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Earth has an 80% chance of hitting 11 billion people by 2100

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Are we running out of room? This is a key question when assessing the impact of global population change, and your intrinsic feeling about the answer may vary based on your country or even city of origin. Myself, Im from Canada we have roughly 11% the US population spread over 102% the physical space. To me, someone who has to drive at least 10 hours East (10 fastdriving hours) to get to the nearest major metropolitan city, the idea of running out of room is a bit odd. To someone living in Tokyo? Less so.

New research from the United Nations tries to projectoverall global trends, however, and it makes thealarming prediction that the world population will reach 11 billion by 2100. Most of that growth will come in areas that still enjoy lower population density such as Africa, which is projected to explode from 1 to 4 billion people.

Population is an interesting problem for statisticians, in that projecting its changes on the large scale requires that you think about your data points (people) as both data points and people. If you think of the actors of population change (people) too literally as people like yourself, you act naively and make bad predictions based on an incorrect understanding of their incentives; this has been the bane of birth control in the third world, as reality has challenged the assumption that that all poor women would necessarilychooseto limit the number of children they have, when given the chance. On the other hand, ignoring the human aspect of these global issues leads to even moreunproductive strategieslike the evil and unscientificschemes of old-school eugenics.

The top panel shows total world population projected to 2100. Dotted lines are the range or error, while shaded regions are the uncertainties. The darker shading is the 80 percent confidence bars, and the lighter shading shows the 95 percent confidence bars. At the bottom are the population projections for each continent.

In general, the solution to ballooning population isnt complex, its just difficult: fix world poverty. Across the board, by far the best predictor of a populations birth rate is its affluence; as a people become progressively more comfortable generation over generation, more likelyto be happy with what they see whenthey focus on their own life experience, the fewer children they have. Bringing it back to my native Canada, the birth rate for born Canadians has fallen well below replacement, and our population is only sustaining itself thanks to immigration from countries that still breed i.e., countries that are or were recently very poor.In line with this thinking, the report predicts that the now-ascendant Asian continent will plateau in population and grow from todays 4.4 billion to only about 5 billion by the centurys close. Europe,North America and Latin America are all predicted to stay under a billion people a-piece.

This study used sophisticated analytical techniques to draw some (hopefully) reliable predictions from raw data about fertility and mortality. Thats basically all these studies are doing: adding up the people wholl probably be born and the people wholl probably die, with a bit of accounting for how the living will move around the world over that time period, and youve got your number. By bringing some hard data into the conversation the team tried to give us a margin of error, calculating an80 percent probability that by2100 the world will be home to between 9.6 billion and 12.3 billion people.

Of course, any prediction looking fullyeighty-six years into the future has to be taken with a grain of salt. Global climate change could throw virtually every assumption in this paper into the garbage heap. Given breakthroughs in energy production and agriculture, we could very plausibly see a population of 50 billion, and given breakdowns in the same areas we could inherit a sparsely populated hell-world. We could end up adding the Moon, Mars, or beyond to our list of inhabitable areas. We could invent immortality and end up issuing licenses to bring a finite number of new, permanent people into the world. Remember that this paper looks ahead almost a hundred years; perhaps by then well all be plugged into a neural meta-network and physical reproduction will be a quaint and mildly disgusting idea.

Frankly, these studies mean more for the trends of today than for the realities of tomorrow, showing us the path were on so that we may intentionally step off it and onto another.

Now read: Roadmap to physical immortality: The end of death in 7 easy steps

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Earth has an 80% chance of hitting 11 billion people by 2100

SIBARIUM: Pinkers false logic

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In a recent article for The New Republic (no doubt inspired by that publications nascent affections for controversial and unsubstantiated indictments of elite education), Harvard professor Steven Pinker rightly lambasts the Ivies for perpetuating admissions standards that fall short of pure meritocratic ideals. Students who brave the murky bottleneck of selective admissions teams have access to both an astonishing library system and a professoriate with erudition in an astonishing range of topics, including many celebrity teachers and academic rock stars. I agree wholeheartedly with Pinker that to fill the halls of Ivy League schools with anyone less than the best is an unconscionable waste of tremendous resources.

But I cannot abide by Pinkers appallingly backwards recommendation that we cultivate meritocracy by relying on the narrow-minded, soulless caprice of standardized testing. His disregard for holistic admissions demonstrates more than jaded cynicism; it is an endorsement of the exact kind of incoherent, unpragmatic and unmeritocratic pedagogical philosophy that Yale and its peer institutions would do well to shy away from.

Calling standardized testing a magic measuring stick, Pinker attempts to downplay the well-documented correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and SAT scores. With maddening obfuscation, he summons the most conservative estimates he can find, which puts SES-SAT correlation at only 0.25 on a 1 to 1 scale. That of course neglects an infinitely more transparent statistic, published earlier this year in The Washington Post: families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326. Pinker then attempts to explain away such discrepancies by suggesting that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores.

Think about that for a moment. Pinker wants to make SATs the number one criterion for admissions on the view that merit is reducible to eugenics. Lets make the dubious assumption that talent is an entirely hereditary trait. And the far less controversial assumption that recipients of an Ivy League degree have an extraordinary advantage in the job market, and that acceptance to Ivy League schools is to be basedexclusively on SATs. Under these conditions, Ivy League schools would be complicit in perpetuating a system of socioeconomic inequality essentially predicated on hereditary caste. Far from being a meritocracy, this is positively dystopian.

So by Pinkers own logic, the claim that SATs are a valid way to divine the suitability of a student for an elite education, without ethnic bias, undeserved advantages to the wealthy, or pointless gaming of the system is self-defeating. Despite his inveighing against Gladwell-esque theories of socioeconomic determinism, he ends up with a repugnantly Darwinian vision of college admissions at odds with our most basic sense of compassion. Were this vision to become a reality, we would be faced with a moral imperative to dismantle Pinkers so-called meritocracy. Fortunately, it will never come to that.

For one thing, Pinker and myself probably agree that talent is not necessarily hereditary (and this is one reason SAT scores should play some role in assessing applicant candidacy). But more fundamentally, I think Pinker misunderstands how close we already are to a kind of just meritocracy already.

There are metrics of intellectual and leadership capabilities that are nonnumerical and unambiguous. These include starting a company in high school, conducting original scientific research, coordinating a political campaign or writing and publishing a textbook. Someone who scores 50 points lower on the SAT because they were composing masterful symphonies should not be penalized for their supposed lack of measurable talent. And the reality is these achievements matter far more to society than a 2400 SAT. Maybe this is why Yalies dont brag about their test scores they just arent significant in light of their peers prodigious accomplishments, which actually have the potential to do good in the world.

Achievement cannot be codified so easily by an objective, depersonalized formula, even one that purports to account for grades, essays and other non-standardized metrics. In any case, the ability to maintain respectable grades and scores while spending eight hours a day practicing music or working a job to support ones family suggests far greater intellect and discipline than what perfect test scores can indicate. Before Pinker lambasts Ivy League students, perhaps he should actually talk to a few of them: about science, about law, about Nietzsche. I think hed worry less if he did.

Aaron Sibarium is a freshmanin Timothy Dwight College. Contacthim at aaron.sibarium@yale.edu.

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SIBARIUM: Pinkers false logic

Letter: Heros examined

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Published: Friday, September 12, 2014 at 04:31 PM.

The left has an interesting set of heroes, including but not limited to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Maynard Keynes, Che Guevara and Margaret Sanger. A scant exploration of some of these individuals is quite revealing. Marx, for example, was a drunkard who was unable to care for his wife and children. Three of his six children died in infancy from starvation, and he failed to attend his wifes funeral. Fair enough only 12 people attended his. Keynes was a reprobate and pedophile.

However, perhaps the most notorious and evil figure embraced by the left is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Successive presidents of the group have failed to denounce Sanger or her agenda, and many leftist politicians have embraced the legacy of Sanger proudly carries on the courageous tradition of Margaret Sanger. They are either ignorant of Sangers background, they choose to ignore it, or they embrace it.

At one time Sanger denounced marriage as a degenerate institution but seemed to reconcile with it later when she married a multi-millionaire. She opened a birth control clinic in Brownsville, N.Y., which had a large Slavic, Italian, Jewish and Latino population. Sanger said these groups were dysgenic and diseased races that needed to have their reckless breeding curbed.

In her publication, The Pivot of Civilization, she praised the cause of eugenics, openly calling for the eradication of human weeds, for the segregation of morons, misfits and the maladjusted, and for the forced sterilization of genetically inferior races.

Her association with the KKK has been well documented. How ironic that so many Planned Parenthood clinics are located in poor and minority neighborhoods. After all, they are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.

No amount of whitewashing can change the history and foundation of Planned Parenthood. And dont forget your tax dollars help fund this spurious organization and its proud heritage. One would doubt that God would bless Planned Parenthood, regardless if it were the president of the United States uttering those words.

Nancy Murdoch, Havelock

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Letter: Heros examined

James Ellroy's 'Perfidia' Is A Brutal, Beautiful Police Procedural

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There are a lot of reasons not to read James Ellroy's newest novel, Perfidia the opening shot in his proposed second L.A. Quartet. It's a long and sprawling book with about a million pages and 10,000 characters, so if that kind of thing scares you, go back to your Hunger Games and leave the grown-ups alone.

It's a brutal book. More than one person crawls home with a handful of his own teeth. A quick gunshot to the head? That's a merciful way to go in Ellroy's Los Angeles, and not many characters get that kindness.

There's terrible, casual racism in here, reflecting the terrible, casual racism of the day (that day being Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941, where the book starts the day before Pearl Harbor). Serious men talk about eugenics and racial purity in a way that makes today's discussions of profiling seem like cocktail party banter. Innocent Japanese-Americans are rounded up in vicious sweeps and sent to internment camps. Mexicans and African-Americans don't fare any better. Neither do the Jews. Or the Chinese. It's a white man's world, this LA of Perfidia. Too bad if you're not.

Worse than all this, Perfidia is a book with no good guys. Even the most sympathetic characters (the sole Japanese man on the LA police force, the coerced Girl With A Past) swim in moral relativism with expert strokes. And it's tough to root for a character even a great character, like Ellroy's Dudley Smith, who anchors Perfidia as a pre-L.A. Confidential sergeant worming his way up through the ranks when he pops bennies, smokes opium and threatens to kill virtually everyone he meets. Doubly so when he actually does kill a fair number of them, for reasons that are good only within the warped ethical architecture of a crooked and horrifyingly realized Los Angeles Police Department.

So there's all that. Plenty of reasons to pass Perfidia up. But this is why you should read it.

Because it's beautiful. It's got style like your grandfather did back when he dudded up on a Saturday night in a zoot suit and chain. Because it's epic in its depth and evocation of an ugly time and an awful place that, with its sheen of youth and beauty, is too often made glossy and innocent in our memories.

And because in a book which leans heavily on a boxing motif, Ellroy writes like a great fighter works the ring. He bobs and he feints along the book's 23-day timeline. His sentences are short, sharp jabs, building into gorgeous combos that can floor you with their precision. In over 700 pages, he rarely meets a conjunction he doesn't excise.

The story rips along. There's Pearl Harbor. Internment. The murder of an entire Japanese family posed to look like ritual suicide. Schemes within schemes within schemes. J. Edgar Hoover makes an appearance. So does Bette Davis. Ellroy mixes the real with the fictional and never loses track of either.

At its black and dripping heart, Perfidia is a police procedural. But like all great procedurals, the case is just what gets people up and moving, allowing Ellroy to dip into radical politics here, rabid jingoism there. He back-lays groundwork and motivation for characters already fully alive in his other novels, which will certainly be a draw for anyone who wants to ride Dudley Smith's shoulder through LA's Chinatown, or witness some of Ellroy's other cops and crooks in the hotblooded viciousness of their youth.

There are issues. I'm not kidding (too much) when I say there are 10,000 characters because every twisting subplot comes fully staffed with guys named Buzz and Bucky and Two-Gun. And Ellroy has a woman problem which, oddly, is the opposite of the woman problem that many male authors have (making their female characters mere window dressing or arm candy), in that his are Cassandras in Christian Dior too smart, too manipulative, too prescient and too always-in-the-thick-of-it to be entirely believable. Especially considering Perfidia has, essentially, just one. And she has that Forrest Gumpian quality of conveniently being everywhere that matters, all the time.

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James Ellroy's 'Perfidia' Is A Brutal, Beautiful Police Procedural

When Babies Become Commodities

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The New Eugenics Rome, September 07, 2014 (Zenit.org) Father John Flynn, LC | 345 hits

Several recent cases involving the rejection of babies by people who were using the services of surrogate mothers have drawn attention to the alarming ethical shortfalls of the surrogate industry.

The first example came from Australia, where a couple who had contracted a surrogacy agreement with a Thai woman, Pattharamon Janbua, rejected one of the two babies she carried because the child had Down syndrome.

The couple asked that the mother abort the baby and when she refused they only accepted the healthy baby, leaving the surrogate with the other one.

Later, it emerged that the father of the Australian couple had previously been convicted of the abuse of two girls under the age of 10 and was sentenced to three years in jail.

The news raised concern in Australia over the use by sex offenders and pedophiles of surrogacy arrangements in Thailand and other countries.

News of the Australian case prompted an American woman to reveal a similar experience. In 2012 Andrea Ott-Dahl agreed to bear a child for a lesbian couple but it turned out the baby she was carrying had Down syndrome, Yahoo reported Aug. 20.

She refused the request of the couple to abort the fetus and went on to keep the child for herself.

A few days later, on Aug. 26, the Daily Mail newspaper reported a similar case in England, where a surrogate mother, only identified as Jenny, decided to take for her own a disabled daughter who she had been bearing for another couple, as they did not want to accept what the mother of the couple said was a dribbling cabbage.

Ethical responsibility to abort

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When Babies Become Commodities

Editorial: Governor should apologize to eugenics victims

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Published: Thursday, September 4, 2014 at 09:46 PM.

Its hard to blame Elnora Mills for not feeling terribly grateful. Decades after being forcibly sterilized under the state eugenics program, she and other victims of that cruel social experiment are finally seeing some compensation. Mills has been notified that she soon will receive the first half of a payout that is expected to total about $50,000.

Mills had a nervous breakdown as a teenager, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital and, as a result, was deemed unfit to bear children. Her reproductive organs were removed during an appendectomy, unbeknownst to her. She didnt find out that she couldnt have children until after she married.

Mills was one of an estimated 7,600 North Carolinians who were sterilized against their will between 1929 and 1974, when the forced eugenics program at last was brought to an end.

The legislature capped total payments at $10 million, to be split among victims who are alive and who can prove they were part of the sterilization program that continued in North Carolina for years after other states had abandoned the practice.

Advocates for the victims estimated last year that 2,000 of them may still be alive, but far fewer have been confirmed in the narrow window the General Assembly left for them to apply for compensation approved last year. As of mid-August, only 180 people had been approved to receive payments; Mills was among them.

Seven hundred eighty claims were received, and 500 have been reviewed by the N.C. Industrial Commission, which is overseeing the compensation program; the others are still being researched. Those whose applications were denied may appeal or provide additional information to support their claims.

The state Senate last year finally conceded to the measure that the House already had passed. Much of the credit for pushing this legislation through the General Assembly goes to Rep. Thom Tillis, R-Mecklenburg, who announced during his first term as House speaker that compensation for sterilization program victims would be a priority.

The cap and the amount of compensation do not sit well with those who believe these victims deserved much more. After all, they had something taken from them that cant be stated in monetary terms. It is, however, far more than has ever been done to make amends.

Former Gov. Mike Easley issued an official apology to eugenics victims back in 2002, but a blanket statement is not the same thing as a personal acknowledgement.

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Editorial: Governor should apologize to eugenics victims

True Jew News ~ CDC’s Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed + Blacks are the New Terrorist – Video

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True Jew News ~ CDC #39;s Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed + Blacks are the New Terrorist
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gocchurch BREAKING NEWS: CDC whistleblower confesses to MMR Vaccine research fraud in historic public statement by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor...

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True Jew News ~ CDC's Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed + Blacks are the New Terrorist - Video

Karen Straughan Interview – "Feminism: Socialism & Eugenics in Sheep’s Clothing" – #210 – Video

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Karen Straughan Interview - "Feminism: Socialism Eugenics in Sheep #39;s Clothing" - #210
GirlWritesWhat - Karen Straughan interview. This episode is about feminism, socialism, eugenics, freedom, social control, and is called Feminism: Socialism Eugenics in Sheep #39;s Clothing,...

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Karen Straughan Interview - "Feminism: Socialism & Eugenics in Sheep's Clothing" - #210 - Video

GOCC Radio ~ CDC’s Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed plus Blacks are the New Terrorist – Video

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GOCC Radio ~ CDC #39;s Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed plus Blacks are the New Terrorist
Gathering of Christ Church Phone: 888*334*3330 Email: gatheringas1@aol.com http://www.gatheringofchrist.org/ Blogtalkradio: http://m.blogtalkradio.com/gocchurch YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/use...

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GOCC Radio ~ CDC's Racist Eugenics Attack on Black Babies Exposed plus Blacks are the New Terrorist - Video


  1. Eugenics