Frontiersman, February 2026

Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin — and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone.

—from Of Men and Monsters, 1968
by William Tenn

A common perception of the natural world is that it’s an idyllic and picturesque wonderland. That’s a myth. When we gaze upon a seemingly peaceful natural scene, we’re seeing an illusion. It isn’t the Disneyesque fairyland that we perceive it to be, filled with happily frolicking creatures, living in harmony with one another. It’s an endless and relentless struggle to stay alive. In that imagined realm of peaceful beauty, predators kill without hesitation or remorse. Prey animals that are incautious or unlucky die horrible deaths while being ripped apart by predators. The survival strategy for most species appears to be to produce as many offspring as possible so that, by the time that most of them have been polished off as food, a sufficient number will remain to perpetuate the species. Herbivores, if they aren’t culled by diseases, parasites, or predators, will become too numerous, strip the landscape, and waste away due to a lack of food. Parasites and disease organisms will inflict discomfort, pain, or death on their host organisms. The only category of creatures that seems to be innocent of harm is the scavengers. They don’t kill anything. They eat only what’s already dead. They don’t strip the environment by overgrazing, and they clean up the mess that other creatures leave behind.

We like to think that we’re above such natural animals (q.v.), but we’re not as far above them as we might like to believe. Like those natural animals, we have too many offspring and, without sufficient culling by diseases, parasites, or predators, we exceed the capacity of the natural world to sustain us. We kill other animals without hesitation or remorse, sometimes for food but sometimes merely for sport or pleasure. We imprison or torture our own kind. We also kill our own kind, combining the horrors of both predator and prey into one unhappy species.

Our claim of superiority over the natural animals isn’t entirely convincing but, in our defense, we have somehow stumbled across such virtues as compassion, generosity, mercy, and humility. I don’t know how that happened, or why, because such virtues don’t seem to have any survival value in the natural world in which our species evolved, but there they are anyway. Such virtues don’t guide our behavior as often as they should and not very effectively when they do, and our grip on them is tenuous. Even so, if we can manage to hang on to them for long enough, and if our species can manage to survive for another hundred thousand years or so, then maybe our descendants will eventually evolve into something better. Maybe, instead of being merely human, they might actually become humane.

“Natural animals” refers to animals in their original, wild state, living freely in ecosystems, rather than being domesticated or confined, encompassing diverse groups like mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and invertebrates, from lions and elephants to tiny insects, all playing crucial roles in nature's balance.

—From Google Search

There’s a last time for everything.

—Saturday, August 25, 1979

Experience would be a better teacher if people would be better students.

—Friday, February 6, 1981

Man’s capacity for self-deception is boundless.

—Sunday, May 3, 1981

Some things cannot be taught, but only learned.

—Tuesday, February 7, 1989

Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, January 1818
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Lost Colossus
Sam Aurelius Milam III, September, 1993
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “A vast and fallen metal arm
Lies on an island. Near it in the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose brow,
And lips, and eyes, and broken crowning band,
Tell that its sculptor well that wisdom read
Which yet survives, stamped on those lifeless things,
Those fragments left by people now long dead.
Inscribed nearby is this, and nothing more:
‘Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and endless waves roll far away.”

Additional Reading

Lost Colossus

http://sovereign-library.org.uk/Gallery/Posters/Posters.html#Lost_Colossus

So Simple

Sam Aurelius Milam III

Here’s an idea for how to solve two intractable problems, both at the same time and all in one fell swoop. The idea came to me in my sleep. All that we need to do is to have a worldwide nuclear war. That will solve the overpopulation problem. The resulting nuclear winter will solve the global warming problem.

So simple!

Global warming, an AI Overview

Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth's climate system observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, leading to rising average surface temperatures and widespread climate change effects. This rapid warming, faster than natural cycles can explain, is causing more extreme weather, melting ice, rising sea levels, and disruptions to ecosystems.

—from Google Search

Nuclear winter, an AI Overview

A nuclear winter is a severe, long-term climatic cooling predicted after a large-scale nuclear war, caused by massive amounts of smoke and dust from firestorms blocking sunlight, plunging global temperatures, disrupting agriculture, depleting the ozone layer, and causing mass starvation and ecosystem collapse. Temperatures could drop 20-40°C for months, with cooler conditions lasting years, leading to crop failures, famine, and widespread death, making it an extinction-level event.

—from Google Search

The Doomsday Clock

The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the nonprofit organization Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Maintained since 1947, the Clock is a proxy mechanism for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances: A hypothetical global catastrophe is represented by midnight on the Clock, with the Bulletin’s opinion on how close the world is to “zero” represented by a certain number of minutes or seconds to midnight.

—from Wikipedia

The Doomsday Clock
from Wikipedia

Additional Reading
•

Industrial Society and Its Future, by Theodore John Kaczynski
http://sovereign-library.org.uk/Main_Directory.html#Kaczynski
•

Human Society and it’s Future
http://frontiersman.org.uk/2012/2012-10/2012-10.html#Human_Society_and_its_Future

Predictions, from 1987
from the miniseries Amerika

You never took any interest in the rest of the world, in understanding the rest of the world. You always saw things through your own vision. You wanted things to be right, by which you meant, moral, and democratic, and your own way. So, when you found yourself the most powerful country in the world, the only clear policy you could agree on was being anti-communist, and with such a, with such a simplistic viewpoint, you began to miss the point of a lot of what was going on in the world. People who looked to America as an example for their own aspirations found themselves opposed by you because, because we supported them. One of the ways we were able to usurp the United Nations was because, when the nations of the world, rightly or wrongly began to perceive you as the problem, you gave up. You took your ball and you went home. When there was a conflict in the world, you either acted as a strong man bending backwards for fear of offending someone or, suddenly thrashing about wildly in some futile and foolish attempt to prove you were not weak. So ultimately you found yourself alone, feared, envied, hated.

—Andrei Denisov, KGB colonel
Soviet Advisor
to the Central Administrative Area

Additional Reading
•

Quotations from the miniseries Amerika
http://sovereign-library.org.uk/Main_Directory.html#Amerika_the_Miniseries

Letter to the Editor

Dear Sam,

I love the Frontiersman. You know your stuff. In “A Term Limit” [December 2025], you bring up a point I have long pointed out. The Speaker of the House can be anybody. They don’t have to be an elected representative and the Speaker is third in line for the POTUS.

And I also agree with you, Trump’s days are numbered. He was recently heard over a “hot mic” when talking to Putin, that they figured they were going to live to at least 150 years of age, due to medical organ transplant technology. I disagree. His ticker is winding down. You can see it in his face.

There will be some lackey who will try to walk and talk like Trump but won’t succeed. I gotta admit, Trump is like the guy at a 3-ring circus who gets everyone’s attention. He’s good at stirring up the shit, but horrible at delivering promises....

Any who, Sam, be well.

—S. H., a prisoner

A Sign of the Times
Sam Aurelius Milam III

The newsletters that I send to prisoners in Arkansas are being either rejected by the prisons, and returned, or disappearing. I wouldn’t know about the ones that disappear except for letters to the editor, inquiring about the missing newsletters. I don’t know if my replies to those inquiries have been delivered. As far as I’m aware, the rejections and disappearances are happening only in Arkansas. I haven’t received any such inquiries, or any returned newsletters, from other states.

It’s tempting to believe that, when an item of mail is sealed and bears a first class stamp, then the prison is required to deliver that mail. It’s tempting to believe that any prisoner who’s arbitrarily deprived of his first class mail, by the prison, would have a cause of action against the prison. I suspect that, instead, the prisons, like other parts of the police state, can do whatever they want to do with the U.S. mail, and that there isn’t anything that either me, the prisoners, or the Post Office can do about it.

For now, I’ve removed the prisoners in Arkansas from my mailing list. I hope that, eventually, the prisons will stop rejecting my newsletters, although I don’t know how I’d find out about it, since I’m no longer sending the newsletters.

Known Locations
Sam Aurelius Milam III

PBS News Weekend, Sunday, January 11, 2026, presented a report about some scientists who are using radio tracking devices to follow the migrations of Monarch butterflies. The devices are small enough that they can be carried by butterflies. They’re sufficiently powerful to track migrations between Canada and Mexico. That’s a migration of thousands of miles.

On Unusual Suspects, season 5 episode 3 of The X-files, Susanne Modeski discovered that she was being tracked by a federal agency, using a device that her dentist had installed in one of her teeth.

In the X-Files episode, the tracking devices were presumably fiction. In the PBS report, they’re reportedly fact. Thus, anybody who’s recently had a dental or surgical procedure, or maybe even something as simple as a blood test or a vaccination, can’t be sure. Maybe such a person is carrying a tracking device.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.

—from If this Goes On-, 1953
by Robert A. Heinlein

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Reprint Policy — Permission is hereby given to reproduce this newsletter in its entirety or to reproduce material from it, provided that the reproduction is accurate and that proper credit is given. I do not have the authority to give permission to reprint material that I have reprinted from other sources. For that permission, you must apply to the original source. I would appreciate receiving a courtesy copy of any document or publication in which you reprint my material.

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— Sam Aurelius Milam III, editor