News & Articles

The Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, whose partial skeleton is seen here.

Is it remotely possible for homo sapiens to move up to homo humanyms?
Scientists studying the evolution of living organisms determined the first human being who walked our planet was Lucy, an animal that fell out of a tree 3.2 million years ago. 

She learned to walk upright on two legs to save her life. Her remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974. After 40% of her hominin fossil was assembled, seven years of research determined she had been 3.5 feet tall, weighed between 29 and 93 pounds and bones and muscles made her capable of standing and walking. 

Lucy raises a question. The Bible claims God created Adam and Eve in His own image. 

So far, in more than three million years, we have had seven species of humans walk on earth: H.naledi, H.heidedbergensis, H.floresiensis, H.erectus, H.longi, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens. Maybe Adam was a dwarf when created in the image of God. Was Eve too small to birth Cain and Abel? 

I wonder which one had the trans-gender gene. If you want a brief rundown on our ancestors, the latest National Geographic has a 36-page article titled “Finding the Other Humans” complete with text, drawings and paintings about our ancestors and their migrating to other continents from central Africa.

  Last week I wrote about George Orwell and his book 1984, and about Big Brother and Winston, the history writer for the Party. This week I’m going to write about his first satiric novel, Animal Farm published in 1945, where pigs replace humans as the leaders of society. 

I know something about pigs. We used to raise about 600 little pigs each year to sell in “the biggest little pig market in the world” at Little Falls, Minnesota. I think pigs may be smarter than dogs, and dogs are pretty smart. 

Pigs rarely get upset with each other; rarely coming to blows. We had a nice warm house for them, and a huge muddy pond out back where they luxuriated in a muddy spa and wallowed during warm days.
But, back to humans, and how Orwell evaluates us: “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits, yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.” 

We have had three million years to stop killing each other! Why failures?
We have evolved for three million years through seven major modifications, grew from 3.5 ft.  to 7 ft., slightly increased the size of our brains, and became more beautiful over this time. 

At the same time, we have certified war criminals torturing and killing Homo sapiens on every continent and ocean. We have doubled and tripled our life expectancy up to 2024 A.D. but are now losing years around the globe because of wars and pandemics that continue to make life shorter. 

The evidence indicates that we are not changing enough to bring about the eighth hominin we could call Homo Humanyms. 

Why? Brain worms? An unknown pandemic? Too many Homo sapiens with too much testosterone, creating world leaders who are malignant narcissists, jerks, pricks and assholes? 
Professor Aaron James in his serious book Assholes: A Theory defines assholes as follows: 
(1) Allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically, 
(2) Does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement, and 
(3) Is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.” 

When asked if an asshole can be rehabilitated, Bob Sutton, who wrote “The No-Asshole Rule,” said “You can’t rehabilitate an asshole who won’t admit they are an asshole.”

We now have Robert Lipton, an investigative psychiatrist (a new breed), who believes King Donald is a victim of solipsism rather narcissism. 

A solipsist believes  “the only thing someone can be sure of is that he or she exists and that true knowledge of anything is impossible.”  

The only point of reference is himself. He has a total lack of empathy, emotional blindness and absolutely makes no effort even at faking interest in other people. King Donald has even referred to his own daughter Ivanka as “a nice piece of a--.” 

An example of two dictators who have narcissism and solipsism
Basher al Assad of Syria finally recognized Syrians had had enough of him, so he cowardly ran to Moscow to the strangling arms of his buddy Vladimir Putin to save his ass from his own torture-killing prisons and dungeons. 

During the years of the rule of the Assads (his father killed an estimated 20,000 Syrians in just one revolt), when prisoners died of torture the records said: “the patient died when his heart stopped.” 
Everybody in the country knew when another Syrian had died of torture. It was deliberate. 

Mazen al-Hamada was one who surviv-ed torture, escaped to the United States, and revealed the torture techniques used on him. He was hung from handcuffs hooked to metal bars and beaten with pipes and sticks, ribs were broken when the torturer jumped on his chest, was repeatedly sodomized with metal pipes, and his penis was clamped into a vise and squeezed until he thought it was severed. 

He returned to Damascus in 2020 to see family and was immediately arrested and was “disappeared.” 
The regime owned earthmovers that dug huge pits to fill with dissident Syrians caught by the “Thought police.” A Syrian death prison at Sednaya was estimated to have killed an average of 10 Syrians every day for 30 years.

War criminals in the Middle East dominate governments and Assad ranks way above the rest. Syria’s bloodshed in the 20th and 21st centuries is unique. Just take a look at the numbers. 

Civil wars have killed at least 620,000 people in a country of 22 million. The results are a shocker. More than 14 million Syrians have lost homes or have fled Syria to experience safety. About 150,000 have simply “disappeared”  into the butchershops and torture chambers of the Assads and will never be accounted for.

King Donald of the Divided States of America is another dictator who has the characteristics of being a victim of narcissism and solipsism. He has killed thousands of people because of his lack of control over the COVID-19 pandemic. He never wanted to cover his “beautiful” face with a mask or reveal he had been vaccinated for the disease. He is already a felon, convicted of 34 violations of New York state laws. He certainly is the most illiterate, ignorant and uninformed person ever elected to the presidency of the United States. 

Even his own sister, a judge, publicly announced she didn’t trust him. His niece Mary, a member of the LBGTQUIA+ community who has married her lesbian partner, says he is the most dangerous man in the world because he does not know science or history or art or literature or nuclear science of his country. 

His executive orders about transgender people reveals his extreme ignorance and hate of those members of our society.

The major reason the United States exists is the rule by the “divine right” of English kings such as the lusty King Henry VIII and the nutcase King George III. Dissidents boarded the Mayflower to escape the demands of the Catholic and Protestant churches that pretended to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ but had adopted the morality of Wall Street bankers and criminal mobs that avoid the rule of law. 

The Federalist Society, the “immunity” decision of the Roberts Supreme Court, Catholic and evangelical “Christian” fundamentalist blatherings and babblings about race and prosperity gospels, White Nationalist bigotry, and  the spineless Republican Party have chosen to destroy democracy. 

Regardless of judge and court decisions, they have chosen to follow their “Chosen One,” King Donald of Mar-a-Loco. Prince Donald, Jr. is waiting in the wings to succeed his father. The Trump Organization will finally cash in.

Charity: A scheme for giving a penny and going to the bank with a dollar
Why do we have so much poverty and the highest economic inequality in the richest country in the world when we have so many billionaires giving to charity? 

We have billionaires such as Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and a few others who have given billions to fight disease, poverty, protect the environment, improve education and keep the system of charities alive in the Divided States of America. 

Why don’t we have happy citizens in the happiest country in the world – like Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark? 

Something in our country is not working right. It’s because billionaires and corporations “earn” a lot of moral credit for donating money to charities cover the fact they are publicly giving a penny to charities while sneaking off to the bank with a complete dollar.

Census data reveals that about half of Americans earn less than a living wage. Senator Bernie Sanders says 60% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have less than $400 to cover an emergency, like car tires. 

A majority of the workers in the fast-food industry are paid so little they must depend upon public assistance in the form of food banks and pantries, soup kitchens and food stamps to survive. The average family of three earns about $75,000 a year, which is much less than a living wage.

The Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology Living Wage Calculator has financial data on all the states and has determined a “comfortable” income needed to cover a 50/30/20 budget for a family of four (50% goes for housing and utility costs, 30% goes to discretionary spending, 20% for savings and investments). 

The five most expensive states:
(1) Massachusetts-$301,184
(2) Hawaii-$294,611
(3) Connecticut-$279,885
(4) New York-$278,970
(5) California-$276,723

Minnesota “comfortable family of four requires $244,774 and North Dakota at $202,176.  Mississippi is the least-expensive state to live in at $177,798. The median for the Divided States of America rests at $213,782. 

Housing represents the largest vari-able in the list of necessities used in the survey. Data from Geowealth U.S. reveals that the richest One Percenters in Minnesota own nearly one-third of the total wealth within the state.
 

Whether this Living Wage information will make any difference in the economy and individual lives of Americans in the future is becoming more doubtful in the remaining seconds on the Doomsday Clock. 
Homo sapiens show no sign of advancing to the next level perhaps called Homo humanyms. 

Historian William D. Hartung has expressed doubts I share (a combined quote): “The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war, climate change, a possible nuclear arms race again, anti-science forces, anti-knowledge MAGA cults misinformation and stupidity, book banning, brain worms, the suppression of free speech and the failure of religions to stop the emptying of pews by declaring abortion and homosexuality are religious issues, not economic and bigotry issues.”

Perhaps the Perfect Intelligent Designers can explain why one pregnancy out of five ends in miscarriage or a fatal poorly-designed physical or mental abnormality.