Letters to the Editor
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@Breeders from Anonymous, the 1st
I'm the straight anonymous, not the later posting gay one. And since the question has been posed (not by me) I will have you know I'm reasonably hot and my wife is a total piece of ass who turns heads everywhere she goes, so bite me.
Hmmm. Why was I smug in my first post? Look at all the breeder responses:
1) You were too smug in your post and that invalidated your argument
2) You're too ugly to breed
3) You're selfish
All of these are illogical ad hominems -- and false ones at that. Breeders have no arguments. Just attitudes. Why was I smug? Because I could have predicted those responses with apodictic certainty.
I especially love the selfish argument. Selfish? Uh, no I'm not. No one who knows me would call me selfish. I promise you. And you don't need children to find out what love is like. There's approximately 6.6 BILLION motherfuckers out there, all of whom would love to be loved. You don't need children. You can be loved by your friends, your wife, and your existing family members. And you can be liked by many more.
You want to know who reaks of desperation? People who can only find love from their own children, who, in most cases, will love them automatically.
I'm not sugggesting any Pol Pot policy. I'm not even necessarily suggesting any legislation. But at least we can try to change social norms.
If you have very little family then go ahead and breed. If you can get your love elsewhere, then get it elsewhere and don't burden the planet unnecessarily.
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Don't Know If You Can Find It Online
The Pentagon released a white paper several years ago that said that water was going to become issue over the next 50 years, eclipsing oil as a desired, and limited, resource. It went on further to talk about how almost all regional conflicts would revolve around it, and the potential for an international conflict as well. People have been paying attention to this issue on a government level, just not the departments that you would hope.
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No Water
I had never experienced the faucet running dry until Hurricane Wilma in south Florida in 2005. None of the storms Florida experienced in 2004-05 had resulted in loss of water, in my area at least, until Wilma (which was a power issue, actually). Try going days without water coming from the tap, without any idea of when it would return. I guarantee it's far more unnerving than most readers realize, and if prolonged in a major metro area would be certain to create colossal social and economic unrest.
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The main man does it again...
.., the reporter had reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look, lest we all go over.
And Tom will take us to the edge to look and learn the abyss.
Good for him then...and us, for sure.
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Look on the bright side . . .
Droughts in the South may mean less water-boarding!
And by the way, it sounds like praying for rain is about as effective as voting republican . . .
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Punishment?
... Georgia's Baptist Gov. Sonny Perdue led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain.
Didn't work did it. Maybe god is punishing them for their ways.
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water war
The first serious step would be to persue a population reduction strategy coupled with the economy going sustainable instead of the assine growth policies we have guiding us now.It would also help to elect intelligent leaders that recognize these facts.
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Y'all Keep Making Fun of Buffalo and Other Great Lakes Cities...
I'll be happy to sell you a house when you move up here in a few years.
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@ Country Mouse
2 acres per person per year? No. Check out http://www.growbiointensive.org. Their agricultural methods could supposedly support one person with 100 square feet of growing space. Now, maybe that depends on climate, the soil you start with and a lot of other factors that you'd have to get exactly perfect. But let's say it took 200 square feet. That's still a far cry from 2 acres. Check it out.
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Radical? No. Reality.
I've been saying this for years, and I'm going to keep saying it: We can either reduce our population voluntarily, or Mother Nature will do it by force.
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@ The Fool
Something very fundamental you are missing in your self-absorption. When people talk of love in terms of their children, they don't mean the love they GET from them. That is your typical anti-"breeder" interpretation and it illustrates how self-absorbed you are quite nicely. You can't even imagine it is about the love you feel and give which is unlike any other. You don't have to believe that. You can continue to sneer snotty names at people and act surprised that they get defensive. But there is a reason that everyone tells you you're missing out. Frankly, we've experienced something that you haven't, and we know you can't possibly understand it until you do it. So you just come off as presumptuous (and smug).
also, to repeat a point, the people you really want to go talk to are in the third world. I dare you to go sneer "breeder" the next time you see a mexican with 6 kids in the supermarket. huh? Or is your contempt directed only at those who are just like you... except they have children?
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food and water
@captainlarab
two acres per person is what we have today for agricultural land in the United States. As for the intensive gardening reference, it can be made to work if you have a lot of practice, if you have a lot of skill, if the weather goes right, if you keep on top of destructive pests like groundhogs and deer ( i.e. you kill them as soon as they show up) and if you grow crops that have lots of leaves and don't preserve very well. I know this from practical experience because my wife uses those techniques in her 600 square-foot garden. She has taken sandy soil almost completely devoid of organic matter and turned into something resembling 7 inches of loam in eight years. At best, in a 600 square-foot garden we grow approximately 1-2 month's worth of supplemental food for two people. This year between drought, heat, and woodchucks, the only thing that survived was tomatoes and we got a fraction of the crop will usually get.
Extrapolating to space needed for growing enough so you can store balanced meals for a full year, we would need 15 times 600 sq ft (9000 sq ft or 0.2 acres) if everything goes perfectly right (i.e. no margin) but in a devastating year like this year, you would need 10 times that acreage (two acres) in order to be able to survive with long enough to plant again in the spring.
Each kind of food has its own kind of pests. corn will tell you if you have raccoons. Broccoli will tell you if you have woodchucks. beans, and tomatoes will tell you if the woodchucks are hanging around. Lettuce is a great test for deer as are tulips. As with woodchucks, they will also stay around to wipe out your beans.
by grilling food is only half the problem. The other half is preserving the food. My father had a garden on the order of 5000 sq ft. I remember him an my mother's spending weekends from the end of August through mid-September canning and freezing everything they could. Still, their efforts supplied food for a fraction of the year for our family. Can you imagine the amount of work you would have to put out preserving crops so you can eat for the rest of the year? This is part of the reason why meat is so popular. It stays fresh until you kill it and the food you feed it so it will stay alive over the winter is not human quality food.
I'm willing to concede that you might not need two acres per person for growing food but with all of my experience with my parents gardens, working on dairy farms, and conversations with local farmers, I believe that space needed to grow a years worth of food is measured more in acres than hundreds of square feet. It's important to remember that the number of acres you need depends on where you live. In New England, you can grow from June through August semi-reliably. On bad years, the ground doesn't dry out and warm up until mid-June and it gets too cold in mid-September. So if you want to survive, you plant more land. Down south, you can probably get by with a lot less land.
here's an experiment I don't have time to do but it would provide useful results. Plan out a years worth of meals that are fully balanced with regards to proteins etc. etc.. Don't forget fragile vitamins like vitamin C. Assume you only grow food for three months. Assume you lose 30% of your crop to random failures (pests, drought, flood, etc. etc.) and figure out how much you need to put into that farm (compost, fertilizer etc.) to get out enough food to feed you and your family (four people total) for one year. How many acres do you need? how many man hours must you supply to produce your food and then preserve your food? What kind of storage space (at what temperature) do you need to store your years worth of food? What storage techniques would you use?
For answers to some of these questions, I refer you to the historical accounts of pioneers in America. The life they live would be our life if we have to be responsible for our own food. Those same accounts also reveal insights into the kind of political future facing us.
--- country mouse