Although I have long known that East Asia has suffered from the threat of a population implosion, it is really shocking to notice that the government of birth-starved South Korea wants to enforce laws against abortion.
Although I have known for a very long time that South Korea has had major demographic problems and a fertility rate lower even than that of Japan, it really chocks me to know that its abortion laws are so strict. However, when one looks at the models provided by Richard Nisbett, Dov Cohen and Bruce Lerro, it is no surprise that South Korea suffers from lowest-low fertility.
South Korea’s total supply of usable land is only thirty thousand square kilometres, or around one two hundred and thirtieth the supply of Australia. Yet, it has to fit twice the population onto that area. Even with more efficient use of housing space, it becomes almost impossible to fit a family into the average-sized home in South Korea. Then, the absence of resources encourages very rapid innovation and change in production, because skilled labour is the only area where these mineral- and land-starved nations have any chance of competing with nations like Australia and South Africa that possess enormous gluts thereof. Rapid innovation is of itself a handicap to family raising because people have to spend money buying new products too often to be able to spend them on their children (it is no coincidence Australia, the most socially conservative developed nation, has the oldest average age for its private car fleet, simply because with lower turnover people have more to spend on families).
In such conditions, governments have a natural tendency to try to do something to prevent fertility rates falling to lowest-low levels through punitive laws on birth control. However, the experience of twentieth-century “Catholic” Europe shows how badly this works. Expecting women to have large families or refrain entirely from sexual pleasure during their age of procreation simply is impossible when the costs financial and personal are psychologically as high as they are in land- and mineral-starved regions. Italy and Spain – seen until recently as the heart of Catholicism – were throughout the twentieth century (at least their urban areas) actually atheist (Marxist) nations ruled by devoutly Catholic ruling classes. Laws against artificial birth control were simply ignored before the atheistic masses felt there was little enough risk challenging the conservative ruling class and force alterations of the laws.
Although South Korea has never had the marianismo of Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is no reason to assume that tougher laws against abortion will not lead to ignorance or violent protest rather than the desired higher birth rates. Only when South Korea’s natural land and fisheries resources can be made economically usable will fertility increase and attitudes change.
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Rhino horn: a precious, marketable commodity?
In an article from Sind Today, it says that (Indian) rhino horn is more expensive than gold for the first time in a decade.
The present prices, according to Sind Today, are:
Although political support for poaching of rhinos is not in my opinion as criminal as Australia's politicians support for wasteful freeways to appease a dictatorial road lobby, it is still something which the international community should take seriously. Even if sanctions against Vietnam are not justified, people should be wary of buying Vietnamese goods or visiting the country.
The present prices, according to Sind Today, are:
- Indian rhino horn: $65.46 per gram
- gold: $44.36 per gram
Although political support for poaching of rhinos is not in my opinion as criminal as Australia's politicians support for wasteful freeways to appease a dictatorial road lobby, it is still something which the international community should take seriously. Even if sanctions against Vietnam are not justified, people should be wary of buying Vietnamese goods or visiting the country.
A surprising revelation about tiger and giant panda parts
Although my main focus in studying endangered species has always been the poaching of rhinos for their horn, I have long known that trading in tiger parts has been just as much a threat to tigers as rhino horn is to rhinos. However, tiger bone is much less expensive than rhino horn, costing as little as 38¢ per gram.
This cheapness has a mixed impact:
What this article reveals much more surprisingly, and which the average person interested in wildlife conservation would never have been told, is that for a time giant panda parts were sold as regularly as tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. However, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the Chinese government cracked down on panda poachers to the point of even executing people for poaching giant pandas. It says that, despite Deng's crackdown, lack of habitat has prevented the giant panda from recovering.
However, the article shows that orders of magnitude more tigers could be supported in the available habitat without numbers kept very low by poaching. It also says that tigers are just as endangered as even Asiatic rhinos as a result of such poaching.
What is really interesting and even more surprising in this context is that the article argues that tiger farming is likely to make the problem worse. This is opposed to the argument of Robert P. Murphy in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, where he says that if tigers were completely privatised and deregulated incentive to conserve them would appear. Private owners would - and Murphy does not exclude violent means - stop poaching because they would be interested in long-term financial gain from tigers. This quest for long term financial gain would stop tigers becoming extinct and allow them to breed sufficiently to reach something approaching their carrying capacity. People like Hans Hoppe argue that private ownership without any government regulation will eliminate incentives to waste resources. However, the fact that animals like the passenger pigeon became extinct before the first Progressive wave makes one question the strictest interpretation of what Hoppe says.
This cheapness has a mixed impact:
- on one hand it discourages sellers from killing tigers
- on the other hand it gives less incentive and money to conserve them
What this article reveals much more surprisingly, and which the average person interested in wildlife conservation would never have been told, is that for a time giant panda parts were sold as regularly as tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. However, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the Chinese government cracked down on panda poachers to the point of even executing people for poaching giant pandas. It says that, despite Deng's crackdown, lack of habitat has prevented the giant panda from recovering.
However, the article shows that orders of magnitude more tigers could be supported in the available habitat without numbers kept very low by poaching. It also says that tigers are just as endangered as even Asiatic rhinos as a result of such poaching.
What is really interesting and even more surprising in this context is that the article argues that tiger farming is likely to make the problem worse. This is opposed to the argument of Robert P. Murphy in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, where he says that if tigers were completely privatised and deregulated incentive to conserve them would appear. Private owners would - and Murphy does not exclude violent means - stop poaching because they would be interested in long-term financial gain from tigers. This quest for long term financial gain would stop tigers becoming extinct and allow them to breed sufficiently to reach something approaching their carrying capacity. People like Hans Hoppe argue that private ownership without any government regulation will eliminate incentives to waste resources. However, the fact that animals like the passenger pigeon became extinct before the first Progressive wave makes one question the strictest interpretation of what Hoppe says.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
The misnamed "Nanny State" should be called "Daddy State"
One of the most typical criticisms of Europe by the American Right is that Europe’s big governments constitute a “nanny state” that serves to cause:
There is one issue here I have long been wanting to speak about, that being the misuse by Steyn of the terminology “nanny state”. Steyn and too many other conservatives often speak wrongly of “feminising the males”. Whilst on the surface the low levels of violence and conflict in European cultures can give an impression of a gentle, compassionate society, Arthur Brooks completely annihilates that idea with his research in Who Really Cares, showing that Europe is an extremely tough society in which compassion is more or less viewed as a sin. In the process he confirms a long held suspicion of mine that “secularisation” and “masculinisation” are synonyms for one process. It is in fact the hatred of passive acceptance and helping others voluntarily that makes Europeans unwilling to accept even a small pruning of from their huge welfare states. Politicians in nations like Sweden would know there is the potential for enormous bloodshed if they carried out policies recommended by the likes of Hans Hoppe or Thomas Woods. Following upon Europe’s working-class radicalism after the earliest Industrial Revolution, governments have been forced to develop generous welfare states even where, as in Italy and Spain, they were long resistant to secularisation and their policies created entirely false impressions of strongly Catholic and traditional cultures.
The very essence of the welfare state is not gentle and soft, but tough, even manly. It should thus not be called a “Nanny State” but a “Daddy State”, to show the reality of a culture where being gentle and nurturing is effectively viewed as sinful.
The term “nanny state” can be far more accurately used to describe the traditional Australian state with its limited subsidies to help people in the dire trouble that Australia's erratic climate and rivers cause. A “nanny state” would never interfere in the personal affairs of its citizens as most European states (and those of Canada and New Zealand) do today. It would allow for general freedom in education, religion and development, quite unlike the “Daddy States” of Europe today. One can see such a true “Nanny State” in Australia’s combination of unsubsidised farming with drought subsidies that are of themselves destructive because they stop farmers from suing ecologically vandalous car and fossil fuel corporations for the changes they have caused to our climate.
It really is time people see that even the intention of the big governments of Europe, Canada and New Zealand is in no way gentleness but responding to working-class (and student) militancy that is the opposite of the gentle marianismo that is the essential value preached by the Right. A writer who uses mistaken terminology should be properly criticised.
- regulation of every aspect of people’s lives, including trivial matters like obesity of parents or the beliefs of children
- lack of responsibility
- dependence of the elderly on the young
- inability to innovate due to a “sedating cocoon” protecting people
- people being told what they can and cannot think, in order to exclude traditional values of Western Civilisation regarding sexuality, marriage, traditional culture and the unregulated market
- a point where it is impossible for people to “live free” because of government regulation and the State gives people exactly what they want - at the cost of responsibility and commitment to the point of total self-interest
There is one issue here I have long been wanting to speak about, that being the misuse by Steyn of the terminology “nanny state”. Steyn and too many other conservatives often speak wrongly of “feminising the males”. Whilst on the surface the low levels of violence and conflict in European cultures can give an impression of a gentle, compassionate society, Arthur Brooks completely annihilates that idea with his research in Who Really Cares, showing that Europe is an extremely tough society in which compassion is more or less viewed as a sin. In the process he confirms a long held suspicion of mine that “secularisation” and “masculinisation” are synonyms for one process. It is in fact the hatred of passive acceptance and helping others voluntarily that makes Europeans unwilling to accept even a small pruning of from their huge welfare states. Politicians in nations like Sweden would know there is the potential for enormous bloodshed if they carried out policies recommended by the likes of Hans Hoppe or Thomas Woods. Following upon Europe’s working-class radicalism after the earliest Industrial Revolution, governments have been forced to develop generous welfare states even where, as in Italy and Spain, they were long resistant to secularisation and their policies created entirely false impressions of strongly Catholic and traditional cultures.
The very essence of the welfare state is not gentle and soft, but tough, even manly. It should thus not be called a “Nanny State” but a “Daddy State”, to show the reality of a culture where being gentle and nurturing is effectively viewed as sinful.
The term “nanny state” can be far more accurately used to describe the traditional Australian state with its limited subsidies to help people in the dire trouble that Australia's erratic climate and rivers cause. A “nanny state” would never interfere in the personal affairs of its citizens as most European states (and those of Canada and New Zealand) do today. It would allow for general freedom in education, religion and development, quite unlike the “Daddy States” of Europe today. One can see such a true “Nanny State” in Australia’s combination of unsubsidised farming with drought subsidies that are of themselves destructive because they stop farmers from suing ecologically vandalous car and fossil fuel corporations for the changes they have caused to our climate.
It really is time people see that even the intention of the big governments of Europe, Canada and New Zealand is in no way gentleness but responding to working-class (and student) militancy that is the opposite of the gentle marianismo that is the essential value preached by the Right. A writer who uses mistaken terminology should be properly criticised.
Sunday, 15 November 2009
Two disasters in two projects
Today, a terrible accident occurred when I was painting a desk I had bought as early as January, on the same day I began to visit my eldest half-sister. I have always wanted to have a good solid timber desk for the computer because the old kitchen table I have used since I had a computer does not have the necessary space for those things I need to keep near the computer.
Between February and October, I left the desk alone. I did not know how I could work on the desk in the garage. Whilst Mummy was away I thought I could work in the kitchen, but a major paint spill doing a bookcase for my bedroom made her extremely angry. I had to use writing paper to clean up the kitchen, and she said it would be possible to do my work in the crowded garage once the desk was put there.
Although I bought the sandpaper and paint to repair the desk during the winter, it was not until the beginning of this month that I seriously started to sand and re-paint the desk. Moreover, when I did so I consistently had to work slowly because the paint was so wet and the desk's outside constituted only a small portion of the surface needing painting.
Nonetheless, I had been working well enough to paint three-quarters of the outside of the desk by today, and was hoping dearly to have it finished before I leave for a major holiday in Asia, Helsinki and the United States on the nineteenth of December. Them this morning, I had a serious disaster. In order to allow for a much better coverage of the desk, I diluted the paint with mineral turpentine, but this mixture spilt everywhere on not only the desk, but also on the floor of the garage and on my shorts!
I felt extremely angry that this had happened for the second successive time I was doing a major project painting furniture. I admitted to my mother that the accident occurred because the tin of paint was not placed perfectly horizontally on one of the desk's drawers. She was horrified, and I had a slight tantrum saying as usual that I could not be more careful. Still, I was really horrified that I had spilt a full tin of paint, and was, despite the opposition of Mummy, desperate to waste absolutely the minimum quantity of paint. As a result, I immediately spread the paint over unpainted or poorly-covered areas of the desk, and I felt did a good job of losing as little paint as possible. Nonetheless, I still had a harrowing time removing the large amount of paint that accumulated on my body and especially on my shorts. Though they were an old pair, they were still in very good condition but Mummy said I would never wear them outside again even after soaking them for days with Sard - a soaker which she seems to keep in a secret place.
One thing I have learned is how awfully I prepared for this difficult job! There was on the floor no newspaper , and books of potential (though very unlikely) value were almost touching the desk as I was sanding it. I was really angry and said I could not do anything more to create space in the cluttered garage but now I realise I can at least store some of the books in a cardboard box - though it will still be hard to create real space when I fear Mummy won;t have the time to help me to continue.
Between February and October, I left the desk alone. I did not know how I could work on the desk in the garage. Whilst Mummy was away I thought I could work in the kitchen, but a major paint spill doing a bookcase for my bedroom made her extremely angry. I had to use writing paper to clean up the kitchen, and she said it would be possible to do my work in the crowded garage once the desk was put there.
Although I bought the sandpaper and paint to repair the desk during the winter, it was not until the beginning of this month that I seriously started to sand and re-paint the desk. Moreover, when I did so I consistently had to work slowly because the paint was so wet and the desk's outside constituted only a small portion of the surface needing painting.
Nonetheless, I had been working well enough to paint three-quarters of the outside of the desk by today, and was hoping dearly to have it finished before I leave for a major holiday in Asia, Helsinki and the United States on the nineteenth of December. Them this morning, I had a serious disaster. In order to allow for a much better coverage of the desk, I diluted the paint with mineral turpentine, but this mixture spilt everywhere on not only the desk, but also on the floor of the garage and on my shorts!
I felt extremely angry that this had happened for the second successive time I was doing a major project painting furniture. I admitted to my mother that the accident occurred because the tin of paint was not placed perfectly horizontally on one of the desk's drawers. She was horrified, and I had a slight tantrum saying as usual that I could not be more careful. Still, I was really horrified that I had spilt a full tin of paint, and was, despite the opposition of Mummy, desperate to waste absolutely the minimum quantity of paint. As a result, I immediately spread the paint over unpainted or poorly-covered areas of the desk, and I felt did a good job of losing as little paint as possible. Nonetheless, I still had a harrowing time removing the large amount of paint that accumulated on my body and especially on my shorts. Though they were an old pair, they were still in very good condition but Mummy said I would never wear them outside again even after soaking them for days with Sard - a soaker which she seems to keep in a secret place.
One thing I have learned is how awfully I prepared for this difficult job! There was on the floor no newspaper , and books of potential (though very unlikely) value were almost touching the desk as I was sanding it. I was really angry and said I could not do anything more to create space in the cluttered garage but now I realise I can at least store some of the books in a cardboard box - though it will still be hard to create real space when I fear Mummy won;t have the time to help me to continue.
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