Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock’s 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven’t seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)

In Kagoshima, a city on the southern island of Kyushu, in Japan, crows have just recently been on the attack: destroying power lines and fiber optic cable, stealing candy and bloodying children’s faces, and outwitting human “crow patrols” by building decoy nests. It was also reported recently that crows had been caught on film making tools, a behavior previously thought restricted to humans and some primates.

You see, birds are smart: They make tools, have sentries, navigate by magnetism, sense impending geophysical events and, of course, they can fly.

The whole birds-were-once-dinosaurs thing is one of those boggling things that just seems so obvious once you think about it or, really, just look at birds for a bit.

“Rahonavis is a primitive bird from 80 million-year-old rocks of Madagascar. Despite being more bird-like than Archaeopteryx, raven-sized Rahonavis retains some distinctive theropod features, including the distinctive slashing claw used to murderous effect by Velociraptor in the film Jurassic Park. Velociraptor is thought to be about as close as a dinosaur gets to being a bird without actually being one.”

It’s interesting. I was talking to my mother about birds a while back, and when I mentioned their ability to navigate by magnetism and, I’d heard, listening to underground rivers, she said: “Yeah, with their lodestone.” I’d heard the word “lodestone” before, but never knew what it meant. When I asked, she said it was like a magnet in their heads that let them find their way.

My mom sometimes shares wisdom that I’m fairly certain I should not believe. For example, that if buttercups turn your chin yellow you like butter, that Santa Claus actually exists, or that the world began just a few thousand years ago, just like the Bible says.

But anyway: Lodestones. Mom spoke of it as a kind of known thing, but I went looking online, and science, as so often seems to be the case, only recently caught up with known things.

The discovery in 2004 of tiny deposits of a mineral called magnetite (lodestone) in the beaks of pigeons and bobolink (a North American songbird) biased the debate [about how birds navigate] towards the hypothesis that birds can read Earth’s magnetic field (image).

* * *

So, do the math; birds can fly, solve problems, make and use tools, organize, and navigate by magnetism. Why do they put up with us? Against all reason, birds must like us. Despite modern industrial chicken “farming,” despite our erecting cell phone towers that disorient them, wind farms that sometimes clobber them, or mountains–continents!– of trash that poison them, they must just like us anyway, you know, the way you might love that guy who sometimes gets mad and beats the crap out of you. Like that.

It wouldn’t be because they’re meek or physically incapable of carnage, either. Check out just one type of one species, the golden eagle: flying down and killing a deer :: or strategically hunting goats by knocking them off of cliffs.

That’s the only possible explanation for why they haven’t already devoured us, pecked us underground, or made pinnipeds of us. They must enjoy watching humans. Who knows? Maybe the second most popular leisure activity among birds is peoplewatching. I suppose a few — buzzards in particular — must also possess a gustatory appreciation for people and our reputedly pork-like flavor.

Their feelings toward us must be very complex. After all, in addition to lodestones, they possess specialized limbic systems in their brains, necessary for true emotional behavior. Outside of birds, this system only exists in the higher vertebrate species. So things like rage, fear, and curiosity are not merely anthropomorphic projections when it comes to birds. They really do have distinct personalities. They also have gender-bending, “promiscuity” and sometimes engage in illogical risky behaviors.

I wonder what finally set the crows of Kagoshima over the edge?

POSTSCRIPT: Cosmos Online also just reported on findings of the fossils of previously unknown species of giant feathered tyrannosaur–Yutyrannus huali–in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, in China.

by Brian Awehali

Comparisons to the more fabulous and generally less professional wing of the futurist community—palm, tarot and crystal ball readers, millenarian apocalypticists, Miss Cleo—are tenuous at best. Frankly, most divinators aren’t terribly interested in manufacturing the future in ways broadly aligned with the interests of corporate and government elites. And no self- respecting divinator would be caught dead using “strategic foresight,” “competitive behavior anticipation,” or any other such tool of the more employed wing of the futurist camp. There’s just no life in it.

To combat the professionals, and after failing to generate any predictions of our own that weren’t predictably bleak (and not all that useful) we advertised online for someone with real divination skills, and sifted through about 200 responses before settling on Victor, who mostly makes his living now as an online gambler. The predictions Victor gave us certainly aren’t “professional” in any sense of the word, but we were somewhat surprised—and frequently dismayed—at his prognostications…

• Your brand new high-def, drug-enhanced holo-television will still have nothing interesting on.

• Shortly after animal-human hybrids gain equal rights, cat people will quickly rise to the rank of de facto aristocracy, much to the consternation of humans and hybrids alike.

• The average life span won’t change, but some people will live to be 150 while others die at 30.

• New music will be made available only in the form of ring tones. Enthusiasts who seek out complete songs will be referred to as “completists.”

• Corporate consolidation will continue. In 2030, Disney will finally buy Apple and Russia.

• You’ll be able to record and edit a feature-length film on your phone, but you still won’t be able to get reliable reception.

• Bill Clinton’s disembodied head in a jar will host a hit talk show. His recurring guest host will be Al Sharpton.

• Oxygen bars won’t seem all that stupid anymore.

• The Rapture will be scary, but it’ll get rid of all the Christians and leave a lot of nice vacant housing available.

• Contraception will be unnecessary because everyone will be born sterile. Access to fertility drugs will be restricted and prohibitively expensive. Wealthy families will have multiple children as a sign of extravagance and wealth.

• Microsoft paraphernalia will be very retro.

• Taking everyone by surprise, giant pandas will overrun the Earth.

• News will be photoshopped onto the daily adpaper.

• The tourist trade will boom in the underwater cities of Amsterdam and Venice.

• “FTMTF post-op pre- transition soft butch” and “björk” will officially become the eleventh and twelfth genders.

• US schools will merge with Sony-Nintendo, and bundle 6th through 9th grades with any purchase of Grand Theft Auto Tasmania.

• Paper-based “magazines” will be rare and really, really cool; hipsters will collect them, like they once did vinyl-based “records.”

• The existing global capitalist order will descend into chaos as its own unsustainable operating instructions and increasingly disruptive climatological forces take their course.

This piece is part of the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.

“I love the trite mythos of the outlaw,” wrote Tom Robbins, in his comic novel, Still Life with Woodpecker. “I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw…The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that…There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.“

Great outlaws should be better known! Consider these three: Elmyr de Hory, Alves Reis, and Scott Scurlock. It should be noted that all three are dead, and that two of them died in poverty. Two also committed suicide, though one, an art forger, is rumored to have faked his death in order to escape actual death. Peaceful old age is a jewel rarely found cleaving to the heels of outlaws and, as with many famous painters, outlaws usually die penniless after a series of unfortunate events.

Elmyr de Hory, by far the greatest art forger the world has ever seen, successfully painted and sold as originals his counterfeit renditions of paintings by Picasso, Renoir, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Modigliani, among many others. Born to a rich Hungarian family in 1906, Elmyr went to art school in Budapest before moving to Paris, where he seems to have squandered some of his artistic acclaim and momentum for amusement and sexual experimentation.

This is one key aspect of the great outlaw: a certain shiftlessness, not exactly idleness or laziness, but awaiting the right stimulation or opportunity. It also helps a great outlaw’s stature to spend some time in a prison of particularly “nightmarish” reputation, as Elmyr did after being arrested for ties to his lover, a British journalist and alleged spy.

The prison was Transylvanian and, of course, nothing but bats, castles, foreboding mountains, counting, creepy royalty, bloodsucking, and other gothic nightmares come from there.

Elmyr survived his imprisonment in part by painting portraits of some guards and thereby currying favor. Yet soon after his release, de Hory was re-imprisoned in a German concentration camp, where he was badly beaten and had one of his legs broken. Elmyr claims to have escaped from the camp infirmary on a still-broken leg, though he is also a well-established fabulist, as was his official biographer, Clifford Irving (famous for his fake autobiography of Howard Hughes).

After escaping, he eventually returned to Paris and set about creating a new life. He most likely couldn’t have known that he was about to earn a reputation as one of the most talented criminals in history.

In 1974, Orson Welles released “F for Fake,” his final major film, which cast de Hory in the main role, playing himself. The film goes into detail about much of de Hory’s life, while also unspooling a fascinating prismatic essay on authenticity, identity and the basis of value for art.

And, thanks to this glorious age of free internet video, you can check out Welles’ sometimes hard-to-find gem right here.

* * *

I’d originally planned for this post to include excursions into the lives of de Hory, Reis and Scurlock, but realize now that blog posts are made for more brevity. One’s enough for today.

People suck, and that’s my contention.
We’re a virus with shoes.
—Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?

Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.

On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.

Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.

Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.

“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process.

Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion.

In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…

Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”

—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University

The complicated relationship between language and its host was a major theme in the work of William S. Burroughs. When pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:

“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.

Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.

by Brian Awehali

Read on >

by Timothy Kreider ( <– you should go here when you’re done.)
from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt 

“You’re not just kissing,” said one scientist suggestively, “you are likely absorbing information about your partner’s immune system, looking for a good match should you two procreate.”

Other scientists in attendance copiously supported their colleague’s assertion by noting findings in related studies. “A similar tendency has also been found,” asserted one postdoctoral researcher in the Berkeley Olfactory Research Program, “in some rather interesting tests where women sniffing male armpit sweat chose those indicating immune systems complementary–not similar–to their own.”

Certainly there exist women for whom the idea of a long session of male armpit huffing evokes an unseemly dark thrill. You might hope that one or more such women were among those who signed up for this study. But when pondering this (absolutely true) armpit-sniffing story, one must consider the long tour of ignominies visited upon countless women that led up to this particular moment in scientific history, and the moment in which each woman in the study was bade: Choose the best armpit.

(Alternately, the study may not have involved live male armpits at all, but rather the sniffing of previously collected male armpit sweat. Either way, it’s an odd study. It also provides me a rare opportunity to link to an only slightly related Old Spice commercial about armpits, men, manliness, and frenching):

Anyway.

Even if you don’t want to have kids or sniff anyone’s armpits, scientists say, the kiss is still crucial: it can help you chemically decide whether you will have fun dating. At least that’s the assumption you could make from research results indicating that people clicked with others based on levels of hormones present in saliva. Testosterone and oxytocin–a hormone involved in maternal bonding with offspring–are among the many hormones expressed in saliva.

(In a thankfully totally separate yet related experiment, virgin sheep injected with oxytocin began to mother unrelated lambs, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise, and which they were surely confused about afterward. Other oxytocin studies reveal even more interesting things).

Those with average-to-poor dental hygiene can take some heart from these recent studies: Even with all the advertising focus on minty fresh sterile mouths, oral hygiene or the lack thereof doesn’t obscure these chemical clues, researchers say. Sloppy kissers who aren’t lesbians can take heart as well: Men apparently like more drool in a kiss, perhaps because they tend to have worse senses of smell and taste and hence need more to work with.

–with reporting by Kari Lydersen

(originally published by Britannica.com as part of a regular history feature called “Yesterday’s News”)

July 25, 1876 — The U.S. Army today suffered its worst defeat ever in Plains Indian warfare, as more than 260 soldiers in the 7th Cavalry were killed along the banks of the Little Bighorn River in the disputed Montana Territory. The bloodbath ensued after an evidently ill-conceived charge under the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. There appear to be no human survivors from the 7th Cavalry and only one equine survivor, a cavalry horse (ironically named “Comanche”). Because of the Indians’ custom of immediately removing their dead from the battlefield, it is difficult to ascertain how heavy their losses were, though estimates place the total at around 140.

Sources report that Custer may have disregarded the orders of Brigadier Gen. Alfred H. Terry—as well as the dictates of sound judgment—when he rushed ahead of reinforcements and led between 260 and 270 cavalrymen against a force of approximately 2,500 Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians, a war party believed to have been the largest that the Plains Indians have ever arrayed against U.S. forces.

According to one eyewitness, during the battle “Indians took clothing from dead [U.S.] soldiers and dressed themselves in it to confuse the soldiers,” a ruse which appears to have been successful. Further eyewitness reports indicate that many of the U.S. troops, confronted with certain defeat, attempted to surrender, but that the Indians “did not take a single soldier prisoner, [killing] all of them.”

Custer apparently decided not to wait for reinforcements from Terry, who was to bring a larger body of troops up the Yellowstone River in an attempt to trap the Indians between the two forces. It is unknown why Custer chose this course of action, but his tactic appears to have been undermined in no small part by the failure of at least one officer under his command. Maj. Marcus Reno, after assuming command of one of two flanking forces, retreated prematurely and with apparent cowardice, leaving Custer’s main force fatally exposed.

Following so soon after last week’s defeat of Gen. George Crook at Rosebud Creek by Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse and his warriors, this newest setback underscores the poor planning and lack of resolve that have come to characterize the U.S. military’s inglorious campaign against the Plains Indians. Although the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 guarantees Indians the exclusive and permanent possession of the Dakota Territory west of the Missouri River, the U.S. government has consistently failed to take measures against illegal pioneer settlements in the region. In fact, several Indian raids on such settlements have been taken as a pretext for release from the terms of the treaty. The recent discovery of gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory—recognized as a sacred hunting ground for the Sioux and Cheyenne—has only worsened matters.

The death of Custer, who takes two brothers, a brother-in-law, and a nephew with him to a High Plains grave, brings to an end one of the more colorful military careers in recent history. Despite graduating last in his class at West Point in 1861 and, in the words of one commentator, “utterly fail[ing] to distinguish himself,” Custer achieved surprising success during the Civil War, as the Michigan cavalry brigade he commanded doggedly pursued Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and led in no small part to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Custer personally received the flag of truce that brought the war to a close.

Although Custer was court-martialed two years later for abandoning his post to visit his wife, his suspension from military service was short-lived. The decline in military enlistment and the demand for leadership in the intensifying campaign against the Plains Indians soon led to Custer’s reinstatement.

He wasted no time in stirring controversy when, under the orders of Major Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, troops under his command ambushed a Cheyenne encampment along the Washita River. Custer reported that he had killed about 100 warriors, women, and children and that he had destroyed all livestock and winter supplies. Public outcry about these events led to the creation of the federal Peace Commission, which was charged with converting the Plains Indians from their nomadic life to reservation settlement; faced with exposure and probable starvation, many of the Cheyenne at Washita accepted resettlement. Custer’s reputation as “the Army’s premier Indian fighter” is based upon such actions.

The bloody end that has befallen Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn will surely resonate in the public mind for many years and is all but certain to intensify U.S. governmental action against the Plains Indians.

Sources:

• Encyclopædia Britannica: “George Armstrong Custer and Battle of the Little Bighorn”
• Larry Sklenar, To Hell with Honor: Custer and the Little Bighorn (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000)
• The West, PBS
• Interview with Louise Barnett, author of Touched by Fire, on C-SPAN’s Booknotes