Shira Schoenberg - 03/11/2011

A 91-year-old state representative told a constituent that he believes in eugenics and that the world would be better off without “defective people.”

Barrington Republican Martin Harty told Sharon Omand, a Strafford resident who manages a community mental health program, that “the world is too populated” and there are “too many defective people,” according to an e-mail account of the conversation by Omand. Asked what he meant, she said Harty clarified, “You know the mentally ill, the retarded, people with physical disabilities and drug addictions - the defective people society would be better off without.”

Harty confirmed to the Monitor that he made the comments to Omand. Harty told the Monitor the world population has increased dramatically, and “it’s a very dangerous situation if it doubles again.” Asked about people who are mentally ill, he asked, apparently referring to a lack of financial resources, “Can we afford to bring them through?”

Harty said nature has a way of “getting rid of stupid people,” and “now we’re saving everyone who gets born.”

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Eugenics lawmaker resigns

David Cronin - 14 March 2011

Conspiracy theorists make me laugh. So when I’m in need of comic relief, I occasionally check out the website of Jim Corr, knowing that its contents are a lot more entertaining than the music of his banal pop group The Corrs. For a number of years, Corr has been spouting pseudo-scientific gobbledegook in an attempt to persuade the gullible that man-made global warming is a hoax and that the collapse of the World Trade Centre wasn’t actually caused by the planes flown into it.

Just because conspiracy theorists are nearly always wrong doesn’t mean everything they say should be dismissed. A dedicated bunch of researchers and bloggers have made it their task to follow the activities of the Bilderberg Group, that bunch of businessmen and politicians which meets in top secrecy on an annual basis. Some of these researchers – like the Italian MEP Mario Borghezio – belong to the extreme-right and should be denounced as racist opportunists. Yet while warnings about the Bilberbergers wanting to create a new world government might be far-fetched, there are solid reasons to be wary of what they are up to. Any club of the wealthy and powerful which seeks to avoid scrutiny is by definition a threat to democracy. And so it is correct that questions were asked about why Herman Van Rompuy dined at a Bilderberg event near Brussels shortly before he was appointed the first full-time president of the European Council in November 2009. If nothing else, his attendance at the exclusive gathering indicates he is more eager to please Goldman Sachs and Shell than the 500 million mere mortals who live in the EU.

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William N. Grigg - March 10, 2011

Shortly after midnight on the morning of New Year’s Day, a green Skoda automobile pulled up outside the Saints Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, Egypt. The vehicle decanted two men, one of whom was seen speaking tersely into a mobile phone as they walked briskly from the scene.

A few minutes later a 100 kilogram bomb detonated inside the car, sending its densely packed, lethal payload of nails, glass and iron balls into the sanctuary. The explosion, which was powerful enough to shatter every window in the neighborhood, killed more than twenty worshipers gathered for New Year’s mass. Nearly a hundred more were seriously wounded. Body parts were propelled into the fourth floor of the church building and onto a neighboring mosque.

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The Patriot Ledger - Mar 10, 2011

It was a routine call for Quincy police about two homeless men fighting. Hussain Al-Hussaini was arrested. The victim was taken to the hospital.

Then came the surprise. Readers commenting on a story about Wednesday’s arrest on The Patriot Ledger’s website noted that a man with the same name was mentioned prominently in a book about the deadly bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

By Thursday afternoon, police had contacted the FBI and spoken to the book’s author.

Jayna Davis, author of the 2004 book “Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing,” said she asked a Quincy police detective if Hussain Al-Hussaini, the man police arrested, had a tattoo of an anchor with a snake wrapped around it. He did. Police sent her a photo of him.

“His age, his name, the picture, the mug shot – that’s him,” Davis told The Patriot Ledger via telephone after speaking with police. She said the anchor-and-snake tattoo was common among members of a branch of the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein.

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Hannah Thomas - 9 March 2011

The quaint cul-de-sac of Kidwelly in west Wales has been stirred by news that a satanic cult has been carrying out sexual assaults and a string of child rapes over the past several decades within the small community.

Self-styled high priest, Colin Batley, was yesterday found guilty of conducting quasi-religious sex sessions involving children with his wife Elaine and fellow cult members Jacqueline Marling and Shelly Millar.

Batley began the sordid rituals by reading from The Book Of The Law, written more than 100 years ago by occultist Aleister Crowley, to brainwash his victims before ordering hooded cult members to have sex.

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Kidwelly sex cult victim breaks silence to tell of childhood horrors

Daurade (LOS) - March 12, 2011

I had an opportunity to watch The Order of Death (Alex Jones’ documentary on the Bohemian Grove) the other night. It’s a deft piece of propaganda and like all propaganda, it’s filled with an unfortunate bevy of distortions and half-truths, if not outright lies.

Bohemian Grove is a campground in northern California owned by the Bohemian Club, a men’s social club founded in San Francisco in 1872. Initially membership included journalists and artists, but it soon accepted businessman into its ranks. Today the club holds an annual gathering at the Grove which includes a largely GOP crowd, but includes a smattering of liberals, too. This is not some conspiracy theorist’s wild imaginings. Guests have included the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Kohl, Colin Powell. The list goes on. Not only such well-known figures but a long list of power players in industries from petrochemical and media to defense. Celebrities are involved. Harry Shearer and Steve Miller, of all people, are members. So are Mickey Hart and Bob Weir, formerly of the Grateful Dead.

But what do they do? Given the highly secretive nature of the proceedings, a lot of what goes down is fairly well-known.

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Eric Margolis - March 8, 2011

The US media, perfectly described by Israeli thinker Uri Avnery as “a mixture of propaganda, news and entertainment,” is steaming with righteous indignation over the awfulness of Libya’s wicked Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, and is once again baying for his blood.

“On to Libya! Down with the Tyrant of Tripoli!” That’s the latest hue and cry from North America’s lynch mob of right wingers, jingoistic media, and neoconservative jackals. Once again there’s talk of war against a small, almost defenseless nation that can’t seriously fight back. What Imperial Britain used to call, “a jolly little war.”

War fever over Libya is gripping the United States. After a hiatus of nine years, in which he was a useful ally to western interests, Col. Muammar Gadaffi is once again the monster we love to hate. It’s damned hard trying to keep track of when we love him and when we hate him. Not so long ago he was our bosom buddy in the “war on terror.” Now, he’s a devil all over again.

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Darlene Storm - March 3, 2011

Having previously looked at how biometric recognition is more than a fictional spy-thriller, we didn’t look at biometric technology used in the past which seems like something out of the future. These are some of those past biometrics, followed by a few new biometric recognition technologies being proposed for everything from securing your smartphone, replacing the ID in your wallet, and even required testing to prove paternity.

From WikiLeaks diplomat cables, we discovered that the State Department is more interested in collecting biometric data than was previously disclosed. A cable supposedly from Hillary Clinton told certain embassies in Africa to collect more biographical information like fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans for U.S. Intelligence. Besides asking for "detailed biometric information," the government asked for "e-mail listings; internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information." Other diplomatic cables asked other countries to pick up their spying effort by collecting biometric DNA identification as well as health, biographic, and assessment information on leaders.

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William C. Bacon, in The Annals of the Bohemian Club for the years 1907-1972 (Vol V., Centennial Edition: Bohemian Club, 1972)

It is thought that one rather interesting period in Bohemia’s history merits a little space in these annals. Preliminarily let’s record that in 1944 a then young man, after twelve years of membership, was selected by the nominating committee as the next president of the Club. It is reported that Palmer Fuller, Jr., the chairman of that committee, called on the selected candidate and said to him, “Bill, it becomes my duty to tell you that our committee has, after long consideration, decided we must reach into the bottom of the barrel for our next president. And guess what we came up with your name!” He then tempered that with the statement that the candidate having served on all club committees, as chairman of the Jinks committee, as secretary and as director several times of the Board of Directors appeared to be prepared for the job.

The manager of the Club at that time was a man named Crabb. When the report of the nominating committee with the name of the nominee for president on it was posted, the manager immediately resigned for reasons known to him and the nominee. In his Thanksgiving dinner talk that year Fred Thompson said, “I shall always think of this administration as the “blue ointment regime”.

The period from 1944 to 1946 made up part of the time our country was engaged in the second world war. They were difficult years with many restrictions imposed upon the way of life of our people. Among them was the rationing of certain foods and gasoline which was felt by Bohemians like all other citizens and the limitations made operations a real problem, particularly in the dining rooms and bars, and whenever transportation was required. This was aggravated by the discovery of the new administration that the former manager left it short some 16,000 ration points. Fortunately, the Office of Price Administration was understanding and made it possible for the Club to carry on satisfactorily.

It was during this administration that San Francisco was selected for the meeting of The United Nations Conference on International Organization, which brought to our city delegations from fifty nations of the world headed by their foremost diplomats. The purpose of that conference was to prepare and adopt a charter of a World Organization to maintain peace for all nations and to promote the welfare of all men. After two months of serious effort the conference completed, approved and unanimously adopted the United Nations Charter. President Harry S. Truman came to the closing plenary session of the Conference on June 26, 1945 to express the thanks of our nation to the visiting delegations for their significant achievement.

Our little principality of Bohemia, while not a member of the conference, played an important part in getting it under way and entertaining the representatives of the member nations during their stay in our city. At the opening session Bohemian Earl Warren, then Governor of California, on behalf of our State, welcomed the visitors to California, and Bohemian Roger Lapham, then Mayor of San Francisco, extended the traditional hospitality of our city to them.

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I confess I hadn’t known anything about Mark Lombardi and his fascinating work.

Ultimately, Israel’s sane majority that wants peace and democracy rather than war and theocracy will wake up and break the destructive stranglehold of those who wish to make the country a theocracy.

Carlo Strenger - Published 17:36 04.03.11

Benjamin Netanyahu, very belatedly, has decided to confront the settlers on a limited scale, and their reaction has been violent. At some point an open conflict with the national-religious movement will be inevitable, because Israel will end the occupation either on its own initiative or through growing international pressure. For many years Israeli decision-makers have been worried about how this conflict will be played out.

To predict the course of this confrontation we should look at the extremes of the national-religious movement in a wider historical perspective. Active Messianism is, an incarnation of the much wider historical phenomenon of Millenarian movements in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These were fuelled by the belief that the end of time was near, that the messianic period was close, and needed actively to be brought about. This was one of the theological foundations of the crusades; it plays an important role in Shiite theology, and it has of course played itself out in Judaism a number of times, most famously in the messianic frenzy around Shabbetai Zvi in the seventeenth century.

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Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

It is a great pleasure to be here at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for this retrospective on “The Death of Environmentalism.” In early 2005 Yale invited us to debate that essay, and since then the School has continued to demonstrate a genuine interest in what our friend and colleague Peter Teague has taken to calling ecological innovation. You train your students to ask hard questions — we saw this first hand in 2010 Breakthrough Fellow and Yale School Masters candidate David Mitchell — and your flagship publication, Yale360, is publishing some of the most interesting green thinkers today. We are grateful once again for this opportunity to reflect on the nearly seven years since we wrote our essay, and make some new arguments about what the green movement must do now.

Seven years ago the two of us started interviewing America’s environmental leaders with the intention of writing a report on the politics of global warming for the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We came away from the experience deeply disappointed. Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge. None expressed much interest in rethinking their assumptions about the problem or the solutions. What we heard again and again during our interviews were the same old riffs that green leaders had been repeating since the late 1980’s. Global warming would be solved through the same kinds of policies that we had used to address past pollution problems such as acid rain. Most were confident that John Kerry was, with their help, about to be elected president, and the biggest funders in the movement told us they were just a few steps away from passing cap and trade legislation.

That October we delivered our paper, “The Death of Environmentalism,” at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. While leaders at environmental philanthropies and national green groups hoped that the debate the essay started would just go away, “The Death of Environmentalism” struck a cord with many others and sparked a spirited debate. Many took the paper’s arguments personally and, without question, the most common reaction to our essay was “I’m not dead.” Our friend Adam Werbach gave a speech called “Is Environmentalism Dead,” wherein he suggested that environmentalists make common cause with a broader coalition of progressive interests in hopes of building a broader and more diverse movement. And Yale’s own Gus Speth questioned whether capitalism itself was compatible with ecological sustainability and suggested a radical shift in values was required to deal with the problem.

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William N. Grigg - February 27, 2011

“This is a massacre,” the frantic Libyan woman, speaking by telephone while cowering in her apartment in Tripoli, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I hope you know that people around the world are watching and praying and wanting to do something,” Anderson told her, as if he were a stage prompter hinting at a performer’s next line. Whether or not she had been given a copy of the script, the caller performed as expected: “[T]he first step [is to] make Libya a no-fly zone. If you make Libya a no-fly zone, no more mercenaries can come in…. There needs to be action. How much more waiting, how much more watching, how much more people dying?”

It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the subject of Cooper’s interview was simply a terrified but resolute woman who risked her life to describe the violence devouring her country amid the death throes of Khadafi’s police state.

It’s likewise possible that her call for international action to impose a no-fly zone was a desperate plea from a victim, rather than an act of media ventriloquism in which an anonymous figure endorsed the first plank of a military campaign proposed by the same neo-conservative kriegsbund that manipulated us into Iraq.

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