Debit or Credit?

184 thoughts on “Debit or Credit?”

1. While the “over-population” scare is pure junk, somewhere I read that Malthus was more rational than most who “invoke his name”.

   1. No. He literally thought we’d reproduce ourselves to death. That’s bullshit.

      1. FACT CHECK: TRUE

      2. It is true and on of the guiding principles of the Nazi party was there needed to be a way to remove the defectives so that the food Germans wouldn’t run out of food or room.

   2. I’m afraid Malthus was all too rational. He had his one idea and kept on and on at it. It’s even behind his position on the Corn Laws where he defends tariffs and banning imports of grain because more grain would mean more people leading to immiseration and gluts, etc. Malthus is Keynes’ predecessor. Almost everything you find in Keynes, you first find in Malthus.

      1. it’s perfectly logical. It just has no contact with reality.

         1. I’d call his “logic” a classic example of “reductio ad absurdum”. Asimov, regardless of his (deserved) status as somewhat of a polymath, had exactly the same blindness on this subject.

      2. Once when I was in a B&N Bookstore and was browsing the nonfiction section, I encountered a book on applied logic. As I recall from skimming it, it took Malthus’ essay on population as an example of bad logic and eviscerated it. I couldn’t afford it at the time and I don’t know if I could find it again, although I wanted it.

         1. It wasn’t, if I recall it correctly, bad logic, in that his conclusions correctly followed from his premises. Those premises, on the other hand… 😦

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3. applause especially on last line.

4. Yep. Humans are stupid, and the stupidest think they know how best to run everyone’s lives in minute detail and are bound and determined to force the rest of us to go along with their stupidity.
   Well, Sod Off!

5. The BBC series Torchwood (a Doctor Who spinoff aimed at adult audiences) had a season called “Children of Earth”. (1. Incredibly well-written, 2. horribly and traumatically brutal, not just because of the “Cold Equations” sacrifice at the end. It’s a horror series, do not recommend unless you can stand seeing kids directly threatened.)

   At part of the plot, all the children in the world start simultaneously chanting a number that is supposed to be a certain percentage of the population below puberty. A lot of commenters at the time claimed this to be in error, since the numbers were way below where they should be.

   Well, first of all, this is the same universe as Doctor Who. One can assume that many of the events that happened since the reboot reduced the world population.

   Orrrrr, if you prefer, some scriptwriter had an idea that global population numbers were fudged, and this was their nod to that.

6. “Someone with more time and patience for the research can do it, but in the famines I’ve researched, from the 18th century on, almost all were what I’d call political famines. There wasn’t a lack of food. Your government/tribe/conqueror/despot just didn’t let your group have any. Absolutely nothing with too many people for the world to feed.”

   Three words: Irish. Potato. Famine. There was plenty of other food being grown on the Emerald Isle, but the Irish weren’t allowed to have it. It was all to be shipped to England for the Irish’s “lords and masters.” They only had potatoes to eat, and when that crop failed, they had nothing. Nothing but the “charity” of the English who promised them soup or other food if they would “only” give up their faith. As one young boy told his mother when she told him to take his brothers to a soup kitchen and let their obvious plight move the English to offering them soup, “Ah, Mother, death were better!” They knew darn well that many Irish weren’t going to take that kind of “charity” – and even in the midst of that horror, the Irish managed to scrape together money to send to the Cherokee and other tribes being sent West on the Trail of Tears.

   The Potato Famine. The Holodomer. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” They were all done by governments, not natural causes. Starvation in the modern era isn’t natural. It’s the result of bad governments considering Certain Humans a Detriment To Society. Food production now outstrips human reproduction by a mile and has for decades, if not the past century. We are actually trying to eat less now, something our ancestors could never comprehend, because they were always trying to find enough to eat, not less.

   The Netherlands and/or Scandinavia also allow kids (one girl was no older than 5 when she said she didn’t want to live anymore) to “choose” euthanasia. Oh, but it is not at all like what happened in that country over in Europe that was enemy number #1 from 1939-1945. Oh, no, how could anyone ever imply such a thing….

   1. In Europe, the last “caused by horrible weather” famine (more widespread hunger than large numbers of people dying in the streets) was in 1846-47. Asia? Monsoon failures were still a cause of mass death until the 1900s, despite British attempts to get food to where it was needed. That’s one reason why the Indian government asked Norman Borlaug to come and try his super-wheats and other hybrids (plus nitrogen fertilizer) in that country, to try and build up a reserve and forestall more mass deaths. [Don’t get me started on what happened in India after the 1980s with agriculture and their bureaucracy.]

      1. .In Europe, the last “caused by horrible weather” famine … was in 1846-47.

         So, it suddenly occurs to me to ask, how much did this have to do with making 1848 “The Year of Revolutions”..? (Surely, it must be that, it says so right there in the book title.)

         It’s been a while since I read that one; but I don’t remember that being stated as one of the main causes of some of those, even in Europe. (This point in our history is pretty useful for me in a fictional sense, because the failed 1848+ revolution in/by Hungary is what gets a very inventive character to leave her native Buda-and-Pest first for Paris, where she sees Giffard’s first airship fly, then on to America in plenty of time for their — rather different in her timeline — Civil War Between the States. Yes, it’s a steampunk story, and someone has to make the airships and submarines and so on and on. And Giffard’s was pretty good, basically lacking only horizontal stabilization and a decent propeller.)

      2. Is there anything bureaucracy can’t make worse?

         1. War.

            Maybe.

      3. 1946 was a particularly cold and dry year, on top of the destruction of much of Europe’s agricultural infrastructure. Even with food imports from America, some people starved.

         The famine usually either gets overlooked entirely or just rolled into WWII statistics. Well, since the war was a major contributor, there’s justification for that.

      4. Speaking of which, apparently Brazil has managed to develop a strain of wheat that thrives in tropical conditions. If this is successful, especially if successful outside of Brazil in other tropical zones, it has the potential to not only provide lots more food but also provide it in the very countries that depend on food imports.

         https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/farming-in-the-tropics-brazil-has-high-hopes-for-a-new-strain-of-wheat-a-d81db3c2-fbcb-4c3a-a5f6-00cf0a17f76b

   2. Even being Irish myself, I’m not sure I agree. The issue in Ireland was not lack of food, as you say, but lack of cash to buy it. Was that government caused? Probably. On the other hand, Catholic Emancipation was well underway and the penal laws had been repealed. It’s not they weren’t allowed, it’s that they didn’t have the money. The government did take some actions and many did personally, but they were also wedded to a doctrinaire fiscal policy and, well, Malthus. Should they have provided relief? Again, probably, but that would have been a massive expansion of the state.

      Amyarta Sen wrote a good book on this and certainly didn’t spare the Brits in it.

      Now, the Holodomor, China, Cambodia, and Ethiopia were political and manufactured. Communism needs a way to kill its enemies which is everybody.

      1. Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” covers the 14th century just after the Black Death. She also mentions the sudden climate change; over the course of just a few years, Europe got much colder, with some countries going from three growing seasons to one. Since the population was roughly in equilibrium with the food supply, a lot of people starved; more than died in the Black Death, which usually gets the entire blame for the troubles back then.

         As far as we can tell (from things like mentions of snowfall and harvests), Europe still isn’t as warm now as it was before.

   3. I do believe one of the reasons we are at the stage where we are so obese as a people, is because the human body is so good at storing food in the form of fat. Up until now we lived more or less hand to mouth. We have never had a time where food is more plentiful. The type of work has changed also, where you needed ten kids to do the farm work, you no longer do. Where everyone worked at some type of manual labor, machines now do most of that work. So you have less kids, the need just isn’t there. Machines have replaced animal drawn farm implements, there by reducing the amount of work done by humans as well as animals. The need for large meals to power all that work has also been reduced. Now we as a people are adjusting what we eat to the amount of work we are doing. Why? Because we still want to be attractive enough to mate, and keep hold of that mate, or at least have sex.

      1. I can see that. Is like a donkey from a desert land being shipped to the eastern USA. FOOD AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE! And the poor donkey has to be kept away all from the grass much of the time for his own good, or he’d founder.

      2. Must respectfully disagree. Given the ludicrous, epidemic amount of obesity one sees these days, can -everybody- who’s fat be weak of mind and will? Really? If it was merely a matter of pushing back from the table a little sooner, would that many people be that fat?

         Also militating against the “dumb fatties” concept is the speed with which the population became this obese. Pre-1980s, obesity was much less common and morbid obesity (Walmart Sea Mammal) was extremely rare.

         40 years later, here we are. Lifestyle? Diet? Genetics? Doesn’t seem to matter much, generally speaking. People in nations where no one was fat twenty years ago are fat.

         This leads me to think somebody is putting something in our food. A hormone, a chemical, maybe even a virus. Something that leads to absurd weight gain. I have no suspects at this time, not going to blame any industry or type of food, but using the wide-angle lens, it seems unreasonable to think that everybody in the world over-eats. North America doesn’t have “more food” now than it did 40 years ago. I was here the whole time, I remember.

         No doubt if there is something, it will be discovered in due course. There are a lot of guys working on the issue, there’s a ton of money to be made.

         1. Given the ludicrous, epidemic amount of obesity one sees these days, can -everybody- who’s fat be weak of mind and will? Really? If it was merely a matter of pushing back from the table a little sooner, would that many people be that fat?

            I know for a fact that part of it is the opposite; people of healthy weight being told they are fat, behaving as if they are fat, and thus teaching their body that they are in starvation mode, which destroys their metabolism.

            There is the additional issue of epigenetics, and doctors telling pregnant women to limit their weight gain. (While, hilariously, also insisting they’re not allowed to diet. That one was interesting.)
            Being starved before birth teaches your body to store food.

            Then there’s the way that obesity is a following indicator for a lot of diseases, so if you don’t die, you become obese…and are then told that’s why you’re not healthy….

         2. For why healthy people are told they’re fat– it’s use of a screening tool (BMI) to diagnose, and that tool was changed about 25 years ago.

            WASHINGTON (CNN) — Millions of Americans became “fat” Wednesday — even if they didn’t gain a pound — as the federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight.

            The strict guidelines, revealed earlier this month and formally approved by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), measure a person’s Body Mass Index. To calculate yours, read on.

            Using the old criteria, the average woman — with a height of 5 feet, 4 inches (1.6 meters) and weighing 155 pounds (70 kilograms) — was considered overweight.

            Under the new definition, that weight drops to 145 pounds (66 kg). A person at the same height who weighs 175 pounds (79 kg) would be considered obese.

            http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/

            1. At 5’4″ at 125#’s, I was “fat”. I will be thrilled to get down to around 160# or so. At 66, 125# is ludicrous.

               My system is so screwed up that the ONLY way I can lose weight is to minimally eat and heavily exercise. At that it is an extremely slow weight loss. And I can’t let up. Even then, I swear my fat system goes “Oh Dear! Famine! Don’t worry dearie, we’ll safe you!” I can gain weight. I do not eat excessively. I eat healthy. Also any weight lost doesn’t stay lost. A joke: “I’ve lost 200#’s! 30# – 25#’s eight times!”

               1. I think you’re in the Hun’s discord- you saw the rant about 20 year old “fat girl” a few weeks back. (Then-active Navy enlisted.)

                  She was stunted, compared to siblings, from extreme dieting as a teen, able to meet the male PRT “excellent” requirement, and still scolded for being “fat.”

                  Her– and my– system do the same thing.

                  “Oh, no! You are starving, and going to die– WE WILL SAVE YOU!!!!”

               2. Same here.

            2. At 5’10” and 200 lbs., I am “borderline obese”, and to get down to normal I’d have to drop to 165 or so.

               I haven’t been at 165 since I was 35 years old, and at that weight I looked skinny.

               BMI is biased against tall people, since mass does not scale proportionately to the square of height. The real exponent should be more like 2.3.

               1. I’m 100 lbs overwieght. And 50 came on without my noticing because Thyroid went wonky.
                  I don’t know how to START.
                  Only thing that works is starving AND exercising a lot.

               2. You can still get me to cuss — with actual obscenities, which I don’t usually use– with talking about my weight.

                  My family literally switched from “you are fat and suck because you eat to much” to :”you suck because you are too thin”.

                  BMI is a screening tool. Using it to diagnose is malpractice.

   4. And remember the starving children of Ethiopia? The sad photo of an emaciated black child holding a food bowl? We were admonished in school to finish our lunches and not to waste food. “Think of the starving children in Ethiopia.”

      Just a few years ago I read a book about the Marxist rebellion in Ethiopia which overthrew the old government and installed commies in their place. The result of course was terrible famine, obediently blamed by the Marxist US press on “weather.”

      They want to do the same thing here. Everything the Zhou Biden administration has done is for this purpose. They must be so terribly annoyed at how we keep prospering despite them.

      1. Sam Kinnison bless his departed soul. “Don’t send them food, they live in a desert. Send them luggage so they can move where the food is”.
         On side note, the Marxist in Ethiopia ran into Somalia, where the same thing happened, only the Marxists lost to the Islamist. That is what gave us the stellar mind of Illahn Omar.

         1. My uncle was chased out of the hospital where he worked by the Ethiopian doctors and nursing staff as the Communists came up the hill. He and my aunt managed to get out of the country and back to the US. Their native colleagues … were less fortunate. My uncle had nothing good to say about Communists.

            1. No one should have anything good to say about communists.

               Sinistra delenda est

   5. Snarls

      Me family made it through the Hunger. We stayed in Ireland until the Army drove some of us out several years before the Rising.

      A pox on the Saxons. And twice the pox on the modern Saxons who destroy our language, our culture, and wish us to starve because we are not them.

   6. Yes, this, and esp. about the Great Hunger / Potato Famine. (The first is a direct translation of what everybody seems to call it in Irish.) And the description of the mechanism fits, too.

      Which makes the answer to “was it food shortage or poverty?” pretty much “yes.”

      Pre-famine, many Irish people subsisted quite well enough on what they grew… which was so often potatoes (even though that’s a New World crop), because they were good food and grew well on only a little land (even bad land, at that). There was so often no money to just run out and buy food all the time; but as long as the potatoes grew, you could subsist and often, as I said, quite well enough. (Compare ‘Appalachia’ in my grandparents’ time, or even to some extent today… money had to be saved for taxes, and for whatever you simply could not make or do for yourself, and maybe even the odd luxury.)

      Until, of course that fungus (from the Isle of Wight?) took those ‘taters out. Then… bad, as described here and other places. Not really a workable substitute crop, there / then, either.

      Meantime, ships full of food were sailing off to England etc.; yes, food, just “not for the Irish.” Imagine watching planefuls of ‘agricultural surplus’ taking off from, e.g., “famine ravaged” Ethiopia, and you’ll get the point pretty clear.

      The question as to how much the marginalization (leading, basically, to slow-burn genocide) was accidental vs. intentional is — debatable, I guess; but what sticks in my mind is the (far earlier) quote from good old Edmund Spenser of “Faerie Queene” fame: “force must be the instrument, and famine must be the means” (IIRC). Not exactly wide-eyed innocence.

      And culturally and lingusitically, whatever the intentions of Those Sitting Above, measured by results the genocide worked… even beyond the raw ‘population reduction” aspect. Before the Hunger, a majority of Irish people spoke only Irish, and far more spoke Irish and English than only English. After — that was no longer true. (One good discussion, along with the numbers I don’t precisely remember, is a chapter in Patricia Monaghan’s The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog — though, trigger warning, if you’re highly allergic to what can be called “woo-woo” stuff, do read selectively.)

   7. I do think the left is summoning the wrath of God with all the euthanasia. What they are doing is spiritually sickening.

   8. HOW TO STOP FUTURE FAMINES

      Determine a Famine is being inflicted.
      Thermonuke the capitol city.
      Offer choice: End the famine… or get more free neutrons

      When “international outrage” shows up ADD the ‘outrage’ spewers to the PUBLICLY VISIBLE target list.

      Yes, it’s monstrous. And the sad thing? It’s LESS monstrous.

      Really, humans, you guys make monstering so much harder.

7. I told a joke on FB the other day, the punchline being that next election why waste all this time on representatives, just elect me king and I’ll take care of everything. After my Ascendancy, I will load certain elements into boxcars to be shipped to my happy-fun camps for further education. Some person comments to the effect that Please, don’t mention boxcars.
   Now, It was a throwaway line and I didn’t take up the argument, -busy, and all that- but,
   It has bugged me ever since. Truth be told, Boxcars is exactly what we should be talking about!
   It starts with some jerk who can’t mind their own business. They poke around, and soon find other like minded yo yo’s and so it evolves into “They need to mind everyone’s business.” Because of course they do. and their so smart, after all and… why not?
   *”I hear the train a’comin’,
   its comin’ round the bend,
   Its all made of of Boxcars,
   to take me to my end…
   I posted jokes on Facebook,
   I don’t even know why.
   So I’m headed out to fun camps,
   til the day i die…”

   *Sorry, Johnny.

   1. We SHOULD be talking about the inevitable boxcars, but instead of boxcars, let’s call it Carousel.

      Sounds friendlier and those who know will know. And those who don’t know won’t get it anyway and maybe they will volunteer for Carousel and leave us alone.

      1. Renew! Renew!

      2. …And try like hell for renewal on carousel?
         I always thought they were feeding the fusion reactor that ran the City. Otherwise, they could be converted into Soylent.
         Tough choice.
         Burnt to a crisp, or be gnawed on by some aging guy in a beret.

      3. I always felt skipping renewal and heading off into the waste with Jenny Agutter was the correct choice. Of course I was 15 at the time, so that explains a lot…

         1. I’d want to see if I could drag Farrah Fawcett along as well, just for variety.

            1. Oh heavens I forgot Farrah Fawcett had a minor role in it. Well as they say variety is the spice of life. Although I think if Ms. Agutter caught you with Ms. Fawcett things might get a little too spicy. Though I’d be willing to risk it (certainly 15 year old me would have).

   2. Thank you for not using the term “cattle cars.” Moo.

      1. You’re welcome. You know, most cattle are transported by truck these days anyway. If the Fash get their way and ban all the things, trucks, especially, the Warren buffet might start building some, to add to his fleet of oil tankers that will be a gold bonanza for him if the competition is all shut down. (I know, crude is not shipped by truck much. but the dig is too good to resist.)

8. The left is onto child sacrifice in a big way here in this country even.

   If you want to have a successful life, young men and women are told, you must sacrifice children either by contracepting them out of existence or killing them outright by abortion or infanticide if they come at an inopportune time or have defects.

   They actively hate children or they wouldn’t be so keen on drugging and castrating them to signal their virtue. And they would be rioting in the streets over the innocent children killed in the crossfire in the cities instead of over career criminals who’ve met an abrupt end.

   A rabbit warren is in very great distress when the dams start eating the litters. And apparently humans are no different.

   1. Except our wabbits are so chunky they can barely waddle out to loot big screen TV’s.

   2. “Don’t fall in love from 22-29.

      Your career will thank you.”
      https://the-american-catholic.com/2023/05/23/thanks-but-no-thanks-2/

      1. On one hand I lament all the millions of years of genetic evolution that went into producing the modern human being aborted away. On the other hand I can’t help but think we might be better off without that flawed genetic lineage to begin with. Maybe it is a flawed system deeming itself unworthy of reproducing, I certainly don’t know. If you look at it in that light, Gay is a self correcting problem. Simply put if you want to reproduce, you’re not gay. That’s why Gay and Tranns never really bothered me, they’re too few in number and a genetic dead end. I really don’t care what you screw, just don’t do it on my coffee table and we’ll be fine. Oh and leave the kids alone, their teachers and others are screwing them up enough.

         1. I’m not sure what you’re smoking, but you really need to put it down, and maybe get the God complex checked out.

            Those things are nasty.

            1. I do not presume to be God, although if I were I doubt the world would be any more screwed up than it already is, but I find that when I ask questions I generally receive answers that make me think. I already said today I don’t communicate well and I did opine, I Certainly Don’t Know the answers. But thank you for keeping me honest. Call me an asshole if that makes you feel better, or a moron, either one fits rather well. I do tend to rub people the wrong way at times, not my intention, but I are human. I don’t hate anyone by the way, it takes too much energy and nothing anyone else does unless it is to you is really worth that much thought. Again it wasn’t flippant when I said I don’t care what you do just not on my coffee table is true. Why would I care? I do believe in the individual, why can’t we ask what makes us individuals?

               1. Scarier, you’re saying the stuff that keeps floating up in common culture, and it isn’t before the good stuff.

         2. Sigh. Not a genetic dead end. It’s a recessive if it’s anything.
            BUT they don’t bother me either. Or most people. It is giving drugs to kids to “transition” them before they can decide that worries me. Or to adults by lying to them..

            1. My problem with the current trans hysteria is the basic premise is, “God made a mistake with you.” No, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” more, “You should have had a penis…but we can fix it!” Plus the suspicion girls in particular are transitioning to belong to a group, the, “mediocre male athlete becoming champion female athlete,” and so on.

            2. Sigh. I have an autistic friend, high functioning, brilliant programmer, who apparently decided he’s now a girl (shortly after legal adulthood) and cut off all contact with his family and social circle. His family is very pro-alphabet people, but still worried about him. I suspect some untoward online influence while he was a minor. Ongoing prayer request.

               1. Pray for all of them. Poor things. This is a cult pure and simple.

                  1. Definitely a cult. Sounds like a cult, acts like a cult, recruits like a cult, hits back against non-agreeing others like a cult… Even that one bare phrase “gender affirming surgery” (gag!), all by itself, goes very far toward being diagnostic of cult-ism.

                     Yet I’m also far from sure it’s not an extremely cynical, calculated, targeted psychological operation — so much of its craziness (as we’d call it) also fits well for a psy-op. Like the way it seems to be increasingly targeted at minors (adults having proved somewhat resistant), and especially ones right in the middle of that personal, bodily, and social chaos known as ‘puberty.’ Even up to pushing on them major, irreversible, effectively maiming and sterilizing surgery, right then, rather than “wait till your majority.” That isn’t likely just co-incidence.

                     Gender dysphoria is real; but also, at least ‘until recently’ quite rare. Nobody ever had to be talked into having it, by the equivalent of a ‘free lap dance with every Clotshot Jab!’ It was (usually) bad enough you spent years / decades trying to talk yourself out of it…

                     Normally, cult and psy-op are incompatible, mutually exclusive; true-believers and cynical manipulators not being very inter-operable. But then I remember such things as, say, the cult of Styphon The Gunpowder God in H. Beam Piper’s “Paratime” series… where lower-grade priests were often (useful) true believers, but all the upper-level ones were 100% corrupt and cynical as the Northern summer day is long.

                     Imagine being a cult-infected apostle of the Church of the Holy Transition — and then, maybe many years later, coming down from the ‘high’ to comprehend all the lives you blighted and all the lovely bodies you helped maim. Irreparably and irreversibly.

                     Yes, pray for them. First to stop doing evil (it is, because it does), and next to recover from the having done.

                     1. > “gender affirming surgery”

                        I always come back with, “You mean ‘genital mutilation.'”

                        1. I know someone who had a hysterectomy under “gender affirming surgery,” and it made me mad because that should have happened years before under the concept of “it’s badly broken and ruining the life of someone who never wants kids anyway.”

                           I honestly don’t know how much of the “non-binary gender dysphoria” was actually “I can’t stand this body part that is trying to kill me on a monthly basis, make it stop.” /insert rant about how women can’t get certain care even when they are in their majority if it deals with broken lady bits/

                           1. actually, hon, they tried to convince me to have an hysterectomy starting before #2 son was born.
                              Depends on who you see and where.

                           2. Okay, that last one puzzles me. My ex, and many women I know personally or online, complain at great length about how male doctors don’t take them seriously, especially about female medical issues.

                              Except: female doctors nearly outnumber male doctors these days. What’s stopping these women from choosing a female physician?

                              (And if you say the female doctors have “internalized misogyny” I will find you and beat you to death with Friedrich Engels’ headstone.)

                           3. Female doctors are WAY worse.

                           4. Is that due to “I’m a woman, and I can tell you’re a full of s**t hypochondriac?” Because, honestly, the set women I know who complain about doctors extensively overlaps the set who are hypochondriacs.

                           5. I don’t actually know. Most of the time it’s because women get through every school including medical with the “Lady’s A” I think. And has been for 30 years.
                              When I was giving birth to older son, I was full of water (pre-eclampsia.) I mean, really full of water. The anesthesia didn’t take, which was a KNOWN effect. Idiot decided the pain was in my head and instead of thinking how to fix it she instead sent a nurse behind me to prick my leg with a needle to prove I couldn’t feel it. She got treated to swearing in seven languages and a question of whether she thought I was dumb?
                              Also, idiot gave me too much pitosin, stopped the contractions and turned them into fibrilation. And kept yelling at me — 3 days, baby crowned — to stop whining and just push. Until she realized she had to do an emergency caeserean, which she botched so badly that we almost died, and it made it really hard to have more kids.
                              Second one decided I needed an hysterectomy because, why not, and hounded me into one. I was exhausted and gave in. G-d knows if it was needed. She showed me papers saying there was a pre-cancerous growth, but somehow that’s not what’s in my file. So, you know what? Those two did it for female doctors and me. Not fond of the species.

                           6. Is that due to “I’m a woman, and I can tell you’re a full of s**t hypochondriac?”

                              Had that once.

                              I was in full labor in a “if you give birth naturally you are both dead” pregnancy.

                              While I think they were wrong, and dumb– her only information was literally that my BEING in labor was a life threating situation, and she was screaming at me to not show pain.

                           7. No, I don’t think it’s internalized anything. most female doctors are woke, and bitches to boot.

                  2. CULTS… damnit, more 1970’s crap repeating or at least rhyming… now with Official Approval.

                     Look, if we’re gonna repeat or semi-repeat stuff, can we do the cool stuff? “Recreat ’68!” Fine, send folks around the moon. That was the high (yeah, I know) point of 1968. The 1970’s? Well, some rock tunes did rock… (Look, I likes me my big band swing, but I can certainly appreciate Iron Man for the music). Heck, most of the 1980’s were pretty good – unless you were a parasite, er, Public Sector.

                  3. “There have been trans people in every age and culture!” they say.

                     There have been schizophrenics, too. What’s your point?

               2. Groan. Boys are not girls. Girls are not boys. Unless you have one of a few very rare birth defects, you are one or the other. You can choose what kind of boy or girl you want to be, but you can’t change your biology by wishing at it. Modern medicine is not up to the job, either. They can remove what is there, but they can’t create what your DNA didn’t grow.

                  Funny how children didn’t commit suicide in droves over ‘gender dysphoria’ in all the thousands of years before this delusional cult started preaching nonsense at them. Now there are suicides, mostly among the ‘post-transition’ population.
                  ———————————
                  It takes a LOT of Education to make somebody that stupid.

                  1. It’s a ONE WAY trip… and you never actually GET THERE.

            3. My point was not to point fingers at another as being less than human, but that maybe genetics goes much farther than we can imagine. Instincts are passed down between the generations in the lesser animals, and for all our human bravado, we are still animals, albeit very bright animals.

            4. The transition thing really bothers me because they want me to lie and support them in their delusion. I don’t tell anorexics they are fat, I’m not going to tell men who want to LARP as women that they are in fact women.

            5. The lying is what bothers me. The ongoing PRETENSE that “transition” is a real thing and can be accomplished by mere surgery. If people really knew what’s involved there and how it actually turns out, they’d change their tune pretty damn quick. It is an atrocity.

               The reckoning coming for all this is going to be really something, I think.

         3. Paul Harvey had a book out, which I read many years ago. He related two near-identical stories of poor mothers, poverty issues, sickly children, and pondered abortion choices in each case.

            The two cases were both Austrian, etc. About as identical as could be. And yet…

            Well, if you prevented Adolf Hitler, congratulations — MAYBE. What if the same role was taken, but by someone more competent?

            The other? Some Albert fellow… thought about physics some.

            And there was NO WAY TO TELL which would do what.

            All of History is a risk. The way to avoid risk is to end History (of your kind). Sure you wanna be doing that?

            1. > Well, if you prevented Adolf Hitler, congratulations — MAYBE. What if the same role was taken, but by someone more competent?

               Young Adolf was a quiet and studious lad, never any trouble. He wanted to be an artist. His parents came up with the money to pay to send him to art school, but the headmaster not only rejected him, he took the time to ridicule the boy’s efforts.

               So, who’s really the villain here? The young man, or the headmaster who took such joy in derailing his dreams?

               1. Both.

               2. “Hitler… there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats!”

            2. What if the eugenists really managed to get rolling? What if humanity was going extinct because it had been purified down to genetic similarity and can’t resist a new plague?

               The time travelers want humanity to live and therefore insist on giving eugenics a bad name.

9. Thinking back to long ago when I used to work for a living.

   Thinking about the time I worked for local government.

   I remember listening, as an obligatory attendee, at a Fairbanks, Alaska city council meeting; One of the councilmen moved that the population of Fairbanks was 17,282 (-or some number roughly like that.). The motion was seconded. No discussion. The vote was unanimous. The number wasn’t carved in stone but it was transmitted to the borough, state and federal agencies, giving it a durability far greater than granite.

   Of course I am quite sure all other towns and cities, nation wide, world wide, take a far more rational approach to counting their citizens, hence I have perfect faith in the 8.5 billion world population number, give or take a few trillion..

   1. I simply must protest that, regardless of the errors of count, surely there exists a non-negative number of humans.

      Even the solipsist thinks there’s one.

      1. Oh, we’ve all met far too many negative humans.
         Now dogs? Dogs are net positive.
         I suspect horses are as well.
         I don’t know from cats.

         1. Of course you don’t know about the cats.
            THEY know, but they are usually quite satisfied with the staff they have, and so, aren’t saying.

10. This doesn’t mean the culture wasn’t in there, giving him rats in the head that even his very premature daughter had to be big or people would assume she wasn’t his.

    Ours does this, too– usually on similarly stupid excuses.

    Nothing quite like hearing “she must have cheated!” when if you hand them the daddy’s baby picture, they think it is the kid.

    My family’s boys tend to start out blond, and darken to nearly-black.

    1. I thought that if your baby had had a beard he’d be identical to his father. 👶

       1. :laughs at the mental image: You’re not wrong.
          Your brain doesn’t turn off when it sees white-blond, dirty brown, and baby-bald following a salt and pepper fellow with a Xanatos beard– I don’t know why, but folks seem to stop at hair color a lot.

          The one that talked a lot actually dressed up as a cowboy one year, which involved making his hair dark so we could give him a beard.
          “Oh my gosh, how CUTE– he looks so much like his dad!”
          /snicker

          1. I have a friend with Finnish heritage who married a guy with Korean heritage. She showed me pictures of her kids with some cousins of theirs at a family reunion—black hair and brown eyes next to white-blonde and ice blue eyes. “You’d never know they were cousins, right?”

             I told her to put the photo in black & white and look at their facial structure. Oh yes, they were definitely cousins, almost identical in facial features.

          2. Considering how easy it is to change hair color, that’s just silly. Occasionally someone says it’s a shame neither one of our kids got our red hair. We say they could have it if they wanted it.

    2. The Reader has pictures of himself at 4 with lovely blond curly hair. Gone by 6.

    3. I look like my dad. Younger kid looks like me. Dad looked like his mom. It’s been going on a long time.

       1. #SadButTrue

    4. Mine was blond when I was born. It turned jet-black by the time I was ten – and I had silver-gray streaks at the temples – and then turned into dirt brown.

       1. Mine was white blond as a toddler (supposedly, old enough that those pictures are not color). Dark brunette before age 3 or so. Started with the white hairs at age 23. Finally enough to color hair from age 30 until pandemic. Now, hair is again white blond with gray, at age 66. Full circle.

          1. We had a hilarious family “scandal” with my brother and dad’s dog.

             Hank (the cow dog) was small enough my maybe six year old brother picked him up, and got photographed, as a half grown dog.

             He died like ten years later, and then ten years after that, brother was asking for pictures…. gets the picture….

             “I WAS BLOND?!?!?”

          2. That was my mother as well. It’s the classic “towhead” pattern.

11. Bohica, just in time for 2024:
    https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2023/05/23/whos-tedros-fearmongers-again-world-should-prepare-for-even-deadlier-pathogen-than-covid-n750407

    1. Yep, they’re cooking it up right now. 😦

    2. WON’T WORK. Trust me. Funny only once. The only people who’ll obey are the ones STILL wearing masks.

       1. Depends on your definition of “work”.

          — Preventing campaign rallies in blue jurisdictions.
          — Justifying sending out 100% mail-in ballots so no one has to stand in groups at polling places.
          — Of course Zhou Bai-Den will basement campaign.
          — Disrupting the supply chains thru blue ports.
          — Arresting selected deplorables in the name of public health.
          — Censorship of various kinds.

          It will work just fine for those.

          1. I don’t think so. Not when the majority are actively rebelling. They don’t understand this won’t work again. But it won’t.

    3. Hard to make a less deadly one…

12. Reblogged this on Head Noises and commented:

    Each individual no matter how flawed adds something and is a credit, even if just by giving us someone to love and care for. And as such, every individual is indispensable and unique. You might not personally like someone, but it’s neither your duty nor your right to control their every decision and interfere in their every action. It is not your right nor your duty to dictate how your fellow man lives and dies. They can decide that each one by himself.

13. Even the WHO has started to notice the population discrepancy. (That it’s growing slower than expected, not that it’s shrinking.)

    I fully expect (if current trends continue) that in 20-50 years things will start to be desperate enough that they will start forcing young women to have children (I have no idea how they would do this), and the same people (or their ideological descendants) who now are totally in favor of abortion will be totally in favor of doing this, and see no distinction between the two issues. Note, I’m not saying that they’ll have the young woman raise the babies. After all, it will be much better for everyone if these children were raised by professionals.

    I think I’m still reacting to being told to my face in church (not by the pastor) that the only reason people want rules against abortion is to control women, not to save lives. (As if abortion won’t be used to control women.) The hypocrisy is obvious because many people who are opposed to abortion are also against gun control. And being opposed to gun control is also an atempt to control people. I had heard of these arguments before, but this is the first time live and to my face, and not just something the argument being repeated.

    My husband fortunately deftly changed the subject. When I get enraged, I get stupid.

    1. Sadly, a lot of folks kind of snag whatever hammer they think will make someone agree, and use that– especially if they can’t answer the argument you actually made.

       :hug:

14. Perhaps your last sentence could be re-written:

    “To value life is to value living”

    When the vet has pronounced that your best (and only true) furry friend is suffering too much and the only humane thing to do is to “put her down” and you make the preparations and try to pick her up for a last walk to the spot under the shady oak and she looks up at you and clearly says with all her heart “I want to live” could you pull the trigger?

    To speak about programs of mass killings is to speak of an evil so profound, so horrifying the term “inhumanity” can’t even begin to describe.

    And recorded human history is replete with examples of such un-fathomable evil. Even in the OT we have the “good guys” of God putting to the sword every living thing, man, woman, and child and animal in city after city.

    Cherish the living; cherish life

    1. “When the vet has pronounced that your best (and only true) furry friend is suffering too much and the only humane thing to do is to “put her down” and you make the preparations and try to pick her up for a last walk to the spot under the shady oak and she looks up at you and clearly says with all her heart “I want to live” could you pull the trigger?”

       I pray so.

       “Lord, look down on Thy Servant! Bad things have come to pass.
       There is no heat in the midday sun, nor health in the wayside grass.
       His bones are full of an old disease – his torments run and increase.
       Lord, make haste with Thy Lightnings and grant him a quick release!”

       https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/his_apologies.html

       1. This is why I stopped having pets…

          1. Not me. I rescue the occasional abandoned cat. I know they’re not forever, but I can give them good lives. Way better than leaving them to die alone and unwanted.

             1. Well, I lost three kittens the same day back in 1980 and it tore my heart out. But now I’m old and my wife is allergic, so I have a continuing reason. But thank you for taking care of them when you can.

       2. This. Have the Tshirt and a long since (mostly) healed holes in my heart. As a vet once told me, “getting an animal is making an appointment for heartbreak”. It’s worth it, but it’s awful when it’s time to go.

          (This might be one of the reasons why that vet retired early… Being the trigger is a stone bitch.)

          1. Kipling saw that too… but he seemed to find the upside.

             “When the fourteen years which Nature permits
             Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
             And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
             To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
             Then you will find — it’s your own affair —
             But . . . you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.”

             https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/power_of_dog.html

    2. When my pets are clearly in pain that cannot be relieved, I take steps to end that pain as gently and quickly as I can. Pets are not humans. Pets cannot be asked, I know it hurts, but do you want to go on anyway? When you take a pet into your life, you owe it to them to make their life as good as possible for as long as possible. You also owe it to them to let them go when the time comes.

       1. I have stories. The coming end of every pet we’ve had has had different stories. Some we involved a veterinarian in a timely manner. Some too late. We’ve had pets die in our arms at home with no medical assistance. We’ve come home to pets who have died at home. We’ve had pets “disappear” when we knew it was time to make the call. One we retrieved (because where he curled up) the neighbor knew where he belonged. Other two just “disappeared” (one we found out months later where he went). Between inlaws 3 malamutes, our 3 dogs, and our prior 11 cats, we could write a tome. We’re by no means the exception.

15. I reserve the right to interfere with anyone’s actions that place my, or my family’s lives in peril. And immediate peril warrants an immediate, lethal interference.

    The Founders of this country understood that. Too bad those of the modern Left haven’t a clue.

    1. That’s a completely different thing than telling people how to live who aren’t bothering you.

       1. That’s a completely different thing than telling people how to live who aren’t bothering harming you.

          –
          Had to change that, because everything bothers the Leftroids. Everything you do, and everything you don’t do, ‘Offends!!’ them — which they take as a ‘right’ to tell you what you can and can’t do. “Silence Is Violence!!” don’tcha know.

          So, no, just ‘bothering’ you is not sufficient grounds.
          ———————————
          Only idiots believe they know how other people should live their lives. The stupider they are, the more blindly they believe it.

          1. Eh. Meant in the “harming” sense, so you’re right. I have been building shelves and I’m TIRED.

          2. “Silence is violence!”

             Which more and more as time goes on reminds me of a variation on a certain (semi-)famous scene from the original Crocodile Dundee movie, the one with the “scary” punks…

             “Silence is violence!”

             ((A few quiet seconds.))

             “Naw, that’s just peace and quiet, that’s not violence.”

             ((BAM! POW! ZOWIE! and other Batman-like noises.))

             “Now, there, that’s a bit ‘a violence. You just lie there and be non-violently silent all you want, ‘kay, mate?”

             (Yes, sometimes I am not a nice person at all.)

             1. /laugh

                Croc Dundee is another one of those movies that Hollywood would never make today. More’s the pity.

             2. But, but, I thought (wrongthink) speech was violence. I’m so confused . . .

                1. Consistency is racist, comrade! Logic is cisheteropatrichical! Only a kulak would be confused!

                   (Besides, if they were consistent, it might be possible to meet their demands, and then what would they do?)

          3. If Silence is Violence, can I be non-violent at them at 250+ dB? Maybe in ultrasound, so as not to disturb the neighbors?

16. Each individual no matter how flawed adds something and is a credit

    –
    I disagree. Some folks just need killin’, because of what they’ve done, and what they’ll do if allowed to continue breathing. They make themselves a debit by being a danger to everyone around them. We need to eliminate them in self-defense.
    ———————————
    ‘Progressives’ will do the wrong thing just because the people they hate do the right thing.

    1. That has absolutely nothing to do with who they are but with what they do.
       I’m talking of innocents, OBVIOUSLY. Criminals it’s a different matter.

17. I’m reading that Canada is proposing euthanasia, not only for the terminally ill, but for the poor and homeless. As if that won’t turn into social and governmental pressure to make their lives so miserable as to make it an attractive option. (Why should we pay for health care for someone who’s already dying or otherwise not fit to live? “Let them die and decrease the surplus population”, to quote an infamous miser. ) I’m not sure exactly where the border between this policy and outright murder is, but it isn’t far away.

    1. There isn’t one.

       At least, that was the conclusion when the Nazis were doing it to their unwanted populations.

       There wasn’t a border between the policy and murder.

    2. It’s not genocide when people commit suicide, is it? Asking for a government.

       1. Whether it is or not, it still makes about as much sense as combining a fitness program with a hunger strike. Governments that do want citizens are sooner or later going to eat your lunch…or even eat you for lunch.
          When you regard the poorest, sickest , or oldest 5% of the population as dispensible, you have taken a dive into the bottomless pit, because no matter how many of them you dispose of, there will always be a poorest, sickest, and oldest 5% of the population.

       2. Soylent Green.
          Logan’s Run.
          Sins of the Fathers.

          Of course, Goodreads has a list of 85 books about Euthanasia in Fiction; and I’d say most of them are of the horrific dystopian genre.

       3. “They walked into the showers of their own free will.

          That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!”

    3. As I said. I prophesied this ten years ago. The left will herd homeless into camps and kill them. The left said I was crazy.

       1. I guess it was inevitable they would come up with a final solution to the homelessness problem.

          1. Just wait until somebody makes ‘A Modest Proposal’ 😮

          2. BTW they literally think people are homeless because there aren’t enough houses, not because these people have other problems. No, seriously, they DO.

             1. Well, there is a housing shortage in some places — because the government makes it all but impossible to build more, or even improve your own property. See Dave Freer’s travails with his local permit department.
                ———————————
                The one thing we need more of from the government is LESS!!

                1. Yes, but the feral homeless in the cities are there for other reasons.

                   1. Most of them.

                      “Suffered a temporary setback, and living in the car” is a thing. But the majority are there because of drugs and/or mental health (and the former will quickly lead to the latter, of course).

                      This, of course, is the problem with “homeless housing”. It forces the former to have to deal with the violence and other criminality of the latter, who spend most of their time looking for money for another hit.

          3. In Ohio, they already attempted a vinyl solution….

       2. The thing that bothers me most is they’ve first used them to so thoroughly break everything that it’s going to be very hard to even have any sympathy for them, which is evil in and of itself.

          Yet how does one even help someone who is a danger to themselves and everyone around them, and who you will get the full force of the state dropped on you if you lay a hand on them?

          This is going to be so ugly.

    4. They’re not proposing it. They’re DOING it. The mentally ill can chose MAiD in the hospital.

       They are also shipping cancer patients to the USA for treatment because they don’t have beds right now.

       Because they fired all the nurses and doctors who wouldn’t take the jab, but don’t mention that. We’re supposed to pretend not to remember that and say its all a mystery.

       1. https://tnc.news/2023/05/23/quebec-6m-maid1/

          The province of Quebec spent $6 million bucks on MAiD in 2022.

          “The Quebec government spent a total of $5,880,162 on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to euthanize those seeking services, according to government documents.

          A freedom of information request by “Run with Life” blogger, Patricia Maloney, revealed that general practitioners and medical specialists charged nearly $6 million in fees in order to render MAiD services to patients in Quebec.

          Quebeckers paid $674,102 for initial consultations lasting 15 minutes and $2,333,692 for additional 15-minute consultations. Patients then paid nearly $350,000 to have physicians administer MAiD to them. Additional costs were collected from administrative fees, forms, visits and recurring consultations.

          10,064 Canadians chose doctor-assisted suicide as a means to end their lives in 2021. Data for 2022 is currently not available.”

          So there you go, even suicide can be made worse by bureacracy. 10,000 people murdered by government minions in Canada, 2021. Can’t call them “doctors” really, a doctor saves your life.

          But -I- am the bad guy for suggesting the government just tip them over a handy bridge, or off the top of the hospital. Then at least they have a nice view and fun ride down for their last memory.

    5. And at the same time they propose euthanasia for the homeless, they will continue to teach in the public schools that Aktion T4 was bad because Nazis. And the left won’t notice the hypocrisy because they can’t.

18. I don’t know if anyone mentioned it yet, but today’s post has a lot to do with part of the topic from yesterday. That being SAND. Most of the justification the leftist commie pinko dumb-asses use is not built upon a foundation of logic or reason, but upon sand. Which is why when ever you try to duplicate their numbers or results, it generally blows up in your face. I guess the easiest way to put it is Socialism/Communism is the religion of the Devil, because it is all built on lies. The insanity from the left is because they realize it themselves, but it’s too late for their putrid souls to change.

19. That importing of 3rd worlders into the US is having some pretty horrific casualty rates. I’m hearing anywhere from 10-15% of all attempties do not survive the trip.

    I wonder if that assumption, that there are an infinite ever growing number of people without end, is why that doesn’t seem to bother the open borders folks?

    1. They’ve stripped much of Central and South America and don’t seem to care.

       1. Is the current ‘mass migration’ a repeat of the ‘BoatLift’…. where Cuba got a Two-fer by emptying their prisons & psych wards by dumping their problems on the USA? And now all of South & Central America can pull the same stunt?

          1. Part of it. At least according to reports from honest Border Patrol agents, before the Administration shuts them up. That doesn’t include the actual ones associated with terrorist groups or foreign militaries.

          2. Some is. Saw some toe-hair-curling reporting from Michael Yon and Matthew Bracken in the Darien Gap, Panama. Illegals from further south have to cross the nearly-roadless Darien Gap (the only break in the Pan-American Highway system, because of a combination of “muh environment” and “not worth building a road across 50 miles of the worst jungle in the Western Hemisphere”) and they’re doing it on dirt paths, guided by NGOs, with shuttle buses at both ends to keep them moving norte, ever norte. It is very organized, by somebody or somebodies.

             1. Skinwalkers must be eating well.

       2. Well, that saves the rain forest from evil human interference, don’cha know.

       3. The only parts of those countries that they care about are the resorts (need enough locals to provide services to the tourists), and the as yet unspoiled parts of the jungles.

20. Each individual no matter how flawed adds something and is a credit

    Or, to use one of my favorite lines: Nobody is so worthless that they can’t serve as a bad example.

21. Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” movies were blatant propaganda; but that didn’t make them wrong, except where they excused Communists doing exactly the same things as the Axis Powers.

    1. I used to watch ‘Prelude to War’ every couple years as a reminder/warning. I haven’t for a few years… It Can Happen Here.

22. “Eventually the only way to save humans from suffering is to kill them …”

    Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

    Known for his humor, he wrote a dark horror. He would not allow that story to be published until after his death.

    1. …and there were three different versions of that story. Curiously, it was a video adaptation (Chris Makepeace, Lance Kerwin) that got me to consider Twain after school did its damnedest (and I do mean DAMN) to kill off any interest in Twain.

       Twain was a curious fellow. He rightly had it in for British royalty, but had no issue with dining with German Princes…. WTH?!

23. I realized the other day that the “new new soviet man” is a trans man, and the “new new soviet” woman is a trans woman. And eventually everyone not willing to be new will be rounded up and eliminated.

    And then the new sterile women and men will have NO children and mankind will die out and they will finally have their promised utopia. No humans at all. Perfect communism, everyone dead.

    1. Except no. They can’t round up a majority. hence what I said.

       1. Especially not a heavily armed majority. No government has ever tried to oppress this many people with this many guns before.

          Will. Not. End. Well.
          ———————————
          Pacifism will, at best, get you a nice peaceful trip to the slave pens. At worst — tell me, have you ever heard of the Aztecs?

          1. Yes, but I keep coming back to what Sarah has said in the past. “They can’t win but we can lose.”

    2. Let them drink Bud Light.

24. I realized the other day that the “new new soviet man” is a trans man, and the “new new soviet” woman is a trans woman. And eventually everyone not willing to be new will be rounded up and eliminated.

    And then the new sterile women and men will have NO children and mankind will die out and they will finally have their promised utopia. No humans at all. Perfect communism, everyone dead.

25. I’m convinced that the efforts to mass-trans the current generation in the US and import as many third-world people as possible is an effort to make the country into something that is more…amenable to the people in power.

    I can’t see it working any other way for the people in power.

    1. I call it Die Lösung Immigration, from the poem of the same name, because said poem ends thusly: “Would it not in that case
       Be simpler for the government
       To dissolve the people
       And elect another?”

26. I’d post something else, but thru my own stupidity and inability to properly communicate I’d just piss someone else off. Please feel free to blame everything today on me. Tomorrow is someone else’s problem. Tongue firmly planted in Cheek. Now where is that joint?

    1. er…. I don’t think anyone is upset enough to be offended. What actually?
       This is a very weird comment.

    2. Well, since there are 250 to 350 in the human body (depending on your definition), it could be anywhere. Which one hurts the most right now?

27. My oldest daughter, by any ‘rationale’ measure, was ‘too expensive’.
    In health care alone the total cost was millions.

    And yet … I have absolutely no regrets for the love, smiles, and joy she experienced and brought into other lives throughout her 28 years. She lived, and that was worthwhile.

    We knew we must say farewell every day of those 28 years. When the time came, we held her, she was calm and comfortable, and was welcomed by many family when she walked for the first time ever (in heaven).

    I most certainly would have had a large honor guard IF…

28. In reading about various inventors and scientists that made some history and actual progress (not to be confused with the anti-progress of ‘progressivism’) one thing turns up repeatedly. Not universally, but i enough to get remembered: many were “sickly children” and often mostly in bed, doing little more than… reading. And yet.. these were the folks who Changed History. No, not every sickly kid did, but…

    Ever wonder how much further along Humanity might be if ‘kid x’ hadn’t been aborted? “Oh that advance was scheduled for 1998, but the gal who’d make the connection was aborted in 1975. Better luck next century.”

29. A little illustrative mathematics on overpopulation.

    Category: Weird Thoughts About [Over]Population

    1. “A little illustrative mathematics on overpopulation.”
       Excellent!
       One of my favorite books for keeping things in perspective is “Innumeracy” by John Allen Paulos.
       Wikipedia for the book:
       “Paulos speaks mainly of the common misconceptions about, and inability to deal comfortably with, numbers, and the logic and meaning that they represent…. He looks at real-world examples in stock scams, psychics, astrology, sports records, elections, sex discrimination, UFOs, insurance and law, lotteries, and drug testing.[1] Paulos discusses innumeracy with quirky anecdotes, scenarios, and facts, encouraging readers in the end to look at their world in a more quantitative way. The book sheds light on the link between innumeracy and pseudoscience. For example, the fortune telling psychic’s few correct and general observations are remembered over the many incorrect guesses. He also stresses the problem between the actual number of occurrences of various risks and popular perceptions of those risks happening.[1] The problems of innumeracy come at a great cost to society.[6] Topics include probability and coincidence, innumeracy in pseudoscience, statistics, and trade-offs in society. For example, the danger of getting killed in a car accident is much greater than terrorism and this danger should be reflected in how we allocate our limited resources.”

30. c4c

31. Thanks for the mention, Sarah.

    Sometimes I look at many of the Big Ideas of the 19th Century sometimes, like Overpopulation/Resource Depletion, Social Darwinism, Communal Living, Communism (Marxian version), Racism and a few more…

    …and I think that if I were an alien trying my best to f- over the crazy Humans with one little starship and a small crew, that’s the kind of thing I’d do.

    Blood And Soil is another one, pre-Victorian, that has caused a lot of misery. These days, best candidates for alien information attack virus are Post Modernism and its bastard child, Critical Race Theory.

    Unfortunately I can’t kid myself into pretending aliens did it. Humans did it. Now we are all stuck cleaning up after them.

    1. Weird how stuck in the past all these “progressives” are, huh?

       1. they’re progressing bravely to the 1930s

32. Tangentially related to population discussion, I wonder how many people on Earth live truly off of anyone else’s radar, so remote hardly anyone knows they exist. Or no one truly knows they exist. Think of the ones we do know of because they were discovered somehow: The Lykov family in Siberia, the North Sentinal Islanders, Christopher Knight the North Pond Hermit, the few uncontacted tribes deep in a remote rainforest we only ever see with a plane and a telephoto lens. How many more people are living in the wilderness of Earth as hermits, or small hidden communities? A big media fad/urban legend recently was “feral people” living in National Parks and other places of vast wilderness in North America and a lot of people believed it, or at least believed it was possible just because of how much space there is out there. Just sharing my minds rambling wanderings.

    1. How many people live in -Detroit- that nobody knows about?

       1. How many people in Detroit only exist in election years?

    2. There’s folks living out in the national forest, yeah.

       ….they’re not unknown, they’re usually on pot grows. Can find the stories on that pretty easy.

       Out in the desert, too. “Public land” is big enough there’s a lot of officially-nobody-knows places.

       1. Do they pay property taxes? If not, I’m movin’

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