Wise words from Bill Maher.

Dead_Lioness

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May 31, 2002
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"So, here's a quote from Albert Einstein. He said, if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination. No more plants. No more animals. No more man. Well, guess what? The bees are disappearing in massive numbers all around the world. And if you think I'm being alarmist, and that, "Oh, they'll figure out some way to pollinate the plants." No, they've tried.

For a lot of what we eat, only bees work. And they're not working. They're gone. It's called "colony collapse disorder," when the hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear and all that's left are a few queens and some immature workers. Like when a party winds down at Elton John's house. Queens imagery.

But, I think we are the ones suffering from colony collapse disorder. Because, although nobody really knows for sure what's killing the bees, it's not Al Qaeda, and it's not God doing some of his Old Testament shtick. And it's not Winnie the Pooh. It's us. It could be from pesticides or genetically-modified food or global warming, or the high fructose corn syrup we started to feed them.

Recently, it was discovered that bees won't fly near cell phones. The electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees' navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So, thanks, big mouth guy in line at Starbucks. You just killed us.

It's nature's way of saying, "Can you hear me now?"

Last week, I asked, if it solved global warming, would you give up the TV remote and go back to carting your fat a$$ over to the television set every time you wanted to change the channel. If it comes down to the cell phone versus the bee, will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death? Will we continue to tell ourselves that we don't have to solve environmental problems, we can just adapt? Build sea walls instead of stopping the ice caps from melting. Don't save the creatures of the earth in the oceans; just learn to eat the slime and the jellyfish that nothing can kill; like Chinese restaurants are already doing.

You know what? Maybe you don't need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don't need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out 100 billion plastic bags a year, and they all take 1,000 years to decompose. Your children's children's children will never know you, but they'll know you once bought batteries at the 99-cents Store because the bag will still be caught in a tree. Except there won't be any trees.

Sunday is Earth Day. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees. Because, without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine. And we make bad canaries, because we're already such sheep."




:cry: :worship: :eek:
 
reading about thist stuff makes me sad, but i dont think its only americans, its people all over the world
 
Wise Words? Where now? Oh I see he quoted Einstein, that must be it.

But that Einstein quote has been used and abused ad nauseum and there has been nary a source proving it to be a real. Bees hardly top the list of things we should be concerning ourselves with.

And before you say "Oh, but Bill was simply using it as a point to make a more generalized comment", deeply thought out or not (obviously the latter), it's a silly matter altogether however you piece it. Nonstop media sensationalism.
 
Massive bee death == massive starvation == decreased cell phone use == bee comeback. I'm not trying to sound apathetic; I'm most definitely NOT, but during the Permian 95% of all species to have ever existed went extinct, and yet here we are. Life is tenacious.
 
Sure, but is human life tenacious? Untested so far.

I think we're tenacious enough to withstand a bee die-off. After all, we became a species in tropical Africa, emigrated, and managed to survive a brutal ice age for which we were not physically prepared. The factor in the equation is our disproportionately large brains.

Firstly, although they are the major pollinators of flowers, bees are not the only ones. (for example, blowflies have been known to do so).

Secondly, (and I may well be wrong) it seems that the bees which are dying off are the apiary bees, and not necessarily the wild bees.

Granted, if this is as serious as it sounds, there are hard times ahead, but I think we will survive.
 
i'll just follow the silly cell phone theory and just keep using it more and more in hopes that the mosquitos go next.
 
I hate cell phones. I think all the problems they cause are human ones though. It's gotten so bad that people are helpless without them. Unfortunately, I have one.

My distaste comes from inconsiderate users who do things like yak away while driving. :(
 
Firstly, although they are the major pollinators of flowers, bees are not the only ones. (for example, blowflies have been known to do so).

It's true, bees are not the only ones, though I'm not knocking their importance.

Secondly, (and I may well be wrong) it seems that the bees which are dying off are the apiary bees, and not necessarily the wild bees.


The original reports that starting popping up with this story in the past months were claiming "Honey Bees". Over time this has progressed to an overall "Bees", thus making it seem more of an epidemic than it truly is. As I have not seen a scientific report of this anywhere (NBC Nightly news with Brian Williams = wikipedia = Bill Maher = pulled right out of an ass), as far as we know it could have been a single Apiary where this data was recorded.

I'd be more worried about our honey supplies from this than anything else.
 
There's a tendency to blame everything on Man. Since we have had such an effect on the world, sometimes negative, it's natural for well-meaning people to assume we're at fault for anything on a large scale.
 
Also,

"This truly sounds alarming: Bees are disappearing for reasons we can't yet explain, and a certified genius such as Einstein noted long ago that if all the bees disappeared, we'd soon be following them into extinction. If the intent of propagating this quote is to get our attention, it's certainly been working. Did Einstein sagely foresee an environmental crisis we're only just now beginning to notice?

To answer that last question (without denying the importance of the honeybees), we have to consider the related question of "Did Einstein really say this?" First off, searches of Einstein's writings and speeches and public statements, as well as of (scholarly) compilations of Einstein quotations reveal nary a reference to the "four years" phrase or any other statement mentioning bees (save for a brief comparison between humans and colony insects such as ants and bees). The compiler of <I>The New Quotable Einstein</I> also found no Einsteinian source for this quote and lists it as "Probably Not by Einstein.'

From Snopes.
 
I know how to kill flies. *sits and contemplates whether to move the Earth into the sun or into deep space.*