Too-Damn-Many-People dept., et alia

Sorry I haven't written … dog-days ennui plus the ever-increasing weight of entropy. We had a young relative out Sat night along with her sorta new light-of-love and had a good time, ate tortilla de patata in the Spanish style and steak and seared green beans and a fine lemon ice and drank wine in two colors, then brandy and seegars out where the seabreeze cools the front yard. Not bad, not bad. We wondered what the pore folks was a-doin. The world continues its own losing battle with various inexorable laws of nature. This from the LATimes on the hot, dusty, and crowded road we rush down:

Environmentalists tend to avoid the topic of population control. Too touchy. But the politically incorrect issue is becoming unavoidable as the global population lurches toward a predicted 9 billion people by mid-century. Will there be enough food? Enough water? Will planet-heating carbon dioxide gas become ever more uncontrollable?

Read all the rest here.
With crude oil north of $71/bbl on Monday morning, this from The Independent of Britain:

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

Read all of that here. When you read some economist happily babbling about the wonderful advantages of growing populations, remember the E. Abbey remark, 'Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.' Economists need to go have lunch with biologists about once monthly for a chat about population density and carrying capacity of land and social effects of overcrowding. Just because we could theoretically cram some hundreds of millions more people into this poor nation doesn't mean we should import Third-World peasants and do it.
And also from The Independent, just for pilón:
… Jacques Mesrine may have been a clown but he was also a vicious, professional criminal with an unusual capacity for abstract thought, an impressive writing style and an instinct for public relations. He was a Franco-American cultural hybrid, a kind of criminal version of Johnny Hallyday: American in many of his influences and, at the same time, utterly French.
As a middle-class boy growing up in the middling Parisian suburb of Clichy (only a couple of miles from where he died), Mesrine was a greedy consumer of American gangster books and films. He bore a curious likeness not to Vincent Cassel, but to Charles Bronson.
And yet his own literary works, L'instinct de mort and Coupable d'être innocent – written in prison and on the run – read in parts like a pastiche of Albert Camus. Mesrine tried to present himself in print as a kind of existentialist gangster, or, in his own words, "a kamikaze of crime".
Read it all here. There is much about the French that is a little peculiar. I'd never heard of this guy.