Open thread: Numbers up

how much I appreciate all the great work Betsy has done to make BlueNC such a beautiful new place. The site refresh has been flawlessly executed. Very exciting!

Not too far into the future, it is likely that there will be about as many people in the Carolinas (13.5 million in 2007 and exploding) as in all of New England (14.3 million and barely growing at all).

All this growth, and planning for it, should be one of our key issues, if not the very top one, in our local elections this fall.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi

We can learn a lot from our Haiti. The country is years ahead of us in many ways.

It's an overpopulated, ecological nightmare landscape where the majority poor scramble for what little resources trickle down from a super-rich ruling elite.

Its economy is an unregulated Libertarian paradise that has driven out almost all foreign and domestic investment (including Hanes and Sara Lee, good Winston-Salem brands both) because HA HA! the government can't provide electricity, water or telephone service. Plus: the cheap labor (best deal in the hemisphere!) wants you dead.

Everyone who can afford a gun must be armed with one, natch, to fend off the starving multitude. With no way to fund schools, upward mobility is impossible for the rural poor or children of the harrowing urban slums. Emigration is illegal since the rest of the world sees you as an economic refugee; it's also unfortunately your only hope for survival.

There's no nice curb-side trash pick-up in Haiti. When it rains, the topsoil runs into the culverts. The culverts are full of trash because no one takes it away. Now the culverts are full of floating trash. When it really gets to raining, your neighborhood fills with sewage, then washes downhill.

But it doesn't rain as much as it used to because the 90% deforestation of Haiti's useable land (the result of bad land-use practices in the past and non-existent land-use policies recently) has turned this formerly lush agricultural paradise into a semi-arid desert. Yep, they literally changed their own weather.

I'm not a big world traveler. I've been to one place: Haiti. Why? Because it is the single best illustration of the ecological, economic and social disasters that a civilization can bring on itself.

All those boring land and water use, pollution regulation and other growth issues that most of the electorate like to ignore? Let me tell you first hand:

They get real exciting when they turn into water shortages and land ruin because of a simultaneous population spike.

(footnote: Haiti's problems are not all her own doing. After Haitian independence from France following the worlds first successful slave revolt, Thomas Jefferson refused to normalize relations with the fledgling republic and it's been more or less down hill from there from them.)

Fondwa Haiti, December 2005

Somehow I can't edit my comments anymore. "We can learn a lot from our Haiti?" Who wrote that? Max? :)

I really rely on the comment edit option because quite honestly I'm a bit stupid on the first draft. And that's on a GOOD day. Today my head feels like a wet brick and "we can learn a lot from our Haiti" and "it's been more or less down hill from there from them" is what's been coming out of it.

Thanks for intuiting what I was trying to say...

Robin Hayes lied. Nobody died, but thousands of folks lost their jobs.

Is so very, very wise:

Are you a fundamentalist father worried that your daughters may learn to think for themselves at college? Never fear: Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is offering a course (for women only) that will teach your female offspring how to graciously submit to the supremacy of their future husbands.

Associate Press Article here

At one time what made Baptists Baptists was the radical notion that a man (or presumably a woman) could read the bible and form his or her own relationship with God without intermediary. Many Baptists still believe this. Unfortunately, the handful of political operatives that hijacked the Southern Baptist Convention back in the eighties continue to insist that they are the only ones who God is willing to talk to.

Here's hoping honest folks who read the good book are getting sick of this nonsense.

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Thomas Jefferson said you always get the rulers you deserve.

has an excellent post today on our policy makers' "head in the sand" approach to confronting the hard realities of health care in America.

Opponents of universal health care can and do argue that universal healthcare is too expensive ... or that mandating health insurance somehow threatens their economic freedoms. Well and good…they are free to make these arguments. Studies like these, however, show the sometimes uncomfortable consequences of our policy decisions. Americans are literally dying at younger ages with greater suffering than they would if we had universal health coverage. Universal health care opponents should acknowledge this simple truth.

about Republican corruption.