Population

It is a commonplace to find the US media (e.g., International Herald Tribune 2011/6/4 p.1) complaining that food-production is falling behind world-population needs — never instead: world-population-growth is falling ahead of food production.

Our Planet on the Rack:
When you die, the US will probably be about five-to-ten TIMES more crowded than when you were born. Compare old houses (two generations ago) to new: the newer have smaller lawns, nearer (more audible) neighbors, smaller rooms, lower ceilings. I.e., birth control is not just a theoretical issue. The squeeze's force accumulates so gradually that most of us notice only effects (worsening traffic, intractable poverty, and war, etc), but don't see that the underlying cause is out-of-control birth-rates.
[The most artistic torturers of history moved the rack slowly. Which temporally maximized their victims' agony.]

Is the Third World Going Celibate?
Experts keep claiming that the world's population growth-rate is now slowing. and that the world population will soon max out. But is the truth that the number of people who can't count is increasing?

Did Titanic Passengers Wonder If All That Water Was Caused by Water?
The galloping modern phenomenon of mass immigration is not just caused by the population-explosion — it IS the population-explosion. It's the allegedly-just-theoretical over-population “problem” hitting you again&again in the face, increasingly pouring right into “your” own babel-neighborhoods and work-places — even while the Free Press is too unfree, too chained to its commercial masters, to speak of what we all see before our eyes — instead guiding the public's attention to: anything-but.
[Borders collapse. Ethnic-hatreds run rampant, aided by linguistic non-communication. Bunnyrabbit-religion nations boil-over with slums, rage, paranoia (some of it plenty justified), suicide-bombings. Fear grows (esp. in Washington) of eventual terrorist-nuked Western cities. Through it all, whatmeworry business-pleasing commentators go right on prayer-wheeling their sameold mantras:
What population-explosion?
(Recall “leftist” [snicker] 2006-election-period Dembos: Why has immigration even been brought up? Babbled as recently as 2007(!) Autumn by Dem-puppet Airhead-America's Rachel-Something on Dan Abrams' MS-NBC program.) Paul Population-Explosion Ehrlich got some predictions wrong, so we go ad-hominem: ignore that nut.
The system is working wonderfully….]

At present population growth-rate, humans will cover the Earth's entire land-mass shoulder-to-shoulder in ordmag 1000 years, turning this planet into a round human-sardine-can.
(See “The Roundest Possible Number” at DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §F [p.14].)
So: What (other) catastrophe will happen before 2600 AD? Isn't it already happening?

GOP Panditry-Panderage Rescues 2600 AD Earth All the Way Until 2620 AD:
Could DR have made the previous paragraph's observation into a satire on a be-fruitful religious nut? How about:

No, no, no — when satire goes too far, it isn't satire anymore — and it isn't amusing.

Anyhow, the above delicious Mars-colonization quote is actually not an invention of demographic satirists at all. It is in fact taken verbatim from Republican whoreling Ann Coulter's latest brilliant panderation to her readership, who are so humorlessly fanatical that they can't even tell when they're being kidded.
(See Godless NYC 2006, at p.4 — before she gets around to demolishing publicity-seeking [this from Ann] 9-11 widows, the baby-killing Dem party, and that poor deluded Darwin nut.
[By the way, Godless makes some good & needed points here & there; but they are de-valued in being set amidst, e.g., standard evidence-less and logical-progress-less attacks on natural selection.]
Comment: Ann is profitably proving that, when a nation goes so far towards irrationalism as to reject Darwin, it's brain-putty for anything.)
[One hesitates to post a sober reminder here, lest Ann think we don't get her serial-joke on the GOPbrained, but: if in 2600 AD, packed-Earth's overflow started going to tiny Mars (whose atmosphere is almost as vacuous as a groupie-skull), Mars' surface rapidly — even though oceanless — would fill up with human sardines, in only about 20 years. I.e., by 2620 AD, Earth & Mars would BOTH be standing-room-only.]

Every so often, one reads of a sweet old doll being rousted for keeping a few hundred cats in her house. What a nut. But those world rulers who push policies that ensure the Earth's ever-more-crowdedness are getting us all into the same insane fix.

Peaking Into the Future:
If you're wondering what's the (latest) trick to keep birth-control programs low [if at all] on the list of potential solutions in public discussion of horrors like world-slum-explosion & poverty, here it is: for years, we've been subjected to well-publicized, supposedly authoritative projections telling us that total world population-growth is within sight of peaking.
Intended public impression: so, who needs even to talk about promoting or forcing birth-control anymore?
[In 2019 we hear a parallel assurance: immigration is declining — so why borders?]
In truth, the world per/annum rate of growth may actually be accelerating slightly. Obvious reason for non-acceleration: groups where growth slows [encouraging all-too-easily-encouraged peakists] — just die out. (Like Episcopalians.) And the bunnyrabbit-religions quickly swamp them. Even if a subdivision of the new group gets progressive and starts controlling birth-numbers, that sub-group will itself soon be numerically flooded-out by the fecund-fanatical remainder of the clan — with dissenters quickly converting, shutting-up, or disappearing. Ad virtually-infinitum? — DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §B3 [p.113].)

Double-Crammy Frathouse-Prank on the World?:
So we're seeing the light-at-the-end-of-the-mass-vaginal-funnel? Bad joke. (No, not just mine.)
Several population-doublings hence, a jillion-gun-salute world siring-squad activity will be continuously ensuring an equally continuous, thundering-Niagara birth-canalonnonade that could resemble a non-stop simultaneous-flush frat-prank upon all humanity — seguing to frat-chuckle  #2: won't the Moon's people be impressed when they find they're circling a giant crowded-telephone-booth?

World population about to peak? Does a crock this transparent arise from innocent blind-hope? Innumeracy? — or did it originate as a deliberate lie, initially put over on earnest demographers by expensive mout'pieces, working for privately-snickering (and ecstatically dazzled: I-can't-beLIEVE-they're-buying-this) globalist hucksters?
[E.g., a recently-cited 1997 report in Nature has predicted that world population will peak at 10 billion, tops, by 2050. Provided as confirmatory to this, on the urban-sprawl front, is the case of Mexico City's population, which has fallen short (at a trifling 20 million) of the projected 25 million earlier predicted for it by the 1990s. Hmmm. A 5 million “shortfall”. (Translation: OK, so Mexico City still grew — but: [o-joy] less-than-predicted. Sound like US-federal-budget-babble?) For the same 5 million-short-fall period, anyone want to guess how many million Mexico City folks crossed into the US?]
This propanda's bottom-line: worry not about that birth-control nonsense.

In 2006, DR rode in Czech trains that were so sardine-can-crowded that he wondered if Coulter's cozy-paradise was already coming to pass. The experience sweatily & all-too-intimately brought home the wisdom of ever-crammed India's trains being gender-separated. [A rabbit-test later proved DR had escaped unpregnant.]

Necessity-Mom vs Population-Pop:
World population growth now pops at 2%/annum. Which means: doubling every 3 1/2 decades, septupling every century, multiplying about FIFTY-fold in 2 centuries. As growth of consumer-numbers (AS ALWAYS) cannot keep pace with growth of consumable commodity&energy supplies, median (and perhaps average) lifestyle tends to decline. So if the well-off stay well-off (and don't they always?) — and especially if consumers' numbers (in China & India) start growing rapidly — the rest of the world must get less (perhaps much less) of everything. Except the jealous rage of the powerless — and their resultant hate.
In response, a gaggle of corporate-slut-pundits is ever-ready for automatic-TV 'snews-sloganeer assurance that: Necessity-Will-Provide….
Yet, as prices for limited-supply entities (fuel and land) skyrocket, and the “terrorist” era gets increasingly intense, and as recruits for suicide bombings are burgeoning, won't any reporter ask such panglossian-capitalist theologians if they can point to an era when “necessity” (as against a mild and flexible variant of socialism) has cured for long the chained misery of slum-life?
In today's context, one wonders if Necessity is less the mother of invention than the father of cheap, overpopulation-supplied, union-busting peon slave-labor. And the media's lawyer-apologists for it.

Necessity is not the parent of invention, ingenuity & greed are. It is curious not to say suspicious to see Adam-Smithites & social-darwinisats, who customarily preach praises of selfishness, claiming society's generosity to the desperately-striken is the engine of progress. No, inventions happen when minds have spare time, and they spread when the wealthy support the opening phase of their establishment.

Improvident Providence:
In the popular press, we hear much of incipient growing disasters such as global warming, rising oceans, disappearing rain forest, terrorism, commodity-depletion, slum-growth, mass-immigration and its resulting strains on middle-class security, etc. Leading mags' cover stories are devoted in fine detail to analysing & analysing & analysing such subjects — yet, in none of these pop-press stories is the word “birth” allowed near the word “control”.
[The rate of ocean-rising is minuscule compared to 2%/yr world population growth-rate. But you'd never know that from relative press-ink-spilled.]
The only thing more mysterious than humanity's improvidence in this regard are rulerships' short-term-provident cleverness and omniscience in bringing down an impenetrable iron-curtain (for decades on end) upon discussing birth control-lack's dangerous relation to these problems. Like killing mention of arms-races from histories of WW1&2.

Fanning the Fans:
A factor not previously considered regarding why celebrityhood is increasingly a moneyin-vs-moneyout-cycle business (DIO 10 [2000] end-note 21 [p.104]): as the nation's population gets ever larger, the profits to be made from fame by a single person increase proportionally. It's just that simple.
And so the ubiquity of celebs will only get worse, and their average character will do likewise: celebs are ever-more likely to be inept or even fake gods (though Good-Works are now bundled-standard as part of [daily-incessant] top-celeb-p.r.), since fiscally fanning (rather than legitimately earning) one's fame via p.r.-agentry is now the rule and is increasingly a full-time profession, leaving little time over for developing other, socially useful skills. Academe is one of the worst arenas for this phenomenon's pathology, because genuine expertise there is not something one can conjure up part-time — so most of the well-known academics are accorded much less respect by genuine professionals than the public is likely ever to learn. (DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 §F2 [p.94].)

As a backup to lobbying Congress for women's control over their reproduction, abortion-rights promoters should providently be aiming also at spreading access to do-it-yourself methods, manuals, and medicines.

Lay opponents of abortion frequently call it murder. But: how often do priests do so? The theological problem here: if a foetus is enough of a human that killing it is murder, then this human's sinlessness will ensure that it will go right to Heaven. (Which is why the French call abortioners “Angelmakers”.) Such reasoning can only reduce guilt among women who are considering abortion, which could hurt a religion's projected bunnyrabbit-growth-rate, which is of course what all this “theology” is really about.