The bit he papers over is our role in increasing the rate of extinctions

[james_davis_nicoll]

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Preserving species is important.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-delicious-species-discovered,1331/

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I think Nancy once laughed at me for suggesting the discovery of tasty animals in Europa could drive people to fund space flight but I was serious.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

IIRC, there was a time travel story that used that premise. They called their product 'dinochicken' :-)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Asimov. ``A Statue For Father''. (There are likely other stories using the gimmick too, but time-travel dinochickens is definitely this.)

[(Anonymous)]

I recall an aside in a novel by L. Neil Smith that some one noticed that there was no shortage of chickens...therefore he started selling 'eagleburgers'. Once eagles were commercially valuable, there was no shortage of breeders for this once endangered species....

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Of course, today's chicken is a far cry from its wild ancestor. It can't even sustain flight, for example. Arguably it's a different species.

Granted, maybe a similiar "eagle" would be a great symbol for today's USA.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Man, imagine the feeding protocols. Debeaked eagles crammed into four-foot pens being force-fed pureed rat slurry mixed with eagle offal. Makes me want to sing the national anthem.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A nice libertoonian world: eagles and all sorts of other species would be extinct in the wild because of massive agricultural DDT use, but the one or two species we'd deemed worthy of burgerization would be thriving on farms. I can only imagine what a domestic meat eagle would look like.

Meanwhile, in the real world, bald eagles are doing fine. I remember when you only ever saw them in zoos; now they hang around my parents' neighborhood catching fish from the river.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The Quad Cities in Illinois/Iowa, four industrial cities on the Mississippi, become swarmed with migrating eagles when the winter is cold enough for the river to freeze over. The eagles congregate there because the roil below dams keeps the water clear of ice (and cause stunned fish to float to the surface).

It's bizarre driving through an urban park and seeing hundreds of the birds in the trees.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

This routine is the exact one that made me change my opinion of George Carlin. Comedians "paper over" stuff all the time in the name of humor, but the older I got and the more examples I saw, the more I felt Carlin genuinely believed what he said. And when called to expand on opinions in interviews (radio shows mostly, IIRC) he wasn't particularly well-informed. I didn't hate the guy or anything, I just didn't experience as much whelm with his philosophies as everyone else around me seemed to.