Bonobo Diary

November 5, 2014 - Remember, back in the Congo, how antelope liked to invite leopards to lead their herds and tell them what to do? No? You don't? That's because no antelope in creation is stupid enough to do that. For that level of idiocy, it takes humans. And they just proved it again yesterday. Given a choice of leaders who will represent them and leaders who will represent their predators, they invariably go for the predator reps.

And you know, when antelopes get really tired of being savaged and eaten by leopards, they bring in lions to do the job What? No again? Right. That's humans again. The humans got really angry at their leaders for doing nothing but abuse them, so they kicked out all the ones who wanted and tried to do something good for them, and brought in a fresh new batch of even worse abusers. I would try to explain, but it's beyond me. It's a human thing.

October 18, 2014 - Humans, as a species, are vile. "Vile" is an anagram of "evil," which I think is no coincidence. However, whereas "evil" evokes lunatics with bwa-ha-ha laughs, out-sized opinions of self-importance, and grand designs for the conquest of country, world, galaxy, or whatever the current popular apple of the evil eye may be, "vile" is a commoner clay. Vile is petty evil. Nastiness. Nastiness for its own sake. Being vile may have rewards, but at bottom, it's being nasty because you're an asshole. Humans are, and the viler the more powerful, generally speaking.

To return to how humans govern themselves, the earliest form was the One Big Thug form of government. In that form of government, one almighty asshole tells everyone else what to do, and they do it. This is still the best model humans have ever come up with. The One Thug is violent, bloody, mean, arbitrary, and (yes) vile, but he might also be efficient and get a few things of general usefulness done. The weakness of the One Big Thug form is that it tends to be hereditary. That is, the One Big Thug always wants his son to be the next One Big Thug. What happens eventually, if not immediately, is that the hereditary One Big Thug loses his ancestor's talent for getting stuff done, and the humans are left with a bloody, violent, mean, arbitrary, vile, and incompetent ruler. Then some other Big Thug has to overthrow the incumbent Big Thug at a cost of thousands of innocent (or less guilty) humans.

Another human form of government is the Many Big Thugs form. In this form of government, a gaggle of Big Thugs share power. This usually reduces the competence entropy and regular violent upheaval problem. Usually. It also decreases efficiency, as the various Big Thugs bicker and dicker and plot to become the One Big Thug.

Then there's that democracy thang, which I have discussed before. The important thing to remember is that the same Big Thugs still run the show. And the puppetry "elected" by "the people" still come from the same pool of vile assholes. What the election shows is how vile these assholes can be to one another as they vie for the power and wealth that comes with office. May as well go with One Big Thug.

May 25, 2014 - Humans claim to be in favor of something they call "democracy," which basically means majority rule. The great democratic institution, the enabler of the will of the majority, is the "election." Humans claim to be great believers in elections. But something happens between the professed ideal and the awful reality. Ultimately, humans know that someone has to make things right when the majority elects the wrong people.

Take Thailand. Please. The Thais have a very distorted idea of how elections work. They think (1) Everyone votes, (2) You count the votes, and (3) The human with the most votes wins. This always elects the wrong people. For the simple reason that there are a lot more poor people than rich people. When the rich people realize that "the people" have voted wrongly again, they have to call out the army to overturn the election. It makes them look not-democratic. And it has happened twice in less than 10 years. Making the army your go-to democracy-corrector is clumsy, but this is the common fall-back for countries that don't have much experience with democracy. Egypt is having the same problem.

Let's take a more sophisticated country. Please. I'm thinking of Iran. They have the intelligence to appoint their democracy-corrector up front. It's God. Or a guy who claims to talk to God. At least, they don't have to call out the army for every little thing. Even so, Iran has had trouble with democracy. The first time they elected a president, "the people" got it wrong. They always do. They elected a guy who was not a fire-breathing, demon-spawned zealot. So the next time, they had a God-appointed (indirectly) committee screen the candidates and disqualify any who were insufficiently ... avid. Some might say that this was not very democratic, but they don't understand democracy very well, do they? It got a more correct result. Although you can never trust those "people," as long as any of them get to vote.

Ah, but let us discuss the most accomplished democratic human country in the world. Take the United States. Please. The US has finessed the whole democracy-corrector issue by contracting it out to its approved political parties. They are not called "parties" because they are fun. Back in the day, the Lords of Lucre asked who would like to be a party to conning the ignorant into voting the right way. And they got two parties. You can't get elected Miss Congeniality in the US without going through one of the tame gatekeepers. And the legions of stupid humans have accepted the Two Parties as the unalterable way of the universe, possibly even incorporating it into their DNA. The Two Parties are different enough for one of them to try to disqualify still more humans to make the elections turn our even better, but neither will ever challenge the interests of the Masters. Ever.

April 14, 2014 - I have some encouraging news today. It is possible that humans will kill each other off before they get around to wiping us out. I offer but a couple of recent examples, although it's hard to choose from among the daily roll call of intraspecies slaughter. In one human hive called Chicago, they averaged one human shot every hour for 36 hours. In another instance, one human shot three others to death. That's a very small number by human standards, but this one was interesting for the light it casts on the dark human brain. First, the human shooter wanted to kill the other humans because their belief in the imaginary big sky spirit was a little different from his. He did not know the humans he shot, although that is very common among humans. But second, he was wrong about his human victims' imaginary sky spirit beliefs. They were actually the same as his. However, the humans were standing in the wrong place. But finally, the humans are not very upset about this triple murder. They may "tsk, tsk" a bit, and they may kill the killer to show willing, but they are not outraged or frightened. That is because this was a good crime from their point of view. The killer was white, native, and "Christian," which is one way of describing sky-spirit beliefs. If the killer had been dark-skinned, foreign, and Muslim (another sky-spirit variant), you would be able to hear the howling in the Congo. Humans love guns like we love sex. And hate sex like we hate guns.

April 7, 2014 - An interesting fact about humans is that they are unable to share. I believe it's in their DNA. To replace sharing, they have come up with a complicated quid pro quo system. The first cut of that was what they call "trade." I give you a banana, you give me some grapes. But this was too hard for them. They could never agree how many grapes equaled one banana. So they invented "money" as a universal medium of exchange. Money isn't worth anything, but as long as they pretend it is, it kind of works. The beauty of it is that you can do some rubbish like write computer code, and humans will give you money for it. Then you can use the money to get food and other actually useful things. When you are given money for writing computer code (or whatever), they say that you are paid for doing work. We will put aside, for the moment, whether writing computer code is actually work or whether it worth getting paid for, put it certainly can be a pain in the hmm-hmm.

But this brings us to the question of how humans decide how much work is worth. It is more complicated than how many grapes equal one banana. There are many factors, such as how hard the work is, how many humans you can find to do it, how boring or dirty or uncomfortable it is. But you will never guess what the most important factor is. Give up? Sure you do. It is who does the work! That's right. The work of male humans is more valuable than the work of female humans. This would never occur to anyone but a human. Have I mentioned my assessment of human intelligence?

April 5, 2014 - Just read an article by one of the less crazy humans. He said last week was a "good news/news/bad news" week. I love those because the only other kind of week is bad news/more bad news/horrific news. The good news was that the new human health insurance program seems to be working. Imagine that someone offered us protection against leopards, and half our elders jumped up and down screaming that it was against nature not to be devoured by leopards. Well, many humans just opted for not getting ripped apart by leopards. Frankly, that's genius-level thinking for humans.

The bad news, by the way, is that humans continue to torch the planet without qualm or hesitation, so what's the point of human health insurance, eh? Some of the less stupid humans, called "scientists," went into great detail explaining why crapping in your own nest and setting the walls on fire for warmth were bad ideas, but their conclusions remain very controversial and certainly nothing do anything about. In the meantime, another human war veteran went off his nut and shot up another shitload of humans, including himself. After analyzing the human news media, the closest I can find to a consensus on all these events is, "It's Obama's fault, and we need more guns." I'm not quite sure what this means, but it seems to be a mantra to solve all human woes.