The Other McCain

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

‘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?

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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

Gov. Sarah Palin To Address CPAC; Doug Mataconis’s Nose Wrinkles In Disdain

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

CPAC 2013 remains a crucial huddle for the battered troops.

The American Conservative Union (ACU) today announced former Vice Presidential Candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will address CPAC 2013 – the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. America’s largest gathering of conservative leaders and activists will be held Thursday, March 14 – Saturday, March 16, 2013.“We are pleased to again welcome Governor Sarah Palin to CPAC in March,” said ACU Chairman Al Cardenas. “Governor Palin electrified the crowd in 2012 and we are thrilled to welcome her back this year.”

The whole GOProud kerfuffle doesn’t interest me, on so many levels. Sexuality as policy is the ne plus ultra of politics in everything. The SoCon/GayCon cage match is just a distraction from the reform we need.

On the other hand, Sarah represents the anti-elitist spirit that founded this country. Her capacity to make heads on the Left, and even thinly-disguised statists like Mataconis, remains a site to behold.

CPAC’s a month away, and I can’t wait.

via Dos Mas Cervezas

Category: CPAC, Sarah Palin

Thaddeus McCotter Remembers, If Not Honors, Millard Fillmore

Posted on | February 18, 2013 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

In one of the biggest Huh? moments of my memory, McCotter went from high-ranking GOP representative and dark horse Presidential hopeful to. . .recovering Congressbum and of Counsel at the Detroit law firm of Ottenwess, Allman & Taweel, PLC.

McCotter offers a profile of Millard Fillmore over at Breitbart.com, wherein he performs the masterful trick of making 160-year-old history quite interesting. A taste:

Historians have been even less kind. Fillmore’s presidency has been consistently ranked in the “Bottom 10,” no mean feat for someone who wasn’t a Republican. A key reason is Fillmore’s acquiescence to signing the Compromise of 1850 over the objections of, among others, Northern Whigs and his wife Abigail (Note to husbands: she is always right).
The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state; settled the Texas boundary and gave that state $10,000,000 in debt relief; granted territorial status to New Mexico and Utah and allowed them to determine the status of slavery within their own borders; enacted the fugitive slave law, which put Federal officers in the service of slaveholders; and abolished the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia. Intended to end slavery’s sectional divisions, the compromise only exacerbated them: afterwards, Northern Whigs prayed, “God Save Us from Whig Vice Presidents!”

A great read. About the only thing missing was a “separated at birth” gag, which I’ll provide:

Category: Uncategorized

World’s Youngest Blogger: I May Be Needing A Raise

Posted on | February 17, 2013 | 10 Comments

Haven't even reached my 2th birthday, and already getting hammered with chores. Where is the love?

Haven’t even reached my 2th birthday, and already getting hammered with chores. Where is the love?

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Boyle on Menendez: ‘Miller Cut His Teeth in Democratic Scandal Management’

Posted on | February 17, 2013 | 9 Comments

The shameful partisan effort of the major media to discourage attention to the Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) scandal gets a brutal beatdown from the man who originally broke the story last fall:

The New York Times on Saturday published a story with a headline claiming “Inquiry of Democratic Senator Started With a Partisan Push,” referring to the multiple ongoing investigations of New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez.
Times reporter Eric Lipton named National Legal and Policy Center chairman Ken Boehm as the person behind the story. . . .
Lipton could not be further from the truth. While Boehm and his group have done phenomenal work investigating the Menendez scandal and his ties to Democratic Party mega-donor Dr. Salomon Melgen, he was never an original source for this story.

This tactic — claiming that Democrat scandals are the artificial products of “partisan” opponents — was pioneered by Chris Lehane during the Clinton administration, when the White House circulated a 331-page report called “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.” Knowing that the Washington press corps is overwhelmingly Democrat (e.g., 89% voted for Clinton in 1992), the Clintonistas knew that all they needed to do was to convince liberal reporters that coverage of Clinton scandals was bad for Democrats, and they’d shut up about it.

As Matthew Boyle points out, the media lapdogs are eager to regurgitate Democrat spin on the Menendez scandal:

This is the second questionable mainstream media article on the scandal in as many days, too. . . .
It appears the progressive press is working with aides from Sen. Menendez’s office on narrative reconstruction, in [an] attempt to the blur the truth to help the senator skate off allegations of misconduct. The tactic is one that Attorney General Eric Holder and his aides have skillfully employed in the past.
Menendez hired former Holder aide Matt Miller as this scandal heated up to help him try to get out of the scandal, and this all appears to be the work of Miller. Miller cut his teeth in Democratic scandal management, getting Holder out of allegations of impropriety surrounding the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation scandal.

Keep an eye on Matthew Boyle’s continuing coverage at Bretibart.com.

 

 

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Category: Corruption, Crime, Democrats, Dominican Republic, Media Bias, New Jersey, Scandal, Senate

The Left Loves Cop-Killers

Posted on | February 17, 2013 | 29 Comments

The usual suspects protest in L.A. (Photo: Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times)

Call it the Mumia Rule: All you have to do to become a hero to the Left is kill a cop. So the renegade ex-cop Christopher Dorner qualifies:

Dozens of protesters rallied outside Los Angeles police headquarters Saturday in support of Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer and suspected killer of four who died after a shootout and fire this week at a mountain cabin following one of the biggest manhunts in recent memory.. . .
Michael Nam, 30, who held a sign with a flaming tombstone and the inscription “RIP Habeas Corpus,” said it was “pretty obvious” police had no intention of bringing Dorner in alive.
“They were the judge, the jury and the executioner,” Nam said. “As an American citizen, you have the right to a trial and due process by law.” . . .
Dorner was already believed to have killed three people when he was cornered Tuesday at the cabin near Big Bear Lake, and during the standoff shot and killed a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, authorities said. . . .
The 33-year-old has already inspired a burgeoning subculture of followers. While most don’t condone killing, they see him as an outlaw hero who raged against powerful forces of authority.

An “outlaw hero . . . against powerful forces of authority”!

Why do these radical anti-authority types never protest against speed limits? Here I am, minding my own business, driving 82 mph in a 45-mph zone, and suddenly The Man and his radar are infringing my rights. How come protesters aren’t hailing me as an “outlaw hero,” huh?

The Left’s boundless rage “against powerful forces of authority” doesn’t extend to cops running a speed-trap in Livonia, Louisiana, I guess.

Nor does the Left seem able to muster any indignation about Mayor Bloomberg’s tyrannical nanny regime in New York City. Bloomberg is taking his anti-gun crusade nationwide and we haven’t heard a peep of protest from the Left.

Hey, lefties: How are your “outlaw hero” types supposed to kill cops and become symbols of “due process” (!) if they don’t have any guns?

Seeking logical consistency from the Left is a waste of time. Civil disobedience against speed limits doesn’t count toward “outlaw hero” status, and they don’t give a damn about “powerful forces of authority” unless it involves a cop-killer with a man-crush on Piers Morgan.

Jazz Shaw exposes the bogus victimhood meme in the Left’s claim that cops deprived Christopher Dorner of “due process”:

At any point in this saga, Dorner could have put down his weapons and walked into a police station with his hands up and he’d have been taken into custody without further incident. But by the same token, the police weren’t going to blindly wander around while searching for someone who had already shot several of their fellow officers without being prepared for the worst.

Good luck proving the hypothesis that the Left is interested in facts.

 


Category: Crime

Rule 5 Sunday: Golden Ball & Chain

Posted on | February 17, 2013 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho
New to Rule 5 Sunday? Be aware that many of the links below go to pages that are definitely NSFW, and opening them in the wrong company could have adverse effects on your purity of essence.
This week we bid a sad farewell to El Opinador Compulsivo, who is getting out of the blogging game and will no longer be sending us the finest of Argentinian Rule 5. He will be maintaining his archive of Opiladies, however. FOR SCIENCE!
Speaking of science, Fishersville Mike leads off with Kaley Cuoco, Laughing Conservative has Nikki Cox, and Animal Magnetism brings Rule Five Friday along with the Saturday Gingermageddon. Randy’s Roundtable has Carly Foulkes from T-Mobile this week, Eye of Polyphemus settles on Amanda Seyfried, while First Street Journal provides their own version of Rule 5 in Iraq and Ninety Miles From Tyranny delivers a threefer with Lingerie Ladies, Beautiful Bikini Babes, and Boootay!
EBL gives us a blast from the past with Linda Ronstadt, and a blast of an entirely different sort with the women of The Walking Dead. (Caution: stops being Rule 5 and starts being gross after a while.) Also, vintage Roman beach volleyball and Valentine’s Day with Democrat Steve Cohen.
A View From The Beach brings the Thora Birch; also, Let The Old Boy Enjoy, Valentine’s Day Pinups, A Little Gymnastics Humor, I Didn’t Think The Job Was This Dangerous (Kate Upton in Antarctica), Important Things Seen At The Grammys, On How To Smell Less (Hunting Advice From Women), and Scientists Confirm Asteroid Strike Killed Dinosaurs -with obligatory Cave Girl alternative hypothesis!
Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Reeva Steenkamp, his vintage babe is Sharon Tate, and Sex in Advertising this week is covered by Victoria’s Secret. Also, Adriana Lima’s Valentine! Dustbury offers Susan Oliver and Beril Akcay, and at the Camp of the Saints it’s Maite Perroni and the Rule 5 News.
The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Kim Delaney, Nikki Limo, Jamie Lee Kirchner, Tracey Edmunds, Liz Vassey, Bikinis and Racism, Aryane Steinkopf, Maria Menounos Can’t Help It, Catalina Oltavaro – and over at the DaleyBabes blog, Hungarian Hooters Girls, Maria Menounos in tight leather pants, Adrean Butler, a Daisy Watts video, Vanessa Veasley, Random Beauties, Amanda Cerny, and some Evening Hotness.
Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is Saturday, February 23.

Category: Rule 5
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