Mark Steyn riffs on Live Earth and its dead TV ratings, before noting, "Professor Chris Rapley, head honcho of the British Antarctic Survey, turned up on the BBC to argue that population control is central to the environmental debate":

How many Englishmen, Scotsmen, Greeks or Italians are around in the year 2050 will have no measurable impact on so-called "climate change." None whatsoever. Having fewer British or Spanish babies will do nothing for the polar bear on the ice floes posing for Al Gore's next documentary. But how many British and Spanish babies are born right now — this year and next year — will certainly have an impact on what Britain and Spain are like in the year 2050. These men of "science" have not called on Niger or Somalia or Afghanistan or Yemen — where women have seven or eight babies — to have one or even six less. Presumably the Optimum Population Trust (a magnificently totalitarian-lite moniker, by the way) feels the average Somali or Afghan has a more eco-friendly carbon footprint, and thus a world with fewer English and more Yemeni will be a more "sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren."

Well, I guess Professor Guillebaud's grandchildren (assuming he has any) will eventually discover whether he was right about that. Few westerners are yet as boldly explicit in their anti-humanism, but there is a more general insouciance among these ancient European peoples as they commence, in effect, to vanish from the earth in an incremental auto-genocide: the Scots and Germans would rather weep for obscure insects on distant continents than for themselves. They agitate for a Live Earth but are indifferent to their own demise.

The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."