The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek way in which certain people are honored for improving the human gene pool by means of some fatal and stupid act, such as a too-long bungee cord. Some are famous, as the lone survivor who earned the an honorable mention, Larry Walters. He is the guy who in 1982 used helium balloons to fly high in the sky (16,000 feet). His plan was to use a shotgun to one-by-one deflate the balloons, but he dropped his shotgun. As I understand, he eventually had to be rescued from electrical and telephone wires. Once rescued, he was arrested.
If I were on the nominating committee, I would name Randy Lee Tenley, from my home state of Montana. In 2015 he was trying to create a big foot (Sasquatch) sighting, using a “Ghillie Suit, seen to the left. Such a suit is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble the background environment such as foliage.
It worked very well for Tenley, who stepped out on a highway. Because he was so well camouflaged, drivers could not see him. He was hit by a car, and then run over by another car. I assume alcohol was involved.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the president of Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, just southeast of India in the Bay of Bengal. He had to flee the country and announced his resignation while taking refuge in Singapore. He is now going to be prosecuted for financial irregularities. This article, from The Conversation, which prides itself on “academic rigor with a journalistic flair” gives a nice summary of the circumstances of Rajapaksa’s departure, but forgets to do the one thing a worthy journalist would do: State the cause of the problems.
Rajapaksa, listening to environmental nutjobs in his administration, banned the use of synthetic fertilizers in Sri Lanka. The results were quick and brutal, food shortages, an 80% increase in food prices, and riots in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, the country’s capital. He rightly feared for his life.
There are several myths at work here, one of which is that fossil fuels are a danger to human survival, rather than our benefactor. Another is that fossil fuels are part of nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizers. Some people flinch at the thought of eating oil.
That is not how it works. Synthetic fertilizers require lots of heat in their manufacture process, and that heat is normally supplied by natural gas. But at no time does any form of fossil fuel come in contact with soil.
Estimates are that without synthetic fertilizer, the soils of our planet could support only three billion people. Their elimination would amount to genocide. And that pretty well sums up the climate change madness, misanthropes who want to get rid of as many people as possible – so that we can go back to nature.
Alex Epstein in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels does a good job explaining the religious nature of the climate change movement, not at all science-based, or at least the science is corrupted and wrong. They are oblivious to the fact that nature is our friend only to the degree that we conquer it. Fossil fuels have been our friend in this endeavor, making our lives easier and better, and making us wealthier. If you are not into reading, he can be viewed here on YouTube. Get there before they take him down. We live under heavy, heavy censorship.
My nomination for the 2022 Darwin Award based not on his death, but potential imprisonment and based on sheer stupidity: Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
As a general rule, Darwin Awards require that the recipient receive it posthumously. OK, I’d go for that.
Piece of Mindful 
We most definitely can and most definitely should grow our food without the use of chemical fertilizers. Organic farming and soil science are fields that have been growing exponentially the last 20 years. Of course, you won’t hear about that on tv or at any college that teaches agriculture. They only teach the agricultural version of germ theory. One disease, one chemical solution. Everything gets distorted the same way when put under the lens of modern $cience.
This sounds to me like a 100% planned failure. It takes time or a very good plan to make the switch to organic. Our fertile lands are basically drug addicts, and have had the microbiology stripped out of them by synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. It would take more thought and more manpower to farm in accordance with nature.
Unfortunately, the parasites that run this world would much rather us cram into smart cities and eat a steady diet of bugs. Just think of all the cow farts and sheep burps that are killing our planet!
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I see no correlation between the massive rise in crop yields in the post Ww2 20th century and organic farming. Data matters. It too is fake? I do not know about the effects of pesticides and herbicides, but do know that nitrogen is pulled from the atmosphere and sent back again in the manufacture of fertilizers, and that I do not fear it. Left to nature, there are far fewer of us, and this is the essence of the Climate Change movement. It has everything to do with limiting the number of people, and nothing to do with warming, which historically, in any event, is a good thing. The movement is a large stick in our eye … “Stop existing!” they are saying to us.
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Who collects the data on organic vs. conventional farming practices? I suspect it’s the same folks who collect the data on vaxxed vs. unvaxxed.
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I do not know.
I have long expected a huge scandal in the organic world, that most produce labeled that will have turned out to be a hoax. But it has not happened. They guard their fences pretty well. But still, I do not trust them, or any kind of advertising. It is nothing more than professional lying.
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Yes, there is no doubt there a lot of fraud in the organic markets. That’s why a lot of conscientious farmers and consumers have started using their own kind of alternative labeling—like ‘beyond organic’ or ‘regenerative’ or ‘sustainable’ (which then gets abused by international agencies looking to capture those markets and exploit them). It happens quite a lot with brands and products that get very popular, like Burt’s Bees comes to mind. They sell, the product changes from good ingredients to crap, but the consumer is none the wiser because they keep the label the same.
I think of it like the scene in Idiocracy where they are trying to water all the crops with their manufactured ‘electrolytes’ product. This is what the high intensity monocropping does to the soil—good yields for a while when using all the chemicals to fertilize and control pests, but then degeneration which the next folks on that land have to deal with to regenerate the soil—time consuming, expensive, labor intensive.
So the current system of conventional farming is increasingly reliant on outside inputs that future generations pay the cost for—it’s the same mentality from the Geoengineers and the Crispr gene editing fanatics—someone is paying the costs, the very steep costs, for their follies. But they never do, so they don’t care. Where’s the karma?
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Agreed. Organic and even the newer regenerative farming label are pretty much dead words. I can’t even label my produce organic without going through the corrupt government where I live. And even then, they have some leeway as to how much chemicals you can use.. doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t think gathering data would even be possible since there are so many factors. If we define organic as only using homemade compost, and all organic farmers use the same inputs to make it, we would still get wildly different results. I’ve seen studies on regenerative farming that seem to discredit it, but when you look into them it’s clear they’re not doing it right. But there’s really no definition of the right way.
After this last few years I sometimes wonder if less people would be better. I’ve lost a lot of respect for the common man… but I suppose that’s what they want me to think.
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I agree, the kind of data required would never work in this system as it is so highly variable. I see the same for most data, that’s why it’s so easy to fudge depending on the agenda of those doing the fudging. And it fools a lot of people who love numbers and graphs and think that makes it all official.
As for ‘the common man’ — I don’t even know who is ‘common’ anymore. Common is as common does, and the so-called elite and our supposed leaders are behaving as common as they come.
I would like to know who came up with the masterful proposition that we must ‘feed the world’ — that was a magnificent plan for collapse that has been roping in folks since at least the 60s. I have learned one good lesson over the decades of constant fuckery—never help anyone who doesn’t come to you directly for help, hat in hand, then give them only and specifically the help they ask for, no more, no less, if it is in your power to do so. Misplaced generosity, compassion overkill, pathological empathy are catastrophic problems on the same level with greed, corruption, abuse.
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Good discussion
Thank you
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