Quickie Learn: The religions of the world



Book Review: Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas



here is a bit from the book:

Assayas: I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono: Yes, I think that's normal. It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma…I really believe we've moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn't make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I'd be interested to hear that.

Bono: That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.
Assayas: The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono: But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there's a mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let's face it, you're not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point. It should keep us humbled… . It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.

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If Atheists Ruled The World... 0.o

Addictions in Computer Gaming



Tyra Banks Show Kills World of Warcraft: Will One Man Give Up His Addiction?

February 11, 2007 by
Lisa A. Mason


Someone Should Tell Tyra You Can Play Without the CDs
If you have not seen the recent clip from Tyra Banks' hit daytime talk-show where she helps a young woman confront her fiance about his addictive game play, then you might want to check it out so you know what I'm talking about here.

First, I have to say that I love Tyra. I'm not really a TV fan so I don't watch her show religiously or anything but I've always been a big fan of her. I really like the way she keeps things real and tries to be a great role-model for all
women out there. That being said, she really let me down
on this one.

Let's explain upfront that the focus of this show was not on video games, MMORPGs or World of Warcraft. The focus of the show was helping people confront their loved ones about a problem. This woman had a problem and she went on Tyra's show to confront her fiance and recent father of her newborn baby.

The fact that the show mentioned World of Warcraft leads one to take notice of how incredibly large WoW has now become and shortly after the episode of Tyra's show aired, clips of this segment were all over the internet, featured on sites like You-Tube and link-posted on forums all over cyberspace. It spread like a bad plague, haunting us all because although our minds told us not to look, curiosity won and we watched the stupid clip anyway.

To fill you in for those that missed it, here's the basis of the story. Girl goes on Tyra and says soon-to-be-husband ignores her and their new baby girl to play World of Warcraft all day. Girl says she's asked him to stop and spend time with her and baby and he refuses. Girl says she's threatened to leave him if he doesn't stop his addictive behavior. He stays up all night playing and even sleeps on the couch before waking up to play again before work. Next comes the real clincher when she proclaims that he left her in the hospital in labor to go home and play for a few hours before coming back to deliver their child.

By this point, every non-gamer in the audience is either hating this guy or thinking he's some kind of freak and every gamer is well, probably not watching the Tyra Banks show in the first place.

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African Media: Hussein Returned To “Continent Of His Birth”

Ghanaian news outlet claim sure to raise eyebrows of birth certificate skeptics

Paul Joseph Watson
Tuesday, July 14, 2009


A major Ghanaian news outlet has been caught in a revealing slip-up after it reported that President Barack Hussein Obama’s recent visit to the African country was a return to his birthplace.

Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution states, “No person except a natural born citizen… shall be eligible to the office of president.”

This invalidates the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency if, as a growing number of people believe, he was in fact born in Kenya and not Hawaii as he claims. After mounting pressure, the Obama campaign released a Hawaiian birth certificate on June 13 2008, but skeptics claimed that it showed signs of being forged.

Contained in an otherwise relatively mundane account of Obama’s recent visit to Ghana in the Daily Graphic news outlet is a sentence sure to raise eyebrows amongst people like journalist Jerome Corsi, who has been at the forefront of the Obama birth certificate scandal since well before the election.

The full paragraph reads, “For Ghana, Obama’s visit will be a celebration of another milestone in African history as it hosts the first-ever African-American President on this presidential visit to the continent of his birth.”

Why the Ghanaian news outlet would report that Obama was born on the continent of Africa, when this would instantly invalidate his entire presidency, is unclear.

In April a transcript from an interview with Obama’s step-grandmother was released in which she discussed being present at Obama’s birth in Mombasa, Kenya.

“WND is in possession of an affidavit submitted by Rev. Kweli Shuhubia, an Anabaptist minister in Kenya, who is the official Swahili translator for the annual Anabaptist Conference in Kenya, and a second affidavit signed by Bishop Ron McRae, the presiding elder of the Anabaptists’ Continental Presbytery of Africa,” reported Corsi.

In his affidavit, Shuhubia asserts “it is common knowledge throughout the Christian and Muslim communities in Kenya that Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born in Mombasa, Kenya.”

As Corsi reported recently, the hospital in Hawaii where Obama claims he was born has refused to produce documentation or even acknowledge the fact. Attempts to obtain Obama’s hospital-generated long-form original birth certificate have been rebuffed.

Doubts about Obama’s birth certificate are now spreading in military circles. U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook has refused to deploy to Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief. Cook’s lawyer, Orly Taitz, has filed separate lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency.

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“Rogue Hacker” and Black Ops: Behind the Cyberattacks on America and South Korea

Tom Burghardt
Global Research
Monday, July 13, 2009


The iconic American investigative journalist I.F. Stone once said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” Stone’s credo is all the more relevant today when it comes to the pronouncements of intelligence agencies and their corporate masters, particularly where official enemies are concerned.

A widespread computer attack that began July 4 took down several U.S. Government, South Korean and financial web sites, the Associated Press reported.

Multiple media reports claim that the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Department of Transportation web sites were struck by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) assault that began last Saturday.

According to Computerworld, “a botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against U.S. government Web sites and causing headaches for businesses in the U.S. and South Korea.” The magazine reported July 7, “on Saturday and Sunday the attack was consuming 20 to 40 gigabytes of bandwidth per second, about 10 times the rate of a typical DDoS attack, one security expert said after being briefed by the US-CERT on Tuesday. ‘It’s the biggest I’ve seen’.”

This is particularly embarrassing to the DHS since the agency’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (U.S.-CERT) is responsible for preventing illegal hacking forays on government networks.

Attacks were also reported on the White House, the Department of Defense, the State Department, The Washington Post, U.S. Bancorp, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Affected sites in South Korea included those of the presidential Blue House, the Ministry of Defense, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the newspaper Chosun Ilbo. South Korea’s top Internet Service Provider, Naver.com crashed on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

Despite the unsophisticated nature of the cyber incursion that employed a variant of the MyDoom virus, unnamed “senior U.S. officials” told The Wall Street Journal that American and South Korean officials are “probing North Korea’s possible role.” The same anonymous sources said that the botnet attack “coincided with North Korea’s latest missile launches and followed a United Nations decision to impose new sanctions.”

That the cyber assault also “coincided” with a holiday fireworks accident that killed 5 workers in North Carolina, multiple deaths due to drunk driving on U.S. highways or an Italian railway disaster that claimed 21 lives, is hardly “evidence” of Pyongyang’s shadowy hand.

Nevertheless, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), the successor organization to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), was quick to blame the troglodytic Stalinist regime for the blitz. However, the opposition Democratic Party “accused the spy agency of spreading unsubstantiated rumors to whip up support for a new anti-terrorism bill that would give it more power.”

In a media statement NIS said: “This is not a simple attack by an individual hacker, but appears to be thoroughly planned and executed by a specific organization or on a state level.”

But given the nature of the event, not all cybersecurity specialists are convinced of a North Korean provenance. Amit Yoran, the former director of DHS’ National Cybersecurity Division told Federal Computer Week: “I think at this point it is highly unlikely, highly improbable that any reliable attack-attribution data is available. It’s a very intense process and it could take weeks. … The analysis here–both technical and nontechnical–is not trivial and takes time.”

In other words, NIS pronouncements should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. After all, this is an agency with a repressive pedigree and its own dodgy agenda. “Trained-up fierce” by the CIA and the Pentagon, the South Korean intelligence service has been involved in some of the worst human rights abuses in East Asia.

According to a series of reports by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the agency was involved in the mass murder of their own citizens. In 1980, the Army’s feared “Black Beret” Special Forces and the KCIA were given a “green light” by Washington to suppress a pro-democracy uprising in the southern city of Kwangju in which some 2,000 students and workers were massacred; hundreds more were “disappeared,” tortured and imprisoned.

And with hostilities between Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang steadily on the rise, one cannot rule out the possibility that the cyberattacks are an exploitable entré by enterprising security agencies for further escalating the current crisis. Recent U.S. history is replete with examples of “intelligence and facts … being fixed around the policy.”

Fitting North Korea into the Frame

While the cyberassault “seemed to have come from South Korea,” The Wall Street Journal reports that American and South Korean officials are “trying to assess whether this is some random attack or the North Koreans might be working through a proxy, said the official.”

Just as likely however, someone or some entity may be trying to fit the repressive Stalinist regime into the frame.

Maneuvering to transform the thin gruel of fact into a meatier stew, Rodger Baker, the director of East Asian analysis at Stratfor, a private think-tank that describes itself as “the world leader in global intelligence” told Reuters the “timing of the cyber attacks raised suspicions about North Korea because it was around the U.S. Independence Day holiday and Pyongyang conducting missile tests.”

Another “expert,” Nicholas Eberstadt, a senior researcher at the rightist American Enterprise Institute (AEI), linked the cyber blitz to a recent flurry of missile tests as well as to North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear device. He told Asia Times: “The general purpose was clear. When one looks at the nuclear chessboard, their security is integrally tied to cyber-warfare. … This strategy fits in integrally with tests of atomic devices.”

Eberstadt’s proof? He has none, but handily furnishes us with a speculative worst-case scenario that has the North launching a massive artillery and missile attack on major U.S. bases “in tandem with a full-scale cyber-offensive.” In other words, Eberstadt has conjured up a digital bogeyman to scare the kiddies.


Such pronouncements are all the more remarkable given the decrepit state of the North’s technological infrastructure. Computerworld reported July 10, there “are just over a million telephone lines installed in the country of 26 million people, home PCs are rare and Internet access is heavily restricted.”

While the country has made IT expertise a priority, the publication averred that “North Korea’s sophistication in hacking makes it less likely to be behind the attacks.”

Despite something as trivial as evidence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, urged President Obama to launch a cyber attack against North Korea.

Hoekstra told the right-wing America’s Morning News radio show on Friday, “some of the best people in America” had been investigating the attacks and have concluded that “all the fingers” point to North Korea as the culprit.

That Hoekstra’s comments were showcased by the radio mouthpiece of The Washington Times, speak volumes to the agenda being pushed here.

The far-right news outlet is a wholly-owned subsidiary of clerical-fascist, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church empire. With long-standing ties to Japanese and Korean fascists and war criminals, including reputed yakuza capo tutti capos Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, “Moon’s Korea-based church got its first boost as an international organization when Kim Jong-Pil, the founder of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, brokered a relationship between Moon and … Japan’s leading rightist financiers,” according to a definitive series of reports by investigative journalist Robert Parry.

Added Hoekstra, North Korea should be “sent a strong message.”

“Whether it is a counterattack on cyber, whether it is, you know, more international sanctions … but it is time for America and South Korea, Japan and others to stand up to North Korea or the next time … they will go in and shut down a banking system or they will manipulate financial data or they will manipulate the electrical grid, either here or in South Korea,” Hoekstra said. “Or they will try to, and they may miscalculate, and people could be killed.”

Hoekstra’s provocative statements echo remarks offered up by STRATCOM commander General Kevin Chilton. In May, Chilton suggested that “the White House retains the option to respond with physical force–potentially even using nuclear weapons–if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks,” according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire.

And with a vested interest in blaming their historic enemy for the cyberstrike, enterprising defense and security grifters on the southern side of the 38th parallel–and in Washington–have been hyping reports that the Stalinist regime is building a “cyber division” within the North Korean army.

Indeed, Bloomberg News reported that “South Korea’s Defense Ministry plans to spend 489 billion won ($382 million) next year to beef up its defense against cyber warfare, the ministry said in a budget report today.”

Who might benefit from such a large expenditure of public funds? Why private U.S. defense and security corporations of course!

Amongst the largest U.S. firms doing business with the South Korean Ministry of Defense, one finds the usual suspects. These include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, L3 Communications and Booz Allen Hamilton to name but a few of the dozens of corporations with a stake in the South Korean military bazaar. That all of the above-named entities are heavily-leveraged in the emerging cybersecurity market is hardly a coincidence.

The Korean Herald reported in its July 10 edition that “some experts here [are] now fingering hackers in the United States” as the culprits. Hong Min-pyo, the CEO of the security software firm Shiftworks who forensically examined the virus, “raised the possibility of the distributed denial of service attacks originating from a locale in the United States, which also was hit by the attacks.”

Unlike corporate media here in the heimat, the Herald referenced critics who warned “against politicizing the latest cyber infections,” including opposition Democratic Party lawmakers who “protested the passing of the anti-cyber terrorism bill citing invasion of privacy and internet censorship.” The opposition demanded the government “offer concrete evidence to prove that North Korea was involved in the latest attacks.”

But given the right-wing political offense currently underway in Seoul and Washington, opposition lawmakers may have a very long wait.

A Sociopath with a Keyboard and a Grudge … or Something More Sinister?

The unsophisticated nature of the attack should have alerted the media that any number of bad actors, particularly cybercriminals who specialize in transforming computers into zombie machines, or botnets, for their own nefarious purposes were prime suspects.

Computerworld reported July 8, that “an updated version of the MyDoom virus is responsible for a large DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack that took down major U.S. Web sites over the weekend and South Korean Web sites on Wednesday, according to Korean computer security company AhnLab.”

Since its 2004 appearance, MyDoom has become “the fasted-spreading e-mail worm in Internet history.” When a PC is infected with MyDoom, malicious code enables the program to harvest email addresses and mail itself out endlessly, the publication reports. According to AhnLab, the latest version contains an additional file with a list of web sites to be attacked.

Computerworld reported July 9, that infected systems also contain a destructive Trojan “programmed to encrypt user data or reformat the hard drive of a PC,” thus erasing the evidence.

Joe Stewart, a researcher with SecureWorks who examined the code, told Computerworld that the botnet “does not use typical antivirus evasion techniques and does not appear to have been written by a professional malware writer.”

Stewart told the publication that it is unusual to see low-profile state web sites being hit. “Who goes around targeting a site like the FAA or the U.S. Treasury? It’s not something that most people would think to attack.”

When contacted Friday for an update, Stewart told Computerworld there is “still zero evidence of North Korean involvement.” Though relatively lengthy in duration, Stewart believes the attack could have been launched by a single person.

Who then might attack “low-profile web sites” such as the Federal Trade Commission for example?

According to Wired, the FTC shut down an Internet Service Provider for its illegal and highly-lucrative hosting practices.

Identified as a “Black Hat” firm variously known as “Pricewert,” “3fn.net” and “APS Telecom” the company was accused by the FTC June 3 of “actively recruiting” to its hosting service “thousands of ‘rogue’ web sites distributing ‘illegal, malicious, and harmful electronic content including child pornography, spyware, viruses, trojan horses, phishing, botnet command and control servers, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest’.”

Wired reported that the company “had thousands of servers” in the San Jose, Calif. area and the firm ”actively shields its criminal clientele by either ignoring take-down requests issued by the online security community or shifting its criminal clients to other internet protocol addresses controlled by Pricewert so that they may evade detection.”

The Washington Post reported June 3, that “Botnet experts … have found that 3FN housed many of the command and control networks for ‘Cutwail,’ one of the world’s largest spam botnets. As late as mid-April, Joe Stewart, a botnet expert and director of malware research at SecureWorks, tracked nearly a dozen Cutwail control networks hosted at 3FN.”

Which raises an uncomfortable question for security “experts” hyping North Korea’s alleged “cybersecurity threat:” were the past week’s attacks the work of a sociopath with a keyboard and a grudge, particularly if one of his/her botnets lost the critical command and control hubs that make spam, an illicit drugs market and Internet porn profitably sizzle?

While we may never know who actually launched the incursions, we just might have a slight inkling of who’ll benefit. As Antifascist Calling reported July 6, plans are already afoot to roll-out Einstein 3, a Bush-era surveillance program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks.

In partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency, communications, defense and security firms such as AT&T, General Dynamics, L3 Communications, MCI, Qwest, Sprint and Verizon stand to make billions from contracts under the government’s Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services (MTIPS) program with its built-in “Einstein domain.”

How’s that for timing!

Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, July 11, 2009


President Obama’s top science and technology advisor John P. Holdren co-authored a 1977 book in which he advocated the formation of a “planetary regime” that would use a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.

The concepts outlined in Holdren’s 1977 book Ecoscience, which he co-authored with close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, were so shocking that a February 2009 Front Page Magazine story on the subject was largely dismissed as being outlandish because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it could be true.

It was only when another Internet blog obtained the book and posted screenshots that the awful truth about what Holdren had actually committed to paper actually began to sink in.



This issue is more prescient than ever because Holdren and his colleagues are now at the forefront of efforts to combat “climate change” through similarly insane programs focused around geoengineering the planet. As we reported in April, Holdren recently advocated “Large-scale geoengineering projects designed to cool the Earth,” such as “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays,” which many have pointed out is already occurring via chemtrails.

Ecoscience discusses a number of ways in which the global population could be reduced to combat what the authors see as mankind’s greatest threat – overpopulation. In each case, the proposals are couched in sober academic rhetoric, but the horrifying foundation of what Holdren and his co-authors are advocating is clear. These proposals include;

- Forcibly and unknowingly sterilizing the entire population by adding infertility drugs to the nation’s water and food supply.



- Legalizing “compulsory abortions,” ie forced abortions carried out against the will of the pregnant women, as is common place in Communist China where women who have already had one child and refuse to abort the second are kidnapped off the street by the authorities before a procedure is carried out to forcibly abort the baby.



- Babies who are born out of wedlock or to teenage mothers to be forcibly taken away from their mother by the government and put up for adoption. Another proposed measure would force single mothers to demonstrate to the government that they can care for the child, effectively introducing licensing to have children.



- Implementing a system of “involuntary birth control,” where both men and women would be mandated to have an infertility device implanted into their body at puberty and only have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.



- Permanently sterilizing people who the authorities deem have already had too many children or who have contributed to “general social deterioration”.



- Formally passing a law that criminalizes having more than two children, similar to the one child policy in Communist China.



- This would all be overseen by a transnational and centralized “planetary regime” that would utilize a “global police force” to enforce the measures outlined above. The “planetary regime” would also have the power to determine population levels for every country in the world.



The quotes from the book are included below. We also include comments by the author of the blog who provided the screenshots of the relevant passages. Screenshots of the relevant pages and the quotes in their full context are provided at the end of the excerpts. The quotes from the book appear as text indents and in bold. The quotes from the author of the blog are italicized.

Page 837: Compulsory abortions would be legal

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

As noted in the FrontPage article cited above, Holdren “hides behind the passive voice” in this passage, by saying “it has been concluded.” Really? By whom? By the authors of the book, that’s whom. What Holdren’s really saying here is, “I have determined that there’s nothing unconstitutional about laws which would force women to abort their babies.” And as we will see later, although Holdren bemoans the fact that most people think there’s no need for such laws, he and his co-authors believe that the population crisis is so severe that the time has indeed come for “compulsory population-control laws.” In fact, they spend the entire book arguing that “the population crisis” has already become “sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Page 786: Single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or they could be forced to have abortions

“One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.”

Holdren and his co-authors once again speculate about unbelievably draconian solutions to what they feel is an overpopulation crisis. But what’s especially disturbing is not that Holdren has merely made these proposals — wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms and giving them away; compelling single mothers to prove in court that they would be good parents; and forcing women to have abortions, whether they wanted to or not — but that he does so in such a dispassionate, bureaucratic way. Don’t be fooled by the innocuous and “level-headed” tone he takes: the proposals are nightmarish, however euphemistically they are expressed.

Holdren seems to have no grasp of the emotional bond between mother and child, and the soul-crushing trauma many women have felt throughout history when their babies were taken away from them involuntarily.

This kind of clinical, almost robotic discussion of laws that would affect millions of people at the most personal possible level is deeply unsettling, and the kind of attitude that gives scientists a bad name. I’m reminded of the phrase “banality of evil.”

Not that it matters, but I myself am “pro-choice” — i.e. I think that abortion should not be illegal. But that doesn’t mean I’m pro-abortion — I don’t particularly like abortions, but I do believe women should be allowed the choice to have them. But John Holdren here proposes to take away that choice — to force women to have abortions. One doesn’t need to be a “pro-life” activist to see the horror of this proposal — people on all sides of the political spectrum should be outraged. My objection to forced abortion is not so much to protect the embryo, but rather to protect the mother from undergoing a medical procedure against her will. And not just any medical procedure, but one which she herself (regardless of my views) may find particularly immoral or traumatic.

There’s a bumper sticker that’s popular in liberal areas which says: “Against abortion? Then don’t have one.” Well, John Holdren wants to MAKE you have one, whether you’re against it or not.

Page 787-8: Mass sterilization of humans though drugs in the water supply is OK as long as it doesn’t harm livestock

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

OK, John, now you’re really starting to scare me. Putting sterilants in the water supply? While you correctly surmise that this suggestion “seems to horrify people more than most proposals,” you apparently are not among those people it horrifies. Because in your extensive list of problems with this possible scheme, there is no mention whatsoever of any ethical concerns or moral issues. In your view, the only impediment to involuntary mass sterilization of the population is that it ought to affect everyone equally and not have any unintended side effects or hurt animals. But hey, if we could sterilize all the humans safely without hurting the livestock, that’d be peachy! The fact that Holdren has no moral qualms about such a deeply invasive and unethical scheme (aside from the fact that it would be difficult to implement) is extremely unsettling and in a sane world all by itself would disqualify him from holding a position of power in the government.

Page 786-7: The government could control women’s reproduction by either sterilizing them or implanting mandatory long-term birth control

Involuntary fertility control

“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

Note well the phrase “with official permission” in the above quote. John Holdren envisions a society in which the government implants a long-term sterilization capsule in all girls as soon as they reach puberty, who then must apply for official permission to temporarily remove the capsule and be allowed to get pregnant at some later date. Alternately, he wants a society that sterilizes all women once they have two children. Do you want to live in such a society? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Page 838: The kind of people who cause “social deterioration” can be compelled to not have children

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.“

To me, this is in some ways the most horrifying sentence in the entire book — and it had a lot of competition. Because here Holdren reveals that moral judgments would be involved in determining who gets sterilized or is forced to abort their babies. Proper, decent people will be left alone — but those who “contribute to social deterioration” could be “forced to exercise reproductive responsibility” which could only mean one thing — compulsory abortion or involuntary sterilization. What other alternative would there be to “force” people to not have children? Will government monitors be stationed in irresponsible people’s bedrooms to ensure they use condoms? Will we bring back the chastity belt? No — the only way to “force” people to not become or remain pregnant is to sterilize them or make them have abortions.

But what manner of insanity is this? “Social deterioration”? Is Holdren seriously suggesting that “some” people contribute to social deterioration more than others, and thus should be sterilized or forced to have abortions, to prevent them from propagating their kind? Isn’t that eugenics, plain and simple? And isn’t eugenics universally condemned as a grotesquely evil practice?

We’ve already been down this road before. In one of the most shameful episodes in the history of U.S. jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the State of Virginia had had the right to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck against her will, based solely on the (spurious) criteria that she was “feeble-minded” and promiscuous, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluding, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Nowadays, of course, we look back on that ruling in horror, as eugenics as a concept has been forever discredited. In fact, the United Nations now regards forced sterilization as a crime against humanity.

The italicized phrase at the end (”providing they are not denied equal protection”), which Holdren seems to think gets him off the eugenics hook, refers to the 14th Amendment (as you will see in the more complete version of this passage quoted below), meaning that the eugenics program wouldn’t be racially based or discriminatory — merely based on the whim and assessments of government bureaucrats deciding who and who is not an undesirable. If some civil servant in Holdren’s America determines that you are “contributing to social deterioration” by being promiscuous or pregnant or both, will government agents break down your door and and haul you off kicking and screaming to the abortion clinic? In fact, the Supreme Court case Skinner v. Oklahoma already determined that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment distinctly prohibits state-sanctioned sterilization being applied unequally to only certain types of people.

No no, you say, Holdren isn’t claiming that some kind of people contribute to social deterioration more than others; rather, he’s stating that anyone who overproduces children thereby contributes to social deterioration and needs to be stopped from having more. If so — how is that more palatable? It seems Holdren and his co-authors have not really thought this through, because what they are suggesting is a nightmarish totalitarian society. What does he envision: All women who commit the crime of having more than two children be dragged away by police to the government-run sterilization centers? Or — most disturbingly of all — perhaps Holdren has thought it through, and is perfectly OK with the kind of dystopian society he envisions in this book.

Sure, I could imagine a bunch of drunken guys sitting around shooting the breeze, expressing these kinds of forbidden thoughts; who among us hasn’t looked in exasperation at a harried mother buying candy bars and soda for her immense brood of unruly children and thought: Lady, why don’t you just get your tubes tied already? But it’s a different matter when the Science Czar of the United States suggests the very same thing officially in print. It ceases being a harmless fantasy, and suddenly the possibility looms that it could become government policy. And then it’s not so funny anymore.

Page 838: Nothing is wrong or illegal about the government dictating family size

“In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Why?

I’ll tell you why, John. Because the the principle of habeas corpus upon which our nation rests automatically renders any compulsory abortion scheme to be unconstitutional, since it guarantees the freedom of each individual’s body from detention or interference, until that person has been convicted of a crime. Or are you seriously suggesting that, should bureaucrats decide that the country is overpopulated, the mere act of pregnancy be made a crime?

I am no legal scholar, but it seems that John Holdren is even less of a legal scholar than I am. Many of the bizarre schemes suggested in Ecoscience rely on seriously flawed legal reasoning. The book is not so much about science, but instead is about reinterpreting the Constitution to allow totalitarian population-control measures.

Page 942-3: A “Planetary Regime” should control the global economy and dictate by force the number of children allowed to be born

Toward a Planetary Regime

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

In case you were wondering exactly who would enforce these forced abortion and mass sterilization laws: Why, it’ll be the “Planetary Regime”! Of course! I should have seen that one coming.

The rest of this passage speaks for itself. Once you add up all the things the Planetary Regime (which has a nice science-fiction ring to it, doesn’t it?) will control, it becomes quite clear that it will have total power over the global economy, since according to Holdren this Planetary Regime will control “all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable” (which basically means all goods) as well as all food, and commerce on the oceans and any rivers “that discharge into the oceans” (i.e. 99% of all navigable rivers). What’s left? Not much.

Page 917: We will need to surrender national sovereignty to an armed international police force

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

The other shoe drops. So: We are expected to voluntarily surrender national sovereignty to an international organization (the “Planetary Regime,” presumably), which will be armed and have the ability to act as a police force. And we saw in the previous quote exactly which rules this armed international police force will be enforcing: compulsory birth control, and all economic activity.

It would be laughable if Holdren weren’t so deadly serious. Do you want this man to be in charge of science and technology in the United States? Because he already is in charge.

Page 749: Pro-family and pro-birth attitudes are caused by ethnic chauvinism

“Another related issue that seems to encourage a pronatalist attitude in many people is the question of the differential reproduction of social or ethnic groups. Many people seem to be possessed by fear that their group may be outbred by other groups. White Americans and South Africans are worried there will be too many blacks, and vice versa. The Jews in Israel are disturbed by the high birth rates of Israeli Arabs, Protestants are worried about Catholics, and lbos about Hausas. Obviously, if everyone tries to outbreed everyone else, the result will be catastrophe for all. This is another case of the “tragedy of the commons,” wherein the “commons” is the planet Earth. Fortunately, it appears that, at least in the DCs, virtually all groups are exercising reproductive restraint.”

This passage is not particularly noteworthy except for the inclusion of the odd phrase “pronatalist attitude,” which Holdren spends much of the book trying to undermine. And what exactly is a “pronatalist attitude”? Basically it means the urge to have children, and to like babies. If only we could suppress people’s natural urge to want children and start families, we could solve all our problems!

What’s disturbing to me is the incredibly patronizing and culturally imperialist attitude he displays here, basically acting like he has the right to tell every ethnic group in the world that they should allow themselves to go extinct or at least not increase their populations any more. How would we feel if Andaman Islanders showed up on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. and announced that there were simply too many Americans, and we therefore are commanded to stop breeding immediately? One imagines that the attitude of every ethnic group in the world to John Holdren’s proposal would be: Cram it, John. Stop telling us what to do.

Page 944: As of 1977, we are facing a global overpopulation catastrophe that must be resolved at all costs by the year 2000

“Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.”

This is the final paragraph of the book, which I include here only to show how embarrassingly inaccurate his “scientific” projections were. In 1977, Holdren thought we were teetering on the brink of global catastrophe, and he proposed implementing fascistic rules and laws to stave off the impending disaster. Luckily, we ignored his warnings, yet the world managed to survive anyway without the need to punish ourselves with the oppressive society which Holdren proposed. Yes, there still is overpopulation, but the problems it causes are not as morally repugnant as the “solutions” which John Holdren wanted us to adopt.

It is important to point out that John Holdren has never publicly distanced himself from any of these positions in the 32 years since the book was first published. Indeed, as you can see from the first picture that accompanies this article, Holdren prominently displays a copy of the book in his own personal library and is happy to be photographed with it.

It is also important to stress that these are not just the opinions of one man. As we have exhaustively documented, most recently in our essay, The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies, the positions adopted in this book echo those advocated by numerous other prominent public figures in politics, academia and the environmental movement for decades.

Consider the fact that people like David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, and Bill Gates, three men who have integral ties to the eugenicist movement, recently met with other billionaire “philanthropists” in New York to discuss “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” according to a London Times report.

Ted Turner has publicly advocated shocking population reduction programs that would cull the human population by a staggering 95%. He has also called for a Communist-style one child policy to be mandated by governments in the west.

Of course, Turner completely fails to follow his own rules on how everyone else should live their lives, having five children and owning no less than 2 million acres of land.

In the third world, Turner has contributed literally billions to population reduction, namely through United Nations programs, leading the way for the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet (Gates’ father has long been a leading board member of Planned Parenthood and a top eugenicist).

The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer. Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in “slowing the growth of world population” by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about “culling” the surplus population via draconian methods.

David Rockefeller’s legacy is not derived from a well-meaning “philanthropic” urge to improve health in third world countries, it is born out of a Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor and those deemed racially inferior, using the justification of social Darwinism.

As is documented in Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.

The justification for the implementation of draconian measures of population control has changed to suit contemporary fads and trends. What once masqueraded as concerns surrounding overpopulation has now returned in the guise of the climate change and global warming movement. What has not changed is the fact that at its core, this represents nothing other than the arcane pseudo-science of eugenics first crafted by the U.S. and British elite at the end of the 19th century and later embraced by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

In the 21st century, the eugenics movement has changed its stripes once again, manifesting itself through the global carbon tax agenda and the notion that having too many children or enjoying a reasonably high standard of living is destroying the planet through global warming, creating the pretext for further regulation and control over every facet of our lives.

The fact that the chief scientific advisor to the President of the United States, a man with his finger on the pulse of environmental policy, once openly advocated the mass sterilization of the U.S. public through the food and water supply, along with the plethora of other disgusting proposals highlighted in Ecoscience, is a frightening prospect that wouldn’t be out of place in some kind of futuristic sci-fi horror movie, and a startling indictment of the true source of what manifests itself today as the elitist controlled top-down environmental movement.

Only through bringing to light Holdren’s shocking and draconian population control plans can we truly alert people to the horrors that the elite have planned for us through population control, sterilization and genocidal culling programs that are already underway.

oh look! it's a song about my fiance! how wonderful!

oh look! a song about how my ex-wife makes me feel! how quaint.