Short People and Pessimists
In 1977, in recording the song “Short People”, singer-songwriter Randy Newman said sarcastically that he wanted to “change the course of western music”. The lyrics for the first verse are:
They got little hands, little eyes
They walk around tellin' great big lies
They got little noses, tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet
And the chorus declared, “Short people got no reason to live.” Albeit, intended as humor and whimsy, after receiving several death threats, Newman exclaimed, “I had no idea that there was any sensitivity, I mean, that anyone could believe that anyone was as crazy as that character.” The character is the role Newman was playing or acting as he sang the song.
Returning to today, and a recent New York Times Op-Ed article, author Mara Altman declares that short people are much better for the future of planet earth. Is this ‘short people’ vindication some 46 years later?
She writes, “Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked). She goes on further to state, “When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.”
So, never mind using eHarmony, Match, SilverShingles or It’s Just Lunch, start immediately with Short Singles or Petite Mates and begin to make babies that turn out to be of shorter stature – perhaps for males, anything over 5’10” (1.778 meters) doesn’t get on the celestial journey with Captain Kirk.
And there is not that much time at least according to the following:
Despite a vast array of failures on each and every fatalist prediction, Paul Ehrlich gets enough authority and credibility to recently be interviewed on 60 minutes with CBS’s Climate Alarmist in Chief Scott Pelley. Ehrlich’s failings nonetheless have made him Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. I had recently written about Ehrlich and his comrade John Holdren who was President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The two had some pretty crude and gruesome methods and techniques on how to reduce populations. I link that article here.
Paul Ehrlich is likely the most famous of all Malthusians and wrote “The Population Bomb” which was published in 1968 and declared that the earth’s food production cannot sustain a growing worldwide population. As a result, he predicted mass starvation and death by the 1970s and 1980s.
His other predictions include:
That in the 1970s there will be deaths en masse resulting from global cooling;
The will be a total destruction of humanity from pandemics and plagues;
The population of the earth will never reach 7 billion (it’s now over 8 billion);
There is an insufficient reserve of food supply in the USA;
Every person will eventually die by the age of 20 years of age due to pesticides; and,
Every person added to the planet increases the potential for nuclear war.
In this most recent interview on CBS television, he claims humanity is not sustainable and will require at least five earths to provide a tenable life.
I very much doubt Ehrlich can be characterized as a psychotic optimist.
Scott Pelley who seems to be quite enamored with his subject interviewee claims that Ehrlich predicted devastation by global warming, but it was actually global cooling.
Further, Pelley ignores delving into the failures in point form above which is shown as a montage in the YouTube video linked in this article by Michael Shellenberger.