Is PETA un-American?

Recently PETA announced that it would be suing Sea World on behalf of five Orca whales at the park, arguing that the whales should be set free.

In the first case of its kind, PETA, three marine-mammal experts, and two former orca trainers are filing a lawsuit asking a federal court to declare that five wild-caught orcas forced to perform at SeaWorld are being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The filing—the first ever seeking to apply the 13th Amendment to nonhuman animals—names the five orcas as plaintiffs and also seeks their release to their natural habitats or seaside sanctuaries.

Now I'm all for publicizing the potentially (I'm not a marine biologist and can't make such a definitive claim) harmful conditions under which these Orcas were acquired, maintained and treated but that does not mean that anyone should try to undermine the US Constitution in this manner.

 To be honest, I see this as being a frivolous law suit and one that will do more harm than good for the cause of the whales and PETA. As most people will look at this as a stunt rather than a meaningful issue deserving of their consideration. I base this on the notion that PETA is trying to equate whales with humans. Now, PETA states that this is not the case.

The suit is based on the plain text of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits the condition of slavery without reference to "person" or any particular class of victim. "Slavery is slavery, and it does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on gender, race, or religion," says general counsel to PETA, Jeffrey Kerr.

The 13th Amendment states: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

 Slavery is defined as: the practice of owning slaves.

Slave is defined as: a person legally owned by another and having no freedom of action or right to property.

It seems very clear that the intention of the amendment related only to people as by definition only people can be slaves. To extend this to things that are not people is a corruption of the language and intent of the amendment.

The power to enforce the 13th Amendment was given to Congress and can be found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, formally titled: An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their vindication.

So to have the 13th Amendment apply to whales would require that whales be given the legal status of person.

 I'm sorry, but a whale is not a person.

A game by any other name

The idea of Game has, in my opinion, made many inroads in popular culture. I came to it rather late in my social education and at first was hesitant to acknowledge the veracity of its underlying principles.

When I was first introduced to it it was by a friend who had come to it from pick up artist websites and the like. As a Christian I was hesitant to understand the underlying principles due to the ends that people on such websites were using them. Promiscuity was not on my personal agenda.

 Then I was introduced to the concept in a slightly different form; ladder theory. It laid out some of the core principles without all the bravado of pick up artists detailing their conquests. It was through that that I came to a slow understanding of Game.

What surprised me at first was that rather than trying to force the concepts onto social reality, once I had an understanding of the concepts, when I was able to sit back and watch social situations the concepts were verified.

 As one blog writer I read says, he's not writing the rules of the game, but merely reporting on what he sees. Time and again the basic principles of Game have been reinforced as I watch and experience social situations.

I've had my brushes with the red pill, as another blog writer terms it, and have come to a point where I can recognize those moments in my life when I have been able to display alpha or beta traits to my gain or detriment.

One of the things that has helped to really reinforce the notion of Game or Ladder Theory has been by watching children of various ages interact with one another.

 Young children, boys and girls, before they recognize their sexual difference, play as virtual equals. You can see the beginnings of what would be termed alpha and beta behavior that seems to be ingrained in certain people, but the sexual motivations just aren't there. They are simply interacting with each other as they are. 

As they grow up and begin puberty you can see these ingrained traits come to the fore as they interact with members of the opposite sex. When I was growing up, adults would always joke about how a young boy who pulled on a young girls pig tails, would do so because he liked her. He was displaying interest in her in a way that for some reason came natural to him. The adults would see it as innocent and playful. They might even chuckle over the incident.

 As children grow up though, pulling on a girls pig tails is wrong, or so boys are told. Only assholes would do such an act of egregious effrontery. Boys are told that they need to be nice, to be complimentary, to treat the girl of their desire as a princess. Yet as the boy longs and yearns for the girl of his dreams, it seems to him that there is something wrong with the world because as he is doing everything 'right' but the girl seems to always end up with the boy who does everything 'wrong'; the asshole.

Rather than questioning the advice they were given, they redouble their efforts and either live a life of distant longing or grow to dislike the girl and eventually women. Its either that or he sees reality as working differently than how he was told it would work and changes himself accordingly.

As I watch children interact you can see the differences in how boys act towards girls and how the girls in turn react to the boys. The cocky kid who pulls a girls hair, hits her books or buts in front of her in line is looked on admiringly by girls when the boys back is turned. When the boy is roughhousing with another boy and winning, the same girls are looking on admiringly.

The other boys off to the side or getting the short end of the stick in the roughhousing look on the boy as an asshole. The girls look on him as something they want.

The alphas and the betas.

Many adults and other children look down at the Alphas as being jerks or worse.

Some children recognize something in the Alpha and attach themselves to him.

Many adults will actively fight this, but its natural. Its how people naturally act and function when left to themselves. They are Alpha or they are Beta (or worse) and no amount of telling the Beta how special he is, or how lucky a girl would be to have him, will change reality.

Girls and women want an Alpha male.

Game is the tool that non-Alphas can use to demonstrate Alpha qualities to the opposite sex as a means of gaining success in the social market place.

Reality is a cruel mistress.

You can hate the game but you shouldn't hate the player that plays by the rules.

Nothing new under the sun

Yesterday I commented on the state of the earth's population as it is set to reach seven billion in about three days. In that post I voiced the opinion that the desire for a sustainable population is a good thing but that the methods that would be required to truly bring it about would be of a rather bloody nature.

 Today the BBC posted a decent article detailing the history of population control. Beginning with Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century and continuing on till the present day. One of the main thrusts of the article was to point out the fact that much if not all the major efforts at population control had been imposed on poor people and nations by richer people and nations. It's always been a top-down situation where those without say suffer the most. For much of the past two centuries the main focus of population control has been to protect the economic hegemony of the West.

Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US. 

"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says. 

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.

As I stated yesterday, the best way to help reduce the populations of poorer countries is to raise the economic realities of those countries. This isn't my idea, and its not new.

Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974. Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".

This coming from the country that forcibly sterilized millions of its poor people in the mid 1970s.

In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. 

Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor. The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.

Another famous example of enforced population control is China's famous One Child Policy.

The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. 

In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.

Of course, it was not without its faulty consequences.

But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.

Some point to these examples as a means of learning from the past in order to improve population control efforts going forward. Of course the term 'population control' was deemed to have negative authoritarian connotations and so they adopted such terms as 'women's rights and reproductive rights'. Some see women as being the magic silver bullet to end the world's population problem.

According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years. 

"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.

I'm a bit skeptical of this.

So lets look at what would be an ideal situation; Canada. A place of vast economic prosperity where women's and reproductive rights are protected.

If a country wanted to simply maintain their population growth at zero (simple generational replacement - two parents have two children - population does not grow or decrease) then the birth rate for the country should be 2.33 per woman. Its been noted that economic prosperity helps to bring down fertility rates as does the protection of women's and reproductive rights.

So Canada, an economically and socially healthy country could be see maintaining the status quo as being sustainable. The Canadian birth rate is 1.58. Canadians are breeding themselves out of existence. How is that a benefit to society?

 At some point a tipping point will be reached when economically rich nations can't make up their lack of numbers by bringing in people from impoverished nations to meet the societal need for workers. As was seen during the immediate aftermath of the black death, as the population fell, there were less workers who were able to earn higher wages due to the decrease in the labour supply.

If economic prosperity reduces fertility rates and lower fertility rates reduce the labour supply pushing up wages, it would seem that rich nations could see a demographic downward spiral that could place their societies in peril.

Lets hope that the women in such societies recognize this pattern and alter their birth rates accordingly. So it would seem that the solution for the world's population problem is the leveling of the economic playing field that would help to decrease the fertility rates of those impoverished nations driving world population growth.

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s. 

Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out. 

Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.

That was then. Now they are trying to get away from such heavy handed control mechanisms and its perhaps not surprising to see where they are looking for solutions.

Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. 

If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC. 

"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."

Economic redistribution.

Its not the poor that are the problem. Its the rich.

 I think that Chairman Mao and Brother Stalin would be happy to see the West finally see the light.

 Of course they both already did their part for reducing the world population by murdering tens of millions.

That's a big number

So according to the UN the world's seven billionth resident is due to be born on October 31st. Statistics show that the world's population grows at a rate of 200,000 a day. There is talk that the earth's population could grow to be ten billion by the end of the century or even as high as 16 billion, with much of the growth taking place in poor countries.

 In 2011, the population of Ethiopia is approximately 80 million. In the next 50 years the country could see its population grow to 145 million.

 In contrast is Germany, with a 2011 population of approximately 80 million but rather than grow over the next 40 years, Germany could see its population decline to 75 million people over the next 40 years.

 There is a scenario from the UN in which the world's population in 2100, rather than being higher, is actually lower than it is today due to the decrease in fertility rates. Since 1950 the fertility rate has nearly halved, falling from 6.0 children per woman in 1950 to 2.5 children in 2011. If this trend was to take hold in places such as Ethiopia and other sub-Saharan African countries, which are said to drive the population growth, then the world's population would decrease by the end of the century.

"The world's population is going to continue to grow and we may as well be prepared for it, " says the editor, Richard Kollodge. "We may as well make sure that as many people as possible are healthy, that as many people as possible have access to education." "We have a chance right now in our world of seven billion to build a more stable, more socially just world by the time we reach 10 billion but that requires us to act now," he says.

So we need to act now or something is going to happen and I'm sure that according to them it will be disastrous. So what to do? One of the things that need tackling is fertility:

"Sex education has an impact in delaying the age at the first sexual intercourse, in increasing the use of contraception methods and condoms," says Gabriela Rivera from the Mexico City offices of the UN's population agency.

This is a fairly easy first step. It can be done for relatively low costs and can have an immediate impact. So women start having fewer children. Okay. Great. So, who looks after them when they are old?

Caring for the increasing number of elderly people will also present many challenges, says the report.

The rate in fertility in the West has declined as a result of economic prosperity. Modern Western countries have government programs that help to look after people when they are old and combine with a person's personal savings and pension to ensure that a large portion of the population is looked after by fewer and fewer children. This can't be said of the world's poor countries where people rely on their children to look after them when they are old. Children are their pension plan. So it would seem that in combination with sex education efforts and access to contraceptives the economic prosperity of these people needs to increase.

The UN has expressed concern that in many poor countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, the speed of population growth could hold back economic development and trap future generations in poverty and hunger.

But apparently this is a catch-22. They are too poor to be able to give up having children to look after them in their old age, but having more children keeps them poor. So in some way this cycle needs to be broken.

The challenges from the growth in population include the massive inequalities between different countries in access to food, water, housing and work.

The West and parts of Asia are far richer than vast portions of Africa, Asia, and South America. According to the CIA World Fact Book the world's GDP in 2010 was $74.54 trillion.

Here are the top ten in the world:
1 European Union $ 14,820,000,000,000
 2 United States $ 14,660,000,000,000
 3 China $ 10,090,000,000,000
 4 Japan $ 4,310,000,000,000
 5 India $ 4,060,000,000,000
 6 Germany $ 2,940,000,000,000
 7 Russia $ 2,223,000,000,000
 8 United Kingdom $ 2,173,000,000,000
 9 Brazil $ 2,172,000,000,000
 10 France $ 2,145,000,000,000

 This totals $59.593 trillion or 79.95% of the world's wealth. Of the 227 nations listed in the Fact Book, this translates into 4.4% of the countries controlling nearly 80% of the world's wealth.

 So if the economic realities of the poorer nations need to increase in order to combat population growth which will (insert something scary) allow them to ease up on having babies which will reduce the fertility rate of those nations driving the world's population growth which in turn will avoid (insert something scary). So what needs to happen is for the wealth of the richest nations to be diverted to the poorest nations.

 -insert thought bubble- I wonder what the UN would do with all the money that they gained from the carbon tax that has been proposed? -end of thought bubble-

 So you take a country like the US which had a GDP per capita of $47,200 in 2010. Then compare that to the GDP per capita for the world of $11,200. A big difference there. Heck, even China as the world's third largest economic entity had a GDP per capita of only $7,600 in 2010. India's was even worse at $3,500. 

As an aside, the US ranks 11th in terms of GDP per capita with Qatar being first at $179,000 and with the Congo and Burundi tied for last at $300. The number of countries equal to (St. Lucia) or above the $11,200 mark is 99, meaning that there are 128 countries below it.

 The point of the matter is that you will have a hard time convincing people living in countries like Qatar, the US, Canada, France, etc. to voluntarily give up their standard of living in terms of improving the standard of living of people in Burundi or Lesotho. It would either take a massive amount of robbery and collusion (hmmm, global warming is what again?) or violent and bloody conflict. You think that the world is a bloody place now, wait till you try and reduce the GDP per capita of the people in places like America or Germany or Kuwait to less than half of what they are used to and see what happens.

A quagmire

An amusing look at the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Having the Tea Party blaming only the government on one side and the OWS protesters only blaming corporations on the other side is futile. Both are the problem because they both work together. The corporations finance the politicians that subsequently use the government to finance the corporations. Blaming one member of the team while ignoring the other is not going to solve anything.

Staring you right in the face

If you still need a reason to support the idea that those western nations still fighting and dying in Afghanistan should simply pack up and leave, how about this one?

Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday. The remarks were in sharp contrast to recent tension between the two neighbors over cross-border raids, and Afghan accusations that Pakistan was involved in killing the chief Afghan peace envoy, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber on September 20. "God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan," he said in the interview to Geo television. "If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you."

Yep. After more than a decade (the war began on October 7, 2001) of blood, sweat, tears and untold billions of dollars spent by countries such as the US, Canada, Germany, France and the UK fighting and dying to free and protect the people of Afghanistan, its Presidents says that if push came to shove, he would fight against those same people. They don't want us there, so we should just pack up and leave. We have done more than our share. Now its up to them.

Corporate lackeys?

Shouldn't the corporations affected be the ones to fight their own battles through the WTO?

Canada's natural resources minister is criticizing the European Union over its plan to discriminate against Canadian oil derived from Alberta's oilsands. Joe Oliver released a letter Sunday to EU energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger in which he lambastes the EU's fuel quality directive — a proposal that ranks fuels based on their carbon footprint, and suggests ranking Canadian oil derived from oilsands in a separate category because it is perceived to be so dirty.

I understand that the province of Alberta and the Canadian government would stand to lose out on a small amount of potential tax revenue, but the direct interests are those of the corporations who gain huge profits off of what accounts for 75% of North America's petroleum reserves. If companies such as Suncor, Syncrude, Shell, Chevron and Marathon Oil want to be able to sell their products in Europe then they should be able to handle the legal aspects of it through the WTO rather than Canadian tax payers fronting the costs of protecting corporate profits. Canada and the EU have a trade relationship that is enforceable. The Canadian government has done its part. Now its up to the corporations who profit to step up and do theirs.