No. I'm saying birth rates don't matter as much as y'all think. It is NOT the only number used when calculating population growth.

I find it humorous, Kevin, that you say:

 That's really fucking funny. One of these days, I may explain. For now, I'll just point to the fact that in real life, ONE thing that I manage delivers thousands of kilograms of material per week and I have to account for where it goes. 

Yes. Approximately 6,500,000,000. Those aren't just numbers. They're PEOPLE.

I don't have to 'believe' it. It's evident. However, the number has risen why?

You're not arguing with a theist so put your 'A' game on already.

The number is a composite number. As such, variables within the demographic are not factored.

Huh? Reread that. Your asking me to substantiate your argument, not mine.

My position is that people declaring 'overpopulation' as fact have no idea what the 'number' could be or needs to be to warrant the cries of unsustainability.

Given: There are vast resources on this planet as yet untapped.

Given: Only within the last half-century(that's 50 years for numbers, right Kevin? lol) has there been a drive to find renewable resources. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Given: Most of the world is seeking guidance on this issue from each other.

Given: No hard trend regarding population growth beyond 10 years has been accurate enough to use as a base for future trend predictions. 

Postulate: Since there are this many unknowns, we cannot assert that we are overpopulated.

Accusation 1: Declaring that we are currently or will be 'overpopulated' soon is irrational

Accusation 2: Forcing contraception or euthenasia is unethical; primarily because it is based upon the aforementioned irrational precept of 'overpopulation'. 

No wait. Really? It was early man that killed off the megafauna??? Wow. You're going to need to publish that! Holy shit, batman. I seriously thought all you caveman haters were christian? I'm pretty sure it has been established that early man was a small factor in this. The glacial ice age wiped out your big critters, Kevin. With the exception of bison which were still prevalent until the mid-to-late 1800's. Shooting them for sport from the tops of railroad cars as I recall reading. lol.

Nice try though.

We manage food now. Missouri has a huge buffalo farm. The guy that picks up some of my scrap brought me 2 lbs. of frozen bison. It wasn't bad.

I hear they have ranches in Canada too. Is that true? lol.

Perhaps we have had our weekly limit of wanton graphic violence for the week, doomed. It's been a little 'rough' around here lately. Go easy on us, please.

Having not red any of it... Yes, yes... mine is better

Actually, i think ill get started on a little project that co-incides with it >.>

Which im sure will be an entertaining, and "enlightening" read

There have been a tremendous amount of posts, all of which verify my signature, since I last commented.  As I do not live on the internet, I'll only respond to the one post by Nikolaj which seemed to generate much acclaim, and to which the others nearly invariably deferred.

Before I address his actual quotes, I must remind the readers that the plan to effect the "slaughter" of the world's population was a satire thrown in for good fun.  My mistake, atheists only pretend to be carefree to the world.  Lighten up!

As to the serious discourses:

That's very nice.  Practically, a series of philisophical disputations will not bring about the desired result of decreasing the world population.  If this is a serious discussion on actual reduction of the world's birth rate, you need a new plan.

"If a well off Libetarian American wants to espouse his freedom to, his right to, have 12 children, and that noone has the right to tell him not to, I would argue with him too, but I would readily use the emotional argument that I think he was being spoiled, self-serving, and, literally: immoral."

He is responding to his natural impulses, by biology's reckoning of man the animal.  It's the selfish gene. 

"We are all free to do whatever we want. Indeed, ironically, we are bound to, forced to do whatever we want (that is: only I can make my own choices)."

And you make no exception for duress, irresistable impulse, or any of the other conditions which it has been agreed inhibit seriously the free will of man? 

"So freedom is a red herring. You can kill people if you want to. You'll have to deal with the potential social and legal fall-out of that, but it is your choice to do whatever you want. You are FREE to do so. Responsibility is what is not given. We have to fight for responsibility: both our own, and others'. You can't fight for freedom. Every act you do, every thought you have is free. It cannot be otherwise."

Yes it can, see above.

"And I want to fight for responsibility. I will be responsible. I will have no more than two children, one for me, and one for whoever I have them with. That way, at least, I wont bring more people into the world."

Thanks for sharing.  Once again, this does nothing except help maintain and reduce the atheist population (thanks, thanks, and ever thanks for that).  You've yet to convince me that any solution based upon "urging" people to be "responsible" could ever be an effective global solution to avert a Malthusian catastrophe.

"I will urge others to take that responsibility. And depending on who I try to urge to be responsible, I will urge them with conviction and with passion, and I don't care if it offends their selfish impulses."

I will urge you to convert to Christianity with conviction and passion.  Will you convert to Christianity?

"Libetarians who want to espouse their freedom to have as many children as they want can kiss my ass! I have an earful to tell them about starvation, disease and warfare, and about taking responsibility for their fellow man and their planet's future, and not just themselves, and their immediate family."

I'm not a libertarian.  I am a Christian.  As such, I must respect the free will of men.  I find no viable solution to control the "population" variable which does not impede on the free will of men.

Take into account, then, that most historical efforts at population control, eugenics have failed.  Take into further account that industry and science have repeatedly been able to improve the techniques of agriculture, increase food production, and make the world inhabitable by more and more people.  Indeed, the last predicted Malthusian crisis was averted by such rapid developments in farming. 

Of the options presented, then, the only viable, moral choice is to focus not on the variable of population, though activists like Nikolaj remain privately free to do as they will, but rather to focus on the variable of food & resources. 

It strikes me as better to fail at an endeavour nobly than, in saving humanity, to lose one's own.

 I've said many times that the way to change people's behavior is to change their environment.  This goes for first and third world.  In America and other Western countries, our culture teaches us that having children is the pinnacle of human existence.  A woman's "purpose" is to be a mother.  A man isn't really a grown up until he has raised a child.  And so on... and so on... and so on.

Changing this attitude is not an easy thing since it really does match our biology in quite a few ways.  It's not impossible, though.  Consider that even though conspicuous consumption is the norm for humans, we had a brief period in the 70s when everybody was all about the economical cardboard boxes with go-cart engines.  (Anybody remember the late 70s Honda Civics?  You could pick those things up with two strong guys.)  The same kind of cultural attitude could be molded with regard to childbirth.  Make TV shows about strong women who choose not to have children.  Portray the single life as something other than irresponsible party people who can't make anything useful out of themselves.  Of course, ending the power of Christianity as a moral compass would be nice.

I've been trying not to butt into Josh and KB's convo, but here's my two cents -- and believe me, that's all you're getting.  I think you're both right and your both wrong.  It's certainly not just about birth rates.  Reducing the population drastically would have its own problems, particularly when you rule out euthanasia for all the elderly people who will still be alive when there aren't enough yung'uns to keep the Country Buffet open.  However, as DG has pointed out a couple of times, when you have as many people as we do -- almost all of whom consume conspicuously -- you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.  I'm not going to get into speculation about where the human population will level off.  There is certainly a leveling off point, but what I think is slipping past some people in this conversation is that starvation, disease, and other nasty things are what cause the leveling off.  As we have already noted, people don't stop having kids just because they'll starve.  Africa, anyone?  Sally Struthers would be out of work if people naturally accounted for future food availability.  So for those who think it's humane and moral to let the population take care of itself, I'm sorry, but that's the equivalent to saying that it's ok to leave your pet hamster in the same cage with your pet cat because nature will take its course.

We simply don't know exactly what will happen with the human population in the future.  Certainly global warming will factor into the equation as various ecological niches change character.  Extinction events -- both for flora and fauna -- will have a significant impact as well.  What if the ice caps melt?  What if significant glaciers drop into the ocean before they melt completely?  What if the bees die?  There are lots of things that might increase or decrease the total sustainable population cap.  This is all neither here nor there IF you hold that it is a bad idea for us to reach our population cap.

That's what this is all about -- not when and how the human population will cap, but how we can humanely keep it from capping.  I suppose there are some who will argue that we needn't worry about it, but I suggest that they don't know much about ecology.  Bearing in mind humans' innate belief that sparing suffering for huge groups of people is a good thing, it's hard to find a compelling argument for just letting things be.

Hrm... so by that calculation, a lot of living people are dead of starvation.  Doesn't quite make sense.  Clearly there's enough food to keep 6.5 billion people alive, so that half a hectare must be wrong.  I get that you're saying half a hectare ensures security against crop failure, but can we really take the entire planet as a single ecosystem?  If crops fail in China, sure the U.S. will send a few trucks of grain over, but in the long run, when a local population starves, it's because that particular part of the earth was overpopulated.  Granted, there is a total number of people that the earth can sustain, but I'd think that can only be roughly estimated by a much more thorough study of localized ecologies.  For instance, I have no doubt that parts of Africa are already topped out, and probably cannot help but decline because of starvation as arable land turns to desert.  The U.S., on the other hand, could probably take at least another couple billion people.  Look at how many more people are in China or India compared to here.

/me slaps KB with a trout.

Dude, if you just tell me you're not serious, all will be ok.  Otherwise, I'm going to have to tell you to get put on some meds.  Haven't you seen Logan's Run?

I'm sorry, dude, but preventing someone from being conceived is in a totally different ballpark than ending someone's life.  I can't think of a reasonable way to institute euthanasia without a totalitarian regime in the style of 1984.  That's because people love their grandparents, and their grandparents love them.  Old people find a great deal of meaning in life, and I, for one, am certainly not going to let some young whippersnapper decide I'm too old when I'm the one who has fifty years of knowledge and wisdom on him!

Do me a favor.  Go get Mark Twain's autobiography.  Read it.  Read it again.  Then come back and apologize for this post.

I certainly would not be indulging "philosophical" discussions, there are plenty of really basic practical arguments that can be made. I will leave the empty philosophical and even emptier theological discussions of this important issue to the Churches and other groups similarly out of touch with reality.

What I had in mind is all part of the need for educating all people about the facts here - population growth rates need to brought down, since food resources are finite - it is that simple.

We inevitably will need more than just talk and education, but it would be criminal not to do all we can to get people to understand, as well as understanding their point of view. Whatever we can do to make it easier for people to adjust, by positive aid and assistance is also essential.

All orderly civilzed societies have required restraint of many 'natural' urges, and Christianity has traditionally gone much further to demonize many activities which are all part of what makes us human, including our individual variation of taste in food, art, recreation and other activities, including sexual interactions. So it is hypocritical in the extreme for a Christian to object to any imposition of restraint on the number of children a couple can be allowed to have.

Here; I can even provide a contemporary example of a situation where an age cap was the norm, and the society in question was neither totalitarian nor repulsive:

The Canadian Inuit.

It wasn't even a 'nice' sort of death. Once people in a community became too old to fish/catch food for the village - so they were, essentially, able to make no practical contributions yet still needed food themselves - they said goodbye to their loved ones and sent themselves out to sea on ice floes.

Perhaps you don't like it, but it was necessary to maintain the villages given the relative lack of resources in the upper north.

Yearh, I was gonna say tortoises too. And I believe elephants live as long as humans, more or less. Does anyone else know how long different whale species can live? Then there's giant octipuses (Or is it octipi? No, it's octipuses isn't it?). We know very little about them, but I'm fairly certain it's been discovered that they can live well beyond a hundred years.

But I digress... I was going to adress Dogmaticon's post.

<edit> Oh and crocodilles and alligators. They are can live 100+ years too, at least some species.

The 'half a hectare' measure comes from not only the space needed for the food, but for the food's production, josh. Housing equipment, housing laborers, setting-up infrastructure, etc.

Or did you think that none of that stuff needs to go anywhere?

Uh. Did you miss thsi thread? Desdenova and Jill beat me to the punch, but I'll post what Des wrote there for your benefit:

More numbers, andthe ones you claimed to be looking for this time.

EDIT: Of course, you have your utopian blinders on, so I imagine you'll just dismiss whatever is presented to you anyway. Yes, Josh - we're doing just fine.

wtf? Go back and reread the post. Nevermind. Here:

I honestly didn't see that thread before, but it still didn't meet the criteria. Read on.

While Desdenova's post is well-received, it also lacks exactly what I have been trying to reason with you. (I will ignore the use of previous years crops compared to the present population.)

Part of the world's population does not eat beef. Part of the world's population does not eat pork. Part of the world's population does not eat meat of any kind. Part of the world's population does not eat grains. Part of the world's population can't eat peanuts or strawberries or seafood.

You skipped the mention of the countries with declining populations.

You're trying to macroeconomically micromanage the world's population into YOUR notion of it already or soon being overpopulated and that doesn't work on any rational level.

As far as untapped resources, Canada has a fuckton of unused areas. The US is right there too. We have national forests forbidding crops or harvesting of fruits. Africa has giant swaths of land that people are forbidden from planting on because of unharvested/untouchable animals.

Does the grain count include rice? Where is the sugar(talking about calories)? Where are the eggs? Where is the ostrich? Alligator? Catfish farm? Shark?  [ALL ONE QUESTION]

Here's what I don't get coming from capitalists either... what about Manatee/dugong farms? Elephant farms instead of just sanctuaries?

Did you mow your lawn this year? Where did the clippings go... to feed animals? I doubt it.

Do you eat sheep?(oops forgot. canada. sheep are friends. lol.) Goats? Mahi Mahi?

To say that we are at the maximum level is irrational because of the aforementioned omissions.

I agree that we MIGHT reach that level someday, but that would be utter disregard for the interim between now and then. The times are changing faster than we can count the numbers. PEOPLE are changing faster than the data can be assimilated into your model.

The following is not part of the argument; not an appeal. Just an opinion.

DUDE! I don't have 'utopian blinders' and I fucking DO NOT 'dismiss whatever is presented' to me. Think about it. If I did that then why the fuck would I have read your posts and put thought into responding?

This very same accusation can be leveled at the 'doomed blinders' people.

It's sad on a level. To me, some of you are my 'guy on the corner' with a "THE END IS NIGH" sign because someone told you they were out of peanut butter at the store.

You're thinking of New Zealand.

Besides, you're just jealous because you know damn well that we are imbued with the innate property of awesomeness.

Well... isn't it funny that this comes down to meaning?  Depending on the usage of overpopulated, we might be.  My usage of "overpopulation" is a state at which normal human consumption (conspicuous overconsumption) will irrevocably damage the ecosystem, to the severe detriment or possible extinction of humans.  It is my observation and belief that the current world population would drive most large animals extinct without any more population growth.  We will most likely destroy virtually all of the world's rainforests.  The coral reefs will die.  Most large game fish will go extinct.  "Lower" forms of life like the jellyfish will become the dominant species in the ocean.  Depending on the severity of the effect of our carbon emissions, we might go extinct.

I suggest that we are overpopulated.  However, I do so with the caveat that overconsumption is our natural state and cannot (or is extremely unlikely to) be changed.  I'm not an ecologist, so I'm not qualified to suggest an ideal population of humans, but I feel like it's probably a lot lower.

I can't answer that question authoritatively.  I hold the belief that we are at such a population level, but I hold it with only the conviction due a mildly educated guess.  

Heh...  I'll give you ten dollars if you can organize a consortium of scientists unbiased enough to compile such an analysis and then get them to come to a consensus on the results.

In reality, I'm sure there are plenty of such scientists.  I just don't think such a consortium could make it past the various political, economic, and cultural obstacles that would certainly spring up.

I mean, hell's bells... we were happy in America when GWB mentioned global warming without a condescending sneer.

Adoption just shifts the population burden, and not many people outside Hollywood celebrities adopt babies from Africa/Asia. As far as the poor pregnant 16 year olds, wouldn't it be better to provide free abortion and give the mother a chance to improve her life and prevent more criminals/foster kids/generations of people in hopeless situations regardless of how badly it pisses off the religious right?

 American couples only adopt white babies.  Look at the stats.  You'll see the truth of it.  Ninety out of a hundred babies that need adopting are black.

This is a problem.

Need = orphans or children taken from their parent(s) by the state.  I have no desire to argue over that policy.  It happens now, and that's part of what I define as "needs adoption."

FWIW, an ex-gf was a social worker who specialized in children taken from their parents, so I know quite a bit about it.

Are you sure you're not talking about foster parenting?  I'm talking about adoption.  That's permanent.

I'm pretty sure there are more kids in foster homes who have been taken away from their parents than actual orphans.

But then how would they afford two SUVs?

I know you're joking, but I'd much rather have comprehensive sex education... for parents so they know how to teach their own children about sex.  I think grade schools should have sex ed, too.  I just don't think there's such a thing as a public that knows too much about sex.

If it were true that women only mate with the richest guy they could get, I don't thinks we'd see so much poverty in the world. They mate with the guy that makes they feel the right way. I think that's the difference between rich societies and poor ones, in rich societies money is the most important factor in picking a man.

I don't think it just about materialism. It's about being drugged. Females choose the guy with the best drugs to supply them with. Many christian women would never have anything to do with a rich atheist. Why? Religion is their drug of choice(or indoctrination). For some women they'll go with the poor musician(music is a drug too), artist or funny man. Money is important because men can buy drugs like comfort, convenience, luxury, adventure, etc... So, I think women are more drug addicts than whores. Men too, we got to get our high(so as not be accused of being sexist).

I think the real conflict of our time is human motivation. We are still in a mode driven by our evolutionary past where almost everything we do from breathing, eating, shitting, shitting, fucking, etc... is driven by the short term need for pleasure, survival and avoidance of discomfort. Everyone just wants to feel good all the time.

We have the ability for rational thought and long term planning, but this is usually pushed aside for the sake of our prime(chemically based) motivators. I think we all live in world were we are all in denial about being addicts to all kinds of drugs.

Go Leamington! (Which, no joke, produces cacti for Mexico. Not kidding.)

Exactly because we would have to determine a precise and meaningful way to tell what "overpopulated" actually means.

One slight problem there is that our food production and distribution methods both demand the extra input of oil and natural gas. There's plenty of food, but it's an unsustainable level of food. Therefore, we are guaranteed at some point to have famine no matter what anyone says.

Now, should we plan a preemptive strike against famine by killing off some of the population? Uh, why? We know who's going to die: the poor people. They take the brunt of everything. No matter what we decide to do, poor people will get screwed. Not that I'm saying we should stop caring, just that this particular problem is an uphill battle.

But don't fret, my man, we'll see god in our time and won't that be better?

EXC, it's really hard for me to be polite to you.  I'm going to try very hard not to needlessly insult you in this response, but I want you to know it's an act of sheer willpower on my part.  It boggles my brain that you can get so many things wrong.

In any big brained social animal, you're going to have multiple fitness indicators for both males and females.  Imagine a simple system with only three variables: size, intelligence, and accumulated resources.  For males and females, size will refer to the best size and strength for their respective tasks, namely providing and securing resources, and childbearing and rearing respectively.

Suppose that each of the three variables is ranked from 0 to 100.  We have a population of unmated individuals, all of whom have set ranks.  Imagine a male and a female:

MALE 1:  SZ 85, INT 56, AR 38.

FEMALE 2: SZ 91 INT 73, AR 2.

As you can see, M1 is very well suited physically to resource accumulation and parenting, and has better than average intelligence.  However, he has significantly less resources than average.  F1 is nearly perfect for raising healthy children, but she is horrendously poor.  On the other hand, she's quite intelligent.

Now, a very intelligent but poor female might look at M1 and say, "He hasn't got the most resources, but he has significantly more than me, is reasonably intelligent, and has the physical stamina to accumulate more resources, even accounting for my poverty.  He is a very good choice."

Then, lo and behold, along comes MALE 2:

MALE 2: SZ 56, INT 85, AR 38.

M2 has exactly the same number of distributed points, but they are distributed quite differently.  M2 is smarter than F1, and also has significantly more resources.  Unfortunately, he is not the most strapping lad in the whole queue.  So, F1 has an interesting choice.  Does she choose the more clever mate, who will be able to outsmart his rivals?  Or does she go with brute strength and rely on her own intellect to be able to direct the duller man in the right direction?

This is a simple example, but there's no clear answer.  If you think for a minute, you'll realize that the answer is environment dependent.  With both males having the same resources, the female will have to judge whether a strong or smart man is more likely to succeed.  If they run out of resources, they will all die, so resources are the ultimate deciding factor, but the female will not be choosing the richest man.  She will be choosing the man who she believes has the best future potential.

Consider a foppish young dandy who has just inherited his family fortune of five million dollars.  He'd be a catch, except that within a year of coming into the cash, he's down to a little over a million dollars.  He's blown it on parties and loose women.

On the other hand, you have a hard working, conservative office manager who makes $75,000 a year, spends frugally, and has accumulated $100,000 of savings in ten years.  The poor guy will be over a hundred by the time he has as much money as the dandy has now, but he's likely to be a better mate, and is likely to have more money than the dandy in five years.

Now, realize that human mating is not based on three variables, but hundreds, each of which has an impact on many others.  Am I tall and symmetrical?  That effects my resource earning potential.  Am I well spoken and articulate?  That effects my resource earning potential.  Do I come from a moneyed family?  Am I well educated?  Etc, etc, etc.

Beyond all of that, there's the simple matter of physical attraction.  Many women would not marry an attrociously ugly billionaire.  They'd rather take their chances with a man of less means and more sexual charisma.

In a lot of ways, resources are the ultimate judge of mating success, but only a fool would say they are the only judge.

Yes, EXC, but "feels the right way" means different things to different women.  That's because there are hundreds of variables working within thousands of environments.

I should have known this was coming.  You've never defined "drugs."  Humans are chemical factories.  Everything we do is the result of a "drug."

Let me quote myself:

I wrote that passage about Christians who say that happiness as a goal is a dead end.  The funny thing is, you're making the same argument, and it's just as wrong when an atheist makes it.

Over this past weekend, I spent all but about ten of my waking hours working my ass off.  Nobody held a gun to my head and made me.  I chose to do it.  My power isn't about to get turned off.  I have enough money in the bank to pay all my bills for several months.  I could do whatever I want for several months, but I want to do work that sometimes makes me very unhappy, tired, and cranky.

You haven't defined "drug."  You haven't defined "happy."  You're just ranting.

Citation please.

Everyone here knows you think this.  We'd just like to see something approaching a rational argument with defined terms backing it up.

The reason I keep hammer this point is this. People keep coming up with solutions to the problems of poverty and overpopulation. Some of them actually can work short term, but the problem is we are stuck with the Malthusian model for human population growth: People will breed until misery(i.e. starvation, war, disease) limits the population growth. This is the 800 pound gorilla everyone seems to ignore.

So you believe in solution to the problem of poverty, namely have a minimum wage law. Fine, I actually can agree that supplementing some one's income short term could be a good thing with strict restriction on how the money is used and how they live their lives. Because this could actually help people while limiting their ability to breed, pollute and consume without producing any wealth.

You on the other hand, wish to essentially pay people to have no job skills in demand. You want there to be no time limits, education requirements, restrictions of liberty on the people receiving a supplemented income. The limits on how high the minimum wage should be set seem to be until anyone that works has a comfortable life.

Now I point out that you get what you pay for, you pay people to be unskilled laborers, you'll get lots of unskilled laborers. You pay people to consume, they'll consume. You give people the freedom and resources to breed, they'll breed. We ought to be able to understand what the effects are of a given system of welfare and understand it's limits. You're response to my objections is that I'm an idiot(I've attacked your religion apparently).

So we disagree fine. But we have scientific methods in place to determine what is true and what the results of action would be. Experiments can be designed to see who's ideas could work. For example in the USA, one state could have a pay for poverty system that you believe in, another could try something different. If others are right and I'm wrong fine, so be it.

But this can't happen. Why? Because in the world of socialism/wealth redistribution, you care soooo much. Caring (with other people's money) is what makes the lefties feel holy. And I'm an ignorant, cold-hearted bastard. I've argued with people of that believe in 'pay for poverty' enough to know it's their religion. Believing that you care more than others makes you feel good about yourself(can I say it's your drug?). It doesn't matter if it works in the real world, like prayer it makes the person doing it feel they are doing something useful.

So the solutions to poverty, pollution and overpopulation become a kind of religion. Communism and Socialism are examples of this. People stick to their ideology(can I say religiously?) because of how it makes them feel. The Malthusian problem never gets taken on because there is no easy solution, but people would rather live in a fantasy world and pretend that there can be some easy solutions(like minimum wage) to this dilemma.

So I keep hammering this point because I believe the real conflict in humanity is between rationalism and doing and believing what feels good. Until people realize this, I don't thing there can be any effective long term solutions with people who would get high on 'caring' and start a conformity cult rather than follow a rational process to discover truth.

No, that's the result of a nationalized local supply and an extremely low peso. Many oil producing countries could do that, but Chavez is the only one who has escaped the CIA ... twice!

By the way, that's what you get if you want a democratically elected socialist government. You get a visit from the CIA. First, from the corruption squad, and if you don't like those guys, they get someone to cut your brakes. If that doesn't work, they send in actual freaking commandos! Chavez escaped being kidnapped by commandos, and it didn't even show up on US television. Here (in Canada) it was on the BBC, CBC, and every other news station. I checked CNN, and no mention.