From Our Friends At The Population Research Institute

and then

The sad, painful, and all too undiscussed truths of these offenses are simple - our way of life in America is growing increasingly dependent upon China, her goods, her services… And this holds sway over there.

Keep them in your prayers.

This entry was posted on January 2, 2008 at 4:01 am and is filed under Abortion, Apologetics, Prayers and Requests, Pro-Life Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “From Our Friends At The Population Research Institute”

  1. Rob Says:
    January 2, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    I apologize for a long comment, but I thought yoou might be interested in some data I compiled for a post on my now-dead blog, Back to Catholicism. Here it is:

    Any American over the age of twenty-five remembers pictures of Somalia and Ethiopia on television when we were kids. Who can forget the scenes of hunger on television, flies crawling over the bodies of bloated, big-eyed children? Overpopulated countries, right?

    Somalia has a population of some 10,700,000 souls, according to the 2003 estimate. Now, Somalia is not an easy country in which to take a census, so the number could be too high or too low. I will take into consideration that it may be too low later on. Given it’s area, 246,201 square miles, that comes out to almost 44 people per square mile. Wikipedia says 34/sq. mi, but that doesn’t jibe with my numbers (10,700,000 divided by 246,201 comes out to 43 and a large fraction. I suspect Wikipedia has made a typo.) We will err on the side of a larger density since, according to the ‘overpopulated’ crowd, the world is teeming with humans and needs to rid itself of a great many of us.

    Well, who knows density? Is 44 too many in a square mile? Those of who live in cities certainly experience more density, but then we also know that a country needs a certain amount of wide-open space, farmland, pasture, forests. When it is all averaged out, is 44 too many? Let’s look at the United States.

    Wikipedia says that the United States has a population density of 80 people/square mile. When I do the math, I actually get 81.

    Wow. Who would have guessed that the US was almost twice as dense as Somalia? And yet we have great wide-open spaces and farmland that the government pays people not to grow crops on so that the market is not flooded.

    But, the US is a special country, a superpower, who cannot be easily compared to a country like Somalia. Is it not possible that the US is able to maintain such a high density because of its special fortune as the lone superpower? It could be. Let us look at some other countries.

    Have you ever been to the United Kingdom? It is a lovely place. There are crowded bustling cities and yet there are great expanses of pasture, farm and forest land. The UK is also, as we know, a fairly successful country. It is certainly not a disaster zone. The economy there is quite strong.

    And it has a population density of 629 people/square mile! How can that be? How can a state so burdened with people manage to survive? It is beginning to look like, if we are going to tie population density to a state’s economic success, we need to airdrop several tons of Viagra into Somalia every day for the next few generations.

    Of course, Somalia could be an aberration, just as we suspected might be the case with the US. Why don’t we look at several countries and see if we can detect a relationship between overpopulation? Here is a list:

    Ireland - 148/sq mi
    Germany 598/sq mi
    Denmark - 333/sq mi
    China - 363/sq mi
    Netherlands - 1,023/sq mi
    Japan - 873 sq mi
    Ethiopia - 181/sq mi
    Nigeria - 374/sq mi
    Nicaragua - 109/sq mi
    Singapore - 16,392/sq mi

    Note the countries with the highest densities. They tend to be the most successful. And look at Singapore! And this from a country that is 22nd in rank by dollars per capita!

    With this information so widely available, why aren’t we encouraging fertility? Based on this data, economic success does seem to be tied to population density, only in an unexpected manner.

    Dense populations are more successful!

  2. Katherine Says:
    January 2, 2008 at 4:55 pm

    The kow-towing of the current Administration to the Chinese dicatorship is most distressing, particularly theri obession with trade liberalization. No better is the matter of “Yahoo” cooperating with the Chinese government in spying on those who resist the government. And I am sorry to report that even the Opus Dei run Catholic bookstore here had no comment when I suggested to them that they cease marketing religious goods made in China, given that the workers making these object would not be able to posess them.

  3. Joyful Catholics Says:
    January 3, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    mind boggling. You know, I was at our Catholic bookstore and saw “made in China” on some items. I wonder… probably not. Does it come down to the mighty $$ here…and as Catholics it’s sobering. I’ve bought ‘made in china’ merchandise before. It’s darn near impossible not to around here…it’s been mostly clothing when that happens for me, however. I’m going to check what I buy more carefully and inquire of Gloria Deo about this, but probably won’t get much traction.

    Thank you for the post and rob and katherine for your comments.

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