Category Archives: Overpopulation

04/12/2014
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Anat Shenker-Osorio, Birth Control, Holy Bible, Jonathan V. Last, Overpopulation, Paul McCartney, Poverty, State Book of Louisiana, Wealth & Privilege, What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Hot Air

Church & State

Time to get scared, kiddies:

NO Times-Picayune Headline

Click Image To Read Article

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Do I need to riff on this, or does the intrinsic insanity of it speak for itself?

Yeah, I’ll go with the latter.

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Too Many People….

I hate to be a buzzkill to all those proud pappies and mammies who plaster zillions of pix of their trophy babies all over the interwebs, but my deeply held opinion is that we have way, way, way too many peeps on this planet.

I’ve heard humanity described as the ultimate invasive species. I won’t go that far but I cannot deny that the lot of us need too much of the limited tonnage of natural resources Ma Earth can provide. There’s flat-out not enough raw stuff to produce all the goods needed to elevate everybody alive to our Murrican standard of living. Not everybody can expect to drink water out of a plastic bottle, keep a calendar on a handheld electronic device, wear a pair of sneakers made by slave labor in China, and have a Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese for lunch every day. Homo Sapiens sapiens would need two or three Earth-like planets to supply all the ingredients for that universal lifestyle.

Street Crowd

Oh, The Humanity….

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Still, folks want us to go blithely and merrily along, procreating our way toward 8, 9, even ten billion cramped souls on this little rock, religious fundamentalists, primary among them. IDK why but the uber-pious loathe the notion of birth control in any form. I suppose it goes back to their codified worldview, which was formed and refined for a passel of pre-technological, pre-literate, overly-credulous, nomadic desert tribes in what we now call the Middle East. Nothing like having that forward-thinking gang set cultural and scientific policy for our 21st Century society, no?

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading both sides of the overpopulation argument, the New York Review of Books has a piece on a book by Jonathan V. Last entitled “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.” Last’s argument — one that’s pretty much advanced by all anti-birth-control-ists — is that if the pop. growth of this holy land is in any way curtailed, even slightly, why then these United States will be wiped off the face of the Earth by whatever gang is busy humping its way toward elbow-to-elbow existence.

The reviewer takes issue with Last in no uncertain terms. If you want more, here are a few other links for reviews of the tome:

Conservative news outlets, natch, are hot for Last’s book,

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Nobody’s Poor

Speaking of having not enough — or not having enough…, oh, you know what I mean — recent research has found that, in this holy land at least, even the poor don’t want to be classified as poor, so any pol trying to get votes by declaring himself a friend to the needy isn’t going to find much of a sympathetic audience.

Weird, huh?

If you’ve been following these screeds of late, you know my feeling that most Murricans harbor the fantasy that they’ll be billionaires one day, ergo the electorate’s patience with pols who do the bidding of the Kochs, the Ricketts, and Sheldon Adelson. In a sense, common folk think that whatever benefits the plutcocracy will one day benefit them.

Great Depression

Not Us!

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Talk about fairy tales.

Ironic — isn’t it? — considering the fact that the divide between the haves and have nots is growing enormous-er every second of every hour of every day.

So, back to pols erring in their siding with the poors, that’s the conclusion arrived at by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political communications consultant. She writes in Salon that progressive candidates and sitting office-holders have to start using new terminology to show how much they love the more unfortunate among us. Or the less fortunate. Whatever, you know what I mean.

The idea being you can’t say, “Hey, guys, you ain’t rich and I’m on your side.” Our American egos are so fragile that if you think we’re poor, we don;t want you on our side.

Like I said, weird.

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Too Many People…, Redux

My least fave Beatle, sure, but Ram was a cool album. And this cut fits today’s post theme.

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03/17/2014
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B-Line Trail, Bloomington Certified High Tech Park, Climate Change Denial, Goddard Space Flight Center, Great Recession, Guardian UK, Habitat for Humanity, Huffington Post, Jamie Dimon, Jim Hightower, JP Morgan Chase, NASA, Overpopulation, Ralph Nader, Soma Coffee

Hot Air

The Mob

Ralph Nader quotes Jim Hightower in Saturday’s Huffington Post:

Assume you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating US trade laws, and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the punishments you’d get? Howe about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. No jail time. Not even a fine. Plus, you get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!

The hoodlum H-tower speaks of would  be the big boss of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, a man whom, Nader reminds us, proclaims for all the world to hear that he is “so damn proud of this company.”

Dimon

“Proud”

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We keep forgetting that reprobates like Dimon were responsible for crashing the entire world’s economy back in the mid-aughts. It wasn’t socialism, or communism, or same-sex marriage, or legalized pot, or a Manchurian Candidate president from Kenya, or even god’s will that millions more Americans now live below the poverty line, millions are unemployed, municipalities are going broke, school budgets are being slashed, libraries are closing, and…, and…, oh, it’s all too depressing.

All those ills were brought to us courtesy of the Liar’s Poker, casino-mentality, degenerate gamblers in fancy Wall Street offices (and their coat-holders in Congress).

They all are the very definition of mobsters.

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Trade Rumors

Here’s an idea regarding the development of some land along the B-Line Trail that cuts through central Bloomington. Habitat for Humanity wants to develop a little strip of woods along the Trail, just northwest of downtown B-town. So the city’s angling for a zoning variance to allow HforH to build a couple of dozen homes for the needy there.

Habitat/B-Line

Habitat’s B-Line Neighborhood Is Next Door To…

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And, according to folks who don’t think much of the idea, the city’s positioning the question as an either-or: either you want to help Habitat do its good works or you don’t. The problem acc’d’g to some, is that Habitat’s property is the last lush green space near downtown. That, and it is apparently going to be difficult to develop.

Instead, say a group of petitioners, the city and Habitat should swap land. The city-owned Certified Tech Park butts up against the Woods parcel. The CTP already is zoned for high-density residential development, the argument goes, and much of the land is cleared.

Bloomington CTP

…Bloomington’s Certified Tech Park

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The simple solution? Let HforH build its homes on the Tech Park site and let the city take over the Woods and transform that land into a Parks & Rec facility.

If you buy this argument, slap your sig. on the petition calling for the land swap.

Then again, if you think the city’s gonna let low-income folks live in its shiny new neighborhood, you must believe you live in a liberal college town.

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A Dickens Of A Tale

Overheard at Soma the other day, a barista talking to a customer:

My parents told me my actual last name was Nintendo. When I was about six, they said I was the heir to the Nintendo family fortune but that my original parents disowned me because they didn’t like the way I looked. So I was adopted.

Does too much coffee do that to people?

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The End Is Near — Maybe

And finally, it took a foreign newspaper to report on disturbing study by this holy land’s own NASA. Our Murrican space geeks have sponsored some alarming research with the help of scads of scientists from a variety of disciplines that show humanity’s present rate of consumption and excretion could potentially topple our whole house of cards within a few decades.

Fin

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We’re using so much stuff and belching so much of our wastes into the air, the water, and the soil that our civilization itself could collapse of its own weight. Don’t laugh — countless civilizations before us have gone all to hell for a screwing up what they knew of the world a lot less than we are.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has submitted the study to the peer-reviewed journal of the International Society for the Journal of Ecological Economics. That gang contemplates stuff like this; you know, how much it costs us as a species to make sure everybody’s got all the latest hand-held devices and to keep our petro-plutocracy in charge of, well, everything.

Natch, Murrican newspapers and TV news outlets haven’t touched this thing yet because it has nothing to do with Justin Beiber or a white man shooting an unarmed black kid. Those, of course, are the only topics of import in this mad, mad, world.

Anyway, the study doesn’t come right out and say we’re doomed, only that we could be. There’s a chance, see? Except folks who think scientists are a political party would pooh-pooh the report out of hand, if only they had the intellect to understand it.

Inhofe Book Cover

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And here’s a conclusion the study makes that’s sure to make Ma & Pa Kettle bristle: We ought to stop having so many kids. Yup, overpopulation is strangling us, the study sez. There ain’t enough raw stuff on this planet to manufacture the products needed to satisfy all 7B of us. The conclusion is, those of us who have need to make sure that the rest of us have not; otherwise, we lucky few won’t have as much as we want.

Yeesh. So, when’s the last time you read the word overpopulation in your morning newspaper? Or heard the word uttered by a blonde, lacquered anchor lady?

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