The Great Wall of People, is set in China. The main topic is a revealing look at China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1979. _see here_ So that's how you protect yourself as best as you can. As a side note, when animal mothers (e.g. frogs, mice, and turtles) were placed in environments with high percentages of plastics and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals, their children turned homosexual and/or androgyneous. Some had testes with eggs in them. Male turtles start humping other male turtles (how familiar!). Female frogs and fish became masculinized (sound similar to our women?). Other pesticides in the environment made male and female fish not want to mate with one another. They also decreased both sexes' fertility (rise of asexuality, incels). Drug-polluted rivers create intersex fish; minnows exposed to antidepressants spend their blissful lives swimming eternally towards the sun until they get eaten, and also sometimes experience autism-like symptoms (transsexuals, autism). Holy cow, that's a lot of diversity! I have concluded that plastics, fertilizers, and other chemicals have continually homosexualized our species since their rise after WW2. They have disrupted development in utero and led to massive sexual and evolutionary dysfunction.

By the end of the year, my scientific paper “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis,” which sparked these stories—and hundreds of others around the world—was ranked number 26 among all referenced scientific papers published worldwide, according to Altmetric’s 2017 report. The books you receive as gifts often go one of two ways: they’re incredible or mediocre at best. This is the latter. Credit due to James Patterson, he’s a prolific author with I assume many great works. Perhaps he should slow his writing down and focus on true originality. Two things annoy me: restaurant food is the worst, I get that, but ALL restaurant food? Fast food and five star restaurants? I need more information on that one. It is no secret that the writing and publishing machine that is James Patterson often includes his combining efforts with other writers. This is the case with his latest release entitled COUNTDOWN, which was co-authored by Brendan DuBois. Though I was familiar with the name, I had not personally read anything from DuBois and was looking forward to this title.

But this is just the beginning of a tangled skein of threads that Weisman weaves, threads which include among many others the story of CIMMYT, the Spanish acronym for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (located outside Mexico City and “considered today to be the birthplace of the so-called Green Revolution”}; a bit about CIMMYT’s former director Dr. Norman Borlaug, who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing a disease-resistant, high-yield strain of wheat (Borlaug has been called “the man who saved a billion lives”); pieces introducing Malthus’ famous 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb; the disdain which has been heaped on Ehrlich ever since because he didn’t anticipate the Green Revolution; and Borlaug’s own words, from his Nobel acceptance speech, which shoot down those who believe that Borlaug had put Malthus (and Ehrlich) in their places: The last part of the chapter was quite surprising to me. Weisman relates how much of rural Japan (with an economy based on agriculture and traditional crafts) is now almost a no-man’s land for young people, who have fled to the large urban areas. He mentions a village which in 1975 was 2300 people, now having a population of 500 and dropping, where “young” means someone in their fifties. The older people, still enjoying good health, continue traditional small farming, but wonder who will do it when they finally disappear.

After these findings were published in 1997, I felt that we needed to ask whether sperm counts were different in different locations, since that would point to environmental factors at play. I’ve spent the last twenty years basically trying to answer that question. After conducting many more studies on semen quality, sperm decline, and related factors, I feel that I have. Not only have I shifted from being dubious to being utterly convinced that a dramatic decline in sperm counts is occurring, I’ve also discovered that various lifestyle factors and environmental exposures may be acting in tandem or in a cumulative fashion to fuel the decline. A little (or a lot) information on what’s in most of the chapters. Some of the longer ones are taken from status updates for the Transition group read. The book does go into great detail - typically in the form of streams of statistics and numbers. I don't know if it's possible to write a book like this without going into statistics, but it became boring and bland; I ended up skipping some of the numbers because, ultimately, it is meaningless to me and doesn't paint a vivid picture of what is actually happening. Knowing that her leadership is corrupt to the core, intelligence officer Amy Cornwall is forced to give up her identity and work from the shadows. But it's not easy staying hidden when your enemies are elite intelligence operatives. In many ways, this is a typical Patterson/Dubois political thriller delivered with their usual formula plotlines. There’s a lot of dramatic twists, multiple interconnecting storylines, and a larger rather than smaller cast of characters presented in a strong Tom Clancy techno-style delivery. It also has the required level of action, violence, suspense, and mystery expected by us as Patterson readers.Weisman clearly perceives the earth is overpopulated. I agree. He clearly believes that the earth and humanity are facing tremendous problems in the coming decades: global warming, food shortages, rising sea levels, degrading ecosystems, peak oil, falling water tables, possibly severe fresh water shortages in some parts of the world. All of these challenges would be made less formidable if humanity could level off its population and then start to decrease it.

Aside from the obligatory kowtows to the homosexual and transsexual, this book has a great deal of very frightening (yet enlightening) information. Our sperm counts have been dropping by 1% per year for the past 50 years, which means that we have half the sperm as did men in 1970. Only about ~10% of males today will get their sperm accepted into sperm banks. Our sperm are becoming mutated, without tails, spinning in circles, and decreasing in density and volume. Why? Part IV: What We Can Do About This" contains 3 chapters, two of which are filled with ideas for reducing your chemical footprint. Chapter 11 includes common sense ideas such as: don't smoke, eat healthfully, and manage your stress levels. Chapter 12 has less obvious [but still kind of obvious] ideas such as: don't microwave plastic and don't use air fresheners. Another suggestion was to avoid antibacterial soaps, but it is not explained why. Do they or don't they contain endocrine disrupting chemicals?The book is divided into five Parts. The Parts have no titles, and it’s anyone’s guess what the different Parts represent. Likely there’s a thematic connection, or maybe an organizational/narrative similarity, between the chapters in these parts, but I doubt that it’s important for the reader. I would guess that Iran became, if it wasn’t already, the most woman-friendly Moslem country in the world. Education, college, healthcare, the whole nine yards. (In 2012, 60% of Iranian university students were women.) There are still dress restrictions, which are apparently flouted in legal but brazen ways. This was no longer only a matter of scientific study for me. I felt and remain genuinely scared by these findings on a personal level. An undercover CIA officer has seven days to save her country from the world's most dangerous double-agent. The goals of this program were modest, but within two years Iranian demographers couldn’t believe the census figures they were seeing, nor could officials at the 1994 World Population Conferences. But UNFPA sent its own demographers to Iran, and got the same results. (275) By the year 2000, Iran’s total fertility rate had reached replacement level (2.1 children per woman), “a year faster than China’s compulsory one-child policy”. In 2012, it was 1.7. (In 1986 it had approached 9!)