Archive for September 2009

The future will be crowded. It’s clear that the world’s population will increase, but by how much? The United Nations predicts that by the middle of the 21st century, population growth will slow down significantly, and the world population will stabilize at around 9 billion people - compared to 6.8 billion at present. For the sake of comparison, this forecast states that over the next four decades, the population will increase by “only” 50 percent, whereas over the past four decades it increased by 100 percent.

The UN bases its forecast on a trend of declining fertility rates in many countries, including many in the developing world. The organization expects that in the coming decades, the global fertility rate will be 1.9 children per woman - meaning a lower rate of population growth - as opposed to the current 2.56 children per woman.

Many variables affect this situation: Indeed, no one can precisely estimate the impact of employment, education and infrastructure in most of the developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia - regions that are expected to account for 95 percent of world population growth. In particular, it is unclear what the state of women’s education and employment will be, both of which are key factors in population growth.

Furthermore, it is difficult to assess the success of family planning programs. The U.S. organization Worldwatch estimates more than 700 million women around the globe are currently at risk of unplanned pregnancy due to a lack of birth control or the improper use of it.

While the United States is working on the assumption that the world will be able to support this growth, many scientists are unsure of how it will affect our lives. One well-known debate on this subject is that between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon.

Four decades ago, in his best-seller, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich argued that the population explosion is irreversibly destroying the earth’s resources. Simon claimed these prophecies of doom and destruction were wrong. In 1980 he challenged Ehrlich to a bet, on how the prices of five metals would change over the following decade. Simon said they would continue to be readily available; Ehrlich said they would become more expensive due to a lack of supply. Simon won and claimed that Ehrlich and his colleagues do not appreciate man’s ability to be efficient and innovative with resources.

A while ago, Ehrlich published “The Dominant Animal” with his wife Anne, in which he admitted he had been “way too optimistic. In many ways, the situation is far worse today than I could have imagined when I wrote ‘The Population Bomb.’ We did not predict the massive loss of tropical rainforests. We thought climate change would affect us much later in the century. The seas have been exhausted much earlier than anyone had thought. Some 10 million people die from hunger and hunger-related disease every year.”
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Mark Levin_________________________Glenn Beck

President Obama still plans an amnesty in the near, though unspecific, future, according to threats continuing to burble out of the White House.

That’s despite record unemployment and widespread misery throughout the land.

Obama’s Treason Lobby supporters nag him constantly that he promised to reward illegal alien lawbreakers. So there’s no danger he will be allowed to forget.

We have become so desensitized to Washington’s daily cruelty to average Americans that the systematic displacement of citizens in the workplace is accepted as the norm. Plus, not only is the White House guaranteeing to reward millions of aliens for violating U.S. sovereignty, but legal immigration on auto-pilot continues to dump 125,000 new workers per month into America’s already flooded labor market.

In boom times, captains of industry demanded additional foreign workers and got them. But now, when 15 million Americans are jobless, there is no corresponding reduction.

Why is that? Is there no OFF switch anywhere in Washington? An immigration moratorium, a time-out , would be sensible public policy and would relieve a lot of pain among citizens.

But there is no such legislation in Congress.

Has America drifted into an alternative universe where evil rules? Perhaps traditional citizens have been a little late in finding their voice in townhalls and tea parties.

Interestingly, President Obama understands something of the principle of supply and demand regarding employment—as he demonstrated in his CNN interview broadcast September 20:

“I think we’ll be adding jobs, but you need 150,000 additional jobs each month just to keep pace with a growing population,” the president said. “So if we’re only adding 50,000 jobs, that’s a great reversal from losing 700,000 jobs [a month] early this year—but, you know, it means that we’ve still got a ways to go.” [Obama: Economy probably won't produce enough jobs until 2010]

Among Americans, the economy is the top concern. An August Gallup poll found that 31 percent of workers personally feared losing their job, a new high and double the rate of a year ago. A Harris Poll taken in early September noted that 60 percent of Americans polled gave the President a negative rating on handling the economy.

Yet Washington and the elite media are stuck on healthcare. It’s certainly important and needs fixing. But unemployment is worsening (now at 9.7 percent nationally), and badly so in many regions and job sectors.

In August, 42 states lost jobs (an increase of 29 states from July) with a nationwide total of 216,000 persons laid off.
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Yes, you read that correctly. It took one thousand, three hundred heavily armed police officers to arrest 46 gang members in LA.

Since the 1950s, the Avenues gang has terrorised northeast Los Angeles. Families targeted by the organisation — in particular African-Americans — would wake up one morning to find a chalk outline of a body drawn on their driveway.

Some people were murdered in their homes. Joggers who passed through the “wrong” territory would be pistol-whipped. One woman complained of being pushed off her bicycle while her husband was threatened with a Stanley knife.

But after a police raid on Tuesday involving more than 1,000 officers and 300 federal agents, prosecutors say they have finally shut the organisation down.

———-

After Monday’s pre-dawn raid 46 gang members were arrested, with nine remaining at large.

“There are parents today that don’t have to run to the bus stop to make sure that their kids don’t get jumped because they have an iPod, or because they are carrying books, or because they have lunch money,” said Ed Reyes, a City councillor, after the raid. “This is the daily terror that gangs like the Avenues impose.”

For years, concern had been growing in Los Angeles that the Avenues gang — which takes its name from the numbered avenues that cross Figueroa Street — was beyond the law. On gang websites members were posting statements such as “Avenidas don’t get chased by the cops. We chase them,” and, “Avenidas don’t just hurt people. We kill them.”

Oh yeah, I’m sure the gang has been “shut down.” If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Besides, there are tens of thousands of gang bangers in LA. If it takes a raid involving 1300 heavily armed cops to round up only 46 of these scum, how in the world do the authorities ever think they’re going to deal with the tens of thousands of others?

Just imagine how much this one raid cost us. Then add in all the costs resulting from non-white crime across America for jail, prison, investigations, court proceedings, public defenders, translators, hospital payments for the victims, etc., etc. There’s no estimating how much this madness is costing us in just dollars, let alone the long term cultural costs.

And this wasn’t a police operation. It was a military style operation. Liberals and libertarians are always talking about how bad a police state is, but refuse to face the fact that in a country that is increasingly filled with non-whites, the only two choices are a police state, or blood running in the streets.
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Bull run is over: Spain is sliding into a full-blown economic depression akin to that seen in the 1930s Photo: AP

The Madrid research group RR de Acuña & Asociados said the collapse of Spain’s building industry will cause the economy to contract for the next three years, with a peak to trough loss of over 11pc of GDP. The grim forecast is starkly at odds with claims by premier Jose Luis Zapatero, who still says Spain’s recession will be milder than elsewhere in Europe.

RR de Acuña said the overhang of unsold properties on the market, or still being built, has reached 1,623,000 . This dwarfs annual demand of 218,000, and will take six or seven years to clear. The group said Spain’s unemployment will peak at around 25pc, comparable to the worst chapter of the Great Depression.

Spanish workers typically receive 50pc to 60pc of their former pay for eighteen months after losing their job. Then the guillotine falls. Spain’s parliament has rushed through a law guaranteeing €420 a month for long-term unemployed, but this will not prevent a social crisis if the slump drags on.

Separately, UBS said unemployment will reach 4.8m and may go as high as 5.4m if the job purge in the service sector gathers pace. There is the growing risk of a “Lost Decade” akin to Japan’s malaise after the Nikkei bubble.

Roberto Ruiz, the bank’s Spain strategist, said salaries must fall by 10pc in real terms to regain lost competitiveness, replicating the sort of wage squeeze seen in Germany after reunification.
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From the Archives of FrontPageMagazine.com

Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending.  When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America. To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)

In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.

The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:

In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.

What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.

The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:

Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”

No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.

Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred.  But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers a traditionalist conservative perspective at View from the Right.

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.

First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
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HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) — A desperate Zimbabwean farmer fighting to hold onto his land — a year after the country’s political rivals pledged to govern jointly — fears he will eventually lose to politics and violence.

Ben Freeth’s farm was gutted by fire, as was his father-in-law’s.

The power-sharing agreement included an undertaking by both parties to ensure property rights are upheld but farm attacks and invasions continue unabated in Zimbabwe.

Charles Lock is one of an estimated 400 farmers who have remained in the country despite President Robert Mugabe’s policy of redistributing white-owned farms to landless blacks.

“Why do they want to remove me when I’ve complied with everything they want? What more do they want other than for me to pack my bags and leave and if that’s the case, then admit that that is the policy. Pass a law: no whites are allowed to farm. Then it makes it clear,” Lock said.

Since 2000, Mugabe’s controversial land reform program has driven more than 4,000 commercial farmers off their land, destroying Zimbabwe’s once prosperous agricultural sector.

“When the land reform program began, we decided we were not going to have a confrontational attitude; that we would actually go along with this program because it was the only way that this whole thing would be sorted out. So I voluntarily gave away my own farm and moved onto my father-in-law’s farm,” Lock said.

That was in 2002. A year later the government came knocking on his door again, he said, demanding more land.

Lock told CNN he eventually gave up 70 percent of his father-in-law’s farm, which he then owned. Now an army general is demanding Lock’s remaining 30 percent.

When Zimbabwe’s new unity government was formed — with Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change — in February this year, the general allegedly posted soldiers on Lock’s farm. The farmer said he stopped farming and trade at gun point.
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Diversity Fight at Center of Wake Schools Race

“I can’t imagine why they’re so proud to support a policy which is only graduating 54 percent of the group that they claim to be heroes for.”

There’s no mistaking where the school board candidates in northern and eastern Wake County stand on hot-button issues such as student reassignment, school funding and the diversity policy.

Voters in District 1 who think the Wake school system is moving in the right direction and want to preserve the diversity policy will likely choose Rita Rakestraw, who has the backing of groups who support current policies.

But those who think Wake is out of control and spends too much time on busing can choose between Chris Malone and Debbie Vair.

The decision voters will make in two weeks in District 1 could help decide whether Wake continues its nationally recognized diversity policy or moves to a system of neighborhood schools.

“This is the most important school board election in 30 years,” said Rakestraw, a former teacher. “Our community is at a crossroads.”

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The diversity policy has emerged as a sharp dividing line for the candidates. At issue is Wake’s practice of trying to balance the percentages of low-income students at each school, a policy that causes some students to be bused to more distant schools.

“Diversity is a fine thing,” said Malone, a former Wake Forest town commissioner. “We should strive to know more about other cultures and encourage understanding. But that has to be secondary to the primary goal of education.”

But for Rakestraw, keeping schools balanced is an important part of providing a high-quality education. She credits the diversity policy with keeping schools healthy, fueling economic growth and leading to Wake having a higher SAT score than the national average and a higher graduation rate than the state average.

Getting to diversity

Rakestraw warns that dropping the diversity policy will lead to resegregation and an increase in the number of high-poverty schools. She says that this would result in higher taxes to help fund those high-needs schools.

“It’s a good school system, but if we get rid of economic diversity, it’s going to be really harmful for the school system and the economy,” she said.

But Malone and Vair say concerns about resegregation are overblown. They say that allowing children to go to schools closer to where they live will help academics by increasing parental involvement.

“Our neighborhoods are diverse,” said Vair, a former school PTA president. “Diversity is something done in the ’60s. Our children need to stay in their neighborhoods. If any school has the right programs and teachers, it will succeed.”

Malone questions the success of the diversity policy by pointing to the recent decline in Wake’s overall graduation rate and how the district’s 54.6 percent graduation rate for low-income students is below the state average.

“I can’t imagine why they’re so proud to support a policy which is only graduating 54 percent of the group that they claim to be heroes for,” Malone said.

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Original article

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Massive pot harvest continues

When the plane discovered the farm Tuesday, the growers on site apparently began burning several of what McKinney described as bunkhouses. By the time law enforcement on the ground arrived at the farm, no one was found.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MAINE DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENCY Some of the marijuana plants authorities seized in Washington County are shown.

TOWNSHIP 37, Maine — More than 60 law enforcement officers continued Thursday to harvest massive, high-quality marijuana plants at a remote location in Washington County. Not only is the seizure the largest in Maine’s history, the multimillion-dollar operation was the first of its kind seen in the state, according to drug enforcement officials.

The pot plantation was discovered Tuesday when a law enforcement plane scoured the area after Maine State Police Troop J received a tip on its Web site.

Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Director Roy McKinney, who was on site Thursday, said the size, scope and detail of the farming operation was quite surprising.

“We have never seen this type of operation in Maine before,” he said.

No one had been arrested as of Thursday and McKinney would not identify who owns the land.

He confirmed that it was a plantation or farm, where caretakers of the crop lived 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “These are the types of operations we see on the West Coast. In Maine, when marijuana is grown in remote locations, someone usually hikes in and checks it periodically. These growers were living right here.”
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