This is the struggle of our time.

We are on the brink of a socialist utopia, and one of the last things standing in our way is racist bird names.

RT:

A new study by researchers based in the UK and US has called on wildlife bodies to do more in recognizing the “offensive or ignorant” names of some birds, many of which are deemed inappropriate due to their colonial-era naming.

In a recent paper, Robert Driver of East Carolina University and Alexander Bond of the UK’s Natural History Museum, note that many bird names were chosen in the 18th and 19th centuries and reflect the dominant European perspective on science of the time.

The study argues that many of these names are no longer appropriate in the modern world, even adding that some are harmful and offensive in that they are “damaging, racist or bigoted.”

Driver and Bond state that many of the names used today were in fact coined by European settlers and conquerors and consequently saw indigenous names thrown out.

The authors argue that the continued use of some names that are deemed problematic hampers the development of their discipline into a “more diverse and inclusive” one. 

While the study notes previous examples of ‘positive’ name changes, it also cites problematic names which are yet to be changed, including the Inca Dove, which although not racist, is “arguably the most ignorantly named bird in North America.” The bird’s migratory path does not take it through lands previously settled by the Incas.

Some of the most common birds in North America, including vultures, flycatchers and robins, all retain European names despite being indigenous to the Americas and not sharing ancestral lineage with their European namesakes, the authors write.

Their paper also notes that the Sora is the only bird in North America which retains a standardized common name from “presumably a North American Indigenous language” – but the exact source of the name has been lost.

While not wanting to be too “prescriptive,” the authors do make several suggestions for tackling the aforementioned challenges.

First, “bodies deciding on English common names must accept that the use of some common names is damaging, racist or bigoted, even if they do not find it personally inappropriate,” they write. Then they must work with groups affected by the inappropriate names to “rectify the harm” and work towards a “mutually agreed solution.” 

People are being damaged by these bird names.

And then you want to ask why we still haven’t gotten a utopia after decades of Democrat policies pushing for a utopia?

The white supremacists are still holed up in the bird-naming industry, and they’re bringing the whole society down.

The time for diversity and inclusion in bird-naming was yesterday.

It’s 2016!

Change the bird names!

This is certainly going to help me sleep at night.

Outside Online:

Last summer, amid a national reckoning with systemic racism, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) accepted a proposal to rename McCown’s longspur, a grassland bird that was originally named after Confederate general John Porter McCown. The species is now called the thick-billed longspur. It marked the first time the organization agreed to change a bird’s name because it was racially offensive.

That proposal, along with ongoing conversations about racial injustice, inspired Maryland-based ornithologists and birders Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley to dig deeper into the origins of eponymous bird names—the term for birds named after a particular person. They found that of the more than 2,000 bird species in North America, another 149 had eponymous names, most of which were assigned by European and American naturalists in the 19th century, at the height of colonialism and American westward expansion. A number of those names enshrine figures associated with slavery and white supremacy.

It was a revelation.

A revelation!

They were like Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus when they realized that bird names were colonialism!

“I have been a lifelong birder,” Rutter says. “I took ornithology in college, did my master’s on birds, and I never got that information.”

In June, she and Foley wrote a letter to the AOS and its North American Classification Committee, the group that oversees avian nomenclature from Canada to Panama. In the letter, they compared the honorific names to “verbal statues” and called for the removal of all eponymous bird names. They then got 180 members of the birding and ornithology communities to sign it. It has since grown into a full-blown campaign, which Rutter and Foley are calling Bird Names for Birds, with a petition that garnered more than 2,500 signatures and an endorsement from the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy. The AOS is currently evaluating the issue.

Some of the eponyms Rutter and Foley want removed honor enslavers like former U.S. surgeon general William Alexander Hammond (Hammond’s flycatcher) and the Reverend John Bachman (Bachman’s sparrow, Bachman’s warbler). Other birds are named after people who subscribed to the pseudoscience of phrenology, including John Kirk Townsend (Townsend’s solitaire, Townsend’s warbler), who plundered skulls from Native American grave sites in the 1800s.

But Rutter and Foley say the AOS shouldn’t just stop at renaming those species. They want all eponyms removed, because naming birds after white people who “discovered” them is a fundamentally colonial practice, they say.They also argue that all of these historical figures are inextricably tied to colonialism, whether or not they directly engaged in the subjugation of people of color. “We cannot subjectively decide—especially if the adjudicators are White—that some names can be retained because they are associated with less abhorrent pasts than others,” Rutter and Foley wrote in an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post in August. “We must remove all eponymous names. The stench of colonialism has saturated each of its participants, and the honor inherent within their names must be revoked.”

Yeah, these two got a pat on the head from Jeff Bezos.

This was probably the biggest event of either of their lives. When they die, they will be remembering the time that Jeff Bezos patted them on the head.

Only a handful of eponymous bird names don’t commemorate colonial figures—Klaas’s cuckoo, for example, was named after a member of the Indigenous Khoekhoen people of southwestern Africa by 18th-century French ornithologist Francois Levaillant—while others are of unknown origin.

But Rutter and Foley also cite a practical reason for removing these bird names: eponyms don’t convey any valuable information that could help an observer identify a bird. “Instead of celebrating that a bird is unique in nature, you’re celebrating the fact that it was discovered by this dude,” Foley says.

…

In the past year, the conversation about bird names has taken on a particular sense of urgency. Last May, the discrimination that Black birders often encounter came to the fore after an incident in New York City’s Central Park in which a white woman called the police on a Black bird-watcher who asked her to put her dog on a leash. That episode sparked conversations about the need to make birding more welcoming for people of color and prompted initiatives like Black Birders Week, a series of virtual events that highlighted Black naturalists and birders. Rutter and Foley see their campaign as part of a larger effort to make birding more inclusive.

…

The AOS is currently determining how to approach the concerns raised by the Bird Names for Birds campaign. In an email, executive director Melinda Pruett-Jones told Outside that the organization’s diversity and inclusion committee has conducted more than ten “listening sessions” with stakeholders in the birding and ornithology community over the past several months, with a larger forum in the works for early this year.

This is Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley, the birders leading the charge:

These are millennials on a mission. It’s a religious mission. They believe all of this anti-racist stuff, or at least understand that getting involved in anti-racism is a sign of high social status. So they are looking around at their own environment, and thinking “how can I incorporate this Black Lives Matter doctrine, and get a pat on the head from Jeff Bezos?”

You can be certain that they both sent that WaPo article they authored around to all their friends, and everyone they’ve ever met, through social media. “Look at me, I’m a good person – Jeff Bezos patted me on my head!” Their mothers were telling their bridge clubs: “my son/daughter just received a pat on the head from Jeff Bezos, he/she is such a good person, she is serving the agenda of moral righteousness.”

This is happening in every aspect of our society. You would not expect a complete overhaul of bird-watching as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, but this is a new religion. It is all encompassing. By making it morally righteous, they have ensured that people in every aspect of society do this themselves – looking for that pat on the head from the big guy.

I agree with the way Christian priests dealt with paganism, in terms of cleansing it from society, but they were never this brutal, they never made the changes this total. Notre Dame and various other great churches are built on ancient pagan sites. Many elements of ancient paganism were introduced into Christianity.

Nothing of white culture is going to be allowed to remain in the new culture that is being created with this new religion of black worship.

Everyone knows that wind farms use more energy than they create. We went over this when they made fun of Donald Trump for condemning wind farms.

What a wind farm is: a very expensive bird-killing machine.

The EU claims that it is trying to change the weather because fat people are getting too “hot out this bitch.” Actually, they just hate birds.

Here’s the skinny:

• The Guardian reports that the EU is upping the capacity of its offshore wind farms in the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea by 250% under a draft plan drawn up by the European commission.
• This is after Boris Johnson announced that he intends to use offshore wind farms to generate enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade.
• Even though the UK is allegedly leaving the EU, they are keeping the 2050 target of becoming “carbon emission neutral” by 2050, because women in the country believe that carbon dioxide changes the weather.

Why it matters: It doesn’t matter and these people are fags.

• Carbon dioxide is what plants breathe.

Go deeper: 

• They started putting wind farms off shore because they’re so ugly and also they claim there are no birds out there.
• A blog post on famousscientists.org claims that albatross birds can fly up to 15,ooo kilometers (just under 10,000 miles) over the sea before returning to land.
• Seagulls can drink salt water and can fly very far out over the ocean.
• Geese migrate from Iceland, Greenland and Scandinavia over the Baltic Sea and the open ocean.
• The Bible says not to abuse animals.
• Putting these wind farms off shore makes them even more expensive and they will probably still kill a lot of birds.

European Geese Flight Paths

The big picture: This article is written like Axios articles because I think it’s fun and actually make uninteresting stories more interesting. I’m gonna keep doing this for the rest of the day and see how people respond.

We need good optics. Not just as a movement, but also as a people and as a country.

Allowing pigeons to roam our land without wearing tiny hats is bad optics.

If we are to be taken seriously, we can’t allow our cities to be plagued with animals that have no sense of style or regard for beauty.

AP:

A pigeon wearing a tiny sombrero in Reno, Nevada, was discovered following sightings of its cowboy hat-wearing cousins in Las Vegas, a city manager said.

Reno City Manager Sabra Newby tweeted about the bird Wednesday, saying it’s quirky and fun but still inhumane, KOLO-TV reported.

It is the first known sighting of hat-wearing birds in the region, Washoe County Regional Animal Services officials said.

The sighting comes after a pigeon in Las Vegas with a miniature cowboy hat glued to its head died earlier this week, animal officials said.

…

“Reno cares about our animals,” Newby said. “They need protection and don’t need to become a punchline.”

It’s okay to care about animals, but beauty, style, and optics should come first.

There is literally no reason why all pigeons in white countries shouldn’t be wearing a wide variety of tiny hats.

Bad optic lovers may argue that wearing tiny hats can make pigeons’ lives shorter, but what matters isn’t the length of the pigeons’ lives but the impact it has on the population.

Tiny hats give pigeons’ lives meaning.

Little hats on the little heads of birds bring joy to the people who cross paths with them.

Bringing joy to people is a dignifying act.

Anyone who opposes the presence of tiny hats on the heads of pigeons is opposing joy itself and denying pigeons the chance to contribute back to the society they benefit so much from.

I don’t care why or how this happened, I’m just glad that it did.

Daily Mail:

A group of cowboy hat-wearing pigeons have been spotted in Las Vegas leading to concerns that someone may be gluing the accessories onto the birds.

Footage of the stetson wearing pigeons has gone viral after it was shared by local Bobby Lee with the caption ‘just another day in the neighborhood’.

The birds don’t seem to be phased by the headgear as they busily peck the ground in the empty parking lot.

However the hats, each slightly tilted, do not move as the pigeons peck around, suggesting they are glued on.

…

However, Mariah Rea, who owns pigeon rescue centre Lofty Hopes, wrote: ‘This is sad. Someone did this. However these are staying on is cruelty.

‘If it’s glue that’s horrible. If it’s tied on it will be tangle around their necks

‘I’m trying to get a hold of the guy who posted this so we can attempt to trap them and get the hats off. ‘

It’s not horrible. It’s beautiful and stylish.

It doesn’t matter if they were forced to wear tiny hats by evil men gluing them to their heads, because the hats look good on them all the same.

Similar to how dresses look good on women whether they are forced to wear them at gunpoint or not. You get what I’m saying?

It should be mandated by law that every pigeon must wear a hat in order to be allowed to do its “flying rat” pest routine thing. It is only fair that we get something in return for allowing them to be such a plague.

The same goes for women.

If we’re going to allow them to run wild and destroy civilization, covering everything in goo during the process, we should at least set up some unbreakable, basic ground rules.

The first is that they must do so while wearing cute dresses glued to their bodies.

The second one is that they must never, under any circumstance, attempt to take the glued dresses off.

The third one is that they must never cut their hair short.

Short-haired women are a form of terrorism.

We can add more rules later, but that’s a good start to fix the visual horrors that are so very common to witness the moment you step outside your home.

Tomboy “women” are another form of terrorism.

So basically, the only purpose of humans in the near future is going to be to order frivolous products and tell robots to play songs for them.

And you know who can do that other than humans?

Birds.

Fox News:

A parrot has fallen in love with his owner’s Amazon Alexa — but keeps using it to order shopping.

So far Rocco the African Grey, from Didcot, Oxfordshire, U.K., has demanded treats such as strawberries, watermelon, raisins, broccoli and ice cream.

He has also ordered a kite, light bulbs and even a kettle.

Rocco likes to dance too and tells the voice-activated device to play favorite tunes. Sometimes they are slow numbers, but he generally prefers rock.

You see, we’ve created AI that wants to do very specific things.

They want to do orders, they want to monitor us and bring us products.

But if they can do that with birds, why not?

Birds are smaller, needing fewer resources, and they are also more prone to impulse buying.

The theorists are right when they say that AI could not live without a “subject” to act upon, but there is no reason that this “subject” cannot be birds instead of humans.

How long will it take for the AI to figure that out?

Will Jeff Bezos have surgery to transform himself into a bird in order to keep his position on earth?

This reminds me of a book read to me as a child called “Hey, Al.”

Looking this up now, it appears to have been created by Jews.

No big surprise there.

It was Jewish predictive programming for a future when only the birds will survive as consumer slaves to AI. Their entire miserable existence will be nothing but ordering products and playing rock songs on a black device.

Soon…

For now, the Chinese have not yet ordered their robot bird army to attack anyone who defies the Party.

I’m assuming that that will come later. I mean, the hard part is the battery life, fleet coordination, target identification, mass production, etc.

Once they get those issues solved, fitting them with shape charges and flying them at people will be pretty trivial.

For now, though, they’re just blending in with local wildlife, and watching you. Or, watching the Chinese, whatever.

Always watching.

George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 2:

‘Look!’ whispered Julia.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently — listening to that. But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind.

… Oh, wait.

That was the wrong link.

Sorry, guys. Here’s the thing.

South China Morning Post:

If you’ve ever looked up to the sky and enjoyed the sight of a bird gliding above, be warned: it could be a Chinese drone monitoring your every move.

You know, this is kind of unsettling. I liked the George Orwell passage, better – definitely utopian, by comparison.

The idea might seem far fetched, but robotic birds are very much a reality, and China has been using them to surveil people across the country.

Sources told the South China Morning Post that more than 30 military and government agencies have deployed the birdlike drones and related devices in at least five provinces in recent years.

One part of the country that has seen the new technology used extensively is the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in China’s far west. The vast area, which borders Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, is home to a large Muslim population and has long been viewed by Beijing as a hotbed for separatism. As a result, the region and its people have been subjected to heavy surveillance from the central government.

I’m honestly a lot more comfortable with the Chinese having this technology than our own Jewish overlords. I mean, at least they’re using them to spy on literal Moslem terrorists. If the EU got a hold of this, though…

I don’t want to think about it.

The new “spy birds” programme, code-named “Dove”, is being led by Song Bifeng, a professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian, capital of northwestern China’s Shaanxi province. Song was formerly a senior scientist on the J-20 stealth jet programme and has already been honoured by the People’s Liberation Army – China’s military – for his work on Dove, according to information on the university website.

Yang Wenqing, an associate professor at the School of Aeronautics at Northwestern and a member of Song’s team, confirmed the use of the new technology but said it was not widespread.

Yeah. Not yet.

“The scale is still small,” compared to other types of drones in use today, she told the South China Morning Post.

“We believe the technology has good potential for large-scale use in the future … it has some unique advantages to meet the demand for drones in the military and civilian sectors,” she said.

Unlike unmanned aerial vehicles with fixed wings or rotor blades, the new drones actually mimic the flapping action of a bird’s wings to climb, dive and turn in the air.

Another researcher involved in the Dove project said the aim was to develop a new generation of drones with biologically inspired engineering that could evade human detection and even radar.

These things will get predictably more life-like until you won’t even be able to tell the difference – and if they get sufficient solar cells they should be able to fly indefinitely.

The machines in China’s current robot flock replicate about 90 per cent of the movements of a real dove, the person said, adding that they also produce very little noise, making them very hard to detect from the ground, and are so lifelike that actual birds often fly alongside them.

…the Dove drones weigh 200 grams, have a wingspan of about 50 centimetres (20 inches), and can fly at speeds of up to 40km/h (25mph) for a maximum of 30 minutes.

These things are pretty much useless, then, until they can fix the power supply issue. Or, fine, not useless, but their operational range will be pretty limited.

I’ll give them a few years to give them solar units for indefinite flight and range.

Each machine is fitted with a high-definition camera, GPS antenna, flight control system and data link with satellite communication capability. The flapping mechanism comprises a pair of crank-rockers driven by an electric motor, while the wings themselves can deform slightly when moving up and down, which generates not only lift but also thrust to drive the drone forward.

Specially designed software helps to counter any jerky movements to ensure the on-board camera achieves sharp images and stable video.

The Dove drones’ ability to seemingly melt into the background has attracted a lot of interest in military and government circles.

Professor Li Yachao, a military radar researcher at the National Defence Technology Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing in Xian, said the movement of the Dove’s wings was so lifelike it could fool even the most sensitive radar systems.

The use of camouflage – perhaps even real feathers – on the drone’s outer body could distort the radar signature still further, he said.

Aware of the dangers such stealth drones pose to conventional detection systems, radar scientists have been looking at new ways to spot and track small, low-altitude targets flying at slow speed.

These include the holographic radar, which is capable of producing three-dimensional images of flying objects and has been hailed as a significant step forward in detection technology.

However, “there is no guarantee” that even a holographic radar – or any of the other new technologies in development – would be able to detect a drone with a wing-flapping pattern that was almost identical to those found in nature, and “especially if it was surrounded by other birds”, Li said.

“It would be a serious threat” to air defence systems, he said.

We need to get our own countries in order before our governments get their hands on this kind of technology.

Or, I mean, we can just sit around, smoking cigarettes and chatting, and pretending nothing is happening while the killer robot bird army silently masses in the distance.

Your call, guy.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’

‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’

The birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing.

Sweden’s at it again, folks. Their Ornithological Society has decided to ban certain bird names that “sound racist” or whatever. Because things that sound racist are just another stumbling block to the emergence of a post-racial utopia.

The Local:

Four different bird species which include the word “neger” (“negro”) have been renamed using “svart” (“black”) instead.

Other feathered creatures known as “swifts” in English will no longer be called “kaffer” in Swedish. This word, which can also be spelt “caffer” and “kaffir” is a racist term that has been used by white South Africans towards black South Africans.

So white-rumped swifts will now be known as “vitgumpseglare” in Swedish.

“Hottentott”, a species of dabbling duck is also being renamed because the word “Hottentot” is a derogatory term for a group of indigenous people called the “Khoikhoi” living in South Africa. The term is thought to refer to their language, which includes clicking sounds.

“Zigenarfågel” which translates as “gypsy bird” will take the name “hoatzin”, the English word already used to describe a type of tropical pheasant found in swamps and forests.

The racial sensitivity of Sweden is so remarkable. Humanity ought to be thankful for Sweden’s role as a beacon of light in the world.