Archive for March, 2019

TBR News March 31, 2019

Mar 31 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 31, 2019: “The Internet has proven to be the greatest source of information since lunatic Christians burnt down the library of Alexandria. Anything being sought, be it an address or an in-depth analysis of Dead Sea scrolls, is there and is the main reason that the famous Encyclopedia Britannica has gone out of business.

At the same time, because it is open to one and all, the Internet is also a breeding ground for a legion of strange persons with a frantic desire to air their pet theses, themselves and their friends.

We see earnest discussions about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, , the Sinister Truth about Hurricane Katrina, Tesla Death Rays used to bring down the buildings of the WTC, balanced with other information proving beyone a shadow of a doubt that Russian bombers were used. We also discover the evil plottings of the Illuminiati, a group that has been long gone, or that the Rothschild banking house had taken over the whole world. And from one source, now long  vanished, we discover that Houston was destroyed by a nuclear bomb set off by Jewish radicals or that the Fukishima disaster was really caused by an Israeli submarine, using German-made nuclear torpedos!

Yes, the Internet can entertain as well as inform.

But the fact that the Internet has many independent news sites means the diminution of the print media and the television news stations. Since these are the propaganda control for the oligarchy, there is great distress in board rooms and from them to the halls of Congress. They would like to shut off the Internet so that the stupid, and tax-paying public can only see what they are supposed to and not what might be the truth.

Obama and Cass Sunstein tried to shut down anyone who dared to interfere with the propaganda machinery but they were not successful. Even a furious and highly delusional eccentric, Trump and his decaying machinery, can’t do it and if they continue to try, there will be very serious public reactions indeed.”

The Table of contents

  • The 47-Minute Presidency
  • Making America Great Again: Trump’s Impossible Challenges
  • From victory to vengeance: Trump scents blood in 2020 fight
  • Enough collusion talk. It’s time to focus on Trump’s corruption
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons
  • David Rives
  • -David Reardon
  • -John Ragan
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 30, 2019

Mar 30 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 30, 2019: America today is led by the rabid lunatic fringe, to include the President and his top people. They believe that”

-the earth is flat,

-that Jesus existed and will return,

-that vaccines will kill everybody,

-that President Obama was born in Africa,

-that Planet X will be arriving at Cleveland and disembarking its cargo of Superior People to Guide Us All,

-that a former Russian intelligence officer, living in England, was poisoned by Russian nerve gas,

-that Israel has the moral right to kill Palestinian children and seize their family property for apartment construction,

-that Donald Trump is a genius and will Make America Great again,

-that sea levels are not rising but all the land is sinking,

-that Princess Diana was killed by mutant dwarves and that Russian President Putin is a robot.

-After all, former sports announcer Icke proved that President Obama and British Queen Elizabeth were actually large lizards!

-There always have been such rampant lunatics in every society but usually they are found in psychiatric facilities wearing paper nightgowns and not in the White House and Congress.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • Corporations are endangering Americans. Trump doesn’t care
  • Trump wrecked summit with Kim by suggesting N. Korea give all its nukes to US – report
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

    -Mike Pence

    -Ted Poe

    -Stephen Pidgeon

    -John Pendleton

  • The Earth isn’t flat, but you’d never know that from watching YouTube
  • It is near; it is at hand! Maybe tomorrow but probably never: Fictions for fun and profit
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Exclusive: More than 1 million acres of U.S. cropland ravaged by floods

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 29, 2019

Mar 29 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 29, 2019: “When Dr. Calhoun wrote about increasing crazy behavior in overcrowded rat popultions in 1962, these observations are now bearing fruit among another species.

Homo sapiens to be specific.

Random mass killings in churches, mosques and schools are becoming common and the public we find growing interest in such lunatic matters as the discovery of alien mummies in Peru, belief that the planet is flat, rejection of healh vaccines as poisonous, and in the Unites States, the belief by many Amerians that President Tump is a great man who will make America a white and truly Christian country.

There is a Latin observation that whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

On the brighter side, there are still reasonably free elections in the United States and the bulk of the population are still reasonably sane.

One hopes at least.”

 

The Table of Contents

Lunatics Abounding

-‘There’s more to this story’: NRA staffer contacted conspiracy theorist about Parkland shooting

-Encyclopedia of American Loons

  • Michael Rivero
  • Alex Jones
  • Bill Posey
  • Kerri Rivera

-A Very Incomplete List of Sinister Things Vladimir Putin/Russia/ ‘the   Russians’ Have Been Accused of Doing

-Who Will Guard the Guardians?

-‘Hoarder’ pleads guilty in one of biggest breaches of U.S. secrets

-Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York      Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous

-Trump overrides advisers, backs funding for Special Olympics after uproar

-Shape-shifting Jesus spent his last supper with Pontius Pilate, claims just-deciphered 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

‘There’s more to this story’: NRA staffer contacted conspiracy theorist about Parkland shooting

Emails emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents against the Infowars host Alex Jones

March 28, 2019

by Lois Beckett

The Guardian

An NRA employee corresponded with a prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist the day after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, speculating that the gunman had not acted alone.

“Just like [Sandy Hook], there is so much more to this story,” the NRA employee, Mark Richardson, told the conspiracy theorist, according to emails obtained by HuffPost. “He was not alone.”

“Thank you for all the information. And for what you do. STAY SAFE.”

Since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, conspiracy theorists who claim grieving family members of shooting victims are “crisis actors”, and that mass shootings are staged to advance gun control, have continued to harass victims’ families. This confrontation is sometimes very direct: a Florida woman was sentenced to five months in prison for sending threatening messages for one Sandy Hook father that death was coming for him “real soon”. New theories targeting family members of the most recent victims emerge immediately after each high-profile shooting, and generate online and in-person harassment.

The emails from Richardson, who was using his official NRA email address, emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents against the Infowars host Alex Jones, who used his show to air Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Wolfgang Halbig, the conspiracy theorist Richardson emailed, has contributed to Infowars.

The same day Richardson emailed Halbig, the InfoWars site published a post alleging that a second shooter had been reported in the Parkland attack, HuffPost found.

In one of several Sandy Hook parent lawsuits, in which Halbig is named as a defendant, a complaint alleges that Halbig has made at least 22 trips to Connecticut to “investigate” the shooting, that he deluged officials with public records requests and that when a father asked him to leave victims’ families alone, the man was informed: “Wolfgang does not want to speak with you unless you exhume [you son’s] body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

The NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify Richardson’s role within the organization, or whether the NRA has policies about employees promoting mass-shooting conspiracy theories. Richardson’s name is listed on an NRA website as a “training counselor program coordinator” in the organization’s education and training division.

A spokeswoman for the NRA’s political arm did not comment on the specifics of Richardson’s emails, but said that “any suggestion” that the Sandy Hook shooting was faked was “insane”.

“Sandy Hook was a horrific tragedy, and any suggestion that the unspeakable atrocities committed by an evil lunatic were faked as part of an elaborate hoax are insane,” Jennifer Baker, of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in an email on Thursday. “The men and women of the National Rifle Association grieve for the innocent people who were killed, the families ripped apart, and the entire Sandy Hook community.”

Halbig suggested in a separate email to friends in early 2018 that he had been trying to get in touch with the NRA for four years, and that Richardson’s email was the first contact he had had with the organization, HuffPost reported.

In a statement to HuffPost, Richardson defended his email as raising a “legitimate question”. He did not respond to a request for further comment via his official NRA email address, which was still active as of Thursday afternoon.

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

March 29, 2019

#2165: Michael Rivero

What Really Happened (WRH) is a website run by one Michael Rivero. The website, which sports the tagline “Putting America First, Second, And Third!” claims to be telling you “what really happened,” which is rarely what really happened. Rivero credulously endorses more or less any conspiracy theory he comes across, and the website is particularly heavy on 9/11 conspiracy theories, Jewish banker conspiracies, JFK assassination conspiracies, Bin-Laden-is-alive conspiracy theories, the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, global warming conspiracy theories (dominated by a large number of links to articles about days with cold weather and snow), as well as a range of conspiracy theories and nonsense related to various types of pseudohistory and survivalism. He also has a podcast – until recently on a shortwave radio and carried by the Genesis Communications Network – and a wiki.

As for his climate change denialism, Rivero thinks you should take his collection of weather reports seriously since “I come from a science background myself” (he does not), and knows that science is corrupt and arrogant. “Why should you not trust science?” Well, according to Rivero, science was wrong before: “Alchemy, for one [which is decidedly pre-scientific]. Phlogiston Chemistry, for another.” Moreover, “[p]rior to the 14th Century Astronomers thought the Earth was the center of the universe, because, well, that’s what the church wanted,” which would count as an instance of the science-was-wrong-before fallacy only if you count church-appointed theologians living before the discovery of scientific methodology as “scientists” (one would think that Rivero, an unrelenting atheist, would be observant of that difference). Indeed, “18th Century Geologists thought the Earth was 6000,” which they did not, and “[P]rior to the 1950s, scientists thought proteins carried our heredity,” until the hypothesis was falsified by … independent conspiracy theorists? In any case, the main gist is that because science is wrong you should reject the scientific consensus about climate change because Rivero can show you news articles about cold days in North Carolina and climategate.

Rivero claims to have started the website as well as his radio show as a result of wondering (i.e. blindly endorsing a conspiracy perspective on) what happened to Vince Foster. Of course, Foster was not the only troublesome character assassinated by the Clintons, and WRH website dutifully keeps records.

Diagnosis: At least his rants tend to be grammatical and internally mostly coherent. Which is more than one can say about a lot of people pushing the kind of nonsense Rivero pushes. His website has been called “a poor man’s version of Infowars, which sums it up pretty wel

197: Alex Jones

Alex Jones is the guy who has yet to meet a conspiracy theory he doesn’t endorse, no matter how batshit insane it is (and, interestingly, no matter how much it conflicts with other conspiracy theories he already believes). For at least ten years he has predicted, in his rather popular radio program, the imminent roundup of Americans by the New World Order.

In addition to his radio program, he is also the director of several straight-to-video documentaries, and he runs the websites Infowars and PrisonPlanet (for those who wish to avoid the site itself, it is detailed here).

Some conspiracy theories endorsed by PrisonPlanet are:

  • The Bilderberg Group (or Skull and Bones, or the Freemasons – it depends on the day, it seems) controls some/most/all governments in the world as well as the economy.
  • The New World Order will kill almost everyone. Vaccine programs seem to be just one of their methods – of course Jones has endorsed Andrew Wakefield as a martyr. To get a feel for the level it is pitched at, you may want to check out this one – or then again, maybe not.
  • In fact, Hurricane Katrina was merely an opportunity to test out the FEMA concentration camps.
  • And the tsunami in south-east Asia in 2004 was man-made.
  • 9/11 was (of course) an inside job.

This is, of course, only a selection; in general it is hard to find a loon that Jones does not take seriously. He is basically a living embodiment of whale.to.

Other bizarre antics are chronicled on his wikipedia page. Apparently the ravingly mad and utterly dense (but British) Vicount Monckton views PrisonPlanet as a legitimate news outlet. That explains a lot.

The interesting thing about Alex Jones’ reasoning is that he does not seem to run with the common fallacy ‘authorities (e.g. scientific) say X; I don’t like X; hence there must be a conspiracy’, but rather with the inference rule ‘everything is part of a conspiracy; authorities say X; hence X is false’ (which is a fallacy as well, of course, but a somewhat more interesting one).

Now, some may think Alex Jones is batshit crazy, and he is. But surely he is beaten by Lorie Kramer, who believes that Alex Jones is a pawn created by the New World Order to divert attention. Seriously. And if that is not enough, this site, run by Gary & Lisa Ruby, claims that Jones is part of a scientologist conspiracy to take over the world and demolish Christianity. I guess this is what you risk when you start to gain notoriety in the hyper-paranoid and chaotic field of conspiracy theory.

Among Jones’s more notable collaborators is the equally insane Paul Joseph Watson, who may consider himself indicted by this entry as well (he does not deserve a separate one). Watson is, among other things, behind this, uh, illuminating screed.

  • Diagnosis: The ur-loon. Extremely famous and frighteningly influential, but one suspects that he would be able to convince anyone who were not already at least mildly unhinged. Jones may be partly in it for the money, but there is little question that he actually believes much of whatever falls out of his mouth.

December 31, 2018

#2124: Bill Posey

William Joseph Posey is the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 8th congressional district, member of the Freedom Caucus and Congress’s resident (main) anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist after the departure of Dan Burton.

Together with Carolyn Maloney, Posey – who has received significant donations from the anti-vaccine movement – sponsored “The Vaccine Safety Study Act”, which would direct the National Institutes of Health to conduct a retrospective study of health outcomes, including autism, of vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated children, and to determine whether exposure to vaccines or vaccine components are associated with autism spectrum disorders, chronic illnesses, or other neurological conditions. The bill should, according to Posey, “bring an answer to this decades-long question.” Of course it won’t, and of course Posey knows that it couldn’t. For, of course, the “decades-long question” has long been settled; there is accordingly no scientific rationale for the suggested studies, in particular since there is no evidence suggesting that the problem exists (but plenty showing it doesn’t) – antivaxx delusions really don’t count. The purpose of the bill was, in other words, not to settle anything but to legitimize antivaxx conspiracy theories by suggesting otherwise. Posey has been pushing similar resolutions for a long ti

He is, however, particularly famous for pushing the utterly debunked CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory (still popular in antivaxx circles) in Congress, attempting to initiate apparently formal investigations, without providing any documentation whatsoever of any wrongdoing to be investigated, for obvious reasons; he claimed to have a bunch of documents, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing interesting in any of them – no whistle to blow, in other words. Posey also suggested that there is – despite near-conclusive evidence to the contrary – a link between vaccines and autism (it is worth pointing out that Posey doesn’t care one whit about autism, however). He has also pushed the Poul Thorsen gambit, which is pretty ridiculous (a Danish coauthor on one of numerous studies showing that vaccines are safe once misused grant money to cover personal expenses; therefore all research showing that vaccines are safe is invalidated). Posey denies being anti-vaccine, however; he just pushes antivaxx conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine legislatio

Now, pseudoscience and conspiracy theorizing rarely come in isolation, and Posey is also a climate change denialist. At a 2018 hearing in the Science, Space and Technology Committee, Posey claimed that climate scientists in the 1970s believed that the Earth was cooling, which is a myth but at least shows what kinds of sources Posey is using to inform his policy decisions. At the hearing Posey expressed skepticism that humans contributed to climate change, asked whether climate change was occurring because carbon dioxide captured in permafrost was now leaking out, and suggested that global warming would be being beneficial (it won’t). “I don’t think anybody disputes that the Earth is getting warmer,” said Posey, but “I think what’s not clear is the exact amount of who caused what, and getting to that is, I think, where we’re trying to go with this committee.” God forbid that the question is left to scientists, who, unlike Posey, have some ineffable agenda. It really isn’t not clear.

He is also consistently opposed to gay rights or legal protection from discrimination. And to top it all, Posey was the sponsor of H.R. 1503 to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 requiring the campaign committee to give documents proving that a candidate for president is actually eligible for the office – yes, if not a birther himself, Posey was one of the major birther conspiracy theory enablers in Congress. He declined to provide documents to disprove rumors about his own past, however.

  • Diagnosis: Perhaps the leading conspiracy theorist in Congress at the moment, and that says quite a bit. Posey is anti-science and pro-pseudoscience to the core, and if you scratch any denialist position even superficially, a deranged conspiracy theory appears. But Posey also wields quite a lot of influence and power, and though his wild-eyed conspiracy rants still appear to be mostly ignored, he may cause serious damage to civilization.

March 27, 2019

#2164: Kerri Rivera

The Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) is, essentially, industrial strength bleach (28% sodium chlorite) that, when diluted in acidic juices, results in the formation of chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. As a treatment for medical conditions (and other things) MMS should rank as among the most dangerous and delusional pieces of quackery out there, yet according to proponents, MMS can cure almost anything from cancer to AIDS and anything in between and beyond. There is no biological plausibility to any of these claims, and no evidence, either preclinical or clinical, that MMS can do what its proponents claim it can do. According to Kerri Rivera, one of the most dangerous and insane people on the planet, MMS can – in particular – cure autism, and her abhorrent insanity has unsurprisingly made significant inroads in already severely reality-challenged antivaxx communities, whose members, demonstrably mistakenly, still think that vaccines cause autism. Rivera was for instance invited to talk at the 2012 Autism One Quackfest to convince parents to torture their autistic children by giving them painful bleach enemas. As Rivera sees it, “autism means that your child has virus, bacteria, Candida, inflammation, heavy metals and food allergies … [this is, hopefully needless to say, insane nonsense],”therefore these children take (her) poison, which would do nothing to address these issues if they had anything to do with autism, which they don’t. At the conference, Rivera boasted about 38 children who purportedly recovered in 20 months (by 2018 the number is allegedly in the hundreds, and if you need proof that her numbers are nonsense, here it is).

Needless to say, her presentation was short on documentation but rich on paper-trail-less anecdotes. Among the attendees it seems to have been sufficiently popular to get her reinvited in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Indeed, media attention to her dangerous nonsense prompted the Illinois attorney general to send agents to her presentation at the 2015 conference and serve her with a subpoena; unable to present evidence for MMS’s benefits, Rivera was forced to sign an agreement barring her from further promoting MMS or appearing at conferences in the state of Illinois. Rivera has since announced that she will no longer do MMS consultations for autistic kids. MMS remains popular in antivaxx communities, however, and central players like Julie Obradovic and JB Handley quickly ran to Rivera’s defense when she was “attacked” by skeptics. Rivera herself addressed critics by telling them that “You have your science all wrong. The websites that you site are incorrect.” Short and sweet, in other words.

Rivera runs, or at least used to run, a clinic in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, called AutismO2 Clinica Hyperbarica (Rivera is also fond of hyberbaric oxygen therapy), where she would expose autistic children to MMS by mouth and enema – at her AutismOne presentation she also discussed “recent protocol developments around MMS and Autism, such as loading the dose, the baby bottle, the baking soda mix, enemas, baths, and how to handle a fever.” One would think that parents bathing their babies in bleach and putting bleach in their bottles would face some social condemnation. Occasionally, Rivera uses the letters “D Hom” after her name. D Hom is not a real degree. But as a homeopath, perhaps Rivera could at least dilute her bleach to the point where there is not a molecule left before serving it to children? According to homeopathic theory doing so shouldn’t decrease its effectiveness, quite the reverse.

Apparently, children undergoing the therapy she recommends will often experience diarrhea (which is “good” since it is a “detox diarrhea”) and fever, which according to Rivera is also good since it is “waking up the immune system” to realize that there’s “autism in the house.” This is, hopefully needless to say, not how this works. And what do you think is her evidence that the regime has any benefits? Nothing, of course – Rivera has some undocumented anecdotes, which really, really means nothing. She also has leaflets and handouts with the fake Schopenhauer quote about truth “passing through three stages”, which is, of course, false but a surefire sign that we are dealing with a quack. There is a horrifying account of one of her clients undergoing her treatment regime here, and a good takedown of her dangerous nonsense here. A response from (insane) MMS and Rivera apologist Adam Abraham is discussed here.

Ultimately, and as mentioned above, attaining good health is (apparently), according to Rivera, mostly a matter of getting rid of toxins and parasites. As described in her book Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, “[a]lmost all of the people with autism have high levels of pathogens; virus, bacteria, parasites and heavy metals. Chlorine dioxide kills pathogens and helps the body to detoxify itself. It is considered safe at doses we use for weight.” It is not considered safe, and Rivera has no remotely reliable test for “levels of pathogens” beyond the a priori, of course. But this is really a matter of religion – what she is promoting is a cleansing ritual – not evidence, truth or reality; indeed, seeing how no player in the antivaxx community can bring themselves to criticize even feeding bleach to kids with autismshould really, really illustrate how much of a cult the antivaccine movement has become (unity against criticism from the outside is a familiar hallmark of cults).) None of the parasites in question actually exist, of course, which is good, since MMS would presumably not have had helped deal with them anyways – the rationale behind MMS is that bleach unsurprisingly can kill microbes in petri dishes; therefore it can kill them in the body, too, without harm; and therefore all disease, also autism, is caused by microbes. Needless to say, none of those steps in that piece of reasoning are anything but idiotic. There is a good resource on Rivera and her crazy here.

Currently, Rivera also runs CD Autism, a “grassroots movement” devoted to marketing and selling her products and services. More recently, she has also launched ketokerri™, a company selling supplements (particularly targeted at kids with autism who have already suffered through her bleach enemas) supposed to aid with “natural healing processes.” Apparently she is enjoying both recognition and influence in a variety of quackery group. And her MMS insanity continues to be used, despite demonstrably causing irrevocable harm to children.

  • Diagnosis: As sane and scientific as the flat earth movement, but far more harmful. Now, Rivera’s base is in Mexico, and we cannot say with any confidence that she’s actually American. But she has at least enjoyed plenty of popularity in the US, and what really matters is presumably ultimately that her insanity – and the cult that has grown up around her and her crazy – is exposed.

 

A Very Incomplete List of Sinister Things Vladimir Putin/Russia/‘the Russians’ Have Been Accused of Doing

March 27, 2019

The Gray Zone

According to the finest minds of Western media and political life, “The Russians” have been responsible for everything from sowing discord with sex toys to weaponizing humor, sexual assault allegations, and “black America’s experiences.”

Editor’s note: A friend of the site has been keeping tabs on everything that Russia, “The Russians,” and Vladimir Putin have been blamed for in the past two years or so. We thought this list was a perfect window into the hysteria of Russiagate and published it with a few additions of our own.

  • Forcing Donald Trump to hire Rex Tillerson (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor).
  • Forcing Donald Trump to fire Rex Tillerson (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor, eight days later).
  • Forcing Donald Trump to give concessions to North Korea (Rachel Maddow, MSNBC anchor).
  • Meddling in the 2018 Italian parliamentary election (George Soros, billionaire; Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former president of Denmark, former secretary general of NATO; and Michael Chertoff, former U.S. secretary of homeland security).
  • Winning the 2018 Italian parliamentary election (Haaretz, The Hill).
  • Hacking the 2017 French presidential election (Michael Rogers, NSA director, Politico, numerous other outlets).

No, really, hacking the 2017 French presidential election (Jamie Raskin, U.S. congressman, after French government denied Russian involvement, stating the hack was “so simple it could have practically been anyone”).

  • Brexit (New York Times, numerous other outlets).
  • Helping rise of far-right AfD party in the 2017 German election (Time).
  • Causing the 2019 U.S. government shutdown (Haaretz).
  • Making the New York Times editorial board criticize Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine).
  • Weaponizing sexual assault accusations in order to attack Kremlin critics (George Takei, Kremlin critic accused of sexual assault).
  • Weaponizing information (Theresa May, UK prime minister).
  • Weaponizing misinformation (NPR).
  • Weaponizing the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe (Philip Breedlove, U.S. general, NATO, John McCain, U.S. senator).
  • Weaponizing humor (CNN, BBC).
  • Weaponizing “black America’s experiences” (Slate).
  • Using the popular cartoon Masha and the Bear as “soft propaganda” to indoctrinate British children (The Times of London).
  • “Promoting sex toys on Instagram to sow discord in the US” (Quartz).
  • Influencing the Standing Rock movement (Buzzfeed).
  • Making “‘useful idiots’ of unwitting environmental groups and activists” (U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology).
  • Targeting the U.S. embassy in Cuba with “some kind of microwave weapon, that is so sophisticated, that the Americans don’t even fully understand it” (Ken Dilanian, MSNBC reporter) [The microwave weapon turned out to be crickets. As in actual insects].
  • “Infiltrating” America’s Christian conservative homeschooling movement (Casey Michel, Think Progress).
  • Inflaming “race wars” across America with Facebook ads (Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic).
  • Assassinating self-exiled Russian journalist Sergei Babchenko (Ukrainian government) [Babchenko turned up alive the following day and revealed that he had faked his death in cooperation with Ukraine’s security services].
  • Whatever the hell Jonathan Chait was trying to explain with a Glenn Becksian diagram – “a plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion” (Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine).
  • Arming the Taliban (John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan; Nick Patton Walsh, CNN) [Nicholson’s claim was debunked by a two star US general speaking under oath. The report by Patton Walsh was thoroughly demolished by Task and Purpose].
  • Employing U.S. senator Rand Paul (John McCain, U.S. senator).
  • Interfering in the Catalan referendum (US Congressional Democrats).
  • Planning to interfere in Israel’s 2019 elections (Israeli Shin Bet General Security Service).
  • Recruiting Princeton/NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen to influence U.S. policy (Bill Browder, CEO Hermitage Capital) [Browder’s tweet was deleted after people pointed out that casually calling for Americans to be investigated by the FBI is not a good idea].
  • Funding The Intercept (Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and DNC head).
  • Spreading disinformation about Ukrainian neo-Nazis carrying out Roma pogroms (Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and DNC head).
  • Inflaming the NFL kneeling controversy “to make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue” (James Lankford, U.S. senator).
  • Inflaming ICE detaining immigrant children in cages controversy – “using the current family separation & immigration debate to sow discord among Americans” (James Lankford, U.S. senator).
  • Orchestrating the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic lawmakers and liberal figures (Chuck Todd, MSNBC anchor).
  • Tricking Guardian journalist Luke Harding into writing a questionable, thinly-sourced story in order to make it look like Harding is an untrustworthy journalist (“Alex Finley”, ex-CIA officer writing under fake name).
  • Using “Soviet-era tricks to evoke racist white fears” (Terrell Starr, Washington Post).
  • Harvesting “American rage to reshape U.S. politics” (New York Times).
  • Dividing America (New York Times).
  • Using “vaccine debate to sow discord” (New York Times).
  • Sowing discord in the 2018 elections (Dan Coats, director of national intelligence).
  • Targeting African-Americans to suppress 2016 election turnout (New York Times).
  • Amplifying “existing divisions in American society” (USA Today).
  • Hacking “the mindset of the American people” (Malcolm Nance, MSNBC contributor and grown man).
  • Tricking Americans into thinking Jesus hates Hillary Clinton (New York Times).
  • Supporting Bernie Sanders (New Knowledge, which was later caught interfering in the 2017 Alabama Senate election).
  • Tricking Americans into voting for Bernie Sanders, via Facebook ads featuring drawing of buff Bernie Sanders (New York Times).
  • Turning Jill Stein into a Russian agent (Zac Petkanas, Democratic strategist, former Hillary Clinton campaign director of rapid response).
  • Is Putin using his influence to support/oppose [insert whatever you want here]? You’re probably right! For more information, please contact the appropriate Putin disinformation warriors:
  • Anything that can be sprinkled with meaningless terms like “active measures,” “useful idiot,” and “kompromat” and repackaged as expert analysis – Atlantic Council’s Disinfo Portal.
  • Things even the Atlantic Council won’t touch – Louise Mensch.
  • Game Theory – Eric Garland.

 

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Plots and Counterplots cleverly exposed by more ‘experts’

March 29, 2019

by Christian Jürs

 

The Toronto Citizens’ Inquiry will be the most ambitious such inquiry held in the world to date. It is anticipated that more than 1000 people will attend over the scheduled six-day event. The Inquiry will be held at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre and at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto. 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani, who is suing George W. Bush for the loss of her husband on September 11th, will address the Inquiry, as will her lawyer, Phil Berg.

Other leading 9/11 skeptics that will be speaking include: Michael C. Ruppert ¬ former Los Angeles police detective; Thomas Kimmel ¬ retired FBI Agent and US Navy officer; Michel Chossudovsky ¬ author of War and Globalization, the Truth behind 9/11; Thierry Meyssan ¬ author of 9/11 The Big Lie; Mathias Broeckers ¬ best-selling German author/journalist ¬ Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories, and the Secrets of September 11 There are more than 20 other presenters confirmed. Please check our web-site for more details

The San Francisco Inquiry (Phase 1), held March 26-28, was attended by more than 1,500 people and was front-page news in California.

Am important speker was Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr.  A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Tom served on three warships during the Vietnam War and attended John Marshall Law School prior to joining the FBI in 1973, where he continued to serve his Country as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than 25 years.

Tom investigated organized crime in Cleveland, served on the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations Staff at CIA Headquarters, headed the FBI in East Texas, headed the Labor Racketeering Unit at FBI Headquarters, headed the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, PA, and served on the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency. Tom was also the Assistant Agent in Charge of the Philadelphia FBI Division heading the Foreign Counterintelligence and Terrorism Programs during the 1st attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Upon retiring from the FBI, Tom served as a consultant to the Bureau addressing major spy scandals in the FBI and CIA. Tom has appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, twice on 60 Minutes, on War Stories Investigates with Oliver North, and spoken throughout the United States, Canada, Columbia, and Japan to hundreds of groups of all ages frequently as a repeat speaker.

Tom Kimmel knows firsthand how federal government debates over use of wiretaps, exchanges of data between agencies, the hoarding of intelligence and the use of grand jury testimony can prevent cohesive responses to terror. He worked for the FBI in 1995 when the infamous memo was written by Jamie Gorelick of the Clinton Justice Department that created the so-called ,wall, banning certain cooperation between the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA.Kimmel has studied another intelligence and bureaucratic squabble, Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack that ruined the career of his grandfather and catapulted the United States into war with Japan.

,The seeds of 9-11 were planted at Pearl Harbor,, said Kimmel, whose grandfather and US Army General Walter Short were made scapegoats for the failure to anticipate the Japanese surprise attack. ,Good intelligence fell on deaf ears then, and in the case of 9-11, policy failed when the many government agencies tracking terrorists failed,or were prevented from,exchanging data., Ironically, Kimmel noted, Gorelick served on the 9-11 Commission whose report found no one person or agency accountable for Al-Qaeda’s attack.

 

‘Hoarder’ pleads guilty in one of biggest breaches of U.S. secrets

March 28, 2019

by Mark Hosenball

Reuters

(Reuters) – A former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, portrayed as an eccentric hoarder by his lawyers, pleaded guilty in a Baltimore, Maryland court on Thursday to stealing classified documents in a deal likely to put him in prison for nine years.

Harold Martin, 54, who worked for several private firms and had clearances to access top secret information, was arrested over two years ago for what may have been the biggest breach of classified information in history.

When Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his home south of Baltimore in 2016 they found stacks of documents and electronic storage devices amounting to 50 terabytes of files, including classified ones, prosecutors said.

U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors said in a statement that Martin’s actions risked the disclosure of top secret information to America’s “enemies.” One of their allegations was that Martin talked online with people in Russian and other languages but they never found proof he shared stolen information with anyone.

His lawyers said he was a hoarder who liked to take work home with him.

“His actions were the product of mental illness. Not treason,” lawyers Deborah Boardman and James Wyda said in a statement.

Martin and the government agreed that if the federal court in Baltimore accepted the plea agreement, he would be sentenced to nine years in prison on the charge of willful retention of national defense information, prosecutors said. Sentencing was set for July 17 by U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett.

Reporting By Mark Hosenball; additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico; Editing by Grant McCool

…And coming soon, the Life and Times of Captain Wierdbeard, Israel’s True Friend and a 32-page psychiatrist’s report on Donald Trump who was interviewed for an insurance company in 2010. This report is devastating and is nick-named ‘The back wards beauty.’

 

Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous

September 6, 2018

by Bandy X. Lee, Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University

The Conversation

Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” describes a “nervous breakdown of Trump’s presidency.” Earlier this year, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” offered a similar portrayal.

Now, an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous “senior White House official” describes how deeply the troubles in this administration run and what effort is required to protect the nation.

None of this is a surprise to those of us who, 18 months ago, put together our own public service book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

My focus as the volume’s editor was on Trump’s dangerousness because of my area of expertise in violence prevention. Approaching violence as a public health issue, I have consulted with governments and international organizations, in addition to 20 years of engaging in the individual assessment and treatment of violent offenders.

The book proceeded from an ethics conference I held at Yale, my home institution. At that meeting, my psychiatrist colleagues and I discussed balancing two essential duties of our profession. First is the duty to speak responsibly about public officials, especially as outlined in “the Goldwater rule,” which requires that we refrain from diagnosing without a personal examination and without authorization. Second is our responsibility to protect public health and safety, or our “duty to warn” in cases of danger, which usually supersedes other rules.

Our conclusion was overwhelmingly that our responsibility to society and its safety, as outlined in our ethical guidelines, overrode any etiquette owed to a public figure. That decision led to the collection of essays in the book, which includes some of the most prominent thinkers of the field including Robert J. Lifton, Judith Herman, Philip Zimbardo and two dozen others. That decision was controversial among some members of our field.

We already know a great deal about Trump’s mental state based on the voluminous information he has given through his tweets and his responses to real situations in real time. Now, this week’s credible reports support the concerns we articulated in the book beyond any doubt.

These reports are also consistent with the account I received from two White House staff members who called me in October 2017 because the president was behaving in a manner that “scared” them, and they believed he was “unraveling”. They were calling because of the book I edited.

Once I confirmed that they did not perceive the situation as an imminent danger, I referred them to the emergency room, in order not to be bound by confidentiality rules that would apply if I engaged with them as a treating physician. That would have compromised my role of educating the public.

The psychology behind the chaos

The author of the New York Times op-ed makes clear that the conflict in the White House is not about Trump’s ideology.

The problem, the author sees, is the lack of “any discernible first principles that guide his decision making … his impulsiveness [that] results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back, and there being literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next.”

These are obviously psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness. They are identical to those that Woodward describes in numerous examples, which he writes were met with the “stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters.”

They are also consistent with the course we foresaw early in Trump’s presidency, which concerned us enough to outline it in our book. We tried to warn that his condition was worse than it appeared, would grow worse over time and would eventually become uncontainable.

What we observed were signs of mental instability – signs that would eventually play out not only in the White House, as these accounts report, but in domestic situations and in the geopolitical sphere.

There is a strong connection between immediate dangerousness – the likelihood of waging a war or launching nuclear weapons – and extended societal dangerousness – policies that force separation of children from families or the restructuring of global relations in a way that would destabilize the world.

Getting worse

My current concern is that we are already witnessing a further unraveling of the president’s mental state, especially as the frequency of his lying increases and the fervor of his rallies intensifies.

I am concerned that his mental challenges could cause him to take unpredictable and potentially extreme and dangerous measures to distract from his legal problems.

Mental health professionals have standard procedures for evaluating dangerousness. More than a personal interview, violence potential is best assessed through past history and a structured checklist of a person’s characteristics.

These characteristics include a history of cruelty to animals or other people, risk taking, behavior suggesting loss of control or impulsivity, narcissistic personality and current mental instability. Also of concern are noncompliance or unwillingness to undergo tests or treatment, access to weapons, poor relationship with significant other or spouse, seeing oneself as a victim, lack of compassion or empathy, and lack of concern over consequences of harmful acts.

The Woodward book and the New York Times op-ed confirm many of these characteristics. The rest have been evident in Trump’s behavior outside the White House and prior to his tenure.

That the president has met not just some but all these criteria should be reason for alarm.

Other ways in which a president could be dangerous are through cognitive symptoms or lapses, since functions such as reasoning, memory, attention, language and learning are critical to the duties of a president. He has exhibited signs of decline here, too.

Furthermore, when someone displays a propensity for large-scale violence, such as by advocating violence against protesters or immigrant families, calling perpetrators of violence such as white supremacists “very fine people” or showing oneself vulnerable to manipulation by hostile foreign powers, then these things can promote a much more widespread culture of violence.

The president has already shown an alarming escalation of irrational behavior during times of distress. Others have observed him to be “unstable,” “losing a step” and “unraveling.” He is likely to enter such a state again.

Violent acts are not random events. They are end products of a long process that follow recognizable patterns. As mental health experts, we make predictions in terms of unacceptable levels of probability rather than on the basis of what is certain to happen.

Trump’s impairment is a familiar pattern to a violence expert such as myself, but given his level of severity, one does not need to be a specialist to know that he is dangerous.

What next?

I believe Woodward’s book and the revelations in the New York Times op-ed have placed great pressure on the president. We are now entering a period when the stresses of the presidency could accelerate because of the advancing special counsel’s investigations.

The degree of Trump’s denial and resistance to the unfolding revelations, as expressed in a recent Fox interview, are telling of his fragility.

From my observations of the president over extended time via his public presentations, direct thoughts through tweets and accounts of his close associates, I believe that the question is not whether he will look for distractions, but how soon and to what degree.

At least several thousands of mental health professionals who are members of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts share the view that the nuclear launch codes should not be in the hands of someone who exhibits such levels of mental instability.

Just as suspicion of crime should lead to an investigation, the severity of impairment that we see should lead to an evaluation, preferably with the president’s consent.

Mental impairment should be evaluated independently from criminal investigations, using medical criteria and standardized measures. A sitting president may be immune to indictments, but he is subject to the law, which is strict about public safety and the right to treatment when an individual poses a danger to the public because of mental instability. In the case of danger, the patient does not have the right to refuse, nor does the physician have the right not to take the person as a patient.

This evaluation may have been delayed, but it is still not too late. And mental health professionals have extensive experience assessing, restraining and treating individuals much like Trump – it is almost routine.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on September 7, 2018; it reflects new information about the author’s contact with White House staff.

 

Trump overrides advisers, backs funding for Special Olympics after uproar

March 28, 2019

by Steve Holland

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump overrode his budget team and backed funding for the Special Olympics on Thursday after his proposed cuts to the athletic program drew heavy fire from both Republicans and Democrats.

Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2020, which he released earlier this month, would have zeroed out funding for the Special Olympics, which has an allocation of $17.6 million this fiscal year.

There was no sign that Congress was going to agree to defund the popular Special Olympics program in spite of Trump’s proposal. He had sought to cut funding last year as well and lawmakers added the funding back into the budget.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had struggled to defend the proposal in testimony to Congress and both Trump’s Republicans and opposition Democrats had denounced the move.

The Special Olympics is the world’s largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities or physical disabilities.

Talking to reporters on the White House South Lawn, Trump said he had just heard about the controversy on Thursday morning.

I’ve been to the Special Olympics, I think it’s incredible and I just authorized a funding,” Trump said. “I heard about it this morning. I have overridden my people. We’re funding the Special Olympics.”

(This story corrects amount in paragraph 2 to $17.6 million from $17.6 billion)

Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Dan Grebler

 

Shape-shifting Jesus spent his last supper with Pontius Pilate, claims just-deciphered 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’

  • Claim explains why Judas used a kiss to betray Jesus, since he could have transformed to foil any attempt at description
  • Manuscript also claims that Pontius Pilate offered his own son for crucifixion in place of the Messiah – but Jesus declined

March 14, 2013

by Damien Gayle

Daily Mail/UK

A 1,200-year-old ‘Egyptian manuscript’ tells the story of the crucifixion with incredible plot twists – including the revelation that Jesus could change shape.

The ancient illuminated text’s claim explains why Judas used a kiss to betray Jesus, since the Christian Messiah had the ability to transform his appearance.

It also claims Jesus in fact spent his last supper with the man who ordered his execution, Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who is said to have offered to sacrifice his own son in Jesus’ place.

And it defies the official Easter timeline by putting the day of Jesus’ arrest on Tuesday evening, rather than the canonically agreed Thursday.

The translation from the original Coptic has been revealed for the first time in a new book by Roelof van den Broek, emeritus professor of the History of Christianity at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

In the commonly-accepted Bible story it is claimed that the apostle Judas agrees to betray Jesus in exchange for cash, then kissed him to reveal his identity.The newly-deciphered text explains that, far from a sign of affection or guilt, the kiss was Judas’ way of forestalling any shapeshifting confusion.

‘The Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man…’ it reads.

For a man who could walk on water, raise the dead, feed 5,000 people with just a single loaf of bread and a fish, and turn water into wine, such abilities are perhaps unsurprising.

But shapeshifting is not the only superpower the ancient manuscript attributes to Jesus – it also says that he could even turn himself invisible.

It claims that on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus ate dinner with Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect who decided his sentence – who, it is said, remarkably offered his son to be crucified in place of the Messiah.

Jesus declined the offer, explaining that if he could escape from his fate if he wanted to.

‘Pilate, then, looked at Jesus and, behold, he became incorporeal: He did not see him for a long time,’ the text says.

Later that night, according to the manuscript, Pilate and his wife dreamed of an eagle representing Jesus being killed.

The incredible text, which is thought to be some 1,200 years old, is written in the name of St Cyril of Jerusalem, although, Professor van den Broek says, it was probably written by someone else.

Back then it was looked after by monks at the Monastery of St Michael in the desert of north-west Egypt, south of Cairo.

The text was rediscovered in 1910 and, the following year, it was bought along with other manuscripts by the wealthy Wall Street financier JP Morgan.

Morgan’s collections were later given to the public and they are now kept in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

Professor van den Broek told LiveScience that the Bible was already canonised in Egypt by the time the text was written, but that such apocryphal stories nevertheless remained popular among believers.

He said he was not convinced that the monk who wrote down the story necessarily believed all the details in it, ‘but some details, for instance the meal [Pontius Pilate had] with Jesus, he may have believed to have really happened.’

‘The people of that time, even if they were well-educated, did not have a critical historical attitude,’ he added. ‘Miracles were quite possible, and why should an old story not be true?’

Professor van den Broek’s book, Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ, is out now, published by Brill.

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2293301/Shape-shifting-Jesus-spent-supper-Pontius-Pilate-claims-just-deciphered-1-200-year-old-Egyptian-manuscript.html#ixzz2No8Q52cV

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

March 29, 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. 45

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 1996

Commenced: 8:02 AM CST

Concluded: 8:23 AM CST

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. I’ve pretty well firmed up our meeting. Everyone can make it and we’ll have lunch. You’ll need to be at the University Club before noon and we can talk for a while before lunch.

GD: I’ll make a note of it, Robert. Is the food good? I have a great liking for crab cakes, Maryland-style.

RTC: They certainly have that, Gregory. Want wine to go with that?

GD: I’m not much of a drinker but wine will be fine. A nice white wine. Will you have the Allende hit letter with you?

RTC: Oh yes but we can deal with that out of sight and earshot of the others.

GD: But these are your friends.

RTC: Well at least one of them isn’t yours.

GD: A nice book on ‘Bringing True Democracy’ to some backward country. Very inspiring. Robert, you’ve been walking in the corridors of power and you have a first hand knowledge of such things but I think I could tell you the basics in governmental change. I mean securing some natural resource-rich but otherwise insignificant country. Would I offend with some satire here?

RTC: I’m not in harness any more, Gregory. Let’s see what you’ve learned in school, why not?

GD: Here we have a country. Call it Flavia. Not much but goats, much incest, but huge deposits of swan guano. An American firm, Sawney Bean Inc, has the permanent rights to mine the precious swan guano. And eventually, some Flavian intellectual decided that only the President and his family shared in that wealth so he leads a campaign, is successful and is elected to Holy Office. Norman Crotchrott, who owns Sawney Bean, believes that he is going to have to pay bigger bribes to the new president-elect but is horrified to discover that the new leader is a genuine populist and wants to seize the guano and exploit it for the people of Flavia. Shock, rage and horror in the boardroom of Sawney Bean. But, we have a possible salvation just down the road. Mr. Crotchrott went to Harvard with the DCI. He invites him up to a lavish weekend in the Hamptons and closets himself with your former boss for over two hours. Certain matters are discussed, drinks raised and hands shaken. Almost immediately afterwards, the CIA prepares a horrifying report that names the new president of Flavia as a Communist who went to the Lenin School. Shock and horror! The report states that if Flavia falls to the Communists, they will set up a power base and take over all the countries within earshot, to include, shock and horror, one country that produces uranium. My God, Robert, the DCI makes a personal trip to the White House, with a phalanx of aides and experts, all armed with charts, pointers and reports. Once the President is told that the situation in Flavia is critical and the evil Russians might get their Slavic hands on the uranium, he agrees to special action. The CIA starts the ball rolling by having doom-laded and alarmist reports published on the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and about twenty lesser papers. Communists take over Flavia! More shock and horror. The president gives a press conference and says we must save Flavia and the entire region from the evil Communists. In the meantime, the CIA, who has bribed dissident groups in Flavia, regardless of the fact that most of them are pedophiles and chronic alcoholics, supplies them with Chinese weapons, purchased through one of their front companies from Turkey and sends a new cultural attaché to Flavia to spread bags of bribe money. There is a coup, led by U.S. Navy personnel dressed in native costume, the new president and his whole family are set on fire and a newer president is quickly installed. Return of democracy to Flavia is the watchword in the media. Several weeks later, Mr. Crotchrott deposits several million dollars in the black Swiss bank accounts of the top CIA people and sends a Steuben glass bowl to the President as a token of respect for his quick action. The new head of state signs a permanent contract with Sawney Bean and the papers and the boob tube show pictures of happy laughing Flavians cheering the American ambassador as he drives down the street in his armored limousine, surrounded by a battalion of Marines from the embassy. Now, Robert, tell me how far off I am?

RTC: You are a very wicked person, Gregory.

GD: Is that a negative comment?

RTC: Not really. You have Chile in mind specifically?

GD: More like Guatemala, Robert. My uncle was involved with that game and that’s where I got my baptism in bringing true democracy to a backward country with wonderful natural resources.

RTC: A word of caution here, Gregory. At lunch, do not bring up such subjects around Tom. He would start a file on you as a Communist agitator.

GD: Robert, Communism is a dead issue. The Arabs are our new enemies now. The Israelis have told us so and they own the papers. How about a Muslim sympathizer?

RTC: Well, you take my drift, Gregory. Better safe than sorry. Then the FBI will start looking into your garbage.

GD: They ought to feed them better.

 

(Concluded at 8:23 AM CST)

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

No responses yet

TBR News March 28, 2019

Mar 28 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 28, 2019: “The America Trump claims to be supporting, and is supported by, is a country populated solely by white Christians. Latin Americans, Native Americans, Hindus, all black people, citizens or immigrants and perhaps Asians are considered unwelcome and not only is their presence unwanted, their expulsion is a goal to strive for. And another aspect of this plan is to support Israel in her vicious persecution of any and all Arabs whose land they demand for new high rises. These attitudes are not surprising in a country that has large groups who believe the earth is flat or that Jesus will be appearing very soon at a Dallas shopping mall. In 2020 the nation will have the opportunity of either rejecting these concepts or accepting them.Will Donald Trump be crowned emperor in the National Cathedral or will he and Mr. Bolton be seen boarding a plane bound for Aruba and safety?”

 

The Table of Contents

  • An Iranian April Surprise?
  • ‘Why not give Israel North & South Carolina?’ Syrian envoy asks US at UN
  • Conway’s Spin on Trump’s ‘Obstructive Conduct’
  • Russia says it sent ‘specialists’ to Venezuela, rebuffs Trump
  • Why Does the United States Want to Overthrow the Government of Venezuela?
  • Past, Present and Future
  • Full stream ahead: RT takes a peek at progress on construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline
  • The Tragedy of Trump’s Foreign Policy
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • The Amercan Gestapo
  • How to sell a massacre: NRA’s playbook revealed

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 27, 2019

Mar 27 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 27, 2019: Waiting to Happen

It was in the Spring of 2001 when a young computer expert living in the Mid-West developed a lethal virus intended to do a full-bore global destruction to the international computer/internet system.

The virus is spread from computer to computer system to computer and it is so constructed that it cannot be searched out by any known computer security system. The virus remains placidly dormant until it is triggered and then after a specific lapse of time, is fully activated.

What does this virus do?

Totally obliterates the computer hard drive and expunges it of all memory.

In essence, the hard drive is flat line and cannot be reconstructed.

What sort of a trigger would activate this?

Perhaps a first, middle and last name coupled with a fake social security number.

The probability of this trigger accidentally emerging would be a mathematical impossibility.

Let us say that this was triggered on the computer system of a major bank.

When the activating time arrived, everything on the bank computer would be gone. No one could access the ATM machine, cash checks, or otherwise have access to the bank’s services.

There would be mass panic and the bank’s computer people would install backup systems.

After a frenzied flurry, all would return to normal, that is until the activated triggers would work again.

Official records, social security, food stamps, passport data, criminal rap sheets, and dozens and dozens more of vital services would, in essence, be gone with the wind.

And since this project has been silently contaminating the global systems since 2001, the length and depth of the infections would be immense and all-inclusive.

Of course the Russians would be blamed but the computers would be as dead as a squashed cockroach and the entire societal global informational and business structures would gasp, gurgle and die.

People could not buy food, electrical systems would fail and soon, the woodlands of America, and the world, would be filled with frantic citizens digging caves in the soil, or places to bury their surviving family members.

The motto?

Never put all your eggs in one basket.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Second Wisconsin judge blocks Republican-backed laws curbing Democratic governor’s powers
  • Trump and the Numbers Game
  • Despite report findings, almost half of Americans think Trump colluded with Russia: Reuters/Ipsos poll
  • 75 years on from D-Day, is it time Germany liberated itself from the US?
  • Mueller could never have saved us from Trump. That’s what politics is for
  • Afghanistan Wars: Drugs for Fun and Profit
  • America’s energy capital became a battleground over a Russian pipeline to Germany this week
  • Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is 70 percent complete
  • US Crude Oil Imports by Supplier Countries
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • How to sell a massacre: NRA’s playbook revealed

 

Second Wisconsin judge blocks Republican-backed laws curbing Democratic governor’s powers

March 26, 2018

by Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – A Wisconsin judge on Tuesday blocked several laws passed by Republican state lawmakers during a December lame-duck session intended to curb the powers of newly elected Democratic Governor Tony Evers, the second such ruling in the past week.

Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington issued a temporary injunction on legislation that requires lawmakers to approve discontinuing or settling lawsuits by the attorney general, allows them to dictate how governmental documents are written and gives them the ability to halt state rules written by Evers, court documents showed.

Remington said in his ruling that the labor unions that brought the lawsuit were likely to succeed in showing the laws violate the separation of powers provision in the state constitution.

It was the second ruling against the series of statutes passed in the last days of former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s administration. Democrats had criticized the legislation as a last-minute power grab.

“It is now abundantly clear that the lame-duck session was nothing more than an illegal power grab intended to override the will of the people,” Evers said after the ruling on Tuesday.

Remington did not issue a temporary injunction on laws that allow lawmakers to intervene in legal challenges to state statutes and new enterprise zones.

Republican legislative leaders said they would appeal Remington’s ruling.

“It’s encouraging to see the court ruling in our favor on elements of this case. However, all of the Legislature’s actions are consistent with the separation of powers that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld for decades,” state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a joint statement.

Last Thursday, Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess issued a temporary injunction stopping the laws from taking effect as part of a lawsuit filed by several left-leaning groups.

Niess said the legislature’s use of an “extraordinary session” was not explicitly permitted under the state constitution.

After that ruling, the governor immediately moved to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Obamacare healthcare law, the signature domestic achievement of former Democratic President Barack Obama and a longtime target of Republicans, including President Donald Trump.

One of the statutes passed in December had prevented Evers from pulling out of the lawsuit absent legislative approval.

Several other lawsuits have been filed challenging the lame-duck legislation.

Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Peter Cooney

 

Trump and the Numbers Game

There were 56.5 million Hispanics in the United States in 2015, accounting for 17.6% of the total U.S. population.

The Hispanic Mexican population of the United States is projected to grow to 107 million by 2065.

The share of the U.S. population that is Hispanic has been steadily rising over the past half century. In 2015, Hispanics made up 17.6% of the total U.S. population, up from 3.5% in 1960, the origins of the nation’s Hispanic population have diversified as growing numbers of immigrants from other Latin American nations and Puerto Rico settled in the U.S.

For example, between 1930 and 1980, Hispanics from places other than Mexico nearly doubled their representation among U.S. Hispanics, from 22.4% to 40.6%. But with the arrival of large numbers of Mexican immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mexican share among Hispanics grew, rising to a recent peak of 65.7%.

California has the largest legal poplation of Mexicans, 14,013,719. And  California is also home to almost 25% of the country’s undocumented population. California is followed by Texas where 31.14%,(8,500,000) are Mexican, Florida has 4,223,806 Mexicans, Illinois 2,153,000, Arizona,1,895,149, Colorado, 1,136,000 Georgia, 923,000, North Carolina, 890,000, and Washington, 858,000 Mexicans.

Given the fact that President Trump has strong personal dislikes for both Blacks and Latinos, manifest in his recent vicious treatment of Mexican immigrants in their legal attempts to immigrate to the United States, the sheer number of Mexicans now resident in the United States ought to give him, and his far-right Republican Congressional supporters serious pause in their denial of entrance for legal immigrant attempts and the subsequent brutal maltreatment of small children of these immigrants.

If the Mexican voting population of the United States were to organize, like the recent organizing of the black voting population of Alabma in opposition to the fanatical Judge Moore, the results in the November elections could well prove to be a stunning disaster for both Trump and the Republicans.

Numbers certainly count but Trump is obviously unaware of their potential danger, both to him and his right-wing radical supporters.

Despite report findings, almost half of Americans think Trump colluded with Russia: Reuters/Ipsos poll

March 26, 2019

by Chris Kahn

Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nearly half of all Americans still believe President Donald Trump worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared Trump of that allegation.

Americans did feel slightly more positive about Trump after learning the findings of the 22-month investigation into Russian meddling in the election, the national opinion poll released on Tuesday showed.

But U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of Mueller’s investigation did little to change public opinion about the president’s alleged ties to Russia or quench the public’s appetite to learn more.

According to Barr’s summary released on Sunday, Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election, but did not exonerate the president on the question of obstructing the investigation.

When asked specifically about accusations of collusion and obstruction of justice, 48 percent of poll respondents said they believed “Trump or someone from his campaign worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election,” down 6 percentage points from last week.

Fifty-three percent said “Trump tried to stop investigations into Russian influence on his administration,” down 2 points from last week.

Public opinion was split sharply along party lines, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to believe that Trump colluded with Russia and obstructed justice.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll measured the public reaction in the United States on Monday and Tuesday, after the report summary was released, gathering online responses from 1,003 adults, including 948 who said they had at least heard of the summary findings.

The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of its precision, of about 4 percentage points.

Trump’s approval rating got a slight boost, with 43 percent of Americans saying they approved of his performance in office, the highest he has polled so far this year and an increase of 4 percentage points compared to a similar poll last week.

Since January, the proportion of adults who approved of Trump has ranged between 37 percent and 43 percent.

Trump heralded the summary of the Mueller report as a “complete and total exoneration” and vowed to strike back with investigations of his own against unnamed political enemies who he believes are guilty of “evil” and “treasonous things.”

Democrats have called on Barr to release the full report, a position shared by a majority of poll respondents.

Among those familiar with Barr’s summary, only 9 percent said it had changed their thinking about Trump’s ties to Russia and 57 percent said they want to see the entire report.

Thirty-eight percent of all adults, including two out of three Democrats, support efforts by Democratic leaders to continue the Russia investigation in Congress, according to the poll.

The poll also found that 39 percent felt that Trump “should be impeached,” while 49 percent felt that he should not.

Reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Leslie Adler

 

Mueller could never have saved us from Trump. That’s what politics is for

Being unfit for office is not a crime. It will be up to the American people to absorb and act on that insight

by Lawrence Douglas

The Guardian

The Mueller investigation has ended, not with a bang but with a whimper. Dispirited are those who looked forward to seeing the President removed from office first by impeachment and then in leg irons.

True, the investigation was, by many measures, a redoubtable success. It painstakingly documented Russia’s criminal meddling in our election and led to the conviction of several of the president’s closest advisers and enablers. And it hardly provided the “complete and total EXONERATION” that the president claimed in a characteristically inaccurate tweet, as the report left open whether Trump obstructed justice.

Still, for those who saw Mueller moving up the chain, closing in on the president and his family, the report – or at least what we know about it – must disappoint. Yes, Attorney General William Barr’s conclusion that Trump did not obstruct justice warrants closer scrutiny, and certainly we deserve a full release of the findings. But Barr’s conclusion – that it’s hard to prove the existence of obstruction when there was no underlying crime to obstruct – hardly seems scandalous.

How are we to make sense of the disappointment? I think the answer is that many of us were hoping that the law could deliver us from our contemporary politics, a toxic world shaped but not created by Trump himself. If in Trump’s universe, no facts are safe from distortion, the law at least holds out the promise of resting on somewhat firmer terrain. In court, the word “felony” still has a stable meaning.

And while congressional Republicans might be too craven to place restraints on the president, not so federal prosecutors and judges. And so we looked to a handful of public servants, dedicated to no value higher than the preservation of the rule of law and the impartial administration of justice, as our saviors.

The Mueller investigation lulled us, then, into hoping that Trump’s essential unfitness for office would find objective confirmation by our system of criminal justice. By pinning our hopes on Mr Mueller, we were hoping for legal corroboration of something millions take to be true – that an intemperate and unbridled liar, who never ceases to shower contempt on the most basic constitutional norms and practices of democracy, is unfit for the presidency.

The mistake, of course, was to seize on evidence of criminality as the standard by which to measure unfitness for office. For while proof of serious criminal actions may suffice to demonstrate a president’s unfitness, the opposite hardly is true: absence of clear criminality hardly resolves the question of fitness.

The idea that the law could have saved us from what ultimately must be a political judgment was perhaps always naïve. The president had already made sure that among his fervent supporters, no member of his justice department or even federal judge of his own picking could be trusted not to be part of the witch hunt that made the Salem tribunals look even-handed by comparison.

Some may relish the irony of the president citing a report he claimed tainted to the core as proof of his complete innocence. All the same, trying to score points by demonstrating the president’s lack of consistency is an exercise in futility. And alas, Trump’s response to the end of the investigation – his announced intention to redouble his efforts to settle scores with his political enemies – only underscores the very unfitness that made so many see Mueller as our deliverance.

This is not to say Trump won’t one day face his legal comeuppance. The president’s former lawyer has testified that Trump violated campaign finance law, engaged in an illegal payoff and instructed him, the lawyer, to lie to congress. Federal prosecutors in New York’s Sixth District continue to investigate whether the Trump organization engaged in criminal activities such as money laundering on behalf of Russian investors. So the president is far from in the clear.

But neither is American democracy. We hoped that grave character flaws and egregious misbehavior would manifest themselves in transparent violations of law. Alas being unfit

 

Afghanistan Wars: Drugs for Fun and Profit

March 27, 2019

by Christian Jürs

It ought to be recognized that part of the so-called Afghan opium pipeline runs through the United Arab Emirates on its way to Kosovo where it is refined into heroin and shipped up into Europe.

Opium crops located in Afghanistan, over 95% of the world’s opium production, is protected by US CIA people and elements of the American military who have made themselves responsible for the bulk of the illegal heroin markets worldwide.

There is a deliberate effort to convince the bulk of the public that opium in Afghanistan is a Taliban operation but in fact it is not

An ‘Afghanistan Opium Survey’ details the ongoing and steady rise of Afghan opium production. In stated: “In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.”

In 2011 a US MI report had stated, very clearly, that US military convoys operating from Pakistani ports were specifically used to ship both raw opium and refined heroin out of that country and to South American ports.

And then there are the origins, and development of the CIA’s modus operandi.

In what is called the Golden Triangle area, during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos — complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the set-up of nefarious Air America to export the raw gum opium by CIA-owned aircraft, to Columbia where it was, and is, being refined into heroin.

During its involvement with the war in SEA, the CIA used the Hmong groups to counter the activities of the Pathet Lao groups. The Hmongs used the profits from their opium productions to live on. The CIA protected the opium trade and very soon, realizing the profits to be made from it, expanded their control over the opium-growing business.  The Hmong were very important to CIA operations and the CIA was very concerned with their well-being. The CIA began to export raw opium from the north and east of the Plain of Jars to Long Tieng and later, during the height of the Vietnam wars, began to take a great interest in the very large and successful Afghanistani opium fields.

A Pakistani intelligence report based on Pashtun sources, most specifically indicates that the controlling factor in the opium production is not Muslim but American.

According to Pakistani government intelligence, the CIA is heavily involved with al-Quaeda and IS and introduced them into Afghanistan for guerrilla actions so as to be able to convince Washington to increase the number of American troops into that country to protect the highly profitable opium fields.

If one looks at a map showing the locations of the known opium fields in Afghanistan and then looks at another map showing US military units in place, the two are nearly identical.

Russian intelligence is well aware that the US CIA and the Pentagon are secretly supporting the Saudi-raised Sunni IS, a branch of which is now very active in Afghanistan.

It is very well known that a major portion of Afghanistani gum opium is taken over by CIA people and most of it is shipped to Columbia.

A portion of this opium goes to Kosovo where it is also refined and then shipped up through Germany to Russia. This annoys the Russians who have made a strong effort to put a halt to something that killed over 50,000 Russians last year from heroin overdoses.

Here we have an interesting situation.

Russia, with good reason, objects to having heroin smuggled into her country and attempts to put a stop to it.

The United States, a country that, via its agencies, is heavily involved in the international drug trade, objects to this attitude.

Therefore, in addition to all Russia’s oil and gas which America badly needs, the US has an excellent motive for making Russia a handy enemy.

Enemies are necessary to stimulate public support for more profitable (to some at least) small wars.

 

75 years on from D-Day, is it time Germany liberated itself from the US?

March 27, 2019

by Neil Clark

RT

Germany is being pressurized to act against its own economic interests – and put those of US business first.

Wolfgang Kubicki, deputy leader of the opposition Free Democrats (FDP), called last week for the US Ambassador to Germany to be expelled for acting like a “high commissioner of an occupying power.” And it isn’t hyperbole.

We’re coming up in a few months time to the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, which began the liberation of western Europe by Allied forces from the Nazis. Who would have thought that in 2019, we’d have a high ranking German politician from a party, known for its strong support of the Atlantic Alliance, calling for the American Ambassador to his country to be booted out for interfering in his country’s affairs?

Last week, Ambassador Grenell criticized Germany’s military spending plans within NATO as insufficient – echoing President Trump’s calls for European NATO members to spend more on defense.

The premise behind this is that NATO’s actions protect Europe and therefore Europeans should pay their fair share ie 2 percent of GDP. But certainly since the end of the old Cold War, NATO’s aggressive operations have actually made Europe – and Europeans – less safe.  A terrible example of this was the Islamic State terrorist attack which killed 39 European tourists including two Germans, while they were relaxing on the beach and round their hotel in Tunisia in 2015. The gunman was reported to have trained at a jihadist camp in neighboring Libya, ‘liberated’ by NATO in 2011.

German troops were not deployed directly in that action (though there was behind-the-scenes assistance) but German holidaymakers paid the blood price. We now have a jihadist’s playground on the shores of the Mediterranean, where we didn’t have one before.

While it’s true that Berlin doesn’t meet the new 2 percent NATO spending target, (as of 2018 only six member states did), Grenell seems to have overlooked the fact that Germany has been the second largest provider of troops to the Alliance’s military operations in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, no country in NATO has been so generous in taking in refugees fleeing conflicts which the US and other NATO powers have helped to ignite.

In 2016, over 50% of all asylum applications in Germany were from citizens of Iraq or Syria.

In 2018 it was reported that Germany was home to 1.4mn ‘new’ refugees. How many has the US taken in, Mr Renell?

If anything the German government should be raising its concerns to the US Ambassador that his country isn’t doing enough – and not the other way round.

It’s not just defense spending levels that Ambassador Rennell has criticized. Earlier in the month he warned the German Minister of Economic Affairs that the US was prepared to restrict intelligence sharing with Germany should Berlin allow “untrusted vendors” ie Chinese operators, to build 5G mobile networks in the country.

He also doesn’t like – and that’s putting it very mildly – Germany’s involvement in the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

This 1,200km (746 miles) long construction, which would carry gas straight from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea is good news for Russia, Germany and European consumers, who will see their gas bills lowered, but not for the US, which wants European countries to buy its more expensive LNG.

It’s also not great news for the US client state Ukraine, which loses out on transit fees.

A key reason behind the recent ratcheting up of Cold War tensions by the US has been to try and get Germany to cancel its involvement in Nord Stream 2, which is currently 70 percent complete.

In late 2018, Ambassador Grenell warned that German companies involved in Nord Stream 2 could face sanctions. The US really hates it when there’s a competitor in town. Europeans shouldn’t buy the cheapest gas, but what the US wants to sell them.

If the pressure on Germany to spend more on defense and pull out of Nord Stream 2 isn’t enough, there’s also the matter of the country’s trade with Iran. America wants everyone to follow its line on Iran, no matter how big the financial hit. To enforce this, once again there‘s been the threat of secondary sanctions.

Data last October showed that under this threat, German exports to Iran had dropped by 4% in the first 8 months of the year.

But for Washington, this still isn’t good enough. In February VP Mike Pence accused Germany (along with Britain and France) of trying to “break”  the sanctions on Iran by developing non-dollar trade. “Sadly, some of our leading European partners have not been nearly as co-operative,”said Pence, doing his best Godfather impression.

Germany has been Iran’s most important trading partner in Europe – with the value of German exports to the Islamic Republic being worth 2,358 billion Euros in the seven months from January to October 2017.

Yet Berlin is expected to sacrifice this very lucrative business at the behest of anti-Iranian hawks in Washington.

While the protracted Brexit saga is making all the headlines when it comes to European politics, arguably an even more important story is this attempt by the US to make Germany, the biggest economy in the EU, commit what can only be described as acts of great economic self-harm.

The German left has for long wanted a new, less subservient relationship with the US, but now we have German industry and capital – through its political representatives (the FDP has traditionally been the party of business), saying “enough is enough.” Will the US back-down, and allow Germany some leeway? Or imbued with its sense of manifest destiny, and a belief that it has the right to demand economic sacrifices of others that it would never make itself, will it continue to antagonize a traditional ally?

When Trump says ‘America First‘, the right cheer him, but it seems other countries allied to the US, aren’t allowed to do the same, showing that Kubicki’s imperial analogy was quite correct.

75 years after D-Day you really can’t blame Germans – and indeed other Europeans – asking the question: “Is it time to liberate ourselves from our liberators?”

 

America’s energy capital became a battleground over a Russian pipeline to Germany this week

  • Some of the tensest moments at a major energy conference in Houston were over a Russian-German natural gas pipeline.
  • The debates this week show that Germans and their counterparts in the U.S. and Poland cannot even agree on why the line is being built.
  • Berlin sees Nord Stream 2 as a purely economic project, while its opponents see it as a tool of Russian influence over Europe.

March 15,2019

by Tom DiChristopher

CNBC.com

This week Houston became the latest battleground in the international dispute over a pipeline project located more than 5,000 miles away from the Lone Star State.

The dispute over the project in question — the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany — is not new. But the debates in Houston show how intractable the issue has become, with the two sides sitting elbow to elbow and unable to even agree on why the project is being built.

From Germany’s perspective, Nord Stream 2 is a purely commercial endeavor that will double the volume of Russian gas flowing to its north shore on the Black Sea. To the United States and some European countries, it’s a political tool to extend Russian influence over Europe.

The debate has taken on urgency following clashes between Russia and Ukraine in the Kerch Strait, a move in the European Union to delay Nord Stream 2 through legislation and persistent threats by the U.S to sanction companies involved in the project.

“It’s clear. This is Germany giving the Russians money while others are defending them,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNBC at CERAWeek, apparently evoking the administration’s complaints that Berlin is not contributing enough to NATO.

The panels on Nord Stream 2 at CERAWeek were generally more diplomatic, but the stakeholders nevertheless appeared exasperated with the stand-off, with tempers threatening to boil over at points.

“This focus on Nord Stream — I find it totally out of proportion,” Emily Haber, Germany Ambassador to the U.S., said at the apex of a tense exchange with American and Polish counterparts on Thursday.

Haber acknowledged that Nord Stream 2 has become political since Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014. But she insisted it was an economic project first and foremost.

“It was not pursued by the state. It was pursued by companies, and it had economic advantages because that’s what companies like,” she said.

U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette pushed back on that claim. The Russian partner Gazprom is state-controlled and initiated the project on behalf of Moscow, he said.

“This is not purely a private project for the development of energy,” he said. “And so what are the motives for doing that? If it’s a government driven exercise, you have to look at… geopolitics and the particular governments involved.”

Russia’s motives for building Nord Stream 2 and another pipeline called Turkstream are clear, according to Amos Hochstein, a former special envoy for international energy under President Barack Obama who now sits on the supervisory board for Ukrainian gas company Naftogaz. Moscow wants to circumvent the Ukrainian pipeline system, depriving its regional rival of valuable transit fees and making it easier fo the Kremlin to pressure its neighbors.

“If you have a piece of infrastructure that works, you rarely see somebody saying, ‘Hey, it works. Let’s go and finance billions of dollars worth of a different piece of infrastructure to accomplish a very similar goal, which is to get a molecule of gas from Russia into Europe,'” Hochstein said during a separate panel on Wednesday.

“So that is what’s on the table at the moment, a non-commercial project that serves a political goal.”

That viewpoint ignores major changes in Russian gas supply, said Thilo Wieland, an executive who oversees Russian exploration and production at Wintershall, a German oil and gas company co-financing Nord Stream 2.

Russia’s main source of gas is moving north as the country taps the Yamal Peninsula, he said. Piping these new supply sources through Nord Stream 2 is quicker, more efficient and gives Europe another transportation option, he claimed.

“You need infrastructure if you want to have a functioning market. You need to have abundant supply, and I think the European Union has done a lot in the past to really create a liberalized market which is defined by non-discriminatory access for everybody,” Wieland said on Wednesday.

Germany sees the issue through the same lens, Haber said. Berlin believes energy security hinges on having transportation options and does not necessarily depend on where the gas comes from.

But even on this basic definition of energy security, the officials could not agree.

“If we have a lot of infrastructure, but we know that the gas is coming from the same place, in fact it does not change anything. We are still dependent on one supply,” Tomasz Dabrowski, deputy energy minister for Poland said at the Thursday panel.

The lack of consensus and tension at the Thursday panel prompted IHS Markit senior vice president and seasoned statesman Carlos Pascual to briefly switch roles from moderator to diplomat.

Pascual, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and Ukraine, urged the officials to consider the possibility that Nord Stream is at its heart both a commercial and political project. He also noted that Ukraine will face pressure from liquefied natural gas imports into Europe, flows from the Caspian Sea and perhaps supplies from Mediterranean fields currently being explored.

He urged the officials not to lose sight of the broader issue: What is the joint European-U.S. policy towards Russia for addressing its behavior in Ukraine?

“Sometimes if we end up getting caught in individual pieces of that discussion without putting them in the broader context, it can end up becoming sometimes a little bit more difficult,” he said.

Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is 70 percent complete

March 2, 2019

RT

More than 800km of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has already been laid under the Baltic Sea, the project’s operator announced. The gas pipeline is scheduled to be fully finished by the end of this year.

Some 400km of pipes along the 1,200km route were laid along the seabed since the beginning of the year. In January, the Nord Stream 2 operator reported that 400km of the line had been completed by the end of 2018.

“We have a complex, non-linear schedule for laying the twin Nord Stream 2 pipelines, taking into account the environmental requirements and using a large number of vessels for the implementation of various activities,” Nord Stream 2’s Chief Project Officer Henning Kothe said on Friday. He added that the works are progressing according to the schedule, which will the gas pipeline completed by the end of 2019 as the company earlier promised.

Over 1,000 people are currently working on some 20 vessels for the project in the Baltic Sea. However, the heavy lift and pipelay vessel ‘Pioneering Spirit,’ the world’s largest of its kind, will temporarily be used in another project in the North Sea. The construction vessel is set to continue laying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in around one month.

The $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project is set to run from Russia to Germany to deliver Russian natural gas to European consumers. It is expected to double the existing pipeline’s capacity of 110 billion cubic meters.

Earlier this week, a poll conducted on the YouGov platform and published by German media showed that a majority of Germans support the project. Some 56 percent of 2,058 participants voted in favor of the pipeline, while only 16 percent said they were against the construction. The remainder of respondents did not express an opinion on the matter.

The Nord Stream 2 has long attracted opposition from some European countries, especially Ukraine, which fears that Russia wants to bypass the country and deprive it of its gas transition revenues. At the same time, the US voiced criticism of the gas pipeline, saying that it will make Europe dependent from Moscow, while trying to sell more of its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) to its overseas partners. The claims have been repeatedly rebuffed by both Russia and Germany.

On Friday, one of Russia’s partners on the Nord Stream 2 construction, Austria’s OMV energy group, said that buying expensive American gas would hurt European companies.

“If we want to keep Europe competitive, importing overpriced American liquefied natural gas is not an option as it will not allow our industrial companies withstand competition with the US,” CEO of the company, Rayner Zele, told Neue Zurcher Zeitung outlet.

 

US Crude Oil Imports by Supplier Countries

March 13, 2019

by Daniel Workman

worlsstopexports

During 2018, the United States of America imported US$163.1 billion worth of crude oil from a total 44 countries.

The global cost for all US imported crude oil purchases fell -35.6% since 2014 but increased 17% from 2017 to 2018.

Among top trade partners, Canada furnished about two-fifths (39.5%) of America’s imported crude oil while Saudi Arabia supplied 13.4% worth. Crude oil delivered to the US from Middle Eastern nations was valued at $36.5 billion in 2018 or 22.3% of America’s worldwide total. Mideast oil delivered to America rose in value by 10.6% from 2017 to 2018 but plunged -49.4% since 2014

America’s top 15 suppliers of crude oil in 2018 generated 95.3% of US purchases from foreign markets, with over three-fifths (61.9%) of the overall cost of unprocessed petroleum originating from suppliers in Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

1.Canada: US$ 64.3 billion (39.5% of total US imported crude oil)

2.Saudi Arabia: $21.9 billion (13.4%)

3.Mexico: $14.7 billion (9.0%)

4.Iraq: $12.1 billion (7.4%)

5.Venezuela: $10.6 billion (6.5%)

6.Colombia: $6.6 billion (4.0%)

7.Nigeria: $5.1 billion (3.1%)

8.Ecuador: $4.2 billion (2.6%)

9.Brazil: $3.9 billion (2.4%)

10.Angola: $2.5 billion (1.5%)

11.Algeria: $2.2 billion (1.3%)

12.Russia: $2.1 billion (1.3%)

13.Kuwait: $1.9 billion (1.1%)

14.Norway: $1.7 billion (1.1%)

15.United Kingdom: $1.5 billion (0.9%)

 

Five among these top suppliers posted increases in the value of their crude oil exports to America since 2014, namely Algeria (up 756.7%), United Kingdom (up 258.7%), Norway (up 258.4%), Russia (up 170.3%) then Nigeria (up 88.9%).

Leading the decliners over the 5-year period were: Kuwait (down -83.5%), Venezuela (down -59.8%), Angola (down -52.7%), Saudi Arabia (down -52.5%) and Mexico (down -47.8%).

America’s leading provider Canada also experienced a significant downturn in the value of its crude oil exports to the US from 2014 to 2018, thanks to a -24.9% reduction.

The table below shows the dollar amount for crude oil sold to the US in 2018 by country. Also shown is the percentage value change for each supplier from 2017 to 2018.

 

List of US Imported Crude Oil Suppliers

 

2017-18

 

Rank –Supplier- Imported Crude (US$)

 

  1. Japan $14,000 no 2017 data
  2. Israel $151,000 no 2017 data
  3. Barbados $4 million no 2017 data
  4. Belize $13.2 million +97.5%
  5. Peru $18 million -23.8%
  6. Thailand $19.4 million -67.5%
  7. Bolivia $19.4 million no 2017 data
  8. Italy $26 million no 2017 data
  9. Australia $42 million +20.4%
  10. Cameroon $49.6 million no 2017 data
  11. Vietnam $70.5 million -51.9%
  12. Brunei Darussalam $78.6 million +866.2%
  13. Tunisia $90.6 million +75.2%
  14. Côte d’Ivoire $121.3 million +241%
  15. United Arab Emirates $141.4 million -65.8%
  16. Guatemala $145.3 million +47.2%
  17. Gabon $186.2 million +80.3%
  18. Trinidad/Tobago $222.2 million +26.2%
  19. India $276.7 million +103.1%
  20. Congo $286.6 million +247%
  21. Ghana $302.8 million -31.3%
  22. Azerbaijan $426.4 million +248.1%
  23. Equatorial Guinea $462.1 million +91.5%
  24. Egypt $471.9 million +183.5%
  25. Chad $486 million -8.4%
  26. Kazakhstan $582.3 million no 2017 data
  27. Argentina $747.3 million +10,675,571%
  28. Indonesia $1.1 billion +37.2%
  29. Libya $1.4 billion +8.5%
  30. United Kingdom $1.5 billion +190.6%
  31. Norway $1.7 billion +85.9%
  32. Kuwait $1.9 billion -33.4%
  33. Russia $2.1 billion +113.8%
  34. Algeria $2.2 billion +56.4%
  35. Angola $2.5 billion +0.3%
  36. Brazil $3.9 billion +0.3%
  37. Ecuador $4.2 billion +4.3%
  38. Nigeria $5.1 billion -21.6%
  39. Colombia $6.6 billion -1%
  40. Venezuela $10.6 billion –
  41. Iraq $12.1 billion +8.7%
  42. Mexico $14.7 billion +43%
  43. Saudi Arabia $21.9 billion +20.3%
  44. Canada $64.3 billion +20.7%

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

March 27, 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. 50

Date, Friday, November 29, 1996

Commenced: 11:20 AM CST

Concluded: 11:55 AM CST

GD: How are you doing today, Robert?

RTC: Had a bad night, Gregory. Couldn’t get to sleep and then dozed off about five. Not a good night.

GD: Take sleeping pills?

RTC: I don’t like to start with things like that. You can get addicted to them so I just put up with it and I will take a nap after lunch. That will help. How are you today?

GD: I’m OK. Been working on the latest Müller book and I got bogged down. When that happens, you have to just stop everything and walk away for a while.

RTC: How is the book coming?

GD: Making it, Robert. Publisher tells me the first book is doing very well.

RTC: Any negative comments?

GD: Not to him.

RTC: Oh, there are some unhappy people back here. The rumors are out that you might do another book so I would be careful talking about its contents to anyone.

GD: Corson and Kimmel have been very interested.

RTC: That’s what I mean. Don’t tell either one of them a damned word.

GD: No, the more curious people get, the less I say. I know Tom is with the FBI so, naturally, I only engage in light conversations with him and Bill is too curious to suit me.

RTC: Bill like to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, if you follow me.

GD: Yes. Typical.

RTC: Müller died in ’83, didn’t he?

GD: Yes. Buried in Oakland.

RTC: Buried under his Company name?

GD: No, his real one.

RTC: He sold paintings for us, as I remember.

GD: Oh, yes he did. Your people took over looted Nazi art from the Army after the war and then you know what happened to it.

RTC: Yes, of course. We sold it for profit and if we had any trouble with previous owners, we simply terminated them. Mostly hysterical Jews screaming about this or that but eventually, they were dealt with and business went on.

GD: Heini told me he took in millions.

RTC: Oh, yes, he did. Some of it we used for off the books operations, like snuffing Diem and other nasty businesses and the rest ended up in private hands, let us say.

GD: Well, I recall the beautiful Raphael hanging up in Heini’s office. A fruity looking fellow in a white shirt. It apparently came from a collection in Warsaw along with a Leonardo. The Leonardo was found and sent back but the Raphael ended up with the Gestapo and Heini hid it and later went back for it. Of course he could never sell it but it looked so nice in his home. I can imagine the howls of rage if the Polacks found out about it.

RTC: Yes, indeed. God, how many such scenes we had to take care of.

GD: Terminate with extreme prejudice?

RTC: No, that term is used for in-house problems. Like the unfortunate fellow who shot himself in the back of the head and jumped off his little boat with weights on his feet. Things like that.

GD: And Olson?

RTC: Well, he was potential trouble so he did a full gainer out of a hotel window. It wasn’t the long fall that did him in, Gregory, but that sudden stop at the bottom.

GD: Müller told me about that. He said unwanted people like Forrestal rained down all over Washington until he introduced the heart attack drug. He used to feel sorry for people down below. I mean, some woman taking mail to the corner box gets an unwanted individual landing on top of her. Or imagine someone just bought a new Packard and there is a huge mess on their crushed roof and brains splattered all over the rest of the car. No, Heini was right about the heart attacks. Much more plausible and certainly less messy.

RTC: I agree.

GD: Diem?

RTC: Oh that business. I was on the inside with that one. What a mess but typical. Diem and his brother ran Vietnam and were trying to kill off the Buddhists. Kennedy had no idea what was going on over there and was waffling about pouring American troops into the country. The Diem family were crooked as hell and very, very nasty and demanding. Thee were two camps here, Gregory. The first one wanted a major effort there to stop Communism dead in its tracks and the other felt that such actions would become a bottomless pit.

GD: In the event, they were right.

RTC: Yes, but that is now, based on hindsight, but at the time, no one knew just what to do. We were technically only advising Diem. We had a deal with the French, at least the Company did, to support any régime that would protect their interest there. Lots of rubber and there was also untapped oil fields offshore. Jack was an idealist at times and got pulled this way and that. I mean we felt that a strong military presence there was good. We could use that country as a base of operations to expand into Laos and other areas but we had to act like we were supporting the democratic movements in Saigon. Diem was a vicious dictator and was surrounded with totally corrupt officials so he was not a good image for us. After we talked about it somewhat, it was decided to get rid of him and his brother and put in new people. We talked with dissident generals and pretty well set up a putsch. The idea was not to run him out of the country but to kill both of them and set an example for others.

GD: Was Kennedy in on it?

RTC: OF course, he knew in advance. We tarted it up and he went for it. But kept waffling this way and that so we just told the generals to go ahead. They grabbed the two of them and chopped them both up with bayonets in the back on an armored car. I personally told our people there that it ought to be done and the bodies tossed out on the street as an example to others.

GD: Admiral Byng.

RTC: Yes, just so. Kennedy was presented with a fiat and went along.

GD: And what about the usual Congressional investigations?

RTC: We did what we always do, Gregory. Private talks with key people on the hill and the whole thing is rigged from the beginning.

GD: You told them the truth?

RTC: Oh, be a realist here. Of course not. We lie to Congress and the White House every day. We know so much about all of them, just like old Hoover did, that they shut up and we have our people at the New York Times write things up the way we wish. And then the public goes off and watches a football game and opens another beer.

GD: Could any of this ever get out?

RTC: No. Say some gung ho reporter wants to do a story on how we killed Diem or something else like that. We would hear about it at once because we have our people in all the major papers and television offices so we would get the word right away. The usual drill is to call up the editor and have a talk with him and the reporter gets assigned to inspect whale shit somewhere.

GD: And if he gets too curious or won’t give up?

RTC: There’s always the heart attack or the road accident.

GD: Of falling out of the window.

RTC: Not much of that anymore. As you say, too messy.

GD: Heini used to off them and then turn up the heat in their house until they got really ripe.

RTC: Not personally?

GD: No, he used Arno to off people. Arno is a real jewel. He’s a Lutheran minister at the present time but Heini told me once that Arno loved the knife and some of his victims looked like something Picasso would have painted

RTC: (Laughter) Yes, well, we had some of those too.

GD: I recall the Diem business. That was the turning point over there. The hawks won out.

RTC: What a mess that was, Gregory. Now mind you, I felt that Diem just would not listen to us and was causing such bad publicity here by his undemocratic behavior that I really don’t think we had much of a choice. Kennedy was a twit and proved to be so unreliable in the business that we eventually decided he had to go too. Johnson would do what he was told but Kennedy was as independent as a hog on ice so onto the face of the fifty cent piece and into the hearts of all Americans. You won’t find Johnson on a coin but he put plenty of them into his pocket. Give me the crook over the idealist any time.

GD: I agree. Anyway, I am writing the art business up for the new book. They never took anything really big but all the small stuff fell through the cracks. Müller used to call it degenerate filth and that Hitler was right about it but I notice he never burnt any of the Klees or Picassos. You can get money for all of that and I find that money has such a soothing effect, Robert.

RTC: Yes, I believe it does. It is the root of all evil, after all.

GD: No, the actual Biblical quotation is that the love of money is the root of all evil.

RTC: One or the other.

(Concluded at 11:55 AM CST)

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

How to sell a massacre: NRA’s playbook revealed

Three-year undercover sting reveals how US’ National Rifle Association handles public opinion after deadly gun attacks.

March 26, 2019

by Peter Charley

Al-Jazeera

Sydney, Australia – How should you respond to a deadly mass shooting if you are a gun rights advocate?

First, “Say nothing.” If media queries persist, go on the “offence, offence, offence”. Smear gun-control groups. “Shame them” with statements such as – “How dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda?”

This was the advice the US’s most powerful gun lobby gave Australia’s One Nation party, according to an Al Jazeera investigation, when representatives of the Australian far-right group sought guidance from the National Rifle Association (NRA) on loosening the Pacific country’s strict gun laws.

The NRA’s playbook on mass shootings came to light during the course of a three-year undercover sting by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. Rodger Muller, an Australian undercover reporter who infiltrated the gun lobbies in the US and Australia, used a hidden camera to record a series of meetings between representatives of the NRA and One Nation in Washington, DC in September last year.

The secretly filmed footage provides a rare inside view of how the NRA deliberates over mass shootings and seeks to manipulate media coverage to push its pro-gun agenda.

Australia’s One Nation party, led by Senator Pauline Hanson, has long sought to relax the country’s gun laws, which ban almost all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

The rules, some of the toughest in the world, were introduced in 1996 after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 35 people in the town of Port Arthur.

Since then, Australia has had no mass shootings where the attackers did not know their victims. However, the NRA has denounced Australia’s laws as “not the definition of common sense”.

‘The graves of those children’

Muller, Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter who posed as a gun-rights campaigner, introduced One Nation’s Chief of Staff, James Ashby, and the leader of its Queensland branch, Steve Dickson, to the NRA, and travelled with the pair to Washington, DC last year.

Ashby and Dickson were hoping to secure up to $20m in political donations from supporters of the US gun lobby.

In meetings at the NRA’s Virginia headquarters, officials provided Ashby and Dickson tips to galvanise public support to change Australia’s gun laws and coached the pair on how to respond to a mass shooting.

The best method to handle media inquiries in the wake of a massacre was to “say nothing”, according to Catherine Mortensen, an NRA media liaison officer. But if inquiries persisted, she recommended an offensive communications strategy.

That included deflecting public concern by smearing supporters of gun control.

“Just shame them to the whole idea,” said Lars Dalseide, another member of the NRA’s public relations team. “If your policy, isn’t good enough to stand on itself, how dare you use their deaths to push that forward. How dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda?”

Dickson responded: “I love that, thank you”.

Then, explaining how the NRA manipulated media coverage, Dalseide told One Nation to enlist the services of friendly reporters.

“You have somebody who leans to your side that worked at a newspaper, maybe he was covering city hall or was a crime reporter,” Dalseide said.

“We want to print up stories about people who were robbed, had their home invaded, were beaten or whatever it might be and that could have been helped had they had a gun. And that’s going to be the angle on your stories. That’s what he’s got to write. He’s got to put out two to five of those a week.”

‘Outrage of the week’

Another NRA tip was to ghost-write columns for pro-gun law enforcement officials.

“We pitch guest columns in the local papers,” said Mortensen.

“A lot of the times, we’ll write them for like a local sheriff in Wisconsin or whatever. And he’ll draft it or she will help us draft it. We’ll do a lot of the legwork because these people are busy. And this is our job. So, we’ll help them and they’ll submit it with their name on it so that it looks organic. You know, that it’s coming from that community. But we will have a role behind the scenes.”

As for social media, the NRA recommended producing short videos that highlight how useful a gun is for self-defence.

“These are hugely popular and they’re short little snippets. You know, ‘Joe Blow’, cashier at the local convenience store, had his firearm with him and protected himself,” said Mortensen.

“Those are good because they’re short and they kind of get you outraged. We call it like ‘the outrage of the week’.”

During the same meeting, Dickson told the NRA that “African gangs imported to Australia” were committing rape and burglary in the country, including “coming into the house with baseball bats to steal your car”.

To that, Dalseide advised the following: “Every time there’s a story there about the African gangs coming in with baseball bats, a little thing you can put out there, maybe at the top of a tweet or Facebook post or whatever, like with ‘not allowed to defend their home’, ‘not allowed to defend their home’. Boom.”

The NRA officials named in this report, One Nation, Dickson and Ashby did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

No responses yet

TBR News March 26, 2019

Mar 26 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 26, 2019:” The so-called “Orange Revolution” funded and directed by the CIA, overthrew the pro-Moscow government in the Ukraine, giving the United States theoretical control over the heavy industrialized Donetz Basin and most importantly, the huge former Soviet naval base at Sebastopol.          The Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP) was an American-sponsored 18-month, $64-million program aimed at increasing the capabilities of the Georgian armed forces by training and equipping four 600-man battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communications. The program enabled the US to expedite funding for the Georgian military for Operation Enduring Freedom.

On February 27, 2002, the US media reported that the U.S. would send approximately two hundred United States Army Special Forces soldiers to Georgia to train Georgian troops. The program implemented President Bush’s decision to respond to the Government of Georgia’s request for assistance to enhance its counter-terrorism capabilities and addressed the situation in the Pankisi Gorge.

The program began in May 2002 when American Special Forces soldiers began training select units of the Georgian Armed Forces, including the 12th Commando Light Infantry Battalion, the 16th Mountain-Infantry Battalion, the 13th ‘Shavnabada’ Light Infantry Battalion, the 11th Light Infantry Battalion, a mechanized company and small numbers of Interior Ministry troops and border guards.

Eventually, responsibility for training Georgian forces was turned over to the US Marine Corps in conjunction with the British Army. British and American teams worked as part of a joint effort to train each of the four infantry battalion staffs and their organic rifle companies. This training began with the individual soldier and continued through fire team, squad, platoon, company, and battalion level tactics as well as staff planning and organization. Upon completing training, each of the new Georgian infantry battalions began preparing for deployment rotations in support of the Global War on Terrorism

The CIA were instrumental in getting Mikhail Saakashvili, an erratic politician, pro-West, into the presidency of Georgia but although he allowed the country to be flooded with American arms and “military trainers” he was not a man easily controlled and under the mistaken belief that American military might supported him, commenced to threaten Moscow. Two Georgian provinces were heavily populated by Russians and objected to the inclusion in Georgia and against them, Saakashvili began to make threatening moves.

The 2008 South Ossetia War or Russo-Georgian War (in Russia also known as the Five-Day War) was an armed conflict in August 2008 between Georgia on one side, and Russia and separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the other.

During the night of 7 to 8 August 2008, Georgia launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetia, in an attempt to reclaim the territory. Georgia claimed that it was responding to attacks on its peacekeepers and villages in South Ossetia, and that Russia was moving non-peacekeeping units into the country. The Georgian attack caused casualties among Russian peacekeepers, who resisted the assault along with Ossetian militia.

Georgia successfully captured most of Tskhinvali within hours. Russia reacted by deploying units of the Russian 58th Army and Russian Airborne Troops in South Ossetia, and launching airstrikes against Georgian forces in South Ossetia and military and logistical targets in Georgia proper. Russia claimed these actions were a necessary humanitarian intervention and peace enforcement.

When the Russian incursion was seen as massive and serious, U.S. president George W. Bush’s statement to Russia was: ‘Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.’ The US Embassy in Georgia, describing the Matthew Bryza press-conference, called the war an ‘incursion by one of the world’s strongest powers to destroy the democratically elected government of a smaller neighbor’.

Initially the Bush Administration seriously considered a military response to defend Georgia, but such an intervention was ruled out by the Pentagon due to the inevitable conflict it would lead to with Russia. Instead, Bush opted for a softer option by sending humanitarian supplies to Georgia by military, rather than civilian, aircraft. And he ordered the immediate evacuation of all American military units from Georgia. The huge CIA contingent stationed in the Georgian capital fled by aircraft and the American troops, mostly U.S. Marines, evacuated quickly to the Black Sea where they were evacuated by the U.S. Navy.

British and Israeli military units also fled the country and all of them had to leave behind an enormous amount of military equipment to include tanks, light armored vehicles, small arms, radio equipment, and trucks full of intelligence data they had neither the time nor foresight to destroy.

The immediate result of this demarche was the defection of the so-called ‘NATO Block’ eastern Europeans from the Bush/CIA project who saw the United States as a paper tiger that would not, and could not, defend them against the Russians. In a sense, the Russian incursion into Georgia was a massive political, not a military, victory.

The CIA was not happy with the actions of Vladimir Putin and when he ran for reelection, they poured money into the hands of Putin’s enemies, hoping to reprise the Ukrainian Orange Revolution but the effort was in vain.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • Robert Mueller May Not Have Found Evidence of Collusion, But His Report Proves the System Worked
  • Trump’s Golan recognition: A dangerous precedent?
  • US Politics
  • How to Make a Difficult Situation Awful
  • From the Encyclopedia of American Loons
  • Smart talking: are our devices threatening our privacy?
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 25, 2019

Mar 24 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

         Washington, D.C. March 25, 2019: “Venezuela, who holds the largest oil reserves and has  a left wing, anti US president in power, is the target of the American governments’ various disrupt, kill and sieze agencies.

Venezuela has cut off all oil sales to the United States and is selling its products to both China and Russia.

This infuriates proto-fascists like Bolton and Trump and they are doing everything they can to overturn the current anti-American government and replace it with the usual obedient pro America puppet government.

Unfortunately, the Russians have been sending troops to Venezuela and supplying the public with the medicines and food products the Americans thought they were denying the public so as to hasten the departure of Maduro.

If, as is usually done, the US sends in troops to enforce its demands, there will be confrontations with Russia and if some drug-stoned GI starts shooting, the Russians will shoot back.

Trump is stupid enough to start serious trouble but he believes his far-right pointy-headed supporters, replete with red Trump caps, can turn any tide against him.

Perhaps he thinks the Sacred Easter Bunny will lead the drooling pack.

All media speculations aside, Trump’s real Achilles Heel is not in his right wing SS men but in all the very expensive hotels he owns.

Sabotage to these would cost him enormous money and that, and that alone (aside from various attractive vaginas he loves to touch) would bring him down.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • America’s Corruption Is a National Security Threat
  • No collusion, plenty of corruption: Trump is not in the clear
  • Donald Trump’s Russian Connections
  • Russian air force planes land in Venezuela carrying troops: reports
  • Russia sends more than 100 troops to Venezuela
  • Russian troops land in Caracas as US considers military intervention in Venezuela
  • Russia Comes to Maduro’s Rescue After U.S. Sanctions Hit
  • How the Media Distort News From Venezuela
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 24, 2019

Mar 24 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

         Washington, D.C. March 24, 2019: “Fake coins.  

It is a violation of United States federal law to sell unmarked replicas. The U.S. Hobby Protection Act, first enacted in 1973 (Public Law 93-167 15 US Code 2101 et seq) requires manufacturers and importers of imitation numismatic items to mark them plainly and permanently with the word, “COPY” in accordance with the Code of Federal Regulations (16 CFR part 304).

With the collapsing American economy, many Americans are rushing to invest in gold; either coins or bar, and also silver. One of the most popular forms of this investment are American coins. Where there is a need, there is always someone to fill it and in this case, the filling consists of the massive counterfeiting of gold coins, silver coins, and even Swiss and US Treasury gold bars in China.

Initially, it appeared they were only faking Morgan dollars, but then it turned out they were also making $20 Liberty, and Indian Head gold $2.50, $5, and $10 coins, of all dates. These forgeries are extremely easy to accomplish  with today’s computer-and-laser-die-cutting technology, and the fakes are being die-struck in vast quantities, not cast, and visually at least, are superb copies.

Coins and bars are struck in China, with laser-cut dies, in tungsten (which is very close to the weight of gold) and then plated with 23 caret gold.

Partial listing of proven Chinese fakes

  • 1856 Flying Eagle cent
  • 1909-S VDB Lincoln cent
  • 1913 Liberty head nickel (never issued, a few samples illegally struck)
  • 1955 double-die Lincoln cent
  • 1916-D Mercury dime
  • Cincinnati commemorative half dollar
  • 1804 Bust dollar (a million dollar rarity for some but this coin was never minted in 1804 and  a few presentation copies were struck many years later with new dies. These are not considered a circulation coin.)
  • Morgan dollars: all mints and all dates. Note: It is very important to understand that most of these coins were removed from circulation and melted down for their silver content. Therefore, the enormous numbers of Morgan dollars, ‘recently discovered, in mint condition, in an old vault,’ is only a predictable fabrication designed to sell Chinese fakes to the gullible.
  • Saint-Gaudens 1907 high-relief double eagle

Other frequently seen Chinese counterfeit U.S. coins, include:

  • 1914-D Lincoln cent
  • 1922 Lincoln cent
  • 1943 bronze Lincoln cent
  • 1912-S Liberty Head nickel
  • 1937-D three-legged Buffalo nickel
  • 1944 copper-nickel Jefferson nickel
  • 1799 Bust dollar
  • $10 Gold Eagles, and the $2.50 and $5.00 pieces issued by the southern U.S.mints of New Orleans, Charlotte, NC and Dahlonega, GA. These coins bear the mint marks of O, C, and D respectively
  • $2.50,  $5.00, $10.00 Indian head gold pieces dates of 1908–1915, 1925–1929
  • Seated Liberty Half Dollar 1861-O “S.S. Republic”
  • 1857 “S” Shipwreck Gold Coins “S.S. Central America”
  • 1858 “S” $20 Liberty Shipwreck Gold “S.S. Republic”
  • 1853 United States Assay Office proof gold $20
  • Three gold Imperial Russian roubles from the reign of Nicholas II
  • A gold 20 franc coin with the head of Napoleon I on the obverse
  • The South African Krugerrand
  • The Canadian Maple Leaf
  • British sovereigns and half sovereigns of different monarchs and dates
  • And in addition, the Chinese are also making fake tungsten, gold plated bars from the Credit Suisse people and the United States Treasury.

 

The Table of Contents

  • It’s Mueller time but don’t forget: Trump has undermined the very idea of America
  • Kushner, Inc review: Jared, Ivanka Trump and the rise of the American kakistocracy
  • Fear of a Black Homeland
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 23, 2019

Mar 23 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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

Washington, D.C. March 23, 2019:”The so-called Mueller report has been submitted and the press and sections of the public are frantic to learn what it says. To me, all it does is to substantiate the fact that Trump is not an honest man and has a personality that ought to preclude him from occupying the Oval Office. The public likes clear-cut answers but often they find only partial answers and random facts which breed the conspiratorial fabricators’ creative writings. Although it appears from disconnected fragments that Trump had some kind of undercover dealings with the Russians, concrete proof would be very hard to find. But in the law, circumstantial evidence is considered superior to direct evidence. Of the corruption, arrogance, unlawful and disgraceful behavior of Trump has been well established but solid connection with Russian intelligence is another matter. In fact the former far outweighs the latter.”

 

 

The Table of Contents

  • House Democratic Leadership Warns It Will Cut Off Any Firms That Challenge Incumbents
  • Trump’s son-in-law Kushner cooperating with U.S. House probe: source
  • What does the Mueller report say and what does it mean for Trump?
  • The Chilling Censorship of the Christchurch Shooting
  • Who Spawned the Christchurch Killer?
  • The Transnational Network That Nobody is Talking About
  • Fact and Fiction
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Germany: Foreclosed house explodes shortly before auction

Continue Reading »

No responses yet

TBR News March 22, 2019

Mar 21 2019 Published by under Uncategorized

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.

  1. 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).

  1. 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!

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

No responses yet

Next »