Deatheaters and the 90% Solution? UPDATED

I’m taking this story with a grain of salt, and I’d advise everyone else to, also, given that there is only one source and I don’t know how good that source is.

“Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine,” Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward’s University on Friday.

Not content with their servings thanks to abortion and euthanasia, the Deatheaters are looking up from their feast and demanding more, more, more. How about serving us up a banquet via the ebola virus?

Sounds demented, I know. Eric Pianka – a “world reknowned ecologist” making such a suggestion before a group of scientists got a standing ovation for it, though.

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us.

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

[…]After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We’ve got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”
[…]
The audience laughed when he said, “You know, the bird flu’s good, too.” They laughed again when he proposed, with a discernable note of glee in his voice that, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”

After noting that the audience did not represent the general population, a questioner asked, “What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?”

Pianka replied, “I speak to the converted!”

Okie on the Lam – in a very long and smart post – says this all sounds like a Tom Clancy novel – Rainbow Six, to be precise.

And then there is Rainbow Six — where a collaboration of elite scientists and wealthy benefactors engineer an even more lethal form of the Ebola virus, (with no fall-off of kill rate in succeeding infections), with the sole purpose of killing off the majority of human life on Earth — all except the few hundred thousand that they have chosen to survive, via a closely guarded antidote.

So, perhaps this professor is someone who is merely out of ideas and has stolen one from a novelist in order to give himself the patina of the provocateur? Well, maybe. Maybe he is just a phenomenal crackpot, but he has a legitimate place in a legitimate university and Okie finds that this Pianka has much of the same material on his website:

If humans do not control their own population (and we seem unwilling and unable to do so), then other forces will certainly act to control our population. The four horseman of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and death) are all candidates. Most likely, lethal virulent microbes like HIV and Ebola zaire will set limits on the growth of human populations. HIV, by allowing infected hosts to survive years while they spread the virus and infect new hosts, has already become a pandemic, but it will be years before it decimates the human population.

Hmmmm…well, I will take that as confirmation, then, that our primary source – the witness to his speech – is possibly a good one.

Kobayashi Maru is looking at the odd theology behind this save-the-planet-kill-the-people idea and relates his concerns.

First, we were treated to a sermon by a substitute pastor that could have passed for an Earth First! ad. Delivered by an environmental lawyer called to ministry late in life…

Gone was any sense that God sent His Son to earth, much less to save people. Gone was any traditional notion of humans having dominion, of being first among created things, or of going forth and multiplying. Replacing it was a chip-on-the-shoulder twenty-minute lecture (interspersed with laughably silly 1970’s-era hymns I didn’t even know existed) emphasizing the importance of opinion polls on global warming, and generally making the point that in the greater scheme of things, humans are no better than lily pads, leeches, or lichens – probably worse because we’ve changed the environment.

Nick Schultz noted here that the last few weeks have seen a herd run on the “Global Warming” story. I noted last week that Bill Clinton has suddenly decided he is the voice of the Revolution to save the planet. Noting that everything Clinton focuses on becomes the obsession of the press, I figure the “Global Warming” theme is the one on which many sorts of campaigns are going to be run. Masks are coming off – they have been for the last 6 years. This particular mask, however, has been in place for a little while.

A pal of mine, reading this story, tells me that at The Carter Center in Altanta, you can read the entire Global 2000 Report, authored by the Carter Administration. He says if anyone takes the time to read it they will discover ideas that are similar to what we read here, descriptions of “useless eaters,” discussions about how the “surplus population” might be eliminated. Pretty interesting. Seems Carter accepted it as U.S. Policy.

We never do know what is in those multi-volume report type things, do we? We simply accept the 30-second broadcast news summary, or the three paragraph print-news summary. And I’m not indicting the press, either. Who has time to read such a thing?

It is not really surprising to me that a year after John Paul’s death spoke eloquently to the world about the value and sanctity of human life, in all of its forms, we are reading this. Deatheaters are insatiable, and they think a major voice of opposition is gone.

How real all of this is, I am still not sure. I am as much a slave to Big Time Professional Journalism as the next, and I’d like to see a more credible outlet report on this before dismissing the “grain of salt” notion.

UPDATE: Apparently this blogger was there?

It’d be nice if humans could learn to manage our population as successively as we’ve learned to manage the population of literally every other species on this planet with whom we share. We’re very skilled when it comes to killing off deer, snakes, rabbits, and fish for population control. But we’re a stupid species when it comes to managing ourselves. An insightful observation was made during the talk that education should be the key to learning how to take care of the Earth, but the problem is that the educated have fewer children and the uneducated have many children. So eventually, the uneducated will take over the Earth. It may have already happened.

Hmmmm…”educated” doesn’t really mean “intelligent,” does it? Many seem to think it does.

Okie has an update that is pretty interesting, too.