Population and Immigration

Most animals instinctively understand that, to the extent that one's territory is necessary to survival and reproduction, that territory must be defended against encroachment by others that would threaten one's survival. All resources are finite, and must not be over-consumed. This is especially relevant to the human immigration problem. Whereas immigration may be easily accommodated if population density is low, and may even be beneficial, once a certain population density is achieved, additional immigration becomes detrimental.

Currently the United States population density is a little under 100 persons per square mile of land, including marshes, swamps, deserts, mountain ridges and other unusable terrain. Although this translates to about 6-7 acres per U. S. resident, probably a quarter or so is unusable, and the remainder must not only provide living space but also supply food and other necessities and absorb the wastes. So far this density has been tolerable, although consumption of water supplies and other resources may be pushing critical limits.

The world population density is somewhere around 140 per square mile, and again this includes all mountains, deserts, and other unusable areas except Antarctica, which we cede to the penguins. Thus we in the U. S. are a little better off than most, but even increasing our density to the world average would not make a dent in conditions elsewhere. China and India, both large geographical areas, have densities in the order of 1000 per square mile, and this in spite of unusable areas in the Himalayas and the Gobi Desert. Again, we could double our population density by absorbing 150 million from each of these two countries, and not make a noticeable dent in the density of either. And since the human population is currently increasing at a rate of more than a quarter million per day, during the time that it might take to move 300 million people to the U. S. the population of the rest of the world could easily increase by more than the 300 million, and therefore nothing would be achieved except basically destroying the U. S.

As I discussed in my essay 'Population'(1), the growth rate of a bisexual species is primarily a function of the female reproduction success rate (the average number of successfully breeding females each female produces), and depends much less on the number of males. This presents an interesting conundrum with respect to war philosophies. In the past, with adequate land and resources, the objective of wars was to annex the opponent's land and resources, including their breeding stock (females). This bluntly translated into killing off or enslaving the males, but not killing the females. One could then spread one's own genes by breeding the conquered females. In this scenario, the invading army consisted solely of male combatants.

The problem facing Western Civilization in the 21st Century differs in several respects. In addition to a horde of invading male 'combatants', e.g., the illegals, refugees, etc., that are pouring into First World Western countries, part of the invading army consists of immigrating women, children and complete immigrating families. These members of the invading 'army' intend to win the war of conquest by out reproducing the native population, and incredibly the invaded countries are supporting their attempt to do so. Once the resident 'army' is sufficiently large, the male combatants will attempt to kill or enslave the native population.

The moral of all this is that, unlike in previous wars, women and children cannot be spared. If possible, they, along with the invading male battalions, must be removed as soon as and as completely as possible. Territorial borders must be defended from any and all encroachment. Any residue of the resident 'army' must be required to obey all laws and must NOT be supported to breed (welfare) here or abroad. If this is not successfully implemented immediately, Western Civilization is over, we will lose the 'war', and will be the subjects/slaves of the occupying invaders. The only alternative will be a no-holds-barred ethnic/race/religious conflagration where all men, women and children will be fair game. Humanity has achieved a 'critical mass', and avoiding a runaway detonation may not even be possible. As an aside, Google 'too many mice in a cage' and read the report entitled 'Behavioral Sink' by John B. Calhoun on the experiments he ran from 1947 to 1973. It's a little scary.

(1) Musings and Rants, p. 173, Marcus Everett, CKCPC3 publishing, March 2016, RR1 Box 510. Nowata, Oklahoma 74048

(c) Copyright 2016 by Marcus Everett, Wallback, WV

marcus.everett@citlink.net

We Need More Growth - NOT

I have often challenged the budding young geniuses that I know with the following problem: We have been doubling the human population on Earth every 35 to 50 years for several centuries. If we had maintained that rate from the beginning, when would Adam and Eve have lived?

The current population is approaching 8 billion people, or in scientific notation, about 8x10^9. For those that have a background in digital computers, a convenient approximation is that 2^10 is just a hair more than 10^3 (2 to the 10th power is 1024, which is 2.4% more than 1000). Thus a billion (10^9 or 1,000,000,000) is 1000x1000x1000, or approximately 1024x1024x1024, which is 2^30. 8 is 2^3, so 8 billion is about 2^33. Thus the population has doubled 33 times since Adam, or 32 times since Adam and Eve.

For a doubling rate of 35 years, 32 times 35 years is 1120 years, so Adam and Eve would have started just about 900 AD. Even at a slower rate of doubling every 50 years, 32 times 50 is 1600 years, so we still could have made it to the present starting at 400 AD.

Obviously the human population growth rate has been much less over most of our history. The problem has been the growth possible in recent history due to the industrial, technological and medical advances.

Now maybe making it from 2 people to 8 billion people in 1100 or 1600 years doesn't scare everybody. But consider this: in another 1100 to 1600 years at this rate, there will be 4 billion people for EVERY ONE of us here today. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to happen - people would be a couple miles deep over the entire planet. Even at the slower rate of doubling every 50 years, by the end of this millennium there would be a million times as many people with only 5 square feet of land or water to stand on.

Currently the human density on usable land is about 250 per sq. mile, or about 2.5 acres for each person. At current rates we would expect the population to at least quadruple over the next century, which would leave less than an acre per person. By the end of another century we're down to less than a quarter acre, and by 2300 we're down to an area of a small apartment. Remember, if you want roads, farms, malls, etc., then you have to give up part of your apartment for that.

It is the opinion of the author that we are already over a sustainable population for the planet. But even if that is not so, in very few years it will certainly be true. If we do not learn to live with stability, not growth, catastrophe is inevitable.

(c) copyright Marcus Everett, Wallback WV 25285

The Left, Socialism, and Open Borders Immigration

It's not where you are that determines your prosperity, it's who you are.

For some reason unfathomable to a rational person the Political Left always seems to prefer being the last to sink in a bog to grazing with everyone else in a lush meadow. Since Marx promulgated his egalitarian anti-capitalist drivel, the Left has tried over and over to implement his flawed political/economic model, always with the same disastrous results. Whether the example is the communist versions of the USSR, the People's Republic of China, Castro's Cuba, or the Social Welfare States of Europe and Latin America, the final outcome is always a stagnant economy with a starving population.

These people never give up. Their mendacious rhetoric is always able to convince the ignorant and stupid to implement their schemes, always with the same long term disaster. In the worst cases cited above, the mob was stampeded into a 'revolution' to put the Political Left in power. In the more insidious implementations in the modern Western Democracies, the Left has utilized the ignorant and stupid mob to vote them into power. Once their foot is in the door, promises of something for nothing keeps the mob in their pocket no matter how obvious it becomes that the promises are blatant lies.

To guarantee that the gullible mob continues to dominate the electorate, the Left has refined two schemes to drastically increase their numbers. The first is to not only support the mob by wealth transfer, but to actually pay them to breed. The Welfare States in Europe and North America have become baby factories for the Left's constituency. In this scheme, the Left is seeking to augment their supporters by in effect an inverse eugenics mechanism.

Not content with destroying from within the prosperous civilization created by the Western peoples (primarily the currently despised 'white males' and the Judeo-Christian religion), the Left has a second game plan to guarantee the total collapse of Western Civilization. They have opened the doors of the Western Democracies to the Third World, and convinced the unwashed masses that they can all be prosperous by merely moving. But, as the first line of this essay implies, those that invade the First World will not become prosperous First Worlders, but the countries that they invade will become Third World hellholes like the ones they left behind. This has already become painfully apparent with the Muslim invasion of Europe. They have added virtually nothing to the economies of the invaded countries, and the Islamic 'no go' slums that they have created are cancers that will quickly kill their hosts. The U.S. Southwest is on the verge of economic collapse due to the Latin American invasion there. And in both the U.S. and Europe the threat of open borders enabling infiltration of Islamic Jihad is a serious security problem.

The thing that is difficult to understand is why the Left thinks that any of these schemes are in their long term interest. Not only does history demonstrate a high likelihood that their dominance will not last their own expected lifetimes, but their descendants are guaranteed a much less desirable world to live in. These people seem to exhibit a shortsightedness that can only be viewed to be as ignorant and stupid as the mob they exploit.

Women and Big Government

Women are naturally pro big government. Since they cannot physically prevail against the larger male, they must rely on convincing one or more males to defend them. By passing laws that they think will require males to defend them, they see big government as a form of legal jiu-jitsu. Before Women's Suffrage women had to convince their male acquaintances of the necessity of such laws in spite of the more powerful and dangerous government the laws imply. Once they obtained the vote, it became obvious that they no longer needed the acquiescence of the males - they could, as in jiu-jitsu, use the male's strength against himself, so to speak. Thus we see that, after a century of women voting, government has grown into a nanny state - providing the female with not only protection against physical harm, but guaranteeing food, shelter, health care and anything else her little heart desires. The Welfare State is the direct result of Women's Suffrage. In fact, it has evolved to the point that, in the welfare class, the presence of the male is actually discouraged.

The historic flaw in democracy is the Tyranny of the Majority, i.e., the tendency of 51% of the electorate voting to have the remaining 49% for dinner (and not as guests!). Since there is naturally a slight majority of females in the population, there is a ready-made majority to exploit. The Left has done just that, with the constant drumbeat of more promised security, more freebies, more equality, etc., that appeal to the supposedly underdog females. The fact that, in almost every election, the female vote is significantly in favor of more government proves the point.

Western Civilization was built by males, and over centuries ceded many rights and protections to women. But ceding control will almost certainly be its downfall.

Discrimination

This essay was written in the 1980's and published on OpEds.com in 2005.  Its relevance to the U. S. scene seems to increase with each passing year.

Discrimination, particularly racial, has commanded the limelight of the media and the almost undivided attention of the citizenry in America for most of the last half of the Twentieth Century. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, opened the floodgates. Since then there have been uncountable laws and rules written, bureaucracies created, suits filed and children bused, wheelchair ramps built and parking places painted, all trying to eliminate both real and imagined discrimination in every possible form. Some of the more blatant cases of discrimination, particularly those denying equal protection under the law, have been eliminated or at least minimized, but in many cases there has been only exchange of one form of discrimination for another.

The existence of discrimination in a society is indicative of a more fundamental underlying problem. Discrimination can only exist when there are identifiable factions in the society. A homogenous population defies discrimination, since there is no identifiable attribute upon which to target individuals to discriminate against. But since most social systems develop identifiable factions sooner or later, it ultimately becomes necessary to address the subject of discrimination of one faction against another.

The solution that has been proposed and attempted by the simple-minded idealists is to legislate the problem away by defining any and all discrimination as illegal. This is the current state of affairs in the United States, but the approach has two shortcomings. The first is the fact that laws are only definitions and no real problem has ever been solved solely by trying to define it out of existence. The second shortcoming stems from the reality that not all discrimination is unjustifiable.

In a social system based upon the principle that all members are equal under the law, no discrimination by the government against any law-abiding citizen should be condoned. The social system as a whole can afford the luxury of presupposing innocence of each individual and only discriminating against those that have been proven as undeserving by due process of law. Relative to the individual the state has virtually unlimited resources, and therefore it is reasonable for the government to amortize the risk of possible damage by an individual over the population. For the individual, however, the situation is very different. Not only is the average citizen blessed with modest resources, but also above all he (or she) is a mortal. As such, survival demands that the individual use any and all information at his disposal to protect his life and property from a hostile world. If experience, valid information acquired from others, or even unfounded rumor suggests that additional risk is associated with the members of any group, the individual must be allowed to take such information into consideration in his dealings with the group. This is true whether the identification of the group is based on race, creed, sex, political affiliation, length of hair, style of dress, or just plain ugliness. Mortality and limited resources deny the individual the otherwise noble philosophy of judging everyone innocent unless proven guilty. In addition, it is unreasonable to expect the state to protect an individual from all risk, and it is even more unreasonable for the state to force any individual to assume additional risk.

A gray area exists with respect to private organizations. If an organization is sufficiently large it would seem reasonable to require it, like the society as a whole, to amortize the risk of each individual over all the individuals with which it interacts. The problem exists in determining where to draw the line as to whether or not each particular organization is 'sufficiently large'. Not only is the wisdom necessary to make such a determination beyond any mortal, and especially beyond those that usually try, but the existence of such an arbitrary 'cut-off' only serves to complicate the subject discrimination, not to eliminate it. An exception to this might be corporations, since a corporation is an entity created by the government and enjoys several legal advantages by virtue thereof. It is not mortal and by definition has limited liability. It would therefore be reasonable to deny it an exemption from anti-discrimination law.



Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that group or faction based discrimination does create a burden on the targeted individuals. In addition, the severity of the burden increases as the relative size of the targeted faction decreases. One of the primary factors of the discriminatory burden is the cost to the targeted individual in determining by trial and error whether he or she will be subject to discrimination in dealings with others. It is therefore proposed that a reasonable, proper and adequate measure to protect the rights of all parties is to require any discriminatory behavior on the part of all private business entities to be publicly declared. Such declaration would at a minimum entail a declaration of discriminatory bias in every advertisement published or displayed by the entity desiring to discriminate. Failure to properly declare bias would then expose the guilty party to criminal prosecution or civil suit.

This approach has several attractive features. First and foremost, it retains the inalienable right of the individual to minimize his risks in the necessary day to day dealings with his fellow man. It puts the burden of action on those that wish to discriminate, but in such a way that protects the privacy and autonomy of the individual. An individual that has no public business dealings with others is unaffected by the rule. It addresses all forms of discrimination without explicitly reciting a list of particulars. It spares those targeted by a properly declared discriminatory policy from the cost and embarrassment of attempting to interact with the discriminating faction, and in addition allows all concerned who are offended by a particular case of discrimination to boycott the business. Last but not least, it spares the society the greater costs of the inevitable failure ensured by attempting to regulate day to day behavior of a large segment of the population by government decree.   

Democracy and Demagoguery

As has been said by many others, and covered in several 'Rants', democracy does not work. Whether any government 'works' in the sense of being a stable and contributory adjunct to a prosperous and free society remains to be proven. A more focused question here is whether any representative government can work in the above sense, and the original objective of the Founders of the United States Government had hoped that they had achieved such a goal. We are close to definitively proving them to be wrong.

It is fairly obvious to this author that a fully enfranchised citizenry of a representative government system such as ours is doomed at the outset. Maybe in a pure democracy (everyone voting on every piece of legislation) the majority would mostly avoid shooting themselves in the foot on taxes and similar matters, but then again there is the spectre of the 'tyranny of the majority' in which any identifiable minority faction will be exploited to benefit the majority. In the representative version, there will always be a majority - poorer, dumber, more ignorant or just envious - that are vulnerable to demagoguery. This has been the evolution of the situation in the U.S., particularly as we have embraced universal suffrage over the last century or more.

Over the last century the Democrat Political Party has utilized demagoguery to gain and remain in power a large percentage of the time. Class Warfare, 'something for nothing', free lunches, you name it, have won the game for them over and over. The Republican Pary has adhered to fiscal and constitutional principles more closely, and has suffered defeat for their efforts more often than not. As a Maryland politician said when a reporter questioned her for telling one group one thing and another group the opposite, "I tell them what they want to hear". Demagoguery works!

The problem in the Republican Party in the 2016 Presidential race is that, contrary to the norm, a bonafide demagogue is in the running. And although it seems that somewhat less than a majority of registered Republicans are taken by the demagoguery, a sufficient plurality is gullible enough to possibly make him the Republican candidate in November. At that point we would have a Democrat demagogue against a Republican demagogue, and could very likely prove the thesis of my first paragraph. A century of democratically elected representation has brought us to the brink of implosion, and one more demagogue may very well be the final straw.

It is possible that one of the several principled Republican candidates can pull off both the nomination and the election, but the odds are against it. As the pilot of the PSA jet said seconds before it plowed into a San Diego neighborhood in 1978, "Brace yourself".

Returning to the abstract question of whether any variation of representative government can work, it doesn't seem too hopeful. Perhaps conditioning suffrage on demonstrating with some sort of standardized competency exam a rudimentary knowledge of the functions of government would help, but then the inevitable question is: who defines the exam? It seems all too likely that all forms of government are vulnerable to ultimate demise - monarchies and dictatorships to mortality and representative versions to demagoguery.  Sad.