Arizona alone steps up to the plate to help shoulder some of the burden for America. This one state is going above and beyond what some of the others are only yet considering and that is improved law enforcement.

“Despite erroneous and misleading statements suggesting otherwise, the new state misdemeanor crime of willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document is adopted, verbatim, from the same offense found in federal statute,” she said on April 23, 2010, the day she signed the bill.

politifact

Less interested in reality than in sensationalism that gets an uninformed crowd buying products, the mass media has done its part to infect public reality with needless controversy. Nonetheless, as the dust settles a bit, the facts remain intact. Arizona is keeping the privilege of American citizenship at a premium and taking some of the burden off the national budget.

Then, as now, people claimed that immigration is a federal issue, and that the police cannot enforce federal law, and blah blah blah. They didn’t really care about the law. They just wanted to stop anyone from doing anything about illegal immigration.

There is nothing now but deception, corruption, and intimidation, the usual Third World symptoms, preventing the other 49 from doing their part for America:

Here’s what I want to get through your head: state and local police can enforce federal immigration law. Federal law does not prevent them from doing so.

mac

With a $13 trillion and steadily rising debt, it is becoming clearer that more than just one state needs to consider taking up some of America’s burden. In so doing, they may also reduce the amount of public assistance benefits doled out and get the unemployed, who are already citizens, working again doing tasks Americans have as always. Consider it state budget control.

The only loser is the federally-defined criminal and those who aid him, rather than punishing the existing citizen and voting taxpayer as is the case right now.

For most of us, our ethical social manchimp brains shy away from the fact that labor is something that can also accumulate to extreme excess. We understand that inert objects, which when foolishly produced in gross excess, can go to waste.

But the idea of wasted human lives is for us a different beast. Reality often hurts, so stictly in the case of our bias favoring our manchimp equals, we modify the rules we use to engage with it as if reality is going to sympathize with us.

This is irrational. A unit of labor, embodied in a human, is a component of economy, not the cause of it, not the whole of it, and not the purpose of it. It is even questionable whether as much human labor will be required in the future as we increasingly automate tasks using our technologies.

Our reasoned response is to face reality and get used to the continued devaluation of the human labor component within economies.

For 23 years, 58-year-old Cindy Paoletti of Salina, N.Y., worked in the corporate accounting division of J.P. Morgan Chase, balancing payroll accounts in an upstate office of the Wall Street bank. In December 2007, Paoletti was let go in a wave of layoffs that eventually shuttered the entire Syracuse operations center. “My job went to India,” she sighs.

washingtonindependent

There is only so much competent ownership that can go around. Every human has not shown himself capable of entrepreneurship, industry leadership, or even business management. Relatively very few have.

This is why we have a division between the great mass of human labor and the far fewer providers of the means to work. If the human labor portion had even minimal mental compentence, it would understand its own role in the arrangement. It is not the place of labor to own and control the means of production.

Thus, the unemployed are not entitled to work. They are drawn upon as a resource pool and then discarded as required by the reality of economy as a system requiring proportional balance to function.

Too much labor is a gross imbalance between human population numbers and the means of the providers to make use of this overwhelming excess. Unemployment is a compensatory effect of an economy that requires the harmony of its components to maintain stability.

But don’t mention the possibility that we are blundering into disaster, one following another, caused by ever increasing consumer demand from adding more of us. You see, we just aren’t engaging in the correct kind of consumption is all.

You can get some of them, not most, not all, to comprehend finite space, finite habitat for man and the lifeforms he relies on and crowds out. But even this minority, will without realizing what’s implied, unwittingly propose whittling consumerism to ever tinier slices of the collective pie for each person as our numbers continue to grow.

How far does the slippery slope slide? Not to infinity, which would make the slope argument fallacious. But, some propose regression to paleolithic society, a place humans have already been. Will 11 billion mud huts and caves suit 22nd Century Mankind?

Without any advanced form of preserving history and managing society, no one will understand, much less have the means to stop all the thousands of future curious inventors, using their advanced human brains, from reinventing modern consumer society again from scratch.

Overpopulation remains taboo for the green people, yet it is the factor, as we increase its value on the other half of the equation that makes any form of consumerism whatsoever more burdensome on the environment.

All sort of products, from cars to consumer durables to consumer electronics used to have much longer average lives in service. More frequent trade ins/ups seem to have been foisted upon consumers by playing on status-seeking and a desire for novelty.

nakedcapitalism

Environmentalism for many greens is a means to political ends, what humans want,  like selling green goods or votes, not the goal itself, which is what the non-human life we depend on to exist needs.

Make room for nature. This needs to be our litmus test for separating the ecology conservationist from the products and politics utilitarian.

“My fellow Americans, we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness — it is our greatest strength.”
William Jefferson Clinton, State of the Union 1997

Twelve years after this insidious slogan was uttered and accepted by our obliviot voting population, the contrary results continue to reveal themselves. Maybe it is more accurate to look to 50 years of Civil Rights activism and our shift to open immigration that helped prepare the field and sow the seeds of decay that now blossom in our midst.

Terrorist incidents over the past 12 months show that Islamic extremists within the U.S. increasingly are launching attacks against targets such as military bases, anti-terrorist experts said today.

“The threat is now increasingly from within, from homegrown terrorists who are inspired by violent Islamist ideology to plan and execute attacks where they live,” Mitchell Silber, director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department, said.

yahoo

But wait, isn’t there more to American diversity than individual actors dedicated to radical Islam? In the name of humanitarian political and economic asylum, American “social justice” advocates have been encouraging the remnants of foreign rebel armies to set up camp in your home town.

MS-13 is believed to have originated in El Salvador, as a response to a brutal civil war. But some immigrants to the U.S. brought the gang mentality with them, where it spread like a disease. They are known to be extremely violent and seem to go out of their way to commit the kinds of atrocities that will get them noticed by police and the press. Membership is said to range in age from as young as 11 to as old as 40.

citytv

While the social justice people are hard at work dumping the world’s problems on excessively privileged, and thus unequal you, science instead takes a hard look at population numbers and ecological footprint for an alternative to obliviot liberal activism.

Stocks continued to move higher and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new 2009 intraday high Monday, extending a strong run fueled by the flow of easy money to support global economic recovery.

The Dow was recently up 176 points, or 1.7%, to 10199.43. The measure is on pace for a fourth straight daily gain and a new closing high for the year.

wsj

We have about as large a population as ever, but millions have been virtually exiled from the economy by way of job loss, to expired unemployment compensation, on down to complete destitute homelessness.

They may remain consumers to some extent, but to be sure, they are no longer producers. Let’s not count the few million self-exiles incarcerated, institutionalized, and the several who have dropped out of the system entirely to rough it in the wilderness.

So far we have learned the market is, or was at the time up, a likely hiccup, but that Obama administration spending is also up variously for corporate and public welfare. This is the cause of the stock market hiccup. The number of productive working people doesn’t appear to be climbing, so it is of questionable value to point to rising stocks for one given reporting period:

The jobless rate rocketed to 10.2 percent in October, the highest since early 1983, dealing a psychological blow to Americans as they prepare holiday shopping lists. It was another worse-than-expected report casting a shadow over the struggling recovery.

yahoo

With unemployment across the board, labor migration from the southern border has taken its own losses for about a year now:

According to informal surveys by the Mexican consulate in Dallas, most of those wanting to return to Mexico cite the sudden scarcity of jobs, fear of deportation and uncertainty about obtaining legal resident status any time soon.

In the last few years, and particularly the last few months, Mr. Sánchez struggled to find work. His earnings dwindled as his children grew up and their needs multiplied.

“People like me, if you don’t work one day, you worry about how to feed your family the next day,” he said. “We as immigrant workers never have stability, even if the economy is doing well. Imagine how things are now.”

dallasnews

Looking back to the Clinton administration, we can recall the growth of the information technology sector, the IT bubble, which would bust soon after Bush took office. When the bubble was inflating, demand for trained IT people was up.

Twelve years ago, ordinary Americans who were unskilled or underskilled labor at the time found ways to get certifications like the commonplace MCSE or even a technical degree. Many of them went on to make a decent living in IT for a few years until the tech bubble burst and mass layoffs took place under the first Bush term.

The Clinton IT bubble created a demand for new unskilled laborers to flip burgers, house clean, mow lawns, hammer trusses, lay up drywall, or pour concrete. We added millions of immigrants to fill this gap and they brought families. So for several years, we operated with a larger population than ever, mostly employed and consuming.

But then there was another bubble bust with the housing collapse, an end to many new construction proposals and the banks seizing up new credit for growth capital. Now, we have some low wage laborers making their exit, the unemployed masses, the broken homeless, the long term institutionalized, and a handful of voluntary society dropouts.

That’s less productive people operating in the economy and less consumerism. Yet, if you are one of the remaining productive consumers, life goes on much as before, except perhaps with a bit less crowding in some places, less traffic in other places, and a little more quiet at times.

Does America have an ideally stable optimum population density that is similar in ways, and possibly parallels ecological carrying capacity?

One of the older online domains takes us in for a closer look:

“In 1990 the nonrenewable resources remaining in the ground would have lasted 110 years at the 1990 consumption rates. No serious resource limits were in evidence. But by 2020 the remaining resources constituted only a 30-year supply. Why did this shortage arise so fast? Because exponential growth increases consumption and lowers resources.

So, real progress is found in the maintenance of an equilibrium factoring tech level or affluence, population numbers and the carrying capacity of our living space, which includes to lesser extents, foreign trade with the carrying capacity of places abroad.

Progress is evidently not found, as popular notions would have it, in perpetual growth.

“As both food and nonrenewable resources become harder to obtain in this simulated world, capital is diverted to producing more of them. That leaves less output to be invested in basic capital growth.

dieoff

Band Aid was a British and Irish charity supergroup, founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia by releasing the record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

whateva

Fast forward to present day. The cycle not only doesn’t end with this continued foreign aid, the cycle strengthens and expands.

The Ethiopian government has asked the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.

The request came at a meeting of donors to discuss the impact of a prolonged drought affecting parts of East Africa.

The UN’s World Food Programme says $285m (£173m) will be needed in the next six months. Some aid officials say the numbers of hungry could rise.

bbc

Most people in modern society don’t like talking about overpopulation because they don’t want to admit that not every single human life is precious and worth saving – which denies the simple reality that death happens; either at old age or infancy, it’s inevitable. It can happen under tragic or not-so-tragic circumstances.  The most profound part of our existence is the fact that it ends, and yet we still can’t really grasp it. If every human life isn’t worth saving, the thinking goes, then maybe my life isn’t worth saving, and this is unacceptable to just about everyone. Instead of simply admitting that we are a society of narcissistic morons who parrot about individual rights and entitlements while hoarding and consuming all available resources, though, we project that thinking into, “no one’s life is anything but precious, therefore anything that reduces or limits anyone else’s entitlements is a direct attack on humanity and life itself.” Of course, this is silly as it relates to overpopulation, because the simple fact of the matter is that the less people we have, the more resources there are for everyone.

The point that’s being driven home by those who believe overpopulation has and will continue to be a real problem in our world, can be expressed in this equation:

Number of people * Average resource consumption per person = Total resource consumption

The simple beauty of this equation really begins to shine when one considers what humanity can control and what makes sense to control: the average consumption per person, or the number of people on planet Earth? The answer is obvious, but cutting through social norms proves a bit more difficult:

This is a column I don’t want to write. Its subject is ugly; it makes me instinctively recoil. I have chastised people who bring it up at environmentalist meetings. The people who talk about it obsessively have often been callous about human life, and consistently proved wrong throughout history. And yet … there is a grain of insight in what they say.

The subject is overpopulation. Is our planet overstuffed with human beings?

Are we breeding to excess? These questions are increasingly poking into public debate, and from odd directions. Phillip Mountbatten — husband of the British monarch Elizabeth Windsor — said in a documentary screened last week: “The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really (that there are) too many people. It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it.” He is not alone.

[+|SeattlePi.com]

Further complicating this issue is the manner in which overpopultion is becoming a problem for everyone. Of course, planet Earth is still a big place, so the problem isn’t evident everywhere, and many people are now used to the idea of living in crowded cities so they scoff at the idea that infrastructure could collapse if yet more people were added into the fold. This is another layer of our social reality that most people refuse to see through, but when you look at the facts from a birds-eye view, you realize that something unpleasant has to happen – even with the first-world relief valve of immigration (legal or illegal) continuing to allow populations nearest the equator to continue to grow:

In 2008, world population is 6.7 billion: 1.2 billion people live in regions classified as more developed by the United Nations; 5.5 billion people reside in less developed regions. “We will likely see the 7 billion mark passed within four years,” said Carl Haub, PRB senior demographer and co-author of this year’s Data Sheet. “And by 2050, global population is projected to rise to 9.3 billion. Between now and mid-century, these diverging growth patterns will boost the population share living in today’s less developed countries from 82 percent to 86 percent.”

“The differences between Italy and the Democratic Republic of the Congo illustrate this widening demographic divide,” said Mary Mederios Kent, co-author of this year’s Data Sheet. “On one side are mostly poor countries with high birth rates and low life expectancies. On the other side are mostly wealthy countries with low birth rates and rapid aging.”

Worldwide, women now average 2.6 children during their lifetimes, 3.2 in developing countries excluding China, and 4.7 in the least developed countries. Lifetime fertility is highest in sub-Saharan Africa at 5.4 children per woman. In the developed countries, women average 1.6 children. The United States, with an average of 2.1 children, is an exception to this low-fertility pattern in the world’s wealthier countries.

[+|2008 World Population Data Sheet]

Interestingly, my perspective is one of a father-to-be. People grasp at straws when it comes to the supposed “irony” of my reproducing vs. my feelings on overpopulation.  What they don’t understand is the process by which this problem is shared by everyone, and that fertility rates are higher in places they have no business being high at all (whereas, in places where fertility rates are low, average resource consumption tends to be high). The overflow comes home to roost in places like Portland, Maine when developed nations provide the aforementioned relief valve for overpopulation, when it would be better to simply reject massive waves of immigrants into towns and cities that not only don’t want it, but certainly don’t need it.

Since our economies are based on the idea of ever-expanding growth, though, we once again hit the wall of social reality and have a hard time saying “no”. The simplicity of Dr. Bartlett and Asimov, among others, states that it’s about time we say no not only to more immigration waves, but consumerism as well.  The first step is admitting there’s a problem, as the saying goes, and for society to admit world overpopulation is a concern would be a great first step.

Whether it even exists, and if it does, whether the cause is anthrogenic, solargenic, tectonic/volcanic/geological or a combination, global warming has long occupied center stage.

This effect is simply another error, perhaps orchestrated or accidental, created by our liberal democracy, with its oppositional polarizing process forcing important topics into a false dichotomy or other unrealistic position.

Thus, we rarely achieve lasting decisiveness, regardless of importance or urgency.

Whatever the case, the effect is the same. If we value maintaining our social image by living like all the other Americans around us, we too will adopt a degree of psychologically defensive indifference to the results of our lifestyle choices.

‘But then,’ you might ask, ‘what about all the other negative effects of pollution such as respiratory illnesses, heavy metals in our lakes and oceans, acid rain, etc.—we are still poisoning our atmosphere and environment, should we not be concerned about that?’

diversion

Venus offers us a glimpse into an extreme case of global warming with a greenhouse effect run amok. Its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead.

The crushing atmospheric pressure is over ninety times that of Earth. The clouds contain sulphuric acid droplets. Each day is eight months long.

Like feverish visions from a surreal grindcore soundscape, Venus is a hell.

Then young, Carl Sagan connected these two facts to correctly surmise that a runaway greenhouse effect dominates Venus. Carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, traps the heat trying to radiate away from Venus causing a huge global temperature increase.

suite101

From the perspective of planetary science, global warming happens to planets without human interaction.

This opens up the possibility that the effect on our own planet, like any cosmological challenge is for the forseeable future, beyond the means of our control.

A frozen peat bog covering the entire sub-Arctic area of Western Siberia, the size of France and Germany, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas that is melting for the first time since it was sequestered more than 11,000 years ago before the end of the last ice age.

terranature

The early 21st Century is a globalizing world of billions of people, each seeking to attain American levels of material affluence.

The United States GDP accounts for nearly a fourth of the world’s total productive output in exchange for the largest share among nations from the accessible petroleum.

Everyone in the world cannot then move up into an American level of affluence. The desire is unrealistic and irresponsible of those who insist every human in the world may live a First World material existence.

What we may consider grinding poverty compared to our few decades of modern prosperity is approximately a typical lifestyle for almost everyone throughout civilization’s history.

However, innumerable small villages have been replaced with crowded urban sprawl. The displacement of wilderness, the sprawl and crowding are certain to continue well into the coming decades.

More people will live in cities than in the countryside next year, and a growing number will be living in slums. The UN report says the number of slum dwellers will pass the 1bn mark in 2007. Urban growth and slum expansion rates are nearly identical in some regions. For a long time we suspected that the optimistic picture of cities did not reflect reality.

corrupt.org

The negative effects of crowded urban spaces in the midst of “grinding poverty”, a deliberately unsavory euphemism meaning “traditional living”, is synergistic.

Disease spreads more quickly and is less easily isolated. Psychological stressors, loss of social control and social isolation tend to rise in settings larger or denser than small communities.

Criminality has more opportunity to strike and then disappear into the sea of people. Traditional living, off a landscape now replaced with concrete, has vanished. The slums are a font of unchecked, ever flowing pollution of destroyed human lives and discarded waste.

So, we come to the real environmental debate of the Twenty First Century. Overpopulation, now buried by the global warming controversy, was first formally addressed 35 years ago:

Throughout the world, urban populations are growing in size at a considerably faster rate than rural populations. As a result, by the end of this century, and for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population will be living in urban areas.

Urbanization is an element of the process of modernization.

Moreover, while in certain countries this process is efficiently managed and maximum use is made of the advantages this management presents, in others urbanization takes place in an uncontrolled manner and is accompanied by overcrowding in certain districts, an increase in slums, deterioration of the environment, urban unemployment and many other social and economic problems.

population-security

Mankind’s historic milestone of more people inhabiting urban spaces than open countryside three years ago passed virtually unnoticed, minimized by a notoriously unreliable mainstream media.

We need a better approach to help ground our ecology concerns in reality and within the context of what mankind is able to control.

Anthrocentric morality, an effect of crowdism in action and a problematic distributive justice reaction, defeats us. Overpopulation is the obese elephant in the room and global warming has become our collective blindfold.

Ultimately what conservatives are trying to argue toward is that the society as a whole is more important than the individual, and that the individual must adapt to common sense about how reality works. They think “freedom” is a vector to that because it sounds good.

As a result, they’ve invented this mythos that Big State government — think Hitler, Stalin and Democrats — wants to take away your ability to do whatever you can afford to do. After all, those who are born smarter and work diligently tend to have some cash ready to use.

In this view, you can buy that big SUV because global warming is an illusion, and no one should be able to tell you what to do so you can be a rugged individualist. This thinking is doomed for the following reasons:

• Given such freedom, people opt for the least obligation possible. They’re not going to uphold traditional values, but demand no values.
• You can’t out-”freedom” the Democrats. They offer no restrictions, no cultural norms, and a welfare state. Almost no obligation, even to go to work.
• If everyone acts on their freedom, we’re not going to pull together in the same direction, and we won’t be able to face big problems of resources limiting our ability to do whatever we want.

It’s that latter one — limited resources versus unlimited needs and desires — that we’re going to face. For a minute, assume that global warming is simply a power grab by third world countries who want the first world to turn off its industry so they can get ahead. Fine — but what about pollution, species depletion, limited farmland, low water supplies, and violent cities?

The libertarians and Republicans this week set up a great wail about a new face in Washington who they associate with Big State decisions. They will claim he is against their Holy Book, their values as individualists, and the sanctity of life.

And thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s, called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, online.

In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.

Reason

Oh no! Abortions and mass sterilizations — those might not be fair to the rugged individualist. But they also might be required by the demands of our situation here on earth.

After all, the world isn’t just humans — it’s an environment, too, and scarcity of resources including space which will regulate humanity. We can make decisions within the anthrosphere, but since we’re one part of a big world, we may not have the ability to make those decisions the way we want to. Sometimes, we must simply adapt.

It is now hard to think of a single major problem we face, here in Britain or elsewhere, which would not be solved, or at least ameliorated, by having fewer people.

Everything from hospital waiting lists, crowded trains, the looming energy crisis, water and sewer systems unable to cope, unaffordable housing and unavailable dentistry have, at their core, Britain’s burgeoning population.

Our roads will become even more congested, our trains more crowded and even slower, the waits for service longer and delays ever more a part of life.

Housing will become ever more unaffordable, we will have to spend billions on new schools and hospitals to cater for the equivalent of two new Londons – two vast metropolises somehow to be shoehorned into what is already a desperately crowded land.

We will, inevitably, lose great swathes of our countryside. The green belts will have to disappear. Ghastly and ill-conceived ‘new towns’ will spring up all over the South East and Midlands, the areas where new people want to live. London and its environs are already, effectively, full; but that will not stop them getting fuller still.

The Daily Mail

His point is refreshingly clear: even if we just look at numbers of people, what happens when we get more? We all live in cities, and the cities expand. The countryside is consumed. Whatever environmental problems exist get worse.

How do we reconcile the individual’s unlimited wants and desires with a finite amount of space before we wreck things we need or should keep sacred, like a healthy environment and unpolluted air and water, or just enough space so that earth is not a giant sardine can?

Here’s a short list of data points about how we’re wrecking this planet with overpopulation:

• Humans are using the Earth’s resources and dumping waste 23 per cent faster than nature is able to regenerate, according to the Global Footprint Network, a non-profit group in Oakland, Calif.
• We won’t make adequate progress on the most crucial environmental goals — reducing carbon emissions, preventing overfishing and decreasing deforestation, among them — unless we tackle growth and its ever increasing demands on the planet.
• Forest protection attracts people, people wreck forests
• But isn’t the problem solving itself, as people have fewer children and population growth rates slow? Yes, he says, if you discount immigration
• Human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during 20th century. During that time emissions of CO2, the leading greenhouse gas, grew 12-fold.
• Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned.
• Given our disproportionately large population to land mass ratio then, put simply, we are running out of space to dump our waste.
• A link between immigration and water shortages: the more people share the water, the less each one has.
• Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources.
• Water use is growing twice as fast as population, but there is no more water today than there ever has been.
• Seven Environmental Problems That Are Worse Than We Thought — courtesy of our booming human population.
• While the wildlife-conservation movement is valiantly attempting to save the world’s remaining diversity of life, this effort is overwhelmed by the demands of mounting numbers of people.
• Uganda’s rapid population growth — one of the highest in the world — means it will lose its entire forest cover in the next 50 years
• Consumption has grown so much in the last 30 years that demands on natural resources now exceed the planet’s capacity for renewal by a quarter each year
• All efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions may be for naught, however, if we ignore population growth.

You get the picture. Now on to the magic question: how is it that we have systematically failed to address these problems, and that they’re still elephants in the room today?

You’ll notice that a lot of our effort spent on this blog is devoted to smashing the idea of equality, or that each person has a “right” to do whatever they want. We also spent a lot of time pointing out that people have different abilities and hence values to a forward-moving civilization.

Our goal in this is to smash the sacred cow of the conservatives, which is individual autonomy as a promised right to all people. It is also a sacred taboo of the left through their dogma of “equality.”

Why would we do this? After all, we’ll be more popular if we promise you can buy that SUV, and that just buying green light bulbs will take care of the problem. The people who make those promises are far more popular than us.

However, dishonesty has a way of coming back to haunt people. When our writers go home at night, we have no guilt on our consciences because we did not lie — we faced the truth with a level gaze and if it didn’t blink first, we didn’t back down.

Our society is making people into small atoms that do not interact with others. People recede into themselves and do not face reality and mortality. They fear anything except what they intend to do, or in other words, their wants and desires.

Students are immature, they rely too heavily on Internet tools such as Wikipedia as research sources, they fail to learn independently and they expect success without putting in the effort, said respondents to the survey by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.

“The McGuinty government is applauding itself for increased graduation rates from secondary school,” says the confederation’s report, which urges more funding for for classrooms.

“However, it appears that secondary students are not receiving the requisite skills that they need to be successful in university studies.”

Only 2.27 per cent thought students are better prepared.

Observers blame a number of factors, from inflated parental expectations to the self-esteem culture that leads young people to believe that failure is impossible and paying tuition means getting a good grade.

Ottawa Citizen

Look at what this article shows us: the end result of “freedom,” or agreeing to have no direction except personal directions, is that people recede into themselves and become less capable, and more solipsistic.

We’ve been so busy worrying about how to make everyone feel equal and wanted, we’ve forgotten about the world around us. Now as the free resources get tighter, we’re going to have to make hard decisions about the future.

Conservatives are making the biggest career screwup ever by not simply being honest. They could be like the government in the article above — promoting themselves for having made more people graduate, even if at a lower rate of quality, or in other words, hiding the truth behind one positive attribute of a bad situation — or they could be honest.

When you fail to tell the truth, you are de facto lying, because you are hiding things people need to act on behind a smokescreen of happy — like lying to them directly and telling them something or other is not a problem. Conservatives are attempting to embark on a big lie to try to beat the even bigger “freedom” dogma of the Democrats. It is not going to work.

If instead they got practical about facing this situation, starting with the hard parts we are afraid to face — that not everyone can fulfill all of their wants and desires, and that we’ll have to rank people by their usefulness — they will become known as honest people as the years go by. And people will thank them for that.

No obligation to others means we’re just fine pretending we’re solitary hunter-gatherers, even if we depend on society and will cry like infants if our grocery stores, hospitals, shopping malls, cars, running water, electricity and cars aren’t there for easy picking.

There’s about to be a bit of a ruckus now that the major nations have dropped their CO2 capping plan:

Major nations have failed to agree to set a goal halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to a draft document ahead of talks tomorrow – a setback to efforts to secure a new UN climate pact.

Neogotiations involving senior officials from the 17-nation Major Economies Forum broke down overnight after China and India opposed any mention of the target, a source familiar with negotiations told Reuters.

They first want to see rich nations commit to making deep cuts in their own emissions by 2020 and they want developed nations to work out plans to provide developing nations with short-term finance to help them cope with ever more floods, heatwaves, storms and rising sea levels, the source said.

The Independent

Translation: rich nations said let’s all work together now, and developing nations said “You first!”

Setting aside moral and legal issues, which seem to be a luxury of rich European and North Asian populations, we can see this is a problem: one group will emerge on top if any capping, limiting, etc. occurs.

In the developed world, this would mean asking our industry to cut itself in half, and our people to halve their lifestyles. The way of handling things in developed nations is to offer tax incentives, gear up industry to make the right products, etc., and stop what we can that way.

But as you can see from the energy use of different nations, most developed nations exist because they regulate climate and expend a lot of energy on infrastructure, including industry, hospitals, law enforcement, etc. The developing world has no such expenditure curve.

So we’re at an impasse because the developed world is unwilling to regulate its existing population and thus fall behind in competition, and the developing world is unwilling to limit its future capacity and thus remain under the developed world’s thumb. And in the meantime, we have six billion people, soon to be nine billion.

Each of those people is going to require at minimum a certain amount of water, electricity, gasoline, food and space; it’s not just the space to house them, but the space and energy required for the infrastructure. They will all want hospitals, schools, roads, stores, running water, etc.

And that brings us to the dilemma humanity is unwilling to solve:

Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, and Professor John Guillebaud, vented their frustration yesterday at the fact that overpopulation had fallen off the agenda of the many organisations dedicated to saving the planet.

The scientists said dealing with the burgeoning human population of the planet was vital if real progress was to be made on the other enormous problems facing the world.

“It is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about” Professor Guillebaud said. “Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.”

The Independent

We cannot say no to anyone, because each voter fears it will be he or she that will hear the “no.”

So because of our political systems — democracy, consumerism, capitalism — the unpopular idea of population reduction goes unacted, even as it becomes vital.

It’s simply an unpopular truth.