Category: Uncategorized

Immigration Reaches All-Time High

A report by the International Organization for Migration estimates that there are more international migrants worldwide than at any other time in human history. Currently the IOM estimates there are more than 150 million international migrants scattered around the world.

The IOM defines a migrant as a person who resides for an extended period in a foreign country. The 150 million migrants today represents an increase of more than 30 million people in just the last decade. The upswing in migration has been fueled by a number of factors including the collapses of the Soviet Union, an increase in civil wars, and the ongoing globalization and integration of the world economy.

The country that receives the most immigrants is the United States, with more than 1 million people immigrating to the U.S. legally every year and another estimated 300,000 people illegally settling in the country.

Women now make up almost half of all international migration, with an increasing number being professional women and primary wage earners rather than simply accompanying other members of their family in migrating.

Source:

Global migration Trends: An Era of International Migration. International Organization of Migration, November 2000.

Global migration reaches record high. The BBC, November 2, 2000.

Pharmaceutical Companies Finally Get a Backbone

Better late than never — some British pharmaceutical companies recently decided they’re no longer going to stand by and twiddle their thumbs while animal activists pick off companies like Huntingdon Life Sciences. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry announced that its members would begin taking their business away from banks and other financial institutions which cave to the demands of animal rights activists.

Unable to make much of a dent in the companies themselves, animal rights activists have recently begun going after the banks and financial institutions that companies like HLS rely on. So far, that strategy has worked better than anyone anticipated, with HLS’s long term survival seriously in doubt thanks to the activist campaign against banks and stockbrokers doing business with HLS.

ABPI director-general Trevor Jones told Reuters, “If they are not prepared to support a member of our industry (Huntingdon), we must ask if they are the people we should rely on for advice and to invest our cash. That debate is taking place right now.”

In April, Britain’s Association of Medical Research Charities transferred its accounts to protest its bank’s decision to cut all financial ties with HLS.

Because of the strong pound, many foreign pharmaceutical firms — especially those located in Japan — have sizable investments in Great Britain, and Jones said that caving in to the animal rights activists could cause hundreds of millions of pounds of pharmaceutical investments to find safer havens.

Besides which, as numerous companies which have tried to meet the activists halfway have learned, banks and financial institutions are buying themselves a temporary peace but ensuring they will be the main targets in the long term war being waged by activists. Once they are finished with HLS and turn their sites to other companies, don’t think for a second they will forget how easy it was to make banks and stockbrokers jump ship. Citibank, HSBC, and others who quickly caved are likely to find themselves the constant target of activist threats.

Source:

UK drug firms issue warning to banks. The BBC, May 1, 2001.

UK drug firms may boycott banks in animals row. Reuters, May 1, 2001.

Summer Baby Killing Season Starts Early

Diana Rodriguez, 18, has the dubious distinction of kicking off this year’s round of bad parents whose children die because they get left in a car for hours on end. Rodriguez left her baby in her car for 7 1/2 hours while she worked her shift at McDonald’s. According to the Associated Press story, the autopsy on the 13-month old infant indicated that temperatures in her car reached upward of 130 degrees.

Police have charged here with child abuse resulting in the death of a child, and she was released after someone put up her $25,000 bond.

Rodriguez won’t be the last. I couldn’t find any solid statistic on how many children die this way, but in a typical summer I see about 15 to 20 of these sorts of news stories. Typically the deaths fall into two categories: a) parents who forget that their child is in their car, and b) parents who don’t think it’s wrong to leave their child unattended in the car, often for hours on end as Rodriguez did.

The most disgusting case I read about of the latter type involved a man who was scheduled to go mushroom hunting with a friend. At the last minute, his wife, who was going to watch his daughter while he was scouring for mushrooms, was called into work and so the man took the daughter with him on the mushroom hunt. While he and the friend scoured a cave for about 6 hours looking for mushrooms, the child was in her car seat in a locked car with all of the windows up. In Arizona. In August.

Some of the people I’ve talked about this topic with think I’m a bit too “law and order” on this, but aside from the sheer idiocy of such preventable deaths, the thing that really gets under my skin is that there is almost never any real punishment for such acts. It is very unlikely, for example, that Rodriguez will spend any time at all in jail. In some cases, in fact, grand juries have refused to indict parents whose children died in such incidents, on the theory that the parent has suffered enough by knowing that he or she caused the child’s death through negligence. (Which to me always sounds like the classic legal example of a man asking for lenience from the court for killing his parents because the murder has suddenly left him an orphan).

Consider the case of Gail and Julius Baker. Their 10-day old daughter, Joy, died after Mrs. Baker left the girl in a car for 7 hours. Where was she during that period? Playing video poker in a South Carolina game room. Rather than blame his wife for her obvious negligence, Julius blamed the gambling industry and led a successful campaign to outlaw video poker in South Carolina. Gail Baker? She received a sentence of 5 years probation.

Using Satellites to Reduce Pesticide Use

A brief news item in The BBC reported that Kazakhstan is planning to use state-of-the-art satellite technology to conquer an age-old crop problem: locusts.

Locusts are apparently a severe problem in Kazakhstan. The only solution is to apply pesticides to crops to kill the locusts. The problem with that approach, however, is that pesticides are expensive.

To reduce the amount of pesticides that will have to be applied to crops, the Kazakhstan Space Research Institute signed an agreement the Canadian company, Radar Sat International, to use satellite data to predict which areas are most likely to be hit by locust attacks.

According to Radar Sat International, using a combination of meteorological and soil data should allow areas at high risk of locusts to be pinpointed, and the amount of pesticides needed reduced by as much as 60 percent.

Source:

Kazakh locusts tracked by satellite. The BBC, May 8, 2001.

Excellent Teresa Platt Article on PETA, Animal Rights

Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission, USA, a fur industry group, recently wrote an excellent article defending animal agriculture from the claims made by animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Platt dug up some succinct quotes about the importance of animals as a food source from Oklahoma State University’s Department of Animal Science:

Only about one-third of the land area of the world is classified as agricultural. Thus, roughly two-thirds of the land area of the world is not suited for any sort of agricultural use because it is covered by cities, mountains, deserts, swamps, snow, etc. Of the 35 percent that can be devoted to agriculture, less than one-third can be cultivated and produce plant products that the human can digest. The remaining two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is covered by grass, shrubs or other plants that only ruminant animals can digest. Thus, the inefficiency of animals is not a major concern since they represent the only way these plants can be converted to human food. As the human population of the world increases, it is likely that we will be forced to depend more and more on ruminant animals to meet the increased demands for food.

As Platt notes near the end of her article, if PETA and other animal rights groups are serious about obtaining all human-edible food from plants, they should acknowledge that the environmental changes such a transformation would entail would likely rival the changes that took place with the massive worldwide clearing of forests and other ecosystems for farmland in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Of course one way to get around that would be to use genetic engineering, but the activists are opposed to that, too).

Source:

Let Them Eat Cake!
PeTA Sees Foot-and-Mouth Disease as the Final Solution. Teresa Platt, Fur Commission USA, April 24, 2001.

Breeds of Livestock. Department of Animal Science, Oklahoma State University, Factsheet, undated.

Age of Puberty Has Not Declined Substantially

A handful of small studies had suggested that the age at which girls enter puberty had been declining dramatically. This led to an explosion in possible explanations, from environmentalists who blamed it on manmade chemicals to some feminists who blamed it on the glut of sexualized images that children are exposed to. But a new, larger study published in the British Medical Journal confirms what other larger studies have reported — there has been little or no change in he age at which girls experience their first period.

In the study, 1,000 British girls completed a questionnaire about their first period. The average age at which the girls reported having their first period was 12 years, 11 months. This represents an almost negligible decline of about 6 months from the average menarche age from the 1950s and 1960s.

The small change is likely due to the same reason that the age of girl’s first period declined by more than a year between the 19th and 20th centuries — an overall improvement in general nutrition.

Sources:

No change found in age of menarche. National Center for Policy Analysis, May 4, 2001.

Girls maturing slightly earlier. The BBC, May 3, 2001.