(See text below and Vote { - many interesting choices} at Adult Christian Forum Thread 90634.)
The elites of the modern West have been given a choice (largely economic they believe) between bareness and terminal discomfort.
They have chosen bareness. They shall have terminal discomfort.
As they might have understood, had they paid more attention to: Abraham and Sarah, Zachariah and Elizabeth, and Jeptha's daughter.
From a New York Times article, Come October, Baby Will Make 300 Million or So :
January 13, 2006 [\] Come October, Baby Will Make 300 Million or So [\] By SAM ROBERTS
If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.
As of yesterday, the Census Bureau officially pegged the resident population of the United States at closing in on 297,900,000. The bureau estimates that with a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is growing by one person every 14 seconds.
At that rate, the total is expected to top 300 million late this year. But with those projections adjusted monthly and the number of births typically peaking during the summer, the benchmark is likely to be reached about nine months from now.
"You end up with a number in October," said Katrina Wengert, a demographer and a keeper of the Census Bureau's official Population Clock, getting about as specific as possible this far in advance in a field subject to chronic fudging and revising. The clock is, itself, a contrivance, of course, but no more so than other pretexts for a wintertime sexual encounter.
According to the Times, all pretexts for wintertime sexual encounters are contrivances.
One hopes that they have more life-enhancing views of other seasons.
Still one can be thankful that the Times has, inadvertently undoubtedly, given some a marvelous "pretext" for "wintertime sexual encounter[s]": begetting living American number 300,000,000.
Rest assured that hospital publicists, canny obstetricians, entrepreneurial chambers of commerce, baby food manufacturers, public officials and countless others pursuing some political social or personal agenda, abetted by the media, are already guesstimating the growth rate to anoint any number of unsuspecting newborns as the mythical American who pushed the nation's population to 300 million.
According to the Times, it is only those "countless" groups and persons " pursuing some political social or personal agenda " that are in favor of our Nation having more babies.
Not any agenda-less normal married couples or other agenda-less normal human beings.
[…] That same year, [1967, when 200,000,000 was reached,] David E. Lilienthal, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, warned in The New York Times that unbridled population growth might doom the nation to shortages of water and energy, bury it in pollution and saddle it with unmanageable poverty. "A population of at least 300 million by 2000 will, I now believe, threaten the very quality of life of individual Americans," he wrote.
Projections are subject to unimaginable imponderables - from the impact of wars and epidemics to dramatic gains in life expectancy. It has taken 230 years for the United States to reach 300 million people (the total number of people who have ever lived in America is obviously much higher). The Census Bureau projects that even with the nation growing more slowly than ever beginning in 2030, the population will top 400 million less than 40 years from now. [My ellipses and emphasis]
Instead of noting the obvious, that the 1967 prediction was ridiculously wrong.
And that we can expect similar predictions today to be ridiculously wrong.
The Times blows a big smokescreen of what they are pleased to call "unimaginable imponderables".
"Dramatic gains in life expectancy" are predictable and the predictions have been pretty good.
"Wars and epidemics", particularly catastrophic ones, are difficult to predict. But their "impact" is obviously not an "unimaginable imponderable".
"Spin, spin, spin" is getting rather close to "Lie, lie, lie".
