November 9, 2016 - “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and you can fool the majority of the people most of the time.” Some human said that. Or something like that.
Have I ever mentioned that humans are too stupid to live? If anyone still questions that, I have the clinching argument for you. Take last night's US national elections. Please. American Homo moronis just voted, rather overwhelmingly, for xenophobia, racism, abuse of females, bullying, incompetence, irresponsibility, and – oh, yes – species suicide. Well, not they weren't already so deep in denial about human-generated climate change that they were covered in crocodiles. But some of them were at least taking some baby steps toward slowing it down. Forget that now. Deniers in charge, full steam – or full greenhouse gas – ahead.
Now, I understand that the losing candidate for president had the wrong chromosomes. And I know she (barely) won the popular vote. (Thank you idiot electoral college.) But that still leaves over 59 million humans who were stupid, ignorant, and fearful enough to vote for, well, that list of abominations I mentioned above.
It's a failed species. They voted their level of intelligence, and they will get what they deserve. Unfortunately, the rest of us will also get what they deserve.
September 3, 2016 - No, "burkini" has nothing to do with the northwest African state of Burkina Faso. Common misconception. The word is an unholy coupling of two of the most fiendish meat=packing devices ever devised for human females. By human males, of course. There's the "bikini," which is the one they use to display the meat for sale. And there's the "burqa," which is the one used to store the meat for personal consumption.
But the "burkini" is just a blinkin' bathing suit, not a lot different from what human females used to use about a hundred years ago. Which makes it a bit puzzling that the humans in a place called France got so worked up about it that they passed laws banning the burkini. These are the same people who seem to have no problem about nude bathing.
Ah, but wait! It's Muslim women who wear burkinis. So it's a bigotry thing. Bigotry, that core human value. So that's that explained.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention that some humans have rallied to the defense of theri burkinied sistren. Nuns, for example, wear a similar type of beachwear, known as the "penguini."
August 29, 2016 - Ah, long time, brethren and sistren, but a question has arisen that I must address. Here's the question: "What is the meaning of 'journalistic objectivity' among humans?" It means that a journalist should present all sides of a situation without bias. Let me give you an example.
Suppose that Candidate A and Candidate B are running against each other for the office of, say, Resident of the Untied Skates. Let's say that Candidate A is a loathsome, lying, hypocritical bastard who persistently reaffirms, in word and deed, his bona fides for the title of loathsome, lying, hypocritical bastard. He calls Candidate B "crooked," "a bigot," and "the devil," among other things. There is no evidence for any of the things he calls her.
Candidate B is not crooked, bigoted, or satanic. She says Candidate A is a loathsome, lying, hypocritical bastard, which he is, and for which there is ample evidence available to anyone who wants to see it.
An objective human journalist will report exactly what each candidate calls the other and say, "Just listen to what awful people they are! There's not a dime's worth of difference between them. They are exactly the same!"
You, not being a human, may find this strange, but that's humans for you. Evaluating charges for, say, factuality would be considered a violation of objectivity. If, for example, a journalist should discover that one candidate was a loathsome, lying, hypocritical bastard, while the other was not, that would be considered taking sides. To a human, journalistic objectivity means taking everyone at their word. Analysis does not enter into it as that would be too hard.
May 15, 2016 - "Government" is a kind of human organization intended to keep them from killing each other so that they can focus their homicide on only the right people. I can't say that it has proved very successful, but humans like it so much that they have multiplied and proliferated and layered it into every cranny of their existence. Where I live ... let's call it "Extas" to protect the guilty and protect my anonymity, they have three layers of government. They call them "local," "state." and "national." In fact, it is more complicated than that, but I am trying to keep this simple.
Recently, two predators moved into my "local" area and began, as predators do, to feed on the fauna. The local government does not object to predation on the local fauna, but it has rules to prevent over-predation. These new predators didn't believe in rules, so they enlisted the prey to make the government eliminate the rules protecting prey. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the "prey" we are talking about are actually humans, so the rules of logic are off. Surprisingly, the local humans voted to rebuke the predators and support their local government. The humans call this "democracy."
The predators have been temporarily balked, but they now turn to the next layer of government, the state government, which is populated by scavengers who are eager to feed on the predators' leavings. We now have some of these state-level scavengers vowing to overturn the tyranny of that "democracy" stuff.
I know this probably sounds very confusing. Perhaps I can explain human government with a more understandable analogy. Suppose that the governed humans are a buffalo carcass. Some hunter shot it and left it to rot. The jackals, the hyenas, and the lions are all fighting over the carcass.
"Stop scavenging our carcass!" bark the jackals.
"No! Our carcass!" chortle they hyenas. "We're not scavengers! You're the bloody scavengers!"
"Who are you calling a scavenger, scavenger? It's our carcass!" roar the lions. "Off with the pack of you!"
A bit Prime Postulate-y, isn't it?
March 17, 2016 - You know how babies sometimes get a little cranky if you're not paying them enough attention? That's about as bad as it gets with us, but human children develop much worse behavioral problems. Because ... of course ... humans take neglect and abuse ... like everything else ... to extremes. In a successful effort to create yet more of their vile, violent, greedy, grasping ilk. That is the subject of many volumes, but right now, I only want to raise the example of the bratty human kid who, unhappy with the results of some ball game he is playing, quits the game, takes his ball, and goes home. This is actually a cliche for petulant, selfish behavior among humans. And boy, do they have unending use for it.
The latest example is the human US Senate, which is supposed to be composed of some of the most mature and responsible humans in the country. And it probably is. Which tells you how immature and irresponsible the normal run of humans is.
Here's what happened. A member of the US Supreme Court died recently. The way this is supposed to work is that the human President nominates a new member. Then the Senate approves or disapproves the nomination. If they disapprove the nomination, their human constituents generally want to hear at least one reason why. So the dead member was a paragon of the Mean Party, but the President is a member of the Not-so-mean Party. The Senate has a Mean majority. The Supreme Court also had a Mean majority until this Mean member died. The Not-so-mean President has nominated a Not-so-mean candidate to the Supreme Court, but the Mean Senate refuses even to consider him because if they approve him, they will lose the Mean majority on the court. This behavior is counter to the US Constitution, which the Mean Party claims to defend to the death and to the letter. But only when it suits them, apparently. The Mean Senate is behaving similarly to the human child who takes his ball and goes home, except that the Mean Senate doesn't even own the ball. But then, they're Mean. If you know what I mean.
January 23, 2016 - Humans are obsessively fond of something called "money." I may have mentioned this before. Money used to be some kind of metal. Then it became slips of paper. Now, it's an electronic smear on some storage device. You can't eat it, drink it, wear it, live in it, or even touch it for the most part. You can exchange it for things that you can eat, drink, and so forth. It's hard for us to understand why someone would give up a perfectly good banana for an electronic smear, but you must trust me when I say that humans do that. Sometimes. But there are two things humans prefer to do with money: horde it and worship it. Again, trust me ... but I really can't explain it either. Maybe it's because, deep down, they know that money isn't really worth anything, so they might just as well do something completely bizarre and frivolous with it.
In any case, money is so important to humans that it is their primary criterion for choosing leaders. They don't choose leaders who are wise or benevolent. They don't choose leaders who will protect them and make their lives better. They choose leaders who promise not to take their money. Or take less of it than the other guy would. The leaders always lie and squeeze every last electronic smear they can out of the humans, but it is the promise that is important.
So the human leaders in a place called Flint took away their followers clean water and replaced it with polluted water. Because the polluted water was cheaper. Apparently, no one asked why the polluted water was cheaper than the clean water. Although "polluted" vs. "clean" kind of says it all to me. Everyone in Flint has been getting poisoned for the last two years, but that is ok because they can keep a little more money.
While the people in Flint are drinking poisoned water, a lot of people in a place called Los Angeles are breathing poisoned air. That's because of a massive natural gas leak that has been spewing tons of methane into the atmosphere for three months. This is because the humans have been unwilling to spend ,,, you guessed it ... money on safety measures. Or switch to renewable energy that doesn't cook the planet.
There is another huge leak that the humans have not noticed yet. That's the stupidity leak. It's engulfing the planet, but it seems normal to humans.
January 14, 2016 - There are a few Stealth Bonobos (or SBs) living among the human population, attempting to raise the quality of the host population. They can be spotted by their intelligence, kindness, generosity, peacefulness, and absence of violent, homicidal episodes. None of these characteristics occur in the human genome. I regret to say that the efforts of our SBs have so far borne negligible results. Nevertheless, it has been particularly brutal for Stealth Bonobos of late, as we have lost two in a single week. RIP David Bowie and Alan Rickman. You were always too good for this planet.
January 13, 2016 - So this year, I decided to push back my New Year's commentary yet a few more days, under the faulty assumption that things might get better if I wait. Nah, that wasn't it. Just dealing with writer's acre, which is like writer's block, but a lot bigger. Maybe it's just raw horror. Remember: depression is a rational being's reaction to reality.
I was just reviewing my Resolutions for Humans from last year. I have to admit that every single one of them was spot on. (See my 2015 archive, below; they'll still be good for 2016.) Maybe I should hang out a shingle as a psychic. Or maybe they're just so frickin' transparent that any half-wit could have seen it. Which excludes, obviously, humans.
New Year's. (That's like saying, "Morning," instead of "Good morning." Cuz ... really.)
copyright © 2016 Robert L. Blau