Reply #9: I agree totally and this has been going on for a long time. I have

[bbgrunt]

spent my productive years in the ed business so I have witnessed it first hand.

Many forces are now coming together that exacerbate the problem. Besides media allowing us to "amuse ourselves to death" and create alternate realities, and dosing us all with brain numbing pharmaceuticals there are some basic economic forces at work:

Several years ago I gave students the book by Jeremy Rifkin called "The End of Work" that described the tendency for productive capacity to over run the need for work. The book was a little pie in the sky but it described a real phenomena. Basically we have to alter our paradigm on what is valuable if we are going to protect life and values as we know it--otherwise we will see the devaluation of all the "extra" people (some would call the useless eaters) and an effort to get rid of them.

I believe that all this nastiness-- in education, media, pharmaceuticals, war on the middle class, and other general hate mongering is part of the process of culling the herd.......Malthus lives not because our reproductive capacity has outstripped our productive capacity, but for basically the opposite reason--our productive capacity has outstripped our need for people.