Old And Alone

The Associated Press recognizes Europe's devastating demographics problem. There simply are not enough children to support the elderly in Italy - and things are beginning to fall apart.

ROME - As a police officer, Luigi Marzano was used to being in command. He still walks ramrod straight, but at 97 and deep into retirement, his memory is weakening and he has turned over command of his household to a virtual stranger half his age.

Rita Duda, who left Ukraine in search of work, lays out caffe latte and cookies each day for Marzano's breakfast, shops for him, and, every afternoon after his nap accompanies him to a bench on the corner, which he shares with ladies and gentlemen in their 70s and 80s while their caretakers — Ukrainians, Moldavians, Poles and Romanians — catch up on gossip.

Marzano is one of a swelling number of Italians entrusting themselves to an army of foreign workers from eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Africa who are doing what families here are increasingly can't or won't do — take care of their elderly.

Long life and low birthrates have conspired to change family life, which long had been the one institution Italians could count on while history rolled past, with its parade of conquerors and short-lived governments.

Italy's demographics — and Europe's as a whole — give new meaning to the term "Old World."

Twenty-four of the world's 25 oldest countries are in Europe, noted a joint report by the European Commission and AARP, a U.S. lobby for the elderly. Japan's population, with 27 percent of it older than 60 in 2005, is a shade grayer than Italy's 26 percent.

Italian life expectancy is 78.3 years for men and 84 for women. But more significantly, Italy holds the world record for the highest percentage of what experts call the "old old." One out of every five elderly Italians is over 80.

Meanwhile, the incentives to have children are few. Italians joke that by the time their children qualify for scant public day care, they are too old for it. Tax breaks for minor dependents are miserly. Costly housing makes it hard to give a child his or her own room.

Italy, home to the Vatican and predominantly Catholic, legalized abortion in 1978, and Italians upheld the law in a 1981 referendum, despite fierce opposition by the Vatican to abortion. And Italians have long tended to ignore Vatican teaching forbidding contraception.

Now, with so many living so long — and with retirement possible as early as age 57 — Italy is paying the price in medical care, pensions and social security, for having so few children.

While decisions to have one or no children might make for easier lifestyles when young, a generation or two later the choice means fewer children and grandchildren to help the aged.

The problem is exacerbated in Italy by a lack of nursing homes and anything resembling assisted care facilities. This problem will only accelerate. Many people have been warning about the pending demographic collapse of Europe. Italy is the canary in the coal mine. Extravagant socialist programs ignore economic realities and have unintended consequences.

The Beat Goes On

The Telegraph punches - again - at the Live Earth concerts. And they also have a couple of very telling quotes from folks attending the British event at Wembley.

She provided the finale to yesterday's Live Earth concerts, even writing a special song to mark the worldwide musical event.

But instead of being lionised, Madonna found herself accused of hypocrisy last night after allegations that she has financial links to some of the world's biggest polluters.

The Ray of Light Foundation, a charitable fund established by the star to support her favourite causes and named after one of her biggest selling hits, has $4.2 million (£2.1 million) of shares in a string of companies including Alcoa, the American aluminium giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, an international forest products company. All have been criticised by environmentalists.

Alcoa was ranked number nine on a list of all-time toxic companies drawn up by the University of Massachusetts' political research institute in 2002. Other companies linked to the foundation, including Northrop Grumman, the global defence and technology giant, and Kimberly-Clark, the huge health group, appear on the same list.

The disclosure was made by America's Fox News network, which obtained the foundation's most recent tax returns for 2005.

Oh, gee, that will set off the left. Fox News! Eeek! But the best part of the story is the "man in the street" part:

Nick Du Rocher, 40, an insurance broker from Lewisham, southeast London, said: "I'm only here to see the bands, to be honest. I think Bob Geldof was absolutely right when he said people are already aware of global warming and a concert is not going to make any difference."

Carol Mayzes, 41, from Bexley, Kent, said: "I'm going to sound really hypocritical but my family and I are here for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and we're not really bothered about climate change."

And that is the problem that the sycophants could not see coming into this. This is not the epiphany; this is just a concert. And all the lecturing from various musicians will not change a lot of minds out there. The global media will puff and pontificate about it, but Du Rocher and Mayzes pretty well wrapped up what the average person will take away from the parade of hypocrites on display at the goregasm. The fact is that most of Gorezilla's current fans don't know or don't care that only a few years ago he was trying to drop the full weight of the Federal government on rock music lyrics. (Where do you think those parental advisory labels came from?) Now Gore sees fit to cuddle up to rock stars if he thinks it will sell Gorezilla 2.0. Just another batch of hypocrisy from the strip-mining energy hog with a green label.

Bad Review

The Times of London has released its review of the British leg of the Live Earth concert. Their judgment: tedious.

It did what it said on the poster – but no more. The British leg of Live Earth started at 1.30 pm sharp with a thunderous five-minute drum fanfare by a 20-odd troupe of flailing percussionists, battering a miscellany of ethnic skinned instruments.

Led by Roger Taylor, formerly drummer with Queen, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, their SOS pattern, hammered out in morse code, was a cute way of flagging up the Live Earth message: environmental calamity ahoy. But it couldn’t disguise the problem that regularly threatened to becalm this Wembley show.

As a concert, Live Earth was not the repeat of Live Aid/Live 8 it clearly wanted to be. Unlike the events organised by the charismatic Sir Bob Geldof – upon which this one modelled itself closely, right down to its choice of name – the acts who answered the call from Al Gore’s people to play at Wembley Stadium were a bit short on superstar clout.

It was Geldof’s legendarily persuasive powers which got Pink Floyd to abandon a 20-year feud and re-form for Live 8 in Hyde Park in 2005. There was nothing on the Live Earth London bill to command that level of anticipation and potential drama.

With the exception of the closing act Madonna – who played next door at Wembley Arena only last summer – there was nobody on the Stadium bill with the cross-generational appeal, and catalogue of monster hits, to supply the great unifying moments which event gigs need to make their message stick in the mind.

Queen singing We Will Rock You at Live Aid, or Robbie Williams leading the 80,000 Live 8 crowd through a giant karaoke session of Angels, are worth far more in this context than the 20 minutes per hour of worthy exhortations dished out on screen or by guest celebs at Live Earth.

Genesis were the first band to take the stage, playing a four-song sample from the set they performed in its entirety later in the day at Manchester as part of their current British tour. The middle-aged-male contingent in the crowd were delighted to welcome back Phil Collins’ recently reformed band of pop-rock veterans. An element of surprise entered an otherwise solid performance when Collins appeared to let out a rare ‘f **k’ during Invisible Touch. But with latecomers still trickling into the stadium, Genesis landed a few punches – notably with the environmentally incorrect Turn It On Again – without knocking anybody out.

Read it - almost universally negative with a few bright spots. But the review indicates that most people who attended were not exactly knocked out by the performances. Does it make a big difference in the media hype? No. But the British press, long a champion of the entire global warming hype, is not overly enthusiastic about the goregasm in general. Worth the huge waste of energy and the massive carbon emissions? Not likely.

Beary Bad News

In what can only be considered bad news, a bear climbed a 100 foot tall power pole and completely stopped traffic in the California desert.

LANCASTER, Calif. (AP) — Must've been a poler bear. A black bear climbed 100 feet up a power pole and brought traffic to a halt on a California desert highway below as motorists stopped to gawk and take pictures.

In fact, it was a black bear that climbed 100 feet up a power pole in the sweltering high desert Friday and brought traffic to halt on a highway below as motorists stopped to gawk and take pictures.

"Not a whole lot we could do except keep the people out of the area and let him decide he needs to come down and continue his way on to the mountains, and with the assistance of the Highway Patrol that's what we did," game warden Martin Wall told KCAL-TV.

After a couple of hours taking in the view from a crossbar supporting electrical wires, the bear came back to earth, walked across the highway and ran off into the desert scrub.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard spend seven days a week plus weekends documenting the Animal Uprising™ and we can tell you two things for certain. First, if suicide squirrels routinely cause electrical outages by lunging onto power lines and the bear did not, it is an irrefutable fact that bears are fully insulated electrically. Second, if the black bear spent a couple of hours up on his perch in the scorching desert sun and did not suffer heat stoke, we can conclude that the bear is actually solar-powered. Those two facts lead to an inescapable conclusion:

The Animal Uprising™ has perfected the Bear-Bot®.

Robert Anson Heinlein, 1907-1988

Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907 in Butler, Missouri. He is one of my favorite science fiction authors of all time, as I have mentioned before. Here's an excellent short biography of Heinlein. There is also one on his wife, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, who died in 2003.

A Day At The Track

It seems that as the Animal Uprising™ gets closer to realizing its goal of conquering humanity, they are actually getting to be more and more like humans themselves. Thus we have stoned deer, pub crawling rats and drunken moose wandering about. The deer appear to be most susceptible: now they've taken up gambling. That's right, they're playing the ponies. Or playing with the ponies, as the case may be.

SALEM, N.H. — A deer jumped onto the track at Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H., on Friday and followed the field of horses down the stretch.

Witnesses said that the deer went out of the lake in the Rockingham Park infield and jumped onto the track during the eighth race. It then waited for the horses to go through the turn and started racing behind them before jumping back into the infield. 

Ok, so maybe they confused gambling with gamboling but they're trying to acquire the bad habits.

Shark Jumping

John Berlau argues that the global Goregasm of the whole Live Earth concert extravaganza (along with massive energy consumption and subsequent enormous release of carbon) is an indication that the entire global warming hysteria has jumped the shark.

This weekend, rock stars will jet around the world, cars and buses will clog traffic, and elaborate sound stages will be set up to burn massive amounts of fuel to send the message to fans at home that they better conserve their energy or face the allegedly dire threat of global warming.

The Live Earth concerts, which start this Saturday, July 7, are also one last chance for Baby Boomers to relive the “flower power” activism of the ’60s. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, former Vice President Al Gore invoked music icon Bob Dylan to promote the importance of these concerts. Citing Dylan’s ‘60 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Gore rambled: “What’s the old Bob Dylan line? ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows’ - what’s the rest of it? - ‘for the times they are a-changin’.”

But there’s just one problem with invoking Dylan to hype the global warming scare. And that is that Dylan himself has expressed skepticism — to the same magazine — to the notion that global warming is a catastrophe. When he was asked by Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner in the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue if he worried about global warming, Dylan replied with an unexpected rejoinder. He asked Wenner, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.” Wenner, who has blanketed Rolling Stone and his other magazine Men’s Journal with doom-and gloom climate change stories (that often bash CEI), quickly moved on to other topics after he received his comeuppance.

Yet Dylan’s latest statement may signal that in the global warming debate, the times are changing. Even independent-minded celebrities are now questioning the establishment media orthodoxy that the debate over global warming and its effects are all but over. In a phrase familiar to those who study pop culture, it appears that the global warming scare may have “jumped the shark.”

Oh, do read it all. He's got quite a lot over there, including a quote from one of the more sensible musical acts in the world, the Arctic Monkeys:

And the latest is from the new band Arctic Monkeys, who expressed skepticism about the concert to the French wire service AFP. “It’s a bit patronizing for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world,” drummer Matt Helders said. “Especially when we’re using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It’d be a bit hypocritical.”

In other words, they get it. Wasting vast amounts of energy and producing large volumes of carbon gases to "raise awareness" about the dangers of wasting vast amounts of energy and producing large volumes of carbon gases is, at best, a bit hypocritical. Actually, it is outright fraud pimped by a man with a massive financial stake in making people believe his pronouncements. Shark jumping, indeed.

Death Cult

Michael Hirsh takes a look at the history that has brought about what he calls the cancer infecting the Muslim religion - the violent death cult that tolerates and encourages the murder of innocents, the use of children as human shields and other depravities. He says that the rise of the death cult is a relatively recent phenomenon.

July 7, 2007 - It is the question at the back of many people's minds as they absorb the frightening details of the terror plot in Britain. Yes, we understand that many Muslims are angry—about the Iraq War, about Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and the usual list of grievances. But there are many people, in many different societies and cultures, who are angry about many things. Would any other culture or religion produce a group of doctors and professionals who apparently deemed it morally correct to kill innocent people in large numbers? Has something gone wrong with Islam itself, or at least the culture it has produced?

To merely pose that question, of course, is to play with political dynamite. But it must be asked. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that “a death cult” …“has taken root” in Islam, “feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.” The conservative commentator Cal Thomas also used a cancer metaphor in comments that provoked an outcry from the U.S. Muslim community in recent days. “How much longer should we allow people from certain lands, with certain beliefs to come to Britain and America and build their mosques, teach hate, and plot to kill us?" Thomas asked. "OK, let's have the required disclaimer: Not all Muslims from the Middle East and Southeast Asia want to kill us, but those who do blend in with those who don't. Would anyone tolerate a slow-spreading cancer because it wasn't fast-spreading? Probably not. You'd want it removed."

Even in the United States, where Muslims are far more assimilated into Western society than they are in Great Britain or Europe, 26 percent of younger Muslims say suicide bombing can be justified under some circumstances, according to a Pew Research survey released in May. The question of whether modern Islam has been contaminated, or twisted out of shape, is even on the minds of some Arab leaders. “We used to talk about the extremists coming from the poor or desperate people,” says a high-ranking Muslim diplomat. “Then, after 9/11, we had to face the fact that it was middle-class Arab men, too. Now with this British plot it's not just middle class but also doctors. It's very strange. I don't know where this will take us.” Indeed, it is fair to ask: how many sensitive, intelligent scions of cultured families might have been stopped in their tracks if the Islamic social culture that nurtured them had vehemently said “no” to the direction they were headed in?

It is a fairly good capsule summary of how we got to where we are in the world today. Hirsh criticizes Wahabism very heavily here, calling it more of a cult than a legitimate school of thought in the Muslim religion. (I imagine he won't be getting too many invitations to Saudi Arabia.) It is a very bleak picture. His conclusion is that the death cult, the cancer, can only be removed from within the religion of Islam itself. Who knows, maybe the fact that the Pakistani press is making fun of "Auntie Aziz" is actually a good first step toward that removal. One can hope.

Hostages

The "brave" jihadis holed up in the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan appear to be holding children as hostages against their will. They have actually fired on family members who have approached the mosque trying to get their children out. For now the Pakistani forces surrounding the complex are following a strategy of waiting the thugs out.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 6 — Security forces ringing a besieged mosque pummeled Islamic radicals with gunfire on Friday, as concern grew that many of those still inside — including children — were being held against their will.

Although more than 1,200 people have fled the mosque since the siege began Tuesday, authorities estimated that several hundred remain within. Only a few dozen are suspected to be hard-core radicals; others appear to want to leave but have been prevented from doing so.

The government has refrained from launching a full-scale invasion of the mosque compound, even though the militants are believed to be severely outgunned. In the meantime, thousands of heavily armed rangers and commandos have formed a tight cordon around the compound.

Clerics at the pro-Taliban Red Mosque, also called the Lal Masjid, want to turn Pakistan into a theocracy. During the past few months, students at an affiliated madrassa, or religious school, have abducted alleged prostitutes and forced them to confess and threatened video store owners with attacks. On Tuesday, a clash between the radicals and government forces left at least 19 people dead…..

….About 1 p.m., a contingent of family members of those still inside approached the mosque hoping to retrieve their loved ones. Instead, they were met with gunfire. At least one person was slightly wounded in the attack.

"They said, 'We will not hand over your children,' and they fired on us," said Yasar Shah, who came to Islamabad from a village in western Pakistan. "My sister is in there. I have to get her back."

There is one sign that I think is very hopeful in all of this. Although the Western media hasn't gotten the message yet, media in Pakistan have: they are openly making fun of the leader of the jihadis who tried to flee the mosque dressed in a burqa. They are calling him "Auntie Aziz." If the trend continues, the islamists will lose their mystique with the populace. That's a good thing. If enough of the media stopped treating these vicious thugs to gobs of free - and mostly fawning - publicity, there is a chance they would have to change their ways. It's that mutually beneficial spiral of death that encourages the jihadis to continue with the tactics they are using.