Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe.
This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer.
But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.
I suppose they have a point here. Going slower than people who want to speed does indeed get in the way of those people.
So, now we have two contradictory laws. The first sets the speed limit. The second requires you to violate the first.
The underlying premise to these contradictory laws is the one I mentioned at the outset: It’s generally believed that the speed limit should be something higher than the current 75 mph.
OK, there’s a solution to this. Rather than mandating that people violate a speed limit that is generally recognized to be too low, simply raise it.
Instead, they have instituted a system where it’s literally impossible to drive lawfully in the left lane. If you go 75 mph, you can be ticketed for going too slow. If you go 95 mph, you can be ticketed for going too fast.
Here’s where it gets really crazy. If you go, say, 83 mph, you could literally be ticketed both for going too fast because you’re going faster than the speed limit, and for going too slow because you’re in the way of the people who want to go 95 mph.
Isn’t it great how the left has breathed new life into Franz Kafka and George Orwell? And Joseph Stalin’s henchman who bragged “Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime — and if he’s in the left lane, I’ll show you two.”
What do you call a government that employs this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t methodology for ruling the masses? Fascist, that’s what.
What do you call the masses who tolerate such a government? Slaves, that’s what.
Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.”
Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.
This raises a question: How fast will our population decline due to our low fertility rate of 1.6 compared to the replacement rate of 2.1?
The answer is, pretty fast. At our current fertility rate of 1.6, the U.S. population will decline by 50% in 77 years.
Granted, that calculation doesn’t account for immigration into the country. But are we willing to accept an enormous number of immigrants – something like 200,000,000 – over the course of three-quarters of a century?
That would constitute the biggest immigration wave in the history of the world. It would be much bigger, on both an absolute basis and percentage basis, than the massive waves of the Irish to America in the 1800s, Italians in the 1900s, and even Latinos in the 2000s. Immigration on that scale is inconsistent with the current political sentiment and, arguably, inconsistent with maintaining our American culture.
If it makes you feel better, know that the fertility rate in most of Europe is even lower. In Italy, it’s about 1.2. At that fertility rate, the population of Italy will decline by about 75% while the population of America declines by “only” 50% over those 77 years.
Extend that out further. At a fertility rate of 1.2 over 800 years, the population of Italy will decline to approximately 20 people. At least there won’t be any complaints about a housing shortage.
(BTW, consider the fact that this ridiculously low fertility rate in Italy is in a country that is nearly universally Catholic, and that the Catholic Church prohibits abortion and contraception. Along with art and food, the rhythm method has apparently been perfected in Italy.)
Back to America. The bottom line is America is apt to shrink. I see some good and some bad in that.
First the good. As a matter of personal aesthetics, I think we have enough people here already. The roads seem sufficiently crowded. Even hiking in the remote mountains of Colorado, it’s rare that I wish there were more people on the trail.
It’s true that our cities are hollowed out, but that’s due to crime, corruption and mismanagement, not a lack of people.
Now the bad. Our economy, like most modern economies, hinges on growth. Imagine an economy where the gross domestic product is flat forever. Imagine an economy where the stock market doesn’t go up and everyone’s 401K stagnates.
Worst of all, imagine an economy where the number of young workers paying Social Security taxes drops dramatically due to low birth rates while the number of retirees collecting benefits rises dramatically due to longer life spans.
This touches on a basic issue. Our Social Security system is a big pyramid scheme. Old people like me tell ourselves that we’re simply collecting the money we paid in over a lifetime of work, but, in point of fact, the average retiree collects far more than he paid in. That’s possible only because the number of payors continues to grow faster than the number of payees.
At our current fertility rate, expect a collapse sometime in the next few decades. We’ll lack the workers to fill the bottom of the pyramid.
Finally, there are some aspects of our de-population explosion that are philosophical, metaphysical and even religious.
God told the Abrahamic religions to “be fruitful and multiply.” We obeyed. Did we ever.
This advice to “be fruitful and multiply” was given twice. The first time was at Creation when the human population was two people. The second time was after the Flood when the population was eight people.
We haven’t heard that advice for a long time. During that long time, we’ve multiplied and fruitified to a population of eight billion people. If the advice is still applicable, then when will it expire? When we’re eight trillion? Eight quadrillion? Do we just keep multiplying and fruitifying until there’s no place to stand?
In the philosophical realm, there’s this. We seem to be the only form of life in the universe that is capable of asking questions like “How many of us are enough?” And, from the evidence found so far, we inhabit the only home of all life. As a philosophical, moral and ethical matter, what is our obligation to propagate? To what extent? How many? Where?
These questions are not easy, but it’s worth talking about them. We might be the only creatures anywhere at any time to have that talk.
Note to readers: In case you’re wondering, I fathered at least two children, and one of them gave birth to my grandchild a few months ago. Two of the three pay Social Security taxes.
Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.
And so, the stock market is having fun today.
And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.
The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie courtesy of War Secretary Hegseth, starring War Secretary Hegseth.
Still, I’m skeptical. I’m not selling into this market uptick, mind you, just as I was not buying into the preceding market dip. Er, market correction. Er, market crash.
You see, I’m a buy-and-hold sort of guy. I don’t pretend to know more about market values than, say, Goldman Sachs and their mega-massive-computing computers and their MBAs who learned at Harvard how to extract insider information from public company Chief Financial Officers. (I won’t give away their secrets, but have you heard the name Jeffrey Epstein?)
So long as you don’t bet against Goldman Sachs, a diverse stock portfolio has proven to be a good investment over a period of decades, and it will probably continue to be, and so that’s where I keep most of my meager money.
I’m just sayin’, as they say, that the people who try to time the stock market are probably getting this one wrong in their buying spree this morning.
Because this cease fire is flawed seven ways to Sunday. To name a few:
Even now after the cease fire has been announced, it still has not taken effect. Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones at its neighbors. I always thought the sine qua non of a cease fire was that everyone ceases firing, but I’m old school.
If Iran finally observes the cease fire by ceasing its firing, rest assured that it will then violate the cease fire by ceasing its cease fire.
It’s who they are: Missile and drone lobbers. That, and terror financiers.
We are told that the big condition to the cease fire is the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – that waterway that Iran has closed to the great angst of civilized people everywhere, and also those monsters in the monster pickups.
So how exactly is that supposed to happen? Who will police it? What happens when a rogue or not-so-rogue Revolutionary Guard lobs an ad hoc drone on a frolic of his own?
Um, details to follow. Uh huh.
This war is not over. But the cease fire is – before it even started.
Power plants are legitimate targets in war. They’re “dual purpose” infrastructure in that they serve a civilian purpose but also a military one. (The same was true of the large bridge in Tehran that we took out last week.)
That’s one reason that terrorists like Hamas position their military commands in hospitals, not power plants. It is recognized that hospitals are not legitimate targets (unless a military use is made of them) while power plants are.
America is therefore justified in disabling Iran’s power plants, as President Trump has threatened to do. It will be much tougher for Iran to launch drones and missiles without electric power.
But let me offer a fine point on this strategy. Once you carry out a threat, then you can no longer threaten it. A threat that has been carried out has no further utility in negotiations.
And so, don’t disable all the power plants at once. Let’s instead disable, say, one power plant per day. Call it the One-A-Day treatment. AI tells me that Iran as a country of 90-some million people has a few hundred power plants. At one a day, we have a year’s worth of targets.
By proceeding this way, the mullahs will experience ever-increasing pain and ever-decreasing lights, air conditioning and electricity. Moreover, the mullahs themselves will endure this, not just their people.
Let’s make good on our threat, while still keeping the threat alive.
I once saw an unidentified flying object, or “UFO.” I was a passenger on a commercial airliner on an overnight flight. I awoke in the middle of the night, looked out the window, and saw a lighted object flying near the airplane. I couldn’t identify it.
The object kept perfect pace with the airplane, as if it was shadowing us. Once in a while, it blinked, as if it was signaling us. Maybe the blinks were an extraterrestrial form of Morse Code?
In my half-awake stupor, it thrilled me to realize that we are not alone.
But after a few minutes of gradually waking up, I realized that what I was looking at was the light on the end of the airplane wing. It was an object and it was flying and for a few minutes it was unidentified, at least by me, and so it was a UFO.
Mind you, I was not an 11-year-old boy at the time. I was in my 20s and was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.
The point of my little story is that my eyes and my mind played a trick on me.
I’m not alone, even if we are. Thousands of people have reported UFOs. Such things have now been re-branded “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “UAPs,” apparently because these things are typically not objects at all, but instead lights or reflections in the air.
Personally, I like the old term, “UFOs,” because there’s a well-earned stigma associated with that term. Let’s not rebrand “UFOs” into “UAPs” the way the Democrats keep rebranding socialism into “liberalism,” “woke-ism” and “progressivism.” Some things deserve the stigma they earn.
Notwithstanding the stigma, many people believe in UFOs with a fervor normally associated with sports events and Revival Meetings, These people believe UFOs are close encounters of some kind with “flying saucers” which is a layman’s term for . . . [drum roll] . . . aliens.
And I don’t mean the kind from Guatemala who clean toilets unburdened by any immigration documents. I mean the tall, pale kind with big heads and long fingers driving a spaceship from across the galaxy. The kind that kidnap you, take you to that spaceship, and perform – shudder! – secret experiments. On your body.
Then they let you go home. To tell everyone about them and their secret experiments that they performed. On your body.
UFO reports have been reviewed and re-reviewed ad nauseum. Most of the “sightings” are perfectly explainable, as in the manner of my own “sighting” of the airplane wing light.
Some UFOs are not explainable, but are extremely unlikely to be aliens. After all, we see lots of things on this planet that are not explainable, such as people with a taste for brussels sprouts, men who pretend they’re women, and dogs that chase frisbees. Just because something is inexplicable doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrial.
Think about it for a millisecond. If we were being visited by extraterrestrials who’ve flown across the galaxy (Lord knows why), then they would either (1) want us to know about them, or (2) want us not to. If the former, wouldn’t they just hold a press conference? If the latter, wouldn’t creatures smart enough to fly across the galaxy faster than the speed of light in a flying saucer be smart enough to conceal themselves from us?
Speaking of creatures that want us to know about them, there’s the attention-getting, influence-peddling, pod-casting, You-tubing Bill Maher. Until now, Maher has made a name for himself by being a Democrat who says Republican-ish things occasionally.
That strategy is a proven click-generator. Republicans and Democrats love it when they hear Republican-ish and Democrat-ish things from a Democrat or Republican, respectively. (To map this out for you, I’m saying that Republicans love to hear a Democrat endorse Republican positions, and Democrats love to hear a Republican endorse Democrat positions.)
When that happens, it seems to show that “the other side” has suffered a defection. No one loves a traitor, except the side to which he trades himself, and they love him a lot. Clicks follow a traitor like flies follow dung.
The problem with this marketing strategy is that it’s self-limiting. If a Democrat like Maher endorses enough Republican positions, Republicans stop loving him as a traitorous Democrat because he’s become just another Republican.
So, Maher has a new click generating scheme. He has gone FULL UFO. He’s announced that UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft.
Like the fake traitor scheme, this new scheme is a proven click generator. Say something crazy, and people will tune in, for a few minutes anyway. On the right, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have this down pat in their Jew-baiting conspiracy schticks. Before that, on the left, were the Russian collusion schticks.
The scheme originated in the entertainment business. Remember magic acts? A “magician” would stand on stage and “do magic” by making things disappear and re-appear, or by pretending to saw a woman in a box in half, or by pulling rodents out of a hat.
Of course, nobody actually thought this was “real” magic. After all, by definition there’s no such thing as real magic. But people were willing to pay to see the show.
Welcome to Bill Maher’s magic show. Let him entertain you. Pay him a nickel or a click. But don’t take him seriously.
the Aspen beat 