Month: August 2001

NOW Chapter Raises Money for Yates

The Houston area branch of the National Organization for Women recently announced that it and several other groups had formed the Andrea Pia Yates Support Coalition to raise money for the defense of Yates, 37, who admitted drowning her five children. As Debora Bell, president of the group explained, “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women. Some good may come out of this tragedy.”

Along with possible future fund raisers, the group is planning to hold a candle light vigil on Sept. 12 for Yates — the day before she is supposed to appear in court for a hearing to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

In a column on the topic, Wendy McElroy report that FEMNET, an online forum used by the Houston area NOW, included a request to send “cards or notes of caring” to Yates in prison. McElroy adds, “I searched but found no record of FEMNET requesting ‘notes of caring’ be sent to the funeral of her children.”

I wonder if Nikolay Soltys, who is still on the loose and accused of murdering his wife and unborn baby, 3 year-old son, and five other family members, will receive similar sympathy and outpourings if he explains that he was insane at the time of the killings. Even if he does, however, I don’t think any men’s groups will come out and say they have to support Soltys because they have to “be there for other men.”

Sources:

Rallying Around a Baby-Killer. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, August 28, 2001.

NOW, ACLU oppose seeking death penalty for Yates. Pam Easton, Associated Press, August 28, 2001.

NOW creates coalition to raise funds for Yates. Lisa Teachey, The Houston Chronicle, August 23, 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.

Mink Releases in Spain and Holland

Sometime the night of August 1st or the early morning of August 2nd, animal rights activists released 3,000 mink from a fur farm near the Spanish city of Teruel.

The Guardian (London) reported that the mink are an American variety not native to Spain and officials were concerned that the mink might displace local native species. Although Spain is generally too dry to allow the mink to survive very long, local officials told The Guardian that mink who escaped from a farm a decade earlier had set up a small colon on the banks of a nearby river.

Even local ecologists who oppose mink farming were appalled at the action. Teo Oberhuber of Ecologists in Action told The Guardian, “Despite the terrible conditions in which they are kept and the shameful systems employed to kill them, setting the animals free into the wild is an act of gross irresponsibility.

A few weeks later in Holland, activists freed almost 17,000 mink from a farm in Valkenswaard. As of August 24, about 1,500 mink had been recaptured and about 200 ofthe animals had been killed, mostly after being struck by automobiles.

Sources:

Mink ‘liberation’ sparks mass hunt. Ananova, August 24, 2001.

Fur flies as 3,000 mink freed in raid. Giles Tremlett, The Guardian (London), August 2, 2001.

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.

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.

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.