Happy St. Pats!

In honor of St. Pats, we drank beer on Friday night. Then, in honor of the Irish, I thought I'd post this fact related to that country. It's strange and disturbing, but interesting at the same time...

In 1729, Jonathan Swift (best known for writing Gulliver's Travels) wrote A Modest Proposal supposedly written by an intelligent & objective "political arithmetician" who had carefully studied Ireland before making his proposal. The author calmly suggests one solution for both the problem of overpopulation & the growing numbers of undernourished people: breed those children who would otherwise go hungry or be mistreated in order to feed the general public. In A MODEST PROPOSAL (1729) the narrator with grotesque logic recommends, that Irish poverty can solved by the breeding up their infants as food for the rich.