5/7/11
5/5/11
Michael Moore: 'Bin Laden Was Executed'
Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed by a Navy SEAL team -- he was straight up executed, Michael Moore told TheWrap on Wednesday.
The “Fahrenheit 9/11” director has been setting Twitter aflame Wednesday afternoon urging the Obama administration to come clean about the circumstances surrounding the terrorist leader’s death -- particularly in light of the White House’s shifting account of last weekend’s firefight in Abbottabad.
The Oscar-winning director has been tweeting about his belief that Bin Laden should have received a trial, and his theory that Pakistan was keeping the Al Qaeda head under house arrest. TheWrap grilled Moore about his controversial views.
Is Obama lying about how Bin Laden died?
Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children.
I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, "There was a firefight." "He used a woman as a shield." Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed.
Does it matter if he was executed? Do you think he deserved a trial?
I am a Catholic, and the position of the Catholic Church and the Pope is that we are 100 percent against the death penalty unless it is in self-defense. Look at the Nuremberg Trials. We didn’t just pop a bullet in the heads of the worst scum in history. We thought it was important to put them on trial and expose their evil. In a democracy we believe in a system of justice and we believe in a judicial system that gives people a day in court...and then we hung them.
It doesn’t mean we can’t hang them afterward.
Do you think people will be angry if it turns out the operation was less heroic than it originally seemed?
It was heroic. There was no need to embellish things. People in positions of power tread so gingerly around the electorate. Some people may not like it, but don’t bullsh*t us anymore about stuff like this.
The government, especially the Pentagon, has a poor track record of telling the truth, starting with Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman, that was all made up, and this firefight is going to turn out to be hooey.
Will it hurt Obama if the story turns out to have been partly false?
It won’t hurt him, because the basic facts will remain the same. Osama is still dead and everybody is happy about it.
In your tweets you say that Pakistan was safeguarding Bin Laden.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This was a garrison city. He was living in a compound attached to their version of West Point.
Where were the bodyguards? There were no bodyguards because the Pakistanis were in charge of him. They had him there under house arrest to contain him.
Was Bin Laden still a threat to the United States, then?
He was put out of business some years ago. Now, we’re dealing with rogue underwear bombers. Bin Laden was probably going, "This is so fucking embarrassing. Just hook me up to the Internet and let me get on with my business."
Were you surprised that we didn’t find Osama in a cave?
Not at all. I alluded to the fact in “Fahrenheit 9/11” that this man was a multi-millionaire, and if you know these kind of people, they don’t live in caves. I said on “Larry King,” he’s in some place comfortable with lots of money, not in a cave in the tribal region.
Why didn’t Bin Laden’s wealth get mentioned more?
From day one, they would use his name and pair it with Muslim, as some kind of fear thing about Muslims. Well, he was as much a multi-millionaire as he was a Muslim, but we didn’t start profiling multi-millionaires. Everybody who flew those planes into the Twin Towers rode in first class.
Do you think Osama was really buried at sea because of his religious beliefs?
That’s bullshit -- "He was buried at sea according to Muslim tradition." I’ve got many Muslim friends where I live in Michigan. When I go to a Muslim funeral in Detroit, we don’t hop in a chopper after the ceremony and drop the body into Lake Erie.
We’re so worried about upsetting the Muslim world. We just shot him in the fucking head, do you think they care how we conduct the funeral?
5/4/11
New Population Projections Show Us Growing Unsustainably, But We Can Put on the Brakes?
Posted by Bryan Walsh Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Pencil in October 31, 2011 on your calendar. It's not just the one day of the year you get to dress like Edward Cullen without everyone thinking there's something deeply wrong with you. According to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD)—the demographers who rule over all demographers—that's the day when the 7 billionth person on the planet will be born.
But will population growth be a trick for the planet—or a treat? That still remains to be seen. The new UNDP numbers, released earlier today, project that global population could reach 9.3 billion by mid-century, and rise to 10.1 billion by 2100. That's a revision upwards from earlier numbers, which had projected population to level off at about 9 billion by 2050. The difference? Unexpectedly high and continued population growth in Africa, where the UNDP now predicts population could rise from 1 billion today to an almost unimaginable 3.6 billion by the end of the century, at the highest estimates. Nigeria, already Africa's most populous nation at 162 million, could grow to 730 million by 2100, while Malawi—a country smaller than Pennsylvania—could grow from 15 million to 129 million. Given the difficulties Africa finds today in feeding and supporting itself, more than tripling of the current population could cause havoc and misery—and that's without even counting the impact of global warming, which could further stress agriculture and water, while worsening infectious disease. As John Bogarts, a demographer at the Population Council, told the New York Times:
Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it's as simple as that. Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.
Even as Africa continues to multiply, other low-fertility regions like Europe, Russia and Japan will actually decline in population, and age rapidly. (42% of the world's population currently lives in areas where fertility is actually below replacement rate.) China—thanks in part to its one-child policy—will grow slowly to 1.4 billion (up from about 1.3 billion now) before eventually falling below 1 billion, while India will eventually pass it as the world's most populous nation.
All in all, it's looking to be a very crowded future—and since population is the great multiplier of all environmental ills, that would seem to be bad news for the planet. But any prediction made 90 years into the future should be taken with a whole mine's worth of salt—and that's especially true for population projections, as any reputable demographer will tell you. The predictions are made based on fertility data—how many children each woman plans to have—and the projections are incredibly sensitive to any changes. Increase fertility by just half a woman per child, and global population could rise to 16 billion by 2100.
Obviously, that's not too likely to happen. But the most recent projections were revised upward today largely because fertility rates in much of the world—and especially Africa—have remained higher than demographers had expected. In high-fertility countries, fertility is still at nearly 5 children per woman, compared 1.6 per woman in low-fertility nations. The good news is that fertility can be controlled—and not in a controlling way. As countries get better off, fertility rates tend to drop, a phenomenon known as the fertility transition that's been seen pretty much everywhere. But that requires the availability of contraception—and importantly, empowering women to actually use contraception. A quick and revealing stat: while three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive, only a quarter of women in East Africa do, one in 10 in West Africa and just 7% on Central Africa.
Women in these countries need help from overseas, but aid for family planning—at $238 million in 2009—is far too low, and budget problems and social controversies mean the U.S. won't be able to make up much more. That's a shame—actually, it's a tragedy. As Robert Engelman—a vice-president with the Worldwatch Institute—writes in an excellent journal article, unsustainable population growth isn't inevitable, and population control doesn't require authoritarian means. The key is education:
More than 40 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, with higher proportions in developed than in developing countries.
As these figures suggest, it might be possible to end and then reverse human population growth through a strategy aimed at elevating women's status and increasing access to contraceptive services, so that essentially all births result from intended pregnancies. Preliminary calculations based on conservative assumptions suggest that global fertility would immediately move slightly below replacement levels, putting world population on a path toward an early peak followed by gradual decline. The success of such a strategy would have many other benefits, such as reducing disability and deaths among mothers and their children and freeing more women to earn money and participate actively in social affairs.
There are very few truly win-win policies out there, but female education and access to contraception is one of them. Demography is destiny, it's true—but we can control our demography.
Pencil in October 31, 2011 on your calendar. It's not just the one day of the year you get to dress like Edward Cullen without everyone thinking there's something deeply wrong with you. According to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD)—the demographers who rule over all demographers—that's the day when the 7 billionth person on the planet will be born.
But will population growth be a trick for the planet—or a treat? That still remains to be seen. The new UNDP numbers, released earlier today, project that global population could reach 9.3 billion by mid-century, and rise to 10.1 billion by 2100. That's a revision upwards from earlier numbers, which had projected population to level off at about 9 billion by 2050. The difference? Unexpectedly high and continued population growth in Africa, where the UNDP now predicts population could rise from 1 billion today to an almost unimaginable 3.6 billion by the end of the century, at the highest estimates. Nigeria, already Africa's most populous nation at 162 million, could grow to 730 million by 2100, while Malawi—a country smaller than Pennsylvania—could grow from 15 million to 129 million. Given the difficulties Africa finds today in feeding and supporting itself, more than tripling of the current population could cause havoc and misery—and that's without even counting the impact of global warming, which could further stress agriculture and water, while worsening infectious disease. As John Bogarts, a demographer at the Population Council, told the New York Times:
Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it's as simple as that. Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.
Even as Africa continues to multiply, other low-fertility regions like Europe, Russia and Japan will actually decline in population, and age rapidly. (42% of the world's population currently lives in areas where fertility is actually below replacement rate.) China—thanks in part to its one-child policy—will grow slowly to 1.4 billion (up from about 1.3 billion now) before eventually falling below 1 billion, while India will eventually pass it as the world's most populous nation.
All in all, it's looking to be a very crowded future—and since population is the great multiplier of all environmental ills, that would seem to be bad news for the planet. But any prediction made 90 years into the future should be taken with a whole mine's worth of salt—and that's especially true for population projections, as any reputable demographer will tell you. The predictions are made based on fertility data—how many children each woman plans to have—and the projections are incredibly sensitive to any changes. Increase fertility by just half a woman per child, and global population could rise to 16 billion by 2100.
Obviously, that's not too likely to happen. But the most recent projections were revised upward today largely because fertility rates in much of the world—and especially Africa—have remained higher than demographers had expected. In high-fertility countries, fertility is still at nearly 5 children per woman, compared 1.6 per woman in low-fertility nations. The good news is that fertility can be controlled—and not in a controlling way. As countries get better off, fertility rates tend to drop, a phenomenon known as the fertility transition that's been seen pretty much everywhere. But that requires the availability of contraception—and importantly, empowering women to actually use contraception. A quick and revealing stat: while three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive, only a quarter of women in East Africa do, one in 10 in West Africa and just 7% on Central Africa.
Women in these countries need help from overseas, but aid for family planning—at $238 million in 2009—is far too low, and budget problems and social controversies mean the U.S. won't be able to make up much more. That's a shame—actually, it's a tragedy. As Robert Engelman—a vice-president with the Worldwatch Institute—writes in an excellent journal article, unsustainable population growth isn't inevitable, and population control doesn't require authoritarian means. The key is education:
More than 40 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, with higher proportions in developed than in developing countries.
As these figures suggest, it might be possible to end and then reverse human population growth through a strategy aimed at elevating women's status and increasing access to contraceptive services, so that essentially all births result from intended pregnancies. Preliminary calculations based on conservative assumptions suggest that global fertility would immediately move slightly below replacement levels, putting world population on a path toward an early peak followed by gradual decline. The success of such a strategy would have many other benefits, such as reducing disability and deaths among mothers and their children and freeing more women to earn money and participate actively in social affairs.
There are very few truly win-win policies out there, but female education and access to contraception is one of them. Demography is destiny, it's true—but we can control our demography.
5/2/11
5/1/11
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