Internation Events X - Why such a long break...?

[kissdbyfire]

And a couple of days later we get breaking news that Torres, former Justice Minister in Bozo’s government and former security secretary  in Brasilia from Jan 1 through Jan 9 is Brazil’s own John Eastman. The search warrant executed in his home revealed documents laying out a plan to overturn the election. And by the way, he’s still in Orlando. 

[Zorral]

Dispatch
Cleaning Up After the Bolsonaristas in Brasília
President Lula’s government spent the week reassuring Brazilians that the threat of a coup had been contained

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/cleaning-up-after-the-bolsonaristas-in-brasilia

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

China population reached its peak in 2022: China’s first population fall since 1961 creates ‘bleaker’ outlook for country | China | The Guardian

Quote

The country had 1.41175 billion people at the end of 2022, compared with 1.41260 billion a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday, a drop of 850,000. It marked the beginning of what is expected to be a long period of population decline, despite major government efforts to reverse the trend.

Projections show their population as low as 0.77 billion in 2100, so it is possible the world population may also start declining (or equilibrating) towards the end of the 21st century.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

China population reached its peak in 2022: China’s first population fall since 1961 creates ‘bleaker’ outlook for country | China | The Guardian

Projections show their population as low as 0.77 billion in 2100, so it is possible the world population may also start declining (or equilibrating) towards the end of the 21st century.

There was an interesting “NPR: One Point” about population last week.  In it a population scienctist pointed out that while population continues to grow, and very quickly in certian areas, the overall trend line for population growth has been pushing towards negative growth since the 1960s.  We’re at a growth rate of about 2.3 per person right now.  1.99 is population decline.

Here’s a link:

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/01/11/earths-growing-population-a-direct-affront-to-our-own-survival

[IheartIheartTesla]

Thats not quite true. The replacement rate globally currently stands at 2.1 - the 2 of course comes from replacing the parents, but the additional 0.1 is mostly because some children don't reach reproductive age. As you can imagine, certain areas will require higher replacement rates (but the global average is 2.1). The average fertility per woman is currently at 2.3, as you note but the gap towards population decline isnt as wide

[DireWolfSpirit]

As if I didnt have enough news this year to be irritated with the Russian government. I read some more gas for the fire in an older Slate article-

 hybrids millions of years ago. In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.

Just really gross, apparently Mengalese did not have anything on Stalin when it came to monstrous medical cruelty.

 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/11/can-humans-mate-with-other-animals.html

[Zorral]

For something much better! The photos in the piece are eye-popping too.

Rainforest? Turn left after the drawbridge! Inside Madrid’s eye-popping living school

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/17/reggio-school-andres-jaque-madrid-rainforest-zig-zag
 

Quote

 

.... From here, you get a good view of the building’s blobby, buttery surface, which turns out to be a natural cork mixture, pulverised and sprayed on to the walls to form a thick insulating jacket – with twice the thermal properties that Madrid’s regulations require. Specifically developed for this project, it is unlike any other cladding around, with a texture somewhere between gritty, earthen plaster and sponge. It has an alluring, tactile quality, covering the building in globular lumps, forming creases and folds as it splurges around the corners, with the look of supersized Play-Doh.

Beyond providing insulation, this 15cm-thick coat is intended to take on a life of its own, becoming a habitat for fungi, insects and other organisms to flourish in its nooks and crannies. Rainwater is designed to run down the facade, following the clefts in the cork, nourishing whatever microbial lifeforms take hold. Other schools might reach for the pressure-washer, but this one will embrace the grime. “I hope it will become like the surface of a tree,” says Jaque, “full of life.”

The idea of the building as an armature for “more than human” life (an ongoing theme in Jaque’s work) recurs throughout the school. On the landings, windows look out between the classrooms into recessed gardens, each designed to attract a different form of wildlife, from butterflies to birds and bees, in spaces that are specifically inaccessible to humans, so the creatures can be observed undisturbed.

The third floor, meanwhile, is home to a miniature temperate rainforest, which rises two storeys in a covered courtyard, with laboratories and workshops accessed off a deck around the edge. There is something poetic about coming out of a biology class to be confronted with a lush botanical garden and its attendant insects, and it serves an environmental purpose, too. As an enclosed greenhouse space, it helps to heat the classrooms in winter and cool them in summer, with ventilation hatches in the translucent barrel-vaulted roof.

Younger pupils have already begun to colonise the forest floor, building a model cardboard city between the ferns. “This is a collaborative project initiated by a second-grade student,” notes a sign, in classic Reggio style. “Together, the pupils discussed the buildings their city must have, elected a mayor and organised a collective management strategy.” Will the next step be unleashing their skills on the building itself? ....

 

 

 

[ThinkerX]

4 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Thats not quite true. The replacement rate globally currently stands at 2.1 - the 2 of course comes from replacing the parents, but the additional 0.1 is mostly because some children don't reach reproductive age. As you can imagine, certain areas will require higher replacement rates (but the global average is 2.1). The average fertility per woman is currently at 2.3, as you note but the gap towards population decline isnt as wide

That is what the *current* fertility rate is. In the not so distant past, those numbers were much higher. 

[IheartIheartTesla]

Yeah, I think research has found one of the key drivers for lowering female fertility rates was level of education among women. You can draw a direct line between literacy rates in India and the quite substantial drop in growth rate in India, for instance.

[DMC]

Any thoughts on Jacinda Ardern's abrupt resignation?  I appreciate her admitting she just doesn't have "enough left in the tank" to do the job, and I know she has a young daughter, but resigning at 42 is still very interesting.  Gotta expect she'll be back, right?

[Fez]

On 1/17/2023 at 12:02 PM, IheartIheartTesla said:

Projections show their population as low as 0.77 billion in 2100, so it is possible the world population may also start declining (or equilibrating) towards the end of the 21st century.

Several years ago now there was a UN projection that Nigeria would reach 1 billion people by 2100, and that actually all of sub-Saharan have a population growth explosion. If that's still the case, and if India is supposed to keep growing (which I think it is), I would think the world population keeps growing for a while longer than that. Assuming catastrophic climate change is held off. 

[Zorral]

A Refreshing Way to Think About Border Wars and Debates
In a fascinating new book, the author has a knack for original perspectives and observations about familiar, intransigent problems.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/borders-migration-ukraine-war-edge-plain-crawford-review.html

Quote

 

.... In a moment of reading serendipity, I listened to a recording of Zelensky’s interview just as I was reading the Scottish historian James Crawford’s beguiling new travelogue/history/meditation The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World. Crawford’s reporting and research took place almost entirely before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and he refers to it only in passing, but it’s hard not to think of the war, and the notion that life and territory could be inseparable, when you encounter a statement like “what is a border, if not a story? It is never simply a line, a marker, a wall, an edge. First, it is an idea […] It can only ever be made. It can only ever be told.” ....

.... Crawford, a prolific writer and broadcaster in the U.K., endeavors to trace the history of borders back to the beginning. The title comes from the inscription on a pillar recently rediscovered in the British Museum’s collection that is believed to be the oldest surviving boundary marker: It separated the territories of the states of Lagash and Umma in present-day Iraq. The pillar’s text also includes the first known use of the phrase “no man’s land.” Tying the past to present in a later chapter, Crawford graffitis the phrase, in ancient Sumerian text, on the separation barrier in East Jerusalem.

After examining the origins of borders, Crawford takes a global tour of their present configuration. (As if to underline the book’s theme, he was frustratingly unable to visit all the case studies in the book due to pandemic-era travel restrictions, though to his credit as a writer, this doesn’t hamper the narrative much. Some of the most familiar examples are included. Crawford takes in the U.S.-Mexico border, the contested Israeli-Palestinian border, and Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves surrounded by Morocco that are the last remaining European-controlled territories in continental Africa and have, in recent years, become a target for migrants seeking entry into Europe. Even in this well-trod territory, Crawford has a knack for finding original perspectives and observations.

One of the refreshing aspects of Crawford’s approach is that rather than leaning primarily on historians or political activists as his main sources, he gravitates toward artists who incorporate borders into their work. We meet Hans Ragnar Mathisen, a Sámi artist who creates maps that both celebrate the Nordic indigenous group’s culture and question officially accepted geographies; Marcos Ramirez and David Taylor, who erected dozens of obelisks marking the short-lived 1819 border between the U.S. and Mexico; and Marco Ferrari, whose work documents how the Italian-Austrian border is literally moving as a result of climate change–driven glacial melt. Fans of Thomas Pynchon will enjoy an extended riff on the 1997 novel Mason & Dixon and its historical subjects.

Crawford’s depiction of the modern reality of borders is often very dark, never more so than in exploring the work of anthropologist Jason de Leon, who describes his work as an “ethnography of death” based on study of the artifacts (and sometimes bodies) left by migrants attempting to cross the Sonoran desert of Arizona. And plenty of Crawford’s sources argue that borders are merely artificial constructs that don’t correspond with human or environmental realities. ....

 

 

[Impmk2]

6 hours ago, DMC said:

Any thoughts on Jacinda Ardern's abrupt resignation?  I appreciate her admitting she just doesn't have "enough left in the tank" to do the job, and I know she has a young daughter, but resigning at 42 is still very interesting. 

Probably a question best posed in the NZ/Aus thread. Not an expert on NZ politics, but it's funny how often politicians retire to "spend more time with family" right before an election they're expected to lose.

6 hours ago, DMC said:

Gotta expect she'll be back, right?

Again I can't say I follow NZ politics that closely, but generally parties in the westminster system dont recycle leaders. So no, wouldn't expect that at all.

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

but generally parties in the westminster system dont recycle leaders. So no, wouldn't expect that at all.

I understand generally but she's just so damn young.  Be pretty weird if her career is over.

[kiko]

4 minutes ago, DMC said:

I understand generally but she's just so damn young.  Be pretty weird if her career is over.

She's very popular outside of her country, so an international body?

[Maltaran]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

I understand generally but she's just so damn young.  Be pretty weird if her career is over.

Her career won’t be over, but it’s unlikely to come back into Parliament 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

Her career won’t be over, but it’s unlikely to come back into Parliament 

Maybe?  I'm not saying anytime soon, but y'all sound way too sure of yourselves.

[ThinkerX]

5 hours ago, Fez said:

Several years ago now there was a UN projection that Nigeria would reach 1 billion people by 2100, and that actually all of sub-Saharan have a population growth explosion. If that's still the case, and if India is supposed to keep growing (which I think it is), I would think the world population keeps growing for a while longer than that. Assuming catastrophic climate change is held off. 

Outside of Africa, the population of the various continents is either below or barely above the replacement level.

 

World and continental fertility rate, 1950-2020 | Statista

 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

12 hours ago, DMC said:

Any thoughts on Jacinda Ardern's abrupt resignation?  I appreciate her admitting she just doesn't have "enough left in the tank" to do the job, and I know she has a young daughter, but resigning at 42 is still very interesting.  Gotta expect she'll be back, right?

Well, unlike the previous Prime Minister who resigned unexpectedly in 2016(?) it wasn't because she is having an affair with another member of cabinet and jumped before the information got leaked. At least that's what reliable sources say about John Key.

My view is this has been a totally shit past 4 years starting with the Mosque terrorist attack in 2019 and then a volcanic eruption killing a bunch of tourists who really had no business going to an island that is an active and unpredictable volcano, but our tourism sector became very blase about taking people there, and then the pandemic. Also she is far more popular outside NZ than in NZ now, though until yesterday she was still the preferred Prime Minister by a decent margin. The remaining 23 years of her pre-retirement life can be much more rewarding doing something other than being PM. However, my speculation was she also looked at the prospects for the election this year and decided it will be unlikely for her party to get back into govt with the Reserve Bank hell bent on forcing the country into recession and creating an unemployment wave this year. Being the PM that loses an election and then retires isn't worth sticking around for the 9 months until that happens. In the less likely event of getting back into govt 3 more years, she clearly doesn't have the motivation to see through another term. 

Late last year lots of media were speculating on whether she'd want to keep going, she had to deny at that point, but clearly there was a vibe out there that she was getting tired of it all. I certainly imagine she had a chat with the last Labour PM Helen Clark, and I imagine she said if you are not up for the fight you're better off out of it.

For me it was a surprise, but not a shock. But I think partisan politics is a mug's game so I will always advise any politician to get out of it no matter where they are at in their political career, and I will always advise friends thinking about getting into it to not be such a fool. Of course if you only see elected office as a form of grift and opportunity for personal gain, I guess you are in exactly the right place.

Also, the only people who come back around these parts are those who acrimoniously split from one of the major parties and take enough support with them into a smaller party: Winston Peters; Jim Anderton; Tariana Turia; Richard Prebble are examples. I think Jacinda Ardern will remain Labour aligned, if not a paid up member, so will never seek national elected office again. She might try for a second life as Auckland Mayor. I wouldn't be surprised if she has a tilt at that in 2025 or maybe 2028. Last year Auckland elected a right-wing mayor who is not much younger then Biden, but Auckland would probably be more naturally centre-left, so the mayoralty could be hers for the taking if she so desired. I doubt she's interested though.

[TheLastWolf]

India has already overtaken China in terms of population...

The 2020 goals for development preached when I was a kid are now nowhere to be seen but I distinctly remember that this overtake wasnt expected till the end of this decade. Cant help if politicians here ask the majority to extend their lead by breeding more to combat alleged minority conspiracy to proliferate and convert. Population control here is taken as seriously by the boomers in power as climate change is. That is to say, nil.