Posted on 10/12/2014 9:13:30 AM PDT by JCG
There is always something special about science meetings. The 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006 was especially exciting for me, because a student and his professor presented the results of a DNA study I suggested to them last year. How fulfilling to see the baldcypress ( Taxodium distichum ) leaves we collected last summer and my tree ring photographs transformed into a first class scientific presentation that's nearly ready to submit to a scientific journal (Brian Iken and Dr. Deanna McCullough, "Bald Cypress of the Texas Hill Country: Taxonomically Unique?" 109th Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science Program and Abstracts [ PDF ], Poster P59, p. 84, 2006).
But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.
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. Because of many years of experience as a writer and editor, Pianka's strange introduction and the TV camera incident raised a red flag in my mind. Suddenly I forgot that I was a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section. Instead, I grabbed a notepad so I could take on the role of science reporter.
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”
Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.
Saving the Earth with Ebola
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.
He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.
Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.
AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.
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.”
With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.
After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.
“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.
How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.
When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.
Questions for Dr. Doom
Then came the question and answer session, in which Professor Pianka stated that other diseases are also efficient killers.
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!"
Pianka responded to more questions by condemning politicians in general and Al Gore by name, because they do not address the population problem and "...because they deceive the public in every way they can to stay in power."
He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, "Smarter people have fewer kids." He said those who don't have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, "...because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn't care made more babies." He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and "I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too."
With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered. Dozens then mobbed the professor at the lectern to extend greetings and ask questions. It was necessary to wait a while before I could get close enough to take some photographs (Fig. 1).
I was assigned to judge a paper in a grad student competition after the speech. On the way, three professors dismissed Pianka as a crank. While waiting to enter the competition room, a group of a dozen Lamar University students expressed outrage over the Pianka speech.
Yet five hours later, the distinguished leaders of the Texas Academy of Science presented Pianka with a plaque in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. When the banquet hall filled with more than 400 people responded with enthusiastic applause, I walked out in protest.
Corresponding with Dr. Doom
Recently I exchanged a number of e-mails with Pianka. I pointed out to him that one might infer his death wish was really aimed at Africans, for Ebola is found only in Central Africa. He replied that Ebola does not discriminate, kills everyone and could spread to Europe and the the Americas by a single infected airplane passenger.
In his last e-mail, Pianka wrote that I completely fail to understand his arguments. So I did a check and found verification of my interpretation of his remarks on his own web site. In a student evaluation of a 2004 course he taught, one of Professor Pianka's students wrote, "Though I agree that convervation [sic] biology is of utmost importance to the world, I do not think that preaching that 90% of the human population should die of ebola [sic] is the most effective means of encouraging conservation awareness." (Go here and scroll down to just before the Fall 2005 evaluation section near the end.)
Yet the majority of his student reviews were favorable, with one even saying, “ I worship Dr. Pianka.”
The 45-minute lecture before the Texas Academy of Science converted a university biology senior into a Pianka disciple, who then published a blog that seriously supports Pianka's mass death wish.
Dangerous Times
Let me now remove my reporter's hat for a moment and tell you what I think. We live in dangerous times. The national security of many countries is at risk. Science has become tainted by highly publicized cases of misconduct and fraud.
Must now we worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria? I believe that airborne Ebola is unlikely to threaten the world outside of Central Africa. But scientists have regenerated the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. There is concern that small pox might someday return. And what other terrible plagues are waiting out there in the natural world to cross the species barrier and to which scientists will one day have access?
Meanwhile, I still can't get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings.
Forrest M. Mims III is Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, and the editor of The Citizen Scientist. He and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org. The views expressed herein are his own and do not represent the official views of the Texas Academy of Science or the Society for Amateur Scientists.
Copyright 2006 by Forrest M. Mims III.
HIV and EBOLA: How Political Correctness Will Get You Killed!
The ongoing – and expanding –Ebola situation and how it’s being handled (or, more accurately, NOT being handled) has a parallel with the HIV panic of a number of years ago.
It may ALSO be another manifestation of the schizophrenic nature of the hard leftists who unfortunately sit at the levers of power in this country and whose double-mindedness should now be clear to all but the dullest among us.
Allow me to explain.
A San Francisco (where else?) based and HIV infected “leader”of the homosexual community began a serious campaign encouraging fellow HIV carriers to attempt to bypass or defeat the donor screening process and actively donate into the national blood supply. When pressed as to his justification for jeopardizing the entire nation, he declared that if HIV spread out into the “straight” community, it would almost certainly catalyze and accelerate the search for a vaccine.
Am I the only “conspiracy buff” to see the similarities between that and what’s going on today vis-a-vis Ebola?
I hadn’t thought about this angle until I heard Rush recently ranting about some author who’d written that because Liberia was founded by former slaves who returned to Africa, it was our unfortunate institution of slavery that is directly responsible for Ebola in the western nations of Africa. (Please note that I stop FAR short of the recent utterances of Calypso Louie Farrakan who claims that Ebola was created by evil white men to kill blacks!)
But I digress. That reasoning that America is responsible for Ebola – if it can be called “reasoning” – holds that it is America’s place to come to their rescue with a “cure”. And how better to “catalyze and accelerate” that process than to INFECT as many native born Americans HERE with the disease as possible?
Now here’s where the schizophrenia comes into the picture:
There is a growing group of folks who believe that the earth cannot support the current population approaching 7.3 billion. The bulk of them are in the same leftist camp as those now directing the present halfhearted “effort” against Ebola. Many of them are one and the SAME people directing the Ebola thing! The most radical of them embrace the words of a speaker at an early green movement/save-the-earth rally in California. Odd coincidence that, aye? He declared that “Man is the ultimate DISEASE of nature.” He got a standing O for that line!
From that meeting and others still being conducted, the greenies now believe that the 7.3 billion MUST be reduced to around 1 billion or less. And which members of which nations, ethnic groups or races are “eliminated” is irrelevant – so long as THEY are excluded!
Scriptures informs us that “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” The writer must have known a fair number of the leftists of his day.
Back to my question.
If, on one hand, the leftists are sincere in their effort to SAVE THE EARTH from overpopulation, why would they attempt to save the victims of Ebola and allow them to come here?
Could it be that allowing them to come here with the disease (and sending 3,000 potential military carriers THERE to bring it back with them) while portraying these actions to the noinfo masses as the compassionate thing to do is part of the same scheme attempted earlier by the HIV crowd?
I suggest that we prepare ourselves for the spread of the this 60% to 90% fatal disease among the population of this nation. (This may have been the reason for the Homeland Security “drills” about some “zombie apocalypse”.) This IS, after all, the same America that is hated by Obama and the One World leftists now in control here as the source of every evil committed in the rest of the world and for which evils it must be properly punished?
Do I really think these miscreants – living in their sanitized and safe gated “compounds” — would do that?
After witnessing 6 years of this gang’s criminal behavior, I absolutely think that!
Just finished reading Dan Brown’s “inferno”.
The unfortunate thing is that people will play this scenario as pie in the sky fiction. There are people, powerful people, that actually believe in this ‘solution’. Most also assume, that because they are the enlightened elite, they will be among those who get to choose.
Been saying for years someone should remake Logan’s Run...
I think that the people pimping this genocide need to lead by example and take themselves out first. The world would be a better place and we could save “da planet and da nviomen”. They need to put a gun where their mouth is.
And if he dies tomorrow, the world will not know or care, But Jesus will know, because the “hairs on your head are all numbered.” There are no unnoticed deaths in God’s world, not a sparrow falls without Him taking note. “Are you not woth more than a sparrow?” Jesus asked. This scientist says “No.” Jesus says “Yes.”
I wonder what this author thinks about that now?
“Many such people exist in science. I worked with a few who expressed the belief, after the 2001 terrorism events, that while an outbreak of terrorist seeded smallpox could kill 1/3 of the planet, that it would nevertheless be a net good for the environment.
They were totally serious about this too.”
Californicator land has been infected with these liberals for decades.
Then, they became enviral whackos and preached the same terminal thoughts to save the trees, critters, water, ozone layers, oceans, salmon steelhead, red legged frogs and the planet in general by having less humans. They are so pro abortion, they can’t say a couple of sentences with being so called pro choice.
Of course 99.9% of them are liberals or faux independents.
There was also a Tom Clancey book about eco-nuts trying to depopulate the Earth.
Someone has to polish the royal jewels
Obummer’s Ebola advisor
In any case, these elitist, eugenics and population bomb types want nothing more than to turn the earth into their own personal safari park, with just enough population left to use as slave labor to fulfill their whims and desires.
At least the NAZI’s and the communists were upfront with their approach. These population reduction eugenics types are downright psychotic diabolical plague mongers for profit genocidal types.
I think you are absolutely right. Agreement and approval of this point of view would need to be considered volunteering for elimination, if not it is a proposal to commit murder. Is this scientist threatening to commit suicide, or trying to solicit murder and the commission of a terrorist act?
Pianka’s rebuttal: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html
In it he doesn’t deny that essence of Mims’s charges - just that his words were misinterpreted. His strident protests ring hollow to me.
Personally I don’t have a doubt from what I’ve been seeing the Ebola outbreak has been planned for the US for at lest 2-3 years.
I have no doubt bringing in the illegals with, for the most part, non life threatening diseases was just a run up to bringing in Ebola.
Can you post the link to the original article? I went to the original page on FR but the link to the article is not working now.
As sick and twisted as this turd is I have greater condemnation for the students that applauded. Sure they are young and have received indoctrination their entire lives. They fact they could fall for this fraud is instructive. They would support a Hitler or worse.
College students used to challenge the establishment and were free thinkers. Nowadays they are pliable and weak with no independent or critical thinking abilities.
Typical Ivory Tower thinking. People are somehow not real, they are faceless pawns on a vast chessboard of many levels of complexity.
Darth Vader showed more compassion. And he was not even in a popularity contest.
Even a vast reduction of the human population on this planet would have only a temporary effect. People will replenish right up to the maximum of sustainability, and beyond, just as quickly as the last of the “Overlords” were overthrown and the artificial limits on population growth could no longer be enforced.
Lord knows there are plenty of natural limitations on population growth, without delving into some draconian measures like widespread euthanasia or induced plagues.
I don’t think you were reading it right.
These were not young idealistic students who were applauding, these were his fellow scientists.
Yes!
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