The first thing you need to know about Pete Newman is that people loved him. He has olive skin, dark hair, and thick eyebrows that generated good-natured “unibrow” teasing. Girls wanted to date him, guys wanted to be him, and children wanted to follow him.

He was a camp director at Kanakuk Kamps, one of the largest Christian camps in the world. Kanakuk is an immense operation. Since its founding in 1926, it claims to have served more than 450,000 campers. Its main campus is located outside of Branson, Missouri, but it has international reach. Every summer approximately 20,000 kids pass through its gates, and the institution is particularly prominent with the Evangelical elite. [snip]

He was also a superpredator. He groomed and abused boys in their own homes. He groomed and abused boys at camp. In fact, he abused boys across the world. On June 9, 2010, he pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexually abusing boys. He received a sentence of two life terms, plus 30 years. His guilty plea was but the tip of a terrible iceberg. A civil complaint alleges that there were at least 57 victims, but the prosecutor in his case estimates that the real number could be in the “hundreds.”

The true dimensions of the worst Christian sex abuse scandal you’ve never heard of have long been largely unknown. Newman’s initial arrest and sentencing received little media attention. Few reporters knew about the camp’s size or importance. They were unfamiliar with Joe White. Moreover, the limited scope of the guilty plea concealed the sheer scale of the abuse. The resulting civil lawsuits received little attention, and nondisclosure agreements silenced victims and kept evidence under seal.

On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians — mostly old men, women and children — from their thatched huts and herded them into the village’s irrigation ditches.

As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents desperately used their bodies to try to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.

The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage that would stain the reputation of the U.S. Army. But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai. Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill.

A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Ga., was furious at the killings he saw happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit. Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson’s men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they flew to safety.

Again and again throughout his storied rise, Powell made Faustian bargains, publicly endorsing military excursions, including both Iraq wars, that he privately admitted were risky enterprises. Whether Powell knew the falseness of the intel on which his security council testimony rested, whether he genuinely failed to find evidence of the My Lai massacre or whether he regretted the first Iraq war’s toll in blood and treasure, Powell, like the military man he was, never broke ranks.

@wrathsong 1 month ago (edited)
As a person who lived in South Korea for 10 years in total spanning nearly 2 decades as an academic, please know that we have a history of the USA and other countries giving food to North Korea as a point of negotiation to get them to stop shooting practice missiles. Add to that, the country's most concerned about these exercises are Japan and the United States. [snip - more]

Kristine Kenyon @kristine_kenyon
Replying to @SawyerHackett and @serrano_alej
So they’ll block every child from the benefits of a public library out of pure racist, homophobic spite? Read @hmcghee’s Sum of Us. Perfect cement pool analogy.

Darlene McDonald @Darlene_McD
·
Aug 11, 2022
Read Heather McGhee’s, The Sum of Us to learn how racism drained pools. Southern cities like Birmingham had rather drain community swimming pools and fill them with cement than follow orders to desegregate. The Sum of Us should be required reading for every school board member. twitter.com/CH005Y/status/…

6:53 PM · Apr 10, 2023

Abortions accounted for 3 percent of the nearly 10.6 million total services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, according to its annual report.

Some services it provided in addition to abortions were:

4.5 million tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections
3.6 million contraception related services
935,573 cancer screenings including breast exams and Pap tests
1.1 million pregnancy tests and prenatal services

The ecological footprint is a measurement of the anthropogenic impact on earth. It tracks how much biocapacity (biological capacity) there is and how much biocapacity people use by comparing the rate at which we consume natural resources and generate waste to the planet’s ability to replenish those resources and absorb waste. Today, our global footprint is in overshoot. It would take 1.75 Earths to sustain our current population. If current trends continue, we will reach 3 Earths by the year 2050.

The number of people Earth can support is not a fixed figure. The way humans produce and consume natural resources affects how our environment will be able to sustain future populations. As Gerland said, "When it comes to carrying capacity, it's a matter of mode of production, mode of consumption, who has access to what and how."

One study published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(opens in new tab) found that if the population of the United States switched to a vegetarian diet, the land used to grow crops for humans rather than animal feed for meat production would feed an additional 350 million Americans. High-income countries, where females have increased access to education and family planning, tend to have lower birth rates and smaller family sizes than middle- and low-income countries, according to Max Roser, director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development in the U.K., writing in Our World in Data(opens in new tab).

Put another way, there may be an upper limit on how many humans Earth could support, but we don’t know exactly what that figure is. It varies based on how we produce, consume and manage our resources. For Cohen, if we want to affect how many people planet Earth can support, we will need to decide "how many people want Jaguars with four wheels and how many want jaguars with four legs."