Mass Extinctions
When the Polynesians first arrived in New Zealand in about AD1280 they encountered many new flora and fauna. One the fauna they definitely didn't want to encounter was the Pouakai. This raptor had evolved to take down the large flightless birds that were common in NZ, like the Moa. And Maori folklore suggests it was partial to humans too. Near-complete skeleton finds show that it had the body and wings of a giant eagle, legs and bill larger and stronger than the largest living vulture species, and feet and claws as big as those of a modern day tiger.
The response of the Maori was to exterminate this species. Following their arrival, around half the islands’ bird species were wiped out including Haast’s eagle which is the big bird now identified with the Pouakai.
Humans are rather good at exterminating competition for food and resources. In fact they're just very good at exterminating. The Moa itself was annihilated not long after the Pouakai.
The extinction of competitive species by humankind has apparently being going on for the last fifty millennia. Mammoths and Moas, Tasmanian Tigers and Passenger Pigeons have all made the trip to oblivion.
When they've run out of other species to annihilate, humans sometimes turn their attention on each other. They have specialised workers for this very task - known as politicians – who set other humans against each other and keep nudging them until they're so fired up they'll go to war.
When we talk about extinction, what we really mean is the removal of the niche that the particular species had made for itself over the aeons via the evolutionary process. So we should think of it more like compulsory redundancy as opposed to murder.
Our political classes, in their simple-minded way, seem to be especially prone to the notion that we can exterminate things they perceive as a threat. So we hear about Zero Covid, Zero Carbon, Zero Migration and so on. As if they either understood any of the consequences of zero anything or had the slightest chance of achieving it.
So we come to how the panocracy will help to save the world by exterminating just one species.
Net Zero
The absence of professional politicians will mean:
Zero hot air and CO2 emissions (masquerading as political debate) to warm our supposedly endangered planet.
Zero pointless air travel as there won't be any of these charlatans to jet off to international confabs to lecture us about how we can't fly any more.
Zero spending of our hard earned dough on vanity projects like a railway between two cities that already have a perfectly good rail link.
Zero pol-splaining to us bingo playing, soot-faced proles why we're so lucky to have the NHS and SAGE, or the SPI-B nudge unit, or why inflation is outstripping wages, or a million other things whose real explanation is simply the incompetence, vanity and hubris of those same pols.
Zero attempts by governments to alienate us from our friends, our neighbours, our countrymen and the people of other nations in the pursuit of their own agendas.
If you're new to this column, then you are most welcome!
Please read about our proposals for panocracy which are laid out in earlier posts (A New Hope, The Open Agenda) and comment if you like or don't like what you see!