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There Are More Boys Than Girls in China and India

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Preference for sons could spell trouble for China and India

It’s one thing to wish for a boy or a girl when pregnant; but it’s something else entirely to take steps to guarantee your wish comes true. Enter China and India, where the ratio of boys to girls is so lopsided that economists project there may be as many as 30 to 40 million more men than women of marriageable age in both countries by 2020.

The question is: Why? It’s more than just the historic birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Both abortion and infanticide, largely triggered by a long-time limit of one child per family in China, each played a role. The skewed populations have prompted Chinese men, left with a limited pool of potential brides at home, to seek wives in other regions of their own countries as well as those abroad. But a dearth of mates isn’t the only concern for population giants China and India, which together account for 2.4 billion of the 6.7 billion people on Earth.

There are 119 boys born for every 100 girls in China today, compared with 108.5 boys per 100 girls during the 1980s. Recent national data is less comprehensive for India, but census records show 115 boys born for every 100 girls in 2003. That represents a major leap from 104 boys per 100 girls in 1981. By comparison, the U.S. is closer to average: 105 boys for every 100 girls this year.

The growing imbalance slows in older age because women tend to outlive men, with the ratio in both countries falling to about 106 men per 100 women after age 60. But such figures are cold comfort for younger men who lack marriage prospects in their age groups.

China’s lopsided population woes began in the early 1980s when its government began enforcing a one child per couple rule. The cap was first adopted in 1979 as part of a series of ongoing measures to curb population growth to help the government manage the country’s still-limited resources. The move correlated with an attempt by Chinese authorities to improve healthcare that included taking portable ultrasound machines to the most isolated rural villages, which gave women advanced knowledge of the sex of her fetus.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Could we start industrial society from scratch today?

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

– An excellent article over on Resource Insights Blog. Kurt Cobb writes some good stuff and I’ve had his Blog listed in my Blogroll for some time.

– The point he’s making here is one I’ve thought about for years. Though I would have said before that we might rise and crash two or three times in succession until we figured out how to either establish a steady-state relationship with the biosphere or until the resources were too depleted to support another rise.

– After reading his piece, I think I’m in the “we have just one change to get this right” camp now.

– This sort of thinking has been around for awhile. Here’s a quote from Sir Fred Hoyle in Of Men and Galaxies, 1964:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

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By Kurt Cobb

Could we start industrial society from scratch today? The answer is probably not. While such a question seems merely hypothetical, its answer has important implications regarding the prospects for a sustainable industrial future.

The reason it would be so difficult to start an industrial society from scratch today is that most of the natural resources associated with advanced societies have been drawn down to a point where it would be difficult to extract what’s left without an up-and-running industrial system. It is worth quoting at length Harrison Brown, author of “The Challenge of Man’s Future,” writing on this point in 1954:

Our ancestors had available large resources of high-grade ores and fuels that could be processed by the most primitive technology–crystals of copper and pieces of coal that lay on the surface of the earth, easily mined iron, and petroleum in generous pools reached by shallow drilling. Now we must dig huge caverns and follow seams ever further underground, drill oil wells thousands of feet deep, many of them under the bed of the ocean, and find ways of extracting the leanest ores–procedures that are possible only because of our highly complex modern techniques, and practical only to an intricately mechanized culture which could not have been developed without the high-grade resources that are so rapidly vanishing.

As our dependence shifts to such resources as low-grade ores, rock, seawater, and the sun, the conversion of energy into useful work will require ever more intricate technical activity, which would be impossible in the absence of a variety of complex machines and their products–all of which are the result of our intricate industrial civilization, and which would be impossible without it. Thus, if a machine civilization were to stop functioning as the result of some catastrophe, it is difficult to see how man would again be able to start along the path of industrialization with the resources that would then be available to him.

What Brown is really describing is a lack of resilience in modern industrial civilization. It lacks the redundancy built into agrarian cultures because the whole system has become so specialized and interdependent. For example, rare earth minerals are critical to the functioning of modern electronics, in the making of strong magnets useful in such things as hybrid cars and as catalysts in chemical processing. Some 90 percent of these elements currently come from China. Any cutoff could prove difficult for the rest of the world. There are other known deposits of rare earth elements, but it would take time to develop them and start up production.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Letter to a young idealist

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

R.,

A few more thoughts along the same lines I talked about previously.

All of humanity’s history has been a series of incremental advances along multiple paths; business, social organization, military, agriculture, technological, etc. In all of this, the thought has primarily been to advance, empower and grow.

Now, for the first time in humanity’s history, we have filled the planet and have begun to hit various unyielding limits; water, food, oil, pollution, as well as limits having to do with how much impact we can have on the biosphere without causing huge shifts in the demographics of various species and even causing their extinctions.

It is clear, if humanity wants to continue to live indefinitely on this planet, that we are going to have to shift from a growth and advance strategy in all we do to one predicated on establishing a steady-state and sustainable balance with the biosphere around us.

We cannot use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. We cannot occupy more of the planet’s surface than is consistent with allowing the rest of the planet’s biology to exist and flourish. These both imply that our population has to come down to some sustainable number and be held there. We have to come up with ways to govern ourselves that are consistent with establishing and maintaining these essential balances. Nation against nation, system against system is not compatible with long term survival. The ultimate goal and purpose of government in an enlightened world should be to secure all of our futures (we and all the rest of the planet’s biology) and maintain the balance.

We could, if we cut our population to sustainable levels and learned to live within a sustainable footprint on this planet, exist here for tens of thousands of years and maintain a decent quality of life for all those who are alive at any specific point in time. We do not have to give up comfort or technology – we just have to dial our impact on the planet back to sustainable levels and stay with in those levels.

Anything that the Gates Foundation or any other forward looking organization works on that does not include long term goals like these is likely in the big picture to just be a shuffling of our problems from one place to the other rather than a real indefinite-term planet-wide solution to how our species is going to solve the problem of learning to live here without fouling our nest for ourselves and all the other species that depend on this planet’s biosphere.

Tags:Gates Foundation
Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Human Rights, Immigration Stress, Nuclear Waste, Ocean Dead Zones, Pandemics, Peak Oil, Personal, Philosophical, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Women's Rights | No Comments »

History brewing…

Friday, July 18th, 2008

– Here’s my take on what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment. Like so much going on around us now, it is in almost everyone’s best interests to keep things stable. But, on the other hand, entire forests can be lost to just one careless match.

– I correspond a lot with friends off on the side from this Blog. The following is my half of a recent exchange with a friend of mine who lives in Europe.

– All food for thought in a changing world.

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M.,

I share your concerns about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. And I agree that Turkey, Pakistan and Iran are certainly centers of deep concern.

I saw a lot of news a week or so ago on the topic of whether or not Israel might ‘whack’ Iran. And those, plus your E-mails alerting me to your concerns, certainly got my attention.

On the other side, I also saw an article that looked at the probable consequences if the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran, and it concluded that these consequences were so bad, that an attack would be unlikely.

Of course, this latter article had no answer for the longer term conundrum of if Iran is not taken down now, she will have nuclear capabilities later and that will be the worst of all possible outcomes for Israel.

In talking against the likelihood of an attack, the article pointed out that attacking Iran would result in them shutting the Straits of Hormuz and that, in turn, would cut the world’s oil supplies by almost half and the economic chaos would be colossal.

Then there was the likelihood of Iran lofting missiles into the main producing Saudi oil fields, into Israeli cities and into the large US bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are known to be highly concentrated.

And, in the end, the efforts to eradicate Iran’s nuclear facilities might very well fail due to their intentional wide distributions, hiding and hardening.

And, finally, one possibility that none of the articles mentioned but which I think is highly likely: To date, so far as we know, rogue governments with enriched nuclear materials haven’t released such materials into the hands of the suicidal Islamic Jihadists. Such governments would probably prefer not to send such loose canons into the world where their control, thereafter, of how things unfolded would not be under their control.

But, if Iran is attacked, their nuclear ambitions thwarted and much of their nation damaged, just think how easily they could play that card to hurt the west. Think what just one dirty bomb loosed in Washington, D.C. or Manhattan might do to the U.S.

All of this is extremely ugly and I believe that the major players can all see the likely outcomes and all are holding back from acting because one event could trigger huge consequences for everyone. The only ones who want to act immediately are the Jihadists who are eager to pass into paradise. But, the Israelis are also thinking very hard about where their best options lie. And for them, indefinitely inaction could be fatal.

It looks like a fatal embrace to me.

Posted in CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm | 2 Comments »

The Black Hole in The Cost of Healthcare: Big Pharma and Transparency

Monday, July 7th, 2008

It’s no secret that Big Pharma has been providing doctors with special perks in return for prescribing their products. This has been going on for ages. But to get a better grip on why the costs of healthcare have been increasing dramatically we need to understand about the massive networks that Big Pharma is involved in. Believe it or not, Big Pharma is connected to everything. The AMA, the FDA, the financial markets/big business, the insurance industry, law and politics; these are all affected by Big Pharma.

Recently it was reported that there are more Americans addicted to prescription drugs than illegal drugs. An article in The New York Times stated that “An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.” That’s a pretty hefty number. I know quite a few people who became addicted to prescription drugs. Some said tranquilizers and painkillers were harder to quit than illegal drugs. Prescription pain killers have become the “new heroin”, and are increasingly becoming a major problem in the school system.

Not only are the doctors getting “perks” from the drug companies, but the professors and the research facilities of major universities have been the recipient of “special benefits” as well. Recently “three influential psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School seem to have been caught with their hands in the drug-laced cookie jar, and now they’re in big trouble. Two days after it was alleged that the three doctors failed to report a collective $4.2 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies, Harvard and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into the doctors’ behavior.” Big Pharma = Big Money.

More… ➡

– research thanks to: Bruce S.

Tags:Healthcare, US Medical System
Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Culture - How not to do it, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

All Too Human

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

By Bob Herbert

Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future.

For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary — when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers.

Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.

The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released — their lives ruined — without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.

He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”

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– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

Tags:David Addington, John Yoo, Torture, United Nations Convention Against Torture
Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

This worrisome research article has appeared in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not telling us anything that we didn’t already know, but it does catalogue the situation and help us steer clear of the hyperbole.

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed ’sceptics’ claim to be unbiased analysts combating ‘junk science’. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Immigration Stress, Ocean Dead Zones, Peak Oil, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

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