Life Neutral: like carbon neutral, but for kids killed by arms dealers' products

Leah sez, "DSEi, the worlds largest arms fair, takes place in London every two years. This year, Life Neutral Solutions announced that it was using the event to launch a new 'life offsetting' scheme. The company claimed that it was working with the defense industry to balance the 'unfortunate side effects' of weapons use by sponsoring the costs of raising a child in the west. After causing a bit of a fuss, it turned to be just an activist prank. The BBC World Service ran the story, but got the hoaxers to reveal their intentions. The culprits were the Space Hijackers, who have harassed the arms fair a few times before. In 2007 they even bought and sold their own tank."

You’ve heard of the importance of being carbon neutral? Well, being Life Neutral is the same - but with people. For every* life lost as a result of the use of products from our member organisations, we make sure that a new life flourishes. Join today and your next child could be a Life Neutral™ child.
Life Neutral Solutions works with the defence industry to provide solutions for balancing the unfortunate side effects of weapons use. Through sponsoring the birth and care of children in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, Life Neutral™ is committed to offsetting the collateral effects of defence operations in third-world conflict zones.
Life Neutral Solutions is interested in working with you. We are seeking potential parents who are committed to an ethical approach to weapons use and are excited by the possibility of an integrated package that would support you in bringing new life into our world.

Life Neutral - Life Beyond Conflict (Thanks, Leah!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Funny • Happy Mutants • politics • prank • uk

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://www.facebook.com/people/Cloud-Buster/100001449931827 Cloud Buster

Wow, that’s great the’re so big on helping kids, but helping children not becoming soldiers with AK’s in their hand in the rest of the world would be a bit more helpful,yes?
Bad for business I guess.
- http://twitter.com/Dave_Eger Dave Eger
  
  Did you read the entire article, or just skim it? Your comment doesn’t make it clear that you understand it was a prank.
- http://www.facebook.com/daen.de.leon Daen de Leon
  
  The key words are “activist prank” …
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_7DVEAI2OY6E3RWOO6G5PE3DTJQ Rhodeguy

Yah maaannnnn, like, you can’t hug kids with nuclear arms maaaannn.

WAR IS SUPPOSED TO BE UNPLEASANT. THATS WHY THEY ARE A LAST RESORT. We lose something, buildings, soldiers and, yes, sometimes innocent civilians including children. Why do we beleive that we can somehow make war more palatable by decrying the deaths of civilians or doing something like this piece suggests?
- http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb
  
  “THAT’S WHY THEY should be A LAST RESORT.” There, I fixed that for you.
  
  “Why do we believe that we can somehow make war more palatable by decrying the deaths of civilians or doing something like this piece suggests?”
  For one thing, “What do ya mean ‘we’, kemo sabe?” For another thing, the pranksters are trying to make war less palatable, so that they might actually be last resorts instead of profitable ventures to help monied interests, often called “our national interest”.
- IamInnocent
  
  If only it were truly a last resort but it never is, not really. It is almost always just another geopolitical tool. Hence the point of ridiculing it.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002004321483 Mladen Kalinic
  
  Yeah you sound like someone who has really felt the unpleasantness of a war.
  
  Try living in a war zone with your family for 5 years, then consider yourself qualified to comment on the ‘unpleasantness of war’.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Aron-Briggs/1386087012 Aron Briggs

this program misses the big picture. I find it incredibly offensive. We don’t need to support bringing more lives in to first world countries to make up for the children dying in war torn third world countries. Do you know how many children are starving in those war-zones? A lot probably. Life neutral should focus more on the equalization of life in the war-zone. Those children who are unfortunately losing their lives as a result of weapons do no need to die in vain. In most instances the meat left on their bones is still 70% palatable, and with today’s advances in hyper accurate weapons systems we are looking at a possible increase to 87% good meat left on these civilian deaths. There is absolutely no reason any child should go starving on the battlefield when so many plentiful resources are provided. But until programs like Life Neutral start rethinking casualties loss management strategies there is going to be a lot of opportunities for good going to waste.
- Daniel Sinnott
  
  Yet another who has an epic fail whilst reading the article … it is a hoax – a prank to make people think about the innocent lives lost through the use of weapons.
  
  Now read the article again!
  - Daniel Smith
    
    Speaking of failures in reading comprehension….If you re-read his comment I think you’ll find that Mr. Briggs was making a modest proposal.
  - mccrum
    
    Reading is FUNdamen… aw, who am I kidding, reading is hard! It’s got all those words! :)
- http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral
  
  Aron, fancy a job at Life Neutral as Corporate Social Responsibility Manager? @lifeneutral:twitter @spacehijackers:twitter
http://www.jeremiahblatz.com/ Jeremiah Blatz

1) Good on the BBC for picking up the obvious prank (if only the AP could be so non-credulous)
2) Will they also buy carbon credits, etc. to offset the increased resource utilization by a first-world child?
- http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral
  
  Jeremiah… Agreed! Well done BBC World Service for restoring some faith in quality fact checking journalism.
csforstall

This group is attempting the impossible, they are straining in desperation to hold back the tide of human history. Conflict isn’t by itself a good thing, but we as a species have been at it since the beginning of time and that unfortunate truth shows no signs of abatement.

This group has a good and very pertinant policy point, yet the way they are spending their money doesn’t seem like it is truly aimed at addressing the problems they claim they want addressed. In other words rather then buying a tank, or playing a prank they probably could have spent those substantial sums on a demining operation or through a Humanitarian NGO.

You don’t win people over with pranks, showmanship, and a desperate beg for attention. I think it would be easy for them to win followers, but it would require them to commit those funds to those conflict zones and not spend them as side-show dollars at their local arms show (no matter how big it might be).

Also, as a side note, if you are going to go after arms dealers, the most common weapon that is used in all those conflicts is the AK-47, and not all the wiz-bang gagetry stuff.
- http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral
  
  Goblin, you raise some good points. The facts are, however, that there’s very many NGOs out there doing just what you suggest. Our group (Space Hijackers) fit into a different, er, space. Diversity of tactics. We have some small funds to do our projects – not 1000s as you seem to think but we scrape enough to get interesting projects going. We’re not a charity, we don’t accept sponsors or dodgy donations, and none of us are trust-funded rich kids. We figure the small sums we do have are better used doing what we do best, rather than being swallowed up by all the baggage that goes with big NGO operations – paying for health and safety training, bodyguards, flights(!) 4x4s etc.etc.
  
  Diversity of tactics, a broad spectrum is needed.
  
  Don’t forget the type of operations you describe such as demining are picking up the pieces after conflict. We’re playing the long game, a long slow process of changing attitudes. You do win people over with pranks. Yesterday 1000s of people heard for the first time about the world’s biggest arms fair, DSEi, and what goes on there. Thanks to a prank. That’s a good start.Oh, and AK47s are on sale at DSEi.
  - csforstall
    
    not 1000s
    
    Then how did you afford a “tank” as you claim on your website? Surely you can understand why I would think you had lots of cash as a “tank” is a very large and expensive piece of hardware.
    
    We’re playing the long game, a long slow process of changing attitudes.
    
    This in a way relates to a deeper point that I was trying to make in my orginal post. You are focusing on a narrow sector, UK/ Western World and specifically an arms show, with a broad self-imposed mandate, as listed on the Life Neutral website, offset deaths in third world conflict zones. I am just interjecting the concern that the problem is very broad and exists outside of the scope for which you have defined your actions. There are more black market activities and arms dealers whom feed the problem in a much more oblique way then does any single arms/technology show. At the heart you are chosing to address one of the many symptoms of the problem and not the root cause. I think it is fair to say that most of the western world, the people anyway, if not always its leaders, naturally eschews conflict. This is noted when you look at the western world’s policies regarding their own militaries: no draft, all volunteer, comparable pay to civilian sector.So to get to my point, I think the western world has already more or less agreed to your message, and thats why you don’t get much play with media pranking. You are essentially preaching to the choir. The broader aspects, and strategies of this arguably world wide problem are ignored. One size doesn’t fit all, and one government can’t fix all the problems in the world. Local problems require local solutions.Thanks for your willingness to exchange ideas.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KK2VCGZCDJWDBZ4JPE53DX3FOE gaisgach

Faced with the prospect of having to offset the unfortunate side effects of cluster bombs in the 3rd world by bumping off large quantities of first world offspiring, the organizers of the DSEi today instead decided to ban two Pakistani purveyors of canister munitions:
“They have been widely condemned because they have killed and injured
hundreds of civilians long after conflicts have ended. One third of all
such casualties are thought to have been children.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/16/ejected-arms-fair-cluster-bombs
Event_Horizon

Is this another one of those “so sick it has to be a prank but ‘no one’ notices” from The Yes Men? That was my 10 second impression.
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

Fantastic. That is the creepiest logo In History.
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenahoo Ken Williams
  
  I was actually just about to say that’s the coolest logo I’ve seen in a long time.
tmcsweeney

Whilst I realise this is a joke, the joke could work the other way: Want to raise a child in the west? Fund guns in 3rd world conflict zones in order to kill enough poor children that it offsets your own offspring.
digi_owl

Sad thing is that war is the perfect market in the eyes of capitalism, as anything sold gets destroyed or in some other way used up. End result is that there is always a sellers market.
- backyardfoundry
  
  turn_self_off,
  
  This is actually a Keynesian idea, not a capitalist one. Most free-marketers view war as purely destructive. It’s economists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman who claim that war (like other calamities) can boost wealth. Extreme libertarian capitalists don’t:
  
  http://blog.independent.org/2010/02/16/one-more-time-world-war-ii-did-not-bring-us-out-of-the-depression/
  
  War, like most violence, is produced by governments.
  - digi_owl
    
    My dog knows more about Keynes then Krugman do…
    
    http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2011/03/04/%E2%80%9Clike-a-dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs%E2%80%9D-krugman%E2%80%99s-minsky-model/
mahlsdorferami

Am I the only one who’s intrigued by the asterisk in “for every* life lost”? I wonder what was in the fine print.
- http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral
  
  Check out lifeneutralsolutions dot com and you can read all you like!
Kerouac

Well played, Life Neutral. I’m looking forward to more of your “activities” in the future. If you ever hooked up with The Yes Men, it could really get nuts!
Karen Eliot

“Yesterday 1000s of people heard for the first time about the world’s biggest arms fair, DSEi, and what goes on there.”

That’s just conjecture, you’ve really no idea how many people heard about it for the 1st time. Seems you’re trying to make good PR out of a failed hoax. Failing still.
- http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral
  
  Karen, try checking out the listening figures for BBC World Service World Update (And the global reach). Then, add the listeners of BBC London drivetime. Next, add (admittedly an estimate) 100s of tweets going out to 1000s of people. Next, add the readership of Boing Boing, and other sites. Then add the 1000s of people on our mail list. Then add a few hundred people walking past the billboards.Of course you’re right you can’t come up with an exact figure. Even the lowest guesstimate, taking into account people who already knew about the fair, would be in the 1000s. Marketing companies make these kind of educated guesses all the time. What makes you think we can’t?You’re right, we are making good PR. In some ways, that’s exactly what we do, and we’re not too shabby at it. Not perfect, but not bad for a rag-tag bunch of anarchitects. Difficult to see where the fail is, but perhaps you can explain further.
- teapot
  
  Uh, did you ever consider how many daily hits BB gets?
  
  If you did you would realise that the estimate is not conjecture. Try employing logic in your comments before proudly declaring who has failed. You’ll appear less foolish that way.
blehtastic

It’s unfortunate that progressives, being highly correlated with those holding atheistic, humanist, and feminist views see the limiting of offspring as a positive result of a developed society. Since science is the closest thing to worship that atheism allows, and since science (with its unremovable sidekick technology) is the only thing that can both maximize the productive agricultural use of this planet, and allow us to colonize other planets, and mine less than planet resources in space such as asteroids and comets to make human habitable structures in the next frontier; and since liberals are apparently unwilling to believe that these advances will happen and will solve the current issues affecting our planet, as shown by there self limiting anti-reproductive tendencies, liberalism therefore admits itself as nothing more than negativity and self doubt. If you can’t even believe in your chosen viewpoints, beliefs; and their methods, to provide an essentially unlimited set of resources and possibilities in what is, from our understanding an infinite universe at our present time, then why should anyone else?

In short, quit being so fucking negative, make some babies, and trust that space elevators, biospheres, and other scientific advances will solve all these problems we worry so much about today. Why are progressives only willing to heed the negative teachings of sci-fi, and scientific theory, never realizing how hopeful things are if you only look at it from a different angle?

And it would be nice if you realized that a belief in the teachings and miracles of Jesus didn’t make a person a drone to the obviously anti-Christish republican/tea party hate speech, but I’m not expecting miracles here.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  In short, quit being so fucking negative, make some babies, and trust that space elevators, biospheres, and other scientific advances will solve all these problems we worry so much about today.
  
  I don’t find that much more realistic than trusting that angels will make us some extra dimensions to live in. And then destroy.
- Daniel Smith
  
  Because people who believe in reason and science realize that we have no great sky daddy that will save us if we fuck up, that species go extinct all the time and there is nothing special about us in that regard, and that not dealing with the very real threats that face us both in the universe at large and our internal cognitive deficiencies can render all of our hopes as no more than the lost dreams of another dead species. Having hope does not mean ignoring reality.
backyardfoundry

Space Hijackers is confused; it doesn’t matter if arms dealers are stopped from making modern weapons. Whole civilizations were destroyed in times past by pokey metal stuff and people are murdered to this day en masse with the same devices:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5129350.stm
Lobster

I don’t see any harm in asking people at a gun show to donate to children. It’s not like people who are pro-gun are anti-child… which is where this all breaks down. That’s the implication. By tying the two together so overtly, Life Neutral is basically accusing gun owners of killing children. That’s not a good way to get someone feeling generous.

Even if you believe that in your heart of hearts, there’s nothing to be gained by telling anyone about it, and there’s plenty to be lost.
sagodjur

We’re already doing that. For every person who intelligently decides that they couldn’t conscionably bring a child into the world, there’s some idiocratic mouth-breather shagging away without condoms because the Lord told him they’re bad (or he just doesn’t think about the big picture).
sugarsails

cheers to you sagodjur
http://twitter.com/syphax Brian Crounse

Well I’m Ivy & MIT educated and have 4 kids. Sue me.I apply Gate’s CO2 formula (CO2 = P x S x E x C) to sustainability in general. I lost a bit on the P, but work hard on the E (energy per service) and C (CO2 per energy).My kids are happy, loved, and taught to be kind and helpful to others. But, I guess I’m the a-hole.
TooGoodToCheck

I believe XKCD has rebutted idiocracy more effectively than I am ever likely to

http://xkcd.com/603/
backyardfoundry

sagodjur,

The U.S. Census collects lifetime fertility data. You should know that BY FAR the most procreant Americans are Hispanic, who tend to be in origin: Mexican, Amerindian, and Catholic.

If you read the top section and chart you’ll see what I’m talking about:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0083.pdf

Do you really want to go on about Lord-loving mouth-breathers?
sagodjur

I didn’t say anyone who has kids is an idiot. Being well educated, intelligent, and/or a good parent likely eliminates you from the pool of “idiocratic mouth-breather(s)” to whom I was referring. You shouldn’t take offense at comments of which you are not the target.
http://twitter.com/lifeneutral Life Neutral

Brian, thanks for Gate’s formula. Shame we didn’t have you on board to create a believable algorithm for Life Neutral’s offsetting. We coulda gone all Sokal with a bit of academic help!

Talking of Sokal, LIFE NEUTRAL WAS A HOAX! A HOAX! READ BEFORE POSTING, PEOPLE!
A hoax, designed to get people talking about the world’s largest arms fair, DSEi, which happens in London every two years. This year, once again, cluster bombs were on sale to people from such democratic regimes as Bahrain and Saudi.

Go to lifeneutralsolutions dot com or spacehijackers dot org or tweet: @spacehijackers @lifeneutral:disqus for more…
ocker3

Except for the fact that there Is a negative correlation between IQ and birth rates (http://www.sciencedirect.com/s… and it’s not just coming from one study (http://w-uh.com/posts/030831-I… this data is based on stuff from the US Census Bureau, who are apperently keeping data on the entire world, not just the USA). I haven’t seen Idiocracy, so I have no idea as to the veracity of their claims about the intelligent upper classes having more children in the past, but does anyone Really think the average farmer 100/200/500/1000 years ago had fewer kids than the average nobleman? Cost-of-living vs a child’s utility ratios for the varying social classes will always be higher for people who have low education/medical costs and a need for lots of hands to get manual labor done. If you’re really worried about birth rates, educate people, they’ll soon have more things to do with their time and be increasingly interested in pursuits other than staying at home and boning. Hey Presto, world birth rates drop.
Antinous / Moderator

Really think the average farmer 100/200/500/1000 years ago had fewer kids than the average nobleman

Unlike Mrs. Noble, Mrs. Farmer would have to nurse her own children, which tends to suppress fertility. And she probably didn’t live nearly as long. A dozen children would have been quite normal in a noble family, but only a couple would have lived to adulthood. I do know that the Spanish Habsburgs had a higher rate of child mortality than Spanish peasants of the time, due to inbreeding. So, yes, quite possible.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=607675355 Brent Kirkham

Hmm, well argued. Except for the point in human biology that is classless, breeding. There isn’t a class-limit on breeding, even a monetary one. It’s what evolution did, made the genitals sexy, made them work, made us produce children. It really is nothing to do with education per se, it’s what we humans do. We fuck. A lot. War, plague, famine, threat of thermonuclear war, we don’t give a shit, but we give a fuck. Every time.

I’ll take your Malthus and raise you a Darwin.
E T

IQ ≠ education
IamInnocent

If we limit our examples to farmers/nobles…

What if cleverer people were also wealthier in general and could offer better survival chances to their offspring ? I’m no expert but Googling it seems to confirm that supposition.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=607675355 Brent Kirkham

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain
More recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemophilia_in_European_royalty

As an aside. Doesn’t Prince Harry look like his father?
http://www.facebook.com/mollyclendon Margaret Louise Clarke

My English ancestors, shepherds, apparently lived into their 80s, according to church records. That’s when average life span was much lower. It’s possible that from the 1700s, it has been healthier to live in a small village than in an urban environment.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=607675355 Brent Kirkham

Citations please! Seriously Margaret, I’m not taking the piss/being sarcastic. There are and have been populations who have weathered the Plague, movement to America, finding a place to live there. I’d be really interested to read about that if any papers exist and you could do something with them. Every American is from somewhere else.

Also any stories from African and other European Americans who have found their history, one way or another.

In the UK we have a TV program called ‘Who do you think you are?”. Most folks are Eastern European, Sub-saharan African or just here from the outset. With very few exceptions, most folks are mongrels. Not a bad thing. The whole concept of “pure blood” reminds me of the medical (psychological and physical) deformities we had to pu up with in Europe, but you Americans got away from. Until Palin and Bachmann. Darwin Awards await them. Not you, THEM.
sagodjur

That’s a nice strawman you killed with numbers. Can you point out where I said that the wildly spawning idiots would belong to a single and most statistically significant group? Why do they have to belong to a particular group at all? Idiots who have too many kids can come in any demographic.
backyardfoundry

I want you to be clear who most of these “condom-eschewing, mouth-breathing, wildly spawning idiots” are. The facts are clear from MSNBC:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35793316/ns/us_news-life/t/minority-babies-set-become-majority/

“Johnson explained there are now more Hispanic women of prime childbearing age who tend to have more children than women of other races.”More white women are waiting until they are older to have children, but it is not yet known whether that will have a noticeable effect on the current trend of increasing minority newborns.”

I just don’t believe you know who it is that you’re hating on.
sagodjur

That’s funny. I just don’t believe you know who it is that I’m hating on. You keep trying to say that my comments must be about a particular group. Just because some minorities are having more kids than the majority, doesn’t mean that I’m attacking those minorities specifically.

To be clear, the target of my “hate” (and I would know because I’m the one “hating”) are people who, regardless of their gender or ethnicity or supposed membership in any cultural identifiable or arbitrarily-determined statistical group who choose to have children without regard for whether or not they can afford them, or feed them, or educate them well, or if they can be good parents. Bad parenting, including the decision to become a parent when circumstances aren’t good, is an equal opportunity flaw amongst all human beings.