Monday, February 11, 2008


The World Health Organization reported this week that tobacco could kill over a billion people in the 21st century. They recommend raising tobacco taxes, banning smoking in public places and enforcing laws against advertising tobacco in an effort to save lives. Tobacco causes cancer and cardiovascular disease. The poor souls who are addicted, prematurely age with wrinkly skin and yellow fingers where they grasp the cigarette. They also smell like the gates of hell.

Of even greater interest is that the world population as of today was 6,652,740,600 and the population of the US is 303,418,524. The world population is expected to soar to over 9 Billion by the middle of the century. There were 343,000 births in the first week of the year in India. The US will be well over 400,000,000 by the middle of the century with most of the growth coming from immigrants flooding into this country illegally. The alarming thing is that the birth rate is outpacing the death rate more than 2 to 1.

Tobacco simply is not doing the job of killing enough people. If something doesn’t happen we are going to have standing room only on the planet. There certainly won’t be enough food for everyone. We need another great plague or a cataclysmic event like an asteroid hitting the earth. Perhaps global warming will end up saving the planet from over population.

Meanwhile, I’m just sitting on the porch waiting for it to rain and watching the second hand of the clock sweep around signaling that there are several births every second in the world. The thought of it is enough to make my head swim. It almost makes me want to encourage smoking.

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