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Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
FlashForward predicted this!
Maybe the birds realized they were in Arkansas and figured suicide was really the only way out.
Monstar L
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter. And despite this, sometimes you want convenience. Like if you're American and you want to get milk, you're tempted to use the SUV to drive two blocks away and save five minutes of walking. Well, she saved five minutes changing out of two or three layers of clothing and suffered from it, due to a tragic weather event. OVer there, the Siberians get these tiny tornadoes that only last a few seconds. They're invisible. But inside of them, the temperature isn't just eighteen below zero, it's like thirty-eight below zero. And the wind is reintroducing that temperature of air at a rate of sometimes around a hundred miles an hour, but confined in a very tight vortex of only three or four feet across due to the nature of convecting currents and their abilities to maintain micro systems, something not very well understood. Being in that tiny cold whirlwind for even a few seconds can cause really horrible physical traumas. She was struck dead by hypothermia by an invisible weather phenomenon, struck dead by a tornado as big around as her sucking down temperatures from the upper atmosphere that were cold enough to lower her core temperature down below dead in only seconds. This sort of thing is a reality, and we can assume that there is plenty under the sun that science doesn't quite comprehend. If this doesn't turn out to be a low-pressure or mega-updraft incident of some kind, then I think we can all safely assume it is a pathogenic or local effect. A bacteria or virus. A radioactive or electromagnetic pulse. At any rate it's anomalous and anybody studying it with interest is probably more intelligent than the average scientists who, based largely on risk assessed values of research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates, side squarely with what is pre-established and therefore never learn anything new and fail to ever address the slightest anomaly whether it challenges their worldview or not.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Given the fanciful explanations being put forward, I thought I'd add these possibilities which are just as likely:
- Blackbird mob war (explains the trauma too!) ....Variation: A new super race of pigeon decided to whack the competition
- Suicide protest over the abandonment of puppies and kittens over Christmas
- Someone below was constipated for a week after eating some curry and after going off to die on his own in the wilderness managed to pass wind just in time to prevent death from toxic shock. Unfortunately the birds copped the brunt of it.
- Terrorist Blackbird not caught at the Blackbird airport in time because those pesky Blackbirds loved their freedom too much and refused to be irradiated and groped before they travel
- Y2K11 didn't just hit iPads and iPhones. Those poor Blackbirds shouldn't have bought their pacemakers from Apple and believed the "It just works" hype
- An alien witch temporarily transformed them from Blackbirds into Lemmings. When they hit the ground they changed back
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
see how angry meat makes you!
Why would someone ever *choose* to live in such an environment? *shivers*
Nobody said it was a choice. In most of the world, you live and die where you were born.
If everyone stopped eating meat today, they would have to immediately slaughter billions of cows, chickens, pigs, sheep etc. as the market as every day keeping them alive would be just sinking money for nothing. Nice short-term outcome, is that what you want? Then rather than saving these animals, the majority would cease to exist, as one of the main reasons we keep them is for their meat. It would also cause the price of products like dairy to skyrocket, it may even become totally uneconomical, in which case rather than saving these animals, you may just drive them extinct. These animals are domesticated, it's not going to be like a Disney movie where they are all freed into the wild to survive happy and free on their own, they don't have survival skills - we keep them alive. The trade is really that they get to exist at all, and we get to eat them.
I'm all for non-cruel livestock raising methods but ceasing to eat meat is completely illogical, it doesn't do anything to solve that problem at all, in fact it may exacerbate it, since by stressing the market for meat products you directly put pressure on farmers to cut corners price-wise. There are better ways to solve that problem; lobbying for regulation and enforcement, raise public awareness, and selective boycotting - e.g. name and shame the worst farms. These methods have done huge amounts to help improve farming conditions for animals.
GP sounds like a nice troll. Unless you replace air with 1000-fold more dense material it is impossible to cool a person to hypothermia in few seconds, no matter what is temperature and wind speed are. A human can spend comfortably tens of minutes at temperatures well below 200K even naked (or swimsuit) and this is used to heal pains in rheumatoid arthritis. And as one who lives in north, I can imagine the amount of snow taken air with wind over 30 m/s. Invisible in your dreams.
I think falling hundreds of feet out of the sky would cause trauma.
Falling hundreds of feet could not cause trauma to the birds. The sudden stop at the end, however, will do the trick.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Survival strategies: Being delicious.
Seriously. Look, Fuck the whales. They had their chance at life, they had a nice evolution plan, and it was working very well, but they'd forgotten to take something into account: Japan. If you have tentacles, or you are huge and unique, or if you have Shitting Dick-Nipples, you have to watch the fuck out, 'cause Japan is coming for you. The Dodo was ugly as fuck and tasted like crap ... and it went, well, the way of the dodo. You don't care about Siberian Tigers either.
Now, even if you care about endangered species, you care up to a point. That is, unless you are a crazy-ass peta member or something, you limit yourself to sending a donation, or going to a stupid sit-down somewhere. Now, you tell us that FUCKING COWS are going extinct, and there's going to be chaos on the streets. People will fucking murder politicians and feed them to the cows. They'll offer virgin sacrifices and pray to Thor until they can guarantee that they'll keep getting their fair share of beef.
So, yeah, being delicious with us humans around seems like an awesome idea.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It's not the personal choice that annoys me, it's the evangelism. Good for you and how you choose to live. Leave me out of it.
That also goes for your gods, your software licenses, your sexual proclivities, and everything else you really think I need to do because you like it so much.
Most people who try veganism get horribly sick
There are hundreds of millions of people on the Indian subcontinent alone who eat no meat - none whatsoever - from the moment they are born until the moment they die some 80 years later. They do not get horribly sick. They do not "wind up" eating fish or chicken. They live healthy, balanced, and lengthy lives.
Fact.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
As hilarious as it sounds, it's true. I love me some pork, and I do go buy ribs from the store or whatever. But I've had wild boar ribs and they are a whole other thing, it might as well be another kind of animal. That's why all you well-exercised vegetarians and vegans are fucked when civilization collapses; we know you're delicious. Oh sure, if you take a city dweller and raise them on beer and frequent massages they're going to be tasty as well, but they just won't have the same kind of muscle structure, or the same depth of flavor that game meat has. And of all the game meat, the tastiest and least gamey is the boar... or the free-range vegan.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you missed the GP's point. Plenty of atheists/agnostics are vegetarians/vegans. You don't have to believe in God or the supernatural to believe that unnecessary suffering, to humans or animals, is wrong.
"But animals eat other animals, so it's natural!"
If eating meat is natural because animals do it (and if something that's "natural" is also "good"), then rape, incest, and shitting in the same river that you drink from would be just as tolerable. However, our highly evolved brains allow us to circumvent Nature's cruel impulses with reason and empathy. We can use science to figure out that shitting in the river is a great way to spread disease, and we can use empathy to understand that raping your co-worker after the Christmas party wouldn't be quite as fun for the co-worker as it would be for you.
Nature, "red in tooth and claw", is both cruel and amoral. However, there is no reason why we have to be like Nature.
To paraphrase Richard Dawkins: our genes gave us our brains, but our brains have the power to subvert the will of our genes.
"Why care about chickens and pigs when we don't give a shit about mosquitos, fungi, and cancer cells?"
While I adore George Carlin, I think he's slightly off the mark here. We care about chickens, pigs, cows, dolphins, etc. because they are mammals and birds. They possess complex nervous systems that can sense pain, adapt to their surroundings, and protect their kin. Most can learn, socialize, and even dream. In other words, they're a lot like us.
If I cut the limb off a tree, I know it won't scream. It doesn't feel pain, because it's not equipped with an apparatus to sense pain. Why should it? Pain is a response to external threats, designed by evolution to rescue a creature from something that could destroy it. Pain teaches me not to touch the hot stove again, and the simple idea of pain is powerful enough to make me flee from hungry wolves, even if they haven't nipped me yet. A tree has already prepared its defenses: a thick coat of armor against predators, and waxy, water-resistant leaves for storms. If a tree is in danger, it can't fight or run away. It just sits there. A tree that could sense pain would be the product of cruel and wasteful design, indeed.
Do mosquitos and flesh-eating bacteria sense pain? I don't know, but I'd guess they experience some limited form. Even so, I do know that, as parasites, they are quite a nuisance. The amount of suffering/pain/disease they inflict on more complex life forms far outweighs the amount of suffering I might inflict by killing them.
Keep in mind, death != suffering. The Humane Society puts stray dogs and cats to sleep because letting them run free or starve is more hazardous and painful than allowing them a peaceful release.
--
Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, so I'll be quick with my final point: the GP asked to limit your meat consumption gradually because it is impractical and uneconomical for society to stop all at once. Buy meat from animals that have had their suffering reduced to minimal levels. Only you can create the demand for such products, because you have the choice. Eventually, forgoing all meat would make the vegetarian groups happy, but they are willing to compromise with reduced levels.
One day the technology may exist for us to "grow" our own meat without a brain or nervous system that has to sense pain and suffer. We might design our meat without gristle and bone, concentrating on the most tender and delicious cuts. It might even be cheaper than growing real meat the old-fashioned way. At that point, many will finally consider it unequivocally immoral to kill animals for food (barring famine). Much like how we see slavery today, they will look back at our ancestors and ask how an entire civilization could exist that engaged in the wholesale slaughter of innocent life, pumped through factory farms and made to sleep in its own filth at night.
Because meat tasted good? What the fuck?
How do the 'British' feel about the Japanese eating Wales? I'm surprised we have not heard about this before. Why don't the Japanese eat England and leave Wales alone?
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