The government needs to listen to the electorate. Consecutive public community polls have shown that Australians are very concerned about the ongoing rapid rate of population growth and density of development, food security, and social disorganisation in poorly serviced new suburbs.
Public should have last word on urban expansion and population growth.
Today, 20 June 2012, Jill Quirk, President of the Victorian and Tasmanian branches of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), said that the public should not only 'have their say' on urban expansion and population growth, but they should be listened to and heeded.
She strongly criticised the Baillieu government’s move to further extend the urban growth boundary around Melbourne.
In addition, she pointed out that consecutive public community polls have shown that people are very concerned about the ongoing rapid rate of population growth and density of development that is causing traffic congestion, crowded public transport and environmental pollution in Victoria.
“Extending urban growth further into green wedge is not the solution” she said “as it is creating unsustainable communities without adequate infrastructure and services, heavily dependent on motorised transport. There are also food security concerns as more and more food-growing land is being lost under concrete construction and roads.”
Ms Quirk said
“Planning Minister Mathew Guy has failed to act for future sustainability and instead has responded to pressure from property developers and land-banking speculators who are the drivers of high population growth”.
The history of Victoria's began with historically well-planned open and natural space, in contrast to the cramped living conditions of overpopulated Britain. In recent years large swathes of public land have been sold off and truncated, with Melbourne's Royal Park among the most notable. Green wedges were identified for protection broadly following rivers in Melbourne, but these are being ripped into by government supported developers in defiance of public opinion.
“Earlier governments strongly endorsed the preservation of green wedge areas beyond Melbourne’s fringe as essential for healthy communities” President Quirk said “ but we are now losing those areas to the detriment of future generations who will be left with just ribbon suburbs.
We firmly believe it is time for a referendum on population growth.”
Johnny and Joanie were once the typical post-apocalyptic Stone Age couple. Each day was a tribulation. Minding the kids, fending off predators and raiders from adjacent tribes, hell, just putting food on the table were stressful enough. The versatile Tim Murray reaches out to new-agers everywhere in this article about personal adjustment in a time of advanced oil-depletion.
Our personal lives
Having marital difficulties?
Has the mindless pursuit of game and sustenance got you down?
Has the quest for more and more left you spiritually empty as the environment degrades around you?
Then you need to attend the Barney Rubble School of Sustainable Happiness (BRSSH)!
Johnny and Joanie were once the typical post-apocalyptic Stone Age couple. Each day was a tribulation. Minding the kids, fending off predators and raiders from adjacent tribes, hell, just putting food on the table were stressful enough. But worse was that feeling of spiritual vacuity that comes with the subconscious understanding that one's life in this dog-eat-dog stone-age world is simply not fulfilling. Like all couples in our society, Johnny and Joanie knew in their hearts that they were not happy, but they just couldn't put their finger on the reason. Some said it was "capitalism", some said it was the lack of renewable technology. But no answer seemed satisfactory. So naturally, they blamed each other. To Johnny, the reason that their marriage was falling apart was that Joanie was not "putting out". But for Joanie, it was always "our relationship". Johnny just never seemed to want to find the time to talk about, although, in his eyes it seemed that was ALL Joanie ever wanted to talk about.
At first they considered marriage counselling, but the shaman next door seemed like the very last person who you would want to confide in. The guy seemed like he lived a dream world. Always in delirium, going off in the wild for days of fasting, always seeking some hunger-induced vision, celibate, living alone----what the hell did he know about family dynamics?
Then they heard about “THE BARNEY RUBBLE SCHOOL OF SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS”, and the workshops held by Mark Anielski. It seemed like an option that they couldn't pass up. So they enrolled, and boy were they glad they did! Now they live in connubial bliss as spiritual beings who just happen to live in material world----in it, but not “of” it. Who needs a GDP anyway?
http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=I4948713428353107&pid=1.1
Johnny (to the left), a hunter-gatherer in what used to be Wisconsin (a member of the “Walker” kinship group) testifies as to how the Barney Rubble School of Sustainable Happiness changed his outlook on life.
"I use to measure my happiness on the basis of how many dead carcasses I could bring home each week to the family, or how many skulls I could crack in encounter with a rival tribe, but thanks to the BRSSH, I now know that what is most important in life is to live at a subsistence level and come to enjoy it, knowing that in so doing, I am reducing my footprint so that the hunter gatherers of other tribes have enough to sustain themselves too...voluntary simplicity is what it’s all about, man. You gotta embrace destitution and grab what life doesn’t offer while you can. Ask any self-righteous green: pointless self-sacrifice gives you a big-time dopamine hit---trust me! It’s not about results, it’s about feeling good about yourself.”
http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=I4767624741126759&pid=1.1
Until she enrolled at BRSSH, Joanie (to the right) thought she could only be happy if she was grabbed by the hair and hauled away by a knuckle-dragger who would "bring home the bacon" and allow her to raise a big family in a big cave or hovel befitting her elevated status.
"Maybe it was just the time I was brought up in. As a stone age girl I was expected to fulfill the tribal dream. I was raised to believe that to be happy, I needed a brave man, I needed a caveman. After all, every red-blooded female hunter-gatherer wants someone she can always look up to. Someone who loves her of course, by letting her know that he's the boss. So before attending the Barney Rubble School of Sustainable Happiness, I wanted Johnny to get angry. I wanted Johnny to get mad. I wanted him to give me the biggest lecture I ever had."
But after graduation, she is brimming with sustainable happiness knowing that she her modest lifestyle is permitting other hunter-gatherers the ecological room they need to expand to push the limits and persist in equally miserable circumstances. "As the saying goes", Joanie explained, "if you can't change your situation---in my case, the situation of a living in a post-apocalyptic dead-end world that lacks the non-renewable resources to re-launch civilization---then change your attitude!"
"Before I went to the BRSSH I thought that suckling my kid while I was gathering berries and wood bugs for dinner, and wearing big necklaces of fake sabre tooth tiger teeth was the ticket to self-esteem and contentment. Now I realize that I can gain the same satisfaction by meditation and deep breathing exercises.....and I can do this without taxing the resources that future generations of no-hopers will depend on....people whom we must rely upon to carry the torch for a species that will never again create civilization or accomplish anything of significance....It is this vision of the future which gives me purpose in life."
Culex molestus is thought to have been introduced into southern Australia in the 1940s, hitching a ride into the country with travelling American military personnel. The species is known in other countries for the spread of West Nile virus. Since the 1940s the mosquito has been found in all states except Queensland and the Northern Territory. Where exactly the mosquito came from before arriving in Australia is still a mystery but it is well known from cities in the US and Europe. The mosquito infamously made a meal of Londoners sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz and is often commonly referred to as the London Underground Mosquito. The culex species, although not necessarily Culex molestus, has been implicated in the spread of diverse diseases which include Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Japanese Encephalitis Virus, St. Louis Encephalitis, and Western Equine Encephalitis.
Enigmatic international mosquito species lurks in unexpected places
(19 June 2012) A secretive and exotic species of mosquito found across much of Australia has revealed a new twist on the insect’s famous ‘blood-sucking’ reputation to researchers at the University of Sydney.
Researchers discovered that rather than breeding in ponds, pools or wetlands, the Culex molestus mosquito has adapted to life underground, particularly in septic tanks and disused stormwater pipes.
Exotic underground mosquito that postpones its blood feast
Unlike other mosquitoes, the Culex molestus can also develop their eggs without first requiring a blood meal.
“The curious biological trait of this underground-dwelling mosquito shows that people in cities need to take mosquitoes’ amazing adaptability into account when designing water storage systems,” said Dr Cameron Webb, from University’s Department of Medical Entomology and Westmead Hospital.
Dr Webb is the team leader of a study on the mosquitoes which has been published in this month’s edition of the Journal of Vector Ecology.
“We have spent the last two years chasing the species, which has adapted superbly to life beneath our cities,” Dr Webb said.
“Finding this mosquito isn’t easy. Instead of wandering through pristine wetlands, we were snooping around stormwater drains and other polluted structures,” said Dr Webb.
“However, the toilet blocks in urban parklands were where we really struck gold. The disused septic tanks associated with these structures are where this mosquito is commonly found.”
While the majority of pest mosquitoes require blood to develop their eggs, the female of this species can develop and lay a batch of eggs using nutrients stored earlier in its life cycle.
This phenomenon is known as autogeny and has been documented in a number of mosquitoes.
“The breakthrough with our study is that if this mosquito is offered a blood meal, it won’t bite until its first batch of eggs has been laid. We believe this is the only Australian species to exhibit this behaviour” Dr Webb said.
“Once that first batch of eggs has been laid, they are on the hunt for blood and can be severe nuisance-biting pests.”
It is difficult to know why the mosquito ignores the offer of blood but given the absence of suitable animals to feed on in underground tanks and pipes, this biological adaptation ensures the mosquito can exclusively exploit these habitats not just during the summer but throughout the year.
Mosquito epidemiology-naive Planners and Developers increase risk to community
Planners and Developers need education in the risks of exacerbating mosquito-borne disease when they clear new land, disturb soil and water, and create new water-storage opportunities.
Dr Webb mentioned that in NSW some councils are requiring developers to incorporate mosquito opportunity prevention into their plans.
“One of the major implications of this work is that we must be mindful of the mosquito risks when designing subterranean water storage systems in our cities so we do not create new opportunities for mosquitoes.”
“Ensuring water storage structures are screened or designed to limit the opportunities for mosquito access is crucial. Perhaps more importantly, when assessing the risks of mosquito-borne disease, these underground habitats shouldn’t be ignored,” said Dr Webb.
Risks involved in community's and gardeners' water-saving techniques
The community should be aware of the risks involved in opportunistically conserving water in all sorts of containers as the cost of water rises in Australia. Dr Webb described how, although a well-constructed water tank may be impermeable at first, over time most water-storage becomes vulnerable.
The presence of fish in natural water-sources is a safety factor that is lacking in most artificial storage containers. Fish love mosquito larvae and, together with other predators of mosquitoes in natural environments, keep diseases associated with mosquitoes down.
Culex molestus is thought to have been introduced into southern Australia in the 1940s, hitching a ride into the country with travelling American military personnel. Since then, the mosquito has been found in all states except Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Where exactly the mosquito came from before arriving in Australia is still a mystery but it is well known from cities in the US and Europe. The mosquito infamously made a meal of Londoners sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz and is often commonly referred to as the London Underground Mosquito.
“Mosquitoes have adapted to a wide range of ecological niches, from coastal rock pools to alpine snowmelt pools. Advancing our understanding of how mosquitoes adapt to their habitats will improve the ways we manage their pest and public health impacts,” Dr Webb said.
Human disease implications of culex molestus habits
I asked Dr Cameron Webb whether there had been any epidemiological reasons for studing Culex molestus.
Dr Webb said that the species belongs to a group internationally known to be important for spreading diseases like West Nile Virus. The species has not been studied well in Australia. Recent study has focused on the species with the aim of filling a gap in our knowledge in case of any problems in the future.
How does culex molestus get into closed systems like disused underground pipes and septic tanks? Do they seep in as 'wrigglers' or do they find other ways in?
Although these underground spaces appear closed to us, they presumably have all kinds of fissures and small openings, particularly with earth movement over time.
"We should not underestimate how clever they are," says Dr Cameron Webb.
There are few if any marine or aqueous environments that don't have their mosquito. Wherever a mosquito can find a toe-hold, it is likely to establish. In the case of Culex molestus lack of fish and other predators in its underground lairs is an obvious advantage.
Some mosquitoes require sunlight to dry their chitinous wings before they can fly. Culex molestus, which spends much of its life underground, must have found some way to do without sunlight in this process. There is a lot we still do not know about this mosquito and other mosquitoes.
There are about 300 species of mosquito in Australia.
The culex species, although not necessarily Culex molestuss, has been implicated in the spread of diverse diseases which include Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Japanese Encephalitis Virus, St. Louis Encephalitis, and Western Equine Encephalitis.
With climate change and expected warming of south eastern states of Australia, there is also a risk of in-migration of tropical mosquitoes and their diseases, including those that carry dengue fever (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus and malaria (notably the anopheles mosquito).
The contributing authors on the paper are Nur Faeza Abu Kassim and Professor Richard Russell from the Department of Medical Entomology at the University of Sydney.
ACT Parks and Conservation Service director Daniel Iglesias said these kangaroo "culls" would only occur ''every now and then'' to bring the number of kangaroos down to a sustainable level to vaccinate to control fertility.
These ecologists are playing "god" and obviously don't trust Nature, or natural evolutionary/environmental methods to stop "over abundant" native kangaroos. TAMS Parks and Conservation director Daniel Iglesias said the cull would ensure kangaroos level are kept to an appropriate level and would protect threatened ecosystems and other animals.
ACT Parks and Conservation Service director Daniel Iglesias said these kangaroo "culls" would only occur ''every now and then'' to bring the number of kangaroos down to a sustainable level to vaccinate to control fertility.
These ecologists are playing "god" and obviously don't trust Nature, or natural evolutionary/environmental principles, to limit "over abundant" native kangaroos. TAMS Parks and Conservation director Daniel Iglesias said the cull would ensure kangaroos level are kept to an "appropriate level" and would protect threatened ecosystems and other animals. It assumes that kangaroos are excluded from ecosystems!
What are "sustainable" or an "appropriate level" except for esoterical words that are flexible, covering with "greenwashing" implications? It's also a word used to justify native animal massacres. What real ecological evidence is there of numbers being not "sustainable"? None have been revealed, and with the ignorance of most of Canberra's population, they will accept the status quo, from a government-employed "expert".
An anti-fertility drug in bait form could be available in the next 10 years, but the ACT government will still use firearms to help control the abundance of eastern greys in Canberra. Research officer Claire Wimpenny said the most recent trial had shown positive indications for a successful vaccination. It's ironical that the real environmental threats don't come from wildlife, but urban expansion and human population growth.
Highly skilled marksmen?
Activists found kangaroos with bullet wounds to their bodies, contrary to government policy, which states that the animals must be shot in the head.
TAMS Parks and Conservation director Daniel Iglesias said the government employed "highly skilled" marksmen who were able to hit their targets. With carcasses quickly disposed of, and little transparency, the activists are the only source of reliable information.
However, clean head-shots would require almost Olympic standard skill as kangaroos are likely to be moving, and they have small heads.
Mr Iglesias said the RSPCA approved of using firearms to prevent the "over population" of kangaroos. It remains qualitative and subjective, and without sound ecological support or empirical evidence.
(brochure - thanks to Sylvia Raye)
Mulligans Flat- long history of cattle grazing
Mulligans Flat contains areas of native grassland which are of interest as south-east Australia has lost 99.5% of its lowland native grasslands in the last two hundred years. Native grassland areas were attractive to European farmers for grazing sheep and cattle, consequently, most of these grassland areas have been changed by grazing and pasture improvement. Mulligans Flat has retained areas dominated by both kangaroo and wallaby grass as well as open forest and woodland areas and it has few introduced grasses or weeds. The reserve was included in Canberra Nature Park in 1994.
The Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary encloses over 400 hectares of critically endangered yellow box-red gum grassy woodland. The aim of the sanctuary is to restore the woodlands to pre-European condition by removing feral animals including foxes, cats, hares and rabbits and reintroducing locally extinct species. Just how do kangaroos conflict with this aim, rounded together with "feral" animals, considering they are part of the pre-European ecology? There still hasn't been time for the ecological systems to fully restore from 200 years of destructive cattle grazing, and it's all to easy to use kangaroos as scapegoats for Nature's struggle to restore the systems to pre-European pristine levels.
Mulligan's Flat with Kangaroo group
Density estimates of 1.42 kangaroos per hectare were made in Mulligans Flat in August/September 2008. This doesn't sound like an "overpopulation"! Kangaroo numbers will naturally fluctuate according to the seasons, and this so-called, "humane", surgical removal and disposal of native kangaroos from Nature parks is based on questionable, self-serving arguments.
Our native symbols - bloodied, dead and buried
The grisly photos from a dug-up mass grave show bloodied corpses clutching hairless joeys, all victims of Canberra's barbaric bureaucratic "management" of Australia's iconic marsupials.
The participation and death of Spanish mercenaries in armed actions in Syria was revealed by local media today. By Claudie Gomez. Originally published on Global Research on 16 June 2012.
The Syrian news agency SANA quoted reports from the Spanish dailies El Pais and El Mundo, which reported the death of the first Spanish terrorist in this country.
Both publications indicated that Spanish citizen Rachid Hussain Mohamed or Rachid Wahbi, born in Ceuta 32 years ago, who had worked as a taxi driver, died somewhere in Syria.
The circumstances of his death are unknown. Certainly, another two residents from Ceuta, Mustafa Mohamed Abselam, alias "Tafo" and Mustafa Mohamed Layachi, alias "Piti", traveled to Syria through Turkey to join the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, said El Mundo.
It added that one of them is still missing and it was the third one who called to find out what had happened to his partners and raise the alarm.
For its part, El Pais assured that authorities are investigating how they were recruited, who paid for their trip, which route they followed and whether they coordinated with young Moroccans from Castillejos and Tetouan from which at least a dozen would-be jihadists also departed. It also added that all apparently travelled through the eastern provinces of Turkey, where the militia of the so-called Syrian Free Army (ESL) have a wide margin in which to maneuver.
Way back in 1960s America, a series of three major political assassinations marked the end of a rich and optimistic period with lower income differences, where the imminent threat of nuclear war was thrice averted. Controversy surrounds each assassination, implicating a shadowy military industrial complex and the CIA operating to undermine democracy and promote war and inequality. On Nov 22 1963 US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. One of many consequences was the continuation and escalation of the Vietnam war. In April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, the US's most famous black leader, was assassinated in Memphis. On June 5, 1968 John F. Kennedy's brother, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles. For each of these assassinations a lone gunman was officially held responsible. In 1999, UK barrister William Pepper,obtained ajury verdict (PDF - 3.2MB) that the US armed forces and police had, in fact, conspired to murder Dr. Martin Luther King. Pepper now claims to have new evidence which he says proves 68 year old Christian Palestinian, Sihran Bishara Sirhan, could not be guilty of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on 5 June 1968, for which Sirhan has, so far, served 44 years. A new analysis of acoustic evidence shows that 13 shots were fired the night of the assassination, whilst Sirhan Sirhan only fired eight in a hypnotic state, including six with the hand holding the gun restrained and pointed beneath the table. In 2006 The Guardian published Shane O'Sullivan's investigation, which makes similar claims. Barrister Pepper is now seeking a re-trial.
The shot that killed Robert Francis Kennedy was fired from behind his ear and no more than one inch away, whilst Sirhan was at all times in front of Bobby Kennedy.
Had Bobby Kennedy lived, he would have won office. As president, in addition to resuming his late brother's good work domestically and internationally, he intended to conduct a new and more thorough investigation into the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK).
Bobby Kennedy, however, gave no outward indication that he did not accept the findings of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had murdered John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He failed even to offer public support to attorney Jim Garrison, who was at the time filing charges against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for his alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. (Garrison's very convincing analysis of the evidence is minutely explored in Oliver Stone's remarkable movie JFK (1991).) Robert Kennedy clearly judged that his chances of gaining the office of President would have been harmed, rather than helped, by his giving public support to Garrison's inquiry.
More thought and considered discussion with his friends might have helped Robert Kennedy to see that his reasoning in this was flawed. Had he come out and publicly endorsed Jim Garrison's prosecution, that prosecution would have gained a much higher profile. With a higher profile, it would almost certainly have achieved a lot more than it did. Results would have included a public much more knowledgeable of the suspicious circumstances surrounding JFK's murder. With a well-informed public, it would not have been possible for Bobby's murderers to cover their tracks in the way that they subsequently did. Without that possibility, perhaps they would not have carried out Bobby's assassination.
Why didn't Robert Kennedy pursue the course of action that would almost certainly have saved his own life and which should have been obvious to him? Did someone working for his enemies succeed in gaining Robert's trust and the trust of those around him, then use that influence to dissuade Robert from questioning the Warren Commission's findings? (The Warren Commission's findings underpinned the official explanation of the lone gunman as President Kennedy's assassin, which Oliver Stone's dramatisation of Jim Garrison's investigation destroys.)
Historians should pursue this line of inquiry to determine whether or not a person or persons close to him influenced Robert Kennedy to remain publicly silent about his lack of confidence in the Warren Commission's lone gunman findings. This has not happened, to my knowledge, to date.
What is the importance of these cases for the world, so many years later?
With Jim Garrison's case against the lone gunman theory of President Kennedy's assassination and Barrister Pepper's successful jury verdict that conspiracy was involved in Martin Luther King's assassination, if conspiracy can also be shown in Robert Kennedy's assassination, then this would point to the existence of organised forces in the US government that prevent candidates they don't like from holding office. Such a finding would call all US governments since JFK's assassination into question. If exposed by further inquiry, such forces would be likely to represent the interests of powerful people who are behind the resource wars of today, part of the warlike military-industrial complex which President Eisenhower's warned was rising in his farewell Presidential address. [See on you-tube].
This introduction precedes the fascinating forensic discussion below, which is about why Sirhan Sirhan could not have killed Robert Kennedy.
The Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!
by Frank Morales, June 16, 2012 republished from Global Research
This past March 19th Sirhan Bishara Sirhan turned 68. A Jordanian Christian convicted of the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the night of June 5th 1968, Sirhan has spent the last 44 years behind bars, currently at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, framed for a crime he did not commit.
A quick Google search this past week is revealing: One finds very little news items memorializing the assassination or the circumstances surrounding the murder of the presumptive next President of the United States, amounting to a virtual amnesia in the public mind regarding the death of RFK, friend and associate of Martin Luther King Jr., also murdered a few months earlier.
But what is even more deeply ironic is that the purported assassin of RFK, Sirhan Sirhan, doesn't remember being there either. [1]]
"I was told by my attorney ... that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile ... (but) I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy."
Sirhan stated this on August 9th in 1997 in "Exhibit J. Declaration of Sirhan Sirhan," one of number of exhibits, declarations and briefs recently submitted to a California court that definitively show that Sirhan was set up and framed for the murder of Senator Kennedy, a manipulated and coerced patsy in the assassination of a popular leader who like his brother John, assassinated in 1963, was perceived as a threat to the structures of power in America.
A little more than a year ago, on April 23, 2011, attorneys Dr. William Pepper and his associate, Laurie Dusek, filed a 58 page supplementary brief with the Honorable Andrew J. Wistrich, United States Magistrate Judge, US District Court, Central District of California, "requesting relief" in behalf of Sirhan. In the brief, they stated that, "petitioner requests that this court set this matter down for an evidentiary hearing and issue a writ of habeas corpus." In other words, they are seeking a new and thorough review of all the evidence in the case, including new and expository testimony that threatens to topple the official story. Recently, they intensified their argument, setting forth proof of a "fraud on the court" involving the documented substitution of critical evidence. According to Pepper, "they put fabricated evidence into court before the judge and jury ... for the first time in 43 years of this case, we think we have the evidence to set this conviction aside."
Given that the extensive testimony, which as we shall see, sets forth a convincing case for Sirhan's innocence, it will be hard if not impossible for Magistrate Wistrich not to grant such a hearing. But we know better don't we! That is why this is being written, to inform you, the American people, that at this moment, as you read this, in a courthouse in the Central District of California sits evidence which tends towards proving the innocence of Sirhan and more critically, as to the means by which RFK was murdered, who was involved, and the need for justice in this case. Hence, we cannot and must not rest. It is time to set Sirhan free and bring to justice the real "perpe-traitors" of the crime in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
To refresh our collective memory: Robert Kennedy, moments after having won the 1968 California Presidential primary on night of June 5th 1968, concluded his victory speech on the stage in the Embassy Room of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. About midnight, he and his entourage left the stage to the joyous applause of his supporters and was led to the hotel pantry area where he proceeded to greet the staff workers and others there.
Suddenly shots rang out in the densely populated, closed in area surrounding the Senator and in the blink of an eye the presumed heir to the Presidency, a candidate committed to peace, civil rights and social justice, was lying mortally wounded on the pantry floor. With chaos and confusion all around, a young man, Sirhan Sirhan was seized, with smoking gun in hand, some 3-7 feet in front of the wounded Senator, wrestled to the ground while Kennedy lay bleeding. Rushed out of the hotel to a nearby hospital, RFK was pronounced dead at 1:44 PM the next day.
"This is to certify that the autopsy on the body of Senator Robert F. Kennedy was performed at The Hospital of the Good Samaritan, Los Angeles, California, by the staff of the Department of Chief Medical Examiner-Coronor on June 6, 1968." According to Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, MD, "from the anatomic findings and pertinent history, I ascribe the death to: Gunshot wound of the right mastoid, penetrating brain." The "right mastoid" is the bony bump just behind and slightly above the level of your right earlobe. So, Robert Kennedy was killed, according to the official autopsy report, by a gunshot would to the brain, fired from the rear, behind the right ear.
According to his declaration ("exhibit G") in the case, submitted in October of 2010, Dr. Cyril M. Wecht, M.D., J.D., a licensed medical doctor and medical examiner, who has "personally conducted approximately 17,000 autopsies and reviewed or supervised 36,000 other autopsies," and who having consulted with Dr. Noguchi on the case, was and is "extremely familiar with the autopsy report regarding Senator Kennedy," "the physical evidence, which is described in detail in his report, confirms that Senator Kennedy died of a gunshot wound which entered Senator Kennedy's head through the mastoid bone behind his right ear at point blank range, that is, at a maximum of one to one and one half inches, and moving forward." And further, "this can be stated with certainty because of the presence of powder burns at the entrance point."
Dr. Robert K. Joling, a licensed attorney for over 60 years, authorized to practice before the Supreme Court of Wisconsin and the Supreme Court of the United States of America, past president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, and member of the board of the Forensic Science Foundation for 8 years, concludes in his October 25, 2010 declaration ("Exhibit A"), that the "fatal bullet was fired from a distance of approximately 1and 1/2 inches to the rear of the Senator's right earlobe and approximately 1/4 inch from his skull."
So, to sum up, according to both Wecht and Joling, two well credentialed doctors, who affirmed Dr. Noguchi's extensive and highly competent autopsy, Robert Kennedy was murdered by someone standing behind the Senator and to his right, shot from behind, from behind and up close, fatally, behind the right ear.
Now the problem with this fact is that it tends to undermine the official version of events, the accepted paradigm of the lone assassin. The raging contradiction here regarding the official story of RFKs murder is that Pepper and Dusek offer the sworn testimony of "12 RFK shooting witnesses establishing that Sirhan Sirhan was in front of U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy when Sirhan fired his gunshots in the pantry," making it impossible for Sirhan to have fired the fatal shot.
Edward Minasian, statement to LAPD, June 5, 1968:
A: "... some one reached around from the ... from the front, it would be to the Senators left as he was facing him, and ... I personally saw two shots fired ... he came running -- he came running towards the Senator." Q: "From what -- from where?" A: "From in front of us. From the direction in which we were walking."
Lisa Urso, LAPD statement, June 27, 1968:
" ...she observed the Senator approaching. She stopped approximately in the middle of the room in the area between the first and second table and stood watching the Senator shaking hands with Hotel employees ... then she recalled a male enter her field of vision approximately three to four feet from her (between her and the Senator) about three to four feet to her left. She was looking at what would be the right rear of this person. She observed this person take his right hand, move it across his body in the area of his waist and then move his hand back across his body, extend his arm in an upward position and at this time she observed the gun and the flash of the shot. She heard three shots as she recalled ..."
Jack Gallivan's LAPD statement, June 5, 1968:
A: "I was ahead of the Senator and the immediate party and going ahead of them with my hand raised to direct the party to the press room. They were going from the big Embassy Room to another room that had been set aside for the print media, and they were going through the kitchen. I was, at the time of the shooting, ahead of the party with the suspect between me and the party ..."
Martin Patrusky, FBI statement, June 7, 1968:
"After Senator Kennedy shook hands with Juan Romero I noticed a man pushing his way towards Senator Kennedy and Karl Uecker. I thought this man was going to shake hands with Senator Kennedy. He pushed himself around to the right of Karl Uecker. This man leaned around toward the left side of Uecker's body and extended his hand toward Senator Kennedy ... I heard a sound like that of a firecracker."
Juan Romero's FBI statement June 7, 1968:
"... I noticed a man who was to my left and who was smiling and who appeared to be reaching over someone in an effort to shake Senator Kennedy's hand. At about the same time I heard gunfire and I noticed that this individual was holding a gun in his hand. ... and that the gun was approximately one yard from Senator' Kennedy's head ..."
Valerie Schulte, trial testimony, February 18, 1969:
Q: "Where did you see the arm of the gun, please?" A; "Approximately here. I can't say exactly with reference to here, but approximately five yards from me, approximately three yards from the Senator."
Karl Uecker, LAPD statement, June 5, 1968:
"...Uecker was holding Kennedy's hand ... Kennedy had stopped to shake hands with a dishwasher ... was slightly to right and in front of Kennedy. Saw suspect standing directly in front of him holding gun in right hand. Fired two or three times at Kennedy ..."
Reporter Pete Hamill, LAPD statement, October 9, 1968:
"The suspect was standing approximately four to six feet from the Senator ... his right arm was extended with the gun in his hand. Witness estimated the gun was about two feet from the Senator."
Boris Yaro, FBI statement, June 7, 1968:
" ... the senator was backing up and putting both of his hands and arms in front of him in what would be best described as a protective effort. The suspect appeared to be lunging at the senator."
Richard Aubrey, LAPD statement, June 5, 1968:
A: "When I thought about the firecrackers, I wanted, you know, and I turned around this way to my right." Q: "And how far would you say he was from you?" A: "Oh, I don't know. Again, I had -- " Q: "Was he between you and Kennedy?" A: "When I looked back at first -- oh yes." Q: "He was between you and - you say he was six or seven feet ahead of the Senator and the newsmen?" A: "Yes."
Frank Burns, FBI statement, June 12, 1968:
"...The one clear impression I have is of an extended arm holding a gun. This arm appeared to be next to the serving table and the gun would be about even with the from edge of the serving table."
And finally, Nina Rhodes-Hughes, whose July 1968, FBI statement reads as follows: "She had just left the entrance to the kitchen and noticed the Senator shaking hands ... when she suddenly heard a sound like a firecracker and she saw a red-like flash three to four feet from the left of the Senator's head."
That was then. This past April 30, in an exclusive interview with CNN, 78 year old Nina Rhodes Hughes said she heard not one, but two guns firing during the 1968 shooting, and more than 8 shots (the maximum Sirhan's gun held), and that the FBI had extensively altered her account of the crime. "What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right." In the eye-opening interview, Rhodes-Hughes reported that part of her view of Sirhan was obstructed and consequently she could not see the gun in his hand, but she said that as soon as she caught sight of Sirhan, she then heard more shots coming from somewhere past her right side and near Kennedy. She was hearing "much more rapid fire" than she initially had heard.
Attorney Pepper contends that the FBI misrepresented Rhodes-Hughes' eyewitness account and that she actually had heard a total of 12 to 14 shots fired. "She identified fifteen errors including the FBI alteration which quoted her as hearing only eight shots, which she explicitly denied was what she had told them." She believes senior FBI officials altered statements she made to "conform with what they wanted the public to believe, period." "The truth has got to be told. No more cover-ups." RFK assassination witness tells CNN: There was a second shooter
Again, to sum up, twelve witnesses locate Sirhan in the pantry, with a smoking gun, but in a position from which he could not have inflicted the fatal wound to Senator Kennedy, nor any of the three shots that hit the Senator, which were, according to Dr. Noguchi's autopsy, all from the rear of Kennedy, the fatal shot from no further than an inch or less! Also, many witnesses in the pantry recall more than 8 shots fired. Logically then, we are forced to posit a possible second shooter, and ask if there is any other evidence, beyond witness recollection, of a second gunman involved in the assassination, a second gun?
"In the case of the killing of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, I was able to determine the existence of two firearms being discharged during the shooting, verified through the identification of unique resonant frequency characteristics present in several -- but not all -- recorded gunshots." And further, "I confirmed that my analysis revealed; that 13 shots, or more, were fired in the pantry during that brief five second period of time; that five of those shots were fired from a west-to-east direction, opposite to the direction that witness accounts report as the direction in which Sirhan was firing (east--to-west); and that in two instances within those five seconds there were virtually simultaneous, or ?double' shots (shot numbers 3-4 and 7-8)." The "double shot ... clearly evidences that two guns were fired, given that Sirhan's weapon type cannot be fired anywhere near rapidly enough to account for the shot pairs -double shots- occurring as they do."
This according to Philip Van Praag, in his November 14th 2011 "declaration" in support of a new evidentiary hearing for Sirhan. Van Praag is extensively qualified in the area of audio engineering and computer technology, having studied at California Western University (MS & BS Engineering), DeVry University (AAS) and other institutions, working for Ampex Corporation (Senior Instructor in the commercial Audio / Visual Products Division), Audio Consultants (Technical Services Manager) for Hughes Aircraft Company, and other audio/computer positions at places like Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories. "I also gained considerable experience from utilizing my personal audio / video equipment test facility, equipped with hundreds of audio related items representative of analog magnetic and digital recording methods, formats. technologies, test equipment and characterization capabilities from the inception of magnetic tape recoding in the 1940's."
In 2005, Brad Johnson, a senior international news writer with CNN, (co-author of recent Rhodes-Hughes interview) contacted Van Praag, having read Van Praag's 1997 "Evolution of the Audio Recorder." Johnson asked if he (Van Praag) was familiar with the so-called "Pruszynski Tape," an audiotape that was recorded at the Ambassador Hotel by free-lance newspaper reporter Stanislaw Pruszynski and is the only known soundtrack of the assassination. According to Van Praag, Johnson asked that he "examine an audio cassette copy from (and created by) the California State Archives (CSA) that contained the content of Pruszynski's recording made at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California during the June 5th shooting that resulted in the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy."
He agreed to do so and subsequently, "on or around August 6, 2005, I began to examine the sounds contained within the Pruszynski recording ... and in light of the discoveries comprising my findings, together with the Spangenberger-verified analysis, in my opinion the conclusion is inescapable that there was a second gun fired by a second shooter during the shooting that resulted in the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and that the five shots from the second gun were fired in a direction opposite the direction in which Sirhan fired."
So, numerous shots fired, people screaming, mass hysteria, and Sirhan himself, gun in hand, firing from a position inconsistent with Kennedy's wounds, who doesn't quite remember being there. How is that possible? Is it conceivable that he was manipulated to perform such an action contrary to his nature and one that he would be unable, after all these years, to clearly recall? Is this sort of mind control possible?
"Is it possible to gain control of a person's mind to the extent that that person will unknowingly commit criminal or other antisocial acts, and then have amnesia for those acts? This is the topic I will address in my Declaration."
"Exhibit G Declaration of Alan W. Scheflin", an Exhibit to the Petitioner's Sur-Reply submitted to the Court on February, 22, 2012, concludes, "that it is possible, with a small select group of individuals, to influence the mind and behavior beyond legally and ethically permissible limits." And although "it is uncomfortable to accept the idea that the human mind could be so malleable ... I firmly believe, it s more uncomfortable to deny it. The idea of a hypnotically programmed agent may be ?fantastic' ... but it is not untrue."
Alan Scheflin is currently a Professor of Law, Santa Clara University Law School. He notes in his "declaration" that "my specialty area is Law and Psychiatry. In addition to law degrees, I also have a degree in Counseling Psychology." Scheflin has received multiple awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis, and is the only lawyer ever named as a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. As the Past President and continuing Executive Board member of the International Cultic Studies Association, "I have for three decades been in communication with leading experts from around the world on brainwashing and extreme social influence."
"My research since the 1960s has focused on the extreme limits on human influence, and particularly on the use of hypnosis and other social influence techniques to alter the way people think and act. As part of this work, I have read over 10,000 pages of declassified Central Intelligence Agency documents on the mind and behavior control programs run by the Agency beginning in the late 1940s. I personally know several of the leading researchers who participated in these programs." "I have qualified as an expert in court on the ?Manchurian Candidate' concept, and I have qualified in court as an expert in brainwashing, mind control and the anti-social uses of hypnosis."
"Scientists, since at least the 1880s, have considered the mind as a territory to be conquered. American military and intelligence agencies have spent millions of dollars since the last half of the twentieth century conducting secret experiments whose express purpose it was to obtain dominance over the human mind." "As I got to know hypnosis experts in the United States and from around the world, I learned that the public image of hypnosis as benign was a cautionary position, though not an accurate position. In private, many of these experts tell a different story. Indeed, many experts, including myself, have appeared as consultants or experts in court cases involving the antisocial use of hypnosis ... At hypnosis conferences the topic of the dark side of hypnosis is virtually never discussed in a formal presentation."
"For those hypnosis specialists who believe that hypnosis can only be used for good, A TOP SECRET CIA Report contradicts this position: ?Frankly, I now mistrust much of what is written by academic experts on hypnotism. Party this is because many of them appear to have generalized from a very few cases; partly because much of their cautious pessimism is contradicted by Agency experiments; but more particularly because I personally have witnessed behavior responses which respected experts have said are impossible to obtain.' [CIA Report, Hypnotism and Covert Operations 1955]."
Finally, Scheflin concludes by stating that, "the creation of a hypnotically programmed assassin or patsy (distracter) is possible only with a very small percentage of people who fall within the category of ?high hypnotizables.' Sirhan Sirhan, based upon Dr. Daniel Brown's extensive psychological testing and interviews with him, meets the criteria for an ideal subject for this extreme form of mental manipulation."
The "Declaration of Dr. Daniel Brown," also filed as an Exhibit to the February 22, 2012 submission, states that, "I am an Associate Clinical Professor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School at the Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center. In the course of my professional career I have been qualified as an expert witness on psychological assessment, memory, memory for trauma, and the effects of suggestive influence in numerous state and federal jurisdictions I have never been disqualified. I am the senior author of a textbook, Memory, Trauma Treatment and the Law (Norton, 1999) which was the recipient of awards from 7 professional societies including the Manfred Guttmacher award for the ?outstanding contribution to forensic psychiatry' given jointly by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law. I also served as an expert witness and consultant on three occasions for the prosecution at the International War Crimes Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands."
"I have written four books on hypnosis, including a standard textbook, Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (Erlbaum, 1986, co-authored with Erika Fromm). I also wrote the current guidelines on forensic interviewing with hypnosis, which are in the current edition of The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry. It is with these qualifications that I agreed to interview Mr. Sirhan B. Sirhan around his memory for the events leading up to and the evening of the assassination of Senattor Robert F. Kennedy."
"In May, 2008, I was instructed by the attorney for Mr. Sirhan B. Sirhan, William F. Pepper, to begin a series of interviews with Mr. Sirhan. One purpose of the interviews was to conduct a detailed forensic psychological assessment of Mr. Sirhan regarding his mental status. The second purpose of the interview was to allow Mr. Sirhan the opportunity to develop a more complete memory, in a non-suggestive context, for the events leading up to and of the night of the assassination. The central question Attorney Pepper asked me to render an expert opinion about is whether or not Mr. Sirhan was a subject of coercive suggestive influence that rendered his behavior at the time of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy involuntary and also made him amnesic for his behavior and role in the assassination."
"Memory exploration consisted of a systematic step-wise approach according to current guidelines for non-suggestive interviewing. These steps included repeated free recall, followed by repeated recall plus context reinstatement (a procedure known as the Cognitive Interview), followed by a focused interview with non-suggestive, open ended prompt questions, and lastly followed by free recall under hypnosis."
Spending "over 60 hours interviewing and testing Mr. Sirhan," reading everything on the case, including FBI files, interviewing witnesses, administering myriad psychological tests, questionnaires, scales etc., Dr. Brown, "under penalty of perjury," arrived at a startling conclusion; that "Mr. Sirhan did not act under his own volition and knowledge or intention at the time of the assassination and is not responsible for actions coerced and/or carried out by others, and further that the system of mind control which was imposed upon him has also made it impossible for him to recall under hypnosis or consciously, many critical details of actions and events leading up to and at the time of the shooting in the pantry of the Ambassador hotel."
"It is an indisputed fact that Mr. Sirhan fired a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination," Dr. Brown states. "The evidence revealed by my extensive interviews substantiates the less refined allegation that he engaged in this activity in response to a cue given by another party, and thus compels the conclusion that his firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control. I am convinced that Mr. Sirhan legitimately recalled a flashback to shoot at target circles at a firing range in response to the port-hypnotic touch cue and did not have the knowledge, or intention, to shoot a human being, let alone Senator Kennedy. Even after 40 years Mr. Sirhan still is confused when told by others that he shot Senator Kennedy."
On the day and evening of the assassination, "Mr. Sirhan's going to the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination was not consciously planned. Mr. Sirhan did not know and could not have known that Senator Kennedy was going to pass through the kitchen area. Mr. Sirhan was led to the kitchen area by a woman after that same woman had received directions from an official at the event. Mr. Sirhan did not go with the intent to shoot Senator Kennedy, but did respond to a specific hypnotic cue given to him by that woman to enter ?range mode,' during which Mr. Sirhan automatically and involuntarily responded with a ?flashback' that he was shooting at a firing range at circle targets. At the time Mr. Sirhan did not know that he was shooting at people nor did he know that he was shooting at Senator Kennedy."
"Mr. Sirhan freely recalled going to the gun range during the day of the assassination." Arriving at the Ambassador somewhat by chance later that evening, looking for a party, according to Brown, Mr. Sirhan recalled: ?Now I'm going to another area ... I don't know the name ... Later I heard it was the Embassy Room ... it's like a huge hallway ... tremendous lights ... no tables ... the brightness ... a lot of people ... I'm getting tired... I wasn't expecting this ... It's getting hot ... very hot ... I want to get a drink. A make-shift bar area ... I see a bartender... a white smock... he looked Latin ... we just nodded ... I told him what I wanted ... it's like I have a relationship with this guy ... Tom Collins ... I drink it while I'm walking around ... this bartender ... he wasn't looking for a sale ... he wasn't talkative ... it is like he's communicating with gestures ... a nod after I paid for it."
"I'm still looking around ... he didn't make it (the drink) right in front of me ... he made it and brought it over ... after that I came back again ... it was like a routine between us ... like I'm more familiar ... like I'm a regular customer of his ... I don't remember seeing him before ... it seemed like he was a professional ... he never initiated a conversation but after a second time it was like there was a communication between us ... he knew what I wanted ... it's hard to figure out if he's targeting me or I'm targeting him ... I don't remember him saying anything like ?shoot Kennedy' or anything like that ... he's just very quiet ... I begin to get tired ... I want to go home ... I've seen the party."
Dr. Brown:
"It is noticeable that at this point in time Mr. Sirhan can only think about going home. Again, his expressed desire to leave the party and go home does not suggest the motivation of an assassin ready to kill a presidential candidate shortly thereafter."
And Sirhan tried to go home. "I get in the car ... I couldn't think about driving the car ... it was late ... I sit in the car ... I couldn't make myself drive it ... There was no way I could drive the car ... I don't want to chance it ... I wanted to sleep ... I wanted to sleep ... sleep ... sleep ... sleep. Then I go back to the hotel to get some coffee."
According to Brown, "Mr. Sirhan recalled re-tracing his steps to the same bar. When Mr. Sirhan arrived at the bar he asked the same bartender for coffee. The bartender told him that there was no coffee at the bar. An attractive woman with a polka dot dress was sitting at the bar talking to the bartender. She over-heard Sirhan asking for coffee and she said that she knew where coffee was. The woman in the polka dot dress then took Sirhan by the hand and led him to the ante-room behind the stage where Senator Kennedy was speaking." There they found some coffee at which point, Sirhan begins to feel attracted to her ("it was my job to woo her") when all of a sudden, according to Brown, "they are interrupted by an official with a suit and clip board. This official tells them that they cannot stay in the anteroom for security reasons, and the official then tells the girl in the polka dot dress to go to the kitchen."
"All of a sudden they tell us, we have to move. This guy comes by wearing a suit ... darkish hair ... a big full face ... seems like he was in charge ... he wasn't wearing any uniform ... wearing a suit ... she acknowledges his instruction ... he motions towards the pantry. The man said, ?you guys can go back in this room.' I followed her. She led ... I was a little like a puppy after her. I wanted to go back to the mariache band ... but she went straight to the pantry area ... with my being so attracted to her I was just glued to her."
Sirhan was clueless, possibly drugged. "She" and the "official" led him to the very place that the assassination was to occur. Sirhan, by this point enamored with her, recalled:
"I am trying to figure out how I'm going to have her ... All of a sudden she's looking over my head toward an area ... Then she taps me or pinches me ... It is startling ... I thought she did it with her fingernails ... like a wake-up ... it snapped me out of my doldrums ... yet, I'm still sleepy ... She points back over my head ... She says, ?Look, look, look.' I turned around ... I don't know what happened after that ... She spun me around and turned my body around ... She was directing my attention to the rear ... Way back... There are people coming back through the doors ... I am puzzled about what she is directing me to ... It didn't seem relevant to me ... Some people started streaming in ... She kept motioning toward the back ... then all of a sudden she gets more animated ... She put her arm on my shoulder."
"I think she had her hand on me ... Then I was at the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun ... there was this target like a flashback to the target range ... I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let lone Bobby Kennedy ... [Brown: Recall your state of mind] My mental state was like I was drunk and sleepy ... maybe the girl had something to do with it ...I was like at the range again ... [What did the targets look like?] Circles. Circles... It was like I was at the range again ...I think I shot one or two shots ... Then I snapped out of it and thought ?I'm not at the range' ...Then, ?What is going on?' Then they started grabbing me ... I'm thinking, ?the range, the range, the range.' Then everything gets blurry ...after that first or second shot ... that was the end of it ... It was the wrong place for the gun to be there ... I thought it was the range ... they broke my finger ... [What happens next?] Next thing I remember I was being choked and man-handled, I didn't know what was going on ... later when I saw the female judge I knew that Bobby Kennedy was shot and I was the shooter, but it doesn't come into my memory."
That's because he was in "range mode." According to Dr. Brown, "while interviewing Mr. Sirhan I, along with attorney Dusek, directly observed Mr. Sirhan spontaneously switch into ?range mode' on several occasions, where upon Mr. Sirhan automatically took his firing stance, and in an uncharacteristic robot-like voice described shooting at vital organs. Following brief re-enactments of ?range mode' Mr. Sirhan remained completely amnesic for the behavior."
Finally, in the alleged "notebooks of Sirhan, which emerged after the shooting, the following words appear: "Alcohol will love love love love love love." Summing up the case, Dr. Brown makes the point that "in this passage Mr. Sirhan has made a connection in his recall between alcohol on the night of the assassination and his ?love' for the Polka Dot dress girl. Touching Mr. Sirhan on his shoulder and/or turning him round suggests a hypnotic cue to enter ?range mode,' to hypnotically hallucinate the firing range, and to fire automatically upon cue. My review of the eyewitness accounts in the kitchen at the time of the assassination suggests that giving Mr. Sirhan the cue to start shooting may have been synchronized to a second shooter and that the sound of the second gun may have also served as an additional cue to Mr. Sirhan to keep firing."
"Maybe the girl had a kind of signal," said Sirhan in 1997. "I don't know. When she turned me around the Kennedy group kept coming in and she was trying to get my attention. When I spun around, that was the last time I saw her. I don't remember shooting. I don't remember aiming at Bobby Kennedy."
Sirhan's lawyers have no doubt that their client was used as a patsy for this history changing political assassination, planned and carried out by forces determined to prevent Robert Kennedy from becoming President. Pepper asserts that the evidence of his actual innocence, which would be set out in detail if an evidentiary hearing is granted by the Court, would leave no doubt as to Sirhan's innocence, and his wrongful and fraudulent conviction, which has been sustained by a long standing cover up, would be overturned.
Pepper says
"the denial of justice in this case is not only unconscionable in terms of both victims-the Senator and Mr. Sirhan- but makes a mockery of the criminal justice system in this Republic. We fervently hope that, at long last, the Court will grant the writ and set this innocent man free, order a new trial or, in the very least, set the matter down for an evidentiary hearing.
To this end we ask for the support of the general public in every way possible, for the denial of justice to any one of us, diminishes the degree of freedom for all of us."
Appendix 1: William Pepper, Sirhan's lawyer talks to CNN, part 1
Also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti1unCs8RBw
Appendix 2: William Pepper, Sirhan's lawyer talks to CNN, part 2
Also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMqX3CLoqhQ
Footnotes
[1] See towards end of William Pepper, Sirhan's lawyer talks to CNN, part 2, also embedded above. William Pepper describes how psychologists who have interviewed Sihran Sihran agree that he is still under a state fo hypnosis. They believe that with further hypnosis, he can be de-hypnotised and recover his memory of what happened on the night of 5 June 1968.
Here is a book by a philosopher and neuroscientist about how to keep Outer Space safe for everyone. "Dr. Al-Rodham hopes his book will spark new conversations about ways to increase the benefits of space for all countries, while expanding the working definition of "sustainability." Sustainability is no longer just about using recycled paper products or eating local organic produce grown by eco-conscious micro-farmers. It's also about thinking far beyond the Earth. And, stresses Dr. Al-Rodhan, these are issues that affect each and every one of us. "Ultimately," says Dr. Al-Rodhan, "space will either be safe for everyone or for no one." (And we could use a little more common-good planning on earth as well (Ed. Candobetter.net).
Keeping outer space safe
Geneva, Switzerland (MMD Newswire) June 14, 2012 -- "Sustainability" and "geopolitics" have become powerful media buzzwords in recent years, but a new book by prizewinning scholar, philosopher, neuroscientist, and geostrategist Nayef Al-Rodhan, M.D., Ph.D., takes both sustainability and geopolitics to a whole new realm: outer space.
In practical terms, sustainability is really about the survival of the human race, and the same might be said of geopolitics, inasmuch as it is concerned, more often than not, with keeping disparate members of our species from blowing each other into oblivion. On both fronts, we can no longer afford to limit either our thinking or our policies to Earth. In "META-GEOPOLITICS OF OUTER SPACE: An Analysis of Space Power, Security and Governance," Dr. Al-Rodhan offers a new paradigm of outer space as a global commons, outlining the promise, and offering solutions to potential perils, of the vast area beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
We have long since passed the point where such considerations are mere fodder for sci-fi TV series or movies. Though some of NASA's programs are now on hold, there's a whole new space race involving wealthy entrepreneurs who are driving the trend towards privatization of space travel. And that is just one promising but potentially troubling aspect of the new space paradigm. The bottom line is that, given humanity's increasing dependence on outer space, we need to adopt a fresh perspective to make space more useful and safer for humanity, Dr. Al-Rodhan believes.
"Simply put, we need new ways of defining space power," he says. He proposes to define space power as the ability of a state to use space to sustain and enhance its seven state capacities as outlined in the Meta-geopolitics framework. In addition, the governance and sustainability of space power will need to employ a 'symbiotic realism' approach to global relations and a 'multi-sum security principle' approach to global security.
In essence, says Dr. Al-Rodhan, his new book is about developing comprehensive tools to insure space security and governance in a connected, interdependent yet competitive world. "We need an innovative and comprehensive political framework for outer space that traditional geopolitical approaches have not addressed," he explains.
Accordingly, his book provides an expanded framework of his previously published books on geopolitics (see list below), expanding it to outer space security. His approach is a comprehensive one that takes into account social and health issues, domestic politics, economics, environmental matters, science, human potential factors, military and security issues, and international diplomacy- in addition to traditional factors of geography, demography, and economics.
"What I have provided," says Dr. Al-Rodhan, "is a new proposal for reconciling competitive national interests of states in outer space with the need to secure space as a global commons that belongs to everyone."
He also strives to clarify the important relationship between security here on earth and security in outer space. "Numerous security threats exist in space," says Dr. Al-Rodhan. "They range from space debris, collision and frequency interference to weaponization of outer space and space weather events. In order to contain these, good governance at all five levels of global security - namely human, environmental, national, transnational, and transcultural - must be assured."
That's a pretty tall order, but Dr. Al-Rodhan, who has also earned renown as a philosopher, seems up to the challenge. To date he has published 19 books proposing many innovative concepts and theories in global politics, security, philosophy, and history. He isn't the only expert who believes that such a multi-disciplinary approach is the only way we can hope to solve the most pressing problems we're facing today.
For instance, Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Washington-D.C. based Stimson Center (a think tank for international security and peace issues), says of Dr. Al-Rodhan's new book, "Traditional works of geopolitics have stopped at the atmosphere's edge, grounded in geography, economics and demographics. Nayef Al-Rodhan has expanded classical geopolitical considerations to include societal, health and the environment. In this book, he elevates geopolitics into space. The result is an analysis that challenges our assumptions about power and space power."
Theresa Hitchens, Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), Geneva, Switzerland, says Dr. Al-Rodhan's newest book is "a welcome 'outside of the box' analysis of outer space, geopolitics and the foundations of space power."
And Laurence Nardon, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the United States Program and the Space Policy Program at the Institut francais des relations internationales (IFRI) in Paris, France, writes, "Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan's book provides a first rate summary of key aspects of current space policies. It also shows how space adds new and important elements to many policy areas on Earth, but also has a life of its own, as a new field of policy, strategy and geopolitics. Much of the difficulty in grasping space issues derives from this double status."
Says Dr. Al-Rodhan, "A new perspective on space politics is necessary to understand current dynamics and be able to promote peaceful cohabitation of the space powers. Traditional theories, such as realism, liberalism and critical geopolitics, are limited, as they apply earth-bound assumptions to space. Moreover, these theories do not include technical innovations - namely, communications and remote-sensing satellites, space launch rockets, global positioning and navigation systems, and other new technologies that have revolutionized space politics." All of these are discussed in the new book.
Through his new book and other current efforts, Dr. Al-Rodhan hopes to influence policy. "We want policy makers to recognize space as being important to future generations, namely by avoiding its misuse by states through its weaponization," he says. "We would like policy makers, academics, and concerned citizens globally to be aware of the need to keep space as a global commons by solving its debris problems and preventing weaponization. And we would like states to think in cooperative symbiotic terms of achieving their respective national interests in outer space while not harming space's global commons secure status."
Acknowledging the entrepreneurs' role in the space race, Dr. Al-Rodhan adds, "We want to encourage a more responsible view of space through global treaties and regulations. We must increase awareness that the private sector is becoming more involved in space activities, and while this should be encouraged, strict regulatory frameworks need to be put in space to insure transparency and accountability."
Most of all, Dr. Al-Rodham hopes his book will spark new conversations about ways to increase the benefits of space for all countries, while expanding the working definition of "sustainability." Sustainability is no longer just about using recycled paper products or eating local organic produce grown by eco-conscious micro-farmers. It's also about thinking far beyond the Earth. And, stresses Dr. Al-Rodhan, these are issues that affect each and every one of us. "Ultimately," says Dr. Al-Rodhan, "space will either be safe for everyone or for no one."
About the Author
Dr. Nayef R. F. Al-Rodhan is Senior Member of St Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK, and Senior Scholar in Geostrategy and Director of the Geopolitics of Globalisation and Transnational Security Programme at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Switzerland. He is a philosopher, neuroscientist and geostrategist. A prize-winning scholar, he has published 19 books proposing many innovative concepts and theories in global politics, security, philosophy and history. Dr. Al-Rodhan was educated at Yale University, the Mayo Clinic and Harvard University. He is best known for several philosophical and analytical books on global politics, including "Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man," "Emotional Amoral Egoism," "Neo-Statecraft and Meta-Geopolitics," and "The Politics of Emerging Strategic Technologies and Symbiotic Realism."
A recent article about Nigel Franks, who tortured a female kangaroo and cruelly disposed of her joey, led to expressions of despair and horror about this young man's behaviour. A criminological link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans was drawn. I would like to suggest here that there may also be a political explanation in the normalisation of cruelty to animals by Australian authorities. Governments are demonstrating that they think it is okay to mistreat these sentient creatures, with the thinnest of justifications. At the end of this article I will suggest that this political attitude may forerun government violence against citizens in Australia.
Public shame for one, Status for another
One does not have to go so very far to see the example that Nigel Franks may have been following. Australian Government attitudes to kangaroos are appalling. They are violent, cruel, and use corrupt science (see "ACT Roo killings: Who profits? Behind the Earless Dragon mask". In mild contradiction to other anemic motherhood statements about 'biodiversity', their actions denigrate nature and objectify warm-blooded social animals by acting as if they have no family feelings and no rights to place and life itself.[1]
Government propaganda an inspiration to sadists?
Individuals who are gratuitously violent towards kangaroos quite possibly justify their actions as getting rid of 'pests' just like the ACT and other state governments. Kangaroos are not pests, of course, but they are demonised and objectified as such. "Theories" on kangaroo overpopulation ignore Australian Federal and State government policies to artificially stimulate human population growth on and around kangaroo territory and to run cattle and sheep in competition with kangaroos, even in the National Parks. Practice purportedly based on scientific theory on kangaroo overpopulation even ignores its own research. ACT government scientist, Don Fletcher, has been supportive of kangaroo culls on the basis of 'overpopulation', yet his own doctoral thesis, on my reading, completely undermines those attitudes. For instance, he wrote on page 237 of his study [2] that :
“The study did not provide evidence that high densities of kangaroos reduce groundcover to the levels where erosion can accelerate. Unmanaged kangaroo populations did not necessarily result in low levels of ground cover. Groundcover had a positive but not significant relationship to kangaroo density, with the highest cover at the wettest site where kangaroo density was highest. Weather has an important influence on groundcover.”
Translation, if needed: Fletcher found that very high densities of kangaroos, even in wet weather, have unimportant impact on grassland.
Fletcher also wrote that some of the populations he was studying were at the highest density recorded. They ranged between 4.5 and 5.1 kangaroos per hectare. The density in the studies below was expressed in square kilometers. To get density per hectare, divide by 100. Fletcher wrote:
“The kangaroo density estimates reported in Chapter 7 for the three study sites (mean eastern grey kangaroo densities of 450, 480 and 510 km2) are the highest kangaroo densities reported. For comparison, the maximum density of combined red kangaroos and western grey kangaroos in the Kinchega study was less than 56 km2 (Bayliss 1987) and the density of eastern grey kangaroos at Wallaby Creek (Southwell 1987b) was 41 to 50 km2. The next highest kangaroo density outside the vicinity of my study sites appears to be that of Coulson et al. (1999a) for eastern grey kangaroos at Yan Yean Reservoir near Melbourne, which was 220 km2.”
Does the emotional blunting affect our judiciary?
Was the magistrate who gave Nigel Franks a suspended sentence, disappointing many animal carers, influenced by the same attitudes? If the government leads with misinformation and violence, we can perhaps expect some of our judiciary to go along with this and some of our youth to act it out. Our laws and their enforcement also reflect this immoral and violent outlook, this unfair demand upon the environment that it give 100% of everything to our species alone (which then is siphoned upwards to the cruel and greedy elite who model these attitudes in the first place.) Australian State government performances with regard to carrying out their obligations under wildlife acts and environmental laws have been formally shown up as incompetent and mean by recent Auditor General reports. ("Tasmania, West Australia, Victoria - our wildlife are ignored by government," and "Damning Auditor General Report on Fauna protection for Victoria.".
Unfortunately demographic 'science' is full of potted attitudes like the clunky ones on which the ACT bases its 'wildlife management'. Whilst wildlife activists that compare the shooting squads to Nazi death squads may initially strike daily consumers of the Age, the Australian, ABC and commercial tv and radio as dramatic and implausible, the clunky swiss-cheese of economic and demographic 'science' is very similar. Hitler's message,[3] on the basis of publicly endorsed statistics which really only bulked up church and business attitudes were that Germans should breed up and jews, gypsies, homosexuals, insane and intellectually disabled people should be culled. The ACT's message, on the basis of publicly endorsed statistics which really only bulk up growth lobby and economic scorched earth attitudes (shared by most churches, although perhaps not always the Anglican Church) are that Australians and new Australians should breed up and kangaroos, dingos, and wildlife habitat should be culled because they are clogging up the economy or are in need of pain-relief due to being too many now that we have taken their habitat. If possible we should make money out of them first by turning them into dog food for one market or gourmet meat for another market, composed of those who like to think they are showing discriminating taste and economic intelligence. Completely overlooked in this case, by normally humane people who are usually kind to animals, is that these creatures that stand on two legs like us, look forward like us, and bring up their young together like us in close-knit social groups, and can meet our gaze, also have feelings and memories like us. They may not be human but that does not make them nothing.
Thinking of animals as stupid 'things' pervasive
People are so blind to the consequences of what we do to other creatures that it is, not only possible, but the rule, for a human being to move into a new suburb and not realise that land was cleared for that house and that, therefore, other creatures were displaced. Then, when one of those creatures tries to fight back, no connection is made. Reading this article ("Woman-says-kangaroo-stalked-her-then-attacked."), about a kangaroo who attacked a woman and her dog in a new housing estate, you have to wonder, are most humans really so much more intelligent than kangaroos when they seem to lack such a basic understanding of territoriality? A more satisfactory explanation is that our society teaches us to ignore what is obvious - kangaroos experience suffering and can react to persecution.
Kangaroos are horribly badly treated in Australia. They are harassed, hunted and tortured, culled in thousands. The area where the animal described in the article alluded to above attacked or defended itself is an area of suburban expansion. We cannot know what that animal saw happen to its family, but it is very likely that this was its clan territory (clans are subsidiary to 'mobs') and that it has seen terrible things. The only reason people are surprised at this kind of thing is because they have so objectified these animals that they simply do not give them credit for feelings. This animal would be a refugee in his own country. It is heartbreaking for anyone with compassion and open eyes. I have spent a fair amount of time with wild kangaroos and have never encountered an aggressive one, although quite a few frightened ones, including some over 7 feet tall. As an environmental sociologist who looks at population and land-use planning I can see how our system is all wrong and our culture cruel to animals and to people and that these two things are related.
Overpopulation - human or kangaroo?
The reader may notice my attention to the problem of human overpopulation in Australia. My attitude could be described as 'eco-malthusian' but I have never advocated the culling of human beings. There are so many ways to defuse our population bomb and I have written a short book on this issue that identifies keys to stabilising population that are inherent in populations of most or all species, including human ones. Unfortunately for the status quo of dodgy demographics, I became curious and did my own research. I will be bringing out a more comprehensive book but the basic theory has been published and is available. If you really want to know how populations work ecologically, you can purchase Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse and Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations at Amazon.com and Lulu.com among other retailers.[4]
Population and economic growth model and its consequences all unnecessary
The drive for economic and population growth in this country is counterintuitive to what most of us know to be true. For this reason constant propaganda is needed to obscure its adverse consequences and to make us ignore the evidence of our own eyes and hearts. We have every reason to think for ourselves in this case, instead of listening to our corrupt and emotionally blunted official leadership.
The financial and development industry reliance on population growth to fund expansion is no longer economically viable even in the short-term. It is contributing to the rise in the cost of water, power, food and housing. These high costs make manufacturing in this country extremely uncompetitive against other countries where the cost of land is much less. These high costs have contributed to the destruction of our manufacturing industry and our import/export imbalance. These costs are within the control of the government through the reduction of costly economic activity which is based on the creation of debt for the profit of a few focused beneficiaries in the growth lobby.
Employment is going to start to dry up and this is immediately very frightening if you are paying rent, mortgages or need to drive a car to get to food outlets. Once again, the government can mediate and mitigate the impact of employment decline. There is actually a positive way to deal with this. That is to halve the working day, share the work, and to reduce the costs of living which are in Australia’s control. Slowing down our economy by stopping expansion will save fuel, save lives, and save time for quality of life and local community strengthening. (I have written more extensively about how to cut down our impact per capita by limiting production and increasing local self-government, notably in the first chapter of Sheila Newman, Ed.The Final Energy Crisis,, 2nd Edition, Pluto Books, 2008.)
Unfortunately, instead of a democratic review of our resources and self-government strengths to meet the coming resource crisis, we have seen a rise in cruelty to other species and the objectification of citizens into customer-subjects to King Economy. Just as criminologists draw a lesson in psychology between Geoffrey Dalmar's and Ted Bundy's cruelty to domestic animals and their 'progress' to cruelty to humans, we should draw a warning from the increasingly blatant use of propaganda to justify cruel annihilation of native animals to facilitate the activities of an elitist growth lobby. As propaganda paves the way for developers to cover natural habitat and agricultural land with new suburbs for private profit, we may see that cruelty to humans follows the collapse of democracy in population policy and land-use planning in Australian states.
Are there any exceptions to the rule that destruction of local environments always accompanies destruction of democracy, equality and fraternity? Is the pain we know we cause around us a sign we should attend to for our own good?
NOTES
[1] By talking about warm-blooded species, I am putting roos in a similar grouping to humans, but that does not mean that I think that 'cold-blooded' species don't deserve our respect.
[2] Don Fletcher, “Population Dynamics of Eastern Grey Kangaroos in Temperate Grasslands,” was on line as a pdf, which is the form I downloaded it as. Now apparently only available from University of Canberra Library, reference: https://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an42269526. A book by the same title and author has also been published. For more detailed analysis of the ACT situation and the 'science' of the culls, see (see "ACT Roo killings: Who profits? Behind the Earless Dragon mask".
[3] I have been criticized for wielding the Nazi example as if it were the only example of depraved official behaviour in relatively recent history. Unfortunately it isn't and the wars instigated in the Middle East by western powers are a contemporary example of brutality on the basis of proven false propaganda (weapons of mass destruction etc.) Almost anywhere strategic to resources or marketable land sees dispossession and brutality on a state and corporate organised basis. See Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine for a team-research effort in exposing the motives and examples of this.
[4] The theory of the book is written first from a sociological angle and then from a biological angle. I found that some sociologists had problems understanding the biology and some biologists had problems understanding the sociology, despite positive peer reviewing from biologist, Prof David Pimentel of Cornel University and Dr Joseph Smith, who is a doctor of environmental law with knowledge of inheritance law. I will therefore be bringing out a longer book, with a generalist introduction and integrating the territorial allocation part of the theory with human inheritance laws and land-use planning and historical and actual examples, in the next few months hopefully.
The Lindy Tapes documentary premieres on Channel 7 this Sunday Hans Brunner was the man who finally identified the dingo hairs in the Azaria Chamberlain Appeal in 1988. He also examined the jump-suit she had been wearing and experienced the attitudes of Northern Territory officials involved in the case. Here we publish his remarks on the recent coronial verdict. He is refreshingly candid. He also defends dingos and comments unfavorably on the the fining of a woman who fed hungry ones on Fraser Island. Brunner's remarks add to the evidence that Australians should not just assume that the Australian justice system and media are basically reliable. Nor, particularly, should we assume that the government knows what it is talking about with regard to Australian wildlife. These 'authorities' need to be questioned constantly and those who question them should not be easily dismissed.
In 1980 Azaria Chamberlain disappeared at Ayers Rock/Uluru. She was 9 weeks old. Her mother said that she had seen a dingo leaving the tent. The implication was that a dingo had taken the baby. Mrs Chamberlain however, was accused and convicted of murder.
1988 Appeal overturned convictions based on Brunner dingo hair identification
In 1988, the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal overturned all convictions against the Chamberlains. The evidence of Hans Brunner, a forensic hair expert,[1] was crucial for the overturning of the conviction, since he was able to identify dingo hairs.
Although the convictions against Mr and Mrs Chamberlain were overturned, a coronial inquest in 1995 delivered an open verdict.
June 12, 2012 Second Inquest: Brunner comments
On June 12, 2012 a second coroner delivered a verdict that a dingo did take Azaria.
I asked Hans Brunner what he thought of this and published his response as a comment, on June 13, 2012. He wrote to me,
"Why did it take so long to finally admit that a dingo took the baby Azaria? This result was obvious to me right from the start. Mrs. Chamberlain would have had to be twice as clever as Houdini to accomplish what she was accused of. I thought that it was over and done with after I identified Dog (Dingo) hairs found on the jump suit and singlet. But no, the 'powers that be' did not like to admit that Dingoes can be a danger to children as this could have badly affected tourism. A lot of the scientific evidence given was scandalous and perverted and left the door wide open for a conviction. We can't blame the judges when they were fed with lies.
But now I am elated that the truth has finally been accepted."
Doubt in public mind, re jumpsuit
This statement about the role of dingoes in the fate of Azaria Chamberlain elicited some doubtful comments.
One comment was, "Its not so much that I don't believe it. It's that I don't believe there was no human involvement at all... Someone took her from that tent and the dingos may have ended up with her. It just doesn't sit right ; I'm not saying that Lindy did or didn't have anything to do with it, but I'm just not convinced."
Another comment was, "The biggest question in my mind is how did the blood-stained jumpsuit get off the baby in one piece and undamaged?? Why did no one see anything? Evidence was removed beforehand. There are just too many unanswered questions surrounding the whole situation."
Brunner today on jumpsuit, officials' attitudes, dingoes and injustice
I asked Hans these questions and he wrote the following explanation based on his observations of material for the Appeal. It contains information about police attitudes of the time, which is shocking. One can only feel the greatest dismay at the way Lindy Chamberlain was treated by our police, court and media.
Hans wrote to me on 16 June 2012:
"I have seen and carefully inspected the jumpsuit and singlet as well as many other items in Canberra.
The jumpsuit was soaked with blood and badly damaged in front. I have taken special notice of the ends of the fibers in the damaged area and found them with torn ends and not cut. I was well trained for this as I had to examine lots of sheep wool found in wild dog droppings. When the wool had natural tips it was from a lamb that has not yet been sheared. The others had clearly cut ends.
As to human intervention, I have no doubt that this happened, but only AFTER the dingo took Azaria. I belief that the baby was taken from the dingo, disposed of, and the clothes placed where they were found.
At an earlier stage, just when the clothes were found, I rang the police and offered to examine dingo droppings collected in the surroundings to see whether I could find remains of Azaria in them. I was bluntly refused and told that, "She did it anyhow," and the phone went silent. I was only asked very much later by the Defence to examine hairs mounted on two microscope slides. This was very easy for me since I used dingo hairs as reference sample in my book, The Identification of Mammalian Hair.
As for the skeptics, they probably took only notice of what was fed to them by journalists and crook scientists, while the real information remained hidden from them.
I love dingoes very much. I worked with them while two were in captivity for two years at the Keith Turnbull Research Institute in Frankston.
I am still extremely angry that a women on Frazer Island, who fed a hungry, sick looking dingo, was fined $ 40,000 for giving it some food.
When does injustice stop?"
Notes
[1] Mr Brunner was then a Senior Technical Officer for the Department of Conservation, Forest and Land. He developed the technique for identifying mammalian hair which was published in 1974 and is used around the world. In Australia users include the CSIRO, Government agencies and universities.
Having trouble finding the right man or the right woman? Not sure which you want? You are not alone - well, not completely .... Female fish in Mexico, living in polluted streams, are mating with male fish of the wrong species, West Australian beetles are mistaking beer bottles for prospective partners. A new book by Bob Wong and Ulrika Candolin, Behavioural Responses to a Changing World: Mechanisms and Consequences is the first book of its kind devoted to understanding animal behavioural responses to environmental change. Behavioural Responses emphasises the vital links between environmental change, behaviour and population dynamics. Topics as diverse as endocrine disruption, learning, reproduction, migration, species interactions and evolutionary rescue are canvassed.
Behavioural responses to a changing world
Male beetles in Western Australia are mating with beer bottles in response to environmental change caused by human activity. A new book examines why, and the impacts on biodiversity.
Oxford University Press today announced the launch of Behavioural Responses to a Changing World: Mechanisms and Consequences by Dr Bob Wong, of Monash University, and Ulrika Candolin from The University of Helsinki, Finland.
Drawing on international experts from across the globe, it is the first book of its kind devoted to understanding animal behavioural responses to environmental change. Behavioural Responses emphasises the vital links between environmental change, behaviour and population dynamics which have been rarely examined in the context of one another.
Co-editor Dr Bob Wong, Senior Lecturer at Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences and an expert in behavioural and evolutionary ecology, said how animals respond to changed conditions was a growing area of research interest.
“Due to human activities, almost all creatures live in environments that have been altered to some degree. The ability to behave accordingly under new conditions is crucial for survival,” Dr Wong said.
“Environmental change caused by human activity is considered the greatest single threat to global biodiversity. Scientists are only now beginning to appreciate the important ecological and evolutionary implications of altered behaviours due to environmental change."
Dr Wong said the initial response of many animals to human-induced environmental change is often behavioural, which in turn affects species’ interactions, population viability, evolution, and ultimately, biodiversity.
“Some of these behaviours can be beneficial and buy more time for populations and species to genetically adapt to altered conditions. Some species might even thrive in urban environments. But behaviours can also be maladaptive,” Dr Wong said.
“Male beetles, for example, are mating with beer bottles because they resemble female beetles and female fish in Mexico, living in polluted streams, are mating with male fish of the wrong species.”
The comprehensive text discusses impacts on both the mechanisms underlying behavioural processes, as well as the longer-term ecological and evolutionary consequences. Topics as diverse as endocrine disruption, learning, reproduction, migration, species interactions and evolutionary rescue are canvassed.
Dr Wong will officially present ‘Behavioural Responses to a Changing World’ at a post-congress symposia of the 14th International Behavioral Ecology Congress on 18 August in Sweden.
For more information or to arrange interviews, contact Courtney Karayannis, Monash Media & Communications on +61 3 9903 4841 | +61 408 508 454 or [email protected]
The world graph shows Australian private debt to be proportionately higher than that in the US, Financial sector debt to be significant and Govt debt to be relatively small. Why then is so-called excessive Government debt ALL we ever hear about from the media and the growls emanating from the political bear-pit? Are they just stupid or are they trying to hide or completely deny something?
Also of morbid interest is that the UK is an economic meltdown waiting to happen. Financial debt is running at 1000% of GDP. How can that astronomical amount possibly be bailed out when it implodes? Greece and Spain are flecks of dust compared to that one.
These give a snapshot of the extremity of the national and global debt situation. Very evidently it is the biggest elephant in the global lounge-room at the moment and will only get stinkier and more broadly destructive the longer that its overwhelming presence is ignored.
Australian debt related to housing
Australian debt related to housing represents a huge part of the costs of doing business and of living. The opposition has a lot to say about the cost of a carbon tax, but that cost would be imperceptible if governments and the growth lobby stopped pushing up land and housing costs by importing whole towns worth of people into this country.
We are looking at long-term loss of spending capacity
There is a pressing need for governance to recognise the game-changing transition that is now irreversibly underway so that the best outcomes can be drawn within the very unfamiliar and difficult economic rules of this new game. We have now moved from a long build-up period of enormous credit spending and debt accumulation into a long period of debt de-leveraging and consequent loss of spending capacity. The loss will hit Individuals and thus the retail economy, and hit all levels of government and thus the entire public spending program. Public debt and Government financial capacity will be hit even harder if governments continue to bail-out wealthy financial institutions for their speculative losses.
Unfortunately a number of reasons make such bail-outs likely to occur, and particularly so if the ordinary person remains unaware of the nature of this big structural change that is underway. Its impacts will reach deeply across our entire socio-economic framework. It effectively destroys the growth model that has been employed since World War Two.
Local councillors need to educate themselves beyond State ideological feed
Local Councillors need to become aware of this so that they can pull back from a futile reliance upon property development and associated tourism to drive Shire economy. I know most do not have the mental faculty or will to do so, however some might if the material is presented in the right way. This need is especially urgent in the context of the impending construction a new Strategic Town Plan.
Greg Wood is a leader in the fight to stop inappropriate development at Rainbow Beach Queensland in a World Heritage area.http://www.inskip.org/index.html
"Every time I hear or read the word 'sustainable', for instance, in 'sustainable growth', 'sustainable living' and 'sustainable economy', I feel that we are being cheated and lured into false security."
Article by Hans Brunner
"Sustainability," a word much used and abused
Every time I hear or read the word 'sustainable', for instance, in 'sustainable growth', 'sustainable living' and 'sustainable economy', I feel that we are being cheated and lured into false security. These expressions permeate our cultural communication and continuously mislead. It is therefore time to alert people to the uncomfortable, or ‘inconvenient’ truth about to what is urgently needed in order to obtain realistic sustainability. The fundamental problem that causes all our present and future unsustainable existence is that there are far too many of us on this planet of finite resources.
Ehrlich and Flannery
Professor Paul Ehrlich (ehrlich in German means ‘honest’), in his report “People and the Planet” to the Royal Society said
“ The optimum population of the earth was 1.5 to 2 billion people, much less than the seven billion alive today. So we have to humanly and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage.”
A similar statement was also made by Professor Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters as early as 1995:
“Because of the structure of our economy, a population of 6-12 million (people) would give Australians enormous flexibility in dealing with environmental and other problems.”
Both professors are surely acutely aware that they have to protect their reputation when making these statements. Obviously, their conclusions must have been based on lots of accurate and unbiased information, while realizing that their research results could upset a lot of people. Both also insist that their estimates are made under the condition that the living standard per person must not increase.
Increasing number of concerned people as people numbers increase
There is now a rapidly increasing number of other people who also express their concern about over-population, many of them well informed scientists.
Based on my own experience, I am personally convinced that their statements are realistic as well as accurate. We all can ill-afford to live any longer in a fools' paradise and naively belief that the little bandage work we are doing will save the world. The truth about over-population has to come out and be shouted from every rooftop. It is sad that, in spite of this, our politicians on both sides still push for population and economic growth as if there was no tomorrow. By this, they blindly speed up the certain and disastrous consequences that will inevitably doom our future.
Easy way to inform yourself: Check out Sustainable Population Australia (SPA)
I ask the skeptics to do their own, honest research or to contact Sustainable Population Australia for information before they refuse this important warning. Acting now, even if it seems harsh and difficult, is much better than to wait for the much more brutal and out of control responses, such as inevitable wars, famine and natural disasters, to do it for us.
Since there is abundant information and many detailed studies available on the above subject, it was not my purpose to go into all the details of what has happened and why it has gone so wrong, as it would take pages to cover it all. Greed would probably be one of the most fatal factors.
So, in future, when you use the word ‘sustainable’ think at least twice and more seriously about it and then you will most likely not use it.
This superb document establishes a history of concerted public demand for protection of the green wedges and a host of reasons for that public opposition to Matthew Guy's six new suburbs. It represents more than 80 groups of Victorians - (Ed. Candobetter.) "The whole rationale for extending the Urban Growth Boundary is to accommodate the unprecedented flood of population to Victoria. PPL VIC considers that the extension of the Urban Growth Boundary is really the thin end of the wedge. As there are no plans to stop the present high rate of population growth (mostly from immigration) the process of loss of Green Wedges and agricultural land is endless. There will be another extension when the proposed boundaries are seen to be filling up. The Government must abandon the Green Wedge land grab as destructive of the environment, a threat to wildlife, including endangered species, and as a major contributor to Green House Gas Emissions. Around the urban fringe we have a concentration of some of the most endangered eco- systems in Australia..." Julianne Bell, Protectors of Public Land, VictoriaJulianne Bell, Protectors of Public Land, Victoria.
The superb document below establishes a history of concerted public demand for protection of the green wedges and a host of reasons for that public opposition to Matthew Guy's six new suburbs. It represents more than 80 groups of Victorians protesting against Victorian government population growth and development policies for reasons that damn Matthew Guy's extension of the Urban Growth Boundary. These extensions are even worse than those planned by the preceding government, however the preceding Kennett, Bracks and Brumby Governments created the planning precedents and undemocratic conditions that give the Baillieu Government the delusion that it has the right to ride over citizens rights' to conserve public land and wildlife habitat from private greed.
Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.
Mr George Seitz
Committee Chair
Outer Suburban/Interface Services & Development Committee
C/- Parliament House
Spring Street, Melbourne
VIC 3002
19 October 2009
Dear Mr. Seitz,
Submission to Parliamentary Outer Suburban Interface/Services and Development Committee Inquiring into the Impact of State Government Decision to Change the Urban Growth Boundary
Introduction:
I am making a submission on behalf of Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. (PPL VIC.) I should by way of introduction mention that our organisation, established in 2004, is a State wide coalition of over 80 environment, heritage, resident and parks groups across Victoria. We are dedicated to keeping public lands in public hands and to protecting and conserving iconic heritage places and environmental sites of significance.
Summary of Grounds of Opposition: In addressing the terms of reference we are considering
“The impact of the State Government’s decision to change the urban growth boundary on landholders and the environment…”
PPL VIC draws the Committee’s attention to the failure of the State Government in strategic urban planning over the last 10 years and in encouraging uncontrolled entry of settlers to Victoria without examining sustainable population levels. We object to creation of growth areas outside the existing boundaries as extending and creating urban sprawl; alienation of established Green Wedges; destruction of the environment and wildlife; loss of biodiversity; creation of “dormitory” settlements without infrastructure and services; likely social alienation of youth; loss of arable land for food production; increasing car dependency; worsening Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to climate change with land clearance, unsustainable housing and reliance on road transport; plus knowingly approving the building of new settlements in fire-prone areas. Additionally we deplore the imposition of a vendor tax on landowners in order to fund the infrastructure of the new settlements and the impetus given to land speculation and “land banking.” PPL VIC supports the submissions made by our colleagues from the “Green Wedges Coalition” and “Taxed Out”.
The grounds of our submission are as follows:
New Growth Areas = Future Urban Sprawl = Major Failure of Strategic Urban Planning:
The Bracks Government guaranteed in 2002 that, under a Labor Government there would be no changes or amendments to the Urban Boundary or to the Green Wedges corridors. The fact that there are now radical changes represents a serious breach of faith with the electorate by the Brumby Government. Melbourne 2030 was considered to be the blue print for future development and was expressly intended to contain future urban sprawl; to prevent urban incursions into rural land; to concentrate residential growth into areas served by high capacity public transport; and protect sensitive environmental zones around the city. Many planners have pronounced Melbourne 2030 dead in view of recent radical departures from the plan.
Before the 2002 election the State Government announced protection of Melbourne’s green wedges from subdivision and inappropriate urban uses. There was bipartisan support - the Opposition supported the green wedge protection legislation when it passed through the Legislative Assembly before the 2002 election.
The Government has additionally broken a 2005 promise when 11,500 hectares was excised from Green Wedges land that there would be no further changes until 2030. The community accepted the excision on this proviso. Apparently, the Minister for Planning gave a number of assurances right up to the announcement of the review of the Urban Growth Boundary that there would be changes to Green Wedges. .
The State Government announced its review of the Urban Growth Boundary in December 2008 when it released the Melbourne @5 million, an update to Melbourne 2030: Planning for Sustainable Development. This signalled the State Government’s plans to open up at least 23,000 hectares – including land in Green Wedges areas - for urban expansion to allow for construction of 600,000 houses with 284, 000 of these to be located in growth areas. It was only apparently belatedly realised by Government advisers and planners that Victoria needs to accommodate another 1 million people before 2025. By 2036 Melbourne is predicted to have a further 1.8 million, twice the number forecast by Melbourne 2030 planners. By anyone’s reckoning failure to predict this massive population boom is a monumental blunder in strategic planning (See also comment under population)
We can see no improvements under the current Delivering Melbourne’s Newest Sustainable Communities (DMNSC) report on the Urban Growth Boundary Review released in June 2009. PPL VIC was alarmed to see that according to the Green Wedges Coalition the report proposes to excise a further 41,663 hectares from Melbourne’s Green Wedges, nearly twice the area estimated to have been needed in last December’s Melbourne @ 5 Million report.
Minister Madden has added to proposals by announcing on 6 October 2009 that new “Precinct Structure Plans guidelines” were to be added, a kind of overlay for suburbs of 3,000 dwellings or more. These guidelines were drawn up to try to ensure developments avoided becoming isolated, so called “dormitory” suburbs - places where there is nothing to do but sleep. The Age article of 11 October 2009 “Sprawl of the wild,” by Melissa Fyfe says “
The Victorian Government has discovered sustainable communities. Pity it’s 10 years late.”
On 16 October 2009 Planning Minister Madden announced the draft legislation for Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution Bill. We have only been given time to make comments until 2 November 2009. (It is not known if the legislation will be introduced to Parliament before this Committee has reported.) The problem is that arrangement to levy the GAIC have been changed or significantly amended. Michael Hocking of Taxed Out says on his website:
“This is taxing the landowner by stealth. The tax is still applied at a flat rate regardless of the sale price yet the land may be twenty years from development. A property owner needing to sell in the short-term will find it virtually impossible to find a purchaser who is prepared to accept a GAIC liability when he sells, meaning the only likely purchaser is a developer not interested in the value of the dwelling and not interested in paying development prices for land that won't be developed for decades. The Growth Areas Authority assumptions relating to value uplift remain fundamentally flawed and Taxed Out Inc. intends to expose these issues at the Parliamentary Inquiry…In many respects this situation is worse than that originally proposed.
PPL VIC deplores the fact that the State Government appears to have attempted to mislead affected landowners. We also point out that this debacle over changes to the GAIC further illustrates that our contention that this is planning on the run.
What is a Sustainable Population for Victoria?
The whole rationale for extending the Urban Growth Boundary is to accommodate the unprecedented flood of population to Victoria. It is instructional to Google the “Population Clock” of the Bureau of Statistics. This shows the resident population of Australia which increases by one person every 1 minute and 12 seconds. This projection is based on the estimated resident population at 31 March 2009 and assumes growth since then of:
• one birth every 1 minute and 44 seconds,
• one death every 3 minutes and 39 seconds,
• a net gain of one international migrant every 1 minutes and 53 seconds leading to
• an overall total population increase of one person every 1 minute and 12 seconds
PPL VIC considers that the extension of the Urban Growth Boundary is really the thin end of the wedge. As there are no plans to stop the present high rate of population growth (mostly from immigration) the process of loss of Green Wedges and agricultural land is endless. There will be another extension when the proposed boundaries are seen to be filling up.
The extension of the Urban Growth Boundary does not save private or public open space in the established suburbs - the rate of population growth is so high that Melbourne is getting more urban densification daily as well as urban sprawl. As we have pointed out the State Government is devoid of coherence in these planning matters and its approach to endless population growth.
PPL VIC considers it imperative that the Victorian Government hold a forum to determine the population sustainable for Victoria, especially in view of water shortages and the likelihood of future droughts. (Excuses used have been “immigration is a Federal matter” but State Premiers have influence in Canberra.) At a rally on 14 July 2009 protesting over Planning Minister Madden’s “Cash for Chat” with developers, PPLVIC and allies delivered a set of resolutions to the Minister including the need for a population forum. There were over 500 people at the Rally which indicates the strength of public feeling concerning the issues raised here.
I have a quote here from Mr Kelvin Thomson MHR, Federal Member for Wills who says that:
Everything that makes our city the great place to live, work and raise a family, is potentially under threat if population growth and urban sprawl continue at the current rate. We must implement a strategy to control population growth, urban expansion and development. Our way of life, open spaces and infrastructure cannot be sacrificed on the altar of ever expanding population. We have a responsibility to secure our city’s future by thorough, thoughtful and detailed planning. This planning should not include an expanding Melbourne waistline.” (“Five Million is too many: Securing the Social and Environmental Future of Melbourne” Submission to the Urban Growth Boundary Review July 2009.
Destruction of the Environment and Green Wedges:
The Government must abandon the Green Wedge land grab as destructive of the environment, a threat to wildlife, including endangered species, and as a major contributor to Green House Gas Emissions. Around the urban fringe we have a concentration of some of the most endangered eco- systems in Australia including the Western Basalt Plains Grasslands and Grassy Woodlands in the Darebin, Jackson and Merri Creek valleys, with 400 year-old red gums, and plus loss of habitat for a range of threatened species (e.g. Southern Brown Bandicoot.) PPL VIC supports the submission of the Green Wedges Coalition as being an excellent detailed statement of the threats to significant landscapes, endangered species and wildlife plus indigenous vegetation.
The 15,000 hectares of grassland reserves to be provided over 10 years as a trade-off for grasslands is apparently of poorer quality than the kangaroo (themeda) grasslands to be destroyed
The removal of environmental protection from all areas within the Urban Growth Boundary would seem to indicate that areas such as significant parts of the Merri Creek Catchment will not be protected from environmental damage or even clearing.
Areas for development are clear felled by developers. The loss of trees and other vegetation for housing adds to global warming effect. Is there any provision for conservation?
The proposed high density, low open private space in these outer suburbs means they will be hotter - urban heat island effect - from the lack of the cooling effect of vegetation/transpiration - low ratio of vegetation to concrete and other hard surfaces.
What provision is made for public open space? There is no mention made of public open space for passive recreation as well as sports fields and recreation areas.
On past performance, no allowance will be made for wildlife in outer suburban development. PPL VIC has had experience with kangaroos of Somerton and Morang where animals get trapped in developed areas and just left to get killed on roads. The outer suburban interface is considered terra nullius it seems. What of smaller animals/birds what about the grasslands and inhabitants? There appears to be no consideration given to the creation or maintenance of wildlife corridors.
The State Government appears to have taken little notice of report by the Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Mr Ian Mc Phail, in “The State of the Environment Victoria 2008”. In it he comments:
"Victoria's population growth, increasing affluence and the expansion of our cities and towns has contributed to unsustainable levels of resource consumption and waste production. This has direct environmental impacts through changes in land use from conservation and agriculture to cities and towns. To supply our cities and towns, we harvest water for residential and manufacturing purposes, changed river flows, discharge wastes to land and sea, remove native vegetation and send damaging gases into the atmosphere." (Refer in the report to A Culture of Consumption. Drivers of Change – Population, Change and Settlements Page 9)
The report continues:
“Continuing growth of Victoria’s population will increase demand for land, as well as housing and transport services, potentially leading to more waste and pollution. Extra demand for water is particularly pertinent given the predictive effects of climate change on already depleted water storages.”
Mr Mc Phail concludes on a depressing note:
"It is currently cheaper to protect the environment to than to restore it but it is even cheaper to degrade it…”
Urban Growth Areas in Fire Prone Areas:
Whether it is advisable settling thousands of people in outer suburban fire prone areas does not appear to have occurred to the Government. These are the outer suburban areas classified as "Growth Areas": Beveridge, Bulla, Devin Meadows, Cranbourne East, Clyde North, Diggers Rest, Donnybrook, Kalkalo, Melton, Mt Cottrell, Officer, Pakenham, South Morang, Sunbury, Tarneit and Truganina.
Councils opposed to the extension of the Growth Areas Boundary and the imposition of the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution are Melton, Casey, Cardinia and Mitchell. Wyndham refuses to comment.
It is apparent that these areas are either under resourced by fire services or not serviced at all. We assume this also goes for ambulance and police. Would the State Government be liable if fire services were not provided and a fire went through the settlement?
The Age reported on 4 July 2009 (Lessons to Learn) on the proceedings of the Bushfire Royal Commission and pointed to urban sprawl as one of the “fatal confluence of factors” that led to Black Saturday.
Cost to Victorians:
The cost of building new homes in the rural fringes of Melbourne is double that of constructing infill dwellings in the inner city. This is the hidden cost of suburban sprawl. This is an unacceptable financial burden for Victorian tax payers to shoulder. The added costs include extra infrastructure such as power, water and transport, as well as higher health costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
The report, commissioned by the State Department of Planning and released in July, cites research that found
"for every 1000 dwellings, the cost for infill development (in existing suburbs) is $309 million and the cost of fringe developments is $653 million".
It has been stated by Minister Madden in Parliament (and reported in the Sunday Age 11 October that the funds to be raised by the $95,000 hectares Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution will cover only 15 per cent of total infrastructure costs. The Minister is prepared to sacrifice Green Wedges land that makes Melbourne “livable” and to destroy the livelihoods of many small landowners and farmers for this minor financial return. Unfair Tax on Land Vendors: The Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution is an unfair, discriminatory tax on family farms and small landowners, even after amendment by the State Government in draft legislation. As we have consistently maintained, the tax needs to be withdrawn and any charges levied at the point of development, consistent with the approach taken in other Australian states. PPL VIC supports the campaigns of “Taxed Out” and as mentioned above held a joint rally on 14 July 2009 to protest against the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution. Perpetuation of Car Dependency: The plans to construct major freeways/ring roads and the absence of plans for extensive rail networks to serve the new suburbs spells out that the population of Melbourne will remain dependent on cars despite the uncertain future of oil. We are particularly concerned over plans to build the E6 freeway through Woollert. The roadway appears redundant. Reduction of Arable Land: Given our population crisis and likely food shortages with the drought it is unthinkable that the Government can even be contemplating turning over arable land for housing development. The loss of vegetable farms including prime market garden land in the Westernport Catchment will increase food miles for our produce. Increase of Green House Gas Emissions: Climate change is the most important moral question of the age and must be at the forefront of our public policy. The State Government appears to have its head in the sand. Compared to other cities in the world Melbourne has one of the highest rates per capita. Our private vehicles and public transport were recently recorded to generate 11 million tonnes of carbon monoxide a year compared with 8.5 tonnes in London. The increase in urban sprawl will worsen our figure.
Accommodation of Population within Existing Urban Growth Boundaries:
No examination has been undertaken of how the increased population can be accommodated in Metropolitan Melbourne.
Suggestions have been made that an inventory should be conducted of development applications which have already been approved by Council within the Urban Growth Boundary but which have not yet been built. Utilizing existing approvals might go some way to addressing the issue.
An inventory also needs to be undertaken of brown field sites and land which could be available for residential development – former transport depots, rail sidings and Commonwealth Government sites eg the Maribyrnong Defence site.
It is most unfortunate that the practice of “land banking” by developers appears widespread throughout the city. Take for example land on the former Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital site in Parkville which was given to Australand and the Citta Property Group to build a residential development then used for 2 weeks for the 2006 Commonwealth Games Village. The original plans showed a wall of 700 units in a 9 storey block along City Link. The land is still vacant and there have been no attempts to commence building. The developers are said to be waiting until the “market is right.” The truth is that developers prefer green field sites and are unwilling to invest in developing brown field sites.
Request to Committee: PPL VIC urges the Committee to reject approval of the extension of the Urban Growth Boundary and the iniquitous Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution and to develop recommendations for accommodating increased population within the Urban Boundary plus arriving at consensus for determining a sustainable population for Melbourne.
Yours sincerely
Julianne Bell
Secretary
Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.
P) Box 197
Parkville 3052
Growth, the ultimate dictator: "There seems to be no language that get’s through to our governments in Australia who, it seems are addicted to growth. It’s as though growth is all we can do. We may know of nothing else."
Matthew Guy's plans for Melbourne's Green Wedges
In this land where once many of us enjoyed bushwalking, helping our neighbour, and didn't like pretension, we are now ruled by bodies with surreal names like "Logical Inclusions Advisory Committee" and "Growth Areas Authority," which have replaced the local governments that once answered to residents and citizens. The department of planning and its committee offshoots are peopled by petty privately remunerated bureaucrats, with little apparent loyalty or feeling for this country or its people. Melbourne and Australia are becoming like the movie, Brazil.
It's slash and develop for the foreseeable future if the global economic tidal wave of doom fails to save us from what Matthew Guy announced today in his two press releases, "A logical approach to planning for Melbourne's growth," and "Managing Melbourne's Growth." (on 12th and 13th of June)
"Couched in terms to minimise the full and bloody impact on wildlife and the repressive consequences for democracy, the Minister for Planning's department was keen to portray its planning decisions as politer and more careful than those of its similarly destructive predecessors, the Bracks and Brumby governments. The truth is that, if the Baillieu Government had really been different, it would not be going ahead with plans to massively enlarge Melbourne and to continue unwanted and unsustainably high levels of immigration. It would simply put a cap on building permits and thereby stop permanent moves to Melbourne.
We are to have six more suburbs in places where agriculture or nature currently reside. What is this madness?"
Sustainable Population Activists Australia (SPAA)
How far will this dumbed down developer economy drag us down?
"The Liberal Government, like the Labor Government before them, seems bereft of any policies to enhance quality of life. Victoria needs sustainable economic development based on productive innovation and diversity of economic opportunities. All the Liberal and Labor parties can offer is a dumbed-down economy reliant on evermore short term housing projects that degrade our environment. Where does Mr Guy’s overdevelopment and sprawl end?"
"Planning Minister Matthew Guy in 2 of his Media Releases today (Managing Melbourne’s growth and “Growth Corridor Plans to Manage Long Term Growth) waxes enthusiastic about yet more urban sprawl. This time, it seems it will be “sophisticated” “attractive” with “great town centres” “services” offering employment, and access to local jobs etc. etc. and will see us through “the next 30-40 years”.
The message however is really sad. There is no end to the plans for Melbourne’s growth and because of this there is no guarantee at all of Melbourne’s continuing “livability”. Livability depends on access to open space which is being systematically and inexorably taken from the people of Melbourne both in the established suburban areas and at the fringes where we used to escape on weekends. It’s getting to be a long drive to the edge of our city and set to increase.
Under endless new housing to accommodate a greater and greater population, our precious farmland and wild life habitat will continue to be annihilated.
The continuing growth of our population is presented as an inevitability and that our city will continue to grow. It is presented as though we have no choice in the matter. In fact we could stabilize our population over the next few decades instead of setting in place continuous growth.
Imagine if we were to set that in place! We could see the outer limits of our very large city and have some certainty of its final girth. Conflicts between residents and governments, councils and government authorities would be vastly reduced. There may also be some future for our environment. We may have some hope of coping with oil and other resource depletion. There seems to be no language that get’s through to our governments in Australia who, it seems are addicted to growth. It’s as though growth is all we can do. We may know of nothing else."
Jill Quirk, President, Sustainable Population Australia, Victorian Branch
Asset speculation masquerading as economic development
"This form of asset speculation masquerading as economic development just does not work anymore, not even for its proponents. All it does now is disable genuinely sustainable planning options by creating a herd of white elephants that have permanent common law entitlement. Beyond being further trampled in the final death throes of this zombie herd, how do we annul the entitlement?
When will 'decision-makers' begin serving today and the impending future rather than a part fantasy world that ended with the GFC and which will be kept permanently in the past by the realities of Peak Oil?"
Syrians despair as chemical weapons, advanced Javelin surface-to-airmissiles and depleted uranium rifles have been smuggled in to the 'rebels'. The Syrian government says it now has no choice but to do what it has been deceitfully accused of in the past by the Western newsmedia. It has given the terrorists 24 hours to disarm or else face artillery bombardment in urban areas. This article benefits from the modern-day phenomenon of serious real-life observers reporting via the Internet. Have you heard Syrian Girl yet? She is a major credible independent source on Syria.
The western media have been deceitfully accusing the Syrian government of bombarding urban areas for over a year, without evidence. Now the Syrian government faced with a terrorist insurgency within its cities armed with more deadly weapons says that it has no choice but to bombard its own cities at the greater risk of civillian casualties. In the video, Russian news sources are cited asserting that Israel is smuggling weapons through Iraqi-Khurdistan (currently dominated by US corporate forces).
The United States and its NATO allies and the Arab dictatorships and Israel may have finally succeeded in getting the Assad government what it has so far avoided having to do. Mim Al Ahram, the Syrian Girl states that she holds NATO and its leaders, and not the Syrian government, responsible and she cites several sources for her broadcast. Please listen to it because she is warning us all that the Third World War is about to break out if Western populations continue to allow their governments to go after oil in a war-like manner. This outcome has been widely feared since oil-depletion scares began to resurface in the 1990s.
Why would the West promote instability in the Middle East?
If it had not occurred to you before, please consider the motives the West has for stimulating instability in the Middle East in order to take that area over. Consider that there is a competition between Western and Eastern (Russian and Chinese) powers for the Middle East. This area is the backyard of Russia and China, but it was long been managed as colonies for the benefit of British, US and French petroleum companies. Before the 1980s China was too riven by poverty to pose much of a challenge to Western hegemony over world resources. Nor did she pose much competition as a consumer of resources then. Now she does. After the two World Wars Russia was pretty much put out of action and, with the fall of the iron curtain, the rise to power of the USSR failed. Initially the countries in the Middle East were colonies and the oil companies exploiting them were National companies belonging to the UK, France and the USA. Since the first oil shock in the 1970s, many of these countries became independent. Since then there has been a battle to bring them back to 'heal'.
Role of Saudis
As often happens in colonisation, elites are given special privileges and immunity by colonial powers in return for managing their countries on behalf of those foreign powers. This is the way that the relationship between the Saudi Arabian royal family and the governments of the United States, the UK and even France is often interpreted. The Saudis are seen as oppressors of other Middle Eastern oil producing states or states located strategically near the oil producing ones.
West desperate to maintain economic growth
The competition for the Middle East and its oil reserves over the past few years has assumed a war-footing because, due to the declining availability of cheap oil, it is becoming extremely difficult for the US, the UK and the rest of Europe to maintain economic growth needed to maintain consumer economies and control over their growing populations. (Note however that the populations in the English speaking countries are growing much faster than in continental Europe, which, sensibly, is not stimulating population growth.)
Isolating Iran seems to be the major objective
The immediate objective of the West seems to be to isolate Iran, which has relatively good reserves of accessible oil, and, since February 2008 has been encouraging an oil-trade that avoids using US dollars. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Oil_Bourse. This is part of a trend among lesser powers, some more familiarly thought of as 'undeveloped' which include South American and African petroleum producers to retain or take charge of their own economic destinies. Ghadaffi was a part of this. It is a movement similar to the 'third world' political alignment that created in the late 1960s OPEC - the Organization of. Petroleum Exporting Countries which creation was also accompanied by revolutions (but real ones) in the early 1970s. The control by OPEC of oil supply caused the 1972/3 oil shocks that also caused a 'revolution' in Western economics and a sharp divide between the more socially oriented policies of Western Europe and the savage capitalism of the Anglophone economies, led by Thatcher and then Reagan.
China and the US
Peak-oil discussions have long anticipated a show-down between China and the US over oil and have interpreted US military incursions in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq to be an attempt to beat China to the 'prize' before China becomes too strong to beat or the US becomes economically too weak to maintain military control of this part of the world. The late Mark Jones was a petroleum expert and lived for a long time in Russia. This final stand between China and the US is the subject of his "The Battle of the Titans," in Sheila Newman (Ed) The Final Energy Crisis2nd Edition, Pluto Press, 2008.
Australia and the US
Australia depends a lot on the US for economic and military security.
The world is becoming very insecure because we are beginning to run into real problems maintaining our economies. Although Australia is currently apparently economically buoyant, what usually happens is that we start to go into recession and depression six months to a year after Europe and the US do. A theory as to why is that it takes that long for us to suffer from loss of buyers for our commodities. 'Emerging countries', notably Asian ones, tend to purchase our commodities for a while before they too lose their buying impetus and this delays our decline.
Why we have to abandon economic and population growth ASAP and start peaceful negotiations
If Australia and her Anglophone allies don't start to allow population growth to slow, land prices to fall (which will then greatly alleviate the cost of production and the need to produce and work so much) and production to reduce we will be forced into continuous wars which we can only lose, since neither we nor our allies have the local energy capacity to win them. To endorse the take-over of the Middle East is mad, in my opinion. What we should be doing is negotiating peacefully with Syria and her neighbours for long-term economic fair-sharing.
According to a report on VoltaireNet.org, at two recent meetings in Qatar and a further meeting in Riyadh, operatives of the Arab dictatorships and NATO met to coordinate a disinformation campaign including interference with satellite broadcasts to conceal a coup against the Syrian Government. As the article notes, the actions proposed, including the planned complicity of the international newsmedia violate intentional law. Nazi German propagandists were tried at Nuremburg for committing similar crimes.
In a few days, perhaps as early as Friday, June 15, at noon, the Syrians wanting to watch their national TV stations will see them replaced on their screens by TV programs created by the CIA. Studio-shot images will show massacres that are blamed on the Syrian Government, people demonstrating, ministers and generals resigning from their posts, President Al-Assad fleeing, the rebels gathering in the big city centers, and a new government installing itself in the presidential palace.
This operation of disinformation, directly managed from Washington by Ben Rhodes, the US deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, aims at demoralizing the Syrians in order to pave the way for a coup d'etat. NATO, discontent about the double veto of Russia and China, will thus succeed in conquering Syria without attacking the country illegally. Whichever judgment you might have formed on the actual events in Syria, a coup d'etat will end all hopes of democratization.
The Arab League has officially asked the satellite operators Arabsat and Nilesat to stop broadcasting Syrian media, either public or private (Syria TV, Al-Ekbariya, Ad-Dounia, Cham TV, etc.) A precedent already exists because the Arab League had managed to censure Libyan TV in order to keep the leaders of the Jamahiriya from communicating with their people. There is no Hertz network in Syria, where TV works exclusively with satellites. The cut, however, will not leave the screens black.
Actually, this public decision is only the tip of the iceberg. According to our information several international meetings were organized during the past week to coordinate the disinformation campaign. The first two were technical meetings, held in Doha (Qatar); the third was a political meeting and took place in Riyad (Saudi Arabia).
The first meeting assembled PSYOP officers, embedded in the satellite TV channels of Al-Arabiya, Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Fox, France 24, Future TV and MTV. It is known that since 1998, the officers of the US Army Psychological Operations Unit (PSYOP) have been incorporated in CNN. Since then this practice has been extended by NATO to other strategic media as well.
They fabricated false information in advance, on the basis of a "story-telling" script devised by Ben Rhodes's team at the White House. A procedure of reciprocal validation was installed, with each media quoting the lies of the other media to render them plausible for TV spectators. The participants also decided not only to requisition the TV channels of the CIA for Syria and Lebanon (Barada, Future TV, MTV, Orient News, Syria Chaab, Syria Alghad) but also about 40 religious Wahhabi TV channels to call for confessional massacres to the cry of "Christians to Beyrouth, Alawites into the grave!."
The second meeting was held for engineers and technicians to fabricate fictitious images, mixing one part in an outdoor studio, the other part with computer generated images. During the past weeks, studios in Saudi Arabia have been set up to build replicas of the two presidential palaces in Syria and the main squares of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. Studios of this type already exist in Doha (Qatar), but they are not sufficient.
The third meeting was held by General James B. Smith, the US ambassador, a representative of the UK, prince Bandar Bin Sultan (whom former U.S. president George Bush named his adopted son so that the U.S. press called him "Bandar Bush"). In this meeting the media actions were coordinated with those of the Free "Syrian" Army, in which prince Bandar's mercenaries play a decisive role.
The operation had been in the making for several months, but the U.S. National Security Council decided to accelerate the action after the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, notified the White House that he would oppose by all means, even by force, any illegal NATO military intervention in Syria.
The operation has a double intent: the first is to spread false information, the second aims at censuring all possible responses.
The hampering of TV satellites for military purposes is not new. Under pressure from Israel, the USA and the EU blocked Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian TV channels, one after the other. However, no satellite channels from other parts of the world were censured.
The broadcast of false news is also not new, but four significant steps have been taken in the art of propaganda during the last decade.
In 1994, a pop music station named "Free Radio of the Thousand Hills" (RTML) gave the signal for genocide in Rwanda with the cry, "Kill the cockroaches!"
In 2001, NATO used the media to impose an interpretation of the 9/11 attacks and to justify its own aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. At that time already, it was Ben Rhodes who had been commissioned by the Bush administration to concoct the Kean/Hamilton Commission report on the attacks.
In 2002, the CIA used five TV channels (Televen, Globovision, ValeTV and CMT) to make the public in Venezuela believe that phantom demonstrators had captured the elected president, Hugo Chávez, forcing him to resign. In reality he was the victim of a military coup d'etat.
In 2011, France 24 served as information ministry for the Libyan CNT, according to a signed contract. During the battle of Tripoli, NATO produced fake studio films, then transmitted them via Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, showing phantom images of Libyan rebels on the central square of the capital city, while in reality they were still far away. As a consequence, the inhabitants of Tripoli were persuaded that the war was lost and gave up all resistance.
Nowadays the media do not only support a war, they produce it themselves.
This procedure violates the principles of International Law, first of all Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights relating to the fact of receiving and imparting information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Above all, the procedure violates the United Nations General Assembly resolution, adopted after the end of World War II, to prevent further wars. Resolutions 110, 381 and 819 forbid "to set obstacles to free exchange of information and ideas" (like cutting off Syrian TV channels) and "all propaganda provoking or encouraging threats to peace, breaking peace, and all acts of aggression". By law, war propaganda is a crime against peace, the worst of crimes, because it facilitates war crimes and genocide.
Appendix: War propaganda from Australian newspapers which violate international law.
The misreporting of the Syrian conflict in order to overcome public opposition to NATO's planned war against Syria, examples of which are shown below, are no less violations of Interntional law than was Nazi Propagandist Hans Fritzsche who was tried at Nuremburg for his crimes.
The Syrian army has killed at least 23 civilians in two protest cities, a watchdog says, as international outcry mounts over a massacre in a central village. ...
Syrian troops have tortured children, executed them and used children as young as eight as "human shields" during military raids against rebels, according to a UN report to be released today.
The United Nations named the Syrian government one of the worst offenders on its annual "list of shame" of conflict countries where children are killed, tortured and forced to fight.
SYRIAN troops have tortured children, executed them and used children as young as eight as "human shields" during military raids against rebels, according to a UN report.
The United States voiced fears that Syria's government is planning a new massacre, as regime helicopters fired on rebel stronghold towns and raging violence killed over 100 people. ...
As the bloodbath in Syria continues, with grotesque new atrocities being committed on a daily basis, the international community must not allow itself to be frozen into inaction or acquiescence by the veto wielded at the United Nations by President Bashar al-Assad's two protectors, Russia and China.
Tyrants the world over - be they Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea's Kim Jong-un - rest easier knowing that when it comes to human rights and decency, they can count on support from Moscow and Beijing. Mr Assad is no exception. ...
Further editorial comment: The contents of all the items listed above are demonstrable fabrications of which their authors cannot be unaware. These lies are certain to be paid for in coming days with Syrian lives. In a fair trial those who authored and edited these lies would almost certainly be convicted and jailed for violating international law.
Why is a national organisation standing for 'all creatures great and small' supporting an annual and bloody kangaroo 'cull' in Nature Reserve Parks in Canberra, of all places? Aren't Nature Reserves supposed to be a place for all creatures to feel safe and protected? You have to wonder how an animal protection organisation can stand by and say nothing about the egregious cruelty for no justifiable reason, year after year. Do they think the public is so stupid as to believe the lies that kangaroos 'overgraze' and are a threat to other species?
I certainly don't believe it - here is my open letter to the RSPCA.
Dear RSPCA
I write regarding the current slaughter of kangaroos in nine of Canberra’s Nature Reserve parks. Apparently 2000 kangaroos have been buried in Kama and Mulligans Flat Nature reserves, including possibly the much-loved stars of the recent ABC documentary ‘Kangaroo Mob, Madge and her joey Sonny.’
Only a few months ago cattle were brought into these parks to control the overgrowth of grasses, so clearly you cannot use the excuse of kangaroos ‘overgrazing’. As for being a threat to other species, no scientific proof has ever been shown that to be the case, yet every year the ACT government announces another sickening massacre of our country’s national icon.
WHY???? WHY IS THE RSPCA NOT CONDEMNING THIS? IF RSPCA IS SUPPOSED TO BE OVERSEERING IT, WHY ARE THEY PERMITTING THIS EGREGIOUS CRUELTY TO OCCUR AND WHY ISN'T RSPCA TAKING ACTION????
Last year 75% of the kangaroo population in so-called ‘Nature Reserves’ of Canberra were ‘culled’, again with no justifiable reason since there was plentiful grass.
Requests for FOI by the Australian Society for Kangaroos (ASK) have been ignored within a legally reasonable time frame. ASK uncovered the battered and shot bodies of 300 + kangaroos showing multiple cases of throat, jaw and face shots of adults and joeys, decapitated joeys and mature kangaroos with smashed skulls. All bodies exhumed were NOT killed by one shot to the brain as required by the Code of Practice but had multiple face and neck shots and incompletely severed heads. This raises the very serious question of the brutal nature of this massacre, supposedly overseered by the RSPCA.
It is difficult for me to comprehend the horrific manner in which these innocent native animals died at the hands of these shooters – and ultimately Canberra’s politicians.
This abject cruelty was attempted to be hidden from view by burying the kangaroos in the pits and starting new pits. Activists also found evidence that kangaroos had been herded into a fenced area at the back of Kama Nature reserve where multiple parallel 4WD tracks appeared to repeatedly drive towards the fence trapping the kangaroos, presumably in order to be shot.
It is truly time for this charade to end and for prosecutions to begin. I call for the RSPCA to put pressure on the ACT government to cease this illegal, cruel and unnecessary killing of our kangaroos. Animal rights activists are exposing Canberra’s hypocrisy to international arenas and this will negatively impact tourism to ACT and Australia.
While the latest reports from Greece indicate that the country’s supermarket shelves could soon be out of food stocks and humanitarian war rhetoric bellows across the Eastern Mediterranean towards the terror-stricken Levant, Europe’s degenerate oligarchs are silently waging another war against a sovereign European state: the Republic of Belarus.
Original article on 7 June 2012 by Gearóid Ó Colmáin posted on Global Research.
The European Union imposed sanctions on the Republic of Belarus in Janauary of last year and further sanctions this year, due to the failed attempt by the West to install a mob of putschists in power after the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko as president in December 2010.
The sanctions are, of course, punishment for the Belarusian government’s arrest of hundreds of rioters after they attacked the
Belarusian parliament buildings with iron bars, bottles, screw drivers and other weapons.
Arresting criminals attempting to install a Western puppet regime constitutes an unpardonable violation of "human rights" according to the insane kleptocrats in Brussels and
Washington. Like all criminal gangs, the Western-backed putschists began to fight among themselves even before the attempted seizure of parliament! The same in-fighting and criminality has characterized the NATO hordes that took over Libya last year and the current terrorists attempting to seize power in Damascus.
It was the second time since 2006 that a Western-backed "colour revolution" failed to take effect in the Republic of Belarus. The dismal failure of NATO-fomented regime change in Minsk has driven Europe’s delusional oligarchs to despair
Sanctions and threats are all that remain of NATO’s indefatigable desire to extend its power to the Russian border. In spite of the fact that the EU sanctions are illegal according to international law, the restrictions they impose on Western European companies eager to trade with a robust and stable Eastern European economy are a cogent example of the madness that currently reigns among Europe’s ruling elite.
As European economies tether on the edge of collapse, sabotage, as well as economic, and media warfare is waged on the only government in Europe that is still providing full employment for its citizens through a strong industrial production base, while increasing its exports and ensuring a standard of living for the worker that has continued to rise since Alexander Lukashenko promised to rid the post-Soviet republic of corruption, oligarchs and predatory capitalism in 1994.
Belarus is probably the only country in Europe that still invests more of its GDP in the education, healthcare and housing of its people than it does in zombie banks, rogue financial institutions and foreign wars of conquest. The story of Belarus and its survival in the chaos of the post-Soviet space is one every trade unionist should learn. It is the story of a people who said no to unregulated privatization, no to an economy based solely on greed and inequality, yes to education, yes to healthcare and yes to a future of full employment for its people.
That is why the only news about Belarus the trans-Atlantic elite want you to hear is bad news; news about "human rights" activists paid by America’s National Endowment for Democracy( a front organization for the CIA) and arrested by the "regime"; people like Alias Bialiatsky of the "human rights" centre Viasna, a member of the Féderation International de Droits de l’Homme(FIDH),of which Bialiatsky is the vice-president.
The FIDH supplied false information to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in 2011, leading to the bombing and destruction of the Libyan Arab Jamahirya, Africa’s richest state, and the lynching and assassination of its revolutionary leader Muammar Gaddafi; acts of fascism which President Lukashenko rightfully compared to the brutality of Nazi Germany.
The North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation (NATO) will not be able to treat the people of Belarus to the version of "humanitarian" bombing it unleashed on Libya, but the possibility of using the "Salvadorian option" of death squads and armed gangs, which has been pursued in Syria since March 17th 2011, was openly admitted to the London Times by the US ambassador Micheal Kozak to Belarus in 2000 where he said that in Belarus the American""objective and to some degree methodology are the same" as in Nicaragua.
Reagan’s covert 1980s Contra-war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua resulted in the deaths of thirty thousand people.
The failure of copious fake NED-funded "opposition" media outlets, phony demonstrations and attempted coups could yet prompt Washington and Brussels to opt for destabilization through the funding and training of terrorist gangs as in Syria. But this is unlikely to come in the following months as NATO undertakes its attempted conquest of Syria.
Meanwhile, Belarus continues to conduct peaceful relations with all its neighbours, signing extensive bilateral agreements with emerging economies such as China, Bangladesh and Vietnam, and expanding its export market in Latin America where it has agreed to supply Cuba with new buses and technical and medical supplies, Venezuela with agricultural and medical equipment together with the construction of thousands of new social housing units.
Virtually unknown in Western Europe, Alexander Lukashenko enjoys considerable prestige in left-wing Latin American countries. He received the Order of José Marti from Fidel Castro in 2000 for his achievement in preserving what was best of the USSR, and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has described Belarus as a "model state".
The inauguration of the Eurasian Union in 2012 has hammered another nail in the coffin of the moribund EU, as the geopolitical chessboard moves to Central and Eastern Asia. In a multi-polar world with its centre in Eurasia, there will be no place for trans-Atlantic plutocrats.
The integration of Belarus, Russia and Kazakstan together with the strengthening of ties with China through the Shanghai Co-operation
Organisation poses a serious threat to NATO’s plans for global domination.
Belarus is perfectly positioned to play a leading role in this integration as the portal to Eurasia. Although significant privatization has taken place in Belarus since the dissolution of the USSR, the vast majority of enterprises remain in public control. This is in contrast to Russia where predatory oligarchs have reduced millions to dire poverty.
President Vladimir Putin made his first foreign visit to Belarus on 31th of May where he made the following joint statement with the President Alexander Lukashenko:
""In accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and based on the value of diversity of ways of progressive development, as well as recognizing the right of peoples to determine their own path of social and economic development, Belarus and Russia will coordinate efforts to counter attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Union State and the Common Economic Space member- states, putting pressure on them by the introduction of restrictive measures and sanctions,"
The defense of the UN Charter sent a clear message to the war-mongers law-breakers of the NATO states that the Eurasian Union would assume its responsibilities in restoring international law, peace and diplomacy.
Relations between Russia and Belarus have improved considerably since the re-election of Vladimir Putin. If Russia is to survive it inevitable confrontation with the West, it will have to ollow the economic model of Belarus, as a nation run by oligarchs and private interests will never have the power and unity to defeat NATO. Russians should know this from their own history, for as David Stahl amply proves in his book ‘Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s defeat in the East’, it was the productive and organizational superiority of the socialist economic system which enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany single-handedly during the Second World War, a fact right-wing Cold war historians have repeatedly distorted.[1]
Other European neighbours have also expressed admiration for Belarus’s socially-oriented economy.
Latvia’s former Minister for Economics Ingrida Latimir Udra told the Pro100 TV channel on May 23:
"In 2004 there was no alternative to the EU. However, if politicians had started thinking about it in 1991 when we separated from the USSR
and when the USSR collapsed, we would have had alternatives. We would have been developing like Belarus.
"Belarusians are developing their industry. They produce tractors, machines, TV sets. And they trade. They receive foreign investments
despite any political disagreements. Even Americans invest there. They are building up their national capital and it is not bad,"
That a former minister of an EU state should make such an astonishing admission shows that sanctions and aggression against the Republic of Belarus are destined to fail in the long term. Many business people in Latvia are unhappy with the EU’s decision to continue with sanctions against Belarus and some have called for 1 billion Euro from Brussels to compensate for the exorbitant rise in freight and cargo costs caused by the sanctions.
The presidents of Lithuania and Latvia Dalia Gribauskaite and Andris Berzins made a joint declaration in Vilnius on 22 March stating that the sanctions against Belarus would adversely affect business on both sides of the border. The Latvian and Lithuanian economies have been reduced to abject debt slavery to the EU and the IMF. These economies will die a slow death or else gravitate towards a Belarusian-lead Eurasian Union.
The obsessive media campaign against the Republic of Belarus regularly resorts to the most absurd conspiracy theories to create the image of a dark, totalitarian dictator "oppressing his own people". After the terrorist attacks in Minsk on April 11 2011, paranoid conspiracy theories abounded in the Western press suggesting that the bombs could be the result of an elaborate government plot, a pretext to "clamp down on opposition".
As in the terrorist blasts that have recently rocked Syria, there is little if any sympathy shown by the corporate press for the innocent victims. The two men convicted for the Minsk Metro were proven guilty in a court of law through video footage, confessions and witnesses. There was no evidence of torture, ill treatment or fraud.
Yet one mendacious propagandist in the Irish Times claimed that President Lukashenko approved the execution of two young men who were convicted of planting a deadly bomb in the Minsk metro, despite a paucity of evidence and suggestions the blast was used as a pretext to clamp down on growing anti-Lukashenko dissent.
How ironic that "suggestions" and conspiracy theories regarding terrorist attacks in countries resisting Western hegemony are perfectly normal and routine in the mainstream press, in spite of the absence of evidence, while no interrogation, speculation or investigation is ever tolerated by the same press agencies when terrorism strikes Western states.
The fact of the matter is that real opposition politicians and media play an active role in Belarusian society. The Belarusian government has no need to clamp down on dissent, as ‘dissidents’ in Belarus constitute no more of a threat to the government than Trotskyist or anarchist groups threaten the governments of the EU. In fact, the ridiculousness of the
Western-funded opposition in Belarus has only served to strengthen support for Lukashenko.
The problem for the Western leaders is that they could never hope to enjoy the confidence and support Lukashenko has in Belarus.
The reason working men and women in Western Europe never hear about the achievements of the socially-oriented industrial economy of Belarus is because the editors of the Western newspapers and TV channels are far too busy attending secret meetings with the captains of finance and other class-peers, in order to co-ordinate their next collective assault on the rights of working people all over the world through austerity, war and a vast quotidian tapestry of hypocrisy, deceit and lies.
Footnotes
[1] Whist I find my find myself strongly in agreement with the rest of this article, this claim, often made by people who share my left-wing world views, seems not to be born out by the evidence. Whist it is true that the Soviet Union 'won' its war against Nazi Germany, it won at a terrible cost of 23,400,000 lives as was noted in the article Need 60 million have died to rid the world of Hitler? of 17 Dec 2011 on candobetter. It needs to be asked: How many more lives could the Soviet Union have lost without losing the ability to further resist Nazism? It seems to me that this number was not unlimited. Had the Soviet Union suffered more reverses, for example, had they lost Stalingrad and had the Germans gained access to the oilfields in the Caucasus or beyond there, Iran, could the Red Army have continued the fight? Had the red Army lost the massive tank battle of Kursk in 1943, could they have pursued their war to defeat Nazi Germany or would they have felt no alternative but to sign a truce with Nazi Germany?
One factor that could well have made a difference between defeat and victory for the Soviet Union was the supply of equipment, particularly trucks from the United States. In fact, more of the credit for defeating Nazi Germany may rightly lie with the capitalist United States than with the 'socialist' (or 'post capitalist') Soviet Union. Even if the sacrifice of American lives was much less than that of the Soviet Union -- 418,500 as opposed to 23,400,000 according to Wikipedia --- it seems to me that what was far more decisive than the sacrifice of manpower in winning that fight was the supply of hardware, particularly vehicles for transport and fighting, fighter aircraft, bombers and warships. That hardware was supplied to itself and to allied nations far more abundantly by the United States than by any other single nation.
Whilst the United States military industrial complex appears to have, on a number of occasions, acted to deliberately prolong the Second World War, for example by having failed to bomb the Nazi German ball bearing factory at Schweinfurt, which would have very rapidly ended the production of any heavy equipment necessary for Germany to fight a modern war, it nevertheless appears that the United States and not the Soviet Union had the most decisive impact on that war.
Whether that was due to the innate superiority of 'capitalism' over 'socialism' or simply the United States' better access to petroleum, coal, metals and other natural resources is another question.
The Japanese government has recently announced power supply "options," which it says will be used as a basis for a "national debate," the outcome of which will be reflected in the formulation of a new Basic Energy Plan. But what is it about the deceptive methodology of the "options" that always leads to the conclusion that nuclear power is "necessary"...?
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station catastrophe has caused something of a national debate, if such a thing can be said to occur in Japan, on Japan’s energy future. The core of the debate is, naturally, how much, if any, nuclear power will Japan require in the coming decades and how much power can be produced by renewable energy technology or supply requirements reduced by energy conservation and efficiency efforts. Power companies, business circles and the politicians, bureaucrats, academics and so on who constitute the ‘nuclear village’ claim that without nuclear power Japan will face power shortages and try to scare the general public into acceptance of nuclear power with dire warnings of blackouts during the peak summer power consumption period. Nuclear opponents, on the other hand, say that there is no non-nuclear energy/electrical power shortage in Japan and that nuclear power stations are simply not necessary.1
Japan’s new energy policy, the “Innovative Energy and Environmental Strategy” is due to be unveiled sometime during the summer of 2012 and is supposed to reflect discussions on reviews of the Framework for Nuclear Energy Policy and the Basic Energy Plan. The Basic Energy Plan was revised in June 2010, but is now being reviewed ‘from scratch’ since it has a strong bias towards nuclear power.2 The Plan is drawn up by the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy, a consultative body of the Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry (MITI), and the review of the Plan has included a number of options for the composition of power supply from different sources (nuclear power, thermal, renewables, etc.). These options have been published in the Japanese press recently, and are as follows.
No figure was given for total energy or electrical power requirement in 2030.
Luckily, we have recently been treated to a rare look into the process of discussions in one of the subcommittees that has been deliberating these options. This appeared in the form of a monthly mail magazine sent out in English by Japan for Sustainability (JFS).3 Under the title “Re-Examining GDP Growth Projections to Plan Japan's Future Energy Policy,” the author Junko Edahiro, representative of JFS and a member of the Fundamental Issues Subcommittee under the Advisory Committee on Natural Resources and Energy,4 describes the discussions in the committee meetings on the various energy ‘options’ and the economic growth scenarios that form their basis. The English article also contains a link to a Japanese PDF (originally a PowerPoint presentation) that was submitted to the subcommittee as an opinion by Ms. Edahiro on March 9, 2012. This PDF contains detailed material supporting Ms. Edahiro’s argument and the discussion below will be based on the English article and the Japanese PDF. Slide numbers mentioned below refer to the slide numbers in the Japanese PDF
Regarding the lack of a figure for the total energy requirement for the 2030 power structure, Ms. Edahiro says, “This discussion gives me the impression that we are being told to think about how to cut a pie into pieces without knowing the size of the entire pie. I've been saying at the meetings that we need an estimate of the quantity of energy required before discussing how to secure the supply.” Quite right, but not unusual. Even the well-known Tetsunari Iida, sitting on the same subcommittee, and his Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP) do the same thing – giving energy source mixes for the power supply for 2020 or 2050, but failing to mention how large the pie is.5 (Strangely, Ms. Edahiro also gives a similar power structure graph for 2020 and 2030 on Slide 41 of her PDF.) Perhaps it is hard to calculate, but all the non-expert people I have talked to have assumed that the total energy/electrical supply in 2050, when ISEP says that it will be possible to supply 100% of electrical power by renewables, will be roughly the same as it is today. The graph on p.1 of ISEP’s paper makes it look like all electrical power in 2050 is supplied by renewables, but has been reduced by 50% through energy savings, and there is no indication of the actual size of the power supply. Less than we are consuming today, I’m sure, but how much less, and what might that mean it terms of lifestyle? I am not suggesting that it will necessarily be a worse lifestyle than we ‘enjoy’ in Japan today – one of the major points of Ms. Edahiro’s article is that it may well be a better, more relaxed, happier, less stressed-out lifestyle – but it will be different from what we have today. Perhaps that is what Tetsunari Iida wants to avoid saying, though I have no idea why he would want to avoid saying it. Perhaps that is what the nuclear village wants to avoid saying, since it might mean that if we are living in this low-energy 2030 or 2050 society we might not need nuclear power.
So we want to know just how much energy/electricity Japan will need for its economy in 2030 or 2050. To estimate the amount of energy that will be required at some point in the future, we need to have some way of calculating what the level of economic activity will be at that time. We can do this by knowing the current GDP, which is given by multiplying productivity by the number of workers in the labour force, and then by estimating the labour force and productivity in the target year. Calculating precise figures is difficult, but pretty good estimates can be made. This will result in an estimate of the amount of energy required for that level of economic activity, leading then to a number of options on how the energy can actually be supplied. At the same time, this will also result in an annual growth rate for the period up to the target year. The current Basic Energy Plan of June 2010 assumes an annual growth rate of approximately 2% for Japan for the period 2010 to 2020, then an approximate 1.2% for the period 2020 to 2030 (which is about the same as called for in the Japanese government’s New Growth Strategy6), with oil prices of approximately $120/bbl for 2020 and $170/bbl for 2030 (which is taken from the IEA’s “World Energy Outlook 2009”) (Slide 10). But note that these annual growth rates do not seem to have been calculated using the method mentioned above. They appear to be more like wishful thinking “called for” in the New Growth Strategy for the purposes of alleviating Japan’s wobbly pension, social security and public debt problems.
In the Fundamental Issues Subcommittee, the committee secretariat firstly proposed two growth scenarios, apparently based on cabinet office calculations:
(1) 1.8 percent this decade and 1.2 percent from 2020 (the “growth strategy” scenario), and
(2) 1.1 percent this decade and 0.8 percent from 2020 (the “prudent” scenario).
Ms. Edahiro, however, pointed out that Japan's labour force is estimated to decrease by 19.2 percent, or 13 million workers, between 2000 and 2030, due to the rapid aging of the nation’s population. (See graph in Slide 14, which shows that Japan’s population peaked at around 2005 and is now in decline).
Ms. Edahiro goes on to propose that projections of energy/electricity demand be based on the growth rate of GDP per capita rather than on total GDP, since Japan’s “economically affluent lifestyle depends on the level of national income per capita, not on the overall size of the economy.” What happens when we make growth predictions based on the reduction of the size of the labour force and per capita GDP?
Japan's annual GDP growth rate from 2000 to 2010 was 0.74 percent, while the annual GDP growth rate per capita was 0.65 percent. Calculating on the basis of these numbers and the reduction in the size of the labour force, the annual growth rate per capita can be estimated at 0.3 percent this decade to 2020, and zero from 2020 to 2030 (Slide 18). Ms. Edahiro estimates that the real GDP in 2030 would be only 3.7% greater than in 2010, i.e. an effective zero-growth scenario, whereas under the scenario envisaged by the current Basic Energy Plan it would be 40% larger. Assuming that there are possibilities for renewable energy expansion and increased energy conservation and efficiency, this clearly shows a huge gap in perception between the bureaucracy, which maintains that nuclear power is necessary for economic reasons, and people like Ms. Edahiro, who are not necessarily “anti-nuke,” but who base their estimations for the necessity of nuclear power on more realistic growth scenarios.
At this stage, the committee secretariat added the following to the growth scenarios:
(3) The case suggested by members, which assumes that Japan will maintain its per capita GDP growth and estimates the real GDP growth rate at 0.3 percent this decade and at zero percent from 2020.
Some committee members complained that this low growth rate in scenario (3) would cause some difficulties with government policies, such as the pension system. Ms. Edahiro rebuts this argument by saying,
“… I believe people who address policies based on easy assumptions that the size of a pie will get larger should reconsider their way of thinking… It is more important that we consider how to sustain those things under the situation of a realistic growth rate.”
I would interpret this as meaning, “What’s the point of having nuclear power if there is no basis in reality for the economic growth that it is intended to support?”
It should also be pointed out that, although not mentioned in Ms. Edahiro’s article, the PDF shows in Slide 20 that the real GDP of Germany has been rising for more than 20 years while the energy supply has gradually fallen. This is compared with Japan, where it looks much more like energy supply and real GDP rise or fall together. Presumably, this is due to Germany’s efforts to promote renewable energy as well as energy conservation and efficiency improvements, which have been stifled in Japan by the power companies and the nuclear village, who do not wish to see any competition for their energy regime. Thus, even if Japan’s real GDP is 40% larger than what it was in 2010, that does not necessarily mean that 40% more energy will be required to fuel it or that the energy must come from thermal (fossil energy) or nuclear sources.
Finally, in the PDF slides, Ms. Edahiro points out that electricity is not even the Japan’s biggest energy problem. Oil is. Oil supplies 52% of Japan’s final energy demand (electrical power is 26%, coal 11%, natural gas 10%, industrial steam 4%, and renewables are negligible – Slide 23). What Japan needs to do is reduce consumption of vehicle fuel through the introduction not only of hybrids and EVs, but also by allowing the use of bioethanol and biodiesel. This is another area where the big energy companies have tried to block off competition to their fuels by delaying tactics or by the use of ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) as a 3% gasoline additive instead of making serious efforts to introduce the use of bioethanol, e.g. by small, private enterprises making use of waste plant materials and so on. No one in Japan seems to have woken up to the fact that there are plenty of countries in the world where large numbers of vehicles are run on 100% biodiesel fuel or bioethanol (Slide 31 - or that in countries like Brazil there are thousands of flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs), which make it possible for cars to run on any mixture of gasoline and ethanol). It is very interesting to hear the gasps from Japanese audiences when I tell them that all gasoline cars can run on ethanol with certain, relatively easy, changes to the fuel injection system (and tell them about the existence of FFVs, some of which appear to be running on Japanese roads with neither the owners nor the dealers knowing it!) and that Henry Ford actually designed his first mass-produced cars to run on ethanol, not gasoline, and were effectively FFVs!
There are a large number of other issues involved here. The IEA estimates, mentioned above, that oil prices will be approximately $120/bbl in 2020 and $170/bbl in 2030 are a joke. Anyone can make a guess, I suppose, and they might be right, but at the same time, the tendency for oil-exporting countries to consume more and more of their production domestically as their resources deplete also suggests that the amount of oil reaching Japan’s shores might be zero in 2030.7 Who knows? What’s the betting that Japan will not be importing any fossil energy in 2050? If we think like Tetsunari Iida and imagine that 100% of Japan’s energy (not just electricity) will be supplied by renewables in 2050, then perhaps we need to start thinking about what kind of agriculture Japanese people will be doing in 2050, what Japan’s population will be then, and whether Japan will need to import food or how it will do so if it needs to. These are just examples; there are hundreds of energy issues that all countries will have to face in the coming decades. The extent to which we are able to make use of one energy resource or another defines our societies and lifestyles. The Oil and Gas News, an Internet newsletter sent out by the Energy Daily (www.energy-daily.com) proclaims oil and (natural) gas to be the “fuel of civilization.” Quite right. It will not even be possible to operate nuclear reactors for more than a year or so without (relatively cheap) oil supplies.
For the time being, though, how and why the nuclear village bureaucrats, politicians and others abuse figures and ‘options’ to persuade the Japanese people that nuclear power is necessary for the future of Japan’s economy is a story the Japanese people need to know. Along with the Japanese earthquake/tsunami problem and the problem of nuclear waste (symbolized by the continuing horror story at Fukushima Daiichi’s extremely precarious Unit 4 fuel pool), it is quite clear that the Japanese people should not be wasting their time trying to decide how much nuclear power they want. The answer should already be patently obvious: ZERO.
An ecological, rather than a business profit mindset requires thinking beyond commerce and money-making and focusing on the biological parameters that keep civilisations in existence.
Anyone who has read Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, Meadows’ et al. The Limits to Growth, Smith’s Population Crisis and most recently Lowe’s Bigger or Better? will appreciate that humanity is facing a series of converging catastrophes including fossil fuel shortages, water shortages, a food crisis, soil degradation and climate change.
The world’s population is projected by the United Nations to reach at least 9 billion by 2050. By that time the world will require twice as much the food and energy consumed today. At present resources are consumed at a rate of 1.5 times the Earth’s capacity to renew them. By about 2030 this ecological overshoot will exceed replenishment levels by 100 percent. The natural capacity of the Earth is thus being rapidly depleted.
With business-as-usual Australia’s population is likely to reach 36 million or more by 2050. This increase is occurring at a time when the converging catastrophes are beginning. The technological optimists say that Australia should first increase its population via immigration and then worry about the consequences later. This is merely a front for corporate greed: to make short-term profits while leaving the mess for future generations to clean up.
So what now? Australia continues on the path to Big Australia given existing immigration numbers and the population growth rate. Big Business continues to push for big numbers. The media generates anxiety about asylum seekers and the control of borders, when in reality the number of asylum seekers is small compared to legal migrants. Nevertheless, critics of immigration are conveniently dismissed as nativists, not concerned with the ‘global good’ when in fact the strongest advocates of mass immigration to Australia, the Big Business lobby group, are primarily concerned with their profit margins rather than morality. They get away without the strong condemnation they deserve.
An ecological, rather than a business profit mindset requires thinking beyond commerce and money-making and focusing on the biological parameters that keep civilisations in existence. Our business elites, with the notable exception of Dick Smith, seemingly have no concern beyond day-to-day profit making. This would not matter if they did not have such a death-lock on the throats of both our major political parties.
What to do? A reduction in Australia’s immigration rate to 70,000 per annum, in accordance with Kelvin Thomson’s ‘14 Point Plan’, will still enable Australia to increase the intake of refugees and meet our humanitarian obligations.
Following in the footsteps of the greats I referred to at the beginning of this message, my contribution to the cause has been my own book: Sleepwalking to Catastrophe which exposes the pro-immigrationist arguments as the sophistry which they are. This work also serves as my manifesto for an alternative economic system considering the long-term future of our environment. Ultimately, the pen is still mightier than the sword as writing remains the most powerful medium we have to educate others.
As a young person I call on all celebrities to join with me in voicing opposition to the perpetual growth model. It is important that we combine the power of writing with the public exposure of celebrities to communicate with the masses. In doing so, young people just might be able to have a future.
On 9 June Russia Today reported how Alex Thomson, the Chief Channel 4 News correspondent accused Syrian insurgents of having deliberately set him up to be killed by Assad government forces.
The embedded broadcast included the following testimony from Alex Thomson:
We were deliberately led out of that town a way which ... the rebels knew was dangerous. We were led there in a car full of four men, two of whom were armed. They told us to go down a route which looked dangerous to us, but we trusted them and we said that we would go down the road and turn. We turned and found the road was blocked. That was a roadblock that they had to have known was there. There was nobody around and at that point we were forced to ... turn the vehicle around in a free fire zone and one round was duly fired. We were definitely exposed to a dangerous situation and I am in no doubt that they did it deliberately. My point is that dead journalists are bad for Damascus. Now that's going to reflect all the way to Moscow and all the way to Beijing. ... You don't have to be very clever to work out that the death of any journalists at the hands of the Syrian Army are going to be an appalling blow again for president Assad. So the motivation for the rebels to pull as stunt like that seems to be very obvious.
The logging crew could have left the pond alone and still allowed clearance for any passing logging vehicles. But that would have required a rudimentary respect for natural beauty. What are these brutes made of?
The Pond in its glory
“O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers” Shakespeare (from Julius Caesar).
“We end, I think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But, they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it....We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Aldo Leopold
Barney stands and meditates in the Pond
Rage and grief
My present mood is one of rage and grief. Two miles from where I live was a little jewel of a pond beside a forest trail, that even in the midst of summer, offered a deep, cold bath for dogs like mine---- and I just learned, a little boy as well. It was welcome respite from the heat, and an opportunity for meditation. Even the dogs paused to take in its soothing silence. It was shrouded by trees, fed on one side by a stream coming from the other side of the trail. As the pond narrowed, it formed another stream which wound its way through the forest, broad enough to form an impenetrable marsh made tantalizing by its mysterious course. On sunny days shafts of light would allow glimpses of its beauty as if it was a strip-tease dancer trying to excite my imagination with fleeting revelations.
Days ago, in its mission to cut back the foliage that had encroached upon the two mile trail, a machine of some description massacred the site, laying waste to the pond's shield of trees and bushes, fragments of which were left strewn over it like a carpet. I looked upon it as if it were a loved one I found beaten, violated and left to die in a ditch, tossed aside as if rubbish. Destroyed without respect or ceremony.
Gratuitous destruction
The logging crew could have left the pond alone and still allowed clearance for any passing logging vehicles. But that would have required a rudimentary respect for natural beauty. What are these brutes made of? Have they no sense of the sacred? Did they never pause to marvel at this masterpiece of solitude and life? Wolves, cougars and bears have drank from that pond. Frogs, and many other creatures that I can't imagine had made it their home.
Our social system impotent to protect what we love
That pond died a lonely death. Murdered without witnesses, like a mob hit that will never be punished in a court of law. Its passing will escape wide notice. There were no protestors to bar the road to logging equipment, no petitions handed out to lobby for its protection, no politicians around to make it a cause celebre. After all, it was just one pond, one stream, one marsh. But nevertheless, it was a big part of my world, and of so many others of no political account. Not much in the grand scheme of things, I suppose, but it does serve to remind me that at the root of ecological destruction is a spiritual vacuity that when recruited by the profit motive, is a reckless, ruthless and apparently irresistible force.
Where does one direct anger? Who can be held accountable for this callous mentality that is so pervasive and universal? Corporate directors? Shareholders? Consumers of wood products? Slumbering voters? Parents? Human nature? I feel impotent and heartsick......
What is wrong with our species?
Tim
June 20, 2011
PS. A year has now past, and the wound has not yet healed.
Tim
June 9, 2012.
Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) and the Department of Primary Industries' (DPI) court cases against five duck rescuers falls apart. Rescuers found guilty of only one of five charges. Magistrate refuses to award the $18,000 court costs because of DSE wildlife heavy handedness in arresting rescuers final weekend last years' duck-shooting season and criticizes wildlife officers for refusing warmth to rescuer. Magistrate says legal for rescuers to be on the water, expresses surprise that DSE did not provide care for injured birds at the wetlands - that it was left to duck rescuers to do this. No rescuers convicted or fined. No court costs. Rescuers good behaviour bonds until October this year.
Government departments fail to suppress duck rescuers, waste scarce court resources and taxes
Following a six-day hearing [!] in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court in March this year, five duck rescuers were today each acquitted of four charges out of five. Each were found guilty of only one charge when rescuing waterbirds on wetlands near Kerang, in northern Victoria, during the final weekend of the 2011 duck shooting season.
Magistrate Mealy found the charge of 'hindering' proved against rescuers Luke Milroy and Lucas Treloar. The charge of operating noise producing equipment, being a whistle, in a manner likely to cause unreasonable inconvenience or nuisance to any person contrary to the Wildlife (SGR) Regulations 2004 was proved against Linda Duckham, Penny Cameron and David Mould. They were given undertakings (good behaviour bonds) without conviction.
DSE Prosecution fails to get costs
Prosecution costs of approximately $18,000 were sought by the Department of Primary Industries (DPI), but refused. The Magistrate observed that the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) had not been even-handed in the laying of charges (with the DPI prosecuting). He indicated that the Department appeared to hold rescuers responsible for the provision of vets at the wetlands, when the Department should be responsible for the welfare of wildlife.
Wildlife Officers known duck shooters: conflict of interest needs Omsbudsman
Coalition Against Duck Shooting Campaign Director, Laurie Levy, today said: "Last year, DSE compliance officers planned a 'sting' that was code-named 'Operation Bolte' - after the late Victorian Premier, a keen duck shooter - with the aim of cracking down on rescuers in what can only be seen as a blatant attempt to accommodate their duck shooting mates.
"Most of these compliance officers, who are now all working in the newly established 'Game Victoria' within the DPI, are themselves known duck shooters.
"These officers have a serious conflict of interest which must be investigated by the Ombudsman's office."
Undemocratic abuse of taxpayer's time and overburdened court system
"The charges against rescuers have resulted in an enormous waste of taxpayers' money and court time, especially when Magistrates' Courts throughout the state are clogged up and unable to hear important cases for months on end, and when the majority of Victorians oppose the recreational shooting of native waterbirds and want this activity stopped," Levy said.
Source:
Laurie Levy,
Campaign Director
Coalition Against Duck Shooting
MEDIA RELEASE, Thursday, June 7, 2012
Got 6 mins 25 secs to see this video about how Japanese women feel about nuclear power? Forget Hollywood. This is the Japanese reality!!This 6 min. 25 sec. will show you how Japanese women feel about nuclear power and how the Japanese male bureaucracy is trying to foist the deception of the century on the Japanese people by suddenly deciding to hold meetings behind closed doors!
Australia, still a colony, has more supermarkets per capita than the US and nearly three times as many as the UK. [1]India, no longer a British colony, has no supermarket chains. What other country can claim this? Late last year Indian shopkeepers rioted successfully to stop foreign investment liberalisation and multinational supermarkets. Here is a mostly French-sourced article about how emerging powers are looking after their own industries, while the free-marketeers of the west sell the rest of us down the river. See also article about President Francois Holland's program to meet protectionism elsewhere with protectionism at home: ,"New French industry policy to moderate globalisation, Ministerial interview" A word of warning to vegetarians, the sacred cows of India are being sacrificed now to the mighty dollar.
(Adapted from a report entitled, "La pousee du protectionisme a l'echelle mondiale" by Pierre Monègier et Nicolas Ducrot on France2 Journal Televise, Thursday 7 June, 2000hrs.)
Presenter David Pujadas relating the phenomenon to the global financial crisis, says that according to an annual report from the European commission, world-wide, import duties are strongly increasing in number and in size. "This is particularly so among emerging powers, which have no qualms about protecting their markets."
India's export market
The France2 report centers round India.
We see film of a factory where millions of bright green gerkins are being processed. The message from Pierre Monègier is that
"This little gerkin has every chance of finishing up in [a french] plate. Indians produce more than
200,000 tonnes a year, but they don't like gerkins themselves.
The subtitle for this report, filmed in India, is, "You buy my products, I'll tax yours."
Reporter Pierre Monègier tells us,
"All these gerkins are therefore destined for export to France, the United States, Africa... 'Made in India' rolls out everywhere in the world, without obstacle. It's the same for livestock. In the Land of the Sacred Cow it would be sacreligious to put your fork in one, yet this year India will become first in the world in beef exports.
These performances signify a giant in the making. And that makes foreign investors want to have a share in the Indian cake, but in cooking, India doesn't really play fair," he concludes.
The camera shows us a French restaurant in India with a number of business-class looking male diners in the dining room and then moves to the kitchen, where the French proprietor tells us that he estimates that the cost of French products is multiplied by Indian import duties by three and a half to four times, generally. He says that it is the same for all French products - for wine, for fine delicatessen goods.
The reporter says that the result is that it is almost impossible to find french farm products in India. Furthermore, he says, one cannot rely on big supermarket chains in India to reduce the costs and put French products on their shelves.
There are no supermarkets in India
"In contrast to China and Brazil, India is still ferociously resisting foreign investment in the form of supermarket chains here. There are no supermarkets here. Carrefour [French supermarket chain] and Wal Mart have come to grief here. The government rejected them in order to protect thousands of grocery stores."
Proud democratic history of multinational supermarket chain failure in India
It began with an attempt to pass a law permitting 51% foreign investment-led multinational supermarket chains:
"NEW DELHI: Global chains like Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco may face problems in opening stores in over half of the 53 cities eligible for FDI in multi-brand retail.
The parties and alliances ruling in 11 major states with 28 cities, have strongly opposed the decision of the Central government to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail which is dominated by small traders" Source: "FDI in retail: Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco may face hurdles in 28 cities."
(25 November 2011):"Anger and indigation took over the Indian Parliament on Friday, after the Indian Minister for Industry and Commerce, Anand Sharma, announced the liberalisation of market policy towards foreign multinationals in India. The Opposition parties and the Trinamool Congress, key ally of the Congressional Party in the heart of the governing coalition (UPA), loudly protested against the green light given by New Delhi to big supermarket chains, permitting for the first time, foreign investment at 51% in the country in that sector.
...Direct foreign investment by groups like Wal-Mart and Carrefour to open a retail store would be subject to several conditions: minimum investment of 100 million dollars, of which 50 per cent must be devoted to housing infrastructure (chaine du froid etc), 30 per cent of produce would have to be sourced from small and medium sized businesses, and the stores would only be allowed to open in cities of more than one million inhabitants."
(Translation by Sheila Newman): Source:
-la-polemique">25/11/2011 | Antoine Guinard ( Aujourd'hui l'Inde).
It ended with direct democracy:
Policy changes aiming at opening the market up to 51% foreign investment in the form of big multinational supermarket chains resulted on 2 December 2012 in one of those huge popular protests that India does so well and which constitute its chief form of real democracy.
"New Delhi backs down. ... Parliament was paralysed by the anger of the opposition. All the legal projects are in limbo today. Last Thursday the protests went to the streets, with one hundred thousand shopkeepers in a general strike. (Translation by Sheila Newman). Source:"India suspends the introduction of foreign supermarkets." (Article by Vanessa Dougnac.)
On January 11, 19 year old Nigel Franks was driving a car towards Huon Hill with two passengers when he hit a kangaroo.
Franks kicked the kangaroo's head twice while laughing, before stomping it to death. Franks then pulled a joey out of the kangaroo's pouch and threw it into a nearby paddock.
Franks hit, bashed and killed a female kangaroo, disposed of its young, and paraded the hapless animal's body down the streets of Wodonga – leaving a trail of blood!
Magistrate Stuthridge told the court that she was deeply troubled by Franks' complete lack of empathy. Why then wasn't he given a jail sentence?
Nigel Franks, 20, pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated animal cruelty, dangerous driving, careless driving, public nuisance and driving an unregistered car in relation to the January 11 incident. The "public nuisance" and driving offenses shade into insignificance compared to the animal cruelty crimes?
Franks was sentenced to six months jail, suspended for 12 months, ordered he complete a 12-month community corrections order, pay a $750 fine and that his licence be cancelled for six months. A more heavy fine could have been directed towards wildlife carers who are always struggling to find funds.
A psychologist's report stated the need for Franks to undergo further psychological treatment but the magistrate failed to understand his reasons for the offences. Actually, there is no "reason" or logic in the violence. It's lack of empathy, evil tendency, lack of a soul, and love of violence. All these traits are found in may violent criminals, and many have started their careers torturing animals.
Melbourne County Court Judge Gucciardo sentenced another kangaroo abuser-killer to jail for shooting an arrow in the head of a hapless kangaroo. They are a protected species.
The violence against animals is sickening and gut-wrenching, and animal lovers and wildlife advocates are advocating for greater protection and higher penalties for animal abuse and killing. This light sentence doesn't meet community expectations.
How many criminals start their careers torturing animals? Acts of violence towards animals are symptomatic of a deep mental disturbance. Research in psychology and criminology shows that people who commit acts of cruelty to animals don’t stop there—many of them move on to their fellow humans. There are numerous examples of such evidence from the childhoods of well-known serial killers.
Franks should have been given a custodial prison sentence to understand the severity of his appalling crime, but he needs psychological treatment as well as punishment. He should be supervised in learning to empathise with animals,how to care for orphaned and injured wildlife. He should pay a heavy fine so funds can be distributed to wildlife carers.
The community should be disappointed by the light sentence given to Franks, at a time when animal advocates are calling out for more severe penalties for cruelty to animals.
Here is a short report from University of Sydney about recent research which threw into doubt the role of genetic inbreeding as a factor in lack of immune defense against the killer tumours in devils.
Picture: "Tasmanian Devil." Photo by Rodrigo Hamede, University of Tasmania.
Mystery of Tasmanian devil tumour deepens – for now
The degree of genetic difference to a tumour rapidly decimating the ranks of Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) is not a factor in their likelihood of contracting the disease, according to research led by the University of Sydney.
The finding, published today in PLoS, the Public Library of Science journal, surprised researchers and means they will take a different approach in the race to better understand the Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD), a contagious cancer which has already wiped out 85 percent of all Tasmanian devils.
“We looked at the West Pencil Pine population, in north-western Tasmania because they are the first population to be less severely affected by DFTD than other populations,” said Professor Kathy Belov, the senior author of the study from the University’s Faculty of Veterinary Science.
In West Pencil Pine there is lower prevalence of the disease, increased survival time of infected individuals and little indication of changes in population size or population growth rate, four years after the disease was first detected.
“We thought that differences in certain key immune genes might explain the different susceptibility patterns between devils in West Pencil Pine and other devils,” Professor Belov said.
Due to devil populations having low genetic diversity most Tasmanian devils share the same Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) genes as tumours. The researchers believed that since the tumours were genetically similar to individual devil’s own cells their immune system wouldn’t recognise that the cancer cells were foreign and wouldn’t attack them.
“Many of the devils at West Pencil Pine are genetically different to the animals in the east of the state. We thought these genetically different animals might be able to mount an immune response against the tumours,” Professor Belov said.
“We thought devils that were most genetically different to the tumours would be less likely to catch DFTD. This isn’t the case.”
The researchers will have to go back to the drawing board to try to work out why DFTD is affecting genetically different devils.
“It is possible the tumour itself is suppressing the immune response in some way. We also know that DFTD is evolving and changing over time. Perhaps the strain of DFTD in West Pencil Pine is different and that is why fewer animals are getting sick in that region,” Professor Belov said.
The next step will be to look more closely at the tumours in West Pencil Pine and at genetic difference across the entire devil genome, rather than simply focusing on the MHC genes. West Pencil Pine may still hold the key to why some devils catch DFTD and others do not.
The other contributing authors to the PLoS paper include Dr Amanda Lane, Yuanyuan Cheng, Belinda Wright, Dr Laura LeVan an and Dr Beata Ujvari from the University of Sydney and Dr Menna Jones and Dr Rodrigo Hamede from the University of Tasmania.
Media contact:
Verity Leatherdale: (02) 9351 4312, 0403 067 342 or verity.leatherdale[AT]sydney.edu.au
These photographs of a mass-burial pit in Canberra for kangaroos gunned down by the government was sent to me by 'Friends of AnimalArmy' with the message, "We cannot find an investigative journalist anywhere who will expose the corruption and the lies." I cannot understand why not. Don't we want to know the truth?
Do we want to know the truth?
I think that Australians do want to know the truth, but it seems that the mass media is letting us all down.
This infinitely sad photograph of the dead kangaroo with bent head and hand placed around the body of a hairless joey might remind some of you of pictures of Mary and the infant Jesus, and others of bodies in a pit in Auchwitz. The point is that the photograph documents a deeply tragic mistake on the part of the ACT government, that taints it as brutal and dishonest. This is one of several remarkable photographs that came to me via "Friends of AnimalArmy," with the message,
"We cannot find an investigative journalist anywhere who will expose the corruption and the lies."
"They are shooting 20 metres off major 4 laned highways during peak hour in full view of all traffic, being the ACT Govt they are untouchable and do not answer to anyone."
In the early hours of Sunday morning 3 June 2012, activists uncovered a large mass burial pit at the Kama nature reserve. It contained up to an estimated 300+ slain kangaroo bodies. Evidence was discovered amidst a slurry of mud and blood illustrating unethical and illegal practices including throat shots, partially severed joeys and mature kangaroos with smashed heads. The large kangaroo among the small and tiny ones is a big mature male.
These images were taken of an unearthed pit where hundreds of kangaroos have been buried during this 2012 cull. The images are graphic and may be distressing but think how the kangaroos felt. Can any of us imagine? It is most important to share these truths around to friends, families, colleagues, media, and politicians. Blow the lid off the dodgy 'wildlife management' that goes on in the ACT and blow the lid off the mainstream media conspiracy to hide the facts from Australians.
When I received these pictures from friends of 'AnimalArmy', I wondered where to begin to describe what I can see is happening. Leisa's poem (above) sums it up. Leisa has said to me that the longer she knows kangaroos, and she has worked intimately with them for 25 years, the more impressed she is by their intelligence and their capacity to love - "not just their own species, but humans as well." She also says, "When I look into a kangaroo's eyes I see a capacity to analyse."
In contrast to the Canberra male half-buried in mud, the picture at the bottom of this article is of a healthy South Australian animal interacting with a friendly photographer.
NOTES
[1] This poem by Leisa Moore, a kangaroo rescuer in South Australia was originally written in memory of 453 Belconnen Kangaroos Killed by the A.C.T. Government in a Kangaroo Management Cull, 2009. Leisa called it, "Message from a Belconnen Kangaroo, 'Reflection In My Eyes'.
The ACT government is driving a terrible animal Holocaust involving thousands of kangaroos. This is becoming close an annual event. To wildlife carers, the official rationale seems about as sane as Hitler's reasoning for driving whole sections of society into concentration camps. The ACT government wants more people in Canberra because the growth lobby wants to sell more land and house packages. The violence and dodgy science used to excuse this behaviour, supposedly to protect native grasses, would be funny if we were not actually expected to take it seriously and if hundreds of kangaroos were not currently lying slaughtered in pits for no good reason.
According to the Australian Society for Kangaroos (ASK)[1] one of the parks where yet more kangaroos are to be killed is where the ABC did a documentary on Canberra’s Kangaroos which went to air earlier this year. The main scientist featured in that documentary admitted that the mortality rate of joeys (baby kangaroos) is 70%.
Picture of what ASK believe to be death pits at Mugga Lane where the ACT government will dispose of the cull victims.
Comment from Sheila Newman: At this rate they will wipe out Canberra kangaroos completely. It has been estimated that a female kangaroo only replaces herself in a lifetime due to the low survival rate of baby roos. This is especially true in wildlife-hostile modern Australia, where the mobs and clans that provide social support for kangaroo families are dispersed and fragmented, leading to short-term population booms, as kinship rules are lost, and long-term population busts, as the supportive network of mobs across established territories is destroyed by human infrastructure expansion and activity.[2]
The Australian Society for Kangaroos (ASK) has said that animal activists have located what is believed to be fresh graves at Mugga Lane where 2000 of Canberra's iconic kangaroos will be buried during this year's slaughter, including the stars of the recent ABC documentary "Kangaroo Mob".
The Canberra government today announced it will shoot another 2000 kangaroos in Canberra nature parks only months after bringing in cattle to control the overgrowth of grasses.
Sadly this years cull will target Wanniassa Hills Nature Park where Madge and her joey Sonny, much loved stars of the recent documentary “Kangaroo Mob”, reside.
The announcement of yet another massive kill has shocked animal advocates who are still reeling from the government's massacre of 75% of the kangaroo population in ACT nature parks last year. Despite claims by the ACT government that their killing program is about protecting threatened species, they have failed to provide any credible evidence to support this claim. (See ACT Roo killings: Who profits? Behind the Earless Dragon mask," for a comprehensive analysis of the 'science' behind the ACT rationales for massive culls.
ASK says that the ACT government has also refused recent Freedom of Information requests from the Australian Society for Kangaroos relating to questions about recent culls in ACT nature parks.
They allege that the Canberra government has breached multiple FOI laws by failing to respond to ASK's request about their kangaroo culls within the legal time frame. They say that four months after the request was lodged, the ACT government refused to provide any of the documents requested. ASK say they will be appealing this decision with the ombudsmen and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Protesters from across Australia wanting to defend Madge Sonny and their fellow kind are gearing up to descend on Canberra ready for a fiery front line battle with park authorities.
For those wanting to protest this massacre please contact:
Katy Gallagher ACT Chief Minister
GALLAGHER[AT]act.gov.au
PM Julia Gillard
http://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm
Lee Rhiannon GREENS ANIMAL WELFARE
senator.rhiannon[AT]aph.gov.au
NOTES
[1] Source: "Action Alert: Canberra plots death of tv heroes Madge and Sonny," from the Australian Society for Kangaroos
[2] For a critical analysis of population dynamic theory for humans and other species, read, Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse, Candobetter Press, 2012
The government needs to listen to the electorate. Consecutive public community polls have shown that Australians are very concerned about the ongoing rapid rate of population growth and density of development, food security, and social disorganisation in poorly serviced new suburbs.
Johnny and Joanie were once the typical post-apocalyptic Stone Age couple. Each day was a tribulation. Minding the kids, fending off predators and raiders from adjacent tribes, hell, just putting food on the table were stressful enough. The versatile Tim Murray reaches out to new-agers everywhere in this article about personal adjustment in a time of advanced oil-depletion. 
Culex molestus is thought to have been introduced into southern Australia in the 1940s, hitching a ride into the country with travelling American military personnel. The species is known in other countries for the spread of West Nile virus. Since the 1940s the mosquito has been found in all states except Queensland and the Northern Territory. Where exactly the mosquito came from before arriving in Australia is still a mystery but it is well known from cities in the US and Europe. The mosquito infamously made a meal of Londoners sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz and is often commonly referred to as the London Underground Mosquito. The culex species, although not necessarily Culex molestus, has been implicated in the spread of diverse diseases which include Eastern Equine Encephalitis, Japanese Encephalitis Virus, St. Louis Encephalitis, and Western Equine Encephalitis.
"0IL SPILL: Skulking low in greasy places, liars speaking truths obscene..."
ACT Parks and Conservation Service director Daniel Iglesias said these kangaroo "culls" would only occur ''every now and then'' to bring the number of kangaroos down to a sustainable level to vaccinate to control fertility.
Mulligan's Flat with Kangaroo group
The participation and death of Spanish mercenaries in armed actions in Syria was revealed by local media today. By 
Here is a book by a philosopher and neuroscientist about how to keep Outer Space safe for everyone. "Dr. Al-Rodham hopes his book will spark new conversations about ways to increase the benefits of space for all countries, while expanding the working definition of "sustainability." Sustainability is no longer just about using recycled paper products or eating local organic produce grown by eco-conscious micro-farmers. It's also about thinking far beyond the Earth. And, stresses Dr. Al-Rodhan, these are issues that affect each and every one of us. "Ultimately," says Dr. Al-Rodhan, "space will either be safe for everyone or for no one." (And we could use a little more common-good planning on earth as well (Ed. Candobetter.net).
A recent 
Having trouble finding the right man or the right woman? Not sure which you want? You are not alone - well, not completely .... Female fish in Mexico, living in polluted streams, are mating with male fish of the wrong species, West Australian beetles are mistaking beer bottles for prospective partners. A new book by Bob Wong and Ulrika Candolin, Behavioural Responses to a Changing World: Mechanisms and Consequences is the first book of its kind devoted to understanding animal behavioural responses to environmental change. Behavioural Responses emphasises the vital links between environmental change, behaviour and population dynamics. Topics as diverse as endocrine disruption, learning, reproduction, migration, species interactions and evolutionary rescue are canvassed.
Source of photo: 
"Every time I hear or read the word 'sustainable', for instance, in 'sustainable growth', 'sustainable living' and 'sustainable economy', I feel that we are being cheated and lured into false security."
This superb document establishes a history of concerted public demand for protection of the green wedges and a host of reasons for that public opposition to Matthew Guy's six new suburbs. It represents more than 80 groups of Victorians - (Ed. Candobetter.) "The whole rationale for extending the Urban Growth Boundary is to accommodate the unprecedented flood of population to Victoria. PPL VIC considers that the extension of the Urban Growth Boundary is really the thin end of the wedge. As there are no plans to stop the present high rate of population growth (mostly from immigration) the process of loss of Green Wedges and agricultural land is endless. There will be another extension when the proposed boundaries are seen to be filling up. The Government must abandon the Green Wedge land grab as destructive of the environment, a threat to wildlife, including endangered species, and as a major contributor to Green House Gas Emissions. Around the urban fringe we have a concentration of some of the most endangered eco- systems in Australia..." Julianne Bell, Protectors of Public Land, VictoriaJulianne Bell, Protectors of Public Land, Victoria.
Growth, the ultimate dictator: "There seems to be no language that get’s through to our governments in Australia who, it seems are addicted to growth. It’s as though growth is all we can do. We may know of nothing else."
Syrians despair as chemical weapons, advanced 
According to a 
Why is a national organisation standing for 'all creatures great and small' supporting an annual and bloody kangaroo 'cull' in Nature Reserve Parks in Canberra, of all places? Aren't Nature Reserves supposed to be a place for all creatures to feel safe and protected? You have to wonder how an animal protection organisation can stand by and say nothing about the egregious cruelty for no justifiable reason, year after year. Do they think the public is so stupid as to believe the lies that kangaroos 'overgraze' and are a threat to other species?
The Japanese government has recently announced power supply "options," which it says will be used as a basis for a "national debate," the outcome of which will be reflected in the formulation of a new Basic Energy Plan. But what is it about the deceptive methodology of the "options" that always leads to the conclusion that nuclear power is "necessary"...?
An ecological, rather than a business profit mindset requires thinking beyond commerce and money-making and focusing on the biological parameters that keep civilisations in existence.
The logging crew could have left the pond alone and still allowed clearance for any passing logging vehicles. But that would have required a rudimentary respect for natural beauty. What are these brutes made of? 
Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) and the Department of Primary Industries' (DPI) court cases against five duck rescuers falls apart. Rescuers found guilty of only one of five charges. Magistrate refuses to award the $18,000 court costs because of DSE wildlife heavy handedness in arresting rescuers final weekend last years' duck-shooting season and criticizes wildlife officers for refusing warmth to rescuer. Magistrate says legal for rescuers to be on the water, expresses surprise that DSE did not provide care for injured birds at the wetlands - that it was left to duck rescuers to do this. No rescuers convicted or fined. No court costs. Rescuers good behaviour bonds until October this year.
Got 6 mins 25 secs to see this video about how Japanese women feel about nuclear power? Forget Hollywood. This is the Japanese reality!!This 6 min. 25 sec. will show you how Japanese women feel about nuclear power and how the Japanese male bureaucracy is trying to foist the deception of the century on the Japanese people by suddenly deciding to hold meetings behind closed doors!
Australia, still a colony, has more supermarkets per capita than the US and nearly three times as many as the UK. [1]India, no longer a British colony, has no supermarket chains. What other country can claim this? Late last year Indian shopkeepers rioted successfully to stop foreign investment liberalisation and multinational supermarkets. Here is a mostly French-sourced article about how emerging powers are looking after their own industries, while the free-marketeers of the west sell the rest of us down the river. See also article about President Francois Holland's program to meet protectionism elsewhere with protectionism at home: ,
Here is a short report from University of Sydney about recent research which threw into doubt the role of genetic inbreeding as a factor in lack of immune defense against the killer tumours in devils.
Picture: "Tasmanian Devil." Photo by Rodrigo Hamede, University of Tasmania.
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