sign me up

"Hump, or wrestle crocodiles? Make love, or skin another kangaroo?"

Are those euphemisms? I'm trying to decide if I have an informed opinion here.

They should add a fourth in case of dingos.

You know there are worse ways to spend your time than making babies. As my wise wife once said to me: "This is fun, we can do it whenever we want to, and just think--its free!!!!".

McDonald believes the rate will stay around 1.8 for the next 5-10 years...

Ummm, assuming monogamous relationships (I know this could be a dicy assumption) even this isn't enough to even maintain the population.

Now if they were to pay a bounty for tykes - say $100,000 per, I'd be down there in a flash impregnating everything in sight.

If a bloke could go on one solid week long sex bender and walk away with a million bucks I'm sure they'd be knocking down the doors to oblige.

hey, Purple....pack your bag for Singapore. Here the birth rate is so low the govt pays you a stipend for children plus some nice bonuses if you have more than 2!! although I think they actually want you to stick around and raise them!

Think it over, Purple. I've been to Singapore, and there are a lot of hot-looking women . . .

indeed! thanks for noticing Michael!

I've had a fascination with Singapore ever since they wanted to "cane" that juvenile delinquent idiot Michael Fay some years ago for vandalizing cars.

This struck me as quite a practical solution to youthful miscreants - something sadly missing in American society. Being a "traditional kinda guy", things like the stocks, pillory, public humiliation, have great appeal to me.

Seriously - does anyone really doubt that say 48 hours being stretched on the rack would have LESS "deterrant effect" than being threatened with a few years in the pokey? Meh! they laugh at jail time these days. NOBODY would laugh at doing some time on the rack, or spending a couple of days in the stocks in public having rotten fruit/veggies/eggs and ripe road kill thrown at them - NOBODY.

A retired (now deceased) ex-NYC dective I knew had a saying -- "nothing hurts like pain". Valid 50 years ago, still valid today.

Ace Dude, don't bag on Australia. That place is a paradise. Nice beaches, small towns, clean cities, and some of the hottest women on the planet.

Not too shabby for a former penal colony. It's like a second home to me right now because of the exchange rate. You need to get down there with the Mrs. and check it out.

Heh. He said Penal.

How do Australian's find sheep in the long grass?

mmmmmm not bad.

You know there are worse ways to spend your time than making babies. As my wise wife once said to me: "This is fun, we can do it whenever we want to, and just think--its free!!!!".

Yeah, fun fun fun, until it gets to the part when they've got to come out. It's a good thing for the human species that we women have short memories when it comes to childbirth.

The problem with negative population growth is that your neighbors are not likely to have the same tender feelings.

Just as Europe stopped reproducing at adequate rates, the Arabs and the Turks started to move in. Likewise with Australia - soon the Indonesians and the SE Asians will be jamming the place.

Plus, I sooo agree with Sue - thank goodness women love babies!

what were my choices again?

You know there are worse ways to spend your time than making babies. As my wise wife once said to me: "This is fun, we can do it whenever we want to, and just think--its free!!!!".

"Yeah, fun fun fun, until it gets to the part when they've got to come out."

The same can be said of it being "free." (Even without marriage and kids, is there such a thing as "free" sex for guys? Dinner, drinks, dancing, cab fare the next morning ... And those rufies don't exactly grow on trees, either.)

"During a budget speech in May last year, Costello urged Australians to have more children, telling couples to "have one for your husband, one for your wife and one for your country."

How many Australians have both a husband and a wife?

I bet the only people that were bothered by that statement were engineers.

Thanks for bringing up Peter Costello's speech and the Australians' concern over their low birthrate, LauraW.

I'm glad the Australians are at least talking about the problem of the low birth rate and that the talking seems to be having good effects. One sees how important even mere lip service can be, when one considers the effect of all of the talk, in the U.S. and perhaps other industrial democracies, about overpopulation in the 1970s. It seems to have become a common view back then that having no children, or just one, was commendable austerity; having two or, at most, three was moderation; and that having four or more was carelessness at best. It's only occurred to me just now to wonder how much of the scaring and shaming about overpopulation was indirect marketing on the part of the companies producing and selling the Pill. If the Australian government wants to increase the birthrate sufficiently by talking about the need, they'll have to talk on the same scale as did the scaremongers some decades ago.

Now it occurs to me to wonder also how much of the feminist campaign for female "careers" was indirect marketing on the part of the drug makers. I'm not proposing conspiracy on a grand scale, but mostly just that in the minds of the owners and managers of drug companies, the feel-good politics of environmental protection and sexual "equality" must have aligned itself very easily with the good feeling of profits from sales of their contraceptives.

I know LauraW was joking about sending missionaries to Australia, but our hosts sometimes even hit the target when they're not aiming. The people who talk about the "post-colonial era" are such stupid fucks. We are never post-anything; colonization is permanently one of the alternative orders and, right now, it's being practiced on the descendants off the old colonists. I'm sure most of the old colonists were nice people; after all, they were adherents of Christianity, a religion of peace. But their large-scale effects included wiping out the American "Indians" and the Australian aborigines. Thank Heaven for the ancestors who cleared the way for us, but their work will only confer lasting value on their descendants if their descendants don't succumb in turn.

Arafel

Stephen den Beste: That was pretty funny; Costello's expression had slipped right by me.

The discussion of stipends for childbirth in Singapore reminded me of an odd thought that's occurred to me previously. I wonder if there are wealthy men who want a large number of descendants and who have therefore gotten around the restriction of legal monogamy by deliberately engaging and paying numerous women to be the unacknowledged mothers of their unacknowledged children.

Arafel