Here's the most remarkably astute rant I've read in a couple of years

[GliderGuider]

It's not often that someone completely outclasses the genetically recombinant offspring of James Howard Kunstler and Hunter S. Thompson. Joe Bageant takes the crown with this one. Here are a few sample paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned

Population growth is the rhino in the playpen, the root cause of our approaching eco-disaster that that no one honestly talks about. On the left we get an onslaught of information about what we must and must not do to prevent climate change. Good Democrats get Al Gore's advice, which somehow never mentions the corporations doing the damage. And all of America gets feel-good electric car ads -- buy your way out of the problem, or at least your guilt if you happen to have any. But nowhere do we get an honest discussion about population growth. If you care to, argue that climate change may or may not destroy us. But uncontrolled population growth is guaranteed to do the job. As an old Idaho rancher told me, "You can't run a hundred head of cattle on half an acre."

SCREAMING MAN: LOOKY HERE BAGEANT, YOU PICKLED OLD GAS BAG. HALF OF AMERICANS LIVE UNDER THE GOOFBALL HALLUCINATION THEY CAN SEAL THE BORDERS WITH SILLY PUTTY, DRONE AIRCRAFT AND MACHINE GUNS. THE OTHER HALF, LIBERALS OVERDOSED ON PROZAC AND WHITE WINE, IS LINED UP LIKE DOCKSIDE WHORES WAVING AT THE INCOMING FLEET. "LET'S WELCOME THEM ALL! AMERICA IS THE LAND OF IMMIGRANTS SO HELL FUCKING YES, LET'EM ALL IN!" YEA, RIGHT. LET EVERYBODY LIVE LIKE A FUCKING HATIAN WHARF RAT IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD AMERICA. HELL, IT'S ALREADY STARTED. THEY'RE CROAKING 49 MILION AMERICANS BECAUSE THEY CAN'T COME UP WITH THE BLACKMAIL DOUGH FOR HEALTHCARE. THEY'RE KICKIN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OUT OF THEIR PLYWOOD NESTING BOXES BECAUSE THEY CAN'T MAKE THE MONTHLY NUT. AMERICA IS ALREADY A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY WITH DRIVE THROUGH FEEDING BOXES.

Meanwhile, the truth stays buried in the crapola. According to the UN's newest report on the planetary condition, crop production has improved but has not kept up with population. World cereal production per person peaked in the 1980s, and has since been decreasing. We have over six billion people now -- there were far less than half that when I was born -- and there will be roughly nine billion people by 2050. But the UN, being a world organization that has to please a couple hundred governments, each beating its own national drum to its people, pretending there is a long term solution other that to eliminate two thirds of the world population within the above mentioned kids' lifetimes. Thus, the UN issues "millennium development goals." This neatly sidesteps the fact that if the present six billion mouths and assholes running the world's resources through their gullets like shit through a goose is unsustainable, then nine billion of the same are waaaaaay beyond sustainable in any way worth calling human life.

Old Tom Malthus said something like this was gonna happen, although he got some of the details wrong, which a person just might conceivably do in predicting the fate of human civilization a couple hundred years in advance. Call me a softie here, but I tend to give the guy a break for getting it 90% right.

But then I'm no scientist. Supposedly sophisticated American scientists have been pissing on the grave of poor Tom at least since I was a kid in school. All my life American capitalist economists have proclaimed they've licked the population problem by using the world up faster. "A failed prophet of doom," I believe my high school teacher called Malthus. Even commies kicked Tom's dog around. Engles called him a barbarian. Marx couldn't handle Tom's action, either. Nor practically anyone else, from John Stuart Mill to Allen Greenspan. And we still get the stale argument that "This planet isn't crowded; it is just mismanaged." Even the greens seem to believe that we can manage our way out of this fatal mess, if we just recycle, wear hemp and vote for the candidate on the bicycle with the Celtic tattoo. The alternative geeks swear nanotech is gonna pull us through. But last I heard pandemic viruses were still smarter than carbon nanotubes. Something about rapid adaptability. Those little fuckers seem to be fast on their feet, so in a title match between nano tech (or any tech for that matter) managed in the ring by nerds, and natural evolutionary biology -- which not only has mother nature holding the towels in its corner, but also calling the fight -- I'm damned sure betting on the biology.

Malthus must be thrashing inside his lead lined English coffin right now, cackling, "Do the math, you fuckers!" But they won't. With the world's geet presently being loaded into their yachts bound for the Caymans, they don't have to. Not just yet, anyway. As for they guy on the bike with the Celtic tattoo, if he peddles long enough he's bound to run into some of those 49,671 human beings born while I was writing this.

Civilization's most fatal folly was monetization and propertizing of the natural world that is humanity's great common. In fact those two things ­ monetization and propertization -- have come to mean civilization from the perspective of most ordinary people over the increasingly brutal centuries they have enabled. If modern cumulative civilization is not perceived as being very brutal by, say, the average hedge fund manager or Russian oligarch with a cell phone jacked into one ear and hurtling through the earth's commons in a new BMW toward either the Outback Steakhouse or an appointment with is mistress, well, theirs is certainly a minority perspective. Ask any indigenous person.

There's a whole lot more. It's a killer essay. It's also (to me anyway) a curious relief to hear it all spelled out so loudly, clearly and poetically.

[RufusEarl]

1. So many people so little time, but it's not a joking matter it 's real.

Peace!

[phantom power]

2. The journey of a thousand miles...

[XemaSab]

6. There's always HOPE

[pscot]

3. World class rant

by a guy who definitely "gets it".

[Orwellian_Ghost]

4. K&R n/t

[NNadir]

5. I have never felt that Malthus was "trashed."

He was, in fact, a pioneer of mathematical modeling in a time before access to computers.

I have always thought of him as such.

I think the case that Malthus is regarded as a fool is vastly overstated.

Many mathematical models of complex phenomena have been proposed since, and the failure of the predictive ability of said models has lead to many important discoveries, the most famous of which is quantum mechanics.

The fact that an object reaches a fixed speed when falling in the earth's atmosphere is hardly an indication that Newton's laws of gravitation are failures, but merely that other factors, like wind resistance, are involved.

In fact, when one takes an introductory course in Calculus in many curricula, one almost always learns about bacterial growth, and one is asked to calculate how long it would take a bacterial colony to approximate the mass of the earth. Obviously everyone knows that bacteria do not exceed the mass of earth, never have, never will.

And yes, population is the real problem. Everyone could live an American lifestyle if the world's population were one tenth of what it is today.

[stuntcat]

7. thank you.

k&r

[hogwyld]

8. K & R

That light at the end of the tunnel is NOT the end of the tunnel.