The other night I found myself in the ignomious position of driving to my mother’s house to do laundry, like some sort of Univsersity student.  Not because I’m broke, mind you – though I am – I’d simply lost the damn card required in this era of Electronic Money and the Number of the Beast.  Coin-op washing machines are a faint and precious memory…

So while I was crusing along one of Calgary’s main-drags, tailgaiting an $80 000 minivan which refused to exceeded the speed limit, I Swear to Odin that the following stories came on the hourly news:

A Jewish/Muslim Alliance is protesting anti-bullying legislation which informs School Children that there are, in fact, six genders. Good Lord, I thought – wasn’t this the premise of a Heinleinian Dystopian Novel?

Next on, it seems that Helmets will now be necessary for skiing in Nova Scotia – a Province utterly free of Mountainous Regions.

Thirdly – if you drive through a CheckStop here in Calgary, and blow a 0.05 – which is below the legal limit of 0.08 – your car can be impounded for up to a month, without recourse, though you will not be arrested.

Fourthly – an MP was arrested that night for refusing a breathalyzer after having a glass of wine with dinner.

Every single time I turn on the news, without fail, it gets More and More Bizarre.  And it’s getting Bizarre at a Faster Rate.

It’s getting to the point where I’m not even angry over it anymore; nowadays I Laugh in Despair.  Truly, I am a Mad Man living in a Mad World!

And yet, in my current line of work, I’m constantly in touch with The Common Man – or at least, the common man who is also a small-business entrepreneur.  A nowhere do I see this constant insanity which seems to pervade, according to The Media.

A fellow Canadian Blogger pointed out some time back that 49% of the Canadian Population believes that we have too much immigration; a proposition which is so incredibly obvious that I once convinced a Mexican Immigrant of the Truth! of this statement, after only minutes of conversation (for the record, she was a Medical Doctor, not a Landscaper; Mexicans only landscape in places without winter) – but every political party wants to increase immigration, and your average Joe is ashamed of his Racism for being against it.

Your average blue-collar, white-collar, politically-bored and hard-working man I meet on a day-to-day basis is just as Sane as this Mexican Elite – no crazy at all!  Not a single one is as Pathologic as the nonsense reported by the Merchants of Mendacity.  What is it then, a trick?  A myth?  Normal People are Everywhere!

…at least, they are for 8 weeks.  That’s roughly the gestation cycle of The Worm.

It seems that folks will only talk sensible about what’s going on at any particular Time and Date.  Give it a few weeks, and they’ll say what the Talking Heads said; a few weeks and they’re buying it hook, line, and Stinker.

Let’s go back – waaaay back – and think about the smoking bylaws for a moment (a constant thorn in my side).  Back in the day, there were a lot of people against these things – even if they didn’t understand Private Property or other such Civilized Principles that our High School Teachers ‘forgot’ to mention…  Even years after those laws got passed, I could still talk to folks about the Insanity Of It All; and roughly 70% of the time the Signal Went Through.

Nowadays?  Bars have Always been non-smoking.  We’ve Always been At War with Islam.  That’s Just The Way Things Are.  You don’t want to go back to Monarchy, do you?  Democracy is the Wave of the Future.

Way back then, back when I was a civilian, back when the world was at peace, back when the sixties weren’t being re-enacted (this time Dirtier and More Destructive!), I used to have some Hope that the smoking bylaw would change; that me, the owner, and the other two dudes wouldn’t all have to step outside together to spark a dart, leaving his bar empty….  Surely this madness cannot last? I would say with a half-cocked grin.

It’s been 8 years.  And it’s getting worse.

Surely, we are living in the Cyberpunk Dystopia.  William Gibson is spinning atop his grave.

But as to the whole Birthrate issue; I need to get this out of my head before the ideas start to rot, and I wind up laying on the couch with an ear canal full of sodium bicarbonate.

Last time we discussed why immigration is a Non Starter.  Quite frankly, if we’re going to import an entire ethnically homogenous community, we might as well just cede our territory to country X.  This time we’re going to look at the whole incentives issue, the real nut of the problem, and see if we can’t come up with some solutions (which of course will never be implemented – but thought experiments are fun!).

On the radio program, they were asking the questions: “Is the Baby Bonus enough?  Do we need state supported daycare for single moms?  What kind of socialist money-transfer schemes could we implement to cause more baby-making?”

The reason these questions are useless is because they don’t address the root of the probelm – namely: Why The Hell Are We Having This Problem Anyway?  No society in History has ever had a problem making the next generation,* so what’s changed in our present world?

Two things; one that we can’t do anything about, and another that we most certainly can.

The first is birth control, and the pill in particular.  It’s hard to say how many of our grandparents were Oops Babies, but I know for a fact that I was, and it’s a good guess that many of them were, too.  Giving people to choice of when to bread has advantages and disadvantages; it’s hard to say whether or not this is a net positive.  But the point remains, Pandora’s Cunt has been opened, and trying to close it won’t clear the air of that fishy smell.

The second reason – the one we could control (but won’t) is the role we’ve ‘given’ to women in our Modern Progressive society.

Pundits love to talk about how people are having babies later in life, because they’re spending so much of their twenties pursuing an education.  University is Good, we are told, opportunity costs be damned.  Look at how -fucking- progressive we are, sending half our population to attain these worthless degrees!

So right off the bat, we have ghettoized immigrants creating three generations, in the time it takes a native-born to create two.

But that’s not where the story ends; if the only problem were that we were breeding later in life, that would be offset by the fact that we’re living longer.  As usual the pundits have it wrong; it’s not just that women are wasting time and money getting useless degrees in their early twenties – we need to look at what they’re doing after University (aside from visiting Europe, and volunteering with third world destroying charities).  Do they find a husband and get married?

No.  They enter the workforce.

You show me a stay-at-home mom, and I’ll show you a dad who got out before the dot-com bubble burst.

A question for all you women out there (forget for the moment that fifty years ago, all husbands beat their wives, and women were considered property, not people): throughout history women have always had the opportunity to pursue meaningful work (well, at least as much opportunity as men), but they were seldom forced to slave away at back-breaking, soul crushing jobs at the box factory.  They had the choice of getting married, and staying home to raise babies.

How many of you have such a Choice nowadays?

Some of you – aw, hell, all of you (since you’re literate enough to understand my Esoteric Nonsense) – probably work at one of those rare fulfilling jobs.  You are the exceptions.  Take a moment, and think back to the last time you were at Tim Hortons.  Do you really think that the 40 year old woman behind the counter prefers serving coffee to staying at home and making babies?

So in a sense, the Radio People were right; it is an issue of incentives.  Only problem is, they’re watching the front-end, when they shold be checking out the back.

We live in an era of female ‘prvilige’, by policy and by subsidy (privilege that ultimately harms women, but that’s not the point).  On the one hand, educational systems, legals systems, and workplace harassment policies are all designed to be anti-male – they throw an extra pound of straw on that camel’s back, giving women the handicap’s advantage.  Simultaneously, our governments institute transfer payments which drive women towards the workforce: scholarships, social services, broken divorce-law incentives.

All of it comes together to form a nice little stink flower, where men have more difficulty than ever before in affording (let alone attracting) a wife, and women are constantly pushed to go out into the world and find out just how crappy Working For A Living really is.  We’ve shattered the institution of Marriage, and convinced little girls that being a Stay At Home Mom is a moral failing.

Oh, gee – and this somehow translates into dropping birth rates?

If you want to fix the birthrate, it’s pretty easy: stop trying to recruit women specifically into the work force; stop wasting money advertising STEM degrees to them, stop funding councils and workshops about a woman’s ‘issues’ in the company.

Start treating women like Equals.

Do this, and most women will take the past of least resistance, the path most in tune with their innate nature: they will stay home while their husband goes to work at the Box Factory, and start popping out plenty of Babies.  As it was fifty years ago, as it was five-hundred years ago, some of them will still go out and work.  Equal treatment won’t hold back the Madame Curies of the world, but the sad fact of the matter is that most people just aren’t talented.

So there’s my modest proposal: start treating people all the same, stop messing around with egghead incentive schemes, and just let human nature take it’s course.  There’s your birthrate for ya’.

Yes, yes, I know – it’ll never work.

* Untrue, actually.  Both Greece and Rome in their latter years saw declining birthrates alongside the decline of democracy, immigrant power blocks, excessive transfer payments, and bronze-age feminism.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

The government’s main concern, of course, is the baby boomer retirement – and there are plenty of damned problems with the children of the Greatest Generation; there’s a lack of skilled workers to replace them (thanks to tenure), the upcoming generation is pathologically obsessed with Bread and Circuses rather than civic virtue, and then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room:

It may well be that people are all inidviduals, but a student of history knows that demographics are destiny.

How bad is it getting?  Let’s talk numbers; the global rate is about 20 births per 1000 people – this is considered medium-low.  South Africa’s at 19; China’s at 12; Chile’s at 15, Mexico’s at 19, and Iraq (thanks to the war) has dropped from 35 to 29.  As for Canada?  Hey, let’s go all out and post a chart!

That’s right… we’re creating Emos, Punks & Pussies at a rate lower than Little Emperors.

You know, maybe it’s my steady diet of Little Red Pills, but I eventually had to shut the radio off.  The Official Ideologues (decent folks in their own right, I’m sure) addressed two possible solutions to the problem: immigration-replacement, and financial incentives, such as the Baby Bonus.

[Goddamn, a little education really is a dangerous thing, ain't it?  Somebody learns a tiny bit of Econ 101, and suddenly the March of History boils down to the fact that 'People respond to incentives, LOL!' I prefer to take a more nuanced approach]

So, let’s dive into this, and see if I can get someone to accuse me of being rassist!

First, the immigration solution – remembering of course that Demographics are Destiny.

As individuals, I love immigrants.  Here in Soviet Canuckistan we have Nazi-esque immigration standards (unlike you poor bastards down in Washington-Corp), and the ones who manage to make it through are almost entirely crème de la crème.  They’re hard working, smart, if they’re Black African they almost never pull the race card, and they get shit done – unlike the many, many entitled, lazy, not-quite-fat Canadians that I’ve met.

To put it in perspective I only Hate about 30% of the immigrants I’ve met; with natural-borns that number is closer to 70.

Economics is not a zero sum game.  While the argument (in the United States) that the exportation of low-wage jobs over-seas, combined with the importation of cheap Mexican labour, is harming the black underclass does have merit to it; however, this is not a comparable case.  A hard-working and skilled immigrant, who displaces a native-born, doesn’t ’steal his job’ he expands the economy!  We’re expanding our Human Resources as a Country, and until the water runs out, that ain’t a bad thing (though it may result in a brain-drain in their native land).  In this part of the world, the ‘diverse’ companies tend to be the better ones to work for.

But -

[When discussing race, if the person says 'but' you can then diregard everything they just said, and accuse them of racism for what comes after.]

But – economics ain’t the whole picture.

For any of you Vancouverites – how does if feel living there if you don’t speak Mandarin?

Some might say that there’s Far Too Much corruption in Chinese-run Vancouver.  Possibly.  I think this is too harsh of a term, however.  Call me culturally ambivalent, but so much of our day-to-day behaviour – interacting with strangers, businesses, and government – is based upon the cultural context we pick up with our mother’s milk.  Why do we tip 15% at restaurants, but not at fast food?  I’ve got no idea – but it’s just how we do things.  There are hundreds of these subconscious protocols, they lube the gears of social interaction, and provide the social unification that lets us all get along.  Start to throw that away, and things go south, fast.

So while the Chinese may be ‘corrupt’ by Canadian standards, I don’t view that as a judgement on their population.  In China, with their own set of mores and traditions, the behaviours make sense, they’re more-or-less fair (as fair as having to pay a 15% tip is, anyway); and in cities without this huge concentration, the Chinese get along fine with everybody else.

When immigrants arrive in small numbers they acclimatize; when they arrive in large numbers they balkanize.  Look at the French – it took us 400 years to pacify them, and even now the Bloc is at danger of re-establishing!  Go ask somebody of low- to middle-income, who’s from a major city, what their experiences are with different immigrant groups.  They’ll complain about the banding together of Filipinos, Muslims, or whomever else is beginning to settle in large numbers; the complaints, largely true, are called racist.

This immigration problem is by no means restricted by differing skin colours; when the Italians, Polish, Ukranians, and the rest from South-Eastern Europe came across, they self segregated; there’s still some history of this in the Eastern half of the country (Wops and Porkchops in Hamilton love to pretend to hate eachother).  But back then, before multi-culturalism, the rate of immigration was restricted – we’re only a few generations in, and most whites can’t tell one another apart (incidentally, East Indians in the GTA seem to be following this pattern closely – your typical Young Brown Male is apt to complain about his parent’s traditional mannerisms, and listen to the same godawful music as everyone else).

Immigration can work, cultural osmosis can improve a culture (Britain and Curry, for instance), but only when it’s done gradually, only when the brakes are put on to prevent balkanization.

The NDP contains members who are advocates of allowing Sharia Law in some parts of Canada.  Need I say more?

Immigration at the levels needed to rebuild our country will destroy it, turning it into something it never wanted to be, as well as engendering the strife and sporadic violence which occurs whenever insular communities bump up against eachother.  Just because we can get along, doesn’t mean we always will.

And that’s not even considering the problem that immigration is supposed to solve – when the immigrants control 51% of the votes, what do you think is going to happen to that Old Age Welfare being provided to people they don’t know, don’t empathize with, and frequently don’t like?

So – problem Number One: Immigrants as Solution – that don’t carry water, no matter how awesome my buddy Sange is.

What about financial incentives?

Oh, ho, ho – we’ll get to that next time!

At first I kept myself amused by playing with any of the equipment I could get my hands on, and then by casing the security systems and examining the door locks, but the security guards – complete with tazers, handcuffs, and multitools (they were far better equipped than the old men you see guarding our military bases; the closest thing they have to a weapon is a radar gun) were quick to notice a Free Man standing in their midst, and ordered me to head across the street to the bar, where my drinks were served by a young Asian girl in a bikini.

The whole experience was jarring, particularly in a place called an ‘Emergency Room’. Several other customers – I mean, members of the proletariat – decided they’d waited long enough and left, one whose progressive alcoholism had resulted in a seizure, and another who was complaining about a swollen appendix – presumably of the opinion that either A) once their case worsened the ambulance would give them prompt attention, or B) dying at home in the loving glow of their televisions would be preferable to waiting in this stale, halogen-lit environment with nothing for entertainment but a single cathode ray tube playing a CBC report about how the Premier of one of our East Coast Provinces made it a habit to visit New York for his medical needs.

I chatted with one of the nurses, and she told me that they’d recently converted one of the storage closets into a patient room. They now stack their equipment along the walls.

But ranting about make-do solutions like that, the ratty-looking desks and tables, the Windows 95 Operating Systems, and the general 3^rd World vibe to the place misses the point. Having brand new mahogany desks and MacBook Pros (that’s what House uses to read his spreadsheets, isn’t it?) aren’t going to make a lick of difference with the treatment you get. The reason I mention them however is because of the mindset they imply – Fuck You if you have a problem with it, it’s not like you have anywhere else to go. Veterinarians may be expensive, but at least they know which side of their bread is buttered; that’s why you get things like comfortable seats, decent magazines, and prompt service when your ferret catches the flu.

Long story short, my friend got better despite the medical service he received. I spent a week helping him out, jumping through pointless bureaucratic hoops, and raging impotently at his Kafka-esque system which retains the right to judge me Psychologically Unsound without any sort of Due Process.

I hear something similar’s been happening in the US. I’ll get to that next time.