The Slog meets some funny monkeys, detects chimps at work in the literature about species evolution, pulls horrible things out of his head and offers enlightenment about Xi Jinping fake news, and the role of a 4-star serial lying gorilla in the caper.
You’re looking at one of the world’s most endangered species, the West African Red Colubus monkey. When you see troupes of them sauntering about, you wouldn’t think they have a viability crisis; at the moment, they’re covered in young clinging variously onto tails, backs and necks. But that’s because here in Gambia is their biggest single reserve, Monkey Park. I took the shot (left) of a female last week in a hotel garden.
On the other hand, look closely at her mate (right) in the next door tree, and as he appears to be sucking contentedly on a joint of weed, feckless male idleness could well be the the source of the problem. You can just make out his son’s tiny arm clinging desperately to his foot. It’s pretty clear that the head of the household isn’t feeling much pain
They are indescribably, heart-stoppingly beautiful animals, and the little ones are cute enough to squeeze a genuine tear out of Anthony Fauci. They share the park with Green-tailed Vervet Monkeys – allegedly more shy, but I’ve seen and been close to several of them, although not as yet when I had a camera.
The Vervets look straight at you….right into your eyes, in fact. The expression on their faces as they do so is kind of, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” If you’ve never enjoyed higher primate eye contact, I can recommend it: we might only be monkeys’ uncles, but the tranquil recognition is very obvious and moving. The only exception in my experience is baboons, most of whom clown about like Jerry Lewis on speed, poo manically everywhere and hang upside down a lot as if they maybe think we’re the wrong way up.
Sort of allied to this subject – the derivation of Homo sapiens – was a further update a few days ago in Nature on the “amazing” discovery in 2018 that two “completely unrelated” species could copulate and produce children.
The girl was born some 90,000 years ago, and the DNA in her remains allegedly proves that she was a first generation hybrid between Denisovan and Neanderthal Man, or Person if you’re a feminist.
I don’t go along with the “completely unrelated” descriptor, and I’m not surprised that the mating produced another step forward (or not depending on your view) given that I’ve believed since school days that Darwinism would fall flat on its rear entrance if such wasn’t possible.
Anyway, this (left) is a facial reconstruction of “Denny”, and perhaps the nicest thing I can say is that, on the whole, I’d rather have a Red Colubus – although not in the biblical sense, obviously.
The biggest evolutionary mystery for my money, however, is not relations between different deity attempts to get it right, but rather how and why the leap from one species status to another actually takes place. Clearly, it has a lot to do with climate change causing food-type extinction; new predators that force adaptation; and total isolation from most of the species.
But I continue to feel first, that the science behind the how of dietary change is flakey at best; and above all, you can try all night to tie evolutionary scientists down to the timescales involved, but you won’t get anywhere beyond an airy-fairy “It varies”.
Asking questions about timescales in Gambia is much the same. You ask someone to order a taxi. Ten minutes later you ask, “How long before it arrives?”, and the person confirms, “He comin’ bro'”. Except that, with evolutionists, even the inevitability of an outcome is missing.
Knowing of my cynicism about received scientific theory, two years ago close chum and allround mega-bright good egg John Emerson pointed me at a book called The Tangled Tree. This tome concludes, following an avalanche of evidence, that Darwin’s tree wasn’t just a growing bigger vertically story – rather, one’s DNA can change dramatically in one lifetime thanks to inter-species contact not necessarily involving Haitian monkeys’ bottoms. I created a Slog’s Law on the basis of the book:
“The angle of arrival from the DNA of a rival causes a rumpus around the compass – and one helluva tangle that can be quit viral”
By example: having tended soft-fruit trees in abundance during the previous twenty years, I’ve been stung (literally) hundreds of times by wasps. The DNA from the stings doesn’t dissipate – it sticks with you. I am now completely immune to European wasp stings.
The Tangled Tree posits that many of us have more insect DNA bits in our bodies than mammalian. Here in Africa we have a little charmer called the Mango Fly, who doesn’t just bite or sting, he lays eggs under your skin (complete with liquid placenta) and leaves the rest up to you. I have personal experience of this horror: this is what I pulled out of my hugely swollen left eyelid ten days ago:
But that’s not important right now. What is important (at least to me) is that two doubts I expressed earlier about the science of all this remain:
*We’re told that if climate change occurs, the brain is able to realise this because amino acids in the digestive system give off signals to tell it that, for example, there’s less tree fruit and wheat grain in the diet. So the brain’s evolutionary alert system starts a few fire sirens here and there.
*It is hypothesised that the speed at which evolution occurs is directly related to the degree of urgency involved in the species’ problem. This makes eminent sense.
Let’s get real for a minute: this is advanced finger-in-the-air stuff, is it not? Amino acids lack a few vital things like mouths, arms, brains and so forth. So how do they draw conclusions and tell the brain about them? And if the brain simply reads the data coming back from the stomach, how did it first learn that trick? Sure, evolutionary speed should be related to seriousness of crisis, but who’s telling the cerebrum thinking department…..and how?
I wonder if cutting edge “expert” theorists are being too clever and/or atheist about all this?
Here’s an alternative take on it: brains both control and react to primary senses – they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Isn’t it rather more likely that both cerebral hemispheres observe the look on fellow tribe members’ faces, watch the weather, hear the fear, taste diet changes, smell excretia and ‘touch’ changes in normal temperature?
If cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) has taught us anything in the last thirty years, it is that even the more emotional/intuitive right brain learns stuff very quickly if tutored properly, and the rational/mathematical left brain is pretty crap without the humanity/creative input of the right. AI is an abject failure because it has no right-brain lateral problem solving element at all. Only the Davosilicon tramline, materialist idiots fail to see this….because they designed the damnable thing.
To conclude on the evolution spot, follow this Google link and note my summary of the key content:
‘Across a broad range of species, research finds that for a major change to persist and for changes to accumulate, takes about one million years….[but]….New species or varieties can arise in a matter of years or even days.‘
So, um, it’s somewhere between those two poles, then.
But Schwab, Gates, Zuckerberg, Blair, Whitty, Fauci and Hancock stick to their smelly cod science about transhumanism via robotics, bioweaponry and metaverse unreality holding the key to our future as a species.
It’s just more monkey business, only this time from chimps. Chimpanzees, by the way, are rabidly omnivorous – and are not entirely innocent in the story of red and green monkey extinction. The only outcome chimps of all shapes and sizes care about is “more and more and more for meeeee”.
And so, onto today’s Demolition Derby victim – who’s the cheeky monkey this time?
I was swapping ideas with a close colleague the other night about the who and why of the social media “news” about Xi Jinping being under house arrest, which has since turned out to be a non-scoop to rival Murdoch’s Hitler Diaries fiasco. Although now dubbed “a hoax” by those keen to write it off as satire, it is hard to ignore the similarity between this fakery and Pentagon et al attempts to suggest – at the outset of the Ukraine occupation – that wicked Vlad Putin was a baby-eating paedophile in the final stages of cancer, and going to war solely to rescue the parlous nature of public disapproval of him at home.
Speaking of those who are keen to convince allows me to segue effortlessly into revealing the identity of umpteen-stars General Jack Keane (left) as today’s Slog Slimeball. Keane it is who has been forcing home the latest ludicrous continuation of the Mad Monk Rasputin narrative. In an interview with Fox News yesterday, Jack Flash averred that the Russian leader “is aware he’s losing this war against Ukraine and is forcing an annexation referendum vote to score a political victory with the Russian people….it’s an attempt to obtain a political victory largely for his own domestic audience, so he can gobble up increased terrain in four different regions of Ukraine” – apparently, Keane is oblivious to (a) the fact that 100% of canvassed Ukraine regions are overwhelmingly Russian speakers and (b) pro-NATO sovereigns have gone 1300 kilometres closer to the RF border than they were when CIA hotshot POTUS Bush Sr promised the late Gorbachev such a thing would never happen.
But hey – we mustn’t get picky – it’s a moral maze. I’d just prefer it if one US Deep State Rentagob would one day soon acknowledge the irrefutable empirical fact that outrageous Ukrainian attacks on Russian speakers there have been the order of every day since the risibly termed cease-fire of 2014.
Don’t be under any illusions here: Jack Keane retired from the US Army twenty years ago. But nine times already this year, he has resorted to media appearances attacking Chinese alleged aggression on Taiwan, the potential for Taiwan to invade China, Chinese military games close to Taiwan, and support for Pelosi the Mad in her attempt to ‘uncensor’ discussion in the US of the “obvious global ambitions of Beijing”.
Keane isn’t employed by the US Army: he’s a consultant to FoxNews, the Pentagon and the CIA. In terms of US military foreign policy, he’s filling the space left by the death of John Wayne.
But here is perhaps something of a clincher. On 15th February 2021, obviously well-briefed Keane told the media in a series of interviews that “a global food crisis is coming”. You have to admit, that has a certain familiar Ukraine – Davos – food chain destruction ring to it.
On the same theme, over a year later (May 22nd 2022) Wacko Jacko repeated the prediction almost word for word in the Wall Street Journal, blaming the coming food crisis on Russia’s occupation of Ukraine. As I’ve noted before, Ukraine accounts for 0.2% of global food production: Google continues to use 10% as a figure, but this purely a wheat market share….and as the saying goes, ‘Man does not exist on bread alone’.
General Jack Keane is a 79 year old card-carrying NWO joke, wheeled out whenever someone needs a fearmongering quote about the enemies of USNATO unipolar Earth power ambitions. He has a track record of uninformed codswallop, upped to Defcon Madness since 2020 on the subject of Russia and China. There is no record of this piece of work ever stepping foot in Ukraine, the RF or the CPR.
If that’s where you want to get your information about cultural geopolitics, feel free to do so.
No wonder the wags at Fox are referring to him this morning as “Jinping Jack Flash”.
The Slog 