Day: August 28, 2001

Feminist Majority Foundation on the Evils of Political Advocacy

Although I am pro-abortion, the inanity of much of the pro-abortion movement continues to astound me. The anti-abortion group, The Center for Bioethical Reform (WARNING: their web site contains graphical images of aborted fetuses) has created an unorthodox and controversial way to spread its message.

It uses large trucks that are painted with billboard-sized images of aborted fetuses. Overlayed on the images is a single word — “Choice.”

According to The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminist Daily News Wire, by sending these trucks throughout the country, the CBR is “continu[ing] to harass, endanger, and misinform the American public.”

How ironic that the same feminist movement which once urged frank and open discussion about reproductive health now apparently considers a photo of an aborted fetus to be nothing less than harassment.

Feminist Majority Foundation Vice President Katherine Spillar manages to be misleading in her attempt to describe the billboard trucks as misleading themselves.

“The typical abortion is done at eight weeks or less, when we are talking about a pre-embryo the size of a grain of rice,” Spillar said. “Women know from their experience that those photos aren’t what an abortion is.”

Huh? Even if a typical abortion is done at eight weeks, how is it misleading to portray the results of an abortion done at a much later period of a pregnancy? Is Spillar claiming that no later term abortions are conducted? Or is she uncomfortable defending late term abortions?

Who needs enemies when the right of a woman to have an abortion has friends like the Feminist Majority Foundation?

Source:

Misleading anti-abortion billboards causing congestion on freeways. Feminist Daily News Wire, August 23, 2001.

More Proof that Palm is Doomed

I can’t believe that Palm is counting on Blue Tooth to rescue their rapidly sinking ship. First they tried wireless in the Palm V that nobody wanted, now they’re going to let it all ride on Blue Tooth… maybe the third time will be the charm and they’ll ship a Palm with 802.11b built in. Even then, they’re falling so far behind what Compaq and other PocketPC manufacturers are doing (and I am stunned at that), the entire Palm platform risks being relegated to obscurity in a few years if it doesn’t play its cards right.

Business Week Profiles Right Wing News Sites

Business Week has a look at right wing news sites such as WorldNetDaily and FreeRepublic.Com. Along with their right wing political angle, these sites have something else that differentiate themselves from other content sites such as Salon.Com — they’re not losing millions of dollars a month.

In fact, World Net Daily claims that most months it breaks even with monthly revenue in the $250,000-$300,000 range (that wouldn’t be enough to pay the inflated salaries of the folks at Salon.Com).

Or look at Australia’s Crikey.Com.Au which takes in a paltry $66,000 a year in revenue (Salon.Com burns through that much every two days), but keeps costs below $11,000 a year. Stephen Mayne, who runs the site, isn’t getting rich, but is well on the way to turning his site into a profitable small business.

According to Business Week,

Profits may sound miraculous for any content-based Web site right now, but given the smaller scale and narrower focus of these online niches, everything is possible.

“The smaller sites can survive on the media edge. It’s even easier if they are willing to focus on costs,” says Eric Scheirer, an analyst with Forrester Research. Moreover, niche sites’ long-term success could eventually threaten big media’s domination — a concept that has been all but discredited since the Internet bubble burst.

Personally, I don’t think we’re going to see any disruption of big media’s domination of the news anytime soon. On the other hand, the same economies of scale and organizational structures which make those companies very profitable also make it very difficult for them to meet niche market needs — the return on investment simply isn’t worth it. Which means plenty of opportunities for savvy independent web sites.

Was Danny Almonte a Ringer?

I did not watch any of the Little League World Series, but it was almost impossible to avoid coverage of pitching sensation Danny Almonte. The young man from the Dominican Rublic struck out 86 percent of the batters he faced, gave up only one run in four games, and managed to pitch a perfect game to boot.

Of course, those feats might not turn out to be all that amazing if, as Sports Illustrated claims, Almonte was in fact 14 years old — a full two years older than the cutoff age for players in the Little League World Series.

Almonte’s coach was showing reporters a copy of Almonte’s birth certificate listing Almonte’s birth date as April 7, 1989, but when Sports Illustrated traveled to the Dominican Republic it found that Almonte’s birth had been registered twice.

In 1994, his parents registered his birth and recorded his birthday as April 7, 1987. But then in March 2000 — coincidentally just before Almonte left the Dominican Republic to play Little League Baseball in New York — they re-registered his birth, this time listing the birthday as April 7, 1989.

Little League officials plan to investigate.

The End of Population Growth?

Wolfgang Lutz, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, recently published the results of his institute’s forecast of future population growth. The forecast received a lot of media attention in part because its forecast is significantly more optimistic than the United Nations’ forecasts about the rate at which grow will come to a halt.

The main difference between the IIASA’s forecast and the United Nations’ forecast is their differing assumptions about fertility. Lutz and his fellow researchers argue that the UN model underestimates the rate at which fertility is declining worldwide and thus overestimates future populations.

Warren Sanderson, an economist who worked on the IIASA model, told ABCNews.Com that the UN model was flawed because it assumes that fertility will stay above the replacement level of 2.1. Sanderson argued that this is unrealistic.

“The evidence shows women are already not having enough children to replace themselves,” Sanderson said. “We may as well wake up and smell the coffee and begin focusing on how to live sustainability with the number of people we will have in the next century.”

And how many people will that be? In a letter published in Nature, Lutz, Sanderson, and Sergei Scherbov write that,

Improving on earlier methods of probabilistic forecasting1, here we show that there is around an 85 per cent chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century.

By the end of the century they predict an 80 percent chance that the world’s population will be 8.4 billion. The United Nations, in contrast, forecasts that under the most likely scenario world population will be roughly 9 billion by 2100, and possibly still growing (though at the extremely small rate of one-tenth of one percent per annum).

Sources:

The end of population growth. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov, Nature, 412, 543-545, August 2, 2001.

Population to peak. Amanda Onion, ABCNews.Com, August 2, 2001.

American-Israel Chamber of Commerce Threatens to Sue In Defense of Animals

The American-Israel Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta, Georgia, recently threatened to sue animal rights group In Defense of Animals in a dispute over a web site that In Defense of Animals maintains, EmoryLies.Com.

The web site targets Emory University and the Yerkes Primate Center, which In Defense of Animals wants to shut down. Probably because it is a high profile target, the group has lately been targeting Coca-Cola in its dispute over the primate facility. Although the company has nothing at all to do with the primate facility, it has donated more than $100 million to Emory University.

On October 11, 2001, the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, whose mission is to highlight and encourage economic ties between the United States and Israel, plans to hold an awards ceremony at Coca-Cola’s world headquarters honoring “people and companies who have made a significant impact on business between the Southeast and Israel.”

In Defense of Animals plans to protest at the meeting and has posted information about their protest on the EmoryLies.Com, both of which are perfectly legal. But they have crossed a line in expropriating artwork from the AICC site and placed it on the EmoryLies.Com site in a way that would probably fool a reasonable person.

Judge for yourself. Here’s the real page from the AICC announcing its awards ceremony:

Now, here’s the page from EmoryLies.Com announcing their protest:

The overall effect here is clearly to make it appear as if the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce is somehow involved with or in support of IDA’s actions against Coca-Cola.

IDA released a press release claiming that the lawsuit would go the same route as a lawsuit filed by Stephens Inc. against Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. SHAC had used the logo and web site design from Stephens web site to parody Stephens. They used the logo, for example, but added the words “Invest in animal cruelty.” A judge threw out the lawsuit, saying that this was protected under the First Amendment.

But the situation is very different with IDA since it has made no effort to distinguish the AICC materials as a parody. I suspect that Jean Barnes, who apparently created the site, will find herself on the losing end of this lawsuit.

Sources:

American-Israel Chamber of Commerce threatens legal action against web site exposing bad science and animal cruelty. In Defense of Animals, Press Release, August 21, 2001.

Animal activists ready for fight–attorney retained. In Defense of Animals, Press Release, August 21, 2001.