What Caught My Eye Today - Iran, Syria, Pope, Natural Disasters, India, Time

Iran - Having successfully curbed birth rates for two decades, Iran now is promoting a baby boom to help make up for its graying population. Here's a thought. Instead of trying to control the forces of nature, why not just let things play out and see what happens. Iran's birthrate reached a peak of 3.6 children per couple after its 1979 Islamic Revolution, among the world's highest at the time. By 1990, experts estimated Iran could be home to 140 million people if the rate was left unchecked. To combat the rise, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei endorsed birth control. The birth rate dropped precipitously, now reportedly standing at 1.8 children per couple with a population of some 77 million people. In case you were wondering, you need a birth rate of just about 2.2 children per couple to maintain a population at its current level. Experts now say that drive might have been too successful, estimating that Iran's population growth could reach zero in the next 20 years if the trend is not reversed.  Khamenei, who has final say over all matters of state, now says Iran should have a population of 150 million people or more. Some blame a drop in marriages and a rise in divorce for the falling birth rate. Others point to Iran's economy, battered by Western sanctions over its contested nuclear program. Inflation stands at 36% while unemployment officially stands at 12%, though some private experts suggest nearly one in three working-age Iranians is out of work. Leave it to the so-called civilized western world to complicate things.  Here we are trying to use economic sanctions and other political tools to reign in Iran's nuclear ambitions. Who would have that that if we just leave Iran alone, it might birth control itself out of existence.

Syria - The U.N.'s human rights office has stopped updating the death toll from Syria's civil war, confirming that it can no longer verify the sources of information that led to its last count of at least 100,000 in late July, 2013. Is this sort of like the adage, "if a tree falls, but no one is around to see it, does it make a sound"? If we cannot count the fatalities is no one actually dying? I think not. Officials blamed the failure to provide new figures on the organization's own lack of access on the ground in Syria and its inability to verify "source material" from others. The total number of dead the U.N. had estimated was based on an exhaustive effort to verify six different figures supplied by a variety of nongovernmental organizations in the region. I think the issue here is motivation rather than the ability to count. The technology to provide reliable counts certainly existing.  If a drone can gather intelligence for a pinpoint missile strike, it seems reasonable that the same drone could take some pictures of bodies lying on the ground as well. 

Pope - Pope Francis is set to name new cardinals in the next few weeks who will help him set its future course and one day elect his successor from their number. In the past, it was a fairly safe bet that archbishops of big dioceses or those heading Vatican departments would be named as cardinals, but Francis has shown little regard for precedent or tradition. Atta boy. You do your own thang, boyfriend! There are currently 14 vacancies in the College of Cardinals for cardinal electors, those who would be allowed to enter a conclave to elect a pope. Church rules, in theory, limit the number of "cardinal electors" to 120. The "in theory" part is a subtle acknowledgement that the pope can pretty much do whatever he wants, what with him being infallible.  Nice job perk, don't you think? Apart from potentially shifting the liberal-conservative balance of the College, and elevating men whose personal abilities he values, Francis could also alter its geographical distribution. In the conclave that elected Francis last March, 60 cardinals were from Europe, even though the Church on the continent has been hardest hit by falling membership. Italy alone had 28. By comparison, there were only 19 cardinals from all of Latin America, a region with the largest Catholic populations, and 11 and 10 respectively from Africa and Asia, where the Church is growing fast. Maybe, if the pope is successful in his endeavors, we won't have to wait another 1600 years for the next non-European pope.

Natural Disasters - This is one of those matter of perspective stories. Here's the first perspective. A German insurance company says some 20,000 people died in natural disasters in 2013, about twice as many as in 2012. Most of the deaths resulted from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines, Vietnam and China in November with a loss of almost 6,100 lives. This was followed by floods in India that killed about 5,500 people in June. And now for the other perspective. The company's annual disaster report found that the economic cost of natural catastrophes was lower last year. Some 880 events cost about $125 billion, with insured losses of $31 billion. This compares with costs of $173 billion and insured losses of $65 billion in 2012. The costliest natural disasters were summer hailstorms in Germany, floods in Central Europe, and storms and tornadoes in the United States. Okay then, more people died, but the financial losses were less.  What can we conclude from this? Personally, I think the losses were less because the vast majority of those who died in the nations mentioned about probably didn't have much in terms insurance.  My guess is that they probably placed a higher priority on putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads. Until, of course, Mother Nature came in and did her thing.

And finally, we have a two-fer on, of all things, the peculiarities of time...

India - Assam, a northeastern Indian state, plans to shift its clock one hour ahead of the rest of India saying the adjustment will boost the state's productivity, granting its workforce more time in the daylight hours. It is unclear whether other states in India’s far-flung Northeast will follow suit or if the move will gain official sanction from New Delhi. Despite India’s continental vastness, the country has clung to one time zone. Imagine if you will, Los Angeles and New York being in the same time zone. Sunrise in the west at 3:00am and sunset at 3:00pm. What's not too like about that?  It’s not alone in such a conspicuous arrangement: China, which rivals the U.S. in landmass, operates entirely on Beijing time. Already, there are fears that an abrupt changing of timetables will lead to disruptions in the country’s plane and railway services. I can certainly sympathize with that.  My goodness, can you even contemplate the difficulty of printing new timetables that reflect time zone differences? Neither can I. And don't even get me started on the mass hysteria that would ensue caused by having to try to read those new time tables.  Oh, the horror.

Time - At the International Meridian Conference in 1884, the world’s time standard was established from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, U.K. Greenwich Mean Time is still the global measuring stick, but not without its wrinkles and oddities.

• In 2011, the Pacific island of Samoa erased a day off its calendar by jumping over to the other side of the International Date Line — rather than being the last country to ring in the New Year, it became the first, a move that also better aligned the tiny country closer to nations in Asia. Dude, Hawaiian must be totally pissed at that move. Now they are last.
• The massive Soviet Union, on the other hand, sized up its immensity and figured it justified 11 distinct time zones of its own — a boasting, nationalist legacy that Russia has inherited. In 2010, Moscow trimmed the number of zones down to nine (some experts think just four would suffice). Poopy-gook. More is always better than less. 
•  The ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, in China’s far west, is two and a half hours ahead of India on the clock despite lying further west on the map than much of the subcontinent. In fairness, this is not exactly a unique occurrence.
• In India, a 2012 study by the National Institute of Advanced Studies suggests that if the entire country moved its clock half an hour ahead (GMT +6 hours, rather than +5:30), India would save 2 billion kilowatt-hours in electricity a year. But there’s an inertia about making the change, in part because of politics — no nation wants to lose its time-stamp (see Nepal, at GMT +5:45).  Can someone please enlighten me as to when time-stamps became status symbols? Seriously, what's this +5:45 thing all about?