explain why…
– according to a recent opinion poll published in the Rome daily Il Messaggero, 67 per cent of Italians want Italy to close its ports to rescue vessels or deport all migrants ferried to Italy, and 61 per cent want a naval blockade of the Libyan coast@Nassim
“I don’t believe these billionaires just say such things publicly without checking with their homologues”The universe cares little, grasshopper, about the limitations you have about what you can believe or cannot.
@Diogenes shrugged
Goodness gracious, where do I start?Here you have Mr. Gates, devoting a huge chunk of the humongous fortune he amassed, trying to save Africans kids lives, yes among other things through vaccination. Obviously he is a planetary-scale super-villain up to no good. And he is ALSO saying that the solution to a happy mankind might NOT be to have half of Africa and the Middle-East and southern Asia relocate to Europe, but to actually have Africa be a place in which Africans can lead meaningful lives.
What is the evidence he actually wants to kill off much of mankind? Well, here is this video in which he can be heard saying that population growth rate going down could be a good thing! Same thing, right?
Well, not to send the mathematically challenged among us into shock, but a slowing growth rate is still a *growth* rate. Africa is not about to have a fertility rate that goes below replacement level. African population will still increase under a lower growth rate. Now there are large parts of the globe that are below replacement level. But if you ask the childless adults of the western or asian world if they are childless because of a nefarious conspiracy (involving vaccination?) by Bill Gates and other billionaires, you will be asked to seek help, seek help now.
If you look at fertility rates among the countries of the world, you will see Niger top the charts at an average of 7.6 children per woman. Followed by Somalia, Chad, Burundi, Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Gambia, Cote d’Ivoire. Unsurprisingly, countries that send so many of their citizens as migrants to Europe. Do you truly think it would be horrendous to see the fertility rate in those countries go down to, say, 3.5? That maybe, just maybe, they would be more likely to, first off, feed all of their kids, then devote more resources to their education and gradually get into the same development track that catapulted asian countries that not so long ago where considered poor and agrarian like China, Taiwan, Korea into the developped world?
Or you could have the Raúl Ilargi Meijer solution: shake your fist at Europeans who are not enthusiastic enough at seeing a never-ending wave of illiterate third-world peasants come to their countries uninvited; cheer the migrants on, encourage the modern slave trade that gets them to Libya and onto leaky dinghies off the coast so they will reach Europe and live happily ever after.
I am with Bill Gates.
Now I realize that you will dismiss this as the ravings of an unreducated yokel, one of the confused angry losers of globalization. Yet I feel the need to quote:
“On the one hand you want to demonstrate generosity and take in refugees, but the more generous you are, the more word gets around about this – which in turn motivates more people to leave Africa.”
While Germany has been one of the pioneers of the open door policy, it cannot “take in the huge, massive number of people who are wanting to make their way to Europe.”
Thus Gates advised European nations to take action in order to make it “more difficult for Africans to reach the continent via the current transit routes.”
– Bill GatesFrance, united?
This presidential election has shattered the French political world. Enough has been said about the Front National. Macron is a one-man party. The socialist party has been wiped out to an extent one wonders if it will ever bounce back. The France of old, bourgeois, conservative and, surprisingly for France, unapologetically catholic made an unexpected resurgence lately, seemed headed for glory with Villon but went down with Penelopegate. Then there is the incredible electoral success of Mélenchon: the extreme left scored almost 20%, a score the communist party never achieved in the 70s back in the heyday of the hard left, in those days when communism still mattered among the intelligentsia. And all of these factions hate each other. France used to have a reputation for fun, joie de vivre, but the country of Gay Paree, the country of glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich is now a deeply unhappy country, nothing works, the country is sinking and no one knows why or what to do about it, or rather there are several explanations but no consensus. Is it immigration, racism, globalization, the euro, unions, Brussels, red tape, taxes, islamism, or the liberalization of the economy?
“Europe must find an actual response to this, or face a lot of struggle. There are too many people living in all these countries”
That’s what some of us have been saying for quite some time! The latest numbers: nearly 6 000 migrants rescued Friday 5th and Saturday 6th (https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2017/05/07/environ-6-000-migrants-secourus-en-deux-jours-en-mediterranee_5123607_3214.html). Enough tear-jerking stories about victims fleeing war and persecution. The top country of origin of Mediterranean migrants are Guinea, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Bangladesh. The current policy of welcoming millions of third-world peasants into Europe is barking-at-the moon madness. Unemployment has been over 12% for years in Italy. Italy is incapable of finding jobs for its own population. The idea that illiterate third-world peasants who speak no Italian will find jobs there is lunacy. We can expect them to be a burden to the societies where they will stay. They might turn homeless, live on charity or any street trade or criminality. Italien journalists have some pretty footage of the predictable results (before getting assaulted): https://www.romatoday.it/cronaca/francesca-parisella-aggredita-giornalista-matrix.html
Indeed there are millions in Africa, the Middle-East or South Asia who dream of moving to the western world. The only sane policy is to discourage them by any means. Intercept the “boats” that human traffickers have put the migrants on, and escort them to safety to the nearest port… back to Libya or Tunisia. Break the business model of the modern slavers, do NOT encourage it in any way. Otherwise you can only expect impoverishment, rising anger, radicalization, and escalating violence.
By all means rescue the migrants, but then promptly bring them to safety to the nearest port – Libya and/or Tunisia. Keep this up for a few months, and the migrants would get the idea. Scooping them up just off the Libyan coast and bringing them safely to a meal ticket in Europe – you just guarantee that thousands more will attempt to cross, getting many killed in the process.
Expecting that much of the southern mediterranean countries – nah, make that pretty much of the entire African continent, the middle east all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan could just walk up to Europe and everything will be peachy is lunacy. Europe, its cultures, languages and prosperity will be destroyed in the process – that much is already under way.
Russia did not engage in cyber warfare to interfere with US elections. Democrats, bitter and incredulous at having lost the election, are clinging to the comforting fiction that the evil Putin bogeyman stole the election from them and they are not going to let the absence of any sort of actual fact get in the way of their magnificent conspiracy theory. For instance, read https://theintercept.com/2017/03/07/leading-putin-critic-warns-of-xenophobic-conspiracy-theories-drowning-u-s-discourse-and-helping-trump/
3000 Africans in Italy in a single day? How long until there is nothing italian left in Italy? Whose idiotic idea is it that, as long as the standard of living is higher in the western world than wherever it is on planet Earth, then the only logical thing to do is to encourage the population of these countries to move to Europe, come hell or high water? Where is Europe supposed to store these waves of human beings? The suburbs of Paris are already powderkegs of discontented, idle, criminal and/or radicalizing youth. The cities that used to be blissfully deprived of ghettos like Stockholm and Bruxelles are rapidly developping their own Rinkebys and Molenbeeks. Unemployment in France has been around 10% for years, make that 12% in Italy, above 20% in Spain and 25% in Greece while their governments are up to their eyeballs in debt and deficits – and that is after 8 years of a supposed recovery.
Apparently inhabitants of Europe are supposed to look forward to having their economic well-being degrade ever further until Athens, Rome, Paris or Stockholm are no richer than Karachi or Alger and no longer attractive to the third-world. We can expect the european middle class, already battered by globalization, to keep sinking until it vanishes. We can expect the social safety net to collapse under the additional load, and the political situation to keep ever worsening, as the Lebanonization of European countries continues apace with all nuances of political debates disappearing as everyone gets reduced to crude membership in one of the ethnic groups jostling for power, be it Turk or Kurd or Shiite or Suni or White or Black.
You write “Since it’s impossible to deport millions of people”…
Impossible, and yet US government figures show that between 2009 and 2015 the Obama administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders. This does NOT include the number of people who “self-deported” or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection
<German Government Plans To Spend €93.6 Billion On Refugees>
That is over 100 billion US$ not going to the german populations’s education, elderly care, infrastructure, energy transition, social housing, etc but instead being hastily thrown together to cope with the influx of refugees. It is written in the sky that this demographic disruption will result in the kind of intractable problems of ghettoes of poverty, criminality and resentment that plague other countries. Countries like Sweden and Germany had rather homogeneous populations and had been spared the racial and religious animosities that have poisoned life in countries like the US or France, a consequence of which is that they have been free to spend their energy successfully building societies of by and large productive, educated citizens. Now thanks to well-meaning but demented immigration policies, they can expect public discourse to revolve around rancorous debates of discrimination and allocation of ethnic quotas. I hope they love their future of race riots and religious extremism.
In the latest child refugee news this week…
In Sweden, a family that had opened its doors to child refugees were repaid by having the supposedly 15 years old, but probably adult, sexually assault the family daugther.
You act as if those unaccompanied child refugees were all poor 8-year old orphans and you just take their claim at face value. This is incredibly naiive. Check out:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3422000/Just-old-think-migrant-children-Alarming-pictures-shed-light-growing-scandal-amid-asylum-crisis.htmlThe number of children seeking asylum in Sweden has exploded over the last ten years, presumably because children are granted asylum much quicker than adults, and Swedish authorities don’t verify the age of these “children.” Refugees are allowed to bring their entire family to Sweden once they get residency status. It is considered unreasonable for children to wait longer than six months for a decision on whether they get to stay or not, and thus it is a huge advantage, when seeking asylum, to claim that you are under 18
Norway and Denmark, despicable dastards that they are, seek a medical assessment when a claim is doubtful. Unsurprisingly, 70-90% of the times the claim to be a “child” is a lie and a fraud.
Meanwhile in Germany, https://www.welt.de/regionales/hamburg/article134823100/Polizei-kapituliert-vor-kriminellen-Fluechtlingskindern.html
“Hamburg is now home to more than 1,000 so-called unaccompanied minor migrants (minderjährige unbegleitete Flüchtlinge, MUFL), most of whom live on the streets and apparently engage in all manner of criminal acts.A confidential report, leaked to Die Welt, reveals that Hamburg police have effectively capitulated to the migrant youths:
“Even the smallest issue can quickly lead to aggressive offensive and defensive behavior. The youths come together in groups to stand up for each other and also to fight each other…” etc etcGerman authorities are reluctant to deport the youths back to their countries of origin because they are minors. As a result, as more unaccompanied minors arrive in Hamburg each day, the crime problem not only persists, but continues to grow.
For the latest incident involving a “child” refugee in Sweden, see: https://madworldnews.com/muslim-refugee-carves-face. Another of those angels, this time stabbing a girl who had turned him down in the face.
You can bet that this girl will support the Sweden Democrats rather than the Social Democrats now. Funny how being stabbed in the face twice by an unaccompanied child refugee will do that to you. Oh the moral values of that wicked girl! The humanity!
Completely agree with you Raleigh. This is insanity.
The automatic Earth has been documenting over the past several years how the middle class in western countries is economically disintegrating under the pressure of economic globalization. Political and economic decision-makers have established the primacy of corporations rights and freedom of financial flows over the well-being of a large section of their population. Established political parties and mainstream media have, on the demographic front, been relentlessly campaigning for ever more immigration, legal or not. The stresses on society are growing ever more apparent, the structure is creaking and groaning but the political leadership was always determined to stay the course, considering that there is no alternative. Populations abandoned to their fate have started rebelling, deserting traditional political parties in favor of newly-created populist parties in spite of a relentless mainstream media opposition painting them as beyond the pale. Actually most of them just happen to think that maybe the Euro might not be the key to widespread prosperity, the European Union not the utopia it’s cracked up to be, mass immigration is not helping anyone and may actually contribute to the demise of the welfare state they are fond of.
It is only under this newly appearing political pressure that the Establishment has started to reluctantly step back some on refugees. Many asserted that there was no alternative, that it was futile to think of preventing refugees from ever entering Europe – but it turns out that putting some mild border enforcement does go a long way. We can see that refugees have little chance to hold jobs in the developped world and we can expect most to be wards of the state forever, creating ghettos of poverty, criminality and resentment. Cologne and the recurring riots in asylum centers and criminality by refugee status seekers have turned the masses against refugees. Sheltering refugees in camps in the Middle-East is a simple and cheap affait. In Germany, France or Scandinavia you cannot accomodate people in a tent, you need housing which the state does not offer its own poor population. Hence Sweden renting luxury cruise ships to find a roof, any roof to put above the “refugees” heads. Add in health care, welfare, translators, language teachers, police, social workers – stabbed to death! – it adds up. Since money does not grow on trees, countries cut help to refugees elsewhere in the world to shelter fewer refugees at a much greater cost in Europe, and endanger their own social safety net as growing deficits create a need to go through austerity. Some program!
Who put the dying kids on boats? Europe? No, their parents. Their parents decided to put their kids in floating bathtubs on rough seas without a lifejacket. But they were running away from bombs? No, they had been living for months or years in Turkey. Turkey is a safe country. They were fleeing boredom and the lack of a welfare state, not death and bullets.
Political powers are whipping mobs against refugees? Well for years, with a savage monotony, all respectable political parties of Europe and all mainstream media have been preaching in favour of refugees and migrants. The result is plain to see. Ordinary people who do not have the luxury of spending their lives sheltered in academia’s ivory towers and TV’s well-lit studios see the subways and central stations of Europe overrun with refugee criminals (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/thief-punches-good-samaritan-mum-7223642. That guy was a Tunisian, living in a refugee center. Or https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3415477/Swedish-police-warn-Stockholm-s-main-police-station-overrun-migrant-teen-gangs-stealing-groping-girls.html), formerly peaceful neighbourhoods like Molenbeek or Husby turn into terrorist breeding grounds and immigrant no-go zones where cars are torched and police or firefighters get pelted with rocks if they dare to intervene, refugee centers be torn by violent mass brawls between Pakistanis and Afghanis about alcohol that take 32 police cars to quell (https://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/25/riot-at-asylum-centre-after-pakistani-muslims-catch-afghan-muslims-getting-drunk/), Christian refugees be the target of a lynching mob (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33999801), swedish social workers get stabbed and killed (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/worker-stabbed-to-death-at-swedish-refugee-centre), and young european women get molested in swimming pools or the streets by roving bands of refugee sexual predators.
All traditionally dominant political parties supported by mainstream media are uniformly in favor of the Euro, immigration, Brussels, refugees, transcontinental trade deals and toppling regimes in Iraq, Libya, Syria for democracy with the results we know. It is no wonder that, much to the consternation and condemnation of every right-thinking well-groomed pundit, ordinary people abandoned by their political and media elites are turning to upstart political parties, left or right, (Front National, Podemos, UKIP, 5 Stelle, True Finns, Syriza, Alternative für Deutschland etc and to a lesser extent Trump or Sanders in the US). No they are not always sweet-smelling, but if the authorities had been more concerned about the well-being of their population rather than their dogmas of free financial flows and unrestrained mass migration from the third world, those guys would never have been paid attention to.
Babble,
Two things can influence something like obesity: genes and the environment. Obesity rates have shot way up in most contries while the gene pool has not changed, or imperceptibly so. This makes it plain that the source for the increasing obesity is environmental not genetic. Now everyone commutes by car to an office job, then sits down for a supersized barrel of junk or comes home to microwave dinner and stares at a tv or computer screen in the evening.
Raúl,
The children washing up dead on Greek shores were safe in Turkey. They were put on leaky dinghies without a life jacket by their parents who thought a shot at getting a welfare check in Germany or Sweden was worth gambling on the life of their kids.
The humanitarian policy by european countries would be to ship everyone back to Turkey. Everyone would get the message that there was no room for them in Europe, and no one would drown. The baby-drowning policy is to encourage everyone from Afghanistan to Guinea to try their luck at landing on the shores of Europe, no matter what the odds or the costs.
You ask: “if there are four people with identical -fake- passports, how do they know the perpetrator was the one who passed through Greece, and not one of the other three?”
What was announced by French and Greek authorities was that, though the passport was fake, – and there are fake syrian passports by the boxful these days – fingerprints of the dead terrorist matched fingerprint taken in Greece on a refugee claimant in Leros, Greece. So though the actual identity of the man is still unknown, Syrian, French, Belgian, Algerian, he still came in among other refugees in the Turkey-Greece-Balkans route.
Now everyone from Ouagadougou to Karachi can picture themselves being greeted with marching bands and saurkraut, and driving BMWs. THAT will stem the tide of migrants. Germany is already budgetting 10 billion euros per year and that will only go up. European countries already stand on colossal debts, cannot balance their budgets, have had unemployment rates from 10% in France, 12% in Italy, to 22% in Spain and 25% in Greece for years, can keep the charade going only by going ever more into debt, have no jobs for legal immigrants. What can possibly go wrong with adding hundred of thousands of migrants who speak no Greek, Italian, French nor German into the mix? Europeans should come to love seeing their standard of living come down to meet the one in Islamabad, Oran, or Timbuktu. Any other reaction would be racist.
I know I have a heart of stone.
Mr Meijer,
TAE claims that humans are about to hit a wall regarding resources. That may well be true, but I don’t think we have actually hit that limit, yet. By and large in the last generations human beings pretty much all over the planet have been getting a better suppply of calories and proteins (in many countries obesity is more of a health concern than malnutrition), live longer, consume more energy, get more cars, iphones, etc. And yet they have had fewer and fewer babies, instead of having more and more as the malthusian theory would have them behave. That seems a clear sign there is more to human population growth than availability of resources.
We may have problems, but to me overpopulation is a problem that is taking care of itself without drama, and evoking mass suicides or die-offs is completely unwarranted. Mankind has managed to cope with a more than doubling of the world population since 1960 with the technology and brain resources of the day, with a fertility then much higher. Now you would have us believe that it could not handle a growth of a third in the next 30-some years without going through a cataclysmic collapse. Sorry, to me this is doomster porn.
Tabarnick
Mr. Meijer asserts that humans are like bacteria in a petri dish, set on the maximal population growth only kept in check by the harshest resource constraints. But are we? Let me make a different case.
I don’t know about other TAE readers, personally, I have no kids. Beyond personal anecdote, we can look at the numbers from the real world, and what we actually see is not quite the picture of yeast in a vat. The fertility rate in the developed world is significantly below the 2.1 marker for population stability. The highest ones are at about 2, and in many cases, markedly below. According to the CIA 2014 factbook, the US is below replacement, the European Union as a whole is at 1.55 and so is China; Eastern Europe is lower and Japan and South Korea stand at 1.4 and 1.25. Some surprising countries are below too, for instance Iran (1.9 today, 6.9 in 1960!), Vietnam, Brazil, Thailand. Population in all of those countries will start to drop if it has not already, with no need for a massive die-off.
Even in countries that are currently above the threshold, fertility is generally dropping like a stone. See India (5.87 in 1960, 4.28 in 1985 down to 2.53 in 2011). Mexico (from 5.7 children per woman in 1976 to 2.2 in 2006). Indonesia (5.67 in 1960, 3.75 in 1985 and 2.4 in 2011).
Basically, in the real world even though population has been going up, fertility has been going down for the last 50 years and this even though the world population has never been so well fed.
