Duterte Tells Globalist Gaviria That Methamphetamine Is Not Marijuana or Cocaine...,

NYTimes |  The war on drugs is essentially a war on people. But old habits die hard. Many countries are still addicted to waging this war. As Colombia’s current president, Juan Manuel Santos, said, “We are still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the last 40 years.” Fortunately, more and more governments also concede that a new approach is needed, one that strips out the profits that accompany drug sales while ensuring the basic human rights and public health of all citizens.

If we are going to get drugs under control, we need to have an honest conversation. The Global Commission on Drug Policy — of which I am a founding member — has supported an open, evidence-based debate on drugs since 2011. We strongly support reducing drug supply and demand, but differ fundamentally with hard-liners about how this should be achieved. We are not soft on drugs. Far from it.

What do we propose? Well, for one, we do not believe that military hardware, repressive policing and bigger prisons are the answer. Real reductions in drug supply and demand will come through improving public health and safety, strengthening anticorruption measures — especially those that combat money laundering — and investing in sustainable development. We also believe that the smartest pathway to tackling drugs is decriminalizing consumption and ensuring that governments regulate certain drugs, including for medical and recreational purposes.

Visualizing the Global War on Cash

The Global War on Cash

the insurrection of the seeds

opendemocracy |  Don Halcomb is a 63-year-old farmer who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on his 7,000-acre family farm in Adairville, Kentucky. According to a report in the New York Times he’s expecting his profits to vanish this year because crop prices are falling and seeds and fertilizer are increasingly expensive, their costs driven up by Monsanto, Dupont and other agribusiness giants.

“We’re producing our crops at a loss now,” he told the Times, “You can’t cut your costs fast enough…It’s just like any other industry that consolidates. They tell the regulators they’re cost-cutting, and then they tell their customers they have to increase pricing after the deal’s done.”

The ‘deal’ cited by Halcomb concerns Monsanto’s recent announcement that it plans to merge with Bayer, one the world’s largest producers of agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, spiking fears that the new conglomerate will raise the cost of inputs even further. Less competition equals more room for large corporations to dictate their prices and raise their profit margins, producing a virtual monopoly on seeds which will prevent farmers from diversifying and encourage the trend towards highly-vulnerable agricultural monocultures.

It’s a fearful image that’s been exercising my imagination in recent weeks, evoking some powerful theological memories in the process. Yes, I did say ‘theological’, though perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word, so what’s the connection between spirituality and seeds?

stand down in bloody kansas...,

kcur |  A standoff in Kansas City, Kansas, ended Tuesday afternoon when law enforcement officers at the scene decided the risk of injury to bystanders outweighed serving an arrest warrant.

The standoff began around 8:20 a.m. with a man at 5701 Parallel Parkway refusing to come out of a house.

KCK Police Chief Terry Zeigler tweeted shortly before noon that his officers had come to the assistance of U.S. Marshals trying to serve a warrant to the man, who had failed to register as a sex offender.

Had a warrant for his arrest. When Marshal Service went to get him, he threatened them. We were asked for help. https://t.co/eWJ7NyDW07

— Terry Zeigler (@KCKPDChief) August 16, 2016 The man was later identified as convicted sex offender and gospel singer Greg Andrews, whose yard is full of homemade signs accusing Wyandotte County District Attorney Jerome Gorman of corruption.

Andrews’ wife and two of his sons were home at the time. Speaking through a bullhorn, Andrews and his wife Renee repeatedly stated their willingness to die if police didn’t leave. As the standoff dragged into the afternoon, a crowd gathered across Parallel Parkway.

Around 2 p.m., police commanders determined the best course of action would be to stand down.

the absolute certainty that nottingham gotta go, gotta go, gotta go....,

theatlantic |  Last week, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. This abhorrent act of political extremism cannot be divorced from American history—recent or old. In black communities, the police departments have only enjoyed a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is because wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.

To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.

What does it mean, for instance, that black children are ritually told that any stray movement in the face of the police might result in their own legal killing? When Eric Holder spoke about getting “The Talk” from his father, and then giving it to his own son, many of us nodded our heads. But many more of us were terrified. When the nation’s top cop must warn his children to be skeptical of his own troops, how legitimate can the police actually be?

And it is not as if Holder is imagining things. When the law shoots down12-year-old children, or beats down old women on traffic islands, or chokes people to death over cigarettes; when the law shoots people over compact discs,traffic stops,drivers’ licenses,loud conversation, orcar trouble; when the law auctions off its monopoly on lethal violence to bemused civilians, when these civilians then kill, and when their victims are mocked in their death throes; when people stand up to defend police as officers of the state, and when these defenders are killed by these very same officers; when much of this is recorded, uploaded, live-streamed, tweeted, and broadcast; and when government seems powerless, or unwilling, to stop any of it, then it ceases, in the eyes of citizens, to be any sort of respectable law at all. It simply becomes “force.”

In the black community, it’s the force they deploy, and not any higher American ideal, that gives police their power. This is obviously dangerous for those who are policed. Less appreciated is the danger illegitimacy ultimately poses to those who must do the policing. For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

DNC THOTing and Plotting Put Out on Front Street

guccifer2 |  Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.

I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.

Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.

Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?

Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.

They mentioned a leaked database on Donald Trump. Did they mean this one?

Tulsi Gabbard launches petition to end Democratic Party superdelegate process

politico |  The Democratic presidential primary process may be ending next Tuesday, but the fight among Bernie Sanders supporters to rid the party of superdelegates and install new leadership at the Democratic National Committee is not.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard encouraged her followers on Saturday to sign a petition ending the Democratic Party’s use of superdelegates.

“Whether you are a Bernie Sanders supporter or a Hillary Clinton supporter, we should all agree that unelected party officials and lobbyists should not have a say in who the presidential nominee of our party is,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “That should be left up to the voters.”

Gabbard resigned as a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in February to publicly endorse the Vermont senator’s campaign.

Gabbard isn’t alone in the fight: The West Virginia Democratic Party at its state convention Saturday passed a resolution calling for the elimination of superdelegates, or that superdelegates be required “in each state to vote in the same relative proportion as the elected delegates of the state they represent.”

isn't "word of mouth" one of the most important elements of a "free market"?

NYTimes |  American corporations are under new scrutiny from federal lawmakers after well-publicized episodes in which the companies laid off American workers and gave the jobs to foreigners on temporary visas.

But while corporate executives have been outspoken in defending their labor practices before Congress and the public, the American workers who lost jobs to global outsourcing companies have been largely silent.

Until recently. Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.

Marco Peña was among about 150 technology workers who were laid off in April by Abbott Laboratories, a global health care conglomerate with headquarters here. They handed in their badges and computer passwords, and turned over their work to a company based in India. But Mr. Peña, who had worked at Abbott for 12 years, said he had decided not to sign the agreement that was given to all departing employees, which included a nondisparagement clause.

Mr. Peña said his choice cost him at least $10,000 in severance pay. But on an April evening after he walked out of Abbott’s tree-lined campus here for the last time, he spent a few hours in a local bar at a gathering organized by technology worker advocates, speaking his mind about a job he had loved and lost.

“I just didn’t feel right about signing,” Mr. Peña said. “The clauses were pretty blanket. I felt like they were eroding my rights.”

Leading members of Congress from both major parties have questioned the nondisparagement agreements, which are commonly used by corporations but can prohibit ousted workers from raising complaints about what they see as a misuse of temporary visas. Lawmakers, including Richard Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest-ranking Senate Democrat, and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the Senate JudiciarySubcommittee on Immigration, have proposed revisions to visa laws to include measures allowing former employees to contest their layoffs.

“I have heard from workers who are fearful of retaliation,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “They are told they can say whatever they want, except they can’t say anything negative about being fired.”

der will zur macht - beezees....,

scientificamerican |  It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience?

In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.

But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose, that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause of behavior.

In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.

"If we let Americans sue Saudis for 9/11, foreigners will begin suing US non-stop"

RT |  President Barack Obama has said the classified pages of the 9/11 Commission report that do not “compromise major national security interests” may “hopefully” be soon released, but argued against any potential legal action against Saudi citizens. 

“But this has been a process which we generally deal through the intelligence community, and Jim Clapper, our director of intelligence, has been going through to make sure that whatever it is that is released, is not going to compromise some major national security interests of the United States, and my understanding is that he’s about to complete that process,” said Obama.

Rose also asked about legislation that would allow the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudis, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, but has yet to be voted on by the full body.

Obama has said that he doesn’t support the bill, due to the possibility of foreign citizens – presumably victims of US wars and drone strikes – suing the government.

"If we open up the possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," the commander-in-chief said.

The Saudis have reportedly threatened to sell its $750 billion in US assets if Congress passes the law.

Obama described the US as “the world’s singular superpower” during the full interview and said anyone who doubts his willingness to take military actions should “ask Bin Laden.”

there's no place for clean drinking water under free trade agreements

systemicdisorder |  Yet another standoff between clean drinking water and mining profits has taken shape in Colombia, where two corporations insist their right to pollute trumps human health and the environment. As is customary in these cases, it is clean water that is the underdog here.

Two million people are dependent on water from a high-altitude wetlands, which is also a refuge for endangered species, that a Canadian mining company, Eco Oro Minerals Corporation, wants to use for a gold mine. The wetlands, the Santurbán páramo in the Andes, has been declared off-limits for mining by Colombia’s highest court due to the area’s environmental sensitivity. Eco Oro is suing the Colombian government because of this under the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

The dispute will likely be heard by a secret tribunal that is an arm of the World Bank, even though the World Bank has provided investment capital for Eco Oro to develop the mine.

Eco Oro has not said how much money it intends to ask for, but another mining company, the U.S.-based Tobie Mining and Energy Inc., has separately sued Colombia for US$16.5 billion because the government refused to allow it to establish a gold mine in a national park. To put that $16.5 billion in perspective, the total represents more than 20 percent of Colombia’s budget.

To the north, El Salvador is still awaiting the decision of another secret tribunal in a case heard in September 2014. An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, sued El Salvador for $301 million because it was denied a permit to create a gold mine that would have poisoned the country’s biggest source of water.

Under “free trade” agreements (which have little to do with trade and much to do with enhancing corporate power), governments agree to the mandatory use of “investor-state dispute mechanisms.” What that bland-sounding phrase means is that any “investor” can sue a signatory government to overturn any law or regulation it does not like because the law or regulation “confiscates” its expected profits, with no limitations on who or what constitutes an “investment.” These cases are not heard in regular judicial systems, but rather in secret tribunals with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. The judges who sit on these tribunals are corporate lawyers whose regular practice is representing corporations in these types of disputes.

this rigged election's outcome pales by comparison to the establishment's loss of control...,

cassandralegacy |  For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn't find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner. In the case of the Roman Empire, also, there is no evidence that it run out of food or of any basic resource. Rather, it ran out of the resource it used for paying its troops, gold and silver for its currency. In both cases, it was a question of the collapse of control. As we all know, power without control is nothing.

Note that the loss of control is related to resource depletion, but the relation is not direct. It works like this: any complex society can exist only in certain conditions: it is not enough to have access to natural resources. It is necessary to be able to distribute these resources in such a way to keep all the sections of society supplied; this is a question of control. You can also use the term "governance" if you like to avoid a term that has a military ring to it. The point is that if a society is unable to allocate the resources in such a way to make most people accept the way they are allocated, it will break down, or collapse, or both things.

In our world, resource allocation is controlled by the entity we call "the market", with some correction on the part of another entity that we call "the government". Generally speaking, the government is supposed to correct for the fact that the market is not supposed to provide a fair distribution of wealth. For instance, the government is supposed to provide health care services even to people who can't afford it. This is why taxes are progressive (or used to be, before president Trump took office). This is what we normally call democracy: it works on the shared belief that society is kept together by a certain degree of fair sharing of the available resources.

It works, but only in some conditions. In particular, it works under the assumption that the available resources are relatively abundant. If that's the case, it is more convenient to create new wealth by exploiting some untapped resource than to steal wealth from others who already have it. But that's not always the case. Lets'imagine that you are out of your job. In normal conditions, you look for another job. But if there are no jobs available, or you are too old to get a new job, your only possible survival strategy is theft or robbery (it is happening). Then, if those Arabs are sitting on our oil, then it makes sense to bomb them to smithereens and get it. And why should the poor get our money fortheir health problems?

Note that you don't need to run out of anything to cross the critical point. Within some limits, you may assume that the cost of exploiting a natural resource goes up with the inverse of the resource abundance while the cost of stealing it from someone who has it may be taken as approximately constant. So, there has got to be a point where stealing becomes a better strategy than finding new resources. It is a phase transition in society (see the model, below). At this point, society goes to a crisis that leads it either by some form of breakdown, including "ethnic cleansing," or to some kind of centralized military control. The second outcome can be said to be better than the first. That's what the Romans did when it moved from a republic to an Imperial system. That's the path in front of us.

how DO you respond to someone taking over your country and ruining it?

lewrockwell |  The Shire had changed dramatically for the worse when Frodo, Sam, and their companions returned from Mordor.

The hobbit-folk had previously enjoyed a society largely free of the affliction called “government.” Frodo and his friends were mortified to encounter a regimented dystopia in which the shire-riffs –who had been peripheral under the old order – were enforcing an ever-growing list of rules handed down by an unseen “Chief.” The shire-riffs themselves weren’t intimidating, but behind them lurked a band of “Ruffians” who looked upon the inhabitants of the Shire with disdain and were prepared to inflict mortal harm on anybody who resisted the Chief’s decrees.

Farms and homes, once self-sufficient, had been ravaged by officials called “Gatherers” and “Sharers,” although the bounty that was gathered in the Chief’s name was never shared with the populace. The verdant countryside, which once thrived under the husbandry of private landowners, had been despoiled by those acting on the “authority” of the new government. Any residents of the Shire who resisted that “authority” were hauled away to “lock holes.”

Furious over what had been done to their home and steeled by their experience in battle, Frodo and his companions sounded the tocsin and organized the Hobbit-folk to “scour the Shire.” This meant driving the Ruffians and their adherents from the land, including any shire-riffs who remained loyal to the usurpers. Frodo gave strict instructions to avoid bloodshed where possible. The Chief – as it happens, Saruman in disguise – would not relinquish power without extracting a price in blood.

The “scouring,” as portrayed by Tolkien in “Return of the King,” is distant kindred to Homer’s account of Odysseus dealing with the interlopers who had plundered his home and sought to seize control of Ithaca during his lengthy absence. “I will not stay my hand till I have paid all of you in full,” Odysseus told the men who had sought to steal everything he cherished, including Penelope. “You must fight, or flee for your lives.”

In dealing with the shire-riffs – or, to use the more familiar term, sheriffs – who had become oppressors, Frodo, and his friends were more merciful than Odysseus and Telemachus had been. As Sauron had expected, many of those who had been public servants found it intoxicating to exercise power over the “little folk.” Others, disgusted by what they had become, threw away their badges of authority and were welcomed into the righteous rebellion against the Chief and his enforcers.

mommy not having it LeeAnne Walters set the entire cascade in motion...,

michiganradio |  “The preliminary draft report should not have been released outside the agency,” Hedman wrote to then-Flint Mayor Dayne Walling after the ACLU’s investigative reporter, Curt Guyette, asked city officials about it. The report was a “preliminary draft” she wrote, adding, “it would be premature to draw any conclusions based on that draft.”

The draft report details hazardous waste levels of lead in Lee Anne Walters’ home. In it, Del Toral raises serious red flags about the lack of corrosion control treatment, something that’s required under federal rules.

These days, Del Toral says he hasn’t been keeping up with all the national news headlines about Flint. Since October, he’s been busy working with a water task force to help resolve Flint’s water problems.

Del Toral was first alerted to Flint’s water problems last spring, when Lee Anne Walters called the EPA to complain about high levels of lead in her tap water and warn officials that her child had been diagnosed with lead poisoning.

Militiamen vs BLM

obb |  Some of the leaders of the militia are supporters of the Bundy family in Nevada. Cliven Bundy refused to pay the Bureau of Land Management more than a million dollars in cattle grazing fees.

What resulted was an armed standoff between the BLM and militiamen from around the U.S. who flocked to defend Bundy. Militiamen even shut down I-15 north of Las Vegas as part of the confrontation. 

In YouTube videos posted over the past two months, Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, has made similar statements about the Hammonds – that the family is “being silenced” by federal officers and prosecutors. In one online posting titled a “Redress of Grievances,” Ammon Bundy alleges federal prosecutors are intimidating the Hammonds.

“We have obtained appalling evidence that the U.S. Attorney’s Office threatened the Hammond family with early detention and further punishment if the Hammond family continued to communicate with a certain individual,” Bundy writes. “This evidence…speaks against the U.S. Attorneys [sic] Office in their gross effort to infringe upon the Hammond’s right to free exercise of speech.”

In an interview with OPB, Cliven Bundy said the Hammonds reached out to his family during the past two months and asked for help.

“In public, they haven’t asked for our help,” Bundy told OPB. “In private, we’re still needed. I talked to Dwight Hammond…for probably close to an hour. His conclusion is basically, ‘I do not want to be shot in the head.’ He had fear that if he actually rejected what was going on, and stood up for the abuse in what was going on, there would be somebody who would actually kill him. Fear, is what their problem is.”

Spurred by outcry from the Bundy family, the militia organized a rally in support of the Hammonds for Saturday in Burns, calling out to self-described patriot groups from across the country.

They said it would be a peaceful march. Yet, threats are implied in many of the calls to protest from all quarters.

Ammon Bundy writes that if the Hammonds are imprisoned, “there will be some serious civil unrest.”

And militiaman Ryan Payne said he will do “whatever it takes” to support the Hammonds.

blackest chick on the planet escaped ultra-bibtards only to be betrayed by kneegrow racetards...,

guardian |  “Other people are operating on an autopilot that race is coded in your DNA, that there are different races of human beings and those races are called black, white, etc. As opposed to race is a fiction that was invented,” she says. “What I believe about race is that race is not real. It’s not a biological reality. It’s a hierarchical system that was created to leverage power and privilege between different groups of people.”

But race was real enough for her to call herself black.

“I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race you’re questioning racism, you’re saying racism isn’t real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We’d have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.”

But she does draw on the transgender experience to say that a person should not be defined only by what and who they were at birth or when they were younger. “Caitlyn Jenner has not been seen as a woman, and treated as a woman by other people, for her entire life. So what does that mean? What if somebody transitions as a teenager and their entire adult life we know them as a woman,” she says. “I hope we can reach some kind of term for the plurality of people and allow everybody to be exactly who they are on the spectrum of all these things. Religion, gender, race.”

There is one person Dolezal identifies with, a South African woman called Sandra Laing, who was born black to a white family in the apartheid era. Laing was legally classified white but shunned by the white community and as a teenager eloped to Swaziland with her Zulu boyfriend.

“It’s a story that resonates personally, because of the themes of isolation, of being misunderstood, of being categorised different ways, by different people, put in different boxes, emancipating myself from boxes, being put in other boxes, and it just seems to be like this struggle of finding your place in the world and owning that place and being free to celebrate it,” she says.

‘Blackface is not pro-black. That was a pretty harsh accusation’

Dolezal has made a point of describing herself as black, not African American, a distinction derided by Vanity Fair, but one that black Africans in the US would recognise. She describes African American as a particular historical experience. To be black is broader, unbound by dates or borders.

bedroom issues far more crucial than christianity to conservative catholics

WaPo |  When Steve Skojec heard that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected pope, he got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He can’t say why, exactly — though he follows Vatican politics closely, he didn’t know much about Francis then. But as he watched the new Catholic leader greet the crowds on his office television in Manassas, Va., he was filled with dread.

“I felt a discontinuity,” he said. “A disruption.”

At first, he didn’t want to make too big a deal of it. Though Skojec blogs regularly about Catholicism at the Web site he founded, OnePeterFive (tag line: Rebuilding Catholic culture. Restoring Catholic tradition.), he mostly avoided the subject. “I wanted to withhold judgement,” he said.

Six months later, he was ready to judge. What really turned Skojec against Francis was the pope’s October 2013 interview in the Jesuit magazine America. Buried in the transcript was a comment, by Francis, that the world’s biggest evils are youth unemployment and loneliness.

“That’s a jarring statement . . . when you’re on the front lines of the culture wars, looking at the death toll of abortion,” Skojec said. “There was definitely a sense that this could be trouble.”

Among Americans Catholics, Francis is wildly popular, with an approval rating hovering near 90 percent. The faithful are drawn by the pope’s humility and inclusive message. But a growing number in the church’s conservative wing don’t feel so welcome. Just 45 percent of conservative Catholics have a favorable opinion of Francis, down from 72 percent a year ago.

They worry that Francis is loosening the church’s strict teachings on morality (he famously told a prominent Italian atheist that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil” and has said “who am I to judge” when asked about gay priests). They accuse him of deserting them on issues such as abortion and contraception (he has said he avoids those issues because the church has become too “obsessed” with them).

And they say his attacks on capitalism are ill-conceived and amount to a plea for redistribution of wealth — or worse.

society depends upon competent parents

pbs |  Even though appearing to decrease somewhat recently, violence and crime have reduced public safety in the United States to an unacceptable level. The rising rates of juvenile violence and crime portend greater social problems in the future. 

The past focus on socioeconomic, racial, educational, and biological factors that contribute to violence and crime has obscured the most important element - parenting. The main source of these social problems is the cycle of child abuse and neglect that results when parenting fails. Incompetent (defined in legal terms as unfit) parenting is the most important factor in those adult outcomes. Competent parenting protects even biologically vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged children from those outcomes. 

Because of the high financial and social costs of dealing with adult and juvenile violence and crime, in 1991 the National Commission on Children, appointed by Congress and by the president, urged a change in focus to preventive interventions during early life. 

By far most children who live in poverty, who come from broken homes, who receive welfare, who have been abused, or who have criminal relatives do not become habitual criminals or welfare dependent. When any of these factors converge with parental abuse and neglect, however, one of two or three of these children is destined for criminality or welfare dependency. Some are handicapped by brain damage resulting from maternal drug abuse and alcoholism and inadequate prenatal care. All do not learn from their parents the values and personal skills necessary for effective education and for productive employment. These dangerous and dependent persons are increasing in numbers to further drain public funds and to erode the productivity of our workforce.

any purchase from the infowars store revokes your procreative license for three generations....,

wired |  The transhumanist age -- where radical science and technology will revolutionise the human being and experience -- will eventually bring us indefinite lifespans, cyborgization, cloning, and even ectogenesis, where people use artificial wombs outside of their bodies to raise foetuses.

Breeding controls and measures make more sense when you consider that some leading life extensionist scientists believe we will conquer human mortality in the next 20 years. Already, in 2010, scientists had some success with stopping and  reversing ageing in mice. The obvious question is: In this transhumanist future, should everyone still be allowed to have unlimited children whenever they want?

In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a driver's licence.

The philosophical conundrum of controlling human procreation rests mostly on whether all human beings are actually responsible enough to be good parents and can provide properly for their offspring. Clearly, untold numbers of children -- for example, those millions that are slaves in the illegal human trafficking industry -- are born to unfit parents.

In an attempt to solve this problem and give hundreds of millions of future kids a better life, I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a driver's licence. Parents who pass a series of basic tests qualify and get the green light to get pregnant and raise children. Those applicants who are deemed unworthy -- perhaps because they are homeless, or have drug problems, or are violent criminals, or have no resources to raise a child properly and keep it from going hungry -- would not be allowed until they could demonstrate they were suitable parents.

procreation is not a right

starbuckseverywhere |  Society's ills will never be corrected by attacking the symptoms, which is the path taken by many, from politicians to charitable organizations. To solve the world's problems, we need to attack the root causes. Religion is one such cause, as is overpopulation. Related to overpopulation is the idea that people should have the right to procreate according to their desires. Besides overpopulation, this right creates other problems, the primary of which is an inability to tackle the number one root cause of humanity's troubles--human nature itself. Below are examples of how society has been harmed by allowing people to procreate at will.