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To: Space Wrangler; Alexander Rubin; speed_addiction; Knitting A Conundrum; agrace; lightingguy; ...
Of course they'd all be determined to be in the 5% that survived. What they fail to realize is that their lives, too, would be nasty, brutish, and short.

Human society depends on an enormous network of support, and the removal of far less than 95% of it would result in total collapse. Look around you. Look at every single thing you see. How many people were involved in making it and/or keeping it operational? Well, let's see... the first thing that caught my eye was a cordless phone. Those involved include:

...and I'm going to stop this particular train right here, because I could literally go on for pages. We're only up to the plastic case, and already innumerable people have had a hand in the making of this phone. Let's move on...

...ad nauseam. And I haven't even gotten into the phone's radio transmitter, and the radio receiver on the base station, and the backlight for the liquid crystal display, and the diodes that make the keypad light up, and the speaker for the ringer, and the contacts for the base station to charge the handset, and the handset's battery, and the guys who mined the lithium for the battery, and their equipment, helmets, and light bulbs, and ten thousand other things. And that's not even beginning to touch the phone system itself, into which billions of man-hours have gone and millions of man-hours are necessary to keep operational.

And that's just one item... one item which most of us would find very difficult to live without. Hey, DUmmies... any guesses as to how many people were involved in getting you that organic granola bar you had for breakfast? How many people were involved in growing the oats, producing the fertilizer, producing the equipment used by the farmer, conveying the whole oats off to a processing plant, making the machines used to hull, parcook, and roll the oats, produce the sugars and other ingredients, convey all of the above to the granola bar company, mix them in the proper proportions, produce the wrappers, convey the wrappers to the granola bar company, heat-seal the wrappers, package them in boxes, ship them off to the local Whole Foods, keep the Whole Foods lighted and heated, produce the cash registers used to complete the transaction?

No man is an island. Heck, no man is even a peninsula. Our very lives depend on the efforts of millions of other people, each of whom is motivated solely by his own self-interest. Get rid of 95% of us, and the remaining 5% will die off faster than you could imagine. And not very peacefully. The efforts of millions have already gone into the production of lots and lots of weapons, which would certainly be used as the desparate last dregs of humanity struggled over the few remaining resources.

37 posted on 07/13/2005 8:11:59 AM PDT by Politicalities (http://www.politicalities.com)
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To: Politicalities

Well you know that, and I know that, and probably every freeper knows that, but we ARE dealing with DUmmies here ya know! LOL!!


39 posted on 07/13/2005 8:16:42 AM PDT by Space Wrangler
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To: Politicalities

Don't forget the ENORMOUS support system that goes into making the all-important plastic swizzle sticks.


68 posted on 07/13/2005 10:01:07 AM PDT by PJ-Comix (Join the DUmmie FUnnies PING List for the FUNNIEST Blog on the Web)
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To: Politicalities
Of course they'd all be determined to be in the 5% that survived. What they fail to realize is that their lives, too, would be nasty, brutish, and short.

Yep. The only way their plan would work is if all .3 billion survivors were in a single geographical area, and life would only stay comforttable if the area was a place where lots of technicians and infrastructure already exist. Hey, wait a minute...300 million people with high tech infrastructure? My God, the DUmmies want to kill everyone but the U.S. and Canada! Xenophobic fiends!

99 posted on 07/13/2005 7:41:46 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback ("James...Earn this...Earn it.")
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To: Politicalities

Oh, forgot to mention...darn fine analysis there.


100 posted on 07/13/2005 7:49:10 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback ("James...Earn this...Earn it.")
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