John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar

I was over at lgf earlier today and was reading the posts of a member named 'zombie' who runs a blog called 'zombietime'. The blog focuses on photos of protestors. Seems that 'zombie' goes to these events and takes the pictures, sometimes at personal risk to herself. (I'm assuming zombie's gender, as the feminine term has been used).

What really intrigued me was zombie's essay about John Holdren, Obama's science czar.

I think it's a must-read.

The wiki entry on Holdren claims that he is fascinated by population control, authoring a book called 'The Population Bomb'. Wikipedia soft-pedals Holdren's beliefs in regards to population control, but Zombie pointed out that Holdren hero-worshipped a fellow scholar named Harrison Brown whose views on eugenics are rather scary.

John Holdren, the Science Czar of the United States, has long expressed an intense admiration — one that bordered on hero-worship — of a man named Harrison Brown, a respected scientist from an earlier generation who spent his later years writing about overpopulation and ecological destruction. In fact, as Holdren has pointed out several times (including very recently), it was Harrison Brown's most famous book, The Challenge of Man's Future, which transformed the young Holdren's personal philosophy and which inspired him to later embark on a career in science and population policy which in many ways mirrored that of his idol Brown.

Holdren's regard for Brown was so high that in 1986 he edited and co-wrote an homage to Brown entitled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, in which Holdren showers Brown with accolades and unrestrained applause.

At first glance, there's nothing remarkable or amiss with this picture: one respected scientist giving credit to and paying tribute to another. Happens all the time. Except in this case, something is amiss. Grievously amiss. Because Harrison Brown, whatever good qualities Holdren might have seen in him, was also an unapologetic eugenicist who made horrifying recommendations for "sterilizing the feeble-minded" and other "unfit" substandard humans whom he thought should be "pruned from society." (See the quotes from Holdren on the left and Brown on the right for a small sampling of the evidence presented below.)

I haven't finished reading zombie's essay, but so far it's been an eye-opener.