What did I say?
So my husband asked me how many hits I got today and I said I dunno. Then I clicked over to my stats counter and saw this! Who are you people? 108 people came over took a look and ran for the door? What the heckle jo jeckel? Now, I'm not one to ask for comments and my life and sanity is not depending on how popular my blog is, but geez! At least say hi or tell me that you were here and now you're going somewhere bigger, better and far less annoying....or don't, either way.
7 comments:
sorry--- i was here. Shoulda said hi before! I am not always the best commenter
Mary, mom to many
Lol. Me. I was here. I can't remember how I found your blog but I have been enjoying your posts. Your 'Beds for Sale' could have been written about my house.
(weirdo in the corner waving her hand)
I'm still checking in - though I'm embarassed to comment now because I realized that though I had heard of you from another blog and been reading yours because I appreciated your sense of humor and therefore felt like I knew you...um, I'm a total stranger to you and I probably looked like a total stalker.
April,
I comment often, but I stop by more often. So I probably skew your counter results a good bit.
Sorry, April, that I never say anything! I just love reading your blog, and you kind of give me a connection to "back home." Did you find those jeans yet?
Guilty as charged. I pop in, read, and run. Usually I have an 11 month old pulling on the mouse cord so I have to be speedy. :) Today she is at home with her momma so I can post for hoooouuuurrrsssss...
www.vhemt.org - The Stork Video for your edifiction and enlightenment.
"The bottom line for our species is that because of population growth and the fivefold economic expansion since 1950, the environmental demands of our economic system now overtax the available environmental space of the planet. This has brought us to a historic transitional point in the evolutionary development of our species from living in a world of open frontiers to living in a full world - in a mere historical instant. We now have the option of adjusting ourselves to this new reality or destroying our ecological niche and suffering the consequences.” – Omega
“The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realized that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. After all, it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment.”
- Clive Ponting
“The prevailing view holds that a stable population that does not tax the environment’s “carrying capacity” and would be sustainable indefinitely, and that this state of equilibrium can be achieved through a combination of birth control, conservation, and reliance on “renewable” resources. Unfortunately, worldwide implementation of a rigorous program of birth control is politically impossible. Conservation is futile as long as population continues to rise. And no resources are truly renewable.” - David Price (Energy and Human Evolution)
“It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develop a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spreeead to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern; a virus. The human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague” - The Matrix (Film)
“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.” - Pardot Kynes (First Planetologist of Arrakis)
“POPULATION GROWTH DESTROYS DEMOCRACY. 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?" 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.” - Isaac Asimov on the Bill Maher Show 1989
“We are killing the planet as a life support system. And we may have gone so far already that there's no recovery from it. The game may be over. Just to cheer you up. I think the earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, and it's high time it did. My goodness, we are a disease on the face of this planet. You know, after two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Roman games, The Spanish Inquisition, and the burning of women in public squares. It's time we got out of here and I think we ought to become "syphilis with a conscience" and stop reproducing.” – Kurt Vonnegut on the Bill Maher Show 2005
“The road to the future leads us smack into the wall and we simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. The wall is a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species… Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.” - Jacques Cousteau (1910 - 1997)
"The damage people cause to the planet is a function of demographics, it is equal to the degree of development. One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangaladeshes. The damage is directly linked to consumption. Our society is turning toward more and needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer.... This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it." - Jacques Cousteau (1910 - 1997)
“A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.” - Senator Gaylord Anton Nelson (1916 - 2005) Founder of Earth Day
“It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for “natural methods” of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.” - Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“I question whether technological growth can keep us ahead of the consumption wolf pack. Particularly if we're trying to export a consumption-based economy to the whole world. At some point we need to say enough is enough.” - Kurt Yeager (President and CEO of the industry-funded Electrical Power Research Institute)
“Urban growth is a pyramid scheme. A few people make a killing, some make a living at it, the many pay for it and the planet is dying for it." - Andy Kerr
“We are being bred for slavery by the corporate elite. We are their cattle. Perched outside the limit of our sight, they are feeding on us, from birth to death.” – They Live (John Carpenter Film)
“Our problem results from acting like cowboys on a limitless frontier when in truth we inhabit a living spaceship with a finely balanced life-support system." – David C. Korton
"Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population?" - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado; World Population Balance Board of Advisors
"Which is the greater danger - nuclear warfare or the population explosion? The latter absolutely! To bring about nuclear war, someone has to DO something; someone has to press a button. To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values-there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally - and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing."- Dr. Isaac Asimov, biochemist and science writer (in this 1966 interview he predicted that world population would reach 6 billion around 2000. Most leaders dismissed his prediction as outrageous. Population passed 6 billion in 1999.)
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity" and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons. - The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin (1968)
Altruism evolved as a means to a selfish end and selfishness, not altruism, ultimately drives our behavior. Over multiple generations it is the gene that is selected for rather than the individual, group or species. Genes that code for selfish strategies are always the most stable. However, we, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. As we noted, we do so in a small way every time we decide to use contraception. There is no reason that we should not rebel in a large way too. We alone on Earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. - Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“What I know of Man was written long ago set down by the greatest ape of all, Our Law Giver. Cornelius, come here, reach into my pocket, read too him the 29th Scroll, 6th Verse:
“Beware the beast man for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among god’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yeah, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle liar for he is the harvenger of death.”
Dr. Zaius: I found nothing in the cave to alter that conception of man and I still live by its injunction.” - Planet Of The Apes (Film)
“People do not go to hell after death. The designers and builders of hell are living human beings on Earth. The designs and buildings are almost completed. It is becoming difficult to add more hell.” - Tamo-san
“There need not be any more people in a world than one can get to know in a lifetime.” – Zacharus
“But why then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?” - Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
"Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth." - World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, signed by 1600 senior scientists from 70 countries, including 102 Nobel Prize laureates
"What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. It is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. It is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. It overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable." - James Madison, 1791, U.S. President
"When the family is small, whatever little they have they are able to share. There is peace."
- Philip Njuguna, pastor, Nairobi, Kenya
"Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation." - Helen Keller, world-renowned deaf and blind author and lecturer
"It is not prudent to rely on science and technology alone to solve problems created by rapid population growth, wasteful resource consumption and harmful human practices." - U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society of London, joint statement
"If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers." - B.F. Skinner, psychologist and author
"'Smart growth' destroys the environment. 'Dumb growth' destroys the environment. The only difference is that 'smart growth' does it with good taste. It's like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado; World Population Balance Board of Advisors
"We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning." - Lester Milbrath, professor emeritus and author, Learning to Think Environmentally (While there is Still Time)
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado; World Population Balance Board of Advisors
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