Pt 2.
Gunny Dye & Harry Solberg’s ‘God’:
Sam ‘Wrecker’ Rome
Gunny Dye & Harry Solberg’s ‘God’:
Sam ‘Wrecker’ Rome
Overpopulation:
Urinetown, MuseLetter
Isaac Asimov’s Bathroom Population Theory, Energy Bulletin
Pakistan’s Population Bulge
Déjà vu: Latest Surveillance Leaves Nothing to Chance, Winds
Reinventing Eve’s Xmas Collapse, Kunstler
YEW-R-IN TOWN
Urinetown is a funny, smart, Tony Award-winning musical. Its action takes place in a city of the future where, as the result of severe and ongoing water shortages, private toilets have been banned. A giant corporation, the Urine Good Company (UGC for short), is in charge of all pay-per-pee services.
The gradually escalating price is still affordable to a well-off few, but teeming masses of poor have to scrape together piles of spare change every day in order to take care of their private business. This, announces policeman-narrator Officer Lockstock, is “the central conceit of the show.”
The cast includes a greedy villain (Caldwell B. Cladwell, the CEO of UGC), a courageous hero
(Bobby Strong, a poor lad who works for UGC collecting fees at a down-scale public toilet), and a big-hearted heroine (Hope, Cladwell’s daughter). Bobby and Hope fall in love; Strong leads a rebellion against UGC; the “terrorists” take Hope hostage. She sings the uplifting “Follow Your Heart,” assuring herself and everyone else that love will win the day, but every line is tongue-in-cheek.
Though Bobby is soon killed by UGC minions, Hope manages to gain ultimate power, disposing of her father and telling her followers that the time of deprivation is over. In the last scene, she sings the fervent anthem “I See a River,” envisioning a new era when all can pee as much as they like, whenever they like, wherever they like. However, by the end of the scene the entire cast—excepting the narrator—has perished in an ecological catastrophe.
Officer Lockstock’s epilogue tells the sorry tale: Of course, it wasn’t long before the water became silty, brackish, and then dried up altogether. Cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption. . . . Hope, however, chose to ignore the warning signs, choosing instead to bask in the people’s love as long as it lasted.
Hope eventually joined her father in a manner not quite so gentle. As for the people of this town? Well, they did the best they could. But they were prepared for the world they inherited . . . .
For when the water dried up, they recognized their town for the first time for what it really was. What it was always waiting to be . . .
The Chorus sings: “This is Urinetown! Always it’s been Urinetown! This place it’s called Urinetown!” And with their unison cry of “Hail Malthus!”, the curtain falls.
The entire play is a send-up of the musical comedy genre, and the audience goes home laughing at gags and humming memorable tunes. Many reviewers have emphasized the infectious zaniness of the play, seemingly missing its explicit message (that idealism and good intentions are insufficient responses to problems of population pressure and resource depletion). Maybe that’s just as well: Urinetown succeeds so well as comedy and theater that even people utterly immune to its insights still have a good time; thus more people are drawn to see it, including those who do “get it.”
So what’s the significance of the play’s last line, “Hail Malthus”?
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In a 1989 interview, Bill Moyers asked Isaac Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?” Asimov replied:
It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom.
You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to stay as long as you want for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution.
But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, Aren’t you through yet? and so on.
In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]. Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.
Urinetown, indeed.
So the population reduction scenario with the best chance of success has to be Darwinian in all its aspects, with none of the sentimentality that shrouded the second half of the 20th Century in a dense fog of political correctness. . . .
The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state. Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage.
The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.
The scenario is: Immigration is banned.
Unauthorised arrives are treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.
In a reply comment, also posted on the website under the title “Triumph of the Will(iam),” writer “guamanian” opines: William Stanton’s Essay “Öl und Volk” is best read in the original, preferably out loud in a shrill Austrian accent with suitable stiff-armed gestures and much goose-stepping. . . . Invoking Victorian-parlour Social Darwinism, and railing against “the Western world’s unintelligent devotion to . . . human rights and the sanctity of human life,” Stanton presents as a solution to energy descent the classic Fascist (or Corporatist) State, in which the powerless individual serves the homeland, for the greater good of, if not all, then at least of some.
11/29/2007 12:00:00 AM
Other observers blame Pakistan's domestic chaos on religious leaders preaching hatred. But why would Pakistanis respond to radical rhetoric at a time when prosperity is improving their quality of life?
However, prosperity itself may stoke the fires of civil conflict when it is accompanied by a "youth bulge"—a phenomenon that occurs when 30 to 40 percent of nation's males are between the ages of 15 and 29.
Over the last 80 years, Pakistan's population exploded from 20 million in 1927 to 165 million today. If the United States had grown at the same rate as Pakistan, instead of 300 million the U.S. population would now be 960 million.
For millions of young men, ambitions and hopes for a successful future cannot be realized. Attractive jobs matching ever rising ambitions are hard to find. Today, three or four Pakistani boys compete for one place in society, or for the property left by their father. Angry, frustrated young men are easily recruited into radical groups and terror organizations.
"It is sometimes said that there is no food problem, only a population problem. This is an oversimplification -- there would be food problems in many developing countries even if their populations were suddenly much reduced. But, unquestionably, the severe undernourishment of two-fifths of mankind is attributable, in major part, to the handicap of too many mouths to feed. And the number grows daily."
Touted as a significant breakthrough, especially in the area of search and rescue involving such as bombed buildings and structural collapses due to earthquakes, the device would be able to ascertain the presence of victims invisible due to concrete rubble. The advantage, says its inventor, is that the chip would be able to tell, by the biological signature, if the victim were alive or even whether it was human or otherwise--a dog, for instance.
As with every new and amazing invention, there is always a segment of the government that possesses a consummate talent for the covert misuse of it. Every living biological organism, it is well known, has its own peculiar genetic and bioenergetic signature, much the same as a physical fingerprint. The aforementioned device is capable of taking great advantage of that "bio-fingerprint."
If this scenario, to some, appears to proceed from a Buck Rogers comic strip or the pen of George Orwell, it should be noted that surveillance and tracking technologies by government agencies has been taking a series of quantum leaps.
"During the Cold War," the document says, "the most strategically significant form of conflict short of war--then called 'low-intensity conflict'--was revolutionary insurgency in the Third World." This, the document claims, was the result of Maoist type involvement that "sought to overthrow fragile, pro-Western regimes. It also makes the ominous prediction that "while war or near-war may be no more common than in past decades, general, low-level violence will be pervasive."
"The Gulf War," the authors submit, "was widely seen as a foretaste of RMA [Revolution in Military Affairs] warfare, offering quick victory with limited casualties. As a result, most attention has been on the opportunities provided by RMA rather than its risks, costs, and unintended side effects." (emphasis supplied)
In reference to U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs and other developing nations, Metz and Kievit candidly acknowledge that, "admittedly no Third World insurgency directly endangered the United States..." which apparently was no deterrent to U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of those nations.
Among those things mentioned as requiring "conflict short of war" is "peace enforcement" and the ability to protect American lives anywhere in the world by keeping very close electronic tabs on their whereabouts and activities. An equally portentous claim, however, is that "behavior modification is a key component of peace enforcement." As outlined in two previous WINDS articles, the United States' doctrine of "behavior modification" as taught to leaders of third world nations has previously included instruction on terrorizing or even torturing those whose behavior the U.S. desired to modify. (See America's School of Death and Who are the Real Terrorists?).
Supposedly under the category of "only to be used voluntarily":
"In the near future every American at risk could be equipped with an electronic individual position locator device (IPLD). The device, derived from the electronic bracelet used to control some criminal offenders or parolees, would continuously inform a central data bank of the individuals' locations.
The biggest difference, though, between Soviet Russia and America today is the psychology of the people. Soviet citizens were prepared for trouble by lifetimes of comparative hardship. I won't even go into the Stalin terror and the agony of World War Two. In more recent Soviet times, money meant little in a system without real shopping -- but maintaining personal networks based on mutual trust or strength-of-character was the greatest asset in acquiring life's necessities.
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Sam Smith, Progressive Review (Ecology & Nature Undernews)
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POPULATION, ECONOMICS, CONFLICT, RACISM & RELIGION
AN EXAMPLE: POPULATION AND PAKISTAN:
11/29/2007 12:00:00 AM
PAKISTAN'S GROWING WAVE of internal terror that led Pervez Musharraf to assume dictatorial powers on November 3 is commonly blamed on the country's poverty. Such an assessment, however, is not supported by the facts. etween 1979 and 2007, per capita income in Pakistan jumped from 600 PPP-$ to 2,600.
Other observers blame Pakistan's domestic chaos on religious leaders preaching hatred. But why would Pakistanis respond to radical rhetoric at a time when prosperity is improving their quality of life?
However, prosperity itself may stoke the fires of civil conflict when it is accompanied by a "youth bulge"—a phenomenon that occurs when 30 to 40 percent of nation's males are between the ages of 15 and 29.
Over the last 80 years, Pakistan's population exploded from 20 million in 1927 to 165 million today. If the United States had grown at the same rate as Pakistan, instead of 300 million the U.S. population would now be 960 million.
For millions of young men, ambitions and hopes for a successful future cannot be realized. Attractive jobs matching ever rising ambitions are hard to find. Today, three or four Pakistani boys compete for one place in society, or for the property left by their father. Angry, frustrated young men are easily recruited into radical groups and terror organizations.
To them not only the spoils of victory but even the honors of a hero's death become an option.
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‘Birth rates must come down more quickly or current death rates must go up.
There is no other way.’
~ Robert McNamara, Worldbank Pres, 1970 ~
~ Robert McNamara, Worldbank Pres, 1970 ~
"It is sometimes said that there is no food problem, only a population problem. This is an oversimplification -- there would be food problems in many developing countries even if their populations were suddenly much reduced. But, unquestionably, the severe undernourishment of two-fifths of mankind is attributable, in major part, to the handicap of too many mouths to feed. And the number grows daily."
~ World Population: The Silent Explosion' - US Department of State. ~
In 1969 [Robert] McNamara's [Secretary of Defense] speech to the Governors of the University of Notre Dame cited the population explosion as more significant than the danger of nuclear war. "Casting its shadow over all this scene is the mushrooming cloud of the population explosion"
In 1969 [Robert] McNamara's [Secretary of Defense] speech to the Governors of the University of Notre Dame cited the population explosion as more significant than the danger of nuclear war. "Casting its shadow over all this scene is the mushrooming cloud of the population explosion"
October 2, 1970:
'Robert McNamara, [now] World Bank President, made a speech to international bankers in which he identified population growth as "the gravest issue that the world faces over the years ahead." In his speech McNamara argued that population growth was leading to instability, that a 10 billion world population would not be "controllable." Said McNamara, "It is not a world that any of us would want to live in. Is such a world inevitable? It is not sure but there are two possible ways by which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way." -- ~ The Phoenix Letter ~
‘Root Cause Of Terrorism Is Overpopulation’
- Vice Pres. G.H.W. Bush (Snr), 1986. -
"The causes and implications of population growth in America were cogently presented in the definitive report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (The Rockefeller Commission) in 1972. According to John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the U.S. Catholic Bishops threatened President Nixon politically, and bowing to their pressure he disavowed this report.
- Vice Pres. G.H.W. Bush (Snr), 1986. -
"The causes and implications of population growth in America were cogently presented in the definitive report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (The Rockefeller Commission) in 1972. According to John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the U.S. Catholic Bishops threatened President Nixon politically, and bowing to their pressure he disavowed this report.
"Arguably the most authoritative work on terrorism was the February 1986 Report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism, chaired by Vice President George Bush, Sr. Yet no mention of the study has appeared in the press since September 11,
2001. This report concludes that the root cause of terrorism is overpopulation."
2001. This report concludes that the root cause of terrorism is overpopulation."
~ The Public Report of the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism, from The Center for Research on Population and Security ~
"National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200 was the definitive interagency study of world population growth and its implications for U.S. and global security, requested by President Nixon in 1974. It concluded that sustained rapid world population growth had become a danger of the highest magnitude, calling for urgent measures to avoid severe damage to world economic, political and ecological systems, and to our humanitarian values.”
~ The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, by Stephen D. Mumford, Ph.D.
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PROBLEM SOLVING:
OLIGARCHICAL RESPONSIBLE TECHNOTRONIC FASCISM
VS.
‘DEMOCKERY’ DISCLOSURE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
OLIGARCHICAL RESPONSIBLE TECHNOTRONIC FASCISM
VS.
‘DEMOCKERY’ DISCLOSURE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
Latest Surveillance Leaves Nothing to Chance
Winds
ABC News recently aired a story about a high-tech inventor who has produced a type of radar device destined to be reduced in size to a microchip. Projected to eventually cost less than fifty cents a copy, the invention, the ABC report claimed and demonstrated, is capable of "seeing" through walls and detecting biological signs of life on the other side such as heartbeat and respiration.
Touted as a significant breakthrough, especially in the area of search and rescue involving such as bombed buildings and structural collapses due to earthquakes, the device would be able to ascertain the presence of victims invisible due to concrete rubble. The advantage, says its inventor, is that the chip would be able to tell, by the biological signature, if the victim were alive or even whether it was human or otherwise--a dog, for instance.
As with every new and amazing invention, there is always a segment of the government that possesses a consummate talent for the covert misuse of it. Every living biological organism, it is well known, has its own peculiar genetic and bioenergetic signature, much the same as a physical fingerprint. The aforementioned device is capable of taking great advantage of that "bio-fingerprint."
Imagine, for instance, the ability to use the microchip radar to first map an individual's biological signature and then deposit the digitized information of that unique signature into a computer database. This could be done, for instance, while passing through the ubiquitous metal detectors in any airport. Once that signature is on file, it is not an unreasonable stretch of logic to imagine an unmarked van carrying the radar chip and a copy of the database passing any home or building with the ability to not only determine that there are people occupying the dwelling, but who they are--and--whether or not they should, according to the officials conducting the "survey", even be there.
If this scenario, to some, appears to proceed from a Buck Rogers comic strip or the pen of George Orwell, it should be noted that surveillance and tracking technologies by government agencies has been taking a series of quantum leaps.
In a publication issued by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army's War College, entitled, The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War much reference is made to developed technology aimed at not only detection but tracking and identification.
The work, released in June of this year, is authored by Steven Metz, Ph.D., Associate Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College and co-authored by James Kievit.
The work, published in booklet form, details current problems faced by the military of the world's only remaining super power, and includes a fictional scenario that takes place in the second decade of the twenty-first century--approximately 2010.
PERVASIVE VIOLENCE PREDICTED
"During the Cold War," the document says, "the most strategically significant form of conflict short of war--then called 'low-intensity conflict'--was revolutionary insurgency in the Third World." This, the document claims, was the result of Maoist type involvement that "sought to overthrow fragile, pro-Western regimes. It also makes the ominous prediction that "while war or near-war may be no more common than in past decades, general, low-level violence will be pervasive."
"The Gulf War," the authors submit, "was widely seen as a foretaste of RMA [Revolution in Military Affairs] warfare, offering quick victory with limited casualties. As a result, most attention has been on the opportunities provided by RMA rather than its risks, costs, and unintended side effects." (emphasis supplied)
In reference to U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs and other developing nations, Metz and Kievit candidly acknowledge that, "admittedly no Third World insurgency directly endangered the United States..." which apparently was no deterrent to U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of those nations.
Among those things mentioned as requiring "conflict short of war" is "peace enforcement" and the ability to protect American lives anywhere in the world by keeping very close electronic tabs on their whereabouts and activities. An equally portentous claim, however, is that "behavior modification is a key component of peace enforcement." As outlined in two previous WINDS articles, the United States' doctrine of "behavior modification" as taught to leaders of third world nations has previously included instruction on terrorizing or even torturing those whose behavior the U.S. desired to modify. (See America's School of Death and Who are the Real Terrorists?).
Behavior modification, by practical U.S. definition, encompasses everything from inducing a slight change in ideas to having no behavior at all. The latter is commonly referred to as death.
WE WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU
Where do these new surveillance and tracking techniques enter into the Strategic Studies presentation? Their publication discusses contingencies in dealing with threats to Americans, especially nonmilitary personnel, during heightened international tensions and times of impending conflict, including hostage-taking possibilities. In cases where civilian personnel could be potentially involved in a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) or hostage-taking crisis, plans have been proposed for the tracking and identification of "victims".
Supposedly under the category of "only to be used voluntarily":
"In the near future every American at risk could be equipped with an electronic individual position locator device (IPLD). The device, derived from the electronic bracelet used to control some criminal offenders or parolees, would continuously inform a central data bank of the individuals' locations.
Eventually such a device could be permanently implanted under the skin, with automatic remote activation either upon departure from U.S. territory (while passing through the security screening system at the airport, for example) or by transmission of a NEO alert code to areas of conflict. Implantation would help preclude removal of the device (although, of course, some terrorists might be willing to remove a portion of the hostage's body if they knew where the device was implanted). The IPLD could also act as a form of IFFN (identification friend, foe or neutral) if U.S. military personnel were equipped with appropriate challenge/response devices. Finally, such a device might eventually serve, like Dick Tracy's wrist radio, as a two-way communication channel permitting the NEO notification to be done covertly."
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Reinventing Eve’s Xmas Collapse
Dmitry Orlov's publisher sent me the galley proof to get a blurb for the dust-jacket, and I'll furnish one in short order because Reinventing Collapse is an exceptionally clear, authoritative, witty, and original view of our prospects. The thesis is that the United States is headed for troubles as broad and deep as the ones that brought down the Soviet system in Russia, though we will get there via a somewhat different route. Orlov has been in the privileged position of living under both systems at critical times, and the parallels are striking, but the differences even more so.
The Soviet experience was a collapse of consensual reality as much as of economy. Nobody could continue to support the credibility of a one-party, centrally-planned, "command" economy best represented by the joke: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." An economy in which nobody had any real stake other than ideological finally ground ignominiously to a halt.
Once the state surrendered its authority, the society was stripped of assets. The social safety net dissolved. A lot of people on the margins slipped through the cracks and died. Eventually, the Russian economy (and government) reorganized on a different basis -- largely because its remaining oil resources and annual production exceed its domestic consumption. So, this reorganized new oil-exporting state, with its shocking poles of extreme wealth and poverty, will go on for a while until the oil is gone, and then it will face more transformations.The comparison with the American situation is chilling.
The biggest difference, though, between Soviet Russia and America today is the psychology of the people. Soviet citizens were prepared for trouble by lifetimes of comparative hardship. I won't even go into the Stalin terror and the agony of World War Two. In more recent Soviet times, money meant little in a system without real shopping -- but maintaining personal networks based on mutual trust or strength-of-character was the greatest asset in acquiring life's necessities.
Americans didn't need political dictators to whip us into line -- we volunteered to become a nation of TV zombies. Our fantasies are arguably more disabling than the mere cognitive dissonance that reigned in Soviet times. Liberty itself has allowed the American public to freely choose passivity, illusion, and incompetence. Anyway, when it comes out in 2008, Dmitry Orlov's book will deserve the attention of whatever thoughtful people remain in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
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