Last Straw

While cor­rel­a­tion doesn’t neces­sar­ily prove caus­a­tion the study doesn’t need to. It only needs to prove cor­rel­a­tion to chal­lenge the claim that “reli­gion leads to bet­ter soci­et­ies.” Click through for the video.

Can­cel Haiti’s Debt peti­tion — Oxfam International

Alex von Tun­zel­mann, writ­ing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:

The appalling state of the coun­try is a dir­ect res­ult of hav­ing offen­ded a quite dif­fer­ent celes­tial author­ity — the French. France gained the west­ern third of the island of His­pa­ni­ola — the ter­rit­ory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and cof­fee, sup­por­ted by an unpre­ced­en­ted increase in the import­a­tion of African slaves. Eco­nom­ic­ally, the res­ult was a suc­cess, but life as a slave was intol­er­able. Liv­ing con­di­tions were squalid, dis­ease was rife, and beat­ings and abuses were uni­ver­sal. The slaves’ life expect­ancy was 21 years. After a dra­matic slave upris­ing that shook the west­ern world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared inde­pend­ence. But France deman­ded repar­a­tions: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not sig­nify the begin­ning of free­dom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged coun­try could afford. Haiti was the only coun­try in which the ex-slaves them­selves were expec­ted to pay a for­eign gov­ern­ment for their liberty. By 1900, it was spend­ing 80% of its national budget on repay­ments. In order to man­age the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, fur­ther loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Ger­many and France. Instead of devel­op­ing its poten­tial, this deformed state pro­duced a parade of nefar­i­ous lead­ers, most of whom gave up the insur­mount­able task of try­ing to fix the coun­try and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the ori­ginal repar­a­tions, plus interest. Doing so left it des­ti­tute, cor­rupt, dis­astrously lack­ing in invest­ment and polit­ic­ally volat­ile. Haiti was trapped in a down­ward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hope­lessly in debt to this day.

James Love­lock, amongst oth­ers, is pro­mot­ing a plan to cut CO2 emis­sions by pay­ing for fam­ily plan­ning in the devel­op­ing world:

Cal­cu­la­tions based on the trust’s fig­ures show the 10 tonnes emit­ted by a return flight from Lon­don to Sydney would be off­set by enabling the avoid­ance of one unwanted birth in a coun­try such as Kenya.

So one African’s life is worth the car­bon emis­sions of one flight from Lon­don to Sydney? Some­thing tells me the African is not the prob­lem in this equation.

Provid­ing the means for women to avoid an unwanted birth is an admiral pur­suit but, really, off­set­ting the over con­sump­tion of people in rich coun­tries to fund it?

Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter on cli­mate change scep­tics:
… these do-nothing cli­mate change scep­tics are pre­pared to des­troy our children’s future … cli­mate change skep­tics in all their guises and dis­guises are not con­ser­vat­ives. They are radicals. They are reck­less gam­blers who are bet­ting all our futures on their arrog­ant assump­tion that their intu­itions should tri­umph over the […]

Amy Wal­lace writ­ing for Wired: An Epi­demic of Fear: How Pan­icked Par­ents Skip­ping Shots Endangers Us All:
The rejec­tion of hard-won know­ledge is by no means a new phe­nomenon. In 1905, French math­em­atician and sci­ent­ist Henri Poin­caré said that the will­ing­ness to embrace pseudo-science flour­ished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we won­der whether […]

They invade and lay waste another coun­try, des­troy the lives of mil­lions of Iraqis for gen­er­a­tions to come, all on some trumped up drivel about “weapons of mass destruc­tion.”
Now they’re arguing over the real reason. Oil. It’s not enough that con­trol of Iraq’s crude is being div­vied up amongst the cap­it­al­ists of the world. Thomas […]

No Right Turn on the NZ National/ACT government’s oppos­i­tion to a new bill that would make it a national crim­inal offence for any New Zea­l­and polit­ical leader to “plan, pre­pare, ini­ti­ate or execute an act of aggres­sion” in viol­a­tion of the UN Charter.
… when Wayne Mapp says he doesn’t want our for­eign policy to be sub­ject to […]

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on ter­ror.’
Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already pur­chased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).
As John Gruber notes:
It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s some­thing else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been written, […]

Landon Thomas Jr. in the New York Times:
Nor­way is … a major oil exporter [and] Even though prices have sharply declined, the gov­ern­ment is not par­tic­u­larly wor­ried. That is because Nor­way avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich coun­tries.
Instead of spend­ing its riches lav­ishly, it passed legis­la­tion ensur­ing that oil rev­enue went straight into […]