But honestly, folks, having safely returned from a symposium by the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies (GCTS) - the Ophiuchusian equivalent of the Royal Society - I remain somewhat isolated in believing that intelligent life might actually exist on earth. And may this be last time, please God, that I am ever called upon to defend it. What’s more, many Ophiuchusians hold views on human intelligence that do not alight well with politically correct doctrine as disseminated on this planet. But since political correctness has frequently pronounced me a racist bitch, a homophobic anti-feminist, and potentially insane, it is not - in my opinion - entirely to be trusted. Nor was I deliberately trying to be provocative. Let’s face it, plain human idiocy stuffed in a closet of political correctness gets no less stultifying with being aired. But I beg you, nevertheless, fellow-aliens, to give a moment of your time to this particular post, and to try and stick with it to the end.
To begin with, I concede readily every person’s right to his own opinion on the merits of any topic they’re appraising. Needless to say. But I do reserve the right to resent very emphatically any climate change sceptic who writes from an ivory tower. Indeed, I note, that there's still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the warming trend. And I hate to call anyone a liar. Fact is, I also humbly acknowledge the intriguing scientific case that the world is in a global thaw after the last Ice Age, rather than warming to 6,5 billion people putting out 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
That’s fine by me. That and the filth...
Nor am I about to embark on an asinine harangue about buggeroff benefits of carbon capture technology. I really couldn't give a monkey's. And I don’t care tuppence either about anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons or impending ozone depletion. That's clean over my head, if you don’t mind the pun. But what I do care about - the joy of sex apart - is not getting mugged, stabbed, run over, poisoned, asphyxiated, raped, or urinated on, the moment I step out of doors. Frankly, you don’t need chlorofluorocarbon-science to capture the true chaotic horror of the Biblical admonition “go forth and multiply.” The countryside is humanity’s scrap yard. We are in each other's faces as never before. Humans are compressing the Earth's Lebensraum with no hint of the horror to come. Gaia’s demographic bounty, certainly no less than every bit of contaminated, tarmac-fouled, urbanised, poisonous, gasoline-and-pesticide polluted countryside, richly attests to that. And what are we doing? We feature in a comedy that aims to remind people to turn off their lights?
Lord give me strength...!
There are now almost seven billion of us on this blue and fragile planet. There will be nine billion in less than forty years' time. What happens when people start arguing, not about lightbulbs but food and water? And there’s no doubt they will. What are we going to do when people start arriving on our shores fleeing not political persecution but environmental catastrophe?
Shoot them, I suppose.
There are more than 11m abandoned children in India alone, where in a growing number of vast urban slums newborn babies are being dumped anonymously in cots placed outside orphanages. Perversely - in an extraordinary subversion of UN population policy - in some Eurocountries, such as France, governments have introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children. The Spanish government awards £ 2,000 to mothers on the birth of each child. China, by contrast - and this is where I can’t help approving, callous bitch that I am - executes more than 10,000 people a year (albeit the wrong sort). Obviously, they’ve seen too much of it to have any respect for human life. In fact, the Chinese government has moved away from economic incentives for children and awards punishment, instead. And not just punishment. Babies are snuffed out. Or abandoned at birth on rubbish heaps, doorsteps, bus stops, railway stations and hospitals.
In Britain they live in a fool's paradise
An English mum was aiming for her eighth child last year. Set to become the most prolific surrogate mother in the UK by carrying other couple's babies. A number of British mothers have even frozen their eggs so their infertile daughters can use them to give birth. Others are selling them. And not only eggs. The government is to sanction fatherless families by giving single women and lesbian couples an entitlement to fertility treatment. Dozens of gay British men - who for fear of a libel action I hesitate to call parasitic - have paid about £33,000 to create a child of their chosen sex on an IVF programme for two-father (sic) families. Eureka: a 67-year-old woman became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to twins after having travelled to America for IVF.
We are an astonishing nation!
Here we have an advanced technological species failing under the weight of idiotic affirmative action, bogus equal opportunity, endemic kleptocracy, escalating traffic congestion, and chaotic maladministration, while trying to save the world with low-energy light bulbs, solar panels, windmills, and compulsory loft-insulations. No wonder, the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies showed no particular interest in what, clearly, it assumes to be a superannuated and elusive fragment of a declining terrestrial race, switching off the lights with a feeling of foreboding in their hearts, though obviously no brains in their heads.
Truth to tell, I myself have few virtues - my incurable passion for adorable fat little babies apart - but I do know that population management, not carbon manipulation, is our only shot at survival.
What this pathetic, mendacious effort in carbon capture technology leads to is simply a decline in futuristic and scientific imagination, and perceptions of a coming new dark age rather than visions of the conquest of space. The introduction of mediaeval windmill machinery instead of nuclear fusion technology, brutalised fossil expertise, and an atrophy of cosmic creativity, while lacking the elegance and conditional structures essential for evolutionary thinking, to say nothing of the failure to build highly optimised conceptual frameworks in space - the whole point of evolution and the basis of a higher-order human identity.
‘Ever fewer climb with me up ever higher mountains,’ Nietzsche once wrote, but for God‘s sake, homo sapiens, turn on the lights...
Dreamy
9 comments:
Good to have you back, Selena - and it does rather look as if your dark visions are coming to pass, especially with regard to food. However, I do wonder if it's simple population pressure as such that's the root of it, rather than all the various forces that have led people in 'developing countries' away from subsistence farming. The fact that Africa is a net importer of food - to the tune of £28 billion, I think - surely isn't the result of population pressure as such, but of what has been done, and is still being done, to Africa.
Thanks Nige, for popping by. Tried to post on your blog this morning (and afternoon), but alas. Didn't take??!!
Is it me, or the site? I wonder!
I'm glad you mentionend Africa. I have covered your very points on a previous occasion: AGONY
i feel this is true, that overpopulation is going to be a serious problem in the very near future. It already means, in England, that much of the countryside has been paved over with hideous suburbs and seemingly endless conurbations.
One answer would be to sterilise people. It raises unpleasant Nazi echoes but if it's either that or have universal mass murder, too many rats in a small cage with too little food & water and space, well, then forced sterilization starts to look like a good idea.
Population in my bit of the countryside, (E. Lincs) is actually declining - or would be but for the influx of migrant farmworkers displacing Brits who are now paid by the Govt to sit at home watching TV instead of picking caulies.
But I'm with Selena on this. Sooner or later, there's going to be too much pressure on Gaia and she'll turn round and bite. No need for pre-emptive action, war and famine will do the job when the time comes. I can only be glad I've lived during what's probably going to be proved the most luxurious (progfligate) age of all.
war and famine will do the job when the time comes....
...no doubt about it!
Already, the addictive habit of fundamentalist suicide is being acquired in a wave of atrocities. On a religious pretext admittedly, but for a cause that is inherently demographic. Humans are being turned into murdering demons. Here the distinction between warfare and terrorism has narrowed to nothing. Truth to tell, warfare has become a peacetime reality in what will almost certainly be proved the most progfligate age of all.
Make the best of it, folks!
Oooops, Elberry - sterilization?Somewhat drastic, don’t you think!
I was merely hoping that demographics would begin to enter popular politics. It beggars belief, but I have yet to see a single “official” representation of the carbon catastrophe that includes a solitary mention of the only thing that - in the long run - can actually prevent it: population management.
Demographic congestions has been relegated to a footnote by almost universal connivance. Unsustainable population growth takes place under a kind of political anaesthesia. Indeed, there seems no way of separating economy from demography, or any willingness to attempt to do so. Nor is there a single monetary and economic system that does not require demographic growth.
Hence, there has, in my opinion, never been a bleaker rendition of the orderly management of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Death on the Instalment-Plan.
Dreamy
Selena, it’s so good to have you back. Not that I’ve noticed that you were gone if one is to assume that Mutley is right and that we’re one and the same. However, I must take you task about this rant about population control. How can you write about the subject without mentioning the daughter of my next-door neighbour? She’s currently on her fourth or fifth child, via the sixth or seventh father (I’ve lost count), and clearly intends to have more (in both the maternal and biblical sense). The poor woman’s thighs are worn to the bone and I fear that it is my manly musk, wafting as it does over the garden fence, which is the real cause of the unnatural fecundity of the women in the neighbourhood.
I’m looking for advice, Selena. What am I to do?
Romantic looking, perfectly-lashed, cool grey-blue eyes, the healthiest of complexions, and a full and perfect-sized smile, you Richard Madeley have the irresistible allure of a WWI flying ace. Everything about you magnetizes. You're more or less irresistible. It creates awful resentment, though, of which you seem quite unaware.
Hence: there is only one thing to do: take out your manly musk and put in in her palm. It is the last, and indeed only, resort of the magnificently endowed.
Your jealous companion and devotee, Selena xxx
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