Hippies, Monkeys, and UFOs

Here's what's happening in TannyTalk land recently.

Greetings all,

It’s Phil Tanny from TannyTalk here. It’s been awhile since I last wrote. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Substack Notes in recent months, which may be where you learned about this newsletter. To all subscribers new and old, hello! Here’s an update of a few things that seemed to merit sharing.

Hippies

First, I’ve launched a new project over the last month which I’m calling Hippy Toons.

Hippy Toons is a multi-media site which explores hippy culture through the lens of artificial intelligence. I’m creating hippy characters in AI, and then animating some of them in to movies, typically with rock music sound tracks. There’s some mellow tunes for quiet times, and some uptempo numbers for visitors who are fully caffeinated.

Because you probably found me on Notes, I’m guessing many of you have your own newsletters. If so, you may be interested in following my migration away from text content and in to the more colorful world of images and video. Hippy Toons has very close to no text at all, so I’ll be interested to see how that works on the Substack platform which was designed with writers in mind.

In coming months I’m hoping to expand Hippy Toons beyond music videos, and in to video presentations of some of the same kinds of topics I like to write about here on TannyTalk. So, still nerdy as hell, but with better graphics. :-)

Monkeys

Well, chimps actually. One of the most influential inputs to my thinking in recent months has been the excellent 4 hour documentary series on Netflix called Chimp Empire. Here’s the trailer to give you a quick taste.

Chimp Empire takes you in to large tribe of chimps living in the Ugandan jungle. Every minute of the show is in the jungle, focused on the chimps, and they never cut to talking head human commentators, which I found refreshing. There is a narrator in the background to help you understand what’s going on, but he keeps a pretty low profile.

The show excels at helping you experience these chimps as individuals with unique personalities, which I found very engaging. This film is not just an educational exercise, but instead tells a tale with real life characters who draw you in to the story, just as a good film about humans does.

And Chimp Empire is really about we humans as well. What really impressed me was how similar our behavior is to chimps. Seeing this made me realize that a lot of what defines us as humans and guides our actions to this day was installed in us millions of years before we were even human. This insight has substantially sobered any idealistic dreams I’ve had about our ability to change the course of our human destiny.

As just one example, chimps are a male dominated society which is highly territorial. A chimp tribe is continually monitoring the borders of their territory so as to defend those borders, and expand them if possible. Conflicts with other chimp tribes are common when the borders come in to dispute, and the film ends with a big bar brawl type battle between two tribes.

Does any of this sound very familiar? As I’m watching Chimp Empire I’m thinking, there you go, the war in Ukraine explained. We’ve been fighting these territorial battles since long before we were human, which probably explains why no ideology, religion, or system of law has ever been able to stop the murderous madness, and probably never will.

Anyway, if you’re not that interested in such philosophical reflections, it’s still a very well done film which tells a quite engaging story. I’m sure I’ll be watching Chimp Empire again and again over the coming years.

UFOs

Finally, the biggest story of modern times, the high performance objects of unknown origin navigating our atmosphere, that is, UFOs.

If you haven’t already seen it, I would urge you to take the time to watch the recent Congressional hearing on this subject.

As is typically the case, all the congresspeople on the panel have to give their opening remarks, which you may wish to skip over. This link will take you past the opening remarks, and to the introduction of the witnesses.

The witnesses are two veteran navy pilots and a high ranking intelligence expert. I found their testimony to be highly persuasive. These are serious professional people with very relevant skills, and not a group of bubba hunters who think they saw a UFO while they were out in the woods drinking beer.

Tips

I find it very helpful when engaging this subject to clearly separate two things, UFOs and aliens.

UFOs: There is a TON of credible evidence from multiple credible sources over a period of many years that there are high performance objects of unknown origin navigating our atmosphere. I now consider this to be an established fact which is beyond dispute. However…

ALIENS: I’ve seen no credible proof that these craft are being directed by aliens from another planet. The alien explanation seems to be a highly speculative theory lacking convincing evidence, merely a guess which has gained wide popularity. It may turn out to be true, but I see no reason to believe in the alien theory at this time.

A great deal of the discussion of this topic I’ve seen muddles these two issues together, the proven and the unproven, and that’s a distraction we would be wise to avoid.

ANALYSIS

If UFOs are indeed real, and I’m convinced they are, this is obviously a most astounding fact, however they may someday be explained.

What is perhaps even more remarkable is the casual attitude most of society has towards this truly historic phenomena, even by those who believe the UFOs are real. As just one example, I’ve been in Substack Notes daily for the past couple of months and UFOs have been just barely mentioned. We seem to find every other topic under the sun more interesting, which can only be described as a bizarre reaction to such a remarkable phenomena.

After all, even hippies and monkeys are not as interesting as UFOs! :-)

Conclusion

So that’s it for today folks. Thanks for listening. Should it interest you to keep up with what I’m doing, most of the action will be over on Hippy Toons for now, so feel free to visit and subscribe if you wish to be notified when AI hippies are belting out their latest tune.

I’m going to hit the Send button now, because that seems to be the best way to find any mistakes I made above. :-)

Have a good one!

Phil