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xmasdale
Angel - now passed away
Joined: 25 Jul 2005
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Location: South London
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 Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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| chek wrote: | I was walking through the park with my kids the other week when I saw something that struck me as extraordinary and maybe relevant to this topic.
A few yards ahead, an unleashed dog got hold of some martin-y or
finch-y type small bird in its mouth, though luckily the dogs owner intervened and the bird was released still in one piece. It was able to hop away to put some distance between itself and further danger, but it was obviously unable to fly.
A minute later a large magpie landed beside it and started attacking it, pecking away pretty savagely and was going to make short work of the smaller bird.
I was still wondering whether to intevene or not when suddenly two of the smaller birds mates divebombed the magpie and scared the sh*t out of it. It could have taken one of them, but two were just too much to handle and after some token resistance, the magpie backed away to safety.
A minute later it was back ready to have another crack at the injured bird when again the two birds attacked it and seemed to be driving it crackers in a hi-speed co-ordinated multi-dimensional attack. It was quite a sight! The magpie flew off into the distance this time, seemingly having totally given up.
It occurred to me that it was more than a match for any of the smaller birds on their own - but a lucky peck or claw could have downed one of the rescuers and all three would then have been easy meat, as it were.
Were the two rescuers acting altruistically, or was it some extended sub-type of dawkinesque species/gene protecting selfishness? I dunno, but it was real, red in tooth and claw, deadly danger - and what if the saviour birds were atheists?
By this time the injured bird had disappeared into the undergrowth, hopefully to recover and live happily ever after.
Unless something else got it later, of course. |
Sounds like what you saw was a fledgeling which had been caught by a dog (more often it's a cat which does this) and the other two birds which rescued it were its parents who had been feeding it frantically for the past few weeks. I've seen that kind of thing myself.
Altruism or parental instinct or flock instinct or an attitude of "after all that hard work hatching it and feeding it I'm b**gered if I'm going to see our offspring killed by a dog or a bl**dy magpie" |
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chek
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Joined: 12 Sep 2006
Posts: 3889
Location: North Down, N. Ireland
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 8:56 pm Post subject: |
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You could be right Noel - I wondered why the whole flock didn't respond or if maybe two was the optimum guard squad number. It being the parents does make sense, although there was no noticeable difference in their sizes.
Quite a sight to see though whatever the motives, and a sign of something definitely. I'm not quite sure of what yet 
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rodin
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Joined: 09 Dec 2006
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Location: UK
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| Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Dogsmilk wrote: | | rodin wrote: | | Dogs... do you think that 19 Arabs did 911? Or are you with us 'conspiracy theorists' on that one? I forgot to ask... |
19 arabs did 911? Unlikely. |
I will rephrase that. I see I am debating a keen legal mind..
Do you think that the planes that hit the twin towers had Arab hijackers on board?
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Dogsmilk
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Joined: 06 Oct 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 11:46 am Post subject: |
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| rodin wrote: | | Dogsmilk wrote: | | rodin wrote: | | Dogs... do you think that 19 Arabs did 911? Or are you with us 'conspiracy theorists' on that one? I forgot to ask... |
19 arabs did 911? Unlikely. |
I will rephrase that. I see I am debating a keen legal mind..
Do you think that the planes that hit the twin towers had Arab hijackers on board? |
I have no concrete belief either way. All I know is I'm not happy with the official theory, including the narrative about the hijackings. All I'm certain of is that actual planes hit the twin towers.
Of course, if there were actual 'hijackers', this would not necessarily mean they were the only people being naughty that day.
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rodin
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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Meanwhile...
Todays Sunday Slime has a review of the chirpily* titled 'Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia'
(*didja geddit, cats n dogs?)
This book was written by John Gray, who came up with a spoof pseudo-scientific entity called the 'ergoneme' - which he himself ridiculed, but which seems interchangeable with Dawkin's 'meme' - an idea whose time, it seems, had come. In fact the meme was itself a very successful meme, and probably did as much to elevate Dick Dawkins into the high priesthood of atheism than the rest of The Selfish Gene combined. There seems to be some dispute about who plagarised who, I will leave that for the 'reader's comments' to sort out.
| Quote: | "It is a sign of Gray's remarkable prescience that one of Revais discoveries was the ergoneme, a primitive atom of meaning that exactly anticipates Richard Dawkins' idea of memes." The Selfish Gene, with its chapter that introduced memes, came out in 1976. When was Gray's spoof review published?
Colin Creevy, Winchester, UK |
I was, however, struck by this observation in the article
“I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.
“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.” The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”
That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously – though the comedy is very black indeed – he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.[/b]
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/book s/article1961492.ece
Knock me down with a feather. I thought I had done my research. The neocons were mostly Trots? This intersects so well with the notion that the creators of soviet communism are still running the show, I am more than ever convinced of the big picture.
The following was written in 2002. I wish I did not have to link to a site that can be labelled 'racist' but it is the story that wants telling. Note the writer did not know as much as we do now about the Israeli connections to 911. Perhaps if Gray had read this the wars of the 20th century might not have been such a mystery to him after all.
http://www.solargeneral.com/pdfs/wtc1.pdf
Elsewhere in that article (or one on a following page in the same same supplement) I read that before the Napoleonic era, wars were fought for conquest. During the Napoleonic and since wars have been about 'fighting for ideas'.
Ideas.
Memes.
I better sit down...
Is the appearance of Dawkins in the left sidebar and Putin on the right sidebar of the Gray page an omen or just good sub-editing?
| Quote: | How dare you call me a fundamentalist
I believe that people will courageously cast aside their celestial comfort blankets, says Richard Dawkins |
| Quote: | | The TLS on Putin's grip on power and the chauvinism of Russian society |
BTW IMO every war since and including the Napoleonic has been orchestrated to enrich the same elite - the Rothschild gang.
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