DOES YOUR COW POINT NORTH

I am certain that some will think this story is much a moo about nothing. But I think it behooves us to consider the implications of what at first blush seems like a simply grazy observation. Back in 2008 zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany made the startling discovery that at any given instant on any given day, two out of every three cows  - and roe and red deer - standing in fields all over the earth have steered themselves along North-South magnetic lines, as if they were over sized leather covered compass needles. We don’t yet know for certain if they are headed for the North Star or aiming their dairy-airs south, but we now know that those of us with frontal mental lobes, single chambered stomachs and just two teats apiece have been missing the meat of this story for the last 10,000 years.

The word “cow” derives from the Latin word ”caput”, meaning the head, which is the ancient way of counting cows, as in “Me and Tex are driving five hundred head to Abilene”. Clearly it was the head of the living cow that Gandi was thinking of when he wrote, “The cow is a poem of pity…She is the second mother to millions of mankind.” She is also, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the source of 18% of the world’s methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And almost one third of the world’s oversupply of cow burps (the primary source of bovine methane) comes from India’s 280 million sacred cows. Holy or not, cows belch so much because they re-chew their cuds, regurgitating and re-digesting the cellulose over and over again. So the first secret of cows is that every cow is bull-limic.

The emotional life of the average Daisy or Bessie has been described as comparable to a potato on sedatives. But complexity was always hidden just beneath the hide. The American Humane Society has taken note that if one herd member is shocked by an electric fence, the entire herd avoids the wire. English linguistic bull artists have noted that cows moo in local dialects and inflections. And it has long been common knowledge that ungulates form their own bovine breakfast clubs. Three or four females establish lifelong bonds, a cow herd within the herd, or a “curd” if you will. Daisy actually enjoys a rich emotional life, nurturing animosities against her fellows, developing friendships and even mulling over the bovine equivalent of the Stephen Sondheim conundrum, “Is this all there is?"

This shared arrogance of our two species matches the obsession of Bessie with a subject familiar to many obsessive humans; sex. Eric Idle has described cows as the “…librarians of the animal world; mild by day, wild by night." And John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University in England, describes cows as “gay nymphomaniacs”. The “curds” constantly cowlick one another. And a single Bessie in “heat” can set off a Daisy chain of cow girls “mounting” herd mates in a riot of bovine dominatrix behavior. Unseen by inattentive humans, a pasture of grazing Gurneys is in reality a seething mass of bored libidos on steroids.Literally  It gives a whole new meaning to the term “pasteurization”.

Few have ever denied that individually cows process a certain personal magnetism. Their sheer bulk demands respect, if not religious devotion. These are not cuddly creatures. The one point three billion cows alive at this moment are ponderous moovers and shakers, and udderly unimpressed with humanities’ crème-de-la-crème, logic. Every dairyman has herd that cattle tend to face uphill, into strong winds or turn their flank steak to the sunny side on a cold morning; and that all seems plausible. But the idea that these cow hides might be sharing some kind of mystical, new-age ferris sensitivity seemed until 2008 to be an oxymoron. But scientists seeking out the magnetic orientation of hills created by the European ground mole (Talpa europaea), stumbled over the realization that perhaps larger mammals might also be influenced by something other than human magnetism.  And this has been confirmed by further study.

German researchers examined Google Earth photographs taken at the same local time of day, observing some 8,510 individual cows in 308 separate herds on five different continents, at essentially the same moment. And the humans stumbled upon this udderly amazing fact; cows got magnetism. Generally, at any given moment, 70 % of the cows in any herd are standing about five degrees off of true North-South orientation. In Oregon State, closer to the North Pole, the deviation of cows is all of 17.5 degrees. In the southern hemisphere (Africa and South America) the alignment was slightly more north-eastern, south-western. Still, adjusted for latitude, 70% of all cows point toward the magnetic pole, and this is much too large a percentage to be a mere homogenized coincidence. The next question is, of course, why have cows got magnetism?

Cows are not migratory, but they once may have been. Cows share a common ancestor with whales, the “Pakictids”, which 53 million years ago had a whale’s ear and a cow’s teeth in a really ugly little dog’s body, sort of a Mexican hairless meth addict with hair. Could this ancient mongrel have been the source of the current magnetic deju moo? It could, if it milked its genes for all they were worth.

So it seems, upon rumination, that we owe cows an apology, that to err might be human but to forgive could be bovine. But stop the stampede for animal rights. My guess is we could be apologizing to Daisy and Bessie “auf die Ewigkeit warten”, as they say in Germany, and it would make no difference because Daisy and Bessie are not particularly interested in our moo-tivations, because cows are just as conceited as we humans are. And in the final rendering the squeaky veal always gets the cud. Holy, cow!

P.S. Photographs are from “The Secret Life of Cows” by Glen Wexler.

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OH, HENRI!

I have long held the view that "anarchist" as a label became passé with the invention of psychiatry. Of course it has stuck around as a vestigial etymological fossil, but any current criminal shrink can now vouch that the loonies who espoused anarchy are really just pathological egotistical narcissists. As proof of this contention, I now present you with the head of Emile Henri, who lost his head over the injustice he suffered because of another inarticulate Frenchman who sought to overturn the establishment and managed only to blow his nose at them.

Everything about Auguste Vaillant screams of irony. He was a kin of Lee Harvey Oswald, a little man who wanted to be important, but lacked the necessary attention span. He claimed to be the leader of a socialist group but seems to have been the only regular member. While waiting for the revolution he was ironically employed sewing expensive handbags and wallets for rich people to store their money in. 

Concerned about justice for the poor, Vaillant had abandoned a wife and two children - leaving them in poverty - and then lived with a deaf woman. For a political revolutionary to be living with a woman who could not hear his rants against capitalism passes beyond ironic into the realm of absurdity. And that is where we find Auguste Vaillant on Saturday 10 December, 1893,  entering the public gallery above the Chamber of Deputies, the French congress, carrying a sauce pan bomb in his overcoat. Ce n'est pas ironique, c'est le plus absurde

Auguste had constructed two sauce pan bombs, but discarded the larger one after realizing he could never sneak a 3 quart sauce pan past security. Spotting his intended target, the French President, standing on the Chamber floor, Auguste revealed and armed his 1 quart sauce pan. This attracted the attention of the woman sitting next to him. (“Excuse me, but is that a sauce pan bomb in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see me?”). She was able to deflect his throw so that the sauce pan bounced off a decorative cornice before exploding. The blast shattered Auguste’s right arm. The nuts and bolts packed around the explosive, shrapnel intended to kill 150 deputies, instead lacerated Auguste’s neck and chest. And the explosion blew his nose completely off his face. Unfortunately, the quick acting heroine was also badly wounded, as were at least 20 politicians. But the only person who died, if not immediately, was Auguste. Ce n'est pas tragique, c'est le plus absurde.

Auguste’s trial was brief. And on 3 February, 1894, the guillotine finished what Auguste’s own bomb had started. His last words, before the blade severed the rest of his head from his body, were, “Mort à la société bourgeoise! Vive l’anarchie!” The translation would be, “Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live Anarchy!” Even his last words turned out to have been ironic.

The irony developed because, of the millions who were outraged by Auguste’s departing utterance, the most significant turned out to have been another nobody anarchist fanatic, this one named Emile Henri, a 21 year old who was consumed with envy. Henri was convinced that Auguste’s noble death scene should have been his. After all, just over a year before had not Henri stricken a much more effective blow against the bourgeois but had received little of the press coverage afforded to the now headless incompetent dead man?

Henri had decided to strike his blow for striking miners. He packed 20 sticks of dynamite into a sauce pan and rigged to explode if it was jostled. He then carefully left this “infernal device” outside the second floor offices of a mining company just before lunch on 8 November, 1892 - 2 years before  Auguste Vaillant's incompetent attack on the Chamber of Deputies..

A lowly Porter noticed the sauce pan, and realized immediately it was probably not somebodies' lunch. But rather than evacuating the offices he ordered an office boy to carry the suspect sauce pan down to the street. Somehow the office boy made it in once piece, but he felt a little uneasy about just leaving it on the sidewalk, in case a passing pedestrian should be injured. So he alerted a nearby school crossing guard. She called the police, and two patrol officers responded. They tied a napkin around the bomb and then the three of them, the cops and the office boy, carried the bomb suspended between them, to the local police station at the rather mis-named Rue des Bon Enfants (Street of the wonderful children.) There the bomb exploded, killing four cops and the office boy.

Henri had to lay low for awhile, but he was still living in anonymity in a crummy apartment when he opened his anarchist newspaper on 4 February, 1894 to read of Auguste’s dramatic speech at his execution. And Henri was green with envy.

Now, there might be some who feel my tone slights the victims of such attacks; baloney. Murder has been anathema for at least six thousand years, when the ancient Egyptians made “Thou shalt not kill” their first commandment, predating Moses by at least two thousand years. If a human being is murdered by a serial killer, a lunatic at the controls of a hijacked jet, a deluded doctor, a drunk at the wheel of a car, a Christian with a gun, or a waiter too busy to wash their hands, the result for the victims is the same; tragedy. Fundamentalist Islamic-Christian-Marxist- Socialist-white supremacists - cultural and political justifications matter only to the perpetrator; I say again, baloney.

As if to prove my point, one week after the glorious execution of Auguste, Henri entered the restaurant at Hotel Terminus, next to the Gar Saint Lazare train station in Paris. He had stopped at two other bars earlier but, he claimed later, they weren’t crowded enough. My guess is he had not yet drunk enough courage. He nursed two drinks for an hour at the Terminus, and then as he staggered out the door, tossed his bomb back into the cafe, where it exploded, killing one. A waiter ran after Henri, who shot him. Two policemen took up the chase. Henri shot one of them. The other knocked him down and restrained him. Henri’s toll was now eight dead – five at the police station and three at the restaurant.

At his trial Henri was defiant and bombastic, until his attorney put Henri’s mother on the witness list. Henri objected. He told the judge, “It never occurred to me to inflict such pain on my mother.” In fact I suspect Henri was more concerned about sullying his image. It would be difficult to maintain the role of a logic driven dedicated anarchist while his mommy was telling stories about what a emotionally unstable childhood he had suffered.. 

According to the New York Times, On 21 May, 1894 at “4:07 a.m.…the iron doors swung apart…Henri was ghastly white, but walked with a firm step. As he approached the platform he shouted, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.” His voice…trembled noticeably…As they pushed him against the plank he shouted again, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.”  He had evidently worked this out and wanted to be quoted exactly. The click of the knife was heard the next moment, and Henri’s head dropped to the ground. The blood from the his body spurted high as the body revolved and dropped into the basket. (The executioner) himself picked up the head from the sawdust and threw it viciously into the basket with the body.”

Anarchy, it turned out, was not long lived. History proved it to be a temporary delusion, to join those other temporary delusions people have claimed as justification for random murder; communism, fascism, Black power, White power, the Basque Independence Party,  abortion, the Irish Republican Army, the John Birch Society, the Confederacy, and the myriad other stupid self-justifications invented by humans. So, hatred is a just another ideology in this respect - reduced to its core it is all about self.

 

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KILLING HITLER

I am amazed there were only 35 attempts to murder Adolf Hitler (above), not counting the entire Second World War, of course. He was in public life for 25 years – 1920 to 1945 - so that works out to less than one (actually 0.777) attempts to shoot, stab, poison or blow him up per year. True, it was not generally known at the time that he was the greatest mass murderer of the 20^th Century. But he was a polarizing public figure, a supercilious, narcissistic vulgar vegetarian given to long antisemitic bile filled public tirades. Hitler should have attracted assassins the way the Republican Party draws frat boys. I think the explanation for Hitler's longevity may be the illusions he created to fool others, and the delusions of his would-be assassins, by which they fooled themselves.

Adolf Hitler was just an average man, about 5 foot 8 inches tall and weighing about 150 pounds. There is no accurate record for his weight because Hitler refused to disrobe for physicals. But other than that phobia, little about him was not ordinary. He had a reputation as a great public speaker, but I have doubts about that. The only thing that made him stand out in a crowd was that distinctive “chaplinesque” mustache. It was chosen by Charlie Chaplin for his “Little Tramp”, to stand out in a long shot. And that was also probably why Hitler cut his World War One mustache so sharply. In fact just about everything Hitler did was for effect and illusion.

Marcel Gerbohay was the definition of delusion. The studious, serious French boy, and a devout Catholic, was just another seminary student at Saint-Ilan (above), in the Brittany coastal village of Saint-Briuc. And it was there in 1936 that he was stricken with what his teachers described as a nervous breakdown. Marcel was not sent home, but confined to his dorm room bed for most of the year. After he had physically recovered, he displayed a new malady, a grandiose delusional disorder in which Marcel believed he was actually Dimitri Romanov-Holstein-Gottorpa, a member of the Russian royal family. He shared his delusion with only a few carefully chosen fellow students, who he admitted to his secret “Compagnie du Mystère”.

After trying to seize power by force in the November 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler's party failed to secure even a single seat in the May 1924 Reichstag elections. By 1929, the power of Hitler's antisemitic speeches had increased the Nazi share to... less than 3% of the voters – winning just 12 out of some 600 Reichstag seats. Everything changed with the Great Depression. In the September 1930 elections the Nazis won 107 seats, making them the second largest party in the Reichstag. Two years later Adolf Hitler became a German citizen, and in May of 1932 the Nazi share climbed to 230 seats, 37% of the electorate. But that would be Hitler's democratic high water mark. In new elections that November, his party lost 34 seats. Luckily for Hitler, that would be the last free election in Germany for 17 years.

In 1937 Marcel/Demitri's plan to defeat communism and put himself on the Russian throne ran into an obstacle. He decided Adolf Hitler, the most virulent anti-communist in Europe, had betrayed the cause. For that crime, Hitler must die. In July of 1938 Marcel/Dimitri gave the assignment to one of his most ardent acolytes, a 21 year old Swiss landscaping student named Maurice Bavaud (above). 

The chosen assassin returned to his family home in the Swiss lakeside resort town of Neuchetel (above). His return was a financial burden to his family, but Maurice spent his time studying German and reading the book Hitler had written while in jail for the Beer Hall Putsch - “Mein Kampf”. Then in the early hours of 9 October, he stole 600 Swiss francs from his mother, leaving behind a note which read, “I am going to make a life for myself.”.

Adolf Hitler's father, Alois, had been born to the unmarried Maria Schicklgruber in 1837, so he used her last name until he was 39 years old, when he finally petitioned the government to adopt his stepfather Johann's last name - Hiedle. The church recorded it in another form, as “Hitler”. In German both versions mean “small land owner”. In January 1885 Alois married his third wife, Klara Potzl. Their first three children died in infancy. Their fourth child, born when Alois was 52 years old in 1889, was thus Adolf Hitler (above), and not Adolf Shicklgruber. In German Hitler means “wolf”, and Hitler often used the pseudonym “Mr Wolf” when registering in hotels. During World War Two, which he would start, Hitler called his headquarters the “Wolf's Lair”, and he named his favorite German Shepherd “Wolf”.  In 1945 Hitler tested the cyanide capsules prepared for his own suicide, on his beloved Wolf.

Maurice Bavaud went first to Berlin, where he discovered Hitler was actually at his Bavarian mountain top retreat above the village of Berchtesgarden (above). Disappointed, Maurice headed for Munich, where he took a bus 2,300 feet up in the Bavarian alps, and on 25 October checked into the budget hotel Stiftskeller. Maurice spent a week pretending to be a fanatical Nazi, trying to gain access to Hitler. Then he encountered a police captain who told him Hitler had just left for Munich, to participate in the annual celebrations of the Putsch. On Halloween, Maurice headed back down the hill to Munich.

Adolf Hitler often described Angela “Geli” Raubal (above), as the only woman he ever loved. In 1929 her mother, Hitler's half sister, allowed the vibrant 19 year old girl to move into an apartment in her 42 year old “Uncle Alf's” Munich suite. The women on Hitler's staff never approved of “Geli”, one saying, “She flirted with everybody; she was not a serious girl.” 

On Friday, 18 September, 1931 as he left for a rally in Nuremburg, Hitler (above right) and Geli (above left) argued loudly over the degree to which he controlled her life  Around 9:30 the next morning, worried staff knocked down the door to Geli's apartment. She was found wearing a blue night dress, face down on the floor, with a bullet wound from Hitler's Walther pistol through her left lung. She had drown in her own blood and had been dead for several hours. 

Hitler was inconsolable and friends feared he would take his own life. As Chancellor Hitler hung portraits of Geli in his public offices, and for the rest of his life kept her apartment as it was the day he last saw her.

On 9 November, 1938,  Maurice Bevaud secured front row VIP seating along the parade route by telling officials he was a journalist. His position street side, at the corner of Prälat and Miller Way in Munich, in front of the Church of the Holy Spirit ("Heiliggeistkirche"), meant the Nazi leaders would pass within feet of him. 

As the line of brown shirted officials leading the parade approached, Maurice stood and prepared to draw his pistol. But he was shocked to see Hitler had moved to the opposite side of the street, fifty feet away from him. Worse, the crowd rose to offer the Nazi salute ("Hitlergruss"), preventing Maurice from even seeing his target clearly. 

Still, no one had searched him before allowing him into the restricted seating and even though he spoke bad German, no one had asked to see his credentials. The frustrated Maurice Bevaud caught the next train back to Berchtesgarden.

Beginning at night fall, this night, 9 November, 1938 , the Nazi Party unleashed a 48 hour wave of violence against Jews across Germany and Austria – called the Kristallnacht, or crystal night, because of the tens of thousands of smashed store windows. 

Almost every synagogue in Germany was damaged or burned down. More than 7,000 Jewish owned shops and department stores were burned or ransacked (but not looted). Even Jewish cemeteries were attacked, tombstones smashed and shattered, crypts opened and bodies thrown onto the ground. Jews were beaten to death in the streets, in full view of the police. 

Another 30,000 Jewish men were arrested (above) and detained in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen – concentration camps to be infamous in another 7 years . This time most were released over the next three months on the condition that they leave Germany, but over 2,000 died while in Nazi custody. And finally, insult to injury, the Jewish community was fined for the cost of cleaning up their assault, one billion Richsmarks.

Maurice Bevaud took a taxi directly from the Berchtesgarden train station to the front gate of Hitler's retreat. He managed to talk his way inside and was finally stopped only because Hitler had already left by plane for Berlin (above). The Swiss assassin immediately returned to the capital, where he again plotted to reach Adolf Hitler. But by 12 November, Maurice he had finally used the last of the 600 francs stolen from his mother, and was forced to abandon his quest. 

Maurice stowed away aboard a train, but was caught by a conductor while still carrying the revolver and ammunition, a map of Berchtesgarden and a faked letter of introduction to Hitler. The railway officials handed him over to the Gestapo in the Bavarian university town of Augsburg. They assumed he was part of a larger plot, and tortured him until he confessed..

Adolf Hitler became a vegetarian in 1937, lecturing his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbles that “meat-eating is harmful to humanity”. His Nazi party created the most stringent anti-vivisection laws in Europe, and stopped all use of animals in medical experimentation. Hitler would even turn his head to avoid watching any scene in a film which depicted the injury or death of an animal. 

Yet, after the 20 July 1944 bomb attack on his life, Hitler ordered the conspirators “must be hanged like cattle”, and had film of them slowly strangling on piano wires suspended from meat hooks, rushed through the developers, so he could view it the same night..

According to a witness “the men dangled and strangled, their belt-less trousers finally dropping...”. Now it was Goebbles who had to look away from the images.  Berthold von Stauffenberg, eldest brother of the man who planted the bomb, was hanged, revived, hanged again, and again and again, at least four times in all, before finally dying in front of the cameras. All German officers were ordered to watch the full 2 hour record of the executions, although many turned their backs to the screen and the SS cadets at Berlin's Lichterfelde barracks, training for Hitler's personal bodyguard, walked out during the showing.

Maurice Bevaud was convicted of conspiring to assassinate Hitler on 18 December, 1938, and was sentenced to die in Ploetzensee Prison (above). He was questioned and tortured for another 17 months. In one of last letters to his parents, Maurice had written, “Ah, if I had just kept my service to God, and not left the creator for the creation...then I would not be here...I don't know, whether my last words will be 'damn' or 'God, I put my soul into your hands.. Since my mistake was made from weakness and passion and not from bad, arrogant intention, God (may) give me the victory of goodness and mercy.”

 

On 14 May, 1941, Maurice Bevaud was led to the execution shed at the rear of the prison, and was beheaded by guillotine (above). The German government charged him 300 Reich Marks for the service.

Marcel Cerbohay went into hiding when Hitler's armies conquered France in June of 1940. Gestapo agents were then dispatched to Saint-Briuc, but the founder of the “Compagnie du Mystère” had fled to Vichy territory. But that December, Marcel slipped home to spend Christmas with his ailing mother, and was captured by the Gestapo on New Years day, 1942. He was questioned and tortured in France for 9 months, before being sent to Ploetzensee Prison, where his deluded brain was separated from his body 9 April, 1943, in the same execution shed where Maurice Bevaud had died two years before.

Adolf Hitler's illusions resulted in the deaths of some 5, 500,000 Germans, Austrians and allies, 20 million Russians, 6 million Poles, 1,500,000 Slavs, 350,000 British empire citizens, 500, 000 Czechs,  500,000 Frenchmen and women, almost 500,000 Americans, 200,000 Dutch, 160,000 Greeks, 88,000 Belgians, 20,000 Bulgarians and 10,000 Norwegians. The delusions of Marcel Gerbohay resulted in just two deaths, that of Maurice Bevaud and his own. And that is the difference between politics and mental illness. One is illusion, and the other is delusion.

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