The bad news for us is, humanity is doomed. The good news for planet Earth is, humanity is doomed.

Do you like cockroaches? In the future they may like you — in a salad.

Let’s face it, humanity is a pest species. 

Directly or indirectly, we destroy forests. We wreck and pillage the natural habitats of other animals and plants for what we perceive as our own benefit. We foul and clog rivers and streams. We pollute oceans. We poison the air. We gas the skies. We chop down mountains, to get the coal inside of them, to burn and add to both air and water pollution. We endanger other species. 

Wherever we go, anywhere on the planet, our modus operandi, intentionally or otherwise, is to upset nature’s setup.

Do other species find us disgusting?

You could probably make book on it.

In all probability other animals, with the possible exception of dogs and cats (and I’m not all that sure about cats) find us repulsive and loathsome. Yes, we leave behind a lot of rotting trash which is a useful source of food to rodents, raccoons, ants, maggots, and cockroaches. But to the millions of other life forms on the planet — or what is left of them — we are the equivalent of what those same cockroaches mean to us. Moreover, the vermin could, if need be, get along without us.

Fortunately for Planet Earth, Mother Nature has a nasty trick or two up her own sleeve to keep the damage we’re doing under control. 

When the dinosaurs became too plentiful, too massive, and too voracious for the planet, she whacked Earth with a giant meteorite that changed the weather and killed off the dinosaurs. In time the planet healed. It gave up on most lizards, leaving behind only enough snakes, crocodiles and other reptiles to limit the growth of some other varieties of living protein. 

Meanwhile, instead of dinosaurs, she gave monkeys a shot at being the dominant species, which with a few eons of evolution is how we came to be in charge of screwing things up.

Now most scientists are telling us that humanity has a dozen years, and maybe less, to fix the mess we’ve made, or most of us are goners.  Deserts and oceans will expand. Arable land will contract. Glaciers and polar ice caps will vanish. Vast populations of the ocean-going species we devour will become extinct, along with the coral reefs that nurture them. And the air will be rich with an aromatic blend of sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane-rich cow farts.

Who will you be killed by

when the global famine arrives?

You know perfectly well where all that leads. It leads to famine. It leads to war. It leads to desperate people raiding each others’ nations for food. Which will lead to nuclear strikes. Which will lead to retaliation. Which will lead, inexorably, to the obliteration, or near-obliteration, of homo sapiens — along with a huge bunch of innocent bystander species.

In fact, self-extinction as a cure for over proliferation of humanity seems welded into our DNA. How else to explain Donald Trump and other nationalists around the world working so hard to dissolve the bonds of cooperation that could save us from our own offal — bonds ranging from the UN, to the Iranian nuclear treaty, to such basic stuff as civil discourse and human decency? 

It’s the baked-in drive to self-annihilate. Nursing mice, when disturbed, eat their own offspring. It’s in their genes. Humanity eventually kills itself off via war, or self-suffocation, or self-poisoning. It’s in our DNA. 

Nature gives lemmings a suicidal urge. It gives moths a deep yearning  for self-immolation on light bulbs. It gives rodents and guppies the notion that all will be well for a while if only they eat their own offspring. And it gives us the immutable urge or incompetence to hand control of the planet over to the likes of Donald Trump. Or to that thug of a prince in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who Trump so adores. Or to Kim Jong Whatzisface. Or insert your own favorite political thug’s name here. Or his hive of enabling lackeys.

Humanity is dead!

Long live the bugs!

And what will take our place after humanity cooks its own goose? I can’t know for sure, of course, but if I were a betting man I’d put my money on the cockroaches. They can live almost anywhere. They can dine on almost anything. They are tolerant of heat, a useful trait in a warming planet. Some of them can swim. Others can fly. And while they’re doing fine just as is, my bet is that, over time, unhindered by hordes of humanity who now keep trying to poison them, they’ll flourish and develop bigger brains.

Write this down and preserve it for any of your progeny — although they will be the rare exceptions — who survive humanity’s near total disappearance: 

In time, ten-foot-tall cockroaches with IQs in excess of 250 will breed and herd human beings for food. In fact, that may be the only way our species will be able to continue, from the few of us left after the one-two punch of self-imposed nuclear and climate holocausts.

The gourmet cockroach

Some of us will of course try to hide under rocks, on in the empty spaces inside cockroach computer keyboards. But they will get us anyway, and trap us, and mate us. And when we are old enough and big enough, they will pick us up, masticate us and mix us with their saliva between their evolved mandibles, and swallow us alive and writhing. 

Perhaps there will even be cockroach gourmets, and cockroach master chefs who will figure out appetizing (for a cockroach) ways to prepare us and serve us. Like semi-dismembered human, writhing on a fine coulis of sun-warmed vulture turds.

Thank you, Mr. Trump, arrogant humans, and climate deniers everywhere. And bon apétit!

Utah Senator Mike Lee’s heroic plan to destroy humanity, the epidemic of Republican logorrhea, and how we know that at least 20 percent of Georgia’s Trump voters are going to spend eternity in hell.

Slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee. (Photo
courtesy of slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee.)

Quick, who talks too much, blurts out whatever’s on his mind, and spouts crackpot ideas sometimes worthy of a world-class lunatic, the rest of the time worthy of a confirmed nincompoop?

If you said, “Donald Trump,” well, of course. 

But who else?

Well, if the headline and photograph made you think it must be Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, you’re certainly right, of course. 

But who else?

Probably every Republican on the planet, that’s who. 

The Republics are coming down

with virulent logorrhea again

There seems to be an outbreak, no, an epidemic of mindless Republican logorrhea. More and more Republicans, from Donald Trump, to Mike Lee, to some obscure Georgia preacher who seems to think he has his own personal direct line to the Almighty are are spewing it. They’re seizing microphones and delivering rambling addresses full of crackpot notions and self-satisfied conceits.

Let’s deal with Mike Lee first. In what appears, from a video, to be an address to a considerably-less-than-packed Senate chamber, Lee recently delivered a smirking oration punctuated by what appeared to be illustrations swiped from some George Lucas storyboard that accidentally got left  behind in a Hollywood conference room. 

While rambling on in a thirteen minutes-long monologue that clearly demonstrated he has no future as a standup comedian, Lee said:

“The green new deal is not the solution to climate change. It’s not even part of the solution. In fact, it’s part of the problem.”

And then, a few seconds later he added: 

“You know where the solution can be found, Mr. President? In churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity awards across the country and around the world. Mr. President, this is the real solution to climate change. Babies. Climate change is an engineer problem. Not social engineering, but the real kind. It’s a challenge of creativity, ingenuity and most of all technological innovation. And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws. They’re solved by more humans. More people mean bigger markets for more innovation.”

Into the deep

hole we go

Uh Mike? The Green New Deal is an innovation. But more and more babies, and more babies after that, will just put further pressure on resources, consume more energy, result in further acceleration of climate change, and dig us deeper into a hole.

Now, I admit that nature has a way of compensating for excesses. An example? A forest fire will burn most of the trees. But it will also clear spaces for new trees to catch the sun and grow.

Similarly, on a planet overcrowded with imbeciles who are destroying the place, the planet will let the imbeciles have at it for a while. Sooner or later, some of those imbeciles will unleash a nuclear war. Or they’ll raise such havoc with the climate that there will be earthwide annihilations by means of famines, floods, and droughts, causing the deaths of millions, or perhaps billions, and forcing others to kill huge swaths of invading hordes — maybe with nuclear war again — to get humanity down to manageable levels.

After all, if humanity were an endangered species, with perhaps only 500 living examples, then even if they all drove gas-guzzling SUVs with no pollution controls, the consequence would be something that nature could handle. It’s only when the earth’s 7.54 billion people are burning carbon and mowing down forests all at once that we become a problem.

Give Mike Lee

a vasectomy

So it sounds to me as if at least a tiny part of the problem could be solved if we forced Mike Lee to have a vasectomy before he adds to the problem again. Speaking of which, what’s with the blonde in the lower left-hand corner of the video, who seems to be laughing at all of Lee’s lame jokes? 

I have no idea who she is, or why she’s there, or why nobody else seems to be there. But should it ever turn out that she’s having an affair with Mike, I wouldn’t be completely flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, in Georgia...

Speaking of undesirable gene pools getting perpetrated, a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives, one Trey Kelley, recently stood by while his father, Pastor Doyle Kelley, was the House’s pastor-for-a-day. It was more than just a demonstration that idiocy may be a hereditary trait.

The event also demonstrated, yet another time, that you can’t fix idiocy by handing the idiots a microphone. Toward the end of a lengthy invocation that seems to have violated the shaky line between church and state, Pastor Kelley declared:

The command is there: Do all in the name of Jesus Christ. People always ask me, ‘Why are there so many lost people in the state of Georgia?’

“The statistics came out that there’s 70 percent of the people in the state of Georgia that are lost. That are lost. Seventy percent. There are over 10 million people in the state of Georgia. That means there are 7 million people lost. 

“Now you want to hear it in Baptist terms: Seven million people that are lost are dying and on their way to Hell. That’s what that means.”

Well, Pastor, let’s do a little bit of arithmetic here. During the last Presidential election, only 49.6 percent of the voters cast their ballot for Hillary, Gary Johnson, or some obscure candidate. That’s a total of 2, 025,341 voters. Assuming every one of those voters is going to hell, that’s still far short of the 70 percent of Georgians who are hell-bound. And you know what that means?

The Georgia delegation in hell

Right, at least 20 percent of the 2,089,104 Georgians who voted for Trump — very roughly 410,000 of them. are going to hell. Along with roughly four and a half million Georgians who voted for nobody.  (On the other hand, all those folks may simply be going nowhere, same as they’ve done for their entire lives, but that’s an argument for another day.) 

Anyway,Trump-voting Georgians, I look forward to seeing you all in hell. And yes, you can remind me that Pastor Doyle Kelley told me you’d be there.

And here, if you can bear it, is the whole long, boring, discourse on hellfire and damnation in Georgia. Have a nice day.

Five rumors invented by this blog to concern, alarm, excite, and inflame the paranoia of panicky Republicans

I haven’t posted for the past few weeks because I’ve been left almost dumbstruck by the extent of small-mindedness, unreasonable “reasoning,” fake science, complete disregard for facts, insane rants, and other thinking , either of the stupid or the neo-Nazi kind, that seems to be prevalent in the Republican party.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? That Cruz, and Carson, and Christy, and Carly, and Trump, and (ad infinitum) are full of crap? That it’s alarming how we are tumbling pell mell down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism? That the denial of science is not only stupid but suicidal for the planet? That allowing only “Christians” to immigrate to this country is a de facto establishment of religion in violation of the United States Constitution?

Nah! It’s all being said. Over and over again. And meanwhile, rumors, misinformation, outright lies, and filthy slanders abound to reinforce either the sclerotic Congressional status quo, or the candidacy of whacko Republican candidates. 

One of Trump's towers. Why so big? The

grainy secret is revealed in this blog post.

So if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Here are some rumors I’ve deliberately invented, just to see if the stuff that springs from my head is as good as the stuff that springs from Republican heads. 

1. What the Trump towers are really for.  There are several Trump towers in New York City. One is at Columbus Circle. Another on Fifth Avenue. Still another on First Avenue near the UN building. Other tall buildings bear his name on the Upper East Side. Why so many? Well, currently they contain  hotels and the apartments of millionaires and billionaires. But that is only temporary. Long term, comes the world wide famine caused by global warming, they will be used to store grain.

2. Global warming is real, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, there is an international conspiracy of scientists who are trying to keep the truth from you. They have been paid off by the oil industry and Big Government “libtards” to avoid the total panic that might occur if everyone knew the truth.

The truth is that the earth is heating up because the planet has been knocked off its axis and out of its orbit by too much and too-powerful fracking. Earth is now racing toward the sun on an erratically spiraling path that makes us feel too hot one day, too cold the next. But in the long run, we will all be fried, baked and barbecued alive by solar heat. 

Jeff Bezos in his space duds, practicing

to flee Earth with his fellow billionaires

before we're swallowed up by the sun.

In fact, the reason some billionaires like Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Jeff Bezos  (Amazon) are pioneering “commercial” space travel is, they’ve been tipped off that we’re heading on a wobbly course to the solar crematorium. 

Their plan is to sell one-way tickets to another planet for $800,000,000 per seat, economy class, more for Business and First Class. Better upgrade if you can. Seventeen months in a narrow Coach Class seat could be mighty painful on your read end. And yes, baggage, meals and even use of the toilet will be extra. You don’t have that kind of money? Even for Economy? Then you’re toast, pal. Literally.

3. The blonde boy from Brazil.  The late author and playwright Ira Levin, an agreeable guy who at one time was my neighbor, wrote a book called "The Boys From Brazil." It's about a bunch of little Adolph Hitlers, cloned from the original, placed strategically by old Nazis to take over the world. The book later became a movie.

Well, Ira was partly right. There is one “boy from Brazil.” And don't be surprised if you learn that he's Donald Trump. But The Donald was not cloned from Hitler. He was a frozen embryo, fathered not by Fred Trump or by Cranky Adolph, but by Reinhard Heydrich, the “blond beast of the S.S,” who gained Hitler’s favor by making statements such as, “We will Germanize the Czech vermin,” and later became known as “The Butcher of Prague.” 

Reinhard Heydrich (right) with

Henrich Himmler. Note that 

Heydrich was photographed

with his hat on. Want to guess

what's under there?

Heydrich was every bit as good at spreading hatred as Trump is, but other parallels are equally eerie. Both Hydrich and Trump had several wives.  Both were military school cadets, Trump at the now-defunct New York Military Academy. (And by the way, what happened to Donald Trump’s school records, once kept at the military school? Hmm?) Both Heydrich and Trump were efficient organizers and builders. 

Ominously, one of Heydrich’s biographers wrote of him: “Among a crowd of lackeys, imbeciles and unredeemable thugs, Heydrich stands out as the one man who not only seethed with utter hatred mixed with emotional indifference for the welfare of others, but also knew exactly how to do something about it. He was, at that iron heart, a psychopath.”

Need proof that The Donald is The Blond Beast’s frozen embryo son? Notice that Donald Trump has never shown you his birth certificate. Not a legitimate one, at any rate. How can he, when he was born in a test tube? 

4. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are part of a sleeper cell. No no, not Muslim. Cuban. Their so-called “conservative” leanings are only a ruse. They were sent here by Fidel Castro to take over the government by becoming President, and then turn the United States into a Cuban communist satellite. There are two of them so in case something happens to one of them, there will still be another. Mark my words, in 30 years, if the Earth hasn’t been swallowed up by the sun yet, you’ll be speaking Spanish with a Cuban accent, and  driving a 30-year-old Chevrolet .

5. Carly Fiorina is the illegitimate daughter of Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean. Or maybe of Cruella de Vil. I mean, what proof do you Little People need?

Republican Congressmen to Science: “Lalalala I can’t hear you. Shut up! I don't want to know.”

Is this Congressman Lamar Smith of

Texas? The ape is acting like him. Or

maybe it's vice-versa.

Up in Greenland, some scientists are risking their lives to measure the rate at which the Greenland ice sheet  is melting. Read about it here.

Why do the young scientists take such life-threatening risks? Because it will give the world better information about how high and how fast the melting ice will raise the tides, inundating coastal cities, or at least big chunks of them, around the world. What the scientists learn may save thousands —or millions — of lives. And you know what?

Republican Congressman are furious that people are finding this stuff out. The New York Times reports in the same story:

But the research is under increasing fire by some Republican leaders in Congress, who deny or question the scientific consensus that human activities contribute to climate change. 

Leading the Republican charge on Capitol Hill is Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the chairman of the House science committee, who has sought to cut $300 million from NASA’s budget for earth science and has started an inquiry into some 50 National Science Foundation grants. On Oct. 13, the committee subpoenaed scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeking more than six years of internal deliberations, including “all documents and communications” related to the agency’s measurement of climate change.

The know-nothing Republicans remind me of the little kid who closed his eyes when he ran into speeding traffic across a busy thoroughfare. I guess he figured, if he didn’t see the cars, they couldn’t hit him.

As for Texas? Well, maybe after they kiss Galveston goodbye, they can swim after Congressman Smith and hold his head underwater.