[FoxNews] It's necessary to create a culture where having children is celebrated in order to reverse the falling birthrates.
AND increase security and reduce government interference so the economy expands and people are not terrified by government and social media totalitarian Karens, not to mention criminal colonizers. Happy, confident people have babies because they trust the future will not destroy their children. TLDR: Turn President Trump and his MAGA people loose to downsize government and upsize freedom.
WE CAN AVOID THE LOOMING FERTILITY CRISIS WITH THESE STEPS
In my neighborhood, families regularly have five or more children. Playgrounds fill up with 100 or more kids on holidays. Youth multiply on the streets on the way to school or friends’ homes. Meanwhile, families support each other by watching kids, carpooling, establishing meal trains for new mothers, lending or giving away toys and clothes and by doing countless acts of kindness day in and day out.
This kind of high fertility community — and the culture of neighborliness it engenders — used to be the norm everywhere. But today, my neighborhood just north of Washington, D.C., stands out as highly countercultural — an island of fertility in an ever-widening sea of infertility sweeping the world. This natalism isn’t a product of happenstance. It’s largely the result of countercultural norms that governments concerned about low birthrates have the power to foster.
According to the UN Population Division, over two-thirds of the world’s population live in sub-replacement countries. Iran has been below replacement level for a quarter-century. Italy has not seen as few births since before unification in 1861. Even in Africa, rates are dropping, with a few countries now below replacement level. In South Korea, which has the lowest birthrate in the world, less than one-fourth as many babies were born in 2023 than in 1970. With only 0.72 children per woman in 2023, its population will dramatically fall from today’s 51 million to as low as 20 million by the end of the century. Will it have enough soldiers to defend itself from North Korea?
The North Koreans also aren’t having enough children — according to the CIA World Factbook it’s estimated at 1.81 children born/woman, and the reality is probably considerably less — officially more than twice South Korea, but still well below replacement. Like Russia and Ukraine, it’s a race toward extinction.
Concerned about how declining populations will affect everything from economic growth to national security, the number of countries trying to increase birthrates grew from 19 in 1986 to 55 in 2015, according to the U.N. These efforts have centered predominantly on providing material incentives that putatively lower the cost of raising kids, such cash handouts, reduced taxes, and subsidized day care. More generous parental leave and reduced work hours have also been dangled. Yet, such efforts to boost birth rates have repeatedly failed. What gives?
Policymakers have neglected to address snowballing cultural norms that have led to fewer marriages and children. Many younger people write off having kids as an undertaking that threatens the climate or spells the end of their personal freedom, financial ease and happiness itself. If everyone you know thinks it's disadvantageous to get married or have kids, more money is unlikely to change your calculus. The norm that having zero or few kids is a favorable life path then spreads. As the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has written in "Foreign Affairs," "Many women (and men) may be less keen to have children because so many others are having fewer children."
My neighborhood, which is overwhelmingly orthodox Jewish, shows how a reimagined set of cultural norms can drive natalism. According to the Pew Research Center, the birth rate of American orthodox Jews is well above three children per woman, with some subgroups reaching much higher numbers.
Yes, orthodox Jewish birthrates are often high worldwide because of religious and cultural factors. But I think our fecund neighborhood reflects another factor at play: the simple normalization of childrearing. From the inside of a high fertility community, young people (as well as anti-natalists and child skeptics) are exposed to the joy and relative ease of handling what can seem to the uninitiated to be an insurmountable, joyless task. Life here is centered on bringing more life into the world, with celebrations for births, birthdays, growth milestones, bar or bat mitzvot, with marriages a regular part of it. When you see your neighbors finding joy in their children despite the daily grind of raising them, the sacrifices that attend childrearing are perceived as easier to bear. And by living in a community whose participants are willing to help each other out each day, raising kids becomes less arduous for all of us.
Changing cultural norms is not easy, but as we have seen with societal views of smoking, homosexuality and teenage pregnancy, it is quite possible. Several academic studies have concluded that "having babies is contagious," highlighting how our thinking on the subject depends on those near us.
Governments concerned about low birth rates can help reset cultural norms by shifting more of their resources into the development of child-centric, place-based communities. These "neighborhoods of joy" should be designed to attract and bond large families so that they create islands of countercultural norms. This means affordable housing geared towards their needs, highly walkable streets, high quality schools that kids can easily commute to on their own, playgrounds and compelling activities for youth, kid-friendly shops, and sympathetic churches and other houses of worship eager to support norm-setting efforts.
Once these neighborhoods have attracted enough families to establish their own communal ideas of what is normal, they can be incrementally enlarged in ways that incorporate more families, especially those just starting off. The cost for such efforts is modest when compared to the subsidies currently being offered in many countries.
The Japanese town of Nagi offers intriguing evidence of what might be possible. By not only easing the financial burden of having children by offering a range of subsides, but by building a child-centric place-based community, it has been able to achieve a birth rate that is double the Japanese national average — 2.68 in 2021 versus a national average of 1.3. While some of this may be because it attracts families eager to have kids, the community support system and norms are clearly playing a role. As Yuki Fukuda, who has three children, says, "Mothers feel safe having more children; it’s not easy to create those conditions."
Continued on Page 47
#2
Keep kids in school, unable to get a job, until they're in their mid-20's. Make sure they are unable to support a family until they're in their 30's...or maybe never. Then wonder why they're not having babies.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/18/2025 12:43 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Isn't this what the Environmentalists / Globalists want anyway?
Or has the Political Elite class finally "woke" up to understand it needs more TAXPAYERS to cover their spending sprees?
It should be noted that a large part of this post on Vk.com was cribbed from the historical text "Scorched Earth" written by Paul Carrell, considered one of the best and best written narratives about WWII on the eastern front.
Carrell was the pen name for the high ranking German Nazi official Paul Schmidt, who was involved in Nazi pogroms in Hungary.
[VK] On January 17, 1943, the 3rd Shock Army of the Kalinin Front liquidated the encircled 7,000-strong enemy garrison in Velikiye Luki and liberated the city. The battles for Velikiye Luki were the most fierce. After all, the capture of this city by the Red Army opened up the opportunity for it to advance on Vitebsk, this was understood on both sides of the front line.
Hitler, as he had promised Paulus in Stalingrad, promised assistance to the commandant of the encircled city, Lieutenant Colonel von Zass, and even promised to name Velikiye Luki after him – Zassenstadt.
The German historian Paul Karel called what was happening here a “miniature Stalingrad”. He wrote: “The Soviet rifle battalions fought with amazing courage. Especially the Komsomol members, fanatical young communists, in the next few weeks glorified themselves with their devotion to duty. Private Aleksandr Matrosov of the 254th Guards Rifle Regiment earned the title Hero of the Soviet Union at the cost of his life."
The Germans really did their best to help the dying garrison in Velikiye Luki. Karel wrote: "The last attempt was made on January 9. The strike group of Major Tribukait, commander of the 5th battalion, went to the fortress: several armored personnel carriers from the 8th tank division, tanks of the 1st battalion of the 15th tank regiment and assault guns of the 118th reinforced tank battalion.
"Move and shoot!" - that was the order. Do not stop.
The crews of the destroyed vehicles were to immediately climb onto the armor of others. With this method of "non-stop movement" Tribukait really managed to break through the enemy ring. Several of his tanks and armored personnel carriers remained on the battlefield, but the group reached the target.
At exactly 15:06, Darnedde's exhausted men saw their tanks from the citadel ramparts. They cried with joy and embraced each other. "They did it!" came from everywhere. "They did it!"
Fifteen combat vehicles clanked into the fortress courtyard, among them the last three tanks of Lieutenant Koske's 1st Battalion of the 15th Tank Regiment. However, the fortunes of war had once again turned against Darnedde's battalion. As soon as the outflanked Russians realized that the Germans had broken through, they concentrated their artillery fire on the fortress.
Tribukait immediately ordered the tanks to get out of the small courtyard among the ruins, to which the only road led. But everything seemed to be against him now. At that very moment, as one of the fifteen tanks was passing through the gate, it was hit by four shells. The tank with torn tracks blocked the exit for the others.
Tribukait's small force was trapped and turned into a target for fierce fire from guns of all calibers. One tank after another fell victim to the Soviet bombardment. The surviving Tribukait tankers joined the defenders as infantry.
On January 15, a parachute battalion tried to break into the fortress, but this attempt also failed."
On January 17, it was all over in Velikiye Luki. The last surviving Germans surrendered. Many of them died after they had already capitulated, as they were severely exhausted and frostbitten. And no one was going to arrange sanatorium conditions for them after the surrender...
The most "irreconcilable" of the Germans decided not to surrender, and tried to reach their own in small groups. Only eight out of several hundred succeeded. The rest were killed by the Red Army or simply froze to death on the way.
In 1946, von Sass was convicted of war crimes and was publicly hanged with a group of accomplices in Velikiye Luki, which never became Sassenstadt.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] More than half of the population of Greenland, an autonomous province of the Danish Kingdom, spoke out in favor of leaving the rule of His Majesty Frederick X and joining the world's largest island to the United States.
According to a recent (January 6–11) poll, 53.7% of respondents essentially supported the idea of US President-elect Donald Trump, while only 37.4% were against it. The poll, we note, was conducted by the American non-governmental organization Patriot Polling. This public opinion survey coincided with Donald Trump Jr.'s "strictly private" visit to the island.
While a shocked Danish cabinet expresses deep concern about the new leader of the allied country's insistence on "making Greenland great again", King Frederik has taken a more decisive stance - within his powers.
BEAR, RAM, THREE CROWNS
His Majesty has deigned to change the Great Coat of Arms of Denmark so that it better reflects the overseas possessions that the kingdom retains in the 21st century, namely the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The coat of arms now “emphasizes the silver ram and polar bear,” which symbolize the respective North Atlantic territories.
If previously the heraldic animals were placed in the basement of the coat of arms, then from now on the symbols of the overseas provinces are equated with the two historically main parts of the kingdom - the original Denmark and Northern Schleswig.
Perhaps, in order not to irritate their great overseas partner, the Danes explained: the new coat of arms "with an emphasis on Greenland" is not Copenhagen's answer to Washington, but nothing more than a tribute to tradition. Indeed, the details of the large coat of arms change with the beginning of each new reign. And Frederick is a new king, and January 14 is precisely the first anniversary of his accession to the throne.
But Danish patriots still cherish the hope that the kingdom has put both Donald Trump and Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Egede in their place. The latter, although he told Trump that “the island is not for sale,” believes that Greenland should become independent, because such is the will of the island’s indigenous population, the Kalaallit Eskimos.
Somewhat lost in the news that Greenland now occupied an important place on the Danish coat of arms was the news of another change. For the sake of the polar bear, the Danish king symbolically "sacrificed" three crowns.
This fragment of the coat of arms still reminded us that once, in the 14th–16th centuries, the monarchs of Denmark ruled all of Scandinavia, from the Norwegian fjords to the “cold Finnish cliffs.” These were the times of the Kalmar Union, a united Danish-Swedish-Norwegian kingdom under the supreme authority of Copenhagen.
For all its symbolic changes, this era of great power remains important for understanding the relationship of a small European kingdom to its vast (if sparsely populated) North American possession. But for greater understanding, we must go back even further: to the Viking Age.
RED, OLD AND LEATHER PANTS
Denmark is the oldest continuously existing state in Europe. Since King Harald Bluetooth was baptized in 965, the state has never been re-established there. Only Japan can boast such continuity. Neither the Reformation of 1527 nor the Nazi takeover of 1940 shook the monarchy.
The Danes can consider themselves the oldest colonial power, since the sons of King Ragnar Lodbrok occupied the east of England in the 9th century and subsequent kings held on to this “area of Danish law” for another hundred years.
And if we consider Greenland as part of North America, then America was discovered by the Scandinavians. As is known, the first to land on the "Green Island" in 980 were the Vikings, led by the Icelander Eric the Red,
…who was not a famous baseball player, I was once shocked to learn…
who was expelled from his native island for killing a neighbor. Free Icelanders and their Greenland "settlements" in the 13th century recognized the authority of the Norwegian king Haakon the Old.
A century later, in 1397, Norway, together with its possessions – Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland – entered into a union – a union proclaimed in the Swedish city of Kalmar. But, as was said above, Denmark played the first violin in the great Scandinavian “concert”. Copenhagen, albeit nominally, could rule the seas – from the Baltic to the Greenland glaciers (by the way, the strait between Iceland and Greenland is called the Danish Strait).
True, there was no Christian population left in Greenland by that time: by the 15th century, the descendants of the Vikings had died out. Historians are still passionately debating the reasons for this. This happened either because of the "little ice age" and the epidemics associated with the cold snap and the cessation of contacts with Iceland and Europe, or because of the raids of the Kalaallit Eskimos (who settled the island almost later than the Vikings), or because of a combination of factors.
Be that as it may, at the beginning of the 18th century Greenland had to be made European again. On the initiative of the missionary "Apostle of Greenland" Hans Egede (the current Prime Minister, ethnic Kalaallit Mute Egede is his namesake), Danish settlers flocked to the island. For the Eskimos, who by that time had become the indigenous population and still make up the majority, the European colonists turned out to be "newcomers", so the current desire expressed in opinion polls to free themselves from the old masters (and even to become the 51st state of the USA) looks quite plausible.
But let's go back to the beginning of the 18th century, to the time of the pastor-apostle Hans Egede. By that time, the Kalmar Union had already collapsed a hundred years ago, Sweden had become an independent (and very strong) European player, but Denmark continued to own Norway, and therefore Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
DENMARK - A PRISON?
But the medieval great power continued to crumble, at first partly due to Bonaparte.
In the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark – not very prudently – sided with France, and Sweden was part of the coalitions that fought the “Corsican monster.” The Swedes took advantage of this when they won Norway from the Danes in 1814.
Ironically, the Swedish armies were led into battle by the former Napoleonic Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, aka Prince Carl Johan, adopted by the Swedish king, aka the future King Charles XIV. The Danish-Norwegian Union turned into the Swedish-Norwegian Union, but the Danes were left with the old Norwegian colonies – the same Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
During World War II, when Germany occupied Denmark in one day, the British and Americans occupied the kingdom's overseas possessions. Against this backdrop, Iceland declared itself an independent republic in 1944. American military bases appeared here and in Greenland.
During the reign of the current monarch's mother, Queen Margrethe II (who is still alive, but who ceded the throne to her son a year ago), Greenland, like the Faroe Islands, received self-government and is not under the jurisdiction of the European Union.
Both territories periodically raise the question of independence. For example, the far-left party Inuit Atakwatigiit (Eskimo Community), which rules the Greenland Autonomous Region, historically considers Denmark to be almost a prison of nations.
ELIZABETH, YOU WERE RIGHT.
For Denmark, losing the shadow of its former greatness and turning from the second largest country in Europe (after Russia) into a territorial dwarf is a blow to its national prestige. Therefore, although support for all US initiatives, including support for the Kyiv regime, is sacred for all Danish governments, “Greenland is not for sale!” Even if the price of this “non-sale” is a quarrel with the elected US president.
Should we be the third rejoicing in this quarrel?
Russia is doomed to be a neighbor of Denmark, and for a long time we were allies. Since the time of Ivan III, we had common enemies - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then Sweden. Several times, rulers tried to conclude dynastic marriages, but only the union of Ivan the Terrible's niece Maria Vladimirovna with Prince Magnus ended successfully.
But the alliance between Russia and Denmark did not stand the test under Elizabeth Petrovna and has not been restored since. Initially, it was due to dynastic reasons.
The daughter of Peter the Great appointed as her heir the Duke of Holstein, Karl Peter Ulrich (the future Peter III), who had irreconcilable territorial contradictions with Copenhagen, and then the Danish King Frederick V entered into a second marriage with Juliana Maria of Brunswick in 1752. The new queen was related to the "Brunswick family" - the same one that Elizabeth overthrew.
Russia and Denmark have never fought each other. But the Danes were Napoleon's allies (for which we must say "thank you" to the English, whose fleet shelled neutral Copenhagen), and after 1814 the country that in ancient times owned half of England found itself in the wake of London's politics.
A bright spot in Danish-Russian relations was the marriage of Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich (the future Alexander III ) and the Danish princess Dagmar, in Orthodox baptism Maria Feodorovna. But this episode rather concerned the personal relations of the royal houses - thanks to which, after the revolution of 1917, Maria Feodorovna's nephew Christian X of Denmark provided asylum to his aunt.
After World War II, the Anglo-Saxons finally took Denmark "into development" - in 1949, the country abandoned its 200-year policy of neutrality and enthusiastically joined NATO, designed to protect against the "Russian threat". It is noteworthy that the country joined the European Union in the 1990s with less enthusiasm, and never joined the euro zone.
Now a small (not in terms of territory, but in terms of population and GDP) Scandinavian country holds the palm in terms of supporting Ukraine with funds and weapons and, along with the Balts and Poles, is at the forefront of all possible anti-Russian initiatives. Let us recall that the undermining of the Nord Streams took place in the territorial waters of Denmark. So we certainly should not regret the quarrel between Washington and Copenhagen that is unfolding “out of the blue” thanks to Trump.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
