Yesterday we reported on the shocking institutional abuse of disabled patients in NHS care homes throughout Cornwall. Once again, a supposedly caring and civilised society turns out to hide shameful treatment of its most vulnerable members.
Take David, for example (not his real name). He suffers from cerebral palsy and was cared for in the Tintagel ward of the newly-built (and award-winning) Ley Line Hospital. What should have been a caring, supportive environment was in fact a waking nightmare of emotional and physical abuse, for which no staff have yet been called to account.
There is action the Government could take which would eliminate such abuses. Compulsory scanning and tests for all expectant mothers would detect the vast majority of the infirmities with which people like David are afflicted. These could then be treated in the womb by compulsory termination. In an age when millions of so-called 'healthy' foetuses are, quite properly, discarded, surely it is an anachronism to allow parents freely to give birth to those who would really be better off dead.
Tomorrow - Our Shame - Why Britain Is Still Discriminating Against The Disabled
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Moorhen chicks on the Curate's Pond
Ah, the cycle of nature ! Score for the last fortnight :
2 cockerels and a hen taken by the fox - all pinched off the back lawn around six in the evening. The cheek of it. Obviously feeding cubs. Poor hens are being kept in their runs and I'm cutting down some of the garden greenery to give a clear field of fire from the house.
Six moorhen chicks on the pond - of which two weeks later three or four still remain, despite cat, crows, magpies. Ahhhh ! They get into the hen-run to pinch food, then can't get out, so we've handled most of them.
More ambivalent Muslim opinion.
"The Populus survey for The Times and ITV News has found that more than one in ten thinks that the men who carried out the London bombings of 7/7 should be regarded as “martyrs”. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims, equivalent to more than 150,000 adults, believe that while the attacks were wrong, the cause was right."
Bob Rowthorn speaks the obvious.
"If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.
Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.
The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.
For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. The economy becomes dependent on a constant influx of immigrants who are willing to accept low pay and poor working conditions. That is what Labour ministers mean when they insist that "public services would collapse without immigrants".
2 cockerels and a hen taken by the fox - all pinched off the back lawn around six in the evening. The cheek of it. Obviously feeding cubs. Poor hens are being kept in their runs and I'm cutting down some of the garden greenery to give a clear field of fire from the house.
Six moorhen chicks on the pond - of which two weeks later three or four still remain, despite cat, crows, magpies. Ahhhh ! They get into the hen-run to pinch food, then can't get out, so we've handled most of them.
More ambivalent Muslim opinion.
"The Populus survey for The Times and ITV News has found that more than one in ten thinks that the men who carried out the London bombings of 7/7 should be regarded as “martyrs”. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims, equivalent to more than 150,000 adults, believe that while the attacks were wrong, the cause was right."
Bob Rowthorn speaks the obvious.
"If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.
Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.
The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.
For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. The economy becomes dependent on a constant influx of immigrants who are willing to accept low pay and poor working conditions. That is what Labour ministers mean when they insist that "public services would collapse without immigrants".
"He very often tells us how glad he is to be alive"
Man recovers after 19-year coma.
"When Terry Wallis’s pick-up truck crashed through a barrier on a mountain road, plunging into a dry river bed, doctors gave the teenager little chance of survival. The accident, which killed one of his companions, left him with severe head injuries, in a coma and paralysed from the neck down.
That was in 1984. Mr Wallis, a farmer’s son from Arkansas, remained in a minimally conscious state (MCS) and outwardly unresponsive for years, until doctors witnessed what they have described as a medical miracle. In 2003, after 19 years, Mr Wallis called out to his mother and asked for a can of Pepsi.
Scientists from Cornell University, New York, believe that a slow process of brain repair and neural reconnection prompted Mr Wallis’s recovery.
A study of the structure of his brain has revealed that neuronal cells in relatively undamaged areas have grown important connections over a period of years."
Hillsborough victim Tony Bland was deliberately starved to death by doctors. Four years later, another Hillsborough 'PVS' victim, Andrew Devine, had recovered enough to be able to communicate.
I'm sure there's a good reason why the people who support starving people like Tony Bland and Andrew Devine to death are the same people who consider that executing murderers is an affront to a civilised society. Just can't quite see what it is.
"When Terry Wallis’s pick-up truck crashed through a barrier on a mountain road, plunging into a dry river bed, doctors gave the teenager little chance of survival. The accident, which killed one of his companions, left him with severe head injuries, in a coma and paralysed from the neck down.
That was in 1984. Mr Wallis, a farmer’s son from Arkansas, remained in a minimally conscious state (MCS) and outwardly unresponsive for years, until doctors witnessed what they have described as a medical miracle. In 2003, after 19 years, Mr Wallis called out to his mother and asked for a can of Pepsi.
Scientists from Cornell University, New York, believe that a slow process of brain repair and neural reconnection prompted Mr Wallis’s recovery.
A study of the structure of his brain has revealed that neuronal cells in relatively undamaged areas have grown important connections over a period of years."
Hillsborough victim Tony Bland was deliberately starved to death by doctors. Four years later, another Hillsborough 'PVS' victim, Andrew Devine, had recovered enough to be able to communicate.
I'm sure there's a good reason why the people who support starving people like Tony Bland and Andrew Devine to death are the same people who consider that executing murderers is an affront to a civilised society. Just can't quite see what it is.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Two Good Things
Firefox. Why didn't I switch years ago ?
And Windows updates - an increasingly dangerous option for those of us who occasionally do a re-install and need to get the updates all over again.
If you have Netscape or Firefox, update via WindizUpdate. Most impressed.
And Windows updates - an increasingly dangerous option for those of us who occasionally do a re-install and need to get the updates all over again.
If you have Netscape or Firefox, update via WindizUpdate. Most impressed.
Racism
The game - same as last time.
It's a little incident before kick-off that caught my attention. As Beckham stepped up to the microphone and started telling us about the evils of racism, my daughter said 'what about people who are racist to us ?' then told me a story.
The day before, Susan took our two youngest up to Ragley Hall near Stratford-on Avon, which has a giant kids adventure playground. Daughter and son were playing when they were approached by two older boys whom she described as 'brown'.
To my son : "What's your name, white chocolate ?"
To my daughter : "What's your name, white pussy ?"
She is nine years old. She didn't get the sexual reference but she knew they weren't trying to be nice. "I ignored them", she said. Probably a good thing I wasn't there.
She, like primary school children all over England, has been taught that racism is something bad that white people do to brown people. The people who teach her grew up in a world where that was just about a feasible approach, but they're educating children who will grow up in a world where they will be the minority in increasingly large areas. By teaching such things they're betraying those kids.
It's a little incident before kick-off that caught my attention. As Beckham stepped up to the microphone and started telling us about the evils of racism, my daughter said 'what about people who are racist to us ?' then told me a story.
The day before, Susan took our two youngest up to Ragley Hall near Stratford-on Avon, which has a giant kids adventure playground. Daughter and son were playing when they were approached by two older boys whom she described as 'brown'.
To my son : "What's your name, white chocolate ?"
To my daughter : "What's your name, white pussy ?"
She is nine years old. She didn't get the sexual reference but she knew they weren't trying to be nice. "I ignored them", she said. Probably a good thing I wasn't there.
She, like primary school children all over England, has been taught that racism is something bad that white people do to brown people. The people who teach her grew up in a world where that was just about a feasible approach, but they're educating children who will grow up in a world where they will be the minority in increasingly large areas. By teaching such things they're betraying those kids.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Bulger Killers ...
He Speaks !
The great Frank 'the unthinkable' Field on immigration. Frank is one of those happy few on the left who will accept that fear of crime, the underclass, and benefit dependency are not artefacts produced by a Daily Mail editorial conference, but descriptions of what is. He also appreciates that it is the poor who are the chief victims.
"Mr Field, a former welfare minister, questioned whether this level of immigration was sustainable without "dramatic" changes to the character of the country and hitting poorer areas, which have to absorb migrants.
"This is the most massive transformation of our population. Do we just merely accept this as another form of globalisation? That it doesn't matter where you are, or that you belong to a country and have roots? That we are all just following the jobs?" Mr Field told the BBC News Website.
People who questioned mass immigration were often accused of "playing the race card" but, Mr Field argued, this was "just another way of closing down debate".
The Birkenhead MP added: "There will be economic gains [from immigration] but I am just raising whether any country can sustain the rate of immigration we are now suffering."
Frank, btw, your website is the slowest in human history.
"Mr Field, a former welfare minister, questioned whether this level of immigration was sustainable without "dramatic" changes to the character of the country and hitting poorer areas, which have to absorb migrants.
"This is the most massive transformation of our population. Do we just merely accept this as another form of globalisation? That it doesn't matter where you are, or that you belong to a country and have roots? That we are all just following the jobs?" Mr Field told the BBC News Website.
People who questioned mass immigration were often accused of "playing the race card" but, Mr Field argued, this was "just another way of closing down debate".
The Birkenhead MP added: "There will be economic gains [from immigration] but I am just raising whether any country can sustain the rate of immigration we are now suffering."
Frank, btw, your website is the slowest in human history.
Another Day ...
... another initiative overturned by the courts.
"A key plank of the government's anti-terrorism laws has been dealt a blow by the High Court. A senior judge said control orders made against six men break European human rights laws. Ministers say they will appeal against the ruling. The orders are imposed on people suspected of terrorism but where there is not enough evidence to go to court. They mean suspects can be tagged, confined to their homes, and banned from communicating with others.
In his ruling, Mr Justice Sullivan said control orders were incompatible with Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which outlaws indefinite detention without trial."
The initiative, of course, replaced another initiative. Which was also overturned by the courts.
"A key plank of the government's anti-terrorism laws has been dealt a blow by the High Court. A senior judge said control orders made against six men break European human rights laws. Ministers say they will appeal against the ruling. The orders are imposed on people suspected of terrorism but where there is not enough evidence to go to court. They mean suspects can be tagged, confined to their homes, and banned from communicating with others.
In his ruling, Mr Justice Sullivan said control orders were incompatible with Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which outlaws indefinite detention without trial."
The initiative, of course, replaced another initiative. Which was also overturned by the courts.
Slavery Days
Jeremy Black at the SAU blog on :
The beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade.
Expansion.
Eighteenth Century.
Abolition.
The beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade.
Expansion.
Eighteenth Century.
Abolition.
Government Control Of Immigration
"Local services across England are coming under huge strain as a result of unprecedented levels of immigration, council chiefs said yesterday.
They accused the Government of failing to take account of the massive influx of migrant workers, especially from eastern Europe, in their financial settlement for local government.
Over the past 18 months, about 9,000 new National Insurance numbers have been issued in Slough, of which just 150 went to British nationals. Yet, in 2004, the Office for National Statistics recorded only 300 international migrants settling in the area."
"Council evidence suggests that the population is continuing to grow. Workers from Poland were the biggest applicants for National Insurance numbers, at 2,561, followed by Somalians, mainly entering from Holland, at 1,193."
The Pub Philosopher has more on Somali migration.
They accused the Government of failing to take account of the massive influx of migrant workers, especially from eastern Europe, in their financial settlement for local government.
Over the past 18 months, about 9,000 new National Insurance numbers have been issued in Slough, of which just 150 went to British nationals. Yet, in 2004, the Office for National Statistics recorded only 300 international migrants settling in the area."
"Council evidence suggests that the population is continuing to grow. Workers from Poland were the biggest applicants for National Insurance numbers, at 2,561, followed by Somalians, mainly entering from Holland, at 1,193."
The Pub Philosopher has more on Somali migration.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Josephine Rooney Jailed
I posted about Ms Rooney a couple of weeks ago.
"In 10 years, the street's decline has been so rapid that out of 50 houses, only eight are now owner-occupied, the rest have been bought up by absent landlords and converted into cramped bedsits and flats."
Now she's been banged up.
"Josephine Rooney, 69, of Hartington Street, Derby, will spend the next 12 weeks at New Hall jail in Wakefield, West Yorks, but vowed to carry on her fight after she is released.
A fortnight ago she was awarded £1,000 by the Government's Taking a Stand programme for her work in the community where she provides food and drink for the needy.
After a five-minute hearing before magistrates, the district judge, Joanne Alderson, said she was "sadly" left with no option but to impose a suspended sentence handed down last month after Rooney reiterated her refusal to pay. Rooney, looking frail and nervous, was handcuffed and led away."
I love this bit. Think of the number of murders and other crimes committed by people released early from their sentences.
"She will have to serve the full three months because there is no remission on non-payment of fines."
Protcting the public ? Nul point. Protecting the revenue ? Dix point.
(What's happened to Hartington Street is an unintended consequence of Tory legislation which pays housing benefit direct to the landlord. Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Private landlords were the only people we had offers from. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back, but I can't find it - it may not be on the web.)
"In 10 years, the street's decline has been so rapid that out of 50 houses, only eight are now owner-occupied, the rest have been bought up by absent landlords and converted into cramped bedsits and flats."
Now she's been banged up.
"Josephine Rooney, 69, of Hartington Street, Derby, will spend the next 12 weeks at New Hall jail in Wakefield, West Yorks, but vowed to carry on her fight after she is released.
A fortnight ago she was awarded £1,000 by the Government's Taking a Stand programme for her work in the community where she provides food and drink for the needy.
After a five-minute hearing before magistrates, the district judge, Joanne Alderson, said she was "sadly" left with no option but to impose a suspended sentence handed down last month after Rooney reiterated her refusal to pay. Rooney, looking frail and nervous, was handcuffed and led away."
I love this bit. Think of the number of murders and other crimes committed by people released early from their sentences.
"She will have to serve the full three months because there is no remission on non-payment of fines."
Protcting the public ? Nul point. Protecting the revenue ? Dix point.
(What's happened to Hartington Street is an unintended consequence of Tory legislation which pays housing benefit direct to the landlord. Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Private landlords were the only people we had offers from. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back, but I can't find it - it may not be on the web.)
Monday, June 26, 2006
Wow
From Brussels Journal, a long Roger Scruton essay on multiculturalism.
A few highlights :
RTWT. For a long time the Left have viewed immigrants as useful allies in the culture war, without troubling too much about the world-view or culture of the arrivals. Wouldn't they always vote Labour ? Just so did the Kentish king Vortigern view his mercenaries Hengest and Horsa fifteen hundred years ago. They turned out to have ideas and ambitions of their own.
A few highlights :
"Someone who is in a state of denial regarding his mortal illness, his wife’s infidelity or his child’s delinquency will turn angrily on the one who refers to the forbidden truth. Likewise, a political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it, and try its best to silence them. For a long time now the European political class has been in denial about the problems posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our European way of life. It has turned angrily on those who have warned against the disruption that might follow, or who have affirmed the right of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate. And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’. People of my generation have been brought up in fear of this charge, just as the people of Salem were brought up in the fear of being denounced as witches. We saw what happened to Enoch Powell, as a result of a public speech that warned against the dangers. I don’t say that Powell’s speech, in which he referred to ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’, was wise or helpful. On the contrary, it was all too easy to accuse him of scaremongering, and his quotation from the Cumean Sybil in Aeneid Bk VI – which of course nobody recognized – was instantly re-written as ‘rivers of blood’, and he himself dismissed as a dangerous madman. That was virtually the last time that a British politician dared to warn against the effect of large-scale immigration. Since then an uneasy silence has prevailed at the political level, while discussion at every other level has been hampered by the periodic show-trials of those judged to be guilty of ‘racism’ – for example, because they have argued that immigrant communities must integrate, and that separatism is intrinsically dangerous: the position adopted by The Salisbury Review under my editorship, and which was the cause of my own castigation.
By denying a problem you prevent its discussion, until discussion is too late."
"Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘tragedy of the commons’, as our inherited social assets are seized for present use."
"Now I do not doubt that there is such a thing as racism, that it has been immensely destructive and that our governments are right to look for methods to prevent its expression. Racially motivated crime carries an added penalty in English law, and incitement to racial violence is regarded as a serious offence. However, the adoption of such provisions should not blind us to the many double standards that haunt discussion of this issue.
First, the double standard over ‘racism’: a charge constantly levelled against innocent members of the indigenous majority, and almost never levelled against guilty members of immigrant minorities..."
"... It is in the light of these double standards that the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’ should be assessed. It is a charge almost invariably levelled at members of the indigenous communities of Europe, and in particular against those at the bottom of the social scale, for whom mass immigration is a cost that they have not been schooled (and through no fault of their own) to bear. It is levelled too at political parties that attempt to represent those people, and who promise them some relief from a problem that no other party seems willing to address."
RTWT. For a long time the Left have viewed immigrants as useful allies in the culture war, without troubling too much about the world-view or culture of the arrivals. Wouldn't they always vote Labour ? Just so did the Kentish king Vortigern view his mercenaries Hengest and Horsa fifteen hundred years ago. They turned out to have ideas and ambitions of their own.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Spot The Difference
When I saw this BBC report my antennae pricked up.
Thus the £3 billion, taxpayer-funded BBC. Why should a 34-year old take it into his head to try to run over four teenagers in an Oxfordshire village. Was this some underclass 'domestic' - or a law-abiding citizen pushed to the limit - and beyond ?
As is increasingly the case, you have to go elsewhere to find the details.
UPDATE - more in the Guardian and Sun.
Elsewhere the BBC does have some details. From Scallyland :
A 34-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car ran into a group of teenagers has been released on police bail.
The crash happened late on Friday in Jerome Way in Shipton-On-Cherwell, Kidlington, Oxfordshire.
A 17-year-old youth remains in a serious but stable condition in the John Radcliffe hospital after suffering severe head injuries.
Two other 17-year-olds suffered minor injuries and a fourth youth was unhurt.
A man arrested after the crash was bailed on Sunday and told he will have to return to Banbury police station on 25 July.
Thus the £3 billion, taxpayer-funded BBC. Why should a 34-year old take it into his head to try to run over four teenagers in an Oxfordshire village. Was this some underclass 'domestic' - or a law-abiding citizen pushed to the limit - and beyond ?
As is increasingly the case, you have to go elsewhere to find the details.
A man aged 34 was being questioned on suspicion of attempted murder last night after he allegedly mowed down a group of teenagers who had apparently vandalised a car near his house. One of the victims, a 17-year-old, had severe head injuries. Two others aged 17 suffered minor injuries and a fourth was unhurt. A witness in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire said the car’s windows had been smashed with baseball bats and its tyres slashed late on Friday. The four teenagers were run down by a van shortly afterwards.
UPDATE - more in the Guardian and Sun.
Elsewhere the BBC does have some details. From Scallyland :
An 83-year-old man has collapsed and died of a heart attack after a confrontation with youths in a park.
The man argued with two boys in Hesketh Park in Southport, Merseyside, on Saturday afternoon, police said.
A pine cone was thrown at him during the altercation and soon after getting up from a bench he suffered a fatal heart attack.
He was taken to Southport Infirmary where he was pronounced dead. Police are treating the death as suspicious.
The man, who has not been named, is believed to have asked the youths to stop playing football in a rose garden.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
See No Evil ...
We're getting used to this sort of coverage now. Compare the coverage of a South London murder.
First the £3billion, taxpayer-funded BBC.
Then the coverage of Lifestyle Extra, a site run by Pathom Ltd.
First the £3billion, taxpayer-funded BBC.
Then the coverage of Lifestyle Extra, a site run by Pathom Ltd.
Two To View
"Liberals have spent years telling us that racism is a feature of right-wing thinking. So what’s going on in the People’s Republic of Scotland ?" muses Dumb Jon.
And the Coulter/Paxman video is most entertaining. Paxman introduces her as "Ann Coulter, whose right-wing rants ..." then asks "You also believe there is some sort of liberal hegemony in the media, do you ? ... I just don't see how this argument stacks up.".
"No, you're right - with the warm introduction like you just gave me - no - no liberal hegemony there ..."
See it at Youtube.
And the Coulter/Paxman video is most entertaining. Paxman introduces her as "Ann Coulter, whose right-wing rants ..." then asks "You also believe there is some sort of liberal hegemony in the media, do you ? ... I just don't see how this argument stacks up.".
"No, you're right - with the warm introduction like you just gave me - no - no liberal hegemony there ..."
See it at Youtube.
As We Know, The Rich Get Richer, And The Poor ...
... quadruple their population. Or more than.
Willam Rubinstein on the third world population explosion.
Afghanistan: 12,000,000 (1939); 29,929,000 (2005)
Brazil: 44,460,000 (1943); 186,113,000 (2005)
Chad: 1,433,000 (1931); 9,826,000 (2005)
China: 457,835,000 (1936); 1,306,000,000 (2005)
Colombia: 9,523,000 (1942); 42,954,000 (2005)
Congo (ex-Zaire): 10,384,000 (1942); 60,085,000 (2005)
Ethiopia: 12,100,000 (1945); 73,053,000 (2005)
Honduras: 1,106,000 (1940); 6,975,000 (2005)
India - includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka: 388,998,000 (1941); 1,407,000,000 (2005)
Iran: 15,055,000 (1935); 68,018,000 (2005)
South Africa: 10,709,000 (1942); 44,344,000 (2005)
These levels of increase are, of course, simply staggering. They are greater, both in absolute numbers and almost certainly in percentage terms, than anything known before in a relatively short period in human history. They have occurred despite losses in wars and civil wars, such as have occurred in India -Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran-Iraq, among other places, despite totalitarian mass murders as in Communist China, despite immigration abroad, and despite losses through AIDS and other illnesses. In just over sixty years, Brazil's population has increased by 318 per cent; Colombia's by 352 per cent, and Ethiopia's by 503 per cent - and so on, with, in general, the most impoverished of these nations showing the most unbelievable increases.
While everyone knows that the population of the Third World has increased dramatically, how many realize that there are now 73 million people in Ethiopia - more than the population of Britain or France - or 43 million in Colombia ? The supergiants of China (1.3 billion) and the Indian subcontinent (1.4 billion) will be less surprising, perhaps, than the current size of several countries not on the above list, such as Indonesia (242 million), Nigeria (129 million), or Mexico (106 million).
The causes of these vast increases are obvious enough: Western medicine, applied to the eradication of communicable diseases and epidemics and to a decrease in infant mortality, in countries which have not undergone the "demographic transition" to smaller family size and lower rates of population growth, such as Britain experienced after about 1870, and in cultures where birth control and family limitation are shunned.
The consequences of these increases are numerous and are almost always extremely deleterious and dangerous. They include:
- The chronic inability of many of these countries to escape from the "Malthusian trap" via economic growth exceeding population growth. Many Third World countries simply lack the economic or infrastructural base to provide a rising standard of living for most of their people, especially in Africa, the Arab world, and parts of Latin America.
Certainly several of the traditional horsemen, war, famine and plague (HIV/AIDS) have been galloping around Africa for the last few decades - but the population keeps on keeping on. Look at the Congo, basket case of basket cases - yet with a six-fold population increase in 60 years.
Willam Rubinstein on the third world population explosion.
Afghanistan: 12,000,000 (1939); 29,929,000 (2005)
Brazil: 44,460,000 (1943); 186,113,000 (2005)
Chad: 1,433,000 (1931); 9,826,000 (2005)
China: 457,835,000 (1936); 1,306,000,000 (2005)
Colombia: 9,523,000 (1942); 42,954,000 (2005)
Congo (ex-Zaire): 10,384,000 (1942); 60,085,000 (2005)
Ethiopia: 12,100,000 (1945); 73,053,000 (2005)
Honduras: 1,106,000 (1940); 6,975,000 (2005)
India - includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka: 388,998,000 (1941); 1,407,000,000 (2005)
Iran: 15,055,000 (1935); 68,018,000 (2005)
South Africa: 10,709,000 (1942); 44,344,000 (2005)
These levels of increase are, of course, simply staggering. They are greater, both in absolute numbers and almost certainly in percentage terms, than anything known before in a relatively short period in human history. They have occurred despite losses in wars and civil wars, such as have occurred in India -Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran-Iraq, among other places, despite totalitarian mass murders as in Communist China, despite immigration abroad, and despite losses through AIDS and other illnesses. In just over sixty years, Brazil's population has increased by 318 per cent; Colombia's by 352 per cent, and Ethiopia's by 503 per cent - and so on, with, in general, the most impoverished of these nations showing the most unbelievable increases.
While everyone knows that the population of the Third World has increased dramatically, how many realize that there are now 73 million people in Ethiopia - more than the population of Britain or France - or 43 million in Colombia ? The supergiants of China (1.3 billion) and the Indian subcontinent (1.4 billion) will be less surprising, perhaps, than the current size of several countries not on the above list, such as Indonesia (242 million), Nigeria (129 million), or Mexico (106 million).
The causes of these vast increases are obvious enough: Western medicine, applied to the eradication of communicable diseases and epidemics and to a decrease in infant mortality, in countries which have not undergone the "demographic transition" to smaller family size and lower rates of population growth, such as Britain experienced after about 1870, and in cultures where birth control and family limitation are shunned.
The consequences of these increases are numerous and are almost always extremely deleterious and dangerous. They include:
- The chronic inability of many of these countries to escape from the "Malthusian trap" via economic growth exceeding population growth. Many Third World countries simply lack the economic or infrastructural base to provide a rising standard of living for most of their people, especially in Africa, the Arab world, and parts of Latin America.
Certainly several of the traditional horsemen, war, famine and plague (HIV/AIDS) have been galloping around Africa for the last few decades - but the population keeps on keeping on. Look at the Congo, basket case of basket cases - yet with a six-fold population increase in 60 years.
Sorry About That ....
A 50-hour working week and ferrying children home from cricket matches meant no blogging last week. Didn't get home before 9 pm any night.
"Get to the top - I'm too tired to blog" as Eddie Cochran might have said.
More than a few blogworthy items last week, too.
How, when homosexual couples were allowed to foster children, could anyone have predicted this story ?
Two stories I'd have liked to cover, which Drinking From Home has reported on - the Tory who compares the Cross of St George to the swastika, and the latest Pew report on Muslims and the rest (management summary, with contrast slightly turned up - we think they're alright sorts, religion of peace, etc etc. They hate our guts.) To quote this old post :
Lionel Shriver is one of the most clear-eyed Guardianistas around. Her stuff on educated, childless women is top. So's this Guardian piece on migration.
"Get to the top - I'm too tired to blog" as Eddie Cochran might have said.
More than a few blogworthy items last week, too.
How, when homosexual couples were allowed to foster children, could anyone have predicted this story ?
Two stories I'd have liked to cover, which Drinking From Home has reported on - the Tory who compares the Cross of St George to the swastika, and the latest Pew report on Muslims and the rest (management summary, with contrast slightly turned up - we think they're alright sorts, religion of peace, etc etc. They hate our guts.) To quote this old post :
Blair has no intention of doing anything about the chain migration which, along with natural fecundity and a severe shortage of lesbian feminists, will have tripled the Muslim population of places like Bradford in thirty years.
The liberal elite's attitude to Islam reminds me of Churchill's comment about Prince Paul of Serbia, whose nation had deeply offended Hitler by the (anti-German) coup of early 1941, but who feared to provoke Germany by mobilising their armed forces.
Prince Paul's attitude, Churchill wrote, "is that of an unfortunate man in a cage with a tiger - hoping not to provoke him, while steadily dinner time approaches".
DFH (and other commentators) don't seem to have picked up on (IMHO) one of the most unexpected (and disturbing) findings of the Pew Report - that only 44% of Turks think democracy can work in their country. This, remember, is the country that the new director of think-tank Demos believes must join Europe or risk "an intensification of Islamism". Ms Bunting (for it is she) thinks that 80 million Turks in the EU 'could shape a new, prosperous and peaceful accommodation between Islam and the secular west.' And Islam, as Maddy will tell you, has only been violent since the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
Lionel Shriver is one of the most clear-eyed Guardianistas around. Her stuff on educated, childless women is top. So's this Guardian piece on migration.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
A Forgotten Princess
Everyone knows about Pocahontas, the Powhatan Indian princess who ended her life in Gravesend, but few know of Paskwâwimostos, the Cree Indian girl buried in the same graveyard.
She was the daughter of Mahihkan (Grey Wolf), chief of the Cree in Saskatchewan, when in 1701 she caught the eye of George Montagu Danderville Herbert, youngest son of the Marquess of Powis, a forty-year old adventurer exploring the area in the company of an intrepid Hudson Bay Company employee, Henry Kelsey.
Although Herbert had a wife and three children at home in Kent, he took the beautiful young princess back with him and kept her, with a few personal servants, in a lodge in the manor grounds, where she gave birth to two of his children. He also changed her name, which he found difficult to pronounce (it means 'great bison') to the somewhat easier 'Meg'.
Herbert, however, was not an ideal partner. His drunkeness, his many infidelities, his occasional outbursts of violence, the scandal of his openly kept mistress, gave him an ill name in the country round. No respectable landowner would entertain him - no respectable lady would entertain Meg.
She grew bitter, frequently upbraiding him for taking her from her own country. He responded with blows, and then stopped visiting her, reducing her servants to one and restricting her allowance. Her children were taken away to be schooled elsewhere. She never saw her two sons again. Worn down and heartbroken, she died in 1712, aged only around 30.
Despite her unorthodox life, there was widespread pity for her, and a large crowd attended her funeral in Gravesend. When Herbert arrived he was hissed by the crowd and stones and ordure thrown at his carriage.
The Gravesend Recorder printed a special broadsheet edition covering her funeral.
The heading : "Cad Buries Cree Meg"
She was the daughter of Mahihkan (Grey Wolf), chief of the Cree in Saskatchewan, when in 1701 she caught the eye of George Montagu Danderville Herbert, youngest son of the Marquess of Powis, a forty-year old adventurer exploring the area in the company of an intrepid Hudson Bay Company employee, Henry Kelsey.
Although Herbert had a wife and three children at home in Kent, he took the beautiful young princess back with him and kept her, with a few personal servants, in a lodge in the manor grounds, where she gave birth to two of his children. He also changed her name, which he found difficult to pronounce (it means 'great bison') to the somewhat easier 'Meg'.
Herbert, however, was not an ideal partner. His drunkeness, his many infidelities, his occasional outbursts of violence, the scandal of his openly kept mistress, gave him an ill name in the country round. No respectable landowner would entertain him - no respectable lady would entertain Meg.
She grew bitter, frequently upbraiding him for taking her from her own country. He responded with blows, and then stopped visiting her, reducing her servants to one and restricting her allowance. Her children were taken away to be schooled elsewhere. She never saw her two sons again. Worn down and heartbroken, she died in 1712, aged only around 30.
Despite her unorthodox life, there was widespread pity for her, and a large crowd attended her funeral in Gravesend. When Herbert arrived he was hissed by the crowd and stones and ordure thrown at his carriage.
The Gravesend Recorder printed a special broadsheet edition covering her funeral.
The heading : "Cad Buries Cree Meg"
Sunday, June 18, 2006
She's Back - And This Time It's Personal (and Political)
Anyone at college in the late 70s/early 80s with the slightest interest in feminism will remember Marilyn French's "The Women's Room" - as much a fixture on the 1981 student bookshelf as Hesse and Castenada were on the 1971 version.
She's back, with a new book and a long Guardian interview - having, it seems, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. I'd been impressed by 'The Women's Room', empathised with poor Mira ("my taste was bitter, my taste was me" - how the quotes stick in the mind), was awed by feisty Val - it wasn't until some years later that I wondered if all men could really be as bad as that, and if it wasn't a tad overdone.
Ms French is unrepentant : "Well, the men of that generation were stereotypes. I was just being honest."
Amazingly, she couldn't find a publisher for the new work, In The Name of Friendship, which ended up being published in Holland. I'd have thought all the teens and twenties who read it in the eighties would buy another 25 years on. After all, TWR came in at #10 in the recent Woman's Hour fiction poll.
Germaine Greer, who was always media-savvy (anyone remember "Nice Time" on ITV ?) seems to have done rather better for herself than most 70s feminist icons, becoming that most British of instituations, the grande dame. Time was not kind to others.
Shulamith Firestone, whose 'The Dialectic of Sex' left a deep impression on a seventeen-year-old Laban (she said 'men can't love' and I thought I couldn't love. At that age you're the world) ended up in a series of mental institutions. According to this 2000 Andrea Dworkin interview, Firestone was "poor and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk."
Kate Millett, whose "Sexual Politics" could be found on the 1970s middle shelf, somewhere between "The Female Eunuch" and "Titus Groan", also went into mental hospital and wrote about it. For years she survived selling Christmas trees and at 62, poor and unable to find an academic post, penned this cri de coeur in the Guardian.
"I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot teach and have nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no longer farm, what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing print. I have no saleable skill, for all my supposed accomplishments. I am unemployable. Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone ?"
She's no longer cutting trees, anyway.
Here's something not so completely different - the very wonderful Christina Hoff Sommers review of Harvey Mansfield's book "Manliness".
"One of the least visited memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."
The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."
Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name."
Mansfield takes a different perspective on 70s feminists :
"In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women. . . . What interested [feminists] in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as fact--God is Dead--and the possibility of creating a new order in its place." Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche. But many did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism. In Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag." Far from being critical of Nietzsche's hypermasculine fantasies, his "will to power," and his rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic--she embraced it all and urged women to emulate it.
Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." She rejected the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an authoritative moral order. When she said that women must seek "transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a "tragedy" for women; both are traps that are incompatible with female subjectivity and freedom. She described the pregnant woman as "a stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg." She compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery.
Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists. The early feminists questioned the rigidity of sex roles, but they never doubted that there was such a thing as human nature, and that women had distinctive roles to play in the family and society. Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to be free of all roles. Toward what end? She did not specify. Beauvoir's womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan. In the decades following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine.
Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they are less effective at being true Nietzscheans. Unlike radicals in other social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never engaged in violence. None went to jail. So how did they succeed in changing American society?
As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices." They formed "consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training" workshops. Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of sexism. Tantalized by the Nietzschean idea that knowledge was a form of power, and not the result of disinterested inquiry, feminist scholars went on a rampage "reinventing" knowledge. In the academy, women took full advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and thwart women.
She's back, with a new book and a long Guardian interview - having, it seems, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. I'd been impressed by 'The Women's Room', empathised with poor Mira ("my taste was bitter, my taste was me" - how the quotes stick in the mind), was awed by feisty Val - it wasn't until some years later that I wondered if all men could really be as bad as that, and if it wasn't a tad overdone.
Ms French is unrepentant : "Well, the men of that generation were stereotypes. I was just being honest."
Amazingly, she couldn't find a publisher for the new work, In The Name of Friendship, which ended up being published in Holland. I'd have thought all the teens and twenties who read it in the eighties would buy another 25 years on. After all, TWR came in at #10 in the recent Woman's Hour fiction poll.
Germaine Greer, who was always media-savvy (anyone remember "Nice Time" on ITV ?) seems to have done rather better for herself than most 70s feminist icons, becoming that most British of instituations, the grande dame. Time was not kind to others.
Shulamith Firestone, whose 'The Dialectic of Sex' left a deep impression on a seventeen-year-old Laban (she said 'men can't love' and I thought I couldn't love. At that age you're the world) ended up in a series of mental institutions. According to this 2000 Andrea Dworkin interview, Firestone was "poor and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk."
Kate Millett, whose "Sexual Politics" could be found on the 1970s middle shelf, somewhere between "The Female Eunuch" and "Titus Groan", also went into mental hospital and wrote about it. For years she survived selling Christmas trees and at 62, poor and unable to find an academic post, penned this cri de coeur in the Guardian.
"I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot teach and have nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no longer farm, what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing print. I have no saleable skill, for all my supposed accomplishments. I am unemployable. Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone ?"
She's no longer cutting trees, anyway.
Here's something not so completely different - the very wonderful Christina Hoff Sommers review of Harvey Mansfield's book "Manliness".
"One of the least visited memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."
The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."
Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name."
Mansfield takes a different perspective on 70s feminists :
"In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women. . . . What interested [feminists] in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as fact--God is Dead--and the possibility of creating a new order in its place." Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche. But many did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism. In Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag." Far from being critical of Nietzsche's hypermasculine fantasies, his "will to power," and his rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic--she embraced it all and urged women to emulate it.
Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." She rejected the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an authoritative moral order. When she said that women must seek "transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a "tragedy" for women; both are traps that are incompatible with female subjectivity and freedom. She described the pregnant woman as "a stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg." She compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery.
Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists. The early feminists questioned the rigidity of sex roles, but they never doubted that there was such a thing as human nature, and that women had distinctive roles to play in the family and society. Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to be free of all roles. Toward what end? She did not specify. Beauvoir's womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan. In the decades following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine.
Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they are less effective at being true Nietzscheans. Unlike radicals in other social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never engaged in violence. None went to jail. So how did they succeed in changing American society?
As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices." They formed "consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training" workshops. Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of sexism. Tantalized by the Nietzschean idea that knowledge was a form of power, and not the result of disinterested inquiry, feminist scholars went on a rampage "reinventing" knowledge. In the academy, women took full advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and thwart women.
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