U Not Gonna Like This

Another benifit of living in a socialist society or watching one from afar...you can watch the population disappear right before your very eyes...

Russian women not reproducing; next stop, dustbin of history
May 10, 2006
Greg Strange

Russian president Vladimir Putin, in a state of the nation address, has highlighted what he believes to be his country’s most serious problem: it’s dying. Specifically, it’s losing about 700,000 people per year. The most recent census had the total population at 145 million, but it could fall by as much as a third by 2050.

Remember the glory days of the old Soviet Union? They were the first into space with Sputnik and Khrushchev, in high Cold War fashion, said, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you,” referring to the West and capitalism.

Turns out history wasn’t on their side after all. Contrary to Khrushchev’s bluster, his own country is now busily burying itself. In fact, if they don’t do something rather dramatic, their country is not just going to experience history, it’s going to be history, literally.

The problem is demographic: Russian women aren’t having babies anymore, or at least not enough of them to replace the population. And why is that? Because babies are a lot of trouble and, in a basket case economy that fails to provide prosperity, they’re also too expensive.
So Putin has a plan. He wants to double the amount of monthly child benefits women receive for their first baby and then double that amount for their second child. On top of the monthly benefits, women should be given a large lump sum of money following the birth of their second child.

Sounds like a lot of wishful statist thinking and where the money is going to come from is anybody’s guess, but if they can scrape it together it might help solve the problem. They might also want to consider outlawing abortions since it is estimated that there are more abortions than births each year in Russia. Having legally available abortions in such a country is sort of like having an open bar at an A.A. meeting.


and this from


Coalition tackles Germany's falling birth rate
By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2006
BERLIN At a time when many European countries are struggling to reverse falling birth rates, Germany's coalition government agreed Wednesday on a financial package that will compensate professional women to take a year's leave to have children and then return to work.

At present, 30 percent of German working women are childless, according to Family Ministry statistics, and Germany lags far behind its European neighbors in terms of birth rate.

"This is a big victory for the chancellor," said Philipp Missfelder, a legislator in the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, who also serves as chairman of the youth wing of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. He saluted the chancellor for "seriously tackling the demographic problem by encouraging professional women to have families." Like Germany, other countries have been coping with falling birth rates by crafting new policies to encourage women to have more children.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia last month instructed his country's Parliament to adopt financial incentives and subsidies to increase the birth rate, which has fallen sharply since the collapse of the Soviet Union. France is also considering increasing its already generous benefits for families with children.

In Germany, Merkel's initiative follows efforts by the Social Democrats under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to change family policy by expanding the number of child-care centers.

"What is also needed is all-day child- care centers and all-day schools," Elke Ferner, a deputy leader of the Social Democrats, said Wednesday.

Most schools in Germany close in the afternoon, forcing one of the parents - usually the mother - to stay at home or else pay for child care. Even where all-day schools have been introduced over the past few years, often they provide neither lessons nor sports classes in the afternoons; children are simply supervised.

In western Germany there also are very few day-care facilities for preschoolers, leading to desperately long waiting lists for parents. In the formerly Communist east, with its different political past, facilities are much better.

Germany lags far behind European countries like Norway, Sweden, and France, where the state provides generous funding for child-care centers and time off for working mothers and fathers. In France, families with children are given allowances for buying clothing and school supplies that increase sharply with the birth of a third child.

Meanwhile, the birth rate in Germany is an average 1.37 children per woman, compared with 1.9 in France, 1.81 in Norway, and 1.75 in Sweden, according to Eurostat, the statistics agency of the European Union.

and this:

The TimesJuly 24, 2006
Battle of the sexes leaves men groping for equality
By Leo Lewis in Tokyo

What started as a desperate measure to protect women from gropers on trains has blossomed into a fully fledged movement. Single-sex places have become a lifestyle choice for many women and a source of outrage for men.

Once women-only carriages became standard on many Japan Railways services and the Tokyo Metro, other businesses quickly followed. Spas and gyms were among the first to pick up the trend, with restaurants, comic-book cafés and convenience stores joining the no-men-allowed movement.

Hotels, apartment blocks and pachinko gambling parlours are experimenting, and restaurants that do not exclude men have taken to giving free desserts to women.

The “women only" trend flies in the face of a massive government effort to put Japanese men and women closer together. Facing tumbling birth rates and a potential demographic crisis, the Government has tried to promote marriage matchmakers and encouraged companies to give staff time off for dating.

“If men want not to be discriminated against, they should have better manners,” Ms Suzuki said. “They sit so they take up lots of space, read newspapers wide open, leaf through pornography in public and some are really arrogant, too.”

So remember this the next time someone points out the benifits of feminism.