Sunday, August 30, 2015

What is worse, agriculture or bombing?

We have written many times that human beings are the worst predators and have even compared humans to the malaria parasite, which invades a body, multiplies relentlessly by evading the immune system, develops resistance to drugs and finally causes fever, which is global warming for mother earth. Research by a professor in Canada shows that humans are indeed 'wickedly efficient super predators ', being responsible for the extinction of 322 species in the last 500 years, the majority in the last 2 decades. We hunt fish 14 times more aggressively than sharks or killer whales. While other carnivores hunt the young and the sick humans hunt adult animals and thus destroy breeding populations. The hunting of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by a dentist from the US is an example. He was head of his pride and his death resulted in the killing of one of his cubs. But killing animals for food or pleasure may not be the greatest killer. It is agriculture. We grow food to eat, which requires vast tracts of land. So people resort to slash and burn technique to clear large areas of forest every year, not only killing all the species living in the forest, but also destroying habitat. But that is not enough. Unlike animals, we have to cook our food to be able to digest what we eat which requires more land to produce cooking oil, so more forests are cut down. Being top of the food chain the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest does not apply to us so our numbers keep multiplying, requiring more food, in a relentless cycle of destruction. There is research and debate about our effect on other animals but no one talks about the real reason, which is unrestrained population growth, because it is politically incorrect. Perhaps, the only reason that some other animals still survive is because, being killers, we kill each other with even more ferocity. For instance, a 3 year old boy was murdered by the mafia in Italy because his grandfather could not repay a loan while a teenage girl was shot by a homeowner in the US, who recorded her dying gasps. The former head of the British army holds the Prime Minister, David Cameron responsible for the chaos in Libya. He tried to prove his manhood by killing Gaddafi, resulting in the death of 30,000 Libyans. That he did not learn from the violence in Iraq due to the removal of Saddam Hussein shows that either he is as big a moron as George Bush is or that he likes killing, or both. The US is of course a leader in slaughter. First bomb Iraq to kill Saddam, which gives rise to Al Qaeda, so bomb Al Qaeda, to create ISIS and now bombing ISIS to kill more civilians. Or use drones for so called ' targeted killings ' and dismiss the death of children as ' collateral damage '. All that bombing has resulted in a mass of migration from Libya and Syria into Europe. Soon they maybe forced to bomb Berlin and London. 

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