Boldt Words & Images: Vampires’ love

Greta Thunberg

A poem

By Bob Boldt

“If the Nuremberg laws were impartially enforced and applied, all thirteen US presidents since FDR should have been hung.” –Noam Chomsky

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

People who like to beat, torture, and sexually abuse cows now have yet another safe haven in which to do so. Idaho has passed an "ag gag" law that makes it illegal for those concerned with animal welfare to take any of the logical undercover steps to expose abuse. Similar laws were previously enacted in Iowa, Utah, and Missouri. By the way, yes, you did read that correctly: some people who work on dairy farms apparently enjoy sexually abusing cows, as documented in an undercover operation in Idaho in 2012. Under the new Idaho law, anyone convicted of working undercover to expose people sexually abusing cows is now in more legal trouble than the abusers. Got milk? Excerpt:

How long 'til we're barely surviving?

Noam Chomsky was in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago. I read in the October 6 Independent Weekly yesterday that Dr. Chomsky predicts, according to reporter David Fellerath, that "in 500 years, humans will be barely surviving." Fellerath writes that Chomsky cited nuclear war and global warming as the biggest threats.
    Chomsky doesn't define "barely surviving." Perhaps a precipitously declining human population? Or a much diminished quality of life for all but the remaining rich? The latter might lead to the former, in any case, as the have-nots rise up and rabble (some with those nuclear weapons Chomsky cites).
    In either case, I wouldn't have given us 500 years myself, but Chomsky is much better read than I am, so maybe he's right. Not that he or I (or you) will be around to find out.
    I suspect that "barely surviving" will come sooner, on the evidence of the sharp recent upward trending of one particular curve, the graph of human population growth (the thick red line in the chart below:

    The curve has been very steep for several decades and is accelerating; it's frankly a wonder that we're not just barely surviving already. Maybe we are but just haven't noticed it yet?

That's certainly true for other species on the planet. The effect on other species is and will continue to be catastrophic in terms of the size (or existence) of their populations. Another way of stating human population growth is in terms of humans' biomass relative to the total biomass on the planet. From the article, "Differential Reproduction - An Exponentialist View":

A sobering [Malthusian¹] thought is that as the global human population increases its percentage of the total biomass so many other species are going extinct [emphasis mine].

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1. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), who "observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine, disease, and widespread mortality."