Trees

Trees
By Hermann Hesse
Source: Order of ATWA

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

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Demographic Winter

I, myself, welcome the thought of population decrease, worldwide, and there are a number of points of varying importance in this documentary that I happen to disagree with. But in stark contrast with the global trends of the last century, I emphatically support the procreation of the healthy, the intelligent, the creative, and the responsible — just as I support restrictions on the reckless reproduction of the unhealthy, the unintelligent, the destructive, and the irresponsible. This cannot, however, be accomplished without the conscious restoration and safeguarding of the traditional family unit, which must take place first and foremost in the developed countries of the world (if we intend to survive at all). -W.

Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family

One of the most ominous events of modern history is quietly unfolding. Social scientists and economists agree – we are headed toward a demographic winter which threatens to have catastrophic social and economic consequences. The effects will be severe and long lasting and are already becoming manifest in much of Europe.

A groundbreaking film, Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family, reveals in chilling soberness how societies with diminished family influence are now grimly seen as being in social and economic jeopardy.

Demographic Winter draws upon experts from all around the world – demographers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, civic and religious leaders, parliamentarians and diplomats. Together, they reveal the dangers facing society and the world’s economies, dangers far more imminent than global warming and at least as severe. These experts will discuss how:

The “population bomb” not only did not have the predicted consequences, but almost all of the developed countries of the world are now experiencing fertility rates far below replacement levels. Birthrates have fallen so low that even immigration cannot replace declining populations [as things currently stand], and this migration is sapping strength from developing countries, the fertility rates for many of which are now falling at a faster pace than did those of the developed countries.

The economies of the world will continue to contract as the “human capital” spoken of by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker, diminishes. The engines of commerce will be strained as the workers of today fail to replace themselves and are burdened by the responsibility to support an aging population.

Government programs will slow-bleed by the decrease in tax dollars received from an ever shrinking work force. The skyrocketing ratio of the old retirees to the young workers will render current-day social security systems completely unable to support the aging population.

Our attempts to modernize through social engineering policies and programs have left children growing up in broken homes, with absentee parents and little exposure to extended family, disconnected from the generations, and these children are experiencing severe psychological, sociological and economic consequences. The intact family’s immeasurable role in the development and prosperity of human societies is crumbling.  

The influence of social and economic problems on ever shrinking, increasingly disconnected generations will compound and accelerate the deterioration. Our children and our children’s children will bear the economic and social burden of regenerating the “human capital” that accounts for 80% of wealth in the economy, and they will be ill-equipped to do so.  

Is there a “tipping point,” after which the accelerating consequences will make recovery impossible without complete social and economic collapse? Even the experts can’t tell us how far we can go down this road, oblivious to the outcomes, until we reach a point where sliding into the void becomes unpreventable.

Only if the political incorrectness of talking about the natural family within policy circles is overcome will solutions begin to be found. These solutions will necessarily result in policy changes, changes that will support and promote the natural, intact family.  

Just as it took the cumulative involvement of activist organizations, policy makers, the business world and the media to create the unintended consequences we are beginning to experience, so it will take the holistic contribution of all of these entities, together with civic and religious organizations, to change the hearts and minds of all of society to bring about a reversal.  

It may be too late to avoid some very severe consequences, but with effort we may be able to preclude calamity. Demographic Winter lays out a forthright province of discussion. The warning voices in this film need to be heard before a silent, portentous fall turns into a long, hard winter.

Questions & Answers

Question
What does the expression “Demographic Winter” mean?

Answer
The phrase “Demographic Winter” denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as a “birth-dearth,” and what it portends.

Demographer Philip Longman (author of “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity”) observes: “The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st. century.”

Worldwide, birthrates have declined by more than 50% in the past 30 years (since 1979). There are now 59 nations, with 44% of the world’s population, with below-replacement fertility

Sometime in this century, the world’s population will begin to decline. (The United Nations Population Division says that, worldwide, we could achieve below-replacement fertility by 2030.) At a certain point, the decline will become rapid. We may even reach what demographers call population free-fall in our lifetimes.

Russia is losing three-quarters-of-a-million people a year. Its population (currently 145 million) is expected to fall by one-third by 2050.

The term “nuclear winter,” popularized in the 1980s, alluded to the catastrophic environmental impact of a nuclear war. The long-term consequences of Demographic Winter could be equally devastating.

Question
What is replacement fertility, and why is the number 2.13 so important?

Answer
Replacement fertility is the point of equilibrium at which a country’s population is neither growing nor declining. In order to maintain current population, the average woman must have 2.13 children during her lifetime. She needs to replace herself and a man. Because some children will die before reaching maturity and having children of their own, slightly more than two children are needed – hence 2.13.

A birthrate of more than 2.13 equals population growth. A birthrate of less than 2.13 means long-term population decline.

Question
If birthrates are declining, why does the world’s population continue to grow?

Answer
If it’s already in motion, car in neutral will continue moving forward for a while, especially if it’s going downhill, even if gas isn’t being injected into the engine.

Today’s population growth is due to two factors: 1. higher fertility rates in the 1950s and 60s, and 2. people living longer than ever before.

The thing to remember is this: Declining birthrates will equal a declining population worldwide at some point in the next few decades. In the West (especially in Europe) population decline will become a reality much sooner. In some countries, such a Russia, it’s already happening.

A nation’s demographic future can be seen in its current birthrate. In Europe, the number of children under 5 has declined by 36% since 1960. Worldwide, there are 6 million fewer children, 6 and under, today, than there were in 1990. If present trends continue, the United Nations estimates that by 2050 there will be 248 million fewer children in the world then there are now.

Question
Where are birthrates lowest?

Answer
Of the 10 countries with the lowest birthrates, 9 are in Europe. Overall, the European fertility rate is 1.3, well below replacement level (2.1). No European nation [at present] has a replacement-level birthrate.

Italy’s fertility rate is 1.2. Spain’s is 1.1. That means in the not-too-distant future, absent massive immigration, these countries will lose half of their populace in every generation.

Russia’s birthrate fell from 2.4 in 1990 to 1.17 today – a decline of more than 50% in less than 20 years. Each year, there are more abortions than live births in the Russian Federation.

While birthrates are also plummeting in developing nations, most still have above-replacement fertility – for the time being.

The U.S. fertility rate is just at the replacement level, due in part to higher immigrant birthrates. How long this will continue is anyone’s guess. It’s also important to note that all of the factors driving down birth rates elsewhere in the world are present here as well.

Question
What are the consequences of demographic decline?

Answer
Economist Robert J. Samuelson wrote in a June 15, 2005 column in The Washington Post: “It’s hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling.” Samuelson warned: “Europe as we know it is going out of business…. Western Europe’s population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030, that could be one-fourth and by 2050, almost one-third.”

By the mid-point of this century, 16% of the world’s population will be over 65. In developed nations, today, 20% of the population is over 60. By 2050, the proportion of elderly will rise to 36%. By then, these societies will have two elderly for every child.

If present low birthrates persist, the European Union estimates there will be a continent-wide shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.

Who will operate the factories and farms in the Europe of the future? Who will develop the natural resources? Where will Russia find the soldiers to guard the frontiers of the nation with the largest land mass?

Who will care for a graying population? A burgeoning elderly population combined with a shrinking work force will lead to a train-wreck for state pension systems.

This only skims the surface of the way demographic decline will change the face of civilization. Even the environment will be adversely impacted. With severely strained public budgets, developed nations will no longer be willing to shoulder the costs of industrial clean-up or a reduction of CO2 emissions.

Question
What factors contribute to demographic decline?

Answer
A number of social trends of the post-war era have converged to create a perfect demographic storm.

Men and women are delaying marriage, making it less likely they’ll have more than one or two children. Today in the West, almost one in two marriages ends in divorce. The children of divorce are less likely to marry and form families themselves. More married women are putting off having children for careers. After 35, it becomes progressively harder for women to conceive.

The news and entertainment media tell young adults that satisfaction comes from careers, romance, travel and “personal growth” – not from having children. It’s rare that Hollywood even portrays large families (today, more than 2 children). The culture’s message is live-for-moment and live primarily for yourself, with no sense of obligation to generations past or concern for posterity.

The growth of cohabitation also has an impact. (In Scandinavia, almost as many couples are living together as married.) Cohabitation is not conducive to childbearing or childrearing.

For the past 20 to 30 years, children have been taught that over-population (the so-called population bomb) will wreak havoc on the environment and economic development. Not surprisingly, children thus indoctrinated frequently choose to have fewer [if any] children when they reach maturity.

Religious observance has been shown to correlate with higher birthrates. The increasing secularization of Western societies has been accompanied by lower birthrates.

Thus, every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness.

Question
Can’t the problem be fixed by increased immigration?

Answer
In a demographic sense, this is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The host country gains people, but the home country loses. The developing world, which has seen its own birthrate cut in half since 1970 (from almost 6 to barely 4) can ill afford to lose large numbers through emigration.

Mass immigration changes the national character of the host country. Immigrants tend to have a lower education level than natives. Many never learn the language of their new home or identify with its history and heritage. (Instead of being French-Algerian, they remain an Algerian who happens to be living in France.)

Citizens of developed countries often worry about the loss of national identity.

Question
Can’t demographic winter be countered by governments encouraging people to have more children?

Answer
This is being tried in Western Europe and Russia. The Russian Federation pays families a bonus of 250,000 rubles (the equivalent of $9,200) for every child after the first – in a nation where the average monthly wage is only $330. It’s not working.

Couples decide to have children for all kinds of reasons – religious, emotional, cultural, etc. Money isn’t one of them.

Children are a life-long commitment. While governments should make childrearing easier by lowering the tax-burden on families (out of self-interest if not fairness), cash incentives don’t work.

Question
If the United States has near-replacement fertility, why should we care?

Answer
All of the factors that are leading Europe into the depths of Demographic Winter are present in the United States as well, including high divorce rates, the rise of cohabitation, families putting off procreation to pursue careers, an anti-family culture and voluntary childlessness.

We may be a few decades behind Europe, but we’re heading in the same direction.

National economies are interconnected to such an extent that the impact of economic collapse in one country or region can be felt around the world.

The social, political and economic decline of previously stable nations can destabilize entire regions and create perils for neighbors and far-ways allies. The United States is connected to Europe economically, [culturally], and through multiple security treaties.

Question
What Is “Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family”

Answer
“Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family,” is an hour-long documentary which explores every aspect of demographic decline based on interviews with hundreds of academics, scholars, researchers, elected officials and civil and religious leaders from more than 33 countries.

Produced by Barry McLerran and directed by Rick Stout, “Demographic Winter” brings together a number of disciplines to examine and analyze what could be the greatest threat confronting humanity in the 21st century.

Question
What role did declining birth rates play in the current economic crisis?

Answer
Economist Harry S. Dent notes that 70% of GNP in the U.S. is consumer-driven. As the Baby Boomers aged, they began spending less, moving to smaller homes and planning for their retirement. Gen-X can’t fill the gap of the decline of spending by 81 million baby-boomers. This contributed to the slump in the housing market – when Boomers began selling rather than buying, there was a glut on the market and home sales began to decline. “Demographic Winter” predicted the financial crash of 2008 to within 18 months. The “Demographic Bomb” forecasts worse in store for our economy.

Question
Can the economic impact of declining birth rates be seen outside the United States?

Answer
Yes, in Japan, which has a birth rate of 1.25. Of the 10 nations with the lowest birth rates today, Japan is the only one outside of Europe. [Ironlight: K strategists vs. R strategists] It also has the highest ratio of elderly to children in the world. As the rising sun sets, where will the next generation of producers and consumers come from? While much of the industrialized world saw their economies grow in the 1990s, from 1990 to 2005, Japan’s stock market fell 80%. Between 1990 and 2005. Its real estate market lost 60% of its value.

Question
What is the population control movement and how has it promoted demographic winter?

Answer
The population control movement includes organizations, governments and international bodies (like the United Nations), dedicated to lower birth rates. Their methods range from the voluntary to the coercive – including forced sterilization in Peru and China’s one-child-per-family policy, which has included forced abortions. Over the course of decades, population controllers have persuaded the public, through fear and hysteria, that there are too many people in the world and drastic action must be taken to curb population growth. Their fallacies have been institutionalized and become the “standard wisdom” of Western elites.

Question
Who is Paul Ehrlich and what is his relation to declining birth rates?

Answer
An etymologist by training, Paul Ehrlich is the author of the 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb,” and the father of the modern population control movement. In “The Population Bomb,” Dr. Ehrlich argued that population would quickly outstrip resources, leading to global starvation. (“The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famine … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”) Ehrlich also argued that if voluntary limitations on population didn’t work, coercion would be necessary – a refrain taken up by the movement he spawned. He described human population growth as a cancer that would require drastic action to treat. Currently a professor at Stanford, Erhlich continues to argue that (absent draconian measures) population growth will doom the planet – this notwithstanding that none of his more sensational predictions have come to pass.

Question
What is “The Demographic Bomb: Demography Is Destiny”?

Answer
Released in July of 2009, “The Demographic Bomb” is the long-awaited sequel to “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family.”

It continues the examination of rapidly falling birth rates (and both the causes and consequences thereof) where “Demographic Winter” left off. “The Population Bomb” focuses on the economic impact of declining birth rates — especially as they relate to the current global economic crisis – and the role played by the population-control movement in this disaster in the making.

Like “Demographic Winter,” “The Demographic Bomb” includes input from distinguished economists, historians, demographers and other social scientists. It also includes the views of Dr. Erhlich, as well as the current and past heads of the United Nations Population Division.

To order a copy of “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family” and “The Demographic Bomb: Demography Is Destiny,” or view a trailer for either documentary, go to http://www.demographicwinter.com

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The World According to Monsanto

The Monsanto family were the first documented Jewish settlers to have migrated to New Orleans from the Netherlands in 1758. They were known slave owners and slave traders of 18th century. In 1901, the Monsanto family founded their eponymous chemical company. Its history is intimately linked to the production and promotion of highly toxic chemicals such as the herbicide, Agent Orange (used as a chemical weapon in the Vietnam war, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects), and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, which can affect fertility, child development, the immune system, and increase the risk of certain cancers). Monsanto has known about the “systematic toxic effects” of such chemicals for decades, but has instructed its salespeople to maintain silence because, “we can’t afford to lose one dollar.” The gigantic biotech corporation now imperils the agricultural biodiversity which has supported life for thousands of years. The endless list of genetically modified seeds now sold and controlled via strict patents by Monsanto endanger age-old agricultural patterns under the presumptuous slogan of ending world hunger. What they really want is to control the future of the world’s food supply — that is, to enforce world hunger — much in the same manner, and with the same effect, that they control every aspect of life in occupied Palestine today. -W.

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The Fluoride Deception

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Pollution Contra Evolution

Pollution Contra Evolution
By Geoffrey Lean
Sunday, 7 December 2008
Source: www.independent.co.uk

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Backed by some of the world’s leading scientists, who say that it “waves a red flag” for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have “gender-bending” effects.

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

“This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,” says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.

Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.

Many have been identified as “endocrine disrupters” – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.

The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.

It concludes: “Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment. Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.”

Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.

Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.

Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.

Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from lower testosterone and higher estrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than 400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.

Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at greater length and with increased virtuosity.

Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be widely affected.

Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.

In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be producing no sperm at all.

At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found to have abnormal sperm.

Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales in Canada’s St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.

Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that the evidence in the report “set off alarm bells”. Whole wildlife populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at risk from hazards such as global warming.

Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of the world’s foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: “We have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system, so it’s not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.”

Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected academics in the field, warned that the report waved “a large red flag” at humanity. He said: “If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human males”

Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.

Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.

And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of Michigan University says that this adds up to “pretty compelling evidence for effects in humans.”

But Britain has long sought to water down EU attempts to control gender-bender chemicals and has been leading opposition to a new regulation that would ban pesticides shown to have endocrine-disrupting effects. Almost all the other European countries back it, but ministers – backed by their counterparts from Ireland and Romania – are intent on continuing their resistance at a crucial meeting on Wednesday. They say the regulation would cause a collapse of agriculture in the UK, but environmentalists retort that this is nonsense because the regulation has get-out clauses that could be used by British farmers.

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Monsanto : Patent for a Pig

The Monsanto family were the first documented Jewish settlers to have migrated to New Orleans from the Netherlands in 1758. They were known slave owners and slave traders of 18th century. In 1901, the Monsanto family founded their eponymous chemical company. Its history is intimately linked to the production and promotion of highly toxic chemicals such as the herbicide, Agent Orange (used as a chemical weapon in the Vietnam war, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects), and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, which can affect fertility, child development, the immune system, and increase the risk of certain cancers). Monsanto has known about the “systematic toxic effects” of such chemicals for decades, but has instructed its salespeople to maintain silence because, “we can’t afford to lose one dollar.” The gigantic biotech corporation now imperils the agricultural biodiversity which has supported life for thousands of years. The endless list of genetically modified seeds now sold and controlled via strict patents by Monsanto endanger age-old agricultural patterns under the presumptuous slogan of ending world hunger. What they really want is to control the future of the world’s food supply — that is, to enforce world hunger — much in the same manner, and with the same effect, that they control every aspect of life in occupied Palestine today. -W.

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Dr. Begich Discusses HAARP’s Scientific and Military Applications

This fascinating discussion on the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) takes a bit to unfold, but I believe it is well worth your time and attention. -W.

The Military’s Pandora’s Box
by Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning

This article was prepared to provide a summary of the contents of a book written in 1995 which describes an entirely new class of weapons. The weapons and their effects are described in the following pages. The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to build a prototype for a ground based “Star Wars” weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska.

The individuals who are demanding answers about HAARP are scattered around the planet. As well as bush dwellers in Alaska, they include: a physician in Finland; a scientist in Holland; an anti-nuclear protester in Australia; independent physicists in the United States; a grandmother in Canada, and countless others.

Unlike the protests of the 1960s the objections to HAARP have been registered using the tools of the 1990s. From the Internet, fax machines, syndicated talk radio and a number of alternative print mediums the word is getting out and people are waking up to this new intrusion by an over zealous United States government.

The research team put together to gather the materials which eventually found their way into the book never held a formal meeting, never formed a formal organization. Each person acted like a node on a planetary info-spirit-net with one goal held by all — to keep this controversial new science in the public eye. The result of the team’s effort was a book which describes the science and the political ramifications of this technology.

That book, Angels Don’t Play this HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology, has 230 pages. This article will only give the highlights. Despite the amount of research (350 footnoted sources), at its heart it is a story about ordinary people who took on an extraordinary challenge in bringing their research forward.

HAARP Boils the Upper Atmosphere

HAARP will zap the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an “ionospheric heater.” (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.)

Put simply, the apparatus for HAARP is a reversal of a radio telescope; antenna send out signals instead of receiving. HAARP is the test run for a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything — living and dead.

HAARP publicity gives the impression that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is mainly an academic project with the goal of changing the ionosphere to improve communications for our own good. However, other U.S. military documents put it more clearly — HAARP aims to learn how to “exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes.” Communicating with submarines is only one of those purposes.

Press releases and other information from the military on HAARP continually downplay what it could do. Publicity documents insist that the HAARP project is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely throughout the world in places such as Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union. However, a 1990 government document indicates that the radio-frequency (RF) power zap will drive the ionosphere to unnatural activities.

” … at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma processes will ‘runaway’ until the next limiting factor is reached.”

If the military, in cooperation with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, can show that this new ground-based “Star Wars” technology is sound, they both win. The military has a relatively-inexpensive defense shield and the University can brag about the most dramatic geophysical manipulation since atmospheric explosions of nuclear bombs. After successful testing, they would have the military megaprojects of the future and huge markets for Alaska’s North Slope natural gas.

Looking at the other patents which built on the work of a Texas’ physicist named Bernard Eastlund, it becomes clearer how the military intends to use the HAARP transmitter. It also makes governmental denials less believable. The military knows how it intends to use this technology, and has made it clear in their documents. The military has deliberately misled the public, through sophisticated word games, deceit and outright disinformation.

The military says the HAARP system could:

*Give the military a tool to replace the electromagnetic pulse effect of atmospheric thermonuclear devices (still considered a viable option by the military through at least 1986)

*Replace the huge Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) submarine communication system operating in Michigan and Wisconsin with a new and more compact technology

*Be used to replace the over-the-horizon radar system that was once planned for the current location of HAARP, with a more flexible and accurate system

*Provide a way to wipe out communications over an extremely large area, while keeping the military’s own communications systems working

*Provide a wide area earth-penetrating tomography which, if combined with the computing abilities of EMASS and Cray computers, would make it possible to verify many parts of nuclear nonproliferation and peace agreements

*Be a tool for geophysical probing to find oil, gas and mineral deposits over a large area

*Be used to detect incoming low-level planes and cruise missiles, making other technologies obsolete

The above abilities seem like a good idea to all who believe in sound national defense, and to those concerned about cost-cutting. However, the possible uses which the HAARP records do not explain, and which can only be found in Air Force, Army, Navy and other federal agency records, are alarming. Moreover, effects from the reckless use of these power levels in our natural shield — the ionosphere — could be cataclysmic according to some scientists.

Two Alaskans put it bluntly. A founder of the NO HAARP movement, Clare Zickuhr, says “The military is going to give the ionosphere a big kick and see what happens.”

The military failed to tell the public that they do not know what exactly will happen, but a Penn State science article brags about that uncertainty. Macho science? The HAARP project uses the largest energy levels yet played with by what Begich and Manning call “the big boys with their new toys.” HAARP is an experiment in the sky, and experiments are done to find out something not already known. Independent scientists told Begich and Manning that a HAARP-type “skybuster” with its unforeseen effects could be an act of global vandalism.

HAARP History

The patents described below were the package of ideas which were originally controlled by ARCO Power Technologies Incorporated (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Company, one of the biggest oil companies in the world. APTI was the contractor that built the HAARP facility. ARCO sold this subsidiary, the patents and the second phase construction contract to E-Systems in June 1994.

E-Systems is one of the biggest intelligence contractors in the world — doing work for the CIA, defense intelligence organizations and others. $1.8 billion of their annual sales are to these organizations, with $800 million for black projects — projects so secret that even the United States Congress isn’t told how the money is being spent.

E-Systems was bought out by Raytheon, which is one of the largest defense contractors in the world. In 1994 Raytheon was listed as number forty-two on the Fortune 500 list of companies. Raytheon has thousands of patents, some of which will be valuable in the HAARP project. The twelve patents below are the backbone of the HAARP project, and are now buried among the thousands of others held in the name of Raytheon. Bernard J. Eastlund’s U.S. Patent # 4,686,605, “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere; and/or Magnetosphere,” was sealed for a year under a government Secrecy Order.

The Eastlund ionospheric heater was different; the radio frequency (RF) radiation was concentrated and focused to a point in the ionosphere. This difference throws an unprecedented amount of energy into the ionosphere. The Eastlund device would allow a concentration of one watt per cubic centimeter, compared to others only able to deliver about one millionth of one watt.

This huge difference could lift and change the ionosphere in the ways necessary to create futuristic effects described in the patent. According to the patent, the work of Nikola Tesla in the early 1900’s formed the basis of the research.

What would this technology be worth to ARCO, the owner of the patents? They could make enormous profits by beaming electrical power from a powerhouse in the gas fields to the consumer without wires.

For a time, HAARP researchers could not prove that this was one of the intended uses for HAARP. In April, 1995, however, Begich found other patents, connected with a “key personnel” list for APTI. Some of these new APTI patents were indeed a wireless system for sending electrical power. Eastlund’s patent said the technology can confuse or completely disrupt airplanes’ and missiles’ sophisticated guidance systems. Further, this ability to spray large areas of Earth with electromagnetic waves of varying frequencies, and to control changes in those waves, makes it possible to knock out communications on land or sea as well as in the air.

The patent said:

“Thus, this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the Earth’s atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level particularly if random pulsing is employed, in a manner far more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art, particularly by detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes…”

“…it is possible not only to interfere with third party communications but to take advantage of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network even though the rest of the world’s communications are disrupted. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another’s communications can be employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communication network at the same time.”

“… large regions of the atmosphere could be lifted to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction.”

“Weather modification is possible by, for example, altering upper atmosphere wind patterns by constructing one or more plumes of atmospheric particles which will act as a lens or focusing device.

… molecular modifications of the atmosphere can take place so that positive environmental effects can be achieved. Besides actually changing the molecular composition of an atmospheric region, a particular molecule or molecules can be chosen for increased presence. For example, ozone, nitrogen, etc., concentrations in the atmosphere could be artificially increased.”

Begich found eleven other APTI Patents. They told how to make “Nuclear-sized Explosions without Radiation,” Power-beaming systems, over-the-horizon radar, detection systems for missiles carrying nuclear warheads, electromagnetic pulses previously produced by thermonuclear weapons and other Star-Wars tricks. This cluster of patents underlay the HAARP weapon system.

Related research by Begich and Manning uncovered bizarre schemes. For example, Air Force documents revealed that a system had been developed for manipulating and disturbing human mental processes through pulsed radio-frequency radiation (the stuff of HAARP) over large geographical areas. The most telling material about this technology came from writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security Advisory to U.S. President Carter) and J.F. MacDonald (science advisor to U.S. President Johnson and a professor of Geophysics at UCLA), as they wrote about use of power-beaming transmitters for geophysical and environmental warfare. The documents showed how these effects might be caused, and the negative effects on human heath and thinking.

The mental-disruption possibilities for HAARP are the most disturbing. More than 40 pages of the book, with dozens of footnotes, chronicle the work of Harvard professors, military planners and scientists as they plan and test this use of the electromagnetic technology. For example, one of the papers describing this use was from the International Red Cross in Geneva. It even gave the frequency ranges where these effects could occur — the same ranges which HAARP is capable of broadcasting.

The following statement was made more than twenty-five years ago in a book by Brzezinski which he wrote while a professor at Columbia University:

“Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth … in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period”

” … no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.”

In 1966, MacDonald was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He published papers on the use of environmental control technologies for military purposes. The most profound comment he made as a geophysicist was, “the key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.” While yesterday’s geophysicists predicted today’s advances, are HAARP program managers delivering on the vision?

The geophysicists recognized that adding energy to the environmental soup could have large effects. However, humankind has already added substantial amounts of electromagnetic energy into our environment without understanding what might constitute critical mass. The book by Begich and Manning raises questions:

* Have these additions been without effect, or is there a cumulative amount beyond which irreparable damage can be done?
* Is HAARP another step in a journey from which we cannot turn back?
* Are we about to embark on another energy experiment which unleashes another set of demons from Pandora’s box?

As early as 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted a “more controlled and directed society” would gradually appear, linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP further quotes Brzezinski:

“Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits,” Brzezinski predicted.

His forecasts proved accurate. Today, a number of new tools for the “elite” are emerging, and the temptation to use them increases steadily. The policies to permit the tools to be used are already in place. How could the United States be changed, bit by bit, into the predicted highly-controlled techno-society? Among the “steppingstones” Brzezinski expected were persisting social crises and use of the mass media to gain the public’s confidence.

In another document prepared by the government, the U.S. Air Force claims: “The potential applications of artificial electromagnetic fields are wide-ranging and can be used in many military or quasi-military situations… Some of these potential uses include dealing with terrorist groups, crowd control, controlling breaches of security at military installations, and antipersonnel techniques in tactical warfare. In all of these cases the EM (electromagnetic) systems would be used to produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation. In addition, the ability of individuals to function could be degraded to such a point that they would be combat ineffective. Another advantage of electromagnetic systems is that they can provide coverage over large areas with a single system. They are silent and countermeasures to them may be difficult to develop… One last area where electromagnetic radiation may prove of some value is in enhancing abilities of individuals for anomalous phenomena.”

Do these comments point to uses already somewhat developed? The author of the government report refers to an earlier Air Force document about the uses of radio frequency radiation in combat situations. (Here Begich and Manning note that HAARP is the most versatile and the largest radio-frequency-radiation transmitter in the world.)

The United States Congressional record deals with the use of HAARP for penetrating the earth with signals bounced off of the ionosphere. These signals are used to look inside the planet to a depth of many kilometers in order to locate underground munitions, minerals and tunnels. The U.S. Senate set aside $15 million dollars in 1996 to develop this ability alone — earth-penetrating-tomography. The problem is that the frequency needed for earth-penetrating radiation is within the frequency range most cited for disruption of human mental functions. It may also have profound effects on migration patterns of fish and wild animals which rely on an undisturbed energy field to find their routes.

As if electromagnetic pulses in the sky and mental disruption were not enough, T. Eastlund bragged that the super-powerful ionospheric heater could control weather.

Begich and Manning brought to light government documents indicating that the military has weather-control technology. When HAARP is eventually built to its full power level, it could create weather effects over entire hemispheres. If one government experiments with the world’s weather patterns, what is done in one place will impact everyone else on the planet. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP explains a principle behind some of Nikola Tesla’s inventions — resonance — which affect planetary systems.

Bubble of Electric Particles

Angels Don’t Play This HAARP includes interviews with independent scientists such as Elizabeth Rauscher. She has a Ph.D., a long and impressive career in high-energy physics, and has been published in prestigious science journals and books. Rauscher commented on HAARP. “You’re pumping tremendous energy into an extremely delicate molecular configuration that comprises these multi-layers we call the ionosphere.” “The ionosphere is prone to catalytic reactions,” she explained, “if a small part is changed, a major change in the ionosphere can happen.”

In describing the ionosphere as a delicately balanced system, Dr. Rauscher shared her mental picture of it — a soap-bubble-like sphere surrounding Earth’s atmosphere, with movements swirling over the surface of the bubble. If a big enough hole is punched through it, she predicts, it could pop.

Slicing the Ionosphere

Physicist Daniel Winter, Ph.D., of Waynesville, North Carolina, says, “HAARP high-frequency emissions can couple with longwave (extremely-low-frequency, or ELF) pulses the Earth grid uses to distribute information as vibrations to synchronize dances of life in the biosphere.” Dan terms this geomagnetic action ‘Earth’s information bloodstream,’ and says it is likely that coupling of HAARP HF (high-frequency) with natural ELF can cause unplanned, unsuspected side effects.

David Yarrow of Albany, New York, is a researcher with a background in electronics. He described possible interactions of HAARP radiation with the ionosphere and Earth’s magnetic grid: “HAARP will not burn holes in the ionosphere. That is a dangerous understatement of what HAARP’s giant gigawatt beam will do. Earth is spinning relative to thin electric shells of the multilayer membrane of ion-o-speres that absorb and shield Earth’s surface from intense solar radiation, including charged particle storms in solar winds erupting from the sun. Earth’s axial spin means that HAARP — in a burst lasting more than a few minutes — will slice through the ionosphere like a microwave knife. This produces not a hole but a long tear — an incision.”

Crudely Plucking the Strings

Second concept: As Earth rotates, HAARP will slice across the geomagnetic flux, a donut-shaped spool of magnetic strings — like longitude meridians on maps.

HAARP may not ‘cut’ these strings in Gaia’s magnetic mantle, but will pulse each thread with harsh, out-of-harmony high frequencies. These noisy impulses will vibrate geomagnetic flux lines, sending vibrations all through the geomagnetic web. ”

“The image comes to mind of a spider on its web. An insect lands, and the web’s vibrations alert the spider to possible prey. HAARP will be a man-made microwave finger poking at the web, sending out confusing signals, if not tearing holes in the threads. ”

“Effects of this interference with symphonies of Gaia’s geomagnetic harp are unknown, and I suspect barely thought of. Even if thought of, the intent (of HAARP) is to learn to exploit any effects, not to play in tune to global symphonies.”

Among other researchers quoted is Paul Schaefer of Kansas City. His degree is in electrical engineering and he spent four years building nuclear weapons. “But most of the theories that we have been taught by scientists to believe in seem to be falling apart,” he says. He talks about imbalances already caused by the industrial and atomic age, especially by radiation of large numbers of tiny, high-velocity particles “like very small spinning tops” into our environment. The unnatural level of motion of highly-energetic particles in the atmosphere and in radiation belts surrounding Earth is the villain in the weather disruptions, according to this model, which describes an Earth discharging its buildup of heat, relieving stress and regaining a balanced condition through earthquakes and volcanic action.

Feverish Earth

“One might compare the abnormal energetic state of the Earth and its atmosphere to a car battery which has become overcharged with the normal flow of energy jammed up, resulting in hot spots, electrical arcing, physical cracks and general turbulence as the pent-up energy tries to find some place to go.”

In a second analogy, Schaefer says “Unless we desire the death of our planet, we must end the production of unstable particles which are generating the earth’s fever. A first priority to prevent this disaster would be to shut down all nuclear power plants and end the testing of atomic weapons, electronic warfare and ‘Star Wars’.” Meanwhile, the military builds its biggest ionospheric heater yet, to deliberately create more instabilities in a huge plasma layer — the ionosphere — and to rev up the energy level of charged particles.

Electronic Rain From The Sky

They have published papers about electron precipitation from the magnetosphere (the outer belts of charged particles which stream toward Earth’s magnetic poles) caused by man-made very low frequency electromagnetic waves. “These precipitated particles can produce secondary ionization, emit X-rays, and cause significant perturbation in the lower ionosphere.”

Two Stanford University radio scientists offer evidence of what technology can do to affect the sky by making waves on earth; they showed that very low frequency radio waves can vibrate the magnetosphere and cause high-energy particles to cascade into Earth’s atmosphere. By turning the signal on or off, they could stop the flow of energetic particles.

Weather Control

Avalanches of energy dislodged by such radio waves could hit us hard. Their work suggests that technicians could control global weather by sending relatively small ‘signals’ into the Van Allen belts (radiation belts around Earth). Thus Tesla’s resonance effects can control enormous energies by tiny triggering signals.

The Begich/ Manning book asks whether that knowledge will be used by war-oriented or biosphere-oriented scientists.

The military has had about twenty years to work on weather warfare methods, which it euphemistically calls weather modification. For example, rainmaking technology was taken for a few test rides in Vietnam. The U.S. Department of Defense sampled lightning and hurricane manipulation studies in Project Skyfire and Project Stormfury. And they looked at some complicated technologies that would give big effects. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP cites an expert who says the military studied both lasers and chemicals which they figured could damage the ozone layer over an enemy. Looking at ways to cause earthquakes, as well as to detect them, was part of the project named Prime Argus, decades ago. The money for that came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, now under the acronym ARPA.) In 1994 the Air Force revealed its Spacecast 2020 master plan which includes weather control. Scientists have experimented with weather control since the 1940’s, but Spacecast 2020 noted that “using environmental modification techniques to destroy, damage or injure another state are prohibited.” Having said that, the Air Force claimed that advances in technology “compels a reexamination of this sensitive and potentially risky topic.”

40 Years of Zapping the Sky?

As far back as 1958, the chief White House advisor on weather modification, Captain Howard T. Orville, said the U.S. defense department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather” by using an electronic beam to ionize or de-ionize the atmosphere over a given area.

In 1966, Professor Gordon J. F. MacDonald was associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, was a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy. ” World-recognized scientist MacDonald had a number of ideas for using the environment as a weapon system and he contributed to what was, at the time, the dream of a futurist. When he wrote his chapter, “How To Wreck The Environment,” for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.

He also said that these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims. Is HAARP that weapon? The military’s intention to do environmental engineering is well documented, U.S. Congress’ subcommittee hearings on Oceans and International Environment looked into military weather and climate modification conducted in the early 1970’s. “What emerged was an awesome picture of far-ranging research and experimentation by the Department of Defense into ways environmental tampering could be used as a weapon,” said another author cited in Angles Don’t Play This HAARP.

The revealed secrets surprised legislators. Would an inquiry into the state of the art of electromagnetic manipulation surprise lawmakers today? They may find out that technologies developed out of the HAARP experiments in Alaska could deliver on Gordon MacDonald’s vision because leading-edge scientists are describing global weather as not only air pressure and thermal systems, but also as an electrical system.

Small Input – Big Effect

HAARP zaps the ionosphere where it is relatively unstable. A point to remember is that the ionosphere is an active electrical shield protecting the planet from the constant bombardment of high-energy particles from space. This conducting plasma, along with Earth’s magnetic field, traps the electrical plasma of space and holds it back from going directly to the earth’s surface, says Charles Yost of Dynamic Systems, Leicester, North Carolina. “If the ionosphere is greatly disturbed, the atmosphere below is subsequently disturbed.”

Another scientist interviewed said there is a super-powerful electrical connection between the ionosphere and the part of the atmosphere where our weather comes onstage, the lower atmosphere.

One man-made electrical effect — power line harmonic resonance — causes fallout of charged particles from the Van Allen (radiation) belts, and the falling ions cause ice crystals (which precipitate rain clouds). What about HAARP? Energy blasted upward from an ionospheric heater is not much compared to the total in the ionosphere, but HAARP documents admit that thousandfold-greater amounts of energy can be released in the ionosphere than injected. As with MacDonald’s “key to geophysical warfare,” “nonlinear” effects (described in the literature about the ionospheric heater) mean small input and large output. Astrophysicist Adam Trombly told Manning that an acupuncture model is one way to look at the possible effect of multi-gigawatt pulsing of the ionosphere. If HAARP hits certain points, those parts of the ionosphere could react in surprising ways.

Smaller ionospheric heaters such as the one at Arecibo are underneath relatively placid regions of the ionosphere, compared to the dynamic movements nearer Earth’s magnetic poles. That adds another uncertainty to HAARP — the unpredictable and lively upper atmosphere near the North Pole.

HAARP experimenters do not impress commonsense Alaskans such as Barbara Zickuhr, who says “They’re like boys playing with a sharp stick, finding a sleeping bear and poking it in the butt to see what’s going to happen.”

Could They Short-Circuit Earth?

Earth as a spherical electrical system is a fairly well-accepted model. However, those experimenters who want to make unnatural power connections between parts of this system might not be thinking of possible consequences. Electrical motors and generators can be caused to wobble when their circuits are affected. Could human activities cause a significant change in a planet’s electrical circuit or electrical field? A paper in the respected journal Science deals with manmade ionization from radioactive material, but perhaps it could also be studied with HAARP-type skybusters in mind:

“For example, while changes in the earth’s electric field resulting from a solar flare modulating conductivity may have only a barely detectable effect on meteorology, the situation may be different in regard to electric field changes caused by manmade ionization… ” Meteorology, of course, is the study of the atmosphere and weather. ionization is what happens when a higher level of power is zapped into atoms and knocks electrons off the atoms. The resulting charged particles are the stuff of HAARP. “One look at the weather should tell us that we are on the wrong path,” says Paul Schaefer, commenting on HAARP-type technologies.

Angels Don’t Play This HAARP: Advances in Tesla Technology is about the military’s plan to manipulate that which belongs to the world — the ionosphere. The arrogance of the United States government in this is not without precedent.

Atmospheric nuclear tests had similar goals. More recently, China and France put their people’s money to destructive use in underground nuclear tests. It was recently reported that the US government spent $3 trillion dollars on its nuclear program since its beginnings in the 1940’s. What new breakthroughs in life science could have been made with all the money spent on death?

Begich, Manning, Roderick and others believe that democracies need to be founded on openness, rather than the secrecy which surrounds so much military science. Knowledge used in developing revolutionary weapons could be used for healing and helping mankind. Because they are used in new weapons, discoveries are classified and suppressed. When they do appear in the work of other independent scientists, the new ideas are often frustrated or ridiculed, while military research laboratories continue to build their new machines for the killing fields.

However, the book by Manning and Begich gives hope that the military industrial academic bureaucratic Goliath can be affected by the combined power of determined individuals and the alternative press. Becoming informed is the first step to empowerment.

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“Everything’s Kosher” — Go Back to Sleep

Remember the controversy surrounding AgriProcessors? Probably not. This was the largest illegal-immigration work-place raid in United States history — a massive raid on the country’s largest “kosher” slaughterhouse, which involved drug-production, underage and undocumented workers, sexual abuse, and possession of illegal firearms. Was this news deemed unfit for circulation beyond Postville, Iowa? And if so, why? Though it is “old news” by now, and whether the story was ever widely known or not, I noticed scarcely a word was spoken of it in our national press. They discussed it with some embarrassment in the Israeli press, but it was, and apparently remains, much too delicate for standard exposure in the United States. After all, someone, somewhere, just might be offended by the facts… So, no exposure. No information. No dissemination of truth. That is, no real loss for AgriProcessors, as they have surely paid their way out of the worst of this “little” mess. Business as usual. “Everything’s kosher” — go back to sleep, America. -W.
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Feds Serious About Illegals?
Posted on: 2008-05-20
Raid in Postville
by James Edwards

The other day the federal government conducted a high profile raid of illegal immigrants at America’s largest kosher meat plant in rural Postville, Iowa, arresting hundreds. No one in management was arrested for hiring these illegals, hundreds of whom were obviously using fake ID and stolen Social Security numbers. Hundreds of your employees are darkly complected, cannot speak English, and they all have names like Tom Richards, William Jones, Edward Jenkins, etc.? Yeah, nothing amiss there.

But that’s not even half of it. The company, AgriProcessors, owns another plant in Brooklyn, New York. They’ve been in a protracted court battle – in a federal court no less – over the Brooklyn employees efforts to unionize. The workers voted to form a union, and the company, which is run by a small clique of Lubavitcher Jews, sued to stop them from unionizing in federal court.

On what grounds? You’ll never believe it:

“And last month, the company lost a federal appellate court battle over whether or not it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize, on grounds that those in favor were illegal immigrants and not entitled to federal labor protections.”

Yeah, go ahead and rub your eyes and read that again. That’s right; they claimed that the workers can’t unionize because they’re in the country illegally, and aren’t entitled to the protection of our labor laws!

Knowingly hiring/employing illegal aliens is a crime. And yet a company can go to federal court, argue that a case against them should be thrown out on the grounds that they themselves have committed scores of illegal acts, and are continuing to do so, and no one says a word, and the judge doesn’t throw the case out and order the owners of the company arrested.

And labor activists claim the real reason the Postville plant was raided was to derail a federal investigation into even worse labor practices:

“This employer has a long history of violating every law that’s out there — labor laws, environmental laws, now immigration laws,” said Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has waged a bitter battle to organize the Postville plant. The union charged that the immigration raid disrupted a separate U.S. Labor Department investigation into alleged child labor law violations and other infractions.

“ICE may be ‘deporting 390 witnesses” to the labor investigation, Lauritsen said, adding, “This administration seems to place a larger value on flashy shows in this immigration raid than in vigorously enforcing other labor laws.”

Of course, should the public outcry against this case grow loud enough, (which is unlikely), the feds will probably move to make a few token arrests among management, while being careful to give the suspects plenty of time to flee to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with us. You know how those “strategic allies” are.
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Feds: Drugs Produced at Jewish-Owned Kosher Meat Plant
Published: 05/13/2008
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/108541.html

Federal authorities charged that a methamphetamine laboratory was operating at the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and that employees carried weapons to work.

The charges were among the most explosive details to emerge following the massive raid Monday at AgriProcessors in Postville, Iowa.

In a 60-page application for a search warrant, federal agents revealed details of their six-month probe of AgriProcessors. The investigation involved 12 federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the departments of labor and agriculture.

According to the application, a former plant supervisor told investigators that some 80 percent of the workforce was illegal. They included rabbis responsible for kosher supervision, who the source believed entered the United States from Canada without proper immigration documents. The source did not provide evidence for his suspicion about the rabbis.

The source also claimed to have confronted a human resources manager with Social Security cards from three employees that had the same number. The manager laughed when the matter was raised, the source said.

At least 300 people were arrested Monday during the raid, for which federal authorities had rented an expansive fairground nearby to serve as a processing center for detainees.

The search warrant application said that 697 plant employees were believed to have violated federal laws.

Agriprocessors officials did not return calls from JTA seeking comment.

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Meat plant vows to cooperate in probe
Published: 05/13/2008
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/108548. html

The nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse says it takes immigration laws seriously [oh, obviously] and will cooperate with government investigators.

AgriProcessors responded to federal charges Tuesday, the day after authorities arrested 390 of its employees on immigration violations in the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.

“Our company takes the immigration laws seriously,” the statement said. “We cooperated with the government in the enforcement action. We intend to continue to cooperate with the government in its investigation. AgriProcessors will also inquire further into the circumstances that led to today’s events.

The company said its facilities were operating after the Monday shutdown. It extended “our heartfelt sympathies to the families whose lives were disrupted and wish them the best.
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And an enlightened man spoke of Postville nearly a decade before…

Free Speech – July 2001 – Volume VII, Number 7
Murdering Iowa
by Dr. William Pierce

To most people statistics don’t have much meaning. They’re just numbers. Tell people that 50 years ago 90 per cent of the citizens of the United States were White, that today only 70 per cent are White, and that 50 years hence less than half the U.S. population will be White, and it doesn’t move most of them. They can’t remember what it was like 50 years ago, when the United States was unquestionably a White man’s country, and they don’t have enough imagination to visualize what it will be like when Whites are a minority and are completely at the mercy of Blacks, Asians, mestizos, and Jews. Tell most people about this trend toward a darker and darker America, and they will just shrug. They don’t see how America’s changing demographics will affect what they can buy at the mall or watch on television. What is happening to America is happening so slowly that they aren’t alarmed.

That’s most people. In a few places in America, however, the changes are occurring more rapidly, and people are forced to pay attention. Many of these people are alarmed. I receive letters every week from listeners who lament what has happened to the towns or the neighborhoods they grew up in. They tell me that 15 years ago every family in their neighborhood was White. The streets were clean and safe. They could leave their doors unlocked without worry. Their kids could walk to school or play with other kids in the neighborhood in safety. They could take a stroll in the evening with a wife or a girlfriend without danger of having lewd comments directed at them.

Today half their neighborhood has become non-White. Streets and yards are littered with trash, bars have been installed on all first-floor windows, Their kids get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen, and no White man in his right mind will expose his woman to the catcalls and deliberate jostling by the non-White thugs who roam the streets and hang out in the malls.

We’ve come to expect changes of this sort in the decaying cities of the East Coast or in California or Florida or Texas, where the impact of non-White immigration has been especially heavy during the past few decades. But the White heartland also is being corrupted now. In fact, there is a deliberate campaign to corrupt and pollute the White heartland as quickly as possible.

Iowa is an excellent example of this. One of the Whitest states in the country, a land of corn-fed, blue-eyed, blond farm boys and girls, Iowa is looked upon with undisguised hatred and distrust by the multicultural planners and diversity mongers of the East Coast. From their point of view Iowa, with less than three per cent minorities in 1990, was far too White, far too Aryan. Something really had to be done about Iowa. And so they’re doing it, with the help of their natural allies in the statehouse, in the Christian churches, in big business, and in the media.

Under Iowa’s new Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, state officials have launched a campaign to bring more non-Whites into Iowa. Recruiting teams are sent to ghettos and barrios around the country to persuade Blacks and mestizos to move to Iowa. The government in Washington is pumping money into a number of special programs in Iowa to help in the process of multiculturalization. Non-Whites are even being recruited in Mexico, Africa, and other non-White areas and then brought to Iowa as government-approved immigrants. A story which appeared last month — that was May 4 — in the Chicago Tribune praising the efforts to darken Iowa contained interviews with several of these non-White immigrants, including a physician from Ghana married to a White woman, a meat-packing plant employee from Puerto Rico married to a Filipina, and a high school student from Laos.

Governor Vilsack and the other politicians justify this program to racially pollute Iowa with the argument that Iowa’s population isn’t growing fast enough through natural increase. Iowa’s population increased by only 5.4 per cent during the 1990s, while the population of the country as a whole increased by 9.6 per cent. Without a faster growth in population, claim the multiculturalizers, the economy will be hurt. The pretense is made that there will be no one to do essential jobs. The Chicago Tribune quotes Governor Vilsack: “Who is going to farm the land? Who is going to teach our children? Who is going to care for our medical needs?”

This same spurious argument is being used by the enemies of our people in Europe to justify opening the borders of European countries to the Third World. Europeans aren’t breeding fast enough to maintain the various welfare programs and social services needed to provide for an aging White population, so fast-breeding Third Worlders should be brought in to keep the population growing, say the multiculturalizers.

Of course, any scheme that depends upon a continually growing population must eventually come to grief, when the land can support no more people. Did you catch that? Any plan, any program, that requires a continually growing population for its success is fundamentally flawed and eventually must fail. But the people pushing such schemes onto a gullible White public don’t really care about the long-range prospects. For them the scheme is simply a trick to get as many non-Whites as possible mixed in with the White population as quickly as possible. They believe that once they have done that it will be too difficult — too bloody — a task for us to unmix what they have mixed. They will be surprised at what we are willing to do to repair the damage they have done.

Listen: If Iowans need more teachers and doctors, the law of supply and demand will take care of that. Iowans may have to offer higher pay to attract needed White workers from other parts of the country, but that is the way things always have worked. The argument that non-Whites are necessary to keep the economy alive is fraudulent, but the politicians, the Christian churches, the big businessmen, and above all the media — the untouchable Jewish media — are supporting this fraud — this genocidal lie — and few citizens, in Europe or in Iowa, are bold enough to challenge it.

The fact is that much of the 5.4 per cent increase in Iowa’s population during the 1990s has been mestizos brought in by the owners of meat-packing plants looking for cheap labor. This has resulted in those Iowa communities with meat-packing plants being especially hard hit by the multicultural onslaught. Storm Lake, a town of 10,000 residents in northwestern Iowa, is an example. In 1990 Storm Lake was virtually all White, a nice place to live and to raise a family. Today a third of Storm Lake’s residents are non-White, and the quality of life has changed accordingly. In all of the 1980s there was just one homicide in Storm Lake. Between 1990 and 2000, as the town went from all White to one-third non-White, there were 10 murders, and other crime also rose proportionately.

This sudden destruction of their community and their life-style in the course of only a decade shocked a few of Storm Lake’s White residents into speaking out. The multiculturalists have responded by bringing their road show to town, proclaiming Storm Lake a wonderful example of how a diverse group of people can live and work together, and denouncing anyone who doesn’t want to go along with the continued destruction of Iowa as a “racist” and a “bigot.” With the Christian clergy and the media noisily on their side and the big businessmen providing support from behind the scenes, the multiculturalists have been moderately successful at shouting down the dissidents even in heavily impacted areas such as Storm Lake.

The local high school students, raised on MTV, have been taught that a White Iowa is a boring Iowa, and that having lots of non-Whites around adds some buzz to an otherwise dull life. The Chicago Tribune article that I cited earlier had an interview with a 17-year-old White high school girl in Storm Lake. Looking around at the non-Whites who make up nearly half of her high school classmates, Jill Parman said:

I know that Iowa doesn’t look like this, but it would be a whole lot less boring of a state if it did.

Thoroughly jaded young people such as Jill Parman, taught by television that life should, above all else, be entertaining, are quite susceptible to the poison disseminated by the multiculturalists. And the multiculturalists are indeed proud of their ability to use their control of the mass media — especially television — to take over the minds of the younger generation and alienate them from their people and from their people’s traditions and values. They have become quite self-confident — arrogant, really — in their ability to keep dissent within manageable limits as they continue their genocidal work.

An even better example of this than Storm Lake is the small town of Postville, in northeastern Iowa. Postville is undergoing an even more traumatic racial and cultural transformation than Storm Lake. A decade ago Postville was an all-White, all-Christian farming community of 1,000 souls, most of German and Norwegian ancestry. Then Aaron Rubashkin, a Hasidic Jew who owns a kosher meat market for supplying his fellow Hasids in New York City, opened a kosher slaughterhouse in Postville. He had bought Postville’s bankrupt meat-packing plant from its Gentile owners and converted it to kosher use, because he could get his meat slaughtered much more cheaply in Postville than in New York, even when the cost of shipping the meat from Iowa to New York was included. Today he and his son Shalom run the slaughterhouse, which employs 300 workers, nearly all of them non-Whites recruited by Aaron and Shalom outside Iowa and brought to Postville specifically to work in the slaughterhouse. They also brought more than 30 Ultra-Orthodox rabbis and their families to town. The rabbis do the actual slaughtering of the animals according to Jewish ritual, a shockingly inhumane procedure, which has been outlawed in many jurisdictions.

The White people of Postville feel overwhelmed. Their town has been stolen from them. Ten years ago everyone they met on the sidewalk or in the local pizza parlor was a neighbor, someone they had gone to school with, someone they shared values and traditions with. Now they see Orthodox Jews wearing black hats and prayer shawls and talking to each other in Hebrew. They see Mexicans and Nigerians and Vietnamese lounging against the lampposts and jabbering at one another in other strange languages. They see their schools, which used to be entirely White, swamped with dusky aliens.

But it is the Jews who are the most difficult for the people of Postville to accept. The Jews are all from New York City. They are loud and pushy. They are fast-talking hustlers. They are arrogant. They make no effort to adapt themselves to the ways of Postville. Instead they demand that Postville adapt itself to them. They even ignore the local laws with contempt. The Rubashkins dump the waste from their kosher slaughterhouse into the local river, polluting it so badly that it no longer is suitable for fishing or swimming or boating. Postville imposed a $2 million fine on the Rubashkins, who simply refuse to pay and keep on polluting, knowing that the governor and the media are on their side.

And unfortunately, some of the White people of Postville are on their side too. The City Council members, for example. And the people at the local newspaper. The newspaper hired a Jewess to write a regular column. When there was a vacancy on the City Council, the council members appointed a Jew to the council, saying that it would be good for the local economy. When local citizens circulated a petition protesting the appointment, they were accused of anti-Semitism by the newspaper. That intimidated most of the White citizens into silence, but not 81-year-old Dorothy Radloff. She said that she didn’t want a Jew on the City Council. She went further, saying what many other Whites in Postville were feeling but were afraid to say:

We’re just afraid if they get one in, then pretty soon the whole council will be Jewish, and they’re going to run the town. They’re working to take the town over and push the rest of us out.

But with the support of the newspaper and the other council members and the mayor, the Jew, Aaron Goldsmith, won a special election two months ago. There’s something about politicians and journalists. And the gullibility and blind tolerance of our people for getting kicked in the teeth and not fighting back seem to know no limits. Perhaps if the White citizens of Postville, Iowa, had known a little more about the Hasidic Jews who are taking over their town and flooding it with non-Whites, besides the fact that they are pushy and arrogant, the election to the City Council might have turned out differently.

The Rubashkins and the other Jews associated with the kosher slaughterhouse all are members of the Ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect. The Lubavitchers are those strange-looking Jews one sees in New York wearing long, black coats and black hats, with sidelocks down to their shoulders. The late leader of the sect, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was worshipped like a divinity by his followers, including the Rubashkins and all of the other Jews they brought to Postville.

Rabbi Schneerson was a real Old Testament Jew, a Talmud Jew, who preached to his followers the unadulterated doctrines of the Talmud, including the doctrine of Jewish superiority and the doctrine that the Jews are the chosen people of God, ordained to rule all the other nations of the world and own all their possessions. His sermons have been published, although you’re not likely to find them in the New York Times or any other place where Gentiles might read them. But I’ll read you a selection from one of them, just to give you the flavor. Rabbi Schneerson preached:

The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of a member of any other nation of the world…. The Jewish body looks as if in substance it were similar to the bodies of non-Jews, but … the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look, and superficial quality. The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews…. Their bodies are in vain … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist. A non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul comes from holiness.

Well, Rabbi Schneerson had much more to say in his preaching to his followers about the satanic nature of Gentiles and the holy nature of Jews, but perhaps you’ve gotten the general idea from what I’ve just read. The general idea is that Jewish superiority has been bestowed on them by their deity. The Jews are so superior to us that they are justified in doing to us whatever they want. They are entitled to deceive us and plunder us and take all our possessions from us, and it is a transgression against their deity for us to attempt to protect ourselves. That’s what the Hasids believe. That’s what the Rubashkins and all the other Jews in Postville believe. It’s too bad that there was no one to tell the White citizens of Postville what the Jews really think about them before they elected one of the Jews to their City Council.

Perhaps Dorothy Radloff had some inkling of the truth when she told her fellow citizens. “They’re working to take the town over and push the rest of us out.” Indeed. Unfortunately, too many of her fellow citizens failed to heed her warning. They listened instead to their Christian preachers and their local politicians and their newspaper. They have for all practical purposes lost their town. They are too confused and demoralized and disunited to put up an effective opposition to the Jews. And if they really started to clean up their town and take it back, Mr. Bush would send in the FBI to stop them. They would be arrested and charged with “hate crimes.”

At this point we might ask: Why are the Jews and their allies doing it? Why are they hell bent on destroying White areas like Iowa? Why aren’t they satisfied with what they have done to California and to the big cities of the East? Why do they want to make the whole country look like New Jersey and New York? Why do they deliberately destroy all-White communities such as Storm Lake and Postville?

I’ll read you a few words written by Professor Earl Raab of Brandeis University’s Institute for Jewish Advocacy:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

“We have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to ethnic bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible….

In plain language, Professor Raab is boasting that he and his fellow Jews have changed the immigration laws — and prevented the government from enforcing what immigration laws we still have — in order to make the American population more heterogeneous, or, to use the more familiar term, more diverse. Their goal is to make Whites a minority in their own country so that the Whites can never combine against the Jews and regain control of their own destiny. You can read more of Professor Raab’s sinister scheming in a book that is available from my sponsor, National Vanguard Books. That book is Alien Nation, by Peter Brimelow.

Professor Raab and his fellow Jews aim not only at eliminating the White majority in the country as a whole, but also at polluting and corrupting every White area inside the country, so there will be no one capable of organizing an effective opposition to the Jews. They will be the only racially conscious group still able to wield power. What the Jews have done to Postville and are busy doing to the rest of Iowa is just one step in their grand scheme for implementing a Final Solution to the Gentile problem. This Final Solution is not being implemented with concentration camps and gas chambers, but with bought politicians, with corrupt preachers, and above all with television and other mass media. It is being implemented by flooding the country — and every White area inside the country — with non-Whites and by encouraging miscegenation. It is being implemented through programs aimed at increasing diversity. It is being implemented by deceiving and brainwashing White people to collaborate in their own destruction.

The hour for our people is late indeed — but it’s still not too late. It’s still not too late to fight back.
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The most cruel method of slaughter, Jewish law describes as the most humane. Where does this reprehensible attitude toward animals come from? “Divine right,” as made clear in Genesis 1:26… Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ It is wise to remember that a derogatory Hebrew term for Gentiles is Goyim, which means cattle or property…



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Investigation at AgriProcessors

In 2004, PETA conducted its first investigation inside a slaughterhouse owned by Sholom Rubashkin, the largest slaughterhouse in the country. The initial investigation at Rubashkin’s Postville, Iowa, facility, AgriProcessors, revealed almost 300 instances of inhumane slaughter, including that cows had their tracheas ripped out while they were still alive, writhed in pools of their own blood, and tried desperately to stand up as blood poured from their throats. When PETA conducted an investigation into a second Rubashkin-owned slaughterhouse—a Gordon, Nebraska, facility—in May 2007, the investigator discovered that animal abuse still takes place inside Rubashkin’s slaughterhouses.

Experts in animal welfare, veterinary medicine, and slaughter systems reviewed the disturbing footage recorded inside the slaughterhouse and noted the following about the abuses documented by PETA:

* Cows remained conscious for as long as two minutes after their throats were cut open.
* A worker ripped into conscious cows’ throats with a metal hook in order to make the bleeding process go faster.
* Cows were handled improperly, resulting in fear and stress just prior to slaughter.
* Workers removed identification tags by mutilating live cows’ ears.

As noted above, this is the second time that PETA has uncovered abuse at a Rubashkin-owned slaughterhouse. The investigator’s log notes from the 2004 investigation at AgriProcessors state that a “worker followed the rabbi and gouged a chunk of flesh out of the cow’s neck and then pulled his trachea or esophagus … outside of his throat so that it hung down.”

The investigator’s notes went on to say, “The first time I saw a cow stagger to his feet and walk around with his trachea dangling outside of his body, I thought to myself, this can’t be happening—but after several days I knew better.”

After the first investigation into a Rubashkin-owned slaughterhouse, the company promised to stun any animals who remained conscious after throat-slitting. Unfortunately, the second investigation proved that Rubashkin has not lived up to this promise. Rather, Rubashkin’s Nebraska slaughterhouse allowed cows to remain conscious for up to two minutes after their throats were slit, leading several experts to condemn the company’s practices. Dr. Holly Cheever stated, “This method of slaughter as depicted on this tape is brutal and should be amended to provide a humane end for these animals.”
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Demand That Video Cameras Be Installed in Slaughterhouse

A new PETA undercover investigation has caught AgriProcessors—the world’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, which is located in Postville, Iowa—cruelly hacking holes in cows’ throats. Dr. Temple Grandin, the world’s foremost expert on slaughter methods, has stated that these gouging, circular cuts cause the cows pain and suffering.

This isn’t the first time AgriProcessors has been caught… In 2004, PETA went undercover at the same plant and videotaped workers who were using a meat hook and a knife to rip out cows’ tracheas while the animals were still conscious—after the shochetim (kosher slaughterers) had cut their throats. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) told the plant to stop this procedure and determined that AgriProcessors employees “had engaged in acts of inhumane slaughter.”

AgriProcessors Deceives Consumers
When Dr. Grandin inspected the facility in 2006, the plant showed her slaughters that did not include a second cut at all, and she gave them her approval. Just two weeks prior to PETA’s August 2008 undercover investigation, AgriProcessors gave a private tour to selected rabbis, community leaders, and reporters, and video footage from that tour shows slaughter done without a second cut at all.

Clearly, AgriProcessors wanted consumers to believe that the plant was operating in a manner that would meet the high standards expected, but PETA’s investigation revealed that things happen differently behind closed doors.

In light of this new video exposing the gouging second cuts—and AgriProcessors’ quite different conduct during the tour—Dr. Grandin has made a new assessment of AgriProcessors, stating, “The undercover video clearly showed that when they think nobody is looking, they do bad things in this plant.”

Demand that the USDA require that AgriProcessors install video cameras on the kill floor as part of a live video-monitoring system that would be audited by a third party. A number of plants already use this important technology, which is recommended by Dr. Grandin, and it ensures that proper procedures and laws are followed at all times.
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Every year, devout Jews around the world engage in an age-old ritual called kapparot, in which an individual swings a chicken over his head, imbuing it with his sins. The chicken is then slaughtered. In this video, the animal rights activist group PETA documents abuses in an attempt to convince the Jewish public that the ritual should no longer be practiced.

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Stop eating meat.
Stop buying kosher products, altogether.
Support local, organic farmers whenever possible.
Boycott businesses which hire undocumented workers.

Read Full Post »

Wolves Off the Protection List (Thank interchangeable Left and Right)

Wolves Off the Protection List

“It is disappointing that the Obama administration is choosing to follow a bad Bush policy to piecemeal wolf conservation efforts instead of prioritizing the development of a national wolf recovery plan.
“

Interior Secretary Salazar Announces Wolf Delisting

Conservation groups will challenge the removal of essential federal protections

March 6, 2009

Washington, DC — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced today the federal government’s decision to eliminate Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the northern Rocky mountains except for those in Wyoming. The delisting effort revives an effort launched by the Bush administration’s which was halted in January for review when the Obama administration took office. Today’s delisting is the second time in twelve months the government has moved to lift federal protections from wolves. Conservation groups, represented by Earthjustice, successfully sued to get the protections reinstated in July 2008.

The decision to lift wolf protections comes as Yellowstone Park wolves declined by 27 percent in the last year — one of the largest declines reported since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Wolf populations in the northern Rockies don’t mix enough between the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, central Idaho, and northwest Montana to avoid inbreeding and ensure wolves’ long-term survival.

Independent scientists say that between 2,000 and 3,000 wolves are needed to have a sustainable, fully-recovered population. After delisting, the northern Rockies wolf population may be allowed to drop to only 300 to 450 wolves.

Wolves will remain under federal control in Wyoming because the court ruled that Wyoming’s hostile wolf management scheme leaves wolves in “serious jeopardy.” The Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly stated that a state-by-state approach to delisting wolves was not permitted under the Endangered Species Act, including in an earlier decision to not delist wolves without Wyoming’s inclusion.

In addition to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have refused to make enforceable commitments to maintaining viable wolf populations within their borders. On the very day the first delisting took effect in March, 2008, Idaho Governor Butch Otter signed a law allowing Idaho citizens to kill wolves without a permit whenever wolves are annoying, disturbing, or “worrying” livestock or domestic animals. The Idaho Fish and Game Commission established rules that would have allowed 428 wolves to be killed in 2008 alone had the court not returned wolves to the endangered species list. Montana also planned a fall wolf hunt.

Conservation groups, represented by Earthjustice, will send the Fish and Wildlife Service a notice that the delisting violates the Endangered Species Act when the government formally submits the rule to the Federal Register, presumably next week. If the agency does not reconsider the delisting rule, the conservation groups will again ask a federal court to reinstate federal Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the northern Rockies until wolf numbers are stronger and the states pledge to responsibly manage wolves.

Earthjustice represented Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, The Humane Society of the United States, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Friends of the Clearwater, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands Project, Western Watersheds Project, Wildlands Project, and Hells Canyon Preservation Council in the earlier suit.

Statements of Conservation Organizations

Suzanne Stone, northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife: “Nothing about this rule has changed since it was rejected and deemed unlawful in federal court. It still fails to adequately address biological concerns about the lack of genetic exchange among wolf populations and it still fails to address the concerns with the states’ wolf management plans. If this rule is allowed to stand, nearly two-thirds of the wolves in the northern Rockies could be killed. We had hoped for a new delisting plan, based on current science that provides for a healthy, well connected wolf population in the region. Instead we are forced to, once again, challenge a bad rule forcing the expenditure of time and money that would have been much better served towards developing responsible state management plans.
“

Sierra Club representative Melanie Stein: “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should be working with the state of Wyoming to create a scientifically sound wolf management plan. Northern Rockies wolves should be treated as one connected population. It’s short-sighted and inappropriate to delist wolves state-by-state. Wolves don’t know political boundaries.
“

Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity: “Today’s announcement means wolves will lose their federal protections before recovery is complete. And, as we saw last year before a federal judge reversed a Bush administration delisting rule, that will result in an unconstrained and unconscionable slaughter of these animals. It is disappointing that the Obama administration is choosing to follow a bad Bush policy to piecemeal wolf conservation efforts instead of prioritizing the development of a national wolf recovery plan. Setting up a system in which wolves in a population are both endangered and not endangered was not contemplated and is not supported by the Endangered Species Act.
“

Jonathan Lovvorn, vice president and chief counsel for animal protection litigation with The Humane Society of the United States: “We are disappointed the new administration has missed this opportunity to change course, and rethink the failed wolf persecution policies of the last eight years. We urge the Department of the Interior to reconsider this ongoing effort to strip wolves of all federal protection, which has been repeatedly struck down by the courts, and is no more likely to succeed here than the previous failed attempts.
“

Michael Garrity, executive director of the Helena-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies: “We are disappointed in this decision since Idaho, Wyoming and Montana stand ready to implement management schemes that have the primary purpose of eliminating, rather than conserving, wolves.
“

Doug Heiken, Oregon Wild: “Oregon has a lot of wild forests that provide high quality wolf habitat, but it’s mostly unoccupied. Secretary Salazar’s decision is a big set-back for wolf recovery efforts in Oregon because true recovery in Oregon will depend on healthy wolf populations across the northern Rockies.
“

Dan Kruse of the Cascadia Wildlands Project: “This decision is a terrible blow to Oregon’s fledgling wolf population, which is so dependent upon the migration of wolves from the northern Rockies. At this critical junction, where Oregon’s wolves have a fighting chance for the first time in more than sixty years, the decision to take away their protection is particularly unjustified.
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Jon Marvel of Western Watersheds Project: “This shameful ruling will result in the killing of hundreds of wolves just to benefit ranchers. With this decision, Ken Salazar is subjecting wolves to the whim of states that have proven to be incapable of protecting them.
“

Jennifer Schwartz, Hells Canyon Preservation Council: “The possibility that a viable population of wolves can naturally disperse and re-colonize in Oregon in the near future is significantly diminished, if our neighbor Idaho is allowed to greatly reduce its core wolf population. The delisting rule amounts to a very disheartening setback for our organization and its many members who welcome the return of wolves in Oregon.
“

Earthjustice Attorney Jenny Harbine: “The states are eager to begin killing wolves without federal oversight. By delisting wolves, the federal government is handing Idaho and Montana a loaded gun. The Fish and Wildlife Service says states may kill all but 300 of the current northern Rockies population of around 1,500 wolves. The population cannot stand this level of mortality.
”

Contact:

Jenny Harbine, Earthjustice, (406) 586-9699
Suzanne Asha Stone, Defenders of Wildlife, (208) 861-4655
Louisa Willcox, Natural Resources Defense Council, (406) 222-9561
Melanie Stein, Sierra Club, (307) 733-4557
Michael Robinson, Center for Biological Diversity, (575) 313-7017
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Her deadly wolf program

With a disdain for science that alarms wildlife experts, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska’s policy to gun down wolves from planes.
By Mark Benjamin

Sep. 08, 2008 | Wildlife activists thought they had seen the worst in 2003 when Frank Murkowski, then the Republican governor of Alaska, signed a bill ramping up state programs to gun down wild wolves from airplanes, inviting average citizens to participate. Wolves, Murkowski believed, were clearly better than humans at killing elk and moose, and humans needed to even the playing field.

But that was before Sarah Palin took Murkowski’s job at the end of 2006. She went one step further. Palin didn’t merely think Alaskans should be allowed to chase wolves from aircraft and shoot them — she thought they should be encouraged to do so. Palin’s administration put a bounty on wolves’ heads, or to be more precise, on their mitts.

In early 2007, Palin’s administration approved an initiative to pay a $150 bounty to hunters who killed a wolf from an airplane in certain areas, hacked off the left foreleg, and brought in the appendage. Ruling that the Palin administration didn’t have the authority to offer payments, a state judge quickly put a halt to them but not to the shooting of wolves from aircraft.

Detractors consider the airborne shootings a savage business, conducted under the euphemism “predator control.” The airplanes appear in the winter, so the wolves show up like targets in a video game, sprinting across the white canvas below. Critics believe the practice violates the ethics of hunting, while supporters say the process is not hunting at all, but a deliberate cull.

Palin has argued that she is worried about Alaska’s hunters, locked in perennial competition with the canine carnivores for the state’s prodigious ungulate population. A hunter herself, Palin has battled critics of aerial wolf hunting with the support of the Alaska Outdoor Council, a powerhouse advocacy and lobbying organization for hunting, fishing and recreation groups. In addition to so-called urban hunters, who shoot moose mostly for fun, Alaska is home to a significant number of subsistence hunters, including some of the Native population. Subsistence hunters rely on an occasional moose to make ends meet. The wolves, Palin has said, are stealing food from their tables.

“Palin acts like she has never met an animal she didn’t want shot,” says Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, based in Connecticut.
The controversy over Palin’s promotion of predator control goes beyond animal rights activists recoiling at the thought of picking off wolves from airplanes. A raft of scientists has argued that Palin has provided little evidence that the current program of systematically killing wolves, estimated at a population of only 7,000 to 11,000, will result in more moose for hunters. State estimates of moose populations have come under scrutiny. Some wildlife biologists say predator control advocates don’t even understand what wolves eat.

State officials stand by their scientific findings on predator control. “Several times over the past several years, our science has been challenged in court,” says Bruce Bartley, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “In every instance it has prevailed.”

Yet it is not hard to find Alaskans who say Palin’s enthusiasm for predator control fits a broader narrative of how she edits science to suit her personal views. She endorses the teaching of creationism in public schools and has questioned whether humans are even responsible for global warming.

In 2007, she approved $400,000 to educate the public about the ecological success of shooting wolves and bears from the air. Some of the money went to create a pamphlet distributed in local newspapers, three weeks before the public was to vote on an initiative that would have curtailed aerial killing of wolves by private citizens. “The timing of the state’s propaganda on wolf control was terrible,” wrote the Anchorage Daily News on its editorial page.
“Across the board, Sarah Palin puts on a masquerade, claiming she is using sound management and science,” says Nick Jans, an Alaskan writer who co-sponsored the initiative. “In reality she uses ideology and ignores science when it is in her way.” The initiative was defeated last month.

Gordon Haber is a wildlife scientist who has studied wolves in Alaska for 43 years. “On wildlife-related issues, whether it is polar bears or predator controls, she has shown no inclination to be objective,” he says of Palin. “I cannot find any credible scientific data to support their arguments,” he adds about the state’s rationale for gunning down wolves. “In most cases, there is evidence to the contrary.”

Last year, 172 scientists signed a letter to Palin, expressing concern about the lack of science behind the state’s wolf-killing operation. According to the scientists, state officials set population objectives for moose and caribou based on “unattainable, unsustainable historically high populations.” As a result, the “inadequately designed predator control programs” threatened the long-term health of both the ungulate (hooved mammals) and wolf populations. The scientists concluded with a plea to Palin to consider the conservation of wolves and bears “on an equal basis with the goal of producing more ungulates for hunters.”

Apparently Palin wasn’t fazed. Earlier this year she introduced state legislation that would further divorce the predator-control program from science. The legislation would transfer authority over the program from the state Department of Fish and Game to Alaska’s Board of Game, whose members are appointed by, well, Palin. Even some hunters were astounded by her power play.

The legislation would give Palin’s board “more leeway without any scientific input to do whatever the hell they basically wanted,” Mark Richards, co-chair of Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, wrote in an e-mail. The legislation is currently stalled in the Alaska state Senate.

Predator control in Alaska dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. Even then, wildlife biologists insisted that wolves were important to the area’s natural ecology and not responsible for inordinate deaths of sheep, caribou or moose. Yet the scientists fought a losing battle against ranchers, hunters and government officials, who backed the extermination of tens of thousands of wolves. Aerial hunting began in earnest in the 1940s and continued through the 1960s after Alaska had earned statehood.

But starting in 2003, Murkowski opened the airborne shooting to citizens with special permits and expanded predator-control programs to cover 60,000 square miles of state and federal land, the largest wolf-killing operation since Alaska became a state. The stated goal is to reduce wolf populations in some areas by 60 to 80 percent. Teams of pilots and gunners have killed at least 795 wolves since 2003. Conservationists counter that the total number of wolves trapped, shot from airplanes, chased down by snow machines, and killed legally and illegally in Alaska every year is more along the lines of 2,000.

Scientists insist that the Palin administration is systematically killing wolves with an inadequate understanding of the relationship between the carnivore and hoofed animals. The state responds that predators kill over 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die each year, while hunters and trappers kill less than 10 percent.

Haber says the state’s numbers are wildly inflated. His decades of wolf research have shown that wolves are, in fact, mostly scavengers. “Sixty to 70 percent of the moose they eat are scavenged, not killed,” he says. He adds that the state’s wolf population estimates, based on secondhand observations and extrapolations, are also high.

Palin offered the $150 bounty for wolf paws in 2007 after efforts to kill wolves from airplanes that season were, in her view, coming up short. State officials had hoped that 382 to 664 wolves would be killed during that predator-control season. State officials were disappointed when only 115 wolves were killed from the air.

Palin thought the $150 cash bounties would do the trick. Haber has another explanation for the dry spell. “I can tell you from my own research that the reason they didn’t get many wolves in certain years, particularly last winter, is because they have scraped those areas clean,” he says.

Last year, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced legislation designed to curtail predator-control programs, except as a last resort. “It’s time to ground Alaska’s illegal and inhumane air assault on wolves,” Miller said. Palin quickly fired off a curt letter in response, applauding the state’s programs as “widely recognized for their excellence and effectiveness.” She pointed out that her state has “managed its wildlife so that we still maintain abundant populations of all of our indigenous predators almost fifty years after statehood.”

Says Jans, co-sponsor of the losing initiative to outlaw aerial wolf hunting: “This is a reflection of a somebody who doesn’t have any use for science.”
– By Mark Benjamin

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Environment, Immigration, and Population Reduction

Illustration from FOOD, LAND, POPULATION and the U.S. ECONOMY, by David Pimentel of Cornell University and Mario Giampietro Istituto of Nazionale della Nutrizione, Rome.

Environment, Immigration, and Population Reduction
Thomas Dalton
March 5, 2009
Source: The Occidental Observer

At 308 million people, the U.S. is currently the third most populous nation on Earth, behind only China (1.3 billion) and India (1.2 billion). By 2050, India will rise to #1, with 1.6 billion—a 37% increase. China’s ‘one-child’ policy will limit its increase to about 8% (1.4 billion). The growth rate in the U.S., though, tops them both: We are projected to hit 440 million, or an astonishing 43% increase. This is, by far, the highest growth rate of any western industrialized nation.

Such dramatic population growth, under any circumstances, causes a variety of social and economic problems. In the U.S., as we know, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of our increase will be among non-White minority groups, primarily Hispanics. The numbers are striking: The 43% increase amounts to 132 million people; of these, 130 million will be minorities. White population will increase by only 2 million, reducing it to 46% of the total by 2050. Thus we can expect that problems with minorities will grow in a variety of areas: housing, schools, welfare, health care, crime, security, economic inequality, and racial and ethnic conflict.

But one neglected area of importance is truly color-blind, and that is the environment. Resource and energy use, development, road construction, expanded cropland and pastureland, deforestation, pollution and waste disposal — none of these care which race or ethnicity is doing the consuming. Only two things matter: sheer numbers of people, and the level of consumption. And on this count alone, we are facing an ecological crisis in this country.

Measuring environment impact is a challenging prospect, but consensus seems to be building around the concept of the ecological footprint as one relevant criterion. The basic idea behind it is sound: that human beings, as consumers and producers, require the ongoing use of some portion of the planet’s surface, from which to draw resources and on which to dump their wastes. Some resources are renewable, others are not. Some waste products decay quickly, others take millennia. Many of our resources demand a quantifiable area of land: land to farm, pave, pasture, or otherwise develop. So too our waste products: our trash takes up an ever-growing space, and greenhouse gas emissions from all sources may require offsets in terms of vegetation (trees or other ground cover). And plant life generally has a vital ability to break down the various pollutants and toxins that our society churns out daily.

In an attempt to formulate a standardized measure, environmental scientists have added together the land area of all our resource use, plus the land area required for all our waste products and carbon offsets. The result is, for each nation, a single measure of land area—the ecological footprint—that represents the amount of area required, per person, to sustain a given standard of living. (In the following, I use the World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report 2008”.)

At the low end, nations like Haiti and Bangladesh struggle by on roughly 1 acre per person. The bulk of the Third World consumes between 2.5 and 8 acres, including India (2.3) and China (5.3). Most of Western Europe ranges from 10 to 15. At the top of the list of major nations is the U.S., at nearly 24 acres per person. (Two energy-intensive oil fiefdoms, UAE and Qatar, rate higher than the U.S, but only slightly.)

Naturally, there is some guesswork and estimation in these numbers, and certainly they are subject to debate. But I have little doubt that they are directionally correct, and that the margin of error is within reason. But even if they are off by 50%—that is, if they indicate twice the actual consumption level—they point to some troubling conclusions for our country.

Consider, for example, the total footprint of the U.S. With over 300 million people consuming on average 24 acres per person, this yields a total footprint of 7.4 billion acres. By comparison, the continental U.S. (i.e. excluding Alaska) has a total land area of just 1.9 billion acres—merely one quarter of our actual usage. Putting it otherwise: Our footprint is 400% of our continental area, and takes in more than 20% of the entire planet.

In fact there is a two-part explanation for our situation. First, we are overtaxing the land itself. The above calculation of ecological footprint for the US implies that it is possible to use more than 100% of the land. This happens by, in essence, depleting the “natural capital” of the biosphere, which occurs through such actions as deforestation, loss of topsoil, and overuse of groundwater. By most indications, humanity as a whole is overtaxing the planet by 30–40%—a condition that, if true, clearly cannot continue indefinitely. But the second and more important factor for the U.S. is a situation whereby we are able, through globalization and international trade, to consume the land resource area of other nations—in the form of imported agricultural products, manufactured goods, chemicals, clothing, machinery, vehicles, and fossil fuels.

For both reasons of social justice and ecological sustainability, the world of the future will have to live within its means. In a practical sense this means three things: reducing total (global) consumption to sustainable levels, reducing the per capita consumption (given the U.N. assumption that populations will rise), and, most critically, living within the capacity of each nation’s land area.

So for the U.S., the calculation is straightforward. With 1.9 billion acres of land, we can carry at most only (1.9 billion / 24 acres =) 80 million people sustainably. Compare this to a present population of 308 million, which is rapidly heading up to 400+ million. Thus, we should be contemplating a reduction of 75%, rather than staring head-on into a 40% increase. (This, of course, assumes a fixed level of consumption; if we are willing to cut our footprint in half, we could get by with a mere 50% population cut, to something like 150 million people.)

But the situation is worse than this. True long-term sustainability demands that a large portion of the land be set aside as true wilderness, unused and unexploited, in order to maintain overall ecosystem viability. How much to set aside is a difficult question, especially given the wide variability and sensitivity of differing ecosystems, and the lack of consensus on the appropriate metrics. Minimum estimates seem to run in the 20–25% range, and at the high end, some have argued for 50% or more, especially in the more biodiverse regions.1 If, worst case, we are then allowed to use only about 1 billion acres of land, current consumption levels will sustainably support only 40 million people—an 87% reduction.

These are, frankly, shocking numbers. And as I mentioned above, even if the footprint figures are significantly wrong—if, say, we are actually consuming only at a rate of 10 or 12 acres per person—then the long-term sustainable population is only back up to 80–100 million. Thus we cannot argue our way out of this problem simply by claiming wild overestimates by some crazed environmentalists. Clearly more drastic action is demanded.

Given the radical unsustainability of our present situation, we need to immediately address both the level of consumption and the population issue simultaneously. On the consumption side, we clearly need to become more efficient, less wasteful, and generally consume less. Americans as a whole waste a tremendous amount of energy and resources, and this does little or nothing for our standard of living. Germany, for example, has an equal or higher quality of life, and it achieves this on a footprint of just 11 acres per person—less than half of ours. A comparable level for the U.S. is clearly attainable, especially over a period of a few decades. But it will not happen without overcoming some ferocious infighting by vested interests.

The other half of the equation is even more difficult and contentious. Tackling the thorny issue of population control, let alone population reduction, is only slightly less controversial than Holocaust denial. And in fact any attempt to discuss large-scale population reduction invariably brings up bad jokes about gas chambers and crematoria. But the situation demands a rational discussion, and there are some obvious first steps.

One: An immediate end to all immigration. The myth of America as the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ is, for most immigrants, nonsense. Immigrants don’t come here because they ‘love our freedoms.’ They come primarily for one reason: to make money, and increase their standard of living. But every new immigrant—whether poverty-stricken Mexican or well-educated Asian—contributes directly to an already overshot ecosystem. Neither our nation nor the planet can stand any more Americans.

Two: Deportation of all illegal immigrants, and termination of green card privilege. Given the urgency, every illegal person here should be arrested and deported. The green card system should be ended, and those holding current green cards should be subject to accelerated expiration without renewal.

Three: Pay people to leave. If anyone wants to permanently relocate outside the U.S., the government should pay all moving expenses, and perhaps throw in a little financial incentive as well. This obviously does nothing for the global population predicament, but it does help the total consumption problem; the fact remains that any given person living anywhere besides the U.S. will, on average, consume less.

Four: A full-court press on family planning and contraception options. Free or low-cost access to condoms, birth control pills, educational programs, even abortions, should be considered.

Five: An end to all tax incentives to have more than one child. Current tax laws allow exemptions for all children, regardless of number. They should be revised to allow a break only for the first child, and increasing disincentives beyond the second.

If these should prove insufficient, more radical options are available:

Six: Government-paid sterilization. Certainly some percentage of the American population would be willing to get sterilized if it was free. More radical yet would be to provide monetary incentives for sterilization. Imagine if the government offered $5,000 for any childless adult who was willing to get sterilized—and imagine the outcry! But there can really be no complaint, as long as there is no coercion and the program is fully voluntary. Yes, the lower classes are more likely to participate; this is perhaps unfortunate, but given that we accept extreme financial inequality in our country, we have to live with the consequences. (At worst, this would offset the higher birth rates of the lower class immigrant populations.)

Seven: Birth licenses or ‘credits’. This is a kind of capitalist version of China’s policy. Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly, among others, have proposed a system that gives every woman a certain number of credits, such that would allow her to have one legal child. If she wants two or more, she must buy the credits from another woman who is willing to forego hers. A national marketplace would set the price, and childless women would clearly profit. This is perhaps a rather heartless method, but the present system is exceedingly cruel in its own way—an uncontrolled human plague eating up the planet.

No doubt many readers will think of sterilization programs or birth credits as outrageous and impossible. To which I offer two replies: (1) we would obviously begin with the less radical approaches first, and only contemplate the more extreme actions if necessary; and (2) do we have any better ideas? Continuing on in the same vein is not a rational option. This only invites catastrophe as a means of reducing our population—which will certainly happen if we do nothing. Human numbers will go down; we can rationally plan a soft landing, or just wait for a ruthless Mother Nature to crush us.

The above actions, addressing population and consumption simultaneously, would doubtless have a substantial impact. The actual effect would of course depend on the speed of implementation. The situation is pressing, but there seems to be sufficient time for these actions to work. Reduced consumption and greater efficiencies can happen rather quickly, but no one is proposing 50% or 75% population reductions in a decade.

More realistically, I would propose something on the order of a 50-year plan to achieve the above goals. If, over the coming five decades, we could reduce both our footprint and our population by just 2% per year, we would reach 2060 with 110 million people, consuming at a level of 8.7 acres per person—a sustainable 1 billion acre footprint in total. Two percent annual reductions are easily achievable, and would barely register on the public consciousness.

There is plenty of flexibility in the numbers, of course. If we were only able to muster, say, 1% reductions per year on average, the process would still work—but it would take 100 years to achieve sustainability. Tradeoffs between population and consumption are also possible. If we could, for example, drive population down by 3% per year, then consumption need only fall by 0.5% annually; or vice versa.

And finally, critical to any population reduction scheme is equitable and proportionate implementation. It would not do, for example, to have one class or ethnicity voluntarily adopting low-growth (or negative growth) policies while others ignored them with impunity. There would thus need to be some minimal policy of monitoring and, particularly for systems of tax penalties or birth credits, equitable enforcement.

Every year that we wait, things get immeasurably worse: growing population, increasing per capita consumption, and a global ecosystem nearing exhaustion. With a sustainable population in America, we could feed ourselves, supply all of our own energy (think of it—no more wars for oil!), and maintain vast areas of wild nature. This is truly achievable. It is only a matter of will. But the discussion must start now.

Note

1. See: Metzgar and Bader (1992), “Large mammal predators in the Northern Rockies,” Northwest Environmental Journal, 8(1). Hoctor et al (2000), “Identifying a linked reserve system,” Conservation Biology, 14(4). Noss et al (1999), “A conservation plan for the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion,” Natural Areas Journal, 19(4). Carroll et al (2003), “Use of population viability analysis,” Ecological Applications, 13. RETURN TO ARTICLE.

Dr. Thomas Dalton (email him) is the author of Debating the Holocaust (2009).
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And a response by Professor MacDonald:

Kevin MacDonald: Thomas Dalton on Carrying Capacity

Kevin MacDonald: Thomas Dalton’s current TOO article “Environment, Immigration, and Population Reduction“ reflects an intellectual movement that was for some time centered around the academic journal Population and Environment, especially when it was edited by Virginia Abernethy and later by me. The basic idea is that in the long run the human population will have to be scaled back in order to come into line with Earth’s carrying capacity.

An immediate implication of this perspective is that countries like the United States would have to institute an immigration moratorium. As things stand now, all predictions are for a massive increase in US population by 2050, almost entirely due to immigration. The figure accompanying the article, from a paper by two academics, David Pimentel of Cornell and Mario Giampiettro of the University of Rome, projects a US population of 520 million by 2050 if current increases of 1.1% per year are maintained.

Recently Lindsey Grant, another major figure in this movement, has distributed a new paper on this topic. He notes that the population restriction movement gained some traction in the 1970s but declined thereafter, and that recently the US State Department commented that “The U.S. does not endorse population ‘stabilization’ or ‘control.’” There is absolutely no discussion of reduction of legal immigration despite high levels of unemployment and wages that have been stagnant for a generation. Instead, as the LA Times reports today, the Obama administration and its Congressional allies are gearing up to legalize illegal immigrants, a policy that will hugely inflate US population as these people bring their relatives here.

Grant also points to economic realities: “The past 35 years have been a period of soaring incomes for the wealthy, stagnant hourly wages for most people, income differentials rising to levels that a humane observer would call obscene.” Rising commodity prices of the last few years are a harbinger of scarcity. Unemployment is increasing: “To keep up with population growth in those two years, we should have added about 1.2 million jobs, rather than losing nearly nine million. The “good” months are those when the job loss slows down. January was a ‘good’ month; only 22,000 jobs disappeared. What kind of recovery is that?” (For February, the loss was 36,000, a report that was greeted as encouraging by the Obama administration.) On the basis of US Labor Department statistics, he points out that the real unemployment level is 16.8 percent of the labor force, and much higher for minorities and youth.

One could say much else about the economic irrationality of current immigration policy. In attempting to explain why there are no attempts to have a population policy, he points to five reasons:

First, the national addiction to growth and the dream of rising prosperity. Second, the political fears of alienating Hispanic voters, business, and their allies by tackling immigration levels. Third, the increased assertiveness of interest groups that oppose governmental population policies on principle (such as the Vatican) or, like the feminists at Cairo, do not want population policy advocates diverting attention from their priorities, or who oppose governmental involvement in women’s decisions about child bearing. Fourth, the defection of most of the U.S. environmental movement from population advocacy, for fear of losing support from the people I have just described, or from immigration advocates. Fifth, the present confrontational climate in Washington, which dictates that politicians avoid any positions that might lose votes.

I think this is basically right. A population policy that included an immigration moratorium flies in the face powerful ethnic and economic interests, as well as a deeply embedded view of perpetual expansion that is very common across the political spectrum.

Of course, I would add a prominent role for Jewish ethnic interests in leading and funding the pro-immigration movement as well as providing support for immigration among media and academic elites. (It’s amazing that it’s okay to mention Catholics, Latinos, feminists and business interests but would never mention the role of Jewish ethnic interests.) A notorious example related to environmental and population policy is David Gelbaum’s $100 million donation to the Sierra Club on condition that they not oppose immigration. As Gelbaum famously said to the president of the Sierra Club, “”I did tell [Sierra Club President] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

It’s interesting that the global warming hysteria did manage to recruit the backing of elites in government and business without offending the coalition of interests promoting a head-in-the-sands policy on population. (Headline you won’t see: Al Gore Proposes Immigration Moratorium To Combat Global Warming.) After all, one could argue that a good way for the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be to lower its population, especially since, as Dalton points out, the US has such a large ecological footprint. Immigrants coming to the US will typically have a larger footprint than if they had stayed at home, and, as Virginia Abernethy has point out many times, this increase in prosperity is typically accompanied by increased fertility — Life is good compared to what you grew up with. Have babies. At present, Latino fertility is 50% higher than White, non-Latino fertility.

Nevertheless, global warming became a pillar of the left — even though the data supporting it are iffy at best and even though dealing with global warming requires the same sort of long range planning and drastic social changes also entailed by taking carrying capacity seriously. All told, it’s a nice comment on where the power is.

As a result, as things stand now, in 2050, not only will the US have a minority White population, it will have a population that is well beyond sustainability. Ethnic conflict will increase in multicultural, White-minority America even in the absence of sustainability issues. But the conflict will be even more intense as resources diminish and humans are forced to find ways to reduce population. As always, conflict will center around ethnic identities. It’s not going to be pretty.

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