Pirate's Cove

The NY Times’ Thomas Friedman brings full bore Barking Moonbat Syndrome, adding in so many Liberals insanity models, but, mostly forgets to offer, you know, solutions. This is what Liberals are best at: bitching and whining, but, refusing to offer a path to fixing the problem, as well as refusing to Do Something themselves. Anyhow, he says The Earth Is Full

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

We’ll look back at this just like we did with Malthus, and Paul Ehrlich’s wildly popular amongst liberals book, The Population Bomb, and laugh at the unhinged hysteria.

After some more blah blah blah, we get

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

You know what causes rising food prices? Using food as fuel. Some minor newspaper noticed that a few months back. Of course, it’s not the only cause, but, you know what would really escalate food and fuel prices? Another Little Ice Age. Oh, and spending enormous amounts of money on idiotic Globull Warming measures. But, good news, Thomas has an answer to all this

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

While that’s a nice sentiment, I fail to see how that solves the problem. Obviously, Friedman either chickened out in calling for population reduction, like so many other climahysterics and extreme environmentalists do, or it was edited out.

Oh, BTW

Ann and Thomas Friedman live in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The July 2006 issue of Washingtonian reported that they own “a palatial 11,400-square-foot (1,060 m2) house, currently valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club.” Friedman is paid $50,000 per speaking engagement.

He has two daughters: Orly Friedman (b. 1985) and Natalie Friedman (b. 1988). Friedman joined The New York Times in 1981 and has won 3 Pulitzer Prizes since. Friedman has dedicated many of his published works to his daughters.

So, he’s using way more than his “fair share” of resources in his palatial McMansion, and has added to the Earth’s population. Tsk, tsk.