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I hope you all have time to see this two brief videos and read the short comment below. The videos are part of an educational series put forth by the Population Research Institute of Front Royal, Virginia.

On Overpopulation

http://youtu.be/vZVOU5bfHrM

On Population growth

http://youtu.be/iodJ0OOdgRg

I read all of the YouTube comments on these videos and they are for the most part negative. Many there comment that the videos are obviously fallacious but fail to explain where the fallacy is.

These videos are actually a simple representation of a rather complex process. The growth of population will trigger many challenges but will also generate solutions of its own.

The problem of analyzing the growth of human population lies in the fact that it’s a very counter-intuitive problem.

Allow me to expose some of the fallacies  in the YouTube comments.

Fallacy 1

The environment will suffer, species will go extinct

More species went extinct when mankind was less than 1 or 2 million people. Even more went extinct before there were any humans on earth. The problem lies not in the number of humans alive on the planet but rather in the actual behavior of the human population and its respect for the environment. The earlier populations of mankind were much more destructive of their environment than we are right now. Solving the problem of appropriately managing the environment will require people that work to preserve and enhance our environmental heritage (hopefully better than the American EPA.)  In a world with scarce human resources the environment suffers more because humans require more from it at an individual level. Buffalo Bill Cody could not massacre thousands of bison today because we have enough “critical mass” to afford park rangers, administrators, biologists, and such. In the same manner mankind is now becoming more aware of the necessity to preserve the environment. In those countries where freedom and economic opportunity are abundant the damage to the environment is less than in those countries with limited economic opportunity, low education, or blatantly despotic regimes.

Fallacy 2

Let’s stabilize the population now
We can’t accelerate the natural process. Besides births cannot outpace deaths for ever. That is what these videos are trying to show. At one point more people die than those being born. As population grows, we shall be forced to grow wiser and administer goods more efficiently (I call that the WALMART trend.) We shall have more human time and capital to manage more and manage better. More geniuses will be born, also more plumbers, more carpenters, more pickpockets, and more dreamers, etc. We could not have national parks and rangers in 1770 but we could easily afford them when the population grew. So the population growth brought problems but also solutions. If we were to return to a population of say 2 billion (like some proposers of a “new order” have suggested) we would have to destroy huge swaths of the global economy and many of the areas we manage well today would not be managed at all. That would not benefit anyone but a few.

Eventually the population stabilizes by itself reaching a state of soft peaks and valleys. Trying to get to that point artificially triggers a population winter like the one Europe is already beginning to experience and China will experience in a few decades. DO THE MATH. Stop shouting “fallacy!” Pop growth control is the real suicide.

Fallacy 3

Poverty will overwhelm society

The SEARS catalog stores appeared when the population of the US was about 4 or 5 million people. At that point all could contribute to sustain an effective postal service. Both SEARS and the US POST OFFICE were new places where people would work and earn money to avoid being poor. The economy grew as these new systems and ideas reproduced and enriched the economic landscape.

After we reached 250 million or so it was possible to have WALMARTS. Notice that the net earnings of WALMART are huge but they represent the smallest percentage of the price of goods in history! That goes to show you that somewhere, someone is still  thinking on how to fulfill the needs of more and more people all the time. This trend will accelerate and deepen. Corporations will be forced to be more efficient in fulfilling market demands. If they try to stick to a smaller market they will be swallowed whole by those who actually manage to serve larger markets. So GOOD SERVICE, FAIR PRICE and EFFICIENCY will become a matter of survival. That is going to become more and more evident as the population grows. This is one application of Jesus’ parable of the talents: the slave that hid the talent had to give it to the one managing the largest amount BECAUSE HE COULD MANAGE IT. By giving him one more talent the master ensured the best administration of the most assets. It’s simple common sense but not much in tune with Marxist “social justice” which impoverishes the most and ends up equalizing misery for all.

For the benefit of those of you who do not have a Bible handy, I include here the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-28) Here Jesus tells his disciples how the time of His return is going to be like… This was said twenty centuries ago.

“It will be as when a man who was going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents;  to another, two; to a third, one – to each according to his ability. Then he went away. Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five. Likewise, the one who received two made another two. But the man who received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried his master’s money. After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. He said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ (Then) the one who had received two talents also came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I have made two more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.’ His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant!  So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter? Should you not then have put my money in the bank so that I could have got it back with interest on my return? Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten. For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.’

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

The proposed immigration law in Alabama could prosecute nuns for feeding the hungry or priests for giving the Eucharist. The same law would have condemned David for feeding the Egyptian that eventually helped to save the royal household of Israel  (unknowingly carrying among them the seed of the Messiah, see 1 Samuel 30: 11-12.)

I am sure I am not the only one filled with suspicion towards our political class. We all know the Democrats and what they stand for but I believe the Republicans have become a lighter version of the Democratic Party. Thus the American people are presented with a false option (a) you get the short end of the stick or (b) Government gets the long end of the stick.

It should suffice to consider the presidency of George Bush, a Republican that governed like a Democrat and spent money like a Greek bureaucrat. The mask is falling with this so called law in Alabama. Nothing is done to punish the good ol’ boys who actually hire the illegal aliens, no sir. Let us punish not the perpetrators but those who feed the victims.

It is high time for a real audit of the records of all employers since 1980. Those found guilty of hiring illegal aliens should be punished with heavy fines sufficient in total to reduce the national deficit. But, oh! such move should be effected by the political class who is in bed with the good ol’ boys… That seems to suggest that we should purge or replace BOTH parties.

The ruling class hates the Church and wants her out of the political discourse. The day is not too far when both parties will attack the Church openly. Fortunately that move will result in their demise. That is what has happened since the times of Nero… mess with the Church first, go to Hell later.

Good luck there, Alabama GOP!

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Catholics invented environmentalism in the times of St. Benedict, and reinvented it with St. Francis of Assisi. The environmentalism of today is closer to Stalin, or Margaret Sanger.

There is no doubt that climate changes, the atmosphere heats up and cools down periodically. During the Pliocene the average temperature of the earth was 3 degrees higher than today: there were no cars, no Chinese babies, no man-made sources of carbon dioxide. Antarctica looked pretty much like Vermont for most of the year. Polar bears had to walk on land and eat river salmon and coastal seafood.

Blaming mankind activities for “global warming” is like blaming cows for bad leather boots. The only human component of “global warming” is that we suffer it. Besides we have been here before. Remember acid rain? Well, it turned out that it was not the Canadian smokestacks… it was the Canadian pines. There must have been some sort of mean capitalist pines I am sure! You don’t hear environmentalists talk about that anymore.

Aborting every baby in the planet will not stop Antarctica from melting away one day. We live 18 minutes/light away from a very moody star we call the Sun. The last time I checked, good old Sol was the source of 99.9999999% of the energy warming this planet. Baby flatulence has nothing on that big star although my little nephew Alex (9 months old) is trying hard to make a difference. In time he will learn to blame the dog just like so many environmentalists blame him.

Planet warming up? Look at that big yellow thing in the sky. Of course those living in Boston will have to take a plane somewhere to see it. Hopefully they will not be in the same plane with little Alex.

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

We have a lot of work to do! The Church has the advantage of looking at things from the perspective of eternity. No matter what happens, we’ve experienced it before.

When Alaric sacked Rome everyone there suffered but the Church was not surprised. St. John had predicted it in the Apocalypse. Rome did not collapse because it was weak; it collapsed because the Church was strong enough to survive. Having used the husk of the Roman Empire it was time for a new world to be born.

To God belong the time and the seasons; it was the time and the season for the beast that was Rome to be trampled underfoot just like she had trampled upon the ancient nations with unmerciful cruelty.

Now it is time for a replay. 1929 saw the end of unbridled capitalism, 1945 it was curtains for fascism, and in 1991 communism proved that it was slow and inefficient even for kicking the bucket. The postmodern era is presided by the leftovers of those three systems mixed with each other to a variety of degrees: a little socialism there, a little capitalism, and a little fascism… a little, a little.

The 20th Century began with great fanfare. Those systems like giants fought for world domination. And then… nothing “Olympus gave birth to a mouse.”

In this nothingness of the apotheosis of modernism (that they now call post-modernism) a tin horse kicks the horseman, a useless flag floats in the windless atmosphere of the Moon, a president of the U.S. announces negotiations to propose a committee that will begin the consideration of the first steps towards a plan to design the implementation of a jobs program… while the vice president snores away. Just in case you missed it, let me announce that the grand charade is almost over.

It is the twilight of the dogs.

There was a time when one needed more money and so one got a second job, a part time on evenings or weekends to buy a better house, or build up the retirement nest. In the postmodern West those who were given through welfare the spoils of the ransacking of the wealth of nations, now add a little more to their income by ransacking their own neighborhoods in the evening. It is a mediocre, stupid version of cutting the middleman. Who needs politicians to dispense the loot when we can loot ourselves? Hey! WE HAVE RIGHTS!

The system cannot be fixed. It will topple. It is easy to see that the cretins running the ship will not let go of the helm just because of a simple little thing like the collapse of society. “A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” they have said. Those who cannot manage the state will attempt to manage its collapse. In the style of Nero they think of rhymes and reconstruction while the city burns to the ground. They imagine themselves Caesars but they are only like Nero, poor fools.

The Church will survive and be purified in the same way that it survived the fall of Rome. One hundred years after Alaric we had our first saints with latinized barbarian names. In time a descendant of those barbarians whose name should have been Alixer wrote in exile the poem of Man lost between Heaven and Hell, but he called himself Alighieri… because the Church have given him the soul that the ancient Romans had rejected and so with his poem Christendom ascended from among the ruins.

Time to do it one more time. A future Christian poet called perhaps Mohammed, or Fatima will sing the fall of the sick man of Modernism from the German Reformation to the Sack of Congress by the Great Unwashed. And there will be saints that will Christianize Europe again, Neo Cyril, Neo Methodius… because the world is passing, and with it its desire but the Word of God remains forever.

This is the third peril and from its ashes the civilization of Mary shall be born.

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

Great article and a great line there: “To attribute everything to the economic factor is to perpetuate the terrible lie of the Marxists.” Marx put the horse behind the cart but modern economists have put the horse on top of the cart and expect us to pull it forward.

Charlie Chaplin mocked the system in Modern Times presenting man as cog in the machine. The truth is not that nice, Communism and Fascism proved that we are not “part” of the machine, we are WHAT FEEDS the machine. Wall Street is the temple where we bring our sacrifices and hope for a blessing from the gods of finance. Some authors have even called New York “The New Jerusalem.” A refined form of blasphemy indeed, a bad copy of the Temple of God.

If you think of Solomon’s Temple and its divine design you shall see that it is a womb. Deep inside that figurative womb lives the Source of Life in the Holy of Hollies. Around the temple there are areas prepared for different groups of people: the High Priest, the priests, the Levites, the men of Israel, the women and the children of Israel, the convert gentiles, etc. Everyone has a place. Seen from above you can describe it as a figurative woman, the “gunai” of Genesis 3:15 with all her children, her family. We all know who she is: Our Blessed Mother.

To that Temple the people brought their children to be dedicated, the tenth of the fruit of their labor to feed the men of God, their sins to be forgiven. The Temple is a model for the family of mankind with life emanating from its sacred figure of Mary’s womb. That is the model for our society, a family model where subsidiarity and solidarity are the fertile soil where God grows His children in peace and prosperity “satisfying the desire of every soul.” It is the triumph of life.

The economic system of this world is the opposite. It is more aptly symbolized by the temple of Baal where people bring their children to be sacrificed, where the priests ravage the land to satisfy their desires and only their desires, where lies and superstition chain the souls to an early death: all ends up feeding Baal, it is the triumph of death.

We are now approaching the time when this nation will have to take one road or the other. The scam is about to be uncovered and its unholy lies are about to be revealed. They are already dumping money on the streets in a vain hope to revive what they have been killing for decades. Just as it has been predicted.

This is getting interesting.

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

U.S. farmers are by far the most productive farmers in the world. Perhaps the greatest American born in the XX century, Norman Borlaug, was a farmer and he may have been the one human being who saved more lives than any other,  not counting Jesus of course. There was a time when the Soviets bragged about increased productivity in their collective farms. Even in those days we could beat the USSR at producing food with just the output of California or Kansas alone.

Subsidies are for farmers what welfare is for ordinary people. They come with lots of strings attached as my fellow Virginian and author of this nice article surely knows. In the inner city if you want your free welfare apartment you must stay poor. The moment one makes one dollar over the line one ends up on the cold, hard street. That has the effect of freezing a person in perpetual poverty.

Subsidies for farmers work the same way. The strings attached to the subsidies are designed to limit productivity and sustain artificially high prices in the commodity markets. That is not capitalism really, it is a form of control that can be compared to the Soviet control over the collective output: central planning with a twist.

If the government stops that practice farmers may very well have to return to basics: produce what the market demands, produce it as fast as possible, and produce it in the largest quantities possible to make money. The good side of that is that we may see a dramatic drop in the price of certain commodities. Of course speculators will find a way to burn production to sustain prices. One day they will have to answer to God for that. I am sure they will be surprised to find out that God supports free market as opposed to our present “free pens to fleece the fools” system.

Just like the Soviet system finally collapsed when Boris Yeltsin climbed to that tank in 1991, America is about to see the collapse of the crony liberal capitalism system that was imposed gradually on us after the Civil War.

Indeed a “new world” is being born but not the “new world order” the Rockefellers dreamed about. After a few pangs of distress people will see (indeed they are seeing) that we are many and we don’t need centralized commanders whose only talent consists in giving a few stinking speeches per day. The prayers of America are being answered and we are walking into a great future of true liberty. We just have to fight one more time to eradicate evil from our land.

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

“I once heard a homilist give what he said was the real meaning of the story: the people in the crowd took out food they were hiding under their cloaks and shared it. Jesus’ preaching inspired the melting of selfishness, and this was the true miracle according to this preacher.” Marcellino D’Ambrosio, Ph.D in The Miracle of the Loaves

Yes. That is the usual interpretation of the priests of the liberashun zeology which is another way of describing those who suffer from Bolshevik Retardation Syndrome. If we all share our bread then we will all have more, twelve baskets more than what we started with. This moment of obscurity brought to you by the same school that got you “if we all pay more taxes we shall be a more affluent society.”

Now, I belong to the superstitious medieval ignoramus part of the Church. You can recognize us in the pews, we are the ones rolling our eyes like Linda Blair in The Exorcist every time father pulls a doozy like that.

I am proud to confess that I have read Karl Marx and I find it supremely boring and wrong. To use Bearded Chuck’s own words: “this matter of the surviving meta-historical values in our societies must be explained, we must explain its influence or else Dialectic Materialism is toast!” A toast! I drink to that.

The miracle did not materialize when the Soviet Commissars forced everyone in the USSR to share his/her lunch. Obviously only Jesus could pull one like that, with no tanks and no KGB. But I digress…

I say that calling Phillip (the practical, educated man among the twelve) and asking him to fix lunch about 8,500 miles and 2,000 years time from the nearest Pizzeria Uno was the way Jesus confronted his body of bishops with the reality of 5,000+ empty bellies. The whole committee of problem solvers could do nothing. To save the day comes a little boy with a few fishes and a few barley loaves, the product of being up early to grind some barley and go fishing (otherwise known to those Neanderthals as individual initiative, work, and dedication–obviously he did not know about Section 8 and the Food Stamps Program, otherwise he would have been taking a nappy.)

So Jesus takes the meager contribution (presumably after giving the boy one or two copper coins for his mom) and starts multiplying bread like nobody’s business. The greatest thing since the chariot (slice bread was a few centuries in the future.)

In the end the 5,000+ hungry travelers were fed and (to rub it in) Jesus sends the bishops on doggy-bag duty and they come back each with a mean basket full of leftovers. Jesus did not want anything to go to “waist” that is He did not want the people to hide it under their cloaks one more time… oh.. let me read that again. It is “waste” you dummy! What a maroon! Of course!

But… that would indicate we have a surplus! Where did the extra munchies come from? I am sure you have to read a lot of Albert Nolan and Leonardo Boff to make this thing square! Look at that! This Jesus must have been somethin’! Where did he get all that chow?

Ah… he must have had some divine powers to make things appear from nothing, like evolutionists make DNA appear from lighting hitting a can of Campbell soup, or Soviet courts make witnesses materialize in the docket declaring they saw their mothers teaching other babushkas that Stalin does not exist.

Like I told you before, I am a complete ignoramus and I live in the mountains. But even here we would be astonished if a regular Billy Bob pulls one catfish sandwich out of his empty raccoon skin hat. Should it ever happen I’m sure we can hit him hard with that old dusty volume of Das Kapital. That will teach him to fake miraculls!

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

The situation we are in here in the once prosperous Western world is similar to that in the last days of the Soviet Union. They had their acquiescent “writers” like Ms. K.C. Dermody who were the defenders of the official way of thinking. Those scabby dogs were quick to throw stones to Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, or Sakharov but they did not say peep about the crimes of the KGB. Ms. K.C.Dermody barks selectively at Christians but she has no qualms in being pretty silent about the blatant abuse of her women sisters in the Muslim world. The cowardice and obsequious unctuose smugness of the slime produced by that despicable kind of “writer” flows like pus out of the postmodern pustules of the gliberal media. One day Sarah Palin will be a President, or a Secretary of the Interior, or a a Secretary of State, or a Senator. She will continue to shine because she lives what she believes. She does not have to prostitute herself and prostrate to the powers that be.

Go on Sarah: as long as the gliberal female dogs bark you are going in the right direction!

All we ever hear from the wild-eyed critics of the Catholic Church, including the dissidents within, is that the Church had better “get with it” and change its teachings on abortion, homosexuality and women’s ordination. Yet it is precisely those religious institutions that are the most liberal on these issues—the mainline Protestant denominations—that are collapsing. Not so the Catholic Church. Indeed, its numbers are going north while the mainline denominations are going south.

The latest findings by the “Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership” project, a collaborative effort with Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, are illuminating. In the last 40 years, the Catholic population has increased by 75 percent; it has grown by 50 percent since 1990. More important, Catholic attendance at Mass is up 15 percent since 2000. And in the last five years, contributions have increased by 14 percent. It is also important to note that there has been a 40 percent increase in Latinos in the Church over the past five years.

Shedding more light on the statistics is a study released a few months ago by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion. Its “Landscape Survey” found that of those Catholics who have left the Church, roughly half became unaffiliated while the other half became Protestant. Regarding the latter half, only 23 percent did so because of the Church’s teachings on abortion and homosexuality; only 16 percent left because of the way women are treated. Importantly, two-thirds of these Catholics elected to join a Protestant evangelical church.

In other words, disaffected Catholics who left for another religion opted to join a more conservative church. That they did not run down the block in search of a mainline denomination—one that entertains the liberal agenda on issues governing sexuality and women—is telling.

It’s time some people took a hard look at the data and made some hard choices. This is great news for the Catholic Church.

Bill Donohue

“Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.” –Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher said: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” There was a United States of Europe once. It was called Christendom. Sometime after Thomas Aquinas finished his Summa Europe began to change from pursuing things eternal to pursuing things temporal: to the enjoyment of the material riches created by centuries of Christian order. In time that change reached the core of the European spirit. The German Reformation arrived and challenged the ancient vision of the Church, the nature of authority, the purpose of obedience.

The fruits of the Reformation were soon made evident in the French Revolution, the Weimar Republic, Marxism, Communism… Europe’s slow death by ideas progresses even to this day.

Just a few years before the French Revolutionaries killed the King of France, the American Revolution triumphed with some help from the French Catholic crown. Our revolution was a reluctant revolution against a Parliament that already had destroyed Ireland because of her obstinate catholicity. Ireland was a nation under God who refused to be a nation under a human king demanding godlike obedience.

It was very present in the mind of our Founding Fathers that we could go the way of Ireland if we did not arrest the growing signs of oppression coming from Parliament. And so, in a subtle way, the American Revolution was a statement in favor of the universal brotherhood of man, a catholic revolution of sorts. It remains a unique milepost in the history of mankind.

In our land we do not have a king who is head of a state church. God is in Heaven, we are under His rule, constitutionally so. That idea is at the core of the American Revolution.

Chesterton’s intuition saw in the American flag a symbol of hope lost even to the Britain that should have inherited the catholic sentiments of Edward the Confessor, and the Crusader King Richard, but instead succumbed to the folly of Henry VIII.

Now Europe is going way past that point trying to be a sort of Christendom without Christ and some of her sick ideas have crossed the sea thus infecting the American soil. Yet I think the destiny of America is to save Europe from herself. It has happened two times and this third time it may happen in a slightly different way (a less bloody way I hope.)

Only God knows how we are going to surmount the perils we face now. Europe may have been the Faith once but now the Faith lives here in this nation under God, this band of brothers who are not united by common ancestry or mere geography but by the conviction that God has endowed all men with certain inalienable rights life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If the happiness that the American people pursue is spiritual happiness under God, then this happy realm will last for a long, long time.

Carlos Caso- Rosendi