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. 

UPDATED (6/9): What Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore Are Hiding About Bush & Housing Bubble

Bush, Hillary Clinton, Private Property, Regulation, Republicans

George W. Bush did his share to bring about the housing bubble, and Stephen Moore, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, knows it. Moore wrote a book he’d like us to forget: “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer” (2004). “Bullish” got one and a half stars on Amazon and it had almost no takers. Moore and Larry Kudlow have no business obfuscating about Number 43’s enthusiasm for giving credit to those who were not creditworthy.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals. “No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

The two’s article, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?”, offers only a veiled allusion to the shared Clinton-Bush blame for the housing bubble:

There was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story. And the Fannie/Freddie chapter is still not solved. It now includes profit-sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.

But not a word about Bush II. And no mea culpa from Moore for his zeal for Bush’s phony “ownership society.”

UPDATE (6/9/016):

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The Statist Mindset Of ‘Libertarians’ Garry Johnson & William Weld

Donald Trump, Law, libertarianism, Nationhood, Rights, The State, War

Gary Johnson and his sidekick William Weld, Libertarian Party goofballs, are running for president and VP, respectively. The two fulminated to CNN’s Victor Blackwell against Donald Trump. From the libertarian perspective, though, their mindset was much more statist and deferential to state structures than Trump’s.

Weld, in particular, went over the various policies Trump was proposing, voicing objections to each that were thoroughly statist.

WELD: Some of the stuff that he’s running on I think is absolutely chaotic. I’m going to do this to Mexico. OK, that’s a violation of the North American Free Trade agreement, which is the supreme law of the land. It is a treaty. We signed it. I’ll do this to China. No questions asked. OK, that’s a violation of the World Trade Organization rules [which good libertarians despise], exposing us, the United States, to sanctions. And we would be the rogue nation. I don’t think we want to be the rogue nation. You know? Let’s let North Korea be the rogue nation, not us.

Trump can’t do what he proposes because he’ll be in violation of this or the other agreement between states, national and international, which Weld treats as holy writ.

Not to real libertarians. The idea of radical freedom is to dissolve the chains with which others have bound us. Smashing or refashioning these agreements and reclaiming national, state and individual sovereignty, as Trump proposes, is more libertarian than the queasiness these two evince at such actions.

Johnson and Weld objected to Trump’s proposals on the statist grounds that renegotiating agreements or optimizing them for Americans would violate agreements that by their nature sideline the American people.

You don’t get more un-libertarian than that. Then there’s the viva Hiroshima attitude:

How The Cult of The Kid Is Making America Not Great

China, Communism, Education, Family, Morality

“How the Cult of the Kid Is Making America Not Great” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

There were likely no kids on board EgyptAir Flight 804 that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, on May 19. Had there been kids on board, we’d be hearing about it a LOT.

Of the 224 people on board the Russian metro jet airbus—it crashed in March—17 were children. I know this because each time TV anchors reported about the plane that went down in the Sinai desert, near El Arish (once way safer because under Israeli control); they counted the kids.

Is the death of a child more of a loss than the death of an adult? Apparently so. Adult lives matter less.

The hallmark of an infantile even immoral society is the deification of The Child. Not for nothing did the Communist slave societies place kids in control of their parents. This is how one inverts the moral order, also the aim of Communism’s leaders.

The feral kids took to killing their elders like the proverbial ducks to water. It’s all in “The Black Book of Communism: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION,” published by Harvard University Press, written by the finest scholars to survive Communism. The BBOC should be compulsory reading for every Bernie Sanders supporter—for every American, once Bill O’Reilly “preps” the text for popular consumption.

Where the mini-Communists killed their Confucian-minded elders—they did so absent any remorse or angst. For kids are naturally feral and liberal. They want nothing more than more privileges, more license and lenience; fewer demands for obedience, chores and hard work. This every parent knows firsthand.

In “The Death of the Grown-Up,” author Diana West contended that “America’s arrested development is bringing down Western Civilization.” Certainly, a moral society must be a hierarchical society, one in which adults guide children until they’re capable of governing themselves.

But first, adults have to be adults. And they’re not.

Take the parent who declared, as a DRUDGE headline blared, that his “Eight-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse.”

The editorial so titled was published on a large website. In line with the prevailing anti-intellectual childishness, public writing has turned into public advocacy. Conjure and cultivate a malady, share it with the world, and—abracadabra!—you’re a hero. In any event, you don’t need to read this flaccid folderol to know the following:

* It’s the fault of the parent that little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.
* Who gave sonny boy the gadget? The parent did! Take the iPad away.
* Stop paying for your kids’ cell phones and assorted hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

We survived without them. If the kid needs to contact crazy-in-love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Kid an opportunity to practice a few civilizing skills you’ve refrained from imparting, lest manners mess with his élan: …

Read the rest. “How the Cult of the Kid Is Making America Not Great” is now on The Unz Review. “Share” and “Like” it on social media.

AND, if you’d like to feature the Unz Review’s “Paleolibertarian Perspective” on your website, please email me at ilana@ilanamercer.com.