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Posted originally on TBP on 27th February 2011 by Reverse Engineer in Politics |Social Issues

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Over in the 53 Million thread discussing the Abortion question, I brought up the alternative to abortion for the poor, which is Starvation. However, given the copious amount of food currently available in the FSofA along with Social Welfare programs like SNAP cards and Free School Lunches for children, starvation is not YET really a problem here in the FSofA. Will it be a problem in the future though? Was it a problem during the original Great Depression? How will society deal with these issues in the future if it is a problem? These are complicated questions not amenable to simplistic exchanges of photos of Fat Kids and Anorexics in Amerika. Although they can be entertaining, these kind of juvenile debating methods do not do much to elucidate the real problems and solutions. So I will treat the questions in greater depth here in this Daily Rant. Not for the squeamish, because I am very Darwinian in my analysis in what is likely to come to pass here. I don’t view this as so much a moral question as it is a question of numbers and real human behaviors as were practiced for most of the history of Homo Sapiens on Earth. The morality with respect to Abortion we developed that is being argued here was mainly a result of the development of Agriculture and then Industrialization after that. As the fossil fuel energy we accessed to make these paradigms possible becomes too low in EROEI to access, I believe we will REVERSE ENGINEER our way back to the systems which worked for some 60,000 years after the Toba Bottleneck until the development of Agriculture, and I will explain here in this post why I believe this to be true. It is a long argument, so settle down with a nice Bloody Mary on this Sunday Brunch Rant to read it, if you so choose.

It’s never going to be possible to determine exactly how many people died from starvation in the FSofA during the Great Depression, in large part because “Starvation” isn’t generally the proximal cause of death in the malnourished. Opportunistic diseases take out the malnourished person usually before the biological systems shut down simply from lack of energy in the chronically malnourished.

We know for a fact that many people fell off the economic cliff during the Great Depression. We know there were “Hobos” who were reviled and who led a hand to mouth existence through those years. They slept in Boxcars and in Parks. Many of them would have died from exposure in the Winter months. Up here in Anchorage every year we turn up a number of Dead Indigents in the parks and in the tent city in Anchorage when the Spring Thaw comes, a few more each year since I moved up here. One has to suspect there were many more such deaths during the Great Depression nationwide. Freezing to Death is listed as the cause, not starvation.

What of poor families where the mother got pregnant, putting another mouth to feed at the table? How many of those children were undernourished and succumbed to the many childhood diseases running rampant at the time? Measles, smallpox, etc. We know that the mortality rate from Childhood disease was quite high during the Depression years. How many mothers on the road from Oklahoma to California on Route 66 chose to take a newborn infant and drown it in a lake and bury it by the side of the road? This happens even TODAY in the inner cities, in fact it happened in the 1980s also and Neil Young sang about it.

I see a woman in the night With a baby in her hand Under an old street light Near a garbage can Now she puts the kid away, and she’s gone to get a hit She hates her life, and what she’s done to it There’s one more kid that will never go to school Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.

What was the suicide rate during the Great Depression? How many people chose to take their own lives rather than suffer a slow death from starvation? How many people became violent criminals, stealing until they got shot in a robbery attempt? We know about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow of course, but there were many other small timers who did not get so much press as Bonnie and Clyde. You can’t find out “reliable” statistics on this sort of thing no matter how long you Google. Frankly, any stats that come out of Da Goobermint that you do turn up are NEVER reliable, so using statistics to try and elucidate what happened is a waste of time..

Now, the Great Depression officially lasted from the crash of the Stock Market in 1929 until our entry into WWII in 1941, with the worst years being 1932-1934. However, out in rural Amerika, land values crashed well before that in the 1920s. So let us say there was a solid 15 years of real deprivation there. To work up to 7M dead with malnourishment as part of the cause would only take around 500K each year, spread out Nationwide in an average population at the time of around 100M. This means only about 1 in 200 people dieing this way in a given year through the time period, which would be pretty easy to miss. I do not agree with Boris Badanoff’s estimation that there was a huge and sudden die off in 1932-1934, that seems unlikely. However, a distributed Die Off between 1925 and 1941 totalling to 7M, similar in size to the Holocaust in Europe seems quite possible to me, particularly when you look at the population stats Boris Badanoff was looking at. It’s just logical to conclude with so much economic dislocation and such a thin social safety net as existed at the time that quite a few folks fell so far off the cliff they starved, or died as a result of malnutrition over more than a decade of time. Frankly, I doubt the 6M Jews and 6M Gypsies and various other poor folks quoted as official numbers who died over in Europe mostly went to the Gas Chambers in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, rather I suspect most of them died of starvation and opportunistic diseases in places like the Warsaw Ghetto, and it happened over a pretty protracted period of time there as well.

Remember, Da Goobermint writes the Textbooks and controls the Statistics any researcher can use to try to piece together what occurred in the FSofA during the Great Depression. Whether the historian is a Russian like Boris or an American, trying to figure this out when it is in the interest of Da Goobermint to paint the happiest picture possible is very difficult. We all are witness to how Da Goobermint is currently manipulating statistics on UE; they would be even MORE likely to manipulate really unpleasant data about the Death rate in the society. So the picture is painted that Plucky, Self-Reliant Amerikans came through the Depression a little deprived, but nobody starved. In fact Herbert Hoover said that, while at the same time 20 dead folks were plucked out of Central Park in NYC. 20 isn’t a big number, but again its just the Tip of the Iceberg of people with no family support and so forth. When a family has someone die, they don’t list the cause of death as Starvation, nor does it get reported in the newspaper in the Obituaries as such. You just don’t know how many people were dieing then from malnourishment, not in exact reported numbers anyhow.

Dmitri Orlov has written about the Die Off over in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the country is depopulating and this is reported in population statistics, its almost unnoticeable on a daily basis. A few more older relatives go, a few more funerals. Are they starving to death? Not in the sense we think of mass and rapid starvation like in Africa where we get whole populations rapidly cut off from food supplies for one reason or another and images of large numbers of people who are walking skeletons, but a slower form of starvation coming from chronic malnutrition. This of course hits the weakest of the population first, generally the very old and the very young.

Here in the FSofA moving into the future, we most likely would see a mirror of what has happened in the old Soviet Union rather than an African style starvation scenario playing out rapidly, but even that is not out of the question. If/when we suffer a transportation breakdown into the Big Shities where they generally only have a few days of food supply n hand, there could be a rapid starvation scenario. Same thing even in rural areas because most people are not farmers in those areas and most do not have a year’s worth of preps to tide them over during a transportation breakdown where the local Supermarket doesn’t get supplied. They may be able to raid the Grain Elevators in the Midwest, but then again the National Guard may be surrounding them and directing the food elsewhere.

Beyond all this is the aspect of Globalization, and who will be faced with starvation first and hardest, and that obviously it’s not the FSofA, its places like Egypt & Libya. That is where the REALLY poor people of the world are right now, and clearly for every one of them that ends up dieing off here it leaves that much more food for the remaining populations around the globe. So, barring a transportation collapse of Food resulting from a collapse of the Oil distribution system, I do not see a mass starvation scenario happening here in the FSofA in the near future, it comes first in the impoverished countries. I don’t see the SNAP Card system here being removed, and essentially Free Food for Amerikans who are UE will continue on right up until the Dollar goes the way of the Dinosaur. I still Prep for the Fast Food Crash though (pun intended), just in case we DO get quickly cut off from food shipments from the lower 48 up here.

Long term of course, my Food Preps don’t keep me well nourished more than a couple of years, and that is only if I kept them all for myself, which I would not do. I’ll be sharing them with friends not so well prepped. Once as a community we strictly have to get by on what we can harvest from the environment around here, its quite possible that chronic malnutrition will be a problem. In this case I don’t go out as a rapidly starving Skeleton, but rather probably get hit by opportunistic diseases hitting on older and weaker individuals. Do you list my death as Death by Starvation? No, it is listed as Death from Pneumonia, but really the cause of that death was slow starvation leaving me succeptible to infection by Pneumococcus.

Even after the collapse of the Dollar and the SNAP Card system administered by JP Morgan (which they book a nice profit on, and more all the time as more people need their SNAP Cards), Da Goobermint in Fascist cooperation with corporations like Monsanto and Conagra still will have the ability to produce copious quantities of food as long as the Oil is available. I can certainly envision a Fascist society here where each person gets a Food Ration Card from Da Goobermint to go to Walmart and get your ration of Goobermint Cheese. So, barring a catastrophic failure in transportation, mass and rapid starvation for people in the FSofA seems unlikely in the near future.

In this sense, the Abortion-Starvation Choice is less about the current FSofA then it is about impoverished countries like Egypt. There, right NOW it really is a direct choice, you can see it in the pictures of the Skeleton-Children. Is it really a better choice to let these children be born just to starve, rather than abort them? When I write about this choice, I am not really talking about the current situation in the FSofA, I am talking about really IMPOVERISHED societies right now, but also as a society I think this is coming down the pipe in the future for the FSofA as well. Right NOW in the FSofA, no problem, we can feed EVERYBODY, at least so long as we will hand out SNAP cards so they can get Free Food, and provide Free Breakfast and Lunch in the schools to impoverished children.

Simply Feeding these children is not enough though, because what good is it to feed the population of the 30 Blocks of Squalor when there is no economic opportunity for them, and they simply will perpetuate the endless dependency cycle as a result of being provided with free food? Here is where you walk into the deep moral abyss of trying to Limit the Reproduction of Poor People. The Margaret Sanger Eugenics style Abortion Clinics theory. Please remember folks, Margaret Sanger was promoting this means of resolving the problem of poor people back in the 1920s. See the connection? You generally cannot expect people will self-limit their reproduction, particularly not horny teenagers with nothing better to do with their time than fuck. You can issue free condoms until you run out of Oil to make the condoms with, they won’t always use them. Teenage girls will still get pregnant with no means of supporting the child growing in their bellies. You will not be able to place ALL of these children with Adoptive Parents, particularly not when they are Brain Damaged as a result of drug addiction the mother has. This leaves you only with the Choices of Forced Abortions or Forced Sterilizations of the Poor. This is just a small step away from Forced EXTERMINATIONS of the Poor, which of course is the FINAL SOLUTION Adolf Hitler undertook. Certainly Jews took a Big Hit in Hitler’s Final Solution, but so did Gypsies. Hitler’s Final Solution wasn’t really about anti-Semitism, it was about eliminating Poor People. In Germany at the time, there were many poor Jews, who got there as a result of Pogroms in Russia preceeding that time. Just like there are now many poor Muslims in Europe now who were driven out of their homelands by economic reasons to become Guest Workers in the rich countries of Europe.

Thing here is, you don’t target people specifically for being Poor, because you probably have a poor relative. You target them based on racial and ethnic characteristics instead. So the Racial/Ethnic Tribe in POWER targets the disenfranchised Tribe. Poor Jews went to the Gas Chambers in Europe, but Rich Jews mostly did not. A few did of course, stripped of their wealth by the Authorities at the BIS much like el-Kabong is being stripped of his, but the REALLY rich ones did not go to the Gas Chambers. No Rothschild went to the Gas Chamber, because of course the Rothschilds are the “Authorities”.

As we spin down here this go round, the vast population of Poor People in the world now are Muslims through Africa and the M.E, along with of course the poor Chindian Hindus and Buddhists Put together the populations of Impoverished in China, India and the M.E countries, and you probably are looking at half the current population extant on the Planet right now. These are the folks Targeted for Extermination, but there are so MANY of them that it would take too much Xyclon-B to Gas them all, and rounding them all up in Boxcars would be too difficult. So instead of that, these folks are going to be EXTERMINATED by Starvation and Malnutrition over the next decade, at least within the borders of the countries from Africa to India that they live in. Their populations have grown WAY past their ability to grow their own food, and once they are economically CUT OFF from being able to import food, they will mostly starve to death. They will fight with each OTHER, Sunni’s vs Shiites, Haves and Have Nots in their various Nation-States, all mostly artificially constructed at the end of WWI after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This kind of economically driven starvation in poor countries can happen VERY quickly, as we have seen in places like Biafra and Somalia over the last 30 years. Their internal Goobermints break down, food importation comes to a halt and inside a year you have an entire country of walking skeletons. Walking only until they finally drop dead of course. Unlike Movie Zombies, they don’t last forever, they just seem to for the Living because they keep being replaced by still more Zombies as they fall off the economic cliff.

What will happen to the ex-pat Muslim Guest Workers in Europe is a more difficult question to answer. It is unclear that the remaining White European population in those countries has sufficient POWER to try and undertake the kind of Final Solution Hitler undertook. It is not clear that they can control the riots sure to come here once the Euro collapses. Europe is a big crapshoot in this regard.

Here in the FSofA, the Muslim Population is still relatively small compared to the overall population of Christians, which means they probably can easily be controlled and targeted. They can be Rounded up and placed in FEMA Concentration Camps before being shipped to the Human Waste Reprocessing Facility in San Antonio, much as Japanese Americans were rounded up here into Concentration Camps in WWII. Not so easy in this country is the vast population of the long term underclass, mostly Black and Hispanic that live in places like the 30 Blocks of Squalor. Like the Guest Worker population over in Europe, the numbers here are soooo big in these groups that any kind of Industrial extermination in Hitler-style Gas Chambers is nearly beyond comprehension as to how it might be accomplished.

The original debate JimQ set up was with regards to the Morality of Abortion. In a society of great PLENTY, abortion is quite immoral of course. How can you possibly justify taking the potential life of an Innocent when there is quite clearly enough food around to feed EVERYBODY, really to the point of OBESITY here in the FSofA? The thing you must remember here is that this extraordinary plenty is an artifact of the Age of Oil, which is rapidly coming to a close here. Its close is certainly hitting the peripheral economies of places like Egypt and Libya first and hardest here, but eventually the same problems will roll around to our own society. The ETHICS you must define are with respect to exactly how you view and implement such things as Abortion, Euthanasia, Exposure, Sterilization and in fact WAR as well as a means by which you control population size.

Every last “30 Blocks of Squalor” post has as its subtext that these folks are WORTHLESS people, LEECHFUCKS on society. It is a form of Propaganda demonizing the impoverished. It’s the area I have the greatest disagreement with JimQ, because I think he writes pure propaganda there that panders to his primary readership of Conservatard Aging White Bizmen suffering from the combined effects Senile Dementia and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy from eating too many Big Macs over the course of their lives. LOL. Regardless of the Propaganda though, Haves in the society no longer want to nor can they really afford anymore a social welfare state which provides these people a living. At the same time, to forcibly require them to ABORT their children or to STERILIZE them is an ethical swamp that puts people who have POWER in charge of life and death of people with no POWER. This is nothing short of Playing God of course. You cannot resolve this dilemma ethically, and so it always ends up in WAR or GENOCIDE, both of which themselves are ethically irresolvable.

Small Tribal populations never really had this problem on this kind of scale, although they also most certainly faced similar questions when for one reason or another their resources ran thin. For the most part though, they controlled their reproduction by a variety of means around the time of Puberty, with Rites of Passage tests. Unhealthy children at birth were left exposed, they were left to die quickly. The healthy children were succored by the tribe until they reached Puberty. At this time Males for the most part had to demonstrate their ability to be a successful tribe member, if they could not they often did not even survive the test, the slightly better alternative was they would not be permitted to reproduce, aka they do not get a Wife. Women did not usually have such tests because childbearing itself was the test. The mortality rate in childbearing was of course quite high back in the day.

I expect this sort of Reproduction control in the population to reassert itself in the future. As long as it is exercised fairly, it’s a little more morally justifiable than Mandatory Abortion, Sterilization or War, the consequences of which always get visited on the less powerful in the society, namely the Poor in a society run on a Monetary system, which all Ag based societies have been. Money, the love of which is the “Root of all Evil” according to the Bible comes as a result of distributing out Ag production. In parable form, the Bite which Eve took out of the Apple was the bite into Ag production of food. In Biblical terms, Evil per se did not exist before Agriculture and Money, and the life of the original H-Gs was essentially the “Garden of Eden” which existed from roughly 70,000 years ago when Toba bottlenecked the population of Homo Sapiens down to around 10,000 Human Souls or 1000 Breeding Pairs up until around 5000 years ago with the development of Agriculture.

In Rites of Passage tests among H-Gs, they are visited equally on all male members of the society, children of Chiefs as well as Hunters. You can’t buy a deferment out or get a cushy job behind a desk to avoid the challenge. You aren’t generally pitted against other males, but rather against yourself and your strength, endurance and intelligence to survive the challenges put before you. If you cannot do that by the time you hit puberty and can reproduce, you are not acceptable to the tribe to reproduce, and so you do not get a wife. Can you imagine how MOTIVATED generally rambunctious 13 year old boys would be to LEARN and LISTEN while being instructed in the means to SURVIVE if they knew the CONSEQUENCE of not learning and not listening would be they would DIE, or at best be allowed to live getting no nookie? Methinks you would have some pretty attentive Teenage Boys in the classroom in that scenario. LOL.

The development of Agricultural society mostly removed these sort of tests, Religious Rituals like Confirmation and Bar Mitzvahs became simply that, RITUALS. No real consequence for not doing too good at these festivals. Everybody Passes their Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah, it is No Child Left Behind. Namby Pamby stuff compared to the Rites of Passage in Hunter Gatherer societies . If you don’t have your shit more or less together by the time you can Reproduce, your reproduction will NOT help the Tribe so it is Taboo and Forbidden. This is FAIR, it gives all healthy children the opportunity to succeed as long as they LISTEN AND OBEY.

What of the children born with Disabilities? Not to sugar coat this, these kids are TOAST from the get go. Minor disabilitites maybe a successful tribe can cope with, maybe there is a role in the society for a child with a bad arm or something like that. SEVERE retardation, Blind Deaf and Dumb though? Sorry you get an early ticket to the Great Beyond when Mom holds you under the bathwater just a little too long there. Maybe I get napalmed for this here with this picture of the future, maybe not. From my POV, I am just being fucking REALISTIC about how people dealt with these issues in the past, and how they are likely to REVERSE ENGINEER their way back to similar solutions in the future. The society that is to come here will not have means to support Blind, Deaf and Dumb Drooling Vegetables. Similarly, the society cannot support rebellious teens who will fuck other children into the world without a means to support those children. Best case scenario for losers like this is they get to live out their natural lives mating with sheep. Generally speaking this produces no progeny so is not a problem for the society overall. Whether the ewes like it or not is another question entirely. LOL.

Is this kind of Rites of Passage testing Morally supportable? Not in a society where there is Plenty for everybody, where you have enough resources to support every blind, deaf and dumb drooling vegetable born into the society. Once your society has limited resources though, it is about the most fair way of limiting reproduction in the society. The only other ways are through forced Sterilization or War, which both also were undertaken in some H-G societies. New Guinea tribes practiced castration of male infants to keep their populations down and many Plains Tribes were quite the warmongers with their neighbors, Apaches were quite a nasty bunch overall and so were the Payute. Given Door #1 of Rites of Passage, Door #2 of Castration or Door #3 of Warmongering, I’ll take Door #1, Monty. This gives me as the Teenage Boy the Power and Responsibility over my own Life to Succeed or Fail in a fair manner. If I study hard and listen to my teachers and I build my strength and endurance, I will make it through. Elsewise, I take an early Ticket to the Great Beyond or I live out my life with great affection for the Sheep I herd. LOL.

The bottom line here is that the population must and will reduce in size, the only real questions revolve around how that reduction is undertaken and then how the lower population will be maintained at a steady state. Eventually the society will self-select against the corrupt, which come at both ends of the spectrum. Both the poorest of the poor and the most outrageously rich will die in the greatest numbers by percentage of their populations, and this is unlikely to be a very fair process. Many Poor folks will be unwillingly conscripted up as Cannon Fodder, many rich Folks will be unwillingly Guillotined. The Meek in the Middle who remain will have to find ways to control their population size in a world of limited resources. It will be a difficult and lengthy process, likely lasting for the next Century. Eventually when this time comes to a close and we have finished our Journey down the Trail of Tears, if we do not exterminate ourselves, we will reach a Better Tomorrow. Until we do though, it will be a major Clusterfuck.

RE

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