They Might Want You to Eat Bugs, But They Would Prefer You Weren't Here at All

(ABI)

Back in January, I did a story on Jane Goodall. Someone I thought was the epitome of the schweet, uber feminine British flower, who spoke softly and risked her life nobly doing things like saving chimpanzees.

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I mean, this is who I grew up with while memorizing the stirring Elmer Bernstein composed National Geographic theme song (GAWD, I love this.).

A heroine of my youth. Who just wishes there were less of us ruining the world she loves.

“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”

That infamous little snippet was from a discussion at a WEF gathering. The same WEF/Davos conferences for which Klaus Schwab has now removed all the videos that were once available to skewer them with on Twitter. It turns out the most elite, richest, and privileged geniuses among us have very thin skins when it comes to the peasants using their own self-congratulatory recordings to eviscerate their big plans and mock them mercilessly.

But the fact of the matter is, they don’t like us very much and would be thrilled to have fewer of us both to control and despoiling their precious Gaia. Life would be better all around.

Proponents of the idea that the world would be a better place sans a significant amount of the current population have a name unto themselves – it’s “Malthusians.” It springs from a late 18th, early 19th Century English economist named Robert Malthus, who believed that over-population was literally the bane of the Earth.

If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus’s observation that populations tend to increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16 …), whereas food reserves grow arithmetically (2, 3, 4, 5 …), leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success, the driver of evolution.

On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse.

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted.

His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.

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Obviously, considering past adherents and their loathsome enforcements of Malthusian-based measures, should one hold such beliefs, they are normally not uttered in polite quarters.

Okay. That used to be true.

With the rise of the WEF globalists and the climate cultists who meet at gatherings like COP28 – many attendees being one and the same, or working for organizations that are represented at both – more than a little of the shame factor has worn off, because there is safety in numbers. Entitlement brings bravado.

In fact, some people are downright proud enough of their place in the purloined pantheon of pretenders, that they’ll publish their views.

No one feels more righteously entitled than Michael Mann of disgraceful global warming Hockey Stick fame. Always a shameless charlatan, Mann has a new, overweening publication out about saving the Earth from boiling. And don’t you know what Mann thinks would help a lot?

If there were a lot less of you and me.

Climate scientist Michael Mann: ‘Our destiny is still mostly in our own hands’
It is not too late to halt global warming but the main obstacles are political rather than physical, he says

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Not only does Mann says that 8 billion people is “beyond the carrying capacity” for the planet, since he can’t off anyone in the name of saving the planet (however wistful at the thought he sounds), he advocates educating women (!) to provide the population control he feels the Earth needs. Mann seems kind of regretful the blame for too many people often falls on “the developing world and people of color” when people like him start talking about over-population. I guess because other people hear these “experts” and then go do all these bad things? I guess?

What a creep.

Of course, Mann is an ardent admirer of one of the virulent Malthusians still on the planet – Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich is not a fan of the great unwashed…

…In a description of a trip to New Delhi, he was vividly forthcoming about his distaste for the living, breathing individuals who make up a population:

People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

…and hasn’t been right about a damn thing.

…Now 90 years old, Ehrlich still takes pride in the work he did turning population growth into a global concern, even though the mass famine and pestilence that he predicted in the ’60s never came to pass.

…And Ehrlich remains a venerated figure. In January of this year, CBS featured Ehrlich on an episode of 60 Minutes on species extinction. The climate scientist Michael Mann called the memoir a “wide-ranging, wondrous, and pleasantly amusing account of his amazing life—as a scientist, thinker, communicator, influencer, and champion for a sustainable world.”

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And he has acolytes like Mann. That’s a rousing endorsement for the Malthusian cause, no?

Of course not. Nothing could be more anti-human. Call them out for what they are.

…The problem with Malthusians, Bailey writes, is that they “cannot let go of the simple but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction.” Humans are thinking animals. We find solutions—think Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. The result is the opposite of what Malthus predicted: the wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, whereas the most food-insecure countries have the highest fertility rates.

The solution to overpopulation is not to force people to have fewer children. China’s one-child policy showed the futility of that experiment. It is to raise the poorest nations out of poverty through democratic governance, free trade, access to birth control, and the education and economic empowerment of women.

What the Goodalls, Erlichs, Manns and others never take into account is that teeming population themselves – they are humans. Adaptable, intelligent and this is not 500 years ago (Sorry, Jane.). They work rapidly across the board, across the races and borders, to find answers to problems.

To survive and flourish.

I know that has to be upsetting. And upsetting all the plans.

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Jazz Shaw 10:00 AM | April 27, 2024
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