Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Back to the 60s

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Romney Man


In the news. A one- percenter?

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

What if the other guy is a really bad criminal too?


Should people get off the hook because they're not as smart as the rest of us?

If a state has the death penalty for murder, should some killers not be exposed to that possibility because they are stupid? Or whatever word you want to use. Disadvantaged. Mentally deficient. Intellectually impaired.

Which is more important: demonstrating that society values the lives of victims by putting their murderer/rapist/torturer to death? Or not executing him because he "may" not fully understand what is happening to him and why?

Read example story here.

Or is no killer THAT dumb?
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If a vicious lion comes into the village and acquires a taste for human flesh and keeps coming back, dragging off another meal each night, what do you do? Shoot it. WAIT! What if it doesn't fully comprehend WHY you are shooting him?

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Keyword = "Jewelry Jewelry Jewelry Jewelry" and more.


This blog is primarily about trying to make things clear. Mainly research notes for myself. Whenever I come across similar websites, I try to learn from them. I have seldom seen a site with more helpful advice and clarity than the one I discovered today which offers free articles on an amazing array of subjects. They appear to all be written by Chinese speakers who have made up English-sounding (to them) names so we won't think they are Chinese who are unfamiliar with the English language. For some fine examples of these helpful articles, please peruse the following. I hope you don't get knowledge overload or get rich too quickly.

I was going to put a link to this site, but then my brain kicked in and said to my fingers, "Don't be silly."

Alternatively, these may simply be the product of a very old version of babelfish.

If any links survived the copy-paste function, please don't follow them.
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Simple Guideline In Terms Of Precious jewelry

Jewelry is a well-liked fashion accessory around the world. Individuals use different types of precious jewelry, such as jewelry, necklaces, jewelry, charms, and much more. Sometimes, getting jewelry can existing an issues to precious jewelry users, because they are confronted by the process of what to get. The tips from the report below can help [...]
Published in our category: Jewelry for Women

Are You Presently Unclear About The Industry Of Investing? Attempt These Superb Advice!

Whether you might try out your hands at the stock market the first time, or you are interested in strategies to make a better forex trader, you may have appear off to the right place. The content listed below features tips and tricks that can help you feel an excellent forex trader. Opt for a [...]
Published in our category: Finances 

A Brief Guide To Fiber Optics Equipment

Understanding how fiber optics are made and performance for uses in everyday life is an intriguing murals combined with science. Fiber optics has been fabricated from supplies that transmit mild and are created from a bundle of very skinny glass or plastic fibers enclosed in a tube. One finish is at a supply of sunshine [...]
Published in our category: Technology

Function As The Parent You Always Aspired To Be With These Details

With the amount of textbooks and video clips readily available, you might think that everybody would be an expert on being a parent right now. However this is simply not the truth because individuals can be getting bad assistance, or they decide to not respond in the guidance they are presented. Make use of the [...]
Published in our category: Parenting

Guard Your Expensive jewelry Collection

Do you wish to know all you need to know about jewelry? Your good reasons may be so you know what to watch out for when buying, and when you are looking for offering. This information will give a lot of assistance that you should feel comfortable knowing that no-one will are able of ripping [...]
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If you thought the mention of Dick Van Dyke feeling a prime Mary Tyler Moore was in poor taste, I don't recommend trying to feel a forex trader.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Babies by Design



Disclaimer for the casual web surfer who stumbles across this: "This is a post AGAINST the concept or practice of eugenics."

Eugenics is the science of attempting to improve a human population by controlled breeding.

Eugenics seeks to mate persons with superior physical attributes so that each generation is physically and mentally superior to the previous generation. Conversely, people with "undesirable" physical traits, or disabilities, or mental deficiencies, or likelihood of birth defects, or undesirable social traits (criminals, etc.,) are discouraged (or prevented by government authority) from reproducing. [An example of governmental prohibition today would be no close family members mating; in some states, you can't marry your first cousin for example. So, most of us support SOME forms of eugenics.]

But much of this is science fiction stuff that has been around at least as long as science fiction has been written.

The questions that come to this blog author's mind are mostly questions such as, "Who decides?" What is desirable? What is superior? Would there come a time when the "superior" beings would be substandard by comparison and no longer be allowed to reproduce, due to being replaced by supermen and women? What becomes of the culls? I'm guessing Stephen Hawking couldn't be allowed to reproduce if the old eugenics folks were in control. They did seem to make some exceptions though, for rich folks with disabilities.

The attempt to improve DNA with the mating of two superior subjects is called positive eugenics, and the goal of removing substandard DNA from a given society is called negative eugenics. In other words, on the one hand you do what Hitler proposed and breed only superior stock to create a Master Race, and on the other hand, you don't allow the feeble-minded, alcoholics, diseased, (or blacks or Jews or _________) to reproduce. You sterilize them or kill them outright. "Superior stock" doesn't have to be big, strong healthy people necessarily; they can be college professors and people whose families have great longevity and don't have a history of disease (as long as they also have white skin, of course.) I hope I am not starting to sound cynical in this piece.

While this series of posts will talk mostly about the eugenics movements in the U.S. and Canada in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics has been around longer than that.  No, you can go really far back in history and find many instances of trying to "improve" the human race by selective breeding. In ancient Greece, for example, the Spartans were amazing warriors, according to the writings that have come down. Surely selective breeding was one of those tools used to achieve this, and not simple calisthenics or cold showers and morning runs. The name "eugenics" was supposedly coined by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Neither was a proponent of it, only interested in the theory of natural selection.

In the Bible you read of God commanding the Hebrews to avoid intermarrying with the local peoples they lived with. There are probably other eugenics stories in the Bible that don't come to my mind right now as well. But the point is, throughout history, attempts have been made to "improve" or "preserve" parts of the human race.

It is interesting to note that in the "recent" eugenics movement, they were not only concerned with physically strong and healthy specimens, but they also practiced negative eugenics by sterilizing every sort of defenseless class of people you can imagine, in the theory that so doing would stop the continuing of feeblemindedness being passed down from generation to generation (which it probably would) to believing it would cure things like alcoholism and criminal activity. Indeed, one of the popular proponents of this commented that if you want to change the undesirable characteristics of a boy, you have to start with his grandfather. I guess he meant there is no real hope of improvement using only environmental means. But that seemed to be the mindset.

Some people whose names were associated with eugenics early on, in some way or another, include Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling, and more.

I won't go on and on forever on this subject, but I want to do at least two more posts, one on Kellogg and the Seventh Day Adventists, and a more serious one on the treatment of mentally ill patients in government hospitals.  I have already covered the Nazi Germany eugenics in earlier posts.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Bred for Quality

Over the years we have bred animals for their best qualities. We breed cows to give the most or best milk and meat, dogs to look funny at dog shows, horses to win races and pull heavy things. We don't give it a second thought. We don't breed the runts of the litters; we discard them. We breed  for desired characteristics. Just like Mother Nature does in the wild. Survival of the fittest, death to the weak and infirm. Same with plants. Some people still get patents for new roses and orchids. And our food? Practically all corn is "hybrid" nowadays. I suppose seeds in general. Bred for beauty or production or resistance to disease.

Humans? Not so much anymore. We still practice eugenics through abortion, of course, including the desired sex of the child. We abort those we know will be deformed, prone to diseases, feeble mindedness. Abortion is so much more than poor teenaged girls not having to have back alley abortions, isn't it? Abortion has become everything the silly moralists of the 1950s and 1960s warned it would become. Or soon will be.

Abortion is used for ethnic cleansing in our society as well, just like eugenics was used in the 1930s, only much more so. MANY more black children are aborted each year, proportionately, than any other flavor. Mostly by white doctors. Not ethnic cleansing, you say? Not eugenics? Ok.

And yet we are appalled when we read about what happened in the 1920s - 1960s. The alcoholics and feeble-minded and retarded (words of that era) not allowed to have babies, sterilize by court order or sometimes only by the order of the warden of an "asylum" somewhere. It is a sad story, even though I try not to judge people from times other than my own.

I want to tell some of those stories in the coming posts. Do you know any?

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Progressives and Eugenics

"Progressives" in this post refers to the American political party of the early 20th century, and their vision for America (and eventually the world.) They had many fascinating things in their political platform, their beliefs and goals. Some were worthy, some were idealistic, and some were downright crazy by today's standards.

A belief that the human species should be improved upon by means of governmentally-enforced "natural selection" methods - as Charles Darwin had written about regarding animals and plants - was one of those rather far-out visions of the early Progressive Party. Although the Party faded before long, the eugenics studies - and experiments - continued on into the early 1960s.

Again, the early Progressive Party is not the same as the ideals and goals of the current "progressive" branch of the Liberal Democrat political party in America today. At least not the eugenics part, I don't think. On the other hand, the current bunch of crazies living on HuffPost would probably think it would be ok to lobotomize Sarah Palin in order to silence her.

I want to talk about eugenics rather than politics in the next few posts, however.

This subject is too large to do in one post. Some of the topics I want to cover include Kellogg's of Battle Creek, Seventh Day Adventists, mental health facilities in the U.S., some theorists, famous locked-up people, some people associated with the progressive/eugenics movement, Nazi Germany, and more. I HOPE YOU WILL COMMENT RIGHT AWAY IF ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SUBJECT INSPIRES YOU TO DO SO, RATHER THAN WAIT UNTIL I FINISH THE WHOLE THING, AND WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER I INTEND TO TALK ABOUT YOUR COMMENT SUBJECT LATER.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Day of Treason


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