Stats of a different kind

In his book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín has a chapter on the writer, James Baldwin. On page 314, in relation to Baldwin's concerns about the experiences of black people in America, and the ongoing racial blindness between white and black, he notes the following statistics (which are a little date, but have doubtless worsened rather than improved):


At the end of 2005, there were close 2.2 million prisoners in federal, state or local jails in the United States.  Three thousand one hundred and forty-five black men out of every 100,000 lived as sentenced prisoners, compared to 471 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males; this compares to an estimated 3,000 out of every 100,000 members of the population of Russia who were in jail during Stalin's reign. 


As of 2006, seven million people in the United States were behind bars, on probation or on parole.  The United States has 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prisoners.  737 per 100,000 compared to 100 n Australia and 50 in Norway and 37 in Japan and 29 in Iceland and India. England and Wales, with roughly the same crime rate as the United States, have 149 per 100,000 in prison.  


A report from the Justice Department estimated that 12 per cent of American black men in their twenties and early thirties are in jail now, compared to 1.6 per cent of white males of the same age group.  The general prison numbers in the United States have double since 1990. 


Incidentally, Tóibín's book is primarily about writers and their families, not about crime and black people.  

Norman Borlaug

More than 30 years ago, Norman Borlaug wrote, "One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy."

He still believes that environmental activists and their allies in international agencies are a threat to progress on global food security. Barring such interference, he is confident that agricultural research, including biotechnology, will be able to boost crop production to meet the demand for food in a world of 8 billion or so, the projected population in 2025.

Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and was still teaching, in 2000, at the age of 86. He was the 'father' of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s, achieved by the production of high-yield dwarf wheat. His team's dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties, and were shipped to countries where wheat was struggling to grow. As a result both Pakistan and India have been able to feed themselves in spite of huge population growth.

Information above from an article in ReasonOnline. Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95, on Saturday, Sept 12th, 2009.

Mark's Mistake

"More than 175 million people use Facebook," said Mark Zuckerberg [co-founder of the social network]. "If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world.
"This was a mistake and we apologise for the confusion."

Mr Zuckerman proving he knows his grammar better than he knows his customers, who rejected new Terms of Use which included a clause giving Facebook 'perpetual worldwide licence' to anything posted on the network.

I'm glad some people read Terms of Use. I'm afraid I'm one of the millions who don't very often.

The Great Unspoken

What's the great unmentionable in human society? Sex, nah. Death, nah. These are both talked about everywhere. We just pretend they're not.
The great unmentionable is defecation, and its companion, urination. Okay, the second of those two occasionally gets a mention in public life, but the first is mostly viewed as something no one actually does.
Why am talking about this then? Because I've just seen a review of a book called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. It's written by Rose George, and was published by Metropolitan Books, back in October this year.
More than 6 billion people have to deal with this (an anagram of shit, did you realise?) day in and day out, and in many parts of the world there just isn't the provision for it, which is why there's a great deal of disease, and so many deaths from diarrhea (I'm using the US spelling because I can never remember the English one.) According to the review (which is based on the book's stats), diarrhea kills a child every 15 seconds. Can this really be true? Perhaps it can, but it's certainly hard to comprehend.
The review, by Bill McKibben, on the Books & Culture site, is well worth reading (only a couple of pages.) It makes a book on a not-so-enticing subject enticing!

Tightening the Belt - severely!

In an article in the Otago Daily Times this morning Murray Grimwood says that for our survival as a species we’ll have to live within some tight parameters. He lists five particular things:

replacement population only;
total re-use of resources;
total elimination of pollution;
self-sufficient housing (linked together in energy terms like the Internet);
a halt to physical ‘growth.’

He adds that as a result of following these things we will work less and walk more, weigh less and live more, impact less, conserve more.
My problem with these points isn’t that they’re unrealistic, but rather that a huge percentage of the population, in the Western world anyway, isn’t interested in recycling, living conservatively or considering how they use the resources they have.
I’m fairly recycling-focused, but even I find it hard to think of living within restricted parameters.
And I’m not sure that I agree, if we were to go ‘conservative’ in our progress, (if that’s not an oxymoron), that we would work less. Rather we would work harder at better things, things that involve domestic manual labour for men and women, things we could do with our hands, creative things. And we’d definitely walk more.
My mother remembers walking to Blackhead Beach when she was a child, with her parents. This would be an all day trip, there and back, up hill and down dale, and no doubt they’d be carrying picnic baskets and all the beach paraphernalia.
The other factor is how to make total re-use of resources. Perhaps with oil running out we’ll have a huge amount less plastic to deal with. That would help immensely. It’s one of the least reusable material on the planet.

I can't show you a photo of Blackhead Beach on this blog, because of copyright restrictions, but if you click here, you'll see several professionally-taken ones.