…and it is dee-lay-cious, I garontee
Jumbled Up Stuff What Fell Outta Me Head This Mornin’
1: LJ entries not as frequent as I’d like, mostly due to the May Mystery Shopping death March.
2: Worked on my garden this past weekend. Planted 4 seedlings each of Sweet Basil and Thai Basil, 7 tomato seedlings (5 varieties), 3 chile pepper seedlings (3 verieties), 4 cantaloupe seedlings (1 variety, Ambrosia, my favorite) and 2 cucumbers (1 variety). Later this week, I’ll start me corn seeds, more beans and possibly my watermelon seeds. After that comes okra, more herbs, more veggies, flowers, etc, etc, etc.
3: Had a dream last night that I was waterboarding Dick Cheney, George Bush and several right wing talk show hosts. They were screaming and crying like little girls. Unfortunately, I woke up before we brought out the cattle prods.
4: We were supposed to see Star Trek on Monday, but the above mentioned Mystery Shopping Death March left us way too tired, so we shall try for this Friday night.
5: Our search for a new sister for Winker continues. There are some sweet looking young ladies on the Golden Gate Basset Rescue website and we will be inquiring about them soon.
6: I recently read a statement that the disease formerly known as swine flu, might possibly kill 8 million people, assuming it is really as bad as we have been lead to believe, which I think is assuming alot. Anyway, 8 million dead just won’t do. We need a flu that takes out a minimum of half a billion people worldwide in the first year. Twice that number would be better, especially if the death rate drops by half in the second year. Two billion dead in say, 3-4 years would be a great weight lifted from the shoulders of our planet, the ecosystem and homo sapiens in general. Unfortunately, I don’t see us getting that lucky from a mere disease.
7: Grace and I have gotten back into playing Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates and it is still great fun, only now there are even more puzzles and other neat stuff. Yarr!
8: I’m still searching for a better job, but so far I’ve found nothing. It’s tough out there, folks.
Gotta go wash dishes now. More blog-o-rama later.
The Dociverse Blog 
Re: Point #6
I assume your promotion of half-a-billion flu casualties as a good thing is predicated on the premise that none of the half-a-billion is you. Or anyone you love. Or know.
As most people probably will, you assume wrong. If I knew that a really effective population control would take place, I would roll the dice along with everyone else. Nor would I choose to exempt my family or anyone else. Fair is fair.
Yes, I’d certainly regret not being able to see the shit hit the fan after a good sized die off, but that’s just how things go. You buy the ticket and you take the ride.
Besides, a 1 in 12 chance of dying for such a good cause is a hell of a lot better odds than most of the other life endangering risks I’ve taken for less noble causes ever offered.
I admire your willingness to include yourself and those close to you in H1N1 lottery. I’m not convinced it would help, though, because as I see it, the problem isn’t too many people for not enough resources, it’s inefficient distribution of the resources we have. If the 400,000 in the Darfur refugee camps were cut back to 330,000 by an epidemic, those remaining would still be starving, homeless, and picked off around the edges by ethnic cleansing militia groups. Any solution that could save those 330,000 would also work if there were 400,000 of them.
You may be right. Half a billion might not do the trick, but then, we are talking just about a disease. To really better things, I reckon something would have to kill off about 2/3rds of the human race in pretty short order. For that, you’d need an asteroid strike or a Yellowstone style supervolcano. Unfortunately, such things are just too rare to count on.
Again, we disagree on a basic premise, that there is not enough room/air/food/whatever to sustain 6 billion lives. I think there is, though I am not in any position to prove it. I am also not very optimistic about my solution — a more efficient (and more equitable) distribution of resources — ever coming to pass.
If you asked an American to choose between a) living on 30% (or less) of his current income so that everyone on the planet had a fair share of its natural resources, or b) rolling the dice on a flu epidemic with a 10% chance of killing you dead, I believe they would overwhelmingly choose “B.”
So maybe that killer flu isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Yeah, asking the average American to give up 30% of anything is doomed.
As for a greatly reduced world population not being a good idea, I reckon that the ecosystem would disagree with you.
Most of the problems of the world today stem from too many humans…and from the fact that we humans talk a good game about brotherly love, but practice quite the opposite.