Untitled Document

Footnotes

This page was prepared for Dr. David S. Jolliffe, CB, FRCP, Chairman of the Court of Governance of the London School of Hygiene, arguing that when a new Director and Professor of Demography [population science] are appointed to the School, it should be on the condition that they 'discorrupt' the Center for Population Studies at the School, so that it enters the real world, faces the reality of the demographic entrapment of Middle Africa.

He replied that "...it is not for the Chair of the Court to decide what the School should ... be discussing...", and did not ...believe that it would be appropriate for us to meet...".

Originally a printed paper, I have developed it for the web, and particularly for those for whom English may be a second language.

...therefore to be declared 'corrupt'

This has nothing to do with the money. It is 'lack of integrity' -- being 'true'. Demographers and development economists know all about demographic entrapment, but don't talk about it in their lectures and journals because of the Demons see.

An ombudsman is a person who acts as a trusted intermediary [go-between, negotiator] between someone and some organization, usually the government

Carrying capacity' is the ability of the land to support people. A lorry can carry, say, 10 tons of goods. A ship can carry, say, 20,000 tons of oil.

250 kilos of maize will feed a person for a year. So if a hectare of land produces one ton of maize, it will feed or 'carry' four people. If it is very fertile and produces 10 tons of maize, it will feed 40 people.

Fig. MALAWI CANNOT FEED ITSELF. In this figure the major foods, maize, cassava, and rice have been expressed in terms of maize of the same energy value. A shows need, based on 250 kg of maize, per person per year, and taking account of population growth. B, shows average production, after the great year-to-year variation of C. has been smoothed out. The difference between A and B. after 1985 shows the increasing need for food aid.in an average year. Malawi became unable to feed itself in1985. It had reached its average carrying capacity. After .Fisher N. Food Security in Malawi: A crisis waiting to happen. Action against Hunger Malawi 2006.

Malawi is the classical entrapment 'basket case' [typical example]. What holds for Malawi holds for for many other areas, notably Ethiopia.

Fig. A MATHEMATICAL SIMULATION [model] of what might happen to a populationas it approaches its Malthusian ceiling [inserted by meas a deliberately vague area]. " for varying support capability, read good years and bad years.

Fig. ESTIMATES OF GLOBAL CARRYING CAPACITY. The red line shows how population grew in the past. Estimates of the number of people the world could support vary so greatly that they are meaningless - it all depends on what assumptions are made'

Taboo hardinae The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus started the tradition of naming all living things with a genus and a species. Thus Plasmodium [genus] falciparum [species] is the parasite which causes malaria, and Vibrio cholerae is the bacteria which causes cholera. In the hope of getting tropical epidemiologists to think of the Hardinian taboo in the same way that they think of these other pathogens [causes of disease], it has been named similarly.

The previous history of The Lancet in respect of the Hardinian taboo spans several papers

Health is a Sustainable State (see) was the first paper I wrote for The Lancet. I was not worried by carrying capacity be exceeded, and argued, rather torturously, that nowprograms for child survival and necessarily have to be applied, because by keeping children alive they could make the situation of the community worse.There was an outcry,as the following headline in the Guardian newspaper shows:

The mistake I made, and it was a serious one, wants to go for not producing child mortality any further, when I should have gone for reducing fertility -- fewer children and if necessary one child families. However, those were the early days, and I was still in thrall to [influenced by] Demon 6, the many problems of one-child families

The paper was highly regarded, and was used to stimulate debate among medical students for many years. It owes much to the contributions of Phillip Payne, then Professor of Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene, and one of the wisest of all colleagues. However, when Phillip saw the proofs, he wanted to have his name withdrawn, because he felt that he could not face his medical colleagues with it.

Robin Fox, Editor of The Lancet at the time, has the reputation of having been weak. The paper was therefore handled by Imogen Evans, who appeared to 'wear the trousers'. She arranged for an editorial by Malcolm Potts, a distinguished family. He picked the key sentence about letting sick children die (see) and then directed the rest of his editorial to family planning -- without mentioning the entrapment dilemma. With hindsight I should have insisted on an apology by The Lancet.

Theory. The only person who seems to have tried to lift a taboo is Garrett Hardin, who left few clues as to how it should be done. This page strikes several deliberatelyb discordant notes, the spiritual, and the scatological etc., in the hope that they will resonate and somehow shake the taboo.see

People vary greatly in respect of the Hardinian taboo.. They vary in at least two ways. They vary in : (a) How strong the taboo is for them. (b) which particular demons are responsible fo//it. . For some there is no taboo, for others it is very tight. For example, Basil King [no relation] an experienced aid worker in East Africa said that he had had no doubts about the entrapment argument ever since it first heard it, and so had his friends

"The writing on the walll" They know that something serious is going to happen. This is a quotation from the book of Daniel in the Bible.

Influential person of integrity. History will probably show that man to have been Dan Kaseje, vice Chancellor of the Great Lakes University of Kenya.

References. Maurice King and Elizabeth Yi Wang' 1. King M. To the Point of Farce: A Martian view of the Hardinian Taboo - the silence that surrounds population control. BMJ. 1997;315:1441-3. 2. Jack Caldwell 1996, personal communication. 3. Dear editors, I love you. The Lancet, 2010; 375: 106.

LOVE and disentrapment by Christmas card. ‘Love’. We are enjoined to love our enemies and those who hate us. . This is difficult. For me, much the most difficult person to love is the Editor of The Lancet, in view of the starvation and violence which he will be increasingly responsible for if he fails to lift the taboo which he readily could, in view of the impact which his journal now has, thanks to the courage and integrity of previous editors.

I therefore sent him the following Christmas Card. Although he never acknowledged it, it seems to have done the trick, in that it has opened the dialogue.see

"We are bidden to love those whom we are called upon to love. For me this means above all, Richard Horton, Editor of the Lancet. This then is an act of LOVE".

This is the only Galenical prescription that I have ever written. Little did I think that it would need to be for the editor of The Lancet! When we where students in the 1950s sitting to the membership of the College of Physicians, we were advised that it would be useful to be able to write one, in case one of old buffers who examined us, should consider it necessary. In fact, such prescriptions were out of date long before that. It is for a pint of syrup of ipecacuana an emetic [a medicine to produce vomiting, usually for swallowed poisons]. A pint is a huge dose! I doubt if it would be lethal, because he would vomit it all up! Syr. prunus serotina is syrup of wild cherry. This was added to medicines to make them taste nice [love?] Misce et fiat mistura means "Mix and make a mixture", which is how all such prescriptions ended - a lovely phrase! Galen was a Roman physician [Google Galen]

St Michael's[ http://www.st-michaels-headingley.org.uk/] Much of this website was in fact composed in St Michaels, as I struggle, and continue to struggle with the overpowering evil of the demographic entrapment of Middle Africa.see

The Spirit of Man. Ever since I was a student I have owned a copy of a book called 'The Spirit of Man an Anthology in English and French from the philosophers and poets, made in 1915 by Robert Bridges OM, Poet Laureate and dedicated it by gracious permission to his Majesty King George V. It was intended to in encourage those who were about to die in the trenches of Flanders in the First World War when the British and Germans fought each other. It is thus very 'powerful' and 'deep'. My copy was rebound in Kitwe in Northern Rhodesia in 1958 by a Congolese whom I taught to bind books.

The passage about St Vincent is item 446 in the anthology, and appears to have come from "Church Services, Accingimini. [I cannot trace this] Antiphons for Trinity-tide Magnificat translated by GH Palmer, in Antiphons from the 'Salisbury Antiphoner', page 74 this is a good example of the beauty which we lost when the Reformers sheared our services - and of what many besides myself [Robert Bridges] wish to see restored"

There may have been better saints, and also more appropriate ones, but it is the passage about St. Vincent that somehow stuck in my mind. After all, he only got a small island named after him!

Spiritual counsel for 'The Blessed Vincent act'. While we drink our early-morning tea, my wife and I always listen to 'Thought For The Day' at 7:50 on the BBC's Channel 4. It's the only 'media' that I ever do listen to. We give the speaker's marks. I will therefore ask the two top scoring learned divines [holy men] what they think? Since they happen to work quite close to one another, we can easily meet, so that they can give me a viva [examination]. It might have been theologically okay for St Vincent in the fourth century, but is it okay for me in the 21st?

I shall be particularly interested to know what they think about William Blake's 'minute particulars', see and whether it is justified to attack 'mega-evi'l in the hope of achieving 'mega-good'.

There is an important distinction between wanting martyrdom for its own sake, which I understand is reprehensible [bad] and putting up with it in the process of achieving something else. I imagine I pass on this one .Or is there something about martyrdom which is so wonderful that it must be wanted?

If I pass, wonderful, I can proceed to The Lancet's front steps reassured. If I fail, also wonderful, I can abandon disentrapment with a good grace and proceed to my next fascination, which is to 'knowledge engineer' the theologians, and get joyously and hopelessly lost, in a webpage called Religiomedici [one word} see.

There is a paradox here. It could be that failing to get The Lancet to publish the paper that that lifts the taboo, could in the end be more effective in lifting the taboo, than actually getting it published! It could be that the media hype surrounding the vigil could be more effective than the paper itself? For example, my youngest son is a television reporter for Channel 4 news. He has promised to send in the TV cameras, but only when Dad is in extremis [about to die]

Meanwhile, the disentrapment valediction [goodbye] is 'Baby tiger'. This was originally a speech recognition error, in which the computer wrote 'Baby tiger' when it should have written 'Big Hug' This raises the interesting question as to whether or not computers have 'souls'? The answer seems to be that they do, but that they have Aristotelian rather than Cartesian souls...

The kind philosopher who gave me this insight, has just sent off his book on St. Thomas Aquinas to press, and tells me that he is now back to his first love, Wittgenstein. I will have to ask him what a Wittgensteinian soul is? [Wittgenstein, it seems, never got within a million miles of the soul]