Category Archives: Eugenics

Asheville Citizen-Times

Surviving families of eugenics victims lose latest round in court fight to get compensation News & Observer (blog) The North Carolina Industrial Commission oversees payments from $10 million that the General Assembly set aside in 2013 to compensate the people who had been sterilized between 1929 and 1974 under orders from North Carolina's Eugenics Board. NC court upholds denial of eugenics compensationAsheville Citizen-Times Judges: No payments for certain heirs of eugenics victimsWinston-Salem Journal Court of Appeals panel rules heirs of eugenics victims won't be compensatedThe Progressive Pulse Minneapolis Star Tribune -McClatchy Washington Bureau all 7 news articles »

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Surviving families of eugenics victims lose latest round in court fight to get compensation - News & Observer (blog)

The return of Star Wars in 2015 kicked off a wave of rampant fan speculation and theorising that feels completely unprecedented.

... But it turns out that the galaxy far, far away is no stranger to bizarre theories that blatantly won't turn out to be true, as demonstrated by a piece from a 1980 edition of Fantastic Films Collectors Edition.

Lucasfilm story group creative executive Pablo Hidalgo posted pictures from the article on Twitter, and things get very strange very quickly (via The Daily Dot).

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Between the frequent misspellings, the theory suggests that Luke and Darth Vader are actually clones created by the Jesus Eugenics Development Institute (or JEDI), and that Boba Fett is Luke's father rather than Vader.

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Fett is also suggested to be someone called 'Roberta', although the theory still mostly refers to the character as 'him'. Fett is also supposed to be the "other" (which turned out to be Leia) that Yoda mentions to Obi-Wan Kenobi's ghost.

As for Obi-Wan, it repeats that old favourite theory that he is really OB-1 a designation for a clone. In this case, he is actually a clone of Jesus. Yes, Jesus. This is possible because the Jedi date back to the time of the Roman Republic, which never fell in this alternate reality.

Feeling confused? So are we.

The theory was published half a year after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, so we dread to think what sort of fever pitch was reached before Return of the Jedi arrived in 1983.

Suddenly those theories about Force-sensitive trees and giant eggs don't sound quite so outlandish, do they?

The idea of Luke being a clone actually predicts the storyline in the well-loved novel trilogy by Timothy Zahn published in 1991-93, which featured a cloned copy called Luuke.

As for fan favourite Boba Fett, he turned out to be a complete waste of space.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released on December 14 in the UK and December 15 in the US, hopefully to answer our questions about the Jesus Eugenics Development Institute once and for all.

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This bonkers Star Wars fan theory from 1980 says the Jedi are clones of Jesus - DigitalSpy.com

On Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump shared a new idea with congressional Republicans:

His vision was a [U.S.-Mexico border] wall 40 feet to 50 feet high and covered with solar panels so theyd be beautiful structures, the people said. The president said that most walls you hear about are 14 feet or 15 feet tall but this would be nothing like those walls. Trump told the lawmakers they could talk about the solar-paneled wall as long as they said it was his idea.

One person cautioned that the President wasnt presenting the solar-paneled wall as the definite solution, adds Jonathan Swan, the Axios reporter who first reported most of the news.

Despite the presidents insistence on getting credit, this is not the first time someone has suggested swaddling the wall in solar panels. During the governments call for proposals in April, a small, Las Vegas-based construction-supply firm named Gleason Partners suggested a suspiciously similar plan. It proposed building a wall of cement, steel, and solar panels. Each mile of wall would cost $7.5 million, it said, but each mile would also generate two megawatts of electricity. This power could then be sold to utilities on both sides of the border.

Never mind Mexiconow the sun would pay for the wall. (Or as Tom Gleason, the firms founder, told E&E News: The wall pays for itself.)

Gleasons proposal even included a mockup, which hints at how his firm would solve a tricky engineering problem. Solar panels usually go on roofs, not on walls, because the goal is to keep them out of shadow and expose their surface to as much sun as possible through the day. To get around this issue, Gleason angles two rows of panels slightly off the walls perpendicular:

In North America, solar panels also usually face south, toward the equator. So presumably the most expensive hardware on the wall would look toward Mexico.

From Trump, the idea seemed like a politically simplistic troll. Progressives will not magically come to support a divisive mega-project if it also subsidizes renewable firms. Environmental groups that believe the wall will hurt local ecosystems will still oppose the project even if it becomes carbon neutral. As Brett Hartl of the Center for Biodiversity said in a statement on Tuesday: An ecological disaster with solar panels on top is still an ecological disaster. With solar panels on top.

But it is not the first time that immigration restrictionists have borrowed environmental arguments to bolster their appeal. John Hultgren, a professor of environmental politics at Bennington College, filled a book with examples of the overlap between the two groups: the now aptly titled Border Walls Gone Green.

Some contemporary figures in immigration restrictionism began in the environmental movement. John Tanton, who founded three immigration-lobbying groups, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, began his involvement in politics through environmental activism. He says he once lobbied the Sierra Club to adopt anti-immigration positions; when they demurred, he founded his own network of groups.

Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls Tanton the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement. They cite a letter of Tantons held at the University of Michigan, in which he writes: Ive come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that. (The New York Times covered the relationship between Tanton and the SPLC in April.) Linda Chavez, a veteran of the Reagan administration, has said that Tanton is both anti-Hispanic and anti-Catholic.

Tantons own website describes him as a supporter of population stabilization and environmentally sustainable immigration numbers.

But the connections between pro-nature sentiment and anti-immigration politicsespecially at their most racistare strongest long before the modern era.

Some of the earliest American environmental groups had interesting and important connections to the eugenics movement, Hultgren told me. The most famous of these is Madison Grant, who worked to conserve huge swaths of American wilderness and helped create the national park system.

As Citylabs Brentin Mock wrote last year, Grant was also a eugenicist and white supremacist. His book, The Passing of the Great Race, served as a bedrock of American and European pseudo-scientific racism until the second world war. Hitler quoted often from Grants writing in speeches and allegedly corresponded with him. (F. Scott Fitzgerald also implies Grants work is a favorite of Tom Buchanans in The Great Gatsby.)

But Grants influence was not just theoretical: He had a material and long-lasting influence on U.S. immigration policy. His statistics and expertise informed the quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned almost all Asians and Arabs from migrating to the United States. It also placed quotas on the entry of southern and eastern Europeans. These rules effectively prevented many Jews from escaping Nazi Germany, and they were not fully repealed until the Immigration Act of 1965.

It may seem a casual coincidence that an American conservationist was also smitten with racism. But Grants views on the environment were inseparable from his adoration for eugenics. When he helped found the Save the Redwoods League, it was out of the same loyalty to the pure.

To Grant, the redwoods were threatened with race suicide in the same ways that whites were, says Hultgren. These folks really saw national purity and natural purity as being interconnected.

This was true also of Theodore Roosevelts nationalist project, which birthed the U.S. National Park Service. In a 1909 government report commissioned by President RooseveltA Report on National Vitality, Its Wastes and Conservationthe economist Irving Fisher spends a full chapter on Conservation by Heredity.

President Roosevelt has pointed out that race suicide is a sign and accompaniment of coming decay, Irving writes. A race that can not hold its fiber strong and true deserves to suffer extinction through race suicide. The decline of our Puritan stock ... need not alarm us if we can replace it with a new influx from the West or from the vigorous stocks of Europe.

Hultgren notes that many environmental groups have now reversed their old anti-immigration positions. In 2013, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, and 350.org all embraced comprehensive immigration reform.

Andof coursemost contemporary advocates of immigration restrictionism do not make racial arguments or share Grants zeal for eugenics.

But the occasional overlap between conservationist and restrictionist rhetoric persists. The Federation for American Immigration Reform and other anti-immigration groups have recently used green-style arguments to push for new legal limits. A magazine ad from the early 2010s argued:

With every new U.S. resident, whether from births or immigration, comes further degradation of Americas natural treasures. Theres not much we can do to reclaim the hundreds of millions of acres already destroyed. But we can do something about whats left.

Stephen Colbert picked up on a TV commercial from the same coalition while in-character on the Report.

Yes, immigrants cause global warming, he said. Saving the planet by demonizing immigrants give liberals and conservatives something they can do together. Now, when a liberal yammers on about the record heat we had this winter, a conservative can say: Lets save the environment by building an electrified border fence that runs on alternative energy.

These Solar Death Panels, as his chyron put it, made for a laugh line in 2012. In 2017, they constitute a serious U.S. policy proposal.

Excerpt from:

Trump's Solar-Powered Border Wall Is More Than a Troll - The Atlantic

Dr. Patrick Neustatter provides an interesting report on his visit to the Hygiene Museum in Dresden, Germany, and his grandfathers involvement with the founding of the museum [Lessons learned from trip to Germanys hygiene museum, May 28 column].

He explains the Nazi takeover of the museum in the 1930s, then makes a leap to compare Nazi eugenics to the present-day political debate on immigration.

Reasonable people can disagree on the need for a border wall (physical or otherwise). And Donald Trumps insulting campaign comments related to our immigration problem were not helpful. But to suggest that were headed toward a Nazi-style eugenics movement is without logic and irresponsible.

Dr. Neustatter offers no evidence to support this claimonly that he perceives a move toward nationalism and isolationism. Its a long way from nationalism and immigration enforcement to the medical/eugenics extremes he discusses.

If anything, the opposite is occurring. Its the jihadi terrorists who are the murderers of fellow Muslims as well as people of other religions.

I find it interesting that Dr. Neustatter hints at Trumps possible support of eugenics when, if anyone, it is his opponents who promoted these ideas. Recall that Planned Parenthoods founder, Margaret Sanger, was an early champion of eugenics in the United States. She is still admired and honored by many in the progressive movement.

Finally, when I read The Free LanceStars Health section, I look forward to informative medical articles, not political columns.

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Letter: Keep politics out of Health section - Fredericksburg.com

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates three years in power, one story has persisted in making headlines: the project to create tall and fair customised children with high IQs.

Its a decade-old project and is operated by the health wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization from which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) draws its inspiration, and the project is spreading its wings around the country.

As the country exploded in rage over similarities with the Nazi Ubermenschen ideal, which attempted to create a super Aryan race through eugenics funded by Hitlers regime, many suggested that the RSS covert admiration for strong leaders like US president Donald Trump and Modi is directly related to this attempt to create perfect babies.

An abiding theme of Hindu extreme right-wing literature has been the self-loathing associated with the inability to fight off invading armies, mostly Muslim, over the last thousand years. In fact, RSS leaders routinely collaborated with British authorities before independence so that they didnt have to join hands with who they perceived to be the greater enemy: Indias Muslims.

No wonder RSS leaders are obsessed with the weak Hindu and how to overcome his weaknesses. Enter the customised baby project.

The RSS Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project, loosely translated as Science & Culture of the Womb, properly prescribes the norms which go into the making of a custom-perfect baby. The Indian Express, which broke the story last week, outlined the process that involves three months of purification of the intended parents which prevents genetic defects from being passed on, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived as well as procedural and dietary regulations.

Certainly, the project has absolutely no official sanction from the government, unlike Hitlers Nazi regime which sought to purify its own Aryan nation from being contaminated by Jews, homosexuals, Roma gypsies, people with disabilities etc. Prime Minister Modi, in fact, has sought to change the demeaning vocabulary used for people with special needs (called viklang, literally deformed body in Hindi) by calling them divyang or sacred body, although the appropriation of divinity has been slammed by people who say that those with special needs are, simply, different.

The project claims to have delivered as many as 450 custom babies and targets thousands by 2020, the project convenor Karishma Mohandas Narwani told the Indian Express.

Our main objective is to make a strong India, she added, insisting that Ayurveda had got it right thousands of years ago.

Alongside bodily purification, a proper diet is paramount so as to push up the IQ. Calcium in the third month when bones develop, ghee in the fifth when the brain develops and Vitamin A in the sixth-seventh month when the eyes develop. Alongside this, the mother must chant shlokas and mantras to help in the babys mental growth and avoid labour pain.

Another RSS ideologue insisted that by following proper procedures, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser height can have fair complexion and grow taller, he said.

It isnt clear either how seriously the senior RSS leadership takes this project, or whether it is simply humouring the odd, but essentially, harmless obsessions of crackpot enthusiasts. According to one school, the ruling BJP as well as the RSS cannot ignore these people who have stayed with the organisation for decades. Now that they have such a huge mandate in power, the leadership cannot prevent people from speaking their mind, even if they are totally retrogressive in nature.

Certainly, the leitmotif of the RSS is to rediscover the greatness of ancient India and re-imagine a golden age before it was contaminated by foreign invasions. It is common for RSS workers to describe India as a golden bird and to be predisposed to a recurring nostalgia about her past greatness.

That is why the need to recreate this prehistoric perfect age where the Hindus did everything right there were no Muslims or Christians or Sikhs or Parsis at the time, remember and to use all the help you can get, preferably from the ancient science of Ayurveda, to round out that picture.

It doesnt matter, then, that post-war Germany has spent all its waking hours in trying to compensate for Hitlers abominations vis-a-vis Jews and other minorities. The RSS believes that India must be made strong again. So when an unnamed RSS ideologue met a German woman (an unidentified woman called the Mother of Germany) some forty years ago and asked her how Germany had resurrected itself so quickly after the Great War certainly no credit here to German hard work or dedication to detail she in turn told him, You come from India, and you havent heard the story of Abhimanyu?.

Ah yes. The story of Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata, as every Indian child knows, refers to the son of the great warrior Arjuna, who learnt how to fight the deadliest opponents because he heard his father reciting strategy when he was in his mothers womb; unfortunately for Abhimanyu, Arjuna never completed the story, which meant that the young boy couldnt save himself on the battlefield.

According to this unnamed Mother of Germany, children in the New Germany after the great war had been created through these practises of Ayurveda.

For the RSS ideologue, it was a sign. The past could certainly be avenged. The future belonged to those intelligent enough to respond to the present. And thus, the perfect baby project was born.

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India's far-right is trying to make India great again through eugenics - TRT World

A wooden puzzle in the silhouette of a human head might look fun if the stakes weren't so high. A doctor named Howard Knox invented The Feature Profile Test the formal name for this puzzle after officials struggled to administer IQ tests to immigrants because of issues with language and literacy. Stephen Lewis/Art + Commerce/Smithsonian Magazine hide caption

A wooden puzzle in the silhouette of a human head might look fun if the stakes weren't so high. A doctor named Howard Knox invented The Feature Profile Test the formal name for this puzzle after officials struggled to administer IQ tests to immigrants because of issues with language and literacy.

A wooden puzzle in the silhouette of a human head might look fun if the stakes weren't so high.

Historians at Smithsonian Magazine say this simple puzzle containing facial features broken into pieces was administered to immigrants at Ellis Island in the early 1900s. The goal was to weed out the "feeble-minded" and ensure that a "better class" of foreign-born people was ushered into U.S. citizenship. The puzzle is currently housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The Feature Profile Test the formal name for this puzzle sprang out of an idealistic policy that was supposed to be fair, writes historian Adam Cohen. A doctor named Howard Knox invented it after officials struggled to administer IQ tests to immigrants because of issues with language and literacy.

"This was in some ways a progressive reform," Cohen says. "The idea that this would be a puzzle that no matter where you were born in the world, where you came from, people generally had the idea of what a face looked like, so it had a kind of democratic impulse behind it."

At the same time, the eugenics movement was informing U.S. immigration policy. Cohen says the eugenicists were worried the wrong types of people were coming into the country.

"They believed that in various ways we had to test and weed out the people who would bring the wrong genes," Cohen says. "That included trying to have fewer people from countries that were deemed to have worse genes, and then also using tests like this to at the individual level weed out people who were unintelligent, feeble-minded, unfit."

Use the audio link above to hear the full story.

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This Simple Puzzle Test Sealed The Fate Of Immigrants At Ellis ... - NPR

Quartz

RSS: Hindu nationalists are trying to create designer babies that are ... Quartz The health wing of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has an astonishing plan to use eugenics to help dark-skinned Indians ... and more »

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RSS: Hindu nationalists are trying to create designer babies that are ... - Quartz

By: Editorial | Published:May 9, 2017 12:15 am The Garbh Vigyan Sanskar (Uterus Science Culture) project of the health wing of the RSS is working on it, and hopes to have thousands of ideal infants on the production line by 2020.

Babies are brought by the stork, the decadent West teaches us, and this very faith in reproductive assistance from random avian fauna may explain their decadence. Fortunately, our ancient civilisation left nothing to chance, and it only remains to codify and institutionalise its knowledge for guaranteeing better, fairer, taller and smarter offspring. The Garbh Vigyan Sanskar (Uterus Science Culture) project of the health wing of the RSS is working on it, and hopes to have thousands of ideal infants on the production line by 2020.

But its protocol is surprisingly Semitic. Parents apparently have small, dark babies because they are impure, but purification is fortunately a simple, protocol-driven process tied to the lunar calendar. Prospective parents should copulate by astrological schedule and watch what they ingest, hear and think. Thus they will clean up the chromosomes in their gametes, and the original sin tattering the telomeres.

Let us, too, untatter our thinking. Let us accentuate the positive. The rise of strapping Germanic heroes and Rhinemaidens in India would annihilate the Rs 3,000-crore fairness cream industry, a national embarrassment. The West will have one excuse less to laugh at us. And the Uterus Science protocol forbids intercourse after childbirth, which is apparently lethal for parents. Let us marvel at the benefits for family planning: The population growth rate must plummet whether parents follow the regimen or not. If they dont, theyll die and the population will fall even more steeply. If a foolproof way has been found for conceiving Aryan god-tier babies, why isnt the ministry of AYUSH providing a firm push already? Maybe because the project cant go the last mile. What is the use of having tropicalised baby Siegfrieds and Gunthers if they arent blue-eyed? Sadly, new paleo-gentic research suggests that the proto-Indo Europeans were mostly dark-eyed. What a downer, baby.

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Ayurvedic eugenics - The Indian Express

Policies that are designed to force certain "improvements" in the population are called "eugenics" and are generally considered a bad thing, especially since the extremes of Nazi Germany.

Fast forward to present-day United States, where Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for health-care reform last week that would kick an estimated 24 million Americans off their plans and let insurance companies deny coverage for such pre-existing conditions as pregnancy (sucks to be you, moms) and post-traumatic stress disorder (thank you for your service, veterans, now get lost). This gutting of Obamacare and common decency, if passed into law, will hit the poor and middle class while the rich get you guessed it another tax cut.

Who won't be affected? (Besides members of Congress, who always exempt themselves from losing their Cadillac coverage because, well, they can.) Wealthy white men won't be affected, the kind who acquire young trophy wives so they can favor future generations with their superior bloodlines.

So how is the Republican plan not eugenics?

Mike Ryder

Louisville

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Mike Ryder: Is Trumpcare a form of 'eugenics'? - Boulder Daily Camera

Most people close their eyes to unpleasantness in their past. Political movements do the same thing on a grander scale. Nowhere is this truer than in the willful blindness of twenty-first-century progressives to their early twentieth-century counterparts embrace of eugenics.

If you have spent any time in the conservative or pro-life movements, it is not news to you that the leading lights of progressive opinion a century ago openly embraced eugenics. Eugenics, the theory that social policies must be enacted to cull the bad genes from society, was popular among progressives across the developed world, including the United States

After seeing the end result of such ideas in the Holocaust, progressives naturally sought to bury their connection to this genocidal concept, and succeeded in doing so, at least when they can discredit conservatives who persist in mentioning it.

It is easy to see why a progressive would be ashamed to have this as a part of his intellectual heritage, but it is harder to understand why progressives have been permitted to sweep it under the rug so completely that even their own adherents have forgotten it. This was not a fringe theory. It was taught without controversy in colleges and high schools across the country, and a consensus of scientists attested to its validity.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:Refusing To Believe Early Progressives Loved Eugenics Will Not Erase The Horrible Truth

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia

Link:

Eugenics was once favored tool of progressives to remove 'bad genes' from society - Genetic Literacy Project