Archived material Access restricted Article
Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Sun 04/02/2006 View Sat 04/01/2006 View Fri 03/31/2006 View Thu 03/30/2006 View Wed 03/29/2006 View Tue 03/28/2006 View Mon 03/27/2006
1
2006-04-02 Home Front: Culture Wars
Influential US scientist calls for death of 90% of all humans ASAP
Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.
Posted by lotp 2006-04-02 13:43|| || Front Page|| [11130 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Perhaps the good 'scientist' would do us the favour of being first to leave the human gene pool.
Posted by ShepUK 2006-04-02 14:19||   2006-04-02 14:19|| Front Page Top

#2 Sounds like he'd be right at home in Belbury.
Posted by Korora">Korora  2006-04-02 14:36||   2006-04-02 14:36|| Front Page Top

#3 Never that, Shep. Dr. Pianka is obviously Too Important to the Movement® to be among the casualties. Only the best and the brightest ought to survive, you know.
Posted by Seafarious">Seafarious  2006-04-02 14:39||   2006-04-02 14:39|| Front Page Top

#4 Yet another reason to be wary of the motives of "ecologists".
Posted by eLarson 2006-04-02 14:53|| http://larsonian.blogspot.com]">[http://larsonian.blogspot.com]  2006-04-02 14:53|| Front Page Top

#5 I had a hard time believing this, for various reasons.

But then I found this account of Pianka's talk by someone who admired it. It pretty much jibes with Mims's recollections.

Here are course evaluations from 1998 which show that Pianka was harping on about ebola at least eight years ago. This 2004 course description witters on about the same thing.

Morality aside, I find it pretty shocking that a biologist can't grasp the fact that humans have, to an extent, risen above biology. A disease that wiped out humanity would have to spring up very fast, before we had time to study it, and kill even the young and healthy very quickly.

And, I'll point out, if he thinks that humans have little use for biologists now, just wait until there's only 10% of us left.

Still don't know what this is doing on Page 1, though.
Posted by Angie Schultz 2006-04-02 14:54||   2006-04-02 14:54|| Front Page Top

#6 Cux he's an Errorist?
Posted by Tholuper Ebbomose9507 2006-04-02 14:57||   2006-04-02 14:57|| Front Page Top

#7 I need to see this one confirmed. There were others at the event, someone can confirm or deny. I'm going to wait and see.
Posted by 2b 2006-04-02 15:02||   2006-04-02 15:02|| Front Page Top

#8 I put it on Pg 1 because of the not-so-subtle threat of a deliberate biological attack by one of Pianka's worshippers.
Posted by lotp 2006-04-02 15:04||   2006-04-02 15:04|| Front Page Top

#9 oops...just checked out post #5 by Angie. What a creepy psycho.
Posted by 2b 2006-04-02 15:05||   2006-04-02 15:05|| Front Page Top

#10 "...evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert..."

Figures.

Posted by Dave D.">Dave D.  2006-04-02 15:27||   2006-04-02 15:27|| Front Page Top

#11 Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us.

Maybe that's because members of the general public might want to track down and kill someone espousing such dangerous and psychotic notions as an intentional pandemic release of Ebola.

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

Au contraire, I think a bacteria like brewer's yeast, for instance, serves a far more noble and valuable role in this world than does our lunatic Mr. Pianka. It is precisely full-goose-bozo wingnuts like this rectal cavity that propel the perjorative notion of the "mad scientist."

I would like to see this individual monitored and surveiled 24-7. His access to all microbiological R&D facilities and sequencing laboratories should be banned entirely. A thorough psychological review and personality index should be performed upon this individual immediately.

What we have is self-loathing brought to pinnacle elevation. This has nothing to do with ecology, liberalism or science.

He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy.

You are staring into the face of naked elitism locked in the embrace of pure evil.
Posted by Zenster 2006-04-02 15:40||   2006-04-02 15:40|| Front Page Top

#12 This guy sets the bar for radical left wing personas non gratis.
Posted by bigjim-ky 2006-04-02 15:45||   2006-04-02 15:45|| Front Page Top

#13 We've been talking about this here for as long as Rantburg's been around -- this subconscious death wish that so many seem to have. And when someone gives voice to that death wish, he gets a standing ovation.

I almost wrote "this subconscious death wish that so many in the West seem to have." Then I pulled back and realized that it's almost everywhere. The industrialized countries aren't breeding. Dar al Islam is edging closer to Allah-daemerung every day. Africa is killing itself with AIDS. Scanning the whole world, only the US, India, Australia, and parts of Latin America seem to have escaped the death wish. Even in the US, the coastal elites would just as soon drag us down into the morass.

It's almost certain then, isn't it? The nexus represented by the Evironmental Liberation Front is at some point going to launch a war virus attack from within even while we battle Islamism in its quest to destroy itself and take the world down with it.

It will be interesting to see if the environmentalists try an indiscriminate attack or if they attempt to innoculate the "chosen" before releasing a weaponized agent. This reminds me a lot of the scenario in Vernor Vinge's Peace War, where environmentalists use weird physics and bio-war to reduce the human population and gain global dominance.
Posted by 11A5S 2006-04-02 15:47||   2006-04-02 15:47|| Front Page Top

#14  Wasn't this the plan in Rainbow Six
Posted by Dan Darling">Dan Darling  2006-04-02 15:54|| http://www.regnumcrucis.blogspot.com]">[http://www.regnumcrucis.blogspot.com]  2006-04-02 15:54|| Front Page Top

#15 I'll let some of you know what happens.
Posted by Captain America 2006-04-02 16:00||   2006-04-02 16:00|| Front Page Top

#16 Hell, maybe it is time to hit the Reset button... just not the one they're aiming for...
Posted by Jaitle Thrineger2931 2006-04-02 16:06||   2006-04-02 16:06|| Front Page Top

#17 He needs a vist by Vager.
Posted by SPoD 2006-04-02 16:21|| http://sockpuppetofdoom.blogspot.com/]">[http://sockpuppetofdoom.blogspot.com/]  2006-04-02 16:21|| Front Page Top

#18 he has no death wish - except for the rest of us undeserving consumers of air/space
Posted by Frank G">Frank G  2006-04-02 16:25||   2006-04-02 16:25|| Front Page Top

#19 I'm with him. Let's see

300 USA
20 Australia
60 UK
130 Japan
35 Canada
5 New Zealand
5 Costa Rica

555 Total

We've got room to spare
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-04-02 17:00||   2006-04-02 17:00|| Front Page Top

#20 OK, I'm going into full Joe M mode here. I don't know if I believe this myself, but I'm throwing it out there for discussion.

Education level seems to be the number one correlating factor for low fertility, both on an individual and national basis. What if that is masking a real correlation? What if the enviros are fighting a memetic war? Perhaps they have so infiltrated the educational establishment that the longer you are in it, the more you are exposed to their memes and the less likely it is that you'll reproduce?

I'll go even further out on a limb. We know from dealing with Salafism, that highly networked organizations tend towards multiple factions with common goals but different means. What if the militants in the environmental movement have lost faith with the moderates. What if they are tired of wandering around the wilderness and want the promised land right now, dammit!?

What would the promised land look like? If we take the 90% population reduction at face value and read between the lines of other environmentalist goals, then it would have a total population of 600M. The equatorial and polar regions would be human free and given back to "nature." The bulk of humanity would reside in the temperate zones. Of the remaining population, 2/3 to 3/4 would be farmers operating at a near subsistence level -- the indigenous peoples and peasants that the enviros always claim to be protecting. Above the peasant class, there would be another stratum analogous to the "bourgeoisie specialists" of the early Soviet era. They would only exist in numbers sufficient to keep the lights on, bits flowing, hospitals open and in general maintain a late 20th century quality of life for the elites.

The elites would certainly be no more than 100 million (though this could grow is they were open to allowing more modern farming techniques). They would be areligious, amoral, and free in their own minds to exercise whatever form of coercion necessary to maintain control over the lower social substratums. Their state would have totalitarian police powers. No dissent would be allowed on the basic social structure and the means required to maintain that structure. Otherwise, limited debate could be practiced. Technological progress would be zero.
Posted by 11A5S 2006-04-02 17:18||   2006-04-02 17:18|| Front Page Top

#21 Our own home grown death cult. I agree that this guy should be denied access to microbio labs, and I'd flag his audience as suspicious also. The Unabomber only killed a few.
Posted by James">James  2006-04-02 17:52|| http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com]">[http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com]  2006-04-02 17:52|| Front Page Top

#22 If you chart the statistics of lethal epidemics, it is obvious that they kill "from the bottom of the pyramid". This means that the poor, uneducated, in ill health, ill-fed, and in countries with poor sanitation and no concept of hygiene die off far more than healthy, educated people in wealthy and advanced countries.

I'm sure the "scientist" is aware of this fact.

So what he is really saying that he wants third and fourth world peasants to die. This is because he is an elitist pig who despises such people primarily because he is an elitist pig. He would hate these people just as much, and want them to die, even if there were only 10 million people on the planet.

He hates their races, their cultures, their very existence in nature--which he sees to be unnatural and destructive. They put "footie prints" all over his pristine sand dunes. They infect "his" nature with their presence, and they do not and cannot appreciate his evolved "aesthetic" of environmentalism.

In a manner of speaking, "he is not a vegetarian because he loves animals, he is a vegetarian because he hates plants."

When pressured, certainly he will point to *some* of the people living in developed countries that he believes need to die, too. These would be those "hoi polloi" living in red States, no doubt.

But invariably *none* of them will be in his personal cocktail circuit of "superior intellectuals" and armchair political activists.

Not surprisingly, however, nature has the last laugh on his clique, as while they might be credentialed from the finest schools, they are so sorely lacking in common sense and judgement that a healthy percentage of them, too, are culled when culling is in order.

Poetic justice, I suppose. You can't fool mother nature. She can spot defectives from a long distance.
Posted by Anonymoose 2006-04-02 18:06||   2006-04-02 18:06|| Front Page Top

#23 NS, I'd add another 5.4 for Denmark just on general principle.

Yes, DD, I thought that Tom Clancy did it better in Rainbow 6, although I think Michael Crichton's State of Fear is relevant too. Guys like this should be dropped naked and alone into the interior of New Guinea for about a year to get a feel for what the earth would be like without 90% of us.
Posted by RWV 2006-04-02 19:13||   2006-04-02 19:13|| Front Page Top

#24 They would be areligious, amoral, and free in their own minds to exercise whatever form of coercion necessary to maintain control over the lower social substratums. Their state would have totalitarian police powers. No dissent would be allowed on the basic social structure and the means required to maintain that structure. Otherwise, limited debate could be practiced. Technological progress would be zero.

Read "Larry Niven, his Police Creation (The ARM) sounds just like this idea.
Posted by Redneck Jim 2006-04-02 20:07||   2006-04-02 20:07|| Front Page Top

#25 Rainbow Six:
"The cause of the sudden outbreak of terrorism is radical eco-terrorists, who are coincidentally owners of a large and successful biotechnology firm. They engineer a modified version of the Ebola virus, codenamed "Shiva"; they also engineer a vaccine for themselves. Their plan is to infect the world, killing everyone but their selected few, who will rebuild the world in a scientifically and environmentally friendly way."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Six_(book)
Posted by Darrell 2006-04-02 21:30||   2006-04-02 21:30|| Front Page Top

#26 #15 CA :) :) :) :) One of the best!
Posted by Inspector Clueso 2006-04-02 22:08||   2006-04-02 22:08|| Front Page Top

#27 No better than the Nazis and their eugenics. Just less straighforward about who they intend the master race to be.

Hint to the Biologists: you're going find the survivors to be the guys with the guns and the isolationist tendencies. Not exactly your ivory tower eletists who cannot survive otuside of modern society and all the scaffolding it requires "from the bottom tier".
Posted by Oldspook 2006-04-02 22:59||   2006-04-02 22:59|| Front Page Top

23:43 RD
23:35 3dc
23:12 trailing wife
23:06 RWV
22:59 Oldspook
22:50 3dc
22:49 3dc
22:49 trailing wife
22:42 JAB
22:32 Listen to Dogs
22:25 JAB
22:18 WTF!
22:11 Anonymoose
22:08 Inspector Clueso
21:59 Anonymoose
21:57 RD
21:44 Scooter McGruder
21:34 Asymmetrical Triangulation
21:30 Darrell
21:26 Agent Bauer
21:21 Gliting Closing8568
21:19 Fordesque
20:55 Darrell
20:54 jim#6









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com