Doombama: Accelerating the Death Spiral of Civilisation?

An atmosphere of general uneasiness and malaise has been growing across the leading military and economic power of the globe, since the election of US President Obama. The level of US government debt over the past few years has been growing at unprecedented -- and unsustainable -- rates. This turbo-boost of debt has apparently not helped the US or global economies. And it appears that Mr. Obama has just begun to boost public indebtedness. Are there any potential dangers when the world's most powerful nation must borrow trillions of dollars just to pay for routine operation and political payoffs?

Even if the US were not the world's most powerful nation, the rapid decline in its financial position would be of concern to global investors and global powers. But the fact that the US is the strongest and richest nation makes the decline far more serious, and in need of good solutions.

Unfortunately, we find the public ways being inundated by a veritable scattershot of doom theories -- from peak oil doom to climate hysteria catastrophe to religious armageddon to overpopulation doom to eco-collapse. In such an environment of diffuse hyper-vigilance, workable solutions to genuinely serious problems are less likely to be devised and implemented.

The following discussion is based upon ideas introduced in the article: The Death Spiral theory of civilisational collapse, and expanded upon in this video discussion. Caveat: The above "news stories" and "information videos" -- as informative and intriguing as they may be -- are disguised promotional materials for paid newsletters and more."

Why should we understand this theory? Because this doom theory is gaining in popularity among general populations and members of many other doomer groups -- including faux environmental green doomers, peak oil doomers, climate change doomers, anti-capitalist lefty-Luddite doomers, anti-government doomers, and even religious doomer groups. This "meta-doom" theory is likely to influence someone you know, before long. You will likely be forced to face it, one way or another.

One of the basic concepts underlying this "death spiral" doom theory, is that private and public debt are expanding so rapidly that the economic system which supports modern civilisation cannot help but collapse.

The theory looks at ideas of exponential growth in the public and private financial sectors, as well as theories of exponential growth in demand for food, energy, and a wide range of materials and services.

More economically aware persons, will already be familiar with the ideas of Peter G. Peterson, and will recognise the arguments dealing with the dangers of exponential growth of government debt.

Anyone who has looked at websites such as dieoff.org or limitstogrowth.org will recognise overpopulation and resource scarcity arguments as dating back close to 50 years, or more. In fact, the "death spiral doom theory" can fit into a wide range of pre-existing doom cults and hypotheses.

The "death spiral theory of doom" borrows from all of these older doom theories, and creates an emotional atmosphere of fear which is contagious, inflaming the fears in anyone who is already susceptible, due to pre-existing beliefs, superstitions, and worries.

As you can see, there is doom enough for doomers of every persuasion in the death spiral doom theory. Regardless of their political, religious, or ideological persuasion, most doomers can find something to cling to here.

What is the problem? Whenever a movement contains roughly 5% of truth and 95% of garbage, the truth is not likely to receive the proper attention it needs in order to solve the genuinely serious problems that exist. The mass of garbage tends to overwhelm every other concern, and to lead adherents willy-nilly across the conceptual landscape of doom.

The resulting de-cerebrate mass hysteria is useful to those who simultaneously create and ride the waves of hysteria. The skankstream media, powerful political lobbies, complicit government officials, politically correct academics, doomer cult leaders, etc. But for ordinary people who wish nothing more than to live ordinary lives, this mass distortion of reality is an ongoing disaster which tends to grow worse with every generation -- as exponential debt and demographic decline proceed along.

Doombama happens. Debt and demographic decline happen. There are answers and solutions to each problem. But not if one is caught up in the mass hysteria and short attention span groupthink. The only preventative to being drowned by the mass delusion is to become dangerous.

Dangerous people breed and raise dangerous children. Enough dangerous children will create a dangerous community. Enough dangerous communities together will evolve into a dangerous society and a ultimately into a dangerous civilisation.

Inconceivable? "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." .... src

If the Great Green Global Agenda is to Succeed, Most of You Will Have to Die

The great green global agenda -- from carbon hysteria to resource scarcity to overpopulation doom to pollution apocalypse -- has been promoted by blowhards such as James Hansen and Paul Ehrlich, and supported by politicians from Barack Obama to Al Gore to Angela Merkel to Kevin Rudd. But prophets of the green apocalypse have been forecasting doom and devastation to occur "in the next ten or fifteen years" for the past 50 years or more. People are beginning to notice that the dire green predictions have not been coming true. And frankly, more and more people are getting a bit nervous about the undercurrent talk about "the great human dieoff" that seems to take the stage whenever green elites think that no outsiders are within earshot.

Concern about the climate, ..., the crazy set of unrealistic objectives, laughable foreign aid boondoggles, Malthusian panic mongering and cockamamie treaty plans made this UN process a clown circus that was doomed to fail — and the sooner, the better. There was a time — as recently as early 2010 — when the Great and the Good, the Champions of the Conventional Wisdom and the Oracles of the Davoisie identified this forlorn negotiation as the wave of the future and the last best hope of man.

Let the futility and failure to which all this led be a reminder to us and to them: those who guide the world’s destiny aren’t nearly as discerning as they think they are. Between the American housing bubble, the European meltdown and the climate disaster, it almost begins to look as if the Establishment consists mostly of overpaid, egotistical blowhards. _WR Mead

Overpaid egotistical blowhards? That could accurately describe the top levels of academia, journalism, government, law, and environmental activism in one short phrase. Too bad there is no way to send such top-floating scum on its merry way to oblivion. Indeed.

Consider energy, and the enormous amounts of reliable and affordable energy that any advanced society needs to provide its people with their many needs and opportunities: The earth contains vast and unknown quantities of fossil fuels, including coal. But greens of the lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy persuasion want all advanced nations to abandon coal, and to move willy-nilly to a dependency on big wind and big solar energy.

Most intelligent and sober analysts understand that such a precipitous move away from coal toward dependency on intermittent unreliable green energy sources such as big wind and big solar, would trigger the very type of dieoff which global green elites (not-so) secretly cherish and wish for.

In fact, while US greens inside and outside of the Obama administration are trying to shut down the use of coal in the US, nations from China to Germany to Vietnam and more are gearing up to use more and more coal. Many of these nations would be happy to buy and use US coal, at the same time that US greens would like to keep Americans shivering in the dark for lack of reliable and affordable energy.

Modern leftist greens are Malthusians by nature, and doomers by inclination -- victims of their own limited thinking. They not only believe that humans are a vermin pest on the pristine landscape of Earth. They actually want to behave as responsible and sustainable pest exterminators, so as to save the planet, while also giving themselves more lebensraum.

The green apocalyptic theories of climate catastrophe and carbon hysteria are based upon computer models that have been fed much erroneous data, while having omitted crucial data that would have helped avoid much of the destructive and disruptive hysteria.

This failure to look at as many aspects of the problem as possible, along with the failure to brutally test their own models and theories (as scientists should always do), has painted the green doomers into a corner. They have no choice but to screech ever louder songs of doom, regardless of what the outer world reality indicates.

The destructiveness of this approach is just now being calculated in the cost of energy to European commerce, government, and industry, and the subsequent demand destruction that is beginning to sweep through those countries, working its way from south to north. The consequent capital flight within Europe has so far landed in continental safe havens, the stronger European economies such as Germany and Switzerland.

But as the consequences of their green energy starvationist approaches hit even the relatively strong industrial economies of Germany, France, and the UK, even these economic strongholds of Europe will suffer from both capital flight and a renewed brain drain to countries with fewer restrictions on energy production and use. All of this will happen on top of an underlying demographic collapse, which is quite real for all its stealth and popular denial.

For the great green global agenda to succeed, most of you are going to have to die. Because, to put it bluntly, the intermittent unreliable sources of energy that the greens are foisting on modern nations will not be able to support the needs of those nations. Systems will collapse like tilting dominoes, and the offal will flow downhill -- doing the most damage to third world nations and their populations as more advanced nations can no longer afford to provide life support to a perpetually failing and conflicted third world.

Will this great green doom and dieoff.orgy actually come to pass? Only if we allow it.

Take your time. Think about it. Here's a riddle to help with your meditations:

What is the difference between an onion and a green activist?

(answer: When you chop up the onion, you cry.)

Heh. Just kidding, of course. If we let it get to the chopping up stage, we are all in big trouble.

Behind the Scenes of The Green Doomer Eco-Fascist Cult

This article was previously published on Al Fin Energy blog

Green doomer eco-fascist cultists all follow similar guidelines: Slash the human population of the planet, although they themselves are unwilling to go first.. Blame free markets and western civilisation for most of the world's problems. Eschew all viable forms of large-scale energy in favour of those which are exorbitantly expensive and innately unreliable. Hate advanced technology, and want to push the world toward primitive lifestyles and global poverty. They are essentially anti-individual and pro-collective.

Members of any doomer cult will recognise the litany, whether from the climate change catastrophe cult, the peak oil doomer cult, the overpopulation doom cult, the global pollution doom cult, the biodiversity doom cult, etc.

Here is more from one of the horses' mouths:

This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

He sees America as the root of the problem:

The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.

He unapologetically advocates bloodthirsty dictatorship:

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth .

We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.

A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.

As is often the way with extremist central planners Linkola believes he knows what is best for each and every individual, as well as society as a whole:

Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

_azizonomics.com

H/T Zerohedge

This fellow is not actually so extreme, for a green. He may be a bit more honest and open about his convictions than most, but that is changing. Even the WWF -- which has written many of the supporting "studies" for the IPCC climate change reports -- has come out in support of policies which would ultimately result in a large scale human dieoff.

Is this also the face of the peak oil doomer cult? Certainly you find a lot of peak oil cult wankers fixated on doom porn, compulsively getting their doom fix whenever possible. It would be easy to assume that they actually want to see suburbia burning, that they would like to see the end of civilisation as we know it.

Not that most of the incompetent athols would survive very long after such an event. More: Europe as the canary in the coal mine

Early dissent among former believers in the CAGW orthodoxy and carbon hysteria warming cult

The Coming Human Die-Off: A Little Goes a Long Way

The idea of a coming great human die-off is gaining popularity among those of the lefty-Luddite green enviro persuasion. Whether the die-off will be triggered by resource scarcity, by a voluntary reduction of human fertility, or by more aggressive means, such a great die-off is being seen as a positive event by the trendy and green forces which have taken over most media outlets, Green NGOs, funding agencies, and large segments of academic institutions.

The great human die-off is being backed by some famous names:

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, CNN founder and UN supporter

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, pg.75

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.” - Mikhail Gorbachev

"I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.” - Dave Foreman, Sierra Club and co founder of Earth First!

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” - Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund

Advanced societies are considered "soft targets," because their populations have become so accustomed to things running relatively smoothly. Just a bit of disruption can go a long way toward upsetting such societies.

It is becoming easier for individuals and small groups to trigger events which can lead to momentous calamity in the advanced world. Increased networking of vital infrastructure is making it easier for hackers to commit cyber-terrorism:

Cyber Terrorism

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Government pressure to create "smart power grids" to replace traditional grids, provides malicious hackers with a wide range of new targets to attack, at various scales.

The threat of an EMP attack -- capable of taking out continental scale power grids -- is likewise increased, as nuclear proliferation proceeds across the Pakistan-Iran-N.Korea axis (aided by China and Russia). As many as 90% of an advanced society can be expected to die within 1 year as a result of a large-scale EMP attack.

Chemical terrorism is another way in which advanced cultures could be targeted specifically. Coordinated chemical attacks using various vectors could decapitate leadership and expertise in several vital areas, leading to widespread paralysis of normal infrastructure. Such a paralysing strike might well be a set-up for a more devastating followup attack.

Increasing sophistication of inexpensive tools for "bio-hacking" are also making it more likely that individuals or small groups will create novel microbial agents of mass contagion.

Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,” said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. “Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.” _WaPo

It is not necessary to target the third world, in order to achieve a high magnitude die-off such as is depicted in the chart above. The third world has become so dependent upon the technological infrastructures and products provided by more advanced societies, that if the advanced world goes, most of the third world will quickly follow.

The resulting world of much lower human population, will also be much less technologically capable than the world at present, in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, however, most of human technology will be saved in digital and book form. This means that within 1 to 2 centuries after the great die-off, the higher intelligence populations of the presently advanced world would grow to a large enough size to begin implementing modern technologies on a global scale once again.

In other words, if lefty-Luddite greens are engineering the great human die-off to permanently eliminate high tech civilisations and infrastructures, their efforts will ultimately fail.

But that will be cold comfort for your children and grandchildren who will have to suffer through the bloody mess aftermath left to them by the possibly well-intentioned greens.

It is up to you to make sure that they survive that bloody mess. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Some of the above is cross-published from abu al-fin

More: The conspiracy zone...

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population....The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

...They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said. _Prison Planet

These are some of the people with the ability to sway media outlets -- which they largely own -- along with NGOs, academic research and pronouncements via funding, and a significant number of elected officials, via campaign support, job offers, board directorships, and the funneling of significant investments.

It is not surprising that the super-wealthy would be concerned about population overgrowth, if they truly believed that it would bring about the end of the world. But it is a bit troubling when they deliberately take a cause such as "the great carbon hysteria orthodoxy and climate change crusade," wrap it into a trans-global agenda, and push it into the heart of each new generation's training and education -- from K-12 through university and beyond.

Does this mean that these people are intentionally contaminating third world immunisation efforts, so as to help bring about the great human die-off -- using the UN and NGOs as intermediaries? Probably not. I am acquainted with a lot of the people involved in such international programs, and do not believe for one second that they would be a part of such a travesty.

But now that we know that the richest of the rich have taken an interest in limiting -- and even slashing -- the human population of the planet, we may want to watch what they do more carefully, through their almost countless intermediaries.

A Deadly Enemy Older than Man: The Buzz of Death

Mosquitoes transmit disease to over 700 million humans a year, with a resulting death toll in the millions (wikipedia). To this point, the insect repellant DEET is the most effective defensive weapon against these disease vectors, other than thick clothing and strong netting. But humans are slowly beginning to decode the language of mosquito smell rceptors.

Scientists at UC Riverside are discovering an array of common chemicals that can inhibit, blind, or lead astray the CO2 receptors of mosquitoes.

Vanderbilt University researchers have gone further, and developed an entirely new class of insect repellant which is thousands of times more effective than DEET.

NewScientist
But now that genetic engineers have become interested in the mosquito problem, we are beginning to see new strategies which are more clever than ever. The illustration above reveals two contrasting approaches to species eradication -- the sterile male technique vs the autocidal technique.

...if autocidal technology lives up to its promise, it could be about as environmentally friendly as pest control can get. It could largely or entirely replace pesticides, and it affects only the target species. Last but not least, it is hard to see what could go wrong. _NewScientist

The autocidal technique produces females which either die before maturation, or which are physically disabled and unable to mate.

Generally, genes that cause a reproductive disadvantage will tend to disappear from the population over time. But there are a number of factors which could alter that Darwinian equation.

If the autocidal mosquitoes were also given traits that conferred a reproductive advantage for themselves -- super powerful sexual attractant pheromones for example -- as part of an overall genetic package, the autocidal trait would spread more quickly.

Likewise, if automated stations were set up in the wild to periodically release new batches of autocidal males, the process could be reinforced over an extended period of time.

If the autocidal trait caused sterility in females, rather than death or disability, the process of species extermination would be accelerated.

And so on. It is easy to imagine dozens of ways to augment, accelerate, or perpetuate such a process of ongoing extermination.

Alert readers will have recognised the return to the New Scientist article on species extinction, applied here specifically to mosquitoes.

But as noted in the NS article, similar techniques could be applied to virtually any species that reproduces sexually. Also as noted in the NS article, the genetic engineers have just begun to think of different approaches to the mosquito problem. This ball has just begun to roll down the hill.

#1 Box Office Movie "Contagion": Realistic Prelude to Global Collapse?

NewScientist
The current movie box office champion, Contagion, is being praised for its realistic portrayal of a global outbreak of a killer virus. A wide range of experts were consulted in the attempt by movie producers to make the film as realistic as possible.

It's hard to name many Hollywood blockbusters that are as invested in the realities of science as Contagion....very few Hollywood productions realistically portray the process of science, both its successes and frustrations. That's what makes Contagion unique. Although it is by no means flawlessly accurate - it's not a NOVA documentary - Contagion has been well fact-checked compared to most science-y blockbusters.

The movie's exhilarating pace never sags, even in scenes that have the potential to bore people out of their minds: a meeting between an epidemic intelligence service officer (Winslet) and the Minnesota Department of Health, for example. But Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Burns practice what is in effect very successful science communication: they keep the viewer's attention as they explain statistics like the all-important R0 - the average number of people an infected person infects - and truths about the scientific process, such as the fact that before researchers can study a virus, they need to figure out how to grow it in cell cultures in the lab, without the virus destroying all the cells.

... _NewScientist

Given the assumptions about the fictitious virus, MEV-1:

• It can be spread by direct or indirect contact, by airborne droplets
• It kills quickly, within a few days of exposure
• The virus remains contagious in the environment for several hours or days
• It kills over 20% of those infected

etc, it is easy to see how such an infection could lead to a global economic collapse.

Such a virus would not lead to the extinction of humans -- unless it left survivors sterile -- but in the age of high volume global travel, such an easily spread virus would end up in most of the world's large cities within just a few days of hitting a busy airport such as O'Hare, Heathrow, or JFK. From there, it would spread radially to smaller cities and the countryside. Air, train, and bus travel would not likely be shut down until it was too late.

Hospitals and clinics would be particularly fertile foci for contagion. Most doctors, nurses, paramedical personnel, EMS, etc. would be infected.

Schools would likewise be hit early and hard. Teachers, children, bus drivers, would all carry the virus home with them. Any workplace where a lot of people work in close proximity, use the same machines, and share the same facilities, would provide the epidemic with a host of new victims.

Even if 80% of the infected eventually survived, a lot of society's most valuable members would have been lost. Regional and national economies would collapse and take time to restore. The transportation infrastructure and product supply lines would take many years to rebuild and replace. Power structures would quickly and radically shift. Central governmental control would be lost for years in many nations, and permanently in others.

I am describing what would be the best case scenario. In real life, an effective vaccine would not be developed or produced nearly so quickly as in the film. The dying would probably continue for months and years as the virus mutated and came back through the same populations a second, third, or fourth time.

So, what do you do, given this very real (although perhaps unlikely) scenario?

How the Green Movement Can Trigger the Great Human Dieoff

Powerful persons in the global green movement would like to see the human population of Earth reduced by at least 90%. For several decades, many of them believed that resource depletion, energy scarcity, mass starvation, or voluntary sterilisation might achieve their grand goal. But it is slowly dawning on them that if they are to slash the human population of the planet to a size that they consider manageable, they will have to be a bit more proactive.

Just in time for the great green engineered human dieoff, biological scientists have devised the perfect method of genocidal species extinction.

IN THE urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed. It is an army like no other: the soldiers' mission is to copulate rather than fight. But they are harbingers of death, not love. Their children appear healthy at first but die just before they reach adulthood, struck down by the killer genes their fathers passed on to them.

These soldiers are the first of a new kind of creature - "autocidal" maniacs genetically modified to wipe out their own kind without harming other creatures....the approach should work with just about any animal - from invasive fish and frogs to rats and rabbits....it could transform the way we think about genetically engineered animals.

... the autocidal approach could not only be used to control invasive species such as cane toads, but that it is the only method that could work in many cases. "It's the only hope we have for the long-term control and eradication of these pests," he says. "Other efforts help, but in the end they are Band-Aids in the absence of a real solution."

Thresher has come up with a way to create fish that produce only male offspring. Releasing enough of these "daughterless" fish into the wild, with each passing on the daughterless habit, would turn a thriving invasive population into a bunch of reluctant bachelors destined for extinction.

...Models suggest that releasing enough daughterless carp to make up 5 per cent of the total population would effectively eradicate carp in the Murray-Darling basin by 2030. Thresher's models also suggest pests such as cane toads and rats could be tackled this way.

... One [approach] that has particular promise exploits chunks of "selfish" DNA that can spread themselves through the population and kill only when two copies are inherited. In theory a one-time release of just a few insects, rather than the continual release of millions, could wipe out a wild population (New Scientist, 22 March 2003).
_NewScientist

ArmageddonOnline.org
The last paragraph from the excerpt above describes the most subtle approach, and perhaps the easiest approach to genocide for greens to take. But they should be prepared to wait several generations to see the completion of their grand project. Such an approach should also allow environmentalists to create an antidote, so they they themselves and their associates could continue to live and procreate indefinitely. Think of it: a master race of environmentalists, sitting back and watching most of the rest of humanity fade away.

It is an approach without gas chambers, without germs, poisons, bullets, or bombs. A clean, test-tube approach that could propagate death and genocide far more broadly than any method previously devised.

Taking Overpopulation Seriously: Forced Mass Sterilisation

A program of sterilizing women...despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
...
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin...opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.

...Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods... would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems....To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective... _Obama Science Advisor John Holdren

More ideas here

World Without HumansIf humans are to deal with overpopulation, they may need to take some extreme measures, such as those favoured by people very close to US President Obama. Involuntary sterilisation and spiking water supplies with contraceptives are two of the suggestions that leftists of the environmentalist persuasion tend to throw around a lot, at get-togethers. Fortunately for such concerned leftists, Oregon health scientists are developing a new generation of contraceptives which might fit their needs:

... the contraceptive OHSU researchers are developing is not hormonal and [is] more focused on mechanisms that directly result in the release of an egg. This new approach targets the key enzymes responsible for the release of an egg.

...This research...has demonstrated that targeting these enzymes can prevent the release of an egg from the ovary. The next step for Hennebold and colleagues is to determine the delivery method of such a drug and the timetable for medication.

"Our hope is that the next generation of birth control is more targeted and has a higher effectiveness level," added Hennebold. _SD

Mass sterilisation is a common topic in fiction and in speculative writing. Sometimes the act of mass sterilisation is initiated by humans, and sometimes extraterrestrials or natural forces are to blame.

A program of mass sterilisation was actually carried out on remote villagers in Peru, and was attempted unsuccessfully in India.

In the context of widespread modern anxiety related to climate change, resource depletion, global pollution, animal species extinction, peak oil, and overpopulation, the idea of forced mass sterilisation of humans seems a very attractive idea to many in the left environmentalist movement. The news item below has been re-written by Al Fin political scientists to better reflect much of the modern thought current among leftist environmentalist thought leaders:

Tomorrow They Vote for Either Mass Sterilisation or Mass Killing

On Tuesday, April 5, the United States Department of Populations will choose between mass sterilization or killing, life or death, for residents in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York, in the first use of new overpopulation legislation passed recently by the US Congress, and signed by the president.

The legislative project adopted by the US Congress promoting mass sterilisation was completely altered by the USDP to allow for the possibility of mass killings in certain situations where the need to reduce populations is particularly dire.

If the choice were left to the states themselves, it is likely that they would choose mass sterilisation over mass euthanasia. The federal government of the United States has decided that the issue is too important to be left to the states.

Environmental advisors to the president and to the congress prefer the use of mass euthanasia -- "to get it over with as quickly as possible." But overpopulation denialists continue to lobby the federal government, as protestors from across the US fill the Washington DC mall into the millions.
_Original Unaltered News Item

As you can see, Al Fin political scientists have mutilated the original item almost beyond recognition. But when it comes to the overpopulation crisis -- or any environmental crisis -- the ends justify the means.

In the interest of fairness, we will present a contrary viewpoint from pro-natalist Bryan Caplan:

The sterilization of half mankind would...be a horrible tragedy of epic proportions. But we wouldn't be losing the society we've got. We'd just be losing the society we could have had: Millions of new creative geniuses, and billions of additional people who'd enjoy being alive. If human beings were built differently, we might inconsolably miss the descendents we never had. For most of us, though, it's "out of sight, out of mind." We miss people we knew and lost a thousand times more than people who were never conceived. _BryanCaplan

Mr. Caplan brings up an interesting point: Once the mass sterilisation program is carried out, the people will never know the difference. They cannot possibly miss the people who are never conceived, never born -- people they never knew. Can they?

It is important that any program of mass sterilisation and/or euthanasia incorporate a wide range of safeguards to be sure that nothing goes wrong with the planning or execution. Most importantly, the elite environmentalists among us who have designed this program to save the planet and its many non-human species, must survive and prosper in the brave new world we create. Denialists and non-believers will be left in the dustbin of history, by any means necessary.

How Quickly Could Humans Re-Populate After a Die-Off?

Although the European population of the world has been shrinking steadily for a number of decades, the global population continues to expand -- almost exclusively among third world populations, and populations of low average IQ. As higher IQ populations shrink, and lower IQ populations grow, one might detect the beginnings of a self-correcting mechanism for the planet's supposed human population problem. After all, it is the innovations of the high IQ populations which have allowed the lower IQ populations to grow out of their normal bounds.

The politically correct intelligentsia of the western world has been obsessed with the "population bomb" and the dangers of overpopulation, for several decades now, but they cannot bring themselves to point to the distinct populations which are growing. That would not be politically correct.

According to the chattering class, all humans are now doomed to a planetary blowback, or die off. Whether the die-off will come via climate doom, resource depletion doom, starvation doom, emerging infection doom ... it doesn't really matter. However it falls, the coming doom and dieoff will be the fault of human hubris, human greed. It is absolutely necessary that humans -- particular humans -- are to be blamed for whatever massive doom and dieoff is to come.

The goal of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, the Dieoff.orgiasts, and the entire leftist-linked faux environmental movement, is the reduction of global human population to approximately 100 million persons or fewer. Even well respected academics at large universities have publicly advocated for an "ecological re-balancing" of the planet by the forced reduction of the human population.

Suppose the dieoff.orgiasts succeed, using the mechanisms of national and international governmental bodies to enact policies of energy starvation, and other draconian measures and mischief which largely lead to the extinction of economic activity and its accompanying intellectual innovation in high IQ populations. With an accelerated dieoff of high IQ groups will come an accompanying rapid genocide of lower IQ groups. Natural losses due to starvation, disease, warfare, and dysfunctional culture -- which have been held off by the paternalistic interference of outside groups -- will resume with a vengeance.

Assume the population of the planet shrinks to roughly 100 million persons, as the left-Luddites of the dieoff.orgy wish. How will that population be distributed? The answer to the question is complicated by the presence of large, growing third world populations residing within the boundaries of the first world. A large global dieoff would certainly trigger massive ethnic bloodshed within ethnically mixed populations which had failed to assimilate. Such localised but widespread civic disorder would disrupt food supplies and normal services, leading to yet more death and loss of human capital.

Here is a rough guestimate of population distribution post-dieoff, if the lefty-Luddites succeed:
Europe: 15 million survivours
East and South Asia: 50 million survivours
MENA: 5 million survivours
North America: 20 million survivours
South America: 5 million survivours
SubSaharan Africa: 1 million survivours
Oceania and islands: 4 million survivours

Clearly advanced technology will take a huge hit from such a dieoff.orgy, as most scientists, technicians, engineers, and technologists will have died along with the masses of other victims. Industrial infrastructure would be virtually non-existent. Any militaries which have planned ahead to provide alternative fuels and power generation schemes will naturally be in a better position to establish local and regional order of sorts.

Give the vestigial governments 50 to 100 years after the dieoff, to establish basic civil order and infrastructure in parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. Once it is safe again to live, learn, trade, and innovate, how long would it take for human neo-civilisation to re-populate, re-build, and establish a pathway to the solar system and beyond?

In the absence of a functional artificial uterus, women of neo-civilisation will need to have many more children than civilised women would consider having today. It is likely that much of advanced technology -- including biotechnology -- will be saved and revived during the recovery from the lefty-Luddite dieoff. Among the saved biotech knowledge will probably be the genetic knowledge for controlling the age of menarche -- the onset of ovulation -- in girls.

The girl in the photo -- Lina Medina -- is over 7 months pregnant, at the age of 5 1/2 years old. She gave birth to a healthy boy by Caesarean Section in 1933, well before the age of modern genetic therapies and IVF fertilisation.

In 1669 Elizabeth Greenhill gave birth to her last (39th) child at the age of 54. The boy grew up to be a London surgeon and author, Thomas Greenhill. Clearly this was before the age of IVF treatments.

So girls and women are historically capable of childbirth from the ages of 5 to 55, without advanced technology. But with the use of advanced biotechnology, women have given birth as late as age 70. And with an advanced knowledge of how early menarche can be triggered, girls as young as 6 could certainly carry and deliver children -- as demonstrated by Lina Medina and other cases.

So assume an age window for pregnancy between the ages of 10 and 60, to be conservative. That is a 50 year window, but women are not cattle, so although they will probably be treated somewhat like brood mares under such extraordinary circumstances, their health and mental / emotional well-being would certainly be watched over, at least inside the nations of neo-civilisation.

Assume one child born every other year, with 5 one-year periods for intensive rehabilitation of lean body mass -- including body calcium. That allows time for each healthy woman to produce 20 children over her reproductive lifetime, by conservative estimate.

Given what we know about pregnancy's potentially rejuvenating affect on the bodies of middle-aged women, one would expect the healthy lifespans of such prolific mothers to extend into the late 80s and 90s. In other words, they would live to see even their youngest children reach adulthood.

So, over a period of 100 years of intensive re-population, a population of 10 million breeding pairs could easily bring the human population back into the billions. The same reasoning would apply to the settlement of new planets or solar systems.

It is unlikely that such a policy would survive for long, however, since among these prolific mothers would undoubtedly be some very intelligent and inventive technologists, capable of inventing, testing, and perfecting a functional artificial womb. Necessity is the mother of invention.

So we see that the popular chimera of the dieoff.orgiasts -- which they cling to under the name of "sustainability" -- is itself unsustainable in the face of a determined nucleus of intelligent, forward minded humans. No one wants to exercise this extreme re-population option -- unless a faster-than-light drive is invented -- for many reasons. But the option is there, and it will grow easier to achieve with every passing year -- if it ever becomes necessary.

The left-Luddite world is a world totally without balance or rationality. It cannot stand for contradictory viewpoints to be voiced, or for skeptical researches to be carried out. Its predictions of doom have been failing in abysmal fashion for several decades now -- without any sign that the delusional doomists have learned anything from their faulty assumptions and reasoning.

In a sense, the predicted dooms were never expected to come about. They were only memetic bludgeons to sway public opinion. Once the right people achieved political power, doom-from-incompetence was certain to follow. We are seeing the beginnings of this destructive incompetence in much of the western world.

Human ingenuity is certainly in short supply -- and the supply grows shorter the longer the Luddites are in control of most of the media, academia, politics, and general intelligentsia. But ingenuity and invention can flare up in places least expected, and they certainly will do if necessary.

Think about it. Unless you want your daughters and grand-daughters to be doomed to a life of perpetual procreation.

All the Oil In the World

Brian Wang provides an edifying comparison of the amount of oil and the amount of water in the world.

If you mixed it all of the oil into the oceans then you would be looking at about 1 part per million. Which is about 35 times less than the EPA defined safe limit of 35 parts per million limit. _NextBigFuture

Oil and water have been mixing for billions of years. When oil mixes with water, the oil is consumed by micro-organisms, and the water abides to provide a home for sea animals, to circle the Earth time and time again, to fall from the sky, to freeze in glaciers miles thick . . . . over and over through the eons.

The deep offshore oil drilling game has just begun. Any nations which prohibit the drilling of oil off their own coasts are simply dooming themselves to buy expensive oil from foreign sources -- many of them quite violent and disreputable. Humans still need oil, will continue to need oil, gas, and coal for several decades.

Humans have only depended on fossil fuels for just over 200 years, and have several hundreds of years of fossil fuel reserves remaining (counting all forms of fossil fuels). The life of the land and the oceans can handle far more CO2 than the trifling 0.04% that resides in the Earth's atmosphere. Most of Earth's land and sea life evolved at a time when the CO2 concentration was several times higher than at present, and would be thrilled to have more carbon.

But it might be best for industrial nations, at least, to shift to safe, clean, compact nuclear power. A wise use of nuclear fuels could provide humans with tens of thousands of years worth of fissionable fuel. It would take us between 30 and 50 years to shift most of our power generation away from fossil fuels and over to clean and sustainable nuclear fission.

In that period of time, unlimited nuclear fusion is likely to be quite close -- if not already arrived.

"Greens", or faux environmentalists, want to shut down fossil fuels and nuclear energy. They believe that by doing so they will be "saving the Earth." But it is their religion, so they are not thinking rationally.

The Earth is doomed -- has always been doomed -- since before it originated. But there is a question of what will be done on the planet while it exists.

The only intelligent life known to exist, exists on this one planet. Faux environmentalists wish to bring about a great human dieoff.org, to save a planet that is already doomed. They wish to bring about this dieoff as soon as possible -- preferably before humans develop the type of technology which would allow them to travel to space where they could protect the Earth and Earth life from malevolent heavenly bodies and other forces. If advanced civilisations are starved by well-meaning "Greens", then humans will remain stuck on the ground -- unable to protect the planet from its greatest threats which will come out of the dark void.

Humans are on the brink of developing technologies that would allow for clean and relatively limitless energy. Technologies that would allow the cleaning of Earth's land, water, and air to pristine conditions. Technologies that would see Earth life colonising the solar system and beyond -- guaranteeing a far longer existence in the universe than confinement to only one planet would have allowed.

Many of Earth's governments have fallen into the hands of faux environmentalists and dieoff.org enthusiasts. The United States' government is one such. Many nations of Europe suffer from the same faux environmentalist religion as well. Australia and Canada have also had their struggles with the malignant quasi-religion of the great dieoff.

It is good to know if your government is under the control of an elitist group of quasi-religionists of doom. You need to know what you are working and paying for.

Rise of the Ultra-Megalopolis Makes Human Dieoff More Likely

As metropolitan cities continue to grow at incredible rates alongside each other across the globe, their boundaries start to blur. This has given rise to a new scale of geography known as "mega-regions". These vastly populated settlements have interlocking economic systems, common natural resources and shared transportation links....According to a new UN report, the world's mega-cities are merging to form these vast mega-regions which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people. _AsianInfrastructure_via_BrianWang

Image from NextBigFuture

The Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou region is home to over 120 million people and it is here where a significant chunk of China's economic boom is happening.

..."The top 25 cities in the world account for more than half of the world's wealth. And the five largest cities in India and China now account for 50 percent of those countries' wealth," he added....Asian cities are growing more equally according to the report, but primarily because they were already uniformly poor with a greater volume of slums. _AsianInfrastructure

As the populations of the world huddle together in ballooning megalopolises, what will happen should something suddenly go wrong? What if war breaks out, and the enemy targets civilian infrastructure such as power, transportation, communications, water, fuel, food delivery, sanitation, health care facilities? What will 100 million people packed together to the gills, do when faced with sudden loss of food, water, fuel, medicines, and such?

Clearly, the strong will prey on the weak, until there is no one left to prey on but other predators.

If a diabolical green leftist scientist wanted to eliminate at least 90% of the human population, the task is made so much easier by the concentration of hundreds of millions of people into small areas. Under such conditions, the effect of the EMP, or the bioengineered lethal virus or toxin, will be magnified. Particularly with the calculated demolition of particular bridges and highway overpasses.

A highly centralised population is a highly vulnerable population -- vulnerable to a decapitation strike. The simultaneous loss of transportation hubs, research and production centers, centers for delivery of health care, and destruction of food, fuel, and water distribution along with bureaucratic infrastructure -- would likely lead to rapid collapse and terminal disorder. Particularly when the same thing was happening to most of the megalopolises of an entire region or continent.

The technology of the 21st century will allow for comfortable rural living -- a reversal of the compulsive urbanisation the 20th century bequeathed to the early 21st. But we have to learn to use it, then make the choices that allow us to break the chains that tie us to the urban lifestyle. Otherwise we are the ones who tie ourselves to the railroad tracks while the black-suited villain in the background pulls the track switch lever, sending the hurtling train our way.

Take your pick of black suited villains, but as long as the radically insane third world nations such as North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela are not allowed to possess reliable nuclear weapons and delivery systems, it is most likely that the threat will come from within high tech societies themselves.

The radical greens have never made a secret of their wish to cleanse the planet of most of humankind. Let's not make it any easier for them than we have to.

Previously published at abu al-fin

The Decline of Europe: The Next 40 Years

ImgSource_H/T_BI
According to the Spanish language blog Venturatis, the fortunes of Europe will fall drastically over the next 40 years -- largely due to its imploding population. If there are no people, there can be no significant economic activity. Hence, the decline and fall of a once great continent.

According to these projections, the world of the future will be a largely bipolar world, with the US balanced by a wealthier China. India and Brasil will also make significant contributions to the world economy -- with Mexico, Russia, and Indonesia trying to keep up.

Most European nations are so far down the chart by 2050 that it becomes difficult to find them. Demography is destiny in far more ways than the modern PC-neutered dieoff left can ever let itself acknowledge.

SeekingAlpha
The runup of US national debt under Obama - Pelosi has genuinely ominous overtones, when one contemplates the fate of smaller -- though barely less responsible -- nations in Europe. Europe has been borrowing against future generations that are not being born. In the US, the future generations being borrowed against will be born -- but perhaps they will wish they hadn't been.

Unsupportable debt is a genuine killer for a national economy. As long as richer nations exist, who can bail out the weaker indebted nation, it remains possible to strive for some type of recovery and normalcy. But if the richest nations themselves become mired in unsupportable debt, there is no bailout. Without a sudden (unlikely) attack of discipline, there is only a growing turbulence of inflationary and deflationary forces, accompanied by increasingly corrupt government and the inevitable (?) path to revolution or civil war -- perhaps lasting for decades.

Spiegel

The banking crisis has turned into a crisis of entire nations, and the subprime mortgage bubble into a government debt bubble. This is why precisely the same questions are being asked today, now that entire countries are at risk of collapse, as were being asked in the fall of 2008 when the banks were on the brink: How can the calamity be prevented without laying the ground for an even bigger disaster? Can a crisis based on debt be solved with even more debt? And who will actually rescue the rescuers in the end, the ones who overreached? _Spiegel

Whoever rescues the deluxe retirement home that once was Europe, will have no one around later who is willing and able to rescue them in return. And yet there is no sign of an awakening of economic common sense in the PIIGS states of Europe, or in the Obama - Pelosi regime of the US.

The US budget deficit has now reached $1.6 trillion, or 10 percent of GDP. The national debt is now over $12 trillion and is forecast to expand to more than $20 trillion by the end of the decade. At that point, Americans will be paying $900 billion a year in interest alone...Today, only four areas consume almost all government revenues: defense, social programs, health care and interest on debt. Americans must pay for everything else with new debt. _Spiegel

Things will simply have to keep getting worse until enough people awaken to the dire straits they have gotten themselves into. At that point, the meaning of the word austerity may become clear to many decadent westerners (of all income levels) for the very first time in their lives.

And lest you think that perhaps a super-wealthy China will be able to prop up the formerly great nations suddenly sinking into debt and demographic decline -- better think again.

European Nations Sign Suicide Pact

Across Europe, once-mighty and ambitious nations are singing a siren song of death and oblivion. Once great empires that spanned the globe are now dedicated to passing from the world stage without leaving a trace. A sad benediction to societies and cultures that once looked forward to an unending ascent of the human spirit.

In Britain, a government commission has drawn up plans for a "steady state economy" that forgoes future economic growth in the name of sustainability by cutting work hours and banning TV commercials (to reduce consumerism). In Germany, new bestseller called Exit: Prosperity Without Growth is just the latest in a growing body of literature pleading for Germans to learn to live with less. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy—who once came to power exhorting the French to work harder and earn more—has thrown his weight behind an expert report that declares the pursuit of GDP growth a "fetish" and strives to replace the GDP statistic with a broader measure of national contentment.

...today's no-growthers seem to make the same mistakes as their many predecessors, from Thomas Malthus—who predicted in 1798 that rising populations would inevitably starve—to the Club of Rome, a group of scientists who warned in 1972 that the world would start running out of key resources in the 1980s. Such movements extrapolate growth rates for resource use and pollution but don't take enough account of technical innovation, environmental regulation, greater efficiency, and behavioral change. Take Exit author Meinhard Miegel's claim that the world is running out of food. It largely ignores, among other things, the barely tapped potential of genetic engineering and other plant-breeding technologies.

Such faults are often overlooked because the no-growthers resonate in Europe today for intellectual and political reasons, not economic or technological ones. Critiques of growth have always been, at their core, about uneasiness with capitalism itself. That this critique becomes mainstream when capitalism seems to be failing us is no surprise. After all, the Club of Rome made its first splash in the 1970s, during a long slowdown when people were also becoming newly aware of environmental degradation.

...the no-growthers are unrealistic about how painful a no-growth reality would be. As the Harvard scholar Benjamin Friedman argues eloquently in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a society that gives up on growth invites nasty fights over the distribution of limited resources and paves the way for intolerance and populism. That economic growth isn't everything—it doesn't measure the value of our relationships, our communities, our culture—is obvious. But so is the correlation between prosperity and quality of life, including health, longevity, and the freedom to pursue happiness. _Newsweek

Indigenous Europeans are failing to replace their own numbers through rudimentary childbirth, and are steadily being replaced -- at least in their cities -- by Muslim immigrants who may be on welfare, but can reproduce all the same.

The failure of Europeans to reproduce is part and parcel of the dying Euro spirit, the culture of the human dieoff. It is the essence of the modern green left, which is strongest and most suicidal in Europe. But it is almost as strong in Toronto, Seattle, and Sydney. The Obama - Pelosi reich is fanning the flames of the dieoff with every legislative drive and push -- in the quest to catch up with Europe.

But do Americans really want to be like Europe in that regard? Perhaps of those who voted for Obama, half do. But of those who did not vote and those who voted for other candidates, it is likely that over 80% oppose the dieoff mentality.

Certainly China, India, Brazil, and other third world nations trying to emerge into a more modern era have no wish to share the Luddite dreams of death with Euro-greens. The billions of the third world, in all of their wasteful polluting splendour, will hardly miss Europe when it is gone. They will simply move in and call it something else, something more populated and polluted, to be sure.

Cross posted at abu al-fin

Prepping for the Coming Ice Age

An Ice Age is an example of a long term survival setting. If you are prepared to survive an ice age, you are prepared for almost anything. But the chances are that you are like the residents of New Orleans during Katrina -- not even prepared for a few days without electrical power, ATMs, and supermarkets. Where do you go to learn to prepare, beyond the silly mainstream media offerings of "survival-lite"?

Preparedness Pro is a website that offers good articles on survival and preparedness, as well as on-site, hands-on preparedness classes. For example: Are you interested in a backup generator for your home or cabin? Backup Power Generators: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 take you through the selection process and tell you where you can obtain them for the best price.

Survival Blog is a well-known and respected personal effort by James Wesley Rawles. Survival Blog offers a wide range of survival advice -- much of it provided in letters and emails relating first-person experiences with different devices and approaches to surviving difficulties.

The Survivalist Blog is another well-known preparedness blog. Here is his "Best of 2009 Survivalist Articles".

The Prepper E-Book site offers practical articles from The Survival Mom on a wide range of "be ready" topics. Example: this posting provides links to 9 articles on the topic of "bugging out / evacuating" in a hurry. By preparing ahead of time, you can have what you need, where and when you need it. There is also a prepper forum where people can compare experiences and recommendations with others with similar concerns.

Tactical Intelligence is a site that deals largely with "gear" -- survival implements that are either ready-made or improvised.

The sites above usually have links to other prepper and survival websites and services. There are at least hundreds of them, but it is generally best to start with those that are well known that serve a wide audience. You can find fairly decent free online survival videos at YouTube and other "how-to" video sharing sites listed on the Al Fin sidebar in the "Reference" section.

So, how would you prepare for an ice age, anyway? Ice sheets have been known to grow miles thick. How does one live, stay warm, grow food, maintain transportation networks, and provide schools, health care, power, sanitation, and other essential services when the land is covered with ice 1 mile thick?

First, you need a large source of combined heat and power -- a nuclear plant is ideal, a coal or bitumen / kerogen plant might also work. You would need plenty of fuel to last hundreds of years. (You should begin to see the advantage of a nuclear plant, thinking of fuel volume for that length of time. Remember that next level humans will live hundreds of years or longer, on average.)

Second, you need a method of distributing heat over a large area, preventing that area from accumulating snow and ice on a year-to-year basis (winters may last 9 or 10 months). Al Fin ice age architects recommend redundant systems of conductive, convective, and radiative transfer of heat. A village-sized geodesic dome incorporating a network of heat-pipes should provide safe shelter for the community itself. Similar structures for croplands should extend the ice-free area well beyond the residential zones. (Crops and living zones will require artificial lighting most of the year -- confirming the wisdom of locating a nuclear power plant close by. Imagine trying to survive an ice age with solar and wind power!)

Third, you need to provide a wide range of human expertise for your community -- and sound means of transferring that expertise to new members. The community will need to provide its own power, water, farming, health care, education, defence, sanitation, entertainment, maintenance, construction, search and rescue, clothing, and a wide range of other services generally overlooked.

Fourth, although the coming ice age is unlikely to progress to "Snowball Earth" -- when the ice reached the equator from both North and South -- it won't hurt to plan for extremes. To achieve a Minimum Viable Population, plan for a village of about a thousand breeding pairs -- or a group of villages whose combined populations provide a thousand breeding pairs. (Most geneticists may recommend a founder population of at least 10,000 breeding pairs, but Al Fin geneticists have discovered that 1,000 breeding pairs should be sufficient for most situations where "time-to-discovery" of other compatible human populations is no longer than 10,000 years.)

Fifth, follow a plan of expanding the "ice-free zone" around your village(s) and agricultural / industrial / power generation zones. Always incorporate your ice-melting infrastructure into any new construction. Nature will never stop trying to defeat your efforts, so you must never stop using your brain and body to assert your own intentions.

Prepare yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally to be a survivor. Then begin prepping for yourself, your family, your closest associates. Learn, teach, experiment. Always think in terms of "what could go wrong, and what could I do about it?" That should teach a bit of humility, and hopefully provide motivation for what you will have to learn to know and to do.

More: The Lifeboat Foundation has several projects dealing with existential risks which might be helpful in the event of a glaciation, including space habitats and "lifeshield bunkers." Josh Hall has devised a "weather machine" concept that would have the power to throw the Earth into an ice age, to bake the planet beyond livability, or anything in between.

Eliminating Billions of People to Salve Qualms of Pseudo-Science

Canadian Diane Frances and China's Zhao Baige are agreed that over 3 billion humans must be eliminated from planet Earth, to save the planet.

This is a common thread among leftist environmentalists and green enthusiasts: eliminate up to 90% of the human population (or more) in order to make the planet more "sustainable." At this time, CO2 hysteria is a convenient justification for these calls to quasi-genocide. But any cause would do.

No one knows what a sustainable population for this planet might be. 50 years ago in the time of the Club of Rome's ambitious proclamations, it was expected that the Earth would have been destroyed long before now. Billions dead from starvation, disease, scarcity.... It was expected to have happened in the 80s and 90s. By now, we were supposed to be living in a post-oil, post-industrial, post-commercial devastation.

It is all laid out at Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, dieoff.org and similar websites. The hopeful denizens of doom dwell daily upon their decades-obsolete predictions of devastation Earth. They pore over every news report in search of confirmation for their '60s and '70s era prognostications of doom. And of course, they cannot help but find such confirmation -- even if they have to change the definition of what "confirmation" is.

To see such absurd bottom dwelling of doom publishing at Canada's Financial Post does constitute a bit of a surprise. It is as if instead of living in "The Matrix", we are living in "The Consensus", an idiocratic mob mentality that no one is allowed to question. How do such things happen?

If one sets out to dumb down a population, and is willing to take the many years and decades required to do it right, one can eventually create an idiocracy "from the top down." It does require a dedicated, large-scale movement, but if the organisation and financing is there, it is not as difficult as most people might think. Particularly if the population is not especially bright to begin with.

Have you ever imagined a world such as is being recommended by Canada's Financial Post and China's China Daily? A world where every household produces only one child? A world without uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins? How does one go about convincing all parents to have only one child?

It might be easy in countries such as China or Canada. In fact, Canada's fertility rate -- even without a one-child policy -- is dipping dangerously close to 1 birth per mother. The same is true for Japan, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Greece. In third world countries -- where virtually all of the population growth is occurring these days -- fuggidabowdet!

In other words, developed countries already have fertility rates below 2 -- sometimes very close to 1 -- without encouragement from the anti-natalist gestapo. Affluence and hedonistic lifestyles are generally enough to encourage most women of advanced nations to put a lid on child-bearing. Without affluence and hedonism, the third world is likely to never reduce its fertility rates to these levels.

But you can always send in the blue hatted peacekeepers to enforce your anti-natalist policies in Africa, Muslim Asia, and elsewhere in the third world. What would you accomplish? Fomenting revolution, insurrection, mayhem, starvation, disease, and widespread death. Well, wasn't that what you wanted all along? No doubt.

Excuse the rest of us if we disagree with both your objectives and your underlying rationale.

Postscript: It is the welfare-based nations with the lowest birthrates who will experience the severe effects of shrinking population the soonest. Pension and health care entitlements are ballooning under welfare-state policies. But huge welfare and pension entitlements require a lot of young taxpayers to fund them. If no babies are being born to keep those young taxpayers coming, entitlement debt will completely capsize these welfare economies.

Japan: The Environmentalist's Paradise

In places like Japan and Italy we are seeing the environmentalist's paradise. The result: children are rapidly disappearing from much of society, schools closing, playgrounds are empty, and emergency services crews are overburdened by calls to serve an aging population without much of an extended family to help them in their declining years. In these places, the term "extended family" will soon come to mean three or for people, at most. This is uncharted territory for modern humanity. The implications are not clear but will certainly be profound. _RCM

With a fertility rate of 1.2 (replacement rate is 2.1), Japan is leading the way to population implosion. Italy, Spain, Russia, and much of the rest of Europe is walking the same downward path.

With each day that goes by the problem gets tougher to solve in places like Japan because the number of child-bearing adults is already significantly below what it was decades ago. That means that even a return of birthrates to replacement levels or higher will only build the population slowly. Some demographers describe the problem as a pyramid standing on its head, with each successive generation working from a smaller base, and it's happening virtually everywhere. _RCM

So many people dismiss this trend as irrelevant, or easily reversible. It is not. It is the depopulation of the developed world. Once it reaches the point of no return, it is irreversible.

This is the goal of the modern faux environmental movement: depopulation, the great dieoff.orgie. Under the false flags of carbon climate catastrophe and peak oil catastrophe -- among others -- the faux environmental movement marches toward a future without the very humans who could have saved the environment for real. Without these humans, the third world explodes and devours every resource within reach.

Due to China's enormous population, and its growing tentacles of influence and control within the third world, China may be able to outlast the developed nations while maintaining much of its huge industrial and military infrastructure. If so, then China will oversee the devouring of resources at the hands of an exploding third world population. Until China itself is devoured.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage enough people to see past the smoke screen of the faux environmentalists and the new leftists. Just a few tweaks to existing human knowledge would be enough to extend human life, increase human intelligence and creativity, open the gates to space exploration and development, and achieve abundant energy and material wealth.

It is the revolution of the next level. But aspirants to the next level have to see the folly and deceit that are inherent in the mainstream reality facade being painted for them.

The Fallout Could Cover Half the United States . . . .

A drop in global temperatures of just a few degrees may not sound catastrophic but would have far-reaching consequences. The 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatau sparked a ten-year period of global crop failures. And compared to the Yellowstone super volcano, Krakatau is what a tea-warmer is to a blast furnace. _radionetherlands

Scientists are wondering whether the Yellowstone super volcano is preparing to erupt.

The super volcano in Yellowstone Park, which includes parts of the states of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, is making its presence felt. On New Year's Day, the situation was so alarming that geologists called for an immediate evacuation of an area within a radius of 325 kilometres around the national park. At a rate of four tremors per hour, an eruption appeared imminent. The tremors have subsided slightly since 1 January, but it would appear the beast is slowly coming awake. _radionetherlands

How bad would it be?

The eruption of pent-up energy will cover half the United States in ash, in some places up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Earth will be plunged into a perpetual winter that would last years. Some plant and animal species will disappear forever.

Even humans could be pushed to the edge of extinction. Anthropologists suggest it won't be the first time. Space

Video courtesy of Watts Up With That

Planes would fall from the sky, automobiles would stall, people would choke on the ash. Skies would go dark, croplands would die, and a cold chill would settle over the entire planet for years or longer. It has happened before -- the Yellowstone super volcano -- and it will happen again, someday. Even now, murmurs of future catastrophe emanate from deep under Yellowstone.

Potential for supervolcano eruptions exist at several spots around the globe. What are you doing to prepare?

Human Extinction: Pro and Con

How do you feel about the prospects for human extinction? More specifically, are you in favour of human extinction, against it, or indifferent?

Listed below are several websites dealing with human extinction, both pro and con:

Pro Extinction

Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
Dieoff.org
Gaia Liberation Front
Church of Euthanasia
More links here

Pro Survival

Lifeboat Foundation
Alliance to Rescue Civilization
More links with emphasis on space
Surviving Future Technologies

"Civilisation is Doomed" Sites

Life After the Oil Crash
Timeline of Doom
Survival Blog
Survivalist Blog
Survival Links (just in case)

Several bona fide existential risks are hanging over the Earth. Unlikely visions of doom such as "peak oil" and "global warming" are popular catastrophes du jour, but they are two of the less likely sources of doom we face. Over the next two decades, humans will move progressively away from petroleum and fossil fuels, to substitute fuels and energies. And for the foreseeable future, a devastating ice age will be more likely than any type of warming catastrophe.

Al Fin blog salutes those working to mitigate the influences of the several bona fide existential risks that threaten the planet. For those such as the current US Congress, the IPCC, NASA GISS, and other incompetent political/bureaucratic groups who divert important resources away from solving real problems, only to waste precious resources on phantom fears, Al Fin--together with Oynklent Green [OTC:OYNK]--is helping to devise suitable remedies and work arounds.