Camaraderie

"Many Native American tribes would consult a shaman before embarking on a hunting expedition. In one tribe, a shaman would take a caribou bone, carve on it images of the kind of prey the tribe were keen to find (buffalo, deer, trailer-park video-poker addicts) and then place it on a fire. At some point the heat of the fire would cause the bone to split. The hunting party would then set out unquestioningly in the direction of the line of the crack.

"This is of course a completely insane practice; the kind of irrational, superstitious nonsense that would have Richard Dawkins foaming at the mouth. Except it isn’t. In fact, it’s rather brilliant.

"One hundred years ago there was no surefire way of predicting where to find a buffalo herd. But there were two ways to improve your odds when hunting them. First it is better to keep moving. Secondly it is a good idea not to hunt buffalo alone: hence it is vital for the group of hunters to stick together — and to maintain internal cohesion and solidarity. Once you get dis­unity or dissent (‘I told you we should have gone west this time or ‘Why didn’t we go fishing instead?’) your odds of success fall dramatically. Since disobeying the shaman was unthinkable, this kind of dissent almost never arose. A sociologist would say that the bone-cracking ritual helps create gemeinschaft rather than gesellschaft — it helps individuals subordinate their different interests to the common good. A military man would call it camaraderie.

"Once you understand that man is a eu­social species (humans were recently described by the evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt as ‘90 per cent chimp, 10 per cent bee’), many seemingly arbitrary and irrational religious practices reveal a remarkable hidden intelligence. They may not seem to make sense intellectually, but behaviourally they work."

--Rory Sutherland, from "Divided We Stand", The Spectator, 7 July 2012

"All great novels are great fairy tales."
--Vladimir Nabokov

Here's What Real Theocracy Looks Like

A man named Muree bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri was beheaded in Saudi Arabia this week after being found in possession of spell books and talismans. Beheading is "God's punishment" for "sorcerers and charlatans," according to a statement that the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice issued in March.

Al-Asiri's execution was the latest accomplishment of Saudi Arabia's Anti-Witchcraft Unit, an elite police force specifically trained to track down and arrest practitioners of magic. The Anti-Witchcraft Unit was part of a larger campaign to exterminate sorcery from the kingdom which began in 2009 and has included a hotline for reporting witch sightings, raids on suspected houses, and lectures to inform the public about the dangers of magicians -- "key causers of religious and social instability in the country," according to the Commission's statement.  
(Foreign Policy, 6/26/2012)

Leap into the Unknown

Another one for the Courage file:

Later this summer, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will ascend to 120,000 feet in a pressurized capsule and, wearing only a spacesuit, jump.


As he plummets 23 miles in the highest skydive ever, Baumgartner will become the first person to break the sound barrier in free fall. That’s the plan, anyway. To even attempt this will expose him to many challenges, including the risk that water in his body could vaporize. 


But one challenge in particular is foremost in everyone’s mind: What happens when Baumgartner encounters the shock waves that invariably occur when something exceeds the speed of sound?

No one really knows.

"Until you do it, it's still an unknown," says Jonathan Clark, the medical director for Red Bull Stratos, the team assembled to help Baumgartner reach his lofty goal.

American Fury

MAN INGESTS DRUG, TURNS INTO RAGING CANNIBAL.  Who could have imagined such a thing?

"On Saturday, May 26, Ronald Poppo, a 65-year-old homeless man, was attacked allegedly by 31-year-old Rudy Eugene, also homeless, in Miami, Fla.  The attack has been dubbed the "naked zombie attack" and "zombie apocalypse" because Eugene reportedly pounced on Poppo while naked and began eating his face, to the shock of several passerby and vehicles.

"Eugene reportedly continued to eat Poppo's face until police arrived 18 minutes later. All that was left of Poppo's face was his beard and mustache, reports indicate.  Eugene is suspected to have been taking a new drug called "bath salts," and although it was not immediately clear if the properties of the drug are linked to the household item of the same name, there have been other violent cases involving the drug." (The Christian Post)

Bean Queen

"A sculptor has created what is believed to be the world's smallest portrait of the Queen - on a 2mm coffee bean.  ...British micro-sculptor Willard Wigan created the commemorative tribute by slowing his heartbeat and working between beats to avoid hand tremors.  He used tiny homemade tools and painted with a hair plucked from a housefly's back to carve the microscopic figures."

Truth

"There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart.  The first of these is science and the second is art."
--Raymond Chandler