Issue # 114 / 30 January 2009

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A note about confused pagination: The true Page One, the featured article, of this issue (#115) is to be found on The Ylog page. This "Page One" is from issue #114. I caused this confusion when I created The Ylog Page seven months ago and I wish I hadn't. I will return to my universally admired level of clarity at a future date. The Mayan Calendar is involved.

A Consideration of Population

As Prompted by
Headlines from
the Front Page of the Los Angeles Times
Collected Over a Period of Three Days

by Britt Leach

ON MONDAY OF THIS WEEK, octuplets were born in Bellflower, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. (All of L.A. is a suburb, but that’s not the point.) There’s no chance in hell that those eight babies, let’s call them the ocks, were conceived without the aid of something called a fertility doctor. They were born at a Kaiser Permanente hospital and in a photo all the Kaiser doctors are shown smiling after the deliveries and that’s because they are simple baby-poppers and weren’t thinking about freeway traffic. So let’s call it plus eight. L.A. population: plus eight. (We’re gathering data for a tally.)

On Tuesday in Wilmington, California, a suburb of Los Angeles that is approximately ten miles west of Bellflower, a man who works for Kaiser Permanente and was recently fired by Kaiser Permanente killed himself, his wife and five children. So that’s negative seven, L.A. population. And for Kaiser Permanente, plus one (eight minus seven).

And on Wednesday in the early morning on the Santa Monica Freeway, at a location that is approximately thirty miles north of Bellflower and Wilmington, two people died in a head-on collision. So that’s negative two with no connection to Kaiser Permanente that has been established at the time of this writing. So, negative two, L.A. population.

So let’s see; let’s do the tally. I’m just doing marks on a paper with a pencil—mark, mark, mark, mark, cross-mark, etc,—okay, and over a three-day period and just looking at the front page of the Los Angeles Times with its sensational stats I get a negative one on the L.A. population clock, which would be good, were it accurate but is not…

Because it’s only data from sensational headlines and there were other births and deaths in L.A. during those three days and I don’t have access to those figures. But I do know damn well that there were more births than deaths, which is bad, and I know that to be true having looked at and extrapolated from…

The U.S. Census Bureau website.

Here's some data as of 29 January 2009 at 16:44 GMT.

In the United States :

• One birth every 8 seconds. (The stat needle must have wiggled a little with the news from Bellflower and the ocks but that was an aberration caused by something called a fertility doctor all of whom should be brought under the control of the Environmental Protection Agency given the methane and other environmental degradation produced by babies. You always hear about cows. We talk about bovines and their contribution to greenhouse gases, but what about gassy little babies and the resultant people and their methane production? Old gas, young gas, baby gas. What about all the goddamn gassy people in the U.S.? All passing greenhouse gas. Particularly those who eat cow. To be fair to carnivores, it has been said that vegans who eat only raw food can power a small generator with their daily gas output,)

But I digress. Continuing now from the U.S. Census Bureau website:

• One death every 12 seconds. (Something we need to work on. I’d like to see a U.S death every second or fraction of a second for a few hundred years to get our population down to a level that isn’t planet-eating.)

• One international migrant (net) every 36 seconds.

Giving us a…

• Net gain of one person in the U.S. every 14 seconds.

And I started this draft of my Friday piece at 09:20 on Thursday morning when the U.S population clock showed 305,708,153.

It is now 11:07, still on Thursday morning, and the U.S population clock now shows 305,708, 636. One hour and forty-seven minutes. Got a pencil? Get one. Do a tally. They’re all standing in line in front of you at the grocery store, i.e, the planet.

I never see (in the mainstream media) anything about our world and population. Nothing. Just news about having to find new sources of energy and widening the goddamn freeways to accommodate more cars, on and on. And just recently, in news from Bellfower, the smiling docs and the ocks. V

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U.S Census Bureau Population Clock

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