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!

Is Jeff Bezos a good guy or a bad guy? Also: cockroaches, meerkats, a deadly snake, and an app for persecuting women.

Is this your ex-lover? Don't answer until you read the post below.

I’ll get to Jeff Bezos in a bit. Just bear with me while I explain that I’m old enough to remember when television only came in black and white. I’m talking 1948-ish. The screens were so small that some television sets were sold with a giant magnifying glass that stood on a pedestal in front of the screen — the better to see the grainy, static-y images.

Since all television shows were new, there were no reruns. The closest thing to old television series were old westerns, full of good guys, bad guys, and people jumping on and off horses.There wasn’t much room for subtlety on those grainy little black and white screens, so the cowboy movies made the job of telling good guys from bad guys easy-peasy. The good guys, who were all good, from their pure intentions to their boot-shod toes, wore white hats. The bad guys were all bad, from their evil scowls to their nefarious intentions, and wore black hats. 

In real life, especially in this day of color screens that can be big enough to cover a wall (or small enough to slide into your shirt pocket) things are a bit less subtle. And not only television programming. Case in point?

Jeff Bezos. Should Jeff Bezos be wearing a white hat or a black hat? Considering that the guy appears to have two heads, I’d say both.

On the one hand, one Jeff Bezos good guy head has had the courage (admittedly backed by more money than you or I are likely to even imagine having in a lifetime) to stand up to what appears to be a blackmail threat from David Pecker, the head honcho of American Media and, by some strange coincidence, a pal of Donald Trump. This led, unsurprisingly but delightfully, to tabloid wordplay headlines that will last long past the scandal.

So Jeff is a good guy, yes? Yes, indeed. But also no, no way. Which brings me to Jeff’s other head. Because Bezos is also also a very, very bad guy.

First of all, he got into this pickle with American Media by carrying on an extramarital affair. This happens often, to many people, but it’s never good guy stuff.

More importantly, Bezos is a sonofabitch. In his search for a second Amazon headquarters, if you want to call it that, he baited and switched cities like a polished con man. It costs tons of money and time for a city to put together a proposal for Amazon, and in some cases, according to this report, Amazon had no real intention  of ever locating in the cities that Bezos baited. The sole objective was to scare the hell out of other cities, so they’d pile on more incentives for Amazon to choose them.

It used to be, the reason anyone would want to live anywhere near an industrial behemoth like Amazon was that the beast would throw tons of tax money into the city coffers. These days, it’s the opposite. Instead of paying taxes, monster corporations insist that taxpayers pay them to locate nearby. 

Yeah yeah, I know Amazon will employ some people — at least until Bezos finds robots that will be able to do most of the jobs for no salary at all. But inevitably, the benefit to those people could be more efficiently distributed if the government just sent a check to all the Joe and Josie Dufuses in the neighborhood.

Not to mention that Bezos hates unions and New York is still a union town. Trust the Jeffster to start pumping for local laws that cripple unions, if he locates his second headquarters here. 

On the other hand, Bezos bought the crusading Washington Post, thus assuring its survival, at least until he gets bored with it. Pat the Bezos head that wears the white hat. 

But on the other hand, the Jeffster’s management style at that newspaper has been all black hat. Just ask the journalist in charge of the union bargaining unit at the Post. Last year he said: “We are toward the end of settling this contract, and it’s not going to be a great contract. We know that. We’ve basically spent a year fighting off bad things.”

Personally, I’d like to bang both of the Jeffster’s heads together, good and hard.

P.S. The day after I posted this, Amazon announced it was pulling out of New York. Or at any rate, that it's not coming here. That's a good thing, not done for a good reason. As best I can figure it, Bezos wanted to punish New York skeptics who had doubts about giving him a huge tax break to change a Queens neighborhood, drive up rentals and force out the mostly working class folks who are hanging on there by the skin of their teeth now, enrich real estate speculators, and try to impose a silicon ethos on New York. Well, consider us punished, Jeff. Oh boo hoo!  And to the next municipality that thinks it's doing itself a favor by paying Bezos to locate his sweatshop there — lotsa luck. You're getting the head with the black hat.

Cockroaches and meercats. Speaking of bad things, do you have an ex who you dream about running into —  with a speeding Mack truck? Have I got an event for you! Down in El Paso Texas….No no! Calm down! This is not about Trump's wall!

Down in El Paso, the local zoo recently announced a Valentine’s Day event which enabled irked ex spouses and significant others to name a cockroach after their exes. But that’s only the beginning.

One of these adorable little critters may have just eaten
your former main squeeze

You could then watch the disgusting creature named for your ex get fed to a meerkat. (Who knew that such cute little animals ate such disgusting things?) Anyway, there’s the proof, if you ever desire it, that revenge is a dish best served up lukewarm and crunchy.

Then there’s the deadly snake — and no, you smartass, I’m not talking about Stephen Miller. A zoo in Sydney, Australia, held a contest to see who could name its new acquisition, “one of the world’s most venomous” snakes. Contestants were required to donate a buck (I assume an Australian buck, the equivalent of 71 cents, American) along with a brief essay explaining why your ex deserves the honor. Heck, it’s almost worth going to Sydney just for a better chance of naming the snake. Maybe you could go during feeding time and hope it’ll choke on a rat.

And now for some high tech persecution of women. It’s a Saudi invention. Moreover, in more ways than one, it's a 12th Century leap into the technological present. Turns out the in Riyadh they created a cell phone app that enables men to track their wives (yes, plural), daughters, sisters, and any other women they more or less own, so that the guys can tell if any of the women are traveling anywhere without patriarchal permission.

Speaking of big business and big bucks, the app has been installed on Google Play more than a million times, according to a report in the Washington Post. (Thank you White Hat Jeffster.) Apple also supports the app because, umm, hey, you wouldn’t want those girls sneaking out of the harem and getting lost while driving around in the desert without permission. If they dare try it, you'll just have to give them a good beating when they get home. Now the app makes it easier.

Amnesty International has complained that human rights abuses of women are “facilitated by the App, and mitigate the harm that the App has on women,” the Washington Post story continued.

Well at least it’s a bit more up-to-date than the bone saw that one Saudi agent was wielding in Istanbul a while back.

In just a few years, when humanity is done destroying itself and its habitat, the disgusting shall inherit the earth

Bet your money on the future of cockroaches. 
Not that you’ll be around to collect.

Okay, let’s deal with it. When it comes to climate change and the horrors that climate is about to wreck on the human race, humanity's collective response is one enormous, crawling, filthy mass of Donald Trump-like yawns.

Yeah sure, many of us, maybe even most of us talk a good line. But like the Trumpster, our attention span is too short, our adoration of bright shiny toys like zippy automobiles is too great, the threat of extinction seems too remote for our feeble imaginations.

So let me be the six-zillionth person to lay it out for you again. Briefly:

• Your islands and many of your cities will be underwater. If you try living in them, you’ll drown. Shanghai, Bangladesh, most of the peninsula that is Florida, even big chunks of New York City are goners. What’s that you say? You think you’re safe because you have an apartment on a high floor of a skyscraper? So what! The wires that deliver power to your apartment and to the elevator will be shorted out and corroded away in salt water. You may be able to use your window ledge as a diving board and take a nice refreshing swim, but then you’ll have no way to get back into your apartment, which because of the flood waters will have no electricity, no air conditioning, no heat, no refrigeration.

• Running inland or to high ground will do you no good whatsoever. Your forests will burn down. Your plains and valleys will become deserts. Agricultural enterprise will be shafted. Incidentally, that’s one of the reasons — but only one — why you’re likely to starve to death. 

• And don’t tell me you can always go fishing. Clobbered by a quadruple threat of warming waters that kill off marine life, overfishing, chemical pollution and garbage pollution, the oceans of the world are becoming to edible protein what the Sahara Desert is to forests. Already, blooms of toxic algae fed by pollution and high water temperatures, are not only killing off fish population, but also making it unsafe to swim.

• If you think refugee immigration is a problem now, wait until most of Latin America and Africa become uninhabitable.  The deserts will spread from the equator out. As people who once scratched a living in equatorial places discover they can no longer live there, guess where they’ll flee to. "Caravans?" You ain't seen nothing yet.

• You may die of suffocation. Scientists aren’t talking about this yet, so far as I know, but I suspect that as the “earth’s lungs” — the Amazon jungle and other rain forests — give way, and carbon dioxide levels mount, you’re going to have trouble breathing. Or even staying awake to observe yourself slowly smothering to death, since CO2 also makes you sleepy.

See, no matter how you look at it, humanity is a pest species. We destroy environments. We directly or inadvertently murder other species. We foul the air and the water. We are to the rest of life as cockroaches are to us —  repulsive, filthy, annoying, lethal pests, spreading death and destruction to other species in the short term self-interest of our own. 

And now that our population has expanded to nearly the breaking point, the irony is that the one species likeliest to adapt to, survive, and thrive in the mess of waste and filth we have created is the species that we consider pests — the cockroach family.

Cockroaches have been around for about 140 million years. Moreover, antecedent cockroach-like bugs were  crawling and creeping around 300 million years years ago. That’ s one hell of a lot longer than, say, dinosaurs. The oldest of those lizards dates back a piffling 50 million years.

For a while you may be able to survive by eating cockroaches. Yes, they’re infested with dangerous bacteria. Yes, they also carry fatal viruses. But they’re also full of crunchy protein and minerals, plus a little bit of water, and if you’re hungry enough and they’re the only meal option, trust me, you’ll be holding Thankscockroach Day feasts at Grandma's house. 

But in the end, they’ll eat us. The little buggers keep evolving. There are thousands of species today. Some crawl. Some hiss. Some fly. In the suburbs of Houston they call ‘em “Palmetto Bugs,” perhaps because now and then they have the habit of dropping out of palmetto trees into passing baby carriages. There are said to be thousands of species, in part because they keep evolving to adapt to whatever nature, or human vermin, throws at them. 

Below there’s a palmetto bug porn video. (The palmetto bug is evidently also known as the Florida woods cockroach.) Don’t get too excited. All the photographs are stills. And this isn’t a portrayal of bug sex. It’s just of ugly repulsiveness. Or is it repulsive ugliness? Or is it bugly repulsiveness? Anyway, it’s cockroaches.

Sooner or later, we will become their primary food source. The cockroaches will grow bigger, more intelligent, with bigger brains. Perhaps they will even develop a language that goes beyond hissing, as Madagascar cockroaches already do. But you won’t be around to hear it. You will be dead — either of suffocation, or of starvation, or of drowning, or of poisoning, or of dehydration, or of disease. Meanwhile, the intelligent cockroach of the future, with a head as big as a bowling ball and evolved manual dexterity, will be sharing recipes for your roast eyeballs. Count on it.

Bon apétit Monsieur Cafard!