My distopian afternoon (warning: post may contain lists)

As far as go convalescent Sunday afternoons, I have to say that I've had better. First, the soundtrack. Not being one who subscribes to the lazy notion assigning a given band or album to a particular time of day, I'll here do the reverse and say that Radiohead has none too subtly affected the direction of the day. [Break here to discuss random Radiohead thoughts:

1. How pissed was Radiohead, do you think, to not be the first to think of putting an {insert little r with circle around it symbol here} after their name, like Spiritualized did? Probably pretty durned pissed, I'd think.
2. "Hail To the Theif" sucks. Ok, it sucks in relation to other Radiohead albums. Is it better than the album/clothing line so horribly named that I dare not type it? Yes. Is it better than other albums of recent vintage by brethren recovering British paranoiacs? Decidedly no.
   

Note also that Radiohead ("Nice Dream," first) appeared quite by accident, on Angry Hippie's car stereo, and only when I got home did I follow it up with "Hail..."] Unsurprisingly, the music has directed my thoughts toward Thom Yorke's lyrical concerns, which seem to be:

1. Being lonely, British
2. Technology, how it sucks and/or contributes to being isolated or lonely (see point 1)
3. the vomit, the vomit, the vomit, the vomit...
   

I don't mean to poke fun. He's a somewhat easy target, and one who would seem to have difficulty firing back, what with the gammy eye and all. But I respect Mr. Yorke's lyrical gifts to the extent, in fact, that I briefly considered breaking my self-imposed ban on posting song lyrics, so enamored was I.
My second disappointment of the afternoon is that I lack nearly all the requisite ingredients to concoct a Bloody Mary, of which I am in sore need. (Other hilarious, but assuredly nasty drink here.) Also, I'm out of Hot Pockets. Which sucks.

Howevs.

The music did gel nicely with the two articles I came across today while catching up on my surfing of the computer interweb. Both by one Philip Longman, and both jumping off from the counterfactual springboard of the global population decline. Everything you thought you knew about overpopulation is a myth.

Or will be very soon.

All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045, according to the latest UN projections, the world's fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.

This, of course, has yuge implications. Everything from health care, to Social Security, to national defense depends on people making more people. Or at least making enough people to replace the ones we lose every year. It is henceforth our national duty, as Americans of child-bearing age, to get bizzay. Reihan over at The American Scene calls this the "pro-natalist" agenda, and commands, often in raps disguised as paens to Saffron Burrows, that we get down wid it.
It's not just governments that are affected, though.

Population aging is also likely to create huge legacy costs for employers. This is particularly true in the United States, where health and pension benefits are largely provided by the private sector. General Motors (GM) now has 2.5 retirees on its pension rolls for every active worker and an unfunded pension debt of $19.2 billion. Honoring its legacy costs to retirees now adds $1,800 to the cost of every vehicle GM makes, according to a 2003 estimate by Morgan Stanley.

So, where are the kids going to come from? Not you, hippies!

In Utah, where 69 percent of all residents are registered members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fertility rates are the highest in the nation. Utah annually produces 90 children for every 1,000 women of childbearing age. By comparison, Vermont -- the only state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to embrace gay civil unions -- produces only 49.

Less and less (liberal) people, more and more technology...sounds like a hit record!
It's important to note, I think, that nowhere does Longmann mention abortion as a cause of the precipitous decline in world-wide birth rates. AIDS, yes; infectious disease, yes; abortions, no.

It is a bit of a time investment, but you should read the whole article in Foreign Affairs that details the scope of the problem. There's a more digestible version here, and more hearty version here. The final word goes to Reihan:

[B]eing down with the pronatalist agenda, insofar as it demands an explicitly countercultural stance - a critical distance from a broader cultural licentiousness that defines cool at the present moment - is necessarily "uncool." For now. We need "happening" young people to embrace said agenda, the better to dupe the bobbysoxers and hepcats alike to "go with the flow," as it were.

Any volunteers?