Anything Goes When You’re Saving the World
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | May 30, 2018
SPOTLIGHT: Saving the world = barbaric behaviour.
BIG PICTURE: The paperback edition of biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, was 233 pages long. The first three chapters described a problem.
The final two chapters were titled “What Needs to be Done” and “What Can You Do?” They were followed by an Appendix of examples of letters readers might send to influential individuals. In other words, 83 pages of that book (more than a third) was an unabashedly political discussion.
These pages reiterated that the future was bleak. Overpopulation threatened America, the American way of life, and the “very lives” of US citizens (pp. 135, 138, 172, 180, 182).
The “only hope for survival,” was “drastic worldwide measures” lest civilization itself go “down the drain.” The “time of famines” had arrived (pp. 134, 143, 145, 148, 157-9, 161, 165, 198).
50 years later, we know Ehrlich’s apocalyptic predictions were wildly off target. Half a billion people did not starve to death during the 1970s. Instead, via ingenuity and technology, humanity grew more food and got better at transporting it to wherever it was desperately needed.
Americans weren’t forced to “slaughter” their dogs and cats so that pet food protein could be fed to the “starving masses.” Luxury taxes weren’t placed on diapers, and a powerful new arm of the US government wasn’t created to “take whatever steps are necessary,” in order to bring that country’s birth rate in line with its death rate. In 1968, there were 200 million Americans. Today, there are 326 million (pp. 134, 137-8).
Ehrlich’s fanaticism was on stark display when he described overpopulation as a cancer:
We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival. (pp. 166-167)
In this regard, he declared that America should have pressured the Indian government to sterilize “all Indian males with three or more children”:
We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program…Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause. (pp. 165-166)
TOP TAKEAWAY: Fifty years after The Population Bomb appeared, few people remember that it advocated dispatching US helicopters so that Indian peasants could be kidnapped & forcibly sterilized.
No comments yet.
Featured Video
Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Thousands of Syrian troops set to join Saudi war on Yemen
- Jared Kushner’s Diplomacy for Hire
- Russia backs Tehran’s conditions in talks with US, Iran’s envoy says
- Irish ‘fake news’ expert exposed as fake
- China expresses strong opposition to Dutch report alleging Chinese cyberattacks
- Coup d’état in Poland
- The Endgame: When the CIA Proxy War Runs Out of Ukrainians!
- Over 16,000 hectares of farms, forests burnt in Israeli offensive on southern Lebanon, says minister
- Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War /John Mearsheimer
- Kafr Qasim at 70: The massacre Israel still hasn’t owned up to
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
Leave a Reply