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What is it about the "Global Population, Magnitude Of" thing that so vexes the world's rich people? I'm asking in light of the food crisis and the energy crisis bringing back that old "Malthusian population crisis" fear. I'm also asking in light of my kinda recent discovery that the American rights to the RU-486 abortion pill are owned by some super-secretive subsidiary of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council. (Which is, by the way, charging too much money for it.) But mainly I'm asking because I just read this NYRB piece on two new books about the population control movement in the '50s and '60s which, among other things, taught me this about the challenge Western family planners faced in getting (and sometimes coercing) Third worlders into embracing birth control: More »
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GODDAMMIT GERALDINE, you just had to drag me back down into your withering wackjob abyss. I said I was never going to post about the Clinton campaign and sexism, since more than 12 out of 12 Clinton campaign surrogates agree that's not why she lost to Obama (despite that, congrats on winning Kentucky yesterday!), and then you go on Fox News and tell Shep Smith that Bob Herbert is a "black journalist who is a surrogate for Obama" on the basis that he is an unremitting misogynist who "hasn't had anything nice to say about Hillary in the last six months." Well, Geraldine, your charge that the media ignores sexism brought me back to a column I read about five months ago. "If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media," it opined, "it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America." Well, if it wasn't written by BOB HERBERT himself! Not that you'd bother reading the writings of such a blatant token with a political leanings so simpleminded he would support a candidate solely on the basis of a shared RACE. Anyway, that and oil prices, Hezbollah, a new World Bank report and how come there are no black people in Kentucky with Megan and (a somewhat irate) me after the jump. More »
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Barack Obama thinks the new Pope is hustling the opiate of the masses. But it's the opiate that kept him off his cokehead ways so it's okay! Hillary thinks the potential for life begins at conception, and that Obama is an elitist. Is it possible that the second coming of the Messiah is also the reincarnation of Karl Marx? Is it possible that some countries can only subsist on dirt and opiates for so long? Are we talking about Marx when we should be talking about Malthus and stockpiling guns? Barack Obama seems to think so, and guess what? We agree. In Jezebel's deepest spiritual discussion since I wrote about how being a Libra made me believe in God, the inimitable Megan and I discuss the papacy, fave hymns, and how cool it would be if Jesus came back as a Palestinian stand-up comedian. More »
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Recent revelations of marital infidelities by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, etc. have clearly fueled the mainstream media's crusade against Shaha Ali Riza, the feminist, Muslim World Bank staffer with whom World Bank president, Iraq War architect (and general evildoer) Paul Wolfowitz has been knockin' boots for the past few years. Apparently Riza makes more in her post than Secretary of State Condi Rice does, an income disparity that is the result of a series of completely inappropriate raises fast-tracked at the hands of Wolfie, to the point that she now makes $193,000 a year. We'd be really shocked and outraged about this if Riza looked anything like the sort of big-haired, 80s-centerfold types Republicans are generally fond of screwing, like Callista Gingrich or the above pictured Jessica Hahn and Paula Parkinson. But, uh, from the looks of it, Riza is clearly competent at something. (Whether that 'something' is devising loan packages that will keep Third World regimes beholden to the interests of Bechtel, Halliburton and other significant campaign contributors — or just good old bondage play — we'd rather not know.) More »
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