View Full Version : Never let a crisis go to waste
The Population Bomb was written in 1968 by Dr. Paul Ehrlich and sold more than 2 million copies. The author warned the reader in its opening paragraph: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” Ehrlich was dead wrong on his predictions of world-wide calamity, in fact death rates steadily declined. Yet the population bomber was undaunted and upped the anti in his book “The End of Affluence…warning that a billion or more “…could die of starvation by the mid 1980’s.” As time has shown, none of Ehrlich’s prophecies with death rates steadily declining over a 25-year period as food production grew faster than the 50% population increase in population the world has seen since 1968.
Naturally his "solutions” and those like him included a national state run organization with the power to use sterilants in water supplies, and to limit family size and the promotion of DDT which resulted in millions of deaths in 3rd world nations (due to increased malaria deaths)
With every Statist problem their proposed solutions always include greater state control, a need for a whole bunch of money and the loss of personal liberty and choice – hmmmmm, can’t imagine the same thing is being seen with the latest global hysteria of climate change?
Please, pontificate on "the latest global hysteria of climate change".
I've dispatched boomy; I need fresh meat.
Please, pontificate on "the latest global hysteria of climate change".
I've dispatched boomy; I need fresh meat.
We have gone at it years ago...I respect you.
I do find it amusing and concerning that many past "problems" that science (when coupled with statism) has found a need to address has resulted in lost liberty. The eugenics movement that started with the progressive movement and encouraged by Sanger, and resulted in 50,000 sterilized individuals in America -- not to mention when happened in Germany comes to mind. The Population Bomb was pretty nutty -- but his solutions, the solutions from a "respected scientist" were pretty darn scary.
Statists have used problems (real and imagined) as an excuse to dictate how the rest of us must live in order to avoid "certain doom."
mhgaffney
12-10-2011, 09:24 PM
Over population is a slow motion disaster --
Not a sudden catastrophe.
You can see it here in India. I am in Kerala province -- and have made several long drives in buses and taxis. There is almost no undeveloped land. People occupy almost every square foot.
To say it's over populated would be an understatement. Be thankful you live in a nation that still has open space.
Despite its major problems -- there is hope for India. What Amma has done here is incredible.
She is showing the way into the only future that makes sense.
MHG
Statists have used problems (real and imagined) as an excuse to dictate how the rest of us must live in order to avoid "certain doom."
It's too bad that you think climate change must be addressed by "Statism". That's certainly what the deniers of climate change want you to believe, so that you'll recoil in horror and claim that the science is a fraud or a hoax or a Marxist conspiracy.
Mitigating and adapting to climate change is a market worth trillions to those companies and entrepreneurs who figure out how to cure us of our fossil fuel addiction. It's not rampant Statism, it's new means to acquire and use the energy we need and want. There are untold profits to be made.
El Jué
12-10-2011, 11:02 PM
Over population is a slow motion disaster --
Not a sudden catastrophe.
You can see it here in India. I am in Kerala province -- and have made several long drives in buses and taxis. There is almost no undeveloped land. People occupy almost every square foot.
To say it's over populated would be an understatement. Be thankful you live in a nation that still has open space.
Despite its major problems -- there is hope for India. What Amma has done here is incredible.
She is showing the way into the only future that makes sense.
MHG
Fair warning. If a stranger should ever try to hug me, I won't be responsible for his immediate future and whether or not he can make sense of it.
Rohirrim
12-11-2011, 06:25 AM
Soylent Green. Problem solved.
Just a joke, or not. What will change is the quality of life. Is that what you want? Did you know there is an entire science, with huge labs and industries built around it, that specializes in creating flavors? When you see a package that says "natural flavors" that's what you are eating. They can take a molecule of strawberry flavor and synthesize it a billion times over. That's a natural flavor. No need to eat "real" strawberries. We can make a crunchy and tasty flavor-cake out of ****roaches (full of protein) and make it taste like anything we want. And it will have just the perfect "mouth feel" that people love, engineered right into it. We're already replacing wild caught fish (because we've raped the oceans to depletion) with farmed fish. I don't know if anybody has noticed, but good luck finding "prime" beef anymore. Or even choice. Now it's select, the bottom of the barrel. Soon there will be predigested beef flavored patties, full of flavor and just the right mouth feel and umami. Even our livestock is engineered to produce massive amounts of tasteless protein on the least amount of resources. The heritage breeds are disappearing, replaced by massive breasted turkeys, cows that produce floods of milk, and pigs that fatten into massive, pasty slabs of white meat in the time it used to take you to raise a good hen. And chickens? Hell, put a billion of them in a huge shed, locked in tiny cages their entire lives, pump them full of hormones and speed, and they're crapping out eggs like a slot machine.
And you don't even want to know what we've done to the soils around the world in order to pump a hundred times more crops out of them than they can handle. We've basically turned the soils of the world into meth addicts, pumped full of speed. Don't even look for micro-organisms. You think that's fun, wait until they start crashing and are unable to produce anything without massive doses of petro-chemicals (we're probably already there). Why? Because organic farming is too slow and labor intensive. We want farms with no farmers. That's "real" progress.
A lot of people believe one of the major causative factors of the Arab Spring was the wheat crop failure in Pakistan caused by flooding (which many blame on climate change). Get used to it.
Hell, maybe us crazy apes will figure out a way to feed a world with 10 billion, or even 20 billion people in it. We're just crazy enough, and unconscious enough, to think that it is a good idea. Personally, I'd like to enjoy life, pick fruit off a tree, eat a delicious, juicy steak on occasion, etc. But that's just me. I'm sure I could also survive living in a tiny cubicle in a massive city full of other tiny cubicles with a bunch of other crazy apes munching on cockroach cakes. ;D
It's too bad that you think climate change must be addressed by "Statism". That's certainly what the deniers of climate change want you to believe, so that you'll recoil in horror and claim that the science is a fraud or a hoax or a Marxist conspiracy.
Mitigating and adapting to climate change is a market worth trillions to those companies and entrepreneurs who figure out how to cure us of our fossil fuel addiction. It's not rampant Statism, it's new means to acquire and use the energy we need and want. There are untold profits to be made.
There is money to be made -- sure. if folks want to buy products that are green I think its great. Its the dictating to the rest of us how we must live that obviously concerns me. If one really believes that we are on the brink of an ecological disaster, than naturally one feels justified in taking some pretty extreme measures in terms of controling behavors that one is convinced will destroy us all.
Eugenics led to millions of murders using simular arguments...and a few years ago with the Population Bomb he was proposing simular extreme measures to save us from ourselves. If the solution involves even larger doses of statism, it should give one a reason to pause and consider the implications about what that mean as governments (whom we all know and trust Im sure) would be given the lion share of the responsbility to impliment such a large scale solution.