Animals have feelings too. And when we destroy our habitat we are also destroying their habitat. The planet may survive our terrible habits and inconsideration for other life but if we persist in our madness, this insanity, the way we are using our biologically unique brains, will surely result in more pain and suffering and ultimately more extinctions. If suffering is measured at some level where it is just clearly immoral to do these things to each other we cannot consider ourselves in some way better. Better than what?

Human beings are a genetic success story. There are over 6 billion of us and there is altogether about 300,000,000 tons of Homo sapien biomass on the planet.

Many of our cousins were not so successful. In fact we come from a very long sucession of genetic failures. Ninety-nine percent of them didn't make it. Is that the fate that awaits us?

In 13 Chromosomes there is no visible differences beween chimpanzees and humans. We are 98% chimpanzee. We are more like chimpanzees than we are like gorillas and we are still 97% gorilla. We share the same bone structure as chimpanzees. The same chemicals in the chimpanzee brains are in human brains. They have the same immune system, the same digestive system, the same vascular system, the same lymph system and nervous system as far as we know.

Smokey (2000)

Smokey was the nephew of Charlie. Charlie died in a bad lightning storm when he darted into the street and was hit by a car. He was about 10. Then we adopted Smokey who lived with us until he was 14, when he died of natural causes. I miss them both. In our family we have never been without our canine friends.

IDEALISM and the Human Animal

Perhaps idealism is just something we have invented in order to keep us busy? It is difficult to rationalize any sense of human significance when we examine evolutionary time and our place in it.

Apes, our primate relatives, who we are related to more recently, but not more so than Chimpanzees and Bonobos, though we are also related to every living thing (we share genetic code with every living thing on this planet), as pointed out by Matt Ridley in The Agile Gene (2003). Apes are not simply an older, primitive version of of Homo sapiens.

Apes are excellent at being apes. They are not good at being us, because they are not us. Perhaps we are also good at being us, although that doesn't' seem like we really know what we're doing, does it?

We have evolved enormously from the time we shared a common ancestor with apes. But it is also a mistake to think of them as somehow worth less than us in the natural scheme of things.

And while closer genetically to a Chimpanzee, our common ancestor with them; the point of divergence is 5 million years ago so there is a lot of difference in the less than 2% of difference in our DNA (with Chimps). And it is a mistake to think of only what is similar. But as to worth, it is also a mistake to assume they are somehow of less value than we are. We are not that special.

So is that difference enough for us to think of ourselves as our brother's keeper and guardian of our planet? Or are we simply just another animal with a bigger brain and a bigger penis, which enabled us to survive, think about our own death and be obsessed with what's best for us; instinctively greedy, duplicitous and cruel?

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Everything must end. Species become extinct. Life is snuffed out. DNA survives but we do not. It is not a big deal nor a very big loss.

I grew up in a Yiddish home. Not Hebrew, but Yiddish, which my parents always spoke when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying. They did not speak Hebrew which I learned to read and write. My grandparents hardly spoke English except for my mother's father, who did the best with his English since he lived in England for awhile (-- long enough to marry another women, not my grandmother, the rumor has it) My Russian grandfather was a tailer and very good at it. He made all my cloths and even when I was barely out of diapers I wore little suits he made for me - mostly military outfits because for some reason they were very popular then and I had an army _suit_ and a navy suit, etc.) My other grandfather was an outcast of sorts because all of his 8 or 9 children became the wards of some other relative when my grandmother was hospitalized for dementia while my Polish grandfather was off working on the railroad - and saying his prayers because he was an orthodox Jew - and my father never forgave him and he hated his dedication to Judaism when it seemed to my father that there was a lapse of dedication to his mother. How it worked out for my grandfather - being away from home and kosher food I don't know but it must have been difficult for him to survive also. All of my grandparents fled pogroms and antisemitism in Eastern Europe. My father was estranged from his orthodox father but not from Judaism, although he was the only kind of Jew he understood, and barely observed anything but we ate Jewish and from my grandparents I learned about a Yiddisher kop and Goishe kop. I also learned from them that my wife was a shicksa and my Russian grandmother never approved of the marriage to this non-Jew.

I didn't understand all the antisemitism at first but after awhile it became all to clear to me that people hated me even if they didn't know me and for some inexplicable reason they blamed me for killing their god. My god came out of my big console radio that I listened to incessantly while imagining all the little people who lived in there.

I also marveled at the vitality of Jews. Nobody had to tell me Jews were special and to tell the truth I found on my own that many were also very disagreeable on just about everything and I suppose I fit into that same category and seem very disagreeable to other people - I know I do to my wife and she can't be wrong (She married me after all). At least my folks thought so, that I too was disagreeable, or they would not have sent me to military school.

Many Jews are socialists and many more are atheists but just as many who are socialists are also conservatives. When I didn't do so well at something which to my father was all the time it seemed and I once used the excuse that "I am only average", his response was we cannot allow ourselves to be only average. I eventually learned what he meant and was often disappointed in my own children when they didn't exceed their own expectations. Jewish achievement seems to be almost genetic. It is the way we win (See book by Lipset and Rabb].

Jews make up 50% of the top U.S. intellectuals according to Lipset and Rabb's research. 40% of the Nobel prize winners in Math and Science are Jewish. And yet, we only make up a small percentage of the population (anywhere except Israel). We are 20% of the professors at the top universities. ETC...

And by the way, there is evidence for all of this. None of it is imagined. To speak of it sounds as-if we are bragging, but it is the truth. It is also just as much truth to say many Jews are poor and not nearly as many are as rich as you would expect us to be and while our influence is great we don't rule the world nor control politics, but we do have grit and influence for which we are often faulted and blamed for things which go bump in the night and all the discontent others have - for which they can say, "It is the Yid's fault." So be it! and of course the Jews are behind every conspiracy there is. I guess I no longer care what they think.

My Polish grandfather was the only person to stand up and pray with me at my Bar Mitzvah and embarrassed my father (but not me) and died in a hospice but I can't ever remember him being invited to our home for dinner or to stay with us or to go out with us for dinner.. It just didn't happen and my father blamed him for his mother's illness and blamed his orthodoxy also. BUT, that was really all he knew and it was not easy for itinerant unschooled immigrants from the old country to have anything else. In that respect, maybe religion helped to make some sense out of it all? I don't believe in god, but I can understand how Muslims (and some Jews - and others) find a need to believe in belief - if they need to make some sense of it all in their own mind and their own reality.

As for my own children, my son had a bar mitzvah but we had it at home and on that day he and I shared a joint.

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Muse - Mt Weather - White House - DSA - Humanity - POTUS
Re-up - Coevolution - France - War Room - Ike - Hackers - ENIAC
Teddy - Patriot - Ana-Mae - Ancestors - Hotel - Military School
Army - Special - FBI - Jane - South - Luca - Link - Reason - Shop
Up-Hill - Capitalism - Family - Down-Hill - Struggle - Vagabonds - Left
Children - TN - Liberal - Angst - Faith - Extinction - Curse - Blast #1
Blast #2 - DARPA - WormHole #1 - WormHole #2 - Crypt #1 - Crypt #2
Hack Attack - High Crimes - (BHG) Jewelry - Golem - Pyramid
Epilogue - Epilogue to the Epilogue - No Coherence - Nature of Nature