America IS the Duggar family.

By Bob Cesca:

If someone asks you what is the planet’s most dangerous problem, your immediate answer should be overpopulation. There are simply too many people and nowhere near the resources to adequately sustain the current population, much less the population of one, five or ten years down the road.

Here’s a cheerful thought. At some point, nature will rise up and correct the human population problem as we reproduce like cancer cells, and I don’t necessarily want to be around when that happens, either by an unstoppable global pandemic or some other worldwide calamity. The climate crisis is probably first in line to wipe out large sections of the human population, mostly in densely populated third world coastal nations. Ultimately, though, the planet will be just fine without us, but unless we intend to curb our population growth and the accelerated doubling time (the rate at which the human population doubles) nature will do it for us.

In America, however, everything is fine and dandy. It feels like we’re shielded from the overpopulation crisis, which is probably why no one here really talks about it in spite of its critical importance. Actually, the only people talking about population in America are conservatives who are worried that we’re not having enough babies — arguing that we need to increase our birth rate and population.

Ross Douthat posted a column in The New York Times yesterday perpetuating this ridiculous argument. Here’s what set him off:

Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.

Zoinks! We’re not salad-shooting as many babies as we did 21 years ago! Someone notify the Duggars to keep going!

Douthat argues that a healthy American population growth rate provides an economic benefit: more babies means more taxpayers and entrepreneurs. But of course we’ve never lacked entrepreneurs and the primary reason for the recent decline in tax revenue has been the supply-side Reaganomics ideas marketed by people like Douthat: tax cuts, deregulation, income inequality, and so forth, which precipitated the Great Recession. Instead of rolling back 30 years of Reaganomics favoring the wealthy, while also undermining the middle class, Douthat thinks it’s a better idea to “make more babies.”

No thanks. I can’t imagine anything more irresponsible.

America represents only four percent of the world’s population yet we consume 33 percent of the world’s resources. That’s dangerously unsustainable — not to mention totally immoral. We’re a self-indulgent, greedy culture, and yet even as we seemingly digest the planet like a Double-Down sandwich, America has the second highest rate of child poverty in the world — 23 percent — second only to Romania. We have 1.6 million homeless children. We’re 34th in infant mortality (Cuba is 33rd). We’re 13th in education, 31st in math, 23rd in science. Hell, we’re 51st in life expectancy. And conservatives suggest that should have more children?

And yet:

The average person living in the United States uses 300 shopping bags worth of raw materials every week – weighing as much as a large luxury car. We would need the resources of three planets for everyone on Earth to live as people in the United States do. [...]

The Ecological Footprint (the amount of the earth’s surface that it takes to provide everything each person uses) of the average person in the United States is about 12 times larger than the footprint of the average inhabitant of India. So the 4.1 million babies born in the United States this year will have almost the same impact on the earth as the 27.6 million babies born in India.

We’re consuming far more resources than is necessary and yet we still have a terrible record when it comes to raising healthy children. Why?

Partly because our healthcare system sucks. Douthat and other conservatives have demonized and shouted-down the expansion of programs like SCHIP, Medicaid and Obamacare, not to mention universal healthcare and a single-payer government-operated healthcare system — the very programs that contribute to higher life expectancies in nations like Canada and Japan (in Japan, for example, citizens pay just 30 percent of healthcare expenses while the government picks up the remaining 70 percent). In the world of conservatism, as Barney Frank once said, life begins at conception and ends at birth. After that you’re on your own.

How about this: instead of indiscriminately squirting out more babies than we’re capable of adequately caring for, with one in four being born into poverty, let’s make sure the children we’re birthing have a better shot at growing up healthy, happy and well-educated, and thus developing into the taxpayers and entrepreneurs of the future that Douthat is looking for. And it’s likely that with an increase in healthier Americans, fertility rates will improve.

Until we get there, until we can figure out how to do it in a responsible and sustainable way, please don’t make more babies, America. So far, we’ve really screwed it up.

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No more Viagra if Republicans have their way? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Bob Cesca: There might come a time, men, when we’ll need one of the various erectile dysfunction remedies, be it Viagra or Cialis or Other New Penis Pill X. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the existence of these pills nor in the responsible practice of taking them, either out of necessity or, you know, recreation.

The sad fact is that the increasingly poisonous foods and pollutants bombarding our bodies, along with record levels of obesity are reducing testosterone levels in men across the board, and, combined with the natural process of aging, it might become more and more difficult to get hard much less remain fertile and generally healthy. Whether it’s endocrine disruptors leaching into our water bottles, hormones in our meat, genetically modified organisms, chemical preservatives, artificial sweeteners, air and water pollution and stuff we haven’t even heard about yet, modern humans are fighting a battle between what we’re putting into our bodies and what we’re supposed to be able to do naturally — like maintaining normal hormone levels and so forth.

The irony is that we might need chemicals help to overcome the destructive impact of other chemicals that are rapidly poisoning us. In this sense, the food and drug companies have formed a mutually beneficial alliance — an axis of evil, if you will — keeping us sick and then delivering the cure. It’s almost unavoidable.

By the way, exercise and eating locally sourced foods, etc, can mitigate the quantity of poisons we consume, but we’re more or less surrounded on all sides. Navigating a grocery store, even with a healthy agenda, is like navigating a delicious mine field. Even if you eat well, there’s the water and air and pollution. There’s a wide variety of other attackers that prevent our bodies from behaving normally. And none of this takes into account the psychological issues we face these days with increasing stress levels, income inequality, demands for higher productivity while salaries remain stagnant. On and on and on.

All of this is to say, yes guys, the cards are stacked against us when it comes to keeping it hard and functioning normally.

Here’s the twist. As the Republican Party — half of the voting demographic in this country — continues to wage a legislative war against reproductive healthcare for women, in addition to being oppressive and misogynistic, the actions of Republicans could begin to demonize reproductive healthcare for men. Specifically, there have been several tongue-in-cheek laws introduced in state legislatures pushing back against Republican laws restricting birth control and abortion. Of course they’re never designed to pass, but they’re putting these man-meds into the crosshairs. And you know what? Maybe they should be.

Here’s Minnesota State Senator Paul Gazelka (R), the sponsor of a bill that restricts access to RU486, the morning-after pill.

“Viagra is a wonderful medical advancement in that can help couples with sexual disfunction issues…it can even help in producing life. RU486 always destroys life by taking the life of the unborn child.”

Utter nonsense. First of all, he misspelled “dysfunction” in his statement. Secondly, RU486 is most often used as an emergency contraceptive by preventing ovulation after sex. Thirdly, how exactly does Viagra create life? Sure, it enables an impotent man to have sex and to potentially fertilize an egg. But not every time. By Gazelka’s terms, maybe a doctor should be present for any and all sexual activity in Minnesota — you know, to make sure Viagra is being used without contraception, to make sure both sexual partners are fertile and to make sure the woman is ovulating. No life-creating intent, no Viagra.

In fact, a case could be made that Viagra destroys Republican sacred cows. In some scenarios it breaks up families by boosting a man’s mid-life crisis and allowing him to more fully re-enact his promiscuous youth, thus leading to divorce which, in turn, destroys the sanctity of marriage. It can also lead to unintended pregnancies and abortions just as well as it can lead to conception.

I’m not necessarily saying that the war against women will lead to a backlash war against men in the form of laws restricting ED meds or even the rising testosterone replacement products. But, again, while anti-birth control laws and anti-choice laws are hurting women, Republican men are also making themselves and, by proxy, a lot of other non-Republican men look ridiculous for our boner pills and testosto-gels. When and if the time comes, guys, we might want to have access to some of those products.

Seriously, Republican men, stop ruining it for the rest of us. Keep your puritanism to yourselves.

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Obama may have lost control of the debt ceiling negotiations, but his administration is continuing to make positive changes behind the scenes. Expect an uproar from the GOP on this one. From the Huff Post:

Health insurance plans must cover birth control as preventive care for women, with no copays, the Obama administration said Monday in a decision with far-reaching implications for health care as well as social mores.

The requirement is part of a broad expansion of coverage for women's preventive care under President Barack Obama's health care law. Also to be covered without copays are breast pumps for nursing mothers, an annual "well-woman" physical, screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer and for diabetes during pregnancy, counseling on domestic violence, and other services.

In most countries, this would be seen as a common sense move – it will help prevent unwanted pregnancies and as a consequence lower abortion rates. But in America, the fanatical religious Right will view it as nasty liberals encouraging premarital sex. Thankfully, rational people are still in charge (just) and passing legislation that should help regular people enormously.

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