Sorry for the sparse postings yesterday, but we went all Howard Hughes upon hearing of the latest killer: Pollution. As in, it kills 40 percent of everyone; more than AIDS, heart disease, and Dateline: To Catch A Predator combined. Scary stuff, but Cornell prof David Pimentel says it's so, and his curriculum vitaeis so big and long we're too self-conscious to argue. Plus, he had some hippie grad students read, like, a 120 trillion published papers on the topic, so we're pretty sure he knows what's up.

Basically, Pimentel theorizes that starvation and unsanitary living conditions equal death. And this whole time we thought that combination was just typical college living! It turns out that there are whole countries, like India, which are just big frat mixers.

But if you read between the lines, Pimentel's beef isn't really with pollution. It's with all those pesky people MAKING the pollution. A few years back, Pimentel was one of those Sierra Club candidates dubbed "xenophobic" and "bigoted" by reactionaries when part of his platform for being elected to the board of directors was closing off the borders and regulating the U.S. population. While we hear that sort of talk is common with the plebes, it didn't sit well with the ivory towers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, MoveOn, and the Anti-Defamation League.  Pimentel's bid ultimately failed as those groups tastefully compared his ideas to those of the Nazi party (despite the cult-leaderish picture above, that characterization may have been a wee bit harsh).

So what does the good professor prescribe? In a speech a few years back, he hypothesized that the total sustainable world population should be about two billion peeps, a little less than a third of what we have to deal with now. Sounds about right to us ... Any more than that, and driving the Jersey turnpike gets damn near impossible. --MICHAEL MORISY