I'll Thank Them....

The six hundred pound gorilla of the world's problems -the one that seems to be consensually suppressed in the world's press- is population. It is the real core of "green," the sine qua non: with population control, the other problems can all be ameliorated; without it, they just get worse & worse. Resource depletion, energy, food supply, endangered species, pollution....even theories with untenable conclusions like global warming.
Population theorists like Paul Ehrlich have long passed from favor, yet they haven't been disproven. In the long haul, they maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth is probably no more than the current population of the United States.....and perhaps less.

Well, the Chinese have brought it up, and good for them.

As an aside, the Euros -among others- are becoming more deeply mired in highly questionable programs like establishing carbon markets for "cap & trade." As with all sweeping government economic manipulation it sounds good on paper......and it might just send the world economy down the same path that destroyed the economy of the Soviet Union, and was on the way to doing the same for China until they wised up.

It's about time.

If they can have Book-O-Mania or whatever it is on C-SPAN, so can I. Besides, now that Don Imus is busy making his crawl in sackcloth and ashes to Canterbury Cathedral, I don't think books are mentioned anywhere else on TV, except when it's absolutely unavoidable.

Today, something short: E.M. Forster's The Celestial Omnibus. This is no fairy tale; it is absolutely true, and absolutely necessary for anyone who plans on maturing into a proper adult to take with deadly seriousness. I believe that the child is born, and the imagination, given proper stimuli, develops as a matter of course in any normal person. Lacking those stimuli (...and TV, quite specifically, qualifies as a "lack"), it will wither and die in adulthood, and that person becomes, at very best, pathetic.

There you are; a review of a short story, short and to the point.....