There are some of us who remember the stories of a time when our grandfathers could raise a family with two mules and 80 acres of productive land. The wheat was sold for cash at the local railroad elevator, and the onions and potatoes and dried apples were stored over the winter in root cellars, after the hogs and beeves were slaughtered and smoked. The children survived.

There's only about an acre of arable land per person on earth--rapidly decreasing as arable land is eaten by erosion, desertification, and development, and while population continues to explode.

Try raising enough food for the wife and kids and some for market on an acre, or one exurban backyard. Then maybe you'll understand the why we have modern agribusiness and biotech and why despite it there are more hungry people on earth than ever before in human history.

I was talking about the earth, not the USA. I know sometimes it may seem like they are the same, but they are not. Honest.

The USA is not as overpopulated as the rest of the world--although it is still overpopulated. Three acres per person is not much cropland, especially when we are exporting a lot of that in a pathetic attempt to meet a fraction of world demand, burning a lot of it in our cars, and then feeding most of the rest of it to animals.

Subsistence farmers can't feed the world. Biotech and agribusiness can't even feed the world. There's not enough land. Pwoxby's figure of 6 billion people is out of date; the UN says there are 6.7 billion, the U.S. Census says there's 6.64 billion. We're a lot closer to 7 billion now than 6.

for the orc comment.

Apology mostly accepted. Because I feel exactly the same way. After it was clear Edwards was not going to win the nomination, I decided to go with Obama--Edwards wasn't going to get any delegates in NYC, whereas Obama and Clinton were. After Edwards withdrew, I again decided to go with Obama. The war issue was a stickler for me.

Yet... yet... These last few days have really muddied the waters. Clinton's healthcare plan is closer to Edwards. Obama's attack on it really did channel Harry and Louise—Clinton's previous oversensitivity aside, this was really an unfair attack. That and a host of other domestic issues revived all my previous concerns about Obama being more style than substance. It's easy to be against a war when you're not actually voting for bills. Clinton also has a stronger environmental platform than Obama. Yet I still have concerns about Clinton's hawkishness and her stance on the mideast. Yet Bill Clinton has a pretty good track record there... blah blah blah.

So when it comes down to it I am still leaning towards Obama, but I really don't know who to vote for anymore.

Posting a link to that spam-trap SelectSmart website was a really, really bad idea.

The quiz itself is a worthless hook to the dozens of "offers" it demands you to sign up for afterwards.

I have a tattoo.

That's it? Good for you! You have a friggin tattoo! You have some obscure, dated lyric permanently scrawled on your arm.

It's not the henna folks that are out of touch. I certainly don't want to interfere with anyone else's right to chisel anything into their own flesh, but come on, it just comes off as desperation to feign some kind of cultural superiority because you permanently inked some ephemera into your skin, that you ended up regretting. Sure it's not a huge mistake (even for a tattoo mistake), but it's nothing to celebrate.

Yet another Salon fluff piece. It's not even like it's a slow news week or anything.

And it is not too few babies in Europe, as the not-so-thinly-veiled racist Quiverfull and natalists would have.

It is that the earth is way past the bursting point in terms of a sustainable number of human beings. Virtually all problems of a global nature are directly or indirectly caused or exacerbated by this, and it's going to get much worse as population continues to balloon. It won't get better when population peaks, because that number will be at least 9 billion. It won't get better until the global population is well below current levels of 6.7 billion and by then the worst damage will likely already be done and there is a serious question as to what kind of world that will be.

The last thing we need is high-consuming Europeans (if not as high-consuming as Americans) to have more babies. The population of Europe could be easily maintained with a immigration from a fraction of the population growth of the rest of the world, even if Europeans stopped having any babies at all.

his upbringing in Indonesia. Being born in and living as a child in Hawaii (which is as close to an international outpost as any state) and having the experience of growing up as an expat surely had a formative influence on Obama, as far as realizing that there's a real world out there beyond America full of real human beings, something that GWB is sorely lacking.