Index

Stupid is Dead … Eventually

Planet of the Apes may have it right after all.

I grew up thinking that smarter was better, and the orange 3rd-grade bully that is the so-called “president” and his collection of idiots have done nothing to convince me otherwise. The human race became apex predators by being smarter than the competition, not bigger, meaner, or stronger. The throwback in the Whitehouse just reinforces that understanding.

Of course, that concept is completely beyond the orange cult’s comprehension. Many in that group also opposed teaching evolution in classrooms, so it is no surprise that they ignore its corollaries. As current understanding shows, evolution is not linear, so occasional reversion to an ape-like state is always possible. While that may be a sad observation, it is essential to note that evolution does not just look at the physical structure; it also considers the mental.

The Planet of the Apes series starts with the results of this reversion. In that story, humanity wasn’t smart enough to survive, so nature did what it has always done: replace us with a new apex predator. The specifics of how aren’t relevant in this case; we are supplying our own by ignoring the reality of global warming.

How long would most of us live without our vaccine protection?

Our society is built on a very tightly interwoven web of supply chains. From food to phones to weapons, everything we live on has many complex layers of technology beneath it, and many of those layers directly affect our survival in the short term.

One particular item that the lunatics are attacking illustrates this wider issue. Vaccines, especially the new COVID vaccines, represent the pinnacle of our technological achievements. Without the thousands of layers of education and technology behind them, the world would have suffered much worse from the COVID plague. The orange bully and his lunatics are undermining this chain on several levels, from destroying education to discrediting the vaccines themselves, a pattern consistent with their broader approach to science and learning.

A decent education would also have taught them the value of the vaccines and the need for them. Some of us have lived long enough to have seen that value directly in the form of Polio survivors - the ones that didn’t get the vaccine were obvious. Education makes the entire technology chain possible at all levels, and so-called “conservatives” have been attacking it all through history. The problem is that at least since Reagan, they have been winning battles and destroying education piecemeal. Now that they have power at the top, they are attacking higher education directly. This is already causing “brain drain” and technological backsliding in this country, but several other countries are willing and will soon be able to pick up the slack. We are rapidly becoming a nation of stupids.

The orange baboon is afraid of China with good reason. The Chinese are more than happy replacing the U. S. at the top of the trade and technology heap, so this MAGA country is becoming just another third-world terrorist state. Some of the amoral rich are just as happy selling to the Chinese as they are to anyone else, so there is nothing stopping them.

The bigger problem

All of this ignores the big problem. Global warming is destroying society from the bottom up. When the food chain collapses, the rest doesn’t matter because food directly affects the entire population. Better quality food is already only affordable to the rich, and global warming is making that worse. While the Chinese are attacking the problem head-on with technology and innovation, our corrupt MAGA leadership is destroying the innovation that has already occurred in the U. S. while pushing us back into oil-company serfdom.

The oil companies do not care how badly they wreck the ecosystem. They do not care how many people they kill. They do not care how many cities they sink under the rising ocean. The oil companies are morally bankrupt billionaires, and only care about their own wealth. The amoral orange loon fits in perfectly with them. The rest of us are irrelevant.

This is the “stupid” of the title. We are letting a very small group of very rich men dictate our path to self-destruction. There are a number of species in our world that would happily take our place as apex predators, but more than likely, the U. S. will suffer alone as the rest of the world gets smarter and deals with reality. While MAGA destroys us, the rest of the world will learn from us as a bad example and, sooner or later, eliminate us as a drain on the world economy, just as we helped eliminate the fascist states in World War II.