Finally, some major bloggers begin to get a hint of the threat of our time. Forget Islamofacism… It’s the animals are taking over, and they’re not happy:
Like a scene from the horror movie The Birds, large black grackles are swooping down on downtown Houston and attacking people’s heads, hair and backs. Authorities closed off a sidewalk after the aggressive birds, which can have 2-foot wingspans, flew out of magnolia trees Monday in front of the County Administration Building.
I, of course, have been yelling about this danger for years, but my cries of warning have been like casting pearls before swine (incidentally, you should use metaphors that degrade animals while you can, before the shadow of our very near, animal-dominated future darkens into night). I will now lay out my full case for the danger that haunts humanity.
Scientists have long puzzled over why the fossil record does not display even, uninterrupted evidence of evolution (as we would expect from orthodox Darwinian theory). Rather, it seems that evolution occurs in sudden bursts of speciation, interrupted by long periods of relative stability. Gould and Eldredge thus developed a theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein ecological pressures build up gradually to deal with the most hostile environments, and then spread rapidly throughout a population.
So to be precise: as humans continue to knock off species and habitats, we’ve created a hostile environment that species are in the midst of rapidly adapting to. Unfortunately, that hostile environment is us. You see where I’m going with this – animals are about to become much faster, meaner, and, yes, more intelligent than us (there are already several species of insect, for instance, that display higher cognitive ability than the average Democratic Underground reader). Which brings us to the one of the best-kept and most horrific secret of our time: call it a survival instinct, call it Mother Nature, call it the will to power – there are lots of nonhuman things threatened by a myriad of insults from soil erosion to deforestation, and the evidence is now overwhelming that animals are evolving in order to replace us at the top of the Animal Kingdom.
I have proof.
The first threat will come from the animals who have to evolve the least in order to surpass us, our relatives in the primate kingdom. First off, at some point, damned dirty rhesus monkeys learned how to count:
In recent studies of rhesus monkeys, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) determined that specific neurons in the monkey’s brain are “tuned to” certain numbers, and play a major role in the animal’s ability to determine quantities… “Our evidence is imprecise, but the monkeys showed a language-independent ability to discriminate numbers,” Nieder said.
Now you, the slumbering future ape-slave, might say something idiotic like “ahh cute… counting rhesus monkeys!” But this so-called counting is not innocent arithmetic – it’s military strategy! What you think is cute is actually being used to mobilize entire battalions of 200-300 killer monkeys into highly-organized rhesus monkey armies:
Bamboo farmers in east China’s Anhui province are mobilizing against armies of rhesus monkeys, who attack their fields in a veritable “war of the species”. The conflict has broken out in Jing county, where rural families living on some of China’s most suitable soil for bamboo have seen unusually fierce assaults from roving bands of monkeys this spring. The problem for the farmers is that they cannot kill the monkeys, as the government has launched a campaign to protect the rhesus species, now considered “nearly endangered” after decades of hunting. Instead, they have hired laborers whose only task is to drive the monkeys off the fields by peaceful means, an onerous task as they sometimes come in groups of 200 to 300.
So yeah counting rhesus monkeys are funny, but not in that ha-ha kind of funny. More in that Simpsons “I kind of wish I hadn’t freed [the dolphins'] leader and, you know, doomed mankind” funny. But you, like some kind of especially myopic MoveOn activist, wish to go back to the animal equivalent of a pre-9/11 world – where you could comfortably rest on your superior ability to walk on two legs and ignore the rising threat. Fools:
A young monkey at an Israeli zoo has started walking like a human following a near death experience, the zoo’s veterinarian said Wednesday. Natasha, a small five-year-old black macaque monkey at the Safari Park next to Tel Aviv, began walking exclusively upright on two legs after a stomach ailment nearly killed her, zookeepers said.
“Walking exclusively upright”. I’m not making this up. It’s in the damned newspaper. Look it up yourself! Nobody else is worried about this?
Here’s the thing though – even if the monkeys couldn’t count or walk or mobilize into nearly invincible monkey armies, we would still be screwed. The monkeys are just a distraction – the real threat is going to come from the air! The article above is just the beginning – soon random and vicious attacks by birds with 2-foot wingspans will seem as entertaining and easy to defeat as Howard Dean Presidential run. Think of what’s going to be happening when enormous flocks of these things start attacking:
A newspaper story this week about the sightings of a large bird in Southwest Alaska turned out to have wings. The tale of villagers seeing an eaglelike bird with a wingspan as long as a Dodge van brought dozens of e-mails from readers in Alaska and the Lower 48 and one from the Netherlands. The online newsmagazine Drudge Report posted links.
Very clever MSM cacooning – the story “turned out to have wings”. No seriously, really funny. Because birds have really small brains, so we have nothing to fear, right?
Anyone who has watched crows, jays, ravens and other members of the corvid family will know they’re anything but “birdbrained.” Yet corvids may be even cleverer than we think. A new study suggests their cognitive abilities are a match for primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas. Furthermore, crows may provide clues to understanding human intelligence.
And that’s before I even get into the morons who think that telepathic parrots with human-like intelligence are an “outstanding example of interspecies communication” and that we should try harder to “meet their needs.”
The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short. The bird, a captive African grey called N’kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour… N’kisi’s remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.
N’kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world. About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N’kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material… He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive…
Dr Goodall says N’kisi’s verbal fireworks are an “outstanding example of interspecies communication”… Alison Hales, of the World Parrot Trust, told BBC News Online: “N’kisi’s amazing vocabulary and sense of humour should make everyone who has a pet parrot consider whether they are meeting its needs.”
Some of these people are just the useful idiots in the coming inter-specie war. But how much longer are we expected to excuse borderline speciest treason as nothing but misplaced affection for the cute underdogs of the animal kingdom (“underdog”, incidentally, is another word I expect to see purged in the impending Orwellian takeover).
But you might slip into the same false sense of security found in the traditional International Relations Realist camp, and say that we need not fear alliances against us because we can always play one party against the other. An attractive assumption to be sure – like China and Russia, monkeys and winged beasts have always been traditional enemies who were never supposed to gang up on us. But just as their traditional enmity didn’t seem to trouble China or Russia, so there is now clear and uncontroversial evidence of a tactical alliance between monkeys and things with wings:
300 children bitten by ‘blood sucking’ monkeys at famous Indian temple. Monkeys lurking at an ancient Hindu temple in India’s northeast have attacked up to 300 children over three weeks, temple officials said Tuesday. “They hide in trees and swoop on unsuspecting children loitering about in the temple premises or walking by, clawing them and even sucking a bit of blood,” Bani Kumar Sharma, a priest at the Kamakhya temple in Assam state, told The Associated Press.
They’re taking notes from the vampire bats!!
At least 20 people were attacked and bitten by vampire bats as they returned home from work in the jungle community of Mansiche, Peru, a top official at the Ministry of Health said.
No seriously, keep laughing, cause I’m the crazy one.
Listen, all I’m saying is that at some point, nature decided that the only way to save the planet was by simultaneously and quickly evolving several different species. The day is coming when most animals will have evolved past us, and on that day we will witness almost unthinkable speciest blood-letting and retribution. My suspicion is that they’re going to be especially pissed about veal.
