Friday, September 04, 2009

The GOP Strategy: Operation Monkeyshit

By Ian Gurvitz, TV writer/Producer
www.huffingtonpost.com
September 3, 2009

The current debate over health care has nothing to do with health care, any more than the TARP debate was about the economy. This is about one thing and one thing only: the GOP's apoplexy over losing power, and their pathological desire to get it back. They despise Obama's popularity, they detest his intelligence, his compassion, even the smile on his face. This is 21st-century Clinton hatred with a side order of racial resentment. Thinking there was ever any chance at bi-partisanship was as reality-challenged as picking up a rattlesnake thinking you could tame it as a house pet.

The GOP's goal from the second the president took office was to bring him down. Their strategy: Operation Monkeyshit. Just like a monkey in the zoo will wildly fling his shit at tourists, the GOP started flinging their shit with the sole intention of diminishing the president's popularity, tarnishing his image, and hurting his brand, all to lay the groundwork for the 2010 midterms and 2012 presidential elections. Tea parties. "Mortgaging our children's future." "The TARP didn't work." "Death panels." "Killing grandma." Birthers. "He's going to take your guns and house terrorists in your neighborhood." "He's weakening the country." "He's going to give Bin Laden the keys to your city where he will take your job and sleep with your daughter."

Now it's the professional tailgaters in town halls holding Hitler signs, screaming about Fascism and Socialism -- as if they could either define those ideas, or spell them. It's Rove 101. Take your opponent's biggest strength and turn it into a weakness. John Kerry the veteran fabricated his injuries. Obama is Hitler.

Of course it's insane, but getting out the hicks provides the sound bites for the party's media flacks and congressional representatives to hit the talk shows and smugly fob off these contrivances as spontaneous expressions of national outrage, as opposed to insurance- and drug company-created street theater. As if a few hundred illiterate screamers in a nation of several hundred million constituted a popular uprising. People with legitimate concerns don't reach for Hitler signs and mob chants as if the increased volume gave them some sort of collective higher intelligence. These are not outraged citizens. These are the great unwashed with too much free time on their hands, and access to their children's crayons.

The GOP has no platform. They don't care about the economy, unemployment, jobs, the deficit, the wars, or their cost either in dollars or human life. Just witness their current leader -- Mr. Potato Head look-alike, Michael Steele -- and his reaction to a woman in a wheelchair talking about her medical horror story. His response was pure Republicanism: disdain in the face of human suffering.

All these people care about is regaining power by diminishing the president's image, and defeating his every initiative. ...

CONTINUED: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-gurvitz/the-gop-strategy-operatio_b_276729.html

Thursday, September 03, 2009

“[I] Pray For Barack Obama To Die And Go To Hell”: The Story the Media Missed

By Frederick Clarkson
www.religiondispatches.org
September 1, 2009

When an Arizona man brought guns to an Obama speech the story went unnoticed by a media prone to seeing such people as lone nuts. A look at the sermons of his virulently anti-gay pastor who’s been praying for Obama’s death, however, reveals similarities to a far right theology associated with militias, radical prolifers, and proponents of theocracy.

Pastor Steven L. Anderson explaining why it's good to carry a gun Chris Broughton, 28, made national news when he showed up to protest a speech by President Barack Obama in Phoenix, Arizona with an AR-15 automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and a handgun. While Broughton claims that his (apparently legal) actions were not meant to threaten the president, there was more to the story than a single citizen’s dubious actions and pronouncements. Local print and television coverage in Phoenix, and bloggers all over the country, have led the way on an interesting and important story of religion and politics that has been almost entirely ignored by the traditional media.

Here is what they missed.

The night before Broughton’s fifteen minutes of fame, he attended a fiery Sunday sermon by his pastor, Rev. Steven L. Anderson, at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Rev. Anderson, also 28, explained not only “Why I Hate Barack Obama,” but also why he and God both want the president dead. “When I go to bed tonight,” Broughton’s pastor declared, “Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell.” He even goes so far as to claim that:

"God appointed [Obama] to destroy this country for the wickedness of the United States of America. God appointed him because that’s what our country has turned into. That’s who we deserve as a president."

And yet, even though we may deserve Obama, Anderson urges his congregation to pray for the president’s death, issuing imprecatory prayers and repeatedly asking God to kill the president. Most dramatically, and in an interesting shift to the passive voice, he said Obama “ought to be aborted” because the president is pro-choice, and therefore a “murderer.” Despite all this, Anderson has insisted to reporters that he was not calling for vigilante violence. Ditto for Broughton, who told a reporter for the Phoenix New Times: “I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that,” said Broughton. “It would be better now than later.”

“However it happens, I’m going be happy that it happens,” he continued. “I’m gonna be a happy man… I would rejoice.”

While our national media and political culture often succumb to the temptation to classify people who take extreme political acts, particularly of violence, as lone nuts, in fact such people are not necessarily either nuts or alone. Even when acting individually (as Chris Broughton did when he brought an automatic weapon to an Obama speech), they are frequently operating out of a particular religious, cultural, and political context. Absent the distraction of a horrific crime, the story of Chris Broughton and Steven L. Anderson provide a perfect example. In fact, Broughton had discussed his act in advance with Anderson, who praised him afterwards, writing “Good job, Chris!”

At a teabagger rally in Arizona, Anderson denounced both the Republican and Democratic Parties, declaring without a hint of irony that Obama, the “worst president” in American history, is “selling us into slavery and serfdom.” Further research revealed Anderson’s involvement in the Constitution Party, the third largest “third party” in the United States. In a June speech to the state convention of the Arizona Constitution Party, he introduced himself (in addition to being pastor of a church) as the owner of a “firearms business” operating in “several states” and closed with a plea for an American government based on God’s laws as set out in the biblical book of Deuteronomy.

The Constitution Party (which has tended to be the political home for people with views strikingly similar to Anderson’s) is frequently dismissed as a fringe party of little electoral consequence, even though its significance lies elsewhere. It is in fact a steaming hotbed of far-right factions with theocratic, vigilante, and sometimes revolutionary ideas whose like-minded members get together to make their plans, just like any other organized faction in American public life. The party says it is 100% pro-life and pro-gun.

Many of the party’s early leaders were Christian Reconstructionists, or were heavily influenced by Reconstructionism, including party founder and three-time presidential candidate Howard Phillips. Reconstructionism is a theocratic systematic theology whose seminal thinker, the late R.J. Rushdoony, spoke at the Constitution Party’s founding convention and was a longtime advisor to Phillips. Reconstructionism was one of the significant theological catalysts for the modern religious right; a movement, like other social and political movements throughout history, that has transcended party identification.

The Constitution Party has also been a political home to a wide array of militia proponents, including one of the movement’s leading theorists, Larry Pratt head of Gun Owners of America; Rev. Matthew Trewhella, founder of Missionaries to the Preborn (who has urged parents to buy each of their children “an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition” for their church militia); Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry (who ran as a Constitution Party candidate for Congress in 1998, but who has since become a Republican); and even Rev. Michael Bray, a convicted felon and longtime leader in the Army of God.

Like the Reconstructionists, Anderson believes in the death penalty for homosexuality, and the death penalty for abortion (which is of course understood to be murder). And these points are highlighted in the sermon he gave the night before Obama’s speech in Phoenix:

… you’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things—you’re gonna tell me I’m supposed to pray for God to give him a good lunch tomorrow while he’s in Phoenix, Arizona? Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.

But no one should come away from this story without a sense of the depth and breadth and virulence of the views being expressed or that Anderson sees his views as anything other than the truth and an effort at common sense. Fortunately, diligent bloggers have been on the case, notably TPM Muckraker, Crooks and Liars’ Dave Neiwert, Pam Spaulding, PFAW’s Right Wing Watch, and the excellent reporting of the Phoenix New Times.

Interestingly, nationally syndicated liberal radio talk show host Alan Colmes conducted a particularly penetrating interview. When Colmes asked Anderson what his response would be if someone killed Barack Obama in response to his sermon, he replied: “I wouldn’t cry about it.”

Colmes said to Anderson: “You want the president dead…”

“Absolutely,” Anderson agreed. “Now that doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill him. But you know what? I believe he should reap what he’s sown.”

“[Obama] deserves to die, because he’s a murderer.”

“I’m not going to take responsibility for other people’s actions,” said Anderson. “You know, it’s ridiculous how I’m supposed to be held accountable for what anyone who listens to my sermons does.”


In fairness, Anderson says he also thinks that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney also deserve to die for their alleged crimes of torture and the deaths of a million Iraqis in a war he opposes. But lest anyone think that such views betray a kind of moderation, his views on homosexuality, which may one day make him a contender for the mantle currently held by the infamous Rev. Fred Phelps, will probably check any such temptation:

Anderson claims among other things that all gay people are “predators” who are “infecting our society”; that they are on a “rampage”; that the disease is “exploding in growth.” He claims that homosexuals “recruit” via, among other things, child rape and molestation and that God commanded that homosexuals “should be taken out and killed.”

“[E]very good king of Israel,” he claims, either “got rid of” or “exterminated... the sodomites…”


He rhetorically asks “how do we stop it?” remarking only that “they have no natural predators,” leaving it to the imagination of the listener as to what might be done. He is an artful demagogue who seems to be well aware of the line between wishing homosexuals and the president to be murdered, and directly calling on anyone to act.

In the course of another sermon he angrily denounces the United Methodist Church because, as he puts it, “ten percent of their preachers are queers”:

“I’ll stand behind the pulpit call them the fag that he is. I am here to preach the Bible.”

Anderson’s anger is hair-raising as he shouts: “I am not going to stand by… and let faggots run the church! It’s bad enough that we’ve got a bunch of faggots running the government!”

It might be tempting to dismiss Anderson as the meaningless leader of a small congregation whose post-controversy service drew, by his own account, only forty-nine. But he says such extraordinary things all the time—as his effective and demagogic appearances at teabagger rallies and other venues of the far right have shown—and it doesn’t take large numbers of people, acting singly or in cell groups, to commit horrific acts of violence in God’s name.

Virulent ideas, and a will and a capacity to carry them out, are all that matter. We have seen many such cases in recent years in which at some point, actions meet the demands of the words of leaders with particular ideas about what God may require.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religiousright/1801/%22%5Bi%5D_pray_for_barack_obama_to_die_and_go_to_hell%E2%80%9D:_the_story_the_media_missed_?page=entire

Meet the Arkansas GOP

" ... In 2005 Gilbert Baker asked the 1st Division Faulkner County Circuit Court for "leniency and mercy" for a campaign worker of Baker's who repeatedly beat his female victim, held a knife to her throat, smothered her until she threw up, and using a cigarette lighter burned her multiple times. ... "

by ArkDem the Ragin Cajin
Wed Sep 02, 2009

Now people wonder why Arkansas Democrats do so well? Well it's quite frankly because all the state's Republicans are utter radicals, I mean true radicals. Many Arkansas state Democrats are actually fairly standard Republicans, like State Sen. Bob Johnson, but they are not in the Republican party because it has such a radicalized base.

In Arkansas being a Republican pretty much, with occasional exceptions, means being a radical. We've already seen Kim Hendren, a State Senator, dismiss Schumer as that "Jew" and State Republicans defend him on the blogosphere. We've seen the craziness of Jim Holt and Asa Hutchinson, (Hutchinson by the way, spent most of his time as a drug Czar trying to prosecute 80 year old women in California for medicinal uses of Marijuana). They are too conservative and they have a passion for hypocrisy and bigotry like no others. I remember recently Paul Greenburg of the Democrat-Gazette criticized, yes, criticized Gay Rights opponents for listing how to contact lawmakers who supported it on a website and in the same sentence he managed to include bigotry in the form of "the traditional definition of marriage" as a legitimate reason to deny tax paying citizens equal legal rights. Such blatant reason-twisting logic is what Greenburg is famous for, famous for finding ways to criticize any liberal group while being a huge proponent and apologist for the Conservatives, he makes his God-Given goal to promote conservatism in the Gazette.

Now I would like to you all to meet the new highly touted GOP candidate, State Sen. Gilbert Baker. Sounds like they have a good candidate right? They finally found a sensible one, I mean good relations with some conservative Democrats, a good statewide profile as former Chairman of the State GOP, (and he did a wonderful job, losing all statewide offices including the two they already held, failing to pick up Senate Seats they should have picked up, and losing seven house seats to be relegated to 26 seat minority in the 100 member AR-State House, though they have since gained one or two of those back).

But so he has more experience, he's been in the limelight, can speak without sounding like an idiot or devolving into racial epithets, can raise money, has the connections, sounds good right? And he's two points ahead in early polling despite being known to only 25% of the population.

Well not so good when the campaigning starts. First off he did piss off a lot of people in Republican bastion Benton County when back in 2006 he back-stabbed moderate Republican State Senator Dave Bisbee, (a frequent ally of Huckabee who was instrumental in getting compromises passed in the Senate), over what was ostensibly purity reasons. It was an interesting case where many Democrats were supporting Bisbee and a select group of Republicans came in to help get a possibly more conservative Democrat the position, with Baker leading this. In the process he cost Benton County a Co-Chair of the Budget Committee, (Bisbee had to resign), and he all around screwed them over influence wise. So yes, whatever some people may say, I know for a fact many people in Benton got pissed off permanently at Baker and Bisbee certainly will not be helping him.

Second, (things get better as I go along), the University of Central Arkansas, in his hometown of Conway, is in the midst of what has been described as the biggest scandal in state government in a decade, and while he is not in charge or involved, even being connected to UCA is enough to cost a person 2-4 points in the polling right now, so toxic an issue it has become with voters.

But that's all tame little stuff, normal political stuff, that's pretty much what you expect to come up as a minimum when someone goes after a higher office.

This isn't, the next issue is revolting and disturbing and it will be the key issue Lincoln should make:

Recently, Baker sent out a press release claiming the issue of women's rights is one he takes "seriously". However, in 2005 Gilbert Baker asked the 1st Division Faulkner County Circuit Court for "leniency and mercy" for a campaign worker of Baker's who repeatedly beat his female victim, held a knife to her throat, smothered her until she threw up, and using a cigarette lighter burned her multiple times. Baker testified repeatedly as a character witness to help the defendant, also an elected Republican constable. The defendant was accused of rape, and convicted of kidnapping and assault against a Faulkner County woman. According to Circuit Court documents, Baker testified twice for the man, after knowing the horrible facts of the case and even admitted the defendant had "done wrong."

Meet Gilbert Baker, Republican Candidate for Arkansas Senate, also a Character Witness for people who violently rape women.

Please have the sense not to vote for Lincoln and let a deranged conservative in, if you live in AR.

P.S. Please vote in the poll, even if you don't care, I use it as a counter to determine readership. Just as a courtesy even vote, so I have some proof I'm not talking to a brick wall.

http://www.swingstateproject.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5516

Op-Ed: Health Care Reforms are the Antithesis of Nazi Practice

By Michael Berenbaum ·
jta.org/news
August 19, 2009

LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- It is the nuclear bomb of epithets, a shorthand way of tarnishing any opponent. In recent weeks, Rush Limbaugh and others repeatedly have compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and his health care policies to Nazi tactics. More than one activist showed up at a town hall meeting brandishing a swastika sign and Obama's name.

"They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables," Limbaugh said of the Nazis on his radio program. "As we all know, they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized health care."

Reviewing what the Nazis actually did, and why, shows that such inapt comparisons reveal more about the attackers than the current proposals by the president or Congress.

Some history: At the Nuremberg doctors’ trials in the late 1940s, the judicial process focused mainly on Nazi medical experiments. But scholars now regard standard Nazi medical practice -- the so-called euthanasia program -- as more serious, more all encompassing and more criminal.

Long before World War II, Nazi physicians began with a mass sterilization aimed at propagating a master race. Doctors sterilized mentally retarded and congenitally ill Germans, designated by Nazism as "useless eaters," consuming scarce resources of the German nation still mired in depression. Worse, much worse, was to follow.

Within the war's first six weeks, Hitler signed an order (backdated to Sept. 1, 1939 to give it the appearance of a wartime measure) giving two doctors "responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians ... to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing."

The Nazis popularized and made into policy a concept first advanced by the eugenics movement: "life unworthy of living."

Mass murder of the handicapped began slowly. At first, authorization was informal, secret and narrow in scope -- limited to the most serious cases. From the Berlin Chancellory Tiergarten 4 (code named T-4), officials ordered a statistical survey of all psychiatric institutions, hospitals and homes for chronic patients. Within months the T-4 program enlisted virtually the entire German psychiatric community.

Three medical experts reviewed forms submitted during the survey without examining individual patients or reading detailed records. Theirs was the power to decide life or death. Patients ordered killed were transported to six killing centers: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar and Brandenburg. The SS donned white coats for the transports to give themselves the appearance of medical personnel.

The first killings were by starvation -- passive, simple, natural. Then injections were used. Children were simply put to sleep, never again to wake. Sedatives soon became overdoses. Gassing became the preferred method of killing. False showers were constructed. Ph.D. chemists were employed. The process was administered by doctors, who killed 15 to 20 people at a time. Afterward, black smoke billowed from the chimneys as the bodies were burned.

A few doctors protested. Carl Bonhoeffer, a leading psychiatrist, helped his son Dietrich contact church groups urging them not to turn over patients to the SS. A few physicians refused to fill out the forms. One psychiatrist, Professor Gottfried Ewald of Gottingen, openly opposed the killing.

Growing public pressure, including a sermon on Aug. 3, 1941 by Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Muenster, openly challenged the euthanasia program.

"We must oppose the taking of innocent human life even if it were to cost us our lives," he argued.

On Sept. 1, 1941, almost two years after it began, Germany appeared to discontinue the operation. In truth, it was merely driven underground. "Mercy killings" secretly continued until the end of the war. Some 200,000 Germans -- who the Nazis termed Aryans, not Jews -- were victims.

While T-4 continued in secret, mass murder was just beginning. Physicians trained in the medical killing centers graduated to bigger tasks. Dr. Irmfried Eberl, who began his career in the T-4 program, became the commandant of Treblinka. His colleagues went on to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, where killing took on massive dimensions.

At the Nuremberg doctors’ trial of medical personnel, the judges realized the need to enunciate ethical principles for physicians that would prevent them from ever engaging in such practices. The first principle articulated the universal right of individuals to make their own medical decisions, free from coercion.

"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential," it reads.

Obama's health plan honors that very principle by entitling the patients to be reimbursed for consultations with their physicians to discuss end-of-life issues. That measure is the essence of humane and moral medical policy -- the antithesis of Nazi medicine and Nazi practice. (We also should consult with clergy to ensure that decisions are compatible with both science and faith.)

That is not to say there is no place for a Nazi analogy in this debate. The Nazis rose to power by mastering the art of propaganda, repeating lies so frequently and so widely that eventually people took them as truth. Hence the importance of seeking out the truth and exposing those who would engage in such deceit.

Freud taught us about projection: Those who would compare Obama to Hitler or his policies to Nazism ought to look in the mirror.

(Michael Berenbaum is a professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He was the project director for the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Museum and is the former director of its research institute.)

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/08/19/1007357/op-ed-health-care-reforms-are-the-antithesis-of-nazi-practice

The University of Astroturf: FreedomWorks "Educates" the Tea-Baggers

From: FreedomWorks VP Refuses To Try To ‘Calm Down’ Angry Protesters At Health Care Town Hall Meetings (Updated)
By Ben Armbruster
thinkprogress.org
Aug 7th, 2009

FreedomWorks, an industry-backed right-wing group led by former GOP congressman Dick Armey, has been heavily engaged in organizing conservatives to ambush Democratic members of Congress supporting health care reform at town halls across the country during the August recess. Its “astroturf” campaign is designed to present the appearance of wide-spread public discontent with health care reform, but the reality is that the town halls have become forums for disruption, extremism and even violence.

Last night on MSNBC, FreedomWorks Vice President Max Pappas boasted about flooding congresspeople’s town hall meetings and “blowing them apart.” “We have about 400,000 on-line members who we can contact with an e-mail database that we have, send them information about when the town halls are, give them briefings on the health care reform plans,” he said.

Pappas was on C-SPAN this morning, and a Republican veteran called in and asked Pappas to “to tell these people to wrap it down.” “We Republicans already have the image of being owned by corporate America. Now we’re getting the image of being owned by wild red-neck America,” the caller complained. ...

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/07/freedomworks-cspan/

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

"Racial Hygiene" in America: Eugenicist Founders & Directors of the Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund was instrumental in the formation of the Third Reich's "racial hygiene" policies, and it is still very active, covertly, in the US. Many of the ballot measures around the country turning back affirmative action, welfare and racial "entitlements" were quietly financed by the Pioneer Fund. (This could only happen in a country in which an overwhelming majority of the population are "conservative," pathological liars living in a delusional universe of propaganda programming pumped into their air-compression heads by CIA- and Mafia-run cable companies.) So was The Bell Curve, the notorious, discredited "study" that maintained African-Americans are inherently less intelligent than white people (a best-seller at the Neo-Nazi National Vanguard book shop). For historical background, see: "Pioneer's big lie.(Pioneer Fund, Nazi eugenics) - (response to article by J. Philippe Rushton, Albany Law Review, vol. 66, p. 207, 2002 ).

- AC

Pioneer Fund
From Wikipedia

The Pioneer Fund is a U.S. non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to controversial subject matter.

Two of the most notable studies funded by the Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families. The Pioneer Fund has been the main source of funding for the partly-genetic hypothesis of IQ variation among races. The fund's grantees and publications have generated controversy since the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund has also been criticized for its perceived stance on eugenics.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights advocacy organization, has characterized the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. In support of this, the SPLC cites the Pioneer Fund's funding of organizations and individuals which the SPLC considers racist. It has also been criticized by some scientists and journalists, and in various peer-reviewed academic articles. Critics of the fund include the SPLC, IQ critic William H. Tucker, and historian Barry Mehler and his Institute for the Study of Academic Racism.

Researchers who have been criticized for accepting grants from the fund have argued that the public debates have been disconnected from the expert debates. Robert A. Gordon, for example, replied to media criticisms of grant-recipients: "Politically correct disinformation about science appears to spread like wildfire among literary intellectuals and other nonspecialists, who have few disciplinary constraints on what they say about science and about particular scientists and on what they allow themselves to believe." ...

MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund
****
Pioneer Fund Founders and Former Directors
http://www.pioneerfund.org/Founders.html

Wickliffe Preston Draper (1891-1972), Pioneer’s main benefactor, served on its five-person Board of Directors from 1937 until 1972. Draper was born in 1891 to a distinguished New England family, distant kin to three American presidents. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1913.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Draper enlisted as a lieutenant in the British Army and saw action on the western front and then in Greece. Returning to the western front, he fought at Messines and Ypres, where he was seriously wounded, and was later awarded the British Star Medal and the Belgian Croix de Guerre. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Draper transferred to the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was discharged with the rank of major. Promoted to Colonel in the Cavalry Reserve, a title by which many people addressed him, he continued to take officers’ courses until the outbreak of World War II.

When Draper’s father died in 1923, he inherited the family’s wealth earned from a textile machine manufacturing company. Dedicating his life to intellectual pursuits and philanthropy, as well as to adventuring, Draper studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of London, and genetics with private tutors. In 1927, he joined the French Mission led by Captain Augiéras to the southern Sahara and helped discover the remains of “Asselar Man,” some 400 kilometers north of Timbuktu. For this, the French Societé de Geographie awarded him their 1928 Gold Medal, and in Britain he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

When the United States entered World War II, Draper, now 51 years old, returned to active service. Assigned to military intelligence, he joined British headquarters in India. Later, he was made responsible for internal security for the Alcan (Alaska-Canadian) Highway.

By nature introverted, shy, and modest, Draper refused honorary doctorates or having university buildings named in his honor. The only distinctions he accepted were for his role in the discovery of Asselar Man and his military decorations. Draper insisted that his role as benefactor to many charitable causes (including military history, archaeology, conservation, and population problems) remain anonymous. He never married and when he died in 1972, he left a significant portion of his assets to the Pioneer Fund to continue its scientific philanthropy.

Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943), the first president of the Pioneer Fund (1937–1941), was a life-long scientist. Laughlin served as long-time director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, funded by the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Among his duties was the editing of the Eugenical News, which reported on scientific research and eugenic issues from around the world. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1880, the son of a minister and academic, Laughlin grew up in Kirksville, Missouri. He first taught school for ten years before developing an interest in agriculture and plant and animal breeding. In 1910 Laughlin moved to Cold Spring Harbor. In 1917 he received a Doctorate of Science from Princeton for his work in genetics. During the 1920s and 1930s Laughlin served as an advisor to several Congressional Committees. He retired in 1941 and died in 1943.

Frederick Henry Osborn (1890-1981), the second president of the Pioneer Fund (1941–1958), was born into a wealthy New York business and banking family, and was the nephew of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. After undergraduate and graduate work in geology, human evolution, and eugenics—at Princeton and Cambridge—he abandoned business and banking to devote himself to genetic science. The books he wrote in 1934, 1940, and 1951 described the scientific evidence for the heritability of intelligence and mental disorder based on family, twin, and adoption studies. During World War I, Osborn served with the American Red Cross in France, and in World War II, he served as Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Selective Service as a Major General. Osborn continued his public service after war’s end by serving on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission from 1947 to 1950 as Deputy U.S. Representative.

John Marshall Harlan (1899-1971), the highly respected U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was a director of the Pioneer Fund from 1937 to 1954. During World War II Harlan led the Operational Analysis Section of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, for which the U.S. awarded him the Legion of Merit, and France and Belgium each awarded him their Croix de Guerre. In 1955, President Eisenhower appointed Harlan to the U.S. Supreme Court. He voted with his fellow Justices in the second of the two historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decisions, which first outlawed school segregation between Blacks and Whites and then set forth the means of relief.

Malcolm Donald (1877–1949), another of the initial directors, was a graduate of Harvard Law School and editor of the Harvard Law Review. He worked in the War Department during the First World War and in the Pentagon during the Second World War, with a rank equivalent to Brigadier General. Donald served as a director of the Pioneer Fund from its inception in 1937 until his death in 1949.

Subsequent Board Members have included John M. Woolsey, Jr. (1954–1959), whose distinguished legal career included serving as a staff attorney at the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecuting Nazi war criminals, for which he received the Order of the White Lion from the Czechoslovakian Government. Another director was war hero Marion A. Parrott (1973–2000), who served during World War II with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. He took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy and was wounded and captured in northern France. He escaped from a prison camp in occupied Poland during 1945 and made his way to Russia. From there he returned to his unit in France and took part in the final advance into Germany at war’s end, at which point he was discharged as a Major.

Another eminent member of the Board was Charles Codman Cabot who served from 1950 until 1973. His renowned Boston family gave rise to the quip, "the Lowells talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God." Cabot served as a Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts during the 1940s. He also served as Chief of the Secretariat of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey during World War II. Still another director was Henry E. Garrett (1972–1973), Chair of the Psychology Department at Columbia University from 1941 to 1956, and president of the American Psychological Association in 1946. During World War II he was a member of the Adjutant General’s committee, responsible for the classification and selection of military personnel.

Complete Listings of the Past Directors of the Pioneer Fund and Years Served

Wickliffe P. Draper [1937-1972]

Harvard College (cum laude); volunteer British Army WWI, wounded, decorated; volunteer Lt Col US Army Intell, India, Alaska WWII; member of Mission Augieras, co-discoverer of Asselar Man.

Harry Hamilton Laughlin [1937-1941]

ScD, Princeton; director Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office (Carnegie Institution); numerous publications.

Frederick Henry Osborn [1937-1958]

Princeton (Phi Beta Kappa); Trinity (Cambridge); LLD, Washington & Lee; SD, Norwich; Litt D, NYU; several Pentagon committees; Maj Gen USA; UN Atomic Energy Commission; trustee Population Council; trustee Carnegie Corp; trustee Milbank Fund; co-author Dynamics of Population (1934); Preface to Eugenics (1940, 1951); editor Heredity and Environment; contributor articles on population.

John M. Harlan [1937-1954]

Princeton; Balliol (Oxford); Root Ballantine Harlan Bushby & Palmer; Judge 2d Cir Ct/App; Justice US Supreme Court.

Malcolm Donald [1937-1949]

Harvard college (cum laude, football 4 years, Phi Beta Kappa) and Law (cum laude); editor Harvard Law Review; Gaston Snow, Boston; Herrick, Smith, & Donald, Boston; War Department, Washington WWI; trustee Roxbury Latin School.

John H. Slate, Jr. [1941-1946]

Columbia college and Law; editor Columbia Law Review; co-founder Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom; contributor to Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and others.

James P. Kranz, Jr. [1948]

U of the South; Harvard Law; Root, Clark.

Henry Rice Guild [1948-1974]

Harvard College and Law; Lt (JG) US Navy WWI; Herrick Smith, Boston; trustee Mass General Hospital; director Audubon Society; chmn Greater Boston Community Fund; chm, Mass Department of Public Welfare.

Charles Codman Cabot [1950-1973]

Harvard College and Law; Choate Hall, Boston; Ropes Gray, Boston; associate justice Mass Superior Court; chmn, Mass Crime Commission; chmn Mass Bay Transportation Authority; OSS in WWII; Chief of Secretariat, US Strategic Bombing Survey WWII; pres United Community Service of Boston; overseer Harvard College; pres Boston Bar Assn; chmn/trustees Wellesley College; pres/trustees Milton Academy.

John M. Woolsey, Jr. [1954-1959]

Yale College (Phi Beta Kappa) and Law; note editor Yale LJ; Lt US Navy WWII; staff attorney for US Nuremberg War Trials; Debevoise Plimpton; Herrick Smith, Boston; trustee Society for Preservation of N Eng Antiquities; vice pres Trustees of Reservations.

Harry F. Weyher, Jr. [1958-2002]

UNC (Phi Beta Kappa); Harvard Law (magna cum laude); note editor Harvard Law Review; sr ass't counsel New York State Crime Commission; adj assoc prof NYU Law School; Olwine, Connelly, Chase, O'Donnell, & Weyher; author legal articles, books.

John B. Trevor, Jr. [1959-2000]

Columbia College and Engineering Sch; WW II Project Engineer in charge of developing and evaluating Shipborne Anti-Aircraft Control Systems at Naval Research Lab; author of several classified books and manuals for armed forces; decorated by Navy, investment management.

John F. Walsh, Jr. [1971-1973]

Harvard College, Yale Law; Whitman Breed Abbott & Morgan.

Henry E. Garrett [1972-1973]

U of Richmond; Columbia U; prof, chmn Dept of Psychology, Columbia U; pres American Psychological Association (1946); author Great Experiments in Psychology, Psychology and Life, other books, numerous articles.

Marion A. Parrott [1973-2002]

The Citadel; UNC Law; Major US Army (377th Parachute F A Bn, 101st Airborne Division, wounded, captured, escaped and rejoined unit); representative and chmn of Com on Constitutional Amendments, NC Gen Assembly.

Thomas F. Ellis [1973-1977]

UNC College, Virginia Law; Lt (JG) US Navy WWII; ass't US attorney; Co-founder Maupin, Taylor & Ellis, Raleigh; special counsel Governor's Advisory Com on Education; NC State Chairman 1976 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign, National Co-Chairman 1988 Jack Kemp presidential campaign; advisor 1996 Steve Forbes presidential campaign.

Eugenie Mary Ladenburg Davie (Mrs. Preston) [1974-1975]

Westover School; Republican Nat Finance Com; Executive Com and Finance chmn, NY Rep State Com; regent Nat Lib of Medicine; trustee LIU; trustee Adelphi College; chairwoman Robert A. Taft Institute of Gov’t.

Randolph L. Speight [1975-1999]

UNC College; partner, Shearson Hamill.

William Dawes Miller [1983-1993]

Carnegie Inst Tech; engineer and operations officer, Oak Ridge AEC (Manhattan Project); chief engineer Continental Copper & Steel ("Texas Towers" radar project), pres and CEO Consolidated Aluminum, sr vice pres The Anaconda Company.

Karl Schakel [1993-2002]

Purdue U; founder of weapons systems and aeronautical engineering company; founder of ranching-farming company operating in 12 countries on five continents.

Edwin D. Morgan [2000-2001]

Morgan served with the 1st Marine Division in Guadalcanal, New Guinea, New Britain and Peleliu; he founded Holographics, Inc., which developed useful laser technologies.

R. Travis Osborne [2000-present]

Osborne earned his first degree from the University of Florida (1935) and later a M.Ed. (1938) and a Ph.D. (1950) from the University of Georgia. Commissioned in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he taught air navigation at the Navy Pre-flight School in Memphis, Tennessee. Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, he organized and directed the Student Guidance Center, which later became the Counseling and Testing Service. He became Emeritus Professor (1980). He is the author of numerous articles and books including Twins: Black and White (1980), and with F. C. J. McGurk, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, Vol. 2 (1982).

The Current Board

The late Harry F. Weyher, Jr. (1921-2002) served as the third president of the Pioneer Fund for 44 years (1958-2002). He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After serving in World War II, Weyher entered Harvard Law School, where he was note editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude. In addition to his private practice, Weyher also taught law at New York University. Along with two books and a number of articles on law, he also wrote two major articles on the The Pioneer Fund ("Contributions to the history of psychology: CXII. Intelligence, behavior genetics, and the Pioneer Fund," Psychological Reports, 1998, 82, 1347-1374; "The Pioneer Fund, the behavioral sciences, and the media’s false stories," Intelligence, 1999, 26, 319-335), as well as contributing a lengthy preface to The Science of Human Diversity, by Richard Lynn, which gave an inside view of his over four decades at the helm.

J. Philippe Rushton, B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.B.Ps.S., the fourth and current president of the Pioneer Fund, was born in 1943 in Bournemouth, England. He received all his degrees from the University of London, including a Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of 5 books and over 200 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Rushton is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavioral Genetics Association and the Society for Neuroscience. Rushton has summarized his research for journals of opinion such as Liberty, the National Review, and the Washington Times’s Insight on the News, and discussed it on TV talk shows such as Donahue, Geraldo Live, and Connie Chung. His major published work is Race, Evolution, and Behavior, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review of October 16, 1994, translated into Japanese, and is now in its 3rd unabridged edition, as well as in an abridged edition and an audio book.

Professor Rushton began his career by researching the basis of altruism. The question of why one individual aids another, thereby exposing himself to risk, has long posed a challenge to evolutionary theories of human development. Rushton’s early work focused on the social learning of generosity in 7- to 11-year-old children. After writing a book, Altruism, Socialization, and Society (1980), which examined the influence of the family, the educational system, and the mass media, he broadened his perspective to include sociobiological and behavioral genetic factors. He then analyzed the University of London Twin Register and found that individual differences in empathy and nurturance are about 50% heritable, as were individual differences in aggression and crime, some of which he found to be mediated by testosterone.

Studying behavioral genetics and sociobiology led Rushton to explore the dilemma of why, throughout the natural world, “birds of a feather flock together.” He found that genes incline people to marry, befriend, associate with, and help others like themselves. Typically, individuals learn to identify and prefer their own ethnic group, rather than others, for largely genetic reasons. Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory expanded the kin-selection theory of altruism (a fundamental theorem of sociobiology) to explain why the pull of that factor is so powerful across human relationships and how it provides an explanation for ethnocentrism and ethnic competition. Altruism follows lines of genetic similarity in order to replicate genes more effectively; xenophobia emerges as the dark side of human altruism.

It also led Rushton to examine race differences. In new studies and reviews of the world literature, he has documented that East Asians and their descendants consistently average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, a slower rate of maturation, and greater levels of law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants. Europeans, in turn, average higher on these dimensions than do Africans and their descendants. To explain this pattern he proposed a gene-based evolutionary theory in his book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995).

The Current Board of Directors

When Harry Weyher died on March 27, 2002, J. Philippe Rushton, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, a long-time Pioneer grant recipient, was appointed the new president. At the same time, Weyher’s widow, Mrs. Michelle Weyher, was appointed a Director, as was Richard Lynn, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster, also a long-time grantee. They joined existing Board members R. Travis Osborne, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, and Karl Schakel, an engineer and businessman-rancher from Colorado.

Qualifications of Scientists
(From the PF weibsite)

In considering grant proposals, the Fund has always sought excellence in the researchers. We review the scholastic background, extent of field research, published writings and citations of those writings, and reputation among peers of all applicants. Two of our grantees are among the most cited psychologists of all time (Hans J. Eysenck, Arthur R. Jensen). One won a Nobel Prize (William B. Shockley). Three are Guggenheim Fellows (Arthur R. Jensen, Ernest van den Haag, and J. Philippe Rushton). Pioneer grantees have been elected as the presidents of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the British Psychological Society, the Behavior Genetics Association, the Psychometric Society, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences. Grantees currently serve on the editorial boards of major academic journals, including three on the board of Personality and Individual Differences, and three on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence. The Galton Society of the United Kingdom has selected three Pioneer Fund grantees to give the annual Galton Lectures (Hans J. Eysenck, Thomas J. Bouchard, and Arthur R. Jensen). The collected works of grantees total over 200 scholarly books and 2,000 scholarly articles.

Pinochet Purges Arrests Ordered

Gen Pinochet died in 2006 without facing trial for human rights abuses

BBC
2 September 2009

A Chilean judge has issued arrest warrants for 129 people for allegedly helping to purge critics of former ruler General Augusto Pinochet.

The suspects - the largest group so far to face arrest warrants - all worked for the secret police agency, Dina.

They are accused of taking part in killings and disappearances of dozens of leftists and opposition activists. ...

CONTINUED

Doctors had 'Central Role' in CIA Abuse: Rights Group

WASHINGTON — A US-based medical rights advocacy group on Monday blasted health experts for playing a "central role" in advising and implementing the CIA's abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued its six-page white paper after shocking details about the range of techniques used by interrogators, including the simulated drowning known as waterboarding, came to light one week ago with release of a 2004 CIA inspector general's report.

The revelations have fueled the raging debate over interrogations during the "war on terror" of the George W. Bush administration.

"Health professionals played a central role in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture," PHR said in its report.

"Health professionals in the (federal government) and psychologist contractors engaged in designing and monitoring harmful interrogation techniques. Such medical participation in torture is a clear violation of medical ethics."

The not-for-profit group also said the medical experts "were complicit in selecting and then rationalizing these abusive methods, whose safety and efficacy in eliciting accurate information have no valid basis in science."

Interrogators are alleged to have used a range of techniques on suspected Al Qaeda members, including physical threats, mock executions, choking to the point where detainees lost consciousness and even using a stiff brush to scrub a detainee's skin raw.

PHR warned that such spy agency techniques -- and monitoring by doctors to gauge their effectiveness -- "approaches unlawful experimentation" on human subjects.

The report's lead author, PHR medical advisor Scott Allen, pulled no punches in a statement on the organization's website, saying "medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation."

By standing by to monitor the effects of acts such as waterboarding on detainees, the health professionals were "laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA's illegal torture program."

PHR urged a separate investigation of the medical experts involved to determine whether "criminal and unprofessional conduct" took place, and said those who violated medical ethics rules should lose their license.

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