As the furor grows over Obama’s science czar John Holdren’s apparently favorable view of forced abortions and sterilizations to control population numbers, Holdren and company are making some attempt at damage control.

Holdren’s co-worker at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, Rick Weiss, apparently contacted the Catholic News Agency which resulted in their printing an article with Weiss insisting that Holdren does NOT support coercive population control.
 
Weiss, reports CNA, could “easily dismiss” fears that Holdren favors such draconian and totalitarian controls by saying, “He made that quite clear in his confirmation hearing.” At that hearing, Holdren told Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) that he no longer thinks it is “productive” to focus on the “optimum population” for the United States. “I don’t think any of us know what the right answer is."

Weiss went on to describe Ecoscience, the controversial book that is at the center of the controversy, as a “textbook,” and the descriptions therein as being “misrepresented as endorsement.” Critics, however, maintain that Ecoscience goes beyond mere dispassionate description.

Over at themunz.blogspot.com, a retired police investigator who admits to being pro-abortion, debunks several lines of defense Holdren and Weiss are tying into. He did everyone a service by scanning portions of the book and even posting actual photos of the book, which over and over and over reiterate Holdren and the and his coauthor Paul Ehrlich’s radical views.

Of particular import are the sections on individual rights and sterilization, along with pro-natalists—people who approve of or participate in human procreation—and families in general.

On individual rights, pg. 838:

Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction. Some people—respected legislators, judges, and lawyers included—have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce. Nor does the UN Charter describe such a right, although a resolution of the United Nations affirms the "right responsibly to choose" the number and spacing of children (our emphasis). In the United States, individuals have a constitutional right to privacy and it has been held that the right to privacy includes the right to choose whether or not to have children, at least to the extent that a woman has a right to choose not to have children. But the right is not unlimited. Where the society has a "compelling, subordinating interest" in regulating population size, the right of the individual may be curtailed. If society's survival depended on having more children, women could he required to bear children, just as men can constitutionally be required to serve in the armed forces. Similarly, given a crisis caused by overpopulation, reasonably necessary laws to control excessive reproduction could be enacted.

Keep in mind that the book’s authors insisted in 1977 that we were “facing a global overpopulation catastrophe that must be resolved at all costs by the year 2000,” which of course didn’t pan out, based on alarmist pseudo-science as it was. Still they didn’t hesitate to go to great lengths to explain their methodical madness for mass sterilization:

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.

Physiologist Melvin Ketchel, of the Tufts University School of Medicine, suggested that a sterilant could be developed that had a very specific action—for example, preventing implantation of the fertilized ovum. He proposed that it be used to reduce fertility levels by adjustable amounts, anywhere from five to 75 percent, rather than to sterilize the whole population completely. In this way, fertility could be adjusted from time to time to meet a society's changing needs, and there would be no need to provide an antidote. Contraceptives would still be needed for couples who were highly motivated to have small families. Subfertile and functionally sterile couples who strongly desired children would be medically assisted, as they are now, or encouraged to adopt. Again, there is no sign of such an agent on the horizon. And the risk of serious, unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent, even though this plan has the advantage of avoiding the need for socioeconomic pressures that might tend to discriminate against particular groups or penalize children.

Most of the population control measures beyond family planning discussed above have never been tried. Some are as yet technically impossible and others are and probably will remain unacceptable to most societies (although, of course, the potential effectiveness of those least acceptable measures may be great).

Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying. As those alternatives become clearer to an increasing number of people in the 1980s, they may begin demanding such control. A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries.

For Holdren, the over population myth is a means to an end, as is global warming/global cooling—he's been on both bandwagons—control of the seas, earth resource management, etc. Holdren’s world government would be master supreme of every bodily function and action. Individualism would be quashed. God-worship would be supplanted by man-worship, i.e., the elitists would be the demi-gods.

What Holdren has given us, along with the Ehrlichs’ help, is a view of the big picture and all of the various issues and ideologies used to, step-by-step, achieve world government. Really, Ecoscience is a blueprint masterpiece.

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Lal Wynstrom said:

Another High Priest of Power, Master Ascendant of the Scientific Dictator Class, part 1 Many, upon examining the "Ecoscience" book, and especially Holdren's current attempts to damage control and backpeddle his 1977 remarks, will be tempted to look upon his "analysis" as simply the rantings of a younger, less wise, less informed scientist who possessed not the wisdom of selective verbalization (whether by pen or by tongue) of his own thoughts. Similarly, others will be tempted to think of Holdren as a high-brow intellectual theorizing in the towers of academia rather than living in the real world. We need not be misled by either cover! Men like Holdren represent those "High Priests of Power," or what Marx and Engels referred to as the scientific dictatorship, where a priestly caste of intellectuals may use great learning and rhetoric to advance the long arm of government interference, but also *conceal* such advance behind justifiable reasoning which most uncritical and unaware minds will accept. Holdren's "logic" is an example of where the science of tyranny, cloaked as social accountability, soon becomes law as the non-elite "common people," whom are the very targets of his theorizing, put on the shackles of their own slavery by their tacit acceptance of his ideas.

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July 17, 2009
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Lal Wynstrom said:

Another High Priest of Power, Master Ascendant of the Scientific Dictator Class, part 2 Moreover, while we are (rightly) striking back at this “learned man” for his Nazi-style form of eugenics, we should recognize that the roots of "Emperor" Holdren's thinking have long established origins in epistemic oligarchy and authoritarianism and predate by centuries the rise of National Socialism. In other words, Nazism is not the origin of eugenics, or even of its more modern incarnations. It is imperative that this ideology be defeated lest men like Holdren, as the intellectual inheritors of such likes as Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley, et al, make their philosophy the chief cornerstones of our tombstones.

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July 17, 2009
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James Curtis said:

What are Holdren's credentials? If he wants to say he was wrong about his early career as a population timebomb alarmism scientist, then what are his credentials for being a global warming scientist? Shouldn't the assumption be that he is an alarmist who gets it wrong? The truth of the matter is that his beliefs haven't changed one bit. They believe the population timebomb has already exploded and the hallucination of global warming is the continuous fountains of flames and shrapnel that won't end until they get the population under control. This stuff is their religion, and Holdren is an important prophet of their religion. The most important commandment of their religion is called "I PAT". Look it up.

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July 17, 2009
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Stella said:

	... please see the link > http://about-orphans.blogspot.com
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July 18, 2009
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us and them said:

	OR We could hang the nazi
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July 18, 2009
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danwhitehead1 said:

	It is encouraging - - - - - - that the loathsome rats still squeal and run for cover when the light of truth shines on them. Perhaps there is still a chance they can be struck down?
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July 18, 2009
Votes: +1

MarkGlen said:

	2 Questions for anyone This doesn't fit the subject, but I would like answers to 2 questions: 1. Why did the U.S. install Saddam Hussein in Iraq? 2. Why did the U.S. drive the USSR out of Afghanistan?
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July 20, 2009 | url
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