Vermont Commons Blogger Using Scare Tactics

We can all think of recent and not so recent uses of scare tactics by political entities bent on shaping public response to their desired end: WMD, Jews, "death panels", Willie Horton, "traditional" marriage, the list is endless - and always quite shameless.

So when I saw this recent call to arms by "Vermont Commons" blogger Simha Bode I was struck by his boldness, as well as the bold-faced quality of his deception.

Bode seeks to galvanize public opinion against the use of Smart Meters, not unlike some Tea Party activists elsewhere in the country, and writes,

"This letter is to inform you that as a Vermont utility customer, I support the halt of “smart meter” installations, the removal of wireless smart meters installed and an immediate restoration of analog utility meters."

"The World Health Organization has recently classified radio frequency electromagnetic fields (wireless) as possibly carcinogenic (cancer causing)."

"It is a violation of our rights to force the installation of wireless devices upon utility customers without fair process of public or environmental review, or proof of safety."

"I demand an investigation and evidentiary hearings into the safety impacts of wireless smart meters, including over billing, interference, burned out appliances, fires and explosions, and health complaints."

"The people of Vermont deserve to know they are safe in their own home. Implementing a “pay to opt-out” legislation as has been tried in CA is unacceptable. Even if a person opts-out they still can not avoid exposure from RF meters in the workplace, public buildings and other places wireless meters will be installed."

"As a Vermont tax payer and utility customer I support imposing an immediate moratorium on wireless utility meters (smart meters) and the restoration of any analog meters that have been changed to wireless."

"Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter!"
(add your personal Message for more impact)

Vermont Public Service Board
112 State Street (Chittenden Bank Building)
Drawer 20
snail mail is recommended you can also e-mail it to - psb.clerk@state.vt.us

What Bode does here is conflate a WHO report on cell phone radio wave emissions (see here) with a marginally related fact that Smart Meters (wireless) emit RF. What is not said by Bode is that the WHO report clearly states,

"A large number of studies have been performed over the last two decades to assess whether mobile phones pose a potential health risk. To date, no adverse health effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use."

There's much more in the WHO report and further study is urged but the immediacy of the threat, much like the bombshelter scares of the 50s and 60s, is being grossly overstated by Bode.

Unsurprisingly, Bode fails to include this study (here) (and much closer to home by the way) conducted by the Maine Public Utilities Commission - the very same sort of study he demands in his letter to the Vermont Public Service Board. The Maine review concludes:

"In conclusion, our review of these agency assessments and studies do not indicate any consistent or convincing evidence to support a concern for health effects related to the use of radiofrequency in the range of frequencies and power used by smart meters. They also do not indicate an association of EMF exposure and symptoms that have been described as electromagnetic sensitivity." (Bold type by MPUC)

Remember, scare tactics like Bode's are not about direct, provable threats, but are more on the order of coerced conclusions. You can read more about the sort of scare tactics and fear mongering Bode is using in service to his political agenda here.

Now if Simha Bode or one of the other scare mongers at VTCommons had only made some connection to the Illuminati and the UN/New World Order (NWO), I'd have gotten my letter out to the Vermont Public Service Board today.



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Vermont Commons' Nucular Fusion Expert

Simha Bode: truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Probably nothing sums up better "Vermont Commons" publisher über propagandist and half-assed media wiz Rob Williams' desperation to expand his "small community of secessionists," electoral losers, anti-Semites, white supremacists (and their promoters) than the inclusion of Simha Bode to Williams' small shelf of cracked pots (pun intended, Simha) posing as bloggers of importance to Vermonters.

"VT Commons blogger Simha Bode has apparently made the discovery of the millennium, as he's discovered nuclear fusion reactors (here and here). Somebody should call the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and tell them to stop wasting their time and money."

(h/t odum at Green Mountain Daily)

Other areas of Bode's expertise include opining on the wisdom of sovereign citizen movement types' legal claptrap, the "commie UN conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids with bicyles," scanning the Internets for thinly reasoned arguments for his passing pet theories and, frankly, his loopy understanding of political strategeries of the more minor players in the Vermont Yankee drama.

Now comes Bode's revelation of the nucular breakthrough of this and the last century.

Priceless.



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Second Vermont Republic's Longtime Advisory Board Member, Thomas DiLorenzo, Cites Racist Sources for His Criticism of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Shameless audacity in their endeavors is something of a prerequisite for neo-Confederate, secessionist ideologues.

A recent whine about the Southern Poverty Law Center by the LewRockwell.com blog poster, longtime Second Vermont Republic advisory board member (no link to SVR's advisory board is presently available - it got "disappeared" after the Frank Bryan post on this blog), a past contributor to the now defunct journal of the Holocaust denial organization, Institute for Historical Review, and creator of a fictionalized Lincoln history that is available for sale at a the Holocaust denial website called The Barnes Review, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, has taken chutzpah to a new extreme.

DiLorenzo has jumped the neo-Confederate, racist shark by citing as a source for criticism of the SPLC the website of The Social Contract.

The Social Contract is a publisher of racist, anti-immigrant books like The Camp of the Saints. [1] [2]

The Social Contact's editorial board for the past 20 years has read like a Who's Who of racist. white supremacist, anti-immigrant "big thinkers" such as John Tauton, Kevin Lamb (who's also an editor of the white supremacist Occidental Quarterly and the communications director for the racist National Policy Institute) and Wayne Lutton (a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and has served as editor at Occidental Quarterly and the racist American Renaissance), each of whom is cited in the incredible article for that which DiLorenzo outrageously claims is already known about the SPLC.

Here's what DiLorenzo posted at the LewRockwell.com's blog:

Hate-Group Racketeering

Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo on May 21, 2011 10:56 AM
"A recent issue of a journal entitled The Social Contract contains seventeen articles about the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The journal demonstrates what many of us already know: The SPLC is a neo-McCarthyite, cultural Marxist organization whose basic role within the Democratic Party is to smear all conservative or libertarian critics of Big Government in general, and Obama in particular, as racists. There can be no reasoned debate over immigration policy, for example, for the SPLC informs us that all critics of open borders (including the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and Nobel laureate Gary Becker; and African-American scholars Walter E. Williams [Editor's Note: A search of the SPLC website reveals no such references to immigration and Friedman, Becker and Williams]; Thomas Sowell, a true nutjob, has compared President Obama to Hitler and has a long record of overtly screwball views.) are motivated by nothing but racial hatred of “brown” immigrants. Case closed. Shut up."

"Their purpose is to censor debate, and their tactic is what the cultural Marxists call “ritual defamation,” as opposed to civilized debate of public policy issues. As an example, I recently read one of the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” reports that catalogues several genuinely nutty-sounding characters who ran for political office recently. Some of them were crazed neo-Nazis who received maybe a dozen votes in a some local political race. Then included in the list is U.S. Senator Rand Paul. Get it: Rand Paul is nearly identical to the mentally disturbed neo-Nazi who hides out in the mountains of Colorado reading a dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf. The SPLC race racketeers have personally become very wealthy at this game, as is discussed in the journal."

Source

Here's the list of The Social Contract's journal contributors to their SPLC exposé. Some on the list are regular "contributors" to the racist, white supremacist Internet radio program of James Edwards, called The Political Cesspool, in addition to their role literary mainstays of the white supremacist, conservative, racist, anti-Semitic movement.

Longtime SVR advisory board member DiLorenzo's work has been lauded by Thomas Naylor, "Vermont Commons'" publisher, Rob Williams and VTCommons' white supremacist contributor and author of "Rearing Honorable White Children", Robert S. Griffin. [3]

Given DiLorenzo's choice of fellow travelers in his doomed campaign against the SPLC, is it little wonder then that Loyola University has been "looking more closely into" his activities and his "hateful messages," as desribed by one Loyola librarian?" This isn't the first time that one of DiLorenzo's racialist sole-mates has caused a problem for him at Loyola University. In 2008 his Economics Department offered an apology for a visiting professor's racialist, economic views that "indicated poor-quality scholarship." Naturally, taken as he is with racialist "theology," DiLorenzo took issue with that reasonable view.

DiLorenzo's citation of known racist trash as qualified critic's of the SPLC, much like his own past bad acts on behalf of a racialist professor's "poor-quality scholarship," says it all.

Two weeks after DiLorenzo's post citing the work of his racist colleagues he reloaded and fired off another salvo at the SPLC, citing the 'research" of the profoundly racist and anti-Semitic VDare website here.

The VDare.com hypothesis lashes out at SPLC's "anti-majority" work and, while making poorly evidenced economic extrapolations about SPLC, warns that the SPLC is "anchored by wealthy Jewish contributors on the East and West coasts." The fervently anti-Semitic VDare writer even tries to make a Kevin Bacon-style link to Bernie Madoff in the year old piece DiLorenzo found of such value that he added it to his anti-SPLC diatribe. VDare's founder, Peter Brimelow, has counseled the GOP to concentrate its electoral efforts on white voters. He predictes that:

"Obama will do something 'that will start to shock people right away. I think that whites — that is to say, Americans — will organize...'"

Source

Tea Party, anyone?

Will Rob Williams and Thomas Naylor now care to explain to Vermonters why DiLorenzo should be advising Vermonters on their not-so-likely, inchoate future republic, although I'd say that we'd best not hold our breath waiting for that explanation.

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