Ok, the arguments posed by David Rockefeller are so huge and, as a trillionair, self serving, that you can drive a truck through them.
It isn't population pressure that is forcing gas companies to engage in fracking - only the industry deregulation that he and his thinktanks have evangelized. People are not drinking themselves out of fresh water, drilling companies are destroying water supplies with chemicals in search of fossile fuels. A problem that can easily be solved by switching to solar and other renewables, and re-regulation.
Overconsumption of resources - again, this has nothing to do with the number of people on the planet. It could be 7 billion, it could be 50 billion. There is no known mathematical limit to the earth's population if resources are shared equally and technology advances as it has so far.
Ironically, however, the very innovations that are making possible dramatic improvements in human wellbeing, are also creating new problems, which raise the spectre of an alarming and possibly catastrophic disaster to the biosphere we live in.
And herein lies the dilemma that we all face.
Improved public health has caused the child mortality rate to decline by 60% in the last 40 years. In the same period, the world's average life expectancy has increased from 46 years in 1950, to 63 years today.
This is a development which as individuals we can only applaud.
However, the result of all these positive measures is a world population that has risen during the same short period of time geometrically, to almost 6 billion people, and could easily exceed 8 billion by the year 2020.
The negative impact of the population growth on all our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.
The rapid growing exploitation of the world's supply of energy and water is a matter of deep concern. And the toxic byproducts of widespread industrialisation have increased atmospheric pollution to dangerous levels.
Unless nations agree to work together to tackle these cross-border challenges, posed by population growth, overconsumption of resources, and environmental degradation, the prospects for 'a decent life' on our planet will be threatened.
The recent UN meeting in Cairo was appropriately focused on one of these key issues - population growth - but the controversies which have erupted at the conference illustrate the problem of coming to grips with issues that are deeply divisive and which have a profound moral dimension.
The UN can and should play an essential role in helping the world find a satisfactory way of stabilising world population and stimulating economic development, in a manner that is sensitive to religious and moral considerations. Economic growth is of course an inevitable corollary of a growing population, and is essential of improving standards of living. But without careful coordination, unrestrained economic growth poses further threats to our environment.
This was a major subject of discussion during the conference in Rio Dejaneiro on the environment, two years ago. The focus then was sustainable growth and global development. It was pointed out at the conference that growth is most efficiently managed by the private sector, but regulation of the process by national governments and international bodies is also needed. And once again, the United Nations could certainly be among the catalysts and coordinators of this process.
What David Rockefeller is really advocating, is the maintenance of this global aristocratic system of government. He is not advocating for the benefit of mankind, but the benefit of his own trillionair lifestyle and economy, with himself and his family remaining at the helm of the global economy, of course.
This is the same choice that Britain was faced with in the 1880s - democratic reform at home, or exportation of their rigid class system abroad. They chose exportation and colonialism, in order to keep the working classes at bay and give them a role as colonial servants and troops in far flung places. Emigration is a big reason the British population only went from 40 million in 1880 to 60 million in 2012. And Britain is still 'full' because they have not opened up land for settlement - only 7% of Britain's land surface is destignated for human habitation, the rest is still in aristocratic hands and used for agriculture.
Rhodes, funded by the world's other and even richer trillionair banking dynasty, the Rothschilds, started the diamond company De Beers and Rhodesia, had made the following remarks, which Lenin quoted at length in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Therefore what is at stake is not merely the future of mankind, which can plod along with this population growth for decades at least, but the survival of a failing aristocratic, top-down economic system called globalisation, which has already stratified entire continents by economic function - raw materials from Africa, manufactured goods from Asia, and financial services and security from the United States (Wall Street)/Britain (The City).
The answer obviously is not population control, but the localisation of production and consumption worldwide. If locales fail, then so be it, but the impact on the rest of the world will be minimal. No more booms and busts.
Also, a much bigger impact on population growth than the 'empowerment of women' (as the creepy 'I Am Powerful' CARE ads want us to believe), but the increase of public (including women's) health - contrary to what David Rockefeller believes or says he believes is the cause of the world's growing population.
The act of giving birth is a life endangering process, especially without medical helpm, and having 10 children is really rolling the dice. However, without medical help, 50% of children die before the age of 5, making survival into adulthood unpredictable, which is a crucial fact in understanding why women have children so often. Add to this, that without the presence of well funded local governments supplying pensions and social security, women and men depend on their children to survive in old age or beyond working age. No children or extended families (someone else's children), no life.
That is the key to understanding population growth in poor economies, and slowing population in wealthier economies.
This is also the one thing that the environmentalists are resisting, under the guise of pollution.
Now To The Real Discussion No One Is Having
The real problem that hampers a serious discussion, is the environmentalists refusal to separate genuine concerns about the environment and the global population, from the ethnocentric desire to maintain 'our' numbers and reduce 'their' numbers.
They have refused to distance themselves from the eugenics movement, and it's advocates like Margaret Sanger, who in her earlier days clearly targeted African American, Irish and Jewish women.
"My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris". Sponsored by "Philip Morris, probably the best cigarette you have ever smoked". An interview of Margaret Sanger by Mike Wallace, and his sponsors Philip Morris. :)
What is clear about this documentary, is that given time, the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians are proven wrong again and again, and the achilles heel of their argument is technology, and the human characteristic (not shared by horses, cats or lab rats) to innovate their way out of problems.
At the time of that interview, the population of Japan was about 83 million people. This led Sanger to proclaim that disaster was at hand, that Japan could not possibly feed itself and that it was in imminent danger of disappearing through famine, and that 'she has to be fed, from the outside, somehow'.
Today, there are few economies and people wealthier than Japan. So what changed? Did they reduce their population from 83 million, to say, 60 million and lived happily ever after?
No. In 1950, Japan's population was 83 million, and people were indeed starving. Today, it is 127 million, and people are thriving in the third biggest economy on the planet.
The ironic thing is that after the war, there WAS a famine in Japan. However, it was not caused by too many people being left after WWII. And it was remedied by a) land redistribution and b) the car industry. In other words, the deconcentration of wealth and technology.
The fact that the car industry runs on heavily polluting fossile fuel instead of biodiesel does not change that - that choice was made on a different continent, decades earliers. All diesel engines to this day can run on vegetable oils, something that trillionairs like Rockefeller abhor because it does not allow them to profit from and control the fuel industry. (Remember that the Rockefellers started their fortune during the robber baron era, by starting a company called Standard Oil, now called Chevron.) His concern about environmental pollution is not driven by the desire to switch to renewables, but to keep the pollution caused by Chevron at survivable levels.
Japan was not only allowed to set up it's own industry, it was allowed to keep the proceeds of that industry, unlike African countries, where the IMF and World Bank demanded 'privatisation' (profitisation) and the opening of the entire economy to foreign ownership. Again, poverty results from the concentration of wealth into a few foreign hands, not population numbers - the Chinese recently described Africa as 'thinly populated', which it is.
Again, overpopulation is used as a cover for a failed economic system that is based on the exploitation of other people's resources so they do not benefit the original owners.
Fix that, and all these problems disappear as if they had never existed.
Going into poor countries with pills is cheap. Ensuring independence in old age through shoring up local government budgets is smart.
Identify the problem, not mere correlation, before supplying the solution. And the problem is exploitation and the resulting poverty, not population numbers.
Comments
I do believe that Thom's emphasis on the education and status of women in societies is directly related to the problem of exploitation and poverty. It is not about population control politics or eugenics at all, in fact, it is a direct rebuff to that line of thinking. After all, if we want to address the problem of over-population in the ecological frame directly, we would kill all the First world because we consume and pollute a lot more than the poor do.
The education of raised status of women is how to fix "all these problems."
The education of raised status of women is how to fix "all these problems."
I seriously doubt that the education of women can be done successfully in isolation of actually eliminating poverty. There are no cheap solutions. I still need to understand the resistance against eliminating all poverty, not just poverty among women.
I do believe that Thom's emphasis on the education and status of women in societies is directly related to the problem of exploitation and poverty.
But only if women are exploited by their husbands. The problem with that is that their husbands and families are poor too.
Looking at poverty as gender issue is just dividing men against women.
The real exploitation is the alienation of raw materials from entire economies. That is the real cause of poverty.
A country like Zambia, where the majority of the population live on $1,- per day, is losing at least $3 billion a year because the mines are now foreign owned, courtesy of the World Bank.
The 'privatisation' of the national mines was handled by NM Rothschild & Sons (see: A Brief History of ZCCM-IH), the very same bank that set Cecil Rhodes up in the empire business in the 1880s and is doing road privatisation in the UK today), the same banking dynasty that is the largest shareholder in Anglo-American De Beers, the former global diamond mining monopolist. Anglo-American was also already directly/indirectly a 1/4 owner of ZCCM before privatisation, through Zambia Copper Investments Ltd.
Guess who received Konkola Deep Mine? Anglo-American De Beers, for which it was the single bidder (see point 16 of the complaint).
That is why people are poor, why roads are in bad shape, why the state borrows at the private market and (exacerbates) why there is a permanent 'liquidity gap' for ordinary people - savings rates are at 2%, lending rates are at 24%. No legitimate business can make a profit borrowing at 24% interest. The entire economy is massively distorted by the foreign ownership of it's main drivers.
So what you are seeing here is what is happening to the world in a nutshell. The permanent suppression/prevention of the rise of a middle class. The concentration of wealth into the hands of a few.
The rich not only become rich by having the first mover advantage of accumulated wealth, they also stay rich by preventing competition.
Which in the case of aristocratic wealth, means preventing the rise of a middle class entirely.
I think you're conflating issues, Roger. The point that Thom makes and that DRC was trying to communicate is that the number of children a woman has (on a broad average) is directly proportional to women's rights/opportunities/freedoms. Ya see, in developed countries where women have equal rights as men, there is no population growth, much less population explosions. In some of these countries like Italy, there is actually negative population growth where women choose to have less that two children.
In places where women don't have rights, they are sold as child brides and are forced to breed.
It's pretty simple, really. Just acknowledge that reality and we can talk about the other issues.
Proof? Like, two countries neighboring eachother, one with lots of women's rights and low family size, next to a country with few women's rights and large families?
I am talking about distinguishing spurious correlations that have 'truthiness' to them, but aren't backed up by statistics.
The underlying idea is that it is men who are telling women to keep having children, and if only we could 'empower' them, they would reduce the number of births (for us).
The problem is that 'empowerment' never seems to include reducing poverty for all (women, men and children).
It also presumes that poverty is caused by having lots of children, and that
The thing is that these beliefs come and go.
From the BBC:
The world at seven billion
27 October 2011 Last updated at 23:08 GMT
As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.
The temperature is some 30C. The humidity stifling, the noise unbearable. In a yard between two enormous tea-drying sheds, a number of dark-skinned women patiently sit, each accompanied by an unwieldy looking cloth sack. They are clad in colourful saris, but look tired and shabby. This is hardly surprising - they have spent most of the day in nearby plantation fields, picking tea that will net them around two cents a kilo - barely enough to feed their large families.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
* A three-part radio version of this story was broadcast on World Service.
* You can listen again using the link below.
* Listen to The Documentary: Controlling People
Vivek Baid thinks he knows how to help them. He runs the Mission for Population Control, a project in eastern India which aims to bring down high birth rates by encouraging local women to get sterilised after their second child.
As the world reaches an estimated seven billion people, people like Vivek say efforts to bring down the world's population must continue if life on Earth is to be sustainable, and if poverty and even mass starvation are to be avoided.
There is no doubting their good intentions. Vivek, for instance, has spent his own money on the project, and is passionate about creating a brighter future for India.
But critics allege that campaigners like Vivek - a successful and wealthy male businessman - have tended to live very different lives from those they seek to help, who are mainly poor women.
These critics argue that rich people have imposed population control on the poor for decades. And, they say, such coercive attempts to control the world's population often backfired and were sometimes harmful.
Population scare
Most historians of modern population control trace its roots back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman born in the 18th Century who believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth's capacity to feed them.
Giving succour to the resulting desperate masses would only imperil everyone else, he said. So the brutal reality was that it was better to let them starve.
'Plenty is changed into scarcity' Thomas Malthus
From Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population, 1803 edition:
At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall.
Rapid agricultural advances in the 19th Century proved his main premise wrong, because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing population.
But the idea that the rich are threatened by the desperately poor has cast a long shadow into the 20th Century.
From the 1960s, the World Bank, the UN and a host of independent American philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, began to focus on what they saw as the problem of burgeoning Third World numbers.
The believed that overpopulation was the primary cause of environmental degradation, economic underdevelopment and political instability.
Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US.
"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says.
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes.
Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.
'Unmet need'
What virtually everyone agreed was that there was a massive demand for birth control among the world's poorest people, and that if they could get their hands on reliable contraceptives, runaway population growth might be stopped.
But with the benefit of hindsight, some argue that this so-called unmet need theory put disproportionate emphasis on birth control and ignored other serious needs.
"It was a top-down solution," says Mohan Rao, a doctor and public health expert at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
"There was an unmet need for contraceptive services, of course. But there was also an unmet need for health services and all kinds of other services which did not get attention. The focus became contraception."
Had the demographic experts worked at the grass-roots instead of imposing solutions from above, suggests Adrienne Germain, formerly of the Ford Foundation and then the International Women's Health Coalition, they might have achieved a better picture of the dilemmas facing women in poor, rural communities.
"Not to have a full set of health services meant women were either unable to use family planning, or unwilling to - because they could still expect half their kids to die by the age of five," she says.
Us and them
File photograph of Sanjay and Indira Gandhi in 1980
Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay (above) presided over a mass sterilisation campaign. From the mid-1970s, Indian officials were set sterilisation quotas, and sought to ingratiate themselves with superiors by exceeding them. Stories abounded of men being accosted in the street and taken away for the operation. The head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, congratulated the Indian government on "moving effectively" to deal with high birth rates. Funding was increased, and the sterilising went on.
In Delhi, some 700,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted, and given replacement housing plots far from the city centre, frequently on condition that they were either sterilised or produced someone else for the operation. In poorer agricultural areas, whole villages were rounded up for sterilisation. When residents of one village protested, an official is said to have threatened air strikes in retaliation.
"There was a certain madness," recalls Nina Puri of the Family Planning Association of India. "All rationality was lost."
In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s.
Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out.
Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.
"They spoke of a war on population growth, fought with contraceptive weapons," he says. "The war would entail sacrifices, and collateral damage."
Such language betrayed a lack of empathy with their subjects, says Ms Germain: "People didn't talk about people. They talked of acceptors and users of family planning."
Emergency measures
Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974.
Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".
But just a year later, Mr Singh's government presided over one of the most notorious episodes in the history of population control.
In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor.
The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.
Yet, for all the official programmes and coercion, many poor women kept on having babies.
And where they did not, it arguably had less to do with coercive population control than with development, just as Karan Singh had argued in 1974, says historian Matt Connelly.
For example, in India, a disparity in birth rates could already be observed between the impoverished northern states and more developed southern regions like Kerala, where women were more likely to be literate and educated, and their offspring more likely to be healthy.
Women there realised that they could have fewer births and still expect to see their children survive into adulthood.
Total control
By now, this phenomenon could be observed in another country too - one that would nevertheless go on to impose the most draconian population control of all.
China: 'We will not allow your baby to live'
Steven Mosher was a Stanford University anthropologist working in rural China who witnessed some of the early, disturbing moments of Beijing's One Child Policy.
"I remember very well the evening of 8 March, 1980. The local Communist Party official in charge of my village came over waving a government document. He said: 'The Party has decided to impose a cap of 1% on population growth this year.' He said: 'We're going to decide who's going to be allowed to continue their pregnancy and who's going to be forced to terminate their pregnancy.' And that's exactly what they did."
"These were women in the late second and third trimester of pregnancy. There were several women just days away from giving birth. And in my hearing, a party official said: 'Do not think that you can simply wait until you go into labour and give birth, because we will not allow your baby to live. You will go home alone'."
The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.
Assessed by numbers alone, it is said to be by far the most successful population control initiative. Yet it remains deeply controversial, not only because of the human suffering it has caused.
A few years after its inception, the policy was relaxed slightly to allow rural couples two children if their first was not a boy. Boy children are prized, especially in the countryside where they provide labour and care for parents in old age.
But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.
Moreover, since Chinese fertility was already in decline at the time the policy was implemented, some argue that it bears less responsibility for China's falling birth rate than its supporters claim.
"I don't think they needed to bring it down further," says Indian demographer AR Nanda. "It would have happened at its own slow pace in another 10 years."
Backlash
In the early 1980s, objections to the population control movement began to grow, especially in the United States.
In Washington, the new Reagan administration removed financial support for any programmes that involved abortion or sterilisation.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society”
End Quote Adrienne Germain
The broad alliance to stem birth rates was beginning to dissolve and the debate become more polarised along political lines.
While some on the political right had moral objections to population control, some on the left saw it as neo-colonialism.
Faith groups condemned it as a Western attack on religious values, but women's groups feared changes would mean poor women would be even less well-served.
By the time of a major UN conference on population and development in Cairo in 1994, women's groups were ready to strike a blow for women's rights, and they won.
The conference adopted a 20-year plan of action, known as the Cairo consensus, which called on countries to recognise that ordinary women's needs - rather than demographers' plans - should be at the heart of population strategies.
After Cairo
Today's record-breaking global population hides a marked long-term trend towards lower birth rates, as urbanisation, better health care, education and access to family planning all affect women's choices.
With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and some of the poorest parts of India, we are now having fewer children than we once did - in some cases, failing even to replace ourselves in the next generation. And although total numbers are set to rise still further, the peak is now in sight.
Chinese poster from the 1960s of mother and baby, captioned: Practicing birth control is beneficial for the protection of the health of mother and child China promoted birth control before implementing its one-child policy
Assuming that this trend continues, total numbers will one day level off, and even fall. As a result, some believe the sense of urgency that once surrounded population control has subsided.
The term population control itself has fallen out of fashion, as it was deemed to have authoritarian connotations. Post-Cairo, the talk is of women's rights and reproductive rights, meaning the right to a free choice over whether or not to have children.
According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years.
"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.
"If you don't, then you'll just be in an endless cycle of trying to exert control over fertility - to bring it up, to bring it down, to keep it stable. And it never comes out well. Never."
Nevertheless, there remain to this day schemes to sterilise the less well-off, often in return for financial incentives. In effect, say critics, this amounts to coercion, since the very poor find it hard to reject cash.
"The people proposing this argue 'Don't worry, everything' s fine now we have voluntary programmes on the Cairo model'," says Betsy Hartmann.
"But what they don't understand is the profound difference in power between rich and poor. The people who provide many services in poor areas are already prejudiced against the people they serve."
Work in progress
For Mohan Rao, it is an example of how even the Cairo consensus fails to take account of the developing world.
"Cairo had some good things," he says. "However Cairo was driven largely by First World feminist agendas. Reproductive rights are all very well, but [there needs to be] a whole lot of other kinds of enabling rights before women can access reproductive rights. You need rights to food, employment, water, justice and fair wages. Without all these you cannot have reproductive rights."
Perhaps, then, the humanitarian ideals of Cairo are still a work in progress.
Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue.
If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC.
"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."
Mike Gallager is the producer of the radio programme Controlling People on BBC World Service
Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds Of Deception and the website of the same name, on the effects of GMO foods on fertility.
Sterilization of Population Via GMO Foods on The Alex Jones Show 1 - 3.
Sterilization of Population Via GMO Foods on The Alex Jones Show 2 - 3.
Sterilization of Population Via GMO Foods on The Alex Jones Show 3 - 3.
I see, the cup is too full of jaded koolaid for a conversation, but I sure did get a kick out of this...."
If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC.
"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."
In this blog the terms "Population Control" and "Eugenics" have been used synonymously, which is an error. The term Eugenics" also needs to be distinguished from "The Eugenics Office" which was established by Mrs. Harriman and her friends.
Population control refers to balancing the number of humans with our ability to dispose of the amount of garbage produced.
Eugenics in medicine was an early approach to educating men and women in health and sexual hygiene, an untouchable subject to write on in the early 1900's. The medical goals were, by education, to improve the outcome of marriage and childbirth with a healthy baby, and to educate still- dating people who up to this time were unaware of STDs.
The Eugenic Society was devoted to promoting principles of genetic engineering, both in agriculture and in marriages of wealth to wealth, which would simultaneously effect legislation to sterilize those in society who might perpetuate a burden on the healthy, therefore should be scientifically cleansed from the gene pool of the future Super Race which will populate the Fatherland.
1904
first chairs in Medical Eugenics instituted at University College, London
1907 " In 1907, a new law passed by the state legislature and signed by the Governor of Indiana provided for the involuntary sterilization of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists." Although it was eventually found to be unconstitutional, this law is widely regarded as the first eugenics sterilization legislation passed in the world. In 1927, a revised law was implemented and before it was repealed in 1974, over 2,300 of the State’s most vulnerable citizens were involuntarily sterilized. In addition, Indiana established a state-funded Committee on Mental Defectives that carried out eugenic family studies in over twenty counties and was home to an active "better babies" movement that encouraged scientific motherhood and infant hygiene as routes to human improvement.
http://www.iupui.edu/~eugenics/
Founded 1907: Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, London
1910 Founding of the Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, financed primarily by Mary Harriman, widow of E.H. Harriman
2/1/1911 "AMERICAN BREEDERS MEET 'Men Who Aim at Improvement Plants and Animals Are Guest of Corn Exposition. of Columbus, 0., Feb. 1.—Coming here as " the guests of the National Corn Exposition, the members of the Arnerican Breeders' Association today began their seventh annual'meeting in the exposition auditorium. This association is devoted to the 'improvement of breed not only of plants and domestic animals, but of the human, race as well.' The last-named feature .of its work will be explained this evening, and again tomorrow afternoon when the eugenics section meets In the Home for the Feeble-Minded,. .." -Fort Wayne, Indiana
The Kalikak Family of 1912
I Love to tell this story. First please notice the name Kali Kak contains the name of both The Goddess and the initials of Katherine Ann Kryder. What's in a word?
"The significant lesson then is that the study of a group of families generated by a feeble-minded mother or father reveals the defect of mind in nearly every branch of the family. The notorious Jukes are lined up before us in every discussion of the subject.
And now comes "the Kalikak family," which will attract the attention of the student of eugenics everywhere. The mother of this line of 480 descendants was a feeble-minded girl who transmitted her weakness to her illegitimate offspring...
...The price the race must pay for this ceaseless stream of mental weaklings is incalculable. The price the taxpayer must pay is ... indeed enormous., And not until there is a thoroughly scientific method of classifying the mentally defective can we hope to prevent insanity. Colonization and in certain cases sterilization of the mental defectives of every community would doubtless reduce the number of insane, criminal, depraved and helpless persons and practically abolish many almshouses and asylums."
-Fort Wayne, Indiana
1914 Social hygiene department Grand Opening
"There was also at that time a display of paintings by Mr. Davisson and Miss Jfewman. The social hygiene department had Dr. Crull and Miss Fleming for its regular meeting, and the chairman herself has been a very active speaker at the Parent-Teacher clubs in promoting the gospel of eugenics".
1916
"SAVANNAH, Ga,,—Susan Myrlck, of Milledgevllle, Georgia is a human thoroughbred, and is the first to measure up to the high standard of mental and physical perfection demanded by the Eugenic Registry, which has just been Instituted by the National conference on race betterment. The Eugenics Registry will include a list of human thoroughbreds and proposes to popularize the registry and encourage a broad interest in matters of health, thus hoping to upbuild an aristocracy of health in the United States. Miss Myrick Is a graduate of the Normal school of Physical education at Battle Creek, Mich. She is now physical director and next year will be supervisor of physical training in the public schools of Hastings, Neb,, and director of physical training for the girls in the high school at the same place. Miss Myrlck is a firm believer In the history of practical eugenics,"
obviously the way to a nice career in those days.
In poor countries, lots of children are the only open option for a retirement plan. Enough surviving children are required to support the parents in their old age. It takes a lot of surviving kids to support the two extra mouths on $1 a day income.
Kids begin earning their keep when they can walk...usually on a small plot of agricultural ground. In the U.S. we shipped them to coal mines to earn their own keep at about age 7 if there wasn't a family farm..
Young people today are already beneficiaries of Social Security. An option would be a law requiring them to support their parents It would probably cost more than their modest Soc. Security deductions. but would avoid the need to pick up dead, emaciated bodies from the streets every day as some countries do and have done. That's both unsightly and unsanitary.
Tip toeing past the bodies and the stench on the way to the shopping mall might be bad for business and the economy in general. People might drop from the stench before they are done shopping. "Shop till you drop" would take on a new meaning.
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease".
..
Webster Tarpley on Eco-fascism and eugenics.
On the rigid belief in overpopulation - no matter what the actual size of the population is - and the distortion of public policy to meet that ideology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myZQh_LS2HI
Overconsumption of resources - again, this has nothing to do with the number of people on the planet. It could be 7 billion, it could be 50 billion. There is no known mathematical limit to the earth's population if resources are shared equally and technology advances as it has so far.
"There is no known mathematical limit to the earth's population if...."
I can only guess: is this proposition then a form of scientific hypothesizing on your part?
Should I take it that this is offered as substantiation for your hypothesis?
Author, researcher, multiple degree holder Webster Tarplay as he is about to launch into "a whole host of historical, financial and geopolitical detail" begins thusly:
Well, now. There's a couple of lovely sentences to deconstruct.
The industrial answer to "overpopulation" was the failed Green Revolution of industrialized, petro-chemical agriculture, a technocratic fix for a problem of soulfulness. The Gramin Banks take the power of poor women to make good investments locally and in context and do much better. The empowerment of women does not have to be limited to creating Western societies of high consumption, and should in fact be about bringing a much smarter and more moral appreciation of wealth and human happiness. The richest countries are far from the happiest. As stated above, it is the rich countries that stress the carrying capacity of the earth, not the poor. I doubt the assertion that there is no limit to how many human beings can inhabit the earth; but the way to find the balance is not "eugenics" or any top-down political answer from technology or power.
I will give the empowerment of women a larger scope than 'education,' but there is nothing wrong with that as part of the picture. The idea that women are more likely to see that their children are cared for than men and will make decisions that improve the way money is invested and diplomacy is used is based in good historical examples. Women who have been educated in Western countries to become professionals and politicians within our existing systems have a more mixed record of transcending the masculinity of these cultures. Maggie Thatcher is Reagan with skirts. And so on. Nonetheless, I think Jesus was his mother's boy, and she was a political radical far from the venerated Mother of God in Catholic European image. She taught him in the spirit of II Isaiah. He had a thing about the widows and orphans being fully human members of the family.
DRC,
There are real world alternatives to chemical based agriculture.
People should check out the work on 'permaculture' and 'natural farming' by Sepp Holzer and Masanobu Fukuoka.
The key is that these methods
1) only slightly bend nature to produce more food than can be consumed, not go against nature; they actually increase the quality of the soil with their methods and as such can use land into infinity, and
2) Their methods are more labour intensive than capital, technology or energy intensive.
They could permanently tranform even sub-urban areas into the continuous production of food.
Fukuoka's bests books are: The One Straw Revolution (introduction) and Natural Farming (workbook).
It looks small scale, but as long as people produce more food than they consume, they are adding to the food supply.
They are only labour intensive in the harvesting/sowing part, and in fact create a lot of leisure time in between. Natural Farming *largely* takes care of itself when it gets going.
Chemical agriculture takes much or all the plant off the soil, and then adds fertilizer to make up for the lost nutrients. Natural Farming takes only the fruit (grain, fruits, etc.) of the plant and leaves the rest, it works the way nature works - through recycling of nutrients. The breakdown of organic matter on the land itself becomes the sole refertilization method.
As such, soil life is enhanced, unlike through plowing. Land can be used in perpetuity, without ever being exhausted.
Remember that most agricultural land in 'developing' nations isn't even in use - which is why claims of 'overpopulation' are so bizarre.
Those of us actually doing permaculture, not philosophizing about its potential to support a human population of 50 billion, know that it's a process that involves self actualization, self motivation and a very real return to actual, face to face community engagement at a local level, because it's about being sensitive to one's immediate ecology and its environment, and learning about everything that's taking place. Holzer's permaculture principles reflect some of that.
Additionally it involves a willingness to part from the deeply entrenched world views of mass culture and it's dependency on modern industrialization, which itself is the very system that created the mess of destroyed cultures and displaced people. These peoples are what the cadre of global managers fret about and whom the educated have come to call "underdeveloped" or "developing" countries, as opposed to what is now a neoliberal industrialized network of "developed" nations operating under a variety of capitalistic market principles, and of course primarily driven by cheap energy.
Cutting down the huge ecosystems that are the rain forests is one way of making available the:
What's bizarre to me is the disconnect I sense in what you are presenting here.
Thank you ren. I am all for the future of human life on earth, but I am not very attracted to these grand ideas of technical solutions to moral problems. I am with you in the practical adoption of working with the earth and others, but I suspect that we are part of an overall finitude where balance and harmony matter more than the discovery that the green future is not austerity and the loss of what we think is the "good life." Roger is not the real problem, but "what, me worry" has a deeper ironic wisdom. Being positive does not mean believing that there is nothing but roses out there.
.ren,
Roger Casement wrote:
"agricultural land in 'developing' nations [that] isn't even in use - which is why claims of 'overpopulation' are so bizarre."
What's bizarre to me is the disconnect I sense in what you are presenting here.
I don't see how you get from permaculture to cutting down the rainforrests.
Rainforrests are cut down by huge transnational corporations, not to make way for human habitation, but to a) reap timber and b) make way for grassland to feed beef cattle for the McDonalds of the world.
Somewhere, some people have started mistaking the destruction of the environment by transnational corporations and local elites with population pressure.
In Africa, nearly all agricultural land is rainfed. That means that if they had access to irrigation, they would easily double or triple yields - and make (what is now dry land, not forests) available for agriculture. If they used more land for growing food crops instead of cash crops for export (tea, coffee, cotton, tobacco, etc. - usually on the highest rainfall land), they could feed even more. Again, no need to cut down rainforrests.
I don't see how you get from permaculture to cutting down the rainforrests. Rainforrests are cut down by huge transnational corporations, not to make way for human habitation, but to a) reap timber and b) make way for grassland to feed beef cattle for the McDonalds of the world.
Somewhere, some people have started mistaking the destruction of the environment by transnational corporations and local elites with population pressure.
In Africa, nearly all agricultural land is rainfed. That means that if they had access to irrigation, they would easily double or triple yields - and make (what is now dry land, not forests) available for agriculture. If they used more land for growing food crops instead of cash crops for export (tea, coffee, cotton, tobacco, etc. - usually on the highest rainfall land), they could feed even more. Again, no need to cut down rainforrests.
Really. So now you are going from promoting permaculture to promoting industrial irrigation systems. I wonder what's next.
.REN,
Please don't tell me what I'm saying. If it is unclear, I am more than happy to clarify.
There are many ways to increase water retention that do not involve the technology of the 1950s, like giant dams or canals. Think of the following, times 100,000. Water retention on a farm, measured to each farm, stored in a way that actually *increases* forests and tree growth:
Permaculture Water Harvesting Through Swales
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3vcf1F10oQ
What's not clear is how you plan to promote your program.
Permaculture is by its very nature a self actuated way of life. It's a unique transformative experience for individuals, and it must be experiential, not managed by managers who deem themselves better minds than those who need to be managed in a hierarchy. I know this experientially, first hand. If you attempt otherwise, it becomes something else. Transition Town Communities and the like are arising out of the permaculture idea.
(From the site: Transition Towns)
Permaculture seems to embody the way of thinking, acting, and living that embraces the Transition model most naturally. If you are not familiar with Permaculture, it is worth understanding and experiencing it, or something similar, firsthand.
and
From the site: Permaculture)
The word 'permaculture', coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is both permanent agriculture and permanent culture. However, the concept is evolving... As with Life Coaching, its harvest of wisdom is growing as it addresses our changing situation and our urgent need for sustainability.
How anyone can imagine fifty billion people living peacefully and in harmony with the earth is beyond my imagination, knowing people and recognizing the effects of the endless schizmogenisis they create where ever they go and set up shop.
Reacting to Thom on the radio:
If there is a lesson to be drawn from Japan, it is that you CAN NOT lift out 'one thing', you have to have it all. The building of a large middle class through free education, healthcare, low bank lending rates for businesses, protection for domestic production and the encouragement of domestic consumption.
The population control people always have one same answer - lower the population.
This kind of reductionism smacks of an agenda.
(THE ECOLOGIST) Fred Pearce: overpopulation worries are a potentially racist distraction
Matilda Lee
2nd February, 2010
Environmental journalist Fred Pearce, author of the new book Peoplequake, on why overconsumption is the key issue, the need for relaxed immigration laws, and why men should look after children
Matilda Lee: What spurred you to write a book on population?
Fred Pearce: We had huge population concerns during the 1960s and into the 70s, then people rather lost interest in it. Just in the last two or three years, I've noticed that people have been talking about it again in the context of climate change and new concerns about food security. I wanted to look at what was actually happening to the world's population and the relationship to resource use and environmental damage.
ML: Many respected environmentalists - from Lester Brown to Jonathon Porritt - believe we are headed for disaster by not supporting family planning in countries with high fertility rates and dire poverty. What do you make of this?
FP: Overpopulation is the wrong issue. Forty years ago, women were having 5 or 6 children each. There really was a population bomb going off. Actually, around the world today, women have diffused the population bomb. Women now have an average of 2.6 children globally and the replacement level [demographers' figure for the amount of offspring women must have to maintain the population] is 2.3 - so we are really very close to replacement level fertility rate. There are exceptions, but those rates are still coming down very fast in most of the world. I'm not sure how much more we could actually do, short of really unpleasant Draconian policies, to make that happen any faster.
People like Jonathon Porritt and David Attenborough say it is the number one issue - Lester Brown often says it, but has a more nuanced stance. Every time people say that, they are not talking about the real elephant in the living room, which is over consumption.
If we're talking about overconsumption, we're talking about what we're doing. If we're talking about overpopulation, we're somehow blaming the planetary predicament on poor families in India, or Africa, or parts of the Middle East. That really ain't fair.
ML: Yet the Optimum Population Trust chairman Roger Martin says that ninety-five per cent of the poorest countries have identified rapid population growth as a significant factor inhibiting their development and keeping their people poor.
FP: People aren't just more mouths to feed, they are hands to work and brains to think. I'm not arguing in favour of fast population growth, but let's have a slightly more nuanced discussion about this. Fast population growth - where it is still happening - is a problem. Let's address it in a sensible way. If you are a woman farmer in Africa, you need children to work on the farm. You have rational reasons for wanting children. Let's be aware of that.
You can demonstrate in a lot of places that more people can - not necessarily will - but can be good for the environment and for the local community. The one famous case is the Machakos area in Kenya - which was on the verge of going to desert, but with an increasing population, there were more people to dig terraces, to organise water systems to grow more crops.
I'm very wary of people sitting in Europe deciding what an appropriate population level is for a country far away.
ML: The first part of your book traces the history of the population control movement and makes some disturbing links between eugenics and the founders of the modern environmental movement. Do you believe that there is a racist element to population control measures?
FP: There has been. I suspect that in some places, there still is. I think it's dying. But we have to be careful to look for it. You can see it as underpinning the notion that it's people in countries far away, with dark skins, breeding, that are damaging planetary systems and are causing greenhouse gases emissions. How dare we! Is there racism in that? I suspect there is a bit.
ML: What do you mean when you write: 'demographically, Europe is living on borrowed time'?
FP: Fertility rates in Europe are so low. Britain, and parts of northern Europe aren't too bad. But in southern and eastern Europe, fertility rates are below 1.5, and as low as 1.1. The indigenous population, if I can put it that way, is going to die out. At those rates, by the end of the century, those countries will have lost 80-90 per cent of their population.
ML: As regards social policies, you say that the key to raising fertility back to replacement levels is to 'instil new responsibilities in men'. What are you talking about?
FP: We're talking about men taking more responsibility for childcare in the home, employers taking more responsibility for childcare in the workplace, the state taking more responsibility for childcare in the wider society.
The very lowest, and oddly, the very highest fertility rates in the world are in patriarchal societies. Once women are asserting their rights to an independent life, to be employed and have a wider role in civic society - if they are forced to choose between children and work, they choose work and go on what one might call 'childbirth strike'.
ML: You write that 'national border controls are the new apartheid of a globalised world economy'. Should rich countries simply open their borders to all migrants?
FP: One libertarian economist I interviewed argues that if money can move freely around the world, we have to have free movement of people. I agree with this. You cannot say that money has a higher priority, or right, to move than people do. Let's get our priorities right and put people first, for once.
People don't come to Europe in order to live on welfare. They want to work. We need them, but what tends to happen is that we then criminalise them. That is a real form of exploitation. You have an economic situation that requires people, and then when they come, you give them no rights at all.
ML: Do you see any justification for environmentalists' focus on population issues - or is it, in your view, a distraction from the real issue - the fact that the rich world over consumes?
FP: I think it is a distraction now. Looked at in a global sense, it seems to be rich people engaging in the really unpleasant 'life boat' ethics, of saying, 'we're alright, the problem is the other people'.
Jonathon Porritt talks about exponential population growth - there is no such thing. My judgement is that by the middle of the century, world population is going to be falling. We've got a few decades, and an awful lot of technical innovation and new ideas about how we live our lives, before we get there. But there is something to fight for. We're not doomed.
Peoplequake by Fred Pearce (Eden Project Books, £12.99) is published on 4th February, 2010.
Matilda Lee is the Ecologist's Consumer Affairs Editor
Bill Gates (19:30-20:40) on the joys of Eugenics and Death Panels that can best be discussed 'in quiet rooms' (paraphrasing). From the Alex Jones Show. Apparently Bill Gates father is on the board of Planned Parenthood.
New World Order: Blueprint of Madmen
I have so far only skimmed this thread. Perhaps I need not point out that just because some who express concern regarding overpopulation are driven by racism does not mean all who are concerned with the world's growing population are driven by racism. As DRC points out, it is 'first worlders' who consume a hugely disproportionate percentage of the world's resources (one reason why my wife and I elected to not have children). But that does not mean an equitable distribution of resources (which, sadly, will likely never come to be) would allow for an infinite number of humans. I just can't accept the notion that a population of 50 billion is sustainable, particularly without drastically altering human nature (or whatever it is that makes our species socially dysfunctional in large groups).
"Sustainable (economic) growth" (quoting Rockefeller) seems like a nonsense phrase regardless of population size. Earth is finite, is it not?
Garrett78,
"Sustainable (economic) growth" (quoting Rockefeller) seems like a nonsense phrase regardless of population size. Earth is finite, is it not?
But our ability to innovate is not. It simply increases with time.
For instance, right now we have trillions of dollars worth of oil reserves. However, those reserves would be absolutely worthless if we switch to solar energy. For which the technology already exists. Technology and innovation can reduce demands for raw materials.
Secondly, our present agricultural systems are extremely inefficient and wasteful, not in the least because they are based on fertilizers and pesticides that come out of the petrochemical industry, as well as consumption of luxury items (tobacco, cotton, tea, coffee), instead of growing food. If agriculture was based on recycling nutrients (which is what forests do), then the expansion of agriculture is not exactly literally infinite, but huge. If we re-legalized hemp, it could easily replace all cotton, which right now is consuming 25% of all agricultural chemicals because it is grown outside of it's natural habitat and most farmers use chemicals instead of labor. Why would African countries export record levels of tobacco (which is bad for people's health, which is another deferred cost to the tobacco industry that is not taken into account), when they could use the same high rainfall land to grow staples? Grow hemp instead of cotton, and there would be a 25% drop in the use of chemicals in agriculture - reducing the demand for a 'finite resource'.
At some point, we will take to space again (first time: 1968). In the process, we'll learn how to create biotopes for entire planets, which means we will be able to repare the biotope of the earth too.
So the entire idea that 'there are too many people' simply isn't true, it is based on false presumptions, presumptions which have been proven false again and again ever since Malthus. And this claim is usually made at a time of economic crisis or failure/downturn in the capitalist system - irrespective of how many people there actually are on the planet. So you find the 'there are too many people' claim made today, 1968 (Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb), 1950 (Sanger in the interview), the 1880s (by Cecil Rhodes and his fear that urban poverty would lead to a - much needed - revolution in England), etc.
Remember that in the Mike Wallace/Margaret Sanger interview from the 1950s linked to above, the claim was that there were too many people in Japan. That was when Japan's population was at 83 million and people were starving because after WWII, there were too few Japanese men (farmers) returning to work the land. Because there were too few people, land was not worked and people starved. Today, there are 127 million Japanese, and Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world, based mainly on free education, free healthcare, land reform, and the highly protected production of consumer technology and electronics.
And by the way, you should have some kids. Go for it.
Roger, I love your going to space to fix the earth fantasy movie, but even with the end of industrial ag and a human intensive food production, the idea that human beings can simply keep increasing in numbers does defy the finititude of our earth ecosystem. If your case hangs on new technology and solutions from outer space, please excuse me from the cult while I laugh and/or cry.
I would like to see the decision to have children be about being parents rather than having some genetic footprint in the future. If you don't like kids, please don't have them. However, if you don't like kids, why do you think adults are so great? Not everyone who likes kids has to have them, however, because doing parenting is labor intensive and means a major change in your "lifestyle." It is also going to cost cash. Go ahead, make your choices, but don't think you are saving the world by not having kids as THE REASON.
Empower women. Educate and end rape culture. You can start with the Republican Party.
DRC,
I mentioned space travel because that is something we were capable of *44 years ago*. Imagine how much farther we would be down the line without the reliance on oil and war.
Rape culture. I don't know what that is. Certainly the likes of Eve Ensler are nothing to go by when it comes to statistics, which I still have to see.
There are too many activists and corporations that abuse statistics for their own purpose. And it always takes weeks or months (sometimes decades) to debunk them.
So let's have the statistics and their sources first, and then we can have screaming headlines. :)
I think a lot of folks seriously underestimate just how oil-dependent we (humans) are, and how difficult it will be to convert (and not just because of Big Oil's greed). If anyone thinks we could stop using oil tomorrow or anytime soon, I'd suggest that person think again.
In case it hasn't already been posted, I recommend this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddmQhIiVM48
DRC,
I'll give you an example of how for instance UNAID$, or the MRC in South Africa abuse statistics.
Or take the case of Rachel Jewkes, of the MRC in South Africa. Last year, screaming headlines made it across the world that '25% of South African Men Admit To Rape'. When you dig down, and I e-mailed Rachel Jewkes and amazingly she e-mailed me back, the following became clear.
1) She padded the 25% number with questions about having sex with a women 'who was too drunk to resist your advances'. She defended that with 'technically it's rape'. The problem is that people are not thinking about 'technical' rape when they think of rape in South Africa. They think of either 'gangs' or farm invaders - in other words, stranger rape. So by the time the headline of 25% of South African men 'admitting to rape' made it across the world, everyone was horrified. And of course, it plays into pre-existing racist stereotypes from slavery days. So this kind of slight of hand can only be examined by knowing the questionnaire.
2) Tiny sample, from a tiny part of the country
The entire sample was from a questionnaire that was given to a few hundred men in Kwazulu Natal. There is no guarantee that this result would be repeatable in any other part of the country, or even KZN as a whole. You wouldn't know that until you found out the details of the study.
Circumcision Prevents HIV
This was based on three studies (Kenya, Uganda and South Africa), two of which were 'stopped short for benefit' - in other words, they were stopped because the researchers received the results they wanted. This did not stop UNAID$ from claiming that circumcision 'reduced HIV infection by 60%'. What they didn't say was that the total number of conversions were small (a couple of dozen in a two samples of over 1500 participants). (Read: Impact of male circumcision on HIV doubted)
Uganda Is the Epicenter Of AIDS Of The World
This was during the 1990s. Except that it never was. Even during their 'epicenter' years, the population growth of for instance Rakai District never went below 3% per year. By 1998, the UNAID$ crew dropped Uganda, and started to make their way to greener pastures - South Africa, about 1999-2000.
Meanwhile, the population of Uganda, which had been predicted to be decimated by a 30% HIV infection rate, went from 14 million in 1985, to 28 million in 2005. Their population doubled in one generation. And that's the 'epicenter of AIDS in the world'. (Also read, for the amusing headline: Uganda: 'Population Pressure Affecting Aids Fight')
You wouldn't know why, unless you actually examined the HIV testing procedure, how HIV testing is applied in surveys as opposed to diagnosis of individual patients (1x ELISA p24 or p55, as opposed to a battery of tests including 2 positive ELISAs and 2 positive Western Blots), and why pregnant women have unusually high rates of false positives when subjected to a single ELISA (protein or p24 or p55) test. You wouldn't conclude that pregnant women at antenatal clinic surveys have huge positive rates on a single Elisa screening test, because of interference by Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLAs), which is specific to pregnant women. And there are about 60 other known factors too.
And yet, for decades, data about national HIV infection in Africa were nearly completely based on blood taken from pregnant women at urban antenatal clinics.
So when the DHS (Demographic and Health Survey) of statistically representative population samples were used, national HIV prevalence rates in most countries were drastically revised downwards. For instance, Sierra Leone went from 7%, down to 0.9%. Just by using a statistically representative population sample to test for HIV infection.
(WASHINGTON POST, 2006) How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated - Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 6, 2006; Page A01
(BOSTON GLOBE, 2004) Estimates on HIV called too high>A?
New data cut rates for many nations
By John Donnelly, Globe Staff | June 20, 2004
(IRRINNEWS, 2004) SWAZILAND: New survey shows much lower HIV infection among youth
Using the same switch from ANC (urban pregnant women) to DHS surveys, HIV infection rates in Swaziland among girls/women were downwardly revised from 32.5% to 6%.
On Rape Statistics In South Africa
Understanding men’s health and Use of violence: interface of rape and hiv in South africa, by Rachel Jewkes1, Yandisa Sikweyiya1, Robert Morrell2, Kristin Dunkle3
* How many times have you slept with a woman or girl when she was too drunk to say whether she wanted it or not?
* How many times have you and other men had sex with a woman at the same time when she was too drunk to stop you?
I still haven't found out what percentage of the yes questions were to these questions in the questionnaire, let alone of course whether they were telling the truth. And like I said, having sex with a women who is 'too drunk' is 'technically rape', but not what people imagine when they think of the much publicised stranger rape that people think of when they say 'rape in South Africa'.
From Statistics South Africa, and the South African Police Service:
Source: Quantitative research findings on
RAPE in South Africa (Statistics South Africa)
http://www.statssa.gov.za/Publications/Rape/Rape.pdf
REPORTING: " Table 4: The rate of reporting rape to the police and reasons for not reporting (all figures are weighted)
Reporting to the police
Yes 56,2%
No 43,8%
So if 56.2% are reported to the police are 50,000, to total number of rapes per year are 89,000, in a population of 50,000 million and about 25 million women. Not the 400,000 rapes claimed by the MRC, and not the 1.1 million claimed by the 'only 3% of rapes in South Africa are reported' crowd.
CONCLUSION
Do not believe stories about Africa that are based on 'Staggering Statistics', because it is just too cheap a tactic to use and abuse. Always demand to see the original research before you believe it.
That's all I'm saying. I could spend a week getting together all the data I have, but I think this would suffice.
The carrying capacity of the planet is finite for all species...including our own. When a species becomes larger than the carrying capacity, the planet disposes of the surplus through illness or starvation..
Just exactly how many human beings should we have before we begin harvesting roaches for food? After they are gone, then what? Algae? After we eat algae into extinction like we are doing with fish, then what. Soylent Green? Corpses turned into edible wafers?
Probably most countries should attempt to stop population growth. regardless of race.
The sustainable environmental carrying capacity of the U.S. is about 1/3 of its current population. Depleting and destroying our soils, watersheds and aquafiers so we can support more than that in the short-term is rather stupid. Our grandchildren or great grandchildren will probably curse us for it.
I like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz's definition of sustainable. It means it can go on forever.Population growth can't do that .Neither can our depletion of natural resources at even current rates."That which is unsustainable won't be sustained" - Stiglitz.
There was a biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. We did that....perhaps too well.
Without predators, rabbits will multiply themselves into starvation. Human beings aren't rabbits. We don't have to unconsciously do that. We can see limits. Rabbits can't.
Retired Monk - "Ideology is a disease"
Thanks for the sanity therapy. Roger, your wilco goes over and out. Pile up the anecdotal and ignore the obvious. If exceptions prove the rule, your case is exceptional. But, if you were right, what a wonderful world it would be...Alfred E. Neuman.
DRC,
" But, if you were right, what a wonderful world it would be...Alfred E. Neuman. "
I am right. There are very obvious, very real problems. The problem is that when they are mis-identified, they cannot be solved.
The biggest single problem throughout all of Africa (and frankly much of the rest of the world, including the Middle East) is that the ownership of natural resources is not permanently vested in the people of the country or their governments.
If all natural resources had to be
a) sold to the State at cost only and
b) sold by the State at international market prices
then 99% of all the wars and conflicts in Africa (DRC, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, etc.) would evaporate. They would completely disappear.
At the same time, money (not debt) would be available for physical and human infrastructure growth. Add to that decentralisation to local government levels, and you would pretty much get democracy everywhere.
All the poverty, all the conflicts can be reduced to the fact that people are allowed to jockey for position for being the bribe taker for transnational corporations and their IMF/World Bank enablers.