Was Thanos Right?

If you look at history you start to get the "evil" idea that Thanos was right. Every time the population is halved, or at least a significant part of it is eliminated, the standard of living of the survivors increases.

The Black Death (which was not bubonic plague, it was a hemorrhagic disease, which plague is not*) turned Europe from a continent where lords owned the people as slaves to one where workers had the power to demand improved standards of living and allowed for the creation, for the first time ever, of a middle class. Social mobility was created. Had millions of people not died and the social order of the world not been overturned those opportunities would never have arisen.

After 100 million people died in the Second World War America, as the only industrial nation that was not destroyed, saw the greatest boom economy in human history. For the first time ever a man with no education, no training, and no connections could demand, and get, a job that could support a wife, three kids, two cars, a house, a month of vacation, and retire in 30 years and live off a full pension. It was the first time ever that young adults could venture off on their own and not have to live in multi-generational families just to make ends meet (something still tragically seen as normal in our crippled economy). Had millions of people not died and nations not bombed to oblivion that opportunity would have never arisen.

Even in the Soviet Union, with that man-made catastrophe rent by Stalin that saw the murder of 20 million people, actually dramatically improved the lives of the survivors. An entire nation of peasant slaves was turned into an industrial super power with a standard of living half that of the United States in only 70 years. The survivors did have their lives improved. That would never have happened under the Tsar where everyone lived as chattel in an agrarian shithole.

History seems to attest to the fact that there really is a finite amount of resources, and if you eliminate half the people everyone not only gets double the share, but those double shares are worth even more.

"But why not just double the resources?"

Because things that are not earned have no value. Low IQ people take resources given to them by guilty Westerners and use those resources to quadruple their populations. Doubling the resources just exacerbates the problem by incentivizing bad behavior.

Everyone wanted silver, which was rare and highly valued. Wars were waged over silver. But when Spain discovered Potosi, the largest silver deposits in the world, and the supply of silver increased dramatically, all of a sudden silver became worthless because everyone had it and the Spanish economy collapsed.

Everyone wants to be a trillionaire, but when Zimbabwe made everyone a trillionaire the money became worthless. If everyone has a trillion dollars then no one will work, no one will pave roads, or build houses, or bake bread, or raise chickens. Why work when you're rich? But then, since no one is working, all those ordinary goods become extremely valuable and money becomes worthless.

Increasing the supply of a given resource devalues it. Increasing the supply of food, for example, would cause the excess food to rot and be wasted, or would incentivize people to have more kids who would demand more food, which would require resources to be doubled again to meet the new demand.

Any perceived increase in standard of living brought on by increasing resources is an illusion predicated on credit. Extraction of ground water and phosphate have allowed for an increase of food production which has allowed 6 billion extra people to be born in excess of the carrying capacity of the planet. The problem is ground water and phosphate take thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years to become replenished. Meanwhile they are exhausted in generations. Saudi Arabia totally depleted its ground water supply in a couple decades. There are places in America where the ground has subsided 70 feet or more because of the extraction of aquifers that took millennia to fill up. Whole "guano islands" were mined below the waves to extract phosphate for fertilizer and for making explosives and have been depleted in the past century.

It's a simple calculus: extraction of these resources allows for the increase of the population because most people have no concept of a future beyond their own death (or maybe the deaths of their children), an increase in population leads to an escalating pace of resource extraction beyond the point where those resources are being replenished, which leads to a population crash.

Now, it's true that places like Japan and Europe, especially Eastern Europe, have seen declining populations, but Africa's population is exploding. Within the next 50 years 1 in 3 people on the planet will be African if this trend continues. Sustainable agriculture can only support 2 billion people, and there will be at least 4 billion Africans who will not work, who will not invent new particle physics, who will not build rockets to colonize Mars. 4 billion more mouths to be fed by an increasingly smaller pool of Western workers who are being replaced in their home countries.

The long-term survival of the human species requires colonization of other planets. That cannot happen if dumb Westerners keep giving aid to countries in Africa and across the third world where people breed like crazy. There is a finite supply of resources, and those resources must be apportioned toward advancing the survival of the human species over the long-term, not increasing the population dramatically in the here and now.

The long-term survival of the human species requires the immediate end of foreign aid across the board.

“But wouldn't the population just grow back if half of it is eliminated?”

No, not if you eliminate the half that breeds beyond the replacement level.

You're committing the fallacy of assuming humans are fungible, like bacteria. If you eliminate half of a colony of bacteria the colony will just continue to grow until all the resources are consumed. If you double the resources for the colony to grow on the colony will continue to grow until all the resources are consumed.

If you double the resources on Earth some humans will continue to breed until all the resources are consumed. If you remove the half that is breeding beyond replacement level then those resources can be recycled, as they always have been.

Resources are recycled. There are water cycles, phosphate cycles, nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles. Humans use resources, die, and the dead bodies decompose and return the elements to the Earth to be reused. If population is kept stable, at the carrying capacity, then resources can be recycled endlessly. The world will not become overrun with Japanese people, ever. Japanese people are not exhausting resources to fuel their bottomless thirst for expansion, like in China or Saudi Arabia, or Chad. If the wasteful half is eliminated, or simply not allowed to expand, then the stable, sustainable half can reuse the world's resources endlessly until the Sun dies.



*The disease that killed most of the people in the Americas when the Spanish arrived is called "Cocoliztli". It has the same symptoms as the Black Death: high fever, profuse bleeding, large dark spots - especially around the neck and genitals, bloody diarrhea, bloody vomiting, severe body pains, delusions, discoloration and necrosis of the skin. Death was usually in 3-5 days after onset of symptoms, an extremely short amount of time. We don't know the incubation/latency period is, there are very few diseases that kill that quickly. People with Ebola usually linger for 21 days or so. Cholera can kill quicker, but that's from fluid loss.

Coupled with the fact that the disease is spread primarily from person to person, and was devastating in areas that were virtually rodent free while sparing other areas that were teaming with rats, indicates that some unknown viral hemorrhagic fever was the worst killer of humans of all time. It wiped out 75% of Eurasia and 90% of North and South America. We are all the survivors of some extremely virulent disease that nearly brought humanity to extinction within a span of 300 years.

Population Will Peak At 11 Billion

Hans Rosling explains why a replacement rate of childbirth means that the human population will probably reach a stable limit of 11 billion. This is inevitable, provided the population explosion in Africa can be controlled by ending crippling poverty. The only way to get the population below 11 billion will be to institute a regime of mass murder and sterilisation. Responsible planning of resource allocation and energy development requires us to take into account a future world with 11 billion people.

The Religious Shall Inherit the Earth

And it's the fault of secularism.

Dreams of Foreign Suns

Walking around yesterday I thought about my second great love (my first being freedom), and one of the three original goals I set for my life: space travel. I got to thinking about all those books I loved reading and how the future is almost certainly not going to be like that. The future will not be like The Stars My Destination, Harvest the Fire, Starship Troopers, or The Zero Stone. The future will not be like Star Trek (except maybe Deep Space 9 which was boring and grim and I never watched more than a few episodes) or Firefly.



It has to do with a phenomenon called Dunbar's Number, and a disturbing trend seen with the rapid advancement in technology and the social order.



John Stringfellow in 1848 built a steam-powered flying machine that was the absolute apogee of steam technology. While it did fly it was not powerful enough to carry a person. On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers made what is recognised as the first piloted powered flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle.



NASA became operational 1 October 1958. 20 February 1962, a little over three years later, John Glenn got into orbit. 12 September 1966, eight years later, Gemini 11 completed the farthest ever orbit of the earth, never to be exceeded, and successfully created artificial gravity with the Agena Target Vehicle. 20 July 1969, ten and a half years later, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally demonstrated that that light in the sky is a real place, and people can go there. 11 December 1972, Apollo 17 spent the most time on the Moon. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there, and when they left they became the last men ever to land on another celestial body, and the last to leave low Earth orbit.



The past 41 years have been spent doing high school science experiments at 200 km above sea level (and the Russians tried to see if they could kill people by keeping Valeri Polyakov in space for over 400 days. I think he was crippled for about a year after he returned).



Also in 1969 plans were drawn up for Big Gemini, which was superior to the Space Shuttle in every way, but they were scrapped. In 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched. Along with Pioneer 11, and later Voyager 1 and 2 - launched in 1977 - they demonstrated the possibility of sending unmanned spacecraft outside the solar system (as of August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first, and so far only, manmade object to leave the solar system).



NASA had plans for a Mars mission set for 1986 with a colossal football field sized NERVA nuclear rocket, that was successfully tested on the ground (they were buried underground with just the tail spouting highly radioactive jets into the air. At least two men died and had to be buried in salt mines in multi-tonne lead coffins.). The mars mission was scrapped when Congress decided killing Vietnamese people was a better allocation of the $10 billion necessary to build and launch the full size NERVA rocket. There were plans to send manned missions to the moons of Jupiter by the 1990s and Proxima Centauri by the early 2000s using nuclear rockets that were built and successfully tested in the 1960s and 70s. These too were scrapped.



The technology to go to the stars existed 40 years ago and has never been used for political reasons. Yesterday I had the feeling that, like freedom, once the initiative for space travel is lost it can never be gotten back. We will probably never land escape Earth orbit again. (Although the Chinese have plans for a colony on the Moon, let's face it, China is over. The Chinese economy is a house of cards built in mid-air waiting for a stiff breeze and some common sense to knock it over. Without the hundreds of billions in government spending, building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese economy will collapse and then the hundred million surplus men will become the largest demonstration of pure anarchy in history, as, like the man who castrated himself this past week, they have nothing else to live for. It is impossible to build a civilisation on population control and sex-selective abortion that produces 9 males for every 1 female. Sure, the military may crack some skulls and force its way to the Moon, like pretty much everything the Soviets ever did, but the Chinese dreams of empire and space travel are made of gossamer and the dreams of children.)



But there's something bigger than that. A new direction society has taken that threatens the very idea of space travel. As I said earlier:



There is the interesting side question of modern Western society, indeed any extremely affluent society, as to whether it does, in fact, represent a diseased PBC and not merely an alien one. All extremely affluent societies throughout history have been plagued by extreme narcissism and apathy, which is displayed in declining fertility rate. Some societies, such as Japan, are so affluent that they are literally on the fast track to extinction because they simply stop breeding. A PBC that cannot[3] produce children above replacement rate (2.1 births/woman) has no survival value and would, by the above criterion, represent a disease. After the inevitable collapse whatever society that arises to fill the void would be made of individuals who possess viable PBCs. As I mentioned in "Affluence and Apathy", there is a healthy form of affluence, though it has never seemed common enough to prevent an entire affluent society from collapsing. It would be possible for healthy affluent to form a viable society, and so I would classify healthy affluent as alien, though it has never happened before and probably never will.



The United States is the most affluent society ever. One third of the population is obese, including poor people. And along with affluence comes extreme narcissism and apathy, but there is something more. Something that was engineered by the power elite during the Apollo program. The creation of the welfare state coincided with a fundamental shift in the perception of sex in society. Both happened together because the government was setting itself up to become the new parent. No-fault divorce, ever expanding welfare programs, and the shift away from sex for procreation to sex for fun changed the way people viewed their place in society (to be sure, people had sex for fun since the beginning, but men always wanted sons as a matter of pride and women always wanted men around to provide for their children, and in the 1970s there was a shift away from that to "we'll hold off having kids until we're 40, if ever, and just enjoy our permanent adolescence now!"). Now, with the redefinition of marriage away from providing for children to some vague conception of love/lust, the coup d'état is now complete.



The US Department of Education was created in 1979. Before that all schools were run locally, with education tailored to the needs of individual students. Since there has been a shift in a one-size-fits-all education policy, with "no child left behind." The DoE is a gigantic indoctrination program, and they're not even covert about it. Common Core is demonstrably indoctrination. School officials in Memphis provide breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner to kids, and admit that if they had rooms for beds the kids would sleep there permanently. The government sees the only role of parents to be breeding. Once the children are born, they belong to the state.



How did this all begin? Urbanisation. Cities are a statist's best friend. It has to do with a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain seems to be able to hold detailed interpersonal information on at most 150-200 people. There appears to be a correlation between the size of the neocortex of primates and the maximum number of individuals a primate can keep track of and maintain social relationships with. This is Dunbar's number. This is what kept population size limited during almost all of prehistory. (If humans have been around at least 200,000 years, and writing was invented only 5,000 years before present, then prehistory makes up 97.5% of humanity's entire time on the Earth. The earliest cities appear 12,000 years before present, 7,000 years before the start of written history, so cities make up 3.59% of the duration of prehistory. 94% of the time humans have been here was before the first city was built.)







When people live in small communities people care about one another because people can keep track of everyone living in the community. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions of people this is impossible. People stop caring about the other denizens of the city, and the social structures that keeps a community together never form. The vacuum left over by the lack of a stable community is filled by the government. Private charity gives way to the welfare state, and education becomes indoctrination.



Technology isn't helping either. In 1980 the average person had 3 close friends. In 2011 the average person had 0 close friends. The advent of smart phones, social media, and people taking pictures of their sandwiches and posting them online has served to destroy human interpersonal communication faster than urbanisation ever could. People, for the most part, and especially the Millennials (the first generation to grow up totally under government indoctrination),  are not connected to anyone anymore except the government.



Human sociality is necessary for space travel. Big giant space projects like the colonisation of planets require thousands of people working together, billions of dollars, and the support of entire societies. People stopped caring about space travel, and space programs died in the 1970s. Without all three elements of properly sociable, funded, and motivated people, then landing on Mars or going to the stars is impossible. We appear to have topped out: humans have developed to a certain point, but there is a definite limit to that development, and we're right about there.



Humans appear doomed to low Earth orbit. The future in space I dreamed of as a child seems like it may have evapourated along with the sex and welfare revolutions.

Survival of Someone

Everyone who references Phillip Longman's article "Survival of the Godliest" titles thier own critiques "Survival of the Godliest" so I didn't. He writes about the trend of religious people having more children than secular people, so in the future there will be a trend toward more religious people and less secular people. Also, the more religious the person is the more children they have, so more deeply fundamental religious folks have more children than fair weather religious folks, but more on that latter.



Once again we resume our exploration of the topic of the demographic decline of atheism. Modern fundamaterialists of all stripes like to think that we're fucking killing the earf and humans have to go extinct to save the planet. Some like to anthropomorphise the planet, thinking the earf to be their mother goddess. Those who are not dirt worshiping dirt worshipers (when people refer to "mother earth" they mean dirt) are in the Dickey D crowd, folks who think they're better than us and shutter at the fact that they must inhabit the same space-time continuum as us lower forms of life. They don't care about the earth but they are smart enough to use the language of the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers in order to get the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers to join forces with them against their religious enemies.



Not too long ago I got into an argument with someone who may or may not fall into one or both of the above groups. Now, I don't like to get into arguments. They're rarely fun and even rarelyer accomplish anything. I'm more like a reporter. I report things here and then tell you, my valued couple of readers, to go out and do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Often I will give opinions, but more often than not I will admit that more study is needed and we shouldn't jump to conclusions. She used a lot of ten dollar words, said I was mistaking correlation with causation, and that when Muslims move to Europe and secularize their fertility rate drops. Well, big words won't win you an argument, around half the people who take a side on the issue of declining population raise the issue of the decline of secular people and I doubt ALL of them are mistaking correlation with causation (aside from myself and Phillip Longman, Vincent Torely at UD, and secular University of London professor Eric Kaufmann must be mistaking correlation for causation, plus Dean Radin didn't mention any logical mistakes with this argument, though he did question what the world would look like if the trend continues), plus, the argument is that religious people have more children so will outbreed secular people, if Muslims who migrate to Europe SECULARIZE one would expect them to have fewer children if the argument were correct. I'm not trying to make an argument from authority. All the people I've listed fall into the group of humanity, and as a member of that group there is metaphysical certainty that they will be mistaken at least once in their lives. I'm also not trying to make a climate change (hide the decline) type appeal to concensus, which does not exist in science. However, using fancy rhetorical devices won't make the argument go away just because you don't like the implications with regard to your lifestyle choice. Vincent at UD presented a good argument why secular people may still win the demographic battle, due to legislation (some passed, some very easy to pass) that would limit the number of children religious people could have or prevent them from having children in the first place, and those few children they do have, assure that they are given secular indoctrination so secularism survives the demographic decline. On top of that I might suggest that in the future, at the current rate of government expansion, there may come a day when political dissidents (libertarians, fundamentalist religious folks, etc.) may just be rounded up into camps (extraordinary rendition, 110,000 Japanese rounded up during WWII, it's happened before) and exterminated, or at least removed from the breeding population.



Getting back to Longman's article, he writes:



"To be sure, in countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no believe in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and “cafeteria” Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels. Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, “fundamentalism,” do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth."



If you're wondering where the Urban Mystic falls on that scale, well, I'm wondering too. At the present moment it's best to let Longman do the talking.



"When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers — such is the assumed allure of freedom and individuality....Arguing against this proposition, however, are some stubborn demographic facts. Among fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies."



According to Eric Kaufmann's new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Darwin explains why secular people will be much fewer and farther between in the future and the religious shall greatly multiply.



"In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And so, by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to “go forth and multiply” wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t. As Kaufmann shows, fertility, over time, plays out like compound interest. That is, even if religiously fundamentalist families only have a few more children than secular or religiously moderate counterparts, and they can keep those children holding on to fundamentalist faith and values (especially related to child-bearing), the passage of generations will greatly magnify their numbers and influence. Similarly, secularists and others who choose to have only one or two children, and who pass those values on to their children, will, over time, see their population decline precipitously."



Will religious people inherit the earth? Will secular people go extinct? I will say this only once, so pay attention: I don't know.



I am NOT an unbiased observer. There are few such people, maybe none. I do have a stake in the matter, and you may as well. I can only present to you the information that I am given and then ask that you draw your own conclusions.



-Dee

The French Revolution

"...the French Revolution ironically was a failed revolution: Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité quickly descended to the towering figure of Robespierre and his Reign of Terror as the revolution spun out control and began to murder itself.... 26 years after the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man' was written up, a Bourbon once more sat on the throne as the King of France - that is what I mean by 'failed' Revolution. Since 1793, France has had no less than 11 subsequent constitutions (while the United States still uses their first)."

The above is from an interesting article on the French Revolution, a favourite topic among the secular, politically correct, intellectual crowd the world over. Hailed by some as the birth of the greatest virtues humanity has ever come to understand, as outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. They raise the revolution up to godly heights; the emergence of a reason powerful enough to liberate the world from God. William Wordsworth didn't share in those people's sentiments when he wrote "Head after head, and never heads enough;
For those that bade them fall."

The greatest evils ever, Hitler (20 million killed), Stalin (43 million killed), Mao (60 million killed), were the result of the French Revolution. They took their ideology from Jean Jacques Rousseau (who liked to sire illigitimate children and wine and dine with the ultra-rich while pesants starved to death), and were moulded in the image of Maximilien Robespierre. Every subsequent tyrant who preached equality and justice, and forced freedom on their subjects is the legacy of the French Revolution.

It marked the rise of the intellectual empire of atheism, which is destined to fall in the demographic winter (atheists aren't having enough children to replace their ranks who die of old age, whereas religious people reproduce with fervour).

The article goes on to say:

"Can you force a person or people to be free? Can one person - or small group of people - truly discern a clear 'General Will' which represents the entire people? Is this not in practice a call for dictatorship?"

-Dee