Bonobo Diary

December 26, 2012 - I have for you, brethren and sistren, another insight into the human ... for want of a better term ... character. This is it: If X is horrible, 2X has to be the solution. I know that you, as rational creatures, will find this next to impossible to believe. However, please bear with me.

Here is an example. Suppose that humans are conducting tests on the efficacy of a new drug. In the first round of tests, one in ten subjects die. For the next round, the humans will double the dose of the drug. If, as you might guess, two in ten subjects die in the second round, the humans will double the dose again for the next go.

No, really. They do this in real life. Every time there is another gun massacre, they decide that the solution is ... yes, more guns. When an even crazier than usual human slaughters little humans in a school, the answer is not to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of crazi(er) people or to prevent the crazi(er) people from walking into schools armed. No. It is to arm all the adult humans in the schools so that there can be a healthy crossfire. When that doesn't work, they will want to arm the little humans as well.

December 18, 2012 - And the other way humans deny responsibility, not to mention reality, for their mass murders is this: It was God's Will. Apparently, God slaughters little children because certain bad humans refuse to make little children say the right prayers in the right place. Or because they fail to persecute certain other humans designated by the good humans. God bears a remarkable resemblance to the humans who make this claim. He shares all their opinions and, like them, is a tiny-minded, self-righteous egomaniac. You might say the humans created him in their own image. In fairness to humans, insane and stupid as the species may be, I must mention that this lot is the scummiest layer of a bad pond.

December 17, 2012 - Some of the brethren and sistren have been asking this question: "Are humans stark, raving mad?" The answer, as usual, is "yes." I have already told you that humans are insane as a species, too stupid to survive, and lack the moral compass of an alley cat. However, I don't believe I have adequately dealt with the human love of guns. Humans love firearms as moths love flame. If humans were mice, they would breed cats. If they were turtles, they would invent nets. If they were humans, they would drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, and take drugs. Oh. Right.

But about the human love affair with guns. In the evolutionary scheme, humans are basically intelligent rabbits, prey animals. But the gun makes them alpha predators. The gun is the coward's courage and the pipsqueak's power. Humans love to shoot things. That includes anything of the furry persuasion, such as us, of course, but what humans really, really love to shoot is other humans. Periodically, a human so crazy that even other humans recognize the madness picks up a gun or two or three and starts slaughtering other humans at random. The periods keep getting shorter, by the way. The same day as the Connecticut massacre 3 days ago, there were at least two other shootings the humans considered important enough to announce as news.

So how do other humans react to these even crazier than normal shooting sprees? They close ranks to protect the guns. The standard litany is, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." So leave the poor guns alone, right? It isn't their fault. It's the crazy people! And you have to let crazy people have guns. If crazy people can't have guns, who will be next? And honestly, all humans are crazy, anyway.

November 21, 2012 - How to explain the "Fiscal Cliff," O brethren and sistren? I will compare it to lemmings swarming over precipices. But, you may object, the lemming mass suicides are a myth. Yes. Keep that in mind.

Suppose that you are a lemming, foraging around for the things lemmings forage around for. Or maybe you're reading the Sunday paper. Suddenly, you are accosted by a deputation of hawks and foxes and owls and other things that eat lemmings.

"The cliff!" they howl. "The cliff! You are about to go over the cliff!"

"I don't think so," you reply. "I'm just foraging or reading or whatever."

"No no no!" they insist. "You have to go over the cliff! Because you're lemmings. And that's what lemmings do! It's your destiny ... unless you make a deal with us."

"I don't want to make a deal with you," you protest.

"But you have to," cry the lemming eaters urgently. "It's that or the cliff! You have no choice! Here's the situation: we're very hungry. We want to eat you."

"I don't want you to eat me," you say.

"Exactly," say the foxes and weasels and things. "Each of us wants something. We want to eat you, and you don't want us to eat you. That means we have to compromise! Let's say, we eat ... 80% of you. How does that sound?"

And if you think haggling them down to 75% is a triumph, you are half way to becoming human.

November 10, 2012 - All this election fracas and hoo-ha and brouhaha has prompted a lot of questions about the meaning of the term "democracy" in human. Well, this is how it works.

Some rich humans decide that they want to protect the wealth they have and get a lot more. They create two Wealth Protection Instruments (WPI), but they don't call them that, lest someone get the right idea. Instead, the call them "political parties," or just "parties." Each party is empowered to choose some human wealth protection and enhancement candidates, though (again) they don't call them that, of course. They call them things like "gubernatorial candidates" or "presidential candidates" or "congressional candidates." The purpose of the WPIs (or parties) is to vet the candidates thoroughly to ensure that they will dutifully serve the rich people in all important matters. Then they have "elections" to allow the non-rich humans to choose between the sets of approved candidates. Other parties are allowed to exist and even put forward candidates, but they are not allowed to win. The rich people understand that the human brain can barely encompass the idea of choosing "A" or "B." Any more than that is just too confusing for them.

Now, you might think that having just two approved parties, both WPIs, would result in two identical partyies and legions of identical candidates. This is not actually true. Ask any accumulation of two humans their opinions on one subject, and they will give you at least three opinions and fight to the death over all of them. Create two WPIs, and they will create distinct structures of absolute truth and fight over them like cats and dogs. Or worse, like humans. The key point to the rich people is that their interests are protected, and the WPIs do not fight over that. Anything else is fair game, and the WPIs do fight over just about everything else. The classical divide between the WPIs is that one is inevitably meaner and smaller minded than the other. The meaner WPI tends to want to make the weaker humans suffer. The less mean party tends to consider suffering optional. The rich people don't care about the details. That is why the outcome of human elections matters.

November 8, 2012 - The bad news is that humans still run the world. And this is unlikely to change in the next 5 years. I'll come up with an exact date for the collapse of human hegemony after December 21st, when the humans realize that the world is not going to end because some Aztec calendar maker got called to dinner. Or was that Incan? Anyway, I will be just in time to give the humans some other end-of-the-world date to obsess about.

But the good news is that the American humans didn't elect the most lunatic members of their species to lead them. This time. I am aware that this bucks the trend of centuries, but I am nonetheless grateful to all those humans who spared me the indignity of swallowing drano yesterday morning. A reprieve. However brief.

October 25, 2012 - It behooves me to clear up a widespread misunderstanding concerning the h Mitt Romney, a candidate for the human presidency of the United States of America. Many of the brethren and sistren have expressed the opinion that h Romney does not have any beliefs. They cite his frequent mood and policy swings from one end of the political spectrum to the other, depending on whom he is talking to, what the polls say, and possibly the state of the weather. Even other humans have remarked on h Romney's ideological shape-shifting. It is my solemn duty to debunk this erroneous characterization of h Romney. He most certainly does believe in something, and that most fervently. He believes that he should be president of the United States.

October 9, 2012 - I fear I must return to the subject of the "presidential debate." You, my fellow bonobos, are frightfully confused about the results. Why, you ask, has the human who lied his ass off been universally declared "the winner," feted and lionized, and crowned as the likely next human president? Perhaps, say some of the more percipient, the humans were at first fooled by the lying human's bravado, but afterwards, when the lies were revealed and abundantly documented by "fact checkers," why are the humans still gushing over the liar, fulsomely touting his triumphant performance, and, well, not saying, "Good god, what a lying scumbag?" I envy your ignorance of human behavior.

Allow me to remind you of three salient and related hallmarks of human behavior. They worship the Prime Postulate. They are delusional. They have a different definition of truth than you and I do. We bonobos think that truth is something that fits objective reality. If something exists or something happened, we say it is true. Humans think that Truth (and they slap a capital on it, see?) is something that fits the story that they like. Humans are always going on about what separates them from the "lower animals." Well, that about sums it up.

I will give you an analogy for illustrative purposes. The male bower bird constructs a lovely "bower" to attract females. The bower is colorful, garish, and absolutely useless for anything other than attracting female bower birds. Tbe female bower bird, overcome by the tawdry show, throws herself into the male's wings and gets thoroughly screwed. She doesn't ask if the male is honest, intelligent, kind, moral, thrifty, brave, or cheerful. The tinsely show is everything. Human voters are exactly like female bower birds, right down to the thorough screwing.

October 4, 2012 - The B & S have been asking me to explain last night's "presidential debate," apparently thinking that I watch that infantile crap. But never fear! Even though I haven't watched that infantile crap in years, I can still give you a ... partial explanation.

A presidential debate is a human gladiatorial event, along the lines of other quasi-military extravaganzas, such as football games and boxing matches. There are two combatants, a referee (whom the combatants routinely ignore), a raft of scorers (also known as pundits), and (of course) shiploads of spectators. The combatants engage in a war of words while the referee flails impotently about. The scorers award points based on "zingers" (positive) and "gaffes" (negative). A "zinger" is a clever one-liner at the opponent's expense. A "gaffe" is anything deemed stupid by the scorers. Prime Postulate violations are the worst gaffes. At the end of the debate, the scorers declare a winner and a loser, in much the same way that boxing officials do. Another analogy is the quarterback rating in football.

The alleged reason for presidential debates is for the candidates, or combatants, to argue their policies to persuade the human voters of the superiority of those policies. The assumption is that all the human voters have been living in caves for the last decade with no communication with the outside world. In many cases, this is true.

September 22, 2012 - The question I hear most often these days, O brethren and sistren, is, "Why do humans lie so much?" Number 2, along the same lines, is "Why do humans have so little regard for facts?" You have come to the right bonobo.

I have often mentioned the Prime Postulate, but now it is time for me to explain its philosophical underpinnings. There was once a human named Rene Descartes, who was a philosopher and a mathematician. He famously reasoned, "I think, therefore I am. And therefore, the Judaeo-Christian biblical bully god also exists." The second part isn't quite as famous, but that is h Descartes' reasoning. Although he may not have phrased it quite like that.

In any case, humans reason like that, and Cartesian reasoning has carried over into the human political and social spheres. In that translation, h Descartes' "I" becomes a "we." So the reasoning goes like this:

1. We're right, therefore we're right.

2. There must also be an omnisient, omnipotent God who thinks exactly the way we do and justifies and validates everything we do.

3. Therefore, we have the Truth, and compared to the Truth, facts are as piffle before the wind.

4. Anything that advances the Truth is True.

If I may restate this in a perhaps more understandable way, facts have nothing to do with the Truth (with a capital "T"). Truth is defined as what the Good Guys (i.e., "us") know it to be. A lie that advances the Truth is truer than fact, truer than truth (with a small "t").

That is why humans can believe all sorts of rubbish, lie with a straight face, sneer at science, and embrace their own doom.

It's very simple, really.

September 21, 2012 - A big question for the human punditry these days is this: "Who the heck is h Mitt Romney?" Is he the "moderate" who was Governor of Massachusetts, or the "conservative" who is running for President? ("Moderate" and "conservative" are political terms among humans. They have meant different things over the years, but today, "moderate" means "a little bit mean," while "conservative" means "as mean as you can get." Humans like their leaders mean, under the "meanest son of a bitch in the valley" theory of government. It's a lot like lions. The biggest, strongest, nastiest lion kills all the cubs that aren't his, gets all the females, and never has to work again. You could say he has the place of pride. Humans are exactly like that, except that they roar more than lions.)

But I digress. Back to h Romney. Who is he, they ask. Which of the two? The answer, of course, is that he is neither. He is the little man behind the curtain, the one who projects big scary heads on the walls to frighten and cajole little girls and their motley friends to kill his powerful enemies for him. h Romney's political philosophy isn't "moderate" or "conservative." It's "I want to be President." To achieve that, he'll give any head he has to.

September 19, 2012 - I write today to quash an ugly rumor. It is not - I repeat, NOT - true that h Barack Obama has hired h Mitt Romney to run against him for human President of the United States. I know that it looks like that. There's the "leaked" video of h Romney crudely insulting 47% of the humans needed to elect a president. That's his number. Needing around 50% of the vote to be elected, he claims to write off 47% out of hand. Then there was his premature (and hence grossly inaccurate) criticism of h Obama's response to the latest iteration of the Crazy Muslim show. His pugnacious refusal to admit error. His continual projection of arrogant wealth and disdain for the hoi polloi. I know what it looks like, but it's not true. The fact of the matter is that h Romney really is that dumb.

And this is the guy who got his party's nomination because he was the least crazy of the lot.

February 24, 2012 - Yo, brethren and sistren! I have been receiving inquiries about what a "person" is. A lot of you are under the misconception that "person" means "human." Nothing could be further from the truth. A person is an imaginary entity created by powerful humans to do their dirty work and take the guilt and responsibility for them. So the powerful human is not greedy and heartless; the person, also known as a "corporation," is. And that's fine, because a corporation is supposed to be greedy and heartless.

We know that these imaginary entities are persons because the human Supreme Court told us so in an important ruling. Humans have no such legal support for their personhood. Humans, except for the rich ones, are "resources," which are things persons use, typically to do work. Every person, or corporation, has a "Human Resources" office for managing its human hammers and nails.