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I like animals. Some make great pets, some make for great meals, and some are just beautiful and fascinating to watch. In the 3rd category, my favorite animals are the apes. Monkeys too, but monkeys are cute and funny, whereas apes are magnificent, and inspiring. We are descended from apes. Our relation to monkeys is probably a few million years further back.
I could watch documentaries about Orangutans, Baboons, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Bonobos for hours. Chimps, they say, are the most like humans, with something like 97% of our DNA being identical. That’s what makes this recent news so believable, and so disturbing. Recently, two attacks by chimps on gorillas have been witnessed. As far as scientists know, this has never happened before.
Of course, the attacks were by groups of 20-30 chimps, against like 5 or 6 gorillas, but that’s a common chimp tactic. They even mention it in the jungle book, that the other animals all hate them because they don’t fight fair. And one surprising, and rather horrifying, aspect of the attacks was that they drove the adult gorillas off, only to kill (and eat) the infants.
The theories mentioned in the article are global warming, food shortages and habitat shrinkage. I’d like to add one more. Maybe the chimps have started thinking of gorillas as a food source because they’ve evolved, and simply see the gorillas as animals, whereas they, the chimpanzees, see themselves as the dominant, enlightened species. They have developed some primitive tools, and with all the chattering they do it seems they have a rudimentary language (but gorillas surely can’t be far behind them in this), so maybe they have started to think of themselves very much like we humans think of ourselves., and we humans often eat the young of other animals. That’s what veal and lamb are. And eggs. Don’t forget eggs.
In any event, this is something that bears watching. Especially if the gorillas start fighting back.

Now that the whole world is aware that the whole Afghan war has been nothing more than a huge money suck, a deliberate orgy of violence with the sole purpose of enriching weapons contractors, isn’t it about time that Julian Assange was released from prison, Edward Snowden welcomed home from exile, and Chelsea Manning vindicated?
After all, they were right. The information they released, about war crimes and skullduggery, is information that might have saved lives if anybody in government had listened to it.
In fact, isn’t it about time that there was a truth commission to go through all U.S. classified information (of which there is a huge amount, to be sure, but it pales compared to actually trying to monitor the internet), and declassify anything that is obviously classified just to cover somebody’s ass, or which poses no threat at all to U.S. military security. You know, all those studies, going back years, which show that global warming is a threat to our species, that marijuana is totally harmless and has scads of medicinal uses, and that most legislation is written by lobbyists. They could release all of the information about the Kennedy assassination, the other Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination, and 9/11.
It would be an eye-opener, for sure. But, who could we trust on such a commission? Nobody in congress, for sure. We are likely to find out bad things about them, and they would be spending all their time figuring out how to keep their own stuff classified. The military, I trust even less. The Supreme Court? Hah.
It should be a fairly large number of people, so each flagged document could be checked two or three times, it should be people who can read fast and understand big words, and of course they will have to have some security clearance: over 18, no felonies, no known affiliations with terrorist groups or hostile nations, that sort of thing. I would suggest law students, of whom there are thousands at American Universities, and they could get extra credit, maybe based on how many documents reviewed, or their success rate. Maybe add some journalists into the mix, but nobody needs to get paid, they would be looking for the big scoop as their reward. You should have a few scientists involved, too. Surely there are some selfless, altruistic types among them who could contribute a few hours each week. Maybe add in some retired people or others who are just bored and home alone all day with nothing better to do.
Of course, with a few thousand people reading classified documents, there is a risk that someone might see something that was better left unseen. (I don’t think that’s likely, because I tend to the philosophy that anything that had to be done in secret was something that shouldn’t have been done) In any case, it’s better that a few government secrets be revealed that that they should be allowed to continue in secrecy, starting more wars, polluting the environment, and making themselves rich by destroying everything, for everybody, forever.
The government is supposed to represent the people. The idea that they can keep secrets from the people is absolute bullshit.

It struck me as I was scrolling through Facebook, despite the ugliness and combativeness of the comments, that there sure are some nice pictures. Smiling people on vacations, a dog with her head out the window, exotic locations around the world, a cat dress up as a shark, a cabin next to a lighthouse, a bit of topiary, a bicycle by a sign for a town with a funny name, good stuff like that. And it struck me that maybe people still like to post nice pictures, and maybe that’s a better medium for expressing all that’s good in the world, and our words mostly get spent on describing all the anxiety, and stress, and fear of the modern world because maybe those are things a picture can’t really describe, but I decided to go through and have a look and and catalog things a bit, nothing really scientific yet, just a basic 2 minute test of the hypothesis, and lo and behold…
I found that there are just as many pictures of ugliness, pictures of war, pictures of horrible politicians, and pictures of just gobs of stuff I either don’t like and am not interested in, and contrariwise, I read some posts which were very positive and encouraging, and in both cases I found things that were somewhere between the two.
There is dark and light, comedy and tragedy, available in every medium. Any message you want.

There is a lot of talk about the U.S. not doing enough to help those Afghans who have worked alongside U.S. forces over the last 20 years. The State Department has said they’re prepared to help the approximately 20,000 who have applied for asylum in the U.S., which is really a very small number that won’t even be noticed outside of a few large cities, and will widen cultural diversity and lead to finer dining. However, they won’t lift a finger to help them get out.
Seems harsh and cruel to me, but it happens a lot with American overseas conflicts.
Anyway, what we need to learn from this conflict is not how to extricate ourselves with a bit more decency and grace, but how to actually win the next time. The answer is easy. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
If, the next time the U.S. wants to invade some country, to steal their oil, or their poppy fields, or whatever (and I’m not actually recommending the U.S. do that), they should start by picking a few communities, near the border so a quick retreat is possible, and flood them with food, medicine, a new hospital or two and lots of local clinics, elementary schools for all the kids, especially girls, a few high schools with great sports facilities, a university, a couple of cinemas, and so on. As people move into those communities, you can expand, and build more.
The labor will be local, and their economy will improved, and before you know it you will have a modern state, at a small fraction of the price. It costs less to build a high school than it does a fighter jet, and the high school will last longer.

The sudden and seemingly total collapse of Afghanistan, the way the Taliban are taking immediate control, has kind of surprised me. But, it shouldn’t have. The purpose of the war wasn’t to build up Afghanistan, because apparently that didn’t happen at any point in the last 20 years. So, we’re leaving it as we found it, except with a lot of people dead, a lot of people homeless, physically damaged, and/or traumatized. We’ve spent trillions of dollars, and on what? Military equipment. That a few people made a lot of money on.
It reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s famous drunken comment on the Steve Allen show, I think it was, that the Viet Nam war was a conspiracy between the North and the South to bring a lot of Jeeps into the country, and the evidence of that theory was that they sure did have a lot of jeeps. That was after the days when he was a fiery beat poet and into the days when he was a former fiery beat poet now in his fat alcoholic and maybe brain damaged phase, but I think he was maybe onto something.
It seems that modern warfare is nothing but a scam to funnel a lot of money into companies like Boeing, and Lockheed, and Raytheon, and a few others. It seems that way because that’s the only objective that has been achieved.

That’s the lesson of Afghanistan.