Fwd: NASA-Funded Roman Empire Study - must be NUTS

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert Hooi" <rwlh21@sbcglobal.net>
Date: March 23, 2014 1:48:56 PM CDT
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: NASA-Funded Roman Empire Study -  must be NUTS

NASA-Funded Roman Empire Study Promotes Collectivist Policies

Fri, 03/21/2014 - 10:27am | posted by Alice Salles

There's a thick fog clouding the judgment of those currently holding official positions in Washington that should be carefully cut through so that logic is given room. Because those who lead are misguided, we're better off identifying the problem and dealing with it now, before it deals with us.

NASA has unveiled the results of a study focused on finding ways to keep the United States from falling like the Roman Empire did. Oddly enough, the study, which has been funded by taxpayers' dollars, managed to obtain results that seem to match what John Holdren, current Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, defends.

According to researchers, the Roman Empire fell because people were consuming too much.

The study used a formula that allows researchers to take into consideration only the broad characteristics of fallen civilizations, leaving no room for the specifics. According to NASA researchers, "two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed: the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses."

The study results suggest that collapse can only be avoided if the government is successful in keeping the "rate of depletion of nature" reduced to what researchers called "a sustainable level," and only if "resources are distributed equitably."

Holdren has defended controversial policies such as mandatory population control and has collaborated in the past with an essay that defended that "man's present technology is inadequate to the task of maintaining the world's burgeoning billions, even under the most optimistic assumptions."

According to the paper that the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy co-wrote, "it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society."

We are privileged to live in a world that is experiencing a major reduction in global poverty, which had not been estimated expertly before. Most agree that liberalizing the markets and easing trade among nations and individuals have all led to the improvement of all of our lives. Ingenious entrepreneurs continue to come up with solutions to our most pressing problems and have done so while also cutting costs, benefitting the environment, creating jobs and offering a better quality of life for the entire world population.

Decentralization has been the very factor that led to the changes that have pushed innovation, which has also improved our lives but NASA researchers seem to have learned that only the very opposite of decentralization is the way to go.

Limiting resources, consumption and pushing for population control could all be part of the solution package that NASA researchers seem to have arrived at while asking themselves what one must do to keep an Empire alive.

What they fail to notice, however, is that heavy-handed interventionism and its consequences are the main factors behind the fall of the Roman Empire: precisely the type of policy Holdren defends and just what the doctor prescribed, if you suffer from severe allergy to reality.