TBR News March 22, 2019

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. March 22, 2019: We are out of the area until March 23. ed

 

The Table of Contents

• The Attack on Iran: Israel’s Plans for a US Action
• 80-year-old man raises over $250K for Bernie, Beto. What he ACTUALLY did with the money is rather interesting.
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• A History of Ice Ages
• Crowding into the behavioral sink

 

The Attack on Iran: Israel’s Plans for a US Action

1.The problem under consideration here is that Iran has, or will have, a nuclear weapon within a two year time span. If Iran gets a nuclear bomb, Israelis are afraid Iran will use it on them.

2.Israel would have logistical problems attacking Iran. Any attack would have to be an aerial attack, using fighter-bombers to pin-point known Iranian nuclear facilities.

The current opinion in some circles, mostly in the United States, is that at some point in the near future, the growing threat or re-imposition of devastating economic sanctions on Iran will convince its radical religious leaders to terminate their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Also, there is the growing hope that the CIA’s funded Iran’s Green Movement will overthrow, a la the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and replace the Muslim fundamentalist regime, or at the very least find the means to modify and secularize the regime’s ideological extremism. It is also possible that disrupting operations  now being implemented by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through physical sabotage and, upon occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have derailed Iran’s progress towards achieving the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

It is now planned in Tel Aviv that senior Israeli officials, representing both their political and military establishments, will come to Washington for conferences both with their American counterparts and, eventually, with President Trmup. These conversations, which have been carefully planned and scripted, will have the Israelis advising their American counterparts that they are planning an attack, nuclear or non-nuclear as the situation develops, on Iran because a nuclear Iran poses the ‘gravest threat since Hitler’ to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe that  by launching a preemptive strike at all possible Iranian sites suspected of participation in their nuclear program they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years,. Further, talking-point secret Israeli memos state: Israel will inform their American counterparts that Israel has no other choice than to launch this attack. They will not ask for permission for this attack, because it will soon be too late to ask for permission.

Insofar as President Trump is concerned, the Israelis are considering the most important point of these interviews would be to discover as to what would be the circumstances under which President Trump would move to halt the Iranian projects. The primary point, then, is to convince the Americans that only military force, i.e., heavy bombing raids, would be able to “totally obliterate Iran’s attempts to get a nuclear weapon and, further, to prevent them from rebuilding their infrastructure in the foreseeable future.” From the Israeli point of view, all of their future actions, which also include the use of their own nuclear weapons on Tehran depends entirely upon the answers, primarily of the President but also of the American military leadership..

Also, in the possible event that the American President were to agree fully with Israeli wishes, i.e., to use American aircraft to obliterate the perceived Iranian threat by bombing specific, and even general, Iranian targets, could an Israeli-sponsored domestic American propaganda campaign to encourage sections of the American public, outside of the fully-cooperative Jewish community, to support such an American attack.

At the present time, it is well-established that Israeli agents, Mossad and others, have inserted themselves into all the instruments of power and propaganda in the United States where they have sent any pertinent information to Israel and kept up a steady offensive against the minds, and wills, of the American people. Also, many of the more prominent American newspapers, such as the New York Times is entirely Jewish-owned, this is stated to be the most receptive to the needs of both Washington and Tel Aviv.

Israel is fully prepared to take a chance on permanently alienating American affection in order to make a high-risk attempt at stopping Iran. If Iran retaliates against American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the consequences for Israel’s relationship with America’s military leadership could be catastrophic.

It has been seriously discussed in Tel Aviv and in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, that probably the best way to compel the American public and through them, the President, to unilateral action, would not be to launch an attack on Tehran but instead, attack America through a false-flag operation. This would consist of a believable attack, or attempted attack, on a major American target a la the 9/11 Saudi-supported attacks.

The most current plan would be for a known militant Arab anti-Israel group, Hezbollah, to actually deliver an atomic device to the city of New York, or, alternatively, to Washington.

The American Central Intelligence Agency, now seeking to reshape its negative image, would report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the exact details of the arrival and placement of the bomb.

The actual bomb would be genuine but would have a part that was malfunctioning, thus rendering the weapon impossible to detonate. The Arabs involved in this delivery would have in their number, a Yemeni Jew, such as the ones that instigated the 9/11 Saudi attacks, and this sleeper would carry numerous forged documents “proving” that Tehran was directly behind this planned attack.

Revelation of these documents by the fully-supportive New York Times and Washington Post would immediately swing a significant bulk of the American public behind an immediate attack on Tehran with the purpose of neutralizing its atomic weapons capacity.

This program is now on the table and undercover Israeli agents, posing as top-level Iranian operatives, have located a small group of Hizbollah in Lebanon who would be willing to deliver and prepare this device in New York or, as an alternative, Washington itself. Israeli intelligence feels that the use of Hizbollah personnel would entirely justify their obliterating Hizbollah-controlled territory in southern Lebanon that now house many thousands of long-range surface to surface missiles that could easily reach Tel Aviv and other vital Israeli targets.

This action, which has already been planned in detail, would be conducted by Israel alone and would compliment the projected American attack on Tehran. Israel stresses the fact that both attacks must be simultaneous lest a forewarned Hezbollah launch rocket attacks on Israel upon hearing of the American attack. Timing here is considered to be absolutely vital.

Both Israel and Hezbollah have accused UNIFIL of bias. Israel again accused them of failing to prevent, and even collaborating with, Hezbollah in its replenishment of military power. Hezbollah, in turn, said “certain contingents” of UNIFIL are spying for, if not assisting, Israel.

Israel has long been a serious planning for a future invasion of Lebanon and such an assault would continue attacking until both Hezbollah’s membership and their system of tunnels and bunkers was completely destroyed, because Israel will never tolerate a “zone of invulnerability” occupied by a sworn enemy, or a double threat posed by Hezbollah’s rockets.

In the event that Israeli military aircraft attack Tehran, there is the vital necessity that these Israeli military aircraft would be under great pressure to return to base at once because Israeli intelligence believes that Iran would immediately order Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli air-force resources would be needed to hunt Hezbollah rocket teams.

Israel’s Northern Command, at its headquarters near the Lebanese border, is ordered that in the event of a unilateral Israeli or American strike on Iran, their mission would be to attack and completely destroy any and all identified Hezbollah rocket forces, by any and all means necessary, to include small nuclear devices that could destroy a number of square miles of what is called ‘terrorist territory’ and render it useless as any future base of attack against Israel. At the present time the Iranians are keeping their Hezbollah firm ally in reserve until Iran can cross the nuclear threshold.

During  the years since the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon Hezbollah has greatly increased its surface-to-surface missile capability, and an American/Israeli strike on Iran, would immediately provoke all-out retaliation by Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most Israeli/American intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 surface-to-surface rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel. It is further known that Russia has sent large numbers of longer range surface-to-surface missiles to Syria which has, in turn, shipped them to Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. These missiles have the capacity to easily reach Tel Aviv and Israelis are very concerned that a massive rocket barrage deep into Israel could not only do serious damage to their infrastructure but could easily provoke a mass immigration of Israelis to other areas, thus depriving Israel of both civilian and military personnel it would certainly need in the event of increased Arab military actions against Israel.

Even if Israel’s Northern Command successfully combated Hezbollah rocket attacks in the wake of an Israeli strike, which American experts have deemed to be “nearly impossible” political limitations would not allow Israel to make repeated sorties over Iran. “America, too, would look complicit in an Israeli attack, even if it had not been forewarned. The assumption—that Israel acts only with the full approval of the United States is a feature of life in the Middle East, and it is one the Israelis are taking into account. A serious danger here to Israeli attack plans would be if the United States got wind of the imminence of such an attack and demanded that Israel cease and desist in its actions. Would Israel then stop? Though highly unlikely, this is an unpleasant and unacceptable

At this time, the Israelis have drawn up specific plans to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and the Bushehr reactor, along with four other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program that have been identified by joint past and present Israeli-American aerial surveillance.

If Israeli aircraft succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, all well and good but even if  they fail to damage or destroy these targets ,such an attack is feared by American and other nations as risking a devastating change in the Middle East. Such an attack could initiate immediate reprisals such as a massed rocket attack by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon as well as other actions from neighboring Muslim states.

This could become a major diplomatic crisis for President Trump that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the international price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of seriously endangering Jewish groups around the world, and especially in the United States by making them the targets of Muslim-originated terror attacks and most certainly accelerating the growing immigration of many Israelis to what they felt might be much safer areas.

An Israeli political and military consensus has now emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by December of 2010. (Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Trump administration. The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Trump.

The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the United States, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well that if America allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the American orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue, self-interestedly, that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. The basic question then is why the Jewish state should trust the non-Jewish president of the United States to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.

For more than a year, these White House officials have parried the charge that their president is unwilling to face the potential consequences of a nuclear Iran, and they are frustrated by what they believe to be a caricature of his position. It is undeniably true, however, that the administration has appeared on occasion less than stalwart on the issue.

One question no administration official seems eager to answer is this: what will the United States do if sanctions fail?

In Israel, of course, officials expend enormous amounts of energy to understand President Trump, despite the assurances they have received from others. Delegations from Netanyahu’s bureau, from the defense and foreign ministries, and from the Israeli intelligence community have been arriving in Washington lately with great regularity. As an alternative to cooperation by Trump, Israel, through her supporters and lobbyists in the United States are preparing to offer extensive financial and other incentives to political opponents of Trump, mostly the right-wing Republicans and American Christian groups and cults. Both of these groups are being cultivated currently with the idea that if Trump will not cooperate, the Republicans will in the future as they always have before. Also to consider is the current antipathy of American Jews for Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and these American Jews, who are, like the president they voted for in overwhelming numbers, generally supportive of a two-state solution, and dubious about Jewish settlement of the West Bank.

Both Israeli and American intelligence agencies are of the firm belief that Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability, which is the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device.. The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state, the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East

Patriotism in Israel runs very high, according to numerous polls, and it seemed unlikely that mere fear of Iran could drive Israel’s Jews to seek shelter elsewhere. But one leading proponent of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, If Iran crossed the nuclear threshold, the very idea of Israel as a Zionist entity would be endangered. “These people are good citizens, and brave citizens, but the dynamics of life are such that if someone has a scholarship for two years at an American university and the university offers him a third year, the parents will say, ‘Go ahead, remain there,’ If someone finishes a Ph.D. and they are offered a job in America, they might stay there. It will not be that people are running to the airport, but slowly, slowly, the decision-making on the family level will be in favor of staying abroad. The bottom line is that we would have an accelerated brain drain. And an Israel that is not based on entrepreneurship that is not based on excellence will not be the Israel of today.”

Most critically if a Zionist Israel is no longer seen by its 6 million Jewish inhabitants and also by the approximately 7 millions of Jews resident outside of Israel that because of continuing threats from outside the country as no longer a natural safe haven for Jews then the entire concept of a Zionist haven/state is destroyed

To understand why Israelis of different political dispositions see Iran as quite possibly the most crucial challenge they have faced in their 62-year history, one must keep in mind the near-sanctity, in the public’s mind, of Israel’s nuclear monopoly. The Israeli national narrative, in shorthand, begins with shoah, which is Hebrew for “calamity,” and ends with tkumah, “rebirth.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal symbolizes national rebirth, and something else as well: that Jews emerged from World War II having learned at least one lesson, about the price of powerlessness.

If Israel is unable to change Trump’s mind, they will continue to threaten to take unilateral action against Iran by sending approximately one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—by crossing Saudi Arabia, and along the border between Syria and Turkey, and, without consulting the Americans or in any way announcing their missions by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)

The first belief by Israeli military planners is that Israel would get only one try. Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling—perhaps, if speculation rife in intelligence circles is to be believed, with secret Saudi cooperation.

Israel has been working through the United States to procure Saudi cooperation with an Israeli air strike against Tehran and other targets inside Iran.. The Saudis are treating this subject with great caution lest other Arab states learn of their putative cooperation in an Iranian attack with over flights of Saudi territory by Israeli military aircraft.

The current American/Israeli military plans are for the Saudis to turn off their radar after they have been noticed by the American embassy that an Israeli attack is imminent and also to permit the Israeli aircraft to land in their country for refueling The Israelis are not concerned with any kind of Iranian aircraft resistance because their airfields have been pinpointed by American satellites and one of the attacking groups would use low-yield atomic rocketry on all the identified Iranian bases. It is obvious that when, not if, the Saudis part in this becomes public, it will create immense ill-will in neighboring Muslim states, an impression the Saudi government is most anxious not to deal with.

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: At the present moment, Israel possesses 135 nuclear weapons, most of them  mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are currently positioned in the Persian Gulf). Netanyahu is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would, in all probability, destroy or severely damage Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.

Another question Israeli planners struggle with: how will they know if their attacks have actually destroyed a significant number of centrifuges and other hard-to-replace parts of the clandestine Iranian program? Two strategists told me that Israel will have to dispatch commandos to finish the job, if necessary, and bring back proof of the destruction. The commandos—who, according to intelligence sources, may be launched from the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq—would be facing a treacherous challenge, but one military planner I spoke with said the army would have no choice but to send them.

Netanyahu’s obvious course is to convince the United States that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is obligated to grapple with it, not Israel alone. It is well-known that Israel by itself could not hope to deal with a retaliation against it by Iran and other Arab states but that a confederation of other nations, led, of course, by the United States could defend Israel against her enemies. The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, does not place and credence in the current sanctions against Iran, even the ones initiated by the United States at Israel’s urgent request. Is it known that Netanayahu is not happy with President Trumps’s reluctance to support an Israeli attack on Iran and has brought a great deal of political pressure to bear on the President by American Jewish political and business groups.

Netanyahu understands, however, that President Trump, with whom he has had a difficult and intermittently frigid relationship, believes that stringent sanctions, combined with various enticements to engage with the West, might still provide Iran with a face-saving method of standing down.

Israel’s current period of forbearance, in which Israel’s leadership waits to see if the West’s nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December.  The American defense secretary, said at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. “

One of the consistent aims of Israel is to pressure President Trump, who has said on a number of occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” into executing a military strike against Iran’s known main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.

Donald Trump is steadfastly opposed to initiating new wars in the Middle East and an attack by U.S. forces on Iran is not a foreign-policy goal for him or his administration. The Israeli goal is to compel him by public, and private, pressure to order the American military into action against Iran

President Trump has said any number of times that he would find a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” His most stalwart comments on the subject have been discounted by some Israeli officials

If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Trump will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack.

 

80-year-old man raises over $250K for Bernie, Beto. What he ACTUALLY did with the money is rather interesting.

Hideoutnow

Eighty-year-old John Pierre Dupont of California successfully raised money for Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Beto O’Rourke, but none of the money actually went to either candidate.

Instead, Dupont allegedly spent the money on his rent as well as the purchase of a Mercedes-Benz vehicle.

What are the details?

Officials arrested Dupont on Tuesday for reportedly setting up fake websites and political action committees to raise money for Sanders and O’Rourke.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged Dupont with wire fraud as well as identity theft after he fraudulently raised more than $250,000 for the Democratic candidates, as well as other Democratic candidates and causes.

According to the complaint, Dupont set up at least a dozen websites and three PACs to collect the money in the Democrats’ names. One of the websites was reportedly set to help reunite immigrant families.

“Thousands of donors believed their hard-earned money was being used to support the causes described in solicitations, but in reality, the scam PACs had no operations beyond the fundraising itself, and no funds were used to support candidates,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement obtained by NBC News.

Some of the websites included Beto4Senate.org, Sanders2016Campaign.org, GillumForFloridaGovernor.org, and ImmigrantChildrenUnited.org.

Prosecutors do not have any reason to believe that any of the campaigns or candidates had knowledge of Dupont’s operation.

What else?

Dupont reportedly maintained such operations since 2015, according to the complaint. Dupont also reportedly failed to report the donations to the Federal Election Commission.

The accused has an extensive record of white collar convictions stemming back to 1985. Prosecutors convicted Dupont for mail fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, and more. He served time for all crimes.

If convicted on new charges, Dupont could spend up to 22 years in prison.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

March 22, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No. 75

Date:  Tuesday, April 1, 1997

Commenced:  2:05 PM CST

Concluded: 2:25 PM CST

 

GD: I was having a nice talk with Bill yesterday evening. You now, his wife is a very nice person but he’s getting to be a bore. I mean he has all kinds of lies he keeps trying to shove off on me and it’s all I can do to keep from tossing them back in his face. Carter was going to make him head of the CIA for instance. Winning the French Legion of Honor for another fib. Didn’t. But, I must say he is a sharp person. But Bill makes a very important statement today and tomorrow, forgets about it. How much does he know about the Kennedy business?

RTC: Not as much as he would like to. I’ve told you more than I ever told him. Why? Because Bill would take that football and try to make a goal with it. You know how to keep your mouth shut.

GD: A compliment. Everyone else says I can’t keep quiet.

RTC: Oh, that’s true too but I have noticed that you seem to know just what you’re saying even though it sounds like chatter.

GD: You think I might be devious?

RTC: Christ yes.  I know you’re devious, Gregory. And I am happy I am your friend. I seem to have heard rumors that your enemies have terrible problems.

GD: Nonsense. I am a true Christian, Robert. I do unto others before they do unto me.

RTC: Your friend Atwood hates you.

GD: I know. He tried to blind side me but I beat him to the punch. People like Jimmy think they can walk on water until they try it and then they drown. Well, I got the gold and he didn’t.

RTC: And his friends?

GD: Probably swimming around the Caribbean fornicating with mermaids.

RTC: More likely as crab bait.

GD: Such pessimism. Mueller was a pessimist, Robert. He was the same way. Always misinterpreting my pure Christian motivations.

RTC: I recall the loaded soup.

GD: Well, they had it coming.

RTC: Oh, I agree with that. Why didn’t you put something a little stronger into the pot?

GD: Like roach or rat poison?

RTC: Well, something like that.

GD: Mueller asked me the same thing. I have an answer for you, Robert. The same one I gave to Mueller. I only found the detergent. If there were other additives, I never found any. Would I have stuck them into the pot? Well, probably but then we’ll never know, will we? If I had, and if I got away with it, the conspiracy loonies would still be writing books about how the Illuminati were behind it.

RTC: Oh my God, don’t knock those idiots. They put up such a smokescreen over the Kennedy hit that the truth will never be seen, let alone published. Everyone has their uses, Gregory.

GD: What about Mongoloids?

RTC: Entertainment?

GD: Why not? Hire the handicapped because they’re so much fun to watch.

RTC: We used to hire the most stupid people in the Company because we could always set them up.

GD: Sounds like Oswald.

RTC: Yes, doesn’t it.

GD: Except Oswald worked for the FBI and ONI instead of you.

RTC: Notice how quickly they abandoned him.

GD: Certainly.

RTC: And then there was Jack Rubenstein.

GD: Comic relief. I wonder what happened to his dog?

RTC: The Dallas cops ate her at a barbecue.

GD: And they killed her afterwards?

RTC: We are veering into the lewd, Gregory.

GD: Sheba. A dachshund. They don’t make good eating.

RTC: You speak from experience?

GD: Ah, but with a really good sauce and a first class Burgundy, even a dog tastes pretty good.

RTC: Have you….

GD: No. I remember one time, I had a friend who worked in the city morgue in San Francisco and someone stuck a dead baby in a box and left it there. It was winter so it was pretty fresh. He was on the night shift and was drunk so he called me up and said he had a present. Not a nice person.

RTC: He gave you the poor baby? What did you do with it?

GD: Put on the back seat of someone’s car and called the police. Such excitement.

RTC: Who was the fortunate recipient?

GD: I don’t know. It was an expensive car parked near a fancy restaurant. Stirred things up a bit. The dead baby probably went back to the morgue, a bit shopworn, and the car owner and the police had a stimulating and unforgettable evening.

RTC: A monster.

GD: Oh, I know and I sleep upside down like a big bat. I wonder, speaking of dead babies, how much longer Jimmy Atwood will last? We do have a bet.

RTC: As I recall. Jim called me a week or so ago but he never said a word. Remind me to send you a thick stack of his reports from Pullach. He and the Gehlen people. My God, they hired half the Gestapo there.

GD: I knew a number of them.  I would love to stick him with that. Papers might help a bit.

RTC: Now Jim is furious so perhaps it might not be a good idea for you to poke sticks at him. He has wiped out a number of people in his life so watch him.

GD: He’d better watch me, Robert. I’ll bet he told others to do the dirty deeds. I take care of my own problems. Sure he didn’t talk about me?

RTC: Positive. He’s working on a book that will sell all of ten copies. He read your books and I know from his reports that he can’t hold a candle to you as far as literary style is concerned. I did needle him a bit when I said how well you wrote.

GD: Did you mean it?

RTC: Yes. His book will be an exercise in mendacity and self-adulation.

GD: You took the words right out of my mouth. I’ve been eating some Limburger cheese, Robert, so don’t inhale.

 

(Concluded at 2:25 PM CST)

 

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

 

 

A History of Ice Ages

March 22, 2019

by Christian Jürs

Earth’s climate was in a cool period from A.D. 1400 to about A.D. 1860, dubbed the “Little Ice Age.” This period was characterized by harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a drier climate. The decline in global temperatures was a modest 1/2° C, but the effects of this global cooling cycle were more pronounced in the higher latitudes. The Little Ice Age has been blamed for a host of human suffering including crop failures like the Irish Potato Famine and the demise of the medieval Viking colonies in Greenland.

• The Polar Ice Cap Effect

As long as the continent of Antarctica exists at the southern pole of our planet we probably will be repeatedly pulled back into glacial ice ages. This occurs because ice caps, which cannot attain great thickness over open ocean, can and do achieve great thickness over a polar continent– like Antarctica. Antarctica used to be located near the equator, but over geologic time has moved by continental drift to its present location at the South Pole.

Once established, continental polar ice caps act like huge cold sinks, taking over the climate and growing bigger during periods of reduced solar output. Part of the problem with shaking off the effects of an ice age, is once ice caps are established, they cause solar radiation to be reflected back into space, which acts to perpetuate global cooling. This increases the size of ice caps which results in reflection of even more radiation, resulting in more cooling, and so on.

Continental polar ice caps seem to play a particularly important role in ice ages when the arrangement of continental land masses restrict the free global circulation of equatorial ocean currents. This is the case with the continents today, as it was during the Carboniferous Ice Age when the supercontinent Pangea stretched from pole to pole 300 million years ago.

 

Ice Ages and Glaciers

What is an ‘ice age’ necessarily? And what is a ‘little’ one for that matter?

The defining characteristic of an ‘ice age’ is the uniform, global advance of glaciers and sea ice.

How is this so?

The advance of glaciers and sea ice are primarily the result of a decrease in climatic temperature. This is true because of the very nature of what makes a glacier form.

Glaciers are the accumulation of years of snow that had fallen in winter months, yet did not melt in the summer. As more and more layers are deposited, the snow is compressed, changes into ice, and is compacted more and more densely with each succeeding year.

At a critical depth, approximately 18 meters, the ice sheet begins to move as a result of its own weight and gravity. Although ice within a glacier is always moving (like a conveyor belt), if the amount of annual accumulating snowfall which feeds the glacier equals the amount of ice that melts, then the glacier will sustain its present frontal ‘terminus’ position.

But, “glaciers periodically retreat or advance, depending on the amount of snow accumulation or ice melting they experience” (Cheshire 3). The extent of these retreats and advances depends on (1) the type of glacier (expansive ice sheet glacier, mountain glacier, valley glacier, tidewater glacier, etc.), (2) precipitation, and/or (3) temperature. The question is, then, is there a general advance of glaciers around the world during the time of the Little Ice Age?

Glaciers and Greenland

The period before the Little Ice Age was in fact preceded by a several hundred-year period with generally warmer-than-average temperature conditions. During this time, Greenland (which was actually green during this warm period) was settled near the end of the 10th century.

From 1000-3000 CE, the colony flourished: a cathedral was built, a monastery and a nunnery existed, and more than 3,000 colonist lived on 300 farms. But as the Little Ice Age approached, weather continually degenerated for the colonists. Harvests failed, settlements to the north were abandoned as the permafrost level rose and glaciers spread south. In fact, today archeological studies of the Greenland colony date graves based on how shallow the coffin was buried because of the increased permafrost level over time.

Personal accounts, like those of a trader in 1751, tell the story of glacial advance: “The ice increases every year, which is mostly recognizable from the fact that tracks where the Greenlanders used to go hunting are now quite overridden and covered by ice, and, as far as may be concluded from their simple chronometry, the change that has taken place in a score of years is very considerable” (Grove 266). Due to the high latitude of their settlements, the people of Greenland were hard hit by glacial advance of “ice which has laid itself over the entire hinterland” that buried many northern settlements (ibid).

Of the research done after the 19th century in Greenland glacial sheets (203 in all) the Study of their movement ‘strongly suggests’ that the dominant determinant of their movement is temperature.

That is to say, glacial advances and retreats in Greenland over the past hundred years reflect shifts in lower and higher than average temperatures during this time. It is possible to assume, therefore, that this is also the case with the major glacial advance during the Little Ice Age. The next question, then, is what about the other regions of the world? Were there coinciding advances? And if there were, are they the result of temperature or some other factor?

Glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere during the Little Ice Age

In actuality, very little is known about many of the glaciers in Africa and South America, presently and historically. “These are amongst the least known of the world’s glaciers. All -or nearly all- of them have retreated in the course of this century, but information about the timing of their fluctuations in earlier centuries is sparse” (Grove 264). With lack of information on glaciers during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries even a problem in Europe, it is even more difficult in the Southern Hemisphere (or anywhere else other than Europe, for that matter) to be precise about the fluctuations in glacial frontiers over the past four to five hundred years. As can be seen in the following graph of Switzerland glacier, very few sources (individually represented as hash marks) show up until the 1800’s. Frontal positions can only be determined on broad, possible imprecise terms for the majority of glaciers of the world.

In spite of this, moraines (elliptical shaped debris deposits left during a glacial recession) of a significant number of glaciers in southern Patagonia, South America, point to a general advance culminating in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and then followed by a 20th century recession.

As early as 1895, in fact, it was observed that “the present glaciers (of South America) clearly indicate not only that until a short time ago they were of much greater extent but also that they are now losing volume and receding at a great rate” (Hauthol, 1895 in Grove 273). For example, on the western edge of the Cordon Limite in southern Patagonia, the Ada glacier was observed in 1858 to reach down to 1,797 meters; by 1882 the front had risen to 1,929 meters and in 1980, it had risen further to 2,500 meters above sea-level (Groeber 168).

As well, observations of the snow-line in the Andes since European arrival show an overall retreating tendency in the snowline

In New Zealand, where much more research of the glaciers on its two islands has taken place, extensive advances also preceded a twentieth century retreat in earlier centuries. An interesting and dynamic example of the general behavior of New Zealand glaciers is that of the Franz Josef glacier, whose impressive retreat (with occasional advances, like a 200 meter one in 1985) in the past century has been credited, with much debate and controversy, to increased temperature since the time of the Little Ice Age. Although information about the glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere during the 16th through 18th century is very scarce, it is certainly true that they have generally been on a recession since the 19th century, as the following pictures of the Franz Josef demonstrate.

Glaciers in the Himalayas

Glaciers of Asia, as those in the Southern Hemisphere, are scarcely known, thus making conclusions about their movement in the past quite difficult to determine. In fact, of the first three IAHS/Unesco volumes published on the fluctuations of glaciers, “the first contained only European material, and even the third had data from only one Himalayan glacier” in spite of the fact that the area covered by ice in the Himalayas is thirty-three times greater than that of Europe’s ice cover and is the largest ice covered region outside of the Arctic and Antarctic (Grove 199).

Evidence does exist, though, to support the belief that mountain glaciers there were greater during the European Ice Age than present. For example, there exist many Hindu temples near the glacial source of the Ganges River, which plays an important role in the Hindu religion. But these temples are now over 30km from the actual source of the Ganges that leads many to wonder that the glacier was much closer when these temples were initially built (Grove 207-209). More concrete evidence (tree ring studies and observations of Chinese glaciers in the 20th century) leads many to believe that temperatures throughout Asia were lower from the 14th century until the middle 19th century than present.

When looking at the areas of the Earth that is prone to glaciers, it is generally safe to say that around the world, many of the glaciers are presently holding recessed positions when compared to where they were during the Little Ice Age. Still, it is still not totally certain that this correlation is due to falling, then rising temperatures.

One cannot forget the fact that glaciers like the Franz Josef in New Zealand may be contracting more due to a change in precipitin patterns over the past one hundred years that is totally independent of climatic changes elsewhere in the globe. There still remains sufficient evidence, nevertheless, that the European Little Ice Age was at least climatically important (albeit devastating) to places and people situated at polar extremes and mountainous regions where glacial and permafrost encroachment offers little or no alternative, as in the case of the Greenland Colony.

Sources OF THE LITTLE ICE AGE

The factors of climate change can be divided upon a scale of time and space. That is to say, in order to figure out what factors are most responsible for any particular climate change, one must be sure to keep in mind the size the affected area (local, regional, global, extra-global) and the time over which the change occurred. In regards to the Little Ice Age, then, one must look for climatic influences that operate within a two to three hundred year cycle of this Age and were global in nature. But, to be sure not to close our scope too much, let us begin with the external variables, and ultimate (initial) determinants of climatic change on earth: the sun and the earth’s relation to it.

The basic reason why the earth has Weather is because the energy it receives from the sun is not absorbed equally. Winds, currents, and storms occur because of the transfer of the sun’s energy from one place to another and/or from one form to another. Changes in the weather pattern (i.e. climate) can at length be a result of a change in the energy transfer relationship between the sun and the earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans. These external changes can be caused by fluctuations in the output of the sun, earth-sun geometry, and atmospheric chemistry. They differ from internal processes of the earth that involve feedbacks from one part of the climatic system to another, such as surface albedo and the atmosphere-ocean relationship (Adams 1-10).

Wavering sun

It is known that the sun’s output and the earth’s relationship to the sun are quite complicated to quantify. To begin with, the sun regularly fluctuates in intensity by about a fourth of a percent during an eleven-year cycle. But also, studies of other stars have shown that they can regularly go through extended quiet periods where a star’s intensity fell by up to five percent for a number of years. These quiet periods are measured by observing the reduction in sun spot activity of a star. Of thirteen stars routinely measured since 1966, four have exhibited this extended ‘flat’ period throughout the study (Gribbin 19). Not to mention the fact that our sun is constantly getting hotter, and thus affecting earth’s climate, it also has quite the potential (based on studies of other similar stars) to fluctuate its intensity over years, decades, and even centuries. It is believed that these fluctuations are a function of the sun’s rotation. More specifically, “the rotation speed of the sun is inversely correlated with sunspot numbers” because an increased rotation “inhibits transport of the magnetic field from the deep interior to the surface and could cause a reduction of solar wind” (Grove 366-367).

Support for sun fluctuations as the source of the Little Ice Age comes from a recorded decrease in sunspots during part of the Little Ice Age. As early as the 1880’s, a German astronomer, Gustav Sporer, began wondering why it was that very few sunspots were seen in parts of the 17th and 18th century, even though there were “so many observers of the sun, as were then perpetually peeping in upon (it) with their telescopes in England, France, Germany and Italy” (Eddy 1976, in Grove 366). The prolonged absence of sunspots between 1645 and 1715 came to be known as the Mauder minimum. During this period, based on drawing of early astronomers, the sun’s rotation was faster during the Little Ice Age than present, which accounts for the low numbers of sunspots. Still, the Mauder Minimum does not occur through the whole period of the Little Ice Age, thus making a definitive correlation problematic.

Earth-sun Geometry

As well, Earth’s orbit around the sun is far from perfectly static. Rather, as Serbian astronomer Milutin Milankovitch hypothesized in the 20’s and 30’s, the earth’s rotation around the sun and its tilt are subtly influenced by the gravitational forces of other planets and celestial bodies. The subtle changes, though, can “result in different distributions and intensities of sunlight, which then lead to dramatic variations in climate over tens of thousands of years” (Alley 80). These dramatic variations are, in fact, the 100,000 year glacial-interglacial cycle (due to the eccentricity of earth’s orbit), and the shorter-term 20,000 and 40,000 year cycles (due to the earth’s angle of tilt and then the precision of this tilt, respectively). As a side note, we are presently on the tailend of an interglacial period; Milankovitch cycles, though, are on a much too large of time scale to explain the relatively short period of the Little Ice Age. The rest of climatic change variables can be grouped as internal changes on Earth. The four possible factors are volcanism, greenhouse gases, surface albedo, and the ocean-atmosphere relationship.

Volcanism

It is well known that volcanic injection of micro-particles and gases into the stratosphere reduce the amount of solar energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. Successive volcanoes (or even one) can temporarily dust the sky of the entire Earth and thus affect the Climate of the Earth on a variety of time-scales. For example, the eruption of Mt. Agung in 1963 had a marked effect on the climate of the American high Arctic as well as in the tropical troposphere, where temperature decreased almost one degree Celsius from August 1964 to August 1965. But other equally large eruptions, like Bezymyannyy in 1956, have not been followed by a similar decline in temperature, most likely due to difference like the location and chemical make-up of the eruption, which make simply equating more eruptions with lower temperatures a bit troublesome. Consequently, “there seems little doubt that volcanic activity influences climate but the extent of this influence is controversial” (Grove 368).

Nevertheless, an ice-core from Crete, Greenland shows a rather provocative correlation between increased volcanic activity and lower than average temperatures over the past fourteen hundred years. In the following graph, lower-than-average acidic levels of the Greenland core (e), which refers to decreased amounts of sulfate in the atmosphere due to volcanic activity, matches almost perfectly with the warm periods of this era.. “The quietist period volcanically was from CE 1100 to 1250, that is in the medieval warm period. The most active period volcanically came between CE 1250 and 1500 and between CE 1550 and 1700, suggesting that it had an important role in the causation of the Little Ice Age” (Grove 376).

Surface Albedo

A very important amplifier to any glacial-like advance is the reflective effect of ice and snow. An increase in snow and ice reflects back larger amounts of solar energy, thus making surface temperatures even colder and therefore resulting in the possibility for even more snow and ice: a classic feedback situation. Given the fact that the amount of snow and ice can easily be increased or decreased given minor changes in temperature due to, for example, small changes in solar output or volcanism, surface albedo can become an intense resonator to further decreases in surface temperature (Adams 7).

Ocean-Atmosphere conveyor system

One of the most interesting and plausible factors for the Little Ice Age is the relationship between the ocean and the atmosphere. Both are huge sinks for energy and compounds; any change in their relationship “must have effects on the prevailing Climate…” (Lamb 1). Possibly the most famous region for the ocean-atmosphere relationship is in the North Atlantic, where the tropical Gulf Stream brings warm currents and air far north to meet the cold Arctic waters off the coasts of Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. It is well known that the shutting off or slowing down of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic has amplified affects on the climate of Europe because it is responsible for keeping the water and air around Europe (which is very far north) much warmer than its latitude would imply.

Warm, tropical water is brought so far north because the movements of surface winds and surface currents follow each other. Air and water are both fluid and therefore they tend to follow similar courses. ” The general world map of ocean currents is very similar to the pattern of the prevailing winds that drive them. And when the wind-flow pattern is distorted by great meandering of the steering current aloft, …the ocean current system must tend to be distorted as well” (Lamb 3). For example, an atmospheric low, which is by definition is cyclonic, will push air away from the air mass’ center due to the correolis effect. These outward tending winds will also force ocean currents to diverge from the center as well. The opposite is true of an atmospheric high, where anti-cyclonic winds and currents will both diverge towards the center of the air mass.

This fact becomes extremely important with an air mass over the Atlantic because

an atmospheric low will make waters diverge towards the out rim of the Atlantic Basin, while an atmospheric high will cause water currents to converge towards the middle. It is well known that it is the divergent tendencies of the North Atlantic that keep the Gulf Stream powered and if an atmospheric high were to replace the usual atmospheric low over the North Atlantic, the currents would converge, thus greatly weakening the Gulf Stream. In fact, reconstruction of average pressure maps from 1790 to 1829 by Hubert Lamb and Johnson reveal that there was far less cyclonic wind stress south of Iceland then during the 20th Century (Grove 360). It is therefore possible to assume that the deteriorating Climate of the Little Ice Age in Europe can be partly explained by the slowing of the Gulf Stream.

The question is then, did this happen elsewhere in one of our seven oceans? Surely this is not an isolated relationship, right? In reality, many feel that it is, for the following reasons.

The North Atlantic is quite unique, in regards to the ocean-atmosphere connection, for a number of reasons. Firstly, in comparison to the Pacific, it is far more saline. The enriched salinity of Atlantic surface water enable it be become dense enough, when cooled, to sink to the ocean floor. By contrast, the fresher waters of the Pacific, no matter how much they are cooled in relation to the deep water, will never be dense enough to sink more than to an intermediate level. The sinking of Gulf Stream waters in the north Atlantic causes more warm water from the tropics to be ‘pulled’ north like a conveyor.

This warm water brought north brings vast amounts of energy to the Arctic maters and atmosphere. Wallace Broecker, Dorothy Peteet, and David Rind estimate the byproduct of this Deep water formation to be about 5* 1021 calories of heat that is released to the atmosphere: “an amount corresponding to ~30% of the solar heat reaching the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in the region north of 35° N” (Broecker 24).

Obviously, the salinity of the Atlantic is quite important to the transfer of energy (5* 1021 calories of heat) to the region around Europe. If the salinity were changed, then, the deep-water formation of the Gulf Stream would be shut off or diminished. A number of possible hypothesis exist that account for this. For example, there is evidence that the water exchange between the Atlantic and Pacific in the Bering Strait was much greater 300 years ago than present (Lamb 5). Also, the salinity of the Atlantic ocean, as Adams and Maslin suggest, “a pulse of fresh river water (could) dilute the dense, salty Gulf Stream and float on top, forming a temporary lid…”(Adams5). Either of these two scenarios, in conjunction with the anti-cyclonic winds of the time could have lowered (1) the salinity of the Atlantic, (2) made deep water production impossible, (3) and caused arctic ice to form further south. In the winter, with a lack of warm water in the North Atlantic the temperatures in Europe would be much more severe weather. And in the summer, ice formation would (4) make the air reaching Europe cooler and dryer because of an albedo effect and therefore (5) diminish glacial melting in the latitude and altitude extremes, causing glacial advance.

But, this scope of ocean-atmosphere effects on climate (i.e., just the north Atlantic) does not fully explain why there were glacial advances, due to decreased temperature, throughout the world during the Little Ice Age. As Broecker points out, “we may be dealing with a regional change in climate involving primarily the area under the climatic influence of the northern Atlantic Ocean.” To explain global cooling, one must consider the evidence for diminished sunspots and increased volcanism during this time. As well, Broecker adds, “Evidence for such an oscillation (like the deep water circulation in the North Atlantic) has been found elsewhere, that is, in the cordillera of South America and in New Zealand…(T)he situation may well be more complicated” (Broecker 24). Unfortunately, there is little historical data on ocean temperature in any other region other than the North Atlantic. But as Broecker points out, if the reasons why the Little Ice Age had global implications are to be found, the North Atlantic conveyor belt may only explain climate change in the area around Europe. One must not drunkenly ‘look under the street light’, as the saying goes, when what is being looked for is in fact on the other, unlit curve.

The global implications of the Little Ice Age are still debatable, but it is rather safe to say that for a variety of reasons, the world was cooler for a period of time. And although the Little Ice Age devastated those who were sustaining themselves at a latitude and altitude extreme, it is important to keep in mind that this ‘ice age’ was a tiny blip in the climatic fluctuations of earth. By far, other climatic fluctuations in even the Holocene, like Younger Drias which last over 800 years, have been far more intense and last much longer.

Determining the reasons for the Little Ice Age is quite a challenge. Imagine yourself in a time machine, going back in time about 20,000 years. You get out of the machine and all you can see is ice. All around you are miles and miles of ice. You’d think you must have landed on a glacier or frozen lake. Actually, you are in the ice age.

About 1/3 of the earth was ice. The most recent ice age was almost 10,000 years ago. As the earth started warming up the ice started to melt. The last ice age left traces that it was there. It left glaciers.

Sheets of ice covered valleys and rivers. Ice spread to different parts of the world. Scientists called it the ice age. It kept melting, then froze again. This went on for about a million years. About 10,000 years ago the earth started to warm up. Sheets of ice started to melt. As the ice melted it left lakes and broad valleys with a mixture of rocks and soil. The only ice left was up high in the mountains. The glaciers that you see now are what is left over from the ice age.

Do you ever wonder how we know that ice ages really exist? Well one reason is that it left clues. Louis Aggasiz was one of the first scientists to study the clues of the ice age. An erratic is a large boulder, and when Aggasiz told some scientists that the boulders had been left there by a glacier they thought that he was out of his mind. The scientists thought they were put there by icebergs, Noah’s flood, and witches.

The reason Louis Aggasiz proved that they had been put there by glaciers is because they were made of a kind of rock that you can’t find naturally in that area – granite. Because of that he proved that they can’t be from there, they were from somewhere else. Other proof that the ice age really existed is: polished bedrock, sand and gravel piles, big valleys, and rough mountain tops.

People during the Ice Age

During the ice age the men would set a trap for their food. When an animal fell for the trap the men would go kill it. Then the men would work on cutting the mammoth into big chunks, and then carried the chunks of meat to their cave. There the women and children would cut the mammoth meat into pieces that they were able to cook. The ice age people lived 35,000 years ago.

During the ice age countries like the Britain, France, Spain and Germany were very cold. At the northern and southern part of the earth the sheets of ice were much colder than they are today. Nobody knows why the ice age started, or why it stopped after 25,000 years. All we know is that it came and went very slowly. So that is the reason why the people that lived at the time didn’t realize that it was getting colder and colder, nor did they know that they were becoming the ice age hunters. Most of the ice age hunters lived in the western, central part of Europe.

Because of all the ice the land was shaped much, much differently. The land looked bare because it was too cold for beech and oak trees to grow. There would be a few fir trees here and there. No grass grew, just shrubs, bushes, and moss grass. In the northern parts of North America, Europe, and Asia there is still tundra.

The animals were different from today too. Back then there were woolly mammoth, woolly rhinos, cave bears, bison, wolves, horses, and herds of reindeer like modern day reindeer. Woolly mammoth, cave bear, and woolly rhino are now extinct. How do we know that they existed? Well the ice age people painted pictures of these animals on the sides of their caves, and the skeletons of the animals have been found in caves. There are cuts from the hunters’ knives in the bones and the knives were sitting beside them.

 

Just The Facts

• There were about 11 different ice ages.
• The ice ages were during the earth’s 4.6 billion years of history.
• The last ice age was called “The Great Ice Age” and was 11,000 years ago.
• During the “Great Ice Age” over a third of the earth was covered in ice. During the ice age the air had less carbon dioxide in it.
• Right now we are living in a mini ice age.
• There are two explanations of why the ice ages might have occurred:

1.The temperatures were much colder so it never rained, only snowed.

2. The earth changed its tilt away from the sun.

 

Crowding into the behavioral sink

Calhoun, J. B. (1962). Population density and social pathology. Scientific American, 206(3), 139-148.

The effects of crowding on our behavior is something that has interested psychologists for decades. You have probably noticed how your emotions and behavior change when you are in a situation that you perceive as very crowded. You may withdraw into yourself and try to become invisible; you might look for an escape; or you may find yourself becoming irritable and aggressive. How you react to crowding depends on many factors.

You will notice that the title of the article of discussion in this chapter uses the phrase population density rather than crowding. While these may seem very similar, psychologists draw a clear distinction between them.

Density refers to the number of individuals in a given amount of space. If 20 people occupy a 12-by-12-foot room, the room would probably be seen as densely populated. Crowding, however, refers to the subjective psychological experience created by density. That is, if you are trying to concentrate on a difficult task in that room with 20 people, you may experience extreme crowding. Conversely, if you are at a party with 20 friends in that same room, you might not feel crowded at all.

One way behavioral scientists can study the effects of density and crowding on people is to observe places where crowding already exists, such as Manhattan, Mexico City, some housing projects, prisons, and so on. The problem with this method is that all these places contain many factors that can influence behavior. For example, if we find high crime rates in a crowded inner-city neighborhood, there’s no way to know for sure that crowding is the cause of the crime. Maybe it’s the fact that people there are poor, or that there’s a higher rate of drug abuse, or perhaps all these factors combine with crowded conditions to produce the high crime rates. 250

Another way to study crowding is to put human subjects into high-density conditions for relatively short periods of time and study their reactions. While this method offers more control and allows us to isolate crowding as a cause of behavior, it is not very realistic in terms of real-life crowded environments, since they usually exist over extended periods of time. It should be pointed out, however, that both of these methods have yielded some interesting findings about crowding that will be discussed later in this chapter.

Since it would be ethically impossible (because of the stress and other potential damaging effects) to place humans in crowded conditions over long periods of time simply to do research on them, there is a third way of addressing the effects of density: Do research using animal subjects. One of the earliest and most classic series of studies of this type was conducted by John B. Calhoun (1917-1995) in 1962. Calhoun allowed groups of white rats to increase in population to twice the number that would normally be found in a space the size of a 10-by-14- foot room and observed their “social” behavior for 16 months.

THEORETICAL PROPOSITIONS

Calhoun especially wanted to explore the effects of high density on social behavior. It may seem strange to you to think of rats as social animals, but they do socialize in various ways in their natural environment.

To appreciate what led Calhoun to the study being discussed in this chapter, it is necessary to back up several years to an earlier project he conducted. Calhoun had confined a population of rats to a quarter-acre of enclosed, protected outdoor space. Plenty of food was available; there were ideal protected nesting areas; there were no predators; and all disease was kept to a minimum. In other words, this was a rat’s paradise. The point of Calhoun’s early study was simply to study the population growth rate of the rats in a setting free from the usual natural controls on overpopulation (predators, disease, etc.). After 27 months, the population consisted of only 150 adult rats. This was very surprising since with the low mortality rate of adult rats in this ideal setting, and considering the usual rate of reproduction, there should have been 5,000 adults in this period of time! The reason for this small population was an extremely high infant mortality rate. Apparently, reproductive and maternal behavior had been severely altered by the stress of social interaction among the 150 rats, and very few young rats survived to reach adulthood. Even though this number of rats (150 in a quarter-acre) does not seem to be particularly dense, it was obviously crowded enough to produce extreme behavioral changes.

These findings prompted Calhoun to design a more controlled and observable situation inside the lab in order to study more closely what sorts of changes occur in the rats when they are faced with high population density. In other words, he had observed what happened, and now he wanted to find out why.

METHOD

In a series of three studies, either 32 or 56 rats were placed in a 10-by-14-foot laboratory room that was divided into four sections or pens (see Figure 1). There were ramps that allowed the rats to cross from pen 1 to pen 2, from pen 2 to pen 3, and from pen 3 to pen 4. It was not possible for the rats to cross directly between pen 1 and pen 4. Therefore, these were end-pens. If a rat wanted to go from 1 to 4, it would have to go through 2 and 3.

The partitions dividing the pens were electrified, so the rats quickly learned that they could not climb over them. These pens consisted of feeders and waterers and enclosures for nests. The rats were supplied with plenty of food, water, and materials for building nests. In order to observe and record the rats’ behavior there was a viewing window in the ceiling of the room.

From his years of studying rats, Calhoun was aware that this particular strain normally is found in colonies of 12 adults. Therefore, the observation room was of a size to accommodate 12 rats per pen, or a total of 48. After the groups were placed in the room, they were allowed to multiply until this normal density was nearly doubled to 80. Once the population level of 80 was reached, young rats that survived past weaning were removed so that the number of rats remained constant.

With this arrangement in place, all that was left was to observe these crowded animals for an extended period of time and record their behavior. These observations went on for 16 months.

RESULTS

It is important to keep in mind that the density of the rats was not extreme; in fact, it was quite moderate. If the rats wanted to spread out, there would only have to be 20 or so per pen. But this is not what happened. When the male rats reached maturity, they began to fight with each other for social status as they do naturally. These fights took place in all the pens, but the outcome was not the same for all of them. If you think about the arrangement of the room, the two end-pens only had one way in and out. So when a rat won a battle for dominance in one of these pens, he could hold his position and territory (the whole pen) simply by guarding the entrance and attacking any other male that ventured over the ramp. As it turned out, only one male rat ended up in charge of each of the end-pens. However, he was not alone. The female rats distributed themselves more or less equally over all four pens. Therefore, the masters of pens 1 and 4 each had a harem of 8 to 12 females all to themselves. And they didn’t take any chances. In order to prevent infiltration, the males took to sleeping directly at the foot of the ramp and were always on guard.

On occasion, there were a few other male rats in the end-pens, but they were extremely submissive.

They spent most of their time in the nesting burrows with the females and only came out to feed. They did not attempt to mate with the females. The females in these pens functioned well as mothers. They built comfortable nests and nurtured and protected their offspring. In other words, life for most of the rats in these end-pens was relatively normal and reproductive behavior was successful. About half of the infant rats in those pens survived to adulthood.

The rest of the 60 or so rats crowded into the middle two pens. Since these two pens each had central feeding and watering devices, there were many opportunities for the rats to come in contact with each other. The kinds of behaviors observed among the rats in pens 2 and 3 demonstrate a phenomenon that Calhoun termed the behavioral sink. A behavioral sink is “the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers. The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental: A behavioral sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group” (p. 144). Let’s examine some of the extreme and pathological behaviors he observed:

1. Aggression. Normally in the wild, male rats will fight other male rats for dominant positions in the social hierarchy. These fights were observed among the more aggressive rats in this study as well. The difference was that here, unlike in their natural environments, top-ranking males were required to fight frequently in order to maintain their positions and often the fights involved several rats in a general brawl. Nevertheless, the strongest males were observed to be the most normal within the center pens.

However, even those animals would sometimes exhibit “signs of pathology; going berserk; attacking females, juveniles, and less active males; and showing a particular predilection—which rats do not normally display—for biting other rats on the tail” (p. 146).

2. Submissiveness. Contrary to this extreme aggression, other groups of male rats ignored and avoided battles for dominance. One of these groups consisted of the most healthy-looking rats in the pens. They were fat and their fur was full, without the usual bare spots from fighting. However, these rats were complete social misfits. They moved through the pens as if asleep or in some sort of hypnotic trance, ignoring all others, and were, in turn, ignored by the rest. They were completely uninterested in sexual activity and made no advances, even toward females in heat.

Another group of rats engaged in extreme activity and were always on the prowl for receptive females.

Calhoun termed them probers. Often, they were attacked by the more dominant males, but were never interested in fighting for status. They were hypersexual and many of them even became cannibalistic!

3. 3. Sexual deviance. These probers also refused to participate in the natural rituals of mating. Normally, a male rat will pursue a female in heat until she escapes into her burrow. Then, the male will wait patiently and even perform a courtship dance directly outside her door. Finally, she emerges from the burrow and the mating takes place. In Calhoun’s study, this ritual was adhered to by most of the sexually active males except the probers. They completely refused to wait and followed the female right into her burrow. Sometimes the nests inside the burrow contained young that had failed to survive, and it was here that late in the study the probers turned cannibalistic.

Another group of male rats was termed the pansexuals because they attempted to mate with any and all other rats indiscriminately. They sexually approached other males, juveniles, and females that were not in heat. This was a submissive group that was often attacked by the more dominant male rats, but did not fight for dominance.

4. 4. Reproductive abnormalities. Rats have a natural instinct for nest building. In this study, small strips of paper were provided in unlimited quantities as nest material. The females are normally extremely active in the process of building nests as the time for giving birth approaches. They gather the material and pile it up so that it forms a cushion. Then they arrange the nest so that it has a small indentation in the middle to hold the young. However, the females in the behavioral sink gradually lost their ability (or inclination) to build adequate nests. At first they failed to form the indentation in the middle. Then, as time went on, they collected fewer and fewer strips of paper so that eventually the infants were born directly on the sawdust that covered the pen’s floor.

The mother rats also lost their maternal ability to transport their young from one place to another if they felt the presence of danger. They would move some of the litter and forget the rest, or simply drop them onto the floor as they were moving them. Usually these infants were abandoned and died where they were dropped. They were then eaten by the adults. The infant mortality rate in the middle pens was extremely high, ranging from 80% to 96%.

In addition to these maternal deficits, the female rats in the middle pens, when in heat, were chased by large groups of males until they were finally unable to escape. These females experienced high rates of complications in pregnancy and delivery. By the end of the study, almost half of them had died.

DISCUSSION

You might expect that a logical extension of these findings would be to apply them to humans in high-density environments. However, for reasons to be discussed shortly, Calhoun did not draw any such conclusions. In fact, he discussed his findings very little—probably assuming, and logically so, that his results spoke volumes for themselves. He did comment on one clear result: that the natural social and survival behaviors of the rats were severely altered by the stresses associated with living in a high-population-density environment. In addition, he noted that through additional research, with improved methods and refined interpretation of the findings, his studies and others like them may contribute to our understanding of similar issues facing human beings.

SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS

One of the most important aspects of Calhoun’s studies was that they sparked a great deal of related research on the effects on humans of high-density living. It would be impossible to examine this large body of research in detail here, but perhaps a few examples should be mentioned.

One environment where the equivalent of a behavioral sink might exist for humans is in extremely overcrowded prisons. A study funded by the National Institute of Justice examined prisons where inmates averaged only 50 square feet each (or an area about 7-by-7 feet), compared with less crowded prisons. It was found that in the crowded prisons there were significantly higher rates of mortality, homicide, suicide, illness, and disciplinary problems (McCain, Cox, & Paulus, 1980). Again, however, remember that other factors besides crowding could be influencing these behaviors.

Another interesting finding has been that crowding produces negative effects on problem-solving abilities. One study placed people in small, extremely crowded rooms (only 3 square feet per person) or in larger, less crowded rooms. The subjects were asked to complete rather complex tasks, such as placing various shapes into various categories while listening to a story on which they were to be tested later. Those in the crowded conditions performed significantly worse than those who were not crowded (Evans, 1979).

Finally, what do you suppose happens to you physiologically in crowded circumstances? Research has determined that your blood pressure and heart rate increase. Along with those effects, you tend to feel that other people are more hostile and that time seems to pass more slowly as density increases (Evans, 1979).

CRITICISMS

Calhoun’s results with animals have been supported by later animal research (see Marsden, 1972). However, as has been mentioned before in this book, we must always be careful in applying animal research to humans. Just as substances that may be shown to cause illness in rats may not have the same effect on human physical health, environmental factors influencing rats’ social behaviors may not be directly applicable to people. At best, animals can only represent certain aspects of humans. Sometimes animal research can be very useful and revealing and lead the way for more definitive research with people. At other times, it can be a dead end.

Nevertheless, Calhoun’s work in the early 1960s focused a great deal of attention on the psychological and behavioral effects of crowding. This line of research, as it relates to humans, continues today.

RECENT APPLICATIONS

John Calhoun died September 7,1995, and left behind a legacy of insightful and historically meaningful research. The kinds of social problems discussed by Calhoun in his 1962 article are increasingly relevant to the human condition. Consequently, when scientists undertake research to better understand and intervene in such problems as aggression, infertility, mental illness, or various forms of social conflict, it is not unusual for them to make reference to Calhoun’s research on crowding and behavioral pathology.

An interesting study citing Calhoun’s work, examined changes in animal behavior that accompany domestication (Price, 1999). This author contended that species of animals that are domesticated, that is, kept as pets, have undergone genetic and developmental changes over many generations that have altered their behaviors in ways that allow them to share a common living environment with humans. Basically, what Price is suggesting is that as wild animals have become domesticated over centuries, they have had to adapt to human settings that are very different from their original habitats. This usually includes living in peaceful harmony (most of the time, at least) with others of their own species, other animal species, and humans, usually in relatively crowded conditions. This is accomplished, the author contends, through the evolution of increased response thresholds, meaning it takes a lot more provocation for a domesticated animal to become territorial and aggressive. In other words, dogs, cats, and humans are all able to live together in a relatively small space without running away or tearing each other to pieces as would occur among non-domesticated animals in the wild.

In a different direction, an article by Torrey and Yolken (1998) incorporated Calhoun’s study in examining the association between growing up in crowded conditions and the development of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (manic-depression): Many studies have found that people who are raised in high-density urban environments are at increased risk for these psychological disorders later in life. Numerous factors are present in crowded, urban settings that may account for such increased risks. However, the authors of this study hypothesized that it is not the increased density of living conditions in the neighborhood, but rather in the individual homes (more people occupying less space) that may explain the higher rates of mental illness later in life. Why? This study contended that exposure to a larger number of infectious agents may account for this association.

Finally, a related study found a possible key difference in human reactions to population density compared to animals. In animal studies, pathology appears to increase in a linear way as a direct result of increased density: as one increases the other increases. However, a study by Regoeczi (2002) found that for humans, the effect of household population density on social withdrawal and aggression actually decreased as the number of people in a single household increased. However, this effect was only observed until the number of people exceeded the total number of rooms; very much beyond that, the antisocial effects begin to appear with increasing density. In other words when living conditions are such that, say, 5 people occupy a 3-room apartment or 7 people are squeezed into a 4-room house, the tendency for people to withdraw and/or display more aggression increases. Two possible causes may be at work here. Either density is causing the pathology, or people who are more withdrawn or more aggressive end up in less crowded living situations, by choice or by ostracism, respectively.

These studies demonstrate how social scientists are continuing to explore and refine the effects of density and crowding. The causes of social pathology are many and complex. The impact of population density, first brought to our attention by Calhoun over 40 years ago, is only one, but a very crucial, piece of the puzzle.

Bibliography

Evans, G. W. (1979). Behavioral and psychological consequences of crowding in humans. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 9, 27-46.

Freedman, J. L., Heshka, S., & Levy, A. (1975). Population density and social pathology: Is there a relationship? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11, 539-.552.

Marsden, H. M. (1972). Crowding and animal behavior. In J. F. Wohlhill & D. H. Carson (Eds.), Environment and the social sciences. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

McCain, G., Cox, V. C., & Paulus, P. B. (1980). The relationship between illness, complaints, and degree of crowding in a prison environment. Environment and Behavior, 8, 283-290.

Price, E. (1999). Behavioral development in animals undergoing domestication. Applied Animal Behavior Research, 65(3), 245-271.

Regoeczi, W. (2002). The impact of density: The importance of nonlinearity and selection on flight and fight responses. Social Forces, 81, 505-530.

Torrey, E., & Yolken, R. (1998). At issue: Is household crowding a risk factor for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? Schizophrenia Bulletin, 24(3), 321-324.