Red Cross Worker Killed in Eastern Ukraine
teleSUR | October 3, 2014
A Swiss national working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was killed in Donetsk on Thursday as fighting continues between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatist rebels.
Laurent DuPasqiue, 38, had been working with the Red Cross in Ukraine for six weeks before being killed by mortar fire. The aid organization said it has about 20 staff members working in Donetsk.
“We are deeply shocked by this tragic loss,” said ICRC Director of Operations Dominik Stillhart. “We understand that there were other civilian casualties in Donetsk today. Indiscriminate shelling of residential areas is unacceptable and violates international humanitarian law.”
Moscow accused Kiev of responsibility for the bombing of the local Red Cross office which killed the aid worker, located about 2 miles from the Donetsk airport where fighting rages on despite a cease-fire signed September 5.
“Kiev is unwilling to admit an evident thing: that district of Donetsk was controlled by the self-defense forces and was shelled from positions held by Ukrainian troops,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “We categorically condemn such actions that are a blatant violation of the international humanitarian law. We insist on an unbiased and thorough investigation into the killing of the ICRC worker and on bringing those guilty to justice.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin denied responsibility for the shelling, blaming instead local separatist rebels.
Illusionary Growth
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | October 3, 2014
It is amazing how the government manages to continue selling Brooklyn Bridges to a gullible public. Americans buy wars they don’t need and economic recoveries that do not exist.
The best investment in America is a highly leveraged fund that invests only in large cap companies that are buying back their own stocks. Many of the firms repurchasing their stocks are borrowing in order to push up their stock prices, executive “performance bonuses,” and shareholders’ capital gains. The debt incurred will have to be serviced by future earnings. This is not a picture of capitalism that is driving the economy by investment.
Neither is consumer spending driving the economy. The US Census Bureau’s 2013 Income and Poverty Report concludes that in 2013 real median household income was 8 percent below the amount in 2007, the year prior to the 2008 recession and has declined to the level in 1994, two decades ago! Even though real household income has not regained the pre-recession level and has declined to the level 20 years ago, the government and financial press claim that the economy has been in recovery since June 2009.
Neither is an increase in consumer debt driving the economy. The only growth in personal debt is in student loans.
Real retail sales (corrected with a non-rigged measure of inflation) remain at the level of the bottom of the recession in 2009. Macy’s , J.C. Penny’s, and Sears store closings are further evidence of the lack of retail sales growth, as is the fact that two of the three dollar store chains are in trouble. Walmart’s sales are declining.
The basis of auto sales hype is subprime loans and leases taken by those who cannot qualify for a loan to purchase.
Housing starts remain far below the pre-recession level, which is not surprising when available jobs are part-time with no benefits. Such jobs cannot support the formation of households and purchase of homes.
Where does the government’s second quarter 2014 real GDP growth rate of 4.6 percent come from? It comes from an understated inflation measure and jiggled numbers. It is not a correct figure. Nothing has occurred in the economy to turn it from a first quarter decline of more than 2 percent into a second quarter growth of 4.6 percent.
The 4.6 percent number is pulled out of a hat to set the stage for the November election.
It is extraordinary that economists and the financial media permit the government to get away with its false economic reporting. Of course Wall Street likes good news . . . but fake news that misleads investors and covers up economic policy mistakes?
Clearly, something is wrong with the government’s economic reporting. It is not possible to have real GDP growth when real median family incomes are declining and business investment consists of corporations buying back their own shares. Either the government’s GDP estimate is incorrect or the Census Bureau’s Income and Poverty report is incorrect. Apparently Washington doesn’t understand that if it is going to rig the numbers, it must rig all the numbers.
The rigged inflation measures create illusionary real GDP growth. They also block cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security pensions. Indeed, the main purpose of the rigged inflation measures is to get rid of “socialistic” Social Security by allowing inflation to gradually erode away the real values of “entitlements.” Republicans always want to cut “entitlements” that people have paid for over their working lifetime with the payroll tax. But Republicans never want to cut the payroll tax. They need the revenues in order to bail out the big banks and to pay for never-ending wars.
Washington has been conducting needless wars abroad for 93 percent of the 21st century at a cost of trillions of dollars. More trillions have been wasted bailing out banks that deregulation permitted to become “too big to fail.” During the past seven years, millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes, and food stamp rolls have reached record numbers. These hurting Americans have been ignored by policy-makers in Washington.
Clearly, government in America is focused on something different from a healthy economy and the well being of citizens. We call it democracy, but it’s not.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.
David Brooks’ son is in the Israeli Military… Inside & outside the Mondoweiss, Common Dreams loop…
The following explores a variety of cover-ups and sort of cover-ups…
By Alison Weir | October 1, 2014
David Brooks is a prominent and powerful journalist. He is a columnist for the New York Times and a commentator for PBS New Hour and NPR.
Now we learn, through an article in Jewish Journal, that Brooks’ son is in the Israeli military. In other words, he has a profound conflict with impartiality, as the New York Times ethics code calls it, and Brooks, the Times, NPR, etc. have not revealed this to the public.
The Jewish Journal article reports:
One of the more interesting nuggets buried in a long, Hebrew-language interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks in the recent Ha’aretz magazine is the revelation, toward the very end, that Brooks’s oldest son serves in the Israel Defense Forces.
I find it interesting, and disturbing, that Ha’aretz hid this information from its English readers.
(By the way, I have written extensively about numerous journalists having close personal and family ties to the Israeli military – see below.)
Philip Weis has a strong article that tells about Brooks’ reporting, and notes:
“So when David Brooks was commenting favorably on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza this summer on National Public Radio, his son was serving in the Israeli army. Why didn’t NPR tell us?”
It is ironic, then, that Weiss also decides not to tell readers insider information he feels they shouldn’t know:
“This is now the third Times reporter/writer whose son has gone into the Israeli Defense Forces. Famously Ethan Bronner, of course… and a third person I will not identify (I know the individual personally, the beat didn’t involve the Middle East, the son left before long).”
Weiss’s reluctance to share his insider information with others is a bit reminiscent of Ha’aretz. Perhaps it’s ok, since this is a personal friend. But it shows again that some are inside a loop that the rest of us aren’t.
This is also reminiscent of Common Dreams, which exposed an Israel-partisan who posed as an anti-Semite on numerous websites, but refused to disclose his name, thus keeping its insider information away from the rest of us – even though many of our websites may also have been victimized by this infiltrator.
Again, some are in the loop. The rest of us aren’t.
*
Some of my articles on US journalists’ personal ties to the Israeli military
Myra Noveck & the New York Times: Another journalist with children in the Israeli military
US Media and Israeli Military: All in the Family
Ethan Bronner’s Conflict With Impartiality
Is “pundit” actually Israeli military officer?
AP’s Matti Friedman: Israeli citizen and former Israeli soldier
The Israel Lobby ‘In Defense of Christians’?
By Maidhc O Cathail • Unz Review • October 2, 2014
Having long since captured the sympathies of America’s evangelical Christians, Israel’s friends have recently been attempting to show empathy for the persecuted Christian churches of the Arab World in what appears to be a concerted effort to garner support for Tel Aviv’s regional aspirations. Only founded earlier this year, a previously obscure non-profit organization called “In Defense of Christians” suddenly attracted international headlines during its inaugural summit (Sept. 9-11). The stated purpose of the three-day Washington, D.C. gathering was to raise awareness about the plight of beleaguered Middle Eastern Christian communities whose continued existence is threatened by the advance of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other takfiri groups.
Although The Washington Post published a report on the IDC Summit in its Religion section on Sept. 10, it wasn’t until that evening’s gala dinner when keynote speaker Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was reportedly “booed off the stage” for his provocative pro-Israel speech that most people first heard of the Washington-based group. Cruz left little doubt that he was more concerned about defending Israel than the region’s Christians when he began to “loop” ISIS and Al-Qaeda together with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran (i.e. the latter three forming “the strategic arc” that poses “the greatest danger to Israel,” as Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, has admitted to The Jerusalem Post.) But it wasn’t until the Texas senator asserted that “Christians have no greater ally than the Jewish state” that some of the attendees could take no more of what sounded like an AIPAC-scripted sermon and began to heckle him.
In light of the predictable outrage provoked by Cruz’s paean to Israel, it’s interesting to recall what The Washington Post had been told by IDC executive director Andrew Doran earlier that day:
One Orthodox leader on Tuesday (Sept. 9) declared his opposition to military action to stop the Islamic State militants, a view that is not likely widely shared at the conference, Doran noted. The next day, another called the Arab-Israel conflict the root of Middle Eastern chaos. He doesn’t speak for the IDC nor his brother patriarchs, said Doran.
Yet in a Sept. 11 press release entitled “Clarifying Senator Cruz’s Walk Away from Middle Eastern Christian Summit,” Doran, who previously worked for the US Department of State, still seemed assured that he and his allegedly “non-partisan” organization speak instead for the region’s Christians. After having recounted “in tears” his inspiration for the group’s name from a 1933 letter titled “In Defense of the Jews,” the IDC executive director claimed: “In last night’s Solidarity Gala Dinner, Senator Cruz chose to stand against the small and vocal minority of attendees who disagree with his views on Israel rather than standing with the vast majority of those who attended the gala and support both Israel and the Middle East’s Christians.”
Adding to Doran’s “clarification,” IDC president Toufic Baaklini noted “sadly” that “there was a small but vocal anti-Israel element in the room” who “do not represent the views of IDC.” Fittingly, the IDC press release ended by citing one of the summit’s most active speakers [.pdf] whose support for Israel has rarely, if ever, been in doubt: “As Nina Shea, who introduced Cruz later said, ‘We will not agree on territorial disputes, but we stand united against religious persecution regardless of the religion.’”
A senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, Shea directs Hudson’s Center for Religious Freedom. A former vice chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was once led by the pardoned pro-Israel Iran-Contra intriguer Elliott Abrams and currently chaired by a daughter of the late “true blue and white” Israel mouthpiece and infamous interventionist Tom Lantos, the senior Hudson fellow has, as one critical profile puts it, “a long track record of using human rights concerns to promote various foreign interventions favored by neoconservatives.” Significantly, the IDC summit is evidently not the first time concerns about specifically Christian suffering have been used by the neocon interventionist:
In a 2001 article for the Washington Monthly, Joshua Green related how in the mid-1990s Shea teamed up with Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official, in an effort “to put the issue of Christian persecution on the map.” Green reported: “Horowitz, a Jewish neoconservative and a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, detailed the plight of persecuted Christians in Africa and the Middle East. He concluded by calling for intervention. ‘For American Jews, who owe our very lives to the open door of the blessed land,’ he wrote, ‘silence should not be an option in the face of persecutions eerily parallel to those committed by Adolf Hitler.’” According to Green, a favorite Horowitz sound bite at the time was that “Christians are the Jews of the 21st century.”
In a 2012 article entitled “What Will Become of the Middle East’s Christians?”—one of the many pieces in which Doran cites Shea’s work on Christian persecution—the IDC executive director echoes Horowitz’s favorite sound bite:
The exodus of Jews from Yemen, where they had lived for fifteen centuries before the birth of the Prophet, was not an isolated occurrence; it was repeated across the Middle East and North Africa, as these Diaspora Jews made their way, reluctantly in many cases, to Israel. Their fight for survival foreshadowed that of the more than ten million Christians of the Muslim world, who today struggle to maintain a presence and identity in the lands where they have lived for centuries.
Presumably, the reader is expected to infer Muslim persecution of Jews from Doran’s use of the word “reluctantly” as opposed to the Israeli false flag attacks that were required in at least some cases to convince those “Diaspora Jews” to flee to the newly-established “Jewish state” on Palestinian land.
A regular contributor to the neocon National Review Online, Doran also shares Shea’s favored response to the problem of Christian persecution. For instance, in an Aug. 18 op-ed piece entitled “Intervention as Duty,” the IDC executive director writes:
As I argued here last year, the intervention in the former Yugoslavia may serve as a compelling model today for Syria and now perhaps Iraq, but this would call for a willingness to see Iraq and Syria dissolved. For the moment, America clings, as it did at the outset of war in Yugoslavia, to nations that no longer exist.
In Doran’s prescription for the current crisis, one can’t help noticing the similarity with the policy recommendations of Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Foreign Ministry of Israel. In his 1982 essay “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” originally published in Hebrew by the World Zionist Organization journal, Kivunim, Yinon argued that, “The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run….”
However, if the dissolution of Syria, in accordance with Israeli strategic objectives, was indeed one of the ulterior motives behind IDC’s bringing the Middle East’s Christians together in Washington, it appears to have suffered a setback when on the final day of the summit, a delegation of Eastern Christian patriarchs met with President Obama in the White House. According to a report in Al-Akhbar English, Obama surprised his guests by telling them, “We know that President Bashar al-Assad protected Christians in Syria.” Further taken aback by Obama’s use of the term “the Syrian government” instead of “regime,” one of the attendees reportedly challenged the president: “Then you should stop talking about a moderate Syrian opposition.” Ironically, it was in this very same room four months earlier that Obama had met Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) who “thanked the US for its aid to opposition rebels.” One month before that, the leader of the so-called “moderate Syrian opposition” reportedly toured the devastated Armenian Christian village of Kassab, Syria which had been attacked and occupied by the Free Syrian Army, the SNC’s armed wing, and their Al-Qaeda affiliates.
Within a week of the historic meeting of President Obama with the leaders of Eastern Christianity, a World Jewish Congress delegation led by WJC president Ronald Lauder paid a Rosh Hashanah visit to Pope Francis at his Vatican residence. As in the White House, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East dominated the discussion. According to a Sept. 18 report in Haaretz, it was the Bishop of Rome’s turn this time to adopt Horowitz’s sound bite:
Lauder and the pope mutually condemned the attacks against Christians around the world, especially in the Middle East. “In the world, there is still great suffering. First it was your turn. Now it’s our turn,” the pope told the delegation…
Strongly agreeing with the Holy Father’s comments, the WJC president extended the Horowitzian analogy:
He showed a paper bearing the Hebrew letter nun, explaining that: “It is the symbol used in Iraq and Syria to identify Christians’ houses as the yellow star was used in the past against European Jewry.”
The head of the “Diplomatic Arm of the Jewish People” concluded with a well-worn albeit spurious hasbara talking point: “The truth is that Israel is the only safe place for Christians in the Middle East.”
As implied by the Haaretz report, the WJC president—not to mention another pro-Israel interventionist par excellence—has been showing an increased concern for his Christian brethren of late. An Aug. 19 Lauder op-ed in The New York Times asks, “Who Will Stand Up for Christians?” Given the gist of the piece, however, a more candid title might have been “Why can’t the world just stop fussing about Israeli war crimes in Palestine and focus their anger instead on Christian suffering in other parts of the Middle East?” As for how to respond to the persecution of his “Christian brothers and sisters,” the self-described “Jewish leader” pointedly reminds his readers that he is writing this call to action “as a citizen of the strongest military power on earth.” Thus, similar to the fervor that preceded the Second World War, “Onward Christian Soldiers” has yet again become the rallying cry for those who seek to embroil the United States and other Western nations in another major conflict—an unnecessary “Clash of Civilizations”—likely to accomplish little beyond further advancing the hegemonic designs of Israel.
Media hyped walrus climate scare stories debunked
By Marc Morano | Climate Depot | October 1, 2014
The October 1, 2014 Associated Press article linking the walrus gathering to melting sea ice, lacks historical perspective and contains serious spin that would lead readers to erroneous conclusions about walruses and the climate.
Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford weighs in:
Mass haulouts of Pacific walrus and stampede deaths are not new, not due to low ice cover
‘The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science…this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.’
First off, walruses are not endangered. According to the New York Times, “the Pacific walrus remains abundant, numbering at least 200,000 by some accounts, double the number in the 1950s.”
The AP article titled, “35,000 walrus come ashore in northwest Alaska”, claims “the gathering of walrus on shore is a phenomenon that has accompanied the loss of summer sea ice as the climate has warmed.” The AP even includes the environmental group World Wildlife Fund, to ramp up climate hype. “It’s another remarkable sign of the dramatic environmental conditions changing as the result of sea ice loss,” said Margaret Williams, managing director of the group’s Arctic program, by phone from Washington, D.C.
But the AP is recycling its own climate stories on walruses. See: 2009: AP : Walruses Gather as Ice Melts in the Arctic Sea (Sept. 17, 2009) Also see fact check on “melting” Arctic sea ice. See: Paper: ‘Myth of arctic meltdown’ : Stunning satellite images show ice cap has grown by an area twice the size of Alaska in two years – Despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now
The media and green groups are implying that walrus hanging out by the tens of thousands is a new phenomenon and due to melting Arctic ice. But dating back to at least the 1604, there have been reports of large walrus gatherings or haulouts.
Excerpt:
“Walruses became only really known in Europe after the 1604 expedition to the Kola Peninsula of the ship “Speed” of Muscovy Company, commanded by Stephen Bennet. On the way back to England the Speed reached what some years before a Dutch expedition had named “Bear Island”. The crew of the Speed discovered a haulout numbering about a thousand walruses on the island’s northern coast.”
According to a National Geographic article in 2007, walrus populations were not endangered. See: “While scientists lack a firm population estimate for the species, researchers have encountered herds as large as 100,000 in recent years”
Even the green activist group, the WWF, admits walrus ‘hangouts’ of tens of thousands are not unprecedented.
A 2009 WWF blog report noted: “WWF Polar Bear coordinator Geoff York returned on 17 September from a trip along the Russian coast and saw a haul out there with an estimated 20,000 walruses near Ryrkaipiy (on the Chukchi Peninsula).”
AP’s own reporting debunks walrus claims
Are 35,000 walruses gathering in “haulouts” on the shoreline with many be stampeded to death really that unusual? The answer is No!
The AP reported on 40,000 walruses in a haulout just 7 years ago in a single location. See: AP 12/14/2007: “40,000 in one spot” – “As a result, walruses came ashore earlier and stayed longer, congregating in extremely high numbers, with herds as big as 40,000 at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a “haulout” place for a century, scientists said.”
As climate blogger Tom Nelson noted in a December 28 2007 analysis: “Are you saying that that spot *was* used as a haulout in earlier years?” Nelson wrote.
Nelson noted the media reported that “Walruses are vulnerable to stampedes when they gather in such large numbers. The appearance of a polar bear, a hunter or a low-flying airplane can send them rushing to the water.”
Nelson then asked: “Are stampedes ever caused by the appearance of researchers or low-flying research planes?”
Walrus stampede deaths drop dramatically from 3,000 to 50?
The October 1, 2014 AP article notes with obvious concern for the walrus species: “Observers last week saw about 50 carcasses on the beach from animals that may have been killed in a stampede…”
Fifty walrus carcasses? That number is a significant improvement from 2007 when there were a reported 3000 dead walruses discovered from the late summer and fall on the Russian side of the Arctic, according to the AP’s own earlier reporting. See: 2007: ‘3,000 walruses die in stampedes tied to Climate’
Are walrus stampede deaths declining in recent years? It is difficult to say based on reports, but a high of 3,000 deaths in 2007 (for a whole season) to a low of 50 deaths in 2014 for a single location, but it does not appear to be an alarming trend. Why does the AP fail to put any historical perspective on their climate scare stories, especially when the AP’s own reporting from 7 years ago calls into question their claims?
The next issue is whether or not sea ice extent is critical to walruses in late summer and fall. According to this report, ice extent is not critical. As Nelson noted in 2007:
“When I read this in the (2007) ‘walrus’ Wikipedia entry, I’m also not convinced that lack of summer ice is necessarily a big deal.”
2007 Wikipedia entry:
“In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.” [Note: This line has been omitted from the Wikipedia entry in 2014]
Walrus stampede deaths benefit polar bears
In addition, a 2007 WWF post inadvertently noted that the carcasses of stampeded walruses may actually be a great benefit to polar bears.
“Last fall some 20,000-30,000 animals were piled up there. No one has actually counted them all, but the Vankarem residents are certain the number is growing…In early winter, when the ice is re-forming and walruses leave the beach, up to 100 carcasses remain behind. These blubbery animals offer a perfect meal for wandering and hungry polar bears… In mid-November, a truck driver alerted the patrol to bear tracks on the beach. The wave had begun. For the next three weeks, bears making their way along the coast stopped to graze on the carcasses at this so-called “feeding point” instead of proceeding to the village. At one time alone, Sergey and his team counted 96 bears feeding on the walrus. In total they estimated that 185 bears had been circulating with a six mile radius around the village.”
The stampeded remains of 100 walruses fed up to 185 polar bears!
But despite the easily accessible historical data on walruses, the WWF and the AP and other media in 2014, continue to spin the haulouts as evidence of “climate change.”
Margaret Williams, WWF’s managing director of the Arctic program said in a September 18, 2014 article:
“The massive concentration of walruses onshore—when they should be scattered broadly in ice-covered waters—is just one example of the impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine species in the Arctic.”
Is the WWF correct? Should walruses be “scattered broadly in ice-covered waters”? Not exactly. As Tom Nelson noted on Twitter, (Tom Nelson@tan123) “If walrus haulouts are a new thing, why was this walrus haulout sanctuary established in 1960”
According to the Alaskan government, walrus haulouts are not unusual and have long been recognized and islands have been set aside for such gatherings.
Excerpt:
“The Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary (WISGS), protects a group of seven small craggy islands and their adjacent waters in northern Bristol Bay, approximately 65 miles southwest of Dillingham. The WISGS includes Round Island, Summit Island, Crooked Island, High Island, Black Rock and The Twins. The WISGS was established in 1960 to protect one of the largest terrestrial haulout sites in North America for Pacific walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens).”
The Alaskan government report noted that numbers of 14,000 walrus haulouts in a single day were not unusual.
“Each summer large numbers of male walruses haul out on exposed, rocky beaches. Round Island is one of four major terrestrial haulouts in Alaska; the others are Capes Peirce (Togiak NWR), Newenham (Togiak NWR), and Seniavin (near Port Moller). Male walrus return to these haulouts every spring as the ice pack recedes northward, remaining in Bristol Bay to feed they haul out at these beach sites for several days between each feeding foray. The number of walrus using the island fluctuates significantly from year to year. However, up to 14,000 walrus have been counted on Round Island in a single day.”
Hunters have relied on large hangouts of walruses. This report details how walruses were “predictably present” and made for “clean and efficient butchering.”
Expert:
“Qayassiq was especially important for walrus hunting because it was accessible in good weather; walruses were predictably present on the beach during the preferred fall hunt; and the beach is rocky, not sandy, promoting clean and efficient butchering. Hunting on haulouts was a highly organized activity.”
###
Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford:
‘The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science… this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.’ – Large haulouts of walruses — such as the one making news at Point Lay, Alaska on the Chukchi Sea (and which happened before back in 2009) — are not a new phenomenon for this region over the last 45 years and thus cannot be due to low sea ice levels. Nor are deaths by stampede within these herds (composed primarily of females and their young) unusual, as a brief search of the literature reveals. At least two documented incidents like this have occurred in the recent past: one in 1978, on St. Lawrence Island and the associated Punuk Islands and the other in 1972, on Wrangell Island (Fay and Kelly 1980, excerpts below)… Here is how the WWF is spinning this recent gathering at Point Lay:
“We are witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe in the Arctic,” said Lou Leonard, WWF’s vice president for climate change.”
Crockford Summed it up: “this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.”
Related Link:
Tom Nelson’s 2007 report: About those walrus stampedes – FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2007
Google currently shows about 14,000 hits for “walruses stampedes”.
Excerpts from a typical scare story, along with my comments:
The giant, tusked mammals typically clamber onto the sea ice to rest, or haul themselves onto land for just a few weeks at a time.
Ok, so it’s not unusual for them to haul up on land. Google shows a lot of pictures of them on land.
As a result, walruses came ashore earlier and stayed longer, congregating in extremely high numbers, with herds as big as 40,000 at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a “haulout” for a century, scientists said.
Are you saying that that spot *was* used as a haulout in earlier years?
Walruses are vulnerable to stampedes when they gather in such large numbers. The appearance of a polar bear, a hunter or a low-flying airplane can send them rushing to the water.
Are stampedes ever caused by the appearance of researchers or low-flying research planes?
Sure enough, scientists received reports of hundreds and hundreds of walruses dead of internal injuries suffered in stampedes. Many of the youngest and weakest animals, mostly calves born in the spring, were crushed.
Biologist Anatoly Kochnev of Russia’s Pacific Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography estimated 3,000 to 4,000 walruses out of population of perhaps 200,000 died, or two or three times the usual number on shoreline haulouts.
Were anecdotal reports of “hundreds and hundreds” used to come up with the estimate of 3,000 to 4,000? How much actual counting was done? What’s the baseline number of annual stampede deaths? Is anyone checking that any animals found dead were killed in stampedes, rather than dying from some other cause?
No large-scale walrus die-offs were seen in Alaska during the same period, apparently because the animals congregated in smaller groups on the American side of the Bering Strait, with the biggest known herd at about 2,500.
So when a walrus herd of 2,500 is panicked, stampede deaths are not a big deal, but when the herd reaches tens of thousands, we can expect lots of stampede deaths?
—–
It seems to me that more walruses worldwide may die from hunting than from stampedes. Note an excerpt from this Sea World link:
As the Pacific walrus population grew, annual subsistence catches by indigenous Arctic peoples ranged from about 3,000 to 16,000 walruses per year until about 1990, and then decreased to an average of 5,789 animals per year from 1996 to 2000.
A related paragraph is here:
Pacific walrus meat has been used for the past 40 years to feed foxes which are kept on government – subsidised fur farms in Chukotka. One estimate made by natives was of an annual kill of 10,000 – 12,000 walruses per year, but this may have been overstated. Recent investigations have found that much of the meat is left to waste and that there are no markets for the resultant fox furs. Fox farming operations in Chukotka are currently in decline due to economic recession. Local unemployment caused by the general economic situation and the closure of the farms has however led to a recent increase in illegal head-hunting.
Some more background information is in this 2007 WWF post:
Last fall some 20,000-30,000 animals were piled up there. No one has actually counted them all, but the Vankarem residents are certain the number is growing.
…
In early winter, when the ice is re-forming and walruses leave the beach, up to 100 carcasses remain behind. These blubbery animals offer a perfect meal for wandering and hungry polar bears.
…
As soon as the walruses departed, the polar bear patrol spent several days working to collect the remains of walruses killed in the stampedes. Using a tractor, they carted the carcasses six miles west of the village, anticipating that the bears would come from the west in the fall. In the end, they scattered some 80 walruses around selected sites — and then they waited.
In mid-November, a truck driver alerted the patrol to bear tracks on the beach. The wave had begun. For the next three weeks, bears making their way along the coast stopped to graze on the carcasses at this so-called “feeding point” instead of proceeding to the village. At one time alone, Sergey and his team counted 96 bears feeding on the walrus. In total they estimated that 185 bears had been circulating with a six mile radius around the village.
My comments: Eighty-100 dead walruses out of 20,000-30,000 hauled out on land seems quite low, if Kochnev’s estimate of 3,000-4,000 total stampede deaths is correct (remember, his estimate is based on a population of maybe 200,000, many of which are not hauled out in huge herds).
Also, if polar bear numbers are so threatened by global warming, what are 185 of them doing within six miles of the village?
When I read stuff like this, I’m also not completely convinced that walruses are threatened with extinction:
… researchers have encountered herds as large as 100,000 in recent years…
When I read this in the “walrus” Wikipedia entry, I’m also not convinced that lack of summer ice is necessarily a big deal:
“In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.”
In the same entry, when I read this, I’m not convinced that polar bears really need year-round sea ice in order to feed successfully.”
Polar bears hunt walruses by rushing at beached aggregations and consuming those individuals that are crushed or wounded in the sudden mass exodus, typically younger or infirm animals.
Some video of polar bears successfully hunting walruses is here and here. I don’t see any ice in that first hunting scene.
Massive new debt hides years of negative GDP growth in EU and USA
By Jon Hellevig | Oriental Review | September 29, 2014
Finland – In a groundbreaking study Awara Group reveals that the real GDP growth of Western countries has been in negative territory for years. Only by massively loading up debt have they been able to hide the true picture and delay the onset of an inevitable collapse of their respective economies. The study shows that the real GDP of those countries hides hefty losses after netting the debt figures, which gives the Real-GDP-net-of-debt.
The moral of the study is that GDP growth figures as such reveal very little about the underlying dynamics of an economy if one does not simultaneously attempt to analyze what part of the growth is credited to simply artificially fueling the economy with new loans.
The study has found that the Western countries have lost the capacity to grow their economies. All they have left is a capacity to pile up debts. By massively accumulating new debt, they are able to keep up a semblance of at least sluggish growth, or of hovering around the zero growth mark.
If this massive debt would go towards investments, then there would be nothing wrong with it. But, it is not. The debt is going towards financing the losses in the national economies and essentially it all is wasted on consumption that the countries in reality cannot afford. The Western countries act like a 19th century heir to aristocratic wealth, borrowing from year to year to keep up the former lifestyle, while the estate is relentlessly dwindling. Sooner or later the prodigal heir would be forced to face reality and sell the remaining property to stave off the creditors, downgrade his dwellings, and rein in spending. Inevitably, the European countries and the USA will have to curb their excessive consumption, too, but for the time being they are putting off the final reckoning with new debt rather the way a drunkard reaches for the morning after drink to put off sobering up. In the case of the EU and the USA, we are speaking about a debt binge that has been going on for a decade.
While the situation has been generally bad for the last decade or so, it took a dramatic turn for the worse, or should we say for the catastrophic, following the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. The shocking figures depicting the virtual crippling of the Western economies from 2009 to 2013 are illustrated in Chart 1. It depicts the development of real-GDP-growth per country in years 2005 to 2013. The chart shows that during this period Russia has been able to deliver real non-debt fueled GDP growth, whereas the Western countries are running huge deficits. The accumulated growth of the Russian economy from 2005 to 2013 was 147% while the Western countries accumulated losses from 16.5% (Germany) to 58% (USA). In the case of Russia, the real-GDP-net-of-debt figure is also corrected to adjust for the calculation error caused by an erroneous GDP deflator that Russian Statistics Agency (Rosstat) has used. We have discussed the persistent problem of Russia’s GDP growth having been underestimated due to the use of a wrong GDP deflator in the study Awara Group Research on the Effects of Putin’s Tax Reforms 2000-2012 on State Tax Revenue and GDP
Chart 2 shows the real GDP growth net-of-debt after deducting the growth of public debt from the GDP figure. Net of debt we see the scale of the Western economies, for example the Spanish economy, which amounts to the staggering figure of minus 56.3%. This while the conventional official method of crediting GDP growth with growth of debt would give only minus 6.7%.
The analysis shows that by these measures Russian economic growth, unlike that of the Western countries, has been comparatively healthy and not debt-driven. Russia has in fact a resoundingly positive ratio by these measures, where GDP growth has exceeded growth of debt by a staggering 14 times (1400%). The figure is astonishing when compared with the Western countries that have been flooded with new debt.
Chart 3 shows how much the accumulation of debt in the Western countries exceeds the official GDP growth. The USA is leading the pack with an increase in the debt load in years 2004 to 2013 of USD 9.8 trillion (in the chart in euros, EUR 7 trillion). In those years, the growth of the USA public debt exceeded the GDP growth 9 times (900%), which is illustrated by Chart 4, comparing the proportion of growth of debt to that of growth of GDP.
The comparison of growth of debt to growth of GDP reveals the UK, as the country that has amassed the most amount of new debt relative to GDP growth, having a new-debt-to-GDP-growth ratio of 9 to 1; in other words UK has taken on 900% new debt relative to the GDP growth. But the picture is grim for all the Western countries surveyed, less so for Germany, while Russia’s debt increase amounts to only a fraction of the GDP growth.
The analysis shows that by these measures Russian economic growth, unlike that of the Western countries, has been comparatively healthy and not debt-driven. Russia has in fact a resoundingly positive ratio by these measures, where GDP growth has exceeded growth of debt by a staggering 14 times (1400%). The figure is astonishing when compared with the Western countries that have been flooded with new debt.
The above figures are adjusted taking into account public debt (general government debt), but the situation is even worse when we consider the effect of private debt on the GDP. New debt of corporations and households have at least doubled private debt of most of the Western countries since year 1996 (Chart 5).
Reviewing these figures, it becomes evident that in reality Western economies have not grown in the past decade, rather the countries have massively inflated their debt load. With these levels of debt reached this cannot continue for long. There is a real risk that the bluff will be called sooner rather than later dropping the Western economies to GDP levels that they can carry without debt leverage. But in that situation they will not be able to serve the accumulated debts leading to catastrophe scenarios.
We have not included Japan and China in the analysis due to the difficulties attributed to finding consistent data for all the input variables. For those countries we have come across problems of fractured data that do not capture all the relevant years; inconsistent data across the samples we looked at; and uncertainties about conversion of the input data into euros. (We are sure that major research houses could overcome such problems, having greater and more sophisticated resources than ours). This exclusion of Japan and China is regrettable as Japan is the country worst affected by the problem of debt-fueled GDP growth, having a public debt to GDP ratio of well above 200%, and would therefore have been very instructive for our purposes.
Japan has been essentially living on debt since the early 1990’s. However, some of the more irrational Western analysts want to take Japan as a prime example to follow, arguing that since Japan has been able to pile up debt for some 25 years now, all the Western countries would be able to do it as well for the foreseeable future. In this they fail to grasp that Japan earlier had the luxury of being the sole country living on such exorbitant levels of debt. Japan has enjoyed great support from the Western countries to be able to continue that practice, not least for political reasons. Another important consideration against the idea that Western countries could continue to accumulate debt is that they have, since the early 1990’s, rapidly lost their economic hegemony in terms of share of world trade and global GDP. I have written about this in a recent article entitled Why the West is Destined to Decline.
The West is fast shrinking in economic significance relative to the rest of the world. This is demonstrated by comparing the GDP of the Western powers as represented by the G7 countries (USA, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy and Canada) with the GDP of emerging powers. As recently as 1990, the combined GDP of the G7 was overwhelming in relation to that of today’s 7 emerging powers: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and South Korea (not necessarily constituting one political block). In 1990, the G7 countries had a combined GDP of USD 14.4 trillion and the emerging 7 had a GDP of USD 2.3, but by 2013 the tables had been turned, as the G7 had USD 32 trillion and the emerging 7 had USD 35 trillion. (Chart 6).
With the challenge of the ever increasing share of world economy belonging to the emerging countries, it becomes clear that the Western countries will not be able to profit sufficiently from world trade to service their debt loads.
For the time being the Western countries benefit from the privilege of having currencies that the rest of the world still largely trusts as reserve currencies. In essence, the USD and the euro enjoy a kind of monopoly status. This is what allows Western countries to gain access to cheap debt and fuel their economies with central bank financing (quantitative easing or “printing of money”). But the risk is that, with the deteriorating debt situation and diminishing share of the global economy, they will forfeit this privilege, perhaps even in the near future. What would follow from this is sharply more expensive financing and inflation, with hyperinflation as the eventual outcome. In this scenario – which I consider inevitable over the next 5 to 10 years – the economies of Western countries would essentially collapse.
The problem is that there is no way of averting this scenario, because the Western powers have lost their competitive advantages as economic powers. Eventually, their economies must shrink to match their resource and population bases. (I have written about this in the article referred to above). But it seems that the ruling Western elites have no intention of facing up to these realities. They will try to keep up a semblance of prosperity with ever new debt, as long as they can. The political parties of the West have been essentially converted into voting machines with one singular concern – that of winning the next elections. To do that they will continue to engage in what amounts to bribing of the electorate – creating new debt that fuels the national economy.
But there is no way to turn back this historical tide. Just as the aristocrat of the old regime eventually squandered his legacy, so will the Western powers. This inevitability of the process is what makes it really scary, because I am afraid that the Western elite might be tempted to bail itself out from this doomsday scenario with a war of epic proportions. We are now truly approaching the Armageddon between the West, with its desperate economic circumstances, and the emerging world powers.
Jon Hellevig is a business consultant and economic and political observer. He is the co-editor and co-author of Putin’s New Russia and several books on philosophy and political and social sciences.
You Have Depression
By Martha Rosenberg | CounterPunch | September 26, 2014
Are you depressed? Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? Are you eating or sleeping too much? Big Pharma hopes so! The push to convince people who are dealing with job, family, relationship and money problems that they actually have “depression” has resulted in almost one in four American women in their 40s and 50s taking antidepressants. Ka-ching.
Psychiatry is often accused of not being “real medicine” because the diseases it diagnoses cannot be proved on blood tests and brain scans. That’s why this month’s announcement of the “first blood test to diagnose major depression in adults” is good news for psychiatrists and Big Pharma. Developed by Northwestern Medicine® scientists, the test, announced this month, “provides the first objective, scientific diagnosis for depression,” says Northwestern.
“The blood test can also predict which therapies would be most successful for patients, and lays the groundwork for one day identifying people who are especially vulnerable to depression — even before they’ve gone through a depressive episode,” gushes a Huffington Post article. No kidding. Treating people “at risk” of heart disease, asthma, osteoporosis, GERD and other conditions is Pharma’s marketing plan. Patients never know if they would have gotten the disorders and will stay on the drugs for decades.
Another Pharma plan to sell antidepressants is “pimping suicide.” Groups like the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention present our national suicide rate as an “antidepressant deficiency” and cite a “stigma” that keeps people away from depression medication–like the 25 percent of older women who are on them right now.
Yet, despite a huge chunk of the population being on antidepressants, suicide is up not down. And in the military, where antidepressant use is rife, suicide is way up, including among those who never deployed. Left out of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s marketing materials is mention of the “black box” warnings on antidepressants that say “Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults…Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior.”
Antidepressants have other risks besides suicide. They can cause weight gain, sexual dysfunction, passivity and general complacency about life. When antidepressants quit working or don’t work to begin with the “depression” is called “treatment resistant” and more drugs are added. Their side effects–and symptoms if a patient tries to discontinue–are often taken as “proof” of the initial depression. The result is people who were never depressed being on the drugs for years.
The truth is antidepressants can increase or diminish the risk of suicide, though both suicide and meds are way up. Another truth is the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention received $100,000 from Eli Lilly in 2011 and $50,000 in 2010 and was led for a time by psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff who was found by Congress to have failed to disclose at least $1.2 million in Pharma income to Emory University.
So, yes, the pills do treat depression–depression of Big Pharma profits.
US wants Guantanamo force-feeding hearing to stay secret
RT | September 29, 2014
Attorneys for the United States government say that an upcoming court hearing concerning the force-feeding practices used on a Guantanamo Bay detainee should be held almost entirely behind closed doors.
The motion, filed by US attorneys on Friday in District Court for the District of Columbia, asks that the preliminary injunction hearing for Gitmo detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab scheduled for early next month be conducted largely in secret over supposed national security concerns.
“As an initial matter, the hearing should be closed in order to prevent any unauthorized disclosure of classified or protected information,” the motion reads in part. “Furthermore, the hearing should be closed because, although portions of the materials in the record in this case are unclassified, conducting an open hearing in this case would impose significant burdens on the parties and the Court.”
Dhiab, a Syrian national, was cleared for release by the US in 2009 but remains in Pentagon custody at the Guantanamo Bay facility where he and dozens others engaged in a hunger strike last year to protest their continued confinement. To avoid having detainees die from malnourishment, the US has routinely subjected those individuals to force-feeding practices that their attorneys and human rights workers alike have raised concerns about.
Earlier this year in May, US District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the Obama administration to temporarily stop force-feeding Dhiab and release his medical records and 34 of 136 videotapes of force-feeding sessions taken between April 9, 2013 and February 19, 2014.
“It’s 12 years late, but it’s fantastic, it’s the first time a federal court has started paying attention to the conditions of confinement in Guantanamo, that’s a huge step,” Clive Stafford Smith, the director of human rights group Reprieve said at the time.
Now as a District Court judge prepares to consider arguments from attorneys representing both the US government and Dhiab, federal attorneys are asking that the public be excluded from key elements of the hearing.
“It’s obvious what is really going on here,” Cori Crider, an attorney for Dhiab with Reprieve, said to The Guardian this week. “The government wants to seal the force-feeding trial for the same reason it is desperate to suppress the tapes of my client being hauled from his cell by the riot squad and force-fed. The truth is just too embarrassing.”
“There is no reason to close the upcoming hearing, other than the government’s intense desire to hide from public scrutiny the evidence we have managed to uncover over the past few months,” co-counsel Jon Eisenberg told POLITICO over the weekend. “This evidence, which consists of videotapes of Mr. Dhiab’s force feedings, his medical records and some key new admissions by military officials, vividly establishes that the force feeding at Guantanamo Bay is the opposite of humane. Its overarching purpose is to cause the hunger strikers a great deal of pain and suffering, in hopes that they are convinced to give up this peaceful protest of their indefinite detention without trial.”
“If, during any part of this hearing, the judge feels there is a need to protect national security information from public disclosure, she can simply close the courtroom for that part of the hearing. That’s how these sorts of cases are commonly handled, and that’s how this one should be handled,” he said.
According to the government, however, opening and closing the hearing because of classified information being presented would “interrupt the natural flow of the hearing, preventing full, frank and uninhibited discussion of the record necessary to conduct the hearing.” As a compromise, acting assistant attorney general Joyce Branda wrote for the government on Friday that “Respondents will create a public version of the transcript of hearing on an expedited basis and, consistent with the practice in many other Guantanamo Bay merits hearings, Respondents agree the parties should begin the hearing by delivering unclassified opening statements in public.”
According to the Guardian, several news organizations, including the British paper, plan to file a motion challenging the government’s request to keep the hearing largely secret.
