"You just keep having children. This is how you keep a man," Sylvia, mother of twelve, told Maternowska. "If you don't give [children] to him, he doesn't give [money] to you.... And sometimes even if you do give, you lose anyhow. Life is hard." Women would do anything to keep a man. There was a brisk trade in sexy outfits and wild rumors circulated about love potions, some from voodoo healers, some home-made, including rice and beans cooked in water in which a woman had washed her underwear.

That's a passage about Haiti. Haiti, poorest country in the Western hemisphere…is there enough rice in Haiti to waste on a man who might leave? Or can a woman cook dirt cookies in her underwear water, too? Not uplifting questions, sure, but what exactly did the World Bank so fear from these people that they were willing to endorse the literal dragging of Indian women to sterilization clinics and worse, the measures that in China all too often resulted in forced third-trimester abortions?

Well, eugenicists feared the introduction of the Pill into the First World would cause "the swamping of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races by imbeciles, blacks, Asians, and eastern and southern Europeans," and technically, that happened. By the late sixties, books like the Population Bomb had softened that message, focusing on India where the (not improbable) prophesy was that "squalid, teeming slums and mass starvation" would beget "imminent political collapse." Ahhh, political collapse, our generation knows it well! But then what?

Particularly after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Washington policymakers began to fear the rise of an increasingly resentful—and rapidly proliferating—global population of poor people who were easily susceptible to radical ideas and militaristic leaders. But in the end such people, if they threatened anyone, were mainly a danger to themselves.

As we know from the poor countries in which we've brought about political collapse lately!

Helen Epstein's whole review is worth reading — and the NYRB is worth subscribing to and makes a great gift for dads! — but here's a critical line. As anyone who has ever been in love knows, treating others humanely might come more naturally when you suspect they might have the capacity to hurt you.

The greatest threats to the global climate come from China and the West, where birthrates are extremely low. The future of the planet depends less on the number of babies born in Uganda than on the choices we in the West make, which, at the moment, are not good ones. As recently as 2004, a Japanese study found that when shopping for cars, Americans cared more about the size of the cup holder than fuel efficiency.[10] Our habits may be shifting, but ever so slowly.

The Strange History Of Birth Control? [New York Review Of Books]
Earlier: Is It About Time We Made A "Pregnancy Pact" Of Our Own? [Jezebel]

Related: New Limits To Growth Revive Malthusian Fears [WSJ]
RU-486: Brought To You By John D. Rockefeller [Some weird website I don't think is related to antiabortion zealots]

MOE: Did you check out Geraldine Ferrarro giving Shep Smith a beej? How could someone be SO HYPER AWARE OF anything even remotely construable as "sexist" still be saying things like "black journalists who are Obama surrogates like Bob Herbert." Because yes, Bob Herbert is so simpleminded, so singlemindedly focused on electing one of "his own" that — oh yes, and the only reason he has his New York Times platform is surely tokenism in the first place — why would a progressive white woman even read him to begin with?
MOE: You know he doesn't have anything worth saying about misogyny

MEGAN: Like Shep wants a beej from a girl...
MOE: Dude
MOE: I'm shaking from anger.
MEGAN: Also she wants an "independent group to do a study on media." Like Media Matters?
MOE: Yeah maybe they should check out that Obama surrogate Bob Herbert who hasn't had anything nice to say about Hillary in the past six months because he's so sexist

MOE: OH EXCEPT WELL THIS FIVE MONTHS AGO

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America

MEGAN: Also, so, can we check her crazy hair? She's got a tuft sticking up in the back. How did that happen?
MOE: Okay, I can't handle it anymore, let's just have a moment of silence for Ted Kennedy's brain. I had dinner with Jennifer Gerson last night and she said that as an intern for MSNBC she was once charged with escorting him up a platform and he was outraged to find that he had to climb steps. "There were literally two steps," she said. My kind of septugenarian! Although…not if I stay in this apartment!!
MEGAN: Well, I think his knees are shit. But, yes, it doesn't surprise me. But brain cancer sucks. I'll bet he thought his heart would get him.
MOE: Okay, in another window SinisterRouge is calming me down. (Imagine if Geraldine Ferrarro was a commenter! She'd get put on notice, and then she'd just go crazy and her last comment would be something like "Hang that darkie from a tree!" and then she'd claim it was a joke and then no one would pay attention to MY brand of "controversy" anymore.)
MEGAN: I love that she's the one calming you down today. I mean, Ferraro just makes me sad. I'm sad that's she's turned into this caricature of a nasty old woman whose racism shows and who is so concerned with her supposed victimhood that she dismisses the claims of others. She was the first female candidate for the vice presidency of the United motherfucking States of America and she's stomping all over the legacy of that. I realize that not everyone reading this would remember, but I remember 1984 and I remember thinking it was, like, totally normal that a woman be running and then realizing it wasn't and thus how cool she was. Only now she's not cool. So I'm more saddened than outraged.

MOE: Uh, in other news Hillary won Kentucky by a 30-point margin. Um, dumb question: are there no black people in Kentucky or something? What's up with that? Also oil went above $130 a barrel, another new record.
MEGAN: I have deliberately avoided looking at gas prices while in New York, a situation helped by the fact that the only times I've passed any have been in a cab and I've been intoxicated. I'm sure they're high.
MOE: A friend of mine asked me the other day why oil prices were so expensive and I was like "1. China 2. India 3. The market tends to overreact 4. no exploration or real incentive for exploration." But I forgot to add "the dollar." And seriously regarding the exploration thing I'm not sure whether that's still true.
MEGAN: Also, Obama barely campaigned in Kentucky. I think despite his crazy fundraising skills, he's conserving his money at this point to get through the convention and Pennsylvania sort of proved that sometimes its just a waste. He doesn't need Kentucky, so he didn't spend so much to make that margin tigihter.
MOE: Kentucky is only like 7.5% black.

Gross reports having students of his at the University of Kentucky tell him they had never seen or talked to a black person before coming to Lexington, a college town of nearly 300,000 people. In some areas of Kentucky, Gross says there's perhaps only one or two black families there.

MOE: Also Kentucky declared neutrality during the Civil War…
MEGAN: I actually met someone once in her forties who had never seen a black person until she left her state. It was, um, interesting. I'm amazed it still happens.
MOE: Though it was a slave state and in the early 1830s slaves comprised a quarter of the population. They just never had much of a plantation economy…Is it possible my perception of Kentucky has been skewed because some huckster from Indiana decided to dress in "stereotypical Southern gentleman type clothing to promote his restaurant chain"?? Um why yes it may be!
MOE: Oh in other news Hezbollah has veto power over everything the Lebanese government does now.
MEGAN: Oh, well, that's great. I love how having the power to scuttle stuff is important.

MEGAN: Kentucky was an okay state. I drove through it once. It was sorta pretty, plus, obviously, bourbon.
MOE: OBVIOUSLY
MOE: So, here's something else. I was on the train yesterday with this lady who was really nice and let me use her phone. Her computer said "Property of the World Bank" and she told me how she was coming up to New York to present a new survey on economic development and by George it would appear she was not pulling a fast one on me! And check this:

But departing from free-market orthodoxy, the panel also said that governments had a far greater role to play in development than was recognized in the markets-are-king 1980s and 1990s. To boost growth, the panel urged developing nations to spend heavily on infrastructure and endorsed, with some reservation, government subsidies to build local industries.

MOE: You don't say!

Among the findings that are bound to stoke the most controversy: democracy isn't essential for growth. Autocratic governments that allow "vigorous debate" internally on economic policies are sufficient, the report said. Free trade isn't a prerequisite either. Some fast-growing economies kept barriers high to imports, even as they promoted exports, the report said.

MEGAN: Oh, wait, someone noticed China! Cool!
MOE: Well yeah and who did China notice? Why…Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and also Thailand!
MOE: But what I really love is this:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers praised the commission's focus on government-led growth policies, but said its emphasis on economic winners didn't fully take into account how industrial policies deepened corruption in many countries and failed to ignite growth there. "It's like looking only at those who made fortunes in the stock market without diversifying their portfolios" to figure out the best way to get rich, he said.

MEGAN: Indonesia's kind of a hot mess, though, and has oil/natural gas, so I think that's a little different. But otherwise, I agree with your list.
MOE: Um, actually, looking at the United States economy is what that is like.

MOE: Well yes, Indonesia is an incredible mess, which is why China managed to grab so much manufacturing business from them as Suharto's government crumbled.
MEGAN: Indonesia is one of those places I'd really like to visit. I don't know why. I wish I was like my friend Tim, who parlayed a Masters in theology to a job as an investment banker, saved a shitload of money and bailed on life to travel the world for a year. I am really jealous of him right now, and not just because I keep looking at his flickr account.
MOE: Which speaks to Larry Summers' point, but the fact is that Korea and Taiwan both paid close attention to Japan's climb up the "economic value ladder" into more sophisticated manufacturing. When you manufacture computer chips, for instance, which are by definition very small and shrink in size every 18 months, the cost of sending them down the Insatiable Consumption Esophagus toward the US is not that great. So your population can eventually see much more of the cost! But semiconductor plants are incredibly expensive and sophisticated to operate, so while they're harder to transplant in other countries — though the Taiwanese have certainly been doing just that in China despite the fact that you still can't get a direct flight between the two countries — they also require a lot of PLANNING. INVESTMENT. An educational strategy.
MOE: And then! Much to the chagrin of shareholders…semiconductors are a highly cyclical business! So while the demand keeps growing, sometimes you have to sell them at a loss!
MOE: It can be painfully low-margin…again something the market doesn't reward!
MEGAN: Oh, God, stop, visions of grad school case study horrors dancing in my head!
MOE: BUT. Your countrymen will thank you!
MOE: Sorry, it just completely kills me that you mention how we need better economic and industrial planning in this country to some people and they act like you're fucking advocating the next Great Leap Forward.
MEGAN: I mean, the problem with industrial planning is that you take the concept, throw in 20,000 businsess lobbyists and 535 Members and Senators and you come up with a bullshit plan that won't help anyone that really needs it and will help whomever has the political capital to get help. Ahhh, democracy.

MEGAN: Whatever we talk about, can we agree that Bittergate is about to be as played-out as Reverend Wright?
MOE: I haven't been watching the news, so I was really confused by that. Like, okay, so...Obama is saying that people cling to religion in times of crisis, and...like hello have we not talked enough about Obama's religion already Jesus Fuck...and Hillary says that's elitist but she won't say when the last time she set foot in church...and the Pope is coming? Peggy Noonan wrote about the Pope coming. I couldn't quite get through the column though. I have always been one of those terrible Catholics who was like, "John Paul II...uh, what's the big deal?"
MEGAN: Nope, it's the new Pope, JPJ bought it a couple years ago. This is the one who used to be a Nazi, loves him the Opus Dei and the Latin masses and hates that you and I have teh sexes.

MOE: Speaking of which, over the weekend, Tracie and our friend Ryan and I went to a gay bar and burst into "On Eagle's Wings" followed by a "Be Not Afraid," "One Bread, One Body" "Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace" medley.
MEGAN: Oh, God, I miss all the fun by being in D.C.
MOE: No I know that there is a new pope DUH. I am just saying, it seems like everyone is comparing him with the old pope, who was so iconic and humanistic and crap; but I never really understood the hype about the old pope, maybe because he presided over an era of officially sanctioned child molestation? I dunno. I'm pondering this now.

MEGAN: I think the hype about the old Pope was that he eschewed the Pope Pius model of appeasing dictators (cough, Hitler, cough) and instead used the power of his office to confront them directly in countries where there were Catholics. Also, it was only once he was infirm and shit that the Church came to a détente with the Chinese about letting the Chinese government decide on Church officials because when JPJ wasn't laid up he mostly told the Chinese to go fuck themselves, but Benedict is fine with it.
MEGAN: Also, I think probably all the eras of the Church involved the sanctioning of inappropriate sexual or ethical behavior. Absolute power corrupts, yadda yadda

MEGAN: Notably, I left the Catholic Church at 16, so I'm not really a "Catholic" so much as an ex-Catholic with major leftover guilt issues.
MOE: Okay, so sure, he's cool. Let's play a game: The Avignon papacy or the Council of Nicea?
MOE: The Gospel of Tom or the Gospel of John?
MOE: Vatican I or Vatican II?
MEGAN: Hmm, was Vatican I the one in the late 19th century that declared that the Pope was infallible?
MOE: Karl Marx or Bill Kristol?

MEGAN: Karl Marx, but I was a German lit major AND a Sociology major. Also, I'd pay significant money to hear/videotape Bill Kristol reading crap in German
MOE: Okay, so Vatican 1 was indeed about papal infallibility. It was a controversial topic since it made Catholics seem like they had some sort of weird foreign allegiance, so everyone did like Barack Obama and didn't show up, then there was the Franco-Prussian war, which is why they had to revisit the issue a hundred years later. Papal infallibility is such a weird idea. How do you come into this world with Original Sin and achieve "infallibility" when you've NEVER EVEN HAD A REAL JOB?

MEGAN: Also, it was retroactive! I love that they went, oh, by the way, the last 1800 years? Those guys were totes infallible too, even the ones who were all Crusade-y and Inquisition-y. And it means that Pius was, like, totes right for making nice-nice with the Nazis and shit.

MOE: John Henry Newman, a fanboy of St. Augustine and the church's famous advocate for not talking about Papal infallibility, just skipping that discussion entirely.
MOE:

But he made no sign of disapproval when the doctrine was defined, and subsequently, in a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on the occasion of Mr William Ewart Gladstone's accusing the Roman Church of having "equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history," Newman affirmed that he had always believed the doctrine, and had only feared the deterrent effect of its definition on conversions on account of acknowledged historical difficulties. In this letter, and especially in the postscript to the second edition of it, Newman finally silenced all cavillers as to his not being really at ease within the Roman Church.

MOE: To me there's something Obamalike about that. Jeremiah Wright or John Henry Newman?
MEGAN: So, like, it's harder to make people convert to Catholicism if you ake shit up 2000 years in to quell dissent? Honey, it's hard to make people stay Catholic when you do that.
MEGAN: Jeremiah Wright. Newman's got, like, centers and shit on campuses everywhere.
MEGAN: Anyway, so, to get back to Bill Kristol, I have definitive evidence that he's either never read any further into his Marx reader than he had to to get that quote, or he's just misinterpreted the entire point of Marxism.

He's disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.

In response to a question about when life began, Mrs. Clinton replied, "I believe that the potential for life begins at conception."

MOE: IMHO.
MEGAN: Also, apparently the head of PA's Democratic Party is a Hillary surrogate who just said that "she's the most vetted candidate in the Democratic Party's history" and that she's "ready to go to work on Day 1." Can we please, please, please stop hearing that bullshit phrase. You know what happens on Day 1? Everyone parties. There are balls upon balls and everyone gets drunk and then on Day 2 everyone hangover brunches. No President really starts Presidenting until Day 3 anyway.
MEGAN: And I agree with you on Hillary. I don't believe life begins at conception, and I think that abortions should only be as rare as the women who want and need them prefer they be and I think a candidate who thinks that s/he can save the world from abortions is being deliberately disingenuous and courting people I don't agree with.
MOE: Anyway I'd say I'm an agnostic who finds comfort in faith. Because — and speaking of cowards, for every Alberto Gonzales not getting a job, there seem to be a hundred men gangraping children in the name of God, a billion people paying for America's nonsense wastefulness in their stomachs.

MEGAN: Although, isn't it some weird turn of fate that the guy calling for more money to feed the world's poor is a former Bushie?
MOE: That's a good point. Ever the optimist. So...Haiti got sick of eating dirt for breakfast.

MEGAN: Well, that should work out well again. Why does Haiti suck so much worse than anywhere else in the Caribbean?
MOE: Here's the dirt cookies post, which has a decent link to a web page called "Why is Haiti so poor?" The answer is just sort of an orgy of miserable circumstances, the type that lead a person to take comfort and solace in absurdity, which is sort of like my faith. Like, when Jesus comes back he will be an existentialist stand up comedian.
MEGAN: Or Muslim. That would be pretty funny.
MOE: OH my god he will sooooooooo be a Muslim and his middle name will be Hussein. Hey, wanna write a screenplay?
MOE: He'll be a Muslim from Yemen.
MEGAN: Wait, wait, no, a Palestinian!
MOE: Okay but can he escape to Yemen?
MOE: Because that would be absurd.
MEGAN: Yeah, he could "cross the desert" of Saudi Arabia in 40 days to get there.
MOE: OMG and at the end he would marry Ashley Alexandra Dupre.