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Mar. 3rd, 2003
On Shaving
Mar. 3rd, 2003 04:03 pmI've just come back from a two-hour-long workout in the gym. My favourite element of the post-gym experience--yes, even including the sauna--is the post-gym shave.
My facial hair, unlike the facial hair of some other people, grows copiously. A once-daily shave is barely sufficient; sometimes, I have to shave twice a day. In another lifetime, I would have been a hairy barbarian--you know, one of those unshaven wild people who lives in the north and descends with his cohort upon one unsuspecting settled civilization or another (China, Rome, Persia, India) once every millennium. Come to think of it, I do live to the north of a large prosperous settled civilization.
Back to shaving. Shaving after a workout is fun, if only because my muscles are relaxed and the sweat is enough to serve as a useful substitute for lather. Post-gym shave susually proceed quickly and smoothly for me, now that I've gotten the hang of them, and they leave my face nicely smooth. I like the end result, but the process is fun, too: Making my face a slightly less fractal surface is always fun.
My facial hair, unlike the facial hair of some other people, grows copiously. A once-daily shave is barely sufficient; sometimes, I have to shave twice a day. In another lifetime, I would have been a hairy barbarian--you know, one of those unshaven wild people who lives in the north and descends with his cohort upon one unsuspecting settled civilization or another (China, Rome, Persia, India) once every millennium. Come to think of it, I do live to the north of a large prosperous settled civilization.
Back to shaving. Shaving after a workout is fun, if only because my muscles are relaxed and the sweat is enough to serve as a useful substitute for lather. Post-gym shave susually proceed quickly and smoothly for me, now that I've gotten the hang of them, and they leave my face nicely smooth. I like the end result, but the process is fun, too: Making my face a slightly less fractal surface is always fun.
[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Dubya's Failure
Mar. 3rd, 2003 07:28 pmYou know, when the efforts made to date by Dubya et al to impose a Mel Gibson revenge-flick ethos on international relations at the cost of destroying the post-Second World War framework remind me of the fact that, no matter how dependent we are on the American export market for our prosperity Canada is still the United States' biggest trading partner and we consequently have some muscle that we can and should use to protect our interests, with or without the United States, it's safe to say that he's basically lost the planet. I'm the person who keeps defending the United States in conversations; if I am that frustrated with Dubya ...
A thought:
When considering the fact that, after all, there is no reason for fertility rates to settle around replacement levels, given that the decision to bear children is individual while the question of maintaining a styable national population is a very collective decision that no one person can make adequately, it occurred to me: Is there any reason for fertility rates in the Middle East to stabilize at replacement levels?
Certainly growing poverty makes raising large numbers of children difficult, while rising levels of education and urbanization have been shown to encourage low fertility rates. Too, patriarchal societies are always challenged by the advent of inexpensive forms of birth control, when the women decide that they are no longer interested in having children. Already, in the vast majority of the Middle East (Saudi Arabia accepted) fertility rates are no higher than they were in the United States during the baby boom of the 1950's and 1960's, and they are continuing to drop sharply. (In Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia and Iran, for example, they are barely at replacement levels.) If relatively conservative mores, coupled with a strong familial orientation, are responsible for the radically below-replacement fertility rates in Mediterranean Europe, what on Earth will things be like in the Middle East in a generation's time?
It doesn't seem that unlikely that the Middle East might complete the transition to below-replacement fertility rates fairly soon. Enough demographic momentum has been built up to ensure that even with fertility rates substantially below replacement, there would still be net natural increase. Still, by 2100, the Middle East's major problem might be a rapidly aging and declining population--if anything, a population that might be more sharply declining that the southern and eastern European, since those countries can at least count on being net immigrant-receiving countries, and those countries are likely liberal enough to see the shift towards pro-feminist and pro-natalist views that have helped keep birth rates in France and Norden relatively high. It looks like Islamism might not be the best ideology for long-term population growth after all.
(Insert "India" or "Southeast Asia" for "Middle East," if you wish. For that matter, insert "China"--fertility rates in Shanghai and Hong Kong are already some of the lowest in the world, and it's only the ethnic minorities which continue to show strongly positive growth.)
When considering the fact that, after all, there is no reason for fertility rates to settle around replacement levels, given that the decision to bear children is individual while the question of maintaining a styable national population is a very collective decision that no one person can make adequately, it occurred to me: Is there any reason for fertility rates in the Middle East to stabilize at replacement levels?
Certainly growing poverty makes raising large numbers of children difficult, while rising levels of education and urbanization have been shown to encourage low fertility rates. Too, patriarchal societies are always challenged by the advent of inexpensive forms of birth control, when the women decide that they are no longer interested in having children. Already, in the vast majority of the Middle East (Saudi Arabia accepted) fertility rates are no higher than they were in the United States during the baby boom of the 1950's and 1960's, and they are continuing to drop sharply. (In Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia and Iran, for example, they are barely at replacement levels.) If relatively conservative mores, coupled with a strong familial orientation, are responsible for the radically below-replacement fertility rates in Mediterranean Europe, what on Earth will things be like in the Middle East in a generation's time?
It doesn't seem that unlikely that the Middle East might complete the transition to below-replacement fertility rates fairly soon. Enough demographic momentum has been built up to ensure that even with fertility rates substantially below replacement, there would still be net natural increase. Still, by 2100, the Middle East's major problem might be a rapidly aging and declining population--if anything, a population that might be more sharply declining that the southern and eastern European, since those countries can at least count on being net immigrant-receiving countries, and those countries are likely liberal enough to see the shift towards pro-feminist and pro-natalist views that have helped keep birth rates in France and Norden relatively high. It looks like Islamism might not be the best ideology for long-term population growth after all.
(Insert "India" or "Southeast Asia" for "Middle East," if you wish. For that matter, insert "China"--fertility rates in Shanghai and Hong Kong are already some of the lowest in the world, and it's only the ethnic minorities which continue to show strongly positive growth.)
