The Coming Malthusian Catastrophe

After such a glowing post about the bounties in American supermarkets, I feel like I should take it back down to earth, as the coming crisis of feeding the world becomes serious.

Let me introduce you to my buddy Thomas Malthus. Malthus predicted that throughout history food production is cyclical, from agriculture boom to massive famine. When more food is produced, the population of the world jumps, when the food produced can't match the population spurt, there is famine, and the cycle begins anew.

In the beginning of the 20th century, we faced such a trap, yet with the extraordinary work of men like Norman Borlaug, technology prevailed, and the famine was nearly averted. What happened in the wake of this was a world population that jumped by a whopping FOUR BILLION.

FOUR BILLION.

This cannot hold, and the trap will catch us by the neck. What we will be living through may be the greatest famine in the history of Earth. There is no simple way to say it, but there will be starvation not just across the world, but in America too. We will go hungry, and our personal experiences will be of immense suffering.

This is coming at a time where the Earth is warming, environmental degradation is rampant, and governments across the world are closing down with an iron fist... including ours.

The coming decades will be horrifying times for us all. You can bet on it.

The Warm Embrace of Pax Americana

Last night I was at Wegman's for three things: Rabbit Food, Minced Garlic, and DVD returns. I was there for at least a half hour... never had I felt so at peace with consumerism.

Everything was so perfect. Walking through the bakery, all the earthy tones took me back to a time when I couldn't tell how long a baker has been "serving the community" by looking at his/her name tag. I'm glad I can tell now, it means a lot to me to know how long they've been steadily employed, but not that much.

Everything is so neat and clean, each aisle is completely sterile and screaming with brightly colored cans, bags, and boxes of necessities. You don't have to pick the forbidden fruit from the tree of Eden, Wegman's did it for you and its $1 off if you have your shopper's club card. On top of that, they offer it in three dozen flavors! What a country!

All of a sudden I can understand how people could be at peace with all of this, it really is the closest a giant warehouse with shelves of food will come to being art. Usually when I walk into a Wegman's my senses are on full alert as if I'm walking into the house of a person that I hate but my friend likes him and he's loaded and generous so it makes it easier to tolerate. I'm always watching the cameras hanging from the ceiling, the microphones picking up shopper chatter... and the possibility of plain-clothed security guards that caused me to sneer at a menopausal woman just wondering if I could direct her to the soy sauce.

This time the occipital lobe was pulsing, taking in everything in all its American glory. Mmmm, garlic... So many choices, wasn't this cheaper just a few months ago. Aww shucks, who cares? Everyone working here wants to help me get everything I want with a bright smile.
Walking through the cheese section, John Fogerty's voice leaked out of the speakers asking me if I have ever seen the rain.

Usually, but not today.

American Redundant Consumerism

I wanted to buy some cheese.

Well...... The store has cheese in blocks, wedges, crumbles, shredded, finely shredded, cubes, some fat, no fat, regular fat, mexican mixes, pizza mixes, other sorts'a mixes, real coloring, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, all-natural flavoring, with anti-caking agents, without anti-caking agents, organic, local, local organic, store brand, and all different sizes.

I bought a block of some pepper jack and shredded it myself.

I am not anti-semitic, but I hate the Israeli state with a passion unmatched.

I am not anti-semitic, but I hate the Israeli state with a passion unmatched. Seriously, but I'm not anti-semitic.

I feel like I'm going to have to write that I'm not anti-semitic between every paragraph because for some reason whenever I talk to Israel being a rogue state committing atrocities on the Palestinians, I'm being anti-semitic.

Now rather than give a history lesson I'm just going to say this: Palestine is the way it is only because of Israel's constant military presence and manipulation of Palestinian lives
in every way imaginable. It's disgusting.

I recognize Israel's right to exist like any other nation, but I can't support their policies in the middle east as well as the manipulation of our own foreign policy. If they want to do these things, I can't stop them, but since they are doing it with my tax dollars I must object.

Great Fictional Conversations Indicative of a Much Larger Problem, Part I

I was watching five minutes of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," you know, that one where the Earth freezes over and everything seems really bleak but Dennis Quaid is there and it's gonna be O.K.! movie.

Well, if my synopsis is wrong, don't heckle me about it, I didn't dare watch it nor try to justify the film's existence with googling it. The five minutes I saw on basic cable gave me an insight into the largest logical fallacy of a generation: The age of the Ad Hominem. This quote is from a scene where they are trying to find books to throw on the fire to keep warm, and they are scouring a giant library with a cart. Elsa picks Nietzsche.

Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We can't burn that! He's one of the most important thinkers in 19th Century!
Elsa: Please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.
Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!
Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.

Besides the fact that Nietzsche would want you to burn Nietzsche, what the hell is Elsa's point? Who cares if he was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister, he still had a mind that influenced Western thought trememdously, to say the least. Some of the greatest minds we have ever known come from lousy people, but we should be alright with that because these people have given us something wonderful. Albert Einstein was a terrible father and husband, but this simple patent clerk gave us the Theory of Relativity. The founding fathers owned slaves, but they were still an enlightened group of men determined to preserve liberty in the best way possible (and for those who want to talk about their voting qualifications, they had good reason for that too). John Lennon, FDR, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few that pop into my head, were never good members of society, but influenced that society to the point where their names will continue to echo long after their time.

We see this everywhere in our society today. We had a president impeached not because he lied us into a war, tortured innocents in the name of national security, favored big business interests in a time of a global environmental crisis, or used the Constitution as a jizz rag, but because he lied about getting a blowjob from an intern. Let that sink in until you cry, and when you're finished send your American flag to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I hear the Executive washroom ran out of toilet paper again.

What bothers me so much about this is that Jeremy's reaction is so typical. He plays into the game and therefore has no choice but to lose. If someone is not exactly the greatest person, there's only so much you can do to sway a moral argument in the favor of the "immoral." All he had to do was say "So what? You're no saint either, bitch. What God are you trying to please, 'cause he's sooo dead."

... Does this sound familiar?
Supposed Patriot: "Why won't you support our troops!?"
Assumed Traitor: "We DO! Really! we just don't think they..."
Supposed Patriot:"How dare you make them think their mission isn't important, this is America! They're defending America."
Assumed Traitor: "Well, maybe, but maybe they shouldn't be in Iraq, there's no proof of WMD's, Saddam Hussein has no links to Al-Qaeda and he's completely inert as a military power, and maybe we might fall into a quagmire like Cheney warned us about back in 1994."
Supposed Patriot: "Saddam is part of the Axis of Evil, he's a bad man, so says The Decider."

Next time someone tells you "I'm voting for ____ because he/she is a 'viable' candidate," give them a slap in the face.

I was at the video rental shop with a friend looking for a movie to pass the time. Since this was a small shop in a college town, you can actually interact with the people running the store. While my friend filled out a membership form coupled with talking on the phone, the clerk and I had a friendly conversation about politics when he uttered: "I like McCain because he seems like a viable candidate."

Taken aback, I wanted to know what a '"viable candidate" meant to him. Well, its someone he can get behind that he thinks other people will vote for. Makes sense at first glance right?

Well it shouldn't! Why compromise your own personal beliefs in order to accommodate a nebulous fickle entity known as the American voter! You are literally voting for what you think others are voting for.

This primary I'm going to vote for what I believe in, and I believe so strongly in it that no claims of "viability" will compromise my vote. I'll defend my reasons against anyone else's, and I hope my arguments are persuasive enough to change minds. How does anyone expect to change things in this country if they are willing to compromise so readily for someone whose only reason for popularity is not their positions but their name recognition?

You can make your vote count, or you can make your vote mean something.