Yahoos fighting in Gulliver's Travels.

What happens when snakes follow humans to the temperate zone?

I wonder if two other words so close in structure have such different meanings.  “Rapture” means a feeling of ecstasy, a sudden glorious elation or to a large religious group, “transportation to Heaven” while leaving all sinners to destruction and death and Jesus Christ back on Planet Earth.

“Rupture” translates to breaking open, sudden groveling, a hernia, suffering from something broken – or a sudden disaster. All for just changing one letter out of seven. We have several great-grandchildren who will have the capacity to live fruitful, bountiful and rapturous lives beyond the 21st century.

The Big Question: Will Planet Earth be too hot to live out their life expectancy? Will governments rupture into competing groups to “save” a country? We used to call increasing heat on earth and its oceans “global warming” instead of the present “climate change.” If the outside temperature is 118 degrees, do we feel rapture when we enter the bar cooled to 72 degrees? Phoenix, Arizona, had 54 straight days of more than 110 degrees last summer, with night temps around 90 degrees. If old people fell on a sidewalk, they often suffered second-or third-degree burns. I see the Arizona Legislature passed a law creating the new position of heat czar in the state cabinet for the 2024 summer.  

Will global warming rupture the relationships among species?

As more than one billion people depend upon fish for the protein necessary for life, should they be concerned that most fish seem to be getting smaller? Reports from the industry indicate that three-fourths of the marine fish population has seen their size “dwindle” between 1960 and 2020.

Marine biologists from the University of Tasmania in Australia and the University of Massachusetts conducted experiments on sardines and brook trout by feeding them the same diet but raising them in different water temperatures of 59 and 68 degrees. By the end of the experiment the fish in the warmer tank were less than half the size of the fish in the cooler tank. The result gives us something to think about. Crappies as goldfish?

European climate experts have records indicating the continent is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world. European populations are concentrated in cities and roads, bridges and buildings made of concrete and tiles heat up faster and stay hot longer than grass and trees. The Copernicus Climate Change Service and the United Nations estimated heat waves in the summer of 2023 created 110-degree weather in nearly half of southern Europe and resulted in the deaths of at least 60,000 people because they lacked air conditioning. Europe is also closer to warmer ocean and atmospheric currents making London much warmer than Chicago although it is much further north.

The good news? Europe in the last two years generated more electricity with renewables than by burning fossil fuels.

When the North Dakota congressional delegation voted against the Biden administration efforts to put more electric vehicles on the roads, it indicated how anti-science ignoramuses are bringing on the heat sooner in the Divided States of America. It’s time to tell the Koch father and sons goodbye. In Vietnam in April, 102 weather stations recorded record highs, experiencing temperature up to 110 degrees. And it was very, humid which increases the heat index. At the same time, Kolkata, India, and surrounding country hit 108 degrees.

Dr. Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology states: “We are on a rollercoaster ride in terms of temperature, which is not going to come down any time soon. It’s going to be worse, which means we need to be prepared.”

The Divided States of America suffered the rupture of 350 tornadoes in April, the second highest number in history, but the highest number of 4s and 5s. As I am writing this paragraph, Kansas and Oklahoma are in a tornado zone that almost guarantees 4s and 5s, and the entire storm is moving to the Great Lakes states. Global warming has millions of species on the move to cooler climes. White-tailed deer, a common sight in most states, are moving north to Canada. Woodland caribou in northern Canada can’t find other forests to move to. The North Pole has no trees yet. Poisonous snakes are moving from the Tropical Zone to the Temperate Zone because it is too hot. Anti-venoms are usually not stored in cooler zones. The World Health Organization estimates 1.8 to 2.7 million people are bitten by venomous snakes each year, causing 138,000 deaths and about 400,000 amputations and permanent disabilities.

High tides from 2013 to 2023 increased six to nine inches on the shores of Texas to North Carolina, a 2,000-mile coastline. Half of the eight billion people on earth live 50 miles or less from ocean coastlines. If this increase continues, another nine inches will be added by 2050 – or sooner.

To sum up the world situation on global warming, David Boyd, UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment from 2018 to April 2023, sums it up: “I started out six years ago talking about the right to a healthy environment having the capacity to bring about systemic and transformative changes. But this powerful human right is up against an even more powerful force in the global economy, a system that is absolutely based on the exploitation of people and nature. A

nd unless we change that fundamental system, then we’re just re-shuffling the chairs on the Titanic.” Remember: the unsinkable sank in two hours. Hundreds of scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that pledges by polluters will not be met in time to prevent disastrous increases in temperatures. Across the globe. And why don’t Trumplicans buy electric cars? Because they are called Bidenmobiles.  

Will a political party that bans The Scoop on Poop change the climate?

The battle to save the earth from additional global warming may be beyond the tipping point, and one of our political parties, the GOP (now known as God’s Own Party) is so anti-science it will probably not have a “Jesus” point about climate. It’s more interesting to battle about culture than climate. Trumpistan is so busy banning books, transforming transgenders, hobbling homosexuals, activating anti-abortion laws and protocols, shrinking federal monuments, controlling state and federal courts, filling the malls, streets, churches and human hands and pockets with firearms, it will leave preserving His Garden of Eden up to God, not Joe and Jane Sixpack and their representatives.

We will save the world by banning books in schools and libraries, turn librarians into felons for approving sexy books, keeping teenagers from reading such culture-destroying books as The Scoop on Poop and Walter, the Farting Dog. It must be a shock for the book-banning Moms for Stupidity to discover people poop and dogs fart. I can assure you, both are facts. Our family has had the pleasure and aromatic smell of eight dogs.  

If we don’t amend the Constitution we will commit mass suicide

There is no chance the Trumplican Party will agree to amend the Constitution that requires each state, regardless of population, to have two senators. It made no sense in the 1770s, if all men, women and children were “equal” (when only white property owners were equal), it is an absolute democratic disaster now. Two hundred years ago Virginia had a population 12 times the population of Delaware. In 2024 California, a state with a White minority, has 63 times the population of Wyoming while both have two senators. In another decade,70% of DSA citizens will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30%, who are White, much older and rural, will elect 70 senators.

The senate, which used to be “the saucer that cooled” the hot debate in the country, has dropped the saucer, broken it and now meets in two silos with no connecting doors. The filibuster has no basis in any governing state and continues to make the DSA even more undemocratic. In half a century, filibusters have blocked legislation on abortion, voting rights, gun control, political campaign funding and other legislation supported by huge majorities.

Forty Trumplican senators representing only 21% of the population can keep us killing 50,000 and wounding 100,000 people while adding another 20 million firearms to the home arsenals each year. We must also dump the Electoral College in the trashcan of history. We have five conservative justices on the Supreme Court who have been chosen by presidents who have lost the popular vote. The present Supreme Court is wallowing in the same mud-wrestling crap the Senate has drowned in. The chances our democracy will survive the empire-expectancy death sentence like Rome, Russia and many others are slim to none – and guess what, Slim has moved quickly to a state which has assisted suicide.

The sounds of death are deafening. In the years between 2016 and 2023 we have had 91 colleges and universities close for lack of interest. Politico says “Double-haters” is a popular term because a majority of voters hate old Joe Biden and old Donald Trump because both are too old to serve as president. An ABC News/Ipsos Poll shows 81% of voters think Biden is too old while 55% think the same of Trump. Approval ratings trash both: Biden-35%, Trump-33%. Looking at head-to-head numbers, Trump leads Biden 46% to 44% among all adults. Among likely voters it’s Biden over Trump, 49% to 45%.

The most ironic, satiric statement in our Constitution uses only five words: “All men are created equal.” When have we believed it? The Anglo-Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift said: “We have as much religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

In 1792 he was so angry about the treatment of the Irish poor by Irish and English authorities, he wrote the most famous satiric essay in the world to this date: “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial To the Public.” He shocked his world with this solution: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted or baked, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”

He then follows with arguments, markets, financial considerations and other possible preparation styles. If you want to understand Swift’s political pessimism, read his Gulliver’s Travels published in 1726. The Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, Glubbdubridians and the Houyhnhnms will delight you while he attacks European politicians and their animalistic friends. In his opinion: “Whoever could make two years of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, that the whole race of politicians together.”

It has come to pass that millions of species and humankind hangs in the balance in this century. If  the world doesn’t cooperate to solve global warming, all life will rupture. Fundamentalist Christian believers will be raptured to Heaven while Jesus Christ returns to earth and starts the thousand-year end times.