LIVE AT FIVE: 02.19.13

In the spring of 1961, the German producer and composer Bert Kaempfert offered recording contracts to both Mr. Sheridan and the Beatles, with the intention of using the Beatles as Mr. Sheridan’s backup band, but with the option of recording them separately as well.
During sessions in Hamburg in 1961 and 1962, Mr. Sheridan and the Beatles recorded nine songs together. Mr. Sheridan sang seven of them — “My Bonnie,” “The Saints,” “Why (Can’t You Love Me Again),” “Nobody’s Child,” “Take Out Some Insurance On Me, Baby,” “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Swanee River.” The other two were purely Beatles performances: “Cry for a Shadow,” an instrumental by Lennon and Harrison, and “Ain’t She Sweet,” with Lennon singing.
When the first single from the sessions, “My Bonnie” — a rocked-up version of the folk ballad, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” — was released in Germany on the Polydor label in October 1961, Beatles’ fans in Liverpool flooded local record shops with requests for the disc. One shop manager, Brian Epstein, decided to see what all the fuss was about, and caught a performance by the group at the Cavern, a club not far from his store. He quickly persuaded the Beatles to hire him as their manager, and within a year, he got them a recording contract of their own with EMI. They recorded their first album, “Please Please Me,” 50 years ago this month.

Here are two cuts from the Sheridan/Beatles sessions, the second featuring classic photos of the Beatles in Hamburg:

Category: History, Music

Connecting the Dots, Telling the Story

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 5 Comments

“[Neal] Rauhauser consistently promoted the hoax-hack theory of the WeinerGate scandal, continuing to argue that [Rep. Anthony] Weiner had been the victim of some devious hacker, even after Weiner admitted his guilt and resigned from office. Rauhauser also repeatedly linked [Brett] Kimberlin’s ‘Indict Breitbart’ site and, along the way, made several interesting statements.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 4, 2012

Remember that on Thursday, May 17, my plan had been to cover the G8 Summit at Camp David, until I saw Aaron Walker’s 28,000-word epic, “How Brett Kimberlin Tried to Frame Me for a Crime” and immediately recognized his story as newsworthy.

Four days later, on Monday, May 21, Kimberlin contacted my wife’s employer and accused me of “harassing” him, inspiring my departure to an undisclosed location so that I could continue to cover the story without endangering my family or others. And by June 4, I’d finally put together enough of the story to explain in detail how the tax-exempt “progressive” empire of Brett Kimberlin was connected to the WeinerGate obsessions of Neal Rauhauser:

‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’:
Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection

Both Rauhauser and Kimberlin were enemies of Breitbart for different reasons and in mid-2011 — in the wake of Weiner’s resignation — they joined forces, an alliance that eventually made Aaron Walker a target of convenience, collateral damage in a much larger campaign against their enemies, especially including Andrew Breitbart.

A lot of people became targets in that campaign, including Seth Allen, Mike Stack, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Mandy Nagy, Ace of Spades, James O’Keefe, Lee Stranahan, Brandon Darby, Ali Akbar and myself, to name a few. And what Ace wrote in May is still true:

“It is very easy to decide ‘this isn’t any of my trouble’ and permit vicious behavior. . . . Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.”

A fearful, defensive posture toward danger will not save you, and the “duck and hide” response only permits the danger to envelop others.

Anyway, I refer to this June 4 post because it has been nominated for the “Best Investigative Post” award at Blog Bash March 14.

Both Mandy Nagy and Lee Stranahan have also been nominated for awards, which inspired my inquiry:

Hey @ali: Aren’t you worried #BlogBash will get SWATted this year? blogbash.org/2013/02/the-20…

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 18, 2013

Living well is the best revenge, and having a party with hundreds of bloggers at CPAC is a pretty good definition of “living well.”

Category: Blogging, CPAC, The Kimberlin Files

‘A Particularly Odd Argument’ by the Particularly Odd Bill Schmalfeldt

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 5 Comments

After Lee Stranahan filed online harassment charges against deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, the deranged cyberstalker argued:

You have the ability to block incoming messages from people you do not wish to hear from.

Aaron Walker observes:

This is a particularly odd argument for him to make because he has used four different Twitter handles and six different email addresses I know of. . . .
So how exactly does Lee block all six email addresses he is known to use? Is Lee supposed to be psychic? And given that a person can invent a new email in all of ten minutes on gmail or hotmail, and a new Twitter account with similar ease, why should anyone expect blocking to be a viable solution to harassment?

Walker demonstrates that Schmalfeldt’s defense is legally invalid.

John Hoge notices that Schmalfeldt has switched his Twitter account to “protected” status, the same move Neal Rauhauser made after “TwitterGate” blew up in Neal’s face. Such a gesture is the cyberstalker’s white flag of surrender.

Lee Stranahan has recorded a podcast discussing the harassment charges he filed against Schmalfeldt.

Category: Blogging, Crime

Tehran Supports Chuck Hagel, and Nobody Really Seems to Care

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 9 Comments

This ought to be shocking:

Hooshang Amirahmadi, who led Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies when Hagel came to campus, is the founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He arranged for Hagel’s speech on March 2, 2007, the faculty source told The Daily Caller.

The connection between Obama’s choice for Secretary of Defense and Amirahmadi, a tool of the anti-American dictatorship in Tehran, really ought to be shocking — even more shocking than a Soviet spy becoming a key State Department official. Yet the embrace of America’s worst enemies is nowadays greeted with nonchalance, because . . .

Well, who is America’s worst enemy, eh?

[B]eing friendly with Hamas supporters is no obstacle to higher office in American politics. We elected a guy president twice who fits that description, remember?

Patriotism, R.I.P. Welcome to the post-American age . . .

Category: Iran, Military, Senate

Green: The Color of Stupidity

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 12 Comments

Andy at AOSHQ calls attention to an amusing episode of environmentalist stupidity: About 5,000 people showed up in D.C. for a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. The free-market group Center for Industrial Progress attended in a counter-protest capacity, but the environmentalists were too stupid to get it:

We wore shirts with the equation “Anti-Fossil + Anti-Nuclear = Pro-Blackout.” While we were preparing, at least a dozen protestors unthinkingly tried to buy the shirts condemning their position. . . .
The mindlessness of the protest was highlighted by the typical response to a series of questions we asked. 1) “Are you anti-fossil fuel?” “Yes!” 2) “Are you anti-nuclear?” “Yes”! 3) “Are you pro-blackout?” “Yes!” . . .

Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. Environmentalism is the socialism of people too stupid even for anti-Semitism.

Category: Environmentalism

‘Privacy’ as Intimidation: How Abortion Supporters Suppress the Deadly Truth

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 19 Comments

If there were a Pulitzer for stunning disingenuity, Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak would be a sure-fire winner: Jennifer Morbelli died after undergoing a late-term abortion and Dvorak is concerned about violations of the dead woman’s privacy:

Her name and photo have appeared on protest signs, in blogs and in newspapers.
The intimate details of her medical records — probably leaked by someone with access to that information at the Germantown clinic where she got the abortion or the Rockville hospital where she died — should never have seen the light of day, let alone be broadcast at a rally the day after her death.
That pesky HIPAA privacy law, the one that forces you to fill out a bazillion forms whenever you go to the doctor, did absolutely nothing to stop this. . . .
Unless someone inside the clinic contacted the antiabortion groups, the only other possible source of such sensitive information is the hospital.
Of course, the hospital can’t even confirm that she was there or that she died there.
“We maintain a fierce commitment to protecting the privacy of our patients and their care,” said hospital spokeswoman Marissa Levine.
If there is a violation of HIPAA laws, hospital officials investigate and discipline. They have fired people for such violations. So are they investigating this one?
“I can tell you, whenever we see information in the public domain about patient care, we absolutely look into it, internally,” she said. . . .
The protesters are exploiting this woman’s death and making other women think that their privacy is never truly protected when they seek an abortion.

Petula Dvorak evidently believes that the abortion industry should be shielded by such an ironclad cloak of secrecy that even when their patients die, these deaths are not actually news, and that anyone who reports this news is guilty of wrongdoing — as if reporting her death is worse than causing her death. Steven Ertlelt reminds us that Jennifer Morbelli’s death is now the subject of multiple investigations:

Following a new probe started by local officials, the Maryland Attorney General has opened an investigation into the late-term abortion practitioner who killed a Morbelli. The Maryland Attorney General’s office is not specifically looking into Morbelli’s death but it is looking at illegal dumping by the abortion clinic that could result in fines or other form of punishment.
Operation Rescue told LifeNews today that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has ties to Carhart. The group says the links raise concerns that she may attempt to interfere in ongoing investigations involving Carhart.

The attempt to suppress the identity of Dr. LeRoy Carhart’s victim is clearly intended to render Jennifer Morbelli a mere statistic, a faceless “Jane Doe,” in order to conceal the profoundly tragic human reality of this young kindergarten teacher’s death. And there has actually been talk of legal action against reporters: “Does Bridgette Dunlap really think that Jill Stanek can be successfully sued?”

We should not be shocked. If they had any integriy, any conscience or any respect for truth, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Abortion

About Paul Ehrlich and ‘The Most Spectacularly Wrong Book Ever Written’

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 27 Comments

Cover of Time magazine, Jan. 11, 1960

“You’re f–king up our future. . . . What do you think we learn at school? This is what we learned about. . . . We’re the 99 percent.”
— 17-year-old student, St. Mary’s Academy, 2011

In an interview with Ed Driscoll, Jonathan V. Last discussed Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb:

[I]t’s one of these weird situations where everything we think we know is wrong, and it’s all wrong because of one guy, Paul Ehrlich. Paul Ehrlich is not a professional demographer. He only plays one on TV. And he wrote what I think of as the most spectacularly wrong book ever written.
He was wrong in the particulars. He said that within a couple years, hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death, and that nothing could be done to stop this. He said the population growth was going to increase asymptotically to the moon. That — neither of these things happened.
But more to the point, he was wrong at the moment when the exact opposite thing was happening. He published his book in 1968. In 1968, the fertility rates across the Western countries fell off of the table and went into steep, prolonged, sustained decline; decline which they are still experiencing today. So he was exactly wrong.
And what’s funny — and also, you know, slightly frustrating — but funny, is that again, in the world of professional demographers, like the people who do this for a living, the people who are tenured professors and who work at the United Nations, they all — you know, for the last thirty-five, forty years, have basically ignored Ehrlich and viewed him as sort of a crank. And they’ve been actually focusing the bulk of their research on exactly the opposite question. . . .
It’s just that his books, I think, really touched a spot with the sort of deeply anti-humanist strain of the environmental movement.

Certainly, Ehrlich’s book was “spectacularly wrong,” and he was a ubiquitous media presence in the late 1960s and ’70s, appearing repeatedly as a guest on The Tonight Show, among other high-profile venues. However, Jonathan Last is incorrect to say that “one guy, Paul Ehrlich” was responsible for all this disinformation about demographics.

No, ultimately, that “one guy” is John D. (David) Rockfeller III, who became obsessed with neo-Malthusian worries about overpopulation in the 1930s. Ehrlich was merely one of the chief propagandists who helped popularize bad ideas Rockefeller promoted for decades. As I wrote in July 2009:

The population control movement . . . was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
[B]etween 1959 and 1964 one organization alone, the Population Council, got more than $5 million from the Rockefellers, $8.4 million from the Ford Foundation and $2.1 million from Scaife. So that’s $15 million in five years, back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

Among other things, Rockefeller helped fund Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent sex research, as well as development of the birth-control pill, and created an organizational infrastructure that coordinated propaganda campaigns for population control and related issues. Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America:

[T]o raise the public’s consciousness about the threat of overpopulation . . . the population movement undertook a concerted public relations campaign through a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles. This campaign was aided by the involvement of key publishers and editors who were actively involved in the movement, including George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine. The drumbeat around the population crisis reached crescendo by the early 1960s. Readers of popular magazines were faced with a barrage of articles warning of an impending population crisis . . . Women readers were inundated with articles like “Are We Overworking the Stork?” (Parents Magazine, 1961), “Why Americans Must Limit Their Families” (Redbook, 1963), “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Population Explosion” (McCall’s, February 1965), “Overpopulation: Threat to Survival” (Parents Magazine, 1967) and “Population Increase: A Grave Threat to Every American Family” (Parents Magazine, 1969).

Pierre Desrochers has examined the intellectual roots of Erhlich’s work in two 1948 bestsellers, Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. Vogt’s book inspired businessman Hugh Moore (another leader of the population-control movement) to write a 1954 pamphlet entitled, “The Population Bomb,” and Moore granted Ehrlich permission to use that title for Erhlich’s 1968 book. Years before Ehrlich published his book, “overpopulation” hype was sufficiently intense to be featured on the cover of Time magazine in January 1960.

The point is that Ehrlich was not the originator of this neo-Malthusian theme, but merely the most public advocate of an idea with which Rockefeller and a number of other rich “philanthropists” had been obsessed for decades before Erhlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. The money men behind the population-control movement helped promote Ehrlich’s book, purchasing thousands of copies to distribute to college and university students, and mounting the same kind of P.R. blitz on behalf of The Population Bomb they had previously unleashed in support of Kinsey’s sex research and “the Pill.”

What too many Americans today fail to understand is the extent to which popular ideas about many issues — ranging from contraception to environmentalism — are not organic, but were manufactured by this cabal of wealthy population-control fanatics led by David Rockefeller.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
— William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

These skillful indoctrinators are still at it and, after many decades of propaganda from the population control movement, their ideas have been sufficiently diffused throughout our culture that the indoctrinators themselves don’t even know the etiology of their ideas, so that their students are entirely clueless.

In May 2009, the Times of London reported on a secretive gathering of billionaires who met “to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population”:

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. . . .
Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority. . . .
[A] consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.
“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

This is counterfactual lunacy, thoroughly discredited, and yet some of the world’s richest people believe it as gospel, in the same way that the teenage private-school students who identified with the “Occupy” movement believed they were the “99 percent.”

Such childish credulity — a stubborn refusal to examine evidence that contradicts fashionable belief — is nowadays considered the epitome of enlightenment: The truly smart people know that overpopulation is a crisis, and any skeptics who cite contravening data are dismissed as ignorant yahoos. And if you dare call attention to the fact that this phony “consensus” about overpopulation has been manufactured by a comparative handful of ultra-wealthy fanatics, you’ll be condemned as a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

So I understand why Jonathan V. Last may have wished to avoid discussion of David Rockefeller’s role in fomenting the population-control ideas that Paul Erhlich helped popularize. Start telling the truth about this stuff, and people will call you a kook.

Please read the rest of Last’s interview with Ed Driscoll, and you should buy Last’s book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Ed Driscoll, Intellectuals, Science

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE: 02.19.13

Tony Sheridan, R.I.P.

Connecting the Dots, Telling the Story

‘A Particularly Odd Argument’ by the Particularly Odd Bill Schmalfeldt

Tehran Supports Chuck Hagel, and Nobody Really Seems to Care

Green: The Color of Stupidity

‘Privacy’ as Intimidation: How Abortion Supporters Suppress the Deadly Truth

About Paul Ehrlich and ‘The Most Spectacularly Wrong Book Ever Written’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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