Category Archives: Intelligence

UPDATED (1/14/020): Traumatized Parrots & Veterans Flock Together To Heal

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Parrots

The veteran and parrot community exhibit remarkably similar symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, which is why they are uniquely able to help each heal. This achingly beautiful expose looks at post traumatic stress disorder in parrots and how, in their great intelligence and capacity to detect emotions, these much-abused creatures are drawn to veterans and can help them heal. Explains Matt Simmons, once a highly accomplished military and business man, who got “broken” in combat and found his way back through parrots:

… Now, when I’m with a parrot, it’s not a total time-change thing, but I do have to act like a 12-year-old boy again. And here’s why. Because parrots are not domesticated animals. They haven’t been bred for hundreds of years to be at my feet.’’ Simmons paused for a sip of Coke, the third one of the night. ‘‘So in order to have a relationship with a parrot, that parrot has to select me. In order for that to happen, that parrot has to be comfortable. I have to come in open and quiet and calm. Much like that 12-year-old boy that met the mean dog next door and never had a problem. Much like that 12-year-old boy that went hiking and saw a mountain lion. I’m acting like the 12-year-old boy again around the parrots, and what that does is help me confront my trauma rather than carry it around. Because now I’m with a psychiatrist, and I’m talking about how this bird didn’t feel so good today and wasn’t very comfortable and was kind of hiding in the back of the cage, and the psychiatrist goes, ‘Hmm, you’re starting to talk about emotions.’ I’m talking about how the bird was feeling, but I’m also transferring my own emotions. So being with the parrots allows me to take that third-person look at my own trauma, which you can never do when you’re whacked out on Vicodin and Budweiser and living under a cement highway bridge.

… In one recent psychiatric study conducted at Midwest Avian Adoption and Rescue Services, a parrot sanctuary and rehabilitation facility in Minnesota, a captive-bred male umbrella cockatoo who had been exposed to multiple caregivers who were themselves highly unstable (e.g. domestic violence, substance abuse, addiction) was given a diagnosis of complex PTSD. When examined through the lens of complex PTSD, Dr. Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and ecologist and an author of the study, wrote, the symptoms of many caged parrots are almost indistinguishable from those of human P.O.W.s and concentration-camp survivors. She added that severely traumatized cockatoos commonly exhibit rapid pacing in cage, distress calls, screams, self-mutilation, aggression in response to .?.?. physical contact, nightmares insomnia.

… Veterans, of course, share similar psychological scarring, but whenever I asked any of them how it is that the parrots succeed in connecting where human therapists and fellow group-therapy members can’t, the answer seemed to lie precisely in the fact that parrots are alien intelligences: parallel, analogously wounded minds that know and feel pain deeply and yet at a level liberatingly beyond the prescriptive confines of human language and prejudices. …

… Abandoned pet parrots are twice-traumatized beings: denied first their natural will to flock and then the company of the humans who owned them. In the wild, parrots ply the air, mostly, in the same way whales do the sea: together and intricately. Longtime pairs fly wing to wing within extended, close-knit social groupings in which individual members, scientists have recently discovered, each have unique identifiable calls, like human names. Parrots learn to speak them soon after birth, during a transitional period of vocalizing equivalent to human baby babbling known as subsong, in order to better communicate with members of their own flocks and with other flocks. This, it turns out, is the root of that vaunted gift for mimicry, which, along with their striking plumages and beguilingly fixed, wide-eyed stares, has long induced us to keep parrots — neuronally hard-wired flock animals with up to 60-to-70-year life spans and the cognitive capacities of 4-to-5-year-old children — all to ourselves in a parlor cage: a broken flight of human fancy; a keening kidnapee. …

…. recent studies of crows and parrots have revealed that birds think and learn using an entirely different part of their brains, a kind of avian neocortex known as the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale. In both parrots and crows, in fact, the ratio of brain to body size is similar to that of the higher primates, an encephalization quotient that yields in both species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like problem-solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and awareness, to yourself and to others. …

UPDATE (1/14/020):  Parrots are innately kind. 

Marco Rubio Has Been Probed, I Mean Tapped, By ‘The Kochtopus’

Conservatism, Intelligence, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans

The Onion’s spoof is not far off. Marcobot, aka “GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio, reportedly awoke in the Koch brothers’ secret compound Thursday and reached suddenly to his throbbing head to discover a cold metal device implanted behind his left ear.”

The Koch Brothers are a GOP Goliath worth around $115 billion. They’re gunning for Donald Trump who’s worth $10 billion.

USA Today:

A key player in the Koch brothers’ inner political circle will work directly on Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, bringing deep connections to the brothers’ vast network of donors and experience helping oversee their sophisticated political operation.
Republican power brokers Charles and David Koch haven’t endorsed a GOP primary candidate, but Marc Short’s decision to move to the Rubio camp, first reported by Politico, comes as the party’s top figures grow increasingly alarmed by Donald Trump’s rise and looks for ways to stop his momentum.

WARNING: Donald Trump appears partial to Rubio and is making overtures to crooked prosecutor Rudy Giuliani. At the same time, Trump is trashing Ted Cruz, an enormous talent who has argued brilliantly and numerously before the Supreme Court and WON.

Were I president, I’d tap Cruz for Attorney General and task him with getting the U.S. out of binding, costly, and disadvantageous agreements with the UN (such as when “our” refugees are vetted by their Palestinian-run refugee division). Just for starters.

Intelligence, as in a very high IQ, is a rare thing. Intelligence that is as focused as that of Cruz is still rarer. No conservative should squander the scarce resource that is Cruz’s legal aptitude and ability to win big for the country.

Then again, conservatives do squander.

Chris Christie Catches Kelly In Promoting Empty Rubio Talking Points

Elections, Intelligence, Media, Propaganda, Republicans

Gov. Chris Christie is very smart. And he puts in her place someone who thinks she’s super smart, but is “just average,” as loose lips Megyn Kelly once quoted her own mother saying.

“Four times in a row” did Sen. Marco Rubio repeat the damaging lines, “in one debate, in a manner that was non-responsive to the questions he got, and as though he was drowning and grabbing for a life jacket.”

As Gov. Christie attests here, “Nobody [except for Fox News and Megyn Kelly] buys that Rubio’s replies are responsive. Rubio has no depth and no substance. There is no substance there and it shows.”

For what it’s worth, Christie is macho, forceful and smart.

Dumbness Might Explain National Review Mediocrities’ Missteps

Conservatism, Intelligence, Neoconservatism, Republicans

Question: Where is Chucky Krauthammer in the “Conservatives Against Trump” production? He is one self-important, neoconservative, who’s not mad about Trump. Why is Chucky nowhere to be found among the NRO Peanut Gallery standing “bravely” against the Republican base rising?

My working hypothesis: Chucky Krauthammer is smarter than the mediocrities on the “Conservatives against Trump” list.

It’s a super-duper dumb thing to come out as a collective against a candidate—Trump—who’s so wildly popular with the Republican base and beyond, and who could very well be the GOP’s nominee.

Dumbness—overall G-factor deficit—might explain the National Review mediocrities’ missteps.

Have you checked the names on the National Review list Against Trump? They’ve been anointed “prominent conservatives,” or “leading conservatives” in the Moron Media. But most are conservatives in name only—as Jack Kerwick has argued, with reference to the absence in their “work” of a hint of Edmund Burke, “the patron saint” of conservatism,” his “20th century’s American reincarnation, Russell Kirk,” or Michael Oakeshott.

And they constantly yack it up for a global, ideological American Manifest Destiny.

One might say these National Reviewnicks stand athwart historic, Old Right conservatism.

As to “thinkers. Kenneth Minogue was a “thinker.” Roger Scruton is a thinker. John O’Sullivan, boy, can he think (which is probably why he was nudged out as editor of NR, in favor of intellectual pygmy, Rich Lowery).

But these people?

Mona Charen (mediocre scribbler), Dana Loesch (gorgeous gun-toting broadcaster), Katey Pavlich (youthful nullity), Glenn Beck (irrational mystic), Michael Mukasey (government functionary/attorney and Jeb Bush cheer leader), on and on. (Thomas Sowell is an economist, that’s about it. He’s nothing like Murray Rothbard or other Austrian-school thinkers.) As for Rich Lowery; he needs your pity.