The Pessimist

It really pisses me off to write this, because I am a Liberal supporter.
But the Liberals' lack of workable ideas on crime prevention were exposed in the Boxing Day shoot out in Toronto.

The Liberals have won past elections by exploiting Canadian's fear of big city violence before. The gun registry being the most notable example. Now, I'm all in favour of gun control. I actually thought the gun registry was a good idea when I first heard about it. It was going to cost $100million. Yes, it wasn't quite on target, what with long guns not typically being used by criminals (the criminally insane Montreal massacre being the one notable exception). But hey, knowing where the guns were made sense.

But when the registry ended up costing $2billion, and it still couldn't save the lives of 4 Mounties in Alberta, or the recent Quebec cop killed with an elephant gun (by a killer already under a court ordered set of restrictions) -- well what good is it? I'm sure $2B could have been better spent on border controls and extra policing resources.

Now Paul Martin says he is going to ban handguns! News flash for Mr. Martin ... handguns are already banned in Canada. Does he think that making them any more banned is going to cause the gang-bangers in Toronto to say, "gee willikers, I better turn my glock in at the local constabulary before I get into some kind of trouble".

All Stephen Harper needs to do to win this election now is come up with some better ideas on how to battle gun violence in the cities.
Here are a few ideas Mr. Harper:

• Put some money into research and development to find a way to detect guns remotely -- Xray, magnetic imaging, chemical sniffing, whatever -- then equip every border crossing point with the detectors.
• When a gun is detected crossing the border, confiscate it and the vehicle. Jail all Canadian citizens involved for a minimum 5 years; NonCanadians involved should be banned from crossing the border forever.
• Increased jail time for using a gun to commit a crime
• One year in jail just for being found in possession of a handgun. Five year minimum for an automatic weapon. (Deportation if you are not a Canadian citizen.)
• Use the military for gun search and seizure exercises. Enter the projects where criminals are known to congregate. What better way to get the training needed for Urban warfare.
• Eliminate racial profiling as a defense and make it police policy. If you look like a gang member, you will be stopped and searched.

For something completely different today, I went to a screening of Walmart - The High Cost of Low Prices yesterday. The screening was a fund raiser for the local NDP candidate Edwin Laryea. Now I usually support the Liberals, but I was interested in the movie so I went anyway.

The crowd was a typical NDP crowd. You know, lots of 30 something white guys with dreadlocks, wearing army fatigues, and ernest little guys who could stand to get out of their mother's basement a bit more. The candidate seemed a pleasant enough fellow, but he had the misfortune of having to fill in for the guest speaker who couldn't make it due to the blizzard. I didn't catch her name but I believe she is some functionary in the union movement. Anyway, she sent a copy of her speech which Edwin read to the assembled masses.

Unfortunately, he or she made a numerical blunder that lowered the credibility of the entire exercise. To paraphrase: The speech was going to take 7 minutes, and in those 7 minutes Wal-Mart would make $100Million in sales. But the next couple sentences said "That's $1.5M a minute !" (Crowd gets silent while they do the mental arithmetic) "Every hour their sales are $90Million". Now, I don't know if the first number was written down wrong, or if Edwin just misread it. But after a bit of mental reconciliation I concluded he must have meant the 7 minutes would equal $10million. And at the end of the speech he did conclude that WAL-mart was now $10Million richer, though I think the speech took significantly longer than 7 minutes.

Numbers are a dangerous thing to put in a public address. They're difficult to listen to; boring usually; and it seems, easy to get wrong.

Anyway, on with the movie. What a damning indictment of WAL-mart's business practices. Now, I always knew that their low prices were a result of dumping cheap Chinese crap into the American market place. But the movie makes it clear that they are an equal opportunity thief. It seems it is their standard operating procedures to:

• Pay the lowest possible wages
• Not pay for all of the hours they coerce from their workers.
• Minimize employee benefits
• Help employees make ends meet by directing them to state and federal social programs like welfare, food banks, medicaid, etc.
• Discriminate against women
• Union bust like the '30's
• Disregard environmental laws
• Crush local competition
• Steal services and tax breaks from local municipalities
• Disregard customer safety
• Squeeze every last nickel out of their suppliers
• Lie about and cover up environment, safety and human rights violations necessarily employed by their suppliers to meet the low cost requirements.

I can happily say that I have never bought anything from WAL-mart. I've been in them because they make a good bathroom break on the long haul across Michigan and Wisconsin. But I've never shown them my wallet. However, I have relatives who love to shop at WAL-mart -- and some of them are union folk! My mission will be to get them to watch this movie and stop shopping at WAL-mart.

Google this "world over-population predictions" and get a surprise.
Most of the articles returned on the first page claim that the over-population threat was just a scare. It was never real, and now it is proven that things are getting better on all fronts.

Huh! How about that.

I went looking for some information on over-population. I know there have been dire predictions on-and-off for centuries. In the 1700s, the europeans were well into their imperial project. Educated men -- governors, administrators, expat's of all kinds -- were living in all corners of the earth. And it came to their attention that the swarthy masses they possessed existed in great numbers and reproduced rapidly. A few simple actuarial calculations and agricultural projections, and it seemed obvious that the population would soon out-run its ability to feed itself.

But that didn't happen. Why? Charles Darwin. The improved understanding of plant hybridization yielded hardier, more productive strains. Improved agricultural methods also increased yields. Tragedy averted.

Populations really took off in the early 1900s. But food production continued to not just keep up but to surge ahead of the human population bloom. And why? This time it was oil. Pesticides and fertilizers are produced from oil (and natural gas). Improvements from mechanization of farming, in the fields and the processing, are directly attributable to cheap, portable energy (oil and electricity).

Food is now so plentiful that we can easily feed everybody on the planet. Now, there are still huge populations of starving people, but that is not because of a scarcity of food. People starve because of:

• artificial famine resulting from war, or even direct political creation of local shortages
• poverty; wealth is so unevenly distributed that, as cheap as food is now, there are still large populations too poor to afford it.

In recent decades, the population is continuing to increase, but it is no longer because of high birth rates. Fertility rates are declining almost everywhere -- both amongst the developed world, and the large swarthy masses. Why? Because world populations are moving from rural areas to urban settlements.

On the farm, large numbers of children are highly useful. They are cheap labour; subject to high mortality rates due to limited availability of health care; useful for creating inter-familial or inter-tribal aliances; and the source of support in old-age.
But in the city, large numbers of children are a burden. They cost money to feed and house. So when populations move from rural to urban settings, birth rates drop from 8 or more to just one or two.

But the population has continued to increase despite declining birth rates because of increases in life expectency. Except for perhaps Africa, what with their AIDs problem, life expectencies have shot up from 35 years to 70. Because people are living longer, there are more of them.

But what happens when cheap oil ends? All those billions of people living in their mega cities. Dependent on far-flung agriculture, which itself is dependent on the productivity push of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and machines and asphalt highways. When the cities depend on electicity that comes from natural gas.

The world is going to change quite suddenly, and it's not going to be pretty. ThePessimist isn't going to guess at a date, but I think we'll know it when we see it.