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The Bomb That Never Detonated
I.
Back in the early 1970s, in the heyday of unceasing rancor over Humanae Vitae, a great number of books were published that prophesied disaster for the human race. Among the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s widely read The Population Bomb. At that time, we were given various apocalyptic scenarios about the end of things caused by our own uncontrolled breeding. We were soon to starve to death. The world, then with a population of around three billion, was running out of food, clothing, gas, and just about everything else. Things could only get worse. Resources were “limited”; no more new ones were imaginable. The Catholic Church was often singled out as contributing to this approaching demise of the human race since she taught that the world was made for man. Her weird stance on human breeding was “irrational”. Her views on marriage and children were said to go against the principles of, you guessed it, “modern science”.
The main group did not readily buy these forebodings were the economists, or at least the free market ones. (See, for example, John Mueller’s Redeeming Economics and John McNerney’s The Wealth of Persons). Not a few farmers and agrarian biologists also thought that perhaps increasing populations was not such a bad thing. Increased yields in many grains were shown to be quite feasible and soon put into production. India, once a basket case became a bread basket, an exporter of grain and not just an importer of it. Children and youth meant new markets and incentives. They also meant more potential workers who would be both producers and consumers. They were also provided some assurance to the elderly, as the Japanese and Europeans were to find out when they had too few of them. Some folks seemed to know how to respond to these so-called scarcities; others did not. It was something that needed to be both learned and encouraged.
World population proceeded to reach four billion, then five, and now approaches eight billion. If anything, we are better prepared to deal with eight billion than the world was prepared to meet its needs when the population of the planet was less than half a billion. This is counter-intuitive; many would expect the opposite, especially if they do not really think about it. In fact, the whole socialist agenda was largely a thinking about it in a way that never worked and usually made things worse. The solutions based on empowering governments to deal with it always backfired. Instead of inciting growth and increased quality in things, government control of resources to insure justice invariably produced stagnation and inefficiency. Such a seemingly sensible solution produced something worse; good intentions did not produce good results.
At that time, I wrote two books, Human Dignity & Human Numbers and Welcome Number 4,000,000,000 (more recently, there is On Christianity & Prosperity). My thesis was that the birth of new human lives was not a disaster. It was something to rejoice about. This welcome was not merely in a family sense, but also in an economic, political, and cultural sense. This approach seemed to be the way things were supposed to work. Earlier writers such as Locke and Rousseau had understood this value of population long before Malthus came along with his calculus of a world with standing room only. Subsequent writers have often been amused to point out that we could put the whole present eight billion population of the earth into the state of Texas with about as much space between folks as present day New Yorkers enjoy in their neighborhoods. Increasing populations were in fact good, but this possibility depended on what we thought of the family, of children, and of the human ability to meet its own needs by means that actually work and were not intrinsically immoral. Man was not created with all the answers, but with the capacity to find good answers, and this process required a rejection of what did not work.
II.
At the time, I knew the late Julian Simon, whose books, The Ultimate Resource and The Ultimate Resource 2, proposed (along with George Gilder and Herman Kahn) that wealth was not a matter of supposedly available resources based on contemporary estimates of their quantities. Rather, the human mind was the only real source of wealth in the universe. The Arabs sat on pools of oil for centuries with no idea what to do with it. Oil or anything else is only valuable if some use can be found for it. It seemed odd at first sight that people would think that unused raw material was of any value at all. The American Indians, who were said to have had ten square miles of territory for each person when the colonists arrived, actually were not surviving well merely on what they could garner from unimproved nature. An intimate relation is found between human culture and nature. Contrary to some recent sentiments, the world was not intended just to sit there in order for us to admire it or to leave it alone.
Everyone was amused when Simon made a bet with Ehrlich that in the future more—not fewer—resources of every type would be available than when the bet was made. Ehrlich assumed we were rapidly running out of most everything. As I read later, Ehrlich lost and paid the bet. Adequate resources become available when we need them—if we are permitted to figure out how to do so and are allowed to sell them in the market at a profit. Simon’s point was that resources are not merely things in the ground, sea, or air. They are products of mind that only come about when we have need of them.
This point is why the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “entrepreneur” is so important. If someone does not know what to do or how to do something, nothing much will happen. Moreover, to understand the world as a place designed for what man is, we need to have a correct philosophy about what nature and man are in themselves and in their relation to each other. Poverty is mostly caused by bad ideas and lack of virtue, not lack of resources. Many cultures and societies are indeed stagnant because they never learned or never wanted to learn how to be otherwise. This is why cultures ought not simply to remain what they are. They ought to be open to what is the right order of things. Sometimes a little preaching helps.
After the seventies, the population issue seemed to die down. It became clear that resources were not the real problem, nor were babies. Governments, religions, and ideologies were the problem if they did not know or did not want to know how to deal with increasing human numbers. If there is a population problem, it is almost always the result of ideas and government controls that had other purposes than human well-being. In addition, the countries we thought to be the poorest, China and India, suddenly became richer, though with many a dubious anti-human policies still in place. The places where we were told people were starving, were in fact busy coping with smog from their new cars and industries. They had learned how to become rich by imitating enough of those systems that did know how to succeed in improving themselves.
III.
Paul Ehrlich, still around with his theories, was recently invited to a conference on “biological extinction”, to be held at the Vatican in late February. Several similar advisers, who were well-known advocates of limiting world population, were invited earlier to discuss Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’. There is no problem in hearing what adversaries hold, provided they are not imitated. For many, such invitations seemed to imply an unholy alliance. People who insist that the world should be limited to two or three billion in population, assuming this is a good idea—which it isn’t—also advocate enthusiastically the means they insisted must be accepted to achieve it: birth control, abortion, gay marriage, and sundry other lethal proposals that sound mostly like the narrative in The Brave New World.
The key to understanding this strange relationship seems to be found in the notion that the earth is our permanent and only home. It needs to be protected at all costs from man’s incursions. Instead of looking on the earth as itself given to man to accomplish his natural and supernatural purpose, the emphasis is shifted to the notion that the earth is the sole place of man in the universe. The purpose of the human race is to keep itself afloat in space for as long as possible. This end requires an ethic of complete care rather than an ethic of virtue and abundance. Sin and moral fault are redefined in terms of how we use the earth, not how we stand to one another. The moral absolutes must be reinterpreted in the light of this priority.
Though not always immediately evident, behind this earth-first perspective is a human control mechanism that usually proposes limiting the number of people present on the planet at any one time. This limitation, said to be based on available science, requires medical and legal procedures to limit these numbers, to license those who can and cannot be born. Eventually, no doubt, the sun will burn itself out, and human life on this planet will be rendered impossible. But holding out as long as possible is, it is thought, a workable endeavor. Out of this thinking we find frequent proposals to transport at least some human beings to other planets, so that our kind are not “lost in the cosmos”, to cite the title of Walker Percy’s famous book.
Supporting much of this thinking is also the proposition that earth warming is caused, it is said, primarily by human development, not by recurrent natural causes. This is presented as an unquestionable scientific fact, even though recorded changes and computer projected changes are not the same. The evidence for this man-made cause is, to say the least, ambiguous, if not simply false. It is opinion, not science. And many think that a warmer earth would be an advantage in many ways.
There is danger here, in any case, of what might be called the “Galileo problem” in reverse. Namely, the Church seems to embrace another form of dubious science in the name of its primary mission. This time the danger is in agreeing with popular science, not disagreeing with it. The so-called “sustainability” principle is premised on a projection of present-day science and technology on what might or might not be available in the future. It would be like proposing, on the same grounds, to leave development as it was in 1800 or 1900 and then to insist that what we have in the 21st century could not be possible on scientific grounds.
The view of the earth as parsimonious instead of abundant under man’s dominion results in very different attitudes towards the earth and our place in it. Suppose we imagine that things are radically limited, that waste is the biggest problem. The world is basically divided between haves and have-nots. The function of morality is to redistribute existing goods on some abstract equality principle. With such suppositions (besides making everyone poor), we will usually end up with a total control position. International control of resources and population will be offered as the only “just” solution. We will in practice, if not in our rhetoric, elevate goods over people and their final end. We estimate what we think is now available in terms of technology and enterprise. Our focus is to take care of the poor, not to enable them to not be poor and hence independent of state control. This control is now justified because of scarcity thinking.
If, however, our operative presuppositions are abundance, we will emphasize our mind and inventiveness. We will suspect that plenty of resources are or can be made available. We do not need to panic and cut ourselves off from those ideas and procedures that can provide for increased population without subjecting everyone to state control. The dark side of ecology, as Paul Johnson pointed out, is the ease with which its logic justifies the totalitarian state. Emphasis should not be on a morality that assumes scarcity, but one that presumes abundance and gift. We need a just order that can envision a world prospering with more brains, more freedom, more virtue, and more enterprise.
IV.
Looking back over the whole cast of thinking in this area, we suspect a curious separation of reason and revelation. Reason and what we can learn from it are replaced with a exclusively revelational approach that does not envision any possibility of meeting normal human purposes. Rather it falls back on a keep-things-going vision. For actual persons, there is an inner worldly instead of an extra worldly approach. Revelation normally presupposed, as in St. Thomas Aquinas, that man could and would learn to take such care of himself. He could, but he need not, lapse into a constant recurrence of worst regimes with different rationales. Revelation rightly did not see any necessity to reveal what the various sciences and arts were all about. It presumed that man could and should be left to figure out these things by himself.
Even with its relation to reason, revelation would always be needed and welcome in any existing society, as Pope Benedict pointed out in Deus Caritas Est. But revelation was not intended to substitute for it. When it did so, we witness a strange overturning of human ends. The end of man now is said to be keeping the earth in its pristine form down the ages, not the salvation of actual persons within the time and place in which they actually lived. The focus is not on eternal life for each person according to his deeds and faith. At the end of time, however, we have no reason to suppose that the earth will also be running out of its resources at the same time. This suspicion of a “wasted” abundance should alone be enough to cause us to take another look at what the earth is really “for”. The end of the earth is a function of the end of man.
Perhaps a hundred billion human beings have already lived on this planet. They did not exist so that some future society be kept going down the ages. They existed to save their souls in the places they were. There is nothing wrong with seeking a better regime in our time. But whatever regime we find ourselves in, even in the worst, we can achieve or reject the purpose for which we were created, that is, to achieve the eternal life that Jesus Christ, in a nasty political trial in one of the better ancient regimes, promised to us.
66 Comments on "The Bomb That Never Detonated"
Jef on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 8:02 pm
The amount of death and destruction throughout the fauna and flora of planet earth is nothing short of catastrophic. But unless and until it happens to you…all is well.
“First they came for the _____ but I did nothing because I was not a ______.”
makati1 on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 8:16 pm
More propaganda from the “Once upon a time there was this god…”
The Catholic Church is a promoter of poverty, not a savior. Anyone who looks behind their curtain can see it and smell it. Billion dollar cathedrals with gold everywhere, and millinds of their members in rags and starving.
Boat on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 8:27 pm
Asians might not get that. They may think Budda is the preferred link to the future. No mention of hate of something or somebody’s as a key to regime improvement. Is the Catholic world that lost? Were they not once the Islamic huckleberry?
They must not spend much time reading the Russian gospel assuring the Saint Putin as a key player in today’s regimes. The hope for those who wear headgear and those who don’t. The leader who knows which humans to kill. The great sorter of good and bad.
Unfortunately the average Russian citizen who ranks like 77th in purchasing power is losing money y over y. But these sacrifices apparently must be made for the good of the world. Thank you Russian citizens.
Midnight Oil on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 8:30 pm
The author is just not paying attention.
How many die each year of starvation?
How many are seriously undernourished with malnutrition?
Are humans really making progress?
Soil erosion, water aquifers depletion,
Habitat loss. Ect.
Suppose when we hit the wall we will notice!
dissident on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 9:18 pm
This is more of the “Malthus got it wrong, so we are going to be OK forever” BS posing as rational analysis. The onus is on the cornucopians (such as this clown who thinks that intellectual “resources” will get us by) to show how water can be squeezed out of the same rock to any amount necessary and not for Malthusians to predict the future (i.e. the timing of every collapse). Crop yields have come at the expense of chemical rape of the land. Without fossil fuel supported pesticides and fertilizers there is no crop yield. To claim that crop yields can always be scaled with population is simply retarded.
Doubling the population after 1970 did not lead to collapse. But doubling the population from now is not guaranteed to avoid collapse. It is hard to see how more fertilizers and pesticides will double the crop yields. We are saturated in terms of the response to these parameters. And in fact, plant diseases and insects are getting progressively immune to our chemical control agents.
Apneaman on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 9:22 pm
The bomb has a fuse that’s almost reached ignition point.
KA – FUCKING – BOOM!!!!!!
penury on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 9:32 pm
AGAIN WITH THE FICTION OF “MAN CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF” unless and until humans accept that they are animals,and just like the others we need to care for and protect our specie and all other species that we depend on to survive. We theoretically should have the same ability of the other not to over populate and over graze out home.
GregT on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 10:02 pm
“Unfortunately the average Russian citizen who ranks like 77th in purchasing power is losing money y over y.”
As of Dec 2015 Russian debt to GDP was less than 18% Boat. US debt to GDP was 104%.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp
Now tell us all again, who is it that is losing ‘purchasing power’?
makati1 on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 10:09 pm
GregT, Boat is having problems with his 3rd grade math homework. You shouldn’t make fun of his handicap. LOL
Boat on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 10:13 pm
greggiet,
Try googling purchasing power per capita by country. I can teach you a new way to look at the world. No Jews or women involved. Think of it as non hate information. Did you know there are 3 states with a larger GDP than Russia. Florida will soon make it 4. That puts Russian influence in a little better perspective. Google US states and global countries GDP.
GregT on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 10:29 pm
“I can teach you a new way to look at the world.”
I progressed well beyond the point that you’re at now about 30 years ago Kevin.
makati1 on Tue, 17th Jan 2017 11:26 pm
State of Florida Debt Clock:
http://usdebtclock.org/state-debt-clocks/state-of-florida-debt-clock.html
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 12:01 am
Ah yeah the bomb is going off as we speak. It’s called the CARBON BOMB and it triggers a shit load of other bombs like methane bombs and ocean acidification bombs culminating in the grand finally, mass extinction bomb. Happened before. In previous carbon bomb explosions the detonating cap was volcanism – but never this fast. This time the det cap is a two legged cancer.
Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”
http://energyskeptic.com/2011/will-global-warming-drive-us-extinct/
condensed summary of
“UNDER A GREEN SKY” BY PETER WARD: TECHNICAL SUMMARY NOTES
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.ca/2012/01
/condensed-summary-of-under-green-sky.html
Alarming new study makes today’s climate change more comparable to Earth’s worst mass extinction
https://skepticalscience.com/Lee-commentary-on-Burgess-et-al-PNAS-Permian-Dating.html
joe on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 12:55 am
Mak equates economic output with influence. As Trump might say, THOSE GDP STATS ARE RIGGED!
dooma on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 12:57 am
I wonder if the Catholic church is going to pay for the wall for the devout Mexicans?
Nah, they probably couldn’t afford it….well not out of gold anyway.
Hubert on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 3:52 am
MEXICAN BOMB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0EBlUa1l_U
MEXICAN CRISIS: http://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/gasoline-supplies-at-crisis-levels-secretary/
makati1 on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 4:21 am
joe, China is the economic engine of the world these days. To say that they do not have clout equal to their position is to be ignorant of current world events and conditions. Their ‘influence’ is growing whereas, that of the u$ is diminishing. China is still sitting on about three trillion dollars in reserves. The U$ is sitting on $20+ Trillion of Debt.
GDP of the U$ is in negative territory and has been since at least 2008. China may exaggerate but it is still way over the plus side of the ledger. The U$ will NEVER be on the black side again.
forbin on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 4:36 am
for the reader – please read The Population Bomb and The Population Bomb revisited
“The fundamental point of The Population Bomb, is still self-evidently correct
we believe: the capacity of Earth to produce food and support people is finite. ”
and
“A lack of understanding of the power of exponential growth in population and consumption is seen in this article.
In 1994 the world population was growing at 1.4 percent annually. At that rate it would
only take some 6000 years for the mass of the human population to equal the mass of the universe.”
of course this was never going to happen as we’d stripe the planet bare before then
My opinion is the article is misguided because it seems to me the Pop bomb has already exploded and we have proven we are no
smarter than yeast.
Forbin
Kathy C on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 5:36 am
The longer you put off going over the cliff the steeper the cliff will be – We have been borrowing on the past and are borrowing on the future. When there is nothing more to borrow, 7 billion will go extinct.
Duncan’s Olduvai Gorge is still awaiting us. Fracking pushed it back. So he put the crossover at 2006 – in the ten years since we have added 1 billion to the world population. So when peak oil once again becomes obvious, fracking will be responsible for 1 billion or more people dying, many who might not have been born if we hadn’t have been extending and pretending there was no population problem. 1 billion in 10 years. Let that sink in
http://tinyurl.com/m2prgd3
makati1 on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 5:57 am
Kathy C.– About 600,000,000 people die every 10 years currently. A few hundred million more will hardly be noticeable over the next 10 years. We are still growing at about 70+ million per year and will continue to do so with or without oil. The areas growing the fastest are the ones that use little oil per person. For example: the U$ uses 20 times the oil per capita than the Philippines. It will be the 1st world that will hurt the most and where the die-off will be the highest.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/world-rankings-total-deaths
Davy on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 6:42 am
When your intellectual interests is this subject you dwell in a bizarre surreal world on some levels. I think this is the reason I live on 400 acres in a rural area. I can go 2 weeks only seeing a few people. In fact I see more animals than people. There was a time when I lived in a big city. One of the finest I lived in was Madrid Spain. That was a human cultural hot spot. I can no longer live in a big city. I can go and resupply and enjoy a good restaurant occasionally but I can’t live in these places. When you go from living close to nature and then go into a nest of humans it causes discomforts. When you know the things I know from the study of years of ecological and systematic human overshoot of our civilization you see surreal circumstances. Highways amaze me because I know they are a ribbon that covers the earth. I see crowded highways and know they are crowded across the earth. How horrible to think about crowded highways covering the earth. The finite complexity of it and the dirty destructiveness of it give me a sick feeling. In my small cabin I have electrical devices and they too pollute my spirit. I have not yet left them and probably won’t. I am getting to old and life tougher by the day. My body is slowly breaking down. I want to build an even smaller cabin out of a shipping container in the deepest part of the woods. I want it completely off the grid and even without solar. I just want wood heat and oil lamps. I want quiet.
Talking about ideas of Ehrlich and others I have mix emotions. A part of me understands from the balance found in the Ecos that this is a natural process. Earthly conditions are present for life to do what we have done. It is our exceptionalism that thinks we have the wisdom to be different. We have elaborate skydaddies that offer us fantastic images of the divine and our reflection of it. That’s the problem. We have in ourselves that craving for a piece of the divine or the feeling of complete emptiness. We crave it because we can imagine it. We are doing what species do at a certain level above this introspection. We are part of a process of life and planetary activity. We want to separate ourselves from this because this is how we find meaning. If we do not separate we are consumed by it. It is this separation that leads to so many issues individually and at the civilization level. In fact it is now planetary. We are destroying what gives us life. How much more separate can separate be?
We are the most destructive form of life that has ever evolved that I have researched. It took ages for cyanobacteria to trigger the onset of a Snowball Earth. http://www.snowballearth.org/life.html. Look at what we did in 200 years. In 200 years we have had the impact of tectonic forces. We can’t say we are the most creative and productive because it is well documented Nature without man has achieve far more complexity and biomass. This leaves us the individual in the here and now. We are in and responsible for planetary destruction and extinction. It is in some deeper way part of life that this is happening if you acknowledge man as part of nature and the universe as a unity. Maybe it isn’t and I am insane. If you have a skydaddy or believe there is some meaning in a power of knowledge out there that permeates the universe then you are part of this duality and it is that duality that gives us an existential guilt or exceptionalism. These together represent our separateness. It is separateness that gets us emotional when we deal with the good and bad of Ehrlic’s message. At a certain level this is a natural process. If we see ourselves here in this process as nature’s actors then you see it is futile to worry over it. This process is self-organizing and at the planetary level. It is the finite of the planet that will rebalance humans. Humans are not going to think our way out of this mess. Really it is not a mess it is a planetary phenomenon that is a reflection of the universe.
You can now go back to being yourself and obsess over how bad or good man is. At this point science is telling us some very troubling things. No amount of hopium is going to make this situation better. We can make the best of it and we can try to help others through it. Some find revenge and killing special. We can temper the guilt and exceptionalism with a sobriety of death and the wonder of new life. We can do random acts of kindness to others and nature because, well, it is good human nature. We are in overshoot and every human and natural metric is in a negative trend. We are likely in a paradigm shift of life. We are transitioning epochs. We can live better in the here and now by accepting this. Vast destructiveness of humans is upon us and in our hearts. Horrible things are ahead. We can yield to these greater existential forces and navigate ourselves through the gauntlet but we can’t change what has been done. Live today like it is the last. Accept what you can’t change and look out in wonder at what is left of nature. Quit thinking you are special. Realize you and Nature are special together. Maybe nature will let us live to die another day.
Davy on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 6:48 am
makati, I was curious where does the 1st world and the 3rd world begin? Where is the envelope? Is it like gravity? Is it dimensional? I think the envelope is in your mind and it is called mental illness. You are insane and your insanity is saying things like this: “It will be the 1st world that will hurt the most and where the die-off will be the highest.” How horrible a person that can wish pain, suffering, and death on billions he has never met.
Kathy C on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 7:51 am
makati1 – Yes of course I know how many people die every year or ten years, and I know how many people are born every day, week, year. The population increase is the difference between the two. When you look at it that way, every day that extinction is put off means 300,000 people who will die untimely deaths who wouldn’t have had to die if they had not been born. Countless baby rabbits will be torn apart by foxes that wouldn’t have had to die if they hadn’t been born. Countless domestic animals will be produced whose only function is to die when they have enough meat on them. Every day extinction is put off increases the number of cows, chickens, and pigs who are born for the sole purpose of becoming meat. 21 million chickens are eaten every day in the US. The slaughter of animals (with all the pain and suffering that insues) by us and in nature will end if extinction includes all creatures with central nervous systems.
Evolution is based on death. For a species to change some have to die before reproduction. Without those selective deaths evolution would stop in its tracks.
Davy, I don’t wish pain and suffering (or untimely death) on anyone. (death is a given regardless of anyone’s wishes or actions, once born, a creature has to die. PERIOD)
Extinction, as horrific as it seems to contemplate, means the end of death, the end of suffering. What else can do that? If there is some way to end all this suffering I would be all for it. Maybe some aliens will come and “save” us from the pain and suffering and from our own mad rush to extinction. However if they are also a product of their own evolution I wouldn’t count on them having benevolent feelings for us.
Davy on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 8:22 am
Kathy, you are a beacon of sanity. I am not referring to you. I am referring to makati and friends who make death a personal passion of their petty personal agendas of revenge and self-importance. You and I attempt to depersonalize death and see it for what it is. If we are going to accept death which is likely ahead as part of a die-off then we must take on a hospice mentality. If you have made it to a hospice you have made it through the stages of grief. This is why building mental hospices as part of the social narrative is so important to our wellbeing in these final days of civilization.
Boat on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 8:46 am
Speak for yourself. I think most humans prefer to go one at a time. Lol there is no guarantee of misery or much pain for that matter. Many of us will go in an instant.
Dredd on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 8:50 am
catholicworldreport,
First, the catholicworld is not the world.
Second, how many people must die of starvation, disease, war, and climate catastrophe to please your intellect?
I wrote this in 2009:
“Thousands of fellow humans die from the worst possible death, starvation, every day. Somewhere around 85% of these starvation deaths occur in children 5 years of age or younger.
Why are we letting 16,000 – 30,273 of the most beautiful children die (depending on who is saying it) the worst possible death everyday?
Every 2.43 – 5 seconds (depending on who is saying it) another one of our fellow brothers and sisters dies of starvation. Starvation doesn’t just happen on Tuesday September 11, 2001, it happens everyday, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day, it never stops.
Our governments are not helpless, they are hapless at this juncture in time.
Visit this website or this website and find out how to get involved.”
(Death Mostly Ignored).
Duncan Idaho on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 9:23 am
Math Problem:
World Birth and Death Rates:
19 births/1,000 population
8 deaths/1,000 population
• 131.4 million births per year
• 55.3 million people die each year
• 360,000 births per day
• 151,600 people die each day
• 15,000 births each hour
• 6,316 people die each hour
• 250 births each minute
• 105 people die each minute
• Four births each second of every day
• Nearly two people die each second Average life expectancy at birth is approximately 67 years.
Sissyfuss on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 9:28 am
Should read “The Bomb That Hasn’t Detonated Yet”. What could be more delusional than a religion/cult that recycled its pedophiles for centuries and proudly claimed it was the true voice of god. The sheeple buy into the fantasy because reality takes too much effort with so little reward in return.
diemos on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 9:34 am
Summary:
Keep breeding. It’s god’s will and he’s going to destroy the world before it becomes a problem anyway.
These days the first thing I do with any article is scroll to the bottom to see where it came from and I can usually make a pretty good guess beforehand about the ideology of the authors.
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 10:01 am
Davy, 400 acres? Wow. Didn’t realize it was that much (did you mention that before?). You might be crazy ya know or maybe all the work is keeping you sane? Seeing 400 acres instantly triggered that line from John Cougar’s “Rain on the Scarecrow”
“Four hundred empty acres that used to be my farm”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joNzRzZhR2Y
I luvs me some John Cougar.
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 10:11 am
Speaking of Catholics and bombs…………
Child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church
”
Child sexual abuse perpetrated by priests appears to have a long history within Christianity,[2] and is especially associated with the Roman Catholic Church, due to a number of high profile scandals which have come to light in recent decades.
Many of these scandals relate to molestations committed decades ago, which were hushed up by the Church at the time. This hushing up included pressurising abuse victims into silence, a practice supported by Church decrees such as the Crimen sollicitationis. Priests can also threaten victims with eternal damnation if they speak up to secular authorities. This culture of secrecy and self-preservation is one of the factors which has allowed paedophiles to remain active within the clergy, together with the tradition of clerical celibacy which may attract those who cannot satisfy their sexual proclivities openly, and priests’ frequent access to children in the pastoral duties.”
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Church
I know, I know, most of the faithful are not child fucking sick-O’s, but it’s the silence from most of the faithful that speaks loudest.
Kathy C on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 10:29 am
Boat, as the warmongers push for war the likelihood that many of us will go in an instant increases. That is some comfort.
The problem is that we are programmed to not want to die (the power of the program lessens with old age and with intractable pain or disability). But unless we choose self exit, the manner of our death is not in our own hands. Even in the wealthy west (we in the west are all wealthy) death is seldom easy. A massive heart attack, brain embolism, or sudden cardiac arrest are about the best ways to go. However we in the west have in our fear of death and our love of technology, made death more horrific by extending the time people spend dying and giving people life without the ability to enjoy life (see the movie The Sea Inside).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369702/
The popularity of living wills and hospice, attest to the fact that most people in the end are more sane than many in the medical profession. Years and years of agony for the well off if you don’t fight back against doctors and often family. For what. You still die.
As for the church and molestation there isn’t enough space to write about how evil that is. Pedophilia is bad enough. But for the priest who is respected, who holds the keys to the kingdom, who tells you what is sin and how it will damn you, for that man to betray a young child’s trust and do things to him that he preaches against, there are no words to convey how depraved that is.
No one should listen to the Catholic Church on any issue.
aidan on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 10:33 am
Interesting that the 2 groups which refuse to accept climate science are
a)This group – weirdly, bearing mind that Pope Francis who they to believe to be infallible is deeply concerned about the reality of climate change.
b) The neo-liberals – who aren’t liberal at all in any other aspect of life – just in getting money for themselves.
These are clearly both deeply irrational religions whose positions are not only in conflict with reality, but whose beliefs are contradictory and irrational.
Cloud9 on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 10:58 am
I guess this guy missed the horde that invaded Europe and is not paying attention the ongoing political and economic collapse we are witnessing. Tribalism is on the rise. There is a reason the Germans are reading Mien Kamph again. Natural selection is preparing to select.
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 11:06 am
Another “Rain Bomb” from the new abnormal AGW jacked hydrologic cycle
Floods leave seven dead in the Philippines
More than twice the average January rainfall in a day forces nearly 7,000 people from their homes.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/floods-leave-dead-philippines-170117102042199.html
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 11:39 am
Temperature carpet bombing
Global Analysis – Annual 2016
“Twelve Warmest Years (1880–2016)
The following table lists the global combined land and ocean annually-averaged temperature rank and anomaly for each of the 12 warmest years on record (2003, 2006, and 2007 tie as 10th warmest).”
RANK
1 = WARMEST
PERIOD OF RECORD: 1880–2016 YEAR ANOMALY °C
ANOMALY °F
1 2016 0.94 1.69
2 2015 0.90 1.62
3 2014 0.74 1.33
4 2010 0.70 1.26
5 2013 0.67 1.21
6 2005 0.66 1.19
7 2009 0.64 1.15
8 1998 0.63 1.13
9 2012 0.62 1.12
10 (tie)2003 0.61 1.10
10 (tie)2006 0.61 1.10
10 (tie)2007 0.61 1.10
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201613
Kenz300 on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 11:43 am
If you can not provide for yourself, you can not provide for a child.
Birth Control Options: Pictures, Types, Side Effects, Costs, & Effectiveness
http://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/ss/slideshow-birth-control-options?ecd=wnl_day_010817&ctr=wnl-day-010817_nsl-ld-stry&mb=dtfWIHfXZxtqE9pudELmLeHnVev1imbCq%2f0xB3s74mA%3d
GregT on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 11:50 am
“I think most humans prefer to go one at a time. Lol there is no guarantee of misery or much pain for that matter. Many of us will go in an instant.”
Sorry to break the bad news to you Boat, but peoples’ preferences as to how they die have nothing to do with reality. Unless you plan on taking your own life, you don’t have a choice, and far more people will suffer before they die, than those who will go in ‘an instant’.
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 11:51 am
2016 hottest year ever recorded – and scientists say human activity to blame
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/18/2016-hottest-year-ever-recorded-and-scientists-say-human-activity-to-blame
The last time the Earth was this warm was 125,000 years ago
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/01/18/hottest-year-on-record/96713338/
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 12:30 pm
“…and scientists say human activity to blame”
Blame? Well the humans behaviour certainly triggered GW this time (as opposed to volcanism), so in that regard they are responsible, but if you’re looking for a root cause to blame – blame evolution. Tack on one of the worst ideologies/religions the humans ever invented, neo liberal capitalism, plus industrialization and you get your timing. The humans are a plague species plain and simple. The only difference between an individual human cancer and a non human cancer is the non human cancer has no emotions and thus blames no one or feels any guilt for being born a cancer.
Midnight Oil on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 12:57 pm
Cute, Ap, next time I see a woman expecting, I’ll mention to the parents to be… “How does it feel bringing another cancer cell into the world?”… Most feel it is their gift to the world….at this point, why bother?
Kathy C on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 1:36 pm
Cloud9 you wrote “Natural selection is preparing to select.”
Yep it is preparing to select in favor of thermophiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile
They get their day in the sun once again. 🙂
If collapse takes some time the thing to do if you are fertile is get your tube snipped. Other forms of birth control will become unavailable. In hetero couples this goes for the man and the woman. They might try abstinence but in times of collapse rape is likely. As for the man, if his wife dies, he might want another partner who might be fertile. Lesbians should also get snipped because of rape. Gay men who are not bi can keep their tubes. It looks ever more likely that collapse will be quick, in which case the advice is not needed. That is my prescription for not creating more death by creating more life. Doing this now might seem a hard thing for those who have some hope for the future but it might also prevent the horror and guilt of birthing a child only to watch them die from starvation or some other such painful end.
Maybe we get all out nuke war and all go up in a flash of light. I’m unable to come up with anything more hopeful…..
Kathy C on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 1:49 pm
Midnight Oil, instead of “How does it feel bringing another cancer cell into the world?” you could try “how does it feel to have created a life that will inevitably have to die?” While the first implies judgment of the new life’s impact, the second just states the facts. Facts parents don’t think about when they decide to have a kid.
People have all sorts of explanations as why they have children. None of them address the wants of the unborn. Of course the unborn have no wants, but people could say “if I imagine an unborn having thoughts, would this unborn want to be brought into the world as it is. Would this unborn want us as parents. How might this unborn feel about having to suffer much pain in life followed by death. How can I guarantee this unborn a relatively good life”.
But the unborn, being unborn, cannot be consulted. People who plan to have children give all sorts of reasons, but they have to be rationalizations because the unborn cannot agree to be born for the parent’s reasons. Thinking it is OK to create life for your own reasons seems the height of selfishness. No we have children because we are programmed by evolution to desire sex and to want families. The second reason has had to do most of the work of procreation since the advent of birth control. It is not as strong, doesn’t produce families of 6, 8 10 kids much anymore, but it works well enough.
I have 2 kids. Needless to say these insights came to me after I had them. Now I know I brought them out of nothingness in order to die untimely deaths in a collapsing civilization. I write this stuff to hopefully save a few unborn from being snatched out of peaceful nothingness to a very unsettled somethingness that may turn very ugly soon.
Midnight Oil on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 3:55 pm
Kattie…those little darlings are sooo cuuute.
Believe me, I heard ALL before…you ladies are very persuasive…. Just kidding..
Like I said…at this point, why even bother?
peakyeast on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 3:55 pm
An article written by the typical imbeciles with no perception of scale and time.
The bomb has been exploding for more than 100 years. The destruction from it is still spreading. At a time not too far away – but obviously too far away for these people to understand it – there will not be more than the explosion can burn and destroy.
From 2000 to 2016 We burned, looted and destroyed 7% af the remaining forests on earth. In 2016 the speed was 3 times faster than in 2000. So we are accelerating towards the wall with not a care in the world..
That is where the explosion ends and the implosion starts.
sinnycool on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 4:10 pm
In their haste to discredit doomsayers many people choose to forget that the little boy crying wolf only got one thing wrong – timing.
Those who put the kid down ensured the end of the story was not a happy one.
Ehrlich and others are far from being kids; they are earnest in their warnings and their messages come from a deeper understanding than those who choose to look away from the many potential dangers that arise to threaten us all.
If those that lead us had taken notice of the messages, those threats would no longer exist and we wouldn’t be in a position where the cry of ‘wolf’ is more relevant today than yesterday and the visit of the wolf is potentially catastrophic than it ever was.
“The Bomb That Never Detonated” … never? No, just not yet.
Davy on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 5:24 pm
Kathy, birth control is going to have little to no effect in timing and scale to prevent a tragic outcome. It is too little too late. The cooperation and compliance needed to make it effective is not going to happen. That said it should be promoted and will achieve localized results. We just should not put our faith and hope in success from birth control. The amount of deaths over births needed to get us to 1BIL global population over a generation is something like 200MIL on average. The only way we are going to rebalance populations to that degree is by a broad based die off of all age groups and all nations. This being an average number means numbers will be even higher in some years. There are some who don’t think our population needs to drop this far. They think we have a generation to level off and then begin to drop. I don’t see this. There are several collapse dynamics at work that surely will require population to decline by an order of magnitude. I hope I am wrong but I have yet to see anything to be optimistic about.
makati1 on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 5:42 pm
“How horrible a person that can wish pain, suffering, and death on billions he has never met.”
First, DAVY, I do NOT wish it. It is going to happen because that is how it works. The 1st World is all of those living way above the world average. Most of the Western countries and a few Western wannabees are the 1st world. Those who have climbed the highest on the ladder have the farthest to fall. You are one of them. I am moving down that ladder and therefore lessen the coming pain for myself in the future.
If you want to see insanity, look in the mirror. You still have that “wealth’ effect from your so called elite upbringing. Hard to get rid of voluntarily. Fire your paid help and work your big farm with your own muscles (not big machines) and I would have more respect for you. As long as you cannot do it yourself, you are an elite farmer. Not independent. Point that finger, but remember, three point back at you.
Apneaman on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 6:17 pm
Venezuelan women’s response to the country’s economic crisis: Get sterilized
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/24/venezuelan-womens-response-to-the-countrys-economic-crisis-get-sterilized/
Good move. Spare themselves and any children they might have had much pain and suffering.
Davy on Wed, 18th Jan 2017 6:22 pm
makati, sorry if I got you all twisted up but you sound flustered. Look at yourself makati, you are living in a condo in Manila drinking San Miguel by the pool. I call that stupid. How is that going to lessen the pain? You admitted a few days ago you are rarely on your farm you claim is your special refuge. Maybe you should go over there to the fantasy farm and climb down the magic ladder you speak of. Makati, I don’t have help here on the farm except when I need specialty work done. My wife and I do everything else. Elite farmer lol, thanks for the compliment I was pretty sure I made an impression on you.