This went on for a few years or so, when in 1953 Allen Dulles was made the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and made it his mission to ramp up the surveillance program; hiding cameras in thousands of locations and ordering his staff to plant them in areas that would be impossible to detect (although let’s face it, in the 1950s- you could walk into a bank with a slingshot and steal thousands of dollars. Security was one big joke.) He knew that the possibilities for this camera program were endless, and on April 15th, 1956 met with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and proposed a plan that would putcameras in the sky. Dulles knew that the sky was the future for his surveillance program, as you could truly track someone with a moving camera- much easier than having to switch between cameras on street corners and hidden in storm drains. One camera in the sky could do the work of hundreds on the ground…
I love 😍 the internet and I often like to give the middle finger to the robin as I eat my breakfast and dhe pulls worms out of the earth. 🐦 I figure this puts ne in the government's naughty list as my middle finger is recorded for all to see.
For much of its devoted fanbase, Birds Aren’t Real is a respite from America’s political divide—a joke so preposterous both conservatives and liberals can laugh at it. But for a few followers, this movement is no more unbelievable than QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory turned marketing ploy that holds that someone with high-level government clearance is planting coded tips in the news. Therein lies the genius of Birds Aren’t Real: It’s a digital breadcrumb trail that leads to a website that leads to a shop full of ready-to-buy merchandise.
The creative muscle behind the avian-inspired conspiracy (and thinly disguised marketing scheme) is 20-year-old Peter McIndoe, an English and philosophy major at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. McIndoe first went live with Birds Aren’t Real in January 2017 at his city’s Women’s March. A video from the event shows McIndoe with a crudely drawn sign, heckling protesters with lines like, “Birds are a myth; they’re an illusion; they’re a lie. Wake up America! Wake up!” The idea of selling Birds Aren’t Real goods, he says, came after the stunt gained traction over Instagram.
Noe get the taje of the Audubon society, eho thinks birds are real. Which theu probably are but the internet is a fun place to explore.
Crows have long been associated with creepiness. After all, a group of them is called a "murder." But maybe the birds have gotten a bad rap — maybe their most unsettling quality is really just how smart they are.
To get some insight into crows and perhaps set the record straight, Short Wave spoke with Kaeli Swift, a lecturer at the University of Washington who wrote her doctoral thesis on crow behavior. She cites three examples of crow smarts.
Every year, David Willard, collections manager emeritus at the Field Museum, measures the lifeless bodies of birds that die from building collisions in Chicago. Since 1978, this has been his routine every spring and fall, when millions of migrating birds pass through the city to reach their seasonal homes. All told, he’s gathered some 70,000 avian individuals from 52 species.
In a study published today in Ecology Letters, researchers from the University of Michigan and the Field Museum put to use Willard’s 40 years of data and found that North American migratory birds have been shrinking throughout the decades, likely a result of the warming climate. As their bodies have gotten smaller, most of the species have also developed longer wings.