Maximilian Bartie

Life and death

NOT for the first time I am confused.

I have spent many hours listening to and empathising with an assortment of pundits who tell me that we cannot produce enough food to feed a world population that is expanding exponentially.

To put it bluntly, at some point in the not too distant future there will be too many of us and not enough grub to go round.

While I have been absorbing this message, I have also been receiving signals that certain regions of the world have been experiencing floods, famines and pestilences of Biblical proportions.

The death toll has been truly staggering.

We are exhorted to donate money and to save these beleaguered peoples.

The awful dilemma is that, in so doing, we further exacerbate the problem of escalating population numbers.

On the one hand we have the impending crisis of population explosion; on the other we have annihilation on a massive scale.

Could it be that nature is intervening where our own feeble measures have failed?  Is there some indefinable, immeasurable force that is trying to protect and sustain the human race?

If there is I cannot, for the life of me, see why it would bother.

Confronted with the problem of feeding ourselves or controlling our numbers, we are, after countless millennia of evolution, still found wanting.

Religious tensions abound; internecine squabbles flourish; political differences divide, corruption is rampant.

The Age of Aquarius eludes us and, I strongly suspect, it will continue to do so unless and until we collectively accept the fact that we can’t all have everything that we think we have a God-given right to have, regardless of which particular God we happen to follow (mine is Mammon).

It is perhaps unfortunate that our world leaders in particular and our politicians in general will not or cannot accept the realities of existence.

They all want to be seen to provide for the needy while protecting the interests of their electorates, at whatever cost.

Even the best PR support can’t balance this one.

Hanging’s too good for them

THERE is a disturbing tendency emerging in the courts to sentence even recidivist criminals to nothing more than a few hours community service to repay society for the crimes committed.

This is little more than a slap on the wrist before the reprobate slopes of to commit more offences of a similar or more serious nature.

This liberal approach to criminality is ineffective as it does nothing to divert the hardened criminal to the path of righteousness and public responsibility.

Even with an incompetent police force recidivists will occasionally be apprehended and thus present an opportunity for the government to make examples that will play hard on the minds of novice delinquents.

Naturally, as regular readers will have come to expect, I have the solution to the problem of entrenched criminality.

Where a felon is apprehended, and I am particularly concerned with crimes that adversely affect the community at large – car theft, mugging, graffiti, vandalism, littering, etc – the offender should quickly be hauled before the beak with the sentence summarily executed.

And, for the avoidance of doubt, capital punishment should be re-imposed.

The lily-livered liberals will obviously complain about such a strict regimen but, frankly, there will be little necessity to don the black cap in court when habitual criminals realise that society is serious about stamping out their nefarious activities.

One would only need to hang one or two car thieves before the cost of automobile crime became too expensive to contemplate.

A couple of muggers condemned to the gibbet would convince even the least socially committed members of society that transgression of the rules is not a viable option.

Yes, it is a tough solution but nothing in the way of legislative penalties thus far imposed by any government has made the slightest dent on the ever-increasing number of criminal offences.

Three strikes and you are out sounds good but it could become a reality and not simply a slogan expounded by spineless administrations.