The Journal

Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

February 2nd

TOO MANY PEOPLE!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

“That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed on it.”

- Aristotle

This ol’ gray and gassy planet’s passed another milestone a while back… and plague be damned... it now houses eight billion of us. Eight billion!

And change.

If there's a common environmental root to Entropy's many noxious weeds, it's the ancient problem of unrestrained population growth. When Mancunian textile wages plummeted in the calamitous decade following the American and French Revolutions (during which emigration of labor's surplus was sharply curtailed), Mr. Adam Smith, beholding a vista of desperate, starving and riled-up proletariati, remarked: "The minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation, education is despised or, at most, neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished."

And crowned heads started rolling.

Smith's contemporary, Thomas Malthus, espoused that Christian principle (as also, although he would have cringed at the prospect, was and remains encountered among certain other Asiatic faiths) equating life with suffering; suffering pleases God, so those who ratchet up body counts by war or plague or famine or dealing bad fentanyl or kicking dogs, do Godly work. Upon themselves or others - no difference! – and it is more felicitous to inflict suffering than suffer oneself, just like the root flaw of Communism was and remains that Dictators of the Proletariat turn out to prefer being dictators to proletarians and eventually turn to… well… dictatorial measures to prevent the sort of deadly competition as results. Them as limit the extent of the suffering do Satan's work. Tommy Malt advocated lower classes be forcibly made celibate, like certain Chinese of the day, or like feral cats of our own; "peaceable and orderly... less inclined to tumultuous proceedings in seasons of scarcity... less influenced by inflammatory and seditious publications..." and wasn’t thought a danger to reproductive or civil rights because there were no such rights back then. In fact, Tommy Malt exceeded even present biotech dystopianism by advocating that minds, as well as genitals, be altered or abolished; perhaps by lasers or nanoparticles as will eventually solve that thinking problem. Swallow that, Info Wars! England's high mucky-mucks... having just lost their American colonies and resenting the cost of transport to Australia for all but the most persistent problem people, not to mention seeing the French aristocracy losing its heads over too much democracy... found Malthus a fine, useful fellow. They bought enough of his books so... with his pay as propagandist for the East India Tea people (that Tea Party progenitor being a sort of early spin doctor)... he was able to raise up and feed his own family of three kids (as defenders say) or up to eleven (according to his enemies who, then as now, hastened to employ the politics of personal scandal to attack his ideas).

Fortunately for Britain... as also Germany and Italy, Ireland, France, Spain and Russia, among other nations... the Louisiana Purchase happened and America would soon again absorb their Eurosurplus plus a few handy-dandy Africans and the occasional Chinee. But that frontier is populated, now... fields enclosed, rents skyrocketing, water rationed during those endemic (trending towards pandemic) West Coast droughts, and the cities of the plain teem with men as cry for work and bread where there is none. Complicating the situation is the drift into idleness of working

We don't have an America to ship our undeserving poor off to... we are America.

Stability in population is a precondition of prosperity, which is a precondition for democracy. James Madison, a defender of democracy in the Athenian sense... that it be extended only to rich, white male citizens... thought population growth dangerous at a time when we had less than a tenth as many people as we do now. "An increase of population will, of necessity," predicted li'l Jemmy, "increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings."

Them sighs ain't so secret anymore... and are apt to be followed by singing bullets in such places as are less and less burdened by identification principality as more and more surplus Americans realize that their once (and probably future) President has played them for fools and the guy who replaced him has a lot of aspirations, but somewhere less inspiration. On other hand, the pivot as has occurred since 2016 from a class war to a race war will engender problems of its own.

Former maquila zones along the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, which tasted just enough prosperity before runaway Amerijobs re-migrated to China, have sunk into lawlessness bad as some parts of Honduras (or Chicago) - narcoterrorists gunning it out over control of the lucrative arthritis, blood pressure medicine and egg smuggling trade. India and Pakistan's population war (as usually precedes shootin' war), Chancellor Jofl's expulsion of Muslims out of Austria, them food wars over most of Africa and Mr. Tillerman's folks as privately patrol both borders... there being this dispute about those two weedy Quebecoís crucified to maples in Maine... all augur a certain, well... discontent?

Ukraine? North Korea? Let’s not go there, not just yet...

Clean air, water and... as some believe... clean genepools are birthrights for which Americans fought a war of independence, cleared the continent from sea to shining sea and... well, you get that picture too. "Most people are not qualified to have children," said that late "monkeywrencher" of the Ubergreen persuasion, Edward Abbey, following Mr. Aristotle's premise that "Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons," as ranks up there in present-day pre-MAGA Teabag Party relevance (its conspiracy zone population, of course, excepted) with the Tragedy of the Commons.

Tho', as columnist Myriam Marquez had a lack of political correctness to observe: "if we don't want people coming here illegally, then we have to be willing to pay Americans more for back-breaking work that desperate immigrants are willing to do."

Or lock them up and then make them “arbeit mach frei”. It might be that the problem isn’t the population surplus, it’s the deficit of smart people as can do things like write the code that robots (who never need to urinate!) use to sort packages for Amazon and the Fed Express (or fix plumbing fixtures). Do we have to wait until those clever robotics people… mostly in Japan where a sudden population drop has left a shortage of minimum and subminimum wage caretakers for the elderly and young folk as to carry on the breed… ride to our rescue? That they’ve also been developing sex robots (think of the Austin Powers movie) isn’t helping either. Maybe we could ship a few shiploads of those critters over to Pakistan or Zimbabwe to cool the testeronian passions of the dictators there once the prices go down – or to Mad Vlad Putin or, even, to Mister Trump if his marital problems persist!

Clearly there's a need for hard decisions as to whose lives need be preserved, for how long, and at what cost. We might handle our old folks' problem and solve Mexico's awhile... ship aging Americans off to Baja to roast on beach chairs in brightly-colored Depends while their social security checks get deposited directly into Mexican banks. And, after a particularly vitriolic round of voting on the partial-birth, back in the day, I proposed a cheap deal: toss any pregger as third-trimester aborts (raped, incested or health-menaced, and their li'l doctors, too) under a jail, so long as Virtuecrats swallowed simple "morning-after" contraceptives like the RU-486. I did so knowing both sides were masterminded by fanatics, so chances for compromise on the RU-486, not to mention that new pill from Switzerland for guys, was nil – meanwhile, the rebirthers and their pals at SCOTUS conquered the first and second trimester and are advancing on the contraception while liberals do what they do best... cringe, cry and march around in circles rattling their coathangers.

During my stint in Congress, I also met an Egyptian with UN/New World Order strings and an un-Islamic whiskey/cocaine problem as provoked him into unpleasant truthfulness now and again. "Rome and Mecca will never consent even to the safest means of contraception," he said, "for there has been only one means of population control acceptable to God for the last fifteen centuries… and that is war. To pretend otherwise would cause the man to lose his status as master of the household, no matter which God he prayed to."

Then he said that the problem is that women took control of their lives in parts of the world where they shouldn't have been expected to have... and over the strenuous objections of men, God and... especially... men of God. Pretty much all religion, I've figured out... Patriarch Kirill to Jerry Falwell to the muzzahs in Tehran... boils down to old, long-bearded, self-appointed holy lechers in dirty robes and adult diapers wantin' all the ripe l’il cherries – daughters, neighbors, strangers, howsoever. To keep' most of the young bucks out'n their orchard, they have to develop causes to go to war, so the surplus can either lose and die in the fighting, or win and get to rape the vanquished.

Meaning that, when all's said and done, there remain only two solutions to the population crisis that the President and next Congress will steer away from as they wrangle with immigration... birth control or death decontrol. If, as Austin Tillerman suggests, government ties the tubes of welfare queens… shouldn’t we also chop the li’l jerries off Jerry Sandusky or li’l bernies off’n Bernie Madoff? (Or Sanders?... the MAWA-men might grunt and Elizabeth Warrens agree… but that’s a different story, and for a different bedtime.)

Them rumblings as are tumblin’ out’n the deep Green State about just letting the Omega plague have its way or, in fact, even helpin’ it along some instead of killing it daid… well, as the day traders are proving, it only takes a few nerd turds to blank out a power grid. Or an election. Or a species.

There is, of course, the possibility of shooting the unwanted off into space viz. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson in their competition to colonize Mars. But Mars is a cold and hostile place, and the involuntary astronauts will probably want to be paid for their sufferings and risk. That’s what comes of letting women go flouncing about with shootin’ irons, but without veils.

"Put simply," remarks Jeremy Rifkin, population futurwurster, "does every member of society, even the poorest among us, have a right to participate in and benefit from increases in productivity brought on by the information, communications and technology revolutions?"

If not, cautions Judy Goldsmith, former president of NOW: "These disadvantaged children will be the caretakers of the world in which we spend our later years."

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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