Category: Current Events

Tom’s World – 14JUN2025 – How Many Humans, Redux

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Obviously, you could plot a graph with the x axis being total human population and the y axis being some amalgam of average human well being. I’m pretty sure it won’t graph as an exponential function, that’s impossible. It would be a bell shaped curve with maximum human happiness occurring at some level and declining in both direction, more population or less.

The population peak, I suspect, will occur at the point of maximum available resources, including energy per capita. And I also suspect that increasing resource availability largely pulls population as opposed to population increase pushing resources.

Total available energy per capita may well be the bottleneck. But there will come a point at which the total resources of a large but closed system cannot continue to increase to match.

There are probably other limits. A future with the average population density on earth being that of Hong Kong, no matter resource availability, would explode.

Maybe we could start hollowing out large asteroids, spin them, and make little worlds. That’s a common SF scenario. Or a Dyson sphere, one of those of radius of the earth’s orbit would give 1.21 x 10^17th square miles of living space.

The Wise of Heart: A Modern-Day Re-Imagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Hans G. Schantz – A Book Review

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“Inherit the Wind” was a famous fictionalized account of the Scope’s Monkey Trial of the early twentieth century.  It centered on a young school teacher who was arrested and put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution in the Bible Belt where laws had been passed to forbid it.

Dr. Schantz has managed to swap out transgender orthodoxy for fundamentalist creationism in his story and crafted a courtroom drama that captures all of the nuances of our present-day retreat from reality that calls sexually mutilating adolescents, “gender-affirming therapy” and allows grade school teachers to conspire with social workers to perform these procedures on minors despite parents’ horrified resistance.  A high school biology teacher is accused of teaching the biological facts of human sexuality and this throws him in conflict with a state law that forbids a teacher from challenging a student’s “selected gender identity.”

For those familiar with the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” some of the plot twists will reappear in a new analog.  But this isn’t a rehash of the old story.  This is a very in-depth look at the illogic and fallacies of the transgender narrative and the way different parts of the government, the medical profession, media and academia pander to the delusions of confused children and frighten their parents into allowing terrible things to be done to their children.

The story is inhabited by a cast of characters that interlock at multiple points.  Small town politics and society mesh with national political figures who have their own agendas but seize upon the trial as the perfect battlefield to win a victory for their side.  Both sides are portrayed believably.  The woke activists aren’t just straw men but sound quite close to what their real counterparts sound like in news clips.  The details of the trial sound extremely close to what the transcript of a trial would consist of.

So, what did I think of the story?  I think the story takes a while to get going.  There is a set-up needed to get all the pieces in position for the trial.  During this period the reader will have to be patient.  Once the trial gets going the story finds its stride and becomes a courtroom drama.  And I found the ending satisfying without being overdone.  As with its predecessor it doesn’t attempt to write a conclusion to the clash going on in the story but rather capture the flavor of the two opposing sides and show how each side attempts to paint itself and its opponents using the weapons that each prefers.  The Left fixates on emotions and idealism while the Right points to logic and reality.

Who is this book for?  Well, first off, people of the woke persuasion will not be amused.  Despite being reasonably accurate in his portrayal of the woke side they don’t come off as sympathetic characters.  So, this leaves moderates and people on the Right.  Also, this book is a courtroom drama and folks who read these are its intended audience.  Personally, I liked the book.  I liked the defense attorney and I despised the prosecutor.  This made the courtroom battle satisfying for me.  But you’ll have to make up your mind based on what I’ve described whether this is your kind of story.

How Many Humans Should There Be on Earth?

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I asked Grok how many humans are currently living on Earth.  It said, “As of June 12, 2025, the world population is approximately 8.23 billion people. This estimate is based on projections from the United Nations and other demographic sources, which indicate the global population surpassed 8 billion in November 2022 and continues to grow at a rate of about 0.84% to 0.89% per year.”

Eight billion two hundred thirty million is a big number.  That’s a whole lot of people.  At the same time, most advanced countries are barely or not even replacing their dead with children.  At the same time, we’ve been told that AI will make almost all of our cognitive work skills redundant and substandard.

These three facts being true at the same time means that the future of humanity is in flux.  We know that people like Bill Gates and the other globalists think the answer is stop humans from producing children.  That simplifies their work to merely managing a last generation of aging humans while the population of Earth is reduced to some tiny fraction of the current billions.  And that lucky remnant will be the globalists who will inherit the Earth without all those messy and expensive plebians.

And they’re making a very good start to the plan.  They’ve brainwashed a good chunk of the Millennials and the Zoomers into thinking producing children is morally wrong.  They’ve convinced them that Gaia isn’t happy sharing the planet with humans and the best thing to do is play video games, watch porn and take drugs while waiting for death.  Of course that’s not everyone.  Plenty of people are still having kids but the numbers are way down.

The real question is how do we want the human population of Earth to exist going forward?  Well, when I was young, we were told that the opposite problem existed.  Malthusian theory said that eventually human population growth would eventually outstrip food supply and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; starvation, war, pestilence and death would ensue.  The reason this didn’t happen is a combination of technological advances in food production (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical planting and harvesting equipment and superior plant species) and effective birth control agents.

At this point governments have to incentivize people (especially women) to have children.  Hungary is one of the pioneers in this idea.  They provide incentives for Hungarian women to have children and even provide lifetime tax-free status to women that have four children.

Obviously unlimited human reproduction could become a problem again in the future but currently the globalist campaign has made that an unlikely problem for the foreseeable future.  But the question is will the United States shift its policies to try and restore fertility to at least replacement levels or will we depend on immigration to take up the slack?  If we go with immigration then it’s inevitable that the country will change drastically.  The culture that made America such a desirable place to live has already been eroded by the globalist program of demonizing the European descendants that built the nation.  If this continues much longer it will inevitably turn the United States into a third world country like Brazil or Mexico.

As to what will be the eventual population of Earth (my original question), I think inevitably it will decrease.  And this will be caused by the decay of Western civilization and the attendant degradation of food production capacity.  Currently western countries feed the third world.  And feed them so well that obesity is endemic throughout these poor countries.  When Europe has transitioned to a majority non-European population it will no longer be able to “feed the world.”  And the four horsemen will reappear to balance out the population back to food production limits.  Within a century the population of Earth will be about a billion people.  Should it be more?  We’ll never know.

Ramping Up the Trump

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Looking around it appears that the Trump administration intends to make an example of Los Angeles.  If we really were living in an analog of the Roman Empire then we could expect all kinds of fun.  All the men would be put to the sword; the women and children would be led away into slavery to the sound of their lamentations and the ground would be sown with salt.  Today the best we could hope for would be a perp walk for the Mayor of LA and the Governor of California.  But that would be a start.  But it appears that Trump is serious about confronting the sanctuary state on its home turf.

What that looks like is ICE lurking around Home Depot and scooping up the illegals looking for work.  As expected, the NGO’s have deployed their permanent college students with bull horns and whistles and assigned street actors to riot.  And we see all the usual theater.  Masked weirdos throwing water bottles, Molotov cocktails, bricks or whatever comes to hand.  But there has been a surprise.  The feds are arresting the guys throwing bricks.  Yesterday I read that the guy throwing fire bombs has been charged with attempted murder.  Now that’s progress!

Following this the Mayor of LA decided to order a curfew.  That’s huge.  In a sense she’s declaring defeat.  She blinked.  Basically, she’s telling the shock troops to go home and wait for a better opportunity.  That’s huge.  Because Trump isn’t going home.  ICE and the FBI are ferreting out the people who organized the violence.  And they are still rounding up illegals.  Now, without a doubt what has been done so far is a drop in the bucket.  Half of LA is made up of illegal aliens and their children and grandchildren.  But unless all of this is public relations it looks very much like Trump is going to make deporting illegal aliens his dominant play.

And he should because it’s extremely popular and it allows him to show his opponents as complicit with illegal immigration and on the side of the foreigners in the street burning cars and throwing firebombs at law enforcement doing their jobs.

As far as the scope of deportation, I’m not worried about how slow it currently is.  Trump learns by doing and as he learns he will get better and more efficient.  By the end of his four years, he’ll probably have it down to a science and there will probably be a bullet train shooting fifty thousand illegals down to Mexico City every day (and he’ll get the Mexicans to pay for it too).

So, looking at Trump’s current strategy, I think he’s making gains on multiple fronts.  He hasn’t ended the Ukraine or the Gaza wars or gotten his “big beautiful bill” signed or annexed Greenland yet but he has gotten the military and the ICE personnel to begin the signature policy of the Trump administration; deporting the millions of illegals that Joe Biden inflicted on us.  And energy prices are coming down and that drives down inflation.

Keep up the good work Mr. Trump.

The Blue States are Hurting

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Trump seems to have turned off the faucet that Biden was using to keep the blue states solvent.  A sense of panic is setting in and lots of towns are finding their voters are revolting against the budget increases that followed the end of the COVID gravy train (CARES Act).  All of the unfunded mandates that were paid for with that money now have to be paid for by the state and local governments.  And the local governments are squealing like stuck pigs because the state is hanging them out to dry.

 

In Dunwich it’s reaching a crisis.  There are grumblings against Cthulhu because he took credit for the CARES Act spending.  Now he’s being blamed for the higher taxes and another Great Old One; Azathoth is taking advantage of the outrage to challenge Cthulhu in the coming First Selectman race.  Azathoth’s campaign literature is branding his plan as MAGA (Make Azathoth Govern Again).

He’s handing out red hats and recently he’s started to take on a familiar orange tint.  His boldest campaign promise is that under his administration he would pledge not to eat anyone at public meetings or official town functions.  When asked for public comment by the local radio channel Cthulhu ate the reporter and walked out of the studio vowing to put a stop to all this “fake news” and misinformation.  He was quoted (from a distance) as saying, “This is madness.  If I can’t eat my constituency when they cross the line, then Dunwich would descend into anarchy and no one wants anarchy, except anarchists and I hate anarchists, even thought they taste really good.”

 

Outside of the Dunwich enclave the human (or somewhat human) local governments are probably going to have to tighten their belts a good deal.  Lots of services that everyone has come to think of as critical will be on the chopping block.  One of these is winter road treatment.  Salt, sand and other materials have surged in price this year and depleted supplies will likely bust the budgets of towns and cities if we have another normal winter like we had in 2024/25.  Likewise with neglected infrastructure and school costs.  The state has mandated very expensive special education requirements.  Providing these mandated services may mean that the rest of the students will lose out on curriculum and services like library and arts classes.

It’s believed by the local governments that if these services are curtailed that voters will agree to add them back into the budget.  But from what I’ve heard and seen this isn’t the case.  A revolt is going on and the angry voters in New England may finally have become fed up with the feckless spending that their politicians routinely legislate.  The next few weeks are going to be instructive as these towns and cities struggle to resolve the impasse that has developed.  The budgets are overdue and without a budget they can’t begin signing contracts and paying salaries.

I think I’ll go to Azathoth’s July rally.  I hear he dances a mean YMCA.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 09JUN2025 – Fate

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It’s interesting when something happens, and you think, “If I had left 5 minutes later”, or “If I hadn’t tossed X-item into the car.” I had one of those in 2018 when I was trying to get a hotel reservation for a hurricane evacuation. We needed a pet-friendly room, and just as I was about to hit the “Confirm key” >BLIP< -room gone! So I scrambled and found an alternate 30 miles further on. While there, we rescued a little tortie cat who had apparently been dumped at the motel. We added her to our clowder and named her Florence, for the storm that brought her to us. She crossed her Rainbow last April due to FIV and Thyroid trouble, but we loved her, and she had a good life with us, and we miss her.

Probably Not Smart

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Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.  Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway.  After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway.  For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.  But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.  It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.  A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.  The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free.  Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was.  He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead.  He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock.  Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.  That would have been bad.  That would have been a mess for both of us.

So, this is apropos of nothing.  It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.  If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.  If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.

It’s funny.  Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.  For a long time, I’ve had this theory.  I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.  And I think there are different kinds of luck.  For instance, I never win at games of chance.  I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.  All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.  And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch.  And it’s been going on since I was a child.  And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.  And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.

Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.  Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.  I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.  Probably not smart.

Everybody’s Gotta Eat

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The circle of life.  Despite the claim in the song, Disney never shows us the predators, including his highness the King, chowing down on the herbivores that provide the carnivores with their sustenance.  Theoretically Mufasa is the apex of the food chain but all of his meals are “off-camera.”

But Camera Girl claims to be a wildlife realist and the hawks and vultures, the foxes and coyotes according to her “gotta eat.”  So, when a rabbit or a squirrel ends up as a meal somewhere on the property, she shrugs it off, “everyboody’s gotta eat.”

Today one of the local hawks performed its patented power dive a couple of feet away from Camera Girl’s bird feeders and the bird (we think it was a catbird) never knew what hit it.  Oh well.

But there is a more gruesome aspect than just the kill.  The hawk eats the entire bird while plucking the feathers as it goes.  Camera Girl watched this from her kitchen window and I could tell she wasn’t shrugging it off.  She has a soft heart.  And since she feeds the birds and attracts them to the location, she feels that she was responsible in a way for the predation.

And all things considered that is true.  That hawk would not have caught that catbird today if she didn’t feed those birds every day.  But I tried to cheer her up.  I said, “Well, you’ve been feeding these birds for years.  And all those free meals have contributed to the health and longevity of all these birds.  With all that extra food they’ve probably produced double the number of hatchlings they would have raised if they were thin and weak.  Maybe that very catbird would never have been born if his parents hadn’t eaten the seeds you provided.”

So, I threw that out there.  Hopefully it helped a bit.  And I’m sure she’ll bounce back tomorrow when she goes out early to feed Moe and Flo the crows and Poe the raven.  And she’s been watching this skunk (of course, it’s Pepé Le Pew) that appears at dusk and scratches around where Moe’s food was earlier in the day.  He’s almost all white and kind of wide and flat to the ground.  He looks like a giant Tribble or a furry version of the Horta.  But so far, I’ve managed to avoid it while I’m doing my late afternoon watering.  The last thing I need is getting skunked in my own yard.

Of course, the flipside of all this is the fact that the bird feeders also occasionally attract black bears to the property.  The last time the bear used its weight to bend a very substantial steel tube all the way over.  I guess it’s within the realm of possibility that one day the circle of life might mean I could be on the menu for Yogi Bear.  So, there is that to consider.  I’ll mention this to Camera Girl and see if that changes the whole risk to reward ratio for her bird feeding hobby.  I tend to doubt it.  She really likes those birds.

Joe Rogan Made Me Think

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I know this is old news but I decided to watch this Joe Rogan podcast with Kash Patel that was taped I guess today and just listening at random almost, you hear that the people who were in charge under Obama and Biden were ruthless criminals who had no fear of being caught performing completely illegal operations against their political enemies.  Russia-gate is the supreme example but there is no end to how many crooked acts and operations they performed with complete impunity.

I think the stellar quote is that former FBI director Comey had a room where he stashed his worst documents and data.  When he left, he locked the room and removed all record of what was hidden in the room and from 2017 till 2025 no one outside of Comey’s inner circle knew about it.  Patel says he’s mining those documents and data files for proof of Comey’s crimes.

So other than a reason to be outraged by all of these Deep State criminals what is the take away from all this?  Well, to me, it’s just a reminder that this is government.  Corruption and abuse of power is what happens as soon as people get a taste of power and the money that comes with it.  And this will happen with Republicans in power almost as egregiously as when the Democrats are running things.  This is human nature.

So, from my point of view, we have to look at the present Trump agenda as an extreme anomaly.  Maybe it won’t happen again for a hundred years or maybe never again.  And that is why it must be embraced and ridden as far as it can possibly go.  When it’s time for Trump’s term to end we should select the man who promises to do the most damage to the existing system.  Whatever damage Kash Patel does to the FBI should be considered only a good start.  What is really needed are legislative mandates to eliminate the unconstitutional activities that the 9/11 attacks enabled.  The Patriot Act and the FISA Courts need to be eliminated.  Those instruments strip away our constitutional protections and render the FBI and the other intel agencies the equivalent of the Stasi or the KGB.

I don’t know if it’s Trump’s intention to push for these legal changes.  His Justice Department should right now be in front of SCOTUS with a brief declaring these laws unconstitutional.  And this isn’t even radical.  Even at the time they were enacted it was believed that they were unconstitutional but because of the public’s fear after the 9/11 attacks it was believed that these laws should temporarily exist.  Well, it’s almost a quarter of a century down the road and these laws aren’t keeping Americans safe.  They’re being used to put us in prison.  They need to be struck down as unconstitutional.

People seem pretty sure that JD Vance is going to be Trump’s successor.  Well, maybe Trump will make that decision.  But I want to hear from Vance’s mouth that he is going to continue the process of tearing out the Deep State by the roots.  FBI. CIA, IRS, ATF; all of these agencies are pointed like weapons at the American people.  Destroying them now will not make us permanently safe.  But it will buy us a respite from the worst of the surveillance state that has been built by the people who run our government.

That’s what that Joe Rogan podcast made me think.

June, Moon, Spoon, Tune

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What is it about the first really hot patch of summer weather.  Today was the first day where the inside of the house was warm enough not to require three layers of clothing.  The attic has absorbed enough heat so that it has finally heated up the leftover winter air.  It’s actually uncomfortably warm inside and I’m luxuriating in it.

And outside it’s ninety.  Butterflies and dragonflies are flitting around and the birds are tearing around looking for food for their hatchlings.  The moist hot grass is breathing water right into the air and you can smell the photosynthesis cranking away.  I love this kind of weather.  It rejuvenates me.  It makes me wax rhapsodically.  It makes me babble idiotically.  It recharges body and soul.

For the last couple of weeks, on and off, a hatchling milk snake has been sheltering under an old sheet of copper that I put out for snakes.  I have been hoping for years for a mouse eating snake to take up residence in the lower driveway wall.  We have plenty of mice and moles and voles around here and a milk snake (or even better, a black rat snake) would put a real dent in their numbers.  So, I’m cautiously hopeful that this little reptile is gonna stick around.  But currently he’s so tiny that nothing but the youngest pink mice could serve him as food.  I wonder if he’s presently surviving on insects, worms and maybe very small salamanders.  Well, it’s something to think about.

But it’s not all fun and games.  I’m still so behind in the repair and maintain chores.  I haven’t even gotten to clean the really high gutters.  I’ve got a twenty-four-foot ladder and my guilt is slowly driving me to get busy on it.  Camera Girl thinks I should hire a handyman to do it but I scoff at this kind of defeatist talk.  And likewise, all the other chores.  They build character and spare the bank account.  So, I’m putting together my schedule and thinking through the order of operations and locating rope and other supplies to set up the ladder.

Today I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen around here.  Whether people call them fishing spiders or wolf spiders I haven’t done a close identification.  But it was a huge bugger.  He’s living close to where the exhaust from my heating system reaches the open air.  I’m guessing the heat is an attractant for insects in the colder months.  I’ll attach a photo here.

Camera Girl says she bought a red coneflower plant for me at Wally Mart.  I’m making a row of various perennials but especially coneflowers.  They attract butterflies and other insects for my photography.  And finally, the other three preying mantis egg sacs that I can still find have all now hatched out.  And they’re pretty evenly spaced around the property.  Nice how that worked out.  Of course, there were another six or eight of the things that seem to have disappeared.  Well, that’s on me.  Anyway, it’s an excellent day to be out and about.  Nothing exciting just the good old summertime.  June, moon, spoon, tune.  All that stuff.