Here's an idea:

the idea behind The Long News: to try to identify news stories whose significance seems likely to grow, rather than diminish, over time.

We will link to articles about trends, discoveries, and events that might have a long term impact on humanity — or at least, for several decades. We will try to spot stories which appear likely to shape the future, and that a future historian might some day look back upon as important.

OK, so it's not original, or even particularly interesting. But it is being done, so far, in an unusually incompetent way. Consider the second of four future shaping stories:

Given the resources each new American consumes, this story (found by Stuart Candy) is troubling: Baby boomlet: US births in 2007 break 1950s record

Well, resource consumption is irrelevant when we think of long futures, since it is directly related to technological development, and only the most foolish try to predict that. Nothing troubling here on that score. But how about this "boomlet"?

On average, a U.S. woman has 2.1 babies in her lifetime. That's the "magic number" required for a population to replace itself.

Countries with much lower rates - such as Japan and Italy - face future labor shortages and eroding tax bases as they fail to reproduce enough to take care of their aging elders.

But it's not clear the boomlet will last long. Some experts think birth rates are already declining because of the economic recession that began in late 2007.

"I expect they'll go back down. The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depression - and that was before modern contraception," said Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.

The 2007 statistical snapshot reflected a relatively good economy coupled with cultural trends that promoted childbirth, she and others noted. . .

Today, U.S. women are averaging 2.1 children each. That's the highest level it's been since the early 1970s, but is a relatively small increase from the rate it had hovered at for more than 10 years and is hardly transforming.

If not for immigration US population would be aging and declining, and given the maniacs we have in government running up debts that will tax those babies near to death, it would be far more troubling to report that the US birth rate had fallen below replacement level than that it had, briefly, achieved the magic number.

I suggest that a more troubling news item for the Long Now Foundation would be that their own staff has repeatedly shown itself to be the most mundane of culture victims without the slightest bit of prescience or insight that might be useful as a futurist filter. They are dead, and in decency ought to fall over and be still.