Behind Pakistan floods, is water shortages

I had no idea it was so bad that the Indus River, like the Colorado, no longer even makes it to sea because it's so overappropriated.

That said, instead of just passing out dam building advice, the Obama Administration should also be passing out birth control advice. (As we should be doing in Iraq, Mexico, Guatemala and all sorts of other places. And India — especially since the Hindu Nationalist Party still seems to have this idea of "winning" a population race with China.)

If Pakistan's population is expected to increase by 50 million in just a decade, NOTHING is more important than preaching birth control, and providing pills, condoms, diaphragms and anything else. In fact, in such cases, we ought to require that birth control goes along with other foreign aid.

Question, though: Does Obama have guts enough to even suggest that?

Big lie of omission on U.S. vs Euro birthrates and illegal immigration

And, I’m pretty sure it’s deliberate, which makes it a LOT worse. On page 6 of his NYTimes Mag story “No Babies?”, Russell Shorto (sorry, no e-mail addy for him, but here is a generic one for the magazine) compares America’s relatively robust birth rate of 2.1 to European countries, which range from 1.9 all the way down to 1.3, with 2.1 being the “break-even point.” (Italy could lose half its population, not counting immigration, in less than 50 years.)

Anyhow, here’s the start of the erroneous nutgraf on page 5:

“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate.

WRONG.

It’s an explanation of two parts that neither Haub nor author Shorto may want to tackle, though.

Take a look at the CIA factbook. Mexico, the primary source of our immigration, especially of the illegal variety, has a birthrate of 2.37. Guatemala, possibly the top Central American source of illegal immigrants, has a fertility rate of 3.59.

American-born residents in the U.S. have a fertility rate of below 2.0.

Indeed, it looks like Shorto actually tries to HIDE the immigration explanation on page 8, discussing the higher birthrate in Great Britain vs. continental Europe:

The British situation today seems a far cry from “lowest low,” but it doesn’t mean that immigration is the answer to low birthrates. The actual numbers, according to several authorities, are discouraging over the long run. By one analysis of U.N. figures, Britain would need more than 60 million new immigrants by 2050 — more than doubling the size of the country — to keep its current ratio of workers to pensioners, and Germany would need a staggering 188 million immigrants in the same time period. One reason for such huge numbers is that while immigration helps fill cities and schools and factories in the short term, the dynamic adjusts over time. Immigrants who come from cultures where large families are standard quickly adapt to the customs of their new homes. And eventually immigrants age, too, so that the benefit that incoming workers give to the pension system today becomes a drag on the system in the future.

Ahh, but, what if the immigrants keep coming? Obviously, that’s what’s happening to our south.

The second part of the explanation of “how we do it” also gets ignored — the difference between ethnic groups among American natives in birth rates, as well as the difference in socioeconomic classes, tied with the bigger income gap here than in Western Europen.

Oh, no Mr. Short and Mr. Haub, the explanation is quite easy. You just don’t want to talk about it.