The Classic Liberal Blog

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)?  Nah! ... we don't need to worry about no stinkin' Council on Foreign Relations ... How sure are you?

Because Hillary Clinton says she takes her orders from the CFR (emphasis added).  I'm just sayin', that's all ...

I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department.

We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

Hillary Clinton admits that the CFR runs the Government:

Secretary of State (and CFR member) Clinton admits in her latest address to the Council on Foreign Relations what Carroll Quigley wrote about in Tragedy and Hope (Chapter 65), Dan Smoot wrote about in The Invisible Government, and Gary Allen wrote about in None Dare Call It Conspiracy (emphasis added):

… we will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world…Building the architecture of global cooperation requires us to devise the right policies and use the right tools…Our first approach is to build these stronger mechanisms of cooperation with our historic allies, with emerging powers, and with multilateral institutions …

Remarks by National Security Adviser Jones at 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy (emphasis added):

Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.

Henry Kissinger is still in government?  Oh, that's right ... No.  He is not.  Hmmm ... it's a head-scratcher, isn't it?

Why then, did the National Security Advisor of the United States say he "take[s] daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger"?

Nope.  Nothing to see ... I'm sure they're all saints. Yeah, that's it ... Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Joseph McCarthy were very suspicious of the CFR.  Just sayin' ...

Visionary Smackdown: George Orwell v. Aldous Huxley: Who Got it Right?

NEA: Socialist, and Proud of it!

Goetic minds think alike:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.

It's back ... creepy, bizarre, POPULATION CONTROL!

In 1977, Mr. Holdren was a young academic who helped anti-natalist guru Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne write an arrestingly horrible book entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. Today, Holdren is Barack Obama’s “Science Czar,” in which capacity he counsels the president regarding the role of science in public policy. This relationship has a certain Strangelovian undercurrent, given Holdren’s enthusiasm for eugenicist and totalitarian methods of population “management.”

In a passage that reads eerily like the direct counterpoint to Ginsburg’s musings about the reduction of undesirable populations, Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote:

“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….”

As judges like to say, the matter of reducing "undesirable" populations is reaching "ripeness" now. Barack Obama's administration is eagerly expanding the government-dependent population and preparing to impose centralized "universal" health care on our society. And while all of this is going on, John Holdren, unabashed advocate of totalitarian population control, is in a position to whisper unthinkable thoughts into Obama's ear.

Big Money and the Culture of Death: *H/T The Daily Gator!*

This morning, I watched Michelle Malkin on Fox News talking about Obama's "science czar" John Holdren, advocate of "compulsory abortion" and "involuntary fertility control" to deal with a non-existent overpopulation crisis.

The population control movement, which generated the anti-baby hysteria that Ehrlich and Holdren promoted in their books, 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.

Rockefeller promoted the population control movement through many means, but just to give you an example, between 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.

Big money continues to fund the Culture of Death. In 1999, I was the only reporter in the room when Ted Turner gave a speech at a conference of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association:

Mr. Turner, founder of CNN and now the vice chairman of Time-Warner Inc., also suggested that world population could be reduced by the adoption of an international "one-child policy."...
The Atlanta-based billionaire and his wife, actress Jane Fonda, are active supporters of the United Nations Population Fund. In 1997, Mr. Turner pledged $1 billion to a new foundation to support U.N. efforts on population and the environment.

Speaking of himself as a member of "the progressive movement," Mr. Turner urged the NFPRHA audience to "give 'em hell" when seeking more government funds for population control."People who think like us may be in the minority, but we're the smart ones," he said, and as a result should be able to defeat opponents he called "a whole bunch of dummies."

People like Turner think they're "the smart ones," and love to recite environmental nonsense, global warming idiocies and pro-choice talking points as if these were indisputable facts. The neo-Malthusian agenda (which I discussed in "Forbidding To Marry" in April) is advanced by people who don't even realize they're advancing an agenda at all.

An excellent series on the Alinsky Method from Flopping Aces - Alinsky Perfected.

The curious case of Obama's Missing Birth Certificate is gaining steam on the Left.

Governments lie or they wouldn’t last long:

When you know history, you know that governments lie ... it's in the nature of government ... since they act against the interests of the people, the only way they can hold power is if they lie to the people.  If they told people the truth they wouldn't last very long. The interests of the government and the interests of the people are not the same.  It's very important to know this ...

What Climate Change Can Do For the Left:

A review of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, by Mike Hulme (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

More than a few people will be tempted to buy this book based on the promise, implicit in its title, that it offers an examination of the ideas and motives of both sides in the global warming debate. But that is not what this book is about. Rather, it is the musings of a British socialist about how to use the global warming issue as a means of persuading "the masses" to give up their economic liberties. The fact that the author, Mike Hulme, is a scientist who helped write the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other influential government agencies makes this book more disturbing than informative.

In his preface, Hulme frankly admits that his perspective is colored by his politics - "democratic socialist"(p. xxxiv) - and it soon becomes apparent that the only disagreements about climate change he's aware of are those occurring between the left (people who think like him) and the far left, people he describes as "eco-anarchists" (p. 268), "eco-socialists" (Ibid.), and "eco-authoritarians" (p. 309). Opposition from centrists, conservatives, libertarians, and nonideological opposition from scientists who dispute his alarmist spin on the complicated data of global warming merit hardly any mention.

"The idea of climate change," Hulme writes at page 326, "should be seen as an intellectual resources around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us." According to Hulme, climate change can do a lot: "Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs" (p. 329).

In other words, socialists like Hulme can frame the global warming issue in such as way as to achieve seemingly unrelated goals such as sustainable development, income redistribution, population control, social justice, and many other items on the liberal/socialist wish-list.

... "we will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise them in support of our projects" (p. 330). These "myths," he writes, "transcend the scientific categories of ‘true' and ‘false'" (p. 341). He suggests that his fellow global warming alarmists promote four myths, which he labels Lamenting Eden, Presaging Apocalypse, Constructing Babel, and Celebrating Jubilee.