An assault on life took place in France on the evening of 11/13/15.  I’m sure I could go on about the monsters, political ramifications and whatnot,  but that is not what is primarily running around in my brain.

The way I’m seeing it is that “Life” seems to have a goal.  Spread as much as possible.  We humans seem to be hard-wired for it, and we are pretty good at it for the most part.  That is assuming we don’t completely botch it up via bad management, nukes, bio weapons, global warming, destruction of our environmental infrastructure, and general insanity (as evidenced in France).  Even if we somehow manage to keep a relative frail peace going long enough to not kill ourselves, there are external factors that will take us out eventually (meteors, super volcanoes, new epic diseases, even a changing sun if we haven’t found a way off this planet by then).  To reach that goal, we need more brains (BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS /zombie).  Moreover, they need to be *quality* brains.  Just popping out a bunch of kids with no regards to good education will only work against that progress, as all those brains will do is destroy other brains that had the potential to move humanity one more step forward.  For me, that is the real tragedy of France.  My bias is France is a place of art and beauty, so while that alone might not be what finds out how to get around road blocks like the speed limit of light or all the very many things that will kill us out in space, it might just inspire the one guy/gal that does figure it out.  It is a cumulative game.

Both the problem and the good thing about brains is that they are quite malleable early on in development.  Folks like ISIS know this.  They were already damaged by this, but they had *just* enough logic left over to kidnap then brainwash new monsters that are an anti-thesis to the ultimate goal of life.  I hate to sound cliche’ but they really are a cancer to life, that if left unchecked, will retard any progress humanity has made towards that life goal.  More like a kind of brain cancer come to think of it, since they are a corruption of ideology rather than a more traditional nation-state ala WW2.  They need to be excised, but it’ll cause some damage one way or another.  Hopefully the net effect for life remains positive.

Scary times.