The population bomb: why it didn't explode

In 1977, John Holdren wrote a book detailing what should be done about the then trendy coming population bomb: (1) forced abortions, (2) sterilization via infertility drugs in the water supply, (3) sterilization of those who "contribute to social deterioration," and (4) the formation of a trans-national armed police to enforce these policies. A person of such extreme views should have remained on the fringes except that Pres. Obama has just appointed Holgren to be his science czar.

For the skeptical, Zombietime has the details including scans of pages from Holdren's book.

Population trends were well understood by economists even when Holgren was writing his book: populations follow an S-curve. In undeveloped societies, even though the reproduction rates are typically near the biological maximum, population is constant due to limits of the food supply. (Under such conditions, many births are needed to ensure that one of your children survives to work the farm and provide for you in your old age.) As a society begins economic development, its population grows. This is the rising part of the S-curve. Developing societies start with the same birth rate as undeveloped societies but, since more children survive due to improved health and food production, the population grows rapidly. In developed countries, even though most children survive, population levels off or even declines (this is the top of the S) because, as people move away from the farm and also come to understand that most of their children will survive, they choose to have fewer children. Those who didn't understand these dynamics, such as Paul Ehrlich and Holgren, however, imagined that population would grow forever until disaster struck and therefore extreme policies were required. One can just hope that, as 'science czar,' Holgren will have little influence on actual policies.

Michelle Malkin has more on liberal advocacy of eugenics for racial improvement.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll points to this AP story which shows Holdren still advocating irresponsible policies, this time in the service of the "global warming" crisis:

The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

The pain of unrequited hatred

James Taranto writes about the difficult position that liberals are in now that Sarah Palin has resigned:

Sarah Palin has deeply disappointed her enemies," writes Ann Coulter:

People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning.

She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about--really, it's O-ver--but they just can't stop talking about her.

Over at TalkingPointsMemo.com, a blogger called "Richardxx" illustrates the point:

Sarah Palin is a rather sad, empty and unimaginative person of little real long term importance. Personally she does not matter much to me. . . .

So tell me. Why should we care about the sad spectacle that Sarah Palin is making of herself? Should I add Governor Mark Sanford?

Between that opening and that closing are 7½ lovingly constructed paragraphs--995 words in all, not counting footnotes--about Sarah Palin. We never thought we'd say this, but Ann Coulter has a gift for understatement.

How much does silence cost?

In Sen. Ensign's [R-Nev] case, the $96,000 that he paid to the family of his ex-mistress was not enough.  Despite the money, the ex-mistress's husband still took his allegations public.  It has never been disclosed how much the Kennedy's paid Mary Jo Kopechne's family.

The power of the echo chamber

As the economy has collapsed (see here for some statistics), Democrats think things are getting better:

Among Democrats, the Rasmussen Consumer Index jumped from 53.7 a year ago to 79.5 in 2009.

Among Republicans, confidence was at 99.4 a year ago and it’s fallen to 68.6 today.

As for those not affiliated with either major party, there’s been little change.....

Recent polling showed that just 42% of voters give President Barack Obama good or excellent marks for handling the economy. He earns positive reviews from 75% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans.

The Rasmussen Consumer Index reached its highest level ever at 127.0 on January 6, 2004. The all-time low was reached on March 10, 2009 at 54.7.

The Rasmussen Investor Index reached its highest level ever at 150.9 on January 7, 2004. The lowest level ever measured was 52.5 on March 9, 2009.

This is a natural result of (1) since Obama's inauguration, the MSM portrays even the most disastrous economic news in a positive light, and (2) Democrats, as an act of faith, believe that the MSM tells the truth.

Racism in liberalland

A new study says that, in very liberal San Francisco, gays discriminate against blacks:

To study the influence of social and sexual mixing between racial and ethnic groups of gay men in San Francisco, [H. Fisher] Raymond and [Willi] McFarland [of the San Francisco Department of Public Health] interviewed 1,142 gay men. Fifty-six percent were white, 22% Latino, 14% Asian and 9% black. The men reported on a total of 3,532 sexual partnerships.

[B]lack gay men were the least preferred of sexual partners by other races and were believed to be riskier to have sex with, which can lead to men of other races avoiding black men as sexual partners.

Black gay men were also counted less often among friends and were perceived as less welcome at the common venues that cater to gay men in San Francisco by other gay men.

PREVIOUSLY, on the subject of racism:
 "He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line" and
"NAACP defends racism."
Stanford finds Democrats are racist
Obama nominates a racist
Leaders acknowledge Democrat base is racist
"That's just how white folks will do you." ---Barack Obama
Dem says Dem primary voters are racist
Dems accuse Bill and Hillary of racism

Is having a big bureaucracy the same thing as food safety?

Marion Nestle is professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She also holds appointments as Professor of Sociology at NYU and Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. Apropos of the recent cookie dough recall, she writes:

What are we going to have to do to get a real food safety system in this country? By real food safety system, I mean one that requires production of all foods-- from farm to table--under science-based food safety plans (HACCP with pathogen reduction), overseen by a single federal agency that unites and rationalizes the current functions of USDA and FDA.

So "real food safety" requires putting all power in "a single federal agency" that "unites" and "rationalizes."    For liberals, the idea that a bureaucracy becomes more "rational," as opposed to, say, more political, when it becomes larger seems to be beyond question or doubt.

Obama = BusHitler!

Remember when presidential signing statements were considered bad, such as in this Boston Globe story back from August, 2006:

The American Bar Association's House of Delegates voted yesterday to call on President Bush and future presidents not to issue ``signing statements" that claim the power to bypass laws, and it urged Congress to pass legislation to help courts put a stop to the growing practice.

Or this story from January, 2008:

President Bush this week declared that he has the power to bypass four laws, including a prohibition against using federal funds to establish permanent US military bases in Iraq, that Congress passed as part of a new defense bill.

If you thought that such deviltry would stop when The Messiah became president, you were wrong.  At the Volokh Conspiracy, John Elwood reports that Pres. Obama is issuing signing statements and his statements are quite similar to Pres. Bush's.  Obama's key innovation seems to be waiting until Friday evening, when much of the press corps has left for the weekend, to issue the signing statement.

PREVIOUSLY, on the subject of "that was then, this is now":
Broadcast networks discover a new responsibility to air presidential speeches.
Saddam's connections to terror change depending on who is president.
Dems advocate 10-year effort in Iraq until they don't
Dems supported enhanced interrogation.

PREVIOUSLY, see also the general subject of hypocrisy.

Scientists failing to back Al Gore

In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel provides a good summary of the state of the global warming debate:

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Separately, over 31,000 scientists, including over 9,000 Ph.Ds, have signed a petition stating, among other things, "[t]here is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

Improve the environment: burn a tree

Prominent liberal intellectual Jared Diamond has written books about civilizations that have been ruined by deforestation.  Environmentalists, however, are now encouraging power companies, as a solution to "global warming," to switch to burning trees:

Power companies are burning more trees because the renewable fuel can be cheaper than coal and ignited without needing permits to release carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

Vattenfall AB of Sweden, Germany's RWE AG and American Electric Power Inc. of Ohio, the biggest coal-burner in the U.S., have switched a few plants over to wood and more are planned. ....

"Wood is a huge part of the solution to making a move away from fossil fuel and softening the blow of the transition to clean energy," Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and energy adviser to President Barack Obama, said in an interview. ....

While forests blanket about a third of the planet's land surface, they're being harvested or burned at a rate that reduces tree cover by a Greece-sized area each year, sparking concern about whether replanting efforts will keep pace.

Obama's plan: burn more coal

The LA Times reports on the Obama-Waxman plan to attack "global warming":

Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of heat-trapping gases that cause global warming, but President Obama's plan to fight climate change would result in the nation burning more coal a decade from now than it does today.

The administration's plan, the centerpiece of a 700-page legislative package, proposes strict limits on emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

But to attract vital support from congressional Democrats representing heavily coal-dependent areas, authors of the legislation, including Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), have made a series of concessions that substantially soften its effect on coal -- at least over the next decade or so.

As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.

That's because the bill gives utilities a financial incentive to keep burning coal by joining the cap-and-trade system -- a kind of marketplace where polluters could reduce their emissions on paper by buying pollution reductions created by others. These so-called offsets, for example, could be created and sold by farmers who planted trees, which filter carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Environmental groups also say the bill could set off a boom in the construction of new coal plants because of provisions that would restrict legal efforts to block such projects.  [emph. added]

Soon, this same group will use their brainpower to redesign our health care system.

RELATED:  Michelle Malkin has more on the lobbying for this bill.

Obama wants to kill your mother!

President Obama has weighed in on health care for senior citizens:

President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don't stand to gain from the extra care.

In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don't unthinkingly approve "additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."

He added: "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

RELATED: Michelle Malkin notes that viewers turned away from ABC News' "unbiased" infomercial for ObamaCare and wonders "Who’s funding the Obamacare Astroturf campaign?"

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of government-run health care:
The Canadian health care collapse: 15 years of regress
The Flu and Federal Incoherence
Socialized medicine explained
Health care crisis faces threat. Democrats respond
Socialized medicine watch
Medical care and governmental control
HillaryCare will stop this: Canadian MP flies to US for treatment
In government we trust: Britons fly abroad for health care

Jimmy Carter's lasting influence, II

When the opportunity arose, President Jimmy Carter enthusiastically removed the Shah from Iran, a strong US ally, making possible his quick replacement with the current oppressive, violent, and nuclear-loving theocracy, as illustrated here by Scott Stantis:
President Carter's Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, shared Carter's enthusiasm: Mr. Young predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would go down in history as ''a saint."

Rep. Barney Frank meddles in mortgages, again

Even though the US has not yet recovered from the last mortgage crisis, Rep. Barney Frank is already hard at work trying to create the next mortgage crisis, as the editors of the Wall Street Journal explain:

Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to "roll the dice" in the name of affordable housing. That didn't turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity -- with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development. [emph. added]

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of Barney Frank:
Living in a fantasy world, III
How we got in this economic mess
Those who do not learn from history

The tragedy of the commons

Liberalism is about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result:

GREEN BAY - For the second year in a row, a bicycle sharing program in downtown Green Bay is seeing some problems. The bikes, meant for public use, are disappearing.

The city began its green bike program two weeks ago. 25 bikes were put on the streets and almost all of them are gone. The same thing happened last year. [emph. added]

(Hat tip: Berry Laker.)  Paris has similar problems with its program.

Teaching self-esteem backfires

A university study finds that teaching self-esteem makes people feel worse:

Despite what all those self-help books say, repeating positive statements apparently does not help people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves. In fact, it tends to make them feel worse, according to new research.

Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo in Ontario and two colleagues conducted experiments in which they asked students to repeat statements to themselves such as "I am a lovable person" -- then measured how it affected their mood.

"From at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952), the media have advocated saying favorable things to oneself," the researchers wrote in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science. "At this moment, thousands of people across North America are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves."

But in one of their studies involving 32 male and 36 female psychology students, the researchers found that repeating the phrase did not improve the mood of those who had low self-esteem, as measured by a standard test. They actually ended up feeling worse, and the gap between those with high and low self-esteem widened. [emph. added]

RELATED:
Education in Korea vs. the US: does "self-esteem" backfire?

Fatherhood and leadership

Some important leaders of the last hundred years who lost their fathers in adolescence or earlier include:

Hitler, A.
Stalin, J.
Hussein, S
Clinton, W. J.
Obama, B. H.

In a related essay, Dr. Helen Smith, a Knoxville forensic psychologist, writes:

I can’t help but wonder if this psychological dynamic of a lack of father figures is good for the country or if it simply gives these men and women a larger stage to act out their inner-most demons.

How much does an ambassadorship cost?

Jake Tapper, of ABC News, reports that "President Obama nominated [f]ormer Virginia lieutenant governor and businessman Donald Beyer for ambassador to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein; he and his wife Megan bundled at least $500,000 for then-Sen. Obama's presidential campaign, with Megan bundling at least $245,000 for the inauguration." However, others appear to have, on average, paid less:

[T]he Center for Responsive Politics ... in a recent study concluded that the president's new nominees for ambassadorships to Belize, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Romania and Switzerland "brought in at least $1.1 million for Obama's presidential bid as bundlers, and at least another half-a-million as bundlers for his inauguration. To date, this brings the contribution histories of Obama's ambassador nominees to roughly $1.8 million in donations since 1989. The 19 ambassadors that CRP has found in our campaign contribution database, along with their spouses and children, have given more than $98,200 to Obama personally, bundled at least $3.4 million for his 2008 presidential run and bundled another $1.4 million for his inauguration."

Thus each of the 19, on average, bundled $180,000 to Obama's campaign and another $74,000 to his inauguration. The Breyers, who bundled $500,000 for the campaign and $245,000 for the inauguration, clearly overpaid.

The Canadian health care collapse

The Fraser Institute compiles statistics on hospital waiting times in Canada. Two of their charts show clearly just how much health care has deteriorated in Canada in the last 15 years. The first chart shows wait times by specialty:

12 of the 13 specialties showed increased wait times since 1993. The longest waits are for neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery. It is best not to have a brain tumor if you live in Canada. The second chart shows wait times by province:


In each province, wait times have risen dramatically from 1993 to 2008. Both these charts are for the wait time between referral by a GP and the appointment with a specialist. These charts include neither the time you have to wait to see the GP nor the time you have to wait for treatment after your appointment with the specialist.

Wait times, AKA rationing, are of course the socialist way of saving money. There is a human cost. Calgary emergency room doctor Grant Innes says "there's no question patients are dying because of the wait times. We just don't really know how many." Rationing may not even save money, as Globe and Mail reports;

Waiting for a joint replacement not only prolongs pain in the knees, it causes billions of dollars of damage to the health of the Canadian economy, a study released Tuesday by Canada's doctors says.

The study, conducted for the Canadian Medical Association by the Centre for Spatial Economics, found that it cost the economy $14.8-billion in 2007 to have patients wait longer than medically recommended for four procedures: joint replacements, cataract surgery, coronary bypasses and MRI scans.

That, in turn, cut provincial and federal government revenues by $4.4-billion, the report says.

“Time spent waiting robs the economy of workers, both patients and their caregivers. Time spent waiting also leads to increased costs on the health-care system, as patients need extra appointments, tests and medication,” it says.

Of course, one of the advantages of that single-payer health care would have in the US is that Pres. Obama is so smart he can make work well, as Scott Stantis illustrates:

The best government money can buy

A Michael Ramirez cartoon, from the Washington Times, explains the new economy:

Obama plan will drive more jobs offshore

Bloomberg reports:

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.