There’s a lot of talk about recreating 1968 this year as various groups try to reclaim their youth.  One of the disasters perpetrated on the world that year was Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.”  On the front cover, highlighted in yellow, are the horrifying words:

“While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation.  Most of them children.”

The premise of the book is that we faced a crisis of overpopulation, and that the world’s food producers would not be able to keep up. Millions of people would starve.  This book sold many copies during the late 60s and early 70s.  It was highly recommended in college ecology courses.  And it set the stage for today’s use of environmental hysteria as a basis to shut down the Western economy.

I have searched for an original copy of this book for years, and I finally found one published by Ballentine Books, Third Printing in August, 1968.   Why the need for an original, 1968, edition?  Because as the predictions made by Ehrlich failed to come about, they were conveniently edited out of the later editions.

This book is co-published by The Sierra Club, and it seriously calls into questions the orgainization’s motives and expertise.  Ehrlich is blurbed on the back cover:

Dr. Paul Ehrlich is Professior of Biology and Director of Graduate Study for the Department of Bilogical Sciences, Stanford University.  His specialty is population biology.  He has written over seventy scientific papers and several books on this an drelated subjects.

Sounds pretty good, huh?  In face, Ehrlich was a specialist in butterflies, not human populations.

Here’s another taste of the book, from the prologue

The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970’s (sic) the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to “stretch” the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole.

There you have it.  Modern Environmentalism in a nutshell – we have sinned, the Wrath of Gaia is coming and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but we should still turn an important aspect of our lives over to our betters for management.

And if you don’t remember the 70s, rest assured than none of these predictions ever ocurred.

We’ll have more excerpts from the book.

Plus, twenty-five reasons you yourself may be a racistinflatable water park.

We’re not the only ones inflatable park tired of the election.

If you’re not reading Urgent Agenda every day, you should be.  Bill Katz brings interesting insight to political stories, such as his analysis of Dana Milbank’s piece in today’s Washington Post.

The juiciest of the juicy.  We don’t normally depend on the Washington Post to take a major swing at liberals, but the paper does have its glorious moments.  Today Dana Milbank breaks the silence and finally says what many of us have been thinking – that Barack Obama is a spoiled child with an out-of-control ego, and that even those who have jumped through burning hoops for him are getting disgusted.

While the media is obviously giving Obama a lot of coverage, I’ve wondered if we’d see a McCain rebound.  I spent more than a dozen years working in newsrooms around the country, and I saw how much reporters loved John McCain.  Love was their word.  I was rarely able to get a reason for this love, but the love was there.

Will Barack Obama make enough gaffes, or become arrogant enough, for the media to turn against him?  It seems to me that the past love for McCain may be enough to lure the media back. Despite Obama’s seeming sense of entitlement, I get the feeling this election is far from over.