http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times The Washington Times is not the prestigious Washington Post.   Just this week I must have received from at least six people copies of articles about the Philippines from the Washington Times.  They all purport to describe the crux of the problem the Philippines faces.  Reading the Washington Times articles below show that they point to several most-important reasons why the Philippines is in the state it is, stretching from poor infrastructure, poverty, violence, failure in governance, corruption, storms, terrorism, the NPA, the Muslims, failures by the Philippine military, etc.   Not one word is said by the Washington Times articles about the one giant principal problem that almost every responsible scientist and analyst long ago identified.  Immense overpopulation.   But that is the Washington Times.  It has no credibility except among rightwing nuts because it is a rightwing rag founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in 1982 to give him and his Unification Church some standing in the world's most important center of power namely Washington DC.  The paper has lost billions of dollars since its foundation but these losses have been absorbed by the Unification Church (its members are called moonies ) who continue to use it as it's organ for extreme rightwing causes at the very center of the world's most political powerful nation. The theology behind the Unification Church is this.  God sent Jesus to earth to save mankind.  Jesus FAILED in his mission so God had to send the Rev. Sun Myung Moon to earth to fix the mistakes of Jesus Christ and really save the world.  The Rev Moon and his Unification Church are now saving the world using rightwing ideology that is the hallmark of the Washington Times because God is a rightwinger. So for those who believe that Christ was a failure and the Unification Church accurately represents God as a rightwinger who hates Obama and is against healthcare reform and against saving the environment, against civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and every other right, keep reading and keep quoting the Washington Times. Love to all, Danding     Subject: Rv: Washington Times articles about the Philippines   Sad but true.....Only a miracle can save us.                   The Washington Times.   [Commentary] .   Richard Halloran   10/14/2009.                             In an East Asia that is generally experiencing political and economic progress from Seoul to Singapore, the Philippines stands out as a running sore that seems to have no cure.                   The Asia Foundation, the nongovernmental organization seeking to stimulate development, has reported that the southern Philippines suffers from poor infrastructure, poverty, and violence that has claimed more than 120,000 lives in the last four decades of civil strife, terror and insurgencies, and crime that goes unchecked.                   A retired U.S. military officer with long experience in Asia said that the fundamental problem in the Philippines is that the Philippine government has not figured out how to help the people, to pick up the garbage and to educate the children.                   An American civilian official agreed, saying a failure in governance was the basic cause of the misery in the Philippines. He pointed to the feudal society in the Philippines and contended that until that is changed, the problems will continue to be unresolved.                   From all accounts, Philippine and foreign, corruption is pervasive throughout the archipelago. Renaud Meyer, a representative of the United Nations Development Program in Manila, was quoted in the Philippine press earlier this year as saying corruption is a primary obstacle in the effective delivery of public services and fulfillment of basic rights.                   He predicted it would get worse. These are challenging times for all of us in our fight against corruption, especially in the next two years, Mr. Meyer said. For one, we are in the midst of an impending international economic crisis, which is affecting both developed and developing economies. Second, 2010 is election period in the Philippines.                   The central government in Manila has appeared hapless in the face of repeated natural disasters in recent months.                   The Philippine archipelago, which form the eastern rim of the South China Sea, not only have experienced a breakdown in basic law and order; the country provides a haven and training site for terrorists and insurgents to move into the rest of Southeast Asia. They travel from the southern Philippines along island chains through the Sulu and Celebes seas into Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond.                   In the Philippines itself, the terrorists of the Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiya, and the Rajah Solaiman Movement, plus the communist New People's Army, operate with near impunity. A contingent of U.S. special operations forces, usually numbering 600 troops, has been assisting the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) for about seven years in the southern Philippines but with little visible success.                   The AFP, said a longtime Philippine hand, are glad to have other people do their fighting.                   A U.S. State Department report four years ago asserted, The major, and disturbing, trend in the Philippines has been the growing cooperation among the Islamist terrorist organizations operating in the country: Jemaah Islamiya, the Abu Sayyaf Group, and the Rajah Sulaiman Movement. The latter comprises Christian converts to Islam, which allows them to pass undetected in other parts of the Philippines.                   In a similar report in the spring, the department said Philippine troops, with the intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance help of U.S. forces, continued to marginalize the remaining numbers of the Islamic terrorists. But the report said the 5,000-strong New People's Army continued to disrupt public security and business operations with intermittent attacks on communications and transportation everywhere.                   Late last month, two American soldiers were killed in the southern Philippines by a roadside bomb believed to have been planted by terrorists _link_ed to al Qaeda. The Associated Press said they were the first American troops to die in an attack in the Philippines in seven years. The U.S. Embassy said they were on a resupply mission for a school construction project on the island of Jolo.                   An obvious and disturbing question: Were their deaths an omen of things to come?                   Richard Halloran is a freelance writer and former New York Times correspondent _base_d in Honolulu.                   Another Washington Times Article about the Philippines                   The World Bank issued a report years ago about the biggest cause of the endemic poverty and lack of progress: Corruption on BOTH ENDS of the government revenue and disbursement system. On the revenue side, the BIR collects less that fifty percent of maximum possible collections. The customs function is world famous for its corruption, taking in probably even a lower percentage of total possible receipts. On the disbursement side, funds that go to public works, education and national defense are stripped of commissions and bribes to grease the palms of government officials. Hence the roads and flood systems are in a state of disrepair, police are not paid enough and public school children have to wallow in the midst of substandard facilities and materials.                   Other Asian countries where corruption exists can afford these peccadilloes because they possess natural resources like petroleum which compensates for the withdrawal of funds from the public system. The Philippines has also not made it past the import substitution phase and is unable to feed its own people with its agricultural output. It can thank the oligarchies that have dominated the sugar, coconut and lumber industries over the past fifty years; oligarchies whose main _object_ive was to enrich their families, maintain private armies and withhold revenues from the government. Worse, these oligarchies operate as countries within a country, hundreds of miles from Manila with citizens so attached to the teats of the Robber Barons that they don't care a whit about who is in political power, just as long as the agricultural powers that be provide them with their daily subsistence. Presidential elections are a Metro Manila fashion fad, the rest of the 80% of the country does not care because they feel that whoever sits in Malacanang will not make their lives any better. And they are right.                   There is no cure for this problem unless one hundred million palms descend from the heavens and slap every citizen on the side of the head as a wake up call. The political powers that be will remain there for the rest of time, regenerating descendants who will serve to continue their forbears' efforts. Martial law would have been good, but BEEN THERE DONE THAT. Filipinos can just sit back and wait for the next natural disaster where they again will be ill prepared due to lack of civil infrastructure. Sit back and pray.

Angui, Here is the reality.  Neither you nor I know jack-shit about overpopulation or Malthus or any of that.  So I will not answer any of your points because whatever I answer will be ignorance added to ignorance.  Instead, I will point you to:   The Most Important Video You'll Ever See .  Watch the first then follow the prompts to the next.  [[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related ]] The guy in this video is one of the world's top scholars on arithmetic.  Yes angui... the answer lies in simple arithmetic.  It lies in that one branch of  arithmetic few understand.  Namely, exponential growth .  Listen to this professor because he knows the subject more than you and me combined.   Here is a fact of life.  When we were in high school in the 50s, the Philippine population was 20 million.  Today it is 95 million.  Population growth rate has slowed and is down to a measly 2% per year.  Meaning that at this rate it will double in 35 years.  So if the rate persists, by 2042 the population in the Philippines will double to 190 million.  No problem because Malthus was wrong says Angui.  Let's wait another 35 years.  By 2077 the Philippine population will be 380 million.  Still no problem because Malthus was wrong says Angui.  Let's wait another 35 years.  At only the same small 2% rate of growth, the Philippine population will double again to 760 million by the year 2112, a little more than 100 years from now.  Let it grow at that rate for a few hundred years and there will be more Filipinos than the total mass of the earth. Of course this will never happen.  One thing about humanity is that it almost always tends to avoid global catastrophes once they become imminent.  Church or no church it will do that.  The Philippines can not withstand a population of 500 million or even 200 million without immense catastrophes.  It will stop itself from getting there.  It will do so via: 1.)  strict family planning including the pill, condoms, IUD, morning-afters, and what have you.  That's one way.   2.)  It can restrict population by wars.   3.)  Or by famines.   4.)  Or by pestilences.   5.)  Or by uncontrolled criminality caused by a complete breakdown of law and order.   These will be the choices.  These aren't even choices.  Only the first one is a real choice.  By the time the population approaches 150 million, no sensible Filipino will choose anything but the first option.  Sooner rather than later the church will have no say on the matter as it has no say on the matter in Europe, America, Japan, China, India, etc. Love to all, Danding - Hide quoted text -- Show quoted text - 

Begging your pardon my dear Danding, I may not have all the qualified information, at hand at this stage; on said subject and also given you that much that you are more astute in this field of acquired knowledge plus the added gift of thinking power. But I can assure you, I too, (a bit more limited and confined parameters perhaps than you) have done my research from  our  very early days in High school – when exposed to the alleged social/economic  problem that alleged was to be; then in a young mind; when taking up the question of ‘overpopulation’ on hand  

Several if's with the application of this arithmetic for it to be true. Although it is obvious resources are limited in this planet & too many political idiots(i.e leaders) are contributing more to agravate the situation, poor people only respond to the logic that survival is related to in numbers we have strength . The overpopulation problem in the P.I. is a problem not the problem! Africa has the same poverty issue but overpopulation is not yet a problem. What is extremely obvious to me(I wonder why not to others?) is that the problem is the corruption of politicians & the lack of resolve that political parties have with solving people's problems & I include here the U.N.& the E.U.as well. Have you ever seen Joao Barroso resolve one problem? The chinese communist party has done very little(for 60 yrs) to mitigate its own obvious social problem by limiting it to a 1 child per family dictate(which now it is even relaxing). I suppose the underlying cause of attributing the problem solely to overpopulation(or overcopulation) is to put the blame squarely on the CC in Rome. What about the muslim faith? Is Mindanao not overpopulated? I think the CC is out of sync with this issue but is not the main cause. Europe is facing an aging population issue because of the birth rate being very low. So where do we go from here? I believe that an individual, if rational, can copulate without a need to overpopulate. A condom only helps to depersonalize a natural instinct so this is a convenient commodity for an encounter with a minimum of commitment. The logic that the condom will stop exponential growth of perfect arithmetic is something we can keep farting on. Maybe mandatory sterilization is something someone would like to propose as a solution. I propose we start with all politicians. Abrazos,  Antonio Borao From: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it CC: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Subject: Re: Washington Times articles about the Philippines Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:54:51 -0600 Angui, Here is the reality.  Neither you nor I know jack-shit about overpopulation or Malthus or any of that.  So I will not answer any of your points because whatever I answer will be ignorance added to ignorance.  Instead, I will point you to:   The Most Important Video You'll Ever See .  Watch the first then follow the prompts to the next.  [[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related ]] The guy in this video is one of the world's top scholars on arithmetic.  Yes angui... the answer lies in simple arithmetic.  It lies in that one branch of  arithmetic few understand.  Namely, exponential growth .  Listen to this professor because he knows the subject more than you and me combined.   Here is a fact of life.  When we were in high school in the 50s, the Philippine population was 20 million.  Today it is 95 million.  Population growth rate has slowed and is down to a measly 2% per year.  Meaning that at this rate it will double in 35 years.  So if the rate persists, by 2042 the population in the Philippines will double to 190 million.  No problem because Malthus was wrong says Angui.  Let's wait another 35 years.  By 2077 the Philippine population will be 380 million.  Still no problem because Malthus was wrong says Angui.  Let's wait another 35 years.  At only the same small 2% rate of growth, the Philippine population will double again to 760 million by the year 2112, a little more than 100 years from now.  Let it grow at that rate for a few hundred years and there will be more Filipinos than the total mass of the earth. Of course this will never happen.  One thing about humanity is that it almost always tends to avoid global catastrophes once they become imminent.  Church or no church it will do that.  The Philippines can not withstand a population of 500 million or even 200 million without immense catastrophes.  It will stop itself from getting there.  It will do so via: 1.)  strict family planning including the pill, condoms, IUD, morning-afters, and what have you.  That's one way.   2.)  It can restrict population by wars.   3.)  Or by famines.   4.)  Or by pestilences.   5.)  Or by uncontrolled criminality caused by a complete breakdown of law and order.   These will be the choices.  These aren't even choices.  Only the first one is a real choice.  By the time the population approaches 150 million, no sensible Filipino will choose anything but the first option.  Sooner rather than later the church will have no say on the matter as it has no say on the matter in Europe, America, Japan, China, India, etc. Love to all, Danding - Hide quoted text -- Show quoted text -

Spot on Tony Over population is indeed a problem but is actually a manifestation of other larger problems as have been pointed ( corruption & incompetence of politicians plus the lack of resolve & greed for the rich in society who prefer to keep things as is ). Traditional poor families favor more offspring as it betters an individual family's chance of survival. Condoms might even get used to store water or utilized as chewing gum not because they don't know what they're for but rather because of the sheer lack of basic necessities. Providing opportunities for people to work solve the tendency for the poor & jobless to want to have children. Look at Western societies. In Spain, not too long ago, families had 5 or 6 kids while today, as Tony points out, there is negative population growth. People are just too busy to rear children & they don't have them. This of course brings sustainability problems, where a recently considered overpopulated society, China, now needs lots & lots of new babies. Going back to the Philippines, the church may have actually gotten it right all along. Look at things this way : a. The church considers that there's a great lack of spirituality in the Western world. b. If there aren't enough opportunities in the Phils. people will move, by hook or by crook c. If the church manages a half decent job to train Filipinos in Christianity then there's a fantastic chance for Filipinos to champion Catholicism worldwide in huge numbers in the coming decades ! Now Danding, I'm not asking you to think like a bishop, think only like an ordinary Christian, why can't something like this be God's plan ? Manolo

Manolo and Tony, It can’t be God’s plan because the one thing we can say about God is he (or she) isn’t absurd.  If you’ve not looked at the we_b_link__s and the 8 short videos then we have not much else to talk about on this issue because we’re ships in the night unaware of each other’s positions. Let me just bring it to this into a crystal-clear point using reduction ad absurdum.  If the current rate of growth were to persist for  just 100 or so years into 2112, the Philippine population will stand at over 700 million.  You know this is an impossibility.  Let’s bring it to the ultimate absurdity.  If you saw the _link_ I sent you and understood it as obviously you must have, yet continue defending the status quo when it comes to projections of Philippine population… at just the 2% per year current growth, in less than 500 years, the Philippine population will stand at 1,556,000,000,000.  That’s 1.5 trillion people at just 2% per year growth (doubling every 35 years). Let’s halve the population growth to just 1% per year.  Assuming no wars or famines or super-volcanoes, the Philippine population 500 years from now will stand at 24,300,000,000.  That’s a measly 24 billion people in the Philippines 500 years from now assuming the land and the sea can support them all.  If you can’t see the absurdity of this then you haven’t understood the message on exponential growth.  Does 1.5 trillion 24 billion Filipinos in 500 years sound like a plan from a sensible God?  Is it even feasible?  Or is the absurdity of it all peering through the fog of the religious nonsense the church keeps propagating and you defending? It’s simply this.  We’re at a point of human development on the earth where there are simply no alternatives to zero population growth.  The annual world population growth of 80 million net new human beings a year is unsustainable over time.  It will choke the earth into the absurdly impossible levels of trillions of human beings in a few hundred years.  Mankind is not so stupid as to allow the species to die by choking itself to death.  That is precisely the church’s position you and Tony are defending.  It is completely untenable. Some will reach or exceed ZPG sooner than others and this will result in political and economic dislocation and relocation problems that will need to addressed as real political and demographic issues.  But the issue of worldwide ZPG is no longer a real issue except in the minds of a few eunuchs who inhabit the halls of church power in the Vatican.  It should be noted that outside those opulent palatial halls, these eunuchs have almost no residual power elsewhere on earth, having distanced themselves from the masses precisely because of their lunatic position on population control. Love to all, Danding From: A M Gonzalez [mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ] Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:17 PM To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Subject: Re: {First Principles} Washington Times articles about the Philippines Spot on Tony Over population is indeed a problem but is actually a manifestation of other larger problems as have been pointed ( corruption & incompetence of politicians plus the lack of resolve & greed for the rich in society who prefer to keep things as is ). Traditional poor families favor more offspring as it betters an individual family's chance of survival. Condoms might even get used to store water or utilized as chewing gum not because they don't know what they're for but rather because of the sheer lack of basic necessities. Providing opportunities for people to work solve the tendency for the poor & jobless to want to have children. Look at Western societies. In Spain, not too long ago, families had 5 or 6 kids while today, as Tony points out, there is negative population growth. People are just too busy to rear children & they don't have them. This of course brings sustainability problems, where a recently considered overpopulated society, China, now needs lots & lots of new babies. Going back to the Philippines, the church may have actually gotten it right all along. Look at things this way : a. The church considers that there's a great lack of spirituality in the Western world. b. If there aren't enough opportunities in the Phils. people will move, by hook or by crook c. If the church manages a half decent job to train Filipinos in Christianity then there's a fantastic chance for Filipinos to champion Catholicism worldwide in huge numbers in the coming decades ! Now Danding, I'm not asking you to think like a bishop, think only like an ordinary Christian, why can't something like this be God's plan ? Manolo