A few months ago, if I had to put a banner on my site and was not given the full code I would have closed the site and looked for another site that gave the exact code so I could just copy and paste it into my site!!…

A few, but popular authors and journalists as well as many bloggers write a lot about "Eurabia." An extensive Wikipedia entry with many footnotes describes Eurabia as "a dystopian scenario where Europe merges with the Islamic world, and …

Still, I think you are both right & wrong about productivity. For every thing there is a season – in the field I know best, most or much lyric poetry is written before a poet turns 30 – maturity we might say. On the other hand, poetry concerned more with ideas than images and the head than passion is generally better later in life. Novels are generally a more mature art and James’s best are toward the end of his life – not uncommon. Billy Budd is a different work than Moby Dick – the former a book he was still working on at his death, the latter written over forty years before.

The Sage tradition, with its emphasis upon non-fiction and including histories, personal narratives, etc. is generally a relatively old person’s art. (First novels are often biographical, but they are more lyrical than “sage-like.”) Statesmen and scholars take maturing; apparently, breakthroughs in math and physics are (and this is not something I know much about) often cut off at a certain age. Creativity may be a young man’s sport but synthesis is likely to be an old man’s game.

But it is hard not to see Bernard Lewis and Norman Borlaug – to name two that quickly come to mind – as still productive in their nineties. If Edith Hamilton had died at 65, only her students would have heard of her. Exploring the classics may take one of our lifetimes to accumulate enough experience or knowledge to be productive.

To the gentleman who worried about letting in too many Muslim immigrants: do you mean the Saudi engineering student whose tuition is paid by his home country, who expects to go home and marry his cousin; or do you mean the middle aged Pakistani pediatrician who eats dal and rice and listens to Hindi film music; or do you mean the Nigerian cab driver? On what grounds are you going to deny entry to such people and not to the Indian pediatrician or the Senegalese cabdriver? Or how about the many African American converts to Islam–should they be deported?

There are several reasons that this poses a problem.

The simplest is that those who can live forever are the least likely to willing their lives in defense of their ideals, nations and/or civilization. Europe and the modern left is already unwilling to fight, seeking instead to reach some sort of accommodation with radical Islam. The other side on the other hand has no problem fighting, killing and dying for their ideals.

The speculation about these new technologies is that they can increase with fewer young people. This of course ignores the fact that most important and new breakthroughs originate with people early in their career. How much confidence do you have that someone who has been in their field for 50-100 years will keep being as productive. Current data shows otherwise. We could be approaching the Singularity but there are still lots of unknowns (”known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”) that could trip us up.

Mark Steyn hints at the coming transhumanist future with his comments about the future of Japan. However, for whatever reasons, implies that transhumanism would be even worse than islam (why anyone would think this is completely incomprehensible to me).

Stop letting in Muslim immigrants.

In other words, First, do no more harm.

Then, for countries with too many Muslims alreadly, like the Netherlands, the next step is to start buying out Muslims. Many European countries already have programs that pay immigrants to leave, so they don’t object in principle, but the programs are severely underfunded. Buyouts like $100,000 or more per family would probably be necessary to get a reasonable number of Muslim families in Europe to return to their countries of origin.

Instead, Steyn continues to back Bush’s grand strategy of Invade the World / Invite the World, which has so far proven such a bust.

I would not be surprised if radical Islam’s spread in Africa were to run up against China’s interests. Should that time come I have no doubt as to the outcome and China will be anything but apologetic about stamping down opposition. With no ethical straight jacket like Western countries, China is strengthening ties in ways we can’t. . .

From: China Winning Resources and Loyalty of Africa
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=7051

“At one level China is involved in a straightforward resources grab, sinking billions of dollars into promising oil zones. But it is also engaged in a mix of influence-building and opportunism. Like Africa’s former colonizers, it cements its political and trade relations with aid, special concessions, debt relief, scholarships, training and the provision of specialists. It has recently sent peace keepers and – perhaps more surprisingly – election observers. At the same time, again like Africa’s chief western partners, it has been ready to back its commitments with military assistance and arms, providing equipment to countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan where other suppliers are barred by embargoes.”

“In the face of the retreat of both communism and liberal democracy, Islam has stepped forward to become the credo of choice for the disaffected … whether living in Karachi, or in relative subsidized comfort in London, Rotterdam, and Toronto. The West in general, and America in particular, have made no effort to address the central challenge of an unreformed Islam in the modern world — a Muslim challenge of rapidly expanding populations, corrupt rentier economies based on oil, and theologically-grounded will to power.”

I was reminded of this:

Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

At one time, the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor was the beacon of choice for the world’s disaffected. Were we to seek a return to that objective surely it would be more alluring than a call to live in the 13th century.

Mormons? Not really a big factor. You pass over the enormously fecund ranks of Catholicism, esp. immigrant, conservative Catholics from the south, and the fervent members of the born-again community. It may very well be that we are in the midst of a third awakening, although the media wouldn’t notice, because only those “rednecks” believe in the Bible. In some ways, Steyn is still a captive of the educated and media savvy elite, and doesn’t have much connection with the blue collar, church going, army joining middle and lower middle classes who make up a big chunk of our population.

Separation from real people can lead one to lose heart, and mistake the the malaise of the trendy for the soul of the people.

Worrying about Europe and the EU is like wondering who will win the Louis/Schmelling fight. It’s already history. We have been, and increasingly are, turning to Asia as the natural trade and security partners for the next century. The tranzis who try to set the tone for everything are still europhiles, and so that moribund culture seems to still be significant. Its day has long been over, indeed, since 1918, it has been one long, slow collapse. The future is in the east.

Finally, the weaknesses of the PC, multi-culti agenda are becoming more obvious, and recognized as disfunctional, more so every day. As the danger of the conflict, and depth of the crisis between the west and islam becomes more and more acute, these faulty ideologies will be abandoned more emphatically and openly by the vast majority of the population. Most of it was foisted on people unsuspecting of the true agenda anyway, in a form of stealthy salami slicing, first a rule here about some innocuous guideline, then another coda there about something else. Everywhere it has been spelled out, as in the college speech codes or rewritten classics, it has been defeated repeatedly in court, and ridiculed relentlessly by ordinary people who are more given to plain speaking.

One of the reasons one never sees ordinary people in the media is because they refuse to abide by PC dicta, and always say the wrong things, like ultra militant statements about the war, or insensitive comments about the nobility of other cultures or religions.

Next time you’re depressed about the mealy mouthed approach so many public figures have about islam, go to an evangelical church and ask if muslims can go to heaven. You won’t find any PC delicacy there.

Anyway, is America alone? Yes, of course. It’s always been that way, and we’ve always been the better for it. There’s a reason millions of people try to get here, even at the risk of life and limb—it’s different here, and they know it. Best to keep it that way.

Lik Hong Kong and Singapore…

Thanks for the great work in reviewing the work James.

Additionally, in regard to the demographic question, the demographics of the US are fairly complex. Both evangelicals and Mormons tend to have substanially above-replacement birth rates; however, the Mormons particularly encourage high birth rates and have created social structures designed to support large families. Conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jewish communites similarly encorage larger families.

It’s still the case that best way to replicate memes is to attach them to a gene package — using political loyaltes over generations as an indicator, it is 85% successful. We will see that over several generations, as the leftist communities reproduce at less that replacement rates, or not at all, the above-listed communities will increase their percentage of the population; at some point, they will reach a critical mass at which their values become the majority values of society locally or regionally — which has already happened in the red states. At this point conversion of the indifferent accelerates as well, and the whole phenomenon snowballs. These are trends already in process.