Just when you think the world can’t get any weirder…in steps the Vatican.
https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/4582-downs-and-glaciers
Written by Hilary White
Iceland is aborting Downs babies into extiction while the Vatican helps the country mourn the loss… of a glacier.
A monument to future generations, a bronze plaque, that apologises to our descendents for our stupidity, really doesn’t sound like that bad an idea, right?
I mean… assuming there are any descendents…
I mean, the whole Demographic Winter issue is getting to be a pretty big concern, right?
The government of Iceland has just erected one that reads, in part:
In the next 200 years, our demographics are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
Haha… just kidding. It’s a glacier. It doesn’t mention demographics. Just a big field of ice.
The plaque reads:
A letter to the future. [Okjokull] is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path…”
Yes, there’s a monument erected by the Icelandic government, with a ceremony attended by 100 people, including government representatives and foreign diplomats, to a “dead” glacier.
I’m really not making it up. The BBC reports:
Mourners have gathered in Iceland to commemorate the loss of Okjokull, which has died at the age of about 700. The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 when it was no longer thick enough to move. What once was glacier has been reduced to a small patch of ice atop a volcano.
The CIA World Factbook, a rare goldmine for these times of totally un-editorialized… well… facts, tells us that on the whole, things are looking up in Iceland, economically speaking.
Iceland enjoys a slightly better than usual Total Fertility Rate in Europe and other first world nations, with 1.99 children born per woman. Her median female age is 37.3 years and the mean age of mothers at their first birth is 27.4 years.
Only that pretty much no one seems to want to think about one little thing. The minimum for maintaining a stable population is 2.1 births/woman (and it’s a pretty good sign for your nation’s future if the median female age is below a certain stage of life). The math is pretty simple. That’s one child to replace each parent plus one to make up for the people in your community who don’t have children for whatever reason. So, though it has slightly healthier demographics than most nations of the EU, (the country is criticised by the medical community for “lagging behind” in contraceptive use among Nordic countries) Iceland is starting the same slide down the icy slope of auto-extinction as the rest of the Developed World…
Be seeing you
Yet another strange chapter.
MCViewPoint 